Will Pessimism Bring You Happiness?

Alain de Botton is the current master of pop philosophy. By liberally borrowing from the great sages of the past, he has written a series of popular books about how we should live our lives.

Full disclosure: I have not read a single one of them.

Have I been missing anything?

That question was lurking in my mind when I was reading de Botton's article, "For a Happier Life, Shake Off Your Misplaced Optimism," in the Financial Times. Link here.

This would not be a very bad piece of advice, if de Botton had left it at that. Unfortunately, he takes his idea a few steps too far and advises us to discard all of our optimism.

To be happy, he says, we should overcome our optimism, our bourgeois belief in progress, and our can-do spirit, the better to contemplate everything that can go wrong in life.

If paradox could cure, this would be a panacea.

The philosophy that is going to lead us from pessimism to happiness comes from the Stoics. "It may be time to revisit some of these teachings, not to add to our misery but precisely so as to alleviate our sorrow."

Obviously, syntax is not his strong suit.

De Botton makes two points, both of which are worth considering: first, if we assume that the worst is inevitable, then we will not be as likely to blame ourselves when it arrives; second, if we contemplate the worst, we can better prepare ourselves for its arrival.

De Botton summarizes his argument in the following passage. Please be kind enough to ignore the jumbled syntax: "If we do not dwell on the risk of sudden calamity, in the money markets or elsewhere, and pay a price for our innocence, it is because reality comprises two cruelly confusing characteristics: on the one hand, continuity and reliability lasting decades; on the other, unheralded cataclysms.

If pessimism will really make us happy, then cognitive psychologists like Martin Seligman who tell us that we can overcome depressing by learning to be optimistic are selling us angel dust. Cognitive therapy is just setting us up for calamity.

A cognitive psychologist might reply that optimism and good habits are more likely to help you through turmoil than will a mind filled with horrid thoughts.

Be that as it may, the notion that we should be prepared for the worst sounds a bit like Nassim Taleb's concept of the black swan. For Taleb a black swan, an unheralded cataclysm, causes damage because no one could have predicted it.

De Botton wants us to prepare. Taleb explains that if we could have predicted a black swan event, then we would have prepared for it and mitigated its damage.

Had we all known that 9/11 was going to happen, we would surely have taken steps to stop it.

Personally, I find Taleb more persuasive on this point.

De Botton's prescription for happiness leaves something to be desired. He borrows from a great thinker, and declares: "... we must, argued Seneca, hold the possibility of the most obscene events in mind at all times."

Unfortunately, this sounds like as prescription for extreme video games and internet porn. I would doubt that a diet of Resident Evil and MadWorld, followed by an internet porn kicker, is going to lead to happiness.

In other words, the point is overstated. We should have some awareness of the worst-case scenarios. It is certainly one factor that should enter into investment decisions.

Just as clearly, you should not spend all your time cultivating visions of doom and gloom. Not only will this prevent you from ever getting anything done, but, as Winifred Gallagher offered in her book, "Rapt," it is depressing and bad for your health. See my posts about focus. Links here and here.

It is one thing to know that you should drive carefully because you do not want to get into an accident. It is quite another to sit behind the wheel musing about all the possible catastrophes that can befall you on your way to your grandmother's house.

The former is prudent; the latter will cause you to take your mind off the road.

Remember that philosophers do not have any responsibility for running a company or a country. They are in the business of thinking, of entertaining bizarre fantasies and visions, of stretching the limits of imagination.

They can obsess all they want about it because they do not have to show up for a job every day, meet a production schedule, set policy, or ensure that the factory is running smoothly.

De Botton is correct to say that mindless optimism is not the solution. But mindless pessimism is not either.

The former might leave us unprepared for ruin, but the latter will sap the energy and initiative needed to do the hard work of rebuilding.

Zizek on Violence, Part 2

On August 5 I wrote a long post on the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. For those who wish to read a more complete debunking of his horrific thought, I highly recommend Adam Kirsch's synoptic review in "The New Republic." Link here.

Kirsch has written a truly great article, going much further than I did in revealing the depravity of Zizek's thought. For those who think this is trivial, I would recall that Zizek is something of a cult figure, taken very seriously by academics. Perhaps now they will think twice before forcing their gullible students to accept Zizek as a great thinker worthy of respect... but I have my doubts.

Will the Real Creationist Please Stand Up

The debate continues. Was God an intelligent designer or did the universe fall into place at random? Should we teach creationism or Darwin or both? Must we choose between science and superstition, between enlightened reason or mindless faith?

Of course, most people know that God and science are not contradictory. While you can always find a backwoods preacher who will tell you that the world was literally created in seven days and that Lot's wife was literally turned into salt, no serious person would say that the Bible should be taken as scientific fact.

Does this mean that we should scrap God and become atheists? Or, as the politically correct crowd might say: Is God a social construct?

Before rushing off to embrace atheism-- the latest intellectual fad-- consider a line of reasoning offered by Jacques Lacan a few decades ago. It may not have been original, but it is compelling.

Four hundred or so years ago Johannes Kepler worked out the law that determined planetary orbits. Of course, he did not think that he had proven that God did not exist. Quite the contrary, he thought that he had gained an insight into God's mind.

If the planets were-- obviously-- obeying this law before Kepler discovered it, where had the law been before that time. If it is reasonable to think that the law existed before any humans wrote it down, is it also reasonable to say that a mind was thinking it? If so, what kind of mind? Clearly, it was not a human mind.

The same can be said for any scientific laws, including the laws of evolution. Thus, many have stated that there is no inherent contradiction between physical laws and metaphysical minds. But metaphysics is not the same as physics, and has no real place in a science course.

That is not the issue. Lurking in the wings of this debate is the following problem. Do the enlightened masses who have brandished the truths of science to smite the demons of creationism and intelligent design really believe in science? Would they throw out one of their politically correct prejudices if science proved it was not true.

Several years ago Harvard president Lawrence Summers made a few remarks about the biology of gender differences, some of which derive from Darwin.

As you recall, he was instantly attacked for having committed blasphemy. He was eventually run out of office on a rail. We all remember the furor. Did it sound like a rational, enlightened debate or a witch hunt?

Many of those who are fighting to exclude creationism from 10th grade biology-- position I would support-- believe that gender is a social construct, that sexual roles are a social construct, and that fatherhood and motherhood are socially constructed. Some of them also believe that all science, from physics to chemistry to geology, is one large social construct.

For social construct, read: creation. They really believe that the socio-sexual whirl was created by design. They believe that gender roles were designed intentionally by dominant males in order to serve the interests of an entrenched patriarchy. Some believe that the purpose was to repress human libido and oppress women.

This is a creationist view. Instead of God creating human beings, the politically correct crowd proposes that a trans-historical patriarchy did the dirty deed. They object to this design because they consider it to be unintelligent.

This creationist view has previously led to a re-creationist vision. If a criminal conspiracy created human nature to serve someone's will-to-power, then it should be possible to re-create human nature, the better to liberate the impulses that patriarchy has oppressed. Manifestations of this new human being are the Nietzschean Superman and the New Socialist Man.

You cannot hold fast to these beliefs and tout the virtues of Darwin. Among the better known aspects of Darwin's theory is the notion that sexual selection is based on a reproductive calculus. People are hard-wired to seek out sexual partners who will aid in the successful reproduction of the species.

This theory-- call it a scientific fact-- does not jibe with the notion that gender roles are social constructs or social creations. Nor does it jibe with Freud's Oedipal theory that everyone's true desire is to copulate with his or her mother. Nor does it jibe with the notion that sex is fundamentally about obtaining pleasure and that it does not much matter how, when, where, and with whom you go about it.

If you believe that the species is hard-wired to reproduce itself, then any theory that tries to explain sex by saying that human beings are merely seeking pleasure.. is unscientific. Call it neo-creationist dogma, if you like.

Zizek on Violence

The prolific Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, has just published yet another of his meditations, this time on violence. Zizek is constantly churning out these volumes, chapbooks of advanced free association mixed with self-deprecating humor and fuzzy thinking.

Zizek has gained his measure of fame by being one of the few serious thinkers who is still proud to be a Marxist and a Communist. Surely, it takes a peculiar warp of mind to persist in defending political systems whose only distinction lay in their extraordinary capacity to destroy human life.

But Zizek is not merely a retrograde Marxist apologist. He is an academic whose elucubrations address the concerns of post-Marxist intellectuals. He appeals to the reactionary left, to people who learned critical theory because they believed it would undermine capitalism, and who have had their hopes dashed by, among other things, the emergence of China as a twenty-first century beacon of capitalism.

Keep in mind that French thinkers of Zizek's generation pledged their youthful allegiance to Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a last ditch effort to destroy the remnants of capitalism, by marginalizing and disempowering "capitalist roaders" like Deng Xiaoping.

When Deng was rehabilitated after the death of Mao, when he had the infamous Gang of Four arrested, and when he launched China's great leap into capitalism... the junior French intellectuals who had supported Mao were bereft and forlorn. Where could they go for solace? In fact, they went into psychoanalysis. Many even became psychoanalysts.

American critical thinkers faced a similar problem, though later. What were they to do with their training after the fall of Communism? How do you undertake your intellectual labor when facts on the ground have rendered it empty and useless? What if it is all you know how to do? What if you are getting paid to do it?

One thing that they did not do was heed the advice of John Maynard Keynes: "When the fact change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Instead, this merry band of outmoded thinkers has lifted its heads from a landscape littered with the corpses produced by modern communist practice and decided to follow Zizek's advice: keep on criticizing.

For those who are impelled toward political action, who are impatient to overthrow imperialism and liberal democracy, Zizek counsels them to: Do nothing. Why waste you time trying to change the world when the theories you have expounded have become historical detritus.

Unfortunately, you do not become a great thinker by beating a dead theory. And Zizek, dare I say, is a master at beating dead theories. He does it with verve and panache, with energy and boundless enthusiasm. He embellishes his books with a flood of cultural references and cherry picked historical details. Surely, he is more mythmaker than analyst.

Nonetheless, there is something ultimately futile about the exercise. Point that I believe Zizek knows only too well. Fortunately, he has been sufficiently influenced by certain currents in French philosophy to find a redeeming social value in futility.

Meantime, Zizek's new book begins with a distinction he borrowed from the French Marxist Etienne Balibar. He divides violence into the subjective and the objective. Perversely, he calls real acts of violence "subjective," and declares that the violence perpetrated on the human species by capitalistic exploitation constitutes "objective" violence.

Like any good Marxist Zizek believes that the latter is the cause of the former, thereby allowing us to excuse most acts of terrorism as dialectical inevitabilities. In his more impish moments Zizek labels terrorism an act of love.

Thus, the terrorist attack against the World Trade Center was "subjective" violence, while the people who were working in the building would be considered by Zizek: "agents of the structural violence that creates the conditions for the explosion of subjective violence."

As I said, Zizek does not counsel resistance or rebellion. That course might be good for those who are dispossessed or dislocated in society. For the rest of us Zizek's advice is to do nothing. Literally. "Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts the ultimate function of which is to make the system run more smoothly."

Disregarding the clunky syntax, this advice is vapid and useless. At best, it will produce more depression, and more prescriptions for Prozac. Fortunately, Zizek's persona of class clown makes it that no one takes what he says as rules to live by.

Obviously, the use of terms like "subjective" and "objective" in a way that defies their normal meaning is intentional. But don't imagine that this transformation makes you some kind of cultural revolutionary. The fact is, these terms are being used as shibboleths: they identify the user as a member of an outlaw gang. Nothing more, nothing less.

Zizek's larger argument begins with the proposition that all human groups have been founded on violence. This echoes Freud's notion that civilization was founded on the repression of human libido.

Zizek presents it as an axiomatic truth. It is not. It does, however, serve a purpose. If all groups have been founded in violence, we cannot condemn anyone's violent acts. The world, as Zizek notes, is divided between those who commit violence and those who want to commit violence. Again, this is reheated Freudian theory.

If all human societies are founded in acts of violence, this also implies that they were not founded on free choice or the free consent of their members. This means that when Marxists dream of a world in which people are deprived of their free choice, they are thinking that they are helping disabuse the masses of the illusion of freedom.

Hopefully, no one needs a reminder that the radical left has no use for freedom. It has no use for an economic system like capitalism that runs on billions of decisions made by millions of individuals in the marketplace.

The great thinkers on the left (and right) believe that they should do the thinking for everyone. Like their favorite modern philosopher, Martin Heidegger, who wanted to serve the Third Reich as Hitler's philosopher-king, they dream of becoming court philosophers to despots and tyrants.

Then their minds will rule the world without their having to dirty themselves with practical politics. Where previous great thinkers like Michel Foucault and Juliette Binoche have heaped praise on the despotic Ayatollahs in Iran, Zizek has expressed great fondness for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

But there is a therapeutic side to Zizek's project. It is not for nothing that he is constantly offering snippets of psychoanalytic theory. The psychological issue is this: Should the thinkers who supported Lenin, Stalin, and Mao feel guilty for the carnage that they produced? Should they feel anxious that they will be punished for having promoted these Communist horrors?

If that is their problem, then Zizek tries to show them how to manage their guilt. If, as he says, all human societies are predicated on violence, then guilt puts you in closer touch with the truth, especially compared with those deluded souls who refuse to accept that their capitalistic system is dialectically responsible for all the terror that was committed by those trying to overthrow it. All the violence perpetrated in the name of Marx was the proper reaction to the monstrous hegemony of capitalism. Doesn't that make you feel better?

Another way to manage guilt is to shift the blame. In a silly example of dialectical unreason, Zizek denounced hedge fund operator and philanthropist George Soros: "The same Soros who funds education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial speculations and is so doing has created the conditions for the rise of the intolerance he denounces."

Whether it is coming from Zizek or from Bill O'Reilly blaming the world's ills on speculators is surely in mode. Remember when the speculators were being blamed for the high price of oil. Now, of course, the same speculators are causing its rapid descent.

Be that as it may, the important point in Zizek's statement is the number: "thousands of lives" have been ruined by George Soros.

This from someone who supports a political philosophy whose practical application has murdered tens of millions and ruined the lives of hundreds of millions more. Oh, the irony of it all!

Deep Thinking

From time to time I am amused to see what passes for serious thinking. Take this sentence from Slavoj Zizek's most recent book on violence:
"One thing that never ceases to amaze the native ethical consciousness is how the very same people who commit terrible acts of violence towards their enemies can display warm humanity and gentle care for the members of their own group."

Beyond the obvious fact that Zizek needs a better translator-- I assume that he is talking about naive, not native, ethical consciousness-- his sentence makes no sense.

It says that the rubes of this world are constantly surprised-- as opposed to occasionally surprised-- by the fact that people who violently defend their families are not equally violent towards the people they are defending.

But doesn't common sense tell us that a man who goes out to fight people who want to harm his family intends to spare them harm... not to inflict it himself?

Simple-minded rubes have no difficulty grasping this concept. I would not say the same about supposedly great philosophers. Who but a philosopher would think it logical that simple-minded people are so sophisticated that they can believe that a man who is capable of violence in one circumstance is a violent man in all circumstances.

If such were the case, the person would be fighting off enemies to have the thrill of inflicting violence on his family himself. Dare I say that the common people of this world are smart enough not to be surprised by this phenomenon. I would not say the same of philosophers.

Was Deconstruction a Con?

Last month Prof. Stanley Fish used his New York times blog to attempt to resurrect deconstruction. Several of his respondents mentioned that one reason deconstruction had fallen out of favor was that its founders were Nazis. One man wrote: "What does it say about Deconstruction that its most famous proponent was a hardcore Nazi sympathizer?"

In a second article Fish took up the question, but not without misstating it. His version was: "What does it say about deconstruction that one of its celebrated proponents was arguably a Nazi sympathizer?" To this he responded: "Nothing!"

See the difference. Fish has transformed a hardcore Nazi sympathizer to someone who was arguably a Nazi sympathizer? Is this kind of rewrite the basis of deconstruction?

The person referred to is Paul de Man, a professor at Cornell and Yale, who had written Nazi propaganda under the guise of literary criticism during World War II in occupied Belgium. For a full exposition of his story I recommend David Lehman's "Signs of the Times."

When I first read this question I thought the author was referring to Martin Heidegger. After all, Heidegger was the progenitor of deconstruction. The word itself is a translation from his concept of "destruktion." Does this mean that deconstruction is destruction with a con?

Is Stanley Fish trying to deconstruct us or to con us? Or is he right to say that since deconstruction involves the destruction of meaning and reference, that it cannot have political implications?

After all, you cannot make policy if language is a field of shifting meanings.

As it happens,Heidegger was an active and enthusiastic supporter of Adolph Hitler. He wrote that the Third Reich was the best embodiment of his philosophy and refused to recant his adherence to Nazism after the war. He could not, he said, repudiate his entire philosophy.

If the meaning of deconstruction is the Third Reich, that is not the same as saying that it doesn't mean anything. And even if it is not about politics, then perhaps it is about culture.

Deconstruction is a method of critical reading. It teaches people to scour literary and philosophical texts for alien elements that embody what has come to be called phallogocentrism...i.e. the privilege given to speech and meaning over the fluid activity of writing. Deconstruction proposed to rewrite classical texts in a way that removed and subverted anything smelling of fixed meanings and references.

Is this clear? Try it in a different context. In practice, substitute the word "Jewish" for phallogocentric, and deconstruction becomes a euphemism for pogrom!

It is not surprising that Heidegger was a great fan of Ernst Rohm's Storm Troopers. Weren't they cultural revolutionaries striking blows against certain alien cultural elements.

Better yet, take the fact that Heidegger believed that the source of alien Western thought was Socrates and that if we wanted to restore the purity of thought we had to go back to presocratic philosophers like Heraclitus.

This sounds innocent enough. That's what I thought until I happened on a pamphlet written by Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi propaganda minister, a man who was tried at Nuremberg and executed. In it Rosenberg explained that Socratic thought was the means through which the corrupting influence of Judaism had entered the Western world.

Does it ring a bell?

Deconstruction may not mean much, but that does not prevent it from being a con. Who but a con man is better at not saying what he means of meaning what he says?

If you want to ask who is right, Heidegger or Fish, the answer must be that Stanley fish is a dupe.