Thoughts on Flourishing

Photo credit: Townsend Walton, Unsplash license.

This blog is about the quest to achieve mass flourishing — but what exactly does flourishing mean? Along the way I’ve touched here and there on what constitutes a well-lived life, but I’d like to take some time now to spell things out in greater detail. I can’t pretend to offer anything original here — the question of how to live has been on the table since people first started asking questions — but I can flesh out my own conception of flourishing in a way that clarifies the value judgments that underlie my analysis and prescriptions.

I’ve always loved Dwight Eisenhower’s line about the relationship between religion and democracy: “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply held religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” Ike was roundly mocked for the banality of the sentiment, but I think there’s genuine insight there. He went on to say, though his follow-up was largely ignored, “With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion with all men are created equal.” So his quite liberal point was that democracy is founded on an unshakeable commitment to human moral equality, but that this commitment can be expressed in various ways.  

Flourishing follows a similar pattern: almost endless variation on a few basic themes. Seeing things this way puts me in a familiar position, in search of a middle ground between dogmatic certainty and anything-goes relativism. I cannot accept that there is only a single, narrowly circumscribed path of living right, nor that all paths are equally well chosen. There is such a thing as human nature: we are evolved creatures of a particular kind, and our unchosen genetic constitution imposes constraints on what is possible for us, and what is salutary. At the same time, though, the particular kind of creature that we happen to be is a culture-making animal that is capable of remarkable plasticity. We are born male and female, generally sexually attracted to each other, but culture has taken this basic biological fact and woven rich and intricate tapestries of love, romance, courtship, and union. And so it is with our other inborn drives: biology may call the tune, but culture can devise a near-infinity of dance steps.

I’m sure there are other valid ways of classifying things, but I see three broad avenues for human flourishing. The first is relationships. We are hyper-social apes, born with an intense need for love and physical touch. Throughout our lives, the connections we make with others go a long way toward defining who we ultimately become; we take pride and satisfaction in building a marriage, raising kids, and maintaining friendships across long years; and the love and laughter and comfort and solace we share with others are a treasure that can enrich any life.

The second avenue for flourishing is projects: anything we undertake to accomplish in the world. Here the scope for variation is all but endless. Anything that might be useful or pleasing to oneself and others, anything that absorbs our attention and summons our energies, anything that requires skill and conscientiousness to master can help to fill our lives with purpose and meaning.

The third broad avenue is experiences: all of us are long-shot winners of the birth lottery, and the prize that we claim is the miracle of consciousness. We are little bits of the universe that have flickered on and become aware of our surroundings, and ourselves, and simply by being we open ourselves to the rest of existence and the wonders and joys it offers. A beautiful sunset, a starry night, puddles reflecting the traffic lights on a rainy street, children’s laughter in a park, a cool evening breeze after a hot day, a dramatic skyline seen for the first time, or the hundredth — we are constantly showered with such gifts, and all we have to do is open our eyes and ears and hearts to receive them.

These avenues crisscross each other regularly. Long-term relationships are a kind of project, and one of the most important in which we engage, even as our relationships serve up a wealth of experiences for us to share and memories to enjoy. Our projects, meanwhile, frequently lead us into important personal relationships, and the experience of “flow” that they provide — total absorption in the task, so that the self and time seem to melt away — is a major motivation for doing the work that they require. And our love of certain experiences can lead us into relationships to share them, or projects to create them.

We can say that a well-lived life includes flourishing in all three dimensions, but beyond that it’s hard to get more prescriptive at the individual level. Some people whose other projects amount to little are especially wealthy in rich and rewarding relationships; some people find so much meaning in their projects that they thrive with much sparser human connections; and some people are especially adept at pursuing a life of varied and vivid experiences. The kinds of relationships, projects, and experiences that bring fulfillment vary from person to person, as does the emphasis on one or another of the three.

I think that we can say a bit more if we distinguish between individual flourishing, on the one hand, and collective flourishing on the other. In my way of looking at the world, this distinction is highly significant. It’s not enough that most individuals in a society are flourishing; it is also important that the larger society is flourishing, and that humanity as a species is flourishing. Just as individuals thrive by developing and exercising their capacities, a similar process occurs at the collective level, instantiated in institutions and culture.

I believe that we can be somewhat more specific about the components of collective flourishing. Thus, for some activity X, we may not be able to say that engaging in that activity is required for any one individual’s flourishing; nevertheless, we can still conclude that a certain level of X needs to be present for a society, or a culture, or the whole human species to be said to be flourishing. Parenting seems like an obvious example: while individuals can live wonderful, worthwhile lives without having kids, a certain commitment to parenting throughout a given society is necessary for that society to even continue, much less thrive.

The fact that there are certain necessary components of collective flourishing that are optional at the individual level means that the currently dominant way of conceiving of flourishing and the pursuit of happiness has some serious blind spots. That dominant conception, which has come to us from economics and been internalized through consumerism, sees happiness simply as the fulfillment of individual preferences; in that conception, expanding the range of choices is always a move in the right direction as it allows a wider range of preferences to be fulfilled. At the individual level, such latitudinarianism is appropriate, but at the collective level it robs us of the ability to criticize societies for overdoing Y at the expense of X; it prevents us from concluding that some cultures are better than others; and therefore, it deprives us of the intellectual resources we need to make our society and our culture better.

Appreciating the distinction between individual and collective flourishing goes beyond simply recognizing that the latter has requirements that don’t apply to individuals. In addition, it means facing up to the disconcerting fact that individual and collective flourishing are sometimes in real tension with each other. For one thing, I think we can say that relationships are overall the most important component for individual flourishing, while projects are more important for our collective welfare. Most people lack the talent and drive needed to create something that changes the world for the better in any important way; for most of us, it is our capacity to serve as a good parent, child, sibling, spouse, friend, and neighbor that gives us our best chance to make the world a better place. So for most people, prioritizing love and friendship over career ambition is the better path for achieving satisfaction and fulfillment. That said, our collective capacity to create and thereby improve the world is prodigious, as evidenced by all the world’s cultural treasures and by the astonishing progress in science, technology, and material welfare that has been achieved in the relative eyeblink of modernity. It is crucially important for all of us, then, for a creative minority to be free to conceive and launch their projects for betterment, and for the rest of us to have incentives to help them as we are able.

The tension between individual and collective flourishing becomes even more evident if we refer to them as perennial and progressive flourishing, or average and peak flourishing. When we look at what best advances welfare for most individuals, in other words what works best on average, we are looking at the perennial, unchanging aspects of human welfare — in particular, the universal aversion to pain and suffering and need for love and belonging. But when we shift our attention to flourishing for society as a whole, or humanity as a whole, we need to move our focus to those domains of life in which indefinite progress, or at least indefinite experimentation, is possible — in particular, science, engineering, material production, social organization, and the arts. And here what is decisively important is not average performance, but peak performance: progress that ultimately redounds to the benefit of all of us hinges on unlocking the best that humans are capable of.

I’m firmly of the view that, in the long run, facilitating peak flourishing promotes average flourishing. I am a fervent partisan of modernity, not primarily on the grounds that a progressive society gives geniuses a suitable outlet for their talents (although I do think that is important), but because giving geniuses those outlets — and enlisting the rest of our participation — has produced a humanitarian triumph in which billions of people who otherwise never would have existed enjoy lives with much less suffering and much wider horizons than people in the past would have imagined possible.

But getting to the long run can sometimes take a long time, and in the interim peak and average flourishing can stand in direct conflict. Nowhere has this conflict been more profound than in the event that ushered humanity into history and made all of civilization possible: the advent of agriculture. It’s now generally accepted that the average welfare of human beings declined as a result of the switch to a sedentary farming life: people had to work harder for less food and poorer health, and furthermore were subjected to burdensome and demeaning structures of oppression. And for the 95 percent of humanity stuck in subsistence agriculture, this regress in human welfare persisted for 10,000 years — that’s a long run! Only industrialization succeeded in lifting average welfare reliably above hunter-gatherer levels. But in England, where industrialization began, many decades went by before living standards started to show improvement. And worldwide, grinding poverty remained the norm as recently as when I was young, two full centuries after Watt’s innovations had unlocked steam power.

So there is a real basis for Jared Diamond’s provocative statement that the invention of agriculture was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” This sentiment dates back to Rousseau, of course, but recent anthropological evidence about declining living standards has revived it and made it somewhat fashionable. Yuval Noah Harari, in a similar vein, concluded, “The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.”

For my part, I cannot agree. I am an egalitarian who is committed to the moral equality of all human beings, and humanitarianism — a focus on reducing suffering and increasing happiness for as many people as possible — ranks very high in my scheme of values. But my commitment to humanitarianism does have limits, and they are being exposed here. And that’s because I also put a very high value on excellence and greatness, such that on some margins peak human performance is more important to me than the average. Here, let me recommend this essay by philosopher Richard Chappell, which does a nice job of highlighting the conflicts between a thoroughgoing humanitarianism and a commitment to excellence.

Of course the agricultural revolution and its associated traumas all took place long before I was born, and nothing I say or do can change what happened. But staring back into the black maw of a hundred centuries of impoverished suffering, if it were somehow up to me I wouldn’t stop it from happening: I cannot wish away civilization and all its glories. I prefer a landscape of soaring peaks and deep valleys over an endless plain.

Let me complicate things further now, as there is an additional evaluative criterion in play that significantly muddies the conflict that I have described here. When evaluating the impact on human welfare, we can look not only at the peaks and the average, but also at the total. And when we look at the effects of the invention of agriculture, there is more going on than a simple tradeoff between declining welfare for the many and rising welfare for the few. Beyond that, the numbers of the many swelled dramatically — from roughly 5 million at the dawn of agriculture to 1 billion in 1800 at the dawn of industrialization. And so, if you can think in terms of summing human welfare across individuals, you see an enormous increase in total human welfare.

Summing welfare across individuals runs into serious problems, as doing so can ignore the equal dignity of individuals and treat human welfare as an undifferentiated mass. And that can lead quickly to monstrous hypotheticals: how many headaches averted add up to outweigh a murdered child? That said, there are occasions when thinking in terms of total welfare is entirely appropriate — for example, when evaluating the effects of proposed changes in government policy. Here the focus on the total is actually implicitly incorporating a commitment to the moral equality of all individuals: since everybody counts the same, we should focus on boosting the total.

In passing judgment on the agricultural revolution, considerations of total welfare do in my view add significant further weight to the defense’s case. Yes, average lives were slightly more wretched than before, but there were so many more of them — and thus so many more friendships and true loves, so much more laughter and singing, so many more jobs well done and beautiful sunsets witnessed. If the disparity in quality is small enough, and the disparity in quantity is large enough, then at least to me considerations of total welfare can trump those of average flourishing.

But not always. Right now we’re worried about global population decline, but if we somehow get past this, is there an upper limit on how many people there should be on Earth? If we can move out into space, the constraints are lifted, but to the extent we’re earthbound it seems to me that 10 billion people enjoying mass flourishing is probably preferable to 20 billion living in pods and eating bugs. In other words, I reject the “repugnant conclusion.” All other things held equal, I think more people is better – but I don’t think that more people is unconditionally better.

Okay, so we now have three different ways to think of human flourishing: average, peak, and total. And, to my way of thinking at least, these three different perspectives sometimes clash in important ways. My takeaway is that the moral universe is complicated and messy, and that the best we can do is seek some uneasy accommodation among the existing perspectives. And I believe that many of the disagreements I have with others about what constitutes a good life and a good society turn on the fact they tend to view matters solely in terms of the average, or the peak, or the total, rather than seeing all perspectives and looking for some reconciliation among them.

So to all the romantic pastoralists and neo-primitives who reject modernity, or all of civilization, as a bad bargain, I say that you are misled by an exclusive focus on average flourishing. Peak flourishing and total flourishing matter, too, and giving them any weight at all is fatal to your case. To neo-Nietzscheans who prize human excellence and despise humanitarianism as (in Thomas Carlyle’s words) “a philosophy fit for swine,” I say that you ignore considerations of average and total flourishing at your moral peril: you are traveling down a dark road that leads to Auschwitz. And to “effective altruists” and fellow travelers who pursue total welfare in general, and the alleviation of suffering in particular, to the exclusion of all else, I say that your philosophical premises are faulty and are not leading you reliably in the direction of human flourishing. Poetry is better than push-pin, and there’s more to flourishing than comfort.

In closing, let me point out that it is my understanding of flourishing as complicated — in particular, my recognition of the uneasy coexistence of perennial flourishing at the individual level and progressive flourishing for humanity as a whole — that underlies the dual and equal focus of this blog on problems of inclusion and problems of dynamism. It is not enough to cheer progress while ignoring the social disintegration plaguing ordinary people outside the elite. And it is obtuse to stand against suffering while dismissing or actively opposing scientific and technological progress. We must prioritize inclusion because, for most people most of the time, the perennial problems of avoiding suffering and seeking belonging are paramount. And we must prioritize dynamism because of our reverence for the best that lies within us — our capacity to explore and experiment and create, our endless curiosity, our drive to reconnect to the cosmos through greater understanding — and because, in the long run, facilitating the flourishing of creators and innovators gives all of us our best chance for a better life.

P.S. My practice thus far on this blog has been to write ten weekly essays and then pause for a month to recharge and catch up on other work. This has proved to be a workable rhythm that allows me to be sustainably productive: I’ve now written just under 100,000 words for this site over the course of nine months, which by my usual slowpoke standards is positively prolific. Since this essay is the thirtieth that I’ve published here, that means it’s time for a month off. I look forward to resuming things with a new essay in late July.