Slow down, you’re moving too fast … the plain life beckons
Antonia Pont’s Plain Life questions our thinking about capacities, virtue, envy, wanting, love and kindness – suggesting it might be fine to live a plain life.
How does academic, philosopher, essayist and yogi Antonia Pont define the very “plain life” that sits at the centre of her latest book, Plain Life: On thinking, feeling and deciding? And does her definition do justice to the multi-layered complexity of the discussions and arguments contained therein?
“A ‘plain life,’ you see, mightn’t look like anything,” writes Pont. “From the outside, no one would know if I were living plainly, or not. It isn’t a style you can research and then emulate, recreate. It’s not a way of furnishing one’s situation with a certain set of accessories; it isn’t lived via imitation.
“A stance in relation to one’s own life, plainness, if I can say that, has to do with the fact of deciding, for oneself, that one’s life is intrinsically ‘enough’ that you want it and that you make it to some extent.”
In other words, to live a plain life is to be true to oneself and eschew the directives and suggestions regarding what we should want, need, think and feel issued by external forces, such as society, culture, peers, friends and family?
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Well, yes and no. The title of Pont’s book is at once revealing and knowingly deceptive. She does argue, to a certain extent, that living a plain life based upon greater self-awareness, self-knowledge and self-reliance is simpler than living one beholden to wider cultural and societal norms and expectations, but she also argues that reaching that state of greater self-knowledge is a complicated, potentially emotionally and intellectually taxing and involving process.
In discussing what it means to live a plain life, Pont draws widely upon the existing work and theories espoused by philosophers, thinkers, sociologists and cultural critics including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Adam Phillips, Gillian Rose and Barbara Taylor, as well as the texts and beliefs central to her personal yoga practice and teaching, primarily Swami Hariharananda Aranya’s Yoga Philosophy of Patanjali.
I would suggest that hers are deceptively simple ideas expanded to become markedly more complicated and, occasionally, confounding
Reading Plain Life is a far from simple experience. Pont is prone to long, sweeping sentences and paragraphs that are complicated by the texts of the thinkers, scholars and critics from whose work she draws to emphasise and ground the points she makes.
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While what she posits as constituting a plain life may seem, at first glance, to be relatively simple, I would suggest that hers are deceptively simple ideas expanded to become markedly more complicated and, occasionally, confounding. In other words, a light beach read this book is not.
Central to Pont’s notion of what constitutes living a plain life is the near wholesale rejection of neoliberalism and all that it entails. She embraces University of California professor and political theorist Wendy Brown’s definition of neoliberalism as involving the penetration of market logics into every sphere of life, a penetration that is actively and corrosively “trashing the membranes that make the world”.
Under neoliberalism’s “ghastly spell”, Pont argues, “our best vision seems to amount to making ourselves into small, competitive businesses who each long to become a large voracious corporation, or ‘a successful start-up.’ We are, furthermore, driven into valuing ‘convenience’ over everything else, even above our own survival, our own mutual care.”
She continues: “Welfare, universities, medicine and prisons become sites to stall an unscrupulous business model, rather than being institutions that ensure the continuity of civil society. Neoliberalism leaves people behind. It might talk about inclusion but it walks programs and policies that undermine all our belonging, leaving people of every ilk, creed, level of ability less and less space, and fewer options. We have, for some years now, been witnesses to what such extended experience of being overlooked and blocked from dignified ways to proceed can pave the way for.”
How, then, can we resist the allure and overarching controls inherent in neoliberalism and return to ourselves, to a path that paves a way for a more dignified self and society? This dignity, to Pont, exists in living the plain life she explores and that dignity is gained – or, for many, regained – by daring to slow down, examine the inner workings of one’s own mind, embrace curiosity about things we fear, question and feel that fear, and gain an awareness of how we think and behave enables us in colluding in our own misery and discontent.
Over the course of 11 interconnected essays, she questions dominant, pervasive schools of thought and perception about our individual and collective capacities, virtue, envy, wanting, love and kindness. Her scholarship is rigorous and engaging, though the density of her arguments and the academic scholarship she draws upon may be confusing, if not overwhelming, to some.
I strongly suspect that many bookstores will make the mistake of shelving Plain Life: On thinking, feeling and deciding in their self-help sections, a miscategorisation that does this book a serious disservice. In the first few pages of her manuscript, Pont makes her distaste for the self-help genre understandably clear and those looking for a jaunty, populist, jargon-filled read telling them how to live their best lives would be best to give this volume a wide berth.
Readers in search of an interesting, genre-blending book that deftly combines elements of self-analysis, critical, political and cultural studies with philosophy and a dash of first-person memoir, however, will find much to like in this, an intriguing volume that is reminiscent of the works of Alain de Botton, Maggie Nelson and Rebecca Solnit.
Plain Life: On thinking, feeling and deciding by Antonia Pont, NewSouth Books, $34.99.