By M.D. Aeschliman.
Much of our knowledge is inevitably quantitative and additive, but sometimes a good book contains such necessary, valuable forms of human knowledge while also touching, and being graced by, such qualitative insight that it registers as human wisdom. Such is the case with University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox's ambitious Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.
Wilcox is a strong statistician, and his book is full of exceptionally valuable, detailed information and analysis about contemporary social and economic phenomena in the USA and the West. It's particularly insightful about catastrophically declining birth rates, marriage rates for different demographic groups, and surveys of several negative social indicators such as unemployment of men, drug abuse, loneliness, and "deaths by despair."
His thoughtful and judicious grasp of these phenomena and their dynamics puts him among the outstanding public intellectuals and commentators of our time, and merits the name social philosophy: a tradition of over two centuries which includes Burke, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Weber, and more recent figures such as Robert Nisbet, Raymond Aron, Daniel Bell, Philip Rieff, David Martin, Peter L. Berger, and Wilcox's Virginia colleague James Davison Hunter.
An excellent example of this social-philosophical insight is found near the conclusion of Get Married when Wilcox writes that his research "reveals this paradox regarding the pursuit of happiness in contemporary America: individual happiness is most likely to be found not by directly pursuing it for oneself but by opening your heart to love, marriage, and living for your spouse and family."
Wilcox here vindicates an argument or thesis that has been intermittently meditated in the philosophical, political, religious, and poetic literature of the West, what Plato and Aristotle first articulated and that we have come to call "virtue ethics" or eudaemonism. It has also been the stock-in-trade of centuries of moralists and clergymen.
The Anglican Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752) identified "the paradox of hedonism" in a famous sermon and the Victorian philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) wrote about it in his Methods of Ethics. Their point, writes the contemporary philosopher Simon Blackburn, is "that agents who consciously attempt to maximize their own pleasures are more likely to fail than those who have concerns for other things and other persons for their own sakes."
A particularly poignant case is found in the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (1873), the great Utilitarian philosopher, most of which is exceptionally dry, leading Thomas Carlyle to call it the "autobiography of a steam engine."
But one chapter records Mill's mental breakdown. Mill, a child prodigy and successful public intellectual, records a mental collapse, not apparent to the public world in which he continued to live and work. From 1821 to 1826, he had been the companion and inheritor of the growing political prominence of his own Utilitarian father, James Mill, and of Jeremy Bentham: his "object in life was to be a reformer of the world," and he seemed to be succeeding in journalism and politics.
But Chapter V reports an increasing gloom at the realization that his direct, successful pursuit of Utilitarian ideological aims left him more and more unsatisfied and depressed. He came to credit "the anti-self-consciousness theory of [Thomas] Carlyle" with helping him shape a new "theory of life."
He "never wavered" in his Utilitarian conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life." But he "now thought that this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness: on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind. . .followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else,...
