THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
by Darrin McMahon
Allen Lane £25 pp544

THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS
by Jonathan Haidt
Heinemann £18.99 pp313

Everyone is a little confused about happiness. Even Dr Johnson, that great touchstone of good sense, once declared that “it is the business of a wise man to be happy”, but then, on another occasion, told Boswell that no man is happy unless he is drunk. So, to be pedantically syllogistic, it’s the business of a wise man to be drunk?

But after centuries of uncertain literary and philosophical debate on the subject, here comes modern science to sort us all out: cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, “behavioural economics”. And the answer is: it’s mostly down to those beastly little genes, for whom we, once a little lower than the angels, turn out to be no more than useful vectors. One psychologist says with cold comfort that “trying to be happier is like trying to be taller” . Another exhaustive study of 3,000 pairs of identical and fraternal twins concluded that everyone’s base-line happiness, barring a lottery win or sudden paraplegia, is at least 80% genetically determined: a “cortical lottery”. And even lottery winners and paraplegics return to their base-line happiness within a year.

The most gleefully smart, cynical and scientistic among this latest glut of happiness books is Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. Reading it won’t make you any happier, the author assures us; but by the end you will at least realise why it was really dumb of you ever to have thought it might. Science does confirm, however, in an avalanche of psychological data, the ancient truth that money can’t buy you happiness. We should all be working about two days a week, earning just enough to get by, and spending the rest of the time with friends, family, or even “wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub”. We would be genuinely happier for it. More disconcertingly, having children doesn’t make you happier. Quite the contrary. When candidly questioned, mothers especially admit that they are happier when eating, shopping, exercising or watching telly than looking after the children. Both beliefs, about money and children, are demonstrably false, but society would collapse without them. They are “super-replicators”, Richard Dawkins’s dreaded “memes”, ruthlessly efficient at passing themselves on.

Our gross overoptimism is also a kind of meme: 90% of us believe we are better-than-average drivers, for instance, when, of course almost all of us are, by definition, average drivers. We are “hopelessly Panglossian”, says Gilbert, yet our optimism and huge sense of self-worth are an essential part of our psychological immune system. Without it “we’d be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning”.

Whereas Gilbert looks at happiness as a scientist, Darrin McMahon looks as a cultural historian. His weighty tome is a scholarly, thorough and exhaustive examination of ideas about happiness from Socrates to the present. It is a detailed summation rather than an exercise in original thought. For that you will have to turn to Jonathan Haidt’s riveting The Happiness Hypothesis, the most humane, witty and comforting of these three books, brilliantly synthesising ancient cultural insights with modern psychology, and even holding out some faint hope that your happiness, if not your tallness, might be marginally adjustable after all.

It’s nice to know that happier people are also kinder. One psychologist handed out biscuits to certain passers-by, and then had an accomplice drop a stack of papers in the street. Those still merrily scoffing their free biscuits were far more likely to stop and help than others. Haidt is also fascinating on the uniquely human emotion of awe. (If you ever catch your dog, let alone your guinea pig, gazing up at the stars in open-mouthed wonderment, there’s something seriously wrong.) And he is razor-sharp on the insubstantial lives of atomised, consumer-led liberals. “For the religious right, hell on earth is a flat land of unlimited freedom where selves roam around with no higher purpose than expressing and developing themselves”; and as he swiftly and incontrovertibly demonstrates, they are far wiser about human nature than modern, secular liberals.

He agrees with Gilbert about our comically high levels of self-esteem: so much so that when we hear a word that sounds like our own name, we subconsciously assume it must be good. Hence the bizarre fact that there are more dentists called Dennis than there ought to be, lawyers called Lawrence, and couples called Jane and John.

One of the most honest and fascinating sections is on Buddhism. Gautama Siddartha, you may recall, decided the world was a place of unmitigated suffering and unhappiness, to be escaped at all costs, after he first encountered old, sick and poverty-stricken people. Only recently did a sharp American psychologist, Robert Biswas-Diener, say, “But hang on — did he ever get down from his gilded chariot and ask those people if they were unhappy?” So he went to India himself. He even questioned sex workers in the back streets of Calcutta, surely the most wretched of the earth. “No,” they said, “we’re mostly quite happy, thanks.” How can this be? Well, compare it with the experience of paraplegia. Calcutta’s prostitutes are dirt poor, but then money doesn’t make you happy. Having intense friendships, close-knit families and neighbourhoods certainly does: and that’s just what they have. Bye-bye Buddhism.

So, thanks to a mixture of evolutionary necessity, wild optimism and a hilariously inflated sense of our own importance, we generally continue to bounce out of bed each day, whatever our external circumstances: boats against the current, little Jay Gatsbys all; for tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further . . . And one fine morning — . Funny, deluded little naked bipeds we may be; but as with Gatsby, there’s something rather magnificent and heroic about our self-delusion.

HAPPY AS SANDBOYS

As an image of exuberance, the Jolly Fisherman is hard to beat. First printed on a poster in 1908 to promote rail travel to Skegness, the character — and accompanying strapline of “Skegness is SO bracing” — was still being used by British Rail in the 1960s. Things, though, did not end so happily for illustrator John Hassall; he died in 1948 completely penniless.

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