
Demand elicits supply. The demand I have in mind is the demand for happiness: Suicide rates are up, depression is up, and though people today seek to be happy, as in all ages they do, they say they aren’t. The supply is an explosion of books, conferences, and college and business school courses on being happy, and the emergence of happiness gurus and celebrities.
The scholarly element is the new field of happiness studies, sometimes called positive psychology. Its prehistory seems to lie in the humanistic psychology movement typified by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, who urged practitioners not to dwell exclusively on pathology and mental illness but to consider the elements of well-being. Today led by such figures as Martin Seligman and Jonathan Haidt, the field has left those beginnings far behind. No longer just an academic theory, it has surpassed the stages of bloom, vogue, and fad to become a full-blown, galloping movement. I would by no means say that such an important topic as human happiness does not deserve scholarly attention. And yet the field exhibits some disturbing features, as galloping movements usually do.
The University of Pennsylvania, home to the Positive Psychology Center, hosted the First World Congress on Positive Psychology in 2009. These congresses have become an annual event, organized by the International Positive Psychology Association. So far, by my count, only one university offers a degree program in happiness studies, but a fair number offer certificates or concentrations, and many schools offer courses. The happiness course at Harvard is the most popular in the university’s history, enrolling up to 1,400 students at a time.
Some such courses are designed for the general student, whereas others target psychologists, counselors, or managers. A handbook published by Oxford University Press presents research that applies happiness studies to businesses and other organizations, with the aim of making workers not just happy but “elevat[ed]” and “inspir[ed].” The happiness studies movement has also spawned business opportunities of its own. The instructor of Harvard’s happiness course is an entrepreneur who urges visitors to his website to “Join the Happiness Revolution” by earning a certificate at his Happiness Academy.
If enrollees in this and similar programs expect happiness credentials to enhance their career opportunities, they may be right. Consider the World Happiness Summit, an annual gala that brings happiness enthusiasts together with a collection of psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, yoga teachers, life coaches, entrepreneurs, educational administrators, “master teachers,” and “chief happiness officers” of various firms, along with a person bizarrely described as the “Indiana Jones of Positive Psychology.” Many of these speakers represent entire organizational networks. Did I call happiness studies a movement? It is beginning to look like an ecosystem, with experts, thinkers, promoters, and sales specialists occupying various ecological niches.
It would be cheap to tax serious scholars of happiness with the silliness and excesses of the more enthusiastic votaries. But anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with the tradition of reflection on human fulfillment, a tradition that includes Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, can’t help but be disappointed. A New York Times interview with Yale “happiness professor” Lauri Santos exemplifies the ways in which the happiness studies movement lets us down. Santos’s research focuses on cognition and cognitive development in dogs and monkeys. But she has been teaching a popular course on human happiness since 2018, and producing podcasts about happiness with millions of downloads.
At the end of the interview, the Times asks, “So what’s the answer? What’s the purpose of life?” Santos answers: “It’s smelling your coffee in the morning. [Laughs.] Loving your kids. Having sex and daisies and springtime. It’s all the good things in life. That’s what it is.” In other words, she doesn’t know.
These matters are difficult to think through, challenging to explain. And Santos says some good and important things. She challenges the fixation of many students on money, which is not pertinent to happiness except for those below the poverty line. Her students fight her about this, and she fights them back. Bravo. But when she reaches her positive prescriptions, we find we can gain equally useful insights from greeting cards and embroidered samplers—in fact, better. At least the platitude “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade” responds to the problem of suffering. “Have all the good things” doesn’t. What is the secret to enjoying the good things? What shall we say to the people who have them all, but find they aren’t enough? Between 1999 and 2019, suicide rates increased by 33 percent—and that was before the pandemic. I suspect that a lot of the people comprehended by that statistic smelled coffee, liked sex and daisies and springtime, and at least tried to love their kids.
Happiness studies knows that we are confused about what makes us happy. Unfortunately, it seems just as confused as the rest of us. Santos observes, “Our minds lie to us.” Yet she trusts the results of self-administered subjective self-report happiness questionnaires. She does not object when the interviewer remarks, “We all have more resources about how to be happy than any humans ever.” In this claim, the resources of three thousand years of thought about happiness are passed over—perhaps because earlier thinkers didn’t have self-administered subjective self-report happiness questionnaires.
Maybe they had something better. I am thinking of Socratic dialogue. If on the one hand we have some inside knowledge of ourselves, but on the other hand our minds lie to us, then perhaps instead of tallying what we think we know, we should use some things we think to cross-examine other things we think. “So you think happiness lies in honor? Would you be happy if you were honored for qualities you knew you didn’t have?”
Happiness studies adherents know that we need meaning in life, but they are relativists concerning the meaning of life. Whatever gives you a sense of meaning and belonging conduces to happiness and therefore is good . . . except when it isn’t. In the end, Santos can’t quite stomach the relativism of meaning. Pressed by the interviewer, who asks about white nationalism, she admits that people who have departed white-supremacist organizations report having found a sense of meaning and belonging there—but “I want to stay away from advocating, like, oh, the white-nationalist-exercise organization is great for well-being.” Contrast Augustine, who didn’t need to contradict himself, because he wasn’t a relativist in the first place: “For I ask all men whether they would prefer to have joy in truth or in falsehood. They hesitate no more in preferring the truth than in wishing for happiness itself.”
Santos rightly says that happiness is hard work: “Why are there so many happiness books and other happiness stuff and people are still not happy? Because it takes work! Because it’s hard!” She is right: It is hard! But why is it hard? It is hard because it depends on the practice of the virtues, and the virtues are hard. Virtue alone won’t make us happy, but we sure can’t be happy without it.
Scholars of happiness studies understand that happiness has something to do with good feelings. The problem is that they thinks it simply is good feelings. Martin Seligman, one of the leading figures in the positive psychology movement, writes in his modestly titled book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being that the first pillar of positive psychology is the study of “positive emotion.” Viewing philosophical attempts to define happiness as a bewildering maze, he suggests that we must proceed scientifically, and the scientific approach begins by defining happiness as the aggregate of “emotions” and “strengths” (later amended to “emotions” and “gratifications”). In other words, in the name of not defining happiness, we define happiness, and in the name of avoiding philosophical clutter, we adopt a definition that is philosophically defective. For the classical philosophers presented a compelling argument that happiness is not something we feel, but something we do. Aristotle described happiness as an activity of the soul that implies a rational principle and is carried out in the most excellent possible way. Thomas Aquinas agrees, because such an activity of the soul would be the highest activity of our highest power—overflowing, as he says, into the lower ones. Could these thinkers have been onto something? As Mortimer Adler observed, there is a difference between having a good time and having a good life.
The author of the book of Wisdom writes of those who do not know God:
These men are little to be blamed, for perhaps they go astray while seeking God and desiring to find him . . . yet again, not even they are to be excused; for if they had the power to know so much that they could investigate the world, how did they fail to find sooner the Lord of these things?
Perhaps the happiness studies crowd should not be blamed for their blind spots about God, because their concern is so exclusively with the present world. Or perhaps they should be blamed, since they study this world so carefully, and yet they fail to see even this world clearly. For instance, they cannot tell the difference between being comforted by God, and being comforted by a belief in God (or, for that matter, by a belief in fate, My Inner Goddess, or electricity). Faith, for them, is just another “positive emotion.” Yes, I may feel good if I base my life on a delusion. But can I be said to be having a good life?
Or again, given how fragile the happiness of this life is, it is odd that happiness studies has so little to say about suffering. Has not man a hard service on this earth? I may do everything right and yet find myself mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. I may mourn because I don’t have all that coffee and all that sex, or because it isn’t springtime, or because my children have fallen ill. Or I may have “all the good things” and still mourn. As Aristotle pointed out, good fortune in excess may perhaps better be called bad fortune.
Or again, one may “have everything”—wealth, health, beauty, friendship, and meaningful work—and yet ask, “Is this all there is?” Happiness studies never asks why this should be. The truth is, we cannot help longing for something that is not to be found in the created realm. What adaptive value is there in a natural desire for which there is no natural satisfaction? Even the old pagan, Aristotle, knew that nature makes nothing in vain. Then doesn’t our very nature point beyond nature?
How is it possible to miss this point, even as we gaze downward? If we were merely evolved mud, we would be perfectly happy in this world. We weep; therefore we rejoice.
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