The Alternative Householder

For the past few decades, I tried to interest publishers in the idea of a Manual for housekeeping that was socially responsible, and useful for those short of money, or getting married and needing a present - The Alternative Householder . Now, once again, Australian initiative has been pre-empted by overseas enterprise reaching the market first.

The Frugal Zealot, Amy Dacyczyn (pronounced Decision) began to accumulate a small fortune by publishing a monthly named The Tightwad Gazette. This has already picked up 53,000 subscribers at U.S.$12 per annum, and a rating by Martin Walker in the Guardian Weekly, from which my information about this American scene has come. Amy emphasises personal satisfactions rather than social responsibility to attract her customers - and that may have been the critical element in her success.

Now any American trends in crime, sex, financial rackets, music, entertainment, New Age religions and forms of vandalism are usually confidently expected to root here too. If those do, why not this?

The Alternative Householder manuscript was disregarded because it appeared as a shocker. It advocated glamorous ways to pass children's clothing and gear around family and friends in the role of heirlooms, how to wash dishes faster than with an automatic dishwasher, and using gym exercise machines to power generators or even the TV. Amy advanced this sort of frugality to 'a higher plane of enlightment... the Zen of Advanced Tightwaddery.' 'You progress to a state of mind where you develop an aversion to stupid expenditures.'

Thrift became a bad word post-war because it became associated with hassle and not letting it all hang out. During ten years residence in Aberdeen, Scotland, from 1978-1988, I observed the most dramatic change in a culture I ever expected to see. First the Aberdeen Joke Factory turned to selling only American jokes, then it closed down. Avoidance of hassle becamse such a moral imperative that when people moved house, they chucked the heavy furniture and a good deal of the chattels out of the first and second floor windows into a skip on the cobbles below. Puir auld bodies struggling to survive on the wee pension threw out two thirds of every loaf of bread they bought syne it wis tae muckle hassle to mak frens wi ony ither auld wee bodies on the same fluir of their tower-block to share their loaf turn aboot.

Thrift is a middle-class or peasant virtue, because it calls for energy - and so when middle-class or peasant values are called in question and derided, thrift is exposed as meanness. Instead the Kwakiutl attitude to generosity that we have espoused is seen in the common belief that if you are spending $10 on a present, you ought to spend $1 on the wrapping and $9 on the present, because it is mean to package it in finger-painting or re-use gift-wrap steam-ironed, and so spend the whole $10 on the gift itself.

A consumer society that relies on constant purchasing to make the wheels go round calls for all possessions always to be new and to look new, and so a great deal of chucking out is constantly necessary. Old-looking heirlooms have to be extremely expensive to be OK in your own home and not in a museum.

The return of tight-waddery in a recession and in this modern age because people do not have the money or are starting to become conservation-conscious has some excellent arguments for it - but in a consumer society there are two quite serious drawbacks.

Poor people and the unemployed are those who benefit most from tightwaddery, and it is often essential in order to be upwardly mobile. However, unless comfortably-off middle-class people with jobs also start enjoying the pleasure of not wasting, poor people and the unemployed feel put upon and demeaned if they alone are asked to be a bit more careful about their budgets, about what they buy for Christmas, the clothes they put on their children, and to wash nappies rather than starve to buy disposable ones. That is how individuals are affected by the prevailing culture. (And there is also the point that malnutrition or junk diet reduces the energy a person has available to husband their own resources.

However, unless the prevailing culture starts some tightwaddery, our problems of pollution and waste-disposal and dissipation of irreplaceable natural resources will spoil the quality of life for man, woman, beast and plant, regardless of how many paper towels we continue to buy. This is morality for society.

It is also a religious issue. In this pagan society, 'Judaeo-Christian morality' is a pejorative term. The Genesis statement that the Lord gave man dominion over the earth and living things is interpreted as if it meant orders to enslave and destroy. Certainly, much of recent Western history would sustain that interpretation, but until the 16th century Age of Expansion, the statement was simply a matter of fact. Human beings have in fact had this power to care for, to order, and to benefit from nature. This power has constantly increased, so that today we either conserve or annihilate, and must answer to God for the results of our stewardship. Tightwaddery may be in order for this stewardship.

Tightwaddery also involves 'work'. The 'work ethic' today is usually clichèd as 'the Protestant work ethic' - in the same way that 'reality' has to be 'harsh reality'.

However the work ethic - which is that work is worth doing, and enjoyable and satisfying when it is self-motivated and fruitful - existed long before Protestantism. It has existed in any culture that became prosperous, whether a peasant economy or an Italian city state or modern Japan. The 'Protestant' label became affixed because Northern European Protestants re-affirmed the already existing Christian view that to work for the glory of God was good. A worker was made in the image of the God who worked six days and then enjoyed a great rest on the seventh day. It was honorable to be a worker - nobody should look down on him from a mandarin height. The worker could look upon his work and see that it was good. It was drudgery - forced and ill-rewarded labour - that was the curse of Adam, not the pleasure of caring for the garden of Eden.

Distortion of this joyful ethic came about with the ascetic distortion that people ought to do things they found horrid because horrid things were good for taming the flesh and the spirit, and pleasant worldly things were bad. If work is seen as intrinsically hateful, on this argument it is good for the moral fibre to work, and God likes it being horrid - rather like it has been thought that God favours other ascetic practices such as hair-shirts and self-flagellation which do not directly benefit anyone else. So while there have been Quakers and Mennonites and Aberdonian and Dutch housewives who have really enjoyed applying energy and thought to avoiding waste, there has also been the sour version of the work ethic for those who prefer doing what they do not like. The sourest version is when it is imposed upon others.

George Herbert's view that the servant who swept a room as for God's laws made that and the action fine and any drudgery divine was not such a good view when preached rather than practised by the servant-employing classes.

However, for a socially responsible householder, the Christian work ethic of personal enjoyment of hard work, like a hard sport, can add pleasure of mind and muscle to keeping house cannily. Although the quantity of 'relaxing' may decrease, the quality increases, and the worship of indolence becomes a less devouring idolatry. However, Amy Dacyczn illustrates that the ethic of economy can also be taken to a possibly idolatrous extreme when she says that 'You know that you have gotten 'It' when you prefer refrigerator stew to prime rib steak not because it tastes any better, but because, more than feeding your body, it nourishes your soul.'

It is clear that there needs to be some input of Christian thinking into economics that goes beyond charity, with updated critiques of the capitalist motivation of greed and the totalitarian motivation of fear, and of socialism's drawback of beginning with initial communal enthusiastic altruism becoming private indolence of mind and action.

Demands for profits and jobs, and increasing populations are the three greatest barriers to conserving the earth and its resources. At present in Australia it is the need for jobs that is the greatest argument for waste.

Both Marxist and Capitalist theory see Labour and Capital as the two factors in production - taking for granted inexhaustible natural resources. 21st century economics must include Resources in the equations, and Future Cost in all cost estimates. Future Cost is the cost to be borne by the future through what we use up today, when we exploit all easily accessible resources, or exhaust resources, or dump and pollute with what we use or waste.

During the present recession, perhaps most Alternative Householders and Tightwadders, hard-up, would simply be maintaining a better standard of living on their limited income than they would otherwise be able to. Across the economic divide that the recession is deepening between the haves and have nots, the Alternative Householders still in employment who save 25% of their income, have 25% to put into the economy for circulating again - by giving to charity, by investment, by increased use of services of benefit to themselves and community.

But the nature of the investment will matter. Projects of community value could be supported more than investment in less socially-responsible consumer production, in property, in financial dealings, or in promoting antisocial forms of mass amusement. Australia could lead the world by invention and marketing of technology and products that saved natural resources of materials and energy - and investment and encouragement is needed for this sort of risktaking.

It is also true that the more that people use their energy and intellect to conserve what they need to buy themselves, the more they have to donate for the needs of others. It is surprising how few budgets allow the traditional tithing of 10% off for this item.

There also needs to be some way to raise the standard of living of the 'have-nots' to, help them to become more capable of reaching and remaining in the 'independent' class. Our present reliance on continuing to expand our population in order to continue to have markets for new housing, new cars, new infrastructure is irresponsible. There is a great gap of needs already here in the population we have, and in the housing and infrastructure that need improvement rather than the developers' windfalls when starting with the bare land, and there is a desperate need to improve the lot of other peoples in their own beloved homelands that at present so many economic refugees are leaving for the West.

There is a problem of economic arithmetic in trying to find some way to enable people to make a living in the sort of jobs that do not make big profits for the organizers and the big companies, but help to make life better for all - the service jobs, the recycling and salvage and the mending and renovation. The problem is how to pay standard incomes for necesssary work when that work does not itself generate a standard income to pay for it. For example, it has always been taken for granted that if A has a standard income of say fifty golden guineas, his servant B who works for him cannot have an income of fifty golden guineas too - the servant B must inevitably be poorer. This discrepancy means that a) personal service is given a low and demeaning status and b) many people who need personal service for the quality of their lives cannot afford it and c) the housekeeper is usually described as 'not working' on the grounds that she is not paid.

If mending a mass-produced watch or camera takes three hours, the labor may cost more than the original product - and hence the mendable product is thrown out to add to the waste problem, and a new product is bought. Solve this costs problem, and there is a place for skilled and useful labor and prevention of waste of raw materials.

To extend thinking even further - if we could diminish vandalism and dishonesty in the community, then a great deal more spending in this area that provided jobs could be willingly made to improve amenities in the community outside the home as well as inside, by Alternative Householders as well as their communities,. There would need no longer be such contrasts of Private Affluence and Public Squalor, because the public weal would simply be an extension of the front gate to include the whole local community.