Extra Ordinary Ideas

Truthfully Happy vs. Happily Right

I too was left breathless by Will Wilkinson’s wrenchingly beautiful post last weekend on religion, meaning and memory. Read it if you haven’t. I’ve nothing directly to add, except that it caused me to get off the metro at the wrong stop yesterday remembering its passion and eloquence.

My snarky side recovered just a bit, though, upon reading the comments, wherein a fellow blogger averred that “an intellectual is one who would rather be right than happy.”

Those who know me would suggest that for me this is a false choice, since few things make me more blissfully happy than being right, but the assertion raises deeper questions. Can we choose our beliefs, such that it’s possible to elect the state of being “right” over the state of being “happy” and vice versa? And, if so, does “happy” mean something so narrow that one might “rather” be something else?

In the past I’ve taken the position that beliefs can’t be chosen – that a belief is analogous to the result of an algebraic equation. These inputs, you get that result. Anyone who claims to disbelieve their result is probably just pretending, for to disbelieve the result one would have to disbelieve the inputs (and thus the validity of one’s senses) or the reasoning process itself. Of course perceptions and lines of reasoning are sometimes flawed. But to lack confidence in either of these as a general matter would leave one completely helpless to act. Simply put, we’d have nothing to believe.

But I came to understand rather late in life that many people do not perceive reasoning as their best way of apprehending truth. Instead, they rely to a much greater extent on those inarticulate emotional responses to our environment that we call intuition. But though intuition can generate very general normative results like “he’s a wonderful guy,” it can’t possibly generate specific answers to complex factual questions like “How was the universe created? or “What do I need to know to pass Statistics?” I can understand having a “hunch for God” in the sense that one may have a strong intuition that the world has objective meaning or normative value of some sort. I vaguely remember a guy named Wittgenstein saying something persuasively like that. But how, other than reason, do people arrive at the details of their beliefs?

The group of people referred to in the aphorism above as “intellectuals” share a certain psychological bias: they tend to form their important beliefs based mostly on their own reasoning processes. They welcome additional information or a thorough critique of their process, but don’t generally accept as true the end result of someone else’s process, unless it is a relatively unimportant belief that it’s not efficient to double-check, or unless it rests on so much specialized information that it wouldn’t be efficient to learn it.

The dominant bias, by contrast, may well be to use one’s intuition to choose a person who appears well equipped in one way or another to do the detail-level reasoning for the whole group. The part of this scenario that may be counterintuitive to some so-called “intellectuals” is that this probably a perfectly rational behavior for many people. If one’s gift is great intuition, why not?

It’s the criteria on which the intuitive selection of an opinion leader is often based, I think, that may cause any slippage between reason and belief. To start with, let’s assume that a person selecting an opinion leader wishes to select one from the pool of folks he believes have better reasoning processes than he does. This may not be universally true, but if one’s gift is intuition, and one feels a need to select an opinion leader to fill in details that intuition is poorly suited to providing, then it would make sense.

Now, if one is selecting an opinion leader from a pool of folks whose reasoning processes are superior to one’s own, one might need to look to secondary evidence of the quality of the candidates’ processes, since one is presumably ill-placed to evaluate those processes directly. Persuasive impressions might include popularity, happiness of existing followers, financial success, apparent sincerity and passion for truth.

Is choosing an opinion leader – whether a minister, a teacher, a lawyer or a motivational speaker – with happy followers the same as choosing happiness over “rightness”? Not necessarily, since choosing an opinion leader based on secondary characteristics such as happiness might be the most rational way for a given person to pursue detailed correct beliefs. After all, all forms of this pursuit are imperfect, including ours.

So, I think the answer to the question “Can one choose one’s beliefs?” - or more specifically “Can one choose to be happy rather than right?” - is “No, not directly.” Most everyone is pursuing a rational strategy for finding truth, although approaches may differ. We’re just stuck with wrestling rightness to the ground directly because we’ve personally found that it’s our best survival strategy.

Note: I’ve posted this knowing full well that I’ll be begging for mercy very shortly, and probably drowning in Radley’s pool with the little fishies, or whatever. I ask only one small mercy from potential respondents. Please avoid jargon! I haven’t the educational background for it.

Posted by Marie Gryphon on January 17, 2003