Borsalino Test #28: On happiness
On happiness
Frigid oceans
Last winter I visited Ericeira for an off-the-grid, solo retreat. Ericeira is a cute little surf town off the Portuguese coast. I would surf on cold, early mornings and then curl up with a good book for the rest of the day.
One of the books I read while there is Endurance, the story of explorer Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 attempt to reach the South Pole. My business school professor recommended not to miss this timeless leadership story. But if you peel the layers, Shackleton’s journey is actually about happiness.
On the morning of 15 May 1916, Shackleton began the last leg of one of history’s most grueling adventures. His ship, the Endurance, had sunk in the Weddell Sea, stranding his crew on Elephant Island, Antarctica. Now, Elephant Island is nothing like Ericeira. It’s an uninhabited piece of rock fully glazed with ice. Definitely not on my list of future solo retreats.
After seven months, Shackleton and five of his crewmen boarded a small lifeboat. They spent three weeks crossing eight hundred miles of the frigid, raging ocean. The starving, frostbitten men prepared to disembark and cross the island on foot. No one had ever survived that trek.
Facing almost certain death, Shackleton wrote:
We passed through the narrow mouth of the cove with the ugly rocks and waving kelp close on either side, turned to the east, and sailed merrily up the bay as the sun broke through the mists and made the tossing waters sparkle around us. We were a curious-looking party on that bright morning, but we were feeling happy.
How could Shackleton have meant what he said? Could his happiness be my happiness? Is there any way to tell? Evaluating people’s claims about their own happiness is an exceptionally thorny business. Enough of a reason to write about it.
Catholics and the Spanish colonies
Now, there are thousands of books on happiness. Most of them start by asking what happiness is. This is equal to beginning a pilgrimage by marching into the first available tar pit.
Most disagreements about what happiness is are just semantic contentions. For example, try to make sense of the list of societies that consider themselves happier than others.
Finland is ranked the world’s happiest country. Followed by Denmark, Norway, and Iceland. The Netherlands and Switzerland came just ahead of Sweden. The Nordic nations take five of the top seven spots.
But some of the happiest countries have relatively high suicide rates. But what, besides being Nordic and rich, makes people happy? Fascinating clues are provided by countries whose ranking appears out of place.
Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan are the three least happy countries. And that is, sadly, quite expected. But Mexico ahead of France? Guatemala ahead of Saudi Arabia? Panama ahead of Italy? Colombia ahead of Kuwait? Argentina ahead of Japan?
These pairs form a curious pattern. Their second members are richer, more stable, less violent. They offer a considerably easier life than the first countries of every pair. Those countries may be relatively poor and even violent. But they are all former Spanish colonies and overwhelmingly Catholic.
So are we to infer that if you cannot be a Nordic country, you should convert to Catholicism and start learning Castellano? Is that the path to happiness at non-Baltic latitudes? Does that seem an applicable, intelligent solution to you?
The subjective experience of yellow
Let me take a step back and start by breaking down the semantics. The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things. Let's call them emotional happiness, moral happiness and judgemental happiness.
Emotional happiness is the most basic of the trio. So basic, in fact, that we become tongue-tied when we try to define it. Consider how we might define a subjective experience such as yellow.
You may think yellow is a color, but it is not. It’s a psychological state. It is what human beings with working visual apparatus experience when their eyes are struck by light with a wavelength of 580 nanometers.
Philosophers like to say that subjective states are ‘irreducible’. Nothing we point to, nothing we can compare them with, and nothing we can say about their neurological underpinnings can fully substitute for the experiences themselves.
Emotional happiness is like that. It is the feeling common to the feelings we have when we see our new niece smile for the first time, receive a work promotion, taste Kantine’s Tebirkes, make sweet love to our partner, ride a wave in Ericeira or peak on a tab of LSD. Or even cross Elephant Island on foot.
The LSD trip is not the niece smile, which is not the work promotion or the intimate sexual experience. But all are forms of feeling that occupy different points on a scale of happiness. In each of these instances something is generating roughly the same pattern of neural activity.
If you are a human being who lives in this century and shares some of my cultural conditioning, then my pointing and comparing between experiences will have been effective and you will know exactly which feeling I mean.
More sophisticated than pigs
Bright thinkers throughout history recognized that people constantly seek emotional happiness. Philosophers though consider the desire for happiness to be a bit like the desire for a bowel movement. Something we all have, but we are not especially proud of.
The kind of happiness they have in mind is cheap and base. A vacuous state of ‘bovine contentment’ that cannot be the basis of a meaningful human life. As the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote:
‘It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.’
Emotional happiness may be fine for pigs, but it is a goal unworthy of sophisticated beings like us. Philosophers consider perfectly tragic for life to be aimed at nothing more substantive than a mere feeling.
For Socrates, Plato and Aristotle the only thing that could induce true happiness was the virtuous performance of one’s duties. The precise meaning of ‘virtuous’ is left for each philosopher to work out for themselves.
Christian theologians added a nifty twist to this classical conception. Happiness was not merely the product of a life of virtue. It was the reward for a life of virtue, and that reward was not necessarily to be expected in this lifetime.
So if living one’s life virtuously is a cause of happiness, and not happiness itself, why do we call both the cause and the consequence by the same name? This is getting chaotic!
Sharing a pastry
Philosophers have muddled the moral and emotional meanings of the word happiness. Psychologists have muddled the emotional and judgmental meanings equally well and often.
People sometimes use the word happy to express their beliefs about the merits of things. I would say things like ‘I’m happy Trump didn’t win the elections’. Even when I am not feeling anything vaguely resembling pleasure.
How do we know when a person is expressing a point of view rather than making a claim about their subjective experience? When we say we are 'happy about' or 'happy that', we are noting that something is a potential source of pleasurable feeling. That’s a judgement, not an actual experience.
For instance, when your partner excitedly asks you to share your Tebirkes right before you are about to taste the first, cream-filled bite, you may say ‘Of course I'd be happy to share it with you’.
It would be more appropriate for you to tell your partner something along the lines of ‘I am not happy, but I understand you will be if we share the pastry, so let's do that'.
Speaking like this would require that you forsake all possibility of human companionship. So you opt for the common shorthand and say you are happy about things even when you are feeling thoroughly distraught. That’s fine, just as long as you keep in mind that you don’t always mean what you say.
Shared beliefs to tame chaos
Clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson criticizes the idea of happiness as a proper goal for life. His argument is that in a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual.
So if happiness is not a proper life goal, why is the word so rich in substance and disputed definitions? Why would so many philosophers, psychologists and Antarctic explorers mull over it?
Because a shared belief system simplifies everything. People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another. They can cooperate on Trans-Antarctic expeditions. Because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else.
Shared beliefs simplify the world. Because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world. There is nothing more important in the maintenance of complex organizations than simplification. Which is why we share pastries we'd rather eat by ourselves.
It isn’t that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight, instead, to maintain the balance between what they believe, what they expect, and what they desire. They will fight to maintain the match between what they expect and how everyone is acting.
It is precisely the maintenance of that match that enables everyone to live together peacefully, predictably and productively. It tapers the chaotic mix of intolerable emotions that uncertainty inevitably produces.
A shared cultural system stabilizes human interaction, but is also a system of value. Some things are given priority and importance and others are not. In the absence of such a system of value, people simply cannot act.
In fact, they can’t even perceive. Because both action and perception require a goal, and a valid goal is something valued. We experience much of our positive emotion in relation to goals. We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we see ourselves progressing. And the very idea of progression implies value.
The meaning of life without positive value is not simply neutral. We are vulnerable and mortal. Pain and anxiety are an integral part of human existence. We must have something to set against the intrinsic suffering of Being. We must have the meaning inherent in a profound system of value or the horror of existence would rapidly become paramount.