What is alarming is the way our imaginations can often seem so limited when it comes to thinking about what happiness means to us. A generalized feeling of emotional contentment? An oozy warm sensation? The play of sensual pleasures? Cheap thrills, all of them.
To accept misery as part of the human condition is not to celebrate suffering, or to decline into quiescence. It is, instead, to embrace the range of human feeling and experience as inherently valuable because human. Forget for a moment any lingering technical or specific difficulties in the medical model’s implied project of psychic perfection. Assume that it were possible to achieve, without discernible side effects, the end result of a perfectly, and perpetually, contented population. Would it be defensible?
David Sedaris, describing a strange encounter with a woman who posed the question of what to wish for if having the wish granted left you on all fours, wrote, “Maybe if I were to wish for happiness, I wouldn’t mind crawling. But what kind of person would I be if I were naturally happy? I’ve seen people like that on inspirational television shows, and they scare me.”
The second is an amusing story from his graduate school days:
Pathologizing happiness in response to the tendency of the culture to pathologize unhappiness is a move that appeals on a straightforward level to cynics like me, because we have long suspected that people with that just-down-from-the-mountain look are, in fact, crazy.
For example, I had a friend in graduate school who was otherwise a great guy but had two annoying traits. One was the fact that he would begin social gatherings by saying things like, “What do you think of the following argument?” and “Refute this if you can,” conversational gambits on the order of “Would you like me now to bore you to death?” The second was that he walked around all day looking as though he had just seen the face of God, smiling away for all he was worth. This was in graduate school, where feeling mildly depressed is almost a code of honour (“Semper sigh”).
My friend wasn’t seeing the world the right way, because, from the cynic’s point of view, the rational response to the world’s trials is not happiness, still less transcendental bliss, but rather some form of wisecracking Weltschmerz. I could only conclude that he was, considering the circumstances, unbalanced—just plain nuts.
