The following is a passage from my upcoming book “Submit to the Pause: Meditations on the Power of Being Slow in a World Going Too Fast.”
The classical Christian tradition has made a distinction between intrinsic and instrumental goods. Intrinsic or basic goods are the things we enjoy as ends in themselves and not merely as means. A basic human good is something that derives value from itself and forms a constituent aspect of human flourishing. The most obvious example of a basic human good is virtue: virtue is its own reward, not something that derives value merely as a tool to other ends. Though virtue brings with it a host of practical benefits, those benefits are not where virtue derives its value. To virtue we might add things like health, creativity, attentiveness, marriage, etc. These conditions are all constitutive of human flourishing and thus good in and of themselves—though not the highest good.
Additionally, there are humanizing activities and practices that are intrinsically good, such as painting, bird-watching, making crafts, playing chess, dancing or watching ballet, writing or memorizing poetry, making or listening to music, offering or enjoying hospitality, etc. A well-ordered reason can perceive that these activities are not mere proxies for the satisfaction of desire, nor simply means to other ends; rather, these activities are intrinsically valuable given the type of creatures we are. To say such activities are intrinsically valuable is to say their value is not derived from extrinsic ends, as would be the case if they possessed a merely instrumental value.
The mechanical mind—in both its capitalist and Marxist manifestations—has always been uncomfortable with intrinsic goods. This was portrayed in Diane Glancy’s poetic memoir, A Line of Driftwood, when some of her characters look askance at the northern lights because of their total uselessness.
The Polar Lights prowled like polar bears.
The men watched the lights.
What good were they?
We could not hunt the lights.
We could not eat them.
Though this is imaginary, Glancy captured something of the modern mindset, which easily falls into the trap of assessing everything by how useful it is, with the result that even the Northern Lights were looked upon as a type of profligacy.
Or consider a scene from Huxley’s Brave New World where the director of a would-be utopia explains why hatred of natural beauties was being programmed into the lower classes.
Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes.
The masterminds in Huxley’s dystopia hated flowers because of their gratuity—their total inefficiency in serving the machinery of the state. They could not conceive of things or conditions that might be good in and of themselves, as they only recognized goods that could be operationalized for economic or hedonic ends. While this utilitarian mindset is easy enough to recognize in a story like Brave New World, in the real-life dystopia we are living through, there are more subtle means for assaulting intrinsic goods.
While the twentieth century world of factories, production, and scientific management techniques may seem like a relic of a bygone age, the utilitarianism of today is actually more oppressive for having taken an inward turn. In a trend that was nascent in the Renaissance but reached fruition in late modern capitalism, we have shifted from manufacturing products to manufacturing an ever-expanding array of needs, desires, and identities. The result is that both polarities of the master-slave dialectic have been interiorized since the individual agent now shoulders the wearisome burden of self-creation; he is both creator and product, and thus both master and slave. Instead of optimizing factories according to scientific management techniques, we optimize ourselves with everything from fitness apps to productivity dashboards to smartwatches that harvest biostatistics, all promising ever more granular methods for self-branding and self-improvement. As the self has become its own project, it labors under an onerous regime of constant achievement, refinement, modification, and self-surveillance. This type of achievement society represents the ultimate triumph of the factory mindset, but one not easily recognized since couched in the rhetoric of liberation.
In the pseudo-freedom of the achievement society, we do not seek to destroy the love of primroses, landscapes, and other intrinsic goods, but to operationalize them – to turn things that are intrinsically good into resources and techniques. Thus, even when we revive ancient practices that might offer a corrective to our fixation with utility, it is common merely to leverage these practices for their instrumental value in the ongoing quest of self-creation, self-curation, and self-branding. For example, we listen to Mozart to enhance the brain; we journal in order to optimize goal-setting; we practice mindfulness in order to perform better at work; we teach Latin so students can achieve higher SAT scores; we hike in order to achieve our fitness goals; we read classic novels to boost emotional intelligence, etc. Even slowing down to a more humane pace is now trendy because of its usefulness, as indicated in books such as Carl Honore’s The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed.
The perversity lies not in recognizing the usefulness of intrinsic goods, as indeed I do throughout this work; rather, the misconception lies in the underlying assumption that usefulness determines value. This assumption drives the worldly mind to seek, whenever possible, to transform intrinsic goods into mere cogs within the machinery of utility. When approaching things that cannot be instrumentalized for pragmatic ends, we often become like the men Glancy imagines who look upon the Northern Lights and wonder, “What good were they?”