Hey presto! A magician’s guide to being happy

POPULAR PSYCHOLOGY

HAPPY by Derren Brown (Bantam £20)

Who better to write a book on happiness than a professional illusionist?

We all know — don’t we? — that the quest for happiness, as an end in itself, is a chimera.

That hasn’t stopped countless quacks ( usually American) declaring that they have found the solution to guarantee a happy life.

Brown is not one of those modern mental faith healers.

Far from it: much of his book — happy: Why More or Less Everything Is Absolutely Fine — rests on the philosophers of Ancient Greece. Specifically, he embraces the Stoics, whose basic recipe for the good life was to learn simply to accept things over which we have no control and to limit our desires to the natural and realistic.

The trouble is that such a recipe comes up against the human condition — or, at least, as it has developed in the Western world.

Fatalism is not our way: we feel the need to assert our own influence on events, to improve our lives, even if the odds may be against our succeeding.

In fact, humanity would have never achieved some of the medical breakthroughs that have eased suffering if it weren’t for individuals who were cussedly determined to assert control over events (such as sickness and pain) that the rest of society accepted as our inevitable lot.

This is why George Bernard Shaw wrote: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress rests on the unreasonable man.’

obviously, progress and happiness are not at all the same thing, whether for the world as a whole, or for us as individuals.

So Brown is spot on — even if it disappoints readers looking for a simple answer — when he asserts: ‘The desire to obtain happiness remains the most enduring and conspicuously self-defeating aspect of our modern condition.’

he is also entirely correct (albeit entirely unoriginal) in pointing out that those who are plagued by dissatisfaction with their lot are not going to be rendered happy people by a gradual or even sudden transformation in their material prospects.

happiness, if it is anything, is a state of mind, one based on our characters, rather than our objective circumstances. one thing Brown is sure of is that religion is not the answer. he is entirely dismissive of the fervent Christianity of his youth and early adulthood, denouncing it as a propagator of ‘comfortable solutions’ that are not actually true.

Actually, I have never thought of Christianity as ‘ comfortable’ — unless the prospect of hell, fire and damnation can be so described.

And — though I have never, unlike Brown, been seduced by religion — he is simply making a category error when he implies that religion is a failed attempt to provide us with a happy life. Its doctrines are less self- centred than that: to do with pleasing God, rather than ourselves. Where Christianity and Brown’s favourite Greek philosophers connect is in the belief that one should learn to be happy with what one has. So he enthusiastically endorses Epictetus, who, according to Brown, ‘ summarises our best relationship to fate in his handbook: “Do not seek to have events happen to you as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.” ’

Well, maybe. But Epictetus was a slave whose master crippled him by deliberately stamping on one of his legs. on that basis, learning to ‘want things to happen as they do happen’ seems like a demand that the victims of profound injustice accept their lot in life.

It may make such people happier (though I wonder) but, in practice, it tolerates a situation in which avoidable suffering could continue indefinitely. Brown may regard that as therapeutic and even enlightened; I would not. he does, however, have wise and even moving words to say about confronting our greatest perennial terror: death. he explains: ‘one of the bittersweet privileges of being well known is that now and then, a terminally ill person — too often a young child — expresses a wish to meet you.’ on one occasion, it was the child who asked Brown to meet his mother, Debra, who was suffering from terminal cancer.

Yet Debra did not seem to be unhappy. She was doing her best to stay alive, through various gruelling medical treatments, but she also displayed a kind of fierce happiness at the intensity of her reciprocated love for her children, which had been heightened by the knowledge she had little time left to be with them.

The lesson Brown draws — and it is no less valuable for having been expressed by many others in the past — is that we should live our lives with the clear understanding it could come to an end tomorrow; and we should savour the relationships we have with our partners and children accordingly.

That enables us to put mundane causes of everyday displeasures into appropriate perspective, too.

Brown gives an example of his own trivial irritation ( over a coughing woman in the first-class railway carriage he had booked into): ‘This was not the sound of the sudden choking triggered when the airway of a train passenger is occluded by a wayward shard of reproduction ham.

‘Neither was it the hollow hack of the inveterate smoker: the rattling, guttural clatter of catarrh and cancer and black-lunged death.

‘Instead, this was that peculiar, soft, throaty hmmmkhm, whose opening gentle crescendo discloses that it is not triggered by porkpricked throat or pitch-clad lungs but rather the nervous desire to cough: a satisfying tracheal tension release that dislodges nothing but the need itself.

‘This was the muted, private cough of the compulsively habituated, which I recognised due to my own experience with similar tics.’

ANYWAY, to cut this (very) long story short, Brown managed, by persuading himself that the lady was ‘really quite sweet’, not to be annoyed by her coughing: ‘ All trace of irritation left me.’

I quote that extract for a purpose: to demonstrate how verbose and pretentious Brown’s prose style is. he is an entertainer, but this book of more than 400 pages is far from entertaining.

No reason why it should be: this is a work of philosophy, not of magic tricks. But it doesn’t even contain a single witticism.

It is some sort of achievement, I suppose, to write a book about happiness without provoking this reader to smile once.

Come to think of it, he at no stage suggests that humour has a vital role to play in our life. I wonder how happy Derren Brown really is.