Verdict: Not Guilty
Opinion Editorial by Tibor Machan -
Jul 2, 2007
2 ratings from readers
At last in the modern era, man can finally aim to live long and well. Yet an ancient source, religion, and a modern source, environmentalism, unite to undercut and denounce pursing personal happiness.
In my youth I got a substantial dose of guilt, mostly through the religion in which I was brought up.
No, I was not raised Jewish. But Jews are by no means the only ones who are inundated with feelings of guilt from the outset of their lives.
Nor is it only religions which have had a strong policy of making us all feel guilty for, well, nearly anything we might enjoy in life.
In the past, the religious doctrine of "original sin" was the main source of the idea of our fundamental corruption. Today, it tends to be the environmental movement which preaches this misanthropic doctrine.
Guilt mongering seems to know no national boundaries. Culture after culture denounces the human animal in large measure for our desire to enjoy our lives.
Somehow, paradoxically, it is all right to aim for bliss eternally, after death. But not for a few decades of it here on earth.
If it feels good, it must be something bad. That seems to be the basic point championed in so many circles, religious, secular, ethical, political, and psychological.
Well, actually, perhaps in clinical psychology happiness is still being affirmed as something proper to desire. Although even there the latest trend, judging by recent books, seems to be to denounce our aspirations to be happy.
Another paradox is that even though the bulk of the intellectual community has discarded the idea of free will, the idea of guilt hasn’t been discarded.
Yet, without free will, how can there be guilt? Dumb animals, as they used to be called, feel no guilt because they couldn’t have done better than they did, whereas people can choose badly. But they didn't have to, and that can leave the mark of guilt.
But even with free will, is it really the case that we choose so badly, so often? Is our so called materialism really such a terrible thing about us, or is it simply a very natural desire to fare well in life?
(And notice, it isn’t really materialism to desire fine or even useful stuff. None of it is purely material but mostly imaginatively and usefully shaped matter.)
Maybe what I would like to place on record is an affirmation of enjoying life instead of promoting, endlessly and with such zeal, the feeling of guilt in our lives.
This self-flagellation has gone on long enough. It is time to call a halt to it and to cast aside all those who are its cheerleaders.
Why do those who preach our essential guilt get to hold the moral high ground? Why are they tolerated for the finger wagging, yet mostly arbitrary, accusers who they are?
The Al Gores and Jeremy Rifkins and Ralph Naders, with all their little helpers, just will not rest until we have all surrendered to them and gotten in line to renounce pleasure and joy, little and great, in human affairs.
Their erudition, the learning they have amassed seemingly so as to appear unanswerable in their guilt-mongering accusations, works only because most folks are hard at work making an effort to live instead of seeing a need to defend and affirm enjoying life.
But defend and affirm it we must or else the misanthropes will triumph yet again.
A very nice aspect of the modern world, something so many anti-happiness people despise about it, is that it can actually help people live a flourishing life on many fronts. Human beings are multifaceted. They have aesthetic, philosophic, economic, medical, culinary, familial, athletic, artistic, and many other dimensions to their lives.
At last, the modern era has ushered in the preconditions for creating and developing our own lives on all fronts — by creating individual rights, limited government, free markets, etc.
At last, we can actually aim to live long and well. And strive to have largely fulfilled lives.
But these aspirations must be defended. There are just too many people who are dead set on thwarting them, if only by attempting to make us feel guilty for having them in the first place.
Please find the will and the resources to resist their efforts.
Tibor Machan is the R. C. Hoiles Professor of Business Ethics & Free Enterprise at Chapman University's Argyros School of B&E and is a research fellow at the Pacific Research Institute (San Francisco, CA) and the Hoover Institution (Stanford University, CA).
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