The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [4]
There is much in our daily lives that is hidden from us because we are too close to it. We need historical comparison in order to make our own rituals visible. For instance, historically, whole towns have celebrated joyous and mournful holidays together, with everyone in town aware of the same poignant mythic story: of an ancient god kidnapping another’s virgin daughter, or of a young pregnant woman on a donkey, searching for an indoor place to birth her extraordinary son. Where is today’s mythic image of a girl in trouble? In the news. We follow the news, constructed out of the infinity of human events into a genre all its own that is a running loop of wounds, disappearances, deaths, and rescue. We oddly call this loop of lost girls and other iconic troubles news—the same word we use to indicate the details of politics, economics, culture, and science that affect us all. It may be silly to call it news, but the sensationalist news has its own function as a story of grief and occasional recovery or rebirth, a story that all of us know, that all of us can celebrate, and that all of us can lament. I believe that this story works to bind the community on the level of shared knowledge and conversation, and that it can much more powerfully affect our happiness if we actually join the parade, demonstration, or vigil. Furthermore, when we do go to community celebrations, we get the most out of them when we know about how they worked in the past.
We are not individuals, not really. We are each a node in a mesh of relationships. Throughout history, a lot of group behavior was mandatory: we were all locked into our roles in our extended families, our religions, and our towns. For much of the twentieth century, our culture was marked by participation in voluntary associations, from the Elks club, to trade-union halls, to the numerous women’s auxiliary clubs, to the Boy Scouts and Brownies. Today we mostly participate in one-day commitments. For many of us, that is what works nowadays. Many of us do not even do that much. But we miss out on a lot of what makes people happy if we do not investigate joyful public celebrations and public demonstrations of anger or grief. And we are missing a lot of what makes people happy if we fail to recognize that in attending an annual public event, we are keeping that event, and its community, alive. We embody something larger than our own lives, and when we take part in public expressions of emotion, we are doing something valuable for our human hearts. This may seem an odd assertion, but I think that, once we have a sense of what the ancient and medieval worlds actually did at their celebrations, it becomes obvious that we need some of that now. We certainly need to rebut those cynics who think of all such actions as simple or shallow. Indeed, those actions are a primary foundation for the building of political morality and agency, and for personal solace.
Like celebration, there are other much-maligned aspects of our culture that seem more humanist when seen in light of historical behavior. Shopping, watching television shows, and following sports teams are all ways that people today take part in an otherwise painfully heterodox culture. That is to say, we do not share religion, politics, or ethnicity with the people we work with. We are in need of a common culture that allows for some personal expression, but one that is basically safe. How we accept or reject that culture determines a lot about how we feel about the world, how happy we are. It is a modern myth that money cannot make you happy. We all say that it can’t, but, given one wish, a lot of us would go for cash. We certainly opt for money over many other pleasures in structuring our real lives. Part of the reason is that what you can buy with money today you used to be able to get for free—social contact and play that can fit neatly into your