Last week I got into a Facebook argument with a Buddhist about our attachment to material things.
What started it, if you go back a few steps, is a trendy popular discussion about "Decluttering". I have certainly been involved in it as a pop phenomenon. I Facebook-friended a page called "Decluttering 101" as a New Year's resolution in January, and actually did a few of the daily 15 minute exercises, before the rest of my life rushed back in to my free time like the walls of the Red Sea. I have been in long conversations at work with co-workers who are trying to clear out their basements, scan all their old photos so they don't have to keep them around, get rid of their kid's stuff. In most of these conversations, I just stare blankly, because I am a notorious "Keeper", from a long like of Keepers, famous for never deleting any emails (I just move them to something called "Inbox - Old"), needing a new filing cabinet because I just move piles of paper into the empty drawers, buying a big house so that I have room for all of my belongings.
But I have experienced some joy from decluttering, as well. Informally, since I abandoned the strict calendar of the 101 site, still I have culled and given away some clothes, about 20 old purses, two boxes of books, lots of kitchen items, some expired cans of food (did you know that cans of food can expire?), some bottles of hair products that I tried once and will never use more of. It is a good feeling, decluttering. Getting things out of your house that you have no use for.
Still, I usually end up on the Keeper side of most conversations with other women, and don't share their values. I was in a group of older member of my Mom's church, and all of them were talking about trying to downsize their "stuff", which they pronounced with a spitting vitriol. Get rid of your "stuff"! Why do we have so much "stuff"? And you'd better get rid of it, one woman pronounced, because your kids sure as heck aren't going to want any of it. I looked at my own Mom ruefully, because I have informed her that she and Dad are to get rid of nothing, nothing, without consulting me, and I know in my heart that what I really want is to preserve their house, exactly as it is, forever, with everything in exactly the place that I remember it being, so that I can always go back there, to that place that has been the anchor of my wandering heart for so, so many years.
So, when I was this article called "Let's Celebrate the Art of Clutter" <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/style/lets-celebrate-the-art-of-clutter.html?_r=0> going around on Facebook, I was delighted to see someone beautifully and articulately express the Keeper's point of view. Who was this woman? Dominique Browning, published in the New York Times. No wonder it was so thoughtfully well written.
I posted it on my own Facebook page, because it seemed to speak for me. I did include my dual response to clutter in my comment on the post: "As someone who has derived joy recently both from sending a pile of clothes to Goodwill and also from installing a new bookcase, I can see both sides, so here's something from the under-represented anti-decluttering, pro-stuff point of view." And I extracted this quote:
"I would like to submit an entirely different agenda, one that is built on love, cherishing and timelessness. One that acknowledges that in living, we accumulate. We admire. We desire. We love. We collect. We display."
I'm not sure if it was my post or someone else's or the cumulative effect of many people sharing the article, but the Buddhist on his own Facebook page posted an angry diatribe. His take on the popularity of the article, if I am summarizing him accurately, was that it was just the bourgeoisie making a self-congratulatory defense of the status quo. That the persecution the New York Times writer had described was just the first tiny inklings of an alternative point of view raising its head, and that her article was a disingenuous squashing of consideration. Acquisition is not going anywhere in America, he said, so there's no reason to "defend" it. And he accused the author and all of us of completely missing the point. He had posted a post of his own, a week or so earlier, reporting that he was exploring simplicity, and clearing his home and life out of clutter, which I had completely forgotten, and certainly was not thinking of when I posted my own link.
I was rattled by being called "bourgie", and felt that I was being misunderstood in turn, because the people from whom I felt the strongest attack were themselves extremely bourgie women. In fact, one could argue that their love of de-cluttering and of being "Throwers" was bound up in Capitalist waste and planned obsolesense, that they bought things only to throw them away to make room for buying more things to throw away.
There is one way in which we're all saying the same thing. The Decluttering expert on Facebook and the woman who wrote the celebration of clutter both say we should have things around us that we love and treasure. Everyone is saying that it's bad to surround yourself with piles of useless garbage. The woman celebrating clutter is saying it's good to have things around you that you love, and an article I saw in a whole different Facebook post about the Japanese approach to decluttering said that you should only keep things around you that you love, so it's a junk-drawer-in-the-kitchen is half-empty or half-full type situation.
But what I appreciated about the article was that it presented acquisition as a type of autobiography, which really resonated with me. Since I think that human life has no intrinsic meaning, the only way we can give our lives meaning is by our acts, our choices of action, one action into the next moment by moment, with nothing predetermined and everything free for us to choose, and by choosing and acting on our choices we define ourselves - when we look back at the end of a life, it has meaning because it has been defined by all those series of choices moment by moment along the way. So, the stuff one accumulates by the time one gets into adulthood is a physical manifestation of living our human lives. Which gives the stuff meaning, in the same way that a narrative gives a life meaning.
Plus, the only way we can live on after we die is to leave some physical impression on others. The stories about us (narratives) that live on in others' memories can give us life beyond our death, but the stuff that we have accumulated, as long as the stories are still associated with it, can make our existence have a lasting impact on the world as well.
So I think this is why the responses were so emotional, on both sides. If someone, whether a bourgie lady co-worker or a Buddhist neighbor, attacks my attachment to my stuff, they are attacking the relationship that gives my life not just meaning but a chance at an afterlife.
It then occurred to me, later, after thinking about this exchange some more, that of course I seem to have a materialistic point of view, the point of view criticized as being crass and base. Materialistic, because I am a Materialist. I believe that nothing exists besides material reality. Everything that exists is made up of physical stuff, the stuff that sciences can study. Atoms, cells, rocks, plants, planets, solar systems, but nothing beyond, nothing on any kind of higher plane. Human lives have value as physically lived actions, in a community of other physical things, the greater human community. We don't have souls, we won't go to any kind of heaven after we leave our bodies, there is no other higher plane of perfection or spirit or spirituality.
Does he think there is, my interlocutor? I don't know; the higher plane figures in Greek philosophy, and Christianity of course, but I don't know which other of the world's religions. But if he does, this would explain something foundational about our dispute. I value my things and my attachment to them because they are physical traces of my physically lived life, which will persist beyond me to help tell my story and keep it alive in memory. He believes, if I'm interpreting correctly, which I'm probably not, but I believe that he believes that being attached to physical things keeps us rooted in this lower plane, when our focus and concentration should be on a higher plane of spiritual enlightenment and possible perfection. Does he? Well, Plato did, anyway.
But I am connected to my stuff and therefore open to the accusation of being Materialistic because I am a Materialist.
Postscript: The next time I saw the Buddhist in person was at the opening of an art exhibit by another mutual friend, which was entitled "Shtuff".
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