This year marks the 10th anniversary of Martin Seligman coining the term "positive psychology". The name brought focus to an already emergent science of happiness. So it was appropriate that Richard Schoch, author of The Secrets of Happiness, should turn his inaugural lecture as professor of the history of culture at Queen Mary, University of London, to the matter of just what we have learned.
In three words: not a lot - especially when compared with the insights buried in the ancient wisdom on the good life. Schoch contested that positive psychology has failed to yield any truly original thoughts on happiness. Its recommendations do not rise above the commonplaces of "work less", "stay fit", "think positively", and so on. Why? Because it is based upon a flawed premise. In fact, the science of happiness barely grasps the things that the average sage of antiquity took as fundamental. And as for the now almost mainstream notion that we should somehow look to the government for our happiness? It is symptomatic of how skewed our thinking on the matter has become.
Incidentally, we can be very glad no government will seriously act on gross national happiness, since the research suggests that the most effective policy would be to champion substantial increases in taxation. That is as likely as the Pope recommending contraception. More taxes supposedly works because it incentivises us to work less - though paradoxically, it also turns out that happier people actually work more, because they want fewer days off. That is just one example of how the research ends up chasing its own tail.
The fundamental error of the science - and the reason why so many of its recommendations sound trivial or just confused - is the assumption that happiness is the same as positive emotion. Researchers are continuously drawn back to this idea since it makes happiness measurable. In fact, that is in itself debatable. But if you do take happiness to be tantamount to pleasure you are left with a woefully insufficient model of felicity.
There are three reasons pleasure won't do, Schoch explained, for all that pleasure is undoubtedly one of life's good-to-haves. First, positive emotions are fleeting, rising and falling like the tides: happiness-as-pleasure, too, would therefore be little more than mood swings. Second, the pleasures we seek are not always the pleasures we get, meaning that any happiness associated with it is based on little more than pot luck. Third, and perhaps most profoundly, it is not good to feel good all the time. Unremitting cheerfulness is deluded. Pain is not just inevitable, it contributes to the good life - excluding obvious exceptions such as the agonies of psychotic depression or tyrannical oppression.
So what did the ancients have to say? The first step to recovering their "secrets" is perhaps the hardest: giving up on the idea that to be happy is to feel good, and the corollary that the pursuit of happiness can be reduced to the pursuit of pleasure. When you do that, though, you discover two things. First, that good feelings still come, but they are deeper, more subtle and so more profoundly satisfying. Also you are not attached to them and so can enjoy them without worrying that they will go away, which they will. Second it opens up a whole new world of what happiness can mean.
Schoch told the story of the 11th century scholar of Baghdad, al-Ghazali, to illustrate the point. Al-Ghazali was a man of high mark and repute, when he suffered a kind of mid-life crisis. This seemed like bad news - as indeed was reported the other day in new research which showed that 44 is the age when people feel most unhappy. But this apparent low point in al-Ghazali's life was actually his life's greatest blessing. For instead of seeking to lessen the dip - to recover perhaps, by thinking positively - al-Ghazali pursued the wisdom manifest by his distress. It taught him that he was too much with the world; that he was ruled by pride; that the physical symptoms of his crisis, which included not being able to speak or eat, were signs of a spiritual, interior emergency.
He embarked upon a long journey and developed new disciplines, grounded in Sufism. Then he discovered the secret: the most important thing in life is to have direct experience of the transcendent - a sense and taste for the infinite, because, as the Sufis say, "the one who tastes knows". He then wrote about it in his book The Alchemy of Happiness, an early book of self-help, in which he encourages readers to transform the vices of their life into virtues. Hence the analogy with alchemy: the key to happiness is to cultivate the most precious form possible from the rough matter of your life.
To put it another way, Schoch continued, happiness is not about feeling good, it is about being good. The economist John Maynard Keynes knew as much when he diagnosed the great challenge for the 20th century. Material prosperity, he realised, can never confer purposefulness. So in the midst of unprecedented material prosperity, our task is to learn not just how to live, but how to live well. That is an art, for it requires attention not to the here and now - the logic of immediate gratification instilled by the pursuit of pleasure - but to the remote future. Keynes thought the well-off need to learn to please others not themselves, particularly those whom they don't and will never know. Happiness is fundamentally a moral matter not a hedonistic one.
Which is another reason why politicians and scientists alike always sound a bit silly when they talk about happiness. They can't do morality: professionally speaking, it's not in their sphere of competence. And yet, becoming the better version of who we are, Schoch concluded, is an idea with which we can all engage. It's a struggle: Marcus Aurelius likened it to wrestling. But the pain of that effort is not a barrier to happiness; it is the happiness. It is a possibility that lies before us all.
