The Perils of Desire

Wes Cecil is a philosophy professor with a big following on YouTube. His lectures are at an undergraduate level but they are clear and often amusing, so if there is some philosopher or topic you want an introduction to, he is a good option. Two of my sons are big fans.

I was moved to write about Cecil by this lecture, The Accursed Share. The topic here is desire. As Cecil notes, all traditional societies are intensely suspicious of desire. The Buddhists have taken this the farthest, arguing that the supreme goal of human life is to completely extinguish desire. But skepticism about desire runs in different ways through Stoicism, Confucianism, Christianity, and so on. When nineteenth-century romantic rebels tried to come up with the most radical slogan they could imagine, they hit on "Do what thou wilt."

Cecil says that most cultures practiced arranged marriage because they absolutely did not trust young people to choose mates rationally, since the young are blinded by desire. We've all seen this happen, he says, people hooking up because of intense sexual attraction even though everyone around them can see disaster looming: "pain coming in 5, 4, 3, 2 . . ."

But we celebrate desire. Cecil says he is fascinated by the lies cultures tell their children. In our society, the big lie is, "You can be anything you want." That is, our big lie foregrounds desire. The most important thing you can do is figure out what you want, so you can get it.

Cecil spends much of this lecture asking where our desires come from, especially our desires for material things. These cannot, he says, really come from inside us, because we evolved in societies where none of the thing we covet even existed. You can't have a natural desire for a flashy car. These desires must come from outside us, from our society.

All of which is basically true. It is true that all the old philosophical traditions are suspicious of desire, and that many of the things we covet are recent inventions of dubious value. But note the anti-freedom agenda here; traditional cultures are especially dubious of any desire to be other than what you are. If you are born a peasant, you should strive to be a good peasant, by imitating the ways of your forebears. If you are born an aristocrat, you should strive to be a good aristocrat, by imitating your aristocratic ancestors. And if you happen to be an outsider or newcomer, well, then you had better hide that as best you can by imitating the old families around you.

Which raises questions for me about the extent to which frowning on desire is at base a mechanism of control. I have long wondered if the evolutionary point of our sometimes outrageous sexuality is to shake things up, to break up these mechanisms of control and spread genes around in a more random way.

I certainly acknowledge that from a historical perspective it is bizarre that we use up so much breath telling young people to pursue their dreams.  But what is the alternative? We don't have ancestral plots of land that we can tend, or ancestral houses we can preserve. We can't work in the same factories our fathers worked in. Not only can we choose our own careers, we must; there is nobody else to do it for us. I work in a field that did not even exist when my father was young. 

I am not sure there is much value in thinking too much about the strangeness of our obsession with desire, because I think we are stuck with it.

Nor do I see much point in wondering which desires are somehow our own and which come from outside us. We all live in societies and take our notions of the good life from what we see around us. On the other hand I don't think there is anything more deeply rooted in our evolutionary selves than the desire for respect. So if you want a vacation house because all your colleagues have vacation houses, is that internal or external? An absurd concoction of consumer capitalism, or a deep-seated desire to be thought worthy by your peers? I think this is a meaningless question.

I would sum up the situation in wealthy western countries like this: we are wealthier than anyone in the past, and have more freedom than anyone in the past, but instead of filling us with joy this makes us anxious. No matter how much we have, we always want more; no matter how safe and secure our homes, we lie awake worrying. So far as we can tell we are not any happier than our ancestors. For every person who is thriving in our rapidly changing world, seizing opportunities that never before existed, another is floundering in indecision at the array of choices and outcomes before us.

Philosophy lectures will not solve any of this. What good would it do us to be suspicious of our desires? What could we rely on instead? Part of me cringes at song lyrics like, "How will I know? Trust your feelings. . . ." But what else could we trust? Many of the people who complain about our consumerism and general cult of desire also mock our advice industry, the explosion of self-help books and happiness gurus and so on. Of course the problem with advice gurus is that they disagree about everything, so you still have to pick the advice that best suits your own desires.

I think we have proved by now that neither freedom nor material abundance will make us happy. But neither will hewing to tradition. We need to find new paths, because history's storm surge has washed away the old ones. By all means, interrogate your desires; try to figure out which ones are reasonable, and which ones point toward shipwreck. But don't give up on them, because in the end they are all we have to guide us.