THE TANDEM PROJECT
UNITED NATIONS, HUMAN RIGHTS,
FREEDOM OF RELIGION OR BELIEF
RECALCULATING HAPPINESS IN A
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Issue: Preparation for the
For: United Nations, Governments, Religions or Beliefs,
Academia, NGOs, Media, Civil Society
Review: Recalculating Happiness in a
Excerpt: “Greed, insatiable human greed,” said
Prime Minister Jigme Thinley of
Mahayana Buddhism is the
state’s spiritual heritage and is reflected in the extraordinary lengths the
government is taking to implement a “gross national happiness index” rather
than a “gross national product” as in most countries. Three quarters of the
population of this small country is Buddhist and one quarter is ethnic Nepalese
and practices Hinduism. Less than one percent of the population practices other
religions or no religion.
In the attachment,
Bhutan-Universal Periodic Review & Freedom of Religion or Belief, human
rights NGOs reflect certain aspects of unhappiness and discrimination against
those of other religions that is consistent with larger countries; schools,
housing, national identity cards, favoring construction of Buddhist temples
over Hindu ones, prohibition against proselytism, etc.
Excerpts: Excerpts are presented under the Eight Articles of
the 1981 U.N. Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Intolerance and of
Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief.
4. 1 All States shall take
effective measures to prevent and eliminate discrimination on the grounds of
religion or belief in the recognition, exercise and enjoyment of human rights
and fundamental freedoms in all fields of civil, economic, political, social
and cultural life.
4. 2 All States shall make all efforts
to enact or rescind legislation where necessary to prohibit any such
discrimination, and to take all appropriate measures to combat intolerance on
the grounds of religion or other beliefs in this matter.
Link: Recalculating Happiness in a Himalayan Kingdom, by Seth
Mydans, New York Times, Thursday 7 May 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/world/asia/07bhutan.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
By SETH MYDANS
THIMPHU, Bhutan — If the rest of the
world cannot get it right in these unhappy times, this tiny Buddhist kingdom
high in the
“Greed, insatiable human
greed,” said Prime Minister Jigme Thinley of
The notion of gross
national happiness was the inspiration of the former king, Jigme Singye
Wangchuck, in the 1970s as an alternative to the gross national product. Now,
the Bhutanese are refining the country’s guiding philosophy into what they see
as a new political science, and it has ripened into government policy just when
the world may need it, said Kinley Dorji, secretary of information and
communications.
“You see what a complete
dedication to economic development ends up in,” he said, referring to the
global economic crisis. “Industrialized societies have decided now that G.N.P.
is a broken promise.”
Under a new Constitution
adopted last year, government programs — from agriculture to transportation to
foreign trade — must be judged not by the economic benefits they may offer but
by the happiness they produce.
The goal is not happiness
itself, the prime minister explained, a concept that each person must define
for himself. Rather, the government aims to create the conditions for what he
called, in an updated version of the American Declaration of
The Bhutanese have started
with an experiment within an experiment, accepting the resignation of the
popular king as an absolute monarch and holding the country’s first democratic
election a year ago.
The change is part of
attaining gross national happiness, Mr. Dorji said. “They resonate well,
democracy and G.N.H. Both place responsibility on the individual. Happiness is
an individual pursuit and democracy is the empowerment of the individual.”
It was a rare case of a
monarch’s unilaterally stepping back from power, and an even rarer case of his
doing so against the wishes of his subjects. He gave the throne to his son,
Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, who was crowned in November in the new role of
constitutional monarch without executive power.
Bhutan is, perhaps, an easy
place to nimbly rewrite economic rules — a country with one airport and two
commercial planes, where the east can only be reached from the west after four
days’ travel on mountain roads.
No more than 700,000
people live in the kingdom, squeezed between the world’s two most populous
nations,
If the world is to take
gross national happiness seriously, the Bhutanese concede, they must work out a
scheme of definitions and standards that can be quantified and measured by the
big players of the world’s economy.
“Once Bhutan said, ‘O.K.,
here we are with G.N.H.,’ the developed world and the World Bank and the I.M.F. and so
on asked, ‘How do you measure it?’ ” Mr. Dorji said, characterizing the
reactions of the world’s big economic players. So the Bhutanese produced an
intricate model of well-being that features the four pillars, the nine domains
and the 72 indicators of happiness.
Specifically, the
government has determined that the four pillars of a happy society involve the
economy, culture, the environment and good governance. It breaks these into
nine domains: psychological well-being, ecology, health, education, culture,
living standards, time use, community vitality and good governance, each with
its own weighted and unweighted G.N.H. index.
All of this is to be
analyzed using the 72 indicators. Under the domain of psychological well-being,
for example, indicators include the frequencies of prayer and meditation and of
feelings of selfishness, jealousy, calm, compassion, generosity and frustration
as well as suicidal thoughts.
“We are even breaking down
the time of day: how much time a person spends with family, at work and so on,”
Mr. Dorji said.
Mathematical formulas have
even been devised to reduce happiness to its tiniest component parts. The
G.N.H. index for psychological well-being, for example, includes the following:
“One sum of squared distances from cutoffs for four psychological well-being
indicators. Here, instead of average the sum of squared distances from cutoffs
is calculated because the weights add up to 1 in each dimension.”
This is followed by a set
of equations:
= 1-(.25+.03125+.000625+0)
= 1-.281875
= .718
Every two years, these
indicators are to be reassessed through a nationwide questionnaire, said Karma
Tshiteem, secretary of the Gross National Happiness Commission, as he sat in
his office at the end of a hard day of work that he said made him happy.
Gross national happiness
has a broader application for
“How does a small country
like
Bhutan is pitting its four
pillars, nine domains and 72 indicators against the 48 channels of
“Before June 1999 if you
asked any young person who is your hero, the inevitable response was, ‘The
king,’ ” Mr. Dorji said. “Immediately after that it was David Beckham, and now it’s 50 Cent, the rap artist. Parents are
helpless.”
So if G.N.H. may hold the
secret of happiness for people suffering from the collapse of financial
institutions abroad, it offers something more urgent here in this pristine
culture.
“Bhutan’s story today is,
in one word, survival,” Mr. Dorji said. “Gross national happiness is survival;
how to counter a threat to survival.”
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Documents Attached:
Recalculating Happiness in a Himalayan Kingdom
Bhutan - Universal Periodic Review & Freedom of Religion or Belief
The Tandem Project is a non-governmental organization (NGO)
founded in 1986 to build understanding, tolerance and respect for diversity,
and to prevent discrimination in matters relating to freedom of religion or
belief. The Tandem Project has sponsored multiple conferences, curricula,
reference materials and programs on Article 18 of the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights – Everyone shall have the right to freedom of
thought, conscience and religion - and 1981 United Nations Declaration on the
Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion or
Belief.
The Tandem Project is a UN NGO in
Special Consultative Status with the
Economic and Social Council of
the United Nations