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Wall Street Journal 2-11-98

By David Klinghoffer, the literary editor at National Review (Prager would review Klinghoffer's memoir The Lord Will Gather Me In less than a year later).

One basic point of Mr. Prager's is that to be happy we need to constantly battle human nature, denying ourselves short-term pleasures in return for long-term happiness. This requires self-control, and Mr. Prager's two-page excursion on that subject, "How to Develop Self-Control," will provoke a certain skepticism from anyone who has tried and failed to rein in a bad habit. The first two steps recommended here are, first, "to develop habits of self-control"; second, "to never lose sight of your goal," the ultimate end you are trying to attain by controlling yourself.

Uh huh, sure. In the light of day you can positively spill over with high-minded intentions not to smoke that cigarette, drink that whisky or pursue that White House intern, but when day fades into night, especially late night, many people find their high-minded intentions dissolving with a speed and thoroughness that amazes them. It's as if there were some ingredient in sunlight that temporarily bolsters strength of character, in the absence of which a character of reinforced steel turns to over-baked sweet potato.

OK, so Mr. Prager may in certain places oversimplify matters, but elsewhere he has an astonishing ability to state simple truths we hadn't heard articulated before, at least not so clearly, in a way that makes their truthfulness immediately and powerfully obvious. Readers of this book will find themselves writing in the margin: "right," "exactly," "how true."

Happiness is worth taking seriously, Mr. Prager explains, because whether we're happy or not affects not only us but our friends and family members. He plausibly sees being happy, or trying to be, as no less than a moral responsibility.

The main difficulty is that we tend to confuse happiness with pleasure or fun, the difference being that pleasure is experienced only during the pleasurable act itself and disappears soon after, while happiness persists. Fun, though we relentlessly pursue it, is often not experienced at all. Take parties, for example. "Many people attend [them] not because they actually have so much fun, let alone become happier, at them but rather because they associate parties with fun and believe that fun leads to happiness." ("Right.")

Mr. Prager finds the key to happiness in meaning and gratitude. One price of living in a secular culture is the assumption it carries - the way an ocean breeze will sometimes carry the scent of dead fish, penetrating every beachside house - that existence is ultimately meaningless. To fend off despair, we may willfully assign a transcendent value to our jobs, relationships or political causes. But a thoughtful secularist can't entirely forget that in the end all these values are arbitrary, "made up," as Mr. Prager says. And "it is quite difficult to be happy if we stare into the mirror each morning and see only the random product of meaningless forces, stellar dust that happens to be self-aware." ("Exactly.")

Religious faith provides an antidote for that depressed fellow looking back at you from the mirror, not only by explaining that the universe does in fact mean something but by providing a forum for expressing the other key to happiness: gratitude. In traditional Christian and Jewish liturgies, prayer consists overwhelmingly not of petitions but of thanks. This isn't for God's benefit, but for ours. "We tend to think that it is being unhappy that leads people to complain, but it is truer to say that it is complaining that leads to people becoming unhappy. Become grateful and you will become a much happier person." ("How true.")