Complex Numbers

The Pursuit of Happiness

First of all, no, I haven't seen the Will Smith movie with that (misspelled) title.

It's axiomatic - or perhaps clichéd; sometimes I can't tell the difference - that "ignorance is bliss." Mavis Moog once wrote, "Knowledge is blisser," but I'm not so sure about that.

Human mythology is rife with examples of knowledge being Bad. The best-known myth of that sort is the one involving Adam and Eve. They were living in a state of shining happiness when they "ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge" - which God told them would kill them, but admitted in private that it would make them "become like us" (the antecedent of "us" still being hotly debated). Running a close second, and a favorite of industrial-age writers, is Prometheus. In this case, Prometheus is a god already (well, technically, a Titan) who defies mean old Zeus by giving fire (a metaphor for knowledge, technology and civilization) to the poor, shuddering humans.

At some point I'm going to explore in some depth the central importance of the "apple" imagery among all these knowledge myths - and its use even in myths of science, as an inspiration for Newton among other things. But not today.

Point is, God sentences Adam and Eve to lifetimes of tedium, and Zeus sentences Prometheus to having his liver torn out on a daily basis. Nothing good comes to those who explore knowledge at the expense of a deity's wishes.

All of which makes me wonder what my neighbor, Thomas Jefferson, was thinking when he co-opted Locke's idea of property rights, replacing it with this silly "pursuit of happiness" nonsense. I mean, Tom was an educated man and a great thinker; he had little use for organized religion, and owned quite a lot of property (I'm talking about land here, not slaves. Don't give me crap about Jefferson's owning slaves. I've heard it all.) Still, it's right there, in one of my country's founding documents: the right to (among other things) the pursuit of happiness.

But happiness is anathema to knowledge. This idea is supported by deep-rooted cultural memes, and is one of the few philosophical ideas at home in both eastern and western spirituality (Buddhism's destruction of the ego as a means to enlightenment comes to mind; one must know nothing to experience Nirvana (or be its lead singer (nootch))). Knowledge is elusive; the more one knows, the more one wants to know. Happiness, too, is elusive (and we have no explicit right to it, anyway; all we have is the right to pursue it) but is quite simply not found in the assumption of knowledge. Clearly, some people can find satisfaction in the pursuit of knowledge, but the very force that drives scientific investigation is by its nature unquenchable. There is always the drive to find out more, gain more knowledge; a discontent with what is already known. And discontent is not happiness.

So I've decided, today, that this whole pursuit of happiness thing is crap. It's a semantic paradox, for starters; and the clincher for me was when I realized that I'd rather know stuff, if necessary in defiance of the gods and mortal authorities, than fit myself into some lotus-eating state of ego-free bliss.

Give me that apple. It won't make me happy, but it will set me free.