Monday, December 2, 2013

Happy

Happiness.  I came across this in a student's discussion post where he disputed the fact that First Nations' peoples may have  been 'happy' to convert to Christianity.  This got me thinking about happiness and our pursuit of it in this modern world.  The Americans have it built into their Constitution as a human right.. not happiness itself, but the pursuit of same.  I may be reading history badly, but I don't think happiness was a goal of human societies, or even of individuals until the Enlightenment.  This is not to say a society or an individual might not be happy, either generally, or on occasion. In another discussion in another class, a student brought up one of those statistical studies that float through the ether these days which stated firmly [being the result of scientific research] that the Danes are the happiest people on earth, while being amongst the least religious. I wonder what Hamlet would have thought?

Hmmmm......

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