If we want
to learn from people in more traditional eras, we can do several things; we can
read books and journals from that era, from before fossil fuels or electricity,
before cars or internet, before everything became cheap and fast and thrown
away. Some books from that era remain widely read; Mark Twain and Laura Ingalls
Wilder from the USA, Jane Austen or Charles Dickens from England, and I would
encourage readers to can go back farther in history to medieval writers or
Ancient Greeks and Romans. We can also read historians who specialise in
everyday life, or people today who still practice traditional crafts and write
about it – I recommend John Seymour and Scott Savage, among others.
Many people
today are forced by poverty to live simpler lives, as in the Third World, but
their circumstances are often less healthy, literate or safe than those of 20th
century Ireland. We in the West have too few first-person narratives from
people who grew up in such poverty, and their cultures, climates and languages
often pose a barrier to understanding.
We can talk
to people closer to home who grew up with very little – say, people who grew up
in trailer parks or slums – but again, they experienced a different kind of
poverty. Most families I know in my native USA grew up with a lot of
television, little freedom and the constant threat of violence; in many ways, they
experienced the opposite of my Irish neighbours.
We can talk
to people Western countries today who grew up living more simply than most
Americans today – say, Amish, Mennonites or plain Quakers. Such groups,
however, typically withdrew from the world because they have a rigid and
insular culture, making them reluctant to share with outsiders and making their
habits less relatable. I wasn’t just interested in sitting and watching
television shows about people living simpler and more traditional lives; I
wanted to learn how to do so myself.
We can talk
to elderly Americans who remember the mid-20th century, and I have
talked to quite a few over the years and learned a great deal. Their world,
however, is not too unfamiliar; if you talk to a 70-year-old American, you are
still talking to someone who grew up watching television and sitting in
traffic.
That’s what
makes my Irish neighbours so valuable; they are among the last Westerners on
Earth, speaking English and now living in a familiar modern world -- to grow up
in the pre-modern world, before electricity and modern media, before cars and
modern devices. As late as the 1960s in Ireland, by contrast, fewer than one
per cent of Irish owned a car, relying instead on feet and horses. As late as
the 1970s many areas lacked electricity, meaning not just electric lights but
radio and television.
Their lack
of modern influences kept the culture parochial and traditional even into
modern times; birth control was legalised only in 1978, and divorce only in 1995.
My elderly neighbours grew up with different priorities from people today; they
had skills, not career tracks, and lived not as individuals but as members of
something greater. Their homes were filled with family members who pitched in
with the work of getting food and water and warmth, and the ones who worked
outside the home brought in the little money they needed for a few luxuries.
At
gatherings they sang songs and told stories that were hundreds of years old,
passed down like prayers from father to son, mother to daughter. They grew up
knowing the histories of their cousins and neighbours, who were often the same
people. When I ask them to remember a certain decade in their lives, they
remember their childhood adventures and adult duties, the aging and passing of
family, the passing down of traditions.
Of course,
the Ireland my neighbours talk about has mostly disappeared, replaced by a
modern country not very different from the USA or Britain; drive along the
major roads near our house and you sit in traffic jams, pass billboards and
fast-food stops, see advertisements for Hollywood blockbusters, and hear wacky
morning-zoo DJs on the radio. Cities are filled with young people constantly
staring at little glowing rectangles, addicted to video-games or social media,
increasingly dependent on touching a screen to get the basic needs of life.
Raising a teenager here means talking about “sexting,” drugs, date rapes – the
same uncomfortable parent-child discussions as you need to have anywhere these
days. It’s difficult enough for older Americans who grew up with television and
movies, albeit an older and gentler variety. Older Irish I talk to feel like
they are living in a foreign country.
When I moved
to rural Ireland 15 years ago, I admit, there was a lot to get used to. Ireland
lies at the same latitude as southern Alaska, so the winter nights can be
eighteen hours long, and the days quite dim. During the summer we have the
opposite problem, and I have to cover the windows with tinfoil to get any
sleep. It rains one day out of three – that’s the price you pay for the lush
countryside – and even in summer it never gets very warm.
Nonetheless,
my family and I made a go of living here, building a house and garden and
turning the land into a homestead. We grew some of our own food, kept chickens
and bees, and learned as we went. I’d always loved traditional crafts, so I
learned whatever I could about skills being kept alive by a few devoted
aficionados. I tried my hand at blacksmithing, basketry, hedge-laying, natural
building, bush-craft, leather-working, book-binding, brewing, pickling,
cheese-making and wine-making, sometimes just dabbling, sometimes making it
into a hobby.
I had to
work in Dublin to pay the bills, which meant three hours a day on the bus and
back each day. That meant devoting the few remaining waking hours each day to
doing chores on the land, feeding possibly checking the bees, doing some
traditional crafts, giving my daughter home-schooling lessons and having a
writing career on the side.
Thankfully,
I discovered that was much more feasible than you might imagine; a garden,
animals and crafts can take up perhaps an hour or two a day, and you can learn
a great deal while working around a regular life. It’s not being entirely self-sufficient
or off the grid, in the manner of doomsday preppers or reality-television
eccentrics, but I don’t need that kind of life, and you probably don’t either.
Many people I know just want to be more self-reliant, or have fun learning
skills, or to pollute less, or spend less money, or work with the land instead
of against it – all things that go along with the old-fashioned skills I was
learning.
Most of all,
I talked with elderly people, and realised what a different world they had
grown up in, and what an underappreciated resource they were. I struck up
conversations with neighbours passing on the road, or having tea at their
house, or sitting next to them on the long bus ride to Dublin, or visiting the
local old folks’ home. Occasionally I asked them if I could sit down for formal
interviews, and sat down with a camera and audio recorder.
I found that
Irish radio had done occasional documentaries on traditional life, that
school-children had collected the memories of their grandparents, that documentarians
had filmed Irish villagers decades ago, and that historical societies and local
experts had scrapbooks filled with the minutiae of day-to-day life. I listened
to hundreds of hours of recordings and read thousands of pages of transcripts,
collecting the details of their everyday lives.
Again, I’m
not trying to romanticise their difficult lives, or claim that they didn’t have
their own problems, or that the world hasn’t improved in certain ways – of
course it has. I’m not saying that we could or should do exactly what they did,
or that all traditional societies were as beneficial as the examples I use. Of
course Ireland in the fifties was quite different from America in the 1950s,
and from many other traditional times and places, and of course I’ll be
cherry-picking good qualities from many times and places and ignoring the
downsides of each era. There’s no perfect past that I’m demanding we emulate.
I am saying
that certain peoples in history created societies that were healthy, educated,
clean, happy – by their own testimony – and ran on little energy, generated
little waste and needed little government. I want to look at how they did these
things, and what we can learn from them.
