Matthew Inman’s comic on the creative process (which you’ve almost certainly seen already because you already read The Oatmeal; and if you haven’t because you don’t, now’s the time to start) got me thinking about creativity and political leanings. I don’t know anything about Inman’s own politics, really, aside from the fact that he has a firm grasp of the notion of copyright, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he leans to the left at least a little bit. People who make a living– and people who wish they could make a living– producing creative content tend to, and I’ve been contemplating why that is.

I think it has something to do with just world bias and how utterly it conflicts with the creative market.

See, probably every creative person you know has at some point (probably many points) in their life had the thought about someone “That person produces complete crap, and yet people shower affections, praise, and cash upon him/her.” A creative person is intimately aware of how much of his/her success (or lack thereof) is based on a combination of the sheer caprice of public taste and plain’ old dumb luck. This does not mean that creative types who are successful didn’t earn their success, but rather that their success cannot be summed up simply as the reward of effort, and most of them know this. A creative person doesn’t want his/her success to be simply the reward for effort, because that totally discards the notion of talent. And how much of it they have. And how that makes them special.

Note: there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be special.

But what this means is that even the most full of him/herself, egotistical artist/writer/performer on the planet– and there’s no shortage of those– is at least tacitly aware that things could be very different, that he/she might not have been “discovered,” that his/her genius might have gone permanently unrecognized, and he/she could have become the proverbial starving artist. Or, in many cases, is one now. So the artist sees the importance of a social safety net, and doesn’t look down on those who find themselves needing to land in it. But, you could say, artists don’t have to starve– they could easily do something else! Many of them do do something else! Yes, but one of the things about creativity is that you have to do that, to be that. Creators gotta create. They find themselves doing it regardless of whether anyone’s paying attention, let alone paying them for it, and that takes time, energy, and other resources. Money that a non-creative person might spend on tickets to the Super Bowl (no, I’m not saying only non-creative people like football. But…well, hmm. Maybe I am) gets spent instead on paint, instruments, clay, fabric, microphones, and Photoshop. Etc.

But what does this have to do with being liberal, exactly? Well, conservatism is rife with just world bias– the assumption is “I built this,” or, when prompted to be religious, “I built this, with the opportunities God gave me.” A conservative’s success is his/her own, and a conservative’s lack of success is…temporary. Not necessary. A test of faith. Things along those lines. To a conservative, the market is not a matter of public taste– it’s a matter of public recognition of quality, and quality is produced through effort. Effort and know-how. The market approaches objectivity in that regard. Criticize a movie that won out big at the box office, and a conservative will be the first person to remind you of that fact. The existence of Jersey Shore is simply the public not knowing what quality is.

This is why, when a conservative talks about “personal responsibility,” he/she is talking about taking responsibility for the fact that you’re successful or not, and not bugging anyone else about it. You’re poor? Get a job. Got a job? Get another/better job. Do some work; work people will pay you for. Don’t take from others, you lazy grasshopper, when all of us ants are putting in an eight-hour day, every day, and providing goods and services the market wants. It might not be “fair” that the market doesn’t want whatever it is you are producing, but life ain’t fair. Suck it up.

The starving artist does have to suck it up. But they are very aware of the “have” in that sentence. This is why the expression “selling out” exists. This is why creative types can be suspicious of the notion of “property rights”– because it suggests that property is as important as people. Other rights we’re familiar with are about individuals and what individuals are allowed to say, think, and do…property rights are about what they’re allowed to have, and that’s suspicious. What we’re allowed to have has, after all, at some points included other people. The notion of a corporation has made what we have into a person, and liberals are not any happier about the thought of property becoming people than they are about people becoming property.

Property rights are important to me, but I had to learn why they should be. It wasn’t nearly as intuitive as the right to be creative, to produce things because you can and want to for your own pleasure and that of others.  I had to come to see property as the necessary condition for that that production, an extension of the individual which the denial of directly inhibits his or her pursuit of happiness. I think that’s how you sell the importance of the Fourth Amendment to liberals, to make them regard it as anywhere near as important as the First– you make it harder for a person to live, to create, to pursue happiness, when you take his or her things away. Creation is done via speaking and doing, and the speaking reduces to doing, and you can’t do without stuff. Artists are well-accustomed to doing with less than they’d prefer to have, making it work (because the alternative is to not create at all), but it’s possible to see the practical effect of taking away what a person needs, and recognize that the damage that does is similar to that done by attacking or silencing them. And creators are good at nuance, so they can recognize that this doesn’t mean taking someone’s stuff is identical to attacking or silencing them, though it can amount to the same thing or even be worse. Property rights aren’t just so that CEOs can live in enormous houses– they’re also so that your life savings doesn’t get confiscated by the police without so much as charging you with a crime, so that your privacy is not invaded for the sake of preventing you from ingesting materials which conservatives find morally objectionable, so that your autonomy is not taken from you because you were caught doing so.

The emphasis on autonomy is, incidentally, why I consider myself a libertarian, albeit a very left-leaning one. I support a safety net, but I also support the ability to do pretty much any kind of gymnastics you care to above it. My sense of personal responsibility doesn’t extend to being fully responsible for screwing up your life, and certainly not to others– or life itself– screwing it up for you. I strongly believe people should be allowed to make their own mistakes, but there’s a limit to how much suffering should be permissible as a consequence, and not everyone who finds themselves suffering made any mistake at all– certainly not one that the person looking down on them from the balcony of a mansion or the edge of a pulpit couldn’t have made just as easily him or herself, if things had gone slightly differently. Trading Places is a damn good movie.

And it was made by creative people. Probably liberals.

This is a bit old, but I just came across it– an article in Time reports on a study which says that money can buy you happiness, but it reaches diminishing returns past $75,000 or so. That is, people whose yearly salary is around $75,000 seem to have reached the point at which money can make them maximally happy.

I’d be happy for $75,000. Just for the record, if anyone’s wondering? I would.

As you would expect, there are caveats to that. The happiness affected by having that amount of money was not your general day-to-day cheer, but your sense of fulfillment and well-being in life:

Before employers rush to hold — or raise — everyone’s salary to $75,000, the study points out that there are actually two types of happiness. There’s your changeable, day-to-day mood: whether you’re stressed or blue or feeling emotionally sound. Then there’s the deeper satisfaction you feel about the way your life is going — the kind of thing Tony Robbins tries to teach you. While having an income above the magic $75,000 cutoff doesn’t seem to have an impact on the former (emotional well-being), it definitely improves people’s Robbins-like life satisfaction. In other words, the more people make above $75,000, the more they feel their life is working out on the whole. But it doesn’t make them any more jovial in the mornings. . .Researchers found that lower income did not cause sadness itself but made people feel more ground down by the problems they already had. The study found, for example, that among divorced people, about 51% who made less than $1,000 a month reported feeling sad or stressed the previous day, while only 24% of those earning more than $3,000 a month reported similar feelings. Among people with asthma, 41% of low earners reported feeling unhappy, compared with about 22% of the wealthier group. Having money clearly takes the sting out of adversities.
At $75,000, that effect disappears. For people who earn that much or more, individual temperament and life circumstances have much more sway over their lightness of heart than money. The study doesn’t say why $75,000 is the benchmark, but “it does seem to me a plausible number at which people would think money is not an issue,” says Deaton.

And the article mentions what would seem like the biggest point of contention to me, which is that people often care more about their standing relative to others than they do about their sum worth. A person who is financially very comfortable but lives and works around people who make significantly more than he or she does may actually be less happy than someone who makes substantially less but is more on par with his or her friends and colleagues. This tells me that should I ever win the lottery, I should not move into a wealthy neighborhood and hang out with movie stars. Which I wouldn’t want to do anyway.

It also seems, however, that regional differences would matter hugely in this consideration, something the article– and the study it reports on– don’t appear to consider. $75,000 is not stinking rich, but it’s a good bit of money to make in many parts of the U.S. But I sure wouldn’t try to move to New York City or San Francisco on that salary. You’d think the happiness threshold of people who live in such places would be quite a bit higher than for the rest of us, but perhaps that was averaged out. This web site is useful for calculating cost of living for a different city relative to where you are now. It says, for example, that a person who makes $75,000 a year living in Dallas should make $170,571 in San Francisco. Housing is the biggest factor in that difference, being 715% more expensive! Wow.

What this study really says to me is that there is an identifiable point at which people become what you’d call “comfortable,” and this matters in terms of their overall satisfaction in life. Their worries cease impinging on their pursuit of happiness, because poor health and inability to pay your bills are a huge source of worry. The spookiest thing about Mitt Romney is the fact that he not only doesn’t have these worries, but he doesn’t even know what it’s like to have these worries. He can’t properly empathize with Americans on…well, most things in life because he is completely unequipped to process the feeling of not being sure if you need to sell your car in order to hang onto your apartment and keep the lights on, let alone not being sure if you can afford to buy your sixth house (and put a car elevator in its garage). I’m talking about a form of privilege here– inability to empathize because of never having been exposed to the same fear, concern, or worry as those who are suffering it– but it’s so far beyond that, that it hardly seems like the right word. Hyper-privilege, perhaps. Most if not all American presidents have been privileged, but Mitt Romney is hyper-privileged. And that’s why the usual attempts by presidential candidates to appeal to the common American are extra laughable coming from him.

Should someone so far beyond the standard of living which makes the average American happy be in charge of our collective pursuit of happiness? I’m thinking “No.” Perhaps this would be a difficult question if the person under consideration had made some kind of effort to demonstrate an ability to empathize with those who are in a situation he has never and will never have to endure, but Romney has done precisely the opposite– he has sneered at and written off such people. Rather hilariously (and frighteningly) he has lumped people who are comfortable into that group and written them off as well. Like my parents, for example. How does anybody support someone who has said “Screw you” to half the country in that way, even if they aren’t in that half?

Anyway, this wasn’t intended to be a political commentary. If you’re interested in the psychology of happiness generally, I would highly recommend Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis and Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. If you were unaware that there is a psychology of happiness– guess what? There is. And no, it hasn’t succeeded in making everyone happy yet, as I’m sure you are aware. But it’s useful, because it helps us understand why we’re not happy and why it’s very often not our fault. That’s an important counter to so-called power of positive thinking theories which claim that we can just decide to be happy. We can’t. We can decide to do things which will contribute to our happiness, and they may succeed and they may not, but there is no Happiness Switch, and nothing which can flip it. Not even a bucketload of money, though that money can sure help in terms of erasing the worries that are caused by lack of money. So as with all aphorisms, there’s a lot more to “Money can’t buy happiness” than is expressed in the statement itself. It can. It can buy you the happiness of being able to pursue happiness unfettered. Or at least, less fettered than you were before.

Recently I finished listening to Jesse Bering’s book Why is the Penis Shaped Like That? And Other Reflections on Being Human. The book is a compilation of his essays posted at Scientific American so it ranges in subject all over the place, but his introduction states an interest that essentially ties all of them together– Jesse, a research psychologist, enjoys discussing, topics that make a lot of people uncomfortable. Things that are not discussed in polite company, and even in not-so-polite company might turn some stomachs. As the book’s title suggests, much of that is sexual. As a gay man, Jesse is more than familiar with the common homophobic position which holds essentially “I am disgusted by (what I presume) you do in the bedroom, therefore you are immoral/mentally disturbed/criminal/sub-human/etc.” But his book is about far more complex topics than this, taking an evolutionary (“What might be an adaptive function of this?”) approach to topics ranging from female ejaculation to zoophilia to masturbation to age-related sexual interests (pedophilia, ephebophilia, gerontophilia, and so on) and much, much more.

I enjoy learning about topics that make people uncomfortable and gross them out, too. But my interest is more for the sake of the discomfort specifically– I want to know why things disgust people, and how that translates into disgust-avoidant beliefs and behaviors. Sometimes it’s obvious– feces smells bad. It’s not good to eat, have on you, or be around in general. Any of these things could make you sick, and being nauseated is both a sign of being sick and a response to things that could cause sickness. Rotting food, same story. Decaying corpses, same story. But we have developed elaborate responses to these things way beyond what would be necessary to simply keep ourselves safe from contaminants. The anthropologist James Frazer articulated two forms of “sympathetic magic” which have been found to apply very closely to disgust– the first being the law of contagion, which is that a thing takes on the properties of another thing by having contact with it. Homeopathic magic, or “like affects like,” suggests that the resemblance of thing A to thing B can cause one to act similarly to the other. So in the first case you have the obvious example of, say, a dead fly in a glass of water. It doesn’t matter how much water is in that glass; you’re not going to want to drink it because of that single dead fly. In the second case, you have fake dog poo, and such things as brownies shaped (and colored) to look like dog poo. Even with the full knowledge that what you’re holding in your hand is in fact a tasty confection, you’re very likely to look at it with some skepticism.

Of course, you’re not guaranteed to look at it that way– people have different levels of squeamishness, and we can become accustomed to something to the extent that it no longer grosses us out even though it once did. I’m pretty sure that I will never become comfortable with watching a surgery being performed, but some very necessary people– surgeons– either began with a comparatively low level of disgust for the whole experience or adapted sufficiently to be able to handle it. The disgust you feel when looking at an open wound is classified as a response to “body envelop violation,” which is pretty much just as it sounds. The body has been opened in some way, which presents us with the alarming sight (and occasionally smell) of blood and guts, which is frightening because our sense of empathy compels us to identify with the person who has been injured (in the case of surgery it’s obviously not an injury, but this distinction matters not at all to my amygdala) and consider that we also can be hurt, suffer, and even die. A parasite is disgusting for its similar functioning as violating the body– parasites invade for the purpose of benefiting themselves at the hosts’s expense, up to and including death. “Animal reminder” disgust is the emotion we can experience when we think of ourselves as flesh and blood creatures different only in shape from the millions of other forms of furry, scaly, scratchy, or slimy creatures that crawl, fly, sprint, or swim across the planet. You can see this disgust in a person who adamantly avows that his or her ancestors were not monkeys (apes, really) when confronted with Darwin’s tree of life theory of evolution. If we’re animals, the thinking goes, consciously or unconsciously, we’re not special. There is no particular reason for us to be unique in any way. This thought is not at all disquieting for someone knowledgeable about evolution, but can be downright stomach-turning for someone who has been raised to believe that our existence as humans is a result of a special act of God. To say that we are otherwise seems…impure.

In concerns about purity, it’s easy to see where disgust as a physical response translates into a moral emotion. Going back to male homosexuality for example, it’s where the feeling of discomfort is interpreted as an unease in the face of what is obviously a violation of the laws of nature, the way God made things. If you want a good analysis of how disgust as a moral emotion plays out in the theater of public opinion and even makes its way into legislation, I’d recommend Martha Nussbaum’s excellent book Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. In it she recruits study of psychology, psychoanalysis (unfortunately) and the philosophy of John Stuart Mill to examine how moral disgust as a justification for political stances and law-making has led to oppression of minority groups and some very backwards positions on bioethics over the years, as a barrier to compassion, understanding, and acceptance of new science and technology. If you want to read about the most up-to-date psychological understanding of how disgust works as a moral emotion, especially through means of association, I’d suggest checking out the publications of psychologist David Pizarro, whose TED talk on that very topic you can watch here:

You’ll notice that he cites Nussbaum, as well as psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Clark McCauley, Paul Bloom, Roy Baumeister, and the mack daddy of disgust research Paul Rozin. They are all interested in how intuitions shape moral reasoning generally, and how disgust does so specifically.

Pizarro cites studies he himself took part in, as well as those of other scientists, to show that people with conservative political leanings are much more prone to disgust, and that it can actually be predictive of their voting behavior– specifically regarding gay marriage, gay sex in general and other sexual issues. Pizarro actually found that arousing disgust in people caused their political judgments to shift toward conservatism. So not only do conservatives appear to be people who are more susceptible to disgust generally, but you can apparently make a person more conservative by exposing them to sensory input that they find disgusting– in this case, by making the room they were in smell gross.  He even found that prompting people to take precautions involving keeping clean (such as reminding them that washing their hands can help to prevent flu infection) achieves the same effect. Yes, telling people to wash their hands made them think more conservatively in their moral reasoning.

For this reason when Jonathan Haidt articulated his domains of moral emotion, he placed the domain of Purity/Sanctity (along with Respect for Hierarchy and In-Group Loyalty) squarely in the category of conservative thinking. I’m thinking that while this might be entirely valid, there are some things which can be counted upon to arouse disgust in liberals but not conservatives which have not been evaluated in these studies, which have mostly focused on sexual practices, body envelope violations, and excrement. But that is for a post in the future.