Wednesday, February 8. 2012
From Chantrill on Murray's new book:
"The core of Murray's book is that if you want to be happy, in the full sense of "eudaimonia" in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics -- that is, full human flourishing over a lifetime doing the right things in the right way at the right time -- you need to check in on four basic qualities. You need satisfying work, you need to be married, you need to engage in civil society, and you need to attend church once a week. Look at a community without the Big Four, and you will likely find only 10 percent of people "very happy." Look at folks with all four, and you will find almost 80 percent of people reporting themselves "very happy." Call it the American project: family, vocation, faith, and community. Rush Limbaugh talks about it every day: American exceptionalism. Here is Murray's line on it, from page 305 of Coming Apart.
Upper-class Americans live that way. They work, they get married, they are involved in their communities. They just don't seem to think it matters if other people don't, so they have legislated this monster welfare state that pays people not to work and not to marry, and that harasses them if they join a club or run a church. Our elitists insist on lives with meaning for themselves, but for everyone else, they think life begins and ends with a check: a welfare check, an unemployment check, a severance check, or a Social Security check. And they call that compassion.
Historically, Americans have been different as a people, even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I am thinking of qualities such as American industriousness and neighborliness discussed in earlier chapters, but also American optimism... our striking lack of class envy, and the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies."
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