Beyond Liberalism Jules Evans
August 15, 2010 | More on Global system, Influence and networks | 19 comments
One way to understand the modern politics of wellbeing – by which I mean the introduction of policies by governments aimed at cultivating the ‘wellbeing’, ‘happiness’ or ‘resilience’ of their citizens – is as an attempt to move beyond the confines of liberalism, and to answer the question, ‘where next?’
The liberal state aims to safeguard the rights of the individual in their own private ‘pursuit of happiness’, but it does not go so far as to tell the individual where or how they should pursue it. Each individual in a liberal society has liberty of conscience, and liberty to pursue their happiness as they see fit, as long as they are not harming anyone else.
Modern liberal governments are, more or less, disestablished from religion – they do not try to promote one particular religion or spirituality, and maintain a careful neutrality in matters of private moral and spiritual beliefs.
Modern liberalism did once have a telos, or goal: the goal was the removal of all obstacles, prejudices and superstitions, so that each individual could freely pursue their own private happiness.
We have more or less reached that goal in western societies today, particularly with advances in minority rights since the 1960s, and in homosexual rights over the last decade. So the overarching telos of liberalism has been reached, and we are left with liberal society as an assortment of private teloi.
But this leads to an inevitable restlessness among philosophers and policy makers. Where now? Now the priests and monarchs have been defeated, and the old superstitions over-turned, now we are free to pursue our private inclinations…where next to steer the ship?
Export liberalism, defend liberalism
One response has been to export liberalism: to make the rest of the world as politically, economically and sexually liberated as we are. This export of liberalism to Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East has been a source of excitement for policy makers since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It gives them the nostalgic sense of the grand old March to Freedom, a march which their own societies have sadly already completed.
Another response has been to fling oneself into the fight with radical Islam and Christian fundamentalism. Liberalism hasn’t won, goes this argument. It’s under attack again! Once more unto the breach, we must fight off the enemies of freedom.
This is another good way of avoiding the horrible feeling of liberalism having arrived at an end point, and not being sure where to go from here. It takes its followers – Hitchens, Dawkins et al – back to an earlier time, to the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, when liberalism was genuinely under attack.
But it’s anachronistic and nostalgic – Dawkins and his ilk are like bored historical re-enactment societies, spicing up their weekends by play-fighting battles already long-since won.
A third response, the one I’m most interested in, is to seek to move beyond modern liberalism’s defence of the negative liberty of its citizens, and to find some ideal of positive liberty to promote.
Isaiah Berlin and the dangers of positive liberty
Negative liberty, as Isaiah Berlin defined it, is the protection of our freedom to pursue our own private ends. Positive liberty, by contrast, is freedom from unhappiness, freedom from our lower selves, freedom to fulfill our highest selves.
Ideas of positive liberty are founded on essentialist views of human nature. They argue that man has an essential nature which is not fulfilled at present, but which could be fulfilled and made whole under the right social and political conditions.
Man has a telos, a goal, which is the fulfillment of his nature. Government can help man in the achievement of his fulfillment as a human being. So politics is the movement towards the telos of the fulfillment of mankind.
Berlin wrote most of his best writing on the dangers of political philosophies that sought to cultivate positive liberty in its citizens. He claimed that such efforts – in Plato, Rousseau, Marx and others – led directly to the totalitarianism of Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
Berlin declared that the idea of governments ‘fixing’ humanity and making it whole once more was both deeply seductive, and profoundly dangerous. We have to accept, Berlin insisted, that humans will never agree on the aim of life, and any attempts to enforce a common telos onto individuals will result in tyranny and oppression.
The rise of the communitarians
Berlin’s diatribe against positive liberty lasted in influence for a good half-century. But it’s come under attack in the last twenty years, particularly through the rise of communitarians like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel – who for my money are three of the greatest philosophers writing and teaching today.
The key text in this rise of communitarianism is MacIntyre’s 1982 book, After Virtue. MacIntyre takes aim at the liberal idea of the state maintaining moral neutrality and avoiding any positive idea of the ‘good life’ or the telos of human existence.
This sort of liberalism ends up in moral relativism, MacIntyre argues, where people no longer have a common moral language, and public ethical debate is reduced to mere emotivism: ‘I am right, because I feel I am right’, or ‘I am right because I can shout the loudest’. This is the moral Dark Ages in which we now find ourselves, he says.
His ideal society, by contrast, is medieval Europe, when Europe was united under Christian Aristotelianism, with its conception of the cultivation of the virtues as the path to happiness and the fulfillment of man.
MacIntyre dreams, at the end of his book, of a society unified once more by a common idea of the virtues, in which government plays a role in the cultivation of those virtues, and thus in the fulfillment of its citizens as human beings.
His disciple, Michael Sandel, also calls in his 2009 book, Justice, for a return to virtue politics – to a politics based on an Aristotelian idea of the virtues and the common good. He writes that the idea of the morally neutral state is actually a fiction:
Justice is inescapably judgmental…Justice is not only about the right way to distribute things. It is also about the right way to value things…The challenge is to imagine a politics that takes moral and spiritual questions seriously, but brings them to bear on broad economic and civic concerns, not only on sex and abortion.
So, at the heights of contemporary political philosophy, there have been attempts to move beyond Berlin’s negative liberty, and to build a new virtue politics, based on Aristotle’s idea of the cultivation of the virtues as the fulfillment of man’s biological, political and spiritual nature.
The modern politics of well-being
And this philosophical return to Aristotle and the Greek idea of eudaimonia has also filtered down to the policy level as well. A key policy publication in this area was a collection of essays published by Demos in 1998, called The Good Life.
The pamphlet calls for a ‘remoralization of policy debate’, and for a new politics that goes beyond merely seeking material prosperity, and which instead seeks also the fulfillment of its citizens. The collection quotes Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in its opening essay, when it writes:
A fulfilled life is one that has, in modern parlance, some ‘project’ or, as the ancient Greeks put it, a goal or end. But not anything counts as a life project of a kind whose achievement brings real fulfilment.
Perhaps the most interesting essay in the collection is by Geoff Mulgan, formerly director of Tony Blair’s strategy unit, then the founder of Demos, now the head of the Young Foundation. Mulgan writes that governments should not be afraid of promoting an idea of the ‘good life’:
A famous philosopher once asked how the same good life could ever be right for a human race composed of people as different as Marilyn Monroe, Einstein, Wittgenstein and Louis Armstrong. Any single view of the good life, he argued, must inevitably be oppressive. The best that we can hope for is a society in which everyone is given as much freedom as possible to define the good life for themselves.
This view is undeniably attractive. It accords with the ‘non-judgmental’ common sense of most Western societies today. Yet it is as profoundly wrong as any belief could be. Any society which took it seriously would soon become disfunctional. It is wrong, in the first place, because so much about the good life is not solely a matter of individual freedom, but is underpinned by collective provision, by social orders, by the things we share – clean air, safe streets, civility.
It is wrong too because human beings have much in common: we share much the same biology, and many of the same drives and needs, however different we may appear on the surface.
And it is wrong because it ignores the evidence that there have been remarkably constant features of the good life across very different times and very different places….some things are timeless and universal.
He includes among such ‘timeless values’ the family, the community, access to goods, the environment and, finally, ‘the soul’:
a spiritual understanding of transcendence, of connectedness, and awe in the face of the universe, has been made manifest in the church, temple or mosque at the heart of every community…this deep element in the good life is about simplicity and fundamentals. As the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart commented, God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction.
So Mulgan is really returning to an Aristotelian idea of man having a common biological nature, and that the cultivation of the virtues is the fulfillment of this nature: what Aristotle called eudaimonia, or flourishing.
Politics, Mulgan suggests, can be re-invented as the collective pursuit of a common idea of eudaimonia. The idea comes from Aristotle, but the only time society really was united under such a philosophy was the Middle Ages, when Thomas Aquinas succeeded in making Aristotle the ruling philosophy of Europe.
What does a neo-Aristotelian politics look like?
So what would this sort of neo-Aristotelian politics look like? Well, perhaps there have been some steps towards it in the UK in the last few years under New Labour.
Take, for example, the introduction of citizenship classes in 2002, an initiative spear-headed by LSE professor Bernard Crick.
Crick saw citizenship classes as a way to cultivate the ‘political virtues’ of self-confidence, autonomy and active political engagement. He quotes with approval another Demos pamphlet, published by David Hargreaves in 1997:
Civic education is about the civic virtues and decent behaviour that adults wish to see in young people. But it is also more than this. Since Aristotle, it has been accepted as an inherently political concept that raises questions about the sort of society we live in, how it has come to take its present form, the strengths and weaknesses of current political structures, and how improvements might be made… Active citizens are as political as they are moral; moral sensibility derives in part from political understanding; political apathy spawns moral apathy.
Another, less obvious, return to the classical virtues came in the shape of the 2008 Improved Access to Public Therapies (IAPT) policy, which was the brain-child of another LSE professor, Richard Layard. Through IAPT, Layard secured £180 million in funding to train 3,500 new therapists in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).
As I’ve written before, CBT is a therapy grounded in ancient Greek philosophy, which uses the ‘Socratic method’ to teach people how to examine their beliefs, see how they lead to their emotions, and then hold them to philosophical account.
While CBT presents itself as a science, it is very much grounded in the Socratic, Stoic and Aristotelian idea that mental health involves the cultivation of the ancient Greek virtues of rational self-examination, self-knowledge and self-control.
Lord Layard has, together with Geoff Mulgan, also embraced the new field of Positive Psychology, which attempts to build resilience in young people (particularly school-children and soldiers), through the teaching of the CBT techniques of rational self-examination and self-control.
Layard and Mulgan are behind a pilot scheme, which is teaching Positive Psychology in secondary schools around Britain. They hope that Positive Psychology could supplement, or replace, another new New Labour introduction to the curriculum: Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning.
Again, Positive Psychology presents itself as a science rather than a moral philosophy. Its founder, Martin Seligman, insists that it is merely descriptive, and does not take any moral position on what constitutes the good life. It merely describes the different forms of happiness, without suggesting which form humans should seek (so Seligman claims).
And yet behind the pseudo-science is very much the Aristotelian idea of the good life as the pursuit of virtue and the fulfillment of our human nature. In place of the Aristotelian virtues, we have Positive Psychology’s idea of the ‘strengths’: courage, temperance, wisdom, self-control etc.
Positive Psychology tries to ‘prove’ what interventions lead to eudaimonia through the use of questionnaires and life satisfaction surveys. “It’s Aristotle with a seven-point scale”, as one practitioner put it.
A word of warning
These policies are attempts to go beyond merely the liberal defence of negative liberty, and instead to promote positive liberty, to promote the eudaimonic virtues of self-knowledge, self-mastery and political engagement.
They are attempts to take politics beyond moral relativism and to find a new common idea of the Good Life which we can seek to cultivate in ourselves and our children.
I personally have been deeply influenced by this attempt to go beyond moral relativism, go beyond post-modernism, and return to a virtue-based politics. I’ve been inspired by it ever since I happened to buy that Demos collection, The Good Life, when I was in my second year at university in 1998.
But a word of warning: both CBT and Positive Psychology present themselves as empirical sciences, rather than moral philosophies. They insist that they are morally neutral, that they are merely interested in scientifically testing ‘what works’ in the pursuit of happiness.
This is what has enabled governments to embrace them and promote them. Governments can then say that they are not over-stepping the bounds of moral neutrality, are not dabbling in elitist moral paternalism. They are merely promoting well-researched scientific and technocratic paths to well-being. It’s not moral philosophy. It’s science.
Now in some ways, ancient philosophy was a science. It was grounded in a theory of human psychology, a theory of how humans can learn to control their thoughts, emotions and behaviour. This theory is today known as the cognitive theory of emotions, and it has been largely proved correct through the success of CBT in helping people overcome emotional and behavioural disorders.
So ancient Socratic philosophy was a science. It told people how to change their thoughts, beliefs and emotions.
But it was also a moral philosophy. It went on to tell people what they should believe and value.
And here, the various philosophical schools that descended from Socrates actually disagreed. There was no consensus about what humans should value, or what the goal of life should be.
The Stoics believed that virtue was all that was sufficient for happiness. The Aristotelians believed that the good life consisted in virtue, but also in some external conditions, such as wealth and freedom. The Cynics believed in dropping out of society to return to nature. The Epicureans believed in the pursuit of utility and pleasure.
They all shared the principles of Socratic psychology and Socratic ethics: the idea that that you can learn to know and control your thoughts, and that it is a good thing to do this. But they then took this basic starting point in different directions.
So ancient philosophy was a two-stage process:
Stage one – the scientific stage: how to know yourself, how to challenge your beliefs, how to control yourself.
Stage two – the moral stage: what you should believe, what you should value, how you should live.
I believe governments can and should teach their citizens Stage One. I think CBT does this very successfully. It is grounded in a scientifically-proven model of human psychology, and it trains people how to become conscious of their thoughts and beliefs, how to take responsibility for their thoughts and beliefs, and how to change them.
It doesn’t go much further than that. It doesn’t tell people what they should value or seek in life, beyond teaching them the basic Socratic ethics and techniques of self-knowledge and self-mastery (one could argue that these are not valuable ethics, but I think most democratic societies can agree that they are).
Positive Psychology at its best simply teaches young people Stage One: here’s how to understand and control your thoughts and emotions.
But it also, I would argue, tries to teach people Stage Two: here’s what you should believe and how you should live if you want to be happy. And it tries to do this as a science.
I think this is wrong, because it is bad science – you can’t prove what makes a fulfilled or meaningful life – and it is even worse moral philosophy. It doesn’t teach people that there are different competing models of the Good Life, which may share common features, but which also have important differences.
Teaching young people that there is one scientifically proven path to happiness actually damages their ability to think for themselves: which is a crucial part of Stage One, and a crucial part of their ability to achieve happiness.
Stage Two should never be presented as a ‘science’. There is no scientifically-proven path to the Good Life, because the Good Life always involves questions of value, belief and virtue. It will always be a matter of debate, and you should teach young people to understand and debate the different approaches to question of what makes a Good Life.
A proposal
That is why I think the Good Life should be taught at a subject that includes religious education, citizenship education, and emotional literacy. These subjects are at the moment three different subjects, but really they are all the same thing. They are all philosophy.
Emotional literacy is the teaching of Stage One: how do we learn to control our thoughts and feelings? This is the entry level Socratic teaching that makes religious education and citizenship education possible.
Religious education and citizenship education are both Stage Two: what is the meaning of life, what should we value in life, and how should we pursue it, as individuals and as a society?
This should involve the teaching of different models of the Good Life: Christian, Muslim, Stoic-Aristotelian, Buddhist, and liberal. It should encourage debate and experimentation, rather than passive acceptance of either ‘religious tradition’ or ‘scientific fact’.
It should teach both the differences in these traditions, and their common features – their common acceptance of the Socratic goal of ‘knowing thyself’ and learning to control yourself (Stage One).
It is thus based in a common idea of human nature and a common set of spiritual practices. But it also acknowledges and accepts the diversity of approaches to the Good Life, rather than trying to pretend there is one scientifically-proven path to the Good Life, which is a pernicious and harmful idea.
A new virtue politics, a new politics of eudaimonia, can go some way beyond complete moral relativism. But it should tread extremely carefully. And it should not try to sidestep honest moral debate with spurious claims to scientific objectivity.
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Interesting as always Jules.
I agree that modern proponents of happiness/positive psychology tend to fudge questions about eudaimonia; they take happiness to be self-evidently desirable, while many philosophers would want to append important caveats to that claim. In particular, conflicts between personal happiness and other conceptions of 'the good' tend to be brushed aside by categorising things like 'working towards something greater than oneself', or 'engaging in altruistic/other-oriented activities' as routes towards happiness, rather than goals in themselves.
I'm not sure, though, that this is enough to justify labelling positive pyschology as a 'pseudo-science': the various parts of psychology have stronger or weaker claims to science-hood, and 'pseudo-science' makes it sound like you're placing Seligman et al on a par with Gilian McKeith.
On your idea of studying the Good Life as a subject: it sounds excellent, but I want to raise two questions: first, why include religious education? In a secular society there seems little basis for privileging religious ideas over others. If we want to compare and contrast models of the good life (religious or otherwise), maybe we could just call that aspect "Models of the Good Life"?
Second, you seem to leave little room for the genuinely useful work that positive psychology has done in identifying reliable routes to happiness (not the Good Life). We absolutely should be teaching people about diverse conceptions of 'the good'; but it seems perverse for that to squeeze out the robust conclusions reached by Seligman et al. We need to be philosophically questioning citizens above all; but can't we be taught methods for increasing our happiness as well? If Good Life classes do their job, we'll be aware that happiness isn't necessarily the only thing we ought to be concerned with – but surely knowing how to be happy is important enough to be taught as well?
This is fascinating, and I laughed heartily at the phrase "Dawkins and his ilk are like bored historical re-enactment societies." But I think that you mistake the continuing power of illiberal ideas – take, for example, the sudden outpouring of rather nasty right-wing opposition to the idea of a mosque "at" (actually just near) Ground Zero.
It's pretty astonishing that President Obama has been hammered by the Republicans for stating that Muslims have the right to build a place of worship… Dawkins et al do indeed tilt at windmills much of the time, but there are still real giants to fight too.
Similarly, reading this in the U.S., I'm also a little bit disturbed by the way you place "scientific fact" inside inverted commas along with "religious tradition". There is still a battle to be won on this side of the Atlantic to prove that science tells real truths.
Perhaps this reflects our differing geographical stand-points (or blog-points). What may be good policy in the secular UK might work less well in the religious US. Of course, a more serious exploration of religious diversity might also help American debate now and again…..
Hi Andrew, hi Richard
Well, 'pseudo-science' is perhaps a bit harsh, but I think one of the flaws in Positive Psychology is the idea we can arrive at some sort of scientific 'happiness hypothesis', which will do away with the need for moral and philosophical debate over what should be valued and pursued in life.
Science (by which PP means data from life satisfaction surveys) can't answer that question. Doctors have the highest rate of suicide. Does that mean no one should become doctors?
The best thing that PP did was take the basic therapeutic techniques of CBT and take them into the classroom. I wish it would acknowledge that these techniques come from ancient philosophy. But no, it can't do that, because it has to present itself as a morally neutral science.
I'm not sure what else of value PP has brought to the table, beyond teaching the basic techniques of CBT in classes. But I'd be interested to hear – what would you say are its robust conclusions?
On your point about religious education: I'd be interested in teaching young people that religions are not just about faith and myths, but about social and spiritual practices which people without faith can still find helpful.
Richard, I'm not putting 'scientific fact' into apostrophes because I disrespect the idea of scientific fact. But I am wary of social scientists who try to present as objective and morally neutral 'facts' what are in fact normative assertions.
Your point on the continued threats to liberalism is fair. It's strange now that the defenders of liberalism against the dark threat of Islam seem to be, in both Europe and the US, one of the biggest threats to liberalism, or at least to the freedom of religious practice.
I would hope that teaching both secular and theistic models of the Good Life side by side would show the two sides what they have in common, to take the debate beyond the 'there's no God / oh yes there is' stage.
Dawkins' moral outlook has more in common with world religions than he realizes, if he'd calm down and look for points in common. He famously ends The Selfish Gene with the words:
'We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism — something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of… the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our own creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.'
It seems to me that what is valuable in the great spiritual traditions (including ancient Greek philosophy) is the attempt to rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. What I call Stage One – how to became conscious of and control your thoughts and emotions – is basically this attempt at rebellion. Religions have much to tell us on the question of how to rebel.
Jules – I absolutely agree that we need to guard against the pernicious idea that scientific studies can somehow make redundant moral debate about what is to be valued in life. As for the value of PP, I'm thinking of the accumulation of a weight of evidence on ways to be happy in general, outside of a therapeutic standpoint; e.g. The New Economic Foundation's 'Five Ways to Well-Being'. (Perhaps this is what you mean by taking CBT techniques 'into the classroom'.)
I like the linking of rebellion against one's genes to philosophical techniques. The Plutarch quote you used in an earlier article about silencing one's "desires, appetites and fears…with a single cry" seems apposite.
As you point out, stoic and other philosophers had realised these truths far earlier, and have grounded them in coherent moral systems; but empirical validation of these truths is nevertheless invaluable, and it's necessary to do psychology – positive psychology I suppose – in order to do that. I agree with you that this shouldn't obscure the need for moral debate though; and that psychologists and others interested in the 'well-being agenda' are often guilty of neglecting this.
oops, that 2nd para should have been last. Where's the edit button?
Hi Andrew
Thanks for reading the other article too.
Yes, it's a tricky one. With regard to CBT, its evidence base is obviously important – how else can governments know what therapies to support with public money? How can they know whether to support primal scream therapy or laughing yoga (for example)?
But CBT has rather limited aims – the removal of the worst symptoms of emotional disorders – and its moral assumptions are also quite limited, and acceptable.
So in some ways CBT is more about negative liberty – the removal of obstacles to the individual's private pursuit of happiness (in this case, cognitive obstacles).
PP is more about positive liberty – what is the good life, and how do we achieve it?
And here I think they get in quite a mess, philosophically and morally. They boldly weigh in where scientists must tread carefully. Seligman, for example, says one form of happiness is 'meaningful happiness' – the happiness of serving a worthwhile higher cause. How can one tell if the cause is worthwhile?
Seligman writes: '“Meaning is assessed by some combination of societal judgement, factual consequence and subjective state.”
Now it seems to me obvious that science cannot and will never be able to 'measure' whether a life is meaningful or not. How could it? How could scientists even think that this would be possible?
And so, unable to answer that main question – what makes a life meaningful – PP ends up putting great weight on these really quite minor interventions, like the gratitude journal.
Seligman admits that life satisfaction surveys can only measure pleasant feelings, not other forms of happiness. But those same surveys and questionnaires – meagre as they are as ways of describing the variety of human experience – are all PP has to rely on for its scientific data.
I like the fact that ancient philosophy's interventions were built on a sound scientific model of human psychology. In some ways, this takes us a bit of the way beyond relativism – we are beginning to know how the mind works, how to transform it, how to teach people to take responsibility for their thoughts and emotions, which is the starting point for moral behaviour.
But we have to be careful how far we go from there.
In NEF's case, it gets millions of pounds in public funding to find the secret of happiness, and comes back with 'take exercise' and 'have meaningful relationships'. Well…no shit!
It also puts great weight on the idea of using happiness measurements to guide public policy – i think this is a very bad idea – even Seligman criticizes Ed Diener's work in this area as simplistic. Such measurements only measure pleasant feelings. They're highly reductionist and overly narrow.
I'm always interested to read about PP's latest findings, there's no need to dismiss it out of hand, but I do think the best stuff in there was invented by Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck (ie CBT) back in the 1950s, and it hasn't added anything earth-shattering. What it has done is taken CBT out of hospitals and into new areas like schools and the military, although Albert Ellis was also doing this back in the 1960s, via something called Rational Emotive Education.
All best
Jules
Like Mr Stevenson my initial positive reaction was significantly dampened by your mentioning religion. In theory religion has a positive contribution to make in discovering and teaching values, but in practice it seems to me (from the Western European experience) that religion inevitably ends up as a claim of moral superiority for believers over non-believers, and as justification for inflicting harm on non-believers. That for me is too high a price to pay for a system of values. Surely we can do better?
Hi Jan-Peter,
What you accuse religion of can be directed at ANY system of morality, theistic or atheistic.
Presumably you consider yourself a follower of reason and the Enlightenment – that means you presumably think of Europe, as superior to those cultures which still cling to religious superstitions, and which are governed as theocracies?
And it is not inconceivable that you would then use the barbarism and ignorance of other cultures as an excuse to invade them, in order to usher them into the realm of modernity and progress, much as, say, China has done in its invasion of Tibet?
Any system of morality can be used as an excuse for claims to superiority, including secular liberal morality.
Again, I am trying to take the argument between believers and non-believers beyond 'God exists / Oh no he doesn't', and beyond 'religions are evil / no worse than many atheistic ideologies'. That's a dead end.
Instead, I'm interested in the common ground, in what non-believers can find of use in various religious and spiritual traditions, and in the meeting points between philosophy, psychology and spirituality.
Many people would prefer that these traditions, or disciplines, remain ruthlessly separated, but I'm interested in their common ground.
All the best
Jules
Jules,
I don't share Jan-Peter's general anti-religious sentiment (I don't believe in God, but I generally think it's helpful to talk about religious teachings) but I do get a bit uncomfortable when we start associating citizenship with religious education and emotional literacy rather than politics. "Religions have much to tell us on the question of how to rebel," as you say, but the study of politics and history often tells us more.
I side with those liberals who argue that (i) an understanding of history is more liberating than a search for spirituality, because it shows us that no set of beliefs has a lasting claim to eternal truth; and that (ii) helping citizens understand their political rights and opportunities is more important than helping them understand themselves.
Of course, teaching these things is more likely to promote competition and debate than a search for the good life or even common ground – but hopefully this can also challenge the tyranny of dogmas of all types, which none of us like!
Hi Richard
Fair enough. Perhaps it is over-hasty to collapse all three different subjects into one – perhaps citizenship and religious education should be kept separate. But I'd hope at least for occasional joint lessons – what can Christianity tell non-believers about what is involved in the Good Life (eg altruism and philanthropy), what can Buddhism tell us (eg mindfulness techniques) and so on.
And you could also have occasional joint classes between citizenship and the Good Life: asking the question – is politics a part of the Good Life? Do we become more fulfilled through political engagement, as Aristotle argued, or should we drop out and seek the pleasant life, as Epicurus argued? Is it necessary to know how to govern yourself, how to control yourself, in order to engage successfully in politics? What makes a 'good' political ruler?
On your second point, I don't think it's either / or. I'm not arguing that we should suspend history classes, and I am arguing that we should teach the differences between different moral systems.
What I'm trying to move towards, perhaps unsuccessfully, is a very basic form of naturalistic ethics – the techniques of self-knowledge and self-control that fit with our natural psychology, and which can be taught – and then using that naturalistic foundation as a springboard to explore diverse models of the Good Life which share that naturalistic foundation.
So I'm trying to move beyond the complete relativism that historical anthropology can lead to. We all have very different beliefs. But the ability to rationally scrutinize our beliefs, and to replace our beliefs if we think they don't make sense – that is universal.
Fair enough, as you say! I think I probably am a complete relativist of the type you describe – but while I remain reasonably kind to children, animals, etc. I also recognize that it's not an approach to life or ethics a lot of people are comfortable with!!
And, relativist that I am, I'm not going to say my view is any more valid than mine
How can you say that and then advocate international human rights?
Good question! The answer is that, OK, I'm not a complete relativist – I'm actually very keen to promote the values I believe in. I just have to accept that they are contingent, that my belief in them is historically-conditioned, etc.
I'm also digesting a really remarkable new book by Samuel Moyn of Columbia, called "The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History", which argues that "human rights" (as we understand them) are basically a product of converging political factors in the late Cold War period…
That may sound odd, and I am only half way through the book – I'll blog about it when I've finished it. More after that!
Here's a good discussion of the 'new communitarianism' of both Left and Right:
http://www.nextleft.org/2009/07/new-ideological-m…
A very thought-provoking and educational blog, if not genius.
2 things strike me
1) how do we know that self-control, say, is the way to wellbeing
and
2) this article sort of confirms what i think i have been feeling subconsciously: that negative liberty could well be a political conspiracy to justify the status quo, whilst not actually empowering people through making them feel completely 'well', ergo, entitled.
As you imply (i hope) happiness, perhaps in the sense of the feeling that PP is talking about, is a superficial (and often fleeting) emotion, whereas, wellbeing has more constancy, does it not?
Negative liberty provides perfect conditions for governments to 'divide and rule'. It also removes the need to justify the means of the economy. (And also, is a gift to commercial companies who can manipulate the public to buy much more easily, in such an environment of moral ambiguity).
So yes, i see your point, which is (i think) that it is perhaps dangerous for PP to present itself as being morally neutral when in fact it is morally biased. The fact that they are supported by the government could almost lead one to say that it is a form of brain-washing.
Hi there,
Yes, the ethical assumption of CBT is Socratic – it's the idea that teaching people self-knowledge and self-control makes them both more virtuous and happier, although CBT drops the virtue language.
This is an ethical assumption, but I think it's a right one. Being uncontrolled, in the context of mental illness, means being controlled by your compulsive thoughts and behaviour, being unable to rationally choose how you want to think and behave.
Yes, you could say PP is a form of brain washing, but you could say ANY education is a form of brain washing. My point is they should be honest that what they are teaching about the Good Life rests on some ethical assumptions, which they should declare and allow their students to debate, rather than presenting their conclusions as 'proven'.
For example, Matthew Taylor of the RSA tells us 'the evidence is clear: if you want to be happier, don't read a self-help book, spend more time with happy people'.
This is a great example of a PP study presenting as science what in fact is a set of philosophical assumptions. What does he mean by 'happy'? Is happiness one thing, or several things? Should my happiness be the goal of my life? If so, should I not hang around with unhappy people?
PP tries to go beyond utilitarianism, but when it does, it gets even more stuck in a philosophical bog. Is meaningful happiness 'better' than hedonic happiness? How can you possibly measure 'meaningful happiness'? Meaningful according to who?
i meant to say: 'this article sort of confirms what i think i have been feeling subconsciously: a sort of national emptiness. Also, that negative liberty could well be a political conspiracy ..'
- short-term memory difficulties …
This is a speech by Liam Byrne, the Labour MP, on the idea of teaching 'character strengths' to inner city kids, to help them negotiate a way through modern life:
http://www.communitariannetwork.org/Communitarian…
The idea of teaching 'character' is an interesting link between liberals like Richard Reeves at Demos and communitarians like Byrne.
Hi, I am from Australia.
Please find a set of references which are very much about the necessary politics and culture of the future – and the politics of Right Life altogether.
An introduction via:
http://www.dabase.org/p2anthro.htm
An extensive elaboration via:
http://www.beezone.com/news.html
http://www.dabase.org/coopdoub.htm
On Right Life and religion too:
http://www.adidam.org/teaching/aletheon/truth-lif…
http://www.beezone.com/up/criticismcuresheart.htm…