Our own Peter Lawler insightfully examines the evidence that, despite breathless exertions in the service of creating a secular paradise, the modern attempt to "master and possess" nature has failed to make us fundamentally happier. The crux of the problem has to do with our interpretation of the individual as an agent of autonomous freedom untethered from any natural bounds—-happiness is now to be sought against the obstacles of nature rather than consonant with the purposes and limitations it might illuminate. As a consequence, happiness is delinked from virtue, once understood to be its requisite condition, and the experience of happiness is severed from the edifying lessons of melancholy and misery. If we want to be truly happy we have to learn to be truly good, and goodness requires the fortifying experience of struggling with, rather than evading, the characteristic human encounter with alienation and loneliness.
