Satisfaction Not Guaranteed: Dilemmas of Progress in Modern Society by Peter N. Stearns (review)

Books about happiness are a staple of mass-market retailers. Amazon currently lists more than three hundred titles on the topic, mostly in the mode of self-help pop-psychology and philosophy. Histories of happiness are unusual. Peter Stearns's new book, Satisfaction Not Guaranteed, chronicles the rise in expectations of happiness promoted by wholesale improvements in the quality of life for the average person since the eighteenth century and the curious backwash of disappointment that has followed. But Satisfaction is not so much a history of happiness, as a historically informed meditation on its pursuit in modern life and why it is so fraught and frustrated. Stearns poses a simple question with complicated answers: Why is the gulf between how happy we think we ought to be and how happy we actually are seemingly so unbridgeable, despite unparalleled long-term gains in affluence, convenience, education, and life expectancy?

The societal expectation that people should be happy, that personal satisfaction and happiness are, in many societies, now normative aspirations, he observes, "emerged more than two centuries ago, as a product of a transformation in Western philosophy and a new belief in the way that material progress and human improvability might combine." Advances forged by modernity "prompted a rapid escalation of expectations that masked progress and brought about their own dissatisfaction" (1-2). He names this paradox "the satisfaction gap." Perhaps because the United States is foremost among societies mired in the "satisfaction gap," most of Satisfaction dissects Americans' perplexing angst about everything from body image to boredom. The historical linking of happiness and personal comfort to progress, moreover, was most conspicuous in the United States. Stearns locates their convergence in a craze for umbrellas in mid-18th century Europe that spawned an emulative striving for comfort in colonial America that has never flagged. A society endlessly fascinated with the latest novelty, invention, or display of ingenuity, Americans were early adopters of everything from the relocation of cemeteries to suburban spaces to discourage contagion in the 1820s, to the mass use of automobiles in the early twentieth century. The post-World War II popularity of central heating and cooling or the current rage for cell phone applications offer more evidence of an undying cultural predilection. Americans lionized Edison and Ford no less fervently than they idolize Gates and Jobs.

Stearns considers, in turn, modernity's surfacing of concerns widely experienced for the first time or eternal phenomena newly salient on a mass scale. Depression, gender, sexuality, old age, body image, work, stress, death, childhood, education, parenting, affect, consumerism, affluence, and boredom each have a part to play in his pageant of modern unease. Only a historian of his range and erudition could offer a perspective such as this. The most rewarding part of Satisfaction is the middle section of the book ("False Starts"), where Stearns's encyclopedic command of world history is on full display and sweeping observations explain the specific shape of modernity's paradoxes.

The case of gender equality presents the most acute instance of an early misalignment of cultural responses to the shifting realities posed by modernity. While gender parity was the logical outcome of technological and social innovations that have come to characterize modernity, the initial cultural response was heightened gender differentiation and separate spheres for women and men. But another modern development, universal education, ultimately expanded women's employability, moved them increasingly into the marketplace ("men's sphere") discouraged fertility, gave women more time to focus on their own wants, and enhanced their political power. Today the effective differences between women and men—none-lies bare. Still, he says, confusion reigns. Lingering imagery of women's "proper place" "contributes strongly to frequent feelings of guilt and confusion when modern realities, including participation in the labor force, are edged with a sense that somehow this definition is incorrect, that the all-encompassing wife and mother should reemerge" (77).

Stearns's purpose...