What, Me Worry?

Americans seem to believe that God helps those who drag themselves to the self-help shelves, there to rummage through the ever-expanding supply of instruction manuals, each of which promises that the insertion of square tabs A through J into round slots Q through Z will produce a felicity that the reader failed to achieve after following equivalent instructions gleaned from last season’s guidebooks. It would seem from the proliferation of the genre and the habit-forming quality of these manuals that to open a book with “happiness” in its title is (as Samuel Johnson said about remarriage) a triumph of hope over experience.

But this is America, after all, a nation founded on the principle that the right to pursue happiness ranks up there with the right to life and the right to liberty. No less astute an analyst of the American clamor for happiness than Ronald Reagan observed during his 1980 campaign, “For 200 years we’ve lived in the future, believing that tomorrow would be better than today, and today would be better than yesterday.”

But it is not only once-over-lightly hucksters, pharmaceutical faddists and earnest psychiatrists who strain to make themselves happy by selling the most smiley-faced words they can muster. Modern American life delivers scads of promissory notes to ordinary people, telling them they have a right to their own hot pursuits. This is the amazing claim of prosperous modernity, fully equipped with a happiness industry relentlessly advertising new routes to fun so insistently that the emigre psychologists Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites wrote more than half a century ago of Americans’ “fun-morality.”

But moderns and Americans are scarcely the first to think there was happiness to be found from thinking about happiness. For millenniums, honest-to-God philosophers have been pursuing their own happiness writing books about happiness for readers who are willing to consider happiness worth thinking about. Such books begin with the awareness that pursuing happiness is not like falling into a feather bed or plunging into a good bottle of wine. Happiness is worth reading a book about, a book that finds the pursuit of happiness to be a complicated business, even in the country that invented the smiley face. The population of thoughtful pursuers would seem to be a limited population, consisting as it does of people who, however much or little happiness they may derive from the purchase of a new internal combustion device or electronic device or an encounter with Mr. or Ms. Right, are happy to think. And yet perhaps a population of pill-popping, prosperous but grim-eyed hedonists is as good as any for a treatise on happiness, one that has the audacity to propose: “The trouble with most people is not that they are unhappy. It is that they do not know how to think clearly about what happiness might be.”

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With this trenchant yet good-natured book, Mark Kingwell places himself in an honorable tradition of thinkers with the audacity to think that thinking about the nature of happiness might not only be interesting but also contribute to happiness. Happiness concerned an unembarrassed Aristotle and Spinoza. The utilitarians thought they had stated a master principle of all time by deciding that society’s main goal was “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” “What is happiness?” Nietzsche asked, instantly answering: “The feeling that power increases--that resistance is overcome.” Bertrand Russell wrote a smart book entitled “The Conquest of Happiness,” advising negatively that “fundamental happiness” is different from “excitement and distraction,” which are the recourse of divided souls, and positively that “the happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life.” This is not, however, the sort of thing to detain academic philosophy today, any more than it infuses the copy turned out by pharmaceutical copywriters.

Kingwell is a young Canadian philosopher with an eye for a felicitous phrase and a taste for the happy meander. His easygoing book is a loose-jointed succession of essays dotted with revelations of down-home perplexities, picaresque adventures and personal quandaries concerning religion, drugs, consumption, solitude, marriage, academia and other challenges. The adjective “Canadian” is important. (The book was published there two years ago, though without the preface explaining that whatever doubts Kingwell harbored on first publication, he subsequently did get tenure at the University of Toronto.) He shares an unfortified border with our American excesses, respects the fact that we for the first time in political history found a place for the term in a founding political covenant; and keeps a refreshing distance from the happiness industry, yet does not scorn it with the intensity of a disabused refugee. He is not above the pleasures of gossip, martinis and Armani suits. Hating the stupidity of many happiness seekers does not make him happy. He is an intellectual who derives felicity from intellectual pursuit, but not in order to prove how smart he is. Rather, he aims sincerely and self-disclosingly to guide the lay perplexed toward an appreciation that happiness is not the hedonistic riot it’s cracked up to be; it’s more attainable, less utopian, probably less expensive and all-around better for you and for everyone around you.

Kingwell’s key is the Greek distinction between two fundamentally different conceptions of happiness. The hedonistic conception concerns pleasure--”happiness as a contented feeling, sometimes but not always identifiable with simple pleasure, usually of the bodily kind.” The other, perhaps so remote we do not even have a common post-Greek term for it, is eudaemonistic: happiness as “rational satisfaction with one’s character and actions . . . a form of self-assessing cognition, a passing of positive judgment on oneself and one’s projects.” Call this “the virtue theory of happiness.” Kingwell prefers this one. The modern economy’s more hedonistic thrill machine, the promise of the endless satisfaction of desires, manufactures dissatisfaction. Against this glittering treadmill, Kingwell recommends Epictetus: “Let death and exile, and all other things which appear terrible, be daily before your eyes, but death chiefly, and you will never entertain an abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.” Kingwell makes a powerful case for the Stoics, more cheerfully than you might expect.

Kingwell is an earthy guide. He is not above relaying his unhappy experiences with Prozac, exploring the Star Trek theory of felicity or taking a giddy tour through the depressing happiness seminars of the Options Institute in Sheffield, Mass. But his deep interest is in the play of ideas. He writes with spikes of insouciance, but “seriousness” is not a word that makes him unhappy. At times he sounds as though he is going to be a bit glib about the glutting, dissatisfaction-making temptations of consumerism only to pull out the stops with a forthright declaration that envy is the canker in the rose, that “envy would not disappear even if we could, with a wave of the hand, destroy every ad agency and consumer durable in the world; nor would the problem of just how my happiness is related to yours.”

Camus saw happiness in the moment when Sisyphus turned to chase his boulder down the mountain. Jonathan Swift defined happiness as “the perpetual possession of being well deceived.” Kingwell respects deceptions (including the claim that God wants you to be happy) but is not deceived by them. His record of his own grappling illuminates on almost every page. Perhaps without meaning to, he has written an amiable guide to the best thinking about happiness that doubles as a self-help book for those who wouldn’t be caught dead reading self-help books.