The Necessity of Joy

The natural state of any creature is joy. I say this not from a standpoint of speculation or attribution but from the standpoint of having lived my life in the midst of nature. From earliest childhood I grew up hunting. But when as an adult I came to live with the forest creatures I had to give it up having recognized the horrors that my simple pleasure wrought in their already complex existence. I even launched an attempt to live in peaceful coexistence with the mice and the wood rats, but alas there was a failure to communicate. The more obvious examples of animal joy are accessible to anyone: the gamboling calf, the rough tumbling of a puppy, the kitten with its ball of yarn. What about the caterpillar on its twig or the snake basking in the sun? There is no sense in quibbling about degrees or demarcations, for we will soon find ourselves arguing about whether or not they have souls. As for me, it is self evident that life is not only conducive to joy, but feeds on joy. And though sorrow may reduce to a separate state it, is most certainly a deficit of joy. There is some thin ice here, and it is not my intention to delve into brain chemistry or socio-pathology: I merely wish to hold up as fundamental the inclination of all creatures great and small to joy, and to point out that was not joy the natural inclination, sorrow would be no burden. The earthworm on the drying sidewalk; the unfortunate human trekker lost in some vast desert: I posit that the distress differs neither in kind nor quality nor volume by weight.

Whether or not the inner configuration we know as joy is familiar to the rabbit and to the wolf is perhaps an open question, but that circumstances can obliterate any creaturely access to joy is beyond question. It is also beyond question that untold millions of human beings lead joyless lives. Joyless because limitations of environment assure that it will be so. Elaborate studies have been done with rats. It has been shown that at certain levels of population pressure a cornucopia of otherwise unknown antisocial behavior emerges in laboratory populations: and this in circumstances of ample food and water.