Julian Baggini: Stop plundering the past for cheap happiness
Mon 18 Jan 2010 09:15 • Around the web,history,philosophy
Should we be happy that happiness has been taken down a peg or two? Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, Smile or Die, has struck a chord with its argument that the benefits of positive thinking have been oversold. But the adoption of “mindfulness” classes at Tonbridge, a leading private school, suggests that the deeper problems at the heart of our cult of positivity have hardly even begun to be uncovered – and reminds us of why we should positively delight in hearing negative thoughts about positive thinking.
This may sound paradoxical. All things being equal, it is good to be happy, and it’s certainly awful to be severely depressed. But what worries me is that our pursuit of happiness is leading us to judge the great intellectual and spiritual traditions of the past according to only one measure: do they increase happiness and reduce misery? That which passes the test is plundered and that which fails is left behind. The result is that wisdom is hollowed out and replaced with a soft centre of caramelised contentment.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/6979015/The-miserable-results-of-our-quest-for-happiness.html
everyone wants to be happy in one way or another`**
This search for happiness is nothing new and philosophers have been trying to define it for thousands of years. Socrates say happiness as being out of human hands, controlled by fate or in the lap of the gods. Aristotle defined it as a “certain kind of activity of the soul expressing virtue” and held that pleasure and good feelings had their place in a happy life. On the other hand, Cicero held that virtue (which required discipline and sacrifice) was indispensable to happiness, and that as long as a person was virtuous, whatever the circumstances, he was happy. Christian theology teaches that happiness is only achieved in heaven when reunited with god, after a life of privation atoning for sin. It wasn’t until the 17th & 18th centuries during the Age of Enlightenment that the philosophy arose that people were entitled to be happy in this life.
Lauren is right, everyone wants to be happy, but as Freud pointed out, happiness is subjective. Everyone defines and looks for it in their own way. Don’t knock the search for it, however bumbling it might seem. We all have to find our own ways to happiness, and all pathways are valid because we learn the lessons of life from the journey.
Hi Ankhsey. My view is that to the extent happiness can be measured objectively, it can and should be studied scientifically… though I’m far from sold on everything that has come out of positive psychology so far. Hence, while I agree with you that everyone should be free to define and look for happiness in their own way, I don’t think that all ways are equal.
I must confess I thought these one-line trite statements that crop up in the comments on this site from time to time under various names were some sort of link-spam, but sometimes it seems they can have interesting consequences.
Hi Antony, you are right, some searches for happiness have terrible consequences. I should have said that all pathways are valid unless they hurt someone.
The search for happiness is a human instinct but the problem is science is still vague about measuring happiness, and its causation – for example, are people happy because they are healthy, or healthy because they are happy. So far researches have found that although our standard of living have increased massively in the last 50 years, our level of happiness has not. So being richer doesn’t make us happier.
Scientists suggest that the older we get, the happier we become, with people in their 60s being the happiest. Perhaps it’s because we’ve tried every which way to be happy, and finally just settled to enjoy the person we are.
I agree with you about the science of happiness – kind of a problem for utilitarianism, isn’t it
I’m not sure how you reconcile all pathways being valid (unless they hurt someone), with being richer not making us happier – sounds to me like that makes acquiring wealth a less valid pathway to happiness?
(the claim about money usually has a lower bound, so that for example, below an income of ten thousand pounds per year more money does lead to more happiness… but I’m sure you knew that)
I thought an income of £50k/year brought the most happiness but over that, it reduced happiness? I have to go back and re-read the stats sometime. ;-D
No, I’m not sufficiently up on the relevant research either
Happiness rather than misery, advised our esteemed irreligious philosophers. But this hedonism brought friendship (Epicurus), social utility (Hume) and higher pleasures (Mill) to replace the burdens of deprivation and sin on so many.
Quite different are the ‘happiness’ of mindless folly and of consumption which supposes pleasure (aka celebrities, drugs, yachts …) can be bought, so the most stupid and rich become our greedy aspiration.
Simplistic therapy promises that negative thoughts are easily replaced by positive thinking, that success is freely available by ambitious self-mastery. Humanistic psychology has been wiser – and, as focussed attention, a kind of mindfulnes without selfish or religious connotations can perhaps help.
I agree with the discussion above in thinking the issue needs some perceptiveness. Happiness and quality of life (now becoming clearly measurable) are as much communal as individual, and about enjoying helpful achievement more than self-admiration. So getting to the best for oneself together with the many becomes part of morality (as with Kant’s imperative and the ‘golden rule’), a pleasure that does not steal from others.