Love of All Wisdom

I’ve been noticing a topic I’ve dealt with repeatedly in other contexts but would like to address head on: the possibility of deliberately lying to oneself, of intentionally believing things that aren’t true. I spoke before of “noble lies” to others, but not to oneself.

The point seems to come up again and again, for there are many reasons why trying to believe false things might prove valuable. In cases where one’s children make one less happy, one is still a better parent if one falsely believes that children make one happy. Some psychologists suggest the possibility of depressive realism: the idea that depressed people actually view the world more accurately than others. In a comment I noted the happiness often radiated by evangelical Christians: should one perhaps try to become such a person even if their God doesn’t exist? Last time the point came up in speaking of prayer: there seem to be real benefits from prayer, but it might require belief in an entity that isn’t real.

Now in every one of these cases, the good thing about lying to oneself has something in common: it is a good result. (continue reading…)

Having decided on marriage, my fiancée and I are now well immersed in the process of planning our wedding. And like many young couples, we feel a strong distaste for what we have come to call the wedding-industrial complex: the North American industry that makes a lucrative profit from telling couples what they must do and selling it to them, documented in Rebecca Mead’s One Perfect Day. And then too often, we have then wound up going through a process uncomfortably familiar to many couples in our situation: observing traditions you despise, deciding you’ll do it all differently, and then finding yourself going through the traditional process anyway. Susan Jane Gilman expressed it perfectly in her article (and then book) Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress. She and her fiancé decided that they hated the expense, pomp and sexism of a traditional wedding, and so theirs would be different. They’d just leave it as a fun party: hire a DJ, a bartender and an ice cream truck. But:

Somehow, Bob and I had also overlooked the fact that even if all you wanted was an ice cream truck, a bartender, and a deejay, you still needed a place to put them. And if you decided it might be nice to have some photographs of the day — photographs that did not scalp anyone, or feature detailed close-ups of your uncle’s thumb — it was best to hire a photographer. And then, as my mother diplomatically pointed out, if relatives were going to travel across the country to witness your marriage, it was probably polite to feed them more than a Fudgsicle and a glass of champagne. And surely, you couldn’t expect older folks to balance a plate on their hand all night: they had to sit somewhere. And since you were going to have tables anyway, would it really kill you to put out a few flowers to brighten things up?

Eventually Gilman even accepts the pouffy white wedding dress of her essay’s title: “My mind might have been that of a twenty-first-century feminist, but my body was that of a nineteenth-century Victorian, and the dress seemed to have been custom-made for my proportions.” And so it begins: (continue reading…)

I’ve previously written against NOMA, Stephen Jay Gould’s assertion that “science” and “religion” are completely compatible because they represent two incommensurable domains of inquiry. But there’s at least as much of a problem with the other extreme, the view of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins that the two are completely incompatible because “science” refutes “religion.” (Few seriously assert incompatibility in the other direction, to reject science. Creationists, for example, typically proclaim their acceptance of science except where it conflicts with the Bible – thus the popularity of intelligent design, sold as a scientific theory.) Both of these views, to my mind, are almost painful in their oversimplification of the matter. There is incompatibility between certain parts of each domain. Many beliefs called “religious” are perfectly compatible with the evidence from controlled hypothesis testing; many aren’t. In the “scientific” domain, the only views I can think of that are incompatible with all “religious” belief are those which involve scientism: the belief that the only valid forms of knowing are based on the practice of science. (It’s worth stating repeatedly that this belief cannot possibly itself be based on the practice of science, and is therefore self-refuting.)

New Atheists often don’t want to admit this point. When they accept common-sense views at odds with their exultation of science as the only true way of knowing, they do it by equivocating on their definition of “science.” One finds the point in a recent exchange on P.Z. Myers’s blog. Responding to Larry Moran, Myers attacks what he calls:

the bizarre claim that “No scientist that is also a decent human being subjects all her/his beliefs to scientific scrutiny.” I think otherwise. There is a naive notion implicit in that statement that scientific scrutiny is somehow different from critical, rational examination. I’d argue the other way: no decent human being should live an unexamined life.

“Critical, rational examination,” eh? If that’s all science is, then every theologian is a scientist par excellence. I don’t think that’s a claim the New Atheists want to be making. Rather, the “science” they are defending is a) completely empirical, and b) based on the controlled experimental testing of hypotheses. So John Pieret responds to Myers by saying:

Really? What tests did you do on yourself to see if you love your wife and children? Hormone testing, eegs, what? Thinking about things is not “science” per se. Science is empiric investigation. Nor is the question whether “love” can be scientifically investigated, the question is whether individual scientists do it before they decide who they love.

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Heath White of PEA Soup has an interesting new post up called The Ethics of Santa. White argues that parents and educators should not teach their children the myth of Santa Claus, for three major reasons:

1. It involves a lot of lying and deception practiced on credulous people.
2. It tends to foster greed in children and contributes to their false impression that one’s happiness is determined by one’s material possessions.
3. In telling children that the quantity and quality of one’s gifts are a function of one’s behavior, when actually they are a function of one’s socio-economic standing and parental temperament, it induces moral complacency in well-off children and false feelings of moral inferiority in less well-off children.

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One reason I turn back to premodern philosophies so much is that they often show us questions larger than those generally asked in philosophy today. Especially important among these: “what kind of life should I live?” What sorts of major life decisions should I make? It still surprises me how rarely academic philosophers concern themselves with these questions, when we spend so much time teaching people in their late teens and early twenties – for whom these questions are in the foreground.

Lately in my mind I’ve been tossing around the hypothesis that the answers to the question “What kind of life should I live?” roughly boil down to three – and that each of the three is tied to some sort of metaphysics, a theoretical as well as a practical philosophy: (continue reading…)

Pope John Paul II once declared the 20th century to be the most evil of all centuries, and it’s not hard to come up with evidence for such a claim even if one doesn’t share his presuppositions. The Holocaust, other genocides from Armenia to Rwanda, Stalinism, Pol Pot, the threat of humankind’s voluntary self-extinction by nuclear annihilation and then of involuntary self-extinction by environmental catastrophe – the human beings of the 20th century have a lot to answer for.

I sometimes imagine the centuries lined up on some chronological Judgement Day, and the 20th century being shown its great catalogue of horrors and atrocities. A cosmic judge asks that century “What do you have to say for yourself? How can you possibly justify your existence in the face of this destruction?”

In spite of everything, before this cosmic temporal court, I believe the 20th century could make up for it all with three small words: (continue reading…)

I’ll begin with happy news: I’m engaged! This weekend I proposed to my beloved Caitlin, and I’m delighted to say she accepted.

Now, I’ve tried to be explicit that this is a philosophy blog, not a personal blog – while a great deal here is autobiographical, the purpose of even those entries is to point to bigger questions, questions that I hope my life story can help illuminate in some way. So I’m going to talk today a little bit about my reasons for deciding to marry. The particular reasons, of course, are all about my sweetheart herself, a beautiful, smart, funny, playful, charming, sexy, adventurous, responsible, virtuous woman. But there are more general reasons that tie to the blog’s bigger concerns.

Above all, my action this weekend is not one that Śāntideva, or the Buddha of the Pali suttas, would view as a part of the highest, best, most fully virtuous life. They speak at length of the disadvantages of the household life, the life spent among family with a paid job in the everyday world. The life of a monk is a higher and better one to pursue. Eros keeps us mired in the suffering of everyday life, enslaved to the desires and craving that only cause us yet more suffering. The monk, by contrast, devotes himself or herself fully to the development of virtue, much more able to rise above craving and suffering.
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In a previous post on happiness I noted that research tends to show people who have children are less happy than those who don’t. Yet, at the same time, most people who do have children will say that the kids make them happy, often even that their kids are their deepest source of joy in life.

Why? The answer seems obvious: if you don’t think that your children make you happy, if you resent them and regret them, you’re going to be a bad parent. By telling yourself your kids make you happy – even if they don’t – you are giving them a better life, doing something that will help them out. Surely that’s your duty as a parent, to think of your kids as your great joy and the centre of your life.

But there remains something unsettling here. Do we really want to say there’s a duty to lie to oneself, even for such a noble reason? If one allows oneself this kind of self-deception, surely it makes room for other, more harmful kinds of self-deception? I imagine this will be a difficult question to resolve – the kind that would require going down to the foundations – but I would like to hear your thoughts.

(For the record, I don’t have children and don’t plan on having them, so this is not a personal question for me.)

Rare is the philosopher who doesn’t give happiness a significant place in the good life. Even Kant, often caricatured as making no room for happiness, still says both that it is a duty to secure one’s own happiness in this world, and that one needs to hope for happiness in the afterlife. Happiness, then, is a topic of key philosophical importance, whether by “happiness” we mean the pleasant mental state aimed at by Bentham or the broader conception of human flourishing in Aristotle’s eudaimonia; and most accounts of the latter include some element of the former.

We would do well, then, to pay attention to the burgeoning field of psychologists’ empirical research on happiness. The field faces a number of methodological problems, but comes to interesting insights in spite of these. One deservedly popular book in the field is Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, a well written and engaging summary of current research. Gilbert does a good job of summarizing many psychologists’ counterintuitive findings about happiness.

The problem is that some of Gilbert’s conclusions contradict not only common sense – which isn’t a problem, because contradicting common sense is the point – but each other. He concludes at the end that we are not as different from other people as we think we are, and that therefore in order to be happy we should ask other people what makes them happy. Yet elsewhere in the book he acknowledges that people don’t themselves know what makes them happy. The most obvious example is children: ask anyone who has children and they will tell you their children are their key source of joy, yet every study on the subject concludes we get less happy when children are born, and happier again when they leave. Which is to say that according to Gilbert’s own data, other people’s self-report is not the best place to find out what will make you happy.

José Cabezón has an interesting article on Buddhism and sexuality in the latest (summer 2009) issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly. The article examines the tricky concept of “sexual misconduct” (kamesu micchācāra in Pali); one of the basic Five Precepts is a vow to refrain from “sexual misconduct.” But what exactly counts as misconduct? A fellow student asked me this when I took a Goenka vipassanā course. Goenka, in keeping with his general emphasis on non-harming, himself listed only rape and adultery as examples. But premodern Buddhists have typically gone further than this.

Cabezón probes the point that the present Dalai Lama, while defending the “full human rights” of gay people, nevertheless treats male homosexual sex (and oral and anal sex more generally) as a form of sexual misconduct. (continue reading…)