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Good and Happy aren't Boring
Jan. 28th, 2009 10:01 amI am tired of evil.
More precisely, I am tired of analyses of evil: how did it happen? why did it happen? what is its character?
And I am tired of analyses of sadness: what caused it? when will it end? how can I function despite it?
It's not that I think these questions are, per se, unworthy. Rather, I think we have a vast cultural failure to value questions about goodness and happiness. There was a rash of books about happiness a while back (if by rash, you mean 10 or so at most), but they float like foam on a sea of books about evil. True Crime. Histories of unspeakable atrocity, volumes 1-999999999. (I bought Jennifer Michael Hecht's The Happiness Myth, and love it, but it's kind of a lonely book, isn't it?)
Our culture has a narrative convention that happiness is boring. Doing good is uninteresting.
I think this comes from an unexamined faith that doing good and being happy are easy, natural states for humans - that, bar the intrusion of Incitement to Evil or Sad Doomful Influence, we all just float along being happy and doing nice stuff. That happiness is easy.
Pfah. Goodness and Happiness are interesting, difficult problems.
( A quick 6, enumerated... )
And, really, this is just a quick scoop off the top. Utopias, real utopias, shouldn't be boring. They're only boring if they're lying dystopias - strange creations by people who figured that whatever made them happy and whatever they thought was good would be happy and good for everyone else too for all of time. Nonsense. Shallow poppycock. Trying to be good and happy in a diverse society of individuals who have varied experiences and varied commitments to others is one of the most fascinating challenges in existence.
Literature needs to stop treating it like something nonproblematic that happens after the story ends.
[edited for tragic homonym typo]
More precisely, I am tired of analyses of evil: how did it happen? why did it happen? what is its character?
And I am tired of analyses of sadness: what caused it? when will it end? how can I function despite it?
It's not that I think these questions are, per se, unworthy. Rather, I think we have a vast cultural failure to value questions about goodness and happiness. There was a rash of books about happiness a while back (if by rash, you mean 10 or so at most), but they float like foam on a sea of books about evil. True Crime. Histories of unspeakable atrocity, volumes 1-999999999. (I bought Jennifer Michael Hecht's The Happiness Myth, and love it, but it's kind of a lonely book, isn't it?)
Our culture has a narrative convention that happiness is boring. Doing good is uninteresting.
I think this comes from an unexamined faith that doing good and being happy are easy, natural states for humans - that, bar the intrusion of Incitement to Evil or Sad Doomful Influence, we all just float along being happy and doing nice stuff. That happiness is easy.
Pfah. Goodness and Happiness are interesting, difficult problems.
( A quick 6, enumerated... )
And, really, this is just a quick scoop off the top. Utopias, real utopias, shouldn't be boring. They're only boring if they're lying dystopias - strange creations by people who figured that whatever made them happy and whatever they thought was good would be happy and good for everyone else too for all of time. Nonsense. Shallow poppycock. Trying to be good and happy in a diverse society of individuals who have varied experiences and varied commitments to others is one of the most fascinating challenges in existence.
Literature needs to stop treating it like something nonproblematic that happens after the story ends.
[edited for tragic homonym typo]
