I am delighted to announce that the winner of my Prestigious Ashurbanipal Book Award for August 2024 is Jeffrey Rosen's “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.”
The book comes from Jeff's decision during COVID in 2020 to immerse himself in the literature that inspired the Founding Fathers — especially Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison, but also Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Louis Brandeis, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and poet Phyllis Wheatley (if you don’t know Wheatley, you need to read this book). The book that came up the most, by a country mile, was Cicero’s “Tusculan Disputations,” and it has now been added to my reading list. Other ancient texts include Seneca’s “Moral letters to Lucilius” (something I already reread when I am going through hard times), Epictetus’s “Enchiridion,” and Plutarch’s “Lives.” But there are also more modern works included, like Montesquieu’s “The Spirit of the Laws,” Adam Smith’s “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” and my all time favorite (next to John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty”) David Hume’s “Essays: Moral, Political, Literary.”
I know. I get it. This sounds like terrifically dry reading. But in Jeff’s wholehearted engagement with the material, what might otherwise feel gray and abstract becomes a living, breathing source of warming wisdom.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, where we host FIRE’s annual college student conference, and I am lucky enough to consider him a friend. So I will be (and have been) referring to him as “Jeff” throughout this post. But lest you suspect favoritism, I actually tend to be quite a bit harder on books by people I know. And whenever one of my friends writes a book, there's always that muffled dread — like when a friend talks you into going out to see their new band play in Williamsburg.
Thankfully, Jeff’s book is the equivalent of going to see your friend's band and it ends up being the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Yes, that is very, very good). Of course, comparing this book to a cool band is particularly funny because it is such a wonderfully, rhapsodically, nerdy romp. Jeff got so into this that, I kid you not, he even started writing sonnets to summarize his takeaways from the Founders’ ancient reading list. And that was before he discovered that the Founders had actually done the same thing, for the same reasons! Jeff includes those sonnets throughout the book.
And while this might come off to some as weird or over-the-top, it's a reminder that as serious as the Founders could be, they were often quite playful and funny (particularly Benjamin Franklin, a personal hero after whom I named one of my sons). Also, turning what you’ve just learned into a poem is a great way to test whether you've really understood it.
I have already read Jeff’s book twice, and will surely read it at least twice more — possibly even this year.
And here is where those of you who are skeptical of this book recommendation are about to get even more skeptical. The book is organized into 12 chapters, each one centered around classical virtues as understood by the ancient Stoics and Epicureans, as well as people like Benjamin Franklin. They are order, temperance, humility, industry, frugality, sincerity, resolution, moderation, tranquility, cleanliness, justice, and silence.
Well that sounds tremendously fun now, doesn’t it?
Readers may scoff at the apparent seriousness, but actually, having grown up in an environment where my peers dismissed all of these virtues as “uncool” (and made me feel bad about some of the natural Stoicism I had learned from my mother) I have come to realize that these are very important virtues to have and promote.
How the classes police their own
My mother is British, and until I was maybe 10 we spent many years living below the poverty line. Because of this, I might think more about economic class than others — and maybe some of what I'm describing here is actually some of the bad counterculture faux-wisdom that was still in strong circulation in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
But it really did seem to me that when I got to places like Stanford Law School I suddenly came upon people who took a lot of these ancient virtues seriously, even if they were embarrassed to admit it or weren’t even fully conscious of it.
That was certainly true of industry. Indeed, I often joke that Stanford was my first experience with “decent, hard-working rich folk.”
Meanwhile, growing up among more working-class kids, and through working in restaurants when I was young, I could see that the virtue of hard work was definitely taken seriously. Many of the kids I related to the most worked very hard at sports, lifting, or their jobs. But other things, like moderation, temperance, order, etc., tended to be more of a joke — and industry towards study in particular, well, that was definitely uncool. It was the kind of environment in which I didn't want people to know that I snuck off to the Danbury Public Library on Sundays just to read for my own pleasure. I didn't want people to know that I had good grades, and in fact for the first couple years of high school I did everything in my power to not have them — including playing hooky so often that I won the popular vote for “Most Likely to be Absent” in a landslide.
And I do suspect class plays a big role here. As Rob Henderson points out in his memoir, “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class,” (my book of the month for February) our society has a weird dynamic in that a lot of the most successful people have a tendency to avoid (borrowing a term from Charles Murray) preaching what they practice. Henderson writes about arriving at Yale and asking his fellow students how they got there. Oftentimes their answer would be, essentially, “luck.” But he was really skeptical of this and would push a little harder, based on the (almost certainly correct) assumption that this wasn’t the kind of advice they would actually give to, say, their baby sister.
I can understand how saying, “Work your ass off,” “Be disciplined,” or “Practice good habits,” can sound totally obnoxious when imparted to someone else. But it's also profoundly dishonest and indeed patronizing to effectively provide terrible, “Anything goes, it’s just luck” advice about how to live your life to everyone but your friends and family.
But is the happiness of the “decent, hard working, rich folk” really happiness? I was definitely informed that the successful were secretly miserable, grinding themselves away in a dull, gray life, unfulfilled, repressed, and bottling up their emotions until they exploded. But this all kind of rings of propaganda to me now. Yes, many of my law school classmates did go on to some really brutal years in law firms that were pretty miserable, but many of them are really thriving now on multiple levels. And while I see some real value in the book “The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite” about how life for, in particular, elite law school graduates can be pretty awful, I always have to remind people that nobody actually requires you to go the brutal law firm route.
I know this because I was the one who went the non-profit route and found a really fulfilling, enriching, and anything but soul-crushing career. But it's taken me an embarrassingly large portion of my life to get over this dysfunctional programming. I remember when I first started at FIRE in Philadelphia in 2001. I was plugged into the Philadelphia arts scene and was, of course, the kind of person who would work late and go into the office on weekends. There I was, living out what had been my goal since well before law school: to defend freedom of speech and the First Amendment, putting in extra time and extra work for something I found deeply fulfilling. But I felt a little guilty about it. Indeed, some of my friends seemed pretty judgmental about how much I worked, as if I was somehow living my life wrong even though I was actually fulfilling it. So I was working really hard on stuff I really, really loved, and I felt bad about it. It actually took me watching The West Wing and seeing all of these people working at the White House on the show, doing what they cared about and staying late to make things happen, to remind me that commitment like that is something you should be proud of, not embarrassed by.
Now, I look back at those times of very hard work and long hours with great pride and satisfaction. And this is the kind of happiness that “Pursuit of Happiness” draws you to so well. It's not the delirious ecstasy of, say, a peak experience at Burning Man (Confession: Yes, I went for 7 years — you know, back when it was cool). It's the more peaceful, rich satisfaction of feeling like you have things under control, and that the future seems bright with you in charge. And while this may not sound all that exciting to people, I really doubt there's anyone reading this who has gone through a period where they were getting real meaningful work done, keeping to a good schedule, getting a lot of exercise, not drinking or eating too much, and didn’t feel pretty freaking great. I look back on the most hedonistic times of my life with mixed feelings, but I look back on, say, summer sessions for football in high school, or staying up late to work on my first book, with profound satisfaction.
On anger: Lessons from George Washington
I'm fully aware that some of my enthusiasm for this book may come from the fact that I found it as much-needed advice during what has been a hard year. One thing that is hard not to feel doing my job sometimes is, frankly, anger, but this book provided a great role model on how to deal with it: George Washington.
I have been defending freedom of speech on college campuses since 2001, back when everybody would assure me there was no problem. Indeed, depending on how deeply entrenched they are in higher education, or how much they are part of the power structure, people still sometimes assure me that there is no problem. Of course, I also get claims (mainly from the left) that the only real threat is coming from off-campus. They also tell me that it’s actually coming from right-wing attempts like Florida's Stop WOKE Act (which we've actually defeated in court), while pretending that threats from within campus — which are much more widespread — somehow don't really matter or simply represent the right side of history.
It’s worth reminding people, yet again, that 2023 was the worst year for student shout-downs, that 2024 is definitely going to blow that out of the water, and that practically all of that activity is coming from the political left.
Thankfully, an awful lot of people who were once pretty skeptical that there's a problem on campus have come around to the problem being a real and serious one. But the amount of evidence you have to marshal to show that can sometimes be absurd, especially for a problem that I think deep down almost everybody in academia knows is real.
But even those skeptics who will now admit that I — or we at FIRE — had a point can still be filled with absolute vitriol. As Rikki Schlott and I lay out in our book “The Canceling of the American Mind,” the infuriating tactic for winning arguments without winning arguments is generally to apply more advanced insult technology and rely on various repackaged ad-hominem approaches. We even named a fourth Great Untruth (continuing from the three Jonathan Haidt and I named in “The Coddling of the American Mind”) for this tendency: Bad people only have bad opinions. Rather than refuting someone's actual argument, you just have to figure out a way to show or imply that they are bad people — as if bad people could never possibly have a good point.
There is a place on what Rikki and I call the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress (the left’s citadel against productive discourse) called “the ‘don’t get angry’ barricade.” If after being repeatedly insulted by the other tactics employed in the PRF you lose your cool, that itself can become the story and the distraction, and the way to win the argument without winning the argument.
This was most clearly on display in some of the media coverage of the shoutdown of Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan at Stanford Law School last year. Some outlets covered it as if the major takeaway was that he lost his temper and “lashed out at the students,” without pointing out that Duncan was shouted down for 10 minutes, and that students’ insults included things like “I can find the prostate, why can't you find the clit?” and “I hope your daughters get raped.” According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Duncan “got what he wanted” out of the affair: “fame.” Duncan and I couldn't agree less on many things, including aspects of First Amendment law, for example, but I don't blame him one bit for getting angry.
When I'm doing my job right, both progressives and conservatives can hate my guts. That can often be a good sign. In a polarized environment, it can signal that you're actually being nonpartisan. But it doesn't mean it's any less exhausting. Very often, it follows me home. People I interact with off the clock, even my friends, might genuinely hate me for a particular case that I'm involved in, or for the fact that we defend both liberals and conservatives, or because our donors span the political spectrum. I've had many nasty fallings out — usually with people who don't bother to learn a lot about what we actually do, or the kind of amazing people who work for us, or the many, many cases that they would be in violent agreement with us about if they only bothered to take the time to learn.
We have to deal with publications like The Los Angeles Times absurdly claiming that FIRE is “a group that claims to advocate for free speech on college campuses — except when the speakers don’t share its political views.” This is simply astoundingly lazy and, with even the most minimal investigation of what we do, demonstrably false. Since October 7th, for example, we have adamantly defended the rights of both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel students and faculty. Are we a group that somehow magically agrees with both sides of that conflict? Maybe if you actually bothered to look at our record, you would realize that we’ve been involved in the right side of pretty much every single academic freedom and free speech case on campus for a good 25 years. But no.
The policy for many seems to be to do one of two things: First, when you don’t like us but need to mention one of FIRE’s cases, do it without citing us. Or you can just erase our involvement from the record entirely, as a certain high-profile newspaper just did in their slimy writeup about a certain high-profile public figure who used to work for them. Second, if you don’t like us and want to criticize us, mention a case of ours where we’re defending someone or something you don’t like and pretend it's the only type of case that we ever deal with.
This kind of stuff seems to happen almost every day, so it's sometimes difficult to keep my anger in check. That’s why realizing that the Founding Fathers, including John Adams and, most compellingly, George Washington, struggled with keeping their own anger in check — and that they had to exercise those aforementioned virtues to compose themselves — was genuinely what I needed.
Learning that someone who had such legendary self-command as George Washington struggled with his own anger throughout his life was a genuine inspiration. It was also great to learn that his go-to for dealing with it was the inspiration of Seneca's “Moral Letters,” something that I use as well when going through hard times (it is MUCH more fun to read than Marcus Aurelius's “Meditations,” which, honestly, I find grim and almost neurotic).
Here is a little more about how Washington interacted with the old Stoic philosopher who, showing a lack of dogmatism, quoted the Epicureans constantly. From page 152 of the Kindle Edition of Jeff’s book:
Washington’s edition of Seneca also includes the book On Anger. Seneca argues that anger is an unproductive passion: by dividing human beings from one another, it prevents us from pursuing our divine duty to live in harmony with divine Reason. “Anger is not only a vice, but a vice point blank against nature,” Seneca writes, “for it divides instead of joining, and, in some measure, frustrates the end of Providence in human society.” Seneca includes several chapters on how to prevent anger by avoiding rash judgments, techniques of emotional self-regulation that Washington devoted his life to cultivating. “There is hardly a more effectual remedy against anger than patience and consideration,” Seneca suggests. “There is no encountering the first heat and fury of it, for it is deaf and mad. The best way is (in the beginning) to give it time and rest.” Washington deployed the technique of delaying responses to allow his passion to cool so successfully that he seldom lost control of himself in public.
I've often used the image of “bottling up emotions until they explode” as a metaphor. It was another part of the miseducation I mentioned earlier. Growing up, there was always this idea that you had to let your anger out in order to get rid of it. But for those of us who have been in fights (and I have been in my fair share), the truth is that anger tends to feed anger. Rather than provide a release, like a steam valve, indulging anger is like fueling a fire. That’s the better metaphor. Seneca understood that, as did George Washington.
This sentiment is also encapsulated by one of my favorite quotes (which is often falsely attributed to the Buddha but is actually a mashup of at least two different pieces of wisdom describing the same basic idea):
“Holding onto anger is like taking poison and expecting the other person to die.”
Some readers may dismiss Jeff’s book before reading it by assuming that it’s old-fashioned and doesn’t engage with the many flaws of the people it’s discussing. On the contrary, it spends a lot of time pointing out, for example, Thomas Jefferson's hypocrisy when it came to slavery and keeping his own children in bondage. It also points out the racism and sexism of many of these men, as well as their anti-Semitism. It even calls out Jeff's own hero, Louis Brandeis, for showing a blindspot for Jefferson’s gross hypocrisy regarding slavery.
Contrary to what some might assume, “The Pursuit of Happiness” is an absolutely modern meditation on ancient wisdom. It works as much as a self-help book as a piece of history, and I left it feeling genuinely inspired. It's not for everybody, but if you're the kind of nerd who wants to really get into the minds of some great figures from history and learn some of the wisdom that animated their lives, this is absolutely the best book I've read for that purpose.
Shot for the Road
The U.K. is at it again, this time censoring a Charli XCX advertisement for the U.K. tour for her new album “Brat,” featuring an empty “sandwich bag.”
This sounds amazing. Thanks so much for your review.
Thank you. Adding it to my list.