Article summary of From the Paleolithic to the present: Three revolutions in the global history of happiness by McMahon. - Chapter

What is this article about?

This article explains what the three crucial turning points or revolutions have been in the world history of happiness. All these revolutions have had a significant impact in how people experience and understand happiness. 

It is always difficult to measure happiness. There will never be a perfectly reliable instrument that allows us to measure another person's well-being with complete and total certainty. But there are a lot of tools that can be used to come close to measuring someone's happiness, such as scales, questionnaires, experience sampling and a range of physical measures. What is even more difficult, is measuring the happiness of the dead. Historians can make theories of how happy people were in certain times, but they can only use proxy data. Lower levels of slavery, war, or famine would probably correspond to higher levels of happiness in the general public. With this kind of research, there can be made out a history of happiness. If we understand how happiness was conceived, experienced, and defined in the past, we get a better grip on happiness in the present and the future.

What were the earliest developments of happiness?

The further into the history, the more difficult it is to give an answer to the question of how happy people were. There are a lot of myths of an initial paradise where people were completely happy. These myths do seem to match scientific research. Archeologists and anthropologists have found that early human existence, roughly 12,000 years ago, was surprisingly prosperous. The diet was abundant, varied, and nutritious. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors seem to have been relatively well-fed. It can be seen in skeletons and dental remains, that hunter-gatherers were less likely to experience starvation or malnutrition and were healthier than the farmer-peasants of later periods. Average life-expectancy for those who survived the first five years after childbirth was upwards of sixty years. This is more than most human societies up until the time of the industrial revolution. That the average life-expectancy plummeted after that, was due to infectious diseases and large-scale epidemics born of high-density populations and domesticated livestock, and also war because everything became scarcer as more people started to inhibit earth. Hunter-gatherers have also had the most average free time in history. 

It is important to stay aware of the fact that the life of hunter-gatherers was not nearly as perfect as we might imagine in our myths of paradise. Hunter-gatherers were very susceptible to attack by predators such as other big animals and other members of the genus Homo. Evidence of this is found in mass grave sites with skeletons with shattered skulls and severed limbs. There were also long winters in the ice ages that were difficult to live in. 

Agriculture permitted accumulation and surplus, which could then be transmitted to one's offspring, perpetuating status and power. Together with concentrated state power, that became necessary with the fast growing populations, this has created inequalities among people. Those who were able to concentrate the surplus wealth generated by farmers, benefited from this revolution. But the vast majority of people became lowly peasants and laborers that were tied to the land, had to work a lot more in harder and more monotonous jobs, lived in bad circumstances in crowded places and had a less varied and nutritious diet. History is not an inevitable march of progress. The first revolution of human happiness, our exit from our hunter-gatherer past, was an unhappy one. 

The earliest recorded words for happiness in almost every human language have a connotation with the word fortune or luck. For people who were always subject to twists of fate, such as plagues and wars, it was difficult to imagine happiness as something that could endure and even less as something that one could control. The worldview was hostile and unpredictable and suffering was the norm. In such a world, happiness is elusive and fleeting.

How did happiness develop in the Axial Age?

The Axial Age is a term coined by philosopher Karl Jaspers for the time period of 800-200 BC. This was the period that witnessed the emergence of the world's great religious and wisdom traditions. Other traditions would follow, but they were all based on the spiritual foundations already established. The Axial Age brought spiritual values to humanity.

A lot of scholars think that the Axial religions reconceived and redefined human happiness, although each in its own way. People started to think about what could be beyond their own life, making it possible to fantasize about better times. People also started to seriously question whether worldly prosperity would lead to more happiness.

The idea came up that genuine happiness required more than material wealth, like a connection to God(s), Goodness or Truth. "Ordinary" happiness was rejected. So hedonic happiness was rejected for eudaimonic happiness. Eudaimonic happiness is less a good feeling or enjoyment for its own sake, but more a well lived life, something to be proud of. Happiness could only be obtained by cultivation of strengths of character and mind. So, happiness did become something to work towards and hope for, not just a turn of the wheel of fortune, but it was still not expected or assumed.

What is the revolution in human expectations?

Around 1800 the economic condition of the average human being in the world was no better than it had been in the Stone Age. But then there was the Industrial Revolution. Scholars point out that around 1800 people began to speak and write more about how to create happiness in this life, instead of only in the afterlife. The benevolent God would also want us to be happy now. These changes in religious reflection made the pursuit of happiness on earth possible.

There was also the idea of the Enlightenment that we as rational beings are perfectly capable of understanding the world and making it better. Together, this created the idea that human beings were meant to be happy and that one should work on his happiness. This also motivated people to develop economically. The dramatic economic growth that followed, however imperfectly distributed between countries and classes, only fed the expectations that everyone who worked towards it could be happy and rich. 

The dominant ideological systems of the 19th and 20th centuries helped to spread the prospect of happiness to ever wider segments of the world. This had the result that today most people are being raised in environments that inspire the pursuit of earthly happiness and encourage expectations that it will be found.