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Drawing on cutting-edge research, award-winning journalist Jonathan Rauch answers all these questions. He shows that from our 20s into our 40s, happiness follows a well-documented U-shaped trajectory, a "happiness curve", declining from the optimism of youth into what's often a long, low trough in middle age, before starting to rise again in our 50s.
This isn't a midlife crisis, though. Rauch reveals that this downturn is instead a natural stage of life - and an essential one. By shifting priorities away from competition and toward compassion, you can equip yourself with new tools of wisdom and gratitude to head positively into your later years.
And Rauch can testify to this personally - it was his own slump, despite acclaim as a journalist and commentator that compelled him to investigate the happiness curve. His own story and the stories of many others from all walks of life - from a steelworker and a limo driver to a telecoms executive and a philanthropist - show how the ordeal of midlife malaise can reboot our values and even our brains for a rebirth of gratitude.
Full of insights and eye-opening data, and featuring practical ways to endure the dip and avoid its perils and traps, The Happiness Curve doesn't just show you the dark forest of midlife, it helps you find a path through the trees.
"A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all
take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must
place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism;
it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error
offends and upsets, as it often will." So writes Jonathan Rauch in
"Kindly Inquisitors, " which has challenged readers for more than
twenty years with its bracing and provocative exploration of the
issues surrounding attempts to limit free speech. In it, Rauch
makes a persuasive argument for the value of "liberal science" and
the idea that conflicting views produce knowledge within
society.
In this expanded edition of "Kindly Inquisitors, " a new foreword
by George F. Will strikingly shows the book's continued relevance,
while a substantial new afterword by Rauch elaborates upon his
original argument and brings it fully up to date. Two decades after
the book's initial publication, while some progress has been made,
the regulation of hate speech has grown domestically--especially in
American universities--and has spread even more internationally,
where there is no First Amendment to serve as a meaningful check.
But the answer to bias and prejudice, Rauch argues, is
pluralism--not purism. Rather than attempting to legislate bias and
prejudice out of existence or to drive them underground, we must
pit them against one another to foster a more vigorous and fruitful
discussion. It is this process that has been responsible for the
growing acceptance of the moral acceptability of homosexuality over
the last twenty years. And it is this process, Rauch argues, that
will enable us as a society to replace hate with knowledge, both
ethical and empirical.
"It is a melancholy fact that this elegant book, which is slender
and sharp as a stiletto, is needed, now even more than two decades
ago. Armed with it, readers can slice through the pernicious ideas
that are producing the still-thickening thicket of rules, codes,
and regulations restricting freedom of thought and
expression."--George F. Will, from the foreword
Arming Americans to defend the truth from today's war on
facts.Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media
pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent
additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common.
But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front
challenge to America's ability to distinguish fact from fiction and
elevate truth above falsehood. In 2016 Russian trolls and bots
nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy
theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the
same. Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of
falsehoods, and too often didn't even seem to try. Experts and some
public officials began wondering if society was losing its grip on
truth itself. Meanwhile, another new phenomenon appeared: "cancel
culture." At the push of a button, those armed with a cellphone
could gang up by the thousands on anyone who ran afoul of their
sanctimony. In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back
to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal
democracy and science to explain what he calls the "Constitution of
Knowledge" our social system for turning disagreement into truth.
By explicating the Constitution of Knowledge and probing the war on
reality, Rauch arms defenders of truth with a clearer understanding
of what they must protect, why they must do so and how they can do
it. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every
American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from
threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.
"Thoughtful and convincingly argued . . . Rauch's impressive book
is as enthusiastic an encomium to marriage as anyone, gay or
straight, could write."
--David J. Garrow, "The Washington Post Book World"
In May 2004, gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts, but it
remains a divisive and contentious issue across America. As
liberals and conservatives mobilize around this issue, no one has
come forward with a more compelling, comprehensive, and readable
case for gay marriage than Jonathan Rauch. In this book, he puts
forward a clear and honest manifesto explaining why gay marriage is
important--even crucial--to the health of marriage in America
today, grounding his argument in commonsense, mainstream values and
confronting social conservatives on their own turf. Marriage, he
observes, is more than a bond between individuals; it also links
them to the community at large. Excluding some people from the
prospect of marriage not only is harmful to them but also is
corrosive of the institution itself.
Gay marriage, he shows, is a "win-win-win" for strengthening the
bonds that tie us together and for remaining true to our national
heritage of fairness and humaneness toward all.
Thou shalt not hurt others with words. That commandment looks
harmless, even admirable. But it is neither. As Jonathan Rauch
states in this groundbreaking book, "This moral principle is deadly
- inherently deadly, not incidentally so - to intellectual freedom
and to the productive and peaceful pursuit of knowledge". Americans
are used to thinking of liberal society as standing on two pillars:
the economic system of capitalism and the political system of
democracy. But a third pillar of liberalism, although little
heralded and often poorly understood, is just as important: the
system for producing knowledge. "Liberal science", as Rauch calls
it, performs the crucial task of developing knowledge by choosing
between conflicting views. In Kindly Inquisitors, Rauch explores
how that system works and why it has now become the object of a
more powerful ideological attack than at any time since the great
battles between science and religion. Moving beyond the First
Amendment, Kindly Inquisitors defends the morality, rather than the
legality, of an intellectual regime that relies on unfettered and
often hurtful criticism. After explaining the rules that make
science work, Rauch identifies three major threats. The first and
oldest is from fundamentalists - people who believe that truth is
obvious and so need not be questioned. Newer and more troubling are
the intellectual egalitarians, who hold that everyone's beliefs
deserve equal respect. And most problematic of all are the
humanitarians, who decry "verbal violence" and demand that no one
give offense. Rauch traces the attacks on free thought from Plato's
Republic to Iran's death decree against Salman Rushdie, and then to
America's campuses andnewsrooms. He provides an impassioned
rebuttal to the moral claims of all who would regulate criticism on
the grounds of compassion. Attempts to protect people's feelings,
though appealing on the surface, lead to the control of knowledge
by central authorities. "The new sensitivity is the old
authoritarianism in disguise", he writes, "and it is just as
noxious". Kindly Inquisitors is a refreshing and vibrant essay that
casts a provocative light on the raging debates over political
correctness and multiculturalism. Students and philosophers will
appreciate its penetrating analysis of science; citizens, its
passionate defense of unfettered criticism.
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