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COMMENTARY
July 23, 2011
Happy stats
To the annals of United Nations fatuity, already grown to stupendous length, we may soon add the National Happiness Index. This is the pet proposal of the Kingdom of Bhutan, through Lhatu Wangchuk, who heads their delegation in New York. The General Assembly this week adopted a "nonbinding resolution" to make "happiness" a "development indicator." Later, they may agree to be more fully bound and gagged with the concept.I bear no ill will to Wangchuk, and would send my own best wishes to the court at Thimphu, notwithstanding the failure to grant me a visa when I applied to enter their kingdom in 1971. (I'm not the sort of person who holds a grudge.) Wangchuck is himself a perceptive man, from what I can make of Barbara Plett's earnest interview with him, via the BBC. In his efforts to explain the concept of happiness to his skeptical fellow delegates he has, for instance, noticed one thing: that the delegates themselves are not very happy. For this, his proposed remedy is that they should get more sleep, and spend more time with their families. And I could be made more happy, and some of my friends perhaps happier still, if they would spend all their time sleeping, or with their families, or in any pleasurable activity that prevents their attendance at Turtle Bay. Wangchuk is also a rational man, as evidence his observation that, among any two UN members in a state of war, the happiness of one might necessarily entail the unhappiness of the other. No, his proposed index of happiness would cleverly omit the sort of joys for which the Germans have supplied the term "schadenfreude," and will entertain any and all suggestions to achieve the purest possible statistical indication of comparative levels of national bliss. Bhutan itself pioneered (in 1972, the year after denying me that visa) a Gross National Happiness index ("GNH"), to balance the results from surveys of Gross National Product ("GNP") which, as everyone knows, give a very poor indication of popular glee. Indeed, Bhutan has long believed itself, and been believed, to be a country where the GNH greatly exceeds the GNP. (They now encourage hard-currency tourism.) There is a Canadian angle here, my reader will be relieved to learn. The index was recently fine-tuned with the assistance of the British Columbian health epidemiologist and all-round expert on "well-being," Michael Pennock, who has developed a non-Buddhist version for international dissemination based on the various "pillars" of happiness, as conceived by smug, progressive, left-wing people. You know: "sustainable development"; "cultural values"; "environmental preservation"; "good governance." So that the happiest country imaginable will have a lot of windmills, and community centres, no capitalist enterprise whatever, and a vast welfare bureaucracy. One must imagine the inhabitants of such a country living perpetually in a state of unalleviated ecstasy, under the relentless watch of the Happiness Police. Or maybe I'm just an old grump, who still doesn't like communism, even when served up on a delicious bed of organic greens and soya products. "Like many psychological and social indicators, GNH is somewhat easier to state than to define with mathematical precision." I have this nugget of penetrating wisdom from the Wikipedia entry on the subject, no doubt copied from some lobbyist's brochure. I would go farther and observe, that happiness is one of innumerable things that cannot be defined statistically, at all. For there is nothing within the phenomenon of human happiness that can be quantified. Nothing, nada, zero, zilch. Nor can it be explained by reference to tangible, external causes, in any consistent way. Then let me add that, as my mama used to say, "Once we know that something is impossible, we should stop trying to do it." Do not go gliding without a glider. Do not go snorkelling without a snorkel. As the Wiki quote reveals, with unintended candour, it is not just happiness that cannot be measured with calipers and tongs. Every other "psychological and social indicator" is, by its nature, complete bosh. That such numbers are not only gathered, at monstrous public expense, but then used to "craft" elaborate government social programmes, goes beyond scandal. It suggests, on the part of our progressive political masters, an attitude toward being that is actually insane. Let us go farther still, into the advanced territory, and observe, that there is no such thing as a "statistical definition" - of anything. The term is used to refer to something quite opposite to what it suggests: an arbitrary ruling, which precedes the gathering of statistics both logically and temporally. It is an imposition, an authoritarian act, a power play. And it should be resisted from the moment it is first suggested, by every freedom-loving woman and man. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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