How to Be Happy in Life

There are many different ways of life, of course, and each person has to choose the way that fits his or her personality and intuitions about what life is all about and how to be happy. There is the way of the adventurer. The way of the businessman. The way of the scholar or priest. There is the way of the artist or mystic. There is even Gurdjieff’s Way of the Sly Man, the secret mystic who lives like an ordinary business man. But because I studied Aristotle at a young age, I’ve always been persuaded that, when considering how to “structure” your life, you should consider how best to use whatever God-given talents you’ve been given. In his Nicomachian Ethics (1095a15–22), Aristotle said that happiness (eudaimonia) comes from the full exercise of your powers… from using your gifts… and I’ve always thought that is true. And that is why, for me personally, one of the dominant themes of my life has always been what I call balance – the attempt to arrange your life, in so far as its possible, so that you have some balance in life and are able to use as many abilities as possible. Perhaps this is actually the Way of the Dilettante but I prefer to think of it as the Way of the Renaissance. In other words, I wanted a life in which I could marry, raise a family, think, create, study, make money, travel, play sports, stay in shape, play music, read books, and, in general pursue my interests and passions. I tried to make choices, as life went on in its haphazard way, that created conditions in which this multi-faceted, balanced life would be possible.

For example, I knew early on that I wanted to be my own boss – both because I would probably make more money with my own businesses but also because it meant I would have more free time, the ability to travel, the ability to see my children growing up, and so on. As a result, I never really pursued any sort of corporate job or career. This has its disadvantages, of course. We’ve always had to pay for our own health insurance and medical costs, for example – and to this day marvel when friends complain about their $30 “co-pays” and rising insurance costs. We paid for each of our children’s deliveries, about $5,000 each, almost literally in cash. We’ve also had to create our own Defined Benefit Pension Plan with its myriad federal regulations, its mandatory reporting requirementss, its frequent demands for cash, and what I like to call the “adult supervision” of a professional pension fund administrator – a delightful woman, the “dragon lady,” who is an Orthodox Jew and who does her best to keep us out of trouble with the Feds.

But overall, being self-employed, in my opinion, gives you many more opportunities for the “full exercise of your powers” and be happy than working in a nine-to-five corporate job. I am revisiting all these issues afresh because, as I write these words, my eldest son is plotting his own career trajectory in the corporate world of high finance – and I marvel both at his ambitious determination and at the assumptions that underlying his plotting. It is so utterly alien to my own way of life – trying to fashion a career in a corporate setting – that I am only now appreciating the stubborn but quite deliberate choices that went into our way of life.

Another part of living a balanced life is making money – not a lot of money, perhaps, but enough to provide a safe and comfortable home, in a quiet and secure neighborhood, and so that you can afford such luxuries as sports teams, music and language lessons, health care, good schools and so on. If you want to marry and raise children – which, for most people, is the most realistic path to becoming a decent human being and whatever enlightenment is granted us on this earth — a minimum amount of money is a requirement. The practical upshot of this, for me, was that I didn’t want to choose businesses or jobs that would make me too poor. I’ve never really been all that materialistic (as anyone who sees the old truck I drive or my clothes would confirm) but I do like to travel, buy books, study Aikido and philosophy in my spare time, and provide educational opportunities for my children. This meant that my wife and I had to figure out how to make money – and thus becoming a starving artist wasn’t a choice I was prepared to make. I admire artists for their single-minded dedication to their art… and I actually would encourage anyone with serious talented to pursue art or music as a career choice… but you still have to earn a living, artist or no.

When young people call me up, as some do, and ask me if they should become writers, I always say the same thing: Absolutely! It’s the best way of life in the world! My only caveat is that, to be happy, most people will want to marry and have children, to exercise all of their powers – not just their artistic ones – and that you therefore have to balance your artistic pursuits with the need to make money and provide a comfortable home. You want to enjoy your body and stay in shape. Play tennis or softball. Go to yoga classes. This is self-evident to many people but not to all, especially not to all of my children. When you are young and idealistic, you want to give yourself over to a great artistic passion or project – to spend years working on plays that never get produced, or a great novel, or painting, or a rock band. In your early twenties, that’s what you should do – test out your abilities and explore different ways of making a living. But if you want to have a happy life, you need to know that you have to balance the desire for creative pursuits with the need to make a decent living – not to “sell out” but in order that you can “exercise your full powers,” so you’re able to become a full human being.

Again, I am only thinking about these issues because I have so many children. But I really do believe balance in life is essential, perhaps even a key to happiness – even if you decide that your talents lie in science, or engineering, or medicine. For example, my eldest daughter is thinking about becoming a doctor. My wife likes this idea because her sister is a doctor and she likes the economic security that being a doctor can provide to women, especially in an increasingly competitive global economy. I think that’s great, of course, and will do everything I can to help my daughter through medical school, if she decides to pursue that course. My only caution to her would be to strive for balance – to think about how to balance the demands of a medical career with the needs and expectations of family life, her musical talents, her passion for swimming and athletics. Medicine is a fairly demanding and monomaniacal profession… but I know it’s possible to build a balanced life as a doctor, as my younger brother and my sister-in-law have proven. But it takes effort and deliberate choices.

None of the Above

The word “politics” is derived from the word “poly,” meaning “many,”
and the word “ticks,” meaning “blood sucking parasites.”
– Larry Hardiman

The world needs a political and economic alternative.

The obsolete ideas and ideals of Big Government collectivism … and the equally bankrupt ideas and ideals of Big Business collectivism… have run their course.

Now all that is left, in most developed countries, is a political stalemate that is increasingly acrimonious, even dangerous.

The only sane alternative for fair-minded humanists everywhere is to abandon the siren song of politics altogether… to flee the plantation of government rules and regulations… and channel their energies into social and economic projects that lie outside the realm of politics.

What sorts of projects?

Anything that is based on voluntary cooperation, not force. Any individual initiative or social effort that invites participation, not demands it. That would include new businesses, voluntary organizations, neighborhood groups, food and medical co-ops, charities, churches and temples, social outreach enterprises.

For thousands of years, this was how people served the common good: voluntarily.

Someone saw a need that wasn’t being met, thought of a way that need could be met, and then either created a solution that could be sold, or, alternatively, persuaded neighbors and friends to join in a collective effort to provide a solution. Thus, Benjamin Franklin and the early American colonists created the first fire departments and libraries. Politics had nothing to do with it. Everything was done on a voluntary basis, by subscription.

It is increasingly obvious that politics is the domain of losers and leeches, parasites and gangsters; the place where talentless drones go to obtain jobs they could never get in the real world of business or art. It is the realm of ambulance-chasing lawyers and toadying bureaucrats, nepotism and connections, paybacks and bribes. In most developed countries today, politics is a method of career advancement for talentless hacks.

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy,” said Ernest Benn.

H.L. Mencken agreed. “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Indeed. When you think about it, the kind of people who go into politics are, by definition, people who like telling other people what to do. They are at best professional busybodies; at worst, authoritarian thugs and gangsters.

In the past, politicians could at least be voted out of office; but in the past 50 years, the political class has discovered a way to protect itself: It has created a vast, self-perpetuating army of government workers who are 100% dependent upon the politicians for their jobs. In exchange for the government workers’ reliable votes every election, the politicians create make-work that come with bloated salaries and absurd pensions.

This vast army of government workers remains even when the politicians lose their jobs or a government changes. It is easy to fire an individual politician; it takes much longer, and is virtually impossible, to eliminate government bureaucracies.

Fortunately, there is a long and well-developed tradition in the Western world, at least, of ignoring politics and government altogether. It is a centuries-old movement of anti-politics – not anarchism exactly but more polite refusal to participate.

It is the Way of Just Saying No – no to politics, no to politicians, no to voting, no to force, no to imposing your policy prescriptions on other people. In the past, it was called “minding your own business” but today is often called “anarchism.”

Why Newt Gingrich is a False Messiah

Like most people who enjoy frank and intelligent conversation, I like Newt Gingrich. He is smart, knowledgeable, intelligent to a fault, every bit the history professor he once was. I first saw him, more than 18 years ago, at a gathering of conservative activists in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. He mesmerized the audience then just as he mesmerizes growing numbers of Republicans today.

Republicans are so grateful to have someone in their party who can string together more than two coherent sentences at a time — let alone someone who knows the specific details of policy and history — quite a few are falling all over themselves in support of Newt. But Newt is a false messiah. Like the greatest disaster to befall the Republican Party in a century, the faux cowboy George W. Bush, Newt is a “big government conservative.” He believes, like most of the Republican candidates with the exception of Ron Paul, in expanding government power, not limiting it. He wants to start new wars, not end the ones we’re already in.

Indeed, as the historian Thomas J. DiLorenzo has chronicled in painful detail, Newt’s proposed foreign policy is downright frightening — even granting that a lot of what he says is merely posturing for the Republican base.

According to Gingrich, the U.S. military should invade Lebanon with the purpose of “disarming Hezbollah.” This would effectively commence another war with Syria, says Gingrich, as it would be “the first direct defeat of Syria,” which supposedly pulls the strings of Hezbollah. It would also be an assault on Iran, says the former House speaker, and would therefore be an act of war against that country as well.

Next, full-scale warfare should be waged against North Korea, Iran and Syria with the objective of “replacing the repressive dictatorships” in those countries. All of this would somehow serve in “restoring American prestige in the region,” says Gingrich. Yes, murdering hundreds of thousands of Iranians, Syrians, and Lebanese, and destroying their cities and their infrastructure of civilization, which is what war does, would surely lead the people of those countries to think of Americans as “prestigious.”

Gingrich’s enthusiasm for expanding America’s “war on terror” — and his utter indifference to civil liberties — reflects the fact that he is, at bottom, a career politician who believes government is the solution, not the problem. He doesn’t fear an expansion of the police state because Newt and his friends are the police state. He doesn’t feel the TSA is an out-of-control federal bureaucracy that needs to be scraped because, like most government parasites and former government parasites, he never encounters the TSA. He flies on private jets and doesn’t have endure strip searches by illiterate TSA goons.

Worst of all, Gingrich is the epitome of a career politician who cashes in after his “service” and makes literally millions off of the taxpayers. For more on that, check on Ron Paul’s new ad below…

I like Newt. I eagerly watch him on TV. But he should remain a TV pundit, not become president of the United States. His warmongering and lack of respect for constitutional restraint on government disqualify him utterly. The only candidate who will at least try to change the corrupt status quo in Washington is Ron Paul.

Carl Levin and John McCain Repeal the Fifth Amendment

A bipartisan coalition of increasingly rabid U.S. senators, led by Carl “Jabba the Hut” Levin (a Democrat) and John McCain (a Republican), have quietly laid the legal groundwork for martial law in the United States. That sounds alarmist but it may be quite literally true. Their amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) repeals the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (“no person [not citizen] shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”) and centuries of legal precedent regarding the doctrine of habeas corpus. At issue in the NDAA amendment is whether the U.S. military should have the power to arrest U.S. citizens, here on U.S. soil, and detain those citizens indefinitely in military prisons (here or overseas) without access to legal counsel or due process and without trial in civilian court.

Sections 1031 and 1032 of the NDAA, cooked up in secret by the corrupt lizard Levin and McCain and recently passed by the U.S. Senate after heated debate, say that the military can arrest and detain anybody “who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”

Obviously anyone who is actively supporting terrorists or engaged in terrorism should be arrested. But what is troubling in this broad and undefined language (what constitutes “support” or what are “associated forces”?) is that the NDAA asserts that the U.S. military can do this, at their sole discretion and with zero oversight, and without supervision by a civilian court. This is de facto martial law and a de facto repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 that forbids military personnel from enforcing the laws of the land on U.S. soil.

It’s true that the Fifth Amendment provides an exception to the general rule regarding due process: and that exception is precisely War or Public Danger. “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger… It was on this basis that Abraham Lincoln suspended habaes corpus during the Civil War (surely a case of war). But the dire need for such a sweeping suspension of U.S. Constitutional guarantees now, at this time, is far from evident. As much as the “hawks” in the government are continually trying to ratchet up fear of yet another impeding terrorist attack, the evidence that we are in a time of grave “public danger” has not been presented.

The only Republican in the Senate with the spine to stand up against this unprecedented attack on the Constitutional rights of U.S. citizens was Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), son of U.S. presidential candidate Dr. Ron Paul. Dianne Feinstein of California proposed an amendment that would have exempted U.S. citizens from the treatment described in Levin and McCain’s bill. “We are not a nation that locks up its citizens without charge, prosecution, and conviction,” Feinstein said during the debate, but a majority of her colleagues disagreed. Her amendment was rejected by a vote of 45-55, with quite a few Democrats joining the Republicans. The Senate did vote to accept another Feinstein amendment that purportedly “clarified” that the Levin-McCain Amendment, despite its brazen language, did not violate the rights of U.S. citizens:

“Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens or lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.”

Nevertheless, this issue… like that of the CIA’s new enthusiasm for targeted assassination… is not going away. I am cheered to say that a coalition of sane constitutionalists, on both the political left and right, are rising up to oppose this power grab. While the ACLU and Glenn Greenwald have predictably opposed this legislation, many on the libertarian Right have as well — including The American Spectator and libertarian firebrand Judge Andrew Napolitano (see video below). “Some of you may be willing to accept this as a necessary evil…the overhead cost of a living in a country that’s increasingly less free than we’d like to admit,” noted Spectator blogger Reid Smith. “Some of you may be comfortable being told this makes you safer. I happen to prefer the modest benefits of due process and that old chestnut habeas corpus.” President Obama has threatened to veto the legislation, but, given his track record on civil liberties and his groveling desire to appear tough on terrorism before the 2012 election, no one is holding their breath.

New Mass Translations A Bit Awkward and Therefore Beneficial

The entire English-speaking Catholic world today began the painful process of adjusting to new translations of the Mass. And the verdict is in: Many people, particularly clergy and professional church folk, dislike them. Some dislike them intensely. The Jesuits have been carrying on their usual rear-guard assault for weeks now, in the pages of America. Commonweal naturally despises the new translations. Even The Tablet, the English Catholic journal that tends to be slightly more temperate in its expressions of dissent, has run article after article bemoaning the new translations.

The idea behind the new translations, of course, was to be a “reform of the reform,” to correct the overly-sloppy and needlessly dumbed-down translations that were rushed into print in the heady days of folk masses after Vatican II. Conservatives have long pointed out how the translations produced by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) seemed to have a deliberate theological agenda beyond merely smooth diction. It wasn’t merely a question of “dynamic equivalence” (looser) versus “formal equivalence” (more literal) translations but of actual distortion, the conservatives asserted.

Nevertheless, many people find the new, more literal translations from the Latin to be awkward in the extreme, wordy, laden with theological jargon (incarnate, consubstantial) that doesn’t exactly pour off your tongue smoothly. The priest at Mass today stumbled even more than the congregation did… although he carried on bravely, with good humor.

But in my own perverse way, I found I liked the new translations precisely because they are so awkward. Their very awkwardness are what I like about them. They force you to relearn the ancient prayers anew and to actually think about what they are saying. Some people are actually buying missals again. I am paying my young children one dollar for every recitation of the Credo in the new English translation, two dollars for every recitation in Latin (limit: one per day!). I also enjoyed the more theologically precise wording, although I would be the first to admit that the translations are not exactly The Book of Common Prayer, the widely heralded Anglican prayer book known for its timeless poetry.

One fact that is little known to most U.S. Catholics: The new translations actually bring American Catholics more in line with the rest of the English-speaking world which, for decades now, has been using more literal translations that are very close to these new ones. In fact, what is really going on is that the U.S. Church is playing catch up with the Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and other English-speaking places. We are also catching up with the Anglican world — much of which has been using liturgical texts that are much more formal, based as they are on the traditional Book of Common Prayer, than the groovy texts produced by ICEL in the 1960s.

Until today, here is a key passage of the ICEL translation of the Nicene Creed (1975):

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, one in Being
with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he was born of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.

Now, here is the NEW, more literal translation put into place today:

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.

Of course, the awkward parts are merely literal translations from the Latin:

Génitum, non factum, consubstantiálem Patri:
Per quem ómnia facta sunt.
Qui propter nos hómines et propter nostram salútem
Descéndit de cælis.
Et incarnátus est de Spíritu Sancto
Ex María Vírgine, et homo factus est.

And this is very close to the older English translations used by British, Irish and Australian Catholics for decades. In the UK, at least, Catholics have prayed the Credo for decades with the somewhat difficult construction, “by the power of the Holy Spirit, he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary…” Only in the U.S., I believe, have Catholics prayed “born” of the Virgin Mary. The U.S. office of ICEL and their episcopal oversees plainly thought, in the 1970s, that “incarnate” was just too big a word for bleary-eyed American Catholics to get out of their mouths on a Sunday morning and thus substituted the word “born” in its place.

Of course, we’ll get through all this just as we got through the much bigger transition from Latin to the vernacular. Nevertheless, I agree with conservatives who say that Sunday worship should not necessarily use the same casual vernacular of a cocktail party and that there is a place for a more formal, even more archaic syntax in public worship. Go to any Greek Orthodox Divine Liturgy… to say nothing of a Jewish synagogue… and you’ll encounter an infinitely more difficult linguistic situation than what Catholics are encountering in these new Mass translations.

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