The Good Life in a crisis-ridden age

I was recently invited to join an experiment in communal living. The group, titled “Nuclear, no thanks”, rejects the model of the nuclear family in favour of a kind of modern tribe, whose members live and share certain spaces together. The idea is to purchase an old chateau or hotel in France, preferably near a city, where work can be obtained.

A fair but not excessive amount of idealism surrounds the project. Ideally, members possess their own self-contained, sound-proofed units within the building, to mitigate the vagaries of house-sharing. Communal spaces would be used for socialising, lectures and events. In the context of the housing crisis, buying a big place with other people is much cheaper than a single one-bed apartment. There is no overarching ideology to the group save a a general feeling that the good life is best enjoyed when shared among friends and that the current, individualistic, atomised, nuclear-family model of society fails to satisfy some basic needs.

The project reminded me of the philosopher Epicurus, and his experiments with the Good Life in the classical world. In 307/306 BCE, Epicurus bought a house with a garden just outside Athens. The site, known as the Garden, became not just his home, but a place where he and his followers actively lived, studied and worked: a communal retreat from the disturbances of the world.

The main tenet of Epicureanism - that pleasure is the highest good - is more focused on the avoidance of pain than the active pursuit of pleasure, and is more austere than it sounds. Epicurus himself considered austerity to be a grounding virtue, the hard earth out of which a life of pleasure could flourish. Deprivation renews our capacity to appreciate simple pleasures and therefore enables us to be satisfied with less.

Although both Epicureanism and the “Nuclear, no thanks” group exhibit their own tailored versions of the good life, all forms of society-building sprawl out of some kind of positive, moral principle. I will try to illustrate this point using four popular models as examples: the American Dream, the Religious Community, the Buddhist Monastery and the Mediterranean Lifestyle.

The American Dream holds that the good life flows from individualism: the personal satisfaction of an illustrious career, material wealth and social status. The Religious Community argues that the good life derives from spiritual devotion and familial ties; the Buddhist monk emphasises detachment, seclusion and introspection; the Mediterranean exults in a varied, aesthetically pleasing social life, with sunshine and a good diet.

These visions of the good life often exist in antagonism with each other. The American might call the Religious, the Buddhist and the Mediterranean lazy defeatists, who have failed to embrace their personal wills to power and take command of their lives and territories. The Religious might think that the American lives in a superficial, materialistic world, lacks basic ethics, and cannot possibly understand the spiritual pleasures of worshipping a common idol within a small community. The Buddhist could argue that both the American and the Religious are pursuing illusions: either the illusion produced by their hungers for wealth and fame (the American), or the illusions of a narrow-minded fundamentalism in the form of small religious community. The Mediterranean might think that the Buddhist stance – locking oneself away in the mountains – is simply too extreme and itself a delusion. Isn’t it better just to sit back and relax and enjoy life’s fleeting pleasures while they last?

Then, among the prevailing political ideologies, incompatible visions of the good life are often a source of bitter feuds, especially in these polarised, crisis-ridden times.

Liberals frequently denounce Socialists as deluded children who have failed to grasp the essential nature of our capitalist, personal-enterprise driven reality. It is always a lack of realism that defines the unworthiness of the Socialists. Realism is the preserve of those who dictate reality: the gift of liberal clairvoyants who invoke the high priests of “reality” even as the world is sacrificed to their cause (financial crash, housing crisis, environmental catastrophes etc.)

Liberal confidence is the confidence of the status quo: a logic that generates itself out of itself. Markets are wise, wealth-producing organisms that should be left to govern themselves and out of which a natural morality arises. That’s just the market rate, is a phrase often used to stop further conversation on the fairness of a certain price. Accompanied by a shrug, it is typically employed by landlords when he or she is asked whether charging 1000 pounds a month for a leaky bedsit on the outer rim of London is fair. That’s just the market rate, is a soothing, analgesic phrase, which allows the speaker to retreat from a sudden confrontation with suffering into the calming ether of herd-makes-right. Other landlords are doing it. Therefore, so must I.

Meanwhile, the Socialists claim that the Liberals’ emphasis on the natural wisdom of markets disguises an aggressive form of rent-seeking-capitalism whose real aim is to entrench and sanctify the rights of haves at the expense of the have-nots. The good life entails reducing inequalities and intervening in markets to make them “fairer".

No ideologue willingly invests themselves in an immoral identify. Each faction is certain they’ve seen the light. The Faragists and Johnsonites (Brexit politicians) dream of turning back the clock on globalisation and purifying Britain of its European influence. The Scottish separatists dream of purifying Scotland of the Brits. Beneath the flag-waving, it’s important to recall that nationalists are essentially besotted by their own positive ideal of the good life.

In the world as a whole, four main camps have emerged: the Nativists (Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Modi), the Liberals (Macron, Merkel, Trudeau), the Authoritarians (Erdogan, Putin, Jingpin) and the Socialists (Sanders, Corbyn, Iglesias). It would be imprudent to use the word populist, which is now used to denounce anything non-liberal.

Now is a good time to stop and ask ourselves what our own visions of the Good Life are. Can we reconcile the splintered shards of this fragmented, Cubist painting of a world? Or are its visions of the Good Life just too far apart? Polarisation has the tendency to create angels and demons, black and white, out of complications. Perhaps the first step is to resist the urge to shout over the other faction and actively try to figure out why those people hold the beliefs they do.  Even if we don’t share their point of view, it is absurd to think that anyone actively invests in immoral principles. Communities – even the ones that do horrendous deeds – never consider themselves immoral. When we approach the “other” with our mind already made, listening stops and conflict begin.

I’ll try to outline my own vision of the Good Life. The Epicurean model, like the monastic model, feels out-dated. Epicureans, like all retreatists, tend to carve out their own slice of heaven but say to hell with the world. There is no emphasis on the wellbeing of society as a whole. The problems of today – inequalities, environmental catastrophes – are vertiginous. The retreastist model might have made sense two thousand years ago, when critics of state ideology were persecuted. These days, in most Western countries, people are no longer directly punished for their political or philosophical positions (though they are likely to lose job opportunities and find themselves locked out of establishment institutions). This hard-won luxury should not be taken for granted. The Good Life, as a communal experiment, could therefore endorse some kind of political engagement, if only to improve conditions in the present and safeguard the world for posterity. Individual pleasure surely extends from the state of society as a whole.

We are social, political, and spiritual beings. What if the Good Life could enrich each of these aspects of our selves and help the collective consciousness evolve? As for style, my personal preference is for tolerance and open-mindedness - an attempt at least to understand the other - as opposed to a narrow dogmatism and polarisation.