After a certain baseline has been satisfied, we know that increasing wealth does not increase happiness. Anthropologists contend that human beings were probably happiest twenty thousand years ago before farming tied us to property, and work, and fretting about the future. OK, but if few of us would choose to be hunter-gatherers, then maybe it isn’t happiness that we’re actually looking for?
Click here to watch a video of this sermon
We began this church year looking at some of the big questions that define our spiritual beliefs. Questions about the nature of God, and the afterlife, beliefs about prayer and spiritual practice and scripture.
In the last few months we’ve moved to the second area of a complete faith, the domain of values. What are the principles that we derive from our beliefs? What are the principles that we follow that guide our actions?
We’ll get to that third domain of a complete faith, actions, next month.
Because Unitarian Universalists gather our communities around shared values, rather than beliefs or actions, our identity statement, the Seven Principles is a collection of our core values
The statement is called our Seven Principles, because it is written in seven statements, but it actually includes many more than seven values:
Individual worth
Justice
Equity
Compassion
Acceptance
Growth
Freedom
Responsibility
Democracy
Community
Peace
Liberty
Justice
And respect for the system that includes each and all.
But even that long list leaves out several values that are important to my faith, and maybe to yours as well.
A month ago I preached about one word not named in our Seven Principles; love.
Today I want to talk about another important principle of our faith not mentioned in the Seven Principles: the value of joy.
“Enter, Rejoice, and Come In,” we sang earlier this morning. “Today will be a joyful day.”
Our Call to Worship imagined the earth as a kind of playground, and prayed that, “Our arms Be branches That give shade And joy.”
Our Chalice Lighting this morning included several important values, some also not named in our seven principles: love, harmony, wisdom, and joy.
May this clear flame be a symbol
That every heart can burn bright with joy, peace, and harmony.
Joy is an important value of our faith.
Every heart can burn bright with joy, is a hope and a promise of our positive faith.
You may have heard me recite a sentence that I use to describe Unitarian Universalism. My “eelevator speech” useful for even the shortest elevator ride:
“Unitarian Universalists believe that human beings are good enough, smart enough, and strong enough, to create healthy, joyful lives, for ourselves and for each other and for the world we share.”
For me, joy is one of the purposes of religion: creating lives of spiritual health and joy. If it’s not for joy, then why do it?
So, if joy for you is an important principle of your faith, as it is for me, it’s right to ask, “Well what do we mean by joy? And how do we achieve it?”
Joy means happy, but more than happy. Some would say that joy is happiness but just really, really, exuberantly, irrepressibly, unrestrainedly happy. I think joy is actually slightly different from happiness: something more than happy.
But let’s start with the feeling of happiness.
If we’re looking for joy, and happiness leads to joy, we should seek out the kind of life that maximizes happiness. We should try to live in the circumstances that make human beings happiest, the times when human beings are most happy.
Well, surprise! Anthropologists tell us that most human beings were probably most happy, when our species survived and our communities were organized as what we call, “hunter-gatherers.”
That’s right. Not your lifestyle, with television, and iPhones, and flush toilets and anti-biotics, but living in nature in temporary villages following the changing seasons and the migratory movements of animals to gather each day the food we need to survive.
Perhaps that seems strange to you. But the logic is pretty convincing.
Here’s an interview with an anthropologist named James Suzman who studied the last surviving contemporary hunter-gatherer society: the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert of Namibia. He wrote a book called, Affluence Without Abundance.
The interviewer asks:
“What do you think of this idea that the hunter-gatherer way of living makes people the happiest they can be? Is there anything that suggests this to be the case?”
And Suzman answers:
“Look, the Bushman’s society wasn’t a Garden of Eden. In their lives, there are tragedies and tough times. People would occasionally fight after drinking.
But people didn’t continuously hold themselves hostage to the idea that the grass is somehow greener on the other side — that if I do X and Y, then my life will be measurably improved.
So their affluence was really based on having a few needs that were simply met. Just fundamentally they have few wants — just basic needs that were easily met. They were skilled hunters. They could identify a hundred different plants species and knew exactly which parts to use and which parts to avoid. And if your wants are limited, then it’s just very easy to meet them.
By contrast, the mantra of modern economics is that of limited scarcity: that we have infinite wants and limited means. And then we work and we do stuff to try and bridge the gap.
In fact, I don’t even think the Bushman have thought that much about happiness. I don’t think they have words equivalent to “happiness” like we think of. For us, happiness has become sort of aspirational.
Bushmen have words for their current feelings, like joy or sadness. But not this word for this idea of “being happy” long term, like if I do something, then I’ll be “happy” with my life long term.”
So there’s a clue right there about the difference between happiness and joy.
Suzman says that in our modern lifestyle, “Happiness has become sort of aspirational” a word that is connected to wanting and hoping, wishing and striving. I’ll be happy when… when I get, when I do, when I have.
And joy, for the Bushmen, according to Suzman, is a word that describes “current feelings.”
I want to be happy. I am joyful. I want happiness, in the future. I have joy, now.
It feels like the life of a hunter-gatherer should be anything but joyful. They live exposed to the elements. It must take constant work to find food. I imagine anxiety and desperation. Will there be enough to eat? Will I be able to find it? Will the animals be there? What if my arrow misses and our only food for the week disappears into the jungle?
But, in fact, anthropologists say that hunter-gathers actually spend far less time working than we do today.
Hunter-gatherers spend only about 15 hours a week acquiring food. That’s it. They spend another 15 or 20 hours doing domestic chores like cooking and cleaning. That’s less than 40 hours a week for all of their work. How many hours did you work last week?
When human beings switched to agriculture around 12,000 years ago, we could watch our crops growing right outside the window, and our farm animals lived right there in the barn. Food was always at hand. That should ease our anxiety, no?
But farming is actually much harder work than gathering, and no less uncertain. Will there be enough rain? Will there be too much sun? Will the pests eat the crops before I can harvest them? And still the worry, if the crops fail what will my family eat?
Furthermore, living with domesticated animals introduced diseases to human beings that hunter-gatherers had never experienced.
The hunter-gatherer diet was much more varied than the very restricted diet based on farming, and thus much healthier.
And then from farms, all of modern society develops. Farms meant property, and thus, for the first time personal ownership. If you own something you have to define what belongs to you, be able to prove it, and defend it. So we needed lawyers, and law enforcement, and that requires bureaucrats and taxes. And, then we need accountants in order to keep the books, and from accountants we get numbers and then writing, and pretty soon we have television, and iPhones, and flush toilets and anti-biotics.
But less happiness.
Now this idea, that we might have been happier if we had just stayed hunter-gatherers, is not original to James Suzman. It’s been around since the 1960s. Most recently I read the idea in the book Sapiens, by Yuval Harari.
And whenever I’ve encountered this idea my first thought has always been, “OK, but, clearly we’re never going back.” So it’s a wistful observation that we might have been happier in primitive times, but not useful. And my second thought is, “Well, actually, I don’t want to. If you could offer me a hunter-gather life, I wouldn’t take it. I don’t care if hunter-gatherers are more happy, I prefer the life I have.
I’m actually convinced by the argument that hunter-gatherer societies were happier, but I don’t want to live that way. Why would I choose against being happy? Because I want something more than happy.
I want joy.
When I think about what brings me joy in life, I notice two things.
What brings me joy, is deep, rich, experience. If joy is the experience the Bushmen feel of being satisfied, and complete, now, and totally in the moment without thoughts of future wants, but just enjoying what I have, then the Bushmen might feel joy with their deep knowledge of a hundred different plant varieties, and employing their excellent skill in hunting.
But the time I most feel joy, is when I attending the symphony, or attending the opera, or standing in front of a masterpiece of art, or sitting down with a work of great literature. Or, also, when I’m hiking in nature. And maybe coming to the end of a hike and seeing a fantastic view, or a waterfall. Or, also, when I’m working out at the gym, or siting down to a good meal with friends.
Joy, for me, is connected to that feeling that I call spiritual ecstasy, which we talked about when we talked about spiritual practice last fall: that holistic feeling of being totally in the moment and feeling intimately connected to that divine something greater-than-myself. I’m sure that’s what the Bushmen feel walking through the jungle, their senses alive with birdsong, and plant smells, and gratitude for the abundance of nature.
That’s what I mean by joy and for me it comes in great art, and inspiring nature, and being connected to my best self, and in relationship to others.
Of course hunter-gatherers have music and art and story-telling, too, but I’ve developed a taste for more complex productions only possible in our modern lifestyle. Because, along with the soldiers and lawyers and accountants and bureaucrats that appear once we have farms and farming, modern societies also produce philosophy, and science, and architecture, and Caravaggio, and Beethoven, and Dostoevsky.
My mind, and soul, and aesthetic sense, appreciate the joy that comes from thinking hard about life’s deepest questions, from filling my eyes and ears with the most beautiful of human creations and nature’s wonder, from the full encountering of another human mind as we open a great books or relish an intimate friendship, from the vast variety of cultures we can encounter once we realize there are nations beyond our local tribe, from the uncovering of intricate knowledge about the world we live in, and the sky above us, and the human nature within us.
That’s joy for me.
The other insight I notice about joy, when I’m feeling it, is that insight that James Suzman talked about when he described the difference between happy being aspirational and joy describing a current feeling.
The reason that the Bushmen don’t even have a word for happiness is that they have few wants and the wants they have are easily met. The Bushmen’s desires are so simple to satisfy, that there is no gap between the wanting and the having. Thus, they can live in a permanent state of satisfaction.
We are less happy in the modern world because we think of happiness in an aspirational way as something that I hope to achieve, maybe, later, when I get what I want. It’s about acquiring and working long and hard to reach, with a large, unhappy gap in between the wanting and the having. This linear way of thinking about happiness as contingent, and in the future, is a trap, where our wants endlessly multiply, and our happiness every recedes in front of our grasp.
The Bushmen and spiritual health can teach us that joy is for now not later. Joy is an internal spiritual setting, not dependent on outside circumstances. Joy is satisfaction, not desiring.
I try to remember that.
And though my wants, for art and hiking trips and so on, are more complex than the few wants of the Bushmen, my wants, too, aren’t actually all that difficult to attain.
The best of human literature is sitting right now in your local library. And it’s free. And books on science and philosophy are just a few shelves away. There are free lectures at your community college. And free museums. And a ticket to the opera or the symphony or a play costs only a few tens of dollars.
A hiking trip to a national park requires just a few days off and a place to stay. A meal with friends takes just a phone call to arrange and the price of the meal.
So I have desires, but, like the Bushmen, my wants are simple to attain and move quickly to satisfaction. There is little gap between my deciding what I want to read next and having the book in my hand. Joy comes when we train our desires toward what is close, available, accessible. Want what your mind, body and soul long for, but you’ll be happier, you’ll be joyful, if your wants are there in the jungle around you, or the society around, ready for a day’s hunt, waiting for you to gather.
Whether in Namibia or in Bakersfield, the world offers its abundance to you like an ever-flowing fountain.
See all that we have, spilling over, and offering itself to our delight!
Embrace it.
Have joy.