幸福的配方（上）
No laughing matter
Who do you think would be the happier of these two people: Bob, an intellectual 35-year-old single, athletic, handsome white man earning $100,000 in sunny California who spends his spare time reading and going to museums? Or Mary, a sociable 65-year-old plain, black, overweight woman on dialysis, who spends most of her free time on church activities and lives with her husband in a snowy part of New York state on a joint income of $40,000?
Before I started to read some of the new books on so-called “happiness research”, I would have bet that Bob would be happier. But I would have been wrong, according to University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who poses the Bob and Mary case in his work The Happiness Hypothesis. One of the biggest findings in happiness research, says Haidt, is that environmental and demographic advantages - such as Bob’s health, wealth, youth and sunshine - are less important than we think. Marriage and strong social connections are more significant, so Mary is likely to be happier than Bob.
Talk of happiness studies, or the “new science of happiness”, is everywhere at the moment. The BBC has just aired a six-part series on it. The Conservative leader, David Cameron, wants to focus “not just on GDP but on GWB - general well-being”. Harvard University’s most popular class is now a course in happiness, or “positive psychology”. Cambridge University and Wellington College boarding school offer similar instruction.
The flurry of recent books on the subject is a symptom of the happiness phenomenon. But these writers are also fuelling the debate, as they bring previously obscure academic research on happiness - by economists, philosophers, psychologists and geneticists - to more mainstream attention.
So what can an academic usefully add to such a familiar, yet elusive topic as happiness? Happiness is common territory for philosophers who, going back to Plato and Aristotle, have broadly believed that contentment depended on leading a virtuous and ultimately satisfying “good life”. And we understand - even if we don’t always agree with - the great religious figures of history who said happiness was the reward for a life well lived. But is there really such a thing as an objective state of happiness that can be scientifically measured and observed? There is, according to today’s happiness thinkers.
Psychologists say the simple act of asking people how they feel over time will give a surprisingly accurate assessment of their contentment. Those reported levels of happiness may be further verified, they say, by measuring brain activity with electronic scans (happy people have more activity on the left front of the brain; unhappy ones have more on the right). Happiness-school economists then say these findings should help us to shape public policy, by focusing more on the “general well-being” of which Cameron now speaks.
But the happiness movement is making some people very unhappy. Wellington College’s classes are “a recipe for mediocrity” according to one critic in The Independent; “namby-pambying” (the Daily Mail); and an “ideal formula for raising good animals” (The Times).
Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, says the new “happiness crusade” would please the Controller in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. To Furedi, the secret of happiness is a paradox: you only find it by seeking something else, namely the virtuous life advocated by the ancient Greeks. “Happiness,” he has written, “is the indirect outcome of engaging with others in the pursuit of civic virtues, and attempting to do good.”
So who is right? Those who think we cannot much improve on what the ancients said about happiness? Or those who argue that, just as our surgeon knows more about brain surgery than Hippocrates, we can now have a much more sophisticated understanding of what makes us happy?
A persuasive case for the scientists rather than the sages can be found in five new books on happiness, including the one that tries to argue the reverse.
Richard Schoch, professor of the history of culture at Queen Mary, University of London, is very much of the school that the ancients still know best. I was looking forward to reading Schoch’s book, The Secrets of Happiness. The blurb on the cover by Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine, said it was a “kick up the rear to the ‘new science of happiness’” and “hugely enjoyable”.
This will depend on how hugely enjoyable you find Schoch’s descriptions of, say, Stoicism (”like a battery fully charged, it is ever ready”) or desire (”Silk against skin. Scarlett Johannson”).
As for the kick up the rear to the happiness thinkers, Schoch singles out Richard Layard, whose Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (2005) has become a bible for neo-utilitarians swayed by his argument that the ability to measure happiness has significant public policy implications.
One of Layard’s central observations is that even though westerners are now better paid, fed and sheltered, they are not necessarily happier. And once average income exceeds about $20,000 per head, more money does not guarantee greater happiness. So governments would be better off raising taxes and tackling great sources of misery such as mental illness, which accounts for a quarter of disease yet receives just 13 per cent of health spending in the UK and 7 per cent in the US.
But Schoch says Layard’s definition of happiness (”feeling good - enjoying life and wanting the feeling to be maintained”) is a “weaker, thinner” version of contentment and “the so-called ‘new science’ of happiness perpetuates this impoverished notion of the good life.”
Real happiness, he says, requires much more effort. Far better to consider the lessons of detachment and indifference offered by the Stoic thinkers, such as Seneca, or the traditions of India’s jnana yogins, who gave up their family, home, property and career to pursue wisdom, and therefore true happiness.
Schoch does admit that walking out on one’s children, spouse, home and job is unrealistic for most of us. “But that is our problem,” he says, “and it reveals more about us - our weaknesses, our fears or perhaps just the circumstances that press upon us from all sides - than it does about happiness.”
But Schoch’s closing definition of what it means to be happy is curiously unsatisfying: “To be authentically happy means to take possession of ourselves, to bring about the person we are in potential, to become more real.” (His italics.) For many readers, Layard’s ideas of how to achieve happiness will sound more real still.
Nicholas White, a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, offers a more balanced view of the nature of the ancients in A Brief History of Happiness. The chief worth of White’s (unhappily dull) book lies in its attempt to explain how thinking on happiness changed from Greek antiquity through to Jeremy Bentham’s 19th century utilitarian idea of the “greatest happiness of the greatest number”. Unfortunately, his history barely mentions the most recent thinking on happiness. But he does concede that when it comes to giving advice on happiness, philosophers may not be the best source.
“Philosophers’ concrete advice about how to become happy isn’t any better (in fact, it’s probably worse) than that of the average person,” says White. “They generally don’t know enough of the relevant facts, and they don’t have the right temperament.”
Moreover, the Greek prescription for a happy life was often rigidly planned. This, says White, is because Plato and Aristotle were fundamentally private educators, “in the business of persuading Athenian gentlemen to send their sons to them for training for a career”. This meant they saw the need for plans, requiring education to see them through. Real life, of course, can be far more complex.
A more comprehensive, and much more gracefully written, narrative of the evolution of thinking on happiness comes from Darrin McMahon, a Florida State University history professor, in The Pursuit of Happiness. McMahon is wary of some of the newer happiness thinkers: “It is probably worth treating the recent ‘revelations’ of psychologists as less genuinely revealing than they and their publicists would have us believe.”
Even so, he acknowledges that many of the new studies “do shed empirical light on a process of pursuit whose rhythms we have followed in a less clinical context over the course of roughly two and a half thousand years”.
One of the psychologists McMahon cites is probably the most entertaining happiness thinker, Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert specialises in “prospection”, the study of how we think about our futures. His style may not appeal to all readers but there is much to admire in a Harvard man willing to start a chapter with the words: “The last decade has seen an explosion of books about poo.” (Referring to children’s books about potty training, his point is that the brain learns to make its owner use a toilet much more readily than it learns what really makes us happy.)
Gilbert briskly disposes of the idea that the ancients have a monopoly on wisdom about happiness, in part because their lives were so fundamentally different from ours. As he says, we barely think about the fact that most of us now make three big life decisions: where to live, what to do and whom to marry. But we are among the first humans to have had such choices. For most of recorded history, people lived where they were born, did what their parents did (Millers milled; Smiths smithed) and married whomever religion, caste or geography dictated. The agricultural, industrial and technological revolutions unleashed an explosion of personal liberty our ancestors never faced and, as Gilbert says, “for the very first time, our happiness is in our hands”.
The trouble is, as Gilbert shows, the human brain is pathetically ill-equipped to decide what to do to be happiest. We are, he says, the only animals whose brains can imagine the future. “Until a chimp weeps at the thought of growing old alone or smiles as it contemplates its summer holiday, or turns down a toffee apple because it already looks too fat in shorts,” humans will always be distinguished by their brains’ ability to imagine.
But we don’t imagine well when it comes to thinking about future happiness. We could draw on the advice and experience of others (as we did when learning about toilet training). But we don’t, in part because we believe ourselves to be terribly special.
As several studies cited by Gilbert show, young Americans expect to live longer, stay married longer and have more trips to Europe than average. They also believe they are more likely to have a gifted child, own their own home and appear in the papers than have a car accident or venereal disease. (The rest of us are not as optimistic as Americans, but still believe our futures will be superior to those of our peers.)
Similarly, we continue to strive for bigger cars or better lovers, even when past experience teaches we will rapidly adapt to their wonder and they won’t make us any happier. “Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility and the rest of us call it marriage,” says Gilbert.
We also imagine that we will be much more miserable than we often actually are about things we dread and fear, be it the death of a spouse or paralysis from the neck down. So we believe Humphrey Bogart when he tells Ingrid Bergman on the runway that if she doesn’t get on the plane with her husband Victor she will regret it “for the rest of your life”. If she had stayed with Bogey, the man she really loved, she probably would have been just as happy, according to Gilbert.
But for the final word on the ancients versus the happiness thinkers, we should go back to Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis. The subtitle of his book is “Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science”, and as it suggests, Haidt has explored how traditional thinking on happiness compares with more recent empirical research. Haidt is a psychologist, but is far from dismissive of the teachings of Buddha or Confucius.
Confucius, for example, was correct to insist on reciprocity, the principle of doing unto others as you would have them do to you. Research repeatedly shows, Haidt says, that such behaviour is vital for social animals such as humans. But Buddhist and Stoic ideas that happiness can be achieved by detachment or emotional indifference are harder to accept today. Echoing Gilbert, he says such ideas may have made sense in the turbulent times in which ancient thinkers lived, when life was subject to the whims of warring kings or capricious Roman emperors. But we no longer live like this: “For the first time in human history, most people [in wealthy] countries will live past 70 and not see any of their children die before them.”
Moreover, he cites more recent psychological studies showing that some things really do make humans much happier and are thus clearly worth striving for, such as a sense of control over their lives. In one famous study, two groups of nursing home residents were given extra benefits - a plant in their rooms; a movie once a week - but under different conditions. One group could choose their own plants and movie night; the other couldn’t. Eighteen months later, the group with more control had better health and half as many deaths.
Similarly, strong relationships have been shown to strengthen the immune system; extend life (more than quitting smoking); speed recovery from surgery; and reduce the risk of depression and anxiety disorders. Detachment certainly sounds a far less assured path to happiness in comparison.
But one of the significant findings that Haidt mentions is also perhaps the most sobering: happiness appears to be surprisingly hereditary. Researchers think that between 50 and 80 per cent of all the variance among people’s average levels of happiness can be explained by their genes, rather than life experiences.
It is easy to see why when one considers the case Haidt cites of the so-called “giggle twins”, Barbara Herbert and Daphne Goodship. Both left school at 14, met their future husbands at 16, suffered miscarriages at the same time and then each gave birth to two boys and a girl. Both feared blood; drank their coffee cold; and had a habit of pushing up their noses with the palm of their hand that both called “squidging”. As Haidt says, none of this would be astonishing, except that they were separated at birth and didn’t meet until they were 40 years old - when they turned up wearing almost identical clothing.
Both women also had notably happy personalities and a habit of bursting into laughter mid-sentence. They had, says Haidt, “won the cortical lottery”: they had more activity in the left frontal cortex of their brains, making them what he calls cortical “lefties”: less subject to anxiety and more able to recover from negative experiences from infancy on.
In other words, no matter how much we earn, how well we marry and how virtuously we live, the pursuit of happiness will end up being partly determined by the set of genes we were born with.
We can never know what Plato or Aristotle would have made of such findings. And perhaps the fact of knowing these things will not make us any happier. But they surely reveal as much about the enduring human desire for happiness as the teachings of those who lived such very different lives more than 2,000 years before us.
幸福的配方（上）
你
觉得下面两个人谁更幸福呢：一个是鲍勃(Bob)，他是白种人，是个35岁的单身知识分子，喜好运动、英俊，住在阳光明媚的加利福尼亚，拿着10万美元的薪水，他在业余时间读书，或者去博物馆；另外一个是玛丽(Mary)，65岁，她喜好交际，是个超重的普通黑人，要依靠透析。玛丽把她大部分的空余时间花在教堂活动中，与她的丈夫生活在纽约州多雪地带，全家收入为4万美元。
婚姻和牢固的社会关系更为重要
在我开始阅读一些所谓的“幸福研究”方面的新书之前，我可能已经打赌鲍勃更幸福。但是，根据弗吉尼亚大学(University of Virginia)心理学家乔纳森?海德特(Jonathan Haidt)的研究，我可能错了。海德特将鲍勃和玛丽的案例写进了他的著作《幸福假设》(The Happiness Hypothesis)。海德特表示，在他的有关幸福的研究中，最重要的发现之一，就是在环境和人口结构层面的优势――诸如鲍勃的健康、财富、年轻和阳光――并非我们想象得那么重要。婚姻和牢固的人际关系更为重要。因此，玛丽有可能比鲍勃更幸福。
如今，到处都在谈论有关幸福的研究或“幸福的新科学”。英国广播公司(BBC)播放了一部有关这一话题的系列片，由6个部分组成。保守党(The Conservative)领袖戴维?卡梅隆(David Cameron)希望将注意力“不仅集中在国内生产总值(GDP)上，还要集中在总体福利(GWB，即general well-being)上”。哈佛大学(Harvard University)目前最受欢迎的课程以幸福为主题，即“正向心理学”(positive psychology)。剑桥大学(Cambridge University)和威灵顿学院(Wellington College)寄宿学校也提供类似的教育。
幸福研究进入主流
一批新书最近引起的骚动，是一种幸福现象的“症状”。但这些作者也引发了争论，因为他们把先前经济学家、心理学家和遗传学家对幸福的晦涩理论研究，带入了主流。
那么，学者又能为“幸福”这一既熟悉又难以捉摸的主题带来什么有用贡献呢？从柏拉图(Plato)和亚里士多德(Aristotle)开始，对于那些普遍认为满足感取决于一种合乎道德、并最终令人满意的“美好人生”的哲学家而言，幸福是他们的共通之处。而且我们理解――即使我们并不总是同意――历史上那些宗教大人物的说法，即幸福是对好好生活的人生的回报。但是，真的有这样一种客观的幸福状态，能接受科学地衡量和观察吗？根据当今研究幸福的人士，答案是肯定的。
心理学家们表示，只要在一段时间内询问人们的感觉如何，就能得到对他们满足感的准确评估。他们表示，通过使用电子扫描（幸福的人的大脑左前额部分更为活跃；不幸福的人则是在右边较为活跃）来衡量大脑的活动，那些报告的幸福水平可能得到进一步验证。于是，幸福学派的经济学家表示，这些发现将有助于我们通过更加关注卡梅隆所说的“总体福利”，来制定公共政策。
但是，研究幸福的行动，正使一些人非常不快。《独立报》(The Independent)的一篇批评文章表示，威灵顿学院的课程是“为平庸之才所开的处方”；《每日邮报》(Daily Mail)称之为“矫揉造作”；《泰晤时报》(The Times)称之为一个“理想的培养优秀动物的公式”。
“幸福是行善的非直接结果”
肯特大学(University of Kent)社会学教授弗兰克?富里迪(Frank Furedi)表示，新的“幸福十字军”将满足哈克斯利(Aldous Huxley)的《美丽新世界》(Brave New World)中的Controller。对富里迪而言，幸福的秘密是一个矛盾：你只能在寻求其它东西的时候获得它，也就是古希腊人所提倡的道德人生。“幸福，”他写道，“是为了追求公民道德和试图行善，而与其他人接触的非直接结果。”
那么，到底谁是对的？那些认为我们无法在古人有关幸福的理念上有太多改进的人？还是那些主张我们现在对什么使自己幸福，拥有更深奥的理解（就像当今外科医生对大脑的了解比古希腊名医希波克拉底更多）的人？
在5本有关幸福的新书中，可以找到颇有说服力的根据，说明科学家比古代圣人更为正确，包括一本提出相反主张的书。
《幸福的秘密》
伦敦大学玛丽女王学院(Queen Mary, University of London)文化史教授理查德?索奇(Richard Schoch)坚持认为，古人是最明智的。我期待着读索奇的那本《幸福的秘密》(The Secrets of Happiness)。《哲学家杂志》(The Philosophers’ Magazine)的编辑朱利安?巴吉尼(Julian Baggini)在那本书封面的介绍中这样写道，这本书“从背后狠狠踢了‘幸福新科学’一脚”，并且“极为好看”。
好不好看，取决于你能从索奇对斯多葛学派(Stoicism)的描述（“就像一个充满了电的电池，它一直准备着”）或对渴望的描述（“丝绸贴着皮肤。斯嘉丽?约翰森”(Scarlett Johannson)）中找到多大的享受。
至于踢幸福思想者的那一脚，索奇挑出了理查德?莱亚德(Richard Layard)。莱亚德的主张――衡量幸福的能力有重要的公共政策意义――影响了新功利主义者，他的著作《幸福：新科学的教训》(Happiness: Lessons from a New Science，2005年出版)也成为了那些人的圣经。
“西方人不一定更幸福”
莱亚德最核心的洞见之一是，尽管西方人在收入、饮食和居住方面都更优越，但他们不一定更幸福。而且，一旦人均收入超过大约2万美元，更多的钱并不能保证更多的幸福。所以，政府还不如增加税收，并处理精神病等痛苦根源。精神病占目前疾病的四分之一，但在英国和美国分别只得到13%和7%的健康支出。
但索奇表示，莱亚德对幸福的定义（“感觉很好――享受生活，并希望这种感觉得以维持”）是“更薄弱、更空洞”版本的满足感，而“所谓的幸福‘新科学’，使有关美好生活的这种贫乏概念得以延续。”
他表示，真正的幸福需要多得多的努力。最好考虑一下赛内卡等斯多葛学派思想家、或印度智慧瑜伽(Jnana Yoga)传统所提供的超然和淡漠箴言。智慧瑜伽修炼者放弃了他们的家庭、房屋、财产和职业去追求智慧，并因此获得了真正的幸福。
看破红尘是幸福？
索奇承认，为了“超然”而抛下孩子、配偶、家庭和工作，对多数人是不现实的。“但这是我们的问题，”他表示，“而且这揭示出有关我们的东西――我们的弱点、我们的恐惧或只是从各方面向我们施加压力的环境――比有关幸福的更多。”
但索奇对幸福含义的最终定义，令人好奇地不能满足：“真正的幸福意味着把握我们自己、使我们潜在成为的那个人更为真实。”对很多读者而言，这还不如莱亚德对幸福的主张真实。
对于古希腊人的天性，加州大学尔湾分校(University of California, Irvine)哲学教授尼古拉斯?怀特(Nicholas White)在《幸福简史》(A Brief History of Happiness)一书中，提出了一种比较平衡的观点。怀特的书（令人不快地枯燥）最重要的价值是，他试图揭示解释有关幸福的思考，如何从古希腊先哲的观点转变至杰里米?边沁(Jeremy Bentham)的19世纪的“最大数量的最大幸福”(greatest happiness of the greatest number)功利主义思想。不幸的是，他的历史很少提到近年关于幸福的思想。但他承认，当提到给别人幸福方面的建议时，哲学家或许不是最好的来源。
“哲学家的幸福建议比常人还不如”
“哲学家们有关如何幸福的具体建议，并不比平常人的建议好到哪儿去（事实上，有可能更糟糕），”怀特表示。“他们一般不知道足够的相关事实，而且，他们没有合适的性情。”
此外，古希腊人对幸福生活的“处方”，往往计划得很生硬。怀特表示，这是因为柏拉图和亚里士多德从根本上讲是私人教育家，“他们做的买卖，是说服雅典绅士们把孩子交给他们接受职业训练”。这意味着他们看到了计划和教育的实际价值。而现实生活可能复杂得多。
更为全面且文笔更为优雅的、对幸福思维的演变的描述，来自佛罗里达州里大学(Florida State University)历史教授达林?麦克马洪(Darrin McMahon)，在《追求幸福》(The Pursuit of Happiness)一书中。麦克马洪对一些新近的幸福思想家有所警惕：“或许可以认为心理学家们近年给出的‘启示’，没有他们或他们的宣传者原本让我们相信的那样具有启迪作用。”
即便如此，他承认，许多新的研究“的确对追寻幸福的过程发出了经验主义光芒，大约2500年以来，人类一直以一种不太严谨的方式跟随这一过程的旋律”。
（待续）
