Among the reasons for my faith is my conviction that the universe was constructed to make sense. That conviction began long ago as an annoying suspicion. Over time, as I learned more about physics, economics, history, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, game and information theory, it became steel-hard. It informed one of my favorite passages from my first novel:
“Scientists always look for the widest, most comprehensive patterns they can find, and then they try to explain them. And they’ve noticed that, the wider and deeper they go, the simpler the explanations seem to get.
“The great discoveries of the past three centuries have all pointed toward the existence of an enormous central fact, a single law for the whole world and everything in it. All the little patterns we see in things, like legs only being so fast, or arms only being so strong, or water never rising past two-twelve Fahrenheit, are just special cases of that central law, like the differently shaped shadows a statue will cast depending on how you turn it in the sun. Does that suggest anything to you, Chris?”
It took her a moment to register the question. She began to think. He waited in silence.
A million million details. A single truth giving rise to them all. Human reason sifting the details for the patterns that hid in them. Human knowledge of the patterns accumulating over the centuries, gradually reconstructing the statue from its innumerable shadows.
“The more you know, the simpler it all gets,” she whispered. “The parts might be confusing, but it’s made to be understood whole.” The thrill of discovery was coursing through her like an electric current. “Louis, it couldn’t have happened that way by chance, could it?”
He folded his hands and looked down at them.
“Some people think it could have, Chris.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“And that’s religion?”
He nodded.
Benoit Mandelbrot has told us: As above, so also below.
Happy is he whose circumstances suit his temperament, but happier still is he who can suit his temperament to any circumstance. – Originator unknown.
America is the Happy Kingdom. – P. J. O’Rourke.
A chain of links led me to this two-year-old article by social psychologist Lucian Conway:
[I]t is curious that, after almost five decades of research showing that conservatism is associated with psychological health, scientists aren’t vigorously pursuing the potentially positive lessons we can learn from conservatism to improve mental happiness in this country. Instead, the oft-observed finding that American conservatives are happier than liberals has long been a source of consternation in my (overwhelmingly liberal) field of social psychology. Rather than wanting to maximize any psychological wisdom of conservative philosophy, psychologists have largely set about to either explain away or (failing that) reframe these findings to minimize a positive interpretation of all things conservative. It would be analogous to researchers reacting to the news that reducing phone usage is good for people by casting those happy phone-avoiders as bullies (how dare they?) who have conspired to keep others unhappy by pushing the wrong kind of screen time on them.
Leaving aside the business about phone usage, concerning which I have personal confirming evidence (don’t ask), the conundrum Conway presents is a striking one. The data are consistent, as are the efforts of supposed scientists to explain them away. It’s a case of “when the facts don’t fit your theory, discard the facts” in actual practice.
Conway’s article attempts, in a gracious and considerate way, to cope with this contradiction. The urgency is real: a great many Americans are unhappy, and there’s a strong correlation between sustained unhappiness and left-liberal political leanings. If there’s any goal we would logically associate with social psychology, it would be to unearth the reasons for large-scale unhappiness and find correctives. So why would social psychologists systematically minimize or dismiss their own findings?
I could go into a long tirade about the biases of the social sciences, but this is neither the time nor the place for it. Let it suffice to say that owing to the degree of polarization that afflicts us at this time, the phenomenon must be viewed as more religious than intellectual. And you know, Gentle Reader, how acrimonious arguments over religion can get.
If any convictions that factor into happiness are persistent and consistent, it would be these two:
- Agency;
- Meaning.
Once again, it’s possible to make heavy weather out of this, so I’ll restrain myself. The conviction of personal agency, as opposed to personal helplessness, is the soul’s armor against despair. Agency implies the possibility of control. If you’re in control of what matters to you, you have an excellent chance of arranging things to suit you, even if they currently don’t.
Meaning – specifically, the conviction that one’s life and efforts are meaningful to more than the satisfaction of one’s own desires – is a nebulous thing that most people never come to grips with consciously. Yet it is vital in the exact sense: it sustains It provides purpose. It fuels effort. And it is inseparable from agency. Life and work are meaningless if they aren’t matters of one’s own free choice. Determinism fails psychologically for that reason.
In the widest sense, individual agency is sharply limited. Even a genuinely powerful individual is unlikely to direct the fates of nations, though there are occasional exceptions. For the great majority of us, our ability to command our circumstances is restricted to our own lives and our immediate surroundings. Sometimes we acquire partners in the enterprise; sometimes we must “go it alone.” In either case, the limits to our powers determine the scope of our agency.
It is critical to long-term happiness that each of us contract our circumstances and our need for meaning to a sphere that omits intense personal concern for things he can’t control. The connection to political orientation “should” be “obvious.” Ask any Cause Person.
Agency and meaning are necessary to happiness, but they are not sufficient. (Remember your tenth-grade geometry class?) The world is often brutal. Events can invade anyone’s life and destroy all that he cares about, which gives point to this graphic stolen from BustedNuckles:
It’s not necessarily about “finding the silver lining.” Some dark clouds are too large for that. But the Homeric viewpoint, which concedes that one will never understand it all, is a shield for one’s sense of agency and meaning. If you can laugh, you’re still drawing breath. Your own circumstances have not yet turned lethal. The word that applies best here is perspective.
The connection to the theological virtue of hope could not be plainer.
It’s been noted on many occasions that the presidency ages its occupants. The duties and responsibilities of the office are crushing. No president in modern times, if he’s honest with himself, could say that he’s their absolute master. Yet the president must represent himself as being in control at all times, for the sake of American national confidence.
That’s the reverse of the coin of agency. One who accepts the burden of the presidency will know from the very start that that burden is the largest temporal weight any man could be asked to bear. Regardless of the appearance he seeks to project, he must accept that he will not always be in control – that events and adversaries will often be more than he can bring to heel. From that follows severe consequences for his health and appearance.
Yet to accept the duties of the presidency and discharge them acceptably well must give immense satisfaction – meaning writ nationally if not globally large. In a way, it’s a heroic undertaking, even if the egos of those who put themselves forward for the office can obscure it.
A final thought: One who suspects that the station in life to which surrounding forces – family, friends, events, needs – are steering him will make him miserable has a “whole of life” problem: one that may justly be called existential. He must contrive to escape the net being woven around him. It’s not always easy or straightforward, but the need to escape the net can be overpowering. It often gives rise to desperate measures that are baffling to onlookers.
Some fine stories involve people in such circumstances. I recommend the illuminating if fanciful movie Interstate 60. I included a character in such difficulties in this story. There are many others.
What sprouted from a social psychologist’s essay about why conservatives are happier has turned completely away from politics. The larger subject is too important to bind it tightly to politics or political issues. But the correlation remains worth checking against one’s own family, friends, and associates… and within oneself.
Cherish your senses of agency and meaning. Let no one take them from you. Help others to find and cherish theirs. And may God bless and keep you all.
1 comments
“Help others to find and cherish theirs.
I will.