chapter 3 how to be happy (and good) · are not happy with happiness. we do not trust being happy...

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Chapter 3

How to Be Happy (and Good)

If you take an ethics class in college you might be confronted with case studies like these: “You find yourself stuck on a life raft with five other people but there is not enough food for all of you; who do you throw overboard?” or “There is a runaway train coming to a fork in the tracks; if you throw the switch one way the train will kill your child who happens to be inexplicably caught in the path of the train and unable to move, while if you throw the switch the other way the train will careen into a home, killing ten strangers. What do you do?”

This way of approaching ethics assumes that ethics happens in those rare, heroic moments when we face a definitive moral crisis that asks for hard deliberation between difficult options. However, not only is it very unlikely we will encounter the life raft or the runaway train, but this way of approaching ethics makes it rel-evant only to a very small subset of our lives. It falsely suggests that most days we are not acting in a way that has moral conse-quences, but every now and then we face a crisis, and that’s when ethics comes into play. I would argue that this is not only a limited and thin view of the moral life but also a way of ignoring the

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19How to Be Happy (and Good)

pervasive big questions of ordinary living by diverting our atten-tion to the unlikely heroic scenarios.

Conversely, in classical approaches to the moral life, from ancient philosophers to the early and medieval church, atten-tion is given to all of the everyday actions that slowly over time bend one’s life toward a certain purpose or end. If one is reflec-tive about that purpose, and that purpose corresponds to what is good for human beings, then ordering one’s life to that end will bring happiness. But if one ignores the question of ends and instead lives for momentary pleasures or individually de-fined preferences, one will find that the arc of one’s life tends not toward happiness but toward emptiness, boredom, or harm. Ethics names the customs and practices that help order life to-ward happiness.

God and Happiness

Theologically speaking, a life ordered toward happiness is a life ordered toward the enjoyment of God, God’s world, and one an-other. Yet the term “happiness” may seem a bit lightweight to name the ultimate end of human life. The word certainly carries for many of us connotations of fleeting good feeling or transient pleasure. Our happiness or sadness seems to be largely determined by outside factors and not by a steady state of the soul. Happiness seems to be ephemeral by nature.

This is not helped by the way happiness gets coopted through marketing. In the opening episode of the TV drama Mad Men, the lead character, Don Draper, says, “Advertising is based on one thing: Happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car.”1 Coca-Cola must have been listening, be-cause a year and a half later Coke rolled out its “Open Happiness” campaign. In light of this kind of cultural construction of superfi-cial happiness, two friends of mine have bluntly complained, “We


20 Big Questions

are not happy with happiness. We do not trust being happy and we tend not to trust happy people.”2

There are two ways to respond to the trivialization of happi-ness. One is to give up on the idea entirely and search for a term that sounds deeper and, well, less happy. If we do this, though, we hand happiness over to the marketplace. The other is to acknowl-edge the ubiquity of the search for happiness and seek to correct the journey. We don’t trust Don Draper, not because we don’t want to be happy but because we naturally recoil from attempts to reduce happiness to a new car or attempts to manufacture dis-satisfaction for the sake of corporate gain.

In truth, the term persists in the culture and in the church be-cause it names something profound and real that is related to our flourishing. For all its current connotations of ephemerality, “hap-piness” is the primary definition of the ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia (the “well soul”), which parallels the Hebrew term shalom (“peace and well-being”) as well as the Greek term ma-karios (also translated “blessing” or “beatitude”). While it might make more sense for church people to use the word “blessing” to speak of our end goal, the term is so religiously saturated that it generally fails to link up with any nonreligious experience of goodness, love, beauty, grace, or joy. The term “happiness,” for all its problems, allows us to yoke the specifically religious expe-rience of God to the worldly foretastes of that experience in the goodness of creation.

It is not enough, however, to say that our goal as human be-ings is to achieve happiness. If we are, in fact, created by God and for God, our happiness would need to be of a certain kind, a happiness that comes from returning to the one who made us. So, Aquinas suggests that we could actually define our final end in two ways.3 If we are thinking of the goal we seek, our final end is God. If we are thinking of the experience of attaining that goal, our final end is happiness. Objectively, God is our end; subjec-tively, happiness is our end.



Suspicions of Happiness

So far so good. But what about those times when doing the right thing involves sacrifice? Isn’t being good just as likely to make us unhappy?

Imagine the politician who tells the truth about corruption but loses reelection because his party no longer supports him, or the banker who refuses to participate in subprime lending or sketchy derivative trading and so watches less qualified peers advance past her. There is a reason we have the saying, “Nice guys finish last.” Doesn’t this all pour cold water on the “goodness leads to happiness” theory?

Further, isn’t happiness theologically dubious? The same friends who are unhappy with happiness also ask, “If Christianity is about happiness then what are we to make of the repeated and insistent claims arising within it that suffering is the hallmark of the Christian life?”4 Doesn’t Jesus say that we should “lose our-selves”? Doesn’t he say that we should “take up our cross”?

The answer to all these questions is a firm “yes and no.” Yes, Jesus tells us to lose our lives, but he also says that if we lose our lives for his sake we will find them (Matt. 10:39). And after call-ing his followers to take up their cross, he assures them that those who welcome him and care for the “little ones” will “receive the reward of the righteous” (Matt. 10:40–42). The sacrificial element in discipleship is real, but it is not the end goal or the final word. Jesus even promises in Mark’s gospel that “there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age” (Mark 10:29–30, em-phasis added). This is not just a promise of happiness or reward in heaven; this is a promise of goodness right here in this world, in this life.

By viewing happiness as the proper goal of the well-lived life, we affirm that self and other do not have to be in competition for


22 Big Questions

well-being as if it were a zero-sum game. To help another does not require that one’s own self be depleted. Carol Gilligan, a feminist moral psychologist, discovered through her research that many women have learned to think of self-regard as “selfish” and other-regard as “selfless.” The assumption that follows is people (es-pecially women) should always be selfless and never selfish. But this very duality, Gilligan argues, sets up a false choice that ends up excluding relationship. “Selfish means excluding the other, and selfless implies excluding the self. . . . Both selfishness and self-lessness imply an exclusion which destroys relationships. There is no relationship if others are not present in their own terms, or if the self is silenced.”5 Doing good does not require the exclusion of the self, but rather it includes the self’s own flourishing and happi-ness within the flourishing of the wider community.

Keeping the end in Sight

The other day I was having a conversation with a friend who is an architect. We were looking around the seminary library imagining renovations and expansions. I told him that if I had not become a professor I would have liked to be an architect. I am fascinated by the way space invites certain activities, creates particular interac-tions, and contributes to patterns of relating. He responded that he thought training to be an architect actually prepared you for a lot of different jobs. A friend of his, for instance, had gone to school to be an architect but was now leading a nonprofit. The skills of ar-chitecture—that is, the ability to envision a final goal, assess one’s current situation, and create a map to get from one place to the next—was exactly what this nonprofit needed from its leadership.

I was reminded of Aristotle’s account of “final cause.” Unlike those of us who think of causation only as one event pushing an-other in a cycle of cause and effect, Aristotle believed the vision of the final product or the end state was a kind of causation, which he called “final cause.” Just as the architect begins with a vision



of the final product, so causation or change begins with the end or goal set before us. Seen in this way, the cause of an acorn be-coming an oak tree is not just sun, water, and soil but also the completed oak tree itself in some sense “pulling” the acorn toward its proper future. Of course, I don’t mean pulling in the sense of a material force but rather like the way DNA implants in all living things a blueprint of what they will become if circumstances make their full flourishing possible.

Thinking about being good at being human means beginning with a series of related questions: What are we meant to become as human beings? What is our end or “final cause”? What is the blueprint of a flourishing human life? In response to these ques-tions, there are certainly plenty of people who would say there is no given “point” in being human, that we simply construct our own course through free choices, and that we alone determine what we are going to become.

However, as those who believe that God has created this world and all that is in it for a purpose, the church is committed to be-lieving that God has made human beings to flourish in a particular way. This does not mean that everyone’s life is preordained or that everyone’s path is the same, only that there is an endpoint for which we are all made, which we can reach through an endless variety of means and with the participation of our own choices and decisions.

The Christian tradition has many names for this end goal: the kingdom of God, the promised land, the city of God, the great ban-quet feast, friendship with God, the beatific vision. The Outline of Faith in the Book of Common Prayer names our final purpose as “everlasting life” and defines it this way: “By everlasting life, we mean a new existence, in which we are united with all the people of God, in the joy of fully knowing and loving God and each other.” Anglican theologian John Milbank wonderfully com-presses this vision of our highest good into one phrase: “the widest possible conviviality.”6 That, in short, is the point of being human.


24 Big Questions

DISCUSS tHIS

• WhatisyourresponsetoDonDraper’sassertion

that“advertisingisbasedononething:Happi-

ness”?Howcanweresistthekindofhappiness

thatismarketedtousforsomeoneelse’sgain?

• Whatmakesyouhappy?Howdoyourmost

profoundexperiencesofhappinesslineupwith

Jesus’svariousmetaphorsofthekingdomofGod:

abanquetfeast,anestrangedchildwhoreturns

home,asmallseedthatcreatesabigtree,abeauti-

fulpearlthatisworthsellingeverythingfor?


chapter 3 how to be happy (and good) · are not happy with happiness. we do not trust being happy...

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