Happiness is Moral Purpose

Pleasure can be gained from a variety of activities: golf, fishing, playing with your children, sex. Amoral activities can bring us pleasure—that temporary high, that feeling of forgetting our cares. However, that pleasure is never enough. Lasting happiness can only be achieved through cultivation of soul and mind. And cultivating our souls and minds requires us to live with moral purpose.
 
This has been clear since the dawn of Western civilization. The very terminology for happiness is imbued with such meaning in both the Judeo-Christian and the Greek context. The Hebrew Bible calls happiness simcha; Aristotle called happiness eudaimonia.
 
What does the Bible mean by simcha? It means right action in accordance with God’s will. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon laments, “I said to myself: ‘Come now, I will mix [wine] with joy and experience pleasure,’ and behold, this too was vanity.”
 
The Bible doesn’t seem to care very much about what we want. Instead, God commands us to live in simcha. How can He command an emotion? He can’t—he can only command our enthusiastic pursuit of an ideal He sets forth for us. If we do not pursue that purpose, we pay a price: we serve foreign gods, which cannot provide us any sort of true fulfillment.

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: 

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, 2019.

The Ingredients for Happiness

Happiness, comprises four elements: individual moral purpose, individual capacity, collective moral purpose, and collective capacity. If we lack one of these elements, the pursuit of happiness becomes impossible; if that pursuit is foreclosed, society crumbles.
Our society was built on recognition of these four elements. The fusion of Athens and Jerusalem, tempered by the wit and wisdom of our Founding Fathers, led to the creation of a civilization of unparalleled freedom and replete with virtuous men and women striving to better themselves and the society around them.
 
But we are losing that civilization. We are losing that civilization because we have spent generations undermining the two deepest sources of our own happiness—the sources that lie behind individual moral purpose, communal moral purpose, individual capacity, and communal capacity. Those two sources: Divine meaning and reason. There can be no individual or communal moral purpose without a foundation of Divine meaning; there can be no individual capacity or communal capacity without a constant, abiding belief in the nature of our reason.
 
The history of the West is built on the interplay between these two pillars: Divine meaning and reason. We receive our notions of Divine meaning from a three-millennia-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Jews; we receive our notions of reason from a twenty-five-hundred-year-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Greeks. In rejecting those lineages—in seeking to graft ourselves to rootless philosophical movements of the moment, cutting ourselves off from our own roots—we have damned ourselves to an existential wandering.
 
We must make our way back toward our roots. Those roots took hold at Sinai.

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: 

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, 2019.

The Creation of Reason-based Government

The Greeks gave us the roots of democracy.
 
Based on the notion of virtue—use of reason to act in accordance with nature—Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics developed ethical systems. Those ethical systems didn’t merely recommend personal cultivation. They also encompassed the creation of new forms of government. Some of their ideas regarding government were good; others were bad. But they began the process of applying reason to governmental structures—a process that has continued down to our day.
 
The ancients believed that in order to cultivate virtue, the polis—the city-state—must be at the center of human life. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre points out, the Athenians universally believed that good citizenship was a prerequisite to being a good man. Plato’s ethical system tied together happiness and virtue: the truly virtuous man will be happy. Plato defined various virtues, too: justice, moderation, and the like. But these virtues aren’t individual virtues, in Plato’s view—they only exist in the context of a community. The virtue of justice, for example, exists when each person fulfills his or her function in relation to the polis. Our virtues exist in relations with others.
 
Because the polis is the context in which virtue is cultivated—and because cultivating virtue is the ultimate goal of man—the polis must be governed rigorously so that human beings are inculcated with virtue, according to Plato. That means that those who govern must be the best and wisest among us—that we must rigorously condition a class of philosophers to rule. Otherwise, chaos will ensue.

The Athenian system of thought establishes certain fundamental notions crucial to happiness: the notion of telos, discoverable by us; the importance of reason-led investigation, leading to the birth of science; the recognition that social ties bind us to one another.

 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: 

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, 2019.

 

Roots of Civilization

Why should Americans bother to learn about ancient Greeks? Because the classical roots of Western civilization in Athens still have much to teach us. Athens teaches us what we are capable of doing as human beings. Athens teaches us that we have the ability to use our reason to reach beyond ourselves. Athens teaches us not only how liberty can flourish, but why it should. I’ve argued that without Jerusalem, there could be no West; without Athens, the same holds true.
 
Religious faith is empowering because it tells human beings that they are loved, and that they have the capacity to choose between good and evil. But religious faith also requires us to acknowledge the inherent limits on human capacity—it requires us to say that there are things we will never understand, that we are earthly creatures bounded by dust. But if the project of Sinai was about elevating man above the animals by associating him with a Godly mission and granting him a Godly soul, the project of Athens was about elevating man using man’s own faculties. Religion doesn’t discount the capacity of mankind, of course, but that capacity is always secondary to God’s will; Athens elevates man’s capacity and makes it primary.
 

The ancient Greeks gave us three foundational principles: first, that we could discover our purpose in life from looking at the nature of the world; second, that in order to learn about the nature of the world, we had to study the world around us by utilizing our reason; and finally, that reason could help us construct the best collective systems for cultivating that reason. In short, the Greeks gave us natural law, science, the basis of secularly constructed government. Jerusalem brought the heavens down to earth; Athens’s elevation of reason would launch mankind toward the stars. 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: 

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, 2019.

 

A Price-weighted Index: Dow Jones

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is what’s known as a stock market index. An index is a group of stocks that are combined to figure out whether the stock market as a whole is going up or down. It is a way to track the performance of the stock market.
 
The business world has changed a lot since 1896, so the Dow Jones has adapted to keep up. In 1928, the Dow was expanded to include 30 companies instead of just 12. Every few years some of the declining businesses in the Dow Jones are removed and are replaced by businesses that are growing. This helps to ensure that the biggest and most successful companies of the day are always included in the Dow Jones. As of 2021, the Dow includes businesses like Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Disney (NYSE:DIS), and Home Depot (NYSE:HD).
 
The Dow Jones has become one of the most well-known stock market indexes in the world. However, the Dow Jones also has critics that point out two big flaws.
 
First, the Dow Jones only tracks 30 companies. That’s only a tiny fraction of the 6,000 publicly traded companies that exist in the U.S. alone. Critics argue the Dow Jones does not accurately represent the entire stock market.
 
Second, the Dow Jones is calculated by using the dollar price of each stock. The Dow Jones ignores the size of each business. This means that a stock that is trading for $100 per share will have 10 times more influence over the Dow Jones than a stock trading at $10 per share.
 
That’s why the Dow is called a price-weighted index. The dollar price of each stock is what matters, not the size of each business.
 
To see why some investors think that this is a problem, let’s review the stock price from two Dow Jones stocks—McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD) and Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)—in October 2020:

McDonald’s was $52 billion smaller than Intel, but its share price was about four times higher. This means that the price movement of McDonald’s stock had a four times greater influence over the performance of the Dow Jones than Intel’s stock, even though Intel was a larger company!

 

- Brian Feroldi, Why Does The Stock Market Go Up?:

Everything You Should Have Been Taught About Investing In School, But Weren't, 2022

 

A Capitalization-weighted Index: NASDAQ Composite Index

Computers became a lot more advanced during the 1950s and 1960s. By the early 1970s, people who worked on Wall Street started to experiment with computers to see if they could be used to improve stock trading.
 
At the time, there wasn’t a good way to get stock price information—or stock “quotes”—to all investors at the same time. This made buying and selling stocks inefficient and expensive. The National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), an agency that oversees the buying and selling of stocks, decided that computers could be used to solve this problem.
 
The NASD created a brand-new stock exchange in 1971. This new stock exchange would allow investors to buy and sell stocks on computers that were connected to each other. They called this new stock market the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, or NASDAQ.

The NASDAQ stock exchange offered many advantages over other stock exchanges. Since all of the buying and selling was done on computers there was no need to have a physical trading floor. Accurate prices could also be viewed by all investors at the same time.
 
The inventors of the NASDAQ stock exchange also created an index that tracked the price movements of all the companies that were listed on the exchange. They called this new index the NASDAQ Composite Index. Today, there are more than 3,200 businesses that make up the NASDAQ Composite Index.
 
Like the S&P 500, the NASDAQ Composite Index is a capitalization-weighted index. This means that larger companies have a bigger influence over the movement of the NASDAQ Composite Index than smaller companies.

- Brian Feroldi, Why Does The Stock Market Go Up?:

Everything You Should Have Been Taught About Investing In School, But Weren't, 2022

A Capitalization-weighted Index: S&P 500

In 1923, the Standard Statistics Company created a new stock market index. Their goal was to compete with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was popular with investors. To stand out, Standard Statistics decided to use data on 233 companies instead of just 30 like the Dow Jones.
 
Years later, the Standard Statistics Company merged with Poor’s Publishing to create the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) company. In 1957, S&P made a few changes to its stock market index that would allow it to better compete with the Dow Jones.
 
First, S&P increased the number of companies that it tracked from 233 to 500.
Second, S&P let larger companies have more influence over the index’s movements than smaller companies. S&P judged the size of each business by using its market capitalization, which is the total dollar market value of a company’s equity. This is called a capitalization-weighted index.
 
On March 4, 1957, the S&P 500 was officially launched.
 
In 2021, large companies like Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) had market values that exceeded $1 trillion. That causes them to have much more influence over the index than smaller companies like Hanesbrands (NYSE:HBI) and Under Armour (NYSE:UA) which are worth less than $10 billion. This is why many investors like that the S&P 500 is a capitalization-weighted index.
 

- Brian Feroldi, Why Does The Stock Market Go Up?:

Everything You Should Have Been Taught About Investing In School, But Weren't, 2022