The Conservative Heart Read online

  The happiness rewards from work are not from the money, but from the value created in our lives and in the lives of others—value that is acknowledged and rewarded. That is what we call earned success. President Franklin Roosevelt had it right: “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.” The secret to happiness is earned success through honest work.

  When Frederick Douglass rhapsodized about “patient, enduring, honest, unremitting and indefatigable work, into which the whole heart is put,” he was talking about earned success. It is central to the American ideal—a concept we inherited from our forefathers.

  People grasp this intrinsically. Nearly three-quarters of Americans say they wouldn’t quit their jobs even if a financial windfall enabled them to live in luxury for the rest of their lives. In a stunning twist, those with the least education, the lowest incomes, and the least prestigious jobs were actually the most likely to say they would keep working even if they didn’t have to.13 It is the elites who are comparatively likelier to say they would take the money and run.

  The converse relationship between work and happiness is also true, by the way: A lack of work means a lack of happiness. We will explore the devastating blow that joblessness deals to human dignity in a later chapter. But here’s a preview: When people lose their jobs, even if government aid relieves the pressures of a lost paycheck, unemployment proves totally catastrophic for happiness.14 Research suggests, for example, that joblessness increases rates of divorce and suicide and even amplifies the severity of disease.15

  It bears repeating that earned success is often totally uncorrelated with amassed wealth. You can measure your earned success in any currency you choose. You can count it in dollars, if you like. But you can also count it in kids taught to read, habitats protected, or souls saved. When I taught graduate students, the social entrepreneurs who pursued nonprofit careers were some of my happiest graduates. They made less money than many of their business school classmates, but they were no less certain that they were earning their success. They defined that success in non-monetary terms and delighted in it.

  To sum up so far, to pursue the happiness within our reach, we do best to pour ourselves into faith, family, community, and earned success through work. This is our happiness portfolio.

  And you know what? That kind of sounds like a conservative manifesto.

  A FORMULA TO REMEMBER

  Maybe you’re thinking I skipped over money and related earthly rewards—fame, power, sex, and so on—a little too quickly. After all, if they weren’t a big deal for happiness, people wouldn’t be killing themselves and others all day long to get them, right?

  Fine. Let’s go to Spain and meet a man who can help us clear up that question.

  Abd-ar-Rahman III was born in 891 AD. He became the emir of Cordoba in his early twenties and spent the next five decades becoming one of the most powerful rulers of his time. He built incredible palaces and stunning mosques. He raised a powerful navy, subdued rebellions, and consolidated Muslim power in Spain that lasted for centuries. He grew so powerful that he was able to claim the title caliph—leader of all Muslims in the world.

  This absolute ruler lived in opulence and luxury. It is said that his harem included six thousand women.16 In terms of money, power, fame, and pleasure, nothing was denied him. He must have been in bliss, right? Here is his own testimony:

  I have now reigned above fifty years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity.

  Sounds great, right? Ah, but hold on. Abd-ar-Rahman continued his thought:

  In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to fourteen.17

  Fourteen happy days for the richest, most powerful man in the world? Actually, Abd-ar-Rahman’s problem wasn’t actually happiness, despite what he believed. It was unhappiness.

  Does that sound like a distinction without a difference? If so, you probably have the same problem as the great emir, and a lot of people today. But with a little knowledge, we all can avoid the misery that befell him, and help others do so as well.

  What is unhappiness, exactly? You might intuit that it is simply the opposite of happiness, just as darkness is the absence of light. That is actually not right. Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but are not really opposites.

  Images of the brain show that parts of the left cerebral cortex are more active than the right when we are experiencing happiness, while the right side becomes more active when we are unhappy. They are distinct phenomena. So, as strange as it seems, being happier than average does not mean one can’t also be unhappier than average. One common test for both happiness and unhappiness is called the PANAS (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule). I took it myself, and you can, too.18 I found that, for happiness, I am at the top for people my age, sex, occupation, and education group. But I get a pretty high score for unhappiness as well. It turns out I am a cheerful melancholic.

  So when people express dissatisfaction with their lives, whether they realize it or not, they are really doing sums. They are basically saying, “My happiness is X, my unhappiness is Y, and Y is greater than X.” That compels us to take up a new question. If avoiding unhappiness isn’t the same as pursuing happiness, how can we avoid it?

  If you ask an unhappy person why he is unhappy, he’ll almost always blame circumstance. In many cases, of course, this is justified. Some people are oppressed, poor, or have physical ailments that make life a chore. Research unsurprisingly finds that racism causes unhappiness in children.19 Many academic studies trace a clear link between unhappiness and poverty.20

  There are smaller circumstantial sources of unhappiness, too. Researchers at Princeton found that the number-one most unhappiness-provoking event in a typical day is spending time with one’s boss.21 (As a boss, this was not welcome news for me.)

  So circumstances certainly play some role. No doubt Abd-ar-Rahman could have pointed to a few in his own life. But paradoxically, a better explanation for his unhappiness may have been his own quest for satisfaction—a mistaken quest eerily similar to what the modern world offers us today.

  Have you ever known an alcoholic? They generally drink to relieve craving or anxiety—in other words, to attenuate a source of unhappiness. Yet it is the drink that ultimately prolongs their suffering. The very same principle was at work for Abd-ar-Rahman. It turned his pursuit of fame, wealth, and pleasure into a vicious cycle.

  Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the progress of 147 recent graduates in achieving their goals.22 Some of the alumni had previously described “intrinsic” goals, such as developing deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving a good reputation or fame.

  The results brought good and bad news. The good news: By and large, the subjects did achieve their stated goals. They basically got what they had aimed at. But be careful what you wish for, because only the alumni whose goals were intrinsic had happier lives. Those whose goals involved wealth and image found unhappiness instead. The people who attained their extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and anger. They even suffered more physical maladies such as headaches, stomachaches, and loss of energy.

  This is one of life’s cruelest ironies. The unhappiest people I have ever met are those most dedicated to their own self-aggrandizement—the pundits, the TV loud-mouths, the media know-it-alls. They build themselves up and promote their images but feel awful most of the time.

  Talk about the paradox of fame. Just like drugs and alcohol, once you become addicted, you can’t live without it. But you can’t live with it, either. Celebrities report that fame brings “severe loss of privacy” and “a deep loss of trus
t,” according to research by the psychologist Donna Rockwell.23 Yet they can’t give it up.

  But it’s not only celebrities who are at risk. The impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations. One is reality television, in which ordinary folks convert their day-to-day lives into performances for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion.” Those are the words of one twenty-six-year-old participant in the early hit reality show Big Brother.

  Then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And the evidence confirms the anecdotes: This can be a source of unhappiness.

  It makes sense. When is the last time you saw someone post honest negativity on Facebook? “My boss just chewed me out for being lazy!” “My wife doesn’t find me attractive since I went bald!” “My kid is failing math! #brutal.” No, everyone posts smiling selfies of their hiking trip with friends. They build a fake life, or at least an incomplete one, and share it.

  As a result, the rest of us consume almost exclusively the incomplete lives of our media “friends”—and then compare their illusions to our reality. It’s a funny exercise, when you think about it: We spend part of our time pretending to be happier than we are, and the other part of our time seeing how much happier others seem to be than we feel.

  Pride can be a powerful toxin. So can another canonical hedonistic pleasure: lust. From Hollywood to college campuses, the growing assumption among “enlightened” people is that sex is inherently liberating, and sexual variety is normal and good.

  This assumption actually has a name. We can call it the “Coolidge Effect”—and yes, it is named after the thirtieth president of the United States. The story (probably apocryphal) begins with Silent Cal and Mrs. Coolidge touring a poultry farm. The first lady, surprised that there were very few roosters, asked how so many eggs could be fertilized. The farmer informed her that the virile roosters did their jobs over and over again every day. “Perhaps you could point that out to Mr. Coolidge,” she supposedly joked.

  The president, hearing the remark, followed with a query of his own. He asked whether the rooster serviced the same hen each time. Oh, no, the farmer told him. There were many hens for each rooster. “Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge,” said the president.

  Perhaps those were happy roosters. But does the same principle work for us, as modern culture is fond of suggesting?

  It does not. This isn’t my moral opinion; it’s what empirical evidence tells us. In 2004, two economists decided to analyze whether sexual variety led to greater well-being. They examined data from about 16,000 adult Americans, asking their subjects (confidentially) how many sex partners they had had in the preceding year and how happy they felt.24 Across men and women alike, the resulting data meant the researchers could discern the optimal number of partners if happiness was the goal.

  The answer: 1. (Abd-ar-Rahman had about 5,999 too many.)

  If egotistical and physical gratification are both traps, what about riches and luxuries?

  We already learned that money only buys happiness up to a point. Remember, additional income raises the happiness of the poor quite quickly. Escaping poverty and joining the middle class solves a whole host of problems.

  But above the level of subsistence, it takes enormous increases in income for even small amounts of happiness. The renowned psychologist Daniel Kahneman has carefully chronicled how marginal dollars hardly buy any happiness after approximately $75,000 (for a family of four).25 Moving from middle class to rich will not solve whatever problems you have left.

  Think about it. Almost by definition, all you’re left with at that point are the problems money can’t crack. Your wife or husband won’t like you more when you move from $75,000 to $125,000. Your kids won’t suddenly stay out of trouble. You won’t have a better relationship with God.

  Furthermore, the new things that you can buy will probably ultimately prove unsatisfying. A close friend who had risen to great wealth as an entrepreneur explained this to me. Needless to say, I was more than a little skeptical. “You really want me to believe that I couldn’t buy awesome stuff if I had a billion dollars?” I asked. He replied with a story.

  When he was beavering away to start his firm, with hardly anything in the bank, he made a promise to keep himself going: “When I finally make it, the first thing I’m going to do is buy a Mercedes. In cash!” Well, one day, he realized he had made it. He could do just that. So he drove down to the dealership. And what did he find out? “The Mercedes was a nice car, for sure. But it really wasn’t much better than my old Toyota.”

  Even when people get wealthy, they almost never feel like they are “there.” This is a reflection of a very human phenomenon called the “hedonic treadmill,” where our expectations speed up almost seamlessly to match our resources. People are naturally acquisitive. Research on this phenomenon shows that no matter how much people earn, they tend to say they need about 40 percent more to have “sufficient” income. The day after you start making $100,000, you’ll feel convinced you really need $140,000.26

  Another one of Kahneman’s findings is even more interesting than the $75,000 threshold. He finds that our belief that we should be happier continues to rise with more money, even after the actual happiness levels off. We define success using a social script that tells us more money is always better, and we cling to this script even when it has completely ceased to describe our actual emotional experience. That big raise won’t bring you much extra happiness, but you will intellectually feel that you ought to be happier—after all, you’re doing better by society’s standards!

  So for most of the readers of this book, more money really won’t buy happiness. And worse yet, just because money has little impact on happiness, that doesn’t mean it cannot provoke unhappiness—remember, happiness and unhappiness aren’t just opposites. When we obsess over money as an end in itself, we all know it can generate misery.

  Nobody has described the snares of materialism more famously than St. Paul in his First Letter to Timothy: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” If you like your proverbs pithier, try the Dalai Lama: As he likes to say, it is better to want what you have than to have what you want.

  All this might seem vaguely paradoxical. After all, we are unambiguously driven to accumulate material goods, to seek fame, to look for pleasure. It’s in our nature to seek these things. How can it be that these very things can give us unhappiness instead of happiness?

  In short, our evolutionary cables have crossed. We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My instincts tell me, “Get rich and famous.” They also tell me that unhappiness is lousy. So I conflate the two, presuming that getting rich and famous will make me less unhappy.

  But herein lies Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care whether you are unhappy or not. She just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with your personal well-being, that’s your problem, buddy, not hers. This is only exacerbated by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same life goals as bacteria and protozoa, this is a really bad rule of thumb.

  We chase after these worldly goods to reduce our dissatisfaction, and find only more dissatisfaction in the process. We sense that nothing has full flavor. We crave something more, but we can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Wi
thout a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, doubling down on ego and eros can seem like the best paths available.

  But these things don’t fill the inner emptiness. They may bring brief satisfaction, but it never lasts and is never enough. And so we crave more.

  This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upādāna, which refers to a cycle of craving and grasping. Here is how the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s Path of Wisdom) explains it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life.” Further, “Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving,” the text explains, “his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.”

  The thirst for admiration, the hunger for material things, and the habit of objectifying others—this very cycle of grasping and craving—follows a formula of the world that is elegant, simple, and deadly:

  Love things and use people.

  This was Abd-ar-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue. But we know in our hearts that it is morally disordered and a road to misery. We want to be free of the sticky cravings. We want to find a formula that actually reduces unhappiness.

  How about this:

  Love people and use things.

  By simply inverting the deadly formula, we render it virtuous. I offer this to you as a creed for the pursuit of happiness. Of course, this is easier said than done. It requires the courage to repudiate pride and the strength to love others—family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, God, even strangers and enemies. Only deny love to things that actually are things. Few things are as liberating as giving away to others that which we hold dear. And few things produce greater unhappiness than materialism.

  How does all this square with every American conservative’s belief in the free enterprise system? A critic of capitalism might well point out that all the mistakes I have been enumerating—pursuing money, pleasure, and fame—are facilitated by free enterprise. Is our precious economic system just a shortcut to misery?