From my curmudgeon’s corner, there is little more annoying than the “science of happiness.”  Partly this is because I agree with the late social critic Neil Postman that such attempts at quantification of human experience don’t play to the strengths of social research.  “Measuring” behavior is not like, say, observing chemical reactions.  Try to come up with pithy formulas in the realm of mind and culture and you get dippy pop-psych and bumper-sticker ideology, or perhaps Disney montages in which the underdog title character learns to believe in him-/herself and thereby discover that the keys to the kingdom, gosh darn it, have been jangling in his or her pocket all along.  And don’t get me started on the neuroscientists (“Look, this part of the brain lights up when they watch Britney Spears!” “Ah, that explains it.”)  Talking about such a complex and hard-to-define field of experience as happiness in such terms—well, it makes me pretty cranky.

So I suppose I am, by my own admission, one of the intended targets of Eric Weiner’s weekend column in the Washington Post bearing the Aw, shucks, Beaver title “Why Are Republicans So Darn Happy?”  Weiner unearths a social science chestnut from 2006—a Pew research poll showing that Republicans claimed they were generally happier than Democrats— and goes on to remind us that in almost every instance in modern history, the candidate perceived as more “optimistic”—that is, confident of future happiness— has won the general election.  Politically, it’s unwise to say, “Goddamn it, we have serious problems that need addressing!  This shit has been going on for too long!”  (Well, for one thing, there is this curious aversion to cussing that seems to afflict many Americans…)  Instead, the successful candidate must say, “Wow, this is a great country—the greatest in the world!  Let’s make it even better!”  And I have to admit that Weiner has a point.  At the very least, I think we could add our very understanding of happiness, its meaning and its primacy as a goal, to the list of values that place people on opposite ends of the political spectrum in this country— and, as usual, the position of conservative orthodoxy tends to make me very, very cranky indeed.

I’m reminded, first of all, of Barbara Bush and her sparkly brain.  “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths?" she said on Good Morning America just before the invasion of Iraq.  "Oh, I mean, it's not relevant.  So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”  Now, to be fair, Barbara was specifically talking about her aversion to television news, not her indifference to war and suffering.  Except… beyond her (fairly accurate) assessment of the banal nature of most TV journalism, there really was a sense of not wanting to be bothered by the tragedies of the world, even (or, perhaps, especially) when they stem directly from U.S. policies.  This attitude does seem typical of many Republican true believers, and not coincidentally, these folks tend be pretty cheerful.  My go-to neocon Guy Fawkes, Bill Kristol, seems quietly thrilled with himself and the state of his world (and yes, I do think it is his own, special, private world) whenever he appears on the Daily Show, while Jon Stewart, though consistently polite, seems to experience physical pain while listening to his guest’s self-delusions.

There’s a sort of guilt-by-association involved with such happiness—the old, “If Jerry Falwell is in heaven, is that the kind of place I want to hang out?” conundrum.

Obviously, part of the problem lies in our definition of terms.  Most of the press I’ve read about these happiness studies seems relatively unconcerned with what is meant by the words they’re using, and I perceive a similar sort of linguistic impatience among movement conservatives.  Such work, they might say, belongs in the realm of philosophy.  Naturally, I’m inclined to believe the opposite: we need a little philosophy (particularly critical reasoning) injected into all the other fields.  This isn’t a comment on the intelligence or level of education of neocons or anyone else who gets lost in their private world of ideas; I’m sure guys like Paul Wolfowitz have logged plenty of hours reading the work of dead philosophers.  Rather, I am criticizing the lack of vigor in exposing the poorly reasoned arguments that support factually indefensible positions.  This is why we had a debate ten years ago about basing educational policy on IQ tests (anyone remember The Bell Curve?), despite the fact that practically no one who actually studies human cognition thinks there is any such thing as a singular “intelligence” that can be summed up by a damned quiz.  Likewise journalists and rival politicians permit the president and his supporters to get away with claiming that we are “winning” in Iraq when the terms of this supposed victory have changed more often than a pop starlet’s hair color; or proclaiming the continuing “greatness” of our nation despite our decline in both global stature and standard of living.  As long as no one questions the rhetoric, it’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation; challenge them with facts alone (as liberals continue fecklessly to do), and neocons will simply change the terms of the debate and keep smiling.

This is all to say, it may indeed be possible to attain a kind of happiness by simply framing questions in such a way that they seem easily answerable; it’s just that such happiness has never actually helped anyone.

Another part of the problem is that Americans have long seen happiness as a zero sum game.  This is only natural, considering that for a long time the “pursuit of happiness,” as expressed in the expansion of our western borders and the spirit of the frontier, meant forcefully displacing other people and their way of life.  Sometimes we dignified this behavior with actual declarations of war (the Mexican War is an early study in successful jingoism and the general powerlessness of antiwar sentiment), but more often it was just part of an ongoing policy of seemingly smaller-scale, but ultimately more catastrophic, violence and chicanery.  There were a variety of rationales for this, including the ever-popular “These people are backward and inferior; they have all this land and they’re not even using it!”  But ultimately we stretched inspiringly from sea to shining sea because we had more guns and people than anyone else on the continent, and we were only too happy to use them.  And I’m sure that the sense of destiny that came with our rapid expansion made many people feel swell.

So yeah, this particular variety of happiness really pisses me off.

Naturally, there are those who now feel threatened by the ascendancy of other nations, particularly China.  Mitt Romney’s concession speech is a muddled gem of classical American xenophobia.  Of course, the People’s Republic of China is a threat—to its own citizens’ liberty, to the ecosphere, and possibly to some of its neighbors (particularly Taiwan).  But that doesn’t seem to be the tone of Romney’s particular brand of they’re-out-to-get-us hysteria.  He seems more concerned that we might not be #1 anymore.

It should be pointed out that there are lots of countries fairly low on the might-o-meter that rate consistently higher standards of living than the United States (much of northern Europe, for example).  Perhaps the question we ought to be asking right now is whether being a “great nation” is even worth the fuss.  Or, more to the point, what if we abandoned our obsession with being great—or more specifically, the greatest—and decided instead to be good?  To paraphrase an oft-anthologized essay: what would it be like to talk to a guy who, not satisfied with merely loving his family, insisted to everyone that his was the greatest family in the world?

Maybe some of us in this country think that a different kind of happiness is worth exploring; that maybe if we spent our energy and our money on the sorts of not-always-cheerful work that actually improves our shared existence on this planet, people elsewhere might once again generally admire us—instead of thinking, to wit, “What’s that prick so happy about?”