The economics of color in local culture

13 July 2011 by Leave a Comment

I’ve been reading a bit more on distributism at The Distributist Review. This quote captured my attention last night:

Local production for local consumption is a policy enabling the flow of an extensive variety of goods and services created by and sustaining the very community that makes them.

Mass production makes for very little local color. Everywhere, America ends up looking the same. Local culture looks like the variety of goods and service created by the locals. A Grand Island, Nebraska craftsman might use a different lumber, different joinery and different finish — in response to the land and weather around him – than one in Tennesee. Objects coming out of a factory respond to one thing by comparison: Market potential.

Haven’t we been here before, Rocky?

Filed under Buy local, Consumerism, Craft, Design, Disposable culture, Handmade, Mass production, Modern culture

“To create, meditate and really share life”

3 April 2011 by 2 Comments

“I think I want to be an artist monk — with a wife,” I announced to the WordLily at lunch today.

“Nice save,” she replied.

“I don’t necessarily mean I want to move to a monastery.”

“So you mean you want to create, meditate and really share life.”

“Yeah, exactly,” I said. Her elaboration was spot on.

Recently I’ve begun to explore distributism (thanks to Timothy Jones harping on it over at Old World Swine), which as an economic theory is referred to as a “third way,” neither capitalism or socialism. G.K. Chesterton was a fan of the idea — among others such as Dorothy Day and Hilaire Belloc — which was in some ways a Catholic response to the industrial revolution (according to Wikipedia). A few quotes from Wikipedia:

Distributism seeks to subordinate economic activity to human life as a whole, to our spiritual life, our intellectual life, our family life.”

Under such a system, most people would be able to earn a living without having to rely on the use of the property of others to do so.

Pope Pius XI . . . provided the classical statement of the principle: “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.”

I don’t know why the Pope considered taking from individuals what they can accomplish on their own a “great evil,” but I can understand why he would call it a “disturbance of right order.” I love the idea of subordinating economic activity to the rest of human life as a whole. The way we harp on economics in our culture just doesn’t resonate with me. It seems out of place. Shouldn’t economics be an incidental byproduct of our human activity, instead of something we plan for and around?

Distributism is also interested in promoting crafts and culture.

Distributism promotes a society of artisans and culture. This is influenced by an emphasis on small business, promotion of local culture, and favoring of small production over capitalistic mass production. A society of artisans promotes the distributist ideal of the unification of capital, ownership, and production rather than what distributism sees as an alienation of man from work. This does not, however, suggest that Distributism favors a technological regression to a pre-industrial revolution lifestyle, but a more local ownership of factories and other industrial centers. Products such as food and clothing would be preferably returned to local producers and artisans instead of being mass produced overseas.

Returning production to the local level reminds me of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Part of me wonders if distributism would fly in our interconnected internet age. If the producer of a particular item in Indiana was doing a superior job to those in California, wouldn’t people just order from the person in the Midwest who had set up an online store?

Regardless, I need to give a little more consideration to idea. From what I’ve read so far, I like it; it sounds as though it might create a lifestyle a little bit more conducive to creating, meditating and really sharing life.

Filed under Art, Christianity, Consumerism, Mass production, Modern culture, The contemplative life

Craft as connection between generations

16 February 2011 by Leave a Comment

Fiber artist Betsy Timmer rightly observes that “There’s a growing value on things that are handmade . . . and it’s almost a reaction everything being so mass produced.” She’s interviewed in this really nice little spotlight on the Harveyville Project in northeastern Kansas. Timmer continues, “It’s just a reaction against everything being so slick and, you know, assembly line, made in China.” Have a look.

Filed under Art, Handmade, Craft, Sculpture, Found objects, Fiber, Mass production, Tactile

The psychology of wastefulness

10 January 2011 by 2 Comments

Dan Phillips addresses wastefulness — and some of the psychology behind it — via the building industry in this TED talk.

Watch the video embedded below if you have time. If not, here are a few excerpts.

What causes waste in the building industry? Our housing has become a commodity.

Human beings have a need for maintaining consistency of the apperceptive mass. What does that mean? It means for every perception we have it has to tally with the one we had before or we don’t have continuity and we become a little bit disoriented.

It does no good to be responsible at the point of harvest in the forest if the consumers are wasting the harvest at the point of consumption, and that’s what’s happening. So if something isn’t standard it goes to the dumpster . . . I feature all those warped things.

Filed under Basis for designing well, Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Mass production, Modern culture, Restoration, Salvage, Sustainable living

Christmas V

29 December 2010 by Leave a Comment

A sale on storage containers right after Christmas eh?

I’m actually a fan of these plastic storage totes. They keep the mice and bugs out of your Christmas decorations, keep clay wet for quite a while and are stronger and easier to move around than cardboard boxes. Isn’t it a tell-tale sign of a consumer culture, however, when they’re put on prominent display and on sale immediately after Christmas?

Cameraphone capture while shopping for lumber for a work surface for a Christmas gift

Filed under Advertising, Affluenza, Consumerism, Disposable culture, Entitlement, Mass production, Modern culture

What do you want to be? [On consumerism, materialism . . . ]

21 October 2010 by 5 Comments

Quotes from a conversation that started with Jim Janknegt’s Facebook status from this morning:

I don’t want to be a consumer; I want to be a grower, a creator, a husband, a steward. – Jim Janknegt

There are two ways to get enough: One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less. – G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Contentment is natural wealth; luxury, artificial poverty. – Socrates (B.C. 469-399)

Don’t own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire. – Wendell Berry

Filed under Consumerism, Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Mass production, Modern culture, Sustainable living

The Bones of Plenty: Prairie, farms, Depression

5 October 2010 by 1 Comment

Last night I finished reading Lois Hudson’s The Bones of Plenty. I enjoyed it thoroughly, in large part because it’s probably been a couple years since I paged through a novel. Most of my reading is of nonfiction.

I picked this book up in part because it examines life on the Great [northern] Plains. Set during the Great Depression, it follows a year in the life of a farming family near a small North Dakota town. It’s well-written, poetic at times, in a format broken up by dates instead of chapters. As someone who usually needs short chapters to keep me going through a story, this could have been problematic. It wasn’t. In fact, it worked very well in the context of the novel and moved the story along at a good pace. One thing I didn’t understand, however, was the ubiquitous use of italics. Each paragraph contained multiple italicized words, and any emphasis the reader attempts to subsequently apply is strained at best after a few sections of the book.

Kathleen Norris, in Dakota, suggested Hudson’s The Bones of Plenty surpasses Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as a novel about farm families during the Depression. I’ve yet to read Steinbeck’s work.

Abandoned House, Prairie from @Michael's Flickr Photostream

What’s most interesting to me about this literary work is its depiction of farm life on the prairie. Hudson’s characters talk about how farming is changing, how the little guy can’t compete with the company farms any longer — even back in 1933. How prices tanked and middlemen made profits even when the growers lost money. How certain hybrids are supposed to do better than others, and about the government’s fatuous attempts to raise prices and control supply. The author employed historic figures for bushels of wheat and quoted government pamphlets from the 1930s when giving words to local officials. As a bit of a sidebar to this review, one of my favorite literary quotes talks about government involved in farming. From Joseph Heller’s Catch 22:

Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.”

This is the prairie that my wife and I grew up on. This is the prairie that, after living in the Ozarks for more than six years, covertly drew us back to it’s amber waves of grain. This is the prairie upon which we hope to establish a contemplative place for artists to come and create, learn.

Filed under Christian art retreat, Entitlement, Mass production, Modern culture, The contemplative life

Over-eager adopters of newness and supposed goodness

23 August 2010 by Leave a Comment

An article I read this morning made me think of something I posted about a month ago:

It never ceases to amaze me how we’re such eager adopters of new technology ideas that we don’t stop and consider the ramifications of what we adopt — like 90% of soybean farmers planting one genetically modified soybean seed.

I eat locally when I can because, in general, the food is better and I have a better idea of where it came from. There are people who’ve made eating locally a religion, though, apparently in part because they think it a more environmentally friendly lifestyle. Writing for the New York Times, Stephen Budiansky informs us that’s bogus in a little article called Math Lessons for Locavores. “The local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas,” he claims.

Budiansky enjoys eating from his own garden nine months out of the year, but he breaks the energy consumption of foods down for us into layman’s terms. Locavorism has apparently entered pharisaical levels of legalism, resulting in “all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.”

According to Budiansky’s math, driving to the grocery store and then refrigerating your loot consume most of the energy that goes into our food production, even if we can brag about our Energy Star appliances. The diesel fuel to truck or train it across the country uses little energy by comparison.

Guess we have to find another way to boost our own self-esteem.

Filed under Buy local, Consumerism, Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Live car free, Mass production, Mass transit, Modern culture, Sustainable living

On how consumerism changes religion

31 March 2010 by Leave a Comment

David Taylor just had to go and post a review of Vincent Miller’s 2008 book, Consuming Religion. As if I wasn’t depressed enough already at how my reading schedule appears utterly doomed for this year, I now have to add another book to the wish list. A few quotes from Taylor’s review (yes, they’re long, but worth reading, and obviously quite a bit shorter than the actual review which is also worth reading):

    Consumerism may fight against religion. But it is commodification that disarms it. As he puts it, “When consumption becomes the dominant cultural practice, belief is systematically misdirected from traditional religious practices into consumption . . . Traditional practices of self-transformation are subordinated to consumer choice” (225) . . .

    The “use” of Mother Theresa illustrates these dynamics. Her indelible image—the cracked outline of her face, a preternatural smile, tenderly touching an untouchable—gets printed on t-shirts. These t-shirts get mass-produced and worn by young Americans “inspired” by her life. They recite her words. They appeal to her work to denounce, say, two-car-garage lifestyles and the war in Iraq. And they do this while drinking Kenyan coffee and listening to “World Music” on their iPods . . . Religious materials, in short, are “thrown into a cultural marketplace where they can be embraced enthusiastically but not put into practice” (28) . . .

    In Miller’s account, the story begins with Karl Marx. Marx showed how laborers were alienated from the fruits of their labors. This, in turn, led to an increased “de-skilling” of workers, who then more easily “employed” by engineers to perform tasks for which they received “wages.” In time a shift ensued in the mode of human existence from being to having. The suburban single-family home epitomized this shift. Here we had a family supported almost entirely by wages. The family, under this rubric, shifted from managing production to managing consumption. Such a family, for example, now collects “devices” in order to make their lives easier. But for Miller the result leads to increasing isolation from neighbors, who are no longer felt to be needed. Wages and benefits replace “extended family and community relationships as the source of security” (48) . . .

    What advice does Miller offer the reader looking to resist assimilation to consumerism? The first task, he argues, is to name commodification as a problem. After this one can choose a number of creative activities. One can find out where their food comes — Chiquita bananas or breast of chicken. One can take up a craft and gain an appreciation for the labor costs that are involved. The liturgy, at least of the more “high” churches, can serve to reinforce the interconnections between doctrine and symbols and thus aid in the stabilization of their meanings.

After a few criticisms of Miller’s use of sociology over hard data and some hasty comments on the arts, Taylor concludes his review:

    In the end, however, I was very encouraged by Miller’s book. He offered an acute picture of the dynamics of a consumerist culture. The problem is not simply that our culture produces narcissistic individuals who increasingly find themselves isolated from neighbor and nature. The problem is the way that the dynamics of commodification make it easy for us to “consume” religion.

Read Taylor’s review in full via this link.

Filed under Affluenza, Christianity, Consumerism, Entitlement, Mass production, Modern culture

Manly minimalism begins with goals

12 October 2009 by 7 Comments

“The things you own end up owning you.” — Tyler Durden, Fight Club

In high school I became a collector of stuff, mostly decorative objects found at garage sales or hauled out of trash heaps. This practice was in line with my architectural (slash interior design) aspirations, but after a year in college I realized the vanity of so many objects.

So early in my college career I began to cultivate a minimalist aesthetic that has largely stuck with me since graduation. It’s difficult to pull off, though, in a materialistic culture supersaturated with advertisements and run by Washington bureaucrats whose idea of good times seems to revolve solely around the health of a consumerist economy.

Materialism, stuff, a minimalist aesthetic remains on my mind after our move of three months ago. We went from 1,500 square feet of living space to around 500, not including a shared kitchen, bathroom and office. Every so often I find myself looking around again, wondering what we might be able to do without. A multitude of dishes and decorative items remain in boxes. How much of this stuff is worth schlepping around? How much of the unpacked stuff is worth keeping around?

It seems to me this is a more difficult question to answer for craftsmen and women. We are wired to create objects, thus objects potentially have more meaning for us than, say, accountants or fishermen. Furthermore, we often own a slew of tools related to our craft. In some ways these objects are in a different class than what we put in our house, except for the fact that many of us don’t have spaces outside of our home for a shop or studio.

This morning I read a good article on a blog called The Art of Manliness titled Go Small or Go Home: In praise of minimalism. The author quotes Leo Babauta’s answer to the question “What is the minimalist lifestyle?”

    It’s one that is stripped of the unnecessary, to
    make room for that which gives you joy.

    It’s a removal of clutter in all its forms,
    leaving you with peace and freedom and
    lightness.

    A minimalist eschews the mindset of more, of
    acquiring and consuming and shopping, of
    bigger is better, of the burden of stuff.

    A minimalist instead embraces the beauty of
    less, the aesthetic of spareness, a life of
    contentedness in what we need and what
    makes us truly happy.

    A minimalist realizes that acquiring stuff
    doesn’t make us happy. That earning more
    and having more are meaningless. That
    filling your life with busy-ness and
    freneticism isn’t desirable, but something to
    be avoided.

    A minimalist values quality, not quantity, in
    all forms.

The first and last points in Babauta’s list resonate with me. These are things I’ve realized, that overkill kills the potential for joy and quality is more important than quantity. Overkill I’ve yet to get control of in life, but the value of quality is already present.

So what is unnecessary in my life right now that needs to be done away with? What is truly important? I’ve already culled a number of blogs from my feed reader in an attempt to refine my daily news and reading time. In place of that I’ve been trying to go through part of the Daily Office every morning.

Before doing away with too many things, however, I probably need to focus on setting some attainable short and long-term goals. I’ve never been good at this. I’m much more a live in the moment type of guy. I have come to realize the value of setting a certain direction for your life though. Our culture presents us with never-ending distractions that must be tamed. It also steers us into a certain kind of workaholism; productivity becomes a cult we’re expected to aspire to.

Setting [realistic] goals will help me determine what is unnecessary.

The author of the Art of Manliness post concludes by giving us

    Leo Babauta’s Principles of Living the Minimalist Life

    1. Omit needless things. Notice this doesn’t say to omit everything. Just needless things.

    2. Identify the essential. What’s most important to you? What makes you happy? What will have the highest impact on your life, your career?

    3. Make everything count. Whatever you do or keep in your life, make it worthy of keeping. Make it really count.

    4. Fill your life with joy. Don’t just empty your life. Put something wonderful in it.

    5. Edit, edit. Minimalism isn’t an end point. It’s a constant process of editing, revisiting, editing some more.

    I would add the following:

    6. Hold on loosely. Even to your prized possessions. At the end of the day its relationships, not possessions, that make life worth living.

Filed under Affluenza, Disposable culture, Mass production, Modern culture, Sustainable living

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