Minimalism: Are We Done with Modernity?

By Azher Ahmad Dar

“I wish everyone could become rich and famous so they realise it’s not the answer.” These lines were told by Jim Carrey. It is quite perplexing, in the sense that conventional wisdom has otherwise always been tilted toward amassing material resources as much as possible, thereby increasing the quotient of happiness or utility. It has always been perpetuated in everyday life that happiness is directly proportional to consumption. Is that so? 

With the triumph of market fundamentalism and capitalism, this notion is said to have gotten stronger, with the capitalists speaking in pejorative terms of the totalitarian life of those living in the Soviet Union, with a total crackdown on what people eat, what they wear, etc. One positive thing, though, is that the whole world has ushered in the freedom associated with everyday life in terms of choosing whatever one wants. But is that freedom? 

We will have to adopt the lenses of Emmanuel Kant and political philosophy in general. With the Industrial Revolution, we saw a tremendous increase in the production of goods and services, which directly improved the standard of living of people and their consumption of commodities. Saying that conspicuous consumption is the answer to satisfaction implies the intrusion of markets into everyday life. While markets have various moral limits, it seems that those limits have been violated in the guise of maximising consumer satisfaction. 

Now, with postmodernism, we see an everyday contest happening between minimalism and maximalism. While maximalism has been an all-famous trend, it points to a positive relationship between conspicuous consumption and satisfaction. On the other hand, we see the rise of a new ideology or an alternative way of life, for that matter, which is minimalism, which means being satisfied with the little stuff instead of amassing too many material things. While it is not wrong that people consume, it is wrong that humans consume for the sake of consumption or because they are supposed to do so. One problem with humans is that they keep buying more and more stuff and are not satisfied with an assortment of their desired items. 

The reason for this, according to various psychologists, is that they do not know where and how they will be satisfied. Ryan Nicodemus, an American and the co-author of ‘Everything that Remains’, with Joshua Fields Millburn, had a fancy corporate job. Despite drawing a handsome salary, something was missing in him, in the sense that he was not happy in the usual sense of the word. His solution to fill the void was to purchase as many goods as possible and find a solution in conspicuous consumption. However, to his surprise, it did not fill the void that he had in his life, despite having everything that the social world puts a premium on. His friend, on the other hand, whose name was Joshua Fields Millburn, also had a good corporate job .However there was a difference between them. It was that he was comparatively happy and satisfied with whatever he had had. 

During a conversation, Ryan Nicodemus asked his friend why he was happier. The answer that came to his surprise was the pursuit of minimalism. For many months, he had been living a meaningful life with as few things as possible, in that he did not have to worry about what to wear or what to eat. They are now popularly known as minimalists, who have been popular in the West for their advocacy of the philosophy of minimalism. One particular problem, which is difficult for an ordinary person to understand, is human nature, which has always been shown in Hobbesian terms as selfish, nasty, nasty, brutish and restless.

 While it is true that human nature is so, common sense is somehow wrong, and this ideology will likely linger forever. On the other hand, we had John Locke, who described the man in hunky dory terms, in the sense that everything is fine with man; he is not selfish, nasty, nasty etc., as has been perceived by conventional wisdom. Those calling human nature coherent and doggedly chasing tangible goods may be called those who believe in standard preferences, in the sense that preferences do not change. 

However, all of these are partially wrong, as has been put forward by leftists, environmentalists, etc. Human nature can essentially be tweaked, either in a good direction or a bad direction. With the reigning of liberalism and the free market, we have seen that human nature has been painted with negative connotations, and efforts have been made by the marketing industry to change consumer behaviour toward conspicuous consumption. One answer to why human nature is not stable and can be changed is the role of the advertising industry in changing the consumer patterns of a person, be it toward good things or bad, for that matter. What this marketing industry has done is show what an ideal life looks like, which triggers cravings in those who can’t afford to get them, leading to an unscrupulous life.The shift towards consumerism now ,is all because of it . 

Now that we are living in a modern age, it is an age where, because of all of this, the ends justify the means. Saying this points to the intrusive role of money in everyday life, which has become so pervasive that there is no second thought beyond money. That is exactly the reason why the modern age has a moral deficit. We see various people saying “Had I had the information about the earning potential of social media, I would not have studied further’, which is dangerous when we are talking of living a right life. The problem with it is that education is important; leaving education in the middle would make him a beast who would doggedly chase money, since money, in this case, money has no substantive instrumental value, which will ultimately lead him to do something, including unscrupulous things, to make as many as possible. 

This is a grave peril of the so-called liberal order, which has made everyone a slave of his desire, to put it in Kantian terms. We have CB Macpherson saying that liberalism has described individuals as possessive, who could do anything to get their wishes fulfilled, which has negatively impacted the real freedom of other people, specifically the lower middle class. He talks of two kinds of power: one is extractive power, which is gaining satisfaction by extracting a part of the capacities of another person and making him work for his desires. This, according to him, characterises the liberal world order, where the poor, or the have-nots, to put it in Marxist terms, do not have the opportunity to fully develop their power because their power is used and exploited by the big capitalists. A surprising ramification of the same, according to him, is the dehyphenation of the words liberal and democratic, because real democracy is based on the development of a kind of power, where everyone has equal chances of satisfying his desires’, not implying sameness, so to speak. 

An important example of the same would be the decolonial school, which exposed the Cartesian lenses of the West about environmental protection. In South America and the Oriental world at large, we have examples of people holding nature in high esteem, such as in Africa, where the natives considered the Earth an integral living part of their lives and protected it. What we saw after the colonial exploitation and the recent modernization, in general, is the brazen exploitation of natural resources because of the internationalisation of capitalism,to put it in Lenin’s terms or the neo-imperialist project of the global North. Now the West has woken up from slumber, and it is strongly the case that they should pay reparations to third-world countries for their contribution to environmental degradation. 

Ironically, the US has not even ratified the Kyoto Protocol or the Convention on the Rights of Children. All of this is because of consumerism.There is one argument, that often surfaces, related to modernity, which is that with time, humans ought to change, which is doomed to deceive people by adopting immoral modern means to fulfil the ends, which will either put humanity in danger or the whole of modernity project will crash down. It seems likely that the project of modernity is falling because of a paradigm shift to decolonization, in the sense that people have moved away from the project, which has all in all destroyed the fuel of morality and religion in third-world countries. 

The growing number of conflicts is a testament to it, especially in the West, in the form of wars like the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Palestine war. One important drawback of modernity is the crisis of morality. People have become so blinded by the lure of luxury and money that it does not matter whether trying to sell bad things to children is scrupulous or otherwise. In the early 20th century, advertisements for children worked by appealing to parents to buy things. With technology and modernity, now children are directly approached and tricked into buying bad things, which is so dangerous and immoral of liberalism. 

One important reason for this is reigning in deontological logic, which says that it is wrong to judge a person, implying maximum good is always right, which has been adopted by the liberals. On the other hand, we have teleological logic, which judges people for their good, implying that the maximum good is not always right. Not putting a moralistic premium on things is what has plunged the current order into crisis. While there may be divergences on the substantive matter of moral principles, there are some basic moral values, which are absolute and universal, that should guide human nature and have been missing throughout the modernity crisis. We have Emmanuel Kant defining freedom as autonomy, in that it implies that just consuming goods and desires is not freedom; it is being a slave to the desires beyond which people can’t think. As per him, humans have given themselves a higher order, and acting on its path is what is called freedom. 

Deep down, humans should think that it is wrong to expect happiness with the amount of money in hand. People talk of humans as people who are not satisfied with time, but they are partially wrong. I will talk about myself. I am happy with whatever little I have, but my happiness is only relative. I also see others who have been tweaked by the advertising industry to envy the ideal life, which has put them into a restless mode with the result that they do not have mental peace, and this hurts their growth and productivity. 

Minimalism is being deliberate with the choices—not getting lured by fancy fast fashion—doing things that you feel like doing. A grave consequence of maximalism is ending up doing that job, which, although pays well, is not satisfying. This has lately been one of the grave regrets of every person who has gotten into the wrong vocation. It is highly pressing that the human brain needs a permanent resignation from modernity and to be happy with whatever it has; that is what would be satisfying. Now we have political philosophers like Habermas saying that modernization has led to a crisis of legitimacy, a crisis of rationality, a crisis of motivation, and a crisis of economy. In his opinion, modernity, especially the technological revolution, has led to a technical consciousness, and humans do not know what rational choices are. This is how the market has led people to put a monetary value on everything, even those that are non-marketable. Michael Sandel, in his book ‘’The Moral Limits of Markets, says that everything has now become transactional. On the other hand, AG Cohen draws on the analogy of a camping trip to establish the efficiency of the common pursuit of goals instead of being possessive, which is exactly what the capitalist world order has done. There has been a valorization and patronization of self-interest and consent, so much so that now the relationship of parents with their children has become highly consensual, which has repeatedly been criticised by even supporters of the liberal world order like Francis Fukuyama. The growing premium put on the word consent is because of the decline of trust among people today and a rise in murder, crimes, crimes and the abandonment of old parents, which has been most stark in the West , the so-called propagator of flawed capitalism and liberalism.

• The author is a student of political science and economics at the University of Delhi

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