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Debating Human Happiness

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from: Martin Seligman
to: Steve Pinker

Tell Them It Was Wonderful

Posted Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2002, at 3:17 PM ET

Who are these people?

Steve, the chorus of "Pig! Pig! Pig!" to Nozick's challenge 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.

The last words of Ludwig Wittgenstein give the lie to the hedonic account. He was by all accounts miserable. A collector of Wittgensteinobilia, I have never seen a photo of Wittgenstein smiling. (Actually one of my readers just last week sent me a photo of Wittgenstein "smiling." But it looks to me more like he has just sat on a sandwich.) Wittgenstein was melancholy, irascible, and scathingly critical of everyone around him and even more critical of himself. In a typical seminar held in his cold and barely furnished Cambridge rooms, he would pace the floor, muttering audibly, "Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein, what a terrible teacher you are." Yet his last words impeach all forms of happiology. Dying alone in a garret in Ithaca, N.Y., he said to his landlady, "Tell them it's been wonderful!" If we don't take Wittgenstein's judgment of a happy life seriously, whose can we take? Hence Authentic Happiness' delineation of three happy lives: the Pleasant, the Good, and the Meaningful.

I think, Steve, that we should be more careful about distinguishing "heritable" from "evolutionary" from "genetic" from "unchangeable." I believe that the Good Life may be heritable and evolved without being either genetic or unchangeable. (There are, by the way, no data at all on the heritability of flow and few on the heritability of the strengths). Take beauty, for example.

Evolution has certainly worked on beauty. Beauty is passed on from one generation to the next, as is the propensity to be attracted to it. Natural selection sees to it that sexually attractive people have higher reproductive success than ugly people. Beauty in turn is made up of simple traits like eye color, and eye color in turn has even simpler building blocks like a particular chain of DNA. But beauty, like automobiles, comes in many models, and its definition changes within limits over time and culture. There are many ways to be sexually attractive: many combinations of eye color, teeth, and hair will all be attractive, and more important, even more combinations will be ugly and so will be eliminated from the gene pool. If there are myriad kinds of beauty, then there are myriad molecular ways to construct "beauty," all of which get selected for. The upshot of this is that there is unlikely to be a genetics of beauty. There will not be "beauty genes," or there will be so many combinations of genes underlying beauty as to be scientifically unwieldy.

So, too, with the Good Life. There are at least 24 ubiquitous strengths, each of which might well be heritable. The Good Life consists in deploying different combinations of these strengths in work, love, and play. So any genetics of the Good Life will be scientifically unwieldy. Moreover, leading the Good Life is eminently changeable: It consists in identifying those strengths and using them more and more in the realms of life. So importantly, the Good Life may be heritable and evolved but highly malleable and not genetic. This is the main reason why the human genome project is likely to be a flop when it comes to complex traits.

And as for human nature and humane leadership, you and Bob and I still share the dream of a scientific understanding of this great question. Someday, we may hope.

dialogues
entries
123456789
from: Martin Seligman
to: Steve Pinker

Tell Them It Was Wonderful

Posted Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2002, at 3:17 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

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(10/16)

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