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Quarterly Essay 41 The Happy Life: The Search For Contentment In The Modern World (2011)

by David Malouf(Favorite Author)

3.08 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Quarterly Essay

series

Quarterly Essay

review 1: This refreshingly slim volume, at about 100 pages, is like a cool drink of water on a hot day: enervating. More of an essay than an actual book, and then neither a self-help manual nor a philosophical text, David Malouf's wide-arranging examination of the 'good' (materially sufficient) versus the 'happy' (inner contentment) is bracing and entertaining. He examines various examples of the good / happy scale to illustrate the slippery concept of contentment -- an increasingly elusive state in our media-saturated modern world. Interestingly, rather than ranting against our technology-driven society, Malouf proposes that this will invariably accelerate human evolution, and hence is not a bad thing in and of itself ... But will it make us happy? I particularly enjoyed his thoug... morehts on the meaning of happiness in the context of the Declaration of Independence, and the discussion of sensuality and pleasure in the paintings of Rubens. By no means the final word on its subject, this still leaves one with a lot to ponder.
review 2: David Malouf seems to suggest in this essay that the happiness experienced by Solzehenitsyn's character, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov after surviving a day in a Gulag labour camp, is somehow admirable. I found this very unsatisfying. Solzehenitsyn certainly shows in that book human beings' remarkable adeptness at becoming accustomed to changed circumstances (what the psychologists call 'hedonic adaptation') and that 'counting one's blessings' is one technique to achieve happiness. But is that all we can aspire to? After an interesting foray into how the Greek philosophers understood happiness and the evolution of the idea of human happiness as a right to be pursued, Malouf seems to lose his way in suggesting how we can achieve the happy life in modern times when the idea of progress in human affairs has been badly shaken. While he dwells on the trend in western nations of our obsession with the body and ponders if the human brain is evolving faster through its exposure to video games and the internet, these ideas don't seem to bring him to any philosophical resting place beyond Shukhov's strategy. By contrast, the author of Hamlet's Blackberry takes counsel from earlier philosophers to suggest a number of strategies for happiness in modern times. less

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