2.9.2013 C.S. LEWIS on HAPPINESS

the last published article by lewis before his death asked:
have we no 'right' to happiness?

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 go 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.
mus. b had adored her husband at the outset.
but then he got smashed up in the war.
it was though he had lost his virility,
and it was known that he had lost his job.
life with him was no longer what
mrs. b 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.

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 6 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.

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 aqinas, 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 chrished 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 mena?

it is quite certain what they did not mean.
they did not mean that man was entitled to pursued 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.
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.

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
consisted in making money and he was persuing his happiness.
she was also a rabid teetotaler;
i never heard her excuse an alcoholic
because he was happy when he  was drunk.

a dood man 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 enought to believe
they meant what they said.
i have 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 been 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 agains 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 i disapproved of.

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
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.
tat 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 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 the 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 see himself again as the great lover,
and his pity for himself will exclude all pity for the woman.

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 that 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.