[Newspoetry] On Happiness (in the "Happy Halloween" greeting)

[DL Emerick]

"We celebrate a person's life only when it has been rounded out, or to
paraphrase Nicomachean Ethics I 1089a18, do not count people happy until
their death."  D'VAR TORAH- "Chayei Sarah: Sarah's Obituary" Carol Ochs
http://urj.org/torah/.


David Brooks, in the NYT Op-Ed Section, 10/30/2007, re the (alleged)
Happiness Gap
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/opinion/30brooks.html:
"American voters are generally happy with their own lives.  ... Researchers
from Pew found that 65 percent of Americans are satisfied over all with
their own lives - one of the highest rates of personal satisfaction in the
world today.  [However,] Americans are disillusioned with the president and
Congress. Eighty percent of Americans think this Congress has accomplished
nothing. [etc.]  ...  On the one hand, they want the country's political
leaders to take bold action. On the other hand, they are extremely cynical
about those leaders and are unwilling to trust them with anything that seems
risky."  Brooks goes on to suggest a four point plan, for Prexy wanna-bes:
(a) don't try to motivate and inspire the voters; (b) stay away from
proposals impacting their personal life styles; (c) don't play on (income)
class differences; and (d) offer a tiny few thematic proposals ostensibly
addressing a few of the major "looming" threats to personal happiness (and
then transfer-spin every discourse topic as one of the thematic few).
"[T]oday, people want the government to change so their own lives can stay
the same. Voters don't want to be transformed; they want to be defended."

THE CONTRAST BETWEEN WHAT BROOKS STATES AND THE OCHS REFLECTION UPON SARAH'S
LIFE CONCERNS HAPPINESS, of course.

The startling fact of the matter is how comfortable Americans feel about
their own lives -- they are contented, generally, with themselves.  The
larger environment is viewed only as a source of threats to their personal
tranquility.  Americans believe only in what they can do for themselves, as
the only source of their happiness, against a hostile environment.
Americans believe that "public" institutional actions do nothing but make
things worse, with pointless costs (taxes) to themselves, personally.

In short, Americans per Brooks are confused about the nature of happiness,
as to what it is, or is not, according to the sources of happiness.
Americans <wrongly, in my view> conflate personal "satisfaction" with
personal "happiness".  This egregious mistake is characteristic of an
ego-centric, selfish society -- one that fails to understand how micro-lives
are connected and interdependent in the macro-life of all in the community.

That is the hint in the OCHS message, regarding the possibly proper moment
for an evaluation of happiness in a life.  OCHS says, in effect, "It is
morally improper to regard your own life as a happy one."  Happiness is
something that others, and only others, can properly judge, about you, as to
whether your life, in its totality and by its entirety, evidenced it or not.

It would be, by further moral implication, most improper to ask a person
"Are you happy?"

Why is that?  Is it not the case that man, notorious for his lies, will ever
say to himself, "I'm self-satisfied?  And, to the extent that I am not
happy, it is always some Other who is to blame for my unhappiness?"

Judaism never admits (or confesses) to the importance of individual
happiness in the scheme of world events.  Man's lot in life, since Eden and
beyond then, has always been a two-fold balancing of those separating
distances between self and (a) another being and (b) an Other of Being.

In such balances, one could only be, in the words of the Founders, "in
pursuit of happiness", never in possession of it.  Or, as Heidegger might
have said, we are always "On the way" to Happiness.  (For Mr. H, language
was a destination, an arrival at which was never assured(, nor even
possible, per Derrida(, contra the deadly delusions perpetuated by the
school of Habermas on discursive democracy)).)

NOW ALL THIS WE IMPLICITLY KNOW AND UNDERSTAND WHEN WE SAY "HAPPY
HALLOWEEN."  To whom are we truly speaking and of what do we speak?  We
speak to one another of the dead, of their happiness, when their deaths are
hallowed, or celebrated, for the lives that were once lived out, to their
very last moments.  At the moment of my death, says the existentitalist or
Blanchot, perhaps, the alienating gap dividing life from nothingness is
finally closed, all "absurdity" of being ends.
http://www.dividingline.com/private/Philosophy/Philosophers/Existentialism/B
asic_Themes_of_Existentialism_3.shtml

Perhaps, perhaps, but we consider
http://www.othervoices.org/jnschust/death.html as a better positioning, of
Derridean impossibilities against Heideggerian certainties, for H would give
us ownership of the moment of death as what is most "our own", but D would
say that every moment is both and neither birth and death, as its
potentiality/actuality.  No "Now" can be given by the self to its owning
self, to own, perhaps.

We might, per Levinas, be able to give death to others, just as we also give
birth to them.  Levinas often proclaimed that any death giving was as
wrongful as murder -- but he spoke more obliquely about life-giving-births,
implicating as it does the very question of survival, of a child who will
honor parents (who are always and ever and already dead, as every child
foolishly thinks).

This is what we do when we honor the dead, when we find that happiness ought
to belong to the dead, if it belongs anywhere, as a trait properly
attributable and attributed.  One ought not to appropriate from the dead, to
rob their graves, to take their happiness and to own it, as one's own.

(Is it a Small Wonder that H loved the authoritarian war machines of the
Nazis, that he found the dialogues of democracy impossible and ineffective,
non-sustainable?)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!  Parents rise from their Graves and show us how the Dead
walk.  It terrifies children, to think of their Parents, as living beings
enjoying life.  Happy are those who have died, they say (may they stay dead
for another year!)

Brooks has it all wrong.  The false consciousness, of owning happiness, is
symptomatic of deep gaps splitting private order/public disorders in
ego-centric nations like the United States.  A politician who figures out
how to teach people, once again, that happiness is to be pursued, but not
owned, will triumph immensely.  HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!