It begins with feasting

The Pursuit of Happiness:  From the Greeks to the Present
by Damn McMahon
(Allen Lane, 2006, 560 pages)

There are two images that are engrained in the reader's mind after reading The Pursuit of Happiness.  One is of Raphael's "School of Athens", of Plato and Aristotle centred in the picture, Plato in mid-step with one hand pointing to the sky, Aristotle with both feet on the ground with one hand parallel to the earth.  The other is an absurdly futile mathematical formula intended to calculate benevolence, developed by Francis Hutcheson in the eighteenth century.

These images describe the ultimate pursuit -- Plato yearns for some divine, heavenly answer whereas Aristotle concerns himself with more earthly matters.  Likewise, Francis Hutcheson, and later the utilitarians, yearn for some concrete measurement that might place a value on human morality.

Both Raphael's "School of Athens" and Hutcheson's formula epitomise an inner conflict that McMahon attempts to confront in his ambitious history on happiness.  It is a conflict between reconciling our ceaseless hunger for satisfaction with the ever-lingering thought that we can never be completely content -- this is the pursuit of happiness.

The book itself is a very detailed and well-researched history.  Its strength is the objectivity that McMahon has endeavoured to create when dealing with countless competing opinions on the subject, from Thomas Aquinas to Karl Marx.

Each thought and idea is given serious consideration and we are left to draw our own conclusions.  McMahon continually draws upon new ideas that have come and gone since the early texts of the Greek philosophers, and in doing so brings forth important philosophical as well as political considerations when dealing with the problems of our own time.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty with writing a history on happiness is the definitional problem.  If we wish to incorporate the concept into psychological studies or even governmental responsibility, we must at least know what the word actually means.  McMahon's history shows an evolution of the meaning, a constantly evolving but ever-present idea that changes shape and size depending on the general ethos of the society and the times.

For the Ancient Greeks, instability and frequent violence made pleasure a scarce luxury, and happiness a state only attainable through death.  "Where life is governed by uncertainty, one can count no man happy until he is dead", writes McMahon.  Drawing on the writings of Herodotus and the remaining Greek tragedies that have survived the march of time, McMahon interprets happiness during this period as not simply a description of the emotional highs with which we tend to equate happiness today, but a symbol that recognises man's achievement in his work, health, relationships and harmony with the world.  McMahon writes:

Happiness, rather, is a characterisation of an entire life that can be reckoned only at death.  To believe oneself happy in the meantime is premature, and probably an illusion, for the world is cruel and unpredictable, governed by forces beyond out control.  A whim of the God's, the gift of good fortune, the determination of fate:  Happiness at the dawn of Western history was largely a matter of chance.

While happiness certainly celebrated human achievement, the ability for men to actually direct themselves to this goal was practically impossible.

It was a concept that would eventually find a new home in Christianity, a "gift of God" that would be "imparted only at death and only to a chosen few".  McMahon points to a chapter title in one of St Augustine's works -- "True happiness, which is unattainable in our present life".  Original Sin had stripped us of perpetual bliss, punished us with knowledge, and cast us into a world of suffering and pain redeemable only after death.  "The struggle of the journey", writes McMahon, "was itself a constant reminder that struggle was not in vain, for to suffer was to suffer in righteous punishment".

The most interesting part of McMahon's history, and perhaps the most important, comes during his description of the Utilitarians.  Bentham, in his quest to calculate pleasure, was unable to do so.

Tis in vain to talk of adding quantities which after the addition will continue distinct as they were before, one man's happiness will never be another man's happiness:  a gain to one man is no gain to another:  you might as well pretend to add 20 apples to 20 pears.

Perhaps Bentham's discovery (or lack thereof) is the greatest of all arguments for a free and liberal society.  If one man's pleasure is another man's pain, how can any government, or any central authority, successfully hand down orders or pass laws that aim at distributing happiness amongst the people?  When UK Conservative leader David Cameron argues that "it's time we focused not just on GDP but GWB -- General Well Being", it is hard not to take this as just another futile effort to measure the immeasurable.

Contemporary debate on happiness has left-wing critics drawing on the argument that happiness and liberalism are at conflict, and this argument is given ample consideration in the book, and perhaps even a slight endorsement from the author.  When McMahon describes the "troubling thought" that "the majority might actually prefer its petty fortune" to "higher joys" and "Socratic delights", it is hard not to be slightly unsettled by the thought that even the more objective of authors (at least in this book) may be prone to enforcing his own beliefs on the judgement of others.

There is a clear theme that McMahon uses to encompass and bound this history, and it is the age-old idea that the pursuit of happiness is ultimately a tragic one.  "The tragedy of happiness" (which may have been a more accurate title for the book) is not so much a philosophical concept anymore, but a condition inherent in our nature that is supported by contemporary evidence.

"The same research that testifies to human beings' ability to pick themselves up after a fall" writes McMahon, "also suggests a dismaying tendency to waft back to earth when we have risen too far from the norm".  That we will never achieve perpetual happiness, that our satisfactions continually climb to more demanding heights, is considered a "tragedy" by some.  From Darwin to contemporary evolutionary psychologists,

In what they call the "tragedy of happiness" or "the hedonic treadmill", they point out that human beings display an undeniable tendency to quickly accommodate themselves to their pleasures -- to grow bored -- and then become anxious or uneasy in their satisfaction.  Like junkies in need of a fix, we need variety in our pleasures or greater doses of the same when the initial "rush" wears off.  It is this longing -- a form of pain -- that sends us in renewed pursuit.

There are problems with this concept, however, not so much with the explanation of our infinite desire, but with the claim that this is somehow a tragedy.  That our needs can never be fully satisfied is not a tragedy but an extraordinary gift, that without them we would simply stop moving and die out.  Though this is acknowledged by proponents of evolution, it is nonetheless painted in tragedy, suffering, and "longing" by some, including McMahon:

Is not this desperate longing for good feeling -- this frantic, frenzied pursuit -- a symptom of the evaporation of meaning, or the belief in meaning, in other ends?

McMahon's criticism of the pursuit of pleasure will inevitably lead the author to criticise contemporary society in general.  "The problem for many in the contemporary world", writes McMahon, is that people "find it hard to set long-term goals other than good feeling, to chart narratives that give hope, conviction, and purpose in their lives".  This is always useful advice, but probably one that's been given every year since man has learnt to communicate.  When reading the early pages of McMahon's text, of the "privileged male dinner parties" of Ancient Athens "that began with feasting, end with fucking, fuelled by binge drinking and sometimes fighting along the way", the contention that modern man is somehow more materialistic and vulnerable to the simple pleasures becomes utterly unconvincing.

Though the conclusions of the author leave much room for disagreement, they are disagreements that are, ironically, harnessed by the objectivity that McMahon has, for the most part, presented in his history.  That we are able to draw our own conclusions from this smorgasbord of philosophy makes this a rare and ultimately rewarding history.