Happy Mind: The Philosophy and Science of Happiness

 

 

 

If this remark sounds bizarre to modern ears, it is because our concept of happiness is very different from that of the ancient Greeks.
 

 

The roots of our modern idea of happiness can partly be traced back to the founding values of the New World.  In 1776, Thomas Jefferson sought to crystallise the values at the heart of the new American society in the US Declaration of Independence.  At the forefront of his “inalienable rights“ was the tripartite motto of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.  Though this document is specific to US society, and other Western societies have different founding principles, it could be argued that US culture has been exported so successfully through out the West, that we now all feel justified in demanding these rights.  In many ways then this document forms the basis of Western society in general, and successive Western governments have sought to guarantee these rights for their citizens.

 

Life and liberty are relatively easy concepts to measure, but happiness less so, and it could be argued that governments have sought to replace it with the more objectively quantifiable goals of material wealth and consumer choice.  People become happy by getting what they want, according to conventional wisdom, and the more choice of consumer goods they have, and the more money they have to spend on these goods, the more likely they are to be happy.  For this reason, economics has taken hold as the major driving force behind Western government policy.  This has led to an unsustainable rate of resource consumption, with potentially disastrous environmental consequences including global warming, as well as widespread warfare as societies fight for control over dwindling resources.

 

It has also perhaps led to a tendency to equate happiness with pleasure and convenience, and to seek to increase happiness by gratifying our desires in the quickest and easiest available way.  This has had some unfortunate side-effects such as widespread obesity (64.5% of US adults are either overweight or obese), gambling and drug addiction.  The more short-term our idea of happiness, it seems, the more trouble we run into.  In many ways the logical conclusion of the pursuit of this kind of happiness is the destitute junky, ignoring everything except the drug, constantly trying to become happier, and constantly becoming more miserable.

 

This may seem extreme, and it certainly does not provide the whole picture of the pursuit of happiness in Western society, but it does identify a familiar current with very real consequences.

 

All of which might be easier to stomach if it could be proved to be making us happier.  And yet the evidence is that, above a certain threshold, increased wealth has no impact on happiness at all.  According to Lord Layard, government adviser and professor at the London School of Economics:

 

“in the last 50 years average happiness has not increased at all in Britain nor in the USA - despite massive increases in living standards.  This is because above an average income of about £10,000 per head, richer societies are no happier than poorer societies.”

 

Once our basic needs for food, shelter and comfort are fulfilled, it seems, happiness has nothing to do with material wealth.  A side-note to this is that richer people are happier than poorer people within the same society, because people tend to compare themselves with those who are better-off.  This is a strong argument for using taxation to redistribute wealth.

 

One explanation for this apparent cap on the happiness brought by wealth could be the paradox of hedonism.  This was first explicitly formulated by the philosopher Henry Sidgwick in The Methods of Ethics, and was also noted by John Stuart Mill in his autobiography:

 

"But I now thought that this end [one's happiness] was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.... Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness along the way.... Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so."

 

To paraphrase Mill, happiness is to be found in productive, goal-directed activity, and not in the pursuit of happiness as a short-term psychological state.  This is borne out by a new school of psychology, positive psychology, whose main proponent, Martin Seligman, identifies three components to happiness:  pleasure, engagement and meaning.  In order to have the capacity to make us happy, our activity should not just be pleasurable, but also engaging.  It should be the kind of activity which absorbs us completely, even to the extent that we lose track of time.  Perhaps most significantly, it should have meaning in itself, as well as in terms of its ability to give us pleasure.  This echoes the paradox of hedonism; the more we value an activity in terms of its capacity to make us happy, the less it makes us happy.  It also echoes Aristotle’s imperative to “rational activity in accordance with excellence”.

 

What all of these ideas seem to point towards is the view that focussing on our own short-term happiness will not make us happy.  If we can rediscover the concept of eudaimonia, and adapt it to suit our modern values, perhaps we can find a way to achieve longer-term happiness.  A modern concept of eudaimonia, for example, might include the need to take account of the effect of one’s actions on the environment, as well as on other people in one’s community.   It might take the form of political engagement, or artistic creativity, or volunteer work.  By focussing on the effect of our actions on those around us and on the world in general, rather than on our own happiness, perhaps we can learn to be eudaimon, and to be happy.

© Jim Baxter 2006.

Jim is a freelance proofreader and the lead singer of the band Bison, based in Sheffield.

Website: www.allhailthebison.com