If there were a metric for happiness and you could measure it historically… ok, it is nonsense.
I don’t think the article is nonsensical, but it certainly is confusing. He seems to be mixing two topics without noticing it. 1) Doesn’t money and physical wealth bring happiness? Good question, maybe good point, hard to define happiness, etc. Speak to your local philosopher or local rabbi. 2) Does modern civilization bring money and physical wealth and better health? I would think that the answer is, Obviously yes. Bjorn Lomborg has described a number of measures showing that pretty much everyone in the world is vastly wealthier and healther than they were a century ago. Most of us would think that countering with, “Yes, but hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago were quite healthy until they were eaten by sabre-tooth tigers or died of an abcessed cut!” isn’t gonna do it.
“True or false, the practical impact of such alternative views is minimal. For the capitalist juggernaut, happiness is pleasure. Full stop.”
For an alleged historian, he sure is taking things very superficially. Even if all his other assertions and wishful thinking were correct, namely, that history is really the study of historical happiness and those global happiness levels and that it were just a matter of throwing batteries into the ol’ global happiness detector and dialing in April 14,1343, we still have the problem that he chooses to use a standard for happiness that doesn’t make sense.
Will the capitalist juggernaut which is supposedly enforcing this standard be around till the end of time? I’d have to say that human society and our perception of what is happiness don’t seem very static. So why use as your standard something that’s likely to be pretty ephemeral (even if we really could apply it globally today, even though I doubt most people alive today actually would consider it happiness) and inapplicable before modern times?
If there were a metric for happiness and you could measure it historically… ok, it is nonsense.
I don’t think the article is nonsensical, but it certainly is confusing. He seems to be mixing two topics without noticing it. 1) Doesn’t money and physical wealth bring happiness? Good question, maybe good point, hard to define happiness, etc. Speak to your local philosopher or local rabbi. 2) Does modern civilization bring money and physical wealth and better health? I would think that the answer is, Obviously yes. Bjorn Lomborg has described a number of measures showing that pretty much everyone in the world is vastly wealthier and healther than they were a century ago. Most of us would think that countering with, “Yes, but hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago were quite healthy until they were eaten by sabre-tooth tigers or died of an abcessed cut!” isn’t gonna do it.
For an alleged historian, he sure is taking things very superficially. Even if all his other assertions and wishful thinking were correct, namely, that history is really the study of historical happiness and those global happiness levels and that it were just a matter of throwing batteries into the ol’ global happiness detector and dialing in April 14,1343, we still have the problem that he chooses to use a standard for happiness that doesn’t make sense.
Will the capitalist juggernaut which is supposedly enforcing this standard be around till the end of time? I’d have to say that human society and our perception of what is happiness don’t seem very static. So why use as your standard something that’s likely to be pretty ephemeral (even if we really could apply it globally today, even though I doubt most people alive today actually would consider it happiness) and inapplicable before modern times?