From art to religion to sex, instrumentalisation has drained away intrinsic value. But life is about more than material benefits

For decades, films out of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios have opened with Leo the roaring lion, garlanded with the motto Ars gratia artis: art for art’s sake. Given that MGM is a money-making behemoth, we might doubt the sincerity of this high-minded sentiment. Still, along with the contested goal of moral improvement, it certainly expresses one of the few legitimate reasons why people should make movies. Art for the sake of anything else – profit, self-promotion, propaganda – isn’t really art at all, or at least not in its purest sense.

It therefore came as a bit of a shock to see a recent advert for the National Art Pass, which gives holders free or discounted entry to galleries and museums around the United Kingdom. The tag line ‘See more. Live more’ sounded right: art does indeed enrich our lives. But it turned out that the ‘more’ here was purely quantitative, not qualitative. ‘Grow some years onto your life with art,’ proclaimed the main slogan, followed by: ‘Spending time in galleries and museums could help you live longer.’ Art not for art’s sake, but for your heart’s sake, the fleshy not the spiritual one at that. This messaging around the arts has become ubiquitous, with Arts Council England promoting the idea that ‘engaging in creative and cultural activities has proven health benefits for individuals and communities.’

I may have been shocked by the poster, but I was not surprised by it. For a long time, I have been privately lamenting the instrumentalisation of everything: how nothing seems to be of value in itself anymore but is only seen as useful in the service of some utilitarian function. I first got wind of this lamentable trend in 2010, when I had the misfortune to review Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project (2009), an account of a year in relentless pursuit of the happy life. One passage struck me so hard I can almost recall it word for word today. A day with her husband gets off to a sticky start but, following an apology, Rubin writes: ‘We hugged – for at least six seconds, which, I happened to know from my research, is the minimum time necessary to promote the flow of oxytocin and serotonin, mood-boosting chemicals that promote bonding. The moment of tension passed.’

I was left with the chilling image of a woman holding her husband not only out of love or affection but in order to release hormones and reduce her stress. Those sentences highlighted how her happiness project had led her to do everything with the improvement of her mood in mind. Nothing else seemed to matter as much, even truth. At the end of her year-long experiment in treating herself as a felicific machine, she reflected on what had or had not changed. ‘Maybe I was seeing what I wanted to see,’ she wondered, only to add: ‘Maybe, but who cares?’ Whatever makes you feel better, true or not.

In the years between witnessing hugging for happiness and creativity for longevity, I have seen countless other examples of all that is good in life being promoted not for their own sake but for the material benefits they bring. This instrumentalisation has become normalised so insidiously that we don’t even notice that it is odd, let alone wrong. Nor do we seem to be aware of quite how pervasive it is. Yet its effects are profound, leading us to lose sight again and again of what is truly of value in life.

Before offering a diagnosis for what has gone wrong and how to cure it, I need to defend the seemingly hyperbolic claim that everything is becoming instrumentalised. Far from being a rhetorical exaggeration, I genuinely find it difficult to think of anything worthwhile that at least some people have not been advocating for its utilitarian benefits before mentioning any of its intrinsic merits. Take churchgoing. Most believers hold that worship is a devotional duty rather than a pragmatic means of getting into heaven. Today, however, it is not uncommon to hear even Christians, such as Deborah Jenkins in Premier Christianity magazine, pointing to research that: ‘Being part of a church community can lengthen life, reduce depression and promote positive mental health.’ A book I flicked through today advocated prayer for physical health, pointing to a study that ‘found significant medical benefits on the cardiovascular system, blood, as well as muscle and bone resulting from the solat daily prayer.’ Of course, if challenged, none would say these are the best reasons to practise religion. But it doesn’t stop them offering these reasons as very good ones. Furthermore, they are more credible and certainly more scientific than claims that an all-loving creator god really thinks it’s important how you spend your Sunday mornings.

More profanely, we are even given instrumental reasons to orgasm. A headline from The Telegraph in 2015 – ‘An Orgasm A Day Could Keep Prostate Cancer Away, Scientists Claim’ – summed up a now-widely shared belief that one of the best reasons for a man to have sex or masturbate is not pleasure, intimacy or the release of sexual tension but to protect his health.

You could play a very long game of suggesting things people value in their own right in the hope of finding one that hasn’t been praised for its health, wealth or wellbeing advantages. Your search would be in vain. The Opera North website lists 10 benefits of singing, and only one – it lets you express yourself – has anything to do with art and creativity. The others include ‘makes you feel better’, ‘enhances lung function’, ‘helps you beat stress and relax’, ‘helps improve memory’, ‘can help when life gets tough’ and ‘boosts your confidence’.

We increasingly ask not what is good about an activity but what good it can do for us

Many people who advocate for reconnecting with nature do so with reasons that are designed to appeal to the very same utilitarian, self-centred hedonism that is to blame for humanity losing touch with the Earth in the first place. The National Trust talks of how ‘walking in nature can help wellbeing’ while the growing popularity of ‘forest bathing’ encourages us to use woodland as though it were a kind of literal walk-in clinic. These would-be advocates for nature seem to miss the irony that if we go out among the trees because of what they can do for us, we’re going with the same exploitative, extractive mindset as those who log them.

Even philosophy, the disinterested pursuit of wisdom, has fallen prey to the curse of instrumentalisation. It is no longer enough for universities to say that their programmes allow you to explore some of the most fundamental questions of existence. Now the questions are of a decidedly more bottom-line sort: how will philosophy help you buy a house or build your pension pot? Philosophy is routinely sold as a trainer of ‘transferable thinking skills’, and it’s clear where these most transfer to: the world of work. The Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge has a whole webpage devoted to five resumé-friendly skills it teaches: intellectual, communication, organisational, interpersonal and research.

Instrumentalisation is most pernicious when it applies to things we do with and for others. Immanuel Kant saw it as a ‘categorical imperative’ – an absolute demand of morality – to ‘treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.’ The words we use to describe the instrumentalisation of others echo how corrupting we think it is: dehumanisation, objectification, exploitation. That is why the instrumentalisation of social connection is immoral as well as self-defeating. If we start to foreground what social relationships do for us, we treat the other people involved as mere tools for self-advancement.

I haven’t even begun to exhaust the list of activities that have become routinely instrumentalised. Among those we could add are gardening, playing sport, camping, swimming, campaigning, community volunteer work, baking bread, crafts, keeping a diary, laughing, saying ‘thank you’. We increasingly ask not what is good about them but what good they can do for us. And by ‘good’ we mean health, wealth and worldly success.

Those who love nature, art, learning, friendship and so on for their own sake may find it distasteful to spotlight their instrumental benefits, but what is the harm in doing so? After all, someone living an instrumentalised life and someone who is not might be doing exactly the same things. This objection misses the fact that a good life does not only depend on what we do, but how we do it. Two people with the same cultural calendars may go to the same exhibitions, watch the same films and listen to the same music, but if their motivations are fundamentally different then so are the worlds they inhabit.

To understand why, we have to go back to the basic question of why anything has value. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle was one of the first but certainly not the last to observe that we do some things as means to ends and other things as ends in themselves. Only the latter have intrinsic value, while means to ends have mere extrinsic value. If we ask where the ultimate value in life lies, it is clearly in things with intrinsic value.

This piece of wisdom is so uncontroversial it could be dismissed as platitudinous. But it merits repeating across the ages and across all our life stages because it is so easy to be sucked away from what has real value by purely instrumental goods. Money is of course the clearest example. Money is important only for what it can buy and can be used to obtain many of the things we most value. Yet it seems all too human to try to accumulate more and more of it, never believing one has enough, diverting us from time with loved ones and cherished activities.

Pursuing extrinsic rather than intrinsic goods is a common-enough mistake. But the instrumentalisation of everything takes it one step further. It doesn’t just distract us from all the things that are good in themselves; it strips these very things of their intrinsic value and turns them into mere means to ends. Worse, these ends are not even of value in themselves.

Life isn’t a training for the future. It’s a game that’s already started

Think about what instrumentalisation serves: health, wealth and psychological wellbeing. These are all so obviously desirable that it’s easy to miss the fact that none have intrinsic value. That is clearly true of wealth, but it is equally true of mental and physical health.

Take bodily health first. We often talk about it as if it were the most important thing of all. That’s why Augusten Burroughs’s quote ‘When you have your health, you have everything’ has a healthy life as an internet meme. But we don’t prize health for its own sake. We value it for two reasons. One is that the alternative usually involves pain and suffering, which are bad in themselves and so to be avoided. The other is that, with health, we are more able to do the things that bring meaning to our lives. But a healthy life devoid of love, meaningful activity or experiences would be empty. Indeed, many people with chronic illness surprise themselves and others when they discover that, actually, their health is not the most important thing after all. In sickness, they see more clearly what matters and find that it is better to be, say, ill and loved than in good health and loathed. As one wheelchair-using study participant told Elizabeth Lindsey, an associate professor of nursing: ‘I can live life to the fullest, even if I have no physical ability, I can still live life to the fullest because where I am living, life is from within.’ Physical health is important only as a foundation to make it easier for us to appreciate the things that really matter. Indeed, Lindsey talks of ‘health within illness’, arguing that health in its fullest sense is not the absence of illness.

Even mental health is not important in itself. Mental illness is intrinsically bad, since it is suffering without gain. But being in good mental health, like being in good physical health, is just an enabler of what is more fundamentally valuable. Even some mental distress is not intrinsically bad. It is a good thing that we grieve as it shows that our emotions are functioning correctly when bad things happen to the people who matter to us.

Not even happiness, perhaps the most commonly claimed benefit of instrumentalisation, is an intrinsic good. It is not good if someone feels happy to see people they prejudicially hate suffer. It would not be good to live life in a chemical cloud of bliss, content but disengaged from the real world. It is not good to live happily in the illusion of a strong relationship when your partner is cheating behind your back. Blissful ignorance may sometimes be better than painful knowledge, but that does not make it good.

So what is good in itself, if not health, wealth and mental wellbeing? Philosophers have repeatedly made the mistake of trying to identify one thing as the summum bonum, the ‘ultimate good’ for humankind. For Aristotle, it was intellectual contemplation; for the Buddhists, elimination of suffering; for Kant, a good will; for utilitarians, happiness. But there seems no reason to try to narrow down what is intrinsically valuable to one state or activity. Aristotle was more on point when he identified flourishing as the highest good for humanity, erring only when he became too prescriptive about what flourishing demands. We flourish when our lives are ones of engagement with things that are valuable for their own sakes and not for any other. Flourishing takes as many forms as human beings do. Friedrich Nietzsche thought that life without music would be a mistake, but it wouldn’t be for someone who is left cold by it. The idea that ultimate value in life comes from things with intrinsic value is a pluralistic one.

Intrinsic human goods include all the things that make life worth living without need of any further justification. To ask of them ‘What’s the point?’ would be to miss the point. They are the point. We cannot give arguments for why they are valuable; we can only describe what makes them valuable and hope others recognise their worth. For example, we can say that a day spent in the forest should be appreciated first and foremost because it makes us recognise the wonder of being alive and marvel at the natural world. To play or watch a sport is to participate in or witness the struggle and delight of attempting to bring mind and body together more seamlessly than in the rest of life. Learning a foreign language is a gateway into another culture that allows you to communicate with members of it and access its literature and media. All these things enrich our lives and broaden our experience, which is valuable even if it doesn’t add a second to your lifespan or delay dementia by a day. If you see them as a means to boost your mental, emotional or physical strength for future times that may or may not be as meaningful, you are taking your focus away from what is valuable here and now. Life isn’t a training for the future. It’s a game that’s already started, and time is running out.

The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goods may be conceptually sharp, but in the real world it quickly becomes less clear-cut. Most obviously, many things can be both intrinsically and extrinsically valuable, as is the case for all the things that I argued have been wrongly instrumentalised. Instrumentalisation does not create extrinsic value, it merely elevates it above what is intrinsically valuable.

Nor is it always the case that intrinsic trumps extrinsic value. Human beings have practical needs, and it can be more important to earn money, chop wood or hunt food than to read a novel or play with your grandchildren. Many things have to be done for instrumental purposes, and to occupy yourself only with what is intrinsically worthwhile would be an exceptional privilege, an indulgence, or both.

Furthermore, not all extrinsic goods are created equal. Some serve ultimate value more closely than others. Flattering the boss to win favour to earn money to spend on things of true value takes us far from what is most important in life with no guarantee we will get back to it. Studying ethics, in contrast, is in a sense a means to an end of living well, but the end is so close to hand that it almost counts as good in itself.

What look like shortcuts turn out to be short circuits, undermining what they seek to achieve

This is why I think the debate over ‘art for art’s sake’ versus ‘art as a didactic tool’ is somewhat misguided. Some art, especially instrumental music and abstract painting, can and should be appreciated only for its own sake. But much literature, film and drama can give us insight into ethics, politics and the human heart. All such understanding helps us to live better and attend more to what truly matters, in our lives and those of others. Such art can be seen as a means to the end of moral education, but in good art, means and ends are so closely tied that the distinction seems artificial. For instance, any account of why Anton Chekhov was such a great playwright could not separate his stagecraft and the humanity of what it represents. The problem with much didactic art is not that it contains lessons but that they are conveyed so crudely. Such works are not just bad art but poor pedagogical tools.

The relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic value is complex, and one of the problems of instrumentalisation is that it seeks to flatten and simplify it. It encourages us to identify what is most useful, and then separate it from, and prioritise it above, what is of ultimate value. In doing so, it often diminishes or destroys the very benefits it promises to maximise.

Take social connection. I have just heard of a study that says that doing anything – even reading – is better for us when we do it with others than alone. This message is now widely broadcast and understood, so people know that conviviality is important for their mental and physical health. But one of the most valuable features of friendship and community is how they take us out of concern for ourselves and make us more aware of the needs of others. To get the most out of socialising we need to do it in the right spirit, choosing to be with other people because we care for them and they for us, because we find them stimulating, because we enjoy being part of a collective experience or endeavour. So if we choose to mingle only for reasons of our personal wellbeing, we are probably not going to get the benefits that socialising usually brings.

Instrumentalisation has the illusion of efficiency because it promotes the direct pursuit of practical things that we all want. But often this turns out to be counterproductive. More often than not, you will fail to get the claimed benefits of an activity if getting them becomes your primary motivation. What look like shortcuts turn out to be short circuits, undermining what they seek to achieve.

If instrumentalisation is such a profound mistake, why have we made it? After all, we do not deliberately set out to strip meaning from our most valued activities or treat friends as psychic enhancers. Instrumentalisation has its roots in several connected features of Western modernity.

The Enlightenment brought to fruition an idea of the primacy of the sovereign, autonomous individual, one that had deep roots in classical and Christian thought. Over the centuries, this idea has become a kind of common sense. Each person is supposed to be the master of their own destiny, the author of their own life story. Self-expression and self-determination are seen as essential for being an authentic self.

Enlightenment thinkers were correct to promote greater individual freedom in an age when power was wielded by the few over a subjugated majority. But human beings are also social animals and can never be entirely autonomous. Modernity’s mistake is to lose sight of this, placing all the emphasis on personal liberty and not enough on our interdependence. This has led to an exaggeration of the importance of autonomy that has pushed the prizing of individuality too far. The result is atomisation: a world in which our separateness from others has become excessive.

This atomised world has several features, all of which encourage instrumentalisation. First, it promotes an illusion of control. Encouraged to feel autonomous, we lose sight of the fact that there is much over which we have no power. The world unfolds, opening up opportunities and throwing spanners in the works in equally random measure. We are not even in full control of ourselves. We had no say in our fundamental constitutions: our dispositions, personalities, gifts and limitations. We have no direct access to the hidden springs of thought and volition and cannot just choose what we like or what we believe.

Behind much instrumentalisation is a crude reductionism that ignores systems and focuses on elements within it

But primed to think of ourselves as free and autonomous, we imagine that we can manipulate the world to achieve whatever we want. Happiness, health and success are all ours for the taking, just as long as we make the right choices. And so the world becomes a series of levers to be pulled and buttons to be pushed, all to yield to our wills. In short, everything can and must be a means to whatever ends we choose, because that is what we think self-determination requires.

In the era of late capitalism, our autonomous agency has increasingly been expressed through our status as consumers. Freedom is above all the choice of how to spend our money, with the promise that everything we need can be obtained in exchange for cash. The consumer mindset has affected how we relate to everything, not just the things we buy. The result is that the world has become essentially transactional, meaning that everything is an instrument for getting something else. It is no coincidence that dating apps give the impression that we are shopping for partners because we approach even relationships with the consumer framing. Politics has also become a trade for votes in which the electorate and politicians believe that the winner takes all, like the highest bidder in an auction, and damn those who backed the losing side. Democracy should be a way of managing competing demands, not giving the winners everything they want. Voting should be about having your say, not getting your way. But in the new consumer mindset, votes buy power, they no longer mandate responsibility.

Another deep cultural source of instrumentalisation is the reductionism that has surreptitiously seeped into our culture from natural science. Reductionism is the idea that the way to understand how things work is to break them down into their constitutive parts. It’s an idea that served natural science well for centuries. But a clue as to its limitations comes in its relative failure in the social sciences. Economies, societies and psychologies cannot be explained by simple mechanistic processes. We have learned that, even in the natural sciences, you can explain only so much by taking things apart, and that it is equally – sometimes more – important to see how systems work as a whole.

Behind much instrumentalisation is a crude reductionism that ignores systems and focuses on elements within it. The richness of an experience, such as being in the outdoors, is reduced to a means to stimulate blood flow or release hormones. Art, which stirs a large variety of often conflicting emotions, is prized purely for its capacity to evoke certain good ones. Social bonds, which cause pain and heartache as well as joy, are reduced to sources of emotional support.

Combine an inflated belief in personal autonomy, a transactional consumer mentality and a reductionist attitude to how things work, and it is inevitable that we treat the world as a collection of resources we can plunder to promote our own wellbeing. The tragedy is that when we do so, we neglect rather than serve our deepest needs.

What would our culture look like if we were to reverse the instrumentalisation of everything? Of course, we would still do many things as means to ends. We would also be happy to agree that many of the good things in life bring us instrumental benefits too. But we would see these as welcome side-effects, not their purposes. A deinstrumentalised world would be one in which we would attend more to what is of value right here, right now.

Take friendship. The personal benefits we get from others are real, but they should not be the reason for being with them. Relationships are valuable because we value the people in them, not because spending time with them releases endorphins in our brains. David Hume corrected this error more than two centuries ago when he wrote: ‘I feel a pleasure in doing good to my friend, because I love him; but do not love him for the sake of that pleasure.’ To reject instrumentalisation is to understand that feeling good often follows from living well, but it is not what living well consists in.

To appreciate things for their own value instead of what they might bring us is liberating. It frees us from the internal pressure always to make sure that what we are doing serves some further purpose, to justify our days in terms of the future credits that we accrue from them. Living life to the full means fully appreciating what life brings, not trying to extract bankable benefits from it. It leaves us able to recognise that the good life is something we can live every day, in small ways as well as big. Most importantly, it tells us that the things and people we love are enough in and of themselves and don’t need to serve any further function to justify devoting time and care on them. To be in this world realising that life is its own end is the key to attaining its fullness.