How little we know what we most need to know. This is an exceptionally striking fact about the most promising new field to arise in our time, evolutionary psychology, led by Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker and our own Jonathan Haidt, author of "The Happiness Hypothesis." Its emphasis on natural selection serves as a valuable sanity check on the otherwise crushing power of political prejudice in the social sciences (I use the term loosely), especially through its politically incorrect discovery of the evolutionary basis of many sexual inequalities.
It has also curbed some of the more extreme pretensions of the economists by reminding us that human beings often care more about their status and honor, or about vengeance, than their "rational" economic self-interest. Apart from helping to check the almost infinite nonsense going around much of the other social sciences, evolutionary psychology also provides a fund of provocative new hypotheses, for instance, that romantic love evolved by adapting the existing physiological mechanisms by which parents and children bond: If you're bad at love, blame your parents -- you'll probably blame them anyway.
Yet Haidt suffers from a powerful moral and political naivety: He takes for granted the goodness of the justice in which he, as a moderate liberal, believes. Like Pinker, whatever insights he gains from his science, or from the distant East, or from the even more distant ancient philosophers, leave him roughly undisturbed in his original political and moral views. Haidt proudly speaks of how daring he is in thinking "treasonable thoughts" but in the same breath never allows "the ethic of divinity to supersede the ethic of autonomy." Doesn't speaking of an "ethic of divinity" already imply a misunderstanding of faith? Would a man who believes with his whole heart and soul in the Almighty, understand his faith as a mere "ethic of divinity," as if all faiths were equal, and only tools for human satisfaction, even inferior to other tools or values such as "autonomy"? Haidt does not take with sufficient seriousness alternative views because he fails to consider that his understanding of justice may be the irrational or unjust one; or that he may be distorting foreign thoughts to fit into his fundamental prejudice.
It is rare to see a social scientist study a subject of real interest to us all: happiness. Haidt is unusually sensible in understanding how weak the power of reason is against emotion and instinct, and how important our duties, faith, and attachments are for happiness. But what is happiness for him? It reminds one of Nietzsche's last man: you have a little religious sentiment for dignity and elevation and a "connection to something larger," but not too much lest you become intolerant or illiberal; you have a productive career so you feel satisfaction in achievement, but not too much lest you sacrifice private attachments;; and of course you get warmed and buoyed by friends and family. He even allows for a bit of adversity, to grow your character. All this may describe a well-rounded and productive member of society, but not someone who excites longing or admiration.
The fundamentally egalitarian orientation of nearly all social science literature makes it blind to the huge gulf separating different types of human beings and to the injustice of treating those types as if they were the same. The injustice is also to ourselves: in losing sight of rich or well-formed human lives, we have a much harder time resisting the triviality, drudgery and vulgarity that usually degrade and overwhelm life. In particular, given the likelihood of losing ourselves in some specialized or technical career, we especially need those who keep alive for us our concerns as free and whole human beings, so distinct from our artificial functions as doctors, lawyers or other servants. That implies that there is a great difference between the conventional social life most of us know and a truly good or human life; and observers as varied as Chekhov, Stendhal, Tolstoy and Plato agree on that much.
Haidt's most serious difficulty, however, is one that he shares with other atheists, or rather pseudo-atheists: namely, that they have concealed from themselves, in a way that thoughtful believers do not, the irrationality, or problematic character, of what they believe, however much they pride themselves on seeing through the irrationality of others. The thoughtful believers are aware that they have dogmas and sacrifices and mysteries of the faith, but the pseudo-atheists generally see only their own "myth-free" rationality and moderation and self-interest. The extreme extent of the demands of justice, and of their own nutty beliefs or dogmatizing, is hidden from them. Haidt's watered down "divinity without god" (or his search for a meaning only "within life," rather than of or beyond life) conceals the character of happiness, the extraordinary hopes and dreams and wildness wrapped up in the word, which point to nothing less than God. His account of romantic love similarly underestimates the effect of beauty, and love's religious character, in favor of the familiar or functional. It is by facing up to our desire for the limitless and impossible, that we come to understand our limits and ourselves.
Manuel Lopez is a Cavalier Daily viewpoint writer.He is a visiting graduate student in political philosophy.
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