I'm currently writing a paper on Happiness, which is constructed as a series of meditations on the subject. The official title is "Happiness...Is Not a Fish You Can Catch: The Pursuit of Happiness in the Postmodern World." Most of these are based on recent lectures or books I read this term. As I write them, I'll probably post more. Enjoy my musings.
“There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness... is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase ‘the pursuit of happiness’ is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.”[1] I read this, but I am not yet convinced. The pursuit of happiness is supposed to make people…well, happy. Happy people aren’t stupid; they don’t go around intentionally causing problems, creating all the “ills and miseries” in the world. But then, I suppose that would depend on your definition of happiness. Is happiness a communal sentiment, something pursued for the sake of others; or is the goal more individualistic, so that what makes me happy might not make you happy? If we find our joy in others, in our “three strand cord” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12), then yes, we will do everything in our power to ensure their happiness. But if we believe, as Sartre suggested, that “Hell is other people”[2], if we think that we can only pass through Heaven’s happy gates alone, then happiness becomes a race, in which there can be few winners but many losers. As my piece of the pie becomes larger and more satisfying, yours becomes less so. “My good is my good and your good is yours”[3]—and so happiness exists as a competition. I win. You lose.
[1] Malcolm Muggeridge, B.B.C. Broadcast, 5 October 1965, http://thinkexist.com/quotation/there_is_something_ ridiculous_ and_even_quite/295051.html, [accessed 17 April 2008].
[2] Jean Paul Sartre, No Exit, http://www.nyu.edu/classes/keefer/hell/sart.html, [accessed 17 April 2008].
[3] C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters (Springdale, Pennsylvania: Whitaker House, 1984), 87.
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