It sounds like this book tendentiously tries to unite a bunch of disparate things the author doesn’t like under a fuzzy concept of “less” so she can criticize them under the equally vague banner of “more”. She’d be better off just writing separate critical essays on minimalist interior design and sexual conservatism rather than straining to find a thread linking the two. There isn’t one.
At least some of them *were* separate essays collected here, but I think I see at least a plausible connection when it comes to the implied idea that desire is optimally expressed when heavily constrained. Not that there's an explicit political connection of course.
Maybe, although the motivation is different. Minimalism wants to restrain desire for possessions for the sake of personal fulfillment, whereas social conservatism wants to restrain desire for sex in the name of social order and morality.
There's truth to that, though I think it's unfair to soc cons to suggest that they don't involve personal fulfilment too. That social order & morality is meant to protect the deep familial and communitarian fulfillments that - to them (and to *some* extent to me) - high time preferences can deny us.
I admit that there are also rabid moralists and bitter grievance mongers.
I also think both minimalism and social conservatism are countercultural. Most people in the contemporary West subscribe to neither, and the elite are probably even less likely to subscribe to either of them. So critiquing them as though they define the current zeitgeist is the wrong way to go about it.
It sounds like this book tendentiously tries to unite a bunch of disparate things the author doesn’t like under a fuzzy concept of “less” so she can criticize them under the equally vague banner of “more”. She’d be better off just writing separate critical essays on minimalist interior design and sexual conservatism rather than straining to find a thread linking the two. There isn’t one.
At least some of them *were* separate essays collected here, but I think I see at least a plausible connection when it comes to the implied idea that desire is optimally expressed when heavily constrained. Not that there's an explicit political connection of course.
Maybe, although the motivation is different. Minimalism wants to restrain desire for possessions for the sake of personal fulfillment, whereas social conservatism wants to restrain desire for sex in the name of social order and morality.
There's truth to that, though I think it's unfair to soc cons to suggest that they don't involve personal fulfilment too. That social order & morality is meant to protect the deep familial and communitarian fulfillments that - to them (and to *some* extent to me) - high time preferences can deny us.
I admit that there are also rabid moralists and bitter grievance mongers.
I also think both minimalism and social conservatism are countercultural. Most people in the contemporary West subscribe to neither, and the elite are probably even less likely to subscribe to either of them. So critiquing them as though they define the current zeitgeist is the wrong way to go about it.