Scotland
in the
heat
The
death
of depth
Chris Holligan
says that deep reading
is becoming a thing of
the past. We’ve all
gone shopping
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The care system
forgets the people
within us
Victoria Law, a delegate at the Young Scotland Programme, writes for SR
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Lockerbie
An overview by Morag Kerr of the Justice for Megrahi Committee
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The Cafe
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Today’s banner
Within a few hundred yards of Commonwealth House, Glasgow
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
Where should we
start in our
quest for happiness?
Michael Elcock
Eileen Reid’s article about happiness (5 April) hits upon something that’s terribly important – not least because we’re far too quick, in this age of instant gratification, to reach for a pill or a drink – something that doesn’t require much effort – in order to achieve what passes for happiness. The results are fleeting and one dimensional; without depth. But too often they’re the things that give us the ‘momentary snapshots’ she writes about.
According to the Nova Scotia writer and broadcaster Silver Donald Cameron, there exists a country in this world whose government considers happiness to be more important than economic success; that believes happiness is the way to real personal advancement. Some 40 years ago, writes Cameron in an article in ‘The Green Interview’, ‘…the Fourth Dragon King of Bhutan…declared that…Gross National Product was not as important as Gross National Happiness’.
That would have been at the end of the 1960s – a time when the western world was experiencing more hope and expectation than perhaps it does now. Against the wishes of his people the Fourth Dragon King eventually chucked up the throne and turned Bhutan into a democracy. But to this day Bhutan continues to pursue the lofty aims that were encapsulated in the king’s philosophy about the important things in life.
Eileen Reid speaks of Aristotle, but who reads Aristotle any more? He’s far too much work. It’s not many years though since we were inhaling the writings of 20th-century mystics and philosophers like Rabindranath Tagore, with their examinations about the meaning of life and death; their thoughts about who we are and why we’re here. Tagore gave more than a passing nod to Aristotle – and Tagore was friends not only with empiricists, but also with physicists like Einstein, who asked him questions like: ‘Do you believe in the Divine as isolated from the world?’.
The Lebanese writer Kahlil Gibran had considerable currency in the 1960s and 70s. He gave us his own take on the Greeks with what may seem today like simplistic ruminations, such as: ‘They say: "If a man knew himself, he would know all mankind’. I say: "If a man loved mankind, he would know something of himself".’
John F Kennedy borrowed from other writings by Gibran in his inaugural address in Washington in January 1961 when he said: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country’. Kennedy’s ensuing words made it clear that he was speaking in the context of mankind as much as he was of his own nation state.
Maybe I’m getting old, but we seem to have regressed from there. Sure, some people – like Kennedy – fell off their pedestals. And the rise and influence of global corporations since the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher has turned us, and far too many of our children, into good little consumers. But does that mean we have to be lazy? Is that an excuse for losing sight of what’s fundamental, what’s important? It’s no excuse at all; John Donne made that pretty clear in the 16th century. We all have a piece of where we go; we all have a responsibility for it.
Eileen Reid is right when she writes that ‘flourishing requires a lot of luck’. And she’s right when she tells us that ‘human flourishing is not always in our own hands’. But that’s not to say we can’t have a fair bit of control over it.
A few weeks ago I attended a forum where we were asked to come up with a quotation used by one or other of our parents; something that had had an effect on how we live our lives. We were not wealthy when I was growing up in Edinburgh, and my mother often used to say: ‘Money cannot buy you happiness’. It’s funny, that has stayed with me ever since. A friend at the forum, a successful, professional woman, gave us her remembered quote. It came from her father: ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’. That’s an altogether different ethic, and one which she said has had a profound effect on her life.
So where does all this take us? I think it takes us to the unexamined life; something that far too many of us are guilty of as we rush around and claw our way to wherever it is we’re going. HG Wells had something to say about this the best part of 100 years ago:
You can go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities the sweat of your own deathbed.
The concept of the unexamined life was central to my last book ‘The Gate’; a busy, busy professional man coming to a realisation in his 40s that he didn’t really know who he was, didn’t know who his parents and grandparents were, had absolutely no idea at all about any of his antecedents before that. He had been incurious – too busy, too ambitious to think about it. And now it was almost impossible to find anyone who could tell him.
The reviews were more than generous. But the underlying theme – which wasn’t buried all that deep in the book – was beyond the reviewers. They didn’t delve beneath the surface; they saw a mid 20th-century historical novel wrapped up in a kind of detective story. There was real irony in that.
Eileen Reid is right when she writes that ‘flourishing requires a lot of luck’. And she’s right when she tells us that ‘human flourishing is not always in our own hands’. But that’s not to say we can’t have a fair bit of control over it. We’re all different, but we can all make some of our own luck. The unspoken spirituality which lies at the root of her thesis can never be found without a lot of hard work. There are no short cuts, and the work can be painful. Unfortunately, the nature of us all is that it too often requires a personal trauma of some kind to shake us into the fundamental examinations that are required to move us from our intellectual lethargies.
But there are other ways; other catalysts. You have to switch off the telly though, and go for a walk in the hills if you can, or take a hurl among the roses in your wheelchair. Or you can read a book like Antoine de St. Exupéry’s ‘The Little Prince’ – which should be required reading not just for children, but for every adult who has never read it. It’s not a bad place to start, and it’s (almost) never too late.
