Very Radical Centrist perspective. I quibble with details of
the characterization, but admire the character of the writer.
I’m not going to get into the details, but I went through
some extremely difficult times over the past three and a
half years. As in, completely life-changing. The type of
experiences that alter you forever, fundamentally
shifting your relationship to what you thought was the world
around you.
This essay is not about those times. I’m not even going to
tell you about them.
What I am going to say is that, for the first time in my
life, I was forced into searching for reliable ways to be happy.
Not because being happy was a palliative, or a distraction
from my woes, but because the choice was between learning to
wield some of the basic tools of happiness or slope
intractably into dissolution, into the type of defeat from
which the soul does not recover. This was a matter of
survival.
So: enough background. Let me tell you why I bring this up.
A terminal nerd, I am a doctoral student at Boston
University, and over the past few semesters I’ve found
myself somewhat extensively researching the differences
between conservatives and liberals – from psychology to
music preferences to religious beliefs. Definitions are in
order. Conservatives are, for my purposes, people who exist
close to the heart of a traditional culture, whatever that
culture is. They tend to be invested in religion, because
religion is another way of saying culture. They are not
bigots per se, but they tend to distrust or act coolly
toward those who live beyond the warm bubbles of their own
traditions. Tribal beings, they are cocooned in worlds of
constructed social meaning: culture.
Liberals, in contrast, are those who dwell at the
flickering edges of their cultures, in the strange and eerie
space between the spheres of the world’s traditions,
religions, belief systems. They tend to be cosmopolitan, to
live in places where many different cultures rub up against
one another daily. Because of this exposure, liberals have
perceptive, even burdensome insight into how each culture is
flawed and deluded in its own, often very serious, way, and
so they cannot allow themselves to buy into any of them
wholesale. From a liberal perspective, to belong to a
culture unthinkingly means to accept that culture's
injustices and stupid horrors: to grin blithely at the
binding of women’s feet and the redlining of black
neighborhoods. And so the liberal can never fully trust
human culture. She is destined to live just at its
peripheries, in the weird interstices between worlds.
It’s fascinating material, this, but more striking has been
the timing of my involvement in it. This is because the
study of the ideological spectrum could easily be
recategorized as an inquiry into different approaches to the
problem of happiness.
The child of pot smokers and rebels, I have always been
taught to believe that conservatives are mostly wrong, about
most things, and that the project of civilization is largely
the process of dragging these atavistic, blunt-browed
austalopithecenes along, very much against their will, until
we – the radicals and liberals – have built a society free
of inequality, racial hostility, and recreational automobile
racing.
I no longer subscribe to that vision.
Instead, I have a vision that is far more interesting,
because I think it is closer to reality – and reality is
always more interesting than our models of it. In these
times of great social discord, as conservatives and liberals
increasingly slander and vilify one another on windy talk
radio shows and in harrumphing newspaper op-eds, as the
Occupy movement has galvanized an entire generation with its
tent cities and raucous but defiantly democratic general
assemblies, as the culture wars continue screeching on about
what women can or cannot do with the richness of their
wombs, I have begun to recognize a distinction that makes
much of this absurd conflict seem tractable, finally make
some sense. What I have seen is this: conservatives are, in
fact, wrong, but mostly only on those issues and
difficulties that arise on the macro scale, the sweeping
scope of planetary systems, environmental threats, and
cultural tides. This is because conservative people do not
think at this scale.
Instead, conservatives see people. That is, bluntly
speaking, bodies – families, children, neighbors.
They live in environments where they can see and be near
each other corporeally, slap each other on the back, make
off-color jokes, hear the register of each other’s laughs.
Conservatives are connoisseurs of the quotidian. They are
remarkably good – as a general rule, with endless exceptions
– at being human animals.
Meanwhile, liberals and progressives are, let us be honest,
spot-on about the larger issues. This is why they – we? – so
viscerally understand the horrifying implications of the
groaning shift of the climate, why they attend talks to
learn about the decline of cheap oil, why they buy farm
shares instead of Monsanto beans, why they grow indignant at
the treatment of factory workers in China and Peru. They are
act on these issues because they see how the workings
of things are interconnected, because they can shift
the scale of their awareness to pan out, take in the entire
picture, and thus include assembly line wage slaves whom
they have never met in their vision of what is right and
wrong.
Conservatives are microscopes. Liberals are macroscopes.
But conservatives, reliably, arehappier.
The difficulty with being a progressive, radical, or
liberal is that the scale of the world is far larger than a
woman or man can ever be. There is a basic mismatch between
the aspirations and dilemmas of liberal-leaning people and
their meager status as individual, warm-blooded mammals who
must live in family and tribe.
To move toward my conclusion with a concrete example, let
me tell you about a chemical. Oxytocin is a hormone produced in the
hypothalamus. Sex, hugging, breastfeeding, and taking part
in shared rituals all release oxytocin. Its effects are to
make the participants in these humble activities like and
trust one another more, to boost feelings of well-being, to
ooze rivers of warmth through our emotional veins. Oxytocin
is one of the primary ingredients in the rich cocktail of
tribal, family life. When oxytocin is coursing through our
bodies, we feel blessed, as if life is benevolent and our
fellows trustworthy and good.
Compared with conservatives, liberals tend to be less happy
with their family lives, to have fewer children, and to
think and exist on more abstract scales. They also tend to
be less religious. In other words, they use fewer of the
basic biological tools nature has evolved for us to organize
and streamline our social lives. Oxytocin is common in all
people, but I'd be willing to bet that it is more plentiful
in conservatives. They use the tools of the body with more
effectiveness to make themselves, and each other, happy.
Basking in the warmth of tribal affection, though,
conservatives are blind to the looming dangers at the
planetary scale and the miseries the status quo inflicts
upon the dispossessed. In a very real way, liberals and
radicals pick up where conservatives leave off, struggling
always to make the world better, to make it more fair, more
just.
But it can do little good to succumb to the laziness and
hunger for excitement that incites us to cast our enemies as
ogres. Conservatives have real wisdom about life,
specifically about life as a warm, love-hungry animal. They
are reconciled to it, to its limitations. Liberals, it seems
to me, quixotically fight against it. But when the time
comes to adjust yourself to life because there is no choice
– when you realize that you cannot fight the big battles
right now because the smaller ones, the ones arising from
relationships, from personal tragedies, from the pain of
actual living, are threatening to finish you – the wisdom of
the animal body offers real comfort and good.
Conservatives’ small-scaled lives teach us that friendships
and the touch of a loved one matter immensely – give me the
choice between a companion and bread, and I will starve with
the company. Liberals inspire with their broad
understanding, their ability to see the entire and its
patterns, their compassion for those who are left outside
where it is cold and damp. Perhaps it would be trite to say
we need both these strategies. Instead, I will say that I
need both: I cannot live in the world of vast systems or in
the warm, compressed universe of the tribe alone. My own
happiness depends on marrying these knowledges.
When I decided I needed to learn to be happy, I found that
my counterculture background had not provided me with the
tools I needed. I found that the people who voted for my
enemies had a glowing wisdom about the project of the body,
its need for love, touch, and social regularity, that the
wild lives of my peers lacked. The culture wars go on, on
Fox News and the Daily Show. But inside myself, I have
called an armistice.
Note: This is a very slightly modified version of an essay
I wrote in early 2012 for an event in Boston.
