June 24, 2021- Human Happiness

         What Does It Mean To Be ‘Happy’?

Today’s Post

Last week we moved from addressing the many aspects of religion which combine to not only aid us in our continuing journey to the future, but can enrich us on our way.  We have seen how three ‘Theological Virtues’ represent attitudes, stances that we can take along this journey which open us up to a clearer, and therefore more meaningful life.

Thus far, we have outlined the insights of Teilhard, Rohr, Rogers and Haught as we have followed the trail of increasing complexity as it flows through human life.  These thinkers all contribute unique and profound insights into the ‘human psyche’, as well as signposts to a future in which human evolution can continue to unfold.

Such ‘survival’ is clearly important to our future as a species, and the part we play, as outlined by these thinkers, is indeed critical to it.  But, as we have seen many times on our journey, our personal confidence in the future, our accepting of, even our embracing of our lives is also critical.  All this evolution, if it is to be authentic, must somehow be compatible with satisfaction with life: our ‘happiness’.

The Slippery Subject of Happiness

A common term for accepting and embracing life is ‘happiness’.  Like the term ‘love’, the term ‘happiness’ is somewhat overused in Western society today.  This overuse belies a clear understanding of what it consists of and how it can be found in our lives.  The aspect of ‘happiness’ in the human person, while much to be desired, is both difficult to quantify, and if common belief would have it, difficult to attain.

This week we will take a closer look at this slippery subject, to see how Teilhard’s hermeneutic of placing a subject into the context of universal evolution, as has been done for other ‘slippery’ subjects, will help us to see it more clearly as well.

Our approach to ‘happiness’ will address it in five facets.

This week we will address the ‘material’ facet: how human happiness is commonly addressed.

We will then address it from an ‘evolutionary’ perspective, in terms of how humans ‘fit into’ the universal evolutionary flow that Teilhard tracks from the ‘big bang’ to the current day.

In the ‘spiritual’ facet, we will then address how Teilhard’s reinterpretation of ‘spirit’ opens the door to a more intimate mode of satisfaction with life.

From the ‘psychological’ facet, we will then look at how psychology understands a person whose approach to life is mature, and hence better aligned with reality.

In the last facet we will explore religion’s approach to happiness and how it can be seen to align with the other facets.

What Is Happiness?

Not that happiness gives up its secrets willingly.  Teilhard takes note of our difficulty in finding a vantage point from which to address it.

“What, in fact, is happiness?  For centuries this has been the subject of endless books, investigations, individual and collective experiments, one after another; and, sad to relate, there has been complete failure to reach unanimity. For many of us, in the end, the only practical conclusion to be drawn from the whole discussion is that it is useless to continue the search. Either the problem is insoluble; there is no true happiness in this world or there can be only an infinite number of particular solutions: the problem itself defies solution. Being happy is a matter of personal taste. You, for your part, like wine and good living. I prefer cars, poetry, or helping others. “Liking is as unaccountable as luck.””

   He goes on to suggest a basic impediment to human happiness

“Like all other animate beings, man, it is true, has an essential craving for happiness. In man, however, this fundamental demand assumes a new and complicated form for he is not simply a living being with greater sensibility and greater vibratory power than other living beings. By virtue of his “hominization” he has become a reflective and critical living being and his gift of reflection brings with it two other formidable properties, the power to perceive what may be possible, and the power to foresee the future. The emergence of this dual power is sufficient to disturb and confuse the hitherto serene and consistent ascent of life. Perception of the possible, and awareness of the future- when these two combine, they not only open up for us an inexhaustible store of hopes and fears, but they also allow those hopes and fears to range far afield in every direction. Where the animal seems to find no difficulties to obstruct its infallible progress towards what will bring it satisfaction, man, on the other hand, cannot take a single step in any direction without meeting a problem for which, ever since he became man, he has constantly and unsuccessfully been trying to find a final and universal solution.”

   Thus, to Teilhard, in seeming agreement with Juval Harari (Sapiens), the evolutionary emergence of the human interjects what Teilhard saw as “disturb(ing) and confuse(ing) the hitherto serene and consistent ascent of life”.  This disturbance brings about an inability in us to “bring satisfaction”.

The long current of human thinking in our literature, philosophies and religions presents us with a wide spectrum of stances that we can take in response to Shakespeare’s “slings and outrages” as inflicted by life.  At one end of this wide spectrum lies a simple acceptance and endurance of endless rounds of ‘fate’ and ‘fortune’, as the Easterners would have it.   At the far other end lies the ‘joyous embrace’ of the phases of life, which may well recur, but also tend to ‘raise’ us over time, as envisioned in the West.  Not surprisingly, most of us (and our literature, philosophy and Religion) occupy the terrain closer to the center.  Most approaches to happiness contain a combination of some level of acceptance (or denial) of those things over which we have no power mixed with some level of confidence (or despair) that whatever our lot, it is amenable to some improvement.

Happiness, to some extent, is related to the degree of acceptance with which we respond to these cycles mixed with some degree of expectation that the future can be better.

Thus, happiness is difficult to pin down.  Circumstances which would depress one person might be tolerated by another.  Personal welfare that would cause satisfaction in one might not be enough to satisfy others.  Our news is filled daily with stories of people who remain un-consoled by their good fortune, as well as those that manage some degree of life satisfaction without significant material welfare.

In other words, not only is the concept of happiness slippery but recognition of it in reality is highly subjective.

Still, the search for its dimensions continues.  Psychologists conduct surveys, biologists explore chemicals, and religionists look to faith.  Does this level of often contradictory activities mean that there’s nothing that can be said?  Let’s look at a few aspects:

• Surveys: For decades, psychologists have been searching for a process for conducting surveys free of cultural, economic, gender, religious and racial bias.  Not only do the continuing waves of surveys show a wider range of reported states of happiness than statistics suggest, but many of them are contradictory.
• Biology: Many biologists suggest that happiness results directly from our chemistry.  They can measure that chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin in the brain are direct causes of the sensation of happiness, but minimize the influence of those experiences that lead to their secretion in the brain.  Thus, in the ‘nature vs nurture’ spectrum, in their view nurture is clearly a secondary influence.
• Genetics: All of us know persons who are generally cheerful, even under difficult circumstances. We also know those whose ‘glass is always half empty’.  From this view, we are all predisposed by our generic heritage toward some fundamental level of happiness or unhappiness.  The ‘wiring of our brains’ is always complicit in our emotional reaction to reality.
• Religion: The religions of the world all aim at some level of accommodation with reality, from (as above) acceptance to embrace.  Their hermeneutics and practices are clearly myriad, and often very contradictory.

For all this, neither religion nor science can be seen to have an unequivocal grasp of happiness, contentment, or any of the ‘states’ of well-being.

A more nuanced approach to happiness falls into the realm of relative measures.  For example, if a very poor person comes into a large sum of money, the impact on their happiness is directly related to the improvement in their situation that the money enables.  They can be safely said to have increased the level of their happiness by a large amount.

For a wealthier person, even a large amount of money will have much less impact as it did in the case of the one less well off.  In the first case, the impact will likely be longer lasting as well, as the money can also be put to use in caring for family and assuring a comfortable future.  In the second case, the money will most likely have little effect on the person’s sense of well-being, much less that of the family.

The ‘Satisfaction Paradox’

A curious take on this subject, as reported by the Economist in the issue of July 11, 2019, involves generally comfortable people who nonetheless report that they are unhappy, a phenomenon which is relatively new in human evolution, breaking a long-sensed bond between ‘comfort’ and ‘happiness’.  This new ‘dualism’ occurs in the evolutionarily recent group of individuals who are relatively well-off and well-educated: the ‘middle class’.  This ‘satisfaction paradox’ can be seen when seemingly comfortable people vote for political parties which would upend a status quo which had previously supported a high level of life satisfaction.

This involves the dissociation between two longtime political partners: personal well-being and incumbent political parties.  As the Economist relates, the re-election of an incumbent party has historically been the result of a general feeling of ‘well-being’ among the population.   Today, we are seeing a surge in ‘developed’ countries of angry ‘Populist’ and ‘Nationalist’ parties elected by populations who consider themselves as ‘well off’.

The Economist article traces one possible cause of this phenomena, prevalent in the ‘developed’ world, as the result of aging populations.  Certainly, this demographic feels uncomfortable being caught up in the rapid changes precipitated by the swift advances of technology.  As an example, many of us ‘old folks’ were taught by our parents, just as we taught our children, how to use a dial phone.  This same group, in many cases, are now being taught the often bewildering complexities of ‘smartphones’ by their grandchildren.

The reliance on ‘habit’, those learned since birth to enable us to smoothly function, can become a liability, as the necessity for a rapid learning curve seems to be increasingly prevalent.  The ‘fruits of our labor’, pensions, investments and assets built up over a lifetime of cultivating productive ‘habits’, may well have provided us with much quality of life, but do not necessarily constitute a comfortable emotional bulwark against today’s turbulence.

This certainly leads to an increase of indignation, a level of personal life satisfaction which is nonetheless deeply critical of others.  We have seen how indignation can induce pleasant feelings, but this phenomenon also brings us back to the insights of Yuval Harari (‘Sapiens) concerning the ‘fit’ between the human person and his environment.

Harari notes that in the human person, consciousness such as ours, aware as it is of itself, speeds up evolution in an environment which becomes increasingly subject to our influence.  This recursive spiral of ‘upset,’ is not unlike that found in weather, where a stable air mass becomes unstable, leading to the emergence of patterns unforeseen in the stable state.  Can the tension between a changing environment caused by humans who are themselves rapidly changing have such a future?  Harari questions the possibility that the incessant but more frequently recurring cycles of harmony and disharmony that we see today can result in a future plateau of harmony.

And, on top of this, what is the forecast for a level of accommodation, even happiness, for the human person caught up in such a dynamic milieu?  Is the very increasing speed of our evolution a material impediment to our happiness?

If Teilhard understood it correctly, and the energy which unites human persons is no more (but no less, as he would say) than the current manifestation of the fourteen billion years of energy by which the cosmos has risen to its current complex state, then how can we fail to recognize the potential for fulfillment, both at the personal level as well as the level of society?

More specific to the topic of happiness, how can Teilhard’s perspective be used as a signpost to happiness?   If the energy of increasing complexity and emerging consciousness can be seen in human relationships (love, in its most universal manifestation) and consciousness aware of itself, how can we better understand how we fit into it?  What is the appropriate niche for the human person in this grand process of universal evolution?

The Next Post

This week saw a broad overview of the subject of ‘happiness’ and its vagueness and began to place it into Teilhard’s context of universal evolution.  If the energy of increasing complexity and emerging consciousness can be seen in human relationships (love, in its most universal appearance) and consciousness aware of itself, how can we better understand how we fit into it?

Next week we will begin to explore such ‘universal accommodation’ and attempt to locate the appropriate niche for the human person is this grand process of universal evolution.