[lbo-talk] voluntary simplicity as secularized calvinism (or, how to achieve a state of grace by buying locally)

Tom Walker timework at telus.net
Sun Mar 27 16:23:50 PST 2005


Kelley wrote,


>/ Good. I killfiled him. My experience with voluntary simplicity Chucklefucks
/>/ is that no amount of talking changes a thing.

Carrol wrote,

/>Tully silly politics, in other words, may be merely a
>bewitchment by bourgeois ideology, not any particular pathology on his
>own part.

A close reading of Tully's posts would suggest that "he" is a she. And a more careful reading of what she wrote would also suggest nothing particularly silly or chucklefuckish about her politics or ideas. In fact, she has been remarkably respectful given the gratuitous abuse that has been directed at her. Don't folks on the "left" have enough enemies without making new ones out of everyone that doesn't buy 100% what you happen to be thinking at this particular moment.

And by the way, Kelley's analysis of the secularized Calvinism of voluntary simplicity would almost be apt if it didn't rely on reductive interpretations of both historical Calvinism and voluntary simplicity. Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin's "Your Money or Your Life" could have been written by Benjamin Franklin, that original "secularized Calvinist" (according to Max Weber). But then it seems to me that much of the radical thought of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was essentially secularized Calvinism. So it sort of depends on how many political babies you want to throw out with that bathwater. Contrary to popular suspicion, Calvinism was not some devious capitalist plot hatched on 16th century Europe by 20th century corporate PR propagandists.

Bourgeois ideology? Bourgeous ideology???? Carrol, do you have any idea what bourgeois ideology signifies or doesn't signify? May we for a moment, perhaps, step back to the Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin and define our terms with a little less, shall we say, anachronism?

The Sandwichman



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