Historian Jennifer Michael Hecht is perhaps one of the best demonstrations of the usefulness of history in counteracting erroneous beliefs about the world, past and present. And she herself goes even further: “What a paralysing potion culture can be! The antidote is history,” she writes.
Her best-known book and magnum opus, Doubt, proves this emphatically. But so does this smaller book on a completely different topic. “This book seeks to prove that the basic modern assumptions about how to be happy are nonsense and that we do not have to listen to people argue about the details,” Hecht explains, noting that once the reader sees how past myths functioned and similarly how present-day myths function, they will be “let out of the trap of thinking you have to pay heed to any of them.”
Of course, no worthwhile book about happiness can be purely historical. Hecht also delves into the psychology of happiness, albeit mostly to show that none of the ideas is new. She lists three distinct kinds of happiness: a good day—ie one that is filled with many mild pleasures and some rewarding efforts; euphoria, which is intense and memorable but often involves some risk or vulnerability; and a happy life which, Hecht writes, “requires a lot of difficult work...sometimes seriously cutting into time for a good day or for euphoria.”
The work of a happy life consists of studying, striving, nurturing, negotiating, mourning, and birthing. One of themes relates particularly to Trinidad (not so much Tobago). Hecht notes that there are four kinds of ecstasy: drug, sexual, spiritual, and bacchanalian. It is this last which Trinis embrace, with a perhaps specious link to sex.
But historically, Hecht notes: “As the Enlightenment took hold, carnival disappeared as a major force in European lives...Gone was the time of publicly turning the world inside out and upside down.” She adds: “We first-world moderns are not like everybody else.
“Historically, the average person expected to be a little miserable most of the time, and ecstatic on festival days. We now expect to be happy all the time, but never riotously so.” This may be the core reason for commentators’ differing attitudes towards the Trinidad Carnival.
Hecht notes that, according to the great philosophers, your worst barrier against happiness is you, listing four problems: (1) You can’t see yourself or much about the world you live in; (2) You are ruled by desire and emotion; (3) You will not take your place or rise to your role; (4) You are alternatively oblivious to death and terrified of it.
“As such, your job is to master these four errors in yourself. If you do, you will be happy and more free to love, work, and play the way you wish you could,” she writes.
While this is never perfectly achieved, Hecht concludes by listing the main activities anyone can do to achieve happiness, which she notes need no argument: being loving to your spouse; nurturing your children; tending to your extended family; nurturing friendships; helping strangers; caring for animals; engaging in the arts, fine (poetry) and mundane (cooking); risking being in the world and in being apart from it; doing philosophy; planning for the world’s future; and increasing the world’s knowledge.
Which, really, is timeless advice.
Review by
KEVIN BALDEOSINGH
More info
Jennifer Michael Hecht (born November 23, 1965) is a teacher, author, poet, historian, and philosopher. She was an associate professor of history at Nassau Community College (1994-2007) and now teaches at The New School in New York City.
Hecht has seven published books, her scholarly articles have been published in many journals and magazines, and her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Ms. Magazine, and Poetry Magazine, among others. She has also written essays and book reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The American Scholar, The Boston Globe and other publications. She has written several columns for The New York Times online Times Select.
Hecht is a longtime blogger for The Best American Poetry series web site and maintains a personal blog on her website. She resides in Brooklyn, New York.
The Happiness Myth
Jennifer Michael Hecht
HarperOne, 2008.
ISBN-13:978-0060859503; 368 pages.