Thoughts on Happiness 2: The Necessity of Sadness

“A slimy grey hand with six fingers and a thumb slipped round the open edge of the door and beckoned to her.

The hand gave Tina a wrong-feeling. Her heart started to beat faster and she got a kind of runny sensation down her arms and legs. She’d never felt it before. But she knew it was wrong, so she tapped a general all-purpose relaxing code into her popper pack and felt better straight away.

The hand beckoned again and Tina walked closer to the door.

It snatched her by the shoulder and pulled her inside.

Tina had a really bad wrong-feeling about this. She couldn’t see much inside the Grey Door, as it was very dark, and then the owner of the hand bit into her side and she got a very, very wrong pain-feeling.

She had enough strength to reach for her popper pack, which sent a soothing balm into her head, and the pain-feeling evaporated. She guessed she was about to be terminated and wondered why. But it seemed pointless to concern herself with this, so she let the question go.

‘I’m fine,’ said Tina. ‘Everything’s fine.’ …

Then the owner of the hand held her steady, opened its huge mouth and bit her head off.”

Gareth Roberts, Only Human (2005)

 

She looks sad, but just so you know for sure, she’s been painted in lovely shades of metaphorical blue.

There are all sorts of bits of fiction I could have written this post about. I could have written about Disney Pixar’s Inside Out, and Joy’s eventual realisation that her colleague Sadness had an important role to play in Riley’s experience as much as she did herself.¹ I could have written about Cartoon Saloon’s Song of the Sea, and Maka the owl-witch’s railing against sadness with such fervour that she would rather turn her loved ones (and herself) to unfeeling stone than watch them endure it.² I could have written about the second episode of the latest series of Doctor Who, ‘Smile’, in which a band of robots charged with facilitating and measuring the happiness of the humans who built them decide that the easiest way to remove the threat of sadness is to swiftly dispatch anyone who starts feeling anything less than perfectly content and grind down the skeleton for fertiliser.³

Wait – are you saying you could have written about Doctor Who, but you’re actually going to write about something else? Dear me, Anne, what on earth has happened to you? Are you feeling all right?

Not so fast – I didn’t say I wasn’t going to write about Doctor Who. It’s merely a matter of transferring our attentions from the aforementioned Twelfth Doctor episode ‘Smile’ to a novel featuring the Ninth Doctor, Rose, and Captain Jack, written by Gareth Roberts and entitled Only Human.⁴ In this story, our intrepid time-travelling heroes encounter a society of humans who have phased out negative emotions altogether. Have a scan of the following extract:

… a man called Jacob was tucking into his breakfast of cauliflower cheese. He realised he wasn’t enjoying it very much, so he reached for the small, brightly coloured metal pack attached to his breast and tapped in a five-digit combination on its small keyboard without looking. Then the breakfast of cauliflower cheese became incredibly tasty, one of the best meals he’d ever had. But then, most of his meals tasted like the best meal he’d ever had. So he punched another five-digit combination into the metal pack and then the cauliflower cheese tasted like nothing he’d ever tasted before, in a strange but very pleasant way.

He heard his wife, Lene, enter the living room of their married quarters. She gave a little sigh as she pulled her chair up to the breakfast bar and poured herself some cauliflower cheese juice.

“What’s the matter, darling?” asked Jacob.

She didn’t say anything, just stared into space with an expression he didn’t recognise.

“Lene?”

“You know I took that diagnostic test yesterday?” said Lene casually. “The result’s just come through from Chantal, on my phone.” She still had her phone in her hand. She flipped it open and stared at the little screen.

Jacob felt a pang of wrong-feeling about her expression. He found he wanted to know – desperately wanted to know – what the result was. That felt uncomfortable. “What is it?”

“Incipient renal collapse,” said Lene.

Jacob felt the wrong-feeling swell inside him. “How long have you got?” he asked.

“Three weeks at the outside,” said Lene. “It’s no surprise, I guess. I am 387 and no one can live for ever.” She smiled, but it wasn’t a proper, fine smile.

Jacob didn’t know quite how to feel.

“Where’s my popper pack?” asked Lene. “I put it down somewhere last night…”

Jacob found her pack under a cushion on their settee and quickly handed it over. Lene took it and pressed its soft, adhesive pad to her chest.

“Right, quickly…” said Jacob. He opened the kitchen drawer and fished out the instruction booklet. He scanned through it, searching the index. “Bad news, bad news … page 43.” He turned to it. “Ah. Here we go. ‘News of your impending termination … Combo 490/32’.”

“490/32,” Lene repeated, tapping the numbers into her pack. Immediately the wrong smile and the strange expression disappeared.

“And I’ll need ‘News of partner’s impending termination’,” said Jacob, searching for it among the lines of crabbed text. “‘Combo 490/37’.”

He tapped the code into his pack and the wrong-feelings disappeared. He smiled at Lene and took her hand.

“It’s a shame, isn’t it?” he said.

“Can’t be helped,” Lene smiled back.

 

Frankly, I’m not a great fan of cauliflower at the best of times, so I hate to think what it would be like as a juice.

Now, there are a lot of pretty messed-up things that happen in Doctor Who stories of numerous formats, but this scene – the reader’s first introduction to the popper-pack society of Only Human – has always stuck in my head as a particularly disconcerting one. (Obviously the one from which I took my opening quotation is also a strong contender, but it comes later on in the novel when we’re already used to the idea of people responding to any and all negative emotions by thumbing a code into their popper packs and acting as if everything’s fine.) That the tone of the scene’s narration is so utterly mild and harmless only compounds the unpleasantness. The very idea that one could fail to be distressed by news of a so obviously distressing nature is extremely unsettling. I find myself beset by all sorts of so-called ‘wrong-feelings’ at the notion of so blithely making light of a situation that clearly warrants some pretty major so-called ‘wrong-feelings’. Although in fact, let’s rephrase my earlier sentence: Jacob and Lene don’t fail to be distressed; they refuse to.

Why so? Because their society deems happiness the ultimate good, and any feeling opposed to it therefore counts as a fault to be corrected. My own society, I posit, is similar to some extent. One’s own personal happiness is definitely considered a worthy and important goal to be pursuing, and that naturally leads to some understanding of unhappiness as a fault to be corrected. If the point of life is to be happy, it follows that happiness is success and sadness is failure. Commendably, there has been some movement to challenge this principle recently; Inside Out would seem as good an example as any of a piece of media whose moral is that it’s OK to be sad sometimes.

Nonetheless, I’d like to push further than that. It’s not just that it would be OK for Jacob and Lene to be sad that Lene has less than three weeks to live – that if they happen to be feeling sad about it, that is to accepted as a valid response. On the contrary, it strikes the reader as frankly wrong that they aren’t sad. That’s the whole wrongness of the scene, in fact. They ought to be sad. It is not acceptable – not right –  for them to smilingly shrug the whole thing off as ‘can’t be helped’. It doesn’t do justice to the severity of what’s happening. So-called ‘wrong-feelings’ aren’t really wrong at all; in this scenario, the only right feelings to have are ‘wrong-feelings’.

It isn’t just that it’s OK to be sad. It’s that there are some situations in which it’s not OK not to be sad.

Now the glory of the God of Israel had gone up from the cherub on which it rested to the threshold of the house. And he called to the man clothed in linen, who had the writing case at his waist. And the Lord said to him, “Pass through the city, through Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it.” And to the others he said in my hearing, “Pass through the city after him, and strike. Your eye shall not spare, and you shall show no pity. Kill old men outright, young men and maidens, little children and women, but touch no one on whom is the mark.” – Ezekiel 9:3-7

Here the mark of protection against the coming punishment is given to those who are sad about all the terrible evil things that are being done in the city.⁵ Such terrible evil things warrant sadness, and not to experience it when confronted by them is to be morally deficient. More accurately, it’s to insult the God who has in his perfection decreed that such things ought not to be done. It’s to fail to grasp the severity of disobeying him, just as Lene failed to grasp the severity of her impending death. Or, again, let’s rephrase that: it’s to refuse to grasp the severity of disobeying him. One cannot claim to worship God, to strive to walk in his ways and align with his values, and then turn round and offer a blithe ‘can’t-be-helped’ shrug of the shoulders in the face of rampant wrongdoing. That is not what someone who belongs to God looks like.

After all, adelphoi, to walk in God’s ways and align with his values is what we’re trying to do – to care about the things he cares about – and so if God is saddened by wrongdoing (which he most certainly is), then so should we be. We should be saddened by whatever saddens him. I was particularly struck by this when reading the oracle against Moab in Isaiah 15-16 earlier this week:⁶

Therefore I weep with the weeping of Jazer for the vine of Sibmah; I drench you with my tears, O Heshbon and Elealeh; for over your summer fruit and your harvest the shout has ceased. And joy and gladness are taken away from the fruitful field, and in the vineyards no songs are sung, no cheers are raised; no treader treads out wine in the presses; I have put an end to the shouting. Therefore my inner parts moan like a lyre for Moab, and my inmost self for Kir-hareseth. – Isaiah 16:9-11

 

This is a harp, not a lyre: you can tell because the strings go directly into the body of the instrument, without passing over a bridge. But it’s hard to find a stock photo of a lyre.

The authorial voice here – which I think we have to take to be God rather than Isaiah, because the latter can hardly claim to have single-handedly put an end to the shouts of joy concomitant with harvest-time in Moab – is deeply, deeply sad about the judgement wrought against Moab. He weeps and mourns right down to the centre of his being – and no less so because he was the one who wrought the judgement.

I think in evangelical circles we can sometimes be so keen to defend the doctrine that God is perfectly just in punishing guilty human beings that we don’t give ourselves any proper room to be sad about the fact that he does so. To be distressed by the notion of people facing divine judgement sounds to us like the first step towards denying that a loving God could really enact such judgement⁷ – and yet, from Isaiah 16, that shouldn’t be the case at all. Isaiah expects us to hold these two strands together: God brings just disaster on Moab for her sins even as his inner parts moan like a lyre for her sake. It’s not our job to execute divine judgement, but if we’re striving to walk in God’s ways and align with his values, it seems very clear that we ought to be profoundly sad about its being executed even as we acknowledge and praise God’s perfect justice in executing it. And much as that doesn’t seem at all a straightforward thing to do, it nevertheless strikes me as a more satisfactory course of action than denying either one principle or the other.

Last week I argued that I don’t need Jesus to be happy.⁸ It now emerges that in some situations he actually calls me to be sad. Not in all situations, I hasten to add; there’s room for happiness too: rejoice in the Lord always and that. Still, to learn to be saddened by what God is saddened by is to reflect his image more fully. It’s part of my sanctification. I’m not to buy into the myth that happiness is success and sadness is failure – that ‘wrong-feelings’ are faults to be corrected. Rather, I’m to try to grasp the true severity of the situations I encounter and respond in a genuinely appropriate manner. And I’m to do that, furthermore, all the while knowing that those who mourn now are blessed, because they shall comforted, when one day God wipes the tears from all eyes.⁹ That is a reality, indeed, that I am to acknowledge with just as much earnestness as I am to acknowledge those situations which demand sadness as their appropriate response.

Footnotes

¹ Here’s a fun multiple-rejig of the film by Editing Is Everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4GlQ3ciV1M. ‘Disaster Movie’ is my personal favourite.

² It’s my favourite film and you should totally watch it if you’re into ridiculously beautiful animation. Here’s a music video/trailer to whet your appetite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7enRvwFUTes.

³ Quick little trailer to remind you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2hc4UA8pf8.

⁴ You can now get it with a snazzy new cover: http://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Gareth-Roberts/Doctor-Who-Only-Human--50th-Anniversary-Edition/14525409.

⁵ Here’s the whole chapter for you: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel+9&version=ESVUK.

⁶ You can have a skim of Chapter 15 (it’s mostly place names, to be honest) and then click the right-hand arrow for a look at the following one: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+15&version=ESVUK.

⁷ Not a very sensible argument, as illustrated here by the ever-excellent Adam4d, http://adam4d.com/good-loving-judge/, but I can nonetheless see why people advocate it.

⁸ Box on the right. But you already knew that.

⁹ In this final paragraph I allude to Philippians 4:4, Matthew 5:4, and Revelation 21:4.