The New York Times ran an especially interesting op-ed last week from the president of the AEI (American Enteprise Institute, h/t Der Schneider) claiming that all statistics point to conservatives being happier than liberals. Given the reasonably nuanced, even-keeled tone of his article, perhaps the main point was not to crow about conservatives being happier people in the New York Times – though I can’t imagine such considerations were not in his mind – but to state an important fact of life about America.
Alright, so conservatives are happier than liberals. I know a lot of liberals, and many of them find their lives pretty miserable – sometimes with justification. I know a lot of conservatives too, for a liberal at least – and while they don’t really strike me as happier, in many cases they do seem more accepting of the personal flaws and foibles of people they like than liberals – and perhaps that goes a long way to making them happier. Perhaps you’d think it a paradox that conservatives are more tolerant of people than liberals, but consider then how the two philosophies work. Liberalism is an empirical philosophy: for liberals, trust, approval, and respect for the establishment must always be earned and can be taken away at any point. Conservatism is an instinctive philosophy: if a person is part of the group or establishment worth conserving, then a large degree of approval, respect, and trust must be given automatically. It is not a question of conservatives being authoritarian and liberals being meritocratic, it is a question conservatives tending towards belief, and liberals tending towards doubt. I know of no better example of the difference in these two philosophies than my own parents. My father is a moderate liberal, yet I think few people (himself least of all) would think of him as a person satisfied to give respect to those who do not meet his requirements. My mother is a (somewhat less) moderate conservative, and is probably the best example I will ever meet of someone who can live her own life as a model of tolerance, forgiveness, and open-mindedness (she lives with Dad and raised me…).
I probably should have said this at the beginning, but in case there’s any doubt: politics is a horrendous way to gauge happiness. Political beliefs are of such little consequence to our everyday lives that they are perhaps the easiest way we have of projecting an imaginative world that would better meet our requirements for a happier life. How many liberals do we all know who came from tight-knit families with good values and came to their belief-system as a way to justify breaking out of from a good family’s grip? How many conservatives do we all know who came to their belief system as a means to justify doing everything it takes to raise themselves up from dissolute beginnings? We all know people like this, and there is no shame in reading into them a bit of the bad faith we all have in how we make the choices we do. Much more often than not, a person’s politics is a way of projecting what they want from their personal lives. This, and not that our lives have such potentially world-changing importance, is the true meaning of “the personal is political.”
Speaking for myself, I consider myself a liberal resolutely and happily stuck in the year 1954 who wishes all American history since the downfall of McCarthy should be wiped clean. Civil Rights should be redone, and done better. The marginal tax rate for the top 1% should still be over 90 cents to the dollar, with plenty more money to invest in better education, better research, better health care, better business regulation, better building and road maintenance, better job creation, better hospitals, better futures. Military might is inevitable so we might as well use it for good rather than evil. Support of an authoritarian dictatorship is a horrible moral choice, but if alternative is a totalitarian dictator, it's one the US should make with no regrets. And incremental liberal progress is better than conservative regression, so we should make whatever ideological compromises it takes to prevent conservatives from gaining power. How did I come to these conclusions? I can make a litany of reasons, but it would be sophistry to say that it came solely from impartial judgment. It is at least as much a matter of personal experience and wish fulfillment. My personal experience, which is perhaps inaccurate to the larger public, is that the family members in the generations before mine were better educated, as are my friends in European countries – in large part because their schools were better funded. Without military might, much of my family in Israel would still die, as would members of my family in World War II without whom I’d not be here to write this.
I consider myself a liberal. I always have and I always will. But for years, many liberals have considered me a moderate – an accusation I find truly appalling. In a properly functioning society, a philosophy based on empirical data - for which hundreds of thousands of people in the world devote their lives to gathering with integrity – is the center of discourse; and liberalism is that ‘vital’ center. It is a philosophy whose core belief is the absence of a core belief. Socialism and conservatism are both belief systems in which the belief is more important than the facts, liberalism suits its beliefs to whatever the facts are at hand – and every generation creates a new version of liberalism to best fit the facts of its time.
But there are very few properly functioning societies, and we certainly don’t live in one: we live in the era of Bush v. Gore, of a mismanaged two-front war, of political appointments trumping expert credentials, of congressmen trying to let the debt ceiling collapse to score political points. We live in an era when a large membership within one party (and ONLY one party) insists again and again on bringing our country to the brink of economic and political suicide. So the thought that people to my left believe that to not agreeing with them about every little detail of their ideology is the same as giving tacit consent to the Republican’s worst excesses is simply maddening. So to all sixty of America’s lefties/socialists/progressives (every one of whom I seem to know…), you’ve been completely shut out of power now for 40 years and Barack Obama has finally given a chance for some of your agenda to be enacted. Being so picky about your friends that you can exclude Barack or me from your soiree is a luxury you cannot afford.
But then again, my own political beliefs are as much wish fulfillment as personal experience, and as much wish fulfillment as anybody else’s. The way I’ve lived my personal life is every bit as extremist as any communist’s political beliefs. My biography (such as it is) is one long litany of refusals to compromise that have set me back for decades on virtually every front of my life. To put it simply and without going into detail, the idea of doing things according to other people’s instructions terrifies me. Any learning disabled kid (or adult) who can’t remember a time when he wasn’t yelled at or insulted for not properly following directions will understand this problem implicitly. The rest of you probably can’t.
The very idea that a person like me has to follow someone else’s directions is not just nauseating; it’s an active source of unimaginable fear. And even if a person like me realizes that (in most cases) such fear is completely irrational, there is no way in which it can be overcome except to subject yourself to a completely fresh batch of horror during every day of your life in which you try to fight it (again, I’m not going into detail). People tell you that once you master the details, the terror will go away. Perhaps it will for that particular task, but then a new task arises, with a new infinity of details to master, and the cycle of horror begins anew. One can either resign oneself to a level of anxiety at getting things wrong with which no other human being could cope better than you, or one can simply go one’s own way and refuse to do those things which so many others find such an ordinary part of their existences. Out of necessity, my wit became quicker than other people so I could make quick work of anybody who decided to take practice on a target as easy as mine. It made me spurn decades worth of well-meant advice from teachers because they had no idea what fortitude it took to simply persist in classes. And after years of bad jobs, no jobs, and dashed dream jobs, I became as close as I could to my own man, a ‘professional idiot son’ in my father’s business and otherwise free to pursue my interests without the interference of the outside world – perhaps with all the loneliness which such solitary pursuit implies. Hopefully I do something of value for my family, but I’m glad my brothers have many talents I don’t. Hopefully there’s a way to include others in my musical and literary ambitions without my going completely crazy about the organizational end of it.
But the fact that I have taken this latter ‘road less traveled’ is as much a source of pain to me as the fact that it was necessary. This desire for compromise comes from that honest-to-god wish I have, a wish that I perhaps carry with me more devotedly than any other, that I could simply let my guard down and compromise – to do what I’ve been told to do, and to learn at least some of those practical tasks to which a brain like mine could not be more ill-suited. Surely, even in the best of circumstances the process of learning some of them will be every bit as horrible as I imagine, but surely some will not be. But after a certain point, one has to realize that the anxiety of not knowing which tasks will be which, after so many years of precisely that struggle with tasks which others find so absolutely basic, is dangerously close to insurmountable. Other people dream of drawing lines in the sand because they’ve seen the damage which compromise does to their lives. I dream only of compromise, because I see the damage which its lack thereof has done to me.
It wasn’t long ago that this post was about an op-ed... In any event, after a certain point this op-ed alleged that all statistics point to the fact that the happiest of all people are extremists. Again, we have no way of knowing whether this is true. Do extremists feel coerced by fellow extremists into saying they’re happy? And if they’re told to believe that they’re happy, is that in some cases the same as believing they’re happy? I know a number of people whom I’d reluctantly classify as extremists (if you’d classify me as one, that’s probably a sign…), and by and large I have to conclude that yes, they do seem a little happier than the rest of us. Not much necessarily, but a little. They have a built in, ironclad network of solidarity. They believe they know exactly whom to trust, and whom not to. Their minds are unclouded by that pernicious human folly: doubt. The least happy are, of course, moderates.
It was moderates, by far, who came out the least happy in this survey, and one can easily see why. Moderates, true moderates by the standards of 2012 America, get a lot of shit – much of it deserved. They split the difference evenly between two ever more diametrically opposed ideological camps with little if any regard for what’s true, and for their troubles they find their position increasingly attacked by every side. In their effort to keep a part of themselves in two worlds, they are mistrusted and insulted by both for not pledging fealty to either. Many people’s political beliefs are a mere projection of opposite of their personal lives, but if the opposite of right is left, then what is the opposite of centrism and moderation except more centrism and moderation? It would be like multiplying zero against itself. Most people who consider themselves moderates in their political lives are probably moderates in their personal lives too – insulted by their parents for not going to church more often, insulted by their children for going to church at all. They, not liberals, are the true textbook example of people plagued by doubts and stuck between two diametrically opposed worlds. They may not deserve our intellectual respect, but they certainly deserve our pity.
It should also be noted that even among these extremes, the extremely conservative were quite a bit happier than the extremely liberal. Is this just because conservatives are nuttier than liberals? Well, considering that we still don’t know what motivates people to say that they’re happy, this is clearly not a valid thought. What is valid is to say what’s so obvious: that belief inspires greater happiness than doubt. Skepticism may be a good tool for understanding the world, but it takes an enormous emotional toll on those who use it. To have a system of belief which one can affirm in a community with others, and which tells you that a much greater future is in store, is the greatest potential source for happiness our misbegotten species yet possesses. In our era, it is still most easily derived from religion; the time may yet come when such beliefs are derived from collectivist anarchism or transhumanist science worship or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Who knows?
But there is one group curiously missing from this survey. Where are the apoliticals? What about those people who don’t bother themselves with politics and have no beliefs? My guess is that it would cast a bad pall over the whole poll – it would tell us something which no political person wants to believe. The happiest people in the world are the ones who never bother themselves with politics.
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