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| Sunset on Kelley's Island, Ohio, Lake Erie |
Theistic philosopher J.P. Moreland has written about "happiness" as a poor goal to be sought after in The Lost Virtue of Happiness. J.P. presented chapter 1 of this text at our HSRM/Green Lake conference a few years ago.
The bullets are:
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American people are
addicted to happiness, and they overemphasize its importance in life.
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If, right now, you are
not tremendously happy, that's OK.
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Yet in America, if you
are not happy, or your children are not happy, it seems like the world is
falling apart.
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Given the American
emphasis on happiness, are Americans happy?
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The answer, says
Moreland (drawing on Martin Seligman's research), is that the rate of
depression and loss of happiness has increased tenfold in the span of just one
generation in America. We Americans are not a bunch of happy campers!
We have an epidemic of depression and the loss of happiness.
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Yet the Boomer
generation is twice as rich, a lot healthier, more youthful, and a lot safer
than our predecessors were 50 years ago. These are the kind of things that have
defined the "American Dream." We are now living in this
"Dream." We have more discretionary time. We have more money. It
takes longer to age. So we feel younger, longer. J.P. says: "There's just
one problem with this. All of this has not only not made Americans happier. We're slowly getting worse."
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Why is this happening?
Seligman's answer is this. "The Baby Boom generation forgot how to live
for something bigger than they were." Americans have been taught to get up
each morning and live for their own selves and try to find meaning in their own
lives, rather than live for something other than their own well-being and
bigger than they are. (E.g., those who now live for Pokemon.)
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From Moses to Solomon,
to Plato and Aristotle, to Jesus and Augustine and Aquinas, to the Reformers all the way up to the 1900s, everybody meant the same thing by 'happiness.' But
from the 1920s/30s on a new definition of 'happiness' was introduced and lived
by. This new definition of 'happiness' is: "a feeling of pleasurable
satisfaction." (See here, e.g.)
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"Happiness' has
become a positive feeling. Moreland is not against positive feelings; he'd
rather experience them then their opposite. But there are two problems with
this definition of happiness: 1) pleasurable feelings are not big enough to build your life around; and 2) the more you try to get of it the less
of it you have. "The best way to be happy is largely to forget about
it."
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Now watch this. 1) If
'happiness' is the feeling you have, say, when your team wins; and 2) the goal
of life is to be happy, which means to retain that kind of feeling; then 3)
your goal this year is to make sure that your job, your spouse, your church,
your children, etc., help you achieve that positive feeling named 'happiness.' All
the aforenamed things (job, wife) are but a means to making you happy. If a
man's 4-year-old wife doesn't make him "happy" he may trade her in
for a 20-year-old woman that gives him that hap-hap-happy feeling.
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The ancient definition
of 'happiness,' used by Aristotle and contained in the word eudamonia,
is: to live a life of wisdom, character, and virtue." Plato thought it
would be terrible if all a person did was spend his life worrying about
whether he was good-looking, wealthy, and healthy. Solomon tells us that
the happy person is the one who lives his life wisely, reverencing and fearing
God. In the New Testament the happy person is the person who looks like Jesus of
Nazareth and lives the way he lives.
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How do you get that? See
Matthew 16:24-26, where Jesus says: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny
themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to
save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find
it." Jesus is not here commanding us to do this. He is saying,
if you want to get good at life, this is what you have to do.
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If you want to get good
at life, if you want to be "happy," then learn daily to give yourself
away for the sake of God and others. J.P. says, "Give yourself away to
other people for the Kingdom's sake."
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If you do that, you end
up finding yourself. That's the upside-down logic of Jesus. "Happiness
makes a terrible goal. It is the byproduct of another goal, which is giving
yourself away to others for the Kingdom's sake."
***
My first book is Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.
***
My first book is Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.
