Is there anything more depressing than the happiness industry? Never mind Google, just check out Amazon Books for something to read about this mental snake-oil, and just look at that — “50,000 results for Happiness.” With so much advice available, it’s hard to grasp how there could be any misery left in the world. At the top of the list among the “happiness projects” and “happiness how-tos” sits The Art of Happiness by no less a global guru than His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet. But wait; there’s less. The small print reveals that the Dalai Lama didn’t even write the book. It is a set of “observations and analysis” by some American psychoanalyst who “echos” the ideas of the world’s favourite holy man. I wonder if he’s happy with that.
The British feminist Lynne Segal has suggested that the “happiness agenda” ought to be named the “misery agenda”. She argues that it adapts people to the causes of their misery, rather than addressing them. That’s a nod to Professor Pangloss, of whom more later. The Dalai Lama is elsewhere reliably quoted as teaching that “the purpose of our lives is to be happy.” The American people’s genius, Benjamin Franklin, wrote that “wine is constant proof that God loves to see us happy.” Come on guys — this is a serious existential topic, and that’s all you’ve got?
The mystery of happiness, once owned by ancient high philosophy, is now all over the place. As with so much else in the disintegrated temples of ancient values, we can probably blame the Americans. The ancient wisdom of the Greeks, of Marcus Aurelius, the Buddha, Confucius and other giants has been deconstructed into streams of glib cliches that can be transformed into dollars by slapping them on mugs, T-shirts, Hallmark cards and blurbs for “self-help” trash. What have they wrought, those framers of the U.S. Constitution, by sticking into it that fuzzy inalienable right to “the pursuit of Happiness”?
Not happiness itself, mark you, as if a little happiness would be too much to ask. No, instead you can have the lifelong pursuit of happiness, alongside the pursuit of money, to bring joy to your life, and good luck with both of them. Of course, if you can’t catch actual happiness, you can always sell the illusion of it in small bottles from the back of a covered wagon, or later, on Amazon. As an aside, just ponder that word “inalienable.” It means something that cannot be bought, sold, or transferred from one person to another.
It’s about now that one should pose that question begging to be asked — exactly what is happiness? The cartoonist Charles Schulz said it’s a warm puppy. For John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “Happiness is a warm gun, yes it is (bang, bang, shoot, shoot).” Take your pick. Since the middle of the last century, happiness research has slithered out of theology and philosophy into a plethora of scientific disciplines — psychiatry, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, gerontology, medicine and even economics. The United Nations publishes an annual World Happiness Report — last year Finland was ranked as the happiest country in the world for the second year running. In 2008, the government of Bhutan enacted a constitutional amendment to install GNH (Gross National Happiness) as a government goal.
Since 2013, the UN has celebrated an annual International Day of Happiness to promote the importance of happiness in the lives of people around the world. In 2015, it launched a list of development goals, “aimed at ending poverty, reducing inequality, and protecting the planet – three key aspects that lead to well-being and happiness.” This is all very worthy and commendable of course, but so far our cynical fractured world has seemed more happy to ignore than embrace World Happiness Day. (It’s on March 20, if anybody cares.)
Because of its modern scientific drift, the term happiness is now associated with mental or emotional states, including positive emotions like contentment or joy. For personal happiness, choose from your thesaurus — delight, enjoyment, peace of mind, well-being, contentment, hopefulness, exhilaration, delectation, exuberance, contentment, flourishing. The multiplicity is unhelpful, but the word that probably introduced the concept in the west was eudaimonia. (In the early Pali language of Buddhism, it was sukha.) The Greek eudaimonia came from eu, meaning “well”, and daemon, a minor guardian deity. Eudaimonia implies a positive state of being that a person may strive toward under the protection of a benevolent spirit. This state of being was the best a person could hope for, so it has been translated as “happiness”, but like the translation of the Greek arete as virtue, the English misses the divine nature of the word that the Greeks would have understood to be implied. In other words, happiness was not just a contented state, but a blessed one, rendering its pursuit elusive and not altogether within human power to achieve.
But even in early Greek philosophy, eudaimonia would have no overt religious or supernatural significance. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics says that eudaimonia means “doing and living well.” The modern concept of happiness tends to lose this attribute of doing and living well. When we observe that someone is happy, we usually mean they are feeling pleasant because things are going well in their life. Eudaimonia was a more encompassing idea than feeling happy. The philosopher Zeno believed that happiness was not dependent upon present enjoyment and security, but also on an expectation that the good times would continue. This gave rise to the concept that no person can be judged happy before they are dead. While we are alive, something can go badly wrong, and goodbye happiness.
by Thomas O’Dwyer, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:
Image: Pollyanna, uncredited
The British feminist Lynne Segal has suggested that the “happiness agenda” ought to be named the “misery agenda”. She argues that it adapts people to the causes of their misery, rather than addressing them. That’s a nod to Professor Pangloss, of whom more later. The Dalai Lama is elsewhere reliably quoted as teaching that “the purpose of our lives is to be happy.” The American people’s genius, Benjamin Franklin, wrote that “wine is constant proof that God loves to see us happy.” Come on guys — this is a serious existential topic, and that’s all you’ve got?
The mystery of happiness, once owned by ancient high philosophy, is now all over the place. As with so much else in the disintegrated temples of ancient values, we can probably blame the Americans. The ancient wisdom of the Greeks, of Marcus Aurelius, the Buddha, Confucius and other giants has been deconstructed into streams of glib cliches that can be transformed into dollars by slapping them on mugs, T-shirts, Hallmark cards and blurbs for “self-help” trash. What have they wrought, those framers of the U.S. Constitution, by sticking into it that fuzzy inalienable right to “the pursuit of Happiness”?Not happiness itself, mark you, as if a little happiness would be too much to ask. No, instead you can have the lifelong pursuit of happiness, alongside the pursuit of money, to bring joy to your life, and good luck with both of them. Of course, if you can’t catch actual happiness, you can always sell the illusion of it in small bottles from the back of a covered wagon, or later, on Amazon. As an aside, just ponder that word “inalienable.” It means something that cannot be bought, sold, or transferred from one person to another.
It’s about now that one should pose that question begging to be asked — exactly what is happiness? The cartoonist Charles Schulz said it’s a warm puppy. For John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “Happiness is a warm gun, yes it is (bang, bang, shoot, shoot).” Take your pick. Since the middle of the last century, happiness research has slithered out of theology and philosophy into a plethora of scientific disciplines — psychiatry, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, gerontology, medicine and even economics. The United Nations publishes an annual World Happiness Report — last year Finland was ranked as the happiest country in the world for the second year running. In 2008, the government of Bhutan enacted a constitutional amendment to install GNH (Gross National Happiness) as a government goal.
Since 2013, the UN has celebrated an annual International Day of Happiness to promote the importance of happiness in the lives of people around the world. In 2015, it launched a list of development goals, “aimed at ending poverty, reducing inequality, and protecting the planet – three key aspects that lead to well-being and happiness.” This is all very worthy and commendable of course, but so far our cynical fractured world has seemed more happy to ignore than embrace World Happiness Day. (It’s on March 20, if anybody cares.)
Because of its modern scientific drift, the term happiness is now associated with mental or emotional states, including positive emotions like contentment or joy. For personal happiness, choose from your thesaurus — delight, enjoyment, peace of mind, well-being, contentment, hopefulness, exhilaration, delectation, exuberance, contentment, flourishing. The multiplicity is unhelpful, but the word that probably introduced the concept in the west was eudaimonia. (In the early Pali language of Buddhism, it was sukha.) The Greek eudaimonia came from eu, meaning “well”, and daemon, a minor guardian deity. Eudaimonia implies a positive state of being that a person may strive toward under the protection of a benevolent spirit. This state of being was the best a person could hope for, so it has been translated as “happiness”, but like the translation of the Greek arete as virtue, the English misses the divine nature of the word that the Greeks would have understood to be implied. In other words, happiness was not just a contented state, but a blessed one, rendering its pursuit elusive and not altogether within human power to achieve.
But even in early Greek philosophy, eudaimonia would have no overt religious or supernatural significance. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics says that eudaimonia means “doing and living well.” The modern concept of happiness tends to lose this attribute of doing and living well. When we observe that someone is happy, we usually mean they are feeling pleasant because things are going well in their life. Eudaimonia was a more encompassing idea than feeling happy. The philosopher Zeno believed that happiness was not dependent upon present enjoyment and security, but also on an expectation that the good times would continue. This gave rise to the concept that no person can be judged happy before they are dead. While we are alive, something can go badly wrong, and goodbye happiness.
by Thomas O’Dwyer, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:
Image: Pollyanna, uncredited
