The "Happiness" Of Your Lawyers

Back in March at the American Enterprise Institute annual dinner, Charles Murray gave a talk entitled "The Happiness of the People."   The managing partner of a large AmLaw firm recently brought it to my attention.

The AEI's "abstract" would have you believe that the speech responds to the premise that "America's current leaders seem to be leading us down the path to European-style social democracy," but it's actually nothing of the sort.

The speech is remarkable, not just for its non-ideological, unorthodox, fascinating, and deeply insightful perspective on human nature, but, so the managing partner suggested and so I agree, because it's pregnant with implications for the proper molding of the culture of high-performing law firms.

The speech does proceed, however (as advertised), from the premise that a critical question facing the nation given some of the predilections of the Obama Administration is "Do we want the United States to be like Europe?"   Whether or not you ascribe those motives to or endorse that characterization of the Obama Administration, I'd like to ask you to step back and put that aside in order to be able to reflect without prejudice on Murray's insights into the elements necessary for the proper expression of human nature.  (Nor, for the record, is Murray a hard-bitten opponent of the European model.  Indeed, he writes that "Not only are social democrats intellectually respectable, the European model has worked in many ways. I am delighted when I get a chance to go to Stockholm or Amsterdam, not to mention Rome or Paris. When I get there, the people don't seem to be groaning under the yoke of an evil system. Quite the contrary. There's a lot to like--a lot to love--about day-to-day life in Europe.")

Nor s his critique focused on the economic consequences of the "European model:"  "[It] has indeed created sclerotic economies and it would be a bad idea to imitate them. But I want to focus on another problem."

He begins with Federalist 62, which, he scrupulously notes, was "probably" written by Madison:

"A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained."

"Happiness," rather than equality, security, or prosperity, is the key word, and "happiness" in the Aristotelian sense of an enduring and well-justified satisfaction with life as a whole.  This is "happiness" in the sense of "deep satisfaction," or, viewed from the public as opposed to the private perspective, reflecting the old-fashioned notion of "a life well-lived."  And on this score the European model is profoundly flawed:  Simply put, it does not conduce to Aristotelian happiness.

How so?

"It drains too much of the life from life."

This seems a large indictment, but here's what Murray is driving at:

[When I talk about "deep satisfaction"]  I'm talking about the kinds of things that we look back upon when we reach old age and let us decide that we can be proud of who we have been and what we have done. Or not.

To become a source of deep satisfaction, a human activity has to meet some stringent requirements. It has to have been important (we don't get deep satisfaction from trivial things). You have to have put a lot of effort into it (hence the cliché "nothing worth having comes easily"). And you have to have been responsible for the consequences.

There aren't many activities in life that can satisfy those three requirements. Having been a good parent. That qualifies. A good marriage. That qualifies. Having been a good neighbor and good friend to those whose lives intersected with yours. That qualifies. And having been really good at something--good at something that drew the most from your abilities. That qualifies. 

All these activities, Murray observes (uncontroversially, I think) occur within four institutions:  Family, community (which can be virtual), vocation (or avocation, or cause), and faith (which can be a- or non-religious, in my opinion, although Murray presumably would beg to differ).  If, then, the goal of social policy should be to help make those institutions "robust and vital," then "the European model doesn't do that.  It enfeebles every single one of them."

Again, a large charge.  But we've reached the crux of his analysis:

Put aside all the sophisticated ways of conceptualizing governmental functions and think of it in this simplistic way: Almost anything that government does in social policy can be characterized as taking some of the trouble out of things. [...]

The problem is this: Every time the government takes some of the trouble out of performing the functions of family, community, vocation, and faith, it also strips those institutions of some of their vitality--it drains some of the life from them. It's inevitable.   Families are not vital because the day-to-day tasks of raising children and being a good spouse are so much fun, but because the family has responsibility for doing important things that won't get done unless the family does them.

If this sounds a bit too abstract and theoretical (certainly at first blush it frankly does), Murray makes it concrete:

When the government takes the trouble out of being a spouse and parent, it doesn't affect the sources of deep satisfaction for the CEO. Rather, it makes life difficult for the janitor. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: "He is a man who pulls his own weight." "He's a good provider." If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away.

I am not describing some theoretical outcome. I am describing American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn't. I could give a half dozen other examples. Taking the trouble out of the stuff of life strips people--already has stripped people--of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say, "I made a difference."

The immense perversity of "taking the trouble out of" being a spouse or being a worker is that, as soon as the trouble is taken out, human beings lose interest in it.  Witness Europe:

Scandinavia and Western Europe pride themselves on their "child-friendly" policies, providing generous child allowances, free day-care centers, and long maternity leaves. Those same countries have fertility rates far below replacement and plunging marriage rates. Those same countries are ones in which jobs are most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are most lavish. And they, with only a few exceptions, are countries where work is most often seen as a necessary evil, least often seen as a vocation, and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.

How can this be?, you're asking yourself.  And yet you immediately, gut-instinct level, know the answer.

Murray elaborates on the human psycho-social-cultural dynamic at work here, and particularly on the implications of what he calls the error of "the equality premise."  As he would have it:

The equality premise says that, in a fair society, different groups of people--men and women, blacks and whites, straights and gays, the children of poor people and the children of rich people--will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life--the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and CEOs. When that doesn't happen, it is because of bad human behavior and an unfair society. [...]

Within a decade, no one will try to defend the equality premise. All sorts of groups will be known to differ in qualities that affect what professions they choose, how much money they make, and how they live their lives in all sorts of ways. [...]

There is no reason to fear this new knowledge.   Differences among groups will cut in many different directions, and everybody will be able to weight the differences so that their group's advantages turn out to be the most important to them.

If we "repeal" the equality premise, there's just one problem.  As your life experiences accumulate--in the vital contexts of family, vocation, community, and faith--you will slowly become more and more responsible for the life you are living, and the ultimate question whether it all adds up to "a life well lived," and to "deep satisfaction" with what you've accomplished, in the eyes of both yourself and those who populate those vital contexts.  The "European model," or the indulgently paternalistic law firm, would steal that responsibility away from you.  This would be a Faustian bargain.

And so there's hope.  Not only the hope that I have always fervently embraced, which has its roots in the truest and noblest strains of what it means to be American, such as our uncanny predilection for optimism, even when there seems to be no explicable reason for it, or our still amazing lack of class envy (we celebrate rather than resent success), or our potent assumption that each of us is in charge of our own destiny.  More than that, it's the essential belief in the powerful respect due individuality:

Restoration of the premise that used to be part of the warp and woof of American idealism: people must be treated as individuals. The success of social policy is to be measured not by equality of outcomes for groups, but by open, abundant opportunity for individuals. It is to be measured by the freedom of individuals, acting upon their personal abilities, aspirations, and values, to seek the kind of life that best suits them.

Combine this profoundly American value, now merely two centuries old and counting, with the insights emerging from behavioral evolution (confirming what some texts over two millennia old have taught) that the "life well-lived" requires dynamic and energetic and fruitful engagement with those around us, and you begin to have the ingredients for a "vibrant and robust" culture.

And as for your firm?

Well, haven't we just laid it out?

Focus on individuals.

Eschew equality of outcome but insist on equality of opportunity.

Expect optimism in the face of deepest adversity.

Demand engagement with the community.

Celebrate the "life well lived" (the career well performed).

And most importantly:  Beware "taking the trouble out" of things. Because the deep secret of human nature is that we don't appreciate that.  We not only don't appreciate it, we don't respond well to it.  We not only don't respond well to it, it's toxic to our communities, and it devalues the very virtues you thought you were trying to promote.

So in a word:  In your firm, dare not try to take the trouble out of things.