Spirit in Action
Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping
[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives Of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, Creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Imagine a year without shopping if you can. That's what Judith Levine did, and she recorded the experience in her book Not Buying It, My Year Without Shopping. Judith has thought deeply and honestly about our conflicted relationship with shopping Both our attraction to it and the way that our consumer lifestyle is ruining the planet and obsessing our lives. Judith Levine is my guest today for Spirit in Action in two ways. First, I recorded her presentation that she gave at the June 2007 Midwest Renewable Energy Association's Energy and Sustainable Living Fair in Custer, Wisconsin. I followed that with a phone call that I made to Judith this past week. Judith has insights that are deep and thorough of valuable inspiration For all of us concerned about our consumer culture. Let's go first to the MREA's 2007 Energy Fair, where Judith Levine is keynote speaker. Okay, now on to the keynote, Judith Levine. When the keynote was decided this year, one of the different speakers that we have decided this year, I came to the MREA, picked up a book and thought, "I'm going to be introducing Judith, I need to read this book." So I started reading this book and I thought, "Who the hell chose this person?" I honestly thought, "Oh man, is this going to be interesting?" Well, by the time I got halfway through the book, I was pretty interested in. By the time I got to the end of this thing, I thought, "I really want to talk to this woman." This has been a very, very, very interesting odyssey. Judith? Well, Mick and I know each other well because we shared a bed and breakfast last night. Along with his wife, I think. Thank you so much for coming to hear me. This is really a fantastic fair. There is so much great stuff here I've spent the morning looking around. I mean, you can get a renewable energy thing, 1Z, for your child. You can get a kilowatt electrical user monitor, a cobra head weeder. You can get any kind of windmill in the whole world. You can build your house out of hay bales or cement or whatever. You can get a fair trade, watermelon shaped napkin holder. Wood burning hydraulic home heating, wind data logging in case you want to keep track of how much wind is going past your house. Recycled glass, beer mugs, clay dyed, hemp t-shirts, candles, soap rooms, pesto, sorghum, syrup, very good, I recommend it. Bumper stickers, consulting for everything, you know, everything from making a solar house to your own personal sustainability as a writer, I could use that. And my personal favorite, which is the real good personal solar powered fan, which you stick on your brim of your hat, and the guy who sells it from Giam told me that if you don't have a hat, you can use a double stick piece of tape. Put it directly on your forehead, but he said he cautioned me to watch out for my eyebrows. So, this is my souvenir from this. Yes, my friends, the Midwestern renewable energy fair is chock full of wonderful opportunities for shopping! Yes, some of us buy shoes, some of us are really into windmills. I read a really nice piece the other day by Joseph Goldstein, some of you who are Buddhists may know of him, he's a Buddhist teacher, and he was talking about the ways that Buddhists go around shopping for, the most exotic, the wisest, the cheapest, the most experienced local and teacher. And for those who are very busy, they're looking for the most enlightenment per hour of Dharma talk, you know, the most Buddha for the buck. We all breathe the air, and the air in America is consumerism. Goldstein calls this a delusion, a machine that feeds what Buddhists call the hungry ghosts. Those are the ones with the big bellies and the little mouths who were never, never satisfied. And this is basically the message of the anti-consumerist movement, which I'm sure many of you are a part of, that shopping is an addiction, it's an illness. They've got a big glossy book called Psychology and Consumer Culture, The Struggle for a Good Life in a Materialistic World, it's put out by the American Psychological Association. And they say that we are plagued by acquisition-related disorders. These are marked by a number of contradictory symptoms, including depression, anxiety, impulsivity, compulsivity, shame, guilt, perfectionism, narcissism, self-loathing. I like the narcissism and self-loathing, I don't know how you do that. Fear of intimacy, cognitive narrowing and magical thinking. A Robert H. Frank, who is an economist, says that as the lives of the fabulously rich and sinfully comfortable become more and more visible to us in the media, we are not just keeping up with the Joneses anymore. We're keeping up with the Zeta Joneses, the Gateses, the Hilton's, and Frank calls what ails us luxury fever. The guys who made the film Afluenza, which you might have seen, called Afluenza an epidemic. They define it as a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste, resulted from the dogged pursuit of more. Sounds awful, doesn't it? But hold on, it gets even worse. Look, read the circle of simplicity by Cecile Andrews, and she will tell you that shopping saps your energy, reduces ingenuity, harms your health, and makes you unhappy. Shopping, she says, supplies you with a purchased identity, a false identity. It makes you a traitor to the person you really are. Stop shopping, she says, toss out those old shoe boxes and broken tennis rackets at the bottom of your closet, and you will discover, crouching there among the debris, your authentic self-loathing. When I started my book, not buying it a few years ago, my year without shopping, I read all these books. And I worried some thought kept occurring to me. What if I find my authentic self and she is a shopper? You laugh. You're not worried. I'm not like that woman you're saying to yourself. I'm an environmentalist. Should I have a few things that I like? People tell me, I only buy books. I only buy bicycles. I only buy cross-country skis. I indulge in a few luxuries, such as coffee, but it is organic fair trade coffee. It's good for the Andes. My desires are minimal, you say. I only buy what I need. When my partner Paul and I started out our year without shopping, that's what we thought we would do. We were going to buy only necessities. Now, this was going to be a cinch for Paul, who is a native Vermonter from a poor family. He is a born and bred recycler, repairer, and reuser. I mean, this is a man who straightens out bent nails and reuses them. You know, when you applauded the number of kilowatts that this guy has put in, I knew this was a knowledgeable audience. I like my stuff a little more than Paul does, but as a writer, I know how to make a penny last a long time. So in the scheme of Things American, I am a disultry and uncommitted shopper, at best. When the market researcher calls, I am an outlier in the sample. Yes, ma'am, I tell her. I own a television. Yes, one television. Oh, about 25 years old. No, no electric hedge trimmer, no riding mower, not even a solar powered one, no dishwasher, no cappuccino maker. Yes, you heard right, no microwave oven. And no, I am not talking to you through an orange juice can at the end of a string. I buy mostly what I need, I tell her. Other than that, I don't want much. And yet, Paul and I have amassed, but can only be described as a lot of shit. I conducted an inventory at the beginning of our year. I wrote my possessions down on a pad. I don't own a single pair of Manolo Blancamix shoes at $900 a pair. Nevertheless, my closet floor was a stampede of shoes, work boots, snow boots, dress boots, barn boots, and ski boots, as well as winter shoes and summer shoes for business and for play in dry weather and wet weather. For running, walking, hiking, cross training, mountain biking and road biking. When I did the kitchen inventory, I counted eight kinds of rice, six flowers, three grades of cornmeal, two dozen varieties of beans and peas, and an entire section of organic furrow. We have six oils, six sweeteners, nine vinegars, and condiments to cheer any hungry, homesick member of the UN General Assembly who happens by. From dried Chinese mushrooms to a can of Mexican wheat Lecolce fungus. I'm not sure that this is a food. I imagine that you have arrived at a similar strategy to the one that Paul and I came to. You indulge, but it's not too much. This strategy prevents you from getting too much in debt, from adding too much crap to the landfill. You don't stop buying, but you try to divide things between two categories, necessities, and luxuries. You purchase the first, you try to keep them fuel efficient, local, non-exploitive, and the rest. And you think hard before shelling out your money for the latter. Now this is what Paul and I set out to do. We had a few necessities on our list, food, but no prepared foods, except for bread. Medicine, including insulin for our diabetic cat, Julius. Now you may think having a diabetic cat is something of a luxury to begin with, but we're attached to him. Some of you have diabetic cats in this audience. How many? No one here has a diabetic cat. There you have. And business supplies, including internet access because we both work from home. Luxuries included everything else, clothes, books, CDs, theater, movies, restaurant meals, leisure, travel, no elective surgery, no liposuction during the entire year of 2004. It seems simple for about five minutes. Early in January, we served kale and olives to our friends, Kathy and Charlie. So olives said Charlie, fixing me with narrow prosecutorial eyes. Would you call olives a necessity? Allison, a cartoonist called me up. She wanted to know if Mescalin was allowed or did we have to make do with plain unprocessed lettuce heads. We nixed the meslin. We would buy medicine, but did this include antihistamines when one of us gets a cold? Usually a cold goes away. So it's not really a cure. It's just a comfort. And what about these insy homeopathic pills that you put under your tongue? I think they're a hoax. Paul swears by them. Business. We bought pads of paper, but I like to use post-its. But could I use the neon colored post-its and not just the plain post-its? A necessity? A friend Roger wanted to know if we were going to get DSL, or could we make it with dial-up? "No movies," cried my friend Janice, who adores movies as much as I do. She mourned with me for a few minutes, then brightened, having discovered a possible loophole. "Well, you can see documentaries, can't you?" she said. The answer, alas, was no. And then there was a dispute over wine. Paul, being Italian, claimed that wine is a necessity. "It's like milk to me," he said. And then I raised an eyebrow, and later on in the year he said, "It's like water to me." And then there were these little things like this weekend. I wanted to come here. I was asked. You guys were paying me. So I just got on a plane and traveled round-trip 1,800 miles, which I just learned is about 900 carbon dioxide pounds that I have personally helped to emit into the air. So it's hard to sort out the needs from the desires. Do you really need a solar-powered irrigation system for your garden? Couldn't you just use a hose or perhaps a watering can? But the funny thing is, research shows that just about everyone thinks that they need the things they buy and considers almost everything they want a necessity. We're not greedy, we say. It's everyone else who is acquiring useless stuff. One study conducted by the sociologist, Juliet Schor, found that 78% of respondents stated that most Americans are very materialistic. Maybe 8% considered themselves very materialistic. How many in this room are very materialistic? It's about 8%. Half every single audience, the same. The typical of this attitude is a couple of Texans, profiled in a book called Trading Up. The husband, a real estate developer, called Charles, owns a BMW 325 and a Jaguar X-Type. Judith bought a Thermador 6 burner range, which I think costs about $20,000, and other premium appliances when they renovated the kitchen. Nevertheless, Charles and Judith say they don't like to overspend and they don't believe in status buying. For instance, Charles scoffs at the idea of buying a fancy watch. I don't consider myself materialistic either, like Charles and Judith. I don't like to overspend and I don't believe in status buying. I'm a vegetarian. I eat at the low end of the food chain. I sneer at the New York Times travel section about pieces where people go to retreat, sleep on a cot, rise at five, eat some gruel and apple and three almonds and pay $4,000 a week for the privilege. I brush my teeth with hydrogen peroxide and buy $3 shampoo. And yet, I think nothing of forking over $10 to view any obscure French film that passes through town, or $15 per hour and a quarter of yoga instruction, half of which time I do nothing but breathe. (Laughter) And so do you. (Laughter) I buy the no-name shampoo, yet I unswervingly maintain that the 200 milligrams of pure ibuprofen in an Advil capsule cures my headache faster than the 200 milligram capsule of pure ibuprofen. In the bottle labeled ibuprofen, which costs half as much. In the pantry, Paul and I have three kinds of salt. Perhaps you do two, or perhaps you have six bicycles in your garage. (Laughter) I'm not here to make you feel guilty. For one thing, you probably already do. You in this room have measured your ecological footprint down to the quarter inch. You know by heart America's greenhouse gas emissions. Some of you know just how much methane you emit every time you fart. (Laughter) A few of you have disciplined yourselves to stop farting altogether. (Laughter) In fact, I am not keen on all this misery mongering and guilt tripping at all. I don't believe that shopping makes you unhappy. If shopping made you unhappy, people would not shop. If they didn't like shopping, they might not come to the Midwest renewable energy fair. Between you and me, let's just confess. I won't tell anyone outside of this tent. Shopping is not all that bad in and of itself. In fact, it's kind of great. My thing might be salt. Yours might be bicycles or windmills, but it's fun. I mean it's sort of thrilling all that hunting and gathering, and it's satisfying to haul the thing back to the lair and look at it. (Laughter) We humans like to acquire things. We're like squirrels that way. And the other thing is this, that Paul and I learned during our year of not shopping. You can decide to buy less. You can buy green. You can buy with a social conscience. But try as you may. You cannot decide to step out of the marketplace altogether. Any more than you can choose to stop breathing the air. After all, civilizations are glued together by the exchange of goods and services. Since the beginning of time, people have been going to the market square, haggling over prices, buying a bushel of yams or a rug or a bag of spices, sitting under a tree and having a smoke or a cup of tea. And in this way, they exchange pleasantries and ideas, religions, sexual practices, cultures. Consumption is the very arena in which culture is fought over and licked into shape. A barren issue would end, Mary Douglas, who are an economist and an anthropologist. She wrote a wonderful book called The World of Goods. So through exchange, the agents built not just economies, they became interdependent. They conquered each other for their resources, but they also had to make peace because they needed to keep trading. And all of this happened through the exchange of goods and services. And for those goods and services, they paid in barter, in money and in credit. In other words, they shopped. Now, this is true in our personal lives as well. Never mind a livelihood. Forget about for a moment, war and peace and other big issues like that. Without buying, it's almost impossible to have a social life. If you live in the city, you stop by a bar and meet a friend and have a beer. Or a cultural life. You read books, you go to the movies. You can't really have a family life. Your children like to have birthday parties, for which you buy things. Or your mom may have an 80th birthday. A political life also costs money. Somebody has to turn on the lights and send out the mailings. Even an identity is purchased. We show who we are by what we wear, the t-shirts we have on. You know, where we hang out, we show our political affiliations, our tastes. Just deeply, really, who we are. I noticed one of the sun oven was a Christian company. And so they're selling stuff and they're also talking about Jesus to people. So all of these things, religion, everything, has some connection to the marketplace. So Paul and I next movies for the year. We missed Fahrenheit 9/11. Now this was not just a movie, this was a cultural, political phenomenon. So you say, it's only a movie. Well, not seeing it, not reading the new books. I often felt kind of out of it. I felt a little stupid. I felt not like myself, which is a person who's in the know who can talk about the latest stuff. So movies may seem superfluous, but is friendship, is cultural and political engagement, is feeling like oneself, superfluous. And all this has created, mediated, and sustained through stuff. As Douglas and issue would say, take goods out of human intercourse and you have dismantled the whole thing. Friends, we have a dilemma. We want a need and cannot escape having and exchanging our stuff. We may even enjoy having our stuff. And yet the endless, ever escalating production, shipping, storing, fueling, and disposing of our stuff is depleting our earth of its water, its soils, heating our atmosphere, killing off species, drowning continents, and maybe finally putting an end to life on our planet. We cannot keep growing like this, or we will outgrow a finite home. Consumer culture is not going to go away soon. I, for one, don't really want it to go away. In many ways, consumer culture nourishes us, but it is also killing us. We have to reach a balance. Some people call this balance as the balance between the material and the spiritual. Some talk about selfishness on one side and sacrifice or charity on the other. This is the way I think about it. On one side, there's pleasure. On the other side, there's restraint. On one side, there's personal freedom. On the other side is restriction, compulsory restriction, which is enforced by the government. This is not a new tension. It's been going on for centuries. The rights of man now included women. Go back to the 17th century to the Age of Revolutions, including our own, which enshrined an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Now, everyone always says, we don't actually get happiness. You just get to pursue it, but I actually think we get some of it. And this idea of the pursuit of happiness really underlines some of the great movements of our time, like feminism and gay and lesbian liberation and the abolition of slavery, they're all written into the Bill of Rights. On the other side, there's restraint. Now, this includes everything from criminal law to zoning regulations. The idea that you can't dump your oil in the creek because somebody's going to drink the water in the creek downstream. It may be much more convenient for you to dump your water in the creek. Paul tells me that when he was a kid in Vermont, everyone had an edge. And just whatever the junk was, they pushed it over that edge. So, never mind where the edge ended up. So, we need to think about how to restrain ourselves. And let's face it, each other. And when we do that, we assess how much we have, what our needs are, what resources we have, and then we try to divide it up more or less equally. Economically, pleasure and individual freedom are the values that for better or worse underlying capitalism. And restraint is closer to socialism, or at least to regulated capitalism. So, the pleasure people, the freedom people say, paradise now, the restrainers say, put some away for later. Sustainability is a principle of delayed gratification. So, when you boil it down, we're talking about a tension between individuals and the greater good. And in a democracy, we have to care about both of those. So, how do you, the two sides influence each other? I'm Mark Helpsmeet, your host for this Northern spirit radio production called Spirit in Action. The spirit we're visiting today is that of Judith Levine, author of Not Buying It, My Year Without Shopping. And we're listening to the talk she did at the MREA's Renewable Energy and Sustainable Living Fair this past June, after which I'll visit with her via phone. Back to her candid look at our consumer culture and her enlightening experience with Not Buying It. As I said before, I don't cut into the kind of environmentalism that throws the baby out with the gray water. That is throwing all the imaginative juicy stuff about consumer culture away with its devastating consequences. For certain people, now I'm not accusing anybody here in this room. It's not enough to love your bicycle. You have to hate your television, too. It's not enough to buy green. You have to condemn the whole enterprise of shopping as a crime and a sin. And look down on shoppers, including yourself as advertising, adult, instant gratification, addicted zombies. Social critic Ellen Willis called anti-consumerism the Puritanism of the Left. Now, you may disagree with me, but I don't look back on the Puritans as one of our proudest American creations. At this moment, though, I think the pleasure people are winning. And that's good for capitalism, whether you like that or not. Suddenly, the marketplace is green. Every coal producer is an environmentalist. The gyms are running their lights under the treadmills. Everybody's building their kitchen cabinets out of plyboo. Even Walmart, having covered half the earth with plastic, is becoming carbon neutral. And the M-R-E-A fair is flourishing. (Applause) Now, you would think this would please me, and self-professed, freedom and pleasure person. But there is one way that it worries me. And not just for the obvious landfill-filling problems, because the stuff that you're selling here hopefully is going to last a really long time and you can fix it, you can replace it apart. In America, we really encourage to think of ourselves as consumers. Everything we do is a consumption thing. And we're also, when we think of ourselves as individuals, I was in a very good carbon footprint workshop over there, in which the guy said, "Look, this is what I can do in my home. This is what I can do with my car. I can make a difference." And that would seem like a very good idea. Clearly, it's why we're all here. It's because we want to take some immediate steps right away. Not to mention, bring down our electric bill. But I just read an interesting book. It's called "Shopping Our Way to Safety" by a guy named Andrew Zaz. How we changed from protecting the environment to protecting ourselves. Zaz talks about something called inverted quarantine. In an old-fashioned kind of quarantine, you take the individual who's ill and you separate that person to safeguard the public health. An inverted quarantine, you take yourself an individual and you quarantine yourself from the toxic environment. He says, you know, there's certain things that we do in inverted quarantine, like eating organic vegetables, which are good for the public, because they bring soils back and the more people eat organic vegetables, the better it is for the earth. But there's a hidden danger that he calls political anesthesia. The more you filter your own water, the less you're going to care about restoring a crumbling water infrastructure or cleaning up the water, which he says to bring the whole country into compliance with the Clean Water Act, it would cost a trillion dollars. We're spending a fraction of that. And the more you build with Playboo instead of Amazon, the more you are lulled into thinking that the Amazon is going to be okay. And then you don't spend as much time pushing for international treaties to save places like the Amazon. In other words, inverted quarantine is a consumer tactic. It's not a citizenship tactic. It's an individual solution and not a collective one. Now, many people who build Green's houses are also environmental activists, and I think that includes lots of you. And furthermore, caring about your own health and your children's health is a good way to become an environmentalist. Still says that, and I tend to agree with him, in solving our problems for ourselves and our families, in creating the feeling that each family is safe, we forget about the greater good and also the greater dangers. And that ends up empowering everybody. During our year without shopping, Paul and I spent a lot of time out in the public sphere. We went to the public library, we went to the public parks, and we found that they were really great and they were also in really bad shape. And what we realized was the amount of money and passion we pour into personal consumption is indirect. Inverse proportion to the amount we are willing to invest in the public good. So everybody gets poor services. We don't want to pay taxes. The services get worse sooner or later. People have a tax revolt. This public swimming pool has become crowded and dirty. Build your own swimming pool. And before you know it, nobody wants to support the pool anymore. Goodbye, swimming pool. We learned that our personal choices, moreover, are very much restrained by what happens in public policy. I was talking to somebody over here who said she had reduced her driving to one gallon per week, which is great. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, which is a small town. You can walk places. There's public transportation. But if she lived here in central Wisconsin, she'd probably have to get into her car to get to her job. And so you can't just do it on your own. So we have to fight for good policy. If there's curbside recycling, it's easy to do it. And if you mix your plastics in with your trash, you will get a fine. And therefore it is painful to not do it. This is a compulsory thing. And I think that's good. And if there was stringent fuel emission standards, you wouldn't be able to buy a gasoline car. You wouldn't have to make a personal moral decision every single time you wanted to do the right thing. Public policy, good public policy, makes it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing. And furthermore, the prices of Priuses would come down. So you wouldn't have to be rich to do the right thing to. [APPLAUSE] Now, at this point, as your inspirational speaker, I am supposed to tell you how rewarding it is to get involved in your community and join a political group. Actually, I have been an activist my whole life. My mother was an activist her whole life. My mother's both a lifelong activist and a lifelong gardener. And she tells me that gardening is an exercise in lowering your expectations. [LAUGHTER] Folks, so is politics. [LAUGHTER] It is frustrating. It is full of compromises. It takes a hell of a long time to get anything done. And you often end up with only a little bit of what you wanted to get. And yet, it is a lot like gardening. We have an orchard at home. Some years, there are no bees. I learned the other day that one of the reasons they may be no bees is because of cell phones. I don't know if any of you have heard that. The cell phone signals are confusing them and they don't go back to where they started. Anyway, it's a lot like growing trees. You put in your trees. You may never see your trees mature. We have some cherry trees. And in northeastern Vermont, there's a guy named Lewis Hill, who's an organic, great organic gardener. Every year we get enough cherries for one pie. So I looked up in Lewis Hill and he said, you know, I've been growing cherry trees for 30 years and I always get enough cherries for one pie. So, you know, you may just get your one pie. So get out there. Go back by your stuff. I think the prices are coming down in the last few hours. Get some of that sorghum syrup, very good. But before you go home, check out the political temps. Learn a little bit about nonviolent direct action. If shopping is the air we breathe, it will not save the air we breathe, unfortunately. But as my mom said, politics and gardening are like. And you may find that you like it just as much to get out there and do something outside of your garden as you like being in your own garden. Thank you so much. [ Applause ] So I'm going to stand here and tell you that Judith's book is for sale. [ Laughter ] And it is outside at the picnic tables out there and Judith will be signing them. But we've got about ten minutes that Judith can take questions. If anybody's got a question or a challenge for that matter, we've got about ten minutes to entertain those before. We need to clear the area for the next workshop. Judith? You know, if you don't want to read this, you can put it on your head if it's raining, or you can burn it if you're called. And also it is a vegan alternative to Pate de Fuegra. Yes? [ Inaudible ] She wanted to know what was the first thing I bought at the end of my -- of our year. I went out and rented six movies and Paul bought a box of Q-tips. [ Laughter ] I just didn't think perfect ear hygiene was an absolute necessity. [ Laughter ] Anyone else? [ Inaudible ] She asked would I ever do something like this again? Well, you know, I'm a writer, and so periodically I have to do something like this. But, you know, I do think that we learned a lot of lessons. I mean, you learn what you can live without Q-tips, for instance. And also, it just makes you a much more conscious shopper, and that certainly happened to me. And it helped me recommit myself to political action. So, I think it's a good exercise once in a while. It's sort of like fasting for a week, but you can't stop eating altogether. [ Inaudible ] Yes, do we shop less or differently? Yes, I would say that Paul and I have pretty much vanquished the impulse buy, except for every once in a while, when you have to have a solar-powered personal fan. Anybody else? Yes, sir? [ Inaudible ] [ Inaudible ] Yeah, he asked whether that year, whether we felt an aversion to shopping, like going to a mall. I mean, I was feeling aversion when I go into a mall. I'm lucky that I live in a place where you don't have any. But, you know, I think we have to -- yes, the answer is yes. And I would look at people eating at restaurants and think, boy, could they spend their money better. But, you know, I think we really have to try not to be judgmental in that way. I mean, there are a lot of places in this country where there is nothing to do except shop. I mean, there aren't even any sidewalks to take a walk on. And so, there's no cultural life, there are no public parks. In fact, there's been like a 50% decrease in public space since the 1950s in the United States. And the only public place is you can't -- if you want to go for a walk, you have to go to the mall to take one. So, you know, I mean, this is another thing about how, you know, people have constrained choices. And so, we really have to work in the long term to spread those choices out. Yes, sir. Could you talk about what you've learned about the junction between making good judgments personal and for the common good, and judgmentalism, which includes the guilt stuff? Right. He said, what's the connection between making good judgments for yourself and judgmentalism? This is why I come down in the end to feeling like what -- you have to put your moral energy into good public policy. Because, as I said before, it is very hard for people to make a good choice. For instance, you know, we talk about nutrition. There are many neighborhoods in this country where there really isn't any good food to eat. You know, you want to get local food, you cannot buy it. And so, now there are certain people who need to be judged and held accountable. And those are the people that we elect. You know, the people who own companies who make big decisions for us. Those people all have to be held accountable. But I really draw back from making this kind of -- from feeling superior, you know, to people who are making choices that I consider not great choices. And furthermore, I think that guilt shipping is a very bad strategy for a movement. It just doesn't work. It can't make you feel bad about themselves and hope they're going to come in under your tent. Yeah. [ Applause ] What would you do or think or say if I don't -- if the movement can, drop it here on the crown and then walk away? I would say, do you think your mother's going to pick that up for you? [ Laughter ] Follow up on the demo's question. When you're thinking about the state that the personal is political and typical, how do you reconcile that with kind of your current call for really taking direct political action versus kind of working with policy makers? That's a really good question. He said that the slogan, the personal is political, which is a feminist slogan. You know, how do you reconcile that with this call for, you know, public and collective action? You know, I'm a feminist and I've -- most of my work has really been, in fact, I'm very interested in the ways in which these big forces like the economy and cultures are felt in personal life. I mean, that's really what it interests me most and that's what this book is about. And so I wouldn't say, you know, don't do stuff that's important personally, but don't delude yourself to thinking that if you build your own personal pliable house, you are changing the world because, you know what, you're not. Now, it's a great consciousness razor for people to think about each thing. You know, where does this would come from? You know, are we going to clear cut a forest for it and all that kind of stuff? Better yet, don't buy it, don't build a new house. Buy it, one that already exists. So each personal choice we make is very important. And we also have personal responsibility because we do have freedom to make personal choices to a certain extent. But an enormous amount of what affects us is history. That's what Marx said. You know, you can't get outside of it. So we need social movements. And social movements, I've come to think more and more really about emotions, almost more than rational stuff. And so like, how do we get to feel different? How do we get to experience things differently? So it's a very complicated relationship between these two things. But unfortunately, I fear that people, the easier it is to do the right thing for yourself. The less people worry about doing the right thing for everyone. Because that means conflict. And conflict is not fun. It's much more fun to be out pruning your apple trees. So, you know, that's what we have to engage in, some way of being persuasive. Yeah? She said, what do I do personally about these awful things that are happening in the world, such as wars? I'm personally a very active anti-war person. You know, this is a hideous war. We should never have gotten into it. It is sapping every single penny we've got. You know, people talk to people about how there's been cuts in, say, energy efficiency, and, you know, in their schools. They're just talking to somebody this morning. They don't have math anymore. It's a Wisconsin school. So, you know, it has a direct impact on you, even if your own children are not going to fight there. You can't do everything. You know, you need to focus, I think. But I do -- you know, it's very hard because it feels so big, you know. And, you know, it's hard to buy a grapefruit that was grown in any place where you might have some idea of what pesticides are on it. You know, how can you stop these great big things? But, as I said, also, you know, I think a lot of us look at the Democrats and think, "God, this is what we work for, you know, they're not doing so well." And yet, you know, this is what politics is about. It's really long and slow. So, yeah. When you've got out, you know, restaurants, recreation, and travel, do you really need to lose any family or friends? Yes, did we alienate or lose any family or friends by not traveling and not going to restaurants? There was a certain penalty to hanging out with Paul and me. You know, you couldn't go to the movies, for instance. It was sort of -- we got a little boring, I think, although, you know, we always brought a pie wherever we went. So, there was some reward as well. It's an interesting thing. People kept wanting to give us stuff. They were -- (Laughter) -- incredibly generous. This friend said, "When someone stops shopping, it's as if a vacuum forms, and you feel you have to rush in and fill it." (Laughter) And, you know, there are unwritten social rules. Somebody gives you something, you should give something back to them. You know, so we're constantly fending off, you know, people giving us stuff, which is also kind of rude, accepting a gift is polite. But, you know, people stuck with us, and some people even -- I said that they regarded us with an attitude that's probably a German word for it, which means admiration for an enterprise. You're glad someone else is doing, so you don't have to. (Laughter) If Paul were gifted with those two tips, would I have allowed him to have them? No! (Laughter) So, yeah, one more. Did I put all the money that I saved into my IRA? I put all the money I saved into paying off my credit card debt, which was almost exactly the amount I saved, about $8,000, and I have not run my credit card bill up again. (Applause) I got an Oprah for that. (Laughter) As I said, I hope you will buy the book, give it to your friends, and I'm all for buying books. That's one of the things I learned I can't live without, so it's cheap. (Laughter) Thanks. (Applause) Thank you very much. Judith Levine, author of Not Buying It, my Year Without Chopping, is my guest for today's edition of Spirit in Action, a Northern Spirit radio production, and I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeade. After recording Judith's speech at the MREA's Renewable Energy and Sustainable Living Fair this past June, I made arrangements to call her up after I did some research. Instead of buying her book, I drew on some of our Commonwealth by checking it out through my local library, reading it, and then another of the books she's written. This past week, I called her up to follow up on some of those questions I had, the kind of things I like to check out as I trace the roots and the fruits of the spirit. Judith, thanks for joining me for Spirit in Action. Nice to be here. I thought your talk at the Renewable Energy Fair was absolutely wonderful, stunning, and I wanted to ask you a few more questions if I could to follow up on themes that you dealt with. Be my pleasure. One of the things I like to explore with my program is the religious, spiritual, and moral basis of people's actions that work. For instance, you mentioned that you're a vegetarian. Why is that? There are several reasons I'm a vegetarian. One is I love animals, and it occurred to me some years back that the only difference between my cat, Julius, and some pig is that I don't know the pig. Since I wouldn't eat Julius, I don't want to eat a pig either. I don't think it's necessary for us to kill animals in order to live. The other part of it is that environmentally not efficient to grow animals, we have to use lots of lamb to feed them. The industries that raise the animals that we tend to eat are often inhumane and, in fact, brutally cruel to the animals that they're raising. So if I were to eat animals or foul, I would want to do it from a place that I knew where I knew the animals were being treated well. Do you believe that animals have, I don't know, souls individual worth in the same way that people are presumed to have souls? I don't really believe in souls at all. I'm an atheist. But I do believe in something like what the Quakers call the inner light or the spirit, what you would say of God in each person. Anyone who's ever lived with animals or spent any time with animals understands that they have intelligence and feelings and intuition, and they relate to each other and to us, and they have certainly those more primitive emotions of fear and affection and actually quite complex emotions as well. It's ludicrous to see them as some sort of machines that don't have thoughts and feelings, and so the process of being raised to be eaten and then killed is such a traumatic experience, I would think, for any animal. So that's what I feel about them. I also believe in, I guess, something like karma, which is that when you do violence to others, it redounds to you. And to be thoughtful about the lives of other things, a spider that comes in my house, I can just as easily pick up and bring outside and squash him. You mentioned in your book, there's several times that you touched on various, I guess, religious practice and so on. You mentioned Buddhist practice and thoughts, you do yoga. I think you mentioned somewhere in there you went to a Quaker camp or a school or something like that. Can you give me some of the background of how you got to being an atheist, obviously having some encounter with various religions? Well, first of all, as probably lots of your listeners know, Buddhism is an atheist, so-called religion. But my parents were socialists, they were culturally Jews, but they did not believe in God and I grew up not believing in God. That's not to say that my family didn't have very strong moral principles that they lived. I was sent to a Quaker camp in Vermont called the Farm and Wokeness Camps, where we had a Quaker meeting every morning and we made decisions by consensus and we lived simply and we did physical work and everyone, even the smallest children, contributed to the community both in decision making and in keeping it going. I think I became a pacifist when I went to Quaker camp. And the older I got and the more I learned about history, the more I have become convinced that wars do not solve the problems that they intend to solve, they tend to create more problems that endure for many centuries. Furthermore, for a very practical standpoint, I think that the weapons that we have now make were an impossible means of trying to solve any problems. The weapons are just too powerful, they can do too much destruction. My belief is that we have to take that off the table as a way of resolving conflict. You seem to be one of the most extensive readers I've come in contact with. Have you read The Left Hand of God by Rabbi Lerner? No, is that Michael Lerner? I'm not a huge fan of Michael Lerner. I mean, I'm sure that Michael Lerner and I share lots of values in politics. You know, I'm not a religious person. I'm a moral person. I think more, as many Jews do, frankly, even Jews who believe in God, I'm much more focused on our lives in the world while we're alive. I don't believe that there's some larger consciousness that's controlling things, which makes us all the more responsible for taking care of this Earth and for each other. So for people who say that those of us who are atheists are somehow a moral, to me we're just realistic, but it surely doesn't make us less active as moral actors. I mentioned you've read clearly so extensively. Are there any authors that you feel are particularly influential that are particularly valuable like we should all read them? And I know that that's made a statement about what other people should do, but... I'm not averse to telling other people what to do. I guess a person who was kind of a mentor to me who recently died was Ellen Willis, who was a social critic, an essayist, an activist, a feminist, who wrote about a great many things. I think she's one of the most important writers of my generation, certainly. She was even quite influential in my thinking about consumerism, because for Ellen, the chief criterion of what is important is freedom. That's something that I care a great deal about too. And yet she was not at all irresponsible about the necessity of us all restraining certain behaviors and uses of the Earth and consumption and all of those other things. She was a profoundly political person, and that is to say that she was interested in the way the world really works and not in sort of idealizing things. So Ellen Willis, who wrote a number of books of essays, is somebody that I like a lot. You spoke at the MREA about a really interesting concept, which I hadn't heard before, that of an inverted quarantine, kind of a firewall to protect yourself instead of addressing the source of the problem. It seems to me that your critique of the problem that an inverted quarantine results in, lessening the drive to protect the common good is very significant. So much of our culture is in this me first mode that it seems that you're arguing for moral imperative that goes beyond the personal. So what in your view is the basis for caring about someone other than just ourselves, I'd like to make this clear. For instance, I'm 53, so I'm good for maybe another 30 years on the planet. So why should I worry about global warming disasters that will really land on other people's heads, future generations, species like the polar bear? Why should I connect concern to them? What's the basis for that kind of moral judgment? Well, the first thing I would say is that inverted quarantine is not my coinage. I got that from a book by a guy named Andrew Vaz called Shopping Our Way to Safety, how we changed from protecting the environment to protecting ourselves. And his thesis is, as you say, instead of working politically to say make sure that we have clean water, people start to drink bottled water or to get rid of nuclear weapons. They would build themselves a fallout shelter. You know, as if these really, these things would really protect them. It's always hard to know what the consequences of one's actions are going to be when you throw the stone in the water. You don't know which leaves the rippling is going to move around or not. Every one of us is connected to everyone else, so no one lives on their own. No one is independent, no one pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps, somebody else helps them. You know, life would be pretty darn lonely if we cared only about ourselves. So, you know, well, I don't, certainly not averse to self-interest, nor am I not interested in personal freedoms and personal liberation. I care a lot about that stuff, but I don't necessarily counterpose personal liberties and personal rights and freedoms from the good of everybody. In fact, in some ways, these things are always in tension with one another. That's true of any democracy. We're always trying to balance the greater good with the needs of the individual, but you can have both of them. It's true that each person has to leave some room for other people who can't take up all the space. But I think that one of the things that gives life its meaning is the sense that you make a mark that you leave a footprint. Now, people talk about our ecological footprints. We don't want to leave too big a footprint, and yet we might want to leave a mark that's a positive mark to make things better. That seems to be one of the primary things that gives human life meaning is to have some sort of impact on another person on a place that you live. You plant an apple tree, and the trees may not even bear a lot of fruit during your lifetime, and yet you think about those trees and what they're going to be like 30, 50 years from now. It certainly gives me a certain pleasure to think that I have planted a tree that's going to outlast me or written a book that's going to outlast me. I hope my books do outlast me. The polar bears were here probably longer than we were here, or their ancestors were here, at least as long as us and probably longer than us. It's arrogant to think that our little moment on this earth and our little needs and desires on this earth are somehow more important than the needs and desires of the other creatures and the other plants. In fact, all those things that we don't even know have any need or desires or reason for being, you know, rocks and weeds and bugs that seem like tests to us. You know, we began this conversation talking about religion and moral values and the experience of withdrawing from the rush of the marketplace. For many people is an experience that encourages meditation and they find out stuff about themselves, which I did too. But for me, the most important experience or lesson of it was that it pulled me outside of myself. Confumption is a pretty private affair going out and getting stuff and bringing it back to your lair and enjoying it at home. I really have all that much against that, but it excludes many other experiences that we could be having out there in the community, seeing other people just walking around in the world and observing it. And so for me, the experience of withdrawing from being a consumer recommitted me to the responsibilities and the joys of citizenship and simply of a kind of social life that is unmediated by the things that we can buy. I'm glad both of you did the experiment and that you wrote about it. Thanks for doing the work and setting an example of another path that we can check out. Well thanks so much for the interview, it was fun to talk to you. We can run without running the pants. We don't need leotards to dance. We can walk in the woods without having to shoot. We can even swim without a swim and suit. We don't need a stereo to sing. We don't need much of anything. We've got everything that we need. There's no reason not to proceed. So jump right in. Let's begin. We've got everything that we need. That was a bit of a song by Carol Johnson called Everything We Need. And you've just been listening to a spirit and action interview with Judith Levine, author of Not Buying It My Year Without Shopping. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit and action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website. Thank you for listening. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit In Action. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)