Seeking the Good’s next adventure

Bryce Fuemmeler and Danilo Petranovich

Culture & Society

Seeking the Good has a new roof over its head. Our team at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Leadership & Happiness Laboratory (“the Lab”) is thrilled to collaborate with the Abigail Adams Institute (AAI), an interdisciplinary humanities center devoted to open and civil inquiry at Harvard and beyond. Let us—Bryce Fuemmeler, the Lab’s research lead and Seeking the Good’s Managing Editor, and Danilo Petranovich, AAI’s Director—lay out the vision of this new project.

Seeking the Good

Seeking the Good, launched in 2023 by the Lab, explores issues facing community, culture, and society, with an explicit aim toward interdisciplinary, hopeful solutions. (You can read a primer on the journal’s purpose—including why we ought to seek “the good” in the first place—here.) We invite guest authors to opine about cultural problems and then, using their expertise, prescribe answers to these problems. 

That is a strange mission amid a specialized academy and a pessimistic culture. But then again, the Lab is a unique outlet. Led by Professor Arthur C. Brooks, one of the world’s leading experts on “the happiness science” and a senior fellow at AAI, the Lab is a translation engine: our goal is to translate the social science on happiness for a broad audience, so that we might play a part in reversing the unhappiness epidemic plaguing the West. 

The Abigail Adams Institute

AAI’s mission is rather different, but fundamentally bound up in “seeking the good”. With a core focus on the humanities, particularly  philosophy, theology, and literature, we offer our students an alternative path toward transcendence. Nothing is the matter with modern science—indeed, in its proper place, it is extremely useful—but questions relating to beauty, wisdom, faith, truth, and “the good” are, in our view, best left to the humanities. Unfortunately, growing evidence suggests that cultural interest in the humanities is on the downslope, which is bad news for answering some of life’s most enduring questions. We seek to reverse that epidemic.

Static truth in the midst of change

Here is another way to view the diverse missions of the AAI and the Lab. The great English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley once noted that “the charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.” AAI, you might say, operates on the “nothing changes” side of the ledger, as we contemplate ineffable truths; the Lab operates on the “everything is completely different” side, as we study shifting cultural trends that pull humans away from happiness, and as we translate the evolving social science. 

Of course, Huxley’s cheek implies that both sides of the ledger are paradoxically true. “So,” you might ask, “are your perspectives really so different?” And our answer, happily, is “no”: AAI and the Lab are each dealing with eternal topics, all oscillating around human nature. We only diverge in our methodological bent—which is why we think a merger of these methodologies in Seeking the Good is such an exciting venture. 

A note on mergers

We use the term “merger” purposefully, knowing well it is an imperfect descriptor. In the popular conception, a merger involves two old, giant companies becoming one. (Think of the 1999 merger between Exxon and Mobil, or more humorously and fictitiously, if Harvard and Yale were to merge.) Such organizations have stability and experience to navigate the transition, but, as plenty of data show, mergers of these types can be bogged down by cultural clashes, bureaucratic processes, and regulatory hurdles. Fortunately, AAI and the Lab face no such hurdles, because we are better defined as start-ups—not ancient centers within the Harvard sphere. AAI opened its doors in 2014; the Lab, in 2022. And as managerial science teaches us, start-ups use mergers to accelerate growth, expand customer bases, and acquire talent. 

Indeed, these three reasons are why we are merging Seeking the Good into a joint project. In the first place, we wish to accelerate the growth of our mutual ideas. Our ideas are complementary but, as of yet, uncombined, so it seems to us that our merge will give the journal ample room to expand and flourish on the intellectual side of things. But we are not only interested in intellectual expansion—which leads us to the important task of expanding our “customer” base. Secondly, then, Seeking the Good will operate free of cost to our readers, but the audiences of the Lab and AAI are distinct; it is our hope that expanding the philosophical and theological elements of Seeking the Good will be of interest to our followers, which will in turn enlarge our megaphone and provide a better way to tackle the twin “epidemics” at the heart of our missions. Finally, but no less importantly, we are merging the journal to acquire new talent in guest authors. Harvard’s humanities community, who AAI knows quite well, will make excellent new additions to Seeking the Good’s portfolio. We welcome submissions from this community who are thrilled by ideas and energized by the journal’s aim. 

A defense of depth and breadth 

We noted above that Seeking the Good goes against the grain of a “specialized academy”. What do we mean by that? And why does it matter?

Those familiar with university history will know that the academy witnessed a surge of hyper-specialization during the 20th century. There are many reasons for this trend. Basic academic disciplines began to solidify at the turn of the 20th century; the expansion of universities and enrolled students led to more subject niches; the sheer amount of information began to expand faster than any time in human existence, making it (nearly) impossible for any one person to master diverse fields; after the Second World War, American universities drew massive research funding, which necessitated specialized projects, roles, and the “professionalization” of sub-disciplines; and the list goes on. 

Hyper-specialization is not a problem per se. On the whole, it has unleashed spectacular progress in fields of medicine, economics, engineering, psychology, and the like. But let us be frank: on a very practical level, hyper-specialization also ushered in the phenomenon by which physicians speak to physicians, economists to economists, engineers to engineers, and psychologists to psychologists. A scholar who wades into disciplines outside her purview runs the risk of becoming a “generalist”—a dirty word in academia—and had better, therefore, keep within her lane of expertise. This basic idea implies that the scholar ought to prioritize depth over breadth.

This is the way of the world, and Seeking the Good does not aim to change it. But being social entrepreneurs of a certain ilk, we see real benefit in interdisciplinary collaboration—as does, in fact, the Harvard Kennedy School (the birthplace of Seeking the Good), one of the world’s leading schools on both knowledge creation and practical application across many disciplines. 

Consider public leadership development, a core objective of the Kennedy School. Properly developing public leaders requires technical study on quantitative policy analysis; it requires social science research underpinning negotiation and psychology; and it requires philosophy courses on ethics and morality. This basic curriculum implies that, to really see the world clearly, one ought to prioritize breadth over depth.

To our minds, Seeking the Good champions both. You can think of the journal itself as a platform of breadth. Our revamped, post-merger topic areas include Culture & Society, Psychology & Science, Philosophy & Theology, and Leadership & Business. These categories are about as wide-ranging and interdisciplinary as is possible to be. Yet, as readers will see, each essay is one of depth—written by a scholar or practitioner with serious knowledge about a specific subject area, and, when appropriate, drawing on other disciplines about how to solve the challenges of the day.

We welcome this interdisciplinary adventure and very much hope to see the same problem addressed from different angles. Put differently, in the pages of Seeking the Good, we hope to—as one example—have philosophers write on the virtue and theological importance of love (a strength of AAI), and then to have neuropsychologists respond to the philosophy with hard science (a strength of the Lab). In this way, Seeking the Good will be a platform on which scholars can debate depth, while readers can benefit from breadth. 

An interdisciplinary example

Let us make things terribly tangible by running with the above example of love, so as to showcase why AAI and the Lab are true complements.

To us at AAI, thinking about love requires a humanities perspective. Many of the greatest philosophers and ancient texts have concerned themselves with the virtue of love. Take Plato, for example—a philosopher on whom this very journal leans in its namesake. (All of our essays are in pursuit of some Platonic “good”, after all). In Plato’s Symposium, he distinguishes between earthly (physical) love and a higher, spiritual form of love (“Platonic love” in the vernacular). This latter form of love, if we strive for it, is for Plato a motivating force that can lead one to discover absolute beauty and truth. The fourth-century theologian Saint Augustine of Hippo thought that love—in the Platonic sense—aligns the soul with “the good” and the divine, allowing humans to withstand life’s suffering in pursuit of something higher. He drew this inspiration from the Gospels, such as the wisdom of 1 John 4:18: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”

As far as the Lab is concerned, here is where the rubber hits the road, because modern science gives us hints about love’s ineffable nature. One famous 2007 review of the neurobiology of love in FEBS Letters found that romantic and maternal love—that is, Platonic forms of love—deactivated brain regions responsible for negative emotions. A newer 2015 study in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience found similar evidence, but this time specific to the amygdala, a region in the brain’s limbic system responsible for fear. In this experiment, participants first viewed photographs of their loved ones, and then viewed threatening stimuli (angry or fearful faces). The treatment group (the group who had viewed photos of their loved ones) had significantly less amygdala activation, compared to the control group, in response to the threatening stimuli. Together, this modern neuroscience proves that perfect love does, indeed, drive out fear, because love itself attunes us to something higher than ourselves. Put another way, 1 John 4:18 turns out to be a neurobiological fact. 

Now, this is all very interesting, but “how is this actionable?”—you might ask. This is the real value-add of Seeking the Good. After demonstrating how ancient wisdom and modern science are not only not at odds, but in reality, mutually reinforcing, our journal will use this information to prescribe solutions to today’s most pressing problems. For example, in Seeking the Good, political scientists might note that in order to get a grip on the daunting problem of polarization—which of course involves fear of the other side—partisans can stem their fear by genuinely attempting to love the opposition, notwithstanding their flaws; perhaps clinical psychologists focused on curbing levels of Generalized Anxiety Disorder—a condition characterized by unfocused fear—will recommend that readers should, when they are feeling anxious, focus intensely on the people whom they love to quiet their amygdala; maybe existential philosophers, who often ponder humanity’s fear of death, will suggest that when The Death Fear surfaces in our lives, we ought to summon feelings of love for what we have today, on Earth, while alive. As you can see, diverse disciplines can use the same social science and ancient wisdom to prescribe unique solutions. 

An adventure

The above example is but one illustration of how Seeking the Good will be used to improve culture and society. Together, from minds at AAI, the Lab, and our guest authors, we are setting out on an adventure that promises fascinating ideas and solutions across interdisciplinary lines of thought. We hope that you follow along for the ride.

Bryce Fuemmeler is Managing Editor of Seeking the Good and Senior Research Associate at the Leadership & Happiness Laboratory. Danilo Petranovich is the Director of the Abigail Adams Institute.

May 2025