'Disgust is so hot right now'

An interesting piece in the New York Times, looking at the growing amount of academic interest in the emotion of disgust:

Disgust is having its moment in the light as researchers find that it does more than cause that sick feeling in the stomach. It protects human beings from disease and parasites, and affects almost every aspect of human relations, from romance to politics.In several new books and a steady stream of research papers, scientists are exploring the evolution of disgust and its role in attitudes toward food, sexuality and other people.

Paul Rozin, a psychologist who is an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a pioneer of modern disgust research, began researching it with a few collaborators in the 1980s, when disgust was far from the mainstream. “It was always the other emotion,” he said. “Now it’s hot.”

The article goes on:

The research may have practical benefits, including clues to obsessive compulsive disorder, some aspects of which — like excessive hand washing — look like disgust gone wild. Conversely, some researchers are trying to inspire more disgust at dirt and germs to promote hand washing and improve public health. Dr. Valerie Curtis, a self-described 'disgustologist' from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is involved in efforts in Africa, India and England to explore what she calls “the power of trying to gross people out.” One slogan that appeared to be effective in England in getting people to wash their hands before leaving a bathroom was “Don’t bring the toilet with you.”

Disgust was not completely ignored in the past. Charles Darwin tackled the subject in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” He described the face of disgust, documented by Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne in his classic study of facial expressions in 1862, as if one were expelling some horrible-tasting substance from the mouth. “I never saw disgust more plainly expressed,” Darwin wrote, “than on the face of one of my infants at five months, when, for the first time, some cold water, and again a month afterwards, when a piece of ripe cherry was put into his mouth.” His book did not contain an image of the infant, but fortunately YouTube has numerous videos of babies tasting lemons.

Let's see some of that lemon-eating fun (no babies were harmed in the course of these experiments)...

Skepticism versus the marching band of materialism

Rupert Sheldrake's new book, The Science Delusion, has been getting an unusual amount of media attention. I say unusual because Sheldrake typically operates somewhat at the margins of mainstream science, researching such phenomena as telepathy or the idea of 'morpho-genetic fields'.

Mainstream scientists usually steer clear of such topics, even if they are interested in them, because they're worried about being ridiculed and harming their career. And also science has, over the last 300 years, situated itself against spirituality, vitalism, mentalism or psychic phenomena. Anything outside the materialist paradigm today is condemned as woo-woo, bunkum, bullshit etc.

The aggressive fight against anyone skeptical of materialism is bad news for science, because it means scientists are afraid to consider anything outside the box, for fear of public attack.

Sheldrake's book argues precisely that we need to challenge the dogma of materialism and consider the data that doesn't fit it, such as telepathy. He's spent several years attempting to amass empirical data on telepathic events, exploring for example whether dogs know when their owners are coming home (the evidence suggests they do).

Isn't that an interesting research topic? It suggests, firstly, that dogs have some sort of consciousness; secondly, that there is a relation or connection between human and animal consciousness; and thirdly, if there are links of consciousness between persons, those links are dependent on emotional bonds - so one of the functions of emotional bonds, perhaps, is to enable messages to travel between loved ones at distances. I'm not saying the evidence is unanswerable - but it's definitely an area worth exploring as we try to work out what consciousness is, what it does, and whether it is confined to our bodies.

Nonetheless, working on the taboo area of parapsychology has got Sheldrake labeled a crank by mainstream science. Look, for example, at this incredibly sniffy post about Sheldrake on the New Scientist blog, which dismisses a re-issue of another of his books, without even reading it. The blogger expresses embarrassment that the New Scientist favourably reviewed an earlier edition of Sheldrake's book, ten years ago, and says 'attitudes have hardened against him since then'. Why are 'hardening attitudes' something to be proud of? When attitudes harden, they turn into unexamined prejudice.

When Mary Midgely gave Sheldrake's new book a favourable review in The Guardian this week, the attack dogs of materialism come out, predictably enough, to denounce the article in the comments as woo-woo, bunkum, bullshit. If you look at the comments, many of them see the book as an attack on science. It's not. Sheldrake is a scientist. He merely wants us to have the courage to look at all the data, rather than having a pre-existing narrative that we aggressively defend.

That is the problem about turning secular materialist atheism into a political ideology, as Richard Dawkins and others have done. When you turn Skepticism into a political mass movement, the dogma is what gives the movement its coherence, like a marching band keeping soldiers in step. God forbid anyone who walks out of line. But is that how science has ever progressed? By an orderly march of believers? Isn't it precisely the mavericks, those out of step with the dominant beat, who reveal new worlds to us?

The original Skeptics, in ancient Greece, were against any sort of dogma. They believed in hypotheses, in probabilities, in exploring the unknown. Today, Skepticism is too evangelical for my liking. It has become a set of beliefs to be aggressively defended by its 'champions'. Skeptics go looking on the internet for 'smack-downs' - they love seeing their champions rudely dismiss and destroy anyone who contradicts the dogmas. But the ability to recognise and challenge our own most deeply held convictions is, surely, the definition of Skepticism.

Social anxiety and the escape from life

I had social anxiety for several years. I developed it as a side-effect of post-traumatic stress disorder when I was 18. When you have PTSD, you fear you are broken, and you don't want others to see that, and to think less of you, so it can often develop into social anxiety, where you end up avoiding or fearing social situations - all because you are afraid of being judged, or ridiculed, or rejected.

People suffering from social anxiety fear the pain of rejection, so they preemptively reject themselves. They exile themselves from society, deeming themselves unfit for it - and then project that self-condemnation on to others, seeing them as cruel and insensitive bullies, when in fact it is they who are bullying and condemning themselves. (This is what philosophers call 'alienation' - you create a God, raise it above you, and then cower beneath it.)

And this constant evasion, this attempt to protect oneself from the judgement of others, leaves one cut off from life, cut off from other people. The defences we construct to protect ourselves from pain often turn into prisons, condemning us to an isolation and loneliness that is, ultimately, far worse than the pain we sought to avoid. Kafka said as much:

“You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.”

Social anxiety affects as much as 12% of the population at some point in their life. As the cognitive therapist and expert in social anxiety, Richard Heimberg, told me: 'You can't get nastier than it. Anything that cuts people off from being able to bond with others leads to a very unsatisfying existence.'

Some people think social anxiety is a myth, something Big Pharma invented to sell drugs like Zoloft. But it's not. I had it for years before I'd ever heard there was such a thing as social anxiety. And if you go to a social anxiety support website, you'll see it's full of people amazed and relieved to discover they're not uniquely fucked up, and that millions of other people suffer from the same thoughts and feelings. It seems the mind can get stuck in certain destructive patterns or loops, and social anxiety is one of those patterns.

In that sense, there is a value to diagnoses like 'social anxiety'. These are not always artificial inventions by psychologists and psychiatrists. In the case of social anxiety, I think it is a genuine condition, and it's very helpful to people like me to discover that others fell into the same rut. Because, initially, you think you are uniquely fucked up, which makes you hide your condition even more.

And it's even more useful to discover that some people have escaped from the prison of social anxiety. They got out! And some of those who got out were good enough to come back, and tell others how to get out - like Plato's philosopher escaping from the cave then coming back to try and free the rest of us.

In fact, what helped me most to overcome social anxiety was a CBT tape course called Overcoming Social Anxiety Step By Step, by a man called Doctor Thomas Richards (pictured on the right) . Thomas had really severe social anxiety for many years. He heard about CBT, and used it to get better. Then he founded a social anxiety clinic and made his audio course, which has helped thousands of people escape from the prison of social anxiety. Thanks Dr Richards. You've made a lot of people's lives a lot better.

PoW: Friday highlights from philosophy, psychology and the politics of well-being

Welcome to this week's round-up. First, some good news: the Arts and Humanities Research Council has agreed to fund a project I'm going to run from the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London, to research and encourage the growth of philosophy groups around the world.

The project will involve me writing a report on the rise of philosophy groups and the different forms they take; and will also set up a website where people can find out how to run philosophy groups or locate their nearest group. You can get involved, by keeping an eye out for any philosophy groups near you, wherever you are in the world, and putting me in touch with them. The idea is to help the creation of a global philosophy group network.

Talking of which, here is an article from the Boston Review, looking at the example of Brazil, where philosophy classes are compulsory for children. Some people say it gives them the tools to discuss justice and rights, while critics say it is a well-intentioned mistake when some of these children still don't have basic literacy.

Here is a good TED talk by Julian Baggini considering the nature of the self. Baggini argues that, just because the self isn't some permanent entity, that doesn't mean it's an illusion. Rather, he suggests it's like a waterfall - although the water always changes, the waterfall is nonetheless 'there'. And we can also steer the self, and slowly choose its direction, he says. So we can build our selves over our lifetimes.

I agree - though if you accept the idea of self-authoring, as I do, then you still have to ask: what is that free, conscious bit of us that can choose our direction? Is it always there? Can we develop it?

These questions of the self, consciousness and identity go back at least as far as the Stoics, who, as the Stoic expert AA Long discusses in this talk that I videoed on Monday, helped to invent the modern notion of the self. The Stoics argued that the 'real' self is our free rational consciousness - that part of our personality that observes, considers and chooses what to believe. They thought this part of us was divine - a fragment of the Logos, the 'god within', an inner daemon (this is where the word eudaimonia comes from - it means 'having a kindly daemon within'). But, as Long explores, there are some paradoxes here. If 'I' am really a fragment of the divine consciousness, then who is really calling the shots -'me' or my inner daimon? Who's in charge? Am I authoring myself, or is God authoring me?

Talking of communicating with your inner daemon, here is an article from Time magazine about new research into magic mushrooms here in the UK. The research suggests that, rather than 'expanding' the mind, mushrooms shut down the parts of the brain that make things familiar and habitual, so that the everyday becomes suddenly strange and new.

Is grief a mental illness? The new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM V) which psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illnesses is reportedly considering classifying grieving as a form of depression, which critics say is pathologising something that is quite natural. How long is it appropriate to grieve? How should one grieve - uncontrollably, or with firm Stoic rectitude? I am not sure scientists or philosophers can answer such questions objectively, but that doesn't stop them trying. Here is a great article by Roland Pies, a leading American psychiatrist who has also written books on Stoicism and Judaism, arguing psychiatry needs to scrap the DSM altogether.

The Young Foundation, the East London think tank, is launching a new enterprise called Resilience on February 7th with a talk by Brigadier-General Rhonda Cornum, the director of the US Army's ambitious resilience training programme. I wrote an article in the Spectator about Cornum and the programme, which you can read here.

Finally, some pieces on the crisis in capitalism. Here is a very interesting discussion from C-Span with Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former NYT journalist, about the triumph of the corporate state and the failure of the liberal elite to challenge corporate interests. Hedges is no populist firebrand - he's been a war correspondent, he's trained as a priest, he's very smart and well-read, and his analysis is pretty devastating. Watching the video (all three hours of it) motivated me to read Hedges' 2002 book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which is an excellent blend of reportage, moral meditation, and cultural analysis. A very humane human, by all accounts.

The New Economics Foundation is also holding an event in London this coming Tuesday about the failure of the elite to protect the public interest, in a discussion which includes Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and sociologist Richard Sennett.

The ethical crisis in capitalism is apparently leading to a boom in demand for 'ethical consultants' at corporations. This article complains that few of these 'ethics consultants' have any training in philosophy, and that they're really instrumentalist poodles of corporations rather than genuine ethical guardians. This article, by a leading ethics consultant, puts forward a somewhat rosier picture, and notes how many philosophy departments are now offering degrees and PhDs in ethics consultancy. And this article talks about the venerable ethics consultant Lee Taft, who teaches organisations not merely to cover their asses legally when malfeasance is exposed, but instead to genuinely repent, say sorry and make amends. If only Rupert Murdoch had hired him...

See you next week,

Jules

The Natural History Museum: temple to science, God...or both?

Alain de Botton keeps coming up with new projects for his religion for atheists, and I admire his energy and willingness to put his ideas into practice. It's refreshing. His latest plan takes very concrete form: he wants to build temples for atheists, and is starting off with a pillar in London to give people a sense of perspective: it will show the history of the universe, with a tiny gold band at the bottom showing how recently man came on the scene. Good stuff: though a Stoic theist would think this was just as conformable with theist as atheist beliefs.

But naturally, the more ambitious and serious De Botton gets about his project, the more criticism he will encounter. Sure enough, Steve Rose wrote today in the Guardian that De Botton's project sounds increasingly like a religion. Well, yes, that's the point Steve. That's why he called his book A Religion for Atheists. But we don't need a new religion, says Steve. If atheists need monuments, they already have the Large Hadron Collider, the Natural History Museum, Wembley Stadium, even the Westfield Shopping Centre.

Not sure about that last one, though I guess it is certainly a monument to consumerism. Perhaps Steve is right - perhaps Las Vegas is a monument to atheism, a paradise city where everything is permitted and nothing is sinful. It's where the Sceptics have their annual gathering, appropriately enough. Or is that the 'wrong' kind of atheism for Alain?

Anyway, of all Steve's examples, it struck me that the Natural History Museum was closest to what Alain perhaps has in mind. The central hall of the museum really is very like a cathedral, with a sculpture of Darwin where the crucifix would be, and a giant (fake) skeleton of a diplodocus reminding us of the creation and destruction of nature, and the apparent absence of divine providence.

But is that really the message of the museum?

I looked into it today, and the real story is a little stranger. In fact, the founder of the museum, Sir Richard Owen, believed in transcendental morphology. He believed that a divine creative force moved through evolution, and that God revealed himself through history to man - particularly to scientists. I quote from Nicholaas Ruupke's Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin. Owen believed that:

The history of scientific discovery had been a process of gradual self-revelation by God, not accidental but guided by illumination of 'His faithful servants and instruments', the scientists. 'No scientific discovery collides against any sentence of the divine Sermon on the Mount' [Owen declared].

Owen believed God's self-revelation has been a continuous progressive process, with new insights and information downloaded (as it were) in chunks, and accessed by prophets and scientists through history. He tried to combine belief in a transcendent creator with scientific optimism in evolution, and ended up falling out with both Darwin and the Church of England in the process. In one service of 1876, for example, the priest criticised those who tried to replace God with science. To the shock of the congregation, Owen harangued the priest, declaring: 'My Christian brethren! I trust with God's help, that science will continue to do for you what she has always done, return good for evil!'

When Owen successfully lobbied for the establishment of a Natural History Museum in London, it was designed by the architect Alfred Waterhouse specifically as a 'Temple of Nature' to embody Owen's vision of a nature guided by God's transcendent power. In the words of the journal Architectural History:

The Temple of Nature that Alfred Waterhouse built embodied Owen's belief that the history of the natural world was not a matter of randomness and chance but the creation of a transcendent presence.

So the Natural History Museum is really a monument to a moment in science before it moved in the direction of reductive scientific fundamentalists like Dawkins or Hawking, a moment of broader thinking - represented today by a handful of thinkers working at the cutting edge of science like James Lovelock, Roger Penrose or Rupert Sheldrake, who challenge reductive Darwinism and are able to think outside its narrow atomised functionalism. Owen was a champion not of atheism but of that rare but optimistic belief, that science and theism are not incompatible, that scientists are revealing the transcendent power that moves through creation, and that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in Darwin or Dawkins' philosophy. His statue looked over the hall until 2009, when it was replaced by a statue of Darwin to mark his centenary. Time to bring the original statue back.

Resisting the corporate state

It's an unlikely YouTube hit. Not sneezing pandas or dancing babies, but a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist talking for three hours about the corporate takeover of the world. I haven't heard of him before, but former NYT journalist Chris Hedges gives a remarkable performance, discussing with intelligence and a quiet moral rage the over-reaching of American empire, the triumph of the corporate state, the decline of the left, what's wrong with the liberal elite, the Occupy movement, the role of Christianity, the role of Oprah, the 'pornification' of society...everything really! Very interesting stuff. And since it was posted two weeks ago, it's already got a quarter of a million hits. Lady Gaga must be getting worried.

I started watching, and found myself gripped for the whole three hours by Hedges' analysis, and also the sheer breadth of his experience - he trained as a priest, became a war reporter, was in the siege of Sarajevo, covered the first Iraq war, won a Pulitzer covering the War on Terror...then quit the NYT when he objected to the Second Iraq War. He strikes me as a very moral, intelligent and admirable person. Have any of you come across him before? Into his stuff?

If you get through all three hours of that, watch him defend the Occupy movement on CBC, and how he deals with the moronic shock-jock presenter. Masterfully done.

National happiness measurements don't correlate with anything

The BBC's Sunday ethical debate show, Big Questions, debated the politics of happiness last Sunday. They initially invited me along as a sceptic voice, but I think they chose to go with someone from the Institute of Economic Affairs instead - and actually he did a good job, as you can see here (it starts 30 minutes in - and the show will only be accessible online for a few days unfortunately).

The IEA representative makes the valuable point, also made by Paul Ormerod in the IEA's excellent new book on happiness economics, that it's not just that our happiness levels don't correlate with GDP. They don't apparently correlate with anything.

Many happiness economists, like Richard Layard or Andrew Oswald, argue that governments should pursue more of a Scandinavian economic model of higher job security, lower inequality, and higher state spending - because Denmark often comes out on top of international happiness measurement tables.

But look at these two graphs that Paul sent me, which come from the IEA book (if you can't see the graphs in your browser, they're on page 47 of the book, which you can access here). The first is happiness versus public expenditure in the UK. As you can see, state spending has risen dramatically since the 1980s, while happiness has remained flat.

What about happiness versus inequality? Again - inequality has risen sharply since 1980, while happiness has remained flat.

You see people in the debate trying to use happiness rhetoric to support their particular political or religious positions: 'happiness is about working together', 'happiness is not about money', 'happiness is about Jesus Christ', 'happiness is about equality' and so on. We all have our own understanding of happiness and we're all certain it's true for everyone. Unfortunately, national happiness measurements don't shed much more light on this ancient debate - because the measurement tool is simply too blunt, and because humans adapt to their situation and their level of daily contentment stays more or less the same, except in moments of real chaos.

The guy from Spiked magazine also makes a good point - why should we grant authority to 'happiness experts' to tell us what happiness really is? Why should we be forced into their bureaucratic model of happiness? Mark Williamson of Action for Happiness replies: 'This isn't about clipboard-wielding bureaucrats telling us how to be happy'. Yes, I'm afraid that's exactly what it is - or at least, it's what the politics of well-being can very easily become.

Yet I do believe there are valuable things we can learn from 'experts': psychologists, certainly, but also philosophers, novelists, humanitarians, religious leaders. Why, for example, do people so often come back to great thinkers like Aristotle and John Stuart Mill when they think about happiness? It's because they thought about the same question, and came up with some excellent attempts at answers.

It's a question of finding the right balance between the 'experts' and our freedom to disagree, to challenge their expertise, to find our own definition of well-being. That's what Aristotle tried to do in his Nichomachean Ethics - to find a balance between our common opinions about happiness, and the views of the experts (ie philosophers like him). Perhaps he ended up erring too much on the side of the expert, and didn't find the right balance, but it was a decent attempt. John Stuart Mill also tried to find a balance between the authority of experts and the individual's freedom to disagree. We're still looking for that balance.

I think group discussions like this show are actually a good way to get us to think about these questions. I much prefer group discussions like this about the nature of happiness and well-being to someone telling me they have all the answers.