The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

In the selfish path to romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com and Amazon.com.

Now, what if you're feeling really bogged down? You don't feel happy? What can you do to feel happier about your life? Well, we can turn to the experts, and the experts of the 1990s or the experts of the 1900s will give us some advice. But what do you think people tried to do to become happy, to achieve their own happiness over 2000 years ago? And what can we learn from this?

With me today to take a closer look at how the ancient Greeks achieved a sense of happiness is an authority on this subject, Dr. John Lewis. Dr. Lewis received his PhD in History from the University of Cambridge in England, and he is now an Assistant Professor of History at Ashland University, specializing in classical Greece.

Welcome to the Rational Basis of Happiness. How are you, Dr. Kenner?

Great! Compared to the Dark or Middle Ages, ancient Greek civilization was sunshine. Can you tell me one or two reasons why Greek civilization was a much healthier one to live in if you valued happiness, rather than the people who value suffering and becoming a modern life?

Well, that's interesting. You know, of course, the Greeks left us a lot of material that we can read directly. Just the sheer fact that they've left us all these different plays and all these different treatises, including explicit examinations of what happiness meant. The first full-length treatises about happiness were done in ancient Greece. You know, that itself is a sign. But there's a certain character to that literature, to that material, that's very different from the Middle Ages.

You know, in the Middle Ages, you get a lot of stuff that always begins by putting oneself down. For example, I'm thinking of St. Wilbur from the mid-700s, I remember. He writes letters and always begins by saying, "I write to you, the lowest of the low, the most miserable of sinners here on Earth, you know, not worthy to write this letter." And then he proceeds from there. That's his basic premise. His basic view of himself is that he's basically no good.

This is one of the great contrasts with the Greeks. No Greek would ever start off speaking in that way. His view was that he was a good person. Now, of course, there are certain limits to this. There are the gods, and there's a certain, you know, fate that he might have to face on Earth. But within his own existence on Earth, here he was a good person, and he could go out and be happy, and so he could achieve values. He didn't have to constantly give up his values and go through a continual Lent in his life.

No, there was no. I mean, Lent was a Christian creation later. The Greeks, of course, had, as did the Romans, festivals. Rather than in the springtime going through a period of 40 days of fasting, they would go through a festival period of feasting and eating and drinking and making merry.

And it wasn't just that they were into fitness. You look at their statues; they're not blobby old Buddhas.

No, they're not blobby old Buddhas, but neither are they shriveled up. You know, people cringing before a fate or a malevolent god that was about to crush them. They stand forth independently, as independent persons, right? I think of a statue like the Discus Thrower, right? Where they're in the process of throwing that discus. Oh, gosh, when you look at it, you can just see the motion within it.

You know, there's a funny story about a Greek sculptor who did a sculpture, and it was of a boy holding a bunch of grapes. While he was holding the statue, standing there with the grapes in his hand, the birds came down and started to peck at the grapes—the grapes of the statue.

You mean, yeah, the statue came down and started to peck at what was supposed to be the grapes carved in stone. And the sculptor was told, "Boy, look how realistic it is that the birds came down." And he said, "That's not realistic. If it was realistic, the birds would be afraid and fly away."

Yeah, you know, they valued recreating reality and doing it in a way that showed off, basically, what a wonderful world it was. And they did have that sense of curiosity.

You mentioned that they wrote the first treatises on happiness. Could you tell us? I know there's a word term they use—eudaimonia. Could you tell us a little bit about their view of happiness and maybe contrast it to a wrong view of happiness?

Well, I mean, what I'm thinking of here is Aristotle, the Greek philosopher. What he basically said was happiness is an action. Happiness is not something that happens to you. You don't—you, if you sit there and you wait for happiness to happen to you, you wait in vain, and you will wait all of your life. Happiness is something that you have to go out and achieve.

And he says it is an activity of the soul. So, an active person is one who is active; a happy person, rather, a happy person is one who's active—physically active and mentally active and rationally active. Because you can be active as a bank robber.

Well, of course. And the Greeks had, you know, the pit for them.

Oh yes, they had executions, you know, for someone who didn't want to allow others to be happy. We have a Greek historian who writes, "Our city is one of the great cities in the world because we are free to do different things, and we don't look at each other with those bad glances, you know, those hard-edged eyes that put other people down with the envy. With the envy, we go out and we attain our happiness, and consequently, the great things of the world come to us."

Now, you mentioned curiosity. Were they good question-askers? I know that many people and families feel trapped. Well, there are unwritten rules in this family that you cannot question Dad on this topic, period. There are religions that say you have to have faith. You can't question God or something. What about the Greeks? What was their attitude towards question-asking?

No, the Greeks invented a form of philosophy that was just asking. That was just that—asking a series of questions. "What do you think about this? What do you think about that?" And the Greek sense of wonder. You know, they had the idea that to be a happy person was to be a philosophical person.

And to be a philosophical person meant going out and looking at the wondrous things in the world, asking questions and finding answers, asking questions and finding answers. And we have this picture of the Greek who gets on his ship and spends the next 20 years traveling around the Mediterranean, just looking at all the wondrous things you can see and jotting it down, writing them down so we can read about it thousands of years later. Writing about it—and of course, many of them probably didn't write it down, so they had that child-like sense of exploration.

Oh, absolutely. And that is missing in the Middle Ages. And look at just what they did in the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages, they retreated into monasteries. Anyone who was active intellectually and wanted to do something with his mind and with himself would either join the military and go out and loot and plunder, or if that didn't sit well with him, could retreat behind the walls of a monastery and spend the next 40 years in constant prayer, day in and day out, right?

And that's a little different from discus throwing.

That's a bit different from discus throwing, and it's a bit different from traveling around, looking at the wonders of the world, right?

So then they had the Socratic method—that's a question-asking method.

That's a question-asking method, you know? That's where, you know, we sit here and we—well, let's apply it to this. You say to me, "What is happiness?" And I say, "Well, happiness can be an activity." And then you say to me, "Well, what kind of activity?" And I say, "Well, an activity to go out and attain your values." And then you say, "Well, what do you suppose your values are? To rob a bank?" And I would say, "No, that is not a real value." Because, you know, can a value be something that is taken by force? And it's a series of questions back and forth, right?

That's wonderful. Well, this has been terrific talking with you, Dr. Lewis. This is Dr. John Lewis. Do you want to give your website?

Oh yes, well, yes, you can find me at www.ashland.edu and either look for me under the Faculty of History, or follow ashland.edu with a front slash tilde, which is one of those little squiggles, JLewis8.

Okay, well, this is Dr. John Lewis, and we're just talking to him from Ashland University. He's a classical Greek specialist, and we hope you enjoyed learning a little bit more about happiness.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to DrKenner.com, and please listen to this.

Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance, the serious romance guidebook by clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner and co-author Dr. Edwin Locke:

Do you have a friend or relative who takes advantage of your inability to say no? Here is what you might say after being asked to babysit for the 1,000th time:

"I need to do myself a favor and you a favor. I need to be honest with you. I want to enjoy your darling kids as an aunt, not as a perennial sitter. I felt obligated to help you out over the years at the expense of taking care of myself. I grew to resent it, and then I felt guilty about the resentment. Now I see the error I was making. This weekend, I want some time with just Joe and our kids. My guess is you felt this way in your life too."

You can download chapter one for free by going to DrKenner.com, and you can buy The Selfish Path to Romance at Amazon.com.