I have been increasingly interested in the question of what is the ‘good’ life. I mean by this, the question of what mode of living brings about the best outcomes. From the beginning this is a problematic question; it is full of normative (value based) words that must be disambiguated before the main task can be undertaken. My thoughts on this are a bit scattered at the moment, so I don’t really want to draw any conclusions. Rather, I want to begin to lay out the landscape with the hope that I can fill in the questions later.
What is ‘good’, what is ‘happiness’?
I think I have a cheat for this question that can avoid most of the worries that irrealists about morality (myself included) would have about defining the ‘good’. The ‘good’ is that which makes me happy and I will just define ‘happiness’ as the Gestalt goal of my activities. I recognize that this is a bit of a tautology; I’m not stating anything of substance about what the content of those are. Instead I want to formulate the relationship between those terms and our beliefs and wishes. This changes the search for the ‘good’ from the typically construed metaphysical one into a psychological one. This also means that the answer we formulate is only an answer for an individual. It may be the case that some sort of life makes me entirely happy but would make someone else miserable. Any generalizations that we want to make about the good life for all humanity (or any segment of it) will be tenuous at best and can only be generalizations from what we know about what is good for each person individually.
How can we achieve the good life?
In my view this is where it gets difficult. Even if I know what sort of life will bring me happiness, this sort of life-style may not be possible given the social realities of life. This is the sort of problem that Helen and Scott Nearing attempted to solve. They proposed that the good life could be achieved if we went ‘back to the land’. It seems to me that they saw this solution as a global one; all people would obtain happiness if they would abandon the city and society in order to directly produce their own food. This has a certain appeal, but the assumptions it makes are rather obvious. The Nearings, and many others like them, found happiness by adopting the agrarian lifestyle, but this is certainly no guarantee that this would be the ‘good’ life for everyone; different sorts of things make people prosper and it is dubious to assume that one form of life will benefit everyone just because it is beneficial for a group of people.
However, there is a more important worry, one that the Nearings did not seem to acknowledge. If our mission in contemplating the ‘good’ life is to change society in such a way to allow many people to obtain such a life (as I believe it is) then for people to abandon the city in favor of many spread out farmsteads would drastically reduce the efficiency and food output of society. Put simply, we don’t have enough land for everyone to have their own farm, and small farms can’t produce enough food to feed everyone. When people are clustered together in cities, work is done more efficiently and fuel is conserved; therefore, it doesn’t seem that cities are the impediment in and of themselves. Rather, I think the question we should ask is how we can make society less anxiety producing and more accommodating of people’s search to obtain a lifestyle that conforms with their view of the ‘good’ life. We are not even close to obtaining this yet, but through changes in life priorities and our overall environment it might be possible to make the city a place of beauty and happiness.
This is just what I was able to type out today, and it is far from complete. I will try to get some less random thoughts written up in the future.