Rules of Life: Finding Moral Ways to Make Our Livings
The farmer and poet Wendell Berry has told us we’d solve our environmental problems if we found moral ways to make our livings. I’m beginning to feel guilty because I’ve been thinking about this bit of advice for nigh onto ten years and haven’t come up with much. It’s not that I make my living in an immoral way. When my corporate career floundered, I decided to start studying and writing rather than rescuing that career or finding another way to make a high income. I’ve lived with a gradually decreasing standard of living since then, bottoming out only by the generosity of my late parents and my sister and some friends.
I’m also stuck. I’m not able to make the sorts of changes in my life I’d like. If it were up to me, I’d be studying and writing and gardening on a small plot with a small house somewhere in a rural area. I’d be trying to train myself to live on a daily diet which has little pre-processed food in it, to purchase fewer useless things of the sorts which fill American houses, to treasure and care for the things I do possess.
As it is, I am trying — with only partial success — to live more simply. It’s a matter of attention as it always is for human beings who’ve gone astray. We’re creatures of moral intention and that means we’re creatures of moral actions, not of noble sentiments or grandiose plans of reform. In Thomistic terms, intention means not what it means to modern moral philosophers or psychologists but rather what it means to lawyers when our imperfect human systems of justice are functioning fairly well. If you drink and then get behind the wheel of a car, you act with (Thomistic) intent to kill. If you discipline your children with insults or use of subjective guilt feelings, you act with the intent of crippling their moral development.
To live more simply is part of traveling a moral path proper to a human being. To live more simply allows you to live with greater deliberation, to live with greater attention. One of the ways to achieve some peace in the modern world is to let yourself be lulled into a state of sleepwalking, the state of life that St. Paul warned us against. It’s in the details that we’re alert and aware, paying attention to what lies around us and to our own actions.
And we have a chicken-and-egg problem. We can’t just decide to pay attention and find ourselves suddenly awake and alert. In a sense, that sort of alertness is part of the goal, part of a state of being we can’t achieve perfectly after a life of practice. I return to the Thomistic idea of intention.
Take a short time each day to just think about what you’ve done that day and what you plan to do the next day. Look around at the products you use and think of how much time it took to earn the money for those, to shop for them, to use them.
Just a small example: maybe you’d be better off using handkerchiefs and bandannas rather than running through boxes of disposable facial tissues? Certainly, disposable tissues can be useful to stop the spread of serious colds or other respiratory infections but would we be better off with washable cloth when we simply clear our noses after working in a dusty cellar or during pollen season?
Pay attention to the little things. Think of it this way for now: we forge our own chains a little link at a time.
I’ll leave matters there for a while. I’m not sure I’ll come up with any answers to help me or others to actually form new ways of living. We need to feed and cloth and shelter ourselves, we need to provide ourselves with entertainment and some luxuries, but we need to do so in moral ways, ways that better reflect the sorts of creatures we are. We need to dare to change our lives and to start forming news ways of living. We need courageous experimenters and it’ll probably be easier for some of us to adopt the spirit of innovation if our various crises continue to grow. We may soon have the painful benefit of courage born of desperation.
