Delphic Maxim 24: Praise the good

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.

24. Praise the good

Hot take: der. Why would a person ‘praise the bad’? Let’s get a bit more complicated here and think about why praising the good is worthy of a daily maxim, particularly in our nihilistic, late-capitalist times.

Actually, if there’s a maxim that probably needs a workout these days more than ever, it’s this one. The world seems to be a profoundly depressing, negative place. Politics has become reactionary in many respects: there are angry people shouting about race, exploiting ‘freedom of speech’ to say horrible things, and on the other hand there are people arguing that we live in an age that is worse than ever, and the situation is deteriorating. Amongst all that cultural rot, where is the room for optimism and goodness?

One way that we might ‘praise the good’ is to consider just how much things have improved. Steven Pinker argues that life is getting better for most people across two books — his recent (problematic) defence of the Enlightenment, Enlightenment Now!, and his earlier and far superior book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. This argument tracks numbers (not always the most accurate way of measuring these things, I should say) across a huge range of metrics: our societies are less violent, more affluent, we live longer, we have technology that should give us more time for leisure. While this jars with a lot of progressive political takes, there’s truth to it: less people live in absolute poverty than have in the past — our measures of inequality may be trending up (in some places, slightly), but that doesn’t mean the quality of life in aggregate is deteriorating. I have to use qualifiers here because sometimes the aggregate misses the specific circumstances, and specifics matter too.

So Pinker’s argument is that we shouldn’t focus only on the bad, or the places where progress hasn’t been as rapid. Let’s remember the good.

This is important for our politics, because our attention to the bad — on both ‘sides — means that neither is necessarily articulating a vision of the ‘good’. It’s actually a necessary thing as well for us to spell out a vision of The Good Life so that we can begin to describe a program that takes us there. Human rights, for example, are an unambiguous good: tracing a basic program of protections and dignities that inhere in being a person is a good way to take care of the basics. Safety, education, liberty and health are all arguably fundamental elements of a basic good life — something we should collectively strive to ensure all people can enjoy.

But what does a richer vision of the good life look like? If we are praising the good in our politics, we might look to the ways we can improve on the basics: the ancients valued friendship, magnanimity, magnificence, learning and wisdom. We should be creating leisure time, not working more and more. The Good Life isn’t a life spent working for hours on end, but actually spent pursuing activities that make us feel good, that bring us to our friends, and help us to enjoy our leisure time.

I’m sure there’ll be more on the good as these maxims continue. I’ll end by saying this: the ‘good’ isn’t a simple matter of ‘the pleasurable’. The good is a moral state, as much as a pleasurable one. It’s about bringing happiness to your own life, as well as the life of the community in which you’re embedded. And that is absolutely worthy of praise.