The Odyssean option

Comments on the left and the good life

Issue 36 of The Point has a symposium on “The left and the good life.” You should read the whole thing, but my favorite contribution is by my old friend Jonny Thakkar, who argues that the left cannot live by equality alone. A politics devoted only to reducing injustice has a hard time determining what the purpose of reducing injustice is: what are we trying to make possible through removing inequality and domination?

This essay suggests that the liberal left does have a vision of the good life, even if it is not always very good at recognizing it. It is a second-order vision of a world in which many forms of life are available, and open to people who were not born into them. I call this The Odyssean Option.

One of the running themes throughout The Point’s forum on The Left and the Good Life is that the left is much better at articulating what is wrong with the present than describing what would be good in the future. We live in a world defined by domination, exclusion, exploitation, racism, sexism, alienation, climate catastrophe, and whatever else composes the current polycrisis. After some epochal transformation, things will be better. But what will we do then, and why will it be good? That question is often left for later, and later never comes.

Jonny Thakkar, to his great credit, tries to give an answer, grounded in an idea of cultivating essential human capacities, or what Marx called species-being. The good life is one devoted to the development and exercise of human potential. The political project of the left, on this view, is to create a world in which all people can realize these potentials, which necessitates public provision of the basic conditions under which that is possible.

What I like about Jonny’s answer is that it goes beyond negation. He wants to know what human beings should actually be able to do and become once the barriers have been removed. Things get a bit tricky when one tries to say exactly what those essential human capacities are, and how they will be provided. In a wide-ranging and intellectually rich conversation on the matter, Jonny and his interlocutors at Wisdom of Crowds seem to agree they would include the arts and sports. Jonny discussed the latter, and pointed to swimming as an example of a basic form of physical development that, unfortunately, in the United States is too often treated as a private or club good.

I think Jonny is right about the philosophical point. But the empirical picture is more complicated, and worth paying some attention to. Jonny and I went to grad school together in Chicago, and the City of Chicago actually does provide a great number of public swimming pools free of charge, not to mention public beach access and lifeguarding services along Lake Michigan. Philadelphia also offers over 60 free outdoor public pools. Last I checked, Chicago and Philadelphia are in the USA.

Chicago also offers lots of free cultural festivals and arts programming, both in central locations such as Millennium Park, and distributed throughout its neighborhoods, often in ways that express and celebrate the local communities. When I and collaborators counted the number of public libraries in US zip codes, Chicago had one of the highest rates among major cities. It also offers a lot of free tennis courts. They are not all the most well maintained, but many are pretty good. Nobody I think would call Chicago a socialist experiment in which capitalism is unwelcome. But you can develop the swimming, music-listening, book-reading, festival-going, and tennis-playing parts of your human potential there rather well, if you so desire. It isn’t perfect, but we’re talking about the good here.

None of this is to say that Jonny is wrong. It is to say that his question becomes more concrete once we bring it down from “capitalism” and “socialism” or America vs Europe to the level of institutional design, not to mention cities and neighborhoods. When I lived in Chicago, if you wanted to play tennis, you often had to wait for a public court, and more than a few times fights would break out over who had next. How can a problem like that be solved? Consider as an alternative my current city, Toronto. Toronto is in Canada and you might therefore conclude that it would provide tennis courts as a public good, at least more directly and fulsomely than the more laissez-faire USA.

In fact, the city does have much free leisure swimming and many public tennis courts, but it also relies in part on community tennis clubs operating on public land. These clubs charge (quite reasonable) membership fees, run leagues and lessons, maintain courts, and are required to provide public access hours. In exchange for operating on public land, they must make the courts available to non-members for six prime-time hours per week, including two hours on weekends or holidays. They are also required to have membership accessibility policies, including financial and physical accommodations. This is not laissez-faire capitalism, and it is not state socialism. It is, well, Canada.

I bring up this mundane example of tennis courts because it helps to make more concrete what the vision of the good life as cultivation of human potential really means. We seem ready to agree that the arts, sports, and natural beauty would be a part of that, but should these be directly embedded in and provided by state planners?

Philosopher Joseph Heath in his The Machinery of Government recounts the sad story of urban planners taking to heart the proposition that nature is good and all people should have access to nature.

In the early 20th century, many urban planners were persuaded that parks would produce ‘moral improvement’ in the working classes—a judgment that was particularly influential in the decision to raze working-class slums and replace them with residential towers surrounded by green space. This backfired spectacularly, as the green space remained largely unused, making it a magnet for crime. As a result, the ‘parks are good for you’ judgment that prevailed in the first half of the 20th century is now regarded as involving an impermissible partiality toward a particular set of values. Some people like trees and green spaces, some people do not. Planners tend to share the values of those who do, but it is a clear violation of liberal neutrality to use that as a basis for decision. No matter how much planners may like parks, they must ultimately defer to patterns of use.

In a situation like this, the commitment of planners to confidently and knowingly provide the specific good of access to nature for all is exactly what produced dangerous and neglected swathes of urban blight. You could say that they should not do that, and yes they should not, but if you ask what they should do instead – and you resist the temptation to say that all should become new men of socialism – this leads you to the kinds of tedious technocratic cost-benefit and willingness to pay analyses that Heath describes in the Machinery of Government. In other words, to technocratic liberalism. That world is often dull, but dull is not always wrong, and if your vision of the good life does not include it, or is so repelled by it as to wish to look past it to Utopia or a Glorious Golden Age, so much the worse for that vision.

Having spent a fair amount of time actually working on city cultural policy and planning, it is hard to avoid the liberal’s intuition that, yes, the swimming, the arts, and tennis might be very good, but it is not our job as planners to make any specific form of the arts or sports or any other candidate good the target of a political program. We want to give room and resources for people to pursue their visions of the good as they understand them, create organizations and practices for realizing them, while remaining attentive to whether anyone actually uses them, not to mention unintended consequences of our own efforts to provide them. And that is good enough, at least for creatures like us.

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That’s a thin notion of the good, and I, like Jonny and the other contributors to the Point forum, do feel some compulsion to say more. What I want to say is that this very vision, the second-order one in which many people have the chance to pursue many different life plans, is a worthy project in its own right, animated by a vision of the good life. You could call that vision one of Odyssean adventure, or maybe one of Baudelairean flânerie. Or maybe a combination of both. I’ll call it The Odyssean Option.

The Odyssean spirit of adventure is one of entering into some new country or arena, finding some challenges thrust on you, and then moving along to the next one. Each place you go, you have to learn its local norms and customs, you have to open yourself to them, make yourself adaptable and flexible. You have to be a person of many shapes, clever, wily, and yes maybe a bit of a trickster. You have to enter deeply enough to learn, but not so completely that you never leave, or lose the drive to move on, which would ipso facto end the quest. You have to resist mistaking any one island for the whole of life.

This ideal in turn depends on a rich set of norms regarding relationships between hosts and guests. Hosts should welcome guests, give them safe passage, allow them to dine and enjoy their company, participate in the life of their community – without expecting them to fully conform to local norms or display complete commitment to them. They should allow the guest to move on when they are ready. The guest should enter into the world of the host with curiosity and humility, allowing the host to guide them to what is worth paying attention to. The guest should be ready to set aside worldly knowingness temporarily and allow herself to be carried by the inner logic of the time and place. And yet, all should be ready to move on when that moment has passed.

This is the Odyssean version, and if you like that kind of thing, it can help to envision the liberal spirit as a kind of heroic quest to sail from island to island. But maybe you are more of a city dweller, more of a modernist. Then the Baudelairien version could be a better place to start. The Baudelairean flâneur moves from scene to scene, tasting what it has to offer, peeking in to its events and activities, even joining for a while, blending in enough to temporarily seem very much like a full member. But always holding some part of themselves in reserve, remembering in the back of the mind that there is another scene to visit tomorrow, and more ways for this very scene to manifest and join elements than it does in this specific location.

In this way, flâneurs distinguish themselves from both the single-minded political activist and the empty-minded contemplative mystic. In contrast to the activist, the flâneur never fully, wholeheartedly commits to any scene in which they participate; they keep some part of the self in reserve. And unlike the mystic, the flâneur does not withdraw from life into speculative contemplation; they are instead out and about, on the streets, prowling the alleys. Here too is a vision of the liberal good life, moving along from street scene to street scene, like a rolling stone: Baudelaire’s heroism of modern life, with its own vices and challenges to constantly be on the lookout for, which require courage and conviction to face up to.

To be sure, you might worry that if everybody adopted this somewhat ironic view, then nobody would ever fully commit to anything. For my part, I’m not too worried about that. For one thing, we can worry about it if it happens, rather than waiting until the Revolution. For another, it is hard for me to imagine what that would look like.

Take my own enthusiasms of boxing and curling. A scene does not need everyone to be equally committed. In fact, most scenes depend on gradients of commitment. My gym is full of a range of people, some training for amateur or even professional competition, other high level hobbyists, others there for fun and fitness. This kind of mix is what makes the entire gym hold together, and the casuals do not undermine the small number of highly committed competitors. Rather, this creates a broader social environment in which their own commitment shines out in its contingent splendor. And anyway, while neither boxing nor curling fully consume me, I am still pretty darn into them, even while leaving enough room in my self to cultivate other pursuits, such as Substack essays, academic research, and being a solid upstanding family man and community member.

Yes, you could call this cosmopolitanism, and that is probably okay. But if the other guys are going to bring the Benedictine Option to the fight, you should not bring a knife. You should pull out the Odyssean Option.

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Above, I mentioned that we had counted the number of public libraries in Chicago and compared that number to all other US cities and neighborhoods. This could sound like a pretty dull exercise compared to the high questions of social and political theory animating The Point contributions and the (excellent) podcast conversation among Jonny and his interlocutors.

One thing social science can add to conversations like this is a way of following the question downward. If we are going to argue about whether societies make human capacities available, we should know where the pools, courts, festivals, libraries, boxing gyms, churches, galleries, and curling clubs actually are. You don’t even have to learn to code anymore, Claude Code or Codex can do it for you.

At a first cut, even simple exercises like counting the number of public pools or festivals across cities and neighborhoods and countries is both very much within our reach and helps to ground statements we might be tempted to make about how prevalent various practices are, and where they might be more or less common, and why. For example, the City of Berkeley (home to my other alma mater, and a place where the left has a chance to put its vision of the good life into practice) does not offer free public pools. These are basic empirical questions that can inform our conversations about who is and is not realizing some progressive notion of the good life, and help to figure out why.

More generally, however, it is worth considering what kind of social science can even incorporate into it questions of the good life. Much like the background worry animating the entire Point issue – that such questions don’t really have a place in the discourse of the left – they also are not very well posed within the standard practice of social science. The surface form this takes is in the vast bulk of contemporary sociology dedicating itself to identifying various inequalities and calling it a day. The deep reason is that much social science operates by a background assumption that social life is driven by large impersonal forces, usually economic or geographic, pushing people around, behind their backs, as it were.

In the more mundane practice of social science, this background manifests on the surface in terms of the types of variables that one tends to include in a statistical model, such as age, income, ethnicity, or physical proximity. All of those are obviously important, and obviously all can feed into a notion of social life as in significant part driven by decisions and judgments by responsible human actors. But to the extent that they do, they become something else: components in notions of the good life, such that, for example, closeness to friends and family is more important than wealth, or utilitarian considerations override those of tradition, or your ethnic heritage is considered your true and real wellspring of selfhood.

If that is the case, what we want to know via social science must include knowledge about where and what these visions are, and how much latitude they have in animating people’s decisions, over and above the forces operating upon them. That’s what we tried to do in Scenescapes, and still do, now with more and better data. We treat local amenities not merely as conveniences but as clues to styles of life. A place full of churches, bowling alleys, and family restaurants offers one kind of life. A place full of galleries, boutiques, cocktail bars, and music venues offers another. Neither is reducible to income or education, even though both are entangled with them.

Every time I return to that work, I am surprised again by how strong the results are. If you want to know what predicts people moving about from one place to another, for example, the very best indicator, after geographic distance, is the set of local amenities it has to offer, and the specific cultural style it evinces – whether it offers a life of transgressiveness, glamour, neighborliness, local authenticity, tradition, personal self-expression, utilitarian functionality, ethnic authenticity – is about as strong as education or voting.

It has been and will be an uphill battle in the social sciences to convince mainstream researchers that something like a notion of the good life plays a strong role in driving large patterns of social life, but we struggle on. I highlight this in part because ever since I found myself, through a random series of events, doing empirical social science, it has often been hard to explain the significance of that work to my old Social Thought friends, and this particular conversation helps articulate it. Counting pools, courts, and festivals is one way of asking where candidate answers to the question of the good life actually exist.

I also highlight it because, like Jonny’s swimming pool example, it brings things down to earth. For example, in our chapter on policy (Chapter 7, “Making a Scene”) we talk about how to encourage local policy-makers and politicians (e.g. mayors and city councillors) to think about the kinds and ranges of conceptions of the good life that their cities make available to their citizens. It is again very mundane advice, like: Walk around your city and talk to people. Ask what forms of life are already being cultivated there. Ask which ones are missing. If they are missing, ask whether there are nascent versions hiding somewhere: a chess club, a boxing gym, a church basement, a music scene, a garden collective, a cricket league, a poetry reading, an immigrant festival, a half-dead theater, a public pool nobody maintains properly. Talk to the people who care about them. Ask what they need to make it grow. Often even small things, like a little prize or public recognition, or just an opportunity to exhibit and showcase talent, can go a long way.

Yes, this is not so high flying as the Marxian revolution and the unleashing of our species being. But if the aim is to give people, in the real world we inhabit, a greater chance to cultivate a greater range of human capacities, this is the kind of thing one actually does, and the kind of aspiration that can give its creation meaning.