Amitai Etzioni, the communitarian thinker, was in London last night, and he wants us to ask one question: what is the good life? This is the debate he thinks we now need to have, given that old social norms have tumbled - liberating all sorts of people - though no new social norms have yet established themselves.

He believes that 'moral dialogue' is the way to discover these values we'll share, since if they emerge from the demos as a whole, then the demos will also be inclined to enforce them for itself. (Think smoking ban: who's ever seen the police being called because someone lit up in an enclosed space; no, we accept the ban because not smoking became a new norm.)

Moral dialogues are messy when you're in the midst of them. Gay marriage is a current case in point in the US. And we're just entering a dialogue about climate change, so expect things to heat up for a while, along with the planet.

But what are his bullet-points for the good life? One, spend more time with others. Two, spend more time not labouring. Which seems entirely common-sensical, though given that, and that we've not done it yet, I was left wondering what it'll take for us so to do. You'd think that the good life would be the first question we ask in the morning, the last thing we think of at night. In fact, it's far harder. Why's that?