Author: Andrew Sullivan

How Money Can Make Us Unhappy

Jonah Lehrer reflects on a new study over at his new blog:

The Liege psychologists propose that, because money allows us to enjoy the best things in life – we can stay at expensive hotels and eat exquisite sushi and buy the nicest gadgets – we actually decrease our ability to enjoy the mundane joys of everyday life.

But the more I have stayed in expensive hotels, the more I long for my own bed. And the fancier food I eat, the more I yearn for a burger and fries. And nothing beats Nabisco Ginger Snaps. Or Skittles.

The Language Of Faith

Thornton Wilder once wrote these prophetic words:

“The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem — new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.”

This seems to me to be a much more potent problem than many of us believers grasp. Sometimes, I think of faith as like looking at an old and famous painting for so long that it becomes impossible to see it any more. By see it, I mean see it with eyes fresh to its core meaning, open to its ambiguities and associations, and prepared to be shocked by its audacity.

I think of the term “incarnation” – a word that has come to seem like tired dogma. But what can it possibly mean that God became man? How is that different from God infusing all of us with love and hope and sometimes such overwhelming power that we lose all sense of ourselves? What made Jesus so different, so more remarkable than all the rest of us sons and daughters of God? To non-believers I know this must seem just insane; for those of us trying to get past the staleness of our faith, it’s a pressing challenge.

Mockingbird blog touts Paul Zahl, mentioned on the Dish before, as someone engaged with this issue. The video above speaks for itself. There are more here.

Facts Infused With Morality

Edge held a seminar on morality. Here's Joshua Knobe:

Over the past few years, a series of recent experimental studies have reexamined the ways in which people answer seemingly ordinary questions about human behavior. Did this person act intentionally? What did her actions cause? Did she make people happy or unhappy? It had long been assumed that people’s answers to these questions somehow preceded all moral thinking, but the latest research has been moving in a radically different direction. It is beginning to appear that people’s whole way of making sense of the world might be suffused with moral judgment, so that people’s moral beliefs can actually transform their most basic understanding of what is happening in a situation.

David Brooks' illuminating column on this topic covered the same ground:

Paul Bloom of Yale noted that this moral sense can be observed early in life. Bloom and his colleagues conducted an experiment in which they showed babies a scene featuring one figure struggling to climb a hill, another figure trying to help it, and a third trying to hinder it.

At as early as six months, the babies showed a preference for the helper over the hinderer. In some plays, there is a second act. The hindering figure is either punished or rewarded. In this case, 8-month-olds preferred a character who was punishing the hinderer over ones being nice to it.

This illustrates, Bloom says, that people have a rudimentary sense of justice from a very early age. This doesn’t make people naturally good. If you give a 3-year-old two pieces of candy and ask him if he wants to share one of them, he will almost certainly say no. It’s not until age 7 or 8 that even half the children are willing to share. But it does mean that social norms fall upon prepared ground. We come equipped to learn fairness and other virtues.

Advantage Locke over Hobbes.

The Evolutionary Case Against Monogamy, Ctd

Jessa Crispin reviews Sex At Dawn. She found it lacking:

If there’s something to take from Sex at Dawn, it is simply that there are thousands of ways to be sexual creatures, as well as the reminder that societal norms flux with time for a reason. Did agriculture (and monogamy) come with some baggage? Absolutely. But did it also make us literate and productive, technologically advanced and romantic? Hell yes. It is possible that this particular mode of being no longer serves us, but neither will getting starry-eyed about better days long since past. There’s nothing progressive about this totally old-fashioned idea that women’s sexuality is the victim of, and secondary to, men’s sexuality. You can unpack the baggage from agriculture, and hunting-gathering, to figure out a new way to move forward with relations between men and women. But only if you’re honest about the contents — good and bad.

For Its Own Sake

The New Statesman interviews Rowan Williams:

If religion is pushed into private spaces, as increasingly it tends to be by our public discourse, we lose one of the most emotionally and imaginatively resourceful ways of seeing human behaviour; we lose something of the sense that certain acts may be good independently of whether they are sensible or successful in the world's terms. I suppose you could say that we lose the "contemplative" dimension to ethics, the belief that some things are worth ­admiring in themselves.

If you haven't read Marilynne Robinson's "Absence Of Mind", it speaks powerfully to the civilizational loss that a failure to grapple with. let alone understand, religious discourse and culture can bring. If you see the world as something to be understood, you will seek to understand it through many voices, idioms and perspectives. To dismiss all religion as mere anachronistic bunk is a closure of the mind, not an opening.

(Hat tip: Dreher).

The Rules Of Conversation, Ctd

Scott Adams keeps talking:

As a general rule, the more dangerous or inappropriate the conversation, the more interesting it is. You'll have to use your judgment to know when you've crossed the line.

Also as a general rule, conversations about how people have or will interact are interesting, and conversations about objects are dull. So steer toward topics that involve human perceptions and feelings, and away from objects and things.

You also want to avoid any topic that falls into the "you had to be there" category. For example, if someone is describing a vacation, avoid asking about the food. Nothing is more boring than a description of food. Ask instead if the person answered email from the beach. That gets to how a person thinks, and how hard it is to release a habit. And it could provide an escape route to move the conversation to yet another place. Sometimes it takes two or three bounces to get someplace of mutual interest.

My thoughts here.