In a weary land

Wisdom from one unwise man to another:

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.
There as a king reigned in the east:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.

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.

The disadvantage

The problem with blogging about something with a good reputation, like reading, is that going quiet is an admission of backsliding into vice. I should have chosen to blog about well I was doing at killing endangered animals. Everyone would have liked me more when I blogged less.

Anyway, I have been reading even in this fit of the lazies, but this post is just to call attention to a beautiful column by George Will. Eirenic is just the word for it, I think. My own life is significantly worse than four years ago but significantly better than two years ago, which I think means I need to support Pelosi for president. Or does my life only prosper when there is a Pelosi retrograde in a quarter with a descending Bush? The astrology of personal politics is a tricky thing.

Life of Johnson: Miscellaneous

A few disconnected bits before the last post:

Speaking of Lord Lyttelton's supposed vision of his own death and its occurrence as envisioned, which Johnson had heard from Lyttleton's uncle, he said "It is the most extraordinary thing that has happened in my day... I am so glad to have every evidence of the spiritual world, that I am willing to believe it," and when someone said he should already have enough evidence, he replied, "I like to have more." Several times, Johnson's eagerness for proof of spirits gives Boswell pains to clear him of the charge of superstition. Except when pressed, Johnson often described his fear of death as though it were a fear of damnation, but more proof of a spiritual world could not reassure someone fearing the worst from the spirit world. I take this to be further proof that his true fear was of annihilation.

Johnson told a funny story of human perversity:

You put me in mind of Dr. Barrowby, the physician, who was very fond of swine's flesh. One day, when he was eating it, he said, "I wish I was a Jew." "Why so? (said somebody;) the Jews are not allowed to eat your favorite meat." "Because, (said he, ) I should then have the gust of eating it, with the pleasure of sinning."

While discussing whether life was "upon the whole more happy or miserable," Johnson argued for misery and Boswell added the argument, "that no man would choose to lead over again the life which he had experienced." Boswell says, "Johnson acceded to that opinion in the strongest terms." I agree too, except that if I could go back with the knowledge I now have, I would risk it, though with not a lot of optimism. However, Burke argued for happiness:

Every man would lead his life over again; for every man is willing to go on and take an addition to his life, which, as he grows older, he has no reason to think will be better, or even so good as what has preceded.

Boswell blames false hope, and quotes the first line from the elegy Johnson wrote for the strange lower-class doctor who lived with him for decades. Here is the whole first stanza:

Condemn'd to Hope's delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts or slow decline
Our social comforts drop away.

He also quotes Dryden, who is much more on point:

When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat,
Yet fool'd with hope, men favor the deceit:
Trust on, and think tomorrow will repay;
Tomorrow's falser than the former day;
Lies worse; and while it says we shall be blest
With some new joys, cuts off what we possest.
Strange cozenage! none would live past years again;
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain;
And from the dregs of life think to receive
What the first sprightly running could not give

Life of Johnson: Wine

Without thinking about it, I started drinking late, have only drunk too much a handful of times, and on the whole prefer not drinking, nor has any stronger drug tempted me, even when offered. When people find out, usually while swapping drug stories, they hardly believe it is not from some excess of religion. I rarely explain, because it is somehow embarrassing to admit the sole reason, that thinking clearly makes me happy, and thinking muddily makes me unhappy, which is what Johnson, who for a few years drank too much, felt too:

[I left off drinking wine] because it is so much better for a man to be sure that he is never to be intoxicated, never to lose the power over himself. I shall not begin to drink wine again, till I grow old, and want it... It is a diminution of pleasure, to be sure; but I do not say a diminution of happiness. There is more happiness in being rational... Supposing we could have pleasure always, an intellectual man would not compound for it. The greatest part of men would compound, because the greatest part of men are gross.

(He was 69 when he said that; "till I grow old" must mean very great age. Also "to compound for" means "to settle for," so to exchange happiness for pleasure.) It is probably relevant that Johnson had a painful fear of madness, which I share; that fear is the fear of "losing the power over himself." He also greatly feared annihilation: "No rational man can die without uneasy apprehension" and "It is in the apprehension of it that the horror of annihilation consists." It does not create happiness, to pull the shades and dim the lights when daylight is so brief, twilight so gray, and night so empty.

Life of Johnson: Happiness is forgetting

"That man is never happy for the present is so true, that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment."

So Johnson does mean, when he says men are never happy in the present, that they are never happy because of the present. Also, I was going to write today about the ephemeral happiness of high spirits, which he did not seem to allow in yesterday's quotation, but he says enough with that description of relief from unhappiness as self-forgetting.

Though he went through long periods of abstinence from drink (in a very sodden age), he says that when not abstaining, he often drank wine by the bottle to raise his spirits. He drank alone, though, in order not to embarrass himself. I understand it, but the deliberateness of his self-erasure is very sad.

Life of Johnson: Happiness and laughter

Everything Johnson says about happiness and depression convinces me, almost painfully. I am reading his Life now because I read his Rasselas last year. It is an almost classical form of philosophy, an investigation of happiness through a dialogue, and beautifully lucid.

Pope's Essay on Man is also wonderful, though I scarcely remember anything more than that. Boswell has Johnson commenting on Pope's line,

[Hope springs eternal in the human breast:]
Man never is, but always to be blest.

Boswell writes, "[Johnson] asserted that the present was never a happy state to any human being; but that, as every part of life, of which we are conscious, was at some point of time a period yet to come, in which felicity was expected, there was some happiness produced by hope." Further, that man is happy in the moment, "Never, but when he is drunk." In one of his prefaces, Boswell says he thinks Johnson underestimated man's potential for happiness because of his melancholy. With charming guilelessness, Boswell says he is sure he has had more happiness out of life than Johnson did; Boswell was something of a wencher and a wine-bibber. Johnson must be overstating in any case, or Boswell misunderstanding, because the first assertion means that men are sometimes happy in the present, though that happiness properly belongs to their future self, whose state is the cause of the happiness.

Hope is happiness and despair, not a lack of pleasant feelings, is the opposite of happiness. I wonder what Johnson would think of the idea that there is a second happiness, also not in the present. When long-held hopes are worked towards and then achieved, they leave happy memories, even if at the time there was no real happiness. So people are happy in the memory of rearing children, in remembering that they have acted rightly, in having been to school, in having achieved a career, in short in all kinds of things that while still in progress cause too much strain and work to produce a sensation of happiness.

Recent attempts to develop a scientific understanding of happiness have emphasized that our minds can only dimly imagine the future and more imagine than remember the past. We therefore choose paths unlikely to take us to happiness. There is some science to it, but it is mostly a rhetorical trick. The argument is that remembered happiness, being inaccurate, does not count, or counts for much less; with remembered happiness not counting, it is easy enough to show that gaining some hoped-for state brings much less happiness than expected, and thus that the hope itself was mistaken. But why should remembered happiness not count? It is hardly relevant that my memories are not a bald factual account; they are the only sort of memories available to me. Neither can I implant wholly delusional memories as a shortcut to happiness. If I had the mind of a computer, I would be irrational to have the hopes I do, for they have such difficulties in them that to remember every detail would be intolerable. Having the mind of a man, I have every reason to expect that some of the great satisfactions of mankind will be mine as well. But I think the new science of happiness does successfully describe why pursuing happiness through new toys and entertainments is delusional.

Johnson was not as gloomy as it might seem; even while depressed he was good-natured and enjoyed wit and conversation. Sometimes, when the depression lifted, he would be in a "humour for jocularity and merriment," and would laugh often, "a kind of good humoured growl." Boswell quotes another's description of it: "He laughs like a rhinoceros." A good laugh is such a delight. I have a great-uncle whose sweet-natured, quiet, almost rumbling chuckle, which makes the skin under his chin wobble, is one of the great pleasures of knowing him. Strange but wonderful laughs seem to run on that side of the family; my grandmother, his sister, has a sweet, girlish laugh even in her seventies. Her son, my uncle, had a short, odd laugh that was very endearing, especially with the motion of his prodigious gray eyebrows emphasizing his pleasure. He died a year ago, and even though there was much more about him to miss, how sad it is that while the good he did may be remembered, no one will ever hear his laugh again, and in time it will be forgotten.

I first wrote that this would be divine vandalism, if there were divinity, but that makes little sense and is probably pose. If there are two archons battling across creation, one making, one destroying, then it makes sense to call one a vandal, or maybe it just drowns nonsense in a sea of absurdity. If there is a god as described in Bible, in either Testament, then this sort of thing is merely unintelligible, the actions of a creator who labors over small delights but soon smashes them. Paul says,

Will what is molded say to its molder, "Why have you made me like this?" Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? (Rom. 9:20-21)

The potter may make and smash as he wills. If the Bible did not say it, no one would ever have guessed that so capricious a creator could be said to love what he treats so lightly.