Brahms and My Little Theory of the Leisure Class in this Time of Covid and Climate Change
by Bruce Piasecki, author of doing more with less and other books
Brahms and My Little Theory of the Leisure Class in this Time of Covid and Climate Change
My favorite Van Morrison lyric comes from his song If We Wait for Mountains.
The world is full of wonder
It’s never far away
It’s right before your eyes
Every single day
He then has his narrator, full of alto sax and sonorous juice, note the pleasures of having tea at noon while taking a break at work, he cites the grand available free pleasure of big band music, and the idle delight in watching that “pretty waitress with the long blond hair.” Van reminds his listener that:
You’d find something every day
Take your breath away
World is filled with Wonders
No matter what they say
Van Morrison is so right. During my ten years in elite graduate education, I played Van Morrison recordings every day to avoid the idle chatter and needling I received from classmates, and even worse, from the Tweed dressed Faculty. His music reminds me of the pleasures of a free world, devoid of pretense and extremes.
Why did I earn this needling? I am not sure, but it was felt daily, and it does continue in elite business settings even today. Being born a basketball star from a factory town entered into a class of kids that had four years of Latin in prep school before college, I was a stranger in paradise during this decade of learning at Cornell University. Do I sound bitter? Hope not. I am thankful, but wanting to be generous to those still suffering the disdain of the elites.
Fast forward forty years, as we edge the heat waves, fires, and flooding around this capitalist globe from a lifetime of excess. I have become sorrowful regarding the blind ignorance of the leisure class. If you think this through, the leisure class is at the root cause of the climate crisis, with their jets, boats and watches, and four homes.
Yet they are not being focused on yet, except by the European Fit 55 programs and the Biden/Harris tax proposals. You can see in prior Medium entries what I said (in my July 15 entry) about Fit 55. Over the last months here in Medium.com, I have placed other pieces about our President, attempting to level the playing field in a more frugal way. We need to put the Biden revolution in the context of a clear popular vote against the profoundly wrong-headed elitism of Donald Trump, a president who preferred golf to hard work and CIA daily briefings on the real world.
Doing more with less, and here I mean Ben Franklin’s kind of alive inventiveness, is far better than endless consumer demands, the clicks that inflame this world.
Advanced capitalism is about the theory of the leisure class, forgetting about restraint, in a vast universe of consumer delight.
Think that through.
Perhaps it is safer for the world to note the pleasure of tea at noon, and a good meal out with a chat that empowers the waitress. These can take your breath away. Read a book outside, instead of flying to Cancun to look at it. I am not being preachy here, simply trying to add some perspective on where real joy is found in a song, or a video, or at home during these days of Covid’s variable revenge.
Of course, all good music pushes the boundaries of what is fashionable, acceptable and timely. Do you agree? Perhaps it is the same with good writing.
Van Morrison has been doing “this aggressive tonal push” for years, with his smart attitude, for forty years. Listen again to the joy in his song “Cleaning Windows.”
As embodied in my books, I aspire to the same, and see it also in the Music of Brahms — at least as recorded in Malcolm MacDonald’s debt Dent published biography on the working days of Brahms, before the legend settled in.
“This helps,” MacDonald notes, “to clarify the nature of Brahms’s commitment — to all music, but especially to early music as the repository of the contrapuntal mastery he wished to repossess. His instincts and capabilities were scholarly, but they were not academic: he wanted accuracy and availability so that the repertoire could be enlarged and the music performed not just discussed. His approach was rigorous but not doctrinaire: his ultimate criterion was expressive rightness, fidelity to the nature of the work as a whole.” If the leisure class became aware of constructive fidelity, expressive rightness, and the rigor of doing more with less, we’d reach our net zero climate goals faster!
In your own life, achieving more with less allows such beauty, such compositional skill, such performance rigor. That is almost free. You can hear it on your way to work, or at work. It does not take more watches and silk and a fourth house. As Van Morrison ends his song, with this warning: “No matter what they say/Do not wait for the mountains to lift up your spirits/If you wait for the mountains/You will miss a lot.” He suggests a more frugal way of immediate gratification and result.
The reason my mantra “doing more with less is success” works for many billion souls on earth is that it is not predicated by the dictates of leisure class mentality or by the dictates of our vast universe of consumer delight. You can say “NO THANKS” to the next ad, and you can refuse the next click. Which answers another response to climate change.
Instead, the arts of competitive frugality are about self-actualization through restraint and competitive frugality. You do not justify your existence through consumption. The essence of Veblen’s work on the Leisure Class talks about how this manifests into our climate crisis. T. Veblen in his early work on the instinct of workmanship underlines the meaning of real work, like you hear in Brahms or Van Morrison. Veblen wrote about the place of science in remaining clear headed in a time of excess. Veblen wrote brilliantly about absentee ownership of properties, and even the relationship between the engineering class and the price system. I do not want to get into all this again. It is complex but timely as we begin the march to answer climate change. When time permits, check out the brilliant work of Thorstein Veblen evident in THE PORTABLE VEBLEN assembled for pennies by Max Lerner for Viking Press.
Instead of writing more on Veblen now, I am going home for tea at noon with my lovely wife, and perhaps after I’ll turn on some Van Morrison after some Brahms. Total cost; thirteen dollars.
Bio: Bruce Piasecki is in the process of creating a Public Charity, the Creative Force Foundation, after delighting in a year of giving with his community sponsored fund called Creative Force Fund. Learn who the winner of his first Annual Award is in our next entry.
President/Founder, AHC Group www.ahcgroup.com
New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author and Speaker.
For additional perspectives: www.doingmorewithlessbook.com
