The Times publish a gushing interview with Desmond Morris, plus an extract from his latest book, “The Nature of Happiness”, under the heading, “How to be as happy as I am (if that’s possible)”. That sets the relentlessly smug tone – “The family joke is ‘Where did we go right?’” – interspersed with restatements of the clunkingly obvious:
“If you want to watch the postures and expressions of intense, delirious happiness, watch the actions of the players and fans when a last-minute winning goal is scored in an important match. I doubt if any primeval hunter ever leapt in the air with such abandoned joy,” he writes.
Well, he’s a smart self-publicist, and there’s always a place for easily-digested happiness-by-numbers recipes. There are no doubt worse around. What gets me is the lazy assumption that we evolved for a nice easy life in the treetops – or the savannah – but now we find ourselves unsuited to the stress of modern life:
According to Morris, to appreciate happiness we first have to understand our evolutionary past and the difference between our contented tree-dwelling ancestors and the striving, risk-taking, pleasure-seeking urban apes that we have become.
Contented tree-dwelling ancestors? A constant risk of meeting a grisly death from some carnivorous monster, scrabbling around for scraps of food, kids being carried off for lunch by a pack of hyenas, attacks from marauding bands of rivals…. We evolved so rapidly because it was such a struggle that any little genetic mutation could provide a crucial advantage. If it was such a blast sitting up in the trees munching fruit and scratching our arses, we’d still be there.
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