Philosophy of Wantlessness Is Utopian, While Materialism Is a Chimera

In the fifth century BCE a prince in the foothills of the Himalaya left his palace, his wife and his infant son to seek an end to suffering. After years of extreme austerity, in which he is said to have lived on a grain of rice a day, he found that starving the body brought no peace either. He chose what the tradition calls the middle way, between indulgence and self denial. The story contains the question of the topic, which says that a philosophy of wantlessness is utopian and that materialism is a chimera. Both of the great answers to desire, it suggests, promise something that cannot be had.

The word utopia was coined by Thomas More in 1516 from Greek words meaning no place. To call a philosophy utopian is to say that it describes a world that does not and cannot exist. A chimera, in Greek myth, was a fire breathing monster made of a lion, a goat and a serpent, and has come to mean an illusion or an impossible fancy. The topic thus accuses wantlessness of being unrealisable and materialism of being a delusion. Each charge deserves a hearing.

Consider wantlessness first. The traditions of India have praised it for millennia. The Buddha taught that craving, tanha, is the root of suffering. Jain monks of the Digambara sect own nothing, not even clothes. The principle of aparigraha, or non possession, is among the vows of the Jains and the restraints of yoga, and the Bhagavad Gita praises the person who is free of longing. Gandhi lived with a few possessions, and Thoreau retreated to Walden Pond in 1845 to test how little a man needed. Epicurus and the Stoics in Greece taught that the wise man lowers his desires to what is easily met.

The attraction is evident. A person who wants little cannot be disappointed, bribed or enslaved. His peace does not depend on the world cooperating, and he has time and attention for things that matter. But the difficulty is also evident. Human beings need food, shelter and company, and these needs are experienced as desires. Hunger is a form of wanting. A philosophy that demanded the extinction of all wants would demand the extinction of life itself, and most of those who have praised wantlessness have in fact lived on the gifts of those who wanted more. The monk's begging bowl depends on a farmer's ambition.

The monk's begging bowl depends on a farmer's ambition.

There is also the matter of progress. The great reduction in poverty in recent decades came from people wanting a better life and organising to obtain it. The World Bank estimates that the share of the world's population in extreme poverty fell from about thirty six per cent in 1990 to under ten per cent by 2019. A mother who wants her child to be vaccinated and educated is not a victim of illusion. Such wanting is plainly a virtue. The desire to improve things, to cure disease and to know more has driven medicine, science and art. A world without wants would be a stagnant one, and the wantless saint would never have had a language, a text or a village to teach.

Yet if wantlessness is a dream, materialism fares no better. The materialist holds that satisfaction lies in acquiring more, and he orders his life accordingly. The trouble is that the wanting does not end. Psychologists describe a hedonic treadmill, in which a new possession delivers a thrill that fades, leaving the person with a higher standard and the same restlessness. The myth of Tantalus, who stood in water that receded when he tried to drink, is the old image of it. A chimera is not just an impossible creature but one made of parts that do not fit together, and so is the promise of a final satisfaction through accumulation.

Thorstein Veblen explained in 1899 why the chase never ends. Much of what we want is wanted for its display of status, and status is relative, so that when everyone has more, no one is higher. The result is a competition in which the finish line keeps moving. Meanwhile the planet pays. The material demands of a billion people living like the richest tenth would require more resources than the earth can provide, and ecologists speak of overshoot, a state in which humanity uses more each year than nature can regenerate. The materialist dream, if it were fulfilled for everyone, would be impossible to sustain.

The two errors share a root. Each assumes that desire can be settled by a single decision, either by abolishing it or by feeding it. Anyone who has tried to give up sugar or to stop checking a phone knows that wants are not switches but weather, to be watched and managed through the day.

What follows is a position between the two. The Buddha called it the middle way, and Aristotle called it the mean. It begins by distinguishing needs from wants, and the wants that serve a good life from those that merely feed an appetite. Gandhi's saying that the earth provides enough for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed expresses it, as does the old idea of sufficiency. A person lives well when he knows what is enough. A society does the same when it measures progress by the health, learning and security of its people and not just by the volume of consumption.

The difficulty with the middle way is that it offers no fixed measure. What counts as enough in a village in Odisha differs from what counts in Mumbai, and it changes with each decade. There are no rules to tell a person when a desire has crossed from need to excess, and the answer must be found by each person in the place where he lives. It is hard to know whether a philosophy that gives no formula is a wisdom or an evasion, and the seeker who looks for one may notice that the craving for a rule is a wanting as well.