Happiness and Its Pursuit in Modern Society - Essay Example

Happiness and its Pursuit in Modern Society Number Number Teacher’s Due Happiness and its Pursuit in Modern Society Happiness is something that many have attempted to define. In the past, many have attempted to define happiness but have eventually mostly settled for a defined it as an absence of sadness, like Arthur Schopenhauer did through most of his writings (Wicks). Philosophers, theologians, economists and literary figures have often thought of happiness as an ephemeral state that is surrounded on every side by the inevitable sorrow that crowds human lives. Happiness has thus, always been an elusive emotion as far as analyses of it are concerned. In life, people do experience happiness, though. Even the most thorough of pessimists do feel a certain kind of happiness at a certain point of time. Such emotions are inevitable in people as they are social animals who cannot remain isolated from the happiness of other people. This fact makes the analyses which focus on happiness as a merely individual emotion, thereby relegating the emotions of the collective as inferior, less thorough and meticulous than they claim to be. The importance of such analyses lie in their efforts to analyze the individual human psyche and it can be of great help in an analysis of the collective consciousnesses of people in a society. The acquisition of happiness is something that most societies crave for. The pursuit of it too must thus, be done at a collective level. This paper shall seek to provide an analysis as to whether happiness can be found in modern society. The paper shall seek to look through economic, theological, political and philosophical perspectives to analyze the pursuit of happiness. The above paragraph talks about how people can be happy only as a society. However, studying an individual may help in understanding how this is possible. Thinkers have tried hard to define happiness but a neglect of collective groups has led to difficulties in this. Happiness can be attained in a world where people have an opportunity to better their lives at an economic level. This, as Robert Malthus said, is not possible in a world which is overpopulated. Happiness could only follow the satisfaction of bare essentials in the life of a person. According to Malthus, people would not be able to satisfy their wants if there were too many of them, since he felt that nature had resources only for a limited number of people. If the number of people would be more than the number that nature could feed, there would arise an imbalance that would essentially, lead to many people remaining unhappy for the want of resources to supply their demand for certain goods and services (Landsburg). In the absence of such resources, people would have to sacrifice many of their desires, the satisfaction of which may have led to happiness. The lack of happiness may also be because there are more people than there are resources. This creates situations where some cannot get what they want. This leads to unhappiness. This is an economic view of the matter. In an alternate view on the entire matter, Andrew Oswald argues that even an excess of wealth in many situations cannot lead to happiness. It may; however, it also may not. He talks of the need to create different parameters for the evaluation of happiness among the people of a country. Among these parameters, he includes the independence that a job brings in the lives of the women of a nation. Such happiness may not be related to a corresponding increase in the income but the abstract happiness that is gained by the feeling of independence that they gain through performing a task that is productive for themselves and the society (Oswald). The contrasting opinions that are provided by the two economists that have been just discussed may be owing to the time that has elapsed since the theories that were forwarded by Malthus. The theories that have been advanced by Oswald can be seen as a development of the theories that were prevalent earlier. They talk of a departure from classical economics that privileged the quantity of wealth that a particular person possessed as opposed to the quality of life that he or she led. The importance of this theoretical shift lies in the fact that it allows for the possibility of happiness for all. Happiness thus becomes a condition that can be arrived at collectively, a contagious state of being that society can inherit from the individuals that constitute it. Oswald argues that money is not enough for happiness even though it may be one of the things that people want. This is different from what Malthus said and looks at the happiness of society as a whole. Philosophers too, have thought of the nature of happiness. Plato talks of how man would never understand the reality of his existence as all he was able to see were reflections and shadows. He elucidates this theory of his in the “Allegory of the Cave”, where he talks of how whatever man saw and felt were merely shadows of what existed in a heavenly space of ideas. The happiness that man felt was thus, nothing more than an illusion. According to this definition, earthly happiness is an impossibility and it was not possible for man to attain it unless in heaven (Plato, 253-61). This view of the unhappiness of the philosopher was attested by another great philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. He felt that philosophers like Socrates would not be able to attain happiness because of the very nature of their meditations that were based on the nature of life and the larger narrative of it (Nietzsche, 46). Plato and Nietzsche have taken a metaphysical view of the question. Plato says that the happiness that people feel on earth is merely an illusion. Nietzsche says that such arguments would make happiness impossible for the philosopher. Religions of many parts of the world too, talk of such concepts. Christianity for instance, talks of how the earth is a site of suffering. This suffering has to be borne meekly so that heaven may be attained, heaven being the site of all happiness. The concept of heaven being a common one among many religions of the world, earthly happiness becomes an impossibility for many religions across the world. Equally terrifying to the prospect of happiness is the concept of hell. The prospect of everlasting torment becomes for many people the ultimate symbol of the denial of happiness. The everlasting and eternal nature of this torment makes the prospect of it all the more terrifying. There are however, thinkers like Jose Luis Borges who argue against the eternal nature of hell. They term this an illusion that is inconsistent with the rest of Christian theology and also the benevolent nature of God who feels sad at the loss of every human soul (Borges, 12). The pursuit of happiness thus becomes one that for people crosses even the limits of the human life and human mortality. Religions sometimes glorify suffering and persecution and say that true happiness is possible only after life on earth. They say that heaven is what true happiness is. One would understand when one is happy when one feels contented about what one does in life and about what one has achieved. This feeling can be achieved when one sets certain goals in life and achieves them through the amount of hard work that that person is capable of. For this to happen, the person must first be aware of his or her own strengths and weaknesses. This would help the person in the setting of reasonable goals that are in accordance with the abilities and talents of that person. Working hard to achieve one’s goals seems to be a viable way of achieving one’s goals in a world where the globalized and capitalist world seek to provide people with opportunities to receive their due. The manner of the organization of the economy of the world being the way it is has a lot to do with the manner in which economists have started to think of happiness. It is probably because of this that a country like Bhutan adopted a different standard of measuring the well-being of its people. While the Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) of its neighbouring countries have soared in the past few years, unhappiness and inequality remains high in these countries. On the other hand, Bhutan has attempted to keep its progress and development very equitable and has attempted to distribute the wealth of the nation in such a manner that the wealth would result in no person of the entire nation falling a prey to starvation. The switch to democracy that had been effected in the recent past in the Bhutanese state has not affected the way in which this nation perceived development. The manner in which Bhutan has able to achieve its targets in the field of human resource developments is a lesson to the other developing nations of the region which have not been able to provide an equal distribution of the nation’s wealth to its citizens (Results of the Second Nationwide 2010 Survey on Gross National Happiness). Vast differences remain in the way in which social organization is done in these economies and this results in disappointments and unhappiness in these countries. The concept of happiness, if it is sought to be measures through the kind of analyses that are conducted by Andrew Oswald, may help in the bettering of lives of the people who live in third-world countries all over the world. It may lead to a change in the way the poor are perceived in countries. It may also help the rich to sort out the problems that they may have in their lives since all hindrances to happiness need not be economic in nature. Concepts like Gross National Happiness make it clear that mindless economic growth will not lead to happiness. The development of a country needs to be measured in terms of how happy its people are. The different definitions of happiness and the different perspectives that have been employed in this paper have still not been able to provide a definition of happiness that would satisfy everybody. The ways in which one may be able to attain this state are in today’s world, mostly economic. However, it is true that the attainment of such states depends greatly upon the collective state of the society. Works Cited Plato. The Republic. Tr. Benjamin Jowett. London: Vintage, 1991. p 253-61. “Results of the Second Nationwide 2010 Survey on Gross National Happiness”. Gross National Happiness. http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/ Accessed on 25th March, 2012. Wicks, Robert. “Arthur Schopenhauer”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/ Accessed on 25th March, 2012. Landsberg, Lauren F. “The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics”. Library of Economics and Liberty. http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Malthus.html Accessed on 25th March, 2012. Oswald, Andrew. A Non-Technical Introduction to the Economics of Happiness. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/oswald/intro.pdf Accessed on 25th March, 2012. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. www.inp.uw.edu.pl/.../twilight-of-the-idols-friedrich-neitzsche.pdf Accessed on 25th March, 2012. Read More