Three Versions of Happiness

From prolix

Can Happiness Be Bad for Your Health?

• You finally got the thing you wanted. So why does part of you feel worse, not better?
• Positive experiences are not psychologically positive for everyone.
• Research suggests that good fortune may be associated with poorer health among people with low self-esteem.
• Experiences that contradict our self-image can themselves become psychologically unsettling.

To pithy

“What would you call the highest happiness, Lewie?” he asked.

“The sense of competence,” was the answer, given without hesitation.

John Buchan - The Half-Hearted (1900)

To pragmatic

Only the fool and the very young expect happiness. The wise merely hope to be interested, at least not to be bored, in their passage through this world.

Arnold Bennett - Sacred and Profane Love (1905)

The triviality of life

Argentina envoy asks French lawmakers to cover “Falklands” label on map during hearing

Argentina’s ambassador to France, Ian Sielecki, halted the start of a hearing at France’s National Assembly and refused to speak while a map behind him displayed the Falklands/Malvinas as UK territory. Proceedings resumed only after a staff member covered the islands with a sticky note.

The exchange took place before the Assembly’s Foreign Affairs Committee after Sielecki noticed the map included the label “R-U” (United Kingdom) next to the archipelago. “As a representative of the Argentine state, I cannot speak freely in front of that map,” he said, arguing that doing so would amount to “legitimising” a situation he described as a breach of Argentina’s sovereignty and of international law.


It was not death that he feared, but the triviality of life. He had the awe of the eternal upon him, and he saw mortal things as through an inverted spy-glass, small and distant against the vast deserts of eternity …

John Buchan - The Blanket of the Dark (1931)

Return of the Demented Sheep

Ed Miliband 'to hit Brits with £100 boiler tax rise' in new heat pumps plot

 

I thought I had never seen anyone quite so fluent and so futile, and yet there was a kind of feeble violence in him like a demented sheep.

John Buchan - Mr Standfast (1919)

Drink, lunacy and practical joking are barred as explanations

Green Party membership overtakes Liberal Democrats under new leader

Rachel Millward, the party's deputy leader, announced the achievement to members on the second day of the party's annual conference in Bournemouth this morning.

It's believed to be only the second time this has happened, with the last time being more than a decade ago - in January 2015.

The Greens have revealed they now have more than 83,500 members, to the Lib Dems 83,174.


I don’t like games that make me feel a congenital idiot. But there was one that rather amused me. You invented a preposterous situation and the point was to explain naturally how it came about. Drink, lunacy and practical joking were barred as explanations.

John Buchan - The Runagates Club (1928)

When our gods are our weaknesses

Green rules ‘stop Europe preparing for Russian invasion’

European countries have blamed EU environmental regulations for hindering their preparations for defending against a possible Russian invasion.

In a leaked letter obtained by The Telegraph, the nations’ defence ministers argued that the rules had stopped the expansion of military bases and prevented fighter jet pilots from training...

In 2023, the European commission published its Greening the Armies report, highlighting ways in which militaries present a challenge to tackling climate change.


It isn't always easy to know what to say about EU absurdities, but this quote from John Buchan's novel 'Greenmantle' seems appropriate.


The world, as I see it, had become too easy and cushioned. Men had forgotten their manhood in soft speech, and imagined that the rules of their smug civilization were the laws of the universe. But that is not the teaching of science, and it is not the teaching of life. We have forgotten the greater virtues, and we were becoming emasculated humbugs whose gods were our own weaknesses.

John Buchan – Greenmantle (1916)

You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two

Wealth tax fears as Labour uses AI to value all homes

The Welsh Government ordered the programme, which runs on artificial intelligence, to review council tax bands.

Rachel Reeves faces growing calls from Left-wing MPs to slap a levy on the rich, which would be based on assets such as property...

The computer model has been developed by the Valuation Office Agency (VOA), a body within HMRC, for the Labour run Welsh Government.


They were a time-serving lot, who knew how the cat was going to jump, but they kept out of crime and shunned anything imaginative like the plague. I shouldn't think one of them had ever an ambition which couldn't be put in terms of office or money, or a regret except that he had missed a chance of getting at the public purse. True-blue Whigs, all of them.

John Buchan – The Dancing Floor (1926)

Non-starter

'Complete non-starter': Jeremy Corbyn allies snub George Galloway's plea for political pact with ex-Labour leader

George Galloway's hopes of recruiting Jeremy Corbyn to his party have been dashed after sources close to the former Labour leader dismissed the idea he would join forces with the newly-elected MP for Rochdale.


Daftness is the wanchancy thing that ye canna deal wi’.

John Buchan - A Prince of the Captivity (1933)

The plain folk never rise

The last few lines of John Buchan's poem -

PLAIN FOLK 

What if we rose?—If some fine morn,
Unnumbered as the autumn corn,
With all the brains and all the skill
Of stubborn back and steadfast will,
We rose and, with the guns in train,
Proposed to deal the cards again,
And, tired of sitting up o' nights,
Gave notice to our parasites,
Announcing that in future they
Who paid the piper should call the lay!
Then crowns would tumble down like nuts,
And wastrels hide in water-butts;
Each lamp-post as an epilogue:
Would hold a pendent demagogue:
Then would the world be for the wise!—

But ah! the plain folk never rise.

Like a demented sheep

I thought I had never seen anyone quite so fluent and so futile, and yet there was a kind of feeble violence in him like a demented sheep.

John Buchan - Mr Standfast (1919)


Meanwhile it seems to be shearing time -

Jeremy Corbyn: Starmer move flagrant attack on democracy

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has condemned Sir Keir Starmer's decision to bar him from standing for the party at the next general election, calling it a "flagrant attack" on democracy.

Mr Corbyn said it was up to local party members to choose their candidate, not Labour leaders.

The sensation of being spied on

All men know—in imagination or in experience—the sensation of being spied on. The nerves tingle, the skin grows hot and prickly, and there is a queer sinking of the heart.

John Buchan - No-Man's-Land (1899)

It’s coming, but of course we adapt to it, that sensation of being spied on, but it isn't as Buchan described it. Towns, cities, main roads, shops, supermarkets, car parks, public buildings, public transport - we are spied on all the time.

There is probably no queer sinking of the heart because we’ve adapted to it. We see the cameras, not all of them, but we know they are there unless we are away from it all in the countryside, the hills or remote places where cameras have yet to invade. Even then - well there may be a drone around taking videos of the landscape, and people in the landscape.

It isn’t like that sensation where you are sitting in a café and someone looks at you, so you turn your head because somehow you know someone is looking at you. Ubiquitous cameras don’t create this sensation, the sensation Buchan wrote about over a century ago. Now we are spied on in ways which are much more effective than he could ever have envisaged.

Not drink, lunacy or practical joking

I don’t like games that make me feel a congenital idiot. But there was one that rather amused me. You invented a preposterous situation and the point was to explain naturally how it came about. Drink, lunacy and practical joking were barred as explanations

John Buchan - The Runagates Club (1928)

Source

Somehow the fire went out

Their motto was 'What I have I hold,' and while they remembered it they were great people. But when they stopped holding they went out like a candle, and the last of them is now living in St Malo and a Lancashire cotton-spinner owns the place....When we had to fight hard for our possessions all the time, and give flesh to the sons of dogs who were our clan, we were strong men and women. There was a Raden with Robert Bruce--he fell with Douglas in the pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre--and a Raden died beside the King at Flodden--and Radens were in everything that happened in the old days in Scotland and France. But civilisation killed them--they couldn't adapt themselves to it. Somehow the fire went out of the blood, and they became vegetables. Their only claim was the right of property, which is no right at all."

"That's what the Bolsheviks say," said the puzzled Sir Archie."

"Then I'm a Bolshevik. Nobody in the world to-day has a right to anything which he can't justify. That's not politics, it's the way nature works. Whatever you've got--rank or power or fame or money--you've got to justify it, and keep on justifying it, or go under. No law on earth can buttress up a thing which nature means to decay."

John Buchan - John Macnab (1925)

Stirring stuff - but of course it isn’t stirring today and there is a timeless lesson in that. Modern political narratives appeal to weakness not strength. Civilisations cannot thrive on weakness and ours may be that thing which nature means to decay.

Bank Holiday quiz - guess who

She had been a dreamer, an adept at make-believe, but the poor coverings she had wrought for a dingy reality were now too threadbare to hide it.

He had made a sensation, had seen wonder and respect in dull eyes, and tasted for a moment that esteem which he had singularly failed to find elsewhere.

John Buchan - The Path of the King (1921)

Money-bags and faddists

You British have sold your souls for something less than the conventional mess of pottage. You are ruled in the first place by money-bags, and the faddists whom they support to blind your eyes.

John Buchan - The Half-Hearted (1900)

Written well over a century ago but things don’t really change much when it comes to the public arena. We still allow faddists to blind our eyes while the money-bags make off with the money.

Where does the primary responsibility lie? With the mainstream media obviously. The media actively support faddists and always have. Faddists breed an endless supply of stories simple enough for headlines, news, articles, campaigns, freak shows, righteous indignation and even some analysis on slow days.

As long as we have mainstream media wedded to drama we are stuck with faddists, nutters, well-connected loons, creeps, charlatans and celebrities because the media need them. Looping back to the Buchan quote - yes we have sold our souls. We’ve sold our souls to the media. Without the media the faddists would be nothing. 

The sense of competence

“What would you call the highest happiness, Lewie?” he asked. 

“The sense of competence,” was the answer, given without hesitation.

“Right. And what do we mean by competence? Not success! God knows it is something very different from success! Any fool may be successful, if the gods wish to hurt him. Competence means that splendid joy in your own powers and the approval of your own heart, which great men feel always and lesser men now and again at favoured intervals. 

John Buchan - The Half-Hearted (1900)

 Not a novel I recommend but within it there is this fascinating variant of an old insight. Via his main character Buchan asserts that happiness arises when individuals are aware of their own competence. This idea runs parallel  to Baruch Spinoza’s dictum that happiness is only to be found in understanding - to understand is to be competent.

If we accept that personal happiness is related to personal competence then a number of things become clear. Firstly there is no value in government efforts to promote happiness unless it also aims to enhance the competence of its citizens. Not collective competence but personal competence. Yet government is predicated on hierarchies of competence - as is Buchan's quote.

Perhaps this gives us a clue to the modern condition. In spite of their imperfections and biases the internet and social media are facilitating competence which is not hierarchical. Anyone can use the internet to enhance their own competence and from what I see many do just that.

Many don’t of course and therein lies a source of modern conflict in that it is relatively easy to become more competent than a government minister, at least in the way ideas are handled.

Other routes one could take with this is the idea that people can be competently stupid and therefore happy in their stupidity. We see this all the time when governments validate stupid activity. Or one could be happy as a competent criminal or happy as a competent benefits scrounger and so on and so on.

What’s the answer? As usual there is no answer although one might suggest a partial answer in that people could aim to be competently moral. Maybe our political class could set an example here. Doesn’t seem likely does it?

What I have I hold

You see, for a thousand years we have been going on here, and other people like us, but we only endured because we were alive. We have the usual conventional motto on our coat of arms—Pro Deo et Rege—a Herald’s College invention. But our Gaelic motto was very different—it was ‘Sons of Dogs, come and I will give you flesh.’ As long as we lived up to that we flourished, but as soon as we settled down and went to sleep and became rentiers we were bound to decay…My cousins at Glenaicill were just the same. Their motto was ‘What I have I hold,’ and while they remembered it they were great people. But when they stopped holding they went out like a candle.

John Buchan - John Macnab (1925)

Buchan’s character makes a comment on social change and the hard-nosed self-interest required to keep a firm grip on what we have. Otherwise it will be taken from us by those who are stronger and by this exacting standard more deserving. The meek shall not inherit the earth is the message – so don’t be meek. The motto is not original but this is fiction, a way of adding social depth to a central character. Still worth a thought or two though.

A conspicuous feature of modern culture is how tolerance and intolerance have been twisted around to loosen our grip on the culture we had – the one our ancestors fought two bloody wars to defend. Now we see vicious intolerance towards any suggestion that we are less than thrilled with forced multiculturalism and even worse – any implication that the culture we had was worth holding on to and what we have now is not an improvement.

What I have I hold is not a bad motto, possibly more acceptable today than Sons of Dogs, come and I will give you flesh, but it is already too late. We have been induced to let go of what we once had in favour of – in favour of what?

The culture of the BBC

It was the usual round-up of rootless intellectuals, and the talk was the kind of thing you expect—terribly knowing and disillusioned and conscientiously indecent. I remember my grandfather had a phrase for the smattering of cocksure knowledge which was common in his day—the “culture of the Mechanics’ Institute.” I don’t know what the modern equivalent would be—perhaps the “culture of the B.B.C.”

John Buchan - The Island of Sheep (1936)

The quote surprised me when I originally came across it. Surely in Buchan's day the BBC was stuffy, high-minded and acutely conscious of its social responsibilities?

A casual observation by a character in a work of fiction does not overthrow that perception, but it certainly chimes with Buchan's general outlook. He disliked the kind of trite intellectual dominant in our public arena today and especially within the BBC. He would have raised an eyebrow at BBC salaries too.

At the time of publication, John Buchan as 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, was Governor General of Canada so he probably looked down on the BBC as a callow upstart in the world of social and political ideas. Perhaps he thought the corporation might mature into something weightier if only the right chaps were involved,  a perspective likely to be common enough within his exalted class.

Eighty years later the BBC seems to be much the same apart from the technology and the accents. Its culture survived and flourished while Buchan’s did not. 

An ineradicable daftness

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We’re all getting old, of course, but you’re not acquiring the virtues of age. There’s still an ineradicable daftness about you.

John Buchan - The Island of Sheep (1936)

There is problem with being almost the same age as Jeremy Corbyn. In my younger days I knew people just like him, faux political radicals who were never going anywhere but a safe and comfortable niche in the public sector.

Even then it was obvious where they would end up. Even then it was clear that their talk was merely talk, a kind of futile strutting with no more substance than a mission statement.

That is the problem with being almost the same age as Corbyn. I find it almost impossible to take the chap seriously - it's the ineradicable daftness of the man. He should have grown out of it long ago.