Taking Humanity Seriously
Drawing on Robinson’s essay collection The Death of Adam, Jennifer Frey looks at why the search for subjective happiness is leaving so many of us lonely, anxious, and unfulfilled.
By Jennifer A. Frey
This being human—people have loved it through plague and famine and siege.”
— Marilynne Robinson, “Facing Reality”
A few years ago, I was invited to Yale University to talk to students about happiness. Yale students, I was assured by my hosts, would be an especially keen audience for a philosophical discussion of the good life. As evidence, they pointed to the fact that a psychology course aimed at promoting happiness—”Psychology and the Good Life”—had a current enrollment of 1,200 students, which is about a quarter of Yale’s undergraduate population.
Upon my arrival at Yale, I first went to observe this class, the most popular course in the university’s history. From the stage of a music hall intended for symphony performances, the famous young professor held court, surrounded by a wall of speakers in front of a super-sized screen and flanked by a small but vigilant army of teaching assistants ready to receive their marching orders. At the beginning of the lecture, I was introduced to the students as a guest—“a professor of religious studies” (NB: I teach philosophy at a secular school). After the announcements, including details of the event on happiness with me to take place later that evening, huge swaths of students walked out, leaving a quarter of the enormous hall empty. Apparently, not everyone found the spectacle riveting or the lectures life-changing.
For those who remained, the topic of the lecture that afternoon was the neuroscience of procrastination and weakness of will; its upshot was the demonstration of a technique for students to “hack themselves”—i.e., to engage in daily exercises that, over time, would reprogram or rewire the underlying, neurological mechanisms of their own bad habits, enabling them to be more efficient, productive, and successful. While I do not doubt that many students could benefit from learning time management strategies, I suppose I might be forgiven for expecting something more substantive. After all, students at Yale, like the rest of us, still face the inevitable, existential question: to what ends ought I direct my newly efficient and productive energies? On this central question about the good life, however, the class was noticeably silent.
It is no real surprise that young people are clamoring for courses that hold out even the most meagre hope of happiness. We know they are miserable. Sixty-four percent report feelings of extreme loneliness; 23 percent are diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and 20 percent with clinical depression; 30 percent take psychotropic drugs to manage daily life. Nor is the general malaise confined to our university populations. The suicide rate in this country has climbed 35 percent in the past two decades. Anyone looking at these statistics ought to feel a swell of urgency and unease. Something is wrong with us—but what, exactly?
Mental health experts are less inclined to speak of unhappiness and more likely to reach for the impersonal concepts of illness and disease. Clinical depression has replaced our old concepts of despair or acedia, which were once understood in terms of the lack of necessary virtues, such as hope or charity. Like other diseases, without proper medical treatment, depression claims its hapless and unwitting victims, overpowering them completely.
We cannot love without suffering or grief. This is part of the seriousness of human life, its characteristic weight.
In her essay “Facing Reality,” Marilynne Robinson identifies the medicalization of ordinary human suffering as a sign of a deeper problem—our collective refusal to deal with the seriousness of being human. We have forgotten, she argues, that our troublesome emotions “are much fuller of meaning than language, that they interpret the world to us and us to other people.” When we treat our emotions as symptoms of a disease—as alien or external forces—we refuse their meaning and purpose in our lives. But to be human is to be vulnerable to suffering, and it is a central task of being human to learn how to come to terms with this. We cannot love without suffering or grief. This is part of the seriousness of human life, its characteristic weight.
Robinson works toward a different sort of diagnosis of what ails us within an exploration of our concepts of fiction and fact. Generally, we are taught that history, economics, and biology are non-fiction, because they describe reality according to “the facts,” the way things are, which is the foundation of some concept of objective truth. Robinson suggests that this is an oversimplification—that the boundaries between fact and fiction are less obvious and easy than this breakdown would suggest.
Historians do not merely report facts: they write narratives, and the construction of any narrative involves normative judgments about what is worth emphasizing and how best to interpret human motives and actions. Economists construct models of human behavior based on an ideal account of deliberation, according to which we reason and act so as to maximize our own self-interest. As Robinson herself points out, Darwinism, insofar as it is an account of human action and choice, gives us a competing account of human motivations, in which the concept of freedom or human excellence gains no significant purchase. These stories we tell ourselves about who and what we are form what Robinson calls our “collective fiction,” which masks itself under the name of Reality. We are educated and habituated to believe that this Reality must be faced and obeyed, even, or perhaps especially, at the cost of our most cherished goods, which are not accommodated within its narrow vision.
Throughout her 1998 collection of essays, The Death of Adam, Robinson urges us to notice the extent to which this collective fiction narrows and distorts our vision of ourselves, our world, and our place in it. Our collective fiction is not only false, by Robinson’s lights, but alienating, objectifying, and profoundly at odds with our own lived experience. She observes that
“we feel increasingly sunk in a world of mere things, in a hard-edged Reality that disallows imagination except to exact tribute from it, in portraits which assert its own power and ferocity, or in interludes and recreations which concede by their triviality that only Reality matters.”
Robinson confesses to feeling “smothered by this collective fiction,” which she sees as “the work of a grim and minor imagination.” She sees fear at the heart of it, a fear that makes us see ourselves as “ill despite our apparent health, vulnerable despite our apparent safety.” The fiction flourishes because we are invested in our own trivialization. We have adopted a “very small view of ourselves and others, as consumers and patients and members of interest groups, creatures too minor, we may somehow hope, for great death to pause over us.”
Happiness, pagan and Christian philosophers agreed, requires something more than technique or self-help; it requires the transformation of the person that comes with the acquisition of virtue: wisdom, prudence, justice, courage, and temperance.
I thought of Marilynne Robinson often during my visit to Yale, where the failure to take humanity seriously was painfully clear. The course I attended held out the promise of answering a genuine human longing for a better, more fulfilling life. The demand for such a class was unprecedented in Yale’s history. But how we understand the nature of this desire will determine how we set out to satisfy it, and this will depend on our vision of what the good life is. And on this score, Robinson’s diagnosis strikes me as spot-on: There is a failure of imaginative vision about who and what we are and to what we might aspire.
In Yale’s popular course, for example, students learn that human happiness is nothing more than subjective well-being. So long as one experiences an overall balance of positive emotional state and affect, coupled with the general sense that one’s life is, on the whole, going reasonably well, one is happy. A good life is a life that is happier on the whole, but this is purely a matter of one’s subjective perception.
This vision of happiness—which presents itself as scientific and part of Reality—is entirely immanent and achievable with a little luck and proper technique. Students learn that the key to understanding themselves is to understand their brains, which are like computers; if they could understand the various glitches that occur in their own hardware, then they would be able to hack into and reprogram their brains for their own benefit. The key to happiness is to learn how to write better code for oneself. The professor is there to teach them these techniques.
It remains an open question, in this meagre vision of happiness, whether one should strive to be happy at all, as opposed to, say, honest, just, courageous, or generous. After all, we needn’t stretch our imaginations to conjure up cases where the demands of justice or the needs of others might cut against one’s subjective well-being. For people at the top of our unjust social hierarchy—i.e., students at Yale—this is surely an everyday, existential dilemma.
After my visit to Yale’s happiness course, I participated in a public dialogue with its famous professor in front of approximately six hundred students. I was there to present a different perspective and to raise philosophical objections to her position, which is my trade. I reminded our audience that philosophers have been thinking about happiness and the good life for millennia and were disinclined to think of it in solely subjective terms, perhaps for good reason. For thinkers as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas, the central question about happiness concerns what sort of activity could possibly most satisfy, fulfill, or complete a human being, a creature that naturally desires to know what is true and to love what is good and beautiful. This tradition took it as obvious that such an activity would require a certain kind of training and discipline to perform excellently, and that it would consist in a kind of communion with a good that is outside the self.
Happiness, pagan and Christian philosophers agreed, requires something more than technique or self-help; it requires the transformation of the person that comes with the acquisition of virtue: wisdom, prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. Wisdom gives us a clear vision of what is truly good, prudence allows us to deliberate well so as to attain and maintain that vision, justice to realize it in our actions, and courage and temperance to preserve it in the face of fears and temptations. Acquiring virtue is not about hacking oneself or engaging in other forms of self-manipulation; it is about the proper habituation of one’s thoughts, feelings, and desires so that one becomes existentially ready to seek what is truly good and beautiful. In this view, there is a truth about the human desire for happiness, which is that it can either be properly directed toward the possession of what is actually beautiful and good, or it can be improperly directed, remaining within the prison of the self and closed off from transcendence.
There was a moment during our onstage dialogue when I introduced a familiar philosophical thought experiment aimed at generating the intuition that a good human life must have a self-transcendent dimension, that it must make contact with an objective reality outside ourselves that we can really and truly affirm is good. I asked the students to imagine a virtual reality machine that is so advanced one can no longer discern reality from simulation. On the one hand, once plugged into this machine, one seems to experience all the things one wishes for: love, security, professional success, and pleasures of various kinds and degrees. Of course, none of it would be real, but it would seem real. In short, it would meet all the criteria for subjective well-being. On the other hand, to plug oneself into this machine would be to remove oneself from the human world, to refuse the difficult task of being human.
The question I put to the students was this: would they choose to plug themselves into this machine? Is such a life aspirational or worthy of imitation? Could we call such a life “happy”? It is instructive, to say the least, that Yale’s renowned expert on “the good life,” the one to whom throngs of well-heeled students go for lessons on how to be happier, enthusiastically pronounced that she would, without hesitation, lie motionless and alone inside of this machine for the rest of her days. Of course, this is the inevitable conclusion she must reach, given her theoretical commitments. But it was a stunning admission, nevertheless. This was not a bullet I expected her to bite so eagerly.
We have tried to rest content with shallow rather than deep happiness—perhaps because our collective fiction demands it.
From Marilynne Robinson, I have learned to see the meagerness of this vision of the good human life within the broader context of the death of Adam. The story of Genesis provided us with a richer narrative of the value and meaning of our lives. Adam, as made in the image of God, possessed a dignity, value, and purpose that elevated him above a merely animal experience of pleasure and pain. Robinson notes that we have not given up telling stories about ourselves—Darwinism and homo economicus are examples of such stories—but we have removed the sacred, the mysterious, and the beautiful from them; we have systematically deprived ourselves of any conception of a transcendent good, of something greater than ourselves worth sacrificing and suffering for. We now see ourselves as minor creatures of no great purpose, and as a result have settled for pleasure over lasting fulfillment, cleverness over profundity, material comforts over spiritual joys. We have tried to rest content with shallow rather than deep happiness—perhaps because our collective fiction demands it.
It is within this critique of our collective fiction, our Reality, that Robinson offers a diagnosis of our collective anxiety. She suggests that most of us still want to believe in the seriousness of being human; our alienation is not yet total. But we have lost the means of explaining or acknowledging this seriousness to ourselves, which leaves us profoundly anxious, fearful of longings we experience but can neither understand nor satisfy. This gap between our personal experience and our narrative, Robinson suggests, may account for “both the narrowness and the intensity of the fiction that contains us. It is our comfort and our distraction” (86). Robinson suggests that we are “spiritual agoraphobes”—anxious and fearful of what is most essentially human in us.
If we want to be serious about our own humanity again, rather than fearful of it, we needn’t look any further than the source and summit of our practical life, which is our natural longing for happiness, where happiness is understood not as feeling good but as the total and permanent fulfillment of our capacity to desire what we know is truly good. But we must not treat this longing as an object of detached study, as just another item in the world of things. That would be an alienated and objectifying stance, which places us outside the sphere of intimate knowledge that comes from experience. Rather, we must reflect upon our longing and the full range of human emotions that grow out of and are ultimately made sense of in terms of it. We must try to see in what direction this desire ultimately points us, which is outside of ourselves. If we want models for this sort of reflection, the history of philosophy affords us plenty. But it is in this intimate, contemplative space that we might once again begin to appreciate our own humanity as a thing of great depth and complexity, as an inexhaustible mystery worthy of our loving and patient attention. We might even begin to see again why people have managed to love being human, as Robinson notes, “through plague and famine and siege.”
Jennifer A. Frey is associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina.