What Should We Be Worried About?

WHAT IS A GOOD LIFE?

DAVID CHRISTIAN

Professor of history, Macquarie University, Sydney; author, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History

The 2013 Edge Question invites us to identify issues that are not on the public radar but should be—questions that ought to be hot topics in schools, homes, parliaments, in the media, in the U.N. Here’s an old, old question that has dropped off the radar: What is a “good life?” Providing everyone with the foundations for a good life is a basic goal of public policy. Yet how little public debate there is about the real meaning of a good life.

Perhaps we resist these questions because they conjure images of male Greek philosophers drinking watered-down wine at symposia. Can their answers offer us anything useful today? Or perhaps we think we already know the answer. And indeed we do have an easy, plausible, and powerful answer that was not available to the Greeks: Modern technologies let us imagine a world of ever increasing material abundance for everyone. Standard indices of material wealth such as GDP or GNP suggest that we live much better than the Greeks. Between 1500 and 2000 (according to the widely used estimates of the late British economist Angus Maddison), global GDP multiplied almost 150 times and per capita GDP about 10 times. This is what we call “growth.” And most of us, most of the time, are happy to take “growth” as a surrogate for “the good life,” which is why most politicians, economists, and entrepreneurs spend most of their time working to sustain growth.

The story of growth dominates thinking about the good life partly because, as the Chinese say of Mao Zedong, it is 70 percent (well, perhaps 50 percent) true. To enjoy a good life, we need food, security, and protection from the elements, and we must use energy and resources to provide these goods. Attempts by psychologists to measure subjective well-being support the obvious conclusion that raising consumption levels above the poverty line is fundamental to our sense of well-being and contentment. A basic minimum of material consumption is the indispensable foundation for a good life.

Yet the story of “growth” is also at least 50 percent wrong. It is wrong in two important ways: It offers an impoverished understanding of the good life and it is steering us toward ecological chaos.

We all know that beyond a certain level (and that level may not be very high), well-being depends less and less on material consumption. If you’ve just had a great meal, you won’t increase your well-being by immediately eating five more; restraint is a source of well-being as well as consumption. Indeed, many components of the good life do not require more consumption, because they are renewable resources. They include friendship, empathy, kindness and generosity, good conversation, a sense of beauty, a sense of physical well-being and security, a sense of contentment, a sense of intimacy, a sense of humor, and (Edge’s forte) a delight in good ideas. Measures of increasing consumption cannot capture these psychic goods. In March 1968, not long before he was assassinated, Robert Kennedy said in a speech at the University of Kansas:

Even worse, the story of growth steers us toward ecological chaos. The biosphere is rich in resources and extraordinarily resilient, but there are limits. And what “growth” really means is ever increasing consumption of the energy and resources of the biosphere by one species, our own. Today we are learning that “growth” is pushing the biosphere to its limits. There is a real danger that biospheric systems will start breaking down, perhaps violently and fast, because we are messing with ancient, complex, unpredictable, and global metabolic pathways, such as the carbon and nitrogen cycles. If the resources of the biosphere are limited, then “growth” cannot continue indefinitely. So we have to start imagining what a good life will look like in a world of limited resources.

A basic level of material abundance is indeed the foundation. A good society will be one in which everyone enjoys the material foundations for a good life. But beyond that level, we will need to distinguish more clearly between the renewable and the nonrenewable components of a good life. Can we learn better how to appreciate and enjoy the renewable resources of a good life?

Developing a more realistic story about the good life will be an essential step toward a better life and a more sustainable society. These conversations will be complex and difficult. They will engage educators, scientists, economists, politicians, artists, entrepreneurs, and citizens as well as philosophers. But we desperately need the debate as we try to imagine a better future for our children and their children.