Notes
Notes Chapter 1. Voluntary Simplicity: A Cultural Movement 1. Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin’s voluntary simplicity book titled Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence (1992) advocates cutting consumption, saving, and investing to reduce dependence on income from waged work and have more time doing fulfilling activities such as volunteer work. By 1999 over 750,000 copies had sold and a new edition was published. The book advocates making conscious choices that align how you use your money and time with your values. The authors call this “financial integrity.” The book aims to help the reader achieve financial independence by tracking all expenditures, evaluating them based on financial integrity, and reducing consumption to the point that the individual establishes as enough. Meanwhile the person saves as much as possible and invests it (the authors recommend investment in Treasury bills). They provide a method of putting in place and carrying through a plan that reduces consumption, increases savings, and allows the reader to create a plan for not working for pay or reducing work significantly through living frugally and saving enough to live off of investment income. 2. Here, Etzioni (1998) is referring to Joe Dominguez, one of the authors of Your Money or Your Life, a book used by many in simplicity circles as a guide to simplifying their lives. Joe Dominguez was a major player in the voluntary simplicity movement until his death in 1997. Vicki Robin, coauthor of the book, continues to devote her time to giving away the proceeds from book sales through the New Road Map Foundation, which contributes to organizations that promote simple living. I am unclear as to why Etzioni (1998) classifies Dominguez as a “stong simplifier” rather than a part of the “voluntary simplicity movement.” Those in voluntary simplicity certainly claim him as part of the movement. This points to the limitations of trying to understand an unbounded cultural movement such as the voluntary simplicity movement by imposing categories onto the movement participants without doing grounded research that offers access to understanding how they establish the boundaries of the voluntary simplicity movement. 201 Chapter 2. The Ecological Ethic and the Spirit of Voluntary Simplicity 1. I had first read about the movement in a New York Times article. Carey Goldberg’s Septemter 21, 1995, article was titled “Choosing the Joys of a Simplified Life.” The article mentioned a guide for simple living circles by Cecile Andrews, whose book, of course, had not yet been published. 2. A key informant from the movement in Seattle has consulted with me on the analysis of the literature and has confirmed what my research indicates, that these are the three core texts of the movement. 3. They were produced in Seattle by KCTS/Seattle and Oregon Public Broadcasting and made possible by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. 4. Vicki Robin, Cecile Andrews, and Duane Elgin have developed an interest in Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry’s book The Universe Story from the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era: A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (1992) and Swimme’s (1996) The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story. Swimme, characterized as an “empirical mystic” (Scharper 1997, 30) and Berry, termed a “cultural historian” (Blewett 1993, 28), describe a new period in history called the Ecozoic era in which changes in the environment and the major role of humans converge and humanity has taken over control of the earth’s life systems to a much greater extent. The Ecozoic period must emphasize the interrelationship of all life in the universe rather than the separateness of things. They view the earth, the universe even, as an organism which cannot survive in fragments. The natural community exists in balance and humans have not practiced reciprocity with the earth; this is the cause of the environmental problems. Swimme and Berry (1992) maintain that humans are destroying the conditions for the renewal of life, and the world humans have created is worse than the natural human condition it sought to replace. 5. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber ([1904] 1958) maintians that it was Protestant value for salvation through hard work in a calling, frugality, and self-denial that lead to the accumulation of capital that enabled Western capitalism to emerge as dominant. In one way voluntary simplicity can be seen as an attempt to resist...
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