Joe Humphreys: Bono is right - we need to not surrender to the melancholy

When I was young and pretentious (or more pretentious than now), I used to think glumness was a mark of virtue. If friends were guffawing at a boorish joke I’d affect a cool stance of moral superiority. If people were getting carried away over a match I’d mutter something supercilious about sport being opium for the masses.Chin-stroking, humourless detachment was the right sort of posture to adopt when faced with popular entertainment. So I had been taught by fashionable intellectuals like Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and above all Noam Chomsky, that high priest of anti-establishmentarianism who would have us believe that shows like The Great British Bake Off are designed to distract us from the evils of the military-industrial complex.Happiness, I’d been conditioned to accept, was a hallmark of selfish, shallow, capitalistic individuals. It took me a while to realise I’d got it all wrong. There’s probably nothing more important, or more valuable, to a human life than being joyful. But I’ll come to that in a minute. First, I must ask: why are moral philosophers overwhelmingly snooty about happiness?The ancient Stoics told us to greet pleasure with a shrug and a casual “meh!” For misery guts John Stuart Mill, it was “better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied”. As for Nietzsche, he proclaimed (in the worst put-down he could imagine): “Man does not aspire to happiness; only the Englishman does that.”READ MOREMore recently, American philosopher Robert Nozick designed a thought-experiment pooh-poohing happiness. Imagine, he said, you could be in a constant state of bliss for the rest of your life but it would mean plugging yourself into a machine from which you couldn’t then escape. Would you opt in?Most people instinctively say “No”, and this is cited as proof that there are better things in life than happiness – like freedom, authenticity and good works.What Nozick and these other philosophers are really talking about, however, is physical pleasure – and that’s only one type of happiness. Crucially, Aristotle spoke of another type of happiness called eudaimonia. This is something like wellbeing or flourishing but with a moral dimension.Eudaimonia comes from living a good life – a life of truthfulness, courage and humility. It’s a higher form of happiness – one associated with Socrates during his last hours as he waited to succumb to poison after being sentenced to death. Scolding his friends for weeping over his condition, Socrates used his last breath to make a joke about a sacrifice to the gods.It’s this sort of happiness Albert Camus had in mind when he spoke in defence of joy in the wake of the second World War. “Today happiness is like a crime – never admit it. Don’t say ‘I’m happy’ otherwise you will hear condemnation all around,” the French-Algerian philosopher said.He was troubled by political actors who “prefer their principles over their happiness” – here he was thinking of left-wing intellectuals drawn to Soviet authoritarianism. Far from being a sin, happiness was something like a moral duty, according to Camus. Why fight for freedom – like he did in the French resistance against Nazi Germany – unless you were going to take your happiness seriously?His message resonates today at a time of doomscrolling and disillusionment with politics. A burst of merriment can shake us out of political apathy. Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina made the point in an interview with Lara Marlowe earlier this year, proclaiming that protest must be “desperate, sudden and joyous” (my emphasis). Despots like Russia’s Vladimir Putin know how to deal with fear but they have no answer to happiness. The political power of “defiant joy” has also been highlighted by U2’s Bono. Speaking to The New York Times last month, he described how the band’s latest album was inspired by something the American gay rights activist Dan Savage said about campaigning in the 1980s: “During the darkest days of the Aids crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night ... because it was the dance we were fighting for.” We need that spirit today, said Bono, a spirit of “not surrendering to the melancholy”.So don’t be afraid of happiness, I say. It doesn’t make you a better person to be glum.Imagine a god who would wish you to be miserable just so you could be good. What kind of monster would that be? Imagine a life of rigid adherence to moral law at the expense of personal satisfaction? It is unconscionable.Returning to the question of where happiness stands in the hierarchy of values, could it be that the very point of our existence is eudaimonia? Aristotle believed so, and Camus edged towards the same conclusion.In his most famous essay, he presents the human condition as that of Sisyphus – a king from Greek mythology who was punished for trying to outsmart the gods. Day after day, Sisyphus pushes a boulder up a hill which rolls back down again, forcing him to continue the struggle indefinitely. Sisyphus is you. The toil is life. What’s the point in living?In the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus is tempted to answer: there is no point; there is no reason for us to be here. But he corrects himself. The life of Sisyphus has meaning. And, crucially, that meaning becomes apparent not by imagining Sisyphus to be good. Rather, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”.