Personal Wisdom: Meaning in a Pragmatic World

CHAPTER ONE

I.

If there is one character in American literature who demonstrates the importance of humanism, it is Willy Loman. The protagonist of Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, Loman defined himself from childhood as one who could find his way in life through charm, a good appearance, a façade of self-confidence, and a sales record that would support a family and bring admiration from others. By pragmatism, I mean a person’s goal or plan that may disregard contradictory results or moral problems, sometimes to the detriment of that person or others. As a pragmatist, he invented a plan for his life –as a successful salesman–and pursued it without self-doubt. He accepted the virtue of masculine ambition and self-direction long past the time he could justify it to himself, his family, or his acquaintances. Swallowing whole the characteristic pragmatism of our culture, he was flummoxed by self-deception, unintended consequences, and ironic reversals. We may say that Willy Loman makes the case for humanism because of its absence in him. (Miller, 1949, pgs. 237-338.)

The play hints of the personal background of Loman that contributed to his misguided view of success. With an absent father and an older brother he barely knew (who made a fortune in an undisclosed way in the wilderness), young man Willy Loman was desperate for respect and wealth. In the terminology of this book, Willy Loman sought social positioning. In one of the play’s most memorable scenes, Loman told his boss that as a young man he witnessed the celebratory funeral of a famous salesman, the toast of New England because of personality, popularity, and success. At that moment in his youth, Loman developed a plan for himself: to gain the popularity and income he saw in the recently deceased salesman. Because of changes in the economic history at the time, Loman developed this dream at about the point that traveling salesmen were becoming obsolete. Throughout his marginally successful career, he inflicted pain on his wife, Linda, who understood him all too well; also, he raised his two sons, Biff and Happy, into slightly different versions of himself. Altogether, Willy Loman is the dark underside of the mythical self-made man that leaves us aware of our capacity for self-deception in the face of failure. Further, the play is a poignant depiction of failure in a society that so values success.

A common objection of English professors of undergraduates is the latter’s inclination to treat a literary figure in sociological or psychological terms. Admittedly, in much of the discussion that follows, I give in to this temptation, because Willy Loman absorbed the culture of the self-made man so uncritically that he can be partly explained by the social sciences. On stage, Loman is invariably portrayed as aggressive, loud, a stage persona that captures the attention of the audience. Miller wisely created a central character who, given the force of his temperament, is not immediately regarded as one who is defeated. This balance between the literary strengths of the play and its implicit appeal to psychological and sociological analysis contributes, I believe, to its enduring appeal. (The play has been revived on Broadway three times in the last thirty years.) Willy Loman has entered the collected consciousness of the nation in part because so many of us can recognize a portion of ourselves in him. Therefore, it is instructive to understand him through the common discourse of the social sciences.

A person who does not learn from direct, negative experience, according to the model of human nature to be presented in the next chapter, is often attempting to sustain his correspondence between his inner subjective nature and the more objective world around him by living in denial of his mistakes or misfortune. From a largely psychological perspective, the persistence of the positive perception of oneself, despite objective, contradictory evidence, may function as a personal cement that sustains the integrity of the personality. Without such cement, morale and motivation will suffer. We understandably seek to see ourselves in a positive light; hope about oneself is quite helpful to our functioning. From a sociological view, American individualism—at least as seen in the play– offers little solace or hope of affirmation through membership in a community. In a culture with limited community, there is often scant opportunity to readjust oneself to the expectations of others. Others may not know us or care to. If one is primarily secular in perspective, the opportunity for affirmation by others through religion may be minimal. Therefore, in a culture of success, those less successful often suffer in solitude.

Throughout the play, Willy is unable to interpret the accumulating contradictions in his life. The juxtaposition of past and present in the play highlights the gradual failure of Willy Loman to maintain the integrity of his personality. In raising his sons through an image of himself—that is, masculine and not curious in general nor doubtful about pragmatism– Loman encouraged his older son, Biff, to become a football player in high school. Loman wrongly assumed that Biff’s success in football would bring him a college scholarship. During the high school years, a teenage neighbor, Bernard, generously worried that their math teacher would flunk Biff, making him ineligible to play football; both Willy and Biff dismiss Bernard’s generous efforts to tutor Biff as neurotic. In fact, the math teacher did fail Biff, ending his high school athletic career and therefore his plans to receive an athletic scholarship for college. In a panic, Biff traveled to Boston to see his father to report the catastrophe. To his shock, Biff discovered his father having a sexual liaison with a woman, which ended Biff’s positive identification with his father. In a single day, Biff experienced two blows to his life; like his father, Biff had no alternative life plan to a football career. Later, as other events in the play unfolds, Bernard (the concerned neighbor) became a successful lawyer who argued cases before the US Supreme Court. Biff, who cannot grab hold of a responsible adult life, compulsively steals a pen from the office of a man who is in position to offer Biff a job; having committed the theft, Biff runs from the interview in a moment of shame and self-doubt. The pen is a symbol of executive prestige and wealth that has eluded Biff. Willy Loman, not in a state of composure himself, cannot grasp what has happened in Biff’s life. Never able to interpret these events in the context of his own, unfortunate history, Willy Loman careens to a self-destructive end himself, completely missing the redeeming love his wife has for him that might have sustained his morale.

One reason the play succeeds dramatically is that Miller contrasts Willy Loman with others who have achieved success. Character contrast energizes the play. Though the play’s minor characters each have their own perspective about success and the society, as people they compare favorably with Willy Loman, who (in the language of this book) is unable to reconcile his inner state with the outside world. Better than the protagonist, these minor characters understand the contradictions in the society that are helpful for composure or even success. Through such understanding, one is more likely to surmount the risk of falling prey to the unfairness in the economic struggle. In one scene, Willy Loman visits the office of Howard Wagner, the son of the man who hired Willy decades earlier. Willy wants a sales job in the home office. While he needs the income, he believes the job will sustain his illusion of success. In fact, Howard Wagner sees Willy as an anachronism, an embarrassment to the company. For Howard Wagner, having Willy Loman as a conspicuous presence in the company is an intolerable prospect. In rebuffing Willy’s request, Howard displays anger and guilt. Willy’s unexpected visit to Howard, and the emotions it provoked, forced Howard to carry out the dreaded termination of Willy. Before leaving, Willy reminds Howard that his father, the founder of the company, had promised Willy lifetime employment. Though Howard recognizes that Willy has a psychiatric condition, Howard’s own business pragmatism forced him to fire the long-term employee. To soften the blow, Howard said that Willy was in need of rest– recognition in layman terms of his pitiful condition. Willy appears to have seen the original owner of the company as the father he had lacked in childhood.

Miller uses the scene with Howard Wagner to drive home the point that in a primarily pragmatic, capitalist culture, people will often act in an almost unavoidably destructive manner to one another. Let us apply some aspects of the play to this book’s goal of understanding human nature. First, we recognize that if human nature is indeterminate, then it is difficult to discuss its essence in everyday conversation. We cannot capture the sea by constructing a chain link fence in the surf. Nevertheless, were we to abandon the attempt to understand human nature, we could bring about greater problems from the resulting ignorance. Second, a problem in understanding human nature is that each of us has a perspective about our nature that has been conditioned by genetics, early life experience, especially in the family, as well as by broader, culture experience. As mentioned in the Introduction, we are required to understand our own unique fate. In American culture, the central role of free enterprise may call for a level of personal initiative that less capitalist cultures might not always expect. For person’s without the natural endowment for realistic self-direction, or without the family advantages to promote such self-direction, the personality of the individual is more likely to lose its self-integration. In the terminology of the model—not yet explained—there is insufficient connection between the individual’s subjective state and the outside world. Psychiatric symptoms are more likely to develop.

The person without the capacity to adjust to the expectations of the larger world may retreat to a condition of bitterness or self-deception. The alternative is for the individual to embark on a program of change, or personal evolution, that may lead to a greater reconciliation with the larger world. Of course, in real life, often forced by economic necessity, the individual may attain the outward appearance of connection with the world. In discussing a poor correspondence between our inner nature and the outside world, we must recognize we are talking about a matter of degree; however, the degree matters. Because of his limitations, Willy Loman remained mostly in a position of self-deception. One purpose of the model, to be discussed in the next chapter, is to help us understand how the individual’s life course will go in a negative direction, a positive one, or somewhere between. The model acknowledges that indeterminate human nature, and the relativism implicit in each person’s own perspective, cannot provide an easily identifiable way of understanding others (or even ourselves). Of course, the model is intended to help. Let me use an analogy. Suppose an individual unfamiliar with New York City travels there as a sightseer. If he came only with a subway map, he could travel efficiently through the city, but he would not necessarily know the worthwhile places to go. If he went with a sightseer’s guide, he would know where to go but not necessarily how to get to the places. The sightseer needs both kinds of direction. The model is intended to be both a subway map and a guide. Admittedly, just as the map and guide book would help him only moderately, so would the model of human nature presented in this book.

Let us clarify the nature of pragmatism as used in this book. Through the development of a life’s project, the pragmatic individual gains vitality– some meaning and direction– that not only contributes to a sense of belonging but satisfies the need for food, shelter, clothing and necessary fuel. Most often, pragmatism means a way of earning a living. (When we reach the chapter on employment and the economy, this definition of pragmatism will be qualified.) Pragmatic self-interest without reference to the collective or prevailing political order, or the problems of inequality, sounds quite rational; one takes responsibility for one’s life. The difficulty is that the culture heavily weighted towards pragmatic self-interest often contributes to the misreading of the economy and culture. Even if the collective good is emphasized—what is often called utilitarianism—the economic functioning of the nation, or its consequences, can contribute to failure. Each individual’s self-interest, if carried out too assiduously, may become collectively destructive. One obvious example is climate change; another is the maldistribution of wealth. As mentioned in the Introduction, Erik Fromm became explicit about the danger of excessive pragmatism; Joseph Schumpeter acknowledged the risk more implicitly. While the present discussion does not allow for a fuller explanation of the conflict between pragmatic self-interest and collective good, we consider the problem in more depth in the book’s last two chapters.

Still, so important is the conflict between the humanistic understanding of our society, and pragmatic self-interest, I will briefly turn again to the early twentieth century, British socialist, R H. Tawney. The Acquisitive Society, published in 1920, brought clarity of thinking to the subject that makes his book still compelling. He defined an acquisitive society as one in which the accumulation of wealth became an end in itself. The upward flow of wealth meant that those who had the money to spend would attract the services of those who would otherwise be out of work. The wealthy would have others to shine their shoes, cook their food, drive them, clean their houses, maintain their gardens, advise them on investments, and tutor their children. The autonomy and pride that came from the working class could be reduced because of the unavoidable differences in social standing brought about by the acquisitive society. A central difficulty of the acquisitive society was that those with the greatest wealth would often have a diminished sense of obligation to the collective whole. Those with less wealth might have an exaggerated respect for the wealthy, no matter how easily, or passively, the wealth accumulated. From a cultural perspective, often, the character that lay behind the wealth was less noteworthy than the wealth itself. The point in an acquisitive society is to have the wealth. The respect for wealth could pre-empt the political and moral discussion about its distribution.

Writing about people in a primarily capitalist society, Tawney observed:

The motives which give color and quality to their public institutions, to their policy and political thought is not the attempt to secure the fulfillment of tasks undertaken for the public service, but to increase the opportunities open to individuals of obtaining the objects which they conceive to be advantageous to themselves. If asked the end criterion of social organizations, they would give an answer reminiscent of the formula of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. But to say that the end of social institutions is happiness, is to say they have no common end at all. For happiness is individual, and to make happiness the objects of society is to resolve society itself into the ambitions of the numberless individuals, each directed towards the attainment of some personal purpose. (Tawney, 2004, pg. 29.)

Once the public began to believe that the attainment of personal happiness was all but identical to the accumulation of wealth, then the interpersonal bonds, or sense of obligation, could decline.

The acquisitive society often makes:

… the individual the center of his own universe, and dissolves moral principles into a choice of expediencies. And it immensely simplifies the problems of social life in complex societies. For it relieves them of the necessity of discriminating between different types of economic activity and different sources of wealth, between enterprise and avarice, energy and unscrupulous greed, property which is legitimate and property which is theft, the just enjoyment of the fruits of labor and the idle parasitism of birth or fortune, because it treats all economic activity as standing upon the same level, and suggests that excess or defect, waste or superfluity, require no conscious effort of the social will to avert them, but are corrected almost automatically by the mechanical play of economic forces. (Tawney, 2004, pg. 31.)

I hope we are in a better position to grasp the dark substrate that pervades the society: that each individual carries the fear of poverty, isolation, lost self-respect, often at the expense of community or even self-understanding. One goal of this book is to provide a different way of interpreting our experiences, not from a primarily pragmatic or expedient position, as important at it is, but from the perspective of humanism.

II.

This section attempts to provide some basis in philosophy for the model to be presented in Chapter Two. While it may be understandable to apply aspects of psychology and sociology to the character of Willy Loman, it is a considerable leap to claim that we can use him as a platform in philosophy. The reason for tying Loman to problems in philosophy is that his inability to see contradictions within himself, or in the society, became a failure in growth or understanding that led to his self-destruction. If Willy Loman is to some degree representative of America, then we may consider his thinking as an American problem. As we proceed to consider the conflict between pragmatism and humanism in later chapters, it is important to see how a conflict in ideas can play out itself out in everyday life as well as in history. To have a generic understanding of the way that contradictions exist in the individual, and the society in general, I rely upon the Russian born philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, who lived most of his life in England.

As a child living in Russia, Berlin witnessed the violence and hysteria that arose during the Russian Revolution. The vividness of these memories, which Berlin described in his adulthood, probably contributed to his intellectual quest to understand the anger or emotionality that often lay behind political and economic disputes. While an advocate for freedom throughout his life, Berlin was repulsed by the justification of violence in the name of freedom. From the wholesale killing of the Russian against Russian during the Russian Civil War—following the Russian Revolution—Berlin began to consider the paradox of conflicting ideas, of unintended consequences. Within human nature lay great dangers. Berlin did not believe that conflicting values or ideas could be brought into harmony with one another. Accordingly, Berlin did not believe a widely accepted consensus about progress or freedom was likely. Although he advocated for greater equality in politics and economics, he rejected an ideological approach to progress. As a witness to violence in the Russian Revolution, he became skeptical about human nature; often, there was an excess of passion, a shortage of dispassion. The best that could be hoped for was an unsettled pluralism that respected the positions of others, as long as the positions fell within a morally defensible range. As one scholar summarized his thinking: Berlin accepted …the necessity of difficult choices between ultimate ends equally good but incommensurable and often irreconcilable. (Gray, 1996. Pg. 43.)

Two of his essays, The Pursuit of the Ideal and The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West, are useful in understanding problems in the history of ideas. (Berlin, 1999, pgs. 1-49.) After considering European philosophy, especially since the Italian Renaissance, he found two contradictory trends in Western thinking. We may define one trend as a hope about the future of mankind through the belief that human nature has inherent characteristics across all ages and cultures that would support the hope for progress. In short, there was enough good in mankind, enough in common among people, for some type of utopian ideal. The opposite trend is that individuals and cultures are inherently different and subject to change over time. Although some traits are common in various societies—the need to socialize, to form families, to establish a government, to have an economic system—the differences between societies in how these values are carried out are often more important than their similarities. Also, within each society, these differences could appear in how an individual acted upon them. Individuals may perceive progress differently.

While Berlin did not address American culture in these essays, one implication of his analysis is that the American ideal of self-reliance and economic individualism could work against an ideal of progress. Economic growth might never work to the advantage of millions; American economic freedom could also work against the common good. We will note in later chapters that an American assumption of endless economic growth as a form of utopianism is not supported by the facts. If we wish for a modicum of equality in the distribution of wealth, the American credo of economic self-interest is not consistent with progress. The reasons for this conclusion will be presented in Chapters Six and Seven.

One element of individualism often includes pragmatic self-interest. Alternatively, there is an ideal of universalism or progress that may include greater material equality and acceptance of others and their values. Unfortunately, the two ideals—individualism and universalism—may be incompatible. Both ideals can be a source of energy and meaning to individuals or a nation without being consistent with each other. Among important thinkers during the past half-millennium, Machiavelli may have been the most disruptive to the ideal of utopianism. The Italian thinker saw that a person in authority, or a government, could not necessarily govern a city or nation without the exercise of authority that was detrimental to at least some of the citizens or residents. A leader could not be all things to all people. We will see in Chapter Six of this book how correctly Machiavelli’s skepticism on progress applies to progress in the workplace; in Chapter Seven, the same may be said of some aspects of government (and especially politics). Nobody could accuse Machiavelli of being a utopian. The immediate point is that if one compromises one’s wish for progress through pragmatic self-interest, there should be an alternative that supplies some hope about what is to come. The most common alternative hope to unfettered self-interest would be some intervention by the central government. An individual’s resignation about the incompatibility of individual self-interest and the common good can lead to a dystopian view of the nation.

Berlin argued that the best way for society to deal with these disparate and opposing trends—that is, between some idealized picture of an improved future and the recognition of individualism or subjectivism that is almost inescapable—was for that society to maintain some common values but with political and social flexibility. Berlin favored pluralism: the contention that society may have a multitude of values or ends that were beneficial to individuals and the society. There should be a degree of diversity in a society with a modicum of unity. Pluralism was necessary and often to the good. One demand of pluralism was to make some effort to understand the perspectives of others, and to respect them, as long as the perspective of those others did not impose an evil on other segments of the population. When pluralism begins to destroy itself through intolerance or fear, pluralism reaches its constructive limits. For a society to remain reasonably coherent, enough individuals have to grasp the unavoidable tension between self-interest and the collective good.

Sometimes Berlin conveyed that he was a liberal in the big government sense of the word because he believed that a society should alleviate hunger or illness when it had the resources to do so. On the other hand, he did not favor wholesale restructuring of society by government for the sake of egalitarianism; government interventions for the wider good could work against the individualism of the many or have unintended consequences. The two most obvious examples of the unintended consequences is that over-regulation of business could stifle business growth in mainstream commerce; another is that business innovation could be reduced. While utopianism has a constructive role to play in promoting progress and justice, it should be tempered by respect for the benefits and energy that arose from personal freedom and individual self-interest. Utopianism and individual freedom, according to Berlin, would forever be in conflict. Pluralism requires a degree of patience and acceptance of the other’s perspective; however, the patience of the pluralist may end when self-interest is assumed to be a universal motive. The negative consequences of self-interest should be noted. When the person advocating for self-interest lacks doubt about his claim’s negative consequences, public discourse becomes ineffective. In the absence of pluralism, and its assumptions of conflicting good, debate becomes meaningless; the emotions of fear and anger take over. To complicate matters, the fear and anger may have a realistic basis.

The attentive reader may ask if I have substituted humanism and pragmatism, the opposing goods previously mentioned, with utopianism and individualism. I have borrowed from Isaiah Berlin to deepen our understanding of opposing goods and how they may interact with each other. Berlin said there were so many opposing forces or values in society they could not be listed. I have borrowed from Berlin the importance of opposing values or hopes but have changed the terminology because I wish to consider different aspects of human nature. My hope is that the opposing values stressed in this book, different from those emphasized by Isaiah Berlin, will become more apparent with each chapter.

Nevertheless, in passing, we can make the following observation: the human desire for agreement between our subjective state and the outside world will come into conflict with the subjective state of others and their view of the outside world. The tolerant pluralism Berlin promoted may detract from the ideal of progress because various forms of individualism will contribute to different pictures of the future. According to this book, the comparatively enlarged role of pragmatic self-interest in the United States, with its often implicit assumption that self-interest leads to progress, contributes to social and economic conflict. One purpose of the model to be presented in the next chapter, and of humanism in general, is to elevate the understanding of human nature so that the desire to achieve consistency between the subjective state and the outside world leaves room for constructive pluralism. According to this book, one way to reach a constructive pluralism is to accept the nature of opposing goods. If one accepts opposing goods, then the correspondence between our subjective state and the larger world must be complicated from the outset. Our views of human nature should temper our understanding of conflict and debate. The challenge is to accept the virtue of opposing goods while still maintaining our first values. Those first values could include humanism as well as the benefits of self-interest. If we understand these conflicting, important values within ourselves, then we may more easily see them occurring in the collective.

Without becoming involved in a discussion that would be a distraction from the book’s main purposes, I wish to discuss the role of social sciences to support the model of human nature offered in this book. The book does rely on the social sciences but is not limited to its conclusions. One reason for not being limited by the social sciences is they have had some difficulty incorporating values into research. The subjective, individualized nature of values, which are often open to revision or doubt in the individual, may be too illusive for the social sciences. As a generality, the social sciences look for measurement through numbers, which assumes a level of consistency in the individual. Sometimes such consistency is present; sometimes not. To get beyond the search for consistency, and to accept the often contingent nature of human understanding, we turn to an informal model of our nature.

The next chapter presents the model of human nature towards which this discussion has been moving.

CHAPTER TWO

FINDING ONE’S OWN CONTRADICTIONS

I.

We now consider a model of human nature. Whether one views a model of human nature that is filled with counter-currents as a burden or an opportunity, there is, I believe, no avoiding the fact that our nature is filled with contradictions. One fundamental contradiction is that while we seek simplification in our view of others, or of society, this simplification is bound to obscure some aspects of the larger world. Therefore, as much as we may seek continuity in our view of the world—to achieve integration of the personality—this desirable integration is likely to lead to a reduced understanding of the larger world. If we cannot see, or will not reconsider such contradictions, then our view of the world is diminished. In the previous chapter, in considering Willy Loman, we encountered a figure who could not understand the reality of his two sons or of the larger world. Later chapters will evaluate possible contradiction in parenting, marriage, and the economic and political world. Before doing so, let us consider the model itself.

My plan is to divide the description of the model into three sections. First, I describe the underlying assumptions upon which the more specific model can be based. I hope these assumptions are intuitively convincing; furthermore, that they are useful. The second section presents the model in a static (or structural) way so as to understand its various parts. I describe the elements of the model while minimizing their functions or roles. The third section describes the model more dynamically—that is, by showing how the parts function. While the second part discusses the model’s muscles, the third part discusses how the muscles interact.

Let us begin with the four elements or assumptions about the model.

Individuals tend to seek a satisfactory correspondence between their subjective, inner state and the outside world. Since we have the capacity to alter or filter the way we see the world, we may seek to find that correspondence despite contrary, more objective evidence from the outside world.

There are various ways to support the claim that we seek such positive connection with the world. The placebo effect is one way that science supports this claim about the correspondence. This phrase refers to the finding that patients report an improvement when given a phony pill (or other procedure) that cannot be of any benefit. Often, the subject who takes the placebo still reports improvement. Since the 1950s, much medical research in the United States has involved a protocol with two study groups: those who actually receive the experimental treatment and those who are given the placebo. Those who receive the placebo are called the control group. Only if the group receiving the actual treatment—the study group—report a statistically significant improvement in their condition (as compared to the control group) is the treatment considered beneficial. In the scientific community, because of the placebo effect, there has been an uneasy recognition that charlatans or those practicing witchcraft from more primitive societies may have provided some benefit to their patients. The subjective nature of the client or patient plays some role when he reports improvement. In the terms of the model, the individual sometimes believes what he wishes to—a wish for greater correspondence between the inner state and the outside world.

During the 1970s, researchers discovered a chemical in the brain called endorphins that help to reduce pain or provide a soothing mood. The patients who had a severe pain found that the control group and the study group both reported about the same improvement in pain when only the study group received morphine to alleviate the pain. Endorphins may have played a role in pain reduction for the control group. Only after the morphine levels had been increased to a comparatively high level did the study group report greater reduction in pain. In recent years, with the development of improved brain imaging, there is now optimism that the placebo effect itself could be studied more scientifically. There may be an evolutionary reason for the placebo effect. One possible benefit of the placebo effect is that it gives a person more hope, which allows him to function more normally.

Shelley E. Taylor’s Positive Illusions, 1998, provides some evidence about the way we view ourselves with considerable optimism. A research psychologist, she found widespread evidence that starting in childhood, we tend to emphasize our positive attributes and minimize what others may see as negative. Children tend to attribute to themselves great virtues that probably gives them a sense of competence or control over their environment. A similar observation was made by the humorist Garrison Keillor, who on almost a weekly basis remarked on radio that the children at Lake Woebegone were invariably above average. Taylor observed that people who have undergone considerable stress—an accident or natural disaster– tend to emphasize the positive. A very ill person may be unrealistically optimistic about his chances for recovery. This conclusion was found in the laboratory, in fieldwork, and in survey interviews. In a more social context, if we consider ourselves witty, we may recall a conversation where we made a joke, while another person, also present, may have no recollection of it. Often, another person, who believes himself a good host, may recall the things he prepared to give everybody a pleasant time at a party. The partygoers may have little recollection about the host’s efforts. Often, our perceptions and memories about ourselves are selective and self-enhancing. If the alternative to our personal optimism is depression, anger or anxiety, we are better off being optimistic about our attributes.

Historians and philosophers also have noted the desire to believe something because of our desire to embrace that belief. In The Great Chain of Being, 1965, Arthur O. Lovejoy traced the history of philosophers and theologians seeking to find an order to the world that explains events and observations. Lovejoy’s classic book noted that over centuries, the conclusions or beliefs promoted by intellectuals eventually succumbed to doubt through scientific advancement. Although Lovejoy ended his book in the late eighteenth century, before the Darwinian revolution, Darwin’s work probably led to the greatest reformulation in centuries of our understanding of the world. As a generality, we have slowly seen ourselves as less central to the cosmic or natural order. Thomas Nagel, a contemporary philosopher, in The View from Nowhere, (1986), emphasized how difficult it was for people, including scientists, to get beyond their perceptions as social or emotional beings. Also, if we go very far in being objective, we may sacrifice our subjective nature, which is important for meaning and direction. The goal of Nagel’s book was to determine how we can understand the world as it is outside of ourselves while still retaining an aspect of our individuality, our subjective nature. It is worth quoting Nagel on the psychological experience of greater objectivity, since this description, I suggest, provides some basis for considering a model of human nature that is less than scientific:

The ambition to get outside ourselves has obvious limits, but it is not always easy to know where they are or when they have been transgressed. We rightly think that the pursuit of detachment from our original standpoint is an indispensable method of advancing our understanding of the world of ourselves, increasing our freedom in thought and action, and becoming better. But since we are who we are, we cannot get outside ourselves completely. Whatever we do, we remain subparts of the world with limited access to the real nature of it and ourselves. (Nagel, 1986, pg. 6.)

Often, sensing that the correspondence between our inner perceptions and the outside world nevertheless has omissions or contradictions, we still embrace some dubious conclusions because doing so allows us to function more smoothly in the world. Under some circumstances, individual optimism can be self-enhancing; at other times, in the face of inescapable adversity, we may find strengths within ourselves that help us with survival or recovery. Being less than realistic in the quest for hope or motivation can be beneficial.

Let us note two of the most well-known survivors of Nazi slave labor camps, familiar to many through their writings about their efforts to cope and survive the suffering. Primo Levi, an Italian chemist with a quiet nature who survived in a camp through much of the war, wrote subsequently that in order to survive, he had to ignore the extreme hardship and approaching death of others alongside him, lest he risk losing his own life. He concluded that not only could he do very little to save others, but if the others observed that he had a kind heart, he could be manipulated by other prisoners. Levi focused on personal survival. After the war, he became world-renowned through his writing. In his books, he sought to formulate observation about human nature, both from the perspectives of the prisoners and their captors. For Levi, behavior in the slave labor and death camps called for a new view of human nature. He sought to explain to the world the unexplainable, at least from his perspective. In his own case, he admitted that in the prison camp he acted for his own survival in ways that in civilian life he would find abhorrent. He may never have overcome the guilt of his survival; many years after the war ended, he committed suicide. The immediate point is that his reformulation of human nature, beginning with an honest description of his own psychology, helped him to survive and provide meaning to his life. (Levi, 1978.)

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist before the war, more extroverted, charismatic, and more of a leader than Primo Levi, helped to maintain his own hope, as well as his fellow laborers. He started informal meetings among prisoners who sought hope. He believed that the improved mental state of the prisoners increased their chances for survival. Frankl used his clinical skills to combat hopelessness. After the war, Frankl helped to develop an approach to therapy that focused on the client’s view of his future. (Frankl, 1968.) These two quite different responses to roughly the same experiences demonstrates how people may draw upon their strengths for their welfare and those of others.

The humanist emphasizes that an individual’s response to adversity draws upon the proclivities and strengths of the individual. Under the best of conditions, the adversity helps the individual to accumulate strength and perspective; under the worst of conditions, the difficulties contribute to reduced integration of the personality. In contrast to the extreme experiences of Levi and Frankl, many Americans can more easily identify with young Abraham Lincoln during his years in New Salem and Springfield in central Illinois, before becoming president. In all of American history, Lincoln’s depression may be the most widely known. Recent biographers have searched assiduously for the events that affected his character, especially his manner of dealing with depression. He had a host of strengths that were apparent to those who knew him well: a piercing intelligence, a sense of humor, the capacity to be a social being and a storyteller when his mood made him more social. Conversely, he could seek solitude, spend a great deal of time with books, and search for tasks that required concentration—the rules of grammar, for example, or the study of law. Also, despite his humble background, he was driven by political ambition. He gained hope for himself by planning his political campaigns and cultivating friendships that might advance his ambitions. His often taciturn nature about his emotions made him something of mystery even to people who otherwise knew him well. Altogether, these traits often coalesced into activities or plans that gave him hope and warded off serious