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Happiness: history of an emotion
00:31:50
Katie Barclay explores how people have thought about happiness down the centuries – and how they have sought to attain it
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A
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Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. The word happiness came into common usage in around the 17th century, but the concept has a much longer history. So how have people understood the idea of happiness over time and how have they sought to attain it? Historian Katy Barclay is one of the editors of the Routledge History of Happiness and she's also written a feature sharing some historical secrets of happiness for BBC History Magazine. I spoke to Katie to find out more. Thanks for joining me. Katie. You've just written a feature for BBC History Magazine which investigates some secrets of happiness through history. So hopefully we'll be able to share some of those with listeners as we go through. But you're also one of the editors of of the Routledge History of Happiness. Happiness is a very intriguing thing for historians to be studying because it's a really slippery concept. How are you defining happiness?
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B
Yeah, it's slippery and it's also really boring because it turns out that when we study happiness, we tend to look at are you healthy, you know, are you wealthy, are you wise, are you well educated? And so we have these kind of markers that sort of suggest that you're comfortable and that you're surrounded by the sorts of things that mean that you're not unhappy, I guess. And so it's kind of funny in a way that a lot of the time we spend more time interested in some of those practical markers of comfort than we are on how you actually feel in your soul, or whether you're elated or joyful. In some ways, the studies of joy or elation are a much smaller part of the field. And so in a way we spend a lot of time thinking about all those boring things that your mother tells you, drink lots of water and get exercise. You know, if you're healthy, this is the way to happiness.
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C
So you're working in the field of the history of emotions. And for people who've come to this History podcast. And they're thinking of history as something that's dates and battles and major milestones. This might seem a very unusual field of study. How, as historians, when you're looking back for sources, are you studying something so subjective as emotions like happiness?
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B
Oh, emotions are everywhere in the records. I mean, because I guess people talk about them a lot, they write about them. Art and literature is just absolutely full of emotion, love and hate. And people are using those words. We're not even working very hard to identify it. And then we get to identify new emotions or old emotions, emotions that don't exist anymore. Apathyia, things like that, that have kind of been part of a historical moment and have no longer got relevance or invention of the word happiness or the invention of the word loneliness. And thinking about why. Why did people start using that word? What has changed that suddenly they needed a new word to help them express themselves. So we can kind of look at words as a useful guide to thinking about emotion. But I think also we are interested in trying to think of it. And so that's where we maybe get a little bit more abstract about it. And we're going, well, if happiness involves health and wealth, then can we measure that in different societies? Or if loneliness is about your relationship to your community, can we look at people who are isolated from their communities and think about that as a type of loneliness? And so we kind of look at people's experiences and conditions, and we use the records that all historians use, letters and diaries, institutional records and paintings and art, and whatever we can get our hands on that just help us give us insight into how people are experiencing certain kinds of conditions and to think about that for what it tells us about how they feel about it and what that might tell us.
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C
Going slightly off topic here, but I have to ask on something. You just mentioned emotions that don't exist anymore. You mentioned one called apatheia. This is news to me. Tell me about emotions that don't exist anymore.
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B
Yeah, well, apathea, I'm trying to remember exactly how this works. It's a bit like boredom, but it's also sometimes imagined as a demon that kind of sits on your shoulder and haunts you a little bit. And it's a sin. All right, so it's a medieval sin. So the medievalists are worried about it, and it's something that they're trying to avoid, but which kind of creeps up on them and kind of maybe leads them into something that we might think looks like depression, but it's kind of not quite Depression, because also there's a strong boredom element. So it's kind of an emotion that's kind of hard to explain because it doesn't exist anymore. Right. And so we can look and see them being very concerned about it and experiencing that emotion and then realizing that there are lots of other emotions that overlap. You know, if you imagine Venn diagrams that seem to share characteristics but don't quite help us get at what they are experiencing. And that happens all the time. Right. People have words to describe these emotions that they're having that we don't use anymore. And we think about why, why did that stop happening? And then you get new ones. And like, loneliness is often seen as the new one because it's not really used until the 19th century. And so that sense of, well, what happens in the 19th century, that loneliness as a word gets used a lot. And there's a big discussion about is it actually a new emotion or is it just a new language to explain a particular kind of emotional experience? And that's a big debate in the field, I guess. But you can kind of track these moments of words as they come in and out and then think about, what does that say about the underlying feelings that people are having?
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C
That's so interesting. So language is really important here. It strikes me as a similar kind of thing of where some languages have really nuanced words to describe certain things that in English don't exist.
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B
Yeah, exactly. And the way that we know you can't translate across languages, so sometimes we borrow words. You know, schadenfreude is borrowed from German because we can't quite capture that word in English. And it's a similar thing across time as well. And you also get it with words like love, for example. Well, love has so many meanings across time and across relationships that there's no one sort of definition of love. But it gets even more complicated when you're trying to compare medieval definitions of, you know, 19th century ones and 20th century ones. And so you have one word that superficially looks the same, but can be used in quite different ways and ticks with different expectations and a range of different contexts.
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C
I mean, happiness, to me, instinctively, it feels like something universal, right? That's always been around, this quest for happiness. But is that true? Have people always been worried about happiness, or has it sometimes been more about just survival?
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B
Well, we know that people have pursued pleasure, and that maybe is a slightly different question. Again, like, for example, taking drugs and alcohol seems to go back to the Neolithic, right? There's lots of Evidence of people trying to alter their moods, and perhaps that's how you cope with very difficult conditions, is to kind of form some kinds of pleasure. And then we could also think about all the religions, like even the very ancient religions are usually aspiring to some sort of. We might call it happiness, but they might call it some sort of contentment or joy or peace that you have in an afterlife or with a divine, which uses a lot of language and experiences that we now today would associate with happiness. So I'd say lots of cultures are interested in the idea or the pursuit of happiness. Not every culture's convinced you can have it on Earth. I think that's maybe the big difference. They're like, oh, no, life is suffering and misery. But, you know, if you hold on, you might get to some happiness in the end.
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C
Interesting, because your new edited volume, the one that you've worked on, it looks at everything from, you know, classical Greece and Rome, modern Bhutan, Shakespeare's England. You've got such a variety of places and times. Can we speak about any kind of sense of universal pursuit of happiness, or is what happiness means to you kind of always socially constructed, always dependent on the time and place that you live in?
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B
It's kind of two parts to this question, because as a good historian, I'm going to say, yes, it's culturally specific. You know, what you think will make you happy will depend on your culture and what it tells you to value, what gives you pleasure, and what kind of experiences, I guess, that you are taught are associated with happiness. And I think that there's lots of evidence for that. But the other thing is that when we write a book on happiness, in our minds, we are thinking in the English language and we have a modern concept of happiness. And so often we're going backwards, looking at other societies and going, are they happy in the way that we understand happy? And so the really interesting question then is, are they actually happy in different ways that we completely miss because we're not using the right word and that we're not looking for the right things? So one of the challenges as a historian, I think, is often you are looking for modern concepts especially, or modern emotions in societies where they might not exist in the same way. And there are ways to get around that, but it is one of those big questions, right? Are we missing a whole set of happiness just because we don't know what to look for?
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C
Yeah, we're using the wrong word, but if we do look at that English language word happiness, can you tell us about the origins of that word?
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B
It's a relatively new word. Well, it depends on how you count new, but it comes from the word happiness, which means fortune or good luck. And it comes into its modern form in the early modern period. So in the 17th century it kind of becomes used in association with things like consumption. When we're starting to have that consumer revolution and we're thinking about pleasure and comfort in more practical ways, suddenly happiness becomes a word that we use a lot, which is quite interesting to think about, that relationship. But I think for a long time before that hap and the word hap and luck sometimes was associated with things that we think, I guess, like happiness. To us, that might seem like happiness, but there's a strong sense that, you know, God or some divine or supernatural element was going to determine whether or not that was ever a thing you could achieve. Right. Whereas now happiness, we feel, is something we can achieve if we just do the right things. Suddenly it's in our control. And I think the happiness revolution, which kind of comes post the industrial revolution, is a thing that's very much about telling you that happiness is in your control.
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C
I'm really intrigued by this idea of the happiness revolution. I wonder if you could unpack that a bit more for us, tell us what was going on there.
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B
Yeah. So I think if you imagine that happiness is something you should have in the afterlife or something that happens by luck, you might try and manipulate luck. We all have our charms and our magical rituals, but, you know, it's not in your control. But the happiness revolution, you think about the American Declaration of Independence where it says the right to pursue happiness. We're not guaranteeing you'll get it, but you have the right to pursue it. And so kind of in this moment of the 18th century, it starts before those ideas are starting, but in the 18th century, it clarifies and people are like, what is happiness? Well, happiness is the right to earn money that can buy us nice things, to pursue pleasure. And to not feel guilty about it. So we've got nice studies of luxury. For example, luxury used to be a sin. And you would, if you were a good religious person, you would want to take away all of your wealth and your goods and live in a cave and try to be very kind of, you know, devoted to God and very frugal. And in the 18th century, like, no, no, no. Little bit of luxury is okay. You know, too much is maybe bad, but no. Enough luxury to be comfortable, to be easy, to be happy. So there's this kind of moment where they think that goods are useful. They think that good health is something we should try and pursue actively. And there's sort of a lot of debate around this. And I think it matters that we're also technologically able to kind of produce these goods for the first time on scale and increasingly at prices that fell down the social ladder. So there's kind of, I guess, more opportunity to be happy in that sort of literal sense of if you think happiness is owning things and being comfortable and being war and having nice food. And the happiness revolution is this moment where we think it's possible and we think it's something good, and so we pursue it.
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C
Well, one of your secrets to happiness that you discuss in the feature that you wrote for BBC History magazine is about that thing you just mentioned. Can owning goods and having nice things really buy you happiness? This is something that so many people grapple with today still. But what have people thought about that down the centuries?
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B
I think nobody has ever thought that money is the end goal. In fact, people are very anxious about that. And the example that I give in the article is about the classical Greeks. And they're very worried that people pursue wealth and actually don't look after the virtuous life. They don't live a life that will make them, at the end of it, look back and go, oh, I did good things and people respected me and valued me, and the gods looked upon me and thought I was blessed so that in the afterlife, you know, I could benefit from that blessing. So they were very skeptical of wealth for wealth's sake. And I think that is absolutely something that's changing. And the happiness revolution is part of that moment where you're suddenly saying, no, if you get a good job or you have a trade or you bring an income, you can have these nice luxuries that will make your life easy that's good and valuable, and we should not kind of shame it or say it's sinful. Big language of sin and Christianity around that. But you'll never have anybody going, greed. Greed is really good. It really takes until maybe the 1980s and that wolf of Wall street moment where suddenly they're like, greed is good. But they're kind of shouting that because nobody thought so. I think we think that life is more than just money. Right. It's more than just what you own. And you have to have this full and rich life to kind of achieve happiness. And I think that's when you can also look at. I guess we now have, like, Maslow's hierarchy of needs and things. And things like wealth and comfort are only coming down the middle of that. They're not at the top. Yeah.
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C
And that hierarchy of needs, that's basically saying that in order to achieve any higher levels of happiness, you have to be able to have basic comforts and survival dealt with. And I guess for a lot of people in time, you were stuck at the level of trying to achieve basic comfort and survival. You didn't have the opportunity to move on to happiness. Do you think that that's fair?
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B
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that I wouldn't want to say is because you were very poor, you were never happy. Right. But I do think that it's probably easier to be happy if you aren't having to worry every day about whether your children are going to be fit or whether you're working, you know, 15 hours a day just to kind of keep a roof over your head. I think for people who are genuinely struggling to kind of maintain themselves, then moments of happiness are perhaps fewer or just harder or are balanced out by the stress and the anxiety and the worry and all of those other things. But I think you also know when you look at poor families, you know, they tell jokes, they sing songs, they love each other. They find those moments of joy and pleasure, even in the mess and the hardness and the hardship. So nobody's saying that they never feel happy, but I think we are saying it's much more challenging. And maybe the happiness is more fragmentary when you're trying to pursue survival, but.
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C
It provides a different perspective from the idea that, you know, everybody in the medieval era, for example, all their lives were brutal, nasty and short, and there was nothing else going on. It's obviously more complicated than that. You've mentioned religion and the idea of sin a few times. Do you think that religion has offered people a path to happiness over time?
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B
Yeah, I think as well that sometimes happiness was the goal. Not always. Like, if you're a Buddhist, you're trying to eventually you want to be happy, then you want to not be happy. You want to be able to leave those worldly kind of concerns and emotions behind to. So it'd be sort of on this plateau of contentment. But if you're a Christian or if you're Muslim or the kind of Abrahamic faiths, the afterlife is meant to be one of joy, right? When you are in God's presence, you are going to be elated, you're going to be joyful. In your spiritual practice, there are moments perhaps that take you there until you feel that joy, often fleetingly. There's a lot of work on people pursue it, the rituals they do and things to try and pursue that feeling of joy. So in some ways, happiness is absolutely critical to them. And in a very specific form, right. They're not just happy as in content or happy because they're comfortable. They're happy because they're elated. They're looking for an uplifting feeling, a feeling that takes them out of themselves. We could also maybe think about drug taking and raving and those kind of elatory moments as well.
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C
Well, if we go from the spiritual to the bodily, another secret to happiness that you look at is healthy habits. I mean, long been thought to aid happiness. What were some of the practices that people put forward?
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B
This advice is. So this is what I mean by it's boring. They have been telling us the same thing for a thousand years, and we just don't listen. And it's always moderation. You can never do anything too much, right? So you have to drink enough water, you exercise, but not too much exercise, but not too little exercise.
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C
And how far back is this going? Is this medieval? Is this ancient?
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B
Ancient, right. So it comes from the ancients. The medievalists love that idea. So they get really back into it. So these ideas are just persistent. And then you get all the different scientists and doctors and each one has a different idea about how much water or how much exercise or what kind of exercise, or should we be doing this exercise. And so you get these moments of debates around what is the ideal healthy practice. But what does not ever kind of change is exercise, health, eating moderately, you need enough sleep, very important. Everybody thinks that. And so there's kind of these behaviors or advice you've been told now for thousands of years, and it hasn't really changed when you kind of strip it back to the basics.
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C
That is so striking to me that really all of these are still things that people on the Internet influencers would recommend today. But I mean, also Something that everybody always talks about today is good luck. If you win the lottery, your problems would be solved, you'd be happy. How much have people focused on luck in happiness over time?
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B
I mean, it's literally in the language, Right. So happiness comes from luck, but also in pretty much what you call every Indo European language, the word that they associate with happiness is also coming out of a root word for luck. So that association between luck and happiness seems to be a very common thing in the countries that share our kind of languages, which is quite a large area. And so that's kind of an interesting thing that we never truly believe it's under our control, possibly because it's not right. Sometimes, you know, natural disasters happen or some terrible thing happens without your control. So you can't really ever know, I guess, what's what the future holds for you. And so I think people are very aware that your life is a kind of fragile thing. That's. Yeah, it's about luck. And so your happiness is ultimately always tied up. So that idea is really quite strong, I think, across time and place.
- [18:54]
C
And another secret of happiness I wanted to ask you about was family life and the role of families. Not everyone would agree that families necessarily bring happiness, but what have people theorized about that over time?
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B
Yeah, so lots and lots of teaching about happiness has rooted it in the family so that it's a foundation of happiness. So you want a happy wife. I mean, this is like. It's a Bible verse, actually, that tells you that you need a happy wife. But because of that, you get in a lot of, say, medieval literature, so, like Chaucer and things talks about the sadness of not having a happy wife or a merry wife. And I like the fact that idea that the wife is often jolly. She's meant to be someone who brings you out of yourself, who kind of makes you cheerful. So you don't just want any old lady in the kitchen. You want one that has that kind of capacity to raise the humors, I guess. But there's this sense, I think, for a lot of people that first of all, love with a partner is the thing that's going to make you happy. And then children are an important next step as part of that. And I think less so today. But in many cultures, having children is so kind of critical to their sense of what's important and what's valuable. And perhaps today, with medical technologies that so much more of us have that choice, that perhaps we can feel like not having children is okay and we can still be happy.
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C
The volume that you're one of the editors of. As I mentioned, it covers so many different time periods and places. There's some very intriguing stuff in it. When you had the essays submitted, was there anything that came in that really surprised you or changed your perspective on something?
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B
One thing I've been thinking about a lot recently is about the present, right? So if you live in circumstances which are very uncertain or you don't know what your future is in this volume, this is work around, say, African young people for whom economic conditions are such that they are trying to imagine what life will actually look like. And things that they aspire to, like a partner and the children and a house, which are all rely on a good wage, are just not available to them in their economies. And so there's kind of this sense of which, well, how do you find happiness when you can't see a future for yourself? Which is a really interesting question and interesting to think about the way that our future orientation is actually part of our happiness, right? You have to kind of see yourself down the track. You have to have some sense of what's coming, to feel happy. And so what in these examples these young people are doing is they're doing activities that allow them to not think about the future. So that might be taking drugs, but they might be watching movies. So lots of them go to the cinema and just imagine themselves in stories that allow them to not think about other stories, the ones that they are involved and what they will kind of have to live in or in another context. They take tea together. So the kind of tea making ritual, it's very slow. And they sit around in their community and make tea over many hours and drink it and do kind of sociable activity. But in that moment they're very present, present each other's company, and they're not trying to think about themselves beyond that moment. And so there's an interesting thing there that if you are very precarious, that happiness isn't something that you are looking forward to. It's something that you're trying to kind of create by escaping the future and thinking about the present. And I think that's kind of interesting as well, that we're often told that as advice, you know, do you want to be happy? You should try to maintain yourself in the present. But I think it's really interesting to think about that. And for people who have such limited choice in the way that that's not necessarily a good thing that they have to live in that present, but also it's that they can find Certain kinds of happiness in a life where other kinds of opportunities aren't available.
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C
And that present day example is really interesting because I mean, traditionally there's an idea of history in which everything has got better over time. A lot of historians have rejected this more recently that we're on kind of one big escalator of progress and people are getting happier and happier over time. What do you think about that? Is it completely misguided to assume that people have got happier over time?
- [22:45]
B
I think if the thing that you are measuring is are people welfare and healthier, then that's probably true. Even though even in African societies that are very poor, they probably get better healthcare now than they've ever had. Right. So there's kind of certain things that are happening that allow us to have greater longevity and to have a better quality of living. I think the real challenge at this moment under a cost of living crisis is suddenly all those benefits that we've been having suddenly feel like they're stalling or going backwards bit. But probably in terms of real standard of living, we are much better than we were 70 years ago. Certainly things aren't genuinely better. So I think that standard of living is improving. But I'm not sure it's useful to measure happiness in the same kind of stick in that sense because it's about how we experience those conditions. It's about how we compare them to our parents conditions. It's about what we look forward to in the future and how we imagine ourselves into that future. So I think that, that we are all. We have messy emotions that respond to our circumstances and that happiness is much more than just you're getting richer and you're getting healthier. Because I think even if that is true, other things are changing that are making life difficult and certainly ominous futures that bear down on us put certain kinds of pressure on the possibility of being happy.
- [24:00]
C
And are there any lessons from history that you personally have taken to try and find happiness for yourself?
- [24:08]
B
That's a wonderful question. I do try to drink my water right. And get enough sleep. But I do. I think the one thing about being a historian is, and also because I'm not just a historian of happiness, I've written a book on loneliness. You know, I work on people in all sorts of emotions and at times of their life. And it's to recognize that life is long and complicated and there will be moments that are terrible and moments that are wonderful and joyful and to know that you're not going to be in that emotion forever. Right. And that emotions are things that you manage and you move through and things change and they are not absolutely in your control, but they are in your control in many ways in the sense that you can actually go, well, yes, this is very frightening, but here are the things I could do to try and change that or think about it. So I think what seeing how our ancestors survived, I guess, and probably conditions that are much worse many times than the life I live, it does really give you a sense of perspective that kind of makes you happy with what you have and grateful for the things that you have.
- [25:05]
C
Note that was Katy Barclay speaking to me. Ellie Cawthorn Katie is one of the editors of the Routledge History of Happiness, and you can also read a feature that she wrote on the subject in BBC History magazine's Christmas 2024 issue. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer, ARD.