I recently read the speech given by Charles Murray at his acceptance of the Irving Kristol Award at the American Enterprise Institute last year, entitle The Happiness of the People. You can find the full transcription of the speech here, which I urge, in the strongest possible terms, everyone to read in its entirety. The text of the the speech is taken from Federalist 62 most likely written by James Madison:
A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.
Despite the title of the speech, the central theme is actually the challenge of the European model of socialist democracy to the present American political milieu, I think best exemplified by this excerpt:
The goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions [family, community, vocation, and faith] are robust and vital. And that's what's wrong with the European model. It doesn't do that. It enfeebles every single one of them.
Later in the speech Murray introduces what he characterizes as two erroneous premises that are at the heart of the socialist democratic agenda driving the European welfare states, endorsed and rapidly being adopted by the present American administration: the "equality premise" and the "New Man premise." The equality premise, which proposes that in a just society--"different groups of people--men and women, blacks and whites, straights and gays, the children of poor people and the children of rich people--will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life--the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and CEOs," is indispensably supported by the New Man premise which proposes that the very nature of man is changeable through the application of government interventionist policy.
I was struck, upon reading this, by its intersection with a conversation I had a short while ago with a friend. My friend was belaboring leftist's unwavering faith in this very thing: the linch-pin of leftist ideology that a human utopia can be created through their wise implementation of governmental control over the affairs of society. He recounted how his own conversion to Christianity came when he decided to give it a fair hearing by reading the Bible from cover to cover. One of the major epiphanies he had from this was the realization that even though these stories were of events that occurred thousands of years prior he still recognized the same passions and motivations of human nature he saw in himself and his friends: man himself had never changed.
Murray makes his case admirably, but falls just short of making the point I see at the root of this matter: that the European model--and its American counterpart--are a repudiation of the Christian worldview. The Christian and Jewish system of moral ethics is the foundation upon which Western Civilization was built, informing everything from family structure to market economics to law. It was the underlying truth that gave meaning to Western culture. When that meaning is denied--as it is under the European model--the sinews, ligaments and connecting tissues of culture attenuate; in the words of Yeats:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
But if that seems too melodramatic for you, consider this from Murray:
Drive through rural Sweden, as I did a few years ago. In every town was a beautiful Lutheran church, freshly painted, on meticulously tended grounds, all subsidized by the Swedish government. And the churches are empty. Including on Sundays. Scandinavia and Western Europe pride themselves on their "child-friendly" policies, providing generous child allowances, free day-care centers, and long maternity leaves. Those same countries have fertility rates far below replacement and plunging marriage rates. Those same countries are ones in which jobs are most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are most lavish. And they, with only a few exceptions, are countries where work is most often seen as a necessary evil, least often seen as a vocation, and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.
[The European] mentality goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.
If that's the purpose of life, then work is not a vocation, but something that interferes with the higher good of leisure. If that's the purpose of life, why have a child, when children are so much trouble--and, after all, what good are they, really? If that's the purpose of life, why spend it worrying about neighbors? If that's the purpose of life, what could possibly be the attraction of a religion that says otherwise?
The same self-absorption in whiling away life as pleasantly as possible explains why Europe has become a continent that no longer celebrates greatness. When life is a matter of whiling away the time, the concept of greatness is irritating and threatening. What explains Europe's military impotence? I am surely simplifying, but this has to be part of it: If the purpose of life is to while away the time as pleasantly as possible, what can be worth dying for?
The process of disintegration of Western Culture has not happened over night. Societies can live for a while on borrowed cultural capital, so to speak, mores and attitudes which remain as holdovers for a time long after the beliefs upon which those attitudes were based have died out, in the same way that the moribund economies of Europe have existed for quite a while on borrowed money. But of course eventually it all plays out; the bond ratings plummet, the banks will no longer loan, the balloon payments come due--and a new generation is born distant enough from the last believers that all connection to meaning is lost.
Murray's point is that "the happiness of the people", or as he later calls it, "deep satisfactions" only come from important things done with much effort and for which one must be responsible for the consequences. He identifies these important things in four categories: family, community, vocation, and faith. Let me submit that apart from the Biblical worldview and perspective none of these things has any meaning. We are left with John Lennon's dream of narcissistic bliss,
Imagine there's no HeavenWell, we don't have to imagine it anymore because we can see it living in the flesh throughout the European Union today--and more and more in the coastal metropolises here in the United States. Life can certainly be pleasant, even pleasurable without meaning, but the "deep satisfactions" of happiness in the Aristotelian sense--of a "life well lived"--can never really be achieved.
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
My quote from Ecclesiastes embeds this truth within it. Just a few verses prior Solomon bemoans the futility of his work because of his bitterness at having to leave it, after he dies, to someone who didn't have to work for it. It's only when God is included in the equation, and the meaning the eternal perspective gives to life, that he is able to reconcile the goodness of his labor and can truly savor his accomplishments.
