“Poverty has no causes,” wrote the economist Peter Bauer. “Wealth has causes.” In a world governed by entropy and evolution, the streets are not paved with pastry, and cooked fish do not land at our feet. But it’s easy to forget this truism and think that wealth has always been with us. History is written not so much by the victors as by the affluent, the silver of humanity with the leisure and education to write about it. We are led to forget the dominating misery of other times in part by the grace of literature, poetry, romance, and legend, which celebrate those who lived well and forget those who lived in the silence of poverty. The eras of misery have been mythologized and may even be remembered as golden ages of pastoral simplicity. They were not.
In preindustrial Europe, the purchase of a garment or of the cloth for a garment remained a luxury the common people could only afford a few times in their lives. One of the main preoccupations of hospital administration was to ensure that the clothes should not be usurped but should be given to lawful inheritors. During epidemics of plague, the town authorities had to struggle to confiscate the clothes of the dead and to burn them: people waited for others to die so as to take over their clothes - which generally had the effect of spreading the epidemic.
Electronic media are commonly cited as a threat to human relationships, and certainly Facebook friends are a poor substitute for face-to-face contact and with flesh-and-blood companions. Yet overall, electronic technology has been a priceless gift to human closeness. A century ago, if family members moved to a distant city, one might never hear their voices or see their faces again. Grandchildren grew up without their grandparents laying eyes on them. Couples separated by study, work, or war would reread a letter dozens of times and tumble into despair if the next one was late, not knowing whether the postal service had lost it or whether the lover was angry, faithless, or dead. Even the long-distance telephony allowed people to reach out and touch someone, the exorbitant cost put a strain on intimacy.
And speaking of seeing, the plunging cost of photography is another gift to the richness of experience. In past eras people had only a mental image to remind them of a family member, living or dead. Today, like billions of others, I get a wave of gratitude for my blessings several times a day as my eyes alight on a photo of my loved ones. Affordable photography also allows the high points of life to be lived many times, not just once: the precious occasions, the stunning sights, the long-gone cityscapes, the elderly in their prime, the grown-ups as children, the children as babies.
Another way in which the scope of our aesthetic experience has been magnified is food. The late 19th century diet consisted mainly of pork and starch. Before refrigeration and motorized transport, most fruits and vegetables would have spoiled before they reached a consumer, so farmers grew nonperishables like turnips, beans, and potatoes. Apples were the only fruit, most of which went into cider.
Emotions and evaluations are, of course, related, though imperfectly: an abundance of happiness makes for a better life, but an absence of worry and sadness does not. And this brings us to the final dimension of a good life, meaning and purpose. This is the quality that, together with happiness, goes into Aristotle’s ideal of eudaemonia or “good spirit.” Happiness isn’t everything. We can make choices that leave us unhappy in the short term but fulfilled over the course of a life, such as raising a child, writing a book, or fighting for a worthy cause.
People who lead happy but not necessarily meaningful lives have all their needs satisfied: they are healthy, have enough money, and feel good a lot of the time. People who lead a meaningful lives may enjoy none of these boons. Happy people live in the present; those with meaningful lives have a narrative about their past and a plan for the future. Those with happy but meaningless lives are takers and beneficiaries; those with meaningful but unhappy lives are givers and benefactors. Parents get meaning from their children, but not necessarily happiness. Time spent with friends makes a life happier; time spent with loved ones makes it more meaningful. Stress, worry, arguments, challenges, and struggles make a life unhappier but more meaningful. It’s not that the people with meaningful lives masochistically go looking for trouble but that they pursue ambitious goals: “Man plans and God laughs.” Finally, meaning is about expressing rather than satisfying the self: it is enhanced by activities that define the person and build a reputation.
And speaking of panics, what do you think are the greatest threats to the human species? In the 1960s several thinkers advised that they were overpopulation, nuclear war, and boredom. One scientist warned that although the first two might be survivable, the third definitely was not. Boredom, really? You see, as people no longer have to work all day and think about where their next meal is coming from, they will be at a loss as how to fill their waking hours, and will be vulnerable to debauchery, insanity, suicide, and the sway of religious and political fanatics.
The divergence of the curves is not a paradox. Recall that the people who feel they lead meaningful lives are more susceptible to stress, struggle, and worry. Consider as well that anxiety has always been a perquisite of adulthood: it rises steeply from the school-age years to the early twenties as people take on adulthood responsibilities, and then falls steadily over the rest of the life course as they learn to cope with them. Perhaps that is emblematic of the challenges of modernity. Though people today are happier, they are not as happy as one might expect, perhaps because they have an adult’s appreciation of life, with all its worry and all its excitement. The original definition of Enlightenment, after all, was “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity.”
The Enlightenment era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress.
The idea of a universal human nature brings us to a third theme, humanism. The thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment saw an urgent need for a secular foundation of religious carnage: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the European wars of religion. They laid that foundation in what we now call humanism, which privileges the well-being of individual men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion. It is individuals, not groups, who are sentient - who feel pleasure and pain, fulfillment and anguish. Whether it is framed as the goal of providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number or as a categorical imperative to treat people as ends rather than means, it as the universal capacity of a person to suffer and flourish, they said, that called on our moral concern.
Rather than trying to shape human nature, the Enlightenment hope for progress was concentrated on human institutions. Human-made systems like governments, laws, schools, markets, and international bodies are a natural target for the application of reason to human betterment.
In this way of thinking, government is not a divine fiat to reign, a synonym for “society,” or an avatar of the national, religious, or racial soul. It is a human intervention, tacitly agreed to in a social contract, designed to enhance the welfare of citizens, by coordinating their behavior and discouraging selfish acts that may be tempting to every individual but leave everyone worse off. As the most famous product of the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence, put it, in order to secure the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
They of all people would have been the first to concede this. If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers. And if you’re committed to progress, you can’t very well claim to have it all figured out. It takes nothing away from the Enlightenment thinkers to identify some critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of progress that we know and they didn’t. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information.
“Why should I live?”
In the very act of asking that question, you are seeking reasons for your convictions, and so you are committed to reason as the means to discover and justify what is important to you. And there are so many reasons to live!
As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You can seek explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and richness of the natural and cultural world. As the heir to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn. You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy - the ability to like, love, respect, help, and show kindness - and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family and colleagues.
And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so, and you can help to continue that progress.