Abundance

"A society of performance is replacing a society of discipline"
--Z. Bauman.

"A gross error it is to think that regal power ought to serve for the good of the body and not of the soul, for men's temporal peace and not their eternal safety; as if God had ordained Kings for no other purpose than to fat up men's souls like hogs and to see that they have their mash.
--Richard Hooker.

There was this line from Thesiger, 'the tougher the conditions, the better the man'. And woman, of course. Paraphrased, of course. From your own relative level of comfort this seems deeply appealing. But I don't think that it's just nostalgia or a false craving for a situation that you, personally, would never be able to endure. What resonates with a lot of people is the artificiality of our wants and desires. Actually, perhaps it doesn't resonate at all and that's precisely the problem? Could it be that in reality we're all quite content either fattened up or dreaming of that state of satiation?

And yet there is always the nagging feeling that the small-scale utopia of limited wants, self-imposed austerity, a republic of needs (Rousseau) allows us to concentrate on the fundamental things in life. Live within yourself, within your means. Don't get ahead of yourself. The heart should follow the foot, the sufis would say.

To modern ears this will, no doubt, sound like a harking back to 'the good ol' days' or, worse, a justification for turning the clock back-if such a thing were possible-to a Talebanesque state of affairs. To those who are liberal minded (or, more accurately, self-proclaimed liberals) it will come across as a clamouring for a return to more conservative times when everyone knew their place (racial purity, class and gender hierarchies), dim-witted small-mindedness (as opposed to the open-mindedness of the cosmopolitan). Isn't Trump, for example, simply a manifestation of a similar longing, a similar distrust of metropolitan elites?

There's a grave danger of relating everything to that great buffoon. But you can see the general point: an end to multiculturalism and a return to simpler times, the undifferentiated conditions of small-town or rural life. 

What is missed in all this? That there's an anarchic possibility in the small-scale option; that a life lived in a particular place, with specific attachments, independent of the state, untouched by the frenzy of the media and market deceptions, is not necessarily a claustrophobic one. In fact, quite the opposite: if there is joy in austerity (Aquinas?) then it can open out to something else, wider vistas. And in contrast, it is restless desire for more and more commodities, 'experiences', that is stifling...a slave of one's desires? Hell hath no limits. The notion that we could possess happiness, time, as if we owned them, had a right to them instead of recognizing them for what they are, pure gifts, is one of the deepest sources of our contemporary illusions.

Abundance, in a different sense -and perhaps one could call it a Qur'anic sense- would mean something quite else: there is enough for everyone right now. Abundance is not a utopian fantasy but a present possibility that is warped by capitalism and the capitalistic mentality. Not only does the system produce inequalities that generate genuine scarcity; it also forces us to think of scarcity exclusively in terms of commodities (Iliich). Furthermore, by setting up the notions of "mine" and "thine" (exclusive property rights) it helps drown out the idea of a common good and the substantive notion of the person that is connected to it.