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For most of us, happiness lies at
the end of an elusive rainbow, argues Jennifer Michael Hecht in her new book The
Happiness Myth: Why what we think as right is wrong. The poet-historian relies
on history in her attempt to prove her thesis that "the basic modern assumptions
about how to be happy are nonsense". Don't worry, be happy, she says echoing Bob
Marley: getting fitter, thinner or richer won't necessarily make you happier.
These goals belong to a "Cultural code" or "an unscientific web of symbolic
cultural fantasies" that we harbour. Once you realise this, you may perhaps feel
a little more free to be a lot more happy, says Hecht. Thus, coming to know
yourself and re-creating how you experience the world may be a more efficient
way of getting comfortable and happy than directly altering the world.
The first aspect of knowing
yourself is Socratic. This has to do with knowing what you believe. The second
one is Freudian and deals with knowing who you are. The first path seems more
lonely and has to do with training yourself to take your intellect as your own
companion. Having a guru or a trailblazer helps. The psychological aspiration
can also be pursued with the help of a white-coated shaman. But both endeavours
challenge your complacency with change.
Knowing yourself entails roughing
yourself up a little, writes Hecht. Socrates and Plato both held that this kind
of ruthless thinking makes you happy in the process. When Plato does imagine an
arrival, a coming to the most profound knowledge, it is blissful (as distinct
from garden variety of happiness). But most of the time this is all about
happiness as a process, as an effort,
Thus, ancient ideas of knowing
yourself were about becoming a better person. while the process may have been
psychological, it involved conditioning one's mind rather than finding out why
the mind does what it does. As Marcus Aurelius said, "Cast away opinion and you
are saved. But who hinders you from casting it away ?" Nor does your 'heart'
always listen to your head. The best of the ancient writers, including Aurelius,
concede the difficulty of the endeavour and "with a smile and a shrug provide
exercises for teaching ourselves to improve what self-control we have," says
Hecht. That's what religion and New Age philosophies are doing with their
rituals and their meditations: teaching us to wake up to ourselves, for the sake
of happiness. |
