howardpark

Happiness may seem like a pretty nebulous concept, but psychologists like Martin Seligman have been doing their best to study it scientifically. This field is called Positive Psychology, and over the past few decades its practitioners have come up with some interesting results.

"Contrary to everything you might think, 'in the long run, it doesn't much matter what happens to you,' [Jonathan] Haidt writes.... 'It's better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you'd think.... Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both (on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of happiness.'

"The study showed that people were most content when they were experiencing... 'the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one's abilities.' We are at our happiest when we are absorbed in what we are doing.... [Happiness is] 'a by-product of absorption.'

"A person in good health in a Western liberal democracy is, in terms of his objective circumstances, one of the most fortunate human beings ever to have walked the surface of the earth. [People in the past] would have regarded our easy, long, riskless lives with incredulous envy. They would have regarded us as so lucky that questions about our state of mind wouldn't be worth asking. It is a perverse consequence of our fortunate condition that the question of our happiness, or lack of it, presses unhappily hard on us." (John Lanchester, "Pursuing Happiness")

In short, your attitude has a much stronger effect on your happiness than any external event does. If you want to be happy, do something you're good at. And even the people who have the most to be happy about can find reasons to be unhappy.

If you were to ask an art historian about landscape painters, two names that would probably come up are Constable (above) and Ruisdael (below). John Constable was an English painter born in 1776, the year of the American Revolution. Jacob van Ruisdael was a Dutch painter who lived a century before him. They had some similar ideas about how to paint a landscape. For instance, they both considered the sky a matter of maximum importance; they thought of it as a dome of light that controlled the appearance of every other part of the painting. But in one important way, they were diametrically opposed. Ruisdael felt free to paint from his imagination and "improve" on reality. Constable felt that imagination could never surpass reality. For him, the highest goal of a landscape painter was to observe and understand nature.

Should art try to be better than life? Or is that merely self-delusion? Both sides have a point, but I'm a fan of better-than-life. Sure Constable is the purer artist, sticking to his principles... but his pictures don't make me long for another time and place, the way Ruisdael's do. What's wrong with a little outrageous invention if it produces pleasure? For me, enjoyment is everything; artistic principles are nothing.

Speaking of landscapes giving pleasure, my friend ShirlT made and sent me a beautiful painting for my birthday. Deepest thanks, Shirl! Her paintings can be viewed online here.


(The first painting is John Constable's Stour Valley and Dedham Church. The second is Jacob van Ruisdael's Bentheim Castle.)

Thumbs-up on this site.
But be warned: too much time here
Will make you talk weird.

"I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting--its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers.... it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation." (General William T. Sherman, 1865)


When he was proposed as a candidate for President, Sherman replied, "If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve."

King's Academy is a rigorous and progressive boarding school modeled on Deerfield Academy (of which HM King Abdullah II is an alumnus). If you want to spread tolerance and humanism in the Middle East, you do it with schools, not bombs! (President Bush, please take notes, or at least try.)


This is the school, outside Amman, Jordan, where I will be teaching 9th-grade World History and 10th-grade Middle Eastern History, beginning this fall. I will also be living in the dorms as a faculty advisor. On this map, the dorms are on the far side of campus (around building 22).

As this graph shows, "terrorism" is a much smaller threat than some people would like us to believe. Even if America suffered a 9/11-style attack every week, the damage (in terms of lives, money, and productivity lost) would be far less than what we routinely suffer from tobacco and its purveyors. But damage, in the sense of destroying one's enemy, isn't the purpose of these attacks. Educated "terrorists" such as Osama bin Laden know that even the most spectacular acts of destruction have no chance of defeating a powerful, prosperous nation-state--let alone the most powerful, prosperous nation-state in the history of the world. His purpose, as he has stated many times in his writings and messages, is to cause the U.S. government to overreact and make costly, self-destructive mistakes (such as the invason of Iraq), setting us on the path of long-term decline. It's like an ant stinging an elephant and infuriating it to such a degree that it falls off a cliff. In this light, 9/11 was a trap, and our president fell right into it.

(Thanks to Marcus-Lycus for this picture.)