On magazine covers and adverts and other such cultural dandruff, I’ve often seen an intriguing phenomenon: the grouping together of health, happiness, and beauty. These are what you will acquire from the latest miracle diet, secret lifestyle tips, or biomedicalised yoghurt.
It’s an odd grouping, when you think about it. In particular, I was struck by the idea of linking happiness and beauty (try googling the phrase “when you look good, you”, and read the first page of results unanimously answer that “when you look good, you feel good”).
It’s not just that they’re not the same thing – you can be ugly and happy, or miserable and beautiful. It’s that they have quite different structures – or so we might think. What I mean is that to be beautiful is to look good to some observer. Even if that observer is yourself, looking at your reflection or your legs, there’s still an analytical distinction between the you-that-sees and the you-that-is-seen. Beauty is mediated by a viewpoint that is, substantively or formally, external.
This is why it’s relatively common to see criticisms of beauty, of the beauty industry, of beauty ideals, of the cult of beauty as a means of oppression. But happiness, surely, is different – it’s a prime example of an unmediated, intrinsic good. When you feel good, that feeling is good, after all.
I want to suggest that ‘happiness’, like beauty, carries suggestions of a relationship, potentially a power relationship, to outside people. I’m not arguing that in a particular culture or cultural product it does actually function as a means of oppression – that verdict I leave open. I just want to show how it could make sense to think of it that way.
So first, we need to put some cracks in the obviousness of happiness as a direct, simple, personal good – what might be expressed by saying that ‘after all, everybody wants (their own) happiness, that’s what drives us.’ This sort of claim, that happiness is sort of necessarily what we’re after, works with an exceedingly abstract, maybe even meaningless, definition of ‘happiness’. We pursue happiness because happiness just means ‘whatever we pursue’.
That’s fine on its own terms, but we also use ‘happiness’ and ‘happy’ in very different, very concrete ways. To be ‘happy’ is a particular emotion, a mood, a particular set of physiological responses and neural patterns, which typically are pleasant but don’t apply to every possible pleasant experience.
In particular, ‘happiness’ is associated iconically with the smile. Smiling stands, perhaps, at the extreme pole of concreteness in our concept of ‘happy’, opposite calculable ‘utility’ at the extreme pole of abstractness.
But now observe that smiling is an enormously social activity. People are far more likely to smile when talking to or facing someone than they are when they’re just feeling happy on their own. That, after all, is why the urge to smile is sometimes a response to a very negative emotion: embarassment. In this case, the smile functions to appease, to try to ‘break the tension’ as much as possible.
That’s not to say all smiling is appeasement. But there’s a reason why the same expression is linked to embarassment and to happiness – in both cases it works similarly, to reduce tension. Tension, bear in mind, is often what we expect (and hope for) from things which are challenging, difficult, novel, or otherwise important.
Recall the point made in this post, that anger is a privilege: some people are accepted and respected when they express anger, while others are looked down on or rejected. Seeing someone angry would certainly be the sort of thing that tends to raise ‘tension’.
So I’ve pointed out the two extremes of what ‘happiness’ means – abstract utility and a concrete pattern of muscle contractions. Presumably, when we hear or use the word, we have some mixture, some ambiguous in-between, in mind. It follows that encouraging people to be happy, or telling them how to be happy, or offering to help make them happy, shares this ambiguity, this shiftiness of meaning.
And one side of that shiftiness, the once concerned with the concrete, specific, expressions of the emotion ‘happy’, is strongly associated with a tension-defusing, unchallenging, social role.
If, in our heads, the image of ‘happiness’ is the energetic, unperturbed, smiling person, then happiness is a way of acting more than it’s a way of feeling, and it’s a way of acting towards others that aims to make oneself as unthreatening as possible, i.e. which actually functions partly, just like beauty, by the mediation of an outside person, the person who isn’t challenged or threatened, the person who your sweetness gratifies and reassures. And that can easily be part of oppression.
(To put it another, more grammatically-minded way: ‘to be happy’ can be turned easily into ‘to be happy with’, which means ‘to accept’, ‘not to complain’)
Now as I said, this doesn’t directly imply that any particular reference to ‘happiness’ is in fact participating in oppression of any particular victim. It’s just meant to outline how it might be, to enable a critical stance towards ‘happiness’ as an ideal and as a marketable goal, in the way that is already commonly done for ‘beauty’.