In the last post, I argued that a properly lived human life displays a certain kind of robustness in the face of the external world.A person's core values and practices ought to be relatively stable over time, such that chance events do not totally demolish them. One way of creating this robustness is to use reflection and imagination: imagine (likely) future possibilities and reflect on whether your values would survive such events.
Imagine that someone offered you an alternative way of achieving this sort of robustness: a pharmaceutical pill that makes you a kind of ultra-conservative, resistant to changes in values and practices, come what may.
It is clear that there is something deeply wrong with this alternative: it embodies a total lack of responsibility for oneself. As I've previously said, these core commitments aren't just things you have, rather they are you because they constitute your character. In taking the pill, you are signing away responsibility for your very self to an external entity, one which will make it impossible for you to engage in the kind of imaginative reflection I have outlined.
The process, not just the result, matters.
When we ask questions about a good human life, we often find quick, all-too-quick answers coming from the mouths of "experts": understand that your mind is essentially a product of natural selection, understand that neuroscience will (soon) be able to tell you why you experience anything at all, and understand that thinking about your life in these terms is the best way because it is the most "scientific". Also don't be religious.
Yet, we might ask just what sorts of help these methodologies can offer a thoughtful person seeking to live a good, healthy life.
"Well," they might say, "I have certain strong desires largely because of natural selection. These desires appear to be in conflict. Got it. And any mental distress I experience as a result of this conflict can easily be identified as patterns in my neural activity. Check. Um. And...?"
And, what, indeed? Remember that we want our subject to be able to direct their own mental flourishing, not to simply take a pill. Does an individual subject have the ability to direct, by sheer force of will, his own neural activity? This involves a further question: is the subject aware of the activity as neural activity (taking a third-personal view of their own brain) or are they simply experiencing (first-personally) this activity?
If the answer is the latter, then neuroscience becomes utterly irrelevant, for the subject is simply accessing and directing his thoughts in the old-fashioned way, the way involved in imaginative reflection. But what about the third-personal approach?
Imagine the ability to view a map of one's neural activity and stimulate one's mind towards more "healthy" states. Such a feat might (might!) be possible, but would involve a set of talents and a knowledge-base that would surely have to be classified as "superhuman". Such an ability would be beyond almost all human beings, and there are good reasons to think that it is actually a conceptually confused project to begin with. The pill looms.
The same kinds of considerations affect the modern obsession with natural selection as an explanatory mechanism. Understanding that you are an animal, part of the natural world and similar in kind to dolphins and apes is surely important. But when you seek mental health, such considerations can play at best an auxiliary role. Suppose I am cheating on my wife: I reflect that my desire to cheat may have been influenced by natural selection in some way. And...?
Surely, the important information here is not that I am a kind of ape or that laboratory workers might be able to provide me with detailed neurological data concerning my desire to cheat. Rather, the considerations that matter are thus:
- I care deeply about my wife, and
- If she found out she would be devastated.
And that is actually, um, it.
As I see it, the central tasks of a human life are to act according to one's deepest values, to ensure that those values can survive imaginative reflection, and to accept that nonetheless this reflection cannot entirely immunize you from the possibility of tragedy. These are the tasks that a healthy intellectual culture will help us with. They are also the tasks for which our actual intellectual culture—obsessed as it is with pet-projects, passing political fads and (above all) "science"—remains almost entirely unhelpful.
