Essay

A Picture of Happiness

 

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I remember attending a party a long time ago at which my partner discovered a plain clothed vicar and asked him why God allowed so much unhappiness.

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'Probably because she's black', came the reply.

 

It was the most politically incorrect response he could have made. No doubt its flippancy was born to some extent from alcohol but I took the underlying point to be something along the lines of, 'If you ask me stupid, unanswerable questions what do you expect me to say, particularly at a party?'

 

It went down well with most of those gathered around. The fact remains, however, that in our more sombre moments the question of why there is so much unhappiness and discontent is often not far from our minds.

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Those with no religious belief it bothers less. There is unhappiness because there is, they might say. We are born with the ability to make choices and we make them at our peril without knowing the full consequences. Sometimes when we can guess a bad end result we still make the choice - usually because the choice seems to our short term advantage. In any event, we can forget choices. Unhappiness occurs because it hits us in the way life’s randomness does.

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Those with religious belief fall into two broad camps irrespective of the faith followed. The first camp begins with a premise that is not dissimilar to the agnostics and atheists. Choices are made and bad luck comes along. But for them the supreme being, who understands that life's path may be strewn with rocks and troubles and pitfalls, is always there to guide and support them through the agony.

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The second camp considers there is an 'ideal' way that He has marked out for them and if they find themselves in trouble and in misery it's because they have strayed from it. A Christian version of this message is 'beware your sins will find you out' or, more convoluted, 'the sins of the father will be visited on the sons'.

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Hinduism assumes that the position one finds oneself in life is due to the manner in which a previous life was led. This is a gross generalisation and apologies to Hindu readers. It is a somewhat different view from Christianity but the similarities in the general principle is recognisable. If you deviate from the 'straight and narrow' punishment of one form or other will follow.

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The question I have asked myself is whether there is a view of unhappiness which would fit all contexts. We all know it exists. We all know that the Universe was built with unhappiness as a component. Is there a way of explaining it from all points of view?

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I suppose one needs to define what we mean by it before we can go any further, even though it looks obvious to everyone. I am using the word 'unhappiness' in its widest context. That is any emotion that is recognised as being of a negative quality. Thus unhappiness can mean mild momentary irritation (Where the hell are my socks? What a moronic driver!) or the deepest and most devastating experience classically instanced by the loss of a loved one.

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At first sight it may seem flippant or even insulting to group these sorts of experiences into one idea but if I don't I can get no further. If I remove from the experience called 'unhappiness' all mild irritations how mild is 'mild'? If I can't find my keys, I'm irritated. If it takes so long to find them that I miss a crucially important engagement and make someone else unhappy have I crossed the line into 'seriously unhappy' from being 'mildly irritated'? In short, if we do not include all negative emotion we are left with an impossible task of drawing the line somewhere else and having to decide the difference, for example, between 'mild', 'serious' and 'devastating'.

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The next tricky task is to find a starting point that both theists and atheists can agree upon. For a start, is it true that the Universe was constructed with a component called 'unhappiness'? Fundamentalist christians believe that the world was created in 6 days and that God made a ‘perfect’ Garden of Eden for Adam and Eve. But that garden included the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’ (New English Bible translation) so we know evil was a component of the universe thus created. And what is one of the consequences of evil if not unhappiness? It seems to me that unhappiness must have been an ‘implied’ component even if Adam and Eve were not aware if it until they ate the forbidden fruit and got thrown out of the garden.

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So what was in the beginning that everyone, fundamentalist Christians and atheists alike, can agree about? The scientists, and many theists, accept the 'Big Bang' as being the start of all things. But whether it was the most monumental explosion of all time or the creation of light and dark culminating in the Garden of Eden, the essential element in the passing from 'nothing' to 'not nothing', is ‘change’.

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From the first microsecond, the universe started to change. Particles became atoms, molecules began to form stars (or, on the third day, land was formed between the waters). All matter was there but from the beginning it changed position or structure or characteristic continuously.

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What wasn't there, until the sixth day or for several billion years depending on your point of view, was a human mind to perceive it. This essay is not about theories of evolution so the problems, theories and purposes surrounding the creation of human consciousness is not being dealt with. It is sufficient to recognise that at some point consciousness existed when previously it did not.

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This is a vital issue. Up to this time the changes throughout the universe were occurring without a conscious perception of them (apart from the possible perception by a creator). After this momentous event changes would be perceived and, most important of all, emotional judgements about those changes could and would be made.

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In a very real sense, change is the basis of perception. A purposeful effort has to be made to perceive of a lack of change. Thus familiarity with the minutiae of life, the corners of your home, a continuous background noise, the colour of a friend's hair, are unnoticed until change occurs. This occurs to an extent with sets or groups of events. Travelling to work every morning, greeting the family and robotically processing the same routine each evening when you come home, using the same shops to buy the same products the same evening each week.

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All these things are set to the back of the mind until the car won't start, a member of your family is missing or the supermarket has been redesigned so you don't know where anything is. These examples of how we concentrate on change may seem puerile but in each case we perceive that change and react positively, negatively or neutrally to it. We are able, if we think about it, to place every perception of change on an emotional 'happiness' scale.  

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A change in supermarket layout may induce a negative reaction in some and a positive reaction in others (because it makes it more interesting). The fact that your husband or wife is not home preparing a meal when you get in may give you negative reactions at first until you remember the visit to a friend that was arranged the previous week.

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But suppose there was no other arrangement. Suppose there is no reason on Earth why the house should be empty at that time. And suppose the phone then rings and it is the hospital? We can all perceive of changes that produce emotional devastation on a far wider scale than a single family. News of wars, famine and genocide have assaulted our senses in recent decades and no doubt would have throughout the centuries if technology had allowed it.

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The point of providing all these minor and major examples of emotional reaction is not to try to explain why all this unhappiness occurs. I would be risking an accusation of flippancy if I did. The point is to underline a recognition of a scale of emotion built in to each one of us. We have all experienced the heights of ecstasy and the depths of despair or recognised it when we see or hear of it in others. Because we are conscious feeling beings, every change we perceive will result in an emotional response even if that is more or less neutral.

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So in answer to the question as to why there is so much unhappiness I would turn the issue on its head. Events, i.e. changes, occur otherwise we would not exist. And those events will produce an emotional response because that’s how we are built. The reason there is so much unhappiness in the world is simply because that is our response to specific events. We are human beings, why would it not be?