Happiness in Our Time
IN this day of speed, machines, and no time, it is customary to think of our ancestors as enjoying greater happiness than is our lot. Within recent months two books have been published which seek to analyze the source or failure of contentment. For their explication we have turned to Dr. Henry Murray, who is in charge of the Psychological Clinic at Harvard University.
The Conquest of Happiness by (Horace Liveright, $3.00), within its limits as a primer of self-regeneration, is a most excellent book. Although it is especially fitted for emotionally unprecocious sufferers, this manual of systematized common sense, sane and forthright, should be read by every parent, teacher, minister, and Congressman in the land. For no one who is unfamiliar with its contained truth should be allowed to direct or in any way tamper with the lives of others, particularly with the evermalleable lives of youth.
When he was a child Mr. Russell’s favorite hymn was ‘Weary of earth, and laden with ray sin,’ and during adolescence he contemplated suicide, but now, in the Indian summer of his life, he finds himself a happy man. The experience gained in this passage from misery to contentment has provided the data for the speculations incorporated in the present volume, which was written, so he tells us, that ‘men and women who suffer unhappiness without enjoying it may find their situation diagnosed and a method of escape suggested.’
The author begins by enumerating some common causes of unhappiness: ennui and fatigue, the competitive compulsion, envy and malice, guilt, cosmic despair, the fear of public opinion, and the delusion of persecution. Russell’s analysis of these ailments is strengthened by ligaments from psychoanalytical doctrine, such as the concepts of the unconscious, repression, narcissism, inferiority, overcompensation, and rationalization. This makes of it a more substantial volume than most ‘Why worry?' books for nervous people.
Russell considers that the greatest blight to joyful wisdom is that grim legacy of Christian faith, the consciousness of sin. Hence the very idea of Sin, as well as that of Sanctity, must be eradicated us a determinant. Rather would he be an animal ‘so placid and self-contain’d,’ for animals, he says with Whitman,
. . . do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins; They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.
We are so accustomed to Bertrand Russell in the rôle of a moral mutineer that his present even-tempered advocacy of zest, work, love, parental affection, and impersonal interests — a theme which might almost be placed as a companion piece to the less vigorous and tough-minded What Men Live By of Dr. Cabot —surprises us by its very commonplaceness. We cannot take exception to what he says any more than we can take exception to our own skeletons. For better or worse these are the bare bones of existence.
In many respects this book may be considered an auxiliary to Lippmann’s more eloquent Preface to Morals. It takes, for instance, the same position when it maintains that the happiest men at the present day are the emotionally simple men of science — an opinion which may be used by his readers as a gauge of the level of happiness upon which Russell is willing to rest. Some persons who know to a nicety what sort of contentment the scientist enjoys may not be willing to remain in that state continuously. But it is not Russell’s intention to address such seekers of intense delight.
The other book of the two, Civilisation and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud (Cape and Smith, $2.25), is more difficult for me to review, since I cannot detect its central purpose.
Dr. Freud commences with a consideration of the feeling of ‘cosmic belongingness’ which a mystical friend of his asserts to be the basis of religion. Freud, however, traces this ‘oceanic’ feeling to a reactivation of that state of limitless narcissism which exists in early infancy before the Ego has come to distinguish itself as a separate entity in the world. The mass delusion known as religion he traces to the child’s need for a father’s love and protection. This delusion of the loving Father granting immortal life is, as he says, ’so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that to one whose attitude to humanity is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never rise above this view of life.
For the intellectuals who hypocritically use the name of God to stand for an impersonal, shadowy, abstract principle, Freud has nothing but reproaches. ‘Some of the great men of the past,’he remarks, ‘did the same, but that is no justification for us; we know why they had to do so,'
‘The intention that man should be “happy" is not included in the scheme of “Creation,”' says Freud, and with this as a basic assumption he proceeds to review the various modes which men have adopted to protect themselves with partial success from pain, or to capture an occasional rare moment of intense pleasure.
In reading this discussion — which is for the most part a repetition of former statements and sentiments one communes with a spirit very different from that of llertrand Russell. Freud is speaking— manfully, to be sure — from the depths of a black despair, and we cannot refrain from attributing, by the use of psychological laws which he himself has called to our attention, the darkness of his vision to his own present most grievous physical state, and also to a disheartenment of a deeper sort which I shall not attempt, to analyze. In the presence of misery we stand with bowed heads. But it is to our peril if we allow such instances of private suffering to color our entire philosophy.
After indulging in a few fantastic and provocative speculations, Freud approaches the problem of guilt and the aggressive tendencies. The aggressive tendencies are manifestations, he states, of the death instinct. The life instinct (love), represented by Eros, binds elements together; whereas the death instinct (hate) breaks them apart. The death instinct, which appears most explosively in war, is antagonistic to our culture, and if it were not for an internally active and aggressive Superego (conscience), which is the representative of culture in the personality, there would be no control of the death instinct. The self-castigations arising from the Superego explain the painful experience commonly known as guilt. ‘What an overwhelming obstacle to civilization aggression must be if the defense against it can cause as much misery as aggression itself!' the author exclaims.
I shall not pursue any further the giant allegory of two contending forces which the ever-fertile but undisciplined mind of this great man has constructed. At present it is a religion in disguise. Suffice it to say that Freud ends his book on a single hopeful note. ‘And now if may be expected that the other of the two “heavenly forces,” eternal Eros, will put forth his strength so as to maintain himself alongside of his equally immortal adversary.’
HENRY A. MURRAY