A Book Review By Jonathan Freedman

Slow is Beautiful:New Visions of Community, Leisure and Joie de Vivre
By Cecile Andrews
New Society Publishers, 2006

Cecile Andrews’ Slow is Beautiful is a look at the time poverty America suffers now, and a sometimes thoughtful consideration of ways to counteract it. She explores ways of replacing the current fixations of status and material wealth with strong connections to community.

This is a key principle of the nonprofit organization “Take Back Your Time”, which she had a part in building. While many parts of this movement resonate with me, Andrews’ strong political biases greatly detract from the book. They result in excluding people who are needed to bring about a change in the way we live.

Andrews documents a brief time in our history, the 1930s, when major corporations and the government experimented with shortening the working week. During the Depression, Americans, slowed down by epidemic unemployment and a wrecked economy, pooled resources, looked out for each other and built community. We took back our time, and wrested control of our lives from the roaring twenties capitalists who had failed us.

As we fast forward to the present, capitalism sports a capital “C”. It has grown into a force so powerful it seems few can resist it. We work many more hours than we did 30 years ago, and the ties between our once public-minded citizens have weakened as Robert Putnam demonstrates in “Bowling Alone”. And so, Andrews searches for a path out of the gloom, exploring ways for Americans to rebuild their communities and live slower, meaningful lives.

Unfortunately in the process, she also blames this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into on the Republican right wing, Christian fundamentalists, Puritans, and rich capitalists instead of treating it as a national problem. Playing the blame game means she isn’t inclusive in the search for solutions.

We read that America’s Puritan forefathers are at fault for laying the foundation of our present hyper-consumerism. Aside from being difficult to prove, this doesn’t make much sense. Puritans believed in hard work, but they were also frugal and believed in delaying or even denying material wants. A much more plausible explanation is offered by Benjamin Barber, author of “Consumed”, who says, “the original Protestant ethos of deferred gratification has been replaced by impulsive consumption. Capitalism’s original core virtue, a marriage of altruism and self-interest has now become a frenzied need to expand wants.” Could capitalists somehow become allies in finding a solution?

She declines to explore that, and proclaims instead, “the ad-driven media exists as an arm of the wealthy and powerful” who “want nothing more than to keep us believing in the centrality of money, because if we were free from that belief we would be free of their power”. But time poverty is a systemic problem. Rich Americans suffer from it as much as the rest of us (maybe more). Blaming the right-wing for consumerism is another dead end; time poverty plagues conservatives and liberals. Calling the political right compulsive liars will not convince them they too need to slow down and help rebuild community.

Andrews dismisses organized religion in the same way, saying: “evangelicals asking for your money have no connection to God”. While she agrees that religious conservatives from rural America live in strong communities, she believes pressures for them to conform are likely to blame for the recent surge of school shooting rampages. But two of the deadliest incidents were in suburbia (Columbine High) and on a college campus (Virginia Tech). Is she saying only politically progressive communities work?

Fortunately, the book turns away from current politics enough to be helpful. She writes of studies done on many Nazi Germany functionaries after the war. Caught in a fascist world gone mad, some of them said they had only one source of satisfaction and meaning left, doing a job well and pleasing their superiors. Eventually many of them lost their ability to distinguish good from evil. She makes a credible argument that this could ultimately be a looming danger for our society if we continue our present preoccupation with work.

She is also convincing as she advocates a society where economic inequality is minimized. The evidence shows us that financial equality breeds more social health. She writes of the latest research on the benefits of play and laughter, of her experiences with Europe’s volunteer summer work camps. She describes her participation in innovative efforts in Seattle to build real community from the ground up.

While many of these things are very thought provoking, her dismissing so many Americans makes it hard to imagine building a populist groundswell. A broad national movement is needed to make slow beautiful again.

Jonathan Freedman lives in Seattle and bikes to work to toil as an ecologist for the EPA. In his spare time, which he wishes he had a little more of, he enjoys volunteering on local habitat restoration projects and bicycle advocacy work, staying informed about smart growth and sustainability, and staying passionate about playing music