We cannot fix the world, and to fix ourselves without fixing the world is merely selfish. There remains the option – some would say the temptation – of withdrawing to a private world where we fix ourselves by helping other people, of showing the world what it is missing by placing the joy of loving kindness in direct opposition to destructive consumerism. After the years he spent taking apart the kleptocracy of Berlusconi’s Italy, Jones was ripe for conversion to an ideal, and this is the story of his love affair with the communal simple life.
Much of this book is attractive. How could it not be? Jones spends time in a Quaker retirement community, with a Catholic Italian charity that brings up orphans, and with an Italian cult that makes candles. He plays billiards and mends hedges with alcoholics in recovery and chats to mystical hermits about the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity. And he does all of this not as a tourist but as someone who, for a while at least, walks the walk of the communities to whose talk he is listening.
The problem is that Jones is far too tolerant for his own good. He bites his tongue about Ultramontane Italian attitudes to Protestantism, but fails to see the deeper malaise of intolerance that underlies the minor jokes and slurs; indeed, a lot of the time he comes out with standard crass apologetics about how the secular world mistrusts the good intentions of the religious.
The issue in the end is this: for most believers, saving bodies is the fast track to saving souls. For too many of the communities which Jones records accurately but over-sympathetically, the point of living together in harmony is to turn all the inhabitants, and all the recipients of their bounty, into sock puppets for a strong central personality or set of dogmas.
