The uses and abuses of 'happiness'

As mentioned before, I'm currently editing a series of articles at Open Democracy, responding to the burgeoning field of happiness economics and policy. I've authored a new piece myself, seeking to distinguish four different scientific, intellectual and philosophical traditions that contribute to public discussions of happiness. These are the Aristotelian, the statistical, the economic and the psychological. Each is fine, within limits; the problem, it seems to me, is that they become confused and conflated, leading the happiness 'movement' to make exaggerated claims, and their critics to make exaggerated, curmudgeonly rebukes in return. For example:

At a recent ONS event on measuring ‘national wellbeing’ at London School of Economics, Paul Dolan claimed that 2,400-year-old Aristotelian ethical questions regarding the nature of a good and happy life were now finally answerable using statistical, survey and neuro-scientific techniques. It was provocative and attention-grabbing, but it wasn’t smart. Who, after all, would even want to be a human being, if fundamental questions of virtue and fulfilment were amenable to econometric modelling? Dolan is at the forefront of an exciting new field of health and psychological economics; it just hasn’t got a great deal to do with Aristotle.

Then look at how Action for Happiness has presented itself. We are told to do things for each other, ‘notice’ the world around us, participate in social events. These touchy-feely tips and preaching smack of positive psychology, and get on people’s nerves. Is there an ethical issue regarding the socialisation and exchange of goods in our capitalist, increasingly privatised economy? Certainly there is. Is there a medical and economic issue regarding levels of depression and anxiety in our individualised, atomised aged? Certainty there is. But neither of these requires optimisation, optimism or the abandonment of irony.

The question 'for or against happiness?' seems to me an unhelpful one, that leads to caricatured answers. Whether the nuances I'm asking for can be sustained in the public or media debate is, of course, questionable.

Comments

[IanC]

Completely agree.

Much as I feel the people behind Action for Happiness are well-intentioned and insightful, there is something about all this that makes one queasy and irritated. I think it is the divorce of the positive-psychological tips from any sense of a diagnosis of social, environmental, spiritual and economic ills; and also the implication that, like everything else in a modern consumer economy and society, happiness can be specified and optimised and maximised. This is positive psychology allied to inability or unwillingness to look beyond the neoliberal and utilitarian nature of our times. Its also politically unsound: do we want governments to steer us towards an officially approved model of happiness, or to tackle and reduce avoidable evils and ill-being, which at least tends to be a lot easier to agree about than the nature of wellbeing?
I will end with the wildly unfashionable point that AfH etc should pay more attention to the vast accumulated experience of religious traditions and communities. You don't achieve the 'life more abundant' by trying to get happy, that is for sure.

[Will Davies]

Thanks, Ian. Similar arguments have also been made - rather more aggressively (!) - over at the Open Democracy article page itself. And I agree that isolating the psychological from the social and economic is both unnecessary and unhelpful. But there's no automatic reason why this outcome has to predominate. I think sociologists and political economists can and should occupy some of this territory.

[IanC]

Thanks Will. Agreed.
Time to revisit the political economists and sociologists who were on this terrain in the 60s and 70s, perhaps, eg Illich, Scitovsky, Hirsch; and to go back to Erich Fromm, who was a remarkable thinker; and to look again at Robert Lane.
PS In 1998 I edited the Demos collection The Good Life, which felt ahead of its time then and is just about coming into its own now. I am hoping that a new version of this for the 2010s will be produced and have encouraged another think-tank to do it. We went out of our way to connect the psychological, social and economic dimensions and also to identify policy implications, and I think it could be done still better now.

[Dick Pountain]

Could I venture to recommend a book called "On Deep History and the Brain" by Daniel Lord Smail
(University of California Press 2007). He takes a viewpoint of human society as providing the means by which people seek to alter their own and others emotional states: through violence, ritual, art, food, drugs etc etc etc. It's a very compelling case,escapes from naive rationalism without descending into irrationalism, integrates latest findings from neuroscience and evolutionary biology with Weberian institutionalism.

Poetry got there a long time ago:

"A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy."

(Wallace Stevens - Of Mere Being)