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!
Some other interesting stuff from the author home page:
If there is an Intelligent Designer, he has an inordinate fondness for abortion
Copyright © Paul W. Andrews, PhD
Ah, well, JD–you can incorporate the new information into the second edition. 🙂
Before I can do that I need you to buy more copies. Buy more! Buy more! Why would you not want to read the case for pessimism?
Of course, I don’t expect you will.
“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. “
To be honest I’m going to wait for the movie version to come out.
Sirrah, what do you think adolescent Emo/Scene culture is about?
Goth culture?
Edgar Allan Poe?
I’m fairly bogged down in Differential Equations and Mathematical Structures these days, we’ll see about after finals.
Roger: I can certainly work up a précis in the language of ODEs and PDEs, if that will help. Everything comes down to math ultimately.
Hummm. The new “Bright Side of Being Blue” sounds remarkably similar to what I remember reading in this excellent book written from over 20 years ago: “Control Theory: A New Explanation of How We Control Our Lives”, by William Glasser
I may take you up on that offer for ODE, Derb. Anyways, I’m planning on picking We Are Doomed up at B&N with my next paycheck, even if it sits around until the holidays it will get read. I’d try for fall break, but it seems that only my daughter–in second grade–gets that. I’m jealous…but on the other hand since I tutor for a college’s math department, maybe I should be thankful that I’m not losing a week of pay. (Hell, with the state budget the way it is, I should be thankful that they’ve closed the highway rest stops and not my tutoring center…) Now, back to set theory…