Happiness in World History

Peter N. Stearns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367561031
• eBook ISBN: 9781000329810
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Happiness in World History traces ideas and experiences of happiness from early stages in human history, to the maturation of agricultural societies and their religious and philosophical systems, to the changes and diversities in the approach to happiness in the modern societies that began to emerge in the 18th century.

In this thorough overview, Peter N. Stearns explores the interaction between psychological and historical findings about happiness, the relationship between ideas and popular experience, and the opportunity to use historical analysis to assess strengths and weaknesses of dominant contemporary notions of happiness. Starting with the advent of agriculture, the book assesses major transitions in history for patterns in happiness, including the impact of the great religions, the unprecedented Enlightenment interest in secular happiness and cheerfulness, and industrialization and imperialism. The final, contemporary section covers fascist and communist efforts to define alternatives to Western ideas of happiness, the increasing connections with consumerism, and growing global interests in defining and promoting well-being. Touching on the experiences in the major regions of Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America, the text offers an expansive introduction to a new field of study.

This book will be of interest to students of world history and the history of emotions.

1 Introduction

Early in the 18th century, it was common for literate individuals in Britain and North America to emphasize the importance of a “melancholic demeanor” in the face of a rather joyless, judgmental God. Some might actually apologize, in letters or diaries, for moments of laughter, admitting that they should spend their time with “graver people”.

Fast forward a few decades toward the middle of the century, and leading intellectuals are proudly proclaiming “Oh happiness! Our being’s end and aim” (Alexander Pope) or “the best thing one could do (is) to be always cheerful, and not suffer any sullenness” (John Byrom). And not too long after, a group of American revolutionaries would boldly proclaim “the pursuit of happiness” as a basic human right. The fashionable stance toward happiness was changing dramatically.

Other examples, a bit less striking, suggest other patterns of change. As their religions took hold, Christian and Muslim leaders sought to convince the faithful that full happiness must await the attainment of heaven, deliberately challenging many assumptions about pleasure in this life. Middle-class parents in Britain and the United States, in the mid-19th century, began to establish the custom of regular celebrations of children’s birthdays – for several reasons, but primarily because they sought a new way to provide happiness. Communist governments, in the 20th century, worked very hard to promote ideas about happiness that would differ both from religious and from dominant Western concepts, and the process proved quite challenging.

Happiness may be a constant human goal – though that can be debated – but it unquestionably evolves. How it is defined, what expectations and judgments it provokes, and – probably – how happy people actually are, can shift dramatically depending on a combination of ideas and material conditions. Often the change is somewhat gradual, but as the 18th-century example suggests, it can be impressively swift. Opening this process to historical inquiry can reveal a lot about the past but also about how our own commitments to happiness have formed.

This book seeks to extend the evaluation of happiness by asking how major ideas and practices aimed at defining and attaining happiness have altered over time; how different cultures have approached the subject; and how concepts and initiatives today can be better understood through analysis of how they have emerged from the past. In the process, we will also periodically address the really challenging question of how happy people “actually” have been, and are today.

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The history of happiness covers many different regions of the world and several distinct periods of time. It involves a mix of formal ideas and more diffuse popular assumptions. It includes explicit efforts to generate happiness, from activities like traditional festivals; to the apparatus of modern consumerism; to broader attempts to improve levels of health and comfort. It traces ways that people have defined happiness, the extent to which they have actively expected happiness in their lives, even the important instances where, for religious or other reasons, apparently popular pleasures were viewed with suspicion. Always, the focus is both on understanding a key feature of the past and applying this understanding to an assessment of the often-eager quests for happiness in society today.

A reasonable first question, however, would simply be: is this a subject with a history at all? Isn’t happiness a basic feature in the human emotional arsenal, and not really subject to significant changes or variations? Babies everywhere, for example, regardless of time period or regional culture, learn how to smile by the time they are four weeks old (and some experts argue they actually figure this out even earlier). They are thus able to express this aspect of their mood and also manipulate their parents, many of whom are suckers for an infant’s smile. It would be hard to argue that there is much history here. Furthermore, psychologists have demonstrated, in arguing that happiness is a basic human emotion, that people everywhere usually agree on what a happy face looks like.

A variant on this argument, also heavily dependent on psychology, admits that there are lots of gradations in happiness but insists that they are mostly the function of individual personalities. Some people are simply born happier than others. One study claims that as much as 80% of a person’s happiness is innate, and therefore that urging someone to be happier is about the same as urging him or her to be taller – there’s nothing much to do about it, and certainly no reason to look at history.

Or finally, leaving psychology for what might be regarded as pop philosophy, happiness is simply a bit of a mystery. We often have trouble figuring out whether we ourselves are happy, let alone other people or people in the past. We wonder if certain conditions normally generate more happiness, but we’re not sure: hence, the old argument about whether money “buys” happiness (often accompanied by a somewhat wistful hope that it does not). Or we might throw up our hands at the range of individual tastes involved: some people are deeply happy watching their sports teams win, but others, in the same society, could care less about sports. Happiness, in this line of thinking, is unquestionably an interesting topic, but it’s simply too ill-defined to warrant historical study. Dan Gilbert, a psychologist who has all sorts of interesting things to say about happiness, admits that we will never have a “happymeter” that infallibly indicates how much happiness there is, or even exactly what it is, and if this is true for the present it is even more true for the past.

The historian of happiness can grant all these arguments – up to a point. There are innate features to happiness across time and place; yet, as we will show, even smiling is a social variable, capable of change (at least post-infancy) depending on cultural assumptions and even dentistry. And it is probably true that, in any society, some people are more disposed to happiness than others; but this does not override larger beliefs and assumptions that make some societies, and some time periods, different from others where happiness is concerned.

Finally, we can certainly agree that a precise definition of happiness is really hard to come by and that specific tastes unquestionably diverge – but one reason for this confusion is the fact that a society’s ideas about what happiness is, and how much of it we should expect, change over time. All of this is to say, in other words, that the history of happiness is complicated, but historical analysis can nevertheless contribute actively to how we can understand the emotion both today and in the past. The difficulty in offering a single definition of happiness is in a sense an invitation to trace the various conceptions in different regions of the world, how they have changed over time, and how pervasive notions today have emerged from the past. To the extent that a history of happiness not only explains current approaches but also contributes to any personal evaluation of what happiness means, its service is amplified.

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This book further complicates the study of happiness by looking at it in a world history context. The goal is to connect what we know about changes and variations in happiness to a global framework and in turn to introduce regional diversity to the subject at various points in time. This is a tall order, compounded further by the unevenness of available work on the subject: more on Western Europe, for example, than on Latin America, more on China than on Africa. Further as we will see, there may have been more fundamental changes in the Western approach to happiness in modern times than in most other regions, except insofar as they have tried to come to grips with this aspect of Western example. But this does not mean that the modern Western take on happiness is the best version imaginable (it has some built-in disadvantages, as we will see). And it certainly does not suggest that other cultural approaches have somehow disappeared. Indeed, interactions among various happiness standards form an important part of contemporary emotional history.

Huge opportunities exist for further research on the history of happiness even in the Western tradition, and certainly on the world stage. While all sorts of historical research bears on the subject of happiness – from treatments of the great philosophers to work on material conditions or changing levels of health – there is less explicit coverage than one might imagine, partly because the subject can seem so diffuse. Happiness is something of a pioneering historical venture. At the same time, enough spadework has been done on several different societies in several different time periods to venture a brief survey. The results contribute additional perspectives beyond what is available from attention to one region alone and certainly help explain the various contemporary approaches involved. And if they also whet the appetite for further comparative work, all the better.

^^^

Modern Russian adage: “A person who smiles a lot is either a fool or an American.”

One way to begin to get a handle on the study of happiness, but also its global complexities, is to look at the fundamental contemporary fact that happiness varies a lot, today, from one region to the next – or, at least, claims about happiness vary greatly. Ever since 2012, the Gallup organization and the United Nations have sponsored an annual international happiness survey, which among other things involves careful polling of a sampling of individuals from each major country around the question of where, on a scale of one to ten, they would rate their own happiness today. (The idea that this kind of attention to international happiness is worthwhile is, itself, a novel and intriguing development.)

The responses demonstrate striking differences. The happiest nations – happiest at least by self-report – are for the most part highly industrialized and Western: leading the list, usually, are the Scandinavian countries along with Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, and New Zealand. Not too far behind are bigger and arguably more complex societies, like the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States. At the bottom of the list are societies that are not only extremely poor but also often involved in bitter civil conflicts: South Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Syria.

With this, the obvious but nevertheless significant point: people’s happiness can vary a lot depending on political, military, economic, and epidemiological circumstances. This is true today, and there is every reason to assume it has been true over time as well. Hence, historically, some time periods are likely to have been happier than others: people in the Roman or Han Chinese empires, at their height, with considerable prosperity and internal peace, were almost certainly happier than their counterparts in the same societies once invasions and disease helped topple the great imperial structures. And there may be more subtle judgments, about the relationship between circumstance and happiness, that can be applied to the historical record as well, that will help explain not only levels of happiness but also changes in the ways the condition is defined.

But the contemporary polling data harbor one other kind of differentiation that is at least as interesting, and certainly more challenging, than the relationship between happiness and objective circumstance. One set of societies, today, consistently score more toward the middle of the scale than in its upper reaches, despite considerable prosperity, good health, and low crimes rates: Japan, South Korea, and indeed most of East Asia (only Taiwan and Singapore, in the 2019 poll, even placed in the top 35). In contrast, another set, though not at the top of the rankings, often score quite well despite lower levels of economic performance: a number of Latin American or Caribbean countries, headed by Costa Rica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Psychological Basics
• Part I The Agricultural Age
• Part II The Happiness Revolution, 1700–1900
• Part III Happiness in Contemporary World History
• Index