Improvement of Society and the Role of Work

I happened upon this page: "What would make the best society?", which has a number of entries, and found this to be a rational answer, and it ends on an "Epicurean" note.

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What would make the best society? An aggregate of people living together in a harmonious community with common values and customs. But although this appears an acceptable definition, harmony is a difficult if not impossible state to achieve in society, and the maintenance of harmony invariably impedes the achievement of individual ideals. So this definition is nothing more than an unachievable ideal.

Philosophy has long been a defender of this impossible ideal, yet it seems that many are still confused by the nature of the notion: an ideal may be desirable but wholly unobtainable, especially if it concerns social matters. Plato reported such an unreachable ideal in the Republic, as did More and Bacon; and it is disparaging to their works if one thinks they were so na ïve as to believe that what they wrote could be actualised. Yet people still criticise their work on just this basis.

Maybe a poet could better portray the way things are. D.H. Lawrence says of love: “We have pushed a process into a goal.” Love is an ideal we all wish to acquire; but as Lawrence says, it’s a process not a goal, and to believe it is something to acquire is actually a fallacy. We do not fall in love to reach something and then stop: love is ongoing. So too must we understand social improvement as a process, for if we begin to view the ideal society as a thing we can create, then we’re accepting that we’ll reach a point at which we can go no further, no longer improve. Instead then, we must formulate an ideal and work towards it, knowing that its perfect implementation is unattainable. At least we will be moving in the right direction.

With all this in mind, I offer up the suggestion that we work towards a society where due to advances in technology no one works any more – allowing us to sit around discussing philosophy, eating fine food and drinking fine wine!

Christopher Burr, Southbourne, Dorset

Further thoughts from the quote from above website entry:

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With all this in mind, I offer up the suggestion that we work towards a society where due to advances in technology no one works any more – allowing us to sit around discussing philosophy, eating fine food and drinking fine wine!

I just realized that the author of this short entry contradicts himself, because he wrote that perfect implementation is unattainable... and ....therefore perfect technology (where no one needs to work anymore) is also unattainable.

Also, the assumption is that sitting around discussing philosophy, eating fine food and drinking fine wine are the most pleasurable activities. But there is only so much food and wine that one can take in at a time. And this would be rathering limiting, as far as activities go.

And this brings up a contemplation on "work"...certain work is necessary, certain work is vain, and certain kinds of work bring forward benefits and pleasures at the same time.