December 22, 2003, 12:01 a.m.
Pursuing Happiness
An age-old question, updated.

By Peter Augustine Lawler

This is a holiday season for almost all Americans; most of us are about to celebrate Christmas. The President's Council on Bioethics has just issued an important and impressive report, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, which gives plenty to think about as we take a break from our usual activities to be grateful for who we are.

The pursuit of happiness is the comprehensive purpose of human life, according to our Declaration of Independence. We have life and liberty for its pursuit. For John Locke, the philosopher who most of all inspired our Declaration, we transcend the world inhabited by the other animals not because of our happiness, but because we spend our time pursuing it. The other animals seem much more happy or content with what they have been given by nature. Locke makes the suggestion that our futile pursuit of happiness is the clearest evidence with have souls, and so "happy soul" is an oxymoron.

Locke understands us to be individuals — or free, consenting, calculating beings. But we can reasonably object that we are more than individuals; we are also parents, children, friends, neighbors, citizens, and creatures. Insofar as we are individuals, we are war with nature and paranoid about each other. That individualistic spirit is what drives us to conquer nature — to make ourselves more free, wealthy, and powerful — in the quest for happiness.

Our technological conquest of nature is entering a new, biotechnological phase. We are just starting to be able to alter our own natures, to even give orders to our genes. The result will be not only the eradication of some particularly horrible diseases such as Alzheimer's. The performance of our bodies and our minds may well be enhanced quite amazingly, and the length of our lives may well be indefinitely prolonged. No one can deny the coming benefits in terms of health and safety, even if there are difficult new ethical issues too. My point for now is that our successes will largely be on behalf of the security and comfort of the individual in mind, and most of all we individuals will be pursuing unprecedented happiness.

But we really know that it is friends, family, God, and country that make us happy; happiness is far more a matter of virtuously and lovingly performing our duties to them than anything connected with rights. What we achieve as individuals is good only if we can use what we've acquired as family members, friends, citizens, and children of God. As commercial as Christmas has become, it still shows us so clearly the connection between getting and giving when we're happy.

As the President's Council (chaired by Leon Kass) explains, the drive to use biotechnology to make ourselves happy is at heart an exceptionally misguided individualistic project. We will not, for example, really be able merely to manipulate our chemical make-ups to produce endless good moods or happy feelings. No super-Prozac is going to save us from us from our depression, loneliness or anxiety, and the danger actually is that biotechnology will isolate us from others even more. Our successes will really contribute to our happiness only if they don't cause us to experience ourselves as individuals and nothing more, but we're most likely to embrace them as ways of freeing ourselves even more from everything we have been given, from God, nature, and dependence on other people. It will likely seem quite possible to rely less on family and friends and withdraw more into ourselves, into a kind of a "virtual reality" of our own making.

We can see that the hope we place in biotechnology is based, in part, on our present desperation. In some ways — despite the wonderful and undeniable benefits we enjoy because of our technological successes, we find ourselves less happy than ever because we understand ourselves more than ever before as merely individuals. Family ties are weaker than ever, and even friendship is becoming merely networking. The critics are right that even our religion is often becoming cloyingly therapeutic or rather narcissistic, and we sacrifice and even deliberate hardly at all as citizens. We are more than ever under the libertarian spell of thinking that freedom means designing our lives without the constraints of others. We are more than ever merely "consenting adults." Biotechnology, by itself, is far from offering any true antidote to our unhappiness as individuals; its central promise, of course, is to make our designer fantasies real. Our technological pursuit of happiness is never a cure for our real desperation; it can never be a replacement for virtue.

Beyond Therapy concludes by asking Americans not merely to pursue happiness but to reflect on what human happiness actually is. And now is the best time to begin; we're in the season during which no one really thinks that happiness is merely subjective or up to the individual. "Happy soul" is not really an oxymoron; because we are more than individuals we can be happy because we have souls. No biotechnological success will ever be enough, by itself, to make us feel good. But we should be grateful because we were made to be good. One of the duties we have been given is to make technology — including biotechnology — serve human virtue, and that task is going to get progressively more difficult. But the need to practice virtue in order to be as happy as we can be will never wither away.

— Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government at Berry College. He is author of Aliens in America: The Strange Truth About Our Souls.