The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [5]
These four issues—drugs, money, bodies, celebration—seem to me the largest topics of happiness that are made visible through historical study, and they are at the center of this book. What about love, faith, and art? They are not made visible through historical study. Love, faith, and art seem to me safe from the chuckles of history: if you have passion in love, faith, or art today, you are likely to take seriously an expression of love, faith, or art from two hundred years ago, or five hundred, or two thousand. We understand a toy carved by a frontier settler for his infant son; we understand a cathedral; we understand a gazelle painted on the wall of a cave. A doctor’s advice, by contrast, does not hold up even from decade to decade. Nothing is more important for your happiness than whether you are fully interacting with the timeless realm of things. Much can be done to enhance that interaction: be more open to change and more forgiving of faults; find time to do some painting; go to church or temple, or go to the ocean; go to the planetarium and see an intergalactic show; find some way to help someone; or be an inspiration. This book trusts you to know as much about the timeless sources of happiness as anyone else. But very likely you have a lot of trouble doing all of this. It is as if you know the beautiful ballroom dance, but you are limping. Well, the limp is curable through history. Drugs, bodies, money, and celebration are the themes of the four central chapters in this book. They may seem an odd collection of subjects. Maybe they are. They all overlap so much that I certainly could have divided my discussion of them along other lines. Still, these do very nicely. Happiness is feeling good. Drugs, bodies, celebration, and money are worldly, mundane techniques for making ourselves feel good. They are badly controlled by historical whims, and we need to rise above today’s version of mythic prattle about them and still take advantage of what they have to offer. I call my method “happiness by historical perspective.”
The book opens a little differently. The first section is a summation of happiness wisdom through all of time. It highlights the ways in which our society has taken certain age-old advice and blown it far out of proportion while giving short shrift to other advice. In this sense, this is another kind of happiness by historical perspective. But this section is also an opportunity to collect the greatest pieces of advice for individual happiness from all time and sort them into four memorable directives.
Happiness may seem like a populist goal, as if serious people should consider less emotional matters. But since we judge everything through our minds and moods, what could be more essential as a philosophical starting place? Ignore the reputation of “self-help,” and let us concede that happiness is important to us. As I see it, there is a moral imperative to be open-minded, investigative, and in pursuit of happiness. People have argued that we moderns are self-indulgently expectant of our own happiness, compared with the great mass of historical humanity who lived without such lofty goals. But I do not think this is true. Indeed, I believe that other historical eras have given more value to happiness in the form of euphoria, leisure, play, celebration, and indulgences. Other eras have also offered more choices of behaviors with no end other than the happiness of a given individual or crowd. Yes, there was also more hardship in the past and more hierarchy, and I do not want to go back. But I do think we have a lot to learn from other historical moments.
What is happiness? Obviously, we are dealing with an issue that is a moving target. We could say that everything we welcome is an agent of our happiness, including misery—and we will have lost our subject. We know what we mean when we say the word in context, but it has a cluster of meanings that must be sorted