Why Yes, I Do Love Life
Dramatis personae:
Blaise PASCAL, no relation to present company.
VOLTAIRE
Louis PASTEUR
A GRANDMA, who lived to a ripe old age.
A HIPSTER, who died before her time.
Setting: On the Islands of the Blest, the honored dead enjoy an eternity of warm, perfectly sunny weather. They drink excellent wine crafted in the fertile uplands. They stroll hundreds of miles of pristine beaches.
Unlike you, they never have to sneak in the wine.
Prologue: from “The Worldly,” (“Le Mondain,” by Voltaire, my translation) spoken by VOLTAIRE before the curtain, 18th-century style.
Let them regret who may
A long-lost good old day
Ruled by Queen Astraea,
Saturn, Rhea.
In happy times of old
They say the streets were gold.
In Eden they would play.
As far as I can see
Providence put me
In just the proper age;
She is a sage.
Though grumblers abase it
They do have to face it:
Right now’s the time to be.
The arts in all their kinds
Are dear to decent minds.
These things I hold aloft —
Effete, and soft.
Good pleasure and good taste
In ornament no waste.
Or so the Worldly finds.
My impure heart adores
How sweet Abundance stores,
And happily she feeds
New joys; new needs.
She spins gold from the earth,
Assays vast oceans’ worth;
Air itself she implores!
Do you know what drew us?
The mere superfluous
But truly needful things —
The Iron Age sings!
VOLTAIRE: Say, anyone have a look at the U.S.A. lately?
GRANDMA: Yeah, but it’s been a couple of… wow, it’s hard to keep track of time up here, isn’t it?
VOLTAIRE: Up here? It’s hard to keep track of direction. But how goes it… down there?
HIPSTER: The same as always, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. And a perpetual crisis.
PASCAL: Ah yes, the pursuit of happiness. But happiness never does manage to get caught, and what little they have is always threatening to go down the toilet.
VOLTAIRE: Something to do with government bonds, no doubt.
PASCAL: It usually is. Oh, and you might find this interesting, my dear philosophe — there’s a bit of a debate underway among three distinct propositions: One, we should have more kids. Two, we should have fewer. And three, the mere act of having any children at all is indefensible.
VOLTAIRE: I would think the natural inclination rather settles the argument, doesn’t it? “Be fruitful and multiply” — never was an easier command given to the Jews. Or to anyone.
PASTEUR: It’s not for the parents’ happiness alone that you should have kids. It’s for the kids’, too. Or so they say.
VOLTAIRE: How do they come to suspect that the children will be happy? Have the Americans been reading… Leibniz?
PASCAL: The argument, if you can call it that, goes something like this. Premise one: You do not want to die. Therefore life must be pretty good for you, no matter what your station. So it must be good for others, too… and so have more kids. They will thank you for being born.
VOLTAIRE: But every birth means one more death, and death is miserable. In a sense, all parents are killers. Better not to have children: if the child-to-be misses out on some pleasure, no one really cares, and at any rate, the pleasure he might enjoy is always uncertain. But if the child-to-be misses out on death, then he has done better than any now living. And the only certain way to do that is never to be born.
PASCAL: I see you’ve already divined the third position in the debate.
VOLTAIRE: It was easy, for me anyway. I never had any children.
PASCAL: It wasn’t for want of trying.
VOLTAIRE: Ah, true.
PASTEUR: But what if the first argument’s right? What if it’s better to bring someone into the world, because life really is a blessing? The premise bears all sorts of joyful extensions, if only we look for them.
VOLTAIRE: Oh?
PASTEUR: You’d hate to have your buttock cut off, right?
VOLTAIRE: What? I mean — I would. Yes.
PASTEUR: Or even a part of it?
VOLTAIRE: Or even a part of it. I’m quite happy, thank you, with the flesh that nature has given me.
PASTEUR: But you acquired that flesh through your own efforts at the dinner table. If it’s such a misfortune to have even a piece of you cut off, then being a part of you must be really, really great. So it would appear that you have a moral obligation to get fatter. Grow those buttocks! Let ever more carbon and nitrogen take part in the miracle of life!
VOLTAIRE: You said this was a… joyful… extension. Didn’t you?
PASTEUR: Joyful after your manner. Ironically joyful.
VOLTAIRE: Oh. Of course.
GRANDMA: There are joys to life, though. There are. Real ones, too. Having children. Having grandchildren. Singing hymns. The bloom of the flowers.
HIPSTER: Sure there are pleasures. Reading a good book, or having a good cup of coffee. Music. Get-togethers with friends.
GRANDMA: I can’t imagine. Whatever you’d get up to, it was probably something revolting.
HIPSTER: Not as bad as you’d think. Some of it might be familiar stuff, too. One time we had a canning party.
PASTEUR: A canning… party?
HIPSTER: Oh yeah.
GRANDMA: Just like I said, revolting. Canning’s a chore. And not even a fun one.
HIPSTER: It can be fun sometimes. I mean, why not? It’s great to make something with your hands. Take work back from the machine. Feel independent, for once. Like, you’re really in charge of your life.
GRANDMA: If you liked canning so goddamn much, why didn’t you move back in with me? I’d have you canning every day of the week.
HIPSTER: But then it wouldn’t be fun. And besides, every day of the week? What did you can so much of?
GRANDMA: Leftovers.
HIPSTER: You mean, like, from dinner leftovers?
GRANDMA: That way they don’t go bad.
HIPSTER: And you call me revolting.
GRANDMA: That’s not revolting, that’s survival. Eight decades of frugality, sweetie. But you—well, you wouldn’t know, would you? [Grandma, who teetotaled in life, has resolved to make up for lost time.] When I was younger I planted my own green beans for canning. And just look at you. You go to the grocery store, you buy your green beans from France or Argentina—and then you can them. Oh ho ho! Such a little saver you are!
HIPSTER: [Gasps.] Why I’d never! We always went to the farmer’s market.
GRANDMA: The farmer’s market? Weren’t no market in my day. Just us farmers.
HIPSTER: And the companies who owned you. I’ve read The Grapes of Wrath.
VOLTAIRE: Have you ever noticed that there’s a certain tension between being a hipster and being a cosmopolitan? To be a cosmopolitan is to suspend your judgment, or at least very carefully pretend to. But to be a hipster you need this excruciatingly precise judgment. On everything. And you need to flaunt it.
[Pause.]
PASCAL: So which one are you?
VOLTAIRE: Never mind. [Sips his champagne. From the bottle.]
HIPSTER: Okay, fine. Canning wasn’t the same thing to me that it was to you. You can’t step in the same river twice. What am I supposed to do? Apologize for liking something?
GRANDMA: Did you knit?
HIPSTER: Yeah.
GRANDMA: Compost?
HIPSTER: Yeah.
GRANDMA: Bake your own bread?
HIPSTER: Sometimes.
GRANDMA: Those weren’t hobbies for me, and if you had to survive by them, you couldn’t. I’d just like to you admit it. That’s all.
PASTEUR: Let me ask a question. Why would you want to survive that way? There’s no need anymore. You can buy canned vegetables for pennies in the grocery. The bread’s cheap, too. Germ theory and modern sanitation makes food- and water-borne illness extraordinarily rare in the developed world. And a single machine knits faster than an army of hipsters. Aren’t you, well, you know… supposed to be happier that way?
PASCAL: Otherwise you nineteenth-century folk really shouldn’t have bothered.
PASTEUR: I guess there’s the love of knowledge for its own sake. But that never was quite my style. I really thought I might make people happier. That’s why I did all that stuff.
PASCAL: I tried to warn you. But did you listen? Vanity, I tell you…
HIPSTER: The Bible doesn’t always end in Deuteronomy. Sometimes it gets as far as Ecclesiastes.
VOLTAIRE: With the same results, my dear girl. It’s an exercise in creative unhappiness.
PASCAL: Don’t blame the Bible. The world has gotten more adept, and less religious, and it certainly has not gotten any happier. Not even by a little.
VOLTAIRE: Come now, my great good man, are you mad? You’re never going to convince the rest of us that scientific progress is in vain. Not all vanity is in vain, even. To Hell with Ecclesiastes.
GRANDMA: Don’t talk about Scripture like that. It’s not respectful.
VOLTAIRE: I’d prefer we not talk about scripture at all.
GRANDMA: Probably for the best.
HIPSTER: Odd, isn’t it, that living in the afterlife doesn’t clear up any of these questions.
VOLTAIRE: As one of my biographers put it, I spent 83 years dying. I never had good health. I loved life anyway.
HIPSTER: And you didn’t even have an iPod.
PASCAL: Pity him! Better that he were never born!
Jason, I enjoyed this tremendously. Lots of food for thought here. I guess I’ve never thought about it before, but it seems to me that people must be a lot happier today than they were in the past, even if they cannot appreciate it. Although I’m considering the possibility that it may be an absurd comparison.Report
I think it is absurd, like concluding that someone living in pretty dire straits nowadays should be thrilled because he’s richer in absolute terms than Louis XIV.Report
Well, which one would you choose? I’m not in any doubts at all.
On reflection this is not to say that the poor person today is happier. His situation may be preferable, while happiness may depend — as Pascal suggests — on factors that are more or less independent of material goods.Report
There are plenty of folks who would rather be Louis XIV than get the next cure for cancer (or whatnot, presumably involving stem cells).Report
If nothing else, if they were going to be Louis XIV, they were less likely to end up as stem cells.Report
Though being royalty had other disadvantages, as a few of the later Louis’s found.Report
I have no desire to run an entire country, but for people who do, that’s even better than an iPod.Report
I have no desire to submit to anal fistula surgery without anesthesia. But Louis XIV did it.Report
Touché.Report
I suspect that I’m one of those who would have been happier to have been born in an earlier age.Report
There’s a trifle of Orwell’s of which you reminded me just now.
A Happy Vicar I Might Have Been
(a little poem written in 1935)
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;
But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.
And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.
All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.
But girl’s bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.
It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.
I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;
And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn’t born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?Report
See, in an earlier age, you would have had to tell me that in person at a bar. By the time you got to the second paragraph, I would have said “Yeah, that’s nice. I’m gonna put on some music”. Then I would put some coins in the jukebox and the entire bar would start singing along with the music and we’d all be happy.Report
Pye, if the “earlier age” you’re talking about has jukeboxes, then you aren’t talking about an earlier age in the sense that the OP means.Report
The phrase “earlier age” is subjective. Using the original post, it wasn’t so long ago that people did their own canning yet, to the Hipster, what Grandma is talking about might as well have been the Dark Ages. I choose to define “earlier age” as any earlier period where the culture is significantly different from the current one.
Admittedly, my use of jukeboxes was to make reference to one of Jaybird’s earlier posts but the “age” when everyone got together and sang along at the bar after working their shift at the plant is so far removed from our current day social situation that I might as well have made reference to longships.Report
In an earlier age than that, Jaybird would have composed the first verse himself, handed you the pen and paper, and flipped over the minute glass. Your turn!
I’ll say this at least about the eighteenth century. There never was an age with a more functionally literate upper class.Report
I’ve said before and I’ll say again: We need a higher class of Brahmin.Report
I like to think I am a higher class of Brahmin.Report
I don’t know if I could stand the Brahmins in my neck of the woods getting any more high class.Report
They’re just Dalits with money, Russell.Report
What do you think the blogosphere is?Report
I’m reminded of a quote used to describe Usenet:
“I think of it as a party held in a very, very large house. In one room people are drinking espresso and discussing translations of Rilke, while in another they’re sucking nitrous out of a garbage bag and setting fire to a couch.” -Tom FawcettReport
“…sucking nitrous out of a garbage bag and setting fire to a couch.”
Is Usenet located in Dunedin, NZ? (http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Dunedin)Report
Like Philosopher Kings?Report
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.
Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.
Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam’s neighbors.
Minever mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.
Minever loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.
Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.
Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.
-E.A. RobinsonReport
Alfred Bester wrote a story called “Hobson’s Choice”, which explains where the people you see cadging quarters and cigarettes come from: they’re Time Bums, who time-travelled to their personal Golden Ages, not realizing how useless they’d be not having grown up with any of the necessary skills, and hopelessly trying to save up the money to go back.Report
Someday in all likelihood we’ll look back at asthma like we now look back at polio. I had asthma when I was a kid: I couldn’t play sports, the other kids teased me, I was hospitalized constantly, my grades did actually suffer from it, and it probably permanently damaged my health, but I know I’d be a different person if it were not for asthma. Asthma in many regards shaped the adult I became and this for the better: I had lots of time to read books and developed refined senses of both patience and resistance to panic.
After taking medicine every day and resigning myself to the fact that I’d have to take medicine every day for the rest of my life, suddenly last summer after coming back to the U.S. I noticed that I had been exhibiting no symptoms of asthma and I’ve been officially asthma-free for just over a year now. Looking back I’m glad I had such severe asthma, and I wouldn’t trade it for a life without asthma.
The epicurean concept of happiness is wrong. It is the stoics who’ve got it right – at least for me – and this makes me wonder if we really are “happier” today than we were in the past.Report
This applies quite well to growing up gay in a homophobic society, FWIW.Report
Worth a lot. It’s difficult to appreciate happiness without having some sort of opposing benchmark.Report
In the summer, the French court would evacuate from Versailles. The stench of the privies eventually overpowered their perfumes. Off they’d go in great wagons and carriages to other, less-stencheous chateaus.Report
A friend of mine made the same point to me about my most recent angsty post. It’s a fair point, I think. You can’t bury your feelings with a tide of analysis about the economics of the past, but it’s good to be reminded every once in awhile that that crippling unemployment for me means time to blog, not starvation.Report
What happens when your money runs out?Report
people must be a lot happier today than they were in the past, even if they cannot appreciate it
If there’s one lesson to be taught by unimaginable wealth and luxury and leisure it’s this: You can get used to anything.Report
But Jaybird, it’s a basic human right that my cell phone have access to the Internet! (And, for that matter, that I have a cell phone!)Report
Wonderful.
One quick thing: In the first four lines, you have the hipster (“Up here?”) responding to the hipster (“Same as always”). Did you intend for Pasteur or Pascal to be on one of those lines?Report
The first should have been Voltaire, and now it is.Report
There’s always going to be someone who reads a post like this and thinks “oh, sure, some white boy telling me racism doesn’t matter because we have refrigerators”.Report
You’re no doubt correct.
But it’s funny. I intended this post as a partial retraction or a problematizing of the idea that we are happier today. Or that “happiness” and “getting what you desire” map very well onto one another at all.
I have strong preferences about when I would like to live, for example. Let me live as late as possible; I’m an optimist, and I’d gladly fast forward 500 years if I could.
But afterward, would I be happier? I’d have a preference of mine fulfilled, and if I’m right about the direction of history, I would also be a lot more materially comfortable now than today. (In part, I expect we’ll have biological immortality by then.) But still — happiness might be another creature entirely.
None of which is to say that our preferences for material abundance are wrong. They are what they are, and in particular, with the health conditions I have, I would find it horrible to live in the seventeenth century. To go the rest of my life short of breath and wheezing from asthma? Sick every spring and fall from allergies? When pneumonia set in, as inevitably it would, I doubt I’d last very long.Report
Were time travel possible, I would never travel farther back than the widespread adoption of the flush toilet.Report
I hear that, brother.Report
Yeah, that’s about as early as I’d be willing to go, too. I’m also not so terribly keen to find out what life was like before anesthesia or effective antibiotics.Report
And yet, equally so, you might be far happier a hundred years from now — when your asthma was cured by a bit of viral tinkering with your immune system responses.
You can say “happiness is relative” — and indeed, the poor now would MUCH prefer to be poor now than poor then…or poor in America as opposed to poor in Ethiopa (although they might also prefer to be poor in England or Holland to America).
But more than anything — they’d prefer not to be poor at all. And saying “Oh, but you’re so much better off here than there, now rather than then” — does not make them any less poor, nor their lives any easier.
I have no doubt that a black man sitting in a Georgia jail right now — and I have heard many horrible, horrible things about jails in Georgia and Mississippi — would probably rather be incarcerated in what’s the closest thing America has to a hell-hole than be a slave 300 years ago.
But try telling him he should shut up and ignore his heatstroke, because at least Master ain’t gonna whip him for laziness and ain’t gonna rape his wife tonight? Well, you deserved the butt-kicking you’re about to receive.
Happiness is relative — and it’s relative to “here and now” and people trying to make it relative to “then and there” are just SOL on general principles. (And wrong on basic logic. A family of four making 12k a year in America is poor, regardless of whether or not they have a fridge.)Report
And yet, equally so, you might be far happier a hundred years from now…
I expect I would, as I suggested.
I have no doubt that a black man sitting in a Georgia jail right now — and I have heard many horrible, horrible things about jails in Georgia and Mississippi — would probably rather be incarcerated in what’s the closest thing America has to a hell-hole than be a slave 300 years ago.
I have very, very, very often argued at this blog that we incarcerate far more people than we should, that our justice system is functionally racist, and that prison conditions are often appalling.
If I am not permitted to occasionally observe some form of improvement in some social conditions — well, what would you have me do? Just pretend that everything was uniformly bad until last Tuesday, when suddenly we discovered Progress?Report
I’m all for it. 🙂 I am, as a child of the 20th century, thrilled to freakin’ death that I was born when I was.
As is my father, who has outlived his own father by a good two decades now — because of better medicine. (Where his father had a quadruple bypass he never really recovered from, my father had a stent. Where my father had a stent, I’m fully aware of a genetic legacy towards blood clots and a particular pernancious little protein that mimics bad cholesteral — but isn’t routinely screened for. Where my father had micro-strokes that left him with a permanent tremble in one hand, I hope to have none….)
The only thing better than living now would be living a century from now — assuming we haven’t wrecked the place. 🙂 Although perhaps too far and I shall find the world uncomfortable and difficult to adjust to, so I suspect there is a limit to how far I might like to be catapulted.
(Views on race, gender, sexual orientation spring to mind as things that have changed greatly over the last several generations).
I suppose I am just prone to seeing “Better now than then! Be happy with what you have!” not as general advice on “it could be worse” or even “count your blessings” but as “Shut up and stop rocking the boat, it could be worse”.
Progress is something you work towards, agitate towards, bleed and sweat for. Whether it’s the progress of generations — today’s poor having TV’s that would be beyond the means of the wealthy of a generation or two ago — or the progress of a lifetime (trying to NOT be dirt poor. Trying to make a better life).
I don’t like the habitual way that argument is deployed — “We don’t have poverty, because the poor have iPods, they are immeasureable wealthy!”. No, they’re not. They’re still poor. Their lives are still hard. Telling them to suck it up is telling them — and society itself — not to progress. Not to do better.
Because you like it just as it is, and you don’t want the boat rocket.
(You is not you, specifically. You is, in generally, those deploying the beloved “Poor have TVs, they are not poor and should shut up and pay a higher tax rate than Bill Gates” types. )Report
“Better now than then! Be happy with what you have!”
I only see myself as saying the first, not the second. Though in objective terms I would prefer to be poor today rather than king of France in the 17th century, this doesn’t make being poor happy or wonderful. It just makes the 17th century a lot more miserable than we are used to thinking about.Report
I think part of the reason for this is that history makes differences in status obvious, but differences in wealth less so (especially if you define wealth the way an economist odes, rather than how much gold you have in basement). There’s no question Louis XIV had higher status than I do (hell, he probably had more status than anyone on earth currently does), and of course he had more gold in his basement. But he certainly wasn’t richer than I am.Report
“Be happy with what you have!”
This is just good advice.Report
It would appear that a lot of people are unhappy with it.Report
“The Happy Helmet” is a fairly interesting, if weed-fueled, discussion of happiness.
Accepting its conclusions as given for the sake of argument, I suspect that most of the people who are communicating unhappiness are, to some non-trivial extent, thrilled.Report
Are you talking about Ren and Stimpy? That has to be the best episode EVAHReport
Seconded.Report
Be happy with what you have is excellent advice but it’s a bad arguement.Report
My advice is to be somewhat dissatisfied. With whatever you have.
The future isn’t going to be awesome unless you are.Report
Again great advice.Report
Jason, another home-run OP. This almost qualifies for the inequality symposium too, since “pursuit of happiness” invariably gets ensnared by inequality of results.
You’re dead right about not being “too” happy (or shall we say content?)
To achieve, to get up in the morning, to face untold hardships requires a dissatisfaction with the status quo and the content are obviously happy with things as they are.Report
Ol’ BlaiseP’s advice. Be happy. What you have really doesn’t matter. Don’t agree? Talk to someone who’s survived a house fire or a bad accident or a war. Things don’t matter.
You’re alive. Someone loves you. Those are reasons enough to be happy.Report
The point is that it’s not invalid to make a distinction between, figuratively, the black guy dying of heatstroke and a teenager complaining that the air-conditioner isn’t cooling the room off fast enough.Report
Very true. But on the other hand it IS totally invalid to say:
“X isn’t poor, because by the standards of [time period that isn’t now] or [place that isn’t here], X is rich”.
Because, you know, X ain’t living then or there.
And as the father of a soon-to-be-driving teen who is devestated, DEVESTATED that the car he will have access to is a 10 year old Beetle (girly!) in the uncool shade of Silver, I can assure you I have plenty of experience with the fine line between griping and legitimate complaints.
(Not to mention, he’s so off base! Sure it’s a ten year old Beetle that my wife was not the kindest too, but it’s got less than 50k miles on it and is the turbo version. As soon as I get the brakes redone and the sunroof drains fixed, that baby’s golden. At least as golden as “free car” gets. Well, free car when it’s available).Report
As the father of a boy who was similarly “devastated” to drive his father’s Honda Civic, I learned this was only a negotiating tactic. He came to love that Civic and drove it far longer than he should have.Report
A hipster who’s read the Bible?Report
He read it before it was cool.Report
Back when “The Passion Of The Christ” was in theaters, someone asked me if I was going to go see it. “Nah,” I replied, “I know how it ends.”Report
Dude, there’s totally a twist. Kinda. It’s more of a double-twist.Report
People asked me if I was going to watch the new Mel Gibson movie. I told them I went to the Bob Gibson version. Instead of a crucifixion, they kept throwing at his head.Report
I am perhaps a terrible person, because I didn’t bother thinking very hard about this philosophically – o lazy me! – but I think it is wonderfully witty, so I read it all the way through just for the hilarity factor.
“VOLTAIRE: How do they come to suspect that the children will be happy? Have the Americans been reading… Leibniz?” was merely the first of several times that I snorted and had to sternly counsel myself that I am working a public service desk and really couldn’t be dissolving into giggles.Report
These dialogues are one of my favorite things at the League. They’re witty, well-written, thought provoking, and leave me with a faint glimmer of melancholic cheerfulness. Thank you.Report
Thank you. Though the amount that I’m actually ripping off Voltaire does make me slightly ashamed. There’s not a whole lot here that’s not to be found in either Candide or Micromegas. Or “Le Mondain,” for that matter.Report