From Amitai Etzioni, From Empire to Community, NY: Palgrave, 2004. Pages 56-60

LIFE’S PROJECTS AND MEANINGS

The term “project” refers to what a person or a group (even as large as a society) is seeking to accomplish, the vision projected into the future that provides benchmarks for progress and the criteria for choices. Thus, if a person projects herself as a physician in the future, her chosen project will affect the classes that she chooses to take in college, the amount of debt she is willing to assume, whether she should defer having children, and much else. Viewing people as what they project themselves to become is radically different from treating them on the basis of where they are coming from (inner-city Detroit or Appalachia). Above all, projects give meaning to life. They tell people why they should make an effort, defer gratification; why they should get up in the morning, so to speak. Although many projects are individual or corporate ones, they reflect the culture and society in which they are embedded. Most relevant for the issue at hand is that societies can also be viewed as centered around projects.

There are great differences between the projects that many in the West, as opposed to those in the East, pursue. Millions of people in the West center their projects around the affluent way of life; they work hard to make consumer goods (and services) in order to gain the means they need to purchase them. Prestige, self-esteem, and sense of purpose for many millions are closely wrapped around their achievements in this area. They measure their progress in terms of how much money they earn and what kind of goods they are able to purchase. The source of their motivation to exert themselves is their high pro duction/consumption project. True, the same people also strongly favor keep ing their society safe, free, and democratic, but most days these commitments do not entail any particular efforts on their behalf. Hence such commitments are not part of their defining, main project. Production and consumption are.

To highlight the nature of the high production/consumption project, which for many is so self-evident it is often not examined, it might he useful to mention other projects that some people center their lives around. These include serving the Lord as one’s dominant activity (e.g., missionaries), making culture one’s project (e.g., struggling artists), or political action (e.g., organizers). Typically these people scoff at maintaining an affluent way of life. They tend to make less money than others with similar qualifications, and they tend to be much less interested in purchasing the most fashionable clothes or cars, nor do they mind the absence of these objects. Instead they find other sources of meanings for their effort, other criteria for their decisions, and other bench marks with which to assess their progress.

Currently it may seem, as millions upon millions in the East are rushing to join the high production/consumption project, that it will become the one around which most people in the East and in the West will center their lives and from which they will derive meaning. Many prominent tracts about economic development as well as programs promoted by the World Bank, United Nation’s Development Program, and numerous other agencies as well as national governments assume—although it is rarely explicitly stated—that people of the world aspire to an affluent way of life. They hold that all people of the world are (or ought to be) willing to put in the work and scale back other competing commitments—for instance, family and the spiritual life—in order for them to be able to gain more income. A cursory examination of former communist societies, India, and newly liberated Islamic countries (see Afghanistan and Iraq) seems to indicate that there is nothing that the people of these countries aspire to more than getting their hands on ever more consumer goods. For some it is merely bicycles, for others motorcycles or cars; for some merely new sneakers, for others satellite dishes, CDs, and cell phones.) Whether they are willing to submit to the rigors of the market economy is less obvious, but they are surely told, and quickly find out, that if they wish to live an affluent life her will need to follow its economic logic. Accordingly, it would seem that in the future the whole world will increasingly aspire to look like an American suburb. Indeed, as various developing countries grow in wealth—Singapore and Taiwan, for example—they tend to mutate American suburbs in housing, styes, traffic patterns, and much else. In short, at first it may seem that, at least in economic matters, the Western ideals will dominate.

There is, however, a great deal of social science evidence that shows that human contentment ceases to increase as income grows beyond a fairly modest level. To cite but a few studies of a large body of findings: Frank M. Andrews and Stephen B. Withey found that the level of one’s socioeconomic status had a limited effect on one’s “sense of well-being” and no significant effect on a person’s “satisfaction with life-as-a-whole.” Jonathan Freedman discovered that levels of reported happiness did not vary greatly among the members of different economic classes, with the exception of the very poor, who tended to be less happy than others. David C. Myers and Ed Diener report that while per capita disposable (after-tax) income in inflation-adjusted dollars almost exactly doubled between 1960 and 1990, 32 percent of Americans reported that they were “very happy” in 1993, almost the same proportion as did in 1957 (35 per cent). Myers and Diener also show that although economic growth slowed between the mid-1970s and the early l990s, Americans’ reported happiness was remarkably stable (nearly always between 30 and 35 percent) across both high- growth and low-growth periods. Richard A. Easterlin’s work found that happiness remains generally constant throughout life cycles. Typically, income and general economic circumstances improve throughout one’s life until retirement, hut happiness does not experience a comparable level of growth; nor is the leveling off of income during retirement accompanied by a decrease in happiness. In other words, once basic needs are satisfied, the high production/ consumption project adds little if anything to human contentment.

There are several reasons to expect that maximization of income and con sumption will not constitute the economic and certainly not the social agenda at the heart of the evolving global normative synthesis. Many millions of people (even in the West) already show that they are not as willing as most Americans are to pay the social and human costs that maximizing wealth entails. This fact is reflected in their strong support for a social market, a thick welfare state, and large amounts of time free of labor—even if it entails a relatively lower level of consumption of goods and services. And there seems to be some increasing awareness that the affluent way of life project is not truly satisfying and that it is accompanied by a wide range of neuroses; that the pursuit of ever higher levels of affluence is not conducive to human flourishing.’ Moreover there is a growing recognition that the more that people across the world be- conic involved in the high production/consumption project, the more the environment is undermined. We can hardly assume that the Earth can sustain an ever-growing population at ever-higher levels of production and consumption and that alarms sounded earlier about various shortages, especially about oil— proved to be false—will not turn out to have been merely premature.

The preceding analysis suggests that the higher (and more secure) people income will become, all over the world, the more they will be inclined to search for other projects, although to do so they will first have to break out of the social obsession to gain ever more means (or resources), despite the declining marginal utility of these goods. I am not arguing that, because affluence is not truly satisfying, to protect the environment, and so on, the poor should accept their poverty or that less developed countries should remain so. For the affluent, however, after what Abraham Maslow calls “creature comforts” are well sated and securely provided for, I capping one income and expenditures, embracing “voluntary simplicity,” and freeing one’s energy to engage in other projects are sources of more profound meaning and containment than consumerism.

Economist and Nobel laureate Robert Fogel shows that throughout history, periods of affluence are followed by what he calls Great Awakenings, which entail an examination of life’s purposes and their priority over instrumental matters, and he predicts that the world is due for another one in the near future. Accordingly, we would expect that more and more people, especially in affluent parts of the world, are likely to realize that the pursuit of well— being through ever higher levels of consumption is Sisyphean, and that when it comes to acquiring material goods—where enough is never enough—the project in the end is inherently unsatisfying.

In China it is now fashionable to refer to a “moderately well-off society,” a concept drawn from Confucius. It denotes a level of material success in which basic needs are sated with something left to spare, but contains no ambition for still-higher levels of consumption. Instead, the ambition is to move toward an other concept of the great philosopher—a “great community”: a society with out crime, selfishness, war, or social divisions. The concept far from dominates Chinese thinking, but the very fact that it is popular and promoted by the government shows the appeal of a project different from maximizing wealth, work, and consumption.

I believe that once basic material needs are satisfied, more and more people will break out of the obsession with consumer goods and increasingly will t that profound contentment rests in other projects and activities, especially n ends-based relationships; in bonding with others, in community-building and public service, and in cultural and spiritual pursuits. This is not an idle recast. In recent years there have been numerous reports, albeit about a relatively small number of people, who are engaging in what is called voluntary simplicity; that is, people who can afford a more affluent way of life but choose to adopt a less object-rich one. Some merely moderate parts of their lives (perhaps clothing): Others change their professions and move to the countryside. expect that, as the income of people in many countries rises, more and more n the East and in the West will ask themselves (although rarely in the terms re employed): How much they should worship mammon, and how much of Heir lives they should dedicate to other pursuits?

Aside from making people more profoundly content individuals, a major and broadly based upward shift on Maslow’s scale is a prerequisite for addressing the means/ends imbalance, for establishing human primacy Such a shift entails a growing number of people being willing to relate to one another as members of families and communities, and thus as ends in themselves, and not only or exclusively as means, employees, people to whom products must be Li or with whom one makes economic transactions. This shift, in turn, would help create the social foundations for a society in which ends-based relations dominate while instrumental ones are well contained.

Also, such a change in the core project must take place before the world can come into harmony with the environment, which is a major common good and human purpose. The higher human needs in Maslow’s scale put much less demand on scarce resources than do the lower needs. Involving oneself more deeply in human relationships and spiritual activities is much more compatible with protecting the environment than an ever higher consumption of goods and services.

In short, when we focus on the implications of the global normative synthesis for the economic realm we find that there is a worldwide quest for a higher degree of economic autonomy from political and social pressures, and an intensive quest for affluence, for a high production/consumption project, as the center of life’s meaning. However, there are empirical, social, environmental, and moral reasons to hold that the more affluent people become, the more meaning they find in other core projects, which in turn serve the common good (e.g., protection of the environment) and are closer to ends considerations (e.g., family and communal bonds) than the celebration of resources, that is, of means.

How much of the new blend will draw on Eastern spiritual sources (as do New Age followers in the %Vest as well as converts to soft versions of Islam) and how much on Western religious and spiritual traditions of social activism is far from clear. The basic direction, though, is clear. The high production/consumption project will find its place as one activity that has an important role in human life, as one way to sate basic human needs, and as one that serves other noneconomic projects. However, this project will have to leave increasingly more room for other meaningful but less instrumental projects, if human primacy is to he advanced.

Beyond the question of how much weight to accord to the economic project lies a whole set of even more profound normative issues. To proceed we must differentiate between responding to moral versus transcendental questions. Moral values define what people consider right versus wrong: what we owe our children, what elder children owe their parents, what our obligations are to our friends and neighbors and to the communities of which we are members. Responses to transcendental questions attempt to explain why we exist, why we are cast in this world, and why we are born to die.