Focus on Contemporary Issues (FOCI)

Ziyad Marar

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781861896087
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

The dream of a happy life has preoccupied thinkers since Plato, and in modern times it has become one of the signature tunes of our age – the rise of therapists, gurus, New Age cults and the use of Prozac are familiar indicators of how ubiquitous the pursuit of happiness has become within Western culture. The Happiness Paradox examines how this modern obsession has evolved. Ziyad Marar shows how the state of mind we seek remains highly elusive, and much of the energy devoted to searching for happiness is wasted or even self-defeating. The author argues that happiness is a deceptively simple idea that will always be elusive because it is based on a paradox: the conflict between feeling good while simultaneously being good. It is the conflict, for example, between the desire to break rules, for adventure or self-expression, and the need to follow them to gain the approval of society; these tensions permeate what Freud called the two central parts of a happy life: love and work.Drawing on a wide and varied range of sources – from psychology, philosophy, history, popular novels, television and films – this book will engage all those who are looking for meaning within their lives. It challenges the conventional search for happiness, while suggesting a bolder way to live with one of the central paradoxes of our time.

CHAPTER ONE

Happiness: A Brief History

There is that in me – I do not know what it is – but I know it is in me.

[ … ] I do not know it – it is without name – it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.

Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.

Do you see O my brothers and sisters?

It is not chaos or death – it is form, union, plan – it is eternal life – it is

Happiness.

Walt Whitman¹

It is very hard to get a straight answer from people about what truly makes them happy. Psychologist Jonathan Freedman, working on his book Happy People, complained of a difficulty encountered by his research assistant in asking people this question. When she interviewed them in groups they joked and trivialized the idea, and when she interviewed them alone they became more serious, but stopped talking. She concluded they would rather talk about their sex lives than how happy they really were.²

Happiness is a deceptively simple term, yet remarkably elastic and hard to define. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its etymology to the same stem as happen, and happenstance, being what comes by luck or chance (as in a happy coincidence). Most dictionaries define happiness as a state of well-being and contentment. Beyond this, in everyday usage, we use a spill of overlapping terms such as high self-esteem, excitement, joy, contentment, pleasure, jubilation, serenity, ecstasy, satisfaction, cheerfulness, bliss and many more, to capture the sense of the word. Yet none of these words equates entirely with the feeling of happiness, despite the fact they all seem to bear on it strongly. ‘Happiness’ has many family resemblances but no synonyms.

So what makes us happy? Is it a sunny morning, a warm pub in winter with friends, a great job offer, requited love, unprovoked acts of kindness, a good book, schadenfreude when the bad guy gets his come-uppance, a risky gamble that pays off, a sense of humour, or the triumph of the underdog? We see confusing patterns emerge across Western culture. Conspicuous consumption, the desire for wealth and fame sit uneasily alongside the rise of therapy, ‘emotional intelligence’ and New Age twists on Eastern mysticism. In Is America Breaking Apart? John Hall and Charles Lindholm boiled down the American way to just four words: ‘labour, accumulate, consume, display’. According to Freedman, the happy person is a 40-year-old woman who lives somewhere in Canada and works full time as an entertainer, earning Can.$50,000 a year. Married for the first time, she loves her husband and leads a fairly active sex life, but she sometimes dreams of being Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She is a Unitarian, but is not especially religious and does not believe in ESP. She is an optimist by nature and believes that life has meaning and direction.

But is she really happy? Are we entitled even to ask the question? These days it seems enough for people to say they are happy for us to believe them (or at least, as I argue below, psychologists seem oddly satisfied with that as a definition). However much we may take people at face value, we can’t help looking for evidence. As T. S. Eliot observed, ‘we see them everywhere, those trying desperately for happiness: pitifully chasing clouds of butterflies, laughing too loud, drinking too much, buying too much, working too hard; hating themselves’. Whether we picture what researchers call ‘peak experiences’ or overall ‘quality of life indicators’, a simple look at how people seem to pursue or find happiness today indicates that the pursuit is as multifaceted and elusive as the concept itself.

In this chapter I briefly review the history of happiness, from philosophy and psychology, and reflect on how the term has only recently emerged as a product of social and political changes in the West. Travel across cultures or back through time and the question Are you happy? becomes less and less intelligible or relevant. Most places and epochs have stronger moral scripts than we do, and less room for self-contradiction. In tracing the history and shape of this question, I hope to show why the modern Western desire to be happy is a compelling yet paradoxical aspiration.

The Classical View

It has often been remarked that the history of philosophy is merely a series of footnotes to Plato, and the debates around happiness are no exception. The story starts with the Greek concept of Eudaimonia often (controversially) translated today as happiness. The word denotes an objective idea of a fulfilled, flourishing life worthy of praise. For Plato, happiness or virtue (which were the same thing in his world-view) resulted from psychic harmony between the three parts of our nature; reason, physical appetites and spiritual needs (for honour or success). This harmony was an abstract prescription linked with beauty and mathematical proportion and could only flourish in the right political setting, under a philosopher king.

Plato passed the baton to his student Aristotle, whose seminal book, Nichomachean Ethics, is the foundation stone of an incredibly influential tradition linking happiness with goodness.

The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue … Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy.

Aristotle’s claim was that happiness is characterized by the attainment of virtue and excellence of character. Happiness is not a description of how one feels at any one time, rather it is an outcome of the noble conduct of one’s life as a whole; the central thesis being that virtue brings its own reward. For Aristotle, using the doctrine of the Golden Mean, each virtue sits in a sort of Goldilocks happy medium between extremes. If we are courageous (neither cowardly nor rash), if we are modest (neither bashful nor shameless) and especially if we are magnanimous, more than humble and less than vain, happiness will be ours. Aristotle, more practical, less abstract than Plato, felt that a happy life required external goods to be complete, such as wealth and good luck.

This Eudaimonistic tradition is a common thread connecting the great philosophers of antiquity. Epicurus (contrary to modern associations of his name with self-indulgent pleasures) prescribed an even more self-denying ordinance than Aristotle. Pleasure was indeed the highest good, but since some pleasures depend on pain – in the way that pleasure in eating is connected to hunger and indigestion – we do well to stick to quiet undemanding pleasures. Epicurus (341-270 BC) himself lived on bread (though upgraded to cheese on feast days!). All we need do, he claimed, is to overcome (rather than indulge) our desire for pointless pleasures (food, drink, sex, etc.), as well as our fear of death, and by doing so achieve tranquillity (ataraxia).

The loftily indifferent Stoics such as Seneca (AD 150) and Epictetus (AD 50–130) similarly advocated giving up desiring the things we cannot have. Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–80), the great Stoic Roman emperor, meditated on the thought that we cannot rail against providence. We, the Stoics claimed, are part of a greater cosmos in which whatever happens is for the best, and so must take a dispassionate view of those things that are beyond our control and drop them as a distraction. Some modern commentators advise that we learn from these doctrines to help put things in perspective. Alain de Botton in the Consolations of Philosophy has been a prominent example of those offering comfort from ancient wisdom:

Terror. Recession.War. The modern world is fraught with insecurities. But there’s little new about our woes: peace of mind has always been elusive. And, for thousands of years, the wise have had an answer. It’s called Philosophy …

For all the common-sense value of suggesting we should ‘be more stoical’, work on things we can control and limit our desires to those that are in line with virtue rather than short term temptations, it is worth noting how far the terms of reference have slipped. The gulf between our moral and emotional sensitivity and those of 2,000 years ago is unbridgeable. Compare the modern father jagged by the pain of seeing his child bullied at school with the Stoic sage’s response to the news that his son had been killed: ‘What is that to me? I did not think that I had begat an immortal.’ These tough-minded prescriptions go well beyond even Aristotle’s recipe for the good life, which at least allowed that one needs external, worldly goods to be happy. By contrast the Epicurean or the Stoic could conceive of happiness on the rack if we follow their advice.

In general the point was that to call someone happy, in the Eudaimonistic tradition, was essentially a moral appraisal of their character and worthiness. This linking of virtue and the Good Life with happiness has been the corner stone of moral philosophy ever since and is still prevalent in current debates. Bertrand Russell described the Nichomachean Ethics as appealing to ‘the respectable middle-aged, and has been used by them, especially since the seventeenth century, to repress the ardours and enthusiasms of the young. But to a man with any depth of feeling [like Russell himself, one assumes] it is likely to be repulsive.’³ Kant exemplifies this continuing tradition with the dictum that morality is not properly the doctrine of how we make ourselves happy, but how we make ourselves worthy of happiness.

In the following centuries debates about happiness were largely the business of moral philosophers and the Church, and things got a lot bleaker! The development of Christianity raised the stakes for what constitutes a good life from a merely virtuous life to one that was sanctified by perfect goodness, by God. From this moment happiness was moved out of earthly reach, into the realms of eternity. Life was an unhappy struggle but, if we were worthy, would lead on to eternal happiness in heaven where the lion lies down with the lamb. This ‘hair shirt’ tradition is embodied in Martin Luther’s formula for how to live, ‘leiden, leiden, Kreuz, Kreuz’ (suffering, suffering, the Cross, the Cross), and angrily rejects Glucklichkeit (happiness) as a worthy aim. It finds its most highly evolved exemplars in the iconic images of St Jerome flagellating himself or Origen cutting off his own genitals. This forbidding religious version of the human condition was to dominate medieval culture for centuries.

The slow battle for retrieving the possibility of happiness on earth was begun by St Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, and then taken up by the next generation of writers – Dante, for example – and those of the Renaissance. The shift was ultimately decisive despite strong resistance from the Church and other later critics of the secularization of happiness (such as Pascal in France in the seventeenth century). While the arguments between religious and ancient secular versions of happiness were still only offering different answers to the Socratic question How ought I to live?, the move away from religious constraints was a necessary platform for the emergence of a more subjective, psychological, some would say selfish, picture of happiness.

The Subjective Turn

Virtue as the reference point for discussions of happiness began to come under strain when political and social changes rendered the limitations of an account of happiness that had little room for personal pleasure impossible to ignore. The focus shifted to what moral philosophers call a ‘prudential’ view of the good – feeling good rather than being good. That inveterate iconoclast Bertrand Russell captures the spirit well.

One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.⁴

The historian Roy Porter recently outlined the rise of Enlightenment thinking, with its fondness for happiness and pleasure in a modern sense. He argues that while the Renaissance had still to some extent venerated the high ethics of the Ancients, the unruly politics and culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave emancipatory rise to the feel-good factor. ‘The auguries were auspicious: human nature was not flawed by the Fall; desire was desirable, society improvable, knowledge progressive and good would emerge from what Priestly dubbed man’s “endless cravings”.’ Religious figures began to leaven their preachy injunctions with a nod to vox populi. ‘Even the sober Joseph Butler, later a bishop, doubted we were justified in pursuing virtue, ‘till we are convinced it will be for our happiness, or at least, not contrary to it.’ Not much room for self-mutilation there! And philosophers went much further. Those of the Enlightenment and its aftermath, such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Bentham and Mill, and their Romantic confreres (such as Rousseau) fell over themselves to place happiness, desire, freedom, consciousness, self-expression and/or pleasure at the heart of the modern moral economy.

Thus heartened, Albion’s polite and commercial people seized their chance to express themselves, to escape the iron cage of Calvinism, custom and kinship – even to indulge their whims. Acquisitiveness, pleasure- seeking, emotional and erotic self-discovery, social climbing and the joys of fashion slipped the moral and religious straightjackets of guilt, sin and retribution.⁵

This new form of self-expression redefined happiness once and for all. In earlier times, one might say, the concept simply did not exist. This is a large claim. It’s difficult to accept that people living centuries ago had no sense, that we Moderns would recognize, of whether they were happy. Surely we’re all basically the same and always have been? Intuitively it is almost impossible to imagine anything else. We can’t but see our ancestors through a contemporary lens when our versions of Ben Hur, Cleopatra and Spartacus have all the emotional and individualistic psychology of Charlton Heston, Elizabeth Taylor and Kirk Douglas. Yet despite this difficulty, historians and social scientists have attempted to offer glimpses of historical periods in their own terms by studying the language of the time. If you see emotions primarily as defined through their social functions rather than simple physical states (as researchers increasingly are arguing we should⁶), then when these social functions change, so should the way we describe emotions. Nobody, they claim, would today experience accidie: an extinct emotion meaning, roughly, the sin of sloth or a disgust in one’s failure to take pleasure from one’s religious duty. We don’t talk much of melancholy any more, though we do obsess today with forms of clinical depression.

The social psychologist Derek Edwards draws on the Oxford English Dictionary to trace the changing definition of the term emotion itself. This clearly reveals a shift in its usage from the realm of action to the realm of feeling:

1. A moving out, migration, transference ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Happiness: A Brief History
• 2 Feeling Free
• 3 Feeling Justifed
• 4 Love
• 5 Work
• 6 Living with Paradox
• References
• Acknowledgements