My error, actually. I should have explained more clearly what I mean by "conflict"... I lapsed into a bit of a cliche there, undermining the point I was building up to from the first two paragraphs.
The key is conflict with the current state of reality, distinguished from future state. If you're busy being mad at the current state, you're probably not working as effectively on improving the future state. Negative motivation is primarily reactive, and past/present focused rather than active and present/future focused, the way positive motivation is.
A positively-motivated person is not in conflict with the current state of reality, just because he or she desires a different state. Whereas, someone with an emotion-backed "should", is in conflict.
So my question is/was, can you give an example of active unhappiness that derives from anything other than an objection to the current state of reality?
You implied that there's a "middle ground" between dispassionate judgment and desperate craving, but my entire point is that positives and negatives are NOT a continuum -- they're semi-independent axes.
Some researchers, btw, note that "affective synchrony" -- i.e., the correlation or lack thereof between the two -- is different under conditions of stress and non-stress, and conditions of high pain or pleasure. High pain is much more likely to be associated with low pleasure, and vice versa for high pleasure. But the rest of the time, for most people, they show near-perfect asynchrony; i.e., they're unrelated to each other.
Which means the "middle ground" you posit is actually an illusion. What happens is that your negative and positive evaluations mostly run in parallel, until and unless one system kicks into high gear.
You could compare it to a chess program's tree-trimming: you're cutting off subtrees based on negative evaluation, and more deeply investigating some, based on positive evaluations.
In the ancestral environment -- especially our prehuman ancestry -- this is effective, because negative branches equal death, and you don't have a lot of time to make a choice.
But in humans, most of our negative branch trimming isn't based on actual physical danger or negative consequences: it's based on socially-learned, status-based, self-judgment. We trim the action trees, not because we'll fall off a cliff, but because we'll seem like a "bad" person in some way. And our reasoning is then motivated to cover up the trimmed branches, so nobody else will spot our concerns about them.
So the trimmed branches don't show up in consciousness for long, if at all.
But, since the evaluation modes are semi-independent, we can also have a positive evaluation for the same (socially unacceptable) thought or action that we (for the moment) don't act on.
So we then experience temptation and mixed feelings... and occasionally find ourselves "giving in". (Especially if nobody's around to "catch" us!)
So this dual-axis model is phenomenally better at explaining and predicting what people actually do, than the naive linear model is. (People who approach the linear model in reality, are about as rare as people who have strongly mixed feelings all the time, at least according to one study.)
The linear model, however, seems to be what evolution wants us to believe, because it suits our need for social and personal deception much better. Among other things, it lets us pretend that our lack of action means a virtuous lack of temptation, when in fact it may simply mean we're really afraid of being discovered!
(whew, more fodder for my eventual post or series thereof!)
To paraphrase the Black Belt Bayesian: Behind every exciting, dramatic failure, there is a more important story about a larger and less dramatic failure that made the first failure possible.
If every trace of religion was magically eliminated from the world tomorrow, then—however much improved the lives of many people would be—we would not even have come close to solving the larger failures of sanity that made religion possible in the first place.
We have good cause to spend some of our efforts on trying to eliminate religion directly, because it is a direct problem. But religion also serves the function of an asphyxiated canary in a coal mine—religion is a sign, a symptom, of larger problems that don't go away just because someone loses their religion.
Consider this thought experiment—what could you teach people that is not directly about religion, which is true and useful as a general method of rationality, which would cause them to lose their religions? In fact—imagine that we're going to go and survey all your students five years later, and see how many of them have lost their religions compared to a control group; if you make the slightest move at fighting religion directly, you will invalidate the experiment. You may not make a single mention of religion or any religious belief in your classroom, you may not even hint at it in any obvious way. All your examples must center about real-world cases that have nothing to do with religion.
If you can't fight religion directly, what do you teach that raises the general waterline of sanity to the point that religion goes underwater?
Here are some such topics I've already covered—not avoiding all mention of religion, but it could be done:
But to look at it another way—
Suppose we have a scientist who's still religious, either full-blown scriptural-religion, or in the sense of tossing around vague casual endorsements of "spirituality".
We now know this person is not applying any technical, explicit understanding of...
When you consider it—these are all rather basic matters of study, as such things go. A quick introduction to all of them (well, except naturalistic metaethics) would be... a four-credit undergraduate course with no prerequisites?
But there are Nobel laureates who haven't taken that course! Richard Smalley if you're looking for a cheap shot, or Robert Aumann if you're looking for a scary shot.
And they can't be isolated exceptions. If all of their professional compatriots had taken that course, then Smalley or Aumann would either have been corrected (as their colleagues kindly took them aside and explained the bare fundamentals) or else regarded with too much pity and concern to win a Nobel Prize. Could you—realistically speaking, regardless of fairness—win a Nobel while advocating the existence of Santa Claus?
That's what the dead canary, religion, is telling us: that the general sanity waterline is currently really ridiculously low. Even in the highest halls of science.
If we throw out that dead and rotting canary, then our mine may stink a bit less, but the sanity waterline may not rise much higher.
This is not to criticize the neo-atheist movement. The harm done by religion is clear and present danger, or rather, current and ongoing disaster. Fighting religion's directly harmful effects takes precedence over its use as a canary or experimental indicator. But even if Dawkins, and Dennett, and Harris, and Hitchens should somehow win utterly and absolutely to the last corner of the human sphere, the real work of rationalists will be only just beginning.