The Pursuit of Happiness

    In an article in this week's New Yorker, "Pursuing Happiness," John Lanchester reviews some new books on that contented emotion.  It is a sweeping piece, engaging recent research in psychology and brain scanning technology, and running across a span of history from cavemen to the Greeks to the Enlightenment to our modern condition.  Lots of interesting stuff.  But no mention whatsoever of anything Chinese.

     This is so common as to be unnoticeable: American publications often make big generalizations about "human" characteristics, while never referring to a very big chunk of humanity and culture in Asia.  I know.  I shouldn't expect the Chinese classics to be familiar, but, oy, there are many ways that they could add to Lanchester's piece.   Let me give you a few examples.   

    Early on, he argues that fate shapes our lives and that this undermines our pursuit of happiness:

People who have scant control over their lives are bound to place tremendous importance on luck and fate. As [Darrin] McMahon points out, “In virtually every Indo-European language, the modern word for happiness is cognate with luck, fortune or fate.” In a sense, the oldest and most deeply rooted philosophical idea in the world and in our natures is “Shit happens.” Happ was the Middle English word for “chance, fortune, what happens in the world,” McMahon writes, “giving us such words as ‘happenstance,’ ‘haphazard,’ ‘hapless,’ and ‘perhaps.’ ” This view of happiness is essentially tragic: it sees life as consisting of the things that happen to you; if more good things than bad happen, you are happy.

    For a Taoist, that leap to the conclusion that "this view of happiness is essentially tragic" would be baffling.  It is precisely in the recognition that we cannot control our fates, that "shit happens," and yielding to that reality, that contentment will be found.  It's when you stop consciously and purposefully pursuing happiness that you will find happiness.  That is Taoism 101, and it really should be a part of this reflection.

    Of course, Chuang Tzu takes things a bit further, when he suggests that by yielding to circumstance we not only find contentment, but both sorrow and joy will never touch us.  I think he means that "joy," an overblown form of happiness, might not be a durable and deeply rooted happiness, and, therefore, one could let go of it and still be happy.  The contentment of accepting the non-predestined destiny of Way (Tao) is, however, certainly a type of happiness.  It would include wonder and comfort and security (not in the sense of avoiding death, but in the sense of not fearing death) and humor.  Chuang Tzu has a marvelously complex notion of happiness.

    There is a second tie-in with Taoism in Lanchester's piece.  He writes:

Looking at the data from all over the world, it is clear that, instead of getting happier as they become better off, people get stuck on a “hedonic treadmill”: their expectations rise at the same pace as their incomes, and the happiness they seek remains constantly just out of reach.

 And he continues later:

...the news that we’re on a hedonic treadmill, so that we end up where we’re always bound to end up, is so contrary to our fundamental appetites for exertion and the next new thing, that nobody can really accept it.

     Again, none of this is news to a Taoist, and it hasn't been news for over 2,000 years.  Yes, the pursuit of material riches and status is a "hedonic treadmill" and not a path to happiness.  And, yes, many people are just too caught up in it to accept the idea that their exertions are not bringing them real contentment.   We could spare ourselves a lot of psychological experiments, which Lanchester suggests do not really get us much beyond our common sense anyway, if we read the classics!

      There is a Confucian point to make as well.  Lanchester states:

 At the end of the nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim performed a huge cross-cultural study of suicide, and found, in [Jonathan] Haidt’s words, that “no matter how he parsed the data, people who had fewer social constraints, bonds and obligations were more likely to kill themselves.” The more connected we are to other people, the less likely we are to succumb to despair—a conclusion that isn’t very distant from the common-sense proposition that lonely people are often unhappy, and unhappy people are often lonely.

     This is, of course, the starting point of Confucian philosophy. Our daily duty to cultivate our closest loving relationships are not obstacles to our happiness, they are expressions of our happiness.  We find ourselves, our identities, our happiness, in fulfilling our obligations to those around us.  If, for whatever reason, we are not finding our happiness there, then someone is not living up to their social role.  In such circumstances, we should first look into ourselves and seriously examine whether we are doing the right thing.  If the problem lies with another person in our web of social relations, then (and this would be a modern variation on the Confucian theme) we should look to build loving, happy relationships with others.  In the end, however, happiness is not a matter of self-interest; it is to be created and performed in a social context.

    Without realizing it, Lanchester confirms elements of both a Taoist and a Confucian understanding of happiness.  Too bad he couldn't make the connections explicit.

Comments

[The Rambling Taoist]

Sam,
As always, a wonderful analysis.

I would add that it's not only Chinese philosophy that is left out of these kinds of essays. One rarely sees mention of Muslim or Hindu philosophy either. Add to this the cosmology of American Indians and the various religious and/or philosophic perspectives from Africa.

It is simply a sad fact that too many Western thinkers and pundits only draw conclusions from a most narrow view of cultural history. There is a cornucopia of traditions throughout the world; it's unfortunate that Western "cooks" use the same ingredients over and over again, only to complain that the feast has such a mundane flavor.