Carpe Diem Regained

by Roman Krznaric

  14 Castells 2015, 127.

  15 Castells 2015, 118.

  16 www.avaaz.org/en/about.php

  17 Ortiz el at 2013, 5–6, 31, 34.

  18 http://theconversation.com/hard-evidence-this-is-the-age-of-dissent-and-theres-much-more-to-come-52871

  19 Ortiz el at 2013, 13.

  20 Castells 2015, xv, 23, 132, 250–256; see also Mason’s applications of Castells’s ideas (Mason 2013, 130–131).

  21 Castells 2015, 275–276.

  22 Skocpol and Williamson 2011, 3, 4, 10.

  23 Skocpol and Williamson 2011, 5, 8, 11–12; Castells and Kumar 2014, 96.

  24 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/us/politics/13protestweb.html?_r=0

  25 Skocpol and Williamson 2011, 4–5; Castells 2015, 160–161; http://www.forbes.com/sites/bowmanmarsico/2015/11/19/how-weak-is-the-tea-party-really/#e19bacf52f2a

  26 Graeber 2013, 49.

  27 Castells 2015, 174.

  28 Van Gelder 2011, 8; Castells 2015, 251.

  29 Castells 2015, 251.

  30 Graeber 2013, 240.

  31 Van Gelder 2011, 28; https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QXISGHLT0Og; see also Mason 2013, 37–38, 49,53.

  32 Ehrenreich 2006, 259–260.

  33 Graeber 2013, 255.

  34 The carpe diem quality of Occupy in the US and beyond is perfectly captured by Castells: ‘The rapid propagation of Occupy… shows the depth and spontaneity of the protest, rooted in the outrage felt by the majority of the population across the country and in society at large. It also shows the seizing of the opportunity by many to voice their concerns and to discuss alternatives in the midst of a generalized crisis of trust in the economy and in the polity’ (Castells 2015, 166–169).

  35 Green 2015, 16–17; Mason 2013, 275; https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/eliane-glaser/postpolitics-and-future-of-left

  36 Green 2015, 16; Van Gelder 2011, 11; Castells 2015, 196–197.

  37 http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/4093:framing-occupy-wall-street

  38 Castells 2015, 196.

  39 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1943168

  40 Morozov 2011, 186–187.

  41 Mason 2013, 187.

  42 Quoted in Morozov (2011, 196).

  43 Flesher Fominaya 2015, 148; Van Gelder 2011, 16; Castells 2015, 170.

  44 Graeber 2013, 51.

  45 Iglesias 2015, 1–10.

  46 According to Castells, today’s social movements ‘are suited for their role as agents of change in the network society, in sharp contrast with the obsolete political institutions inherited from a historically superseded social structure’ (Castells 2015, 262).

  47 http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/02/march-for-europe-eu-referendum-london-protest

  48 Klein 2014, 20-22, 450-451, 458-459, 464.

  49 Carpamus diem is the hortatory subjunctive and translates as ‘let’s seize the day’. Thanks to advice from Tim Smith-Laing on the intricacies of Latin grammar.

  50 Arendt 1989, 12–14.

  9

  I Choose, Therefore I Am

  Carpe diem, as a philosophy of life, is not simply composed of the five ways to seize the day: it is also a fundamental route to human happiness in and of itself. By ‘happiness’ I don’t mean a buoyant state of joyfulness and good cheer, but something closer to what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia or ‘the good life’ – a life of deep wellbeing and flourishing that offers a sense of meaning or purpose. Certainly carpe diem cannot claim to be the route to this ideal of happiness. As John Locke noted in the seventeenth century, ‘all men seek happiness, but not of the same sort… you will as fruitlessly endeavour to delight all men with riches or glory as you would to satisfy all men’s hunger with cheese or lobsters; which, though very agreeable and delicious fare to some, are to others extremely nauseous and offensive.’1 Rather, more modestly, carpe diem is a route to happiness that deserves to sit together with other major approaches, but one that for too long has been captured by its cultural hijackers such as the ‘just buy it’ messaging of rampant consumerism.

  So where does it fit into the pantheon of philosophies of happiness? First we need some historical perspective. In most ancient Western cultures, happiness was considered to be largely out of our control and in the hands of the Gods. This view found its way into language itself. In almost every Indo-European language, the word ‘happiness’ was originally associated with luck, fortune or fate. In Middle English and Old Norse ‘happiness’ is rooted in happ, which means chance or fortune, or what happens. That’s where we get words like ‘happenstance’, ‘hapless’, ‘haphazard’ and ‘perhaps’. In German the words for happiness and luck are the same – Glück. The French bonheur comes from bon (good) and heur (fortune, luck), and the Italian felicità and Spanish felicidad are based on the Latin felix, meaning luck or fate. In other words, happiness is what happens to us. Our wellbeing is not subject to our own will or agency.2 This attitude reflected the realities of pre-modern life: you might be born into slavery, you could be struck down by a deadly disease or killed in war, and would in all likelihood be condemned to a life of poverty. Under such circumstances creating your own happiness – for instance, through freely choosing your career path – was wishful thinking.

  It was not until the Age of Enlightenment, in the eighteenth century, that happiness came to be seen as a matter of choice and a viable life aspiration for those outside wealthy elites. This was due to several momentous cultural shifts, such as rising standards of living which meant that for many people the struggle for mere survival could start giving way to the loftier pursuit of happiness, and the erosion of Church doctrines peddling the view that happiness was to be enjoyed in a heavenly afterlife rather than in mortal life on earth.3

  Over the last two centuries, a range of approaches to happiness have emerged as dominant in Western culture. While often rooted in the writings of pre-Enlightenment thinkers, and visible in human behaviour since ancient times, it has only been in the modern age that most of them have become subject to explicit and widespread discussion as philosophies of happiness. They include utilitarianism, a ‘scientific’ theory of happiness from the eighteenth century focusing on maximising pleasure and minimising pain, and the pursuit of a ‘transcendent cause’, which involves striving for meaningful goals beyond the realm of self-interest, such as creating a more equal society or living by the commandments of a particular religion. The Romantic movement championed the idea of deriving happiness from personal relationships, especially romantic love, family life and friendship. The more recent ‘emotional state theory’ of happiness extols the view that it is essentially about experiencing positive feelings – it’s about feeling joyful and ‘up’ rather than sad and ‘down’.4

  Yet amongst such commonly recognised paths to happiness, one is typically left out: carpe diem. At its core lies a very simple and powerful idea, which is that we forge meaning in our lives by making choices and acting upon them. What matters is not so much what we choose, but that we choose. We create ourselves through the exercise of freedom itself, seizing the day by taking decisions. The common thread running through the various forms of carpe diem, from grasping a fleeting opportunity to turning our attention to the present moment, is that they usually involve making a conscious choice. The life projects that shape our identities – supporting a cause, starting a family, building a business, training for a marathon – emerge from these instants of commitment. It’s an idea that I like to sum up in a single maxim: I choose, therefore I am.

  The task at hand is to understand what ‘I choose, therefore I am’ looks like in our everyday lives, and what it can contribute to our search for the good life. Before delving into it directly we need to address two fundamental challenges to the carpe diem tradition that have reared their heads at various points in earlier chapters, both of which raise dilemmas for making seize-the-day choices. First, that it is a philosophy that celebrates the value of freedom while failing to place sufficient moral b
oundaries on it – are we really free to choose anything? Second, that there are formidable psychological barriers to putting carpe diem into practice, namely procrastination, overload, risk and apathy. The deeper our understanding of these challenges, the more robust – and compelling – carpe diem will become as a paradigm for living.

  DOES CARPE DIEM PASS THE MORALITY TEST?

  There is one word you will rarely find in the index of those self-help books on ‘how to be happy’: ethics. Tricky moral questions are generally glossed over, while the focus remains firmly on my happiness with little consideration for anybody else’s. Advocates of the different types of carpe diem tend to suffer from the same myopia. Ethics is a taboo topic in most of the ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’ guides that encourage seizing opportunities and making daring choices. Similarly, as we have seen, the modern mindfulness movement extols the virtues of living in the present moment without putting any substantive limits on what we should be mindful about – hence the awkward problem of the mindful sniper.

  Some people might believe that a philosophy of carpe diem should be kept distinct from moral considerations, perhaps on the grounds that ‘my morals are mine, and yours are yours, so you can’t go around telling people what they should seize and what they shouldn’t’. I take a different view. Human beings are social animals and we must learn to live alongside one another. We cannot retreat into a naïve individualism that assumes our actions miraculously have no effects beyond our own lives and never impinge on others. If we truly wish to reclaim carpe diem, we should explore some of its moral challenges.

  The place to begin is by recognising that carpe diem has a powerful ethical foundation built into it, through advocating a supreme value: freedom. The whole idea of ‘seizing’ the day, or ‘harvesting’ it or ‘plucking’ it, is about taking action, and places absolute importance on individual choice and agency. This regard for freedom is what gives it such strong resonance with existentialism, which I consider to be a modern philosophical expression of the ancient carpe diem ideal (the former has been around for about a century, the latter for two millennia).5 During the heyday of existentialism in the years after World War Two, the movement’s stress on ‘freedom as the foundation of all values’, as Sartre put it, seemed apt for the times.6 It was a rejection of the heavy-handed totalitarianism of Nazism and Stalinism that scuppered individual freedom of expression. It made a radical call for liberty in every sphere of life, for instance sexual relations: Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir – the other half of existentialism’s very own dynamic duo – not only had an open relationship in defiance of the bourgeois institution of marriage, they were also advocates of LGBT rights half a century before their time.7

  Today, don’t we still value the freedom to choose? Is it not an essential human right – the right to join a trade union or faith of your choice, to blog against the government or engage in public protest without fear of imprisonment? Or to marry someone of the same sex? In this sense, carpe diem may be more ethical than other routes to happiness, since it builds freedom of choice into its very essence, embodied in its defining motto, ‘I choose, therefore I am’.

  So what is the ethical case against carpe diem? It can be accused of what philosophers call ‘moral subjectivism’, which means that it offers no criteria with which to distinguish right from wrong actions. There is nothing, it seems, to stop us from doing as we please. A playground bully who intimidates a puny new kid and steals her lunch could simply claim that he was seizing the day. So could a sweatshop factory owner who decides to seize the opportunity to double his profits by paying his workers slave wages, while also exploiting legal loopholes to avoid taxes. How do we know when we are taking our enthusiasm for seizing the day too far? De Beauvoir was well aware that the same criticism could be made of existentialism. ‘If man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes,’ she wrote, ‘can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes?’8

  No matter how much we celebrate individual freedom as a moral good, there will always be a case for putting limits on it in some circumstances. And that’s where carpe diem falls short: it has no inbuilt mechanism to constrain the way we seize the day. What is to stop it, say, from being expressed as violence? Horace’s Ode XI unfortunately offered no answer to this question. Sartre’s view was that violence was sometimes necessary for the greater cause of freedom. In his 1961 preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, he argued that Algeria’s independence fighters were perfectly justified in seizing the day and using force to oust their colonial French oppressors. ‘Violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted,’ he wrote. ‘The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity. For in the first days of revolt you must kill… shoot down a European’.9 Somehow it had escaped him that Gandhi had led India to independence without resorting to arms. If the fighting had come anywhere near his beloved Café de Flore, perhaps he would have thought again.

  Sartre’s position was undoubtedly controversial and for many repugnant. Still, it raises larger issues. What is the relation between my own freedom and the freedom of other people? Does mine trump yours when they come into conflict? What obligation should I have to uphold your freedom? A useful way to think about these questions is to consider adopting three rough moral rules of thumb that we can pop into our mental back pocket and consult whenever faced with tricky choices.

  The first of them, which serves as something of a foundation for the other two, is this: Those who believe in the carpe diem ideal should uphold it for all people, not just for themselves. That is to say, it cannot be only for you, or your family, or people of your religion or nation – it’s for everyone and should possess a universal quality. Sartre took a similar view when he said, ‘I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own’. So did de Beauvoir, who wrote, ‘to will oneself free is also to will others free’.10 For the philosophically minded, this tenet resembles Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative: ‘act only according to a maxim by which you can at the same time will that it shall become a general law’.11

  Now for the second rule of thumb: Do not act in such a way that you deprive other people of their carpe diem freedoms. That reins in the bully because stealing the new kid’s lunch is depriving her of her freedom to sit in the playground and enjoy her sandwich without fear of intimidation. It’s a clear encroachment on her choices. Likewise, the bankers who helped to create the subprime mortgage crisis, which led to millions of people losing their jobs and homes, were responsible for diminishing the capacity of people to make free choices about their lives: you don’t have a lot of options if you are unemployed and up to your neck in debt. This ethical guidepost echoes a long tradition of liberal thought, going back to philosophers such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill, arguing that we should be free to act however we wish except insofar as we encroach on the liberty of others.

  A final rule of thumb is: Act in such a way that you enhance the capabilities of others to exercise their carpe diem freedoms. So an advocate of seizing the day should not only ensure that they don’t deprive other people of choices, but wherever possible take positive action to expand their capacity for making choices. I have unashamedly borrowed this perspective on freedom from the Nobel Prize-winning development economist Amartya Sen. Sen’s ‘capabilities approach’ to human development puts an emphasis on our capacity to make meaningful choices in our lives, and so has close affinities with carpe diem thinking.12 He argues that the aim of development should not be reduced to purely economic goals like increasing GDP or eliminating income poverty, but should rather focus on ‘expanding the freedoms that we have reason to value’ and ‘creating more opportunities for choice and for substantive decisions for individuals’. Above all it is about increasing ‘individual agency’.13 For example, we should ensure that all children have access to education, so that they are then free to make choices later in life such as taking up employment opportuni
ties or starting a small enterprise. In doing so, writes Sen, we would be upholding the ideal of ‘individual freedom as a social commitment’.14

  Translating this perspective to the realm of carpe diem, we should aim to create a world that enables people to make seize-the-day choices. Certain essentials are needed to establish a society where carpe diem can thrive, such as good medical care and education, freedom from material deprivation and discrimination, personal safety and freedom of expression.15 It is only when these are in place that we have the capability of making genuine choices and exercising our agency to full effect. There are many ways we might advance this cause, for instance by publicly advocating for universal health care, gay marriage or a living wage. By doing so, we become activists in a carpe diem revolution.

  Indigenous Guatemalan children at school. What are their carpe diem prospects?

  Like all ethical principles, these three moral rules of thumb are not always easy to apply, and might sometimes conflict with each other. In the contentious case of Algerian independence, shooting a French official living in Algiers would plainly violate the second rule (he can’t make a lot of choices when he’s dead), but might serve to uphold the third one of promoting the seize-the-day choices of native Algerians by contributing toward their struggle for independence. To adjudicate between them, it might be necessary to appeal to a higher-level ethical principle outside the carpe diem framework, such as a commitment to non-violence or the right to national self-determination. A second challenge concerns the relation between present and future generations. My parents have just made the carpe diem decision to fly from Australia to England to visit their grandchildren while they’re still physically able to do so. But the carbon emissions from their flight contribute to global warming, and may create a world of fewer life choices for future generations, including their own grandchildren. Do their seize-the-day holiday plans contradict the carpe diem ethic? There may be no clear answer to this conundrum.