Opinion: Hands Off Our Happiness

Happiness has become a political issue. Championed by Richard Layard, founder-director of the LSE Centre for Economic Performance and a member of the House of Lords, increasing the population's happiness has become the ultimate aim of public policy. Happiness and 'being happy' are now seen as primary personal goals and all other aspects of life are recast - either benefiting or detracting from our happiness. This reification of happiness is justified by research which, it is argued, allows us to 'see' the effects of happiness and measure or quantify those things that modulate it.

At first glance there seems to be nothing to take issue with, in fact is it not rather churlish to complain about politicians, scientists and researchers who seek to offer us happiness? In answer to this I would outline three main areas in which this agenda causes concern:

Happiness - A Goal for Government?

Once increasing happiness becomes a goal for government, policy becomes justifiably focused on our personal and mental lives - for example bringing in additional NHS psychologists to 'improve' mental states.

"Mental illness is probably the single greatest threat to a happy life, and for this reason Richard Layard is currently leading a campaign to provide within the NHS evidence-based psychological therapy for people with clinical depression and chronic anxiety disorder. The Depression Report, published in July 2006, is the manifesto for this campaign."

Justification for any policy can be offered through recourse to the seemingly benign goal of increased happiness. Policy making of this kind places the government as the best attendant to our emotional needs, our personal lives become the stuff of politics, our behavior something to be externally managed. By focusing on the personal, we move away from society or public as the arena of politics, and individuals become of primary import. Precisely because happiness only makes sense on an individual level, it can have curious consequences when applied to governing society.

Happiness - Quantifiable Amounts

In Layard's view, the measure of a nation's happiness is more appropriate than GDP or other standard economic indices of 'progress'. If the goal of governing bodies should be to increase the nation's happiness, then measuring that happiness is a better way to establish success. However, happiness is not easily measured, with disagreement amongst researchers about validity and reliability. Is it sensible to talk of 'collective happiness' when it is a subjective, individual experience.

Happiness - The Personal Ideal

With happiness established as the goal that we should search for in our lives, negative emotions become stigmatized and the breadth of human experience is lost in the search for 'pleasant feelings'. Rather than seeing happiness as the product of action and circumstances, it has become something which we can generate, or produce if only we adopt the right attitude. This introverted view of human experience separates the achievement of happiness from the pursuits that might lead to it, and focuses us inwards away from the society and world where happiness is actively pursued.

The Alternatives:

So what is the alternative? Am I advocating championing policies that promote unhappiness? I believe that we must challenge the unquestioning acceptance that public policy can or should moderate personal experience. I believe it is the role of policy-makers to attempt to remove physical and practical barriers to fulfilment but not to promote particular routes to particular goals for the individual.

The idea of using 'happiness'' as a measure for economic or societal success is also not without its problems. Other measures already exist independent of GDP, that measure general quality of life in more concrete ways - for example the UN's Development Indices. We must challenge the measure of happiness asa basis for policy and for societal development. Those values that are held important - e.g. equality of opportunity and free speech - have value in and of themselves, and for societies as a whole although they may not contribute to an individual's happiness.

To conclude therefore, I want to challenge happiness as the goal of self-fulfillment and open up a public and social debate on happiness and what really constitutes 'the good life'. This is a debate for the public, but not for politics. I want to challenge the view that happiness can be manufactured, and argue for the full range of human experience as essential to a full life and a diverse society. Finally I believe responsibility for happiness should be shared, between a government that seeks to removes practical or physical barriers and the individual who actively pursues fulfillment.