INTRODUCTION: REFLECTIONS ON REGIMES OF HAPPINESS

Bryan S. Turner and Yuri Contreras-Vejar

This book started as a conversation about successful societies and human development. It was originally based on a simple idea—it would be unusual if, in a society that might be reasonably deemed as successful, its citizens were deeply unhappy. This combination—successful societies and happy citizens—raised immediate and obvious problems. How might one define “success” when dealing, for example, with a society as large and as complex as the United States? We ran into equally major problems when trying to understand “happiness.” Yet one constantly hears political analysts talking about the success or failure of various democratic institutions. In ordinary conversations one constantly hears people talking about being happy or unhappy. In the everyday world, conversations about living in a successful society or about being happy do not appear to cause bewilderment or confusion. “Ordinary people” do not appear to find questions like—is your school successful or are you happily married?—meaningless or absurd. Yet, in the social sciences, both “successful societies” and “happy lives” are seen to be troublesome.

As our research into happiness and success unfolded, the conundrums we discussed were threefold: societal conditions, measurements and concepts. What are the key social factors that are indispensable for the social and political stability of any given society? Is it possible to develop precise measures of social success that would give us reliable data? There are a range of economic indicators that might be associated with success, such as labor productivity, economic growth rates, low inflation and a robust GDP. Are there equally reliable political and social measures of a successful society and human happiness? For example, rule of law and the absence of large-scale corruption might be relevant to the assessment of societal happiness. These questions about success led us inexorably to what seems to be a futile notion: happiness. Economic variables such as income or psychological measures of well-being in terms of mental health could be easily analyzed; however, happiness is a dimension that has been elusive to the social sciences.

In our unfolding conversation, there was also another stream of thought, namely that the social sciences appeared to be more open to the study of human unhappiness rather than happiness. To take one example, Max Weber pointed out in his famous essays The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1905 that the rise of modern society was intimately related to the emergence of an irrational form of morality that was antithetical to the logic and demands of a eudaemonistic ethics. These two streams of intellectual concern—the conundrums of successful societies and Weber’s indictment of the irrationality of modernity—convinced us that it was necessary to broaden our discussion and invite others to be part of this conversation, given the scale of the task we had set ourselves. At this stage, we were fortunate to be joined by Joanna Tice Jen as a coeditor. She has been tireless in shepherding our authors to complete their work according to our tight schedule.

The present book gathers essays originating from presentations given at the 2015–16 seminar on Personal Happiness and Successful Societies, organized by the Committee for the Study of Religion at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Before we introduce these reflections on regimes of happiness, we believe it is necessary to provide a broader context for the main ideas and concepts that have underlined and shaped our debates on happiness. The seminar at CUNY was animated by a brief essay on regimes of happiness we wrote as a way of consolidating our early thoughts on human fulfillment, society and religion. This essay has appeared in 2018 in the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory. It was our first attempt to grasp conceptually the role of ethical ideals in society. Our reflections then and now are still exploratory.

The notion “regimes of happiness” is an attempt to capture and define the elusive nature and role of the ideals of human fulfillment found in different societies. They are not mere mores or ethical aspirations. They are not just episodic occurrences of moral convulsion, protest or the expression of revolutionary fervor. Regimes of happiness are social configurations that enact and articulate ethical ideals in everyday life. They do not exist in a vacuum. They are generated by individuals in social networks; they are essential to legitimate or to subvert social institutions. In their practical dimension, regimes of happiness generate ideologies, which as complex articulations of concepts and symbols help to navigate social groups through the uncertainties of social life. Ideologies are practical; they effect praxes; however, the fate of ideologies is determined by their capacities to produce lasting effects: institutions. Either as structured organizations or as ensembles of social roles, institutions are key articulators of regimes of happiness.

Much of the background to our understanding of the history of ideas about happiness started with a reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in which he employs the idea of eudaimonia (or human flourishing) to describe the most general aim of all human activity. It is somewhat misleading to translate this word as “happiness,” and yet in the literature on happiness it is the most frequently quoted text. For Aristotle, flourishing or happiness is a state of human development in which virtue is the key ingredient for producing well-being. Virtuous action requires self-control and self-sufficiency (or autarchy). Consequently, in Aristotle’s conception, women and slaves are unable to achieve eudaimonia through a virtuous existence, because they were not considered to be free agents. Happiness was not necessarily connected with wealth or status or pleasure. It was an ideal in which a human being has a capacity for self-determination. Aristotle wanted to avoid the real possibility that happiness was merely an accident of birth or good fortune. However, this problem—that we might by the accident of birth enjoy the advantages of a rich household and loving parents—clings to the modern debate about happiness and good fortune. Are we happy as an outcome of virtuous living or by an accident of history and genetics? Most regimes of happiness struggle with these intellectual and ethical issues that are part of Aristotle’s philosophical legacy.

Regimes of happiness define and regulate what is desirable, acceptable and permissible in a given society. These normative dimensions are translated into three domains: pleasure, meaning and force. Regimes of happiness constrain and regulate human pleasure, establish ontologies of truth, and set standards and limits on violence. They structure and organize these three domains through the articulation of symbols, discourses, rituals and institutions. Instantiations of these domains are sexual practices, hermeneutic keys and the organization of the means of violence. Let us provide some concrete examples of these reflections and summarize some crucial findings of our research on happiness.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part is predominantly an intellectual history of the semantics and modes in which people, intellectuals and cultures in Western societies, wrote and thought about human fulfillment. The second part of the book is dedicated to comparative analyses of happiness in both Western and non-Western religious traditions and cultures.

In Western societies, the rise of Latin Christianity was framed by Saint Augustine’s notion of beatitudo, which laid the foundation and provided the ideological legitimacy for an epistemic and religious organization, the monastery. As Yuri Contreras-Vejar’s essay argues, this institution was the foundation of the societies that arose out of the ashes of the Latin Roman Empire. Moreover, Augustinian beatitudo embodied a vision of human fulfillment based on withdrawal from the world, sexual abstinence, ascetic rigor and rejection of the earthly pleasures. This regime of happiness did not exist in Latin Europe until it took shape in the last decades of the fourth century CE. It was the culmination of the erosions and collapse of the Latin Roman Empire. From a macro-perspective, beatitudo as a human ideal determined one radical movement in society, withdrawal from the world. Loneliness became an ideal to be emulated—a literal escape from a world in which plagues and disease reigned rampant. Augustinian beatitudo asserted human responsibility for a life that was felt to be a punishment by a wrathful God. At that time, the idea of micro-organism as the culprit of plagues and disease was inconceivable.

Ascetic practices have been reported since immemorial times; however, beatitudo became a regime of happiness when the confluence of junctural societal forces and events took place. The mere practices of Christian hermits in the Egyptian desert were insufficient.

First, cataclysm: The destruction of a significant part of a population by war, plague or a devastating natural catastrophe is a necessary condition to set the ground for a complete reorganization of society. It is not the scale of devastation but the level of uncertainty that matters the most. Plagues were thought to be the expression of a wrathful deity—and the seeming randomness of death could have been only justified as a form of cosmic punishment or as the act of punishing deity. On other occasions, the arrival of alien texts triggered cultural crises, redefining epistemological foundations and erecting new ontologies of truth. Indeed, revolutionary events are not sufficient to create and institutionalize a new regime of happiness; a new frame of reference is necessary. Foundational texts as a sacred mantra can lay the ground for the rise of a new form of intellectuals, which in turn creates the backbone of a new culture. As a regime of happiness, beatitudo served as a sociohistorical configuration that cemented and consolidated the rise of Christianity as the dominant religion and culture of Latin Europe. It was not the only regime of happiness within the confines of the Latin West; indeed, there were conflicting and antagonistic regimes; however, it is possible to argue that the history of the ideals of happiness in Western societies is the story of the dominance of the Augustinian ideal of beatitudo.

Augustinian monasticism was the crystallization of a long-term development of Christian religious symbols and ideologies. A critical moment of this transformation was the arrival, discovery and translation of Aristotle’s ethical writings in the thirteenth century. The efforts to appropriate and reconcile the conceptual framework and language of the Peripatetic philosopher with the ideals of Augustinian beatitudo provoked major cultural and intellectual conflicts within Latin Christian societies. As Jessica Rosenberg illustrates, Aristotelian ideas came to reinforce a literature that exalted heterosexual and monogamous love as a legitimate path toward salvation and human fulfillment. Philosophical texts were only one dimension to the debates on love. Based on a literate tradition of reading and interpreting Ovid’s Ars amatoria, European societies used poetry and philosophical texts to think through ethical conundrums regarding earthly matters of love, loyalty, guilt and human fulfillment. The central concern was about the legitimate locus of sexual pleasure, with debates drawing their symbols and language from an extinct Roman empire. Indeed, Europe’s Middle Age was the land of Latin culture; its societies were culturally shaped and, by and large, controlled by the actions of literate individuals with relative knowledge of the language of the Romans. It was not the classical language of Cicero, but some poor imitation of Saint Augustine’s writings. However, this seeming deterioration of grammatical forms provided the groundwork for new languages and personal and social identities. The Higher Middle Ages was the cradle of vernacular languages, which would provide the cultural repertoire for the development of modern nation-states.

As Stephanie Grace Petinos discusses, medieval societies were defined by binary distinctions rooted in the Christian ontological difference between heaven and earth, with the monastery acting as the door between those realms. The laity, as the counterpart to religious orders, was a crucial actor in the rise of alternative regimes of happiness. Augustinian beatitudo was still dominant and provided the fundamental frame in which human concerns regarding human redemption and fulfillment were conceptually articulated. The analysis of lay literature in old French texts provides a fascinating account of the people who lived outside the walls of the monastery, but who aspired to reach salvation via religious piety. The concept of joie in old French demonstrates the debt and impact of Aristotelian ethical writings in the rise of vernacular languages. It is also the mark of a nascent regime of happiness, in which social recognition was exalted as a fundamental aspect of human fulfillment. In this manner, honor and spirituality were emphasized as the two necessary poles to reach human flourishing. The monastery remains tall and powerful, but life outside its walls was becoming vibrant and looking for fulfillment.

Italian Renaissance was still the land of Saint Augustine. When Ficino undertook the enterprise of translating the works of Plato, he chose the Augustinian term beatitudo to render the Greek term eudaimonia. However, in William J. Connell’s account we see that a couple of decades later, Niccolò Machiavelli would exalt felicità as the conscious effort to circumvent fortuna and luck. Despite his relationship with the Friars Minor, Machiavelli was convinced that it was natural for men to seek acquisition and possessions. Saint Francis had thought that possessions are the cause of war; Machiavelli thought of it as the necessary condition of a civilized life. The recognition of human beings as they are, and not as they ought to be, was certainly a crucial turning point in the rise of modernity. It marked the rise of a moral of magnificence, the display of opulence and wealth. The zenith of that development was doubtlessly the Scottish Enlightenment.

As Megan Hills shows, the eighteenth-century heirs of Calvinism in Scotland radically transformed the old Christian question “how can I be saved?” into an inquiry “how can I attain happiness?” Aristotle had taught medieval philosophers and masters of arts that human flourishing—and not the afterlife—is the fundamental matter of politics and social life. Moreover, eudaimonia for Aristotle did not separate the well-being of the individual from the city and vice versa. Evil individuals are destined to destroy the polis, and a corrupt polis can only produce corrupt citizens. Augustinian beatitudo came to disrupt the intimate link between the individual and political society. Human fulfillment became a matter of an isolated mind, a soliloquy. Francis Hutchinson, Lord Kames and Adam Ferguson sought to reestablish the sacred link between individual and political happiness. Their efforts are still affecting our lives, but that sacred link seems to have been lost to history.

The nineteenth century was the time of political and technological revolutions. Democracy became the dominant political ideal, and semi-autonomous machines altered nature, the production of wealth and social relations. Despite these transformations, the religious calling was still a powerful driving force in the lives of men and women. As Bernadette McCauley shows, convent life was a singular vocation allowing Catholic women to attain fulfillment in an era when women had few vocational options outside the home and marriage. Cloistered life constituted a unique path through which women realized their own autonomy and empowerment, an alternative form of human flourishing. A century later, the religious landscape of the United States is not a context in which the monastic life or religious orders find a comfortable environment. However, the United States is still a society in which powerful Christian values seek to tame desire, suppress sin and reach salvation.

In the contemporary context, the Beatitudes—now a term that has forgotten its origins—provide one of the frames through which a specific type of Christianity, Evangelism, speaks of suffering and salvation. In Joanna Tice Jen’s work, the Sermon on the Mount—in which Jesus pronounced the paths to salvation—is the charter in which suffering has become the cost for a happy afterlife and meditation the means to reach temporary earthly joy. Monastic life has faded, but paradoxically God is everywhere.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Europeans after the Second World War became convinced that social identity within the confines of nation-states was destined to produce more war and collective suicide. In Davide G. Colasanto’s essay, the European Union can be understood as a political remedy through the creation of a postnational identity. To do so, Europeans realized that they must overcome the nationalistic overtones of their semiotic vocabularies and the semantic contents of human flourishing. “Happiness,” “Glucklichkeit,” Felicité, Felicità or Felicidad have to be transformed into a unifying expression. Unfortunately, regimes of happiness are culturally specific and embedded and articulated in particular languages. To overcome the polysemy of human happiness, serious consideration of history and cultural narratives is required. Paradoxically, the social sciences have been moving away from the realm of meaning. But in this case, how can contemporary psychology with its strong inclinations for biological explanations provide an accurate comprehension of the human mind? Samantha Birk’s, Samantha Denefrio’s, and Tracy A. Dennis-Tiwary’s chapter guides us through the new frontiers of psychology and neuroscience and the emerging new meanings of happiness.

The second part of the book explores “non-Western” and alternative conceptions of human fulfillment. The notion of “Western” must always be viewed with suspicion. Roman society dominated Europe for almost a millennium; however, Christianity, Rome’s religious progeny, did not come into existence until the last centuries of the Roman Empire. For three hundred years, it was a pariah religion. Indeed, the expansion of Rome’s frontiers incorporated people and cultures with heterogeneous religious beliefs and practices, among them, Jews and their religion, Judaism. This Abrahamic religion was fundamental in the rise of Christianity. Despite Judaism’s significant connections with the religion of Jesus’s followers, Marc Katz’s essay demonstrates how Judaism was able to develop alternative visions of human fulfillment, sometimes antagonistic to the Augustinian ideal of atonement. Ultimately, Judaism’s ethical ideals would become mirrored alterities to be superseded by the dominant Augustinian regime during the formation of Latin Europe. In different circumstances, but in a similar manner, Islam would arise as another mirrored competitor.

The vacuum created by the collapse of the Roman Empire set in motion revolutionary transformations of the societies that had inhabited the Mediterranean basin. On the margins of Mare Nostrum, a prophetic religion, Islam, arose to create visions and conceptions of human flourishing that would ultimately challenge the theoretical and ontological foundations of Augustinianism. As Anna Akasoy demonstrates, the recovery of Aristotle’s writings would not have been impossible without the respect and admiration of Islamic philosophers for the classical past of the Greeks.

Given this long overview of the history of Augustinianism in the West and its interaction with other regimes of happiness, is it possible to affirm the commensurability of regimes of happiness? Is it possible to translate notions of human fulfillment that are rooted in varied histories and language into different idioms and cultures? Perhaps, the answer to these quandaries can be partially answered by the phenomenon of appropriation. The traverses of yoga and its American reincarnation seen in Shehzad Nadeem’s work and the borrowing of key passages of the US Declaration of Independence by the founders of modern Vietnam—as noted in Oscar Salemink and Nguyê͂n Tuấn Anh’s work—provide fascinating examples of how societies appropriate cultural practices and distinctions. Appropriation is translation, in which specific elements of a culture are selectively reinterpreted and transformed. Semiotic differences are as crucial as semantic contents. What is appropriated is reorganized into the cultural frame of its recipient society and, in turn, the receiver is transformed. In that interaction, there is always the risk of being displaced, subjugated and marginalized as is related by Colin Samson in his account of indigenous conceptions of fulfillment under Western colonialism. Perhaps, the history of regimes of happiness is the history of social domination, a history forged out of fear of life itself.

What might we say therefore of happiness today? Despite the long and unresolved debate about the meaning of human happiness, Happiness Studies, which developed in the 1970s, is a flourishing subfield of the social sciences, especially welfare economics and psychology. The Journal of Happiness Studies first appeared in 2000 and well-being, life satisfaction and personal happiness are now key issues in economic theory in which happiness is one measure of successful social policies. The idea of replacing Gross National Product with Gross National Happiness came from the Buddhist nation of Bhutan where in 1972 King Jigme Singye Wanchuk proposed the creation of a happiness index with four major dimensions: good governance and democratization; stable and equitable socioeconomic development; environmental protection; and preservation of culture. Various countries now have happiness measures including government ministers responsible for assessing and increasing happiness. In world happiness studies, such as the United Nations’s World Happiness Survey, societies with functional welfare states such as Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden have citizens who enjoy high levels of life satisfaction. Countries with a stable history of Westminster-style democracy and steady economic growth, such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand, are also highly ranked in terms of individual well-being.

What can we make of these results within our historical framework? As Bryan S. Turner’s conclusion posits, one answer is to suggest that the modern attempt to measure happiness quantitatively through survey methods is in part the legacy of utilitarianism as it was originally formulated by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. Bentham had to assume a minimal notion of happiness in his “felicific calculus” in which happiness could be measured by its duration and intensity. He rejected the idea that there were different ends or forms of happiness. He famously announced, “the game of pushpin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry,” which was later misquoted by John Stuart Mill as “pushpin is as good as poetry.” Thus, happiness is measured by pleasure and all pleasures are quantitatively equivalent. Listening to Mozart is to be measured on the same continuum as eating candy. In short, virtue had disappeared from the equation.

J. S. Mill, going through a personal crisis in 1826–27, came to the conclusion that he was not happy. He rejected the simple assumptions of Bentham’s calculus and came to recognize the importance of culture, which could not be measured by any simple scheme. He proposed that the cultivation of feelings would become one of the cardinal points in his ethical and philosophical creed. He discovered personal happiness in 1851 in his eventual marriage to Harriet Taylor and concluded that questions about ends are ultimately questions about what things are desirable. In Mill’s mature philosophy the definition of happiness and its measurement remained obscure and essentially circular, because as a matter of fact the only evidence we have that something is desirable is that people actually desire it. But he concluded that the basic social and political circumstance necessary for happiness was personal liberty.

One possible conclusion of this study is the observation that in modern societies there is no single or enduring regime of happiness. There are only competing and fragmented regimes. There is obviously a utilitarian aspect to modern social policy that attempts, at least in liberal democracies, to enhance well-being through policies that promote social welfare through education, health and welfare states. Neoliberalism represents an alternate discourse that promotes the idea of individual freedom in which markets rather than states can maximize choice. There may be another more libertarian version of this argument that associates freedom with the absence of constraints. Yet again one can detect especially among young people the idea that we are happy when we are consuming and consumption is the principal source of pleasure. In our conclusion, we also identify a critique of modern ideas of happiness in an influential intellectual tradition stretching from Friedrich Nietzsche through Max Weber to Sigmund Freud that basically argue that happiness is not possible in a modern highly rational and regulated society. While many unhappy people have sought personal relief from their troubles in Freud’s talk therapy, Freud had argued that his technique released people from their traumatic and painful experiences in order for them to have lives based on ordinary unhappiness. Thus, our contemporary world escapes the strict certainties of Augustinian beatitudo, but has fallen into a state in which there is no longer any shared overarching and authoritative regime of happiness. Human fulfillment remains problematic, obscure and elusive.