Author: Ophelia Benson

Well you can see their point, of course. Men in shorts darting around kicking a ball – I mean to say. If they let women in to watch that kind of thing, not much football would get played, know what I mean? I mean, whoarrrr, right? Obviously. So if they let women in, then all they would get is, the men would come running out and do a spot of kicking and in thirty seconds flat each man would have forty or fifty women on top of him, and those shorts would be nowhere to be seen. Whoarrrrrrr.

That’s how it is here of course. In the West. There’s no such thing as football here, there are just these abortive occasions where men in shorts start to play football and then before you can say ‘Play ball!’ there’s just a lot of rutting going on. Not all that sporting. But you know how women are – one look at men’s knees and they can’t keep their clothes on. I think there used to be football, once upon a time, but I suppose that was before the Pankhursts or Betty Friedan or something.

It’s the thing about the other men in shorts that I don’t quite get.

Women can watch football broadcast on Iranian television and they can attend basketball and volleyball matches even though they too involve men dressed in shorts.

The thing about television seems quite cruel. It must drive them almost insane, poor things. Do they try to hump the television itself, I wonder? But it’s the part about attending basketball and volleyball matches that I really don’t understand. Why is that allowed? Why is it okay to have basketball and volleyball matches interrupted and ruined by throngs of whimpering women dragging the players’ shorts off? What’s the deal – Iranians like football but not basketball and volleyball? So they want football to go ahead and be played all the way to the end without being sidetracked to a copulation-fest, while with basketball and volleyball they figure it’s okay either way? That must be it, but I think it’s a little unfair to basketball and volleyball. But I prefer football myself, so I guess I can understand it.

Members of the clergy say it is wrong for men and women to look at each other’s bodies, even if they have no intention of taking pleasure from it.

Well of course it is. And what do they mean about no intention of taking pleasure from it? What planet is that supposed to be on? The one where women go to soccer matches and tennis matches and squash tournaments and swimming competitions and volleyball and basketball games and marathons and bicycle races with no intention of taking pleasure from slavering over men’s bodies? The one where women don’t even notice those tight tight tight lycra shorts? That planet? Haaaaaaa –

Sorry, but you have to admit, that’s funny.

One MP said, if the reformists had tried this, there would have been suicide bombers protesting on the streets of Teheran.

Protesting? Suicide bombers protesting? In the sense of blowing themselves up? Or just in the usual sense of marching and setting fire to things? But if it’s that – do suicide bombers announce themselves beforehand? Do they have like suicide bomber clubs, or uniforms, or regalia of some sort? Banners, maybe? I’d have thought they didn’t, I’d have thought the idea was to conceal the fact that one was a suicide bomber until the very instant when that fact was made apparent by an explosion. Because, see, if you go around beforehand saying you’re a suicide bomber and protesting things, there is some remote chance that someone might stop you going on being a suicide bomber.

But, maybe not, with everyone so busy keeping women out of football stadiums. First things first, ya know?

One good Radio 4 idea-discusser reviews another. (I like Laurie Taylor. For one thing, he reviewed the Dictionary of FN in the Times Higher. He didn’t think much of it, but he did think some of the jokes were funny – that’s good enough.)

I’m also put off by the assumption that anyone who doesn’t wholeheartedly join Bragg in his latest popularising endeavour is something of a spoilsport or a dangerous elitist…No one can doubt Bragg’s populist spirit. One of the chief pleasures of In Our Time on Radio 4 is the sound of him trying to persuade the assembled academics to speak more plainly about their specialist subject. Whether the topic of the day is quantum mechanics, Goethe, or the rise and fall of Charlemagne, there’s nearly always a magic moment when Melvyn grumbles that a distinguished professorial guest is departing from the order of play or becoming too interested in matters that are not central to the main story. Such episodes perfectly capture the dialectic between Melvyn’s healthy and commendable populist belief that every topic can be successfully brought to heel and his guests’ equally well-grounded insistence that matters are, on the whole, looking at it from both sides, taking everything into account, rather more complicated than their host would wish them to allow.

Yeh. That’s an interesting and tricky dialectic. I spend much of my life encountering it these days. Jeremy and I were always wrangling over it while writing Why Truth Matters, and I always have to keep it in mind while working on The Philosophers’ Mag. The basic issue JS and I kept disagreeing over is whether it makes people feel stupid and frustrated to read something they don’t entirely understand, or whether it makes them feel insulted and frustrated to have something they do understand explained to them. That’s why it’s a dialectic. I tend to think that a certain amount of difficulty or unfamiliarity does not necessarily make people feel stupid and frustrated but rather challenged and stimulated; I think he tends to think I go too far in that direction, and also that the risk isn’t worth it. I suppose the problem is that what a certain amount of difficulty or unfamiliarity does is make some people feel challenged and stimulated while it makes other people feel stupid and frustrated. But the trouble is that there has to be a cutoff point somewhere – it’s not possible or practical to explain absolutely everything, or else no one would be able to write anything at all, since every word would need explaining, as would the words that did the explaining, so that progress would be impossible. But how does one figure out where the cutoff point is? It’s pure guesswork, pure intuition; seat of the pants stuff. Nobody knows. We just do our best, that’s all. And argue over words like ‘quotidian’.

This is good bracing stuff.

At Wellington College, one of Britain’s top public schools, headmaster Anthony Seldon is piloting an initiative that may eventually see lessons in happiness added to the curriculum in both the state and independent sectors. What an unhappy prospect…The problem is that Wellington is opting to teach happiness through positive psychology which, in my view, can amount to little more than self-help with a veneer of academic respectability.

And one thing neither the world nor education needs more of is self-help with a veneer of academic respectability. It’s had lashings of that, via for instance the totem of ‘self-esteem’, and look how well that turned out – producing throngs of people with all too much self-esteem and all too little awareness of their own limitations. Positive psychology sounds unnervingly like more of the same.

A life of unremitting cheerfulness is one of delusion, for it refuses to acknowledge normal ups and downs. By emphasising pleasure, the psychologists turn happiness into something self-regarding: mere accumulation of pleasure and avoidance of pain. More, they leave unanswered all the tough questions: Do you have a right to be happy? Can you be happy if others are unhappy? Does it matter whether or not you’re happy?

The tough questions and also the most interesting ones. For instance: if there were a happiness pill, would you take it? The answer is far from obviously yes, for the same sort of reason the answer is not obviously yes to questions like ‘if there were a pill that could make you write great poetry or play the cello like Rostropovich, would you take it?’ The idea may appeal for about a quarter of a second, but then when we think about it we realize we want our happiness and our accompishments or talents to mean something, which entails that they have to be the product of something, of something connected to our own efforts or experience or thought or all those. No, actually, we don’t want to just magically turn into another Keats or Mozart; what would be the point? We want to cover the ground that lies in between being our poor bare selves and whatever magical being we have it in us to become – we want to cover all the ground, ourselves, wide awake and bending every nerve. If we don’t do that, whatever we get at the end doesn’t belong to us, and it doesn’t mean anything; it’s just some sort of parlour trick. Away with it. Same with positive psychology.

To begin, we must find a better definition of happiness, one that surpasses the restricted boundaries of subjective wellbeing. Lasting and profound happiness is the active orientation of your life towards meaning, purpose and value. It’s a reflection upon the character of your life as a whole. This kind of happiness is strong enough to withstand misfortune and does not depend upon good fortune. It isn’t about feeling good, it’s about being good. That’s what Aristotle meant when he called happiness (eudaemonia) a state of flourishing in the art of living…And thus he insisted that happiness was an activity – because it requires skill and focus.

It’s the opposite of a magic pill; it’s the negation of a magic pill. A magic pill would block and prevent the need for activity, skill and focus, so the happiness it created would be just some sort of weird delusion (a trick of the Evil Demon, perhaps) rather than the real thing. It would be like taking a pill that would cause you to have won a marathon, without having actually run the 26 miles and with no memory of having done so. Not very rewarding.