I gave up on happiness a long time ago.
When I was a young Evangelical Christian, I wrestled with the battle between Mind and Body very often. The Body may have been a temple, but it was a jealous, lazy, and damningly horny temple. The conflict sparked a lot of self-hatred, and I can remember sitting under a breezeway near the high school auditorium remarking that it would be better to be neutered then to have to endure the inner conflict. From Roman 7’s:
“For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?”
Of course, after a few years of psychology classes and Theory of Knowledge, the pain of Christian Dichotomism came crashing down to be replaced by the most beautiful fact: I am a unified whole, the product of nearly four billion years of evolution, and my Body is Mind and my Mind is Body. There is no conflict between the two, for they were designed together towards the same purpose.
“The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.” - St. Augustine; Confessions
It turns out that atheistic monism, while it may be technically true, is completely useless in practice. For a super majority of the months of 2019, my Body wanted to sleep and drink. That’s *really* useless, even if it is a bit understandable:
In Jacksonville, I was walking a dog almost a year ago from the Jaguars stadium to the Landing. This dog is a super high energy dog, and so, while the entire point of doing this walk was to get him to act low energy for like, an hour, I was still surprised when half way back home he decided to sit and strain against the leash to stay put. He was having none of it. His energy was gone. “Fuck you” Fuck me.
I picked him up and carried him home. He liked that. (He did not act low energy for any time period whatsoever, but whatevs).
The Body strains against the Mind in the exact same way as that dog strained against me, and Haidt begins the Happiness Hypothesis with a deep dive into figuring out what this approximate dichotomism mean. I can think of a few modern secular descriptions. Tim Ferris has popularized and Westernized “The Monkey Mind” and he calms it by writing in his journal. Jordan Peterson means to treat The Body like an entirely different person that you have to help.
Haidt shows us a few historical analogies: Freud and his followers have the vast iceberg* of the id, ego, and superego. The Buddah has the “Horse and The Rider”.
What Haidt does is say, “Yeah, a horse is great and all, but a man riding a horse portrays the man waaaaaay too nicely. The man is riding an elephant, because the elephant is the biggest chunk of The Situation and decides what to do most of the time. The Rider and that which is Ridden are not equals; the Rider almost never gets to even steer.”
This is a freeing metaphor and it’s a useful metaphor, it immediately gives a high-level prescription on what to do to make our lives better: get the Elephant to behave in ways that are good for it; train it into happiness.
The rest of the book is more or less organized on that principle (though this isn’t really mentioned in the book, which thinks of itself as “10 principles” but I’ll get to that):
Happiness can be thought of the alignment of an ever greater expanding circle, starting from the individual Rider and their Elephant to the edges of the Universe. Think of it as an additional dimension to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but instead many circles.
Haidt walks us through them: Once the Rider/Elephant pair align, the Elephant needs to be deconditioned from its default Risk Aversion and the depression, rage and fear that come along with it.
As the two parts of the self are less at cross-purposes, Relationships make up the next circle. Three relationships literally matter the most in a person’s life: the two with their parents and the one one has with their significant other. Pick spouses wisely.
Haidt points to Harlow’s poor baby monkey study to back up his assertions about our attachment systems, and rightly points out that ancient philosophies mostly get “Love” wrong. He calls upon modern neuroscience to give some more timely advice: When finding a partner, Romance, Lust, and Companionship need to be given their time and place and balanced. Haidt points out a danger period in relationships between 1-3 years in when “Romance” collapses before “Companionship” builds up enough to take its place. Navigating this correctly or incorrectly has implications for both lost happiness and lasting pain.
Tending to the next circle of relationships requires us to understand how the Elephant is a half-evolved bee: we are a social animal, and have huge mental machinery dedicated to navigating complex social arrangements (For example, one family of four has 6 relationships to keep track of, two families of four meeting for Christmas dinner have 28 relationships to keep track of, four families of four have 120 relationships, etc).
The Social Elephant works off two principles- Reciprocity and Reputation Guarding. The first is fairly obvious- social animals work better when they’re cooperating, and to cooperate they need to perform reciprocal behavior (grooming each other, sharing meat, sex [if you’re a bonobo], etc). To keep from being cheated, we build out a map of trust with everybody we interact with, and then we also download the map everybody else has of everybody else. This makes up a person’s Reputation.
The problem arises when we actually do fail others and lose their trust: we build stories and tell moral fables to say, “Well, aksually, I’m in the right.” This is post-hoc rationalization, or as they say, “Hamstering”. This is an attempt to guard our Reputation, but what we’re ultimately doing is having the Elephant go into Panic Mode. The Elephant in Panic Mode means an Elephant telling the Rider what to do instead of the other way around. This is bad.
Reputation Guarding comes from a good place- we want to preserve the trust we have- but left unchecked it ultimately leads to losing the ability to trust ourselves.
Continue scaling up the number of relationships, and Reciprocity and Reputation Guarding morph into something else: Identity and Morality. The number of relationships, and therefore the number of reciprocal interactions scales as a square (If you used one neuron for every relationship, then keeping track of every relationship at a school the size of UF would require using 1% of your brain just to identify those relationships).
Identifying as a part of a group lets you borrow the Reputation of that group, and therefore cooperate with people as a part of the umbrella of that identity. That means groups put constraints on those members to protect their collective Reputation. This constraint ultimately becomes Morality.
We’re hardwired to build Identity like this, just as we’re hardwired to find a mate and protect our reputation, so leaning into it is good. Becoming an exemplary member of our groups is an innate drive.
Ultimately, Morality, Identity, and Hierarchy blend together at the highest scale to form the dimension of Divinity. Just as we a stricken by adulation of those amongst us who achieve great moral behavior or who are super high status, that same machinery is activated by mountains, oceans, and stars. We naturally imbue the universe with moral purpose**. The Religious Right have a script for this- they have God. The Secular among us have to build out the story for ourselves*, but it is possible to build.
When aligned at this outer level, “happiness” might not arise, but you get the next best thing: a shot at meaning.
To recap:
Are you aligned within yourself? Have you trained your Elephant to want to do what you want to do? Is the Elephant content or trusting that you will satisfy its needs? Is the Elephant (possibly chemically) depressed?
Are you aligned with your spouse? Does your Elephant and her Elephant get along? (Imagine introducing two dogs if you need to, what do they do?) Do you guys agree on high level plans regarding kids, finances, and identity?
Are you aligned with your closest social groups? Do you *have* close social groups? Do you have an identity you can draw upon to represent yourself? To make yourself not bored and not be boring?
Are you aligned with a broader community? Do you have a place to volunteer? To donate? To perform acts of kindness?
Are you aligned with Universe? Do you know your place in it or a plan to find your place in it? Do you have a Mission?
Uh, answering these questions probably won’t make you happy but it’ll get you closer to whatever it even means to be happy.
As I commented above, the structure I’ve just described it not entirely adapted by Haidt’s book. He presents it as actually *testing* different Happiness Hypotheses, like the “Virtue Hypothesis” or the “Stoicism/Buddhism Hypothesis” or the “Consumerist Hypothesis.” This is great and fine (they’re all wrong) except for the fact that he isn’t just describing the relevant psychology and giving thumbs up/down on the hypotheses, but actively trying to create a prescriptive hypothesis.
It isn’t a self-help book, but, come on man! it’s got “Happiness” in the title and it tells the reader to take Prozac!
This is a quibble about the structure and presentation, but the content of the book is solid except for the problem of “Are all psychology studies before 2016 fucked?” The book is a teenager as of this year, and draws on many studies from before 2006, which means that some of which may have been destroyed by the replication crisis. There is a certain haze that surrounds some of the more surreal findings and that means a lot of references have to pass the “Aaron’s Mom’s BS detector test”***
When the content is good though, the content is good!
Haidt’s book is overall great, and his prescriptivist hypothesis that a balance between Materialist Striving and Stoic Buddhism will bring about the most happiness is well-argued. He doesn’t fully synthesize a hybrid theory, but he definitely points an arrow in that direction.
*It occurs to me that the iceberg metaphor is no longer appropriate from a “politically considerate stand point” given the Warming of Our Times
**I’ve discussed the unnerving meta-apathy of black holes once or twice. If I lived in a state or society or generation that didn’t present as an apathetic machine, would it be harder to project apathy onto a celestial devourer. ?
***If I told my mom about this study, would she say “hmm, okay, whatever” or “why did they need a study on this? duh” (The first is the failed state)
