Happiness and the Good Life

So I have a confession: I like self-help books.  Over the years, I have probably read dozens of them, especially those that are – or claim to be – evidence-based.  Often going under the more respectable name of “positive” or “social” psychology, these books promise to deliver, usually in ten or fewer easy steps, happiness or the good life.  The pitch is not subtle: Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment is the title of one such book, leaving little to the imagination.

I am relatively happy and have a pretty fulfilling life.  Yet, like many, I sometimes feel that I could use some help.  I can lose my equanimity after an upsetting social interaction; relate better to those I love; live my life more in accord with my values.  And, after a long day reading serious texts in foreign languages, these books serve up advice in short, easy-to-understand, declarative sentences.  Who doesn’t enjoy a quiz that will tell them who they really are?

These books are not fraudulent.  One of my favorites, Thinking Fast and Slow is written by the Nobel Memorial Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman.  There is serious science behind many of them.  Yet as I read them, it is hard for me, as a scholar of religious traditions and practices, to shake the sense of déjà vu all over again.  Because, of course, the questions of living a happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life are just about as old as a distinctly human consciousness.  Multitudes of very smart people over many thousands of years have wrestled with precisely these big questions, even if they did not have modern survey techniques available to them (which is probably just as well, since they also did not have IRBs to approve them).  The amount of human energy spent pondering the meaning of life, and how to live it, is staggering.  Has today’s science of positive psychology really uncovered anything new, or found new insights that allow us to lead better lives?  Or does it just rehash what we already know, just in a different idiom?

That question is not a rhetorical one.  I don’t know.  What I do know, though, is that the basic problem of living a meaningful life – or at least of developing the tools that one needs to even begin to approach the problem – is a critical one that is at the heart of the humanities.  As a college student, I was vaguely aware of this, even if in the vast majority of my courses we never explicitly framed the question that way.  We learned topics, skills, and texts, but not how to make them relevant to our own lives.

Not much has changed in the nearly forty years since I was in college.  A student can easily go through college today, even as a humanities major, without explicitly grappling with the big – and maybe the only important – questions of meaning, happiness, and purpose.  I try to avoid comparing students today to those in my generation, and so am not sure if much has changed or not.  But it is no wonder that students at Yale flock to Laurie Santos’s happiness course (syllabus here). Even college students recognize that our society has a “happiness problem” (unsurprisingly, also the title of a self-help book) and like many, they look for a quick fix.

Last year as I went through the process of figuring out what to teach this year, maybe in a moment of temporary insanity fueled by envy (a character flaw I should work harder at), I thought, why should Professor Santos have all the fun?  Yes, I don’t actually know positive psychology and its science.  I do, though, know many religious and philosophical texts that deal with the same issues.  I cannot, and would not dare, teach a whole course on the science of happiness, but I could put that literature into conversation with the traditions and ideas that I do know, with ultimately the same goal of helping young adults acquire the resources that will help them construct happy and fulfilling lives.

Ambitious or crazy?  I’m not sure about that either.  What I do know is that this entry-level class is now on the books and I have to teach it in a few months.  And that leads me to the real point of this rambling post.

I am trying to set my readings for the class.  Some of the texts I am already fairly committed to:

• Ecclesiastes, with parts of Ecclesiasticus (also known as Ben Sira): A meditation on the purpose of life, with some debate.  Also, arguably, a very early example of religious existentialism.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.  This is, of course, the classic (if, in my opinion, deeply flawed) text on thinking about happiness and the good life.
• Victor Frankel, Man’s Search for Meaning.  A classic argument that a sense of purpose is critical for human thriving.  (Although, as Martin Kavka has reminded me, it raises a serious debate about whether we, when we lose our sense of purpose, are responsible for our own suffering).
• Plato’s Gorgias.  Normally I would not have thought of including this text, but an opinion piece in the New York Times by Benjamin and Jenna Storey – and their generosity sharing their ideas personally with me – convinced me that it could work.
• Selections of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa on happiness.  Again, an excellent idea suggested by the Storeys.  Here Aquinas thinks quite deeply about the nature of happiness.
• Menachem Mendel Levin, Cheshbon Ha-Nefesh.  A remarkable little book from the nineteenth century that presents a theory of the human and a set of exercises designed to develop virtues.
• Maurice Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being.  One of the positive psychology books that I found personally helpful, with fun quizzes and exercises.
• Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.  This book in many ways tracks closely with what I want to accomplish in the class, by bringing modern happiness studies into conversation with older texts.
• Russ Harris, The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living.  Suggested by a friend, there are a few chapters that are excellent starting points for the entire question of whether we should seek happiness at all.
• St. Therese of Lisieux, Autobiography.  This is the spiritual autobiography of a nun, which has been recognized and promoted by the Roman Catholic Church.  The truth is that I do not care much for this book, but it is worth reading and debating.
• William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.  I debate including this one more than the others, but it does make an argument that students should hear and consider, if they have not already.

I am not sure if this is too much or too little; there is certainly much, much more that can and should be included, despite having to come up against the hard practical limits of a semester’s course.  My thinking remains fluid, and I also posted in Facebook asking my friends to weigh in on texts that might also be included in such a course.  What I was really looking for were relevant texts – texts that changed the way that they thought about the big questions and actually lived – that they read after they were students but that they wished they had read earlier.  Not everybody read the prompt carefully, but it did generate a number of further suggestions that I am considering:

• A number of people recommended various academic books that are not in themselves potentially life-changing, but could provide useful contexts.  Barbara Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600-1700 demonstrates how emotions are not simply raw and immediate feelings but have historical contexts.  Hava Tirosh-Samuelson’s Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-Being is more abstruse but correlates early Jewish and Greek thinking about happiness and the good life.  Even more abstruse (and expensive, but full of excellent insights) is the multilingual collection of academic essays, The Pursuit of Happiness in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Thought: Studies Dedicated to Steven Harvey, edited by Yehuda Halper.  One book that might show more promise for this class is Diane Lobel, Philosophies of Happiness: A Comparative Introduction to the Flourishing Life, that appears to take a similar approach to Jonathan Haidt’s book.  One book I did not expect was Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine, which discusses human emotions and behaviors from the perspective of evolutionary biology.
• I received a couple of other suggestions that I did not expect.  One was Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.  I always thought of this novel as a political commentary, but it has, admittedly, made a deep personal impact on many.  The other was Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure if this book really worked on its own grounds (that is, I was more convinced by the end that Abraham Lincoln was a political muddler than genius).  But, like Atlas Shrugged, I guess some find its central message of encouraging robust disagreement and diverse views inspiring.
• There are several books that are essentially positive psychology books, but that draw from specific traditions.  They include, Evan Moffic, The Happiness Prayer: Ancient Jewish Wisdom for the Best Way to Live Today and Harold S. Kushner (the famous author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People), Overcoming Life’s Disappointments: Learning from Moses How to Cope with Frustration.  C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, is a powerful Christian apologetic that touches on life’s purpose  More directly, Lewis’s The Great Divorce wrestles with the problem of good, evil, and ultimate purpose from a Christian perspective.
• One of the two (pure) positive psychology books recommended was Mo Gawadat, Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy.  Another unhappy engineer who figures out an actionable path forward.  A second is Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte, The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles.
• Several people pointed to authors rather than specific books by them.  Primo Levi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, Abraham Twerski, and the Dalai Lama fall into this category.  A video lecture by Sacks was also particularly recommended.
• Speaking of video, one friend suggested “The Good Place” as a TV series that provokes reflection about these larger issues.

That’s all I have for now.  Further suggestions and thoughts are welcome!