Benumbed by Joy

ARTIFICIAL HAPPINESS: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class.

By Ronald W. Dworkin. Carroll & Graf. 343 pp. $24.95

There’s nothing like an authoritative, well-documented Grand Guignol horror story. If you’ve ever wondered about the source of those big, ecstatic American smiles or the frantically cheery commands to “have a nice day” that have become an inescapable part of our national life, read this riveting book and wonder no more. Chances are that the perpetrators of the friendly fire are zonked out on antidepres­sants, floating on magnetic clouds of alternative medicine, or overexercised into a state of euphoria. All three instrumentalities have a common goal of “artificial happiness”—happiness as an end in itself, an induced emotion with no connection to the facts of one’s life.

An M.D. who is still a practicing anesthesiologist, Ronald W. Dworkin is also a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute with a Ph.D. in political philosophy—that rarity, the doctor-as-intellectual who’s educated in the humanities and well read in something other than his narrow specialty. He traces the beginnings of artificial happiness to the 1950s. Reacting against the alienating conformity described in David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), popular clergy of the day published cheery self-help books. For the com­fortable Protestant middle class there was Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), which counseled, “Practice happy thinking every day. . . . Develop the happiness habit, and life will become a continual feast.” For Cath­olics there was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s Way to Happiness (1953), and for Southern Protestants there was Billy Graham’s The Secret of Hap­piness (1955).

Not surprisingly, the tranquilizer Miltown became popular around this time, followed by Valium and Librium in the 1960s, when the Age of Aquarius hit and Timothy Leary upped the happiness ante in The Politics of Ecstasy (1968). In 1994 Elizabeth Wurtzel published Prozac Nation, a memoir of her 10-year depression. The book and Prozac both took off. Over the next 10 years, prescrip­tions for antidepressants tripled, as doctors began treating depression the way the managed care insurance system wanted them to: fast. With 13 minutes allotted for each office visit, a prescription for Prozac, Zoloft, or Paxil kept the assembly line moving.

Dworkin presents a gallery of legal druggies who are so content with their artificial happiness that they have lost all incentive to take action against what made them unhappy in the first place. A man who stays married to a mentally unstable virago, lest a divorce enable her to clean him out financially and gain custody of their son, tells Dworkin, “My wife is still a bitch. I can’t stand her. But now I don’t care so much. I still feel good no matter what happens.” Dworkin believes that society is the victim when millions choose this stupefied state of least resistance, because it eventually destroys conscience and character on a national scale. As others have noted, we need only imagine Abe Lincoln, a clinical depressive, on Prozac: “Well, the Union is finished, we’re two countries now, and slavery is a fact of life, but hey, I feel good about myself.”

Except for certain chiropractic techniques, Dworkin takes an equally dim view of alternative medicine.  Meditation, yoga, acupuncture, magnets, herbs, and aromatherapy are all variations on the placebo principle. They bring patients to “a state of weakened rational activity, filling the emptiness in their lives with romantic notions and grabbing hold of them with useless substances.”

He’s at his most mordant on the fitness craze, which got its start in 1975 when a scientist studying runners’ euphoric “second wind” discovered naturally occurring stimulants in the human brain that attach themselves to receptors in the same way that morphine attaches to opiate receptors. Scientists first called these stimulants “endor­phines,” “endo” for endogenous and “orphine” for morphine. An e was later dropped and a buzz­word was born. Given a medical imprimatur, joggers never miss a chance to announce, “Gotta get those endorphins going.”

Mild exercise isn’t enough to produce artificial happiness. It has to be obsessive, “a testament of piety and rectitude; going to the gym regularly became medicine’s Sunday school version of life.” The happiness of fitness freaks is more like convert’s zeal. It is also the happiness of schaden­freude, “expressed most commonly in contempt for fat people and an elevation of trim people to sainthood.” The culture of exercise “is not about health; it is about pride.”

Dworkin admits that he has had scant success in alerting political activists to the dangers of artificial happiness. His remarks were received with polite indifference by a gathering of religious conservatives fixated on beginning-of-life and end-of-life issues, yet, as he shows, our belief that happiness is the measure of life has a direct bearing on both abortion and euthanasia. The first-trimester fetus lacks the rudimentary nervous system to experience self-awareness. Without self-awareness there can be no happiness, and thus, in the happiness-is-all worldview, no need for life. By the same token, unhappiness inevitably increases in old age. We are moving, Dworkin predicts, toward accepting physician-assisted suicide as a preemptive strike against the miseries of decrepitude.

The book bogs down only once, when Dworkin, straining to find a cure for our happiness addiction, advises patients to read philosophy and doctors to take courses in the humanities, so that they can relate to each other on a deeper level. This would never work in America, because we know that introspective people tend to be unhappy. But at least Dworkin himself has read widely, and it shows on every page. His best observation is reminiscent of a poem by Wallace Stevens or the baleful imprecations of ancient Greek drama: “And there is something unpleasant about their happiness, something lacking in warmth. There is nothing sunny in the sun; it’s more like a hot moon. Their happiness radiates unwholesomeness because it emanates from an unnatural source, not from real life.”