In Pursuit

...IN PURSUIT: OF HAPPINESS AND GOOD GOVERNMENT Charles Murray/Simon and Schuster/$19.95 Kenneth Minogue THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 37...

...Murray's target has always been the social engineer, sitting in his bureau in Washington juggling statistics with which to lobby for more public money...

...This is a lobby whose only solution seems to be egging Robin Hood on to fresh outrages against the rich...

...While no doubt intended to spur on their charges to greater effort, such attitudes are deeply destructive of the whole idea of the dignity of labor...

...In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government is Murray thinking poverty out anew...

...What is it, precisely, that people need to be happy...

...Murray takes his initial bearings from Aristotle's Ethics, in which happiness—eudaimonia, a good spirit, as it were—is understood to flower in the fulfillment of man's highest and most human capacities...

...But since America is a dynamic society, these indicators are themselves constantly being redefined, so it becomes hard to compare like with like...

...What Murray has done in his new book is to get down to the really serious question: What does poverty actually mean...

...One of the more unfortunate notions to lodge itself in the heads of schoolteachers has been a sneering attitude toward supposedly menial and "dead-end" jobs...

...The reason is obvious: Any bureaucracy facing up to poverty as a problem to be solved by governments will emphasize the basic needs, because these can be satisfied by supplying material things, and that is what governments and bureaucrats can organize...

...It is easy to read, but the basic argument is complex and difficult...

...Further, as those of us know who play games when walking along pavements with cracks in them, challenges can be created in the course of any activity whatever...

...Success or failure is whatever may show up in the indicators, such as the poverty line...

...It is a measure of how far Maslow was pressing the slippery idea of "need" that he went on to identify two further types of need...

...By most of the available indicators, the poor were increasingly numerous and decreasingly independent...

...Education in our century, inheriting a spiritual tradition, has sold out to relevance, ambition, and extrinsic rewards...

...This is a formula which expresses that individuality under law that has always been the strength of Anglo-Saxon cohesion...

...First on his list are organismic requirements such as food, water, shelter, and sex...

...The answer is that there is at least a long tradition of thought about happiness among the political philosophers, a tradition ready and waiting to irrigate the dry slopes of social policy...

...Murray has some interesting things to say about the extent to which money can buy happiness, and about the relation between misery and violent crime, but his basic concern is with the more complicated needs for self-respect and self-realization...

...His bold first move is to shift the debate away from supposedly objective indicators such as income variation or Kenneth Minogue is Reader in Political Science at the London School of Economics and author of The Liberal Mind...

...Murray's argument thus reveals a damaging paradox at the heart of the vision of the social engineer: the very fact that the poor receive from government agencies what most other people organize for themselves may well damage their sense of self-respect...

...It will certainly have a major impact on thinking about social policy, but its real subject is the moral quality of Western, and especially American, life...

...The essence of social engineering is breaking into such mechanical relationships as "the vicious circle of poverty...

...Meaninglessness and the strain of constant threat can destroy happiness...

...Among the more striking of Murray's pages are those in which he explores the idea of the dignity of the poor and argues that self-respect cannot be faked and is indispensable to happiness...

...The social engineer avoids such dangerous ideas as happiness because his cast of mind is essentially bureaucratic: he is only at home with global statistics and ideas about social class...

...But these are, of course, important...

...Just such a policy will spring instantly to the mind of the unfortunate social engineer who has absorbed the vocabulary of the poverty industry...

...The first was for self-esteem and especially self-respect, the second, the need for expressing one's capacities...

...Aristotle is the vogue philosopher of the moment, partly because some socialists think (wrongly) that they can derive their version of distributive justice from him...

...It was this tradition that led Nietzsche to sneer that only the English cared about happiness, but he failed to understand what British philosophers and America's Founding Fathers meant by the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, which gives Murray his title...

...From a highly eccentric vantage point in the modern psychology of happiness, Murray has ventured to re-create something that long seemed lost: the New England tradition of moral seriousness about work...

...Murray takes his bearings from Abraham Maslow's 1943 specification of human needs...

...All that governments cando is to affect the "enabling conditions" for happiness...

...Challenge," Murray writes, generalizing the point, "is a resource for meeting the human need called enjoyment, just as food is a resource for meeting the human need called nourishment...

...Among the main barriers to the reintegration of the poor into modern societies are the meritocratic snobberies we have so foolishly allowed to flower in intellectual circles...

...In Pursuit...

...No one can be given a fixed supply, no matter how many food stamps, income supplements, or other social services may be received...

...But who can measure happiness...

...Of Happiness and Good Government is simultaneously a work of philosophical reflection and scientific popularization...

...The bureaucrat's basic belief is that nothing can be done without more resources...

...No one is likely to be happy when hungry, homeless, insecure, and isolated...

...No less indispensable to happiness is the human passion for meeting challenges...

...This remoteness from the actual is compounded by the fact that, as Murray complains at one point, there are now few administrators of social policy in Washington who have had any direct knowledge of what it is like to be poor...

...They begin simple and become increasingly complex...

...It is continually honest about the force of the evidence on which it is based...

...His developmental idea of human life is a useful stick with which to beat the materialism of the consumer...

...This is an inclination that humans seem to share with rats, for Murray, in the constant trawl through the psychology journals that is a notable feature of the book, has come across experiments which show that rats expecting equal rewards from both familiar and unfamiliar paths often choose the unfamiliar one...

...Yet no poverty is as intractable as that which afflicts the imagination of the poverty lobby itself...

...T he idea of happiness contains 1 one powerfully subversive implication: Happiness depends in part upon the person in question...

...This suggests that we can credit them with something like a natural sense of adventure...

...This means that there is no escaping the "stigma" of social dependency...

...Is it not a thing of fleeting moods...

...Third, there is a human need for intimacy, for belonging to social groups, starting with the family...

...Murray finds some striking illustrations of how in one case a waitress, in another a telephonist dealing with directory inquiries, made demands on themselves for the stylish performance of their tasks...

...Next, there is a need for safety and order...

...That talk is all of under-privilege, deprivation, disadvantage...

...he is merely pointing to a reality of the human condition whose full recognition, he argues, would revolutionize social policy...

...Murray does not for a moment suggest that stigma should be used as a deliberateinstrument of social control...

...the poverty line and toward what really counts: human happiness...

...But there is also another tradition of thought about happiness: its source is the British empiricists of the early modern period...

...To enjoy self-respect means that one must feel that one is a net contributor to the world, and however prone human beings may be to illusion on this score, they all recognize some internalized standards in terms of which they may fail...

...they actually make things worse...

...Its organization into sections does not seem to me ideally calculated to bring out what is an immensely subtle argument, one that carefully distances itself from obvious political partialities...

...He might well have called it "Breaking Ground...

...Words like these make it clear that the poor are deficient in some desirable commodity that governments can supply...

...Murray's main charge is that social engineering has failed...

...It is not merely that social policies are frequently ineffective...

...The social engineer as Washington bureaucrat resembles in his operations nothing so much as the way Robin Hood explained social policy in a famous New Yorker cartoon: "Here is the way it works: we take from the rich and give to the poor—keeping only enough for salaries, travel, equipment, depreciation, and so on, and so on...