Lorne Gunter, National Post
June 09, 2008
Last Monday, the National Post reported on a fascinating paper being delivered to the 9,000-delegate Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Vancouver.
Apparently, the political happiness of we who live in Western liberal democracies is flat-lining — or even declining — despite all the choice and affluence we enjoy.
William Gorton, author of the paper Too Much of a Good Thing: Freedom, Individualism, Autonomy and the Decline of Happiness in Liberal Democracies postulated that “the causes of this stagnation or decline may be attributable, directly or indirectly, to core values of liberalism — namely freedom of choice, autonomy and individualism.”
“There’s the assumption that human beings make the best choices for how to lead a happy life,” noted the professor from Alma College in Michigan. And yet “we haven’t seen increases in happiness that you would expect to see. There’s been a big spike in depression in all the Western liberal democracies over the last 50 years — and this is while gross domestic product per capita has been increasing.
“An abundance of choice may actually make people unhappy.”
No doubt, there will be those on the right and the left who agree with Prof. Gorton, and who will pounce on his conclusions to advance their own anti-freedom agendas.
Social conservatives, for instance, have argued for years that too much personal choice leads to social deterioration. Family values break down when the traditional family model — mom, dad, kids — is devalued by governments sanctioning alternative choices such as common-law and same-sex families. Individualism undermines the sense of community, and so on.
Meanwhile, those on the left have long seen affluence as the enemy. Permit people to have too much money, too much consumer choice, and it undermines a sense of equality needed to advance civil society. Better to tax away great gobs of personal wealth and use the proceeds for the common good.
Both groups (and Prof. Gorton, too) make a common mistake, though: They equate choice with freedom. The two are not one and the same.
It’s entirely likely that as the range of our choices has expanded in the past five decades, along with our ability to afford those choices, we have become less politically happy because our core freedoms have been undermined by a growing, rapacious state.
Consider: The day after the Post reported on the Vancouver conference, its front page featured a report from Brian Hutchinson on the obscene spectacle of columnist Mark Steyn and Maclean’s magazine being hauled before a so-called “human rights tribunal” to justify their publication of facts and opinions that a special-interest group found offensive.
We may be free to buy big-screen HDTVs until we are blue in the face — and be presented with an awe-inspiring array of models — but we are no longer free to speak our minds without fear that crusading government agents will seek to punish and silence us.
We are no longer free to use our property as we see fit without environmentalists or municipal planners interceding. We hold title to our homes and land at the pleasure of governments and courts, which feel little compunction in taking them away for allegedly higher public purposes.
We may not buy added health care for our families. We are prevented from selling our crops to anyone but the government grain merchant. Agents of the state listen in on our telephone calls and scan our e-mails. Our deposits at the bank are reported to authorities. Surveillance cameras monitor our movements through the train station and public square.
Our right to defend ourselves is circumscribed by regulation. We must wear seat belts and helmets when out in our cars or on our bikes and motorcycles. We may not drink or smoke in public (or, in the case of smoking, increasingly even in private). Public health officials remove swings and slides from playgrounds. Schools enforce zero-tolerance policies that cannot distinguish between violence and natural childish roughhousing.
And on, and on, and on.
Some of these may be good ideas on their own, but it is the added element of state compulsion that makes doing the sensible thing a freedom-robbing affront.
Benjamin Disraeli once said an Englishman did not need a lot of laws because he was prepared to do the proper thing of his own accord. Now our statutes fill scores of volumes. Every aspect of our personal, family, professional and social lives, regardless of how minute, is subject to government oversight.
And experts are puzzled about why there is a growing dissatisfaction with government?
Freedom isn’t failing us. We are unhappy because we are no longer free.
We are being offered bread and circuses to satisfy and amuse us, while nearly all of the freedoms that truly matter are being taken away.
Too much of a good thing? We have nowhere near enough.
Stumble It!