A Short History of Happiness
Fragile, but not Illusory
In approaching the subject of happiness, I’m almost always reminded at the start of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and his famous words at the start of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
I know what he means. The annals of human disappointment and misery seem endless, and we always seem more fascinated by tales of woe than by tales of joy. This is why we prefer Dante’s Inferno to his Paradiso, and why tabloid newspapers will never want for juicy copy. Even the most superlative novelist finds that words fail him when the story line runs to “And they lived happily ever after.” That tends to be where the story changes course, or ends.
But I think Tolstoy was deeply mistaken. In fact, it is human happiness that is various, fertile, and mysterious, that comes in many sizes and colors and shapes—reflecting the wondrous variety of the human condition, and the infinitely diverse ways God has gifted us, and has worked in our lives. Looking at the matter from the high standpoint of joy, it’s unhappiness that seems ploddingly uniform and grindingly predictable.
Also, Tolstoy misses the quality of “gift” in happiness. His words reflect an assumption that happiness is our normal, uncomplicated condition, our “default.” This may be easy to believe, especially when we are young, and especially here in prosperous modern America. We assume that if we aren’t constantly happy and cheery, and smiling with dazzlingly perfect white teeth, that there’s something wrong with us. We assume that “the pursuit of Happiness” referred to in our Declaration of Independence means the finding of happiness. But that is not so. To pursue is not necessarily to catch, and few things are so rare as a deep, and genuine, and enduring happiness. That, too, is a fact that Tolstoy’s famous sentence fails to capture, although his books come far closer.
It’s almost impossible to speak about “happiness” in a general way without sounding like a child, or a cynic, or more likely a purveyor of tired and shallow truisms. The problem is that while happiness is a subject of central importance to our existence, and a matter of irrepressibly consuming interest, many of the most reliable truths about it may easily come across as disappointingly flat and trite and commonplace. Surely, we think to ourselves, this elusive thing we all pant after can’t have been captured by a sugary Hallmark card inscription or the maudlin lyrics of a country-and-western song. That would be too much to bear, especially for those of us who consider ourselves intellectuals, and pride ourselves on our superior sense of life’s complexity and depth.
It makes me think back to a conversation years ago with an unhappy friend, a rather theatrical and self-absorbed character who was then buckling under the burden of his crumbling marriage, and badly in need of some straight advice. As I began to offer some rather basic and sensible suggestions—have a “date night,” give her flowers, learn to listen—I was cut off with a violent wave of the hand, followed by an impatient outburst: “Why,” he exploded in fierce exasperation, “am I condemned to live in such a trivial and banal world?” It was hard to tell whether the marriage or the banality was the greater source of his distress.
Actually, though, it was both. My friend, and his doomed marriage, were suffering from his failure to grasp one of the few maxims about happiness that one can repeat without wincing: Happiness is a matter of having the right expectations. You can take that to the bank. When one stubbornly expects the world itself to be something different from what it is—whether lesser or greater—the result is rarely a happy one. The mortifying fact is, we often get better practical guidance in such matters from someone like Dale Carnegie (who said that “Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get,” which is not a bad observation) than from the combined profundity or smart-alecky wit of all the world’s wise guys and gals.
It’s a banal world sometimes, and the truth is often a whole lot simpler than we care to believe. And I might add that the Christian view of human nature—as fallen and corrupt, and saved only by grace—has endured because it finds so much confirmation in the facts. If we take in that view of ourselves, fully, it changes our expectations of ourselves and others. And it makes our happiness more possible.
But why do I propose to take on the history of happiness? We tend to think of happiness, and the quest for it, as one of the timeless and immutable goals of human existence—perhaps even the most timeless of them all. But, as the historian Darrin McMahon has pointed out in a superb recent book on the subject, entitled Happiness: A History, our age’s approach to the pursuit of happiness is far from being the norm of human history. What we mean by happiness is different from what others have meant. Given that fact, our own wrestlings with the subject today may benefit greatly from our taking account of the perspective provided by happinesses past.
To do this requires us to take a journey through the cultural and moral history of the West. In the process, I’ll be making a case for the central importance of ideas in history. What do ideas have to do with happiness? Well, everything. Because the pattern of expectations to which the pursuit of happiness conforms itself at any given time—that age’s vision of feasible felicity, so to speak, and the means one uses to reach it—is itself a product of the dominant ideas of the time in question: ideas about life, death, God, nature, causality, moral responsibility, and human possibility. In a word, what we believe about the world’s structure and meaning will determine what we think happiness is, and how we can act to gain it for ourselves. What we believe provides the basic structure of what we expect.
I’ll begin with the ancient Greeks, and the moral universe of Homeric epic and Sophoclean tragedy. For them, happiness seems quite different matter from what we understand it to be today, precisely because the universe was something different for them: a cruel and mysterious place, governed by dark forces entirely beyond human understanding, in which man must make his way in the face of feckless gods and pitiless Fate. For them, happiness in life could be had only on the fly, and was revocable at a moment’s notice by the most chance and incomprehensible events, which may or may not be related in any way to questions of justice or desert. Happiness for them, as Darrin McMahon puts it, is something that befalls us.
Hence there is a consistent theme in ancient Greek literature, that no man should be considered “happy” until his death. It was given particularly sharp expression by the great Greek lawgiver Solon, who observed that in a world of radical uncertainty, one can count no living man happy, for “to many the God has shown a glimpse of blessedness only to extirpate them in the end.” Happiness was not a subjective state of joy or well-being, but “a characterization of an entire life.” Paradoxically, one could only be finally counted as “happy” when one was no longer around to experience happiness.
This tragic view of happiness was hardly restricted to ancient Greece, as one could deduce from the word itself. The word happiness is linked to the Middle English word happ, from which we get words such as happenstance and perhaps. In other words, for much of the world over much of human history, happiness has been something that happens to one. You receive it passively, rather than achieve it actively.
But it was also in ancient Greece, specifically in democratic Athens, that a different approach begins to emerge. It was a product of the political and social experience of self-rule, which established and reinforced the idea that free men could, through rational inquiry and persuasion, find ways to decide things for themselves, and thereby exert some control over the conditions of their existence.
Such a development soon brings the question of happiness squarely into view. In Plato’s dialogue called Euthydemus, Socrates took it as a given that all men desire happiness, and that a right ordering of our lives can produce such happiness. Aristotle saw happiness as the proper end, the telos, of human existence, a flourishing of the soul that naturally flows from the right ordering of its activities according to the universally intelligible standard of reason. In this new view, men are, in some sense, meant to be happy, in this world, and there should be no mystery about how they get there.
Of course, this view was far from universal in its scope, since only a very few exceptional men could ever hope to attain to this happiness. And the Christian view of happiness further complicated matters, grounded as it was in a more ambivalent attitude toward “the world.” By ambivalent I mean that it pointed in two different directions at once, a condition that we often try to express by the phrase “in the world but not of the world.” It affirmed the world, in ways that reflected Christianity’s Jewish and Greek roots. But at the same time the emphasis on the doctrine of original sin, and the consequent need for divine grace as a means of salvation, seemed to remove from individuals the power to effect their own happiness. The search for a perpetual felicity in God’s presence often seemed, in some versions of the Christian faith, to negate the enjoyment of this world’s passing felicities, in favor of a concentration on the bread of heaven and the rewards (or punishments) of the afterlife. And although it would be very wrong to call Christianity an otherworldly religion, it is not inaccurate to say that, at bottom, the Christian understanding of man seemed to entail the view that unhappiness, not happiness, was his natural condition.
This view was slow to change and has not disappeared. In our own history, the Puritans of New England rarely spoke of personal happiness, but were more likely to speak of “peace of conscience,” or “comfort of heart,” believing that happiness as such was something that would not be fulfilled this side of heaven. Communal worship and marital love might provide foretastes, but only foretastes; and even then, happiness was always something experienced in relationship with others, as part of a social body, and not individually.
But with the coming of modernity, a new picture of things gradually began to supplant this view. Some of this change occurred within the Christian faith itself, as in Martin Luther’s blurring of the line separating the sacred from the profane, or in the gradual weakening of the doctrine of original sin. Some of it was reflected in developments like John Locke’s understanding of the human mind as a tabula rasa upon which experience wrote—which meant no innate ideas, including sin. Or in the Scottish moralist Francis Hutcheson—a major influence on Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence—who thought that man had an innate “moral sense” which made men “hard-wired” to do good, and thereby to have the power to enhance their own happiness.
However one itemizes the particular influences, it was the advent of what we call “the Enlightenment” that marked the decisive change, creating the idea of happiness that dominates our own time—an idea which envisions happiness as something that all human beings can rightly aspire to, in the here and now, as a natural expression of their natural human endowment. Historian Roy Porter put it this way: “The Enlightenment . . . translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’” And the answer increasingly was, through human effort and understanding alone.
By the time of the American Revolution, the “pursuit of happiness” was one of the “self-evident” truths to which Thomas Jefferson felt free to recur in writing the Declaration of Independence. There is, in a word, no more characteristically modern assumption than the belief that it lies within our power to find happiness.
Yet the story does not end there. There are immense difficulties with this modern regime of self-generated happiness. It’s a regime filled with paradox. The self-conscious pursuit of happiness often leads to un-happiness, an unhappiness that is only intensified by the perception that one’s unhappiness is entirely one’s own responsibility—precisely because we assume that happiness is, or should be, something within our power to achieve for ourselves. So the experience of being unhappy, which is bad enough in itself, is rendered even worse by the sense of failure that attends it. Not only are you unhappy, but it’s your fault that you are.
And in its most sophisticated expressions, the Enlightenment project has led to a renunciation of the very possibility of happiness, as in these cheerful words of Sigmund Freud: “The program of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled.” Even on those occasions when Freud was more optimistic-sounding, his mechanistic prescriptions do little to enhance our sense of human dignity and purposefulness: “Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual’s libido.” One can be grateful Jefferson didn’t put that into the Declaration.
All of which suggests that the ancient Greeks and earliest Christians knew things about man that modernity has failed to repeal, even if it has managed to forget them. Indeed, one might ask: Has modern man’s self-conscious pursuit of happiness made happiness that much harder to achieve? Consider this passage from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, published over a century and a half ago:
In certain remote corners of the Old World you may still sometimes stumble upon a small district that seems to have been forgotten amid the general tumult, and to have remained stationary while everything around it was in motion. The inhabitants, for the most part, are extremely ignorant and poor; they take no part in the business of the country and are frequently oppressed by the government, yet their countenances are generally placid and their spirits light.
In America I saw the freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest circumstances that the world affords, it seemed to me as if a cloud habitually hung upon their brow, and I thought them serious and almost sad, even in their pleasures.
The chief reason for this contrast is that the former do not think of the ills they endure, while the latter are forever brooding over advantages they do not possess. It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue their own welfare, and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to it.
The paradox here is that happiness may prove ever more elusive for an age that embraces the all-out, unashamed, naked pursuit of it, by whatever means. Think of it in terms of the expectations game. The modern Americans that Tocqueville describes have been taught, by their culture’s assumptions, to come to life with a very different set of expectations from those of his ignorant and isolated peasants.
And coming at life with the wrong expectations can distort our very sense of our own humanity. One of the most powerful witnesses to that fact was Aldous Huxley, whose novel Brave New World (1932) continues to grow in stature as our world comes increasingly to resemble it. In the novel’s world, as one character says, “everybody’s happy,” thanks to endless free sexuality, endless consumer goods, endless youth, mood-altering drugs, and all-consuming entertainment. But the novel’s hero, the Savage, stubbornly proclaims “the right to be unhappy” and dares to believe that there might be more to life than pleasure: “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” In the end, the Savage is put on humiliating display (by the wonderfully named leader Darwin Bonaparte), as if he were a zoo animal: the Last Man.
Why are our sympathies so powerfully drawn to the Savage? Who in his right mind would want to endorse unhappiness? Could it be because we know, in our bones, that unless we are sometimes willing to be unhappy, we will soon be unwilling to be human? Could it be that this Savage is in fact the novel’s proxy for humanity itself?
Huxley thought so. He knew that there was something radically unharmonizable in the human spirit, a restlessness built into the constitution of our humanity, that could not be stilled by a regime of mere good feeling, or willingly be sacrificed for its sake. Unless, that is, one is willing to give up on the peculiarly between-ness of humanity itself, the riddle that every serious thinker since the dawn of human history has tried to understand, and that the Christian faith alone adequately answers.
Huxley’s most disturbing, but also most prophetic, observation is this one: the fear that in the relentless search for happiness, human beings would soon endeavor to alter their very nature, tampering with the last bastion of fate: their genetic constitution. Should that happen, supreme irony of ironies, the search for human happiness would culminate in the gradual elimination of the human race as we know it, beginning with the infirm and disabled, and ending who knows where. This very prospect may be upon us now.
This is, of course, not really so different from the self-subverting pattern of the modern totalitarian ideologies, which sought to produce “happy” societies by abolishing the independence and dignity of the individual person. Yet the lure of posthumanity may be the particular form of that temptation to which our own technologically advanced Western liberal democracies are especially prone. If we take such a step, in a “quest to live as gods,” we will be leaving much of our humanity behind. One of those things also left behind may, ironically, be happiness itself.
Now some may respond to these conjectures by saying—you think too much about this. Don’t project your fears into the future. Just let things flow. Events are always larger than the human imagining of them. Pessimism is nearly always wrong, and is itself a kind of pridefulness.
Well, I won’t deny that pride can insinuate itself into anything. And there is a serious question embedded in this response. To wit: Is happiness a matter of self-knowledge, or self-forgetting? Is consciousness better when it is fuller? Or is it quite the opposite?
We have all sorts of aphorisms in our culture that suggest the latter may be true, although none of them reflect much happiness about that fact, if I may put it that way. We speak of being “Fat, Dumb, and Happy.” We say that “Ignorance is Bliss.” Or, more soberly, we observe, with T. S. Eliot, that “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” Or consider my quotation from Tocqueville, in which the “ignorant peasants” are actually happier. We even see in much of the modern West a tendency to romanticize the condition of animals, as in these words from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:
I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals.
They are so placid and self-contained.
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied.
Not one is demented with the mania of owning things.
Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago.
Not one is respectable or industrious over all the earth.
Perhaps the self-conscious pursuit of happiness is yet another iteration of the eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which brought the pain of self-consciousness and shame into the world. Perhaps we need to be less self-conscious in order to be happy.
This very point of view has been picked up by psychologist Daniel Gilbert of Harvard, in his recently published book called Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert argues that what we need to make us happy are . . . delusions.
If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we’d be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning. But if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we’d be too deluded to find our slippers. . . .
How do we manage to think of ourselves as great drivers, talented lovers, and brilliant chefs when the facts of our lives include a pathetic parade of dented cars, disappointed partners, and deflated soufflés? The answer is simple. We cook the facts.
But this is too cynical, and too clever by half. After all, Gilbert expects us to believe that he is not cooking the facts. Why should he be the only one who is allowed to tell the truth about life? And why should he expect us to pay attention?
But there is no doubt that he has a piece of the truth here. There is much to be said for being less self-conscious in our devotion to the pursuit of happiness. Like the project of “finding yourself,” the pursuit of happiness may be something best done indirectly, when you are looking for something else.
Consider these words of John Stuart Mill: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. . . . Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art of pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”
Or as someone else put it many years before Mill, and a bit more succinctly, Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.
And we do well to remember that happiness is still, in some sense, just as revocable as the ancient Greeks thought it was. We are brought short by this terrifying fact, something we really do not expect. The physical world is far less mysterious to us. We do not cringe and tremble before an angry Zeus or other sky-god when it thunders. But the vagaries of the human heart are as mysterious as they ever were. And every earthly happiness that we enjoy is still a happiness that can be taken away—and leave behind the greatest un-happiness imaginable.
Permit me to provide an illustration of this. It comes from a letter written by Nadezhda Mandelstam, in October 1938, to her husband the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. He had been arrested by the Stalinist authorities for having years before written verses deemed “subversive,” and was taken away to a remote, frozen prison, his fate unknown to her. This letter was her response, and it is, in its own way, a powerful meditation on the revocability of happiness, and it will have the ring of truth even for those who are happily married in our more comfortable time and place. “Millions of women,” she says, “wrote such letters—to their husbands, sons, brothers, or simply to sweethearts” in Stalinist Russia, knowing full well that their letters might never be delivered or read. In January the following year she learned that Osip was dead.
Osia, beloved, faraway sweetheart!
I have no words, my darling, to write this letter that you may never read, perhaps. I am writing it into empty space. Perhaps you will come back and not find me here. Then this will be all you have left to remember me by.
Osia, what a joy it was living together like children—all our squabbles and arguments, the games we played, and our love. Now I do not even look at the sky. If I see a cloud, who can I show it to?
Remember the way we brought back provisions to make our poor feasts in all the places where we pitched our tent like nomads? Remember the good taste of bread when we got it by a miracle and ate together? And our last winter in Voronezh. Our happy poverty, and the poetry you wrote. I remember the time we were coming back once from the baths, when we bought some eggs or sausage, and a cart went by loaded with hay. It was still cold and I was freezing in my short jacket (but nothing like what we must suffer now: I know how cold you are). That day comes back to me now. I understand so clearly, and ache from the pain of it, that those winter days with their troubles were the greatest and last happiness to be granted us in life.
My every thought is about you. My every tear and every smile is for you. I bless every day and every hour of our bitter life together my sweetheart, my companion, my blind guide in life.
Like two blind puppies, we were, nuzzling each other and feeling so good together. And how fevered your poor head was, and how madly we frittered away the days of our life. What joy it was, and how we always knew what joy it was.
Life can last so long. How hard and long for each of us to die alone. Can this fate be for us who are inseparable? Puppies and children, did we deserve this? Did you deserve this, my angel? Everything goes on as before. I know nothing. Yet I know everything—each day and hour of your life are plain and clear to me as in a delirium.
You came to me every night in my sleep, and I kept asking what had happened, but you did not reply.
In my last dream I was buying food for you in a filthy hotel restaurant. The people with me were total strangers. When I had bought it, I realized I did not know where to take it, because I do not know where you are.
When I woke up, I said to Shura: ‘Osia is dead.’ I do not know whether you are still alive, but from the time of that dream, I have lost track of you. I do not know where you are. Will you hear me? Do you know how much I love you? I could never tell you how much I love you. I cannot tell you even now.
I speak only to you, only to you. You are with me always, and I who was such a wild and angry one and never learned to weep simple tears—now I weep and weep and weep.
There is so much to say about this beautiful, wrenching letter, although in some sense one also wants to let it speak for itself. But let me simply say three things:
First, it tells us that happiness is fragile and revocable. That is our human condition. The ancients were right about that.
Second, that our awareness of happiness may be keenest—in both senses of the word “keen,” meaning not only strong but also sharp—in times of recollection, after profound loss.
And third, that profound human happiness is unimaginable without suffering. “Man is in love,” said the poet William Butler Yeats, “and loves what vanishes.”
Yet the fact of our suffering and grief is also a sign to us, a guarantee that our moments of happiness are no illusion. We cannot grieve for the loss of something, unless we first have loved it intensely, as Nadia loved her Osia. Without knowing the loss of someone or something genuinely precious, our hearts would never know the depth of yearning that leads us to seek God with all our strength. That is one of the many meanings behind the great Beatitude: Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
We trust in the reality of God’s sovereignty. But we also believe in the reality of our human attachments, and the suffering they entail—and we know we are right to do so, because we know that Christ himself suffered, in his tears of disappointment with us, and in his experiences of pain and abandonment on the Cross. The suffering of Christ should remind us, always, that Christianity is not Stoicism or Buddhism; it is not a faith that is designed to insulate us from the pain that our earthly affects and attachments will cause us. Blessed are they that mourn.
Blessed, because we know that God works in mysterious ways to redeem our suffering, to transmute even our most overwhelming grief, and use it to open us to an even fuller and greater life, and to a happiness that we could never otherwise have envisioned or even suspected. That is the object of our hope. It is also the substance of our faith, and the source of our love. To live a life thus animated by the assumptions of faith, hope, and love—that is, like happiness itself, a matter of having the right expectations.
Wilfred M. McClay, a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum, is professor in humanities and history at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. This essay is adapted from a lecture delivered at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia in November 2006.
Features, Character and Ethics, Faiths and Worldviews, Tue 12 Dec 2006
