and of course, it's not simple at all

I’ve been feeling uncomfortable with the More-with-Less post I wrote a few days ago. Maybe it’s just my tiresome Mennonite issues running in circles and snapping at their own ankles, or maybe I just have too much time on my hands. Something about it bugs me, though—like the worry that I’m being as smug as I think that cookbook is.

It’s this trap you fall into when you’re trying to distance yourself from something that you used to be part of and are still sort of part of but would like to define yourself independently from, using all the tools of irony and higher education and feigned smartness at your disposal: you doth protest too much. I once knew this Mennonite—and I won’t say when or where, just that he was of the baby boomer generation—who continued to attend a Mennonite church and participate in that community, but who obviously had a lot invested in seeming more sophisticated than Mennonites in general. He was a well-traveled, high-achieving person with great success in his career, an upstanding liberal who valued knowledge and education and skepticism. I liked him, and yet there were times when I would think, “You’re really working hard, aren’t you? To not be something?” I wasn’t sure what was going on there. I think he was raised by very, very conservative people, and I don’t know what that’s like. I don’t judge him too harshly, but there were times when, somewhat against my will, I found him terribly annoying, a too-cool-for-school sort of annoying. I have a fear of coming across the way he did—like someone who can’t quite hide his pleasure at being worldlier than his roots. (The problem, of course, is that striving to seem worldlier and more sophisticated than other Mennonites is pretty typical Mennonite behavior. There’s no escape.)

I fear the smugness disease from all sides. I linked More-with-Less to Mennonites at large when I wrote how self-congratulatory it is. I’m not the only one who has noticed. Back in the seventies, my mom gave it to an earthly crunchy hippie friend, thinking she would love the values therein and all, and instead her friend’s response was, “Wow, Mennonites sure think they’re smart, don’t they?” So here is my other fear: being seen as part of that.

I grew up with a conception of Mennonites as a persecuted minority, but now I can see how insufferable we can be to the people around us. Even when we’re right about a war being wrong or people consuming too many resources or what have you, we’re often so humorless and superior about it as to hurt our cause. I thought of this not long ago when this quiz, “How Mennonite are You?” was circulating among my friends on Facebook. It was just over-simplified Mennonite trivia, so everyone was scoring “100 percent Mennonite.” Two of my non-Mennonite high school friends took and aced it, and one left a comment on the other’s quiz result: “See? This is what we get for growing up around…them.” And I had to laugh, realizing, God, yes, we must have been a pain in the ass to grow up around. We were so proud of ourselves for our peace stance and our suffering ancestors and our liberal arts colleges and our ethical food choices. When I was a young adult I clung to that pride because I was insecure in every other way.

These days that kind of tribal identification does nothing for me, at least not spiritually. But a blog is not necessarily the best place to stake out a resistance to, for example, the kind of personal lifestyle pride epitomized in More-with-Less. Blogs easily devolve into personal lifestyle catalogs. And sometimes that’s just fun. How many memes are based on this mundane curiosity we have about fellow bloggers, and this mundane desire to reveal our own habits? It can be narcissistic and/or snoopy, but more often it’s just harmless and amusing entertainment. Recently, though, I stopped reading several blogs that I’ve read for a long time because it seemed like in every post the authors were either describing how much work they had to do or explaining the contents of their pantries in minute detail. I didn’t fault the bloggers or think there was anything particularly wrong with what they were writing, but I did find the posts tiresome, so I told myself, for heaven’s sake, don’t get annoyed, just stop reading. Save some time. It’s no big.

Then I came back to my own blog and promptly started worrying that I am just as tiresome. After all, I write a lot about the everyday, especially food, and I write a lot about how I feel my everyday actions affect the whole, and that kind of thing can be self-righteous, or just plain dull. (I’m not fishing for reassurance here, I promise.) That paranoia folded conveniently into my various Mennonite paranoias.

I have two competing urges I’m dealing with here. One is the urge to never incite criticism from any quarters, ever. That urge is Mennonite, or female, or Midwestern, or whatever—take your pick. The other urge is to be unapologetically all those things that I am that might incur judgment on the pages of More-with-Less, and by extension, from the chorus of Mennonite standard-bearers that still lives in my head: Collector of glossy cookbooks. Drinker of alcoholic beverages. Consumer of large pieces of fitness equipment. Lover of diverse and sometimes popular entertainment. Religious pluralist. Profligate user of profanity. One-time co-habitater-before-marriage. Rabid political partisan. Most of the time, I just am those things, without making a big this-is-my-identity song and dance out of it. Identity fixations are part of what drives me crazy about the Mennos. But when I try to explain my life and my choices in the context of my Mennonite background, I end up in this identity hall of mirrors, imagining conversations with all the Mennonites who piss me off with their righteous certainty. You’re too prideful! No, you’re too prideful! No, YOU’RE too prideful!

I started thinking about More-with-Less again because I was trying to figure out a way to write about anti-consumerist simplicity after struggling with myself over a large and arguably non-essential purchase. I got so caught up in my continued frustration over the preachiness of the cookbook, and everything it represents to me, that I’m not sure I explored what I meant to explore, which is my ambivalence about the whole concept of simplicity as a desirable ideal. I find the various movements against mindless consumerism that have been springing up in recent years to be very encouraging and completely necessary, but I’m always uncomfortable when I hear people credulously idealize the Amish, or even when I read about the “voluntary simplicity” movement, as sympathetic as I find most of its ideals. I’m uncomfortable because I’ve seen how easily anti-consumerist simplicity morphs into ideological simplicity, resistance to learning, and dogmatism against any challenge to one’s worldview.

When I rave about all my international cookbooks, I wonder if I’m ranting at the writers of More-with-Less, or if I’m really aiming past them, back to my ancestors who believed that the only books worth reading were the Bible and the Martyrs Mirror. They were always trying to lump the whole world into one big evil entity that they could define themselves against. Now I find myself struggling to be who I am without always using opposition to measure my place. That’s part of what they gave me, I suppose. If only escaping it were simple.