Wrote this piece for the Independent, out today, on two very substantial books summing up the recent 'happiness' literature - a theme we've touched on a lot here. Good to get a chance to grapple with it all (and get paid for it!), but I remain unimpressed with the whole agenda:
Happiness is not a warm gun, contrary to what John Lennon sang. But it might well be widespread access to some powerful tools for living - whether social, technological or educational. Our fretting legislators, and their gurus, should provide these, then stand well back and let the multitude decide their own paths to joy, rather than seek to impose a presumptive "common good". We need to remember the "happ" in happiness - which means, in the old Norse, "luck or chance". Sustain the conditions for happiness, sure. But let happiness happen, too.
Funny how my self-determinist/libertarian tendencies occasionally surface and surprise me. This is part of the ambiguity of play, of course. Whenever I hear people telling me to play, I resist furiously; whenever people reduce play to triviality and abandon, I equally object. I suppose the sense of things being 'in play and at play' - ie open, processual, emergent, co-creative - is the one that always fundamentally fuels me.
Yet asking people to live with that kind of optimism and energy in the face of change is often, I confess, tough. There's a classic local example of how full-spectrum playfulness annoys people happening here in Scotland, with the launch of an excellent report from Demos on Scotland 2020: A Hopeful Nation (Eddie Gibb, an old journo mucker, explains).
Most press response has been scornful of their plea for a 'future-literacy' in Scotland - "what about GDP?", wailed an ex-Enterprise Scottish minister on a late-night political programme. Demos have been playful enough to deploy excellent fiction writers - including Ken McLeod and Julie Bertagna - to 'imagine' some Scottish futures.
I wish them all the best. But It strikes me that, more than ever, we need to defend and extend our open media networks, in order that we can disseminate different wisdoms and perspective than those which get through the mainstream media gatekeepers. I have my lock-picking ways (a ratio of four insults to two insights is usually what most editors need for review prose - Boyd Tonkin, at the Indy, being an exception). But it's hard to be profoundly play-ethical, when our ideas-media is dominantly utlitarian and modernist in tone.
Now this is why I want a fight over broadcasting powers being returned to the Scottish Parliament...(Later. Much later).
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