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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: happiness

Assume that Fortune Carries You

07 Tuesday Nov 2017

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

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Tags

Epicurus, happiness, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Philosophy, Seneca, wealth

“There is also a saying from Epicurus: ‘If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich.’

Nature’s wants are slight; the demands of opinion are boundless. Suppose that the property of many millionaires is heaped up in your possession. Assume that fortune carries you far beyond the limits of a private income, decks you with gold, clothes you in purple, and brings you to such a degree of luxury and wealth that you can bury the earth under your marble floors; that you may not only possess, but tread upon, riches. Add statues, paintings, and whatever any artist has devised for the luxury; you will only learn from such things to crave still greater.

Natural desires are limited; but those which spring from false opinion can have no stopping-point. The false has no limits. When you are traveling on a road, there must be an end; but when astray, your wanderings are limitless. Recall your steps, therefore, from idle things, and when you would know whether that which you seek is based upon a natural or upon a misleading desire, consider whether it can stop at any definite point. If you find, after having travelled far, that there is a more distant goal always in view, you may be sure that this condition is contrary to nature.”

__________

A section from the 16th of Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius. Buy the book, but you can also read the letters on WikiCommons.

More stuff on this topic:

  • Julian Barnes asks, “it all adds up to happiness, doesn’t it?”
  • Mitt Romney: what matters most to me in life
  • John Updike talks about his conversion

Photo credit: The Book of Life

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Who Is the Happiest Man?

03 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Comments Off on Who Is the Happiest Man?

Tags

Ancient Greece, Ancient History, Athens, Croesus, Eleusis, G.C. Macauley, Greek History, happiness, Herodotus, history, Paphlagonians, Philosophy, Syrians, Tellos, The Histories, Tom Holland

Herodotus

“Croesus, king of Lydia, asked him as follows: ‘Athenian guest, much report of thee has come to us, both in regard to thy wisdom and thy wanderings… a desire has come upon me to ask whether thou hast seen any whom thou deem to be of all men the most happy.’ This he asked supposing that he himself was the happiest of men; but Solon, using no flattery but the truth only, said: ‘Yes, O king, Tellos the Athenian.’

Croesus, marveling at that which he said, asked him earnestly, ‘In what respect dost thou judge Tellos to be the most happy?’ And he said: ‘Tellos, in the first place, living while his native State was prosperous, had sons fair and good and saw from all of them children begotten and living to grow up; and secondly he had what with us is accounted wealth, and after his life a most glorious end. For when a battle was fought by the Athenians at Eleusis against the neighbouring people, he brought up supports and routed the foe and there died by a most fair death; and his people buried him publicly where he fell, and honoured him greatly.’ […]

Croesus was moved to anger and said: ‘Athenian guest, hast thou then so cast aside our prosperous state as worth nothing, that thou dost prefer to us even men of private station?’ And he said: ‘Croesus, thou art inquiring about human fortunes of one who well knows that fate is apt to disturb our lot. For in the course of long time a man may see many things which he would not desire to see, and suffer also many things which he would not desire to suffer… As for thee, I perceive that thou art both great in wealth and king of many men, but that of which thou didst ask me I cannot call thee yet, until I learn that thou hast brought thy life to a fair ending: for the very rich man is not at all to be accounted more happy than he who has but his subsistence from day-to-day, unless also the fortune go with him to possess things of value. For many very wealthy men are not happy, while many who have but a moderate living are fortunate… But we must of every thing examine the end and how it will turn out at the last, for to many fate shows but a glimpse of happiness and then plucks them up by the roots and overturns them.'”

__________

Excerpted from the opening third of Herodtus’s The Histories, the only surviving work of the earliest known historian. (The excerpt is from the at-times haughtier G.C. Macauley version, which lends some gravity to sections like the one above. I haven’t read Tom Holland’s translation, but I assume it’s the best vernacular version out there.)

In The Histories, Herodotus notes that Croesus is a “Lydian by race,” a “ruler of the nations between the Syrians and the Paphlagonians,” and the “first Barbarian of whom we have knowledge.”

Read on:

  • Alexander the Great’s horse
  • Why those with a Greek idea of human nature may vote Republican
  • From Homer’s Odyssey “When the wealthy fought on the front lines”

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The Machinery of Happiness

04 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology

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Tags

Contentment, happiness, joy, psychology, Sam Harris, Waking Up

Sam Harris

“There is nothing novel about trying to become happy. And one can become happy, within certain limits… But conventional sources of happiness are unreliable, being dependent upon changing conditions. It is difficult to raise a happy family, to keep yourself and those you love healthy, to acquire wealth and find creative and fulfilling ways to enjoy it, to form deep friendships, to contribute to society in ways that are emotionally rewarding, to perfect a wide variety of artistic, athletic, and intellectual skills—and to keep the machinery of happiness running day after day. There is nothing wrong with being fulfilled in all these ways—except for the fact that, if you pay close attention, you will see that there is still something wrong with it. These forms of happiness aren’t good enough. Our feelings of fulfillment do not last. And the stress of life continues.”

__________

From the opening chapter of Waking Up by Sam Harris (Read the entire first chapter at Harris’s blog).

More happy stuff:

  • John Updike wraps up his memoir with a totally banal moment of pure joy
  • Jerzy Kosiński: how happiness is shaped by age and experience
  • Barnes takes it from a different angle: experiences can’t add up to happiness
  • For politicos: Gore Vidal dissects what ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ means today
  • Charles Murray takes up Vidal’s argument

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Realizing Friendship

06 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

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Tags

Contentment, Envy, friendship, happiness, Sam Harris, Waking Up

Sam Harris

“In the midst of this ordinariness, however, I was suddenly struck by the knowledge that I loved my friend. This shouldn’t have surprised me—he was, after all, one of my best friends. However, at that age I was not in the habit of dwelling on how much I loved the men in my life. Now I could feel that I loved him, and this feeling had ethical implications that suddenly seemed as profound as they now sound pedestrian on the page: I wanted him to be happy.

That conviction came crashing down with such force that something seemed to give way inside me. In fact, the insight appeared to restructure my mind. My capacity for envy, for instance—the sense of being diminished by the happiness or success of another person—seemed like a symptom of mental illness that had vanished without a trace. I could no more have felt envy at that moment than I could have wanted to poke out my own eyes. What did I care if my friend was better looking or a better athlete than I was? If I could have bestowed those gifts on him, I would have. Truly wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own…

Love was at bottom impersonal—and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love—I love you because…—now made no sense at all.”

__________

From Waking Up by Sam Harris. (Find the entire opening chapter, from which this excerpt is pulled, along with Harris’s reading of it here.)

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The Walk Back from the Mailbox

17 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ Comments Off on The Walk Back from the Mailbox

Tags

Faith, God, happiness, identity, John Updike, joy, Life, nature, religion, Self-Consciousness, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, Wisdom

John Updike 2

“And the other morning, a Sunday morning, around nine, walking back up my driveway in my churchgoing clothes, having retrieved the Sunday Globe from my mailbox, I experienced happiness so sharply I tried to factor it into its components. (1) The Christmas season was over — the presents, the parties, the ‘overshadowing’ — and that was a relief. (2) My wife and I had just made love, successfully all around, which at my age occasions some self-congratulation. (3) It was a perfect winter day, windless, with fresh snow heaped along the driveway by the plow and a cobalt-blue sky precisely fitted against the dormered roof-line of my house. I admired this blank blue sky…

Even toward myself, as my own life’s careful manager and promoter, I feel a touch of disdain. Precociously conscious of the precious, inexplicable burden of selfhood, I have steered my unique little craft carefully, at the same time doubting that carefulness is the most sublime virtue. He that gains his life shall lose it.

In this interim of gaining and losing, it clears the air to disbelieve in death and to believe that the world was created to be praised. But I inherited a skeptical temperament. My father believed in science and my mother in nature. She looked and still looks to the plants and the animals for orientation, and I have absorbed the belief that when in doubt we should behave, if not like monkeys, like ‘savages’ — that our instincts and appetites are better guides, for a healthy life, than the advice of other human beings. People are fun, but not quite serious or trustworthy in the way that nature is. We feel safe, huddled within human institutions — churches, banks, madrigal groups — but these concoctions melt away at the basic moments. The self’s responsibility, then, is to achieve rapport if not rapture with the giant, cosmic other: to appreciate, let’s say, the walk back from the mailbox.”

__________

John Updike, writing in the concluding paragraphs of his memoir Self-Consciousness.

More from Updike:

  • On making peace with our past selves
  • On why he was a Christian
  • On why, despite tragedy, he believed the world to be good

John Updike, Ipswich, Massachusetts, 1962

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Your Mind Is All You Have

14 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology, Speeches

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Tags

Death and the Present, dreams, Fulfillment, happiness, mindfulness, neurology, neuroscience, Philosophy, psychology, Sam Harris, Speeches, thought, Waking, Your Mind Is All You Have

Sam Harris

“Whatever you can possibly notice – in your body, in your mind, in the world – has only one place to appear: in your conscious experience.

Now I’m not saying this is all just a dream, but as a neurological matter it is very much like a dream. It is a dream that is constrained by inputs from the external world. And the dreams we call dreams at night are dreams that are not constrained by the external world — and that’s why you seem to be able to get away with everything.

But your mind is all you have. It’s all you’ve ever had. It’s all you have to offer other people. And this might sound calloused to say when there are maybe many other aspects of your life that seem in need of being addressed… But it’s still true. If you are perpetually angry and depressed and confused and unloving, it doesn’t matter how much success you have or who’s in your life, you’re not going to enjoy any of it.

I suspect you could all make a list of things you want to accomplish – of things that really need to be changed about your life. What is the significance of everything on that list? Each thing on that list seems to promise that if you could only do it, you would have reason to just be happy in the present moment. We are all trying to find a path back to the present moment, and good enough reason to just be happy here…

And again, I’m not saying that everything on your list is absurd, or not worth accomplishing. But how dissatisfied with the present do you have to be in order to prepare a satisfying future? If you’re constantly ruminating on what you just did, or what you should have done, or what you would have done if you only had the chance, you will miss your life. You’ll fail to connect with it. You’ll fail to connect with other people.”

__________

Sam Harris, speaking in a section from his heavy and highly persuasive speech Death and the Present Moment.

I apologize for the record-breaking hiatus: I have been under-the-weather, and traveling, and just plain busy.

Read on:

  • Harris reflects on why exactly it’s so tragic that we waste our time
  • From his TED Talk: Sam argues about what societies get wrong about female sexuality
  • As a non-theist, Harris wonders about whether there is a deeper, more spiritual way to find fulfillment

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Jefferson’s Ten Rules

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Advice, American History, Counsel, Epictetus, grandfather, grandson, happiness, Jefferson's Ten Rules, John Spear Smith, Julian Boyd, letter, Monticello, Patience, Philosophy, Ten Commandments, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson Smith, Thrift, Wisdom, Work

Thomas Jefferson

To Thomas Jefferson Smith.
Monticello, February 21, 1825.

This letter will, to you, be as one from the dead. The writer will be in the grave before you can weigh its counsels. Your affectionate and excellent father has requested that I would address to you something which might possibly have a favorable influence on the course of life you have to run, and I too, as a namesake, feel an interest in that course. Few words will be necessary, with good dispositions on your part. Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you have entered, be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss. And if to the dead it is permitted to care for the things of this world, every action of your life will be under my regard. Farewell. […]

A Decalogue of Canons for observation in practical life.

1. Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day.

2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.

3. Never spend your money before you have it.

4. Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.

5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.

6. We never repent of having eaten too little.

7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.

8. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.

9. Take things always by their smooth handle.

10. When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.

__________

A Letter written by Thomas Jefferson to his friend John Spear Smith, on behalf of Smith’s son and namesake, Thomas Jefferson Smith. Jefferson, who was born 271 years ago yesterday, was 81 when he wrote this letter.

The Monticello website has an extended discussion of the meaning of rule #9, about which there has been considerable speculation. It ties into last week’s post concerning the Ayaan Hirsi Ali-Brandeis affair:

Jefferson’s intended meaning is the subject of some debate. Julian Boyd wrote an article on this in 1957, “The Smooth Handle: A Challenge to the Organization Man.” Boyd believed that this statement embodied how Jefferson thought citizens of a republic should behave, and was descended from a similar saying by Epictetus, “Everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne; another by which it cannot.” While debate was essential to a healthy republic, Boyd argued, Jefferson believed strongly that the exchange of ideas must always be civil, and he expressed this belief in his advice to “take things always by their smooth handle.”

This is only one interpretation, however, and without an explicit explanation from Jefferson himself, each reader is free to interpret it as they will.

More Jefferson:

  • Meet Thomas Jefferson
  • Meet Thomas Jefferson’s father
  • David Brooks and Jon Meacham have an entertaining discussion about Jefferson and his brilliant political rival Alexander Hamilton

Jefferson's Ten Rules

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Jerzy Kosiński on How Aging Shapes One’s Outlook on the World

10 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Aging, Experience, Gail Sheehy, General Philosophy, happiness, interview, Jerzy Kosiński, joy, Psychology Today, Sentimentality, wealth, Wisdom, Worldview

Jerzy Kosiński

Interviewer: You have looked at the world from both ends of its ideologies — Soviet totalitarianism and American capitalism. Also from both ends of the class ladder. When you first arrived in this country, with no English, you were scraping ships, cleaning bars, parking cars, chauffeuring in Harlem. You were a truck driver and lived in the YMCA. By 1962, in four short years, you became a known author, you met and married a woman who was one of the largest taxpayers in the United States… At which end of your experience of fear or freedom, rich or poor, did you find the greatest sense of being alive?

Jerzy Kosiński: At both ends – and in between. As I have no habits that require maintaining – I don’t even have a favorite menu – the only way for me to live was always to be as close to other people as life allowed. Not much else stimulates me. I have no other passions, no other joys, no other obsessions. The only moment when I feel truly alive is when, in a relationship with other people, I discover how much in common we all share with each other. Money and possessions – I care little for the first, hardly for the second – were never necessary to experience life as I live it. As greatly as my wife, her wealth, and our marriage contributed to my knowledge of myself, of America, and of the world, they contributed just so much – no more, no less – as all other moments have contributed to my curiosity about myself, others, society, art – and to my sense of being alive.

Of course I’ve always known moments of loneliness when I felt abandoned, rejected, unhappy – but in such moments, I also felt alive enough to ponder my own state of mind, my own life, always aware that at any moment this precious gift of awareness of the self might be taken away from me. That state of awareness has always been, to me, less a possession than a mortgage, easily terminable.

Interviewer: Do you find you are becoming less dispassionate as you grow older?

Jerzy Kosiński: More compassionate, more attentive to the voice of life and more forgiving of its various failures, in myself as well as in others, but also more critical of a society so cruel to the old, sick, infirm. And I begin to perceive certain periods of my past, like certain skiing tricks I used to perform, as not available to be reproduced by me anymore. From now on, they will reside in me only as memory – and as a play of my imagination. Nostalgia and sentimentality – this is new.

Interviewer: Sentimentality?

Jerzy Kosiński: Yes. Once, I considered it merely a mood undefined. To be sentimental was not to be clear about oneself or others. Now I feel it as a minor but necessary shade, a mixture of regret and of desire.

__________

From Gail Sheehy’s illuminating 1977 interview with Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosiński.

This piece was originally published in Psychology Today with the heading, “The Psychological Novelist as Portable Man,” a hysterically pretentious title that mischaracterizes what is otherwise a candid and illuminating piece. It’s certainly worth a read, and can be found alongside other insightful discussions in Tom Teicholz’s 1993 collection Conversations with Jerzy Kosiński.

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It Has to Be Earned: Arthur Brooks on Creating Value

25 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Interview, Politics

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

AEI, American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks, charity, economics, economy, free enterprise, Government, happiness, Marvin Olasky, politics, wealth

Arthur Brooks“Financial status is the way we demonstrate to others (and ourselves) that we are successful—hence the fancy watches, the expensive cars, and the bespoke suits. We use these things to show other people not just that we are prosperous, but that we are prosperous because we create value.

There is nothing strange about measuring our success with money; we measure things indirectly all the time. I require my students to take exams not because I believe their scores have any inherent value, but because I know these scores correlate extremely well with how much they have studied and how well they understand the material. Your doctor draws your blood to check your cholesterol not because blood cholesterol is interesting in and of itself, but because it measures your risk of having a heart attack or a stroke. In the same way, we measure our professional success with green pieces of paper called ‘dollars.’

What scholars often portray as an ignoble tendency—wanting to have more than others—is often evidence that we are driven to create value. Wanting to create value is a virtue, not a vice. The fact that it also brings us happiness is a tremendous blessing.

Have you ever wondered why rich entrepreneurs continue to work so hard? Perhaps you’ve said, ‘If I had a billion dollars, I’d retire.’ This is what Mack Metcalf [a forklift driver who won a $65 million Powerball Jackpot, and died 4 years later from cirrhosis of the liver] actually did when he won the lottery. But if he had earned that money doing something creative and productive, things would almost certainly have gone differently for him. People who succeed at what they do tend to keep doing it. The drive to succeed, as opposed to just having more money than others, explains why the super-rich—who already have so much more than virtually everybody—continue to work.

Take the case of billionaire Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle. The world’s 14th-richest man, he would need to spend more than $30 million per week, or $183,000 per hour, just to avoid increasing his wealth. Further, he would have to spend it on items with no investment qualities, meaning that, unless he sets his money on fire, or (better yet) gives it away, he simple cannot not be filthy rich. Yet he continues to slave away, earning billion after billion. Being rich, and having more than the average Joe, simply cannot be driving Larry Ellison. It is the will to succeed and create value at greater and greater heights.

Who enjoys the benefits created from the slaving of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and all of America’s other success-addicted, ultra-rich entrepreneurs? We all do: As long as fortunes are earned—as opposed to stolen, squeezed from governments, or otherwise extorted from citizens—this is good for all of us.

Oracle has not made Larry Ellison a rich man without any benefit to society. The firm currently has tens of thousands of employees, people with well-paying jobs to support their families. The company has introduced technology that has benefited all parts of the economy, and it has paid billions to its shareholders. And we can’t forget that Oracle has rendered generously unto Caesar, year after year: In 2007 alone, it paid $1.2 billion in corporate taxes, totally apart from the personal taxes paid by Ellison and his employees.

Money is a measure of success, and a handy one at that. But there is a dark side to this fact: People tend to forget that money is only a measure. Some people focus on money for its own sake, forgetting what really brings the happiness…

In 1978, for example, researchers presented a sample of adults with a list of 24 big-ticket consumer items (a car, a house, international travel, a swimming pool, and so on). They were asked how many of these items they currently possessed; they were also asked, ‘When you think of the good life—the life you’d like to have—which of the things on this list, if any, are part of the good life as far as you are personally concerned?’

Inevitably, people felt that the ‘good life’ required more things than they currently possessed. Among the people between 30 and 44 years old, the average number of items owned was 2.5, while the ideal number was 4.3. The same people were interviewed 16 years later, in 1994, and presented with the same list. Naturally, most people had more items; the ones formerly in their 30s and early 40s (now in the next age category, 45 to 59 years old) had 3.2 items, on average. They were closer to the good life, right? Wrong. Their requirements for the good life had now shifted, to 5.4 items. In other words, after 16 years and lots of work, the ‘good life’ deficit had stayed almost exactly the same. The more stuff you have, the more you want.”

__________

From Arthur Brooks’s article Can Money Buy Happiness?.

Tomorrow is my last day working at the American Enterprise Institute, of which Arthur Brooks is the current president.

Following his graduation from high school and a brief stint at the Annapolis Brass Quintet in Baltimore, Brooks moved by himself to Spain to become the principal French hornist of the City Orchestra of Barcelona. While eating lunch in the AEI dining room the other day, I overheard Brooks recount this personal story too improbable for any novel, which he capped off by saying he was leaving the table to head to catch a flight — to western India to meet with the Dalai Lama. Needless to say, he’s a pretty compelling case.

Below is an excerpt from Marvin Olasky’s recent interview with Arthur Brooks:

How many French hornists have become presidents of the American Enterprise Institute? One.

What are the similarities between playing the French horn and being president of AEI? Creativity… the working out of ideas that are of interest to other people… and the privilege of having audiences enjoy your work. The only barriers in front of you are those put in place by your own imagination.

Why did you decide to move from a prestigious orchestra position to academic work? Things were going well … and I wasn’t happy. What I wanted to be was an economist. I wanted to do that analysis of how the gears turn in society. I hadn’t even gone to college, so at 28 I had to go to college and get a graduate degree.

When you told your dad about your new plan, what did he say? I said, “Dad, I want to become an economist.” After a silence he said, “Why would you want to do that? You’re at the top of your career.” I said, “Because I’m not happy.” He said, “What makes you so special?”

A Harvard economist once told me he did not plan to have any children because he figured that every child would cost him a book, and he wanted to publish books rather than have children. You have three children, and you’ve published lots of books. Does having children inspire you to publish more? I do believe the world will benefit more from my children than it will from my books, but there is a connection. My wife and I had had our two sons biologically. I was writing this book about charity and finding that when people give to charities their lives improve dramatically. I wrote a chapter on it, and everything I write my wife Esther reads.

That’s wise. For sure. She’s spiked a lot of my stuff. Susan probably spikes your stuff too sometimes, right?

Yeah. A couple times that she hasn’t I wish she had. Exactly. So I brought home this chapter that shows charitable actions make you happy and healthy. Esther ruminated on it for a while, then said, ‘We ought to use the information in this book to change our lives a little bit. I think we should give more.’ I said, ‘OK, I’ll write a check.’ And she said, ‘I think we should adopt a baby.’ I said, ‘It’s only a book!’ Then of course I had no argument, so we did. We adopted our daughter from China. She’s now 8 years old.

Two questions: First, how should we define fairness? Seventy percent of Americans believe that true fairness means rewarding merit and creating an opportunity society, which is exactly what the free enterprise system is designed to do. The fairest system is one in which people have an opportunity to rise. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have a safety net, but a safety net is not middle-class welfare. It’s not spreading the wealth and getting rid of risk: It’s simply making sure that people don’t have the most abysmal poverty and starve.

Second question: “Earned success” is a key concept in your book. What does that mean? Earned success is the idea that you’re creating value with your life and value in the lives of other people. It’s not money per se: It’s the value you create with your life. You can denominate it with souls saved, or neighborhoods that are habitable, or clean drinking water in Africa, or lots of money, or beautiful works of art, or having children who are honest and have good values, or whatever. People who say they’ve earned their success are the happiest people. It has to be earned. 

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The Moral Landscape

23 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology, Science

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Daniel Gilbert, Daniel Kahneman, happiness, human happiness, joy, psychology, Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape

Sam Harris“One of the most interesting things to come out of the research on human happiness is the discovery that we are very bad judges of how we will feel in the future—an ability that the psychologist Daniel Gilbert has called ‘affective forecasting.’ Gilbert and others have shown that we systematically overestimate the degree to which good and bad experiences will affect us. Changes in wealth, health, age, marital status, etc., tend not to matter as much as we think they will—and yet we make our most important decisions in life based on these inaccurate assumptions. It is useful to know that what we think will matter often matters much less than we think. Conversely, things we consider trivial can actually impact our lives greatly. If you have ever been impressed by how people often rise to the occasion while experiencing great hardship but can fall to pieces over minor inconveniences, you have seen this principle at work. The general finding of this research is now uncontroversial: we are poorly placed to accurately recall the past, to perceive the present, or to anticipate the future with respect to our own happiness. It seems little wonder, therefore, that we are so often unfulfilled.

If you ask people to report on their level of well-being moment-to-moment — by giving them a beeper that sounds at random intervals, prompting them to record their mental state — you get one measure of how happy they are. If, however, you simply ask them how satisfied they are with their lives generally, you often get a very different measure. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls the first source of information ‘the experiencing self’ and the second ‘the remembering self.’ And his justification for partitioning the human mind in this way is that these two ‘selves’ often disagree. Indeed, they can be experimentally shown to disagree, even across a relatively brief span of time. We saw this earlier with respect to Kahneman’s data on colonoscopies: because ‘the remembering self’ evaluates any experience by reference to its peak intensity and its final moments (the ‘peak/end rule’), it is possible to improve its lot, at the expense of ‘the experiencing self,’ by simply prolonging an unpleasant procedure at its lowest level of intensity (and thereby reducing the negativity of future memories).

What applies to colonoscopies seems to apply elsewhere in life. Imagine, for instance, that you want to go on vacation: You are deciding between a trip to Hawaii and a trip to Rome. On Hawaii, you envision yourself swimming in the ocean, relaxing on the beach, playing tennis, and drinking mai tais. Rome will find you sitting in cafés, visiting museums and ancient ruins, and drinking an impressive amount of wine. Which vacation should you choose? It is quite possible that your ‘experiencing self’ would be much happier on Hawaii, as indicated by an hourly tally of your emotional and sensory pleasure, while your remembering self would give a much more positive account of Rome one year hence. Which self would be right? Does the question even make sense? Kahneman observes that while most of us think our ‘experiencing self’ must be more important, it has no voice in our decisions about what to do in life. After all, we can’t choose from among experiences; we must choose from among remembered (or imagined) experiences. And, according to Kahneman, we don’t tend to think about the future as a set of experiences; we think of it as a set of ‘anticipated memories.’ The problem, with regard to both doing science and living one’s life, is that the ‘remembering self’ is the only one who can think and speak about the past. It is, therefore, the only one who can consciously make decisions in light of past experience…

It seems clear, however, that the ‘remembering self’ is simply the ‘experiencing self’ in one of its modes…

If we could take the 2.5 billion seconds that make up the average human life and assess a person’s well-being at each point in time, the distinction between the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’ would disappear. Yes, the experience of recalling the past often determines what we decide to do in the future—and this greatly affects the character of one’s future experience. But it would still be true to say that in each of the 2.5 billion seconds of an average life, certain moments were pleasant, and others were painful; some were later recalled with greater or lesser fidelity, and these memories had whatever effects they had later on. Consciousness and its ever-changing contents remain the only subjective reality.

Thus, if your ‘remembering self’ claims to have had a wonderful time in Rome, while your ‘experiencing self’ felt only boredom, fatigue, and despair, then your ‘remembering self’ (i.e., your recollection of the trip) is simply wrong about what it was like to be you in Rome. This becomes increasingly obvious the more we narrow our focus: Imagine a ‘remembering self’ who thinks that you were especially happy while sitting for fifteen minutes on the Spanish Steps; while your ‘experiencing self’ was, in fact, plunged deeper into misery for every one of those minutes than at any other point on the trip. Do we need two selves to account for this disparity? No. The vagaries of memory suffice.

As Kahneman admits, the vast majority of our experiences in life never get recalled, and the time we spend actually remembering the past is comparatively brief. Thus, the quality of most of our lives can be assessed only in terms of whatever fleeting character it has as it occurs. But this includes the time we spend recalling the past. Amid this flux, the moments in which we construct a larger story about our lives appear like glints of sunlight on a dark river: they may seem special, but they are part of the current all the same.”

__________

An absolutely reorienting insight from chapter five of Sam Harris’s ambitious new book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.

I found and have read the whole book here. But buy it to support one of our best thinkers and writers about cognition and philosophy.

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The Happiness of the People

17 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Political Philosophy, Politics, Speeches

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AEI, American Enterprise Institute, American Exceptionalism, Charles Murray, Freedom, Government, happiness, Irving Kristol Lecture, James Madison, Life, meaning, political philosophy, political science, politics, religion, The Federalist Papers

Charles Murray

“My text is drawn from Federalist 62, probably written by James Madison: ‘A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.’ Note the word: happiness. Not prosperity. Not security. Not equality. Happiness, which the Founders used in its Aristotelian sense of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole…

I start from this premise: A human life can have transcendent meaning, with transcendence defined either by one of the world’s great religions or one of the world’s great secular philosophies. If transcendence is too big a word, let me put it another way: I suspect that almost all of you agree that the phrase “a life well-lived” has meaning. That’s the phrase I’ll use from now on.

And since happiness is a word that gets thrown around too casually, the phrase I’ll use from now on is ‘deep satisfactions.’ I’m talking about the kinds of things that we look back upon when we reach old age and let us decide that we can be proud of who we have been and what we have done. Or not.

To become a source of deep satisfaction, a human activity has to meet some stringent requirements. It has to have been important (we don’t get deep satisfaction from trivial things). You have to have put a lot of effort into it (hence the cliché ‘nothing worth having comes easily’). And you have to have been responsible for the consequences.

There aren’t many activities in life that can satisfy those three requirements. Having been a good parent. That qualifies. A good marriage. That qualifies. Having been a good neighbor and good friend to those whose lives intersected with yours. That qualifies. And having been really good at something — good at something that drew the most from your abilities. That qualifies. Let me put it formally: If we ask what are the institutions through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life, the answer is that there are just four: family, community, vocation, and faith. Two clarifications: ‘Community’ can embrace people who are scattered geographically. ‘Vocation’ can include avocations or causes.

It is not necessary for any individual to make use of all four institutions, nor do I array them in a hierarchy. I merely assert that these four are all there are. The stuff of life — the elemental events surrounding birth, death, raising children, fulfilling one’s personal potential, dealing with adversity, intimate relationships — coping with life as it exists around us in all its richness — occurs within those four institutions.

Seen in this light, the goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. And that’s what’s wrong with the European model. It doesn’t do that. It enfeebles every single one of them…

Drive through rural Sweden, as I did a few years ago. In every town was a beautiful Lutheran church, freshly painted, on meticulously tended grounds, all subsidized by the Swedish government. And the churches are empty. Including on Sundays. Scandinavia and Western Europe pride themselves on their ‘child-friendly’ policies, providing generous child allowances, free day-care centers, and long maternity leaves. Those same countries have fertility rates far below replacement and plunging marriage rates. Those same countries are ones in which jobs are most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are most lavish. And they, with only a few exceptions, are countries where work is most often seen as a necessary evil, least often seen as a vocation, and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.

What’s happening? Call it the Europe syndrome. Last April I had occasion to speak in Zurich, where I made some of these same points. After the speech, a few of the twenty-something members of the audience approached and said plainly that the phrase ‘a life well-lived’ did not have meaning for them. They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.

It was fascinating to hear it said to my face, but not surprising. It conformed to both journalistic and scholarly accounts of a spreading European mentality. Let me emphasize ‘spreading.’ I’m not talking about all Europeans, by any means. That mentality goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.

If that’s the purpose of life, then work is not a vocation, but something that interferes with the higher good of leisure. If that’s the purpose of life, why have a child, when children are so much trouble — and, after all, what good are they, really? If that’s the purpose of life, why spend it worrying about neighbors?”

Charles Murray

__________

From Charles Murray’s speech “The Happiness of the People,” given as the Irving Kristol Memorial Speech at the American Enterprise Institute’s annual dinner in 2009.

One note for the above speech: The governments of Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia, like France, do have generous pro-natal policies in place, and their birthrates are below replacement level. Yet they’re nowhere near as low as that of Germany or the “formerly Catholic” states (Spain, Greece, Italy), nor are they falling as fast as Britain’s. I touch on that fact — and the relative success of Sweden’s state-sponsored day care centers and maternal allowances — in my thesis.

The other day I was at the American Enterprise Institute and got to sit in on a small talk and film session with Charles Murray. Watch a video from that session — where he summarizes his answer to Is America Still Exceptional? — below:

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