All human actions, according to Aristotle, are motivated by the desire for happiness—which is perhaps the silliest thing anyone has ever said about the subject. Then again, it may be the wisest thing anybody’s come up with. Hard to tell, really. The choice between Aristotle’s idiocy and his profundity seems to flip back and forth—like one of those optical-illusion drawings of a white staircase running up and a black staircase running down—depending on how we look at it. Genuine human beings realize, from hard experience, that unhappiness moves the world. And philosophers know, from careful contemplation, that even the most immiserating actions are motivated, finally, by mistaken or insane ideas about what will make us happy.
Anyway, on the topic of happiness, Aristotle caused for all subsequent generations two problems. The first is that, whether silly or wise, his claim proves unhelpful: too big an explanation, too expansive a definition, to be of much use. If happiness prompts everything we do, then it’s just another name for, well, everything we do. How does that get us forwarder, when we study the anatomy of our melancholy? How does it comfort our griefs, ease our pains, or raise our spirits? How does it teach us anything?
The second problem is, of course, that Aristotle managed nonetheless to set, down the long years of Western civilization, the fundamental terms for any discussion of happiness. Whether we want or not, we are all Aristotle’s children, and every attempt to examine the subject must begin with his utterly false, utterly true, observation that we do all we do because we want, one way or another, to be happy.
Comes now the French essayist Pascal Bruckner to take up the topic anew in Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy. Or, at least, comes now the English translation, for the book was published a decade ago in France, and it shows its age in the datedness of its references to news events and pop culture. Still, the puzzle of happiness hasn’t gone away, and neither has the bizarreness of Western civilization’s modern attempts at achieving it. We suffer, Bruckner explains, under a strange and stern moral regime that insists we have a “duty to be happy”—by which he means “the ideology peculiar to the second half of the twentieth century that urges us to evaluate everything in terms of pleasure and displeasure, a summons to a euphoria that makes those who do not respond to it ashamed or uneasy.”
Somehow, happiness has become our great commandment, our rigidly enforced rule, and our overarching purpose. Our collective madness, as well, and Bruckner devotes brutal paragraph after brutal paragraph to exposing and mocking the cultural contradictions of our shared psychological delusions—particularly our banning of anything that might suggest the human condition isn’t entirely designed to accommodate round-the-clock ecstasy.
But his primary concern is historical, in the belief (part of the peculiar gift that Nietzsche seems to have bestowed on every modern French intellectual) that only through genealogy are ideas understood. And so, in Perpetual Euphoria, Bruckner sets out to find an answer to the serious and culturally defining historical question: “How did a liberating principle of the Enlightenment, the right to happiness, get transformed into a dogma, a collective catechism” about “the duty to be happy“?
English readers will recognize echoes of Philip Rieff’s 1966 The Triumph of the Therapeutic and Christopher Lasch’s 1979 The Culture of Narcissism; as intellectuals, Americans were far ahead on suspicion about the pop psychology of universal happiness, even as, perhaps, American culture contributed most to the world’s current devotion to unceasing pleasure. And it’s true that, particularly in his Laschian anger, Bruckner is raising again an old banner in the war against the modern age.
But he is, as well, very French, and that makes a difference. Born in 1948, Bruckner was a key member of the Nouveaux Philosophes who, despite their participation in the revolutionary Parisian events of 1968, rejected Jean-Paul Sartre’s Marxism in the early 1970s. Bruckner’s Frenchness shows up in his quick and easy command of intellectual reference in the essay form that the French invented, and it appears as well in his endless and sometimes forced attempts to describe everything as historical contradiction and inversion. The Enlightenment was supposed to liberate us, and yet the post-Enlightenment has enslaved us. Christianity broke us free from nature, and yet post-Christian Europe is more entrapped by human nature than any culture that has ever existed. Sigmund Freud was profoundly pessimistic about the possibilities of human happiness, but the post-Freudian world to which he gave birth has been captured by an insane psychological optimism.
Perhaps the fact that these fathers consistently sire such children is proof that Bruckner’s understanding of the originals needs some nuance, particular his accounts of Christianity. The French quality of the writing is also apparent in the offhandedness and on-the-fly construction of the book. There’s a reason Perpetual Euphoria waited ten years to find a translator. Organized by chance, the text interrupted by sidebars of newspaper-style columns on only loosely related topics, this is a minor contribution to Pascal Bruckner’s oeuvre.
Not that his oeuvre is anything to sneeze at. His 1992 novel Evil Angels was made into the film Bitter Moon by Roman Polanski, and his 1997 book The Beauty Thieves won the important Renaudot Prize for fiction. In 1995 he won France’s Medici Prize for his book-length essay The Temptation of Innocence, a raging attack on the toddler-like qualities of the adult character admired and extolled by contemporary culture. Earlier this year, Princeton University Press brought out a translation of Bruckner’s major 2006 work, The Tyranny of Guilt—a follow-up, more than twenty years on, to The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt, his 1983 study of leftist politics.
In The Tears of the White Man, Bruckner argued that radicals’ embrace of Third World revolution—t-shirts with pictures of Che Guevara, copies of Mao’s Little Red Book, praise of African dictators—was a snare and a delusion, born of naiveté and issuing in evil. European glorifications of anti-colonial movements among the wretched of the earth weren’t about helping oppressed people; they were about helping Europeans with their psychological and political dilemmas.
In The Tyranny of Guilt, Bruckner returned to the subject and discovered that self-hatred still defines a large portion of contemporary understanding: “From existentialism to deconstructionism, all of modern thought can be reduced to a mechanical denunciation of the West, emphasizing the latter’s hypocrisy, violence, and abomination.” Indeed, “The whole world hates us, and we deserve it. That is what most Europeans think.” And in the West, the personal neuroses and political psychoses of the radical worldview find their current cure in praise of Islam and denunciation of Israel.
Much of Europe—much of America, as well—has simply lost its nerve, unable to maintain the delicate balance of self-critique and self-confidence that was the gift of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Perhaps that makes Perpetual Euphoria a better and more important book than it might seem taken by itself, for it offers a broader, more philosophical frame in which to place the angry pessimism about the contemporary self-understandings of the West that Bruckner manifests in his other works.
Perpetual Euphoria opens with the question of how the wisely defined right to pursue happiness descended into the suicidal duty to be happy, and Bruckner’s historical answer is, essentially, an observation of those rare moments in which civilizations pass through a golden age. Everything is fragile, and everything is evanescent, but, at certain times and in certain places, society seems to achieve, for a brief historical instant, the proper balance—offering opportunities for happiness as widely spread as is humanly possible. Thirteenth-century Paris, Renaissance Venice, the Enlightenment at the American Founding: We cannot demand, or create simply by willing, such moments. But we can appreciate that they were real and that their lucky reality indicts our modern cultural imbalances.
Even on the personal level, Aristotle defined the problem: We act both from the unhappiness of self-doubt and from the desire for happy resolutions; we both live in the tragic world of death’s disease and dwell within sight of ecstatic beauty. As Pascal Bruckner sees clearly, there may be no answer to the question of earthly happiness, but if there is one, it would require a good deal of both luck and individual work at attaining balance. A combination of providence and prayer, in other words.
Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor for The Weekly Standard.
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