Paul Jump
posted 27 April 2007

Jonathan Haidt can’t be happy. The giant yellow smiley face which his publishers have seen fit to daub on the dust jacket of his first book for the general reader makes it look more like the memoir of some casualty of the acid house generation than a serious book about psychology. Such misguided artwork must surely count as one of the uncontrollable negatives in Haidt’s life, which he can only try to take philosophically.

No doubt he’s more content with the strapline: ‘Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science’. After all, Haidt himself sets things up that way in his introduction, explaining that his project involved reading lots of ancient books from India, China and the Mediterranean and writing down every psychological claim he found in them. ‘Whenever I found an idea expressed in several palaces and times I considered it a possible great idea,’ he explains. ‘But rather than mechanically listing the top ten all-time most widespread psychological ideas of humankind, I decided that coherence was more important than frequency.’

He claims he will then go on to subject his coherent ancient theory – basically a mixture of Buddhist detachment and Classical stoicism – to the test of science. In reality, however, what follows is basically a glorified introduction to the modern field of positive psychology – the psychology of happiness – in which Haidt, a professor at the University of Virginia, is active. The aphorisms from ancient philosophy do no more theoretical work than the anecdotes from Haidt’s own experience. They serve either as an opponent against which to argue, or are simply tacked on to sum up (or approximate to) a conclusion which Haidt has just reached by appeal to experiment. Science – as it should – does all the hard work and ancient philosophy, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, is a wheel that turns nothing. That makes a lie of the book’s introduction and strapline, but it also makes it far more interesting and rigorous than it might otherwise be.

Not that Haidt claims to be the bearer of revelations. Instead, his intention is simply to slow us down and focus our minds on which flakes are true in the snowstorm of folk wisdom that engulfs us. ‘Quantity undermines the quality of our engagement,’ he notes. ‘With such a vast and wonderful library spread before us, we often skim books or just read the reviews. We might already have encountered the Greatest Idea, the insight that would have transformed us had we savoured it, taken it to heart, and worked it into our lives.’

As a non-scientist, I found the early chapters dealing with the human mind in general - the divided self, reciprocity and bias - particularly interesting. An example of Haidt’s tweaking of folk wisdom is his central image of the human mind as a hefty and wilful elephant bearing a conscious rider who possesses only limited control over it. He admits that philosophers through the ages have recognised a schism between the rational and the irrational parts of human nature. Yet Haidt’s image is an improvement on, say, Plato’s image of two different horses – one rational, one irrational - bearing the human chariot since that schism doesn’t quite sum up all the four subtly distinct divisions in human nature which Haidt highlights. Haidt’s rider is simply conscious controlled thought, while the elephant is everything subconscious: ‘gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions and intuitions that comprise much of the automatic system’.

Only about halfway through the book does Haidt really start focusing exclusively on happiness. Once again his eventual conclusion is hardly earth-shattering. For happiness, it turns out, you need a happy outlook (to some extent determined by genes, but to some extent controllable by meditation, prozac or cognitive therapy), a positive environment (over which you have some control, such as by moving house or job) and rewarding voluntary activities - especially ones that make best use of your abilities and which contribute to the welfare of others. And, in practice, this amounts to the common exhortation to ‘stop trying to keep up with the Joneses. Stop wasting your money on conspicuous consumption. As a first step, work less, earn less, accumulate less and ‘consume’ for family time, vacations and other enjoyable activities’.

Still, just like any other project in life (as Haidt sees it), the pleasure of reading his book comes not so much from the destination as from the journey. The devil – or, rather, the god – is in the detail.

To me, the most interesting of those details is that we simply have not evolved to seek happiness. We all want, consciously, to be happy: that is what the rider aims for. Yet the elephant is programmed to compete for sex, prestige and resources. The rat race, in Haidt’s terms, is better termed the elephant race. Not only that, the elephant is a miserable so-and-so. Winning a stage of the race only gives him a short burst of happiness before the next – harder - stage begins, yet losing any ground is devastating to him. The rider needs to try to make him follow the path of happiness rather than prestige – yet it is not easy to manipulate an elephant. ‘An emotionally intelligent person has a skilled rider who knows how to distract and coax the elephant without having to engage in a direct contest of wills,’ Haidt observes.

Nor is Haidt by any means the first person to highlight the counter-productiveness of modern people’s habit of leaving towns, jobs and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfilment - thereby ‘breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfilment.’

But if there are no revelations for the man on the Clapham omnibus, there certainly are some for philosophers. Indeed, Haidt’s background in philosophy in many ways makes this a more compelling book for philosophers than for psychologists.

As early as the eighteenth century David Hume said that ‘reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions’, yet well into the 20th century, philosophers persisted in trying to cast morality into one all-encompassing moral theory, as if that could either capture why we (sometimes) behave morally, or encourage us to do so more often. Meanwhile, economists and game theorists still insist on thinking of people as self-interested units who always behave so as to maximise their self-interest.

Haidt mentions in passing what it took this former moral philosophy student six years of study to see clearly: that the crucial point about human behaviour is not so much that we very rarely act purely rationally, but that rationality has no meaning without desire. A purely rational person simply wouldn’t be able to make any decisions because there is no rational reason to do anything in life - besides, perhaps, eat and sleep. At best, rationality can help to achieve what desire identifies as a goal. This is why moral philosophy in its quasi-scientific, post-enlightenment guise is no more than a mental game and why neo-Aristotleian virtue ethics, though intellectually unsatisfying, is its best hope for avoiding complete irrelevance.

The book is also very interesting politically. Haidt is refreshingly free of political correctness. He admits he is a liberal (in the American sense) and, indeed, explicitly condemns George Bush’s reaction to 9/11, based on what he calls ‘the myth of pure evil’. Yet – rarely in modern American discourse – he also sees some value in the other side’s position – particularly in the right’s idea that societies need shared values and moral standards: that complete relativism leads to people feeling morally lost.

There are also implications for the British government’s choice agenda in his observation that ‘we value choice and put ourselves in situations of choice, even though choice often undercuts our happiness’. Meanwhile, his comments on the ‘adaptation principle’ - the idea that the human mind is only really sensitive to changes in life conditions – suggest that stability is more important than social mobility in terms of creating happiness.

Haidt’s recognition that adversity can sometimes make us happier (a fine-tuning of the cliché that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger) also has political implications, in the sense that perhaps welfare states which insulate people too much from setbacks and the negative consequences of their actions might actually stunt people’s personal growth.

But doubtless it is his recognition of the connection between ‘divinity’ and happiness that will be the most difficult part of his book for liberal humanists to stomach. Haidt confesses that he himself does not believe in God, but he is compelled by his research to admit that believers are generally happier than non-believers (although he does also stress that you can still be spiritual – in the sense of cherishing quasi-sacred places, people and memories – without being religious).

That, of course, opens up a whole other can of philosophical worms about whether happiness is more important than truth (is blissful ignorance a desirable state?) – just as his points about shared values raise the issue of whether happiness is more important than justice – especially in a multicultural society. However, these are not questions that Haidt sees fit to address. For all his unshackled thinking, he never examines his tacit utilitarian assumption that happiness is all that really matters in life.

On the other hand, Haidt’s point in his very first chapter suggests that he wouldn’t change anybody’s mind on such matters even if he tried. Moral judgement is like aesthetic judgment, he notes. It is visceral. Any attempt to rationally justify it is just ‘confabulation’ - and, hence, any attempt to refute it by reasoning is just barking up the wrong tree. It took me six years to work that out as well. Still, I had fun at the time – and it only makes you unhappy to dwell too much on your wasted years.