Blessedness and the Zen road to affluence

How can we be happy with less?

Happiness as sufficiency

What is happiness? I was watching the k-drama Summer Strike about Lee Yeo-reum, a young woman who works a high-stress job in Seoul where she is being bullied by her sexist boss. One day, she decides that enough is enough. So she takes her savings and moves to a small town and decides to try to live for a year on her savings, living in a cheap rental (which, it turns out, has a sinister history that is central to the plot).

In the final episode (as happens often in k-dramas), Yeo-Rum has found a new way to organize her life (to not spoiler it too much for you). She reflects on what happiness might be now that she has found it.

I thought about what happiness is. I looked it up in the dictionary. Happiness is a state of being pleased, fulfilled, and content in life. I thought this definition was too long, so I decided to shorten it.

What does she land on?

Happiness is the state of being sufficient. She surveys the different aspects of her changed life and she finds they are sufficient. She lives doing a low-wage job in a low-cost of living area, having lots of spare time after her early morning round as a postwoman.

I came back home thirsty and I drank water. It was sufficient…I hung up the laundry and it smelled nicely of detergent and it made a neat clapping sound. It was sufficient. I dozed off at the library, thanks to the hypnotic afternoon sun light… It was a sweet nap. It was sufficient (Summer Strike, Episode 12).

This sets both a high and a low bar. That sense of sufficiency, of low-cost and low-want living, does not take much, and yet, as we will see, it is demanding, and we live in societies where it is not easily met.

Spinoza's beatitude

I wondered, what would it take for me to be happy the way Lee Yeo-Rum is at the end of the movie? What would it take for a society to make this pursuit of sufficiency possible? I was reminded of the series again reading Alex Douglas's forthcoming book on Baruch de Spinoza's notion of “beatitude,” entitled The Philosophy of Hope, Beatitude in Spinoza.

As Douglas points out, beatitude (blessedness) is a central element that unifies Spinoza's metaphysics, ethics and political philosophy, and yet it has received surprisingly little attention.

Baruch de Spinoza, as an early modern (1632-1677) author with a religious (Jewish) upbringing and many Christian friends, was interested in what it would take to lead a blessed life. Douglas interprets Spinoza's overall philosophical project as a philosophy of hope: whereas some religious traditions such as Christianity promise a potential blessedness after you die, Spinoza maintains that blessedness is achievable in this life, not in a hypothetical afterlife.

Indeed, Spinoza argues in part V of the Ethics that many people have the wrong idea about blessedness. A common view is that to live virtuously is to not give in to our desires at the expense of others, and that virtue is a “burden” that we endure for the sake of a later reward in Heaven (as pictured in the engraving below and countless other representations).

The Reign of Heavens, a German 17th century engraving held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Indeed, for the common people blessedness is the reward of virtue that you obtain after death. If people "believed instead that minds die with the body" they "would prefer to govern all their actions according to lust, and to obey fortune rather than themselves." That sort of idea is captured in the YOLO attitude, the attitude that happiness means getting a lot of fun and exciting experiences before the grim reaper gets you. However, Spinoza overturns conventional wisdom:

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; nor do we enjoy it because we restrain our lusts; on the contrary, because we enjoy it, we are able to restrain them. (5P42)

In this notion of blessedness, there is a deep unity of virtue and blessedness. It consists of our knowledge and love of God (note: God in Spinoza's sense is quite different from the way he is conceived typically in monotheistic religions). This in turn leads to our adequate knowledge of the world. This knowledge helps us to identify how we come in the grip of passions, which helps us to loosen that grip and become freer.

As creatures, we act to preserve ourselves (to nourish ourselves, to keep ourselves housed and clothed). But our passions, which guide us, can give us false ideas. They give us the impression we need to chase prestige, excessive material wealth, or other (in Spinoza's views) empty goods. In doing this, we get more and more in the thralls of the passions in a bad spiral of desires and trying to fulfill them, which Spinoza calls “human bondage.” However, when we understand ourselves as modes of God and as part of an interconnected single substance, we cannot but rationally love God, and we become truly free.

Now, since Spinoza denies free will (in humans, even in God), this freedom does not mean that you can act according to a libertarian free will, but rather, that you are no longer in the thralls of the passions. Spinoza puts up an exemplar of a perfect human being who has achieved mental quietude or true peace of mind. He recognizes (P42Schol) that this kind of sagacity is very hard to attain. But then, sages are rare, and (closing sentence) "all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."

If I read this idea of beatitude together with the Political-Theological Treatise (TTP) and the Political Treatise, two works by Spinoza in political philosophy, then he also has a recipe for how to achieve this blessedness in societies. We cannot act alone, and living solitarily, without mutual aid, would be a wretched, difficult life indeed. However, we can use the instruments of government of the state to act collectively. We are often harming each other in our short-sighted pursuits that are not rational. The state would reign us in, and thus allow us to live more rationally. The ideal state, therefore, does not turn us into automata or slaves, but quite the opposite, it liberates us so we can engage in rational joint projects such as the arts and science. Hence "The purpose of the state is really freedom" (TTP, original Latin: “Finis ergo Reipublicae revera libertas est.”).

The Zen road to affluence

Even in my own (not hugely long yet) lifetime I have noticed a shift about how much more personal wealth is needed to maintain the same level of mental quietude, which comes in part from insulation of certain bad things that can happen to you. Yes, part of it is that I moved from a country with better public provisions (Belgium) to the US where it seems to me like a formidable task, as even basic healthcare is not guaranteed.

But even prior to that, while still living in Europe, I noticed a decided shift in 2008, when the financial crash happened. After the crash, an orchestration of austerity measures came in place. We'd need to tighten the belt; we should not rely on the state but try to scramble together our own means. Rental prices soared. Everything became so expensive.

One great thing about states is how they allow us potentially to organize things that would be very expensive and burdensome to arrange for individuals on their own: public transport, public school, public works, etc. It is much cheaper and more convenient to have a collective old-age pension than to have individual pension plans, or to have subsidized college education rather than student debt and college saving funds.

When we have a well-functioning state, we can pursue that low-key state of happiness where we do not have to pursue wealth, where we don't try to eek out savings to make sure we don't starve when we retire or where our kids can study, where ultimately it's even OK if you do not have a well-paying job, because even if you don't, it will be sufficient.

Marshall Sahlins, David Graeber's supervisor and anthropologist, reflected on the “original affluent society," which he identifies as hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers now live in states (sometimes at the societal periphery) but they did not before, and yet, their social organization, which has large and sophisticated networks of mutual aid, does achieve something similar to the states described in Spinoza.

Hunter-gatherer social communities deliberately put checks and balances on individuals’ chasing wealth and prestige and help people to be not destitute so they can enjoy flourishing lives that involve plenty of art, music, relaxation, opportunity for collective childcare, and more.

Sahlins argues that this economic and political insight gives us a different take on what affluence means:

By the common understanding, an affluent society is one in which all the people’s material wants are easily satisfied. To assert that the hunters are affluent is to deny then that the human condition is an ordained tragedy, with man the prisoner at hard labor of a perpetual disparity between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means. For there are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be “easily satisfied” either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception … makes assumptions peculiarly appropriate to market economies: that man’s wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improvable: thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that “urgent goods” become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty—with a low standard of living. That, I think, describes the hunters (Sahlins, 1972, 1–2).

However, as we have seen, since the 1970s or so, western countries have collectively come in the grip of a great privatization project, which became greatly accelerated in 2008. I often wonder if my parents’ generation, the Boomers at the time hippies in the 1960s, had some sense of what was happening when they embraced low-key lifestyles, experimented with drugs and communes, and read the Daodejing (at the time romanized as Tao te Ching) en masse. It didn't work. I look at my richest aunt right now and her private pool and sauna and her many trips (she married well, to a guy with a high-paying job) and wonder how she ever lived in a commune, and went around motorbiking with her boyfriend and washing dishes across Europe in the 1960s. What happened?

Part of beatitude is structural: we do not necessarily want to pursue all wealth and goods, but we are part of societies that seem to put this as a precondition, and you can of course, buy into it wholeheartedly.

There are of course many countercultural movements: pub music sessions, FaceBook no-buying exchange groups, and more. But as getting basic necessities becomes ever harder and money gets funneled into fewer and fewer hands, the Zen road to affluence and that low-key beatitude goes ever more out of reach.