June 13, 2024

The International Day of Happiness was March 20 this year, and I missed it.  In fact, I have been missing it since the United Nations resolution of 2012 declaring it a yearly event.  I had no idea there was a Day of Happiness. I also missed the World Happiness Summit that took place in London over March 20-21.  I am not sure whether I am unhappy about this or not. 

I have decided to write on “happiness” since it is clearly in the air, though unfortunately only as a concept, not a reality.   But I admit I have had to conquer some resistance to do so.  In the end, it was only Thomas Jefferson who persuaded me to take the idea seriously by means of his ringing affirmation in the Declaration of Independence that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are universal and inalienable rights.  If not for that, I might be persuaded to reject “happiness” as a narcissistic and smiley-button concept, a euphemism for self-involvement.  Isn’t happiness just the contented bubble of unreality chosen by those who have the luck and privilege to escape from the world’s sorrows?  Keats’s late and unfinished poem The Fall of Hyperion is a dream vision in which the poet finds himself on a height in front of a stern judge named Moneta, trying to defend his choice to become a poet rather than a physician.  Moneta is scathing:

“None can usurp this height,” return'd that shade,
“But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.
All else who find a haven in the world,
Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,
If by a chance into this fane they come,
Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half.”

In other words, to aspire to be happy by not feeling pain is to aspire to the condition of a corpse, or at least half a corpse.  But clearly Jefferson had something else in mind, and it is worth trying to discover what it is. 

Ironically, I have been forced to take the idea of happiness seriously by recognizing the destructive consequences of its absence.  And those are all around us.  It is increasingly recognized that the United States is in a fiercely negative, reductive mood right now, one that finds its focus in a hostility to Joe Biden and particularly to Bidenomics.  The reason for that hostility is the 15-20% rise in prices produced by a period of inflation caused by pandemic supply-chain problems plus the war in Ukraine.  Inflation is now tamed, and wage increases have more than compensated for the price increases, at least in general.  The economy continues to generate new jobs beyond the expectations of economists.  Yet, according to opinion polls, the majority of the public thinks we are in a recession.  The pessimistic mood is so at odds with the economic facts that one writer coined the term “vibecession,” which has caught on.  Economists, who have a bad habit of thinking of people as rational, are increasingly puzzled by this.  One explanation is of a kind of national PTSD.   People were not yet recovered from the economic meltdown of 2008 when they were hit by the pandemic, the malicious chaos of Trump and the Republican Party, which has done all it could to fan the flames of discontent, plus increasing anxiety about climate change, which is becoming less and less deniable in the face of terrible storms and heat waves.  Whatever the cause, in the polls, even people who admit they are not economically afflicted express a bleak attitude about the country and the future. 

Whenever economist Paul Krugman, in his column in the New York Times, tries to push back against the irrational negativism, he is inundated with a tidal wave of furious letters denouncing him for his smug, privileged self-righteousness.   Many of them attack his self-righteousness rather self-righteously, without really addressing the facts he has put in front of their nose.   The attitude seems to be, “I’m not happy, and you’re not going to make me happy.  The more you try, the more irritable I’ll get.”  Without wanting to dismiss the genuine misfortunes of some people, I find that some of the respondents remind me of certain senior citizens in the apartment complex for which I was janitor when I was young, who sat in their apartments day after day marinating in their misery, complaining about one problem after another, though it was clear that these were just pretexts.  I think some of them had no idea why they were unhappy, and grabbed at any convenient excuse.  The serious risk is that, by irrationally blaming Biden for their unhappiness, the negative people may in November very well elect Trump and end American democracy. 

It may seem odd that the UN has decided it is part of its job to promote happiness.  But this is partly attributable to the influence of such people are Richard Layard, Lord Layard, an economist, co-director of a Community Wellbeing Programme within the London School of Economics, and co-editor of the World Happiness Report. The title of a recent article by Layard in The Guardian summarizes the point of view of a number of books he has written on the subject: “It’s Not the Economy, Stupid:  Wellbeing Is the Real Vote Getter.”  Simply improving people’s economic lot will not necessarily get you votes if the improvements do not also improve people’s sense of wellbeing.   And wellbeing is exactly what has been regarded as expendable by the neoliberal economics of the past 30 years.  Neoliberalism, which could be called laissez-faire lite, provided a way for an educated professional upper middle class to prosper, but only at the cost of a frenetic lifestyle of overwork, competition and job insecurity, compounded by a lack of social services such as parental leave and childcare.  Also, through outsourcing, union busting, automation, and student debt, it pushed the lower middle class to the brink of falling into the ranks of poverty, debt, and unemployment, unable to pursue happiness, otherwise known as the American Dream.  At the same time, through deregulation and tax cuts, it created a new Gilded Age of income inequality, resulting in the quasi-oligarchy of the 1%.   All of this has combined to produce the depression and anxiety that afflict so many of my students, and that enabled the rise of Trump as a false populist. 

But with Trump came not just depression and anxiety but rage.  Trump is the king of rage.  He is perpetually not just angry but furious and full of hate.  It may not be scientific, but I think being in a state of constant, intense anger over years has started to burn out his brain.  And his hate is gasoline on the flames of MAGA resentment, flaring it into white-hot anger.  This can be seen happening at his rallies.  But there is also a quieter, permanent effect, the inculcation of an attitude that I can only call spite. In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the rebel against God who calls himself the Misfit says that, if Jesus did not really redeem the world, there is “No pleasure but meanness.”  Whatever may be true about Jesus, such spiteful meanness manifests itself everywhere, and some people clearly take pleasure in it.  Trump of course is its master.  He is constantly hurling vicious insults against people, especially women.  The mini-Trumps imitate the master, competing to see who can be the meanest of them all.  Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Jim Jordan, and Majorie Taylor Greene are a pack of nasties who could intimidate Tolkien’s Orcs.  While anger can at least be cathartic, spite is more like a festering disease that eats people away from within, and it has spread by contagion across the Internet. 

Whether or not social media cause spitefulness, they are its Petri dish.  I am not much involved with social media, but I do subscribe to two subscription services that email me each day’s new comic strips.  I have learned by experience to resolutely avoid looking at the Reader’s Comments under new strips, which are almost certain to leave me angry and disheartened.  This is especially true of perhaps my two favorite strips, Crankshaft, by Tom Batiuk and LuAnn by Greg and Karen Evans.  There are parallels between the two strips, both of which gently satirize the foibles of a large cast of flawed yet lovable characters.  On a daily basis, these strips elicit comments ranging from the petulant to the outright abusive.  Positive comments are vanishingly rare.  Both the characters and their creators are harshly judged.  When good-hearted LuAnn makes a fool of herself out of minor vanity or insecurity, we laugh at her gently—except for the contingent who pretend to be morally outraged.  The creators can do nothing right.  “What made Batiuk think this was actually funny?”  “This continuity is going on too long, and I’m bored.”  “What a stupid idea this sequence is.”  A common stance is of the irate customer who has been cheated by being offered an inferior product:  “If Batiuk tries to pawn off such shit to his audience, he deserves to be called on it.”  To which I feel like shouting, “Batiuk and the Evanses have been creating a well-loved, award-nominated work of art for over 50 years.  Have you ever created anything, anything at all?  Why do you read it if you hate it so much?”  But I know that answer to that.  They read the strips because they hate them, because the strips give them the pretext to be spiteful.  But why these strips, both of which are so gentle and compassionate about their characters’ human flaws?  Exactly because these strips are so accepting and humane.  Their mood, and their benign portrayal of the human comedy, provoke the backbiters, who envy the mood of comic inclusiveness, though they will never admit it, and who are determined to destroy a happiness that they feel shut out of, denying their envy by sneering that the strips are sappy and sentimental.  Such envious spite is exactly Iago’s motive for plotting to destroy Othello and Desdemona’s happiness; it is exactly why Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost swears to undo Adam and Eve, when he sees how happy they are, “emparadised in one another’s arms.” 

Anyone, from the highest social levels to the most ordinary, may become a victim of the spiteful crowd.  Traditional poets showed great men and women harassed and sometimes brought down by its power, in the form of gossip, which has always spread like wildfire: all the Internet did was provide a more efficient vehicle.  In the Aeneid, Virgil personifies spiteful gossip as Rumor, and comes close to making it the cause of the tragedy of Aeneas and Dido.  Once they begin their affair, Rumor acts like paparazzi, sniffing them out and spreading tales:

In those days Rumor took an evil joy
At filling countrysides with whispers, whispers,
Gossip of what was done, and never done:
How this Aeneas landed, Trojan born,
How Dido in her beauty graced his company,
Then how they reveled all the winter long,
Unmindful of the realm, prisoners of lust.
         (4.259-65, Fitzgerald translation)

Eventually, Rumor insinuates her tales into the ears of the desert chieftan Iarbas, who becomes furious with jealousy and wounded honor, thus threatening Carthage. 

In Book VI of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, one of the evil figures is the Blatant Beast, a doglike monster, yapping cur on steroids, who bites at the heels of the great, because they are great:

No wound, which warlike hand of enemy
Inflicts with dint of sword, so sore doth light,
As doth the poysnous sting, which infamy
Infixeth in the name of noble wight:
For by no art, nor any leaches might
It ever can recured be againe.   (Book VI, Canto 6, lines 1-6)

The Blatant Beast is captured by his opposite, Sir Calidore, the knight of Courtesy, which is largely a power of language, language that is conciliatory rather than divisive.  But, alas, the Beast escapes and is still at large when Spenser’s unfinished epic breaks off, and is still at large today, still nipping at nobility. In the bitter poem “Parnell’s Funeral,” Yeats treats the fall in 1890 of the Irish politician John Stuart Parnell, and with him the cause of Irish Home Rule, as a victory of the Blatant Beast, working by his usual method:  Parnell was brought down through the revelation, for political reasons, of an extramarital affair:

          But popular rage,
Hysterica passio dragged this quarry down.
None shared our guilt; nor did we play a part
Upon a painted stage when we devoured his heart.

Today, Harry and Meghan, whatever their faults, have been the target of unconscionable abuse both from the tabloids and the likes of professional poisoners like Piers Morgan. 

But commoners are not exempt. I recently read of a woman who posted a tweet about how she loved sitting for a long time in the morning at breakfast with her husband, whom she loved so much.  The woman was repeatedly stung by a swarm of waspish respondents.  Some assumed (wrongly) that anyone who could afford to sit for a long time at breakfast must be rich, not needing to work, and flaunting her privilege.  Others assumed she was boasting of her relationship happiness and replied, “Well, good for you.  Let me tell you what crap my relationship is, and just you wait until you’ve been married longer.”  Once again the common element is envy.  If I can’t be happy, I will at least take satisfaction in destroying your happiness.  Envy combined with peer group bonding has always driven the “mean girls” syndrome among young women.  In Goethe’s Faust, Gretchen, pregnant out of wedlock by Faust, overhears a group of young women gossiping about another unmarried girl who is now pregnant, saying things like “She has at long last gone too far. / That comes from stuck-up airs” (lines 3447-48) and “At last she’s getting her comeuppance. / How long she’s hung upon the fellow’s neck” (3550-51).  But what if the child’s father marries her?  “If she gets him, we’ll make it hot for her. / The lads will tear off her wreath, and we, / We’ll scatter chaff at her door, you’ll see” (3574-76, Walter Arndt translation).  That exotic word, Schadenfreude, satisfaction at another’s misfortune, hides a contemptible reality.  Misery loves company.  Why does it?  Because it’s unfair that someone else thrives while I do not. 

In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (4.3), the opposite of petty, spiteful small-mindedness is what is usually translated “magnanimity,” literally “greatness of soul” (megalopsychia).  Aristotle says at one point (4.3.16) that magnanimity is “a crowning ornament of the virtues: it enhances their greatness.”  Spenser projected The Faerie Queene in 12 books, each book dominated by a knight exemplifying one of 12 virtues that he claimed (not quite accurately) were postulated by Aristotle’s Ethics.  King Arthur himself was to exemplify what Spenser, confusing two of Aristotle’s terms, called “magnificence,” but he most likely intended “magnanimity,” the virtue of virtues.  The magnanimous man is above all petty, selfish motives, what Maslow would call deficiency motivations.  He is genuinely, not falsely, modest, the latter being a disguised form of vanity.  Although he does not care much for honors, he knows what he is worth, and he honestly knows he is worth more than most people, so he often comes off as arrogant, although he is not, merely accurate.  He does not hold a grudge, and refuses to gossip or speak ill of others.  He loves to confer gifts but is ashamed to receive them.  He does not take self-proving risks, but, as Yeats says, “A great man in his pride / Confronting murderous men / Casts derision upon / Supersession of breath.” His is a kind of aristocracy of the spirit rather than of birth, and he confronts the “murderous men” composing the mob that is always the greatest danger to a democracy.  The mob is murderous because of envy:  its inferiority complex reflexively hates the great-souled man’s natural superiority. 

Mark Twain shows the great-souled man confronting murderous men in chapters 21 and 22 of Huckleberry Finn.  A character named Colonel Sherburn is harassed and annoyed by a rowdy drunk named Boggs, who is loud and makes threats but is, the townspeople claim, actually harmless.  Sherburn, after putting up with Boggs’s antics for a while, says he has had enough and gives Boggs until 1:00 to settle down.  When Boggs continues his drunken theatrics, Sherburn shoots him dead in front of his daughter.  A lynch mob gathers in front of Sherburn’s house, where Sherburn faces them with a double-barreled gun and makes a speech that goes on for an entire page:

The idea of you lynching anybody!  It’s amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man.  Because you’re brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a man?  Why, a man’s safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind—as long as it’s daytime and you’re not behind him…. | The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.  But a mob without any man at the head of it, is beneath pitifulness.  Now the thing for you to do, is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole.  If any real lynching’s going to be done, it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they’ll bring their masks, and fetch a man along. 

And that’s what the mob does, slinks off fearfully.  Why is this scene in the novel?  Does Mark Twain intend us to admire Sherburn, a Clint Eastwood character who takes the law into his own hands on the grounds that, under the circumstances, that’s the only law there is?  We are left uncomfortable, pondering a question that, as the mob proved on January 6, is a difficult one for American democracy. 

Is such a person happy?  It might seem that the great-souled man might feel himself above mere happiness as he is above “mere” everything in his Olympian detachment, an ideal with some resemblance to Nietzsche’s Overman or Superman.  The ideal seems akin to the Stoic ideal of apatheia, the absence of unhealthy emotion, which means most emotion.  Stoicism had an influence on later Christian thinking: “Nor love thy life, nor hate, but what thou liv’st / Live well,” Michael counsels Adam at the end of Paradise Lost.  Apatheia led towards the condition of ataraxia, which can be translated “equanimity” or “tranquility.”  Yet it is the Ethics that famously defined the goal of the good life as happiness, and there may be a tension running through its argument that a deconstructionist would expose.  The Aristotelian word usually translated “happiness,” eudaimonia, literally means “good spirit.”  The word implies a “good” condition that resembles that of a daimon or spirit, hence something suggestively godlike, with all needs fulfilled.  The text is interpretable, but it is perhaps reasonable to conclude that the great-souled man is the one who has achieved eudaimonia, and who is therefore happy.  We speak of being in good spirits. 

All this may seem migraine-inducive. We have delved into it because it is the Ethics that has posited the ideal of happiness for the entire subsequent history of social thought.  Let me suggest a way of simplifying the argument that is inherent in Maslow’s well-known hierarchy of needs.  Jefferson said that people had a right to the pursuit of happiness.  To achieve the end state of eudaimonia or happiness, the state that the magnanimous or great-souled have achieved, one has to climb a ladder, pursuing the fulfilment of the lower needs step by step.  Each step reaches a new level of fulfilment, rising from the physical fulfilments of physiological and safety needs through the part-physical, part-psychological needs of love and power (really what Maslow meant by self-esteem), culminating in “self-actualization.  Recently, some writers have been making a distinction between happiness and “well being.”  There is no consistency in the way that happiness is distinguished from well being, but it would be useful to employ “well being” for the fulfilment of more physical needs.  If I am well fed, have rest and a feeling of safety and security, I may feel a sense of well being.  Failure to fulfil basic needs produces anxiety, trauma or PTSD, dependency, greed, and aggression. 

In that case, Jefferson’s pursuit of happiness is really pursuit of well being, pursuit of what we all physically need no matter what our race, gender, sexual orientation, political or religious ideology.   Although their lists do not correspond, Maslow’s idea of basic needs and Frye’s idea of primary concerns have a close resemblance.  Richard Layard agrees with this.  He quotes Jefferson, saying, “This idea was born in the 18^th-century Enlightenment.  It was probably the most important idea of the modern age.”  I would qualify this by saying that what the Enlightenment did was revive the Classical idea of happiness as the goal of the good life that goes back to Aristotle’s eudaimonia, trying to adapt it to the conditions of modern democracy.  Layard is attempting to convince those in power that the ideal of happiness in the sense of well being is not hopeless idealism but hard-headed political common sense: 

The people’s life satisfaction is the best predictor of whether the governing party (or parties) gets re-elected. It is a better predictor than economic growth, unemployment or inflation. That is what evidence in national elections in Europe since the 1970s and in recent US presidential elections shows. It’s not “the economy, stupid”. It’s people’s wellbeing. | Keir Starmer [head of the Labour Party] gets this. He has promised: “With every pound spent on your behalf we would expect the Treasury to weigh not just its effect on national income but also its effect on wellbeing.”

Happiness, as compared with well being, is more psychological than physical.  It is an emotion, and therefore intermittent rather than constant.  Maslow’s “peak experiences” are outbursts of happiness that are more than just euphoria but seem to be a temporary expansion of being.  As their metaphorical name implies, they can be considered momentary Pisgah sights in which we can see the Promised Land of self-actualization in the distance—and not just see, but momentarily experience what Maslow calls the farther reaches of human nature.  Maslow’s theory also takes into account what some theories do not: the fact that happiness is never final, never an end-state.  Richard Shindell has a song titled “Are You Happy Now?”  We may say yes—but wait five minutes.  In an essay bearing one of his typically lighthearted, anti-pedantic titles, “On Low Grumbles, High Grumbles, and Metagrumbles,” Maslow cautions that we never stop grumbling:  “In other words, everything above implies very strongly that human beings will always complain” (231).  We are never happy more than temporarily—but that is okay, because we may hope to progress to a higher level of grumbling.  He begins by remarking that “one can judge the level at which people live by the kind of humor that they laugh at”:

The person living at the lowest-need levels is apt to find hostile and cruel humor very amusing, e.g., the old lady who is getting bitten by a dog or the town moron who is being plagued by the other children, etc.  [Note that “moron” was an actual psychiatric term when this was written].  The Abraham Lincoln type of humor—the philosophical, educational type of humor—brings a smile rather than a belly laugh; it has little to do with hostility or conquest.  This higher type of humor cannot be understood at all by the person living at the lower-level needs.  (229)

What unhappiness means likewise depends on the level at which a person is living.  It is not that we are never happy or satisfied, unless we are Goethe’s Faust, but our happiness is temporary: new dissatisfactions arise, but on a higher level.  To make things more complicated, in the workplace, a complaint may be only a pretext.  We have seen how that works for low-level functioning, in the neurotic people who complain about everything but who are really unhappy in themselves.   But it works on the highest levels as well: when a high-functioning employee complains about inefficiency, it is possible that “he is making a statement about the imperfection of the world in which he lives”  (231).  Management needs to be clear about this:

Therefore, I am concerned to stress this point very heavily because I see in the management literature a considerable amount of disappointment and disillusionment, and an occasional giving up of the whole philosophy of enlightened management and going back to authoritarian management, because the management has been sharply disappointed by the lack of gratitude, by the continuation of complaints when the better conditions came to pass.  But we should, according to motivation theory, never expect a cessation of complaints; we should expect only that these complaints will get to be higher and higher complaints…  (232) 

But this shrewd remark is relevant not just to managers but to individuals.  If I ask myself, “What is wrong with me?  Why at my age am I still not happy?” I should also ask whether I have progressed to higher levels of unhappiness. 

It may at first seem redundant, but the distinction between happiness and well being, between emotional and physical fulfilment, provides an entrance into a subject that is not often discussed in the literature, the happiness of people who have to live with certain chronic physical afflictions.  For some people, well being is either not possible or its meaning has to be redefined.  The extreme case is people with terminal illnesses, but there are so many people who have to learn how to live with chronic pain, weakness, nausea, disabilities, etc.  When you teach, you begin to realize how common this is.  Such people find ways at least to cope, at best to find contentment, within the limits of illness and pain.  Devotion to a greater task is one way of being happy without well being.  Nietzsche wrote his books despite a horrific catalogue of physical afflictions, and Stephen Hawking’s mind ranged the universe while his body was confined to a wheelchair.  The blindness of Milton and Joyce was compensated by the inner sight of their imaginations.  People have become champion athletes despite the loss of a limb.  And, of course, old age is one long lesson in finding happiness despite increasing physical limitations. 

The famous discussions of happiness are either Classical or post-Enlightenment, because happiness is a worldly motivation.  The Christianity of the Middle Ages and Reformation distrusts happiness, even repudiates it.  No true happiness is possible in this world.  Our efforts should instead be focused on salvation and the next world, where we are promised a happiness that will be eternal.  The 17^th and 18^th centuries, however, saw the ascendency of the idea that humanity was responsible for its own salvation and its own happiness, which meant improving life in this world, something that necessitated social change, maybe even revolution.  That made the upper classes quite nervous, resulting in some curious intellectual gyrations, such as in Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man in 1733.  The 4^th of the Essay’s four Epistles is titled “On the Nature and State of Man, with Respect for Happiness.”  It begins:

O Happiness! Our being’s end and aim!
Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! whate’er thy name,
That something still which prompts th’eternal sigh,
For which we bear to live, or dare to die;
Which still so near us, yet beyond us lies,
O’erlooked, seen double, by the fool and wise…  

But as the discussion proceeds it becomes clear that Pope is caught in a bind.  The Essay is a religious work: Pope begins by saying that he intends “to vindicate the ways of God to man,” in other words, to imitate Milton in Paradise Lost.  But also to correct Milton, for Milton was a revolutionary who sought to improve this world by overthrowing the monarchy.  God’s ways need justifying because the good suffer while the wicked flourish.  Milton justifies God by pointing to the Fall of Man, which led “to loss of Eden, and all our woe.”  If we live in a vale of tears, it is because we made it so, but we have the power, with God’s grace, to “repair the ruin of our first parents,” a phrase that occurs in Milton’s definition of education.   But Pope is a Tory, and a Roman Catholic at that.  He has given himself the thankless task of explaining the world’s unhappiness without either blaming God for it or suggesting that we should, God forbid, alter the social order.  All he can do is basically to deny the Fall, which he does in his famous phrase, “Whatever is, is right.”  All the misery of the world, which Moneta castigates Keats for evading, is really part of God’s plan—he looks at it and somehow finds it good.  “God sends not ill, if rightly understood” (line 113), Pope insists:

Remember, Man, ‘the Universal Cause
Acts not by partial but by gen’ral laws,’
And makes what Happiness we justly call
Subsist not in the good of one, but all.  (lines 35-38)

Which is to say, you may have to take one for the team.  Happiness is general, not individual, and God can’t always grant what will make you happy because it may conflict with others’ needs.  This is of course evasive nonsense: how does allowing a child to have cancer benefit the general good?   But it is the type of thing that those who benefit from the social order have to say.  Nothing can be changed, because it is God’s will and part of God’s plan.  Happiness, then, consists in a willing assent to things exactly as they are—fine if you live Pope’s comfortable, well connected life.  If you are an orphaned street beggar, well, your true happiness is in the next world anyway.  

Even within traditional mythology this kind of reactionary conservatism is not the only possible answer.  Spenser was a Puritan, and therefore should have believed in salvation by “faith alone,” not by “works.”  Yet in The Faerie Queene he depicts chivalric knights dedicating their various gifts, their virtues, to the endless task of making the world a better place.  Nor does he see this as a challenge to monarchy:  to the contrary, Arthur and the Round Table are symbols of this ideal of recreating the world insofar as we are humanly able, though always with the help of grace.  The danger of focusing on “happiness” is that it can become self-obsessed.  But two of Spenser’s six virtues are Love and Friendship, and a third, as we have seen, is Courtesy, the empathetic language that makes all social bonds possible.  Modern therapists agree with Spenser:  the happiest people are those with strong and multiple social connections—friends, family, lovers, colleagues, teammates.  The central parable of Jesus is that of the Good Samaritan, who does not pause to consider whether the traveler by the roadside is part of God’s plan, but just stops and helps. 

It is clear that, if Keats had lived to finish The Fall of Hyperion, it would have made a case that the poet shares with the physician the task of trying to make the world happier, patient by patient, reader by reader. What he might have granted to Pope, however, is that, although everything we do is temporary, and the happy events of our lives disappear and leave not a wrack behind, that might not be the full story.  The ruins of time, Blake said, build mansions in Eternity, and in some mysterious way, our happy moments that vanished decades ago may be waiting for us, not “after” death, but in a dimension of being that is somehow here and now, the kingdom that is spread upon the earth, as Jesus says in one of the Gnostic gospels, and yet we do not know it. The imaginative effort to wake up and know it and the effort to improve this world are the contemplative and active modes of the same thing.  If there is a source of happiness, it is faith in and dedication to that twin effort, the process of the imagination, in which we live and move and have our being. 

References

Maslow, Abraham.  “On Low Grumbles, High Grumbles, and Metagrumbles.” In The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.  Penguin, 1976.  Originally published in 1972.  229-38.

Pope, Alexander.  An Essay on Man.  In The Complete Poetical Works of Alexander Pope. Cambridge Edition.  Edited by Henry W. Boynton.  Houghton Mifflin, 1903. 

Twain, Mark.  Huckleberry Finn. In Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings.  Library of America, 1982.

Virgil, The Aeneid.  Translated by Robert Fitzgerald.  Vintage, 1980.