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There is a new
battleground between left and right liberals, namely, happiness.
Their debate about what makes us happy reveals a great deal about
the mindset of both the left and the right, so it’s well worth
looking at.
I will take as a
representative of the left, the Australian “think-tanker” Clive
Hamilton, and on the right, another think-tanker, the Swede Johan
Norberg.
The left: Clive Hamilton
Last year, Clive
Hamilton published a discussion paper called “The
Disappointment of Liberalism”. He began this paper by noting
that liberalism had succeeded in its basic aim.
What is the basic
aim of liberalism? Let me put it this way, as simply as I can.
Liberals believe that we are made human by being self-created
through our own individual will and reason. This means that for
liberals it is important that the individual is “liberated” from
anything which impedes individual choice.
What kinds of
things limit individual choice? Most notably, those things which are
important to our self-identity, but which we inherit or are born to
(and therefore don’t get to choose). This includes our sex (whether
we are man or woman), and our race and ethnicity.
For a liberal, it
is important that these unchosen things be made not to matter.
Therefore, someone who defends them, for instance, by accepting
different social roles for men and women will be called “sexist” by
a liberal. Similarly, a white European who defends his own ethnic
tradition will be labelled a “racist” – because such a view
conflicts with liberal first principles.
Hamilton, though,
doesn’t do much name calling as he is confident that the liberal
project has succeeded. Note how clearly he expresses the basic
principles of liberalism in the following passage:
“Now that the
constraints of socially imposed roles have weakened, oppression
based on gender, class and race is no longer tenable, and the daily
struggle for survival has for most people disappeared, we have
entered an era characterised by ‘individualisation’ where, for the
first time, individuals have the opportunity to ‘write their own
biographies’ rather than have the chapters foretold by the
circumstances of their birth. For the first time in history, the
ordinary individual in the West has the opportunity to make a true
choice ...
“We’ve never had
more freedom to shape ourselves in the way we want ....”
This liberal
concept of “freedom”, though, creates a particular difficulty. It
leaves you with a society made up of millions of atomised
individuals, each acting according to their own individual wants.
How then do you hold a society together?
This is exactly the
issue Hamilton wishes to discuss. He writes,
“this essay is a
prelude to answering the question of how we can reconstruct the
social in an individualized world. In a world where we are no longer
bound together by our class, gender or race, why should we live
cooperatively?”
In the nineteenth
century, liberals thought they had found an answer to the dilemma.
If individuals sought to follow a profit motive, no matter how
selfishly, the hidden hand of the market would regulate the outcome
for the overall benefit of society: for growth and progress.
However, by the end
of the nineteenth century, a group of “new liberals” were decisively
rejecting the free market solution, because it generated
inequalities of outcome. They preferred the idea of a “rational”
regulation of society, particularly by the central state.
Today, the
nineteenth century “classical liberals” are the right-wing of
politics, and the twentieth century “new liberals” are the
left-wing.
You would therefore
expect a left-liberal like Clive Hamilton to be critical of free
market solutions. And he is. In fact, his basic argument runs as
follows.
First, as we have
seen, he celebrates the overthrow of a traditionalist “social”
conservatism. He believes that today,
“the shackles of
minority oppression and social conservatism have been cast off. The
traditional standards, expectations and stereotypes that were the
target of the various movements, dating from the 1960s – the sexual
revolution, the counter-culture and the women’s movement – ushered
in an era of personal liberty.”
And yet, continues
Hamilton, people don’t seem to be any happier. He notes “the
extraordinary proliferation of the diseases of affluence” which,
“suggests that the
psychological wellbeing of citizens of rich countries is in decline.
These diseases include drug dependence, obesity, loneliness and a
suite of psychological disorders ranging from depression, anxiety,
compulsive behaviours and widespread but ill-defined anomie. Perhaps
the most telling evidence is the extraordinary prevalence of
depression in rich countries.”
What can explain
the failure of the liberal project to create happiness? Hamilton’s
answer is to blame the influence of the free market. He believes
that people aren’t using their new found freedom to make reasoned,
considered choices, but are being manipulated by the market to
follow more shallow, consumeristic impulses.
It is Hamilton’s
belief that “The market itself has, in recent decades, evolved into
an instrument of coercion” and that “The activities of the
marketers, given unbounded licence by the free-market policies of
neoliberals [he means right-liberals], reinforce daily the promise
of instant gratification ... So forceful and pervasive are the
messages of the marketers that they now provide the raw material
from which people construct their identities.”
The right liberal: Johan Norberg
Johan Norberg has
also written a paper about happiness: “The
Scientist’s Pursuit of Happiness.”
We know from this
paper that Norberg is a liberal because he expresses in it the
underlying liberal principle that individuals should choose their
own identity, and reject inherited ones. He writes that,
“a liberal and
market-oriented society allows people freedom to choose. In the
absence of authoritarian leaders ... forcing us to live the way they
think is best for us, we can choose the kind of identity and
lifestyle that suits us ... In traditional societies, on the other
hand, the individual has to adapt to pre-fabricated roles and
demands.”
We can also tell
from Norberg’s paper that he is not only a liberal, but more
specifically a right-liberal. Unlike Hamilton, he is a devotee of
the free market, and tends to see man’s economic activity as central
to his life.
For instance, he
writes that, “If you want to meet a happy Australian, ask someone
who thinks that people like themselves have a good chance of
improving their standard of living.”
He believes also
that happiness reached a peak after WWII, because “With economies
growing rapidly, people began to think that their children would
enjoy a better life than they had.”
He is even willing
to place economic activity ahead of family life, by citing a survey
in which people recorded more happiness while working than when
spending free time with their families.
Note too his idea
that “Belief in the future grows when poor countries begin to
experience growth, when markets open up, when incomes increase and
people’s decisions begin to affect their place in society.”
Norberg, in fact,
is such a devotee of the free market, that he wants no controls at
all on the movement of labour. He believes in unfettered
immigration, stating that “If people were allowed to cross borders
at will, they would take their ideas and their labour and skills
with them. This is all part of free trade...” (The Age, 24/9/05)
Of course,
left-liberals also support open borders. However, whereas
left-liberals typically support multiculturalism, Norberg follows
the more usual right-liberal policy of wanting high immigration plus
assimilation. In his view,
“It is time for our
liberal societies to stop apologising, to get back our
self-confidence and state that tolerance and freedom is our way, and
those who are out to destroy that deserve no toleration. The idea
that we shouldn’t impose our values (on immigrants) is bizarre. Of
course we should.
“We should force
everybody to accept every other human being as a free and autonomous
individual with the same rights as himself. That is the law of a
liberal, open society, and that is what has created the most
creative and humane societies in world history. Everybody who wants
to enjoy that society must conform to it.” (The Age, 24/9/05)
Note that Norberg
in this quote writes as a kind of upbeat booster to his own liberal
society. This is, again, typical of right-liberals. Left-liberals
are more inclined to see themselves as “outsiders” (even when they
are very influential) and to be negative and critical of their own
societies.
The fact that
left-liberals often see themselves as “dissenters” is illustrated by
a recent university study which found that 20% of candidates for
the left-wing Australian Labor Party declared themselves to be
either not very proud, or not at all proud, to be Australian.
Finally, as you
would expect of a right-liberal, Norberg is anti-statist. He
believes that the free market is the solution, and so doesn’t like
the idea of state interference. It is no coincidence, therefore,
that he believes that the state can’t create happiness.
It is his view that
“it does not seem like the growth of the welfare state has increased
human happiness” and that “A government that says it wants to make
us happy misses the obvious fact that a government can’t give us
happiness.”
A
conservative reply
How might a
traditionalist conservative respond to Hamilton and Norberg? I have
already written a reply to
Hamilton, so I will focus here on Norberg.
One thing a
traditionalist can do is to reply to Norberg within the current
framework of debate. For instance, Norberg claims that,
“the most happy and
satisfied places on earth are the ones that are most dynamic,
individualist and wealthy: North America, Northern Europe and
Australia.”
If so, this doesn’t
say much about the human capacity for happiness. As Hamilton has
already pointed out, there is an epidemic of mental ill-health in
North America, Northern Europe and Australia. Hamilton notes that
the incidence of depression in the US grew tenfold in the five
decades after WWII, despite this being a golden age of economic
growth. He also cites reports that nearly one in four French people
are taking tranquillisers, anti-depressants, antipsychotics or other
mood-altering drugs.
Even more
remarkably, in Norway, which has reputedly become “the richest
country of all time”, one in four adults
seeks psychiatric treatment each year.
What is also
significant is the survey result, quoted by Norberg himself, showing
that 48% of Americans had “downshifted” in the last five years, by
reducing their working hours, declining promotions, lowering their
material expectations or moving to a quieter place.
So the idea that
careerism and rising material standards of living are sufficient to
produce human happiness doesn’t seem to fit the facts. The free
market doesn’t provide everything we need to be happy.
However, it’s not
enough for traditionalists to respond at this level. We leave too
much of the liberal mentality intact if we do.
First, we need to
engage at the level of underlying principles. Norberg wants us to be
free to choose as long as we don’t choose traditional,
“pre-fabricated” roles and identities. This might not seem too much
of an imposition, but we need to remember that many traditional
identities became accepted and generally applied (pre-fabricated)
because they reflected significant aspects of human nature.
Women being
maternal and caring for their own children is a traditional role and
identity; but it is no light imposition to declare this role to be
illegitimate for being “prefabricated”.
In other words, it
is those things we are most likely to want to choose which Norberg’s
liberalism will frown upon and want to “liberate” us from.
Second,
traditionalists need to question an even more basic assumption
underlying the whole debate. Is it really true that the aim of human
life is the pursuit of individual happiness?
In liberal
societies, this assumption is widespread. One of the inalienable
rights of man listed in the US Declaration of Independence is “Life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. A radical right-liberal, Ayn
Rand, was even bold enough to assert that her philosophy was “the
concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness the moral
purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest
activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
This assumption,
that our life’s purpose is the pursuit of our own happiness, seems
false to me and even a little degrading.
It’s not that
happiness doesn’t form part of a good life, but that we are made to
reach beyond this to more significant things.
It’s difficult to
give a complete picture of what these significant things are, but
I’ll make a start. I think, for instance, it’s important for
individuals to experience certain forms of “connectedness”. This
might include a love of nature, an appreciation of art, romantic or
marital love, a sense of ancestry, an ethnic or national identity,
and our own masculine or feminine natures and the virtues associated
with these.
The importance of
such forms of connectedness is not just that they make us “happy”,
but that they anchor us, provide a significant moral framework, add
meaning to our life efforts, and most importantly provide the deeper
forms of self-identity: our enduring sense of who we are.
Liberalism doesn’t
want us to be connected in the way I am trying to describe; the
liberal aim is for the individual to be free-floating and
self-scripting, always independent and autonomous, with multiple,
fluid, negotiated identities (to use liberal jargon).
It may well be
possible to find a kind of surface happiness in the liberal way,
through the pursuit of a purely individual happiness (shopping,
careers and so on), but much of the traditional significance of life
will be left out.
At any rate, we
should not fall into the trap of accepting the liberal terms of
debate. If we feel uncomfortable with the idea that our life’s goal
is the individual pursuit of happiness, our challenge is to step
outside this view and to advance a clear alternative. |