[Avodah] From Today's WSJ - Paging R'YBS

[Rich, Joel]

Please Don't Have a Nice Day

By COLIN MCGINN
February 8, 2008; Page W5


Utilitarianism is the philosophical doctrine according to which
happiness is the sole intrinsic value -- the only thing that is good in
itself. Although invented by 19th-century Britons, notably Jeremy
Bentham and J.S. Mill, utilitarianism has some claim to be the official
philosophy of the U.S.A. or, as a philosopher might have it, the
"Utilitarian States of America." In America, happiness is what makes
life good, and unhappiness is what makes it bad. We must therefore seize
the former and avoid the latter.

Eric G. Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University,
disagrees, contending that utilitarianism has it the wrong way around.
The "happy types," as he calls them, are apt to be bland, superficial,
static, hollow, one-sided, bovine, acquisitive, deluded and foolish.
Sold on the ideal of the happy smile and the cheerful salutation, they
patrol the malls in dull uniformity, zombie-like, searching for
contentment and pleasure, locked inside their own dreams of a secure and
unblemished world, oblivious to objective reality, cocooned in a
protective layer of bemused well-being.

These are the positive thinkers, in Mr. Wilson's taxonomy, the
see-no-evil optimists, the consumers and users of a world conceived
instrumentally. Deep down they are hurting, like the rest of us, but the
ideology of constant happiness has them in its grip. They pop pills,
read self-help manuals, gorge themselves on feel-good TV and comfort
food -- all to avoid the blues that are an inevitable part of the human
condition.

On the opposite side, Mr. Wilson says, we have the natural sufferers,
their somber faces downcast. Their traits are these: sadness, dejection,
questioning, restlessness, honesty, depth, pessimism, tragedy,
complexity, vitality and a grasp of reality. Confessing his own
melancholic temperament, Mr. Wilson hymns the virtues of misery,
invoking such fellow sad sacks as Keats, Melville, Coleridge, van Gogh,
Beethoven, John Lennon, Rothko and Cary Grant (who would have guessed?).

In such figures he sees perceptiveness and creativity, nobility and
elevation. Mr. Wilson's basic thesis is that, without suffering, the
human soul becomes stagnant and empty. We can only reach our full
potential through pain -- not a pathological kind of pain but the kind
that comes from a recognition of death, decay and the bad day (or
decade). We must live between the poles of sadness and joy and not try
to expunge misery from our lives.

<SNIP>


KT
Joel Rich
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