Good news from genetic research. At least it’s good news for those of us who believe in the value, and truth, of moral purposefulness. A recent article, Be Happy: Your Genes May Thank You for It, tells us:
People who have high levels of what is known as eudaimonic well-being—the kind of happiness that comes from having a deep sense of purpose and meaning in life (think Mother Teresa)—showed very favorable gene-expression profiles in their immune cells. They had low levels of inflammatory gene expression and strong expression of antiviral and antibody genes.
As for those who had what some, simplistically to the point of wrongly, would label as `materialistic’ values? Well, they don’t do so well:
[P]eople who had relatively high levels of hedonic well-being—the type of happiness that comes from consummatory self-gratification (think most celebrities)—actually showed just the opposite. They had an adverse expression profile involving high inflammation and low antiviral and antibody gene expression.
The right sort of values and the right sort of happiness seems to have a very good effect on our immune system and its responses. At the same time:
And while those with eudaimonic well-being showed favorable gene-expression profiles in their immune cells and those with hedonic well-being showed an adverse gene-expression profile, “people with high levels of hedonic well-being didn’t feel any worse than those with high levels of eudaimonic well-being,” Cole said. “Both seemed to have the same high levels of positive emotion. However, their genomes were responding very differently even though their emotional states were similarly positive.
So, those people with “high levels of hedonic well-being” were as happy as those with high levels of “eudaimonic well-being,” but their immune systems were not well-balanced.
“What this study tells us is that doing good and feeling good have very different effects on the human genome, even though they generate similar levels of positive emotion,” he said. “Apparently, the human genome is much more sensitive to different ways of achieving happiness than are conscious minds.”
We can be bereft of well-ordered purpose but still happy but our genes and the immune system responses they control won’t be so `happy’. This is a little different from what I would have expected, but in the same ballpark. After all, a major thrust of my work is to restore an understanding of the reality of purpose at the level of Creation as well as a need for purpose in ordering our lives, most certainly in ordering of a sort as complex as a civilization. Purpose, a focused narrative understanding of what it all means and why we are here, is a civilization in a real sense. With the loss of belief in a Christian understanding, a Christian purpose for our lives and for the very existence of Creation, Western Civilization is unraveling. But apparently, as individuals, we can be happy even while we have selfish values but our bodies won’t be so happy. Our bodies, or perhaps our blood—as Flannery O’Connor would have stated matters, can we wiser than us, even when it comes to moral issues. (See Miss O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood for a tongue-in-cheek exploration of the idea.)
This is, in fact, the meeting point of the most brutally honest forms of evolutionary theory and traditional Christian, certainly Thomistic, understandings of morality and human being in general. To be sure, a Christian would suggest some corrections to a rigid genocentric attitudes but those corrections are strongly implied by the discovery that our way of being happy affects the expression of those genes—is it not expressed genes which are directly subject to evolutionary selection process? As the prominent sociobiologist E.O. Wilson told us in Sociobiology, The Abridged Edition:
Camus said that the only serious philosophical question is suicide. That is wrong even in the strict sense intended. The biologist, who is concerned with questions of physiology and evolutionary history, realizes that self-knowledge is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain. These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions—hate, love, guilt, fear, and others—that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and limbic system? They evolved by natural selection. That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers, if not epistemology and epistemologists, at all depths. [page 3]
In that same book, Professor Wilson also wrote:
Self-existence, or the suicide that terminates it, is not the central question of philosophy. They hypothalamus-limbic complex automatically denies such logical reduction by countering it with feelings of guilt and altruism. In this one way the philosopher’s own emotional centers are wiser than his solipsist consciousness, “knowing” that in evolutionary time the individual organism counts for almost nothing. In a Darwinist sense, the organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and it serves as their temporary carrier. [page 3 of Sociobiology]
The suggested Christian correction here is that the organism can change the expression of its genes and that organism lives not for genes alone but rather for the family-line, genes and communities. But, again, the main line of narrative of sociobiology is correct.
Self-centeredness, whether it leads to hedonic values or the dark and wrongheaded forms of existentialism, leads to erroneous conclusions and also to unbalanced expressions of genes controlling the immune system. Those who hold to greater purposes, to the purposes of their genetic family-lines in the true if incomplete terms of sociobiology can be as happy as the self-centered pleasure-seekers and also can have healthier immune systems.
See my essay, Social and Biological: Being Honest About the Basics of Human Nature, for a discussion of the sociobiological insights set in a greater, strongly Christian, context. For a take on human being in its entirety, you can download: A More Exact Understanding of Human Being.