How to Build a Happy Family

Come to think of it, though, maybe it is more properly Tolstoy’s views on what makes us unhappy. The difference between those two ways of thinking of the matter is rather large. Is your default state being happy and then it is things which occur or decisions you make which make you unhappy? Or is the baseline unhappy, and the question is how to become happy? Are the happy families or the unhappy families the ones worth studying? Which is the norm and which is the deviation from the norm?

It isn’t clear if there are any happy families in Tolstoy. Are Levin and Kitty a happy family? Good question for a collegiate paper topic; I have no idea how to answer it.

Thinking on that, though, raised another question—one which I was surprised had never occurred to me before now. Is a happy family a family in which all the members in it are happy? Or is it something different? In other words, can you have a happy family if some or all of the members of the family are individually unhappy? Conversely, can you have a family in which all the members of the family are individually happy, yet the family is unhappy? Is the family more than its parts? Is the happiness of the family equal to the average happiness of the members or to the minimum level of happiness of its members or something else entirely? I don’t know how to answer those questions either.

Maybe the problem gets simpler if we just think about how to attain individual happiness. But then we run into the Vronsky problem:

Vronsky meanwhile, despite the full realization of what he had desired for so long, was not fully happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is in the realization of desires. (Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (of course—why use any other?))

The eternal error people make. You have a desire. You think the fulfillment of that desire will make you happy. The desire is fulfilled. You are still not happy. So you try again. This process has been dubbed the hedonic treadmill, which is a great term. You are walking toward happiness, but since you are on a treadmill, you never get any closer to your goal.

But Tolstoy goes one step further in the analysis of this condition:

He soon felt arise in his soul a desire for desires, an anguish. Independently of his will, he began to grasp at every fleeting caprice, taking it for a desire and a goal.

This image of a soul desiring things to desire fascinates me. What if the soul is doing that at an unconscious level; what if you don’t even notice your desire for desires? All you would notice is a constant stream of desires popping into your conscious mind. Some of those desires are easily attained—“I really want to reread Anna Karenina.” Some are harder to attain—“I really want the Raiders to win the Super Bowl.” But, all these desires carry with them the promise that if attained, you will be happy.

Why then do all those things not bring lasting happiness? If your soul is just casting up desires to fulfill its own need for desires, then of course fulfilling those desires will not bring happiness. It just causes the soul to desire another set of desires. There is something deeper missing here, something which will bring happiness, something for which the soul is longing that is being masked by the steady stream of desires passing into the conscious mind.

We can hold that thought for another day. Let’s go back to the family. What makes a happy family? Well if you imagine all the members of a family are copies of Vronsky, then they are all individually chasing after these desires created by the soul’s desire to have desires. Each person wants to be happy, each person believes that a happy family will make them individually happy. But will it? If you live in a happy family, are you happy? If your desire for a happy family is realized, is it too only a grain of the mountain of happiness which you expected?

It would seem that the happiness of the family is not a stable state. If the members of a family all find their desire for a happy family is realized, then as soon as that happens, each member of the family recognizes that the realization of the desire for a happy family did not make them individually happy, and thus the happy family suddenly consists of people who are individually unhappy. It seems unreasonable to say that a family in which every person is unhappy is a happy family. The family is thus unhappy. Each family is unique in its unhappiness because each individual unhappiness is unique. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

How then can there be any happy families? If the happy family is doomed to become instantly unhappy, is there even such a thing as a happy family? Can we imagine a family in which all of the members of the family have individually realized not merely a grain in the mountain of happiness, but the whole mountain of happiness? Can we imagine a family in which each member of the family upon realizing that the happy family goal has been reached, no longer has a soul questing to desire new desires? It is hard to imagine that is a possibility.

The solution to the quandary must be in the way we think about what it means to be happy. If I think happiness is the fulfillment of my desires (the eternal error), then there is indeed no possibility of a happy family. But what if that way of conceiving the matter is the mistake?

What if a happy family is one in which every member of the family believes that the happiness of the family itself is the important thing, that the happiness of the individual is irrelevant? I no longer ask if I am happy; I ask if my family is happy. I no longer have a category in my mind of my own happiness. Set aside for a moment whether you think such a thing is possible for you or anyone else. Just imagine a family in which everyone thought like that. Is that a happy family? It sure seems like it would be. And, curiously, a family like that, in which each member is only thinking about the happiness of the family and not their own individual happiness, would indeed look just like every other happy family. In all those happy families, people wake up and only do what is best for others in the family.

Now that I am considering this, I think this is what Levin is groping for in the long rumination at the very end of the novel. The need to replace love of self with love of your neighbor. That is what would make a happy family. Why are families unhappy? Because we all have an impossible time replacing love of self with love of neighbor. It would almost take a Divine Love, a Love Supreme, to be able to do that.

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