6/2/2015 Happiness, the Hard Way | Greater Good

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/happiness_the_hard_way 1/3

Happiness, the Hard WayBy Darrin M. McMahon | May 1, 2009 | 1 CommentDo you want to be happy? Then focus on making other people happy, argues Darrin M. McMahon.

I think it is probably fair to assume that most Americans today consider happiness notonly something that would be nice to have, but something that we really ought tohave—and, moreover, something that’s within our power to bring about, if only weset our minds to it. We can be happy, we tell ourselves, teeth gritted. We should be happy. Wewill be happy.

That is a modern article of faith. But it is also a relatively recent idea in the West which datesfrom the 17th and 18th centuries, a time that ushered in a dramatic shift in what humanbeings could legitimately hope to expect in and from their lives. People prior to the late 17thcentury thought happiness was a matter of luck or virtue or divine favor. Today we think ofhappiness as a right and a skill that can be developed. This has been liberating, in some respects,because it asks us to strive to improve our lots in life, individually and collectively. But therehave been downsides as well. It seems that when we want to be happy all of the time, we canforget that the pursuit of happiness can entail struggle, sacrifice, even pain.

Roots of happiness

Language reveals ancient definitions of happiness. It is a striking fact that in every Indo­European language, without exception, going all the way back to ancient Greek, the word forhappiness is a cognate with the word for luck. Hap is the Old Norse and Old English root ofhappiness, and it just means luck or chance, as did the Old French heur, giving us bonheur, goodfortune or happiness. German gives us the word Gluck, which to this day means both happinessand chance.

What does this linguistic pattern suggest? For a good many ancient peoples—and for manyothers long after that—happiness was not something you could control. It was in the hands ofthe gods, dictated by Fate or Fortune, controlled by the stars, not something that you or I couldreally count upon or make for ourselves. Happiness, literally, was what happened to us, and thatwas ultimately out of our hands. As the monk in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales declares:

And thus does Fortune’s wheel turn treacherously And out of happiness bring men to sorrow.In other words, the wheel of fortune controls our happenstance, and hence our happiness.

There were, of course, other ways of thinking about happiness. Those who have studied Greek orRoman philosophy will know that happiness—what the Greeks called, in one of several words,eudaimonia—was the goal of all Classical philosophy, beginning with Socrates and Plato, thentaken up even more centrally by Aristotle, then featured prominently in all the major “schools”of Classical thought, including that of the Epicureans, Stoics, and so forth. In their view,happiness could be earned, a perspective that anticipates our modern one.

But there is a crucial difference between their ideas of happiness and ours. For most of theseClassical philosophers, happiness is never simply a function of good feeling—of what puts a smileon our face—but rather of living good lives, lives that will almost certainly include a good deal ofpain. The most dramatic illustration of this is the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero’sclaim that the happy man will be happy even on the torture wrack.

That sounds ludicrous to us today—and perhaps it is—but it very nicely captures the way theancients thought of happiness, not as an emotional state but as an outcome of moralcomportment. “Happiness is a life lived according to virtue,” Aristotle famously says. It ismeasured in lifetimes, not moments. And it has far more to do with how we order ourselves and

6/2/2015 Happiness, the Hard Way | Greater Good

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/happiness_the_hard_way 2/3

our lives as a whole than anything that might happen individually to any one of us.

Given these presuppositions, the ancients tended to agree that very few would ever succeed inbeing happy, because happiness takes an incredible amount of work, discipline and devotion, andmost people, in the end, are simply not up to the task. The happy are what Aristotle calls “happyfew.” They are, if you like, the ethical elite. This is not a democratic conception of happiness.

After the Greek and Roman traditions, we have Jewish and Christian ideas about happiness. Inthe prevailing Christian understanding, happiness can occur in one of three circumstances. Itcan be found in the past in a lost Golden Age, in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve wereperfectly content. It can be revealed in the future—the millennium when Christ will return andthe Kingdom of God will genuinely be at hand. Or we can find happiness in heaven, when thesaints shall know the “perfect felicity,” as Thomas Aquinas puts it, the pure bliss of union withGod. Strictly speaking, this is the happiness of death.

And so in the dominant Christian worldview, happiness is not something we can obtain in thislife. It is not our natural state. On the contrary, it is an exalted condition, reserved for the electin a time outside of time, at the end of history. This is the opposite of today’s egalitarian, feel­good­now conception of happiness.

Happiness revolution

Enter the 17th and 18th centuries, when a revolution in human expectations overthrew theseold ideas of happiness. It is in this time that the French Encyclopédie, the Bible of the EuropeanEnlightenment, declares in its article on happiness that everyone has a right to be happy. It is inthis time that Thomas Jefferson declares the pursuit of happiness to be a self­evident truth,while his colleague George Mason, in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, speaks of pursuing andobtaining happiness as a natural endowment and right. And it is in this time that the Frenchrevolutionary leader St. Just can stand up during the height of the Jacobin revolution in Francein 1794 and declare: “Happiness is a new idea in Europe.” In many ways it was.

When the English philosopher and revolutionary John Locke declared at the end of the 17thcentury that the “business of man is to be happy,” he meant that we shouldn’t assume thatsuffering is our natural lot, and that we shouldn’t have to apologize for our pleasures here onearth. On the contrary, we should work to increase them. It wasn’t a sin to enjoy our bodies, hiscontemporaries began to argue. It wasn’t gluttony and greed to work to improve our standardsof living. It wasn’t a sign of luxury and depravity to pursue pleasures of the flesh, and whateverother kind as well. Pleasure was good. Pain was bad. We should maximize the one and minimizethe other, yielding the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

This was a liberating perspective. Starting in Locke’s time, men and women in the West dared tothink of happiness as something more than a divine gift, less fortuitous than fortune, lessexalted than a millenarian dream. For the first time in human history, comparatively largenumbers of people were exposed to the novel prospect that they might not have to suffer as anunfailing law of the universe, that they could—and should—expect happiness in the form of goodfeeling, and pleasure as a right of existence. This is a prospect that has gradually spread from theoriginally rather narrow universe of white men to include women, people of color, children—indeed, humanity as a whole.

This new orientation towards happiness was, as I say, liberating in many respects. I would arguethat it continues to lie behind some of our most noble humanitarian sentiments—the belief thatsuffering is inherently wrong, and that all people, in all places, should have the opportunity, theright, to be happy.

Unnatural happiness

But there is a dark side to this vision of happiness as well, one that may help explain why somany of us are snapping up books about happiness and coming to happiness conferences,searching for an emotion that we worry is absent from our lives.

For all its pleasures and benefits, this new perspective on happiness as a given right, tends to

6/2/2015 Happiness, the Hard Way | Greater Good

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/happiness_the_hard_way 3/3

About The Author

Darrin M. McMahon, Ph.D., is a professor ofhistory at Florida State University and the authorof Happiness, A History. This piece is based on atalk he delivered at the 2008 "Happiness and ItsCauses" conference in San Francisco, co­sponsored by the Greater Good Science Center.

imagine happiness not as something won through moral cultivation, carried out over the courseof a well­lived life, but as something “out there” that could be pursued, caught, and consumed.Happiness has increasingly been thought to be more about getting little infusions of pleasure,about feeling good rather than being good, less about living the well­lived life than aboutexperiencing the well­felt moment.

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing bad about feeling good. But I would suggest thatsomething of value may have been lost or forgotten in our transition to modern ideas ofhappiness. We can’t feel good all the time; nor, I think, should we want to. Nor should weassume that happiness can be had (maybe a better word?) without a certain degree of effort,and possibly even sacrifice and pain. These are things that the older traditions knew—in theWest and the East alike—and that we have forgotten.

Today, science is rediscovering the validity of ancient perspectives on happiness—that there areimportant connections between hope and happiness, for example, or between gratitude andforgiving and happiness, altruism and happiness. Science is often painted as being opposed tomatters of the spirit, but new discoveries by researchers like Michael McCullough, RobertEmmons, and many others remind us how important non­materialistic, spiritual cultivation is toour happiness and well­being. It is all the more important to revive and cultivate this olderwisdom today, given that so many of us assume that we ought to be happy as a matter ofcourse, that this is our natural state.

Indeed, if you think about it, this idea of happiness as a natural state creates a curious problem.What if I’m not happy? Does that mean that I’m unnatural? Am I ill, or bad, or deficient? Isthere something wrong with me? Is there something wrong with the society in which I live?These are all symptoms of a condition that I call the unhappiness of not being happy, and it is apeculiarly modern condition.

To cure this condition, we might focus less on our own personal happiness and instead on thehappiness of those around us, for relentless focus on one’s own happiness has the potential tobe self­defeating. The 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill once said, “Ask yourself whetheryou are happy, and you cease to be so.” Whether that is really true or not, I don’t know. Butgiven that we live in a world that asks this question of us every day, it is a paradox worthpondering.