Delphic Maxim 76: Pray for happiness
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
76. Pray for happiness
Praying is such an odd concept to me. It seems like a kind of practical expression of hope — a ritual of bringing desire into the material world, rather than the world of the mind. In part, I’m sure that I find prayer an alien practice because I so unthinkingly participated in it when I was much younger and a contentedly faithful Catholic school boy. These days, my atheism turns me off the idea of prayer in a fairly pronounced way.
For me, a maxim that asks us to pray for happiness is as meaningless as the ‘thoughts and prayers’ that American legislators throw about after a school shooting massacre. Why pray when you have the power to act? Why pray when it is incumbent on you to make a difference? The only answer I can really think of for this question is that you believe in God, which is fine, but even still — surely your time is better spent creating the conditions for happiness, rather than asking a divine authority to bring them about.
So many ethical systems take a form of happiness as their ultimate aim — whether it’s in the form of utility (a kind of happiness for as many people as possible), or eudaemonia (the state towards which Aristotle felt the virtuous person strives). Curiously though, all these moral systems are underpinned by some kind of conscious effort — you have to work at happiness, it doesn’t just come to you.
Happiness isn’t just the absence of pain either, though I have heard a theory that happiness is our default state, absent any negative influences on our mood. Contentment is more appropriate to describe that state, I would have thought, and happiness is something more elevated. The passivity of praying, where the effort of doing something about happiness is subcontracted out to God, lends itself more to contentedness — a state of neutrality, with minimum effort save for the avoidance of pain.
It’s not unreasonable to hope for happiness, and I suppose in a sense if someone is inclined towards ritual and religion then maybe they get personal joy from the act of praying. Plenty of religious practice rewards its adherents with a sense of inner peace, and calm, and happiness, even joy. So the practical step for a person of faith may be to pray for happiness and they will find that it comes — a kind of self-fulfilling happiness prophecy.
But for people like me, and for the increasing number of secular people out there in the world, the better bet is to work towards happiness in our daily lives. That involves the usual gear we’ve seen throughout these maxims: spend time with friends, keep your home in order, be generous, honourable, and so on. Working at bettering yourself — mentally, physically, emotionally — is the best path to happiness.
Our agency and actions not only influence our character, but they influence our emotional state and the way we carry ourselves in the world. Virtue ethics aren’t just about being good, though that’s a very important part of self-improvement. They’re also about striving for happiness, which is an ultimate good. So prayer is fine, but taking steps to live better will bring you happiness far more quickly.
