Opinion | Our 'Pursuit of Happiness' Is Killing the Planet - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ess-is-killing-the-planet.html
happiness global warming discipline greater good survival collective politics crisis culture liberalism harm
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At some point you’ll begin to think that the increasing globalization of bad things like climate change and infectious diseases is threatening liberal society.
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You’d have a point. At the foundation of classical liberalism is John Stuart Mill’s principle that every individual must be free to speak and act as he wishes “so long as he refrains from molesting others in what concerns them, and merely acts according to his own inclination and judgment in things which concern himself.”
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there’s a problem with this formulation: Even in his own time Mill was criticized for drawing a largely artificial distinction between behavior which does and does not impinge on others
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What would Mill have said if England had had then, as it does now, a public health system in which everyone shared the cost of treatment for alcoholism? What would he have said about smoking if he knew about the effects of secondhand smoke? Indeed, secondhand smoke is rapidly becoming a metaphor for our time.
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Am I being too alarmist? Possibly. Sweeping legislative proposals like the Green New Deal places virtually all of the burden on utilities and industry, rather than end-users like us, by imposing a price on carbon
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The other obvious objection to my scenario would be, in effect, so what? The First Amendment doesn’t protect your right to eat steak
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in 1819, Constant wrote that the democrats of Greece and Rome, like the revolutionaries of his own day, “admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community.”
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By contrast, Constant wrote, “the aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of security in private pleasures, and they call liberty the guarantees accorded by institutions to those pleasures.”
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One man’s meat is another man’s poison, as F.D.R. put it, more prescient than he knew. In the cataclysm of the Depression, the president was able to summon up the sense of collective purpose needed to embark on large-scale change
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We moderns build institutions, and establish tacit norms, to guarantee the security of such private pleasures. That’s liberal individualism.
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But what do we do once we see that some of those choices threaten the health and lives of others? We will have to strike a new equilibrium between what society has the right to demand of us and what we have a right to retain for ourselves.
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F.D.R. was a liberal — that was the word he used to describe himself — but he was willing to restrict some liberties in order to advance larger ones. A liberal, as he once put it, was prepared to use government to ensure the ordinary citizen “the right to his own economic and political life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
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Liberal societies, in short, have always faced the problem of secondhand smoke, but what once was exceptional has now become endemic.
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Constant wasn’t thinking of Marie Antoinette’s right to play at shepherdess while her subjects starved, but the right to open a shop and build yourself a home rather than be drafted into Napoleon’s army
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The Dutch can reach consensus on painful social questions because they’ve spent the last thousand years working cooperatively to build dikes; the climate accord adopted last year came after a full year of discussion among representatives of all interest groups.
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That’s not how American democracy works, and especially so in recent years. We allow those interest groups to wage a pitched battle using all the money and influence they can muster against one another. Legislation emerges only after a war of attrition.