Another Week Ends
The Philosophy of Happiness, Language Games, Blame Games, and the Humiliation of Crucifixion
1. A while ago, empathy researchers made a startling discovery: rats, it turns out, showed empathy and demonstrated altruistic behavior for others. We can, the scientists contended, learn from rats if we are to solve our very human problems of hate, racism, and inequality. While I don’t discount the moral capabilities of vermin, the study seemed like a waste of time (not to mention hundreds of thousands of dollars). It also struck me as a sad barometer of the times, that questions of moral formation were directed to the science and not, say, religion or even philosophy for that matter.
This loss of confidence in the humanities and the turn toward science is nowhere more evident than in current studies on happiness, in which neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and the social sciences reign supreme. These studies are not without value, but, as Justin Smith writes in Liberties journal, the ignorance of the humanities tends to produce a kind of banal wisdom, if not outright error.
Many, though not all, ancient philosophers warned against conflating happiness with a current sensation of contentment or pleasure, preferring to understand it as a long-term condition of the soul, or as a dimension of moral character. But many also argued that happiness is an objective state that attaches to a given individual whether that individual has any first-person experience of it or not. For [Arthur] Brooks, by contrast, “the bottom line is that we may not know much, but we do know when we’re happy.” Brooks must remain committed to the transparency of our own happiness, in order for the data on which he relies to retain their value. But what if things are not so simple?
In the history of philosophy and religion, strong arguments have been put forth in favor of the view that happiness is something over and above what is contained in the notion of pleasure. Happiness is, rather, conceptually distinct from pleasure, and perhaps even incompatible with it. The reason for this is not just that pleasure is sinful, though that has certainly played a role in historical efforts to separate it conceptually from happiness. It is also that philosophical inquiry into happiness, as a concept, lies at some remove from the traditional study of “the passions,” which partially but not entirely map onto what we today call “emotions.” Happiness was not a passion, like anger or melancholy or lust, for it was not the result of some balance of humors in the body, but rather the result of a given external state of affairs. […]
the academic field of what might be called “happiness studies” overlaps considerably not only with behavioral psychology but also with economics, for both of these domains model the human good in the same etiolated terms of abstract reward. Though he denies that happiness is to be equated with pleasure, Brooks often resorts to examples drawn from studies or thought experiments concerning the sharing or hoarding of things like ice-cream cones, essentially no different from the set-up of research on cooperation in macaques. And though he denies that happiness flows from financial wealth, he nonetheless conceives it as somewhat akin to gold, in the sense that each country manages its own reserve.
In the happiness experts’ efforts to isolate the fundamental molecules of happiness and to measure happiness by quantitative means, they have wittingly or not rendered happiness into something money-like, where having more units of it makes you better off and having fewer does the opposite.
The above distinction between pleasure and happiness we get from philosophy is undoubtedly both true and useful. Because if happiness is not a sensation that can be accrued, like money or all those products that promise inner tranquility, but an inner state that exists independent of circumstance (as it was for the Stoics), then so many attempts to be more happy are misbegotten from the outset.
2. On the subject of happiness and Christianity, the difference between the happiness studies couldn’t be more stark. Over at Commonweal, Zena Hitz outlines how paradoxical Christian happiness might appear — having nothing to do with what you gain, but with what you lose in order to gain.
If we take union with God in self-sacrificing love to be the highest end of a life, to constitute human happiness, what is required? Whether or not Paul suggests a shift in what we judge best, he certainly shifts our understanding of how we attain it. We do not “grasp” our highest end. Rather, we sacrifice it. In doing so, our happiness is bestowed on us as a prize: it is given, rather than taken.
We may judge such renunciation to be admirable, or despicable, or pitiable — but how could it be recognizable as a form of happiness, or even a way to become happy? Yet the sacrifice of choice is not as alien to us as it sounds. We regularly live under the regime of other people’s choices, and if we are lucky, we do so with our own consent. Certainly, when we choose to marry, or to have a child — that is, when we seek to love unconditionally — we make a choice to relinquish choosing. It is a form of surrender, or as I’ll call it, abandonment. […]
In Christianity, one’s happiness is not within one’s power on principle. It must be given by grace. Part of the point of renunciation, then, is to clear the obstacles to grace: to break our habits of choosing that blind us to what we might receive. The contrast is not quite between getting and receiving, acting and suffering. Christian discipline involves the use of the will to choose to receive, and to choose to suffer, habitually and freely and out of love. The practice of total renunciation is an action, like the act of marriage, in which one holds one’s whole life in view. The point is not to give up money for a time, to see what it is like; or to fast or to wear a habit for a particular period of penance. It is an attempt to shape one’s whole life.
Or as a pretty famous rabbi once said, “those who wish to save their life will lose, but those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”
3. A quick-hitter … the latest song from boygenius, “True Blue” is brilliant:
But it feels good to be known so well
I can’t hide from you like I hide from myself
I remember who I am when I’m with you
Your love is tough, your love is tried and true blue, ooh
You’ve never done me wrong
Except for that one time
That we don’t talk about
Because it doesn’t matter anymore
Who won the fight?
I don’t know
We’re not keeping score
4. One of the few places where the humanities exerts influence nowadays is the policing of language — the proliferation and constant-evolution of the “right” words to use to describe people or systems. “Marginalized” vs. “underresourced” or “undersourced” and 1,000 other such substitutions. Words that were en vogue until fairly recently, now fallen out of favor. One can be forgiven for not always keeping up. This shift to what’s called equity language has many purposes, but as George Packer writes in the Atlantic, it raises many perhaps unforeseen consequences:
The whole tendency of equity language is to blur the contours of hard, often unpleasant facts. This aversion to reality is its main appeal. Once you acquire the vocabulary, it’s actually easier to say people with limited financial resources than the poor. The first rolls off your tongue without interruption, leaves no aftertaste, arouses no emotion. The second is rudely blunt and bitter, and it might make someone angry or sad. Imprecise language is less likely to offend. Good writing — vivid imagery, strong statements — will hurt, because it’s bound to convey painful truths. […]
The battle against euphemism and cliché is long-standing and, mostly, a losing one. What’s new and perhaps more threatening about equity language is the special kind of pressure it brings to bear. The conformity it demands isn’t just bureaucratic; it’s moral. But assembling preapproved phrases from a handbook into sentences that sound like an algorithmic catechism has no moral value. Moral language comes from the struggle of an individual mind to absorb and convey the truth as faithfully as possible. […]
Prison does not become a less brutal place by calling someone locked up in one a person experiencing the criminal-justice system.
The rationale for equity-language guides is hard to fault. They seek a world without oppression and injustice. Because achieving this goal is beyond anyone’s power, they turn to what can be controlled and try to purge language until it leaves no one out and can’t harm those who already suffer. Avoiding slurs, calling attention to inadvertent insults, and speaking to people with dignity are essential things in any decent society. It’s polite to address people as they request, and context always matters: A therapist is unlikely to use terms with a patient that she would with a colleague. But it isn’t the job of writers to present people as they want to be presented; writers owe allegiance to their readers, and the truth.
The universal mission of equity language is a quest for salvation, not political reform or personal courtesy — a Protestant quest and, despite the guides’ aversion to any reference to U.S. citizenship, an American one, for we do nothing by half measures. The guides follow the grammar of Puritan preaching to the last clause. Once you have embarked on this expedition, you can’t stop at Oriental or thug, because that would leave far too much evil at large. So you take off in hot pursuit of gentrification and legal resident, food stamps and gun control, until the last sin is hunted down and made right — which can never happen in a fallen world.
Packer goes on to argue that, much like the Puritan quests to root out sin, the crusades for equity language will be as effective as either the Puritans or the actual Crusades. Losing the correspondence between language and reality, the word games we play ultimately make reality appear less problematic. The words can change, but the injustice remains — precisely because rounding off the blunt edges of language makes it that much more difficult to address the problem.
Parallels between this phenomenon and the church are difficult to avoid. Sin or guilt might be scrubbed from the vocabulary, but this just leaves one without a diagnosis to address what ails them.
5. Over at ABC Religion, philosopher Adam Piovarchy wrote a guide for when blame can judiciously be assigned to a transgressor. When “the law” can be a useful tool to correct bad behavior. The mountain of criteria he accumulates to assign correct judgment is both reasonable and simultaneously self-defeating. Take a look:
Out target should be a culpable wrongdoer. […]
We also need to ensure our blame is proportionate to the degree of wrongdoing. […]
Finally, we need to be sensitive to the way the target has responded to their transgression and the blame they’ve received so far. Blame should be purposive [seeking an] acknowledgment of fault, or an apology, or a sign that they are committed to avoiding this kind of behaviour in the future. […]
So far so good, but there’s more…
We must have sufficient evidence that our target is, in fact, a culpable wrongdoer […]
Second, we need to make sure that we ourselves meet the standards to which we’re holding others. If you blame someone for cheating on their partner when you’ve been a frequent philanderer, you’re not only treating them unfairly, you’re being hypocritical.
Third, we need to make sure we’re being motivated by the right thing. We’ve already seen how blame can sometimes be a political cudgel hiding behind a fig leaf of righteousness. But sometimes our righteousness has less to do with the person we’re blaming, and more to do with who is watching us blame. […]
Finally, we need to make sure that the thing we’re blaming others for is our business.
I reference this article in part because it attempts to carve out a space for proper judgment in a way that would admirably make private and public discourse far more tolerable. And yet … the net effect of his argument, in practice, actually undermines the use of blame altogether. Can all of these criteria for just judgment ever be fulfilled by anyone but God? Can the workers in the field pull out the weeds without damaging the harvest? Can one ever sufficiently remove the plank in their own eye to then deal with their brother’s speck? I think not.
6. In a lighter note, the Babylon Bee had some top shelf church humor with “Museum Of Great Protestant Works Of Art Just Large Empty Building.” Now, I feel obliged to preemptively note the objections of Lutherans, whose sense of humor is as famous as their lengthy list of artists (Holbein, Cranach, Dürer, etc. etc.). Next, the New Yorker published an astute lampooning of our media saturation in their “Your Dumb Little Advertising Tricks Won’t Work on Me.”
And my favorite from this week comes from Reductress, who hits all the right law and gospel notes in their, “Uh Oh! Therapist a Little Too Supportive of Your Decisions“:
“When she said that what I did was actually ‘really cool’ and that she wished she could be as courageous as me, it allowed me to take a step back and realize, on my own, how bad the thing I did was,” you said. “Sometimes you can’t rely on others to tell you what you did was bad, and I’m so grateful to Chanice for teaching me that.”
Reverse psychology queen!
At press time, you got a new therapist who actually tells you when you’re doing something harmful, so you’re lying to them about still f*cking your friend’s boyfriend.
7. Closing out this week with a tad more devotional flair, Plough interviewed historian Tom Holland, who, among other things, offered some insights into how the Romans viewed crucifixion:
For the Greeks and Romans, the ability to withstand excruciating pain was the measure of a man. The classic example is Mucius Scaevola, who according to the historian Livy infiltrates the enemy camp, is captured, is told to reveal what he knows, and as a mark of his contempt for that demand, thrusts his hand into the fire until it’s consumed without once letting out a hint of pain. This is the kind of story the Romans adored. The pain endured by a hero becomes the measure of a hero.
Conversely, the pain suffered by, say, a slave who is nailed to a cross is contemptible. There is elevated pain and there is servile pain. The servile pain is to be mocked and despised.
The whole point of crucifixion is to humiliate and degrade. It is the punishment seen as paradigmatically suited to a rebellious slave. Not only is it excruciatingly painful and protracted — you could survive on the cross for days — but it’s also public. You are hung up there like a piece of meat, and your sufferings are objects of public ridicule. There’s nothing you can do to brush away the birds who might peck out your eyes or attack your genitals. You can’t stop people from watching your gasps and heaving breath as you struggle to lift yourself up to gulp for air. It’s this that makes you serve as a billboard of Roman power.
This is the penalty that is visited on rebels against Roman rule out in the provinces, and so it becomes the fate suffered by Jesus. The titulus, the board affixed above his head by Pilate’s orders, says that he is the king of the Jews. And there can be no king of the Jews in a Roman province.
Strays:
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“The words can change, but the injustice remains.”
Well said. The status games that well-credentialed Professional Managerial Class elites play through the proxy of language are quite the silly spectacle to behold.
I found this post to be a thought-provoking reflection on the current state of research and the role of science in addressing moral and social issues. It’s interesting to consider the emphasis on scientific approaches to studying happiness and empathy, and the potential limitations of this approach. I wonder, though, if there might be value in combining scientific research with insights from the humanities, such as philosophy and religion, to gain a more comprehensive understanding of these complex topics. What do you think? How can we strike a balance between science and the humanities when it comes to studying morality and human behavior?
Absolutely. I think ideally, there wouldn’t necessarily be a balance, but collaboration. A friend of mine is a professor of medical humanities, where he (a religion scholar) works with physicians and scientists on common research and policy recommendations. The goal of such collaborations shouldn’t be to provide a more comprehensive answer (medicine say X, and religion say Y), but for the humanities to inform the kind of questions asked in the research. For example, medicine can measure increases in dopamine while eating ice cream, but the humanities would certainly have better suggestions for the experiment’s parameters.