"Living Poor With Style"

(Note: I've been working on this post for some time now. Let's see if I can finish it! 🤪)

I recently got out my ancient copy of "Living Poor With Style" (1972) by Ernest Callenbach and I was shocked to realize how strongly this book and the ideas in it influenced my life, and how strongly it still does all these many years later.

Re-reading it, I'm also intrigued at how much and how little has changed since publication. The United States is still a cancer on the Earth, sucking up and squandering resources to no discernible object, devastating people and societies at will, enforcing consumerism on a largely pliant population, and pretending to hold the moral high ground while Americans still have no universal health care -- among so many other deficiencies. Yet in 1972, it was possible to live reasonably well off the fat of the land if you knew how and were willing to take the risk of failing. 

Now? I'm not so sure that one can live well. One can survive, perhaps. Though it is getting harder and harder. Much of what Callenbach suggests a poor person can do to live better is as useful today as it was 50 years ago -- and more -- but many of the public support programs he advises taking advantage of either don't exist any more or have been so transformed and bureaucratized that they might as well not exist for the vast majority of people. 

In 1972 it was possible to live poor and reasonably well if you were clever, skilled, and adaptable. In 2022? Maybe not. 

The ideas Callenbach presents, however, have formed the foundation for many movements we see today, from ecology to minimalism. 

The title of his book changed through many reprints and revisions from "Living Poor..." to "Living Cheaply..." in part, I think, because of the negative connotations of "poor" among his largely white middle class readers. Even in the early edition I have (it's like the third printing of the original 1972 Bantam edition), he acknowledges that the offspring of white middle class families are the primary drivers of the search for "alternative lifestyles," and living poor or living cheaply is one of them or is actually a constellation of them.

You don't need so much stuff, for one thing. Let go of it. You don't have to eat out, you don't have to have a car (if you're in the city), you don't need a lot of living space. You can do without a lot of what you've been conditioned to believe you must have for a happy life. You can disconnect from all of that and still live well -- though your friends and family may think you're crazy, especially if they're still immersed in consumerism. 

The one thing I'd say about his approach is that though he calls on community, he's addressing individuals. This is what you, personally, can do to live well without a lot of things and money. 

I look around and realize that, yes, I've lived very much that way for most of my life and am doing so now. The only caveat is that we have a LOT of things, most of them accumulated and not disposed of over a lifetime (or several lifetimes as our things include many of the things of others who have passed on.) Some would consider us hoarders because we've kept so much stuff over the years. I brought the final bits of stuff we'd been keeping in California out here to New Mexico last month, and we're slowly sorting through it, disposing of some but keeping much. Keeping for what, though?

Most of what we have is old. Older than us. Our house is over 100 years old, and much of the stuff in it is nearly as old or older. Many things we've had for decades. But much of it was old when we got it. What's newish is almost entirely a few appliances, electronics, minimal clothes -- and some books and art. 

We have a 14 year old Subaru that we bought used and a 25 year old Chevy van also bought used. They're "new" in our view. We don't drive nearly as much as we used to, and the van really is superfluous, but we keep it and I sometimes drive it. It's a convenience in a pinch, for example when the car is in the shop or when we need to transport something large/bulky that won't fit in the car.

I've bought some tools/equipment necessary or helpful to growing things and taking care of our little patch of ground. But I also do without. For example, we don't have a wheelbarrow. Seems strange, but I make do with a wheeled garbage can that serves the purpose just as well if not better.

Many other examples of making do could be given, but the point is that much of what needs to be done can be done without things you simply have to have in order to do them. And very often, things that can't be done without this or that tool or equipment don't really need to be done.

"Living poor..." is a lifestyle of survival if you will. Callenbach was adept at it, but he didn't need to live poor because he lacked money or any other benefit of and upper middle class white male life during his lifetime. He wasn't forced into and kept in poverty the way so many Americans have been. He recognized the truth of their plight even in the early '70s, though, and in seeing that truth, he offered what he could of solutions; advice and ideas he thought would be helpful.

At least for me, and I suspect many others, they were. 

Whether poor people today need or want them, I can't say. Much of the practical advice he gives is second nature to someone who's been living poor for a while. A good deal of it no longer applies because of cultural, social and economic changes since the '70s. And the number of abjectly poor people living unhoused on the streets has grown exponentially. His advice won't and can't help most of them, because "Living poor..." in the Callenbach style requires shelter and access to so much of what someone on the streets doesn't have.

We've seen one failed attempt after another to rectify forced impoverishment over the decades; "nothing seems to help" for long or in many cases, at all. In my view, most of these activities aren't meant to seriously address the problem. They are meant as job creation for surplus sons and daughters of the higher classes. They cannot solve a problem they seek to perpetuate to ensure their own well-being. This is not unlike the situation of the monasteries of yore. Yes, some did good works, but that wasn't the point of them. 

Meanwhile, I can and do recommend Living Poor With Style  (if you can find the original publication not one of the later revisions) as a window on the history of poverty in this country. It's not a complete picture by any means, but it serves to illuminate what people could and did do to alleviate poverty themselves. It became something of a guidebook for disgruntled middle class folks who sought to simplify their lives by "living poor" without necessarily being poor (which I suspect was Callenbach's own position.) And it proved inspirational to any number of alternative lifestyle and ecological/utopian ideals we see in operation today.