Episode Transcript  

One

Happiness as the Starting Point

St. Augustine said that when we’re asking ourselves about how we want to live, the starting point should always be happiness. Why? For two reasons: First, because everybody can agree on it. Everybody wants to be happy. And secondly, because it keeps moral and ethical discussion concrete and practical. Whenever things start to sound abstract, you can just say, “Hold on. Let’s make it simple. Does this action really lead you to happiness or not?”

But in order to really use happiness as a clear standard for your life, you need happiness itself to be something you really understand. Something of which you have a clear, detailed idea.

So what, exactly, does happiness look like?

Two

Ingredients for Happiness

To be truly, perfectly happy, you’d have to have every basic human desire satisfied. So one way to think about happiness is just to list out our desires and show how we all desire basically the same things. That’s why the late Catholic ethicist Germain Grisez came up with a list of every fundamental human desire. Here it is, the seven basic things we all want:

First of all, we all want physical goods. We all want things like health, rest, nutrition, and hydration. That’s one. We all want beauty. That’s why we watch movies and listen to music and are attracted to people of the opposite sex, and why we decorate and clean our houses. That’s two. We all want to achieve something. That’s why we compete in sports, and try to do something worthwhile in our work, and why we form families. We want what we do to matter. So that’s three. We all want to know things. We want truth, which is why we read the news and watch informative videos and listen to podcasts, and value education generally. So that’s four. We all want inner peace. We want to be not conflicted, or anxious, or depressed. The search for inner peace is why we go to therapists, and why some people do yoga or practice mindfulness. So that’s five. We all want loving relationships with other human beings. That’s why we want friends and family, why they’re so important to us. We are social animals, and other people mean so much to us. So that’s six. We also all want some relationship with persons that are beyond the human. This is why there are so many religions, and why even atheists are so desperate to try to talk to gorillas or try to make contact with aliens. Because we all want to believe that there is a world of persons beyond the human, and that we can somehow access that world. Ultimately, we want a good relationship with God. That’s seven.

That’s it. That’s happiness. That’s what we all want. The problem is, we really don’t stop and think about how we’re going to get it.

Three

The Temptation to Neglect and Attack the Basic Goods

When we don’t have the strategy and the discipline to really pursue happiness holistically, we end up pursuing some goods by neglecting or attacking others. 

So, for example, sometimes we pursue physical goods in an inappropriate way. Gluttony, for instance, is the pursuit of food until it damages health, and fornication is the pursuit of sexual gratification at the expense of the proper relationship between a man and a woman. In the case of the good of knowledge, one sometimes willingly listens to gossip or scandal. There is also today a widespread mania for knowing things which are degrading, or none of our business (e.g., the intimate and often sordid details of celebrities’ personal lives). All of this idle curiosity is really a hindrance to the healthy development of other aspects of our lives.

With the good of beauty, we see many instances of inappropriate pursuit. Pornography seeks to promote physical beauty at the expense of personal beauty, as does immodesty in dress. Also, often we listen to music or watch movies with evil messages, foul images, or sacrilegious themes. This is a pursuit of beauty that involves an attack on truth, on personal relationships, or on God.

It’s not hard to recognize the person who strives after achievement in a disordered manner. This person steps on others who get in his way up the ladder; he dismisses beauty, friendships, knowledge, and psychological well-being as mere distractions from his career. Such a one causes great unhappiness to himself and to others.

The same goes for a person who pursues “inner peace” at the expense of everything else. These folks become so caught up in their own imminent world that they refuse to do anything that “they don’t feel like doing,” or anything that’s just “not them.”  They say ridiculously self-centered things like, “That’s not what I’m all about,” or “I can’t change who I am,” as an excuse for not pursuing all the goods they should be working towards.  They forget that sometimes the person must change themselves and do what is difficult in order to attain happiness.

Personal relationships can also become an obsession that leads to hurtful decisions.  We will sometimes do anything, no matter how despicable, to “fit in” or to get someone to like us.  Criticizing others, compromising conviction, using foul language, agreeing to impure acts, and other shameless striving for popularity are common occurrences.

Even pursuits of religion can directly attack other goods.  For example, certain forms of puritanism rejected many forms of art and beauty, some ancient religions demanded human sacrifice, some religions practice ritual sexual perversion, and some religions advocate hatred of those who don’t belong to them.

The point is, it’s not enough for happiness that we pursue these things. We have to pursue them the right way. And that’s what virtue means.

Four

Virtue – Pursuing Happiness the Right Way

The cardinal virtues help us become excellent at pursuing the goods and pursuing them in an integrated, not destructive way. Prudence shows us what the goods are, and how to strategically pursue them in a way that doesn’t damage any of them. Justice helps us preserve the goods of achievement and inner peace and beauty and truth in a way that doesn’t conflict with our relationship with God and neighbor. Fortitude gives us the energy and strength to pursue happiness relentlessly. It keeps us from neglecting goods we should pursue. And temperance gives us the self-control to not get off-track by pursuing lesser goods in a way that destroys our capacity for greater ones.

These are the virtues listed in the book of Wisdom (chapter 8:7), because the wise man makes a plan for happiness, and follows it, using these core virtues. But the wise man also knows that perfect happiness, the perfect attainment of all the goods, isn’t found in this life. And so the theological virtues are what bring our earthly quest for happiness to its heavenly fulfillment.

Five

Faith, Hope, and Charity

Union with God Himself is the only complete happiness. The only utterly satisfying experience of bodiliness, of truth, accomplishment, beauty, peace, and community. By the virtue of faith, we receive the instructions we need to arrange earthly goods so that they lead to heavenly goods. By the virtue of hope, we keep our focus on perfect happiness in Heaven. And by the virtue of charity, we experience the ultimate joy where we learn to delight in the supreme good, the good that contains all other goods, that is, the love of God.

This is what the path to happiness looks like. This is how we get everything and lose nothing. This is what we should be working towards all the time.

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