Editor's Note

Visitors to countries in the Soviet bloc before the fall of communism – at least those visitors who were honest – used to speak of how drab things seemed there. When they crossed the border into East Berlin, it looked as if they were leaving a color movie and entering a black and white one. This drabness, to their eyes, was not due entirely to the industrial architecture of the Soviet era or even to the technological backwardness of communist societies compared with the free ones next door.

Instead it was because these societies represented a dearth of choice. On a superficial level, so few retail products were available, there was little need for companies like Pepsi or Coke to plaster blue or red billboards on the sides of buildings. But more importantly, men and women couldn’t choose where to go to school or what career to pursue or which cause to devote themselves to or how to practice their faith. And ultimately, if there is no choice, schools and religions and volunteer groups have no reason to make any option seem attractive, visually or otherwise.

Being able to choose a direction in life, a purpose, and pursue it to the best of one’s abilities is a freedom that we often take for granted. Indeed, as far as some critics are concerned, Americans are pursuing their purposes with too much intensity. A recent article in Harper’s extolled the virtues of idleness, arguing that if people sleep longer and spend less time sending e-mails, our society would be better off. There is no doubt that using fewer cell phone minutes and more family-time minutes would be a good thing, but that’s hardly the end of the argument. The author of the article cites the example of writer Sherwood Anderson who quit his job as the owner and manager of a paint factory at the age of thirty-six because he found his work “patently absurd.” Anderson, however, did not leave the factory to become idle; he went off to pursue his purpose – becoming a writer.

In fact, it is millions of people like Anderson, choosing their own individual purposes, finding out what lights a spark inside them and adding tinder till it becomes a full flame, that makes a democratic society so colorful. Indeed, as Jason Riley documents, tens of thousands of immigrants line up around the world to come here each year, not simply because of the economic opportunities but because the United States offers them the chance to pursue their own passions, whether they want to work on the frontiers of technology, train to be ministers, or give their children a better education.

The causes to which people devote themselves, the career paths they choose, are not always what we ourselves would pick – maybe managing a factory sounds absurd to some, but others might feel as passionate about management as some do about writing novels, running political campaigns, or teaching math to third-graders. Having a purpose, attaching ourselves to something larger than us, is vital for leading a happy life.

This seems to be true starting at a very young age. A recent 4-H study of fifth-graders showed that those who felt they had “purpose in life” had levels of depression that were 36 percent lower than among youth who did not. They were also half as likely to experiment with alcohol and drugs and to engage in delinquent acts. And the sense that purpose is important accompanies us into adulthood. Ninety percent of Americans surveyed in the 1998 General Social Survey disagreed with the statement “Life serves no purpose,” while only 3 percent agreed (The remaining 6.6 percent were still deciding).

Indeed, as Marc Freedman, the founder of Civic Ventures, explains in his article on how older people maintain their sense of purpose, recent surveys report that 84 percent of American men and 77 percent of women would continue to work even were they to inherit enough money to make them self-supporting.

Retirement is actually a stage in life when we can redefine our purposes. If we have been working in a proverbial paint factory for years, retirement is a time when we can volunteer, go back to school, or think more about our faith.

Of course, trying to determine one’s purpose is a project best started early, and so journalist Mark Oppenheimer explores the way in which college students today do so. With so many choices of how to spend our college years, so many extracurricular activities to try, so many résumé-building organizations to join, sometimes we spread ourselves too thin. And the university fails to foster what he calls “a healthy obsession” with a particular area of study.

Nonetheless, there are some groups of people who do develop an intellectual obsession, an extremely strong sense of purpose, which allows them to spend endless hours trying to discover the mysteries of human life and the universe we came from. The sense of purpose among scientists, explored by Dick Teresi in this issue, is particularly strong, and the determination with which scientists in the last century have worked has allowed us to lead longer, healthier lives and to know more about the world than any society before us. But as scientific progress has an increasing influence on the way we lead our lives, from stem-cell research to space exploration, it is important to understand how scientists themselves see their own purposes.

This society, in which everyone from poor immigrants to well-educated scientists can find out what drives them, would not have been possible without leaders who dreamed of a country like this, without leaders who were themselves so resolute about their own moral direction and what they wanted to accomplish. Historian and journalist Richard Brookhiser highlights the lives of three of our Founding fathers to explore how that generation’s sense of purpose made possible the freedom we enjoy today. They embodied the words of the poet Horace from 2000 years ago, who said, “The man who is tenacious of purpose in a rightful cause is not shaken from his firm resolve by the frenzy of his fellow citizens clamoring for what is wrong, or by the tyrant’s threatening countenance.”

But how do we sustain that tenacity in a rightful cause today? One key is certainly the strong presence of religion in American life. The Sabbath in the Jewish and Christian traditions, for instance, provides people with the opportunity to think about their purposes, to take a step back once a week, to be idle for a few hours, and understand why they are here, what they are called to do. Other faiths also encourage this exploration. The Buddha is said to have advised his followers, “Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.”

Religion also forces us to think about our relationship to a larger community. And as Alan Wolfe notes in his essay on the best-selling book by Rick Warren, The Purpose-Driven Life, finding our purpose is not a solitary activity. It is one that involves other members of our faith, and the members of other faiths as well. Indeed, our sense of national purpose, Wolfe argues, is a concept that has been too long disregarded. Whatever our individual purposes as Americans, or our collective purpose as America, we are lucky enough to live in a country where these are open questions and we ought not squander the opportunity to answer them.