Tag Archives: happiness

On Happiness

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There once was a certain king who fell gravely ill and was very unhappy. So he said to his servants: I will give half my kingdom to whomever can cure me. Whereupon all the realm’s wise men gathered and conferred on how to cure the king. But none knew what to do. Until one of them, the wisest of the wise, came up with an idea: they had to search for the happiest man and, having found him, ask him to take off his shirt so the king could put it on. Thus they would cure the king and make him happy again.

The king took the wise man’s advice and sent his servants all over the realm to look for a happy man and bring him to the palace. However, the task proved anything but easy; wherever the servants went, all they found was unhappiness. Wealthy people were sick. Healthy people were poor. The few who were both rich and healthy had wives who made their lives a misery. And those who had good wives found that something was wrong with their offspring who either had accidents or disobeyed their parents. Not one man who was happy with his lot.

Enter the king’s eldest son. One evening he went for a walk and passed the shack of a poor peasant. “Thank God,” he heard a voice say. “Today I had useful work to do. Now I can go to bed with a full belly. That’s all one needs to be happy, isn’t it?”

The king’s son listened and rejoiced. Next he told his servants to knock on the door, pay the peasant anything he might ask for, and get hold of the shirt. The servants hastened to carry out the prince’s order. Only to discover that the peasant did not have a shirt.

(Following Leo Tolstoy).

Big Questions

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Skimming my way through Amazon.com, as I often do either in search of interesting books to read or simply to pass the time, I came across the following description of my former student, best-selling author/historian Yuval Harari. Here is what it said:

Born in Haifa, Israel, in 1976, Harari received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2002, and is currently a lecturer at the Department of History, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He originally specialized in world history, medieval history and military history, and his current research focuses on macro-historical questions such as: What is the relationship between history and biology? What is the essential difference between Homo sapiens and other animals? Is there justice in history? Does history have a direction? Did people become happier as history unfolded? What ethical questions do science and technology raise in the 21st century?

I cannot claim to have researched these questions in any depth. Let alone sold books by the million as Harari did and does. As so often, though, I considered the questions interesting. Sufficiently so to try and provide my readers, and myself, with some off the cuff answers. The more so because, as a historian, in one way or another I’ve been thinking about them throughout my life. As, indeed, most people, though not historians, have probably done at some point or another.

Off the cuff my answers may indeed be. Still, if anyone has better ones I’d be very happy to see them. Not wishing to have my thoughts censored, not even by Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, I refuse to join the so-called social media. But my email is mvc.dvc@gmail.com.

A. What is the relationship between history and biology?

Q. There is no question but that many of our most basic qualities are biologically determined. Including the need to eat, drink, rest, sleep, and have sex; but for them, we could not exist. Including the quest, if not for happiness, which is both a modern idea and hard to define, then at any rate for avoiding pain and sorrow and having “a good time.” Including the desire for security, recognition and dominance. Including the desire to do what we consider good and right (this desire even Adolf Hitler, talking to a small and intimate circle, claimed to feel). Including the need to “make sense” of the world around us. And the desire for sex, of course.

The number of humans who have ever lived on this earth is estimated at 90-110 billion, of whom almost one tenth are alive today. With very few and very partial exceptions, all have experienced these needs and these desires. To this extent biology and history, meaning cultural change, are independent of each other.

But history, meaning social and cultural change, does affect the way these needs and these desires are experienced and expressed by people belonging to different cultures at different times. An ancient Chinese living, say, 3,000 years ago would instantly understand both what food is and why we stand in need of it. What he would not understand is why we in our modern Western society consider some foods (e.g seafood) fit for consumption and others (e.g. insects) not.

A. What is the essential difference between homo sapiens and other animals?

Q. Historically speaking, the answers to this question have varied very much. For the authors of the Old Testament, later followed by any number of adherents to the other two so-called Abrahamic Religions, it consisted of our belief in God as well as the ability to distinguish between good and evil; whoever could or would not do these things was considered in- or subhuman and deserved to be treated as such. For Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes and the thinkers of the Enlightenment it was our ability to use reason in order to both understand the world and achieve the goals we have set for ourselves. For Rabelais it was our ability to laugh; for Marx, our ability to create and sustain ourselves by means of work; for Nietzsche, out concern with beauty and with art in general; and for Johan Huizinga, our willingness to engage in play both for fun and on the way to exploring the world and creating something new.

This organ has the ability to make love and satisfy your partner. viagra generika 50mg How Fast usa cialis Does Kamagra Work Normally, Kamagra is effective with an hour of its consumption. Thus, the man is guaranteed strong erection until generic levitra professional the medication ingredients are present in the system. Because ultimately if you can sort it out cialis online discount http://greyandgrey.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Court-of-Appeals-Ruling-in-Shutter-NYLJ-1997.pdf don’t you think the direct consequence could be that you will get bigger and longer lasting erection. Each of these views have been elaborated in mountains of publications of every kind. Each one has also been questioned at some length. Never more so than over the last two decades or so. The primatologist Frans de Waal, widely acknowledged as the world’s greatest expert on bonobos, in his 2013 book The Bonobo and the Atheist even went so far as to argue that the members of this species show something like religiosity, however rudimentary it might be.

A. Is there justice in history?

Q. Without going into detail as to what justice may mean, let me say that I doubt it very much. However, this question reminds me of a story I once heard about Israel’s former Prime Minister, Menahem Begin (served, 1977-1983). This was not long after he had concluded a peace agreement with Egypt and, by way of recognition, received the Nobel Peace Prize.

The story, which was told by an ideological rival of his, went as follows. Back in the summer of 1939, just weeks before the outbreak of World War II, twenty-five year old Begin was in Warsaw attending a meeting of Betar, a right-wing and rather belligerent Jewish movement of which, in Poland, he was the chief. Doing so he got into an argument with his mentor Zeev Jabotinsky, the equally right-wing leader and ideologist of Betar, world-wide. Then and later Begin was a fiery orator who tended to be swept away by his own words. On this occasion he spoke about might governing the world, called on Jews to use might and even violence in order to counter it, etc., etc. Whereupon Jabotinsky took the floor and said, “The world is run by judges, not robbers. And if you, Mr. Begin, do not believe that is true, then go and drown yourself in the Vistula.”

To repeat, whether there is justice in history I do not know. However, I do know one thing: but for the belief that there is such justice we might indeed drown ourselves in the nearest river.

A. Did people become happier as history unfolded?

Q. Some people today, including Harari himself in at least one of his books, have argued that, far from people becoming happier as history unfolds, they have become less so. As by having to work harder, being subject to greater stress, losing the intimacy that only members of small societies can experience, watching the world around us being polluted and nature destroyed, etc. This is a modern version of the Pandora story; except that, instead of Pandora (literally, “all blessings”), people speak of civilization.

To me, much of this seems to be based on nothing but nostalgia. More to the point, there is no way this question can be answered with any degree of certainty. Public opinion surveys aimed at doing so only started being held over the last few decades, and even they are hardly reliable. So I’ll skip.

A. What ethical questions do science and technology raise in the 21st century?

Q. I doubt whether science and technology raise any new ethical questions at all. To mention a few only, people have always confronted the question how evil—however defined–should be dealt with. They have always been forced to deal with the gap between the desires of the individual and the dictates of society. They have always been forced to decide what, from an ethical point of view, means should or should not be used to attain what ends. They have always done their best to influence the minds of others by whatever means at their disposal. And they always had to decide whether, and at what point, the deformed, the handicapped, the sick, and the old should (or should not) be killed or left to die.

In the words of Ecclesiastics, nothing new under the sun.

Do I Need to Go On?

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Supposedly feminism is one of the most powerful movements of the second half of the twentieth century. One that has greatly improved women’s lives—both above and below the belt—while at the same time fundamentally changing the relationship between the sexes. Enjoying argument as I do, for some years now I have been toying with the idea of doing a book in which I would examine the validity of these claims. A topic, I thought, which would fit well with two of my previous books, i.e Men, Women and War (2001) and The Privileged Sex (2013).

Some weeks ago I was lucky to run into a volume titled The H Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness (2017). The author, Jill Fillipovic, is a New York based journalist and self-declared feminist. By her own statement, she had and has it all. 35 years old, white, upper middle class, good education (by training she is a lawyer), a career, “a nearly full passport,” delayed marriage, apparently no kids so far. Nor, since she considers the idea that motherhood is the most important job in the world a “platitude,” does it sound as if she is planning on having them any time soon; for which her unborn children can only say, thank God.

I quote.

“American women have gotten less happy over the past four decades… [It is] theorized that having to compete and perform in the workplace like men was making women depressed.”

“Nearly all American women—as many as 84 percent—report having been dissatisfied with their bodies at some point in their lives, and most says that dissatisfaction stems from wanting to be thinner. For most women, being thinner means sacrificing food and with it the pleasure that comes with eating. Or it means more hours at the gym, not because it feels good but because working our promises to make you skinnier. Maybe it means restrictive, tight undergarments to smooth out the wrinkles of human flesh or high heels, lengthen the legs and make one look slightly slimmer, even if they’re uncomfortable. It means part of being a woman is striving, wanting and sometimes hurting.”

“Just as feminists thought we were climbing steadily upward—an ascendance symbolized by a woman who seemed posed to finally break the presidential glass ceiling—we found ourselves collectively knocked down. It is a stinging reminder that for all the feminist moment’s renewed pop culture relevance, for all of the ways in which women’s lives are better than ever, there still has been no full vindication of the rights of women.”

“We are becoming the men we wanted to marry” [attributed to Gloria Steinem].

“Today… it is still educated upper-middle class white women who are often selected to embody [feminism]… while women of color or trans women or poor women are pushed aside.”

“Culturally, ‘girly stuff’ is denigrated while men’s staff is elevated; fashion is shallow and women’s magazines are trashy, but sport are a valuable national pastime and men read Playboy and Esquire for award-winning journalism alongside photos of barely-clothed women. If parents give their daughter a traditionally male name, it’s cute, even cool and edgy, and if enough parents start giving girls what was once a boy’s name, the name first crosses over to being ‘gender neutral’ and eventually becomes simply female: Lesley, Ashley, Sydney, Taylor and Reese. But the opposite doesn’t happen: girls’ names almost never become boys’ names, and it is not cure to name your boy after a woman The same goes for clothing: ‘unisex clothes’ are traditionally men’s clothes that women also wear. Women have taken up wearing pans en masse, but most men do not wear skirts or dresses. Women can embrace guy stuff and it is a sign of clout and authority; men who embrace girl stuff are weak, less powerful, gay. And women, too, has to walk a tightrope between femininity and power; act too masculine and you’re an unlikeable bitch, but act too feminine—wear too much makeup or too much pink, talk ‘like a girl’ using upspeak or a high-pitched voice—and you won’t be taken seriously.”

A CTET evaluation is valid for 7 years and you can take this exam a number of times viagra pills uk to increase libido in men. Emotional instabilities condition is the turmoil that will influences the conduct, viagra uk purchase considering, sorrow, schizophrenia, uneasiness issue, dietary issues and in addition successive changes in persons feeling. In 2008, the bulk had alone to about 20 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to the American Solar Activity Society. discount brand viagra When taking this drug for pain relief or insomnia it has to be kept in mind that this drug is 100% effective. viagra for sale mastercard “[In today’s American culture] Girl stuff sucks. And by extension, girls suck too.”

“For women whose hobbies are coded as male—video games, NASCAR—being the only girl can become isolating, and being ‘one of the guys’ can segue into becoming either visible or a sex object.”

“Although American pop culture is soaked in sex, our politics remain at best uncomfortable with and at worst actively hostile to female sexual pleasure. Nearly a century [sic] after its invention and after decades of wide usage by American women, the birth control pill remains a source of debate in Congress and even the Supreme Court. Abortion is a perennial election issue, opposition to it always listed in the Republican Party Platform The idea of poor women or the wrong kind of women having too much sex, or the strong kind of sex, has been used to justify cutting the social safety net, decreasing women’s access to reproductive health care, taking children away from their mothers, and sterilizing women without their consent.”

“The United States, and the world, remain vastly unequal places, marked by profound political, economic and social disparities between men and women. Much of it boils down to sex, and in particular how heterosexual men’s desires and experiences exist as standard, while women’s desires, experiences, and sexualities remain a kind of deviant from the norm, understood primarily in relation to men.”

“Cosmopolitan, by the ‘90s a decades-old bible for the single career, woman, careened straight into pleasure-your-man sex tips, each more ludicrous than the last.”

“It has not gotten any easier, or any less confusing, to be a girl in America.”

“Just 30 percent of speaking roles in the seven hundred biggest movies went to women between 2007 and 2014, and not a single woman over the age of forty-five had a lead part.”

“According to one study, straight women who have sex with a regular partner only orgasm about 63 percent of the time, while men orgasm 85perent of the time. Other studies have found even lower numbers, indicating that women orgasm less than 30 percent of the time… Young women routinely engage in sex they don’t find particularly pleasurable because they want to make their partners happy.”

Do I need to go on?

Seven Things that Will Not Change

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Ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution during the last decades of the eighteenth century, humanity has become obsessed with change. First in Europe, where the revolution originated. Then in Europe’s overseas offshoots, and finally in other places as well. By the middle of the nineteenth century, at the latest, it was clear that the world was being transformed at an unprecedented pace and would continue to do so in the future. As change accelerated there appeared a whole genre of visionaries who made it their job to try and look into that future—starting with Jules Verne and passing through H. G. Wells all the way to Ray Kurzweil and Yuval Harari.

Today it pleases me to try to put the idea on its head. Meaning, I am going to focus on some of the things I think are not going to change. Certainly not any time soon. Perhaps, not ever.

1. A world without war, meaning politically motivated and organized violence, is not in the cards. To be sure, starting in 1945 much of the planet has enjoyed what is sometimes known as the Long Peace. Meaning that, relative to the size of the earth’s population, fewer people have died in war than was the case during any other period from which figures are available. But let there be no illusions: the most important, if not the only, reason behind the decline is not the kind of sudden wish for peace (“the better angels of our nature”) some authors have postulated. It is nuclear deterrence, which has prevented the most important countries from fighting each other in earnest.

Unfortunately experience has shown that, under the shadow of the mushroom cloud, there is still plenty of room left for smaller but no less bloody conflicts. Especially, but certainly not exclusively, of the intrastate, or nontrinitarian, kind as opposed to the interstate, trinitarian one. Such being the case, a world without war would require two things. First, a situation where every person and every collective is always sufficiently happy with his/or its lot to refrain from resorting to violence. Second, a world government capable of identifying and deterring those who would resort to it from doing so. Since war is to a large extent a product of the emotions, moreover, such a government would have to pry into the hearts of every single person on earth. For good or ill, though, there is no indication that either of those conditions, let alone both, are anywhere close to being met.

2. Poverty will not be eradicated. Taking 1800 as their starting point, economic historians have estimated that, world-wide, real per capital product has risen thirtyfold. Based on this, there have been countless confident predictions concerning a golden future in which everyone will be, if not exactly as rich as Jeff Bezos, at any rate comfortably off. However, these predictions have failed to tqake into account two factors. First, wealth, poverty and of course comfort itself are not absolute but relative. In many ways, what was once seen as fit for a king is now not considered suitable even for a beggar. Second, though the production of material goods has in fact increased, the way those good are distributed has not become more equal. If anything, taking 1970 as our starting point, to the contrary.

3. We shall not gain immortality. It is true that, starting in late eighteenth-century France and Sweden and spreading to other countries, global life expectancy has more than doubled. Moreover, the pace at which years are being added to our lives has been accelrating. This has led some people to reason that, if only we could increase it fast enough (meaning, by more than a year every year), death would be postponed to the point where we shall become immortal. The first person to live for a thousand years, it has been claimed, has already been born or is about to be born soon enough. However, the calculation is flawed on two counts First, most of the increase in longevity has resulted from a decline in the mortality of the very young. Second, while the percentage of old people has been growing rapidly, there is no indication that the life span granted to us by nature has been increasing or is capable of being increased.
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4. There is no reason to think the world in which we live is happier than previous ones. Not only is happiness the product of many different interacting factors, but its presence or absence depends on circumstances. Does it presuppose a minimum of physical comfort? Yes, of course, but the extent of that comfort, and even what counts as comfort, is largely dictated by what we expect and do not expect. Does it require a belief in God? Possibly so, but there is no proof that religious people are happier than unbelievers. Does it require leisure? Yes, of course, but the fact that, in Rome during the second century CE, almost half of the year consisted of feast days does not mean that the contemporaries of Marcus Aurelius were happier than their ancestors or their successors. Does it require good interaction with at least some other people? Yes, of course, but there is no reason to believe that such interaction was less common and less satisfying in previous generations than in our own. Does it require purposeful activity? Yes of course, but then what does and does not count as purposeful is almost entirely up to the individual.

5. Whatever feminists may say, men and women will not play the same role in society, let alone become the same That is partly because they are not the same—witness the biologically-determined differences between them in respect to size, physical strength, and the reproductive functions (some experts would add a tendency towards risk-taking, aggression, dominance, and a penchant for mathematical science, but that is moot). And partly because they do not want to be. “The more like us you become, mes dames,” said that incorrigible skirt chaser, Jean Jacques Rousseau, “the less we shall like you.” Conversely, the worst thing one can say about a man is that he is like a woman. It is the differences between men and women, as much as the similarities, that attract them to each other. So it has been, and so it will remain,

6. The question how consciousness could have arisen will not be answered. Starting at least as long ago as the Old Testament, people have always wondered how dead material could ever give birth to a living, sentient being. Especially to the brain as the most important organ in which thought, emotion and, not least, dreaming take place. To answer the question, they invented a God who, to speak with Genesis, blew “the spirit of life” into man’s nostrils. Recent advances in neurology, made possible by the most sophisticated modern techniques, are indeed astonishing. However, they cannot tell us how objective chemical and electric signals translate into subjective experiences; no more than our ancestors knew why certain substances led to increased awareness and others, to torpor. To that extent, the advances in question have not really got us any closer to solving the problem.

7. Our ability to predict the future, let alone control it, has not improved and will not improve one iota. There used to be a time when looking into the future was the province of shamans, prophets, oracles, and Sibyls, and even the dead who were raised specially for the purpose. Other people tried their luck with astrology, palmistry, augury (watching the flight of birds), haruspicy (interpreting the entrails of sacrificial animals), yarrow sticks, crystal balls, tarot cards, tea leaves, and patterns left by coffee in near-empty cups. Starting around 1800, at any rate among the better educated in Western countries, two techniques have dominated the field. One is extrapolating from history, i.e. the belief that what has been going up will continue to go up (until it doesn’t) and that what has gone down will continue to go down (ditto). The other is mathematical modelling, which consists of an attempt to identify the most important factors and link them together by means of algorithms. Of the two the second, especially as applied to very large numbers of people, has been the most successful. But only as long as conditions do not change in a radical way; and only at the cost of ignoring what to most people is the most important question of all, i.e. what will happen to them.

Is that enough to put change, that keynote of modernity about which everyone is talking all the time, into perspective?

With Just One Important Exception

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Quite by accident, I finished reading this book on 7 March, the eve of the International Women’s Day. The author, Prof. Steven Pinker, is nothing if not an optimist. Perhaps one reason for this is because, as a 63-year old psychologist who teaches at Harvard and has several best-sellers to his name, he has good reason to be satisfied with life so far. Parts I and II of his latest book, Enlightenment Now, are basically a list of all the ways in which the world has been improving over the last two centuries or so. By contrast, some of part III looks—to me, at any rate—like a “philosophical” tract so confused as to be hardly worth commenting on.

Even skipping that part, though, no short review can hope to do justice to the tons of evidence Pinker produces to support his claim. Follow some highlights:

  • Starting at the end of the eighteenth century, and taking the human race as a whole, real per capita product has gone up thirtyfold. During the same period the global population has increased tenfold fro 800 million to almost 8 billion; meaning that, in little more than two centuries, total production has increased three hundred times, no less. Contrary to the fears of Malthus and others, humanity has not run out of food and other resources. To the point where many formerly hungry countries have turned to exporting food and where in quite some developed ones obesity is a greater menace than malnutrition is.
  • Taking into account qualitative advances—vastly improved nutrition and living conditions, faster and more comfortable travel, more efficient communications, incomparably cheaper data-processing, to mention but a few—the improvement in our material situation has been much greater still. Just consider that King Louis XIV at Versailles had neither electricity, nor running water, nor flush toilets. Not for nothing did visitors keep complaining about the awful way everything smelled—and this in the palace for whose owner nothing could be too good.
  • The increase in the size of human population could never have taken place without radical advances in the related fields of medicine and health. Including a vast decline in perinatal mortality (the percentage of women who die in childbirth or shortly thereafter); a vast increase in the number of children who live to adulthood; the introduction, during the second half of the nineteenth century, of sterilization and anesthetics; the complete or near-complete eradication of some of the deadliest diseases, such as smallpox and polio; and the mitigation of crises such as AIDS, SARS and the rest which, had they broken out more than a few decades ago, could well have decimated the human race in the same way as Spanish Influenza did in 1919-20. Taken together, these and other advances explain why, world-wide, life expectancy is now around seventy years. That is twice as much as at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
  • Hand in hand with the general “betterment”—a term much beloved by Pinker’s heroes, i.e. the scientists, technicians and philosophers who made the Enlightenment—went improvements in education. To cut a long story short, in all countries with hardly any exception the percentage of illiterates has gone down, whereas that of those who enjoyed a secondary or tertiary education went up. To extrapolate—and extrapolation is the method Pinker himself uses whenever he wants to look into the future—the day may indeed come when illiteracy, like the abovementioned diseases, is all but eliminated. And when, as part of the fight against discrimination, everyone over the age of twenty will be awarded the title of professor free of charge.
  • While wealth and health and education have improved, war has shrunk. Much the most radical changes took place during the decades since 1945. World War II, which was the deadliest in history, probably killed between two and three percent of humanity as it then was (consisting of somewhat more than two billion people). Since then the figures, calculated on an annual basis, have gone down to the point where they can hardly even be expressed in terms of percentages. To put it in a different way, world-wide the average person’s chances of being killed in war are lower now than they have ever been. Which is not, of course, to say that life in some countries is not much more dangerous than in others.
  • Not just war, but other forms of legal violence have greatly diminished. In many countries torture, which used to be a regular and indeed almost ubiquitous part of the justice system, has been outlawed. The same applies to the death sentence as well as other forms of what the U.S Constitution calls “cruel and unusual” punishment. Especially in the US, cases are on record when the authorities wanted to carry out death sentences but could not—because the companies that made the necessary deadly poisons were no longer prepared to supply them.
  • Another sign of the growing concern with human life is the improvement in safety. In many developed countries working accidents are way down from what they used to be only a few decades ago. Calculating on the basis of person/miles travelled per year, the same applies to traffic accidents. I myself am old enough to remember the fight over safety belts—and how, overcoming all obstacles, those who advocated them won.

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Enough, and more than enough, to make many of us happy? Pinker thinks so. True, the evidence, depending as it does on the recent invention known as polls, is not as plentiful as in other fields where progress has been made. But what little of it is available suggests that more people today enjoy more happiness than was the case a few decades ago. With just one important exception: several studies, some that are listed by Pinker and others that are not, have suggested that women, at any rate women in developed counties, are less satisfied with their lot than they used to be.

Time to reconsider whether feminism is such a marvelous thing after all?