At first the Barack victory filled me with hope and excitement. Aside from the symbolic accomplishment of accepting a president of African ancestory Obama seems to be the rarest sort of politician: a man of first class intellect honorably committed to the ideal of improving society but pragmatic enough to deliberately mislead the public. I couldn’t prove that, if I could it wouldn’t be true, but the way Barack accepted Christ (and the particular flavor he lead people to believe he endorsed at that time) was remarkably convenient. Not only is this great man now our president but he providentially bestrides the political landscape at a time of crisis handing him the opportunity to recast the American social contract. Universal health care, improved race relations, universal access to education what isn’t now within our grasp?

Sadly, nothing that really matters. Sure society might improve slightly, we might grow slightly strong social ties, we might erase a little pain with improved health care but nothing fundamentally is going to change. Decades of social science research tell us that our capacity for happiness is handicapped by evolution and their is no perfect social structure that can prevail over basic biological constraints. Even if Barack could spread his hands and bring forth plenty to every man, woman and child in the country he wouldn’t change our human nature. Someone is going to have more money, more power, faster cars, hotter sexual partners and (ultimately) more social status and others will crave it. A well ordered society can eliminate some small genuine efficiencies but ultimately decades of data indicate that further major improvement in overall societal happiness are denied to us by our biology. Sure, the industrial revolution made people happier but a country hits a certain minimum level of prosperity (which the western world has enjoyed for at least half a century) and everyone has indoor plumbing and gets morphine while dying of painful cancer overall societal happiness hits a brick wall.

To put the case more vivedly who would you prefer to be: a roman emperor¹ or a poor resident in an inner city slum? I know I’d prefer the former even though objectively the worst off Americans get a better education, receive better medical care and have better (non-human) toys than the most pampered Roman emperor. The worst school in the poorest slum throws knowledge at children about beyond the wildest dreams of the most educated philosophers of the classical age. No need to stab in the dark about earth, air, fire and water the book tells you about chemical elements right there, no need to wonder if moving lights in the sky are gods, your daily dose of TV makes sure you know they are other stars and planets. For all of Emperor Claudius’s imperial majesty he couldn’t command the quality of medical treatment that we provide to penniless vagrants who wander into our hospitals. Having objectively better conditions simply doesn’t keep making us more happy after some point and there’s a limit to how much fairer distribution can improve the situation.

If this was simply destiny then fine, we do the best that we can but biology need not be destiny. If evolution limits our capacity for joy, wonder and pleasure then we must remove those limits. Perhaps you think this isn’t possible, perhaps the flawed logic of Brave New World² makes you think this dream is only an illusion. However, there is solid research baking up the commonsense fact that some people have innately higher happiness fixed points than others. We all experience the ups and downs of life but some of us tend to return to a state of vague glumness while others drift back to innate happiness. Discovering a treatment, or offering genetic modification, to lift us all up to this higher set point would do an order of magnitude more for social welfare than any single payer health care scheme or universal college access could in the wet dreams of progressives. Even better we need not worry that this pleasure would undermine our social and economic systems: research indicates that hypomanic people are actually more productive and better employees than those of us more given to depression³.

Making us all as resilient and happily inclined as the most good natured of us is only what we know for sure could be achieved. There is no reason to believe that we couldn’t take average happiness to unimaginable levels. Every day could be as good as the best day of your life and there is no reason to believe some kind of drugged out stupor or uniform monotonous joy would be necessary to achieve this. Bad things would still sadden us and good ones life our moods, it’s just a question of where we want to put the baseline. Of course more radical change would have to be carried out with extreme caution but when the benefits are so unimaginably huge we have a moral duty to explore our options.

In light of all this I find myself seeing the activists on both sides of this election as tragic figures. The crusading Obama supporter thinks of themselves as fighting the good fight for a better world but in reality their only fighting over the tiniest crumbs of possible social welfare. It’s as if we are all standing out in the rain zealously debating whether to trade our umbrellas for raincoats to stay dry but failing to even ask if we might want to step inside. Then again maybe Obama is an even better man than I give him credit for, maybe he’ll start a secret government research program into biochemically improving people’s average happiness. It’s a long shot but maybe I’ll write him a note and try to convince him.