2013/02/11 12:51
So I suspect there was always a natural misanthrope within just waiting for his chance. He was kept pretty much in his box during my early years. But when I got to Ireland, his time had come. Given that I was useless at mathematics a year studying engineering at Manchester had conclusively demonstrated this philosophy was probably the only career that allowed me to suitably foster this aspiring misanthrope. My self-imposed exile from the world of humans was simply a logical extension of this. And Brenin the big, bad wolf became a symbolic expression of this exile. Brenin was not just my best, and only, friend. I was beginning to understand myself in terms of what he represented: the rejection of a human world of warmth and friendship, and the embrace of a world of ice and abstraction. I had become a man of the Arctic. My little house in the country my draughty, glacial house with a heating system that rarely worked, and didn’t heat the house even when it did, was a suitable physical shell for my new emotional detachment.
My parents, bless them, were terribly worried about me. The constant refrain on my increasingly infrequent visits home was: how can you possibly be happy living like that?
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According to many philosophers, happiness is intrinsically valuable. What they mean is that happiness is valuable for its own sake, not for the sake of anything else. Most of the things we value, we do so because of other things they can do for us or get for us. We value money, for example, only because of other things we can purchase with it: food, shelter, security, perhaps, some of us think, even happiness. We value medicine not in itself but because of the role it can play in promoting a return to health. Money and medicine are instrumentally valuable, but they are not intrinsically valuable. Some philosophers think that only happiness is intrinsically valuable: happiness is the only thing that we value for itself and not for the sake of anything else that it might allow us to get.
Since those days of the late 1990s, when my parents worried about me, happiness has acquired a much higher profile, not so much in philosophy but in the wider culture. It’s even become big business. Millions of acres of forest have been sacrificed on its alter, bringing us all those books that tell us how we can pull off the happiness trick. Some governments have got in on the act, sponsoring studies that tell us that despite the fact that we are, materially, so much richer than our forebears, we are no happier than they were: proof that money can’t buy you happiness is a very useful thing for any government to have.
Finally, and inevitably, academics, who know a gravy train when they smell one, have jumped on board; accosting or, more accurately, getting their postgraduate students to accost people on the street and asking them impertinent questions like, ‘When are you happiest?’ Coyness and discretion are, of course, not highly ranked in the pantheon of early twenty-first-century Western virtues, and many people actually respond to this question. Apparently and this is something on which all studies concur they’re happiest when they’re having sex and unhappiest when talking to their boss. And if they’re having sex with their boss while talking to him or her, it is not clear what they are: bittersweet opportunists, possibly.
What must we think happiness is, if we answer, ‘when I’m having sex, ‘to the question, ‘when are you happiest?’? We must be thinking of happiness as a feeling; specifically, the feeling of pleasure for this is what sex produces if you’re doing it remotely well. Similarly, the unhappiness involved in talking to your boss presumably has something to do with the feelings of unease and worry, or perhaps nausea and contempt, this conversation involves. Happiness and unhappiness reduce to feelings of a certain sort. Suppose that we combine this idea with the philosophers’ claim that happiness is intrinsically valuable probably the one thing in life we want for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else. Then we arrive at a simple conclusion: the most important thing in life is feel a certain way. The quality of your life, whether your life is going well or badly, is a matter of what feelings you have.
One useful way of characterizing humans is as a particular type of addict or junkie. This, with the possible exception of some of the great apes, is true of no other animal. Humans are not, in general, pharmacological junkies although, obviously, some are. But they are happiness junkies. Happiness junkies share with their ordinary, pharmacological cousins an insistent craving for something that really doesn’t do them that much good and isn’t really all that important anyway. But, in one clear sense, happiness junkies are worse. A pharmacological junkies has a mistaken conception of where his or hare happiness comes from. Happiness junkies have a mistaken conception of what happiness is. Both are united by a failure to appreciate what is most important in life.
Happiness junkies come in all shape and sizes, and from all walks of life. There are no tracks on arms, legs or feet to identify happiness junkies. They don’t need to shoot up or snort. Some humans are 18-30 happiness junkies. They head out every Friday and Saturday nights to the city centre of whenever they lived and get drunk and/or high, have sex, or, if that doesn’t work out(and maybe even if it does), get into a fight. Then, once or twice a year, they’ll travel to Ibiza, Corfu, Crete, Cancun or whether they’re supposed to go this year, and do exactly the same things, just with a little more intensity. This, for them, is what happiness is. Happiness junkie: anyone familiar with the demographics of Saturday night city centre or charter flight to Corfu can tell you that. Some humans stay 18-30 happiness junkies the whole of their lives. Others, however, as they become older, slower and weaker also become, as they see it, more sophisticated. First, they expand their conception of happiness beyond the nakedly hedonistic and decadent feelings that characterized the 18-30 years.
