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By Root 1133 0

Then we pour thick blankets of culture on the whole thing, full of extreme value judgments that determine people’s lives, and yet are as changeable as ocean waves, rolling over and over. The woman whose husband was killed and died in her arms was not a creature of my imagination. I was thinking of a woman named Ashley Smith. As you may recall, in 2005 Smith came to fame when she was taken hostage in her home by an escaped convict who had killed a random four people that day, and she was able to convince him not to kill her, and even to let her go. She told him about her own jail experiences, about the death of her husband, about her little girl of whom she had lost custody because of her recent devotion to methamphetamines. She gave the guy some meth, which he had never had before and which calmed him down. She herself was so moved by her desire to see her daughter again that she decided then and there to quit her use of the drug. The big thing was that she convinced him that there was life after this day of horror: he could go to prison and pay for what he had done; he could find God, and then bring his wisdom to others in prison. So he didn’t kill her or himself, or anyone else, and he didn’t risk getting shot on the run. He stayed put and let her leave to go see her daughter, at which point she called the cops, who sped over and collected him, peaceably. That was some pretty good humanism on her part. Americans responded with wonder and acclaim for her. But only when her book came out did we find out about the drugs. It is so degraded a behavior that she had to apologize to her reader before she could even start, naming her book Unlikely Angel. All I want you to do is imagine how all these actions would look if the whole thing happened in the nineteenth century. Some drug use helps get people through hard times, and it might be better if the culture had room for this, and if this kind of drug use were something one discussed with one’s physician.

In general, Americans have always been worried about unproductive happiness. After all, capitalism and democracy are sustained by unsatisfied desire and alert participation. What if everyone felt super, just rolling out of bed, scaring up some food, and then relaxing? But the concern is not only that contentment might harm capitalism and democracy; we have been worried about contentment as its own problem. Indeed, through much of the twentieth century we insisted that the reason democracy and capitalism were better than communism was precisely because communism might produce too much contentment, and thus turn us into drones. In the midst of the Cold War, the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers drew on this fear, showing vital, frantic Americans replaced by relaxed, dully-happy alien versions of themselves. In reality, you have to be exceptionally miserable to choose a dull, drugged, uninspired stasis. It is terrible to note that many people who take drugs do so because they are, indeed, exceptionally miserable, or at least powerless. The despair of poverty and racism leads people to want to be numb, and sexism does, too: women in Iraq take massive quantities of Valium, which is available without a prescription and costs about two cents a tablet. When drugs ease a tough, unfair experience, they also may allow it to continue, and it is often not obvious whether a drug to ease the pain is a blessed mercy or an insidious tool of the oppressors. If you feel bad and you can change your real-life situation, you still might take some palliative potions, but you certainly would not want that to interfere with your ability to flourish.

We are not happy when we are too sluggish or too wired, when our loved ones feel neglected, when we get nothing done, when we know we are hurting our health, when we can’t remember what happened. If you can take a drug and be happy and still not run into any of those problems, that is probably a good definition of “not taking too much.” Human happiness is always going to be generated through problem solving in our projects and in our relationships. The