"Could this be the country I had loved, honored, worked for, believed in? The general welfare was forgotten. The land had become a happy hunting ground for adventurers, profiteers, and pirates who called history bunk and used their privileged positions to promote their careers and fill their pockets at the public expense. Peace, progress, and prosperity had become scraps of raw meat, thrown to a pack of venal, military minded ravenous wolves."
Scott Nearing, widely known for his book, Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World, written with his wife Helen, might not have thought as a young man that his privileged upbringing would bring him to “living off the land.” His ideas, so radical when he first taught them, are still part of the American debate about what qualifies as “the good life.”
Nearing was born and raised in Pennsylvania and lived a life of privilege. Thanks to the success of his grandfather and his parents, he grew up in a large house, with a tutor and servants, surrounded by books and the arts to feed his intellectual curiosity. But rather than begin a career in the same business vein as his father and grandfather (Nearing left University of Penn Law School after one year), he developed a new philosophy, a social awareness antithetical to that of his family, writing and speaking against capitalism and the acquisition of money and “things” as the route to happiness.
After leaving law school, Nearing went to the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a PhD in 1909, and eventually began teaching economics and sociology. His teachings and outside writings caused great controversy for his attitude toward the American ideal of accumulation of wealth. He writes in his 1913 book Social Sanity: A Preface to the Book of Social Progress, “If wants are limitless, and increasing faster than income, which is limited, and if the difference between wants and income measures the extent of dissatisfaction, or misery, then, so long as men seek their satisfaction in material things, relying upon goods for happiness, they are pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp which flies from them faster than they can ever pursue.” He criticizes “the philosophy of life which has gripped a part of the American population—the philosophy: ‘Be rich and you will be happy.’” This view of an America becoming increasingly unhappy as it values making money and acquiring goods, rather than finding happiness in living a more moderate life, made him popular as a social activist against the extremes of capitalism, but also got him dismissed from Wharton as a teacher.
Undaunted, Nearing began speaking against World War I, and became a member of the Socialist Party. He also began lecturing at the Rand School of Social Science. Here, his writings became even more sharply pointed and critical of what had America had become, as when he writes in 1921’s The American Empire, “Steam, transportation, industrial development, city life, business organization, expansion across the continent—these are the factors that have made of the United States a nation utterly apart from the nation of which those who signed the Declaration of Independence and fought the Revolution dreamed….These economic changes have brought political changes. The American Republic has been thrust aside. Above its remains towers a mighty imperial structure,—the world of business,—bulwarked by usage and convention; safeguarded by legislation, judicial interpretation, and the whole power of organized society. That structure is the American Empire—as real to-day as the Roman Empire in the days of Julius Caesar; the French Empire under the Little Corporal, or the British Empire of the Great Commoner, William E. Gladstone.”
His lectures, writings, and involvement in Socialism and pacifism continued, but in the 1930s he and his second wife Helen bought property in Vermont to begin a new life of living, as much as possible, off the land, rejecting much of “regular” life in order to live more simply. In 1954, Living the Good Life was published. The Nearings traveled, wrote, and continued to spread their anti-war, pro-peace message, all the while devoted to their “old-fashioned” homesteading way of living. Eventually they moved their life to Maine. In the mid-1960s, during the tumultous years of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, an interest in going “back to the land” was very strong. Scott Nearing’s anti-war message and the politics of his and Helen’s sustainable lifestyle generated fresh interest among peace activists.
Scott Nearing continued his work and his writing into his nineties. He died just after turning one hundred in 1983. He left behind an extensive body of work, and proof that a life lived peacefully and more simply can lead to greater satisfaction. A short list of his published works follows, and information about the Good Life Center in Maine can be found here--
http://www.goodlife.org/Available from The Internet Archive:
