Attack of the MOMS - Part III

In Attack of the MOMS parts one and two, I think I did a pretty good job of showing that, at the dawn of the 21st century, we in the developed world are safer and healthier than our ancestors. (We're also safer and healthier than people in the developing world, but that's partly because we screwed up their countries so badly, so I can't really count that to our credit.) This leaves the big question: are we happier? And if so, is it real happiness or some Brave New Worldly pseudo-happiness?

Both questions are important, because those who believe in the Malaise of Modern Society argue both sides: some say that we are less happy than our ancestors; others lament the fact that our lives are so comfortable we have lost our sense of tragedy and succumbed to the anodyne, superflat happiness of contented pigs when we should be discontented Socrateses. Let us examine these one at a time.

It is hard to say whether we are more or less happy than our ancestors, given that in the Middle Ages, no one was wondering around with clipboards and microphones asking members of the public how happy they were. In fact, the sum of human happiness—meaning the ordinary happiness of ordinary people, not the beatitude of a few saints—wasn't even much of an issue until the nineteenth century. My guess is that people were pretty happy in the Paleolithic era since they were living in the kind of environment they had evolved for, but even then, life probably wasn't completely untroubled: watching your kids getting eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger can't be much fun. I would also guess that people in nineteenth-century Europe were somewhat less happy than we are, but this is only a guess, based on the fact that the nineteenth century had a lot of the things that generally make people unhappy, such as poverty, high infant mortality, cholera etc. What we do know is that most people in developed countries today think of themselves as happy. We could tell them that they're lying and in fact they're totally miserable, but what would this achieve? You could just as well tell someone with depression that deep down, they're positively joyful.

Speaking of depression, I am a little suspicious of all the talk about an "epidemic" of depression. Again, I'm not sure, but I suspect that this apparent mushrooming of misery is largely due to two factors: one, depression is now recognised as an illness, so people go to their doctor and get diagnosed with it; two, suicide is more acceptable in Western societies than it was in the past. On the other hand, I have to admit that loneliness is a major factor in depression, and modern societies provide more opportunities to be lonely than, say, a medieval village. Try feeling lonely when you have to share a bed with three siblings. It is also possible for a society to have both a high rate of depression and a high average level of happiness (hence the famous Scandinavian suicide paradox). We should also not forget that there is considerable variation between developed nations: "Around a quarter of British people, and more than a quarter of Americans, experience mental problems in any given year, compared with fewer than 10 per cent in Japan, Germany, Sweden and Italy."

So really, we can't know for sure, but I'd still say that your chances of happiness are higher in modern society. If someone asked me if I'd be happier living at a time before universal suffrage, the welfare state, antibiotics, sexual freedom and painless dentistry, it wouldn't take me long to make up my mind. For this reason, I'll go with the assumption that we are, on the whole, at least as happy as, and probably a little happier than, our ancestors.

What, then, of the second objection, that our supposed happiness is a fake? We've seen that telling someone that they don't feel happy is absurd (unless we are simply accusing them of lying). However, it may not be absurd to tell them that even though they feel happy, this doesn't mean that they really are happy. Certainly a fair number of philosophers would do just that, because the distinction between happiness as a feeling and happiness as living well has been around since Aristotle. There is plenty of empirical evidence to tell us that most people seem pretty happy, but it's mainly based on variations on two types of question: "How often do you feel happy?" and "How happy are you with your life in general?" People could answer positively just because they have low standards. A heroin addict feels happy and may well be contented with their life so long as they have a reliable supply of heroin, but this is obviously not the kind of life we would recommend, and most people would not describe this state as "true happiness".

The MOMS argument is that we have substituted feeling good for living well (or if you prefer the Greek, hedonia for eudaemonia). This is a harder claim to disprove, not least because there is less than complete agreement on what it means to live well. For Homer's Greeks, living well meant, as Tad Williams wonderfully put it, "sticking a spear in you then writing a poem about it." Aldous Huxley in Brave New World expects us to be horrified that Shakespeare is banned but thinks nothing of rewriting Oedipus Rex to give it a happy ending in Island. Attempting to answer the dual question "What is it to live well, and how well are we living?" smacks of hubris, but instead of leaving it well alone, I shall merely put it off until the next episode.