Who Am I and If So How Many? (30 page)

The third key point of contention in Rawls’s theory is the role of reason. Rawls adopts the philosophical stance of a constitutional legislator, using reason, caution, logic, and fairness to design a universally applicable organization that takes into account the needs of virtually everyone (with the regrettable exception of those with severe mental disabilities). He starts from the assumption that his principles are universally valid; but is everyone as wise, incorruptible, and rational as John Rawls? There is no explicit discussion of feelings or emotions in Rawls’s book, which is surprising, since the entire theory hinges on feelings about justice. In the original position, beneath the veil of ignorance, this feeling of justice stems from self-interest. My own potential risk induces feelings of fear, so I look for general rules that would protect
everyone and quell this fear. Is justice Rawls’s way of channeling fear? Rawls does not say. Instead, he speaks only about a ‘sense of justice,’ and does not say much about its psychological origin.

Rawls contends that other intervening feelings, such as jealousy and envy, are highly problematic. He finds it exasperating that Sigmund Freud constructed his theory of justice on these very feelings, and he argued that only the disadvantaged clamor for justice. In Rawls, by contrast, the sense of morality seems to form part of man’s nature much the way it does for Marc Hauser (see ‘The Man on the Bridge,’ p. 132). Rawls does not devote much research to this instinct but rather uses it as a tacit premise, presumably because he – like Kant – took the old-fashioned view that it was an innate law of reason and not a feeling.

The question of whether justice or wealth should be ranked higher sets Rawls apart from utilitarians (see ‘Aunt Bertha Shall Live,’ p. 139). Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill had to figure out how a free individual’s pursuit of happiness could make for a just society, but Rawls had to show how a just society can lead to freedom and hence to the happiness of all. For Bentham and Mill, the state is a necessary evil; for Rawls, it is the moral legislator. This very line divides political factions even today. Is justice a matter for the state or the individual? As far as Bentham and Mill are concerned, when considering matters involving an individual’s interests, if that individual’s actions do not unduly restrict or impinge on other members of society, the state has no business intervening. Its role is that of a night watchman who sounds the alarm only when the building is on fire. For Rawls, by contrast, the state functions as a wise leader and dedicated teacher, in charge of reconciling interests wherever the need arises. The pluralism of individual aims – this was Rawls’s last major topic before his death – ceases when it poses a serious threat to the pluralism of society as a whole. A state that is boundlessly tolerant of all political, ideological, and religious groupings can easily devastate its own foundation. Private pluralism must not be allowed to undermine political pluralism.

The theories are united in their rejection of the egalitarianism found in socialist countries. A society that aspires to nothing but equality, both argue, is at variance with human nature and inevitably stagnates or falls apart. Even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels shared this view, commenting in
The Communist Manifesto
: ‘The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’

It is intriguing to note that every theory of justice regards justice as a basis for happiness – yet justice is merely tangential to most philosophies of happiness. Rawls’s straightforward, candid
definition
of happiness is no exception: ‘The main idea is that a person’s good is determined by what is for him the most rational long-term plan of life given reasonably favorable circumstances. A man is happy when he is more or less successfully in the way of carrying out this plan. To put it briefly, the good is the satisfaction of rational desire.’ The matter-of-factness with which Rawls slips in the word ‘happiness’ when discussing the good is quite remarkable, and it seems an oddly unimaginative way of looking at human nature. From a psychological point of view, there is certainly room for improvement in
A Theory of Justice
. But if happiness does not lead to goodness, what else is needed?

The happiest people on earth do not have paved streets or many natural resources to speak of. They have no army. Some are farmers and fishermen, others work in restaurants and hotels. They do not understand one another especially well – their country has the highest concentration of languages in the world, with a population of two hundred thousand speaking more than a hundred different tongues. Their life expectancy is rather low; most live to be no older than sixty-three. ‘The people here are happy because they are satisfied with what little they have,’ explains a journalist from the local newspaper. ‘Life revolves around the community, the family, and doing good deeds for others. This is a place where you don’t have to worry much.’ The biggest concerns are tornadoes and earthquakes.

According to the first
Happy Planet Index
, published by the New Economics Foundation in the summer of 2006, Vanuatu is the happiest nation on earth. Vanua-what? Yes, this land really does exist. It is a relatively unknown island nation in the South Pacific, formerly known as the New Hebrides. The survey inquired into people’s expectations in life, their overall satisfaction, and their relationship with their environment. Evidently the optimal setting
for humans is life on a volcanic island with about seventeen inhabitants per square kilometer; a mild climate with plenty of sun and lush vegetation; a mix of indigenous religions and Protestants, Anglicans, Catholics, and Adventists; modest but fair-minded working conditions with many people self-employed; and a parliamentary democracy with a strong prime minister, a weak president, and the British judicial system. But the study, which included the environmental organization Friends of the Earth, was not after these kinds of details; its purpose was to determine the extent to which man needs to encroach on nature and inflict damage on the environment in order to create conditions that enhance human happiness. And the answer, with the victor here being Vanuatu, was a resounding: not much!

Compared to this volcanic island, the happiness factor in the wealthy countries of the industrialized world – the countries of progress, high life expectancies, and the most comprehensive array of consumer products, leisure time, and entertainment – is pathetic. Germany is in eighty-first place, though it is still the
fourth-happiest
country in Europe after Italy, Austria, and Luxembourg. The ever-admired Scandinavian countries of Denmark (112), Norway (115), Sweden (119), and Finland (123) are all in the lower half. Life is much happier in China, Mongolia, and Jamaica. The perceived quality of life in the United States, ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ (150) and in oil-rich Kuwait (159) and Qatar (166) – two countries in which the native population is relieved from the need for gainful employment by
government-provided
social services – is pretty miserable. Bringing up the rear of the 178 countries in this index are Russia, Ukraine, the Republic of the Congo, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe.

Let us leave aside the likelihood that the days of a happy Vanuatu are numbered; global warming and the attendant rise in sea level may wash away this Atlantis before long. Let us ask instead what we can learn from the happy people in the South Seas. The first lesson is simple, clear, and certainly intended by the authors of the study: money, consumption, power, and the prospect of living to
a ripe old age are not what make people happy. That is an interesting message, especially at a time in which the income of broad sectors of the population is not rising, even in the wealthy countries of the West, which is presumably the reason that savvy institutes such as the New Economics Foundation are investigating the extent to which money makes us happy at all and whether income and possessions are useful gauges of the happiness and success of a society. In this regard, ‘happiness economics’ is a promising new branch of research, and its findings are remarkable. For example, surveys conducted by researchers in this field reveal that while the real income and the living standard in the United States has doubled since the 1950s, the proportion of respondents who report feeling happy did not keep pace but instead remained virtually constant over the past fifty years. A detailed calculation in another study concludes that upwards of a per capita income of about $20,000, happiness no longer rises proportionally to income. A straightforward explanation for this lack of increase in happiness is that acquiring things can make you happy in the short term, but owning things cannot. (See ‘Robinson’s Used Oil,’ p. 258.) Once basic demands have been met, new ones arise, and possessions are soon taken for granted. Prosperity is thus a relative matter. You are only as rich as you feel, and the point of comparison is others in your milieu. A welfare recipient in Germany is not likely to feel rich, yet the same sum of money in Calcutta might seem like a fortune.

The strange thing about these findings is that they do not have much of an influence on how we see our lives. The dream of financial independence is still predominant in the industrialized world, and achieving this dream is why we toil away for countless hours, although most of us never get to the point of being truly ‘free.’ Money and prestige are at the pinnacle of our personal value system, above even family and friends. This is all the more astonishing because the value scale of the happiness economists is exactly the reverse. According to this scale, nothing provides more happiness than relationships with other people: with one’s family,
spouse or partner, children, and friends. In second place is the feeling of doing something useful; this spot is often shared by health and freedom. The scale shows that most people in the wealthy West are ill advised to place so much value on money; doing so occasions systematically wrong decisions and striving for a security that few will achieve. People sacrifice their freedom and their self-determination to gain a higher income and buy things they don’t need in order to impress people they don’t like with money they don’t have.

The problem is that our way of thinking and our entire social system are built on this material orientation, which the writer Heinrich Böll satirized back in the 1950s in his ‘Anecdote on the Decline of the Work Ethic.’ His story goes like this: in a Mediterranean harbor, a poor fisherman is dozing in the midday sun. A tourist strikes up a conversation with him and tries to convince him that he should get out and fish. ‘Why?’ the fisherman wants to know. ‘To earn more money,’ replies the tourist, who quickly calculates how many additional catches could make the fisherman a wealthy man, with a large staff in his employ. ‘What for?’ the fisherman again wants to know. ‘You’d be so rich that you could lean back and relax in the sun,’ the tourist explains. ‘But that’s exactly what I’m doing now,’ says the fisherman, and goes back to dozing.

I remember this story because it was assigned reading in our middle-school German textbook, and our young teacher had great difficulty presenting its meaning to us. Most of my fellow students, quickly persuaded by the fisherman’s argument, responded by slacking off in class. In a desperate attempt to figure out why this utterly demotivating little story was part of the curriculum and supposedly pedagogically meaningful, my teacher defended the tourist and tried to convince us that more money would mean better health insurance and a secure pension fund for the fisherman. But the text was by Heinrich Böll, not Medicare. Was Böll really putting in a plug for safeguarding bourgeois values and avoiding unnecessary risk?

Happiness economists get more out of the fisherman story than the need for security that resonated with my German teacher. They regard a country’s divorce and unemployment rates as a better barometer of national well-being than the gross national product, and to measure the satisfaction level of a nation and success of a government, they would find it more useful to substitute a National Life Satisfaction Index. The economist Richard Layard, at the London School of Economics, is convinced that there is more to making people happy than simply owning things. People who strive for wealth and status exhibit symptoms of addictive behavior. The quest for material goods creates a perpetual state of dissatisfaction that precludes lasting happiness.

Consequently, the growth that industrialized countries aspire to does not result in happier people. Quite the opposite – people sacrifice their happiness in the quest for growth. Even though people today have more to eat, own bigger cars, and jet off to the Maldives, their state of mind does not improve with their purchasing power, as much as we might labor under this delusion. For Layard there is only one logical consequence: since people’s fear of losses outweighs the happiness associated with acquiring things, industrialized countries need to rethink their policies. Full employment and social tranquility, he argues, are more important than the growth rate of the gross national product. The message here is that happiness for all supersedes economic growth.

One can question the practicality of Layard’s claims, but we will leave that issue aside, since the point is perfectly plain: it is not wealth and money, nor is it age, gender, appearance, intelligence, and education that determines our happiness, but rather sexuality, children, friends, food, sports, and – first and foremost – social relationships. According to the World Values Survey – the most comprehensive and wide-ranging statistical document about sociocultural, moral, religious, and political values – a divorce has about as negative an effect on well-being as losing two-thirds of one’s income. Interestingly, the report shows that even the prospect of happiness contributes substantially to happiness itself. It
is virtually inconceivable for someone to live without a personal vision of and longing for happiness. The dream of happiness is always there – if only as a painful reminder of all we are missing.

All these statistics notwithstanding, happiness is actually a very personal matter. The key to happiness is in your hand. The philosopher Ludwig Marcuse wrote in his
Philosophy of Happiness
(1948), ‘My happiness is the moment of deepest harmony with myself.’ But achieving this harmony is no easy matter. If it is true that there is no single entity that constitutes the self, and there are only states of the self (perhaps eight in all), what does harmony mean? Who is harmonizing with whom? And is the state of happiness somehow more ‘substantial’ than those other states? When I am happy, am I actually closer to myself?

It is time once again to look to neuroscience and our old friends serotonin and dopamine (see ‘Mr Spock in Love,’ p. 49, and “‘A Quite Normal Improbability,”’ p. 237). The idea that happiness has some connection to body chemistry will come as no surprise to anyone who has enjoyed relaxing in the sun. Sunshine lifts the spirits; in neurobiological terms, it stimulates the release of serotonin, so it is no wonder that people in Vanuatu tend to smile more than they do here. Temperature determines temperament. But neuroscientific findings about the mechanisms that generate feelings of happiness are often greatly oversimplified. We are told that positive feelings activate the left hemisphere of the brain and negative feelings the right hemisphere. That sounds a bit like the crude brain charts used in the early nineteenth century. But the interaction of feelings and consciousness, of the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex, is not quite so simple. The only simple part is that certain substances, such as caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, and cocaine, all raise the production of dopamine and sometimes of serotonin, creating a little prickle of excitement and contentment. Still, that explanation reveals little about complex and
longer-lasting
states of happiness. Even when we enjoy relatively simple pleasures – such as a good meal – sight, smell, and taste each has a different role, and even the atmosphere, the anticipation of the
food, and other factors of that kind are important in instilling feelings of happiness.

The interplay between expectation and fulfillment is an intriguing aspect of situations that produce feelings of happiness – flirting or having sex, eating or traveling, sometimes even engaging in sports. Most neurochemical theories of happiness stop right there, before it gets interesting. Chocolate makes us happy because serotonin is released when we eat it; a mere whiff of it promotes the production of antibodies. Pleasant aromas tend to stimulate the release of serotonin. But simply increasing the amount of chocolate we eat, taking a steady stream of drugs, and surrounding ourselves with fragrant flowers will not do the trick. We have to look beyond these factors – to expectations. A jogger can experience a psychological rush because a long run releases endorphins and creates a ‘runner’s high.’ But a runner can feel very different types of happiness by breaking a personal record or winning a race. That extra something doesn’t stem from the natural reaction of the body while running; it comes about by way of the prefrontal cortex, which knows the runner’s personal record. The success rewards the runner with happiness. An expectation has been met or exceeded.

It is no wonder that neuroscientists are now attempting to trace the elaborate intersecting pathways of feelings and consciousness. Feelings of happiness are often more than simple emotions. The fact that laughter cheers up gloomy patients, and that there are even ‘laughter therapists,’ cannot be explained by simple reflexes. Studies have shown that the mere thought of a bad experience results in a weakening of test subjects’ immune systems, but if the investigator elicits pleasant memories, the subjects’ moods brighten on the spot, and their resistance is enhanced.

Feelings of happiness are highly complex. They can represent extremely positive emotions (pleasure, enthusiasm, delight) and result in heightened sensitivity, hyperawareness, and receptivity. Happiness elicits an optimistic take on one’s surroundings and has a constructive effect on perception and memory. When we fall in
love or experience success, everything suddenly appears a little rosier. Self-satisfaction soars and our self-esteem feels dizzying. We tend to become outgoing, friendly, impulsive, spontaneous, flexible, and productive, and we feel as though we can move mountains.