On Settling by Robert E. Goodin (review)

Goethe’s Faust tells two stories about striving. According to the dominant foreground story, striving is good and is the essence both of humanity and of individual human beings. As Goethe has the angels say when rescuing Faust at the end of Faust II: “Who strives forever with a will, by us can be redeemed.” But the foreground story can be told only against the background of a “deeper” story about not-striving. That story is present in Faust as well: “Es irrt der Mensch solang er strebt” (“human beings err as long as they are striving”), and it gives us the plot of Goodin’s book. He convincingly argues that we have always focused on striving, while not-striving, or ceasing to strive, has always come off badly. His book is meant to restore balance between the two, and it does so in discussion of “settling,” which is a most original and thought-provoking idea. Goodin is undoubtedly right that the virtues of settling, or not-striving, have rarely been sung in the history of what Spengler so appropriately called our “Faustian” civilization.

Since Goodin’s book addresses a big theme in a brief and seemingly unambitious book, it is in itself a nice illustration of not-striving and of its downside. It appears, paradoxically, that striving must inevitably be part of any attempt to come to an adequate understanding (and rehabilitation) of not-striving. But short books can be perceptive and convincing. The problem with this one is that Goodin’s approach is almost exclusively lexicographic. The book provides a careful analysis of the meaning of the word settling and affiliated expressions, such as settling for, settling by, settling down, and then goes on to enumerate historical and social contexts reflecting or exemplifying current and past usage. In the process we learn that settling is not intrinsically conservative, that it should not necessarily be associated with conservatism, and that it participates in a societal logic different from that of compromise. Above all, we learn that settling is a far more present aspect of human life and social interaction than we assume. Even so, on the whole, Goodin’s observations remain a bit trivial, the explanation being, probably, that the effort to penetrate a little deeper into the secrets of settling immediately involves one in the trickiest problems of psychology, social theory, and political philosophy. Goodin’s book, however, makes admirably clear that fascinating results must be expected from a more sustained and systematic analysis of settling. Let us hope that this book will prove to have been a preliminary exercise of such a future study by Goodin!