A Quest of Exploration

To follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

[the-utmost-bound]

The Happiness Hypothesis: Chapter 10, “Happiness Comes from Between”

This chapter was about the meaning of life. Haidt doesn’t think that there’s a meaning of life, but he does think it’s possible to find meaning within life. According to Haidt, there’s no one single thing that will give you meaning within life; instead, it’s about recognizing your needs as a human being (which include love, fulfilling work, and participation in larger emergent structures) and trying to make sure those are satisfied.

This chapter basically talked about fulfilling work, and about participation in larger structures.

Haidt starts with these two quotes:

Upanishads: Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear.... When a sage sees this great Unity and his Self has become all beings, what delusion and what sorrow can ever be near him?

Willa Cather: I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.

What was the question?

In this first section, Haidt analyzes the question “What is the meaning of life?” and asks what sort of meaning we’re looking for.

Sometimes, when people ask “What does X mean?” they’re looking for a definition, of the sort that can be found in a dictionary. But this isn’t what we’re looking for; we’re not looking for the meaning of the word “life”; we’re looking for the meaning of life itself.

“A second kind of meaning is about symbolism or substitution.” For instance, Carl Jung once had a dream about a subbasement, and he asked what the subbasement meant, and concluded that it was a symbol for the collective unconscious. But life doesn’t symbolize anything, so that’s not the question we’re asking either.

The third kind of meaning could be called “significance”. If you walk in during the middle of a movie, and see two characters kissing, and you ask “What does it mean that they kissed?”, then you’re asking about the significance of that scene in terms of the overall plot. You’re asking how it relates to other things that happened, and how it fits into the bigger picture. This is the kind of meaning we’re looking for when we ask for the meaning of life; we’re looking for the purpose that our lives play in terms of larger narratives.

The question can be divided into two components: “What is the purpose of life?” and “How can we find purpose within life?” A lot of people ask the first question, and conclude that life has no objective purpose, and then they give up. But just because life doesn’t have an inherent purpose doesn’t mean we can’t find purpose within life. The rest of this chapter is about how we can do so.

Love and Work

People need two things in order to flourish: love (that is, any strong social bonds with other people, either romantic or platonic) and work (that is, “having and pursuing the right goals, in order to create states of flow and engagement”).

Love and work are important because they both connect us to “people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right.”

There was already a chapter about love, so this chapter will just focus on work.

People have an “effectance motive”, which is “the need or drive to develop competence through interacting with and controlling one’s environment”. That is, we have a strong desire to make things happen in the world.

Effectance can help us understand why certain jobs are more satisfying than others. The industrial revolution alienated workers from the products they created, which decreased their sense of effectance.

“In 1964, the sociologists Melvin Kohn and Carmi Schooler surveyed 3100 American men about their jobs and found that the key to understanding which jobs were satisfying was what they called ‘occupational self direction’. Men who were closely supervised in jobs of low complexity and much routine showed the highest degree of alienation (feeling powerless, dissatisfied, and separated from the work). Men who ha more latitude in deciding how they approached work that was varied and challenging tended to enjoy their work much more.”

"[M]ost people approach their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career, or a calling.” The job people are just doing it for the money; they don’t actually enjoy the work. The career people are working towards promotions and advancements and see it as a life-long endeavor, but may ultimately wonder what the point is. The people who have a calling find their work inherently satisfying and would probably keep doing it even if they got rich and didn’t need to work anymore.

People doing blue-collar labor are more likely to see it as a job, managers are more likely to see it as a career, and high-status professionals like doctors and scientists are more likely to see it as a calling. But it’s possible for the lowliest menial worker to see their work as a calling; there are some hospital janitors, for instance, who think of their work as contributing to the larger project of healing people, and take pride in doing what they can to help.

According to positive psychology, you are more likely to enjoy your work if it engages your strengths.

Vital Engagement

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, the man who discovered flow, also discovered something called “vital engagement”.

He interviewed a lot of successful creative people: scientists, artists, etc. who have devoted their lives to a single all-consuming passion. He wanted to understand how they ended up so committed to their goal.

He and his colleagues found that most of them had similar life paths, which led “from initial interest and enjoyment, with moments of flow, through a relationship to people, practices, and values that deepened over many years, thereby enabling even longer periods of flow”. They called this deepening process “vital engagement”.

Haidt gives the example of a student named Katherine, who started riding horses at age 10, and soon started riding in competitions. She made most of her friends through horseback riding, and chose her college based on it, and “her initial interest grew into an ever-deepening relationship, an ever-thickening web connecting her to an activity, a tradition, and a community”.

Vital engagement doesn’t come just from a person, or just from their environment, but from a certain harmony between the two.

Careers differ on whether they promote vital engagement. If people feel like they need to sell out to do their job, or if their job requires them to violate their values, it won’t create vital engagement. Vital engagement requires coherence between one’s work and one’s values.

Cross-Level Coherence

As humans, we exist at multiple levels. “We are physical objects (bodies and brains) from which minds somehow emerge; and from our minds, somehow societies and cultures form.”

“Whenever a system can be analyzed at multiple levels, a special kind of coherence occurs when the levels mesh and mutually interlock.” As mentioned in a previous chapter, it’s important to find cross-level coherence between one’s basic personality traits and one’s life narrative. But it’s also important to find cross-level coherence between the physical, mental, and social levels. This is one of the major things that leads to a sense of meaning.

Haidt gives the example of Bhubaneswar in India, from the last chapter. The physical purity rules, and their social meaning, help connect the body to society, and people who have been raised in this culture experience the rituals at a very visceral level.

On the other hand, empty rituals fail to provide that coherence; even if you understand the symbolism intellectually, it won’t necessarily make you feel anything, unless it evokes specific bodily feelings and connects to a larger tradition.

When you live in a culture that has many rituals, and those rituals engage you across all the different levels of coherence, and your culture “also offers guidance on how to live and what is of value”, then you’re unlikely to experience an existential crisis because you’re enmeshed in a web of meaning.

But if your culture doesn’t provide coherence, and if the different levels conflict with each other, or your culture’s practices conflict with your values, then you’re likely to experience anomie.

God Gives Us Hives

Morality may have its origins in religion.

”Morality and religion both occur in some form in all human cultures and are almost always both intertwined with the values, identity, and daily life of the culture.”

How did altruism and morality evolve? Darwin said it was group selection, but modern researchers discovered kin altruism and reciprocal altruism, concluded that this was enough to explain morality, and dismissed the group selection theory.

The only exception is ultrasocial animals, like termites and bees, where it makes more sense to think of the hive itself as the organism, with the individual bees or termites being cells in it. The queen is the only one who can breed, and the survival of the group is the survival of the queen, so group selection pressures are definitely at work.

But evolutionary theorists claim that this doesn’t happen in humans, because all humans are capable of breeding, so individual selection will always play a role.

However, it could be both: there could be group selection pressures and individual selection pressures happening at the same time.

People don’t just have genes; we also have culture. Culture itself is subject to evolutionary and memetic processes. Haidt argues that cultures and genes have co-evolved.

Biologist David Sloan Wilson argues that religion and the part of the brain susceptible to religion co-evolved via group selection, since religion promotes groupishness and makes people act more morally.

But again, both group selection and individual selection operate on human populations. People can display altruism but they can also display selfishness; culture and circumstances will determine which one people exhibit.

Harmony and Purpose

People accuse religions of hypocrisy because they preach peace and kindness but then wage war against other groups. But this makes sense from the evolutionary perspective of group selection; religion encourages people to be altruistic within the group but even more aggressive to people outside the group.

This evolutionary argument also explains why mystical experiences involve transcending the self and becoming part of something larger. 

Neuroscientists have investigated how this happens, and found that mystical experiences deactivate the part of the brain which tracks where the boundaries of your body are, as well as the part which tracks where you’re located in space. So “[t]he person experiences a loss of self combined with a paradoxical expansion of the self out into space, yet with no fixed location in the normal world of three dimensions. The person feels merged with something vast, something larger than the self.”

These states can be activated by ritual and coordinated movement. Human groups across history have used this to create group cohesion.

Here’s Haidt’s conclusion:

What can you do to have a good, happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life? What is the answer to the question of purpose within life? I believe that the answer can be found only by understanding the kind of creature that we are, divided in the many ways we are divided. We were shaped by individual selection to be selfish creatures who struggle for resources, pleasure, and prestige, and we were shaped by group selection to be hive creatures who long to lose ourselves in something larger. We are social creatures who need love and attachments, and we are industrious creatures with needs for effectance, able to enter a state of vital engagement with our work. We are the rider and we are the elephant, and our mental health depends on the two working together, each drawing on the others’ strengths. I don’t believe there is an inspiring answer to the question, “What is the purpose of life?” Yet by drawing on ancient wisdom and modern science, we can find compelling answers to the question of purpose within life. The final version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from between. Happiness is not something you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationship to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.

[the-utmost-bound]

It occurs to me that I never finished outlining The Happiness Hypothesis. I have one chapter to go, so I might as well finish what I started.

I’ve learned, from this experiment, that outlining every book I read is not a good use of my time. It takes hours to write every outline. It may be worth it on occasion, for dense academic texts that are relevant to my research interests, but it’s definitely not worth it for every book.

The compromise I’ve settled on is: now, when I read a non-fiction book, I save passages that I really enjoy, and I try to write a quick summary of what the book was about overall. Maybe I even write down some of the facts and ideas that were new to me. But I’m definitely saving the full outlining for very special occasions.

But anyway, seeing as I only have one chapter to go in The Happiness Hypothesis, I might as well finish it. I’ve long since abandoned this blog, and have taken up residence at @digging-holes-in-the-river instead. But I figured I’d pop in here for a few hours to finish this.

[the-utmost-bound]

The Happiness Hypothesis: Chapter 9, “Divinity with or without God”

This chapter was about our perception of divinity, which Haidt claims is an important part of human psychology whether or not God exists.

He starts with two quotes about how we need to seek nobility or divinity in order to live good lives:

Meng Tzu: We must not allow the ignoble to injure the noble, or the smaller to injure the greater.  Those who nourish the smaller parts will become small men.  Those who nourish the greater parts will become great men.

Muhammad: God created the angels from intellect without sensuality, the beasts from sensuality without intellect, and humanity from both intellect and sensuality.  So when a person's intellect overcomes his sensuality, he is better than the angels, but when his sensuality overcomes his intellect, he is worse than the beasts.

But this chapter wasn't really about how to live a good life.  It mostly just explained what the divinity dimension is, where it came from evolutionarily, and why it's important to human psychology.

According to Haidt, there are two familiar dimensions along which we relate to each other: closeness and hierarchy.  These govern our interactions with one another (we behave differently to close friends than we do to strangers, and we behave differently to our superiors than we do to our subordinates).

But there's also a third dimension, a specifically moral dimension that he calls "divinity", that also affects how we relate to other people.  To put it shortly, some people (regardless of their closeness to us or their social status) are simply more spiritually pure.

This "divinity" dimension appears cross-culturally, though WEIRDerners often have trouble perceiving it.

To be honest, I don't fully understand this chapter.  This outline is an attempt to make sense of it to myself.  For that reason, I'm not going to follow Haidt's chapter organization as closely as usual.

Apparently, the divinity dimension is rooted in our instinct towards disgust.

Disgust

Disgust, as an instinct, "is largely about animals and the products of animal bodies (few plants or inorganic materials are disgusting)".  Disgusting things include blood, excrement, snot, vomit, and other bodily fluids.

Disgust spreads by contagion.  Something that touched something disgusting is also, by extension, disgusting.  For this reason we are grossed out by rats, cockroaches, and other animals that live in garbage.

Disgusting things make us want to perform purifying actions, "such as washing or, if it's too late, vomiting".

"Disgust has its evolutionary origins in helping people decide what to eat."  As humans got smarter, we also started eating more meat (including scavenged carcasses), which exposed us to more disease.  Plants can't contaminate other things by touching them ("[i]f a poisonous berry brushes up against your baked potato, it won't make the potato harmful or disgusting"), but rotting meat and excrement can.  So the feeling of disgust helps us track this contamination.  Haidt describes disgust as a "guardian of the mouth".

Disgust also protects us from disease.  We're grossed out by bodily fluids like blood, excrement, and mucus, which are likely to be carrying disease.

Disgust "guards the body more generally".  We're disgusted by unattractive, undesirable mates.  We're also disgusted by "skin lesions, deformities, amputations, extreme obesity or thinness, and other violations of the culturally ideal outer envelope of the human body".

It makes sense that disgust would expand from guarding the mouth to guarding the rest of the body, since humans have always lived in dense groups where it's easy to spread disease.

Categories of disgust: "food, body products, animals, sex, death, body envelope violations, and hygiene".

Disgust and Morality

"But the most fascinating thing about disgust is that it is recruited to support so many of the norms, rituals, and beliefs that cultures use to define themselves."

The point seems to be that we use disgust when reasoning about morality.

Human and Animal

Humans are thought to be higher than animals along the dimension of divinity.  And we measure how "animal" an action is by how much it disgusts us (e.g. eating with our hands).  Therefore, every time we do something disgusting, it brings us closer to being animal, thereby reducing our divinity.

So in order to assert our humanness, we are careful to perform biological processes in cordoned-off, socially sanctioned ways.  We wear clothes to cover the "animal" parts of our body.  We pee and poop and have sex in private.  We enforce table manners to make eating into a less animal thing.  (My mom used to tell me to "eat like a human being".)

Disgust is the emotion that enforces these behaviors.  People who break these norms are disgusting.  If we do or see people violating these taboos, we feel degraded; we feel ourselves being lowered on the axis of divinity.

Purity and Pollution

Most cultures attach moral significance to physical pollution.

It's considered immoral to pollute the body in various ways (such as violating food taboos, or performing forbidden sexual acts).  (I guess Haidt's argument is that violating these taboos makes us more animal, and lowers us on the scale of divinity, which reaches up from animal to god?)  Haidt never mentions this, but the moral obsession with virginity seems like a good example of this.

People who are already polluted are forbidden from taking part in holy activities.  For instance, "women in many cultures [are] forbidden to enter temples or touch religious artifcats while they are menstruating, or for a few weeks after giving birth".  The Laws of Manu tells Brahmins that they shouldn't even think of reciting holy scripture while pooping or peeing, or "when food is still left on [their] mouth or hands", or when "in a cremation ground", or "while wearing a garment that [they have] worn in sexual union", etc.

Haidt tells of the temples in Bhubaneswar, which are sacred spaces in the Mircea Eliade sense.  At most temples, Haidt was allowed into the courtyards, and he could enter the antechambers as long as he removed his shoes and any leather items.  But because he is not a Hindu, he was not allowed into the inner sanctum.  They weren't trying to keep it a secret, they were just trying to keep it from being polluted by "people such as [Haidt] who had not followed the proper procedures of bathing, diet, hygiene, and prayer for maintaining religious purity".

Everything in Bhubaneswar is suffused with this sacredness dimension. Places can be more or less sacred (the inner sancta of temples being the most sacred), and so can parts of the body (the head and right hand are more pure, the feet and left hand are polluted).

Other

Immoral acts evoke a disgust reaction, and make us feel less pure, even when they have nothing to do with the physical body or the distinction between humand and animal.

"When people use the ethic of divinity, their goal is to protect from degradation the divinity that exists in each person, and they value living in a pure and holy way, free from moral pollutants such as lust, greed, and hatred."

Physical pollution is thought of as akin to moral pollution.

Physical purity is thought of as akin to moral purity.

Sacred Intrusions

The dimension of divinity is prominent in Bhubaneswar where Haidt did fieldwork.

But it was also prominent in America in Victorian times.

According to Mircea Eliade, all cultures have an idea of sacred and profane space, time, and activities.  Purity / pollution marks the boundary between the sacred and the profane.

WEIRD culture is the first culture to ignore sacredness, and to live in a world that is fully profane.

But even in modern America, we perceive sacredness in certain personally significant places ("a man's birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth").

But these are discovered by the individual, not specified by the culture.

Disgust and degradation are the emotions we feel when we see something low on the scale of divinity.  But elevation and awe are the emotions we feel when we see something high on that dimension.

Elevation

Elevation is the feeling we experience when we see someone do a really good deed.

We tend to feel it in the heart, or as a "dilation" of the chest.

It sometimes involves feelings of chills, or of choking up.

When people experience elevation, they feel motivated to good deeds also, or to become a better person.

Haidt and his students have studied elevation in the lab.

They evoke it using "clips from documentaries about heroes and altruists, and selections from the Oprah Winfrey show".

Elevation is different than "admiration for nonmoral excellence".

"Subjects in the admiration condition were more likely to report feeling chills or tingles on their skin, and to report feeling energized or 'psyched up.'  Witnessing extraordinarily skillfull actions gives people the drive and energy to try to copy those actions."

“Elevation, in contrast, is a calmer feeling, not associated with signs of physiological arousal."

People in the studies say they want to do good deeds, but they are no more likely than others to help a researcher who has dropped a stack of papers.

This may be because elevation influences the vagus nerve, which controls the parasympathetic nervous system, calming people down and making them less prone towards action.

This would explain why people associate elevation with the heart.  "The vagus nerve is the main nerve that controls heart rate, and it has a variety of other effects on the heart and lungs, so if people feel something in the chest, the vagus nerve is the main suspect, and it has already been implicated in research on feelings of gratitude and 'appreciation.'"

(But the vagus nerve is hard to measure, so there's no conclusive evidence of this yet.)

The vagus nerve is associated with the hormone oxytocin.  "The vagus nerve works with the hormone oxytocin to create feelings of calmness, love, and desire for contact that encourage bonding and attachment."

Haidt's student Jen Silvers wanted to see whether elevation influenced oxytocin.  oxytocin is known to increase lactation, so Haidt and Silvers brought a bunch of lactating women into the lab and showed them a video that would induce elevation.  almost half the women leaked milk, or nursed their babies after watching the video, and also played more warmly with their babies.  whereas only a couple women in the control condition, where they watched an amusing video, leaked milk or fed their babies.

If elevation is associated with oxytocin, this could explain why people feel motivated to do good deeds but aren't actually more likely to do them.  "Oxytocin causes bonding, not action.  Elevation may fill people with feelings of love, trust, and openness, making them more receptive to new relationships; yet, given their feelings of relaxation and passitivty, they might be less liekly to engage in active altruism toward strangers."

A reader wrote Haidt a letter, saying he shed two kinds of tears in church. The first was tears of compassion, which felt like "'being pricked in the soul,' after which 'love pours out' for those who are suffering".  But the other was tears of elevation or celebration, which "'is also like being pricked, only now the love pours in'".

This could explain what Christians mean by "referenes to Christ's love and love through Christ".  Going to church could cause people to experience elevation, where they feel the goodness of Christ and feel his love pouring into them.  "[B]ut it is not exactly the love that grows out of attachment relationships.  That love has a specific object, and it turns to pain when the object is gone.  This love has no specific object; it is agape.  It feels like a love of all humankind, and because humans find it hard to believe that something comes from nothing, it seems natural to attribute the love to Christ, or to the Holy Spirit moving within one's heart."

Awe

Awe is the other emotion that moves us up on the dimension of divinity.

Awe is evoked by the vastness and beauty of nature, or by "viewing great art, hearing a symphony, or listening to an inspiring speaker".

Haidt says: "In chapter 1, I wrote about the divided self -- the many ways in which people feel as though they have multiple selves or intelligences that sometimes conflict.  This division is often explained by positing a soul -- a higher, noble, spiritual self, which is tied down to a body -- a lower, base, carnal self.  The soul escapes the body only at death; but before then, spiritual practices, great sermons, and awe at nature can give the soul a taste of the freedom to come."

Awe can also be evoked by psychedelic drugs, which make people feel like they are experiencing the presence of God.

Awe is "link[ed] to fear and submission in the presence of something much greater than the self".

"The emotion of awe happens when two conditions are met: a person perceives something vast (usually physically vast, but sometimes conceptually vast, such as a grand theory; or social vast, such as great fame or power); and the vast thing cannot be accommodated by the person's existing mental structures"

Awe opens people up, shows them how little they understand, and thereby makes them more receptive to change.

Awe is frequently a catalyst in stories of religious conversion (examples: the Bhagavad Gita, and the square in Flatland).

William James studied these stories of religious conversion and found that they contained many similarities, including a sense that the smaller self had been washed away in a moment of profound awe, leaving the larger self to flourish.

These experiences exist for secular people too; Maslow studied them, calling them "peak experiences", and found that they contain many common elements: "The universe is perceived as a unified whole where everything is accepted and nothing is judged or ranked; egocentrism and goal-striving disappear as a person feels merged with the universe (and often with God); perceptions of time and space are altered; and the person is flooded with feelings of wonder, awe, joy, love, and gratitude."

Maslow said that religions were founded on these peak experiences, though they could lose their vitality over time as they were taken over by bureaucrats.

Science, too, has lost its vitality and its ability to evoke wonder as scientists have emphasized the cold, objective study of facts over the experience of amazement at them.

The Satanic Self

The self is an important part of cognition: it helps us think about long-term goals, and create a narrative of who we are, and maintain internal consistency and self-control.  It also helps us see from other people's perspectives, since we can model their selves.

But it also causes lots of problems.

Haidt associates the self with the internal chatter that often causes us a great deal of stress.  This keeps us "locked in the material and profane world, unable to perceive sacredness and divinity".

Also, "spiritual transformation is essential the transformation of the self, weakening it, pruning it back -- in some sense, killing it -- and often the self objects".  The self partially exists to maintain internal consistency, so it objects to efforts to change.  Also, Haidt associates the self with the part that cares about prestige and status, so it objects to spiritual growth that tries to overcome these things.

According to Haidt, the self is also the part of us that has desires and needs, and the self doesn't like these desires to be denied.  The self is the part that wants to give in to temptation.  So it creates an obstacle to spiritual and moral growth that wants to overcome these selfish desires.  This is why the self is often opposed to the ethic of divinity, and societies who value the ethic of divinity try to deemphasize the self and its needs.

The Culture War

The ethic of divinity can help us to understand the culture war.

Liberals primarily value the ethic of autonomy, and they see the ethic of divinity as reducing people's freedom, and making it hard for them to pursue the lives they choose.

Christian conservatives value the ethic of divinity, and think that a life of pure self-fulfillment is hollow, since it neglects higher spiritual pursuits.  They are willing to reduce autonomy in order to preserve divinity.

"On issue after issue, liberals wnat to maximize autonomy by removing limits, barriers, and restrictions.  The religious right, on the other hand, wants to structure personal, social, and political relationships in three dimensions and so create a landscape of purity and pollution where restrictions maintain the separation of the sacred and the profane.  For the religious right, hell on earth is a flat land of unlimited freedom where selves roam around with no higher purpose than expressing and developing themselves."

Liberalism is good because it prevents people from being mistreated.  "An unfortunate tendency of [societies that value divinity] is that they often include one or more groups that get pushed down on the [divinity] dimension and then treated badly, or worse.  Look at the conditions of 'untouchables' in India until recently, or the plight of Jews in medieval Europe and in purity-obsessed Nazi Germany, or at the humiliation of African Americans in the segregated South."

But divinity adds a dimension of richness to human experience.  "If the third dimension and perception of sacredness are an important part of human nature, then the scientific community should accept religiosity as a normal and healthy aspect of human nature -- an aspect that is as deep, important, and interesting as sexuality or language."  "If religious people are right in believing that religion is the source of their greatest happiness, then maybe the rest of us who are looking for happiness and meaning can learn something from them, whether or not we believe in God."

Haidt doesn't really propose a solution or a synthesis of the worldviews. He just invites liberals (his intended audience) to think about the axis of divinity, both to understand the religious right better and to accept that it might have something important to say.

[the-utmost-bound]

Ok, I lied: I’m going to finish summarizing The Happiness Hypothesis after all.  (There was a snowstorm at my house, which knocked out the power for a day, and the phone lines are still down, so I haven’t had much else to do.)

Still planning to migrate to a new tumblr sometime soon.

[the-utmost-bound]

Ugh, I am tired of outlining this book.  And I am tired of this blog format, where I have one Serious Blog for Serious Things and another for hoarding out-of-context quotes.  I tried this once before and it didn’t work then either.  It may have been more chaotic, but I liked it when my blog was a mixed collage of personal posts, art I liked, quotes I liked, philosophy, and conversations I was having with friends.

Sooooo I’m going to abandon this particular blog and resurface somewhere else.  Haven’t decided on a name yet, but it’ll probably appear in the next day or two?  You can find me in the usual way, by searching for the tags I tend to use.  (People track me down this way, right?  I would track me down this way if I were looking for my new tumblr.)

I might even re-use a pre-existing blog name, who knows.  I’ve had some pretty good blog names over the years.

Anyway, see you later in another place.

[the-utmost-bound]

The Happiness Hypothesis: Chapter 8, “The Felicity of Virtue”

This chapter was about virtue, and the claim that leading a virtuous life will lead us to happiness.  Haidt points out that our idea of virtue has changed radically in the last few hundred years; he then evaluates this claim in light of both the old and new ideas of virtue.

Here’s the quotes he starts with:

Epicurus: It is impossible to live the pleasant life without also living sensibly, nobly and justly, and it is impossible to live sensibly, nobly and justly without living pleasantly.

Buddha: Set your heart on doing good.  Do it over and over again, and you will be filled with joy.  A fool is happy until his mischief turns against him.  And a good man may suffer until his goodness flowers.

Is this true, or is it just what authority figures want us to believe so that we’ll behave?  But virtue does not necessarily mean doing what we’re told; sometimes it means ignoring what our parents say, and running off on grand adventures, and building character in the process.

Haidt tells the story of Ben Franklin, who runs away from his apprenticeship with his brother (an unvirtuous act according to the “do what you’re told” model of virtue), but who actively works to cultivate virtue, and ends up very successful at life.  The story of Ben Franklin makes it sound like Haidt views virtue as an internal endeavor -- figuring out what’s important to you, and then cultivating your own virtues and living according to them -- rather than an external thing where you blindly follow whatever you’re told to do.

Haidt spends the beginning of the chapter explaining why our modern conception of virtue is weird.

In ancient Greece, people had a very different concept of virtue than we do today.

It was not all about selflessness, giving to charity, and repressing our sexuality.

Rather, Aristotle’s idea of virtue, called arete, was about excellence: about doing something well.  “The arete of a knife is to cut well; the arete of an eye is to see well[.]”

“He was saying that a good life is one where you develop your strengths, realize your potential, and become what it is in your nature to become.”

The Virtues of the Ancients

The ancients wrote about morality in a different way than we do today.

(1) They wrote about virtues (e.g. “honesty, justice, courage, benevolence, self-restraint, and respect for authority”), and “specified actions that were good and bad with respect to those virtues”.  The virtues were not just for helping others; they were supposed to “benefit the person who cultivates them.”

(2) They “rely heavily on maxims and role models rather than proofs and logic.”  This form of moral instruction inspires the elephant instead of reasoning with the rider.  This is good, because it’s ultimately the elephant that makes the decisions.

(3) The ancient texts “emphasize practice and habit rather than factual knowledge.”  You can know all the moral rules that you want, but it takes practice to become a virtuous person.  Practice is how you train the elephant.  So the ancient texts give exercises and activities that you can use to cultivate virtue.

How the West Was Lost

Two principles led Western thought (especially during the enlightenment) away from this conception of ethics.

(1) Parsimony: science teaches us to “search for the smallest set of laws that can explain the enormous variety of events in the world”.  People applied this thinking to morality, and started looking for a single moral principle from which all morality could be derived, instead of using these long lists of virtues.

(2) Rationality: reason was supposed to be the center of the human mind, the thing that separated us from animals, so naturally, reason should be in charge of morality as well.

Two enlightenment philosophers, Kant and Bentham, tried to propose a single moral principle from which all of ethics could be derived.

Kant suggested the “categorical imperative”: moral laws should apply universally to everyone at all times, so if you are trying to decide whether an action is moral, you need to ask whether it could be proposed as a universal law.  For instance, Haidt says “If you are planning to break a promise that has become inconvenient, can you really propose a universal rule that states people ought to break promises that have become inconvenient?”

Bentham proposed utilitarianism: the principle of creating the most good for the most people.  An action was moral if it increased global utility.

The followers of Kant (”deontologists”) still argue with the followers of Bentham (”consequentialists”).

But they agree on many important things:

(1) “Decisions should be based ultimately on one principle only, be it the categorical imperative or the maximization of utility.”

(2) “They both insist that only the rider can make such decisions because moral decision making requires logical reasoning and sometimes even mathematical calculation.”

(3) “They both distrust intuitions and gut feelings, which they see as obstacles to good reasoning.”

(4) “And they both shun the particular in favor of the abstract: You don’t need a rich, thick description of the people involved, or of their beliefs and cultural traditions.  You just need a few facts and a ranked list of their likes and dislikes (if you are a utilitarian).  It doesn’t matter what country of historical era you are in; it doesn’t matter whether the people involved are your friends, your enemies, or complete strangers.  The moral law, like a law of physics, works the same for all people at all times.”

These two philosophies have changed the way western society thinks about morality.

“The philosopher Edmund Pincoffs has argued that consequentialists and deontologists worked together to convince Westerners in the twentieth century that morality is the study of moral quandaries and dilemmas.  Where the Greeks focused on the character of a person and asked what kind of person we should each aim to become, modern ethics focuses on actions, asking when a particular action is right or wrong.”

“This turn from character ethics to quandary ethics has turned moral education away from virtues and toward moral reasoning.  If morality is about dilemmas, then moral education is training in problem solving.”

Instead of teaching children specific moral facts, we teach them how to solve moral problems on their own.

Haidt has two problems with this.

(1) “It weakens morality and limits its scope.”  Ideas of virtue used to infuse everything a person would do.  Now we only think about morality when confronting specific moral dilemmas, which are usually “tradeoffs between self-interest and the interests of others”.  Morality applies when we’re wondering whether to cheat on a partner, or whether to give to charity.  We no longer use morality to think about things like working hard for our own long-term gain, or developing a skill.

(2) “[I]t relies on bad psychology.”  We teach children moral principles, and show them examples of other people reasoning their way through moral quandaries.  And children are supposed to take away from this the ability to reason morally.  Which they do; when they sit down and think about it, people are able to apply the principles and come to a moral conclusion.  But this doesn’t translate into action; it takes more than reason to persuade the elephant.  Haidt gives an example of how he believed, rationally, in the virtue of vegetarianism, but never actually acted on that principle until he saw a slaughterhouse video that viscerally disgusted him.

The Virtues of Positive Psychology

There has been pushback against the modern idea of morality.

Some of it is from conservative Christians.

Some of it is from a philosopher named Alasdair MacIntyre who argues that “creating a universal, context-free morality was doomed from the beginning” and that we need specific virtues, grounded in a specific cultural tradition, in order to find meaning and purpose in life.

And some of it is from positive psychology.

Positive psychology was founded by Martin Seligman, who noticed that psychology was only focusing on the problems and pathologies we experience.  We have a whole book (the DSM) designed for classifying problems, but no equivalent diagnostic manual for recognizing the specific ways that people can live a good life.

So Seligman and another psychologist named Peterson tried creating a diagnostic manual of strengths and virtues.  Their goal was to make the list applicable to any human culture.  So they looked through every list of virtues they could find, and wrote down six very broad classes of virtues that every culture considers important.  Those virtues are: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.  Cultures may disagree on how to weight these virtues, but they all agree that they are, indeed, virtues.

For each one, Peterson and Seligman also made a list of “strengths of character”, which are specific ways of achieving each virtue.  For wisdom, for instance, the list is curiosity, love of learning, judgment, ingenuity, emotional intelligence, and perspective.

One piece of research that’s come out of this list is: focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses.

It’s easier and more rewarding to cultivate strengths rather than weaknesses.

And sufficient strength in one virtue can compensate for weakness in another.

People who try to fix weaknesses will often find themselves giving up in despair.

But people who work on their strengths will often find themselves improving as a human being.

Haidt spends the end of the chapter trying to answer the “virtue hypothesis”, the claim that living virtuously will make us happy.

Hard Questions, Easy Answers

For the ancient idea of virtue, it’s easy to answer the virtue hypothesis.  If virtue just means cultivating personal excellence, and you focus on your strengths (things you find intrinsically rewarding), then of course living virtuously can bring you happiness.

But what about for “our restricted modern understanding of morality as altruism”?  Does acting against our own self-interest make us happy, or benefit us in some way?

Religious leaders say yes: if you act virtuously, you will go to heaven, or be reincarnated in a better form during your next lifetime.

But this belief in divine punishment / reward can be traced to various psychological principles (whether or not god is real).

(1) Immanent justice: this is the belief that, if you do something bad, then something bad will happen to you in return.  It’s very common among children at a certain stage of development but we see it in adults too, as people try to make sense of terrible things happening in their (or others’) lives.  It’s part of the human instinct for reciprocity.

(2) The myth of pure evil (discussed in Chapter 4): we think people are purely good or purely evil, but really, they aren’t.  “Moral motivations (justice, honor, loyalty, patriotism) enter into most acts of violence, including terrorism and war.  Most people believe their actions are morally justified.”  So Haidt’s argument is that, if heaven and hell existed, few people would qualify for either.

Science also gives us an easy answer: the virtues evolved because they are good for us, and help us to propagate our genes.  Kindness and cooperation help us either through kin altruism (helping others who bear the same genes) or reciprocal altruism (you’re kind, so someone else is kind to you in return).

But just because something is evolutionarily beneficial doesn’t mean it makes us happy.  Our genes also motivate us to seek status instead of happiness, and that definitely makes us less happy.

Also, what about practicing the virtues when they don’t lead to reciprocal altruism?  What about performing acts of kindness that you know will never be repaid?  Does that still make us happy?

So neither religion nor science’s easy answer is satisfying.

Hard Questions, Hard Answers

So does helping people really make us happy?

Studies have shown that altruism correlates with happiness, but this could just be because happier people are more likely to be altruistic.  Indeed, when you make people happier, they are more likely to behave altruistically.

Is there any evidence that altruism makes people happy?  Yes, but it depends on the life stage.  For teenagers, studies have found that volunteering increases prosocial behavior but doesn’t increase happiness; for adults volunteering does increase happiness; and this is especially pronounced for the elderly.

This could partially be because of the social benefits -- teenagers already have good social lives and don’t need to find a community through volunteering, but as people get older (and especially once they’re elderly), volunteering provides a valuable source of community.

It could also be because of life narratives.  Volunteering helps you build a good life narrative, so it matters more for adults who already have a solid life narrative to build on.  Also, “in old age, generativity, relationship, and spiritual strivings come to matter more, but achievement strivings seem out of place,” so volunteer work is especially fitting for an elderly person’s life story.

The Future of Virtue

"Scientific research supports the virtue hypothesis, even when it is reduced to the claim that altruism is good for you.”

“When it is evaluated in the way that Ben Franklin meant it, as a claim about virtue more broadly, it becomes so profoundly true that it raises the question of whether cultural conservatives are correct in their critique of modern life and its restricted, permissive morality.”

As a society, we’ve lost a strong sense of shared cultural values, and this has led us into anomie.

We’ve gone from a society of producers, with values such as self-restraint, to a society of consumers, where people are encouraged to seek personal fulfillment.

Also, our society is increasingly diverse, and values inclusivity.  This leads people to seek out a least common denominator of virtue, thereby ignoring some of the specific ones that give each culture its flavor and give people a strong grounding in their values.

So, as a society, we have undergone tradeoffs: we’ve chosen inclusivity, which makes life much better for immigrants, women, African Americans, gay people, etc., even if it erases our strong foundation of virtues.

Even if you don’t think the tradeoffs were worth it, there’s no way to go back to the 1950s, or to an ethnically homogeneous pre-consumer society.

“Diversity” has become a positive buzzword in liberal culture, but there are two kinds of diversity, demographic and moral.  Demographic is good; it helps us include groups that were previously mistreated.  But moral diversity is what causes anomie and conflict.

“Liberals are right to work for a society that is open to people of every demographic group, but conservatives might be right in believing that at the same time we should work much harder to create a common, shared identity.”

Haidt thinks there’s something to the conservative view that we ought to teach children morals and values, instead of leaving them to figure it out themselves.

It may be too late for this now, given the current state of the culture war.  If this is going to happen, it will need to come from some sort of grassroots movement where a community joins together to educate children according to a particular set of virtues.

Maybe we won’t have as solid or cohesive of a culture as we would if we abandoned our commitment to diversity, but we will be a more just culture.

[the-utmost-bound]

I was reading this article about the Denisovans, and thinking about the era when humans coexisted with other hominid species, and it reminded me how much I like fiction where humans coexist with other human-like things.

One of my favorite genres is “it’s the future, and humanity has diversified into multiple species (either due to ordinary evolution or genetic engineering), and now the species interact with each other in different ways”.  Back when I was in middle school and wanted to be a writer, this was the genre I most liked to write.  But now that I’m thinking about it, it’s hard to remember any real books that fit this description.  There’s Man After Man, but I can’t think of anything else.  Did I read a lot of these books as a kid, and they just don’t exist outside the young adult genre, and that’s why I can’t remember any?  Or are there really just not that many of them?  Where’s all the postapocalyptic “now there are lots of kinds of humans” novels?

I shouldn’t complain, because there’s plenty of sci-fi and fantasy with near-humans in it.  Elves, dwarves, klingons, romulans...  I’m more in the mood for fantasy lately; I don’t want to see anything super high tech; I want to see all the different hominids living together on one planet in a premodern way.

I like elves and dwarves and giants and centaurs but I want to see new semi-humans!  I want to see insect-people with scales and dragonfly wings.  I want to see humanoids with claws and teeth that they use to hunt their prey.  I want to see amphibious humans that spend half their time in the water, and humans that can see in the dark and live nocturnally, and humans that can fly!  I want to see humans with heightened senses of sight or hearing or smell.  I want to see humans with wings that live in nests like birds.  Humans with prehensile tails.  Humans with skin that changes color at will.  Humans who speak the language of horses and live in close communion with them.

I want to see how the regular humans coexist with all these things.  Do they live in villages together and each take on different roles?  Do they live separately but at peace with one another?  Do they distrust each other and go to war?  What happens when a human falls in love with a creature of one of these other species?  How do the other species organize their societies?

Anyway that’s a thing I’d like to see more of.  Seeking recommendations if you have any!

[the-utmost-bound]

In his chapter on love, Haidt writes:

Passionate love is a drug.  Its symptoms overlap with those of heroin (euphoric well-being, sometimes described in sexual terms) and cocaine (euphoria combined with giddiness and energy).  It’s no wonder: Passionate love alters the activity of several parts of the brain, including parts that are involved in the release of dopamine.  Any experience that feels intensely good releases dopamine, and the dopamine link is crucial here because drugs that artificially raise dopamine levels, as do heroin and cocaine, put you at risk of addiction.

I rolled my eyes when I came to this paragraph, because psych writers are always doing this.  “This normal human experience activates the same part of the brain as drugs!”  “It releases the same neurotransmitters as drugs!”  Usually, the point is to say “Therefore, this experience is a drug.  And drugs are bad, so this experience is bad too!”

Which isn’t what Haidt was doing; his point was that we eventually gain a tolerance for drugs, where they no longer feel good anymore because we’re so used to them.  And the same thing happens with passionate love; after a few months it inevitably wears off.

And yet, even in Haidt’s case, I dislike the description.  There’s something disheartening about hearing our experiences described in this way, as if love were an insect under a microscope, dissected and analyzed by scientists in white coats.  I’ve always thought that... there’s something about looking at these first-person experiences from the third-person brain-is-a-lump-of-meat perspective that deflates them, makes them seem less real.  “You only have these feelings because you’re subject to your animal urges.  You’re a product of chemistry, a will-less automaton.”

I don’t know how to explain.  But I’ve never liked descriptions like this and I’ve always found them dehumanizing and demoralizing.

Except... I found this passage in my favorite novelist (and friend) David Zindell’s memoir, and... it talks about love in a very similar way, but somehow I don’t find it demoralizing at all.

Falling in love is a disease, a derangement of the senses, a divine madness -- so declared the ancients who pondered this mystery.  Modern scientists have confirmed their cynicism.  New love, they observe, can resemble mania, dementia, and obsession.  The brain scans they have made of the smitten suggest that love -- or being in love -- looses an electrical storm within the brain’s most primitive structures and appears related to people’s more primitive drives: thirst, hunger, the craving for drugs.  Indeed, the longing for deep romance can obliterate even the will to live.  The poets certainly knew this.  All the great lovers of their stories ended their lives tragically: Tristan and Isolde; Lancelot and Guinevere; Romeo and Juliet.  The wonderful (and terrible) thing about being in love, though, was that one didn’t care.

Not sure what it is that makes this passage less depressing.  But I find it uplifting, just like I find all of David’s writings.

Saving this for future ponderings on the aesthetics of ideas.

[the-utmost-bound]

The Happiness Hypothesis: Chapter 7, “The Uses of Adversity”

This chapter was about the idea that adversity can lead to personal growth.  Or, as Haidt puts it:

This chapter is about what we might call the “adversity hypothesis,” which says that people need adversity, setbacks, and perhaps even trauma to reach the highest levels of strength, fulfillment, and personal development.

He starts out with two quotes:

Meng Tzu: When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent.

Nietzsche: What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.

Of course, trauma doesn’t always lead to personal growth; sometimes it just gives you PTSD.  Haidt consults the psychological literature to determine how trauma can lead to personal growth, along with when it’s most likely to have a positive effect.

Posttraumatic Growth

Three ways in which trauma can lead to growth.

(1) Trauma shows you what you’re capable of surviving, which makes you more confident when facing future challenges.

(2) It shows you who your true friends are (the ones who actually come to help in your time of need) and it strengthens your relationships with them. Helping each other through a crisis brings people a lot closer than casual friendship under ordinary circumstances.

(3) “Trauma changes priorities and philosophies towards the present [...] and towards other people.” When you come close to dying, or you lose someone you love, it shows you how precious every moment is. After facing death, people often realize their priorities are screwed up, or that they’ve been taking their lives for granted. This sometimes leads people to change careers, or reduce the hours they spend at work in order to spend more time with their families. It also makes people kinder, more empathetic, and more forgiving; after facing death, petty conflicts and arguments just don’t seem important anymore.

Must We Suffer?

Weak version of adversity hypothesis: “adversity can lead to growth, strength, joy, and self-improvement, by the three mechanisms of posttraumatic growth described above”.

Strong version of adversity hypothesis: “people must endure adversity to grow, and [...] the highest levels of growth and development are only open to those who have faced and overcome great adversity”.

The weak version is definitely true, based on the scientific evidence, but it doesn’t tell us much about how to live our lives. The strong version, on the other hand, has lots of implications for how to live our lives (namely, exposing ourselves to more adversity), but it’s unclear whether it’s true.

What kind of personality change does suffering cause?

Psychologist Dan McAdams says that there are three levels of personality.

Level 1 is the basic traits (big five, etc.). These are fairly stable over time and very much influenced by genetics; studies show that they aren’t changed much by adversity.

Level 2 is “characteristic adaptations”, which “includes personal goals, defense and coping mechanisms, values, beliefs, and life-stage concerns (such as those of parenthood or retirement) that people develop to succeed in their particular roles and niches”.

The characteristic adaptations are influenced by the basic level traits; they emerge from interactions between the basic level traits and a person’s environment.

According to psychologist Robert Emmons, the characteristic adaptations fall into four categories: “work and achievement, relationships and intimacy, religion and spirituality, and generativity (leaving a legacy and contributing something to society)”.

People who focus on work and achievement are less happy than people who focus on the other three, since achievement is a zero-sum game.

After a tragedy strikes, people experience a brief period where the achievement goals seem pointless compared to the other three. During this window, if you make concrete changes and start prioritize the other three goals, then you can change your life before everything settles back down to business as usual.

(Haidt doesn’t say this explicitly, but my impression is that we get caught up in routines that are very hard to break out of.  Tragedy disrupts those routines, and gives us a chance to change things up, and that’s part of why it’s beneficial.)

Level 3 is the life story.  This is the narrative we weave about what we’re doing with our lives and why we’re doing it.  It’s a conscious interpretation of life events and the decisions we make (even though those decisions are often made by subconscious processes that we have no real access to).

Adversity is particularly essential at level 3; you need some conflict in order to be able to write a good life story.  Overcoming adversity makes for an excellent life story, though succumbing to adversity can lead you to create a self-reinforcing narrative of failure.

Happiness also depends on having coherence between the three levels of personality.  Haidt writes: “Imagine a woman whose basic traits are warm and gregarious but who strives for success in a career that offers few chances for close contacts with people, and whose life story is about an artist forced by her parents to pursue a practical career.  She is a mess of mismatched motives and stories, and it may be that only through adversity will she be able to make the radical changes she would need to achieve coherence among levels.”

So a lot of the benefit of adversity might come from increasing coherence between the levels.  This change in internal coherence could explain why people often report that adversity has changed them a lot, even though (according to studies) their friends don’t necessarily notice these changes.

Adversity often shatters your life into pieces, which forces you to put the pieces back together in a way that might work much better for you.

Blessed Are the Sense Makers

Optimists are better at dealing with adversity than pessimists, because they are better at making sense of events and incorporating them into their life narratives.

Haidt mentions three ways of dealing with crisis: “active coping (taking direct action to fix the problem), reappraisal (doing the work within -- getting one’s own thoughts right and looking for silver linings), and avoidance coping (working to blunt one’s emotional reactions by denying or avoiding the events, or by drinking, drugs, and other distractions)”.

When active coping doesn’t work, we look to reappraisal.  When reappraisal doesn’t work, we resort to avoidance coping.

Optimists are more confident that they can fix things, so they’re more likely to try active coping.  When that doesn’t work, their optimism often makes them good at reappraisal, so they are able to make sense and move on.

Pessimists, on the other hand, are less likely to try active coping because they don’t expect it to help, and they’re less likely to succeed at reappraisal (since they have a hard time seeing the bright side of situations), so they are more likely to resort to avoidance coping.

This sounds bad for pessimists, but pessimists aren’t doomed to misery; they just need to work harder at reappraisal.  A psychologist named Jamie Pennebaker discovered that sitting down and writing about your traumatic experiences can improve your mental and physical health, especially if you’ve never talked or written about these experiences before.  There are great psychological benefits to be obtained from verbally processing traumatic experiences, because that’s when people do the work of sense-making / reappraisal.

If pessimists want to make sure they can get through adversity, here are three steps they can take: (1) improving cognitive style before the adversity strikes, using meditation, cognitive therapy, or Prozac; (2) building a strong social support network (who provide emotional support, as well as being a sounding board as you go through the process of reappraisal); (3) practicing some religion, since religious communities often form strong support networks, and religious beliefs provide frameworks for making sense of adverse events.

For Everything There Is a Season

Adversity is much more helpful at certain points in people’s lives than others.

Children are better off being raised without adversity, since traumatic childhoods can influence people’s personalities throughout their lives.  (Although children are very resilient, so one-off traumatic events (even sexual assault) are unlikely to cause permanent harm; it’s long-term, chronic adversity that is most likely to hurt children.)

People between ages 15 and 25 get the most benefit from adversity.  This is the time when life narratives form, when our memories are most intense, and when events feel most important.  People who experience adversity during this period are more likely to experience lasting improvements, since this is the time when we’re still in the process of sense-making, and when we’re open to our priorities being rearranged into greater internal coherence.

People who experience their first major adversity after 30 are less likely to receive major benefits from it; at this point their lives have mostly crystallized, and adversity will be less likely to lead to personal growth.

Error and Wisdom

It would be nice if we could attain these positive changes without having to suffer adversity.  But wisdom isn’t something that can be taught.

There are two types of knowledge, explicit and tacit.  Explicit knowledge is the factual sort; tacit is the contextual, intuitive sort that you couldn’t necessarily put into words.  Explicit knowledge can be taught in schools; tacit knowledge needs to be acquired through experience.

Wisdom is tacit knowledge, and so people have to learn it first-hand by experiencing adversity and making errors.

Wisdom consists of a few things: the ability to balance your own needs with those of others; the ability to see from others’ perspectives; and the ability to balance between “adaptation (changing the self to fit the environment), shaping (changing the environment), and selection (choosing to move to a new environment)”.

Since wisdom is tacit knowledge, parents can’t teach it to their children directly.  The best thing they can do is expose their children to the sort of situations where they will acquire wisdom for themselves.  This means that it’s important not to shelter children too much, at least once they get into their teens and twenties.  In particular, suffering and posttraumatic growth are likely to lead to an increase in wisdom.

Haidt’s conclusion is that there’s some truth in the ancient wisdom; adversity can lead to personal growth, and might even be necessary for it.  But not all adversity is beneficial, and it’s important to experience the adversity at the proper point in your life.

Here’s his concluding paragraph:

The strong version of the adversity hypothesis might be true, but only if we add caveats: For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen ta the right time (young adulthood), to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to challenges and find benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to cause PTSD).  Each life course is so unpredictable that we can never know whenever a particular setback will be beneficial to a particular person in the long run.  But perhaps we do know enough to [alter people’s lives, if we were given that power]: Go ahead and erase some of those early traumas, but think twice, or await future research, before erasing the rest.

[the-utmost-bound]

I was digging back through my old writings, and I found an idea that surprised me; I had completely forgotten about it.

The idea is that most people need external frameworks in order to figure out how to live their lives.  Back in the day, your social station provided that framework; it told you what job to pursue, what kind of person to marry, and what sort of activities were suitable for you.  Your religion might also give you some framework in which to live your life.  Basically, there were lots of predetermined paths, and if you weren’t sure what to do with your life, or you wanted some external structure, you could easily adhere to one of these paths.

On the other hand, in modern society, we value individualism and “being true to yourself”.  Instead of following a prescribed path, people are encouraged to act in a way that is true to themselves, to pick the life path that reflects who they are as a person.

This is great for people with a strong sense of self, who have a clear idea of what they want to be doing.  But it’s less good for people who prefer an external framework for making decisions.

But nobody wants to say “follow this externally prescribed path” because it would hurt people’s ability to be true to themselves.  So instead, as a culture, we’ve come up with this system of identities that are supposed to reflect who you are as a person.  Each identity then provides a convenient external framework to guide the people who adhere to it.  Identities therefore allow people to seek out an external framework in the name of being true to themselves.

[the-utmost-bound]

It would be nice if there were a drug like “un-caffeine” that you could take to reverse caffeine’s effects.  That way, you could drink as much caffeine as you needed to in order to accomplish a task, but then you could still drink un-caffeine afterwards and be calm and relaxed and able to fall asleep.

[the-utmost-bound]

My last comment is about the Freudian / behaviorist ideas that Haidt started out by rejecting.  From the perspective of 2017, those ideas seem utterly ridiculous.  Of course a child’s attachment to its mother isn’t based only on milk.  Of course human behavior is more complicated than just reinforcement and reward.  So it seems silly that people 100 years ago were so easily beguiled by those ideas.

If people 100 years ago were easily beguiled by dumb ideas, then it’s safe to say that people today are too.  But which ones?

Later in this book, Haidt talks about disgust as a basis for some aspects of morality.  His ideas are compelling, and it seems like there’s something there.  But I wouldn’t be surprised if, in 100 years, someone wrote a book saying “People back in 2017 were so dumb, they believed that a large portion of morality was based on disgust!”

Which doesn’t mean I think that all of that research is wrong.  (I’m not qualified to judge either way.)  The problem, as I see it, is taking a few results and using them to formulate a big overarching theory that’s supposed to explain everything.  (Which I don’t think Haidt is doing, but he did attribute a few things to disgust that I wasn’t at all convinced of.  And you could easily imagine someone else taking the disgust theory and running with it, claiming that it explained all of human morality.)

Anyway, it’s not that the behaviorists were completely wrong.  Reward and reinforcement really are important psychological mechanisms that explain a lot about human behavior.  The problem is that behaviorists extrapolated this too far, and said “that’s all there is”.

My point here is that I think we should be skeptical of overly simplistic overarching theories, ones which say “all aspects of phenomenon X can be explained by principle Y”.  I think that, in almost every case, the universe is more complicated than that.

[the-utmost-bound]

When I first read Chapter 6, which was like a month ago (I’m way behind on summarizing), I was utterly unconvinced by the ending.  As far as I could tell, the chapter was saying:

“Love between parents and children is important, and companionate love between romantic partners is also important.  But the philosophers thought that love (especially the passionate sort) was dangerous, and warned people against it, because it could hurt society or distract people from their duties.  Durkheim found that social connections were really important, and constraints were good for people, and too much choice was limiting.”

And I took that to mean that... we’d be better off with more constraints, ones that said “stick with your marriage even if you fall in passionate love with someone else”, even ones that said “enter this arranged marriage, where you’ll be enmeshed in a network of social responsibilities, instead of running away irresponsibly with the person you actually love”, even ones that say “ignore love and focus on duty”.

So I was confused when Haidt ended the chapter by defending love and its importance.

(I do think the end of the chapter is clumsily argued.  Haidt conflates many different kinds of love, which is annoying because he just spent a whole section teasing apart the different sorts of love and saying how important it is not to confuse them.  He argues that love is important because constraints and social connections are important but that doesn’t mean those constraints and social connections have to be romantic.)

But anyway, upon reading the chapter a second time, it occurs to me that... my objections don’t really apply, because the social institutions in our culture are built around romantic love.  If your goal is “participate in preexisting social structures” and “avoid neglecting your duty” and “follow the social technologies outlined by your society”, then... what you should do is find a romantic partner, fall in love, and marry that person.  That is the social technology of our society.  The fundamental unit of our society is the nuclear family formed by the romantic pair-bond.

So I think Haidt’s right, but only in this culture.  If you want to participate in social structures, and subject yourself to beneficial constraints, and forge strong connections of interreliance with other people in your community, then... maybe your best approach is falling in love, getting married, and working to develop a strong enduring relationship.

[the-utmost-bound]

Ok, so I have a few comments on the chapter I just summarized.

The first is that... if love is really a mixture of a “caregiving system” and an “attachment system”, then this gives us a new way of characterizing relationship styles.

(For those who didn’t read the summary, the idea is that romantic love evolved from the love that binds mothers to their children.  This love has two parts, the “caregiving system” of the mother and the “attachment system” of the child.  According to Haidt, people in romantic relationships experience both of these, along with sexual attraction (the “mating system”).)

Anyway, I remember that a while back (when I was still on one of my previous tumblr accounts), a bunch of us were talking about whether we liked caring for people, being cared for, or both, in the context of romantic relationships.

If romantic love really is made of these two components, then it’s easy to imagine that some people would have a stronger version of one component and a weaker version of the other.  So one could characterize relationship styles by looking at how much of the caregiving and attachment styles each partner exhibits.

[the-utmost-bound]

The Happiness Hypothesis: Chapter 6, “Love and Attachments”

This chapter was about love, relationships, and their importance in our lives.  Haidt starts out with these two quotes:

Seneca: No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility; you must live for your neighbor, if you would live for yourself.

John Donne: No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

The chapter begins by talking about the love between a mother and child, and how, in the first half of the 20th century, the field of psychology dramatically underestimated the importance of this love, until a few seminal studies overturned the consensus.

It then moves on to discussing romantic love: how it evolved through evolution repurposing parent/child love, and how there are actually two types of romantic love that we make the mistake of categorizing as the same thing.

You’ll notice that the two quotes from the beginning of the chapter are not extolling romantic love, but are rather talking about human relationships in general (or even the relationship of a person to the larger emergent structure).  This is because the ancient philosophers were not too big on romantic love.  Haidt disagrees with these philosophers, and spends the end of the chapter arguing against them.  (In my opinion, his argument is unconvincing, but I’ll get to that at the end of the post.)

Here’s a summary of the first part, where he talks about mother/child love:

In the first half of the 20th century, psychology was dominated by two ideas, psychoanalysis and behaviorism.

Both argued that "the infant’s attachment to its mother is based on milk”.

“Freud thought that the infant’s libido (desire for pleasure) is first satisfied by the breast, and therefore the infant develops its first attachment (psychological need) to the breast.  Only gradually does the child generalize that desire to the woman who owns the breast.”

The behaviorists, on the other hand, thought about everything in terms of behaviors and reinforcements, and they thought the infant was attached to its mother because of the reward (milk) received for the behavior of sucking.

“Freudians and behaviorists were united in their belief that highly affectionate mothering damages children[.]”

Some psychologists, like John Watson, believed that the best thing for babies would be to be separated from the damaging influence of their mothers and raised in a baby farm.

To Have and to Hold

Psychologist Harry Harlow tested the claim that milk was what caused infants to attach to their mothers.

He took eight baby rhesus monkeys, and put each of them in a cage with two fake mothers, one made out of cloth and one made out of wire.

For four of the monkeys, the milk came from the cloth mother.  For the other four, it came from the wire mother.

If the milk hypothesis were true, the baby monkey would attach to whichever “mother” gave the milk.

But in practice, all the monkeys spent almost all their time with the cloth mother.

Harlow concluded that baby monkeys have an innate need for physical contact with their mothers, and it isn’t just because the mother provides milk.

Love Conquers Fear

Another psychologist, John Bowlby, contested the claim that separation was harmless or even beneficial to children.

He studied children in hospitals and orphanages, and found that they were either hopelessly clingy or unusually aloof.

After encountering Harlow’s studies, as well as research on baby ducks imprinting, Bowlby concluded that babies of many species have an evolutionary need to attach to their mothers, and that this could explain the babies’ behavior without recourse to ideas about reinforcement or libido.

Bowlby developed attachment theory, based on children’s evolutionary needs.  Children need to play and explore, in order to develop the skills they’ll need in life.  But they also need the safety and security of their mother to protect them.

While conditions are safe and the mother is present, children will play and explore.  But when they sense any danger, they’ll run back to their mothers to receive physical comfort.

Affectionate mothering does not coddle children; it provides them with a safe base from which to explore the world.

Children who are separated from their mother (or other attachment figure) can end up permanently psychologically damaged.

The Proof Is in the Parting

Some experimental evidence for Bowlby’s theories came from the research of Mary Ainsworth.

She devised an experiment called the “Strange Situation” which tested how young children responded to being left alone.  The children and their mothers were brought into a room full of toys, where the children could play and explore.  At various points in the experiment, a stranger would come in and the mother would leave, or both would leave and the child would be alone.  The study investigated how children responded to these changes.

There were three different types of responses.  The children with a “secure” attachment style would get upset when their mother left, but they’d quickly be comforted when she returned.  The children with an “avoidant” attachment style displayed indifference to their mother’s presence (although subsequent studies showed that they were, in fact, experiencing distress when their mothers left, but were trying to tough it out on their own).  The children with a “resistant” attachment style were clingy, and got very upset when their mom left, and couldn’t be easily comforted.

Ainsworth thought that children’s attachment style came from their mother’s parenting style.  Mothers who were caring and responsive had children with secure attachment styles.  Mothers who were cold and distant had children with avoidant attachment styles.  Mothers who provided intermittent rewards produced children with resistant attachment styles.

But this could be genetics as much as parenting; maybe the children are genetically inheriting the mother’s disposition.

Studies have shown only a small correlation between the mother’s responsiveness and the child’s attachment style.  But based on twin studies, attachment style doesn’t seem to be genetic either.  So where does it come from?

Haidt suggests that attachment style is an emergent property that arises through repeated interactions between the child and mother.  Innate disposition and parenting style will influence the initial conditions, but attachment style ultimately depends on the history of interactions.

Then he moves on to talking about how all of this applies to adults.

It’s Not Just for Children

The attachment styles described above also apply to adults in romantic relationships.

For the most part, adults have the same attachment style that they exhibited as a child.

A researcher named Cindy Hazan surveyed people between the ages of six and eighty-two to see who their attachment figures were.  Attachment figures are (1) people you want to be near, (2) people you’ll feel upset when you’re away from, (3) people you come to for comfort, and (4) people who serve as a secure base for exploring the world.  Hazan asked the participants to say which person satisfied each of these things.

For young children, it was parents for all of them.  As the children got older, they listed peers for some of them.  By ages 15 to 17, all four attachment components could be satisfied by a peer, particularly a romantic partner.

Adults respond to the loss of a romantic partner the same way that children respond to separation from their parents.  And when adults lose a romantic partner, comfort from parents is often a lot more helpful than comfort from friends.

When adults cuddle or or have sex, it releases the same hormone oxytocin that binds parents to their children in the “caregiving system” (the complement to the attachment system).

Love and the Swelled Head

So love relationships between adults are built out of the attachment system and the caregiving system that binds mothers and children together.

They also have something to do with the mating system that governs sexual attraction and reproduction.

How did this come to be?

During human evolution, as the brain grew larger, women had to give birth to children before their brains were fully developed (so that the baby’s head could still fit through the birth canal).  This meant that the baby was helpless for years after leaving the womb, and required the mother’s attentive care.

The mother couldn’t do this alone; a mother, by herself, can’t gather enough calories to feed herself and her child.  So the father needed to be involved as well.  This suggests that human intelligence co-evolved with male-female pair bonds, father-child caring bonds, and male sexual jealousy (because if the father is going to devote that much effort to raising a child, it better be his).

Evolution doesn’t invent things from scratch; it repurposes existing components.  It seems very likely that evolution repurposed the preexisting caregiving and attachment systems to create male-female pair bonds (and also the bonds between father and child).

“Take one ancient attachment system, mix with an equal measure of caregiving system, throw in a modified mating system and voila, that’s romantic love.”

I have to say, for a chapter that started off by dismissing Freud, this is the most Freudian evopsych theory I have ever heard.

Two Loves, Two Errors

Our culture gives us a myth of “true love”: “True love is passionate love that never fades; if you are in true love, you should marry that person; if love ends, you should leave that person because it was not true love; and if you can find the right person, you will have true love forever.”

This myth is wrong and dangerous, since passionate love cannot last forever.

Actually, passionate love is just the first stage of a relationship; it is followed by another kind called companionate love.

Passionate is the “new relationship energy” kind of love.

Companionate love is a slow-growing sense of affection that develops over time.

“If the metaphor for passionate love is fire, the metaphor for companionate love is vines growing, intertwining, and gradually binding two people together.”

People make two mistakes because they think passionate love is “true love”.

The first is getting married while in the throes of passionate love; this often leads to divorce once the passion wears off.

The second is breaking up after the passionate love ends, since people think if the passion dies it can’t have been “true love”.  Sometimes this is a good decision (if you were previously blind to major flaws or incompatibilities) but sometimes it’s a mistake, because if the people had stayed together they would have developed strong companionate love.

Haidt believes that “true love” does exist, but it’s this strong lifetime-long companionate love, rather than passion.

Why Do Philosophers Hate Love?

Poetry celebrates love, and psychology explains love, but philosophy usually disdains love.  “Love of God, love of neighbor, love of truth, love of beauty -- all these are urged upon us.  But the passionate, erotic love of a real person?  Heavens, no!”

Buddhists object to love because it’s an attachment and they reject attachments.

Confucius objects to love because it threatens “the higher virtues of filial piety and loyalty to one’s superiors”.

Plato objects to love between a man and a woman because of its animal origins.  To Plato, love between a man and boy is better, because the man can teach the boy philosophy in the process.  But the best thing is to give up the love of any individual person and learn to love beauty in general.

The Stoics object to love because “it places the source of one’s happiness in the hands of another person, whom one cannot fully control”.

The Epicureans objected to romantic love because it was a desire that couldn’t be satisfied.

Christianity told us to “love your neighbor as yourself”, but this clearly doesn’t mean romantic love; it means something more like kindness.  Christians promoted caritas (charity) and agape, which are both general forms of love directed at all humanity instead of one person in particular.

Haidt, however, thinks that people need the particular sort of love; we need attachments to individual people and we need them to be attached to us in return.

So why do the philosophers hate love?

Passionate love is a kind of insanity that causes people to make bad decisions.

Love is a threat to the structure and order of society.

A psychologist named Jamie Goldenberg says that fear of death makes people averse to sex, which makes people want to distance love from sex.

We live in a world that is very different from that of the ancient philosophers, so we should be cautious when trusting them about love.

Freedom Can Be Hazardous to Your Health

Sociologist Emile Durkheim gathered data from around Europe to study the factors that affected risk of suicide.

He found that the more enmeshed people were in communities and social structures (either family or religious), the less likely they were to kill themselves.

“Durkheim concluded that people need obligations and constraints to provide structure and meaning to their lives.”

This is true for both extroverts and introverts.

And it’s not just about receiving support from others; helping others might be even more important than receiving help yourself.

“An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities, and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment.”

So Haidt disagrees with the philosophers who reject love.  He agrees with the philosophers who say we need other people (but note that those philosophers aren’t clearly talking about romantic love).  Anyway, here’s his concluding paragraph:

Seneca was right: “No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility.”  John Donne was right: No man, woman, or child is an island.  Aristophanes was right: We need others to complete us.  We are an ultrasocial species, full of emotions finely tuned for loving, befriending, helping, sharing, and otherwise intertwining our lives with others.  Attachments and relationships can bring us pain: As a character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit said, “Hell is other people.”  But so is heaven.

[wirehead-wannabe]

Weird how “I prefer to date intelligent women” and “I prefer to date women with a high IQ” have totally different levels of social desirability.

[mitigatedchaos]

The former conceals the fact that the latter may not apply to the woman reading it. That’s why one is Feminism but the other is Low-Status Male.

[house-carpenter]

No, that’s not how I see it at all. IQ isn’t the same thing as intelligence! It’s just a measure of it, not the thing itself; and presumably it’s intelligence that you actually value, not the measure of it. Like, even if you believe that IQ tests are flawless instruments that always measure intelligence accurately, and measure exactly the same intelligence-concept that you’re valuing—you can entertain the possibility that you’re mistaken about this, and that actually it would be possible for two people to get scores on IQ tests in the reverse order from their actual intelligences. In such a counterfactual scenario, it’d surely be the actually more intelligent person you’d prefer, not the one who got the higher score. So, unless your preferences are really weird, “I prefer to date intelligent women” is the accurate statement, and “I prefer to date women with a high IQ” is just wrong. Of course this’d just be a nitpick if everybody agreed that IQ tests were basically unproblematic measures of intelligence, but… they don’t, so the casual conflation of IQ and intelligence is naturally going to annoy people who don’t agree that the two things are more or less the same.

And even somebody who’s happy to regard IQ as just a synonym of “intelligence” might observe that it’s a rather technical way of saying “intelligence”; why not just use the everyday English word? Using needlessly technical vocabulary generally comes across as obnoxious.

[the-utmost-bound]

I would add to this by saying that “intelligence” and “IQ” suggest two totally different ways of interacting with a person, in order to determine their intelligence.

Like, when I hear “I prefer to date intelligent women,” I imagine the speaker going on a date with a woman, having a conversation with her, and trying to get to know her as a human being.  Based on those interactions, the speaker can conclude whether or not she’s intelligent and/or desirable as a romantic partner.

On the other hand, when someone says “I prefer to date women with a high IQ,” I imagine them poring over test scores, and prioritizing these on-paper metrics over anything the woman actually says or does.  This is a dehumanizing way to approach a relationship, and I think people are picking up on this when they hear the word “IQ”.

And yeah, as other people have said, “intelligent” (as pertains to relationship desirability) is not necessarily about IQ.  In our culture, when someone says they prefer to date intelligent women, I think what they usually mean is “a woman who can carry on an interesting conversation” or “a woman with intellectual interests (such as reading rather than celebrity gossip)” [1].  Ability to solve Raven’s matrices doesn’t necessarily have that much to do with it, so selecting for IQ either demonstrates a lack of dating skills or an unusual set of preferences.

I mean, there’s also just the cultural associations we have with people who use the word “IQ” (which I assume is what @wirehead-wannabe was getting at).

[1] As an aside, it’s easy to imagine other meanings for “intelligent” in this context.  In some other culture, “I prefer to date intelligent women” might mean “I prefer to date women who make intelligent life decisions” or “I prefer to date women who have obtained a specific academic degree”, and everyone would know that was what you meant when you uttered that sentence.  I’m just adding this because (a) it’s fun to think of alternative meanings for things, and (b) it’s a good reminder that words and phrases often have a lot of culturally-specific baggage, and phrases often have specific, culturally-agreed-on meanings that aren’t obvious just from looking at the individual words.

[the-utmost-bound]

I also think that… Jonathan Haidt misses the main point of decreasing our attachments, which is that… a lot of unhappiness comes from our inability to control the world.  Like, I have a very strong desire to control things, and when I can’t, then I get very frustrated, and spend a lot of time ruminating over the thing I can’t control.

But when I’m able to relinquish control, and recognize that ultimately, the future is out of my hands, then I am much more able to relax.  I can still try to influence events, but I also recognize that I can’t force them to turn out a certain way.

You can’t force a job to accept your application.  You can’t force your children to think or act a certain way.  You can’t force a tornado not to come near your house.  And ultimately, you will be happier if you realize this, and accept the possibility of a negative outcome (even while working carefully on your application, trying to teach your children well, and building a tornado shelter if you live in an area that’s at risk).

So anyway, I think the philosophy that says “decrease attachments” is largely saying “relinquish your need for control”.  It’s saying “the world will always be inherently uncontrollable; the only thing you can control is yourself; so work on that instead”.

And I think that kind of internal work really is important for improving happiness.  It’s not about cultivating indifference; it’s about cultivating acceptance.  Haidt talks about “decreasing attachment” as decreasing your engagement with the world.  And maybe it is; maybe that’s what Buddhism and Stoicism are telling people to do.  But I think there’s a way to decrease attachment that lets you cultivate acceptance instead, and this leads to increased engagement with the world, since the more you are able to accept the world, the more you’ll be willing to engage with it in its entirety.

Which I don’t think conflicts with what Haidt was saying, per se.  But Haidt didn’t mention acceptance in this chapter at all, and I personally think that was an oversight.

[wirehead-wannabe]

“But when I’m able to relinquish control, and recognize that ultimately, the future is out of my hands, then I am much more able to relax.”

I don’t really Get this. Maybe this is why I have so many frustrations with CBT?

“And I think that kind of internal work really is important for improving happiness. It’s not about cultivating indifference; it’s about cultivating acceptance.”

Not with that attitude you can’t

[jadagul]

The “acceptance” or “relinquishing control” part is the part where you say “I can’t do anything about this, so I shoudn’t worry about it”, and then you don’t worry about it.

This may be difficult, but it seems pretty clear to me why it would seem desirable.

[wirehead-wannabe]

In which the “#hedonic witchcraft” tag continues to be highly descriptive.

[maybe-a-lizard]

I think I get this hedonic witchcraft method, and it would help me to remember it more often.

Basically, whenever something goes wrong, a large part of my unhappiness comes from the automatic thought stream of “ugh why didn’t I plan this out better, why didn’t I do X instead of Y so that this wouldn’t have happened, why do I suck at everything”.  So reminding myself that it’s actually impossible to plan for everything and just that something went wrong doesn’t mean it’s my fault seems like it would help.

Of course, sometimes things do go wrong entirely because I fucked up and not because the world is uncontrollable, so this isn’t going to help with those cases. XD;;

[the-utmost-bound]

Heh, I have a very similar thought process whenever something goes wrong (or even just a little bit suboptimally).

If you think about it, though, it’s a remarkably hubristic attitude.  If you blame yourself for everything that goes wrong, you are basically claiming “I have so much power and control over the world that everything bad is my fault.”