Happiness is frequently posited as the ultimate good, the summum bonum to which all humans aspire. The United Nations now measures the collective happiness of nations even to the third decimal point. But is individual contentment really the point of existence? And what happens to a society which believes the only goal of life is the pursuit of happiness? No people have pondered these questions more profoundly than the Russians, whose grim history has compelled a clear-eyed and honest appraisal of the human condition. Gary Saul Morson, writing in The Athenaeum Review, tells us how Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn captured the psychic impoverishment of those who neglect their soul and measure their lives merely by material comforts.
A Spite That Knows No Bounds
Gratingly awful global scold Greta Thunberg’s latest stunt is to turn on her own motherland. Sweden has been very good to her, but the former social-democratic paradise’s mugging by the realities of uncontrolled immigration do not sit well with the keffiyeh-clad rabblerouser. “For years, Sweden took more asylum seekers per capita than any other country in Europe,” writes Fredrik Karrholm in The Spectator. “Now asylum numbers have fallen to their lowest level since 1985.”
