Folk Concept of Happiness

Early in The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being, the author Daniel W. Haybron makes a comment about folk concepts of happiness.

For the most part, folk concepts gain currency and persist because they denote matters of broad and lasting concern. They have been vetted in the crucible of many people’s experience, and we use them because, in some sense, they work for us. One reason they work for us is that human beings are extraordinarily discerning intuitive distinction makers; on a continual basis, we instinctively and implicitly respond to a vast array of important distinctions, most of which we cannot even begin to make explicit. Consider how richly any normal person is attuned to the countless non-verbal cues offered by her conversational partners. Think of how often one person will sense something wrong or inappropriate with another’s behavior or demeanor without being able to say just what it is. And as any ethics instructor knows, people’s sensitivity to values far outstrips their ability to articulate them.

I quote this because I believe folk concepts get short shrift in Objectivist literature. (I think there also is a strong distrust for implicit distinctions.) While Haybron doesn’t elaborate on other folk concepts I think they would include common sense, fairness, and the importance of valuing family and friendships in addition to career goals.

This is not to say that all folk concepts and traditions are healthy or life affirming. While I’m no expert on the subject or on folk concepts in different cultures I’m sure we could find plenty of examples that thwart happiness and well-being. However this doesn’t mean we can chuck all folk concepts as worthless or harmful.

The Pursuit of Unhappiness

A lot of my reading centers on well-being and living a good life. In this vein I just started reading The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being, by Daniel W. Haybron. He makes a distinction between the approach the ancient Greeks took toward happiness and well-being versus that of the Enlightenment that I have not encountered before. I feel it is worth highlighting this difference before finishing the book. I plan to write a review after reading it. Below are several key quotes from early in the book. (Note these quotes are not contiguous.)

The ancients apparently took it as a given that individuals are not, in general, authorities about their own welfare. Quite opposite: most ancient philosophers followed Socrates’ lead in distinguishing ‘the many’ and ‘the wise,’ with the former and much larger class being, basically dolts. Aristotle notoriously maintained that some of us are so ill-fitted for self-governance that we are better off enslaved, with masters to look after us.

The spirit of modernity is rather different. Inspired by Enlightenment optimism about the individual’s powers of reason and self-government, modern liberals tend to believe in one or another form of the sovereignty or authority of the individual in matters of personal welfare: by and large, people know what’s best for them, and tend to act rationally in the promotion of their interests.

But what if it turns out that people don’t have this kind of authority? What if they frequently and predictably make serious mistakes about what matters in life, act irrationally, or otherwise err in ways that undercut their prospects for well-being? What if, as a result, they tend to botch their lives at an alarmingly high rate, in many cases being unwitting pursuers of unhappiness?

The central thesis of this book is that people probably do not enjoy a high degree of authority or competence in matters of personal welfare.

I’m sure the rest of The Pursuit of Unhappiness will flesh out the empirical case for Haybron’s thesis. I’ve read other books that report results of various studies which reveal the inability of the average person to recognize the effects of genetics, temperament, and subjectivity on decision-making. To me these findings don’t prove it is impossible to be objective, just that it’s work. Sometimes it’s hard work!

In any case, I’ll write more on this interesting book when I’ve finished it. Wanted to throw out these quotes as thought provokers.

The Happiness Trap Review

I first starting reading “self-help” books way back in college when Maxwell Maltz wrote Psycho-Cybernetics. (I also got to meet Maltz and interview him for my college newspaper. During the talk he gave at my school he called me onto the stage to answer some of the questions from the students!) Anyway over the years I’ve read dozens of books by Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Tony Robbins, Dwayne Dyer, Stephen Covey and others. Almost all of these books offered some value to varying degrees. Steven Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is one of my all time favorites. Earlier this year I read The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living by Russ Harris which joined Covey’s book as one of my favorite self-help books. While the other books I’ve read were good almost all of them offer variations on one of several themes. Think positively. Repeat affirmations to counter negative thoughts. Bolster your self-esteem. All of them, according to Harris, share the same trap. “To find happiness, we try to avoid or get rid of bad feelings, but the harder we try, the more bad feelings we create.” This trap comes from the shared definition of happiness as feeling good. The Happiness Trap adheres to a different definition of happiness: living a rich and meaningful life.

Living such a life doesn’t automatically mean we’re feeling good all the time. We will still have negative feelings and challenges to overcome. The goal of The Happiness Trap then is to give us strategies to deal with negative feelings without denying them. Harris offers six core principles.

1. Defusion. Painful or unpleasant thoughts are defused by various techniques such as labeling them. When one notices such a thought instead of suppressing or denying it we create some distance by saying “I’m having the thought that …” In doing so we put some distance between the thought and us. In other words, we strive for objectivity.

2. Expansion: consists of making room for unpleasant thoughts and feelings.

3. Connection: being fully aware of your here and now.

4. Distinguishing between your thinking self and observing self. The various techniques in The Happiness Trap get us out of our thinking self and into our observing self.

5. Values: what kind of person are you and want to be? What is significant and meaningful to you? What do you stand for?

6. Committed action. All of this business about being objective and mindfulness must be followed by a commitment to action if we truly want to change.

These principles form the core of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), developed by Steven Hays. While Hays and others have published a number of books on ACT they were written for therapists applying ACT to different conditions. The Happiness Trap translates ACT’s principles for laymen interested in applying these principles. As Harris points out ACT also stands for something else:

A – Accepting your thoughts and feelings and being present in the moment,

C – Connect with your values, and

T – Take effective action.

The Happiness Trap holds a lot more insights and techniques than I can do justice to here. Overall I like several aspects of The Happiness Trap and ACT.

1. They don’t try to suppress or ignore emotions. The recommended methods aim at honoring these emotions while trying to get beyond them.
2. They emphasize mindfulness and objectivity.
3. The end goal is to get us to act, not just to idly analyze our feelings.
4. Values play a key role because ultimately this is what motivates us to action: what is important to us.

As I said at the beginning The Happiness Trap has joined the small group of my favorite books. It offers a realistic guide with a number of helpful activates to get us to move beyond self-limiting thoughts and emotions so we can obtain, express and enjoy our values.

Postscript:

Just recently I received the latest newsletter from the author which had an interesting observation.

[I]f we believe that happiness is the same as feeling good, we are constantly going to be struggling. Expecting to feel good all the time is like expecting a crocodile to be your best friend. You’re soon going to be disappointed. In ACT, we generally stay away from using the term “happiness”, as so many people think it means “feeling good”. Instead, we talk about “vitality”: a sense of being fully alive and embracing each moment of life, regardless of how you are feeling in that moment. If we were to define happiness in ACT terms, we would define it as living a rich, full and meaningful life in which you feel the full range of human emotions; or as the sense of vitality and wellbeing that comes from living by your values (something the ancient Greeks called “eudemonia”).

I like this idea of vitality and eudemonia (also referred to as “flourishing”). In fact, in the late 1980’s I wrote a paper titled Is Self-Interest Enough that was sold as an audio tape through Laissez Faire Books (and received a rave review in their catalog). My paper suggested how the Objectivist ethics could benefit from incorporating the Greek concept of eudemonia.

Edith Hamilton best summarized the eudaemonist approach in her The Greek Way as: “The exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.”

The Happiness Hypothesis

After reading The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt last year I've struggled with how to review it on this blog. It is one of the most interesting, wide-ranging and thought-provoking books I've read in a while. But I wanted to say more than just what the previous sentence does. I debated whether to break the review into pieces to cover the major themes or try to cover the book in one post. So time passed by with me getting no closer to posting something. Recently I came across a web page called The Edge in which Haidt does a nice job summarizing his book. Even so, this summary is 10 pages long! The link is provided here so you can read it yourself.

His essay comments on a group he calls the New Atheists: David Sloan Wilson, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris and others. They responded to Haidt's essay with Haidt getting the final word at the end.

Why do I have a post on Haidt's book? Because I believe Objectivists would benefit from his observations even if you ultimately disagree with him. The Objectivist literature is quiet on how our evolution as a species affects how we think and feel. Rand did say we are rational animals but I believe the animal part of this formulation was shed and/or buried in the emphasis on reason. Our brains evolved over millions of years with the rational portion being a fairly late development. Our emotional mechanism was in place long before our reasoning capabilities emerged. I believe we need to address this in our philosophy.

Below are a few selected quotes from Haidt's Edge essay. I'll have more on this subject in the weeks ahead.

morality, and rationality itself, were crucially dependent on the proper functioning of emotional circuits in the prefrontal cortex.

If the building blocks of morality were shaped by natural selection long before language arose, and if those evolved structures work largely by giving us feelings that shape our behavior automatically, then why should we be focusing on the verbal reasons that people give to explain their judgments in hypothetical moral dilemmas?

Studies of everyday reasoning show that we usually use reason to search for evidence to support our initial judgment, which was made in milliseconds.

we did not evolve language and reasoning because they helped us to find truth; we evolved these skills because they were useful to their bearers, and among their greatest benefits were reputation management and manipulation.