by Ben Shapiro
What, then, prevents one from calling happy someone who is active in accord with complete virtue and who is adequately equipped with external goods, not for any chance time but in a complete life?10
Act well, and in accordance with your value as a rational being, and you will be happy. We find moral purpose in cultivating our reason, and using that reason to act virtuously; pursuing moral purpose makes us “great-souled.”
So, in the end, the Bible and the Philosopher come to the same conclusion from opposite directions: the Bible commands us to serve God with happiness and identifies that moral purpose with happiness; Aristotle suggests that it is impossible to achieve happiness without virtue, which means acting in accordance with a moral purpose that rational human beings can discern from the nature of the universe—a universe Aristotle traced back to an Unmoved Mover. George Washington puts the synthesis well in his letter to the Protestant Episcopal Church on August 19, 1789: “the consideration that human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected, will always continue to prompt me to promote the progress of the former, by inculcating the practice of the latter.”11
If all this sounds like a more restrictive version of happiness than we’re used to, that’s because it is. Happiness isn’t rolling around in the mud at Woodstock, nor is it a nice golf game after a rough week at work. Happiness is the pursuit of purpose in our lives. If we have lived with moral purpose, even death becomes less painful. When Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer knew that his death was imminent, he wrote a letter in anticipation of his passing. Here’s what that great-souled man wrote: “I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking. . . . I leave this life with no regrets.” Only living with moral purpose can grant profound happiness.12
As Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote in his stirring memoir about surviving the Holocaust, Man’s Search for Meaning, “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. . . . We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”13
Frankl’s feeling isn’t anecdotal. According to a fourteen-year longitudinal study from the University of Carleton in Canada, those who reported strong purpose in life at the outset of the study were 15 percent more likely to still be alive than those who did not. That statistic held true for every age group. Another similar study from the University College London found that for those above retirement age, a sense of purpose correlated with a 30 percent decrease in chances of death over an eight-and-a-half-year period. Overall, as Professor Steve Taylor of Leeds Beckett University states, “Those who reported the highest level of fulfillment lived, on average, two years longer.”14 A study of 951 patients with dementia found that those who said they felt a sense of purpose were 2.4 times less likely to develop Alzheimer’s than others. Cancer patients given “meaning-centered” therapy rather than “support-focused” therapy were more motivated to keep living—and even felt better than their colleagues. A study of teenagers found that those who increased their empathy and altruism most also saw the greatest drop in cardiovascular risk. As Dr. Dhruv Khullar, researcher at the Weill Cornell Department of Healthcare Policy and Research writes in the New York Times, “Only about a quarter of Americans strongly endorse having a clear sense of purpose and of what makes their lives meaningful, while nearly 40 percent either feel neutral or say they don’t. This is both a social and public health problem.”15
So, what do we need to generate the moral purpose that provides the foundation for happiness?
We need, in my estimate, four elements: individual moral purpose, individual capacity to pursue that purpose, communal moral purpose, and communal capacity to pursue that purpose. These four elements are crucial; the only foundation for a successful civilization lies in a careful balance of these four elements.
THE NECESSITY FOR INDIVIDUAL MORAL PURPOSE
In the pre-Biblical era, you were invested with meaning by your place in the social structure. In the Hammurabi Code, only the king was described as created in God’s image; the closer you were to the king, the more rights you had.
Not so in the Bible. The key phrase—the beginning of Western civilization—lies in Genesis 1:26: we are all made in God’s image. All of us, not just kings or potentates. That means we all have inherent value, and that our mission in life is to draw close to something beyond ourselves. That individual purpose can be extended to our relationships with other people—in fact, Judeo-Christianity insists that it must be. But the root of our relationship with other people is our relationship with the Divine Creator who endowed us with our value, and who insists that we seek Him out.
We are endowed not merely with rights, but with duties. Those duties give us purpose. And those duties devolve on us as individuals, regardless of social circumstance, thanks to our innate value as creatures made just “a little lower than the angels and crowned . . . with glory and honor.”16
Without individual moral purpose granted by a relationship to a Creator, we seek meaning instead in the collective, or we destroy ourselves on the shoals of libertinism. We live lives of amoral hedonism, in the non-disparaging sense. All of which sounds benign. But too often, it isn’t. After all, to me, my interests are far more pressing than your rights, and atomistic individualism has a tendency to drift toward self-justifying oppression of others. Even the most ardent atheists have historically conceded that much; Voltaire famously stated, “I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, because it means that I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often. . . . If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” Without belief in our innate individual value, we collapse into animals incapable of seeking moral purpose, even though we feel the need for it beating in our chests.
It matters how we fill that need for individual moral purpose. Yet we’re continually drawn to false gods. We proselytize endlessly for everything from intersectionality to consumerism, from Instagram to organic food, from political protest to essential oils. How many of us truly feel that lifelong purpose is to be found in those transitory distractions?
THE NECESSITY FOR INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY
It’s not enough to know our individual moral purpose, to know that we must seek happiness through virtuous action. In order for us to be happy, we must believe that we can pursue that happiness with some degree of success. We must believe that we have the capacity to cultivate and utilize a skill set—that we’re free, active agents in our own lives.
All of the American founders were self-help specialists. Washington spent his formative years copying out rules of civility; as biographer Richard Brookhiser writes, “The rules address moral issues, but they address them indirectly. They seek to form the inner man (or boy) by shaping the outer.”17 Benjamin Franklin was a notorious devotee of self-betterment—he actually created a calendar of virtues, seeking to wipe out his tendency toward wrongdoing (you can actually buy copies of Franklin’s calendar yourself online).18
We must believe that even in the direst circumstances, we have the capacity to better ourselves. As Frankl wrote about living through the Holocaust, “Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.”19
We must also assume that we exist as meaningful individuals, not mere clusters of cells. We’re not just balls of meat wandering through the universe, material agglomerations of matter changing with every moment. We are individuals with identities and responsibilities.
We must believe, too, in the power of our reason—our rational capacity. W
e’re not just instincts and firing neurons. We have the ability to think things through. Scientific materialists talk constantly about the power of reason, and why reason ought to reject religion. But the very notion of reason—the notion of a logical argument that drives my behavior—is foreign to scientific materialism. If we are a set of firing neurons and flowing hormones and nothing more, why appeal to reason? Why appeal to arguments? Reason is just an illusion, the same way free will is. Neurons fire, which cause other neurons to fire, generating a response from another set of neurons in another human body. Of course, to deny reason would be to end all human communication, destroy our politics, to tear down what it means to be a human being at the root. It would end science itself—we can only stab through the pasteboard mask at the nature of the universe by using our cognitive abilities. We must believe in reason to live productive lives.
Finally, we must believe that we are pursuing true goals—not merely effective ones. Darwinian evolution leaves no room for the true; it only leaves room for the evolutionarily beneficial. Survival of the fittest isn’t a moral principle; survival itself isn’t a moral proposition. If it were beneficial to us to kill babies and eat them, that would not make it moral; if it were beneficial for us to calculate that 2+2=5, it would not make it true. But we care about both the moral and the true, and that requires a baseline assumption: that we can discover the moral and the true.
THE NECESSITY FOR COMMUNAL MORAL PURPOSE
We are social creatures, not merely individuals. That means we seek contact, and want to feel like part of something larger than ourselves. That is why we seek friends and communities in which we participate. Seneca stated, “No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility.”20 Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes, “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor, for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up.”21
Social science agrees. Sociologist Emile Durkheim found that we can measure suicide rate by social connection; as Jonathan Haidt writes, “If you want to predict how happy someone is, or how long she will live (and if you are not allowed to ask about her genes or personality), you should find out about her social relationships. Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life (more than does quitting smoking), speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders.”22 In fact, a massive longitudinal Harvard study found that the single best predictor of lifelong happiness was the presence of close relationships: satisfaction with relationships at age fifty was actually more predictive of long-term health than cholesterol level.23
But what binds us to each other?
Of course, there’s romantic love, which grows into deeper, more companionate love; there’s friendship, prized by Aristotle because it was based in virtuous appreciation for the value of the other. But we need even more than that. We need communities. We need civic vitality, engagement in that community. We need nets to fall back on, friends to rely upon, fellow citizens to defend. In Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam’s terms, we need social capital to function properly as individuals: we require trust, shared norms, civic virtue.
So, what builds communities? A shared vision of what the community’s moral purpose is.24 Like Aristotle, the founders believed in social organizations fostering virtue: a country without such social ties could not survive in freedom. They also agreed that the Judeo-Christian tradition had to provide a basis for sound values for individuals living in a free community: as John Adams stated in a letter to the Massachusetts militia, “We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by . . . morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”25
The best countries—and the best societies—are those where citizens are virtuous enough to sacrifice for the common good but unwilling to be forced to sacrifice for the “greater” good. Flourishing societies require a functional social fabric, created by citizens working together—and yes, separately—toward a meaningful life.
THE NECESSITY FOR COMMUNAL CAPACITY
The pursuit of individually and communally virtuous goals can only be effectuated when strong social institutions thrive—institutions like churches and synagogues and social clubs and charity organizations—and when government is both strong enough to protect against anarchy and limited enough to check its tendency toward tyranny. This is a delicate balance. We need social institutions to provide us the safety to take risks, institutions that help pick us up when we fall; we also need governmental structures that leave us free to take those risks. We need social organizations promoting civic virtue in order to instill individual virtue; we need government to protect individuals’ free right to choose. Society is not the government; government is not society.
It’s easy to upset this delicate balance. We tend toward tribalism and group loyalty; we cease worrying about how we can improve ourselves, and we begin reshaping and remolding the society around us, using the power of the collective to crush individuals. We crack eggs to make omelets, as Stalin’s then right hand Lazar Kaganovich (an egg Stalin would later crack himself) told Time in 1932.
In the past, we’ve conflated communal capacity with powerful government. After all, big governments build big things. In 2012, the Democratic National Convention featured a video with the slogan, “Government’s the only thing we all belong to.” That belief has been the defining feature of tyrannies the world over: the utopian notion that if we all pull our oars in the same direction, at the behest of a centralized government, we’ll be able to accomplish more together.
That’s dangerous stuff. It’s tempting to mobilize our ardor for collective mobilization and use it as a state-wielded club to force individual virtue, or to force large-scale change. Tyranny rarely begins with jackboots; it usually begins with ardent wishes for a better future, combined with an unfailing faith in the power of mass mobilization.
Alternatively, we’ve discounted the value of communal capacity altogether. We’ve worshipped at the altar of radical individualism, suggesting that community standards stifle creativity and destroy individuality. The image of repressive small-town Puritans preventing Kevin Bacon from dancing his heart out still resonates with many Americans. Fulfillment, in this vision, is to be found by looking within, by ignoring what your community demands of you.
So, what does positive communal capacity look like? It looks like a governmental system capable of mobilizing to stop external threats, but unable to threaten individual liberties; it looks like a social fabric powerful enough to support community members, confident enough to avoid the tools of governmental compulsion. Few governments in human history have met that standard.
Communal capacity must somehow make room for us to pursue our individual moral purposes and exercise our individual capacity while also providing us the means to work together toward communal moral goals.
In the end, communal capacity requires two things: active social communities promoting virtue, and a state nonrestrictive enough to provide a forum for our free choice.
THE INGREDIENTS FOR HAPPINESS
Happiness, then, comprises four elements: individual moral purpose, individual capacity, collective moral purpose, and collective capacity. If we lack one of these elements, the pursuit of happiness becomes impossible; if that pursuit is foreclosed, society crumbles.
Our society was built on recognition of these four elements. The fusion of Athens and Jerusalem, tempered by the wit and wisdom of our Founding Fathers, led to the creation of a civilization of unparalleled freedom and replete with virtuous men and women striving to better themselves and the society around them.
But we are losing t
hat civilization. We are losing that civilization because we have spent generations undermining the two deepest sources of our own happiness—the sources that lie behind individual moral purpose, communal moral purpose, individual capacity, and communal capacity. Those two sources: Divine meaning and reason. There can be no individual or communal moral purpose without a foundation of Divine meaning; there can be no individual capacity or communal capacity without a constant, abiding belief in the nature of our reason.
The history of the West is built on the interplay between these two pillars: Divine meaning and reason. We receive our notions of Divine meaning from a three-millennia-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Jews; we receive our notions of reason from a twenty-five-hundred-year-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Greeks. In rejecting those lineages—in seeking to graft ourselves to rootless philosophical movements of the moment, cutting ourselves off from our own roots—we have damned ourselves to an existential wandering.
We must make our way back toward our roots.
Those roots took hold at Sinai.
Chapter 2
From the Mountaintop
Imagine a world in which you are a plaything of nature, or the gods. You have a fate, but you have no true agency over it. You may seek to appease the gods through sacrifices, but they’re as volatile and uncaring as other human beings. Those gods have invested kings and potentates with power; you are a commoner, trying to scratch your life from the dirt. You comfort yourself with the things around you, with simple pleasures; perhaps you even find communal meaning in service to the regime. But you are essentially a cork, bobbing on the eddies of an ocean you do not control—an ocean no one truly controls.
