Tom Hodgkinson and 'Idling'

I came across Tom Hodgkinson's idea's while stumbling upon the Idler magazine's website a few years ago. It was not so much a road to Damascus experience as a feeling of being somehow validated, comforted; a feeling that I had fellow travellers in the here and now - not just long (or shortly) dead poets, philosophers, writers, artists and assorted non-conformists, free spirits and eccentrics.

Hodgkinson is the co-founder and editor of 'The Idler' magazine, a publication devoted to questioning the producer/consumer work ethic and championing alternative lifestyles such as green Anarchy, permaculture and basically sticking to 'The Man' wherever and whenever possible.

The 'Idling' of the magazine/website's title describes an attitude and approach to life that puts family, relationships, personal freedom, healthy eating and a DIY approach to basically 'everything' as more important than being a wage slave in somebody else's machine.

The 'idling' thing is actually a bit of a misnomer and a provocative challenge. Hodgkinson uses the phrase to initially highlight how those little pleasures in life like reading a book, watching clouds scud by or just sitting on your arse occasionally(and contemplating your being and nothingness), have almost become the moral equivalent of infanticide ever since the Industrial Revolution first began to shove everybody into factory's and offices, and slice their humanity into utilitarian 'clock-time'.

In the 3 books of his that I've read ('The Freedom Manifesto', 'Idle Pleasures' and 'How to be Free') Hodgkinson reveals himself as a tireless researcher and bibliophile.

He's a really good literary/cultural sampler, what the French call a 'Bricoleur', building his anarcho-bohemian manifesto from a diverse range of fields: Beat writing, Dostoyevsky, Existentialism, Thoreau, Kropotkin, Situationism - and last but definitely not least - a pre-Puritan Medievalism.

The latter, the (somewhat idealized) rustic simplicity of what Hodgkinson calls 'Merry Old England' is the foundation, or ideological skeleton on which the writer drapes all his more historically recent 'Idling' theories upon.

The Middle ages to him are a highly romantic and autonomous time, a period when the seditious, heretical and revolutionary spirit was bubbling away just beneath the surface, a time when folks had not yet been totally yoked to the work ethic, a cultural melting pot and possible catalyst for a more enlightened and emancipated way of living.

Hodgkinson gets a bit of flack for being an upper-middleclass, Cambridge educated purveyor of 'lifestyle anarchism', but, if you read at least one of his books, it's pretty obvious that he's unashamedly and unapologetically woven together loads of other peoples sharp ideas into a reasonably decent and clever argument against the '24-7' work obsessed society we live in.

His books are really well written (not to forget that he is a journalist) and fun to read, but there is an important message shimmering all the way through them...things could be so much better if we all slowed down a bit and took control of our own lives from the clutches of the machine.