AT THE AGE OF FIFTEEN I began calling myself an atheist. It was bad timing because the next year, in English class, I read Waiting for Godot and plunged into a philosophical depression. This was not a clinical depression with thoughts of personal worthlessness and a yearning for death. It was, rather, the kind of funk that Woody Allen’s characters so often exhibited in his early movies. For example, in Annie Hall, a flashback shows us a nine-year-old Allen-esque boy being asked by a doctor why he is depressed. The boy’s response is that he has recently learned that the universe will expand forever and someday break apart. He sees no further point in doing homework, despite his mother’s protestations that Brooklyn is not expanding.
After reading Godot, I felt the same way. If there was no God then my life, and all life, suddenly seemed to be as pointless as the lives of Vladimir and Estragon. Here, for example, is the quote I chose later that year to place under my picture in my high school yearbook: “Whosoever shall not fall by the sword or by famine, shall fall by pestilence, so why bother shaving?” The quote is from Woody Allen.1
The next year I went to college. I was committed to figuring out the meaning of life, and I thought that studying philosophy would help. I was disappointed. Philosophy addressed many fundamental questions of being and knowing, but the question “What is the meaning of life?” never came up. I assumed it was a badly formed question, and I moved on. I went to graduate school in psychology. If only I had been able to read Susan Wolf back then! She clarifies the question so elegantly, and she points to the means by which each of us can answer it for ourselves: go find something to love, something worthy of love, that you can link to and engage with in the right sort of way.
It took me a while to do that, but I eventually did, as so many of us have, both by committing to people and by committing to my work. My remaining comments flow from that work, which ended up bringing me, by a roundabout route, back to the question of the meaning of life. A few years ago I wrote a book that reviewed ten of the greatest psychological ideas of all time, from the vantage point of modern science.2 The last chapter was on happiness and the meaning of life. In writing that chapter I came across two extraordinarily powerful ideas. The first idea is vital engagement, the second one is hive psychology. I will suggest that these two concepts, taken together, can help solve the problem of objective meaning that Wolf raised in these lectures.
Some people live extraordinarily generative lives. They design, write, build, nurture, cure, discover, or invent. They contribute to the knowledge or well-being of humanity to such a degree that others are motivated to give them awards or to write books about them. Most of these people are happy, and nearly all are passionately engaged in their work. Many of us want to know, how did they get that way? And how can I get some of that?
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed over a hundred such eminent people to find out. He and his students have given us a picture of a way of living that they call “vital engagement,” which they define as “a relationship to the world that is characterized both by experiences of flow (enjoyed absorption) and by meaning (subjective significance).”3 Flow is the psychological state that results when you are completely immersed in an activity that is challenging, yet closely matched to your abilities. You can achieve it while painting, dancing, writing, driving on a winding road, or playing video games. Flow is not meaning, but it is a kind of deep interest. Extraordinarily productive people usually began their careers with deep interest—they were drawn to an activity, and often found at least brief moments of flow in that activity. But then, gradually, over many years, vital engagement emerged as the person wove an ever more encompassing web of knowledge, action, identity, and relationships.
Here is an example. When I first taught a class on positive psychology I was trying to explain the concept of vital engagement, and the class wasn’t getting it. I suspected that we had an example in our midst, a shy woman who had said little so far, but who had revealed that she was passionate about horses. I asked her to tell us how she got involved in riding. She spoke of her childhood love of animals, and of how she had begged her parents to let her take riding lessons. She rode for fun at first, but soon began entering competitions. Riding became ever more important to her, and she chose to attend the University of Virginia because of its excellent riding team.
After telling us these basic facts, she stopped talking, unsure of how much I wanted her to say. I wanted more, because vital engagement is not just doing and loving. I wanted to know if she had been gradually engulfed in a web of horse-related meanings. I asked her if she could name specific horses from previous centuries. She said yes, she had begun to study the history of horses as soon as she began to ride. I asked her if she had made friends through riding, and she told us that most of her close friends were “horse friends.” This woman was a perfect exemplar of vital engagement. She had a relationship to riding that had begun with simple interest and had expanded over many years to tie her into an activity, a tradition, and a community. This woman had found more than happiness; she had found meaning.
I tell this story because I want to agree with Wolf’s emphasis on the quality of connection. My favorite statement of her Fitting Fulfillment theory is this one: “Meaning . . . comes from active engagement in projects of worth, which links us to our world in a positive way.” By speaking about “active engagement” and about linking to the world in a positive way, I think she is advocating something close to the notion of vital engagement. But in her claim that the project must be “of worth” she has committed herself to a search for objective value. In fact, she ends her essay with the claim that without a concept of objective value, the concept of meaningfulness (as a type of value distinct from both morality and self-interest) will not be fully intelligible.
This creates a difficulty. Wolf bets everything on the existence, or at least intelligibility, of objective value. I would bet against her. I do not think there can be such a thing as objective value in the form that she and many other philosophers hope to find. Wolf herself is aware of the challenges. She asserts that a meaning-giving project must provide value to someone other than the self, but she recognizes that “independent value” is not enough. If two people find meaning by providing value to each other, how is this any better than two people earning a living by taking in each others’ laundry? She also raises the danger of elitism, the problem of “who is to say” from an external perspective that an activity is a worthwhile or fitting one. I think that this problem, too, is insoluble. Note the kinds of activities Wolf thinks are likely to be objectively worthwhile: being engaged with political and social causes, creating art, preserving natural beauty, developing one’s potential. She admits that these presuppose bourgeois American values, but I think they are even narrower; they presuppose politically liberal bourgeois American values.
But does Wolf really need a theory of objective value? I suspect that she fears that if there is no such thing as objective value, then meaning-relativism will prevail, and lawn mower racing, flagpole sitting, and rock rolling will have just as strong a claim to being meaningful as writing a symphony or righting an injustice. Here is where vital engagement comes to the rescue. Lawn mower racing and flagpole sitting do not lend themselves to vital engagement. People do such things for fun, and to get into record books. They might even find friendship along the way. But how many of them found flow in these activities as adolescents, devoured all the books they could find on the history of lawn mowers and flagpoles, lovingly assembled collections of lawn mowers and flagpoles, and chose colleges and jobs so as to ensure that they would always be able to race mowers or sit on poles in the company of other mower racers and pole sitters?
What is more, if Professor Wolf sticks to her quest for objective value, I fear she must tell my former student that her love of horses is in danger of being declared meaningless, if someone ever does come up with an adequate theory of objective value. After all, all of her horsing around does nothing for anyone else, and it does not make the world a better place. My student may feel vitally engaged, but the joy she gets from riding horses around in circles might just make of her another Sisyphus fulfilled.
The second psychological idea that I think might help Wolf develop her argument is hive psychology.4 We in the social sciences have been plagued by a sixty-year-long attack of methodological individualism. Most of us are firmly committed to a Newtonian approach that aims at producing the simplest possible model and then builds complexity into that model only when it is absolutely necessary. We think about society as a set of billiard balls bouncing around, each with its own magnetic attractions and repulsions. I think philosophy is just as deeply infected, and I see billiard balls bouncing around in some parts of Wolf’s essay. Note this passage:
I am drawn by the particular values of my friend, of philosophy, of a great chocolate cake. These are “objects” whose value has a source outside myself. They would be good, or interesting, or worthwhile whether I liked or cared about or even noticed them or not. But they are values I respond to, for which I have an affinity. . . . (emphasis added)
But what would happen if we thought that the fundamental unit of society was not the individual but the group? What would happen if we looked at the long history of humanity on this planet and recognized our modern, independent sense of self as an historical and geographical anomaly? Cultural psychologists tell us that the independent, thick-walled self is the norm in Europe and in North America, but not elsewhere.5 Historians tell us that Europeans developed this new, more differentiated, more independent self in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—a self that was more self-conscious, more prone to depression, and more likely to worry about finding the meaning of life.6
Why is it often painful to live in our modern, independent selves? I think the answer can be found in our origins. Many animals are social, but only a few are ultrasocial,7 by which I mean that they live in groups of thousands, with extensive division of labor and a willingness to sacrifice and even die for the group. The best-known ultrasocial animals are bees, ants, termites, and naked mole rats. All of these creatures accomplish the trick of ultrasociality by being siblings who can only reproduce through a queen, or a single royal couple. It’s one for all, all for one, and in a very real sense the hive is a superorganism. Bees are best understood as cells or organs within a larger body. The queen is not the brain of the hive, she is only its ovary.
Chimpanzees, by contrast, are social but not ultrasocial. They live in groups of a few dozen at most. They do not sacrifice their lives for others. They rarely even share food. Somehow our ancestors went from the moderate sociability of chimps to the ultrasociality we enjoy today. We humans live in groups much larger than can be explained through kinship; we divide labor, form teams and tribes, rally round the flag when attacked, do the wave at football games, dance the Macarena at weddings, and in a hundred other ways show that we were shaped by evolution to be selective ultrasocialists. We want, need, and love groups. We have special emotions that we feel only in groups. And we have special practices that bind groups together into a kind of hive. Barbara Ehrenreich recently made this case in her book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. She describes how collective, ecstatic dance used to be nearly a cultural universal, which functioned to soften hierarchy and bind groups together with love. But Europeans have long been ambivalent toward Dionysian tendencies, and Western psychology has ignored this side of our nature entirely. Ehrenreich writes that “if homosexual attraction is the love that ‘dares not speak its name,’ the love that binds people to the collective has no name at all to speak.”8
Ehrenreich builds on an older book by the historian William McNeill, who first encountered the joy of synchronous movement during basic training for the army. After weeks of seemingly pointless drilling, his squadron finally got the synchrony right, and McNeill had a kind of mystical experience:
Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.9
McNeill argues that societies have always used synchronized motor movements, in dance, marching, bowing, and chanting, to create a social superorganism in which one loses oneself and finds joy and strength in becoming a cell in a larger body.
I raise these issues of ultrasociality and hive psychology because Wolf considers the popular advice to find meaning by getting involved with “something larger than oneself.” She asks what size has to do with anything, and she concludes that the crucial thing is to get involved with something outside yourself.
I disagree. From the perspective of hive psychology, size matters a great deal. From the perspective of hive psychology, modern humans are essentially bees who busted out of the hive during the Enlightenment, and who burned down the last honeycombs during the twentieth century. We now fly around free and unencumbered, calling ourselves atheists, reading Waiting for Godot, and wondering, what does it all mean? Where can I find meaning? A good hive must be larger than one’s self.
One of the great challenges of modernity is that we must now find hives for ourselves. We can’t create them on our own any more than we can create a language on our own. But the view from positive psychology is that we can find meaning in life if we take advantage of our capacity for vital engagement and bind ourselves to projects and people. We can co-create, or join into, something larger than ourselves. We can join others in pursuit of common goals, nested in shared traditions and common values. Susan Wolf has done us a great service in showing us the challenges we face in choosing the right kind of hive, and in showing us why it matters that we choose rightly.
1 Woody Allen, Without Feathers (New York: Random House, 1975).
2 Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
3 Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “The Construction of Meaning through Vital Engagement,” in Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived, eds. C.L.M. Keyes and J. Haidt (Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2003) 83–104; the quote is on p. 87.
4 For a review, see Jonathan Haidt, J. Patrick Seder, and Selin Kesebir, “Hive Psychology, Happiness, and Public Policy,” Journal of Legal Studies (in press).
5 Hazel R. Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation,” Psychological Review 98 (1991) 224–53.
6 See review in Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).
7 Peter J. Richardson and Robert Boyd, “The Evolution of Human Ultra- Sociality,” in Indoctrinability, Ideology, and Warfare: Evolutionary Perspectives, eds. I. EiblEibesfeldt and F. K. Salter (New York: Berghahn, 1998) 71–95.
8 Ehrenreich 14.
9 W. H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) 2.