Emrys Westacott - The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less

For well over two thousand years frugality and simple living have been recommended and praised by people with a reputation for wisdom. Philosophers, prophets, saints, poets, culture critics, and just about anyone else with a claim to the title of sage seem generally to agree about this. Frugality and simplicity are praiseworthy; extravagance and luxury are suspect.

This view is still widely promoted today. Each year new books appear urging us to live more economically, advising us how to spend less and save more, critiquing consumerism, or extolling the pleasures and benefits of the simple life. The magazine Simple Living can be found at thousands of supermarket checkout counters.

All these books, magazines, e-zines, websites, and blogs are full of good ideas and sound precepts. Some mainly offer advice regarding personal finance along with ingenious and useful money-saving tips. (The advice is usually excellent; the tips vary in value. I learned from Amy Dacyczyns The Tightwad Gazette how to make a toilet-brush holder out of an empty milk carton, and I have never bought a toilet-brush holder since! On the other hand, her claim that one can mix real and fake maple syrup with no significant loss in quality failed a rudimentary family taste test.) But while a few treat frugality as primarily a method for becoming rich, or at least for achieving financial independence, most are concerned with more than cutting coupons, balancing checkbooks, and making good use of overripe bananas. They are fundamentally about lifestyle choices and values. And although they are not works of philosophy, they are nonetheless connected to and even undergirded by a venerable philosophical tradition that in the West goes back at least as far as Socrates. This tradition constitutes a moral outlookor, perhaps more accurately, a family of overlapping moral perspectivesthat associates frugality and simplicity with virtue, wisdom, and happiness. Its representatives typically critique luxury, extravagance, materialism, consumerism, workaholism, competitiveness, and various other related features of the way many people live. And they offer alternative ideals connected to values such as moral purity, spiritual health, community, self-sufficiency, and the appreciation of nature.

One could view the plethora of publications advocating frugal simplicity as evidence of a sea change regarding values and lifestyles that is currently under way or at least beginning. But the fact that philosophers have been pushing the same message for millennia without it becoming the way of the world should give us pause. Many people pay lip service to the ideals of frugality and simplicity, but you still dont see many politicians trying to get elected on a platform of policies shaped by the principle that the good life is the simple life. On the contrary, politicians promise and governments strive to raise their societys levels of production and consumption. The value of continual economic growth is a given. The majority of individuals everywhere, judging by their behavior, and in spite of all the aforementioned literature, seem to associate happiness more with extravagance than with frugality.

One way of understanding this paradox is to see it as a paradigm case of good old-fashioned human hypocrisy. But that is too simple, and not just because many people live consistently thrifty or exuberantly extravagant unhypocritical lives. The gap between what is preached and what is practiced, between the received wisdom we respect and the character of our culture, reflects a deeper tension between two competing conceptions of the good life, both of which are firmly grounded in our intellectual and cultural traditions. Events like the recession that began in 2008 heighten this tension and make us more aware of it. Hard times spur renewed interest in the theory and practice of thrift while intensifying peoples desire to seeand enjoya return to getting and spending.

Most books and articles about frugality and simple living are polemical: their aim is both to criticize materialistic beliefs, values, and practices and to advocate an alternative way of thinking and being. Although I am decidedly sympathetic to the outlook they recommend (and my family can vouch for my being certifiably tightwadish), this book is not a polemic. Readers expecting a searing critique of consumerism will be disappointed. Although in places, particularly in the final two chapters, I defend some of the tenets of the philosophy of frugality against possible criticisms, the purpose of the work is not to tell the reader: You must change your life! Rather, the book is a philosophical essay, an extended reflection on a set of questions relating to the notions of frugality and simplicity, a reflection that begins by referencing certain strains in the history of ideas in order to elucidate issues and to provide a springboard for discussing whether the wisdom of the past still holds today.

The book began as a study of frugality, but I soon realized that it was hard to discuss frugality without also discussing the idea of simplicity, or simple living. From ancient times to the present, the notions have very often been run together and discussed as an entire package of virtues and values. To a large extent I do the same. For brevitys sake I use labels like the frugal sages, the philosophy of frugality, or the frugal tradition, but in all such cases I am referring to the philosophical tradition that associates both frugality and simplicity with wisdom, virtue, and happiness.

The question I began with seemed straightforward enough: Should frugality be considered a moral virtue? Almost every canonical philosopher with whose work I was familiar seemed to think that it should be. But why? These questions quickly led to a host of others. For instance:

• Why have so many philosophers identified living well (the good life) with living simply?

• Why is simple living so often associated with wisdom?

• Should extravagance and indulgence in luxury be viewed as moral failings? If so, why?

• Is it foolish or morally reprehensible to be extravagant even if one has the means to be a spendthrift?

• Are there social arguments for or against frugal simplicity quite apart from its consequences for the individual?

• Is it possible that frugality, like chasteness, or silent obedience in children, is an outmoded value, a trait that most people no longer consider an important moral virtue?