Tim Harford on the Paradox of Work

There’s a short but interesting article here by Tim Harford on what he calls ‘the paradox of work’.

Taking its cue from an analysis of ‘a Depression-era make-work project for white-collar Americans’, it underlines the importance of work and community contributions in addition to family and close relationships.

Basically, whilst work is often ‘the least enjoyable thing’ in people’s lives, ‘there are few more reliable sources of dissatisfaction and disappointment than being unemployed’.

‘The stories people told about themselves, and especially the stories women told about themselves, did indeed often mention friends and family. But they also emphasised, over and over again, the importance of work as a foundation for a meaningful life.’

Theos Report on Religion and Well-Being

The latest report from Theos has recently been published:

Nick Spencer, Gillian Madden, Clare Purtill, and Joseph Ewing, Religion and Well-being: Assessing the Evidence (London: Theos, 2015).

Here’s the summary blurb:

‘The relationship between religion and wellbeing is widely and frequently reported. Academic studies published in peer-reviewed journals regularly confirm the widespread belief that “religion” is good for “well-being”.

‘But what do we mean by “religion” and what do we mean by “well-being”? Neither term is exactly self-explanatory.

‘This report evaluates the evidence from nearly 140 academic studies conducted over the last three decades examining the relationship between religion and well-being in a wide range of countries and contexts.

It clarifies the key terms, showing how “religion” has been used to cover a multitude of subtly different concepts (e.g. religious affiliation, subjective religiosity, religious belief, religious group participation, and religious personal participation), as has “well-being” (e.g. subjective well-being, mental health, physical health, and health supporting behaviours).

‘By doing so the report not only clarifies the extent to which religion is good for well-being, but begins to explain what this means, adding detail to the big familiar picture.

‘Ultimately it confirms that big picture – religion is indeed good for well-being – but by showing the nuances of that relationship, Religion and Well-being hopes to inform the debate about how society should capitalise on this important resource.’

A pdf of the full report is available here.

Happiness, Happiness...

I contributed this week’s ‘Connecting with Culture’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. It’s similar to one I wrote a few years ago, but thought the issues were worth giving another airing.

Last week saw the International Day of Happiness, launched by the United Nations in 2012 to give happiness, described as ‘a fundamental human goal’, a greater priority. And this week, the Office for National Statistics published a report, ‘Measuring National Well-being: Life in the UK, 2015’, providing a snapshot of life across 1o domains of national well-being.

All this is part of an ongoing attempt to measure not just GDP, but GWB (general well-being) or GNH (gross national happiness). To some extent, it takes its lead from economists, but it’s also part of a larger trend to broaden our understanding of well-being beyond economic growth to embrace several areas – health, family, work, community, environment – all supported by an ever-increasing output in ‘happiness studies’.

Inevitably, not everyone holds the various factors to be of equal value, and it’s still not entirely clear how one measures and compares largely subjective indicators of happiness. Even so, this feels like a significant path to pursue, not least because all indications are that healthy relationships are a vital factor in human flourishing.

And that will come as no surprise to Christians. After all, we worship the three-in-one Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; we believe that humans were created for relationship with one another and their surrounding environment; we follow the one who summed up God’s design for life in terms of love of God and neighbour. And – lest that becomes a measurement of performance – we know the call to love comes only because God himself has restored the most fractured relationship of all, that between himself and humanity, with all the implications for renewed relationships with each other that come about as a result.

Happiness too, in the sense of wholeness and well-being, goes back to God’s original intention for creation – not, perhaps, as the end of a search but as the by-product of a yet higher end. From a Christian perspective, happiness ultimately comes down to what and who we love. Our problem is that left to ourselves we attach love to things in disordered ways, leaving God out of the reckoning. When God acts to save us, he reorders our loves and affections, such that true happiness – far from being a pursuit of self-fulfilment – is rooted in a restored relationship with God and others.

Brent A. Strawn et al. on the Bible and Happiness

Brent A. Strawn (ed.), The Bible and the Pursuit of Happiness: What the Old and New Testaments Teach Us about the Good Life (Oxford: OUP, 2012), 368 pp., ISBN 9780199795741.

Having something of an abiding interest in so-called ‘happiness studies’, I was delighted to see this full and substantive collection of essays appear late last year.

The OUP blurb and the contents are listed below.

‘Scholars of the social sciences have devoted increasing attention of late to the concept of human happiness, mainly from sociological and psychological perspectives. This groundbreaking volume, which includes twelve essays from scholars of the New Testament, the Old Testament, systematic theology, practical theology, and counseling psychology – along with an extensive introduction and epilogue by the editor – poses a new and exciting question: what is happiness according to the Bible? Informed by developments in positive psychology, the contributions explore representations of happiness throughout the Bible and demonstrate the ways in which they impinge upon both religious and secular understandings of happiness.’

Brent A. Strawn

Introduction: The Bible and... Happiness?

Part I. Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

Terence E. Fretheim

God, Creation, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Nathan MacDonald

Is There Happiness in the Torah?

Jacqueline Lapsley

A Happy Blend: Isaiah’s Vision of Happiness (and Beyond)

William P. Brown

Happiness and Its Discontents in the Psalms

Carol A. Newsom

Positive Psychology and Ancient Israelite Wisdom

Part II. New Testament

Carl R. Holladay

The Beatitudes: Happiness and the Kingdom of God

Joel B. Green

‘We Had to Celebrate and Rejoice!’ Happiness in the Topsy-Turvy World of Luke-Acts

Colleen Shantz

‘I Have Learned to Be Content?’: Happiness according to St. Paul

Greg Carey

Finding Happiness in Apocalyptic Literature

Part III. Beyond the Bible: Continuing the Conversation into Other Disciplines

Ellen T. Charry

The Necessity of Divine Happiness: A Response from Systematic Theology

Thomas G. Long

A Constructed Happiness: A Response from Practical Theology

Steven J. Sandage

The Transformation of Happiness: A Response from Counseling Psychology

Brent A. Strawn

Epilogue: The Triumph of Life: Towards a Biblical Theology of Happiness

Michael J. Chan

Appendix: A Biblical Lexicon of Happiness

Ross Gittins on the Economics of a Meaningful Life

Simon Smart of the Centre for Public Christianity talks here (in a 8:10 minute video) to Ross Gittins, economics editor for The Sydney Morning Herald. Their discussion takes its cue from the work of Michael Schluter on the fundamental significance of relationships for economic policy, moving towards wider issues of spirituality and wellbeing.

Mark Vernon on Faith and Well-Being

The latest issue of The Tablet contains an interesting piece by Mark Vernon (available online here) on ‘why religion is good for you’.

After presenting some of the well-known indicators of this, he says that ‘the evidence becomes more complicated when a further, crucial question is asked. Just why is it that religion has positive effects?’, noting that ‘a range of possibilities are mooted, and hotly contested’.

A first possibility he explores is ‘the proscriptive character of religion’, adding that proscriptions work ‘not when they are perceived as persecutory commandments but rather when they are perceived as charting a path to a new way of life’, perhaps especially combined when an individual’s well-being ‘is boosted by the social support provided in groups’. Another possibility, via Richard Layard, is emotional habits, where ‘religious practices train individuals to control their feelings’.

Vernon (who has a book due out soon – The Big Questions: God) writes that ‘many of the researchers in the positive psychology field are searching for ways of reformulating such religious attitudes for a secular age’, exhibiting a desire ‘to raid religious traditions for their wisdom, while removing the theological scaffolding that has traditionally supported them’ (Alain de Botton is a well-known recent example of this).

But, if I have understood him correctly, Vernon wonders whether such researchers have overlooked... God, noting that, for believers, goodwill and well-being ‘are happy by-products of the main task, which is not actually to have a successful life. It is to come to know God’.

As he concludes:

‘It is striking that atheistic writers and researchers are coming to a new appreciation of religion. Going are the days when faith could simply be written off. Nonetheless, I suspect that their ideas will flounder because a basic and obvious question is being avoided... Might human well-being actually have something to do with God?’

Ellen T. Charry on God and the Art of Happiness

Ellen T. Charry, ‘God and the Art of Happiness’, Theology Today 68, 3 (2011), 238-52.

One of my summer holiday books was Ellen Charry’s God and the Art of Happiness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), so I was interested to see the latest Theology Today carries an essay by her on the same topic.

For a limited period of time, it’s available for free – linked to from here.

This is the abstract:

‘Christians are skittish talking about happiness because it sounds selfish and shallow. But Christian theology has long engaged the topic on its own terms. While theology has been oriented toward eschatological happiness, the Bible offers a temporal teaching of happiness for individuals and communities in obedience to non-voluntarist divine commands that foster individual and communal flourishing. The Hebrew ‘‘ashrey’’ is the first word of the Psalter. It expresses the fulfilling and satisfying life lived in covenant faithfulness to divine commands that is self-enhancing and enables creation to flourish. Asherism is a way of life that enables God to enjoy creation and us to enjoy God. It is an offering in Christian ethics that mediates between the self-sacrificial teaching of agapism and the atheological offering of eudaemonism.’

Andy Crouch on David Brooks on The Social Animal

Andy Crouch, ‘Common Grace and Amazing Grace: A Review of David Brooks’s “The Social Animal”’, Christianity Today (11 July 2011).

I’m still in the early chapters, but am already enjoying the mix of narrative and neuroscience in David Brooks’ latest work, The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens (London: Short Books, 2011). It manages to be funny and informative at the same time.

So, I was interested to read this review in Christianity Today by Andy Crouch.

Crouch begins by noting how the centre of moral authority seems to have shifted from clergy to psychiatrists to neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, and behavioural economists.

So far as Brooks is concerned, modernistic understandings of the good life have proven inadequate, and ‘the good human life is less about thinking than relating’ – not so much rational animal as social animal. We thrive when shaped by others, with emotion an essential ingredient in relationships, such that (as Crouch puts it) ‘a flourishing human being... is a relationally skilled, emotionally mature creature’.

All of which, of course, Christians ought happily to assent to: ‘It’s no surprise that image bearers of a relational God would be hardwired for deep connections, right down to the “mirror neurons” that allow us to experience viscerally and directly what we see others experiencing.’

And yet, Crouch says, while the narrative Brooks weaves with his fictional characters (Harold and Erica) tells a story of common grace – ‘of provisional, everyday blessings, the sun that rises on the just and the unjust... it is not a story of rescue. Indeed, the main characters, by dint of hard work and good luck, seem not to need any rescuing at all.’

The biblical vision of flourishing – of shalom – will not not be complete ‘without a broken cosmos rescued and redeemed’. As Crouch says, ‘we are no less than social animals, but to understand ourselves, let alone flourish, we must grasp that we were made to be far more’.

Walking Back to Happiness

[I contributed today’s ‘Connecting with Culture’, a weekly email service provided by London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, where I seek to be gainfully employed.]

‘It's time we admitted that there’s more to life than money, and it’s time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB – general well-being... Improving our society’s sense of well-being is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times.’

So said David Cameron back in 2006, and so it is that starting next week the Office of National Statistics will be producing measures to assess citizens’ happiness, yielding data which will inform government policy.

To some extent, this has been inspired by economists, but it’s also part of a larger trend to broaden our understanding of wellbeing beyond economic growth to embrace a number of domains – health, family, work, community, environment – all supported by a blossoming literature in ‘happiness studies’.

Inevitably, not everyone will hold these factors to be of equal value, and it’s not entirely clear how one measures and compares largely subjective indicators of happiness. Even so, this feels like a significant path to pursue, not least because all indications are that healthy relationships are a vital factor in human flourishing.

And that will come as no surprise to Christians. After all, we worship the perfect-in-communion Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; we understand that humans were created for relationship with one another and their surrounding environment; we serve the one who summed up God’s design for life in terms of love of God and neighbour. And – lest that becomes a measurement of performance – we know the call to love comes only because God himself has restored the most fractured relationship of all, that between himself and humanity, with all the implications for renewed relationships with each other that come about as a result.

Happiness too, in the sense of wholeness and wellbeing, goes back to God’s original intention for creation – not, perhaps, as the end of a search but as the by-product of a yet higher end. As Christian philosopher David Naugle points out, happiness ultimately comes down to what we love. Our problem is that left to ourselves we attach love to things in disordered ways, leaving God out of the reckoning. When God acts to save us, he reorders our loves and affections, such that true happiness – far from being a pursuit of self-fulfilment – is rooted in a restored relationship with God and others.

•••

See the BBC News report from 22 May 2006 – ‘Make people happier, says Cameron’.

Read The Guardian article from 14 November 2010 – ‘Happiness index to gauge Britain’s national mood’.

Explore more about happiness here.

‘Wholly Living: A New Perspective on International Development’ is the title of a report published by Theos in partnership with CAFOD and Tearfund, contending that our obsession with money, freedom and choice ‘has resulted in a radical devaluation of the social, cultural and environmental relationships that form us and that enable us to flourish as human beings’. Click here for a copy of the report.

The following books explore this topic in more detail from different perspectives:

Derek Bok, The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

Mark Vernon, Wellbeing, The Art of Living Series (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008).

David K. Naugle, Reordered Love, Reordered Lives: Learning the Deep Meaning of Happiness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).