Charles Taylor and Authenticity

I've been reading more of Charles Taylor's new book, A Secular Age today, and am really enjoying it. I get the same pleasure reading his work as I do reading the work of Isaiah Berlin. Both are wonderful historians of ideas, with the range and depth of learning to draw idea-maps, showing how we got to where we did, what were the main routes of development, the key turnings and junctions. I rate him way higher than some faddish thinker like John Gray, who is taken very seriously here in the UK but seems pretty mediocre to me.

One of the exciting things for me about reading Taylor, whose work I first came across about a year ago, is that his thinking covers a lot of the ground that I have been thinking about over the past four years or so, while I was writing my first book, The Wild Man (which is still adrift in the literary wilderness searching for publication...).

Taylor is also interested in the tension in our society between civility and authenticity, between our desire for public approval and our need to be true to ourselves. His work also takes in some of the thinkers who have been really important for me, such as Norbert Elias, Rousseau, and the Stoics.

I actually wrote to Taylor after reading another of his books, called The Ethics of Authenticity. In that book, Taylor asked what were the philosophical foundations of our culture's obsession with being authentic or true to our personalities, rather than serving our communities as the ancients often strived to do.

He highlighted the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of course, whose Confessions is a great hymn to the modern religion of being true to oneself. He also suggested, less convincingly, that post-modernist philosophers like Derrida and Foucault have also had a big impact on how young people think there is no higher truth than being true to oneself.

Anyway, I wrote to Taylor, saying how much I enjoyed his book, and how I was thinking and writing about similar topics. I suggested to him that the idea of authenticity and of 'being true to oneself' is actually much older than Rousseau, and goes back to Sophocles and the Stoics, and the Stoic or Platonic idea of being true to the God within one rather than putting all one's effort into one's public image.

I also suggested the Sixties and the Me Generation had a big influence on the modern cult of authenticity - particularly all those self-development courses, Scientology, Arica, Reich and the Primal Scream movement, Esalen and so on, all of which, as Tom Wolfe wrote in his essay The Me Decade, were quests for the fabled 'Real Me':

"[Such movements shared a common assumption]... I, with the help of my brothers and sisters, must strip away all the shams and excess baggage of society and my upbringing to find the Real Me."

Taylor was kind enough to reply, and I hope he doesn't mind if I print his reply here:

dear mr evans,

thanks so much for your letter and for your paper. sorry for the lower case, i've broken my arm, and it's hard to write at length. but i wanted to say how much i enjoyed your paper. i am entirely agreed that the sources you mention are much more important for the culture of authenticity than foucault and derrida. i also agree about the importance of the ancient tradition, particularly stoicism for the idea that we should find our truth within rather than in public approval.

but what modern authenticity adds to this is the idea that each person has hi/her own way of being human. the truth is not simply a general one about human beings, but has a dimension which is personal.

this doesn't mean that we have simply replaced a general view of human nature with personal authenticity, rather this is a modification of the earlier view.

it's an interesting question what importance this dimension of personal authenticity has in different forms of the rebellion against [Max Weber's concept of] the iron cage. if i get you right, you favour more the earlier formulations in which some core understanding of the human is the basis of the rebellion.

but beyond all these issues, i hope very much that you finish your book. we urgently need more intelligent and perceptive discussions of this whole range of issues. thanks again very much for letting me see your paper. best wishes, charles taylor

What a nice guy, eh? He may be an important philosopher, but he still had time to reply to some random punter emailing him out of the blue.

I then emailed him back asking him to read the manuscript of my book and make recommendations or help me get it published. He didn't reply to that email :)

Still, I'm thoroughly enjoying his new book, and will write another post on it soon. In the meantime, below is a video of him being interviewed last year by David Frost, around the time he replied to me - in fact, you can see his arm is still broken.

Animism and The Porous Self

I'm reading the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's epic new work, A Secular Age, which looks at what we mean when we say ours is a secular age, and how it differs from all previous ages, how we came to be 'disenchanted' as Max Weber put it.

Taylor makes a good contrast between the self in the previous era, the era of animism and spirits, and the self in the modern, disenchanted era.

He writes how the self in the age of animism and spirits is a porous self:

"Whether for good or evil, influence does away with sharp boundaries. [The self becomes] porous to some outside power, a person-like power...This porousness is most clearly in evidence in the fear of possession. Demons can take us over. And indeed, five centuries ago, many of the more spectacular manifestations of mental illness, what we would class as psychotic behaviour, were laid at the door of possession, as in the New Testament times...."

And this power, as Taylor writes, can equally be seen as benevolent - we are filled with the Holy Spirit, or with the spirit of our elders, we become an instrument of God.

The modern self, by contrast, is what Taylor describes as a "buffered self", in that a much stronger buffer exists between us and our outside environment, and we are much less likely to become possessed by spirits or forces:

"As a bounded self I can see the boundary as a buffer [between me and outside forces], such that things beyond don't need to 'get to me', to use the contemporary expression...This self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it."

He goes on: "Perhaps the clearest sign of the transformation in our world is that today many people look back to the world of the porous self with nostalgia. As though the creation of a thick emotional boundary between us and the cosmos were now lived as a loss. The aim is to recover some measure of this lost feeling. So people go to movies about the uncanny in order to experience a frisson. Our peasant ancestors would have thought us insane. You can't get a frisson from what is really in fact terrifying you."

I was writing about this at the start of this year, when I tried to sell a book on the link between animism and animation (no publishers have gone for it yet unfortunately). My basic argument was that while we did indeed live in a post-animistic age of disenchantment, we are still "haunted by the ghosts of old religions" to use another phrase of Weber's.

And we see old animist ideas of the porous self re-appearing in popular culture, particularly in animation, in sci-fi and in fantasy.

The best metaphor of the porous self, for example, is probably the rickety old hut in Evil Dead II. The self in the animistic universe is like that hut - constantly assailed by external forces, by nature spirits from the surrounding forest, by zombies from the basement, with every object in the hut conceivably housing some benevolent or malevolent spirit.



On the other hand, the flipside of this porous self is that you can become infused by benevolent spirits, and become superhuman. This is what we see happen in many superhero comics, and in a great deal of animation. Take He-Man, for example - he finds a magical sword, utters an incantation, and suddenly he is infused with a magical spirit and becomes "the most powerful man in the universe".



Here the porous self is experienced as something beneficial and empowering. All you need is some magical amulet or charm, and you can draw down the powers of the cosmos and become stronger, fitter, luckier than you normally are.

What I've noticed speaking to a schizophrenic friend of mine is that he, along with many other psychotics, has a very porous sense of his self. He believes that demons are trying to destroy him, and he lives in perpetual fear that they will succeed, so he needs the power of Christ to defend him from these regular assaults on his self.

Many other psychotics have similar fears of intrusions into their self, by demons, or by foreign powers, like the CIA. They fear their minds are being secretly controlled or manipulated. They do not have confidence in their autonomy from outside influences.

Perhaps all mental illness is in some ways a vulnerability to outside forces, real or imagined. And returning to sanity is when you once again assert your independence, your free will and autonomy, when you mark the zone of the self where external forces cannot impinge.

In this sense, you'd have to see Stoicism as a crucial moment in the development of the modern, buffered, 'sane' self, which asserts that a zone of free will exists in the human psyche, which if properly developed and exercised, no external force, spirit or power can manipulate or overcome.

Transsexual Stoicism

I love YouTube. If you type in 'Stoicism' what do you get? An articulate transsexual called Sophia (appropriate that, it means Wisdom in Greek) giving a talk on how she uses Stoicism as a coping mechanism for dealing with life.

She knows her stuff: she describes Stoicism very accurately, and talks about how learning to shrug Stoically at people's disapproval has helped her survive as a transsexual living in the Bible Belt.

There is, in fact, a tradition of transsexual Stoicism - the philosophy to some extent emerged from Sophoclean tragedy, and the fount of all wisdom in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus is...a transsexual, Tiresisas.

Musical therapy

Sorry I haven't blogged much recently - had my once-every-two-months hectic week of magazine editing. Will have more time to blog soon. In the meantime, here's a video of the Pixies live, way back in 1988, pretty much inventing indie rock when everyone else was playing shit synthesiser music. This was the first rock band I ever really loved, and I've never loved anyone quite as much since. First love eh?

The problem with measuring happiness

I've come across a great book, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, which casts a very sceptical eye over the politics of well-being movement, and in particular happiness measurements statistics.

The authors, Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod, take issue with a famous graph that is known as the Easterlin Paradox (pictured), which plots income levels against levels of reported satisfaction. Many happiness experts, such as Daniel Kahneman, Daniel Gilbert and Lord Layard, use this fact to argue that our societies focus too much on economic growth and consumerism, when in fact more money isn't actually making us happier. Some experts have used this to argue for a more re-distributive and interventionist economic policy.

The IEA, however, quite fairly argues that the fact that reported satisfaction levels have not really gone up or down since records began in the 1950s might simply show that measuring happiness is a very imprecise science. As the authors point out, many happiness measurements are based on a three-point scale, with people asked if they feel unhappy, happy, or very happy.

"Basing government policy on such an imprecise measurement would be like the Bank of England's monetary policy board basing its policy decisions on whether people say they are feeling poor, rich or very rich", they write.

It's not just rising income levels that don't appear to affect happiness levels. Rising levels of violent crime also don't appear to affect it. The high unemployment of the 1980s don't seem to affect it. Nothing seems to affect it. It just continues in a straight, boring line. So what policy conclusions can we draw from this? None, it would be fair to suggest.

The authors do admit that behavioural economists and psychologists have made some real additions to economic research, by showing that humans aren't the 'rational calculators' that orthodox economic theory sometimes asserts. Economists like Kahneman, and psychologists like Daniel Gilbert, have shown how our economic and life decisions are often irrational, and not the best maximization of our utility. This is quite accepted now in mainstream economics.

The authors do accept that it is possible to measure happiness levels, using for example the Beck Depression Inventory, created by the CBT pioneer Aaron Beck, which appears a decent way of finding out how depressed someone is. But that survey is much more in-depth than most happiness surveys, and it measures changes in individuals' psychology and mental attitudes over periods of time. And maybe even the Beck survey is too simplistic...

All I can really have faith in is that CBT was very effective for me, and for many other people, in overcoming mental illness. So I fully support the initiative of Lord Layard to improve the population's access to CBT therapy. That aspect of the politics of well-being I find inspiring.

But I also have scepticism about making broader speculations from happiness statistics. For example, one study suggests happiness levels in China stayed level from 1990 to 2000. Another suggests it actually plummeted. It just seems incredibly imprecise.

In fact, I never took a happiness survey that didn't seem to me like something out of Cosmopolitan magazine. Besides, the really mentally ill, the really miserable, are, perhaps, not properly included in such surveys - they're recluses, so you'd never see them to question them.

Another contradiction I have noticed in the happiness debate, by the way: some happiness experts, such as celebrity therapist Oliver James, argue that we are getting more and more anxious and unhappy. They use this to argue against the free market capitalism of the last 30 years.

This would appear to contradict most happiness data, which suggest that satisfaction levels haven't really moved in the West, throughout Keynesianism, Neo-Liberalism, Blairism, or any-ism.

And, as the authors of the study point out, we are all living longer. So the total amount of happiness we feel in a lifetime has certainly been going up, along with the total amount of discontent.

Anyway, you can read the book, as well as a brief summary of it, here.

Raj Persaud busted for plagiarism!

Raj Persaud, a famous 'celebrity therapist' in the UK, admitted in court today that he'd plagiarized heavily for several articles and books he has written in his lucrative media career. Apparently among the people he plagiarized from are Richard Bentall, who wrote the book 'Madness Explained'.

I have to say, I read Raj Persaud's book on relationships, and found it pretty rubbish. Here's the BBC article:

The former Radio 4 presenter admitted plagiarising four articles for his 2003 book "From the Edge Of The Couch". But he denied that his actions were dishonest and were liable to bring his profession into disrepute. Dr Persaud also admitted passing off other researchers' work as his own in articles published in journals and national newspapers.

Jeremy Donne QC, GMC counsel, accused Dr Persaud of enhancing his own reputation at the expense of the hard work and scholarship of other people. "The articles, we say, speak for themselves and they all demonstrate the extent Dr Persaud has appropriated the work of others as his own."

Three years ago an article was withdrawn from Progress in Neurology and Psychiatry after US professor Thomas Blass claimed that "over 50% was my work". At the time, Dr Persaud apologised for the error and told the Guardian newspaper that it had been a cutting and pasting error which meant some references had been omitted.

A second article was retracted by the British Medical Journal "owing to unattributed use of text from other published sources". As a result of the allegations Dr Persaud withdrew from an honorary position as director of the now defunct Centre for Public Engagement in Mental Health Sciences at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London.

A King's College inquiry found that allegations of plagiarism against Dr Persaud "had some substance", but decided no further action was required.

Speaking at the GMC hearing on Monday, Mr Donne revealed that Dr Persaud asked for and received permission to quote an article by a Professor Bentall for his book. He said: "Professor Bentall gave his permission assuming that Dr Persaud would know that quotations would have appeared in parenthesis and be properly attributed.

"Having seen the passage Professor Bentall was astonished that a substantial portion of his paper had simply been copied into the book in what he believes was a deliberate act of plagiarism."

Dr Persaud remains employed as a consultant psychiatrist for the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust. The GMC "fitness to practise panel" has the power to strike a doctor off the register.

Russia and Well-Being

This is an article I wrote for a Russian magazine on the well-being movement and its relevance for Russia.

Russia and the Politics of Well-Being

A new sort of politics has emerged in the last 20 years, which is changing the way people think about economics, society, and the role of the state. It is being called 'the politics of well-being'. Some political thinkers think it will have a big impact on political thinking this century. Geoff Mulgan, former head of the Downing Street policy unit under Tony Blair, says: "Well-being will be the major focus of government in the 21st century, in the way that economic prowess was in the 20th century and military prowess was in the 19th century.”

So what does the 'politics of well-being' mean for businesses and governments, and do we see it emerging in Russia?

The starting point for most thinking about well-being is the idea that, even though our societies are richer than ever before, we are not getting any happier. As Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Princeton University, says: "We've never been able to get what we want so easily. And yet research shows that we are not becoming any happier. So that suggests that we are seeking the wrong things."

The suggestion that economic growth is not making us any happier was first tested out by an economist called Richard Easterlin in the 1970s. He came up with the graph below, which maps people's levels of reported happiness against average income. As the work of the great social scientist Ed Diener has since convincingly shown, incomes have risen four-fold in the US since World War Two, while reported levels of subjective well-being have not risen at all. This being the case, many thinkers have asked if we should still be making economic growth and consumerism the main focus of our societies. Perhaps governments should try to improve not just income and GDP levels, but also, primarily, the well-being of their citizens.

At which point, sceptics among you may raise three obvious objections. Firstly, can you really measure well-being? Secondly, isn't it rather wishy-washy or hippy to say that money doesn't bring you happiness? Thirdly, should a liberal and democratic state get involved in how its citizens pursue their happiness? Isn't that their own private affair?

Measuring well-being

People have always had their own ideas about what makes people happy. Plato thought it was a life of virtue. The Buddha suggested it was a life free of passion. Marx thought it was a life of collective production. Free market theorists assert it is our ability to buy what we want. What has taken the happiness debate beyond philosophical speculation is the evolution of scientific ways of measuring what really makes people happy. Several social scientists and economists - Ed Diener, Paul Dolan, Michael Argyle, Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman - have since the 1970s been working on ways of accurately measuring subjective well-being. There's been some experiments with brain imaging, but most scientists agree now that the best way to find out how happy someone is feeling is simply to ask them.

So the well-being movement rests, to a great extent, on questionnaires asking people to rate how they are feeling at a given moment, on a seven-point scale, from miserable to very happy. Researchers have found that subjective levels of satisfaction tend to correlate quite accurately with 'objective' tests of happiness, such as brain scans. So people seem to be fairly accurate judges of how they are feeling in the present.

So what actually makes us happy? It's money isn't it? Obviously, being unemployed, hungry and deprived makes us miserable, so governments should do as much as they can to make us richer?

Well, yes and no. Research suggests that, yes, poverty does make us miserable. However, once your income has grown above a certain level, to the point where your basic needs are met, your satisfaction levels no longer typically rise. Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology and one of the major figures in the well-being movement, writes: "In the United States, the very poor are lower in happiness, but once a person is just barely comfortable, added money adds little or no happiness. Even the fabulously rich - the Forbes 100, with an average net worth of $125 million - are only slightly happier than the average American." So that's why Roman Abramovich looks so bored all the time.

So becoming richer does not, apparently, makes us happier. However, we tend to believe that it will, and to make life decisions, and policy decisions, based on this belief. For example, a researcher at Princeton asked 700 adults to predict how happy a person who won the lottery and became a millionaire would be after a few months, a year, and several years. The majority predicted that the lottery winner would experience a significant rise in well-being over several years. But in fact, studies of lottery winners showed that, while their happiness levels rose in the immediate months after their win, they returned to their average pre-win level after a few months.

This suggests that perhaps we are simply born with an average level of happiness, and this level stays fairly steady throughout our life, no matter what good or bad things happen to us. Some people are simply happier than others. In fact, studies of identical twins who have been separated at birth have shown that a great deal of our psychology, including our average happiness level, is genetically inherited. Martin Seligman suggests that about 50% of every personality trait, including average happiness levels, is attributable to genetic inheritance.

However, a lot of evidence shows that we can, to some extent, affect our happiness levels by our thoughts, actions and life decisions. So how we feel is, to some extent, in our control.

How can we make ourselves happier?

Ancient Greek philosophers, particularly the Stoics, taught that we could change how we felt by changing how we perceived the world. The Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus once said: 'It's not events, but our opinions about them, which cause us suffering.' If we learn to change the way we habitually interpret the world, we can change how we feel, and become more emotionally resilient in the face of adversity.

Modern psychotherapy has tested this ancient Stoic insight, and found that in many cases it works . In particular, a form of therapy called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which is now the main type of therapy in western medicine, has shown that you can cure many emotional disorders, such as depression, social anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and other phobias, by making people aware of their habitual beliefs and ideas, and how these cognitive habits colour their experience of the world. You can then teach them to replace their negative cognitive habits with more realistic and rational ways of thinking.

For example, something negative happens to you, like you get fired from your job. You can then make this bad situation a lot worse by thinking irrationally about it. You might think 'I always get fired. I'll never get another job. I'm a loser. My boss hates me. How dare he fire me!' These are typical cognitive distortions. You're generalizing (I always get fired), fortune-telling and catastrophizing (I'll never get another job), labeling yourself negatively (I'm a loser) and mind-reading someone else's thoughts about you (my boss hates me). You're also taking very personally an event which might have as much to do with impersonal factors, such as the slow-down of the economy. So all these irrational and negative ways of interpreting an event are making what is already a difficult situation far harder to deal with, and you will probably end up very depressed and demoralized.

Instead, you could say to yourself, 'well, I wish I hadn't been fired, but it's happened now so I may as well accept it. It might not have been my fault, a lot of people are getting fired right now. Anyway, I did my best, and I accept myself even if I'm not employed. My self-esteem doesn't depend on my job. Who knows, maybe the job wasn't right for me anyway, this could be an opportunity to find something better.'

So you can train yourself to think in more rational and helpful ways, and when you change your beliefs, your negative emotions will also be transformed into more positive emotions. Psychologists now have a huge amount of evidence to show that CBT is very effective in treating emotional disorders, and helping people to recover from them in a very short time. CBT is probably the first form of therapy ever to gather this sort of hard supporting evidence - psychoanalysis never did, and always relied on a handful of dubious case-studies. This body of evidence supporting CBT has convinced the British government to put around £300 million into training up some 3,600 new therapists, mainly in CBT, to create the first-ever National Mental Health Service.

Lord Layard, the government's 'happiness czar' says: "One in six people in the UK will suffer from mental illnesses like depression and anxiety in their lifetime, and very few of these millions of people will receive proper treatment." Treating such mental illnesses, he says, should be a priority of governments in the 21st century. The British and Australian governments are also experimenting with teaching CBT-type techniques to young people in state schools, via classes in 'emotional resilience' and 'emotional aspects of learning'. This could be compared to the teaching of Stoic philosophy in the schools and academies of ancient Greece and Rome.

Some schools and health services are drawing on other ancient traditions as techniques for improving well-being. For example, western science is increasingly recognizing the benefits of meditation as a way of reducing stress and depression. Indeed, the only person who the neuroscientist Richard Davidson came across whose brain activity was entirely left-sided, without any apparent sadness or negative thoughts, was a Buddhist monk. Buddhist and Yoga exercises for controlling the breath are also increasingly being recognized in the West as very effective ways of regulating one's mood and improving one's well-being.

Well-being in Russia

So what does this have to do with Russia? In the 1990s, people in the former Soviet Union consistently appeared to be the least happy people in the world. Their society had collapsed, everything they had been taught to believe in had disappeared overnight, life expectancy was short, alcoholism was very high, the rule of law had disappeared, banks went bust, and bandits were in charge. Not surprisingly, the mood was grim. However, the state has since reasserted control, the oil price has risen, incomes have grown rapidly, and people have in the last few years gone on a consumer binge, as they buy a whole range of consumer goods that were never available to them before. The dream of capitalism has finally arrived in Russia.

But will this make Russians happier? I haven't found any recent studies of happiness in Russia, though you'd expect that average levels of satisfaction have risen as the economy has stabilized and people have risen above the poverty line. People can meet their basic needs, and live in greater safety and security than they did in the 1990s.

One would also expect, however, the improvement in satisfaction levels to rapidly flatten out, as has happened in other countries. In fact, a study published in April of happiness levels in China, another fast-growing economy, found that levels of happiness actually plummeted there from 1990 to 2000, even though salaries rose by an average of 16% per annum. The authors suggest that this is because, while average incomes rose, the inequality between rich and poor rose even faster, so even if you were getting richer, someone else was always getting richer than you, leading to high levels of restlessness and dissatisfaction. In addition, the rapid urbanization of that decade led to the dissolution of traditional communities and the growth in urban anomie, the authors suggest.

At the moment, the Russian government is still very much focused on improving the country's traditional economic indicators, such as GDP and income growth. We shall see if Russia's new president, Dmitry Medvedev, shifts the focus of the government onto developing the country's 'human capital'. After all, one of the duties of the president, as enshrined in the Russian constitution, is "to secure the well-being of Russia".

In some ways, the well-being movement belongs in Russia, where Russian intelligentsia like Tolstoy or Soloviev once searched for the Good Life, and tried to follow that life and teach it to others. The well-being movement is, finally, about the power of ideas to transform our experience and enrich our lives, and nobody believes in the power of ideas like Russians.

Why do English girls drink so much?

Tell me. I'd like to know.

Do they drink more than girls from other countries? It certainly appears so to me. One of the things I particularly noticed when I moved back to the UK from Russia was how many drunk girls you saw. Roving bands of them, wandering like howling feral dogs in the street, clutching their bottles of Chardonnay and terrorizing single males.

I remember in my first week back, walking up Ken Church Street one night, and this drunk women in her late 30s wandered up behind me and slurred something like 'Fancy a fuck?' I was kind of horrified, and to my amazement actually said no.

This happened to me again last night. I was getting a kebab on the Archway Road, and a woman came in, stood right next to me and looked at me with squiffy eyes, and breathed 'I want you to take me somewhere'. Needless to say, I got my lamb doner and retreated to the bus stop.

This shocking event occured to me as I was on my way home from a drinks party, which had been full of, yes, drunk English girls. I was talking to one girl, a lovely girl who had been a scholar at Cambridge and had just won a scholarship to do a post-grad in London. She was pretty, charming and smart. Yet she got progressively more pissed as the evening went on. She told me she was a bit worried about her drinking, and that she often got very paranoid hangovers.

'But I don't want to drink less', she told me. 'I like drinking because I'm a feminist, you know? If men do it, why shouldn't we?' This seemed like a crazy theory to me!

But maybe it is one of the reasons that English girls do get so drunk - because they enjoy more economic equality with men than women in many other societies. That's to say, in other countries, women often earn less than men, so they are more dependent on men for financial support. That means their status depends on how men perceive them, so they put all their effort into appearing demure and attractive, which means not getting too drunk. Often, girls in other countries hardly drink at all.

In the UK, women are often just as big earners as men these days. They are of independent means. That means they rely less on the judgement of men for their status, so they can afford to worry less about conforming to male expectations of their behaviour. Perhaps they now feel they can go and get drunk with their girlfriends, because they're earning the cash, just like men, and deserve the opportunity to celebrate their cash-earning, just like men. So perhaps getting incredibly drunk does seem like a victory for feminism.

A new advert from the Drug and Alcohol Service for London plays on this 'why shouldn't we drink like men' mentality among English girls. It shows a drunk, mannish-looking woman, with the caption, 'If you drink like a man, you might end up looking like one'.

I guess you can blame the media as well, for spreading the idea that, in order to be a really fun-loving fast-living modern gal, you need to drink yourself into a stupor. We see this idea in films like Bridget Jones or Sex in the City, and in the media celebration of figures like Lily Allen or Amy Winehouse.

Lily Allen, for example, who regularly drinks herself unconscious, was recently given an award by Glamour magazine for 'Special Woman of the Year'. Special how?! Obviously, it was just a way for Glamour to get the paparazzi to their awards event, where, needless to say, Lily Allen got drunk, swore at the audience when collecting her award, then fell unconscious and had to be carried to a taxi. Glamour indeed.

Theory of Everything (II)

I've written before about how fascinating and bewildering I find modern astro-physics, with its Pullman-esque talk of multiple dimensions and even multiple universes. I admire the incredible ambition, and optimism, of modern physicists, with their eager search for a 'theory of everything', which will combine quantum mechanics with quantum physics, and will finally explain the entire physical universe - from the very big, like black holes, to the very small, like sub-atomic particles.

What sends me off into a reverie about such investigations is the thought that such theories really could be a 'theory of everything' - that's to say, they could incorporate the human mind, and how it relates to the universe. Imagine, a physical theory of the universe that also explained consciousness, that healed the split between mind and matter that we have lived with since Descartes' great critique of the animist and alchemist world view. Imagine a theory where we could once again say, as the alchemists of old did - as above, so below. As in the universe, as in the atom, so in the human mind.

Today, I went to a conference organized by the Royal Society of Medicine and the Scientific and Medical Network, where a psychologist tried to do just this.

Professor Harold Walach, from the University of Northampton's psychology department, was trying to explain why some forms of complementary medicine, such as spiritual healing, homeopathy, Reiki or even distant healing, seemed to work. Was it because of some 'energy' being transmitted from the healer to the patient? If so, what is this energy, where does it come from, why can't we measure it or fit it into any of our working models of physics?

Walach proposed a rather different model to explain complementary medicine. He calls it Generalized Entanglement, or Non-Locality, which is an idea he took from Quantum Physics. I'm a complete beginner when it comes to all things Quantum, but from what I understand, non-locality is the discovery, which has apparently been proven by John Bell in 1961, that two particles can affect each other, to the extent that you can accurately predict how one is behaving by how another is behaving, even if they are great distances apart.

There is a correspondence between the particles, which defies the principle of locality of conventional relativity theory, which says that for one particle to affect another particle they have to be sufficiently near each other to have a causal impact.

Walach connected this mind-bending idea of non-locality to Carl Jung's equally-mindbending theory of synchronicity - which is an attempt to explain the weird coincidences which occur to us all the time, which we can't really explain. Why is it we think of someone one moment, and just the next bump into them at a party? Why do we dream of a white horse, and then see one the next morning? Why do adverts on the Tube sometimes seem to comment with weird appropriateness on our inner thoughts?

Synchronicity is an a-causal way of explaining why such uncanny correspondences happen. They don't necessarily happen, Jung suggests, because of mechanistic causes, because A pushesd B. They happen because all things are connected in the moment, all things are weaved together in the Universal Mind - both our consciousness, and external events. Events reflect our consciousness, and in turn our consciousness is shaped by events.

Walach suggested we could use this idea of non-locality to explain why, for example, healers could heal patients without touching them, even at great distances. They establish a correspondence, a non-local link, between them, which means what happens to one also happens to the other. So a healer generates a positive mental state in themselves, and this mental state is mysteriously and non-locally transferred to the patient.

I was wondering, while he explained this idea, what quantum and astro-physicists would make of it - some physicists are quite clear that their theories only apply to the physical world, and it's dangerous to start applying them to human behaviour.

As it happens, sitting behind me in the audience was professor Bernard Carr, one of the great living experts on relativity and the universe, who I recognized from the BBC 4 show about the Theory of Everything which I watched a few months ago. I also heard him speak on the In Our Time show about multiple universes last year.

After the talk, I went up and asked him what he thought - could the principle of non-locality or other aspects of quantum physics be applied to the human mind. Could we build a true 'Theory of Everything'?

His answer surprised me. He said: "That's exactly what I've been trying to find. At the moment, physicists say they are looking for a Theory of Everything, but actually they're just looking for physics theories. A true Theory of Everything would not just explain the physical universe, but consciousness as well."

So what did he think of Walach's application of non-locality to complementary medicine. "Non-locality is a very interesting principle. It can be explained in two different ways. One way to explain it is that, somehow, there is an instantaneous transmission of information between the two particles that are connected non-locally, so that if something happens to one of them, it is instantly transmitted and communicated to the other particle, no matter how far away it is. The other theory is that there is no causal link, so transmission of information, there is just a formal relationship or correspondence between the two particles. Walach seemed to believe the second of these theories - that non-locality is a-causal, so there is no transmission of information between the healer and the patient."

Professor Carr said that he, by contrast, was inclined to believe that there was such a transmission of information during non-locality, so obviously there is a causal link.

Let's take a couple of examples - two rather freaky psychic events that occurred to me in the last two weeks. The first was this Saturday evening. I was in a pub in Camden, watching the football, and struck up a conversation with another person at my table, who turned out to be an exile from Zimbabwe, who was complaining bitterly about how the country had gone to the dogs. Meanwhile, my brother was in a Chinese restaurant in Gerrard Street, where the person sitting next to him happened to strike up a conversation. He turned out to be an exile from South Africa, who was complaining bitterly about how his former country was going to the dogs.

These two conversations, seemingly related and connected yet without a possible causal link, were going on at the same time, though my brother and I didn't know about it until Sunday, when we described our previous evenings. You could interpret this as an example of synchronicity, of some a-causal principle of non-local correspondence occuring between my brother and I. It wasn't that there was a transmission of information between me or him. There was simply a weird correspondence.

On the other hand, a week before, I was in a store shopping, and I suddenly thought about buying a brown leather jacket. I'd never thought about buying one before, but I suddenly decided it would suit me, and thought about buying one. Then I went to dinner with my parents, and my mum brought out a brown leather jacket which she had seen earlier that day in a charity store and bought for me. You could explain this coincidence as the first explanation of
non-locality - there was a non-local transmission of information from my mother's mind to mine, which made me think of brown leather jackets.

Professor Carr, who was the president of the Society of Psychical Research for many years, believes that many paranormal phenomena can be explained along these lines. He says: "I believe we can explain both consciousness and quantum physics as being united in a higher dimension, a dimension of information, where all information is connected, sort of like a matrix."

I am at risk of misquoting Carr - this sort of talk is way beyond my scientific comprehension. But his theory is not so far fetched. I don't find the idea of non-local psychic connections unbelievable at all. In fact, I think most of us have experienced clear examples of it. And the best explanation for it, and for the quantum theory of non-locality, is that there is some kind of dimension, or field, where both minds and particles are interconnected and capable of transmitting information instantaneously.

Here's an article about a conference on physics and psychics that Carr organized, and here's a Flash tutorial that explains the principle of non-locality rather better than I can. Carr says he is publishing his theory for the first time in the next issue of the Journal of Psychic Research. Should be a fascinating read.

Stoicism, the original cognitive therapy

Here's a piece I did for the latest issue of Psychologies, on the therapeutic benefits of Stoic philosophy:

Stoicism: the thinking cure

As a young man, Jules Evans was plagued by panic attacks and anxiety until he discovered an ancient philosophy that gave him back his peace of mind

You never forget your first panic attack. Mine was at a party, shortly after I turned 18. I suddenly found myself the centre of attention, and for some reason this triggered a wave of adrenalin, making my face turn white and my heart pound. I was terrified that others would notice my fear, and this only increased the panic. I felt like a rag-doll, picked up and shaken by irrational forces beyond my control.

It was the first of many such attacks. I came to dread social gatherings, and to avoid them, or drink to get through them. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, or whether I would ever get better. I felt an exile from the human race.

But what finally helped me return to health and happiness was not a lifetime of anti-depressants or expensive treatments, but a 2,000-year-old philosophy called Stoicism, which forms the basis of cognitive behavioural theory today.

This philosophy first emerged around 350 BC in Athens where the Stoic philosophers would teach (among the Stoa, or colonnades of the marketplace). Their immensely practical teachings aimed to cure the soul of emotional suffering. When we think of being stoic today, we think of stiff upper lips and emotional avoidance, but the philosophical truth is different.

Stoicism is about learning to understand and control our emotions, rather than simply stifling them. It is about learning to feel in control again, when our negative emotions seem to overpower us. For example, I didn’t choose to have a panic attack at that party, it just happened, making me feel helpless.

Stoics try to show how these negative emotions are actually in our control. They don’t just ‘happen’ as responses to external events. Instead, they arise out of our interpretation of external events. As the Stoic philosopher Epictetus put it, ‘it’s not events, but our interpretation of them, which cause us suffering’.

Our interpretations or opinions can make a bad external situation a whole lot worse. For example, what caused my panic attack was not the whole room looking at me, but the thoughts racing around in my head, saying ‘oh my God, everyone is looking at me, if they notice I am anxious they will think less of me, I will make a fool of myself, and that’s completely unacceptable…’

Stoicism helped me get better because it made me realise that what was causing my anxiety was not some burnt-out synapse in my brain, but my own beliefs. Specifically, it was my belief that other people’s opinions of me were all-important, that I must get on with everyone I meet, which was causing me suffering.

Stoics teach us that negative emotions often arise because we have become mentally attached to something external, such as the good opinion of other people. External things are always, to some extent, outside of our control and subject to change. If we build our happiness on externals, we will never feel secure or content. We will always be the slave of external circumstances, always feeling paranoid about what others think of us.

Instead, Stoics advise us to concentrate on what is under our control – our own thoughts – and to focus our efforts on learning to accept ourselves, and to control our thoughts. This is a much more important and worthwhile project than spending our whole life trying to make a good impression. If we follow the Stoic path, we can slowly become masters of ourselves, rather than the slave of externals.

Stoicism is very much an inner philosophy, which emphasizes intensive training of one’s mind, and a lofty disregard for externals. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who is one of the most famous Stoic philosophers, spoke of making your mind an ‘inner citadel’ from the vagaries of the external world.

In part, this emphasis on inner freedom rather than the outer life was a product of the era in which Stoicism grew up. It developed in a time of tremendous political upheaval, when the Greek city-states were being conquered by foreign empires like Rome, when dictators were imposing their bloody will upon populations, when daily life was uncertain and sometimes brutal.
Stoicism gave people a way to survive in such uncertain times. If the city-state fell, the true philosopher could maintain his equanimity, because he was not just a citizen of Athens or Sparta, but a citizen of the universe, a Cosmopolitan. The universe, Stoics believe, is governed by a universal law, which they called the Logos. When we cultivate acceptance of change and indifference to externals, then we live in harmony with this divine law.

This idea of living in harmony with the ever-changing universe could be compared to the eastern philosophies of Buddhism and Taoism. There are marked similarities – the Buddha also spoke of making one’s mind an ‘inner citadel’ – and some academics wonder if Stoicism was influenced by Indian philosophy after Alexander the Great invaded India.

Stoicism was also a marked influence on Christianity, which would claim that Jesus was ‘the Logos made flesh’. Stoic philosophers like Seneca were considered so close to Christianity that they were all but canonized by Christian philosophers in the Middle Ages.

The Stoic creed of accepting externals in the name of the Logos has attracted its critics. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously called it a philosophical example of ‘sour grapes’ – you are too politically weak to alter your environment, so you claim that true virtue lies in accepting the status quo. But shouldn’t we struggle to change the world, rather than accept it?

In fact, Stoics were anything but politically apathetic. There is a distinguished history of Stoics standing up to tyrants – Cicero gave his life trying to defend the Roman Republic against imperial tyranny, as did Cato, while the proto-Stoic Diogenes made a career from ‘speaking truth to power’. And the Stoic idea of natural law led directly to the revolutionary 18th century doctrine that if governments didn’t obey this natural law, then their population had the right to revolt.

But the most enduring influence of Stoicism is on psychotherapy. Today Stoicism is enjoying a huge comeback through cognitive behavioural philosophy (CBT), which is the most widely accepted form of psychotherapy for emotional disorders like depression, social anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder.

I spoke with one of CBT’s founders, Albert Ellis, shortly before he died last year, aged 93. He told me: ‘The main inspiration for my therapy was the famous saying of the Stoic Epictetus: “it is not events, but our opinions about them that cause us suffering.” This is a tremendously powerful tool for understanding the human mind.’

Like Stoicism, CBT helps us become aware of our negative thoughts, and trains us to challenge those thoughts and replace them with more rational thoughts.

CBT uses many of the same techniques which Stoicism proposed 2,000 years ago, such as using a ‘thought journal’ to track one’s mental habits and bring them to awareness; or training oneself to keep one’s mental attention in the present, rather than worrying about the past or the future.

The British government has put CBT at the centre of a new ‘National Mental Health Service’, which it hopes will halve the number of people with depression and anxiety in the UK. And it has also introduced CBT techniques into the national curriculum, to help young people cope with emotional disorders. So Stoicism is having a real influence on millions of people’s lives today.

Some people complain that CBT has stolen the techniques of Stoicism, but ditched the metaphysics, and the Stoic idea of the Logos. But in today’s secular society, that was inevitable. The NHS could never subsidize a therapy that demanded you believe in the Logos.

And CBT has proved that you can still use Stoic techniques even if you don’t fully accept all the principles of Stoicism. Even if you don’t believe in the Logos, Stoic techniques can help you to overcome even the most powerful and terrifying emotional disorders. In the dark helplessness of mental illness, it can give us back our power, our sovereignty, and our health.

Ellis in action

Here's an amusing video of Albert Ellis practicing his Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, which is one of the progenitors of CBT. The lady in the interview, Gloria, went to visit three different therapists - Carl Rogers, Frederick Perls (a leading Gestalt therapist), and Ellis.

Ellis made his name as a preacher of sexual liberation, particularly for single women in the 1960s, so it's appropriate that his patient is a young single woman looking to meet better men.

What strikes me particularly about the video, and about Ellis' approach generally, is the extent to which it is a fusion of therapy and philosophy. Ellis repeatedly states that what causes people mental distress is very often their own 'core philosophy', their beliefs or ideology, and REBT involves challenging this core philosophy and trying to replace it with something more rational.

Note that he quotes the Stoic philosopher Epictetus early on in his talk - I've written before that I see Ellis as the modern descendant of the ancient Stoics, who were really the great pioneers of cognitive therapy, 2,400 years ago. Ellis, of course, is more of a hedonist in outlook than the Stoics, and he doesn't believe in God, unlike them. Nevertheless, his techniques are thoroughly Stoic.

The other man typically credited with inventing CBT, Aaron Beck, is also clearly influenced by Greek therapeutic philosophy, by the way. He calls his therapeutic technique, of challenging a patient's negative or irrational beliefs, the 'Socratic technique'.

Good psychologist, bad father?

There's a fairly damning article in the Observer about RD Laing and his failings as a father, connected to the fact his son recently drank himself to death in Spain.

Laing was, together with figures such as Michel Foucault and Thomas Szaz, a pioneer in the 'anti-psychiatry' movement of the 1960s, which claimed that mental illness was a rational response to an insane society. He also blamed many mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, on bad parenting.

'From the moment of birth [...],' Laing wrote in 1967, 'the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.'

It's rather ironic, then, that Laing himself seems to have been so conspicuously inconsiderate as a father:

He was an unpredictable, occasionally frenzied, father figure who acted with little regard for the consequences. When, in 1975, his second eldest child, Susan, was diagnosed with terminal monoblastic leukaemia, a row broke out between her parents. Anne felt it would be kinder not to tell Susan the diagnosis. Laing disagreed. In the face of fierce opposition from Anne, Susan's fiancé and her doctors, he insisted on travelling to the hospital to inform her that, in all likelihood, she would not live beyond her 21st birthday.

'That was the worst thing,' says Adrian. 'My mother just went potty. She said he was going to rot in hell for that. Then, after he told Susie, he went back to London and left us to deal with it. My mother was spitting blood.'

Susie died, aged 21, in March 1976. 'My father was riddled with guilt about it. He would have been aware of the statistics that demonstrate there is a higher chance of dying from that particular disease if you are from a broken family.'

A year later, Laing's eldest child, Fiona, had a nervous breakdown and was taken to Gartnavel Mental Hospital, Glasgow. Anxious that she should not be subjected to the brutal electric shock treatment and impersonal medical examinations that Laing so detested, Adrian called on his father for advice.

'I was really upset. I asked, "What the fuck are you going to do about it?"' Adrian pauses. A curious smile curls at the corner of his lips. 'At the time we were living in a house called Ruskin Place, and his response was: "Gartnavel or Ruskin Place, what's the fucking difference?" It was a double-bind, you see. Either he had nothing to do with it [Fiona's breakdown] and his theories were shit, or he had everything to do with it and he was shit.'

But how on earth could RD Laing, the celebrated psychiatrist whose entire reputation rested on his theories espousing the compassionate treatment of the mentally ill, reconcile his professional position with his personal behaviour? How could he empathise so profoundly with a naked, rocking schizophrenic patient he had never met and yet fail so spectacularly to do the same with his own daughter?

Adrian leans forward, resting his elbows on the stainless steel cafe table. 'In terms of how he rationalised it... erm... I'm not sure that... I don't think my father felt he was the cause [of the breakdown] so he wouldn't feel it was hypocritical.'

Later he tells a revealing story about Susan being interviewed in 1974 by a journalist writing a feature on the children of famous people. The piece ended with a memorable quote from her: 'He can solve everybody else's problems but not our own.'

The Hungarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz puts it a different way. Laing, he wrote in 2004, displayed 'an avoidance of responsibility for his first family, indefensible since his line had been that the breakdown of children could be attributed to parents and families.'

I suppose you could say geniuses, or people obsessed with getting their vision across to the world, are often remarkably inconsiderate of their families - one thinks of Tolstoy, or Coleridge, or VS Naipaul. Still, you can't help feeling it lessens the psychologist, as well as the man, that he so utterly failed to practice the paternal compassion and understanding that he preached to others.