INTERESTING READING: ‘We Have No Right to Happiness’
A timely and perceptive essay by C. S. Lewis
My Preface:
C. S. Lewis has been one of my favorite writers since I first began to read his books (probably around 3rd grade). His stories have a nobility and an optimism and his didactic writings (like the selection below) reveal a thoughtful and kind man. I greatly admire many British contemporary writers of Lewis (Orwell, Tolkien, Toynbee, Gibson, Shaw… Wilfred Owen). They write clearly and plainly with just enough of a hint of erudition and poetry to assure the reader that the work in question reveals a fine mind. I regard American writers of the same general period (Steinbeck, Hemingway, Kerouac) very well too, certainly but each of them has a hint of affectation (more than a hint for Kerouac… who actually is a Canadian I think, but really he’s an American). It’s like they self-consciously set out to develop not only their own voice but their own style and I detect no such project in Lewis’ writing. Much as I adore the fictional works of Hemingway we can all acknowledge that anyone who spoke like his laconic and brooding characters in the real world would be assumed to be somewhat autistic. I posted an essay by Orwell sometime last year called ‘Politics and The English Language’ and I encourage everyone to read it and re-read it. I read it several times a year. In this age of artifice and self-referential, useless ‘expertise’, when jargon is beloved by every midwit as a sign of compassion or perception, and language is far too often used to signal virtue and status and group affiliation rather than to communicate directly-we would all do well to adopt the writing (and reading) philosophy of Orwell.
Just an aside: George Orwell (née Eric Blair) is my all-time favorite writer. He’s definitely not the best writer. He’s not even really a great writer. He’s not the most verbose or poetic or imaginative. His stories and essays are more like the workmanlike attempts of an honest and perceptive man living life on his terms and trying to shape and reconcile and comprehend existence through writing and I hope that the same can be said of me. Orwell was dead right about the tendencies of the modern Left in the developed world and the nightmarish potential of the Left (really, totalitarianism which is neither Left nor Right in application) in the developing world. He was fantastically wrong about socialism but he was sincere and honest and had a deep sense of fairness and hatred of unjust suffering, which are the only generative impulses for socialism that can be thought of as positive (the others are: envy; denial of individualism; or revolutionary nihilism; or utopian impulses; or sadism and psychopathy). Even when Orwell was wrong he was right and there’s absolutely no chance that the man ever wrote an intentionally false or pretentious word. He simply didn’t seem to possess those tendencies. He lived a varied and interesting and proletarian and curious and courageous life and I have tried, as willful living has become something I better understand, to do the same.
But this ‘Interesting Reading’ is not written by Orwell. It is a C. S. Lewis essay. I don’t think I’ve ever considered the question of our ‘right to happiness’ per se but I definitely agree with Lewis here. Furthermore I think that a ‘right’ to happiness (and positive self-esteem and sensitivity and comfort and inoffensiveness and safety) is truly the fundamental error of our civilization’s conception of value. Like happiness, people may gain all of these things through effort and good behavior and courtesy… but none of them is guaranteed or automatic or a ‘right’. Fortunately we can survive just fine without these things artificially swaddling us as we move through our lives. Indeed, such swaddling seems very likely to contribute to a personal character which is anxious, self-centered, conformist, brittle, cowardly, and soft. If the modern, urgent lessons of history could be reduced to a single statement it might be: any nation filled with such people will be much less happy in the short-term and ruined, by folly or predation, in the long-term.
‘We Have No Right to Happiness’, by C. S. Lewis
“After all,” said Clare. “they had a right to happiness.”
We were discussing something that once happened in our own neighborhood. Mr. A. had deserted Mrs. A. and got his divorce in order to marry Mrs. B., who had likewise got her divorce in order to marry Mr. A. And there was certainly no doubt that Mr. A. and Mrs. B. were very much in love with one another. If they continued to be in love, and if nothing went wrong with their health or their income, they might reasonably expect to be very happy.
It was equally clear that they were not happy with their old partners. Mrs. B. had adored her husband at the outset. But then he got smashed up in the war. It was thought he had lost his virility, and it was known that he had lost his job. Life with him was no longer what Mrs. B. had bargained for. Poor Mrs. A., too. She had lost her looks—and all her liveliness. It might be true, as some said, that she consumed herself by bearing his children and nursing him through the long illness that overshadowed their earlier married life.
You mustn’t, by the way, imagine that A. was the sort of man who nonchalantly threw a wife away like the peel of an orange he’d sucked dry. Her suicide was a terrible shock to him. We all knew this, for he told us so himself. “But what could I do?” he said. “A man has a right to happiness. I had to take my one chance when it came.”
What Is a ‘Right to Happiness’?
I went away thinking about the concept of a “right to happiness.”
At first this sounds to me as odd as a right to good luck. For I believe—whatever one school of moralists may say—that we depend for a very great deal of our happiness or misery on circumstances outside all human control. A right to happiness doesn’t, for me, make much more sense than a right to be six feet tall, or have a millionaire for your father, or to get good weather whenever you want to have a picnic.
I can understand a right as a freedom guaranteed me by the laws of the society I live in. Thus, I have a right to travel along the public roads because society gives me that freedom; that’s what we mean by calling the roads “public.” I can also understand a right as a claim guaranteed me by the laws, and correlative to an obligation on someone else’s part. If I have a right to receive $100 from you, this is another way of saying that you have a duty to pay me $100. If the laws allow Mr. A. to desert his wife and seduce his neighbor’s wife, then, by definition, Mr. A. has a legal right to do so, and we need bring in no talk about happiness.
Happiness and Natural Law
But of course that was not what Clare meant. She meant that he had not only a legal but a moral right to act as he did. In other words, Clare is—or would be if she thought it out—a classical moralist after the style of Thomas Aquinas, Grotius, Hooker, and Locke. She believes that behind the laws of the state there is a Natural Law.
I agree with her. I hold this conception to be basic to all civilization. Without it, the actual laws of the state become an absolute, as in Hegel. They cannot be criticized because there is no norm against which they should be judged.
The ancestry of Clare’s maxim, “They have a right to happiness,” is august. In words that are cherished by all civilized men, but especially by Americans, it has been laid down that one of the rights of man is a right to “the pursuit of happiness.” And now we get to the real point.
What did the writers of that august declaration mean?
Meaning of Natural Law
It is quite certain what they did not mean. They did not mean that man was entitled to pursue happiness by any and every means—including, say, murder, rape, robbery, treason, and fraud. No society could be built on such a basis.
They meant “to pursue happiness by all lawful means”; that is, by all means which the Law of Nature eternally sanctions and which the laws of the nation shall sanction.
Admittedly this seems at first to reduce their maxim to the tautology that men (in pursuit of happiness) have a right to do whatever they have a right to do. But tautologies, seen against their proper historical context, are not always barren tautologies. The declaration is primarily a denial of the political principles which long governed Europe; a challenge flung down to the Austrian and Russian empires, to England before the Reform Bills, to Bourbon France. It demands that whatever means of pursuing happiness are lawful for any should be lawful for all that “man,” not men of some particular cast, class, status, or religion, should be free to use them. In a century when this is being unsaid by nation after nation and party after party, let us not call it a barren tautology.
But the question as to what means are “lawful”—what methods of pursuing happiness are either morally permissible by the Law of Nature or should be declared legally permissible by the legislature of a particular nation—remains exactly where it did. And on that question I disagree with Clare. I don’t think it is obvious that people have the unlimited “right to happiness” which she suggests.
‘Sexual’ Happiness
For one thing, I believe that Clare, when she says “happiness,” means simply and solely “sexual happiness.” Partly because women like Clare never use the word “happiness” in any other sense. But also because I never heard Clare talk about the “right” to any other kind. She was rather leftist in her politics, and would have been scandalized if anyone had defended the actions of a ruthless man-eating tycoon on the ground that his happiness consisted in making money and he was pursuing his happiness. She was also a rabid teetotaler; I never heard her excuse an alcoholic because he was happy when he was drunk.
A good many of Clare’s friends, and especially her female friends, often felt—I’ve heard them say so—that their own happiness would be perceptibly increased by boxing her ears. I very much doubt if this would have brought her theory of a right to happiness into play.
Clare, in fact, is doing what the whole western world seems to me to have been doing for the last 40-odd years. When I was a youngster, all the progressive people were saying, “Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses.” I was simple-minded enough to believe they meant what they said. I have since discovered that they meant exactly the opposite. They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. All the others, we admit, have to be bridled. Absolute obedience to your instinct for self-preservation is what we call cowardice; to your acquisitive impulse, avarice. Even sleep must be resisted if you’re a sentry. But every unkindness and breach of faith seems to be condoned provided that the object aimed at is “four bare legs in a bed.”
It is like having a morality in which stealing fruit is considered wrong—unless you steal nectarines.
And if you protest against this view you are usually met with chatter about the legitimacy and beauty and sanctity of “sex” and accused of harboring some Puritan prejudice against it as something disreputable or shameful. I deny the charge. Foam-born Venus . . . golden Aphrodite . . . Our Lady of Cyprus . . . I never breathed a word against you. If I object to boys who steal my nectarines, must I be supposed to disapprove of nectarines in general? Or even of boys in general? It might, you know, be stealing that I disapproved of.
Sexual Impulses and Preposterous Privilege
The real situation is skillfully concealed by saying that the question of Mr. A’s “right” to desert his wife is one of “sexual morality.” Robbing an orchard is not an offense against some special morality called “fruit morality.” It is an offense against honesty. Mr. A’s action is an offense against good faith (to solemn promises), against gratitude (toward one to whom he was deeply indebted) and against common humanity.
Our sexual impulses are thus being put in a position of preposterous privilege. The sexual motive is taken to condone all sorts of behavior which, if it had any other end in view, would be condemned as merciless, treacherous, and unjust.
Now though I see no good reason for giving sex this privilege, I think I see a strong cause. It is this.
It is part of the nature of a strong erotic passion—as distinct from a transient fit of appetite—that makes more towering promises than any other emotion. No doubt all our desires makes promises, but not so impressively. To be in love involves the almost irresistible conviction that one will go on being in love until one dies, and that possession of the beloved will confer, not merely frequent ecstasies, but settled, fruitful, deep-rooted, lifelong happiness. Hence all seems to be at stake. If we miss this chance we shall have lived in vain. At the very thought of such a doom we sink into fathomless depths of self-pity.
Unfortunately these promises are found often to be quite untrue. Every experienced adult knows this to be so as regards all erotic passions (except the one he himself is feeling at the moment). We discount the world-without-end pretensions of our friends’ amours easily enough. We know that such things sometimes last—and sometimes don’t. And when they do last, this is not because they promised at the outset to do so. When two people achieve lasting happiness, this is not solely because they are great lovers but because they are also—I must put it crudely—good people; controlled, loyal, fair-minded, mutually adaptable people.
If we establish a “right to (sexual) happiness” which supersedes all the ordinary rules of behavior, we do so not because of what our passion shows itself to be in experience but because of what it professes to be while we are in the grip of it. Hence, while the bad behavior is real and works miseries and degradations, the happiness which was the object of the behavior turns out again and again to be illusory. Everyone (except Mr. A. and Mrs. B.) knows that Mr. A. in a year or so may have the same reason for deserting his new wife as for deserting his old. He will feel again that all is at stake. He will see himself again as the great lover, and his pity for himself will exclude all pity for the woman.
Society Built On Sexual Happiness
Two further points remain.
One is this. A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women. Women, whatever a few male songs and satires may say to the contrary, are more naturally monogamous than men; it is a biological necessity. Where promiscuity prevails, they will therefore always be more often the victims than the culprits. Also, domestic happiness is more necessary to them than to us. And the quality by which they most easily hold a man, their beauty, decreases every year after they have come to maturity, but this does not happen to those qualities of personality —women don’t really care two cents about our looks—by which we hold women. Thus in the ruthless war of promiscuity women are at a double disadvantage. They play for higher stakes and are also more likely to lose. I have no sympathy with moralists who frown at the increasing crudity of female provocativeness. These signs of desperate competition fill me with pity.
Secondly, though the “right to happiness” is chiefly claimed for the sexual impulse, it seems to be impossible that the matter should stay there. The fatal principle, once allowed in that department, must sooner or later seep through our whole lives. We thus advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche. And then, though our technological skill may help us survive a little longer, our civilization will have died at heart, and will—one dare not even add “unfortunately”—be swept away.
