Bu ödevi hocam Radikal 2'ye gönderebileceğimi söylemişti ben de burda yayımlamaya karar verdim:
Decline of Happiness with the Decline of “Social Capital” and Search for
Happiness in the Individualistic Life
Many of us are looking for happiness
nowadays as the humanity did for years and years. Some may call this luxury,
ease that has come with technology, some call it a family, children and some
call it being independent economically. Some call it being with the loved ones.
Some call it earning good money. Some call it a good standard of living, some
call it being amongst friends. There are many diverse understandings of
happiness and there are many different ways of reaching it. But today’s world for
sure tries to give answers to the questions like the Epicureans or the Cynics
do. To clarify the answer, happiness today is understood more like “a negation
of societal bonds” and replacement of it by self-sufficiency. To need people
either as a part of civil society, or family, or friends or being dependent on
someone is not very much appreciated or understood in a positive manner. A
social fact is that today, social bonds are replaced by religious bonds[1].
One reason behind is that the human-being is excluded from the public space
despite the fact that the human-being is completely is a social and public animal
as Aristotle would indicate.
Does the individual
choose to be excluded? There are two answers to this question. First answer is
that the individual chooses to be excluded not to get into much trouble like
the Cynics would do, to attain inner peace that s/he cannot find in the
workplace in most of the cases. Secondly, it is like a self-censor that there
are subjects in our minds which are taboos and there are ones which are
acceptable (not “harmful”) to discuss. The taboos are composed of issued deeply
related to the current political problems. Actually everyone is talking about
politics but the matter is that maybe things are being discussed like the
Sophists, more like the rhetoric rather than the deeper meaning that also
involves memory, consistency and logic. In other words, to simplify the issue, the
act of discussing even about the decisions that could affect our daily lives is
absent from our lives. There is no activity, Aristotle would say in this case,
that would make us good, that would make us virtuous and happy. We are living
like in the age of empire, where we are a part of the crowd, lost and faceless
and do not feel any bonds to each other. Everybody has their own hobby, own
area of self-sufficiency and self-satisfaction. Diversity, cosmopolitanism,
individualism are the highest goods of the day and what about the common and
essential deficiencies that influence our lives? Most basic example would be
not being able to discuss with the neighbors whether to put a recycling bin in
front of the apartment blocs or not. Even this simple gathering seems unthinkable
amongst the people who even do not know each other.
Therefore, here, what Aristotle
says come into the fore: “The good can be reached through action” You can
become good through the action you do. It is the deeds of a person which makes
him or her a good person, not what he says or what he feels but what he does. And
according to him, a good friendship can bring happiness while a good contemplative
life will bring the highest happiness of all as he sees intellect as the highest
quality of the human-being. Aristotle (p.303) says “Happiness in its highest
and best manifestations is found in cultivating a contemplative life.”
Intellect provides us the possibility of a continuous action, no other physical
action can be continuous even though they might give us happiness. “Happiness
is not in need of anything. It is self-sufficient.” (p.301) Other than real
friendship and using one’s intellect, being in the community is also a way of
reaching the good and the happiness (Eudomonia).
Like Plato, he gives
importance to being in the community and having true friends (friends other
than those of utilitarian). For Aristotle, neither fortune, nor pleasures of the
body can lead a person to a good life and to happiness. “Fortune can create
means but it cannot create happiness” (p.43). However, happiness is reflected
as something that is more materialistic in our society not as something social
or political.
In many of the
advertisements today the script writers use the feelings and thoughts that
correspond to a perfect material: A car of our dreams, a house of our dreams. The
advertisements sneak into our house, our brains and tell us what we have dreamt
of, they tell us what would make us happy, what we are longing for. What would
make us happy? According to the advertisers, a material that makes our lives
more fun, more attractive, more feel-at-home or more charismatic, could make us
happy. Something that makes the person who owns it more sexy. Materials in one
sense are seen as a way to happiness. The end is happiness and the means is to
acquire that material. However, if the good leads to happiness and if happiness
is good, then how can one acquire happiness through a material if not through
good actions and good deeds? This is the dilemma of today. There is some contradiction
in this understanding with the understanding of Aristotle. Happiness is
self-sufficient, you do not need anything else to be happy. And prosperity can
be the means but it cannot create happiness.
When we look good, when
we have a good car, a good house we have the right to be happy. One of the
advertisements of a car brand says: “You want to rebel, you want to say no, you
want to be different, you want to be extraordinary” and then comes a car and is
the advertiser expecting that we will be associate happiness with a car? All
these rebellious and sensational texts and background voices end up in
materialistic assumptions and materialistic shows. How then can I think of
happiness if I am not going to own this car? Then those people who cannot have
the car will never become rebels, they will never say no, they will
unfortunately doomed to a life devoid of happiness. However, happiness as
defined by Aristotle is quite different from what the advertisers assume.
Happiness in Aristotle
is closely related to the good deeds. I can seek for pleasure or honor as an
end too but they are different from happiness and good. Happiness is chosen for
its own sake and not for the sake of anything else, as he explains. Our souls
(p. 62) are composed of “feelings, capacities and dispositions”. He says that
“we are not praised for the way we feel” (p.63) but “we are praised for our
virtues and vices” (ibid.) “Virtues are neither feelings nor capacities they
must be dispositions”. He certainly makes a realistic approach to the human
soul which likes to reach to pleasure and which is actually also very much
inclined to make mistakes but one cannot blame the others for the mistakes s/he
had done. “The act is in you” he underlines. We cannot rely on feelings that
can change or we cannot rely on capacities which differ in each but we can rely
on dispositions which necessarily have to avoid extremes to be happy.
Aristotle used “eidaimonia”
for happiness which is different from the hedonic experience. Believing in the
personal realization, Aristotle, similar to Plato’s views support the view that
self-expressiveness is really important to reach eidaimonia. City-state is an ideal
place to reach this, in the bounds of friendship, where you can socialize and become
a part of the community. In line with the arguments above: The people had
become less happy as they have less social ties and as they had become less political
(self-censoring oneself). And this reminds one the declining social capital. I
believe that there is a strong correlation between the unhappy people of today
and social capital that is declining everywhere, not only in the USA[2].
According to the research
in the USA
by Putnam (1995), he found out that the more educated the people get, the less social
they became. There was a serious decline in the membership to the civil society
or other social groups. The number of civil society organizations have decreased
and the fact that people are participants in this or that group became very
much limited. The people are mostly socializing with their work place friends
and not more than this interaction. Therefore, today’s meaning of happiness is
quite related to being a self-sufficient individual (have your own work, own
life, be independent and free) and not being social during this process.
However, there is something more interesting in this research that is
conflicting with the theory of Aristotle. It is only through education one can
socialize and become self-expressive as Aristotle would say but then how come
the more educated people become less social and less happy? In here, my
assumption is that the education that we are having today has changed its context.
It is true that education raises our expectations by refining our tastes but
does it tie our hands to act? Maybe it has become so. Education has dropped its
connection with action:
“Yet increase in education and sensitivity
brings with it increase in the number of desires, and a corresponding lesser
likelihood of their satisfaction. Instruction and emancipation in one way favor
happiness and in another militate against it. To increase a person's chances of
happiness, in the sense of fullness of life, is eo ipso to decrease his chances
of happiness, in the other way it militates against it.” (Kenny, 1966: 102)
Kenny indicates that education level
has increased, social capital decreased and happiness might have also
decreased. This can be both due to the decline of the social capital and the
education system which taught us not to be contemplative but maybe education
has become something instrumental in itself, too. Something not as an aim but
something to make us find a good job, get a good life and earn good money. It
is not contemplation as Aristotle says, it is just means to something, it is a
means to the better life.
Happiness is taught to
us at school. It is taught and reflected in the advertisements, movies, series
and everything. If all the advertisements were turned in a reverse way saying “you
want to be free, then protest (rather than having a car)” would not people
protest more? I am not saying that people have become herds but I can claim
that people are using their instrumental minds more and more and they do not
really question with an autonomy of the mind, what they are serving for or what
their main aim is for. This is also closely related to the question of who we
are and what we make of ourselves. If I am taught that buying a red sweater
will make me happy, and I will buy it and become happy. If I am taught that
discussing a book makes me happy I will be happy discussing a book. If I am
taught friendship gives happiness, I will be happy with my friends and having
friends. For this reason, even what is taught by the education system and what
is supposed by the advertisements can be questioned. What is admired by the
society, what is seen as prudent ethical and prestigious are all the artificial
parts of happiness. Unless a person is happy in what she is doing, unless that
person is happy in the acts s/he is in that is not possible for that person to
reach happiness easily even though that person has fortune, prestige and
everything that s/he desires. Happiness is something more metaphysical.
To conclude, a good man
will seek happiness as an end, being included in the social context s/he will
be happy. This is one of the reasons why today everybody is talking about
happiness but the word is empty inside as nobody thinks of the aim. And this is
why social capital has declined as social trust has declined because the
context makes us think in a materialistic way. Utilitarian friendships are on
the rise.
Lastly, another question
related to these was this: Can happiness be taught to a person? It can be
taught as pain is happiness and then even if the natural inclination does not
accept it the word happiness is embedded with different meanings on the
advertisements and in the education system. In order to understand what is the
aim and what is happiness, we should be clearly able to see and understand what
exactly makes one person happy and what makes one person unhappy. I believe
that contrast between them is also very much crucial. Nowadays we can say that
success, a good relationship, living in a big city, having a house and a car
are might be accepted as means to happiness. However, the mind is working in a
more and more instrumental way forgetting about the Aim Happiness. What if one
follows each mean to this end? On the other hand, if the aim is happiness would
following each ways and reaching happiness make you happy or would you feel you
are deprived of happiness while you were going through this way to reach the
Aim Happiness? I do not want to be too of an ethicist. Can a person be just if
the way to justice went through injustice? This is another way to ask it if we
think of good, happiness and justice as the ends.
Bibliography
Thomson, J.A.K., (1955) The Ethics
of Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics Translated, Penguin Classic.
Putnam, R. (1995) “Tuning In, Tuning
Out: The Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America”, Political Science and
Politics.
Kenny, A (1966) “Happiness”
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 66 (1965-1966), pp.
93-102.
[1] It is very interesting to see a statement on
the board in Bogazici
University: “The brothers
of religion are for deterring each other from bad and leading each other to the
good.” The friendship that Aristotle defines is re-defined and adopted by
friends/groups tied to each other religiously.
[2] It is not right to say
this without any basis but it is possible to claim this fact for Turkey because
in Turkey people while talking mostly self-censor themselves, politics and
social relations is mostly emanating from the social pressure rather than doing
something together, discussing or acting together. There is always something to
say and not to say. This is close to what Foucault has said: Governance is in
our everyday life.
Yorumlar
Yorum Gönder