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Debating Human Happiness

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from: Steven Pinker
to: Martin Seligman and Robert Wright

Limits to Pessimism

Posted Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2002, at 3:07 PM ET

Who are these people?

Yes, in The Blank Slate I argue that Homo sapiens has much to be modest about. We are prone, to varying degrees and in various circumstances, to ethnocentrism, violence, adultery, ambition, superstition, and self-deception, among other vices. As one reviewer put it, we are not stardust, we are not golden, there is no way we're getting back to the garden—get used to it.

So, does this mean we should all take poison now and be done with it? Not yet. In many ways The Blank Slate is an optimistic book. Limits to pessimism can be found at three levels.

The first consists of philosophical reflections on our condition. Should we rue the fact that we belong to such a sorry species—like Woody Allen when he said, "My one regret in life is that I am not someone else"? In fact our flaws are double-edged, and we might not accept the offer of a demon to trade them in for something else.

Take the kin-selected limits on altruism, which tempt us to form dynasties, hire our relatives, spend money on luxuries for our children (orthodontics, summer camp, expensive educations) that we could have used to save the lives of unrelated children in the developing world, and bequeath our estates to our heirs—one of the biggest impediments to economic equality. Unjust, perhaps. But our close relatives have a special place in our hearts because the place for everyone else is, by definition, less special. Would we really be better off if our relationships with our parents, siblings, and children were not uniquely precious?

Or take romantic love, with all its perfidy and heartbreak. Donald Symons has pointed out that if people belonged to a species in which each couple was marooned on an island for life, the absence of romantic rivals would not select for lifelong bliss; it would select for no consciousness at all. There would be no falling in love because there would be no alternative mates to select from, and falling in love would be a huge waste. Nor would there be pleasure in sex, which would be done for reproduction and would provide no more feeling than the release of hormones or the production of gametes. The richness and intensity of the emotions in our minds are evolutionary testimony to the preciousness and fragility of our relationships in life.

The second level is the one of practical social improvement and hopes for moral progress. Here, too, human nature should not be cause for lamentation. The human mind is a complex system of many parts. It may have temptations toward greed or violence, but it has much else besides. It has cognitive faculties that can learn the lessons of history and take a long view of the future. It has faculties of combinatorial reasoning that can come up with new solutions, just as our combinatorial language faculties come up with new sentences. It has a moral sense and a capacity for sympathy which, granted, might be applied by default only to our clan, but which can also be expanded to include the tribe or species. As Bob Wright showed in Nonzero, this expansion can be driven by our capacity to enjoy gains in trade, making other people more valuable alive than dead; it can also be expanded by cosmopolitan forces (history, journalism, realistic fiction) that make it easier to project ourselves into other peoples' lives.

Finally, we get to the level of individual decisions on how we live our lives. We all know that identical twins reared apart are highly similar in their intelligence, personality, and temperament. That is one of many discoveries suggesting that some of the differences among us come from differences in our genes. But here is a sobering fact. Identical twins, even when they are reared together, are nowhere near being perfectly correlated. Up to half of the variation in psychological traits is not explained by genes, families, or any of the other usual suspects. I believe Marty has some interesting things to say about this.

dialogues
entries
123456789
from: Steven Pinker
to: Martin Seligman and Robert Wright

Limits to Pessimism

Posted Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2002, at 3:07 PM ET
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Steven Pinker is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard and author of The Blank Slate, How the Mind Works, and The Language Instinct. Martin Seligman is Fox Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, former president of the American Psychological Association, and the author of Authentic Happiness. Robert Wright, a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, runs the Web site meaningoflife.tv and is the author of The Moral Animal and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.
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Remarks From The Fray, Day 1:

[The Dialogue] seems to be operating on two different levels already. Pinker is a scientist...he is interested in how things work (especially the brain) and does his best to make very few assumptions that are not backed up by empirical observation. To him, the unknown is close at hand...we don't even fully understand how a human brain recognizes its mother. For Seligman, however, it's no big deal to treat "The Pleasant Life" as an empirically validated REAL THING, and go on from there to discuss it …

Pinker's point is that "positive emotions" (I'm not sure what THAT means, either, since "positive" and "negative" don't usually mean "good" and "bad" in science) are as much adaptations as "negative" ones. They show themselves in specific situations. You can manipulate your environment to emulate those specific situations to a degree, given. However, the fact that Seligman still has clients in a "Sisyphean struggle" means that he has not come up with a reliable and communicable method for infinitely increasing happiness levels. I'm sure he would respond to such criticism by stating that a person's degree of happiness depends on how well they understand or agree with his point of view. Anyone who is still depressed "just doesn't get it". I hope everyone recognizes such arguments from discussions about ESP.

I'm sorry...I think I'm taking this from an unfairly scientific perspective. If Seligman's framework seems to be helpful for his clients, then it is as validated as it needs to be for its purpose. However, if we're going to allow for that kind of validation, then Pinker's more constrained discussion of human mental activity seems to be a poor fit for the discussion.

-- Mangar

(To reply, click here.)


I completely agree! What is he talking about? Even parts of his response that momentarily corresponded with external reality were soon obfuscated by a retreat to meaningless catch phrases. For instance he describes the meaningful life, wherein I might use my "signature skills" to accomplish something larger than myself. I agree, that sounds pretty meaningful. But then he goes on to say that he can`t see how "unfortunate and double-edged genes could compromise that?" Well, he might also give some evidence that he tried, or that at least has some idea what Pinker is talking about. First of all, Pinker isn`t saying that genes are double-edged, but that genetically programmed behaviors are. It`s not like genes are marching around the body saying "stop all of this meaningfulness, it`s just gone too far," although I wonder if Seligman might think so.

-- John

(To reply, click here.)


Seligman says something astonishing:

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.

Surely this can't be true. No genetic constraints on one's willingness and ability to implement the program of change that you prescribe? Someone genetically cursed to live a life of major depression is as capable of implementing this program of change as someone who is genetically blessed with high levels of energy and competence? I may be missing something, but this seems implausible to me.

-- Engram

(To reply, click here.)

(10/16)

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