When asked what hopes or future goals he has for Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, its former president, remarked that it was to ‘become another boring Nordic country, like Sweden’. The year was 1993, and the newly independent Estonia was living through a tough transition from the USSR-styled command economy to a functioning liberal democracy. Ilves’ remark was not a quip: for the people in the ex-Eastern bloc, or for those struggling with poverty and insecurity in the Global South now, the promise of a safe and boring – if not perfect – Western life has been taken to be good enough.
How should we regard this toned-down vision of a good life that, despite being so unambitious and anti-utopian, continues to find considerable support from people in different locations and with various backgrounds? This is one of the several puzzling questions that Daniel Miller, Professor of Anthropology at the University College London, seeks to answer in his new book The Good Enough Life. Miller’s project is premised on an attempt to unite philosophy and anthropology, two fields that have tended to develop independently of each other, by juxtaposing a philosophical enquiry into the nature of good life with an ethnography of people in a small Irish town living a life that seemingly can be characterised as ‘good enough’. Having found himself fortuitously in Cuan – a pseudonym that hides the name of Skerries, a coastal town around twenty miles from Dublin – Miller came to be struck by the ‘love of Cuan felt by the people of Cuan’. The sixteen months he spent living in Cuan among a population of Irish retirees resulted in not only an appreciation of this love, but also the conclusion that it would be ‘hard to find another currently existing society that is demonstrably better’. The town had a vibrant and inclusive community, strong social ties, was broadly egalitarian without being restraining, and was consistently praised by its residents, a high portion of them being migrants from other parts of Ireland. Notably, the praise was directed not to the residents themselves, but rather to the place and its community as a body: the migrants, locally termed ‘blown-ins’, would refer to themselves as having ‘lucked out’ by coming to live there.
Lurking beneath Miller’s careful and empathetic observations of the mundane day-to-day life of Cuan is an implicit engagement with ideal and utopian theorising. The town is not picture-perfect, and Miller never aims to hide this: intergenerational inequality with respect to housing affordability, alcohol and drug abuse, and social stratification are factors that prevent Cuan from being a utopian model of a good life. Still, what makes Cuan stand out is that the lives people live here, while not being ideal, may well be described as ‘good enough’. Miller’s ‘good enough’ is not semantically equivalent to the complacent ‘sufficiently good’. Rather, he invites us to appreciate the unique success of Cuan in the contemporary context. Although a large part of Cuan’s success comes from its relative affluence and privileged location in Ireland, there are plenty of similarly affluent and privileged places that are nothing like Cuan when it comes to the strength of community ties and general satisfaction with life. Unlike most philosophers who theorise about the good life, Miller is taking a characteristically anthropological approach: comparing a society with other existing societies rather than against some ideal. The value of this approach lies in the fact that Miller thereby takes seriously and engages directly with the vision of life embodied in Ilves’s call for boringness or in the decision of millions of people to leave their homes for a life in Western suburbia. Utopian theorising often lacks this engagement, proceeding immediately with a derivation of ideal principles and ignoring potential inputs from relatively successful societies that currently exist. While one should not travel to the other extreme by regarding existing social practices as a sufficient source of inspiration for utopian theorising, Miller’s work demonstrates that utopian philosophers may benefit from embracing the middle way and learning from the approach of anthropologists. The Good Enough Life is a book of rare praise which aims to sketch out an appealing alternative to speculative utopias as a cognitive device that can be used to explore conceptions of a good life.
Indeed, the originality of Miller’s work lies in its attempt to go beyond the traditional ethnography: to juxtapose it with an exploration of a variety of philosophical views on the ideal life. The book’s odd-numbered chapters elaborate an ethnography of Cuan; the even-numbered ones are filled with accounts of a diverse set of thinkers from the Western canon. The relationship between the anthropological and philosophical chapters is complicated, and this is both a strength and a weakness of the book. The discussion of thinkers such as Heidegger, Nusbaum, Rawls, Hegel, and Epicurus is sometimes used to provide the context for the philosophical findings of the ethnography, sometimes to challenge or be challenged by them, and sometimes, seemingly, just to drop a name in front of the reader. Thus, in the course of the book, one encounters a discussion of freedom in Cuan in the context of Nusbaum’s and Sen’s capabilities approach; a highly original investigation into the development of benign consumerism and environmentalism in the town, contrasted with a critique of Adorno and Horkheimer’s arrogant and shallow approach to the same subject; and an account of the importance of sports in Cuan that is presented with a brief side-discussion on the origins of ancient philosophy. Not a philosopher by training, Miller claims that in most cases, his interpretations of philosophers are intended to help us ‘reach a deeper comprehension of the ethnography’. For those with some background in philosophy, this might remind one – in a warmly familiar way – of their own early attempts of fishing in the pond of Western philosophy to make sense of the deepest questions concerning the world around oneself. Yet, that the philosophers in The Good Enough Life function as changeable lenses through which the world of Cuan can be perceived is frustrating for those hoping for a more in-depth engagement with the ideas of the philosophers themselves. The book is not particularly comprehensive, and the clumsiness of the interchanging philosophical and anthropological chapters makes the whole project somewhat difficult to track.
Nonetheless, The Good Enough Life still holds important lessons for those theorising, investigating, and striving for the good life – utopians and anti-utopians alike. If there is a single takeaway from the myriad of carefully collected and analysed stories of Cuan residents engaging in local governance, playing bingo, planning their holidays, or reminiscing about the social problems facing the town, it must be that this flawed but good enough population can ‘teach us things about whom we might strive to be, that an ideal but speculative model could not’. The most significant of them is the power of communal self-creation. As Miller’s ethnography documents, the Cuan that currently exists was created by ‘blow-ins’, the people who arrived from other parts of Ireland after the 1960s. Some were following the memories of their childhood summer holidays there, from the time before the rise of cheap flights to Southern Europe; others were motivated by lower housing prices. The common feature was that these blow-ins needed a community that was not there – a need which was not shared with the natives, who had traditional networks of church and family at their disposal. The beauty of Cuan, perfectly captured by Miller, was that its blown-ins managed not only to integrate successfully within the native population, but also to create a community through the active development of casual socialisation networks and groups – play troupes, amateur societies, expansive volunteering, and participatory local governance. In this sense, Cuan as it currently exists is entirely artificial and based on a vision of community that blow-ins brought with them – diverging sharply from the common wisdom of the popular branches of social philosophy which emphasise the importance of the inherited cultural tradition and the embeddedness of the local social setting. Cuan is thus a unique example of collective agency producing a flourishing community despite its lack of historical identity. This community was forged from an imported vision with no historical links to the place, but this is a forgery that, as Miller writes, ‘captures the movement from forging banknotes to forging steel.’
With its emphasis on the importance of the residents’ collective action in the creation of their community, The Good Enough Life provides a necessary corrective for utopian theorising that consistently ignores the foundational role of agency within a given utopia. The original utopia of Thomas More, for instance, is founded by Utopus – a distantly past, exogenous figure that simply appears one day and creates the harmoniously functioning society. But by failing to give a precise account of how social life was created through a process of conscious collective agency, utopia becomes associated only with an elusive sense of historical non-impossibility. Ignoring the question of agency leaves us with utopian blueprints that we, like More in the original Utopia, ‘wish rather than expect to see’. Miller’s Cuan is not a utopia, as he repeatedly stresses, but its focus on the foundational and self-conscious agency of its residents is a standard that utopian theorising would do well to follow. The community of Cuan, while not perfect, is beautiful and leaves a mark on the reader’s mind precisely because there is no Utopus, no external primordial mover there; only people who, in Miller’s words, ‘made a town that made them’.
Ultimately, the broad lesson that utopians – aspiring theorisers or practitioners – should derive from The Good Enough Life and Miller’s anthropological approach is that of attentiveness to collective agency and recognition of the epistemic value of social practices on the ground. This lesson is especially salient because, on a fundamental level, anthropological and utopian approaches share a similar mode of engaging with the social world: both explore conceptions of the good life by providing us with images. In More’s Utopia, the account of the utopian society is triggered by an exchange between the figure of More and his well-travelled interlocutor Hythloday. Responding to More’s reservations about the feasibility of the abolition of private property in an ideal commonwealth, Hythloday replies that More’s position is not surprising, since he has ‘no image, or only a false one, of such a commonwealth’. The image that Hythloday proceeds to provide More and the reader with is that of utopia. Likewise, for most readers who are not native to Cuan, Miller carefully and attentively weaves an image of a place which, while falling short of the ideal, might well be good enough. Still, despite this similarity in modes of worldly engagement, utopian theorists as image-givers may well have a thing or two to learn from anthropologists as image-weavers.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 12: Utopia.
Justas Petrauskas is Managing Editor of the OPR and a final-year Philosophy, Politics and Economics student at Oriel College, Oxford. His main interests are in the institutional approaches to accommodating differences in diverse societies and epistemological issues in political theory and practice.