This is not a history of happiness and welfare of people through the ages. This is the story of Happiness as thought of by dead white European males (well, Camus makes an appearance at the end). I'm not using the DWM epithet only as a politically correct barb, but more as a warning the book has a narrow focus towards what can be gleaned from the researches of an academic historian.
Happiness, it turns out, is like Narcissus. It reflects the age as it wants to be seen by itself. The Greeks and Romans tended to reflect that happiness in life can only be recognized once the man's life is over and judged by the gods. (Well at least in their writings they did, I think the average Georgios or Georgius probably thought happiness was a bit closer to home, as did Odysseus.) And of course the Christians thought happiness was to be deferred until everlasting life.
The Enlightenment seems to be the time when thinkers came to the thought - Hey, happiness can be here and now and attained through reason. Of course that meant if you weren't happy then you weren't thinking correctly. Plus ça change. These thinkers set the stage for the rest of happiness thinking - in that now it was an internal challenge, the Don't Worry, Be Happy school. An interesting diversion from this is the Communist/Marxist strain where happiness is a class struggle (hammer, nail).
The author at the beginning did check his bias towards DWMs and stated he was Western focussed. Buddhism at the very least has a lot to say on the attainment of happiness (or the uselessness of the struggle), as well as Liberation theology and modern cults (he does have a section on the 1800's religious cults). McMahon's style is easy to read, he seldom falls into academic jargon. The propulsion of the chapter's themes make for a quicker read than I would have thought. In the end, he does do some tallying of psychology and sociology's research on happiness. It may turn out that happiness is attained by doing, not by thinking, believing or being something. In other words Don't just sit there and be happy, DO something! Darrin M. McMahon Darrin M. McMahon is a discursive writer which makes summarizing his books difficult. He is a philosophical historian who explores histories of speculation in wave of themes and variations. I own this one a good review in future. Darrin M. McMahon If you are looking for answers to the questions of how or where to find happiness this is not the book for you. However, if you want an expansive discussion and history of the idea of happiness in many, if not all, of its forms then this is the book for you. The author catalogues many of the most interesting interpretations of this elusive subject, while he avoids concluding precisely what it should be. This is a good place to look for beginnings to the search for answers rather than the answers themselves. One example from the Symposium of Plato links happiness with Eros:
Agathon, in a grand rhetorical flourish befitting a poet, concludes [the early portion of the discussion by saying] that though all the gods are happy, Eros is 'the most happy, since he is the most beautiful and the best.
The author is a professor of history at Florida State University and he can't avoid some subjectivity, but the success of the book is founded on its encyclopedic and accessible presentation of this most evasive idea. Darrin M. McMahon We from our selves alone, and not from Fate,
Derive our happy, or unhappy State....
If Fates Inconstancy we wou'd prevent,
We, in all States of Life, shou'd seek Content...
~William Wycherley
I've found one thing that doesn't make me particularly happy--
reading about happiness.
Or at least what those from all walks of life, all branches of history, and all realms of faith define as happiness.
While some of the history in this book was interesting (especially the ancient Greeks' and Romans' take on this God-given state), it began to irritate. Especially when one cannot figure in circumstances or stations. Happiness knows no classes or boundaries. A poor man can be content, while a rich man can be plagued with dissatisfaction, correct?
So, Shall I try and explain to you why a sunset is beautiful?
Why a pounding ocean surf is stirring?
Why a song can give me goosebumps or bring me to tears?
No. You will know it when you feel it yourself.
Darrin M. McMahon ¡Librazo! Definitivamente vale la pena leerlo.
En realidad son 4.5 estrellas ;). Le puse cuatro porque le faltó un poquitín de estructura y en varias secciones sentí que el autor estaba bastante sesgado (cofcof... cuando hablaba del comunismo XD), pero fuera de eso es un libro excelente =).
Un texto súper recomendado para cualquiera interesado en la historia, la filosofía, la ética/moral, la religión, la economía y/o la psicología. Mezcla historia, arte y las ideas de los exponentes más representativos del pensamiento occidental, es de verdad una delicia.
En pocas palabras: ¡léanlo!
Darrin M. McMahon
Read & Download Happiness: A History
Today, human beings tend to think of happiness as a natural right. But they haven't always felt this way. For the ancient Greeks, happiness meant virtue. For the Romans, it implied prosperity and divine favor. For Christians, happiness was synonymous with God. Throughout history, happiness has been equated regularly with the highest human calling, the most perfect human state. Yet it's only within the past two hundred years that human beings have begun to think of happiness as not just an earthly possibility but also as an earthly entitlement, even an obligation. In this sweeping new book, historian Darrin M. McMahon argues that our modern belief in happiness is the product of a dramatic revolution in human expectations carried out since the eighteenth century.
In the tradition of works by Peter Gay and Simon Schama, Happiness draws on a multitude of sources, including art and architecture, poetry and scripture, music and theology, and literature and myth, to offer a sweeping intellectual history of man's most elusive yet coveted goal. Happiness: A History
McMahon investigates how the concept of happiness came to mean what it means today. Starting out in Ancient Greece, where only a few godlike men were believed to be chosen to achieve happiness in this world and a happy life could only be judged in hindsight after a person's death, up until today, where science promises to discover the genetic secret to a happy life. The idea of happiness shifted throughout history, along with its perceived relevance and McMahon shows the different philosophical concepts at work in this detailled and well-reasearched book. This is NOT a self-help book and I was very glad that McMahon is not looking to tie everything up with a bow and his own definition of what happiness is today. For us, living in the Western world in the 21st century, it is important to keep in mind that neither happiness, nor the pursuit of it, was always considered to be a human right. Struggle, anxiety and uneasiness are features that were always assumed to be eternal companions of man's search for everlasting peace and bliss. I don't believe there to be anything everlasting in human endeavours, especially not happiness. What's new in our capitalist society where most people don't have to struggle for their daily existence, is the unhappiness about being unhappy. Constantly comparing ourselves with other people, we wonder if we are happy enough . And this is such a silly notion that this book was able to put into perspective for me. In fact, after 500 pages of people trying to define and achieve happiness, I'm rather glad that Shakespeare didn't write for an audience that expected a happy ending, and I'd even side with the character John in Huxley's Brave New World and claim my right to be unhappy. It might not exist for much longer.
...
But I like the inconveniences.
We don't, said the Controller. We prefer to do things comfortably.
But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
In fact, said Mustapha Mond, you're claiming the right to be unhappy.
All right then, said the Savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.
Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind. There was a long silence.
I claim them all, said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. You're welcome, he said.
Brave New World
*This book completes task # 10 of the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge 2015:
A microhistory Darrin M. McMahon What I learned:
People have never been happy, that's why there's a God. Darrin M. McMahon As a technical achievement, this is amazing: McMahon coordinated a great deal of learning and very specific histories of eras covering the last 2.500 years. So much thought must've gone into it.
As a history of happiness, though, the book is less invigorating. McMahon's thesis--that there was a fundamental change about the nature of happiness, going from something that may have been universally desired but not controlled, to something we thought we could control--but it's hard to keep track of that argument, as he gets very much into the weeds of the eras he covers and loses sight of the story he's trying to tell.
It reads very much like a book on Western Civ that incidentally hits upon the way verious historical actors conceptualized history. Darrin M. McMahon About happiness you can produce a library and still not get beyond generalities; that's the problem with container concepts, such as 'love' and 'peace'. This book on the history of happiness is quite an extensive study, and yet it covers only what great thinkers in Western history have written about the subject. This is intellectual history in the narrow sense of the word, at most a study of the intellectual concept of happiness. For those that love this kind of approach, this certainly is a successful book, with fine text analysis and a broad overview of the Western philosophical tradition. But this certainly is not a true history of mankind's search for happiness. Perhaps that is as elusive as the goal of this search itself? Darrin M. McMahon This book contains a kaleidoscope of views on the importance of happiness in a human life, and how best to achieve it. McMahon limits his study to the great philosophical traditions of the West, starting with the Greeks, which thus narrows his viewpoint considerably, but of course this is interesting on its own.
What you can learn from this historical overview is that the pursuit of happiness in the West is considered to be the core of human existence, but the concept of happiness has been filled in in many different ways, and also about the way to achieve this blessed state very divergent opinions exist. As we come closer to our present era, it is also clear that in our culture happiness has become a real obsession, and often this pursuit is itself a source of frustration and misfortune.
In his conclusion McMahon enumerates as one of the causes of that 'culture of unhappiness' the disappearance of the great narratives: Western people do not see any final goals anymore that are worth seeking out, which can make life meaningful, and therefore Western man has to put up with a hedonism that will never satisfy him. As McMahon himself points out, this unsatisfactory way of always striving for the higher, the better, the richer and the deeper, belongs to the core of human existence in the West, and consequently happiness is at most an ephemeral, temporarily state of being.
So, it may be better to join another, lately rather fashionable look at happiness: namely that happiness is overrated, that we must get rid of that obsession that makes us unhappy. Or surely get rid of that exaggerated, too absolute concept of happiness that we have been cherishing since the Enlightenment and Romantics in the West. Perhaps, instead, it is better to focus on what is good enough, on the small achievable things, the ordinary existence with a minimum of welfare and a minimum of standards and goals that are attainable.
But while I'm writing this, I feel the hunch that this is too little and too small and petty-bourgeois, and perhaps it is better to aim a bit higher. Nope, I guess mankind will never give up! Darrin M. McMahon