Human Needs and the Good Society
The audio version of the newsletter is on hiatus this time around as Michael Sacasas is traveling.
In a previous newsletter, I wrote about the mid-twentieth century French philosopher and activist, Simone Weil, who, when tasked with writing a report to guide the rebuilding of France after the midst of the second world war, turned her attention to a consideration of human needs. In her view, the creation of a good and just society depended on a proper accounting of the full range of human needs. These included not only the needs of the body, but also what Weil called “moral needs” or the needs of the soul.
I believe Weil’s approach to be a helpful one for us to take as we consider the matter of human flourishing. What exactly does it mean for a human being to flourish? What conditions make such flourishing possible? What conditions undermine its realization? These are the question to which we will be returning often in our work at the center over the coming weeks and months. Today, I’d like to stay with the question of human needs raised by Simone Weil, but also expand our understanding of needs by considering the work of the philosopher, theologian, and social critic Ivan Illich (1926-2002).
Illich devoted a considerable amount of his intellectual labors to the task of exploring the sources of what was, from his perspective, our manufactured neediness. It is not, of course, that Illich denied that human beings have needs. It was that from his point of view many of the needs we think we have are, in fact, deliberately cultivated in us by a techno-economic institutional order that excels at nothing so much as the generation of dependent consumers. So, for example, we may very well have a need to learn, but why exactly has that need been transmuted into the need for schooling?
In the opening of Deschooling Society (1971), Illich claims that the “hidden curriculum” of schooling is dependency on the institution of school. The student, Illich wrote, is “‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.” And this hidden curriculum was not simply about how students experienced school, it prepared them for a life of dependence from various institutions. The student’s imagination, Illich argued, “is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.”
Interestingly, for our purposes, Illich goes on to write about how this process of degradation is “accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or ‘treatments.’”
The line to tuck away, in keeping with Weil’s observations about human needs that we discussed a couple of weeks ago, is the one about nonmaterial needs being transformed into demands for commodities. If Weil is right about the vital importance of what she calls “moral needs” or the “needs of the soul,” then what Illich identifies is, of course, a pernicious and perverse hijacking of these needs. Pernicious because of the transmutation of vital non-physical needs into a need for commodities. Perverse because the nature of the commodification is such that these vital needs are never, in fact, satisfied only exploited. Indeed, having been institutionalized along the lines Illich identifies, these needs must be forever perpetuated so as to justify the ongoing existence of the institution in question.
Consider for a moment a more concrete and contemporary example. Why does anyone need a Ring camera? Or, better, whose interests are best served by a Ring camera? The most obvious answer is Amazon. If there is a problem that Ring is supposed to ostensibly solve, it is the problem of packages being stolen from people’s front porches, a problem that arises when our consumption is increasingly funneled through Amazon. But, of course, Ring presents itself as more than just the surveillance arm of a multibillion dollar corporation deployed to your front door. It hijacks the human need for security or safety and transmutes it into a need for Ring. It is chiefly the needs of Amazon that are being met, particularly given the way that Ring allows Amazon to also profit from partnerships with police departments. And as Illich would have readily predicted, this dependence on a corporate product comes at the additional cost of alienating neighbors, eroding social trust, and replacing mutual interdependence with a state of perpetual suspicion.
By contrast, in Tools for Conviviality, Illich wrote “that society must be reconstructed to enlarge the contribution of autonomous individuals and primary groups to the total effectiveness of a new system of production designed to satisfy the human needs which it also determines.”
In other words, individuals and groups ought to be able to determine their needs rather than have their needs determined or manufactured for them. But, as Illich went on to argue, “the institutions of industrial society do just the opposite. As the power of machines increases, the role of persons more and more decreases to that of mere consumers.” Again, a contemporary example: nowhere is this reduction of the person to the status of mere consumer more evident than in the ruthless efficiency of Amazon’s near total enclosure of our lives within a network of self-perpetuating and automated consumption, one within which we come to increasingly function as a mere node rather than the autonomous consumer we imagine ourselves to be.
But Illich saw in our dependence on institutions that dictate to us the nature of our neediness more than just a failure of personal autonomy and self-realization. The question of justice was also at stake.
“At present,” Illich observed [emphasis mine],
“people tend to relinquish the task of envisaging the future to a professional élite. They transfer power to politicians who promise to build up the machinery to deliver this future. They accept a growing range of power levels in society when inequality is needed to maintain high outputs. Political institutions themselves become draft mechanisms to press people into complicity with output goals. What is right comes to be subordinated to what is good for institutions. Justice is debased to mean the equal distribution of institutional wares.”
Illich is here suggesting the existence of a counterfeit form of justice, one which we might gloss as a matter of becoming equally dependent on institutions and their commodities. Perhaps it will seem like a stretch, but the contemporary example that leaps to my mind is the belief in some quarters that the problem with facial recognition technology is simply that it seems, in its present iteration, to be especially biased against people of color, as if the tool would be just and good as soon as it was calibrated so that people of color were equally legible to its gaze. In other words, equal access to fundamentally degrading institutions and their products is not justice.
Elsewhere in Tools for Conviviality, Illich wrote about the three distinct values: survival, justice, and self-defined work, which were, in his view, “fundamental to any convivial society however different one such society might be from another in practice, institutions, or rationale.”
As he went on to explain,
“The conditions for survival are necessary but not sufficient to ensure justice; people can survive in prison. The conditions for the just distribution of industrial outputs are necessary, but not sufficient to promote convivial production. People can be equally enslaved by their tools … A postindustrial society must and can be so constructed that no one person’s ability to express him- or herself in work will require as a condition the enforced labor or the enforced learning or the enforced consumption of another.”
Illich argues that what he calls a convivial society—which we can think of simply as a distinctly Illichian way of speaking about a good society—involves not only equal access to commodities, however broadly we conceive of them, but something more. This “something more,” as we see in the paragraph just quoted, Illich ties very close to work, work that is free, creative, and meaningful. In this regard, Illich recalls Simone Weil, who, though approaching the matter from her own deeply religious perspective, believed that “all the problems of technology and economy should be formulated functionally by conceiving of the best possible condition for the worker.”
It would be worth exploring how Weil and Illich each conceive of work as a condition of human flourishing, but it is enough for my purposes here to note that they both understand that a good society would furnish its citizens with more than just a steady stream of endless diversions.
But Illich’s three-tiered schema not only recalls Weil in its high regard for meaningful work, it also recalls another threefold schema offered by the philosopher Albert Borgmann in his 1984 work, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, a significant and still highly relevant book that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
In his discussion of technology and democracy, Borgmann also puts forth a three-tiered “vision of society”: the constitutional or formally just society, the fair or substantively just society, and the good society. In the formally just society, all citizens are assured of equal liberties by the constitution and the legal code. But, as Borgmann notes, “formal justice is compatible with inequality.” “I may have the right to do nearly everything,” he adds, “and yet the economic and cultural means to do next to nothing.” Thus the need for what Borgmann calls substantive justice that accounts for “economic arrangements and legislation” as well as “civil rights and liberties.”
Yet, as Borgmann puts it, a substantively just society can still yield a life that is “indolent, shallow, and distracted.” In other words, a substantively just society may still fail to be a good society, one which addresses the full range of human needs. Borgmann believes that a substantively just society “remains incomplete and is easily dispirited without a fairly explicit and definite vision of the good life.”
Further on, Borgmann puts the distinctions this way (emphasis his): “A constitutional society furnishes formal or vacuous equality of opportunity. A just society secures fair or substantive equality of opportunity. Whether we have a good society depends on the kind of opportunities that the society provides for its citizens.”
Perhaps another more contemporary example can help clarify Borgmann’s distinctions as I understand them. We can imagine a society, without a great deal of effort, in which the elderly routinely find themselves isolated, lonely, and lacking a sense of purpose—in a word, uprooted in Weil’s sense. This society has developed robots and digital devices to care for the elderly and to keep them company. In a formally just society, all elderly citizens have the right to procure these consumer goods. In a substantively just society, all elderly citizens can afford to procure these goods or else they are supplied by the state.
I trust, however, that you might agree with me in recognizing neither of these societies as good societies. Better, we might grant, that the elderly have a robot to keep them company or modern tools of communication to slake their loneliness given no other alternatives, but much better still that they be rooted, that be an integrated part of a multi-generational family or community in which they also supply, in their turn and as they are able, the needs of their children and grandchildren, retaining as a result their dignity, purpose, and joy.
Borgmann goes on to argue that “liberal democracy is enacted as technology.” By which he means that contrary to its avowed neutrality toward the nature of the good life, liberal democracy “does not leave the question of the good life open but answers it along technological lines.” Furthermore, Borgmann claims
“the theory of liberal democracy both needs and fears modern technology. It needs technology because the latter promises to furnish the neutral opportunities necessary to establish a just society and to leave the question of the good life open. It fears technology because technology may in fact deliver more than it had promised, namely, a definite version of the good society and, more important yet, one which is ‘good’ in a dubious sense.”
In other words, Borgmann is arguing that the professed neutrality toward the good life that has traditionally ordered liberal democracies has, in fact, acted as a cover under which the advance of modern technology has smuggled in a distinct vision of the good life and one which may not be conducive either to democracy or to human flourishing.
As Borgmann saw it in the mid-80s, while they differed as to how the fruits of economic growth should be distributed, both major American political factions “understand such growth as an increase in productivity which yields more consumer goods.” Echoing arguments we’ve already encountered, Borgmann went on to argue that “improved productivity … entails a degradation of work, and greater consumption leads to more distraction. Thus in an advanced industrial country, a policy of economic growth promotes mindless labor and mindless leisure.”
I’ve assembled the work of these three writers because it seems to me that they are all circling around a similar set of concerns about human needs, work, technology, justice, and the good life. Their reflections make clear that these are interlocking realities, which must be considered together. They direct our attention to a more fundamental level of analysis, which we do well to take up. And they all saw the dangers of ordering society around technologically automated production and consumption and of uprooting human beings to enhance both.
I’ve argued elsewhere that one of the salient features of digital culture is the rapid collapse of the ideals of neutrality and disinterested objectivity that have been central to the legitimacy of modern liberal institutions. While this collapse will continue to be attended by varying degrees of turmoil and conflict, it may also provide us with an opportunity to examine more carefully some of the assumptions that have informed the way we think about the nature of a good life. And I would suggest that we do well to start, as Simone Weil did, with a consideration of the full range of human needs, clarified by Ivan Illich’s searching critique of the needs engendered in us by industrial (and now digital) institutions, and oriented toward a more robust vision of a good society as Albert Borgmann urged us to imagine.
Michael Sacasas
Associate Director
Study Center Resources
This coming Monday (10/12), our twice-monthly reading group, Readings in the Christian Imagination, will take up a short essay by Simone Weil: "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies With a View to the Love of God." We will meet via Zoom at 8:00 p.m. You can use this link to join in.
The rest of our program enters its fourth full week with our Director’s classes meeting via Zoom and in-person and our Dante group meeting via Zoom on Wednesday afternoons. If you have any questions about taking part in these events, please email Mike Sacasas at mike4416@gmail.com.
Recommended Reading
— Joseph Keegin in the “The Wisdom that is Woe,” a review essay that explores the place of the life of the mind in modern society:
Human beings need to think; they also need to eat. One can never supersede, or come at the expense of, the other. But nor can possession of these goods ensure happiness. In the end, misery can find us regardless of circumstances. And yet there is a suffering that ennobles, and one that crushes; there’s a way of struggling for understanding that, even if ultimately unsuccessful, leaves one in better shape than when one began the journey, and one that leaves one ungrounded, derelict and afraid.
— From Jared Michelson’s review of Oliver Roy’s Is Europe Christian? (Oxford University Press, 2020):
Any genealogy of secularization is inevitably a partial story. While Roy’s account is no exception, it is a compelling narrative, worth being set alongside other well-known accounts like those of Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, Brad Gregory, Radical Orthodoxy, and Michael Buckley. Yet any story attempting to narrate events of such complexity inevitably employs framing devices that determine which matters appear as central plot points and which as peripheral. Roy sees values and moral norms as central. From this sharp focus he derives his most interesting contentions and controversial claims.