What makes me unhappy is telling colleagues that I'm writing a piece on happiness, and having each of them sing the first terrible bars from Ken Dodd's 60s aural assault on the psyche, Happiness - more a virus than a tune.
What makes me happy, though? I had thought that the answer to this was as elusive as a dream. A combination of birdsong in the early morning, a child's smile, a fellow columnist being comprehensively trashed in Private Eye, mere absence of pain, that kind of thing.
This turns out to be wrong. In Richard (Lord) Layard's much-discussed new book Happiness, Lessons from a New Science, it transpires that happiness is as measurable as lentils. Scientists can now scan the activity on the happy left frontal lobe, and this, they say, corresponds to people's perceptions as to how happy they are. The implication of this is that, even if I'm not sure what makes me happy, an MRI scan should be able to tell me.
Layard's purpose, however, is wider than informing the world that bliss is now transparent. His Great Question is this: why are we no happier than we were when we were poorer? The happy index shows that once a country has lifted itself out of abject poverty, additional richness doesn't lead to greater happiness. Americans today, he points out, are no happier than they were in the 50s.
It's the rat race. We all work too hard to get more money in order to compete with each other, because we find falling behind in the social status that only money provides too painful. This is not a new idea, of course. When Layard writes that, "One secret of happiness is to ignore comparisons with people who are more successful than you are: always compare downwards, not upwards", one wonders who he thinks this has been a secret from. "Remember, there is always someone worse off than you," was certainly widely taught when I was young. But perhaps Layard never heard it.
The answer, in part, according to Layard, is to discourage excessive work by increasing taxes. Then there won't be the same catch-up pressure and we will all have time for other things. And it is those other things that make us happy.
In fact, he tells readers, there are six basic causes of happiness or unhappiness. They are divorce, unemployment, lack of social trust, membership of non-religious organisations (good), quality of government and a widespread belief in a higher deity (also good). He also points out that excessive job and home mobility threatens security and that, depressingly, happiness forfeited affects us twice as much as happiness gained. In other words, people are deeply conservative.
In addition to raising taxes government can do several other things to improve the happiness index. In particular, it can change things in the education system. "The curriculum," Layard writes, "should cover control of one's own emotions, parenting, mental illness and, of course, citizenship." He also wants to see the "systematic practice of empathy."
I'm not quite sure what the curriculum should teach about mental illness, but the rest of it is already embodied in the citizenship courses taught at most schools. But it is interesting how Layard's social prescriptions fall short of his analysis in areas other than taxation. He should also want to make migration more difficult, discourage divorce, get more parents (and they will usually be women) to stay at home with the kids, encourage religious belief and worship by measures such as returning to Sunday observance, recruit more children into the Scouts and Guides, and proselytise more effectively against egotistic or anti-social behaviour.
But here's a conundrum. We have, in living memory, been a society with narrower differentials, greater social solidarity and conformity, lower divorce and separation rates, lower mobility and much more widespread religious practice. It was called the 50s. And - to invert Layard's entire argument - we were no happier then than we are now. Probably a bit less.
Sorry, but I'm not too keen on living back in the 50s
Talking of the 50s, it's part 538 of Aaronovitch Election Watch 2005, and this week we join Michael Howard's crusade to "root out political correctness" in schools, "replacing it with the building blocks of knowledge that are essential to give every child their birthright: a decent education."
I don't need an MRI scan to know that the prospect of Howard rooting anything out is not going to make me happy. The fact that the former inspector of schools, Chris Woodhead, is to be his chosen instrument in this rooting-out, a sort of human garden-fork, does not add to the appeal of the process. Woodhead is unhappiness made flesh. Anything much more distressed than his haircut is hard to imagine.
An ignoble thought, and we must move on. So what was meant by rooting out political correctness in schools? What needed to be forked? Woodhead gave the answers on the radio yesterday. First, lots more children must fail their exams. Too many are passing, and that's politically correct. He will make exams much more difficult until an appropriate number of children have no chance of succeeding at anything, and that will improve things for everyone. Second, citizenship, with all that stuff about race and esteeming each other and health and sex education (most of it distressingly non-experiential), takes up too much time, when really all kids want is extra maths,writing and reading.
Finally, and - judging by his mighty emphasis, most importantly - too many pupils (I think he said 35%) didn't know that it was Sir Francis Drake who beat the Armada. Six per cent, he told John Humphrys, thought it was Gandalf. Pupils needed to know, he said, "The National Story". This is being put together right now under the aegis of the shadow education secretary, Tim Collins, to be entitled, presumably, The Approved Children's History of Britain.
If you see the connections between the two pieces on this page, then that's entirely deliberate. In the endless battle between modernity and tradition, it is tradition that is currently in vogue. Both Layard and Woodhead, in my view, yearn for lost days of simplicity, slowness and a society held together by buckets of social glue. And, as ever, there are some good arguments on their side.
My problem is that I do not want to live in that other, imagined place. I want mobility, diversity, surprise, respect for difference, Somalis, mohicans, an absence of fear, rude operas, emotional literacy, body-piercings and scepticism.
