Happiness, the Hard Way

By Darrin M. McMahon
This essay originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of
the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley.
I think it is probably fair to assume that most Americans today consider
happiness not only something that would be nice to have, but something
that we really ought to haveand, moreover, something thats within
our power to bring about, if only we set our minds to it. We can be
happy, we tell ourselves, teeth gritted. We should be happy. We will be
happy.
That is a modern article of faith. But it is also a relatively recent idea in
the West which dates from the 17th and 18th centuries, a time that
ushered in a dramatic shift in what human beings could legitimately
hope to expect in and from their lives. People prior to the late 17th
century thought happiness was a matter of luck or virtue or divine favor.
Today we think of happiness as a right and a skill that can be developed.
This has been liberating, in some respects, because it asks us to strive
to improve our lots in life, individually and collectively. But there have
been downsides as well. It seems that when we want to be happy all of
the time, we can forget that the pursuit of happiness can entail struggle,
sacrifice, even pain.
Roots of happiness
Language reveals ancient definitions of happiness. It is a striking fact
that in every Indo-European language, without exception, going all the
way back to ancient Greek, the word for happiness is a cognate with the
word for luck. Hap is the Old Norse and Old English root of happiness,
and it just means luck or chance, as did the Old French heur, giving us
bonheur, good fortune or happiness. German gives us the word Gluck,
which to this day means both happiness and chance.
What does this linguistic pattern suggest? For a good many ancient
peoplesand for many others long after thathappiness was not
something you could control. It was in the hands of the gods, dictated
by Fate or Fortune, controlled by the stars, not something that you or I
could really count upon or make for ourselves. Happiness, literally, was
what happened to us, and that was ultimately out of our hands. As the
monk in Chaucers Canterbury Tales declares:
And thus does Fortunes wheel turn treacherously. And out of happiness
bring men to sorrow. In other words, the wheel of fortune controls our
happenstance, and hence our happiness.

You can read more about McMahon's ideas in his book, Happiness: A
History

There were, of course, other ways of thinking about happiness. Those

who have studied Greek or Roman philosophy will know that happiness
what the Greeks called, in one of several words, eudaimoniawas the
goal of all Classical philosophy, beginning with Socrates and Plato, then
taken up even more centrally by Aristotle, then featured prominently in
all the major schools of Classical thought, including that of the
Epicureans, Stoics, and so forth. In their view, happiness could be
earned, a perspective that anticipates our modern one.
But there is a crucial difference between their ideas of happiness and
ours. For most of these Classical philosophers, happiness is never simply
a function of good feelingof what puts a smile on our facebut rather
of living good lives, lives that will almost certainly include a good deal of
pain. The most dramatic illustration of this is the Roman statesman and
philosopher Ciceros claim that the happy man will be happy even on the
torture wrack.
That sounds ludicrous to us todayand perhaps it isbut it very nicely
captures the way the ancients thought of happiness, not as an emotional
state but as an outcome of moral comportment. Happiness is a life
lived according to virtue, Aristotle famously says. It is measured in
lifetimes, not moments. And it has far more to do with how we order
ourselves and our lives as a whole than anything that might happen
individually to any one of us.
Given these presuppositions, the ancients tended to agree that very few
would ever succeed in being happy, because happiness takes an
incredible amount of work, discipline and devotion, and most people, in

the end, are simply not up to the task. The happy are what Aristotle
calls happy few. They are, if you like, the ethical elite. This is not a
democratic conception of happiness.
After the Greek and Roman traditions, we have Jewish and Christian
ideas about happiness. In the prevailing Christian understanding,
happiness can occur in one of three circumstances. It can be found in
the past in a lost Golden Age, in the Garden of Eden when Adam and
Eve were perfectly content. It can be revealed in the futurethe
millennium when Christ will return and the Kingdom of God will
genuinely be at hand. Or we can find happiness in heaven, when the
saints shall know the perfect felicity, as Thomas Aquinas puts it, the
pure bliss of union with God. Strictly speaking, this is the happiness of
death.
And so in the dominant Christian worldview, happiness is not something
we can obtain in this life. It is not our natural state. On the contrary, it is
an exalted condition, reserved for the elect in a time outside of time, at
the end of history. This is the opposite of todays egalitarian, feel-goodnow conception of happiness.
Happiness revolution
Enter the 17th and 18th centuries, when a revolution in human
expectations overthrew these old ideas of happiness. It is in this time
that the French Encyclopdie, the Bible of the European Enlightenment,
declares in its article on happiness that everyone has a right to be
happy. It is in this time that Thomas Jefferson declares the pursuit of
happiness to be a self-evident truth, while his colleague George Mason,
in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, speaks of pursuing and obtaining
happiness as a natural endowment and right. And it is in this time that
the French revolutionary leader St. Just can stand up during the height
of the Jacobin revolution in France in 1794 and declare: Happiness is a
new idea in Europe. In many ways it was.
When the English philosopher and revolutionary John Locke declared at
the end of the 17th century that the business of man is to be happy,
he meant that we shouldnt assume that suffering is our natural lot, and
that we shouldnt have to apologize for our pleasures here on earth. On
the contrary, we should work to increase them. It wasnt a sin to enjoy
our bodies, his contemporaries began to argue. It wasnt gluttony and
greed to work to improve our standards of living. It wasnt a sign of
luxury and depravity to pursue pleasures of the flesh, and whatever
other kind as well. Pleasure was good. Pain was bad. We should
maximize the one and minimize the other, yielding the greatest
happiness for the greatest number.
This was a liberating perspective. Starting in Lockes time, men and
women in the West dared to think of happiness as something more than
a divine gift, less fortuitous than fortune, less exalted than a millenarian

dream. For the first time in human history, comparatively large numbers
of people were exposed to the novel prospect that they might not have
to suffer as an unfailing law of the universe, that they couldand should
expect happiness in the form of good feeling, and pleasure as a right
of existence. This is a prospect that has gradually spread from the
originally rather narrow universe of white men to include women, people
of color, childrenindeed, humanity as a whole.
This new orientation towards happiness was, as I say, liberating in many
respects. I would argue that it continues to lie behind some of our most
noble humanitarian sentimentsthe belief that suffering is inherently
wrong, and that all people, in all places, should have the opportunity,
the right, to be happy.
Unnatural happiness
But there is a dark side to this vision of happiness as well, one that may
help explain why so many of us are snapping up books about happiness
and coming to happiness conferences, searching for an emotion that we
worry is absent from our lives.
For all its pleasures and benefits, this new perspective on happiness as a
given right, tends to imagine happiness not as something won through
moral cultivation, carried out over the course of a well-lived life, but as
something out there that could be pursued, caught, and consumed.
Happiness has increasingly been thought to be more about getting little
infusions of pleasure, about feeling good rather than being good, less
about living the well-lived life than about experiencing the well-felt
moment.
Dont get me wrong, there is nothing bad about feeling good. But I
would suggest that something of value may have been lost or forgotten
in our transition to modern ideas of happiness. We cant feel good all the
time; nor, I think, should we want to. Nor should we assume that
happiness can be had (maybe a better word?) without a certain degree
of effort, and possibly even sacrifice and pain. These are things that the
older traditions knewin the West and the East alikeand that we have
forgotten.
Today, science is rediscovering the validity of ancient perspectives on
happinessthat there are important connections between hope and
happiness, for example, or between gratitude and forgiving and
happiness, altruism and happiness. Science is often painted as being
opposed to matters of the spirit, but new discoveries by researchers like
Michael McCullough, Robert Emmons, and many others remind us how
important non-materialistic, spiritual cultivation is to our happiness and
well-being. It is all the more important to revive and cultivate this older
wisdom today, given that so many of us assume that we ought to be
happy as a matter of course, that this is our natural state.

Indeed, if you think about it, this idea of happiness as a natural state
creates a curious problem. What if Im not happy? Does that mean that
Im unnatural? Am I ill, or bad, or deficient? Is there something wrong
with me? Is there something wrong with the society in which I live?
These are all symptoms of a condition that I call the unhappiness of not
being happy, and it is a peculiarly modern condition.
To cure this condition, we might focus less on our own personal
happiness and instead on the happiness of those around us, for
relentless focus on ones own happiness has the potential to be selfdefeating. The 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill once said, Ask
yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. Whether that
is really true or not, I dont know. But given that we live in a world that
asks this question of us every day, it is a paradox worth pondering.
Darrin M. McMahon, Ph.D., is a professor of history at Florida State
University and the author of Happiness, A History.