by Henry David Thoreau

"It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a living not merely honest and honourable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not."

The September 29th-October 5th, 2001 Economist, in one of its Leaders, makes a mockery out of the critics of globalisation. In it, they speak to the "distinct possiblity" that many of its critics are talking nonsense. In addition to being "the most effective force for reducing poverty known to mankind," the market's greatest virtue is how under it economic interaction is voluntary. "McDonald does not march people into its outlets at the point of a gun. Nike does not require people to wear its trainers on pain of imprisonment. If people buy those things, it is because they choose to, not because globalisation is forcing them to." I wonder what the poor of those countries who have suffered under Structural Adjustment Programmes would say to this, or for that matter the parents, whose kids are dragging them along to McD after excessive advertising.

I also fear that they are missing a very important point.

In Life Without Principle Thoreau challenges - fundamentally - the values and aims underpinning our civilisation's eagerness to commerce and globalisation. "We are warped and narrowed" he says, "by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce, and manufacture and agriculture, which are but means, and not the end." He asks us, whether we should not instead be placing as much emphasis and dedication to the mining of our inner being, of the spiritual man, as we do to the land, and our material welfare. "Cold and hunger" he says "seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off."

He questions our need for nuts and raisins from a far off land, when the getting of these (in his days) jeopardised the lives of hundreds of sailors. Today the costs may be others, but I think there is a connection - are the costs worth the gains? Especially, when we consider not only the costs in terms of dollars and cents, but also in terms of the Life and Spirit - from a manifestation of the divine, we are reduced to consumers or producers of material wants. These are the means, he reminds us, not the end.

In reading Life Without Principle, I was left with similar questions to a recent reading of Rabindranath Tagore:

What if our civilisation put soul searching and human creativity ahead of material acquisitition and power? I add, what would our institutions look like then? Better yet, what might globalisation then be all about?

I will in the following include a couple of quotes, allowing Thoreau to speak for himself (he does it so well):

"If a man walk in the wood for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is an esteemed industrious and enterprising citizen."

"I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. You must get your living by loving."

"I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business."

And in response to a lieutenant of the time, who had been to the Amazon, and had said that what was wanting there was an "industrious and active population, who have artificial wants to draw out the great resources of the country", to this he said:

"The chief want in every State I have been into, was a high and earnest pupose in its inhabitants. When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more thant sugarplums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men - those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers and redeemers."

I realise that with these quotes, and this review I may myself be viewed as a radical or a left-winger. And yet to move beyond our present challenges we must rise above the desire to pigeonhole each other (and I suffer from this weakness myself) into stale stereotypes. Thoreau's message in Life Without Principle is, I believe (and wholeheartedly affirm), beyond left and right. It is questioning the very aims of our societies, and creating a possible space for us to imagine how we could organise ourselves if other values and princples were to take centrestage in our lives.

• Reviewed by Marianne Knuth

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