A talk by Jacob C. T. Voorthuis
So, let’s begin with the title of my talk today: Imagining a sustainable future…? I am afraid I can’t. The challenge is too great, the conditions required too exacting, the necessary change in our behavior too ambitious, the problem too urgent.
An image of a sustainable future without becoming banal requires too much from us. And in any case, look deep inside you; what is it exactly we want to sustain? ‘Life on earth’? which is not at issue, or ‘Our way of life’? That is the way of life of less than 10 percent of the world’s population? Do we want to sustain our Volvo’s, our pensions, and child‐care subsidies? Our God‐given right to have holidays in exotic places? Do we then also want to sustain the misery that makes all this possible? The question comes down to this: Are we trying to sustain humanity warts and all? Or are we trying to work at a humanity 2.0? And if this last, do we really know what we are wishing for?
I am going to try something difficult this afternoon. I am going to argue that our humanity, warts and all, an all too human humanity that includes the best and the worst, the joyous and the sad, the misguided and the ignorant, the nice, the kind, the horrible, the weak, the absurd and the laughable, cannot be escaped without paying a price that we would not want to pay. At the same time, I am going to give you the means to survive that humanity, warts and all. More than that I shall give you an explicit way to test your design decisions against what matters and give you a way of thinking through what really matters. Without actually giving you ‘a solution’.
I shall call this means ‘muddling on’. I believe I got the insight from the philosopher‐novelist Iris Murdoch, either from one of her wonderful existentialist novels or her beautiful work on The Sovereignty of Good, except that I could not retrieve the exact phrase when I last looked. I shall begin and end this presentation with a clear position but without an answer, but one that will help us muddle on. And we depart with a bold statement: The purpose of life is to flourish. For us to flourish requires us to make our environment flourish.
This is sound advice. It has been around for a while too, laying neglected while we concentrated on other things. Aristotle proposed exactly this more than two thousand years ago. The goal of flourishing, he argued, is the only goal which does not serve a further goal. It is an end in itself, the only one we have; with which is meant that it is an end to which all other ends, such as ideas of sustainability and circularity are means. Think about that. It is quite a message. And I want you to keep it with you during this talk. You may object and you may deny.
And you will not be the first. But those of us ‘Aristotelians’ who take our lead from this idea can then say that all design, especially the design of our built environment, has as its purpose to help bring this flourishing about. And we can translate that into a few clear maxims, we can say that the purpose of design, in fact of all intentional action is to accommodate ourselves intelligently, intelligibly, comfortably, securely, and enjoyably. As such each design decision has to be tested against those desiderata.
A good design decision is then one for which the reasons you want to apply that design decision to the design you are working on, have to harmonize with those criteria for flourishing. The design decision has to be intelligent, that it is adaptive to the situation, intelligible, in that it needs to be comprehensible to all users and stakeholders, comfortable and convenient to use, secure, safe, strong and durable enough to use obviously and…. enjoyable in its use, if only because we are capable of joy and joy is perhaps the best sign that we have achieved what we set out to do: to flourish.
So, in design we look for harmonization between means and ends. Now ‘harmony’ is the foremost criterion of beauty. Something judged beautiful is at the very least in harmony with some idea the judge holds about it. As such a good design decision that is well‐reasoned, is conceived in beauty, “beauty [in design]”, Alberti writes, “is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse”. We all know that point, the joy of finding it and the frustration of not finding it or having spoilt things.
So, we conceive good design in beauty, how means should harmonize with ends we set for ourselves in order to flourish. It is on that basis that we act in order to do good. But beauty and goodness can only hold with what we believe to be true. As such in everything we do we strive for truth in what we believe and do. If we truly believe that sustainable action helps us flourish, then we must measure our design decisions against a notion of sustainability made concrete in the form of a recipe. In trying to make things concrete is where things become difficult and where thinking must go beyond philosophy.
The term harmony derives from the Greek ἁρμονία (harmonía), meaning "joint, agreement, concord", from the verb ἁρμόζω (harmozo), "to fit together, to join". It is a word that comes from the building trade, where there were two ways of making stones fit.
Asking a philosopher to give a talk about sustainability always carries a certain risk. You will almost certainly end up with something you did not ask for. Do not, for example, be tempted to ask a philosopher to give you ‘a way out of the mess’. That is not a philosopher’s forte. Nor is it her expertise to provide theories or technologies of sustainability. Some have tried, such as Roger Scruton, and where he is being properly philosophical —that is trying to clarify the issue at hand— he is sharp and intelligent; where he tries to advance his own politics, he somehow becomes partisan, an easy target for refutation and… a bit boring.
It is not that Scruton is wrong to encourage people to embrace Oikophilia, or ‘the love of home’ or to form ‘small reformative platoons’ to counter destructive tendencies in society on a local level. On the contrary that is great advice. It is rather that he is wrong to promote his political solution and his utopian vision in which everyone is happily conservative and hunting fox in a society where everyone knows and keeps to their place as a one‐size fits all solution. He dismisses on the one hand the complexity of a deeply human, all too human world in which we all have aspirations based on partial knowledge and may not feel comfortable being bossed about by an aristocracy or plutocracy claiming special birth rights.
More than that he is also unreasonably dismissive about the perplexing difficulties governments and NGO’s face when trying to tackle the unsustainable practices of a globalized world in a reasonable and fair way, whilst often having to deal with fierce and undermining opposition, the consequences of their own sometimes disastrous choices, as well as the constant pressures of corrupting forces at work within their own ranks. It is a complicated world, we need to give our institutions support through critical evaluation, calling them to account, but not by dismissing them as defunct just because they are struggling.
We might regret that we have become so globalized, so dependent upon technology, so enslaved to luxury, but we are, and we have to find ways of dealing with it. Any sincere attempt to do so is worth taking seriously and worth listening to and criticizing for its value. But what is the proper role of the philosopher in this? Philosophy is expressly not the activity of proposing answers to problems. When a philosopher does so she crosses a line into speculative theory. Some do this very well, such as John Rawls in his justly famous A theory of Justice. But such events are rare.
Philosophy can help us describe the world in abstract universal and generic terms, but because we do not know the world and do not know what we are capable of, we cannot always be sure how to make abstract advice such as the above, particular and concrete I unique situations. This is our eternal challenge in the quest for joy.
Philosophy when carefully distilled to its essence, is the activity of questioning, and through questioning, clarifying, of making sure that you can legitimately say what it is you want to say. When things become conceptually clearer, answers to challenges on the basis of current beliefs and knowledge inevitably start suggesting themselves. But an answer is never more than a theory.
Now as Kurt Lewin says, there is nothing so practical as a good theory. But as soon as a bold theorist believes she has discovered an answer to ‘the problem of the human condition’, take it from me, she hasn’t. And that is because there is no answer to the problem of the human condition. The human condition is not a problem to have an answer to. It is a given to be explored for its possibilities. It is the human condition that creates problems for itself in accommodating itself in its environment and usually has fun doing so. When humanity has begun to suggest that it is itself the problem, we unleash strange forces of ressentiment. Before you know it, we shall start proposing theories that we should all become different. We shall want a different humanity, a humanity 2.0 that does not have the failings we see in ourselves.
We have been there, and we know what such totalitarian exercises lead to. They have been made into a brilliant parable by George Orwell in his Animal Farm. The ideal of equality, so beautifully crafted, is left defenceless against our agonistic and wilful, uncertain humanity, against the greed and opportunism of some, but even against the good‐natured and the gullible of others. In Animal farm there is one animal that deserves our particular attention in this context. It is the horse Boxer who embodies all the tragedy of trying to do good. He is faithful and strong, naïve, and above all ignorant. (And who isn’t?) His motto is that any problem can be solved ‘if we just work harder’. Perhaps at least it has the virtue of being destructive of self rather than destructive of others.
Although, come to think of it…, that is not really true. The problem with Boxer is that through his intrinsic goodness, and his unquestioning belief in the truth of Napoleon’s every word, he keeps an untenable disharmonious, ugly system going for much longer than it would have, had he not been the rock upon which all that change had to build itself. Do you perhaps recognize yourself in this?
Authoritarian governments are not just the fault of those in authority, they are the fault of those who keep them in authority through personal loyalties and unquestioned beliefs. The boxers of this world are truly paradoxical creatures, admirable… and wrong, good and in their goodness, bad. How to solve that? It is our humanity that needs to be accommodated and not some cardboard image of it. And for humanity to flourish it needs to be accommodated intelligently, intelligibly, comfortably, securely and above all enjoyably.
And so, after every mistake, big or small, all we can do is… muddle on. We learn…. we forget… or as Samuel Becket wrote: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Muddling on is what we do. Building on successes until the whole thing collapses again and we have to start from square one. There however, might be room for improvement in the way we do our muddling as long as we make that activity explicit and clarify what we mean with it. That will be my task. And when we know what it entails, we can practice, and become good at it, perhaps even athletic. But preferably taking humanity as a given and not as the problem.
Muddling on seems to me a profound and above all resilient insight on life, not one promoting progress with a capital P, but one allowing us to survive in the hope of being able to flourish and finding joy in doing so. To me it is much more profound and sympathetic than the reductionist, progressivist and idealist alternatives on the market, which require us to go beyond ourselves into a badly conceived humanity 2.0 in which all our foibles miraculously disappear and we appear to know the answers to all problems and behave accordingly. Why do I know that that is not going to happen? I don’t. I only have the weight of history and all the great novelists behind me, like Iris Murdoch, George Orwell and Samuel Becket, whose job it is to exhibit humanity at work on its ideals and ideas reflecting the misery and joy it is capable of, exploring its wealth and its narrative richness.
The first assumption a muddler will have to embrace is to admit to herself that there is no— and cannot be a one‐size‐fits‐all answer to sustainability. I cannot imagine a sustainable future because I would not begin to understand what I should be wishing for, taking humanity as a given. If I were to be able to imagine such a thing, I would undoubtedly be reducing our humanity to some impoverished banal hobbit‐like version of it. The one thing we should not be wishing for is to determine our humanity, fitting it into some unreasonably tailored straitjacket and stopping each of us becoming the bird of paradise or sparrow we dream of becoming, ‘if only things were different’.
But even if I did have an image of a sustainable world that would not be too odious and laughable, I would have to understand that achieving such a thing on a global scale will involve me in questions that cannot be answered so easily. You see, even though I can argue quite happily for all of us to act with consideration for what we do, and on that basis fully and enthusiastically embrace the sustainable turn, and even admire the manifold ventures into sustainable practice, a practice I myself endorse and do my best to comply with, I have discovered that what I call a good idea at one moment becomes a bad idea at another. Moreover, what many of us seem to believe will make us flourish, doesn’t or doesn’t do so without side effects.
On top of that, there are some really uncomfortable questions I cannot seem to resolve and that appear to form obstacles for what we might imagine to be a sustainable future. Here is the shorter list:
What to do with the ever‐increasing population of human beings…. their structured concentration camps of domesticated creatures? Their newly forming landscapes and their wildly sprawling extended phenotype, the built environment? And their wildly sprawling extended phenotype, the built environment?
What to do in the face of a fast‐medicalizing society that as a result of medicine’s success is growing older, more expensive to keep alive, and more numerous?
What to do about our increasing and increasingly helpless dependence upon technology and the consequence of that dependence making it ‘the only answer’ left to us to solve ‘our problems’?
What to do with those who oppose movements towards the sustainable because of their beliefs?
And a relative newcomer on the list: what to do now that we have a superior intelligence operating among us, becoming more intelligent by the day? In the face of such wickedly complicated questions, what is wisdom?
One of the reasons a philosopher poses questions to clarify things and must not cross the line into theory, is that a philosopher has no pretension to be wise. To claim wisdom is an act of arrogance. She loves wisdom. In fact, the love of wisdom is engraved in her job title: ‘philo(love or desire for) sophos (wisdom)’. If you ask a philosopher what wisdom is she will clarify the idea of it as an abstraction of relationships and leave it to you to come with the concrete filling. And there is a good reason for that.
Philippa Foot, a contemporary of Iris Murdoch and a colleague philosopher of hers at Oxford in the nineteen fifties defined wisdom, I think rightly, as ‘knowing good means to good ends and knowing their value’. This is a clear definition and I think one of the best I have come across. But again, it is just a clarification of an abstract idea awaiting concrete infill giving us no hint as to what might fit the bill. Foot would not be able to tell you what actions are wise. And that is because humanity and its environment are neither of them determined. We can learn, move, adapt, change, invent, build fantastic extensions to our phenotype. Philosophers clarify conceptual relationships, but not in concrete terms what is to be related. To be wise we need concrete theories about what things are good and what good ways there are to achieve them. For this I, as a philosopher, look to you as designers, inventors, and engineers to come up with possibilities. All I can do, is tell you when, where and how you might be talking nonsense.
kant's categorical imperative
Let’s go through the possible ethical theories. Ethics, the philosophical discipline concerned with the question how to act has tempted a number of philosophers to cross the line from philosophy, the love of wisdom into theory: the practice of trying to act wisely. Here are four of the best:
First there is Kant’s categorical imperative which says that you should act only according to that maxim whereby you can will that your action should become a universal law. It is a very tempting stance. However, all or most of our concrete actions will have to be disqualified. Almost none of my concrete actions can, in the light of our humanity, be properly universalized. Except perhaps the action of constant reflection and the agile reform of my actions relative to the newest insights into what sustainability and circularity mean. Universalize the use of wood in the built environment? I cannot think of a worse idea! The opportunities for abuse are far too easy!
Second, we might consult the ethics of care in which we are asked to turn our backs to such universalizing tendencies and show empathy and compassion by privileging interpersonal relations. Again, this maxim sounds good and is good, but in the light of the question posed earlier, such an attitude is no less problematic.
Sure, it informs much sustainable design. After all what is sustainable design if it is not caring? And it informs much of what is best about humanity, such as the design of an inclusive society, the promotion of social sustainability. But it is also our ethics of care which has led us into this mess! Without care expressed in medical progress, in the form of international aid, the development of supposedly ‘helpful’ technologies of personal freedom such as the car and the washing machine, our mortality rates would be far, far higher and we would be kept in what some people might call a more ‘sustainable’ demographic ‘balance’ using low‐tech slavery to get us by. And yet we cannot dismiss an ethics of care off‐hand. What would a human being be like without it?
And that leads me to Virtue ethics, whereby we look at an action in the light of the kind of person we ourselves would want to be. Virtue ethics encourages us to act according to an idealized image of ourselves, crafting in ourselves to the form of virtues such as courage, prudence, temperance, love, justice, and charity. Again, it sounds good saying things like ‘I want to act sustainably’ and ‘I want to be the best version of myself’.
But such an approach is similarly confronted with its own limits in the light of the above. It will strain at the edges as our need to address painful questions will set one virtue up against the other. How can we call a decision courageous when it will necessarily increase the injustices of the world? How can we call a decision just when most people will not see its justice? Nevertheless, that is what we ask our leaders to do: make painful and unpopular decisions that ultimately we know to be for the best.
So perhaps we should look at the consequences of what we do. That is the particular concern of Consequentialist ethics, which projects the possible consequences of our actions to provide guidance in the preparation of our actions. This one looks seriously hopeful. Taking account of consequences might help us to ‘do what is for the best’. This might give us the tool to take some pretty radical decisions. Or rather it would except that we do not generally know what we want and therefore what
would be for the best. That we are in a crisis nobody can any longer sensibly deny, but as to what actions should be taken to get us out of it, our thinking still differs greatly. Do we know how many people the world could sustain with the right technology? Is building with steel intrinsically bad or is it bad because we have issues with energy? And if we solve those?
The reason we cannot simply go with any one of these ethical theories is because we do not know what we are capable of as human beings. A human being is a creature who spends her life getting to know herself. Gnothi se auton, Socrates advised us and it is good advice, but we can only do that by questioning ourselves thoroughly and not settling too quickly for an answer. Socrates was the philosopher who was honest about the fact that he himself knew little and spent his working life making those too confident of their answers, doubt themselves. It cost him his life.
Wisdom has to assume knowledge of good means to good ends, but our ability and wish to learn keeps moving the goal posts! That is what is so exciting about humanity as a given to explore. The current debate about the uses and threats of Artificial Intelligence is a fascinating case in point. In order to find out what we are up against we have to familiarize ourselves with its possibilities. That takes a long time and the quest to explore the subject will contain triumphs and tragedies, comedies and farces, which will no doubt become the subject of great novels.
The point is that we cannot deny our humanity, our all too human humanity. What, for instance, to do with the group that opposes sustainable development? The climate deniers, the ones that quietly think to themselves ‘Après mois le deluge…; or the downright evil who with childish delight celebrate destruction and pain, or the merely lazy who cannot be bothered with anything?
John Rawls in his theory of justice claims that a fair society can sustain a measure of destructive behaviour. But the radicalization of the skeptical voice is no longer a minority. Huge populations are actively working against the sustainable turn. In fact, we can hardly call it a sustainable turn any longer. The world is polarizing. And war is surely not part of any sustainable strategy? He argued that utopian visions in which we require humanity to change radically in order for that utopian vision to be realized are themselves destructive of the very humanity they try to save. Our genetic code spent millions of years evolving into what we have very slowly become, the undetermined learning creature we are, constantly in search of wisdom and always uncertain.
Our freedom is a function of our uncertainty. There is no realistic empirical basis to suggest that human beings will change their nature and their essence overnight. So, we shall be stuck with the humanity that the great Dadaist Dr. Walter Serner characterised so penetratingly in 1917: “Mankind is too weak to be really good, too good to be really bad.”
What to do? None of the ethical theories by themselves help me arrive at a well‐weighed stance. Perhaps I should grab for the most radical option. Kierkegaard’s Troens Ridder or knight of faith. Perhaps this unlikely creature could at least give us a way out of having to explain our actions. Kierkegaard’s knight of faith is an eccentric and deeply lonely creature. He was called into play in Kierkegaard’s famous Fear and Trembing and again in Repetition both published in the year 1843. The first starts with an episode in the bible that is fundamentally opaque: Abraham’s attempt to sacrifice his son Isaac. This act cannot be properly explained. Of course, we can come up with explanations such as the interpretation given it by the theologians as an act of supreme loyalty to a God who apparently is psychologically needy for that kind of affirmation. Cynics and psychiatrists might explain it differently. But all that is of no use. Fundamentally it is inexplicable as the action of ‘a good man’. How can you possibly want to show loyalty to a God that demands this of you? How can you not be mad and disturbed in some way?
And yet Kierkegaard does not judge. Abraham and Mary, according to him, are the only known examples of knights of faith, people willing to undergo the scorn of society to hold what they what they think is right and never try to explain themselves. Where would that lead me in my quest for an ethical stance regarding my place in this changing world? It is a frightening thought, far too Dionysian, opening up an awful dark chasm of lonewolfery, and yet, that is what we see happening around
us. People making their own mind up and acting on their own misguided faith. Faith used to be the greatest of virtues. But think carefully of what faith is, it is essentially ungrounded belief, belief for which there is no evidence except for a book that claims divine authorship. Hm. So then, how should we act? And having acted, how to look at ourselves in the mirror afterwards? The five ethical systems are all part of the answer, but any single one of them cannot be the whole answer. That is what muddling on acknowledges.
Because we cannot agree what is wise, we have an agonistic and essentially muddling way of proceeding to action, having to accommodate different views on both good means and good ends. Which is why I prefer the messy, sometimes exasperating muddling on of a democratic government —with all its intractable problems— to clean authoritarian solutions that presume to know what needs to be done and who are not frightened to project a clean image of the kind of world they wish for. Each of them is hateful even if democracy is sometimes exasperating. Let us criticize our institutions by all means, let us criticise their decisions with good reasoning but let us criticise them in the spirit of reform and not in the spirit of the destructive lust whereby La Cittá Nuova had to be built on top of Venice, whereby the Plan Voisin had to be built on top of the loveliest area of Paris. Why? Their plans were great, but why did they have to destroy what was already there, what had grown slowly?
I now go back to where I began. The world will take its course. I do not really know what a sustainable world would look like, I shall rely on your imagination there. I know what I admire, or at least I think I do. In an abstract and universal way, I admire design decisions that make us and our environment flourish but as we know, that is not yet enough, that is just clarification and not concretization. All design decisions have an alethic, aesthetic, and ethical dimension in the sense that all decisions involve the notions of truth, beauty and goodness and relate them to each other. We believe what we believe to be true, we conceive in beauty whereby our thinking and our experience must harmonize with what we believe to be true, and only then can we act in goodness. In this sense all design
decisions turn on what the two earliest architectural theorists have taught us.
All design decisions have to take account of stability and usefulness in beauty. And beauty is that reasoned harmony whereby no part can be added, taken away or altered but for the worse. I call it ‘het verprutspunt (or spoiling point) of design, of all intentional deliberate action. And because we do not know what human being is capable of, we each of us have to make up our own mind as to when we have achieved that moment of harmony; it is best decided by those in love with wisdom and willing to learn. But do not ask me what is wise to do, what is good to do. I genuinely do not know. Perhaps we should work it out together in a pleasant and open conversation.
Thank you.
This talk is dedicated to Mylène, 23.05.2023
ASSUMPTIONS
Having proposed an answer to our problems, even if it is a very weak one, it is now time to make muddling a little more explicit, as an activity that we cannot help doing because all our actions are necessarily both informed by long terms strategies projected into dreamlike futures and reformed in short‐term tactics having to deal with the broken bits of that dream. Muddling on works on a number of inescapable assumptions that each muddler accepts at least implicitly. These can then be complemented by a number of desiderata that might help to make things easier...
A muddler’s necessary assumptions
1. No concrete action is universalizable. The world is too complex to go with one‐size fits all solutions. We need to strategize on all scales and in all situations from the global to the local and from the point of view of all ethical approaches weighed against each other. If we want to do that well it might help to be agile enough to react to signals reasonably and reform ideas, constantly but conservatively. To give an example, it is impossible to say that one architectural or structural practice is bad in itself. It can only be pronounced good or bad in the context of a particular situation and acknowledge that this situation has the potential for change.
2. No totalitarian conception of the environment will help us. Any solution that excludes any aspect of our humanity and makes people as well as other creatures and things mere means is not a solution but a cause of trouble further down the line. “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” (Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 4:429) Now there is bit of good universal advice, except that it is again not concrete and we will muddle along to make such advice translate into concrete action.
3. There is no system that cannot be subverted, except one, the system of muddling on because it works on the assumption that everything can be subverted. When a muddler is knocked down, she gets up again and finds a response. The paradox of this thesis is illustrated by the fact that social institutions trying to ensure sustainable and just practices, will only ever succeed on the basis of strict conformance with the rules they set out, whilst at the same time needing to be ready and willing to reform themselves when they see their practices or their own corrupting moves and bad decision‐making becoming destructive and untenable. That tension needs constant tinkering.
4. No information is infallible. We model our world conceptually. We do not know the truth about the world and every theory about it is exactly that, a working theory. That process of conceptual modelling in the form of images we make, situations we describe with words or calculations we make of constructions are only ever as good as their practical effect. Concrete certainties are hard to come by. As such doubt is a healthy attitude as long as you are courageous enough to commit to a position you believe in and prudent enough to reject it when it proves itself wrong.
5. Lastly, we do not know what we are capable of. At the very least we are capable of everything we have done and achieved so far. But we are on the cusp of a new adventure. Who knows what that will bring.
Desiderata for good muddling
1. A good muddler is confident that we are in this world for no transcendent reason. We are here, and, as we are here, we have nothing better to do than to make our life flourish. That is best done by making the environment we want to flourish in flourish. Much of what makes us flourish is known and caught in wise maxims. But be careful: we are an indeterminate species. We can learn, we can learn to flourish in yet undetermined ways.
2. A good muddler understands her own intrinsic freedom to determine her own good as a result of her uncertainty as to what concrete action needs to be taken in certain situations. She works quietly towards win‐win decisions.
3. A good muddler takes on board what she observes, is open to what others tell her, but makes up her own mind. She muddles on, unilaterally, lonelily if she cannot agree with others, together if and where she can.
4. A good muddler works with a generous spirit and finds it useful to stop blaming others and contradicting them. We are all muddling along, after all. Some of us in a clearly misguided way, others in a seemingly hopeful way. We are all doing our best.
5. To bring the misguided onto the right path is difficult especially as we cannot be sure we are not ourselves on a misguided path, like Boxer. As such, lead only by example.
6. Give trust and respect to all and everything not because someone or something deserves it, but because it serves you well to do so. To be untrusting is to make yourself ill.
7. Voluntary autonomous action is preferable over regulation, is preferable over coercion is preferable over violence. However, all four forms of persuasion have their place in a society, even violence, preferably vested in an institution that we give a monopoly on it and which we then keep in check. But inevitably violence will break out, if only because for some it is a joy to be violent.
8. We all have the right to determine our freedom and that means that freedom needs to be regulated so that no one claims freedoms that oppress, restrict, or contradict other people’s right to their freedom. In this way regulation is inevitable and a great good but also a source of great frustration. And where regulation becomes restrictive and oppressive, we need agonistic forces to reform them.
So, let’s begin with the title of my talk today: Imagining a sustainable future…? I am afraid I can’t. The challenge is too great, the conditions required too exacting, the necessary change in our behavior too ambitious, the problem too urgent.
An image of a sustainable future without becoming banal requires too much from us. And in any case, look deep inside you; what is it exactly we want to sustain? ‘Life on earth’? which is not at issue, or ‘Our way of life’? That is the way of life of less than 10 percent of the world’s population? Do we want to sustain our Volvo’s, our pensions, and child‐care subsidies? Our God‐given right to have holidays in exotic places? Do we then also want to sustain the misery that makes all this possible? The question comes down to this: Are we trying to sustain humanity warts and all? Or are we trying to work at a humanity 2.0? And if this last, do we really know what we are wishing for?
I am going to try something difficult this afternoon. I am going to argue that our humanity, warts and all, an all too human humanity that includes the best and the worst, the joyous and the sad, the misguided and the ignorant, the nice, the kind, the horrible, the weak, the absurd and the laughable, cannot be escaped without paying a price that we would not want to pay. At the same time, I am going to give you the means to survive that humanity, warts and all. More than that I shall give you an explicit way to test your design decisions against what matters and give you a way of thinking through what really matters. Without actually giving you ‘a solution’.
I shall call this means ‘muddling on’. I believe I got the insight from the philosopher‐novelist Iris Murdoch, either from one of her wonderful existentialist novels or her beautiful work on The Sovereignty of Good, except that I could not retrieve the exact phrase when I last looked. I shall begin and end this presentation with a clear position but without an answer, but one that will help us muddle on. And we depart with a bold statement: The purpose of life is to flourish. For us to flourish requires us to make our environment flourish.
This is sound advice. It has been around for a while too, laying neglected while we concentrated on other things. Aristotle proposed exactly this more than two thousand years ago. The goal of flourishing, he argued, is the only goal which does not serve a further goal. It is an end in itself, the only one we have; with which is meant that it is an end to which all other ends, such as ideas of sustainability and circularity are means. Think about that. It is quite a message. And I want you to keep it with you during this talk. You may object and you may deny.
And you will not be the first. But those of us ‘Aristotelians’ who take our lead from this idea can then say that all design, especially the design of our built environment, has as its purpose to help bring this flourishing about. And we can translate that into a few clear maxims, we can say that the purpose of design, in fact of all intentional action is to accommodate ourselves intelligently, intelligibly, comfortably, securely, and enjoyably. As such each design decision has to be tested against those desiderata.
A good design decision is then one for which the reasons you want to apply that design decision to the design you are working on, have to harmonize with those criteria for flourishing. The design decision has to be intelligent, that it is adaptive to the situation, intelligible, in that it needs to be comprehensible to all users and stakeholders, comfortable and convenient to use, secure, safe, strong and durable enough to use obviously and…. enjoyable in its use, if only because we are capable of joy and joy is perhaps the best sign that we have achieved what we set out to do: to flourish.
So, in design we look for harmonization between means and ends. Now ‘harmony’ is the foremost criterion of beauty. Something judged beautiful is at the very least in harmony with some idea the judge holds about it. As such a good design decision that is well‐reasoned, is conceived in beauty, “beauty [in design]”, Alberti writes, “is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse”. We all know that point, the joy of finding it and the frustration of not finding it or having spoilt things.
So, we conceive good design in beauty, how means should harmonize with ends we set for ourselves in order to flourish. It is on that basis that we act in order to do good. But beauty and goodness can only hold with what we believe to be true. As such in everything we do we strive for truth in what we believe and do. If we truly believe that sustainable action helps us flourish, then we must measure our design decisions against a notion of sustainability made concrete in the form of a recipe. In trying to make things concrete is where things become difficult and where thinking must go beyond philosophy.
The term harmony derives from the Greek ἁρμονία (harmonía), meaning "joint, agreement, concord", from the verb ἁρμόζω (harmozo), "to fit together, to join". It is a word that comes from the building trade, where there were two ways of making stones fit.
Asking a philosopher to give a talk about sustainability always carries a certain risk. You will almost certainly end up with something you did not ask for. Do not, for example, be tempted to ask a philosopher to give you ‘a way out of the mess’. That is not a philosopher’s forte. Nor is it her expertise to provide theories or technologies of sustainability. Some have tried, such as Roger Scruton, and where he is being properly philosophical —that is trying to clarify the issue at hand— he is sharp and intelligent; where he tries to advance his own politics, he somehow becomes partisan, an easy target for refutation and… a bit boring.
It is not that Scruton is wrong to encourage people to embrace Oikophilia, or ‘the love of home’ or to form ‘small reformative platoons’ to counter destructive tendencies in society on a local level. On the contrary that is great advice. It is rather that he is wrong to promote his political solution and his utopian vision in which everyone is happily conservative and hunting fox in a society where everyone knows and keeps to their place as a one‐size fits all solution. He dismisses on the one hand the complexity of a deeply human, all too human world in which we all have aspirations based on partial knowledge and may not feel comfortable being bossed about by an aristocracy or plutocracy claiming special birth rights.
More than that he is also unreasonably dismissive about the perplexing difficulties governments and NGO’s face when trying to tackle the unsustainable practices of a globalized world in a reasonable and fair way, whilst often having to deal with fierce and undermining opposition, the consequences of their own sometimes disastrous choices, as well as the constant pressures of corrupting forces at work within their own ranks. It is a complicated world, we need to give our institutions support through critical evaluation, calling them to account, but not by dismissing them as defunct just because they are struggling.
We might regret that we have become so globalized, so dependent upon technology, so enslaved to luxury, but we are, and we have to find ways of dealing with it. Any sincere attempt to do so is worth taking seriously and worth listening to and criticizing for its value. But what is the proper role of the philosopher in this? Philosophy is expressly not the activity of proposing answers to problems. When a philosopher does so she crosses a line into speculative theory. Some do this very well, such as John Rawls in his justly famous A theory of Justice. But such events are rare.
Philosophy can help us describe the world in abstract universal and generic terms, but because we do not know the world and do not know what we are capable of, we cannot always be sure how to make abstract advice such as the above, particular and concrete I unique situations. This is our eternal challenge in the quest for joy.
Philosophy when carefully distilled to its essence, is the activity of questioning, and through questioning, clarifying, of making sure that you can legitimately say what it is you want to say. When things become conceptually clearer, answers to challenges on the basis of current beliefs and knowledge inevitably start suggesting themselves. But an answer is never more than a theory.
Now as Kurt Lewin says, there is nothing so practical as a good theory. But as soon as a bold theorist believes she has discovered an answer to ‘the problem of the human condition’, take it from me, she hasn’t. And that is because there is no answer to the problem of the human condition. The human condition is not a problem to have an answer to. It is a given to be explored for its possibilities. It is the human condition that creates problems for itself in accommodating itself in its environment and usually has fun doing so. When humanity has begun to suggest that it is itself the problem, we unleash strange forces of ressentiment. Before you know it, we shall start proposing theories that we should all become different. We shall want a different humanity, a humanity 2.0 that does not have the failings we see in ourselves.
We have been there, and we know what such totalitarian exercises lead to. They have been made into a brilliant parable by George Orwell in his Animal Farm. The ideal of equality, so beautifully crafted, is left defenceless against our agonistic and wilful, uncertain humanity, against the greed and opportunism of some, but even against the good‐natured and the gullible of others. In Animal farm there is one animal that deserves our particular attention in this context. It is the horse Boxer who embodies all the tragedy of trying to do good. He is faithful and strong, naïve, and above all ignorant. (And who isn’t?) His motto is that any problem can be solved ‘if we just work harder’. Perhaps at least it has the virtue of being destructive of self rather than destructive of others.
Although, come to think of it…, that is not really true. The problem with Boxer is that through his intrinsic goodness, and his unquestioning belief in the truth of Napoleon’s every word, he keeps an untenable disharmonious, ugly system going for much longer than it would have, had he not been the rock upon which all that change had to build itself. Do you perhaps recognize yourself in this?
Authoritarian governments are not just the fault of those in authority, they are the fault of those who keep them in authority through personal loyalties and unquestioned beliefs. The boxers of this world are truly paradoxical creatures, admirable… and wrong, good and in their goodness, bad. How to solve that? It is our humanity that needs to be accommodated and not some cardboard image of it. And for humanity to flourish it needs to be accommodated intelligently, intelligibly, comfortably, securely and above all enjoyably.
And so, after every mistake, big or small, all we can do is… muddle on. We learn…. we forget… or as Samuel Becket wrote: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Muddling on is what we do. Building on successes until the whole thing collapses again and we have to start from square one. There however, might be room for improvement in the way we do our muddling as long as we make that activity explicit and clarify what we mean with it. That will be my task. And when we know what it entails, we can practice, and become good at it, perhaps even athletic. But preferably taking humanity as a given and not as the problem.
Muddling on seems to me a profound and above all resilient insight on life, not one promoting progress with a capital P, but one allowing us to survive in the hope of being able to flourish and finding joy in doing so. To me it is much more profound and sympathetic than the reductionist, progressivist and idealist alternatives on the market, which require us to go beyond ourselves into a badly conceived humanity 2.0 in which all our foibles miraculously disappear and we appear to know the answers to all problems and behave accordingly. Why do I know that that is not going to happen? I don’t. I only have the weight of history and all the great novelists behind me, like Iris Murdoch, George Orwell and Samuel Becket, whose job it is to exhibit humanity at work on its ideals and ideas reflecting the misery and joy it is capable of, exploring its wealth and its narrative richness.
The first assumption a muddler will have to embrace is to admit to herself that there is no— and cannot be a one‐size‐fits‐all answer to sustainability. I cannot imagine a sustainable future because I would not begin to understand what I should be wishing for, taking humanity as a given. If I were to be able to imagine such a thing, I would undoubtedly be reducing our humanity to some impoverished banal hobbit‐like version of it. The one thing we should not be wishing for is to determine our humanity, fitting it into some unreasonably tailored straitjacket and stopping each of us becoming the bird of paradise or sparrow we dream of becoming, ‘if only things were different’.
But even if I did have an image of a sustainable world that would not be too odious and laughable, I would have to understand that achieving such a thing on a global scale will involve me in questions that cannot be answered so easily. You see, even though I can argue quite happily for all of us to act with consideration for what we do, and on that basis fully and enthusiastically embrace the sustainable turn, and even admire the manifold ventures into sustainable practice, a practice I myself endorse and do my best to comply with, I have discovered that what I call a good idea at one moment becomes a bad idea at another. Moreover, what many of us seem to believe will make us flourish, doesn’t or doesn’t do so without side effects.
On top of that, there are some really uncomfortable questions I cannot seem to resolve and that appear to form obstacles for what we might imagine to be a sustainable future. Here is the shorter list:
What to do with the ever‐increasing population of human beings…. their structured concentration camps of domesticated creatures? Their newly forming landscapes and their wildly sprawling extended phenotype, the built environment? And their wildly sprawling extended phenotype, the built environment?
What to do in the face of a fast‐medicalizing society that as a result of medicine’s success is growing older, more expensive to keep alive, and more numerous?
What to do about our increasing and increasingly helpless dependence upon technology and the consequence of that dependence making it ‘the only answer’ left to us to solve ‘our problems’?
What to do with those who oppose movements towards the sustainable because of their beliefs?
And a relative newcomer on the list: what to do now that we have a superior intelligence operating among us, becoming more intelligent by the day? In the face of such wickedly complicated questions, what is wisdom?
One of the reasons a philosopher poses questions to clarify things and must not cross the line into theory, is that a philosopher has no pretension to be wise. To claim wisdom is an act of arrogance. She loves wisdom. In fact, the love of wisdom is engraved in her job title: ‘philo(love or desire for) sophos (wisdom)’. If you ask a philosopher what wisdom is she will clarify the idea of it as an abstraction of relationships and leave it to you to come with the concrete filling. And there is a good reason for that.
Philippa Foot, a contemporary of Iris Murdoch and a colleague philosopher of hers at Oxford in the nineteen fifties defined wisdom, I think rightly, as ‘knowing good means to good ends and knowing their value’. This is a clear definition and I think one of the best I have come across. But again, it is just a clarification of an abstract idea awaiting concrete infill giving us no hint as to what might fit the bill. Foot would not be able to tell you what actions are wise. And that is because humanity and its environment are neither of them determined. We can learn, move, adapt, change, invent, build fantastic extensions to our phenotype. Philosophers clarify conceptual relationships, but not in concrete terms what is to be related. To be wise we need concrete theories about what things are good and what good ways there are to achieve them. For this I, as a philosopher, look to you as designers, inventors, and engineers to come up with possibilities. All I can do, is tell you when, where and how you might be talking nonsense.
kant's categorical imperative
Let’s go through the possible ethical theories. Ethics, the philosophical discipline concerned with the question how to act has tempted a number of philosophers to cross the line from philosophy, the love of wisdom into theory: the practice of trying to act wisely. Here are four of the best:
First there is Kant’s categorical imperative which says that you should act only according to that maxim whereby you can will that your action should become a universal law. It is a very tempting stance. However, all or most of our concrete actions will have to be disqualified. Almost none of my concrete actions can, in the light of our humanity, be properly universalized. Except perhaps the action of constant reflection and the agile reform of my actions relative to the newest insights into what sustainability and circularity mean. Universalize the use of wood in the built environment? I cannot think of a worse idea! The opportunities for abuse are far too easy!
Second, we might consult the ethics of care in which we are asked to turn our backs to such universalizing tendencies and show empathy and compassion by privileging interpersonal relations. Again, this maxim sounds good and is good, but in the light of the question posed earlier, such an attitude is no less problematic.
Sure, it informs much sustainable design. After all what is sustainable design if it is not caring? And it informs much of what is best about humanity, such as the design of an inclusive society, the promotion of social sustainability. But it is also our ethics of care which has led us into this mess! Without care expressed in medical progress, in the form of international aid, the development of supposedly ‘helpful’ technologies of personal freedom such as the car and the washing machine, our mortality rates would be far, far higher and we would be kept in what some people might call a more ‘sustainable’ demographic ‘balance’ using low‐tech slavery to get us by. And yet we cannot dismiss an ethics of care off‐hand. What would a human being be like without it?
And that leads me to Virtue ethics, whereby we look at an action in the light of the kind of person we ourselves would want to be. Virtue ethics encourages us to act according to an idealized image of ourselves, crafting in ourselves to the form of virtues such as courage, prudence, temperance, love, justice, and charity. Again, it sounds good saying things like ‘I want to act sustainably’ and ‘I want to be the best version of myself’.
But such an approach is similarly confronted with its own limits in the light of the above. It will strain at the edges as our need to address painful questions will set one virtue up against the other. How can we call a decision courageous when it will necessarily increase the injustices of the world? How can we call a decision just when most people will not see its justice? Nevertheless, that is what we ask our leaders to do: make painful and unpopular decisions that ultimately we know to be for the best.
So perhaps we should look at the consequences of what we do. That is the particular concern of Consequentialist ethics, which projects the possible consequences of our actions to provide guidance in the preparation of our actions. This one looks seriously hopeful. Taking account of consequences might help us to ‘do what is for the best’. This might give us the tool to take some pretty radical decisions. Or rather it would except that we do not generally know what we want and therefore what
would be for the best. That we are in a crisis nobody can any longer sensibly deny, but as to what actions should be taken to get us out of it, our thinking still differs greatly. Do we know how many people the world could sustain with the right technology? Is building with steel intrinsically bad or is it bad because we have issues with energy? And if we solve those?
The reason we cannot simply go with any one of these ethical theories is because we do not know what we are capable of as human beings. A human being is a creature who spends her life getting to know herself. Gnothi se auton, Socrates advised us and it is good advice, but we can only do that by questioning ourselves thoroughly and not settling too quickly for an answer. Socrates was the philosopher who was honest about the fact that he himself knew little and spent his working life making those too confident of their answers, doubt themselves. It cost him his life.
Wisdom has to assume knowledge of good means to good ends, but our ability and wish to learn keeps moving the goal posts! That is what is so exciting about humanity as a given to explore. The current debate about the uses and threats of Artificial Intelligence is a fascinating case in point. In order to find out what we are up against we have to familiarize ourselves with its possibilities. That takes a long time and the quest to explore the subject will contain triumphs and tragedies, comedies and farces, which will no doubt become the subject of great novels.
The point is that we cannot deny our humanity, our all too human humanity. What, for instance, to do with the group that opposes sustainable development? The climate deniers, the ones that quietly think to themselves ‘Après mois le deluge…; or the downright evil who with childish delight celebrate destruction and pain, or the merely lazy who cannot be bothered with anything?
John Rawls in his theory of justice claims that a fair society can sustain a measure of destructive behaviour. But the radicalization of the skeptical voice is no longer a minority. Huge populations are actively working against the sustainable turn. In fact, we can hardly call it a sustainable turn any longer. The world is polarizing. And war is surely not part of any sustainable strategy? He argued that utopian visions in which we require humanity to change radically in order for that utopian vision to be realized are themselves destructive of the very humanity they try to save. Our genetic code spent millions of years evolving into what we have very slowly become, the undetermined learning creature we are, constantly in search of wisdom and always uncertain.
Our freedom is a function of our uncertainty. There is no realistic empirical basis to suggest that human beings will change their nature and their essence overnight. So, we shall be stuck with the humanity that the great Dadaist Dr. Walter Serner characterised so penetratingly in 1917: “Mankind is too weak to be really good, too good to be really bad.”
What to do? None of the ethical theories by themselves help me arrive at a well‐weighed stance. Perhaps I should grab for the most radical option. Kierkegaard’s Troens Ridder or knight of faith. Perhaps this unlikely creature could at least give us a way out of having to explain our actions. Kierkegaard’s knight of faith is an eccentric and deeply lonely creature. He was called into play in Kierkegaard’s famous Fear and Trembing and again in Repetition both published in the year 1843. The first starts with an episode in the bible that is fundamentally opaque: Abraham’s attempt to sacrifice his son Isaac. This act cannot be properly explained. Of course, we can come up with explanations such as the interpretation given it by the theologians as an act of supreme loyalty to a God who apparently is psychologically needy for that kind of affirmation. Cynics and psychiatrists might explain it differently. But all that is of no use. Fundamentally it is inexplicable as the action of ‘a good man’. How can you possibly want to show loyalty to a God that demands this of you? How can you not be mad and disturbed in some way?
And yet Kierkegaard does not judge. Abraham and Mary, according to him, are the only known examples of knights of faith, people willing to undergo the scorn of society to hold what they what they think is right and never try to explain themselves. Where would that lead me in my quest for an ethical stance regarding my place in this changing world? It is a frightening thought, far too Dionysian, opening up an awful dark chasm of lonewolfery, and yet, that is what we see happening around
us. People making their own mind up and acting on their own misguided faith. Faith used to be the greatest of virtues. But think carefully of what faith is, it is essentially ungrounded belief, belief for which there is no evidence except for a book that claims divine authorship. Hm. So then, how should we act? And having acted, how to look at ourselves in the mirror afterwards? The five ethical systems are all part of the answer, but any single one of them cannot be the whole answer. That is what muddling on acknowledges.
Because we cannot agree what is wise, we have an agonistic and essentially muddling way of proceeding to action, having to accommodate different views on both good means and good ends. Which is why I prefer the messy, sometimes exasperating muddling on of a democratic government —with all its intractable problems— to clean authoritarian solutions that presume to know what needs to be done and who are not frightened to project a clean image of the kind of world they wish for. Each of them is hateful even if democracy is sometimes exasperating. Let us criticize our institutions by all means, let us criticise their decisions with good reasoning but let us criticise them in the spirit of reform and not in the spirit of the destructive lust whereby La Cittá Nuova had to be built on top of Venice, whereby the Plan Voisin had to be built on top of the loveliest area of Paris. Why? Their plans were great, but why did they have to destroy what was already there, what had grown slowly?
I now go back to where I began. The world will take its course. I do not really know what a sustainable world would look like, I shall rely on your imagination there. I know what I admire, or at least I think I do. In an abstract and universal way, I admire design decisions that make us and our environment flourish but as we know, that is not yet enough, that is just clarification and not concretization. All design decisions have an alethic, aesthetic, and ethical dimension in the sense that all decisions involve the notions of truth, beauty and goodness and relate them to each other. We believe what we believe to be true, we conceive in beauty whereby our thinking and our experience must harmonize with what we believe to be true, and only then can we act in goodness. In this sense all design
decisions turn on what the two earliest architectural theorists have taught us.
All design decisions have to take account of stability and usefulness in beauty. And beauty is that reasoned harmony whereby no part can be added, taken away or altered but for the worse. I call it ‘het verprutspunt (or spoiling point) of design, of all intentional deliberate action. And because we do not know what human being is capable of, we each of us have to make up our own mind as to when we have achieved that moment of harmony; it is best decided by those in love with wisdom and willing to learn. But do not ask me what is wise to do, what is good to do. I genuinely do not know. Perhaps we should work it out together in a pleasant and open conversation.
Thank you.
This talk is dedicated to Mylène, 23.05.2023
ASSUMPTIONS
Having proposed an answer to our problems, even if it is a very weak one, it is now time to make muddling a little more explicit, as an activity that we cannot help doing because all our actions are necessarily both informed by long terms strategies projected into dreamlike futures and reformed in short‐term tactics having to deal with the broken bits of that dream. Muddling on works on a number of inescapable assumptions that each muddler accepts at least implicitly. These can then be complemented by a number of desiderata that might help to make things easier...
A muddler’s necessary assumptions
1. No concrete action is universalizable. The world is too complex to go with one‐size fits all solutions. We need to strategize on all scales and in all situations from the global to the local and from the point of view of all ethical approaches weighed against each other. If we want to do that well it might help to be agile enough to react to signals reasonably and reform ideas, constantly but conservatively. To give an example, it is impossible to say that one architectural or structural practice is bad in itself. It can only be pronounced good or bad in the context of a particular situation and acknowledge that this situation has the potential for change.
2. No totalitarian conception of the environment will help us. Any solution that excludes any aspect of our humanity and makes people as well as other creatures and things mere means is not a solution but a cause of trouble further down the line. “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” (Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 4:429) Now there is bit of good universal advice, except that it is again not concrete and we will muddle along to make such advice translate into concrete action.
3. There is no system that cannot be subverted, except one, the system of muddling on because it works on the assumption that everything can be subverted. When a muddler is knocked down, she gets up again and finds a response. The paradox of this thesis is illustrated by the fact that social institutions trying to ensure sustainable and just practices, will only ever succeed on the basis of strict conformance with the rules they set out, whilst at the same time needing to be ready and willing to reform themselves when they see their practices or their own corrupting moves and bad decision‐making becoming destructive and untenable. That tension needs constant tinkering.
4. No information is infallible. We model our world conceptually. We do not know the truth about the world and every theory about it is exactly that, a working theory. That process of conceptual modelling in the form of images we make, situations we describe with words or calculations we make of constructions are only ever as good as their practical effect. Concrete certainties are hard to come by. As such doubt is a healthy attitude as long as you are courageous enough to commit to a position you believe in and prudent enough to reject it when it proves itself wrong.
5. Lastly, we do not know what we are capable of. At the very least we are capable of everything we have done and achieved so far. But we are on the cusp of a new adventure. Who knows what that will bring.
Desiderata for good muddling
1. A good muddler is confident that we are in this world for no transcendent reason. We are here, and, as we are here, we have nothing better to do than to make our life flourish. That is best done by making the environment we want to flourish in flourish. Much of what makes us flourish is known and caught in wise maxims. But be careful: we are an indeterminate species. We can learn, we can learn to flourish in yet undetermined ways.
2. A good muddler understands her own intrinsic freedom to determine her own good as a result of her uncertainty as to what concrete action needs to be taken in certain situations. She works quietly towards win‐win decisions.
3. A good muddler takes on board what she observes, is open to what others tell her, but makes up her own mind. She muddles on, unilaterally, lonelily if she cannot agree with others, together if and where she can.
4. A good muddler works with a generous spirit and finds it useful to stop blaming others and contradicting them. We are all muddling along, after all. Some of us in a clearly misguided way, others in a seemingly hopeful way. We are all doing our best.
5. To bring the misguided onto the right path is difficult especially as we cannot be sure we are not ourselves on a misguided path, like Boxer. As such, lead only by example.
6. Give trust and respect to all and everything not because someone or something deserves it, but because it serves you well to do so. To be untrusting is to make yourself ill.
7. Voluntary autonomous action is preferable over regulation, is preferable over coercion is preferable over violence. However, all four forms of persuasion have their place in a society, even violence, preferably vested in an institution that we give a monopoly on it and which we then keep in check. But inevitably violence will break out, if only because for some it is a joy to be violent.
8. We all have the right to determine our freedom and that means that freedom needs to be regulated so that no one claims freedoms that oppress, restrict, or contradict other people’s right to their freedom. In this way regulation is inevitable and a great good but also a source of great frustration. And where regulation becomes restrictive and oppressive, we need agonistic forces to reform them.
