Rational Philosophy

Who do you trust, Jimmy Carter or Condoleezza Rice?

And which of them is happier?

Condoleezza Rice complains that Jimmy Carter has confused the middle east peace process by meeting with Hamas and Syria. Carter claims that without talking to Hamas there won’t be a peace process, and that Syria is willing to move toward the west if given sufficient incentive.

Say what you will about Jimmy Carter but he is a man of integrity and courage. I have no doubt that he has confused the Bush administration’s concept of the peace process. The key question seems to be whether he has done more harm than good. To answer this question we need to understand whether the Bush concept of the peace process ever was or is going anywhere.

I find myself asking the question: Why does Bush want peace?

And I find myself coming immediately to the answer: Because it would be an accomplishment that would make him feel good about himself.

Bush’s presidency has always been about impressing people. He’s wanted to impress Cheney and Cheney’s powerful friends in the business world. He’s wanted to impress his dad by ousting Saddam Hussein. He’s wanted to impress historians by establishing some sort of legacy. What could be better than some success in the middle east peace process?

And then to Carter. Carter, it seems to me, had no ulterior motive for remaining involved in world affairs. Just as his desire to lead the country hinged and slumped on his desire wrest a better world out of what we had, so, too, his desire to work tirelessly for the cause of good has been, so it seems, prompted by the will to do good.
I realize that opinion isn’t philosophy. But the point I’m making is that to reach conclusions on questions of better or worse one does need to explore motive.

In a process as delicate, painstaking, complex and treacherous as middle east peace it is reasonable to predict that any effort founded on the ego of the presumptive peacemaker will fail. Whereas, an effort founded on an ego-less attempt to do good, while it may also fail, at least has a chance of making progress.

What does any of this have to do with happiness?

Just look at the picture of Condoleezza Rice. Doesn’t she look miserable?

Now what about Jimmy Carter?

Daniel Gilbert has been researching happiness. When asked what makes people happy, he says this: “We know that the best predictor of human happiness is human relationships and the amount of time that people spend with family and friends.”

Carter is right to meet with Hamas. He is right to meet with Assad. Talking to someone doesn’t mean you agree with them. It means that you are willing to hear what they have to say, and that you want to convey something to them. By shunning them you give them no choice but to maintain their position of antagonism.

Rice may be happier if she had more people to talk to.

Does wealth tend to make us happy, and if so, why?

Last year I explored some philosophical theories of happiness and concluded that happiness may be what we feel when we sate our desires. More recently it occurred to me that we find some things intrinsically satisfying (sex, exercise, conviviality) and that we can also find accidental or consequential satisfaction (in games, reading, work). For thirty years or so the prevailing wisdom of economic theorists has been that money doesn’t make people happy — the Easterlin paradox says that once people meet their basic needs, increasing wealth doesn’t bring greater happiness. But new research questions Easterlin’s work and presents evidence that people with more money do tend to report higher levels of happiness.

Before getting to the central question at hand (what makes people happy) it’s worth pausing to note firstly that Easterlin’s conclusion is internally inconsistent, and secondly that we should regard statistics with great skepticism (about the most charitable thing one can say of statistics is that large numbers make interesting patterns).

Here’s the internal inconsistency: Let’s say that Easterlin correctly detected a relationship between satisfaction and wealth up to the point at which people’s basic needs are met. This result would tell us that wealth does affect happiness if only as a means to satisfy our basic needs. But basic needs have a way of changing. Health care, for instance, becomes more expensive as more expensive remedies, therapies and cures become available. Just today, for instance, we read about a fabulous new hearing aid that costs a few thousand dollars per year and isn’t covered by health care. It’s making people happier. Applying Easterlin’s theory then, as people’s expectations and perceptions of basic needs shifted they would need more money to pay for them, but Easterlin’s results indicate that this doesn’t happen.

Back to the question at hand: What makes people happy and how does wealth factor into that, if at all?

It still seems sensible to say that anything that intrinsically satisfies a need of the human organism will tend to make us happy (sex, food, exercise). Wealth can purchase or indirectly leverage access to some of these intrinsic satisfactions.

It also still seems sensible to say that we can derive incidental satisfaction from other activities (games, sport, creative outlets, work). Wealth can provide more time for or greater access to these things too.

But, and this is a big but, does this tell us anything about the priority we should give to the pursuit of wealth?

If we focus on making money at the expense of some of our intrinsic or incidental opportunities for satisfaction, we may well end up less happy. And if we have an unhealthy relationship with money, or if having money leads to negative consequences (if we don’t feel productive because we don’t work, for instance) then wealth may make us less happy.

This is the true paradox: Money can make us happier, but it comes at a price. Whether greater wealth will make us happier on balance varies enormously depending on the individual and his or her circumstances.

On having fun.

Life can be oppressive at times. Several news stories today depressed me — in Baghdad, for instance, bombings killed dozens after terrorists strapped explosives to mentally disabled women, sent the women into crowds, and detonated the explosives remotely. On the personal front I’m having a low day trying to negotiate family tensions. But while it would be unnatural to be happy and have fun all the time, sometimes we could be having more fun than we are.

Giants’ Coach Tom Coughlin, not generally known for his levity, has surprised his team and observers this week by talking of ‘fun’ and ‘enjoyment.‘ That’s surprising for a man who’s team is headed into the Superbowl against such a formiddable opponent as the Patriots who haven’t lost a game all season. Somehow Coughlin has found a way to stay relaxed and have some fun.

Another story describes the rambling handmade home in Arizona built over the course of two decades by artist Michael Kahn and his wife, Leda Livant. Answering a question about whether she and her husband had planned their work on their home ahead of time, Livant replies: “Michael had no definite plan except to work and see what the natural shape would be. If you stay with a preconceived notion of what you want, it could be too restrictive.”

In this, perhaps, is a clue to having fun. We do many things for fun, and we do many things that could be fun but aren’t. The things we do for fun typically fall into two categories:

1. Things that provide intrinsic pleasure from the release of chemicals that make us feel good (sex, exercise, watching humorous performances, consuming recreational drugs, for instance)

2. Things that engage us in opportunities for being satisfyingly surprised (games, reading, and, for some, work)

To have the first kind of fun requires that we find ways to engage in these and similar activities. To have the second kind requires us either to engage in activities that we find intrinsically satisfying, or to engage in other activities with the right mindset.

This brings us back to Leda Livant’s idea of avoiding preconceived notions. If we expect to find a task monotonous, stressful or unpleasant without looking for ways to approach it differently, we will naturally not have fun. But if we set aside our expectation that a task won’t be fun, we give ourselves the opportunity to make it fun.

These opportunities come up all the time. For many of us, most of what we do in a day can seem monotonous, stressful or unpleasant. Sometimes even the things we enjoy can seem daunting. But if we can catch ourselves in that moment of being daunted, we have the opportunity to find some pleasure in the task at hand.

To give a very pertinent example: Before I began this blog entry I was sitting with about fifteen news stories open on my computer screen, feeling less and less inspired to write anything. Livant’s concept of “preconceived notions” didn’t seem enough and I wasn’t even sure I had anything to say about it. But I knew and told myself that I would enjoy the process once I began, and that beginning was a matter of committing to finding something. It worked.

I’m not happy today. I don’t know why. But perhaps this is a good place to begin in thinking about the philosophy of happiness. I was going to write about the philosophy of depression, but that seemed too, well, depressing.

Arthur Schopenhauer (by all accounts, generally not a happy man) had this to say on the subject: “Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.” Goethe expresses a similar idea, but more gently: “Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.”

Happiness of course is a mental construct or concept that we use to describe a set of complex feelings, and this concept forms part of a spectrum that spans all degrees of happiness and unhappiness. As Carl Yung put it: “The word “happiness” would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

John Belushi said more or less the same thing as Jung — “I guess happiness is not a state you want to be in all the time” — but he pushes back toward the pertinent question of happiness as something that may have a purpose.

The study of happiness has received a lot of attention recently. But, as with most matters of psychological interest, those doing the questioning tend to be psychologists. One such study from a few years ago brings focus to the eternally false expectation that things will make us happy; returning to Goethe, we like to chase the ball of happiness, but when we catch up to it, we kick it off again. 

(I had a striking example of this in my personal life just last week. When we were expecting our first child three years ago, my wife and I discovered that we both carry a gene mutation for cystic fibrosis. When we became pregnant again over the summer, we therefore knew that there was a one in four chance that the baby would have cystic fibrosis. The worry about this consumed us. Yet last week when the tests showed that the baby would be fine, the all-pervasive happiness of the relief was quite short-lived. Here I am again, already depressed about something else.)

The problem with the study of happiness from a psychological perspective is that it tends to reveal more about the symptoms of happiness than it does about the purpose of happiness. To understand that purpose, we need to consider the concept from first principles.

Back to Schopenhauer. His definition of happiness as freedom from pain is compelling, because it is neat. “[Pain] is the positive element of life,” he says. A thought we can happily unpack to mean that pain compells us to do things that help us survive.

This is certainly part of the puzzle. We evolved pain receptors to help us refrain from doing things that would damage the living organism. And psychological (emotional) pain is simply an extension of the same phenomenon. To the extent that we can anticipate painful situations we tend to try to avoid them.

But it is surely not the whole answer. What Schopenhauer sought to exises from our analysis by referring all of happiness back to pain, was the potential for a positive purpose for happiness.

Camus evoked the concept of harmony to describe happiness: “But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?”

As life evolved, the more successful organisms would have been those that were able to effectively balance the functions within the living organism itself and between the organism and the outside world. Every evolutionary step or change succeeds or fails according to whether it brings about a more advantageous balance for the organism. This tendency toward balance reveals itself in all kinds of ways — the physical form of the organism (the giraffe’s long neck balanced with the height from the ground of its food), and the internal functioning of the organism (the short life span of the fruit fly, for instance, which allows it to mutate and adapt rapidly).

In human beings, the mental function takes this process of tending toward balance to a new place. Our mental functions, our processing of impulses and conscious decision making, tends to improve our ability to survive if it helps us to achieve balance. Happiness, however fleeting, is the evolutionary reward for achieving harmony and balance — a good meal, a pleasant experience, making love — all of these things produce the chemical reponse that we call happiness so that we will tend to want to do them again. Happiness is evolution’s form of positive feedback.

Why then have so many great minds decided that happiness is merely pain waiting to happen? Bertrand Russell perhaps can shed some light on this: “I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.”

 

 

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