Don't expect Ukraine to be happy - expect it to rise again
Don't expect Ukraine to be happy - expect it to rise again
We offer hope not happiness, writes George Pitcher, because what happens at Easter isn't a zero-sum game.
Happiness seems in pretty short supply at the moment. Emerging from two years of the plague of covid, we’ve now been presented with war in Ukraine. Two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to go: Famine and Death. There are plenty in the world who have collected the set of four already and in western Europe we could be well on the way to ticking off the final two, as the first two, Pestilence and War, send our economies to hell in a handcart.
Yes, I know. It’s being so cheerful that keeps me going. But happiness is worth a re-examination, since it became such a trendy commodity when the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (was that named randomly by algorithm?) published its first annual World Happiness Report exactly a decade ago on April Fools’ Day in 2012.
Almost impertinent
It seems almost impertinent to measure human happiness this year. How dare we be happy when so many are living and dying in abject misery on Nato’s doorstep? This feeling of guilt precipitates an urge to share our stock of happiness – and I’m happy to say that our churches and many other humanitarian organisations besides are collectively offering hospitality and safe space to some of the near-4 million refugees fleeing the Ukraine war; despite our Government’s best efforts to limit that charity, a source of added frustration for those who already feel helpless in offering practical assistance.
A problem here may be that our instinct is transactional: We have a surplus of happiness over here. So let’s give some of that happiness to other desperate people who need it. Then they, of course, will be happier. True, there is gospel in that – whatever we do for “the least of these”, we do for the Christ. But the difficulty comes in a secular world in which we exactly imply that happiness is a commodity in which we can make a market, if not a profit.
I was talking about living a happy life with my spiritual director the other day. She referenced “living with intent” and the importance, as we grow older, of stripping back on the active clutter of our lives to what is essential for our – and other people’s, such as our families’ – happiness.
Later, she sent me a link to a podcast from Word On Fire (it’s free in Lent), a catholic evangelism site founded by Bishop Robert Barron, a former NBC religious correspondent. It’s one of a course called The Art of Happiness, taught by Arthur Brooks, who is professor of Public Leadership at Harvard and a social scientist.
Three equations
In it, Brooks offers “three equations for happier catholics”. The first is: Your subjective well-being = your genes + your circumstances + your habits. Since the final part of this sum is, arguably, the only part under our control, the second equation unpacks it: Habits = family + friends + work + faith (the last defined as “engaging with the transcendental”). The final equation is: Satisfaction = What you have divided by what you want. That last equation is at the heart of what my SD meant, I guess, by stripping back on the non-essentials.
So far, so social-scientist. My problem here is not the American wellbeing style of delivery – that’s my problem, not theirs – it’s that these equations are essentially rubrics for the Already Happy.
Try them, for example, on the people of Ukraine and they fall apart. Your habits aren’t under your control when they include sheltering your family in a cellar from a missile attack. Similarly, their genes only count in so far as “being Ukrainian” can be considered genetic. And it’s a bit hard to aspire to satisfaction, when what you have is packed in a suitcase and we’re inviting you to divide it by what you want, which is to stay alive.
Not hopelessness
But this isn’t a charter for hopelessness. Brooks is actually at his strongest when he abandons his social science in favour of his theology. He argues that “the well-spring isn’t us or the world” and that “a catholic’s job is actively to participate in our sanctity.” (I’d argue that’s the job of all people of faith).
What Brooks does here is point away from his equations, which may be just a teensy bit trite, to a God who doesn’t make a market in happiness. By that, I mean that the love of God isn’t a zero-sum equation, to take Brooks on with his own terminology. There isn’t that misery over there that we can exchange for some of our happiness (a spare room in our home or a cash-card payment). There is only the sanctity of an unconditional love which, released into the world, transforms it.
Defies mathematics
It’s that divine intervention through humanity into the world that is precisely not an equation, or rather it defies mathematics because it’s not zero-sum. It’s a newly generated resource every time. So it also defies the laws of physics, because it’s an entirely new and miraculous form of energy – not matter that is turned from one form to another, as in an equation, but an entirely new creative process every time.
That’s why what we celebrate at Easter in three weeks’ time isn’t an equation, in which we add human fallibility to sin, which equals God’s new covenant. No, it’s something entirely new – that’s why the first disciples don’t recognise it. Something given free, without exchange (whatever the fans of penal substitution might try to tell us).
So, ultimately it’s about hope, not happiness, and that’s what sanctity, in which we actively participate, and sanctuary, which we offer to refugees, provide. Happiness offers a better version of life; hope offers new life. Ukraine doesn’t need an equation. It needs a resurrection.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.
A version of this column appeared on Premier Christianity