Word: human
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Cairns will speak on the causes of human cancer today in Science Center B at 5 p.m. in the second part of the series...
...analyzes the results of both popular surveys and casual interviews and also attempts, he says, "to present what we, as social scientists, know about happiness." Soon to be published is Optimism: The Biology of Hope, by Rutgers University Anthropologist Lionel Tiger; it explores the possible biological origins of the human sanguineness that underlies feelings of wellbeing, whatever they are called. New York Psychoanalyst Willard Gaylin has just weighed in with a study called Feelings: Our Vital Signs, which scrutinizes and tries to delineate all the familiar varieties of human feeling. Gaylin thus probes the character of a state that...
Lionel Tiger's forthcoming book offers some slightly more definite advice-or at least postulation. Although he is not studying happiness as such, the anthropologist argues that humankind does not have to go looking far for its basic source of wellbeing: it is built right into the human body. Says he: "Our benign sense of the future could have been bred into us and other complex animals out of the need to survive." Tiger speculates that man pushes ever onward, inextinguishably optimistic in the face of adversity, because of his biochemistry. The key to mankind's optimism...
...achieve unnaturally what endorphins do naturally. Still, since individual body chemistries vary, the endorphin theory might account for the fact that some people are habitually happier than others: some might just have a bigger supply of this natural analgesic. It may even suggest, moreover, one concrete way in which human beings might assure their sense of happiness; yet this way-the ingestion of synthetic endorphins-is unnervingly like the drug-popping route to happiness envisioned in Brave New World. In all this, alas, nothing much is added to the question that has always nagged the brave old world: Just what...
Given time, the happyologists could conceivably come up with a useful, or at least a discerning, answer. Perhaps the question is so fundamental that, like love and wisdom, it will al ways elude human definition. For the moment, surely, it can be answered decisively, for better or worse, only by each in dividual. In short, the considerable resources, even good intentions, of science have so far disclosed little about happiness that was not available in the words of Seneca "Unblest is he who thinks himself unblest") in ancient times or those of Abe Lincoln ("Most folks are about as happy...