MULUGETA GUDETA
The World’s Happiest Report a publication of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network has used statistical analysis to determine the world’s happiest countries. The ranking considers a range of economic, social and environmental factors and offers insights into what makes a country a great place to live.
What is happiness in the first place? This is a question that may sound simple but whose answer may be as complex as philosophy itself whose avowed objective is to look into the best ideas in ethics, politics or metaphysics to achieve human happiness. Despite the general agreement that philosophy is committed to finding ways to attain human happiness, philosophers are deeply divided as to how to achieve happiness or whether happiness as such should be the goal of life.
Zeno and the Stoics for instance believed that one of the sources of happiness may be to “change what we can change in life and endure what we cannot” In its modern sense, Stoicism is “philosophy of life that maximizes positive emotions, reduces negative emotions and helps individuals to hone their virtues of character.” This can be interpreted as the Stoic’s road to happiness.
In its ordinary or mundane sense, happiness is defined as, “a sense of well-being, joy or contentment. When people are successful or safe or lucky, they feel happiness. “The pursuit of happiness” is something most Western societies are based on and different people feel happiness for different reasons.”
It has become an established practice for various research institutions to quantify and classify countries and peoples every year on the basis of their median incomes, lifestyles, health and living conditions in general and give us the ten happiest countries in the world. Africa was long neglected by this kind of research because it was largely marginalized or undeserving of research and classification because it was long considered a “dark continent” that has remained so for decades if not centuries.
African countries are therefore a new addition in the global race to claim the status of the happiest countries in the world. This is a sign that Africa is rather an emerging continent that is attracting the attention of institutions and research centers that care to know how Africans feel about their lives and where they stand in the global race to claim the most coveted rank of “happiest country”.
For this year, (2023) the top ten happiest countries in Africa are ranked as follows: Mauritius, Libya, Ivory Coast, South Africa, Gambia, Algeria, Liberia, Congo, Morocco and Mozambique. There is an apparent paradox in this classification. Libya is at war with itself since the fall of Colonel Khadafy’s regime and yet it is ranked as the second happiest country in Africa.
Happiness is basically a subjective state of mind that depends on many factors such as standard of living and material conditions. When we look at the happiest countries in the world according to the opinion polls or research results gathered to determine the ranks or classification purpose, we realize that level of economic development or standard of living or per capital income play the most crucial factors behind the annual classifications. The countries that often rank as top ten in the global classification of happiest people are usually Scandinavian countries whose economic development are also among the top in the world. Per capital income can also be used as an index to determine the level of happiness of its inhabitants.
It would be logical to think that the higher the material standards of living of a people. The higher their level of material happiness, a country or people who live in abject poverty, as many people are in Africa at present, cannot be expected to rank among the ten top in the world in levels of happiness. The richer you are, the happier you are likely to be according to conventional wisdom. Yet many people in the richest countries may feel miserable depending on many other factors.
Peace is one of the factors for the people of a country to be happy in general. Both Ukraine and Russia are developed countries enjoying material riches and higher standards of living that is to say before the current war broke out. But they cannot be happy now that the war is ravaging both countries and peoples without a clear winner emerging soon. A year or so ago Ukrainians and Russians might have been some of the happiest people in the world but they are not now and will not be in the long ran too since the post-conflict is expected to remain as hard as it is now.
Anyway, the happiness index may be controversial for many reasons one of them being its subjective nature. Even under normal conditions, people’s ideas of happiness depend on many more factors than material ones. Many people may be happy although they live in material misery. There are also many people who feel miserable although they may be living in the midst of opulence.
This is particularly true for richer countries where good chunks of their populations live in the midst of riches while they often indulge in devastating habits in their bid to attain the elusive happiness that is escaping them. This is of course a paradox worth studying by the students of happiness. What the researchers into the factors that makes people of many countries happier than others should also take into consideration what we may call the subjective factors of happiness.
Why Tibetan monks living in the Himalayas in the midst of material deprivation may be happier than a Wall Street broker who makes millions of dollars every year could be an interesting subject for research? If we look at it superficially we may think that the monk is happier than the financial broker in Wall Street because they might not suffer from the anxieties and stresses that often accompany wealth and the race for material achievements.
In general, spiritual people may be happier than those who are stressed by lack of money not because poverty is the source of happiness but because they have mentally mastered and controlled the urge for wealth and replaced it with spiritual wealth that comes from within the mind or the heart depending on how they look at it, and gives them ultimate happiness.
This is in fact the role religion plays in the life of ordinary people. It tends to substitutes deprivation here on earth with a promise of gratification in heavens and this gives people hope as a source of forthcoming and everlasting happiness. It is of course impossible for those who conduct researches to see which country or people is the happiest in the world because subjective factors of happiness may not be quantifiable or classifiable.
Happiness may also be culture-sensitive in the sense that people generally live within their cultures and their thinking and behaviors are accordingly shaped by these cultural factors. People who almost go naked down there in the South Omo, Hamer wilderness in Ethiopia may be some of the happiest people in the world because they live in complete harmony with nature and almost in primitive ways because this is the only lifestyle they know and are comfortable with.
In South Omo or among the Hamer people this may be a source of pride and happiness because they have conquered their fears or shyness of going naked that was normal millions of years ago when Lucy was still alive in a locality known as Hadar, in the Afar region. So happiness is not only culture-sensitive but also relative and time-sensitive.
The claim that subjective attitudes and cultural norms may be scientific or objectively quantifiable or classifiable may be complete nonsense simply because the tools and methodology for such an approach is not yet discovered or applied. You cannot obviously go around asking people how they feel about a certain measurement of happiness and collect tour finding and come up with a scientific conclusion that objectively evaluates the feelings and attitudes of people in a country.
You can do so when you conduct opinion polls or market researches to know how people feel about certain consumer goods. Pollsters who are involved in such activities are using time-tested methodologies to arrive at sound conclusions. Yet, you cannot apply the same tools and methodologies to go into the minds of people and register everything that they feel when they are asked whether they are happy or not. This is still science fiction. Neuroscience has not yet developed enough to analyze human feelings of happiness and sadness the results of which could be used in research into public happiness to determine which country or people is the happiest in the world.
To make a long story short, current researches into the classifications and/or quantifications of the happiest countries or people in the world or in Africa may be highly arbitrary or subjective depending on econometrics rather than on sound and objective approaches. It is a conventionally agreed method of showing which countries and people are better off than the others mainly depending on habitual economic measurements of per capita income, purchasing power, annual per capita income and similar other factors.
This is not however to say that this is complete nonsense or a useless tool of evaluation but that it may not be a holistic approach in measuring or evaluating happiness that largely depend on subjective as well as cultural factors. As a last note, the research into the happiness of people is open-ended in the sense that it does not suggest ideas that may help unhappy people become happy without going into the vicious and complex cycles of development and underdevelopment. It may not help a people or a country to tell that they are not happy without telling them why they are not. We better turn to economic science and wait stoically until “the science of happiness” might address such complex issues.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD WEDNESDAY 29 MARCH 2023
