The Problem of Happiness

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working my way through “Happiness: A History” by Darrin M. McMahon (2006, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York).

Like many of the books that I’m reading these days, “Happiness” is a conceptual history, or a history of the changes in meaning and usage of important concepts. I look for conceptual histories of terms that are central to how we talk about what it means to be human and contentious words that shape our understanding of common life (freedom, liberty, rights, justice, sexuality, morality, fact, emotions, mind, reason, faith, doubt, soul, boredom, love, etc.).

McMahon’s book is well researched and written with an accessible style. It takes a lot of effort to digest such a complex body of research and order everything together in a way that a nonspecialist reader can understand. I’m always impressed when someone does that well.

I found his chapter dealing with early Christianity annoying. His examination of the role of suffering in the early Christian understanding of martyrdom takes place outside of a framework that discusses how sin distorts the world and individual personhood. As a result, the idea that we suffer in Christ because we live in a sinful world that opposes him and are dieing to sinful orientations that have formed our personality is obscured. With this mysterious absence of the concept of sin until he introduces Augustine later in the chapter, McMahon’s early Christian martyrs seem to suffer, and find happiness in suffering, out of some ecstatic masochism.

My annoyance with his framework of Christian happiness and suffering aside, I’ve found the rest of the book extremely helpful. The quotes below are passages that I highlighted because I felt that they captured why it’s important to reflect on our own understandings of happiness or summarized radical shifts in understanding of happiness. McMahon is a remarkably lucid writer with a knack for bringing the point home.

This quote from the preface should be a nice appetizer to whet your interest to read the book yourself:
“We can be happy, we will be happy, we should be happy. We have a right to happiness. Surely this is our modern creed. But have human beings always felt that way? Is it correct to assume, with Freud’s contemporary the American philosopher William James, that “how to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times teh secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure”? Is happiness eternal—universal—or does it have a specific record of time and place?
…In the end, William James may well have been right. Perhaps happiness is, was, and ever shall be the ultimate human end in every time and place.
Yet it is also perfectly clear that the manner in which men and women understand happiness–how they propose, and whether they expect to achieve it–varies dramatically across cultures and over time. And as I hope this book will demonstrate, happiness has occupied a particularly prominent place in the Western culture and thought.” from the Preface, pages xii-xiv

On the radical shift in the Enlightement project in understandings of human nature and purpose, quoting Roy Porter in “The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment”:
“If there was a central concern that animated the Enlightenment’s many questions, it was how to make life better. In brief, as one eminent scholar has summarized, ‘The Enlightenment…translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’ The answers eighteenth-century men and women increasingly believed, could be found through human effort and understanding.” page 209

On the shift from Christian understandings of happiness to Enlightenment understandings, and Samuel Johnson’s questioning of the Enlightenment belief that happiness that happiness was the chief end of human life (this one may be a little hard to follow without the context of some of the preceding pages, but you’ll probably be able to get the gist of it):

“Yet [Christians] were resigned to the belief (the hope) that real happiness would come only in death.
But now that the end was now, or rather of this life, the long Christian apprenticeship in happiness deferred had a curious effect. For now that the end was now, did not everyone have the right to hope for salvation? The new faith, like the old, was universal in its potential, and the good news of the modern gospel was free to travel with missionary speed. All could be happy. All should be happy. All would be happy-someday. These were the miracles that talent and art were making in the world. Scarcely a century before, rulers had been required to lead in the service of the faith and morals of their subjects, to lead in the service of God. They were now being asked to serve a different lord. ‘Happiness is in truth the only object of legislation of intrinsic value,’ the English utilitarian Joseph Priestly observed. From the greatest good to the greatest number, this was the voice of a new age.
Without completely dismissing the liberating potential of this creed [Samuel] Johnson detected its darker side. As a companion of Rasselas [a novel written by Johnson exploring the problem of happiness and human nature] inquires, ‘What…is to be expected from our pursuit of happiness, when we find the state of life to be such, that happiness itself is the cause of misery?’ Was it really so clear that human beings were intended to be happy, that they could make themselves so? The supposition itself, Johnson understood, involved an assumption- an article of faith- about the purpose of human existence, about man’s final telos and end. And if this supposition were wrong, as he well believed, then it placed on human beings a terrible burden: a responsibility they could never entirely fulfill. The result, as Rousseau had intuited but never precisely seen, was a new type of unhappiness: the guilt and sorrow one experiences for not being happy in a culture that demands it.” pages 248-250

Happy reading!

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