"For only now", (He is talking about the Inquisition, of course), "has it become possible to think for the first time about people's happiness. Man is constitued as a mutineer; Can mutineers ever be happy?"
The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, Chapter 5, "The Grand Inquisitor"
The modern version of the Grand Inquisitor's concern with men's souls is more ridiculous vacuity than sinister fundamentalism, Toby Young finds in this week's Spectator, where he observes a class in happiness at a public school:
Listening to the various speakers at the one-day conference, it soon became clear that their purpose is both more high-minded — and less objective — than the word ‘Happiness’ implies. They are not simply advocating that children should be given the skills ‘to pursue their own good in their own way’, to use John Stuart Mill’s famous phrase. Rather, they have a very clear idea of what the good life consists of — and it doesn’t include drugs, alcohol, television, video games or high-tech consumer goods like iPods and Sony PlayStations. Rather, their notion of ‘Happiness’ is closer to what Socrates called eudaimonia — a state of profound emotional and intellectual fulfilment that stems from living a meaningful life.
He thinks that the field could benefit, as we all might, from some deeper thinking:
My own feeling is that, far from having some sinister, totalitarian agenda, the advocates of ‘Happiness Classes’ aren’t nearly ambitious enough. Clearly, part of the appeal of this approach to liberal intellectuals is that it manages to go a little further than PSHE in terms of teaching children fundamental values without breaching the sacred taboos of multiculturalism. Martin Seligman, the intellectual founder of the ‘well-being’ movement, is on record as saying that both the terrorists who blew up the Twin Towers and the firefighters who died trying to save people from the collapsing buildings led ‘meaningful lives’. In other words, ‘Positive Psychology’ is, at its core, a relativist doctrine — and the same goes for the ‘Happiness’ cult.
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