January 30, 2016
Even before the time Plato, the work of philosophers has been to ask the Great Questions: What is Truth? Who should rule? What is Justice? Do we have free will? What is the meaning of life? How should we organize society so that everyone benefits? And though all agree that there is no one correct answer to any of these questions, few hold back from giving us their best version. And since new answers are always emerging, all of them are seen as tentative and temporary.
In The Art of Life, philosopher John Kekes is brave enough to insist that he knows which of the Great Questions is the most important and why. It is “What is a Good Life?” And after this bold statement, he moves on to describe the part of a good life that is the most important: “Living it,” he insists. His argument is straightforward: “Living a good life is the most important of all human activities,” he writes, “because the importance of everything else derives from it.” Thus, unless we know what a good life is, and unless we are successful in living it, everything else loses importance and value.
Finding and living a good life is a universal quest insists Kekes: “Everyone is trying – or wishes to be in a position of trying – to live a good life.” Yet many are unsuccessful. “Many lives are bad,” Kekes believes, and for two reasons: Because “the activity is difficult and there are formidable obstacles to doing it well.”
Why do many people fail at living “the most important of all human activities?” They are not willing to put in the effort that is required, and they are unable to manage successfully the “formidable obstacles” that stand in their way. They lack motivation or skill or both.
Keyes identifies several of these “formidable” obstacles that make success in living a good life such a challenge:
“The art of life is making a good life for oneself,” he writes, “…is an art because it requires individuals to make a lifelong creative effort that no one else can make for them, and for which no blueprint exists. For a good life must be constructed out of one’s character, circumstances, experiences, and ideals.”
The Quintessential Wicked Problem
Although Kekes is probably unaware of the the term “wicked problems,” his definition of a good life and his discussion of the challenges of living it make clear that he is talking about wicked problems. Here are some of the wicked elements that are part of his discussion of the art of living a good life:
– A good life doesn’t exist apart from the individuals who seek it. It must be “constructed.”
– It is constructed out of each individual’s “character, circumstances, experiences, and ideals.” In other words , everyone’s “constructed” life will be different. Keyes understands this: “It [ a good life] will vary with individuals, societies, times, and places.”
– No one can make a good life for another. Each person is required to be architect, builder, and designer and eventually resident of the structure that is one’s “good life.”
– While there are experts, gurus, or consultants who offer fully-functioning models of the good life, their version, while it may make sense for them, carries no greater claim to truth than one’s own, and may even be worse.
– It is an artistic endeavor. Creating and living a good life requires creativity.
– No blueprint exists, no instruction book is available.
– And finally, it must be a lifelong process.
While there are more definitional elements that make living a good life a wicked problem, this list will do. It is a prototype for all wicked problems.
Adding More “Wickedness”
Since the struggle of defining what is a good life, and then with living it is a universal one, it becomes an irresistible opportunity to those who want to earn either glory or money or both by telling other people how to do it. Almost always their advice only adds little but more “wickedness” to what is already a wicked problem. Here are several examples:
E. F. Schumacher
In A Guide for the Perplexed, E. F Schumacher’s makes this recommendation:
The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing.
From this several complications follow:
How is one to know what a “bad thing” is?
While there are some things that almost all of us see as “bad,” for the most part whether something is good or bad is a judgment call. What I think is bad, you think is good, and vice versa.
If there’s more than one person?
An individual may be able to define what is bad and then set about making out of it something good. But what about two people – partners, parents, a couple? And what about a team of people? An organization, or a nation? When numbers of people are added into the endeavor, reaching agreement on what is bad and how to make something good out of it becomes an even greater problem to be grappled with.
Establishing priorities?
Generally, one can assume that there is not just one bad thing in the world that needs to be changed, but many. Priorities have to be established. The “worst” bad thing needs to occupy the number one place on the list. Making that happen is in itself a difficult problem.
Making Something Good?
Agreement on the “good” thing to be created from the bad involves the same problems as trying to define the bad. The more people are involved, the more complications will arise.
And then there is the transformation problem. Who has acquired the appropriate knowledge and mastered the skills required to make a good thing out of this bad thing ?
Thomas Huxley
In the 19th century, Thomas Huxley, scientist and philosopher, gave this advice about living a good life:
Learn what is true in order to do what is right.
From this more complications follow:
Learn What is True
It’s a safe bet that no advice has been proffered as often as “Learn the truth.” Yet there is wide disagreement on what is the truth just as there is on how to go about learning it. There are hundreds of versions of “the truth” about any important issue. Which version is the “true” one and how to go about finding and eventually learning it are questions that few of us are able to manage.
Do What is Right
It is a mistake to assume that once a person knows the truth (whatever that is), then he or she will do it. Among the most important of the Gaps that we all contend with is the Knowing – Doing Gap: We know more things that we should be doing than we actually do.
Frederick Buechner
Theologian Frederick Buchner’s offers his recommendation as to how we are to find and then live a good life :
To find your mission is life is to discover the intersection between your heart’s deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger.
And here is one more big complication:
The World’s Deep Hunger
It may be possible for an individual to discover what is his or her “heart’s deep gladness,” but uncovering the “world’s deep hunger” seems impossible. There must be hundreds, or even thousands of “deep hungers” in the world. How does one go about finding one that is not only available but also feasible? And even if one could find it, how is one to make an intersection between the two? Wicked problems all.
Advice Makes Things Worse
Trying to discover what is a good life, and then living it is hard enough. It is only made more difficult when other people give advice about how to do it.
Giving advice is without question the most frequent way one person tries to help another. And without question it is one of the least helpful things one person can do for another. Advice always adds another layer of “wickedness” to an already difficult problem. The one who gives the advice feels confident that he or she knows what is best, something that is almost never true. The one who hears the advice has no idea how to take the words and translate them into action (“Learn what is true in order to do what is right,” for example). If he or she tries to “take it,” and makes an effort to incorporate the advice into their lives, there is little chance that anything good will come of it. But something bad may. And then there is someone to blame: the person who gave the advice!
After having stated unequivocally that giving advice is a bad idea, here is my advice. When someone is struggling with wicked problems, don’t give advice. Be present, listen, give support, and if possible, join the struggle.
Living the Questions
While novelists, philosophers and theologians, among others, are in the business of asking the Big Questions, most of the rest of us are much more concerned with living them. Living the Big Questions is what we do when we come face to face with them; they often turn into problems, dilemmas and crises.
The philosopher’s game of raising the Big Questions and then and debating them is completely different from trying to live them. Once they are out on the table, what usually follows are spirited discussions, heated debates and argumentative arguments. All of the players bring to the debate different perspectives, experiences, and rationalizations, and while some insist that they have found an answer, no one is universally acknowledged as having discovered it.
Most of the time in this game things go no further than the debates and the discussions. Yet if someone goes beyond the debating and discussing and describes someone who is actually trying to live one of the Big Questions (a novelist), or tells someone how to do it (a philosopher), or even tries to live it himself or herself, then a door opens into the world of wicked problems.
Grappling with the wicked problems that arise when trying to live the Big Questions requires a different approach than just talking about them. It starts with ignoring most of the advice from those who insist that they know. It means moving directly into the problem without any clear idea of where to go or what to do. Earlier I described this as “getting down into the swamp!” Moving from High Ground to Swamp means getting down into the mess and muck of the problem. It means getting clear about where you are starting from and where you want to end up. It means pushing hard to move forward, then dealing with each obstacle as it appears. It means making sure that you are learning from your inevitable mistakes and predictable failures. It means inviting other people to travel with you and taking advantage of their suggestions and feedback.
This advice – get down and dirty, move, try everything, learn, involve others, keep going – is the exception that proves the rule to my earlier categorical statement that advice is almost always bad. No one has put these ideas into words as eloquently and as powerfully as the poet Rainer Marie Rilke. In Letters to a Young Poet he wrote:
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to live the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign language. Don’t search for the answers which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.