Part 2, Sections 11 - 14
11. JOYFULNESS, 101
In this section we see another useful ethical idea anyone can energize for themselves with the help of Dewey’s Behavioral psychology -- joy and joyfulness. In fact, today teaching our self ethical feelings of joyfulness and happiness may be more important than ever before, as life has become much more complicated and complex than ever before. Thousands of years ago people worried mainly about good crop weather, not offending those higher up in the social ladder, and getting god to them their prayer-requests. Today, a great deal of entertainment events, as well as economic, health, and political complexities, are helping make life much more complicated and stressful.
As a result, it’s become much more difficult for many people to actually teach themselves how to feel more joyful habit-arts, not just for holidays and vacations, but for everyday living as well. Mainly only the very young and the elderly have slowed down enough to feel joy in life’s little daily events; most others always seem busy going somewhere else, rather than enjoying nature’s energies here and now. Not many people it seems ask if it’s better to feel joyful at least once a day, rather than just at holidays. How many couples, for examples, soon separate mainly became they never build habits of sensual joyfulness for each other? How many people soon become bored with a relationship because they never taught themselves to feel joy just being in someone else’s presence, much less while lovingly touching and caressing someone else? Such useful ethical habits help make all of life more sacred, less stressful, and more worth living! For many people their own muscular tensions and stresses are a real challenge, for which feelings of joyfulness are a great cure. How many normally feel joyful just walking down a street? Many people don’t even enjoy that simple art!
For us Deweyan liberals such useful ethical feelings can become energetic and forceful habits with a little daily practice. With such practice joyfulness can be felt at any time of the day, helping make any experimental learning easier and less stressful. After all, if Dewey's right and the body and mind are really one living object, then all our ethical feelings and habits depend on our own actions for energy and growth. So, the more we know about how to keep practicing and growing useful ethical habit-arts, the easier it is to build a more intelligent set of ethical values helping make life much more interesting and rewarding.
Philosophers Are Human, All Too Human...
For those who actually start reading what the so-called great philosophers said, it may seem as if many simply don't have any feelings; they just have different ideas about life and nature. In fact, for most of Western history conservative and moderate philosophic ideas about life and nature have predominated, and as if ethical feelings and habits were not as important. In life, however, our set of ethical habits is far more important than any ideas we may have about nature; Socrates felt as much in the 400s BCE. Many philosophers were good at hiding their feelings behind the assumptions they felt must be absolutely True and eternally unchanging! For conservatives, spirits were a big part of their assumptions, and for moderates like Aristotle it was eternal and unchanging natural objects. As we’ve been seeing, they, and their Christian counterparts Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, avoided talking about their assumption-feelings, namely that spirits really existed and communicated with some people in the natural world. They knew such feelings couldn’t be proved, and so avoided the topic altogether. To be fair, Thomas did try to prove god existed with some arguments he got from Aristotle, but even undergraduate philosophy students soon learn how they’re all logically flawed and thus useless. They too depend on feeling assumptions beyond proof.
What’s more, to gain more converts they had to feel all other forms of religious competition should be eliminated, and so felt intolerance was a useful ethical habit. General ethical compliance with those feelings lasting until the early 1500s when Martin Luther gave a voice to all those who already felt such ideas were based merely on other feelings, rather than any kind of reliable knowledge. And, philosophers have used another verbal trick to mask such events. Feelings for them became the rather obscure idea of qualities. It sounded much more educated to call our feelings qualities; it helped mask the fact all their assumptions were simply based on feelings often learned at their mother’s knee, so to speak. As we seen, for Plato quality-feelings could never become as real as eternal and unchanging Spirit-Objects; feelings were only tools for finally accepting their existence, and normally just got in the way of thinking about them. Even what little Aristotle does say about joy and happiness is eventually clothed in majestic-sounding ideas like true happiness can only be achieved by imitating god’s thinking eternally about nature’s unchanging Forms. Modern science’s new model of nature shows us we live in an always changing Heraclitean world rather than a Platonic or an Aristotelian one. As a result, an always growing and evolving set of ethical values is much more useful than any other.
A Little Ethical Theory
Perhaps here is a good place to talk a little more abstractly about ethical ideas in general. Liberal Dewey too often seems just as guilty as anyone else, even though ancient Atomist liberals based their entire ethical models on enjoyable kinds of pleasant feelings, as did modern Utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Beginning in ancient times, however, feelings about ethical abstractions like goodness, truth, and honesty were important ethical topics. Much of Plato’s ethical thinking, for example, was called ethical Idealism, and it helped create a new branch of ethics called today meta-ethics. It’s the study of ethical ideas and meanings, rather than ethical actions themselves. After all, how do we know our ethical feelings are really the best ones to have unless they are tested logically to learn more about them? For example, I’ve been talking about the ethical value of wisely helping others, but how do we Deweyan liberals really know it’s an ethical values people should practice? That question is one within the subject of meta-ethics. With Plato’s help ethical ideas like joy and happiness were taken to a more abstract level of thinking and examination. He began asking questions like what do ethical ideas like good and bad mean; and how can we know and defend our ethical feelings about values? Such abstract questions helped take ethical thinking to a more philosophic level, rather than just accepting the values what someone else said was good or bad, as have most people down through history. For those who were never trained to think with such abstractions it was much easier to merely do what they were told, rather than ask why such values are good and what might be a better way of acting. Even Dewey, an ethical naturalist, thought about meta-ethical questions. Ethical feelings like joy and happiness may start out like any other feeling, but were there any reasons why practiced them improved one’s ethical reality? Even though in reality all ethical ideas are never separated from one’s feelings, was there anything else helping make his liberal values better than others?! After all, even to assume one can talk about ethical ideas as based on something more than feelings and results is itself an assumed feeling, as are all so-called eternal values like truth, logic, nature, usefulness, beauty, and even joyfulness and happiness! Ethical Idealist Plato, however, wanted some ethical values to be eternally and unchanging real and true, and much more than mere conservative feelings and assumptions.
In short, all the basic ethical assumptions about life and how it should be lived involves both feelings, ideas, and habits. As we've seen many times already, most conservative and moderate philosophers and people have been on a quest for certain and eternal Truth. In fact, such feelings have anchored their ethical models for thousands of years. However, for many young folks it may take a while to feel how everyone's truth is ultimately based on feelings often learned in childhood. Plato certainly had some deep feelings about Spirit-Ideas and they no doubt began growing during childhood religious habits. Many homes in ancient Greece had shrines where daily sacrifices were offered to one god or another. In this section, then, we’ll look at an important meta-ethical question: What useful results might be produced from building an intelligently joyful habit-art? Meta-ethics here we come.
No doubt, for many young folks who see life and nature with only one set of ethical ideas and habits, philosophy may feel liberating at first. Many of the ethical ideas we learned as children can get a little more depth and dimension to them with just a few meta-ethical questions. It may even feel like philosophy actually sees nature's eternal meanings and absolute Truth, either with reasoning or faith in spiritual revelation. However, for thousands of years liberals have been working merely to help people focus more on the results of their ethical actions as well as their motives. Both results and motives are 2 important parts of Dewey’s liberal model of ethics. In fact, actual results for our ethical actions are the only things helping make ethics an objective study, rather than basing it merely on one’s feelings of what is right or wrong. In short, the actual results of our joyful ethical actions give the idea its best reasons for practicing it. Such was Dewey’s answer to the meta-ethical question of why learn a joyful habit-art. And to the meta-ethical question how can we learn such a value, he answered only joyful actions can teach a person what a joyful value feels like. In fact, with his Behavioral psychology Dewey helped bring ethical art down from the abstract Idealistic clouds where Socrates and Plato had put it!
So far, so good; that much should be pretty obvious already. However, before talking about such results, it might be useful to briefly review a few general psychological facts about building habits. As we’ve seen in Part 1, in general habits can be seen as weak, excessive, and unhealthful or dangerous, so a good first step might be to place one’s joyful habit on that scale. Is it weak, and if so how weak? Is it sometimes excessive, and if so when? Do you ever sing Happy Birthday at someone’s funeral? And is it dangerous, and if so, when? Do you keep feeling joyful as you’re being shipped off to a slave labor camp? How much joy do you normally feel just walking down the street, washing dishes, being with a special person or people, and doing all the little activities life requires on a daily basis? If not, then you might want to build a stronger joyful habit-art with the help of more daily practice. Feeling such practice helps bring all kinds of philosophic abstractions back to the here and now, and how we’re presently feeling! Certainly Dewey didn’t want people to stop thinking intelligently about their ethical values, but once a plan of practice is in place to improve a weak, excessive, or unhealthful joyful habit-art, then attention should become focused on actually feelings joyfulness, rather than merely thinking about it! As those feelings grow stronger it becomes easier to feel them during other daily work. Such a learning plan keeps us in touch with our feelings, and they alone tell us how weak or strong our joyful habit is; such feelings tell us how relaxed we are, and how much we’re allowing our self to feel joyful. After all, if we aren’t feeling joyful, then how can our habit-art become stronger?
In short, practice in feeling the results of our ethical experiments is the foundation for any kind of real joyful wisdom and knowledge! Young doctors or lawyers, for example, come out of med or law school with basically book knowledge, but as they see how such knowledge is needed in real life, such ideas become more than book knowledge, they become more deeply felt and thus real wisdom. What might be an example of such ethical wisdom? Well, like feeling how much time and money was wasted on learning much more knowledge than they’ll ever need in the actual practice of their profession, and also feeling how much of life is now based on who can take as much money as possible from other people.
With such thoughts it becomes much easier to see even books like this one are merely the beginning of real wisdom and knowledge, rather than the ultimate source of those valuable skills. Books like this one merely point the way to how joy and wisdom can become more intelligently learned. In fact, only our own daily joyful and wise actions can keep deepening and broadening such ideas all through life! We suggest that fact is at the heart of all of Dewey’s naturalistic ethics. It’s the growth of our joy and happiness that’s most important, rather than believing there’s a way to experience perfect joy and happiness forever. That idea is more a kind of magical thinking our native, ancient, and medieval ancestors practiced for thousands of years.
If philosophic history is accurate, then the ancient liberal Atomist Democritus of Abdera was one of the few ancient philosophers who taught himself to feel happiness and joy as he walked through life. To him it helped make life's satisfactions more satisfying, and its disappointments less so. If so, then he too took the time to practice a joyful habit-art, perhaps because it helped him feel more grateful for just being alive, and enjoying it as much as possible; some religious people might call it the inner kingdom of heaven. Even Socrates felt life was just a preparation for death and a better life beyond.
In fact, in the much more brutal ancient world many other Greek philosophers weren't so wise. Heraclitus, for example, apparently was unable to grow such feelings, and hence became known as the Weeping Philosopher; today many might say he had a depressive personality. Other philosophers like Empedocles were much more spirit-minded; he believed he had achieved a god-like status while alive because of his ethical actions. In fact both philosophic and religious history is littered with a wide assortment of ethical feelings, mostly felt by men but some women too, and their personalities span a wide range of ethical feelings and actions. Paul Strathern’s little books like Plato in 90 Minutes, Aristotle in 90 Minutes, and so on are great for stepping behind philosophers' assumptions and seeing them as feeling people. Some were as weird as many chess geniuses were, Bobby Fischer included. Who knows? I’m still hoping one day there may even be a Sexy Philosopher; well it's possible isn't it? I already have some ideas in mind, like Mae West for example.
Another Meta-Ethical Question: Why Bother?
No doubt, those who have yet to build a strong and healthful joyful habit-art may ask another meta-ethical question: how can that habit-art be justified? Why take the time and energy to build a joyful habit-art? Why bother? Will it help making money easier? Will it make sex better? How can one even define joy and know when they’re feeling it, and if not, then again why bother? Why not just have a few beers or some wine and be done with it; that’s the easiest way of knowing what real joy is?
Liberals like Dewey felt much more positive and scientific about ethical values like joy. For example, why not picture learning about ethical values the same way experimental scientists learn about any natural fact? Why not feel the results of such experiments and judge for yourself how useful joyful feelings are? We can even make a little list of such results. A joyful feeling can more easily help us keep improving all our weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-arts. Joyful feelings can be a useful learning tool. And for another thing, a joyful feeling makes it easier to keep learning what we want to learn. After all, aren’t most healthy children joyful and happy as they learn more about their world, and joyless and sad when they learn how painful it can be? If so, then why not just continue practicing such habits, only with more intelligence and awareness about future results as life goes on?
In short, a joyful habit-art helps make life itself more enjoyable. A joyful habit-art can also help us through stressful times like, for example, when your annoying little sister has been in the bathroom for about an hour and your bladder is about to explode! Believe me, you do not want to be around when that happens. So, perhaps the best result of a joyful habit-art is its many uses. You can even feel joyful as you break down the bathroom door and order her out for being so disrespectful! Joyfulness can even help make frustrating our enemies that much more enjoyable. In fact, such joyfulness can help us win all such games of freedom! If not, then it’s much easier for tension, frustration, and stress to shorten life itself. Who wants to keep living in a frustrating and joyless world with no ethical weapons to make it feel better?
As we’ve seen in the previous 2 sections, some people will undoubtedly throw frustrating obstacles into others’ lives, just to test their desires and ethical character. A joyful habit-art makes it easier to accept such challenges, and learn how to avoid them now and in the future. For example, at work fellow workers or supervisors may test others' characters, looking for any weaknesses, especially greedy and disrespectful actions. Thus, the more joyfully we can practice sharing with those less well off, and respecting others' lawful habits, the more of a joyful celebration life becomes. What joyful dieter wouldn’t feel happy about the healthful result of passing a display of double-fudge cheese cakes, or even laughing at them while walking past? So again, feelings of joy and humor can help produce less stressful results; that’s probably the best answer to meta-ethical questions like why bother? Once again, however, growing such a joyful habit-art begins within our own muscles and little daily actions. The more we playfully feel joy in our daily lives, the easier it becomes to feel it in life’s more serious and stressful moments. It’s sometimes called keeping one’s cool. The more joyfully we feel, say, helping feed those with food challenges, or finding some useful work, the stronger our joyful habit-art grows. And, also, the more we joyfully practice such actions, the better our chances become for others helping us. With the help of such ethical actions, feeling joyful can become as easy and instinctive as water rolling off a duck's butt.
Without the art of joyfulness, however, another result becomes more likely. It becomes easier to keep feeling life will never get any better, or even worse, possibly lose control of our actions -- as the British say 'run amuck’ or ‘go crackers'! The phrase nervous breakdown is also useful. Again, there's a great example of it in the very funny movie 'What About Bob?' Why not check it out the next time you get the chance? What did it take for Bob to finally send Dr. Leo himself to the ‘crackers’ ward? Another joyful feeling is useful at such times: No matter how bad things may get, when we joyfully feel how much worse they could be, then we gain some control over such situations. We don’t let them get to us, so to speak. In any case, however, Dewey’s Behavioral psychology teaches us, the more joyfully we act, the more joyful feelings get burned into our body-mind, and the more joyful we become.
Needless to say joyfulness's habit-art is certainly not new. Christians too can certainly feel joyful about feeling ‘born again’; it’s a feeling about one's inner Kingdom of Heaven! Martin Luther too describes such a moment in his life. He was obsessed with feeling he was a wretched sinner and needed to earn his salvation with menial work and religious rituals. But the more he studied his Bible, he more he realized salvation was an inner feeling of salvation! Salvation isn’t something you earn, it’s something you feel, and such joyfulness begins improving all other habit-arts. That was a joyful moment that must have been for him. Suddenly he realized all religious rituals were useless for salvation. Shortly after that he wrote down about 100 reasons why Church rituals were useless for salvation, German printers started running off copies of them, and the Protestant Reformation was off and running.
In ancient times many conservatives regularly pictured our inner life as a spirit-object, subject to control by more powerful spirits. Mary Magdalene, for example, was pictured as being possessed by a number of evil spirits who in turn causes her sinful actions. As a result, people didn't put much value in their own little daily joyful actions to keep building useful habit-arts. Instead people kept praying for such spirits to finally leave them and make them healthier once and for all. Such feelings in both the ancient and medieval worlds kept painting the body as merely a prison for one's spirit-soul. The mind and body were psychically disconnected, thus making it practically impossible to actually build more joyful feelings with daily actions. No doubt, Jesus felt joyfulness many times while growing up in his very violent and destructive world. As the eldest of a large family he no doubt often saw innocent kinds of joy on the faces of his many younger brothers and sisters, who, like any child, could find joy in the simplest activities. For most children being poor is no reason not to feel joy; even springtime lilies were seen joyfully. In such a household there was a kind of purity in child-like joyfulness and it no doubt touched him deeply, enough to say the Kingdom of Heaven itself is entered with such child-like feelings, while to those addicted to making more money it was practically impossible. Such innocent feelings of joy are centered completely in the here and now; when’s the last time you joyfully built a mud pie? However, if such actions and feelings aren’t taken into the adult world, then like any habit joy too grows weaker over time. Joyfulness and happiness are like plants; if they’re not watered and cared for, they wither and die. Luckily nature shows us the more we feel joyful, the easier it gets.
No doubt, for thousands of years now such spirit-models of joy have been a part of life. As our modern Behavioral world keeps unfolding, however, one difference between then and now is what we feel joyfulness is. Today it’s easier to feel it’s merely another useful ethical value we can build for ourselves, and then ask our self how strong do we want to make it? In short, such modern ethical models tell us such feelings depend on our actions here and now, and not on anything else. So, perhaps the best place to start strengthening our joyfulness is by noticing what makes us joyful even for a few seconds. Such experiences can help build a joyful plateau, so to speak.
Dewey was one of the leaders helping build such a modern model of ethical excellence. For him, the more we keep feeling a child-like joy in our daily lives, the easier it is to keep making life more joyful. And once again, all the useful results of such joyful feelings help justify building such a habit. Among other results, it also makes it easier to feel ordinary things in life are sacred objects. As with truth, so also with joy; most importantly it focuses on how such ethical feelings are used and what results they produce. For example, harmful results can help us re-think enjoying the mammoth burgers a la mode we eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacking! For us it’s best to keep practicing the art of nurturing, deepening, and preserving our intelligent and healthful childhood joys, rather than our straight-to-the-hospital ones! It’s another benefit of adult life; the results of our enjoyments help build intelligent enjoyments!
Using Joy Wisely...
Simply because life's ethical options are literally infinite in number, there are literally an infinite number of opportunities for acting joyfully. Thus, where to start enjoying life is a choice each of us can make here and now, and start feeling the habit-art as much as we like. Who knows which situations can feel joyful about unless we experiment first? Is that another joyful feeling, or what? In any case, however, we might be good to first look a little closer at other important ethical questions like what can it mean to intelligently act joyfully? For some that question should already be easy to answer. The more our enjoyments help us learn what we want to learn, and produce useful results, the more intelligent our joyful feelings are. As mentioned earlier, continued healthful growth is the ultimate ethical goal for we Deweyan liberals. When, for example, we joyfully help someone become more intelligent, like eating health-producing foods and have joyful kinds of conversation, then joy becomes intelligent and productive. When our joyful feelings help make our community even more beautiful, and maybe even bop that disrespectful neighbor on the nose when all else fails, might be 2 others examples of intelligent joyfulness. In fact, the list is literally infinite in number. Such ethical options are what make modern life so challenging. In many orthodox religious traditions life is much more regulated, thus reducing the stress of making ethical choices. For us Deweyan liberals, however, ethical variety is much greater; we can joyfully learn to keep building more intelligent, creative, playful, and confident ethical habits. No doubt, for most people life is always too short, but why let that fact keep us from intelligently enjoying as much of it as we can? Is there a better way to feel like a smiling and carefree kid again, other than intelligently building a healthful will-to-joy?
That’s some of Dewey’s good ethical news; the bad news has already been mentioned, but I’ll mention it again. No habit-art is fully energized in a day, a week, or even a year. All habit-arts, including joyfulness, can continually keep growing all through life! No doubt, it takes some time to playfully build its first narrow and shallow feeling-plateau, but the more we build on our already joyful actions -- the more joyfully we become here and now -- the more the feeling begins sizzling and crackling with impulsive and instinctive energy! That’s the great news of Dewey’s Behavioral psychology: actions energize feelings. Generous actions energize generous feeling-habits, and joyful actions energize joyful feeling-habits. It’s both as simple AND as difficult as that! After all, who the hell can practice at first what they haven’t felt before?
Everyone can enjoy a satisfying meal, but it takes a little intelligence and practice to enjoy only the foods producing health and vitality! Just like any ethical value, there’s a different between routine enjoyment and intelligent enjoyment. However, once we build that most difficult first feeling plateau, once we, say, feel it while cooking and eating better food, then it becomes easier to keep expanding that feeling.
For us Deweyan liberals, learning to build such ethical habit-arts is character excellence itself. What often makes the process so difficult is the lack of joyfulness at first. People often want to learn things quickly; their patience is quite limited often by the lack of joyfulness. With a joyful habit-art every experience can be felt as a kind of sacred experience, and one worthy of all our relaxed attention. With such actions joyfulness becomes sensual! Such joyful actions give us a fine sensual feeling for how any value at all is a work of behavioral art; we can make ourselves artists in sensual joyfulness! We feel no need to believe such actions are the result of some pre-determined spirit-plan of nature, or the result of what many believe is Karmic law. How deeply can you feel the joy in those ideas? And if not, then why not take a few minutes here and now to feel their joyfulness before reading further. Even as I write these words I feel joyfully engaged. With such liberating results is it any wonder we Deweyan liberals add joyfulness to our list of useful ethical values. Why shouldn’t the joy of a family dinner be extended to dishwashing or even playfully nagging a dishwashing mate?!
As many already know, artfully building any feeling's first plateau is often the toughest part of learning any new habit-art, especially joyfulness. I’m trying to build that first plateau with all the new electronic gadgets now on the market. In any case, however, because it tastes so enjoyable, building a feeling for ice cream is easy, but how many then take their joyful feelings to the next plateau and learn to enjoy healthful ice cream or yogurt? On New Year’s Eve in 2014 I ask, how many joyful New Year's Resolutions to stop smoking, or start building a better exercise habit will last no longer than a week, simply because they’re not felt as sensually joyful and pleasurable actions? How many smokers learn to put more delicious things into their mouths besides a cigarette? Once again, intelligently building any new habit, even joyfulness, is easier with some encouraging and pleasant rewards. Without them, building that all-important first joyful plateau is that much more difficult, if not impossible. So, what was said in Part 1 about intelligently building any new habit certainly applies to sensual joyfulness too. Why not first start feeling joyfulness on a small scale, like only for 5 or 10 minutes at a time, just to begin feeling what it’s like, and not forgetting to reward yourself while you’re practicing too? How joyful does that lollipop taste, and how joyful can you feel when you’re not tasting it? For us Deweyan liberals, that seems to be a more intelligent way to build any ethical value, rather than simply seeing how many days you can go without smoking or binging on junk food. Like plants and animals too, all new habit-arts start small and then gradually become larger with practice; why should sensual joyfulness be any different?
Simply because most people have never been taught how best to intelligently build a new habit-feeling, or reconstruct an unhealthful one, many don't take it one joyful baby-step at a time, like Dr. Leo recommended in What About Bob? They don't first build a little time-space where eating or smoking takes a back-seat to sensually enjoying some other activity. That’s why hobbies are so important to have; they make it easier to feel joyfulness, hopefully in constructive and relaxing ways. Without feeling such practical learning techniques, many people feel they can stop any habit all at once, and quickly learn a new one; it’s like the addict saying I can stop any time I want! Such fantasies show a lack of education about how to best build any ethical habit. In fact, with such learning the subjects of psychology and ethics merge into one organic process – call it ethical psychology if you like, or even ethicology; calling it anything doesn’t change the basic biological facts involved in intelligently learning any new habit-art. For us Deweyan Behaviorists our old weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits are not just ideas or words, they’re propulsive and impulsive biological facts of life; they are sheer will power itself, and sensually joyfully actions helping people relax and gain more control over their propulsive habits helps make us better masters of our self. Who knows? Maybe you’re the kind of person who can build large joyful space-times right away; if not, then try a smaller one.
Teaching our self to build a more sensually joyful habit-art can also build more respect for our already existing habits, and thus become more realistic about learning any new habit. Young folks often feel they can learn anything they want any time they want. How many excessive smokers or drinkers have built strong and propulsive joyless daily routine rituals with their own actions? Such habits can be pictured as little psychic pockets of energy constantly activating our muscles. If so, then without a sensually joyful feeling helping us to relax those muscles, and feel more deeply what we want to feel, it becomes more difficult to even start building that first little intelligent plateau-feeling-space. An atomic physicist might say its first quantum level ... on the level. The longer, say, a smoker goes without smoking, the more they feel their own psychic smoking system becoming more tense and energized. After all, nerves sensitive to powerful drugs like nicotine and alcohol still keep making us feel the need for such drugs. Thus, detoxifying the body-mind can also become an important part of learning more healthful habits. Fasting is one way I’ve experimented with for such detoxifying, but again, there are intelligent and unintelligent ways of fasting. So, before you bravely declare war on your most joyless and unhealthful habit-art, why not read up a little on how people can detoxify their body-minds intelligently? Hey, when’s the last time you treated yourself to some healthy non-fat yogurt with yeast? Isn’t that the yeast you can do? How much is joyful humor a part of your sensually enjoyable habit-art?
Hopefully such ethicological suggestions about joyfulness will also help us feel how simple and practical such learning can be! After all, learning happens all through life, so why not learn to more excellently guide its growth with some sensually joyful feelings? When’s the last time you enjoyed sensually caressing anything? In fact practicing the art makes us joyful ethical artists; well at least it sounds impressive, doesn’t it? For example, only as Van Gogh kept painting his colorful child-like pictures did he feel any kind of joy in his work, and the same applies to any one building a more intelligent habit-art. In fact, even ordinary people like you and me can savor our own artistic growth on a daily basis, even if it's only small! Are you feeling sensually joyful about such ethical ideas yet? No? Then maybe you can look around for some examples. Does looking at Van Gogh's joyful paintings make you feel joyful, or hearing some of Beethoven's music, like his Emperor Concerto? Have you redd his Ode to Joy yet? If so, then it might help you build that first joyful feeling level. For me happy jazz music helped me start feeling more joyful, like Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie, and especially Joe Zawinul. With such music it became easier to feel sensually joyfulness on a conscious level of awareness. At that level it’s much easier to notice joyful results; many call it living in the moment. Seeing sensually joyful art and hearing joyful music can also be used as rewards while you practice.
12. JOYFULNESS, 102
Education
For many people today joyfulness is an important part of an educated character, and so in this section we first look at how our educational institutions could help build such habit-art, then how they might feel on a personal level, and finally how such habit-arts can be seen from Dewey’s liberal ethical models. After all, if our educational institutions like schools, homes, and churches don’t help teach such useful ethical habits like joyfulness, then it becomes that much more difficult to learn one of the most useful habits we have, and how it helps make life so much more worth living.
A joyful habit-art can also help grow our 2 most excellent ethical habit-arts – intelligently helping those we choose to help, and respecting just and fair people and laws. To us Deweyan liberals such useful ethical habit-arts are learned much easier with feelings like joyfulness. If so, then why shouldn’t our schools, homes and churches too help build such feelings in people? The more people realize such joyful habit-arts are even more important than offering students mere academic facts they don’t need or want to learn, the sooner children can start feeling the benefits of joyfully learning what they want to learn! Sadly, however, such a liberal educational model including character and ethical development has been rejected by professional US educators for more than 50 years now. Soon after Dewey’s death in 1952 President Eisenhower himself public said the US needs a more rigorous academic model of education, one in which students are offered only a number of academic subjects most students neither needed nor wanted to learn. As a result, ethical development for living in an open democratic republic has grown much slower than the scientific facts used to build our modern society.
Most people today have gone through such a ethical-free public school model. As a result, most people today feel education should only be learning a certain number of academic facts and reading assignments in English, history, mathematics, science, health, and art. In fact, such schools were similar to what students in the Middle Ages were going to in their conservative church schools. However, without students today first making an emotional commitment to want to know such facts, most all of them are soon forgotten. How much do even recent graduates remember such academic facts; according to some recent articles most students don’t even know when the US Civil War was fought! Such results are often used by conservatives to say we should have an even more rigorous academic model of education, while we Deweyan liberals say the basic educational problem is not what is taught, but the limited freedom students have to choose what to learn. Without such an emotional choice and commitment learning and remembering anything is practically impossible.
For us Deweyan liberals such an authoritarian model of public education is not only a kind of slavery, but it also ignores one of the most important parts of education, namely ethical education. In short, what good is merely knowing a lot of academic facts when one’s ethical habits are weak and unhealthful? Such ethical habits tell us how best to use our factual knowledge! Should we use our knowledge merely to keep increasing our own wealth, or use it to help those who want to keep improving their lives? If you feel schools should focus on the second part of that question, then teaching ethical habits like joyfulness helps makes anything that much more pleasant. After all, where’s the harm in offering classes like Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced Joyfulness, Happiness, and Humor on a formal basis? Aren’t such habit-arts useful throughout life? What’s the use of knowing a lot of useful English and history facts if they’re not used joyfully to help others, or for making just laws and people more respected? After all, such a joyful habit-art could even help make a class in Depressive Novelists more interesting, at least for a day or 2!
Such liberal educational ideas about making ethical development a more important part of the public school curriculum may sound silly to some, especially to those who believe our schools don’t teach enough academic trivia. But for us Deweyan liberals such schools artificially divided human psychology into thinking and feeling, and then neglect the ethical feeling side of students. Such a neglect is not only artificial and unnecessary, but harmful to social well-being itself!
Compared to what educational models are our modern ones perfectly fine? To ancient and medieval schools, where students were regularly beaten for not memorizing their assignments, many of today’s schools are better. But compared to Dewey’s more liberal democratic and humane educational models, they are merely a modern conservative version of medieval church schools; they leave students with many weaknesses for living in a still dangerous democratic republic. In fact, some of those medieval schools actually taught useful skills and ethical habits to students, as one popular education book called the Book of the Courtier taught in the early 1500s. It recommended both poor and aristocratic students learn the same ethical habits.
Education philosophy was one of Dewey’s specialties, as it was for Plato. But other than that they were worlds apart about how their schools should be run. Certainly Dewey felt our public schools could be greatly improved as the US rapidly evolved from a farming nation in the early 1800s to an industrial nation in the early 1900s. Now only Dewey, but the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. too said character habits should be used to judge a person, not their skin color, personal sexual habits, or how many academic facts they knew. And yet our public schools today continue ignoring ethical studies and character development on a formal basis, as do many of our homes and churches.
Where’s the evidence for such general statements? Well, judging by our growing prison populations, and the increasing public taxes needed to pay for them, and also by the very high youth unemployment figures, millions of young folks still don't feel joyful about obeying just laws, or have the needed job skills to start making honest money after high school. If so, then many young folks are coming out of our public schools being both economic and ethical cripples. However, schools where children start learning useful ethical and job skills are some of the best habits they can learn! They’re much more useful all through life than learning anything about ‘Shakespeare,’ English grammar, sentence construction, how to solve algebraic equations, or who the presidents were.
With such useful ethical habits like joyfulness and humor, learning any new skill becomes much more of a celebration than another stressful hassle. What’s more, such ethical character training can begin in childhood, and does for a lucky few with caring parents. Most children naturally find joy in the simplest activities, mud pies included, but don’t easily carry over such feelings when they’re practically forced to learn what they don’t need or want to learn. In most schools natural joyfulness is soon conditioned out of schools. Not learning useful ethical values like joyfulness is much more of a conservative monastery-model of education, as modern conservative public schools continue demanding silent and solitary book work about academic trivia for most of 12 years! In such schools students are told again and again standardized test scores are really how they will be judged, but as test scores and small college graduation numbers tell us, students themselves are rejecting such narrow and artificial educational models. Thus, for us Dewey liberals such public schools are better labeled as conservative, simply because they keep the same basic structure schools have kept for thousands of years: obey the teacher and learn what you’re told to learn! Don’t question any of it, and don’t even think about it. So, naturally, we liberals say, to keep nurturing and strengthening such useful character habit-arts like joyfulness, children and their parents should have the freedom to learn about and then choose what character and job skills their children should learn. Some children want to become police officers, lawyers, doctors, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians, so why aren’t even young students given such freedom to actually start learning about such useful skills?
Dewey thought teaching such useful ethical habits like joyfulness and useful job skills would make school a much more socially useful institution. After all, the vast majority of students don’t go on to college, around 70%, and much fewer than 30% even graduate in 4 years. So, isn’t is logical to ask, why not help students build an excellent set of ethical habit-arts and job skills useful in the community around them, so they can become productive members of it after graduation? How many sad and depressed adults today would be less so if only they were better artists in joyfulness, and liked challenging themselves to practice such skills on a daily basis? Also, why shouldn't older students who already know something about such habits be allowed to help teach younger students? Can’t even younger and older students practice such habits while even working joyfully in a school garden? Isn’t intelligently growing food or flowers a more intelligent form of mud-pie making?
No doubt, many traditional educators and parents will disagree; they want their kids of learn as much academic trivia as possible. Fine, their children wouldn’t take such useful classes; they can remain as dictatorial as parents have been for thousands of years. However, they have no right to make all children learn such academic trivia, or neglect their ethical development, in publicly funded schools! That’s not educational democracy; it’s a rather mean form of educational dictatorship! Such a conservative educational model purposely withholds useful knowledge, and thus increases social stress and frustration; it’s a medieval model at best! By definition public schools should promote public well-being, and thus with liberal homes and churches help reduce public stress and frustration! Those results are what our public schools should be producing? Again, to many conservatives such ideas might sound like educational psycho-babble, and a waste of time. Again, that’s their right, but in a democratic republic they too must yield to the majority or else use some other educational system. In short, in liberal schools psychological and ethical habit-arts are 2 of the most important skills of all; everyone lives with such habits all through life, and so such knowledge remains useful long after most academic book-facts are forgotten!
For such reasons we Deweyan liberals say not teaching such useful ethical habits as joyfulness and humor is a huge educational mistake and a waste of scarce educational dollars! Without teaching such habits school quickly turns into a solitary world where teachers are feared more than admired and where useful knowledge is ignored. Making matters even worse, powerful corporations have arranged life for many parents to keep working to pay their bills; they thus have little time or energy to even learn about different educational models like Dewey’s. As a result, students continue learning ethical habits about how to act in an increasingly corporate and military society, like mainly how to meekly and blindly follow orders, keep working, and never learn how to creatively criticize anyone or anything. Those so-called whistle-blowers who actually expose unlawful actions in their organization are often fired and may even be jailed for their efforts!
With such conservative ethical habits now being taught in many of our public schools, homes, and churches it’s easy to feel life’s basically one long economic war with everyone out to get as much as they can as fast as they can. What is most needed in such a world are more obedient corporate soldiers to keep doing as they’re told. Thus, with the help of educational institutions like our public schools, homes, churches, and corporations our world has largely helped form such feelings while being dominated by a few thousand super-wealthy folks who want that status quo kept firmly in place. To get by in such a world such parents often feel young folks need to become an obedient part of the corporate world; to them talk of social well-being and teaching students to intelligently enjoy helping and respecting others sounds strange. To them the idea of democratic equal rights is why our world and nation has gone so wrong. What counts most to such people is having more money, better weapons, and more electronic gizmos than anyone else. Many such conservatives firmly believe peace only happens when others fear to attack us; such might-makes-right feelings are the only real psychology and ethics to practice! If history teaches anything it's that 'military might always makes right' and to the devil with everything else! You want to feel joyful? Have a few beers and life becomes instantly more enjoyable.
No doubt, such conservative thinking and feelings have helped our alcohol and weapon industries keep taking billions of dollars every year from taxpayers, and putting much of it into the hands of a few wealthy conservatives. Such feelings are common even as democratic ethical values keep growing, but they’ve also allowed conservatives to build our public schools to support such ethical values. They often help people feel profits for a few are much better than democratic feelings of equal rights and human well-being for many. What they fear most is liberal ethical habit-arts like equal rights, kindness, fair play, joyfulness, and humor.
As many people have learned once again during the recently brutal and tremendously destructive Iraq and Afghanistan wars, money and weapons certainly are no guarantee of a peaceful and secure life at home! No one knows where the next angry bomber will strike? Evidently, not many people realize public taxes build our public schools, and so all towns and cities have a fundamental right to say how those schools should work and what they should teach; they have the freedom to build the public schools they think best, as long as everyone has the same learning opportunities. Obviously a great many excellent people have gone through life without building a joyful habit-art; life keeps going with joyless people too! Many people stood up against brutality and violence with a feeling of defiance, rather than joy. During medieval times habits like joy, laughter, and happiness were flatly discouraged in schools, homes, and churches; many feared they might be lured to hell by such actions.
Certainly, joyfulness is merely another ethical option, but if it’s useful throughout life, then why not experiment with it in our public schools and let children themselves decide how worthwhile it is? After all, aren’t our public schools built for their development? What’s more, teaching joyful job skills is bound to have an effect on our budget-busting prisons and millions of overly tense adults relying on sedatives and tranquilizers to keep them calm? As we’ve been seeing, our educational institutions teach ethical habits of one kind or another, so why not teach the ones actually making life more satisfying and productive? Joyfulness helps people relax their overly tense muscles and thus feel life a little differently. It can also help increase feelings of thankfulness and gratitude; for Dewey gratitude is the foundational feeling for all civilized ethical habits. Without such joyfulness, uncontrolled tensions can in fact make anything more difficult, and so help make life feel more tiring and frustrating? Don’t such feelings make it easier for people to ride around in their cars rather than get out and get some healthful walking exercise? How many know people for whom even walking is too stressful and joyless, and thus make health that much more difficult to maintain?
How many people in the US alone are, in fact, psychically confined by their own joyless ethical habit-arts? Ten million? Twenty million? Fifty million? Isn’t that why they spend billions of dollars every year on tranquilizers, antidepressants, and sleeping pills? How much would our big drug companies object to building such liberal public schools? Such questions help us Deweyan liberals ask why are our public schools still not teaching more useful ethical and work habits? Is it mainly because such classes would help reduce profits for drug makers and those who run our prisons? The more people know how to keep practicing joyful habits, and to playfully help let go of their stressful tensions here and now, the less they’d need such drugs and psychologists. In fact, I've been seriously thinking about even giving up my 2 daily cups of coffee … starting tomorrow of course, or maybe next year! In addition to caffeine coffee also has natural muscle relaxers to more easily let go of overly tense muscles. So, maybe if I can practice a more joyful relaxation, it might be more healthful. And if not, the next person you see dusting their breakfast fruit with coffee grounds may be me! I’m still studying the coffee question. Some researchers now say some coffee is an important part of a long life, while others say caffeine is a very dangerous drug helping break down brain blood vessels and cause strokes. If you can feel joy while resolving such contradictions you’re well on your way to psychological and ethical health. Perhaps here again is where the Greek ethical idea of moderation might be useful.
Joyless Institutions Make Ethical Weaknesses Worse
Strange as it may seem, what ethical habits people learn is often determined by the institutions they use, including business, religious, political, and educational ones. If they don’t encourage useful ethical habits like joyfulness and humor, then it’s much more difficult to learn them. Thus, any rigid social institution is another drag on building more civilized ethical habits like joyfulness, respect, and humor. As Dewey saw decades ago, in an always fluid and evolving nature, to remain excellent an institution needs to remain fluid and evolving, rather than routine and unchanging, For example, while science has given soldiers better killing weapons, the basic military structure hasn’t changed in thousands of years: obey orders and do what you’re told. Thus wars continue happening around the world because people keep being taught such ethical habits! The same basic ethical value of obedience is at work in many of our corporations too, and made easier to practice because of our own joyless public schools. Many classes in them are simply not places where joyful habits are encouraged; the focus remains on test scores, test scores, and more test scores.
The question we Deweyan liberals ask is why should people allow their tax dollars to continue supporting such institutions? Why should our homes, schools, corporations, and even churches remain joyless and unchanging? Gone are the medieval days when serious and somber religious rituals dominated daily life, and yet in many institutions today such ethical values continue being demanded, especially about making as much money as possible. Even many churches continue seriously teaching people eternally unchanging spirit-objects exist and they care for them, even though no objective evidence exists for such spirits! Even intelligently helping those less fortunate is an always evolving art, not absolute Truth. Science too has liberated many of us from our own mythical ignorance and religious obedience, and yet institutions continue teaching values like science reveals the absolute truth about life and nature, rather than the intelligent art of experimental testing.
In short, people are challenged now more than ever before to keep all educational institutions as fluid as possible, especially about teaching more useful ethical values like joyfulness! When they don’t, when they keep teaching the same routine habits like the serious and somber pursuit of more profits, then they help make people less ethically fluid and life less enjoyable. Some churches may have some computer classes, but also teach the same serious ethical worship-habits they’ve been teaching for centuries, where people are made to feel like lowly sinners and even god-chosen defenders of the faith! As a result, most people really don’t realize how radical a joyful ethical habit-art really is. It can help transform any form of obsessive seriousness! It can be a great weapon for transforming any habit of blind obedience to authority, and helping increase habits of democratic intelligence and independence. In medieval times all institutions formed what we now call a feudal system, but who realizes today those same institutional values continue educating people to learn ethical habits of obedience and acceptance of a corporate and military status quo? Thus we continue seeing the maintenance of a modern feudalistic society in the US – proudly proclaimed as the world’s oldest democracy. Even at its founding, however, many conservatives believed those who own the country should run the country, and they’ve been building institutions ever since to keep maintaining that social status quo: a military to keep taking more of the world’s wealth, and public schools to keep teaching ethical habits like obedience and respect for authority!
As history teaches, inflexible institutions often do more social harm than good to human well-being. From celebrating the liberal value of worth and dignity for all people in the early centuries of our current era, the Church eventually began killing those who disagreed with their ideas and values, as if no one should be allowed to even talk about other opinions, much less practice different ethical habits. In fact, such actions by religious conservatives continue today in many parts of the world. It’s probably one reason Thomas Jefferson said a little revolution from time to time can be healthy to a society; such ‘revolutions’ can help keep our institutions flexible, humane, and focused on human well-being, rather than focused merely on profits. Like any set of human habit-arts, social institutions too can become overly routine and thus socially unhealthful. How much of a fact of life is this: The more people allow our institutions to stifle and suppress useful ethical values like joyfulness and well-being, the easier it is for life to become what it is already for so many -- a worried numbness about this life and a strong desire for wanting there to be a ‘next’ one. In short, for us Deweyan liberals, ethical habits like joyfulness can be a life-transforming value.
Anyone who's redd about life in the ancient and medieval worlds can feel how ethically important institutions are in civilization. In those worlds life was socially and economically divided between the poor and the wealthy, and religions offered hope for a better life. In fact, until the 1800s most everyone felt life was all arranged by god or some kind of giant cosmic Karma system. Only yesterday, so to speak, has a new science of society begun growing, called sociology. It actually studies how people learn and act.
In earlier largely joyless worlds men and women by the thousands were often afraid to go out into the world god supposedly made and judged good; local robber gangs made life very dangerous. The countryside was full of violent and desperate people willing to kill or rob anyone with anything of value. In the early 500s CE one medieval monk named Benedict concluded the world has nothing worthwhile in it and even joyful laughter shouldn't be allowed! Like serious and somber Plato he too demanded his Christian followers keep contemplating spirit-ideas as the only road to a better life. However, with the help of the religious order he founded, the Benedictines, the most liberating habit-art of all, modern experimental science, remained almost non-existent! Peace and safety could best be felt only behind mostly somber and joyless monastery walls, often praying, singing, or chanting every day for up to 9 hours! Much to Benedict’s credit he also urged followers to care for the sick, dying, and poor; but without much joy in learning more about nature and disease, such useful ethical habits continued convincing many people life was controlled by devious devils and a vengeful god. With such institutions how could the joy of learning more about nature – the basic joy of experimental science – become useful to anyone? Such a joyful learning habit began growing mainly by a few people outside the religious-dominated educational institutions in the 1600s; those early scientists helped build a new institution based on joyfully experimenting to learning more about nature. That was their ethical contribution to Western civilization which has since been monopolized by those often wanting nothing more using military power to secure more of the world’s wealth for themselves!
More About Personal Joyfulness
Every now and then I like challenging myself to feel joyfulness. Sometimes while walking down the street I challenge myself to feel joyful for a few moments. For me such little daily challenges help energize the ethical habits I feel are still too weak, and they help make life more interesting, fluid, and meaningful. I’ve also learned such feelings happen automatically as I relax useless muscular tensions; not thinking about the world helps increase such feelings.
To us Deweyan liberals, modern liberal ethical studies have started challenging people to teach themselves more positive people-friendly habits, like joyfulness. However, if people don’t challenge themselves on a daily basis, such useful ethical habits will remain just ideas in another book. You can even test the idea for yourself; relax, put this book down, and just feel where you’re at! Doesn’t it feel more joyful than before?
In effect, liberal democratic freedom is challenging people as never before to experimentally build a very different set of ethical habits than people have practiced for thousands of years! Joyfulness is simply one of them; it helps make life feel better, even when practiced on a small scale in daily life! Even in them can be felt the challenge to feel more joyful. In fact, consciously answering such challenges are the key to learning any new habit-art, even joyfulness about the world's most tabooed art -- sex! As we’ve already seen, excessive sexual taboos help make life feel more stressful than pleasurable. A Zen Buddhist might say beginning means beginning, so why not believe beginning joyfully means joyfully beginning? For all those English majors out there joy is best thought of as an adverb – joy changes any action -- any verb; in practice it means joyful walking, joyful sex, joyful eating, joyful exercise, joyful … Such abstract grammar ideas were mentioned to me in 7th grade, but didn’t mean anything until I actually began feeling how feeling joyfully does change my actions! And what’s more, such feelings help deepen any action and abstract idea like walking.
Because the secret of growing any useful ethical habit-art like joyfulness lies in our own daily actions, the simple act of just smiling can also begin energizing a joyful feeling. It’s why the family institution is so important; in it children can see what such feelings look and sound like in behavior. Still, people can learn the same kinds of feelings by challenging themselves to feel more joyful here and now. The more we act joyfully, the more we feel joyful! Who knows? Perhaps just smiling will be the first ‘baby-step’ for building joy’s first feeling-plateau. People normally express their inner feelings with outer facial expressions; it’s why Dewey called it the body-mind, rather than just the mind. So, if he’s right, then why not take advantage of that fact and begin experimenting to feel what actions increase a joyful feeling?
In fact all living ethical skills start on a small scale, just as all life forms. The largest whale, dinosaur, planet, or Red Giant star began its life on a microscopic level, and so why should any ethical habit-art be any different? No human is separate from nature, but rather always and forever remains a part of it! So, like any habit-art joyfulness too can start growing by challenging yourself to smile a little more often. There’s no eternal law saying we must keep feeling life is sad, stressful, tense, and joyless; only our own habits make us feel such laws exist. In fact, such tensions and feelings are a kind of body-mind poison, the antidote to which can be answering the challenge to build a joyful habit-art. No doubt, it’ll feel strange at first, just as does learning anything new. Because we’re all just emerging from a long period of joyless and fearful primitive, ancient, and medieval habit-arts, many people still don’t know what joyfulness feels like. In fact, Dewey’s Functional Behaviorism grew out of the need to create more healthful ethical habit-arts as antidotes to such psychic poisons. Joyful feelings are one of them.
Sometimes jokes and funny stories can also help answer the challenge to feel more joyful here and now; they often put a smile on one’s face and make life feel more enjoyable. Other people may feel more joyful after physically clowning and playing around, like Lucille Ball did on her TV shows. Many children often spontaneously use dancing and singing to answer their joyful challenges. Again, caring and intelligent parents can help encourage and expand such excellent ethical habit-arts; I came late to the art mainly because neither my parents nor my schools encouraged it, but better late than never, right? The joyless and somber ethical habits I learned in 2 years of Catholic school had been practiced for thousands of years: solemnly worship and obey.
In fact, the performing arts in general have been helping people answer their ethical challenges for centuries now. They’ve helped keep the values of playfully dancing, singing, telling jokes, and just clowning alive amid a world of dreadful seriously. As the film and TV industries have been showing people for decades, more positive ethical values like joyfulness are a great way to make some honest money and help others too. Don’t forget, in humanistic Hollywood helping others is the highest good! Many an actor has earned millions just by joyfully clowning around in front of a camera, and then also joyfully using it to keep helping those in need. What's more, in everyone, even in kids on a subconscious level, joyful feelings probably happen many times every day, and so good parents will notice what triggers it and encourage them to grow even stronger. I’m guessing most people would be truly amazed to see how joyful their favorite stars act with just a few possessions; helping others often has that effect. Obviously I'm not saying everyone should dance down the street every day while whistling and singing a happy tune, even though it might feel really good once in a while, but what’s wrong with that?
Have you noticed how many people today look like the great silent and somber Easter Island stone statues -- like they're in a zombiesque hell and stoically walking through another joyless day? But there are also some much more damaging results from such joyless habits. How many times have you redd or heard about how illegal drug users support their habits by stealing, robbing, and dealing drugs themselves? It’s all to create an artificial joyful feeling! If so, then again, shouldn’t our educational institutions like schools, homes, and churches, be more helpful for teaching young folks how to act joyfully without any drugs? Three-year-olds don’t normally need drugs to feel joyful while making mud-pies!
Because addict healthcare is often not available, or is much too expensive for most people, why not make such ethical training a part of public education? Why not let the experiment begin? What the hell have we got to lose except more possibly destructive and violent addictive habits? Who needs more of them? No doubt, such an educational improvement would need many more psychologists and volunteers in the early grades, but what’s the alternative besides more tax-sucking prisons, more adult counseling, more homelessness, and more legal drug use?
Which is better, teaching students and adults how to keep growing intelligently and joyfully, or keep paying police, courts, prisons, and welfare workers to merely keep shuffling psychically crippled people around our social bureaucracy? How about this for yet another bold and daring social statement: Feeling joy while having another piece of chocolate cake is much more healthful than feeling joyful only with more ‘crack’ cocaine, heroin, marijuana, meth-amphetamines, or sedative drugs!? After all, why depend on such unhealthful, addictive, and crippling drugs to merely create a brief feeling of joy and happiness, when a joyful habit-art can create such feelings anytime!? If so, then wouldn’t it be infinitely more intelligent to simply empower young folks to keep growing and strengthening their own natural joyfulness? What’s more important folks, social health and human well-being, or gang drug profits, stressed-out police, over-worked judges, addictive diseases, and jails full of undereducated people? Isn’t the flexibility of a nation’s educational institutions really the best sign of how civilized its people are?
Is Joyfulness The Door To ‘Ultimate Reality’?
For some the following cautionary words aren’t needed, but for some they are. Some people may begin feeling joyfulness is really the door to some kind of deeper reality, just as many medieval conservatives felt prayer and chanting revealed nature’s spirit-world. So, maybe another meta-ethical question about the nature of joyfulness might be useful: what is joyfulness? Many intelligent mystics and religious conservatives today teach themselves to grow a strong joyful feeling-habit; why shouldn’t they? We’re all feeling creatures and joyfulness is one of the most useful ethical habits; each day we can feel its power and see if it makes any action more meaningful and enjoyable. But what’s changed for us Deweyan liberals is the meaning WE GIVE to such feelings. From native shamans down through Greek Dionysian, Orphic, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Christian, and Muslim mystics, each and all have often GIVEN the meaning of such feelings as the key to feeling ‘ultimate’ reality, whatever that is. Such feelings of ‘ultimate reality’ have a very long history indeed, going back tens of thousands of years.
Native medicine shamans, for example, regularly went into feeling-trances in the quest to control what they felt were nature's ultimately real causes – spirit-causes. Also, ancient wine-loving Dionysians had joyful orgiastic rituals in the quest to harness what they felt were their spirit-god’s ultimate' power; they hoped to make their own actions feel like ultimate Truth. In China reclusive Taoists felt the Tao that can be told of is not the absolute Tao, meaning ultimate reality could only be felt. The point is, for we Deweyan liberals all such meanings were GIVEN to such feelings, in the quest to make like feel more meaningful, enjoyable, and worthwhile. The more a habit is practiced, the more people can feel they really reflect ‘ultimate reality.’ However, the more ‘ultimate’ praying became, the less free people were to experimentally learn how our natural world actually works.
Such ‘ultimate’ feelings can also be produced with joy and happiness. As we’ve seen, Aristotle felt such joy in contemplating some ideas he felt god itself was a contemplative being. No doubt, it was his version of Democritus’s idea of god as a being made of atoms and caring nothing about earthly events.
In short, feelings of ultimate reality can help produce unhealthful feelings of importance and even delusions of grandeur! Such is the power of some ethical habits. It takes a little realistic thinking to see all such habits are just useful behavioral tools we can build or extinguish as we choose. In reality -- existentially – believing our actions are tapping into some kind of 'ultimate' reality beyond our sense-experience, as Plato, Aristotle, and so many other conservative and moderate philosophers and theologians often suggested, can easily become a kind of psychic poison numbing our ethical growth, tolerance, and psychic health. In a Zen-sounding way, joyfulness is joyfulness, period! In effect, such feelings of ultimate reality can help keep people closed off in their own little psychic bubbles. No doubt, everyone has a perfect right to build their own psychic habit-bubbles, but they become socially dangerous when they feel anyone who doesn’t practice their ethical habits shouldn’t be allowed the same equal democratic rights and freedoms as everyone else! Intolerant actions can easily become a social reality! Therein lies a real danger of such ‘ultimate reality’ feelings, feelings still common to many of today’s major religions. They may even prohibit the rights of other minorities to build their own habits of peace and enjoyment. In short, intolerance is often the result of such ‘ultimate’ feelings. To this day many conservative Christians, Jews, and Muslims practice such serious habits, making life much more stressful and dangerous than it might be.
We democratically liberal Deweyans, however, have no such problems as those. For us such feelings like joyfulness and holiness are all simply feelings here and now. They’re ultimate only to the situation here and now. To us all such mystics merely demonstrate one simple biological fact: Over 3 billion years of evolution have sensitized nature's life forms to feel inner and outer PHYSICAL energies! If that weren’t true then drugs, fasting, dancing, sensually feeling another person, or even joyfully meditating could not produce any feelings, much less ultimate ‘mystic’ feelings. Simply because we Deweyan liberals see all feelings as completely natural and organic sense-based events with varying degrees of usefulness, joyful feelings too become another ethical tool to keep life itself more joyful and sensually pleasant. What good is, say, a carpenter who can use only one tool? Thus, ethical excellence requires many different habit-arts.
For us, the ‘ultimate’ source of such feelings is not out there, somewhere, or in another realm and given by some spirit-object, but rather is completely and totally within our own feeling powers. Building such feelings and values like joyfulness has simply become another new ethical challenge. Joyful muscular practice, like merely smiling for example, is one way raw human energy is formed, shaped, and harnessed into useful and controlled ethical power. Merely with some intelligent practice almost anyone can learn to feel any useful ethical habit-art is ‘ultimate’ reality! Over-eating, for example, is less useful simply because its results often become unhealthful and not enjoyable. More ethically commonsensical it’s tough to be, right?
We say joy’s great power lies in the result of making learning itself that much easier and more pleasant. If there's an ‘ultimate’ for us Deweyan liberals it's learning itself! Learning always happens, no matter what happens! That’s our ultimate reality! And best of all, it’s something WE can learn to control; we can learn to more intelligently guide and choose what we want to feel more joyful about! For us there's nothing more ultimate than learning, so why not make it as enjoyable and satisfying as possible? After all, learning happens all through life anyway, so why not learn to make feel as sensually enjoyable as possible? Nature and evolution have endowed us with a host of sensual feelings, so learning to use them intelligently is yet another ethical challenge. For us what's 'ultimate' is sensual learning here and now! Life’s natural challenge is to keep making ordinary events as sensually pleasant any joyful as 'ultimately real' as possible, everything from a morning kiss to an evening cuddle. After all, all such feelings here and now are always more sensually enjoyable than any memory of them.
In short , any sensual feeling can become as joyfully ‘ultimate’ as any so-called ‘ultimate’ mystic experience! For us any sensual joyfulness can be felt as ultimate with ANY object in our natural world -- every physical object and event is ultimate reality! Life's great challenge is to intelligently keep sensually feeling the objects we choose to remain enjoyable, sacred, fun, educational, and liberating! No doubt, it won’t always be possible, or even most of time, but why should that stop anyone from learning to better control the depth and intensity of their own sensually joyful feelings? Again, and again, it all depends on how one answers one’s daily ethical challenges. How sensually joyful do you want to make your life here and now? How much of a student in sensual joyfulness do you want to become? In fact, with practice any plain and ordinary river-bed rock can FEEL as ‘ultimate’ as any mystic experience of 'Ultimate Reality'! Even joyfully FEELING Satori -- a Zen Buddhist word for enlightenment -- can happen anywhere, and with a sensually joyful practice can be FELT everywhere! Even a single touch and caress of a loved one can feel as ultimately joyful and sacred as anything else. And best of all, any level of joyfulness can begin growing here and now, with our own little daily actions. Healthy children often totally enjoy many of their actions, even their mistakes, but unless such skills are practiced such feelings soon weaken.
People living today have the great advantage and good fortune of living in a more scientific and less spirit-dominated world than ever before. As a species we’ve finally begun liberating human sensual energies to live more enjoyably here and now, rather than in some hoped for life after death. Who knows, it might exist, but in any case our natural life does in fact exist, and so we owe it to ourselves to make it as sensually joyful as we want. We’re also challenged to keep converting ‘ultimate’ weapons of destruction into ultimate feelings of peace and enjoyment. We Deweyan liberals certainly don't ignore real dangers other people may create, but at the same time our joyfulness can help us keep encouraging people to think about more constructive projects than destructive ones. In much of today’s world such sensually joyful ethical habits are being selected for continuation, rather than extinction.
Experimental learning and democratic equal rights has finally begun liberating us to build the sensually joyful ethical habits we choose to build, habits like acting more sensually focused, kinder, more respectful, and more supportive for the objects we choose. We're a long way from that goal on a worldwide scale, but joyful feelings keep moving us in those directions. No doubt, natural obstacles and dangers will almost certainly always exist, but why not feel joyful even about them too? Haven’t you ever heard of joyful cautiousness; it’s the art of joyfully looking ahead and avoiding possible dangers? True, our senses can trick us and lead us astray, but if they didn’t, if a sweet taste didn’t sometimes make us sick, and if some pretty mushrooms weren’t sometimes deadly, then experimental intelligence itself would be completely non-existent. Natural dangers help create the need for an intelligent learning habit, so why not even feel joy about them too? How many dogs have died over the past 100,000 years testing foods people weren’t sure about?
For Dewey, ethical intelligence is much the art of learning the difference between satisfying AND dangerous events. Without our feeling-senses and testing arts all our ethical knowledge about good AND evil -- all science itself -- would simply not exist! Now I certainly don’t know about you, but that to me is another joyful philosophic idea; it's liberating! Sensual joyfulness can help us respect the healthful and combat the dangerous. So, why not teach our self to feel joyful and confident about living in such a world? How many people out there really feel their body is so ugly they really shouldn’t practice a sensual joyfulness at all, either by them or with someone else? Such negative feelings may be natural to many people, but that certainly doesn’t mean they can’t be improved with more sensually joyful actions, does it? Of course not. Why shouldn’t we learn to feel sensually joyful about our bodies as well as possible dangers as well? If we don’t, if we let our negative feelings continue controlling what we want to learn more about, then the more frustrating and stressful life can become. For Dewey nature is ultimately dangerous AND stable, and the sooner we feel joyful about that ‘ultimate’ truth, the easier it becomes to intelligently keep feeling more joyful about it.
Such ethical challenges and practice will almost certainly remain one of life’s greatest challenges. Each generation is faced with them, thus making ethical generalizations live on through time. Why not learn to feel joyful even about acting cautiously! After all, what’s perfectly safe today may become dangerous tomorrow. To many people that may be a depressing thought; after all, many people want life to be as stable and safe as possible. Many religions are built on such wishful feelings. To us Deweyan liberals, however, such feelings are merely another way of avoiding what nature is, namely stable and dangerous! In an always changing world can nature be anything else? If not, then we too we always be challenged to build ethical habits increasing life’s stability while decreasing its dangers. Why not learn to joyfully keep invading a sometimes hostile future? Feeling joyful about nature's sensual satisfactions AND dangers helps us act more intelligently, rather than less. In fact, such sensually ethical joyfulness can help us feel 'born again' a little more every day! It’s yet another ethical idea we feel sensually joyful about, just as many scientists too work joyfully to learn how to use new genetic knowledge to overcome some of life’s crippling diseases and dangerous illnesses!
As we’ve begun seeing, most of our ancestors continued fearing, denouncing, and ignoring nature as the source of excellent power and knowledge. What’s more, their own routine ethical habits helped create feelings of perfection and power for spirit-objects in nature. As a result only yesterday, so to speak, have we finally begun making our world a place where sensual and sacred feelings of joy and happiness can become more widely felt on a daily basis, and used to keep improving both our inner and outer worlds. No doubt, the day has yet to dawn when most people can feel joyful about their own nation being democratic and satisfying to all people, rather than for just a wealthy few people, but such ethical habits seem to be growing, rather than shrinking.
Modern democratic life has begun liberating people from their narrow and fearful ethical bubbles, but it’s just beginning. Only as more liberal values are taught in our educational institutions will more people learn to joyfully practice the values useful in a growing democratic world. There are many signs such liberal ethical growth is happening, but also many signs it’s still being kept as weak as possible by those conservatives with wealth and political power. Many of them feel a feudalistic social structure is normal and natural, with a few at the top controlling others’ lives Meantime, for us Deweyan liberals we can keep feeling joyful about working to build the kind of peaceful and enjoyable democratic world everyone can share in, where every law-abiding person is treated equally, joyful freedom is a growing 'ultimate' social reality, and where sensual learning is practiced on a daily basis. Who shouldn't joyfully feel hosannas about those ideas, I mean except people described in the following lackadaisically lame limerick?
Malcolm was corporate down to his shorts,
Economics was his game, rather than sports.
So, day after day,
He would sneer and say,
Just bring me the latest profit reports.
13. HAPPINESS, 101
If you’re feeling a little guilty about not yet building a joyful habit-art for yourself, maybe this section about joy’s more vibrant twin happiness might be useful. Either that or make you feel even guiltier, I’m not sure which. In any case, not to worry. Even though ideas of happiness have been part of philosophy’s ethical history since the Greeks, most people on earth are still not happy or joyful. It’s yet another example of how important our educational institutions are for energizing any mere idea into an active feeling. Sad to say, merely because of a lack of education many people still don’t realize how they can take a more intelligent control of their happiness with their little daily practices. They were never taught to feel they have such power.
In this section we’ll first trace a little history of happiness’s evolution as an ethical idea, and then in the following section we’ll mention some of Dewey's practical thoughts about it. Obviously, like joy, happiness too is yet another useful ethical habit-art, but the 3 main Western ethical traditions have built very different models of its meaning and nature. Obviously joy and happiness aren’t really completely different from one another; happy feelings are often more obvious than joyful feelings. If a smile expresses joy, then laughter expresses happiness, at least to many people.
In any case, however, the challenge for us Deweyan liberals is helping folks feel how to more easily express happiness more often, and thus better control and reduce the normal tensions felt each day. Just like anything else, acting happily can be therapeutic and healthful, but there are noticeable differences between liberal, conservative, and moderate models of happiness, in both its nature and its expressions. For example, I’ve mentioned this example of liberal happiness before, but it’s appropriate here too. It seems Diogenes the Cynic was fond of challenging Plato’s work at grasping eternally true definitions; one of Socrates’ examples was to define mankind as ‘featherless bipeds.’ So Diogenes plucked a chicken, brought it to the Academy, and said ‘I’ve brought you a man.’ No doubt, he smiled when he saw the student reactions. If nothing else it shows how much fun some ancient thinkers could have with each other. In any case the definition was changed to ‘featherless biped with flat nails.’
Some Early Models of Happiness
As we’ve been seeing, in general conservatives continued diverting peoples’ attention away from secular events and expressions of happiness in favor of serious and somber feelings about spirit-ideas. Anyone who’s spent some time in traditional religious schools knows what I mean; the general atmosphere is one of somber seriousness, even about the most trivial of facts. As a result, western mankind has only within the last few centuries begun stepping away from such somber and spirit-obsessed feelings practiced within native, ancient, and medieval spirit-models of life for thousands of years. Fear was probably the most common feeling.
No doubt, for almost all the last 2 million years of human evolution life didn’t have many happy events in it. Probably the happiest times were feasting after a successful hunt. A full stomach makes it easier to smile and feel happy. After all, more civilized arts like animal-raising and agriculture were completely unknown, and so a successful hunt-feast was probably the happiest time in life; successful child birth was probably another one. But, even those events were still largely uncontrolled and dangerous, and so it was a happy relief when such events were successful.
Into such a dangerous science-less world, solemn and serious spirit-rituals naturally grew; such habit-arts helped people feel they could better control life’s dangers with the help of friendly spirits. Eventually good and evil spirits were pictured as controlling and causing every event in the natural world, and so mankind built spirit-habits for making life a little happier place. People felt happier when they got what they wanted, like a healthy child and mother, or a successful hunt. Who knows when the first laughter was heard, but no doubt watching healthy children playing also encouraged smiles and happiness.
Still, probably only until very recently was a strong happy habit-art allowed to grow; liberal ancient Greeks were, as usual, the exception to that generalization. In general, theatre-going was almost as important as religious festivals, of which there were many during the year, and so in the 400s BCE bold and confident liberal Atomists like Democritus, and a few Greek comedy writers like Aristophanes, began encouraging people to laugh even at characters like Socrates. In fact, liberal Democritus started talking about happiness as an excellent ethical habit as Aristophanes was writing many of his outrageous comedies. In one play he attacked war by showing what happens to men’s sexual organs when women refuse to have sex until they stop fighting. Such scenes would be labeled x-rater today! Also making fun of odd characters was natural to him. In The Clouds he portrays Socrates siting in a basket and slowly being lowered to the stage; no doubt, it caused more than a few audience chuckles. Aristophanes was such a powerful comedy writer there’s a story about Plato having a copy of his work at his bedside when he died. And of course early in his career Plato too wrote dialogues to be performed in theatres; they were main educational sites for Greeks.
Such happy theatre events grew naturally out of their religious practices and festivals and their worship of the wine god Dionysus in particular. Every year the grape harvest was taken in and it was the occasion of some wine-induced happiness and celebration. Where the line was between religious worship and orgy was up to each person, but such actions remained mixed together for centuries. No doubt, such plays and festivals helped relieve a lot of dreadful and fearful tensions still thriving in an ancient world full of war, disease, and famine. Even though such dangers for most everyone in the science-less ancient world were real, a few liberals like Democritus realized how useful happiness was; he took the time to mention a few situations where wise people will take the time to feel happy, like the wisest will feel happiness with few possessions. His work helped add happiness into the new topic of ethics philosophers have embraced ever since. With the work of conservatives like Socrates and Plato, and then moderates like Aristotle, happiness, or as they called it ‘eudaimonia,’ became part of their ethical models.
Around the same time happiness was becoming more important for other peoples as well. In Asia, religious conservatives normally felt there was some ultimate form of happiness which would never change, and which only they could teach people how to attain. For example, religious Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains often called ‘true’ or ‘ultimate’ happiness nirvana; they felt it was the result of finally being released from all of life’s desires and then merging with Ultimate Reality after living through many thousands of lifetimes. No doubt, such models of true and ultimate happiness helped keep their young students hopeful and staying in their monasteries. In fact, in much of the conservative civilized world such models of happiness were based on ideas like Karma and sin; bad Karma is the eastern version of Christian sin. For example, bad Karma is said to be caused by breaking nature’s eternal laws, or at least breaking the laws social leaders said was Karmic law, like the ‘law’ of caste. It said one’s past Karma determined the caste one was born into, and must remain in all through life. It was essentially a social pecking order, with Untouchables at or near the bottom and the Brahmins at the top. Naturally, those conservatives with social power wanted to keep it as long as possible, and so they told their followers they couldn’t become truly happy if they married outside their eternal caste; if they did they earned bad Karma. Stealing, lying, and many other actions also earned bad Karma; diseases and disabilities were also said to be the result of one’s past life Karma.
As a result, people almost always stayed in the same caste as their parents and felt happy with its forms of happiness. In short, life continued on, miserable to most and happier for a few. If such models are accurate, they’re more poignant examples of how even lofty-sounding religious ideas can produce devastating social and personal results when put into action. It may also be yet another reason why science never sank very deep roots in almost all the world, until only recently. Science is the art of intelligently satisfying desires and thus promoting happiness, while especially Buddhism saw desires as the cause of all sorrow and unhappiness. Modern scientists like Galileo and Newton had strong desires to know how nature works; that’s what made them happy, and humanists like Francis Bacon felt happiest saying such knowledge should be used to make everyone’s life better, not just a privileged few.
In any case, it’s taken many centuries for people to even begin asking if fulfilling intelligent desires is really the root of all pain and suffering! Does intelligent desiring, like for safe and helpful knowledge, really produce bad Karma and unhappiness? Does everyone gain bad Karma from merely desiring and working for better homes to live in, more healthful foods to eat, and more useful medical services? No doubt, earth’s caves and hospitals would be a little overcrowded by now if intelligent people hadn’t started asking such ethical questions only a few centuries ago. What about Buddhism’s founder, Siddartha? Didn’t his desire for enlightenment make him happier? Did it produce more pain and suffering, or was it really his door to a happier life? I admit it; desiring to ask such questions makes me feel happier, so I ask on.
As we’ll see in Book 3’s Ancient Models of Excellence, such conservative models of happiness based on one’s caste were formed in many native totem cultures around the world. Thankfully India’s modern socialist democracy is finally helping educate people with more liberal ideas, but in many rural places where education is less than best such ideas are still strong and often violently enforced. Even in Nazi Germany German women were forbidden to marry any Jews; it would pollute the ‘master’ race, which as we liberals all know was neither masterful nor a race! The Nazi model of happiness was yet another example of might makes right, and Germans paid a terrible price for listening to such undemocratic power-hungry leaders.
In the Greek Enlightenment of the 400s BCE, history's father Herodotus also helped break down some Greek fantasies about their superiority. Much of his work shows examples of many diverse forms of happiness, some even directly opposed to Greek ideas. In his travels he saw how different social customs and habits are ‘lord over all,’ including the habits people are taught to feel happy about practicing! Thus, he discovered people were encouraged to build a great variety of happy habit-arts. Like the gods, happiness too varied from culture to culture, and even from city to city. It eventually helped Greek moderates like Aristotle and liberals like Democritus celebrate more secular models of happiness as depending on human actions alone! For joyful and happy liberal Atomists like Democritus such secular models of life helped liberate his thinking to make happiness an important part of character excellence; for him those who teach themselves to feel happy with having what they need and working to become the person they want to be are the happiest. Satisfying work here and now was ultimate happiness to such liberals. Happiness could even be felt while working to get out of poverty. In fact, all those today who aim to simplify their life, and make it as enjoyable and happy as possible with as few possessions as possible, can feel ultimate happiness anytime.
Even though liberal Atomists like Democritus could define happiness rather negatively -- as the absence of pain – or as merely a feeling of well-being after a good meal, it started building a more secular model of happiness. Most everyone could make themselves happier if they practiced such feelings and habits. Today, such ideas are commonplace, but back then any idea not based on spirit-ideas or eternal objects was truly radical; most everyone felt spirit-objects really existed. However, the more Democritus liberated himself from feeling such objects, the easier it was to focus on feeling pleasant naturalistic objects here and now, even while working lowly jobs, as he did.
His conservative contemporary Socrates, however, celebrated a more religious model of happiness. For him the best happiness can only be felt after death, where true lovers of wisdom like himself would at last be free to happily talk with those who were truly wise. For him only such knowledge could produce true happiness. Even when he was threatened with death he said he wouldn’t stop talking and questioning others to learn more about life’s eternal and unchanging Ideas. His spirit-obsessed student Plato then continued building that model of happiness in which only true philosophers had access.
Although both Plato and Aristotle built schools to educate others, they both felt most everyone just wasn’t able to know the highest kinds of happiness – their reasoning kinds of happiness! In short, their models of happiness were anti-liberal both socially and personally. Naturally people in power wanted to keep it and its social privileges, rather than help improve everyone’s life, and both of them were either anti-democratic or undemocratic, take your pick. Then, as now, those with social wealth and power were better able to withstand life's natural disasters than anyone else. As a result, they had more leisure and more freedom to do what they wanted. Naturally, their models of happiness supported the social status quo, thus restricting and weakening the evolution of human happiness. In India upper class Brahmins told people to stay in their caste, accept its duties, even if it meant spending your life cleaning public toilets, and better luck in your next life. Only liberal Atomists like Democritus, and humanist Sophists like Protagoras readily challenged all such narrow and restrictive models of happiness; their practical democratic feelings saw most everyone was capable of teaching themselves to become happier people here and now.
Plato, as usual, was much more focused on reasoning logically and trying to mentally grasp and absorb the eternal meanings he assumed were Spirit-Ideas. Obviously, such work was naturally devoid of most, if not all, feelings of natural happiness. For him even daily religious rituals were probably solemn and serious affairs. Because he felt the gods controlled everything, such rituals might convince a god he was worthy to have such knowledge, especially of what he pictured as the ultimate ethical Spirit-Idea, namely the Idea of the Good, and with it prepare for eternal happiness after death. By definition such a religious model of happiness excluded earthly forms of it. If one continued seeking lowly earthly forms of happiness, like food and sex, then one was bound to be born again into this painful world.
One can well imagine him feeling something like happiness as he watched religious processions slowly make their way to the Acropolis for the current sacred rites. In general, however, he felt too much happiness just wasn't that healthy for people; it tended to keep attention focused onto the natural world and its pleasures, rather than seeking to know eternal Spirit-Ideas. Like any good religious propagandist he even says the gods should never be pictured as laughing too much; evidently too many people might get the wrong idea and start enjoying life more if they thought the gods liked to laugh and enjoy themselves. And so, like Socrates, he felt only knowing the eternal Truth of Spirit-Ideas could produce the most excellent happiness; only such knowledge could properly harmonize the 3 different faculties in all people -- animal, emotional, and rational. It’s a good example of how his ethics too was based on the psychological model he invented.
For example, if people wanted to know why we should be ethically good citizens, respect the laws, honor and worship the gods, and respect other citizens, he said doing those things helps our reasoning faculty harmonize the 3 basic psychic faculties each of us has. Only such harmonious psyches can feel as earthly happy as possible when they’re controlled by our reasoning faculty and the harmony it produces! And what’s more, such personal ethical goodness would help people make social living in city-states more peaceful and productive, rather than merely wanting to get as wealth or honor as fast as they can. Who can be happiest in a world like that? Thus, his model of happiness proposed a new status quo based on education, rather than family birth or wealth. Only when our animal and emotional natures are harmoniously controlled and well regulated by our rational psyche will most people feel earthly happiness, whereas only a small number of intellectuals can know ultimate happiness – Spirit-Ideas. If most people live moderately, obeyed the laws which he felt come from the gods, and worship them, all will be well. Only philosophers who know nature’s ultimate Spirit-Ideas can feel the highest happiness.
No doubt in his day, where democratic and conservative aristocratic political factions kept making life very stressful in many city-states by continually fighting each other for power, he thought such a model of happiness would best keep the peace and make life more livable. In any case, however, it all depended on people being educated properly, which for him meant knowing their social place and staying in it. If not, if people kept allowing their animal psyches to become sexually and combatively excessive and rule their reasoning faculty, then even lower kinds of earthly happiness would be almost impossible. For Dewey too education was the key to promoting happiness, but as we’ve seen, their educational models were as vastly different from each other as their models of nature.
Plato's more moderate student Aristotle accepted much the same kind of happiness model, reserving the highest level of happiness for a few philosophers who can practice god’s contemplative thinking itself! All other lower kinds of practical happiness were based on a person’s being able to find a moderate middle-ground between extremes! Thus for him the most excellent happiness was still rarely attainable -- a god-like contemplation of nature's eternal and constant naturalistic Forms. Human nature and its always moving human attention kept getting in the way. In other words, desire-free contemplation too is his idea of our highest and most excellent god-like happiness. All other examples of happiness depended on learning practical habits of ethical moderation; those who acted moderately felt the best kind of practical happiness. So, unlike solemn and serious Plato, Aristotle had much more respect for our natural world and its 'lower' kinds of common pleasant happiness, the feelings of well-being and contentment our moderate actions ordinarily produce. With the help of such moderate actions most people can enjoy practical pleasures like wine-drinking and maybe even kicking the dog once in a while.
Such a model endorsed the Greek ethical ideal of not acting too excessively or weakly. Actions somewhere in between those extremes would produce some best feelings of well-being and happiness. For him what makes humans different from all other animals was our reasoning ability, and so only contemplative reasoning was capable of producing the highest kind of happiness. What’s more, truly excellent happiness can only be the result of a lifelong practice, not just laughing and enjoying ourselves every now and then. No doubt, that model too helped explain why happiness was so rare, as it was in his world. Greeks really didn’t have a word for happiness itself; the word eudaimonia is usually translated as happiness, but it can mean just well-being too.
Soon after Socrates died in 399 BCE a much more radical model of happiness evolved, supposedly inspired by Socrates’ near homeless lifestyle. Diogenes migrated from Sinope on the Black Sea to Athens and soon began criticizing many of the customs and assumptions of most everyone, including Plato. He rejected most civilized customs, chose to live on the streets, and occasionally walked around town with a lantern looking for an honest person. His model of happiness was completely naturalistic, and saw no reason to assume there would be a life after death; for him the quest for personal wealth and power was a big waste of time. He soon got the nickname of cynic, the Greek word for dog. He didn’t worry about, or desire, much of anything except those natural pleasures life offered; that was his happiness. How far would he go? As described earlier, when Alexander the Great blocked his morning sunlight he simply asked him to step aside so he could get warmer. Even if the story’s not true it still makes me happy to see democratic kinds of ethical variety being practiced in ancient Greece. For him sexual pleasure and happiness too was meant to be felt wherever and whenever he felt like it. At any rate, it seems he eventually met a woman who joined him in his homeless and dog-like lifestyle, and reportedly lived well into his 80s. I hope so; if nothing else he helped build tolerance for different kinds of ethical happiness.
Then, soon after Aristotle, the kind and peaceful liberal Atomist Epicurus opened his own garden school in Athens and proceeded to build a model of happiness very close to what many people today would agree with. People should seek the happiness best provided by simple daily pleasures and enjoyments; such happiness helped make every day more rewarding and enjoyable. Being an atomist he saw this life as the only life anyone will have, and so why not make it as reasonably happy and pleasurable as possible? Since Democritus had died a few decades earlier, atomists had been celebrating the idea of finding pleasure and happiness in life's little events; more extravagant desires and violent pleasures tended to produce unhappy results, so why bother? Truly happy people are those who can enjoy simple pleasures and satisfactions, like a healthful meal and caring friends, and so Epicurus put such ideas into action in his Athenian school.
However, that rather simple model of happiness would quickly become excessive in the Roman upper classes as their empire grew and wealth started flowing into Rome. After Rome conquered Greece in 146 BCE, Epicurean teachers helped bring their ideas about pleasure and happiness to Rome where they were eagerly embraced by the upper classes. Soon, however, many would take such sensible ideas of happiness way beyond anything Epicurus would have wanted; the more the world’s wealth flowed into those classes, the easier it was to take pleasurable happiness to extremes. For many wealthy Romans the ethical idea of happiness became eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. Augustus’s own daughter Julia wasn’t afraid to openly commit adultery, as was one of Claudius’s wives Messalina; Julia was banished and Messalina was executed. Thus, from its humble and simple liberal beginnings of picturing happiness as enjoying life’s simple daily pleasures, many Roman Epicureans soon came to practice indulgence to excess. For some happiness could only be felt during great feasts and drunken orgies. Some Romans often threw large dinner parties where people ate and drank too much, forced themselves to vomit, and then went back for more feasting and drinking. Today it’s called binging and purging.
Like many wealthy folks in America today, it was difficult for upper class Romans to feel happy by feeling life’s simple pleasures, especially in the midst of all the exotic foods and wines flowing into Rome from all parts of its empire. For such people life soon became decadent rather than intelligently happy, and was essentially the ethical model of happiness many early Christians rebelled against; for them such excessive actions could bring only sin and damnation. It’s not just ancient history either. Even today, excessive eating seems alive and well as more and more people are indulging in high-calorie fast food restaurants, now quite common in just about every neighborhood, even though it’s predicted to make public healthcare almost impossible.
Also worth mentioning is a Jewish model of happiness based on the idea of god bringing about an earthly kingdom of heaven in which Jews would rule over all other nations. Such religious Jews included Jesus who went about spreading this religious model to poor and dejected Jews who were suffering greatly under Roman rule. For such Jews true happiness was possible only after a messiah or anointed one would help build a new Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The Gospels tell us even Jesus believed such a kingdom was to happen very soon. However, the longer people waited for such a kingdom to materialize, the more that conservative model of happiness was reconstructed to happen only in a spirit-heaven after death. Then, a few centuries later Muslims would offer a similar model of happiness. In any case, however, both ancient conservatives and moderates often insisted true happiness couldn’t happen in this life, or if it did it couldn’t last very long. Such ideas were of course useful for keeping converts. The more people believed only their group could guarantee true happiness, the more anchored to that group they became.
With the growth of Christianity and Islam Plato’s conservative models of spirit-happiness became dominant in much of the Western world. Like Plato, they too said ultimate happiness can never be found in this world, but only with god after death, and only their own religious rituals could get followers there. And both models of heaven were somewhat similar to the Buddhist nirvana idea; spirits would enjoy the highest happiness of basking or even merging with god’s light. For Christians true happiness was equated to the soul’s basking for all eternity in the presence of something called god’s beatific vision, somewhat similar to the Hindu and Buddhist Ultimate Reality.
No doubt, such ideas can be seen as a reaction to life without much real scientific knowledge, and thus was incapable of making daily life materially safer and more enjoyable. In such a science-poor world of the 600s CE, where disease, hunger, and sickness were still rampant, and where only a few were wealthy, both physical and psychological stress and frustration were everyday feelings! In such a world who even felt like saying anything very positive about happiness here and now? So, quite naturally most everyone continued believing nature itself was devil-infested, much like Plato's idol Pythagoras did centuries earlier. Because many people remained almost totally ignorant about how nature worked, life itself was at best frustrating and dangerous; most people felt true happiness simply could not be felt in this life. Plato's conservative 'ghost' finally seemed to conquer much of the civilized world. Especially lower class people were easily convinced of such ideas. Although Islam at first used its more advanced scientific knowledge to create one of the world's most advanced cultures, it religious leaders still said the highest happiness can only happen in the next life. Comedians, who today help millions laugh and feel happier were, in those days, about as plentiful as airplanes. A few little people became court jesters to make aristocrats laugh and feel happier.
For many thousands of years around the world most everyone went through life with few possessions and few desires to make their own life happier, much less everyone else’s. As early civilization became more divided into upper and lower classes, however, conservative spirit-models of happiness after death often helped poor people feel they too could be happier. Some people realized wanting more possessions was no guarantee of happiness; indeed, they could even make life more stressful and frustrating. Others, however, often wanted what others had, and some ruling-class peoples also realized popular dissatisfaction with what they had was also the road to rebellion, civil war, and possibly loss of their power. Thus, religious rituals became more widespread and socialized to make people feel this life was only a passing event, while helping people accept what little they had. In effect, however, many people were prevented from building a happier life with ideas like ‘god’s will’, predestination, Karmic castes, and religious schools. At any rate, however, we Deweyan liberals can still feel indebted to people like Democritus and Epicurus for building their secular models of happiness based on reasonable pleasures for making life more enjoyable.
Models of Happiness in Medieval and Early Modern Times
Naturally, such spirit-based models of happiness flowed into the medieval period (500-1500). Poor folks continued living basically in filth, squalor, and ignorance while rulers and the upper classes were mostly concerned with war and gaining more territory. For them feasting remained the happiest of times. As Christianity and Islam continued growing during the early Middle Ages people were educated to believe the highest happiness was really an otherworldly event, reached only after death through their religion’s rituals. In their castles rulers of course had their court jesters, and entertaining troubadours toured from town to town, but other than that life remained rather grim and serious; who knew when the next plague would break out? For women the situation was even worse. Every pregnancy could be life-threatening, and often was. Dante’s The Divine Comedy is perhaps the best example of life in that world.
Eventually, by the late Middle Ages of the 1500s, however, as Western mankind began building more seaworthy ships and sailing out into the world, and experimental learning began growing, much more became known about the world and how it actually works. It thus became a little easier to act happily more often. Who wouldn’t feel happy after stealing as much gold as possible from some fearful and superstitious native New World peoples, being blessed for it when they got back to Europe, and then were often rewarded with some land of their own? Many of the early Los Angeles estates were granted by the Spanish king. Those were happier times indeed, at least for the receivers of New World gold and the artists they hired to decorate their palaces and churches, including the Sistine Chapel. Eventually modern science, Renaissance art, religious Reformation, worldwide sailing expeditions, and of course imported fabrics and perfumes for their mistresses' all helped make life for the upper classes much happier.
As a result, at the beginning of our modern era in 1600 a number of more secular models of happiness based on pleasure were built. Conservative spirit-models of happiness became challenged by atomist philosophers like Thomas Hobbes. Even though his model of human nature was medieval and grim, he led the way for more secular-oriented thinkers to offer their thoughts about how to make life better for everyone, not just the aristocratic upper classes. During Europe’s 1700s Enlightenment and the Romanticized 1800s, such thinkers were called philosophes. For people like David Hume (d. 1776), Voltaire (d. 1778), and Jeremy Bentham (d. 1832) intelligent kinds of pleasure were finally liberated from the conservative spirit-model of happiness. With them pleasurable happiness became more and more an ethically naturalistic habit-art, and something to be desired, rather than actions leading to sin and an eternal hell. With their help and more liberal schools to teach them, secular models of pleasurable happiness became much more common and acceptable; no doubt it made the comedians' guilds happier too.
The more a liberal democratic political model grew, the easier it was to justify individuals working to make themselves happier in daily life. Such ideas, however, were still challenged by those within Aristotle’s moderate tradition. One was Immanuel Kant (d. 1804). Though he was raised in the Protestant tradition where choice was an option, he also wanted to answer Hume’s radical skepticism about certainty being possible in ethics and science. To him Isaac Newton had already discovered the absolutely certain laws of nature, and so how could he show ethical certainty was based on something other than pleasure and happiness? Eventually he worked out a system of ethics based on one’s good will, rather than actions producing pleasure and happiness. With the proper reasoning Kant felt people could feel all their ethical choices would be absolutely certain. For him such certainty merely depended on a person’s own choices and motives, rather than the objective results produced by their actions. After all, the emphasis on pure motives had been a part of the Christian tradition since Jesus; by faith alone is one saved. For Kant true ethical certainty and happiness depended not on the happy results our actions produce, but merely on feeling one’s inner motives and good will were eternally best. It sounds like a rather strange kind of happiness today, but to Kant it satisfied a deep desire to elevate ethical choices to the same level of certainty he felt physics was already on.
Naturally, then, the question became, what motives would always help guarantee one’s happiness? Perhaps the best one Kant mentioned was to treat all people as respectfully and honorably as possible; rather than as a way to get something from them. Sounds like a rather democratic way of thinking. If that feeling was one’s ethical motive, and one’s actions matched that motive, then no matter what happened after that one could feel certain their actions were ethically correct and certain. In the Enlightenment’s growing democratic world all people were being seen as deserving of respect just because they were people; human well-being was a growing ethical value. So the more people treated people with dignity and respect, the easier it was to feel certain their actions were best.
Kant was part of Aristotle’s moderate tradition who still sought absolute certainty for some of their ideas, achieved only with the proper motives and reasoning. If people focused instead of the results of their actions, then ethical certainty could never be achieved; the results produced one day in one situation might not be produced another day in another situation. So, because Kant wanted to feel his ethical actions were absolutely the best, he ignored the results of actions as the most excellent cause of happiness. Basically he wanted people to feel their moral motives could be absolutely good no matter what happened, and even before they acted; only such motives could produce a good will, and that was the best result to produce.
As we’ll see in the next section, for Dewey Kant is yet another example of how the quest for moral certainty could be dangerous to the public good. For example, suppose a murderer asks someone where his victim is. Because Kant said all people should be respected and answered truthfully, the person was ethically bound to tell the murderer where the person was. That motive guaranteed to rightness of telling the truth. Such an example shows how dangerous to the social good his emphasis on motives was. The more the actual results of our actions are ignored, the easier it is for people to act irresponsibly in dangerously. A Hitler can feel his motive is to save the German race from contamination, but look at the horrific social results of that motive. What’s more, conservative German princes in Kant’s day controlled the universities and those who taught at them; they certainly didn’t want any of their professors publishing books about democracy and the right to choose which leaders they wanted. They certainly didn’t want any philosophic boats rocked by liberal philosophes. In fact, such princes forbad Kant from publishing any democratic political works. A few years later a conservative establishment philosopher named George Hegel would officially seal democracy’s fate in Germany by elevating the German nation to an expression of god’s will itself!
Happily, however, the liberal genie of pleasurable happiness was now out of the bottle, so to speak, and so Kant's moderate models of ethical certainty based on motives weren't the only ones built during Europe's 1700s’ Enlightenment. In Europe and England many more liberal naturalistic models of happiness became more common and worldly. For them it was up to each individual to experiment and find out what actions produced the happiest results, not only for the person but for society as well. Thus, as more liberal people settled into experimenting with their actions to produce happy feelings, philosophic ideas of happiness too underwent their own reconstructive growth and flowering. In fact atheism was brought out of the philosophic closet, so to speak, by people like David Hume and a famous French philosophe named Baron D’Holbach. He discovered his friends helped him feel truly happy, so they became a part of his happiness model. A little later atheist loner Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) discovered learning itself increased his personal feelings of power and happiness, at least most of the time. In short, for him happiness was the same as learning itself -- everything a person learns increases their personal power a little and that power was really the feeling of happiness itself.
A few decades earlier David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stewart Mill (d. 1873) discovered their happiness was the exact opposite of Buddhism’s Siddartha Gotoma. They reduced true happiness not to getting rid of desires, but satisfying them! To them desiring something, and then fulfilling that desire, created excellent happiness; thus feeling happy was a natural and normal part of life’s work. As we'll see in Book 2's Native Models of Excellence, many of our native ancestors also thought fulfilling their desires was absolutely essential to their health and happiness. If such desires weren't fulfilled, then their inner spirit might get angry and cause any number of problems. No doubt, such ideas about happiness also helped control women’s sexual actions, and so the idea continued living on into modern times. In fact Hume went so far as to say not only should we desire pleasurable kinds of happiness, but our reason itself should be used to find more ways of pleasing our self. Forget about trying to discover eternally certain ethical truths of happiness, and simply continue helping us feel more of life’s pleasures! For Hume food became one of the most pleasurable actions in life; an indulgent Roman Epicurean couldn't have agreed more. No doubt, it helped Hume get more invitations to banquets than to Buddhist monasteries. For him pleasure became the key to happiness's door, as it also did for that feisty little philosophic 'radical' Jeremy Bentham.
Englishman Bentham helped found the so-called Utilitarian school of philosophy in the early 1800s. For him the amount of pleasure produced by one’s actions became the standard for both personal and political excellence! Governments should only produce laws making people happier and life more pleasurable. He made pleasure the ultimate test for his entire Utilitarian ethics as well as politics; even convicts and the mentally ill deserve to live more pleasurable lives. At the time such ideas took humanism to a higher level or awareness. He saw how brutally some people were being treated in English mental hospitals, and so he worked to make them much more humane and decent. Such ideas were based on his model of psychology. It said people always act to produce pleasure and avoid pain, so why shouldn’t their government use that fact to guide its own law-making actions, rather than merely catering to making the wealthy even wealthier? Parliament should thus always act to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Only that kind of helpful government is harmoniously in tune with real human nature, and thus most deserving of true respect and support. He even worked out a pleasure-pain 'calculus' to help discover what would produce the most excellent happiness for the most people. Without too much exaggeration it may be said today’s legalizing of marijuana reflects Bentham’s political philosophy and model of happiness.
Another result of Bentham’s work was to help create the modern welfare philosophy of government now working in many nations throughout the world. When people can’t easily satisfy their needs, as was happening in Britain in the latter 1800s, then people like John Mill said government should do more than just continue building empires and making the wealthy wealthier! It should work to help all people more easily meet basic needs for food, health, shelter, and education. Believe it or not that liberal idea for government had been almost nonexistent in all of human history, so it was another modern ‘born again’ political idea growing from liberal models of happiness. Both Bentham and Mill said government should actively promote the essential needs and pleasures for the greatest number of people. Only then could government justify taking tax money from everyone, have the best chance of being respected and supported, and promote greater happiness for the public! Only then would happiness mean something more than just a philosophic subject. What’s more, since Bentham’s death in 1832 both Western and Eastern governments have increasing worked to promote those basic services for everyone, despite the work of many US conservatives throughout most of our history. After all, capitalism was often said to be the best economic system ever built, and yet it continued breaking down on a regular basis, and thus greatly disrupting peoples' happiness and well-being, making most peoples’ lives truly stressful and difficult.
Finally, in the 1930s, as the Great Depression settled over much of the world, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal put that liberal political philosophy into practice on a scale never seen before in the US. What’s more, conservative Republicans have been working ever since to end many of its helpful and useful social programs. Even our current public healthcare system called Obamacare is yet another example of Bentham's political ideas based on the ethical idea all people seek pleasure and avoid pain. Such a model of happiness gave conservatives something to keep attacking with their hired lobbyists on a daily basis, year after year. Being addicted to money, many simply want more of the public’s money available for themselves, rather than spent on public services, and in the past 40 years they’ve been getting their way more and more. Today, a mere few thousand wealthy folks control most of the economy and almost all of the profits generated by workers.
14. HAPPINESS, 102
Dewey's Naturalistic Model of Happiness
As we’ve seen many times before, the psychological idea of impulses and habit-arts became the ethical cornerstone of Dewey’s own Behavioral model of life. Not merely impulsive motives, but also real actions and their results are the best tools for guiding the growth of our ethical system and happiness. The actual results of our actions in the outer world play a big part in telling us how and where feelings of happiness can best be felt. Thus, one’s own actions in daily life are the best place to keep building the most reliable and useful habits of happiness! What’s more, such habits are easier to build if we continue respecting others and just laws, and also intelligently helping others to help themselves. Such ethical habit-arts are the most reliable for helping produce feelings of happiness on a daily basis. The more we act selfishly and continue disrespecting others, the more difficult it becomes to build a happy habit-art.
Thus, for us Deweyan liberals, happiness too is a habit-art, like enjoyment, and we can learn to train our self to feel it at any time. No doubt, many can and do take the easy chemical way out, and rely on artificial ways of producing happy feelings, like with drugs, alcohol, or dangerous sex. However, the more people carefully experiment with producing constructive and helpful results with their actions, the stronger their chances are for controlling their own feelings of happiness here and now. To us Deweyan liberals, conservative models of happiness telling people it can only be experienced after death were useful when scientific knowledge and power were almost nonexistent. On a social level they helped endorse a conservative model of life and nature based on the assumption of spirit-objects, and so they merely encouraged a conservative status quo. Such a status quo also encouraged people to accept extreme poverty and ignorance while a few lived in relative splendor and ease. As the 3rd millennium of our current era begins, that ethical model of happiness and its assumptions are being questioned more and more.
It should also be clear, liberal Dewey built a more active and ethical model of happiness than most every other philosopher, one in which both impulsive motives and actions are important. Only ancient Greek Sophists and Epicurean Atomists would have agreed with him. He didn’t picture happiness as only the result of, say, knowing nature's unchanging Forms or Spirit-Ideas; it’s not a feeling felt only later after years of study and work. Happiness is something we can feel here and now if we’ll take the time to stop, relax, and focus our senses on enjoying what’s right in front of us, whether it’s an evening meal, a walk in a park with a friend, or even when we’re alone and feeling nature’s energies. For Dewey our educational system is still so weak people leave school thinking they must be doing some fun activity to feel happy. It’s another ethical myth. We can feel happiness at any time once we teach our self what that feeling is like. No doubt, some events are more difficult than others, like when we’re sick or depressed. But to us Deweyans even those times can be felt as ethical challenges! In any case, however, like joy, happiness too is best pictured as an adverb -- an added feeling we allow ourselves to feel AS WE WORK HERE AND NOW! The happier we act here and now, the more we smile and laugh here and now even if we’re poor and haven’t gotten much, the stronger our happy habit-art becomes. And if we're lucky no one will call the mental ward folks to take us to the funny farm for a little peaceful rest and recreation.
For Behaviorist Dewey both joy and happiness are habit-arts living mostly in the muscles we train with our happy practice here and now! The more someone feels sad because they have few toys and little money, the more difficult is becomes to feel happy with what they do have. After all, for most everyone life could be a lot worse than it is, so why not teach our self to rejoice with what we do have and want to keep learning? Excellent happiness is a feeling WE can add to our present actions; with our own little daily actions we can teach our self the art of acting happily here and now, rather than merely continuing to feel sadness. Besides, what’s sad is not being poor, but not working to creatively make our self richer, either materially or psychically or both! Like joy, the more we happily savor what we do have, the easier it becomes to direct our creative impulses to learning what we want to learn. And because happiness is another very useful organic habit-art, it’s something we can keep growing throughout life, rather than something produced only by spirit-objects, court jesters, our breakfast cereal, our new car, or an attractive sex object. Teaching our self to clown and joke around any time we want is another very useful habit-art, even if some recently escaped drooling ape-man is yelling at us and we’re fresh out of silver bullets. There seems to be more than a little truth in the old saying 'humor is the best therapy;' it isn’t really, but it can become an important part of a healthy body-mind. Who knows, if we’re lucky maybe we’ll get to use one of those silver bullets on those who try to keep us from building such a habit-art.
In effect, then, Dewey’s happiness habit-art makes us artists of happiness, rather than just feeling something out there is needed to make us feel happy. That’s another ethical myth! How happy can we make our self here and now? So, if we want to make happiness more of a useful ethical tool, then, some intelligent experimentation is required. We can accept the ethical challenge to build such a habit-art, and begin feeling our first happiness-plateau. From there we can continue deepening its meanings and usefulness all through life.
When it comes to happiness we’re all basically on our own; no one or thing can give us such a habit-art, and what’s more, no two peoples' happiness habit will ever be exactly the same. Happiness, like politics, has been democratized; some are lucky enough to find a mate to share some happy times, and others aren't. In any case, however, only happy practice creatively guides and nurtures the art’s growth. Certainly the government can and should help the disadvantaged with basic needs, but it can’t actually build anyone’s habit-art; in the end we're responsible for building our own habit-art of happiness. And unlike Epicurus, we can keep taking happiness to a higher plateau of excellence other than our own personal feelings; we can keep making our happiness more socially and politically excellent by helping others feel and build institutions making such habit-art easier to grow, especially our educational institutions. After all, who can’t feel happy playing ping pong, chess, or even throwing obnoxious relatives out of the house; some people just cannot take a hint, right?!
What else does Dewey’s model of happiness look like? In his Ethics he spent several pages painting a picture of it, so feel free to read what he said. What follows are similar ideas from his Human Nature and Conduct. Because he was a Behaviorist he certainty encouraged people to take an active control of their happy feelings, and then use such actions to keep energizing and deepening that ethical habit-art here and now. How happy can we feel about trying to meet the mate of our dreams, trying to build a relationship, or trying to pry an obnoxious drunken guest off the couch? Hint: lighting their clothes on fire would probably be a mistake. In any case, however, the more happiness is practiced, the stronger our will-to-happiness grows. Because Dewey saw happiness as another growing and active ORGANIC HABIT-ART he knew people could practice feeling happy most anywhere. We can GROW our happiness like we can grow plants, flowers, trees, fruit, and more healthful diet habits too!
So a practical ethical question becomes, how strong do we want our happiness to become? Do we want it just now and then, often, always, or never? How strong is our own INNER will-to-happiness! Such a liberal model of happiness is now seen as within most everyone’s powers; there's no need to wait for 7,000 more lifetimes as some Hindus suggest, or until after we're dead, as Christians and Muslims suggest. In fact, after death all such options become practically impossible to practice. For us Deweyan liberals merely teaching our self to act happily whenever we want, one step at a time, slowly helps make life more of an adventurous celebration, rather than merely a series of frustrating delusions, or wishing for other-worldly bliss. It's yet another example of Dewey's liberal ethical model of excellence.
No doubt, most children begin subconsciously building their happy habit-art in childhood; they easily feel joy and happiness in many of their daily events; everything is new to them. But it’s not a fully human happiness; it hasn’t risen to a consciously verbal level of awareness, so it can be talked about and better controlled experimentally and intelligently. For normal children happiness is a spontaneous event; even making mistakes can cause laughter and joy; when their actions’ produce surprising results, laughter often spontaneously erupts. Frustration and anger are habits learned later in life. Here’s where caring and helpful parents have an important role to play; they can keep nurturing their native happiness by bringing it to a consciously verbal level of talking and experimenting, so it can become more of a science than just an impulsive reaction. And the more that happens, the deeper and more powerful the habit-art grows, even when the world around them, or within them, is falling to pieces. In the early Middle Ages a man named Boethius was condemned to death and he then wrote a book called The Consolations of Philosophy; it helped him accept his uncontrollable situation. For us, however, our happiness can help us keep working to keep avoiding such situations. In any case, however, the more happiness is consciously talked about and experimented with, even during one’s daily challenges, the deeper our will-to-happiness can grow, and the more it does the more we become artists of happiness.
Hollywood and Happiness
There's more good news too. For many adults today a happy habit-art is a pretty easy habit to keep growing; who forgets completely how to act happily? The challenge, again, is to make that habit-art a stronger part of our conscious body-mind so we can practice it more often; naturally that includes our speaking muscles too, so we can talk more happily anytime, rather than relying on alcohol, brain-rotting drugs, and eating double cheeseburgers with extra bacon and fattening secret sauce for breakfast, lunch, and dinner! The secret it may be hiding is an early wheelchair and grave for yourself.
Aristotle defined comedy as the experience of surprise events, and so life and nature often produce naturally funny and comic events. With a happy habit-art, however, even not-so-funny events can easily be made more so with a little imagination! I’m going to the dentist so maybe I’ll give that SOB some of the pain he’s given me! Thus, the ethical challenge is to begin feeling such events and then turn them into something less frustrating and more enjoyable. Such actions help our laughter keep growing too. For one thing, I feel happy watching some of the 'ancient' comedians of the 1930s and ‘40s practice their art. Sometimes imitating them makes me feel happier. May West, W.C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers have been great models for my habit-art of happiness, as has the marvelous television series Married, With Children. Also, many gifted comedians of my generation have helped me feel happier, like Rodney Dangerfield, Robin Williams, George Carlin, and Joan Rivers to name just a few. And of course so many great films remain comedy classics and thus are also capable of sparking many happy smiles and chuckles. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is definitely one of them, as is Cary Grant’s marvelous Arsenic and Old Lace; for me they’re in a humor class of their own; they never seem to get old. In fact, I’m planning to still laugh at them even at my funeral! What better way is there to lessen death’s sting than with a little humor?
Such movies and TV shows have helped me get better at making real-life situations feel more humorous, and thus helped make life itself that much happier. Sometimes I smile at women or men who squeeze into clothes trying to hide their extra pounds. Sometimes I smile at men who insist on wearing cheap toupees, or at those who comb their hair over to hide their baldness. Sometimes it's even seeing small children hurrying to keep up with a fast-walking parent. Sometimes it's a hopeful aging writer who thinks he’ll get lucky this time; oh wait, that’s me! Well, being able to laugh at our self is another sign of ethical health, isn’t it? Sometimes it's seeing older folks hiding their love behind gruff exteriors. And sometimes it's the cute and cuddly antics of animal youngsters, including any human younger than 18. Sometimes I smile when people try to act tough, but then back down when their bluff is called. After all, doesn’t everyone’s life have a little daily folly in it? With cars jammed up on city streets, why do they call it rush hour? In short, excellent happiness doesn’t just mean memorizing some jokes to tell; it also means learning to laugh and smile at life’s unexpected events, as well as actively creating e a humorous situation when it’s not so. The more you can imagine how lucky you are even in tough times, the deeper your happiness grows.
Such happy creative habits are useful for making every day a more enjoyable and rewarding 'born again' event. Walt Disney may be a good example of that art on both a personal and social scale! Without desiring merely to build a big bank account, it became easier for him to keep using his drawing talent to keep helping others feel life as a happier place. As he did it also made it easier for others to help make his life more enjoyable and happier; the happiness that goes around often comes around too.
In any case, however, it’s important to realize such happiness grows one step at a time. Disney's cartoon art first expressed his happiness and helped others feel more of life's possibilities. Then, a little later, he took that art to a new level on television, after which he built Disneyland in southern California – called the happiest place on earth. And that social form of happiness continues growing in other countries too. If I'm not mistaken another Disney park will soon be built in China. In short, happiness too is a lot like a garden – both can keep growing more diverse and enjoyable all through life. If so, then people can keep becoming better artists in happiness one experience at a time; it’s sometimes called improvisational comedy. Leonardo DaVince’s La Giaconda, better known as the Mona Lisa, made him so happy he kept dabbling on it for about 5 years and experimenting with different varnishes. He wasn't afraid to keep cultivating, nourishing, deepening, and happily enjoying that painting.
Such examples easily point to another part of Dewey’s model of happiness. It’s the organic fusing of one's motives and actions into a body-mind habit-art. Unlike people like Kant, Dewey felt one’s motives could be only one part of happiness; happy actions were also needed to build one happiness habit. Someone may want to make people happy, but without real actions it remains merely an inner motive feeling. Actual results are thus more important for Dewey. After all, why feel happy about telling the truth to a murderer who’s looking for his next victim, rather than preventing violence itself? No doubt, one's ethical motives are important; who can spread some happiness out there without wanting to do so? But constructive and intelligent outer results are more important than mere motives. After all, isn’t picturing true happiness as only the result of our good will like merely wanting sex without also judging what the results might be? How excellent is one’s motive for happiness when the result is some sexual disease? In short, the actual result of someone feeling happier is ethically more important than merely wanting to become happier.
Also, needless to say the most excellent happiness for us Deweyan liberals is certainly not based on some possible future hoped-for perfect happiness and bliss, like many conservative models still suggest. To us it sounds like merely avoiding the challenge of actually building a happiness habit-art here and now, and thus actively making life much happier than we find it! Life is tough enough without actually building such a habit-art.
Just like joyfulness, ‘ultimate’ happiness can be felt HERE AND NOW! As Hume reminded people, all present sense experiences are much more lively and energetic than any memory of them; happiness experienced is better than happiness imagined. For example, I taught myself how to type happily on a word processor; after all, re-writing is the key to becoming a good writer. Like any other happy habit-art, writing too has its own muscular rhythms, felt even in the worts misspelled and not korrected. What's more, we Deweyan liberals also aren't like Hindus and Buddhists who believe in achieving perfect happiness only after thousands of meditative lifetimes! That to us is an even bigger evasion for practicing happiness here and now. To me it sounds like the ultimate Procrastinator's Inc. is running the universe; such feelings and ideas merely work to maintain a social status quo based on class divisions and wealth. In fact, even if I even see a next life, which I highly doubt, I still might not believe in it; it’s called skeptical happiness!
This might bring another smile to your face, unless of course you like to keep your face numbed with drugs or clamped and twisted shut with excessive tension-worries. To liberals like myself ‘ultimate’ happiness can even be felt growing prize tomatoes, watching the butter melt on a hot day, and especially watching conservatives lose more power on election day! For us Deweyan liberals ultimate happiness isn't a cosmic event, or a sudden enlightenment, unless of course we’re in Hollywood and want to get an Oscar. Ultimately meaningful happy feelings can be felt here and now; the more deeply we feel such happiness, the more ultimate it becomes. So, the more we learn to happily energize such feelings with our attentive laughter and smiles, the more powerful our happiness habit-art becomes. In fact, such happiness is self-MULTIPLYING; the more we practice it, the more powerful it becomes! Who knows? Maybe your ‘ultimate’ happiness is to start an obnoxious in-law exorcizing business of your own! Can life get any happier than when we make some honest money at what we enjoy?
In short, we Deweyan liberals certainly don’t need more lifetimes or spirit-worlds to feel ‘ultimate’ happiness, whatever that may be. Like any excellent habit-art, happiness too is an interactive skill between the person and their world. Again, such conservative models of happiness have been a distraction rather than a help in making life happier. They’ve helped keep people anchored to mere religious hopes rather than liberating people to build their own habits of happiness. As history teaches us again and again, social leaders like to have as much control over others as possible; it makes their lives that much easier. Power over others has been an on-going source of happiness for a few people for thousands of years. For us Deweyan liberals, however, acting happily here and now is the key to becoming happier, and thus a great tool for making THIS life more enjoyable on a daily basis.
Certainly many spirit-minded conservatives, or ‘ultimate’ happiness moderates like Aristotle and Kant will say we Deweyans are mistaken. There are ultimate states of happiness and people can achieve them! No doubt, everyone has a right to their own opinions, but what finally launched our modern scientific period is the elevation of an experimental learning art to our most powerful one. The more it spread, the more people demanded all ideas have some objective evidence for them, or else they remain merely ideas. Welcome to our modern version of Western civilization’s 3 main philosophic traditions. If someone says perfect happiness can only be felt only after death, then it’s up to them to offer some objective evidence for that idea, and if not, then it remains just another fanciful assumption about life and nature. Considering the long history of such ideas, and the utter failure to prove any such model of happiness exists, we Deweyan liberals once again point to how important early education is for making progress on any level of society. Children will believe just about anything they’re told; religious terrorists are merely another example of that fact. Such facts may feel depressing, but they’re also a way to keep building more enjoyable and happy habit-arts. For many people healthy children are a natural source of happiness.
Also, for us Deweyan liberals building a happiness habit-art is another great confidence booster. After all, a happiness habit isn’t something someone else gives us to finally make us happy once and for all? It’s something we habit-artists know needs to be actively built and practiced, just like comedians build their comedy art! It’s another example of the saying life is what we make of it! Only as we happily KEEP nurturing, broadening, deepening, widening, and strengthening the habits we choose to build with our own little daily actions, do we become more confident we can overcome any of our ethical challenges. No priest, guru, psychotherapist, or even nurturing parent can make us as happy as we can make ourselves. Only each person has that power -- that inner raw and unshaped natural power.
What's more, shaping, molding, and directing our own raw natural energies into the organic art of feeling and acting happily is like learning to ride a bicycle -- it’s something we never totally forget and thus something we can continue strengthening throughout life! Nietzsche once noted life without music would be a tragedy, and for him it no doubt would have been, but for us Deweyan liberals life without happiness would be like hell without air conditioning. Even in philosophy’s childhood Greece’s happy Democritus reminded people, life without the art of feeling happy is like a long journey without a well-run inn.
Only each of us can teach our self to be a happiness incubator, feeder, mid-wife, nurturer, encourager, provider, refiner, purifier, spreader, and ruler. (I’m smiling already; I never realized such a happy thought was in me!) For us liberals, all past models and theories of happiness built in an often depressed, frustrating, and fearful world, merely POINT THE WAY to experimental testing here and now! They point to the possibility of experiencing such feelings here and now! No doubt, many won’t feel very deeply happy feelings at first, but it’s entirely normal, and isn't that too a happy feeling? In fact, the whole habit-art itself is a delicious experimental adventure. Is happiness best felt while bonding with a life-partner or partners, while tasting good food, feeling good safe sex, playing healthfully with children, meditating in a monastery or ashram, or riding on a backyard electric train? The more we consciously experiment with building a happiness habit-art, and learn how to control its expressions, the more we learn more about our self and how to control our happiness. Once that starts happening, no one can take it from us; it’s like learning how to ride a happiness bicycle. Happiness thus becomes another ethical adventure for making life more enjoyable, interesting, and educational.
In any case, the more people wait to feel ‘ultimate’ happiness after death, and ignore building their own happiness habit-art here and now, the less happy their lives become. The more peoples’ thinking about happiness is separated from the actual adventure of intelligently acting happily, the more separated and divided people become from their own body-minds! The more people merely keep fantasizing about ultimate happiness, the easier it becomes to keep ignoring the infinitely many little bursts of happiness here and now! The more they keep telling themselves true happiness is really governed by some uncontrolled spirit-object or cosmic mechanism like Karma, and thus thousands of life-times are needed to feel it, the more people convince themselves happiness is really beyond their own control. Such conservative models of happiness thus continue artificially separating people from their own learning powers, and the more difficult it becomes to simply feel happiness’s INFINITE forms, energies, and excellent rhythms HERE AND NOW!!
So, existentially -- in reality -- about the only limits to our happiness are OUR OWN ACTIONS! If our own mere philosophic or religious models of life and nature don’t encourage practicing happy actions here and now on a daily basis, then they keep crimping and weakening not only our own body-mind health, but our whole model of ethics as a life-long growth! To us Deweyan liberals such negative models of happiness are like psychic vampires, helping drain and weaken our body-mind energies, thus keeping our inner life pale, weak, and anemic! So let it be said once again, for us Deweyan liberals true and ultimate happiness is, almost certainly, NOT to be found in some object or realm out there somewhere; and it’s certainly not something someone else gives us. Now is the only time to feel happier, and I’m the only one who can best keep building MY happiness habit-art!
Finally, we can ask another rather traditional philosophic question: Is happiness really what some philosophers say is an end-in-itself, or is it just a means to better health? I mean is happiness only something like knowing Plato’s Spirit-Form of the Good, Aristotle’s Prime Mover, or Augustine’s Father-Son-Holy Spirit god -- is it merely an end-in-itself and thus some possible object of worship? Or is happiness merely a means to something else, like our own health? In short, is acting happily something to only admire and worship as an end-in-itself, or is it another useful habit-tool to help make life that much more worth living?
For centuries many people have been fooled with such artificial philosophic questions; all such questions first assume ‘ultimate’ models of happiness really exist! Assuming some ultimate source of happiness exists helped create such artificial questions. For us Deweyan liberals, however, who've liberated themselves from such assumptions and embrace life as a continuing process of growth, acting happily is BOTH an end-in-itself AND a means to better health! Happy feelings are valuable both for themselves, and for the results they produce! Laughter definitely feels good as an end-in-itself and for the positive results it produces in those around us.
Why feel anything is ONLY an unchanging end-in-itself, and so should be an object of worship? From such assumptions have grown every routine kind of worship the world has known! All gods were felt as unchanging ends-in-themselves, and so should be worshipped. However, when all habit-arts are seen as both useful and valuable feelings for themselves, and as useful behavioral tools, then the mind and body are unified into one organic whole. The wonderful movie ‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ is a classic example of what I mean. The great actor Walter Huston laughed a most joyous laughter when he lost all his gold-dust fortune; in that case his happiness was felt both as an end-in-itself and as a tool for letting go of his frustrations and sorrows. As a windstorm was scattering his fortune to the 4 winds his joyous laughter also reminded him of what’s more important in life, namely his life itself! Such laughter was a useful antidote to such poisonous tensions.
But it didn’t stop there as an end-in-itself! His laughter also became useful for teaching his young prospecting partner who also lost his fortune, a fortune they were disrespectfully trying to take from another country anyway! In that way his laughter also helped teach his partner it wasn't the end of the world; it was just the end of one adventure! The more the young partner laughed, the easier it became to turn the present tragedy into something resembling water rolling off a duck’s butt! In short, our laughter can be used as a behavioral tool to frustrate those who try to frustrate us, and that is indeed another great ethical lesson. No doubt, watching the movie will add much more emotional depth to this description.
To me that organic model of happiness is the most naturalistic model. Happiness can be felt merely for its own energies, AND for the results it helps produce. Don't BOTH those kinds of feelings help us stay focused on what's really important, like our work here and now? Isn’t the feel of such actions and its results really the most important part of any habit-art? If so, then happiness is useful BOTH for helping teach others how to use it, AND for helping feel life’s energies themselves. If happiness wasn’t such a useful educational tool, acting happily would soon become just another routine habit, lacking lively and creative social growth. No doubt, building such a habit-art is our choice, but isn’t that too yet another happy thought or what? Otherwise life's annoying and frustrating tensions can keep spewing their venom! It's no state secret or international code; just happily set one foot upon the road. Is all such advice merely hollow? Not really. The other foot will soon follow.
An elegant madam who didn’t fake it,
Needed cash up front in order to take it.
Years of coming and going
Taught her about knowing,
Happiness is whatever we do to make it.
Obviously if you’d like to see such a madam in action, then you’re on your own; I’ve got enough challenges already.