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Don't worry, be critical >> Will Mark Kingwell become the guru of Canadian skepticism? by JULIET WATERS
The title is an ironic three-pronged attack. First on the DuPont slogan, "Better Things for Better Living"; then on the concept of pleasure found in the once popular decorating magazine of the same title; and finally on the cheesey materialism of a place Kingwell remembers from his childhood called the Better Living Center. But also running through Kingwell's philosophical investigation of contemporary and historical concepts of happiness is an attack of the theories of "Simple Abundance," of Martha Stewart lifestyle choices and of books with titles like 14,000 Things To Be Happy About. Real happiness, he argues, is not a simple, fixed and marketable thing. Neither is it a birthright, a form of blissful insanity or something found in another life or a nice garden. If it were, humans wouldn't be in a constant struggle to find it. In fact, whatever real happiness is, it can't even be defined in this book. "The idea of happiness," writes novelist Michael Frayn, "is surely the sun at the centre of our conceptual planetary system--and has proved just as hard to look at directly." "This is a book about questions, not about answers," says Kingwell, in town last week. "I'm having a conversation about the concept. I'm probing it. I'm not trying to tell you what the answer is..." Still, some reviewers have sniped that if there is an answer, it's implicitly to live a life like Kingwell's. Achieve intellectual freedom, academic tenure, a monthly television column in Saturday Night, status as one of the most sought-after media pundits in Toronto and a cover article in this month's Harper's. Also be tall, nicely dressed, likable, soft-spoken, witty and a self-confessed Melrose Place addict. Kingwell's current status as a Canadian media golden boy no doubt has something to do with the barely repressed snideness in some of the media surrounding his book. The Ottawa Citizen accused Better Living of becoming not much more than one of the "machines of better living" it purports to criticize. And often the book seems to have been misunderstood, as when Kingwell was recently described on the CBC evening news in Toronto as a "guru of happiness." Then again, this probably has as much to do with the controversial nature of the topic. "It's a risk you take when you write on this subject and in the way that I approach it," he says. "These ideas are meant as starting points, not as answers. Still, some people will see what they think is there, rather than what is there. But you can say that over and over again and people will still say, 'You defined happiness as blah, blah, blah--and here's why you're wrong.'" If Kingwell becomes the guru of anything, it will hopefully be of healthy Canadian skepticism, a process that will inevitably involve some skepticism directed towards him. Nevertheless, if these attacks spark some debate on the search for "real happiness," then Kingwell is all for it. Ideally his book will spark a movement towards popular philosophy as an antidote to the excesses of popular psychology, start a cultural trend away from the vacuous affirmations of positive thinking and towards what Kingwell describes as "critical thinking meant in a positive spirit." "It's hard to say how that kind of movement might play itself out," says Kingwell. "There's still a lot of hostility in both directions... of the academic philosophers towards the project of being popular (and) from regular people towards academics. It's a real struggle to overcome both of those things. But in Canada you get really thoughtful, engaged people and they really want to talk and have good ideas and can do it at a pretty high level. So the possibilities here are really enormous." Better Living by Mark Kingwell, Viking, hc, 408 pp, $32
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"In some ways this is the anti-self-help book," says Mark Kingwell about Better Living: In Pursuit of Happiness From Plato to Prozac. "It's the book for people who hate self-help books." In other words, anyone expecting his current bestseller to provide a facile program for a happier life is going to be disappointed.