Art and Happiness

I’ve been reading the wonderful Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert and it’s been triggering all sorts of connections in my mind with the way we expect art to do things for us; to make us feel different, better, more learned, or appeased in some way. Gilbert is an American academic, a professor in psychology at Harvard, and he is a very, very amusing writer. He begins the book by describing how all psychology academics are hoist by their own petard at some point in their careers by the way they finish what he calls The Sentence. This is the sentence that begins: ‘The human being is the only animal that…’ Doesn’t matter what else he writes in his career, Gilbert claims, he’ll only be remembered for his own personal ending, and the best he can hope for is to ‘die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by a monkey’. Anyway, Gilbert’s premise of the book is that the human being is the only animal who thinks about the future. Not just in what he calls a ‘nexting’ way, which is to recognize that touching the hot plate will burn our fingers, or a spider that runs behind the dresser will appear out the other side. No, we think about the future in a contemplative, imaginative, anticipatory kind of way. ‘Until a chimp weeps at the thought of growing old alone, or smiles as it contemplates its summer holiday, or turns down a toffee apple because already looks too fat in shorts, I will stand by my version of The Sentence’, he claims.

Now thinking about the future happens in the overdeveloped part of the brain known as the frontal lobe, and this is the place not only where all the planning and foresight happens, but also the place where all anxiety begins, the two being profoundly and irrevocably linked. Looking ahead means acknowledging that bad things might occur, and planning furiously and meticulously in order to avoid them. If we didn’t have the frontal lobe or if, as is sometimes the case, something happened to it, we’d be stuck perpetually in the present, which would not be as nice as it may sound. We would have no capacity to project ourselves into the future, we would be in a time that contained no ‘later’, and we would be unable to make any kind of development of our selves or our lives. We would lose a fundamental pleasure, which is to anticipate pleasure itself. For a large percentage of us, that anticipation is the source of our pleasure, rather than the execution of any supposedly pleasurable act. ‘For instance,’ Gilbert proposes, ‘volunteers in one study were asked to imagine themselves requesting a date with a person on whom they had a major crush, and those who had had the most elaborate and delicious fantasies about approaching their heartthrob were least likely to do so over the next few months.’

Our paradoxical behaviour in this respect is the consequence of one of the other major psychological motivators, and that’s our desire, nay our intense need, for control. ‘The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless and depressed.’ What’s intriguing about us is our belief that we can exert that control over our circumstances. Our belief in ourselves is wholly disproportionate, and slightly crazy when examined closely. People feel more confident they can win a lottery if they can choose the numbers on the ticket and they’d rather bet on dice that are yet to be thrown than those already thrown whose outcome is still a secret. It’s madness, but underneath these preferences is the shadowy act of magical thinking that makes us believe we can control anything, even random, chance events. And you know what, this is what we need to survive the world and feel happy in it. The people with the most accurate notion of the actual extent of our control of our lives are the clinically depressed.

So where does art fit into all of this? Well, I began to think about the relationship between literature, pleasure, planning and control when I was reading John Carey’s chapter entitled ‘Do the arts make us better?’ and his answer was coming out a resounding ‘no’. Now it’s undeniably true that one of the justifications for art is that it can teach us something, or improve us in some way. But after I’d thought about this for a while I began to wonder why on earth anyone would assume that looking at a painting or reading a book would make us ‘better’? That seems a huge burden of responsibility to place upon an activity that is essentially a form of entertainment, and a huge shifting of what is our own duty of responsibility to ourselves to find a path through the obstacles of existence. But then at the same time, it all suddenly explained the 18^th century to me, which is the historical moment when the belief that art has improving properties really took root. The 18^th century was also the time when those same thinkers and writers who were creating the art believed wholeheartedly that the planning issue for mankind was finally under control. The optimism of the 18^th century was fueled by the conviction that humanity was ‘teleological’, that’s to say tending towards its own perfection. That’s right, they were convinced that as a civilization we were just going to get better and better until we were perfect, and art and science were going to help us. Since then it’s pretty much been downhill all the way, as life has become increasingly complex and has proved consistently resistant to our attempts to master it. It’s no wonder we’d like to put the blame somewhere.

What’s really odd, however, is the way that people have thought that art might improve us. Across the nineteenth century, art was considered to be a way to improve the poor. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Chicago’s Art Institute were both founded with the belief that they ‘could function as unifying, democratizing forces in society, allaying fears aroused by strikes and workers’ riots, and transforming American cities by lifting the inhabitants above the material concerns of life’, according to Carey. The founder of the Metropolitan museum declared that ‘knowledge of art in its higher forms of beauty would tend directly to humanize, to educate and to refine a practical and laborious people.’ This sounds ridiculous, right? But to this day things haven’t changed much. The American arts-education expert Elliot W. Eisner in his book The Arts and the Creation of the Mind (2002) can only suggest that students of the arts will have more refined perceptive abilities, developing the ability, for instance ‘to notice the patterns of sunlight on a wall, or the countenance of a homeless person pushing an overloaded shopping cart down the street.’ You have to hand it to John Carey; example-wise no one finds better turkeys than he does. It’s small wonder that people sneer at the ‘use value’ of the arts, if this is the best they can come up with as its selling points.

How much more likely, given what Daniel Gilbert is saying, that we find pleasure in literature, for instance, because it gives us a spurious sense of understanding the world better, and being therefore more able to master and control it. The basic premise of stories is to represent a conflict and speculate on the ways it could develop. If we feel anxious about the events that might happen to us in life, then storytelling is a wonderful way to increase our possibilities in the planning department, offering us a tremendous store of solutions, consequences, possible outcomes and manipulative strategies to choose from. Literature rehearses for us all kinds of likely and unlikely situations, and provides those delicious anticipatory, imaginary pleasures we are so hungry for, as well as reassuring, or at least interesting, conclusions with which to assuage our anxieties.

And yet, for all that this may be one of the reasons why we turn to art, there is still no evidence that it makes us better people. The real revelation of Daniel Gilbert’s book gave me an intriguingly possible explanation for this, too. For all that we are profoundly anticipatory creatures, forever imagining ourselves in the future and projecting the ways we can maximize pleasure and minimize pain, Gilbert suggests that we are seriously bad at actually understanding what it is we want. It is so very often the case that the things we think will make us happy fail to do so. Even when all our carefully laid plans come off, we find ourselves in a place that really isn’t all it was cracked up to be. Now, given that literature is a pure product of our imaginations, a product of the very home of anticipatory planning, is it not quite likely that the answers to the questions it sets are slightly off-kilter when it comes to reality? Of course a lot of literature is all about taking a wry and ironic stance towards the objects of our desires, and given that we can’t anticipate accurately what makes us happy, a certain distance from our own control freakery is perhaps a wise thing to embrace. But that’s still not the education and enlightenment Carey seems to suggest we seek. So what I’m proposing is that we take the heat off the arts and stop expecting them to make life any better for us, except perhaps in the delightful company they offer, the amusement and distraction they afford, whilst we struggle in reality to rein in our planning, controlling propensities, and find a way to live with a little more spontaneity and detachment.