In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. Charles Murray
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of the highest good as a new BMW. Let me add therefore another common understanding from the eighteenth-century tradition. It was taken for granted that any thoughtful person thinks about what “the good” means, and especially about what the highest good means. It was also taken for granted that thoughtful people strive to live their lives (albeit with the frailties and inconstancies of humans) according to that understanding. The pursuit of happiness is not just something that human beings “do,” it is the duty of a human being functioning as a human being, on a par with the duty to preserve one’s integrity.
Let me take this thought further. To imagine a human being not pursuing happiness is a kind of contradiction in terms. To be fully human is to seek the best ends one knows, and to be fully human is also to apply one’s human intelligence as best one can to the question, What is the good? I will be returning to this densely packed thought in the next chapter, but as starting points: Happiness is something that a Mother Teresa is striving to achieve. And anyone whose highest good really is a new BMW is not thinking in recognizably human ways. (If that seems harsh, note the italics.) For those who put their signatures to the Declaration, a society in which people were able to pursue happiness was no more and no less than a society in which people were able to go about the business of being human beings as wisely and
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fully as they could. The job of government was to enable them to do so.6 People can have no higher calling, nor can governments.
My assertion, and the linchpin of this book, is that what was true then is true now. The longer one thinks about why one is in favor of or opposed to any particular measure to help people, the more one is driven to employ that most un-twentieth-century concept, happiness. The purpose of government is to facilitate the pursuit of happiness of its citizens.
Understandings
As I set out to explore this strange but useful concept called “the pursuit of happiness,” two understandings:
NO EQUATIONS
First, I will not be suggesting that we try to assess the “happiness yield” of a given policy. If catalytic converters are proposed as a way of reducing air pollution then air pollution remains the immediate problem at which they are directed and we had better do a hard-headed job of deciding whether catalytic converters are a good way to achieve that immediate goal. Nor shall I be trying to quantify a “happiness index” by which we may measure progress or retrogression. My goal is to make use of the idea of happiness, not trivialize it.
Rather, as I will be arguing in the chapters that follow, the concept of happiness gives us a new place to stand in assessing social policy. New places to stand offer new perspectives and can give better leverage on old problems. I will be arguing that the pursuit-of-happiness criterion gives us a valuable way of thinking about solutions, even when that way of thinking does not necessarily point us toward “the” solution.
NO ROSE GARDENS
I will be discussing the pursuit of happiness as it relates to social policy rather than the achievement of happiness. Only the former can be a “right.” The latter is not within the gift of any government.
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It is equally obvious, however, that the concept of “ability to pursue happiness” is not met simply by dubbing someone free to do so. You cannot pursue happiness effectively if you are starving or suffering other severe deprivations. You may meet misfortune with fortitude; you may extract from your situation what contentment is possible; but you may not reasonably be said to be “free to pursue happiness” under such conditions. “Pursuit” requires that certain conditions prevail, and part 2 explores the conditions that are most immediately relevant to government policies.
But neither does “enabled to pursue happiness” translate into a high probability of achieving whatever you set out to achieve. “Not that I would not, if I could,” writes William James, “be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone-poet’ and saint. But the thing is simply impossible.”7 Similarly, you cannot reasonably ask that you be enabled to achieve any particular sort of happiness you might prefer. “Ability to pursue happiness” will be treated as meaning that no one and no external objective condition controlled by government will prevent you from living a life that provides you with happiness. It may not be the most satisfying life you can imagine in its detail. Others with no greater merit than you (as you see it) may lead lives that you would prefer to live. But you will have the wherewithal for realizing deep and meaningful satisfactions in life. If you reach the end of your life unhappy, it will be your fault, or the fault of natural tragedies beyond the power of society to prevent.
And with that, we have cleared away enough underbrush to begin. Just as war is too important to be left to generals, so is happiness too important to be left to philosophers. It is a word with content that bridges widely varying political views. It lends itself to thinking about, puzzling over, playing with. Doing so can profoundly affect how we conceive of good laws, social justice, and some very practical improvements in the quality of American life.
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Coming to Terms with Happiness
My objective is to provide a new backdrop against which to measure the wisdom or utility of specific government policies. I propose to use the concept of the pursuit of happiness for that purpose, considering the constituent conditions that enable us to pursue happiness and then asking how these conditions may be met.
This is easily said and not even very controversial as long as “happiness” has not yet been defined except as the good-that-one-seeks-as-an-end-in-itself-and-for-no-other-reason. The task in this chapter is to fill in the concept of happiness with enough content to permit us to talk about the pursuit of happiness more specifically.
Happiness from Aristotle to the Self-Anchoring Cantril Scale
There is a curiously common assumption that everyone has his own idiosyncratic notion of what constitutes happiness. One contemporary scholar writing a book on the causes of human misery begins with a casual aside that “On the score of happiness, it is difficult to say anything more than that its sources seem infinitely various, and that disputes about tastes are notoriously hard to resolve.”1 To illustrate his point, he mentions “the happiness to be had by making other people miserable,” apparently assuming that distinctions between sadism and other forms of human pleasure are arbitrary inventions.2 Or there is the friend who, when told that I was writing a book dealing with the pursuit of happiness, assumed that I must necessarily get bogged down in what he viewed as the California school of happiness, sitting on the beach waiting for the perfect wave.
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The assumption that definitions of happiness are idiosyncratic is curious because the oddball definitions are always the other fellow’s. It is as if everyone recognizes the degraded concept of “happiness-as-feeling-good” that dominates popular usage, and assumes that that’s how everyone else looks at it, while at the same time harboring (perhaps even a little guiltily) a private inner understanding of happiness that is close to the classical understanding.
In practice, the level of agreement about what constitutes happiness is remarkably broad—an assertion you may put to the test by turning to the end of this chapter and seeing whether you can tolerate the working definition I employ. If you can, you may skip this chapter without loss except the pleasure of knowing what good company you are in. The purpose of this chapter is not to persuade you of a particular understanding of happiness but to indicate, briefly and nontechnically, how recent has been the retreat from a common intellectual understanding of human happiness. For centuries, there was a mainstream tradition in the West about the meaning of happiness