A Warm Gun
I have a backlog of things to post about, and work to catch up on besides, and then Alan Jacobs distracts me by writing about children and happiness.
Some thoughts:
1. The word, “happy” means, most closely, “fortunate.” The root, “hap,” is tied up in ideas of luck, accident, fate – the word, “happen,” comes from the same root. When thinking about maximizing happiness, it’s worth questioning whether such a state is possible – whether it’s possible to feel fortunate without some realistic concept of misfortune to contrast one’s state with.
2. Relatedly, the “pursuit of happiness,” if happiness is understood as “good fortune,” becomes a rather pregnant paradox. Setting out to “seek one’s fortune” is generally understood to mean embracing the taking of risk in the hope of fortune’s favor. “Pursuit,” though, comes from the hunt. It is a characteristic American audacity that we presume to stalk a goddess.
3. I suspect rather strongly that it would be easier to prove that writers have less “emotional well-being” and more frequent experience of “negative emotions” than non-writers, than to prove a similar comparison between parents and non-parents. I don’t know Wilkinson, but if he is anything like any writer I have met (or like myself), if you monitored his “emotional well-being” over the course of working on a piece of writing, he would demonstrate rather frequent “negative emotions” – probably far more frequent than positive. Again, assuming he is like other writers I know, I cannot imagine that Wilkinson, if offered a drug that would take away his interest in writing, would take the treatment, regardless of the evidence presented. He has not organized his life around “emotional well-being” – and neither does anybody else. Rather, I suspect he has organized his life around the pursuit – both in the sense of “the hunt” and “the vocation” – and, indeed, values “emotional well-being” in large part because that state is more conducive to any pursuit than “frequent negative emotions.”
4. Wilkinson thought this paragraph from the Newsweek piece was excellent and accurate:
“If you admit that kids and parenthood aren’t making you happy, it’s basically blasphemy,” says Jen Singer, a stay-at-home mother of two from New Jersey who runs the popular parenting blog MommaSaid.net. “From baby-lotion commercials that make motherhood look happy and well rested, to commercials for Disney World where you’re supposed to feel like a kid because you’re there with your kids, we’ve made parenthood out to be one blissful moment after another, and it’s disappointing when you find out it’s not.”
Is this an indictment of parenthood, or of baby-lotion commercials? Can Wilkinson think of any product hawked on television that delivered anything resembling the emotional state promised in the advertizing? Parenthood isn’t really about happiness; it’s about continuity. But consumer capitalism isn’t really about happiness either; it’s about efficiency. Either may produce lots of “negative emotion” as an externality.
5. None of this is to suggest that “more kids is better” is the principle I hold or live by (I have one adopted son, and no biological children). Moreover, the emotional risks of deriving one’s purpose from one’s children are (if anything) greater than the emotional risks of expecting them to impart “emotional well-being.” None of us want to wind up like Mama Rose, after all.
6. Nor is this an attempt to suggest that happiness studies have no purpose. Indeed, it is very useful to understand that people do make choices that make them unhappy. And it is then very productive to ask those people why they do these things. Sometimes, there is no good answer, in which case they really ought to stop. Other times, there is a very good answer, in which case the question becomes not, “why don’t you stop,” but, “how can you be happier with this important choice you made?” And, to the extent that we as a society care about the aggregate impact of these choices, is there anything we can do to help?
Because I’ve been writing about happiness for a good long time now (probably as much as anyone over the last couple years), it’s easy for me to write blog posts on happiness mistakenly assuming a great deal of shared context with my readers. So I do encourage folks to read especially the first part of my Cato paper on happiness to understand where I’m coming from. Not saying Noah’s saying this, but others are, so I want to emphasize that I don’t have a vulgar reductionist view about happiness or the value of live. I have a pretty sophisticated reductionist view. I am in fact a pluralist about values (even pluralist about the biophysical constituents of happiness), and my attitude toward happiness research is one of supportive skepticism. Happiness is not the only thing that matters. But it does matter a lot to most of us. If we can measure it, and find out what its determinants are, we should do that. If we’re not doing such a good job of measuring now, which we aren’t, we should try harder. I feel like Noah and I are on the same page here.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8179
Noah’s right. I find writing unpleasant. And I’m having a hard time completing a project I’ve been working on for a long time, and it’s frankly making me miserable, even despondent. But I think it’s worth it. I’ve written in the past that I think a real commitment to truth can make you sort of miserable, too. And I care more about truth than not being miserable. And I badly want to raise a child some day. I just think it’s better to make life’s choices understanding their costs, and if the costs of raising children are high, we should face up to that. I am fascinated by the data on kids, partly because the reaction is so violent. People don’t say “so much the worse for happiness” when the newspapers tell us that commuting makes us unhappy. So I think it’s pretty interesting to understand what’s really going on psychologically and culturally when it comes to kids.
— Will Wilkinson · Jul 22, 02:50 PM · #
I want to say something about this:
“Parenthood isn’t really about happiness; it’s about continuity. But consumer capitalism isn’t really about happiness either; it’s about efficiency. Either may produce lots of “negative emotion” as an externality.”
I’m confused by the idea that parenthood is ABOUT any one thing. The mens rea of most parents is obscure to me. Trying to write a great novel may be about continuity, about getting famous, or making a million dollars. Parenthood can be about having something to love, a feeling of worth since at least SOMEONE depends on you, about qualifying for a subsidy, about gratifying a deep longing to externalize and embody one’s love with one’s partner, and to love it intensly in turn.
Consumer capitalism is even LESS about anything. If it is an aim, rather than a side effect of people pursuing their aims, then the aim may be to make sure people get what they want (efficiency!), but the aim may also be delight in its unpredictable plenitude. I happen to love consumer capitalism itself, for it’s creatively destructive carnivality, in addition to the fact that it makes people happier by giving them more of what they want. But what is it about? What is a coral reef about?
— Will Wilkinson · Jul 22, 03:03 PM · #
I think this conversation is made more difficult by shifting definitions. I can’t tell if we’re talking about happiness as an aggregate or happiness as a binary, for one thing. Pardon me if this is a banal thought but just as Wil and Noah are suggesting that happiness and moral values aren’t the same thing, I would say that I don’t think happiness and unhappiness are conflicting things. I don’t think there is a negative-value happiness; I don’t think happiness increases as unhappiness decreases, but that they are separate phenomena which are perfectly capable of coexisting, even in equal supply. (To get Bob Wright on you, they are non-zero sums.) And I would suggest that this is how most of us feel for most of our lives.
— Freddie · Jul 22, 03:14 PM · #
Freddie,
Biologically, there are multiple systems that create good feelings and multiple systems that create bad feelings. You can feel pleasure and pain simultaneously because these are distinct mechanisms. This is what leads to the internal pluralism I mentioned. You can be feeling great about finishing a project, have a headache, while getting a massage and feeling sad about a relative who has died. How good or bad this mix is in the end depends on how the subject happens to prioritize and evaluate the various kinds of affect he is experiencing, and there is no fact of the matter about how this should be done.
— Will Wilkinson · Jul 22, 03:31 PM · #
Freddie:
I don’t think happiness is properly a feeling at all; it’s a state of being. “Call no man happy until he is dead” and all that. Pleasure is a feeling. So is joy – and I’d distinguish between those two as well for being different kinds of feelings, not just different scales of feeling. It makes life tougher for those who are trying to measure things, but I think we have a rich language for a reason, and any reductionism has to start with a complete picture of our mental and emotional life, and reduce from there, and not start by flattening that picture in the interests of easier analysis.
— Noah Millman · Jul 22, 03:39 PM · #
Will:
Re: what things are about: what I meant was not “what is the motivation” but “what is the governing principle.” Capitalism is “about” efficiency in that sense. Inasmuch as there is any underlying logic to capitalism at all, efficiency is at its heart. The vast panorama of consumer society may or may not be beautiful, but it’s not about being beautiful – it’s not organized on that principle. Nor is it organized around justice, nor, really, around aggregate utility – indeed, critiques of consumer capitalism from within the liberal tradition are generally grounded in an argument that, contra Richard Posner, efficiency is not the same thing as aggregate utility or justice, and the common recognition that it is efficiency, and not these other principles, that consumer capitalism is “about.”
Parenthood is “about” continuity similarly: a zygote is a gamete’s way of making other gametes. That doesn’t stop a girl from getting pregnant as a way of punishing her mother; our individual motivations for any activity may vary widely.
— Noah Millman · Jul 22, 03:57 PM · #
Oh, I see. I misunderstood the sense of continuity you had in mind. I thought you meant people do it to have a sense that a part of them lives on. But you meant that parenthood exists because it creates patterns of molecules that create parents. Indeed!
As a Hayekian, I resist the idea that capitalism is organized on any principles, exactly. Consumer capitalism is part of an order of rules, the unit of selection in Hayekian cultural evolution, and this order of rules has survived for many reasons. There are a lot of selection pressures at this level. One reason it persists is that it is an order of rules that tends to allocates scarce resources better than alternative orders, leaving those who live and act within the order materially better off than those who do not, which tends to attract people to come inside the order, or to attempt to replicate it (whether or not people inside it tend to breed especially rapidly). The wealth enabled by efficiency (which is indeed at its heart) creates proliferating consumption opportunities that compete to attract the wealth. And so the consumer capitalist order of rules throws up motorbikes, death metal, chat rooms about kittens, Legally Blonde: The Musical: The Reality Show, and awesome animated movies about robot love. While these are byproducts of an order of rules that promotes efficient allocation, they create independent reasons — fun, curiosity, aesthetic interest, a sense of belonging — for individuals to find life within the consumer capitalist order of rules appealing. And so the order persists in part because its efficiency properties creates opportunities for fun and beauty and identity, etc. Since these things in part explain the reproduction and growth of the order, it’s not unreasonable to see them as part of what it is “about” in your sense.
Apologies to Freddie if this is an instance of my imposing my idiosyncratic framework on a discussion.
— Will Wilkinson · Jul 22, 06:20 PM · #