Happiness Isn't What It Used To Be

Do you want to be happy? Then focus on making other people happy. That is one finding in the new field of happiness research.

From Ancient times to modern, the dominant Christian worldview has been that happiness is not something we can obtain in this life. It comes in an afterlife, or we are sent to Hell. This life is itself a vale of tears.

We can be happy, we tell ourselves, teeth gritted. We should be happy. We will be happy.

That is a modern article of faith. But it is also a relatively recent idea in the West which dates from the 17th and 18th centuries, a time that ushered in a dramatic shift in what human beings could legitimately hope to expect in and from their lives. People prior to the late 17th century thought happiness was a matter of luck or virtue or divine favor.

Happenstance, something due to chance, exemplifies the English connection of the word to luck.

Today we think of happiness as a right and a skill that can be developed--certainly not due to random chance."This has been liberating, in some respects, because it asks us to strive to improve our lots in life, individually and collectively. But there have been downsides as well. It seems that when we want to be happy all of the time, we can forget that the pursuit of happiness can entail struggle, sacrifice, even pain.

It is a striking fact that in every Indo-European language, without exception, going all the way back to ancient Greek, the word for happiness is a cognate with the word for luck. Hap is the Old Norse and Old English root of happiness, and it just means luck or chance, as did the Old French heur, giving us bonheur, good fortune or happiness. German gives us the word Gluck, which to this day means both happiness and chance.

What does this linguistic pattern suggest? For a good many ancient peoples—and for many others long after that—happiness was not something you could control. It was in the hands of the gods."

Not so today. More

Defender of Belief and Atheist

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins rose to celebrity with the 1976 publication of his brilliant book, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins is an evangelist and publicist for atheism. He also believes that humanity has morally progressed and that the holocaust was merely a temporary set-back. He has stated that human progress is inevitable. (Scientifically speaking, this is a rather un-testable hypothesis.)

Terry Eagleton is a Marxist and highly regarded literary critic who finds in the agony of Christ on the cross a perpetual reminder of humankind's need to rise to its better, more compassionate, loving self. He finds Dawkins' moral progressivism rather shallow. Human history constantly reminds us of our failures to set the world to rights. Dawkins' view is a naive and easy humanism, according to Eagleton. As to Dawkins' evangelism for godlessness, Eagleton also finds that rather empty and easy.

Why We Believe In God

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." Woody Allen

"Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe." Recent research on the minds of infants reveals explanations of why we believe.

"One traditional approach to the origin of religious belief begins with the observation that it is difficult to be a person. There is evil all around; everyone we love will die; and soon we ourselves will die—either slowly and probably unpleasantly or quickly and probably unpleasantly. For all but a pampered and lucky few life really is nasty, brutish, and short. And if our lives have some greater meaning, it is hardly obvious."

". . . sometimes theologians use the foregoing arguments to make a case for why we should believe: if one wishes for purpose, meaning, and eternal life, there is nowhere to go but toward God."

Supernatural beliefs can find explanation in infancy: "Six-month-olds understand that physical objects obey gravity. If you put an object on a table and then remove the table, and the object just stays there (held by a hidden wire), babies are surprised; they expect the object to fall. They expect objects to be solid, and contrary to what is still being taught in some psychology classes, they understand that objects persist over time even if hidden. (Show a baby an object and then put it behind a screen. Wait a little while and then remove the screen. If the object is gone, the baby is surprised.) . . ."

. . . We are dualists; it seems intuitively obvious that a physical body and a conscious entity—a mind or soul—are genuinely distinct. We don't feel that we are our bodies. Rather, we feel that we occupy them, we possess them, we own them. . . .

. . . This belief system opens the possibility that we ourselves can survive the death of our bodies. Most people believe that when the body is destroyed, the soul lives on. . . .

" . . . But while it may be true that "theologically correct" Buddhism explicitly rejects the notions of body-soul duality and immaterial entities with special powers, actual Buddhists believe in such things."

"The major alternative theory [of religion] is social: religion brings people together, giving them an edge over those who lack this social glue. . . . In this conception religion is a fraternity, and the analogy runs deep. . . . This is clear in the Old Testament, in which 'a jealous God' issues commands such as:

'Should your brother, your mother's son, or your son or your daughter or the wife of your bosom or your companion who is like your own self incite you in secret, saying Let us go and worship other gods' . . . you shall surely kill him. '

. . . This theory explains almost everything about religion—except the religious part. It is clear that rituals and sacrifices can bring people together, and it may well be that a group that does such things has an advantage over one that does not. But it is not clear why a religion has to be involved. . . ."

"First, even if a gap between America and Europe exists, it is not the United States that is idiosyncratic. After all, the rest of the world—Asia, Africa, the Middle East—is not exactly filled with hard-core atheists. If one is to talk about exceptionalism, it applies to Europe, not the United States.

Second, the religious divide between Americans and Europeans may be smaller than we think. . . . the big difference has to do with church attendance, which really is much lower in Europe. (. . . they argue that this is because the United States has a rigorously free religious market, in which churches actively vie for parishioners and constantly improve their product, whereas European churches are often under state control and, like many government monopolies, have become inefficient.) Most polls from European countries show that a majority of their people are believers." More

Homeless Mother In Search of A Transmission

As soon as the kids were off at school, I called around to some auto junkyards to see if they had a decent automatic transmission for a 92 Ford Aerostar*. I didn’t have much luck and I called a few garages just to see what would be involved in getting a rebuilt one. To my horror, a rebuilt tranny costs over $1900.00, plus tax, plus almost $100.00 an hour to install it, plus a knot growing in my throat and the feeling of air being squeezed out of my lungs while listening to the mechanics quote prices for money I don’t even have. More. And more here.
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*The VW was the only rust bucket image I could find.

David Brooks on The Brain & The Need For Companionship

The thesis of David Brooks' The Social Animal "can be stated simply: who we are is largely determined by the hidden workings of our unconscious minds. Everything we do in life—the careers we choose; even, on a deeper level, the way we experience and perceive the sensation of being alive—emerges from an infinitely complex neuronal network sending out signals (Brooks calls them 'scouts') that, largely unknown to us, assess and determine our behavior. Insights, information, responses to stimuli are governed by our emotions, a rich repository of thoughts and feelings that courses just beneath the surface of our conscious minds. They are 'mental sensations that happen to us.' . . .

. . . Brooks has written the book in the form of a novel, following an imaginary couple named Harold and Erica from womb to tomb. . . . It doesn’t quite work as fiction, but the plot is just scaffolding designed to elucidate Brooks’s real preoccupation: how Erica and Harold came to be who they are. . . .

In essence, The Social Animal is a book about the human need for connection, friendship, love. . . .

. . . You learn the importance of culture, of history—some of the deep knowledge that comes from Plato and Aristotle. Philosophy and theology are telling us less than they used to. Scientists and researchers are leaping in where these disciplines atrophy—they’re all drilling down into an explanation of what man is'.” More
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My comments: What man is? Hmmm. Explaining that would take more than Brooks and his neuroscientists. What man does? Yes. Why man does it? Sometimes, yes. What he is? No. For starters, they might try explaining what consciousness is, and without the usual dodges--an epiphenomenon of the brain, etc.

The book provides a wide audience an approach to a difficult discipline. I respect Brooks for his capable intelligence. He observes that the findings of modern science indicate 18th Century empiricist David Hume had it right as distinct from Descartes in the Frenchman's rationalist approach to mind. As a popularizer, Brooks makes a weighty subject accessible to the public. In an interview with Charlie Rose he stated he wanted to write a book about neuroscience and human behavior that avoided words such as "amygdala". Expect journalism, not scholarship. I do not mean anything pejorative by that.

Brooks does not insist that we are creatures of our neurons--things determined by matter. He believes in a bounded kind of free will in which we can choose environments that will determine us, be it enlistment in the Marines, or enrollment at University of California, Berkeley. As for changing ourselves, he likes an element of Alcoholics Anonymous' 12-Step Program--"fake it until you make it."

Brooks allows that he thinks in the concrete, not in the abstract, and for that reason he chose fictional characters Harold and Erica as an allegory for what he found in his studies. Contrary to reviewer descriptions, Brooks calls his book an allegory, and distinguishes it from a novel. Although not based on Rousseau's Emile, the book finds an influence there.

The Revolution In Egypt & Neoliberalism

"Neoliberalism describes a market-driven approach to economic and social policy based on neoclassical theories of economics that stresses the efficiency of private enterprise, liberalized trade and relatively open markets, and therefore seeks to maximize the role of the private sector in determining the political and economic priorities of the state." More

The Egyptian public is curiously silent about the wealth amassed by army generals. Instead, the aim is to freeze the billions in public assets stolen by government officials, Hosni Mubarak included. What seems to go unnoticed is the role of neoliberalism in creating the division between haves and have-nots.

The generals, of course, are only too willing to have the blame deflected from them. There is a reason for this. They and their army are depended upon to oversee the engines of change. Scoundrels they may be, but they provide the only means to regime change. The means, in this case, are seen as justifying the end.

But theirs is only one part of the role in a corrupted Egyptian government. Not only that, "calling it corruption suggests that the problem is aberrations from a system that would otherwise function smoothly."

The real culprit, according to some, is neoliberalism. Mubarak and his cronies "were enriched through a conflation of politics and business under the guise of privatization. This was less a violation of the system than business as usual. Mubarak’s Egypt, in a nutshell, was a quintessential neoliberal state."

In his Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey describes "a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade."

If markets don't exist, then the state should create them. Often by privatizing public functions such as "water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution."

In neoliberal doctrine, markets are sanctified. "All human behavior, and not just the production of goods and services, can be reduced to market transactions."

So, against the Marxist utopia of communism, we have the neoliberal utopia of markets.

Seeing Is Not Believing

"From 1992 through 1995, I taught several seminars on reality and consciousness according to quantum theory for humanities undergraduates at the University of Virginia. These seminars attempted to outline in an understandable way to the nonscientist the reasons why consciousness is a necessary part of the most widely accepted interpretations of quantum theory. For these seminars, I wrote concise but complete notes which I handed out to my students, and which summarized the salient points in order to make as clear as possible the scientific basis for the seminar. A revised and refined version of these notes comprises Part 1 of this work. . . .

Because this course makes many statements, the reader might think that it comprises a new belief system, either to be adopted or rejected. However, that is not my intention nor is it the intention of the sages of nonduality who are quoted and discussed. Beliefs are not understanding in themselves--they can actually be obstructions to understanding. Because Reality cannot be described in words, the words are meant to be used as pointers to Reality rather than as descriptors of Reality. Hence, this is a course in seeing, not in believing." More

Memory Doctors & Angel Factories

We like to think that memory is true, that our beliefs and conduct are shaped by that truth, but we can be--and we are--led to lives shaped by false memories, either by outside influences or by ourselves. An article, "The Memory Doctor," and a book review of Children of The Gulag, demonstrate the ability of governments and media, including our own, to reconstruct our views of the past and thus of our own lives and future.