Why Did Chief Justice Roberts Do It?

I think I know why Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. surprised us all by siding with the liberals on the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) to largely uphold the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.   Roberts cares deeply about the reputation of the SCOTUS, and he knows how dangerous being on the wrong side of history and battling with a President can be.   

I bet you Roberts has read James F. Simon’s FDR and Chief Justice Hughes:  The President, the Supreme Court, and the Epic Battle Over the New Deal.  I also imagine that Roberts identifies with Hughes, a brilliant legal scholar who was the Republican nominee for president in 1916, governor of New York, secretary of state, and a judge on the International Court of Justice.  As Chief Justice, Hughes tried to maintain the prestige and reputation of a sharply divided court.  The conservative justices (Pierce Butler, James Clark McReynolds, George Sutherland, and Willis Van Devanter) were called The Four Horsemen, and the liberal justices (Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Harlan Fiske Stone) were labeled The Three Musketeers.  The Chief Justice and Associate Justice Owen Roberts usually played the role of swing vote. 

After Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was elected president in 1932, he pushed through New Deal legislation to deal with the economic depression.  At first FDR was encouraged by the largely favorable Supreme Court rulings in Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell and Nebbia v. New York, but on Black Monday (May 27, 1935) the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against New Deal laws in three cases.  In Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the SCOTUS overruled FDR’s firing of William Humphrey from the Federal Trade Commission. In Louisville Joint Stock Land Bank v. Radford, the SCOTUS ruled against debt-ridden farmers who were trying to regain farmland they had lost in foreclosure proceedings. In the third case Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, the SCOTUS invalidated the National Industrial Recovery Act.  After Black Monday, there were several more SCOTUS rulings, which went against FDR’s New Deal laws attempting to pull the economy out of the depression.

FDR’s frustration with the SCOTUS led to the ill-fated, controversial White House proposal to pack the court with additional justices for every judge over the age of 70, a proposal that had been put forward by Associate Justice McReynolds when he was a much younger Attorney General.  While opposing FDR’s Judicial Procedures Reform Bill by drafting the Senate Judiciary Committee response, Chief Justice Hughes must have felt the pressure of the falling farm prices, FDR’s plans, and the hanging in effigy of the justices.  Chief Justice Hughes influenced Associate Justice Roberts to change his opposition to minimum wage legislation, and the Chief Justice reversed his initial opposition to the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Board, both of which survived 5 to 4 SCOTUS opinions. 

Roberts is a very smart man who knows that this case will define his legacy as a Chief Justice and will contribute to how the public perceives the SCOTUS (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/us/health-care-act-offers-roberts-a-signature-case.html?pagewanted=all).   According to a Gallup survey, the SCOTUS’ approval rating with the public dropped to 46% in September 2011, down from 61% in 2009 (http://ow.ly/bTNdO). The number of 5 to 4 cases, the Gore v. Bush decision, the recent decision by a Congressional committee to hold the Attorney General in contempt, the results of the Citizens United case, and the intense partisan political climate have all eroded the public’s trust in all institutions of government. 

When Roberts was being confirmed he famously stated:

“Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire... I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” (http://ow.ly/bTNp3).

Today Roberts did the right thing and insured that he will go down in history as a great Chief Justice.  He will also face calls from the far right to be impeached as a traitor. 

The Humanities vs. Science, Part II

The title of this blog is purposefully wrong, or at least misleading.  The humanities and science are not at war and are equally important for my understanding of the world.  However, as we saw in Part I many foolishly regard science as reflecting objective truth and religion as reflecting dogma and authority.  And yet Stanley Fish has convinced me that both these two approaches are provisional and affected by the assumptions, beliefs, and theories of those who practice their respective disciplines. (http://ow.ly/bNc0D) (http://ow.ly/bNbUc)

Defenders of the humanities claim they have no problem with science, but they do challenge the wisdom of what they call the “parascience” or “scientism.” Neurologist Raymond Tallis defines scientism as  “the mistaken belief that the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology and their derivatives) can or will give a complete description and even explanation of everything, including human life.” (http://ow.ly/bNOi4)  Novelist Marilynne Robinson in her Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy at Yale (http://ow.ly/bNPbC) attacks the parascientific approach exemplified by E. O. Wilson’s On Human Nature:

“The core of scientific materialism is the evolutionary epic.  Let me repeat its minimum claims:  that the laws of the physical sciences are consistent with those of the biological and social sciences and can be linked in chains of causal explanation; that life and mind have a physical basis; that the world as we know it has evolved from earlier worlds obedient to the same laws; and that the visible universe today is everywhere subject to these materialist explanations.”

One way to get at the tension between the humanities and scientism is to focus on first principles, the subject of the Albert/Krauss conflict described in Part I.  Science has replaced metaphysics in the modern academy, but it is worth recalling the Oxford English Dictionary definition of metaphysics:

“That branch of speculative inquiry which treats of the first principles of things, including such concepts as being, substance, essence, time, space, cause, identity, etc; theoretical philosophy as the ultimate science of Being and Knowing.”

Robinson echoes Fish when she takes parascience to task for saying that metaphysics no longer has utility:

“To say there is no aspect of being that metaphysics can meaningful address is a metaphysical statement. To say that metaphysics is a cultural phase or misapprehension that can be put aside is also a metaphysical statement.  The notion of accident does nothing to dispel mystery, nothing to diminish scale.” (http://ow.ly/bNPbC)

Robinson wants us to remember that science is a relatively recent phenomenon culturally localized in the West and that religion is far more ancient and global.  She argues for including insights from both in our understanding of the world, and she worries that “mind as felt experience has been excluded from important fields of modern thought.”  She finds the parascience view of human history “to suggest a parochialism that follows from a belief in science as a kind of magic, as if it existed apart from history and culture, rather than being, in objective truth and inevitably, their product.” (http://ow.ly/bNPbC)  This is an observation, which I believe Fish would endorse.

Exhibiting a confidence and ego to match Dawkins (which is saying a lot), Tallis attacks scientism with a zeal hard to describe.  His passion seems to come from his stance as a meliorist who needs to believe that humans are fundamentally different from other animals and that we humans have a duty to work together to improve the conditions of existence for our fellow man.  For Tallis the stakes in this battle are indeed high and worth fighting for; if his enemies win:

“Our distinctive nature, our freedom, our selfhood and even human society would be reduced to the properties of living matter, and this in turn would be ripe to be reduced, via molecular biology, to matter period.” (http://ow.ly/bNOi4)

In a previous blog post, I have summarized how Tallis the neurologist gleefully attacks those who have ruined neuroscience with imaging studies that are poorly designed and misinterpreted by the lay press. In just one example he quotes Matthew Crawford’s characterization of a brain scan as “’a fast-acting solvent of critical faculties.’” (http://ow.ly/bNVE5)

In numbing detail, Tallis puts forth his thesis that much of parascience is based on overreaching conclusions from experiments that “grotesquely simplify human life.”  Tallis approvingly quotes Andrew Scull who writes:

“The neuroscientific findings that are so proudly proffered reflect simple simulated experiments that in no way capture the intricacies of everyday social situations, let alone the complex interactions over time that make up human history.” (http://ow.ly/bNOi4)

Like Robinson, Tallis cannot accept parascience’s insistence that everything humans do directly or indirectly serves the replication of our selfish genes.  Tallis believes such a conclusion ignores much that is central to human nature and quotes William James to support his case:

“Man’s chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities…Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.” (http://ow.ly/bNOi4)

Although Tallis dissects neuro-economics, neuro-law,  neuro-lit-crit, neuro-theology, neuro-truistics, neuroaesthetics, and neuroarthistory, I will only summarize his views on art in this blog post.  The parascience approach to art is described concisely by Robinson:

“What is art? It is a means of attracting mates, even though artists may have felt that it was an exploration of experience, of the possibilities of communication, and of the extraordinary collaboration of eye and hand.” (http://ow.ly/bNPbC)

Talllis disapprovingly examines Semir Zeki who directs an institute at University College London devoted to neuroaesthetics.  Zeki discusses his views on art.

“The artist in a sense is a neuroscientist, exploring the potential and capacities of the brain, though with different tools.  How such creations can arouse aesthetic experiences can only be fully understood in neural terms.  Such an understanding is now well within our reach.” (http://ow.ly/bNOi4)

Zeki believes Mondrian speaks preferentially to cells in region V1 and V4 and that the Fauves stimulate V4 and the middle frontal convolutions.  Tallis attacks this approach because

·      “Great artists are more often biological losers than they are alpha semen spreaders.”

·      Art engages us as whole human beings.

·      “Works of art…are in dialogue with the world in which they are produced, with other works in the same and different genres and with the earlier and later works of the same artist.  They invite us not only to have experiences but to examine those experiences.”

·      “Rembrandt’s series of self portraits is not merely a parade of coloured surfaces but a profound meditation on the tragedy and beauty of the course of life.” (http://ow.ly/bNOi4)

Fish, Robinson, and Tallis have convinced me that science does not give a complete description and explanation of human life.  I am going to have to reject Francis Crick’s Astonishing Hypothesis:

“You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” (http://ow.ly/bNVE5)

Instead I am going to embrace Marilynne Robinson’s conclusion that there is a mind separate from the brain, there are things unknowable in this world, and that the humanities can still teach me things that science cannot explain:

“As proof of the existence of mind we have only history and civilization, art, science, and philosophy. And at the same time, of course, that extraordinary individuation.” (http://ow.ly/bNPbC)

           

  

The Humanities vs. Science, Part I

The humanities and the natural sciences are equally important in trying to make sense of the world.  However, neither approach can claim “the advantage of being in touch with the world as it is apart from anyone’s beliefs, allegiances, assumptions and theories.” (http://ow.ly/bNbUc)

And yet some of the most prominent scientists publishing today seem to believe that science provides wise insights into the world based on experiments conducted by logical, rational methods, while the humanities (religion and philosophy for example) rely on dogma, irrational faith, authority, subjectivity, and trust.  Academic superstars such as Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, and John Gray come immediately to mind. 

Two recent public dustups have highlighted the unnecessary tension between science and the humanities that reflects much modern academic thought.  In one quarrel, philosophy and physics squared off over a negative book review of Krauss’ A Universe From Nothing:  Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing. (http://ow.ly/bNbXU)   In the other dispute, Dawkins and Pinker on a MSNBC Sunday talk show exhibited the smug triumphalism of famous scientists who know that their approach explains everything and that “religion clouds the minds of those who, if they were only sufficiently educated, would arrive at the conclusions supported by the overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence and reject the blind adherence to revealed or ecclesiastical authority that characterizes religious belief” about global warming.  (http://ow.ly/bNc0D)

David Albert, a philosopher with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, wrote the New York Times book review that criticized Krauss for writing “that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing.” Albert draws attention to the battle lines between physics and religion by quoting Dawkins who wrote in the afterword to the book, “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’, shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages.  If ‘On the Origin of the Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology.  The title means exactly what it says.  And what it says is devastating.” (http://ow.ly/bNbXU)

Albert is just as devastating in pointing out that Krauss does “not have a clue about” where the laws of quantum mechanics come from.  The fundamental laws of nature have “simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff…But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.”  After explaining why Krauss does not really understand relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states, Albert ends his review with, “It seems like a pity…to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.” (http://ow.ly/bNbXU)   Krauss called Albert “moronic” and is described as believing that “philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless.”  In this assessment, Krauss seemed to agree with Hawking’s declaration that philosophy is “’dead.’” (http://ow.ly/bNc6K)

Stanley Fish explores similar themes because he watched the talk show where the host asked the question, “If you hold to the general skepticism that informs scientific inquiry…how do you respond to global-warming deniers…when they invoke the same principle of open inquiry to argue they should be given a fair hearing.”  Dawkins responded that in science you can quote Professor So-and-So’s 2008 study, “’you can actually cite chapter and verse.’”  (http://ow.ly/bNc0D)

Fish pounces by noting that Dawkin’s argument is “circular and amounts to saying that the chapter and verse we find authoritative is the chapter and verse of the scripture we believe in because we believe in its first principle, in this case the adequacy and superiority of a materialist inquiry into questions religion answers by mere dogma.”  ((http://ow.ly/bNc0D

“With this proverbial phrase, Dawkins unwittingly (I assume) attached himself to the centuries-old practice of citing biblical verses in support of a position on any number of matters, including, but not limited to, diet, animal husbandry, agricultural policy, family governance, political governance, commercial activities and the conduct of war.  Intellectual responsibility for such matters has passed in the modern era from the Bible to academic departments bearing the names of the enumerated topics.  We still cite chapter and verse – we still operate on trust – but the scripture has changed (at least in this country) and is now identified with the most up-to-date research conducted by credentialed and secular investigators.”  ((http://ow.ly/bNc0D

I have written before about the assumptions all scientists make about the world we are trying to understand when we do science. (http://ow.ly/bNcdw)

“The astronomer John Barrow notes ‘the practice of science…rests upon a number of presuppositions about the nature of reality.’ He identifies nine such presuppositions:

▪                The external world is external to our minds and is the source of our sensations.

▪                The external world is rational

▪                The world be analyzed locally without destroying its structure

▪                The elementary entities do not possess free will.

▪                The separation of events from our perception of them is a harmless simplification

▪                Nature possess regularities which are predictable

▪                Space and time exist

▪                The world can be described by mathematics

▪                These presuppositions hold in an identical fashion everywhere and every when.

(The World Within the World, New York: Oxford     University Press, 1988).”

Fish also understands that religious believers and scientists both operate by assuming things, albeit different things, about reality

People like Dawkins and Pinker do not survey the world in a manner free of assumptions about what it is like and then, from that (impossible) disinterested position, pick out the set of reasons that will be adequate to its description.  They begin with the assumption (an act of faith) that the world is an object capable of being described by methods unattached to any imputation of deity, and they then develop procedures… that yield results, and they call those results reasons for concluding this or that.  And they are reasons, but only within the assumptions that both generate them and give them point. (http://ow.ly/bNc0D)  

Although readers responded by “pouring the proverbial ton of bricks on my head,” Fish held his ground in a second blog posting.  Fish points out that both science and the humanities work.  Therapy “enhances the ability to socially interact, at least sometimes,” and religion “gives meaning and direction to life, at least for some people.” “The…qualifications in the previous sentence acknowledge that the certainty these practices give us is, at least from the perspective of the long run, provisional.” (http://ow.ly/bNbUc)

But as I have written before the truths of science are provisional as well. (http://ow.ly/bNcdw)

“Lys Ann Shore and Karl Popper add to my doubts that science will tell me what is really going on. Shore has written, ‘The quest for absolute certainty must be recognized as alien to the scientific attitude, since scientific knowledge is fallible, tentative, and open to revision and modification (Hagen, 1995).’ 

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes Popper’s philosophy of science (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/):

‘Scientific theories, for him, are not inductively inferred from experience, nor is scientific experimentation carried out with a view to verifying or finally establishing the truth of theories; rather, all knowledge is provisional, conjectural, hypothetical—we can never finally prove our scientific theories, we can merely (provisionally) confirm or (conclusively) refute them; hence at any given time we have to choose between the potentially infinite number of theories which will explain the set of phenomena under investigation. Faced with this choice, we can only eliminate those theories which are demonstrably false, and rationally choose between the remaining, unfalsified theories. Hence Popper’s emphasis on the importance of the critical spirit to science—for him critical thinking is the very essence of rationality. For it is only by critical thought that we can eliminate false theories, and determine which of the remaining theories is the best available one.’

Popper thought there are only two kinds of scientific theories: those that have been proven to be wrong and those that have yet to be proven wrong.”

The humanities and the natural sciences are both useful in my quest to better understand the world I find myself living in.  In Part II of this blog post, I will examine the backlash of some humanists who reject the prevailing conventional modern wisdom that science explains everything.

The Humanities vs. Science, Part I

The humanities and the natural sciences are equally important in trying to make sense of the world.  However, neither approach can claim “the advantage of being in touch with the world as it is apart from anyone’s beliefs, allegiances, assumptions and theories.” (http://ow.ly/bNbUc)

And yet some of the most prominent scientists publishing today seem to believe that science provides wise insights into the world based on experiments conducted by logical, rational methods, while the humanities (religion and philosophy for example) rely on dogma, irrational faith, authority, subjectivity, and trust.  Academic superstars such as Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, and John Gray come immediately to mind. 

Two recent public dustups have highlighted the unnecessary tension between science and the humanities that reflects much modern academic thought.  In one quarrel, philosophy and physics squared off over a negative book review of Krauss’ A Universe From Nothing:  Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing. (http://ow.ly/bNbXU)   In the other dispute, Dawkins and Pinker on a MSNBC Sunday talk show exhibited the smug triumphalism of famous scientists who know that their approach explains everything and that “religion clouds the minds of those who, if they were only sufficiently educated, would arrive at the conclusions supported by the overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence and reject the blind adherence to revealed or ecclesiastical authority that characterizes religious belief” about global warming.  (http://ow.ly/bNc0D)

David Albert, a philosopher with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, wrote the New York Times book review that criticized Krauss for writing “that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing.” Albert draws attention to the battle lines between physics and religion by quoting Dawkins who wrote in the afterword to the book, “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’, shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages.  If ‘On the Origin of the Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology.  The title means exactly what it says.  And what it says is devastating.” (http://ow.ly/bNbXU)

Albert is just as devastating in pointing out that Krauss does “not have a clue about” where the laws of quantum mechanics come from.  The fundamental laws of nature have “simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff…But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.”  After explaining why Krauss does not really understand relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states, Albert ends his review with, “It seems like a pity…to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.” (http://ow.ly/bNbXU)   Krauss called Albert “moronic” and is described as believing that “philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless.”  In this assessment, Krauss seemed to agree with Hawking’s declaration that philosophy is “’dead.’” (http://ow.ly/bNc6K)

Stanley Fish explores similar themes because he watched the talk show where the host asked the question, “If you hold to the general skepticism that informs scientific inquiry…how do you respond to global-warming deniers…when they invoke the same principle of open inquiry to argue they should be given a fair hearing.”  Dawkins responded that in science you can quote Professor So-and-So’s 2008 study, “’you can actually cite chapter and verse.’”  (http://ow.ly/bNc0D)

Fish pounces by noting that Dawkin’s argument is “circular and amounts to saying that the chapter and verse we find authoritative is the chapter and verse of the scripture we believe in because we believe in its first principle, in this case the adequacy and superiority of a materialist inquiry into questions religion answers by mere dogma.”  ((http://ow.ly/bNc0D

“With this proverbial phrase, Dawkins unwittingly (I assume) attached himself to the centuries-old practice of citing biblical verses in support of a position on any number of matters, including, but not limited to, diet, animal husbandry, agricultural policy, family governance, political governance, commercial activities and the conduct of war.  Intellectual responsibility for such matters has passed in the modern era from the Bible to academic departments bearing the names of the enumerated topics.  We still cite chapter and verse – we still operate on trust – but the scripture has changed (at least in this country) and is now identified with the most up-to-date research conducted by credentialed and secular investigators.”  ((http://ow.ly/bNc0D

I have written before about the assumptions all scientists make about the world we are trying to understand when we do science. (http://ow.ly/bNcdw)

“The astronomer John Barrow notes ‘the practice of science…rests upon a number of presuppositions about the nature of reality.’ He identifies nine such presuppositions:

▪                The external world is external to our minds and is the source of our sensations.

▪                The external world is rational

▪                The world be analyzed locally without destroying its structure

▪                The elementary entities do not possess free will.

▪                The separation of events from our perception of them is a harmless simplification

▪                Nature possess regularities which are predictable

▪                Space and time exist

▪                The world can be described by mathematics

▪                These presuppositions hold in an identical fashion everywhere and every when.

(The World Within the World, New York: Oxford     University Press, 1988).”

Fish also understands that religious believers and scientists both operate by assuming things, albeit different things, about reality

People like Dawkins and Pinker do not survey the world in a manner free of assumptions about what it is like and then, from that (impossible) disinterested position, pick out the set of reasons that will be adequate to its description.  They begin with the assumption (an act of faith) that the world is an object capable of being described by methods unattached to any imputation of deity, and they then develop procedures… that yield results, and they call those results reasons for concluding this or that.  And they are reasons, but only within the assumptions that both generate them and give them point. (http://ow.ly/bNc0D)  

Although readers responded by “pouring the proverbial ton of bricks on my head,” Fish held his ground in a second blog posting.  Fish points out that both science and the humanities work.  Therapy “enhances the ability to socially interact, at least sometimes,” and religion “gives meaning and direction to life, at least for some people.” “The…qualifications in the previous sentence acknowledge that the certainty these practices give us is, at least from the perspective of the long run, provisional.” (http://ow.ly/bNbUc)

But as I have written before the truths of science are provisional as well. (http://ow.ly/bNcdw)

“Lys Ann Shore and Karl Popper add to my doubts that science will tell me what is really going on. Shore has written, ‘The quest for absolute certainty must be recognized as alien to the scientific attitude, since scientific knowledge is fallible, tentative, and open to revision and modification (Hagen, 1995).’ 

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes Popper’s philosophy of science (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/):

‘Scientific theories, for him, are not inductively inferred from experience, nor is scientific experimentation carried out with a view to verifying or finally establishing the truth of theories; rather, all knowledge is provisional, conjectural, hypothetical—we can never finally prove our scientific theories, we can merely (provisionally) confirm or (conclusively) refute them; hence at any given time we have to choose between the potentially infinite number of theories which will explain the set of phenomena under investigation. Faced with this choice, we can only eliminate those theories which are demonstrably false, and rationally choose between the remaining, unfalsified theories. Hence Popper’s emphasis on the importance of the critical spirit to science—for him critical thinking is the very essence of rationality. For it is only by critical thought that we can eliminate false theories, and determine which of the remaining theories is the best available one.’

Popper thought there are only two kinds of scientific theories: those that have been proven to be wrong and those that have yet to be proven wrong.”

The humanities and the natural sciences are both useful in my quest to better understand the world I find myself living in.  In Part II of this blog post, I will examine the backlash of some humanists who reject the prevailing conventional modern wisdom that science explains everything.

The Downsides of Trying Too Hard to Be Happy (Part II)

“It’s really frightening.  People need to read a book on how to be happy? It’s completely an American thing.  Can you imagine people in Naples sitting on a bus or in a trattoria reading a book on happiness?                                                                                                     Charles Simic

“Melancholia pushes against the easy ‘either/or’ of the status quo. It thrives in unexplored ground between oppositions, in the ‘both/and.’”                                                     Eric G. Wilson

“Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea.  Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.”                                                        Henri Frederic Amiel

Americans are obsessed with happiness.  I have read at last count 16 books on the subject; if you prefer magazine articles to books, take a look at the cover stories of Time, Oprah, and the Economist. I recently published a four part blog with my reactions to an art exhibit titled Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Show (http://www.thedoctorweighsin.com/musings-on-stefan-sagmeister-the-happy-show-part-iv-the-end/). Governments in places as diverse as the UK and Bhutan are trying to pass laws to make their citizens happier, and economists are creating happiness indexes to complement the gross domestic product.   Motivational speakers and therapists are telling us how to become happier and how to raise happy children.  In Part I of this blog I tried to understand why this movement, which I find fascinating and useful, is also troubling.

Recent research has revealed that too much happiness can be detrimental.  In Mark Alan Davis’s 2008 meta-analysis of the relationship between mood and creativity, intense amounts of happiness were correlated with decreased creativity.  Barbara Fredrickson has studied how too much positive emotion makes research subjects inflexible in the face of new challenges.  An older study by Howard S. Friedman found that highly cheerful school-aged children had a greater risk of mortality in adulthood; people who are too happy disregard threats and engage in risky behavior like excessive alcohol drinking, binge eating, sexual promiscuity, and drug use.  (http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/four_ways_happiness_can_hurt_you)

Shigehiro Oishi studied people over several decades of life and found that the happiest individuals had lower levels of income, academic achievement, job satisfaction, and political participation than those who reported only moderate happiness in early life.  In the same study, the happiest research subjects had more close friends, were more likely to be married, and more likely to volunteer in their community.  Oishi concludes, “It is generally difficult to simultaneously have an extremely high level of overall happiness, intimate relationships, and achievements.” (http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/can_you_be_too_happy)

Oishi’s finding that the happiest individuals do not participate in the political process worries some.  In response to the popular happiness advice, “see life as it is, but focus on the good bits,” one blogger wrote, “we should resist the tendency to shy away from certain difficult questions, and to simply roll over and let our stomachs be tickled in a frenzy of feel-good sentiment.”

If we really care about happiness and well-being, of course we should care about the good bits; but we should care also about the bad bits: about the obscene extent of the global military investment, for example; or about the pervasive problems of poverty and the scandal of the fact that there are people in this country who do not have a roof over their head; about the ever-widening gulf between rich and poor; about the way the very richest and most powerful individuals and institutions across the globe, with the support of our elected or unelected representatives, often act to the detriment of the collective good. (http://www.thinkbuddha.org/article/497/the-trouble-with-happiness)

There is some recent research that supports the conclusion that happiness is not suited to every situation, especially the difficult ones described in the above passage.  Maya Tamir of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Boston College has found that happy people perform worse in a competitive computer game than angry people.  June Gruber of Yale University has found that people who experience happy moods in inappropriate contexts such as watching a film of a young child crying are at greater risk for developing mania.  (http://pps.sagepub.com/content/6/3/222.abstract)

In Part I of this blog we encountered Eric G. Wilson who worries that our current interest in happiness may lead to undervaluing sadness and what he terms melancholia; for Wilson there must be a balance between these two emotions in order to authentically live in the world as it really is.  Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield in The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sadness into Depressive Disorder (http://ow.ly/bc3Kw) examine how depression is over-diagnosed in patients who are experiencing normal intense sadness in response to life events. 

On a larger scale, the misdiagnosis of depression creates the impression that Americans are becoming more depressed (an internal condition) rather than suffering greater social problems (an external condition), two problems that call for completely different solutions (medication versus changing social policy). (http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/trouble_happiness)

Whether striving for happiness is good or bad for you depends on how you define happiness.  Differentiating between “hedonic well-being” and “eudaimonia” might be useful.  Movies, big California cabernets, and Philadelphia Phillies baseball victories all make me happy, and they are probably best understood by the former term.  Aristotle wrote that humans can attain eudaimonia (well being or flourishing) by fulfilling their potential by graduating from Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, successfully raising two children, and volunteering at Philabundance.

As Carol Ryff of the University of Wisconsin, Madison puts it: “Sometimes things that really matter most are not conducive to short-term happiness.” In Ryff’s research, she has found that individuals who rank high on eudaimonic well-being had lower levels of interleukin-6 and a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer’s disease compared to those with lower eudaimonic well-being.  Another study of 950 individuals found that those reporting a lesser sense of purpose in life were more than twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease compared to those reporting greater sense of purpose in life.  (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704893604576200471545379388.html)

There is a rich religious and literary tradition that concludes that pursuing happiness may be a fool’s errand.  Malcolm Muggeridge stated, “I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.”  In one study participants who were told to “try to make yourself feel as happy as possible” while they listened to a piece of hedonically ambiguous music reported they felt less positive compared to a control group who received no instructions before hearing the music.  In another study the more people valued happiness the less well-being and the more mental health issues they reported.  In yet another study the more people valued happiness, the lonelier they feel on a daily basis according to their diaries. Other researchers found that leading people to value happiness more resulted in greater loneliness and social disconnect measured by self reports and progesterone levels. (http://pps.sagepub.com/content/6/3/222.abstract)

America’s current obsession with happiness is not without pitfalls and unintended consequences.  Researchers are starting to provide evidence that blindly pursuing happiness for its own sake can result in mixed results at best. 

The Downsides of Trying Too Hard to Be Happy (Part I)

“Whoever commits to paper what he suffers becomes a melancholy author; but he becomes a serious author when he tells us what he suffered and why he now reposes in joy”                                                                                            Friedrich Nietzsche

“So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true – not true, or undeveloped.”                     Herman Melville

“There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity”                                                                 Alan Watts

Martin Seligman’s decision as the newly elected President of the American Psychological Association in 1998 to create a new science of happiness was a welcome and necessary reaction to psychology’s historical focus on mental illness.  Seligman’s two books Authentic Happiness and more recently Flourish have influenced how I think about happiness and how I live my life.  His latest PERMA theory of happiness informs how I try to use evidence-based psychology to become happier. (http://www.thedoctorweighsin.com/musings-on-stefan-sagmeister-the-happy-show-part-ii/)

And yet, even as I devoured book after book and article after article on positive psychology, I sensed there was something wrong or perhaps incomplete about my approach to trying to be happy.  Happiness does not always seem to me to be the proper response to the world that I encounter with all its sadness, hatred, war, poverty, and inequality.   There are times and places where the proper response, it seems to me, is anger and indignation and sometimes sadness. 

I also struggled with reconciling my quest for happiness with my growing realization that I became a better person the less I thought about myself.   Don Beck and Chris Cowan’s book Spiral Dynamics, (http://www.amazon.com/Spiral-Dynamics-Mastering-Values-Leadership/dp/1405133562/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338132230&sr=1-1) based on the human development theories of Clare W. Graves, convinced me that higher levels of consciousness were associated with being less and less concerned about my individual self.  I am not sure I ever fully understood the color-coded memes and the spiral nature of the levels, but the book did change my thinking.

I found Robert Kegan’s concept that the demands of modern society make most of us feel “in over our heads” useful, and his three levels of consciousness were easier for me to explain to others.  The concept of the faithful follower who seeks explicit instructions, worries what others think, and becomes anxious when he is out of synch with leaders helps me interact with my colleagues with a “socialized mind.”  The concept of the “self authoring mind” does describe others and me who become anxious when we lose control and when others challenge our solutions to problems.  The concept of the “self transforming mind” that is comfortable with contradiction and paradox and that realizes that all people are interdependent does make sense as the most appropriate level of consciousness to effectively deal with the world. (http://www.amazon.com/Immunity-Change-Potential-Organization-Leadership/dp/1422117367/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338133294&sr=1-1)

Eric Greitens’ Tufts Commencement Address illustrated the above concept in a forceful and memorable way;

I saw the same thing later when I worked in Rwanda with survivors of the genocide, and in Cambodia when I worked with kids who had lost limbs to landmines.  In every case, those who knew that they had a purpose that was larger than themselves, those who knew others were counting on them, they grew to be stronger….

I found that what was true for the refugees in Bosnia was true in my own life and my own hardest moment; that the more I thought about myself, the weaker I became.  The more I recognized that I was serving a purpose larger than myself, the stronger I became. Having learned that lesson in college, having lived it in the SEAL teams, today, I try to share that lesson and the work we do at The Mission Continues.  (http://now.tufts.edu/commencement-address-eric-greitens)

Greitens’ tough-minded approach contrasts with many of my friends whose focus on personal happiness flirts with a narcissism ill equipped to deal with the human suffering and inequality and war that Navy SEALs encounter in the real world.

Eric G. Wilson’s book Against Happiness crystallized my misgivings about my own and America’s obsession with the pursuit of happiness.  In the introduction, Wilson states his case:

I for one am afraid that our American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am wary in the face of this possibility:  to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations….

Our passion for felicity hint at an ominous hatred for all that grows and thrives and dies.

Wilson believes that the authentic life of anyone who realizes they will eventually die and who sees the world for what it really is must include happiness and sadness, “growth and decay, ecstasy and agony.”

Part II will continue our exploration of the pitfalls of trying too hard to be happy.