Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:

worse, cruelty, Islam, child, industrial, diet, short, correlation, plague, equilibrium, better, increased, scientific, touch, less, miserable, transformed, romantic, dogmatic, 19th, Africa, cautious, necessarily, alienation, famine, spiritual, collective, mechanistic, bliss, European, farm, annihilation, catastrophe, psychology, enslaved, fantasies, urban, point, alleviate, dark, convincing, misuse, disease, suffering, agriculture

•

much of humankind today enjoy a wealth that used to be the stuff of                   fantasies and fairy tales

•

science and the                     industrial revolution have given humans superhuman powers and practically limitless energy

•

many aspects of human life have been completely                       transformed

•

the social order

•

daily life

•

politics

•

human                     psychology

•

but are we happier?

•

did the wealth that humankind accumulated over the last few centuries translate into human happiness

•

do the seemingly inexhaustible stores of energy open up for us inexhaustible stores of           bliss?

•

did the 70,000 years of human changes and revolutions make the world a             better place to live in?

•

if the answer to this question is in the negative

•

what was the           point of all these changes?

•

historians rarely ask these questions

•

e.g. if the rise of           Islam made the Egyptians more pleased with their lives?

•

did the European collapse of empires in             Africa make people there happier or more miserable?

•

what is the purpose of all these changes if it does not make people happier?

•

few have studied in a                     scientific way the long-term history of happiness

•

but we all have some vague conception of the history of happiness

•

theories

•

1. PROGRESSIVE VIEW OF HAPPINESS

•

the more power humans gain over their environment, the more happier they are

•

human capabilities have                   increased throughout history

•

since humans usually use their power to                   alleviate misery and fulfill their aspiration, we must be happier having more power than, say, our Medieval ancestors, and they, in turn, must have been happier than stone age hunters and gatherers

•

not very                     convincing since:

•

more power and new kinds of behaviors and skills do not                       necessarily make life better and happier

•

e.g. when humans learned how to         farm, the collective power of humankind to shape the environment increased

•

but the living conditions of individual humans was in many respects           worse

•

peasants had to work harder than foragers and received in return a less nutritious diets

•

far more exposed to               disease than their hunter and gatherer ancestors

•

e.g. spread of                 European empires increased the collective power of humankind

•

but this was hardly good news for the millions of Africans who found themselves                 enslaved by the Europeans

•

given the human tendency to             misuse power, it seems very naive to believe that there is a direct correlation between power and happiness

•

2. REGRESSIVE VIEW OF HAPPINESS

•

more power leads to         less happiness

•

as humans gained more and more power, this created a cold and                       mechanistic world which is ill-suited to the real needs of homo sapians

•

evolution molded our minds and bodies for the life of hunters and gatherers

•

the transition first to                       agriculture and then to industry, condemned human beings to live unnatural lives that cannot give full expression to our inherent instincts and cannot satisfy our deepest yearnings and needs

•

life may be easier today, but nothing in this comfortable life in the           urban middle class can approach the wild excitement by a forager band on a mammoth hunt

•

this is, of course, a very                 romantic view of happiness

•

this romantic insistence on seeing the         dark side of every invention and development in history is as                 dogmatic in the inevitability of progress

•

it may be true that we are today out of           touch with our inner hunter and gatherer, but it is not all bad

•

e.g. over the last two centuries, modern medicine has decreased           child mortality from about 33% to less than 5%

•

surely this increased the collective happiness of human beings

•

3. PROGRESSIVE HAPPINESS SINCE THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

•

only since the scientific revolution have increases in power led to increases in happiness

•

until the scientific revolution, there was no clear                       correlation between power and happiness

•

medieval people may indeed have been more                   miserable than our hunter/gatherer ancestors

•

but throughout the scientific revolution in the last 500 years, humans have increasingly learned to use their power wisely to create more                     collective happiness

•

modern medicine including vaccines

•

steep decline in violence

•

recent disappearance of international wars and their likelihood

•

elimination of large-scale             famine

•

but this, too, is an oversimplification

•

this view bases its optimistic assessment on the modern age, and so it is a small sample of years

•

people only began to gradually enjoy the benefits of modern medicine in the middle of the         19th century

•

the significant drop in child mortality is a 20th century phenomenon

•

mass famines continued to             plague much of humanity until the middle of the 20th century

•

international wars became rare only since 1945 largely thanks to the new threat of complete                         annihilation by nuclear weapons

•

so even if the last 50 years have been an unprecedented golden age for humanity, it is a very           short time, and it is too early to know if this represents a fundamental shift in the currents of history, or an ephemeral wave of good fortune

•

even if the last half century was a golden age, it may be that during this era we sow the seeds for future                       catastrophe

•

we may be disturbing the                       equilibrium of our planet

•

it may be that we are experiencing a number of good years or decades or centuries, but that we will be paying a high price for this behavior in the future

•

another reason to be                 cautious about this optimistic view of modern happiness is our treatment of animals

•

we can congratulate ourselves on the modern accomplishment of homo sapiens only if we ignore the fate of other animals on the planet

•

much of the material wealth that we enjoy today was accumulated at the expense of laboratory animals, factory cows, and conveyor belt chickens

•

billions of animals over the last 200 years have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose               cruelty has no precedent in the annals of history

•

seen from an animal rights activists point of view, modern agriculture is one of the greatest crimes in history which has caused massive                   suffering for animals living on this planet

•

when we come to evaluate global happiness, if can only see it as a success if we only include homo sapiens

•

problems with all these views

•

they consider happiness largely as a product of material factors such as your health, your         diet, and your wealth

•

according to this approach, if people are richer and healthier, they must also be happier

•

many philosophers, religious thinkers, and poets throughout history have indicated that social, ethical and                   spiritual factors have as great an impact on our happiness as material conditions

•

it is clear that material conditions today are much better than in the past

•

but if happiness does not depend only on material conditions, then it does not necessarily mean that we are happier today as people were in the past even though they had inferior material conditions

•

we know, for instance, that many people suffer today from                     alienation and meaninglessness in their lives