Phinney Ridge resident Cecile Andrews is best known as an advocate for voluntary simplicity, the notion that our consumerist culture leads to distorted priorities and a loss of meaning, and that we can regain control by redefining what is meant by the word “necessary.” Her 1998 Circle of Simplicity is a classic of that movement that resonated strongly within the professional middle-class, drawing thousands of people into “talk circles” to reevaluate the meaning of affluence.

Her newest book, Slow is Beautiful: Visions of Community, Leisure, and Joie de Vivre (New Society Publishers, S16.95), is her most extensive analysis yet of the various political and cultural forces that support an American lifestyle that values status and wealth over community and caring for one another. Andrews argues that our materialist culture undermines our capacity for joy, and that the renewal of a “culture of connection” is an essential step toward building an effective movement for social and economic justice.

When I think about cultural icons that typify a passionate and engaged life, I think about Dean Moriarty of Kerouac’s On the Road, and his thing was, you know, burn, burn, burn. Live like you’re on fire. But your ideal is Vonnegut, who said “the purpose of life is to fart around.” I’m struck by the contrast.

There’s a psychiatrist at UCLA, Peter Whybrow, who did the book American Mania. He feels that Americans are wired a certain way because so many of us are descended from immigrants. I think most of us have a really, really hard time not being busy.

But what has it gotten us, in terms of personal happiness and in terms of what we’re doing, the environment, and achieving social justice? I quote someone in the book who says, “The cultures who die are the ones who keep doing the things that work, and they don’t stop and ask ‘is it still working?’” It’s not our habit to stop and think. A passionate and engaged life. That’s what most people want. But we need to look again at this thing called the American Dream. What has it been?

We seem to have eroded the space that people have in their lives for reflection, and along with that comes the erosion of our capacity for critical thinking.

When I started going around doing this book thing, I started thinking of, you know, sound bites. So one of my sound bites is “stop and think.” Eric Fromm talks about how it’s not the case that people are either basically good or basically selfish, but that we’re capable of going either way, and the reason we choose one or the other has to do with the structure of our culture. So my goal is how do we create the structures that gets us to slow down and think. To have a culture of connection.

In Escape from Freedom, Fromm talks about how life can be viewed as an existential challenge, or as a sort of quest for security. It seems like this idea of life as a creative act is something that is beyond many of us.

Essentially, as an educator that’s always been my goal. How do you get people to live this other life, but to do that we have to give them basic experience. If you look at the happiness literature, one of the foundations is being able to feel safe. I think that people’s natural instinct, like plants, is to want to flower, but if the plant doesn’t get its fertilizer, its going to be a shriveled up thing. And so we have this culture that doesn’t give people the basic security, their not going to want to really live. They just pass their life.

Daniel Gilbert at Harvard talks about whether money buys happiness, and says that up to a certain baseline the answer is yeah. But after that, not so much.

There are three facts I want people to know, and that’s one of them because it’s so clearly opposite our American psyche. We have to put money in its place in this culture. The other is that 30 percent of people think they can be in the top 2 percent. Eighty percent of people in this country think that if they work hard enough, they’ll be rich. And the third is that the biggest predictor of the health of a nation is the gap between the rich and the poor. Inequality correlates to decreased average longevity. And you’d think it’s the poor people who bring down the average, but it’s not just that. Rich people in this country don’t have the same longevity and expectations as the average person in, say, Holland. It also has to do with the status thing. When you’re in a society where people are better than you, your feelings are being hurt all the time because of the way people treat you. People treat you with disdain or they don’t pay any attention to you, you become invisible, and that affects your basic health. People are happiest and healthiest when they’re equal. So those are the three things I want people to know, that these are false belief systems. These are at the core of everything.

Your book characterizes our culture as sterile, shallow, and lifeless, and it strikes me that what we’re talking about there is white culture.

You’re absolutely right. When I went to work with the American Friends Service Committee in the South, essentially we lived and worked with the poor Black community, and it was like, “Ah, I didn’t know I was so repressed and sterile.” But I mean it’s white culture, but is it white because we have a culture going back to England and class? I don’t know rich African-Americans, but I know richer African-Americans, and they’re often pretty white. Right? It’s wealth that does it to us.

You talk about happiness being subversive and the need for convivial community as a foundation for social change.

Caring is a basic human skill that needs to be developed. We have developed our ability to compete, but we have not developed our caring ability. Caring about the other means you are caring about the greater good, the common good, and how else can we learn to care about the common good than to experience caring and community. It came out recently that Americans are lonelier than they used to be, and a quarter of Americans say they have not one friend they can turn to. If you take out family members, a half of Americans do not have someone they can turn to. So this creates an incredible fear and insecurity. Conviviality is a basic orientation to life. It signals to people that I am safe to approach.

I’ve always felt that one of the challenges of our culture is to be able to distance yourself and be able to experience its unreality for what it is. Vaclav Havel talks about how we’ve succumbed to a “profound trivialization of our humanity.”

Advertising has taken over. Advertising is trivialization. You can’t escape. And, then, this is where it comes to the long work hours, the country that watches the most television is the country with the longest work hours, that we watch television more than any other culture. It used to be Japan, but now they’re number two. We come home, and all we can do is turn on the television because we’re exhausted, and then you’re bombarded. And the constant message is that you’re not acceptable, that this thing will make you happier. And this is the other thing—and I never wanted to portray simplicity as without comfort—but essentially we’re too comfortable. I think, it’s kind of like when you go camping. Sometimes you have to make do and it’s not comfortable, but somehow we feel more alive. When you care so much about stuff you don’t care as much about people. To me, its how all these things are connected and that everything has trivialized us until this is the way normal looks.