I’m reading Samuel Alexander’s essays on The Aesthetics of Existence and absolutely loving it. Voluntary simplicity, degrowth, aesthetics, Neitzsche, Camus, Tainter (!), Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (!!) — I’m loving this.
I’m not done yet but I’ve started to get a sense for the overall theme:
Recap
Alexander argues that due to biophysical limits, voluntary simplicity at the personal, local, and societal levels are the only feasible long-term way of life possible. Consumerism is fundamentally terminal. In a best case scenario, widespread adoption of voluntary simplicity could help avert catastrophic collapse. In the much more likely collapse scenario, voluntary simplicity will provide some measure of resilience to those who do adopt it (collapse now, avoid the rush).
Beyond the biophysical impossibility of sustaining a consumption-based society, Alexander argues that acquisitiveness doesn't provide a good enough freedom-to, or vision of the Good Life, for those who pursue it, due to the fact that it's a treadmill: the more you acquire, the more you want to acquire, and you never escape the anxiety trap of more.
However, "just enough is plenty" isn't really a freedom-to Vision of the good life. It's more like a description of how to meet your material needs in a fairly straightforward manner, so that you can put your attention to other things (a way to frame it is that the physiological needs of Maslow's Hierarchy are pretty easy to meet, and once met you can/should/ought to turn to other methods for meeting your 'higher'-level needs).
Alexander proposes that there is actually a purpose to the Universe, and that it is the production and contemplation of Beauty. The 'reason' consciousness evolved is so that the universe can perceive itself, and act in alignment with a universal 'Will to Art'. The desired (although not inevitable) arc of the universe is towards beauty. He proposes this Will to Art as a way of framing the meaning of life and an organizing principle with which to frame one's freedom-to.
In other words, Alexander is saying that we can say that the purpose of our lives is to produce and experience art, which is very broadly defined and does not imply that everyone should/ought to take up painting/music/dance/the formal arts.
So to recap: Alexander is connecting consumerism, collapse, voluntary simplicity, and aesthetic/artistic endeavor. Consumer logic leads inevitably to collapse, and if we want to avert or be as resilient as possible to the consequences of consumer society, voluntary simplicity is our best bet (everything WILL simplify in the coming centuries, the question for each of us is will that simplification be voluntary or involuntary). Voluntary simplicity also provides a potential long-term vision for how a society or churn of societies could persist through deep time.
Further, Alexander is proposing that since it's pretty easy to meet your basic needs under the logic of voluntary simplicity, that will leave us all with abundant free time and attention to devote to the deeper purpose of the production and contemplation(/experience) of beauty/art, and seeing our lives themselves as that which can be artfully constructed and lived.
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Personal Reflection: Voluntary Simplicity and ERE
This series of essays is deeply resonant with me, possibly at a similar level to how resonant ERE was for me. Let me explain.
I was not a naturally frugal person. Besides whatever minimum 401k match my employer gave, I spent all of my income plus a little bit until 2018 or so. But I had deeply help convictions about the limits to growth, 'sustainability', an ecological society, etc. So I lived with a heavy dose of cognitive dissonance between my values and actual lifestyle. I couldn't get the two to line up.
I'd read about voluntary simplicity, but all the descriptions I'd read were either academic apologies ('we ought to adopt voluntary simplicity because capitalism is bad') without any clear instructions, or vague squishy anecdotes about how it felt to live a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity. I wasn't exposed to any brass tacks, practical advice on how to actually get from where I was at to where I wanted to be. In retrospect it seems obvious in the same way it seems obvious to me to lose weight ("put the fork down? duh?") but I just could not put it together. I couldn't connect the dots, it was outside of my Overton window.
Reading ERE and discovering post-consumer praxis was the instruction manual I needed: *how* to voluntarily simplify clicked and I basically just did it. This almost entirely resolved my cognitive dissonance and my life is profoundly different now, for the better.
If I'd ready these essays in 2019, I might have liked them but they would not have been at all actionable to me because I lacked the ability to execute voluntary simplicity. That would have locked me out of approaching the stuff about aesthetics and the will to art. I was stuck in consumerlandia.
Personal Reflection: The Will to Art and the Meaning of the Universe
Now, though, having Achievement-Unlocked post-consumer praxis, I feel like I'm in a place where the aesthetics stuff can actually land and be actioned in my personal life. But I feel like I need to explain why the aesthetics stuff IS landing for me in an extremely resonant way - how I was primed for it.
In 2011 or 2012, I was deep in a period of manic disillusionment. It was right after Occupy had fizzled out and work was getting crazy but the righteousness of our projects was starting to look iffy and the ppm's CO2 were going up, and I was more or less freaking out about the purpose of everything and my role in it.
I went for a walk in the woods with a friend and had a spiritual experience where it became clear to me that the best and also only thing I could do about It All was endeavor to Make Beautiful Art. I could not in fact single-handedly save the world from itself via sheer number of all-nighters, I could not 'figure out' the metacrisis via concentration and blogging, I could not justify my existence by sleeping too little and not caring about my own physical and mental health.
I *could* Make Beautiful Art, which I definitely understood even then as being something very broad - it didn't mean I should go become a painter or start calling myself an Artist, it was pointing me in the direction of an attitude I could take towards my day to day actions. It was pointing me towards a centralizing theme.
This insight brought me a lot of relief from my anxiety, and has continued to do so whenever I revisit it in times of despair. Of course, I haven't actually *done* it in any real way. But I've had experience after experience that seems to confirm the validity of the basic insight -- all we can really do is endeavor to make beautiful art, whether that's in actual formal art, whether it's in the beauty of our relationships, or in the design of social engagements, or even the beauty of engineering or scientific work. I've felt over and over again something deeply correct about this idea that the production and contemplation of beautiful works is central to existence.
So these experiences primed me to pick up what Alexander is putting down. These ideas are now informing and tuning my personal freedom-to visions. I'd found it difficult to articulate exactly what I was doing in a way that seemed to be the final Why. With Alexander's framework it feels possible to say that want I want to do is such and such particular thing, and to do it as beautifully as possible, and done in such a way that it allows me to continue to make more beautiful artful things. The zeroth-order purpose is to make an artful thing: it has first-order purposes of X and Y and Z perhaps.
And Alexander's framework, plus the post-consumer praxis of ERE, ties it all together:
Consumer society is terminally flawed. The consumer *way of life* will not persist.
Post-consumer praxis is the only long-term way of life -- the only question is voluntary or involuntary?
Post-consumer praxis/voluntary simplicity leaves ample free life to do whatever else you want with it, since sufficient material needs are easy to come by.
Consider that the purpose of the universe/your life might be to produce and contemplate beauty. And that the material needs for artistic/aesthetic endeavor are similarly minimal/dematerialized.
With the foundation of post-consumer praxis, you have the option of framing your freedom-to in terms of artistic/aesthetic/beauty production and contemplation.
Further Reading
Solar Punk Farms looks amazing and I want to be friends with them.