Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual.

Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual, by Dennis Prager (HarperCollins, 179 pp., $23)

Miss Shalit is a contributing editor of City Journal.

MY good-natured cousin Emily skeptically eyed the book I had brought to our coffee date. "Happiness Is a Serious Problem? Hmmm," she mused, then cheerfully volunteered, "I think happiness is a serious problem only for people who are unhappy." We both laughed, but I knew I would not be able to dismiss Emily's observation. She is one of the loveliest people I know, happens to be married to a very kind man, and on top of it recently gave birth to an adorable little boy. If anyone is an expert on happiness, it's Emily.

Nonetheless, it is Dennis Prager's task to prove Emily wrong. Happiness, he insists in his new book, must be taken seriously by everyone. Becoming as happy as we can be is not just something we owe ourselves; instead, as we learn right in Chapter One: "Happiness Is a Moral Obligation." Mr. Prager, a conservative radio host and public speaker, first suspected that happiness was fundamentally altruistic when a woman approached him after one of his lectures. She simply sighed, "I only wish my husband had come to this talk!" Anyone who has run out of ways to cheer up a depressed spouse or inconsolable friend instinctively knows the truth of Prager's insight that "we owe it to our husband or wife, our fellow workers, our children, our friends, indeed to everyone who comes into our lives, to be as happy as we can be." Since this is tricky sometimes, a few pointers are in order.

To Dennis Prager, happiness is a kind of craft, or what in philosophy class is called a techne. If you practice it, you can master it.

First, working at happiness entails "developing attitudes that enable us not to despair." One of these attitudes we are to develop is that life is tragic. Prager points out that if we assume that tragedy is normal, then instead of "waiting for something wonderful to happen" to make us happy, we will be happy by default. Next, we must recognize that our nature is insatiable and we will invariably be dissatisfied. To control this insatiable nature, we should distinguish between "necessary dissatisfaction" about things that we can change, and "unnecessary dissatisfaction" about things we cannot change.

It also helps considerably if you lower your expectations to meet reality. One of Prager's examples is a man waiting for "a Playboy Playmate who studies Torah." This is unrealistic. He reminds us that, "in general, expectations lead to unhappiness." So does hoping for unconditional love: "Seeking unconditional love is a vestige of childhood." Prager even equips us with a formula, "U = I - R," which he calls "The Unhappiness Formula: the amount of Unhappiness equals Images minus Reality."

Other recommendations: Don't equate happiness with success or mere fun ("Everything that leads to happiness involves pain"), and don't compare yourself with others. The chapter titled "The Opposite Sex" is the most insightful in the book, underscoring the differences between male and female insatiability: "among men, this area of insatiability is sexual variety; and among women, it is emotional intimacy." Becoming aware of our differences helps us control these areas of insatiability. In the case of the man who acts on his insatiable sexual nature, for example, after sleeping with a new woman he finds that he is "right back where he was the day before he had his affair" -- still "lusting for someone new" -- only now with "potentially disastrous marital and other problems." But if he realizes he can never be satisfied, perhaps he won't make the attempt. A woman, for her part, "must continually grapple with the fact that she can never fully satisfy her emotional nature. For a woman to know this about her nature can be very liberating. By knowing about her insatiable nature, she can come to appreciate (when possible) the intimacy that she does have." It's true. I shut my copy of Happiness Is a Serious Problem, began reciting, "My emotional nature is insatiable," and suddenly a deep feeling of calm washed over me. Unfortunately, this feeling departed shortly thereafter. Luckily, there are other tips.

Prager turns out to be an unreserved enthusiast for curing the "biochemical origins of unhappiness" through psychopharmaceutical drugs. Taking Prozac does not mean one is avoiding "the real sources of pain" in life, he explains, nor do psychopharmaceutical drugs "make anyone happy; they only enable people to become happy."

Fair enough, but those who do not want to go on Prozac will probably find Prager's philosophical advice more helpful than these pharmaceutical remedies. "Happiness is only achievable," he later posits, "when it is a by-product of something else, and you must hold that something to be more important than happiness." Prager suggests that the pursuit of moderation, depth, wisdom, clarity, goodness, and the transcendent will help us attain happiness.

Clearly, Dennis Prager has a talent for getting right to the point, without any footnotes or explanation. In a recent issue of his newsletter, Prager Perspective, for example, he answered that question which had puzzled so many pundits: "Princess Diana: Why So Much Grief?" The greater outpouring of grief for Diana than for Mother Teresa was not, according to Prager, "an example of a world gone wrong"; it was perfectly understandable. After all, "Diana was young"; "Diana was the mother of two young children"; "Fairy Tales should not have unhappy endings"; "She was a good soul"; "She was an accessible, and troubled, princess"; "We care about those we know about."

A few weeks later, this time on his radio show, Prager memorably reproached men who don't open doors for women. Several men called in, each complaining that, once upon a time, a woman didn't thank him for opening a door, and so now he won't do it ever again. Prager was disgusted with these men and notified them that you don't open a door for the thank you, but because you are a man: "Men, you should be ashamed of yourselves! What kinda nonsense is this? Of course you hold a door for a woman!" This remarkable gift Prager has, to state the obvious trenchantly with no fuss at all, is very well suited to his radio show and newsletter. It is somewhat less well suited to a book, particularly one that takes up an idea with such a long history.

After all, Prager's emphasis on moderation and his thesis that "happiness is only achievable when it is a by-product of something else, and you must hold that something to be more important than happiness," are very Aristotelian. (Aristotle, of course, famously drew the distinction between "ends" and "final ends.") Aristotle also held that happiness was not pleasure; it was, rather, the "virtuous activity of the soul." As for Prager's "Unhappiness equals Images minus Reality" formula, his acceptance of fate, and his recommendation that we scale back our expectations, that is all very Stoic. Except that in postmodern Stoicism, should we fail to reduce our expectations sufficiently, there are always psychopharmaceutical drugs at the ready to take care of any remaining "biochemical origins of unhappiness." Yet to conclude that Prager is just Chrysippus on Prozac would be unfair, I think. By the time we jump to his next formula for happiness -- that men and women are more contented when cognizant of their different natures -- we seem to be bouncing much closer to Rousseau's Emile.

The difficulty here is not just one of attribution. Intelligent people are continually reinventing the wheel, and in an age scornful of dead white males it is wonderful to hear a living white male making these old arguments. Rather, the problem with stuffing so many philosophies into one book is that half of the resulting advice is simply incompatible with the other half. An itch to lead a life of Aristotelian virtue, for example, is not likely to issue from a pose of Stoic resignation.

In the end, Dennis Prager's suggestions run in different directions because he hasn't really decided which is the best path to happiness. But then again, who has? At least he warned us: happiness is a serious problem.