Nov. 22, 2009

story and action

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Culture, Psychology
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“we moderns not only continue to be animals who make stories but also animals who are made by our stories.”

-Christian Smith “Moral, Believing Animals“

In a recent op-ed in the Georgetown Hoya, Professor Patrick Deneen makes the following claims about the personal impact of studying economics:

Much of the explanatory strength of economics rests on a narrow and even unrealistic understanding of human behavior, particularly an understanding of the human creature as a utility-maximizing rational actor. Stripped of conflicting devotions, shorn of history and culture, reduced to a few basic motives (especially fear and greed), economic man became highly analyzable data point, but arguably only insofar as he has ceased to be truly human.

Far from being merely “descriptive,” the basic assumptions of economics – that human beings are acquisitive individual utility-maximizers living in a world of scarcity – deeply shape modern humanity’s view of itself.

Stories and theories do shape us, and they profoundly shape our action by making certain actions more plausible, or certain routes more appealing. Such stories shape what type of work we want to pursue, the priority we give to relationships, what we see as the value of place, or whether we primarily see necessity or limitations in rootedness of various forms. A student who studies political science, or literature, or philosophy might arrive at a different set of assumptions about the ‘goods’ of life than those who study economics. To fit in with a certain guiding narrative, we often homogenize, muting aspects of ourselves which do not as easily cohere.

But if we acknowledge the problems of this, and desire to be ‘authentic’ to something deep in ourselves, how do we live into different narratives, build into our lives a different set of stories?  I deeply believe that such changes only happen when we root ourselves in certain traditions and routines, and cultivate a sense of awareness of the ways in which our actions and stories do not leave us untouched.

Take cell phones as an example. I love having my blackberry, and especially the way in which it adds convenience to my life in being connected with, and connecting with others. But what are my actual physical behaviors with this phone? I constantly check my pocket for emails. I wait patiently for text affirmation, often sending out a note and judging its worth (my worth to others), by the speed and content of their response.

Consider as well the pursuit of self-development in education. How does buying into the notion of building a brand to distinguish oneself on the market shape the way I see and interact with the world. For the past several years, I have been trying to pursue the  right set of activities in high school, the right set of leadership opportunities in college, being at the ‘right school,’  pursuing the ‘right graduate degree at the right institution. And while this has obviously set me up to do interesting things, can I really claim being untouched with regards to what I deem as interesting and worthy of pursuit?

I agree wholeheartedly with the quote from Christian Smith on the way the stories we tell shape us and our understanding of the world. I doubtlessly clap my hands in approval of Deneen’s assertion that certain stories, namely economics, radically simplify the complex and conflicting set of desires that we hold, making us self-improve frameworks that conceivably limit such our ability to see what is worth experiencing in life. But I know from personal experience that ‘ratioal-emotive’ therapical approaches have sometimes fallen short with me. Telling myself to be a better person, or to pursue things that matter, or to be more vulnerable in relationships (or any other number of things), often leaves me feeling the post New Years Resolution of failed goals and similar behavior.

But stories are deeper than words we embody them within. Being different and living different narratives requires rooting oneself not only in certain tales, about also concrete sets of behavior which help cultivate in us a posture towards the world that is deeper than theoretical knowledge. In my previous post on Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” I noted philosopher Jamie Smith’s characterization of humans as needing and being formed by such quasi-litergies. I then brought up one such moment in the book where the father physically pursues keeping his son safe:

He kicked holes in the sand for the

boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat

holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it.

All of this like some ancient anointing.

It is these actions which shape us, these behaviors which orient us desired ends, and cultivate in us a posture towards what matters. These behaviors, these rituals are more forming than reading a book about how ‘parenting is important,’ or conceptually realizing that “love is difficult.’ It is a deeper kind of knowing/feeling which, though potentially spoken or theorized about, must be felt, must be lived, must be embodied in routines. To use McCarthy’s words, we must “construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them,” a breath which acknowledges the transcendence of the everyday, of the profane, of the mundane.

 

Nov. 19, 2009

Cormac

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Culture, Film, Psychology | Tags: , , |
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This past weekend’s Wall Street Journal has a fascinating interview with Cormac McCarthy, the author most recently known for his book “No Country for Old Men” made in the award-winning film by the Coen Brothers. Among other things, McCarthy also wrote “The Road,” set for release in film version of November 25th. If you are not familiar with “The Road,” it is a post-apocalypic story of a father and son journeying towards the coast, their only potential place of survival in a world nearly destroyed by some past, yet rarely spoken of cataclysmic act.

The Road is a poignant, heart-wrenching tale.  It pulls out emotion that are severely unpleasant in experience: specifically, the dull sense of loneliness and the profound experience of potential loss. While these are not emotions we actively seek out, it’s fair to say we are better from their experience. Recalling a recent conversation with Krista Tippet of NPR’s “Speaking of Faith,” my good friend Dave expressed that one of the most important things Tippet expressed was the sentiment that we are limiting ourselves when we seek a narrow version of ‘happiness.’ Rather, she suggested that we ought to seek a type of flourishing that encompasses a wider set of emotions and experiences, all which speak to the varied experience of humanity in both its good and bad forms. Cormac pulls you into these moments, highlighting the importance of relationships and the ways in which we often experience them most profoundly with the potential of their loss.

In the interview, McCarthy suggests that the story comes in large part out of his own attachment to his young son. And yet, the love between father and son in the book is different than often portrayed in traditional Hollywood love stories. For example, in The Road, the father and son never explicitly say “I love you.” About this, McCarthy states:

“A lot of the lines that are in there are verbatim conversations my son John and I had. I mean just that when I say he’s the co-author of the book. A lot of the things that the kid says are things that John said. John said, “Papa, what would you do if I died?” I said, “I’d want to die, too,” and he says, “So you could be with me?” I said, “Yes, so I could be with you.” Just a conversation than two guys would have.”

Similarly, McCarthy’s complex relationship with religion comes out in the the way his characters wrestle with the notion of god the seeking of transcendence, even while not ’stating’ religious words, or calling to mind a ‘religious’ book or film. But like the love never stated, religious imagery and themes pervade his work. For example, near the end of The Road, the narrator states that the father, “knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.’” While not traditional religion in the sense of sitting in mass, reciting creeds, or experiencing prayer, there is something spiritual in how the father feels a certain duty to his son’s protection, and acknowledges of the beauty in the world admidst the ugliness of the post-apocalytic setting of the novel.

Cormac’s own religious committment has seemingly adjusted over time, even if it appears his connection to religious orthodoxy was never very very strong. In the interview, speaking about his Irish Catholic upbringing, and religion in his life today, McCarthy summarizes:

I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it’s meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person.

It seems that the type of spirituality that interests McCarthy is profoundly about an existential commitment to living out love in the world, all the while acknowledging his own impotence in this matter. Cormac, like the father in the novel, feels a certain pull of duty, and desires to see the transcendent in the profane. For McCarthy, this duty and transcendent comes in relationships and his desire to find in narration transcendent relationships in contexts typically narrated devoid of them. This posture towards life commits McCarthy to writing novels that, “take years of your life and drive you to suicide.”

It is this existential relationship to all things religious that ultimately makes McCarthy’s novels so profoundly gripping. He calls up religious questions, but doesn’t feel confident in the traditional institutionalized answers. To use the words of philosopher/ theologian Miroslav Volf, McCarthy is reacting against the ‘thin’ view of religion that often rely on cliches, acknowledging the importance of a thick meaningful framework, all the while simultanously doubting its existence.

But isn’t this in itself a TYPE of thick religious understanding, even if not orthodox in the traditional sense? In a review of the book, philosopher Jamie K.A. Smith weaves together the actual practices of father and son and what the mean for the characters, ultimately suggesting that they participate in a form of world-building through the nearly litergical nature of their interaction. Smith writes that, “the book is suffused with ritual and thus a kind of sacramentality. Quasi-liturgies both make and hold together the remnants of a “world” for father and son.” For two men depending on each other in a severely broken world, they needed a way to construct meaning, and live into a ‘reality’ not yet present. Smith highlights one such moment of life re-narration, recast in liturgical form:

The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he not

topple into the flames. He kicked holes in the sand for the

boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat

holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it.

All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the

forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out

of the air and breathe upon them

Perhaps it is such ‘quasi-liturgies’ that we, as the religious and non-religious alike, need more than anything.

 

Nov. 13, 2009

what makes a life beautiful?

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Uncategorized
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Megan FoxI have a good friend who is doing his final interview for this year’s Rhodes scholarship next week. The other day over coffee, he told me that one of last year’s final interview questions was ‘what is beauty?” Imagine answering that on the fly, in front of 7 former Rhodes Scholar, all with a full-ride to Oxford on the line…

Given the recent dabbling into the philosophical/ existential on this blog, I want to take this question a step further… specifically, what makes for a beautiful life? What does it mean to be a beautiful person?

Though it is a hard question conceptually, I think we often know beauty of this type when we see it, don’t we? We know people whose lives seem worth living, who we want to know better and be around? Isn’t this is some sense a beautiful life?

At the core, maybe beauty is constructing, finding, and building a story with one’s life, a story worthy of the title beautiful. The late French Philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote: “The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.” For example, is it not beautiful when we see someone hop out of the normal logic of give and take, or transaction and transaction costs, to pursue something virtuous, however defined. Is that not a beautiful life? As Wendell Berry writes: “Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.” Maybe it is those narrative arcs that give us potential of beauty.

*               *               *

Given this discussion, it’s interesting to look at the forthcoming NY Times Magazine article on the rise of Megan Fox. In this profile, Laura Hirschberg chronicles the following quotes of the sex-symbol of Transformers fame:

“When I sit down to talk to men’s magazines, there’s a certain character that I play. She’s not fully fleshed out — she doesn’t have her own name — but she shows up to do men’s-magazine interviews. There’s something so ridiculous about always being in your underwear in those magazines, and you know the interview is going to run opposite those pictures. So, there’s a character that talks to all of them.”

“All women in Hollywood are known as sex symbols. You’re sold, and it’s based on sex. That’s O.K., if you know how to use it.” Fox paused. “It’s been a crazy year. I’ve learned that being a celebrity is like being a sacrificial lamb. At some point, no matter how high the pedestal that they put you on, they’re going to tear you down. And I created a character as an offering for the sacrifice. I’m not willing to give my true self up. It’s a testament to my real personality that I would go so far as to make up another personality to give to the world. The reality is, I’m hidden amongst all the insanity. Nobody can find me.”

Fox is clearly living out a narrative which plays to the masses, but one that she clearly is aware lacks a certain kind of beauty worth pursue whole-heartedly (ironic given the ‘beauty’ these magazines celebrate). The rest of the article goes onto show how Fox’s real life constrasts with the images she plays in the magazines (she is relatively mild, she has a long-term boyfriend, etc.). This is a distinction Fox believes she can maintain as seen by the final quote, feeling
“nobody can find (her),” this true self.

I can’t help but wondering whether is it really possible to forever remain distant from the stories we live in, from the world-views we swim deep within? In our own lives, do the roles we play and the narratives we buy into leave some type of lasting imprint on our lives? If these stories are not worthy of a beautiful existence, are we are clearly able to shake them off when we want to pursue such ends?

*               *               *

My favorite song on The National’s 2007 “Boxer” album is Fake Empire. The song ends with the following lyrics:

Turn the light out say goodnight
no thinking for a little while
lets not try to figure out everything at once
It’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky
we’re half-awake in a fake empire
we’re half-awake in a fake empire

I do not know what the artists were intending lyrically with this song, but I read it as an indictment of the way we often live half-heartedly with stories not worth living for. With our actions, we buy into stories that we only half-heartedly believe, because we think they are the stories that matter to others. They are stories whic we fear, in the depths of our souls and the in the moments of profound vulnerability, do not hold the promise that we ascribe to them. We’re half-awake in fake empires…

It’s an indictment worth letting reverberate deep and long if we desire living lives of beauty.

 

Nov. 9, 2009

Language and Love, Religion and Risk

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Uncategorized
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Screen shot 2009-11-09 at 2.53.40 PMLately, I have thinking a good bit about the relationship between the words we speak and the realities we attempt to describe. Not being a trained philosopher, I am not really interested in delving into whether we can be accurate in describing the look of a chair, or the movement of a small animal; rather, I am interested in understanding the way which this dilemma affects our lived experience with complicated and ambiguous realities. So, before you click onto ESPN.com because of having just witnessed the most boring opening paragraph of a blog post EVER, try staying with me for a bit through two more concrete examples.

Let’s start with something like religion, or really any sort of ideological commitment. This weekend, I listened to an old interview on National Public Radio with the late religious historian Jaroslav Pelikan. Pelikan is famous in history circles for his work on religious creeds, and the way such documents have encapsulated religion traditions over the generations. Specifically, he chronicles the way in which religious creeds in the Christian tradition arose historically (often through argumentation, and making a statement in contrast to another interpretation), and the relationship these have to the faith of the modern believer. This relationship can become a point of existential tension for the modern religion person when there are significant differences in understanding across time. For example, while the writers of the creed had a clear three tiered view of the universe where one can descend into hell, and ascended into heaven, much like “a lift in a small building,” the modern believer (and unbeliever) often finds this notion confusing at best, and implausible at worst. So how does this person reconcile their own personal feelings with the historical nature of creeds that they consider and recite at mass or some religious service? How does one reconcile the personal existential faith of a sunday afternoon with friends and the historical rigid faith of orthodoxy?

Or consider something like love. What does it mean to say you love someone, especially when ‘feelings’ and ’sentiments’ can be hot and cold, hitting high and low points? Imagine an old married couple and the way their relationship and feelings have changed over the course of their committment. Is love in this relationship infatuation in the same way that it was when they first laid eyes on each other? And is it inauthentic for this couple to say “i love you” when they are frustrated with the personality traits of the person they chose to spend their life with, or upset at a set of actions this person portrayed? Was it inauthentic in earlier times?
In both cases, there is a distinct difference between one’s feeling at specific moments, and the limited supply of words which capture their feelings. What does one do in these situations? The person of faith must either move long in reciting this statement, or they could not state their creed, move away from tradition, and attempt to forge their own existential path forward. Similarly for the couple, they must either state their love and feel the tension, or state the feeling as it is at the moment (“my love is contingent on your being a certain way”).

The interview with Pelikan rang home on this dilemma range true to me for several reasons, but I want to address two in particular. First, sometimes asserting something is more about showing your commitment and belonging to a certain community, or a certain person, than it is about perfectly accurately describing one’s sentiments. So for the person of faith, reciting the creed is not so much as asserting what they think at one specific moment in time (though it could be this), but rather about aligning oneself with a complicated community, deep tradition, and specific way of being, even when there is dissonance. And for the lover, asserting love is about rehashing a commitment, and speaking to something that ideally transcends the conditionality which we most easily fall into when living. In making such statements, we are compelled to moving beyond statements which hedge feeling and belief. This is the ‘absurd‘ at the core of faith for Kierkegaard, a point which one should note does not pull him away from such tradition even given some unorthodox interpretation. On the love front, we resonate with love stories in their assertion of (implausible, improbably, beautiful) statements such as “I will love you no matter how you look someday, or how you change,” even if we struggle with these sentiments ourself. Perhaps we say these things because we believe in the power of language to transform, and its formative role in our own dispositions. The couple grows in love by asserting it. The person grows in faith by aligning himself with a community and an (absurd?) statement of belief.

The second clear take away from Pelikan’s interview is that certain things require an enmeshing in words, no matter how limited that language is. Saint Augustine, at the end of his long treatise on the foundation of the trinity and its relationship to the human soul, states “we have said this, not in order to say something, but in order not to remain all together silent.” Similarly, with love, though it brings up potentially inaccurate connotations at both deep (unconditional commitment) and shallow levels (infatuation), in some ways it is the only way two people can assert their feelings, and assert their commitment. And though there is risk and vulnerability in such statements (what if I am wrong, what if I am not ready, isn’t there something between like and love), they must say something so that they do not remain silent, and that they can forge a path to move forward in vulnerability.

In this way, both situations bespeak to the acute concern of people in our generation of the ‘vulnerability’ and felt ‘inauthenticity’ by a lack of alignment between language and reality. It is a tendency which draws us to the sciences and makes us uncomfortable (or uncertain) with the way in which poetry can speak of truth. This is not to say that when there is enough of a misalignment we shouldn’t move away from such traditions (for the person that loses faith) or such relationships (for the person who falls out of love), but reality is sometimes complicated and thus requires traversing ambiguity, and living with the risks involved even if a lack of perfect correspondence. I think CS Lewis said it best on the role of vulnerability in living and loving in the following quote:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

Language, though limited, is all we have, and as such it stands as the most frightening and beautiful tool we could possibly hold.

 

Nov. 4, 2009

Texting and Relationships

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Culture, Psychology, The Media
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David Brooks recent op-ed in the NYTimes is provocative in arguing for a link between the growth of text-messaging and the decline of committed love. Specifically:

Technology, especially cellphone and texting technology, dissolves obstacles. Suitors now contact each other in an instantaneous, frictionless sphere separated from larger social institutions and commitments.

People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships. Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners.

The opportunity to contact many people at once seems to encourage compartmentalization, as people try to establish different kinds of romantic attachments with different people at the same time.

It seems to encourage an attitude of contingency. If you have several options perpetually before you, and if technology makes it easier to jump from one option to another, you will naturally adopt the mentality of a comparison shopper.

A few bloggers have taken issue with Brook’s analysis. Matthew Yglesias writes that love really hasn’t changed that much, and in the ways it has changed has not necessarily been for the worse (cue reference to love and relationship in Mad Men). He also cites the attached visual on the growth of cell-phone use and sarcastically points to the absurdity of arguing for a direct relationship between love’s decline and technological growth (0 bad relationships -> 95% over the last 15 years?). Screen shot 2009-11-04 at 10.34.31 AM

Ezra Klein takes a different rebuttal approach in pointing to how technology played a role in the development of a committed relationship with his current girlfriend:

Columns like Brooks’s irk me because they demean not only my lived experiences, but those of everyone I know. To offer a slightly more modern rebuttal, Sunday was my one-year anniversary with my girlfriend. A bit more than a year ago, we first met, the sort of short encounter that could easily have slipped by without follow-up. A year and a week ago, she sent me a friend request on Facebook, which makes it easy to reach out after chance meetings. A year and five days ago, we were sending tentative jokes back-and-forth. A year and four days ago, I was steeling myself to step things up to instant messages. A year and three days ago, we were both watching the “Iron Chef” offal episode, and IMing offal puns back-and-forth, which led to our first date. A year ago today, I was anxiously waiting to leave the office for our second date.

In general, I like Brook’s article, but don’t have to take it the whole way to see its general point. Technology does allow us to connect with a greater quantity of people (send out mass twitters, be followed by a multitude of people on facebook, text multiple people at the same time), but along with such potential comes less accountability between our digital profile and the actual way we interact with people. Technologies like texting and twitter create a potential to navigate multiple budding relationships at once in a way that was more difficult in previous years.

At the same time, taking Yglesias’ point the actual correspondence between technology and relational decline will obviously not be linear, and to Klein’s point, technology is somewhat neutral in that it might be used for either good or bad (see: Einstein’s role in the development of nuclear technology…)

The kernel of truth in Brook’s article is his assertion that cultivating a posture of openness to options, in this case enabled by technology, can be detrimental to investing in a particular person. Think of it with careers… leaving oneself open to multiple options is a great hedge strategy, but at a certain point one has to open a specific door, move through it at the expense of others, with all the risk that comes along with such choice. Brooks is right that these technologies allow people to hedge in relationships for a longer period of time. In reality, this might be a good thing seen by lower rates of divorce for people who marry later. Nevertheless, its more than fair to ask whether hedge strategies are ineffective for building commitment once one is in a relationship, and whether such approaches carry-on with inertia from singleness to the time when one is in a relationship. In other words, can the guy who spends years texting to hedge in the relational market quickly drop such habits when he enters into a committed relationship?

 

ADDENDUM- For the nerds among us, there might be a few questions that would be relevant to this debate from a sociological perspective:

  1. Does the availability of texting lead to increased a) hedging strategies/ behavior, and/or b) hedging mentality in relationships
  2. Do hedging strategies prior to relationships correspond with greater hedging mentality once in a relationship (e.g. does this mentality hold with inertia)?
  3. Does a hedging mentality negatively influence relationship development/ lead to destructive relationship outcomes (e.g. divorce)?
 

Oct. 6, 2009

why “up in the air” will be a run-away hit with my generation

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Culture, Film, Psychology | Tags: , |
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Screen shot 2009-10-06 at 12.24.55 PM

“Isolated? I’m surrounded!” George Clooney’s character defiantly states in the trailer of the upcoming film “Up in the Air.” In this, Clooney highlights one answer to the dilemma of the modern individualistic global citizen… in becoming citizen of the world (pursuers of ambition), do we become strangers to all things particular (relationships, community, home)? When it comes to jobs and relationships, the movie sets itself as a reflection on what it takes to live with meaning? If it’s work, then what what does one do and why? If it’s people, then who is the audience and how many admirations does this require?

One of the more poignant moments of the trailer (yes, I know, I am reviewing a trailer) is when George’s character argues the following: ”If you think about it, your relationships are the heaviest components of your life: your husband, your wife, your home. We weigh ourselves down until we can’t even move. Make no mistake, moving is living…”

Contrast this to the following quote from CS Lewis, recently sent to me by my good friend Dave Ellis: “My happiest hours are spent with three or four old friends in old clothes tramping together and putting up in small pubs—or else sitting up till the small hours [of the morning] in someone’s college room, talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes. There’s no sound I like better than laughter…friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘Sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’”

The contrast is stark, and it’s one that many of us feel acutely. Where is significance found, we wonder? Do our strivings for meaning lead us to pursue the needs of the generalized other and the significance driven self (push for health care reform, desires to influence policy, wanting to ‘make’ it in business, attempts to gain recognition and influence), or do they usher us into the arms of others? We feel both desires, and often live in the tension, evidenced by the father who goes to his son’s baseball games (living the particular) while simultaneously attempting to live vicariously through his success and thus enter his unrealized dream of doing something on the big stage (desiring universal recognition). Or likewise, the opposite side can be seen when the most powerful people in the world (universal recognition earned) yearn for relationships, desire significance IN THE EYES OF A FEW OTHERS, rather than the generalized other (desiring particular). I personally find it hard to live into one desire without the other… as Walt Whitman says “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

“Up in the Air” takes on hard questions on the location of significance, and whether at the end of the day, commitments to the particular (one person, one location, one seemingly universally insignificant life) tie us down or free us to act.

 

Oct. 6, 2009

apologies…

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Uncategorized
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… for the slowness around the blog as of late. Busy time for us all. Hoping to finish the series on moral decision-making soon!

Peter

 

Sep. 20, 2009

the seeking of pleasure for pleasure’s sake- part 2

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Culture, Psychology | Tags: |
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Screen shot 2009-09-20 at 1.08.24 PM

In my last post, I pointed to a blog by psychologist Paul Bloom in which he tried to make a psychologically supported case for indulging the simple pleasures of life more, and retraining less (an obviously version of his argument). And yet, I (and a few of the commentors) felt a little underwhelmed by his argument, even though we liked the general project. Before going onto my own response to his argument, I want to lay out a quick hypothetical, and get your thoughts.

Recent evidence on car purchasing from Haper’s Index shows the interesting fact that 1/3rd of all individuals who own a full hybrid Toyota Prius also own a gas guzzling SUV. Tyler Cowen calls this portfolio theory. Ryan Sager calls it moral self-regulation.

So here is the hypothetical. You have a friend at work who drives a Prius. Over the course of the year, you two have become quite close friends and you are especially drawn to his/her ecological responsibility.

One Saturday night, he invites you and your boy/girlfriend over for dinner. When you arrive at his house, you see parked next to his mini-Prius a 10 mpg Hummer H2. You are shocked that your ‘green auto’ friend also owns one of the least fuel-efficient cars on the market.

Over the course of drinks, he mentions one of four explanations for the combo of vehicles in his garage:

  1. “It is my spouse’s car, and I really don’t like how s/he owns it.”
  2. “We used to have 2 SUV’s, but are making an effort to be more green and replaced our other SUV last year. Our carbon footprint dropped so much!”
  3. “We really like both cars… so different, but they fit such different aspects of our personalities”
  4. “I am really into off-road riding and the Hummer is great for getting around in the trecherous driving up in the mountains.”

My question is, which of these things is most likely to quell your astonishment at this purchase? Would you, or would you not pass judgment regardless of their explanation? Is there something else s/he could say besides these? Does s/he need to say anything?

 

Sep. 17, 2009

the seeking of pleasure for pleasure’s sake- part 1

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Culture | Tags: , , |
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Screen shot 2009-09-17 at 9.52.29 PMIn an interesting blog in the NY Times yesterday, Yale Psychologist Paul Bloom poses the following question: should we strive to live life as happy pigs or sad Socrates? In other words, should we lean into out short-term tendencies to seek pleasure, or should we err on the side of rational control? Bloom goes onto make his case for indulging the short terms pleasures that we often feel guilty about pursuing (cue happy pig rejoicing). He writes:

But what about short-term pleasures, like eating cake, drinking beer, or having sex? … These feel good, but if your long-term goals have to do with dieting, sobriety or chastity, you might regret them later. So there is a different dilemma: Do you live a good and happy life or do you satisfy your immediate appetites? …
You can see this as an internal battle between two individuals residing in the same body: one who wants to be thin, sober and chaste, the other who wants to eat, drink and fornicate. It’s the long-term self who is probably reading this now; this is the self that chooses to go to the therapist and read self-help books, working to thwart the short-term self when it comes to life in the presence of temptation.We shouldn’t underestimate the short-term self, though. It is not necessarily evil and not necessarily stupid. Sometimes the long-term self should stay out of its way.

He concludes with the following, “People are better off if their multiple selves establish a truce, respecting one another’s different strengths, and working together to satisfy shared goals.“

Bloom makes some good points in the article, and I think his project of developing a lived philosophy which integrates the relative merits of both pleasure and restraint is a good one. But how does Bloom get to this point, and does he really tell us anything which gives clarity to these types of ‘paths diverging in a wood’ moral decisions.

Let’s start by addressing the reasons he posits in support of both restraint and pleasure.

In making a case for the former, he argues:

  1. “People who succumb to short-term impulses often do awful things, such as driving drunk or beating up their children.”
  2. In addition, while not horrible thing in themselves, he also suggests that sometimes there are better things to do than approach pleasure. To take one of his examples, “perhaps there are better things to do today than go to a horror movie.”

As for his reasons to avoid deliberate ‘rational’ control, and indulge pleasures, he offers the following:

  1. “(Sometimes) it’s the long-term self that’s misguided. It can become committed to belief systems that have immoral consequences. Terrorism and genocide, for instance, are typically deliberate choices, not acts of passion”
  2. “Sometimes we deprive ourselves of perfectly good pleasures, including those involving love and companionship, because of the decisions of the long-term self. Think of the workaholic who never sees his children, or the anorexic who denies herself the pleasure of food.”
  3. “Pleasures reflect a form of safe practice — or, to use a more common term, a form of play. Some play is physical: It is a useful skill to be able to attack and defend yourself skillfully, and you get better at it the more you practice, but real fights are risky and painful, and so certain animals, including us, are constituted to take pleasure in play fighting, going through the moves of combat with someone we like, holding back so that nobody is hurt.”
  4. Building off this last point, he suggests “Even seemingly perverse pleasures have meaning; they have been shaped by natural selection to solve problems that we might not be consciously aware of.” He suggest this should reframe the way we see hedonism, and specifically in a way that is decidedly less negative.

Looking across these points, Blooms seems to be suggesting that we will be less happy in the short-run if we don’t indulge, and also perhaps worse off in that such activities might in fact be evolutionarily adaptive, and thus serve some functional purpose. But what determines when we ought to do one system (pleasure v. restraint) over the other?

Enter work on moral psychology.  Jonathan Haidt’s research lends insight on how individuals think about moral matters, and specifically suggests that humans think morally in terms of the following five foundations: 1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity, 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect and 5) purity/sanctity. Haidt makes the case that liberals classically tend to activate the first two, and see the last 3 as being significantly less valid foundations for moral action. In contrast, conservatives tend to activate all 5 in some way or the another.

Moving back to Bloom, at an individual level he seems to push for a lack of restraint, unless it (1) harms people, or (2) is in some sense unfair. As such, he seems to be thinking of morality like a classic liberal. But is this the right approach, or should other foundations be activated? How do we know what is the ‘right’ approach… what are the ’shared goals’ which our pleasure and restraint sides can jointly agree upon?

It is at this point that empirical psychology fails us in its in ability to move us beyond the descriptive to the normative. Even after answering Bloom’s question (how did we evolve and what does this mean about the functionality of our hedonistic desires) and the questions of Haidt (what moral foundations do people activate when making decisions), we still do not have a good sense of how to mix the perfect cocktail of moral motives, and how they should interact as we decide when to be happy pigs, and when to be sad Socrates. This is the personal dilemma of the social scientist– knowledge of empirical causality does not necessarily lend clarity in identifying the things that one ought to want to cause. In the next post, Ill try to take us beyond this point and outline a theory of ethics which builds off, while not claiming complete dependence upon the social sciences.

 

Sep. 9, 2009

An Orthogonal Health Care Option

Posted by petertuuk under Economics, Politics
[4] Comments 

“On the right, there are those who argue that we should end the employer-based system and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.”

Barack Obama 9/9/09

I’m not sure this is such a right-wing idea since it would be accomplished by raising taxes and regulating insurance markets. But it is a good idea. Here’s why.

It seems like there are two complaints with our current health care system.

The first is that we are spending too much on health care. This is a funny problem to have. We never get this with food or cars or anything. In those markets when people spend too much they start buying less smoked salmon and more potatoes or less Acuras and more Hondas. Or maybe they keep driving the old clunker. These decisions are made on a person-by-person basis. The funny thing about health care is that nobody feels like they are paying for it. Everyone understands, after a two-year campaign to beat it into our skulls, that we spend too much on health care. But few feel like they use too much.

There is too much psychic distance between consuming these services and paying for them. Doctors get paid by health insurers, health insurers get paid by employers, and the employers pay them by not paying us. Since folks never see the money they never miss it. The normal means of cost control, people thinking about how much they can afford, is gone. It’s people at Medicare, Aetna, or some new government agency who look at the costs but regular folks in Grand Rapids who decide whether or not to consume the service. If we want to save money on health care, we need to use less of it. Since we’d like to use infinity amount of health care, it’s either markets or rationing keeping us below that bound.

This comes up because our health insurance system is not really risk pooling so much as obfuscation. When every office visit (even the predictable one) is paid for by “insurance,” the only effect is to trick people into thinking they’re not paying for their own health care. But somebody has to pay for it. And that somebody is everybody. We pay in the form of lower wages and higher taxes. Insurance ought to be for the unexpected. If people know they’re going to use a certain amount of health care we’d be better off if they just saved the money and paid the doctor instead of the employer giving to the insurance company which will in turn give it to the doctor for us.

I have something crazy in mind: I need some medical care. I see some advertisements. One doctor offers the best care in town. Maybe a PA or NP promises close to the same quality at a lower price. I call around and ask what it would cost to have my thing done. They give me their price. I pick the one I think is the best deal, because I know and care how much my consumption costs. To get to this point is tricky. It would take something like taxing employer provided health insurance (getting rid of this removes one roadblock between consumption and cost), a tax-free, rolling-over health savings account for most everything, and a high deductible health plan for emergencies. Throw in a no-discrimination-for-preexisting-conditions regulation and you’re starting to get there. The point is we need people to know and think about how much health care they buy.

I guess this raises the second problem with what we’ve got today; that of distributive justice. Some people are poor and because of their poverty they are unable to buy much health care. If we think poor people are too poor, maybe we should just give them money. Or maybe seed their HSA and pay their HDHP premiums. Just as food stamps help people eat without the need for government farms (except for farm subsidies, but let’s not go there) and a U.S Grocery Service, so too we can provide for the poor without resorting to tax-paid doctors and treasury-backed insurance plans. Sure this gives people extra incentive to be poor, but the same is true for any redistribution program. Given the choice between people dying in the streets and people suckling at the taxpayer teat, I guess the moral hazard is something we have to live with.

Though the incessant red-blue squabbling obscures it, the future does not have to belong to some point between status quo and government-provided care. This doesn’t have to be a one-dimensional problem.

 

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