Mor(e)on happiness

The latest Harper's has an interesting article about psychology and the happiness industry.  When Freud visited the US in 1909, he came “to the land of unbridled optimism to inform its inhabitants that a fragile equipoise between repression and abandon was the best they could hope for,” writes psychologist Gary Greenburg in ‘The War on Unhappiness.’ A century after Freud's visit, Greenburg attends a psych conference at which Freud's pessimism is laughed out the door by a new breed of evidence-based happiness gurus who are contributing to a state-endorsed project of human flourishing, starting with trauma-resistant soldiers. Maybe it’s not as alarming as Greenburg makes it sound, but there is much to be wary of in the notion of happiness as a means, rather than an indicator, of flourishing. Not unlike the craze for laughter yoga, which attempts to harness the medicinal effects of laughter without recourse to jokes. 

What's more encouraging is this article from the NY Times suggesting that happiness in African Americans has measurably improved with the gradual (if stunted) improvement in social equality and civil rights over the past five decades.  Happiness flowing in this direction seems more plausible than the tautological ‘winners are winners’ philosophy of the state-supported gurus.

Are you from the past?

I am always uncomfortable with historical fiction, only slightly less so with historical film, but I've never really put my finger on why. Jonathan Dee, reviewing Tom McCarthy's Man Booker short-listed C, has done it for me:

"A novel is a document of consciousness, and since consciousness today is not precisely what is was when Woolf wrote, or Flaubert or Cervantes, the search for a form that reflects faithfully what it means to be alive in one's own time - for 'realism,' if you're willing to define it as broadly as that - must constantly refresh its own terms. In this light, the historical novel would seem to offer if not a false testimony exactly, then at best a kind of gloss on existing testimony. The effort to credibly reanimate a time, a way of being, that one never knew: even at its most technically successful, what is that effort drawing upon other than research - in other words, the historical novelist's experience of reading other people's writing?"

I concur.

Happiness is...

... reading Pride and Prejudice, which I've just done for the squillionth time. What sprang out at me this time was how much of the book is about happiness. The word ‘happiness’ appears 74 times and the word 'happy’ 84 times in the book. We tend to think that Jane Austen's all about social mores or moralities, and the correction of behaviour through painful experience, but I wonder if she sees these simply as structures put in place to secure or guarantee individual happiness. Charlotte Lucas sacrifices happiness in order to obtain the socially valuable goods of household and status. Elizabeth on the other hand rejects the same offer of social stability in favor of personal happiness and is ultimately rewarded. Her resolve to act in a manner that will constitute her own happiness without reference to Lady Catherine's strict preservation of the distinctions of rank makes her an appealing heroine and ultimately delivers Mr Darcy into her hands.  In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor's constant caution is a means of guarding her personal happiness, rather than simply of obeying social codes, and Marianne provides an example of the pain that ensues when codes are flouted and happiness is squandered on undeserving objects. 

Vale Frank Kermode

This is a belated note on the death of influential English critic Frank Kermode.  I've always enjoyed his writing. He was one of those old school critics who really loved literature and though at times he was at odds with the broad trends of post-modern criticism, by saying what he really thought, he reached a stature where he could say what he really thought and people listened.  He was also one of the founders of the London Review of Books, which has been printing not a few obituaries since his death some weeks ago. Here's a nice one.

Burn me!

I've been following the story of Florida pastor Terry Jones with interest. On the news this morning I heard he's decided not to host a Koran burning on 11 September, after receiving requests, warnings and opprobrium from various senior figures, including the Pope, President Obama, Hillary Clinton and even Sarah Palin.  What disturbs me about the response to his outrageous proposal was that so much of it was focused on possible recriminations. His gesture was criticised more because of its inflammatory propensities in an already volatile global environment than because book burning itself is a vile and alarming act. His right to burn the books was even defended by New York mayor Michael Bloomburg, who said the 'distasteful' gesture was an exercise of the pastor's first amendment right to freedom of speech. Whether or not setting fire to something constitutes 'speech', in the twentieth century at least, book burning has been rightly viewed as a signal of descent into ignorance, barbarism and violence. It is a refusal to engage the mind or the heart; ironically, it is a denial of the human freedom to think and feel.  An act of provocation, it is also fundamentally an act of illiteracy. It reveals a misapprehension of what books are and how they work. The burning of books is the rage of the fool against what he does not understand.

To mark this sorry episode, here's Bertolt Brecht's sardonic poem on "The Burning of Books."

When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge
Should be publicly burned and on all sides
Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books
To the bonfires, a banished
Writer, one of the best, scanning the list of the Burned, was shocked to find that his
Books had been passed over. He rushed to his desk
On wings of wrath, and wrote a letter to those in power ,
Burn me! he wrote with flying pen, burn me! Haven’t my books
Always reported the truth ? And here you are
Treating me like a liar! I command you!
Burn me!