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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This book is a highly original exploration of what life could and should be. It juxtaposes a philosophical enquiry into the nature of the good life with an ethnography of people living in a small Irish town.
Attending carefully to the everyday lives of these people, the ethnographic chapters examine topics ranging from freedom and inequality to the creation of community and the purpose of life. These chapters alternate with discussions of similar topics by a wide range of philosophers in the Western tradition, from Socrates and the Stoics through Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger to Adorno, Rawls, MacIntyre, and Nussbaum.
As an ethnography, this book reveals just how much we can learn from a respectful acknowledgement of what ordinary modest people have achieved. By creating community as a deliberate and social project that provides the foundation for a more fulfilling life, where affluence has not led to an increase in individualism, the people in this town have found a way to live the good enough life. The book also shows how anthropology and philosophy can complement and enrich one another in an enquiry into what we might accomplish in our lives.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Cuan and Kant
The Love of Cuan
Introduction to Ireland
Cuan
Field Methods
A Joke on Kant
What Lies
a Priori
to Kant?
Notes
1 An Exceptionally Free Society?
Freedom from Religion
Freedom from Work
Freedom from Family
Freedom from Age
Freedom from Politics
The Civilized Irish: Politics with a Capital P
The International Context
Good Enough Government
Politics with a Small p
Freedom from Identity
Gender
Choosing to be Irish
Conclusion
Notes
2 Philosophers of Freedom
Sartre
Berlin
Nussbaum and Sen
Cuan, the Philosophers, and Freedom
Notes
3 The First Satiable Society
Satiable Consumption
Environmental Emulation
Why Calling Ourselves Superficial Is Superficial
Pet Dogs
Smartphones
Conclusion
Notes
4 Philosophers and Consumerism
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Baudrillard and Benjamin
The Value of Mass Culture
Are We Post-Human?
Conclusion
Notes
5 Inequality, Drugs, and Depression
Inequality and the Vartry Estate
Five from the Vartry Estate
Class in Cuan: Bingo and Bridge
Migrants
Alcohol and Drugs
Alcoholism
Cocaine and Other Drugs
Depression
Loneliness
Egalitarian Ireland
The Importance of Insult
Conclusion
Notes
6 Justice as Fairness
Rawls and the Family
Fairness in Rawls and in Cuan
Rawls and Citizenship
Conclusion
Notes
7 The Body and Sports
The GAA
Age and Sport
The Body
History and Conclusions
Notes
8 The Origins of Philosophy in Sport
Irish Sports
Why Not Yoga?
Conclusion
Notes
9 Creating Community
Historical Cuan
The Arrival of the Blow-Ins
The Emergence of Community
How Community Operates
Maria
Why Cuan Works: Geography and History
Cuan’s Virtuous Relationship to the State
The Tensions
Conclusion
Notes
10 Placing Heidegger
Heidegger
Heidegger and Cuan
A Caveat
Notes
11 Engaging with the World
Where Next?
The Social World
Three Activities
Sharing a High-Quality Life
Conclusion
Notes
12 The Stoics and Epicurus
The Stoics
Epicurus
Cuan and the World
The Cosmology of Cuan
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion: Hegel, Anthropology, and Philosophy
Hegel
Objectification
Freedom
Pluralism
A Reasonable Polis
Caveats
Anthropology and Philosophy
Finally
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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The Good Enough Life
Daniel Miller
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Daniel Miller 2024
The right of Daniel Miller to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5964-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5965-7 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934604
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am especially grateful to Pauline Garvey, who carried out a parallel ethnography in Dublin and jointly wrote our project book, from which many ideas and passages have been used in this volume. Also to David Prendergast and Adam Drazin. Special thanks to my wife Rickie Burman, who participated in the fieldwork and helped to edit this book.
I would like to express my gratitude to countless people in Cuan. I cannot list you all, but in particular Maria A., Monica A., Edel B., Eric B., Lawrence B., Peter B., Rachel B., Hilda C., Helen D., Mary G., Pat G., Peig, Aiden H., Suzanne H., Dierdre J., Carol K., Eleanor K., Marie K., Sian K., Bob L., Deidre L., Catriona M., Dominique M., Geraldine M., Eamon M., Eugene M., John M., Katherine M., Michael M., Norma M., Oliver M., Raymond M., Vincent M., Catherine N., Kevin O., Michael O., Martin R., Bob S., Henry S., Noel S., Liam S., Maria S., Paul S., Janet W., and Serena W. Maria A. and Henry S. also helped me find additional research participants amongst migrants and in the new estates respectively.
Thanks for comments on the manuscript by Maria A., Rachel Miller, Mathew Doyle, Haidy Geismar, Pauline Garvey, Richard Miller, Sheba Mohammid, Felix Ó Murchadha, Maria Nolan, and especially Martin Holbraad, Bob L., and the readers from Polity Press. I am also extremely grateful to Justin Dyer for his impressively conscientious and detailed copy-editing.
Special thanks to Laura Haapio-Kirk, who painted the front cover for me as a birthday present.
While writing this book, I was very concerned that I would be publishing detailed discussions of philosophers without any personal background or training in academic philosophy, which was likely to lead to misrepresentations and distortions. It seemed essential therefore to have the manuscript also read by someone trained in disciplinary philosophy. I am very grateful to the philosopher Jeremy David Bendik-Keymer for helping to eliminate some of those misunderstandings and misrepresentations from the chapters concerned with philosophy. Any remaining misrepresentations and failures are mine alone – a classic caveat that remains particularly true and pertinent in this case.
Funding for the ethnography came from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 740472).
INTRODUCTIONCuan and Kant
This book sets out to compare two potential sources for understanding how life could and should be lived: the writings of certain philosophers about the good life; and an ethnography based in a small Irish town of people living what will be described as the good enough life. The discipline of Western philosophy is generally considered to have developed from the sixth century bce in classical Greece and its colonies with a focus on the question of how to live well, exemplified by Aristotle’s discussion of the term eudaimonia, generally translated as living well or a good life. Fortunately, eudaimonia resonates with an ambiguity in the English word ‘good’. When we say, I am living the good life, we mainly refer to happiness. But when we say, I aim to live a good life, we mainly refer to virtue and ethics. Early philosophers were concerned with the relationship between these two. Socrates stated that,
Seeing that all men1 desire happiness, and happiness, as has been shown, is gained by a use, and a right one, of the things of life, and that the right use of them, and good-fortune in the use of them, is given by knowledge – the inference is surely that everybody ought by all means to try to make himself as wise as he can?2
Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, confirms both that eudaimonia is the ultimate aim of life (1097 15–21),3 and that the sound use of reason will allow us to flourish through aretē (excellence/virtue), demonstrated above all through thoughtful action by a harmonious, well-habituated soul.
These are philosophical ideals, but what of life as lived? Today, we might feel less confident about the relationship between virtue and happiness. Could a selfish and greedy person still be happy and is a virtuous person necessarily happy? As it happens, most of the people who contributed to this ethnography seemed to share the ideal of eudaimonia that a virtuous life was also the most effective route to personal happiness, though the examples of virtue discussed in this book come from activities such as grandparenting and environmentalism rather than through an abstract philosophical concept of ‘reason’. The people in my fieldsite do, however, make considerable use of the principle of ‘being reasonable’ as a foundation for being judged as wise. But it was a different observation that was the starting point for this comparison between philosophy and ethnography. From the very beginning of fieldwork, I was struck by the sheer love of this community for the town in which they lived and their identification with it – a sentiment reminiscent of the foundation of so much Greek philosophy, which took for granted that the good life was based on citizenship associated with a particular city-state, known as a polis.
This volume is therefore constructed through juxtaposing chapters about well-known philosophers or schools of philosophy with other chapters drawn from an ethnography of the retired population of this small town in Ireland, people who would never consider themselves to be either philosophers or exemplars of the good life. Anthropological ethnography differs from most social research because the emphasis is on observations of what people do, rather than what they say. The portrait of these people’s good enough lives has been extrapolated mostly from their everyday actions, rather than interviews. It is the life they lead that provides our evidence. The premise for this book is that there may be advantages to considering a population that actually exists as against ideal models of what society might or should be. This gives ethnography a potentially important complementary role to certain philosophical questions. Within the discipline of philosophy, a consideration of the good life subsequently took its place alongside logic, epistemology, politics, and a multitude of other considerations as philosophy grew in breadth and depth. The concern of this volume is, therefore, with only a small element of contemporary and historical philosophy. A final unusual quality of this book follows from the use of ethnography to exemplify the good enough life; increasingly, social science seems to be dominated by critique, while this will be largely a book of praise.
The people presented in this ethnography are all Irish. This does not mean that they are necessarily representative of the population of Ireland. I spent sixteen months living amongst these retired people in a small town on the east coast of Ireland, which has been given the pseudonym of Cuan. I didn’t have a car and hardly ever left the town. I therefore cannot say how typical they would be of Irish people more generally, although my findings were generally consistent with a parallel and simultaneous ethnography by Pauline Garvey in an area of Dublin with a similar demographic.4 Furthermore, most of my informants were not born in Cuan but migrated from other parts of Ireland or in some cases from abroad. I will sometimes use the term Cuan as a convenience to describe the people I worked with, but the arguments apply only to my research participants, who were mainly retired, and not necessarily to the rest of Cuan.
The ethnography characterizes this population as an example of the ‘good enough’ life. The semantics are not ideal. The phrase ‘good enough’ might be seen to imply sufficiently good, which would make this a rather complacent exercise, as though we could not aspire to do a good deal better in achieving virtue. This is not the meaning of ‘good enough’ intended here. The phrase is mainly known in academia through the work of the psychologist Donald Winnicott in reference to good enough mothering.5 His point was that we could praise rather than condemn a mother who, under often difficult circumstances and faced by all the contradictions of parenting, manages to develop a reasonably sensitive response to her infant, creating a secure and nurturing environment. The phrase ‘good enough’ is also important as a means of differentiation from the way philosophers consider the good life in reference to how a society should ideally be. By contrast, anthropologists tend to comparison with other existing societies, rather than against some ideal. This book is therefore not trying to suggest that Cuan is ideal; rather that, for all the faults that will be described, it is hard to find another currently existing society that is demonstrably better.
Individual chapters of this book will focus on particular components of the good enough life. John Rawls (chapter 6) helps us to consider justice and fairness, when set against the inequalities and other problems found in Cuan (chapter 5). Socrates helps to explain the centrality of sports to the people of Cuan (chapter 8). Heidegger is contrasted with the way Cuan has been constructed as a place (chapter 10). The Stoics and Epicurus discuss what we should do with our lives as we age, in comparison to these retirees (chapter 12). Other philosophers have been selected because of their commentaries on the nature of freedom (chapter 1) or affluence (chapter 3), both qualities of this population to which chapters have been devoted. The capabilities approach associated with both Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen is found to have some aspirations in common with this ethnography, as does the book After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre. In the conclusion, Hegel is deployed to try to resolve some of the key differences between these philosophical approaches and what has been learnt from the ethnography. In every instance, it is only my attempted interpretations of these philosophers that can be offered in the course of these comparisons. I have no training in academic philosophy.
Why write a book on the good enough life right now? We live in a restless world. Over the centuries, hundreds of millions of people have migrated in search of a better life. Consider those who have over time colonized the lands of North America, reducing the indigenous people to a small remnant. Or consider the 250 million people who more recently have migrated to industrial regions of China and were the subject of a wonderful study by Xinyuan Wang comparing their migration from rural areas to work in factories with their simultaneous migration from offline to online.6 Many contemporary migrants are refugees from war and oppression. The most impoverished rarely have the resources to undertake such migrations. The majority, such as in the case of the vast Chinese migration, move in search of ‘a better life’. What this term ‘a better life’ implies is that they seek the security of a higher income or a better health service or the opportunities of education for their children, as well as escape from struggle and coercion. For many such migrants, the aspiration is to seek a largely middle-class and suburban lifestyle,7 which they hope to achieve over one or more generations.
This then raises some rather important questions. How should we regard this middle-class, suburban, settled life that most of the world now aspires to? Is this a perfectly reasonable ideal, the sort of life that pretty much everyone could and should emulate? Is there some plausible concept of the good enough life, or of life purpose, that this lifestyle corresponds to? Or is it an illusion or a trap, an image created by the wider political economy, these days often glibly termed ‘neo-liberal capitalism’, in order to sell us a lifestyle to which we sheepishly conform? Rather than reaching some ideal, have we fallen into a muddy rut along the way? In the past, the only way of conceiving of an ideal life would have been through sketching out some version of a speculative utopia. But in the twenty-first century, quite a few migrants have largely achieved the life they sought, in countries where that is how much of the population now live. Instead of speculative utopias, we are in a position to appraise the very ordinary lives of millions of people, living in versions of a middle-class, suburban lifestyle within a welfare state. If this lifestyle already exists and can be observed, then we have reached the point where we can consider the value of such lives.
Ireland is a largely middle-class country with a centrist government and a welfare state. Cuan could be considered suburban in that it is within commuter distance from Dublin. The population who form the backbone of this book seem to correspond, then, to these migrant aspirations. One of the groups deliberately included within the ethnography were migrants from outside of Ireland who have settled in Cuan. There were not many such migrants because Cuan is a relatively expensive place to live, but those who became research participants regarded the town as a clear fulfilment of their ideals as migrants.
On occasion when discussing this book with other social scientists, the result has been a horrified expression. Why am I not studying people in poverty or the highly oppressed? Don’t I know how much people around the world are suffering? As it happens, most of my previous work has been with such populations. I have lived for considerable periods with people who had no toilet of any kind other than the fields, only intermittent electricity, and could afford just two meals a day rather than three. I have published a book about a hospice whose patients had received a terminal diagnosis and were dying.8 It is important to observe and report on deprivation, struggle, and suffering. But it is also important to write about lives outside of these conditions. One of the limitations of disciplines such as psychology and much social science is that, if we are mainly engaged with the problems and pathologies of modern life, in order perhaps to assist in such situations, the result is a strange perspective that sees so much in the world from the viewpoint of pathology. By contrast, the remit of anthropology is first and foremost to explore the cultural diversity of humanity and help all of us to understand empathetically what it means to be other than who we are. Anthropology is currently trying to make this a more egalitarian pursuit in repudiation of its colonial and privileged origins. All populations should be equal in the possibility of becoming the subject of some inquisitive anthropologist and also in the possibility of becoming an anthropologist. This was another reason for embarking on a study of a population that is slightly more affluent than the UK, where I live.
Whenever I hear people tell me (as they often do) that, ‘Oh, they would be of interest to an anthropologist, you should study them,’ I sigh, because anthropology should regard no population as more authentic or interesting than any other. It is essential to anthropology that we, too, should be examined for our weird cultural beliefs and assumptions that other people find astonishing and in need of explanation. Otherwise, we will assume that somehow our beliefs are more natural and obvious, and it is only others who require such investigations. Like most of my research participants, I am middle class and suburban and I found many things that we held in common. But I also found people in Cuan to be remarkably different in their approach to life than those I had written about in a previous ethnography of a similar-sized population in a fieldsite just outside London.9 (I am myself a Londoner.) It is reasonable to see Cuan as the kind of society many people aspire to, but beyond that it is hard to regard it as typical. Often in contemporary social science, the context of neo-liberal capitalism is appealed to as the cause of some observation. But the populations who live within neo-liberal capitalism seem just as heterogeneous as those who don’t. If Cuan is remarkably different from the English settlement that I had recently written about,10 it could hardly be because of some fundamental difference between British and Irish capitalism.
One of the reasons for alternating the ethnography with discussions of sometimes analogous and sometimes contrasting philosophy is that the aim of this book is not just observation but also appraisal. Appraisal required some kind of yardstick against which Cuan could be measured, and this is provided by philosophy.11 There have been many previous attempts to juxtapose philosophical questions with anthropological approaches, and there has also been a recent growth of interest within anthropology in topics such as virtue, happiness, and ethics. The closest parallel is probably a recent edited collection by Harry Walker and Iza Kavedžija which explicitly addresses similar questions regarding the relationship between happiness and eudaimonia.12 As might be expected from an anthropological collection, there is no attempt to measure the good or happy life. Rather, ethnographies demonstrate a plurality of values and priorities. Older Japanese people may be more concerned with tranquillity, seeking a balance between autonomy and dependence, and focus on modest aesthetic aims within everyday practices. That makes them very different from the association between happiness and excitement of young people in the US. Humanists link happiness more closely to virtue, while Chinese parents try to decide whether to focus on their happiness or that of their children. Most people see happiness as the by-product of other aims and not necessarily enhanced through explicit discussion, a conclusion that will be reinforced by the evidence presented in this volume. There are many other anthropologists concerned with various aspects of the good life,13 as well as works that examine different dimensions within the relationship between anthropology and philosophy.14 I am not aware, however of any that adopt the precise structure of alternate juxtaposition that is employed here. I apologize that this book only examines Western (itself a highly problematic term) philosophy and that I possess none of the knowledge that could permit venturing beyond this. Given that I have no formal background in academic philosophy, it already felt like an act of considerable hubris to try to engage with the range of philosophers who will be discussed, but at least these were mainly figures I had encountered during decades working in social science.
If anthropology has a record of engagement with philosophy, there are also movements in the other direction. A notable influence has been the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of previous attempts by philosophers to create a more general or universal approach to virtue.15 MacIntyre argues that our ideas of virtue are inculcated by our socialization into particular traditions and cultural values. This would give licence to anthropological approaches that extrapolate eudaimonia from studies of culture,16 and that analyse virtue through observing practices such as sharing.17 Similar arguments about the necessity of culture and comparison may be found in the writings of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, notwithstanding their own philosophical differences.18 By the end of this book, it will be apparent that the example of Cuan differs from some of the expectations that have emerged from this literature. Virtue for this population will turn out to have much less to do with tradition than might have been anticipated. The arguments of the conclusion lie closer to what will be suggested were Hegel’s arguments for virtue and freedom as derived from the way society collectively creates culture and thereby creates itself.
In using the term ‘yardstick’, a curious other possibility arises. If a range of philosophical discussions are set against the ethnography, then it could equally imply an appraisal of these philosophers through examining how their ideas measure up against an actual population. This volume will pay equal regard to both possibilities. The ethnography will be employed to reconsider the contributions of some philosophers, while philosophers such as Rawls will be deployed to make judgements about Cuan. This is, then, two books in one. If you find yourself falling asleep when reading the sections on philosophy, you have the option of just reading the alternating chapters devoted to the ethnography, and vice versa.
It is possible that my research participants are going to be a little horrified at being employed in such a manner. Generally speaking, they are quite a modest lot. I can’t think of a single one of them who would see themselves as representing any kind of ideal life, let alone having the hubris to compare themselves to the great philosophers. As far as I could tell, they do not regard themselves as special in any way. But, of course, that is precisely why they serve this purpose so well. There was no search for an ideal society. The value of the ethnography lies in understanding a ‘good enough’ society that people might feasibly aspire to. I must apologize to my friends and research participants whom I am setting up here as Irish ‘Davids’ against the ‘Goliath’ of Philosophy. It should be crystal clear that this is entirely an author’s conceit exploiting their very modesty by making that virtue part of their qualification for being utilized in this fashion.
As already noted, it was an early but then sustained observation about Cuan that became the catalyst around which the ambitions of this book crystallized. This was the degree to which the people of Cuan seemed besotted by Cuan itself. There was not even the germ of a plan to write a book on the topic of the good enough life at the start of a very different research project. This book arose mainly from the evidence that while people in Cuan did not describe their individual lives in glowing terms, they constantly went on and on about how Cuan itself was the ideal place within which to live a good life. This seemed to correspond to the relationship between the good life and the polis in the Greek city state. This book is not a detective story; it can start with its conclusion: that to the degree to which these research participants live the good enough life, the principal cause turns out to be the manner by which they have created the town of Cuan.
The Love of Cuan
I settled in Cuan for an entirely different purpose. I was running an international project, funded by the European Research Council, called ASSA: The Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing. As part of this comparative project, I would study this topic in Cuan, while my Irish colleague, Pauline Garvey, who teaches Anthropology at Maynooth University in Ireland, would carry out a parallel project in a Dublin suburb. Subsequently, we wrote up our findings, which turned out to be largely identical, in a book called Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland19 as one of a series of monographs that derived from the ASSA project. I apologize for the fact that in writing this volume it has been essential to reprise some of the themes already discussed in that earlier volume, but it is likely that book will mainly be read by those interested in either smartphones or ageing, while this volume is frying up some bigger fish.
One of the joys of traditional anthropology was its aspiration to a holistic methodology. The method known as ethnography or participant observation consists of living with a population, in this case, as mentioned, for sixteen months, during which most days are spent in their company, engaging in activities alongside them, but also sometimes interviewing them directly. The anthropologist arrives with a topic that requires studying, in this instance ageing and smartphones. But an ethnography implies examining those topics as part of everyday life. In order to understand the consequences of smartphones, the vast majority of research has to be about people’s offline lives, since we cannot know in advance whether it may be family life, religion, education, gender, or something else entirely that will help us interpret what people are observed to do with these devices. We therefore need to investigate everything else that goes on in their lives in order to be confident about our explanations for smartphone usage and consequences. After all, no one lives inside an academic topic; they live all these things at once. I call our method holistic contextualization. Ethnography is unusual as perhaps the only academic research method that seeks to correspond to life as it is actually lived. It is almost the exact opposite of hypothesis testing, which would reduce research only to variables already known about. Ethnography is also a qualitative method that refuses to reduce observations to data, or things which can be counted. As a result, it can have no pretensions to be akin to natural science, and indeed ethnography is often looked down upon by other disciplines because it has little that they would consider as hard data. What it contains instead is a grasp on life that is not a result of any kind of artificial parameter or encounter. We simply spend around sixteen months swimming in their sea. (As it happens, most people in Cuan do swim in the actual sea and considered me completely wimpish because I found it too cold.) For many anthropologists, even interviews are suspect as artificial research contrivances. Instead, we mostly trust observations based on life as it unfolds around us and overhearing conversations that are naturally taking place between others.
It follows that often the most rewarding part of an ethnography is the encounter with topics that could not even be envisaged. Ethnography then becomes a voyage of discovery. This book is full of topics that were never intended to be studied, not just the good enough life, but pet dogs, bingo, cocaine, sports, or where people choose to go on holiday, all of which came into the frame as general background. But none of these made quite as strong an impression as the observation that slapped me straight in the face within days of arrival: the love of Cuan felt by the people of Cuan. They were also pretty keen on the fact of being Irish. Most of the current inhabitants of Cuan are themselves migrants from other parts of Ireland. They are referred to as ‘blow-ins’. Soon after arrival, I heard many versions of ‘I didn’t know anything about Cuan when I moved here, but it turned out to be a magical decision.’ For the entirety of my stay, this sentiment dominated all others. Almost everyone wanted to make sure that I was aware of just how much they loved Cuan. Cuan has turned out to be such a perfect place to live that they could not now imagine living anywhere else. None of this was a response to any research question. It just seemed important to so many people to drop this sentiment somewhere into the conversation. Over time, it also became clear that this is something they frequently did amongst themselves and was not just mentioned for my benefit. The people of Cuan are simply besotted by Cuan; the term ‘heaven’ is not infrequently used. As in the initial quotation, a common refrain was that this was an example of simple good fortune, because they had not known any of this in advance of moving there. They had just lucked out.
The praise took many forms. One of the most popular statements concerned the range of activities. The claim that Cuan has everything except a swimming pool, a hotel, and a cinema was heard at least a hundred times, always with those same three caveats. The iconic Cuan walk is along the seafront. This was felt to be an infinite pleasure as the sea presents a different aspect however many times one stares out at it from one’s walk. This particular walk would also inevitably lead to social encounters such that a ten-minute walk could take hours as people stop to chat. Other commonly cited virtues included the lack of crime, the suitability of Cuan as a place of retirement, and the weather relative to other parts of Ireland. Another popular refrain was that, if any individual wanted to develop some new craft or activity, there would always be others who would come together to help make this happen. The claim, however, that dominated to a degree that it ends up as the bulk of chapter 7 in this book was that Cuan is heaven because of the range of sports available.
The emphasis on sports was closely related to another heartfelt form of praise for Cuan. This was the hope amongst older people that their children would return. People living in small towns in every region face the fear that their children will one day leave in search of something bigger and better. The children of Cuan mainly do leave when they go to college or first obtain jobs. By the end of their teen years, they are bored to tears by the town and claim there is nothing to do there. But, in many cases, it seemed that once they contemplate having children of their own, then they wish to return to the town so that their own children might replicate their positive experience. Much of this rests on the success of sports as providing enjoyment and purpose for younger children. A silver lining of the economic crash in Ireland was said to be that children of Cuan were then able to purchase properties in the town that otherwise had become unaffordable for first-time buyers. My study of the newest housing estate suggested that, despite the expense, around a third of purchases were from people originally brought up in Cuan. This will not be the only example of the town’s virtuous circles. In chapter 9, we will see that this sense of positive community led to it being differentially favoured by government grants, which meant it was becoming a still better place to live.
The sheer level of praise for the place might have seemed extreme. But another piece of evidence made this still more strange. If Cuan as a very heaven was an almost universal view of those who had lived for some years in the town, it was not a view shared by anyone outside. Even today, Cuan is a largely disregarded place. On my rare forays to Dublin, people always expressed surprise that I should have chosen this out-of-the-way fieldsite for my research. It is not a place I have found referenced in tourist guides to Ireland. People are aware that it was a seaside destination in their parents’ day but can’t really see much reason to go there now, given the weather is so much better in Spain. There are plenty of good beaches and more swish-looking towns much closer to Dublin than Cuan. It is as though Cuan is surrounded by the river Lethe, so that only those within it are aware of its glories. No one ever suggested Cuan as the kind of place that would be ‘of interest’ to an anthropologist – which seemed as good as any reason for settling there.
How could a place be so well regarded internally and so disregarded externally? I confess that I, too, could have voiced these sentiments. My choice of Cuan as a fieldsite related to logistical convenience and the reputation of its age-friendly group, since I planned to be working mainly with older people. Yet I ended up liking the place just as much as everyone else and wondering which star to thank for my fate. At first, all I felt was some bemusement in the face of this enthusiastic self-love of Cuan. But as an academic it clearly required explanation. Not just why are people in Cuan besotted by where they live, but also, if this is clearly experienced as the good enough life, what does this tell us about the way people consider the meaning and purpose of life more generally? It helped that one of topics within our project on ageing and smartphones was also about life purpose – a topic that arose naturally from a project devoted to retirement, when people are more likely to be confronted by questions of what more they want out of life.
As fieldwork progressed, I realized that not only was I coming to share something of this fondness for Cuan, but I also shared many of the values and interests of my interlocutors. I am not Irish and have no Irish ancestry, though, being Jewish, I don’t identify with being English to the same extent as people in Cuan identified me as being English. I do have Irish grandchildren, which was one of the reasons I wanted to live there, to explore another part of my family identity. More generally, though, I am of a similar age to these research participants. Perhaps bizarrely, I write books about being retired instead of retiring myself, but that seems to make me just as happy as retirement makes them. I come from a similar liberal left-leaning orientation, and most of my informants seemed sympathetic to the woes of the British Labour Party, of which I am a member. I am at a similar level of comfort and income, with common interests in taking holidays and the wider world. We watched the same TV series and the same Premier League football matches, and often read the same newspaper (The Guardian). I support my wife in her work with a project to help asylum seekers, which parallels the kind of philanthropic work common in Cuan. More than any other ethnography I have carried out, I could see myself mirrored by my research participants and increasingly could see myself living happily in Cuan. This obviously raises the question of whether I will be expressing the values and opinions of the people in Cuan or my own. My advice to the reader is that when the values and practices you encounter in this book are those you approve of, you should see them as emanating from Cuan, but when you cringe at what you regard as complacent naïvety, assume that is me.
Introduction to Ireland20
This book is certainly not intended only for people interested in or knowledgeable about Ireland. This presents a problem since it would be hard to fully appreciate the ethnographic chapters without some knowledge of Irish history. Fortunately, a truly excellent account of that history was published while I was writing this volume. Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves is enormously helpful equally for the degree to which it is the background to this ethnography and the degree to which the ethnography turns out to be so different from what this history might have presaged.21 It is a wonderful read because of the author’s facility in interweaving his personal history, the political and economic history of Ireland, and the more general shifts in the lives of the Irish. It is particularly important that this is quite a personal history, because the Irish who appear in my book are of a similar age to O’Toole. The life that is recounted in his book is in large measure the life that my research participants have lived through, with some of them born in a similar part of Dublin to O’Toole. You will therefore certainly have a better appreciation of what follows in this book if you have previously read his book.
The Republic of Ireland, with a population of almost 5 million, shares the island with Northern Ireland, a part of the UK with a population of around 1.8 million. Ireland declared independence from the UK in 1919, and this was acknowledged in 1921. The capital city of Dublin has a population of around 600,000, while that of Dublin county is around 1,300,000. Cuan is within one hour’s travel from Dublin. Ireland became a member of the European Union (EU; back then the European Economic Community or EEC) in 1973. The lifetime of most of the research participants has been an economic rollercoaster. Younger people find it hard to comprehend the social and economic transformation that Ireland has undergone within living memory. At the time of independence, 58 per cent of employed men worked in agriculture.22 O’Toole points out that no one really expected this to change. Ireland was destined to remain a low-income agricultural backwater to Europe. Many of my research participants were born in rural locations and tell vivid tales of poverty both on farms but also in Dublin during that period. They couldn’t possibly have imagined becoming the people we encounter today. O’Toole also stresses the ubiquity of emigration as a hallmark of twentieth-century Ireland, creating a diaspora that is widely dispersed around the world,23 to the extent that there was serious discussion about the possibility that the Irish of Ireland might more or less disappear. A striking feature of the time in which these people were born was that since 1922, the newly independent Ireland under the tutelage of Éamon de Valera systematically replaced the colonial authority with the authority of the Catholic Church. The Church ran almost the entire education system and had such a strong grip over government and the everyday life of the people that the country could be considered an effective theocracy. For example, a marriage bar introduced in the 1930s meant that until 1971 women in the civil service were legally obliged to give up work on getting married, in order to encourage them to concentrate on rearing children and caring for families.24
Many respondents commented on the deeply conservative beliefs held by their parents, and often initially by themselves. Not infrequently, differences of opinion about religion led to rifts within families that spanned decades and left lasting scars. Catholic bodies such as the Christian Brothers oversaw their education and their general behaviour. The Pope’s visit of 1979 seemed to reflect this degree of devotion. The explanation for this theocracy lay in the primary aim of the Independence movement to assert a complete break from British colonial domination. The Catholic Church was being granted power that it seemed to have earned from its relative suppression over the previous centuries of colonial rule by the Protestant English. Similarly, a huge effort was made, and continues to be made, to spread usage of the Irish language, though in this area to little effect. I never heard a single sentence uttered in the Irish language as part of casual conversation in Cuan, though I would have done had I been on the west coast rather than the east. My impression was rather that in Cuan the Irish language has become a kind of performative sacred language that is the effective replacement for Latin within modern secular Ireland.
What is astonishing is how quickly a rural theocracy, without even the expectation of change, has become something else entirely. The sociologist Tom Inglis argues that, in one generation, Ireland has transformed from being an isolated Catholic agrarian society to being a liberal-individualist, secular, urban society revolving around business, commerce, and high-tech transnational corporations.25 By the early 2000s, Ireland was identified as having an open global economy. The Church didn’t so much decline as abruptly collapse in its claims to authority subsequent to a series of scandals from the 1980s onwards.26 This perhaps reached its apogee during my fieldwork in 2018, with the convincing vote to repeal the constitutional ban on abortion.27 The scale of such change is evident in that as late as 1993, homosexuality was illegal in Ireland, but just twenty-two years later, in 2015, it represented the first country to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote and was hailed as being in the ‘vanguard’ of social progression by the New York Times.28
The term ‘rollercoaster’ is appropriate since the experience of Ireland was not simply one of consistent economic uplift. It included the boom years of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ but also the mauling of that tiger by the severe economic crisis after 2008. This recession, sparked by the economic freefall of the banking system, led to a bailout by the International Monetary Fund and EU.29 The period was characterized by high levels of unemployment, mass emigration, a collapse in domestic construction, and austerity measures imposed by the European Central Bank.30 By 2017, when the fieldwork began, the recession had largely passed but had left many scars. Austerity had led to increasing levels of inequality and the proportion of the Irish population at risk of relative (if not absolute) poverty had risen to 21 per cent. Yet property prices in 2016 soared to rates of increase that mirrored the earlier ‘Celtic Tiger’ period. Economic growth for 2017 was among the highest in the EU (at 7.3 per cent). Economic figures for Ireland can be misleading, however, due chiefly to the distortions represented by the activities of the IT sector, which was flourishing thanks to the country’s low taxation rate for such companies. Domestic activity was also up 4.9 per cent and there was strong employment growth. A long history of emigration had been halted by the attractions of Ireland as a site of immigration during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ period. With recession, this was again reversed, only for the tide to turn once more as Ireland recovered its economic prosperity, such that by 2013 there were renewed invitations for emigrants to return.31 My fieldwork coincided with a new confidence, although the shadow of the recession was still present in many people’s lives.32 I heard about people who had committed suicide during the recession out of despair regarding their future prospects. Yet in the post-recession era, Ireland became the fastest-growing economy in Europe, while still dealing with the legacy of recession. This was their rollercoaster. Another important factor was that I was conducting fieldwork in a place where people received a higher pension than the English with whom I had previously worked. Whatever the past, today they were reasonably comfortable.
The shift from theocracy to modern, largely secular Ireland was equally dramatic. The clerical scandals in the 1990s and 2000s, including the sexual abuse of children, the treatment of ‘fallen’ women in the Magdalene laundries, and the deaths amongst children left in care, have all undermined the credibility of the Church. A reversal of past attitudes to same-sex marriage, divorce, and cohabitation have led to newly established norms.33 What is distinctive about Ireland is not these liberal values, but the fact that they developed later and faster than in most other regions.34 Yet here change should not be exaggerated. While there has been a growth in secular values and some forms of liberal individualism,35 the two-parent nuclear family is still the most typical environment in which children grow up in Ireland.36 Divorce rates remain low (6 per cent) when compared to trends in other European countries. While most countries in Europe are concerned with a growing aged population and low birth rates, Ireland’s population is relatively young and fertility rates are among the highest in Europe37 at around 1.9 children per woman.38 Intergenerational ties remain strong.39
The period of fieldwork was one that reinforced a positive sense of European identity set against a dramatic decline in the international reputation of the former colonial power of Britain. The decline in any respect for the British that resulted from the Brexit débâcle is discussed in chapter 1.40 But this also meant renewed anxiety about the future of the Northern Irish border, and the potential economic slump of a no-deal Brexit. Additionally, fundamental state services such as housing had been cut during austerity, while health and welfare provision are still quite fragile. The word ‘crisis’ was a common adjective to describe both health and housing. Housing represents a particularly potent cypher for the state–citizen contract in Ireland41 and economic boom and bust seems to be measured in the popular imagination in bricks and mortar. The fact that Ireland saw the highest percentage increase in property prices during 2017 of any developed country, at 12.3 per cent, seemed reminiscent of the pre-recession unsustainable property boom. Accounts vary in discussions of income inequality in contemporary Ireland and I am not expert enough to judge between them. Chapter 5 in this volume will, however, describe in detail how such inequalities present themselves within Cuan itself.
By contrast, Irish politics had become relatively stable, with nearly a century of fairly predictable alternations between two parties that had origins in the bitter civil war that followed independence: Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Despite these roots in savage conflict, they are today generally regarded as two sides of a centrist coin. Cuan, being mainly middle class, would be strongly reflective of this largely liberal consensus. The main political shifts concerned an oscillation between Labour, the Green Party, or Sinn Féin as people searched for a credible opposition; the specific ideology of these three parties may have been less important than their potential for this role.
A further conspicuous factor is the sheer size of the Irish diaspora, which dwarfs the local population as a result of the more recent emigration to the UK in the 1950s and again in the 1980s, along with the better-known and earlier migration to the US.42 By contrast, migrants from outside Ireland were rare in Cuan owing to high property prices, though women from Eastern Europe were increasingly evident within the local labour force, particularly in catering and childcare. A nearby town to Cuan reveals a sharp contrast. Its older proletarian history is now overshadowed by extensive immigration, with migrants from Africa and Asia representing around 15 per cent of the population.
Today, there is a generally positive sense of Irish identity at home and abroad. An increasingly strong European identity was boosted not just by the decline in respect for the English but also by the sense of European support of the Irish position during the Brexit negotiations. There is a keen interest in travel abroad, where the Irish generally find they are regarded as genial and egalitarian. At the same time, many people either retained or were developing interests in icons of specifically Irish culture. These included Gaelic sports, such as hurling, alongside a substantial revival of traditional music. People in Cuan took pride in the fact that Irish music and literature punch well above their weight, with figures ranging from the novelists Sebastian Barry and Sally Rooney to post-punk musicians Fontaines D.C., alongside a generally positive, albeit romantic and often crudely stereotypical, American-Irish identity that has been disseminated through film and television and is much discussed by Fintan O’Toole.
The importance of O’Toole’s book lies just as much in what it does not presage. My research participants are of a similar age and lived through everything he recounts. Both tell a story of how conservative, theocratic rural Ireland could finally become my ethnography of secular, urban, and urbane liberal cosmopolitans. On the other hand, O’Toole pays a good deal of attention to the rise of mass consumption and the interest in wealth, status, and materialism that grew alongside this history. It is not a book that would predict chapter 3 in this volume, which claims that by far the most important measure of status in contemporary Cuan is environmentalism and anti-consumption. O’Toole’s book has extraordinary stories of veniality, corruption, and scandal, yet this ethnography is of a population of such probity and citizenship that Cuan would have garnered the approval of Weber.
More complex is the relation between the ethnography and the fundamental theme of We Don’t Know Ourselves. O’Toole’s book tells of a people who above all kept things swept under the carpet; a refusal to acknowledge what was nevertheless at some level well known. He argues this through case after case from the heights of politics to what people didn’t acknowledge in the streets around them. On reading chapter 5 of this volume, which examines deep inequalities within Cuan and the incidence of cocaine usage and other problems, there is some continuity with O’Toole’s thesis. But I have never been to a place that didn’t turn something of a blind eye, for example, to lower-income housing within its midst. Instead, I would argue that, taking a more general overview, the people of Cuan have shown, if anything, an admirable self-perspicacity and an openness about (most of) their vices and virtues. In conclusion, there will be shown to be some remarkable contrasts between the portrait painted in this volume of Cuan and that of O’Toole’s entirely excellent and plausible rendition of the recent Irish history which my research participants lived through.
There is, also, an important point where our accounts converge, appropriately since O’Toole’s final chapter is dated 2018, the same year that I spent in Cuan. At this point, O’Toole is remarking on how Ireland both repealed the ban on abortion and granted same-sex marriage.43 He draws attention to the number of over-sixty-fives who voted for the repeal. This tallies with a wider claim that the contemporary Irish possess a legacy based more on embracing constant change, rather than just referencing back to any fixed indigeneity or their own historical narrative. This in turn explains why our accounts are ultimately quite compatible. Because while the focus of O’Toole’s book is on the refusal to acknowledge what was happening, this took place within a narrative of quite remarkable change over his lifetime. If much of the ethnography that follows in this volume contrasts with the Ireland that he has portrayed, it merely confirms that there has been no let-up in the pace of change. It follows that this book’s claim to be contemporary will also soon be out of date.
Cuan
Cuan was, for some periods of its history, an important fishing port, but this peaked in the eighteenth century. Towards the late nineteenth century, the boats were used to trade cargo such as coal. The surrounding area is fertile, but was dominated by English landowners under a tenants-at-will ruling that meant that they could be evicted without notice, making life more precarious. Generally, the area was poor, as was most of Ireland, but perhaps a bit less food-poor and so less impacted by the Famine in comparison to the west of the country. The historical record emphasizes the heroism of those who supported Republican calls, for example, in the 1916 uprising, with streets named after associated martyrs. Less discussed were the splits, even within families, represented by that period and the subsequent civil war, which may well have led to the emigration of those who ultimately supported the losing side. This was combined with the destructive impact of the First World War.
The population before the modern expansion was around 2,300. When most of the research participants were born, Cuan had become mainly familiar as a holiday destination, where local people often rented out their homes for the summer and lived in a smaller dwelling built within their own garden. During that period, Cuan was known for its holiday camps, and the associated ballrooms and music scene. This proved highly significant when the first private estates were built, since many of the people who chose to purchase these houses knew of Cuan because either they or their parents had taken holidays there. The holiday industry was well developed by the 1890s but collapsed quite quickly when people in Ireland started taking cheap vacations abroad in the 1970s, resulting in this current situation of Cuan being largely disregarded and having practically nowhere where people can stay.
There was never much by way of manufacturing industry in Cuan. Its class identity was mainly a result of geography. People saw themselves as higher class than the more proletarian town on one side and lower class than the more upmarket towns on the other side, which continue to draw holiday makers from Dublin. This geography has a considerable impact on how the people of Cuan understand themselves. The feeling that they are middle class is partly derived from being literally in the middle between the posh and the proletarian. With respect to internal class divisions within Cuan, there have been two major state housing projects, the first built conspicuously outside what would have been the town boundaries at that time. Private housing really took off in the 1970s, and during this period the population doubled. From that time on, there has been almost continuous building of new estates, as remains the case today. The result is a major expansion of the population, which currently numbers around 11,000. Much of the state housing has been sold off, with fewer than 200 such homes remaining. It is common for adult children in Cuan to leave in their twenties but return when they want to have families in their thirties. Many people from the new estates commute to Dublin to work or study. Around 700 individuals in Cuan stay at home to mind their family. A feature of note is the degree to which community activities tend to be dominated by the ‘blow-ins’ attracted by the housing estates and commute to Dublin, who are now the majority population. People remain very conscious of whether someone is Cuan-born or a blow-in. Again, this will be the subject of chapter 9.
