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Title: Happiness Author: John Zerzan Date: 2011 Language: en Topics: anti-civ, feeling Source: Retrieved on April 22, 2011 from http://johnzerzan.net/articles/happiness.html
Is happiness really possible in a time of ruin? Can we somehow flourish,
have complete lives? Is joy any longer compatible with the life of
today?
A deep sense of well-being has become an endangered species. How often
does one hear “It is good to be here”? (Matthew 17:4, Luke 9:5, Luke
9:33) or Wordsworth’s reference to “the pleasure which there is in life
itself”? [1] Much of the prevailing condition and the dilemma it poses
is expressed by Adorno’s observation: “A wrong life cannot be lived
rightly.”[2]
In this age happiness, if not obsolete, is a test, an opportunity. “To
be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without being
frightened.”[3] We seem to be desperate for happiness, as bookshelves,
counseling rooms, and talk shows promote endless recipes for
contentment. But the well-worn, feel-good bromides from the likes of
Oprah, Eckhart Tolle, and the Dalai Lama seem to work about as well as a
Happy Meal, happy hour, or Coke’s invitation to “Pour Happiness!”
Gone is the shallow optimism of yesteryear, such as it was. The
mandatory gospel of happiness is in tatters. As Hélène Cixous put it, we
are “born to the difficulty in taking pleasure from absence.”[4] We
sense only “a little light/in great darkness,” to quote Pound, who
borrowed from Dante.[5]
How do we explore this? What is expected re: happiness? In light of all
that stands in its way or erodes it, is happiness mainly a fortuitous
accident?[6]
Very often, to be sure, happiness is approached in terms of what it
isn’t. Walter Kerr’s The Decline of Pleasure opens with this: “I am
going to start out by assuming that you are approximately as unhappy as
I am.”[7] “We are a society of notoriously unhappy people,” according to
Erich Fromm.[8] But we are not supposed to go around admitting this
bottom-line truth about ourselves and society. Various contemporary
theorists, by the way, have steadily chipped away at the very notion of
the self, redefining it as nothing more than an intersection of shifting
discourses. When the self is all but erased, “happiness” can no longer
even be a valid topic.
But our yearning for well-being is not so easily written off. Elisabeth
Roudinesco provides a plausible judgment: “The more individuals are
promised happiness and the ideal of security, the more their unhappiness
persists, the steeper the risk profile grows, and the more the victims
of unkept promises revolt against those who have betrayed them.”[9]
In this precarious world happiness and fear are oddly joined. People are
afraid. “They are afraid,” Adorno claimed, that “they would lose
everything, because the only happiness they know even in thought, is to
be able to hold on to something.”[10] This condition contrasts
qualitatively with what is known of so many non-domesticated people:
their lack of fear, their trust in the world they inhabit.
The Himalayan nation of Bhutan attracted much notice in the middle of
the first decade of this century for its Gross National Happiness
concept: the decision to measure the quality of its society not by
industrial output (Gross National Product), but in terms of its
citizens’ happiness. Apparently, however, Bhutan quickly lost the
somewhat isolated character of its culture, which had spurred the GNH
idea in the first place. Inundated by pop culture, celebrity
consciousness, consumer fads, and the rest of a globalized modernity,
the emphasis on happiness as a national value has faded.
Mass society restricts “happiness” to the spheres of consumption and
distraction to a great degree. Yet happiness remains an experience of
fullness, rather than seriously misguided efforts to fill emptiness.
Many studies show that happiness levels fall with increasing
accumulation of wealth.[11] In removing ourselves from nature, we become
insensible to its wholeness and approach it as another passive object to
be consumed.
Is there a truth of happiness, on whose basis happiness can be judged?
Happiness is as encompassing as it is immediate. It has many facets and
manifestations. It is elemental, potent; like health, happiness is
contagious and breeds hope in others. Happiness has to do with one’s
whole reaction to life, and for that reason alone, it is personal as
well as mysterious. The philosopher Wittgenstein had a harsh and
pessimistic temperament and experienced his share of intense anguish.
His seems the portrait of an unhappy man, and yet his biographer Norman
Malcolm reports that his last words were, “Tell them I’ve had a
wonderful life.”[12] John Keats’ brief life was overshadowed by illness,
but he often claimed that things are gorgeous because they die. The
sources of happiness lie in various spheres of our lives, but
characteristically these are not so separate. Human life has never been
lived in isolation, so we seek experiences that are more than just
meaningful for ourselves alone. Vivasvan Soni’s insight says a lot: “No
part of life can be bracketed as irrelevant to happiness. All of life
counts infinitely. There is no greater tragedy than unhappiness, and no
greater responsibility for us than happiness.”[13]
In my experience, the cornerstone of happiness is love. Here is the
dimension where we find the greatest fulfillment. Frantz Fanon, better
known for his work on other subjects, subscribed to a standard of
“authentic love — wishing for others what one postulates for
oneself.”[14] There are other satisfactions, but do they match the
satisfying and enriching quality of love relations? If a child has love
and protection, there is the basis for happiness throughout life. If
neither is provided, his or her prospects are very limited. If only one
of them is to be given, I think that love outranks even protection or
security in terms of the odds for happiness.
Some have dissented as to the centrality of love. Nietzsche and Sartre
seem to have seen love as confining, closing off prerogatives. That
bloodless master of cheap irony, E.M. Cioran, provides this little
meditation: “I think of that emperor dear to my heart, Tiberius, of his
acrimony and his ferocity.... I love him because his neighbor seemed to
him inconceivable. I love him because he loved no one.”[15]
What would a history of happiness look like? Once happiness was a
central focus of thought in the West. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,
for example, is a major discourse on the subject. Epicurus spent his
life facing the question of how to attain happiness, arousing the ire of
our modern friend Cioran. The latter referred to Epicurus’ writings as a
“compost heap,” citing him as indicative of the false path that occurs
“when the problem of happiness supplants that of knowledge.”[16]
Much later, the Cartesian account of emotions as so many sensations
enters the picture, and Voltaire (1694–1778) was the last happy writer,
according to Roland Barthes. The 18^(th) century saw a deluge of writing
about happiness, mainly focused on private well-being. A thorough
de-politicizing of what was meant by happiness was taking place, on the
eve of mass society. Kant typified this trend, by bonding — even
equating — duty-oriented morality with happiness.
The new century exhibited the Romantic emphasis on joy rather than
happiness (Blake, Wordsworth, et al.), with joy’s strong connotation of
that which is fleeting. Transient indeed was the hymn to a hopeful
future expressed in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in particular its final
movement based on Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” The work has justly been
termed the last serious music expressing happiness/joy. As industrial
life began to spread, it can be no coincidence that Hegel saw human
history as the record of irredeemable misfortune.
Modern wage labor and political social contract theorizing (Rousseau,
the U.S. Constitution, etc.) legitimated the pursuit of private
happiness. In the public sphere, the question of general happiness was
downplayed. Reward became the name of the game. For Hegel, property and
personality were almost synonymous; Marx associated happiness with the
satisfaction of interests alone.
Sentimentalism was an important facet of the 19^(th) century cultural
ethos: the underlying emotional tableau of lost community. A fragmented,
anonymous society had all but abandoned the goal of widespread
happiness. The early Victorian utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill, less
crude than that of its founder Bentham at least, failed to recognize the
impoverishment of the age. Mill was the last philosopher of social
happiness.
Jean-François Lyotard placed “the withdrawal of the real” at the center
of the experience of modernity.[17] We are losing the referents, the
real things, felt contact with what is non-simulated. How could
happiness not decline in the bargain? It has declined; the
technoculture’s ascent is the descent of happiness.[18] Today’s dreary,
isolating technological frenzy keeps sinking it further, with various
pathological effects. But our quest remains what it was for Spinoza: the
search for happiness, with the reality of our bodies in a real, bodily
world.
In the 1890s Anton Chekhov visited Sakhalin Island, with its Gilyak
hunter-gatherers. He observed that they had not yet come to grips with
roads. “Often,” he noted, “you will see them... making their way in
single file through the marshes beside the road.”[19] They were always
somewhere, and were uninterested in being nowhere, on industrialism’s
roadway. They had not yet lost the singularity of the present, which
technology exactly takes away. With our dwindling attention spans,
foreshortening shallowness of thought, and thirst for diversions, how
much are we actually in the world? The disembodied self becomes
increasingly disengaged from reality, including emotional reality.
Anxiety has replaced happiness as the hallmark sensation, now that
community is absent.[20] We no longer trust our instincts. Maintaining a
vast distance from the rhythms of nature and primary experiences of the
senses in their intimate concreteness, the leading “thinkers” so often
consecrate or uphold this unhappy, disembodied state. Alain Badiou, for
example, concurs with Kant that truth and overall health are
“independent of animality and the whole world of sense.”[21]
But what is abstract about happiness? Its states are complete at each
moment — each embodied moment. “Each happiness comes for the first
time,” as Levinas realized.[22] Czeslaw Milosz described his happy
childhood: “I lived without yesterday or tomorrow, in the eternal
present. That is, precisely, the definition of happiness.”[23]
Postmodern irony and detachment, with their bedrock of embracing the
techno-sphere, constitute one more means of wresting us from the present
moment.
A most basic human longing is to belong, to experience union with
something other than oneself. Bruno Bettelheim described a feeling,
engendered in his case by great art, “of being in tune with the
universe... [of] all needs satisfied. I felt as though I were in touch —
in communication with man’s past and connected with his future.”[24] He
associated this with Freud’s “oceanic feeling,” the sensation of “an
indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.”[25]
I think it plausible to see this as vestigial — as a visceral, surviving
link to a previous condition. There is a great deal of
anthropological/ethnological literature describing indigenous peoples
who live in oneness with the natural world and one another. Survival
itself necessitated a borderlessness between inner and outer worlds. Our
ultimate survival requires that we recover that oneness. At times we
still feel a return to that unified state. Fairly often in psychological
counseling, there is a search for a time in childhood when one was
healthy and happy. Arguably, to apply the “ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny” thesis, each of us re-enacts the larger history of humanness.
T.S. Eliot’s designation of our return is “through the unknown
remembered gate.”[26]
Freud counterposed civilization and happiness because civilization
[domestication, more precisely] is “based on compulsory labor and
instinctual renunciation.”[27] “Having to fight against the instincts is
the formula for decadence; so long as life is ascending, happiness and
instinct are one thing,” observed Nietzsche.[28]
The internalization and universalization of this renunciation of freedom
is what Freud called sublimation. As Norman O. Brown saw it, sublimation
“presupposes and perpetuates the loss of life and cannot be the mode in
which life itself is lived.”[29] The very progress of civilization
requires an even greater measure of renunciation, an even greater
setting ourselves apart from our environment. And yet the “oceanic
feeling” can still be powerfully felt, recalling that earlier state of
being. How much fresher, more vivid and more valued life can feel after
a serious illness; this many be the case upon our recovery from the
sickness we call civilization.
But here we are now, so very far from any original wholeness or
fullness. And “the horror,” in Adorno’s judgment, “is that for the first
time we live in a world in which we can no longer imagine a better
one.”[30] At present the only happy context is the imagined one, or at
least, the happiness achieved in expressing the truth about unhappiness.
In Milosz’ heartfelt words: “It would seem that all human beings should
fall into each other’s arms, crying out that they cannot live....”[31]
The aim of life is to live it strongly, to be fully awake. This aim
collides with a new malaise of civilization, an End Times sense of
everything, a “post”-you-name-it cultural landscape. A sense of
helplessness promoted in no small part by the postmodern doctrine of
ambiguity and ambivalence.
Happiness entails refusal of Foucault’s “docile bodies” condition,
insistence on being vivid rather than domesticated, determination to
live as “barbarians” resisting the unfreedom and numbness of
civilization. An instinct tells us that there is something different,
however distant it may seem; we know we were born for something better.
The reality of deep unhappiness is the reminder of that instinct, which
lives and struggles to be heard. The story of happiness did not have to
unfold as it did.
In our own lives we are so lucky to have a sense of being blessed, to
have some gladness, a sense of worth. To have a certain astonishment at
being here at all. For ourselves, meaning and happiness are always
interwoven. Happiness is grounded in meaningfulness; a life of meaning
is the meaning of life. “To happiness, the same applies as to truth: one
does not have it, but is in it,” in Adorno’s pithy formulation.[32]
He also said, “Philosophy exists in order to redeem what you see in the
look of an animal.”[33] “To meet myself face to face,” in Thoreau’s
words.[34] To realize ourselves in our distinctly human capacities
within what is possible (i.e. not to blame ourselves for the limits
imposed on us). And to find the strength to speak the unsaid.
Unhappiness is not the result of understanding the real depth of our
predicament; in fact, this understanding can be liberating,
strengthening. It may lead to something that could hardly be more
momentous: the quest for directness and immediacy in the real world. The
project of confronting the very nature of our domesticated, civilized,
technology-ridden unhappiness.
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[1] Quoted in John Cowper Powys, The Art of Happiness (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1935), p. 49.
[2] Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: MLB, 1974), #18, p. 39.
[3] Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: NLB,
1979), p. 71.
[4] Hélène Cixous, First Days of the Year (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 142.
[5] Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions,
1972), #CXVI, p. 795.
[6] Its etymology is of interest in this regard. From hap (Greek):
chance, fortune, as in happen. Our English word luck comes, in fact,
from the German for happiness, GlĂĽck.
[7] Walter Kerr, The Decline of Pleasure (New York: Touchstone, 1962),
p. 1.
[8] Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 5.
[9] Elisabeth Roudinesco, Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canquilhem,
Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press,
2008), p. xii.
[10] Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: The Seabury Press,
1973), p. 33.
[11] Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization (New York: Penguin, 2009),
p. 498.
[12] Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1958), p. 106.
[13] Vivasvan Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of
Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 494.
[14] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles Lam
Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 41.
[15] E.M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist (New York: Quadrangle, 1968),
p. 200.
[16] Ibid., pp 168–169.
[17] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a Report on
Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 79.
[18] Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp 124, 130.
[19] Quoted and discussed in Timothy Taylor, The Artificial Age (New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 192.
[20] Peter LaFrenière, Adaptive Origins: Evolution and Human Development
(New York: Psychology Press, 2010), pp 288, 296–297. Also Patricia
Pearson, A Brief History of Anxiety... Yours and Mine (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2008).
[21] Quoted in Peter Hallward, translator’s introduction to Alain
Badiou, Ethics: an essay on the understanding of evil (New York: Verso,
2001), p. xxi.
[22] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 1998), p. 114.
[23] Czeslaw Milosz, Proud to be a Mammal: Essays on War, Faith and
Memory (New York: Penguin Classics, 2010), p. 80.
[24] Bruno Bettelheim, Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1990), p. 115.
[25] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, translated by
James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962), p. 12.
[26] T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1963), p. 208.
[27] Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, translated by James
Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), p. 12.
[28] Friedrich Nietzsche, Unmodern Observations, William Arrowsmith, ed.
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. xv.
[29] Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of
History (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), p. 171.
[30] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Dialogue,” NLR
September/October 2010, p. 61.
[31] Czeslaw Milosz, op.cit., p. 296.
[32] Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, op.cit., #72, p. 112.
[33] Adorno and Horkheimer, “Dialogue,” op.cit., p. 51.
[34] Henry David Thoreau, Journal (Toronto: Dover Publications, 1962),
p. 51.