Adam Gopnik on Happiness, and Other Chimeras

I love to celebrate the pursuit of “inner accomplishment”, the way that we take joy as adolescents in learning guitar chords or sewing our own clothes or playing the violin or simply chopping onions. Such things teach us to transcend ourselves by letting us escape outside ourselves.

Yet it’s often said that, by focusing too exclusively on pleasure, on “self-realization”, we escape too quickly from the necessary public sphere of duty and citizenship into a merely private realm of narcissistic fulfillment. We are finding chords and playing with cards while blind to our neighbors. They are burning while we fiddle.

There’s a reason, though, why Jefferson and the rest of the Founding Fathers, whatever their other sins, insisted on the pursuit of happiness in their hopeful catalog of revolutionary purpose in the Declaration of Independence. For it is exactly both the test and the foundation of a healthy society that it encourages the pursuit of private pleasures and encourages their mutual tolerance.

By far the most important conception of a “liberal” society—in the sense of a society committed to argument, elections, and the oscillation of power—is not democracy or equality alone. It is pluralism. Pluralism in politics and political parties, sure, but a pluralism that extends so deeply in our imaginations and practices that it rests in the end on a pluralism of pleasures.

A pluralist politics must rest on a pluralism of pleasures. That’s the lesson of every serious inquiry into the foundations of democracy—whether experiential and firsthand or “scientific” and statistical—of the past hundred years. Some of these pleasures are the obvious ones of close family and warm friends, though even these relationships depend on a protected idea of privacy that is rarely accessible in authoritarian societies.

But healthy societies also have a variety and abundance of pursued public pleasures. They’re the kind made in compact with others, and usually crossing lines of caste and creed.

The Enlightenment itself began not with isolated philosophes making pronouncements but in coffeehouse conversations, and the quality of the coffee and the exaltations of the talk were one. A set of pointless-seeming drifting “accomplishments” accomplished the big change. Mutual pleasure teaches us mutual reliance. We take up playing softball—or even just take up watching baseball—and we learn citizenship by turning double-plays and stealing home, or simply by sitting in the stands and cheering on someone else to do it.

A pluralistic society allows us to play with our pleasures, in every sense—to decide that we want to play ragas instead of rock music, or to turn ragas into a form of rock music—and is the only kind of society that has a ground, a foundation, a set of practices, that respects other people’s pleasures. It is the only kind of society that allows a democratic government to thrive. Without experience in working alongside those not of our clan or kind in non-political pursuits, we can’t practice politics in a persuasively pluralistic way.

It’s usually said, on the social-scientific side of those who study happiness, that what matters most to human happiness is the strength of our connections to family and friends. Who can deny their value? Yet perhaps, the more particular, not to say perverse, eye of the humanist—or at least of the humorist—suggests that happiness moves in a more spiraling, circular movement than that static picture suggests.

Friends, as Friends failed to explore, tend to drift away insensibly as much as they magnetize to us for life. In the genuinely shifting field of ties, weak and strong, permanent and portable, illicit and official, it’s the things we’re good at that tend to amplify and aerate our connections.

In plain English, accomplishment is attractive. If guitar is what you play, first you play it for your (bored but attentive) parents; then for your (competitive) friends; and at last, onstage for (a more-or-less engaged, depending on the state of their bloodstream) audience.

Accomplishment is an adhesive and an expander. Our circles of self-making expand as we escape ourselves. Doubtless we do find our happiness most often with a circle of friends or family around a dinner table. But the circle expands as our lives expand, and that’s a good thing.

It’s not an accident that when we talk about what someone does particularly well, we talk about what they alone “bring to the table.” We love our family, mostly, and we care for our friends, when we can, but the one thing we all tend not to love is freeloaders. As Olmsted said, we like people who do things. Private affections activate accomplishments, and accomplishments in turn broaden our affective ties. It’s a happy kind of circle.