The Goal of a Human Economy—What is the Good Life?

[John McCreery]

What is a human economy? One suggestion that appeals to me is an economy that offers every child the opportunity to live what he or she comes to consider a good life, a life that combines simple pleasures and meaningful fulfillment of some larger purpose. Of course, however, not everyone sees the good life in similar terms, and what I take to be simple pleasures and meaningful fulfillment may be quite different from what someone else prefers. Anthropologically speaking, the possibility that different cultures may embody different visions of the good life is a topic to be explored, not a question to be decided a priori. 

I have read other books on this subject. Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self is a classic survey of possibilities that evolved over time within what is labeled the Western tradition: from heroic selves in the Iliad to bourgeoise and artistic selves in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gordon Matthews' What Makes Life Worth Living,  a comparative study of Japanese and American aspirations also comes to mind. 

Just today, however, I stumbled on a manuscript online, Edward F. Fischer's German Eggs, Guatemalan Coffee, and the Good Life: An Anthropological Look at Markets, Values, and Wellbeing that looks like a worthy addition to this list and has the advantage of for anyone new to the topic of including in its first chapter (all I have scanned so far) a good overview of recent research in happiness studies (did you know there's a field called "happiness studies"?), not to mention the philosophy of John Rawls and the capabilities approach to development articulated by Amartya Sen. It also has the advantage of being a downloadable PDF that you can read for free. 

OK, I really like the title, and my quick scan of the first chapter reveals a style I find enjoyable to read. Anyone care to join me in reading it? Seems terribly relevant to many things discussed on OAC.

[Erin B. Taylor]

Thanks Keith, I will see if I can drag some new voices in :-)

[Keith Hart]

Thanks for the terrific post, Erin. I have some thoughts of my own about morality and the good life, but I will hold onto them for now in the hope that others (apart from me and John) might take you up on your stimulating comments.

[Erin B. Taylor]

Nice find. I had a quick read of the first chapter. It seems to me that everyone I talk to these days is beginning to work on these kinds of issues. The more I hear, the more I suspect that, if 'the good life' involves creating relationships, then we need to interrogate the ways in which people create those relationships, not just directly as individuals but with different kinds of institutions at different levels (regional, national, global, etc).

I've been working on the moral economy of telecommunications in Haiti, where people have a really rather striking and intimate relationship with Digicel. During the course of our research, we were stunned by how many people said things like 'God sent Digicel to save Haiti'; 'Digicel should be President', or that they'd use new products that Digicel launched because 'Digicel never lies'. I came across a survey that showed how people's trust for telcos was sky-high, whereas trust for the government, Central Bank and NGOs was way down. For many people, Digicel is the only company that they feel provides them with social goods on their own terms. Family has a high value, Haiti is pretty much one giant market, and therefore communication therefore has a high value in that it allows people to elaborate their social and economic lives with greater facility, control, and freedom. What the government and NGOs provide people involves little choice on the part of recipients (given that social goods provided by the government tend to be compulsory, and NGOs have their own transparent agendas). This is a pretty clear case of the market providing the means for realising the morality entailed in 'the good life'.

However, the catch is that, in Haiti at least, telcos work as providers of social goods not just because they're better at it than everyone else there, but because the nation was deliberately engineered as a market society. In the early years after revolution, while Haiti was diplomatically isolated, this was a domestic economy in which the nation was held together by the market system spanning the country. Later, when outside interests wanted in, the local system had to be undermined. Between US foreign policy destroying the local agricultural economy, the failure of export-oriented manufacture, the dominance of Haiti's 'five families' and other elites in the political system, and the fiasco that is NGOs in Haiti (who make products for funding bodies, not for recipients), there is very little space for anything but foreign capital to provide social goods. Of course, morality and 'the good life' are still grounded primarily in direct relations, especially through kinship or Mintz's 'pratik'. In this sense, the definition of 'the good life' is located in the domain of production. But the means for realising 'the good life' increasingly lies in the domain of consumption.

Donald Robotham uses the term 'global sociality' to describe how, in his view, it is not so much consumption that connects human beings together, but our places in a system of production characterized by a radical division of labour. I think this has merit, but the distances between individuals in this chain are so vast that it's hard to see how morality could persist in any meaningful way that goes beyond the lip service of 'we are all human beings'. The ethical consumption that Fisher discusses is one way that people try to live this moral stance. But, realistically, I think the building blocks we need to be interrogating are neither the micro-level relationships in communities, nor the big picture of global connectedness, but our everyday relationships with the institutions that configure the 'opportunity structures' within which we seek out the good life.

[Keith Hart]

I saw a program on Big Miracle, a movie about how saving whales allowed people to find a common humanity that overcame divisions, including the Cold war near its end. It flopped. But that doesn't put me off. Let the rest bang on about how different we are.

[John McCreery]

This discussion seems to have stalled, with Keith and I adopting our usual positions, one looking for universal (Kantian) principles, the other insisting on local circumstance and detail. Serendipitously I am reading a book by Kyoto University Business School professor Koichiro Hioki titled Bunmei no sochi toshite no kigyo. The title might be translated  "The Corporation Considered as an Apparatus of Civilization. I am still struggling with the translation, since to get it right you need to realize that it builds on a neo-Kantian distinction in which culture is the domain of human freedom and civilization the material apparatus, artifacts and social institutions, through which culture is manifested and in Japanese the term "sochi" carries a range of meanings that includes "equipment, installation, apparatus, device" but is used to refer to social as well as material arrangements. 

I am struck, as I read this book, by the subtlety of Hioki's thinking. He begins by contrasting the abstract and uniform way in which companies are conceived in economics and sociological theory with the messy and diverse realities revealed by management and ethnographic research. He observes that the relation between them is like that between science and technology. When science and technology are conflated, as they often are in the phrase "science and technology," technology appears to take on the universal, transcultural aspect of science, lending plausibility to the convergence theory according to which, as companies (and whole societies or civilizations) become more efficient they come to resemble each other. But, as people who study technology know full well, it doesn't work like that. How technology is adopted, adapted, and incorporated in particular products and processes varies from company to company. The CEO who makes a decision to introduce the most advanced technology available into ongoing business operations has to deal with how to integrate it with existing technology, which is rarely a trivial task. 

Suppose, he suggests, that we think of culture as software and civilization as hardware. But, no, that isn't quite right. Instead, let's think of culture as software and civilization as firmware, in which software is embedded in hardware and the software in question is a critical part of the operating system to which applications must conform if they are to work at all. Now we have a way of thinking about culture and civilization that incorporates both the intellectual and artistic freedom that drives cultural change and the embedded resistance to change in existing civilizations. Looking at companies as apparatus embedded in civilizations, we can begin to understand why rational first principles and pursuit of efficiency result in diverse corporate cultures and ways of doing business. 

My intent here is not to divert the thread into a discussion of corporations or corporate cultures; but I find Hioki's thinking suggesting useful ways to get beyond the conventional antinomy in which universal principles and messy empirical facts are seen as antithetical domains. I find a similar utility in what Fischer is doing, acknowledging that both German consumers and Guatemalan coffee growers are searching for a better life, while also taking into account the way in which that search is shaped and constrained by the circumstances in which it occurs. 

[John McCreery]

P.S. I wonder about the possibility of getting Fischer to produce something for the seminar series.

[John McCreery]

Is it true that "everyone wants to be good" or at least approved as good? Does the good life always carry a moral imperative of good behaviour?

Let's say yes, and yes, and yes. One thing we know for sure about "good" is that people's notions about what good is vary considerably and that this is the point at which ethnographic and other anthropological evidence have some bearing. My dim recollections of when the issue was raised by Socrates suggest that "good" was, initially at least, a description of skill or the product of skill. The craftsman is good to the extent that his skill and the products of his skill approach perfection. That base meaning is still very much alive today. When we see a football player's beautifully executed goal, hear a jazz saxophonist produce an amazing riff, savor an exquisitely prepared dish, or hear an artful put down, "She's good!" expresses this sense of the good. What then, the philosopher asks, is it to be good qua human being? Kant is very much a philosopher in looking for the One Right Answer, but couldn't we say with some confidence that if the good is approaching perfection in doing what we do qua human, the good is as varied as humanity itself?

[Keith Hart]

Hi John,

Congratulations. You certainly hit a number of my buttons and your suggestion that our discussion might focus on a text is well taken.

The terms of discussion as you set them out are fine, but it will be no surprise to you that I would appeal to Kant for an additional dimension. Kant agreed that notions of the good life are bound to vary cross-culturally, but, like his 17th and 18th century predecessors, he wondered what common grounds an effective world society might be based on. He came up with the "categorical imperative": we may differ in what we consider the good life to consist of, but we all want to be good or at least thought to be good. Morality is about how to be good, so this is a moral imperative and of course some break it self-consciously or otherwise. Kant held that the common desire to be good provided a bridge for a shared conversation about the different ways we interpret that imperative.

His successors a century later, the neo-Kantians such as Weber, Simmel, Cassirer, Bakhtin etc, thought that modern society could never be founded on morality, on notions like the good. So they substituted objective alternatives like how the world really is (Weber). But my bet is that after a century like the last one and facing circumstances like the current global crisis, there is hunger to reinsert morality into politics.

In any case, as well as investigating different versions of the good life, we might also investigate as anthropologists Kant's general proposition. Is it true that "everyone wants to be good" or at least approved as good? Does the good life always carry a moral imperative of good behaviour? The list doesn't stop there. But when I get round to reading the suggested item, those will be the questions I apply to it.