I’m going to assume here that all readers of Secular Right are deep enthralled in their copies of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. That would be the top copy, I mean, of the five you purchased as gifts for family and friends.
One infuriating thing about writing a nonfiction book that uses data from recent research (in my case, from the human sciences) is that some reinforcing research will appear just too late for inclusion.
Well, here I am in Chapter 7 of WAD:
Researchers like S. Taylor and J. Brown (Illusion and Well-Being, 1988) have found that a moderate degree of self-deception is normal in mentally healthy people, and is likely adaptive. Contrariwise: “[I]t appears to be not the well-adjusted individual but the individual who experiences subjective distress who is more likely to process self-relevant information in a relatively unbiased and balanced fashion.”
To put it slightly differently: up to a point, the more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias.
Or differently again: For a happy and well-adjusted life, practice self-deception. If it’s the cold, unvarnished truth you want, seek out a melancholy pessimist. (Which, if you are reading this book, is what you have done.)
No sooner is that out in print than I hear about a paper by behavioral geneticist Paul Andrews titled “The Bright Side of Being Blue.” Andrews goes further down the road opened up by Taylor & Brown (and many others he cites), arguing that depression is not a pathology at all, and may actually be adaptive!
In summary, we hypothesize that depression is a stress response mechanism: (1) that is triggered by analytically difficult problems that influence important fitness-related goals; (2) that coordinates changes in body systems to promote sustained analysis of the triggering problem, otherwise known as depressive rumination; (3) that helps people generate and evaluate potential solutions to the triggering problem; and (4) that makes tradeoffs with other goals in order to promote analysis of the triggering problem, including reduced accuracy on laboratory tasks. Collectively, we refer to this suite of claims as the analytical rumination (AR) hypothesis.
I coulda used that for my book. Of course, we melancholy depressives knew it anyway!
