The Quest for Happiness: A Civilization in Imbalance

One of the most fundamental quests of human life is to be happy. One can debate on the meaning of the word ‘happiness’ but the quest itself remains indisputable. All human actions pivot around this central quest. While individuals want to be happy, institutions rush to fulfill this ‘need’. Almost all of contemporary relations between the individuals and the institutions can be seen through this relationship whether the institution is the State, the free market, or a religion. So the question to ask is: are we happy today?

The Faultline of Use-Values and Consumption of Commodities

There are two ways to assess happiness. One is the way of metrics, of numbers. One can count how much a person earns; what is the HDI of the city he lives in; how politically stable the country is; what is the status of the economy; the ease with which the public institutions work; the status of healthcare and education and various other metrics that constitute the surveys which measure ‘happiness’ and ‘standards of living’ today.

All of these markers illuminate the aspects of life which can be easily measured, recorded and analyzed in numbers. But it is hardly a secret that life is not limited to that which can be measured. Some of the most fundamental aspects which characterize human life defy all metrics.

These aspects of life are more experiential than metrical in nature. They tell us whether someone feels lonely and alienated or is happy in a web of relationships; whether he finds meaning in life or feels aimless; whether he feels in control of what happens around him or feels just a cog in a massive global machinery; whether he finds his life acutely imbalanced in the fulfillment of different kinds of needs and desires or whether he finds it in balance; whether he finds satisfaction in community and use-values or just in the consumption of commodities.

When one tries to assess this ‘second’ nature of aspects in human life in contemporary times, one finds a deep dichotomy of results and a divergent graph of happiness.

In things that are measurable, it is easy to chart a general and global increase in ‘standards of living’ where individuals find it easier to spend their daily lives. Seasons are easier to bear with all the modern equipment. Life is much less given to hard work with all the machines to assist. Communication and transportation is far more frequent and affordable. And there are more and more goods that are being consumed by an increasing number of individuals in almost all corners of earth.

Life reduced to just metrics, is singing a happy tune right now. There are innumerable books, research papers and studies charting this ‘happy journey of humanity’ in the ‘peace decades’ of the post war world, the era which boasts a continuous war on poverty and a war of rights in a world increasingly given to the twin engines of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. If man was just a machine, this tale would be sufficient enough to tell the human story. But this is not the case. Human beings are more than just units. There is another graph, another story which is far more important for the overall well-being of humanity.

This other graph charting happiness based on use-values and experiential quotients tells a very different story. Individuals find that there is a huge gap in the way the consumption of goods in their life is increasing on one hand and the way their overall happiness is increasing on the other. They find that while their income is increasing all the time, their life is becoming much harder than before in several aspects with the overall quality of life decreasing in so many cases. While the overall GDP increases, private incomes soar, the consumption of goods increases, the traditional structures like religion, family and marriage break down. Gaps created by the breakdown of the traditional order are unsuccessfully attempted to be filled by an increasing consumption of goods as per the needs that institutions assign to individuals. And it is all in vain.

According to Ivan Illich, modern civilization overwhelmingly stresses the production of commodities as the sole means of finding happiness. Commodities are of course necessary but so are use-values which are defined by Illich as duties and chores that humans do on their own, in their homes and communities with no involvement of the commodity market. The kind of ‘free’ services that the family, community and such natural institutions provide can be defined as use-values. Only a balance of commodities on one hand and the use-values on the other can create a harmonious and satisfied life. But we find that the modern civilization has gone into an overdrive of creating and consuming commodities. And after a limit, this has become counter-productive.

We must come to admit that only within limits can machines take the place of slaves; beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom. TOOLS OF CONVIVIALITY 12

According to Illich this overwhelming stress on consumption of commodities has resulted in an oxymoronic civilization with disabling professions, impoverishing wealth, time-consuming acceleration, sick-making healthcare, stupefying education and disabling enrichment. All modern institutions suffer from deep iatrogenesis which means their net contribution to society is now negative. Illich says:

Cultures are programs for activities, not for firms. Industrial society destroys this center by polluting it with the measured output of corporations, public or private, degrading what people do or make on their own. As a consequence, societies have been transformed into huge zero-sum games, monolithic delivery systems in which every gain for one turns into a loss or burden for another, while true satisfaction is denied to both. THE RIGHT TO USEFUL UNEMPLOYMENT 27

This imbalanced tradeoff of use-values for commodities is ubiquitous. What is the most curious aspect of this dichotomy is that it is not necessary to chart two different countries, societies or economies to see this faultline. It runs right through the modern individual. You will find that often it is the same individual who is doing quite well on the metrical chart and very bad on the experiential one. Metrically he is doing very well and emotionally very bad.

Dichotomy of Desires

Bearing all these dichotomies inside him, the modern man leads a Kafkaesque existence, unable to make sense of the world around him. The story of unlimited progress and development is sold to him and he is told that it can be verified by anyone. The methods of verification, however, metric in nature, are created by the same institutions which sold him the story in the first place. While technology becomes a handmaiden of politics, science too does not offer much respite for in absence of Nature-conducive culture, all it offers is objective knowledge of the world around man, but nothing about the workings of the internal cosmos, the cidākāśa. As Loren Eiseley, one of the greatest thinkers of our times says:

The western scientific achievement, great though it is, has not concerned itself enough with the creation of better human beings, nor with self-discipline. It has concentrated instead upon things, and assumed that the good life would follow. Therefore it hungers for infinity. Outward in that infinity lies the Garden the sixteenth-century voyagers did not find. We no longer call it the Garden. We are sophisticated men. We call it, vaguely, “progress”, because that word in itself implies the endless movement of pursuit. We have abandoned the past without realizing that without the past the pursued future has no meaning, that it leads, as Morris has anticipated, to the world of artless, dehumanized man. EISELEY 130

This faultline, though most striking when it runs through the individual, is quite evident in various other spheres. The binary of Culture and Nature is also where this faultline is seen manifesting most tragically. While human culture as defined by the modern globalized world is making great progress in science, technology, and ‘standards of living’, Nature in total is suffering immensely.

As studies after studies proclaim great victory of prosperity over poverty; healthcare over diseases; abundance of food over hunger, we find that eco-systems collapse right, left, and center. We are in the middle of the great ‘sixth extinction’ where habitats are being destroyed at an ever increasing rate, species go extinct in hordes every day, and climate changes for the worse visibly and palpably. While the human world has more ‘resources’, and more commodities to consume, the rest of the planet suffers. Mother Gaia groans in pain while one of her children is going on a merry-go-round albeit thinking they are hurtling through space in ‘progress’ and ‘development’.

This is not where the faultline stops manifesting. While most of the modern products and services are sold in the name of empowering individuals, we find that the individual is more and more at the mercy of monstrously huge institutions which are in charge of imputing and then fulfilling needs to individuals who are increasingly powerless to change the situation. At the same time these supra-national institutions and organizations run campaigns arguing for the dismantling of all traditional small-scale institutions like dharmic sects, family, local community etc. The argument is that these institutions prevent individuals from attaining freedom, while the truth is that with the disappearance of all the traditional intermediary institutions, the individual is more and more helpless and powerless against the supra-national and global institutions which make individual action against them almost meaningless.

For advanced industrial society, the modernization of poverty means that people are helpless to recognize evidence unless it has been certified by a professional – be he a television weather commentator or an educator; organic discomfort becomes intolerably threatening unless it has been medicalized into dependence on a therapist; neighbours and friends are lost unless vehicles bridge the separating distance (created by the vehicles in the first place). In short, most of the time we find ourselves out of touch with our world, out of sight of those for whom we work, out of tune with what we feel. THE RIGHT TO USEFUL UNEMPLOYMENT 11

A huge battle of sorts is going on between material prosperity and emotional/ spiritual happiness; between institutions and individuals; and between culture and Nature.

The modern civilization which has resulted in such deep dichotomies and sharp fault lines is a civilization of imbalance more than anything else, where one aspect of the individual, social and global life is in heavy imbalance with the other. The Earth in total is in serious imbalance.

But was it always like this? And is there an alternative? Do we have answers in traditional cultures all around the world? Do we have a civilizational narrative of balance as opposed to the modern global imbalance?

Endnotes

Eiseley, Loren. The Firmament of Time. Bison Books, 1999.

Dehejia, Harsha. The Advaita of Art. Motilal Banarsidas, 1996.

Sri Aurobindo. The Hour of God and Other Writings. Centenary Edition, Volume 17, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, 1971.

Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. Harper & Row, 1973.

Illich, Ivan. The Right to Useful Unemployment. Marion Boyars, 1996

Authored by Pankaj Saxena. Published by Brhat.