It is also not surprising that ancient ethics, with one marginal exception, never develops anything like the related consequentialist idea of a maximizing model of rationality. If my ethical aim is to produce a good, or the best, state of affairs, then it is only rational to produce as much as possible of it. But ancient ethics does not aim at the production of good states of affairs, and so is not tempted to think that rationality should take the form of maximizing them. Rather, what I aim at is my living in a certain way, my making the best use of goods, and acting in some ways rather than others. None of these things can sensibly be maximized by the agent. Why would I want to maximize my acting courageously, for example? I aim at acting courageously when it is required. I have no need, normally, to produce as many dangerous situations as possible, in order to act bravely in them.

Why is this passage particularly striking in New York? Because as I discussed before, New York life is all about maximizing. You go to New York because you want the best of everything – for indeed, in New York you get the best of everything, at least if you can afford it. I like to talk about the great Thai food at a couple of restaurants back home in Boston, being as good as it is in Thailand, but these were blown away by a truly stunning Northeastern Thai restaurant that recently opened up in the East Village neighbourhood – the sauce on their laap was pure perfection. The Boston places are very good, but they can’t keep up. Nor is the Boston subway nearly as fast or as extensive; nor does a brand-new store selling cheap, quality, high-tech Japanese clothing open up all around the city. Nor are there browseable bookstores four storeys tall – one of which was the place where I purchased Annas’s book. And these are just examples I experienced on a four-day trip, with relatively limited funds – no attempt to, say, see Jon Stewart live.

But as I noted before, all this is just the problem. You go to New York because you want to have the best of everything – and that means you will always be wanting more. I remember, on one of my first trips to New York years ago, speaking to the New Yorker closest to me, who was already making an income likely higher than anything I’ll ever make – but spoke of his frustration that this was less than his MBA classmates. You don’t go to the place that has the best of everything if you’re the kind of person who is likely to be satisfied with the life you have. In the terms of Herbert Simon and Barry Schwartz, New Yorkers are maximizers rather than satisficers. And this, in turn, is probably why the people in this wonderland are the unhappiest in the United States.

Which brings me back to Julia Annas’s quote. Like Simon and Schwartz, she uses the language of “maximizing” – in her case, to describe what it is that “ancient philosophy” does not advocate. You can maximize your variety of food choices, but you can’t maximize courage. John Rawls popularized the highly unfortunate term perfectionism to describe virtue-focused ethical theories; it is an awful term, since virtue theories are in this respect the opposite of perfectionism in the usual sense of that word. Perfectionists, as we normally understand the term, are the consummate maximizers, never satisfied because they strive to make everything perfect, including themselves. But Annas is pointing out that the ancient Greeks and Romans from Aristotle onwards are very different from this: their philosophy cannot be put in terms of maximizing, not even the maximizing of virtue. Rather, try to live a flourishing life – a life with which you can be satisfied.

I think it’s important to stress and illustrate Annas’s point because it helps illustrate an alternative to consequentialism, the widespread view according to which the best actions can be defined in terms of bringing about the best total consequences. Consequentialism is the philosophy of maximizing, the worldview that built New York. (Philosophical utilitarianism, the most common variant of consequentialism, is a direct ancestor of modern economics.) The “ancient” view offers us something quite different, in a way that Rawls’s “perfectionism” concept obscures.

It’s important to have this alternative because consequentialism is so filled with problems. I think Schwartz and Simon point us to a paradox at the heart of consequentialism – at least of hedonistic forms of consequentialism, which is most of them. I’ve attempted to note this before: trying to maximize our own happiness is like trying to get to sleep; thinking about it gets in the way. But the same is true about maximizing others’ happiness. Happiness is there in the moment. At some point, you have to be happy with what you have now, and even with what others have now. Eventually, you are going to die; and if you keep trying to maximize, you are going to die unsatisfied. This was the point behind my rejection of utilitarianism: there’s a fundamental problem behind a life devoted to making others happy as possible, when doing so makes you unhappy yourself. If everybody lived the way you did, they would all fail at their goal.

It is true, as commenter Ethan C-F pointed out before, that we can realize a good for others that will come about after we’re gone, even if it too will eventually perish in the cosmos. But it seems to me that if we’re going to strive to benefit others, we need to see a good in the striving itself, in the doing of good works for others, and not in their consequences – successful or not. It is that attitude that allows us to be happy satisficers rather than miserable maximizers. I think that this point is what underlies the enduring popularity of the Bhagavad Gītā, the reason the pacifist Gandhi drew his inspiration from a text that advocates war: if you tie your happiness to the consequences of your actions, you will not be happy, and neither will anyone else who does so. I suspect that Jack Layton had figured out this lesson, which is why he was as inspiring as he was.

The Gītā’s worldview, to be sure, is quite different from Aristotle’s – all about adherence to an externally defined duty rather than the cultivation of flourishing. But they share the rejection of consequentialist maximizing; they are willing to let virtue be its own reward.

The example intrigues me because I’m the exact opposite. I’m in love with spicy international foods of all kinds, one of the most delightful and satisfying pleasures in my life (and one of the biggest reasons why I love being in New York). And music brings me a deep satisfaction – my worst days have often been brightened, even amid the traffic snarls of the Southeast Expressway, by hearing a beloved song. Children’s literature, on the other hand, does little for me – and so, I have to admit, do novels more generally. I have enjoyed a good number of novels in my day, but I don’t go out of my way for them.

The point is one I’ve had to think about whenever I read Martha Nussbaum’s work on philosophical form (in what probably remains her best known work, the first chapter of Love’s Knowledge.) Nussbaum’s argument, broadly speaking, is that literary form and style make implicit claims about what is important, in ways that can undercut themselves if we’re not careful. So Spinoza’s abstract, dispassionate universalistic rationalism, for example, is very well expressed in the geometric theorems of his Ethics. But the kind of philosophy that Nussbaum herself advocates – prioritizing particular human individuals, valuing strong emotions – is best expressed in literary forms that tell the stories of particular individuals and evoke emotions, and above all in novels. This claim made it more difficult for me to get deep into Nussbaum’s thought.

I’ve tried to engage with Nussbaum’s philosophy at some length, as in my dissertation. While reading up on her ideas I tried to read a novel she takes as exemplary, one she quotes and analyzes at length: Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. I clearly did not experience this novel the way Nussbaum did; the first phrase that came to my mind to describe the experience of reading it was “Chinese water torture.” James’s plodding Germanic sentences, combined with the novel’s slow pacing and relative lack of major events, made it an ordeal. A minor ordeal, to be sure – nothing like breaking a bone or losing a job – but not even remotely a pleasurable experience. Even philosophically, I got more out of Nussbaum’s commentary on James than I did out of James himself.

I’ve been thinking about related points in the past couple of weeks, during which I have been obsessed by the recent Canadian election and the resulting transformations in the country’s political landscape. I have several times expressed my suspicion of politics and how political concern can mess up a human life. And yet I love following politics – not even the ideas so much as the “horse race.” Since my teens I have been a “political junkie,” fascinated by seat counts and electoral systems. Am I then unhealthy?

The point here isn’t to go on about my personal likes and dislikes. Rather, it’s to raise a related question about the “Be Gretchen” idea itself. Suppose Nussbaum is right that one learns best about true philosophy from novels, but Rubin is also right that one is happiest when staying true to one’s own desires, loves, preferences. What then should someone do in my position of not particularly liking novels? Or, suppose Plato is right that the greatest of the arts is music – where does that leave Gretchen Rubin, when she doesn’t particularly care for it?

As with most philosophical questions, there probably isn’t a single, easily stated answer to be found here. This too strikes me as a matter of finding the virtuous mean between two vices – akin to the “meta-virtue” I previously discussed with respect to pessimism. To stay entirely in one’s comfort zone and never let one’s choice of pleasures be guided by those whose judgement one respects – this is a vice. It’s a sure way to remain mired in the situation described by Lorraine Besser-Jones in which virtue does not become pleasurable and pleasure does not become virtuous. At the same time, to ignore one’s own preferences and passions in the hopes of reaching an unrealistic ideal of what one should like – this too is a vice, one that sacrifices one’s happiness and likely one’s virtue as well. How does one negotiate the middle ground?

That question may need to be answered on a case-by-case basis. In each case, if one believes one should like something one doesn’t currently like, one might examine the reasons for liking that thing and see if there is an appropriate substitute. For example, Nussbaum recommends reading novels because they tell the stories of particular people, in such a way that the details of those people’s lives matter to us, and matter emotionally. But it is not only novels where one gets this exploration of character; one can find it in any medium that tells people’s stories at length and in depth. I have learned a lot about the subtleties of human personality in media as diverse as the Fox TV show King of the Hill and the teen webcomic Penny and Aggie – both of which derive their humour from richly drawn characters, people who feel real.

As for politics, I recently noted a solution that has worked for me: view it as a spectator sport, as a Sox fan does the World Series. Enjoy the excitement, but don’t get too wrapped up in the outcome. And yet that too has its pitfalls. In Canada, despite the ascendance of the Conservatives I oppose, I was elated to see the rise of the socialist NDP as the opposition, at the expense of the centrist Liberals and the separatist Bloc Québécois. In recent weeks on Facebook I was trash-talking the latter two, just as a fan of the Sox might against the Yankees – even after the election was over. An old friend implied that this might be hurtful to hear for those who now have to live under a Conservative majority government. When your health care is on the line, politics remains more than a spectator sport. Here as elsewhere, there are no easy answers.

As well as spectacular beaches, Zanzibar has a tremendously atmospheric old Stone Town, and crumbling palaces built in the nineteenth century by Sultan Said. On a tour of these palace ruins, our guide spoke mournfully about how the government had destroyed and misused these palaces after independence and revolution in 1964. It is surely worth mourning when a beautiful object from the past is lost forever. In addition to this destruction, the revolutionary government built most of Ng’ambo, the “other side” of Zanzibar town – the part that is completely non-atmospheric, full of concrete blocks designed by East German engineers. It is in Ng’ambo that the majority of urban Zanzibaris live. The tourist guidebooks tend to scoff at Ng’ambo if they mention it at all, which they rarely do – and no surprise, since it is utterly charmless to look at, a generic site that could be anywhere.

And yet driving through Ng’ambo, I could also see what motivated the revolutionary government to build it that way; more than that, I was quite pleased to see it. For much of Zanzibar has little local wealth. It is not like Thailand or India, where local élites are everywhere, and often richer than the scruffy Western tourists who come there on a shoestring. In Stone Town there are the poor locals and the rich tourists. Most of Stone Town, for all its winding, medieval atmospheric charm, is in disrepair. After a while, when one sees a clean building in good condition, one comes to ask “What hotel is that?” – for one realizes that the only buildings maintained well are the hotels for the tourists.

Ng’ambo is a little different. There, unlike both Stone Town and the countryside, one finds modern shopping arcades catering to local residents. From those charmless Stalinist concrete blocks, decaying as they may be, one can see air-conditioning units poking out many of the windows: an expensive luxury, but one very welcome in the humid 35ºC heat of Zanzibar Town. The majority of tourist accommodations in Zanzibar, even huts with thatched roofs on the beach, had air conditioning; Ng’ambo was the only place I saw any local Zanzibaris having access to this delightful comfort when they were not working. Even though those buildings are themselves in disrepair, it seemed to me that for many Zanzibaris they would be a welcome step up.

Old and new Zanzibar Town, it seems to me, express something like Kierkegaard‘s contrast between the aesthetic and the ethical, which Skholiast refers to in his post: the search for beautiful things as opposed to the welfare of the community. (This is not how I prefer to use the term “ethics,” but it will do for the present discussion.) In his The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey perceptively links “ethics” with modernity and “aesthetics” with postmodernity, using the terms “ethics” and “aesthetics” in a sense that I think are similar to Kierkegaard’s. (So too, “postmodern” here refers not merely to relativist postmodernist intellectuals, but to the broader cultural trends of the 1970s and after.)

Harvey is concerned with the “aestheticization of politics,” where the personal appeal of a Reagan or an Obama can trump questions of policy, but even that is part of a broader point. Ethical moderns – Marxist, utilitarian, Rawlsian – favoured the new, replacing unruly traditional structures with efficient rational designs for universal benefit. Aesthetic postmoderns instead preferred the old, preserving authentic ways of living from the past. The Marxist Harvey is of course perceptively attuned to the class bias of all this: our love for the old-school privileges the aesthetic enjoyment of rich tourists over the enrichment of living standards for the human multitude. Harvey would have considerably more sympathy for Tanzania’s socialist revolutionary government than for those who want to preserve the palaces of its wealthy sultan.

Which brings me, finally, to Finkielkraut. In the English translation that Skholiast quotes, Finkielkraut says that postmoderns

do not dream of an authentic society, where people live comfortably in their cultural identities, but a polymorphous one, a multicolored, heterogeneous world in which individuals have many lifestyles to choose from. They have less interest in promoting the right to be different than the right to have access to the differences of others. For the multicultural means a storehouse of options.

Finkielkraut agrees with Harvey here, from a less Marxist perspective. When we rich élites value the old – and there’s nothing like a trip to Africa to make one realize what a rich élite one is, even if one’s means are very modest back home – it is in many ways for our own benefit, even for our own consumption. But I also think Finkielkraut is wrong in saying that this “storehouse of options” is not a “dream of an authentic society.” Rather, it is exactly that. A storehouse of options requires an authenticity that is always just beyond one’s reach, for one’s own choice of the option, one’s own participation in the option, itself makes it less authentic. For in many ways it is authenticity that creates difference. Americanized Thai food tastes an awful lot like Americanized Chinese food – very sweet, mild spice, soy and ginger. Authentic Thai food is much more different from both Americanized Chinese food and authentic Chinese food – a much better option to have in the storehouse. In the original French, Finkielkraut says something a bit different and at least as telling: “Multiculturel signifient pour eux abondamment garni” – for them, “multicultural” means “abundantly garnished.” And there’s no garnish like authenticity. At their worst, the advocates of authenticity effectively want to preserve a human zoo, where others are forced to remain traditional so that we can choose to consume their authentic products.

Where does this all leave us? Well: one of the conclusions that has persuaded me more and more over the years is that there is some truth in everything. As part of the global tourist class, it is very easy for me to see the beauty in the old-school, the authentic, the old and often unchosen ways of living and building that characterize Stone Town. That shouldn’t be neglected, the way it was by the mid-20th-century utilitarians and Stalinists. But there’s also something wrong when that beauty comes at the expense of those who created it or live in it. Sometimes they want a choice too, and they have good reasons for putting other priorities above their authentic ways of life. That, to me, is the lesson of Ng’ambo.

the most precious element any human has, the very measure of his individuality — time…. Everything we value, from love to lucre, takes time. Time is the measure of the conflicting demands put upon us, and as such is the measure of our very selves. It is the one commodity that turns out, for each individual, irrevocably, to be finite. (111, emphasis in original)

Seen from this perspective, there is nothing frivolous or optional whatsoever about “convenience.” This is true whether we live a worldly life seeking worldly ends or a monastic one seeking liberation. Without a belief in rebirth, we do not have anything like the infinite eons Śāntideva envisioned in which one could progress slowly on the bodhisattva path. He thought it was urgent for us to become monks and dedicate ourselves to liberation in this lifetime, because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t get another chance for billions of years. Yet just as importantly, eventually, after some unimaginable amount of time, we would get that chance, in a way that now seems unlikely at best. Without rebirth, death places an absolute limit on our time. Saving time is in a sense saving a life – for when we speak of “saving” a life, all we can ever mean is prolonging that life, which is in turn to say giving that life more time.

Saving time, then, can be among the noblest of human goals. The reason “convenience” looks so suspect, however, is that very often it doesn’t really save us time, doesn’t actually add anything to our lives. The biggest trap is the pattern all too familiar in the US: one spends one’s money on conveniences (convenience foods, labour-saving devices, and so on), in order to save time – and then spends the newly available time making more money, much of which itself is spent on conveniences. Little if anything is gained here. One might well argue that little time is genuinely saved. For too often we are trapped in the belief that our paid work should be our life’s fulfillment when, as Marx long ago noted, it is by definition alienated: to the extent that we work for pay, we work for others and not for ourselves. We might be lucky enough to find work we enjoy most of the time, but there is no reason to expect that paid work should be any more fulfilling than cooking or washing the dishes. Perhaps we are still a little too wedded to what Max Weber called the Protestant ethic, which rejected the use of money for pleasure and enjoyment (vacations, eating out, beauty products) but endorsed spending it on “comfort,” an idea not too far removed from “convenience.” The idea of making money to save time to make more money may have made sense within the dour world of Calvinist theology, but it’s a little bizarre that the rest of us would continue to follow it.

Still, these points all raise a related question: what, exactly, should our time be used for? Suppose that, as Marx imagined, we really could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner” – should we do all of these? Thanks to the heroic work of the early twentieth-century labour movement, most of us have two days a week on which we can do exactly what Marx says – at least if we do not raise children in addition. But how then should we make decisions about how to use this precious “spare” time? Should we indeed spend the day in pastoral and agrarian pursuits followed by dinner, and then write critical philosophy in the evening – or should we spend the whole day doing one or the other if that’s what we love? Or should we play games and sports with friends and loved ones? Or should we raise children and spend the time doing that? Once we realize how finite our time on earth is, the way we spend it comes to take on great importance.

The idea that I always associate with Hadot is encapsulated in the translated English title of one of his major works: philosophy as a way of life. Hadot, a scholar of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, treats this philosophy as a way of life, a set of “spiritual practices,” and in so doing he helps remind us of the distance between ancient and modern philosophy. And I don’t just mean that he gives us yet another reason to critique contemporary philosophy departments, which (whether analytic or continental) typically seem far from any ancient ideal of the love of wisdom. I mean also that he reminds us why philosophy has so little place in contemporary Western culture.

I’ve noticed that a fairly large number of my posts have to do with “religion and science,” and the supposed relation between them. This wasn’t my original intent, since I don’t care much for the idea of “religion” in the first place, as most of those posts attest; and the most animated question in “religion and science” debates – the relation between evolution and Hebrew Bible accounts of creation – is of relatively little interest to me, since I’ve never bought any of those accounts to begin with. But I’ve been realizing something about most people today, even well educated people who might be expected to know some philosophy, and not only in the Western world. When moderns look for the things that Greek and Roman philosophy was supposed to provide – answers to big questions about the purpose of our lives, our proper view of the world and our place in it, ways of dealing with death – they don’t turn to philosophy. They turn to “religion” – Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, various “Hindu” traditions – and they turn to natural science, above all to psychology. It is in the realms of religion and science, that is to say, that philosophy is found today, especially any sense of philosophy as a way of life. Scientists often claim their work to be value-free, but especially for those who are not part of a “religious” community, much of the guidance we receive in life comes from scientific evidence and the people charged to apply it to our daily lives. The title we use for those people – “doctor” – originally referred to learned Christian religious. It is doctors who warn us that our behaviours are self-destructive, that we need to change our views and habits and ways of life, and that we fail to do so at our own peril – and this advice often involves codes of behaviour toward food that rival Leviticus in their complexity.

But philosophy – that is what we don’t have. Hadot reminds us that the ancients did. It’s not just that their academic work was not so carved up into disciplines, so that the inquiries now called “science” would have been known as “philosophy” (though of course it was that). The Stoic practice of prosoche, attention to one’s soul, bears a startling resemblance to Buddhist mindfulness – conducted in the name of philosophy. When the Greek explorer Megasthenes explained ancient Indian society to his fellow Greeks , the name he gave to the brahmins and to the samana wandering monks – the Buddhists, Jains and their ilk – was “philosophers.” He recognized what the Greeks called philosophy in what they were doing. It is in the Christian (and Islamic?) Middle Ages, Hadot notes, that philosophy loses this status, becoming “the handmaid of theology.” It is not a huge step from there to the analytic philosophy of today, which (I think it would be hard to deny) sees itself largely as “the handmaid of science,” answering only those questions left over from the empirical inquiries of natural science.

Now the terms “religion” and “science” seem unlikely to go away any time soon. We are probably stuck with them. Perhaps more importantly, the realms of knowledge and practice that the terms cover – from Kierkegaard to prayer, from Einstein to psychotherapy – are of inestimable value to human life. As much as I might wish for a world where these terms went away (at least the “religion” term), I would find it devastating if the phenomena were to disappear. So for better and for worse, “religion” and “science” are here to stay. So while I have always identified the present venue as a blog about philosophy, it necessarily also becomes a blog about religion and science.

What then happens to “philosophy”? Can it ever again become the way of life that Hadot tells us of? Not in the terms of the ancient world. If one were to start a monastic garden of philosophers the way that Epicurus did – even if one were explicitly to call it Epicurean – most people would invariably call it a religion (or worse, a cult). At the same time, I think philosophy takes on a crucial role in the world of “religion” and “science,” as a middle ground between the two. New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, full of bile toward “religion,” nevertheless affirm the value of (at least analytic) philosophy; and philosophy, even today’s academic philosophy, has tools to examine even conservative forms of “religion” critically on their own terms, terms that science does not have. Even to the fundamentalist who denies philosophy as heretical, one may still ask the fundamental questions: why is scripture inerrant? Why must faith take precedence over knowledge? The answers to these questions can be interrogated by philosophy, but not by experimental science. One might even say that the problem with Stephen Jay Gould’s NOMA is that, in separating the realms of science and religion, it ignores the third realm that unites them, namely philosophy.

This all is at the theoretical level. But it matters at the level of practice as well. One can always try to live one’s life entirely within the guidance specified by a particular tradition of inquiry, including the tradition of natural science. But once one tries to be both at once – to be both “religious” and “scientific,” or even to inhabit more than one “religion” – then one needs philosophy to settle their differences. One can no longer take philosophy by itself as a way of life. But philosophy may yet turn out to be an inescapable part of the best way of life today.

Why did he do this? I suppose it could have been merely a cynical move to gain followers, but Marcionism had an appeal that lasted long after Marcion’s death; I don’t see much reason to believe that Marcion didn’t believe what he was writing. But this is still puzzling. To our eyes it seems like an awful sort of arrogance to edit historical writings according to one’s own theology. One might ask: how could he have believed any of this?

In trying to understand Marcion I can only think of the popular view expressed in the Mahāyāna Adhyāśayasaṃcodana Sūtra, that “whatever is well spoken is the word of the Buddha.” This was a justification used for the newly emerging Mahāyāna s?tras. It’s pretty clear from any historical standpoint that no such texts existed during the Buddha’s lifetime; the Mahāyāna was a new phenomenon, and many of its creators seemed to know it. They justified the composition of new s?tras by arguing: the Buddha knows everything, so anything that is correct is therefore effectively spoken by the Buddha. Surely this is what Marcion was up to: because Jesus was God, he could only have spoken the truth. So since the content of the revised Marcionite Gospels were true, as we could presumably ascertain on scripture-independent grounds, it must therefore have been what Jesus really said.

Which brings us back to the previous post‘s discussion of authenticity. It’s strange to me that today we put such a high value on things being what they have always been, unchosen by contemporary people. But the premodern view of authenticity is curious in its own way. If you are already so convinced that your new scripture is true, why do you need to attribute it to the Buddha or to Jesus? Why not just admit that you found the truth yourself?

I guess I can start to see an answer when I look at what people do try to come up with from scratch, without connection to the past. Modernist attempts to rebuild society from the ground up didn’t work very well. And individually, when we avoid submitting to the guidance of a tradition, we run the risk of merely believing what we want to believe, being guided by our persistent and troublesome unconscious desires rather than by the truth. That’s why I have myself argued that in some cases it is important to argue that some people and practices are not really Buddhist. The example that comes to my mind here is Gary Snyder’s horrifying Smokey the Bear Sutra: a “Buddhist” text advocating ecologically motivated violence and wrath. I try to avoid feelings of offence, but that text felt like a slap in the face toward Buddhist critiques of anger.

Here there seems to be a justified continuity between premodern and modern authenticity: our individual choice leads us too easily to the wrong places. This idea is at the heart of a chastened intellectualist view of human nature, a view shared by thinkers as diverse as Augustine, Xunzi and Freud. If we just do what we choose and believe what we discover for ourselves, we will be led astray: to sin (Augustine), to chaos and disharmony (Xunzi), to repression, neurosis and pathology (Freud). Rather, we need to be humble, to submit ourselves to others with greater vision than ours. I wonder if the contemporary search for authenticity is an aestheticization of this view: there’s something objectively better that happens when a North American discovers the pleasures of Chinese food developed over generations in China, as opposed to the Chinese food designed to conform to his North American sweet tooth at the Panda Hut around the corner. Rather than having one’s existing tastes pandered to, one educates one’s palate, becomes a connoisseur.

Then again, I’m not sure this answers the question of why people write or edit new scriptures and claim their authenticity. One might rightly want to aim at humility, seeking to prevent the arrogance of believing oneself in charge of the whole truth. But isn’t it just as arrogant to believe that one’s own discovery is not only the truth, but the word of the Buddha or Jesus himself?

Still, in many respects these results are exactly what I would expect. I found this happiness data from Penelope Trunk, who nails the problem with living in New York exactly. If you are (like me) the kind of person who loves city life, then in New York you really do have the best of everything, at least on this continent and in some cases anywhere: the best food, the best entertainment, the best shopping for almost any goods you could want, the best access to transportation, the best art. But that’s exactly the problem. On one hand, you’re competing with everyone else to have access to the best of everything, so everything is very expensive, so you have to work much harder to make more money. (A little like Dr. Seuss’s Solla Sollew, where they have no troubles except for the fact that you can’t actually live there.) On the other hand, and more insidiously, if you live in New York, it’s probably because you are the kind of person who tries to have access to the best of everything.

That is to say that New Yorkers, by and large, are maximizers rather than satisficers. The distinction comes from the economist Herbert Simon, and was recently popularized by positive psychologist Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice. In brief: maximizers try to weigh every option and ensure that every choice is the best they can make, to get the best result. Satisficers, on the other hand, make choices quickly and don’t mind the idea that their choice might not have been the best.

I notice this problem in particular with respect to food. I love international food, and to me that’s the most wonderful thing of all about New York – it has a wider variety of food choices than just about anywhere else in the world. New York has Surinamese and Bajan and Xinjiang restaurants; in Manhattan you can get Burmese and Senegalese food delivered to your door, often 24 hours a day. Food writer Calvin Trillin lives in the food paradise of lower Manhattan, in some respects for exactly this reason. But in Trillin’s work one finds little gratitude for this extraordinary and unprecedented variety. Instead he maintains a list of all the food he can’t get in Manhattan, and calls it his “Register of Frustration and Deprivation.” Trillin, in other words, is a maximizer, who will never have enough and never be satisfied – and that seems to me characteristic of New York life. Even when you have the best in the world – maybe especially when you have the best in the world – it’s still not going to be good enough.

In many respects this was the lesson I learned in my youth in Thailand. What makes you unhappy is not that you don’t have enough, it’s the desire for more, itself. The Second Noble Truth again: suffering comes from craving. To live in New York seems to feed that craving.

New York makes me think of the myth of Eden – and the view, going back to St. Ambrose, that the fall from Eden made us better off (“O felix culpa.”) While there are perhaps few places in the world that are less like the Garden of Eden in a literal sense, New York shares with Eden the feeling of being a place where all desires can be satisfied. It seems to me that, if there ever had been an Eden, Adam and Eve would not actually have been happy there – they would have found ways to want more. (Indeed why else would the fall have happened?) At least for a city-lover like me, choosing to live outside of Eden, or outside of New York, is accepting and living with the fact that you can’t always get what you want – even within Eden.

Many people in the United States, of course, do not celebrate Christmas. Most often, such people are Jews, and perhaps sometimes Muslims and followers of Asian traditions. It is the rare atheist or agnostic who refuses to celebrate Christmas – a fact I find somewhat telling. In my own Canadian childhood I found that refusal somewhat bizarre. My family never went to church, my parents never believed or taught any ideas they recognized as Christian; but we nevertheless celebrated Christmas, as North Americans in North America, and nobody thought that was weird. When we went to India we always celebrated Diwali and Holi without thinking of ourselves as Hindus, and nobody seemed to think that was weird either.

The first people to challenge my non-Christian celebration of Christmas were Jewish friends during my undergrad days at McGill. “The word is Christ-mass,” they would say. “It doesn’t make sense to celebrate that if you’re not Christian.” The argument didn’t ring true with me then, and still doesn’t. First there’s the point that Christmas in the West was not Christian to begin with: the date of Christmas was set in the fourth century to follow the feast of the Roman sun deity, and the traditions of pagan Saturnalia became part of typical European Christian celebrations. But even if we think of Christmas’s origins as Christian, the festival of Christmas has become part of North American life, like Thanksgiving. Should I avoid celebrating Hallowe’en because I’m not a Celtic pagan?

I respect the desire of modern Jews to retain their status and identity as a separate, unassimilated people. For them the non-celebration of Christmas could be seen as a deliberate self-denial for the sake of preserving distinctness; modern Jews often view the kosher laws the same way. What makes us who we are is that we don’t eat pork, we don’t celebrate Christmas. (I’ve heard it said that such an oppositional conception of identity is weak and limiting, but I do personally feel sympathetic to it, coming from a place that defines itself above all in terms of not being American.) And I respect the attempt to honour that self-denial by saying “happy holidays” rather than “merry Christmas.”

I’m less sympathetic to the idea that one is obliged to say “happy holidays” to avoid offence, that there’s something wrong with saying “merry Christmas” to people whose background you’re not sure of. Oppositional identity has consequences, including negative ones. Because Canadians are determined to be a separate people with a separate state, we didn’t get to vote for John Kerry in 2004, though our votes would have tipped the election to him; and we face many difficulties trying to find paid work in the United States. We have chosen in important ways to avoid the North American mainstream, and that choice has consequences. If one doesn’t celebrate the mainstream celebrations where one lives, one shouldn’t feel insulted when others assume that mainstream as the norm. If a North American restaurant has its employees say “Merry Christmas,” that’s no more an insult to Jews and Muslims than if it puts bacon on the menu.

Suppose one man likes strawberries and another does not; in what respect is the latter superior? There is no abstract and impersonal proof either that strawberries are good or that they are not good. To the man who likes them they are good, to the man who dislikes them they are not. But the man who likes them has a pleasure which the other does not have; to that extent his life is more enjoyable and he is better adapted to the world in which both must live. What is true in this trivial instance is equally true in more important matters. The man who enjoys watching football is to that extent superior to the man who does not. The man who enjoys reading is still more superior to the man who does not, since opportunities for reading are more frequent than opportunities for watching football. (Russell did not live to see ESPN.) The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another. Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days. (Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, pp. 125-6)

Zest in this sense, I think, is and should be a controversial virtue. There are many lists of virtues in which it does not appear. For Aristotle and the medieval tradition that follows him, the virtue with respect to pleasure and pain is temperance (sophrosyne), which is quite a different thing – more about moderation and controlling desires, “nothing in excess.” Comte-Sponville adds gratitude, which is related to zest (and probably just as pleasurable) but also not the same thing.

This isn’t just a matter of forgetting to include zest on the list, at least in Aristotle’s case. Zest is a potentially problematic virtue. For most Buddhists, indeed, zest looks positively vicious. Zest is exactly the problem; zest is taking pleasure in the impermanent things of the world, which reveal themselves ultimately to be nothing but suffering. We may take some pleasure in our efforts to get out of worldly things – or even in giving others worldly pleasures, in Mahāyāna tradition – but ultimately, zest is something we need to fight against if we are to have a truly good and worthy life.

This Buddhist view is perhaps the biggest reason I don’t identify as a Buddhist. My belief in the value of zest is a more general version of my belief in marriage: the pleasures of this world are, in many respects, good. At the same time, there is a great deal to the Buddhist critique. Buddhist patient endurance (k??nti) is, I think, as important a virtue as zest: there always will be bad things happening to us, and we must be ready to deal with them with equanimity and small-s stoicism. Buddhist practice does a very good job of cultivating this virtue.

In the end, I guess I’m agreeing with Aristotle that there’s a virtuous mean here, but a different one than he describes. Moderation, temperance, is its own kind of virtue, given that health is a good. But it is a virtue with respect to health, not to pleasure and pain. With respect to pleasure and pain, true virtue lies in a combination of patient endurance and zest. A lack of patient endurance is one vicious extreme, the extreme one might see in a child bitterly wailing over a dropped ice cream cone; a lack of zest is the other, the extreme one might see in a monk as in a cynic or a jaded hipster aesthete.

On this point I think MacIntyre is half right – or perhaps three-quarters right. He is quite right to note the low status that the modern West accords philosophers; but he overemphasizes the role of lawyers, because his concept of the good is (to my mind) overly political. Lawyers do play the role of medieval clergy as the rulers’ intellectual assistants in determining what a good state will be in practice. When it comes to the good life itself, however, the intellectual heavy lifting is done by a very different group: namely doctors, and medical researchers. It is medicine, not law (and certainly not philosophy), that plays the greatest role in telling moderns how they should live.

Law merely sets the boundaries, limits beyond which our lives may not go. Medicine tells us far more: what we should do within those boundaries. The point is most obvious in the case of psychology, which has always aimed to tell us what we must do to avoid a miserable and wretched life; now, in the days of positive psychology and happiness studies, it goes further and aims to tell us what a good life is. But it’s not only psychology. The other branches of medicine also tell us what kind of work to do (don’t do something too stressful), instruct us how to spend our spare time (exercise, don’t go out in the sun too long), and provide us with an arcane and ever-fluctuating set of prescriptions on how to eat that make kosher laws and dharma??stra look simple. (At least Leviticus is not supposed to keep changing.) The idea of health has, in practice, become one of the most important concepts in the normative ethics of Western life, the ways we think about how we should live. Sometimes we even think about happiness for its health benefits rather than as an end in itself.

Academic philosophy, however – and “continentals” don’t seem much better than analytics here – has done little to bring the concept of health into dialogue with the rest of our ethical worldview. (Nietzsche, for whom “healthy” was always an important term of ethical praise, is a major exception, though empirical research may have disproven much of what he thought was healthy. But then Nietzsche tends to make himself an exception in many ways.) “Bioethics” or “medical ethics” deals with something very different – ethical decisions made by medical practitioners in extreme situations, not the ethical implications of medicine for everyday life. Bioethicists think about how ethics guides medicine, not about how medicine guides ethics.

For their part, medical researchers, like most scientists, typically claim to be value-free – they’re just telling us about cause and effect, about what phenomena cause us to be healthy or unhealthy. But the normative weight of the concept of “health” is the reason we use it so much – we wouldn’t pay doctors and medical researchers so much to tell us how to be healthy if we didn’t think that, other things being equal, health is a very good thing. And the kind of cause-and-effect relations that the medical sciences establish are not so different from what some philosophers have tried to establish. From the start the Buddha’s teachings, as recorded in the Pali suttas, dealt with psychological causation: suffering is caused by craving. The project of establishing psychological causation becomes even clearer in the Abhidhamma.

We haven’t done nearly enough, it seems to me, to think philosophically about the claims of medicine. What role should health play in our conceptions of the good life? When should we do what is healthy, and when should we ignore our doctors’ advice and seek out competing goods?