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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Reissue of a profound exploration of the concept of human need by the esteemed author of On ConsolationWhat does a person need, not just to survive, but to flourish? In this profound, searching book, Michael Ignatieff explores the many human needs that go beyond basic sustenance: for love, for respect, for community and consolation. In a society of strangers, how might we find a common language to express such needs?Ignatieff's lucid, penetrating enquiry takes him back to great works of philosophy, literature and art, from St. Augustine to Hieronymus Bosch to Shakespeare. Reissued with a new preface, The Needs of Strangers builds to a moving meditation on the possibility of accommodating claims of difference within a politics based on common need.
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The Needs of Strangers
On Solidarity and the Politics of Being Human
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
Pushkin Press
Contents
Preface
Introducing this book to new readers, forty years after it first appeared, makes me realize how many of the ruling passions of my writing life were first expressed in these pages. I was a young man then and my overwhelming feeling at the time was that the language of politics that I had grown up with was losing its capacity to explain the world as it was or to inspire us to create a better one. Words like fraternity and solidarity – the incantations of the left – felt as empty as freedom and enterprise, the incantations of the right. Forty years later, I still feel the same.
I remember looking down from my window onto the market street in London where I lived then and seeing pensioners rummaging through a barrow for cheap clothes. The ‘solidarity’ that connected me to them was the mediated solidarity of the welfare state: pensions, health care, meals on wheels when they got sick, death benefit and a funeral when they died. When the left defended this kind of solidarity, they weren’t noticing how the state’s institutions also confiscated the possibility of a deeper form of community. For the pensioners and I seldom spoke. We were fellow citizens, but we remained strangers to each other.
The people below my window had rights to a decent old age, but what they wanted most – love and a little respect – couldn’t be guaranteed with rights at all. The language of politics was silent viiiabout such needs for recognition and respect, or it implied that prosperity would be good enough. Was it possible, I wondered, that in enthroning a language of rights, both sides of the political divide were confiscating the language of the good?
So if the available language was wearing out, where to go for better? I found myself working my way back to the languages of the past to recover meanings that we had lost.
Re-reading Shakespeare’s King Lear laid bare what the world looks like when greed and power sweep aside the claims of love and respect. Lear destroys any illusion that there is some natural goodness in us that we can all rely on to keep our world human. Tragedy, in family life as in politics, can be just one foolish or violent act away. Tragic art taught me that we need a self-limiting politics that stops pretending it can solve all our problems, a language of the good that stops telling us how nice, how decent, we really are, and starts saying that our first problem in politics is how to keep us from turning into beasts.
This is a religious register, and it has dropped out of politics altogether. Do we ever ask what price our politics has paid for discarding it? You don’t have to be religious – and I’m not – to think there is something to be said for that staple of religious anthropology, the idea of sin. It tells us we are incomplete, fallible, divided creatures, torn apart by desires that we know to be destructive. We may have discarded hope of salvation and expectations of paradise, but we are stuck with sin. So we’ve poured our hope of being delivered from ourselves into political utopias as elusive as they are enticing. They offered us secularized visions of Paradise, dream cities in which we’d shed our inner dividedness and our alienation from nature and from the rest of humankind. Good luck with that, the old religions would have said. All our ixpolitical utopias promise us an escape from ourselves, and there is no escape from that – understanding, perhaps, but no escape.
We need a politics that tells us plainly we cannot fix what ails us most – ourselves – but it’s still possible to build a public world that keeps us safe, keeps us together and gets our children ready for a future we can’t predict. The basic alternatives are not new. They have been with us for thousands of years. In the 1750s Jean-Jacques Rousseau refurbished the republic of virtue, inherited from ancient Athens and Renaissance Florence, and readied it for the modern world. This ideal of citizens, equal in rights, governing themselves in freedom, living in peace with each other and with their neighbours in a stable equilibrium with their environment, remains the dream we all have to this day. There were problems with this vision, and a young Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith, was among the first to spot them: it was static. It failed to realize how insatiable our needs and desires are, how explosively restless we would be with any politics, whether ecological or socialist, that curtails our desires for the sake of equality or the planet’s survival. The republic of virtue also had no grasp of what a global economy would do to any static order of virtue bounded by a nation state. The problem here is not capitalism, Smith argued, but our wants and desires. We will go to the ends of the earth to satisfy them, to subdue nature and other peoples, to get what we want. We’ve created a global economy to satisfy these desires, and now we realize it is making it impossible for us to have what Rousseau said we needed most: a political community sovereign over itself.
Neither Smith nor Rousseau would be surprised to see that our politics has become a frantic struggle to protect what remains of the sovereignty of the national community. Only the richest nations retain any capacity to shape, let alone control, the global xfacts – climatic, demographic, epidemiological, economic – that determine how our lives will go. Most people live in nations with neither liberty nor sovereignty. So we are stuck. We have a political language that doesn’t begin to describe what we need, we have visions of sovereignty that no longer fit the world we live in, and we face problems that require global solutions, while we lack the institutions to make these solutions possible. So we stagger along, cobbling together fixes and patches, imperfect and temporary, for the environmental, demographic, epidemiological and economic calamities bearing down on us, trying to prevent our national politics from collapsing.
This diagnosis isn’t cheerful, so why do I remain hopeful forty years later? To have faith in our future, we need to have faith in the past. For there is wisdom there, if we have the will to find it. The figures I tried to bring to life in this book are people just like us, but they happened to see more clearly than we can, and their serene yet troubling vision remains the best guide to our future.
May 2023
introduction
Tragedy and Utopia
There are few things we should keenly desire if we really knew what we wanted.
la rochefoucauld2
3
I live in a market street in north London. Every Tuesday morning there is a barrow outside my door and a cluster of old-age pensioners rummage through the torn curtains, buttonless shirts, stained vests, torn jackets, frayed trousers and faded dresses that the barrow man has on offer. They make a cheerful chatter outside my door, beating down the barrow man’s prices, scrabbling for bargains like crows pecking among the stubble.
They are not destitute, just respectably poor. The old men seem more neglected than the women: their faces are grey and unshaven and their necks hang loose inside yellowed shirt collars. Their old bodies must be thin and white beneath their clothes. The women seem more self-possessed, as if old age were something their mothers had prepared them for. They also have the skills for poverty: the hems of their coats are neatly darned, their buttons are still in place.
These people give the impression of having buried their wives and husbands long ago and having watched their children decamp to the suburbs. I imagine them living alone in small dark rooms lit by the glow of electric heaters. I came upon one old man once doing his shopping alone, weighed down in a queue at a potato stall and nearly fainting from tiredness. I made him sit down in a pub while I did the rest of his shopping. But if he needed my help, he certainly didn’t want it. He was clinging on to his life, gasping for breath, but he stared straight ahead when we talked 4and his fingers would not be pried from his burdens. All these old people seem like that, cut adrift from family, slipping away into the dwindling realm of their inner voices, clinging to the old barrow as if it were a raft carrying them out to sea.
My encounters with them are a parable of moral relations between strangers in the welfare state. They have needs, and because they live within a welfare state, these needs confer entitlements – rights – to the resources of people like me.1 Their needs and their entitlements establish a silent relation between us. As we stand together in line at the post office, while they cash their pension cheques, some tiny portion of my income is transferred into their pockets through the numberless capillaries of the state. The mediated quality of our relationship seems necessary to both of us. They are dependent on the state, not upon me, and we are both glad of it. Yet I am also aware of how this mediation walls us off from each other. We are responsible for each other, but we are not responsible to each other.
My responsibilities towards them are mediated through a vast division of labour. In my name a social worker climbs the stairs to their rooms and makes sure they are as warm and as clean as they can be persuaded to be. When they get too old to go out, a volunteer will bring them a hot meal, make up their beds, and if the volunteer is a compassionate person, listen to their whispering streams of memory. When they can’t go on, an ambulance will take them to the hospital, and when they die, a nurse will be there to listen to the ebbing of their breath. It is this solidarity among strangers, this transformation through the division of labour of needs into rights and rights into care that gives us whatever fragile basis we have for saying that we live in a moral community. 5
Modern welfare may not be generous by any standard other than a comparison with the nineteenth-century workhouse, but it does attempt to satisfy a wide range of basic needs for food, shelter, clothing, warmth and medical care. The question is whether that is all a human being needs. When we talk about needs we mean something more than just the basic necessities of human survival. We also use the word to describe what a person needs in order to live to their full potential. What we need in order to survive, and what we need in order to flourish are two different things. The aged poor on my street get just enough to survive. The question is whether they get what they need in order to live a human life.
The political arguments between right and left over the future of the welfare state which rage over these old people’s heads almost always take their needs entirely for granted. Both sides assume that what they need is income, food, clothing, shelter and medical care, then debate whether they are entitled to these goods as a matter of right, and whether there are adequate resources to provide them if they are. What almost never gets asked is whether they might need something more than the means of mere survival.
There are good reasons for this silence. It is difficult enough to define human need in terms of basic necessities. These are, after all, relative and historical, and there has always been fierce controversy over the level at which basic human entitlements should be set in any society. How much more controversial must be the definition of need as the conditions for human flourishing. There is not just one good human life, but many. Who is to say what humans need to accomplish all the finest purposes they can set for themselves? 6
It is also notorious how self-deceiving we are about our needs. By definition, a person must know that he desires something. It is quite possible, on the other hand, to be in need of something and not know that one is. Just as we often desire what we do not need, so we often need what we do not consciously desire.
If we often deceive ourselves about what we need, we are likely to be deceived about what strangers need. There are few presumptions in human relations more dangerous than the idea that one knows what another human being needs better than they do themselves. In politics, this presumption is a warrant to ignore democratic preferences and to trample on freedom. In other realms too, the arrogation of the right by doctors to define the needs of their patients, of social workers to administer the needs of their clients, and finally of parents to decide the needs of their children is in each case a warrant for abuse.
Yet if we are often deceived about our own needs, there must be cases in which it is in our interest that someone speaks for our needs when we ourselves cannot. There are people who have had to survive on so little for so long in our society that their needs have withered away to barest necessity. Is it wrong to raise their expectations, to give them a sense of the things they have gone without? Is it wrong to argue that the strangers at my door should not be content with the scraps at the barrow? Any politics which wants to improve the conditions of their lives has to speak for needs which they themselves may not be able to articulate. That is why politics is such a dangerous business: to mobilize a majority for change you must raise expectations and create needs which leap beyond the confines of existing reality. To create needs is to create discontent, and to invite disillusionment. It is to play with lives and hopes. The only safeguard in this dangerous game is the 7democratic requirement of informed consent. One has no right to speak for needs which those one represents cannot intelligibly recognize as their own.
This was the first question I began with: when is it right to speak for the needs of strangers? Politics is not only the art of representing the needs of strangers; it is also the perilous business of speaking on behalf of needs which strangers have had no chance to articulate on their own.
The second question I asked myself was whether it was possible to define what human beings need in order to flourish. The representation of the needs of strangers would not merely be perilous, it would be impossible, if human needs were infinitely contestable. In fact politics as such would be impossible unless individual preferences could recognize themselves and unite under a common banner of need. Consistent moral behaviour itself would be impossible unless there were some minimum degree of agreement, within a given society, as to the necessary preconditions of human flourishing.
The distinction I want to make is also one between needs which can be specified in a language of political and social rights and those which cannot. Most arguments in politics these days are about the first sort of needs, for food, shelter, clothing, education and employment. The conservative counter-attack on the welfare state is above all an attack on the idea that these needs make rights; an attack on this idea puts into question the very notion of a society as a moral community.
In the attempt to defend the principle that needs do make rights, it is possible to forget about the range of needs which cannot be specified as rights and to let them slip out of the language of politics. Rights language offers a rich vernacular for the 8claims an individual may make on or against the collectivity, but it is relatively impoverished as a means of expressing individuals’ needs for the collectivity. It can only express the human ideal of fraternity as mutual respect for rights, and it can only defend the claim to be treated with dignity in terms of our common identity as rights-bearing creatures. Yet we are more than rights-bearing creatures, and there is more to respect in a person than his rights. The administrative good conscience of our time seems to consist in respecting individuals’ rights while demeaning them as persons. In the best of our prisons and psychiatric hospitals, for example, inmates are fed, clothed and housed in adequate fashion; the visits of lawyers and relatives are not stopped; the cuffs and clubs are kept in the guard house. Those needs which can be specified in rights are more or less respected. Yet every waking hour, inmates may still feel the silent contempt of authority in a glance, gesture or procedure. The strangers at my door have welfare rights, but it is another question altogether whether they have the respect and consideration of the officials who administer these rights.
It is because money cannot buy the human gestures which confer respect, nor rights guarantee them as entitlements, that any decent society requires a public discourse about the needs of the human person. It is because fraternity, love, belonging, dignity and respect cannot be specified as rights that we ought to specify them as needs and seek, with the blunt institutional procedures at our disposal, to make their satisfaction a routine human practice. At the very least, if we had a language of needs at our disposal, we would be in a better position to understand the difference between granting people their rights and giving people what they need. 9
I am saying that a decent and humane society requires a shared language of the good. The one our society lives by – a language of rights – has no terms for those dimensions of the human good which require acts of virtue unspecifiable as a legal or civil obligation.
A theory of human needs is a particular kind of language of the human good. To define human nature in terms of needs is to define what we are in terms of what we lack, to insist on the distinctive emptiness and incompleteness of humans as a species. As natural creatures, we are potential only. There is nothing intrinsic to our natures which entitles us to anything. Yet we are the only species with the capacity to create and transform our needs, the only species whose needs have a history. It is the needs we have created for ourselves, and the language of entitlements we have derived from them, which give us any claim to respect and dignity as a species, and as individuals. Needs language, therefore, is a distinctively historical and relative language of the human good.
It is also, in principle, a non-teleological language. If human nature is historical, there cannot be any ultimate state of human fulfilment that corresponds to the attainment of the human good as such. The only human goods which a needs language can specify are those absolute prerequisites for any human pursuit. If we need love, respect, fraternity, it is not because these are required for the realization of our essential natures, but because whatever we choose to do with our lives, we can scarcely be reconciled to ourselves and to others without them.
It is common in the language of rights to define essential requirements – ‘basic goods’, as John Rawls calls them – as necessary preconditions for personal freedom.2 The advantage of this way of thinking is that it seeks to reconcile a theory of the 10good with the freedom of each individual to live his life as he chooses. The disadvantage is that many essential requirements of a decent life – love, respect, solidarity with others – cannot be sensibly justified as necessary for personal freedom. I don’t need to be loved in order to be free; I need to be loved to be at peace with myself and to be able to love in turn. A theory of the human good cannot, I think, be premissed on the absolute priority of liberty.
Nor can it be based on the priority of happiness as the ultimate human end. If we need love, it is for reasons which go beyond the happiness it brings; it is for the connection, the rootedness, it gives us with others. Many of the things we need most deeply in life – love chief among them – do not necessarily bring us happiness. If we need them, it is to go to the depth of our being, to learn as much of ourselves as we can stand, to be reconciled to what we find in ourselves and in those around us.
In the end, a theory of human needs has to be premissed on some set of choices about what humans need in order to be human: not what they need to be happy or free, since these are subsidiary goals, but what they need in order to realize the full extent of their potential. There cannot be any eternally valid account of what it means to be human. All we have to go on is the historical record of what men have valued most in human life.
There does exist a set of words for these needs – love, respect, honour, dignity, solidarity with others. The problem is that their meanings have been worn out with casual over-use in politics. They have been cheapened, not only by easy rhetoric, but also by the easy assumption that if a society manages to meet the basic survival needs of its people, it also goes some way towards meeting these more intangible needs. Yet the relation between 11what we need in order to survive and what we need in order to flourish is more complicated than that. Giving the aged poor their pension and providing them with medical care may be a necessary condition for their self-respect and their dignity, but it is not a sufficient condition. It is the manner of the giving that counts and the moral basis on which it is given: whether strangers at my door get their stories listened to by the social worker, whether the ambulance man takes care not to jostle them when they are taken down the steep stairs of their apartment building, whether a nurse sits with them in the hospital when they are frightened and alone. Respect and dignity are conferred by gestures such as these. They are gestures too much a matter of human art to be made a consistent matter of administrative routine.
Respect and dignity also depend on whether entitlements are understood to be a matter ofright, a matter of deserving, or a matter of charity. In many Western welfare states, entitlements are still perceived both by the giver and the receiver, as gifts. To be in need, to be in receipt of welfare, is still understood as a source of shame. Needs may make rights in law, but they do not necessarily make rights in the minds of the strangers at my door.
There is also a contradiction, at the heart of the welfare state, between the respect we owe persons as individuals and as fellow human beings. In the first case, respect is owed to their specific qualities as individuals; in the second, to their common humanity. The first type of respect requires us to treat them differently, unequally; the second, to treat them exactly like every other human being. In the welfare state, individuals are supposed to be treated equally, as if their needs were all the same. Yet our needs are not the same: what respect means to you may not be what respect means to me. Besides, all individuals are not due the 12same kind of respect as individuals. Treating everyone as if their needs were the same may be a necessary condition, but it is not a sufficient condition for treating each of them with respect. It is an open question whether any welfare system can reconcile this contradiction between treating individuals equally and treating individuals with respect. The most common criticism of modern welfare is precisely that in treating everyone the same it ends up treating everyone like a thing.
This kind of difficulty opened up the third question which came to concern me when writing this book. Might there not be some needs, like our need for respect, which cannot be satisfied by collective social provision except at some cost to other needs, like our need to be treated equally? A potential contradiction of the same sort arises between our need for social solidarity and our need for freedom. The individualist bias of our language of rights and entitlements makes it difficult to grasp this contradiction, but it is a fundamental one. We not only have needs for ourselves, we have needs on behalf of others. Many of those lucky or rich enough to be adequately clothed, fed and housed themselves feel the lack of these things among their fellow citizens as a blight upon their possessions.
This is something more than social conscience. Individuals are not solitary masters of pre-given preferences; what others need and what they lack are constitutive of their own needs. It is as common for us to need things on behalf of others, to need good schools for the sake of our children, safe streets for the sake of our neighbours, decent old people’s homes for the strangers at our door, as it is for us to need them for ourselves. The deepest motivational springs of political involvement are to be located in this human capacity to feel needs for others. 13
The welfare state enacts this need for solidarity yet also ensures that those with resources and those in need remain strangers to each other. There are those, like Ivan Illich, who claim that a social division of labour and social solidarity are incompatible.3 We will have to dismantle the edifice of state welfare if we wish to cease being moral strangers to each other. Yet I doubt that the pensioners at my door want to return to the days when they were dependent on the fickle mercy of their sons and daughters or the uncertain charity of philanthropy. The bureaucratized transfer of income among strangers has freed each of us from the enslavement of gift relations. Yet if the welfare state does serve the needs of freedom, it does not serve the needs of solidarity. We remain a society of strangers.
The obvious question, however, is whether societies can ever reconcile freedom and solidarity. The societies which have marched under Marx’s banner – ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ – have all turned out to be disastrous for liberty.
Faced with this evidence, liberals by and large believe that one has to choose among the needs which one wishes to satisfy in politics. One can either have a society in which individuals are free to choose their needs as they see fit – such a society is unlikely to be rich in relations of solidarity – or one can choose a society which makes the determination and satisfaction of need a matter of collective social choice. In this case, there is a risk that individuals will cease to be free. Given these choices, liberals by and large choose liberty over solidarity. Socialists on the other hand insist that these needs are not in ultimate contradiction; they hold to a vision in which liberty and solidarity are reconciled, in which human beings can have needs for themselves and needs for 14the sake of others and satisfy both equally. To call such a vision utopian is not to demean it, but merely to observe that no socialist society has yet managed to reconcile these antinomies.
