{"id":4538,"date":"2006-01-14T13:34:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-14T13:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8000\/\/?p=4538"},"modified":"2026-04-06T15:33:38","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T15:33:38","slug":"happiness-through-the-ages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/?p=4538","title":{"rendered":"Happiness Through the Ages"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What makes it so difficult to interpret how people in former times have thought about the human condition is that words change their meanings over time, sometimes morphing into the exact opposite of what they originally meant. As I just learned by reading in \u2018The Economist\u2019 a review of \u201cHappiness: A History, \u201d the word \u201chappiness\u201d has changed its meaning considerably. I didn\u2019t quite realize until today that if God wants to speak directly to people or at least their prophets, he or she has to master the idiom of a given age. To come across as really cool, God could walk up to a woman today and say, \u201cHey man, what\u2019s up.\u201d If God had done this two thousand years ago, a woman would likely have replied: \u201cAlmighty, I am sorry,\u00a0 but you are mistaken. I am a woman and not a man!\u201d <\/i><\/p>\n

Happiness: A strangely newfangled idea<\/strong>
\nJan 12th 2006
\nFrom The Economist print edition<\/p>\n

IT WAS 1963 and the atmosphere at the State Mutual Life Assurance Company in Worcester, Massachusetts, was tense. Workers fretted about an approaching merger with another company. Who would stay and who would get the heave-ho? So the management commissioned an advertising man by the name of Harvey R. Ball to come up with something cheerful to smooth wrinkled brows and make the whole merger process a little more bearable for everyone.<\/p>\n

Ball’s brilliantly simple solution\u2014a big yellow dot with a pair of black ovals for eyes and a wide semicircle for a mouth\u2014went on to become one of the most distinctive icons of the 20th century. \u201cSmiley face\u201d buttons, T-shirts and bumper stickers were soon selling in their tens of millions all round the world. But was Ball smiling? Grinning through gritted teeth, more like. Never having filed trademark or copyright papers, he had to make do with his original fee of $45.<\/p>\n

This is just one of many ironies in Darrin McMahon’s excellent history of happiness. His central argument is that the modern idea of happiness was an invention of the Enlightenment. The idea of heavenly felicity came down to earth, says Mr McMahon, during the 17th and 18th centuries. \u201cHappiness, in the Enlightenment view\u201d, he explains, \u201cwas less an ideal of godlike perfection than a self-evident truth, to be pursued and obtained in the here and now.\u201d In 1776 America’s Founding Fathers declared \u201cthe pursuit of happiness\u201d to be one of man’s \u201cunalienable rights\u201d, along with life and liberty.<\/p>\n

Historically speaking, this was a radical change. For the ancient Greeks, happiness was largely bound up with notions of luck and fortune. Any man, however high and mighty, could be brought down by a twist of fate. The important thing, therefore, was not to seek happiness for its own sake but to live virtuously. Being good, as Mr McMahon nicely puts it, was more important than feeling good. For Herodotus and his contemporaries, happiness was not a \u201csubjective state\u201d but a \u201ccharacterisation of an entire life that can be reckoned only at death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later, Christianity would play down fortune and fate while holding out the promise of eternal happiness in the next life. With the Enlightenment, the idea that God was happiness morphed into the idea that happiness was god. By the 1840s the distinguished Scottish curmudgeon Thomas Carlyle was complaining: \u201cEvery pitifulest whipster that walks within a skin has had his head filled with the notion that he is, shall be, or by all human and divine laws ought to be, \u2018happy’.\u201d It is good that Carlyle did not live to see the self-help section of any big 21st-century bookshop, its shelves groaning with bestsellers like \u201cInfinite Happiness\u201d, \u201cAbsolute Happiness\u201d, \u201cEverlasting Happiness\u201d, \u201cCompulsory Happiness\u201d, \u201cHappiness Is Your Destiny\u201d and \u201cFind Happiness In Everything You Do\u201d.<\/p>\n

Carlyle was right to suspect that the new doctrine of happiness tended to raise unrealistic expectations, and his perception is still spot-on. Living standards and life expectancy are better than ever and a multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry provides chemical solutions to gloomy moods. But are we really any happier now than we were in Carlyle’s day\u2014or, for that matter, in Herodotus’s?<\/p>\n

Mr McMahon sensibly does not try to define happiness and, in presenting the theories of great figures of the past, he does not take sides between them. He does, however, show particular sympathy for the views of John Stuart Mill. \u201cThose only are happy\u201d, Mill reckoned, \u201cwho have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fair enough. But if Mill’s suggestion that happiness is to be found \u201cby the way\u201d is a bit too hit-and-miss for your liking, then you might try religion. Or sex. Or shopping. Or work. Or booze. Or Prozac. Or even sitting down with a good book. (PM: Or Movies)<\/i>.<\/p>\n

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What makes it so difficult to interpret how people in former times have thought about the human condition is that words change their meanings over [Read More]<\/a> \"image\" \"image\"<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astute-observations","category-diary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4538"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5487,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4538\/revisions\/5487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}