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

At least since the Axial Age, thinkers have deliberated about what makes for a good life, and today happiness has become a major topic in social science.⁷ Some intellectuals are incredulous, even offended, that happiness has become a subject for economists rather than just poets, essayists, and philosophers. But the approaches are not opposed. Social scientists often begin their studies of happiness with ideas that were first conceived by artists and philosophers, and they can pose questions about historical and global patterns that cannot be answered by solitary reflection, no matter how insightful. That is especially true for the question of whether progress has left people happier. To answer it, we must first assuage the critics’ incredulity over the possibility that happiness can even be measured.

Artists, philosophers, and social scientists agree that well-being is not a single dimension. People can be better off in some ways and worse off in others. Let’s distinguish the major ones.

We can begin with objective aspects of well-being: the gifts we deem intrinsically worthwhile whether or not their possessors appreciate them. At the top of that list is life itself; also on it are health, education, freedom, and leisure. That is the mindset behind Louis C.K.’s social criticism and, in part, behind Amartya Sen’s and Martha Nussbaum’s conceptions of fundamental human capabilities.⁸ In this sense we can say that people who live long, healthy, and stimulating lives are truly better off even if they have a morose temperament or are in a bad mood or are spoiled idiots and fail to count their blessings. One rationale for this apparent paternalism is that life, health, and freedom are prerequisites to everything else, including the very act of pondering what is worthwhile in life, and so they are worthy by their very nature. Another is that the people who have the luxury of failing to appreciate their good fortune make up a biased sample of lucky survivors. If we could canvass the souls of the dead children and mothers and the victims of war and starvation and disease, or if we went back in time and gave them a choice between proceeding with their lives in a premodern or modern world, we might uncover an appreciation of modernity that is more commensurate with its objective benefits. These dimensions of well-being have been the topics of the preceding chapters, and the verdict on whether they have improved over time is in.

Among these intrinsic goods is freedom or autonomy: the availability of options to lead a good life (positive freedom) and the absence of coercion that prevents a person from choosing among them (negative freedom). Sen gave a shout-out to this value in the title of his book on the ultimate goal of the development of nations: Development as Freedom. Positive freedom is related to the economist’s notion of utility (what people want; what they spend their wealth on), and negative freedom to the political scientist’s notions of democracy and human rights. As I mentioned, freedom (together with life and reason) is a prerequisite to the very act of evaluating what is good in life. Unless we are impotently lamenting or celebrating our fate, then whenever we assess our condition we are presupposing that people in the past could have chosen otherwise. And when we ask where we should be heading, we presuppose that we have choices about what to pursue. For these reasons, freedom itself is inherently worthy.

In theory, freedom is independent of happiness. People can surrender to fatal attractions, crave pleasures that are bad for them, regret a choice the morning after, or ignore advice to be careful what they wish for.⁹ In practice, freedom and the other good things in life go together. Whether assessed objectively through a democracy index for a country as a whole, or subjectively through people’s ratings of whether they feel they have “free choice and control over their lives,” the level of happiness in a country is correlated with the level of freedom.¹⁰ Also, people single out freedom as a component of a meaningful life, whether or not it leads to a happy life.¹¹ Like Frank Sinatra, they may have regrets, they may take blows, but they do it their way. People can even value autonomy over happiness: many who have gone through a painful divorce, for example, would still not choose to return to a time when their parents would have arranged their marriages.