The Happiness Paradox

THE HAPPINESS PARADOX.

By Ziyad Marar. Reaktion Books. 08 pp. $19.95

Ziyad Marar is after the Grail. For those of us who believe in this world alone, this life alone, there’s nothing better than happiness. “It is the only good answer to the question What would you ask for if you had only one wish,” he writes in his introduction. “It is the thing we want for our children.”

Though published in England, this book seems aimed at Americans, the people who wrote the pursuit of happiness into a founding document. Since 1776, the chase has only hotted up. Marar notes that “the world database of happiness” identifies 22 scholarly articles published between 1900 and 1930. Since

1960, nearly 3,000 social science studies have pondered happiness, in addition to a glut of pop psychology articles.

Editorial director at Sage Publications in London, Marar opens with a visit to Amman (his father was Jordanian), where he asked an uncle: Are you happy? “He talked for a while about his work, his family, their health, my grandfather, the state of the economy,” Marar recounts. “I pressed for more: ‘But are you actually happy?’ After a while he just looked at me blankly. . . . This peculiarly Western question was incoherent when detached from the aspects of life that contribute to a good life, well-lived.” Kant exemplifies the uncle’s tradition with “the dictum that morality is not properly the doctrine of how we make ourselves happy, but how we make ourselves worthy of happiness.”

Marar pulls quotes from a variety of sources, including Erica Jong, Bertrand Russell, Pablo Neruda, and Joni Mitchell. He seems to be having fun writing this book, and we can’t help but join in. No pretension is safe. On romance we get La Rochefoucauld’s observation that “many people would not have fallen in love had they not heard of it.” The sacred image of man as a single and separate moral being is also assaulted. “We are governed by an invisible web of expectations and finely balanced codes and rules,” writes Marar. “In occasional contexts, like the pressure not to be the first person to clap after a concert, we come to glimpse the silent, and usually concealed, power of others that permeates our identity.”

The book gives a history of happiness, corners it in work and in love, and then devotes the final chapter to the paradox flagged in the title—namely, that we desire the approval of others and, at the same time, freedom from others. “It is not simply that these needs contradict one another,” Marar writes. “They are literally paradoxical in that the successful expression of the one requires the assertion of its opposite.”

Perhaps it’s churlish of me to turn against a book that gave so much pleasure, but I had hoped for more. Marar has a light, welcoming style, and he meets the great questions with deep knowledge and an open heart. It’s a tragedy—and I use the word advisedly—that his happiness paradox turns out to be a rather prosaic idea.

—Benjamin Cheever