Is the earth starting to move for you? Years of Olympic foreplay this week reach their climax. The British government has stripped, daubed and ravished its capital city. Nowhere outside the communist bloc has power coupled sport so clumsily as in London 2012. National ecstasy has been declared a duty to the state. The slightest protest is unpatriotic.
We could all doubtless do with a bit of cheering up. The Office of National Statistics has published its first index of wellbeing, discovering that UK happiness is 7.4 out of 10. This is hardly news anyone can use. An Indian teenage homeowner, in poor health and living in Shetland would apparently be the happiest person in Britain. While I applaud Richard Layard's "happiness" corrective to economic growth, the rubbishing of wellbeing indexes by the philosopher Julian Baggini in the Guardian was convincing.
The search for a "felicific calculus" is as old as Jeremy Bentham, but so are the objections to measuring it, such as discredited cost-benefit analysis. Layard demands: "If you think something is important, you should try to measure it." Baggini rightly replies that some important things are inherently immeasurable, such as beauty or love. The risk is that we regard only what is measurable as important, and allow Whitehall's craving for statistics to reduce it to absurdity.
The ONS wellbeing index, like Bentham's calculus, requires assumptions that are inherently partial. I would posit physical security as the first requirement for wellbeing, followed closely by loving relationships. A survey reaching any other conclusion is asking the wrong question. Such favourites as health and education come lower, but they are boosted in happiness league tables by being easier to measure.
The contribution to wellbeing of national sports success must be near negligible. Playing games makes most of us feel good, at least if we win. Watching sport fills a moment of time with a degree of suspense, with outcomes happy or sad according to loyalty. But claiming wellbeing from the national performance at sport is dangerous. As another philosopher, Roger Scruton, has written: "Ideologies such as fascism which attempt to close the gap between society and state have invaded the institutions of sport … as ready objects of human allegiance, symbolic of local, territorial and national virtues." They corrupt sport as a badge of totalitarian potency.
When Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France I was pleased for him, a pleasure only mildly enhanced by the chauvinist coverage it received. But do I congratulate Wiggins, or my lucky stars for being born British? And was the pleasure cancelled when a Briton failed to win at golf and England lost to South Africa in the Test? Again, the Test might spoil my weekend, but it was eventually balanced by the pleasure of watching the sun dancing on a glorious Norfolk sea.
These happinesses and sadnesses form a bundle of incalculable sensations. In the case of the Olympics, the stakes are awesomely high. The Olympic movement was reinvented by Pierre de Coubertin in 1894 as an amateur ritual of international concord. Its hijacking by commercial and nationalist ballyhoo has been wretched, but at least in theory a positive calculus might be assessed.
The government clearly hopes the wellbeing index will soar because London has hosted the Olympics. This means hosting, since happiness might have soared anyway if medals had been won elsewhere.
I take pride in my home city being on the world stage and doing something well. It is a similar pride to an earlier generation seeing half the world in red on Mercator's atlas projection, or Time magazine putting "London: The Swinging City" on its cover in 1966. Such moments may butter few parsnips, but the feelgood is real enough.
In the case of the Olympics I must thus balance the magnificence of the Stratford site against Locog's humiliating kowtowing to the International Olympic Committee (IOC). This led to guards forbidding mere pedestrians to set foot on a section of Park Lane reserved for the immaculate boots of IOC officials as they stepped gingerly from five-star hotel to five-star limousine. It was the first "Zil pavement".
I must balance the pleasure of watching young people competing for medals against dismay at the billions spent turning my city into a tacky shambles. That dismay is again relieved when I turn on the radio and hear two girls arriving from an African orphanage to sing at the cultural Olympiad. Their ode to a Malawian angel was alone worth £9bn.
The government's problem this week is that an event sold to London by the IOC in a frenetic market for glory has become so grotesquely expensive that politicians feel obliged to render some account for it. They know all big sporting occasions are white elephants, imposing punitive costs on the local public sector. They must thus cover them with dollops of justificatory pride, to lever some notional dollop of happiness. It is what a North Korean politburo does with a military parade in Pyongyang.
Even then, money demands its say. Apart from athletes, few people outside the construction and security industries profit from Olympics. So ministers resort to mendacity. They hype the Games out of all proportion, hiring consultants to claim an implausible "legacy payback" for the £9bn outlay. The mayor's boast that a million extra tourists will be surging through London every day is rubbish. As for David Cameron's pledge that British firms will win £13bn in contracts they would not otherwise have won, it implies bribery and chicanery on an Olympian scale.
I look forward to the eventual audit of the Olympics. The government is entitled to claim this should embrace hard gain and soft, money and "happiness". But audit there should be. Some way of validating these extravaganzas must be found if they are not to slide into the reckless politics of bread and circuses. Otherwise there is nothing to stop governments running off with as much money as they like, and ordering the rest of us to shut up and enjoy it. Athens syndrome is disastrous.
Some benefit from spending public money may be immeasurable. But when bidden to mute ecstasy by politicians who have just blown £9bn on national pride, grownup citizens have every right to count their spoons.
