THE HISTORY—AND THEOLOGY—OF HAPPINESS

In a nation officially dedicated to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," we seem to have lost sight of something else Thomas Jefferson wrote: "Virtue is the foundation of happiness." Jefferson believed what Aristotle once said: that happiness is "the activity of the soul that expresses virtue." Aristotle thought that by improving ourselves through reason, humans could live happier lives. This was a serious challenge to the reigning beliefs of the ancient world, which held that fortune was up to the gods, not individual morality. In fact, most of the Greek words for happiness derived from words meaning "luck" or "chance" (and in English, "happen" and "happy" come from the root word "hap," meaning "luck.")

In the cover story of the spring issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Darrin McMahon embarks on the history (and etymology) of happiness. His essay is intended to examine how "the pursuit of happiness" came to be assigned (in the 18th century) as a duty of government. However, by tracing the history of happiness in Christian thought, McMahon indirectly challenges readers to conceive of a theology of happiness, and even an eschatology of happiness. What degree or form of happiness is appropriate and godly for Christians? How much happiness should be had now, and how much deferred to eternity?

From the Beatitudes ("happy are those who … ") to Augustine, McMahon says, happiness was prescribed as an eternal but future remedy for those who suffered currently. Live virtuously now, have happiness later as a result. Nonetheless, McMahon says the sensuousness of the Christian imagination of happiness—"feeling, intense feeling, was what flowed forth with Christ's blood, transformed in the miracle of the Eucharist from the fruit of intense pain to the sweet nectar of rapture"—stood in stark contrast to the "cool" and "rational" happiness of Aristotle. Although we remember Reformation-era thinkers as a grim lot, it was this visceral sense of happiness that defined the Christianity of their time, McMahon says. "The Renaissance imagination thus ranged freely forward to the joys that would come, and backward to those that had been, [reflecting] greater acceptance of pleasure in the here and now." Even Calvin, who emphasized the misery of the human condition, said: "When the favor of God breathes upon us, there is none of these [sufferings] which may not turn out to our happiness."

Whether it was Christian Epicureans (believe it or not, there were a few), Christian Aristotelians, or Protestants—McMahon doesn't say—Christianity had married future pleasure and present pleasure (seeing a congruence between joyful contentment and eternal bliss) by the 17th century. In 1643, the Reverend Thomas Coleman told the English Parliament that the resistance of Charles I was commensurate to the Israelites' "long pursuit of happinesse" (sic). The phrase caught on in England and made its way to John Locke, and, in turn, to Thomas Jefferson, and soon the collective pursuit of happiness as a foundation of society was unquestioned. Happiness had become a virtue in itself, rather than a result of virtue. (But how did Enlightenment thinkers relax Aristotle's requirement that virtue comes first? McMahon doesn't say.)

This was the Enlightenment's gospel: bringing the happiness of heaven down to earth, rejecting the need for religious access and eschatological delay. But as McMahon says, provocatively, "the shift toward happiness on Earth occurred within the Christian tradition as well as without." Christianity demoted "eternal felicity in the next world" to be an afterthought to "prosperity in this," as Tocqueville observed already in the 19th century. The prosperity gospel, which has thrived among the baby boomers, has deeper roots than we think. Although McMahon's piece, presented as a work of political science, begs a theological critique, it is an informative read that prompts us to examine of the roles of pleasure, joy, and providence in a life of faith.

Earlier: The deception of happiness (third item here)

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times :

BAGHDAD — It is still so extraordinary to see boats traveling any distance on the Tigris River, which has become a smelly, shrunken, deserted, refuse-strewn ghost of its former splendor, that dozens of curious employees of a nearby power plant applauded and cheered when Firas Shihab Ahmed, a chemical engineer at the Iraqi Ministry of the Environment, reached over the side of his boat and filled an amber glass bottle … and marked it as his 14th sample of the day. … Though troubled by what she sees as the environmental depredations of the invasion—including a smoking junkyard on the banks of the Tigris just outside the concrete blast walls of the American-controlled "green zone"— American environmental advocate  Anna Bachmann conceded that the mighty waterway of sixth-grade textbooks on Mesopotamia had not existed for a long time. A series of dams upstream have reduced the flow in the Tigris to less than half of its historical strength, and raw sewage roars in from open pipes. … The river also has an abandoned feel, in part because one of Saddam Hussein's many personal whimsies was to have river views unencumbered by boats.

From the Wall Street Journal:

LONG BEACH, Calif. — As the U.S. Olympic swim trials wrap up here, among the new stars are two prefabricated, above-ground pools. Located in a parking lot adjacent to the Long Beach Convention Center, the two 50-meter pools—one for competition and an adjoining warm-up model—were erected just over a month ago and will be dismantled and shipped elsewhere by mid-August. And having served their primary purpose, they now are a successful case study for communities hoping to host world-class sporting events without building expensive permanent venues that can sit nearly empty years after the crowds and TV cameras go home. [article unavailable online]

WEEKLY DIGEST

• Few events shaped American economics as much as the rise of mass consumption in the 20th century, when Americans began buying cars, refrigerators, and jugs of laundry detergent by the millions. But now the Tide is turning. Procter & Gamble, which has been selling Tide to a mass market since 1949, now insists that "every one of our brands is targeted." Other companies are also "shifting emphasis from selling to the vast, anonymous crowd to selling to millions of particular consumers," wrote Business Week in a recent cover story called "The Vanishing Mass Market." McDonald's has cut its budget for network TV ads in half to spend more on in-store channels or specialty magazines that reach customers of a certain age, sex, or ethnicity. Today, advertisers must reach customers through "hundreds of narrowcast cable TV and radio channels, thousands of specialized magazines, and millions of computer terminals, video-game consoles, personal digital assistants, and cell-phone screens," Business Week says, adding that the challenge is "figuring out the right way to send the right message to the right person at the right time." Article
  Related: Is it good news that American viewers and readers "see only what they want to see, hear only what they want to hear, read only what they want to read"? asks the New York Times
• The mass market may be gone, but collective bodies can still seem a little too collective. A recent Senate report blamed "groupthink" for misjudging "ambiguous evidence" about nuclear and chemical weapons in Iraq. Despite the dangers of groupthink, in which "dissenting opinions … come to seem improbable," James Surowiecki writes that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, often smarter than the smartest people in them." Surowiecki, economics columnist for the New Yorker, makes this claim in his first book: The Wisdom of Crowds, Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few. He tests his thesis in case studies involving everything from the stock market to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (in which the ask-the-audience option yielded the right answer 91 percent of the time). Surowiecki—whose argument is mostly sound though at times morally loose, according to a review in the San Francisco Chronicle—introduces a paradox: "The more influence a group's members exert on each other, and the more personal contact they have with each other, the less likely it is that that group's decisions will be wise ones." Review/Excerpt of book
  Related: More on groupthink and collective wisdom from NPR
• Spam is getting more literate, says the Denver Post. "Purveyors of junk e-mail, increasingly thwarted by electronic filters and new federal labeling requirements, slip sales pitches into inboxes by affixing them to 'messages'" such as jokes and excerpts of novels. Spam used to contain nonsensical strings of words that fooled filters but said nothing. Now that filters are getting wise to this tactic, jokes and quotes "provide enough text to pass as legitimate queries," even though they're just a setup for a solicitation. How will filters ever distinguish these messages from the jokes e-mailers forward to all their friends? Article
• Being a medieval monk not only enlivened the soul, it filled the stomach, a researcher at London's Institute of Archaeology told the International Medieval Congress last week. Philippa Patrick studied 300 skeletons of British monks and found evidence of arthritis and skeletal hyperostosis, strongly suggesting rampant obesity among monks. "They were taking in about 6,000 calories a day," Patrick told the London Guardian. "Their meals were full of saturated fats. They were five times more likely to suffer from obesity than their secular contemporaries." So much for St. Benedict's warning that "there is nothing so opposed to Christian life as overeating." Don't miss Philippa's breakdown of monks' daily menu at the end of the article.
• Miscellaneous:Kid stars for Narnia movie announced, from the New Zealand Herald—Chicago's masterful Millennium Park finally opens, from the New York Times - Why nation-building doesn't work, from the Washington Post, and why democracy isn't working in Egypt, by David Remnick in the New Yorker - Jennings keeps going on Jeopardy! from the Times—American retailers prepare for global bar code standard, from the Times (also see fourth item here on the bar code's 30th anniversary)
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Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant atBooks & Culture. He writes the weekly "On Language" column for the Chicago Tribune.