In Pursuit Of Happiness

March 26th, 2010  |   

Is The Glass Half Full Or Half Empty?

I suspect all of us have had the experience of going into someone’s bathroom and finding reading material next to the toilet. In fact, it’s a rare occasion, when I close the bathroom door behind me, not to find books and reading matter lodged in a basket or on the floor.

I would suggest that you can tell a lot about the people who live there by the reading material for a guy like me making only an occasional visit. Being a student of bathroom reading material, you might call all me a lavatory anthropoligist or a privy psychologist.

Just recently I found a turn-a-page-a-day calendar close at hand. It was one of those calendars with a message—little tidbits of folk wisdom for each day. The reading for my particular visit to the bathroom challenged me with a familiar question I’ll bet my readers have seen more than once.

It read: “Is the glass half full or half empty?”

I don’t want you to think I sat all day in that bathroom pondering the words, “Is the glass half full or half empty?” But I do want you to know that I carried that little question out-and-about for some time. Not as long as Congress has been chewing on the recent health care bill, but for at least as long as it took me to plop down in front of this computer.

When you stop to think about it, the question is naggingly demanding. It’s one of those either/or type questions. Like a true or false question, it doesn’t want to tolerate one single bit of ambiguity. There seems to be no third option. Come on now, it says. Answer up, is the glass half full or half empty?”

Not only does this question demand a clear-cut choice—either half full or half empty—it also implies a psychological judgement. I’ll bet you  know what I’m talking about.

Say the glass is half full, and you are automatically placed in the camp with the optimists—the happy crowd. Say that the glass is half empty, and you will surely be looked at suspiciously as a pessimist—an unhappily negative nabob. 

Well, call me stubborn, if you will, or even indecisive, but I’m going to say that the glass is both full and empty. Don’t tell me I can’t have it both ways either. I’m happy with my answer, and I’ll tell you why. But to do so, I’m required to spend a little time reflecting on the subject of happiness.

The Health Care Bill—Half Full/Half Empty?

While many of my friends jumped for joy when the Health Care Bill was finally passed, I found it hard to join the celebration. It’s an ugly piece of legislation passed in an ugly way by a bunch of ugly politicians fronting for a host of ugly lobbyists.

Okay, go ahead and tell me to cheer up and see the glass half full. Tell me to put on a smiley face and stop looking at the half empty glass. No thanks. Real social change is not made that way.

This bill, despite the cheerful liberal hype and the right-wing apocalyptic panic, is a glass half full of snake oil. Call it a new version of Hadacol—the old-time cure-all that was no more than high content alcohol with an additive that rushed the booze rapidly into the blood stream. I suggest we call this bill Congressional Hadacol.
Some seventeen thousand physicians at Physicians for a National Health Program have spoken the truth. What’s needed, they insist, is a single payer health care plan. Instead of that, look at the half full glass we must now drink from:
• About 23 million people will remain uninsured nine years out.

• Millions of middle-income people will be pressured to buy commercial health insurance policies costing up to 9.5 percent of their income.

• Women’s reproductive rights will be further eroded, thanks to the burdensome segregation of insurance funds for abortion and for all other medical services.

• Insurance firms will be handed at least $447 billion in taxpayer money to subsidize the purchase of their shoddy products. This money will enhance their financial and political power, and with it their ability to block future reform.

• Health care costs will continue to skyrocket.

• The much-vaunted insurance regulations - e.g. ending denials on the basis of pre-existing conditions - are riddled with loopholes, thanks to the central role that insurers played in crafting the legislation.

• Older people can be charged up to three times more than their younger counterparts, and large companies with a predominantly female workforce can be charged higher gender-based rates at least until 2017.

Happiness May Grow In Unexpected Places

The subject of happiness is very much in vogue these days. Elizabeth Kolbert, in the March 22 New Yorker, reviews a number of books about happiness research. The conclusions are interesting. Some are even startling.
• People tend to think that hitting the lottery will make a person happy. Not so. Even accident victims lead happier lives. Check the news out of Connecticut where two sisters in their 80s are fighting in court over lottery money.

• Studies show that women find caring for their children less pleasurable than napping or jogging, and just a tad more satisfying than doings dishes.

• Research out of Afghanistan indicates that, despite three decades of war and destitution, Afghans, on average, are pretty cheerful. How about this: The happiest areas are those in which the Taliban’s influence is strong.

• The average level of self-reported happiness in the U.S. has remained flat over the past three and a half decades, despite the fact that per-capita income has risen from $17,000 to almost $27,000.

Carol Graham, in her book “Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires” concludes that, for the most part, rich people are happier than poor folks, but the relationship between money and happiness is less straightforward than is generally assumed. She writes: “Higher per capita income levels do not translate directly into higher average happiness levels.”

What this means, of course, is that happiness can’t always be bought with money, and people who live in poverty, even amidst war, may be happier than we think.

Dereck Bok, in his book on happiness, concludes with the observation that “People do not always know what will give them lasting satisfaction.” Nor, I might add, do folks know where they will find happiness. Like a green sprig growing out of a brick wall, happiness somehow can find a way to grow in the most unexpected places. 

Happiness has a will of its own.

A Little Girl Gets Venus As A Gift From Her Father

In the last issue of Notes I made a couple of references to Jeannette Walls, the author of “The Glass Castle” and “Half Broke Horses.”Since then, Judy and I have had the chance to spend a day-and-a-half with her in a seminar around the subject of  “Poverty, Resilience, And the Art of the Memoir.”

Briefly, Walls grew up poor—dirt poor. Her family life was rootless—constant movement from one poverty stricken situation to another in Arizona, California, Nevada and finally Welch, West Virginia. Frequently homeless, often living in unlivable housing, and always influenced by the erratic behavior of an alcoholic father and a weird, child-like mother, Jeannette Walls proved to be one of those indomitable human beings.

I recommend  “The Glass Castle” as a remarkable story of the triumph of the human spirit. My god, I ask myself, how could this woman effervesce such joy, such brilliant energy, given the harsh world she grew up in?

Jeannette Walls was encouraged by her husband to write her story. He was convinced it was an important story to tell—an empowering story for readers. Some, of course, would think that she, her brother and two sisters, should have been taken from their parents. Her father smashed windows in a drunken rage, and took food money to buy booze. Her childlike mother, secretly eating candy bars, grew fat while the children lacked food. And perhaps the most painful part for the children was the way they were looked down on as white trash by neighbors and schoolmates.

But the twist in the story comes about when Walls tells us that she never felt unloved in this crazy, dysfunctional family. She sees her father, even in his worst moments, as a bright man who passed knowledge on to her, along with a love of nature. Without money at Christmas, and no desire to fall prey to the materialism of the season, he told Jeannette that he would give her any star in the heaven above as a gift. Pointing to a bright star in the sky, he told her it—Venus—was his gift to her. It was a gift that to this day keeps on giving joy to her.

Walls’ story is about love, experienced in the midst of poverty. It has much to teach any of us who think we know all there is to know about poverty, and what needs to be done with and for the poor. The wisdom of the poor serves as a corrective to the arrogance of the rich.            

A Great Threesome—Life, Liberty, And The Pursuit Of Happiness

I took three years of Latin in school but I’ve forgotten more Latin than I can remember. But I do remember this: Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres—All Gaul is divided into three parts.(The first line from Caesar’s history of the Gallic Wars).

Looking back on my schooling, I’m struck by the significance of the number three. Childhood with Three Bears and Three Little Pigs. Learning Lincoln’s words, “Of the people, by the people, for the people” in Mr. Clark’s history class. And, somewhere along the line, there was the three monkey philosophy—Hear no Evil, See no Evil, Speak no Evil. Ah, and Mark Twain’s trio—Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics.

What I am leading up to is that magnificent triplet handed down to us in The Declaration of Independence, those “unalienable rights”—Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. The interesting fact about these words is that Jefferson, with Benjamin Franklin’s assistance, borrowed the phrase from John Locke, with one correction. Locke’s unalienable trio was “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.” In Jefferson’s rewritten version, the word property was replaced by the word happiness.

Jefferson also altered the Bible by taking a pair of scissors to the Gospel stories. He discarded the supernatural stories about Jesus—the virgin birth and the resurrection—and pasted together, in a 46 page book filled with what Jefferson called “the pure principles” which Jesus taught—the very human stories of Jesus. He called the stories “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”

Some Christians may not like what Jefferson did when he focused his faith around the humanistic Jesus at the expense of the spiritualized stories about the man from Nazareth. But Jefferson’s cutting and pasting teaches us a great deal about his values.

Jefferson was a white member of the landed gentry, which means he had money, land and slaves. But at the end of his life he was deeply in debt. I like to think that this man, who substituted the word happiness for property in the Declaration of Independence, must have appreciated the words of Jesus about the dangers inherent in money.

From the Gospel of Matthew: “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money…Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Happiness as a substitute for property serves as a warning against the snares of materialistic capitalism. Now all we need to do is to discern where true happiness is to be found.

Glenn Beck And John Stuart Mill

Friends are urging me to scream, shout and yell about the Fox Network Fool, Glenn Beck who has gotten a lot of mileage lately going after organized religion. Beck says people should flee from churches that preach “social justice,” because the term social justice is a “code word” for communism and Nazism. 

So far, as much as I can’t stand Beck, I have not joined in the campaign to force Beck off the airwaves. In his treatise, “On Liberty,” the philosopher John Stuart Mill makes an impassioned defense of free speech. We can never be sure, he contends, that a silenced opinion does not contain some element of the truth. I agree with Mill on that.

Perhaps Beck’s outburst does have a kernel of truth to it. I sure as heck would flee from a church that preaches a brand of social justice that beats up on gay people in the name of God, or denies communion to someone who is pro-choice on the issue of abortion.

But I would indeed receive a serendipitous blessing if I could find a few churches I could flee to where a pro-gay, anti-war, clean energy rather than mountaintop removal of coal message was being preached. Maybe Glenn could help me find them. So far, my search has been fruitless.

Happiness And Prophetic Discontent

I consider myself to be a happy person. My family and friends confirm that observation as well. So my happiness must show. I love life, I’m healthy, have a great partner I married 52 years ago, enjoy wonderfully loving children, and have an awesome array of friends. If that weren’t enough, I’ve enjoyed my work as an ordained minister over the past forty-six years. As they say in religious circles, I’m indeed blessed.

That glass I’ve been writing about in these Notes, has been more than half filled. It has overflowed more times than enough. Or, as it is said in Bible-speak, “my cup runneth over.”

But I must be careful not to view my own happiness like some kind of Lazy-E-Boy recliner. Oh, how it could swallow me up. I could begin to think that happiness, especially my own, is the end-all-and-be-all of life, the pièce de résistance of my spiritual life, the entre of my religion. Quite frankly, as many of you know from my writings, I deplore a great deal of religious spirituality that feasts on its own personal peace, at the expense of serious social justice—that takes pride in its own mellow meditative exercises.

I know you must feel my own dissatisfaction with religion when I say those things. Maybe you are tempted to come to my rescue by saying that I should look at the half full eucharistic chalice I have drunk from in my church, and not the half empty part of it. But I cannot do that, even though I recognize the chalice is both half full and half empty.

Elizabeth Kolbert, in her New Yorker article on happiness, comes to my rescue by quoting John Stuart Mill. “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” 

I have come to understand in my life that prophetic dissatisfaction, as annoying as it may be to my friends and enemies alike, is critical in healing not only my sin-sick soul, but a world in which redemptive grace is mediated through cultural and political change. Indeed, such prophetic dissatisfaction hallows and embraces a deeply spiritual dark night of the soul that promises rewards beyond mere happiness.

I know the American fear of China—that the Chinese are taking over the world. But there is an old Chinese proverb that speaks truth to me about the subject of happiness, and so I will close with it.

If you want happiness for an hour — take a nap.
If you want happiness for a day — go fishing.
If you want happiness for a year — inherit a fortune.
If you want happiness for a lifetime — help someone else.

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