Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Get Happy!!: For Margaret Thatcher As For Today's Happiness Industry, There Is No Such Thing As Society
Get Happy!!: For Margaret Thatcher As For Today's Happiness Industry, There Is No Such Thing As Society
The Antidote
Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.
By Oliver Burkeman.
Buy this book
Whether such discontent is more intense or pervasive now than it was fifty or
150 years ago is an unanswerable question. “There have been periods happier
and others more desperate than ours,” the conservative cultural critic Ernest
van den Haag observed in 1956. “But we don’t know which.” Samuel Beckett
put the matter more sweepingly and poetically: “The tears of the world are a
constant quantity,” he wrote, and “the same is true of the laugh.” But while it
is impossible to chart the ebb and flow of emotions historically, to identify
some epochs as happier or sadder than others, it is possible to explore the
ways that dominant notions of happiness reflect the changing needs and
desires of the culturally powerful at various historical moments. One can
write the history of ideas about happiness, if not of happiness itself.
Top Stories
The Power ofNegative Thinking
***
That outlook isn’t new. The assumptions central to the current happiness
boom—that happiness consists in pleasurable experiences, and that human
life can be organized to maximize those experiences—stem from the
utilitarian creed developed by Jeremy Bentham and supposedly committed to
promoting “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” With respect to
political economy, the utilitarian outlook could underwrite everything from
laissez-faire capitalism to Soviet communism. The delivery systems for
happiness varied, but the promised goal was always the same: physical
comfort and material abundance for all (or at least as many as might be
willing to work for it, in the productivist formulation that tended to dominate
this tradition). Happiness, from the utilitarian view, was “our being’s end and
aim,” as Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1843, quoting Alexander Pope. But Carlyle
was not amused: “Every pitifulest whipster that walks within a skin has had
his head filled with the notion that he is, shall be, or by all human and divine
laws ought to be, ‘happy.’ The prophets preach to us, Thou shalt be happy;
thou shalt love pleasant things, and find them. The people clamour, Why have
we not found pleasant things?” This is the dialectic that has dominated
modern political discourse for more than two centuries.
Still, the idioms have varied. In the United States, the “pursuit of happiness”
was enshrined in the nation’s founding document. The phrase marked a
decisive departure from traditional notions that happiness—derived from the
Old Norse hap, or “chance”—was a gift of fate. Now it was a goal to be actively
sought. But the definition of happiness was very much up for grabs.
Jefferson’s phrase combined a liberal zeal for private gain with republican
commitments to the public good. This balance of tensions epitomized what
Tocqueville believed was the force that kept democracy in America from
flying into anarchic fragments. It was “self-interest rightly understood”—self-
interest tamed and chastened by commitments to family, community and
polity. For Tocqueville, happiness was partly a manifestation of reciprocity.
But in the emerging market society of the nineteenth century, the notion of
public good was increasingly privatized as the sum of individual self-interests.
If the good life was no longer publicly debated or collectively defined, the
pursuit of happiness became a personal quest, usually with a monetary
measure of success.
As Jill Lepore observes in her clever but chaotic The Mansion of Happiness,
religious definitions of happiness persisted throughout the nineteenth
century (although she doesn’t mention it, they have carried on into the
present as well). “O Lord! deliver us from sin, and when we shall have
finished our earthly course, admit us to the mansion of bliss and happiness,”
an evangelical preacher intoned in 1814. The original Mansion of Happiness
was a pious, popular board game; revised from an English version for an
American audience in 1843, it sold briskly for decades. According to its rules,
the game
No believing Christian could doubt that abiding happiness was reserved for
the afterlife, while this earthly realm remained dominated by struggle and
sorrow. But by 1860, signs of slippage from this orthodoxy were apparent,
even in such didactic board games as Milton Bradley’s Checkered Game of
Life, which ended (if you were lucky) in Happy Old Age. In 1960, to
commemorate the centennial of the Checkered Game, the Milton Bradley
Company issued another version, the Game of Life. Instead of virtue
rewarded by heavenly happiness, Lepore writes, the Game of Life offered “a
lesson in consumer conformity, a two-dimensional Levittown, complete with
paychecks and retirement homes and medical bills.” Players who successfully
navigated their tiny station wagons along the Highway of Life could retire, at
length, in Millionaire Acres.
***
By the early twentieth century, the subjective side of happiness was acquiring
more demanding dimensions. For Americans, the discovery (or invention) of
the unconscious mind endowed the human subject with a new and practically
bottomless reservoir of mental powers to be cultivated, called upon in times
of stress, and pressed into the service of the pursuit of happiness. In a flood of
self-help literature, a discourse of positive thinking emerged. Popular
magazine articles advised readers “How You Can Do More and Be More,” and
even thinkers as sophisticated as William James became fascinated by
phenomena such as the “second wind” that seemed to promise access to
abundant psychic energy. Visions of psychic abundance proliferated
alongside visions of economic abundance in a society increasingly driven by
the mass consumption of mass-produced goods. Personal growth somehow
would accompany economic growth. The self-made hero of the Horatio Alger
tale, the sign of whose success was an appointment as a bank clerk, gave way
to the pop-Nietzschean titans of Theodore Dreiser’s novels—men like Frank
Cowperwood of The Financier (1912), whose motto was “I satisfy myself,” and
who proceeded to live up to it by flouting conventional norms at every turn.
An obsession with Energy and Force (always capitalized) characterized much
of the literature and social thought of the decades just before World War I,
accelerating an active pursuit of happiness by associating contentment with
stasis and stasis with death. To be sure, the progressive muckraker Ray
Stannard Baker (under the pen name David Grayson) produced a popular
series of essays called Adventures in Contentment. But they were largely
exercises in nostalgic pastoralism, with Baker pitting himself against the
spirit of the age. The dominant impulse, at least among the literate white men
who shaped much of the conventional wisdom, was to recoil from stillness
and celebrate an endlessly renewable vitality.
This vitalism was erotic at its core. Some vitalists, including the psychologist
G. Stanley Hall, endowed sexual intercourse with a sacred significance. “In
the most unitary of all acts, which is the epitome and pleroma of life, we have
the most intense of all affirmations of the will to live and realize that the only
true God is love, and the center of life is worship,” Hall wrote in Adolescence
(1904). “Now the race is incarnated in the individual and remembers its lost
paradise.” From this view, Lepore observes, sex was “a mansion of happiness,
regained.” But vitalism was erotic in a more than sexual sense. It recaptured
the original meaning of eros as pursuit rather than fulfillment. “How dull it is
to pause, to make an end,” cried Tennyson’s Ulysses, a line that Theodore
Roosevelt used as the epigraph to The Strenuous Life. For Progressive-era
vitalists, happiness was always in process, always becoming, never being. It
was as if American men—and increasingly, American women—were being
urged to emulate Goethe’s Faust, never saying “to the passing moment,
‘stay.’”
***
All of this changed with the Depression and the war, when dominant
definitions of the pursuit of happiness—at least as produced by major media
—shifted emphases from the individual to the collective. A desire to immerse
oneself in a larger identity—the People, the Nation, the American Way of Life
—pervaded the culture of the 1930s. In a time of deep emotional as well as
economic insecurity, happiness became a matter of being accepted, of fitting
in (How to Win Friends and Influence People, as Dale Carnegie advised in
1936). On this issue, we have direct testimony from unemployed workers,
interviewed by sociologists at the time and by Studs Terkel later: when people
were out of work, or in danger of being put out of work, they felt fear and
shame—feelings that provoked a yearning for acceptance, a longing to belong.
This desire led people in various directions, from the Popular Front to
populist cultural nationalism to fascism. World War II offered the fulfillment
of those longings—a national crusade (an opportunity to belong) that ended
with the United States poised to become the richest nation in the world.
The problem was that, for some Americans at least, those Depression
longings were satisfied too completely. Almost as soon as the paint was dry
on the first houses in Levittown, critics of the dominant managerial culture
(including many managers themselves) began to worry about the conformist
ethos—what, in The Organization Man, William Whyte called “the social
ethic”—that lingered over American life during the Eisenhower years, long
after the anti-communist witch hunts had spent themselves and their
ringleader, Senator Joseph McCarthy, had been censured. The discourse of
vitalism, the dream of happiness constantly renewed through peak
experience, survived on the outskirts of the collectivist chorus. It turned out
one could fit in all too well.
It is easy to be snide about this brave new science—the vacuity of its view of
human motives, the predictability of its findings, the banality of its
prescriptions. But it is important to acknowledge the likelihood that its
practitioners (most of them, anyway) are decent people responding to
genuine longings in the populace. Their advice is almost always humane and
no doubt at least occasionally helpful to their students and readers. The
problem is that they oversimplify, overreach and, more often, ignore such a
wide swath of human experience (politics, economics, culture, society) that it
is difficult to see how their therapeutic advice can be adequate or their
empirical claims justified—or if they are justifiable, how they can be
significant.
Consider the late Christopher Peterson’s Pursuing the Good Life, a series of
one- to two-page reflections culled from the clinical psychologist’s blog.
Despite its title, there is nothing in this book about the “good life” in any
traditional sense: a way of life that is publicly affirmed and shared with
others. Instead, the good life is a series of pleasurable internal states that can
be maximized by the right choices. Peterson’s reflections range from the
terminally bland (go ahead and act on that idea you had in the shower this
morning) to the mildly interesting (lists of objective criteria for happiness are
plagued by problems of relativism and idiosyncrasy). But when he looks for
examples of these problems, Peterson always lunges for low-hanging fruit: a
long commute, he writes, might be on the list of criteria for happiness
depending on what you like to do during the commute. It might be your big
chance, for example, to learn Spanish or listen to lectures on the rise of the
West. Self-improvement is always a part of the happiness agenda. Indeed,
Peterson writes, Benjamin Franklin became “America’s first positivist
psychologist” when he made a list of virtues and vowed to cultivate them
systematically.
***
What distinguishes Lyubomirsky from Roosevelt (or Maslow) is that she pays
the now-obligatory homage to evolutionary psychology and pop neuroscience.
She asserts that “we continually escalate our expectations and desires” for
good biological reasons. “A ceaseless striving for more is surely evolutionarily
adaptive; if realizing our goals left us all feeling entirely complacent and
content, our society wouldn’t witness much progress”; and “human beings are
programmed to desire, not appreciate, and to strive for more, not be content
with what they have.” All of this inherited wiring can have its downside: as
Lyubomirsky writes, “divorce is highly heritable”—the genes for it are “linked
to particular personalities, like being generally negative and unhappy.” And
negativity lasts for generations. “So when we learn that children of divorced
parents don’t do as well in certain domains,” she concludes, “the effect may
be due to the genes that the children share with their parents and not to the
effects of divorce per se.” Here as elsewhere in the science of happiness,
complex social conflicts and interpersonal differences (if not personal
tragedies) disappear down the rabbit hole of pop genetics.
But not all the evolutionary news is bad. Take parents who discover that
raising children is not the delightful experience they had been led to believe it
would be. “The expectation that having kids will make us immensely happy is
not only rooted in our culture but likely evolutionarily wired as well,”
Lyubomirsky announces. So when it doesn’t make us happy, we’re ashamed
of our failure to do the normal, natural thing. In fact, she says, we are simply
victims of an outdated evolutionary imperative. Feel better?
***
Not everyone will accept the universality of his “we.” Time magazine recently
published a cover story insisting that the happiness of pursuit is peculiarly
American, that from colonial times to the present, “American happiness
would never be about savor-the-moment contentment. That way lay the
reflective café culture of the Old World—fine for Europe, not for Jamestown.
Our happiness would be bred, instead, of an almost adolescent restlessness,
an itch to do the Next Big Thing.” Those assertions, despite their inane
exceptionalist aura, carry as much or more explanatory power than the
neuroscientists’ universalism: cultural differences and historical
circumstances really do make a difference in how people define happiness.
Lyubomirsky and Edelman provide apt examples.
Oliver Burkeman tries to grapple with the subject more imaginatively in The
Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. He
recognizes the absurdity inherent in the notion of willed happiness (which is
much like willed spontaneity). Despite his disdain for positive thinking, he
shares two important assumptions with the positive psychologists—but he
takes them in more interesting directions.
This statement points toward the other assumption shared by Burkeman and
the positive philosophers: the advice to de-emphasize goal-setting. The
problem, says Burkeman, is the interconnectedness of all life: “you can never
change only one thing,” because (as the pioneering environmentalist John
Muir put it) everything in the universe is “hitched to everything else.” This is
a novel turn toward the social and decisively away from the happiness
industry’s obsessive focus on the inner dynamics of the choosing individual.
For the positive psychologists, change is a product of restless human choice—
the recognition of impermanence reinforces a commitment to constant
“personal growth.” For Burkeman, change is a consequence of cosmic
conditions beyond human control; “real happiness,” he writes, “might be
dependent on being willing to face, and to tolerate, insecurity and
vulnerability.” Indeed, “acceptance of impermanence” is a condition for
connections with others. He quotes C.S. Lewis: “To love at all is to be
vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, and possibly
broken.” Ultimately, Burkeman recommends cultivating what Keats called
“negative capability,” the state of mind that occurs “when a man is capable of
being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after
fact and reason.” With this book, we have finally moved beyond the
formulations of utilitarian individualism.
***
The good life has always had much to do with politics—not because societies
can be organized to promote personal happiness by “maximizing utility,” but
because they can be organized to reduce unnecessary suffering. The
Skidelskys recognize the inevitability of insecurity in human life, not to
mention the impossibility and even potential undesirability of eliminating it
from human society. They remember, perhaps too vividly, how easily visions
of abundance for all succumbed to the totalitarian temptation throughout the
twentieth century. Still, they also recognize the possibility of easing certain
kinds of economic insecurity through enlightened public policy. A society that
frees people from anxiety about basic necessities might not make them
happier (“The tears of the world are a constant quantity”), but it might
provide them a better shot at the good life. This is where John Maynard
Keynes comes in.
Keynes’s influence on public policy has been profound and, on the whole,
useful—one could say necessary. He formulated the monetary and fiscal
policies that, in the decades following World War II, allowed welfare states on
both sides of the Atlantic to flatten the curves in the business cycle and move
societies closer to full employment. For a variety of complicated reasons
(which the Skidelskys explore), the wheels came off the Keynesian bus in the
late 1970s. But that doesn’t mean his policy recommendations are no longer
relevant; on the contrary, as Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and other
economists have argued, Keynesian policies of underwriting aggregate
demand are precisely what is needed in this era of Great Recession. The
Skidelskys endorse Keynes’s policy relevance (indeed, Robert has done so at
book length in Keynes: The Return of the Master). But in this book, they are
more interested in Keynes as philosopher of the good life than as economist.
The Skidelskys begin with Keynes’s 1930 essay, “Economic Possibilities for
Our Grandchildren,” which argued that the material basis for the good life
was taking shape. The Skidelskys summarize: “As technological progress
made possible an increase in the output of goods per hour worked, people
would have to work less and less to satisfy their needs, until in the end they
would have to work hardly at all. Then, Keynes wrote, ‘for the first time since
his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to
use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure,
which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely
and agreeably and well.’” This could well happen, Keynes believed, by 2030.
All indications are that it won’t. Since the 1980s, in Britain and the United
States, working hours have been rising steadily among all classes—including
the wealthy, the traditional cultivators of leisure. The rich world is four or five
times wealthier than in 1930, but average hours of work have fallen only 20
percent since then. The utopia of abundance and leisure is nowhere in sight.
And so the Skidelskys want to know: “Why did Keynes’s prophecy fail?”
***
They trace the rise of the Faustian bargain in economic thought, as early
modern thinkers from Machiavelli to Mandeville redefined avarice as “self-
interest.” For Adam Smith, who assumed that humans were driven by a
desire for self-improvement, classical virtues became vices—extravagance and
generosity (not to mention sex) were forms of recklessly scattering one’s seed
instead of prudently saving it. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith
balanced this emphasis on calculating prudence with an emphasis on the
sympathy (or “moral sense”) inherent in man. But later economists ironed
out any such complexities. “The study of man as he ‘really is’ rather than as he
‘ought to be’ turned into an unassailable fortress of mathematics, bewitching
its acolytes and reducing everyone else to futile protest,” the Skidelskys write.
“The value-neutral language of ‘utility’ and ‘preferences’ renders capitalism’s
Faustian bargain necessarily invisible” in the contemporary world.
What was lost was the idea of the social good as a collective achievement.
It became a result of individuals pursuing their self-interest in markets.
The logic of contract was sundered from the logic of reciprocity, which in
most human cultures and societies has been an integral part of the
economy. As economics developed, it became increasingly difficult to
distinguish wants from needs.
All these tendencies were well under way before Keynes made his hopeful
predictions in 1930. He was swimming against the tide. Even during the
Keynesian moment at midcentury, when his ideas had some influence on
public policy, his social-democratic vision was concealed by the apparatus of
value neutrality. After the revival of neoclassical economics in the 1970s and
’80s, what had occurred in the discipline of economics began happening in
the larger world as well. By the late twentieth century, in public discourse on
both sides of the Atlantic, capitalism was no longer an economic system that
could be changed or challenged; it was simply reality, the Way Things Are.
This is the neoliberal world that gave birth to the happiness industry, which is
inspired by the laudable desire to define happiness as something more than
per capita GDP, but which wants to do so without ever challenging the
economic system that produces the GDP. It is a thankless and futile task, as
the Skidelskys make clear. The contemporary science of happiness, they
write, “rests far too much faith on the accuracy of the survey data. More
disturbingly, it treats happiness as a simple, unconditional good, measurable
along a single dimension. The sources or objects of happiness are
disregarded. All that matters is whether you have more or less of the stuff.
These are false and dangerous ideas,” not least because they systematically
ignore the larger interactions of the self and the world. According to the
Skidelskys, “self-reports cannot be the ultimate criterion of happiness,
however useful they might be as supplementary evidence…. Happiness…is
not an item in the mind’s inner theatre, visible only to its owner; it is
essentially manifest in acts and happenings.” Happiness, in short, is about
being in the world with others.
It is, of course, easier to say why things are wrong than how they can be made
right. The closest we have come to realizing Keynes’s vision of the good life
was during the midcentury period, from the late 1930s through the early
1970s, when Western Europe and the United States developed social-
democratic institutions to counteract unfettered capitalism—strong labor
unions, flourishing systems of public education, social insurance and welfare
programs for the elderly, sick, disabled and unemployed. As the Skidelskys
observe, “the political economy of the period was admirably tailored to
realizing our basic goods. The problem was that it lost the language for
describing itself in these terms.” As social democrats began justifying the
maintenance of a well-paid, healthy working population on utilitarian
grounds of efficient productivity, moral arguments for the good life faded
from view. When fiscal crises surfaced in the 1970s, social democrats had no
cogent response to the neoliberal charge that unions and government largesse
were undermining the capacity to compete in the world marketplace. The
failure of institutions was at bottom a failure of moral imagination and
political nerve.
***
The Skidelskys want to revive a more capacious sense of leisure, and they
conclude their book by underscoring the material basis for it: a “long-term
decrease in the demand for labor resulting from continuous improvements in
labor productivity.” This has already happened, but the fruits of increased
productivity have gone to CEOs and shareholders. Were those gains to be
redirected to the workers themselves, the results would be startling:
reductions in working hours, early retirements, experiments in work sharing,
the thirty-five-hour week and the like. Who knows? People might even be
happier.