INTRODUCTION
Cuan and Kant

This book sets out to compare two potential sources for understanding how life could and should be lived: the writings of certain philosophers about the good life; and an ethnography based in a small Irish town of people living what will be described as the good enough life. The discipline of Western philosophy is generally considered to have developed from the sixth century bce in classical Greece and its colonies with a focus on the question of how to live well, exemplified by Aristotle’s discussion of the term eudaimonia, generally translated as living well or a good life. Fortunately, eudaimonia resonates with an ambiguity in the English word ‘good’. When we say, I am living the good life, we mainly refer to happiness. But when we say, I aim to live a good life, we mainly refer to virtue and ethics. Early philosophers were concerned with the relationship between these two. Socrates stated that,

Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, confirms both that eudaimonia is the ultimate aim of life (1097 15–21),3 and that the sound use of reason will allow us to flourish through aretē (excellence/virtue), demonstrated above all through thoughtful action by a harmonious, well-habituated soul.

These are philosophical ideals, but what of life as lived? Today, we might feel less confident about the relationship between virtue and happiness. Could a selfish and greedy person still be happy and is a virtuous person necessarily happy? As it happens, most of the people who contributed to this ethnography seemed to share the ideal of eudaimonia that a virtuous life was also the most effective route to personal happiness, though the examples of virtue discussed in this book come from activities such as grandparenting and environmentalism rather than through an abstract philosophical concept of ‘reason’. The people in my fieldsite do, however, make considerable use of the principle of ‘being reasonable’ as a foundation for being judged as wise. But it was a different observation that was the starting point for this comparison between philosophy and ethnography. From the very beginning of fieldwork, I was struck by the sheer love of this community for the town in which they lived and their identification with it – a sentiment reminiscent of the foundation of so much Greek philosophy, which took for granted that the good life was based on citizenship associated with a particular city-state, known as a polis.

This volume is therefore constructed through juxtaposing chapters about well-known philosophers or schools of philosophy with other chapters drawn from an ethnography of the retired population of this small town in Ireland, people who would never consider themselves to be either philosophers or exemplars of the good life. Anthropological ethnography differs from most social research because the emphasis is on observations of what people do, rather than what they say. The portrait of these people’s good enough lives has been extrapolated mostly from their everyday actions, rather than interviews. It is the life they lead that provides our evidence. The premise for this book is that there may be advantages to considering a population that actually exists as against ideal models of what society might or should be. This gives ethnography a potentially important complementary role to certain philosophical questions. Within the discipline of philosophy, a consideration of the good life subsequently took its place alongside logic, epistemology, politics, and a multitude of other considerations as philosophy grew in breadth and depth. The concern of this volume is, therefore, with only a small element of contemporary and historical philosophy. A final unusual quality of this book follows from the use of ethnography to exemplify the good enough life; increasingly, social science seems to be dominated by critique, while this will be largely a book of praise.

The people presented in this ethnography are all Irish. This does not mean that they are necessarily representative of the population of Ireland. I spent sixteen months living amongst these retired people in a small town on the east coast of Ireland, which has been given the pseudonym of Cuan. I didn’t have a car and hardly ever left the town. I therefore cannot say how typical they would be of Irish people more generally, although my findings were generally consistent with a parallel and simultaneous ethnography by Pauline Garvey in an area of Dublin with a similar demographic.4 Furthermore, most of my informants were not born in Cuan but migrated from other parts of Ireland or in some cases from abroad. I will sometimes use the term Cuan as a convenience to describe the people I worked with, but the arguments apply only to my research participants, who were mainly retired, and not necessarily to the rest of Cuan.

The ethnography characterizes this population as an example of the ‘good enough’ life. The semantics are not ideal. The phrase ‘good enough’ might be seen to imply sufficiently good, which would make this a rather complacent exercise, as though we could not aspire to do a good deal better in achieving virtue. This is not the meaning of ‘good enough’ intended here. The phrase is mainly known in academia through the work of the psychologist Donald Winnicott in reference to good enough mothering.5 His point was that we could praise rather than condemn a mother who, under often difficult circumstances and faced by all the contradictions of parenting, manages to develop a reasonably sensitive response to her infant, creating a secure and nurturing environment. The phrase ‘good enough’ is also important as a means of differentiation from the way philosophers consider the good life in reference to how a society should ideally be. By contrast, anthropologists tend to comparison with other existing societies, rather than against some ideal. This book is therefore not trying to suggest that Cuan is ideal; rather that, for all the faults that will be described, it is hard to find another currently existing society that is demonstrably better.

Individual chapters of this book will focus on particular components of the good enough life. John Rawls (chapter 6) helps us to consider justice and fairness, when set against the inequalities and other problems found in Cuan (chapter 5). Socrates helps to explain the centrality of sports to the people of Cuan (chapter 8). Heidegger is contrasted with the way Cuan has been constructed as a place (chapter 10). The Stoics and Epicurus discuss what we should do with our lives as we age, in comparison to these retirees (chapter 12). Other philosophers have been selected because of their commentaries on the nature of freedom (chapter 1) or affluence (chapter 3), both qualities of this population to which chapters have been devoted. The capabilities approach associated with both Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen is found to have some aspirations in common with this ethnography, as does the book After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre. In the conclusion, Hegel is deployed to try to resolve some of the key differences between these philosophical approaches and what has been learnt from the ethnography. In every instance, it is only my attempted interpretations of these philosophers that can be offered in the course of these comparisons. I have no training in academic philosophy.

Why write a book on the good enough life right now? We live in a restless world. Over the centuries, hundreds of millions of people have migrated in search of a better life. Consider those who have over time colonized the lands of North America, reducing the indigenous people to a small remnant. Or consider the 250 million people who more recently have migrated to industrial regions of China and were the subject of a wonderful study by Xinyuan Wang comparing their migration from rural areas to work in factories with their simultaneous migration from offline to online.6 Many contemporary migrants are refugees from war and oppression. The most impoverished rarely have the resources to undertake such migrations. The majority, such as in the case of the vast Chinese migration, move in search of ‘a better life’. What this term ‘a better life’ implies is that they seek the security of a higher income or a better health service or the opportunities of education for their children, as well as escape from struggle and coercion. For many such migrants, the aspiration is to seek a largely middle-class and suburban lifestyle,7 which they hope to achieve over one or more generations.

This then raises some rather important questions. How should we regard this middle-class, suburban, settled life that most of the world now aspires to? Is this a perfectly reasonable ideal, the sort of life that pretty much everyone could and should emulate? Is there some plausible concept of the good enough life, or of life purpose, that this lifestyle corresponds to? Or is it an illusion or a trap, an image created by the wider political economy, these days often glibly termed ‘neo-liberal capitalism’, in order to sell us a lifestyle to which we...