[Buddha-l] The Malaise of Modernity

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Monday 17 November 2008 09:09:54 Alberto Todeschini wrote:

> What kind of time-frame was he referring to with 'modernity'? The
> word's meaning can be quite nebulous.

As one of my logic professors used to remind me, there is a proper occasion 
for using vague terms, namely, when one does not see a need to be more 
precise. Judging from the kinds of things Taylor talks about in the book, he 
is talking in broad strokes about the culture that has evolved in North 
America under the influence of values promoted during what is sometimes 
called the European Enlightenment.

Taylor's concern with instrumental reasoning is that data collection about 
such things as physical health and psychological well-being tends to focus on 
parts and to ignore the whole person. 

Applying Taylor's concern to the question that has been under discussion here, 
happiness might best be seen as an individual's overall assessment of her 
entire being, whereas most kinds of data collection would be focused on 
particular aspects of an individual's state of being, and especially on those 
aspects that can somehow be measured. 

Now if the data collected is simply a record of responses to the question "Are 
you happy?" there is nothing wrong with those data. They are recording 
whether people are happy, and those data can then be statistically correlated 
to responses to other questions. (Why anyone would do that escapes me, but I 
am sure it could be done.) 

Where investigation goes off the rails is when measurements of physical states 
are taken and used to question the truthfulness of the answer to the 
question "Are you happy?" When someone says something like "Well, you may 
THINK you're happy, but your theta waves and blood pressure would suggest 
otherwise," then we have left science behind and descended into the realm of 
a potentially dangerous sort of witchcraft. (I have nothing against crafty 
witches, mind you, so long as they don't claim to be doing viable scientific 
research.)

Another aspect of giving primacy to instrumental reasoning is that it tends to 
devalue other kinds of evidence. Why, for example, would the testimony of 
thousands of philosophers, poets and prophets not be taken as sufficient 
evidence that an accumulation of wealth is not likely to make a person happy? 
Surely, they are making observations based on their own experience and the 
reported experience of others. Surely their observations are sufficient to 
verify the claim that wealth is neither necessary  nor sufficient for 
happiness. Here is an area where we learn nothing new when someone collects 
data on people's reports of their level of happiness and correlates them with 
data about their financial security. What do these data prove? That all those 
philosophers and poets were right after all, and that before the data were 
analysed the philosophers and poets were just voicing an ungrounded 
prejudice? Bah! 

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico