In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. Charles Murray
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the enabling condition involving “enough” material resources to pursue happiness? And having asked that question, it then makes sense to ask (still sticking to the very practical issues involved) what “enough” might mean.
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With material resources, I began with the most obvious of all enabling conditions. As soon as one pushes further, the room for disagreement increases. One quickly reaches possible “enabling conditions” that some will find marginal, irrelevant, or conceptually redundant with the conditions that have already been defined. I have no interest in pushing the limits. Anyone who wants to develop a definitionally taut, orthogonal set of enabling conditions for happiness is welcome to try to do so; I will not. The objective is not to set up an internally consistent intellectual system but to ask how some obviously important enabling conditions of happiness relate to day-to-day life and day-to-day social policy in the United States of America in the latter part of the twentieth century. For this task, we have an excellent conceptualization already available, and I draw upon it for organizing the succeeding chapters.
Maslow’s Needs Hierarchy
In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow published an article entitled “A Theory of Human Motivation,” which argued that human needs fall into a few basic categories arranged in a hierarchy.1 At the most primitive level, man needs to survive. Withhold food from a man, and food will be what he most wants; for him, utopia is a place with enough food. “Freedom, love, community feeling, respect, philosophy, all may be waved aside as fripperies which are useless since they fail to fill the stomach. Such a man may fairly be said to live by bread alone.”2
When enough food is available, utopia stops being a place with enough food. Other needs surface. “A want that is satisfied is no longer a want. The organism is dominated and its behavior organized only by unsatisfied needs.”3 Maslow identified five categories of need and ranked them in this order:
Physiological needs (food, water, shelter, sex).
The need for safety (predictability, order, protection from physical harm).
The need for intimacy (belongingness, friendship, relationships with spouse and children).
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The need for esteem (self-respect, recognition, and respect from others).
The need for self-actualization (expressing one’s capacities, fulfilling one’s potential).
Maslow argued that these needs are met roughly in the order listed. People whose basic physiological needs have not been met are absorbed first in satisfying them, then in ensuring their safety, then in forming intimate relationships of love and friendship, then in attaining self-esteem, and finally in fulfilling their special potentialities. This order is not immutably fixed (and is not important to this discussion in any case). People trade elements of one good for elements of another, people value different goods differently, but such is the general sequence.
Maslow went on to become a major figure in psychology, with a controversial body of work that extends far beyond his original needs hierarchy. My use of Maslow is limited to this: He provides a useful way of organizing an unwieldy discussion. Taken together, his five categories are a capitulation of the enabling conditions for the pursuit of happiness—which is to say, if all of them were met, it is difficult to see how a person could claim that he was prevented by external conditions from pursuing happiness.
I have adapted them for purposes of this discussion under the chapter headings of material resources (corresponding to physiological needs), safety (safety needs), and self-respect (esteem needs). The discussion of self-actualization has been folded into a somewhat broader topic that embraces as well the concept of intrinsic rewards—taken together and dispensing with jargon, the label “enjoyment” is as good as any.
Omissions
I have omitted a separate discussion of the need for “belongingness” and intimacy in this part of the book not because social policy is irrelevant (quite the contrary), but for two other reasons. First, some of the most important ways in which social policy enables people to form intimate relationships with others are through the other enabling conditions, especially self-respect (self-respect being
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an enabling condition not only for happiness in general but also for the development of relationships with others in particular). Second, I will be arguing much later in the book that the formation of “little platoons” (chap. 12) is the nexus within which the pursuit of happiness is worked out. What Maslow calls the need for belongingness is not just one of the needs, it is the key for meeting the others as well.
Before leaving the list of enabling conditions, a few comments about two obvious missing ones. What about human needs for freedom? Justice? Maslow argues that they are not separate categories, but rather “preconditions for basic need satisfactions.”4 It is perhaps an indication of the underlying coherence of Maslow’s system that, despite my own predisposition to treat freedom as an enabling condition and the disposition of many other commentators on social policy to treat justice as an independent enabling condition, it turns out to be awkward to do so. Few of us wake up in the morning looking forward to the day because we are free or live in a just society. We are much more likely to wake up looking forward to the day (if we are so fortunate) because of other things that freedom and justice have made possible—they are the enabling conditions of the enabling conditions, if you will. In a book about the felt satisfactions of life, freedom and justice seem to be examples of things that from day to day are good for a wide variety of other things and are better discussed in that context.
The Strategy for the Discussion
For the next four chapters of this book about public policy, I ask that you temporarily forget about specific policies. In fact, the key to this enterprise is precisely not thinking about policies (which we will begin to do instead in part 3) and instead concentrating on what it is we want to accomplish regarding each of the enabling conditions, ignoring for the time being how to do so through government programs and largely ignoring even whether it is possible to accomplish such things through government programs. We have identified (I am asking you to agree) four extremely important enabling conditions for the pursuit of happiness: material resources, safety, self-respect, and “enjoyment.” Perhaps public policy can contribute a great deal to the
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achievement of these conditions, perhaps not. We don’t know yet, because we haven’t yet thought about what the conditions consist of. When a person is living in a situation where the enabling conditions have been met—where he has “enough” material resources, safety, self-respect, and access to enjoyment to pursue happiness—what will be the characteristics of each of those states of affairs?
THRESHOLDS
My general strategy will be to superimpose upon the concept of “enabling condition” the concept of “threshold.” To illustrate, consider the role of food as an element in the enabling condition “material resources.” Has anyone been happy while starving? Only, one may assume, under the most extraordinary circumstances. Has anyone been happy while having only a Spartan diet, with little variety but adequate nutrition? Of course; it happens all the time. There is a threshold before which it is nearly impossible to pursue happiness, after which the pursuit of happiness becomes readily possible. The first question to ask of enabling conditions will be, Is there a threshold state and, if so, where does it lie? Is there such a thing as “enough” material resources to enable one to pursue happiness? “Enough” safety? “Enough” self-respect? “Enough” enjoyment?
An intuitive first response is that surely there is not such a thing as “enough” of these goods that can be defined concretely or generalized across all people. But that really amounts to saying that “threshold” can be a complex concept, not that thresholds do not exist. For example, continuing the food example, don’t people who have a wide variety of foods tend to enjoy life more than people who must live on beans, other things being