The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life (24 page)

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Authors: Shimon Edelman

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Alexander Meets Diogenes in Corinth
 
Given that each one of us must time-share between the real world and a virtual one, we might as well make the most of the situation. For that purpose, both the real and the virtual aspects of the situation matter: happiness, it stands to reason, depends both on one’s station in the outer world and on the state of one’s inner self. The implications of this straightforward existential insight are quite far-reaching, sometimes literally so: it has the potential of setting seekers after happiness off on diametrically opposed courses of action. When taken to the extreme, these opposites can be described as world conquest versus self-conquest. Let’s take these ideas at face value and see where they lead us.
A would-be world-conqueror seeks happiness in increased control over his or her worldly circumstances. In classical times, one of the top role models for this kind of behavior was Alexander the Great of Macedon, who had been tutored by Aristotle and who managed to conquer most of what the ancient Greeks called the known universe before keeling over at an age when many people I know are barely out of graduate school. Alexander’s short life may or may not have been a happy one: what he lacked in the way of personal virtue taught by his mentor Aristotle, he made up for in conquests.
In modern times, the need for physical conquest as a means of control has largely abated, because virtually any amount of control can be exercised through money. Even if it can’t buy you love, money can buy anything else that you may care to try to make yourself happier. This fact of modern life underlies an observation that the widely syndicated contemporary philosopher Dave Barry attributes to his mother, to wit, that it is better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.
2
If you manage to get rich without blowing your health, you’ve got it made.
The crucial question here is how rich is rich enough. More folk wisdom to the rescue: as recorded in the Mishna, the scholar Shimon Ben Zoma anticipated Dave Barry’s mother by almost two thousand years when he preached contentment: “Whosoever is rich? He who is happy with his share.”
3
Laozi’s
Dao De Jing
, in the chapter titled “Curbing Desire,” concurs: “The satisfaction of contentment is an everlasting competence.”
4
The association of virtue with the curbing of one’s desires has been contemplated even in the midst of a culture hell-bent on world domination: Diogenes of Sinope, called the Cynic, who was Alexander of Macedon’s compatriot and older contemporary, professed to be content with having no possessions at all.
5
Promulgating happiness by merely pointing to virtue and hoping for the best is hardly an effective way of helping others, even if the sage leads the way with a personal example. One wonders whether the good citizens watching Diogenes at his antics in the agora have ever been bothered by the suspicion that what really made him happy was how good he was at provoking them. Indeed, Diogenes could not sway to his views even Alexander, who must have been smarter than the average agora-goer (unless Aristotle graded on a curve). When the young king of Macedon and leader of all Greece, on his way to conquer the world, met Diogenes in Corinth, he was reportedly much taken with the old Cynic, yet his words of admiration were qualified: “If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes.” As it were, they both remained themselves until the end, which, according to Plutarch, they met on the same day—Diogenes, at age eighty-nine, in Corinth; Alexander, just short of thirty-three, in the old palace of Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon.
The average sage’s point-and-hope-for-the-best tactic in teaching the way to happiness through virtue reminds me of a Russian slapstick comedy from the 1960s,
Captive in the Caucasus
(no connection to the myth of Prometheus, as far as I can tell), in which a memorable toast is proposed at a dinner party: “I have a desire to buy a house, but I have no means. I have the means to buy a goat, but . . . no desire. Let us therefore drink to a future in which our desires always coincide with our means.”
6
Unfortunately, as is the case with all manner of exemplary behavior, getting our runaway desires to turn themselves in at the precinct is easier said than done. To convince yourself that you are in fact content with something that you spurned the first several dozen times around you must seriously warp your value system. That, in turn, seems to imply that you must become a self-conqueror.
History Is Made in Bishopsgate
 
The volume of unsolicited advice one is liable to get when the word hits the street that self-conquest is being contemplated is staggering. Memes affiliated with all the religions you ever heard of turn up at your front door, often in pairs, jostling for porch space with pushy patents for self-improvement, which stand out because of their loud dust jackets. A scantily clad meme of indeterminate sex is beckoning from behind the gauzy curtains of a palanquin. A few dour fellows, some in loincloths and others in habits, pretend stoically not to notice it, while waiting to be noticed themselves. The whole lot look like they’ve been arguing among themselves right up until you opened the door.
In this situation, it is highly advisable to get an advance notion of whether a recipe for self-conquest holds more promise than acting tough while looking in the mirror and whether it is safer than a straightforward lobotomy. To that end, you should examine the meme that peddles it, and its senders, for some sign of understanding of what a self is and how it works. As with any unfamiliar meme, it is also advisable to question its motives, lest a modest bid for self-renovation ends up with the cognitive equivalent of your home being overrun by the Huns. Having gotten this far in my book qualifies you for both those tasks. As promised in the preface, I have lined up for you the conceptual tools needed to understand how the mind really works. Armed with these tools, you can now start figuring out what’s best for you, and the self-knowledge you stand to gain can also help you fend off predatory memes.
Self-knowledge has been highly valued by many philosophical and religious traditions, East and West. Laozi’s comment, “Knowing others is wisdom; knowing the self is enlightenment,” and the Buddha’s gospel of self-knowledge would not have sounded out of place in Greece, where the entrance to the shrine of Apollo’s Oracle at Delphi bore the injunction: “Know thyself.”
7
Such wide endorsement bodes well for the idea of self-knowledge in the abstract, but it is in the details where, as the saying goes, the devil resides. Insofar as they are rooted in intuition or revelation, the actual bits of knowledge that such traditions offer by way of following up on their own advice are like sausages from a street-corner cart: they contain meat, but also other ingredients, some of which resist ready identification—even if (or perhaps especially if) the vendor claims to answer to a higher authority.
8
It took humanity a long time to come up with a trustworthy procedure for monitoring the origin and quality of the ingredients in the sausage of knowledge. One of the clearer signs that such a procedure was forthcoming was the establishment in November 1660 in London of the world’s first academy of sciences. The twelve founders who met at Bishopsgate decided to form a “Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experi-mentall Learning,” which was incorporated two years later as the Royal Society of London. The motto of the Royal Society,
Nullius in Verba
(taken from a line by Horace, which translates roughly as “no faith in mere words”), affirms its commitment to the pursuit of objective knowledge through a process that used to be called “experimental philosophy” and is now called simply “science.”
9
The scientific process ensures that quality control over knowledge is reliable and transparent by placing it in the hands of a community of people who engage in theoretical inquiry, empirical studies, mathematical formulation, and open debate. Science is participatory: anyone who can demonstrate some kitchen skills is free to bring their own stuffing (mystery meats excepted) and learn sausage making, or try to convert sausage eaters to masa tamales or rice-noodle spring rolls. By taking note of the origins of the ingredients, sharing the recipe, and making the finished product public, science makes for the safest knowledge one could wish for.
Over the course of the past several decades, cognitive science has served up a full menu of quality self-knowledge, beginning with the computational fundamentals of representational processes, through theories of perception and action, memory, thinking, and language, to insights into personality, social cognition, and consciousness that arises from the dynamics of effective, narrative, and phenomenal Selves. The understanding of the human mind that has been gained, of which this book has offered only a glimpse, has a direct bearing on what emerged earlier in this chapter as the key happiness-related issue: the apparent need to choose between world conquest and self-conquest. As we shall presently see, the new understanding exposes both these choices as ultimately self-defeating.
Peace Is Struck in the Republic of Soul
 
Let us take another look at the world conquest route first. The example I chose to illustrate it with earlier, that of Alexander the Great, may have seemed far-fetched for most of us. A middle-class hero (let alone working-class hero) is something to be, but what could it possibly have to do with a dead Greek king? In my defense, I’ll quote again from Whitman’s
Song of the Open Road
: “Now understand me well—It is provided in the essence of things, that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.”
10
All of us are susceptible to the same bug that drove Alexander up the wall of Asia; only the severity of the affliction differs. In claiming this, I am not appealing to Whitman’s authority—it is just that his insight happens to coincide with what cognitive science tells us about the dynamics of motivation.
The “hedonic treadmill” on which we are plonked at birth ensures that the perceived returns from equal increments of achievement will continually diminish. At the same time, a course of action grows increasingly difficult to set aside, as long as it meets with consistent success, no matter how dwindling; past reward history pushes people to persevere.
11
The combination of these basic traits of human nature sets up the dedicated world-conqueror types for a rat race that they cannot abandon and cannot ultimately win. The tragically minded among them would find a certain consolation in Rilke, who wrote that “the purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
I seriously doubt that life has any purpose at all, but that’s not an excuse to waste it on striving for more and more of the same. The “greater struggle” in Whitman’s adage becomes your lot only if you want more and more of what you already have. Strike world conquest, then. This seems to leave us with the other option, that of self-conquest, which is not a cakewalk either, by any account.
12
The particularly tricky part about self-conquest is how to bring it about with as little destruction as possible. (The idea, I guess, would be to become like Diogenes, but with enough sense left not to urinate on people you don’t like.) There is a price for every victory in any war, and a civil war is no exception. Even if you don’t mind carpet-bombing your neighbors before venturing out to conquer them, doing the same to yourself would really bring home the meaning of “collateral damage.” Then there is the old Soviet-era joke in which the legendary Radio Yerevan (no relation to the actual Armenian broadcasting service) is asked, “Will there be a World War III?” and replies, “In principle, no. But the struggle for peace will be so great that not a house will be left standing.”
So, is there change we can believe in? The answer, I suggest, is yes, and not just in principle. We did learn a thing or two about selves over the past couple of millennia. As we now know, a regular human self is part virtual construct, part distributed entity, with the latter best thought of as a network of cause and effect that transcends the boundary between the individual and the environment, which includes the society and the material world. This crucial piece of self-knowledge casts the old notions of world conquest and self-conquest in an entirely new light.
It is a mistake to think of self-conquest as the subjugation of a mindless horde of wild emotions and desires by a disciplined, perfectly reasonable tin-soldier homunculus that holds an exclusive title to mindhood. What your mind is really made of is perceptions colored by emotions (and emotions evoked by perceptions), actions initiated by desires (leading in turn to other desires), reasoning influenced by beliefs (giving rise to new beliefs or driving away old ones), and decisions pushed around by the computational avatars of your family, friends, teachers, and idols (and pushing back at them). None of the actors in this game are persons (just as a car wheel is not a vehicle); they are all more or less special-purpose computational processes that can only attain full human mindhood collectively as the whole shebang goes about its business.
The mind’s being distributed and collective places certain constraints on what a self can and cannot do in striving for change and hints at the likely consequences of certain courses of action. Build a wall to keep your barbarians out, and you end up besieged, excluded, divided, and diminished at the same time. Keep them in and teach them to pay taxes and vote, and everybody wins—that “everybody,” of course, being you. (I refer here to the indigenous barbarians, as opposed, say, to the Huns, who really ought to be kept out. Even some folks who you’d think are civilized should be treated with suspicion: remember Greeks bearing gifts.)

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