Brendan Case Episode — Beatrice Institute

In the United States, deaths of despair—from alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide—have risen sharply in the past decades. Many countries have recognized levels of social disconnection so high that they have become a public health crisis; both Japan and the U.K. have appointed Ministers of Loneliness in the hopes of answering this need for community and connection. But awareness of this growing crisis in human well-being does not easily translate into knowing how to fix it—or if we can fix it at all.

Theologian Brendan Case sits down with Grant to discuss the various ways that society can foster—or hinder—the well-being and flourishing of its members. Case is Associate Director for Research with the Harvard Human Flourishing Program, where he helps foster dialogue between the humanities’ long and rich tradition of contemplating human happiness with the evidence-based research of the empirical and social sciences. He brings this unique expertise to the conversation as he and Grant discuss some of the many strands in our social weave that may contribute to or hinder the living of meaningful lives.

Educational methods, religious participation, cancel culture, and the desire for knowledge all come into play as they ask—what is missing in our current understanding of human happiness? Can we have all we hope for, or can some goods only be possessed at the cost of others?

Empirical research without genuine humanistic understanding is blind, but humanistic inquiry without genuine empirical research is empty. So the challenge is to bring them together in complementary ways to foster a really fruitful dialogue.” “home for conversations about flourishing from across all the relevant disciplines, not just the social sciences.”
Curiosity is a modern virtue, but in the past was considered a vice
the 26th Canto of Dante’s Inferno portrays Odysseus as “a figure of a man who is overcome by a perverse desire for knowledge”
Curiositas: a restless desire for knowledge that’s unmoored from a larger concern for the flourishing of oneself and others
The desire for knowledge can become disordered when we desire something we ought to know, but we desire it in the wrong way (i.e. the researcher who neglects his relationships in favor of his work)
Another way that desire for knowledge can go wrong is when we want to know things we ought not to know (i.e. to know sin by firsthand experience)
On gene editing technologies like CRISPR: “we don’t have the vocabulary to conceptualize and talk about whether we should even be pursuing this knowledge”
Pope Francis calls cancel culture “ideological colonization”
No one believes in absolute freedom of speech; ultimately “cancel culture” has to be evaluated on a case by case basis
Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc have a moral responsibility to take some level of accountability for the content they publish or suppress
Long-term, I'm sympathetic to the view that these entities have become something like public utilities and ought to be regulated as such; that the oversight that they exercise over public expression of various kinds is properly a governmental oversight, and we should just recognize and treat it as such.”
How do you regulate public action in an environment where it's difficult to achieve meaningful agreement on what the evils are, much less how to address them?”
Education is a locus of conflict between the authority of the state, the family, and the church because all these institutions see themselves as having a stake in the rearing and nurturing of children
Until around the 19th century, education was the responsibility of the church and families, so this conflict didn’t arise
The more ambitious states become in their vision for shaping the lives of their citizens, the more threatened they feel by all alternative modes of educating kids fearing that churches and families will turn children against the purposes of the state
Bartholet’s concern about abuse is chasing a genuine good, ie the protection of children from abuse, which teachers are in a unique position to report
“You have to trade goods off against one another; every approach has costs.”
America is unique globally in the prevalence of homeschooling
In one study homeschoolers were less likely to attend college; however, there was also a higher incidence of pro-social virtues as compared to other forms of schooling
Since pro-social behavior in kids used to be seen as normal, it’s possible that public schooling may be actively hindering their formation
Character formation in schools currently focuses mainly on warding off negative developments like anxiety rather than forming pro-social virtues
Schools in America are myopically focused on college attainment at the expense of other goals, like character formation and technical or vocational training
I think that the biggest challenge is coming to grips with the fact that education really does serve a diversity of ends beyond just educational attainment. And if we want to be serious about actually serving those ends, we have to invest in them. You can't just invest myopically in SAT prep and college prep and expect everything else that the school might do to sort of magically fall into place.”
The American political ethos is “so suffused with the idea that anybody can grow up to be anything, and all life paths should be open to everybody; the idea that everybody [...] should be able to pursue the goal of going to college is so attractive to Americans that it's easy to get suckered into a myopic fixation on that one goal.”
We need to figure out a way to move toward a more pluralist model of education, where people who are interested in pursuing a technical vocation—whatever that looks like—have opportunities to do it; and where there's opportunities, not just for education, but for gainful employment in those fields after.”
Deaths of despair” refers to deaths caused by drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide—“deaths which tend to occur in people who have succumbed to overall despair about the shape of their lives.”
In recent decades, deaths of despair have risen enough in America to affect the overall mortality rate
Declining economic prospects make it harder to get married; men who don't get married are less likely to be strongly attached to their families, to attend church, and more likely to drop out of other kinds of community; over time this leads to loneliness, despair, and destructive habits that result in their death
What drives deaths of despair is not declining economic prospects, but the loss of a way of life”
If you work in a field that’s heavily shaped by the presumption that the problems you're studying are amenable to public policy, it's difficult to reckon with the idea that wracking social crises might just not have any obvious solutions. This is a terrifying thought for an economist in particular to consider, that there might just not be a quick fix. You can't just turn off the spigot of the opioids and that'll resolve the problem.”
Religion—specifically church attendance rather than self-identification—is strongly causally related to well-being and flourishing
Social community is a really important part of what makes religious communities a pathway to flourishing for a lot of people. But something else that's really important is being together with other people with whom you share a common transcendental sense of meaning and purpose, a common worldview, a sense of what makes life worth living. You don't get that from most Elks clubs.”
Churches also impose a moral code on their members, including the prohibition of suicide
“The reason the U.K. Minister of Loneliness is talking about promoting cooking classes and walking clubs is because it's reasonably clear how you do that. No one knows how to get people to go to church and get married. Everybody's trying to figure it out.”
Simply acknowledging and making it publicly known that church attendance shapes health and well-being might make an impact