The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

This turn from character ethics to quandary ethics has turned moral education away from virtues and toward moral reasoning. If morality is about dilemmas, then moral education is training in problem solving.

The belief that God or fate will dole out rewards and punishments for good and bad behavior seems on its face to be a cosmic extension of our childhood belief in immanent justice, which is itself a part of our obsession with reciprocity.

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.”

Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language—a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak.

Given how easy it is to divide people into hostile groups based on trivial differences,36 I wondered whether celebrating diversity might also encourage division, whereas celebrating commonality would help people form cohesive groups and communities.

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.

Religions sometimes lose touch with their origins, however; they are sometimes taken over by people who have not had peak experiences—the bureaucrats and company men who want to routinize procedures and guard orthodoxy for orthodoxy’s sake.

They showed that scientists and philosophers had traditionally held an attitude of wonder toward the natural world and the objects of their inquiry. But in the late sixteenth century, European scientists began to look down on wonder; they began to see it as the mark of a childish mind, whereas the mature scientist went about coolly cataloging the laws of the world.

when modern philosophy began to devote itself to the study of logic and rationality, it gradually lost interest in psychology and lost touch with the passionate, contextualized nature of human life.

life is much like a movie we walk into well after its opening scene, and we will have to step out long before most of the story lines reach their conclusions. We are acutely aware that we need to know a great deal if we are to understand the few confusing minutes that we do watch. Of course, we don’t know exactly what it is that we don’t know, so we can’t frame the question well. We ask, “What is the meaning of life?” not expecting a direct answer (such as “forty-two”), but rather hoping for some enlightenment, something to give us an “aha!” experience in which, suddenly, things that we had not before understood or recognized as important begin to make sense

Because I embraced the scientific answer to the question of the purpose of life, I thought it precluded finding purpose within life. It was an easy mistake to make because many religions teach that the two questions are inseparable.

If the community also offers guidance on how to live and what is of value, then people are unlikely to wonder about the question of purpose within life. Meaning and purpose simply emerge from the coherence, and people can get on with the business of living. But conflict, paralysis, and anomie are likely when a community fails to provide coherence, or, worse, when its practices contradict people’s gut feelings or their shared mythology and ideology.

Even if the belief in supernatural entities emerged originally for some other reason, or as an accidental byproduct in the evolution of cognition (as some scholars have claimed),54 groups that parlayed those beliefs into social coordination devices (for example, by linking them to emotions such as shame, fear, guilt, and love) found a cultural solution to the free-rider problem and then reaped the enormous benefits of trust and cooperation.

I don’t believe there is an inspiring answer to the question, “What is the purpose of life?” Yet by drawing on ancient wisdom and modern science, we can find compelling answers to the question of purpose within life.

It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.