Category: Sharp Stick

The English writer, mathemetician and philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote The Conquest of Happiness in 1930. It was written for a general audience. It has aged well.

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A few weeks ago I read Letters to a Young Contrarian (ISBN 0-465-03033-5) by Christopher Hitchens. The book is part of a series published by Basic Books called “The Art of Mentoring”. Hitchens has made his career as a journalist, literary critic, political commentator and public intellectual. The pieces in Letters to a Young Contrarian are gems – finely crafted essays on living the examined life in public.

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Yesterday, in a happy coincidence, I read an article in Spiked magazine and the entry on happiness in John Ralston’s Saul’s The Doubter’s Companion.
Saul argued that the meaning of happiness has slipped, and that in modern times we tend to look for the wrong kind of happiness in the wrong places. In Aristotle’s ethics, happiness meant human harmony, and ethical actions were actions that produced that kind of happiness. In modern liberal discourse, happiness means basic material comfort in a prosperous well-organized society. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that Americans had a natural right to pursuit of happiness, he meant the right to work for their own prosperity and to work collectively for that kind of society. When we say that politicians have a responsibility to promote happiness in that sense, we mean to promote laws and policies that promote a prosperous well-organized society.
Happiness has another meaning. Saul suggests that as Western society achieved the goals of prosperity and organization, “the word’s meaning declined into the pursuit of pleasure or an obscure sense of inner contentment”. He cites a comment attributed to the late French president Charles DeGaulle – “happiness is for idiots”. He unpacks this as describing the fact that the political and economic processes of Western society are losing their focus. Those processes should be aimed at maintaining prosperity and well-being, not contentment. People are coming to expect the rest of the world to make them feel good and blaming “society” and life for being uncertain, risky and messy.

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Some of my web feeds are linking to articles about Jean Paul Sartre on what would have been his 100th birthday. The Online Edition of the Independent had one. The Boston Globe had another. Sartre gets a nod from Julian Baggini in the Sunday Herald, promoting David Hume for the BBC poll on the Greatest Philosopher. And Baggini has a Python quote: “David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel”. Which may be true, although Hume was pretty boring, for a Scot.

The online edition of the New Criterion has an article by Roger Kimball appraising the work of the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. It emphasizes his critique of Marxism, as practical politics, ideology and philosophy, which has made him popular with American conservatives and some of the religious conservative intelligentsia. Much of the material about Kolakowski on the Internet in English emphasizes his critiques of Communist and liberal/modern ideas in support of religious and conservative ideology, which is a very shallow approach.
Kolakowski stated a proposition known as the Law of the Infinite Cornucopia. It is summarized in a Wikipedia entry which seems to have parasitically used by dozens of other Web “encyclopedias”. I haven’t found the book, article or speech with the original comment. The Wikipedia summay quoted here appears to have been taken from historian Timothy Garton Ash’s paraphrase, in an essay or review called “Neo-Pagan Poland” published in the New York Review of Books January 11, 1996:

…. for any given doctrine one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of arguments by which one can support it.
A historian’s application of this law might be that a plausible cause can be found for any given historical development. A biblical theologian’s application of this law might be that for any doctrine one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of biblical evidence to support it.

That’s an elegant statement of the capacity of human beings to rationalize to fortify an inituitive, emotional belief.

The second of Alasdair MacIntyre’s lectures published in The Religious Significance of Atheism (I discussed the first lecture in my preceding entry, The Fate of Theism) was Atheism and Morals. His approach was to consider one of the key claims of theists, that without belief in God, morality collapses, expressed in Dostoyevsky’s saying that without God, everything is permitted.
His answer as an observer of life and history, is that morality exists independently of a religious belief system. While some of the atheists of the Victorian area led notoriously unconventional social lives, the majority were moral, principled, conventional, socially conservative. And on the other hand good Christians on both sides in World War II firebombed civilian cities. The repressive morality of the Victorian era was a secular morality of respectability and convention, justified and advanced by atheist utilitarian thinkers like Mill and Bentham, as much as by religious thinkers.

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Alasdair MacIntyre crossed my radar when I was reading Francis Wheen’s Idiot Proof this winter. Wheen, writing as a defender of Enlightenment rationalism, trashed MacIntyre’s 1981 book After Virtue as a thin polemic in favour of enforcing conservative social values under the guise of promoting “virtue”.
MacIntyre is a difficult academic writer. His ideas run in odd directions, and off at tangents. (I found a summary of After Virtue, dense work in itself). He can fairly be called a social and political conservative in his writing after 1968, and his writing underlies much of the writing by modern conservatives about the virtues. He is admired by the conservative Catholic intellectuals at First Things magazine. For instance in 1996 Edward Oakes wrote a favourable evaluation of his work. Conservative Catholics like the fact that he converted from Marxism to Catholicism and has been trying to revive the moral philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, and perhaps some of the medieval Scholastics.
In 1966 while he was still a Marxist, and still teaching sociology in England, he lectured at Columbia with the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. The lectures were published in a short book called The Religious Significance of Atheism. The first of MacIntyre’s lectures was called The Fate of Theism. His perspective was neither Marxist nor Thomistic at that stage. His approach was more that of the philosopher, social critic and intellectual historian than the professional sociologist.

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