Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

But if popular impressions are a guide, today’s Americans are not one and a half times happier (as they would be if happiness tracked income), or a third happier (if it tracked education), or even an eighth happier (if it tracked longevity). People seem to bitch, moan, whine, carp, and kvetch as much as ever, and the proportion of Americans who tell pollsters that they are happy has remained steady for decades. Popular culture has noticed the ingratitude in the Internet meme and Twitter hashtag #first worldproblems and in a monologue by the comedian Louis C.K. known as “Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy”:

When I read things like, “The foundations of capitalism are shattering,” I’m like, maybe we need some time where we’re walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides. . . . ’Cause now we live in an amazing world, and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots. . . . Flying is the worst one, because people come back from flights, and they tell you their story. . . . They’re like, “It was the worst day of my life. . . . We get on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for forty minutes.” . . . Oh really, then what happened next? Did you fly through the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you soar into the clouds, impossibly? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, and then land softly on giant tires that you couldn’t even conceive how they fuckin’ put air in them? . . . You’re sitting in a chair in the sky. You’re like a Greek myth right now! . . . People say there’s delays? . . . Air travel’s too slow? New York to California in five hours. That used to take thirty years! And a bunch of you would die on the way there, and you’d get shot in the neck with an arrow, and the other passengers would just bury you and put a stick there with your hat on it and keep walking. . . . The Wright Brothers would kick us all in the [crotch] if they knew.¹

Writing in 1999, John Mueller summed up the common understanding of modernity at the time: “People seem simply to have taken the remarkable economic improvement in stride and have deftly found new concerns to get upset about. In an important sense, then, things never get better.”² The understanding was based on more than just impressions of American malaise. In 1973 the economist Richard Easterlin identified a paradox that has since been named for him.³ Though in comparisons within a country richer people are happier, in comparisons across countries the richer ones appeared to be no happier than poorer ones. And in comparisons over time, people did not appear to get happier as their countries got richer.

The Easterlin paradox was explained with two theories from psychology. According to the theory of the hedonic treadmill, people adapt to changes in their fortunes, like eyes adapting to light or darkness, and quickly return to a genetically determined baseline.⁴ According to the theory of social comparison (or reference groups, status anxiety, or relative deprivation, which we examined in chapter 9), people’s happiness is determined by how well they think they are doing relative to their compatriots, so as the country as a whole gets richer, no one feels happier—indeed, if their country becomes more unequal, then even if they get richer they may feel worse.⁵

If, in this sense, things never get better, one can wonder whether all that economic, medical, and technological so-called progress was worth it. Many argue that it was not. We have been spiritually impoverished, they say, by the rise of individualism, materialism, consumerism, and decadent wealth, and by the erosion of traditional communities with their hearty social bonds and their sense of meaning and purpose bestowed by religion. That is why, one often reads, depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide have been soaring, and why Sweden, that secular paradise, has a famously high rate of suicide. In 2016 the activist George Monbiot prosecuted the cultural pessimist’s time-honored campaign against modernity in an op-ed entitled “Neoliberalism Is Creating Loneliness. That’s What’s Wrenching Society Apart.” The tag line was, “Epidemics of mental illness are crushing the minds and bodies of millions. It’s time to ask where we are heading and why.” The article itself warned, “The latest, catastrophic figures for children’s mental health in England reflect a global crisis.”⁶

If all those extra years of life and health, all that additional knowledge and leisure and breadth of experience, all those advances in peace and safety and democracy and rights, have really left us no happier but just lonelier and more suicidal, it would be history’s greatest joke on humanity. But before we start walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides, we had better take a closer look at the facts about human happiness.