Happiness is …

Vox Day spoke with Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of "The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom" Nov. 14.

So, what exactly is the Happiness Hypothesis?

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It's actually a title made up by the publisher before the book was finished, and originally I had no idea what it might be. They were trying to convey that the book was about happiness, but it's scientific! But as I was writing the book, it turned out that there are a number of happiness hypotheses, and I was able to derive a pretty good one from them. The simplest happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from getting what you want, but almost everybody knows that's not true. You get some pleasure, but it's very short-lived, and then you move onto what's next. The much more widespread happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from within, not from getting what you want but from wanting what you've got. This is very common. It's the view, taken by Buddha and the Stoics, that happiness is about controlling your wants and desires.

Would that represent the 'S' in the Happiness Formula mentioned in the book? H=S+C+V?

It's not a true formula; it's more of a representation of the factors that matter. The "S," the [biological] set point is an illustration of that. We all have kind of a set point for happiness that fits with the notion that most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be, the idea that you can't really change your level of happiness, and you might as well just accept it. But positive psychology isn't quite so fatalistic. Positive psychology says that there are some environmental conditions, that's the "C," although those don't matter all that much. And then there's the voluntary activities, the "V," the things that you can do that will change your habitual thinking patterns.

Now, the version that I came to at the end of the book, and this is what got me into the study of religion and so many other interesting things, is that happiness isn't just getting your thoughts right; it doesn't just come from within. What I concluded is that happiness really comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself.

It's so easy for us to say, it's trite to say, "Oh, you know something larger then yourself." What the hell does that mean? Does that mean God? What does it mean? What I found in doing research for the last chapter is that there is some research on an off-switch for the self. People have the ability to shut themselves off and become part of a larger, collective group. Religions are technologies that are evolved over millennia to do this, and many religions are very effective in doing this. I'm an atheist; I don't believe that gods actually exist, but I part company with the New Atheists because I believe that religion is an adaptation that generally works quite well to suppress selfishness, to create moral communities, to help people work together, trust each other and collaborate towards common ends.

This is why I now say that even though I'm an atheist, I have a lot of respect for religion, and even though I'm an Enlightenmenter, I have a lot of respect for critiques of the Enlightenment that point out all of the good things that were thrown out by the Enlightenment.

A lot of the Enlightenment and New Enlightenment figures have advocated an ethic based on happiness and suffering. How is this different than utilitarianism, and how can it avoid devolving into a mere numbers game?

This is the real problem, the central problem of the Enlightenment. When you push the rationalist view to its extreme, pretty much all you have left to go on is pleasure and pain, or happiness, or some variant of utilitarianism.

I understand you were at the Beyond Belief II conference.

I didn't go to the first one, but I heard from the people who were there that this one was much calmer, much more focused on the science, much less polemical. The last one really was a big celebration of an atheist rebellion against the oppression of religion and the respect it's been accorded in society.

We had some really good talks from historians about what the Enlightenment was, about how the Enlightenment did lead both to many good things about modernity as well as some terrible moral abominations. My talk was entitled "Enlightenment 2.0 requires Morality 2.0," and I was trying to make the point that morality is, in part, a team sport; it binds groups together to do combat with others, and to point out that we have no diversity within science when it comes to morality. We are all liberals; that's a problem. I asked for a show of hands, and every hand went up when I asked who was left of center; one hand went up when I asked who was right of center.

I think people were receptive to the claim that to really do the Enlightenment right, to really do science right, we have to understand the biases and the problems that reason is prone to. We have to correct for them.

One thing you demonstrate in "The Happiness Hypothesis" is that the scientific evidence increasingly appears to indicate that man is less rational than is commonly supposed. What implications does that have for an Enlightenment that is based entirely on reason?

It means that an Enlightenment based entirely on reason could happen, but not on this planet, not with this species. It means that we must always be aware of how pervasive the confirmation bias is. It especially means that we must be aware of the problem of moral diversity and moral teams. Whenever there is a moral team that has no moral diversity and is trying to study the other team, we can pretty much bet money – we can take 3 to 1 odds – that they're going to get it wrong. They can't get it right because the biasing effects of morality are so strong. If you have atheists who hate religion studying it, you can bet that they're going to get it wrong. Their mental software is too pervasively biased by what they want to believe.

This interview is an excerpt, it can be found in its entirety at Vox Popoli.