In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. - book reviews

National Review, Nov 25, 1988 by Joseph Sobran

IN THE twentieth century, Communism has become common sense. The solution to every problem is of course the Communistic one-using "Communistic" as Marx used it, to denote not a surreptitious allegiance to a foreign power (there was no Soviet Union while Marx lived) but the disposition to use the state to expropriate wealth for an alleged common good.

This common good, in turn, is conceived reductively: it refers to the biological desires (or "drives") that are thought to constitute our common humanity. Frustrated desire gives the state a mandate to pool wealth by force in order to assuage it. Even in the capitalist U.S., this is the working assumption that guides politicians and policy-makers. There's hunger around? So tax us. Create a program to abolish it. Even the reactionary Reagan Administration has been known to boast of its increased food-stamp outlays.

Libertarians and conservatives have coped with Communist enthymemes mostly by rejecting, not answering, the presuppositions. Some critics have argued that the Communist programs don't work on their own terms, and the populace is uneasy about them too. The 1988 campaign has seen liberals treating "liberal"-their own chosen euphemism for Communistic reflexes-as a smear. They understandably don't want to admit that their philosophy has been discredited by experience; they prefer to blame their image on Roger Ailes's perverse wizardry. "Liberal," it seems, is a "label" imposed by the Other.

Now they'll have to cope with Charles Murray's newest book, In Pursuit Of Happiness and Good Government. It doesn't inveigh against liberals. Instead, it addresses the buried premises of misguided ad-hoc policies, allegedly pragmatic, but actually doctrinaire and therefore destructive to the human realities they refuse to take into account. The soul, for instance.

Murray doesn't speak of "the soul." He picks his fight in the most agreeable tone he can manage. Social policy, he insists, must, no matter how empirical its methods, derive from some conception of "human nature." Man is more than a bundle of drives. He observably has long-term purposes, which Murray, following the Founders, is willing to sum up as "the pursuit of happiness."

This "happiness," however defined, is more than sensual gratification. It means something like "lasting and justified satisfaction with one's life as a whole." It has no single form, but we can rule out any drug addict's claim that he is living a happy life. "Happiness," Murray says, "is more than a feeling." In essence it's moral.

Murray appeals to ordinary intuitive morality. You wouldn't be pleased if your own child lived a life of unremitting hedonistic indulgence, every appetite cloyed. Why use only hedonistic criteria for a good society?

True, a certain amount of wealthenough to prevent physical misery-is necessary to happiness. "'Poverty,"' he notes sardonically, "has in recent years been to policy analysts what damnation is to a Baptist preacher." Agreed, we can't have people starving. But the concept of poverty has taken wings and has been defined not only in relative but in almost metaphysical terms: compare Michael Harrington's "invisible poverty," afflicting those who are well fed, clothed, and sheltered. (Any excuse for Communism will do.)

Every man has to find happiness on his own terms. That's why society, including government, can only enable the pursuit of happiness. The preconditions of the pursuit include more than food and shelter. We also need, for instance, safety. But even this isn't enough. We have to be able to trust the people we live among to observe standards of civil conduct when police protection has already done its part. Murray suggests, if I understand him, that much of society's wealth lies in the quality of its people. This too is moral, and of no less practical consequence for that. The much-disparaged middle-class values are necessities, not arbitrary luxuries.

Much of In Pursuit is an attempt to connect the insights of current psychology and sociology with the older idiom of civic virtue. Self-respect (which Murray carefully distinguishes from self-esteem) is a profound individual need as well as a social cohesive. Rights don't just entail responsibilities: responsibilities are as basic as rights. We can't live happily without them.

Murray presses his arguments gently, acknowledging thatthey don't settle all specific policy questions. He merely insists that if he is right about these things, then policy-makers have to take them into account from now on. It's a modest stipulation.

Though he agrees with tbe Founders on what human nature is, and therefore on what government should by and large do, Murray also pays his respects to the Anti-Federalists, whose reservations about a strong central government have been vindicated over the long run. The pseudonymous Brutus spoke for many when he predicted that "the federal legislature [would] lessen and ultimately [would] subvert the state authority"; and that "the judges under this constitution [would] control the legislature, for the supreme court are authorized in the last resort to determine what is the extent of the powers of the Congress; they are to give the constitution an explanation, and there is no power above them to set aside their judgment." All Brutus failed to foresee was that the Supreme Court would steer clear of antagonizing Congress (which can clip the Court's power) and would instead bully the helpless state legislatures, The Court has rarely challenged Congress's assumption of new powers. (How the Tenth Amendment was ever supposed to be enforced is anybody's guess.)