Some things seems to be completely universal, because at least one word for this concept or even a lot of words exist in various "linguacultures" (Risager 2007 has backgrounds of this concept). But it is indeed difficult to conclude the universality of the concept from language usage alone. However, like the ubiquitous phenomenon "language", word for emotions like "happiness" can also be seen as an an invention, as a product of social evolution. In case of "language" D. Gramling (2016) writes about the "Invention of Monolingualism" and proves quite convincingly in the field of culture studies, that modern monolingualism in the most OECD-countries is a historical product, a fact that Anderson (2006) researched and called in
print-cultures "Imagined communities". Compared to "language" or "monolingualism", "Happiness" is likely even more difficult to research, because it is impossible to find out, what people really feel. But claiming Happiness for the people of a country as the US-declaration independence in the phrase "
Life, Libery and pursuit of happiness" (see Wikipedia for historical backgrounds) is not a claim for individual happiness, but an objective for society. Values (like Happiness as a collective virtue) were in traditional societies before, related to religious values and hence to transcendent spheres. But with the pursuit of happiness the matters of the earth, the "lifeworld" the human lifespan got recognized (see
Wikipedia for this often used concept in German, the concept is here used sociologically). It would be overly simplistic to reduce the historical mission of the US only to this one statement ("pursuit of happiness"), but the great success of this concept seems to be obvious and indubitable. What were the consequences of this successful concept? It could be argued that they are disastrous: Mankind is overusing the earthly basis of its existence (see:
How many earth do we need?)
Some are still optimistic that dystopian futures can avoided (like Steven Pole in the Guardian) other like
James Lovelock (also in the Guardian) are more pessimistic. Some Nitzschean scholars (religiously inspired or not) could call this whole problem "
Nihilistic" (see Wikipedia for the lexical field of this multilayered concept). But under the condition there are not only technical problems related to climate change, but also problems of values, how are these going to handled?
Antinatalism seems to be a solution for the earth, but is not a solution for human happiness.
References:
- Anderson, Benedict (2006), Imagined communities, Verso (London)
- Gramling, David (2016), The Invention of Monolingualism, Bloomsbury
- Risager, Karen (2007),Language and Culture Pedagogy: From a national to a Transnational Paradigm, Multilingual Matters
