Richard Schoch - The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life

A LSO BY R ICHARD S CHOCH

Not Shakespeare

Queen Victoria and the Theatre of Her Age

Shakespeares Victorian Stage

Victorian Theatrical Burlesques (editor)

Three Thousand Years of
Searching for the Good Life

RICHARD SCHOCH

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Copyright 2006 by Richard Schoch

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Originally published in Great Britain in 2006 by Profile Books Ltd

Published by arrangement with Profile Books

First Scribner edition 2006

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schoch, Richard W.

The secrets of happiness: three thousand years of searching for the good life / Richard Schoch.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. HappinessHistory.

2. HappinessReligious aspectsHistory.

I. Title.

BJ1481.S36 2006

170dc22 2006044375

ISBN: 0-7432-9844-6
eISBN-13: 978-0-743-29844-5

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To my mother

CONTENTS

THE SECRETS OF HAPPINESS

INTRODUCTION

Unhappy is the story of happiness. More than two thousand years ago, when the ancient Greeks first thought about what constitutes the good life, happiness was a civic virtue that demanded a lifetimes cultivation. Now, its everybodys birthright: swallow a pill, get happy; do yoga, find your bliss; hire a life coach, regain your self-esteem. We have lost contact with the old and rich traditions of happiness, and we have lost the ability to understand their essentially moral nature. Deaf to the conversation of the ages, we deny ourselves the chance of finding a happiness that is meaningful. Weve settled, nowadays, for a much weaker, much thinner happiness: mere enjoyment of pleasure, mere avoidance of pain and suffering. The so-called new science of happiness perpetuates this impoverished notion of the good life. Somewhere between Plato and Prozac, happiness stopped being a lofty achievement and became an entitlement.

We can reject this modern enfeeblement of happiness. We can recover its ancient traditions, the traditions that began in the West with the philosophers of Athens and in the East with the anonymous Hindu sages of the Axial Age. We can, with no exaggeration, call these traditions a secret, so unpracticed, if not obscured, have they become. Yet the secret will not resist our attempt to find it.

Over the past decade or so, behavioral scientists, neuroscientists, economists, and psychologists (including a Nobel laureate from Princeton) have been working to measure reported levels of happiness and to identify its causes. Their methods are droll. In one experience sampling, participants carry Internet-ready palmtop computers twenty-four hours a day. When an alarm sounds on their palmtops, the participantswho have been trained to respond with Pavlovian mechanicity to aural stimulationstop what theyre doing and complete an online survey about how they feel about what theyve just stopped doing. Back in the laboratory of happiness, technicians download these data and then plot a graph showing each participants happiness peaks and troughs over time. In case the guinea pigs have tried to outfox their masterspretending to be happier or unhappier than they actually arebrain scans are used to confirm their testimony. (The participants, it can be revealed, are honest.)

What do the surveys say? Sex, no surprise, makes everyone feel better. The second best thing is having a drink after work with your friends. Work itselfchallenging, rewarding, and secure employmentalso contributes greatly to happiness. Commuting, however, makes us miserable. Well, almost all of us; 4 percent of respondents claimed to enjoy traffic jams. (Who could these people be?) If you believe the statistics, its pretty easy to make yourself happy: live within walking distance of an enjoyable and secure job, prop up the bar with your friends, and then go home and have sex. Happiness: the secret revealed!

Happiness is also a growth industry. Self-help books generate $1 billion in annual sales, and the global market for antidepressants (O true apothecary!) stands valued at an astounding $17 billion. The desire industrywhose titans are Botox jabbers, personal trainers, and lifestyle gurusrakes in even more. (So reports the earnestly named Work Foundation.) As a Harvard MBA would say, its one vast marketing opportunity. At a time when financial prosperity is assured for many, though by no means all, in the industrialized world, happiness has become the ultimate luxury item.

But what is this thing called happiness? The scientists and the social scientists do not stop to ask the question because they presume to know its answer. Happiness is well, its just feeling goodenjoying life and wanting the feeling to be maintained. So say the economists. In the genial patois of the researchers this is called subjective well-feeling. Those now in kindergarten, or who once were, will doubtless be familiar with its romping musical expression: If youre happy and you know it, clap your hands. Maybe the mystery of happiness has not been solved by the palmtop experience sampling.

Although the psychologists and the economists offered no satisfactory definition of happiness, they did provide, however unwittingly, a vital clue to its whereabouts. In studies of happiness among Maasai tribes in Kenya, seal hunters in Greenland, and slumdwellers in Calcutta, there was one commonality amid all the diversity: every study began by declaring, sometimes boasting, that it no longer set store by old ways of thinking that have failed to help us find happiness. But once upon a time, when giants walked the earth, these old ways of thinking were known as philosophy and religion.

Over the centuries, benefiting from the law of compound intellectual interest, this deposit of wisdom has grown rich and vast. Some ideas about happiness are philosophical, some are religious; some Eastern, some Western; some thousands of years old, some not a hundred. They take the shape of open letters, secret diaries, self-help manuals, logical treatises, sacred scriptures, and love poems. They are the wise saws to be tested against modern instances. And such is their vitality that without them life seems wasteful and barren. These ideas are the subject of this book.

For most of human history, happiness has been understood, even experienced, in the context of religious belief. Only in the past three or four centuries, and mainly in Western culture, has happiness been divorced, for some people, from faith, religion, and spirituality. So here at the outset we find ourselves at what seems to be an impasse: If so many paths to happiness are bound up in religious belief, doesnt that render them invalid for people of other beliefs, or of none? How can a Christian profit from Hindu teachings on happiness? Why should an atheist bother to read the works of an Islamic mystic?