A Celebration of the Brave Old World

'We must go back to freedom or forward to slavery'.

G.K. Chesterton

The British writer and idler, Tom Hodgkinson,  has a relaxed approach to life, enjoying it as it comes rather than toiling for an imagined better future. He is the editor of The Idler, which he established in 1993 with his friend Gavin Pretor-Pinney.

In his book, Brave Old World – A Practical Guide to Husbandry, or the Fine Art of Looking After Yourself, he asks why we shouldn't return to the ideals of a pre-capitalist, pre-Puritan, pre-consumerist world of feasting, dancing, horse-riding, wood-chopping, fire-laying, poultry-rearing, bartering, bread-baking and bee-keeping?

Drawing on the wisdom of an eclectic range of thinkers and writers, on medieval calendars and manorial records, and, as ever, on Tom's own honestly recounted and frequently imperfect attempts to travel the road to self-sufficiency, Brave Old World is designed to give us all hope. 

He begins his introduction:

The most important but generally the most neglected of the arts of everyday living are simply these: Philosophy, husbandry and merriment. Philosophy is the search for the truth and the study of how to live well. Husbandry is the art of providing for oneself and one´s family, and merriment is the important skill of enjoying yourself: feasting, dancing, joking and singing.

Hodgkinson claims that all these aspects of life were actively cultivated in the Brave Old World. By “Brave Old World”, he means the time from the Ancient Greeks to the end of the medieval period so, roughly, the two thousand years from 500 BC to AD 1500. He claims that the Old World came to an end in around 1535 with the Reformation, Calvinism, the Renaissance and the looting and smashing up of the monasteries.

Philosophy, husbandry and merriment have been cultivated since, for sure, and still are today by a few brave souls, but since the Industrial Revolution, they have tended to take second place to work – for most of us, wage slavery, i.e boring work done to enrich someone else, the corporation and its shareholders, or for the good of the bureaucratic, totalitarian state. In the Old World, says Hodgkinson, cultivated leisure was the most important part of life. In the new, the job is the priority.

The title of the book is of course a play on Huxley´s Brave New World. Hodgkinson´s point here is that the Old World was indeed braver than ours. But what about the plagues, the pain, the toothache? Well, Hodgkinson says, this is a point explored by Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, in which he attacks “machne-worship” as dehumanizing. Today, we have “technology-worship” in its place, with the Californian ideology and the philosophy of transhumanism. Orwell found himself on the receiving end of attacks when he supported the Brave Old World:

As a matter of fact, most attacks upon the Middle Ages and the past generally by apologists of the present are beside the point, because the essential trick is to project a modern man, with his squeamishness and his high standards of comfort, into an age when such things were unheard of…explain that you wish to aim at making life simpler and harder instead of softer and more complex, and the Socialists will usually assume that you want to revert to a “state of nature”.

It would be a mistake, says Hodgkinson, to see the Brave Old World as a comfort-free zone. It was actually a more sensual period, and people loved nothing more than a roaring fire, wine and music (see the links below for Ronald Hutton´s historical book, which draws another picture of the Middle Ages).

In Huxley´s Brave New World, everything, also humans, and human problems, are treated instrumental or technical. Psychology and genetics are controlling people down to the smallest details, children are being  born  and  “growed”  on  bottles, brains  are  being trimmed, characters are being converted after the needs of the dominant state. The  people  in  this  meritocracy  are  considered  as  being  happy.  If  they  experience some  kind  of  negativity,  they  are  in  large  quantities  supplied  with  the  drug  Soma, which makes them “happy” again. All religion, philosophy, literature and art, which remind people  about  the  past, or awake deeper feelings, nostalgia, or longings,  have  been  removed.  History is bunk.

Truth, beauty, pain, unhappiness: the modern world seeks to abolish these things. But in the Old World, we are faced with them every day. The Old world is a return to Mother Earth, or the Earth chakra. A deep opening of the lower chakras occurs in conjunction with the Earth chakra opening, leading to a release of sexual inhibitions and patterns, a reclaiming of sexuality, an understanding and integration of the “dark” or shadow aspects of Self, and an ability to just be who we are, a fully sensate, sexual, physical being with complete awareness of the darkness and light we carry. A value which the movement of positive thinking is in progress of destroying. It is not surprising that the New Thought movement, from where positive thinking has its origin, originally was an American Christian movement, extremely puritanical and afraid of the dark. It is also a way of thinking which in its most extreme forms claims that reality is a mental construct, and therefore an illusion, hereunder the body. The result is a masculine top-heavy fixation in the head, something which today seems to characterize most Westerners.

When the Earth chakra opens we no longer understand ourselves as separate, rather puritanical creatures. We are in touch with the rhythms of our bodies and the Earth. We no longer feel shame or fear around our darker instincts, and understand that dark and light are simply a continuum. There are other chakras below this that connect us to every single plant, animal, and layer of Earth. Connecting deeply to these chakras allows for us to integrate our shadows and our primal emotions. Emotions are no longer something to fear or avoid. There is an understanding that comes through that we are meant to have emotions – all of them. Rage, anger, fear, joy, happiness, sadness – they all have their own rhythm, their own flow, and are all equally beautiful. When we are fully grounded through the Earth chakra and below we can fully experience these flows of emotion, and discover that a flow of sadness may be exquisite, the flow of rage may be orgasmic, and the flow of everything that we experience as humans, both pain and pleasure, we can take responsibility for. There is no more shying away from full embodiment, our shadow, our emotions, or any part of us.

From January to December, Brave Old World charts the progress of a year in pursuit of the pleasures of the past, taking seriously - though not without much incidental comedy - G.K. Chesterton's exhortation, 'We must go back to freedom or forward to slavery'. 

Brave Old World combines nods to literary authorities with tales of Hodgkinson´s own experience living, with his wife Victoria, on a rented farm in North Devon. He writes:

We have grown vegetables, kept pigs and chickens, killed them, cooked them and eaten them. We have inherited a pony, and Victoria has kept and lost bees. We have sent ferrets down rabbit holes and skinned rabbits. We have brewed foul beer and made wonderful elderflower cordial. Victoria makes butter and bread, and it is the best butter and bread you have ever tasted. We have made jams, pickles and marmalades. We have chopped, stacked and dried logs. We have made a thousand fires. We have murdered a thousand slugs. We have made parsnip wine and sold eggs. We have discovered that the simple life is both extremely complicated and very hard. It is studded with disappointments, but the satisfactions are immense. And the end of it is simply this: you save a lot of money and you make much better food. And in the process, you connect with the living world, with nature, the cosmos. You also connect yourself with the ancient tradition of householding, home-making, husbandry, or whatever you want to call it. When you nurture yourself in this way, you disconnect yourself from the world of supermarkets, with their low, low prices and low, low standards, you become healthy, and whole.

Related:

Philosophical Counseling with Tolkien (Free Ebook. Tolkien and Hodgkinson share a very similar philosophy, and which I, surprise, also share)

Related enemy of this way of life ("know thy enemy"):

Evolutionism – The Red Thread in the Matrix Conspiracy (free Ebook)

Other related books:

The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700, by Ronald Hutton (this book demonstrates how the festive culture of the Middle Ages was gradually eroded by the Reformation and the Puritans. It draws another picture of the dark middle ages than the one we have been indoctrinated to believe in).

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber (this book shows how the competitive Protestants booted out the co-operative Catholics; it shows how a new ethic based on work and earning a lot of money came to replace, in the eighteenth century, the old medieval ethic, which was based on mutual aid. The medieval culture combined a love of Jesus, who preached idleness, and a love of Aristotle, who argued that leisure and contemplation led to happiness. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to banish their guilt around work).