The weak August retail sales have disturbed market watchers. Some have detected a widespread inclination to save. The more ideologically inclined have blamed lefties who look down on shopping and consuming. They point out that the refusal to spend will affect the profitability of businesses, which will then lay off workers or close down.
Virtues such as thrift, simplicity and the satisfaction of needs, not desires, were once dismissed as petit bourgeois. They belonged to the conservative side of politics.
But it has now become an offence against the established economic order to sew buttons on old shirts instead of buying new ones, to keep cars that are more than three years old, to prune one's wardrobe instead of buying another one and to resist the appeal of the latest gadgetry. Incitement to such behaviour threatens Australia's economic foundations.
Yet throughout history simplicity, thrift and voluntary poverty have been valued highly by many philosophies and religions. Restraint in pursuing the desire for possessions is said to focus our attention on what matters most deeply. It nurtures our desire for higher goods than material possessions. The quality of our inner life and the depth of our relationships to the world and to one another will count more than the amount of money or things that we amass. The lightness of the footprint with which we walk on the earth is a measure of the weight we have as persons.
Simplicity, of course, is a personal value. It will rarely be a mass movement. Greed will always be more popular. But simplicity has had social effects.
St Jerome was kicked out of Rome for encouraging noble heiresses to sell all, give the proceeds to the poor, and to enter a nunnery. Dumping serious wealth on the market skewered the local economy as well as family fortunes. The young women's actions, too, implied a judgment on the values of Roman society.
So too when the early Franciscans came begging to the Bishop's place, their presence called into question the way the Bishop lived. Simplicity invited even the reluctant to ask what really mattered.
The critique of values was deeply personal. It had bite only when the simplicity commended by the friars was seamlessly woven into the