Better Off

Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology
© 2004 Eric Bende
256 pages

When Eric and Mary Bendes tied the knot, they chose to kick off their marriage in the traditional fashion: struggling together to make a go of a family farm.  Mary had romantic notions about homesteading, and Eric serious misgivings about the role of technology in human affairs. Together they moved to a quasi-Amish community not attached to a particular religious order, but composed of those too freethinking for the Old Order and too traditional for the modernized Mennonites.  Their mission: to spend a year living in technological simplicity, to discern how much gadgetry was really needed for a flourishing human life. 

Better Off tells the story of the Bendes’ adapting to life  within the community, both socially and technologically. Eric and Mary are outsiders, but so are a fair number of their new neighbors. They are surrounded by those who, like the authors of The Plain Reader, have yearned for a more meaningful life and found it in a community that minimizes those parts of modernity which are most disruptive.  Because it is a farming community,  tending to the family homestead is the major use of time. While this does involve manual labor, often the ‘work’ aspect – the monotony – is completely mitigated by the social aspect.  The members of this community rarely pay strict social visits: instead, relationships are established, built up, and maintained by working together.  Although Eric and Mary both  have their individual   jobs around the house, both are necessary to keep the farm itself functioning:  because they are operating without technology,  more work has to be done by hand. The lack of refrigeration, for instance , means that goods must be canned. The Bendes adopt fairly quickly to their new tech-lite life, aided by generous neighbors who find their new companions to be earnest in their intentions, quick to learn, and hard-working. Bendes is initially surprised to learn that the Minimites are not technophobes; they do not ban any form of mechanical aide on principle, but scrutinize an object’s effects on society before incorporating it.  Tool use is heavy,  but all require human  presence.  The lack of electricity in their community doesn’t require life to be miserable: it just prevents mindless automation.

I read this book years ago (2015) and have been mulling it over once again -- not that I'm tempted to give up technology,   but because society is steadily increasing its own digitalization, and in physical ways so that our homes and automobiles  are increasingly plugged in. Mechanical assistance,  which at least required some human role is now being replaced by total automation. There are dangers there --   more points of failure as things increase in complexity,  the detachment of people from their own lives, the constant generation and possible manipulation of information by smart devices -- but most  embrace things without a thought. It's one thing to become wholly dependent on something outside of ourselves, but we should at least be conscious of it -- and wary, in some cases.  

Off the Grid

Off the Grid:  Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America
© 2010 Nick Rosen
292 pages

When Nick Rosen put up a website to help his fellow Britons find resources and land reduce their carbon footprint by living off the grid, he was astonished at all of the interest his site received from the United States. He had more American readers than English readers, in fact,  and decided to investigate.  Off the Grid records his visits with various communities which operate outside the electrical grid. Although its subtitle refers to a coherent movement, there is nothing like that actually here. Rosen's account includes many people who simply happen  to be without power, like the homeless and the residents of a small Florida key ("No Name Key") who balked at the enormous cost of electrifying their island. Some of the persons included are positively dull, like the numerous wealthy types who maintained a 'vacation home' off the grid when they needed a retreat from their busy lives.  There are far more interesting characters present, though: an aging woman introduced as the founder of the 2nd Maine Militia, who has a working relationship with a local commune of anarchists,  and another woman who gave up PBS videography to teach SCUBA diving and drive trucks, instead.

 The majority of these interviews take place in the Southwest, where land is cheap and the population sparse. While some of the people included here are gridless because of poverty or remoteness, most have chosen it  while trying to find a more meaningful life. They want freedom from the constant distractions, simplifying their lives to the point of being free from utilities: they aim to put to rout all that was not life.  Another element present in these interviews is fear, of people withdrawing from a system that they view as either criminally exploitative or doomed to failure by its excesses. (While Rosen's grid-free interest mostly stems from environmentalism, he has a contempt for power monopolies that gives him plenty of common ground with this last category.)  Most of the people interviewed have a shade of...quirkiness to them, a possible consequence of living either in their heads or in echo chambers. Rosen brings to life quite a few tangential topics like microcurrencies, the pot economy, and the ins and outs of living in cars during these interviews.

Although I found several of the characters of interest, ultimately Off the Grid disappointed me. Far too many of the subjects just happen to be without power, rather than deliberately choosing to live 'outside the system'.   Those who remain don't share a worldview, and the groups that would (that anarchist cult, for instance, or the hippie commune) aren't explored in a great deal of detail.   Practically nothing is mentioned of how they're getting along, aside from the constant mention of solar panels and a one-paragraph visit to a composting toilet,  and Rosen is a grating narrator who makes fun of his subjects to the reader while he's talking with the people.  He does offer some thoughtful commentary though, especially in discussion with one man who lived by himself until he realized he had it wrong: it's not about self-sufficiency, it's about nurturing healthy and self-sufficient communities.   In connection with others, there is meaning --  off the grid or on.





Related:

• Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey. Kind of like Walden, but in the Southwest. 
• Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology, Eric Bende. This is one I read a couple of years ago and should review, as it's the thoughtful work of a married couple who decided to live for a year with a Mennonite community to ponder the role of both technology and labor in their lives.
• Folks, This Ain't Normal, Joel Salatin. Read three years ago, and is also about  humans, tech, and the right balance. I also need to re-read- and review this one.

And Then There Were Nuns

And Then There Were Nuns: Adventures in a Cloistered Life
© 2013 Jane Christmas
292 pages

When Jane Christmas' boyfriend proposed to her, she gave him the most obvious reply: she said she wanted to join a nunnery.  It wasn't that he had driven her to the cloister; she had been tempted by it for most of her life, but it wasn't until her beau was down on bended knee that she realized it was now or never. And so she spent the better part of a year living in monastic communities, with nuns and monks alike, in Canada and in Britain, while her extraordinarily long-suffering fiance kept in contact by letter. And Then Were Nuns is a slightly humorous account of an endeavor seriously undertaken: to see if the author truly felt called to be a nun. The result for readers is a look into a world normally out of mind, and an exploration of the value of a monastic life to the religiously-inclined.

Religious orders are the Anglican church's best-kept secret, Christmas writes, and that's probably the case, for whoever associates nuns with the Church of England? Nuns are black-habited sisters stalking the halls of private schools or hospitals, thumping children with rulers or humorlessly flipping protesting hospital patients on their backsides to administer shots in their hinterlands. But the Anglican church does have religious orders, male and female, throughout the world, and Christmas begins by spending four weeks at a convent in Toronto, where she's treated as if she's on retreat. The initial bit of self-examination unlocks some inner demons, and before making a decision whether to marry her finance or Jesus, she decided a more intensive sojourn is in order, a multi-month stay at a convent in Britain. As she travels there, she stays with nuns and monks at two religious communities on the Isle of Wight, flirting with the Catholic church before an indignant mother informs her that no she bloody well can not join the Romans and become a nun with three marriages to her name. Her experiences there affirm her association with the Church of England, however theologically indecisive and socially regressive it might be. Eventually Jane realizes this time spent living among religious orders wasn't meant so much to help her make a decision about becoming a nun as to face down a harrowing sexual episode years before.

Christmas has a reputation as a humorist, and Then There Were Nuns combines serious introspection and discussion about the spiritual and material value of the nuns' work with wry reflections. Awed and nervous by the exploration she's undertaken, Christmas sometimes escapes the intensity with jokes to herself. This isn't a laughing trip through the world of intentional religious communities, however; she is a woman on a mission. Eventually the mission bears fruit, if not exactly in the way she would have predicted; always a seeker of the simple, quiet life, Christmas is drawn to the convent for its freedom from outside distraction,  constant exhortations to spiritual mindfulness, and above all -- meaningful work.  The monotony of everyday experience, however, and the inviting presence of her children and would-be spouse outside, diminish the allure. She finds her path, however, and for the religiously-inclined or spiritually-interested reader, And Then There Were Nuns will prove informative and engaging; it is a humanizing look at people who seem to have an otherworldly existence.