Posted by
Andrews on Monday, June 02, 2008 4:05:23 PM
While reading
Best of the Web, I followed a link to a
BBC report on Vanuatu. It was one of those stereotypical "happy primitives" or "happiness in simplicity" stories. As I have long planned on writing on the idiocy of Rousseau and his modern followers, it piqued my interest and I read the article.
Well, as expected, what they found was not so much a happy place, as a happy man.Yes, he lived in very simple circumstances, but that was nto what made him happy. Put in the same circumstances one could imagine people with attitudes ranging from happiness to misery. There is nothing innate in his circumstances that produces happiness.
Of course, that is not the conclusion that the writer drew. Instead he concluded that because of a lack of wants the man finds himself delighted. I on the other hand wondered why he would be happy to have so much free time. I am all for simple living, but without even books to occupy my hours I think I would find the supposed paradise a dreadful bore. De gustibus non disputandum est, I suppose. Maybe to someone who loved the beach it would be heaven. I am a snow lover myself.
But my point is that the left, and by default I assume any journalist singing the praises of poverty must be on the left, is obsessed with the external, the material. They assume that the environment determines the man. Just as Marx assumed that the job defined the man, they assume that the culture defines the man. The subject of the essay is happy because of his impoverished surroundings, not despite them.
The myth of the left is that happiness is generated by one's surroundings, that one is entirely determined by one's surroundings. The truth is that happiness comes from within. What is ironic is that the left is decrying the hollowness of western culture, yet they subscribe to its most superficial philosophy, materialism. They think that the trappings make one happy, and, though the author is substituting the trappings of simplicity, he is still mistaking the nonessential features for the essential. He is finding the cause in incidental details.
No, it is not the poverty of Vanuatu that makes the man happy, he is a happy man who happens to live in Vanuatu. And while the press tries to turn this into a story of how hollow our culture has become and how our pursuit of wealth leaves us unfulfilled, they completely ignore men and women who are every bit as happy in the midst of our "miserable" culture. And instead feel they must run off to the most primitive locale they can find to feel true joy.
I can't decide if it is hatred of wealth or of western culture that drives this quest, but either way it is a sad commentary on those who set public opinion.