The Biology of Joy

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When the Christians crawled out of the catacombs to make Rome holy, they took revenge on pagan pleasure by sealing it in--then pretended for centuries not to hear its muffled protests. The frank, ancient light that pervades, say, Egyptian erotic murals with their unabashed portrayals of group sex gave way to a lurid brimstone glow reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch. Eclipsed was the Rose Bowl brilliance of the Roman circus, where civic pleasure reached a level of brutal spectacle unmatched until the advent of Monday Night Football. Pleasure as a public function seemed to vanish.

The end of the Dark Ages began with the Italian poet Dante, who, for all his obsession with the pains of hell, endures as one of the great, if ambivalent, students of pleasure. His Inferno is but a portrait of the enjoyments of his day turned inside out, like a dirty sock. For every kind of illicit bliss possible in the light of the world above, Dante created a diabolically fitting punishment in his theme-park hell below. We can only guess what terrible eternity he has since devised for his countryman, the pleasure-loving Versace, felled in what Dante would have considered the worst of ways--abruptly, without a chance to confess his sins. At the very least he's doomed to wear Armani.

Dante's ability to find a certain glee in the suffering of others--not to mention in the act of writing--goes to the heart of the problem of pleasure. Let's face it: Pleasure has a way of getting twisted. Most people, most of the time, are content with simple pleasures: a walk on the beach, fine wine, roses, cuddling, that sort of thing. But pleasure can also be complicated, jaded, and sick. The darker aspects of pleasure surely lie dormant in many of us, like the minotaur in the heart of the labyrinth waiting for its yearly meal of pretty flesh. In the words of the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan, "Happiness lies in conquering one's enemies, in driving them in front of oneself and taking their property, and savoring their despair, and outraging their wives and daughters." He meant pleasure, of course, not happiness--but you tell him.

In the Age of Reason, the vain hope that humans could reason with pleasure returned. Thinkers like Jeremy Bentham took up the old Greek idea of devising a "calculus" of pleasure--complex equations for estimating what pleasure really is, in light of the pain often caused by the quest for it. The common people embraced these schemes as they did smallpox. A calculus of pleasure? This did not compute. The would-be moral engineers, rational to a fault, found the masses oddly attached to the older idea of pleasure being a simple sum of parts, usually private parts. As for the foundlings thus multiplied, along with certain wretched venereal ills, well, who would have figured?

The first "scientists of mind" were pretty sure that the secrets of pleasure, and the emotions in general, lay locked beyond their reach, inside our heads. Throughout the 19th century, scientists could only speculate about the human brain and its role as "the organ of consciousness." Even more galling, the era's writers and poets clearly speculated so much better-- especially those on drugs.

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