Happiness & Public Policy

Journalist Stuart Jeffries has a truly excellent piece on “Why Happiness Is Overrated” in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog. Choice excerpts:

But as soon as the word “happiness” is invoked in this context, something has gone awry. Every undergraduate who has written an essay on the distinctions between pleasure, wellbeing and happiness (as I remember doing), knows that you’re getting into a conceptual morass by invoking happiness as an achievable societal goal. Kant wrote wisely, “The notion of happiness is so nebulous that although every man wishes to attain it, yet he can never convey accurately and distinctly what it is that he really wishes and wills ” But today, as never before, it is being touted as the societal cure-all: happiness is treated almost as a human right rather than what it is; namely, a goal that retreats the closer one tries to get to it. Perhaps happiness is an unnecessary goal that confuses us when we try to tackle real social problems.

…

A genial spirit, Coleridge was gadding about madly; sometimes winningly, sometimes irresponsibly, just as he usually did, up hill and down dale, through metaphysics and poetry, when he smacked into the wall of Wordsworth’s will. His best friend refused to put Coleridge’s poem Christabel into the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. This, seemingly small, incident crushed Coleridge, making him doubt his poetic gifts, and left him for years crossing a desert of opium, illness and marital unhappiness.

Can we say that Coleridge would have been a better man, poet or essayist had he not been through this misery? You may object that Coleridge was a poet and intellectual, so perhaps needed an injection, of depression to fire him up, while the rest of us shlubs, trying to get through the day, don’t. We must be made happy; insured against depression; inoculated somehow against misery: it is our right, dammit! But it is a patronising view that implies ordinary people must live experientially less-fulfilled lives than artists.

Read the whole thing.