Happiness, Part I: To Be or Not to Be

First off, I warned you. Six months of introspection, baby. Are you excited? I am.

For some reason, today I'm thinking about happiness. What it is, and how you get it, and what kind of it I want for Frances.

I've already written about how inadequate the philosophy of "happiness is a choice" and "if you decide to be happy you will be" is to me. Look a starving woman with a starving child in the face and tell her that happiness is a choice. I dare you.

But if happiness is happenstance, then what sense does it make to set happiness as a goal? Is it equivalent to wishing one were taller? There doesn't seem to me to be much point in setting goals that one has no influence or control over.

On the completely superficial level with which I am familiar with western philosophical traditions, I hold a loosely aristotlean notion of happiness--happiness is what happens when you live an ethical life that is consistent with one's values. Or, as he would have put it, happiness results from the consistent pursuit of virtue.

Whew, that's obnoxious. Isn't it? Virtue! Didn't that go out of style in 1965? Aren't we all about moral relativisim these days?

I'm not sure it's entirely incompatible; well, I'll just get this out of the way first: some things are right, and some things are wrong. Slaughtering a village because of their religious or ethnic characteristics, for instance, ought to be a pretty clear-cut example of "wrong" no matter what your personal beliefs, and it's the kind of thing that large groups of people can generally be mobilized to stand behind. There's a lot of grey, and I don't think that's a problem. Perhaps it's aristotlean to argue that as long as you consistently pursue what you believe is virtuous, and as long as what you believe is virtuous isn't entirely incompatible with reality, that's good enough? There ought to be enough maneuvering room within such a definition for all but the most hard-core moral relativist.

But leaving aside moral relativism and assuming that most people who read this blog will have some common moral basis even if the variation is wide, I think this definition of happiness has several distinct advantages:

1. It's something you have some control over. You might not be able to control whether or not you get Job A or House B or Partner X, but you can, in most instances, exert some control over your own choices.

2. It's compatible with a continuing, decent, sustainable civilization. A definition of happiness based on aquisition, material possessions, or status is not; because there is simply not enough of any of those things to be equitably distributed amongst six billion people, let alone the eight or ten billion being predicted as the peak around 2050. The beautiful thing about this definition of happiness is that it makes contentment something you can have even while you are giving things away and learning to share.

3. If happiness is achieved through the pursuit of virtue, then when we try to be happy, the world gets better, not worse.

I'm not sure if I'm expressing myself well; if not, that's what the comments section is for. Suffice it to say that I think this nicely balances happiness of the individual with happiness of the group.

So I suppose when I say that I want Frances to be happy, what I mean is, I want her to have a consistent ethical code that she strives to live by. I want her to have money and friends and a good job and a loving partner and to achieve all of her dreams, too; but none of those things are in her control, or mine. It's best, I think, to continue to work for them, realize that whether or not one achieves them is at best part effort and part luck, and decide not to place one's satisfaction or self-worth in that basket.

Then she can be happy, as long as her basic material needs are met. It won't take the sting away from any sexism or bigotry she might experience in her life, but maybe it will be lessened.

And the thought of it still makes me sad. One day she will no longer say "I'm little" with pride, she'll realize most people consider it a liability or worse. But less sad than I would be if I thought her happiness was dependent on the best job, the biggest house, the nicest car, all of the material things that prejudice is so good at taking from people.

(Yes, this is going to be one of my patented multi-part entries. I'll come back to this later.)

Posted by Andrea at October 18, 2006 7:50 AM under The World

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