Happiness

Happiness names two conditions that the English language holds in tension: a passing feeling of pleasure, and a settled state of being that grows from righteous living, resilient enough to last through good and bad times alike. The word began with luck, since happy first meant “favored by fortune,” from hap, “chance.” Scripture leans toward the second sense. The Hebrew ‘ashre and the Greek makarios both mean “blessed” or “happy,” and the King James translators usually chose “blessed.”

Blessed Is the Man

The Hebrew Bible pronounces a person happy by describing the road that person walks, and the Psalter opens with such a declaration: “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful” (Psalm 1:1). ‘Ashre is an exclamation, roughly “O the happiness of,” and it describes a condition more than a mood. The verse traces a slide from walking to standing to sitting, and the psalm sets against it a tree planted by water. Lexicons relate ‘ashre to the verb ‘ashar, “to go straight” or “advance,” and the echo of a straight path may not have been lost on Hebrew hearers.

Hedcut illustration of In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus links “blessed” (*makarios*) to hunger for righteousness (Matthew 5:6), not to pleasant circumstances. — In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus links “blessed” (*makarios*) to hunger for righteousness (Matthew 5:6), not to pleasant circumstances.

The Greek makarios carries the exclamation into the New Testament, where Jesus attached it to conditions no one would call pleasant. Greek poets had called the gods makares, from an older form of the word, as blessed ones beyond toil and grief. The Sermon on the Mount opens with a run of beatitudes as the Psalter opens with one, and it blesses the poor in spirit, mourners, and “they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness” (Matthew 5:6). King Benjamin set the two English words side by side in “the blessed and happy state of those that keep the commandments of God,” who are blessed “in all things, both temporal and spiritual” (Mosiah 2:41), a happiness that includes the body.

The Nature of Happiness

The Book of Mormon gives happiness a nature of its own, which no change of circumstance can supply to anyone whose desires run against it. Alma’s son Corianton had left the ministry to follow a harlot, and Alma warned him that the resurrection’s “restoration” returns to each what each has become: “Do not suppose… that ye shall be restored from sin to happiness. Behold, I say unto you, wickedness never was happiness.” The carnal, he added, are “in a state contrary to the nature of happiness,” and he called God’s design “the great plan of happiness” (Alma 41:10-11; 42:8). Said differently, happiness has a nature as God has one, and a person comes into it by choosing righteousness.

In a letter dated 1842, Joseph Smith opined: “Happiness is the object and design of our existence, and will be the end thereof, if we pursue the path that leads to it.” The letter names the path as “virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God,” returning to the psalmist’s road. In this connection, Lincoln Cannon describes joy as the fulfillment of desires and observes that some joys last longer than others, “penetrate the soul” more deeply, or “transfer among different individuals within a community” more fully. Pleasure produced by engineering alone scores poorly on all three.

A Happier People

Technologies acting on the brain’s reward systems offer the first sense of happiness without the second. In 1954, James Olds and Peter Milner found that rats would press a lever again and again for electrical stimulation of the brain. Writers on LessWrong call such stimulation “wireheading,” a “counterfeit utility” that maximizes a good feeling and fails to realize what people value. Robert Nozick imagined a machine supplying any experience desired and judged that “someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob.” David Pearce, who hopes to abolish suffering through genetic engineering, rejects wireheading for “gradients” of well-being coupled to the world. Feeds tuned for engagement act on the same reward circuitry, and are commonly judged by the attention they hold.

After the risen Christ’s visit to the American continent, the Nephites and Lamanites “had all things common among them,” and “there was no contention in the land, because of the love of God which did dwell in the hearts of the people”; “surely there could not be a happier people” (4 Nephi 1:3, 15-16). Generations earlier, Nephi’s people “lived after the manner of happiness” (2 Nephi 5:27) while they sowed and reaped, worked iron and steel, and built a temple. Mormon transhumanists hope new tools will serve that manner of life as Nephi’s forges did. The happiness both records describe belonged to a whole people, living in bodies that worked, built, and dealt justly with one another.