Science and Human Happiness

INTRODUCTION

Happiness is a mental or emotional state of well-being characterized by positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy.^[1] A variety of biological, psychological, religious, and philosophical approaches have striven to define happiness and identify its sources. Various research groups, including positive psychology, endeavor to apply the scientific method to answer questions about what "happiness" is, and how it might be attained.

Philosophers and religious thinkers often define happiness in terms of living a good life, or flourishing, rather than simply as an emotion. Happiness in this sense was used to translate the Greek Eud aimonia, and is still used in virtue ethics. Happiness economics suggests that measures of public happiness should be used to supplement more traditional economic measures when evaluating the success of public policy.

Happiness is a fuzzy concept and can mean many things to many people. Part of the challenge of a science of happiness is to identify different concepts of happiness, and where applicable, split them into their components. There have also been some studies of how religion relates to happiness. Causal relationships remain unclear, but more religion is seen in happier people. This correlation may be the result of community membership and not necessarily belief in religion itself.

Science and Human Happiness. It is said that science is the religion of the modern age. It is so because science has revolutionized the modern life and exposed the centuries old beliefs and superstitions. Science is the modern god of reason that abhors blind faith.

DISCUSSION

We are living in a scientific age. Science has given us a number of inventions and discoveries. Science is trying its utmost to contribute to the happiness of man. It has extended the horizons of human knowledge. It has added immensely to man’s capacity for work. It has helped him in the field of medicine. It has enabled man to delve deep into the ocean and to fly high in the air. It has enabled man to send rockets to the other planets. It has contributed to human peace and progress. It has also provided man with destructive weapons.

Science has brought man nearer to man. It has abolished distance. Journeys which took months in the past are now performed in hours. Trains, buses and cars are all the inventions of science. The aero planes and spaceships are latest inventions. Baby moons travel at a speed of about 18,000 miles per hour. They go round the globe in an hour and a few minutes. Supersonic planes have come. They fly at a speed higher than 800 miles per hour. All these means of transport have made the travel easier. Now-a-days crossing the oceans, climbing the mountains, and traveling across the deserts involves no trouble. You have to get a seat in an aero plane and the job is done. It takes practically no time. During a day time you reach any point on the globe with the help of a fast aero plane.

More wonders await us in the field of communications. The telegraph, the telephone and the wireless enable you to talk to a man at the other end of the globe in less than a second. You have to spend time only in getting the connection. Otherwise the actual act of communication takes no time. Big business deals are made on the phone between merchants living in distant countries. Wireless sends S.O.S. messages and saves people from wrecked ships. Radio flashes the news to the world as-soon-as anything remarkable takes place. While sitting at home you can listen to what is happening in other parts of the world. You can control your business or armies while sitting in your room if you have a telephone set by your side. You need not shout to your subordinates. A whisper I the telephone carries your orders across the seas and across the frontiers guarded by the most powerful armies of the world.

Science has given us many labor-saving devices. Steam and electricity are at our service. Steams pull our trains carrying thousands of tons of load. Electricity works our factories and lights our cities. It is proving helpful in every home. Our bulbs, electric fans, refrigerators, air-conditioners, cookers, radios, stoves, washing machine, iron press all work with the help of electricity. An electric connection is a boon to a family. It inaugurates the process of civilization. It changes very outlook of our hearts and homes. The electric motors move big machinery and thus help in production of huge quantities of essential commodities like cloth, sugar, flour, machinery etc. Electricity thus saves labor, time and money.

Science has come to our aid in our fight against diseases. It has enabled the surgeons to make operation safely. The development of antiseptic surgery is a boon to humanity. X-rays are another valuable gift. Penicillin and Chloromycetin are life saving drugs. Sulpha drugs have also been developed for the benefit of man. Plastic surgery has started repairing disfigured faces. Science is now providing eyes to the blind and ears to the deaf. Heart surgery is a wonderful development. Major operations are performed and the patient does not feel any pain. It is said, in future, during operations even blood will not flow and the wounds caused by operations will heal automatically and instantaneously. Radium treatment is a recent development; even incurable diseases like cancer seem to be within its control.

There is the other side of the picture. Science poses a great threat to the existence of mankind. It has its boons, but also a bane. It has led to the development of nuclear weapons. It has brought into being bacteriological warfare. Guided missiles, rockets and submarines may one day vomit death and destruction on mankind.

Science has, in fact, let loose the demons of war for the destruction of mankind. All this can be avoided if good sense prevails. It is upto man to exercise self-control and not to use these destructive weapons. If this is done man will enjoy blessings of science and save himself from the incalculable harm, which its misuse may cause to him.

CONCLUSION

·         since happiness is such an essential and sought-after personal state – a natural condition of feeling good and whole that most of us experience each day, even if we cannot explain this feeling very well – it turns out that simply asking people if they are happy is a pretty reliable gauge of their actually level of happiness.

·         many scientists understand happiness as a natural motivational force used by our brains to drive behavior toward the things that have reliably advanced our genes for millennia. Scientists also understand that happiness and unhappiness can occur at low and high levels of arousal, resulting in familiar subjective states that we all experience: contentment and joy, and depression and agitation.

·          We know through science that this natural human attribute is hard-wired into our brains, and often is unconscious and one of the hardest aspects of our received nature to overcome. Scientists are reasonably sure that our strong propensity for social comparison once allowed us to expertly judge our fit, and aided us in achieving a roughly optimal (gene-advancing) natural range of altruistic, status-seeking, and selfish behaviors.

·         Understanding the determinants of human happiness and well-being is important in the quest for ecological sustainability (and social justice), because it helps us decide how to best use the limited material through put available, and identify what other, non-material factors are important. Philosophers, theologians and social thinkers have wrestled with these questions for centuries.  Their conclusions vary in detail but all agree that both material and non-material factors are important.

ORIGINAL TEXT

SCIENCE AND HUMAN HAPPINESS

This age of ours is the age of science, and much of man`s happiness depends on how man utilizes the immense power of science. Imagine how the man of today can survive without the various scientific discoveries and inventions made from time to time, which have rendered his life comfortable and worth living. Thinks of electricity, the wireless, are aero plane, the railway, the motor car, wonderful drugs, and thousand and one other achievements of science, which have become indispensable for our day to day existence. Science has also given man something which in much more useful the scientific outlook, without which be cannot make progress that lies in store for him.

Scientific outlook helps a man to ascertain facts, grasp them accurately. It gives him a training in observation, a rational habit of mind. It widens immensely the horizon of the mind, extend its range, gives it a sense of infinite possibilities, and makes life more interesting and alive. It is rare to find a scientist who is pessimist for he lives in an atmosphere of progress. The scientist is an explore of an unknown world with infinite possibilities of discovery, and not only is the act of discovery exciting, but it leads on to actions, to practical result. It seeks to know, but also to transform the world, and this is a further stimulus to those who follow it.

Scientific outlook tends to analyze every object. Chemistry resolves matters into elements, physics resolves it into atoms, biology resolves organic life into cells. Now this spirit which is born of scientific outlook, has become characteristics of any kind of scientific inquiry in any field.

But the various scientific discoveries and inventions and the scientific outlook which the study of science has engendered have not proved to be unmixed blessing for mankind. Science has, no doubt, made man`s life more comfortable, healthy and bright, and it has given him the forward look, and the spirit of inquiry, but it has also brought about certain complications and created some new problems which stand in the way of human happiness.

For example, science has upset international relations by annihilating space. It has abolished distance, made the five continents adjacent countries, and unified the world. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a letter from England took weeks, in favorable circumstances, to reach America, ad its arrival was uncertain. Today one can speak from London to a friend in new York within fifteen minutes and be with him in twelve hours. All kinds of materials can be now brought from distant countries at a much cheaper price, than could be imagined a hundred years ago. Under such circumstances the international relations of the past are a anachronism, and fit the body politic as ill as the clothes of a child fit a grown up man. But the people of different nations have not yet developed the outlook demanded by modern condition, and they still think in an isolated and provincial manner of an earlier age to which steam and electricity were unknown. This fact has created a serious problem which is responsible for much of modern conflicts in the international field, and which has led to much human misery in the form of wars.

Another problems created by science is that it has given man the power to abolish poverty, but this power has brought fortune in the hands of a few nations, who are too uneducated to spend it intelligently. Instead of using huge amount of wealth placed in the hands of the scientifically advanced nations of the world, for the good of mankind as a whole, these nations are trying to exploit the poorer nations, and dominate them politically and economically. Every capacity is capacity for  evil as well as for good, and each addition to human power is a chance to misuse it, for example the printing press has distributed more falsehood, corruption ad rubbish to men than wisdom, knowledge and beauty.

Modern Technology whereas, it has greatly accelerated the industrial progress of the world has impaired craftsmanship replacing it by mass manufacture, turning the skilled worker into an automation on the production line, making men richer in their possessions and poorer in themselves. Ruskin rightly remarked “No changing of place at a hundred miles in hour, no making of stuffs a thousand years a minute, will make us one what stronger, happier, or wiser, there was always more in the world than man could see, walked by over so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. As for being able to talk from place to place, that is indeed, well and convenient; but suppose you have, originally, nothing, to say!

We shall be obliged at last to confess, what we should long ago have known, that the really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast, and if a man be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.

            The outlook also not free from certain glaring disadvantages. A purely scientific education has a narrowing effect. Natural science seems so all embracing, that we do not notice that vast regions of life and these the most important do not came within its view, and a mind dominated by it would naturally be inclined to ignore or underestimate  them. It has little to say about those creations of the human spirit, which alone are immoral, great literature or great art. Moreover, the spirit of analysis engendered by scientific outlook has gone its own serious limitations.

            Science has also created some crucial problems, which if not adequately solved, will jeopardize human existence, ad bring untold misery to mankind. But we cannot blame science for this; it is ma who is to blame. Under the new conditions created by science, man must change his primitive outlook. Science is guiltless; it is our hands that are unclean. Science goes steadily about her work,  revealing the greatness of man, and if he misuses it, he is to be blamed for it. The gifts of science do not corrupt man, If new problem are created by the discoveries and inventions of science, and man is exposed to new temptations, and thrown into confusion; it does not mean that he should go back on science. We must go forward. A great new force that comes into the world is revolutionary. And for the moment upsets and confuses the minds of man. That was true of all great movements as for science. In course of time man will prove himself equal to the ask of solving these problems and meet the new challenge successfully, and will certainly survive the crisis precipitated by science as the past.

            The most outstanding modern inventions is the inventions of the automatic and hydrogen bomb. But we do hope that man will be able to survive this crisis, and use these tremendous energies for his benefit rather than for his destruction, as in the past. Al ready the atomic energy Commission of the united nations is the voting extensive and unflagging attention to the effects of radiant energy, both those that may prove to be beneficent and those that may main or kill. When man first discovered fire he began a large apprenticeship to caution in dealing with what is both useful and dangerous, and the end is not yet. To control the use of this power, explore its nature, its implications and potential applications, and at the same time to protect us against all dangers these possibilities set a series of tasks that also are all but immeasurable. Ultimately, man is the measure of all things and we do hope that he will in course of time learn to control the power that science that placed in his hand, and also adjust himself to the changed conditional an such a manner that if we will contribute to his happiness.

            Albert Einstein the greatest of modern times, give the key to the problem of science and human happiness, when he remarked, why does this magnificent applied science, which saves work and makes life easier, bring us so little happiness? The simple answers runs- because we have not yet learned to make a sensible use of it.

            In war, it serves that we may poison and mutilate each other. In peace it has made our lives hurried and uncertain Instead of freeing us in great measure from spiritually exhausting labor, it has made men to slaves of machinery, who for the most part complete their monotonous long day`s work with disgust, and must continually tremble for their poor rations.

            “Certain we want science to be used for the betterment of human being and humanity. Pure science is important because it is search for truth. Nevertheless we want to apply it for  a betterment of human being. It is not only justified but it is right. On the other hand, if in the pursuit of that objective you make science and the pursuit of truth a kind of handmaid to set policies which you have in mind-political or other-then, perhaps the temper of science is effected and the approach to science is not exactly what it should be.

VOCABULARIES

·         Hatred                         : Kebencian, Hate or Dislike

·         Violence          : Kekerasan, Kehebatan / Behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.

·         Slaughter         : Penyembelihan / Kill

·         Tremendous    : Hebat Sekali / (adjective) Very great in amount, scale, or intensity: | Inspiring awe or dread.

·         Outstanding    : (adjective) Exceptionally good: Not yet paid, resolved

·         Immeasurable : (adjective) Too large, extensive

·         Annihilating    :Membasmi, Menghancurkan / (verb) Destroy

·         Immensely       : To a Great Extent

·         Ascertain         : Menetapkan / (verb) Find (something)

·         To Dissect       : Membelah / (verb) Methodically cut up (a body, part, or plant) in order to study its internal parts.

·         Pursuit             : Pengejaran, Pencarian / (noun) The action of pursuing someone

·         Nevertheless    : Namun, Meskipun Begitu / (adverb) In spite of that

·         Inventions       : Hasil Penemuan / (noun) The action of inventing something, typically a process.