Anatomy of a Hug

It’s difficult to avoid clicking on an article with a title like “The Six-Second Hug.” At least it was for me. Perhaps I’m not quite as immune to click-bait as I flatter myself to imagine. Maybe it was that I had read the author before (Julian Baggini) and found him to be at least somewhat insightful. Perhaps I just needed a hug. At any rate, it was the subtitle that reeled me in: “From art to religion to sex, instrumentalisation has drained away intrinsic value.”

What does Baggini mean by instrumentalisation? I’ll let him explain:

For a long time, I have been privately lamenting the instrumentalisation of everything: how nothing seems to be of value in itself anymore but is only seen as useful in the service of some utilitarian function. I first got wind of this lamentable trend in 2010, when I had the misfortune to review Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project (2009), an account of a year in relentless pursuit of the happy life. One passage struck me so hard I can almost recall it word for word today. A day with her husband gets off to a sticky start but, following an apology, Rubin writes: ‘We hugged – for at least six seconds, which, I happened to know from my research, is the minimum time necessary to promote the flow of oxytocin and serotonin, mood-boosting chemicals that promote bonding. The moment of tension passed.’

I was left with the chilling image of a woman holding her husband not only out of love or affection but in order to release hormones and reduce her stress.

I suspect most of us would find the idea of a spouse hugging us for six seconds as the minimum amount of time to get their mood-boosting chemicals moving to be slightly less meaningful than because they wanted a moment of tenderness and connection or as an expression of love and reconciliation. Nothing downgrades the meaning of a hug quicker than a “How long do I have to do this to make myself feel better?” whirring around in the background. At least it would be for me. Perhaps I have yet to attain Gretchen Rubin’s enlightened views on happiness and fulfillment.

Of course, instrumentalisation extends far beyond the realm of spousal connection. Particularly in our denuded cultural landscape where there is no grand meaning to our lives or to the human story more generally, where we are all busy trying to create meaning and identity for ourselves on our own terms. In this context, happiness and health (mental, physical, emotional, relational… we’ll even tolerate the word “spiritual” provided it is mostly just another extension of ourselves) become the only reason to pursue anything. Everything is instrumental.

Baggini takes us on a bit of a tour through the landscape of things that can be instrumentalised. Church going can lengthen life, reduce depression and promote positive mental health. Prayer can benefit your cardiovascular system. Singing in a choir can enhance lung function and help with stress. Philosophy, once imagined to be the disinterested pursuit of wisdom, can deliver “transferable thinking skills.” Spending time in the nature can aid “wellbeing.” Even sex is often reframed in instrumental terms, as highlighted by headlines like ‘An Orgasm A Day Could Keep Prostate Cancer Away, Scientists Claim.’

Baggini sums it up thus:

I haven’t even begun to exhaust the list of activities that have become routinely instrumentalised. Among those we could add are gardening, playing sport, camping, swimming, campaigning, community volunteer work, baking bread, crafts, keeping a diary, laughing, saying ‘thank you’. We increasingly ask not what is good about them but what good they can do for us.

Well, yes and amen. We increasingly seem incapable of speaking of anything as intrinsically good or bad, worthy or unworthy, enlightening and uplifting or degrading and dehumanizing. All must be framed in terms of “healthy” or “unhealthy.”

Immediately after reading this article, I switched tabs to read two other articles I had flagged for later. One was a post from Richard Beck (whom I respect and read regularly) arguing that transcendence was good for our mental health. Which is true, but feels somehow feels like a much smaller claim than it could or should be.

The second was about how widespread consumption of pornography was making “making Gen Z anxious, lonely and insecure.” A reader would look in vain for even a hint that the production and consumption of pornography was inherently wrong. You would instead find plenty of earnest reporting on how it was having detrimental effects upon young people’s “mental health and broader well-being,” about how it created unrealistic sexual expectations, about how it made it harder to form stable and healthy relationships, how it led to negative body image, how it contributed to heightened anxiety and loneliness, etc., etc. I got to the end of the article and I wanted to scream, “Well, yes, that’s because it’s wrong!”

But this is the kind of language that is increasingly verboten in our cultural discourse. To use the word “wrong” would be, well, wrong. We must not speak of such things. We must only speak of “health.” If we can prove that something is “unhealthy,” that it does not contribute to our happiness, that it does not enhance our overall project of individual wellness, then perhaps we might consider making different choices.

I’ve been thinking about instrumentalisation for as long as I’ve been thinking about God. Which is to say, a long time. Do we pursue God for God’s sake or for ours, because it’s what we were made for or because it’s good for us? Do we attend worship because it will score us points with God or lower our stress or because we were created to worship? Do we engage in embodied community for the mental health benefits it can confer or as an expression of what it means to be created in the image of a relational God who has made us to long to connect, to give and to receive love, to be seen and known as human persons?

Of course, on one level, this is all a bit of a false dichotomy. It surely need not be either we do things because they make us feel better or we do them because of their intrinsic value. Indeed, if we believe in a God of love who created human beings as an expression of that love and who longs for us to flourish in the fullness of our humanity, we would expect that what is objectively good, true, and beautiful would also contribute to our mental, physical, relational, emotional, and spiritual health. How could living along with the grain of reality do otherwise?

But how we speak about things matters, doesn’t it? How and why we engage in activities matters doesn’t it? The order of operations matters, doesn’t it? Doing things because they have intrinsic value and discovering that they have benefits that go beyond acknowledging this is one thing. Doing thing for the benefits and ignoring the intrinsic value seems somehow a far less worthy pursuit. At the very least, it has no room for doing something that has value irrespective of what it might do for us at any given moment.

If you doubt any of this, consider once again the six-second hug. Let us imagine a world where six seconds does not seem to summon the requisite oxytocin and serotonin. Let us imagine that we march off to work still kind of seething at our partner, not feeling appreciably happier, and now grumbling that our investment has not paid off. And yet, what if those six seconds had a softening effect upon our partner? What if it left them feeling loved, cared for, seen? What if it was the brightest spot in their day? What if its value could not always be reduced to the metrics of our happiness?

What if it shouldn’t?