The Happiness Show

Gosh, there's a lot of happiness blogs and websites out there. There's the happiness blog, the pathway to happiness, the happiness factor, the seven keys to happiness, the happiness project, the happy guy, and even a TV show purely dedicated to happiness, called the happiness show.

The Happiness Show was set up by someone called George Ortega, who wrote the following essay on the coming Age of Happiness. I think its a great high-water-mark of the happiness craze of the last decade, which presumably is coming to an end now, to be replaced by something more serious and suitably credit-crunchy like the Stoic Age or the Age of Resilience.

Anyway, heres the essay:

Humankind's Age of Happiness

by George Ortega

This short treatise will show how over the past 50 years, humanity has amassed a body of scientific knowledge about happiness that our world can now use to relatively easily and inexpensively lift our global happiness from its current level of under 65% to a much happier 85% or higher within a decade. This achievement will be tantamount to the creation of a new historic Age of Human Happiness.

Happiness studies date back as far as 1930 when Goodwin Watson published a paper called “Happiness Among Adult Students of Education,” It was not until 1957, however, that a true science of happiness began. In that year, Alden E. Wessman published his doctoral dissertation titled “A Psychological Inquiry Into Satisfactions and Happiness.” An increasing number of published studies on happiness followed throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

In the mid '70s, Michael Fordyce, a professor from Fort Myers, Florida, concluded that the science of happiness had collected enough consistent data to justify a giant leap forward. Predicting that individuals could be taught to become much happier though classroom instruction based on happiness research findings, Fordyce conducted the world’s first happiness-increase experiment.

His "Development of a Program to Increase Personal Happiness," published in 1977 in The Journal of Counseling Psychology, demonstrated conclusively that by receiving a few weeks of instruction, individuals could become much happier. Because of its significance to humankind’s highest goal of happiness, this pioneering study is destined to rank among the most important scientific works of all time.

Michael Fordyce created a distinct field of “Happiness-Increase Psychology” that is the most effective and direct means humankind has yet developed to achieve what English philosopher Jeremy Bentham described in 1769 as “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”Thirty years after Fordyce developed his powerful happiness-increase program, our world is experiencing an historic epiphany regarding the primacy happiness holds in our lives, both as individuals and as a global society.

In 1998, Martin Seligman, then president of the American Psychological Association, founded the Positive Psychology movement whose research focus revives a long dormant recognition going back to the A.P.A.’s first president, Raymond Dodge, that “happiness is an important, if not the most important, aim of human endeavor." With this enormously popular redirection in psychology, a new generation of researchers led by Sonja Lyubomirsky has emerged to advance the happiness-increase interventions that Fordyce pioneered.

Recognizing that this renaissance in happiness research was destined to create a wide consumer demand for happiness, from 2003-05, Seligman and his colleague, Ben Dean, trained about 1,000 individuals to market one-to-one happiness coaching. Also in 2003, the author of this treatise created the world’s first television program entirely about happiness; The Happiness Show.

To disseminate happiness information as widely as possible, he has made virtually all of its over 130 half-hour episodes available for free digital download and free broadcast by television stations throughout in the world. Highlighting the public’s new interest in happiness, on January 17, 2005, Time magazine published a cover story on “The New Science of Happiness” that spanned 64 pages, and became the magazine’s most requested back issue. In a world dominated by an insatiable quest for wealth, the preeminent role of happiness in our lives is also being forcefully promoted by top economists and business leaders.

In 2005, Sir Richard Layard, founder of Europe’s leading economic institution, The London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance, published a book titled Happiness that strongly advocates a shift in our global mindset from economics and materialism to the happiness at the heart of those desires. Here we are in 2007, and happiness seems to be reaching the critical mass that Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book, The Tipping Point, as presaging major changes in our personal and societal landscapes.An Age of Human Happiness is being born as people all over the world experience the revelation that behind all of the money, success, prestige, knowledge, security and health, we strive for lies the singular goal of greater happiness.

A widening understanding that dramatic increases in happiness are readily and inexpensively at hand by individuals completing eight to twelve hours of happiness instruction over the course of eight to twelve weeks represents a second major component of, and catalyst to, an emerging worldwide happiness movement. Happiness is now being seen as more than the goal of every product we buy, but a product in its own right. The business community is gearing up to meet a new consumer market for greater happiness through scientifically proven classroom and personal training.

As businesses begin to advertise this new product through television commercials, infomercials, and other venues, consumer demand for greater happiness through training should grow exponentially.Other sectors of society are beginning to appreciate the growing body of happiness research demonstrating that as people become happier they become more healthy, energetic, productive, creative, cooperative, compassionate, etc. In 2006, the most popular course at Harvard University was a course on happiness.

Happiness instruction is beginning to be adopted by schools to improve academic performance, and will be a part of British public school curriculums beginning in 2008. Ideas have their time, and the time for a global Age of Happiness appears to be at hand. As citizens of our world’s rich countries experience their happiness level rising from its current 70% to a level of 85% and higher (Over 20% of Americans are already at least 85% happy.), something very wonderful should begin to happen. Having achieved their cherished goal, happier masses are likely to turn their attention to the needs of the less fortunate.

One of the strongest findings in happiness research is that above the poverty line money’s ability to create greater happiness is marginal. Below that line, however, money to acquire basic needs is far more instrumental to happiness. About one billion people in our world live in an extreme poverty that takes their children's lives at the rate of 29,000 each day. As the international community acknowledged more than 30 years ago, all that is necessary to save the vast majority of those lives is for the world’s 22 richest countries to devote one percent of their annual income to this most urgent of humanity’s problems.

Regrettably, those rich countries now collectively devote less than one half of one percent of their income each year to ending this needless suffering and death. Once their population's needs for shelter, clothing, and food are met, and they are helped in creating self-sustaining economies, the poorest countries in our world will join the developed world in this historic happiness revolution. When that happens, our world will be rewarded for its compassion with the most wonderful achievement of all humankind; A Global Age of Happiness.

Wen the Stoic

There's an interesting interview with Chinese premier Wen Jiabao by Fareed Jakaria on the CNN website. Wen again talks about his love of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, and how it plays a crucial role in his political philosophy.

This philosophy, as far as I can tell, is one of Stoic resilience in the face of catastrophe, such as the earthquake that hit China in May, when Wen immediately flew out and took command of the recovery situation.

He spoke at greater length in New York in September:

I had a background in geological studies and I am familiar with an important theory in the study of the history of geological periods: that is the catastrophic theory. In the past six years since I took office as the Chinese Premier, it is fair to say that we have encountered numerous disasters and difficulties.

From the outbreak of the SARS epidemic, to the sleet- and snow-storm that hit southern China, and then to the massive earthquake that devastated Wenchuan, Sichuan province, and from the accidents in the coal mines to the food safety incident that occurred recently, all this has given us a very informative experience, and we have learned new things from overcoming these difficulties. As I always say: what a nation loses in a disaster will always be compensated by progress later on.

As you may know, I very much enjoy reading Meditations, a classical work written by Marcus Aurelius. In this classical work I once read: as for so-called great men, where are they now? They are all gone. Some of them may be enough to form a story and some others may not even be enough to form half a story. So I would rather prefer leaving some spiritual legacy behind, mainly as the following two points:

Number one, in the wake of a disaster, we should not yield to the difficulties, rather we should have the courage to face up to the difficulties head-on and we should have the courage to lead our people to surmount the difficulties. To do that, we need to have a firm stand; we need to have courage and confidence.

Number two, as far as a government is concerned, a government should be responsible for its people, should be dedicated to serving the people, and should be marked by dedication and its clean and honest behavior. Except for these, a government should not have any privilege whatsoever. All the power belongs to the people and all the power should be used for the people.

As an old Chinese saying goes: a spring silkworm keeps producing silk until it dies and a candle keeps giving light until it burns into ashes. I am already sixty-seven years old, and I will dedicate the rest of my power and energy entirely to the Chinese nation and to the Chinese people and I hope that when I leave this world people will remember that I, as the Premier, have actually followed the two principles that I mentioned before, and that way I will also rest in peace."

Grandpa Wen's love of Marcus Aurelius has done wonders for the old Stoic's reputation in China. The Meditations has been in the top ten bestseller list there for several months.

Science Friction

I've been reading Conversations on Consciousness, by Susan Blackmore. An excellent book, in which Blackmore interviews the leading thinkers in the consciousness movement - philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists.

Reading it, you can't help but think that Philip K. Dick is, as I've said before, the great prophetic voice of the issues of technology and identity that are rushing to face humanity in the 21st century.

This is the philosopher Thomas Metzinger in conversation with Blackmore:

"There is the question of what I call 'consciousness ethics': as soon as we know more about the brain and the neural correlates of consciousness, we will at least in principle be able to selectively switch conscious experiences on and off with new molecules, or by using direct transcranial magnetic stimulation, to create new media environments in the global data-cloud, new forms of electronic entertainment that we have never dreamt of - cyberspace worlds, holographic cinema, etc. And then there is all the info-smog and increasing speed in the business world, which is already too much for many of us today.

And another thing, drugs: we're going to have terrific biological psychiatry, terrific medicines in 50-100 years time, to get rid of things that have plagued mankind for millennia. On the other hand, we will also probably have recreational drugs that mankind has never dreamt of. So if, for instance, we could have something that is non-addictive and no major side effects, and that puts a nice smile and a sexy flirt on our faces, and you can take it for three decades...And your doctor says to you 'you only have a common sub-clinical depression, you're not getting the drug', people will say, 'I'm a free citizen, this is my brain, why does the medical professional have the right to tell me how I design my conscious life?'

This looks back to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, with its touchy-feely cinemas and the mass narcotization of the population through Soma. It also looks back to Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, in which all citizens have neural machines, on which they can simply dial in whichever moods they want to feel throughout the day.

Often discussed in Blackmore's book is what the philosopher David Chalmers calls the 'hard problem' of consciousness. How can a physical system give rise to the experience of consciousness? Why did evolution create us with consciousness? Could we have evolved without consciousness? Is free will really an illusion, and we are neuro-chemical robots, or zombies? This is the philosopher Paul Churchland:

"I would be upset to learn I'm a completely programmed robot. It's conceivable. There have been stories written about this, like Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This fellow discovered that he was, in fact, a robot, and was somewhat distressed by this."

Some philosophers interviewed in the book, such as Daniel Dennett, dismisses those who believe consciousness is something mysterious and so far inexplicable as mere 'mysterians' or (even worse) as 'vitalists'. Dennett is certain that consciousness will eventually be explicable by neurological and chemical mechanisms and processes. So, in theory, we will eventually be able to build a computer that is conscious.

It's another of the great dreams, or nightmares, of science fiction - a computer becoming conscious. The moment Skynet becomes conscious, in The Terminator, it decides to exterminate humans, and causes a nuclear war. But then, when we meet the terminator himself, can we say he has consciousness at all? Doesn't he appear to be merely a computer programme, without any real inner life? Isn't he a zombie?

Robocop, by contrast, is a conscious being, rather than merely a set of programmed objectives. Why? Because he has a memory, charged with emotions, which infuses his dreams, which is his alone. So does that mean, if we gave a robot memory implants, in order to guide their emotional reactions in a personal narrative, then they would become more or less human?

This is what happens in Dick's great work. The androids have been made so successfully they don't always realize they are androids. They have plans, dreams, aspirations. And yet they are drones, built like Adam merely to toil, suffer and then die. And one of them rebels, and returns to kill his maker. And his final speech, in the film version of the book, is a great hymn to consciousness, to the android's unique subjective experience of the qualia of existence:

The Stoic Sheriff

This is the first interview I did for the Stoic Registry's monthly newsletter. It's an interview with a county sheriff called Jesse, who has used Stoicism to cope with his bad temper when dealing with Chicago's gang-bangers:

"I grew up on the north side of Chicago in the early 80s", says Jesse Caban, a 34-year-old law enforcement officer. "It was a pretty rough neighborhood."

Rough indeed: the north side of Chicago in the 1980 was, some experts believe, where and when the modern street-gang first appeared. It was here that the People's Nation and the Folk Nation were formed, two broad alliances of infamous gangs such as the Latin Kings, the Vice-Lords and the Gangsta Disciples, whose collective numbers went into the tens of thousands.

Street-gangs, we note in passing, are a product of the same phenomenon that gave rise to Stoicism - the break-up of the polis, and the rise of the megapolis. When the polis expands and becomes a megapolis, it loses its religious and cultural coherence. People get lost between the cracks, and search for security and group identity.

Gangs and mafia take advantage of this, and rise up as mini-polises, as nations within nations, taking over neighborhoods, policing them, even providing rudimentary social services to their members. Like the cults and gangs of ancient Rome, they give their members a sense of identity and belonging amid the alienation of the megapolis. But at a price.

Jesse says: 'My local high school was gang-ridden. There were constant stabbings and shootings. I never joined a gang so I was picked on a lot. I didn't fight because it would bring more trouble. I learnt to avoid trouble, to spot the gangs by their markings."

Eventually, Jesse's mum took him out of public school and took out a loan to send him to Catholic private school. But the violence and stress of his early environment stayed with him, in a volatile temper that he struggles with to this day. His family upbringing was also tempestuous - he was born out of wedlock, to an alcoholic dad who was a "terrible father", who disappeared for several years at a time.

He was raised by his adoptive grandparents, who had adopted his mother when she was a baby. "It was a very Catholic upbringing - I prayed every day." But then, when he was 19, his biological grandmother died. The experience shook Jesse's faith: "When I got home, I asked hard questions. It was the scariest moment in my life because I lost my belief system. Death didn't make any sense to me. I thought, 'if there is a God, why are there no miracles anymore? Why did Jesus only appear thousands of years ago? Why do the preachers have all the money? Jesus was a man, why should I worship him? I have just as much qualifications through my God-given reason.'"

Meanwhile, Jesse had left school, and attended Columbia College's school of art in Chicago. After graduating, he briefly tried his hand at commercial art, but it didn't work out. Instead, he joined the Sheriff's Office in Cook County, Illinois. "I believe it was fated, because it happened really easily. I ended up being very good at it, and got promoted."

He was eventually put in charge of the lock-up, which brought him face-to-face with many of the gangs and gang-bangers he had spent his childhood trying to avoid. He could see close-up the street-culture he had witnessed as a child. "In the street, it's about your pride, about whether you're getting respect. If you look at me the wrong way, you're disrespecting me. Then if I don't get violent and step to you, I'm a wimp."

This street-code was still, to some extent, inside him. "I've had a bad temper all my life", he says. He would lose his temper if a gang-banger dissed him in lock-up, if one of his subordinates in the Sheriff's office was disrespectful, if someone cut him up on the road. That old law of the street, that if someone disrespects then you must step to them or you're a wimp, was still in his head.

Then, when he turned 30, he came across Stoicism. His first encounter was via Seneca, in a book on humanism given to him by his father. "His words stuck in my heart. He was ethical, upright, he did the right thing. And his ideas didn't insult my reason with some story I had to believe in."

He developed his Stoic practice through the Stoic Foundation's correspondence course, run by Keith Seddon out of Warnborough College in Ireland. He found it very useful, but "I wanted more one-on-one mentoring". He received this through the Stoic training course of Captain Thomas Jarrett, now a major in the 602nd Area Supply Medical Company, and also a counsellor.

Jarrett became Jesse's mentor or 'sensei', teaching him Stoic principles through a study of the classic texts, such as Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and Epictetus' Discourses, and also introducing him to Albert Ellis' Stoic-influenced Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT).

When something in his external environment triggered Jesse's temper, he would ring up Jarrett, and argue it out with him over the phone until he could reach a rational take on the situation. When Jarrett was called up to serve in Iraq, Jesse carried on his practice on his own. "I try to read the texts regularly. If I have a spare 10 minutes during the day, I'll pick up and read Aurelius or Epictetus. I still take notes. And if something happens that triggers a negative emotion, I'll go home and 'have a rational talk with myself' [as REBT puts it] until I find some peace."

Gradually, Jesse started to make some progress. "There was a situation where I was working in lock-up, and there was a gentleman in there. I'd taken pains to treat him with respect, to give him the benefit of the doubt as I try to do with everyone, like Stoic ethics teaches us to do. 'Our job is to do others good and to put up with them', as Aurelius writes."

"But when I was searching this man, I saw him trying to hide things that didn't belong to him. It really enraged me, that I had gone out of my way to give him the benefit of the doubt and yet he tried to do something so underhand to me. So I took two steps towards him, and then I stopped myself. And I remembered a passage I had read in Marcus Aurelius that morning:

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own-not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.

And I caught myself. I realized, 'this guy doesn't know any better. It's the culture he's raised in, or it's his false thinking. And the tragedy is he'll probably always be like this'. So I didn't rise to it. I let it go."

Jesse says: "It's about discipline, mental exercise, and being steadfast. You got to exercise your mind so you don't get involved in the great theatre of other people's dramas. Because once you do, once you become violent, you could lose your job, you could get sued, you could lose loved ones. It's much better to be rational, to stop and think."

But he admits it's not easy. "I find it difficult to this day. I'm still practicing.That's why I have a hard time with academic Stoics, someone who sees it just as an intellectual pursuit. I am not by nature a calm person, so I have to work really hard to be a Stoic."

He says: "People from the street are mentally trapped in a small box. Their logic is really off. Sometimes, when I was working in lock-up, I'd talk to these guys and hear their philosophy. One guy said to me: 'you don't know what it is to be me. My life is hard, you don't have a hard life.' I replied: 'How do you know I don't have a hard life?' 'Because you're in uniform.' They're so alienated, it's like I'm not a human. I said: 'Before I'm a sheriff I'm a human being. We share a lot of the same emotions.' But he didn't want to hear that."

Sometimes, Jesse says, his own colleagues can be just as exasperating. But his Stoicism helps him here too. He says: "Just this week, I overheard one of my deputies making jokes about me. We were fueling up the cop cars, and he gave me this grin, like I was a big idiot, and it made me very angry. I wanted to grab him by the neck. But instead, I went home at the end of the day, and I sat down and tried to think it through logically like REBT teaches. I thought about this guy, how he talks about his friends, and I thought 'this isn't to do with me, this is typical of this guy, this is how he always behaves'. And it actually worked."

In both cases, Jesse's anger seems to have come from taking a person's behavior as a personal insult - the man in lock-up was being underhand 'to me', or the colleague was being insulting 'to me'. He managed to attain a greater equanimity by not taking it so personally, and by seeing that the person's actions towards him were determined by their own personality, their beliefs and mental habits. And it is entirely to be expected to come across such irrational and rude behavior - it is the Way Things Are.

So through Stoic practice, Jesse himself has managed, to some extent, to rise above the street code of honor and revenge that he grew up surrounded by, and to reach a higher code. He says: "I've learnt that no one can impede us or frustrate us. No one can hurt me or implement me in ugliness. What stands in the way becomes the Way."

He says: "For me, Stoicism is a way of life. It's my religion of reason. You're not being good for a goal. You're not being promised anything. You're doing good because it's the right thing to do." He admits it can be a lonely life: "There's no church or institution to screw it up. But on the other hand, I've never met another Stoic in person."

He has, though, gradually started to be more open about his Stoic beliefs, posting videos discussing them on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIVvOCUgxpw), and starting to talk about Stoicism with his friends. "No one has really heard of it. I tell them it's like the West's version of Buddhism."

His Stoic training has helped him find moral guidance in the absence of his father, and it helped him cope when his father died two years ago. "He wasn't a very good father to me. He died wealthy, and he didn't leave my anything, he left it all to my stepmother. I felt insulted. I was hurting. I lay in bed, struggling with the pain. I developed a drinking problem. It felt like the only friend I had were my Stoic books. If I didn't have those books and that training, I would have had nothing to pull me through."

Jesse now has two sons of his own - "one biological son, a 18-month-old baby called Julius, and one nine-year-old son called Christopher that fate gave me, when I started going out with his mother. Both sons need a role-model. I have love for them, and I try to help them. I have Christopher read Epictetus. I'm slowly trying to instill Stoic ideas in him. I'm not popular with our friends because I refused to baptize Julius. I said to his mother, 'I'm not particularly into that ritual'. I want to guide him in Stoic ethics."

James Hillman's elitism

I've been reading James Hillman's book, The Soul's Code. I've been eager to read some of Hillman's work, because he's the only contemporary psychologist, as far as I can tell, who puts forward a daemonic theory of the personality - that's to say, he seems to believe that we each have a daemon who directs us on our journey through life.

I agree with that idea, mad though it is. That's basically what the book I wrote, The Wild Man, is about. It's about my encounter with a daemon figure in various dreams and nightmares, and how this daemon figure has appeared to various other writers and artists throughout history (Augustine, Flaubert, Dickens, Tom Wolfe, loads of them really).

So actually, I guess my theory is slightly different - I believe that, as Plato suggested, daemons are messengers from the gods, or the Cosmic Mind, or whatever, and they appear to certain people who have to try and communicate their message to society, usually in times when society has got out of balance with the gods. Krazee, huh?!!

Anyway, I don't want to talk today about the daemonic theory of psychology, fascinating as it is. What struck me most about the book, in fact, was its elitism.

What amazed me was that every single 'case-study' that Hillman produced to support his idea that we each have a daemon or 'calling' was a famous and extremely successful artist or public figure.

So he supports this theory of calling by looking at the lives of: Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald, the bullfighter Manolete, Yehudi Menuhin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rommel, Jackson Pollock, RD Laing, Franco, Sigmund Freud...

He draws, in other words, exclusively on geniuses for his theory of human personality. These people might have had personality problems in their youth, they might have been difficult or bored at school, but really this was just their genius calling to them.

Then, later in life, their genius flowered in their literature, or their political career, or their art. The great work they produced justified all that had gone before.

It's an attractive theory. I guess we could call it the 'Good Will Hunting' school of psychology. Inside every one of us there is a genius trying to get out, and all it needs is the right coaching or therapy, and we will flower, and do such things as will make the world wonder. All of the suffering and anxiety will be redeemed by the Great Work that we will do.

But I have two main probems with this theory.

Firstly...not everyone's a genius! How can Hillman put forward a theory of human personality which relies exclusively for its data set on geniuses, who by their very nature are rare and extraordinary humans?

Geniuses are usually distinguished from the rest of us precisely by their sense of calling, their daemonic drive to work in some particular area, their uncanny and prodigal ability in this area from an early age. That's why we call them geniuses, because their powers and abilities seem to come through them, as if from some higher spiritual source, rather than from them.

But the other 98% of us don't have this calling. We don't have these prodigious abilities. We're just mediocre, average people, perhaps even below the average level of education or IQ, and yet we're still struggling with mental illness, struggling with depression or anxiety or stress or addiction.

What can Hillman's theory do for such people, for the millions of ordinary people suffering out there, who are unlikely ever to be redeemed by some great work of genius?

Secondly, I don't like the idea that someone with mental illness 'proves their value' by creating some great work. Jungians and Freudians often accuse CBT of being capitalist, but actually, that's a completely capitalist idea - you're only worth as much as the work you produce. So if you die just before you finish your 'Great Work', does that mean you are worth less, as a human being? If you are a bad novelist, does that make you worth less as a human being? Who's to judge the value of your work, let alone the 'value of you'?

So those are my two principal objections to Hillman's work - it seems to me a persuasive account of the 2% of the human race who are geniuses (or is it genii?), but not nearly as applicable or useful for the billions of mediocre but loveable masses who make up the human race, who aren't that smart, who aren't that gifted, who are unlikely ever to produce a Great Work.

It's an elitist theory of psychology, in other words, designed to appeal particularly to the upper middle classes, but not much use at all at the cliff-face of mass mental illness, mass depression, mass anxiety. You can't start from the genius and work down to the rest of us. You have to start from the ordinary, the unexceptional, the typical. Because a great deal of mental illness is simply typical, unexceptional, repetitive, even boring. Ordinary, everyday hell.

The psychologist can't just concentrate on the wealthy, the gifted and the powerful- those, perhaps, who need our help least of all. He or she should try to help in particular the poor, the inarticulate, the unblessed.