Who’s Happy?

    I was a bit surprised when I opened the latest issue of The Atlantic.  A lengthy, wrenching report on current conditions in Afghanistan (and our own country’s complicity in its undoing) aside, three personal histories made up the bulk of the magazine’s content.  Each of these focused on the themes of satisfaction, happiness, and feelings of well-being.  Curious, I read carefully the lead story by Arthur C. Brooks, former president of The American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think-tank), who now teaches at Harvard.  Since this piece didn’t say much I didn’t already know, I simply skimmed the remaining articles, which proved to be equally unilluminating, 

  Frankly, I am used to more substantive fare from The Atlantic, but then it occurred to be that after two years battling Covid with the limitations it has imposed on daily life, the magazine’s editors may have felt Americans needed a pick-me-up; a little friendly coaching on how to bring a smile back to our faces.   Since I have yet to contract Covid, and haven’t felt terribly oppressed by wearing a mask and ordering take-out, I may not count as part of the target audience.  But my tepid reaction had more to do with a sense of deja vu. 

  Twelve or so years ago the happiness industry was doing as brisk business, and books on this subject and ones closely related to it - positive thinking, optimism, et. al., were sitting atop the nonfiction best-seller lists.  I read a number of these, including Happier by Tal Ben Shahar, Positivity by Barbara Fredrickson, Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert (the best of the lot, in my opinion) and, of course, Martin Seligman’s pioneering Learned Optimism.  I delivered sermons based on the research and recommendations showcased in these tomes.  It seemed like a timely antidote to all the depressing news feeds about the American debacle in Iraq and a recession triggered by the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. 

    But after all this reading, then and now, I’m still scratching my head over the subject.  Truth be told, I’m not at all sure what constitutes happiness or (the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding)  whether it’s even an objective worth pursuing.  Mine is probably a minority opinion, though. Robert Ingersoll, the Great Agnostic of the 19th century, formulated a personal creed which stated: “Happiness is the only good.  The place to be happy is here.  The time to be happy is now.  The way to be happy is to make others so.”  That’s undoubtedly a sentiment shared by many.

  Then, too, there’s the much lauded Dalai Lama.  His Holiness has often said that happiness is something every human being is entitled to, and in The Art of Happiness he offers an expansive defense of this simple assertion.  I do believe the Dalai Lama knew whereof he spoke, and that he may well have had the inside track on happiness, or something akin to it.  Once during the 1990’s I had the privilege of meeting this venerable personage at a reception held in his honor at the First Unitarian Society of Madison.  Accompanied by one of his beloved early teachers, Geshe Sopa, the Dalai Lama simply glowed.  Despite his age and history of adversity, he displayed a child-like exuberance and delight that had all of us smiling in appreciation.

    At the same time, I found it difficult to relate to this man’s happiness.   Temperamentally, I have never been given to highs and lows: neither joy and despondency are really part of my emotional repertory.  Indeed, sometimes I fear that my passions are stuck in neutral.  This may or may not be something I have much control over.  According to David Lykken and Auke Tellegen the nonnegotiable biological aspects of temperament increase over time to the point where “it may be that trying to be happier is as futile as trying to be taller.”  Other research indicates that once environmental and genetic factors are factored in, our ability to change our happiness quotient rests at about forty percent.  Oh well.

  But I’m still questioning:  What is happiness, really?  Is it the same as cheerfulness, reflective of an upbeat attitude?  Or, is it more like contentment, and a feeling of satisfaction with one’s lot in life?  If so, I would wager that most Americans, despite their avowals, aren’t as happy as they profess to be since, as Arthur Brooks points out, our default position as emotional beings is dis-satisfaction (see Buddhism’s First Noble Truth).  Brooks argues that modern civilization was created by and is dependent upon the perpetual dissatisfaction of its members.  Would we really want to give it up for something as squishy and ephemeral as personal happiness?    

     And there’s another issue to consider.  In her biting critique of the positive thinking movement, Barbara Ehrenreich observes that our own appraisal of happiness is undeniably parochial:  “There are cultural differences in how happiness is regarded, and whether it is even seen as a virtue,” she writes.  “Some cultures, like our own, value the positive affect that seems to signal internal happiness; others are more impressed by seriousness, self-sacrifice, or a quiet willingness to cooperate.”  In fact, melancholy was more esteemed as a personality trait than the “shallow” emotion of happiness in the early nineteenth century.

   In other words, happiness may or may not be the summum bonum many of us presume it to be, especially if we prioritize it over worthier values.   Robert Ingersoll believed that the only way to be truly happy was to “make others so.”  That’s an admirable thought but belied, as Sue Halpern suggests, by a finding that bigots are some of the self-reported happiest people in the United States.   It’s also the case that too much solicitude toward others can have the opposite effect, leading to what one commentator has described as “donor fatigue.”  

     This brings us to the crux of the matter: there may be only a tenuous connection between happiness and virtue.  It may be true that helpful, generous people evince higher levels of happiness than selfish people, and that social butterflies experience greater happiness than wallflowers.  But as a sentiment, happiness doesn’t provide much guidance when we must decide how to act.  Suppose we have enjoyed ourselves for the last half century, Elizabeth Kolbert writes:  

“Surely, trashing the planet is just as wrong if people take pleasure in the process as it is if they don’t. The same holds true for leaving future generations in hock and for exploiting the poor and for shrugging off inequality.  Happiness is a good thing; it’s just not the only thing.”