The Good Life

Our religious and philosophical traditions, both Eastern and Western, have a lot to say about the good life. Not one of them suggests that to live it we need 200-horsepower cars, big-box discount stores, 20-room mansions on three-acre lots, Olympic-quality swimming pools on our land, and closets and basements and recreation rooms and back yards and attics and garages full of stuff.

For much Eastern tradition, the good life is about enlightenment—about freeing oneself, by powerful spiritual discipline, from the suffering that is the common lot of humanity. This does not necessarily mean a retreat into individual meditation. Eastern spirituality has produced great leaders like Gandhi and the Dahlai Lama whose concern for social justice and human dignity is (or was) clear in everything they did. But there is nothing in Eastern tradition that identifies justice or dignity—and hence the good life—with the accumulation of stuff or driving 100 mph on the open road. The prevailing ideology of economic growth is foreign to Eastern tradition.

In the West, where the prevailing ideology got its start, religion and philosophy are united in speaking against it. The Old Testament prophets emphasized justice and mercy to the poor, and they pointed out that riches could be a barrier, not a bridge, to the good life. Christianity's founder took a similar position, even teaching that riches not only could be but were a barrier to the Kingdom of Heaven. Islam to this day emphasizes concern for the poor, social justice, and spiritual discipline over accumulation of stuff.

Western ethical thinkers sought the good life in qualities as diverse as moderation, self-realization, obedience to conscience, and social justice—among others. Western philosophy even on occasion (as in the teachings of the Stoics) taught a discipline of self-denial that rivaled that of Christian and Buddhist monks. A determined reader might find some support for our prevailing ideology of growth in Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism, but this would be wrong. Bentham was concerned chiefly, though somewhat eccentrically and wrongheadedly, with social justice and reform. Nowhere in Western philosophy do you find support for the notion that virtue and happiness are identical with more and more stuff and faster and faster cars. Philosophers, East and West, seem as certain on this point as their religious counterparts.

How, then, did we come to identify the good life with constant economic growth? The answer is deceptively simple: the ideology of economic growth, with its accompanying economic structure, produced prosperity as no previous ideology or structure had. What it could not do was to control its own excesses. For that, we need to turn to our older and wiser traditions. They do not necessarily tell us to give up all the good things we have, but they point out that happiness does not reside in things alone. Enough food and shelter are preconditions for happiness and the good life—hence the emphasis in our traditions on mitigating or eliminating involuntary poverty. But we attain the good life by living well—by loving our neighbors and our families, being good citizens, and doing our work to the best of our ability—not by getting and spending alone.

In a future where growth will be limited by finite supplies of natural resources, the increased cost for extracting and processing them, and the need to cut greenhouse gases, that is good news. The economy cannot grow forever, but this is not the end of the world or of civilization. It is a new challenge. Our religious and philosophical traditions, if we understand them rightly, can help us to meet it.