Stumbling on Happiness Page 4
This idea is so obvious that it barely seems worth mentioning, but I’m going to mention it anyway. Indeed, I am going to spend the rest of this book mentioning it because it will probably take more than a few mentions to convince you that what looks like an obvious idea is, in fact, the surprisingly wrong answer to our question. We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain—not because the boat won’t respond, and not because we can’t find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope. Just as we experience illusions of eyesight (“Isn’t it strange how one line looks longer than the other even though it isn’t?”) and illusions of hindsight (“Isn’t it strange how I can’t remember taking out the garbage even though I did?”), so too do we experience illusions of foresight—and all three types of illusion are explained by the same basic principles of human psychology.
Onward
To be perfectly honest, I won’t just be mentioning the surprisingly wrong answer; I’ll be pounding and pummeling it until it gives up and goes home. The surprisingly wrong answer is apparently so sensible and so widely believed that only a protracted thrashing has any hope of expunging it from our conventional wisdom. So before the grudge match begins, let me share with you my plan of attack.
• In Part II, “Subjectivity,” I will tell you about the science of happiness. We all steer ourselves toward the futures that we think will make us happy, but what does that word really mean? And how can we ever hope to achieve solid, scientific answers to questions about something as gossamer as a feeling?
• We use our eyes to look into space and our imaginations to look into time. Just as our eyes sometimes lead us to see things as they are not, our imaginations sometimes lead us to foresee things as they will not be. Imagination suffers from three shortcomings that give rise to the illusions of foresight with which this book is chiefly concerned. In Part III, “Realism,” I will tell you about the first shortcoming: Imagination works so quickly, quietly, and effectively that we are insufficiently skeptical of its products.
• In Part IV, “Presentism,” I will tell you about the second shortcoming: Imagination’s products are . . . well, not particularly imaginative, which is why the imagined future often looks so much like the actual present.
• In Part V, “Rationalization,” I will tell you about the third shortcoming: Imagination has a hard time telling us how we will think about the future when we get there. If we have trouble foreseeing future events, then we have even more trouble foreseeing how we will see them when they happen.
• Finally, in Part VI, “Corrigibility,” I will tell you why illusions of foresight are not easily remedied by personal experience or by the wisdom we inherit from our grandmothers. I will conclude by telling you about a simple remedy for these illusions that you will almost certainly not accept.
By the time you finish these chapters, I hope you will understand why most of us spend so much of our lives turning rudders and hoisting sails, only to find that Shangri-la isn’t what and where we thought it would be.
PART II
Subjectivity
subjectivity (sub•dzėk•ti•vĭtee)
The fact that experience is unobservable to
everyone but the person having it.
CHAPTER 2
The View from in Here
But, O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness
through another man’s eyes!
Shakespeare, As You Like It
LORI AND REBA SCHAPPEL may be twins, but they are very different people. Reba is a somewhat shy teetotaler who has recorded an award-winning album of country music. Lori, who is outgoing, wisecracking, and rather fond of strawberry daiquiris, works in a hospital and wants someday to marry and have children. They occasionally argue, as sisters do, but most of the time they get on well, complimenting each other, teasing each other, and finishing each other’s sentences. In fact, there are just two unusual things about Lori and Reba. The first is that they share a blood supply, part of a skull, and some brain tissue, having been joined at the forehead since birth. One side of Lori’s forehead is attached to one side of Reba’s, and they have spent every moment of their lives locked together, face-to-face. The second unusual thing about Lori and Reba is that they are happy—not merely resigned or contented, but joyful, playful, and optimistic.1 Their unusual life presents many challenges, of course, but as they often note, whose doesn’t? When asked about the possibility of undergoing surgical separation, Reba speaks for both of them: “Our point of view is no, straight out no. Why would you want to do that? For all the money in China, why? You’d be ruining two lives in the process.”2
So here’s the question: If this were your life rather than theirs, how would you feel? If you said, “Joyful, playful, and optimistic,” then you are not playing the game and I am going to give you another chance. Try to be honest instead of correct. The honest answer is “Despondent, desperate, and depressed.” Indeed, it seems clear that no right-minded person could really be happy under such circumstances, which is why the conventional medical wisdom has it that conjoined twins should be separated at birth, even at the risk of killing one or both. As a prominent medical historian wrote: “Many singletons, especially surgeons, find it inconceivable that life is worth living as a conjoined twin, inconceivable that one would not be willing to risk all—mobility, reproductive ability, the life of one or both twins—to try for separation.”3 In other words, not only does everyone know that conjoined twins will be dramatically less happy than normal people, but everyone also knows that conjoined lives are so utterly worthless that dangerous separation surgeries are an ethical imperative. And yet, standing against the backdrop of our certainty about these matters are the twins themselves. When we ask Lori and Reba how they feel about their situation, they tell us that they wouldn’t have it any other way. In an exhaustive search of the medical literature, the same medical historian found the “desire to remain together to be so widespread among communicating conjoined twins as to be practically universal.”4 Something is terribly wrong here. But what?
There seem to be just two possibilities. Someone—either Lori and Reba, or everyone else in the world—is making a dreadful mistake when they talk about happiness. Because we are the everyone else in question, it is only natural that we should be attracted to the former conclusion, dismissing the twins’ claim to happiness with offhand rejoinders such as “Oh, they’re just saying that” or “They may think they’re happy, but they’re not” or the ever popular “They don’t know what happiness really is” (usually spoken as if we do). Fair enough. But like the claims they dismiss, these rejoinders are also claims—scientific claims and philosophical claims—that presume answers to questions that have vexed scientists and philosophers for millennia. What are we all talking about when we make such claims about happiness?
Dancing About Architecture
There are thousands of books on happiness, and most of them start by asking what happiness really is. As readers quickly learn, this is approximately equivalent to beginning a pilgrimage by marching directly into the first available tar pit, because happiness really is nothing more or less than a word that we word makers can use to indicate anything we please. The problem is that people seem pleased to use this one word to indicate a host of different things, which has created a tremendous terminological mess on which several fine scholarly careers have been based. If one slops around in this mess long enough, one comes to see that most disagreements about what happiness really is are semantic disagreements about whether the word ought to be used to indicate this or that, rather than scientific or philosophical disagreements about the nature of this and that. What are the this and the that that happiness most often refers to? The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness.
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Feeling Happy
Emotional happiness is the most basic of the trio—so basic, in fact, that we become tongue-tied when we try to define it, as though some bratty child had just challenged us to say what the word the means and in the process made a truly compelling case for corporal punishment. Emotional happiness is a phrase for a feeling, an experience, a subjective state, and thus it has no objective referent in the physical world. If we ambled down to the corner pub and met an alien from another planet who asked us to define that feeling, we would either point to the objects in the world that tend to bring it about, or we would mention other feelings that it is like. In fact, this is the only thing we can do when we are asked to define a subjective experience.
Consider, for instance, how we might define a very simple subjective experience, such as yellow. You may think yellow is a color, but it isn’t. It’s a psychological state. It is what human beings with working visual apparatus experience when their eyes are struck by light with a wavelength of 580 nanometers. If our alien friend at the pub asked us to define what we were experiencing when we claimed to be seeing yellow, we would probably start by pointing to a school bus, a lemon, a rubber ducky, and saying, “See all those things? The thing that is common to the visual experiences you have when you look at them is called yellow.” Or we might try to define the experience called yellow in terms of other experiences. “Yellow? Well, it is sort of like the experience of orange, with a little less of the experience of red.” If the alien confided that it could not figure out what the duck, the lemon, and the school bus had in common, and that it had never had the experience of orange or red, then it would be time to order another pint and change the topic to the universal sport of ice hockey, because there is just no other way to define yellow. Philosophers like to say that subjective states are “irreducible,” which is to say that nothing we point to, nothing we can compare them with, and nothing we can say about their neurological underpinnings can fully substitute for the experiences themselves.5 The musician Frank Zappa is reputed to have said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and so it is with talking about yellow. If our new drinking buddy lacks the machinery for color vision, then our experience of yellow is one that it will never share—or never know it shares—no matter how well we point and talk.6
Emotional happiness is like that. It is the feeling common to the feelings we have when we see our new granddaughter smile for the first time, receive word of a promotion, help a wayward tourist find the art museum, taste Belgian chocolate toward the back of our tongue, inhale the scent of our lover’s shampoo, hear that song we used to like so much in high school but haven’t heard in years, touch our cheek to kitten fur, cure cancer, or get a really good snootful of cocaine. These feelings are different, of course, but they also have something in common. A piece of real estate is not the same as a share of stock, which is not the same as an ounce of gold, but all are forms of wealth that occupy different points on a scale of value. Similarly, the cocaine experience is not the kitten-fur experience, which is not the promotion experience, but all are forms of feeling that occupy different points on a scale of happiness. In each of these instances, an encounter with something in the world generates a roughly similar pattern of neural activity,7 and thus it makes sense that there is something common to our experiences of each—some conceptual coherence that has led human beings to group this hodgepodge of occurrences together in the same linguistic category for as long as anyone can remember. Indeed, when researchers analyze how all the words in a language are related to the others, they inevitably find that the positivity of the words—that is, the extent to which they refer to the experience of happiness or unhappiness—is the single most important determinant of their relationships.8 Despite Tolstoy’s fine efforts, most speakers consider war to be more closely related to vomit than it is to peace.
Happiness, then, is the you-know-what-I-mean feeling. If you are a human being who lives in this century and shares some of my cultural conditioning, then my pointing and comparing will have been effective and you will know exactly which feeling I mean. If you are an alien who is still struggling with yellow, then happiness is going to be a real challenge. But take heart: I would be similarly challenged if you told me that on your planet there is a feeling common to the acts of dividing numbers by three, banging one’s head lightly on a doorknob, and releasing rhythmic bursts of nitrogen from any orifice at any time except on Tuesday. I would have no idea what that feeling is, and I could only learn the name and hope to use it politely in conversation. Because emotional happiness is an experience, it can only be approximately defined by its antecedents and by its relation to other experiences.9 The poet Alexander Pope devoted about a quarter of his Essay on Man to the topic of happiness, and concluded with this question: “Who thus define it, say they more or less / Than this, that happiness is happiness?”10
Emotional happiness may resist our efforts to tame it by description, but when we feel it, we have no doubt about its reality and its importance. Everyone who has observed human behavior for more than thirty continuous seconds seems to have noticed that people are strongly, perhaps even primarily, perhaps even single-mindedly, motivated to feel happy. If there has ever been a group of human beings who prefer despair to delight, frustration to satisfaction, and pain to pleasure, they must be very good at hiding because no one has ever seen them. People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be means to that end. Even when people forgo happiness in the moment—by dieting when they could be eating, or working late when they could be sleeping—they are usually doing so in order to increase its future yield. The dictionary tells us that to prefer is “to choose or want one thing rather than another because it would be more pleasant,” which is to say that the pursuit of happiness is built into the very definition of desire. In this sense, a preference for pain and suffering is not so much a diagnosable psychiatric condition as it is an oxymoron.
Psychologists have traditionally made striving toward happiness the centerpiece of their theories of human behavior because they have found that if they don’t, their theories don’t work so well. As Sigmund Freud wrote:
The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one. . . . We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavor has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and displeasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure.11
Freud was an articulate champion of this idea but not its originator, and the same observation appears in some form or another in the psychological theories of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Mill, Bentham, and others. The philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal was especially clear on this point:
All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.12
Feeling Happy Because
If every thinker in every century has recognized that people seek emotional happiness, then how has so much confusion arisen over the meaning of the word? One of the problems is that many people consider the desire for happiness to be a bit like the desire for a bowel movement: something we all have, but not something of which we should be especially proud. The kind of happiness they have in mind is cheap and base—a vacuous state of “bovine contentment”13 that cannot possibly be the basis of a meaningful human life. As the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, “It
is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”14
The philosopher Robert Nozick tried to illustrate the ubiquity of this belief by describing a fictitious virtual-reality machine that would allow anyone to have any experience they chose, and that would conveniently cause them to forget that they were hooked up to the machine.15 He concluded that no one would willingly choose to get hooked up for the rest of his life because the happiness he would experience with such a machine would not be happiness at all. “Someone whose emotion is based upon egregiously unjustified and false evaluations we will be reluctant to term happy, however he feels.”16 In short, emotional happiness is fine for pigs, but it is a goal unworthy of creatures as sophisticated and capable as we.