A Cigar Called Hamlet

Happiness

A tired and twisted notion which has become an increasing embarrassment in a confused society.

Happiness rose to great social and political prominence in the eighteenth century, when it was used by most European philosophers as one of the essential qualities of a reformed society. It was legally consecrated at the highest possible level by Jefferson who, in the American Declaration of Independence, made it one of the citizen's three inalienable rights: "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Thanks to its philosophical and legal position, happiness has stayed at the forefront of social and policital policy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, the meaning of the word has gradually changed.

Its Aristotelain sense was spiritual harmony. But Aristotle was the justifying genius of the Scholastics* and spiritual harmony was one of the concepts which helped them to maintain a state of intellectual and social stagnation. It was no accident that the Enlightenment's attack on scholasticism included the reorienting of this word to give human harmony a more practical, active meaning. As a result, in the eighteenth century happiness came to include basic material comfort in a prosperous, well-organised society. As the Western upper-middle and solid middle classes gradually accomplished this for themselves, the word's meaning declined into the pursuit of personal pleasure or an obscure sense of inner contentment. Both the spiritual and the necessary material were forgotten. Few writers and public figures have dared to point this out or suggest that, since the meaning of the word has changed, it no longer needs to be treated as a question of primary importance.

President de Gaulle responded to pressure from his ministers to give in to policies which might be popular in the short run, but were fundameneally damaging, by retorting that "happiness is for idiots." He wasn't proposing unhappiness or a loss of material comfort. Much of his time in power was spent creating social services and prosperity. Rather he was protesting the confusion of happiness with a state of mindless contentment. He was arguing against happiness and in favour of consciousness which, the world being what it really is, might not involve contentment, but would involve Reponsibility*.

Nothing has happened in the last quarter-century to clarify this confusion. As economic and social conditions have gradually sunk, happiness, with its twisted meaning at the ethical and legal centre of our society, has seemed increasingly lugubrious and out of place. In a more practical world, there would be a formal process for retiring a word from active use until it finds itself again.

John Ralston Saul - The Doubter's Companion (A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense)

* Denotes a term that is qualified (i.e. satirised) elsewhere in the book.