The Power and Promise of Humane Education
Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times
Claude and Medea: The Hellburn Dogs
So, You Love Animals: An Action-Packed, Fun-Filled Book to Help Kids Help Animals
There have been lots of books published in recent years about happiness. Most recently, I’ve been reading The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner. This one is a peripatetic look at happiness, from a visitor to the world’s “happiest” places.
I remember studying American History in school and being surprised that the pursuit of happiness was actually a right. My teacher said that happiness was a more like a code word for property, which was sort of a code word for money. It seemed odd to me that one of my rights was the right to pursue happiness, and that this was inextricably linked to something as dull sounding as property, but I tried to accept that I just might not be old enough to understand.
Years later, I’ve spent time writing about happiness myself, most recently in my upcoming book, Most Good, Least Harm. In the book I contrast joy with pleasure, and I explore – through an unscientific survey of a few hundred people – what brings people joy. No one told me property or money. In fact, the most common refrain was service – giving to others, taking part in doing good. Pleasure, it turns out, is fleeting and sometimes addictive, often decreasing real joy when we get stuck craving it.
Even Eric Weiner seems to question the whole premise of his book when he writes:
“A pedophile who reports high levels of happiness – say, a nine out of ten – counts exactly the same as a social worker who reports being a nine on the happiness scale. Likewise, a suicide bomber, firm in his belief in Allah, might very well score higher than either the pedophile or the social worker. He might be a ten, just before blowing himself up and taking a few dozen innocents with him. Aristotle would clear up this moral confusion in an Athenian minute. Happiness, he believed, meant not only feeling good but doing good. Thus the pedophile and the suicide bomber only thought they were happy. In fact, they were not happy at all.”
But saying someone isn’t happy doesn’t make it so, and when I came to this part of the book, I was struck by our obsessive pursuit of perceived happiness rather than with happy goodness. Given that goodness often translates directly into happiness, why don’t we see a plethora of books about goodness with its wonderful side effect of happiness? If we were good AND happy, then the world would be a better place in which everyone could more easily experience goodness and happiness, too.
~ Zoe
Filed under: MOGO (Most Good), positive choices | Tagged: Geography of Bliss, goodness, happiness, Most Good Least Harm, positive choices
There is a wonderful movie called Pay it Forward in which a Jr. High School teacher encourages his students to think of some way to change the world for the better, and then carry out their project. A young teenage boy begins “Pay it Forward” (as opposed to “pay it back”) in which he does a favor someone, but instead of asking them to do a favor for him in return for the favor he has done for them, he tells them to do a favor for someone else, and then tell that person, that instead of paying them back, they should do a favor for yet another person. He taught many people what true happiness is. TRUE happiness is a contentment which comes from knowing that you have done the right, productive, healing thing.
Though both the rapist and the volunteer may say that their behavior makes them “happy” perhaps the rapist’s definition of the word “happy” may be a different definition from the volunteer’s definition of the word “happy.”
When I volunteer, I am “happy” because I know I have made a positive difference in someone’s life. The same word “happy” is being used by two different people to describe two totally different things. People who commit sexual crimes are committing those crimes because they are psychologically and spiritual ill, and though they may use the word “happy” to describe what they feel, they are defining the word “happy” much differently than a philanthropist or volunteer.
It is possible for the same word to be used two different times, and have two totally different meanings.
For those of us who find “happiness” by calming people down, preventing suffering, and protectiong people, the environment and animals, there are several books which act as guides. some of the books which have been recommended by like minded people include
1. 50 Awesome Ways Kids Can Help Animals: Fun and Easy Ways to Be a Kind Kid by Ingrid Newkirk
2. Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times by Zoe Weil (New Society Publishers at newsociety.com)
3. Be the Change You Want to See in the World by Julie Fisher-McGarry
4. Canines in the Classroom (raising humane children through interaction with animals) by Michelle Rivera (Lantern Books at lanternbooks.com)
5. Making Kind Choices: Everyday Ways to Enhance Your Life Through Earth- and Animal-Friendly Living by Ingrid Newkirk
6. So, You Love Animals; An Action Packed, Fun-Filled Book to Help Kids Help Animals by Zoe Weil (New Society Publishers at newsociety.com)