Don’t Worry, Be Happy--and Lose Your Self-Esteem : Psychobabble: A task force addresses good feelings. But you need to live a life that’s good, instead of simply feeling good about the life you’re living.

The California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility was the gift of Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara) to the state. Its final report, three years and $735,000 in the making, was conceived in committee and dedicated to the proposition that everyone is human. It’s a small world, after all.

The task force never reached consensus on what self-esteem is, but members did come up with a compromise: “Appreciating my own worth and importance and having the character to be accountable for myself and to act responsibly toward others.” What oft was thought, but ne’er so expensively expressed.

The Washington-Boston axis powers are laughing at our local legends once again. One such legend goes:

Far across the Hudson’s waters, way out in Lotus Land, lived Oedipus at Rest, “O.R.” to his buddies. O.R.’s problem was his mother, and his reasons were complex. He simply couldn’t bring himself to leave the comforts of her home. So they stayed together, reading self-help books and watching soaps, trying on various personas, from Master Chef to Movie Star, never really doing much except for occasional visits to the therapist. It’s not who you are, but who you think you are that counts. O.R. and his Mom co-depended. They didn’t worry; they were happy. Why can’t we all be more like them?

The self-esteem task force finds such humor in bad taste. After all, it came out squarely against narcissism on page 18 of its report. And who can deny that all social ills affect individuals?

So the task force bravely set out to discover a “social vaccine” to inoculate against despair and hopelessness. Requests for fresh statistics were made. Jonathan Swift would have loved this part (page 42) best: “Far more study needs to be directed to how a person’s self-esteem is affected by hunger and homelessness and on the appropriate social responsibility on the rest of society to welfare recipients.”

Investigating the obvious is not the way to solve social failings. What is equally obvious about the self-esteem report is that feeling good will never cure our social ills, although when social ills are cured, most of us will feel good, as the vicar’s wife predicted at a wedding several years ago. Her cure for social ills: “Send all the troubled youth on a world cruise.”

The self-esteem task force offers a similar philosophy of life: Put the entire California population in psychotherapy. In such a climate, no wonder less is being done, even if more are feeling mellow. There is something quite twisted about regarding criminality and addictions as diseases you come down with rather than activities you choose. Notwithstanding all the psychobabble, human beings are not as passive as all that. We are, by nature, better than the task force thinks we are.

The second half of the report paints a portrait of the social state of California. Societal disasters are graphically displayed, from problems in schools to problems in prisons, from misery at home or work to misery on drugs or on welfare. The social fabric has been torn to shreds. California isn’t what it used to be. Even if things were never that good, now they’re worse.

The task force lists scores of recommendations, constituting a Platonic blueprint--an ideal, if you will. Taken individually, nearly every recommendation makes sense--helping school children feel better about themselves by giving them more individual attention, for example. Perhaps we could afford that, but we can’t afford everything that should be done, without therapy forever. No single segment of society can bear the burden of the others. Teachers cannot compensate for parents who are failures. So, if reforms are only undertaken piecemeal, collective solutions inevitably will fail. And if everything must be done at once, nothing will be done at all.

It would be better to spurn Platonism altogether and turn instead to Aristotle, whose “Ethics” is still worth reading. Aristotle had a lot to say about self-esteem and its relation to morality, a concept conspicuously missing from the task-force report. Aristotle’s word for self-esteem was happiness ( eudaemonia in ancient Greek). But the happiness he had in mind isn’t quite what we imagine it to be today.

Being good at being human is what self-help books are all about. But that’s not the same as being good. The difference lies in virtue: courage, wisdom, self-control, doing the right thing. That’s what Aristotle’s happiness envisions--the difference ethics makes. Ethics, yet another word derived from ancient Greek, describes the way we live our lives--a matter of habit and behavior rather than a happy mental attitude toward life, living a life that’s good instead of simply feeling good about the life you’re living.

The California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility envisions a world where all people are happy, as in a cola commercial. Being psychologically attuned will never guarantee it. Nothing can, in fact. Being good cannot be taught as if it were a code of rules or a potpourri of trendy phrases. Morality is neither law nor advertising slogans. Morality is habit.

Habits can be rationally constructed and instilled. According to Aristotle’s morality, if you say no, it’s not simply because authorities say you shouldn’t but because you wouldn’t , because you have better things to do and you have a plan of your own choosing. All of us are capable of being rational agents in this way.

Yet being rational is not enough. Moral habits must become ingrained, so that you wouldn’t even think of stealing, of taking drugs. In most of life’s pressing situations, there isn’t time enough to think about the long-term plan. For Aristotle, this is where the community figures in; it reinforces the habits of the good and sets visible standards of good character that younger rational agents can aspire to. What is central to morality, as Aristotle conceived it, is the presence of a genuine community--a place where persons of good character can visualize their lives. Morality is social.

The current condition is bad because community is missing. Consequently, support for practical wisdom’s long-term planning is missing; there is no common framework to encourage moral habits. The fragmentation of self-interest groups and prejudices, of ethnic rivalries and economic zones, affords no place for all of us to fit in. This makes morality, on Aristotelian terms, difficult.

But not impossible, as long as there is some narrower community that individuals do find themselves a part of, where the right thing to do can be readily identified by members. In a close-knit family or congregation, no one would ever think of stealing.

The large community in California is comatose. Localities must take its place, apartment building by apartment building, neighborhood by neighborhood, school by school, workplace by workplace. There, morality can be reconstituted and communities can come alive, provided that the pieces are designed to fit together. A matter of working from the bottom up, instead of from the top.