Doomsday

Never mind the Global Recession. Read James Lovelock's interview in the new edition of the New Scientist. He offers us this cheery vision of the future:

I think it's wrong to assume we'll survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It's happening again.

I don't think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing's been done except endless talk and meetings.

God help us. 90% of the world's population wiped out this century? I mean, even if it was 10%...that would still be a humanitarian disaster that made everything else we worry about look insignificant.

Are we too dumb to handle climate change? Personally, I haven't really done anything to try and help the effort to deal with it. This despite the fact that I am entirely convinced that this juggernaut is heading for us, and is likely to have a seriously big impact on our civilisation...And yet I personally have done nothing to try and avert this crisis. I continue living my life, writing about the well-being movement, and about the finance industry.

But how much well-being will there be if our societies are plagued by floods, droughts, food shortages, water shortages, resource wars?

One person who considers these issues and has at least some idea where we might be heading is my brother, Alex, who recently published a report on the upcoming food shortage for Chatham House.

Pills, Thrills and Corruption

The New York Review of Books has a good article in the last issue about the financial ties between US academic psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry, and the misinformation, bad research and lies that are propagated as a consequence of these ties.

It points out:

Of the 170 contributors to the most recent edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), ninety-five had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia. Perhaps most important, many members of the standing committees of experts that advise the FDA on drug approvals also have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

It starts off the article with the example of Dr Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital:

Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.

In June, Senator Grassley on the US Senate Finance Committee revealed that drug companies, including those that make drugs he advocates for childhood bipolar disorder, had paid Biederman $1.6 million in consulting and speaking fees between 2000 and 2007.

Another example is Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff, chair of Emory University's department of psychiatry and, along with Schatzberg, coeditor of the influential Textbook of Psychopharmacology.

Nemeroff was the principal investigator on a five-year $3.95 million National Institute of Mental Health grant—of which $1.35 million went to Emory for overhead—to study several drugs made by GlaxoSmithKline. To comply with university and government regulations, he was required to disclose to Emory income from GlaxoSmithKline, and Emory was required to report amounts over $10,000 per year to the National Institutes of Health, along with assurances that the conflict of interest would be managed or eliminated.

But according to Senator Grassley, who compared Emory's records with those from the company, Nemeroff failed to disclose approximately $500,000 he received from GlaxoSmithKline for giving dozens of talks promoting the company's drugs. In June 2004, a year into the grant, Emory conducted its own investigation of Nemeroff's activities, and found multiple violations of its policies. Nemeroff responded by assuring Emory in a memorandum, "In view of the NIMH/Emory/GSK grant, I shall limit my consulting to GSK to under $10,000/year and I have informed GSK of this policy." Yet that same year, he received $171,031 from the company, while he reported to Emory just $9,999—a dollar shy of the $10,000 threshold for reporting to the National Institutes of Health.

The author, Marcia Angell, says:

No one knows the total amount provided by drug companies to physicians, but I estimate from the annual reports of the top nine US drug companies that it comes to tens of billions of dollars a year. By such means, the pharmaceutical industry has gained enormous control over how doctors evaluate and use its own products. Its extensive ties to physicians, particularly senior faculty at prestigious medical schools, affect the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease.

The result of this capture of US psychiatric academia by Big Pharma US consumers are lied to, with academic studies of pharmaceuticals often skewed to get a positive result:

Many drugs that are assumed to be effective are probably little better than placebos, but there is no way to know because negative results are hidden. One clue was provided six years ago by four researchers who, using the Freedom of Information Act, obtained FDA reviews of every placebo-controlled clinical trial submitted for initial approval of the six most widely used antidepressant drugs approved between 1987 and 1999—Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor. They found that on average, placebos were 80 percent as effective as the drugs. The difference between drug and placebo was so small that it was unlikely to be of any clinical significance. The results were much the same for all six drugs: all were equally ineffective. But because favorable results were published and unfavorable results buried (in this case, within the FDA), the public and the medical profession believed these drugs were potent antidepressants.

Big Pharma and academic psychiatry is increasingly getting busted for this corruption. Senator Grassley on the US Senate Finance Committee has exposed several academics for mis-reporting their financial ties to Pharma, and several investigative journalists have also covered cases where Big Pharma has admitted lying about the effects of drugs. Melody Peterson of the New York Times, for example, has followed the example of Neurontin, made by Pfizer:

Neurontin, which was initially approved only for a very narrow use—to treat epilepsy when other drugs failed to control seizures. By paying academic experts to put their names on articles extolling Neurontin for other uses—bipolar disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, restless legs syndrome, hot flashes, migraines, tension headaches, and more—and by funding conferences at which these uses were promoted, the manufacturer was able to parlay the drug into a blockbuster, with sales of $2.7 billion in 2003. The following year, in a case covered extensively by Petersen for the Times, Pfizer pleaded guilty to illegal marketing and agreed to pay $430 million to resolve the criminal and civil charges against it.

It's an excellent piece, though it ends by bigging up a book by Christopher Lane called Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became A Sickness. This book argues that social anxiety was invented by Big Pharma in the 1990s to sell anti-social anxiety drugs. Big Pharma, Lane argues, was essentially medicalizing normal shyness.

It's certainly true that Big Pharma saw a great opportunity with social phobia, and marketed the hell out of it. Nonetheless, as someone who was diagnosed with social anxiety, and who knows many other people who have suffered from it, I can assure Lane that it is a real condition, one that is extremely life-inhibiting and unpleasant, and worthy of treatment. I say that as someone who never took drugs for the condition, who never saw drug marketing about the condition, and who overcame it without the use of drugs.

It is a real and serious condition, but the stigma in talking about it is quite great, and of course people who suffer from it avoid the public spotlight, so I can well believe it is widely unreported and the real number of sufferers from the condition is greater than we may realize. That's not to say we should all pop beta-blockers. Far from it.

Conversations with Blog

Neale Donald Walsch, the author of the hugely-successful New Age franchise, Conversations with God, has been busted for plagiarism.

He wrote a post on his blog on www.beliefnet.com (the New Age spirituality site owned by Rupert Murdoch) in which he recounted an anecdote where he attended a christmas play at a girls' school and the girls spelled out Christmas Love, with each girl holding up a letter, except the girl holding the M held it upside down, so it spelled out Christ Was Love.

Unfortunately, the anecdote was lifted almost word for word from an article by the writer Chandy Chand, as Walsch has now admitted. He has apologised, sort of:

"All I can say now - because I am truly mystified and taken aback by this - is that someone must have sent it to me over the internet ten years or so ago. Finding it utterly charming and its message indelible, I must have clipped it and pasted it into my file. I have told the story verbally so many times over the years that I had it memorized...and then, somewhere along the way, internalised it as my own experience. I am aghast at how improbable this sounds, even to me, yet I can find now other explanation..."

Well...you could have just nicked it, eh Neale, and tried to pass someone else's work off as your own.

Conversations with God is not a bad book, and even inspiring in its New Age message that we are the divine, we create our own reality. But we don't entirely create our own reality. Or at least, our conscious minds don't. Sometimes, shit happens. You just have to deal with it. The New Age idea that we can wish everything to be perfect and Lo, It Will Be So, is overly optimistic.

I also find myself slightly uncomfortable with the New Age emphasis on spirituality and personal wealth as happy bedfellows. Conversations with God is a great example of this - God assures Neale that it's perfectly OK to be extremely wealthy, that indeed, great wealth is part of spiritual fulfillment.

The book certainly made Walsch extremely wealthy. As did its sequel, and the sequel after that, and the entire New Age franchise that Walsch set up.

You see a similar fusion of spirituality with personal wealth in Paul McKenna. If you listen to the hypnosis CD that comes with McKenna's Change Your Life in Seven Days, there's a rather queasy moment when McKenna says in his slow Aussie drawl: 'Imagine yourself with great personal wealth...see the money flowing towards you...Imagine a truly wealthy you.'

That's the real difference between ancient philosophy and New Age spirituality - in the former, philosophy tries to rise up above materialism. In the latter, material success is taken as part of the blessings of self-realization.

Compulsion

I saw Darren Aronofsky's new film, The Wrestler, last night. I've always been a big fan of his work, from Pi, to Requiem For A Dream. I fell asleep during The Fountain, but then it was the day after a stag party and probably not the best environment. But the guy is wise, spiritually aware.

His films, it seems to me, are often about compulsive behaviour in one form or another. He understands, better than any other film director, the extent to which humans become trapped in repetitive, compulsive and destructive routines, because those routines give them some short-term pay-off, which ultimately stops them from ever getting genuine fulfilment.

The best example of this is Requiem For A Dream, which creates a whole aesthetic of compulsiveness, via its famous 'hip hop montage' sequences, showing the fetishistic preparation and consumption of drugs - lining up the coke, snorting the coke, eyes dilated by the coke - repeated over and over.



Speeding up the various drug events and putting them altogether strips away the individual contexts in which the behaviour pattern hides, de-humanizes it, and exposes the sheer repetition and compulsion of it. In the words of Hot Chip: 'over and over and over and over and over / like a monkey with a miniature cymbal / the joy of repetition really is in you'.

Compulsive behaviour is most obvious with drugs, but humans can be trapped in all sorts of destructive behaviour patterns. The Simpsons, for example, had a homage to Daronofsky in which Homer Simpson becomes addicted to a high calorie rib burger.



In The Wrestler, we meet two forms of self-destructive compulsion, in the two main characters, Randy the Wrestler and Pam the Stripper. Both of them are addicted to their public personae - the sexy stripper working it on stage to the wolf-whistles of the men, and the hard-boiled wrestler winning in the ring to the cheers of his adolescent fans.

These public personae have their cheap pay-offs - the desire or adulation of strangers - but they ultimately stop Randy and Pam from achieving real fulfilment, from engaging in genuine intimacy. But they're both too addicted to the routine, they can't step down off stage. They are trapped in a pattern.

Breaking out of such patterns usually means having the strength to do without the short-term pay-off in the hope and expectation of more fulfilling pay-offs in the future. So much of life comes down to the ability to defer short-term gratification in favour of longer-term pay-offs. You can call it the Protestant work ethic or whatever, but in some ways, it's what distinguishes homo sapiens from other animals.

The tragedy is that this ability is only marginally developed in us. We get addicted to our delusions, addicted to our own legends, and end up killing ourselves for them.

Epicurus on the bus

So Richard Dawkins, Darwinian scientist and crusader for atheism, has launched a campaign to spread the atheist message via bus billboards (see above). The ads read: 'There is probably no God. So stop worrying and get on with your lives.'

This is a reversal to Epicurean tactics. The Epicureans believed a primary cause of unhappiness was worrying what happened to the soul after death, so they would contemplate the vast emptiness and atomic randomness of the cosmos as a means of therapy. They even tried to spread their message via large roadside adverts.

All well and good in the 3rd century BC. But surely there's better ways to spend time and money in 21st century London, the most secular and materialist society that ever existed, where hardly anyone believes in God, and even fewer sit around worrying about the afterlife? Sounds like evangelical atheism to me.

Stoicism meets Halo 3

There are some talented people out there...

My first YouTube video!

Nothing fancy, but here's my first YouTube video, the products of an hour or so of messing around on IMovie, mainly working out how to put pictures, music and titles together. Tomorrow, maybe I'll do one with some video footage. Martin frickin' Scorcese.

Street philosophy

"You don't learn philosophy in the lecture hall. You learn it on the street. The rest is bullshit, and you know it."

Socrates (attrib.)

The best way to think of philosophy is not as a noun, but as a present participle: philosophizing. There is no such thing as philosophy, there is only philosophizing.

Philosophizing, in the Hellenic concept, means an active wrestling with one’s conventional opinions and perceptions. It is something we can practice everywhere and at all times – on the bus, in a restaurant, having breakfast, going to bed. It is something we should try to weave into the fabric of our daily life.

We need to bring philosophy out of the lecture hall and show its practical benefits to ordinary people. At the moment, people in Britain and Russia don’t have many places to turn when tragedy hits them.

Increasingly few people in western societies believe in Christianity. We try to turn to eastern faiths, like Buddhism or Yoga, but these always feel a little exotic, not to say alien.

But what does our own society have to offer, other than the triumph of western science, which presumably means if tragedy hits you, reach for the anti-depressants.

What our own society has to offer is philosophy – not just Stoic philosophy, but Epicurean, Aristotelian, Platonic. Greek philosophy is like a rich well at the centre of our culture, which has become grown over and lost from sight, but the water in the well is just as clear and life-sustaining as ever.

If European culture is a forest, then Greek philosophy is the secret well that has enabled that forest to grow over the last two thousand years.

And it is our inheritance too, not just as Europeans, but as human beings. The object of inquiry in Greek philosophy is not the European mind, but the human mind. Greek philosophy gives us a way of understanding the mind, learning how to become attentive to it, and how to free it of emotional suffering and bring it into harmony with reality.

And those lessons are just as applicable for people living outside Europe. Indeed, other great cultures, such as Buddhism or Taoism, came to very similar conclusions and cognitive techniques about a hundred years before Greek philosophy.

It excites me that the insights of Greek philosophy are gradually returning to the mainstream of our societies, in part through the success of cognitive behavioural psychology, which uses the techniques and insights of Stoic, Epicurean and Aristotelian psychotherapies.

But a lot of work still needs to be done to improve the reputation of philosophy, which has grown dusty and unkempt from being shut up in libraries and lecture halls.

With this in mind, I decided to carry out an experiment last Sunday, and go down to Speakers Corner and do some street philosophizing. I partly wanted to do it just to practice public speaking. Plus I thought it would be fun.

I set off bright and early on Sunday morning, walking through Hyde Park carrying a yellow bucket, for me to stand on. I arrived at Speakers Corner but there was no one there at all, just a handful of middle-aged skin-heads who looked like they were planning a Nazi rally.

Disappointed, I headed off home with my bucket, and decided to try my luck later in the day.
At about four o’clock I came back from various travels around the city, tired and in need of a cup of tea. I didn’t really feel like going back to Speakers Corner and subjecting myself to possible humiliation. But it was an exercise, it would be good for me. So I picked up the bucket, and set off once more.

This time, as I approached Speakers Corner, I could see it was busy. It was a glorious summer’s day, and the sun shone down on around 500 people.

There were about five speakers surrounded by perhaps 80 people each – two of them radical Muslims, predictably, shouting loudly and angrily in Arabic, while a crowd entirely made up of young Arabic men listened and cheered, no doubt while they were cursing the British government.

Another fellow, with a long white beard, was standing on a ladder and speaking to a large crowd about Jesus. I heard him say ‘So what if I do look like Father Christmas?’ There were some people walking around him babbling ‘Jesus loves you, Jesus loves you’ over and over.

I walked to the outer rim of the crowds, and found a spot from which to observe. Opposite me was a man wearing a large purple hat with horns coming out of it. I knew this guy – he claimed to be an alien. Every Sunday he turned up, stood on his ladder, made jokes, and tried to get people’s attention. What did he do the rest of the week, I wondered?

I decided I might as well get to it. But how does one begin? Does one release a flare? Ring a bell? Unveil a large sign saying ‘show beginning’? I decided simply to stand on my bucket. So I got up on it. Oh momentous event! There I was on my bucket. A martyr for philosophy. A stylite, if you will.

No one paid me much notice. A few people walked by, looked at me standing on my bucket, and walked on. I heard a guy snigger to his girlfriend, ‘look, that guy’s just standing on a bucket!’ I felt rather foolish.

Then a person strode confidently up to me, and said ‘what is the subject of your talk today, Mr Speaker?’ Ah ha! A customer! ‘Well, I, it’s Stoic philosophy.’ And we were off. I explained to him the basic tenets of Stoic philosophy and their practical benefits, he nodded and said ‘right, so it’s like cognitive behavioural therapy’. “Yes, exactly! Well, actually it’s more that that, because Stoics also believe that all our minds are connected in one giant network, called the Logos.’

The guy wasn’t so into that, so we disputed about that for a bit, with him insisting I had not a shred of evidence to prove that all our minds were connected in a giant network of consciousness, and that I was suffering from delusions. Anyway, he accepted the first part of my argument, but didn’t seem that transformed by it.

By this time about ten other people had arrived and gathered round my bucket, and we were off. For the next hour and a half, I disputed, philosophized, and extrapolated. What struck me about it most was what a participatory experience it was. The people who gathered round me all instinctively grasped the Stoic ideas I was outlining. There was this small cockney guy in front of me, and he was nodding vigorously, and saying ‘exactly, it’s like the mind is a muscle, an’ you gotta exercise the muscle to make it grow, innit?’

You could take this to mean that the British public, or at least the Speakers Corner crowd, is unusually educated and philosophically-minded. This would make sense – they do turn up at the Corner and philosophize every Sunday. But I think, also, that Stoicism simply feels natural to us. Its ideas don’t seem alien or abstract. A lot of them are simply common sense.‘We know all this stuff already, innit, we jus’ forgotten it!’ as the cockney put it.

Because the people around me were so participatory, so eager to get involved, ask questions, dispute and object, it was actually very easy to stand there and talk. It would have been much harder to give an uninterrupted talk for two hours. As it was, when one point died away, someone else would ask another question or raise a point.

Two other things struck me. Firstly, I was struck that people seemed very literate, fluent even, in philosophical and mystical concepts. Some tall guy wandered up and was disputing with me about going beyond duality, and other such highfalutin mystical concepts, but then as soon as the cockney interrupted him, he got very grumpy and angry.

It struck me that westerners have become very well-read and well-versed in mysticism and philosophy, but we have forgotten how to put it into practice. We read rather than practicing. We think being mystical is like learning a language, learning the concepts. But it’s not. So in fact, people were all too ready to agree with me, to nod vigorously and say ‘yeah, that’s it, exactly’, but then walk off unchallenged and unchanged to their usual lives.

The other thing that struck me is that street philosophizing has its dangers. You are out there in the street, beyond any institutions or confines. Even Aristotle and Plato had their academies, their institutions with strict entry requirements.

The danger is, in the spiritually starved and tradition-less environment of the twenty first century, the street philosopher becomes seen as some sort of faith healer or guru. People start looking at him or her with big round eyes, drinking in his every word, switching off their rational and sceptical brains and going into awe mode.

There was one boy like this, an Arab boy, and he stood in front of me and listened and watched without blinking. And eventually he said ‘you say this will help me? It will help me with depression? I would like. Where I go? You help me?’

I blinked. ‘I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m not even a psychologist. I can help you find a place where you can get CBT, if you want. I can suggest some books you could read.’
‘I not read good.’
At this the tall grumpy mystic said ‘you should meet him, and help him.’
‘I…er…well, here’s my email. I will try to help you find a CBT therapist.’
‘Maybe you could help me?’
‘I’m not trained.’

That’s the danger. I’m just trying to introduce some basic philosophical concepts. I have absolutely no claim to any special insight or virtue. The tall mystic guy said to me ‘I feel that your words are exciting and enervating, but then you leave us in limbo. We don’t have anywhere to go.’

But philosophy is not a movement with a leader. We have enough Eduard Limonov types, people who feed off the adulation of others, who thrive on the bloody sacrifices that the young offer to them. Narcissists. But philosophy is no such guru activity. It is something an individual can only practice on himself or herself, using his reason.

It was a fun afternoon, and it felt wonderful to discuss philosophy, the subjects most dear to my heart, with complete strangers in my home city. It felt natural. This was civil society in action – citizens gathering together to discuss what is the wisest way to live.

I think you have to be careful, when you stand on a bucket, that you are not putting yourself up on a pedestal. You have to be careful you don’t make promises to others, don’t accept if desperate and meaning-hungry people offer the gift of themselves up to you. But with that caution in mind, I look forward to the next time.

California surf 'n' stoicism

For the last two weeks, I've been in California, on holiday. First real holiday I've taken in four years, and it was great.

I started off in San Diego, trying to learn some surfing at Pacific Beach. I did OK, made some progress, and got some exercise after six months of eating junk food and hardly exercising at all. It felt great splashing around / falling off my board in the sea, with all this wildlife around - one morning, there was a seal playing on my left, fish underfoot, pelicans flying overhead, and in the distance, three grey whales blowing water.

The weather was amazing. They call it winter there, but at times it was over 20 degrees centigrade, which is hotter than it usually is in the UK in summer. And the sunsets were out of this world, just jaw-droppingly beautiful.

While in San Diego, I went to stay with Erik Wiegardt, am important figure in the Stoic community. He set up the Stoic yahoo group, as well as the Stoic Registry (www.thestoicregistry.org), whose monthly newsletter I edit. He and his wife Amielle were kind enough to have me to stay, and we had some good chats about where stoicism is going today and how we might be able to help it develop.

While there, I sent off a couple of pitches for my planned book on Stoicism to US agents. I think California in particular is ripe for the Stoic message.

After a week or so staying at the Crystal Pier hotel, in a beach hut with the ocean in front of me, I took the Pacific Coaster amtrak train up to Huntington Beach, Surf City itself, to have a look and a surf. I wasn't that taken by it - it had all these oil rigs just off shore.

Then I took the train up to Anaheim, and went to Disneyland for a day, which was surreal animist fun. The whole Disney trip is so animist - dancing candles, marching broomsticks, singing bears, zombie pirates. All the folklore of the world has been taken, recycled, and merchandised. Smart fellow.

Then I carried on up to LA, staying at the London on Sunset Strip, caught up with an old friend, and did alot of shopping.

Now back to the UK for work, deadlines and tax returns.

Still, I'll keep the memory of the sun, surf and stoicism alive. Wouldn't it be amazing, to have a California Institute of Stoicism, where students studied in the morning and surfed in the afternoon?

Is Laura there?

I had a real David Lynch moment this morning. I'm staying in Los Angeles for a couple of days, at a hotel off Sunset Boulevard. I get up at 7 this morning, tired and a bit hungover, to go get some breakfast.

As I walk down the street, I see a beautiful girl in jogging pants and a hoodie, standing next to a pay-phone. As I walk past, she approaches me, and says 'excuse me, can i ask for your help?' Sure, I say. 'Can you make a phone call for me? It would be better if its a man's voice.'

Im a bit hungover and shes fit, so I roll with it. No probs, I say. She puts coins into the machine. Her hands are shaking. 'Im nervous', she says. Then she dials a number, and hands me the phone. 'Ask if she's with him', she says. 'If he says who, say Laura'.

I listen to the phone ring. It rings. Then it goes to an answer machine. I hand her back the phone and say, sorry, its an answer machine. 'Ok', she says. 'Thanks for your help'. And I walk off to breakfast.

Weird, huh?