Will Eating Pistachio Ice Cream Make You Sublimely Happy?

Interview of J. Budziszewski

by Michael Cook of MercatorNet

https://mercatornet.com/will-eating-pistachio-ice-cream-make-you-sublimely-happy/78120/

Cook:  You’re the author of a book on happiness. Are you happy?

Budziszewski:  If you mean “Are you having a good time?”, the answer is that I am at the moment -- I like cheeky interviewers.  But that’s not the same as happiness.

If you mean “Am I having a good life?”, the answer is yes.  And believe me, I’ve lived through the difference.

If you mean “Are you already experiencing that perfect fulfillment which leaves nothing to be desired, and is not to be found in this life?”, the answer is “Not yet, but I live in hope.”

 Cook:  Apple still hasn’t released a happiness meter, as far as I’m aware.

Budziszewski:  If Apple ever does release a happiness meter, don’t believe the readings!  It would probably measure only your bodily state.  Suppose it went further and measured the electrical activity in the pleasure center of the brain – would that be better?  Sorry:  This may come as a shock, but pleasure isn’t happiness either.  Pleasure is something we are feeling, and it comes and goes.  Happiness is something we are doing, and it abides.

Cook:  How do you know if you’re happy?  If I’m happy?

Budziszewski:  We know through thoughtful conversation and reflection – but I don’t just mean asking “Are you happy?”  It’s possible to be vaguely unhappy without knowing it, until one day, wham! the awareness of misery drops down on you like an anvil.  It’s even possible to be happy without noticing, although time brings greater insight.  My wife and I might look back on an earlier period in our life, for example when we were raising our children, and say, “We were happy, weren’t we?”  Yet at the time, we were too busy and absorbed to think about it.

My hunch is that most people have some share in happiness, but not many are simply happy.  And that most people know something about happiness, but not many have connected the dots to see the whole picture.

Cook:  I’m living in Australia, which ranks 11th in the World Happiness Report.  Sorry to point this out, but the USA only ranks 19th.  And we’re both left flat-footed by Finland, which is the happiest nation on the face of the earth.  Should we be jealous?

Budziszewski:  Australia is a great country.  For all I know people might be happier there.  I’d love to visit.  (Would you like to set up a book tour for me?)  They might be happier still in Finland.  But you know what?  You aren’t going to find out by surveying people.

Even the way you ask the question makes a big difference.  Only small percentages answer “Yes” when asked “Are you happy?”, but high percentages answer “Yes” when asked “Are you satisfied with your personal life?”  There may also be national differences in what people are willing to say to interviewers – or even in how well they understand themselves.

Not all statistics are useless.  Suicide rates are high in wealthy, high-status communities, and that’s a pretty sure sign that there are a lot of desperately unhappy people in them.  But where rates are low, does it follow that people are happy?  Not necessarily.

Cook:  You list a number of possible causes of happiness – wealth, beauty, fame, power, self-esteem, pleasure and so on – and then demolish them.  Pistachio ice cream makes me pretty happy.  Did you forget that?

Budziszewski:  Nope, I always remember ice cream.  Pistachio comes under possibility #6, “pleasure.”  When you say that eating pistachio ice cream makes you pretty happy, you mean it makes you feel pretty good, or that you’re having a pretty good time.  As Mortimer Adler once remarked, there is a difference between having a good time and having a good life.

But in my humble opinion, you’re wrong about pistachio anyway.  Coffee ice cream is much tastier.

Cook:  Do we have a right to be happy?

Budziszewski:  A right to be happy would be like a right to receive payment for the groceries I sell to you:  You have a duty to pay up.  Sure enough, you can give me certain things – bread,  meat, schooling.  But since happiness is not the sort of thing that can be given, how could anyone have a duty to give it to me?  “You owe me ten years of happiness.  Fork them over.”

I have a right not to be murdered, robbed, or prevented from worshipping, and those things are certainly related to my happiness.  But I don’t have a right to everything that might be related to my happiness.  I don’t even have a right to Nike sneakers.

A right to be happy might also be viewed as a right not to have my happiness destroyed by anyone else.  But that’s too broad.  What if I am such a snowflake that I say your disagreement with my opinions destroys my happiness?

Cook:  Or perhaps more to the point, does the government have an obligation to make us happy?

Budziszewski:  As you remind me, I’m in the nineteenth-down-in-the-ratings USA.  Over on this hemisphere, our Declaration of Independence asserts a right to “pursue” happiness.  Some people do think this means a right to be made happy!  But that’s impossible.  The government doesn’t have an obligation to make us happy, because it can’t make us happy.  No one can.

Of course some of the things the government has an obligation to do are connected with happiness, either negatively or positively.  The government has an obligation to administer justice -- that’s positive.  Unless I am a demonstrably unfit parent, it also has an obligation not to interfere with the raising of my children -- that’s negative.  But all sorts of problems arise when we imagine that the government can make us happy, or when the government itself imagines that it can.

Cook:  Isn't happiness over-rated?  Isn’t it just too hard? You quote one of your students who told you that’s there’s no such thing and "If we’re disappointed, we just have to get over it.” A lot of people feel this way.

Budziszewski:  So many people feel this way that I gave a whole chapter to why we shouldn’t “settle” – why we shouldn’t give in to continuous frustration.  You know, people who say “Happiness is too much trouble” haven’t really lost interest in happiness.  They merely think that they’ll have more happiness if they lose interest in it.  Now that is a theory of how to attain happiness – it’s just confused.  People most often say such things because they’ve been burned -- they’ve gone down blind alleys, they’ve pursued happiness in the wrong ways, and they’re tired of all the pain.  I say, why not find out what the right ways are?

By the way, by finding out what the right ways are, I don’t mean obsessing over happiness.  Continuously asking “Are we happy yet?” isn’t a path to happiness either.  But notice:  If we hadn’t thought at all about happiness, we wouldn’t know that, would we?

“Nature makes nothing in vain.”  Everything in us is for something.  There would be no point in natural hunger if there were no such thing as meals.  Well, we have a natural desire for abiding happiness.  We can distinguish between the partial and the complete fulfillment of this desire.  The former is possible even in this life, and I discuss how.  The latter ….

Cook:  I’ll have to give our readers a spoiler alert here, but you say that ultimate, complete happiness has something to do with God.  That’s a hard sell nowadays, isn’t it?

Budziszewski:  It sure is.  That’s why I tell God-phobes early in the book that they can take heart.  They can turn off the alarms.  Although I take questions about the relationship of happiness to God seriously, those questions don’t come up again until much, much later in the book, and all (or almost all) of what I say up to that point should make sense equally to those who believe in Him and those who don’t.  No God for many chapters -- I promise.  The topic is simply how and how not to be happy.  So if people wish, they can read up to that point and then stop.

But I hope they don’t.  I don’t really see why anyone would want to.  For me that would be like reading to the next-to-last chapter of the mystery novel, then stopping because “I’m not the sort of person who likes the mystery solved.”

Cook:  Amongst your philosopher colleagues, what’s the consensus on happiness?

Budziszewski:  There isn’t any.

Which is a strange thing.  I draw from all sorts of people in the tradition – philosophers like Aristotle, theologians like Thomas Aquinas, essayists like Joseph Addison, even satirists like Jonathan Swift – people who “got” what I am saying.  But a lot of what there is to “get” has been lost today, not just in the popular culture – think of get rich quick books and of pop stars melting down on video  -- but also among the intellectual classes.

Cook:  Any hints of an invitation from Oprah Winfrey’s book club?

Budziszewski:  Hold on.  I think that’s her call calling in right now.  Hello, Oprah?

Physicists tell us that time seems to freeze when we enter the event horizon around a black hole.  Our current president has been frozen in the event horizon around the black hole of moral relativism for decades of conventional time.  People think he has shifted to the left since becoming president.  No, he hasn’t.  He is right where he has always been.

The other party has its own difficulties with relativism.  Mr. Biden, however, presents a particularly conspicuous and persistent case of what we might call the relativistic paradox:  Although relativists seem to say that there is no moral law, they insist on the moral rightness of their relativism.

In 1991, then a senator, opposing the Clarence Thomas nomination to the Supreme Court, Mr. Biden worried in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post that the nominee might believe in “a static set of unchanging [moral] principles,” rather than an “evolving body of ideals.”  His statement was relativistic, because it denied that there is a thing as an unchanging moral principle.  But the statement also exhibited the relativistic paradox, because at the same time it insisted that there is.  For consider:  What did Mr. Biden mean by suggesting that moral ideals “evolve”?  I don’t think he meant that they undergo meaningless and arbitrary change; after all, he approved of this so-called evolution.  What he meant was that moral ideals are getting better.  But to suggest that they are changing for the better presupposes a standard of moral comparison, a yardstick of better and worse, which doesn’t change.  So even in order to say that our moral ideals have no fixed content, Mr. Biden needs at least one moral principle which does have fixed content – the principle by which he approves change in the other ones.

He also worried that the nominee might view the natural law as a “specific moral code regulating individual behavior” rather than something that “protects moral freedom, even in areas of moral choice.”  But to suggest that instead of laying down a moral code, the natural law protects moral choice, is to say that it is a moral code, for it does limit moral choice.  It declares exactly one restriction, which it considers all-important.  This restriction is, “Thou shalt not restrict choice.”  Once again we encounter the relativistic paradox.

And now the plot thickens.  We have just seen that if you say that I must not restrict moral choice, then my moral choice has been restricted, for I am not allowed to choose to restrict moral choice.  But it is logically impossible to put just one moral choice off limits.  To say that the only choice that we are not allowed to make is to restrict moral choice is just double talk.  Consider rape, for instance.  You may either permit rape or forbid it.  Either way, you are restricting someone’s choice.  Some relativists try to escape this dilemma by saying that the rapist wants to restrict the woman’s choice, but the woman doesn’t want to restrict anyone’s choice.  Nonsense.  If you permit rape, you are restricting the woman’s choice, because her choice would have been not to be raped.  If you forbid rape, you are restricting the rapist’s choice, because his choice would have been to rape her.  How do we decide which of the two choices is sacrosanct and which one isn’t?  The only way to do so is to fall back on a moral principle which tells us that rape is wrong and resisting rape isn’t.  So you aren’t merely putting one choice off limits, that is, the choice to restrict moral choice.  You are also – in this case, rightly -- putting another choice off limits – in this case, the choice to rape.  And so it goes.

Not only is it logically impossible to put just one choice off limits, but we also find that when Mr. Biden suggests that he wants to put only one choice off limits, he doesn’t mean it.  Leaping from the 1990s to the present, in which he is still stuck in the same event horizon, we find that Mr. Biden, now president, is the most ardently pro-abortion person ever to hold that office.  Mr. Biden chooses to restrict the choice of individuals, medical personnel, and organizations to refuse subsidizing or cooperating in choices which they consider gravely immoral.  Instead he insists that they choose his way, which is to subsidize and cooperate in them.

And so we advance toward the truth of the matter.  The relativistic talk of protecting choices in general never really protects choices in general, because that cannot be done.  You can protect some choices, but it is impossible to protect all choices; to protect some choices logically entails restricting others.  For example, to protect the decision “I choose that someone else will subsidize my act” is to restrict the decisions of other people who choose not to subsidize my act, and vice versa.  So on close examination, what the moral relativist really does is forbid the choices he doesn’t like, and permit or command the choices he does like.

So what?  Doesn’t all morality do that?  Doesn’t all morality encourage good choices and restrict bad ones?  Yes, but there is a difference.  The moral relativist doesn’t do it in the good, old-fashioned, honest way, by explaining why the choices he restricts are morally bad and why the choices he encourages are morally good.  Instead he pretends that he is not restricting anything at all – that he is following the policy of protecting choices in general – which, as we have seen, is impossible.  In other words, he enforces his morality by pretending (a) that he isn’t enforcing it, and (b) that it isn’t a morality.  So moral relativism isn’t just a false and bad philosophy; it is a crooked and deceptive philosophy.

Now you may object that the much-mocked Mr. Biden is an easy target.  Perhaps he is not crooked and dishonest, but just a little stupid.  Perhaps he is not so much deceiving others as deceiving himself, trying to making some sort of peace with his uneasy Catholic conscience.  I think this may very well be true.  But this kind of stupidity is not accidental; it is motivated, and the motivation is bad.   If I lie to myself to make peace with my conscience, it is nonetheless a lie, and it may still be criticized for what it is.

Source:

Joseph R. Biden, Jr., “Law and Natural Law: Questions for Judge Thomas.”  The Washington Post, 8 September 1991, Sunday, Final Edition.

Related:

What Kind of Progress Does Progressivism Want?

Cable Bills and Birth Control Pills

Gentle readers,

I am pleased to tell you that three new interviews have just been posted to the Talks page:

The Truth about Happiness Pieced Together from Lies.  Interviewer Karina Macosko of Academic Influence (video).  This interview aimed mostly at students.

Why Is More Never Enough?  Interviewer Jed Macosko of Academic Influence (video).  This interview aimed mostly at others.

How and How Not to Be Happy.  Interviewer Marianna Orlandi of the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture (audio).

A student who witnessed the incident tells me this anecdote about another course he is taking.

One of his classmates was finding it difficult to accept his professor’s line that people are whatever they “identify” as being.  The classmate asked, “So if someone decides he’s a refrigerator, then he’s a refrigerator?”

A “woke” student retorted, "It wouldn't be like that.  He would have been a refrigerator from birth."

By now everyone knows what canceling is.  Even so, there is a tendency to play it down.  Many people who went to college back in the day can’t really believe the strength of university cancel culture.  They don’t doubt that canceling happens, but they think it must be the exception rather than the norm.

I can understand the skepticism of a lot of non-academic people.  “It wasn’t like that when I went to school.  How could things have changed so quickly?”  Actually, even if it wasn’t quite so bad then, it may have been worse than they thought; it’s hard for students to recognize left-wing professorial bias when almost all of their professors are biased the same way.  Still, people have eyes.  Afterward, when cancel culture invades the places where they work, then they may take notice.

It’s a little harder to understand why even scholars in the midst of university cancel culture often make light of it.

Naturally, left-wing academics do that.  One bad motive and two naïve ones seem to operate.  The bad motive is to deny the strength of cancel culture because you are one of the perpetrators, and smearing people who say that there is such a thing is one of your techniques.  The two naïve motives are more interesting.

One naïve motive arises from a feeling of safety.  I’ve heard left-wing colleagues say, “What cancel culture?  I speak my mind, and nobody has tried to cancel me.”  Of course not, because they are speaking left-wing minds.  Cancel culture operates only on people who step off the reservation.

The second naïve motive arises from obliviousness to what one’s own milieu is really like.  Fish don’t know they are wet; left-wing academics don’t always know how far left they are.  Although they may have traveled the world, ideologically they are provincial.  I have colleagues who think they are moderates merely because they are at the midpoint of the left-wing spectrum.

To people like that, a climate in which non-left-wing opinion is suppressed doesn’t even seem suppressive.  They are hardly aware that other sorts of opinions exist, except in freakshows, and they may even view non-university culture as a whole as a kind of freakshow.

The really surprising thing, however, isn’t why non-academics would doubt the strength of cancel culture, or why leftist academics would whitewash it, but why even some conservative academics play it down.  (Are there any conservative academics?  Yes, although their numbers are shrinking.)

One reason seems to be that conservative academics internalize the norms of the surrounding academic culture.  That’s what people do; we are social beings.  Though academics view themselves as independent, actually they tend to be even more susceptible to peer pressure than most other sorts of people.  The result?  Some conservative academics don’t express their views at all.  Some do, but apologetically – “I’m not one of those kinds of conservative.”  Some habitually express their views in ways that don’t challenge the left, always accepting the way that leftists frame the questions.

People who do these things well enough may be left alone because the institution finds them useful for cover.  They may feel unthreatened because they don’t understand their own status, and they are not being threatened at this moment.  And so they too say, “Nobody has tried to cancel me.”

Give it time.