The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [96]
We spend millions of dollars on health studies, and a huge amount of our time, money, and mental effort on eating right and getting exercise. Yet what really kills us is cars: motor-vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for people aged six to thirty-three. The leading cause. After that age, crashes have to compete with heart disease and cancer, but our cars still kill a lot of us.1 We crash our metal boxes into each other and into walls. Here we are, concentrating our money and minds on tests of whether eating a given fruit might be slightly correlated with the avoidance of some disease of old age and then trying hard to get our children and ourselves to eat the thing, carefully washing off the pesticides we read about in some other test, and meanwhile we ignore the death strips that are our roads and highways. If we rejected cars, we would have to walk, and our exercise problem would be over. So would our fuel problem and much of our pollution problem. But notice that this is completely off the radar as an option for the country. As a culture, we talk not at all about remaking the society so light rail and the Internet and the placement of schools, parks, and stores might make it very rare to have to use a car. I’m not trying to convince you of anything to do with transportation. I’m trying to say that the way we arrange for happiness—all this business with broccoli and treadmills—is not the only way we could be doing things. It is a species of madness called custom. People are going to look at us from the future with much head scratching.
What is the historical wisdom on the subject? Philosophy is often thought of as being devoted to extremes: some stodgy wise men telling you to deny the body’s desires, and some iconoclastic sages telling you to enjoy the sensual pleasures. In reality, history’s graceful-life philosophers tend to favor moderation. Aristotle told us that we should strive for the golden mean, to enjoy most of what the world offers, but not too often. He said the best thing one could do with one’s time was to study philosophy, but he was also a man who took part in life—as a soldier, a husband, a father, a governor, a drinker, and a friend. There were ancient Greek cults of self-denial, and Aristotle dismissed them almost as firmly as he dismissed the glutton and the drunk.
Moderation also found brilliant expression in the East. The Buddha called his philosophy “the Middle Way,” because, as he saw it, people seeking happiness tended to either join the monks and torture their bodies with denial, or join the worldly and go for sensual pleasures. The Buddha said don’t indulge your body in feasts, but likewise don’t starve yourself. Featherbeds might be a distracting indulgence, but likewise, there is no need to go outside and sleep in the snow. Many mystics—including the Buddha—had found harsh self-denial to be very effective in reaching altered mental states, but when he came to express his own philosophy, the Buddha said that this sort of thing was a wrong turn. Your treatment of the body was about training it to an easy roughness so you could concentrate on other things. The Buddha’s moderation was different from Aristotle’s: for his enlightenment project, he suggested you avoid sex altogether; and he felt that alcohol and fancy food were also more of a distraction than they were worth.
Epicurus is remembered by many as the great philosopher of sensual pleasure, so associated with enjoying food that Epicurean today means “a lover of food.” Its not an unreasonable association. As Epicurus puts it: “Pleasure is the beginning and the goal of a happy life. The beginning and root of every good is the pleasure of the stomach. Even wisdom and culture must be referred to this.