The followings is my excerpt from an excellent review by Thomas Meaney on the book French author Pascal Bruckner wrote in 2001, Perpetual Euphoria: ( the full review can be read by googling "
Be Not of Good Cheer" or click here: http://www.google.com/search?q=Be+Not+of+Good+Cheer&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a)
Are you happy right now? Statistically speaking, most Americans say they are. But how much should we trust their response? Whatever the inner reality, we often feel intense social pressure to pretend to a happiness or contentment that, in truth, eludes us completely.
In "Perpetual Euphoria," Pascal Bruckner, a French philosopher and social commentator, proposes to free us from this "pitiless idol of happiness." He subjects our culture's happiness-instructors and self-help gurus to such savage mockery that it's easy to overlook the seriousness of his argument. Reading "Perpetual Euphoria" feels like watching Friedrich Nietzsche give a close reading to the latest issue of Men's Health magazine.
Mr. Bruckner begins his book with an acerbic history of happiness. His version of the story goes something like this: Once upon a time in the West, the pursuit of happiness was not the chief end of life. Parents did not lose sleep over their children's prospects for self-fulfillment; instead they raised them to be burden- bearing members of their community. Christian doctrine stressed that human beings inhabited a fallen world in which satisfaction was postponed. Not only were pain and agony not to be avoided, they were, at times, opportunities to come closer to God. "It is not shameful to die in pain," wrote Pascal; "it is shameful to die in pleasure."
How did we escape this vale of tears? Instead of rehearsing the usual explanations about the rise of science and technology, Mr. Bruckner claims that the Christian attitude to pain contained the seeds of its own undoing. Many Christians naturally desired to hasten the coming of the Messiah, who would deliver them from their earthly torment. During the French Revolution, this urgent desire was secularized into utopian designs—as when idealists like Robespierre tried to eliminate the misery of the ancien regime and remake society in accordance with republican virtue. But for Mr. Bruckner, as much as for Edmund Burke, any attempt to usher in a reign of felicity will be marked by folly—and may well create new forms of misery. He notes that the more secular Western societies have become, the more sensitive they are to suffering that is no longer justifiable as part of a divine plan.
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