TruthBook Religious News Blog

Stephen Matchett
October 28, 2006

A RECENT survey suggested that most Australians want the Government to help us to be happy. It is of course not so much easier said than done than impossible. For a start, the 20th century offered ample evidence that social engineering often suits the interests of the engineers rather than the rest of us.

And the idea assumes the services the state provides, from education to law and order, pension to health care, can make us happy. They are all certainly a start for the ill and indigent. But, for the rest of us, at least in countries where government is servant, not master, our state of mind has always been in our own hands.

Or heads, because it seems that how we live our lives is largely shaped by our brain chemistry, and if we can learn to manage, or adapt to it, we can shape how we feel. If this sounds like the old power of positive thinking on steroids, in a sense that is exactly what it is.

Neuroscientists study the way our brains function, but their work has profound implications for philosophers and economists, politicians and theologians.

Behavioural economists argue that we are not always rational actors, intent on maximising profit. The idea that addiction is explained by moral weakness is long gone. And the way we behave is driven by our chemical programming rather than just what we believe or want to.

Science writer Stefan Klein explains how in a book long available online and now being published locally, The Science of Happiness (Scribe). Intended for general readers, its science may seem simple to professionals. But for lay readers it makes a compelling case about the way our brains work that will impress or unsettle, depending on a reader's attitudes to life (or basic brain chemistry).

Klein describes our brains' chemical systems for positive and negative feelings, the way they interact and how we can learn to distinguish between instructions from our genetic coding and what is appropriate to the circumstances.

And while our brain structures incline us to different temperaments, we can teach ourselves to change the way our brains work. Thus he writes about how we can override negative emotions by catching ourselves in the moment a particular thought kicks in, by deciding whether that is what we want to think.

Perhaps the most intriguing idea in the book is that we can cheer ourselves up by using our brain to outsmart, well, our brain.

Of course, it works the other way. It seems depressed people's brains release more of the hormone that causes their misery in the first place and the more an individual's brain is bathed in chemically induced despair the deeper their decline becomes. There are all sorts of similar examples in Klein's book and the implication is obvious. If we can identify the chemicals and the way they interact in our brains to make us angry and sad, happy and loving, why need anybody suffer any sort of mental misery?

Throughout the book there is a sense of hope, that if we can understand the chemical basis of diseases of the brain then we may be on the way to a cure for complaints that have always afflicted humanity. But Klein is careful to explain that we are not prisoners of the way chemicals bounce around our brains. Nor can we rely on medicine to save us from ourselves.

For a start, he asserts that for people who are not deeply depressed, positive feelings can drive out negative ones.

While Klein sees a role for all sorts of medication, he does not prescribe chemical cures for every miserable mental state.

Indeed, for people who are not profoundly depressed, doing something to take charge of their lives is the preferred solution to the miseries. "Exercise is a kind of natural Prozac," he writes.

Despite the enormous increase in knowledge of the way the brain works, Klein's case has much in common with Martin Seligman's superior self-help classic Learned Optimism (1991), which argues that we can learn to manage the way we look at the world.

Yet even though Klein does not suggest we can chemically engineer our own happiness, or other mental attributes for that matter, there is still a great deal in his book that will bother people who, on one hand, believe we should rely on our will to fight our way through life and those, on the other hand, who believe we are the victim of external circumstances.

There are no deities or devils in the brain, impelling to act, just chemicals interacting as they have always done.

Certainly Klein provides the social engineers with evidence by suggesting that cohesive societies, in which people feel they control their own lives, provide the foundation for individuals to be happy. And he argues that economic growth has not increased happiness in the Western world.

But there is a great deal of difference between the nanny state, regulating everything from hours of work to income, supposedly in the interests of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and allowing each individual the independence they need to take responsibility for their own lives.

It is inane to argue that the state can or should try to legislate happiness when it is something only individuals can manage for themselves.

The study of brain chemistry is emerging but it seems likely to change our understanding of emotions and how and why they rule us, by showing how and why we all act as do.

For people who have assumed that we have no option but to play the hand our genes deal us, Klein's summary of the science can be liberating. However, even though he explains how neuroscience can provide us with strategies to push ourselves towards happiness, without expecting assistance from God or psychiatry, the point of the book is that it is still up to us,however the chemicals in our brain bless or curse us.

"A happy life isn't a gift of fate. To make it happen, we have to act," Klein concludes.

Which sounds suspiciously like what we used to call common sense.