Happiness or Holiness?

David Brooks tells us “We don’t live for happiness, we live for holiness. Day to day we seek out pleasure, but deep down, human beings are endowed with moral imagination. All human beings seek to lead lives not just of pleasure, but of purpose, righteousness, and virtue.” 

It was six years ago as I uncomfortably sat in the economy section of a flight from New York to Madrid that I read, devoured really, his fascinating work, The Social Animal. I retain to this day the notebook that I carried containing my notes from the transcontinental read. 

There is a side to me that likes order, structure and dedication. As well as the flip side craving chaos, spontaneity and improvisation. They sometimes collide. In closer examination this seems to be the way that it is supposed to be, after all doesn’t change begin with a peek at ‘the other side’ of the issue, equation or ideological coin? 

Mr Brooks seems to make the implication that happiness and holiness are mutually exclusive, as in one calls heads or trails and lives with the outcome. I know from experience that there is a warm moral glow that comes from doing what is right as compared to the right thing. We are seeing this play out on cable news every night with the daily recap of the (highly rated) national sitcom reality show where party before country divides and conquers our low information populace. I also know form experience that a questionable or downright immoral act directly affects that happiness glow, obscuring it into a shadowed low-level diffused darkness. We seek the glow of virtue more than instant gratification. Ah the moral dilemma. 

Brooks continues, “…people have a responsibility to become more moral over time. The best life is oriented around the increasing excellence of the soul and is nourished by moral joy, the quiet sense of gratitude and tranquility that comes as a by product of successful moral struggle”.

You’re asking me to be a saint? I understand and agree, but I am weak and subject to the same desires and lusts that have plagued man since the hunters hunted and gatherers gathered. The pleasures of instant gratification, one moment of love, kindness, intimacy, joy and the reciprocality of sexual bonding is a test for even the saintliest among us. We all ‘should’ recognize this and develop strategies to hold the higher standard on demand. Something like the Bro Code when in doubt. It is always uphill. 

Brooks finishes his Humility Code Index One with, “The meaningful life is the same eternal thing, the combination of some set of ideals and some man or woman’s struggle for those ideals. Life is essentially a moral drama, not a hedonistic one.”

How difficult a task to become more moral over time when the ruling class exhibits none and hypocritically puts party ahead of country? The greedy and selfish narcissism that rudely, and perhaps criminally, slams the door on those in simple and pure pursuit of holiness. 

Or happiness.