Happy Happy People!
Jan. 16, 2009

Who could be against happiness? What could it even mean to be against it? Yet a rising throng claims to be. Here's an overview.

I repeat the old joke (a favorite of the late Steve Allen): "Whip me," said the masochist. "No," said the sadist. One way to look at hedonism, or the doctrine that pleasure or happiness (or the lessening of pain) is the highest good, is that it cannot be otherwise. Someone may spend a lifetime in sackcloth and ashes, or even as a Republican, but, ultimately, through such pain he's pursuing his own conception of pleasure, in this case that of an eternity of harp music. (I think it was Twain who said that would be hell.) In the joke, the masochist's physical pain somehow brings him a psychological pleasure that makes it worth enduring, while the sadist, knowing that, denies himself what would usually be a pleasure, i.e., inflicting physical pain, because here that denial results in the greater pleasure of inflicting even greater pain.

In the above conception, then, we are all hedonists and MUST be. Not even the suicidal defy the pleasure principle. They simply conclude that for them death is the best if not sole way to diminish pain. (And in The Land of the Free even suicide is illegal.)

Conceived another way, though, hedonism is an absurdity. Consider the debased conception of my own '60s generation: "If it feels good do it." First, a brief digression. We did get SOME things right. "Make love, not war." Hard to argue there, especially when the wars are Vietnam and Iraq. ("War," as Richard Nixon sternly observed, "is heck." Now comes Bush-Cheney's plaintive swan song: "All we were saying/Was give war a chance.") But the Woodstock Nation conception of "love" was an infantile hash of skin friction, psychedelics, and blubbering sentimentality: all you need is love, share the land, flower power, I think it's so groovy now/That people are finally getting together. (The last lyric is from "Reach Out of the Darkness," a song that could move me to reach for my Saturday-night special.)

So, pleasure and happiness are either (1) what the human animal can't NOT pursue or (2) absurdities as a basis for anything seriously describable as a philosophy.

In (1) above, a first principle of ethics is that "ought implies can": don't bash me for not curing cancer when I still can't figure out a hangover cure. This should be another principle: "ought doesn't apply to inevitability." If I can't help but pursue what I think will bring me pleasure (or less pain), it makes no sense to say I "should" (or shouldn't) do that.

Turning to (2), I'm a huge fan of the ultimate hedonist, Hugh Hefner. Starting in 1953, midst a nation of Puritan bullies, against staggering odds and oppressions, with courage, humor, and savvy he created and maintained his empire of bunnies and quality journalism. By the mid-'60s he'd established his "Playboy philosophy" as mainstream at least among the civilized minority of Americans (and in certain ways became a victim of his own success). The "philosophy" can be fairly summarized as follows: America knows how to work, but it's time that it shed Puritanism and learned how to play as well. Not only is pleasure not sin, boys and girls, as long as it's not exploitative; it's actually GOOD.

NOW, of course, outside the fever swamps of the far right, it all seems such conventional wisdom that I apologize for the banality of rehearsing it. My view is that on the whole Hefner has had a powerfully positive impact on American culture, and, in too many ways to discuss here, it goes far beyond his infatuation with beautiful women and the familiar trappings of his mansions.

But as a philospher surely not even Hef would liken himself to Aristotle, Nietzsche, Sartre, Bertrand Russell, or Wittgenstein (I think the latter is a Bavarian lager soon to be served in Aggieville watering holes). The ultimate statement and defense of hedonism (though he called it utilitarianism) came in the late 18th century from Jeremy Bentham: "Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry." With other fish to fry at the moment, I'll let that stand as its reductio ad absurdum. Can't imagine even Hef agreeing with Bentham on that.

What, then, of the recent attacks on happiness? It's above my pay grade to plow through them all, so suffice to say that they'll be salubrious if they help destroy the champions of the cow-pasture, fluffhead, and cutsie-wootsie conceptions of happiness, with their urgings to have ever more "fun" until everyone is bubbling over with the perky inanity of TV pitchmen and KU pompom girls.

All the while even psychological pain is increasingly equated with illness that needs medical intervention, as some, of course, does. But what is being lost is the view of pain as inseparable from the deepest happiness, which comes from the noble -- and inevitably painful -- pursuit of the highest incarnations of love and beauty, which are the only reasons to live ("the art of love and the love of art").

Beethoven, H.L. Mencken wrote, "became a Freudian case, and had a life of almost unmitigated misery. To that misery we must lay his sterile years, when he could scarcely write at all. . . . But to it, also, we must lay much of the splendor of what he actually got on paper. No healthy and happy man could have matched it, for the gods are jealous of happiness, and punish it with dullness."

It won't make us Beethovens [band cue], but lots of us, know it or not, could profit from a little less Paree and a little more Lodi.

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Great points here. I recommend a good new book called Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy by Eric Wilson. He has a whole section on Keats' famous poem, "Ode on Melancholy," which counsels us to remember that happiness and joy are real but inevitably fleeting; they come and go just as moments of fear and despair come and go. Thus Keats' famous image of Joy, "whose hand is ever at his lips, bidding adieu." We're creatures of cyclical moods and that's just part of being human, not something we should try to escape. CT

Dead on target there, CT, and I do want to read that book. The best thing I've ever read on the ennobling power of suffering is Oscar Wilde's "De Profundis." Tragically, Wilde couldn't live what he wrote, but what a powerful book.

"Treatment" usually means drugs. Much of that definition of pathology and need to escape bad feelings has been fueled by the Pharmaceutical industry, whose existence depends on creating ever more diseases that require their products to cure them. I have the nagging fear that true happiness is something that we can never achieve in this culture. To even discover what true happiness means could threaten the very foundations of our society (e.g., the end of consumerism). There is an old parable about King Solomon, who wanted to humble his prideful minister by sending him on a futile quest for a magic ring that, when looked at would make a happy man sad, and a sad man happy. The minister looked everywhere for six months, finally returning home dejected that he had to disappoint his king. Encountering an old jeweler at the gates, he told him his story. The jeweler produced a plain gold ring, onto which he engraved “This too shall pass.” And so the minister was able to fulfill the King’s mission after all. I wear those words on my bracelet, to remind myself that while my sorrows and trials will pass, so will my joys. That’s not a reason for depression; it’s a reason to celebrate those joy to the utmost, and not get wrapped up in looking to the next moment. I recently read a book in which the author encounters a doomsday prophet carrying a sign saying something like: “Life is short, remember you must die.” The author’s companion reflects that the sign should have said, “Life is short, remember you must live.”

To me, nothing is more engrossing than psychopharmacology, Rose, and I'm sure I've mentioned the New Yorker cartoon that showed two guys riding the subway, one of whom looked sad while the other wore a yardwide grin. The caption was something like, "Your story is very sad, Jerry. I almost wish I hadn't taken an anti-depressant." The humbling implication: fundamentally, we're nothing but biochemicals. The right mix of drugs appears able to turn Albert Schweitzer into Hitler and vice-versa. Kant said the goal of life should not be happiness but to make ourselves worthy of it. But for most of us it's too easy to pop a pill or sip wine. Gotta reread some Aldous Huxley.

Pharmaceuticals might be able to induce a lot of biochemical reactions, Sage, but in doing so we often ignore that our bodies' reactions -- even sadness -- have a purpose, and by drugging them into submission we might actually be doing ourselves more harm than good. For example, take the hysteria that a fever causes. Fever is the body's positive response to illness. It's purpose is to turn on the immune system, and drugs that reduce fever inhibit that response. It would be fascinating to discover whether the chemicals that the body produces during periods of sadness are actually conducive to an earlier or stronger return to happiness. I know, for example, that a good cry is cathartic and calming. I don't mean to say that nothing should be treated -- severe illnesses could require it -- but most drugs are used to treat conditions that would be better cured by a gallon of water and some rest.

And the reason, Rose, is our old friend TOTI: tryanny of the immediate. Part of the appeal of drugs, and of so much in our culture, is that they usually make their impact quickly. The long-term costs often outweigh the short-term benefits, but few care. It takes longer to experience the benefits of diet and lifestyle changes, so we hoist another glass and tell the Dangerfield joke about willpower: being on death row and staying on Weight Watchers.

Re: TOTI, that reminds me of a prayer I once heard: "God please grant me patience. And grant it to me NOW!"

And the other side of the TOTI coin is the procrastination of pain. Pleasure now, pain later, however petty either is. The wine is irresistible in part because it's before us NOW, while the hangovers are eight to ten hours away and the wrecked livers YEARS off (or so we assume). Wanna do lots of things (exercise, clean house, pay bills, world without end), just not NOW, because they're pains. We love pleasures but hate having had many; we hate pains but love having endured many. "Lord make me virtuous, but not NOW." Trouble is, for the body, as opposed to the mind and imagination, it's never NOT here and now -- it can never be in two places or times at once -- and so the painful tasks on to-do lists are often procrastinated forever. On our own, few of us, in the immortal words of the Fabulous Thunderbirds, are tuff enuff.