Questions NOV 2

Flanagan 8-11 (-p.202). PHIL/RS Open House/Pizza Party 4:30–5:30 pm in JUB 202 [we'll begin there]. PRESENTATION: DELANA

1. Interpretive challenges to a reliable picture of happiness are especially pronounced in which societies? 149
2. What did the American Psychiatric Association apologize for in 2021? 154
3. What kinds of questions do the authors think should be added to subjective well-being studies? 160
4. Measures of "hedonic balance" typically focus on what? How might this be misleading? 164
5. Judgments of life satisfaction are arbitrary in part because there's no reason to think most people know where to set what? 173
6. What's the difference between being judiciously positive and being Pollyanna? 180-81
7. Work in philosophy of language and logic, linguistics, and the emotions definitively shows what? 186
8. The consensus seems to be that the primary duties of a good society are  what? Do they unambiguously predict happiness? 189
9. The authors have contended that what goods come first? 191
10. Instead of, or in addition to, a worldwide movement to advance happiness the authors propose that educators do what? 201-2

Volunteer...

 All who've not yet indicated a preference, please do so. Let's schedule no more than two presentations on each available date.

Thanks, Delana.

Happy Halloween: seize the day

And bring treats to share with the class, for an extra base on the scorecard.

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"Do not underestimate the power of costume" 

Carved unhappy

Today is Halloween, or All Hallows’ Eve, a day in which the dead are traditionally believed to walk among the living. Communities all across the country throw Halloween parties and parades, but Salem, Massachusetts, goes all out. It started with “Haunted Happenings” in the 1980s, a celebration that took place over a single weekend. But more and more happenings were added to the events calendar every year, until they filled the entire month of October, and now a quarter of a million tourists flock to Salem to celebrate the monthlong Festival of the Dead. There’s a psychic fair and witchcraft expo every day. Psychic mediums deliver messages from departed loved ones — or an expert can teach you how to communicate with the dead on your own. Witch doctors and hoodoo practitioners explain the art of graveyard conjuring. There are séances and cemetery tours. You can solemnly honor your lost loved ones at the Dumb Supper, a feast with the dead. And the whole thing culminates with The Official Salem Witches’ Halloween Ball at the historic Hawthorne Hotel.

Salem has had a complicated relationship with witches ever since the infamous witch trials of 1692. Over the course of a year, nearly 200 residents of Essex County were falsely accused of witchcraft; 19 people were hanged and one man was tortured to death. For generations after the trials, the residents of Salem Town and Salem Village just wanted to put the tragedy behind them — so much so that Salem Village changed its name to Danvers. But some modern-day pagans and Wicca practitioners have turned Salem into a pilgrimage site, so the city ironically, and somewhat uneasily, has made witchcraft part of its marketing strategy. Author J.W. Ocker wrote about this phenomenon in A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts (2016). He says: “The Witches, capital W, religious Witches, they balk a little bit at the Halloween witch, because it’s ugly and it’s a stereotype, and it has all these historical associations with it. Then there are people like the historians who balk at the religious witches, who kind of co-opt the cause of the accused witches by saying that they were almost martyrs for the cause. Then there’s the city trying to make everyone happy.” WA

A merrier world

https://www.threads.net/@philosophors/post/CzD1e5ItJiI/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

A happy D'back

 Thanks to Ed Craig for finding the good stuff on X (I never go there anymore)...

This is so good!! Watch as Corbin Carroll talks about the Philosophy of Happiness class he took.

Something I preach to athletes nonstop: Strive to collect the ultimate currency in life (Happiness) and everything else will come as a by-product! pic.twitter.com/7B8V1vztDH

— Brandon Guyer (@BrandonGuyer) October 30, 2023

Questions Oct 31

Flanagan 4-7 (-p.145). PRESENTATIONS: KADE, GARY...

1. The authors say proponents of the happiness agenda "only want to know" what? 97
2. What kind of property, implied by the averaging and ranking of happiness scores, do the authors insist does not exist? 100-101
3. By which metrics are Finland, The Netherlands, and Vietnam (respectively) the world's happiest countries? 103-4
4. With what sorts of outcomes are positive and negative emotions correlated? 107 How do Anglophone and East Asian cultures differ on them? 114
5. What did J.S. Mill say about people who are inappropriately happy? Do you agree? 110-11
6. Who said "much laughter deadens the heart." Agree? 112-3
7. What groups do the authors offer as examples of people who are happy "for the wrong reasons"? 117
8. The cultural fit of emotions contributes to subjective well-being and to what? 122
9. What did Edward Slingerland say about the Chinese concept of Tian? 138
10. Chinese feminism is mostly about what? 145

NYTimes: From Serial Productions: The Kids of Rutherford County

In our back yard... 

In April 2016, 11 Black schoolchildren, some as young as 8 years old, were arrested in Rutherford County, Tenn. The reason? They didn’t stop a fight between some other kids. What happened in the wake of those arrests would expose a juvenile justice system that was playing by its own rules. For over a decade, this county had arrested and illegally jailed hundreds, maybe thousands, of children. It would take years, but eventually one lawyer, a former juvenile delinquent himself, asked: Why? The answer would lead back to a powerful judge, the jailer she appointed and a county that treated this astronomical number of arrests as normal. From Serial Productions and The New York Times, “The Kids of Rutherford County” is a four-part narrative series reported and hosted by Meribah Knight, a Peabody-award winning reporter based in the South. In the podcast, Knight explores the world of one county’s juvenile court — a court shrouded in confidentiality and privacy, which in turn allowed something secretive and illegal to grow. How did this happen? What does it take to stop it? And will the people in charge face any consequences? 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/podcasts/serial-kids-rutherford-county.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
From Serial Productions: The Kids of Rutherford County

Enlightened wave

We're all part of something so much larger...

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That was good!

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Jungian happiness

Carl  (not Josh) Jung - How To Be Happy

"Know your shadow… Nurture relationships…"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nKYc1AY_N0

Trees & meaning

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Pizza Party Nov 2

 

Philosophy & Religious Studies Department “Open House” 

with FREE Pizza 

Thursday, November 2nd, 2023 

4:30 pm – 5:30 pm 

JUB 202

How does this lead to happiness?  Health costs and insurance is making us unhealthy and unhappy: 

Americans skipping care due to rising health costs

---

Ken Alltucker

USA TODAY  October 27, 2023

---

Half of working-age Americans struggle to pay for health care, and 1 in 3 Americans owe money to a hospital, doctor or other health care provider, a new survey shows.

The survey by The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that focuses on equitable access to health care, also reports that nearly 2 in 5 people skipped or delayed medical care or didn’t fill a prescription in the past year because they couldn’t afford it. The survey revealed that even people who get health insurance often can’t afford health care costs.

The financial strain of health care has made Americans sicker and often put them in debt, said Sara Collins, a senior scholar and vice president at the New York-based foundation.

Nearly 3 in 4 people without health insurance struggled to pay for health care, but even people with coverage found it difficult to pay for health care.

Nearly 6 in 10 people who bought their own health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, brokers or other health insurance sellers said it was 'very or somewhat difficult' to afford health care costs.

According to the telephone and online survey of a random sample of more than 7,800 adults April 18 through July 31:

38% of people surveyed delayed or skipped needed health care or filling a prescription drug because they could not afford it.

More than half of adults who skipped care said a health problem worsened as a result.

Also, one-third of adult Americans reported they owed money to a doctor, dentist, hospital, home health care provider, nursing home or other provider. Those bills stemmed from routine care for chronic health conditions nearly as often as they did from emergencies or recently diagnosed health problems.

Among those who owed a medical debt, the survey said, nearly half owed $2,000 or more. Nearly two-thirds of adults who owed money for a medical bill paid their health care provider directly, but past-due bills for about one-third of adults were turned over to collection agencies.

In 2021, consumers owed about $88 billion in medical debt, making it the largest category of consumer debt. When consumers owe medical debt, it’s often turned over to collection agencies and appears on consumer credit reports.

The Biden administration has proposed federal rules barring unpaid medical debt from appearing on consumers’ credit reports.

An overwhelming number of survey respondents said medical debt made people anxious or worried. But consumers also had to make other sacrifices to pay their medical bills:

39% cut back on necessities like food, heat or rent.

37% spent all or part of their savings on medical debt.

25% took another job or worked more hours at an existing job.

Joseph Betancourt, a primary care doctor and president of The Commonwealth Fund, said he sees daily examples of patients struggling to afford health care. Patients are confused and frustrated and 'face legitimate threats to their health and well-being.'

'These affordability challenges are real,' Betancourt said. 'They’re getting worse, and they’re a clear and present danger to people’s health and well-being.'

'These affordability challenges are real. They’re getting worse, and they’re a clear and present danger to people’s health and well-being.'

Joseph Betancourt

Primary care doctor

The Blue Zones happiness agenda

 Inspired by Sneh's report, I'm watching the Blue Zones documentary. "Enjoy the present. That's important," says one Okinawan. "Don't get angry," says another. And "make people happy."

So it's not just about longevity, and living longer. It's about living better. Happier...

 

Lessons from Denmark

"7. Take your time in school. Danes don't start school until age six and often don't end their academic careers until they're 30. Along the way, they may travel, take a year off to try a profession, and switch majors. By the time they graduate, they're likely to have found a career that they love, not just one that pays. They've had a variety of life experiences and a rich liberal arts education. Indeed, among the happiest Danes are those in their late 20s and early 30s who are in the marriage market and transitioning from school to their first job.

Lessons: Go to a school you can afford, take liberal arts classes, take a year off to travel before graduating. Don't rush into a job, mortgage, and debt.

8. Take six weeks of vacation. The Danes take at least four weeks a year to travel and often take two months. They'll summer in southern Europe or spend weeks at a time at the sea. A researcher in the Danish statistics office told me that the more Danes vacation, the more value they gain. After six weeks of vacation, they actually feel more satisfied to get back to work and become productive again.

Lessons: Don't be lured by the notion that you'll take your dream vacation later in life. Use all your vacation time and negotiate for more until you're getting about six weeks off. No one on her deathbed wishes she had worked more.

9. Consider cohousing. Denmark is home to more than 100 cohousing projects, or bofaellesskap. In each case, about 30 families live in connected homes that form a long row or a circle around a common area. As a rule, you can walk into any house and announce yourself. Usually you are greeted by friends, but if no one answers, you don't stay. Kids are completely free-range—they end up at each other's houses and roam the grounds and surrounding woods freely. The cohousing arrangement strikes the perfect balance between private and public, as residents can be as social as they want, although circumstances nudge them into a minimum threshold of socialization. (Even introverts are happier, studies have shown, when they're around people rather than alone.)

Lessons: Make a point of moving into a friendly neighborhood with people who share your stage in life. Get to know your neighbors, organize a potluck, help start a communal garden. If you have children, make a deal with other parents to take turns taking care of each other's kids. If you're interested in finding cohousing in the United States, investigate the Cohousing Association (cohousing.org)."

— The Blue Zones of Happiness: Lessons From the World's Happiest People (Blue Zones, The) by Dan Buettner
https://a.co/5cuMMHz

==

As we were saying…

We can't afford to build places where people just park their bodies at night," Burden said. "We can't afford to spend a single transportation dollar that doesn't increase land value rather than decrease it." We should go back to building towns the way our great-grandparents did, he suggested. Most people today want to live in a community where they don't have to drive long distances. They want to live near enough to the stores and jobs so they can walk, take a bus, or ride a bike wherever they need to go. If Muscatine wanted to stay competitive, retain existing businesses, attract new ones, and have money in the treasury for parks and other amenities, then the best thing residents could do would be to focus on making their town walkable and livable, Burden said. That meant adding sidewalks, improving crosswalks, replacing intersections with roundabouts in some places, and converting one-way streets to run in both directions. "One-way streets help move people faster," Burden said. "But is that your goal? To empty out downtown?" You should be doing just the opposite, he argued. You want people to linger downtown and enjoy themselves. "Then, before you know it, your children won't be moving off to other cities. Everything they want will be right here in your own community.

Dan Buettner, The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World's Healthiest People
Like

==

Ikigai

According to the Japanese, everyone has an ikigai - a reason for living. And according to the residents of the Japanese village with the world's longest-living people, finding it is the key to a happier and longer life. Having a strong sense of ikigai - the place where passion, mission, vocation, and profession intersect - means that each day is infused with meaning. It's the reason we get up in the morning. It's also the reason many Japanese never really retire (in fact there's no word in Japanese that means retire in the sense it does in English): They remain active and work at what they enjoy, because they've found a real purpose in life - the happiness of always being busy. In researching this book, the authors interviewed the residents of the Japanese village with the highest percentage of 100-year-olds - one of the world's Blue Zones. Ikigai reveals the secrets to their longevity and happiness: how they eat, how they move, how they work, how they foster collaboration and community, and - their best-kept secret - how they find the ikigai that brings satisfaction to their lives. And it provides practical tools to help you discover your own ikigai. Because who doesn't want to find happiness in every day? https://www.audible.com/pd/Ikigai-Audiobook/B074WFYZYH

==

Kade raised a question...

of whether any governments actually are pursuing the Happiness agenda (making allowance for the fact that different cultures, Bhuddist Bhutan for instance, have non-western notions of what it even means). Maybe not, but maybe they should. That's the Blue Zones (and Jeffersonian) view Buettner defends, pretty ably, in chapter 6...

""The happiness and prosperity of our citizens… is the only legitimate object of government."—Thomas Jefferson, 1811

AS INSPIRATIONAL AS THESE STORIES ARE from Costa Rica, Denmark, and Singapore—from the Blue Zones of Happiness, the homes of the happiest people in the world—there are ways in which the solutions they represent do not translate easily into solutions for the United States. What works for Denmark, a social democracy of five million people, for instance, might not necessarily work for a sprawling, diverse, argumentative, freedom-loving nation like our own.

Unlike Denmark's wealthy, well-educated, relatively homogeneous society of consensus seekers, the United States is a crazy quilt of races, religions, and ethnic groups more accustomed to settling issues through competition than cooperation.

Likewise, could we really emulate the tolerance of Costa Rica? Or the values-driven security of Singapore? I think so. Each of these nations has in a sense manufactured happiness by adopting policies that favor quality of life, and that's something we in the United States can do, too…" https://a.co/bNMHedL

To save the world, or savor it?

Also, I love that Part 3 begins with one of my favorite quotes from the great essayist E.B. White...

" I arise in the morning," E. B. White famously said, "torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." The key is to find that sweet spot between savoring life now and doing things that lead to a richer, more meaningful outcome in the future. As we've seen in Costa Rica, Denmark, and Singapore, people in those places aren't happier because they try harder to be happy—they enjoy good lives because their surroundings nudge them into behaviors more likely to produce happiness. In this section, we turn to you. How can you set up your life so your circumstances nudge you into behaviors that make you happier?"

— The Blue Zones of Happiness: Lessons From the World's Happiest People 

Also, I want to move now to 

Boulder...

"...many ways in which Boulder excels: It has one of the nation's lowest smoking rates, one of the lowest obesity rates, and one of the highest rates of exercise. Boulder residents report high life satisfaction and feel more safe and secure than residents of any other American community. Probably most important, they feel that they accomplish meaningful things every day. When asked if, during the past seven days, they've felt "active and productive every day," Boulder residents overwhelmingly responded in the affirmative. Pleasure, purpose, pride: Boulder provides the context for all..."

RAHHHHHAGHAGH

 

I’m so confused

 

Unable to sign in to comment. Please check your browser configurations to allow sign-in. Learn more. You can still comment anonymously, or with name and URL.

Any time I try to comment as an author, this little message pops up. I am so frustrated and I don’t know what to do other than throw my iPad across the room. Please help.

Trial

 I don’t know how to make this work, this is a test

Growing up takes courage

And luck—the luck of a wise and timely uncle-figure, portly or otherwise, who'll teach you something about meliorism in the real world. Susan Neiman is herself such a (non-portly) figure in "Why Grow Up…"—

"Growing up is more a matter of courage than knowledge: all the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgement. And judgement can be learned–principally through the experience of watching others use it well–but it cannot be taught. Judgement is important because none of the answers to the questions that really move us can be found by following a rule. Courage is not only required to learn how to trust your own judgement rather than relying on your state's, your neighbour's or your favourite movie star's. (Of course, your state, your neighbour or your favourite movie star may often be right, and good judgement requires you to recognize that.) Even more important, courage is required to live with the rift that will run through our lives, however good they may be: ideals of reason tell us how the world should be; experience tells us that it rarely is. Growing up requires confronting the gap between the two–without giving up on either one.

Most of us are tempted to give up on one or the other. People who stick to the dogmas of childhood can spend whole lifetimes denying that the world does not conform to beliefs they hold dear. While examples of these abound–certain preachers and politicians come to mind–in our day it's more common to meet people who are stuck in the mire of adolescence. The world turns out not to reflect the ideas and ideals they had for it? All the worse for ideals. Maintaining ideals in a world that seems to have no use for them becomes a source of disappointment, even shame. Far better to jettison them entirely than to suffer the memory of hope defeated; far braver to face the depth of the rot of reality than to cling to what turned out to be illusion.

Such a standpoint is less brave than you think, for it demands absolutely nothing but an air of urbanity. Far more courage is needed to acknowledge that both ideals and experience make equal claims on us. Growing up is a matter of respecting those claims and meeting them as best you can, knowing you will never succeed entirely but refusing to succumb to dogma or despair. If you live long enough, each will probably tempt you. Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way that it should be, while never losing sight of the way that it is, is what being a grown-up comes to. If you happen to have a portly uncle who taught you that, you are very lucky."

— Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age by Susan Neiman
https://a.co/3JsvawU

Brains, physiology, and happiness

 Following up our discussion of reductionism, eliminativism, and the relevance of physiology to folk psychology...

"Savor every second"

Well, maybe not every...

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A dream? Or a vision?

The conclusion of "News from Nowhere"—

"I lay in my bed in my house at dingy Hammersmith thinking about it all; and trying to consider if I was overwhelmed with despair at finding I had been dreaming a dream; and strange to say, I found that I was not so despairing.

Or indeed WAS it a dream? If so, why was I so conscious all along that I was really seeing all that new life from the outside, still wrapped up in the prejudices, the anxieties, the distrust of this time of doubt and struggle?

All along, though those friends were so real to me, I had been feeling as if I had no business amongst them: as though the time would come when they would reject me, and say, as Ellen's last mournful look seemed to say, "No, it will not do; you cannot be of us; you belong so entirely to the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you. Go back again, now you have seen us, and your outward eyes have learned that in spite of all the infallible maxims of your day there is yet a time of rest in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship—but not before. Go back again, then, and while you live you will see all round you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives—men who hate life though they fear death. Go back and be the happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your struggle. Go on living while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain and labour needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness."

Yes, surely! and if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream."

— News from Nowhere(Annotated & illustrated) by William Morris
https://a.co/0MkT3QW

Meetings

Have you noticed the cartoon in our conference room?

Questions Oct 26

OCT 26 Flanagan ch 2-3 (-p.95). I'll stop explicitly asking for your questions, but do please try to pose at least one or two (pegged to specific page #s if possible) each class. PRESENTATIONS: RUSTY, SNEH...

1. What alternative "businesses" might be appropriate to governments? Does this really have to be an exclusive disjunction? 43-4
2. What do "philosophers call 'content'"? 50 What does this suggest to you about the relation between evidence and experience?
3. It seems obvious that "it is one thing to be happy, another to be good" (51) but in Pragmatism William James asks if we can "keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?" * COMMENT?
4. "True happiness...might not involve feeling happy at all." 57 Which famous happiness author is referenced in connection with this claim? Do you think he'd entirely agree? At all seems excessive, doesn't it?
5. Why do you think 40% of American teens suffer "persistent sadness and hopelessness"? What would you advise they do?
6. What's special about age forty? 63
7. Do we need a Ministry of Happiness? 73 (Or perhaps for the Future?)
8. How does English differ from other languages in the relation of happy to happiness? 86
9. What sort of happiness "involves no smiling or laughing"? 90 Do serenity and contentment not make you ever smile or laugh?
10. About what is Haybron 100% clear? 94

*...truth is ONE SPECIES OF GOOD, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. THE TRUE IS THE NAME OF WHATEVER PROVES ITSELF TO BE GOOD IN THE WAY OF BELIEF, AND GOOD, TOO, FOR DEFINITE, ASSIGNABLE REASONS. Surely you must admit this, that if there were NO good for life in true ideas, or if the knowledge of them were positively disadvantageous and false ideas the only useful ones, then the current notion that truth is divine and precious, and its pursuit a duty, could never have grown up or become a dogma. In a world like that, our duty would be to SHUN truth, rather. But in this world, just as certain foods are not only agreeable to our taste, but good for our teeth, our stomach and our tissues; so certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in life's practical struggles. If there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really BETTER FOR US to believe in that idea, UNLESS, INDEED, BELIEF IN IT INCIDENTALLY CLASHED WITH OTHER GREATER VITAL BENEFITS.

'What would be better for us to believe'! This sounds very like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying 'what we OUGHT to believe': and in THAT definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought we ever not to believe what it is BETTER FOR US to believe? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?

And this, also from Pragmatism, is relevant to our discussion last time about different levels of discourse that shouldn't be "reduced" or "eliminated":

Common sense is BETTER for one sphere of life, science for another, philosophic criticism for a third; but whether either be TRUER absolutely, Heaven only knows. Just now, if I understand the matter rightly, we are witnessing a curious reversion to the common-sense way of looking at physical nature, in the philosophy of science favored by such men as Mach, Ostwald and Duhem. According to these teachers no hypothesis is truer than any other in the sense of being a more literal copy of reality. They are all but ways of talking on our part, to be compared solely from the point of view of their USE. The only literally true thing is REALITY; and the only reality we know is, for these logicians, sensible reality, the flux of our sensations and emotions as they pass.

Lyceum Nov 17

 Eric Weber

University of Kentucky

Freedom in Education:

A Philosophical Critique of Current

Conflicts in Educational Policy

Parents and guardians are naturally concerned about what their children are taught in schools.  Some lament what they feel is a lack of control over curricula and what are thought to be forces or  agendas that they believe are not in kids’ best interests. The arguments advanced in recent  conflicts take two main forms. The first, advanced in similar fashion on opposing sides of issues  concerning gender and early education, takes the form of arguments to “protect” children. The  second, typically arising in discourse about desire for exclusion or selection of curricular messages  or content, typically focuses on parents’ rights, in particular, to freedom of choice, whether  regarding selection of schools, book banning, or inclusion or exclusion of desired or undesirable  subject matters from curricula. In this talk, Dr. Weber will defend the importance of students’ and  teachers’ freedom and challenge the overreach of dominant parental views that seek to silence the  lived experiences and concerns of marginalized groups. 

Friday, November 17, 2023

at 5:00 pm,

COE, Room 164

An Informal Reception to Follow

Questions Oct 24

Now that some of us have had an extended Fall Break, let's see if we can all show up at once on a non-exam day... at least as a courtesy to our fellow presenters. 

1. After you... (we've bumped the schedule back a day, today we're on the preface, intro, and opening chapter).
2.  How did the "Against Happiness" authors begin the project of this book? Of what is it an assessment? What are their goals?
3. Do you agree with Emerson about the purpose of life?
4. Why should we be humble about happiness as a goal? What's WEIRD? 3-4
5. What's missing from the way social sciences currently conceive of happiness? 10-11
6. What concept is "much more capacious" than happiness? 16 Do you agree that "there is no kind of happiness that everyone wants"? 17
7. In April 2022 the CDC reported what about teens? 30 Does this surprise or sadden you? What can be done about it?
8. What kind of happiness does Martin Seligman promote? 32
9. Can Callicles be happy? 36
10. What's the meta-happiness paradox? 41

Southern Festival of Books

Hadn't been to this annual highlight of autumn in Nashville since pre-pandemic, so I went to the wrong venue, the old one on Legislative Plaza. Fortunately I made it to the big tent at the Bicentennial Mall in time to catch Margaret Renkl. The weather couldn't have been finer. Ran into Gary and Diana there too. The whole experience was a delight...

Rousseau got this right

"It is difficult to live nobly when..."

https://www.instagram.com/p/CyvtIULgO_N/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igshid=M2M0Y2JmOTAyOA==

Which “triad” are you?

https://www.instagram.com/p/CytkkOtt6_B/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

Nine!

Light is life. I'm grateful for it. And I still sleep way below average.

"It was on this day in 1879 that the inventor Thomas Edison finally struck upon the idea for a workable electric light…
One of the effects of the invention of the electric light is that people sleep less than they once did. Before 1910, people slept an average of nine hours a night; since then, it's about seven and a half. Sleep researchers have shown in the laboratory that if people are deprived of electric light, they will go back to the nine-hour-a-night schedule."

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-saturday-da8?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Edward Bellamy would not be happy about this

Conversation starter

I've not had happy results with this one:

Moral holidays

Following up our discussion of "moral holidays" as a way of reconciling the pursuit of happiness with the perennial fight against injustice and pursuit of meaning and purpose etc.--

...[For those who believe in a divine providence, or a rationalistic/Hegelian Absolute] we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business.

The universe is a system of which the individual members may relax their anxieties occasionally, in which the don't-care mood is also right for men, and moral holidays in order—that, if I mistake not, is part, at least, of what the Absolute is 'known-as,' that is the great difference in our particular experiences which his being true makes for us, that is part of his cash-value when he is pragmatically interpreted. Farther than that the ordinary lay-reader in philosophy who thinks favorably of absolute idealism does not venture to sharpen his conceptions. He can use the Absolute for so much, and so much is very precious. He is pained at hearing you speak incredulously of the Absolute, therefore, and disregards your criticisms because they deal with aspects of the conception that he fails to follow...

I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true UNLESS THE BELIEF INCIDENTALLY CLASHES WITH SOME OTHER VITAL BENEFIT. Now in real life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable to clash with? What indeed except the vital benefits yielded by OTHER BELIEFS when these prove incompatible with the first ones? In other words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them. My belief in the Absolute, based on the good it does me, must run the gauntlet of all my other beliefs. Grant that it may be true in giving me a moral holiday. Nevertheless, as I conceive it,—and let me speak now confidentially, as it were, and merely in my own private person,—it clashes with other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on its account. It happens to be associated with a kind of logic of which I am the enemy, I find that it entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that are inacceptable, etc., etc.. But as I have enough trouble in life already without adding the trouble of carrying these intellectual inconsistencies, I personally just give up the Absolute. I just TAKE my moral holidays; or else as a professional philosopher, I try to justify them by some other principle. --William James, Pragmatism II

==  ==

...let me explain why 'moral holidays' were the only gift of the absolute which I picked out for emphasis. I was primarily concerned in my lectures with contrasting the belief that the world is still in process of making with the belief that there is an 'eternal' edition of it ready-made and complete. The former, or 'pluralistic' belief, was the one that my pragmatism favored...

...If, as pluralists, we grant ourselves moral holidays, they can only be provisional breathing-spells, intended to refresh us for the morrow's fight...

...The pragmatism or pluralism which I defend has to fall back on a certain ultimate hardihood, a certain willingness to live without assurances or guarantees. To minds thus willing to live on possibilities that are not certainties, quietistic religion, sure of salvation any how, has a slight flavor of fatty degeneration about it which has caused it to be looked askance on, even in the church... --William James, The Meaning of Truth 11

==

John Lachs at Harvard, 2014--

Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy

As mentioned in class…

"Edward Bellamy's 1888 classic look at the future has been translated into over twenty languages and is the most widely read novel of its time. A young Boston gentleman is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century -- from a world of war and want to one of peace and plenty. This brilliant vision became the blueprint of utopia that stimulated some of the greatest thinkers of our age."  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/296977.Looking_Backward

An excerpt:

""To borrow a phrase which was often used in your day, we should not consider life worth living if we had to be surrounded by a population of ignorant, boorish, coarse, wholly uncultivated men and women, as was the plight of the few educated in your day. Is a man satisfied, merely because he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodorous crowd? Could he take more than a very limited satisfaction, even in a palatial apartment, if the windows on all four sides opened into stable yards? And yet just that was the situation of those considered most fortunate as to culture and refinement in your day. I know that the poor and ignorant envied the rich and cultured then; but to us the latter, living as they did, surrounded by squalor and brutishness, seem little better off than the former. The cultured man in your age was like one up to the neck in a nauseous bog solacing himself with a smelling bottle. You see, perhaps, now, how we look at this question of universal high education. No single thing is so important to every man as to have for neighbors intelligent, companionable persons. There is nothing, therefore, which the nation can do for him that will enhance so much his own happiness as to educate his neighbors. When it fails to do so, the value of his own education to him is reduced by half, and many of the tastes he has cultivated are made positive sources of pain.

"To educate some to the highest degree, and leave the mass wholly uncultivated, as you did, made the gap between them almost like that between different natural species, which have no means of communication. What could be more inhuman than this consequence of a partial enjoyment of education! Its universal and equal enjoyment leaves, indeed, the differences between men as to natural endowments as marked as in a state of nature, but the level of the lowest is vastly raised. Brutishness is eliminated. All have some inkling of the humanities, some appreciation of the things of the mind, and an admiration for the still higher culture they have fallen short of. They have become capable of receiving and imparting, in various degrees, but all in some measure, the pleasures and inspirations of a refined social life. The cultured society of the nineteenth century—what did it consist of but here and there a few microscopic oases in a vast, unbroken wilderness? The proportion of individuals capable of intellectual sympathies or refined intercourse, to the mass of their contemporaries, used to be so infinitesimal as to be in any broad view of humanity scarcely worth mentioning. One generation of the world to-day represents a greater volume of intellectual life than any five centuries ever did before.

"There is still another point I should mention in stating the grounds on which nothing less than the universality of the best education could now be tolerated," continued Dr. Leete, "and that is, the interest of the coming generation in having educated parents. To put the matter in a nutshell, there are three main grounds on which our educational system rests: first, the right of every man to the completest education the nation can give him on his own account, as necessary to his enjoyment of himself; second, the right of his fellow-citizens to have him educated, as necessary to their enjoyment of his society; third, the right of the unborn to be guaranteed an intelligent and refined parentage.""

• “There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support. In a state of society so barbarous as not even to know family cooperation, each individual may possibly support himself, though even then for a part of his life only; but from the moment that men begin to live together, and constitute even the rudest of society, self-support becomes impossible. As men grow more civilized, and the subdivision of occupations and services is carried out, a complex mutual dependence becomes the universal rule. Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support...”
• “They were not serving the public interest, but their immediate personal interest, and it was nothing to them what the ultimate effect of their course on the general prosperity might be, if but they increased their own hoard, for these goods were their own, and the more they sold and the more they got for them, the greater their gain. The more wasteful the people were, the more articles they did not want which they could be induced to buy, the better for these sellers.”
• “Moreover, the excessive individualism which then prevailed was inconsistent with much public spirit. What little wealth you had seems almost wholly to have been lavished in private luxury. Nowadays, on the contrary, there is no destination of the surplus wealth so popular as the adornment of the city, which all enjoy in equal degree.”

— Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (Illustrated) by Edward Bellamy

==

AND, there's a British version from 1890...

• News from Nowhere (1890) is the best-known prose work of William Morris and the only significant English utopia to be written since Thomas More's. The novel describes the encounter between a visitor from the nineteenth century, William Guest, and a decentralized and humane socialist future. Set over a century after a revolutionary upheaval in 1952, these "Chapters from a Utopian Romance" recount his journey across London and up the Thames to Kelmscott Manor, Morris's own country house in Oxfordshire. Drawing on the work of John Ruskin and Karl Marx, Morris's book is not only an evocative statement of his egalitarian convictions but also a distinctive contribution to the utopian tradition. Morris's rejection of state socialism and his ambition to transform the relationship between humankind and the natural world, give News from Nowhere a particular resonance for modern readers. This text is based on the 1891 version, incorporating the extensive revisions made by Morris to the first edition.

• "If others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream".
• "It is real learning, knowledge cultivated for its own sake—the Art of Knowledge, in short—which is followed there, not the Commercial learning of the past".
• "We are only the trustees for those who come after us".
• "Have nothing in your house you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. Nothing useless can be truly beautiful".
• "The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life".

 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/189746.News_from_Nowhere

 

Believing in "the continuous life of the world"

     "...and consequently we are happy."

"More akin to our way of looking at life was the spirit of the Middle Ages, to whom heaven and the life of the next world was such a reality, that it became to them a part of the life upon the earth; which accordingly they loved and adorned, in spite of the ascetic doctrines of their formal creed, which bade them contemn it.

But that also, with its assured belief in heaven and hell as two countries in which to live, has gone, and now we do, both in word and in deed, believe in the continuous life of the world of men, and as it were, add every day of that common life to the little stock of days which our own mere individual experience wins for us: and consequently we are happy."

News from Nowhere by William Morris

==

The conclusion of "News from Nowhere"—

"I lay in my bed in my house at dingy Hammersmith thinking about it all; and trying to consider if I was overwhelmed with despair at finding I had been dreaming a dream; and strange to say, I found that I was not so despairing.

Or indeed WAS it a dream? If so, why was I so conscious all along that I was really seeing all that new life from the outside, still wrapped up in the prejudices, the anxieties, the distrust of this time of doubt and struggle?

All along, though those friends were so real to me, I had been feeling as if I had no business amongst them: as though the time would come when they would reject me, and say, as Ellen's last mournful look seemed to say, "No, it will not do; you cannot be of us; you belong so entirely to the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you. Go back again, now you have seen us, and your outward eyes have learned that in spite of all the infallible maxims of your day there is yet a time of rest in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship—but not before. Go back again, then, and while you live you will see all round you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives—men who hate life though they fear death. Go back and be the happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your struggle. Go on living while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain and labour needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness."

Yes, surely! and if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream."

— News from Nowhere(Annotated & illustrated) by William Morris
https://a.co/0MkT3QW