I think the following information has tremendous, even global significance. It comes from David Shluman’s review of Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire:

As Velcheru Narayana Rao has eloquently shown for southern India, a form of awareness that can be characterized as modern emerged naturally and organically in the Telugu- and Tamil-speaking parts of the subcontinent toward the end of the fifteenth century.¹ It had nothing whatever to do with Western influence or the arrival of Vasco da Gama in Calicut in 1498. Highly original thinkers and poets, writing in all the languages of the south, discovered, or invented, a series of interlocking notions that together comprise a novel anthropology.

Thus we find, with particular prominence, the concept of an autonomous, subjective individual, responsible for his or her fate; a new theory of romantic love; the development of literary fiction as a privileged literary technique; a vogue for skepticism and realism, seen as informing the pragmatics of everyday life; the emergence of a cash economy and the conceptual revolution that rapid monetarization entails; the appearance of a bold, full-throated, unfettered female voice; and a new concept of nature as a rule-bound domain, separate from the human and amenable to disciplined observation and extrapolation. An innovative economic model of the mind, centered on the imaginative faculty, came to define the meaning of being human.²

With this shift in incorrigible assumptions there arose a new kind of state, which we call “Nayaka,” founded by a recently recruited elite of self-made men who had cut free from their ascriptive caste and family backgrounds and who saw themselves as free agents in a world of hitherto unknown opportunities.

I resist generalizations about “the West” because it encompasses too much diversity to be a meaningful category. What do such “Westerners” as Saint Teresa of Ávila, Oscar Wilde, Daniel Boone, Lenin, William Penn, Cole Porter, Thomas Edison, Martin Heidegger, Andy Warhol, Donald Trump, Emily Dickinson, and Hernán Cortés have in common? There is also, of course, tremendous internal diversity in other parts of the world–witness the ancient tradition of materialistic and hyper-individualistic thinkers from India, which is supposedly the home of mysticism and communitarianism.

Also, the borders of any area that we might call “the West” have been too vague and too porous for too long. Did you know that Menander I was a Buddhist Greek king of part of India in the second century BC, named after the Athenian comic playwright, whose coins bore Greek inscriptions on one side and Pali (the language of the Buddhist scriptures) on the other? He and successor kings, with names like Strato I and Theophilos, often depicted themselves as Greek gods in Buddhist poses and called themselves Dharmaraja or “King of the Dharma.” Was this the East or the West?

But I did used to think that the West could be distinguished from the rest of the world on one specific dimension. During the 19th century, in some parts of some European countries or countries settled predominantly by Europeans, two phenomena developed:

Modernity: a social order in which great masses of people are governed by laws and markets more than personal ties; in which few traditions and norms are seen as natural or inevitable and society is understood as an artifact; in which contract has replaced status as an organizing principle; in which individuals are primarily interested in their own personal attributes and rights; and in which technology pervasively mediates individuals’ relationship with nature.

Modernism: a set of intellectual and cultural movements that emerge in modernity, that describe modernity, and that bring modernity into the realm of ideas by renouncing aesthetic or intellectual traditions; instead, the ideal artist invents a new “contract” for each work.

Everywhere that modernity and modernism arrived, even in Paris and New York, they were perceived as new and problematic phenomena that caused distress. But the experience felt different in the West. This was also the age of European imperialism, of gunboats, missionaries, and the East India Company. And it was an age of race-consciousness, in which some people saw themselves as “white” and were seen that way by others. If you lived in a country where people were predominantly white and Christian (“the West”), then modernity and modernism seemed like indigenous changes. “We” were changing–for better or worse. If you lived elsewhere, modernity and modernism seemed to arrive with the imperialists, whether they came as conquerors or traders.

Thus modernists outside of Europe were pro-Western; anti-modernists were typically also anti-Western. In contrast, modernists in America or Europe (perhaps excepting Russia) were simply the progressives within those countries. The distinction was temporal in the West and spatial elsewhere. It was about “us” in the West and about “them and us” elsewhere.

Regardless of our views of modernism/modernity and of European global influence, we often equate the two. For instance, when a group of us viewed graphic art from the Johannesburg-based Artist Proof Studio last summer, the debate was whether young Black South African artists had been “Westernized.” See Leroye Malaton’s linotype “Zoey” below as an example:

Johannesburg is a modern city, and the contributors to Artist Proof Studio are modernists (or post-modernists, which I take to be just a stage in modernism). Authors like Shulman and Rao are asking us to drop the identification of modernity and modernism with the West. If the same social structures and intellectual responses also developed in Southern India in the 15th century, then they may have popped up in many other places as well. They are best understood not as Western inventions but as responses to a certain logic of development and scale. Then modernity and modernism are as much the property of Black South African artists as of (say) contemporary Germans. Neither invented modernity; both contribute to it; both must deal with it. Thinking that way would not solve any of the dilemmas of modern life, but it would make the dialogue healthier and more productive.

On Jan. 8, 2003, I posted a first blog, having decided to try posting every work day. Ten years and 2,403 posts later (one per work day, without any exceptions that I can recall), I’m still at it, propelled by a weird obsession, a chronic case of cacoethes scribendi, and feedback from friends and strangers alike. I’m so obsessive about posting every day that you often could find me, ca. 2004, attaching my laptop to a payphone jack in an airport lobby so that I could upload before the day ended. (Smartphones and pervasive wifi have made connections easier.) Feedback now comes in all forms–comments on the blog itself or on my Facebook page, citations in journal articles, long, critical emails, and random remarks at social gatherings. I appreciate it all. I don’t seem to be running out of steam, nor has the genre died, so I imagine I’ll still be at it at least a few years hence.

Deirdre McCloskey’s “Happyism: the Creepy New Economics of Pleasure” (New Republic, June 8) was one of David Brooks’ favorite articles of the year. It is indeed funny and learned, and McCloskey scores some valid points, but I think she evades the hardest questions.

The effort to quantify happiness goes back to utilitarianism (and before that, to Thomas Hobbes), but it has become highly empirical in the last few decades. The findings tend to challenge the gospel of free markets, because happiness seems to be only weakly correlated with liberty and prosperity but more reliably related to security and community. From a libertarian perspective, one ought to be suspicious of any argument that happiness can be enhanced by limiting freedom. Indeed, McCloskey believes just the opposite. She thinks that once happiness (rather than piety or honor) became a public priority, individuals were unleashed to pursue their own happiness, and that led to an astounding increase in prosperity that has also enhanced people’s happiness.

I agree that individual liberty can boost prosperity and that prosperity has genuine benefits for human development. I tend to assume, for example, that the liberalization of the Indian and Chinese economies since the 1980s has done far more good than harm. But McCloskey oversimplifies the story.

First of all, her explanation of economic growth is too simple. She attributes it to a change in public philosophy:

In the eighteenth century, our earthly happiness became important to us …. As a result, real income per head commenced rising after 1800, from the hopeless $3 a day that humanity had endured since the caves. … It’s ten times more stuff, more access to clean water, a higher life expectancy, and even, for the middling, more dishes of ice cream and more pastrami on rye.

She tells this story in large books that I have not read, but I would have to be persuaded to discount all the other explanations of economic growth since 1600 or 1800: colonial conquests, slaves, and silver; stock markets and banks; puritanical campaigns against worldly happiness; the steam engine and long-distance sailing ships.

Her intellectual history is also too simple:

By 1738, the Comte de Mirabeau wrote to a friend, recommending simply, ‘[W]hat should be our only goal: happiness.’ … To see how strange such a remark is, consider whether it could have been uttered by a leader of opinion in 1538. Martin Luther? Michelangelo? Charles V? No. They sought heavenly, artistic, or political glory—not something so domestic as happiness.

Those three examples are well chosen, but an old tradition did presume that happiness was the purpose of human life. Both before and after the bourgeois revolutions that McCloskey celebrates, happiness had defenders as well as critics. For instance, Aristotle  asked (in Ross’ translation), “what is the highest of all goods achievable by action”? He answered: “Verbally there is very general agreement; for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness, and identify living well and doing well with being happy; but with regard to what happiness is they differ, and the many do not give the same account as the wise.” The “many” (both in Aristotle’s day and in 1538) assumed that happiness was “some plain and obvious thing, like pleasure.”

McCloskey’s critique of the methodology of “happiness economics” also strikes me as too sweeping. I am all for debunking scientific pretensions in fields like economics that really rest on philosophical principles. But in faulting happiness research, McCloskey rides some hobby horses of her own. She has separately criticized statistical significance, arguing that this is an arbitrary threshold and that many findings meet the statistical test of significance without actually being meaningful. That is correct, but the question is whether all the claims of happiness research are insignificant in moral or policy terms. It’s a poor argument to say: (1) happiness statistics are presented as statistically significant; (2) the concept of statistical significance is widely misunderstood and overblown; therefore (3) happiness statistics must be misleading. McCloskey also criticizes happiness research for failing to address the difficulty of interpersonal comparisons, but I think that difficulty is widely acknowledged.

Her faith in progress also seems too simple:

One of the proponents of happiness studies, the eminent British economist Richard Layard, is fond of noting that “happiness has not risen since the ’50s in the U.S. or Britain or (over a shorter period) in western Germany.” Such an allegation casts doubt on the relevance of the “happiness” so measured. No one who lived in the United States or Britain in the ’50s (I leave judgments on West Germany in the ’70s to others) could possibly believe that the age of Catcher in the Rye or The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner was more fulfilling than recent times.

I think it is a difficult, interesting, and unresolved question whether people are happier in the US and Britain today (the age of Infinite Jest and The Corrections) than they were in the 1950s. The answer presumably varies by region and demographic group, but I find it completely plausible that at least some groups are less happy now. If we take suicide as a very hard measure of unhappiness, we can see that it has risen since 195o for younger men (Black and White) and for older Black men:

McCloskey does offer an attractively humane view of happiness. Of a modern woman in a developed country, she writes:

She has hugely greater scope, capabilities, potential, real personal income for what Wilhelm von Humboldt described in 1792 as Bildung, ‘self-culture,’ ‘self-development,’ life plans, the second-order preferences fulfilled that make for inner and outer success in life. She leads a life in full—fuller in work, travel, education, health, acquaintance, imagination.

A well-fed cat sitting in the sun is ‘happy’ in the pot-of-pleasure sense of happiness studies. The pussy is a 3 [on a 1-3 scale]. But what the modern world offers to men and women and children as against cats and other machines for pleasure is not merely such ‘happiness,’ but a uniquely enlarged scope to realize themselves.

I agree that liberty and prosperity have extended human capabilities over the centuries and across the globe. It is a different question whether the extra doses of consumer advertising, the longer working hours, the movement from manufacturing to service jobs, and the decreasing security seen in the US in  the last quarter century have brought any extra Bildung. I doubt it.

(See also Unhappiness and Injustice are Different Problems, Must You be Good to be Happy?, and Why we wish that goodness brought happiness, and why that is not so.)