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Debating Human Happiness
Slate Magazine
From: Robert Wright
To: Steven Pinker and Martin Seligman
Subject: Human Nature and Happiness
Tuesday, October 15, 2002, at 11:06 AM PT
First of all, thanks to both of you for gracing the pages of Slate. It's nice to be in the company of two of America's most eminent psychologists. And congratulations on your new books, and all the attention they're getting.
To judge by the press coverage, at least, one might guess that there's some intellectual tension between the two books. Marty, your book, Authentic Happiness, is being described as upbeat and hopeful. And certainly its subtitle—"Using the New Positive Psychology To Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment"—isn't loaded with negative vibes. Steve, your book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, has been described as presenting a "tragic" view of human nature. And, though you'd probably call that an oversimplification, I think you'd agree that in some ways life would be easier if the view your book debunks—of an infinitely malleable human mind—were closer to the truth than it is.
So for starters, I'd like to ask you, Steve, whether your book, with its emphasis on the role of genes in shaping the mind, indeed paints such a grim picture. And, Marty, in reply I hope you'll tell us how your prescription for happiness reckons with the sometimes stubborn limits that genes place on our potential.
To get a little more specific: Steve, your book emphasizes the importance of genes in two senses, and I think Marty basically agrees with you in both cases. But each of these senses would seem to complicate the search for happiness.
First, Steve, you endorse evolutionary psychology, which holds that there is a fairly firm and universal human nature. People in America and Bhutan may in some ways behave quite differently, but if you peer beneath the cultural overlay, you find minds that are basically the same, featuring, for example, the same basic set of emotions, deployed in generally predictable fashion. And various features of human nature would seem to make "lasting fulfillment" elusive. To take a pretty fundamental example: Natural selection didn't "design" us to be lastingly fulfilled. An eternally happy animal would presumably sit around and bask in bliss, rather than do those useful things that anxiety and restlessness provoke us to do—find food and mates, cement alliances, stay vigilant against threats, etc. In other words, lasting contentment would seem to be a prescription for genetic oblivion, in which case genes highly conducive to it presumably wouldn't have survived natural selection; happiness, it seems, is "designed" to evaporate shortly after we attain it by reaching some goal. (Hence addictive behavior—the repeated pursuit of repeatedly vanishing gratification.) And various other features of human nature—rage, jealousy, etc.—would also seem to complicate the quest for bliss.
Second, Steve, you endorse something that is commonly confused with evolutionary psychology but is actually a separate field—behavioral genetics. This field, while not denying the universality of a basic human nature, nonetheless studies genetic differences among people. Yes, anxiety is a part of human nature, and it's elicited by the same basic things in all cultures; but I'm more anxious than my brother, and behavioral geneticists ask how much of such differences is due to genetic difference. And, with all the major personality traits—extroversion, conscientiousness, etc.—they conclude that genetic difference is of non-trivial importance. Of course, these estimates of a trait's "heritability" in a given population don't necessarily tell us anything about any given particular case, such as me and my brother (and for that matter "heritability" is a slippery concept in some other ways, too). Still, behavioral genetics raises the prospect that maybe from birth the chances were overwhelmingly high that I'd always be more anxious than my brother, and that Marty's book can't help me—bad news for me, bad news for Marty.
Broadly speaking, then, I'm asking both of you to tell us whether the role of genes in shaping our everyday experience is legitimately depressing news—and if not, why not? I hope this question helps get the dialogue going, after which you two can take it wherever you want.
From: Steven Pinker
To: Martin Seligman and Robert Wright
Subject: Limits to Pessimism
Tuesday, October 15, 2002, at 12:07 PM PT
Yes, in The Blank Slate I argue that Homo sapiens has much to be modest about. We are prone, to varying degrees and in various circumstances, to ethnocentrism, violence, adultery, ambition, superstition, and self-deception, among other vices. As one reviewer put it, we are not stardust, we are not golden, there is no way we're getting back to the garden—get used to it.
So, does this mean we should all take poison now and be done with it? Not yet. In many ways The Blank Slate is an optimistic book. Limits to pessimism can be found at three levels.
The first consists of philosophical reflections on our condition. Should we rue the fact that we belong to such a sorry species—like Woody Allen when he said, "My one regret in life is that I am not someone else"? In fact our flaws are double-edged, and we might not accept the offer of a demon to trade them in for something else.
Take the kin-selected limits on altruism, which tempt us to form dynasties, hire our relatives, spend money on luxuries for our children (orthodontics, summer camp, expensive educations) that we could have used to save the lives of unrelated children in the developing world, and bequeath our estates to our heirs—one of the biggest impediments to economic equality. Unjust, perhaps. But our close relatives have a special place in our hearts because the place for everyone else is, by definition, less special. Would we really be better off if our relationships with our parents, siblings, and children were not uniquely precious?
Or take romantic love, with all its perfidy and heartbreak. Donald Symons has pointed out that if people belonged to a species in which each couple was marooned on an island for life, the absence of romantic rivals would not select for lifelong bliss; it would select for no consciousness at all. There would be no falling in love because there would be no alternative mates to select from, and falling in love would be a huge waste. Nor would there be pleasure in sex, which would be done for reproduction and would provide no more feeling than the release of hormones or the production of gametes. The richness and intensity of the emotions in our minds are evolutionary testimony to the preciousness and fragility of our relationships in life.
The second level is the one of practical social improvement and hopes for moral progress. Here, too, human nature should not be cause for lamentation. The human mind is a complex system of many parts. It may have temptations toward greed or violence, but it has much else besides. It has cognitive faculties that can learn the lessons of history and take a long view of the future. It has faculties of combinatorial reasoning that can come up with new solutions, just as our combinatorial language faculties come up with new sentences. It has a moral sense and a capacity for sympathy which, granted, might be applied by default only to our clan, but which can also be expanded to include the tribe or species. As Bob Wright showed in Nonzero, this expansion can be driven by our capacity to enjoy gains in trade, making other people more valuable alive than dead; it can also be expanded by cosmopolitan forces (history, journalism, realistic fiction) that make it easier to project ourselves into other peoples' lives.
Finally, we get to the level of individual decisions on how we live our lives. We all know that identical twins reared apart are highly similar in their intelligence, personality, and temperament. That is one of many discoveries suggesting that some of the differences among us come from differences in our genes. But here is a sobering fact. Identical twins, even when they are reared together, are nowhere near being perfectly correlated. Up to half of the variation in psychological traits is not explained by genes, families, or any of the other usual suspects. I believe Marty has some interesting things to say about this.
From: Martin Seligman
To: Robert Wright and Steven Pinker
Subject: Unconstrained Happiness
Tuesday, October 15, 2002, at 12:24 PM PT
Steve suggests that human hope lies in the fact that our flaws are double-edged: that whatever foisted nepotism upon our species also bound us very tightly to our children. Unlike Steve, I think our hope comes more from huge differences between the negative motivations and the positive ones. Our negative emotions, dysphoria, are firefighters, urgent, merciless engines that eliminate irritants. In contrast, happiness broadens our psychological repertoire and builds the psychological capital that we draw on much later in life.
Because happiness is about positive-sum games, about creating what was never there before, obtaining happiness is less genetically constrained than is relieving misery. In Authentic Happiness, I distinguish three very different kinds of happy lives: the Pleasant Life, the Good Life, and the Meaningful Life.
The Pleasant Life is a life of smiles, ebullience, and good cheer. It consists in getting as many of the felt pleasures as possible and using three sets of skills to amplify them: savoring, mindfulness, and variation. Such "positive affectivity" is highly constrained genetically. It is roughly 50 percent heritable, with identical twins much more similar for it than fraternal twins. Like any heritable characteristic (e.g., body weight), the best we can achieve by dint of will and of tuition is to live in the best part of our set range of smiley good cheer. Negative emotionality is also about 50 percent heritable, however, so the 50 percent left over is not what differentiates the plasticity of happiness from rigidity of dysphoria. Rather, Debbie Reynolds notwithstanding, happiness is not just about the Pleasant Life. In fact, Aristotle and Thomas Jefferson would have trouble recognizing American hedonism as the pursuit of happiness.
Half of humankind, genetically in the lower half of positive affectivity, is not smiley and cheerful. They do not look or act like Goldie Hawn, and pleasure-centered ideas of happiness consign these 3 billion people to the hell of unhappiness. But many of these people are enormously capable of the Good Life, what Aristotle called Eudaimonia. The Good Life is a life filled with absorption, immersion, and flow. When we engage in inspiring conversation or listen to great music, for example, time stops for us. We are one with the music. In such a state there is no consciousness, no thought, and no feeling. Afterward we may say, "That was fun," but what we mean is not that there were felt ecstasies, but that we were swept away.
Having the Good Life consists in my view of two steps. The first is simple, the second is difficult. First you need to know what your signature strengths are. Do you "own" social intelligence, or kindness, or fairness, or spirituality, or love of beauty, or integrity? There is a well-validated test for these and Slate's readers can take it free at www.authentichappiness.org. Next, and this is the hard part, you need to recraft your work, your love, your friendships, your leisure, and your parenting to use these signature strengths more frequently than you do now. This produces more flow in the activities of daily life. Importantly, while there are shortcuts to the pleasures (e.g., drugs, masturbation, TV shopping), there are no shortcuts to the Good Life. It can be had only through the knowledge and deployment of your signature strengths.
No one has yet discovered genetic constraints on the Good Life. Everyone has signature strengths and everyone is capable of recrafting their lives to use them more. There may turn out to be some heritability of intensity of flow and immersion, but no one has yet found it. So, happiness in the sense of the Good Life likely does not have much in the way of the genetic chains to drag it down, as does the Pleasant Life.
The third happy life, the Meaningful Life, is likely without any genetic constraints at all. The Meaningful Life consists in knowing what your signature strengths are and using them in the service of something much larger than you are. It is hard to imagine how "unfortunate" and double-edged genes could compromise that.
I have been a therapist and when I help patients fight dysphoria, it is an uphill battle. The success of therapy is measured by how long change lasts before it melts. This Sisyphean struggle likely results from fighting genetic dispositions to sadness or anxiety or anger. When I work with people to increase the Good Life or the Meaningful Life what I see is spontaneous accretion and growth. When an individual learns that she is very kind and uses her kindness more and more at work, kindness simply increases on its own.
Evolution selected for negative motivation to reliably eliminate threats; so urgent and so stereotyped are threats to survival that there is little leeway for ornamentation. Evolution also selected for positive emotions; these are what broadens and builds, and our best hope lies in their legacy: the peacock's tail, the periodic table, and the cathedral.
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very year as February 14 approaches, we are bombarded with
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cause us to lose sight of the complicated realities of entering
into and sustaining intimate relationships. As a counterpoint to
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