Welcome to the EvoS Consortium!

Forged from fragments of private disclosures, invidious rumors, and personal inventions, gossip is a weapon often wielded to wound an absent other. In a brilliant but troubling short story by William Faulkner—“Dry September”—it even leads to the tragic murder of an innocent man. In short, gossip is cheap, tawdry, and often hurtful. And yet, when I log into my email account and spy a seductive headline about Kim Kardashian’s tumultuous romances or Miley Cyrus’s scandalous performance, I furtively click the link and eagerly read like a drunk greedily gulping gin from a hidden flask. Of course, my brain, disciplined by years of self-esteem preserving distortions, quickly exculpates me for my sin. I read such stories ironically—I am patently better than the material and read only to observe how vapid other humans can be. Poke this thin cognitive veneer and the ugly truth pours out like saw dust: I am, like all of us, compelled to absorb gossip.

We are all addicted to gossip, not because we are malevolent, but because we are designed to desire and disseminate information about others. But why should we so feverishly desire such information and so happily promulgate it despite often explicitly denouncing such behaviors? Several reasonable evolutionary hypotheses have been forwarded to explain our propensity for gossip. These are not mutually exclusive. First, it has been argued that gossip is a social regulation mechanism (Barkow, 1992; Merry, 1984). That is, gossip is a cudgel that smites those who violate important social norms. If Sally sleeps with a married and man and no one cares, her transgression will go unpunished. However if people revel in the scandal and constantly chatter about it, news of her transgression will quickly spread and she will suffer reputational damage. Second, it has been argued that gossip is a way to enhance one’s own status and/or diminish another’s status (McAndrew & Milenkovic, 2002; McAndrew, Bell, & Garcia, 2007). For example, a gossiper might proudly broadcast his or her triumphs while concomitantly trumpeting the colossal failures of his or her rivals.

Evidence supports both positions. In support of the first, researchers have noted that gossip is often about important violations of social mores or group norms (Barkow, 1992). People do not generally gossip about trifles such as the color of Sally’s favorite plates or the height of Steve’s new lamp. Upon the other hand, people inveterately gossip about the sexual behavior of those around them, especially if such sexual behavior is scandalous and violates social expectations. Put simply, Tom’s sexual encounter with his wife isn’t gossip worthy; however, his sexual encounter with his married dental hygienist is. In support of the second, researchers have noted that positive information is disseminated about friends and allies, where as negative information is disseminated about enemies and rivals. People do not generally gossip about their spouses’ failures, or their own shortcomings. Upon the other hand, people gossip constantly about their spouses’ triumphs and their own heroic successes.

But what about a ubiquitous form of gossip in modern society: gossip about celebrities? Why should we care at all about people whom we will never meet? Kim Kardashian may or may not have been abducted by a secret Russian paramilitary force, but either way the fact is unlikely to impact our lives. We do not fraternize with her or her friends and do not count on either for social support. And yet, judging from the prodigious amount of magazine covers dedicated to Kim, we certainly do care about her. A simple byproduct explanation might go like this. Kim possesses social status and her life is constantly broadcast into our living rooms; therefore, our brains treats her as if she were important to our everyday lives because high status people were important to our ancestors and were not abstractions created by a powerful and exquisitely complicated media machine. I think this is partially correct. But I would like to add another component.

Social scientists have noted that status is contagious. People who associate with high status people absorb some of the status spillover, and people who associate with low status people are stained by that same spillover (Benoit-Smullyan, 1944; Winegard, Winegard, & Geary, 2013). Personal information is a means of publicly displaying a relationship with a person or persons. That is, if I know something personal about Kanye West, it might seem that I have personal access to his life—or that I associate with him. In our ancestral past, this heuristic would have been useful. Today, it is often useless. However, like our sweet tooth, it persists and is carefully exploited by marketers and magazine corporations. It also leads to humorous conversations about celebrities and their foibles and idiosyncrasies. We often act as if we know Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt simply because some magazine has disclosed an (possibly) invented scene from their lives. “I think Brad was just bored with Jennifer. He needs to be challenged.” This possibly explains why people who possess private information about celebrities are accorded a certain kind of status. (One, that it must be noted, is often textured with moral opprobrium).

What practical advice can be drawn from this? The flourishing celebrity-gossip industry is not going to perish anytime soon. And it may be more of a nuisance than anything, so we will all have to tolerate it, convincing ourselves that when we read about Tom Cruise’s Scientology conversion, we are doing so ironically. Gossip on the more local level, however, remains a deleterious and ubiquitous phenomenon. Here, we need to treat our propensity as a full-blown addiction, striving not to quell it, but to control it, discipline it, channel it. Some fraction of this species of gossip is not necessarily bad. It is, after all, important to regulate social behavior. But much of it is petty and hurtful. The next time we feel tempted to gossip, we should contemplate how small the reward is and how large the possible punishment to an absent other. Failing at this, perhaps we should slake our rapacious desire for gossip by reading about Kim Kardashian’s baby.

David’s both smart and proactive – so he worked to develop a campus-wide program in evolutionary studies (EvoS) – an academic curriculum open to all students – where students from any academic major can learn about the basics of evolution and see these applications in any area – engineering, anthropology, literary studies, the arts, psychology, and more. And this idea was successful – with the EvoS program at Binghamton now in about its 10^th year, our sister program at SUNY New Paltz in its 7^th year, and about 50 colleges and universities around the world explicitly connected to the international EvoS Consortium (see www.evostudies.org).

Darwin was clear that he thought evolution had broad implications for humanity. In fact, when we think about the question of “who was the first evolutionary psychologist” – the first scholar to really see how important evolution is to understanding human behavior – Darwin is the man. He wrote several books that were primarily about our evolved psychology – including much of what he wrote in The Descent of Man (Darwin, 1871) and in The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (Darwin, 1872) – and more. Darwin realized that to best understand the full human experience, we need to understand where we come from and what our minds and bodies were naturally selected to do.

In working with professors and students around the globe, the EvoS Consortium is working to help realize Darwin’s big vision of utilizing evolutionary approaches to help us understand all aspects of the human condition – human psychology (see Geher, 2013), politics, the arts, religion, and more. And major steps toward understanding human health from an evolutionary perspective (see Platek et al., 2011) are underway in labs across the world.

Evolution is not just for biologists any more – a point that comes out clearly in the work of renowned evolutionary biologist Lee Dugatkin, whose current work on topics such as Jefferson’s naturalistic tendencies during the founding of this nation, integrate politics, history, evolutionary biology, and more (see Carmen, Dillon, & Geher, 2010). And it’s this kind of cross-disciplinary integration and synthesis (see Wilson, Geher, & Waldo, 2009) that will help us as thinkers, scholars, and citizens of the world with an investment in the future, allow Darwin’s vision – which connects not only the entirety of life – but also the domains of body with mind and behavior – to better understand the world and our place in it.

Recent research has demonstrated that there is considerable resistance to the application of Darwin’s ideas to issues of human behavior (see Geher & Gambacorta, 2010) – and, worse, scholars have to pull teeth to obtain a solid education at the graduate level on the topic of evolution as it relates to the human condition (see Glass, Wilson, & Geher, 2012).

As evolutionists in 2013, we are Darwin’s Footsoldiers. And we will not rest until Darwin’s full vision – which includes evolutionary principles applied across all areas of academic inquiry – is realized.

References

Carmen, R., Moss Dillon, H., & Geher, G. (2010). History, biology, and politics neatly intertwined: Lee Dugatkin’s newest work as an exemplar of an EvoS education. EvoS Journal: The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium, 2(2), 67-71.

Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection

or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life (1st ed.). London, UK: John Murray.

Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex (2 vols.). London, UK: John Murray.

Darwin, C. (1872). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. London, UK: John Murray.

Geher, G. (2013). Evolutionary Psychology 101. New York: Springer.

Geher, G., & Gambacorta, D. (2010). Evolution is not relevant to sex differences in humans because I want it that way! Evidence for the politicization of human evolutionary psychology. EvoS Journal: The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium, 2(1), 32-47.

Glass, D. J., Wilson, D.S., & Geher, G. (2012). Evolutionary training in relation to human affairs is sorely lacking in higher education. EvoS Journal: The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium, 4(2), 16-22.

Platek, S., Geher, G., Heywood, L., Stapell, H., Porter, R., & Waters, T. (2011). Walking the walk to teach the talk: Implementing ancestral lifestyle changes as the newest tool in evolutionary studies. Evolution: Education & Outreach, 4, 41-51. Special issue on EvoS Consortium (R. Chang, G. Geher, J. Waldo, & D. S. Wilson, Eds).

Wilson, D. S. (2007). Evolution for everyone: How Darwin’s theory can change the way we think about our lives. New York, NY: Delacorte Press.

Wilson, D. S., Geher, G., & Waldo, J. (2009). EvoS: Completing the evolutionary synthesis in higher education. EvoS Journal: The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium, 1, 3-10.

When astronauts spend time in outer space, they often focus energy on life forms from Earth – such as the wheat cultivated on the Russian space station Mir by American astronaut John Blaha, and others, in the 1990s. One might wonder – of all the things to focus one’s energy on in outer space, why would someone choose to spend hours a day watching wheat grow?

The field of evolutionary psychology gives us good insights into the “wheat is interesting in space” phenomenon. Evolutionary Psychology is largely premised on the idea that the human mind includes a multitude of adaptations and psychological processes that evolved before the rise of large-scale civilization (as large-scale societies are relatively recent in terms of the evolutionary time scale – and the details of the human mind, that are with us today, evolved by-and-large before human groups expanded to the size of modern large-scale human communities). In modern contexts, we often find environments to be out of synch with our mental proclivities.

Being on a space station with some Russian guys is obviously cool, but is also evolutionarily unnatural – such a situation provides all kinds of stimuli and situations that would have never been encountered by our ancestors. From this perspective, it’s little wonder that astronauts will spend hours a day watching plants grow – as plant life has been part of all hominid environments – forever. And plants provide significant resources that humans have relied on for our entire existence.

I love the out-of-doors – and I think this love of mine for hiking, swimming, camping, etc., has some basis in human evolution. After all, I live in a Westernized place (New York), I have a nice office and a nice house – and I can drive to malls. Like most Americans, I don’t ever need to be outside unless I’m walking through a parking lot. But this summer, I’ve spent lots of time outside – and far away from parking lots at that! I’ve gone kayaking and swimming in Maine, hiking in Acadia (my son, Andrew, and I did the wickedly fun Beehive trail!), running on back roads of the Hudson Valley, camping in the deep woods of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, and, with a group of old friends, I found myself hiking to the top of Mt. Greylock, the tallest peak in Massachusetts. And my daughter, Megan, and I still have our annual father/daughter camping trip to look forward to!

And based on the many other folks I know who are passionate about hiking, cycling, kayaking, running, swimming, camping, and more – I know I’m not alone. Why are so many of us so into the out-of-doors? Why don’t we just stay inside and watch reality TV in the air conditioned house? After all, reality TV often includes others in the outdoors – wouldn’t it be better to simply watch the brave souls on Survivor weather the elements from the comfort of our couch?

If you’re an outdoorsy sort like me, you can rest assured that evolutionary psychology can help explain what we do! Based on the idea that humans evolved in out-of-door environments for years, you would expect that humans have a natural inclination toward things found in nature – items that would have some bearing on survival. And, in fact, research shows that this is exactly the case. Atran (1998) has strongly documented that human cognitive processes are honed for nature – with people all across the world having dedicated psychology for categorizing plants versus animals, for instance.

Along these lines, there’s strong evidence that people are particularly attracted to natural environments that typify the African savanna that our ancestors evolved in (Orians & Heerwagen, 1992). We like to look at trees, animals, and water – and, of course, all these things had important implications for the survival and ultimate reproduction of our ancestors – so it makes good sense that we would have evolved to pay attention to these environmental features.

In a broad sense, the great evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson (1984) uses the term biophilia – the love of living things – to characterize the human mind – and for my money, this sounds spot-on. Next time you just want to jump in a lake on a summer day, hike through the woods up a rocky mountain, or walk along the tidal Maine coast in wonder at the nature that surrounds you, realize that you’re not alone – our love of the out-of-doors is foundational to human evolutionary psychology. Enjoy the rest of your summer – and don’t forget to get outside!

References

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9611/27/mir.blaha/

Atran, S. (1998). Folk biology and the anthropology of science: Cognitive universals and cultural particulars. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 547-609.

Orians, G. H., & Heerwagen, J. H. (1992). Evolved responses to landscapes. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds), The adapted mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wilson, Edward O. (1984). Biophilia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

My friend Navin pointed out this online calculator to me called the “global rich list” – you type in your net annual income, and it tells you, correcting for cost of living, where you stack up to the billions of other humans in terms of your wealth. Navin and I both teach in the Psychology Department at SUNY New Paltz and make typical professor salaries for our respective career stages. Neither of us drives a BMW. But, in spite of this fact, we’re both in the top 1% of wealth relative to all others in the world.

This almost sounds like a cause for a celebration! Perhaps we should collect our small amounts of extra cash – along with several of our other middle class friends – and throw a party (without the caviar!). And, to be honest, maybe we will!

It’s long been established that satisfaction with one’s own lot is a relativistic enterprise (Festinger, 1954). If Joe, the elementary school teacher in the wealthy school district, is paid a very good salary of $180,000, but all the other teachers in his district who started the same year as he did make over $200,000, I have a guess about Joe – he’s likely very dissatisfied with this situation and perhaps with his job more generally. Robert Frank (2012) refers to relative salary as a “positional good” – something that serves as a marker of our status relative to others. And such positional goods seem to have a huge impact on how we see the world and on how happy we are in it.

This idea of happiness being so incredibly relative relates to the idea of the “hedonic treadmill,” discussed by Diener, Lucas, and Scollon (2006), who provide evidence that people are continuously striving for the next great thing to make themselves happy. Often, people will say things like “once I get a job in my field, that’s it, I’ll be totally happy” or “if only I get into one PhD program, I’ll be set – that’ll be all I need in my life” or “If I make the varsity team, that’ll be so awesome – I’ll be happy for life!” From this perspective, life can be seen as something of a hedonic treadmill – once our immediate problems – that may seem like all the matter at a given time – are resolved, we are temporarily happy – and then the treadmill of life continues, and the next problem emerges – often quickly!

The problem is, that true long-term life satisfaction is not adaptive from an evolutionary sense. Humans, like all animals, have an evolved motivational system that pushes us toward outcomes that, on average, facilitate survival and/or reproductive success. Being “truly happy” – like wise-old-monk-in-the-middle-of-the-woods happy – is not very realistic. The hedonic treadmill of human psychology exists for a reason – ancestors of ours who always had some level of dissatisfaction were more motivated to turn up positive life outcomes (often associated with improving one’s ability to facilitate survival and reproductive success) compared with others. Resting on one’s laurels was selected against under ancestral conditions – and we are the products of a long line of ancestors who were less likely than others to show too much in the way of complacency.

A great deal of solid research on the evolutionary psychology of happiness conducted by Sarah Hill and others reveals how incredibly socially relative happiness is (e.g., Hill, DelPriore, & Major, 2012). Consistent with the work by Robert Frank, the research conducted by Hill and her collaborators tells a story of happiness as affected by one’s position relative to others in one’s social group. We compare our own lot not with the lots of strangers or of hypothetical others. Under ancestral conditions, when the human mind evolved and human groups were small and stable, comparing one’s value with the “billions of others who live on other continents” was not, at all, the kind of comparison that would or could have been made. But comparing oneself to the other folks in one’s band – particularly those who are similar in age and gender – would have been a very common process.

And our modern minds betray this fact – we constantly compare ourselves with “similar others.” Telling an employee that her salary is higher than that of anyone else in her position at the company (even if it’s not a ton in an absolute sense) would likely by very empowering. Such information would make that person feel an extraordinary amount of satisfaction. Telling that same person, on the other hand, that she makes slightly less than everyone else – but that her salary is in the top 1% of people in the world, would likely be a bit less satisfying. And this fact makes perfect sense when we think about it in terms of evolutionarily based psychological principles.

This all said, I’ve got to say, I’m happy to have a typical middle-class salary while being in the top 1% worldwide in terms of wealth! I’m a tenured psychology professor at a school with extraordinarily bright and motivated undergraduate and graduate students. My students and I conduct research on any topics that seem of interest to us – from understanding how people feel when they experience infidelity to examining what factors make for high-quality personal ads to understanding the likely personality traits of the Neandertals – and more. And, get this, if I wanted to stop doing all that research for any reason, I totally could – and I’d be paid exactly what I make now! And I write books (see Geher & Kaufman, 2013) – because I like to and because I think I have some interesting things to say that can help people better understand the world and their place in it. No one’s making me do that! And I write this blog. And, again, I don’t have to! 90% of my “work,” actually, is probably stuff that I don’t have to do at all – I do it because I love it! And I get paid enough to put me in the top 1% of people in the world. And my middle-class lifestyle in the USA in 2013 seems pretty good to me – and it comes with an incredible wife and two really fun kids! While it’s not all peaches and cream, I think I’ve got a case for saying I may well have the best job in the world. And I think there’s a chance that you do  too!

 References

Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7, 117–140.

Frank, R. H. (2012). The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Geher, G., & Kaufman, S. B. (2013). Mating intelligence unleashed: The role of the mind in sex, dating, and love. New York: Oxford Univeristy Press. 

http://www.globalrichlist.com/

Hill, S. E., DelPriore, D., & Major, B.(2012). An evolutionary psychological perspective on happiness. In I. Boniwell & S. David (Eds.) Oxford Handbook of Happiness (pp. 875-886). Oxford University Press: New York.

Diener, E., Lucas, R. E., & Scollon, C. N. (2006). Beyond the hedonic treadmill: Revising the adaptation theory of well-being. American Psychologist, 61, 305-314.

I

There is something discomfiting about our society’s constant moral admonitions that we should be happy. The world is not always a benevolent place. And our lives are not always filled with joy. It is vexing to pretend perpetually that “all is for the best.” Such an optimistic attitude is intellectually fatiguing. It requires denying or actively ignoring what we all know: that tragedies are common place and ubiquitous. Every day, innocent children die from illnesses, anguished men and women kill their friends and lovers, and tortured men and women eagerly consume substances to numb pain. On a more mundane level, our day to day existence is often fraught with pain, suffering, and boredom. We hanker after something. We obtain it. We are happy for a day or two. Then we are sick of it and desire something else. In between these desires, these eruptions of our will, we are bored, anxious, or irritated.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection provides an intellectual reason for this sometimes miserable state of affairs. Influenced by Thomas Malthus’s analysis of population growth, Darwin recognized that more offspring are born to organisms than can possibly survive. These offspring vary in traits, some of which immediately affect their prospects for survival. For example, some birds can fly more adroitly and more quickly than others, allowing them to escape from predators. These traits are passed on to future generations. The result of this process is evolution by natural selection. We should pause for moment to reflect on just how disturbing evolution by natural selection really is. Its central premise is that by winnowing out different variations of traits—i.e., by “killing” the organisms that manifest them—nature selects “fitter” organisms. Humans are a late arrival on this planet, and the amount of waste and death that led to them is astonishing and must disturb the conscience of any decent person. There is, to put it succinctly, a surfeit of suffering on this planet. And we, like other animals, are engaged in a perpetual battle. Our battle might be more subtle, more sophisticated, and more “civilized’ than that of other nonhuman animals, but it is a battle nevertheless. (And, in fact, it might be noted that often we are quite a bit more savage than other nonhuman animals).

Despite this, many intellectuals of the past and present have persisted in propounding philosophies of optimism, insouciantly explaining away misery and suffering as aberrations or privations. Although this tendency was temporarily thwarted by World War II (which made “absurdism” popular), it still thrives in American popular culture (see, for example, Ehrenreich, 2009). For many, happiness is a moral good and being unhappy is immoral. People whisper about so and so and how he or she isn’t happy, as if his or her unhappiness were a contagious illness. I am not just talking about shunning a complainer, a person who constantly rails against every inconvenience as if the universe were conspiring against him or her; I am talking about shunning those who, for whatever reason, fail to see that the universe is a beneficent place and fail to deny the reality of suffering that surrounds them.

II

By all accounts, Arthur Schopenhauer was a morose, obstinate, and irascible man. He was prickly, convinced of his own genius, and intolerant of other thinkers who arrived at different conclusions from his. Hegel, Fichte, Schelling (great German philosophers all), he dismissed as quacks and mountebanks. He penned a pessimistic philosophy that was riddled with inconsistencies and obvious sophistries. And yet, there is something refreshing about that philosophy, something compelling and vital and solacing about it. Schopenhauer maintained that the universe is metaphysically evil. The tragedies, dashed desires, and thwarted hopes we witness around us are not accidents; they are the fundamental thread that holds together the tattered tapestry of existence. Each individual misfortune, to be sure, is an accident. But misfortune in general is the rule.

According to Schopenhauer, the universe is composed of one fundamental “thing” and the sundry objects that we perceive are composed of variations of that “thing.” Trees, plants, rocks, stars are really just manifestations of the one “true” reality (Schopenhauer, 1969). This may sound strange. Why assert that the variegated parade of empirical phenomena in the world is really one? Why not just consent to the senses and accept that the world is comprised of many things, all equally real? An answer to this perfectly sensible question would require multiple paragraphs. However, it is worth noting that this is not so strange as it sounds. Philosophers and scientists have engaged in similar speculations since the dawn of reflective thought. Today, we accept that everything we interact with is composed of microscopic particles, and that these particles, in some sense, are the fundamental reality of the universe. Schopenhauer’s assertion that the universe is one is not absurd, even if it is wrong.

But what is this fundamental “thing” of which the universe is composed? According to Schopenhauer, we can directly ascertain the reality of the universe through our own experience of our mind. There is, first, the external world. However, Schopenhauer, following Berkeley and Kant, believed that the external world is a creation of our mind—or is, at any rate, quite different from what we perceive; therefore, it is not ultimately real. And there is, second, the internal world—the will. This, according to Schopenhauer, supplies us direct knowledge of the underlying nature of reality. The universe is will—blind, struggling, ceaseless will. This will’s only goal is to perpetuate itself. This one unremitting need is felt inside each of our breasts and gives rise to the unceasing misery of the universe. We are ephemera; the will is eternal.

Schopenhauer believed that his insight justified a bleak outlook. And what a bleak outlook his was! “If the immediate purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world…” (Schopenhauer, 2004, p. 41). For Schopenhauer, life was an unceasing struggle of man against world and against fellow man: “..the life of an individual is a constant struggle, and not merely a metaphorical one against want or boredom, but also an actual struggle against other people” (Schopenhauer, 2004, p. 42). We can succor ourselves by observing the misfortunes of other, but what does this say about the horrible state of the world: “The most effective consolation in every misfortune and every affliction is to observe others who are more unfortunate than we: and everyone can do this. But what does this say for the condition as a whole?” (Schopenhauer, 2004, p. 42).

III

Put aside Schopenhauer’s somewhat preposterous metaphysics for a moment and the reader will note that his theory is quite similar to Darwin’s. Schopenhauer emphasized that individual organisms were not important in the grand scheme of life. What was important, from his perspective, was the underlying substrate, the will. From Darwin’s point of view, organisms were not important. What was important was the underlying substrate of inheritance—which Darwin eventually called “gemmules.” Today, we would say that what is important is the gene, which is the unit of replication (Dawkins, 1976). Schopenhauer used his insight that individual organisms were irrelevant to explain the power of sexual love (Schopenhauer, 1969; see also an online version: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter10.html). Love is not a trifle, an insignificant decoration that adorns our lives; it is, rather, the force through which the will propagates another generation of humans. And this means that love does not give a fig for our happiness—ít only cares about the propagation of life. This, in turn, means that marriages are doomed to misery. All that matters is that reproduction has occurred. The happiness of the two participants is irrelevant.

Schopenhauer, then, viewed life as a tragic manifestation of the will. He was an inveterate pessimist, and he penned a philosophy that justified his pessimism. Behind the stars that speckle the sky and the flowers that decorate our earth, behind everything that seems good and beautiful, there is the ugliness and stupidity of the will. As Will Durant put it while describing Schopenhauer’s philosophy, “The total picture of life is almost too painful for contemplation; life depends on our not knowing it too well” (Durant, 1961, p. 424). Schopenhauer did, however, believe that man could attain some form of salvation through will-less contemplation of the universe; and he did forward a profoundly moving picture of morality as driven by empathy for our fellow sufferers. He was sensitive to the plight of animals and hurled obloquies at slave owners in North America: “…whatever the reader…may have heard or imagined or dreamed of the unhappy condition of the slaves, indeed of human harshness and cruelty in general, will fade into insignificance when he reads how these devils in human form, these bigoted, church-going, Sabbath-keeping scoundrels, especially the Anglican parsons among them, treat their innocent black brothers…”  (Schopenhauer, 2004, p, 138).

To Schopenhauer, optimism was a form of callousness, an insult to the misfortunes of humanity.

IV

The powerful pessimism that permeates Schopenhauer’s philosophy might be alarming, but it is also appealing. As Durant put it, “..there is about this philosophy a blunt honesty by the side of which most optimistic creeds appear soporific hypocrisies” (Durant, 1961, p. 455). Schopenhauer informs us that all might not be for the best and that it is intellectually dishonest, perhaps even mean spirited, to suggest otherwise. Furthermore, Schopenhauer’s philosophy, if stripped of its metaphysics, resembles modern Darwinism enough to be useful to the contemporary researcher. I turn to his work often, and I find that I am rewarded with novel insights.

And what of those who deny that his pessimism is charming? It is worth noting that in his single-minded insistence on drawing attention the bleak and dreary in our world, Schopenhauer left out much that is joyous and worth celebrating. Every day, millions of humans sacrifice themselves for some noble ideal, rescue wounded animals, give charity to their fellow humans, create lasting works of art, fall in love, create new friendships, birth new children, laugh, sing, dance. Even war, terrible though it may be, compels sacrifice and aid. I have been critical of the facile optimism that some promote, but a realistic tally of the goods and evils of life does not require despair. Persistent pessimism is just as false as obstinate optimism. Schopenhauer himself loved to practice his flute, had many sexual liaisons, walked two hours a day, and penned many essays. I suspect that he secretly greeted every morning’s sun with a smile.

 References

Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. New York: Oxford University Press.

Durant, W. (1961). The story of philosophy. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Ehrenreich, B. (2009). Bright-sided: How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has            undermined America. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Schopenhauer, A. (1969). The world as will and representation. New York: Dover Publications

Schopenhauer, A. (2004). Essays and aphorisms. New York: Penguin Books.