"I should be free to do what I want."

I am working through this thought, which came to me this morning while thinking about how to make a happy society.

"I should be free to do what I want."

The substantive moral argument is over whether the more important part of this claim is "free to do" or "what I want."

The substantive ethical argument is over whether the more important part is whether social structures ought to try to guarantee the "should be" or try to shape the "what I want."

I believe the ancients, including all three biblical faiths, take the latter position.
The moderns, including all kinds of Enlightenment thought, take the former.

Easterin's Conclusion About Happiness

This is the upshot of Richard Easterlin's decades of studying happiness.

People spend too much time working for money and status goods. We do not realize that this will not make us happy, because our aspirations will keep rising as our we achieve our material goals.

Instead, we should spend more time on family, relationships, and health. These things make us happy even when we attain them.

Happiness Most LIkely at Mid-Life

Richard Easterlin, a pioneer in the economic study of happiness, concludes this about happiness and age:

"Happiness is greatest at midlife, but not by very much."

From 18 to 51, about 7% of the population move up to “very happy”;

From 51 to 89, about 9% of the population move back down.

(Incidentally, I am 51. And very happy.)

You Can't See Beyond Divorce's Threshold

Eileen Ansel Wolpe, in trying to describe divorce to someone contemplating it, compares divorce to death in a way I had not heard before:

You cannot see what lies beyond the frame around the door that is the exit. It is not possible. It is a death. And just like life’s death, you are not permitted to see beyond the threshold. But I have been here for the past year and I can tell you it looks nothing like it does from inside the threshold.

Re-reading After Virtue

Thirty years ago, when I was a senior in college, a book came out that shaped my thinking profoundly: Alasdair McIntyre's After Virtue. My now-wife and I read it to one another as we made our evening cocoa. This week I re-read the book for the first time since those formative days.

McIntyre argues that modern moral language is so incoherent, because what we have today are the fragments of several contrasting moral cultures from the past. The virtues tradition, especially as understood by Aristotle and improved by Christianity, was concerned with how people could lead a fulfilling life within the roles and destiny of their community. Modern societies, by contrast, try to find a picture of how human beings can have a fulfilling life without specifying their roles or their community, or even what might be fulfilling.

McIntyre helped me understand why individualist theories of what human beings are seem so impoverished. This has been a great help to me as a sociologist.

His account of politics as a civil war among the virtues of different communities has been a help to me in understanding politics as a social enterprise, while not thinking that my community and my virtues are the only rational ones.

His account of how Christianity synthesized the virtues of the Greek polis with the broader and more inclusive history of the biblical story was crucial to my becoming a Christian.

One surprise of re-reading After Virtue is how little of it seemed new to me this time. I think it was just the right book at the right time for me when it first appeared. I absorbed its message so thoroughly that it shaped the architecture of my worldview. And its message is not a bit less timely now.

Evening the Sex Ratio Among Old People

One of the surprising findings of the new census is that the ratio of old men to old women is evening out. From middle age on there are always more women than men, with the gap widening to about two-to-one by the time people are 85. However, older men are surviving at a higher rate than they used to.

Since 2000, the number of women 60 - 74 has increased by 29.2%. The number of men in that age rage increased by 35.2%

There will probably never be an equal ratio of old men to old women, but things do seem to be evening a bit.

My nominee for the cause: the declining smoking rate.