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Take Pleasure in Taking the High Road
We all know that two wrongs don’t make a right. But does one right cancel out one wrong?
There’s a good chance you believe that it does. Research suggests that our brains are wired to think of a good deed as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card.
Psychologists call it licensing. It works like this:
You come home from a hard workout at the gym and immediately sit down to a double-helping of ice cream with chocolate syrup and whipped cream. The virtuous behavior of exercising makes you feel better about yourself, which then gives you license to indulge the less virtuous behavior of overdosing on sugar. The responsible act of taking care of yourself makes it easier to rationalize letting yourself go.
But Aaron Garvey and Lisa Bolton of the University of Kentucky have discovered that it goes even further than that.
WE ARE WHAT WE THINK
In their research, they took two groups of volunteers and gave them cookies to eat. The cookies were identical for each group, but in one group they were labeled “healthy.” After finishing their cookies, the subjects were given candy.
As the psychology of licensing would suggest, subjects who had eaten the “healthy” cookies ate more candy than the other group. But not for the reason we might have thought.
Garvey and Bolton measured not only the amount of candy eaten but also the amount of pleasure experienced from the candy. They found that the candy actually tasted better to the people who believed they had eaten healthy cookies.
Professor Garvey identified two implications from his research. First, if we do something virtuous before indulging in pleasure, we can actually make the experience of pleasure more pleasurable.
Second, if we reframe our attitude toward responsibilties and acts of virtue by thinking of them as commitments that we want to do rather than obligations that we have to do, we can make vices less attractive and protect ourselves from the damaging fallout of licensing.
THE MOST ENDURING PLEASURE
These two implications teach us an electrifying lesson in human free will. Through disciplined thinking, I can choose whether to make my self-indulgence more or less pleasurable. And that discipline takes the form of how motivated I am to choose virtue over vice.
In other words, do I want to trick my brain into getting more pleasure from healthy acts or from unhealthy acts? And if getting more psychological pleasure from virtue means that I’ll become less interested in the physical pleasure of vice, why would I ever want to choose vice over virtue?
We know from experience that physical pleasure is nothing more than psychological junk food. Enjoyments of the flesh feel good in the heat of the moment, but they leave a pleasure vacuum the instant they’re over. In contrast, emotional pleasures linger, and profound emotional satisfaction endures long after the source of pleasure has passed.
Most of all, the warm feelings we can get from family, community, and the sense of contribution to a higher purpose stay with us constantly. The less we distract ourselves with empty physical gratification, the more intense and continuous those emotional pleasures become.
King Solomon says, One who loves pleasure will be a man of want, and one who loves wine and oil will never become rich.
In a society that has increasingly debased the nobility of human emotion, people say that they love their cars, they love to sleep, they love to go to the beach, they love steak and wine. But if these are the objects of our love, what emotion is left for us to feel for our husbands and our wives, for our parents and our children, for the sources of inspiration that beckon us to moderate our lust and pursue loftier, more satisfying ideals?
The comics page can give us a chuckle, but it doesn’t enrich our minds like a good story. A jingle on the radio might get stuck in our head, but it doesn’t move the heart like a symphony. A passing flirtation may set us briefly a-tingle, but it is a sorry substitute for a lifetime of commitment.
Anything worthwhile requires investment and effort. Life is too short to squander it on fleeting pleasures when there is so much real joy for us to find.
Spread your wings today and soar tomorrow
What can we learn from ravens? Everything we need to know.
If you’re fed up with the politics of tweeting, maybe it’s time to trade in your Twitterfeed for raven song.
New research shows that corvids — a variety of raven — are more adept than chimpanzees at solving puzzles, recognizing symbols, using tools, and preparing for the future. Most significantly, corvids are able to delay gratification, forgoing immediate pleasure now for bigger rewards later.
If this sounds eerily familiar, it should. The now-famous Stanford Marshmallow experiment that began in the 1960s demonstrated that higher levels of self-control in nursery-school-age children foretell a lifetime of dramatically greater success in academic achievement, professional success, and psychological well-being.
So we should be asking ourselves: if ravens can learn from experience and plan for their future, why aren’t humans doing a better job of it?
LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW
Massive deficits to fund blossoming entitlement programs might feel good now, but what’s going to happen when the birds come home to roost and the bills come due? Partisan posturing and government gridlock might provide talking points for the next campaign cycle, but how does it serve the national interest to point fingers instead of finding solutions for our problems? Watered-down and politically-correct school curricula may buoy self-esteem and promote social agendas, but what will happen to the next generation when they have to compete in a world that won’t cater to their feelings?
As the culture of short-sightedness grows ever more entrenched, it becomes more urgent for us to start changing our thinking now. As Robert Redford quips to his secretary in Spy Game: “When did Noah build the ark, Gladys? Before the rain, before the rain.”
Speaking of Noah and the ark… perhaps we can find a new lesson in that very old story.
After the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, Noah released the raven, and then released the dove. However, a careful reading of the verses reveals something curious: where Noah sent forth the dove to see if the waters had abated, scripture gives no reason at all for why he sent out the raven.
What’s more, although Noah waited seven days to send out the dove the second time, there is no indication that he waited to send out the dove the first time after he sent out the raven. And whereas the dove returned to Noah because it found no place to rest its foot, the raven continued circling the ark until the earth became dry.
FAR AS HUMAN EYE CAN SEE
The classical commentaries offer a variety of explanations to resolve these contradictions. But let’s engage in a bit of creative interpretation for the sake of political allegory.
What if Noah had a different reason for sending forth the raven? What if he recognized that the raven possessed a more profound faculty of insight, not merely to report on the present status of the earth but to extrapolate beyond the superficial conditions of the moment? Might the raven symbolize mankind’s obligation to project its inner eye forward? Might the moral of the story be that we must hold ourselves accountable so that we never again to sink to a level of corruption that brings about global devastation?
The sages of the Talmud teach that everything follows the beginning. If we start with the end in mind, then the road to success carries us where we want to go. But if we set off in pursuit of our own gratification, then we are likely to wander into oblivion.
The greatest accomplishments of human history were set in motion by visionaries who imagined futures no one else considered possible. Nelson Mandela endured 27 years in prison rather than renouncing his convictions, eventually breaking the hold of apartheid on his country. Mohandas Gandhi devoted his life, and ultimately gave his life, for the ideal of human rights and non-violent revolution. The Framers of the Constitution envisioned a society of freedom and equality, risking their lives and their fortunes to bring democracy into the world.
Greatness requires vision and self-sacrifice, both of which are in short supply. But if we’re wise enough to learn from ravens, then we’ll soon find ourselves soaring like eagles.
How Ants Survive Rush Hour
Adapted from an article originally published by Pick The Brain.
Who doesn’t hate rush hour? Either we’re stuck motionless in a sea of cars or taking our lives in our hands as if on an amusement park bumper ride.
Maybe we should take a lesson from the ants.
Yes, ants.
Ants are better drivers than we are. And the lessons of their highway habits offer some valuable lessons that extend far beyond the way we drive.
Reclaiming Civility
A child’s brain is like a sponge, absorbing everything with which it comes in contact. As the brain gets older it learns to process, to analyze, to interpret. And eventually it begins to slow, begins to forget, begins to lose function.
Few prospects are as forbidding as mental decline, the specter of which haunts us as we advance toward old age. And so the experts tell us to keep our minds active, that using the brain is the surest way to stave off mental deterioration.
- Crossword puzzles
- Sudoku
- Word games
- Logic problems
These are common recipes from the diet books for the mind. But don’t stop there; the more creative and more challenging, the better for your brain.
- Go traveling
- Take up knitting or gardening
- Learn Italian
- Drive a different way to work
- Get an advanced degree
Anything and everything that piques cognitive activity belongs in our catalogue of mental health activities.
“That’s all good,” says Barbara Strauch, author of The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind and New York Times health and medical science editor. But the most intriguing advice Ms. Strauch has heard is this:
The Science of Fake News
Thousands gathered on the grounds of the Washington Monument this past Saturday for the “March on Science.” What were they advocating? Well, in a word… science.
What can we expect next? Doctors for Hospitals? Lawyers for Jurisprudence? Mammals for Oxygen?
To be fair, there is a real issue here. Namely, the exploitation of science for political advantage. In a perfect world, scientific data would be apolitical, serving as a nonpartisan lodestone for guiding public policy. Facts are facts, and the only debate should be about what they mean, not what they are.
But our world is far from perfect, and the problem is not that we don’t have faith in science. It’s that many have found good reason to lose faith in scientists.
Case in point. Last February, John Bates, formerly of the National Climatic Data Center, charged that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association had manipulated global warming data to advance a political agenda. So here’s the question: if climate change poses as grave a danger as scientists say it does, why do they have to fudge the data to prove it?
HOW TRUE ARE THE FACTS?
The arrogance of scientists is evident nowhere more than in their zealotry against religion. Every thinking person knows that the world came into existence through Big Bang and that life developed through evolution. Anyone who questions these axioms is living in a world of denial and delusion.
Right?
Not necessarily. More than a few members of the scientific community are uncomfortable with their colleagues’ blind worship before the altar of science.
If you ask a professor of physics what existed before the Big Bang, you’re likely to hear that Big Bang created time as well as space. Since there was no time before the Big Bang, the question is “scientifically irrelevant.”
Writes Bob Berman in Astronomy Magazine, the truth is that “nobody has the foggiest idea what happened the Tuesday before the Big Bang.” So why not simply say so?
Evolutionary theory – or, perhaps more accurately, evolutionary hypothesis – is riddled with unanswered questions. The first premise is spontaneous generation, the appearance of life where there was none. According to science, this is impossible.
So how did life begin? In 1954, Nobel Laureate George Wald of Harvard wrote in Scientific American: “One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are – as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation.” Dr. Wald then went on to clarify his definition of “impossible.”
It gets worse. There’s the dearth of fossil evidence. Dr. Gerald Schroeder points out that wings, for example, appear fully formed in the fossil record. There should be countless examples of macroevolution – intermediate stages of change from one species to another. Evolutionists love pointing to apteryx, a prehistoric flightless bird with hairy feathers, as one such intermediary link. So here is one piece of evidence where they should have hundreds. Where are the rest?
Yet another problem is exemplified by bats, which have echolocation — they navigate by sound. To do that, observed the late Michael Crichton, they would have had to develop simultaneously specialized vocal apparatus to make sounds, specialized ears to hear echoes, specialized brains to interpret the sounds, and specialized bodies to dive and swoop to catch insects. Without any one of these, the other three are worthless. How did evolution “know” to bring about all four faculties at once?
Returning to the cosmos, we have to deal with the expansion of the universe – which is accelerating, in contradiction to the laws of physics. How does science explain that one? Again, Bob Berman provides the answer: “It’s not galaxy clusters that travel outward,” the professor will say pedantically, “but space itself that grows larger. The galaxies don’t actually move.” So here I am thinking, wait a minute. Are we at a Daffy Duck convention?
SO MANY QUESTIONS
Educated adherents of religion feel no need to reject evolution or Big Bang completely. But it’s difficult to take seriously scientists who demonstrate such utter certitude in the face of unrelenting mystery. Why aren’t there more scientists as honest as Harry Cliff? Unlike so many, the particle physicist with CERN is unafraid to observe that “maybe for the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we cannot answer, not because we don’t have the brains or technology, but because the laws of physics themselves forbid it.”
So when it comes to climate change and other matters that may affect the future of mankind, perhaps the scientific community should consider how much their own hubris has damaged their credibility before they blame the public for questioning their conclusions.
The Talmud teaches: One who speculates upon these four things – what is above, what is below, what is before, and what is after – would be better off never having been born.
This does not mean that we are forbidden to ponder the vastness of Creation and the mysteries of the universe. Rather, it cautions us that, as J.B.S. Haladane observed, the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
We would all do well to remember that there will always be more for us to know, that the truth may not be what we want it to be, and that humility is the first step toward wisdom.
Yonason Goldson 