Taming the elephant

Say that she rail, why then I'll tell her plain

 She sings as sweetly as a nightingale. 

Shakespeare, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’

Many of you, my dear readers, appear to think that I am wallowing in self-pity and that this is a bad thing. Of course I’m fucking wallowing. Wallowing in self-pity is to a depressed, alcoholic human being as wallowing in mud is to a hippo. It cools the blood and facilitates regrouping. That is not to say that I think life from now on should be one long mud bath. Eventually I expect to emerge from the gloop and re-engage with life on terms, if not equal, then at least tolerable indefinitely. Give me a break, will you?

One of the few constructive things that I am doing with my time in the slime is reading. On the whole, I don’t read literature, partly because the effort required to read it generally negates the pleasure I derive from understanding it and partly because I think there are more interesting things to read. Shakespeare is often cited by the authors of popular science books, presumably as evidence that they can use Wikipedia, as well as solve quadratic equations in their heads. There seems to be a phrase of his that puts in words no mortal can match every sentiment one might wish to express. In the lines quoted above, Shakespeare is describing, from a male perspective, the never-ending battle between the sexes. What might his powers of expression have achieved, had he been privy to some of the results of contemporary research in psychology? If I want to understand the basis of the relations between men and women, I’d read ‘The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating’ by David Buss over ‘The Taming of The Shrew’ any day but, if I want a quote, The Bard is The Man.

The book beside my bed at the moment is ‘The Happinesss Hypothesis’, by Jonathan Haidt. I’ve not finished it, yet, but it is such exciting stuff that I want to share it now. Haidt is an academic psychologist at the University of Virginia, where he researches the ways in which morality functions. Psychology has come a long way since the days when Freudians felt at liberty to lie (excuse the pun) in their couches and construct vast theoretical edifices on foundations entirely devoid of experimental underpinning.

Haidt and his colleagues do experiments that are designed to uncover how and why our minds operate the way they do. For example, by getting volunteers to stare at a spot on a computer screen and then flashing words onto the dot too briefly for the volunteers to register them consciously, researchers are able to influence the volunteers subsequent behaviour. By flashing words related to aggression, they can make the volunteers behave rudely; by flashing words related to old age, they can make them walk more slowly; if the volunteers are American (where the relevant experiments were done) and the words are replaced by images of black faces, they can see regions of the brain associated with dislike and fear light up like a Christmas tree.

I love books that summarise large quantities of recent, hot scientific research and present it in a fashion that neither presumes in a reader any familiarity with the underlying literature nor patronises him by leaving out all of the difficult ideas. Haidt’s book is a brilliant example of the genre. Its USP is the author’s device of discussing the psychological and moral intuitions of widely revered, mostly ancient, thinkers and evaluating them in the light of the fairly recent understanding of our minds as evolved devices that exist in their current forms because they benefited our ancestors. For example, how might the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) emerge from our evolved psychologies (a paraphrase of the answer is that ‘tit for tat’ is an unbeatable strategy in games conducted within the context of the sort of societies humans inhabit)? It turns out that even Christ had some good ideas – for example his intuition that we are all profoundly hypocritical (remove the plank from your own eye…) – although none of them were original.

Haidt’s ambition extends beyond just explaining why we think what we think, however. He wants to use that understanding to enable individual humans to subvert the imperatives that evolution has built into us, opening the possibility that we might make ourselves healthier, wiser and happier, in spite of our predilections. He shows, for example, how some eastern philosophies that teach detachment as the road to nirvana, while on the right track, have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. His advantage over Buddha, say, is that whereas the enlightened one was going mainly on gut instinct, Haidt can do actual experiments on the students of the University of Virginia. If this sounds like fun to you, I doubt what you have in mind would get past the ethics committee.

Although I have read with attention dozens of beautifully written books about physics and cosmology (my favourite is ‘Six Easy Pieces’ by Richard Feynman), if I’m honest, I’d still struggle to explain, say, the theory of relativity at dinner party level, partly because I just don’t have the math and partly because none of the many metaphors designed to convey the gist of the theory has ever stuck. At the heart of 'The Happiness Hypothesis' is a brilliant metaphor, which I don't think I’ll ever forget.

He likens our minds to a rider on an elephant. The rider is our consciousness, the small part of our mind that evaluates our situation and attempts to influence it. The elephant is all the rest, comprising a vast majority of our mental lives, unconscious, stubborn, skilful and extremely powerful. All our ancestors until perhaps two million years ago and all our extant non-human relatives have no equivalent of the rider. She is a very recent innovation in evolutionary history and has been placed on a mount that picked its way through life without her, for aeons. It is a peculiarly human conceit and, as it turns out, a dangerous illusion, that the rider is in charge. On the contrary, she is an advisor or servant to the elephant. By subtle use of nudges and winks and careful tweaks on the reins, she can influence the direction the elephant takes, but if the elephant really wants to go somewhere, the rider is, well, just along for the ride.

In one sense, this is just a metaphor. In another it is a literal, thought vastly simplified, statement of the  brute facts of the matter. The moment the light went on in my mind was when Haidt quoted Ovid’s character Medea: 'I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.' Not only is this an almost perfect description of my current situation, it seems to me to describe many aspects of the lives of everyone I know. If you’ve ever made a new year’s resolution, you’ll know what I mean.

I confess that when I first read about the elephant and rider metaphor, my inner pervert immediately conjured up an image, not entirely attractive, of yours truly as a human-loxodont chimera with an elephantine schlong. Perhaps my mind would have run with the idea, had I not recently been inoculated against this peculiarly male form of self-deception. I have kids and one of their many charms is telling it as they see it. My daughter wandered into the loo the other day, while I was having a pee, and started laughing uncontrollably. ‘What’s so funny?’ I asked. ‘Daddy’, she giggled, ‘you have a very funny piemeltje.’ It’s probably not necessary to provide a translation of the final (Dutch) word in the last sentence but ‘little willy’ is close. When my daughter giggles, I giggle and, as at least some of you will know from personal experience, giggling while pissing has disastrous consequences for one’s aim. ‘Never mind, Daddy,’ said Elsje, ‘everybody has accidents sometimes.’ Wounded pride is a small price to pay for self-knowledge, as Buddha probably didn’t say.

But I digress. ‘The Happiness Hypothesis’ is one of the best of a genre of recent books written by a generation of psychologists undamaged by years of immersion in the dead or dying ‘disciplines’ of psychoanalysis and behaviourism. Instead of swearing fealty to a school of thought taught by their college tutors and never questioning it, they have gone out, done lots of really neat experiments and drawn their own conclusions. One of Haidt’s brilliantly argued conclusions that has me sweating a bit is that the Religious Right in America might have a point, when it argues that liberals have lost their way teaching children that there are no moral absolutes and that they are free to come to their own decisions about right and wrong. Haidt is an atheist and a liberal but he is fearless in letting the facts do the talking.