Tricks of the mind

I have just finished reading Daniel Kahneman‘s book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman is one of the fathers of behavioral economics, having won the Nobel prize in 2002. Thinking, Fast and Slow summarizes much of his work and the state of knowledge on cognitive biases in decision making. There’s a short summary of the book over on Wikipedia. But I encourage you to read the whole thing, which is a treasure trove of insight into how the mind works.

In recent years, Kahneman has been particularly interested in hedonics, i.e. the study of happiness. Experiments show that traditional utility theory cannot be squared with our evaluation of pleasure and pain. Objectively greater levels of pain may be evaluated and recalled as less painful if either the peak of pain is lower or the final parts of the experience are less painful than the experience as a whole. Conversely, the pleasure in an experience can be ruined by less pleasurable moments at the end of it; nonetheless, objectively the pleasure has been had. Kahneman talks of two selves: the experiencing self versus the remembering self. Yet even if the remembering self makes expensive errors, Kahneman cannot dismiss its judgment entirely. Memories are the afterlife of experience, and they matter to happiness also.

Kahneman’s work is of tremendous practical importance, but it raises some theoretical issues which he does not discuss in the book. Specifically, he appears to simply assume that the basis for all the behavior he describes is biological, and ipso facto it is universal. This is doubtless true in part, but it is unlikely that it is true of everything that he discusses. Indeed, the mind can be trained, showing that there is a sociocultural dimension to observed biases and that they are path dependent.

While some errors can be given a plausible evolutionary etiology (but Kahneman warns us to avoid the seductiveness of stories), others, especially the misevaluation of happiness, raise questions as to how the mind has been endemically conditioned by society. Does the remembering self simply get it wrong, or is the experiencing self not really present to its experiences? Our learnt attitudes to experience seem to get in the way.

Ultimately, Kahneman provides a lot of evidence that accidents of life have no long term impact on happiness. Happiness is not obviously generated by what we experience in (adult) life at all, but rather by how we experience it – which has largely been settled by the time we get there. If we experienced life in fullness, we would not be prone to imagining that environmental changes – in job, place, relationship – would generate massive shifts in our well-being. This illusion is a direct result of the lack of well-being we experience because of the bound state of our libido. Given this fact, if we are aiming at gross national happiness, avoidance of disturbances in childhood to our ability to abandon to the natural flow of life should be an overarching priority of public policy.

Nine rooms of happiness?

I have recently discovered Stephen Synder’s very thought provoking blog on sexuality at Psychology Today. Warmly recommended to interested readers.

In this article, he describes a common situation (at least in his therapy room): women who feel their men are interested only superficially in their erotic potential, and that this never gets discovered.

As a rule, I tend to be very sceptical of the glorification of women by men – often by men who have a low image of themselves or of their sex. Whenever I have encountered it, it has had a strong flavor of mother-projection, under which lay plenty of mother-related grievances. Anecdotal evidence also suggests to me that women are as responsible for childhood neuroses as men. Why would they be better lovers than they are parents? So quantitatively I do not see a lot of difference.

I can hardly sit by and accept, either, the portrayal of men as one-dimensional erotic retards. Descriptively, Snyder doubtless identifies a real pattern. But not to dig somewhat under the surface seems a major abdication. Looked at over time, what is going on? I believe it is not so, and I suppose Synder would agree, that male disinterest in the whole woman already typically characterizes the early stages of a relationship. On the contrary, the experience of falling in love is typically one in which there is a high degree of consciousness of the woman in many of her aspects, not merely her propensity to have sex. So we are talking here about a feeling and a pattern of behavior which establishes itself over time; women feel the initial erotic promise remains unfulfilled while men feel that it loses importance.

If this is so, one is entitled to ask why. Part of the reason lies, perhaps, in our social biology. Male/female encounters are not supposed to be characterized by enduring and deepening enchantment. That’s just a myth. Men are resigned to it (even if the less sedentary may prefer affairs to baseball), while women are not. Because women feel they have no chance of full sexual expression except with the one man they married ages ago, they go on building up a greater and greater degree of resentment towards that man, whose fault it is not really.

And therein lies the rub – for while women hope for men to blossom as erotic creatures, they at the same time deny the basic precepts of male sexuality – and indeed of their own. The legitimate aspiration to delve deeper into their erotic being then turns into guerilla warfare against the forces of nature. This leads to deepening estrangement rather than rapprochement, and an eternal, dull and doleful stand-off ensues. Both allow their erotic natures to wither in the wasteland they have created.

Having said which, I am not quite as fatalistic. I think we have been repressing our true nature as a species for far too long to be anything other than ignorant about what would be possible between men and women if we stopped. It is a vast, unexplored frontier. Let us therefore be modest.

The image of all those cold and unexplored rooms is a compelling one. I’m more than willing to believe there are vast spaces inside every woman which neither I nor any other man has yet penetrated (pun intended). I would just like my female readers to understand that there are similarly vast spaces inside me.

The perils of positive thinking (1)

Self-help philosophies are big business. The amount of shelf space devoted in bookshops to titles expounding the power of positive thinking is quite astonishing. You all know the kinds of book I have in mind. It is a genre which spans new age and traditional spirituality, applied psychology and business. Alongside the authors are the coaches and therapists, all of whom make a living from doling out lifestyle advice and running therapy sessions and workshops based on the same principles.

On-line the situation is no different. Indeed, many phenomena of this kind have really been boosted by the power of viral marketing. Let us take just one example which is probably familiar to many – “The Secret”, a self-help film produced in 2006 by one Rhonda Byrne. The wikipedia article is here. The central message is that believing in yourself sets in motion a positive dynamic which becomes self-reinforcing, leading to happiness and success – a cosmic law dubbed the “Law of Attraction”. Another classic of this genre is Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, an all-time bestseller, published, astonishingly, in 1937 and still hugely influential today.

I first encountered this phenomenon within what was then called the “house church movement” in the 1980’s. This neo-Pentecostal movement was in its origins quite ascetic, but became increasingly, and to my horror, pervaded by quite different notions coming from the American “TV evangelists”. God wanted you to be rich and successful and, if you weren’t, it was only that your faith was insufficient for the task. (This doctrine never sat well with the evangelical precept of saving grace, but seemed subjectively appealing to many because it chimed with their self-doubt and perception that there had to be a “quantitative” element to salvation, a notion of course familiar to Catholics and Orthodox).

In its secular form of the Law of Attraction, I believe it expresses, albeit very crudely, something quite true, but at the same time it misses something equally fundamental.

What is true is expressed in the popular adage “success breeds success” and has been identified by many teachers. Jesus is reported, somewhere in the gospels, as saying “to he who has, more shall be given; but to he who has not, even what he has shall be taken away from him”.

Funnily enough, though, few if any of the real spiritual teachers I can think of ever ended their days in wealth and comfort; and Jesus himself was crucified. So what’s going on? Was Jesus just talking of “spiritual wealth”, perhaps, something quite different from, and perhaps opposed to, worldly riches?

Of course Jesus did indeed call on people to forego worldly riches on occasion, though only when an obstacle to spiritual growth. Still, I do not think that spiritualizing perfectly down-to-earth utterances is a proper hermeneutic. Rather, the “Law of Attraction” itself implies a duality of destinies, paths either up or down, virtuous or vicious circles. Not only does success breed success, but failure begets failure. This duality is found back, equally, in the salvation doctrines of probably all world religions (though it may be a somewhat simplistic framework within which to interpret the soteriology of Buddhism or some nature-religions, paganism, Shamanism and so forth, which also suggests it may have a lot to do with the role of institutionalized religions in legitimizing the established social order).

This “either-or” of destiny implies that there are two communities and two poles to which individuals gravitate – a pole of success and a pole of failure. Strictly speaking, there is a “Law of Attraction” at work at both ends; and the closer you are to one, the more difficult to break out of its gravitational field into that of the other. Between the two, though, there is also a “Law of Repulsion”. Individuals gravitating towards the upper pole find themselves spending more time with others who are on the same path, and separate out from them by a process of reverse osmosis. This process is analogous to the processes of self-organization giving rise to order in the cosmos notwithstanding the tendency to entropy expressed by the second law of thermodynamics. On the side of those to whom fate has been less lucky, who are in the vast majority, envy and anger develop and are directed towards those more fortunate. For this reason, prophets, even if they seed a new level of consciousness in the human spirit, are almost always martyrs.

So much for the Law of Attraction as a law. As a self-help program, however, there is much more to be said; I will return to this in my next post.