Category Archives: Religion / Spirituality

We are living in a dessert age. We want things to be sweet; too many of us work to live and live to be happy. Nothing wrong with that; it just does not promote high productivity [at a national level]. You want high productivity? Then you should live to work and get happiness as a by-product.

Not easy. The people who live to work are a small and fortunate elite. But it is an elite open to newcomers, self-selected, the kind of people who accentuate the positive. In this world, the optimists have it, not because they are always right but because they are positive. Even when wrong, they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement, and success. Educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right.

-David Landes, “Culture Makes Almost All the Difference” in Culture Matters

“Then, I said, he also lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing; now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied with philosophy. Often he engages in politics and, jumping up, says and does whatever chances to come to him; and if he ever admires any soldiers, he turns in that direction; and if it’s money-makers, in that one. And there is neither order nor necessity in his life, but calling this life sweet, free, and blessed he follows it throughout.”

-Socrates’ description of democratic man in book 8 of the Republic

From Francis Fukuyama’s After the Neocons (review forthcoming)

A super interesting piece (free) in the New York Review of Books on Daniel Dennett’s new book on religion. Worth a careful read if you’re interested in this stuff. Excerpts:

He observes that belief, which means accepting certain doctrines as true, is different from belief in belief, which means believing belief in the same doctrines to be desirable. He finds evidence that large numbers of people who identify themselves as religious believers do not in fact believe the doctrines of their religions but only believe in belief as a desirable goal. The phenomenon of "belief in belief" makes religion attractive to many people who would otherwise be hard to convert. To belong to a religion, you do not have to believe. You only have to want to believe, or perhaps you only have to pretend to believe. Belief is difficult, but belief in belief is easy. Belief in belief is one of the important phenomena that give a religion increased transmissibility and consequently increased fitness. Dennett puts forward this connection between belief in belief and fitness as a hypothesis to be tested, not as a scientifically established fact. He regrets that little of the relevant research has yet been done. The title Breaking the Spell expresses his hope that when the scientific analysis of religion has been completed, the power of religion to overawe human reason will be broken….

I see no way to draw up a balance sheet, to weigh the good done by religion against the evil and decide which is greater by some impartial process. My own prejudice, looking at religion from the inside, leads me to conclude that the good vastly outweighs the evil. In many places in the United States, with widening gaps between rich and poor, churches and synagogues are almost the only institutions that bind people together into communities. In church or in synagogue, people from different walks of life work together in youth groups or adult education groups, making music or teaching children, collecting money for charitable causes, and taking care of each other when sickness or disaster strikes. Without religion, the life of the country would be greatly impoverished. I know nothing at first hand about Islam, but by all accounts the mosques in Islamic countries, and to some extent in America too, play a similar role in holding communities together and taking care of widows and orphans.

Dennett, looking at religion from the outside, comes to the opposite conclusion. He sees the extreme religious sects that are breeding grounds for gangs of young terrorists and murderers, with the mass of ordinary believers giving them moral support by failing to turn them in to the police. He sees religion as an attractive nuisance in the legal sense, meaning a structure that attracts children and young people and exposes them to dangerous ideas and criminal temptations, like an unfenced swimming pool or an unlocked gun room. My view of religion and Dennett’s are equally true and equally prejudiced. I see religion as a precious and ancient part of our human heritage. Dennett sees it as a load of superfluous mental baggage which we should be glad to discard.

During the James Frey brouhaha the one thing I focused on was how in the world Oprah Winfrey single handedly made that book (and many others) best sellers. Her impact on the book world and on our culture in general is amazing. Lee Siegel has a really good and provocative cover piece in The New Republic (free registration required) on Oprah’s message. "Thank You For Sharing" underpins the Oprah message. Understanding how big time influentials think is important simply because millions of people emulate them. Go read it.

Winfreyism is the expression of an immensely reassuring and inspiring message that has, without doubt, helped millions of people carry on with their lives. And it is also an empty, cynical, icily selfish outlook on life that undercuts its own positive energy at every turn.

A super interesting conversation (print length) a few years ago on Slate between Steven Pinker and Martin Seligman. Pinker is one of the most provocative thinkers around (his book Blank Slate is must-read). Seligman is also a distinguished pyschologist and author of Authentic Happiness. They discuss happiness, genetics, human nature, pyschology, and other yummy topics.

Seligman distinguishes between three very different kinds of happy lives: the Pleasant Life, the Good Life, and the Meaningful Life.

The Pleasant Life is a life of smiles, ebullience, and good cheer. It consists in getting as many of the felt pleasures as possible and using three sets of skills to amplify them: savoring, mindfulness, and variation. Such "positive affectivity" is highly constrained genetically. It is roughly 50 percent heritable, with identical twins much more similar for it than fraternal twins. Like any heritable characteristic (e.g., body weight), the best we can achieve by dint of will and of tuition is to live in the best part of our set range of smiley good cheer. Negative emotionality is also about 50 percent heritable, however, so the 50 percent left over is not what differentiates the plasticity of happiness from rigidity of dysphoria. Rather, Debbie Reynolds notwithstanding, happiness is not just about the Pleasant Life. In fact, Aristotle and Thomas Jefferson would have trouble recognizing American hedonism as the pursuit of happiness.

Half of humankind, genetically in the lower half of positive affectivity, is not smiley and cheerful. They do not look or act like Goldie Hawn, and pleasure-centered ideas of happiness consign these 3 billion people to the hell of unhappiness. But many of these people are enormously capable of the Good Life, what Aristotle called Eudaimonia. The Good Life is a life filled with absorption, immersion, and flow. When we engage in inspiring conversation or listen to great music, for example, time stops for us. We are one with the music. In such a state there is no consciousness, no thought, and no feeling. Afterward we may say, "That was fun," but what we mean is not that there were felt ecstasies, but that we were swept away.

Having the Good Life consists in my view of two steps. The first is simple, the second is difficult. First you need to know what your signature strengths are. Do you "own" social intelligence, or kindness, or fairness, or spirituality, or love of beauty, or integrity? …Next, and this is the hard part, you need to recraft your work, your love, your friendships, your leisure, and your parenting to use these signature strengths more frequently than you do now. This produces more flow in the activities of daily life. Importantly, while there are shortcuts to the pleasures (e.g., drugs, masturbation, TV shopping), there are no shortcuts to the Good Life. It can be had only through the knowledge and deployment of your signature strengths.

No one has yet discovered genetic constraints on the Good Life. Everyone has signature strengths and everyone is capable of recrafting their lives to use them more. There may turn out to be some heritability of intensity of flow and immersion, but no one has yet found it. So, happiness in the sense of the Good Life likely does not have much in the way of the genetic chains to drag it down, as does the Pleasant Life.

The third happy life, the Meaningful Life, is likely without any genetic constraints at all. The Meaningful Life consists in knowing what your signature strengths are and using them in the service of something much larger than you are. It is hard to imagine how "unfortunate" and double-edged genes could compromise that.

I buy this. I’m part of that 50% who does not have The Pleasant Life, but I certainly have the Good  and Meaningful Life (or at least I’m trying!). Next Pinker recalls a class when he asked his students how much they’d give up to gain a little more happiness. Some IQ? A unique talent? A sibling? Pinker says all these examples hsow that happiness is not our only goal in life.

[This] highlights the most awful aspect of the hedonistic American take on happiness. This take says that happiness is entirely about how we feel, not at all about good commerce with the world. Our colleague and new Nobel laureate, Danny Kahneman, holds a sophisticated version of this take. Danny holds that an event (like a trip to Tuscany or a whole life) is some direct function of the number of pleasureful moments minus the painful moments. I think this is profoundly wrong.

Go read the whole thing.