A Dog's Life

One summer evening a few years ago, I was sitting in my backyard unwinding with a bottle of Warsteiner after a day’s work when something struck me that has stuck with me ever since. Our backyard at the time was a rectangle surrounded by a chain-link fence, and as I sat there I could see through to the other backyards, which were also rectangles surrounded by chain-link fences.

What struck me was how much the houses and yards along our block resembled the kennel where my wife and I had boarded our two dogs not long before. It was one of those nice kennels, where each dog had a nice big cage inside and an opening to a nice individual fenced-in “run” outside. We felt good about leaving our dogs there for a week because they were free to go in and out, they weren’t as confined as they would have been in one of those old nasty kennels where they had to sit in a cage all day waiting to be walked.

What we had done, of course, was judge the kennel according to our human standards. Without realizing it, we had boarded the dogs at a kennel that essentially was modeled on our own living space: a box in which we felt safe and sequestered when that was what we wanted, and an attached open area where we could go out and be “in” nature when that was what we wanted, but safely marked off from our neighbors’ parcels of ground. We were imputing to our dogs the same kind of need for a well-defined freedom that we felt for ourselves.

Now, it may seem invidious that I’m comparing an average American suburban home to a dog kennel, but I don’t mean it that way. On the contrary, the comparison really depends on the fact that we love our “companion animals” and want only the best for them. The point is simply that we conceive the “best” for them in the same terms we conceive it for ourselves: as having a certain kind of private, personal space in which we are free to do what we want, when we want.

If there is anything invidious in this, it’s the contrast between this rather limited – one might almost say compromised – version of freedom and the “Freedom” with a capital F that people make such a fuss over in the sphere of public discussion and action. It’s perhaps a little hard to reconcile the Freedom that people have fought and died for with the freedom to have a barbecue and burn tiki torches.

Still, the two kinds really aren’t totally unrelated. Where they are related is in the understanding that you and I have a right to do whatever we want to do in our personal spaces. (Within reason, of course: If my neighbor is committing sex crimes or torturing puppies in the house next door, I need to interfere with him doing that.) This is precisely why the ownership of a home is the core of the American Dream: because my home is a space where I can exercise my sovereignty as an individual, and of course individual sovereignty is what America is all about.

Freedom also involves, of course, the freedom to work at the job one chooses so as to be able to afford a home. And for some fortunate few, their work itself provides the kind of fulfillment we all seek, while for others work is just a means to obtain the kind of personal space we need to practice whatever else gives us that fulfillment (“I work to live, I don’t live to work”).

I happen to live in a kind of middle space in this regard: As a journalist, I sometimes am lucky enough to wander into a story that actually does some kind of good for others, and that’s about as rewarding as it gets. But I also have an inner life that I pursue in the privacy of my home that gives me some satisfaction even on those days when my job totally sucks.

I imagine a lot of us are in somewhat the same situation, doing what we can in our careers to give something to the world, and/or seeking in our “leisure” hours to cover whatever we feel as a lack in our spiritual or psychological lives. This sort of thing is, I believe, exactly what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote that we have an “unalienable right” to “the pursuit of happiness.”

What I find regrettable in our society in regard to these things is the widespread tendency to confuse means with ends. It appears that many of us expect to find fulfillment in the acquisition of the personal space and its accoutrements, rather than the use. There’s a bumper sticker that sums up the attitude: “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Many of us seem to believe that it’s the mere having of a home, or the size of the home, not the life lived inside it, that matters most. Once they have it, what are they supposed to do with it?

It appears that for many, the “pursuit of happiness” within one’s private space or in public means eating as much, drinking as much, owning as much, playing as much as one can, with no thought for the consequences to oneself or the world at large. Such an attitude is truly tragic, because it focuses on the most ephemeral things the world has to offer and leads people away from the sources of real, lasting happiness.

Our consumerist economic structure of course encourages this sort of belief and behavior, and the recent shakiness of that structure is a warning about its unsustainability – as if further warning were needed on top of our repeated energy crises, our “obesity epidemic,” our high crime rates and all the other social ills that are so obviously traceable to our society’s tendency to want more, more, more.

As much as I would like to see increased regulation of businesses, I would be the last person to suggest that we impose further restrictions on people’s private behavior. “An ye harm none, do what thou wilt” strikes me as a pretty good ethical principle. The challenge is getting people to understand the “harm none” part, especially in a world in which we seem to have moved from the idea that “all men are created equal” to a belief that “individual sovereignty” means every man is entitled to be a king. Regrettably, it appears that the king everyone wants to be is this one: