For six centuries, from the Renaissance forward, the architects and creators of modernity have promised and predicted a new world, one which, in Thomas Jefferson’s immortal words, would be dedicated to “the pursuit of happiness.” The birth of that world in its political aspect is being celebrated this year in the United States, as well as, to some extent or another, throughout the West.
This phrase, so vague and rhetorical as to be meaningless, is also the best definition there is of the modern project. Hence the 250th anniversary of the birth of the US is an obvious moment to consider how far America, and with it the world it has so radically influenced, have advanced since 1776.
Christians have, for 2,000 years, seen this Earth as a vale of tears and life here as a trial, a view that no other religion has essentially contradicted. Nonetheless, it has never prevented Christians from affirming that life is a gift from God and existence a blessing. In 1776, human society, in North America as everywhere else in the world, was recognizably a highly imperfect thing in which unhappiness, misery, suffering and injustice preponderated over happiness, well-being, contentment and justice. A quarter of a millennium later, no one anywhere in the world can reasonably assert that the pursuit of happiness or anything like it has been realized.
So far is this true, in fact, that whoever would argue that the Jeffersonian project has advanced appreciably since his day has his work cut out for him. It was said of Sir Christopher Wren: “If you seek his monument, look around you.” In the case of Jefferson, whoever would look about him seeking evidence in the world of what Tom Wolfe in the 1970s ironically called a “happiness explosion” would be hard put to find it.
Enlightened opinion in the 18th and 19th centuries held that political equality, mass prosperity, universal literacy and public education, science and technology, religious toleration, free international trade and global travel and cultural exchange must result in the fullness of time in the more or less universal happiness Jefferson recognized as the final and proper end of all human striving and desires. In the first quarter of the 21st century, with most of these things having been achieved, wars are being fought on four of the seven continents, while Europe is experiencing the most serious military conflict since World War Two and two of the most brutal totalitarian powers in history are threatening to subjugate the world to themselves. Governmental incompetence and corruption have proven to be a corollary of democracy; moral decadence of widespread prosperity; heresy and unbelief of toleration; economic exploitation and illiberalism of free trade; social breakdown, human misery and the exploitation of women of the sexual revolution, and aggressive migrations of global travel.
The unintended, unexpected and unpleasant consequences of these phenomena have been abundantly evident in recent decades, and they are becoming more so. Happy and healthy societies do not display pathologies such as the commonplace murder by schoolchildren of their teachers and fellow pupils, and of their parents; the familiarized massacre of worshippers at prayer by politicized atheists and madmen; the casual resort to assassination by politically and otherwise aggrieved psychotics or the belief that killing people with whom you disagree can be a moral activity. All these are, rather, symptoms and expressions of the pervasive, profound and unprecedented malaise of the present era in which happiness is the pearl of great price discovered apparently by only a small minority, Stendhal’s happy few.
It is possible that these statistics represent what Freud called the discontents of civilization
This spring, London’s Daily Telegraph reported a survey conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development which purported to find that 28 percent of the British public suffer from mental disorders including depression, anxiety, or addiction. In France, the figure is 23 percent, in Germany 19 percent; indeed, previous studies claim that anxiety and mental depression afflict as many as one billion people globally, an epidemic that is expected to worsen. It is possible that these statistics represent what Freud called the discontents of civilization. More probably they reflect the neuroses resulting from the unnatural and antihuman way of life that the postmodern world of industry and technology has created in a world whose populations are informed at every moment of every day by politicians and their advocates of how dishonest, criminal and oppressive the incumbent members of their governments are; by the digital media of what a violent and dangerous place the world is; and by commercial hucksters of how many material goods and pleasures they lack if they are to lead truly happy and fulfilled lives.
I suggest that the most probable cause of modern pervasive angst is its radical separation from nature and from the Earth itself. Removed from his proper human context, which is the natural world of which he himself is a part, “man” is not really man at all.
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