The preamble to the American Declaration of Independence opens with, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But what is happiness?
What would make you happy? Is it more than ‘feeling happy’?
More than walking around with a smug look of satisfaction?
More than having all the things you have?
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) wrote that happiness is “Being well deceived; the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves.”
The American author Willa Cather (1873-1947) defined happiness as the state of “Being dissolved into something complete and great.” Both definitions have an air of surreality about them, a sense that happiness is illusionary, yet the quest for happiness remains one of life’s great challenges. With Swift, being a fool among knaves, deceitful, dishonest, unscrupulous people, where as with Cather, the idea of something complete and great is really a very nebulous concept, it could be for her completing a great novel such as the Pulitzer Prize winning One of Ours, set in World War 1, or it could be for a terrorist that a mass killing is is something complete and great, flying two aircraft into the twin towers in New York 9/11/2001, something complete and great.
Or happiness could be winning an event, putting some-one you are in conflict with in their place. Your team winning the season’s Grand Final, your horse coming in as the winner of the Melbourne Cup, your favoured candidate winning an election, any number of ‘wins’. But for every win, there are others who do not share that happiness, for them the event was a loss.
Happiness doesn’t need to be about winning a contested battle, it can be a sense of satisfaction, in Positive Psychology, happiness is defined as ‘an enduring state of mind consisting not only of feelings of joy, contentment and other positive emotions, but also a sense that one’s life is meaningful and valued’.
The bit about ‘enduring state of mind’ is interesting. Can we be happy all the time, can life be so good that it is filled with ‘joy, contentment and other positive emotions’ all the time, or is are there times when the sense of happiness is challenged?
Does happiness come to us from external influences, or does it become something intrinsic? The consideration of the ‘sense that one’s life is meaningful and valued’ becomes part of the equation. How does that work?
These questions are not just some esoteric ramblings of a old man with too much time on his hands, they are important in considering not just our own happiness, but the quality of lives we can influence.
Would it make Vladimir Putin happy if Ukraine gave up its quest to remain independent and allowed Russia to take control of its people, its economy and its culture, or would that be just a stepping stone to find other parts of eastern Europe to subsume into Greater Russia. Would it really make Benjamin Netanyahu happy if Hamas and Hezbollah surrendered to the Israelis, continuing the ethnic cleansing of Israel to realise the promise made to Abraham after his fight with God as told in the Biblical book of Genesis.
They are big questions which we, as very ordinary people cannot answer, but what we can answer is how we deal with those within our sphere of influence, the family, friends, work colleagues and other people we meet socially or through other connections.
And so much of that depends on how we view ourselves. How we answer the Socratic question, What sort of person should I be? It’s not a question of telling others what sort of people they should be, it is very much a personal question. It flows into a series of sub questions including ‘What kind of life should I lead?’, ‘What values should I live by?’ ‘What should be my aims in life?’ and ‘What really matters?’
I had a work colleague who plays an ancient stringed instrument, the oud, and when ever he performs with one of the two ensembles he is part of I go to listen to their performance. About a year ago, I sensed that his music was free-er, more confident than previously, and when I told him what I thought, he said he understood that he would never be as good as the professional player he idolised and tried to emulate, that he should play for his own enjoyment. He had judged himself by a standard that he imposed on himself, it restricted him, it tied him down. Up until he released himself from that bond, he never felt quite good enough, now he is blossoming. I have seen him three times since then, and the joy he has from playing is so very evident, and it has reflected so much on other aspects of his life.
And that is part of our problem isn’t it, when we are set the standards by some external force whether imposed or by choice?
In relationships, to allow our partners to be who they are, that we can be who we are, that we do not ask for change from our partners but we accept them for who they are. Isn’t that what the initial attraction was about?
How high is the bar that religion places on us, read the bit in Genesis about the fall and banishment from the garden of Eden. For having dared to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil all humanity, all the descendants of Adam and Eve are punished. Read the Ten Commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy, read the minor laws given to the Israelites after their escape from Egypt, these are the foundational laws, rules that religions place on us. As part of those laws, relationship issues, sex, are included, the matter of adultery, the matter of homosexuality. Interestingly, I believe homosexuality is mentioned twice, but I am ready to be corrected, while adultery is mentioned more times that I care to count, yet the focus of most religions is on homosexuality, with the occasional reference to adultery. But the expression of guilt, the cloud hanging over the pew sitter is one of condemnation except through you know who, but the layers of guilt are built on, week after week, sermon after sermon, the whole idea that we are just not able to live up to the standards laid down. Those who revel in the ‘forgiveness’ of Christ become at times a bit sneeringly judgemental at those who refuse to be ‘washed by the blood of Jesus’.
Those external forces are not limited to religion and politics; materialism is a great driver of unhappiness, the quest to have it all, to never be satisfied with what we have, to be on the lookout for the latest fashion, the newest furniture, the latest gizmo. To be like or preferably better than ’the Jones’s’
For the power-brokers, be they religious or political, the condemnation they bring for their sense of happiness has seen rivers of blood through the ages, and they continue today, the sense of superiority because of their self-righteousness devalues lives which do not conform to their criteria. The conflicts, especially between the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam continues today in the Middle East, the superiority once the claim of being of God’s People means that throughout the European colonisation of Africa, the Americas and Asia, indigenous lives were valueless.
Christopher Columbus befriended an indigenous leader in what is now Haiti, managed teach him basic language and wrote in his journal that he could ‘Christianise him and take him back to be a slave for the Queen’. The quest for the newly ‘discovered’ lands over the next five hundred years have seen indigenous populations decimated through war, kidnapping for enslavement and mass deaths through diseases such as small pox.
The plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza and in the West Bank is treated with the same contempt.
But we cannot solve those problems, they really are not ours to solve, except as one person said to me this morning over coffee, that we should allow more refugees in, we need to be more humane. We can carry that burden as we talk to our politicians, and hopefully they will listen.
So coming to what we can influence, what we can do to be happy, to have happiness.
We can ourselves the Socratic questions, and in the at times heated discussions we can have over the political issues which can divide us, remember that the greatest unifiers that we have are the arts, music, dance, art, literature, love.
Ultimately there are four things that mark our lives, that impact on how we live our lives, our state of happiness:
Death: The great inevitable.
Love: The great desire.
Meaning: The great mystery.
Happiness: The great hope.
How we answer the Socratic questions for ourselves determines how we will live and deal with the four ‘greats’.
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