What is the use in seeking good?
October 2024 Issue
Bryce Fuemmeler, Senior Research Associate for the Leadership & Happiness Laboratory, Managing Editor for Seeking the Good
Today marks the one-year anniversary of Seeking the Good, the Leadership & Happiness Laboratory’s monthly digital journal for those within and beyond Harvard, that explores problems facing community, culture, and society.
This might seem like a disheartening mission. Indeed, many problems exist. Anxiety, depression, loneliness, and polarization are all on the rise across the West. Religious adherence, family cohesion, social trust, and civic virtue are all on the decline. We seem to have forgotten how to do many things, such as the complex business of disagreeing well, or the simpler business of making friends. But, happily, Seeking the Good is not some academic MRI machine, diagnosing illnesses and powering down after our “patients”, as it were, are sufficiently terrified. Quite the contrary: our journal diagnoses provocative cultural problems explicitly to provide hopeful solutions. Each month, our talented guest authors—an interdisciplinary, motley crew—are highly aversive to doomsaying, and highly interested in, say, “hope-saying”. We approach societal problems with great concern, and simultaneously refuse to bemoan the state of things. We find that remaining hopeful, and imagining what is possible, is a better use of our time.
True, today seems like a poor time for long-form thoughts with nuanced arguments. If you dare, dig around for thirty minutes on X. You will find raucous solutions to all the above problems. Mostly, these solutions, if we can call them that, involve first blaming “the other side”, and then charging down an ideological path which promises to crush dissenters and liberate followers. Millions of users consume these short-form, coarse arguments every day.
What is more, trust in today’s university is at an all-time low. To some, the idea of a journal like Seeking the Good, which finds its home at a prestigious university, ought to be discredited forthwith. This, we hope, is a position taken up by a sparsely populated minority. But even among so-called undecided voters, it is not unreasonable to assume that a journal such as this might attract suspicion. These undecided voters might wonder if we really are operating in good faith, whether we really are bound by the best science and unbound by ideological positions.
Both points above could be reason enough to shrug our shoulders, and thus give up on putting new ideas into the world. But being “hope-sayers”, we have reason to carry on. First, the rising popularity of long-form media (such as podcasts and Substack) reflects a hunger for something richer than punchy takes and soundbites. Second, part of the success story of the university (from the Enlightenment onward) is how its model of pursuing truth—namely, the scientific method and competitive inquiry—became norms well beyond university campuses. These measures in no small part helped democracy thrive, stamped out abject poverty, and rocketed society toward prosperity. For these reasons, we are not willing to give up hope on the university just yet. It is still a powerful platform for ideas to reverberate far and wide.
But we don’t wish to spread just any ideas. Seeking the Good is grounded firmly in the strange land we like to call “the happiness science”. Admittedly, such a field doesn’t really exist. Yet many disciplines—positive psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, history, philosophy, and theology—all point toward ways for human beings to become happier. Our goal in this journal is to bring thinkers together from each of these disciplines, so that we can lean on many angles to tackle the issues of the day.
In so doing, we first aim to seek. Seeking is neither aimless wandering nor a straightforward journey to some destination. The former is too purposeless for our taste; the latter is too rigid. By its very nature, seeking has an air of adventure and requires an entrepreneurial sense of exploration. That, in short, is what our journal aims to do. We are not bogged down by a single discipline: we are interdisciplinary, invite competing perspectives on how to cure societal ills with “the happiness science”, and remain committed to uncovering new ways to address age-old problems. We have but one requirement for our authors: they must be intensely open to, and thrilled by, ideas.
And as we seek, we strive to move toward “the good”. You might ask, what is “the good”? That is no easy feat to answer, but it is worth an attempt. To us, it means striving upward; it means taking a stance, but not an ideological position; and it means starting from the basis that individual, human dignity is the precondition for happiness, or flourishing, or the good life—however one might conceive of those tricky phrases. Most importantly, we recognize that through this journal, we will never arrive at some abstract, Platonic “good”. We, for one thing, are not that clever. But then again, nor has any human—dead, living, or yet to live—been that clever. In fact, arriving at “the good” is rather beside the point. The idea is to get curious and strive toward it in a spirit of disagreement and dissent, in friendship and adventure.
Seeking the Good was created in this mold. I am sure we will go about this mission imperfectly, but we will nonetheless go about it. We will try. In my view, that is the vein in which all ideas ought to be pursued: curiously, humbly, and together.
- Bryce Fuemmeler, on behalf of our authors and editors, old and new and yet to come, for Seeking the Good