No Shortcut
This is good bracing stuff.
At Wellington College, one of Britain’s top public schools, headmaster Anthony Seldon is piloting an initiative that may eventually see lessons in happiness added to the curriculum in both the state and independent sectors. What an unhappy prospect…The problem is that Wellington is opting to teach happiness through positive psychology which, in my view, can amount to little more than self-help with a veneer of academic respectability.
And one thing neither the world nor education needs more of is self-help with a veneer of academic respectability. It’s had lashings of that, via for instance the totem of ‘self-esteem’, and look how well that turned out – producing throngs of people with all too much self-esteem and all too little awareness of their own limitations. Positive psychology sounds unnervingly like more of the same.
A life of unremitting cheerfulness is one of delusion, for it refuses to acknowledge normal ups and downs. By emphasising pleasure, the psychologists turn happiness into something self-regarding: mere accumulation of pleasure and avoidance of pain. More, they leave unanswered all the tough questions: Do you have a right to be happy? Can you be happy if others are unhappy? Does it matter whether or not you’re happy?
The tough questions and also the most interesting ones. For instance: if there were a happiness pill, would you take it? The answer is far from obviously yes, for the same sort of reason the answer is not obviously yes to questions like ‘if there were a pill that could make you write great poetry or play the cello like Rostropovich, would you take it?’ The idea may appeal for about a quarter of a second, but then when we think about it we realize we want our happiness and our accompishments or talents to mean something, which entails that they have to be the product of something, of something connected to our own efforts or experience or thought or all those. No, actually, we don’t want to just magically turn into another Keats or Mozart; what would be the point? We want to cover the ground that lies in between being our poor bare selves and whatever magical being we have it in us to become – we want to cover all the ground, ourselves, wide awake and bending every nerve. If we don’t do that, whatever we get at the end doesn’t belong to us, and it doesn’t mean anything; it’s just some sort of parlour trick. Away with it. Same with positive psychology.
To begin, we must find a better definition of happiness, one that surpasses the restricted boundaries of subjective wellbeing. Lasting and profound happiness is the active orientation of your life towards meaning, purpose and value. It’s a reflection upon the character of your life as a whole. This kind of happiness is strong enough to withstand misfortune and does not depend upon good fortune. It isn’t about feeling good, it’s about being good. That’s what Aristotle meant when he called happiness (eudaemonia) a state of flourishing in the art of living…And thus he insisted that happiness was an activity – because it requires skill and focus.
It’s the opposite of a magic pill; it’s the negation of a magic pill. A magic pill would block and prevent the need for activity, skill and focus, so the happiness it created would be just some sort of weird delusion (a trick of the Evil Demon, perhaps) rather than the real thing. It would be like taking a pill that would cause you to have won a marathon, without having actually run the 26 miles and with no memory of having done so. Not very rewarding.
This is why “self-help” is an industry with built-in return customers. The little high of newage workshops is ephemeral. I knew a woman who was addicted to the things. I wonder about the psychology of these pockets of self-indulgent “spirituality”.
You are taught there that you create your own happiness (so you have only yourself to blame?) and at the same time that you are a victim of your past (so the world owes you one?). It’s so very nice to be with all those other folks who are just like you, all “on a journey”, hmm? (or is it that they are in your social class? No, multicultural global citizen you, with your dreamcatcher and your djembe, are above classism, yeah, sure.)
Parlor tricks, indeed. Would I take a pill to help me cope? Sure. A pill to delude me? No. Do I do good because it makes me feel good? This is a selling point for being charitable. I have heard it over and again. Yecch.
I have to say I am uncomfortable with charity from both ends. Not because I feel we should hoist ourselves all rugged and independent (that is another stupid myth). The discomfort comes from being in a culture where we so inadequately provide for one another, where a floor of basic welfare is begrudged; the noble haves can shower crumbs on the poor havenots, and the havenots are expected to be grateful.
I’m with Wilde: the best of the poor are ungrateful.
Do I contribute to “charity”? Yes, variously. And, no, it doesn’t make me feel good, it depresses me to see what a drop in the bucket my “help” is. I do it because it is good to do something now, as well as try to change things more broadly for the future.
And it is abetter way to get out of the house than going to some indulgent newagy workshop to learn “happy”.
Now I am all off topic and less than gruntled.
You could take a pill?
“Would I take a pill to help me cope? Sure.”
Sure, so would I. Anti-depressant is one thing, happy pill is another. I’ve known way too many depressed people to think they should just soldier on.
Actually, my first reaction on reading this article was that Richard Schoch is pulling some sort of sneaky maneuver. Because it immediately struck me that, for a professor of history and culture, he seems not to have done much (or any) research. Positive psychology is a sub-field of psychology of fairly recent vintage. It originates first and foremost in the simple observation that clinical psychology is broken, insofar as it has many, many definitions for disfunction (four-plus editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s worth) but no definition for healthy function. This is not only scientifically unworkable, it’s downright pathological.
More than anything else, this complete failure to generate any theory of homeostasis or regular healthy function by which disfunction and disease can be judged is why clinical psychology has always had more than just a whiff of pseudoscience about it. It’s like trying to define what constitutes a fever without knowing the typical range of body temperatures a healthy human generates. Positive psychology as a field attempts to generate an empirically supported theory of psychological health: Positive psychology is a cure for wooly-headed nonsense in psychology, and Schoch treats it like the disease. That made me suspicious. Then I read further and found out he’s telling outright lies.
All the positive psychology literature I’ve read explicitly rejects all feel-good, subjective well-being, strictly emotional definitions for happiness. Martin Seligman (who’s pretty much the founder of positive psychology) goes on a lot about Aristotle in everything I’ve ever read. So Schoch’s accusation that positive psychology ignores the “body of enduring wisdom on how to live the good life” is quite simply false. Rather the opposite.
And upon further detailed reading, I’ve come to suspect that Schoch is lying about positive psychology quite deliberately and knowingly. In the fourth paragraph, he explicitly refers to positive psychology by name and smears it as “little more than self-help with a veneer of academic respectability.” In the next paragraph, he passes off the definition of happiness as a positive emotional state as being accepted by “most psychologists” without any mention of positive psychology in particular. Clearly this is deliberate weaseling: Schoch may be right that “most psychologists” accept such a definition of happiness, everyone in the positive psychology field I’ve ever read explicitly rejects such naive and narrow definitions of happiness. Yet Schoch goes on to discuss that definition and the problems with it as if it were the basis for his dismissal of positive psychology.
In fact, every subsequent reference to psychology and psychologists he makes is general: Schoch never mentions positive psychology by name again after his initial insult. I think this shows that he isn’t merely making a straw man argument, he’s engaging in deliberate misdirection: He mentions positive psychology once, negatively, but everything he says after that one mention is possibly true of psychology and psychologists in general but not at all true of the positive psychology sub-field.
So my question naturally becomes, why is Schoch lying? What axe does he have to grind?
Yes, I know all this sounds like crap. Who deserves to be happy anyway (except the morally good, according to Kant)? Still, the eudaimonistic approach to life does have an impressive heritage. While “feeling good” is not to be confused with Aristotelian happiness/flourishing, the latter has been brought up to date by some positive psychologists at least. Check out:
http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu
Happiness is a good preventive measure against violence and irrationality. If pursuing happiness helps to keep some people from messing with the life and liberty of the rest of us, it’s alright with me.
As every adolescent knows, it is the pursuit of unhappiness that is really interesting. Happiness might have been a revolutionary concept in Europe in the eighteenth century, as St.-Just claimed, but immensely more wealth and opportunity means that we can turn to what we really want: higher, more engrossing forms of unhappiness. Higher in the sense that Mill speaks of higher forms of happiness (which are, when you examine them, actually higher forms of unhappiness). Romantic love is the best form we’ve come up with so far, but also there’s: art, there’s political organization, and — when all else fails — the midlife crisis.
Prudence in pursuing unhappiness is what we really need to learn. But perhaps prudence will never be a brake on this deepest of all passions.
Very good, roger – that did make me laugh.
“Romantic love is the best form we’ve come up with so far, but also there’s: art, there’s political organization, and — when all else fails — the midlife crisis.”
And even better, combining romantic love and the midlife crisis – now that’s really the way to get the job done!
And thanks G and Phil. I should do some of that there reading too, clearly.
“Would you take a happiness pill?”
Greg Egan (Australian SF writer) wrote a wonderful little story called, “Reasons to be Cheerful” (in the book “Luminous”) which raises this question of artificial happiness. The story also leaves you wondering about the difference between artificial happiness and ‘real’ happiness.
Asides the point, maybe, but sparked by the overlapping comments above, what makes anyone think their happiness matters? Compared to, for instance, their ability to make the world better or worse? Surly even under the Aristotelian definition one could be happy in one’s work doing something atrocious? [I won’t mention the obvious examples]. At what point should an ethical and intersubjective measurement of one’s activities determine one’s right/ability to be ‘happy’ about them? Or is worrying about this sort of thing just one of the paths to higher unhappiness?
“Surly even under the Aristotelian definition one could be happy in one’s work doing something atrocious?”
Actually, Dave, Aristotle’s conception of happiness is about living well and doing GOOD. Developing good moral character – that is, developing the habit of and inclination to act morally – is an essential component of happiness on his view. A criminal, for example, might be capable of showing some virtues – courage, perhaps – but would not be virtuous in other important ways (unjust, ungenerous, etc.).
So, in sum, virtue is its own reward? That’s good to know, now I can stop yearning after that new PDA which I had mistakenly assumed would make my life complete…
O’course, the problem here, on a larger scale, is that these virtue-based notions of happiness conflict fundamentally with the competition-based rules of success that our society has become accustomed to adhering to – and which rely precisely on unhappiness [be it yearning for a new PDA or suffering unemployment] for their driving forces…
‘if there were a pill that could make you write great poetry or play the cello like Rostropovich, would you take it?’
Most likely I would.
OB, I think you must either suffer from a lack of ambition or else achieved everything you wanted professionally, without effort.
If you asked a struggling athelete whether they wanted a magic pill to turm them into a great sportsman (undetectably), many perhaps most would say yes. According to one survey I read, they would do so even at huge cost to their health.
If you asked a struggling poet whether they would take pills to get better in touch with their muse and write great poetry ( think Laudanum, LSD, cocaine or whatever). Many would, and many have done so, successfully.
Anyone who is really driven to excel will take almost anything to succeed, and that goes for violinists too I suspect.
The question of taking a happiness pill is quite separate from a magic pill for excellence I think.
Tim
Yes, that’s right, Tim, I suffer from a lack of ambition, and I’ve also achieved everything I wanted “professionally” with no effort whatever. Shrewd observation.