On Happiness (1)

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Part I

Inspired by this article, I have jotted down a number of spontaneous ideas. I think, the text gets more lean in Part II.

To begin with, I doubt that the problem of interpersonal comparisons is overcome simply by interviewing a number of people about their happiness. Happiness is a nested concept. A person who is working exceedingly hard in a job she does not like may consider herself rather happy in view of a range of other circumstances in her life that may or may not depend on her working rather unhappily.

As I have pointed out in other posts here and here and here and here and here, happiness is bounded, you cannot increase the emotional quality of your orgasm in parallel with constant lifelong increases in your wealth. 

It is an error to assume that it is possible to make interpersonal, inter-systemic or inter-temporal comparisons with respect to happiness. Much of what people associate with happiness is intrinsically incommensurable. Diverging definitions and notions of happiness are just one aspect of this.

Comparing "happinesses" is like asking "Are you in favour of more or less freedom," when one of the two interviewees opts for "less" because for her gun-related violence in the US is indicative of "too much freedom," while the other interviewee wishes for "more" freedom because she reckons that "gun control," a restriction of freedom in her view, increases violence in the US (encouraging violent perpetrators in the face of defenceless victims - however, the quality of the arguments is immaterial to our reasoning).

The interviewees are simply not referring to the same thing. The meaning of "freedom" is highly susceptible to differing qualifications of the term. 

Back to happiness: given common objects of assessment, the nexus of a lifetime's associations, with its good and bad experiences, that induces person A to claim 80% of possible 100% of happiness, may lead another person B to ascribe only 20% to it. 

People define happiness differently, and some do not define it at all or only very imprecisely. 

We may be able to construct comparable frames of reference (see small print insertion below), but are they powerful enough to achieve commensurability over hundreds of millions of life experiences and differing ways of assessing these experiences? And are the underlying happiness-verdicts constant and consistent over time, even in one and the same person? People may give more weight to a recent period in their life than to other periods.

(Say, we compare people with three common experiences they consider as dominant regarding their happiness - marriage, having a disabled child, and being a soldier and having fought in a war.)

Happiness is hardly an adequate measure for all the different aspects that we consider important in assessing our overall situation, both as an individual and as proponent of theories, say, of the good society. 

Normative implications of estimates of happiness for systemic choice are a very tricky matter.

You may favour a society in which you are less happy (low-income accountant in a free society) over one where your happiness would be greater (care-free state-sponsored novelist in the USSR). 

More significantly, happiness estimates, or even more difficult, projections of happiness concerning future states, are not what drives human development. 

As I write here: 

Painless dental care or the right to choose freely among a large number of occupations rather than being forced to pursue one's father's occupation -- the attainment of aims such as these will not move the ceiling of happiness any higher than advancements achieved at earlier stages of human development. Yet, they will be pursued because they remove nuisances and widen the range of [promising and useful]options from which one may choose.

This assessment is based on my anthropological views, whose core tenet states that

man is the animal that adjusts to its environment by constantly developing new desires, needs, interests and preferences.

Humans are neither built to enjoy permanent rapture, nor is their personal and social weal dependent on constantly high levels of happiness. What is far more important for human wellbeing is (a) the absence of / the ability to remove [strong] nuisances and (b) the presence of fruitful avenues for personal development; both of which conditions [may well be] accompanied predominantly by low levels of emotional involvement - think of the meditative quality of much of what one likes doing -, though they may lead to an overall situation associated with words such as "happiness" or "contentment".

People will tend toward situations that ensure (a) and (b). Therefore, acts of progress will happen and accumulate irrespective of promises or expectations of global (personal or societal) happiness improvements. Far more people are naturally applying their energies to the pursuit of (a) and (b), thereby achieving incremental progress, independent of commensurate unlimited incrementation of happiness, rather than dedicating themselves to majestic visions of a society promising more happiness.

It is quite possible to pack a number of very different, even unrelated, dimensions of happiness into one and the same term: happiness relative to what is; happiness relative to what appears desirable in the future, in alternative arrangements; and we then mix them up into an inextricable mess. 

Happiness, even if we assume it to be a clearly defined concept that allows for genuine interpersonal, inter-systemic, and inter-temporal comparisons, is not likely to be a good measure of what we would regard as reasonable arrangements among human beings. Simply because happiness is a person-specific concept tied to a vast number of very different perspectives and interests. As an unqualified driving force happiness is little more than merely divisive. 

Part II

In a very thoughtful post, Stumbling and Mumbling writes:

The man who's resting on his yacht regrets being away from the golf course; the woman with the well-paid job regrets not spending time with her children.

Well, opportunity cost considerations are universal as are insuperable local dilemmas. And there is an infinite supply of these in any type of society. It would take a lot more assumptions to establish that we have moved into a time where the set of choices open to us has significantly deteriorated compared to earlier periods.

Also, opportunity cost considerations are highly cross-linked, so that the woman's specific regret may well be compatible with a high level of contentment overall or an attitude of voluntary "committed choice" with a strong sense on her part of having created the best balance between the options open to her.

Committed choice may be a higher value than happiness, or it might go into her happiness definition, which would make her happiness definition surely different from those of many other people, which reminds us that interpersonal, inter-temporal or inter-systemic comparisons of happiness are fraught with difficulties.

The main point I wish to make, however, is that man is not "happiness-driven," contrary to our ability to convince us (in situations of cheap talk) of being "happiness-driven."

Constrained by reality, people rather seek

• (a) to achieve the absence of or the ability to remove sufficiently strong nuisances, and

• (b) conditions in which they are free to follow their preferences.

This is not the same as maximising personal happiness, if by the latter we mean relaxed contentment or even bliss.

Typically, (a) and (b) require a lot of effort, sacrifice and compromise. They require strategic thinking and patience etc. That is, they involve numerous layers and sequences of different emotions and assessments.

Everyone is free to define happiness as she may, nevertheless happiness could be defined as a intermittent summary emotion indicating the extent to which (a) and (b) have been achieved, or the extent to which the person is dissatisfied with the possibilities of (a) and (b).

In their strong propensity to act according to (a) and (b) people subdivide and fragment the world into tractable portions, as opposed to having a holistic idea of the world and the meaning of their being happy vis-à-vis that totality. Ideologues attempt to convince people of such a putatively liberating application of a uniform notion of happiness to the world at large. Unfortunately, sometimes they succeed to rather a large extent.

At any rate, happiness is not a phenomenon that we equally share in such a manner that we can use it as an objective standard measuring the worth of one epoch over another or one social vision over another, unless we persuade ourselves to adopt such a figment.

The idea that there is a uniform notion of happiness is as preposterous as the idea that freedom means the same thing to everybody. And so is the hope to assess the desirability of human arrangements by a fictitiously uniform concept.

Lastly, whatever happiness means to you and me, and it is likely to mean very different things, it will tend to be a derivative concept, involving values, emotions and considerations that are more momentous and better indications of what we truly prefer in life than happiness itself.

People and circumstances make demands on us that deviate from a situation of personal happiness (whatever that exactly means); as most people learn when they are still babies, it is more important to react judiciously and effectively to these demands than to insist on being happy.

If successful in our reactions, we may feel we have engendered outcomes that qualify to be reflected in an intermittent summary encapsulated in a thought-emotion-mix called happiness.