Happiness, the Hard Way
I think
it is probably fair to assume that most Americans today consider happiness not
only something that would be nice to have, but something that we really ought
to have—and, moreover, something that’s within our power to bring about, if
only we set our minds to it. We can be happy, we tell ourselves, teeth gritted.
We should be happy. We will be happy.
That is a
modern article of faith. But it is also a relatively recent idea in the West
which dates from the 17th and 18th centuries, a time that ushered in a dramatic
shift in what human beings could legitimately hope to expect in and from their
lives. People prior to the late 17th century thought happiness was a matter of
luck or virtue or divine favour. Today we think of happiness as a right and a
skill that can be developed. This has been liberating, in some respects,
because it asks us to strive to improve our lots in life, individually and
collectively. But there have been downsides as well. It seems that when we want
to be happy all of the time, we can forget that the pursuit of happiness can
entail struggle, sacrifice, even pain.
Roots of
happiness
Language
reveals ancient definitions of happiness. It is a striking fact that in every
Indo-European language, without exception, going all the way back to ancient
Greek, the word for happiness is a cognate with the word for luck. Hap is the
Old Norse and Old English root of happiness, and it just means luck or chance,
as did the Old French heur, giving us bonheur, good fortune or happiness. German
gives us the word Gluck, which to this day means both happiness and chance.
What does
this linguistic pattern suggest? For a good many ancient peoples—and for many
others long after that—happiness was not something you could control. It was in
the hands of the gods, dictated by Fate or Fortune, controlled by the stars,
not something that you or I could really count upon or make for ourselves.
Happiness, literally, was what happened to us, and that was ultimately out of
our hands. As the monk in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales declares:
And thus
does Fortune’s wheel turn treacherously. And out of happiness bring men to
sorrow. In other words, the wheel of fortune controls our happenstance,
and hence our happiness.
There
were, of course, other ways of thinking about happiness. Those who have studied
Greek or Roman philosophy will know that happiness—what the Greeks called, in
one of several words, eudaimonia—was the goal of all Classical philosophy,
beginning with Socrates and Plato, then taken up even more centrally by
Aristotle, then featured prominently in all the major “schools” of Classical
thought, including that of the Epicureans, Stoics, and so forth. In their view,
happiness could be earned, a perspective that anticipates our modern one.
But there
is a crucial difference between their ideas of happiness and ours. For most of
these Classical philosophers, happiness is never simply a function of good
feeling—of what puts a smile on our face—but rather of living good lives, lives
that will almost certainly include a good deal of pain. The most dramatic
illustration of this is the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero’s claim that
the happy man will be happy even on the torture wrack.
That
sounds ludicrous to us today—and perhaps it is—but it very nicely captures the
way the ancients thought of happiness, not as an emotional state but as an
outcome of moral comportment. “Happiness is a life lived according to virtue,”
Aristotle famously says. It is measured in lifetimes, not moments. And it has
far more to do with how we order ourselves and our lives as a whole than
anything that might happen individually to any one of us.
Given
these presuppositions, the ancients tended to agree that very few would ever
succeed in being happy, because happiness takes an incredible amount of work,
discipline and devotion, and most people, in the end, are simply not up to the
task. The happy are what Aristotle calls “happy few.” They are, if you like,
the ethical elite. This is not a democratic conception of happiness.
After the
Greek and Roman traditions, we have Jewish and Christian ideas about happiness.
In the prevailing Christian understanding, happiness can occur in one of three
circumstances. It can be found in the past in a lost Golden Age, in the Garden
of Eden when Adam and Eve were perfectly content. It can be revealed in the
future—the millennium when Christ will return and the Kingdom of God will
genuinely be at hand. Or we can find happiness in heaven, when the saints shall
know the “perfect felicity,” as Thomas Aquinas puts it, the pure bliss of union
with God. Strictly speaking, this is the happiness of death.
And so in
the dominant Christian worldview, happiness is not something we can obtain in
this life. It is not our natural state. On the contrary, it is an exalted
condition, reserved for the elect in a time outside of time, at the end of
history. This is the opposite of today’s egalitarian, feel-good-now conception
of happiness.
Happiness
revolution
Enter the
17th and 18th centuries, when a revolution in human expectations overthrew
these old ideas of happiness. It is in this time that the French Encyclopédie,
the Bible of the European Enlightenment, declares in its article on happiness
that everyone has a right to be happy. It is in this time that Thomas Jefferson
declares the pursuit of happiness to be a self-evident truth, while his
colleague George Mason, in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, speaks of
pursuing and obtaining happiness as a natural endowment and right. And it is in
this time that the French revolutionary leader St. Just can stand up during the
height of the Jacobin revolution in France in 1794 and declare: “Happiness is a
new idea in Europe.” In many ways it was.
When the
English philosopher and revolutionary John Locke declared at the end of the
17th century that the “business of man is to be happy,” he meant that we
shouldn’t assume that suffering is our natural lot, and that we shouldn’t have
to apologize for our pleasures here on earth. On the contrary, we should work
to increase them. It wasn’t a sin to enjoy our bodies, his contemporaries began
to argue. It wasn’t gluttony and greed to work to improve our standards of
living. It wasn’t a sign of luxury and depravity to pursue pleasures of the
flesh, and whatever other kind as well. Pleasure was good. Pain was bad. We
should maximize the one and minimize the other, yielding the greatest happiness
for the greatest number.
This was
a liberating perspective. Starting in Locke’s time, men and women in the West
dared to think of happiness as something more than a divine gift, less
fortuitous than fortune, less exalted than a millenarian dream. For the first
time in human history, comparatively large numbers of people were exposed to
the novel prospect that they might not have to suffer as an unfailing law of
the universe, that they could—and should—expect happiness in the form of good
feeling, and pleasure as a right of existence. This is a prospect that has
gradually spread from the originally rather narrow universe of white men to
include women, people of colour, children—indeed, humanity as a whole.
This new
orientation towards happiness was, as I say, liberating in many respects. I
would argue that it continues to lie behind some of our most noble humanitarian
sentiments—the belief that suffering is inherently wrong, and that all people,
in all places, should have the opportunity, the right, to be happy.
Unnatural
happiness
But there
is a dark side to this vision of happiness as well, one that may help explain
why so many of us are snapping up books about happiness and coming to happiness
conferences, searching for an emotion that we worry is absent from our lives.
For all
its pleasures and benefits, this new perspective on happiness as a given right,
tends to imagine happiness not as something won through moral cultivation,
carried out over the course of a well-lived life, but as something “out there”
that could be pursued, caught, and consumed. Happiness has increasingly been
thought to be more about getting little infusions of pleasure, about feeling
good rather than being good, less about living the well-lived life than about
experiencing the well-felt moment.
Don’t get
me wrong, there is nothing bad about feeling good. But I would suggest that
something of value may have been lost or forgotten in our transition to modern
ideas of happiness. We can’t feel good all the time; nor, I think, should we
want to. Nor should we assume that happiness can be had (maybe a better word?)
without a certain degree of effort, and possibly even sacrifice and pain. These
are things that the older traditions knew—in the West and the East alike—and
that we have forgotten.
Today,
science is rediscovering the validity of ancient perspectives on happiness—that
there are important connections between hope and happiness, for example, or
between gratitude and forgiving and happiness, altruism and happiness. Science
is often painted as being opposed to matters of the spirit, but new discoveries
by researchers like Michael McCullough, Robert Emmons, and many others remind
us how important non-materialistic, spiritual cultivation is to our happiness
and well-being. It is all the more important to revive and cultivate this older
wisdom today, given that so many of us assume that we ought to be happy as a
matter of course, that this is our natural state.
Indeed,
if you think about it, this idea of happiness as a natural state creates a
curious problem. What if I’m not happy? Does that mean that I’m unnatural? Am I
ill, or bad, or deficient? Is there something wrong with me? Is there something
wrong with the society in which I live? These are all symptoms of a condition
that I call the unhappiness of not being happy, and it is a peculiarly modern
condition.
To cure
this condition, we might focus less on our own personal happiness and instead
on the happiness of those around us, for relentless focus on one’s own
happiness has the potential to be self-defeating. The 19th century philosopher
John Stuart Mill once said, “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease
to be so.” Whether that is really true or not, I don’t know. But given that we
live in a world that asks this question of us every day, it is a paradox worth
pondering.
Darrin M.
McMahon, Ph.D., is a
professor of history at Florida State University and the author of Happiness, A History.
This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley.
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