Whether happiness may be found in political change

Dalrymple's essay in the current City Journal is unlocked now. It is a little wandering, but as always it is rewarding to read him. He quotes John Stuart Mill's self-reflection on happiness and political change:

Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

It is humbling to compare my own experience, not all that different in nature, with Mill's. In 2000, when it briefly looked as though Gore would win on the day of the election, it was as though my own hope for the future was dying. For an hour I was inconsolable, though strangely I was not a great supporter of Bush himself. The sudden access of grief and despair, so manifestly out of proportion to a mere election, shocked me into a thorough examination of not just my beliefs but the place they had in my life; my political maturity began that day. Yet Mill was able to ask himself this question of his own genius, without the rough impetus of a noisy campaign and political defeat.

Like Mill, I was young, though at 25, not so very young. Unlike Mill, whose remarkable genius had been paired from early childhood with an astonishing education, I had been happy only to try to make sense of the world through comparatively scanty reading; he, of course, had already constructed a philosophical view of considerable power. Yet the same falsehood had gripped us both, the belief that a rightly ordered world would bring happiness, not just to a greater number of men, but personally; that the work of increasing happiness in the world is at one with working towards one's own happiness. Escaping that falsehood means abandoning the hope that all the struggle to learn about man (for ethics, economics, and politics are only branches of the study of man) has any meaning beyond the pleasure of learning itself.

Minds of great power, like Mill's, may alter the world a little, but then again they may not, and the changes worked often bear little resemblance to the intention. I doubt Mill would approve of the excesses of libertarianism, despite its closest resemblance to his thought; he did not mean to include the exuberant hedonism libertarians so often present as their highest good. Nor again would the use of cold utilitarian calculus to justify great cruelty to a few suit his character, yet it might well be that such abuses in the 20th century by totalitarians would have been harder to dress in a presentable rhetoric without Mill's work. Thoughts die as well; we scarcely know if Pythagoras really existed or what Heraclitus meant, even in the little of his writing that survives. If great minds can little expect to know the consequences of their thoughts, or even to see effects at all, lesser minds must expect no return on their efforts.

Thus the happiness in the study of man can be nothing more than the happiness in learning itself. Imlac describes the pleasure of knowledge (I think it is safe to take this as Johnson's own opinion) in Rasselas:

Knowledge is certainly one of the means of pleasure, as is confessed by the natural desire which every mind feels of increasing its ideas. Ignorance is mere privation, by which nothing can be produced; it is a vacuity in which the soul sits motionless and torpid for want of attraction, and, without knowing why, we always rejoice when we learn, and grieve when we forget. I am therefore inclined to conclude that if nothing counteracts the natural consequence of learning, we grow more happy as our minds take a wider range.

That man is so various, so utterly resistant to reduction to a system, makes his nature a study that can bring happiness for a lifetime. And yet it is so painful to learn about man and see it bear so little fruit! Imlac himself faults ignorance because it produces nothing, yet how much does the study of man produce? I have learned a little better to preserve an aequus animus; that is an increase in my happiness, at the cost of some intense pleasures; I have learned, a little, to hear the underlying sense in men's incoherence; that is an increase in happiness, though at the cost of alienation of words from sense; I have learned at last and greatest cost how tenuous are the threads that tie reason to the self; a slight understanding, that forgives much and costs more. Little enough; and when I die it will pass away with me. Surely happiness, though the emotion of it may fade, ought in its essence to partake of eternity?

I can easily believe that my mind is simply too weak to learn enough to win an unambiguous increase in personal happiness above the happiness of learning itself, but it does not seem that anyone has ever had a strong enough mind. There is, then, no happiness to be found either in contributing to the right formation of society or in the understanding of man that must precede a correct theory of society. In the end, I can only believe that in good or bad thought, in well or badly ordered societies, in knowledge or ignorance, there can be more or less happiness in the world, but only the pleasure of the learning falls to the learner, and to whom the excess or deficiency of happiness falls is the work of chance alone.