The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

As Buddha said: “When a man knows the solitude of silence, and feels the joy of quietness, he is then free from fear and sin.”

As I suggested in the last chapter, we often use reasoning not to find the truth but to invent arguments to support our deep and intuitive beliefs (residing in the elephant). Depressed people are convinced in their hearts of three related beliefs, known as Beck’s “cognitive triad” of depression. These are: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless.” A depressed person’s mind is filled with automatic thoughts supporting these dysfunctional beliefs,

Depressed people are caught in a feedback loop in which distorted thoughts cause negative feelings, which then distort thinking further. Beck’s discovery is that you can break the cycle by changing the thoughts. A big part of cognitive therapy is training clients to catch their thoughts, write them down, name the distortions, and then find alternative and more accurate ways of thinking. Over many weeks, the client’s thoughts become more realistic, the feedback loop is broken, and the client’s anxiety or depression abates. Cognitive therapy works because it teaches the rider how to train the elephant rather than how to defeat it directly in an argument. On the first day of therapy, the rider doesn’t realize that the elephant is controlling him, that the elephant’s fears are driving his conscious thoughts. Over time, the client learns to use a set of tools; these include challenging automatic thoughts and engaging in simple tasks, such as going out to buy a newspaper rather than staying in bed all day ruminating. These tasks are often assigned as homework, to be done daily. (The elephant learns best from daily practice; a weekly meeting with a therapist is not enough.) With each reframing, and with each simple task accomplished, the client receives a little reward, a little flash of relief or pleasure. And each flash of pleasure is like a peanut given to an elephant as reinforcement for a new behavior. You can’t win a tug of war with an angry or fearful elephant, but you can...

When cognitive therapy is done very well it is as effective as drugs such as Prozac for the treatment of depression,38 and its enormous advantage over Prozac is that when cognitive therapy stops, the benefits usually continue because the elephant has been retrained. Prozac, in contrast, works only for as long as you take it.

I therefore question the widespread view that Prozac and other drugs in its class are overprescribed. It’s easy for those who did well in the cortical lottery to preach about the importance of hard work and the unnaturalness of chemical shortcuts. But for those who, through no fault of their own, ended up on the negative half of the affective style spectrum, Prozac is a way to compensate for the unfairness of the cortical lottery. Furthermore, it’s easy for those who believe that the body is a temple to say that cosmetic psychopharmacology is a kind of sacrilege. Something is indeed lost when psychiatrists no longer listen to their patients as people, but rather as a car mechanic would listen to an engine, looking only for clues about which knob to adjust next. But if the hippocampal theory of Prozac is correct, many people really do need a mechanical adjustment. It’s as though they had been driving for years with the emergency brake halfway engaged, and it might be worth a five-week experiment to see what happens to their lives when the brake is released. Framed in this way, Prozac for the “worried well” is no longer just cosmetic. It is more like giving contact lenses to a person with poor but functional eyesight who has learned ways of coping with her limitations. Far from being a betrayal of that person’s “true self,” contact lenses can be a reasonable shortcut to proper functioning.

The epigraphs that opened this chapter are true. Life is what we deem it, and our lives are the creations of our minds. But these claims are not helpful until augmented by a theory of the divided self (such as the rider and the elephant) and an understanding of negativity bias and affective style. Once you know why change is so hard, you can drop the brute force method and take a more psychologically sophisticated approach to self-improvement. Buddha got it exactly right: You need a method for taming the elephant, for changing your mind gradually. Meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac are three effective means of doing so. Because each will be effective for some people and not for others, I believe that all three should be readily available and widely publicized. Life itself is but what you deem it, and you can—through meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac—redeem yourself.

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; this, in a few words, is the entire Torah; all the rest is but an elaboration of this one, central point. —RABBI HILLEL, 1ST CENT. BCE2

Among our main findings: Gossip is overwhelmingly critical, and it is primarily about the moral and social violations of others. (For college students, this meant a lot of talk about the sexuality, cleanliness, and drinking habits of their friends and roommates.) People do occasionally tell stories about the good deeds of others, but such stories are only one tenth as common as stories about transgressions. When people pass along high-quality (“juicy”) gossip, they feel more powerful, they have a better shared sense of what is right and what’s wrong, and they feel more closely connected to their gossip partners.

Gossip extends our moral-emotional toolkit. In a gossipy world, we don’t just feel vengeance and gratitude toward those who hurt or help us; we feel pale but still instructive flashes of contempt and anger toward people whom we might not even know. We feel vicarious shame and embarrassment when we hear about people whose schemes, lusts, and private failings are exposed. Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.22

Gossip and reputation make sure that what goes around comes around—a person who is cruel will find that others are cruel back to him, and a person who is kind will find that other others are kind in return. Gossip paired with reciprocity allow karma to work here on earth, not in the next life. As long as everyone plays tit-for-tat augmented by gratitude, vengeance, and gossip, the whole system should work beautifully. (It rarely does, however, because of our self-serving biases and massive hypocrisy.

Reciprocity works just as well for bargaining. Cialdini was once asked by a boy scout to buy tickets to a movie he didn’t want to see. When Cialdini said no, the scout asked him to buy some less expensive chocolate bars instead. Cialdini found himself walking away with three chocolate bars that he didn’t want. The scout had made a concession, and Cialdini automatically reciprocated by making a concession of his own. But rather than getting mad, Cialdini got data. He conducted his own version of the encounter, asking college students walking on campus whether they would volunteer to chaperone a group of juvenile delinquents to the zoo for a day. Only 17 percent agreed. But in another condition of the study, students were first asked whether they would volunteer to work for two hours a week for two years with juvenile delinquents. All said no, but when the experimenter then asked about the day trip to the zoo, 50 percent said yes.26 Concession leads to concession. In financial bargaining, too, people who stake out an extreme first position and then move toward the middle end up doing better than those who state a more reasonable first position and then hold fast.27 And the extreme offer followed by concession doesn’t just get you a better price, it gets you a happier partner (or victim): She is more likely to honor the agreement because she feels that she had more influence on the outcome. The very process of give and take creates a feeling of partnership, even in the person...

Reciprocity is an all-purpose relationship tonic. Used properly, it strengthens, lengthens, and rejuvenates social ties. It works so well in part because the elephant is a natural mimic. For example, when we interact with someone we like, we have a slight tendency to copy their every move, automatically and unconsciously.28 If the other person taps her foot, you are more likely to tap yours. If she touches her face, you are more likely to touch yours. But it’s not just that we mimic those we like; we like those who mimic us. People who are subtly mimicked are then more helpful and agreeable toward their mimicker, and even toward others.29 Waitresses who mimic their customers get larger tips.

Proving that people are selfish, or that they’ll sometimes cheat when they know they won’t be caught, seems like a good way to get an article into the Journal of Incredibly Obvious Results. What’s not so obvious is that, in nearly all these studies, people don’t think they are doing anything wrong. It’s the same in real life. From the person who cuts you off on the highway all the way to the Nazis who ran the concentration camps, most people think they are good people and that their actions are motivated by good reasons. Machiavellian tit for tat requires devotion to appearances, including protestations of one’s virtue even when one chooses vice. And such protestations are most effective when the person making them really believes them. As Robert Wright put it in his masterful book The Moral Animal, “Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse.”

You can’t change your mental filters by willpower alone; you have to engage in activities such as meditation or cognitive therapy that train the elephant. But at least a depressed person will usually admit she’s depressed. Curing hypocrisy is much harder because part of the problem is that we don’t believe there’s a problem. We are well-armed for battle in a Machiavellian world of reputation manipulation, and one of our most important weapons is the delusion that we are non-combatants. How do we get away with it?

People who are told that they have performed poorly on a test of social intelligence think extra hard to find reasons to discount the test; people who are asked to read a study showing that one of their habits—such as drinking coffee—is unhealthy think extra hard to find flaws in the study, flaws that people who don’t drink coffee don’t notice. Over and over again, studies show that people set out on a cognitive mission to bring back reasons to support their preferred belief or action. And because we are usually successful in this mission, we end up with the illusion of objectivity. We really believe that our position is rationally and objectively justified.

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun.”32 That is, the world we live in is not really one made of rocks, trees, and physical objects; it is a world of insults, opportunities, status symbols, betrayals, saints, and sinners. All of these are human creations which, though real in their own way, are not real in the way that rocks and trees are real. These human creations are like fairies in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: They exist only if you believe in them. They are the Matrix (from the movie of that name); they are a consensual hallucination.

Sen-ts’an, an early Chinese Zen master, urged nonjudgmentalism as a prerequisite to following “the perfect way” in this poem from the eighth century CE: The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose; Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart; If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.34

Judgmentalism is indeed a disease of the mind: it leads to anger, torment, and conflict. But it is also the mind’s normal condition—the elephant is always evaluating, always saying “Like it” or “Don’t like it.”

when it comes to goal pursuit, it really is the journey that counts, not the destination. Set for yourself any goal you want. Most of the pleasure will be had along the way, with every step that takes you closer. The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than the relief of taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike. If you went on the hike only to feel that pleasure, you are a fool. Yet people sometimes do just this. They work hard at a task and expect some special euphoria at the end. But when they achieve success and find only moderate and short-lived pleasure, they ask (as the singer Peggy Lee once did): Is that all there is? They devalue their accomplishments as a striving after wind.

Shakespeare captured it perfectly: “Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.”4

If this idea is correct, then we are all stuck on what has been called the “hedonic treadmill.”13 On an exercise treadmill you can increase the speed all you want, but you stay in the same place. In life, you can work as hard as you want, and accumulate all the riches, fruit trees, and concubines you want, but you can’t get ahead. Because you can’t change your “natural and usual state of tranquility,” the riches you accumulate will just raise your expectations and leave you no better off than you were before. Yet, not realizing the futility of our efforts, we continue to strive, all the while doing things that help us win at the game of life. Always wanting more than we have, we run and run and run, like hamsters on a wheel.

A good marriage is one of the life-factors most strongly and consistently associated with happiness.14 Part of this apparent benefit comes from “reverse correlation”: Happiness causes marriage. Happy people marry sooner and stay married longer than people with a lower happiness setpoint, both because they are more appealing as dating partners and because they are easier to live with as spouses.15 But much of the apparent benefit is a real and lasting benefit of dependable companionship, which is a basic need; we never fully adapt either to it or to its absence.16 Mary also has religion, and religious people are happier, on average, than nonreligious people.17 This effect arises from the social ties that come with participation in a religious community, as well as from feeling connected to something beyond the self.

As psychologists wrestled with these ideas, however, and as biologists worked out the first sketch of the human genome, a more sophisticated understanding of nature and nurture began to emerge. Yes, genes explain far more about us than anyone had realized, but the genes themselves often turn out to be sensitive to environmental conditions.32 And yes, each person has a characteristic level of happiness, but it now looks as though it’s not so much a set point as a potential range or probability distribution. Whether you operate on the high or the low side of your potential range is determined by many factors that Buddha and Epictetus would have considered externals.

there are two fundamentally different kinds of externals: the conditions of your life and the voluntary activities that you undertake.33 Conditions include facts about your life that you can’t change (race, sex, age, disability) as well as things that you can (wealth, marital status, where you live). Conditions are constant over time, at least during a period in your life, and so they are the sorts of things that you are likely to adapt to. Voluntary activities, on the other hand, are the things that you choose to do, such as meditation, exercise, learning a new skill, or taking a vacation. Because such activities must be chosen, and because most of them take effort and attention, they can’t just disappear from your awareness the way conditions can. Voluntary activities, therefore, offer much greater promise for increasing happiness while avoiding adaptation effects.

One of the most important ideas in positive psychology is what Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, Schkade, and Seligman call the “happiness formula:” H=S+C+V The level of happiness that you actually experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the conditions of your life (C) plus the voluntary activities (V) you do.34 The challenge for positive psychology is to use the scientific method to find out exactly what kinds of C and V can push H up to the top of your potential range. The extreme biological version of the happiness hypothesis says that H = S, and that C and V don’t matter. But we have to give Buddha and Epictetus credit for V because Buddha prescribed the “eightfold noble path” (including meditation and mindfulness), and Epictetus urged methods of thought to cultivate indifference (apatheia) to externals. So to test the wisdom of the sages properly we must examine this hypothesis: H = S + V, where V = voluntary or intentional activities that cultivate acceptance and weaken emotional attachments. If there are many conditions (C) that matter, and if there are a variety of voluntary activities beyond those aimed at nonattachment, then the happiness hypothesis of Buddha and Epictetus is wrong and people would be poorly advised simply to look within. It turns out that there really are some external conditions (C) that matter. There are some changes you can make in your life that are not fully subject to the adaptation principle, and that might make you lasting...

Noise.

Research shows that people who must adapt to new and chronic sources of noise (such as when a new highway is built) never fully adapt, and even studies that find some adaptation still find evidence of impairment on cognitive tasks. Noise, especially noise that is variable or intermittent, interferes with concentration and increases stress.35 It’s worth striving to remove sources of noise in your life.

Commuting.

Lack of control.

Shame.

Seligman proposes a fundamental distinction between pleasures and gratifications. Pleasures are “delights that have clear sensory and strong emotional components,”50 such as may be derived from food, sex, backrubs, and cool breezes. Gratifications are activities that engage you fully, draw on your strengths, and allow you to lose self-consciousness. Gratifications can lead to flow. Seligman proposes that V (voluntary activities) is largely a matter of arranging your day and your environment to increase both pleasures and gratifications. Pleasures must be spaced to maintain their potency. Eating a quart of ice cream in an afternoon or listening to a new CD ten times in a row are good ways to overdose and deaden yourself to future pleasure. Here’s where the rider has an important role to play: Because the elephant has a tendency to overindulge, the rider needs to encourage it to get up and move on to another activity.

One reason for the widespread philosophical wariness of sensual pleasure is that it gives no lasting benefit. Pleasure feels good in the moment, but sensual memories fade quickly, and the person is no wiser or stronger afterwards. Even worse, pleasure beckons people back for more, away from activities that might be better for them in the long run. But gratifications are different. Gratifications ask more of us; they challenge us and make us extend ourselves. Gratifications often come from accomplishing something, learning something, or improving something. When we enter a state of flow, hard work becomes effortless. We want to keep exerting ourselves, honing our skills, using our strengths. Seligman suggests that the key to finding your own gratifications is to know your own strengths.53 One of the big accomplishments of positive psychology has been the development of a catalog of strengths. You can find out your strengths by taking an online test at www.authentichappiness.org

people experienced longer-lasting improvements in mood from the kindness and gratitude activities than from those in which they indulged themselves.

Just try this thought experiment. Which job would you rather have: one in which you earned $90,000 a year and your coworkers earned on average $70,000, or one in which you earned $100,000 but your coworkers earned on average $150,000? Many people choose the first job, thereby revealing that relative position is worth at least $10,000 to them. Now try this one: Would you rather work for a company that gave you two weeks of vacation a year, but other employees were given, on average, only one; or would you prefer a company that gave you four weeks of vacation a year, but other employees were given, on average, six? The great majority of people choose the longer absolute time.56 Time off is inconspicuous consumption, although people can easily turn a vacation into conspicuous consumption by spending vast amounts of money to impress others instead of using the time to rejuvenate themselves.

Most activities that cost more than a hundred dollars are things we do with other people, but expensive material possessions are often purchased in part to impress other people. Activities connect us to others; objects often separate us.

The life of cerebral reflection and emotional indifference (apatheia) advocated by many Greek and Roman philosophers and that of calm nonstriving advocated by Buddha are lives designed to avoid passion, and a life without passion is not a human life. Yes, attachments bring pain, but they also bring our greatest joys, and there is value in the very variation that the philosophers are trying to avoid.

No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility; you must live for your neighbour, if you would live for yourself. —SENECA1

Caritas and agape are beautiful, but they are not related to or derived from the kinds of love that people need. Although I would like to live in a world in which everyone radiates benevolence toward everyone else, I would rather live in a world in which there was at least one person who loved me specifically, and whom I loved in return. Suppose Harlow had raised rhesus monkeys under two conditions. For the first group, each was reared in its own cage, but each day Harlow put in a new but very nurturing adult female monkey as a companion. For the second group, each was reared in a cage with its own mother, and then each day Harlow put in a new and not particularly nice other monkey. The monkeys in the first group got something like caritas—benevolence without particularity—and they would probably emerge emotionally damaged. Without having formed an attachment relationship, they would likely be fearful of new experiences and unable to love or care for other monkeys. The monkeys in the second group would have had something closer to a normal rhesus monkey childhood, and would probably emerge healthy and able to love. Monkeys and people need close and long-lasting attachments to particular others. In chapter 9, I will propose that agape is real, but usually short-lived. It can change lives and enrich lives, but it cannot substitute for the kinds of love based on attachments.

Human beings all know that they are going to die, and so human cultures go to great lengths to construct systems of meaning that dignify life and convince people that their lives have more meaning than those of the animals that die all around them. The extensive regulation of sex in many cultures, the attempt to link love to God and then to cut away the sex, is part of an elaborate defense against the gnawing fear of mortality.51 If this is true, if the sages have a variety of unstated reasons for warning us away from passionate love and attachments of many kinds, perhaps we should be selective in heeding their advice. Perhaps we need to look at our own lives, lived in a world very different from theirs, and also at the evidence about whether attachments are good or bad for us.

The adversity hypothesis has a weak and a strong version. In the weak version, adversity can lead to growth, strength, joy, and self-improvement, by the three mechanisms of posttraumatic growth described above. The weak version is well-supported by research, but it has few clear implications for how we should live our lives. The strong version of the hypothesis is more unsettling: It states that people must endure adversity to grow, and that the highest levels of growth and development are only open to those who have faced and overcome great adversity. If the strong version of the hypothesis is valid, it has profound implications for how we should live our lives and structure our societies. It means that we should take more chances and suffer more defeats. It means that we might be dangerously overprotecting our children, offering them lives of bland safety and too much counseling while depriving them of the “critical incidents”12 that would help them to grow strong and to develop the most intense friendships. It means that heroic societies, which fear dishonor more than death, or societies that struggle together through war, might produce better human beings than can a world of peace and prosperity in which people’s expectations rise so high that they sue each other for “emotional damages.”

The third level of personality is that of the “life story.” Human beings in every culture are fascinated by stories; we create them wherever we can. (See those seven stars up there? They are seven sisters who once . . . ) It’s no different with our own lives. We can’t stop ourselves from creating what McAdams describes as an “evolving story that integrates a reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future into a coherent and vitalizing life myth.”18 Although the lowest level of personality is mostly about the elephant, the life story is written primarily by the rider. You create your story in consciousness as you interpret your own behavior, and as you listen to other people’s thoughts about you. The life story is not the work of a historian—remember that the rider has no access to the real causes of your behavior; it is more like a work of historical fiction that makes plenty of references to real events and connects them by dramatizations and interpretations that might or might not be true to the spirit of what happened.

From this three-level perspective, it becomes clear why adversity might be necessary for optimal human development. Most of the life goals that people pursue at the level of “characteristic adaptations” can be sorted—as the psychologist Robert Emmons19 has found—into four categories: work and achievement, relationships and intimacy, religion and spirituality, and generativity (leaving a legacy and contributing something to society). Although it is generally good for you to pursue goals, not all goals are equal. People who strive primarily for achievement and wealth are, Emmons finds, less happy, on average, than those whose strivings focus on the other three categories.20 The reason takes us back to happiness traps and conspicuous consumption (see chapter 5): Because human beings were shaped by evolutionary processes to pursue success, not happiness, people enthusiastically pursue goals that will help them win prestige in zero-sum competitions. Success in these competitions feels good but gives no lasting pleasure, and it raises the bar for future success.

Marcel Proust said: We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.45

The argument between Kant and Bentham has continued ever since. Descendants of Kant (known as “deontologists” from the Greek deon, obligation) try to elaborate the duties and obligations that ethical people must respect, even when their actions lead to bad outcomes (for example, you must never kill an innocent person, even if doing so will save a hundred lives). Descendants of Bentham (known as “consequentialists” because they evaluate actions only by their consequences) try to work out the rules and policies that will bring about the greatest good, even when doing so will sometimes violate other ethical principles (go ahead and kill the one to save the hundred, they say, unless it will set a bad example that leads to later problems).

The second problem with the turn to moral reasoning is that it relies on bad psychology. Many moral education efforts since the 1970s take the rider off of the elephant and train him to solve problems on his own. After being exposed to hours of case studies, classroom discussions about moral dilemmas, and videos about people who faced dilemmas and made the right choices, the child learns how (not what) to think. Then class ends, the rider gets back on the elephant, and nothing changes at recess. Trying to make children behave ethically by teaching them to reason well is like trying to make a dog happy by wagging its tail. It gets causality backwards.

I think of myself as a fairly rational person. I found Singer’s arguments persuasive. But, to paraphrase Medea’s lament (from chapter 1): I saw the right way and approved it, but followed the wrong, until an emotion came along to provide some force.

Peterson and Seligman suggest that there are twenty-four principle character strengths, each leading to one of the six higher-level virtues.19 You can diagnose yourself by looking at the list below or by taking the strengths test (at www.authentichappiness.org). 1. Wisdom: • Curiosity • Love of learning • Judgment • Ingenuity • Emotional intelligence • Perspective 2. Courage: • Valor • Perseverance • Integrity 3. Humanity: • Kindness • Loving 4. Justice: • Citizenship • Fairness • Leadership 5. Temperance: • Self-control • Prudence • Humility 6. Transcendence: • Appreciation of beauty and excellence • Gratitude • Hope • Spirituality • Forgiveness • Humor • Zest Odds are that you don’t have much trouble with the list of six virtue families, but you do have objections to the longer list of strengths. Why is humor a means to transcendence? Why is leadership on the list, but not the virtues of followers and subordinates—duty, respect, and obedience? Please, go ahead and argue. The genius of Peterson and Seligman’s classification is to get the conversation going, to propose a specific list of strengths and virtues, and then let the scientific and therapeutic communities work out the details. Just as the DSM is thoroughly revised every ten or fifteen years, the classification of strengths and virtues (known among positive psychologists as the “un-DSM”) is sure to be revised and improved in a few years. In daring to be specific, in daring to be wrong, Peterson and Seligman have d...

My colleague at the University of Virginia, the sociologist James Hunter, carries Durkheim’s ideas forward into the current debate about character education. In his provocative book The Death of Character,34 Hunter traces out how America lost its older ideas about virtue and character. Before the Industrial Revolution, Americans honored the virtues of “producers”—hard work, self-restraint, sacrifice for the future, and sacrifice for the common good. But during the twentieth century, as people became wealthier and the producer society turned gradually into the mass consumption society, an alternative vision of the self arose—a vision centered on the idea of individual preferences and personal fulfillment. The intrinsically moral term “character” fell out of favor and was replaced by the amoral term “personality.” Hunter points to a second cause of character’s death: inclusiveness. The first American colonists created enclaves of ethnic, religious, and moral homogeneity, but the history of America ever since has been one of increasing diversity. In response, educators have struggled to identify the ever-shrinking set of moral ideas everyone could agree upon. This shrinking reached its logical conclusion in the 1960s with the popular “values clarification” movement, which taught no morality at all. Values clarification taught children how to find their own values, and it urged teachers to refrain from imposing values on anyone. Although the goal of inclusiveness was laudable,...

With my students Holly Hom and Evan Rosenberg, I conducted a study among several groups at the University of Virginia.37 We found that there was strong support among students for increasing diversity for demographic categories (such as race, religion, and social class), even among students who described themselves as politically conservative. Moral diversity (opinions about controversial political questions), however, was much less appealing in most contexts, with the interesting exception of seminar classes. Students wanted to be exposed to moral diversity in class, but not in the people they live with and socialize with. Our conclusion from this study is that diversity is like cholesterol: There’s a good kind and a bad kind, and perhaps we should not be trying to maximize both. Liberals are right to work for a society that is open to people of every demographic group, but conservatives might be right in believing that at the same time we should work much harder to create a common, shared identity. Although I am a political liberal, I believe that conservatives have a better understanding of moral development (although not of moral psychology in general—they are too committed to the myth of pure evil). Conservatives want schools to teach lessons that will create a positive and uniquely American identity, including a heavy dose of American history and civics, using English as the only national language. Liberals are justifiably wary of jingoism, nationalism, and the focus ...

Yet, once I had learned to see in three dimensions, I saw glimmers of divinity scattered all about. I began to feel disgust for the American practice of marching around one’s own house—even one’s bedroom—wearing the same shoes that, minutes earlier, had walked through city streets. I adopted the Indian practice of removing my shoes at my door, and asking visitors to do likewise, which made my apartment feel more like a sanctuary, a clean and peaceful space separated more fully than before from the outside world. I noticed that it felt wrong to bring certain books into the bathroom. I noticed that people often spoke about morality using a language of “higher” and “lower.” I became aware of my own subtle feelings upon witnessing people behaving in sleazy or “degraded” ways, feelings that were more than just disapproval; they were feelings of having been brought “down” in some way myself.