Joy, according to C. S. Lewis and Miroslav Volf

We don’t use the word "joy" a lot these days. The Google Ngram below shows that the words "joy" and "happiness" occur with about the same frequency, but if you add "happy" and "happiness" together, then they occur about 3 times as often as "joy". They can mean the same thing, but I think of happiness as a passing emotion that depends on external circumstances, whereas joy reflects a deeper sense of contentment, wonder and satisfaction that doesn’t depend on circumstances.



An author who influenced me a lot in younger days was C.S. Lewis, whose auto-biography was called "Surprised by Joy". Late in life he married a woman called Joy Davidman, but that happened after he published the auto-biography, so the book wasn't about being surprised by her. In fact the book is about the intense longing we feel for something supremely good, for a state of all-right-ness that the Hebrews called Shalom. Joy is a longing for the source of that goodness, a longing that can hardly be put into words. It is never found by looking for it, but found by surprise when seeking something else. Joy is like finding out that the thing you most wished were true actually is true.

I heard Prof. Miroslav Volf speak in Sydney last year, a theologian whose core topic for many years has been identifying the good life. People often say they want a good life, but what do they really mean?

He said it is very sad that religion often seems to imply that doing what is good and doing what is fun are mutually exclusive -- that if you do one you can't be doing the other. (It reminded me of what it seems like with food. The really yummy food is often not good for you and the food that's good for you can taste awful.) But Volf says that is a stupid idea. He said that we all wish for both pleasure and meaning and the good life has them both. We want to enjoy what we do. We want to do things that contribute to some greater purpose.

The best line of the lecture … I think I will remember it for a long time … was that joy is the unity of meaning and pleasure.

May we all find that true and deep joy. Don't settle for the fool's gold of surface-level happiness but seek all that is true, noble, right, pure, lovely and admirable; and in doing so may you often stumble into joy.

The wild man at the heart of Roger Waters' "The Wall"

During last week a friend and I watched The Wall at the wonderful Avoca Beach Picture Theatre, not quite knowing what we were going to see. Was it going to be a remake of the original movie or a documentary reflecting on the album that was first released 37 years ago? It turns out to be an edited version of Roger Waters' 2010-2013 concert tour, with concert footage interspersed with Waters' pilgrimage to war memorials where his father and grandfather died.

37 years! Makes me feel old, because I remember buying that album at the time. Now, when I listen to a lot of the music I loved back then, it sounds pretentious and musically lame, but The Wall is one of a handful of albums that continue to be inspiring: the music is still catchy and complex, the lyrics profound, and the artistic vision monumental.

Pink Floyd was always known for the extravagance of their light shows, and Waters raises that in this concert to amazing heights. I mean "raises" literally -- the stage crew gradually build a brick wall at the front of the stage during the concert, so that by half-way through the musicians are completely obscured by a 10m wall and continue to perform behind it.

The wall has always been the central metaphor of the whole project, and Waters has worked that metaphor to the limit through multiple re-interpretations over three decades. We build personal walls to protect ourselves, but they end up isolating and imprisoning us. As he emphasised in the Berlin concert in 1990, the wall can also isolate and imprison nations.

I've always been a great fan of Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, Laurie Anderson's Home of the Brave, and even pretty impressed with Michael Jackson's posthumous This Is It. But from a creative point of view, The Wall has a scope and attention to detail that surpasses them all. The staggering visual effects complement the storyline of the music and amplify the audacious vision that is both a commentary on war and fear, and a semi-biographical reflection on modern masculinity.

It is that last point that stood out to me as I watched the movie. The lasting value of the whole project is likely to be not the creativity, or the music, or the visual effects but the insightful portrayal of the modern western male psyche. Waters has captured the angst I feel, and I think many of my male peers feel. The ambiguity of whether walls protect or imprison. The shame of expressing emotions. The demoralising outcome of modern education. The distrust of government. The misguided aspiration for rock-star status. The disappointment that life has not delivered what we hoped for. The depressing thought they we are no more than a single brick in a huge impersonal wall.

In another review of this movie, Leslie Felperin accuses Waters of misogyny. I think Felperin is wrong about that, mistaking an honest portrayal of the male experience for a denial of the female experience. The movie is almost devoid of females. All the musicians are male. Waters' travelling companions are male apart from a brief scene with someone I presume is his daughter.

The story in the lyrics reveals a youth who had difficulty separating from a perhaps over-protective mother. The original movie (from memory) had more to say about how that psychological rut was transferred to his wife. That's coupled with an absent father. The commentary in this movie explicitly notes that war caused not only Roger Waters to grow up without a father, but that the same thing was true of his father.

Waters is a man castrated, but consciously on the journey to discover what it means to be a true man.

Along that journey he notes -- and discards -- false ideals of the masculine. Waters' repeated use of faux-Nazi characters and symbols satirically presents the emptiness of the supposedly masculine will to power. Woven throughout the piece is a criticism of the tendency to judge those who are different and the way that is ultimately expressed in the stupidity of waging war against the Other. When it comes to male attitudes to women, he notes the pathetic expression of lust for a "dirty woman", and couples that with a fear of being eaten by a vagina.

One of the best outcomes of feminism is that it has forced men to think about the meaning of masculinity. Waters hasn't resolved that here, but he clearly rejects some possibilities, and I think points towards two more helpful possibilities. In "Nobody Home" he sings "I've got wild staring eyes \ and I've got a strong urge to fly \ but I got nowhere to fly to." What I think Waters is attempting here, or at least pointing towards, is to reclaim the wild man archetype. The problem is, how does one get there from here? We feel trapped behind the wall we have conspired with society to build around our male identity. But let's at least affirm the will to break free.

The second direction Waters points to is the demolition of the wall. Sometimes it can be a conscious deconstruction; other times it is forced upon us as a shameful punishment "to be exposed before your peers." But in the end, as is clear from "Outside the Wall", we need each other.

Optical Illusions and the Deception of Desire

I know those two lines are the
same length but the knowing
makes no dent in the illusion
of their difference.

In the Müller-Lyer illusion two lines of equal length are made to look unequal. One explanation of the trick is that our minds interpret the lines as the corners of buildings: the one on the left as an inside corner and the other as an outside corner. Under that interpretation, the one on the left must be further in the distance to us than the one on the right and our perceptual system adjusts it to appear bigger. I’ve read that when those lines are shown to people from the New Guinean highlands – tribes who have never lived inside rectangular houses – they judge them to be the same length as invariably as we judge them to be different. The illusion is culturally dependant. 

What interests me most, however, is that, like most visual illusions, knowing the truth makes no difference to our perception. We can move one line onto the top of the other, or measure both with a ruler to prove that they are the same, and yet when we look again at the two, one still looks longer than the other. What’s more, neither a psychologist who understood how the illusion works nor a neuro-surgeon who tracked down the exact set of neurons that make the visual mistake would be immune to the deception. A complete knowledge of the illusion does nothing to dissolve the illusion. The one still looks longer than the other. 

Desire

Desire often acts in the same way. 

Some of our desires spring from natural appetites and needs: a desire for warmth when we are cold, a desire for food when we are hungry. But the objects of our desires are usually selected for external and cultural reasons. We learn what to desire by imitating the desires of other people. We learn what food tastes good from our parents and friends. We learn what hair-style looks good by watching how our peers respond to each other. We learn what car is cool from marketing campaigns. We learn what jobs are valuable by observing how others value them.

As a result some, perhaps most, desires are illusions. There is nothing inherently “better” about most hair styles (despite what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11:14!). The car most suited to your needs probably bears little resemblance to the car you are encouraged to buy. The hair and the car are desirable because we see what we might look like if we had that hair or that car through the eyes of imagined others.

We do not always succumb to the illusion. There are conscious and unconscious reasons why we might rebel against our desires, or deny ourselves the pleasure promised by the desire, or for any range of practical reasons not pursue the desire.

And yet, like the Müller-Lyer illusion, the desires themselves are immune to our conscious knowledge. We continue to desire something even when we know that the basis for the desire is flawed.

Let’s follow one example in a little more depth. We are bombarded by images of what a desirable human body looks like. Knowing how the psychological mechanism of desire operates does not change my perception that a particular cultural image of physical beauty would bring more satisfaction in a partner than alternatives. At one level that is ridiculous, for the glamorous ideal of beauty changes with time and culture.

The word “glamorous” originated from a Scottish word meaning a magical enchantment. To say that someone is glamorous is to acknowledge that their appeal is an illusion. There is a glamour over our desires, a veil so powerful that even knowing it is there does not dispel its effect.

At another level the beauty assumption is totally contrary to my experience. Good relationships do not depend on it. Why should they? Neither does good sex depend on it. On the contrary, from my limited experience, the most enjoyable sex does not depend on physical beauty but on mutual enthusiasm. But in this instance, another aspect of desire comes to the fore: from whence comes “mutual enthusiasm” if not from both people desiring each other and desiring each other’s desire?

At some other, less conscious level, however, the illusion remains. I want a girlfriend whom others would affirm as desirable and I perceive this girl or that girl in the light of that desire. I’m attracted to a house in a particular suburb not only because I am consciously aware that it will establish my social status but because I genuinely like the house and the suburb. Liking this girl or that house is totally unaffected by my conscious knowledge of the dynamics of desire.

Necker Cube

Ambiguity

In another class of optical illusions, our perception can jump between competing interpretations of an image. A simple example is the Necker Cube on the left. Which face of the cube is in front and which face is behind? You can flip between the two by focusing on either of the inner corners.

A more dramatic example is the train in this animated image, which can be made to move in either direction merely by imagining it to do so.

Such images are ambiguous and what we see depends on what we choose to see.

A similar ambiguity inhabits desire. I noted above that just as the mis-direction of an optical illusion is impossible to dispel, so too the mis-direction of desire. I think it is also true that just as there may be multiple ambiguous interpretations of an optical illusion, so too we often experience multiple ambiguous desires. Sometimes what we desire depends on what we choose to focus on.

Desires are sometimes layered. I desire that house, perhaps because of a deeper desire to impress my colleagues at work, and that may be just an example of an even deeper desire to belong.

Desires sometimes compete. The way we manage personal finances may arise out of a desire to enjoy material possessions now, a desire to save for a secure future, and a desire to use what we have to bless others: desires that ultimately might be mutually-exclusive.

Desires sometimes remain unconscious. We act in order to attain something, but we are unaware of either what we seek or why we seek it.

Add to the mix a type of self-deception that, relying on the ambiguity of our desires, allows us to believe one interpretation, or act as though we believe it, only by discounting or even disavowing the others.

As a consequence of those layered, competing and unconscious dynamics of desires, there is rarely a clean correlation between how we act and what we desire. Nevertheless, and this is perhaps the point of what I am writing, whether and how we act on our desires can be subjected to conscious choice.

We may not be immune to the deception of desire, but we can occasionally see through the veil and decide to not be enslaved by the desire. It is possible to undermine our self-deception and to behave beyond the illusion.

Maybe this helps to untangle an apparent contradiction in a saying of Jesus. Two of his biographers record Jesus as saying “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves” (Luke 9:23, Matthew 16:24) and yet they also note that in the next breath Jesus asks “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit their very self?” Which is it? Are we commanded to deny ourselves, to give up what is most dear to us? Or are we advised that it serves no good whatsoever to give up ourselves?

One suspects that Jesus has seen through the deception of desire. He knows that gaining everything we desire would not bring the wholeness we seek. On the contrary, coerced by our desires, we lose our very selves. But by questioning our desires, perhaps we can dispel the glamour enough to decide beyond desire. Perhaps by understanding the illusion we can regain our true selves.

Everything is holy now

Although life has been hard going the last few years – well actually, because life has been hard going the last few years – I'm no longer so black and white in the way I see many things. I used to think the alternative to black and white was an unattractive gradient of grey. But as my friend Annabella has suggested, there is another outlook: to see the world in full colour! Even hurt and brokenness is richly textured and infused with God.

Peter Mayer's Holy Now (nice live version) captures that transformation well.

Intentional Action and the Praise-Blame Asymmetry

Recent research suggests that it is easier to blame someone than to praise them. Joshua Knobe shows this clearly in the following two thought experiments:

Suppose that a vice-president goes to the chairman of the board and says OK, we've got this new policy. It's going to make huge amounts of money for our company but it's also going to harm the environment. And the chairman says, look, I know this policy is going to harm the environment but I don't care at all about that, I only care about making as much money as we possibly can. So in fact they initiate the new policy and the environment is indeed harmed. Now the question is, did the chairman of the board harm the environment intentionally? So what would you say in that instance?

Like 85% of people, I say he is to blame.

The second vignette is very similar to the first one. What differs is just the moral status of what the person is doing. So suppose we keep everything exactly the same but we just change the word 'harm' to 'help'. So now suppose the vice president goes to the chairman of the board and says, OK, we've got this new policy, it's going to make huge amounts of money for our company and it's also going to help the environment. And the chairman of the board says, look, I know it's going to help the environment but I don't care at all about that, all I care about is just making as much money as we possibly can. So let's implement the new policy. And sure enough it helps the environment. In this case did the chairman of the board help the environment intentionally?

This is From Joshua Knobe (2009). The philosophy of good intentions (podcast on ABC Radio National) but see also Joshua Knobe, Adam Cohen & Alan Leslie (2006). Acting Intentionally and the Side-Effect Effect: 'Theory of Mind' and Moral Judgment. Psychological Science 17:421-427.

Frank Hindriks seeks to explain this asymmetry by saying that praise depends on being appropriately motivated, whereas blame does not. Seems to me that just generalises the phenomenon rather than explaining it. (Frank Hindriks (2008). Intentional Action and the Praise-Blame Asymmetry. Philosophical Quarterly 58, 233: 630-41.)

Reacting and responding

Here's a simple thing really, but it struck me as a neat summary. I was gazing over the shoulder of a fellow passenger on the train home this evening and in her book I read ...

An unconscious choice is a reaction. A conscious choice is a response.

"Canoeing is my religion"

Someone recently said to me "Some people go to church for their religion, but I get my religious nourishment while canoeing". She wasn't a friend -- in fact it was the first time we had met -- so I couldn't delve into what she meant, but it set me to wondering. All I could say on the spot was that there wasn't any reason why she couldn't do both.

But what do people mean when they say things like that? What view of "religion" is behind that comment?

I gather that "He's religious about football" usually means "fanatical" or "dedicated" or perhaps "spends a lot of time on". But that's not what this woman meant.

I think she probably meant that canoeing gives her the experience of comfort, serenity or peace that others feel in church. Maybe it goes deeper. Maybe she is drawn out of herself into a sense of awe and otherness and getting lost in the moment while communing with nature.

That "what I get from religion" approach is quite different from James' idea that true religion is "to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."

Nevertheless, I think comments about what people feel "religious" about still indicate a semi-conscious acceptance that they desire and value the spiritual state that they perceive religious people have.

I'd love to hear how others interpret it.

Effective Motivators

Dan Pink spoke at TED about the disparity between what science knows about human motivation and what techniques business uses to motivate employees.

There is overwhelming scientific evidence that higher rewards lead to lower performance, except in the most non-cognitive tasks. The carrot-and-stick approach only works for tasks where the solution is obvious -- e.g. a mechanical task that requires no thinking.

Key to his argument are the results of numerous variation to the Duncker's Candle Problem.

The better motivators are intrinsic rather than extrinsic:

• Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives
  
• Mastery: desire to do better and better at something that matters
  
• Purpose: service of something larger than ourselves.
  

Can homosexuals change their sexual orientation/identity?

On Hope 103.2's Open House, Stanton Jones discusses the efficacy of the Exodus Foundation program for changing people's sexual orientation. He presented research to the American Psychological Association recently that sought to demonstrate:

• That at least some people can change sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual.
• That conversion programs are not necessarily psychologically damaging.

Jones claims that the beliefs to the contrary are based mostly on anectodal evidence. What research has been published is with very small sample size, short periods of time, and based on therapists input rather than the subjects themsleves. He carried out a longitudinal study of 98 homosexuals in the Exodus program over 6 years.

Setting aside the 33% drop-out rate, the study showed 25% reporting success in becoming heterosexual, 25% decided and succeeded in becoming chaste, 25% remained homosexual and 25% were still in the process and the outcome was unclear.

Although some participants experienced substantial distress during the program, others improved on standard stress scores. The study found no statistical correlation in either direction.

It's useful to read Anthony Venn-Brown's criticism on the Open House blog site.

Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

Alain de Botton's presentation at TED 2009 has greatly inspired me. (And BTW, the podcasts that come from TED are by far the most informative and diverse thought-provokers I have come across.)

1. Snobbery: "A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. ... You encounter it within minutes at a party, when you get asked that famous iconic question of the early 21st century, "What do you do?" And according to how you answer that question, people are either incredibly delighted to see you, or look at their watch and make their excuses. ... The opposite of a snob is ... the ideal mother ... who doesn't care about your achievements."
2. Materialism: "I don't think we are particularly materialistic. I think we live in a society which has simply pegged certain emotional rewards to the acquisition of material goods. It's not the material goods we want. It's the rewards we want."
3. Spirit of equality leads to the problem of envy. "If there is one dominant emotion in modern society, that is envy." That idea that anyone is able to succeed (in terms of social status) makes us all envious of those who have succeeded. "There is a real correlation between a society that tells people that they can do anything, and the existence of low self-esteem." -- because we all feel like failures in comparison to those who have higher social status.
   
4. Meritocracy: "A meritocratic society is one in which if you've got talent and energy and skill, you will get to the top. ... If you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you'll also, by implication, and in a far more nasty way, believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there. In other words, your position in life comes to seem not accidental, but merited and deserved. And that makes failure seem much more crushing."
5. Unfortunates and Losers: "In the middle ages, in England, when you met a very poor person, that person would be described as an 'unfortunate.' Literally, somebody who had not been blessed by fortune, an unfortunate. Nowadays, particularly in the United States, if you meet someone at the bottom of society, they may, unkindly, be described as a 'loser.' There is a real difference between an unfortunate and a loser." The result is s higher rate of suicide. "The idea that we will make a society where literally everybody is graded, the good at the top, and the bad at the bottom, and it's exactly done as it should be, is impossible. There are simply too many random factors. Accidents, accidents of birth, accidents of things dropping on people's heads, illnesses, etc."
6. Ridicule: "When we think about failure, ... what we fear is the judgement and ridicule of others." Newspapers are the prime carrier or ridicule.
7. Tragedy: "An art form devoted to tracing how people fail." This is a more productive response to failure than ridicule. "At one end of the spectrum of sympathy, you've got the tabloid newspaper. At the other end of the spectrum you've got tragedy."
8. Transcendence: "The other thing about modern society, and why it causes this anxiety, is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human. We are the first society to be living in a world where we don't worship anything other than ourselves."
9. Success: "You can't be successful at everything. ... A lot of the time, our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully, are not our own. They are sucked in from ... father ... mother ... advertising. ... So what I want to argue for, is not that we should give up on our ideas of success. But we should make sure that they are our own, ... that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions."

Ian Bogost on serious games

In the ABC Fora podcast Serious Gaming , Ian Bogost commented about the role of video games.

He claims that video games are the one form of modern media that embraces complexity rather than shying away from it. The key characteristics of video games are modelling, role playing and world building.

I found his comments on role playing to be the most insightful. He says that an important aspect is to experience what it is like to be constrained by the rules that the role implies. I can see that as a useful dynamic in my 12-year old son's life. As he plays various computer games, he is forced to work within tight boundaries to reach some pre-specified goal. In doing so, he is hopefully building an ability to empathise. He is brought up will such affluence and power that he could easily be blind to the constraints most people experience. Short of an immersive cross-cultural experience, a role-playing computer game may be his best chance to appreciate what its like to maintain a will to succeed and avoid despair in the face of limited choices.