Friday roundup

 I'm heading out later this morning to be part of a jail-ministry team for the weekend, so I'm putting together your reading recommendations nice and early. Have a safe, fun and edifying couple of days.

Kirstin Anderson Birkhaug, writing at Law & Liberty, invites us to consider that there are better things than happiness. A remark from a college mentor sparked her personal thinking about the matter:

I was twenty-one when I learned this lesson, a senior in college and hopelessly undecided about my future. My worried dithering with regards to this fact often fell upon the ears of a long-suffering political science professor. One fall afternoon, I sat in his office, perched on the edge of the well-worn chair across from his desk, one foot tapping, expressing for the hundredth time that semester my anxiety about the future. My professor often just listened, knowing as only teachers and parents do that young people sometimes just need to be heard. “I don’t know what I want to be,” I sighed. “I just want to be happy!”

My professor tilted his head and squinted at me in a familiar way that told me I’d gotten something wrong. He was silent for a moment, measuring his words in his mind. I had known this professor long enough to value his careful consideration. His next words would mean something. I waited. He leaned forward and said plainly, “you can be so many better things than happy.”

You can be so many better things than happy, he said. I remember feeling confused and disappointed. It was unfathomable to me what he could have meant by that, and moreover, to the extent that I could understand him at all, I thought he must be wrong. I had grown up in an age of self-help, in which happiness was considered the ultimate good. Happiness was the end that could justify any means. It was a viable reason to quit your job, move cross country, leave your marriage. It meant eating, praying, and loving. It meant safety from doubt and regret.

Alternatively, an unhappy life could be no life at all. And so, I wanted to be happy. How or why, or at what cost, I could not say. But it was surely the best and most important thing I could imagine being. Everything else, I presumed, must be secondary. But my professor was a worldly, faithful, intelligent, and very dear friend. I could not ignore his words, even if accepting them would mean challenging the organizational principle with which I had been attempting to build my future. It was the first time anyone had ever given me reason to reconsider the central role that the pursuit of happiness had held in my heart. That day, my professor set in motion a shift in my perception of the world, one that I could not understand at that instant, but I would come to know in time.

About a year after my professor told me I could be better things than happy, I read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. As I did, I could not help but remember his words. Aristotle writes of happiness as eudaimonia, but “happiness” is a poor substitute for the richness described by this term. Eudaimonia refers to a sense of wholeness, of completeness, and of peace. It refers to a flawless harmony between the person and the world outside the person, and of ultimate achievement for the individual. It is happiness, yes, but something bigger and better too—it is perfection; perfect happiness.

At Bari Weiss's Common Sense Substack,  Walter Kirn looks at the nature of fun:

But what do I mean by “fun”? I’m not quite sure. I don’t mean “pleasure” in the old sense, which usually is associated with eroticism or sensuality, and I don’t mean “play,” which tends to refer to structured games. But fun, as such, is not competitive. No one wins at it. Nor is fun the ‘leisure” of the ancients, which one is supposed to spend in contemplation or civic engagement or other worthy pursuits. I mean something bouncier, simpler, more mundane, a feeling of antic stimulation, the opposite of seriousness. Often there is risk involved in fun. Manageable, perhaps simulated risk. You round a tight curve in a sports car that can handle it. You careen down a snowy hill in a red saucer sled. Sometimes you take a tumble or scrape a knee. Sometimes you scream—a laughing sort of scream.

On a more somber note, at Modern War Institute, Andrew Milburn's on-the-ground analysis of the Russian invasion of Ukraine leads him to conclude that "Time Is Not On Kyiv's Side." Milburn had a 31-year career in the Marine Corps and is currently equipping and training Ukrainian frontline units.

The term "ideology" gets bandied about in such a variety of ways that its core meaning can get lost in the shuffle. Jacob Howland has a piece at UnHerd entitled "Ideology Has Poisoned The West" in which he has us get clear on the word's definition and then how it's having its pernicious effect:

ideology is incapable of treating human beings as participants in a shared life, much less as individuals made in the image of God. Like the party hack whose spectacles struck Orwell as “blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them”, it sees them only as groups to be acted upon. The term idéologie was coined during the French Revolution by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, an anti-clerical materialist philosopher who believed that reason offered a way of uncovering general laws of social relations. Tracy conceived of idéologie as a social science of “ideas” that would inform the construction of a rational progressive society governed by an enlightened elite, whose  context technical expertise would justify their claim to rule. The illiberalism of this progressive-technocratic ideal became fully apparent in the West only with the onset of Covid. It is now widely understood that the subordination of public life to ostensibly scientific guidance and the effective transfer of sovereignty from the body of citizens to an unelected overclass are fundamentally inconsistent with liberty and individual dignity.

Finally, there's my latest at Ordinary Times, "Five Quintessentially American Recordings for Cranking Up on Independence Day." It was obviously written specifically for the recently-transpired holiday, but they're worth considering in the context of their quintessential American-ness. Plus, they're all great party tunes, and summer's here and the time is right. It won't be too much of a spoiler to name them here, since the point of each, if I do say so myself, is my commentary on them. I also provide the links, so you can listen right away. They are "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry, "Hey Good Lookin'' by Hank Williams, "One O'Clock Jump" by the Count Basie Orchestra, "Mystery Train" boy Elvis Presley, and "Dancing in the Street" by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas.