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Don't worry; be happy

By BILL DURYEA
Published February 12, 2006

In 1725, at the front end of a century whose inhabitants considered themselves the happiest in recorded history, a Scottish university professor named Francis Hutcheson reduced happiness to a mathematical equation.

If B = benevolence, A = ability, I = interest and M = moment of good, then, according to Hutcheson's calculations, the following algebraic formula was the key to joy unbounded:

B = M+

I/A

To many of Hutcheson's day this equation looked as preposterous as it does now. But the professor was far from alone in thinking science could explain happiness as certainly as Newton had explained the secrets of the physical world.

It was a signal moment in cultural history: Perhaps for the first time, there was consensus that individuals could be the sole determinants of their own happiness. It was no longer, as it had been for millennia, fortune's wheel or God's grace.

People looked around and saw the world was a better place - wealth abounded, as did free time to pursue one's pleasure, wars were on the decline and knowledge was spreading quickly - and this seemed proof that if people simply pursued those things that gave pleasure, and avoided those things that caused pain, then "the greatest good for the greatest number" would be achievable. And that, they argued, was just as God wanted it.

There was, of course, a major logical problem with this utilitarian notion of happiness: One person's pleasure might entail someone else's suffering, a phenomenon Germans call Schadenfreude and most Americans know as reality TV.

Florida State University history professor Darrin McMahon has spent much of the last decade in the occasionally unhappy quest to trace these complex attitudes toward happiness in our culture. The result is Happiness, not another self-help manual for the terminally discontented, but a bright, authoritative and, for a work as rigorously academic as this, quite accessible history.

The title makes it sound like another of those cute examples of history viewed through the wrong end of the telescope (pencils, salt, cod, screws and screwdrivers), but McMahon's Happiness pursues an intriguing thesis: Happiness is the subject that unifies us all - across cultures (though he sticks to Western thought) and through the ages. And, he might argue, makes philosophers of us all. Every time we decide to act virtuously or to seek some fleeting pleasure, we're tapping into a debate that has occupied the best minds of Western culture.

He begins with the story of Croesus, the fabulously wealthy king of Lydia. The king was said to have asked Solon, the famous Athenian lawgiver: Who is the happiest man in the world? Croesus expected Solon to say it was the king himself, but Solon disappointed him, naming instead a relatively unknown father who was killed in battle.

If Croesus had asked for an explanation, Solon likely would have said a man cannot be judged happy until he is dead. Until one was dead, life was subject to sudden reversals, so there was little point in saying a man was happy if the next day his family might be wiped out in a war.

But that notion of happiness as something capricious and fated gave way in time to a belief that we could control our own happiness. This transformation began with Socrates, who posited that happiness was every person's ambition; the only question was how to attain it. Watching how great thinkers struggled for that answer is one of the pleasures of McMahon's book.

Aristotle believed that to be happy one must be good and to be good one must reason; the Stoics argued that happiness is contentment with what one already has; early Christians sought eternal happiness through suffering; Augustine averred true happiness was "the gift of God"; English peasants of the Middle Ages dreamed of happiness in the land of Cockaigne where "turkeys flew ready-roasted and rivers ran with wine"; Thomas Aquinas doubled back to Aristotle's view that reason is the way to happiness in this life, but ultimate joy comes only by following Christ; Martin Luther emphasized that happiness on Earth was a sign of God's grace.

The book really pays off when McMahon reaches the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. His expertise enables him to identify the moment at the start of the liberal tradition when thinkers such as John Locke tried to marry the notions of virtue as a means to happiness and a more utilitarian definition of pleasure as its own justification. That conflict between public duty and hedonism is with us still.

Nearly 300 years after professor Hutcheson failed to capture the "felicific calculus" of happiness, society is still just as preoccupied with how to attain that thing Socrates said was the goal of every man. But we seem no better at achieving it. Paunchy stockbrokers still wear leather chaps and ride Harley-Davidsons. Parents still take their children to Chuck E. Cheese. If we had cracked the code, would there be a need for a book called One Thousand Paths to Happiness ?

Perhaps. But if you want your happiness to be virtuous and utilitarian, pick up McMahon's Happiness instead.

--Bill Duryea is national editor of the Times.

[Last modified February 12, 2006, 00:25:19]