The Conquest of Happiness and Why It Matters Today
Bertrand Russell on how to be happy
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“My purpose is to suggest a cure for the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness from which most people in civilised countries suffer, and which is all the more unbearable because, having no obvious external cause, it appears inescapable,” writes Bertrand Russell in his 1930 book ‘The Conquest of Happiness’. It is not a book on philosophical theory. Instead, Russell draws on his own life, his own experiences as an unhappy child and young man, to try and understand what makes us unhappy — and how we could be happier.
Bertrand Russell (1892-1970)
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British philosopher and writer, one of the most important analytic philosophers of the 20th century.
Russell begins by clarifying that unhappiness is not some kind of personal fault of the unhappy person — at least not entirely:
Society certainly also plays a part in making people unhappy, especially through endorsing those “mistaken habits” and “mistaken views of the world” that cause people to become miserable. But since it is this “natural zest and appetite” that makes a life happy, each one of us can improve their happiness without needing to wait for a change in society. Each one of us has the power to correct their mistaken assumptions about the world and, through clearly understanding the roots of unhappiness, to finally create a happy life for ourselves.
We have so much improved the material conditions of life in the 19th and 20th centuries, he writes in ‘The Conquest of Happiness’. Then why are we still so unhappy?
We have all been at such desperately and determinedly “happy” occasions. What is common to them, according to Russell, is that the unhappiness is driven by particular psychological causes. He names the “sinner,” the “narcissist” and the “megalomaniac” as typical examples of psychological dispositions that cause people to be unhappy. Twenty years later, Erich Fromm will analyse society in very similar, psychoanalytical terms. We talked about Fromm in other posts.
A comprehensive overview of Erich Fromm’s philosophy of happiness. We discuss his life, his ideas and his main works, both in their historical context and how they are still relevant for us today.
Russell begins his book ‘The Conquest of Happiness’ by first analysing the causes for human unhappiness. He identifies eight different reasons for unhappiness, each with its own causes and associated character type.
Russell’s book is an eye-opening treatise on happiness, as seen from the perspective of a famous philosopher in the mid-20th century. Get it here!
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Byronic unhappiness
This is the unhappiness that is supposed to be the stance of an intellectual who is simply too cool and educated to believe in what he perceives to be the “cheap” comforts of lesser men. Like Lord Byron, after whom Russell named this kind of unhappiness, “the men who hold this view are genuinely unhappy, but they are proud of their unhappiness, which they attribute to the nature of the universe and consider to be the only rational attitude for an enlightened man.” (‘The Conquest of Happiness’).
Russell believes that this kind of pessimistic, intellectual unhappiness is the product of too little engagement with life itself:
For him, the best way to leave the “mood” of unhappiness and depression is to find some way to engage with the world in an active way:
Does this not remind us of Aristotle?
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Competition
The feeling of competition, for Russell, is a sure way into an unhappy life. By competition, he doesn’t mean the necessary fight for survival among the very poor. He is focussing, in the whole book, not on those whose existential needs push them into situations of unhappiness, but on those who could, in principle, live better lives because they are sufficiently wealthy to do so, but who, for dubious reasons, stay trapped in a life that makes them unhappy. Russell refuses to take the “struggle for survival” of a businessman seriously:
To be honest, this appears to be a bit too elitist. One can understand how Russell, an aristocrat and wealthy man, would come to hold such a view. But today, especially in times of economic crises that lead to mass unemployment, we are reluctant to see the “struggle for survival” as just an exaggerated, misused figure of speech. Too many of us are indeed threatened by unemployment in their very survival. Competition cannot be reduced to the case of businessmen who might be better off after declaring a profitable bankruptcy. This is one of the points where we must recognise that Russell, although often radically progressive, was radically progressive by the standards his time and class, which is not quite the same as what we might expect today. So we must make some allowances and interpret him charitably from time to time (not very often, it must be said — most of the book is still surprisingly progressive, even by today’s standards).
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Boredom and excitement
“We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom. We have come to know, or rather to believe, that boredom is not part of the natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a sufficiently vigorous pursuit of excitement,” Russell writes. For him, a boring life is nothing to be afraid of. Instead, boredom, or rather monotony, the absence of excitement, is a necessary condition for a life that is rich in meaning and can lead to truly valuable, intellectual achievement. So important is the skill of being able to sit quietly by oneself and do some serious work that Russell would make this a compulsory part of education:
We can probably all verify that too many of the people we know are addicted to various ways of wasting time, just so that they don’t experience the monotony of their lives: computer games, TV shows, but also extensive holidays, dangerous and exciting hobbies, and even just getting drunk over the weekend, every weekend, are ways of combating monotony. On the other hand, the truly productive person needs to be able to concentrate, to sit still, to observe and wait. The scientist who waits for an experiment to finish; the poet who waits for inspiration and the right word; the gardener who has to wait for many months to see a seedling develop almost imperceptibly week for week; the painter who has to spend years painting bad pictures but persisting, until they finally have acquired the skill to master their art.
Success, and the happiness that come with it, do not come to the impatient. Especially success in intellectual and artistic pursuits needs a peaceful environment. Thoughts need time and silence to develop, a life that is undisturbed and calm — or at least this is what Russell is saying here.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British philosopher and writer, one of the most important analytic philosophers of the 20th century.
Fatigue
Fatigue, which for Russell means mental exhaustion, not only one of the body, is the next factor that causes unhappiness in our lives.
“A great many worries can be diminished by realising the unimportance of the matter which is causing the anxiety,” he writes. This is a standard trope of many philosophies of life. The same we have heard from Epicurus, the Stoics and Buddhism, among many other spiritual teachings. Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh writes:
Russell’s recipe for avoiding anxiety goes something like this:
This is an interesting approach. It is probably true that for most of us, our anxieties are not of such an existential nature that we would be utterly destroyed if the feared thing came to be. Even the loss of a job is seldom the end of the world. In time, one will find another job. What is the worst job one could imagine doing? Cleaning toilets? Working on a building site? If we really try to imagine how bad this would be, in all the detail we can imagine, we will probably see that it is all survivable. After all, thousands of people have such jobs and they also manage to do them. For many, just such catastrophic events as the loss of a job have been the catalysts that allowed them to finally step out of their comfort zone and change their lives to be more interesting and meaningful. There are many stories of people who, after becoming unemployed, picked up a craft and managed to sustain themselves with that; or became bloggers, writers, or Youtubers; or sold their house and moved into a van or a small plot of land in the country, where they finally found happiness and peace.
Read on here:
Bertrand Russell proposes happiness as an antidote to envy. Someone who is happy will be content with what they have and will not be looking to compare themselves with others.
Cover image by Eddy Klaus on Unsplash.
