ANOTHER VOICE

What's wrong with being unhappy?

PETRONELLA WYATT

According to all those polls taken after the Panorama interview, public sympathy for the Princess of Wales is running at about 85 per cent in her favour. This is largely because she is seen as 'unhappy'.

And what could be worse than that? In the modern world, nothing, it seems — not hunger, not illness, not death, even — is adjudged more terrible than personal unhappiness.

If the Declaration of Independence enshrined 'the pursuit of happiness', the late-20th century has dispensed with the proviso. Happiness itself has become a right — one no less inalienable, for instance, than the right to universal bene- fits. Indeed, one might say that we were liv- ing in a 'Happiness Dependency' culture.

It is a culture that has inspired whole industries — including the medical and the pseudo-medical. It dominates the media, which dignifies 'gurus' and sundry dubious others with the title of 'psychologists'. It governs our political life — Mr Nicholas Soames was given a severe rebuke for dar- ing to call it into question.

The 'Happiness Dependency' culture has as its patroness the Princess of Wales. The Princess 'just wants to be happy'. She wants everyone to be happy. We know this because she has said it time and time again, like a mantra.

The official title of the 'Happiness Dependency' culture is the 'New Age'. The Princess of Wales is a typical 'New-Age woman'. She is a symbol of the present tri- umph of sense over sensibility, of mumbo- jumbo over reason. She expresses herself in the mystical language of the feelings. She has let it be known that, in order to find happiness, she is hying to 'find herself.

This is deplorable, not because it is fic- tion on her part, but because it is utterly sincere. The Princess, one might say, yearns her living. Every sentence that she utters is infused with longing. 'I want to be a queen in people's hearts,' she told Mr Martin Bashir. She might as well have been talking to Horace Walpole. This was a line from the worst Romantic Gothic novel.

Therein lies the fault, perhaps — not so much in ourselves, but in our age. The end of a century, for reasons which have never been satisfactorily explained, is often char- acterised by gusts of sensibility, by out- breaks of trembling passion.

What is the New Age, after all, but the late 18th-century Romantic movement in designer clothes? Kant placed his empha- sis, very much like our own 'New-Age Princess', on the 'inner voice'. Rousseau acknowledged restraint only to dismiss it: `Of what weight is that against my personal desires?'

The unrestrained pursuit of the self has done irreparable damage to the fabric of modern British society. In a world in which the young grow up to believe that personal happiness supersedes the traditional requirements of the social contract, it is no wonder that, like Diana, not many of them find it.

One of the best things I have ever read on this subject is by Bertrand Russell. In The Conquest of Happiness, written in 1958, Russell warned against the growth of what he called 'self-centred passions'.

In society, a person is only able to achieve some sort of satisfaction provided that his or her passions are directed out- ward, not inward. It should be our aim, therefore, to avoid self-indulgence, and instead acquire 'those affections and inter- ests which will prevent our thoughts from dwelling perpetually on ourselves'.

Among these 'self-centred passions', two of the most common are self-admiration and self-pity. The Princess of Wales, one fears, possesses these to a high degree.

Without wishing to deny the good of which she may be capable, only the naive could have failed to notice how swiftly hos- pital visits and charity work are translated into photo-opportunities. No wonder Diana often appears frustrated. Vanity, when it passes beyond a point, kills plea- sure in every activity for its own sake and leads inevitably to boredom. Mr Soames went too far when he suggested that the Princess was in 'the advanced stages of paranoia'. She shows signs, however, of being in the advanced stages of self-pity.

The kind of ill-treatment of which the Princess complained — ostracism, persecu- tion, etc. — does, undoubtedly, sometimes occur. What in the end arouses the hearer's suspicions is the multiplicity of villains whom it has been the sufferer's ill-fortune to meet with. If one person in a given envi- ronment receives, according to their own account, universal ill-treatment, the likeli- hood is that the cause lies in the person, and that they either imagine injuries, or behave in such a way as to arouse uncon- trollable irritation.

What is wrong, in any case, with a bit of ill-treatment? What is wrong, indeed, with a dose of unhappiness? Who will speak for misery? It looks as if it will have to be me.

Unhappiness should be seen as a neces- sary seasoning, a spur to achievement. Napoleon, for example, suffered at school from feeling inferior to his classmates, who were rich aristocrats, while he was a penuri- ous scholarship boy. When he allowed the return of the émigrés, he had the satisfac- tion of seeing his former schoolfellows bowing down before him. But he had to conquer France to do it.

Happy people are often lazy people. Was Alexander the Great a happy man? His drunkenness, his rages and his claims to divinity all suggest that he was not. Darwin was, one suspects, given to melancholy; so was Marx. Byron once wrote: 'There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away.' Unhappiness may not be greatness, but it may inspire it.

All I can say is, come back, Voltaire. Oh for the age of the Enlightenment, for rea- son, self-restraint and stoicism — for Corneille, Pope and Hume! In those days, men and women alike were encouraged to do their utmost and take the consequences on the chin. Dryden urged: 'Reason to rule'; Corneille: `Do your duty and leave the issue to the Gods.'

But then came sentiment, selfishness and hysteria. Since the 19th century, we enlight- ened rationalists have been fighting a losing battle. The 'Happiness Dependency' cul- ture has triumphed. Call it what you like 'Romanticism', the 'post-Sixties ethos', the `New Age' — the pursuit of happiness has become an undignified scramble for newsprint and air-time. When public figures assume that 'want' is synonymous with 'should', this is something to be deplored. The princess who thinks first of her personal position is bound to come, quite literally, to grief. Besides, being happy never made anyone happy for very long. If this seems a contradiction, just remember Freud's aphorism that it is only in logic that contradictions cannot exist.