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What is happiness? Richard Layard, one of Britain's best-known economists and a world expert on inequality, doesn't shy from the challenge: "Happiness is feeling good, and misery is feeling bad." He continues: "It is supremely important because it is our overall motivational device." Not to put too fine of a point on it, "The search for good feeling is the mechanism that has preserved and multiplied the human race." The philosopher Jennifer Michael Hecht, well-known author of a book about doubt, says "Happiness is feeling good." Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, who strikes me as hilarious (and happy), claims happiness is "the you-know-what-I-mean-feeling." Even Darrin McMahon, after his poetic exploration of the history of ideas, finds a way—when his final chapter comes to the contemporary situation—to morph the word "happiness" into feeling good. For two centuries voices in the rodeo have announced that happiness is pleasure, it is a right, it is achievable in the here and now, and they or at least their publisher knows how to get it. For such folks, happiness is subjective, it is feeling good about myself, and, as both Layard and Arthur C. Brooks have argued, it is worthy of central focus in both politics and economics. And yet, like Civita's tufa, this understanding of happiness—so widely shared, so commonsensical—has long been eroding before our eyes.
Happiness: "Defac't, deflourd, and now to Death devote?"Long ago, of course, Jesus and St. Paul, Augustine and Luther warned against any conception of happiness anchored exclusively in this world. Not only were the latter two bathed in the early Christian eschatological hope that sanctified suffering in this world as the lot of those who followed the crucified Lord, but they had both absorbed enough dualism from Plato to know that gazing at de civitate Dei turned one's eyes from the civitas terrena. We are, they both thought, civitas peregrina, resident aliens in the vale of tears. Luther absorbed and extended Augustine's anthropology in a way that turned the Christian into simul iustus et peccator because, after all, the righteousness of a Christian is iustitia aliena. This alien righteousness dug deeply into the heart, but it what it created was a yearning for the City of God.
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