Spending Some Time With The Monster / The Pursuit of Happiness

My subject is “the pursuit of happiness.”

Everyone agrees that happiness is the one thing that people want for its own sake, rather than leading to something else.

But people have very different ideas about happiness.

We can begin from the United States. According to recent social science research, the US is not a particularly happy place – Denmark is the happiest country in the world, followed by Switzerland and Austria – the US is not in the top 20 and appears less happy, by self-report, than such places as Iceland, Nigeria and Finland. There is a subject called “happiness studies” and some headlines from this field include the idea that American unhappiness derives from people misjudging what will make them happy. One hypothesis is that we simply adjust too fast to improvements, so that as soon as we acquire some new thing, our expectations ramp up and we are no happier than before. Another idea is that happiness is competitive, so that if Jack and Jill both blow their year-end bonuses on Cadillacs, nothing has really changed, and no one feels any happier. Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard, is studying the ways in which people misjudge what will make them feel good: he says that people tend to think they’ll be happier with more variety, but his finding is that people get more pleasure from being offered the same thing again and again. People think that freedom of choice is hugely important for happiness, but research shows that people are happier when they are limited to, and commit themselves, to one thing. One of Professor Gilbert’s big conclusions is that the experience of getting what we want makes much less of an impression on us than the time we spend looking forward to it.

We can consult the philosophers on the question of happiness, but philosophers tell us different things. Buddha tells us that happiness has to do with overcoming desire. Plato tells us that we reach the highest pitch of happiness when we contemplate eternal truth. Mencius argues that happiness comes from nourishing the life force within us with righteous deeds. St. Thomas says that everyone seeks happiness without knowing what it is; we try out different things in life experience; ultimately we discover true happiness by figuring out what actually gets us to the thing we have been looking for all along. Bertrand Russell argued that the big obstacle to happiness is getting stuck – dogmatism and fanaticism deprive us of the chance to learn and grow and flourish as human beings, because we have to expend all our energy protecting some or other sacred cow. Nietzsche talked about happiness as a kind of enjoyment of one’s strength; Rousseau taught that happiness has to do with being weak and vulnerable and needing other people. The existentialist philosopher Albert Camus taught the idea that happiness has nothing to do with success—but has everything to do with passionate effort—the struggle itself, he says, is enough to fill our hearts. John Stuart Mill challenged the idea that happiness is even important. He said that it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied—better Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. On the other hand, Socrates seems to have been an extraordinarily happy person. His famous saying is that the unexamined life is not worth living, but accounts of him from his own time portray a comedian enjoying himself in asking philosophical questions and confusing everyone.

David Brooks hit upon the idea that there is a kind of Big Monster inside us (he calls it 'Big Shaggy') that drives us to do crazy things – the sorts of things that are portrayed in stories, images, music and gossip columns – and indeed a big problem for thought is to try to understand these yearnings – if we don’t understand Big Shaggy, we end up getting eaten by it.

The Monster is partly our own body and the problem of handling stress. When we experience stress, the heart rate speeds up, blood sugar spikes, the immune system is suppressed – lots of other adaptations optimized for immediate action get turned off – you lose your cool and start acting from a very confused place – it's as if you were no longer in the world at all – the troubled inner environment gets all your attention. This is unhappiness.

There is something called the “undo effect” – the idea that positive emotions help to undo the cardiovascular effects of negative emotions – research supports the conclusion that positive emotions (such as curiosity, anticipation, love and wonder) help people who were previously under stress relax back to their physiological baseline. So, if you can get to a happy place, and stay there a while, you end up broadening your awareness and encouraging yourself to have new thoughts, different kinds of thoughts, better thoughts.

The implication is that things like hope, and self-confidence, and a generally optimistic point of view, as well as forgiveness and the ‘rise above’ idea – also “flow” or absorption in what you are doing – these are all CHOICES – that is, happiness is a choice – as the Greek playwright Aeschylus says, “Happiness is a choice that requires effort at every moment in life.” In a way, I think, we are making a choice that comes out of understanding the Big Monster – after spending some time with the Monster – that is: after some time, we learn to acknowledge troubling things, but also to lead ourselves out of troubles, by making the choice to rise above. – The American thinker and activist Henry David Thoreau expresses a similar idea in one of his travel journals. He says: “There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring there yourself.”

Marcel Proust, the French novelist, is another important teacher about happiness. Proust claimed that the main thing we can do to stay focused on happiness is to keep imagining that the world is about to end. Life suddenly becomes wonderful – it becomes easy to appreciate even the simplest things, such as being able to breathe and see and hear – and when we look at things under this threat, we begin to see that unhappiness has to do with the way we look at things, rather than any actual state we face in living. Unhappiness, he says, has to do with taking things for granted. Proust’s other recommendations for happiness are that we take our time, fall in love frequently, and learn to suffer successfully.

When I was a kid I watched a press conference once on TV not long after President Kennedy had been elected. In between questions about the Bay of Pigs and troubles beginning in Vietnam, a reporter asked him the question whether he was happy, since the world seemed such a mess and, as president, he had to face so many problems. JFK answered that Aristotle had defined happiness as the full exercise of one’s powers in pursuit of excellence and so, by that standard, with all the problems he had to face, and the good of the country at stake, yes, he was happy. When I first heard this it made a huge impression on me, and I still think this is a very powerful idea. Aristotle is saying that happiness is not a feeling, but an action; it’s not a result, but is about doing something – working with all your strength on a project that you care about.

Aristotle also devotes several chapters in his book about happiness to the subject of friendship – it turns out that having friends, and being a good friend, is a big part of happiness. My experience has taught me that this is true.

Psychology and Politics

Polybius of Arcadia

It occurred to me to think about the Preamble to the Constitution, and some of the big ideas in the United States Constitution about the way government is supposed to work.  

First I thought I would just read the Preamble so that we can all hear it and think about it.  Here it is:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

We the people.  It would be naïve not to mention that – speaking somewhat ungrammatically – we the people is divided.  The big We is divided north and south, red and blue, life and choice, gay and straight, Bible and Darwin.  There are all kinds of pieces of We that have broken off or declared their independence or migrated to the fringe, maybe even without the rest of us noticing it.  The United States seems pretty disunited, almost as if it were different countries – and speaking for myself, I have to admit that in my lifetime this has nearly always been the case. 

Things are divided today and there is quite a bit of noisy disrespect for the President, for congress and for government in general.  I know this was also the case in the Vietnam era and during Watergate and when President Bush took us into Iraq, and many, many other times too.  But it occurred to me that this must also have been the case in colonial times, right when the Preamble was drafted – in September 1787 – what with north vs. south, big states and little states, city against country, Protestants versus Catholics, free states against slave states.  In trying to think about all this, I pulled out some history books and began pouring over some notes written by the people who wrote the Preamble – the “We the people” people – to see if they could help.

Now it happens that the Preamble was written by Mr. James Wilson of Pennsylvania, a person largely unknown to history. According to the stories, he received a bit of help from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison – and Madison is usually called the ‘Father of the Constitution,’ because he wrote, and led the fight, for the Bill of Rights – that is, the first ten amendments.

Now if you look at notes from Mr.s Wilson and Jefferson and Madison, you see that they were all influenced by, and thought a great deal of, Mr. Charles-Louis le Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, who lived from 1689 to 1755, mainly in Bordeaux, France.  Madison said that “the oracle that is always consulted and who guided us on questions about government is the celebrated Montesquieu.”  Montesquieu himself grew up in a military family, studied the liberal arts and entered government service at age 19.  He decided to travel some and made it to Hungary, Turkey, Italy, Germany and England.  Somehow it came to him while he was travelling that he should make a study of the societies he was visiting, as if he were a scientist – so he started making notes about culture, the different mores of different places, and especially political ideas and forms of government – he did so well with this that he is sometimes considered the 'father of anthropology.'

Montesquieu’s way of expressing himself was creative – his approach was to pretend that he was a Persian fellow named Uzbek, who was writing home to friends in Iran about the odd goings on in Paris, France and all the strange things that people say and do.  The theory of government that comes out of Montesquieu’s travels and notes and his Persian Letters is what he calls “the separation of powers.” This is familiar to us in the idea of the three branches of government – the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Montesquieu himself said that his main idea was that government should be set up so that no one need be afraid of anybody else.  He thought that the way to do this was to make the powers of government separate from, but dependent upon, each other, and ensure that no one power would ever be able to overthrow the other two. 

Now if you read Montequieu’s books you see that he does not claim to have come up with this powerful idea himself, but instead he says that he learned it from the Greek historian Polybius, who was born about two hundred years before Christ.  Polybius lived in Arcadia, in the the Peloponnese, in southern Greece – a place somewhat like my home state of Oregon – mountains, forests, and near the sea – by tradition a place of refuge from the crazy world outside and also the reputed birthplace of the father god, Zeus.  Like Montesquieu, Polybius grew up in a military family, studied the liberal arts, and became a traveller – he made it to Spain and much of Africa, from Libya to Carthage and south as far as Senegal. 

In Polybius’s time, Rome was gradually conquering what remained of Alexander’s empire, and Arcadia got caught up in between.  Polybius was taken captive and spent most of two decades as a hostage – remarkably, though, his Roman captor, the conqueror Aemilius Paulus came to respect him – so much so that he made him the tutor of his sons and even invited him to the Roman senate to teach history and ideas about government to what was then the most powerful government on Earth.  Polybius taught the doctrine of the separation of powers, but also much more than this – he taught the underlying reason why this form of government, which is enshrined in the United States Constitution, must be our guide through life. 

He taught that there are three forms of government – government by one, by a few, or by many – monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy – adding that these three forms of government inevitably corrupt themselves – monarchy becomes tyranny, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, and democracy becomes mob rule – the Greek word for this is “ochlocracy.”  There is a kind of downward spiral, a natural cycle of decomposition which he called anacyclosis, in which all of these forms of government succeed one another – at the stage of mob-rule, things fall into anarchy, a condition that creates a void, which is when a new tyrant seizes power.  The solution to the problem, Polybius argues, is to create a form of government that includes all three of these ideas at the same time – the one, the few and the many; forms of government and their perversions; the archon, the oligarch and the demos; president, judges and representatives.

Polybius reflected still further and argued that each of us is like a little country – each of us is a We – a human being is like a little city whose different factions are often at odds with one another.  We have a little king, a little judge, and a kind of unruly discussion going on in us – a kind of town hall meeting – and each of us has to learn the system of checks and balances in our own way, through experience, so that we don’t ourselves become a tyranny, or an executioner, or a mob, or cut off some parts of ourselves, or lose touch with ourselves, or become too many people at the same time.  The principle of the loyal opposition makes even more sense when you apply it to yourself.  You can’t shout down one part of yourself, or lop off one part of yourself, and still come out ok.  You have to find a way to integrate all the different parts of yourself and stand up as one person. 

Polybius has a very sophicated view of people and government – something like ‘psychopolitics’ or maybe ‘group therapy for the self.’  He is making the point that an ‘us vs. them’ position makes no sense, because the dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every single human being.  This makes it hugely important to see that the other person over there who may in fact be your enemy is also also a human being and not a demon – maybe there is a way to make peace with this person.  Maybe you can even make peace with some of the crazy stuff in yourself.  A person has lots of ambitions within him, just like the factions that are against each other in a country.  The idea is to get them to cooperate with one another, and work together, to get stuff done, to improve things for everybody, for the whole person.  Sometimes groups that form a majority on one question fall out on another – sometimes you agree, and sometimes you disagree with yourself – sometimes harmony, sometimes chaos – you just have to keep meeting together, keep thinking it through, to try to reach consensus – not once but forever, over and over again. 

In a way, I think this is what education is for.  First you lay out all the pieces – midnight and high noon.  Then you try to fit the pieces together.  You’re also learning how to get people together – how to get them talking – how to get the ideas out there and get a conversation going – you’re trying to find common ground – to reach consensus.  At the end you get to “We the people.”