Why Israel is the world's happiest country
By Spengler
Envy
surrounds no country on Earth like the state of
Israel, and with good reason: by objective
measures, Israel is the happiest nation on Earth
at the 60th anniversary of its founding. It is one
of the wealthiest, freest and best-educated; and
it enjoys a higher life expectancy than Germany or
the Netherlands. But most remarkable is that
Israelis appear to love life and hate death more
than any other nation. If history is made not by
rational design but by the demands of the human
heart, as I argued last week
, the light heart of
the Israelis in face of continuous danger is a singularity worthy of a closer
look.
Can
it be a coincidence that this most ancient of nations [1], and the
only
nation persuaded that it was summoned
into history for God's service, consists of
individuals who appear to love life more than any other
people? As a simple index of life-preference, I
plot the fertility rate versus the suicide rate
of 35 industrial countries, that is, the
proportion of people who choose to create new life
against the proportion who choose to destroy their
own. Israel stands alone, positioned in the upper-left-hand-quadrant,
or life-loving, portion of
the chart [2]. Those who believe in
Israel's divine election might see a special grace reflected in its
love of life.
In a world given over to morbidity, the state of Israel still teaches the world
love of life, not in the trivial sense of joie de vivre, but rather as a
solemn celebration of life. In another location, I argued, "It's easy for the
Jews to talk about delighting in life. They are quite sure that they are
eternal, while other peoples tremble at the prospect impending extinction. It
is not their individual lives that the Jews find so pleasant, but rather the
notion of a covenantal life that proceeds uninterrupted through the
generations." Still, it is remarkable to observe by what wide a margin the
Israelis win the global happiness sweepstakes.
Nations go extinct, I have argued in the past, because the individuals who
comprise these nations choose collectively to die out. Once freedom replaces
the fixed habits of traditional society, people who do not like their own lives
do not trouble to have children. Not the sword of conquerors, but the
indigestible sourdough of everyday life threatens the life of the nations, now
dying out at a rate without precedent in recorded history.
Israel is surrounded by neighbors willing to kill themselves in order to
destroy it. "As much as you love life, we love death," Muslim clerics teach;
the same formula is found in a Palestinian textbook for second graders. Apart
from the fact that the Arabs are among the least free, least educated, and
(apart from the oil states) poorest peoples in the world, they also are the
unhappiest, even in their wealthiest kingdoms.
The contrast of Israeli happiness and Arab despondency is what makes peace an
elusive goal in the region. It cannot be attributed to material conditions of
life. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia ranks 171st on an international quality of life
index, below Rwanda. Israel is tied with Singapore on this index, although it
should be observed that Israel ranks a runaway first on my life-preference
index, whereas Singapore comes in dead last.
Even less can we blame unhappiness on experience, for no nation has suffered
more than the Jews in living memory, nor has a better excuse to be miserable.
Arabs did not invent suicide attacks, but they have produced a population pool
willing to die in order to inflict damage greater than any in history. One
cannot help but conclude that Muslim clerics do not exaggerate when they
express contempt for life.
Israel's love of life, moreover, is more than an ethnic characteristic. Those
who know Jewish life through the eccentric lens of Jewish-American novelists
such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, or the films of Woody Allen, imagine the
Jews to be an angst-ridden race of neurotics. Secular Jews in America are no
more fertile than their Gentile peers, and by all indications quite as
miserable.
For one thing, Israelis are far more religious than American Jews. Two-thirds
of Israelis believe in God, although only a quarter observe their religion
strictly. Even Israelis averse to religion evince a different kind of
secularism than we find in the secular West. They speak the language of the
Bible and undergo 12 years of Bible studies in state elementary and secondary
schools.
Faith in God's enduring love for a people that believes it was summoned for his
purposes out of a slave rabble must be part of the explanation. The most
religious Israelis make the most babies. Ultra-Orthodox families produce nine
children on average. That should be no surprise, for people of faith are more
fertile than secular people, as I showed in a statistical comparison across
countries.
Traditional and modern societies have radically different population profiles,
for traditional women have little choice but to spend their lives pregnant in
traditional society. In the modern world, where fertility reflects choice
rather than compulsion, the choice to raise children expresses love of life.
The high birthrate in Arab countries still bound by tradition does not stand
comparison to Israeli fertility, by far the highest in the modern world.
The faith of Israelis is unique. Jews sailed to Palestine as an act of faith,
to build a state against enormous odds and in the face of hostile encirclement,
joking, "You don't have to be crazy to be a Zionist, but it helps." In 1903
Theodor Herzl, the Zionist movement's secular founder, secured British support
for a Jewish state in Uganda, but his movement shouted him down, for nothing
short of the return to Zion of Biblical prophecy would requite it. In place of
a modern language the Jewish settlers revived Hebrew, a liturgical language
only since the 4th century BC, in a feat of linguistic volition without
precedent. It may be that faith burns brighter in Israel because Israel was
founded by a leap of faith.
Two old Jewish jokes illustrate the Israeli frame of mind.
Two elderly Jewish ladies are sitting on a park bench in St Petersburg,
Florida. "Mrs Levy," asks the first, "what do you hear from your son Isaac in
Detroit?" "It's just awful," Mrs Levy replies. "His wife died a year ago and
left him with two little girls. Now he's lost his job as an accountant with an
auto-parts company, and his health insurance will lapse in a few weeks. With
the real estate market the way it is, he can't even sell his house. And the
baby has come down with leukemia and needs expensive treatment. He's beside
himself, and doesn't know what to do. But does he write a beautiful Hebrew
letter - it's a pleasure to read."
There are layers to this joke, but the relevant one here is that bad news is
softened if written in the language of the Bible, which to Jews always conveys
hope.
The second joke involves the American businessman who emigrated to Israel
shortly after its founding. On his arrival, he orders a telephone, and waits
for weeks without a response. At length he applies in person to the telephone
company, and is shown into the office of an official who explains that there is
a two-year waiting list, and no way to jump the queue. "Do you mean there is no
hope?," the American asks. "It is forbidden for a Jew to say there is no
hope!," thunders the official. "No chance, maybe." Hope transcends probability.
If faith makes the Israelis happy, then why are the Arabs, whose observance of
Islam seems so much stricter, so miserable? Islam offers its adherents not love
- for Allah does not reveal Himself in love after the fashion of YHWH - but
rather success. "The Islamic world cannot endure without confidence in victory,
that to 'come to prayer' is the same thing as to 'come to success'. Humiliation
- the perception that the ummah cannot reward those who submit to it -
is beyond its capacity to endure," I argued in another location. Islam, or
"submission", does not understand faith - trust in a loving God even when His
actions appear incomprehensible - in the manner of Jews and Christians. Because
the whim of Allah controls every event from the orbit of each electron to the
outcome of battles, Muslims know only success or failure at each moment in
time.
The military, economic and cultural failures of Islamic societies are
intolerable in Muslim eyes; Jewish success is an abomination, for in the view
of Muslims it is the due of the faithful, to be coveted and seized from the
usurpers at the first opportunity. It is not to much of a stretch to assert
that Israel's love of live, its happiness in faith, is precisely the
characteristic that makes a regional peace impossible to achieve. The
usurpation of the happiness that Muslims believe is due to them is sufficient
cause to kill one's self in order to take happiness away from the Jewish enemy.
If Israel's opponents fail to ruin Israel's happiness, there is at least a
spark of hope that they may decide to choose happiness for themselves.
Why are none of the Christian nations as happy as Israel? Few of the European
nations can be termed "Christian" at all. Poland, the last European country
with a high rate of attendance at Mass (at about 45%), nonetheless shows a
fertility rate of only 1.27, one of Europe's lowest, and a suicide rate of 16
per 100,000. Europe's faith always wavered between adherence to Christianity as
a universal religion and ethnic idolatry under a Christian veneer. European
nationalism nudged Christianity to the margin during the 19th century, and the
disastrous world wars of the past century left Europeans with confidence
neither in Christianity nor in their own nationhood.
Only in pockets of the American population does one find birth rates comparable
to Israel's, for example among evangelical Christians. There is no direct way
to compare the happiness of American Christians and Israelis, but the
tumultuous and Protean character of American religion is not as congenial to
personal satisfaction. My suspicion is that Israel's happiness is entirely
unique.
It is fashionable these days to speculate about the end of Israel, and Israel's
strategic position presents scant cause for optimism, as I contended recently.
Israel's future depends on the Israelis. During 2,000 years of exile, Jews
remained Jews despite forceful and often violent efforts to make them into
Christians or Muslims. One has to suppose that they did not abandon Judaism
because they liked being Jewish. With utmost sincerity, the Jews prayed thrice
daily, "It is our duty to praise the Master of all, to acclaim the greatness of
the One who forms all creation, for God did not make us like the nations of
other lands, and did not make us the same as other families of the Earth. God
did not place us in the same situations as others, and our destiny is not the
same as anyone else's."
If the Israelis are the
happiest country on Earth, as the numbers
indicate, it seems possible that they will do what
is required to keep their country, despite the
odds against them. I do not know whether they will
succeed. If Israel fails, however, the rest of the
world will lose a unique gauge of the human
capacity for happiness as well as faith. I cannot
conceive of a sadder event.
Notes
[1]
There are many ancient nations, eg, the Basques,
but no other that speaks the same language as it
did more than 3,000 years ago, occupies more or
less the same territory, and, most important,
maintains a continuous literary record of its
history, which is to say an interrupted national
consciousness.
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Israel's divine election might see a special grace reflected in its
love of life.
