The Western world has never been more prosperous than it now is, even if much of its wealth seems a futures trading version of the Biblical miracle of the loaves. What to former eras were utopian fantasies (greater productivity, reduced infant mortality, longer life expectancy) are now so taken for granted we hardly notice them. We only notice that reality is a more complicated and obscure matter than hitherto imagined when things refuse to bend to our imperious wills: this state of affairs is called a scandal. In the garden of earthly delights, market forces have even managed to turn hedonism into a kind of militancy. Yet journalists, sociologists and historians, Sigmund Freud and the occasional professional ethicist are equally of one voice: we are not happy. It is one of the distressing futilities at the heart of modern life, one related to that other contemporary concern: the less adversity we come up against the more we feel under threat.
But what is happiness, anyway? Why do we think it for the asking when it more obviously steals upon us like a state of grace… or reveals itself only when our mood has ripened into regret? Why did some of the ancient Greek philosophers—and the idea is Greek—think happiness was a matter of having as few needs as possible? Are we too far gone in materialism to conceive of a neo-Platonic contemplator (Plotinus) asserting that even a person under torture can aspire to happiness? What inspired the German philosopher Nietzsche to write contemptuously of the Benthamite ‘felicific calculus’ (which, refined into the tenets of utilitarianism, has dominated so much thinking about social justice in the English-speaking world), ‘man does not pursue happiness: only the Englishman does that’? Was it good sense or just a kind of cynical world-weariness that compelled François de la Rochefoucauld to write, ‘We are never as happy nor as unhappy as we imagine.’ And what led the poet W. H. Auden to insist in middle-age, in keeping with the providential arguments of an earlier age, that happiness is a duty? ‘Be good and you will be happy is a dangerous inversion’, he wrote. ‘Be happy and you will be good is the truth.’
These are some of the questions that the London-based writer Ziyad Marar attempts to answer in his conceptual history of happiness, The Happiness Paradox, an invitation to meander through the author’s stock of select quotations, urban legends, film plots, personal anecdotes and yarns. He starts with the shift in the term’s freight in the middle of the eighteenth century. No longer did happiness signify a state of right living, less still the knowledge of being blessed in our lives—for the first time it made a gesture towards feeling good. Happiness had once served to describe the shape of an entire life (a largely miserable life could still be described as ‘happy’ if it was judged to be a good life); now it was fleet and punctual, a state more akin to gratification. By claiming in his Discourse on Happiness (1750) that happiness is a mental state dependent essentially on somatic conditions, La Mettrie—best known for his conflation of biology and mechanics—was able to redefine it primarily as a medical rather than an ethical issue. Happiness was losing its public dimension and becoming a sensation, internalised and self-spectating, even though it was still apparent to more reflective Enlightenment thinkers, such as Diderot, that the acceptance of a given social life had hitherto been the presupposition to there being moral judgements at all.
By the end of the eighteenth century, happiness could be actively sought, being congruent to the aspirations, and perhaps even to the acquisitive rhythm of life of the property-owning classes. La Mettrie’s idea of man as a self-regulating machine was followed by Holbach’s conception of happiness (felicity) as the condition to which humans, as physical beings, were entitled under the terms of the ‘natural morality’ he derived from the pleasure-principle and legislated for as the rule of social utility. (‘Unnatural’ morality was that imposed by the Christian religion, and further propagated by the political institutions of the ancien régime.)
After the French Revolution, the firebrand lawyer Saint-Just called happiness a new idea on earth, and tried to get it into people’s heads by guillotining as many of them as possible—until he lost his own. It wasn’t long before liberal writers like Stendhal were taking to the road in France and Italy in an attempt to find out just why happiness so rarely coincided with the desire that clamoured for it. Perhaps Stendhal ought to have stayed longer in England and more thoroughly wet his whistle, since, according to Dr Johnson, ‘there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern’.
Part of the deeper problem was that the old concept of happiness as a social good had failed to disappear entirely: a market society might have no place for ordinary human sociability in its theoretical scheme of things, but mutuality is still necessary for the emotional economy of any society, perhaps most especially that of an egalitarian cargo-cult. Society is not simply a matter of relationships between persons; it is also the consciousness of those relationships in the minds of the individuals so related. Looking out for Number One can’t help but become the focus of an unceasing manipulative tension.
So Marar’s paradox is actually an intensification: it attaches to the fact that rather than having to legitimise himself before God the new individual has to justify himself before other men, which, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau complained most loudly and bitterly, is a kind of secular hell. Being modern means having to compare and be compared, to be saddled by the knowledge that there is no escape from having to plead, as did the Scottish poet Robert Burns, for the gift to see ourselves as others see us. We proclaim ourselves unique and irreplaceable, but that claim looks ridiculous when seen in the light of the equal claims of millions more. So we veer like weathervanes between the absurd solipsism of being ‘self-made’, and the abject plagiarism of prestigious others, a habit which advertises that the imitating acolyte hardly exists at all except by the force of his imitations. What could be more derivative or second-hand than cribbing from a model? What could be a better pretext for embarrassment, shame, humiliation and all the attendant self-conscious emotions?
‘The modern sensibility both wants to break free and wants to belong’, writes Marar. The more freedom we enjoy the less approval we receive; the more approval we seek the less free we become. His quasi-subjects are the latest biofeedback versions of La Mettrie’s pleasure-pain machines, oscillating between the poles of control and remission. Acceptance of this polar condition offers, in his view, the perspective of understanding how going after happiness pulls us from ‘disruption to conformity and back again’.
What he’s not talking about is not an approximation to the old idea of the Golden Mean. Our societies are too creatively unstable, our economies too dependent on the cycle of appetites and disappointments, to allow that kind of harmony. Ultimate questions of what makes for the good life have been leached of sense in a civilisation predicated on the notion that a perpetual bounty of material goods is the best way to guarantee social peace: modern man has been trained to internalise a first-person doubt about all shared opinions, as well as to be seduced by the potentially illiberal thought that governments can and should guarantee his happiness.
The US Constitution guarantees, as Marar observes, the right to pursue happiness; it wisely refrains from saying anything at all about the nature of happiness itself. Carl Elliot, an American bioethicist, takes the view, in his tolerant and mildly ironic book Better than Well—the latest instalment in a modern tradition examining America’s obsession with therapy that began with Tom Wolfe’s 1973 essay ‘The Me Decade’—that the contemporary eagerness for the technological fixes offered by medicine has less to do with consumerism’s infantile prospects of instant gratification than a touch of personal evangelism: the desire to be fulfilled. To be fulfilled in America is to be a self-respecting and respectable social actor. It is to be a puritan once the original premises of Puritanism have been forgotten.
If happiness is a duty that takes the form, especially after the 1960s, of ‘an obligation to the self’, then the self-attending individual is bound to get anxious about being seen to be so beholden to others. Authenticity is at stake, and the very spontaneity of desire. In a society of individualists nobody dare admit to being a conformist. Indeed, the only nobility in a world where looking foolish (being made to look foolish) is the basic fact of social existence is awareness of the fact itself, and its strategic use to deflate the condition that imposes it: Dostoevsky writes about almost nothing else.
Elliott’s chapters offer a thought-provoking tour around his theoretical speculations, moving from a consideration of the pioneering American sociologist Thorstein Veblen (who came up with the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ as long ago as 1899) to such phenomena as the post-war rise of depression as a clinical diagnosis, short-lived psychiatric syndromes like fugue state and repressed memory, the new phenomenon of ‘apotemnophilia’ (apotemnophiliacs are otherwise well people who go to any lengths, including self-mutilation, to become amputees: these are individuals whose felt integrity can be had only through loss of their actual physical integrity), and the various kinds of surgical and drug-based treatments that promise to transform what would formerly have been thought unchangeable aspects of human personality and identity. ‘Why is loneliness not / A chemical discomfort…?’ queried Auden in a poem of 1960, anticipating by thirty years the assumption behind the latest generation of serotonin reuptake inhibitor drugs. Elliott suggests that if Americans worry about these treatments, as suggested by the loaded term ‘enhancement technologies’ (which draws attention to their transformative potential while obscuring the fact that some may be quite conventional treatments of the restorative kind), it is largely because they worry about ‘the good life these technologies serve’. Once the purview of medicine gets extended to boosting a person’s sense of well-being, then the scope of potentially treatable conditions can only expand enormously.
Elliott cites Wittgenstein’s famous thought experiment of the community of language-users with a ‘beetle in a box’, in which every person claims to know what a beetle is by examining only his own box, and has no right to peek into his neighbour’s—a logical parable to show that what has a public dimension cannot be private, and that what is private cannot be a language—as a mechanism for the seeding of doubt about status in a democratic society; and the need to keep up with the Joneses. Are other people playing by the rules of the game or pulling a fast one? Desire is not a democracy; it establishes new hierarchies. Elliott is describing not so much people playing a game but the world of Stendhal’s tormented and deadly serious vaniteux. Our world of escalating wants is the result.
While the American sense of endlessly manipulable well-being is spreading with the global market, a sense of diminishing possibility fed to Europeans by their historical sixth sense (not so much vestigial as undeveloped, we are led to believe, among Americans) has long made us experts in self-mutilation: our apotemnophilia is all at the symbolic level, which is of course where it really hurts. Good Europeans have never aspired to be happy: Freud’s goal was to minimize suffering, and psychoanalysis, at least to begin with, offered a kind of negative freedom. It taught members of the middle classes how to cope with the solitude produced by a market society.
Germany is a case in point. The great nineteenth-century Prussian novelist Theodor Fontane wrote, ‘the large city has no time for thinking and, what is worse, it has no time for happiness. What it creates a hundred times over is the Hunt for Happiness, which is actually the same as unhappiness.’ Such perspicuity notwithstanding, it is a terrible historical irony that the nightmare history that followed the attempts of the Nazis to fabricate a happy utopia based on exclusion has meant that more recently in Fontane’s country happiness was once called—no doubt with polemic intent—a crime. This position, the vigilant reader will realise, is the switch-side of the Marquis de Sade’s.
The greatest achievement of Elliott’s book, which draws purposefully on literature, history, sociology and anthropology, is to show just how some trends in society demand to be examined not in the standard quantitative Benthamite mode but as an extended essay in the manner of Montaigne (who has a chapter in his Essays that bears the Aristotelian title, ‘That we should not be deemed happy till after our death.’). Elliott’s book bears comparison with some of the best essay writing on contemporary American society—even if it neglects to say much about the deeper historical influences on American ideas of happiness.
Rousseau, for instance, is the torchbearer for America’s recurrent sense of itself as an innocent county; and his dream of being a new Adam prior to the troubling claims of adult civilisation could very profitably have been brought into the discussion. ‘One must be true to oneself; that is the homage which the honest man must pay to his own dignity.’ Call self-fulfilment righteousness, and the essentially religious nature of happiness crops up again, except that morality is a blunt thing in a society that ostentatiously rejects what some of its citizens complain it lacks: a sense of limit and constraint.
Such is the peculiarity of consumerist America: it has liberalism as its orthodoxy and not its radicalism, as in Europe, while retaining all the self-righteous fervour of a dissenting religious utopia. Neither Elliott nor Marar, being thoroughly schooled in the cultural sociology of luminaries like Erving Goffman, devote much attention to the mechanisms of the market, which are credited as never before with being able to maintain social peace by their ability to deliver the goods—even though these same mechanisms are manifestly in the dark about human wants (unless we want to credit the Invisible Hand of the market with godlike rectitude). As Robert Reich argues in The Future of Success, market society is always threatened by the success of its own productivity, which, if it were to satisfy our needs in the innocently self-evident way that befell the great minds of the eighteenth-century (‘Enlightenment in all classes of society really consists in correctly grasping the nature of our essential needs’: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, 1789) would be bound to put itself out of business. It therefore has to skew our regard towards things we can never have enough of. Thus are values swallowed up by desire, which in the end seeks nothing very concrete at all.
But that would be to lurch into metaphysics, and the company of the types Nietzsche suggested were even more contemptible than the Englishman. He calls them ‘the last men’. They have made any kind of criticism a sin, and happiness the outcome of a state-sponsored population strategy. They indulge their little pleasures for day and night, ‘but they respect health’. For these last men the old world was quite obviously barking mad. ‘We have discovered happiness’, they tell his prophet Zarathustra. And then they blink, in the terrifyingly guileless spirit of that line in Alexander Pope’s poem Eloisa to Abelard—in the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.
Observing the distracted state of my contemporaries sometimes convinces me that Nietzsche foresaw the nature of the last men all too accurately. But in fact the dictionary provides a remedy for despair. The etymology of the word ‘happiness’ belies the prospect of its ever being planned: its Middle English cognates—chance, hap, luck—are terms for what is not designed or projected. Happiness has no recipe. It cannot be engineered, as in the mixed-register phrase Jane Austen artfully uses in Emma to describe one of her pushy characters, dressed in ‘all her apparatus of happiness’. It is the contrary of the deal offered by the prudent evangelisers who seek to protect us from risks. In fact, it has most to do with another word that also answers to those three cognates: adventure. Happiness is a dare.