‘Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.’
- Joseph Campbell
‘Those who were dancing were thought mad by those who could not hear the music.’
- attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche
My Dad and I would often take a trip down to the south of Fife on a Sunday. Dad was particularly fond of an old hotel in the town of Crail, that serves excellent meals. On the way back, we would stop off at the beach near the small town of Kingsbarns. Dad was too frail to go on the beach, but he would sit in a little shelter that is there, looking over the view of the bay, whilst I stretched my legs for a walk. The open rafters of the shelter hosted several swifts’ nests.
On one particular visit, baby swifts were just emerging from their nests and getting ready for flight. The parent birds were swooping in and out of the shelter with food for the young fledglings. The swift catches its prey on the wing and spends most of its life airborne. These fledglings, once they took to the wing, would set off soon for Africa, spend our winter there and then head back north, possibly to this same little shelter on the coast of Fife. After my walk along the beach, I sat down beside Dad in the shelter to watch the parent swifts’ busy food deliveries and their fledglings precariously perched outside the nests, giving their wings some experimental flaps.
Both father and son have a certain anxiety about life sometimes, although they express it in different ways. These rare moments of calm — looking out over the bay of Kingsbarns, and watching the swifts come and go — are medicine for us both. I think it is my happiest memory of Dad.
The last of four chapters exploring the themes of nature, place, compassion and pleasure. Gandhi’s social sin of Pleasure without Conscience is relevant to this chapter.
Joy, Pleasure and Happiness
I had thought to try to distinguish the meanings of joy, happiness, pleasure and similar words, as an introduction to this chapter. I have to say, it is a challenge. Their meanings shade into each other and there can be contradictory statements about what is really pleasure, or is ‘just fun’ or something more profound, or less profound… Pleasure is more in the moment, whilst happiness is a state with longer duration. Happiness has been described as pleasure and purpose extended over time. Joy, meanwhile, is a word used to describe both the emotion behind pleasure, but also taken to mean a more spiritual and resilient form of happiness — not dependent on circumstances. I’ve decided to stay with just the word pleasure, for the most part, in this chapter.
As I’ve suggested elsewhere in the book, society is built on pleasure; society is the social construction of pleasure. ‘It is in his pleasure that man really lives’, said Agnes Repplier, an American essayist. ‘It is from leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self’. (As quoted by Carl Honore, In Praise of Slow.) So it is a mistake to think of pleasure as something added on to society, once we have taken care of the essential things in life. Rather, we are always looking to find pleasure, even in the most basic things in our life, like health, food, clothing and shelter. We are genuinely an economy of pleasure. This is often denied outright, or at least balanced by more ‘worthwhile’ goals. But I think this denial or awkwardness around pleasure is to make out that pleasure is simply selfishness by another name.
Another attitude to pleasure that has become prevalent is to regard pleasure as a commodity that we must strive to obtain. If we find ourselves unhappy then we are liable to blame ourselves for failing. Instead, we might see pleasure as a gift and it is at its best when it is a shared gift. In the last chapter, we saw that compassion for self takes in a broad view of what our lives are about. Compassion is not just about the smaller things of the present, but also about our aims, values, and meaning. It is self-interest, but not selfishness. This is similar to the view of pleasure that I am trying to get across in this chapter. So we should not strive for pleasure as if it were a product we hope somehow to afford. But we can be open to the gift of pleasure, whenever and however that might arrive. All the while we can be conscious that it is through pleasure, mainly, that the story of our lives is told. Compassion, or lack of compassion is the way that the stories of societies and nations are told. The two are very closely linked. Our individual pleasure relies on the compassion of community. (It is the rules of a community that keeps things peaceful and ordered and this is what affords us individual freedom.) The compassion of a community relies, up to a point, on people finding individual pleasure. A community of unhappy people may struggle to be compassionate. The long-term flourishing of individuals relies on the long-term viability of community. So it is in our long-term interest to look to the interests of society, community and nation. Good community enables individuals to flourish, to realise our full potential of pleasure, passion, vocation, satisfying work. The split between an individual and community is a false split.
Grades of Pleasure?
In my own blurb about utopia (Chapter 1) I identified some pleasures that are specific to me. Inevitably, I’m going to think that these are somehow ‘better’ than what other people may enjoy — that my pleasures are somehow ‘higher’ whilst other stuff is just superficial. Well, the reader will see the problem; along with my own pleasures, I have to agree that rugby, white-water rafting and darts are equally meaningful and profound — and, for those people who enjoy such things — it will equally feed their souls. Isn’t it a bit elitist to say that one type of pleasure is superficial and we should really be aspiring instead to something higher? How can one type of pleasure be better or worse than any other? It’s a question already raised by a school of philosophy known as Utilitarianism. The philosopher who is usually accredited with devising the idea was Jeremy Bentham. Bentham considered all pleasures to be of equal worth, therefore, it is possible to calculate what is the best outcome in any situation, because it is simply the one that provides the greatest good for the greatest number of people. (In fact it is to Francis Hutcheson we can attribute the phrase ‘that action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.) So for Jeremy Bentham, all ‘goods’ are equivalent. John Stuart Mill, his nephew — contrary to Bentham — tried to grade pleasure.
This is where we really get down to brass tacks, because if, as I’ve suggested, pleasure is so essential to society, then challenging people about their pleasures really hits home. One of the worst insults we can throw at people is to say that they don’t really know how to enjoy themselves. So, if at all possible, we must avoid being elitist about pleasure, but still recognise there are pleasures and there are pleasures. There is a balance to be struck, somehow, between judging pleasures in others or just accepting anything anyone wants to do as legitimate.
I’m not pretending to offer an easy answer to this. But, going back to what was said above about compassion for self, there may be a different way of looking at the question. Perhaps the problem with Utilitarianism, and with grading pleasures generally, is that it is not reasonable to compare one person’s pleasure to another’s, as if there was some agreed rating system. Pleasure is unique to each individual life, and need not be compared. And the individual’s pleasure relates very much to those wider questions of meaning, purpose, human flourishing and vocational work — how an individual might view their life in broad terms. Again though, we need to be careful. Alex Lowen (Pleasure) told us: ‘A preoccupation with goals and achievement characterises people who are afraid of pleasure.’ We might say that the heart knows what might ultimately lead to our deeper pleasure. But the mind is a bit more suspect. It can be swayed by wishing to create an impression to other folk, or to seek status, by finding pleasure in things that don’t ultimately satisfy. It is also worth stressing here the importance of our connections with people. The story at the head of this chapter looks to show that even a very brief moment of connection can be worth a great deal. Such connections seem to go beyond any concept of trying to grade pleasures.
Perhaps then, the first thing to start with is simply to acknowledge our own pleasures.
Abundance — what do the Utopias make of Pleasure?
What we mean by abundance is another aspect of what we consider pleasure to be. Privatopia’s abundance is a material abundance. It is this that is the aim of progress, career and money — to build a safe world for ourselves — safe from the surrounding society that may be seen as indifferent, or even hostile. Material abundance is something that builds up our status, makes us feel that we are in control and are a success in the world. Materialism substitutes for other pleasures. This seems to be a choice that people make for themselves. But consumer capitalism presents satisfaction via materialism to us relentlessly, so it has become ingrained as the normal way of life. Our science too, being premised on a universe that is exclusively material — sends out the subliminal message that we are only ‘made real’ through material things. We often try — lured by the story of Privatopia — to make ourselves unique and different by the things we own, the clothes we wear, the houses and the holidays. But these ‘differences’ actually make us more like other people, not less. We are made to feel secure by our stuff, but it is a fragile kind of security. Poor health or bad luck could snatch those things from us in an instant. But also, it is an abundance that has to be won by the exploitation of the commons. Other people and nature suffer as a result of this kind of abundance. Going back to Gandhi then, it is material abundance — mainly — that is the pleasure without conscience. By contrast, when abundance is not seen in terms of materialism, it becomes an abundance of good relationships, satisfying work, and finding home in places and with people that really inspire us. It is also the sharing of ourselves, our gifts, our homes, our culture, that is the alternative form of abundance and the alternative pleasures. As Chapter 7 explored, abundance is often as a result of the gifts between economies. The material economy, by contrast, is usually premised on a fight against scarcity.
The Ecotopians can often seem a bit down on pleasure. There is so much wrong with the world, it is easy to portray the Western consumer capitalist lifestyle as greedy, selfish and irresponsible. Somehow, it is the individual consumer to whom most blame is attributed — perhaps we are just easy targets, or the profligate lifestyle is more obvious when we see people flaunting their wealth right in front of us. Arguably, yes, if all consumers decided just not to buy a particular thing, then the companies who produced that product would either fold or change their ways, and we would have moved towards a solution. But there is more going on, and I think we need to see that disapproving of pleasure — even of the most material kind — is not really helping. Likewise, calling people greedy, profligate and irresponsible is not helping the cause of working towards a sustainable future. Yes, there are greedy and thoughtless people, but for the most part, people are looking to care for each other, to raise families and look out for their friends. Someone has said that we need to heal our relationship with things. That’s not necessarily about getting rid of things — although it might partly involve this — but more critically, it’s about our attitude to things. Likewise, authors who write about simplicity are not always talking about selling everything and living in poverty. Some who we could include under the Ecotopian flavour of utopia have recognised this relationship to things as critical. It is a feature of being embedded in nature and in place, which I have tried to stress in this book. This is a discussion that we will return to in later chapters.
The abundance and pleasure of our current age continues into the future utopia that is named Cornucopia. To an extent, the abundance of Cornucopia is an extension of the current culture, that is, material pleasures in an increasingly private and atomised world. But, of course, the future is open, and we might, with some justification, see Cornucopia taking a different tack. We could for instance, think of an abundance of nature (as discussed in the sections on re-wilding in Chapter 8). Desire may be infinite, but that does not mean we should try to satisfy it through an infinity of stuff. There is no reason why the abundance of humanity and the abundance of the rest of the Earth need be at odds. We are all one eco-system — humans do not sit outside of nature. So, we could view our future pleasure as about a far greater abundance of nature brought about by changes that are positive rather than by abstinence and sacrifice.
Different Pleasures
One simple message I’m trying to get across in this book is that we are already gloriously unique and strange. It is about being radically other. I hope too that the broader perspective I’ve mentioned elsewhere will in turn help us to appreciate that it’s other people’s uniqueness that makes them interesting. We are all wild of mind, body and soul. This is not a matter of race, religion or gender, which are really just superficial differences. I’m talking here about differences in character. Think of one’s friends and how strange and funny each one really is. Isn’t that why we value them? Sharing ourselves with others takes us to different kinds of pleasures. It takes us to more sharing, caring, conversation, community, celebration, carnival.
When I say ‘different pleasures’ though, I’m not suggesting that there’s a whole set of pleasures that people haven’t thought of wanting for themselves before, and that now they might try. No, the suggestion is that a lot of us already want a different lifestyle, but concerns about the need to support others, or our financial security or just about appearing strange constrain us from realising those pleasures. I’m talking about that job or business idea that might really satisfy, about more time with friends and family, more time for making music, dancing, crafts, sport, time spent in nature. I’m talking too about our relationship to things — to possessions. So different pleasures in a sense, but not alien pleasures. Different pleasures are our heart’s desires.
We are often presented with the idea that ‘consumerism’ means we love things too much — but I don’t think this is quite right. The problem with consumerism is that it is often cheap junk that we neither need nor genuinely want. As we’ve touched on above, a problem with Western culture is not that we love things too much, but that we don’t love them enough. We don’t care enough to seek out the things that are beautifully made, durable and built with integrity. We don’t honour enough the hand-made things and especially those things that we make for ourselves. Society even tries to dissuade us from building our own homes. David Fleming told us: ‘Goods in our culture are losing, to some extent, their implicit functions — the symbolism, the social function which ought to travel with them. They are becoming, in a sense, invisible. Here are some examples: food, in addition to its overt function of providing nutrition, also has, or had, an implicit function of reciprocal giving and in the daily interaction around a table, without which the durability of the household in any structural sense is improbable. The implicit function of clothes as symbols of social belonging, courtesy and standing has waned. Sport has lost much of its implicit crucial function of ceremony and play, and is left with the overt futile business of winning. Perhaps sex has lost a bit of its implicit function of cementing relationships and has become a reduced proposition.
‘Paradoxically, we consume in great quantities but aren’t entirely comfortable with actually taking enjoyment in that consumption. Often there is some guilt in there — a tendency to explain fulfilled desires always as needs for which we had little reasonable alternative. There is a hesitation to celebrate goods as material artefacts in their own right. The effect of this disenchantment, this denial of the spirit and deeper significance in the currency of goods, services and behaviour, is to make it harder to recall anything about them at all. The object was eaten, worn, contested or had, but the implicit function — which is the only bit that engages the mind, emotions and spirit — probably did not happen at all. And if it did, you must have blinked at the wrong moment. Goods are finally becoming instrumentalised, invisible except for their instrumental purpose.’
(David Fleming — Surviving the Future.)
Pleasure and Nature
In the chapter on the commons, especially in Figure 3.3, I made a point of identifying our own bodies and minds as part of wild nature. Pleasure, in turn, is in the body. In this book (following Alexander Lowen’s, Pleasure) I suggest there are no purely cerebral pleasures. All emotions and their affect as pleasure are aspects of the body. The body knows what’s really going on, better than the mind. The body knows how to heal itself, if needed, and how to heal the mind — if given the time and space. But minds tend not to listen.
Conflicted as we are about our bodies in Western societies, I think this, in turn, leads to a conflict over pleasure. Perhaps we are a bit concerned about being considered ‘superficial’ if we were to only speak about a motivation towards physical pleasure. Perhaps we substitute possessions as a less direct form of pleasure because of this conflict. If we were more at ease with our bodies, maybe we would not see physical pleasure as somehow decadent or superficial, but as essential to life.
As we saw in Chapter 8, on nature, a new story would be about protecting and enhancing natural environments, so far as this is possible. The reasons for this are several, but one of the most important is for the pleasure that nature brings us. Our connection with nature is a deep source of joy. I can recommend such books as David Abram’s, The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal and Mary Reynolds Thompson’s, Reclaiming the Wild Soul as guides to this subject. It’s the beauty that we find in nature that feeds the soul.
Care of nature stretches between all scales, from the local to the global. At the neighbourhood level, we see so many spaces covered in paving and even fake grass. I would rather see a garden full of weeds than concrete paviours. With a little effort — and hopefully, the co-operation of neighbours — gardens can offer a haven for wildlife. Those little ponds, streams and trees that are so easily swept away by building projects, are deserving of our protection and also inviting our enjoyment.
At the slightly larger scale, parks, woodlands, hedgerows, lakes, rivers and beaches need our careful protection, and offer us great joy. With such features on our doorsteps, there is little need to always be jetting off somewhere else. Let’s enjoy what we have locally, and actively preserve such places as best we can.
At the national level, many countries legislate to protect areas of wild nature. These are a great source of pleasure for us humans. The wilder the wild place is allowed to be, the more the pleasure.
On the global scale, the oceans, rainforests, mountain ranges, savannahs, coral reefs and island chains take us back to who we are. They remind us of our fragility and the precariousness of human life. Without such places, we are doomed to a life of unremitting blandness. The big places of the world invite us to a life of adventure.
But we need to think about how such places steal all the headlines, whilst the smaller and less spectacular corners of nature are often neglected. It is often a mystery to me why small pockets of nature, easily reached by people living nearby, remain empty of human visitors. It is good for me, and for the few others who do choose to visit, but sad to think that so many people are presumably just preferring to go the shops or to travel away to some place more ‘exciting’, than make the most of what is on our own doorsteps. Truly most of us do not love nature enough.
Pleasure and Place
In Chapter 9, on Place, we considered how participation in local governance could bring about a transformation in our physical surroundings. Many of the ideas of Parapolity and Parecon are driving towards this aspect of local decision-making. Seeing local changes, and being able to influence them, is the thing that is going to get people to engage. It starts from the bottom up, so it is very much about seeing an improvement in our immediate surroundings. This is the direct consequence of a more engaged style of politics. It might sound, at best, like a necessary evil, to deal with these administrative tasks. But we could turn this around and say instead that our communities are dedicated to giving joy and pleasure to their citizens.
There is an awful phrase that says: Good fences make good neighbours. It seems to be saying that if everyone just looked after their own (perhaps their own personal business, as well as their own property) then life would be better. It could almost be the mission statement of Privatopia. Why not instead go for the mantra: No fences make better neighbours.
Enhancing the spaces we live in is partly about changing the very rigid and often stultifying spaces that we create around our buildings. The little patch of garden, surrounded by a wall or fence is something of a sad sight. Sometimes, certainly, a garden can be a beautiful space and an oasis from what might, after all, be less than brilliant surroundings. But what if, instead, all those little private gardens were opened up and neighbours shared those spaces in interesting and exciting ways? Think of the parties, the barbecues, the lantern lights, the fireworks — all shared, along with conversations, joys, sorrows, birthdays, weddings, music, speeches, flowers, vegetables, fruit. I cannot help but feel that the grumpy neighbour, who complains about boundaries and fence lines, could be overwhelmed by the simple generosity and kindness of neighbours. The places and spaces we create are the backdrop to shared pleasures.
We can easily extend that concept from gardens and neighbours to bigger spaces like the streets and squares of our towns and cities. Here the parties are on a bigger scale. My own adopted home town of Edinburgh is transformed in August by the largest arts festival in the world, plus all the associated hullabaloo. Recently, once a month, many of the streets of the city are closed to traffic, and festival-style events take over for a few hours. Many cities around the world are doing the same and finding the great benefits that can be derived from streets given back to people instead of being clogged by cars. Those cities that have experimented with car-free days are leading the way towards a pleasure that is almost forgotten — streets that are for people.
Chapter 9, on Place, has already spoken about how the dominance of the car has blighted towns and cities. Roads are not spaces to which we easily relate. The bigger and faster the road, the worse it gets. Ridding society of the tyranny of the private car would certainly change the feel of our cities, towns and countryside. I realise, as we’ve touched on earlier, this would be anathema for some folk. The car is where competing notions of pleasure really come to a head. Perhaps somehow, with some re-thinking, we could look to accommodate our vehicles without spoiling our public spaces.
Pleasure and Compassion
From this chapter and the last, I hope it is clear that there is a very strong link between pleasure and compassion. There is pleasure in simple acceptance. Compassion is as much about sharing pleasure as it is about caring for those in need. Privatopia pushes us towards individualistic pleasure. More genuine pleasures though, tend to be shared experiences. Pleasure is a social construct. How different our relationships would be if the emphasis were on pleasure — if we could seek to be ‘empleasured’ rather than empowered. Compassion is the great leveller in society. When illness or bad times afflict those around us then power relations are dropped in favour of caring. Humour too is a sharing that I would include in compassion. We are all equal when we are laughing.
In the wider, and more formal, relations of compassion, there is pleasure (perhaps even the deepest of pleasures) in seeing other people happy. What, after all, are freedom, justice and equality, except means by which we try to bestow happiness on others? So part of the new story is to go where the love is in your life — to step towards your passion and your enthusiasm. Aristotle saw pleasure and goodness to be intimately linked. ‘The highest good is happiness’, he said,’ and that consists of the actualisation and perfect practice of goodness.’ So here is another way to look at that issue of grading pleasures that we touched on earlier. If happiness is pleasure and purpose extended over time, our beliefs, our compassion for others and care for the world are providing us with the ‘purpose’ side of the equation. A wider view of pleasure takes in what might be for our long-term good and to include what our culture would regard as worthwhile moral purposes. Thus, culture provides a ‘grading’ of pleasure beyond the individual. Higher purpose — beyond individual purpose — provides a measure, derived from compassion — that utilitarian views of pleasure and our economics don’t readily acknowledge. Giving some or all of our lives over to higher purposes may mean we enjoy less individual pleasure and happiness than we might otherwise, but nonetheless feel our lives are more worthwhile. Purpose is a social and cultural thing, beyond individual pleasure. What was said earlier about the pleasure of connection between people is closely related to this thought.
Pleasure and Work
A total commitment to what we are doing is the basis for pleasure — more focused, not less. Alexander Lowen explains:
‘The search for fun in adults undermines their capacity for pleasure. Pleasure demands a serious attitude towards life, a commitment to one’s existence and work… If a person has pleasure in his daily life, he will have no desire to escape.’
Alexander Lowen — Pleasure
So we can recognise pleasure as including such things as having a vocation rather than a career, seeking knowledge for its own sake, and serving others in business and in our communities, rather than trying to profit by them. All of this is just a matter of changing our descriptions of the way our lives and cultures are organised — changing our stories about the meaning of work.
‘The worker must be an artist, and the artist a worker’, said R. Page Arnot, but work, it has to be said, is not such a vocation for everyone. It can seem like a slap in the face to tell people they must have a vocation and not just a job, or that everyone is an artist, in their own way. Can we reclaim work from the drudgery that it is for so many people? Or, returning to the problem of grading pleasures discussed above, perhaps we should just acknowledge that some people may be happier with a straight-forward job and will seek their pleasures in their spare time. Talk of having a vocation then can be a bit elitist.
The dream of a future that involves total leisure has been there for many years. Mechanisation never quite delivered. There always seemed to be new things — new wants and needs — that meant that as jobs were lost through mechanisation, more were created to take their place. But now, with AI and robots developing at exponential speed, it really looks like the future of ‘leisure’ could be a reality. A future that is increasingly computerised might make it more likely that a lot of menial jobs will be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots. This could be a severe problem, if people are not trained and ready to take up alternative models of employment. But if we are ready, then those new jobs are likely to be a lot more creative and interesting. They have to be, as they will be about all the things that AI cannot do. The drive towards increasing computerisation is not something that people are really choosing. AI and robots are, after all, products of Privatopia and Cornucopia. With a system of Parapolity and Parecon in place, we might make different choices — pushing towards more employment rather than less. The idea that we will ever be completely free of work may be just a fantasy. But we might choose to go with the technology and accept where it leads — including the reduction of drudgery — but with other impacts into the bargain. Also it is helpful to think of pleasure being transformed into passion. If we have passion for the things we do then it starts to become irrelevant whether we call this work, labour or leisure.
What might we do with our leisure, if we choose to go there? That leads right back into the questions of abundance and pleasure we discussed above, except not for the lucky few in richer nations, but for everyone.
If Universal Basic Income is introduced, this is a further factor that will allow for fewer to need to work or to be able to work just part-time. Many of us will find ‘work’ of a different kind in our lives — even if that work is not strictly necessary for gaining us a wage or something that is essential to society, that is, not ‘labour’. I am thinking here of the work that people put into gaining a new skill, music, writing, art, cooking and much more. There is an overlap between what is ‘necessary’ wo