In our day there is a tendency to reduce happiness to the level of economic well-being, but what is lost sight of when this outlook is projected into the past is that a contact with nature and natural things are factors essential to human happiness.

In our day there is a stronger tendency than ever to reduce

happiness to the level of economic well-being—which is moreover insatiable in the face of an indefinite creation of artificial needs and a base mystique of envy—but what is completely lost sight of when this outlook is projected into the past is that a traditional craft and a contact with nature and natural things are factors essential to human happiness. Now these are just the factors that disappear in industry, which demands all too often, if not always, an inhuman environment and “quasi-abstract” manipulations, gestures with no intelligibility and no soul, all in an atmosphere of frigid cunning; we have arrived beyond all possibility of argument at the antipodes of what the Gospel means when it enjoins us to “become as little children” and to “take no thought for the morrow”. The machine transposes the need for happiness onto a purely quantitative plane, having no relation to the spiritual quality of work; it takes away from the world its homogeneity and transparency and cuts men off from the meaning of life. More and more we attempt to reduce our intelligence to what the machine demands and our capacity for happiness to what it offers; since we cannot humanize the machine, we are obliged, by a certain logic at least, to mechanize man; having lost contact with the human, we stipulate what man is and what happiness is.

 

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Frithjof Schuon: Light on The Ancient Worlds

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