The Conservative Heart Page 5

  One of my favorite jokes captures this critique perfectly.

  An American businessman is visiting a small Mexican fishing village. He notices a small boat tied up at the dock. He’s surprised to see the boat idle, since it is about 1 p.m.—prime fishing time. The businessman walks over to investigate, peers into the boat, and spies one happy fisherman and one large tuna. He compliments the fisherman on his catch and asks how long it took to nab it. The Mexican man replies that it only took an hour.

  “Well, why didn’t you stay out longer to catch more?”

  The fisherman replies that he has enough to fulfill all his immediate needs.

  “So what do you do during the rest of the day?”

  “I sleep late, take a nap, drink a little wine, and play guitar with my friends, señor.”

  At this, the American is appalled. “It’s your lucky day—I’m a Harvard MBA. Let me give you some advice. First, you have got to spend more time fishing and save the money. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to buy a bigger boat and hire a few men to work for you. After a while, you can buy several boats and hire more crews. Eventually, you’ll have a whole fleet, and so you can sell your catch directly to the processor. Maybe even open your own cannery.” Now he’s really picking up steam. “At that point, you could leave this small coastal village and move to Mexico City—maybe even Los Angeles! You could run your whole business from there.”

  The fisherman ponders all this for a minute. Then he asks, “How long will all this take?”

  “I’d say about twenty or thirty years.”

  “But what then, señor?”

  “What then?! You can sell your whole enterprise for a fortune!”

  “A fortune? Wow! Then what?”

  The American has to think for a moment. Then it comes to him. “Then,” he triumphantly declares, “you can retire and do whatever you want! For example, you could move to a quaint, beautiful fishing village where you could sleep late, take a nap, drink wine, and make music with friends!”

  Now, this joke might seem suited to the critics of capitalism, not to a conservative like me. This misses the point. We can measure the value of our lives in whatever currency we choose. Some prioritize great success in the workplace; others prefer an early retirement and the chance to pursue hobbies. Free enterprise empowers us to make that choice for ourselves.

  No, the real moral of this joke is an ends-means distinction. Material things must never be sought for their own sake; we must recognize them as means to achieve greater, nobler things. Materialism is tyranny, and no ideology or economic system is immune to it. Anyone who has spent time in a socialist country must concede that selfishness and rent-seeking behavior are at least as bad under socialism as when markets are free.

  It is true, though, that free enterprise puts material prosperity within the reach of more people than ever before. It universalizes trade, exchange, and the goal of upward mobility. In a way, it might make materialism easier to attain, just as being a pharmacist makes it easier to get narcotics than if you are a plumber.

  So does that mean free enterprise presents a problem for our formula for happiness? Does it lead us into the trap of unhappiness?

  These questions demand an answer, and I looked all over the world for it. And that’s how I found myself in New Delhi.

  ABUNDANCE WITHOUT ATTACHMENT

  The Swaminarayan Akshardham Hindu temple in New Delhi, India, is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. Consecrated in 2005, it took 7,000 artisans working full-time to carve all the gods, goddesses, people, and animals out of sheer rock. It sits on one hundred acres. And it was where I made friends with a penniless Hindu swami named Gnanmuni.

  Swami Gnanmuni (pronounced “Gyon-moony”) is the administrator of the temple. We had never met before, but I’d caught wind of his reputation. If Yelp reviewed monks, he would have had five stars. A man in his late forties, the swami is a monk following absolute vows of chastity and poverty. He has utterly renounced the material world.

  I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t flawless English. Yet as I approached, that’s exactly what I heard. And what was that accent—Texas?

  “How ya doin’?” The swami’s greeting was avuncular. Within two minutes, he’d referred to me as “dude.”

  Gnanmuni’s journey, I soon learned, could give my own nontraditional life a run for the money. He grew up in Houston, the son of an Indian engineer. He excelled in school and enrolled at the University of Texas at the age of sixteen. (He joked that his orange robe was evidence of his Texas Longhorn spirit.) After completing a bachelor’s and three master’s degrees, including an MBA, he went to work as a management consultant. The money came quickly.

  But, like so many of us, Gnanmuni never felt fully satisfied with the material world. As he walked through the temple with me, he described his sense that a more transcendental, less materialistic life had been beckoning to him. At twenty-six, he wasn’t ready to concede that this was all there was.

  It was then that Gnanmuni had his awakening. He gave up his business career, renounced his possessions, traveled to India, and enrolled in a Hindu seminary. Six years later, he emerged a monk. From that moment on, the sum total of his worldly possessions has been two robes, some prayer beads, and a wooden bowl. He is prohibited from even touching money.

  What would this rebel who had left the capitalist world behind have to say about free enterprise? I took a deep breath, and posed my query nonetheless: “Swami, is free enterprise good or bad for the soul?”

  His response was rapid. “It’s a good thing! It has saved millions of people in my country from starvation.” This was not quite what I expected. “But you own almost nothing,” I pressed. “I was sure you’d say that money is corrupting.”

  He laughed at my naïveté. “There is nothing wrong with money, dude. The problem in life is attachment to money.”

  The formula for the best life, as he told it, was this:

  Abundance without attachment.

  Some might be scratching their heads over Swami Gnanmuni’s enthusiastic endorsement of the first part—abundance. It turns out that this is an utterly uncontroversial assertion, even in traditions commonly perceived as ascetic.

  Don’t believe it? Then let’s go meet none other than His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

  In 2013, I trekked to the Himalayan foothills with two of my AEI colleagues to visit the Dalai Lama at his base in Dharamsala, India. His Holiness has lived there since being driven from his Tibetan homeland by the Chinese government in 1959. He is to this day one of the most revered religious leaders in the world—respected by Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike, and totally dedicated to human happiness.

  Very early one morning during the visit, I was invited to meditate with his monks. About an hour had passed when hunger pangs began, but I worked hard to ignore them. It seemed to me that such earthly concerns had no place in the superconscious atmosphere of the monastery. Incorrect. Not a minute later, a basket of freshly baked bread made its way down the silent line, followed by a jar of peanut butter with a single knife. We ate breakfast in silence, and resumed our meditation. This, I soon learned, is the Dalai Lama in a nutshell: transcendence and pragmatism together. Higher consciousness and utter practicality rolled into one.

  Later, over tea we spoke with His Holiness about the need to make the pursuit of happiness the ultimate goal of public policy. The title of one of my books—Gross National Happiness—actually came from the neighboring Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, where the king had established the happiness of his people as the measure by which the success of his country should be judged. I told His Holiness that AEI’s mission was to harness the power of free enterprise to make it possible for more people to pursue their happiness. Would he be willing to visit us and spend a few days to discuss his concerns about capitalism with American conservatives in a spirit of love and openness? He readily agreed, and joined us for a public summit at AEI’s headquarters in February 2014. />
  The result was magic. At first, his visit caused confusion. Some people couldn’t imagine why he would visit us; as Vanity Fair magazine asked in a headline, “Why Was the Dalai Lama Hanging Out with the Right-Wing American Enterprise Institute?”

  There was no dissonance, though. When asked why he came to AEI, the Dalai Lama explained, “I felt, rightist also human being. . . . Their main purpose is how to build happy society.”

  During our discussions, he returned over and over to two practical yet transcendent points. First, his secret to human flourishing is the development of every individual. In his own words: “Where does a happy world start? From government? No. From United Nations? No. From individual.”

  Further, like Swami Gnanmuni, the Dalai Lama has no hostility to abundance. In fact, Tibetan Buddhists actually count wealth among the four factors in a happy life, along with worldly satisfaction, spirituality, and enlightenment. Money per se is not evil. Indeed, unprecedented abundance means that more and more people can access more and more of the material things they need. This is why any moral system that takes poverty relief seriously has to celebrate the ahistoric economic bounty that has been harvested these past few centuries.

  The real issue, the Dalai Lama explains, is not wealth per se, but rather our delusion that “satisfaction can arise from gratifying the senses alone.” Another word for this delusion: attachment. Sound familiar?

  In Tibetan, the English word attachment is translated as do chag, which literally means “sticky desire.” It signifies a desperate grasping at something, motivated by fear of separation from the object. One can find such attachment in many dysfunctional corners of life, from jealous relationships to paranoia about reputation, professional standing, and material possessions.

  When we become excessively attached to wealth, when we forget that material prosperity and worldly pleasure are not virtuous ends in themselves, we do ourselves and our world a disservice. And lest you think that this is all purely Eastern philosophy, you can find the same ideas almost by dropping the needle anyplace in the Bible. For example, “Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. This too is meaningless.” That’s not Tibetan Buddhism; it’s Ecclesiastes 5:10.

  What’s so bad about attachment? In the realm of material things, it results in envy and avarice. Sidestepping these pitfalls is critical to life satisfaction. The formula for a happy, meaningful life is to appreciate abundance while avoiding attachment.

  I took the Dalai Lama’s—and Swami Gnanmuni’s and St. Paul’s and Ecclesiastes’s—advice to heart. But how do we put that into practice? Moreover, how do we apply those lessons to a real-world philosophy?

  To learn that, I had to dive back into the research. What I found were three strategies, three best practices for avoiding attachment while enjoying abundance.

  1. Collect experiences, not things.

  Material things appear to be permanent, while experiences seem evanescent and likely to be forgotten. Early on in our marriage, when we had next to no money, Ester and I had a dilemma. We had just enough money to go on a short vacation, or we could buy a couch. Not both. Ester argued that a weekend away would be better. I argued that the couch was something we’d have forever.

  We compromised—and took the vacation. But in retrospect, Ester was right. Twenty years later, when we look back, we still remember the weekend away in great detail. If we had bought the couch instead, it would be gone and forgotten. Though it defies conventional wisdom, it is physically permanent stuff that evaporates from our minds. It is memories in the ether of our consciousness that last a lifetime, there for us to enjoy again and again.

  This “paradox of things” has been thoroughly documented by researchers. In 2003, psychologists studied how Americans remembered different kinds of past purchases—both material things and experiences.27 They found that reflecting on experiential purchases left their subjects significantly happier than did remembering the material acquisitions.

  But more than any study, I learned this lesson once and for all from one of my sons. Six years ago, when Carlos was only nine, he announced that all he wanted for Christmas was a hunting and fishing trip for the two of us. No toys; no new objects at all. Just the trip. Just us.

  So we went hunting and fishing. And we have gone every year since. Any toy we could have bought him would have been broken or collecting dust by now. Yet both of us can tell you every place we’ve gone together and every critter we’ve bagged—every single year.

  2. Avoid excessive usefulness.

  Our daily lives often consist of a dogged pursuit of practicality. We want everything around us to be useful. But this is a sure path toward the attachment we need to avoid. Aristotle makes this point in his Nicomachean Ethics, a theory of happiness that still towers over most other philosophy 2,300 years after it was written. Aristotle shows admiration for learned men because “they knew things that are remarkable, admirable, difficult, and divine, but useless.”

  Doing things for their own sake—as opposed to instrumentalizing every moment in pursuit of distant goals—makes for mindfulness and joy. As Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh describes it, “While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes.”28

  That’s an abstract way to drive home a very practical point. Countless studies back up that wisdom. In one famous experiment, college students were given puzzles to solve.29 Some of the students were paid, but others were not. It was the unpaid participants who tended to continue to work on the puzzles after the formal experiment was finished. By contrast, the paid participants abandoned the task as soon as the session was over. The fixation on rewards vacuumed all the pleasure out of the task. And sure enough, the paid subjects reported enjoying the whole experience less—even including the payout!

  What makes you happier: a meeting with colleagues or a game of cards with friends? The answer is the activity you pursue for the sheer joy of it. Unless you’re one of the rare people with a passion for meetings, the things you look forward to are probably those that lead to no other gain than enjoyment itself. A night at the movies with your family, riding a bike, going to a ball game, having dinner with someone you love. These are terrible investments in purely financial terms. They are all “useless” in a purely economic sense. But they are precisely the sorts of things that Aristotle and a Buddhist monk knew would bring us happiness.

  This does not mean we should abandon productive impulses. I am not calling for the end of industrialization and a universal call to artisanal basket-weaving. What I am calling for is a world in which we all treat our industry as an intrinsic end in itself.

  3. Get to the center of the wheel.

  In the rose windows of many medieval churches, one finds the famous rota fortunae—the “wheel of fortune.” The concept is borrowed by Christianity from ancient Romans’ worship of the pagan goddess Fortuna. Following the wheel’s rim around, one sees the cycle of victory and defeat that everyone experiences throughout the struggles of life. At the top of the circle is a king; at the bottom, the same man as a pauper.

  Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales uses the idea to describe important people brought low throughout history: “And thus does Fortune’s wheel turn treacherously. And out of happiness bring men to sorrow.”

  The lesson went beyond the rich and famous. Everyone was supposed to remember that each of us is turning on the wheel. One day, we’re at the top of our game. But from time to time, we find ourselves laid low in health, wealth, and reputation.

  If the lesson ended there, it would be pretty depressing. Every victory seems an exercise in futility, because soon enough we will be back at the bottom. But as the Catholic theologian Robert Barron writes, the early church answered this existential puzzle by placing Jesus at the center of the wheel.30 Worldly things occupy the wheel’s rim. These objects of attachment spin ceasele
ssly and mercilessly. Fixed at the center was the focal point of faith, the lodestar for transcending health, wealth, power, pleasure, and fame. The least practical thing in life turned out to be the most important and enduring.

  There is an important lesson for us embedded in this ancient theology. Namely, woe be unto those who live and die by the slings and arrows of worldly attachment. To prioritize these things is to cling to the rim, a sure recipe for existential vertigo. Instead, make sure you know what is the transcendental truth at the center of your wheel, and make that your focus. Move beyond attachment by collecting experiences, avoid excessive usefulness, and get to the center of your wheel.

  By the way, I never finished my story about Swami Gnanmuni. Before I left him that day in Delhi, we had a light lunch of soup and bread. I told him I would be recounting our conversation in my book and that many Americans would be hearing his name.

  He contemplated this for a moment and, modeling nonattachment, responded simply.

  “Dude, do you like the soup? It’s spicy.”

  THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

  So there you have it, a few simple lessons for happy warriors with a conservative heart, dedicated to the pursuit of happiness—their own, and that of others.

  First, we should concentrate each day on the happiness portfolio: faith, family, community, and earned success through work. Teach it to those around you, and fight against the barriers to these things.

  Second, resist the worldly formula of misery, which is to use people and love things. Instead, remember your core values and live by the true formula: Love people and use things.

  Third, celebrate the free enterprise system, which creates abundance for the most people—especially the poor. But always remember that the love of money is the root of all evil, and that the ideal life requires abundance without attachment.