Superabundance and Happiness
Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970), the celebrated English mathematician, philosopher and humanist began the prologue to his autobiography by declaring that three passions governed his life: “the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” One presumes that those passions were in the service of his ultimate goal of achieving happiness. We lesser mortals may not be moved by passions as lofty as Russell’s but we all strive for happiness which is our ultimate goal.
What makes us happy varies from individual to individual. But prince or pauper, we all want to be happy. Nobody likes to suffer. Around 2500 years ago, the Buddha declared the reality of dukkha (roughly translated as suffering, or a state of dissatisfactoriness) is a primary feature of sentient existence, and said it was the first of the Four Noble Truths.
We want to have a good life. Russell once again. He held that the good life is the happy life. By that he did not mean that if you are good, you would be happy but rather that if you are happy, you would be good. Being happy is a precondition to being good, not the other way around.
Being good is a consequence, not a cause, of being happy. That’s a broad generalization, and therefore it holds for all ordinary people with the exception of psychopaths who enjoy inflicting suffering on others. We not only wish not to suffer ourselves but also desire that others don’t suffer either.
Now, a good life necessarily implies life itself. One cannot be happy if one doesn’t have life. But life and its sustenance has a material substrate. There’s a certain amount of material support needed for living. That’s a biological imperative: without the needed minimum amount of food, water and shelter, there would be no life and therefore no possibility of happiness.
Which brings us to a question: were people happier in the past, say a hundred years ago, or are they happier today? And a followup question: would people in the future, say a hundred years hence, likely to be happier than they are today?
The claim is that people in the past were less happy than they are today, and that people in the future will be happier than today’s people. This claim rests on a demonstrable fact that humanity will be substantially materially wealthy. Material wealth is correlated with happiness.
We have to be clear that material wealth is only a necessary condition and not a sufficient condition. One cannot be happy if one is starving, but having all the goodies one needs or wants is not sufficient to guarantee happiness. If immense wealth were a sufficient condition for happiness, then the very wealthy would all be ecstatically happy. We’d all envy the very rich but we don’t because we know of many extremely wealthy people who are quite miserable.
Regardless of who we are, we all have the same ultimate purpose: to be happy. To achieve that, most of us strive for wealth, power, affection and acclaim from other people. Wealth, fame and power are only instrumental in achieving our goal. Instruments are needed for what we actually want to achieve, never for their own sake. We don’t burden ourselves with instruments that don’t serve any of our purposes.
The past world was incredibly materially poor compared to the present world. Nearly all humans of the estimated 100 billion who have ever lived have suffered extreme material poverty. For most of human history for most people, to be born was to be condemned to suffer a life that was “solitary, poor, mean, nasty, brutish and short,” in the words of Thomas Hobbes.
Fortunately, the world of the future will no longer be Hobbesian, and therefore more conducive for human happiness than it has ever been any time in the past. That will be so because the world will be immensely materially richer than it is today. How much richer?
We are incapable of imagining how rich the world will be in a hundred years just as a person living a few hundred years ago could not have imagined the wealth and prosperity of our present world. But the broad outlines are easy to imagine.
First, there will be no material poverty. That is, everyone will have all their material needs met without the slightest effort. The basic needs of food, clothing, shelter and medical care would be there for the taking. People would not need to work to survive. They would have all the leisure they want to pursue whatever interests they have.
Second, people in the future would be happier. Not having to struggle for a living means that one stops focusing on the instruments (wealth, power, fame) of happiness and instead focus on higher goals like self-fulfillment and self-awareness.
Third, the world will be more peaceful. This one is hard to accept. We are naturally inclined to believe that the modern world is a lot more violent than the world of the past. After all, modern weapons of mass destruction did not exist in the past and the hellishly destructive two world wars happened in the last century, not before.
Therefore we think that the world of the past was not as violent as the present. But that is not so; the world of the past was a lot more violent than the present world. Steven Pinker, a serious scholar of the matter, has the facts outlined in his book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature.”
I believe that the world of the future will be more peaceful than it is today because of immense material wealth. Wealthy people focus on what makes them happy, not on struggling for even more wealth. Poor people have to focus on wealth and that struggle leads to conflict with others. The struggle for life-sustaining material stuff leads to struggle with others. This is a Darwinian struggle for survival.
It is no surprise that it was the idea of a struggle for survival that was at the core of Thomas Malthus’s “An Essay on the Principle of Population” published in 1798. Both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace had read that book, and both came to the same conclusion almost simultaneously about the mechanism of natural selection. (See Darwin’s 1859 “On the Origin of Species.”)
Humanity will be done with the primitive struggle for material survival. But does that mean there would be no further struggle and people will be living in an Age of Aquarius? No, I don’t think so. People will struggle but for other, dare I say, loftier goals.
Struggle is hard-coded in all DNA — human or non-human. It’s the object of the struggle that changes. At the most primitive level, humans struggled against nature. The planet is a killing machine. The claim that the earth is a spaceship that is uniquely suited to human life is plain silly as David Deutsch has argued persuasively.
Having conquered nature, the struggle was man against man. When that is done with, the next struggle is between man against himself. Self-conquest is the final frontier that the ancients of the East investigated for thousands of years, and that will continue into the future as long as sentient life, natural or artificial, exists anywhere in the universe.
And now, an old favorite song to conclude this piece.
Related posts:
Happiness. December 2023.
Happiness. October 2006.