The Price of Civilization

"We have talked about how there has been a revival of ancient philosophy in modern psychology. One of the things that really fascinates me is how that is feeding into public policy and politics. Ancient philosophy offered a form of self-help, but it wasn’t just for individuals, it was also communal and political. Some ancient philosophers thought about what governments can do to help their citizens find fulfilment. You find that idea in Aristotle. His Nicomachean Ethics are all about how individuals can seek fulfilment, and it feeds directly into his Politics , which asks what the best form of society is to help people achieve that fulfilment. The idea that governments have a role in helping us find happiness was very unfashionable for several decades, because it was seen as a recipe for tyranny. Just think about how the communist governments in Russia or China insisted that they knew best how to help their people find fulfilment and positive liberty, and the sort of tyranny that led to. Liberal philosophers like Sir Karl Popper, Sir Isaiah Berlin and John Stuart Mill insisted that we should be free to pursue our own version of the good life in our own way. Everyone has a different idea of happiness so the government should just stay out of it, they thought. But in the last few years, governments – encouraged by the psychology and philosophy of wellbeing – have decided that they should get back into the business of trying to help their citizens become happier. Exactly. But how can a government know if they are actually enhancing the wellbeing of their citizens? One answer governments have tried to come up with is to start measuring our national wellbeing – as the British government started to do in 2011. I agree, and this is partly what Jeffery Sachs’s book is about. He says that we need to look back to the wisdom of philosophers of the past to re-find our collective moral compass – particularly to thinkers like the Buddha and Aristotle. He thinks that national wellbeing measurements are a way for governments to re-find their moral purpose. So rather than just pursuing GDP we can try and enhance wellbeing. Other economists have argued the same thing, but it is interesting that Sachs should come out and say this because he was a key philosopher in neo-liberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, which was very free market and focused on the bottom line of GDP. So it is a real sign of the times that such an influential economist should have said we need to go back to Aristotle and start measuring national wellbeing. It is a very much a phenomena in British politics as well. The coalition government is full of Aristotelians. Oliver Letwin, David Willetts and I think David Cameron himself are all Aristotelians. On the one hand, it’s quite exciting that suddenly these philosophical ideas of the good life should be at the heart of public policy. But it’s also quite weird that we now have the Office of National Statistics going around trying to measure our eudaimonia , which is the word the Greeks used for fulfilment or meaningful happiness. The problem as I see it is that there are different ways to define happiness and wellbeing. The Office of National Statistics has said: “We know there is more than one way to define it, so we will measure both the utilitarian definition of wellbeing, by asking people how happy they are, and also the Aristotelian definition, by asking people how worthwhile they feel their life is.” But of course there are many more than just two ways to define wellbeing. I think people should be empowered to explore the different definitions of wellbeing, rather than forced down one path. We have to be careful to find the right balance between the [ancient] Greeks’ idea of the good life and our liberal right to choose our own path."