It’s a phrase from a Henry James novel. An uptight, square American is in Paris on business, and he finds himself in a low-rent apartment of bohemian artists. People start showing up. So it’s a party. Wine, loose talk. At first, he’s uncomfortable, but soon he starts enjoying himself, and even liking everybody.
He liked the ingenuous compatriots—for two or three others soon gathered; he liked the delicate daubs and the free discriminations. He liked above all the legend of good-humored poverty, of mutual accommodation fairly raised to the romantic.
This newcomer pegs these arty people as “ingenuous,” but of course, he’s the naïve one—just starting to feel the first twinge of growing into a more sophisticated person. A practical man will want to think of himself as hardheaded and pragmatic; he’ll be reluctant to start thinking maybe “poverty” (as he names their situation) could be cheerful, let alone propitious.
Anyway, James’s phrase put me in mind of this other thing I want to say to you both. I want to talk about your generation and how you’ll all be living. At my age, personally, I’ll be dead before the major “correction,” but you two boys will go on living in the direction of the full twenty-first century. It’s going to be an undertaking. My generation won’t be leaving behind an altogether uninhabitable planet, as some warn; but it’s trending that way, and you’ll have to show more fortitude than my contemporaries did. I’m sorry about this. It was great while we enjoyed it. As I’m sure you’ve heard. It was wonderful. Also, I know “showing fortitude” isn’t fun. As an expression, it can sound gallant maybe, but when you’re in the midst of it, fortitude isn’t necessarily a choice you’d make.
So I want to risk being specific with some advice. This won’t exactly be armchair hypocrisy. You’ve grown up uncomplaining in this makeshift cold house with this abstemious father, among second-rate old defective things, and in this you’ve shown the infinitely generous loyalty of children. I was eighteen, younger than both of you are now, when I read Limits to Growth, and from then on—with the onset of a quiet, low-level panic that never has let up—I started practicing austerities like hitchhiking rather than driving, taking stairs rather than elevators, etc. Which I mostly kept to myself, knowing they were laughable or hopeless. And which I’ve inflicted somewhat on you kids. But I wasn’t entirely wrong. The word uninhabitable does apply already in some places. The whole thing is going to be surprising.
You’re going to have to take an interest in hardship. And start to see “hardship” as perhaps a bracing and essential element (I want to say, an ideal element) of the next hundred years.
The cause of the earth’s ills is our affluence, our species’ affluence. That is, prosperity itself is the blight. People in Uganda and Tanzania, now, are clicking on Add to Cart, and so are people in Bangladesh and India—more all the time, while new markets keep getting penetrated. The environmental squeeze, as it comes along, will hit us in the middle class as an economic crunch. Fixing broken things over and over, being inventive sometimes in creating healthy meals, being patient with ever-more-frequent snafus in government or commerce or technology-and-infrastructure, being prepared for large-scale things to go wrong that have no conventional solutions, coming into livelihoods you’d never rehearsed for. In my own career, learning experiences have turned out to be less irksome than I’d thought they’d be. I’m someone who could never have imagined himself with a chainsaw, or even touching a chainsaw. Or ever having a reason to come anywhere near the sound of a chainsaw. My accomplishments were as an “urban aesthete,” habitué of cappuccino bars. Now we’ve been off-the-grid for many years, and I’ve come to think that the most menial, thorny workbench problems, or daylong labors outdoors, are as rewarding as a good review in the New York Times. Considered objectively, honestly, a good review in the Times is a passing, cloying pang. Walking on the wooden floor I made myself is dependably rewarding. Every morning before dawn, when I’m making coffee, I walk barefoot on that floor.
You deserve my, and my cohorts’, admission of responsibility. We’re the generation most blameworthy. It’s not us alone—all the generations did this—but ours is most unforgivable, because we knew what we were doing. We’d been told. Also, we’ve been the ones using everything up most voraciously, as if inadvertently. But we knew. It was hopping on a plane and hopping in the car, and it was grabbing a hamburger. It was our big, constantly changing wardrobes and our temperature-controlled environments. It was doing well and having a family.
It’s success that caused this. Every-thing we love is the problem; even love itself is the problem. The starter home, the children, the shampoo bottles we toss in recycling. The road trips, the juicy steak, the destination wedding. The quick run to the store for ice cream.
People your age know this story of improvidence all too well. Maybe endorsing a code of “good-humored poverty” looks merely feckless, merely hippie. This isn’t the Sixties anymore. Instead, if there’s any “legend” for you in the new millennium, it’s the story of the beautiful and solitary planet that was all used up by your parents before you got here.
The correction (as I’ve called it) of our booming civilization will be more severe and more permanent than popular thinking has yet foreseen. The spectacles of “climate change” are lamentable, and they’re coming on fast, but climate change will be the least of it. The entire complex of problems—the oil and minerals all mined to exhaustion, the deep forests and the ancient water-table likewise emptied, the air dirty enough to be brain-damaging, the migrations of entire broken-hearted populations, the possible destruction of the very matrix of life, from the plankton on up—will have the result, for us, of creating economic absurdities. In these absurdities, the class system will segregate people terribly. A new unfairness will pervade society. Both of you boys, who have health and wit, will do all right. But the unfairnesses will occasionally be grotesque.
You missed it, but you only just missed it. The time has only just passed when you could jump in, carefree, and swim in any river or lake. Gas was a few cents a gallon. There was so much room everywhere. Buying a house, getting admission to a college: everything wasn’t such a moonshot. Almost all the food, wherever you might go, was real. We were so much awash in extra profit, labor unions did all right and people were loyal and stayed put, and retirement pensions were somewhat de rigueur. There was a riverine swimming hole where the water was so clear you could see every pebble ten feet down underwater, and you could have the whole place to yourselves, unintruded-on all day.
Now a provident future—a “good-humored” future—will involve mended and patched clothes, more dinners of beans with rice, more interesting spices like coriander and cumin and paprika, clotheslines on roofs or in backyards, siestas in the heat of the day, a farmer’s market in the shade of a freeway overpass, closer-knitted neighborhoods, used cars galore (at least until, eventually, they dwindle to cherished rarities), cluttered yards, cluttered apartments, cluttered garages. The clutter itself will be important, if not perhaps a delight. (It will be a source of creativity.) People won’t be clicking Add to Cart so much, or opening freshly delivered boxes on their doorsteps, or breaking down the cardboard to “recycle” it along with the bubble wrap, or then—all too soon—dispatching whatever came in the box to the dumpster, and thence to landfill.
As for you two in particular: people with integrity can prosper accidentally, as a kind of byproduct. Or at least stay solvent. One needn’t literally be poor. But get used to the diet, and get used to the look. I’m talking about the middle class and even the upper-middle. Imagine wearing the same down parka year after year. You can keep washing those things and they come out all right. Imagine your wives and children, too, wearing the years-old parkas, even if they may look like they’d been sleeping in them, then cooking breakfast in them, then wearing them around the house all morning because nobody turns the thermostat up. Appliances won’t be quite so replaceable. The refrigerator, the car, the toaster. A bicycle. Start having a go at repairing things yourself when they aren’t working; you’ll find most things are easy, it’s all common sense. I’ve found it’s fun, outsmarting things—at least when I succeed. If you really want to save the planet, put off buying a new laptop for a year, or two years, while the old familiar one gets slower and demands a lot of patience. Also, imagine dropping down a peg from the double-income household. Let one person stay home, where there’s work.
I wonder, though, slightly irrelevantly, why does James call it a “legend”?
He might have simply talked about good-humored poverty. Instead, what his visitor likes to see is the legend of it enacted in a Paris apartment.
Well, as a storytelling artist, he was probably just putting in a dab of characterization for the man. This Ameri-can traveler is supposed to be a somewhat narrow bourgeois tourist. To him, the arty types look “quaint.” He sees bohemianism as sweet but impractical, a kind of fable for young people to believe in.
Your generation’s bohemianism, now, will be different. It won’t be impractical, it will be quite practical, and I worry that it can look grim. People used to say, about the pollution and the rising sea levels and the entire mess, “If it ever gets that bad, by then I’ll be long gone.” Well, now it is that bad. It’s been that bad for a while—even well-off people are putting up with the taste of the water, the crime rate, the expense of weather disasters, the permanent beach closures—and those people aren’t long gone, they’re still here. They seem to be just stomaching it. Or ignoring it. Or maybe literally forgetting. Forgetting what life was like. Governments will be taking various kinds of actions, but not soon enough. So—I don’t know what to say. The entire “correction” scenario, every bit of it, is looking more and more like a sure thing. In your century, over the long haul, it won’t be the specific floods and wildfires. Those will be terrible, and let’s hope you can be nimble and evade them, but the more permanent, widespread hardship, from here on out, will be the economic subsidence.
It will ask of you a different kind of fortitude. Money trouble can be a quieter kind of torment, but a just-as-deadly one, particularly for the people who are already struggling at the bottom. We can hope that the old commercial economy’s basic engine, envy, won’t be so important. (I mean the kind of acquisitive envy provoked by TV and Facebook.) The old sin of invidia itself will never go out of style, but someday soon maybe driving an old car won’t seem such an indignity.
One or both of you, of course, might be planning on doing well financially somehow and living above all this. It wouldn’t be an immoral choice, necessarily. You might, understandably, want a life far from any chainsaws, or any sentimentality about a wooden floor. Still, if sustaining humanity on this planet is ever a real goal, almost all of us need to start living closer to a certain radical ideal. The lifestyle most in keeping with the planet is the lifestyle that most closely resembles what we call poverty. That would have to be the manifesto of any clear-eyed serious environmentalist. The closer to flat-out impoverishment, the more decent. Production and consumption are what’s wrecking everything. A model might be our grandparents in the Depression, with their kitchen gardens and jalopies and frayed shirt collars. Or, if we want to attain environmentalism’s truly perfect kashrut, it would be with a subsistence-level economy: salmon and blueberries, ramps and wild rice, and a few cultivars like beans and squash.
Of course, all eight billion of us aren’t going to start living like the Sioux and the Miwok. The best we might aspire to is thrift—and not as a come-down, but rather as an opportunity for art and experiment. Henry James’s callow party-guest adds an extra remark about those bohemian Parisians: he admires their “mutual accommodation.” Mutual accommodation, to him, looks so amiable and staunch that it strikes him as almost romantic. If I were granted a special ticket and could live on through the twenty-first century, I would plan on making mutual accommodation my legend—that is, a guiding ethos. Mutual accommodation does in fact promise a kind of deliverance, especially in your encounter with the displaced, the bewildered, the newcomers, the family living on the sidewalk in a nylon pop-up tent not because they’re fleeing fires or floods but just because they’ve defaulted on their mortgage.
And let not the good-humor element be in short supply. Everything else, evidently, will be in short supply, but the good-humor element will be abundant, at least for the ones who can accommodate. Happiness, biologically, is a survival strategy. It’s a survival strategy in the individual organism as well as in the collaborating social group. Think, for example, of the sense of elation that buoys you up during a sudden emergency. Actually, the whole thing won’t be that bad. To say so now sounds fatuous, especially because of how bad it will in fact be. But you’ll see what I mean. I wish I could be there.
Louis B. Jones is the author of five novels; the two latest are Radiance and Innocence, both published by Counterpoint.
