In an attempt to find a topic of conversation for today from the long list of websites I've bookmarked, a series of events lead me to an unusual article that is personally intriguing, but even more so, exceptionally relevant for this blog. An article from Boundless (an award-winning ministry of Focus on the Family) entitled "The Happiness Trap" focuses on the relationship between parenting and happiness, but I think the whole article gets at something broader and quite possibly more important when it comes to happiness. The article is by itself interesting, but I will dissect it below according to how it fits in with this blog as well as my interests. What does the word "happiness" mean? How do we describe it? Is it an accurate word to use to describe the emotional state of an individuals' emotional state or life, or even a country or society's state of being?This is what I'm getting at: everyone is "happy" sometimes, and "sad" sometimes. So in the grand scheme of things, happiness and the state of being happy doesn't really say anything about how someone is living; furthermore, the virtue and good fortune in our lives. Eudaimonia is the Greek word that is sometimes translated into the English word "happiness," but there is more to this word. The Greek word refers to an objective state of being: "a combination of living well (virtue) and doing well (good fortune)." The English word "happy", is very much subjective and short-term feeling, precisely what makes it challenging to define, but also nearly impossible to be able to describe an individual's life or an entire society as this. If you could chose, what would you want for society; a short term emotion of joy or long-term virtue, good fortune, and quality living.
I believe that quality living (meaning virtue, as well as good fortune) directly impacts and leads to the maximum amount of what we know as "happiness"; maximum amounts of feelings of "joy." This can ultimately enable us to be generally happy people, allowing us to spread this feeling to others and have positive interactions and effects on people. But it starts with a life of quality. On a different but related note, one of the most backwards notions of the American culture and society is the recurring theme that money and abundance creates happiness. People can acknowledge that this is myth, yet the culture we live in unfortunately makes the pursuit of wealth and abundance on the individual scale sometimes hard to escape. The infamous words from the U.S. Declaration of Independence "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" have truly lost their meaning, or through the years have been misconstrued to the average American. Do we really have the maximum "freedom" to "pursue" a "happy" state of mind?
Happiness is not something that can be pursued. Living well and doing well is. We must help create a society that promotes the state of living virtuous and well in order to create actions of doing well in commitment to a collective betterment of all people. Then, and only then will we have a society that we can call "happy."
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"What's true of the western tradition is also true of the eastern
tradition: In the Bhagavad-Gita, Lord Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna
that happiness lies not in some subjective state, much less seeking
after our own satisfaction, but rather from a whole-hearted pursuit of
goodness and harmony (sattva) and practice of spiritual disciplines (yoga)."
Eudaimonia defined by Google: (also known as Eudaemonism) a
Greek word, which refers to a state of having a good indwelling spirit
or being in a contented state of being healthy, happy and prosperous. In
moral philosophy, eudaimonia is used to refer to the right actions as those that result in the well-being of an individual.
Check out this Opinion Article from the New York Times about "Loving People, Not Pleasure" and the association between money and happiness.
Below I paraphrase my favorite quotes from Lyndon B Johnson's speech at the University of Michigan:
The purpose of protecting the life of our nation and preserving the
liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our
success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a nation.
For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For
half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry
to create an order of plenty for all of our people. The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom
to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to
advance the quality of our American civilization.
The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to
enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure
is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom
and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only
the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for
beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place
which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the
understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned
with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting
place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly
renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives
matches the marvelous products of our labor.
The three places where we begin to
build the Great Society: in our cities, in our countryside, and in our
classrooms. Fifty years from now,
there will be 400 million Americans, four-fifths of them in urban
areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will double,
city land will double, and we will have to build homes, and highways,
and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first
settled.
Aristotle said, "Men come together in cities in order to live, but
they remain together in order to live the good life." It is harder and
harder to live the good life in American cities today.
The catalog of ills is long, there is the decay of the centers and
the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our
people or transportation for our traffic. Open land is vanishing and old
landmarks are violated.
Worst of all, expansion is eroding the precious and time honored
values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss
of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference.
Our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today
the frontier of imagination and innovation is inside those cities and
not beyond their borders.
New experiments are already going on. It will be the task of your
generation to make the American city a place where future generations
will come not only to live, but to live the good life.
Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that
our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a
richer life of mind and spirit?
There are those timid souls that say this battle cannot be won; that
we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power
to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, and your
labor, and your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.
Let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will
look back and say, "It was then, after a long and weary way, that man
turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life."
This speech was given 50 years ago. Take a look at the last half century. As a society, have we been moving towards and building upon such ideals that allow a positive culture to flourish?
