Misery's the river of the world; everybody row
Sarah just posted this:
"Hope is not about proving anything. It's about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us."
--Anne Lamott
I've got a couple of thoughts on this. It's kind of a stream of consciousness thing.
For the purposes of this post, I am going to differentiate between "hope" and "faith". I use "hope" here to mean a positive outlook, and "faith" to imply certainty. The difference is that hope does not preclude doubt. In this post "faith" has no religious connotations.
The Anne Lamott quote is talking about, in my terminology, faith.
With respect to one's self, I think a certain amount of faith is a good thing. It's a natural defense mechanism against depression. It is, and should be, vaguer than one's hopes, because the certainty should not run up against reality. For example, you may have hope that your marriage can be repaired - but failing that, there is a fall back position of faith that your life will eventually improve.
However, an excess of faith is bad. The Law of Attraction is one example of this. It teaches that, basically, the certainty is all you need - be certain good things will happen, and they will.
Moreover, faith - and to a lesser extent, hope - is bad when applied to others. You should not have faith that things will get better for others. Having that implies even if no action is taken, things will still get better. It inspires laziness.
Basically, the faith should only be that the psychological/social situation will improve. It should not extend to an economic or political situation - because those are based on real factors that cannot be altered by a simple change in attitude.
The quote is very arrogant, I think. That kind of position must generally be predicated on a certain base level of comfort. Love will not lift you out of the slums. Love is not bigger than the grim, bleak bullets guerrillas can shoot at you. If you do not have the base level on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, faith and love aren't going to do shit for you.
Furthermore - and this gets back to faith towards others - love on your part, you in the comfort zone, towards people in these kinds of situations is useless. Action is what matters.
Indeed, faith is not about proving anything, because there can be no doubt. And in this way, I don't have the faith that the quote speaks of, at least not beyond a personal level. I do not believe that humans are intrinsically good. I don't think that love will save the human race. Humans are far too petty and conniving for some love- and trust-based system to create happiness for all people. Only a carefully crafted system that enforces the principles we hold important (e.g., love) will work. The reason our government has checks and balances is because if you tried to run a government based on faith, based on love, it would get taken advantage of and we'd be in a dictatorship.
The attitude in the quote, when not taken in moderation as talked about earlier, is problematic. It encourages satisfaction with the status quo. Hope, in the sense of a positive outlook, is good - you can be unsatisfied with your present situation, you can fight against it, and still have a sense of happiness derived from that hope.
The attitude of "love will prevail" is awfully close to "God will provide" in my opinion.
There's a line in the book I'm reading right now: "An excess of reason is itself a form of madness". I think it's very true. There are two things I relate to this.
The first is that the Anne Lamott attitude can surely lead to happiness (if you have secured enough of the hierarchy of needs already). However, it's irrational. Seeing the world as it truly is is a depressing thing. There is so much misery and suffering in the world. And worse, the distribution of suffering is ghastly. There are probably a billion people who are fighting just to stay alive. Fighting against disease, against violence, against poverty.
Sarah said to me, when I said there was so much suffering and misery in the world, "There is so much joy in the world." My response to that is this: go to India, take your 80 goddamn pairs of shoes with you, find some 5-year-old kid tugging at your leg, a kid who is maybe physically disfigured, kidnapped from their parents, probably being sexually and physically abused at the hands of the begging mafia (example), you lean down in your J. Crew sweater into their miserable little face, and you tell that little child how much fucking joy there is in the world.
The second, which follows from the first, is that to be happy, once you have comfort of course (which I'm defining as at least Maslow's first level, and maybe the second too), you have to, in large part, ignore the suffering of other people. This is natural. Ignorance is bliss, but happiness is a certain willful blindness. To truly have empathy for all people is to take on the world's problems, an overwhelming prospect.
"An excess of reason is itself a form a madness." And true to form, I have managed to use reason to tear off the blinders, to care deeply about the suffering of all those missing the bottoms of their needs triangles. In my intellectual pursuits, I have managed to extend my core beliefs to their logical conclusions. Now, the logical conclusions are not those that would normally come from the beliefs, because that suffering-blindness mechanism (an important psychological safeguard) stops it. But I have cracked that apart and forged blindly (ironic, no?) ahead to find what ultimately my beliefs require, in a moral sense. And now I desparately wish I could put that wall back up.
Morally, I see only three viable positions:
1. Care about the sufferings of no one but myself. This is sort of the moral-libertarian viewpoint. I don't think I could think this way if I spent years trying.
2. Care about the sufferings of all people equally. I don't think the suffering of one person (say, because they are close or important to me) can be intrinsically more important than an other. For example, if I could save 100 people from grinding poverty and the threat of death in Somalia, with the consequence being a close friend or relative of mine being thrown in a deep, unrelenting depression, I think I would be as morally compelled to do that as if the target were unknown to me. Some people don't think that way, but I hate that "me and mine" bullshit - it's part of what's wrong with America (but that's another story).
3. Take an economics view. Weigh the costs of caring about others with my own happiness. Now, normally this option is what people do subconsciously. However, having exposed the moral machinery, I find it extremely hard to take this view now. An example: I was walking back to the L, having just bought a tuna sandwich and a bag of Combos because I was very, very hungry. I saw a bum rummaging through a trash can, so I stopped and offered him half of my sandwich. A good deed, right? Well, most people would have felt pretty good about it. But afterward, all I could think about was, "Why didn't I give him all of my sandwich? I would still have had Combos to tide me over until I got home, where I had more food waiting for me. Is that all this bum's suffering is worth to me? Half a tuna sandwich?" Do you see my dilemma?
And that attitude can be taken further. At what point do I say that caring about the suffering of others is too high a cost for me? How can I say I am morally good when there are people with nothing, when I have money I could be spending to help them, and instead am spending it on recreation? I could be happy if I never went out, right? I would still have most of my levels fulfilled, and I could give all the money I would be saving to people struggling to survive. But then take that one step further - I could be getting into a job that is very high-paying, specifically so I could have more money to give to charity. But what if that job contributes somehow to the suffering of others? I could go into something like the Peace Corps. But going to grad school for mechanical engineering - that isn't helping them, only myself. Do you see the endless spiral of moral dilemmas?
But I have not found a way out of it. I have not peeked out from under the blinders - I have torn them off. I see my own (naturally-occurring and necessary) hypocrisy, and cannot morally just let it go. I have principles - and now, knowing what I know, those principles have difficult consequences. To give up trying to accept those consequences would be to give up my principles. And to take the economics view is to know and wrestle with every choice I make, to regret not having done more.
In the end, I guess this is a problem of meta-happiness, happiness about my own happiness. I am happy/satisfied about my concern for others - but that exact concern, because of how much misery there is in the world, makes me unhappy. To be happy, I would have to ignore the suffering of most of the world's people (I could acknowledge it, as people do, but they don't really care on more than a superficial level - but again, it's a natural and not intrinsically bad thing) but this would make me unhappy, as I would be giving up my principles. It's a catch-22 that's resulted from the intellectual pursuit of moral consistency. An excess of reason is truly a form of madness.
A final quote:
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it."
--George Bernard Shaw [link]
"Hope is not about proving anything. It's about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us."
--Anne Lamott
I've got a couple of thoughts on this. It's kind of a stream of consciousness thing.
For the purposes of this post, I am going to differentiate between "hope" and "faith". I use "hope" here to mean a positive outlook, and "faith" to imply certainty. The difference is that hope does not preclude doubt. In this post "faith" has no religious connotations.
The Anne Lamott quote is talking about, in my terminology, faith.
With respect to one's self, I think a certain amount of faith is a good thing. It's a natural defense mechanism against depression. It is, and should be, vaguer than one's hopes, because the certainty should not run up against reality. For example, you may have hope that your marriage can be repaired - but failing that, there is a fall back position of faith that your life will eventually improve.
However, an excess of faith is bad. The Law of Attraction is one example of this. It teaches that, basically, the certainty is all you need - be certain good things will happen, and they will.
Moreover, faith - and to a lesser extent, hope - is bad when applied to others. You should not have faith that things will get better for others. Having that implies even if no action is taken, things will still get better. It inspires laziness.
Basically, the faith should only be that the psychological/social situation will improve. It should not extend to an economic or political situation - because those are based on real factors that cannot be altered by a simple change in attitude.
The quote is very arrogant, I think. That kind of position must generally be predicated on a certain base level of comfort. Love will not lift you out of the slums. Love is not bigger than the grim, bleak bullets guerrillas can shoot at you. If you do not have the base level on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, faith and love aren't going to do shit for you.
Furthermore - and this gets back to faith towards others - love on your part, you in the comfort zone, towards people in these kinds of situations is useless. Action is what matters.
Indeed, faith is not about proving anything, because there can be no doubt. And in this way, I don't have the faith that the quote speaks of, at least not beyond a personal level. I do not believe that humans are intrinsically good. I don't think that love will save the human race. Humans are far too petty and conniving for some love- and trust-based system to create happiness for all people. Only a carefully crafted system that enforces the principles we hold important (e.g., love) will work. The reason our government has checks and balances is because if you tried to run a government based on faith, based on love, it would get taken advantage of and we'd be in a dictatorship.
The attitude in the quote, when not taken in moderation as talked about earlier, is problematic. It encourages satisfaction with the status quo. Hope, in the sense of a positive outlook, is good - you can be unsatisfied with your present situation, you can fight against it, and still have a sense of happiness derived from that hope.
The attitude of "love will prevail" is awfully close to "God will provide" in my opinion.
There's a line in the book I'm reading right now: "An excess of reason is itself a form of madness". I think it's very true. There are two things I relate to this.
The first is that the Anne Lamott attitude can surely lead to happiness (if you have secured enough of the hierarchy of needs already). However, it's irrational. Seeing the world as it truly is is a depressing thing. There is so much misery and suffering in the world. And worse, the distribution of suffering is ghastly. There are probably a billion people who are fighting just to stay alive. Fighting against disease, against violence, against poverty.
Sarah said to me, when I said there was so much suffering and misery in the world, "There is so much joy in the world." My response to that is this: go to India, take your 80 goddamn pairs of shoes with you, find some 5-year-old kid tugging at your leg, a kid who is maybe physically disfigured, kidnapped from their parents, probably being sexually and physically abused at the hands of the begging mafia (example), you lean down in your J. Crew sweater into their miserable little face, and you tell that little child how much fucking joy there is in the world.
The second, which follows from the first, is that to be happy, once you have comfort of course (which I'm defining as at least Maslow's first level, and maybe the second too), you have to, in large part, ignore the suffering of other people. This is natural. Ignorance is bliss, but happiness is a certain willful blindness. To truly have empathy for all people is to take on the world's problems, an overwhelming prospect.
"An excess of reason is itself a form a madness." And true to form, I have managed to use reason to tear off the blinders, to care deeply about the suffering of all those missing the bottoms of their needs triangles. In my intellectual pursuits, I have managed to extend my core beliefs to their logical conclusions. Now, the logical conclusions are not those that would normally come from the beliefs, because that suffering-blindness mechanism (an important psychological safeguard) stops it. But I have cracked that apart and forged blindly (ironic, no?) ahead to find what ultimately my beliefs require, in a moral sense. And now I desparately wish I could put that wall back up.
Morally, I see only three viable positions:
1. Care about the sufferings of no one but myself. This is sort of the moral-libertarian viewpoint. I don't think I could think this way if I spent years trying.
2. Care about the sufferings of all people equally. I don't think the suffering of one person (say, because they are close or important to me) can be intrinsically more important than an other. For example, if I could save 100 people from grinding poverty and the threat of death in Somalia, with the consequence being a close friend or relative of mine being thrown in a deep, unrelenting depression, I think I would be as morally compelled to do that as if the target were unknown to me. Some people don't think that way, but I hate that "me and mine" bullshit - it's part of what's wrong with America (but that's another story).
3. Take an economics view. Weigh the costs of caring about others with my own happiness. Now, normally this option is what people do subconsciously. However, having exposed the moral machinery, I find it extremely hard to take this view now. An example: I was walking back to the L, having just bought a tuna sandwich and a bag of Combos because I was very, very hungry. I saw a bum rummaging through a trash can, so I stopped and offered him half of my sandwich. A good deed, right? Well, most people would have felt pretty good about it. But afterward, all I could think about was, "Why didn't I give him all of my sandwich? I would still have had Combos to tide me over until I got home, where I had more food waiting for me. Is that all this bum's suffering is worth to me? Half a tuna sandwich?" Do you see my dilemma?
And that attitude can be taken further. At what point do I say that caring about the suffering of others is too high a cost for me? How can I say I am morally good when there are people with nothing, when I have money I could be spending to help them, and instead am spending it on recreation? I could be happy if I never went out, right? I would still have most of my levels fulfilled, and I could give all the money I would be saving to people struggling to survive. But then take that one step further - I could be getting into a job that is very high-paying, specifically so I could have more money to give to charity. But what if that job contributes somehow to the suffering of others? I could go into something like the Peace Corps. But going to grad school for mechanical engineering - that isn't helping them, only myself. Do you see the endless spiral of moral dilemmas?
But I have not found a way out of it. I have not peeked out from under the blinders - I have torn them off. I see my own (naturally-occurring and necessary) hypocrisy, and cannot morally just let it go. I have principles - and now, knowing what I know, those principles have difficult consequences. To give up trying to accept those consequences would be to give up my principles. And to take the economics view is to know and wrestle with every choice I make, to regret not having done more.
In the end, I guess this is a problem of meta-happiness, happiness about my own happiness. I am happy/satisfied about my concern for others - but that exact concern, because of how much misery there is in the world, makes me unhappy. To be happy, I would have to ignore the suffering of most of the world's people (I could acknowledge it, as people do, but they don't really care on more than a superficial level - but again, it's a natural and not intrinsically bad thing) but this would make me unhappy, as I would be giving up my principles. It's a catch-22 that's resulted from the intellectual pursuit of moral consistency. An excess of reason is truly a form of madness.
A final quote:
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it."
--George Bernard Shaw [link]