Essays in Idleness

There are many causes of an unhappy childhood; by-and-large, I tend to blame the child. In exceptional cases, I might blame the parent, but I know exceptional children can overcome them. A greater tyranny is a childhood without play, and free wandering, or not in the open air. This generally ends in feminism, and bad marriages, but again, only if the child lacks good will. Architectural influences, for the worse, exist in every modern city, and on balance unhappiness is distributed more in urban than in rural environments, but the urbanity could itself be overcome where the urban young are not encouraged to be lazy, and insolent.

I don’t think such factors are adequately considered in our political sociology. A third of a century ago, when the Ontario socialist party suddenly won after a campaign of only six weeks, I tried to make this point. “It takes more than six weeks to make a socialist,” I wrote in a local newspaper. “It takes a whole unhappy childhood.”

To my surprise, several of the socialists I knew openly agreed with me, and others established an “encounter group” to discuss their respective miserable infancies. This suggests that there are more effective ways to undermine the Left, than by excruciating economic measures. Irrational happiness is the leading instrument, and humour should be tried — shamelessly until it becomes contagious.