What is it that makes a happy life? People have been asking that for millennia and I have a few minutes while I wait to collect someone, so I might not have a comprehensive answer. The reason I’m asking is that Religion ‘linked to happy life’ is one of the most emailed stories on the BBC News site today. I have to admit I’m surprised that there are so few responses to the story on Technorati, but maybe everyone like me is wondering what a happy life is.

Or maybe I’m a bit early with the story and when this goes live that Technorati link will prove me wrong.

The topic of a happy life is a chapter in Julia Annas’ Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. It’s a good book. She uses the image above to introduce Prodicus’ Choice of Heracles. Prodicus was a sophist of the 5th century BC, but his story has come down to us via an ancient form of Chinese Whispers. Socrates told the story to Aristippus — and that conversation was recorded by Xenophon years later.

According to Prodicus:

When Heracles was passing from boyhood to youth’s estate, wherein the young, now becoming their own masters, show whether they will approach life by the path of virtue or the path of vice, he went out into a quiet place, and sat pondering which road to take. And there appeared two women of great stature making towards him. The one was fair to see and of high bearing; and her limbs were adorned with purity, her eyes with modesty; sober was her figure, and her robe was white. The other was plump and soft, with high feeding. Her face was made up to heighten its natural white and pink, her figure to exaggerate her height. Open-eyed was she; and dressed so as to disclose all her charms. Now she eyed herself; anon looked whether any noticed her; and often stole a glance at her own shadow.

The hussy was called Pleasure and the frump called Virtue. They both offered different routes to happiness. Pleasure’s argument was roughly “Wahey! Get a load of this! Grab it while you can! Know what I mean? Nudge, nudge.” Virtue in contrast wasn’t even offering a quick snog. Instead she said happiness can only be found in the things worked for and earned, even if that means self-denial and frustration. Pleasure’s gifts, she warned, would be temporary but hers were lasting.

Julia Annas picks up on the opposition of Pleasure and Happiness in the tale. She says it’s a different way of thinking to about Happiness than Utilitarian philosophers like Mill or Sidgwick who see Happiness as the acculmulation of pleasure and avoidance of pain. Utilitarianism appears to be the philosophical underpinning of this news story, the avoidance of pain makes you a happier person.

Their findings, they said, suggested that religion could offer a “buffer” which protected from life’s disappointments.

Professor Clark said: “We originally started the research to work out why some European countries had more generous unemployment benefits than others, but our analysis suggested that religious people suffered less psychological harm from unemployment than the non-religious.

“They had higher levels of life satisfaction”.

I can put in the Marx quote from Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that everyone knows here, but I’ll also add the sentences around it.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opiate of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

The fact that religion makes people feel better, or even gives pleasure, is no surprise. When Marx was calling it the opiate of the people he wasn’t proposing that we train sniffer dogs to seek out mullahs being smuggled on flights from Afghanistan. He was saying that religion satisfied and sedated people to the extent that they were content to accept the status quo. If you were using Marx to deliberately build a totalitarian state to exploit people (as opposed to doing it by accident) then the first thing on your shopping list would be a religion.

The research is a conference paper, based on the working paper Deliver us from Evil: Religion as Insurance [PDF]. It’s not been published in a journal as far as I know but what the hell, we can critique it. What I find puzzling is that Clark and Lelkes use Life Satisfaction rather than Happiness, which they think is too ephemeral. What does it mean to have life satisfaction? According to page 10 a person who has a satisfied life is someone who answers “10” to the question “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole nowadays?” They then correlated this with factors such as whether the person had been divorced, separated, widowed etc.*

There’s a pretty obvious hole. Does religion cushion people from life’s disappointments or does it dull the senses to everything? If you really want to test the opiate of people idea you’d need to perform similar tests for positive correlations. What the research has found is that life has disappointments and religion can be an anaesthetic.

Sometimes.

Some of the results are odd. They point out that divorce is worse if you’re Catholic rather than Protestant, which makes sense when you compare what the churches’ positions are on the topic. Clark and Lelkes interpret this a punishment effect. I’m not convinced this interpretation stands because, if I’m reading the table correctly, it’s an even bigger punishment effect if you’re a churchgoing Catholic and your partner dies. The correlation figures appear to be twice as bad as the divorce figures. The best thing to do — if you’re a grieving Catholic — might be to sit a home, alone, and pray. I may not be reading it correctly, there’s no confidence factors for some of the figures and the correlations aren’t easy to compare — but this is a working paper — so you wouldn’t necessarily expect that.

What this conference paper doesn’t seem to tackle is how many of those disappointments were made worse by living in a society which bestows privileges on some religions but not others. Does granting heart-felt prejudice respect (so long as it’s a prejudice with a long tradition in that nation) create a need for other religions as a salve for the injuries inflicted by the in-crowd? It’s very much the economics of the individual rather than the society and I think that may be a little myopic. I could do some research to show smack addicts with a reliable supply experienced more life satisfaction than those without such a supply. That wouldn’t mean that smack was a Good Thing.

I’m not sure if this is a case of over-enthusiastic misreporting. Using these findings as evidence for the positive effect of religion is really on a intellectual par with simply saying Christians slaughtered millions of people in the Americas (or whatever Christian atrocity you prefer), ergo all Christianity is bad. Yes the first statement is superficially true, but you’d be amazingly naïve to think the Europeans would have respected the natives if Christianity didn’t exist. Similarly there’s an argument in this paper that there are immediate benefits to religious belief given the current state of society, but it doesn’t answer whether or religious belief is an optimal solution or an example of market failure.

Most of all there’s the big question of what a happy life is. I don’t think that’s going to be answered with a scale from zero to ten.

I put this together in short bursts throughout the day between driving relatives to places, so a few more people have posted on the topic since I started writing it.

Drink-Soaked Trotskysite Popinjays for WAR pick up on the same heavy-handed allusion.

The always excellent Skepchic is, not entirely surprisingly, sceptical.

Comments on the JPS Blog’s brief, but pointed entry Headlines can make you look stupid include the other obvious line which I cut due to space. Ignorance is bliss, goes back to Plato’s thoughts on religion and what the populace should be told to keep them moral.

There’s also JackP at the Pickards is the only blogger broadly supportive of the findings that seems to have thought about it in any depth. At least the only such blogger I’ve found at this time. There may be more found by Google soon.

* I don’t know if they’re using a strictly linear scale which proposes there’s a fixed upper level of satisfaction or if they’re using a Sternbach/Okuda non-linear scale where 10 is a point of infinite satisfaction. Nor is it clear where Larry would sit on this scale. Mick Jagger is at zero, unless we’re being pedantic about double negatives.

See also DaveP’s post on the subject and JQH is more depressing.

There is a petition for UK citizens to sign, but I suspect that even if it was successful that would only be a short term success. Really a shift in opinion is needed that recognises that having a non-Scientist Minister for Science makes as much sense as appointing a brain surgeon as Attorney General.

A series of written answers concerning the Portable Antiquities Scheme came out this week.

David Taylor (Labour) asked what redundancies are going to happen given that the finances were only going to ‘maintain the level of support’. The reply was that the Minister doesn’t know and it’s not the government’s problem.

Hwyel Williams (Plaid Cymru) asked how many Finds Liaison Officers cover Wales and what assessment has been made of their effectiveness. The answer is one, and as far as the Minister is concerned it seems that there’s no interest in how effective that officer is.

Lembit Öpik (Liberal Democrat) had a couple of pointed questions about the future. What would the funding be for the next three years? That hasn’t been decided yet, and it’s not a government matter. Given the current financial crisis the country’s in where cuts are being made across all research councils to bail out other problems it seems that long-term planning simply isn’t possible at the PAS. That does raise the question how on earth are the PAS going to plan for the future. Lembit Öpik also asked what discussions there had been about the scheme’s future with the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. The answer seems to be “none really”.

David Jones (Conservative) asked how many archaeological finds have been recorded by the PAS in Wales, which means every major party in England and Wales has been taking an interest in the subject recently. Unusually that got a straight answer with no prevarication or qualifiers: 17,702. That’s interesting because with 321406 finds in total, that means that one eighteenth of all of the scheme’s finds are coming from an area served by just one of forty-nine officers. It’s not a fair comparison as a lot of borders material is handled by the neighbouring English officers, but it does show that the scheme really isn’t a position to make cutbacks. Add in the answer’s to Lembit Öpik’s questions and it’s clear that there isn’t even a target as to where things will be cut back to.

I’m still baffled. If you were to draw up a New Labour heritage scheme in a cynical bid for money, then the PAS is what you’d get. It’s local and national. It’s inclusive. It’s cheap and it’s multi-purpose. It’s as if Labour has been caught out by the success of their policies and the opposition parties could easily use the government’s disarray for cheap point scoring. Yet it has cross-party support because it has been a huge success. This comes out in the debate held recently on the 5th of March. At a time when it’s easy to hold politicians in contempt this debate shows that there are people from all parties who are capable of serious debate.

It was led by Mark Fisher (Labour) and I can’t help wishing he was Minister for Culture. A quick look on Wikipedia shows that he was Minister for the Arts briefly. If the written answers to Parliamentary questions are to be believed then he’s clearly much more well informed about the PAS than the current Minister. The debate wasn’t so much about how economies could be made but about how the current funding for the scheme is inadequate. Fisher notes:

Already, even at the present time, we have too few finds liaison officers, although the scheme operates well. There is only one finds liaison officer for the whole of the north-east—from Teeside up to the Scottish border—which is an area of incredible archeological importance and includes Hadrian’s wall and many other important sites. There is just one officer for that whole area.

The wall is important, but as he says there are other sites too. If I were to create a research project on Britishness then this is where I’d go to. This is one of the few places where the monasteries kept history alive in the Dark Ages. It bore the brunt of the Viking invasions. It’s been fought over for centuries by the Scots and the English. If you want to know what being British as opposed to English or Scottish means then this is the place to look.

Edward Vaizey (Conservative) has a similar tale from Oxfordshire. There’s no FLO for Oxfordshire at the moment due to the lack of budget beyond 2009, and no officer for Berkshire. The Thames Valley is possibly the closest thing Britannia had to civilisation in the Roman period. It was one of the major farming areas. Oxford was home to the Royalist cause in the Civil Wars. It has sites like the Rollright Stones reaching back into prehistory.

There’s also a nice bit from Tim Loughton (Conservative):

[I]n terms of it being right that there should be a review, will she acknowledge that the efficiencies in the scheme, which has produced, I think, a 73 per cent. increase in the finds recorded year on year, are absolutely phenomenal? In terms of bang for the taxpayer’s buck, this is an incredibly efficient scheme.

How strange is that? At a time when the political parties are all sniping at each other for points you have people from all sides wanting to put on record what a good job government-funded project is doing. When the opposition are telling you you’ve been hugely successful surely it’s time to take notice?

The problem is that the country seems to be in the grip of a severe financial crisis. It’s not just the PAS that’s falling under the axe. The Arts and Humanities Research Council has pulled the plug on its internet archive. It’s a signal that the UK is a no-go area for internet archiving, which could be a problem if you think that academics might be putting more work on the internet in the coming decade or so. The situation is even worse in Physics. There’s been a long-term crisis there which has become so normal that the government has slashed the Astronomy budget by another 25%. Say goodbye to Jodrell Bank.

The most depressing fact about all this isn’t simply the cuts, its that projects are getting cut because they are successful. I can see that Northern Rock had to be bailed out. The economic effect of leaving it to go to the wall would be disasterous, but it seems now that we’re celebrating and rewarding failure. A better example would be the Olympi©s* whose cost has grown from £3.4bn to £9.3bn thanks to financial management. This includes an extra £1.1bn recently pulled from the Lottery funds to be spent creating temporary venues where we can cheer on plucky British athletes as they just miss out on the medals thanks to years of under-investment in basic sports facilities.

Yes, the PAS was initially funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, which has lost its money.

*Bizarrely it’s possibly illegal to use the correct spelling because someone’s stolen a word from the English language. I could understand Olympic™ but copyright is simply ridiculous.

Following Aydin’s advice I’ve tried to go with something simple, but the simpler you go the more likely it is that the name.com has been taken. I’ve settled on Clioaudio.I was wary of using Clio in the title, as I don’t want to cause confusion with Clioweb, Cliopatria, Spinning Clio and so on, but decided that Clio– was probably generic enough to avoid confusing one with the other.

This is the first pilot which is still a bit of a test file. I need to work on recording from phones and also on my esses. This is why I prefer to have someone else in front of the microphone. Oh, and my interview technique.

In the medium term I may be moving newsy posts to Clioaudio with the intention of getting syndicated on NewsNow.