{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0283987915407855, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0018126888217522659, 'mean_word_length': 5.088235294117647, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Downwardly Mobile for Conscience's Sake: Voluntary Simplicity from Thoreau to Lily Bart

In broadest terms, this essay is about a counterculture of self-imposed moral and economic limits, or rather cultures (plural), running through and against mainstream American liberalism from the early colonial era down to the present, at some points more strongly than others. At rare moments, it's shown signs of becoming a dominant culture, or at least a dominant cultural imaginary: at certain points in Puritan and Quaker history, in the cult of republican virtue during the early national period, and most especially in such religiocentric communitarian movements as those of the Shakers and the Amishor, for that matter, as Puritanism and Quakerism once were. All these sects, of course, were transplanted from abroad, not native born. What I am attempting to describe is not a propensity unique to the US. Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Albert Schweitzer might all be worthier prototype cases than any I'll be examining here. But the formation arguably has special pertinence to US culture, which is stereotypically a culture of capitalism, of consumption, of plenty, and of individual upward mobility, relative to most of the rest of the world. Under such conditions the mere existence of countercultures of restraint take on a special interest. As David Shi writes in the best history of national simplicity ethics to date, the myth of the simple life "has, in a sense, served as the nation's conscience, reminding Americans of what the founders had hoped they would be and [so] providing a vivifying counterpoint to the excesses of materialist individualism" (278).