What follows was recently published in The Wanderer, a traditional Catholic newspaper that comes out (in print!) every week–the oldest continuously published Catholic journal in the United States, in fact, to which I contribute a column once a month. Readers will, I hope, forgive me if they recognize this as a severely abridged, slightly amended, (and possibly even improved) version of an essay posted on Priceton some time ago.
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In the last few decades, it seems, everyone has discovered a recipe for happiness, from Hugh Hefner to Madonna to Deepak Chopra, to the cannabis retailers one now sees on every street corner; from the self-righteous torchers of cities to the anatomical male rapists who self-identify as females in order to get sent to women’s prisons. Oh the joys of the examined life! But it doesn’t take much thought to recognize that it is only ideological snake oil that they are trying to sell. Given the popularity of these and other ethical and religious quacks and charlatans, it is almost impossible to persuade people, especially today’s enrollees in Self-Esteem University, that the ancients, the deadest of the dead white males, had something rather valuable to say on the question of how to live rewarding and meaningful lives.
That, of course, is assuming that today’s students have ever heard of “the ancients.” An email I received from a prospective student in an undergraduate course I used to teach speaks volumes—that is to say, the volumes of the Western canon that she has never read. The course was called “The Western Tradition,” and on its syllabus I included as many as possible of the ancient philosophers, poets, and theologians as I could smuggle in without detection by the university’s postmodernist thought police. The student in question wanted to know (in earnest, I assure you) if, in tracing the Western Tradition, we were going to study the later westerns, such as those that exposed the “genocidal extermination of Native Americans by white supremacist colonialists,” or just the classic John Ford films—in which case, needles to say, she wasn’t interested.
In another course, at the end of a lecture on the West’s longest-running and still unbroken literary narrative theme called in the Middle Ages “the matter of Troy,” a student raised his hand to ask (equally in earnest), “Who is this Troy fellow and what is the matter with him?” In the same survey course, at the end of a lecture on the House of Pride in Book I of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, another student came up to my desk and scoffed, incredulously, “Do you really mean to say that pride isn’t a good thing?” Allan Bloom’s 1987 classic The Closing of the American Mind seems to have called long ago for a sequel entitled something like The Emptying of the American Mind.
Vacuums, as the cliché goes, are abhorrent to nature, and what has flooded into the intellectual abyss is the progressive orthodoxy according to which the patrimony of the West is a miasmal swamp of racism, sexism, Christian bigotry, homophobia, and victimhood of every sort, all in conjunction with the modernist historical myth according to which man is inexorably wiser, more virtuous, and his social and political arrangements more fair and just than at any time in our benighted past.
Many of today’s students are convinced that human enlightenment dawned for the first time more or less on the day they were born. On the model of science and technology, it is all too easy to subscribe to the modern fantasy of infinite and inexorable progress. But though tomorrow’s computers will be ineluctably more powerful and efficient than today’s, art, literature, and morality do not necessarily follow such a steady and optimistic trajectory. Our own ideas about beauty, justice, wisdom, and truth are certainly more sophisticated (and sophistical), but not necessarily more intelligent or convincing, than those of the ancients. Indeed, the fact that so many today take it for granted that the latest generation is the wisest and best argues all the more for the need to study the ancients, if only as a means of holding the presuppositions and orthodoxies of our own age up to critical scrutiny. What should be clear at least is that the problem of happiness is hardly a new one, and only a rank species of chronological jingoism could persuade us that the ancients need not be consulted, since our solutions are self-evidently superior to theirs.
But for a teacher of pre-modern literature and thought, the conjunction of historical ignorance with ideological certitude is well nigh invincible. In any case, there is an even more fundamental problem that he faces in his attempt to impart to his students some inkling of how the ancients understood the meaning and purpose of life.
“Happiness,” as G.K. Chesterton wrote, “is as grave and practical as sorrow, if not more so. We might as well imagine that a man could carve a cardboard chicken or live on imitation loaves of bread, as suppose that any man could get happiness out of things that are merely light or laughable.”
Though Chesterton wrote in the early twentieth century, his solemn attitude was apparently already a rather retrograde one. Today, we are more or less all enrolled in the Playboy School of Philosophy, and when happiness isn’t being reduced by the beau monde to something as puerile and frivolous as mere personal pleasure, material success, or the number of one’s followers on social media, it is being merchandised by the self-help set as “making time for ourselves,” or by the gurus of pop psychology as “following our bliss,” usually in conformist defiance of traditional norms or conventions.
In a post-religious age in which the only realities are those that can be perceived by the physical senses, it is no surprise that happiness is defined in purely sensual and worldly terms. Having no acquaintance with the history of either religion or philosophy, most moderns are blissfully (pun intended) unaware that the regnant attitude of Western civilization, both pagan and Christian, was almost always one of contemptus mundi, founded on the entirely logical principle that no true happiness could depend upon the possession of what is mutable and transitory. The goddess Fortuna confers her gifts only to take them away again (one of the longest-running topoi in Western literature), and the knowledge that they are transient is in itself subversive of the “happiness” they confer even in the state of enjoying them. Recognizing the inevitable mutability and impermanence of the specious goods and pleasures of this world, the ancients enjoined that the reasonable man inculcate an attitude of detachment or indifference, neither overly rejoicing in their acquisition nor sorrowing at their loss, both of which were in any case, as Epictetus taught, beyond his control.
To the ancients, by contrast, happiness depended upon virtue, wisdom, and an interior life in communion with and contemplation of the invisible things of God, moral and spiritual states which, once achieved, the happy man possessed inalienably. Residing impregnably in the rational depths of his soul—the very essence and telos of his humanity, in fact—they made his happiness autonomous of, indeed proof against, all the sorrows, injustices, and misfortunes that come with life in a fallen and mutable world. They made the wise man utterly self-reliant, invulnerable, indeed (as Plato described him), a God among men.