I was already aware of several Western sources that called this idea into doubt, and my own disbelief started when I began to contemplate the nature of Russell's concept of zest. The inherent quirkiness of zest allows it to become attached to any number of self-destructive or antisocial objects. In Chekhov's story Gooseberries, for example, a man's zest was fixed to the idea of becoming a landowner and lording it over the peasants. He devotes his life to this goal, achieves it, and (by the only account we have) is happy. In Peter Shaffer's play Equus, a boy's zest is attached to horses, and he spins a complete religion around them. His religion turns destructive when he blinds all the horses in a stable as a way of striking out at God. The play is narrated by the boy's conflicted psychiatrist, who realizes that taking away the boy's pain will involve taking away his zest, something that the psychiatrist himself feels a short supply of. When the sadistic masked villain of the current movie 8 Millimeter is finally revealed, he denies that his actions result from any dysfunction in his upbringing, and he refuses to paint himself as an unfortunate victim. He explains simply, “I do the things I do because I like them.” His personal zest is tied to torturing and killing other people.
The disturbing thing about the sadist's explanation is that I find it entirely believable. For most of my life, my own zest has been tied to things that other people would find either terribly dull or actually painful: solving difficult mathematical problems, trying to understand obscure philosophers and mystics, writing essays and stories, and speaking in public. That all those things happen to be nondestructive and socially acceptable seems to me to be pure chance. I am not conscious of having chosen them; it seems rather as if they chose me. That I can pursue my happiness without harming other people or damaging society seems to me to have been a great stroke of luck.
If I had not been so lucky, I could still lead a moral life while pursuing the kind of happiness that the Dalai Lama talks about. But as the Dalai Lama admits, this path requires a great deal of effort. Without zest, where would I find the motivation to make that effort? This is all-too-common among Westerners who would pursue the Dalai Lama's style of training: It sounds good to them, but they can't get around to doing the exercises. Rather than rising towards Buddhahood, it seems much more likely that I would have sunk into a dull normality, retaining only a few guilty pleasures that would not quite be guilty enough to get me into serious trouble.
The Westerner, I think, can have no clean and absolute answer to the question "Does happiness make the world a better place?" In some aggregate sense it undoubtedly does, but each of us is left with the individual question "Does my happiness make the world a better place?" It may, or it may not.