Evolution Didn't Design You To Be Happy

Happiness and Evolution

When people are asked what they really want out of life most respond that they want to be happy.  They
may think more money, a better job, improved status, social recognition will make them happy.  Or they may think of all that as superficial and that they want inner happiness.  Whichever, people regard happiness as a good unto itself.

Is the brain a symphony orchestra without a conductor?

"You want to make hatred illegal? I've sat up here for fifty years and seen nothing but hatred. Everybody they drag in here is full of it, I'm full of it, you're full of it, and now what? You want to make certain varieties illegal? What are we going to do? Get some samples of hate and send them off to the forensic lab? See what kind we're dealing with?" Judge Whittaker J. Stang in Richard Dooling's novel, Brain Storm

" In 1996, to take a break from the grueling work of producing his second novel, A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe hung out with a gaggle of neuroscientists for several weeks. The resulting 7,000-word essay, entitled 'Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,' [see sidebar Mind Shadows] reminded America once again why Wolfe is our greatest journalist. Amidst humor, dish, details, flair, and lots of exclamation points, he told us what he had learned. The Internet might be nice, said he, '[b]ut something tells me that within ten years, by 2006, the entire digital universe is going to seem like pretty mundane stuff compared to a new technology that right now is but a mere glow radiating from a tiny number of American and Cuban (yes, Cuban) hospitals and laboratories.' The technology is called brain imaging. Wolfe predicted that 'anyone who cares to get up early and catch a truly blinding twenty-first-century dawn will want to keep an eye on it.'

What is it, and why should we care? . . .

Wolfe predicted that, 'in the year 2006 or 2026, some new Nietzsche will step forward to announce: "The self is dead"—except that being prone to the poetic, like Nietzsche I, he will probably say: "The soul is dead." ' And when this happens, 'the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase "the total eclipse of all values" seem tame.' " More

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My comments: This concern is legitimate, and is shared by philosophers such as Thomas Metzinger, author of Being No One and The Ego Tunnel, both of which argue that selves are phenomenal--part of conscious experience--rather than real. He has no religious or spiritual axe to grind, but has expressed concern over future impact on society, culture, morality, and ethics as the findings of neuroscience make their way into public attitudes. Nor can we foresee impact on legal systems.

Who Is Ayn Rand?

I occasionally see T-shirts emblazoned with "Who Is John Galt? as if the wearer signals a secret code to other Ayn Rand admirers. I am not one of them. In fact, I find as pathetic her philosophy, if it can be called that. Her novels are long sermons with wooden characters divided against one another, some for the forces of good (adventurous, heroic capitalists who scorn government interference and public mediocrity), some for the forces of evil (just flip adventurous, etc., over). Hers is a Nietzschean view of the world and her heroes are Übermenschen.* Never mind that she plods along for page after page in strident praise of rationalism when in fact, her narrow understanding of the world reveals she is anything but rational. Hers is a belief, an ism, rather than a practice. All progress, all public good, she says, depends on the elite spirits in our midst, whom we should leave alone so they can make the unwashed masses prosper.

Still, she has a certain following among those who, faut de mieux, had their philosophy of life shaped by her sermons. There is a certain adolescent appeal in carving the world into those who are right and those who are wrong. They don't see that she is a Russian writing to Americans.

Her family a victim of the Revolution, she emigrated to the United States and wherever she looked in her adopted country she found a retort to Marx. Never mind that she didn't look too deeply or too widely. She lived through the Depression; she traveled through slums. Her experiences were bent to fit her thinking. Believers in the proletariat had usurped her middle-class family's place in the Russian status quo. So, then, she would extoll those who rise above the soup lines of proles.

Mind you, Rand was an intellectual force, and she gathered around herself quite a coterie, including Alan Greenspan--who seems to have fallen away from her ideas because of the recent financial house debacle on Wall Street. A woman not unsympathetic, Anne C. Heller has written a book about Rand as intellectual force. It is titled, Ayn Rand and the World She Made. Note that: The World She Made. With Rand's thought-saving ideas and with her persuasive rhetoric, an entire political perspective has been shaped. Though fair to her subject, Heller is well aware of Rand's shortcomings.

Here is a review of the book.

*Bertrand Russell dismissed Nietzsche and his supermen as "mere power-phantasies of an invalid."