In HAP 101 we're doing drugs: Jennifer Hecht's "Drugs," in The Happiness Myth.
My drug of choice, as it says right there on my old mug from the Upstart Crow in San Diego, is caffeine. It’s never failed me yet. I don’t usually feel enraptured by it, but yes: I do enjoy needing it.
"The happiness provided by tea should not be underestimated," either.
Last time I gave serious thought to JMH’s discussion of drugs & happiness, her perspective seemed a bit ”wicked“– not in a bad way, necessarily, just out of step with the conventional mores of the moment. No drugs are good or bad on her view, apparently, but thinking makes it so. And culture.
That sounds rash, but wait:
Our attitude reflects a “dumb” obsession with productivity, and perhaps a dumber unexamined Puritanism (“pharmacological Calvinism”) about pleasure in every form. Just link a drug to increased productivity, and downplay the pleasure angle, if you want FDA or general public approval for your drug of choice. Mine is home free on both counts. Red Label is out, in the college cafeteria, while Red Bull is in. “This is not about health; it is about culture.”
But isn’t it also about mental health and the health of our relationships, the tenability of our habits and the plausibility of our goals? She quotes William James approvingly in his famous “sobriety diminishes” passage , but omits the full story. Yes, he acknowledges the “poison” of drunkenness while still sort of “praising it anyway.” But he also deplores the unsustainability of entheogenically-induced transcendence. A tragic unsustainability, true, but inescapable nonetheless. [SPGS]
So, do we think there’s a respectable place for deliberately-altered states of consciousness in our personal and communal pursuit of happiness? What do we tell the kids, especially when they ask what we did in the counter-culture war?
I tell them everything is chemistry (human & world chemistry share a “porous border”) and there are “natural” ways of tripping your own wires and living better. And of course, we need to address the question of what “natural” even means. What isn’t? What makes the nature synthesized by nature’s children problematically artificial? Anyway, “drugs are in our world like food and sunshine.” Bon appetit, Epicureans, but don’t eat like pigs. Even Socrates feasted at the Symposium, and was well-satisfied.
Maybe, but isn’t the internal experience the same? That’s not the whole issue, of course, but it’s at least coeval with the relational consequences of dialing up a different thermostatic setting.
Last time I gave serious thought to JMH’s discussion of drugs & happiness, her perspective seemed a bit ”wicked“– not in a bad way, necessarily, just out of step with the conventional mores of the moment. No drugs are good or bad on her view, apparently, but thinking makes it so. And culture.
Overall, our public rhetoric is mythically against drugs, and yet our individual lives include all sorts of intoxicants, stimulants, antidepressants, and other happiness drugs. It is powerful simply to realize that all these different drugs, the “good” and the “bad,” are essentially the same: they are potions people use to get a little happy.
That sounds rash, but wait:
Drugs can be dangerous; either the illegal or the legal ones may affect your health or turn out to be more than you can handle. But that is not enough to explain our attitude toward them.
Our attitude reflects a “dumb” obsession with productivity, and perhaps a dumber unexamined Puritanism (“pharmacological Calvinism”) about pleasure in every form. Just link a drug to increased productivity, and downplay the pleasure angle, if you want FDA or general public approval for your drug of choice. Mine is home free on both counts. Red Label is out, in the college cafeteria, while Red Bull is in. “This is not about health; it is about culture.”
But isn’t it also about mental health and the health of our relationships, the tenability of our habits and the plausibility of our goals? She quotes William James approvingly in his famous “sobriety diminishes” passage , but omits the full story. Yes, he acknowledges the “poison” of drunkenness while still sort of “praising it anyway.” But he also deplores the unsustainability of entheogenically-induced transcendence. A tragic unsustainability, true, but inescapable nonetheless. [SPGS]
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the YES function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole. VRE
So, do we think there’s a respectable place for deliberately-altered states of consciousness in our personal and communal pursuit of happiness? What do we tell the kids, especially when they ask what we did in the counter-culture war?
I tell them everything is chemistry (human & world chemistry share a “porous border”) and there are “natural” ways of tripping your own wires and living better. And of course, we need to address the question of what “natural” even means. What isn’t? What makes the nature synthesized by nature’s children problematically artificial? Anyway, “drugs are in our world like food and sunshine.” Bon appetit, Epicureans, but don’t eat like pigs. Even Socrates feasted at the Symposium, and was well-satisfied.
Can true happiness be drugged happiness? You were happy today. Does the fact that you had two cups of strong coffee and a dose of over-the- counter painkiller have anything to do with our assessment of this happiness?
Maybe, but isn’t the internal experience the same? That’s not the whole issue, of course, but it’s at least coeval with the relational consequences of dialing up a different thermostatic setting.
JMH hates the gym, but physical exercise is the best “medicine” of all. Forget the treadmill and stair-stepper, if you wish. (I actually enjoy them, on cold gray and rainy days.) Walk, run, bike, hike, or even pull weeds, whatever: all can take you higher. So, kids, if you’re asking me I suggest you try that first thing.
Or second. A good cup of coffee is my first pleasure. Gets me out of bed and through every dawn, often leaving a perfectly legal “illegal smile” that lasts the morning. Or until my walk. Or until my sunset whiskey.
The joy of bourbon drinking [said Walker Percy] is not the pharmacological effect of C2H5OH on the cortex but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little explosion of Kentucky USA sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime—aesthetic considerations to which the effect of the alcohol is, if not dispensable, at least secondary. SPGS
Maybe that’s an escape from reality, or maybe it’s a point of entry. Either way, I’d also tell the kids not to stay too long on either side of the gate. Sunset will come again, as well as the dawn’s first cup. Just keep moving. But imagine: a world that respected and valued H.G. Wells’s trips “beyond the door,” just because they showed us other possibilities. You may say I’m a dreamer…
Or a poet. Raymond Carver was probably right: happiness comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it. But I’m enjoying this dawn post too much to heed his warning. Philosophers and poets are pathfinders, after all. “What everyone can feel, what everyone can know in the bone and marrow, philosophers and poets sometimes can find words for and express.” (WJ) Or try.
Drugs can provide true euphoria, and they can provide great-day happiness. They cannot provide the goods of good-life happiness, [which] absolutely requires putting in a variety of tiring efforts, many of which are better done sober.
Well, unless you count being drunk on morning Tennessee USA sunshine. And why wouldn't you?
Finally I’d tell the kids to check out JMH’s longish list of “some of the things long-term happiness requires in the short term” (126) and add to it. Nobody else’s list will quite suffice. JMH’s includes happy-making consumables, tending to family & other relationships, taking a walk (good for her!), and studying for exams. Really.
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