Philosophy is dead

Or so the New York Times would have you believe. In an opinion piece on April 6, columnist David Brooks declared we were facing 'the end of philosophy', as cognitive scientists realised the extent to which our moral judgements are guided by our emotions, rather than our reason.

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.

In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, “The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.”

So Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and about 95% of the canon of Western philosophy is a waste of time. We can't reason our way to happiness and virtue. Instead, we should embrace our emotional intuitions about the world.

Well, up to a point.

It's true that cognitive scientists are now arguing that many of our judgements about the world are automatic, non-conscious, and guided by the limbic system in the brain. The limbic system is one of the oldest bits of the brain, and it guides our emotional or 'gut' reactions to things, like desire, shame, revulsion, euphoria, and so on.

We couldn't sit around and philosophize about every external thing that forces itself onto our attention. We'd end up never doing anything and, in our original home of the African savannah, we'd quickly be eaten. So our brains developed to make rapid, automatic assessments of our environment.

However, sometimes our automatic assessments go wrong. They gets out of synch with our external environment, and consistently gives us wrong information. If you're depressed, for example, your automatic assessments of the world are consistently over-pessimistic. If you're in the grip of an anxiety disorder, you consistently perceive or 'feel' danger even when you're in non-threatening environments.

This is where philosophy can help. Socrates taught that you can take even very habitual, automatic responses to the world, and bring the light of reason to bear on them. You can ask 'is this really a wise way to perceive the world? Does it make sense? Is it helpful?'

Then you can gradually replace a habitual, automatic, way of evaluating the world with a wiser, more philosophical way of perceiving it. So philosophy can bring your mind into a more harmonious relationship with your environment, when your automatic limbic system has got out of synch with the world.

This has now been proven by cognitive scientists. The most successful and evidence-backed modern therapy - cognitive behavioural therapy - has shown how unconscious emotional disorders like depression and anxiety can be healed through a process of rational self-enquiry.

The patient, in CBT, learns to become aware of how their automatic evaluations of the world may have become misleading and irrational. Then they work to challenge those automatic views, and to replace them with more rational ways of interpreting the world.

It doesn't come easy - it's a long process of repetition and practice, until the new way of seeing the world sinks in and itself becomes automatic. So while the limbic system often guides our reason, our reason can also, with alot of effort, sometimes shape our limbic system.

And what did the inventor of CBT, Professor Aaron T. Beck, call his method of rational self-enquiry? The Socratic method.

There's life in the old dog yet.

Philosophy and CBT: Donald Robertson interview

Here's an interview I did with Donald Robertson, the head of the Hypnosynthesis school in London, and the author of an excellent new book called Philosophy and CBT. We discuss the influence of Greek philosophy on modern cognitive behavioural therapy.

It's only part of the whole interview, which I've been intending to post in segments. If you click on twice on the screen, you can see the higher resolution version on the YouTube site.

The Poetics of Seediness

I'm reading Graham Greene's Brighton Rock for the first time - it's actually the first time I've read any Greene, and I'm really loving it. Greene is a descendant of a tradition arguably invented by Charles Baudelaire, which I call the poetics of seediness. It's an attempt to find a poetry in the seedy materialism of modern, urban mass society.

Baudelaire began the tradition with Les Fleurs Du Mal, which TS Eliot said made it possible to write a poetry of modern life. What Baudelaire did was to contrast the banal materialism of the modern city, with its gas lamps and gutters and shopping malls, with the heroic soul of the artist.

It is like a collision between the seediness and banality of the modern, with the ancient, haughty soul of the artist, which finds itself in exile in modern life. The artist, alone among the grubby contented masses, has a sense of heaven and hell, of the heights and depths which the soul is capable of, rather than the narrow tremulations of the modern soul, which only knows a simulacrum of passion when shedding tears watching Britain's Got Talent.

The tone is one of aristocratic revulsion against mass society, the artist is a king in exile, a forgotten descendant of priests and shamans, who finds himself usurped by economists, advertisers and two-bit journalists. There is a sort of gnostic horror at the cheery materialism of modern life, at the sheer amount of junk created by it.

But at the same, there's a fascination with modern life, with its sheer vulgarity, and its complete bathetic difference with everything the poet holds dear. And there's a sort of wallowing in the vulgarity of modernity, and also an acute sense of the ridiculousness of the poet's spiritual ambitions, set against the banality of modern life (this particularly in TS Eliot).

So Baudelaire invented it. Flaubert developed it, far more than Dickens. Flaubert has the necessary aristocratic revulsion from the coarse bourgeois sensibility of modern life - Madame Bovary expresses it well, particularly the scene where her Romantic interlude with her lover are set against the coarse backdrop of a municipal agricultural fair:

‘We, now, why did we meet? What turn of fate decreed it? Was it not that, like two rivers gradually converging across the intervening distance, our own natures propelled us towards one another?’
He took her hand, and she did not withdraw it.
‘General prize!’ said the Chairman.
‘Just now for instance, when I came to call on you…’
‘Monsieur Bizet of Quincampoix.’
‘…how could I know that I should escort you here?’
‘Seventy francs!’
‘And I’ve stayed with you, because I couldn’t tear myself away from you, though I’ve tried a hundred times.’
‘Manure!’

After Flaubert, Conrad developed the poetics, particularly in The Secret Agent, which was so different from previous novels, so modern, precisely in its seediness: where previous heroes of novels had been dashing soldiers or heroic women, Conrad's anti-hero was the proprietor of a porn book-shop.

TS Eliot, of course, is the real maestro of seediness. He picks up all the vulgarities of modern life with a ghoulish glee, and sets against it his own lonely, resentful shamanic soul:

When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said—
I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you.
And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said.
Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose if you can't.
But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be alright, but I've never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don't want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

And so we come to Brighton Rock, where the person who expresses this revulsion at the coarse materialism of modern life is, funnily enough, Pinkie, the murdering thug anti-hero. Greene, for reasons known only to him, chooses to give the vicious gangster a gnostic soul, that hates modern life for all its narrow junk:

'We got some presents for you, Pinkie', Cubitt said, 'furniture for the home', and indicated two little obscene objects beside the beer on the washstand - the Brighton stationers were full of them - a tiny doll's commode in the shape of a radio set labelled 'the smallest A.1 two-valve receiving set in the world', and a mustard-pot shaped like a lavatory seat with the legend, 'For me and my girl'. It was like a return of all the horror he had ever felt, the hideous loneliness of his innocence.'

So this is the world view of the poetics of seediness: Our souls are trapped beneath the junk of modern life. They are trapped into parroting the narrow emotions prescribed us by pop culture. They are trapped by the lowliness of the spiritual aspirations of our leaders, our artists, our selves. The common consolation is this: well, if there is no God, there is at least the FA Cup. If we are not angels, we are at least comfortable.

The poetics of seediness is the story of the artist's soul struggling against this, and finding some sort of beauty in the struggle.

It is really a Modernist poetics, aristocratic, snobbish, in some ways hating mass culture. It didn't really flourish after the Second World War, when literature took a more Joycean take, of embracing modernity in all its junk and demotic vitality.

But I still like it.

Childish things

I'm in Faro tonight, on the south coast of Portugal, staying the night in a hotel on the harbour, after a great wedding of my friend Mike and his bride Anna. It was in a town called Serpa, about two hours north from the coast, where Anna grew up.

It's a fairly small town, only 10,000 people, with sun-bleached squares and sleepy stray dogs sniffing at doors. At the dinner, I was sitting next to a young guy who's in charge of the Serpa theatre. I have to say I envied his existence, in a small community where his life and work really matter. He said he liked the idea of London life - 'being connected to the big world'.

Yes, well, I don't feel that connected, though I did get a comment from the famous Guido Fawkes yesterday, on a blog post I wrote about 'smeargate'. That's about as connected to the big world as I get.

Guido's the blogger who exposed that whole sorry scandal, which sadly involves Derek Draper, the former spin-doctor who left government in disgrace a few years back over a lobbying scandal, and re-invented himself as a psychotherapist. He invented the phrase 'politics of well-being', by the way.

I met Draper at Demos two years ago, when I was talking to them about setting up a programme on the politics of well-being. He seemed friendly enough. A pity he got dragged back into the dirty games of power, like a moth to the flame...

His name is mud now, with his beloved Labour party completely disowning him. But let's not forget he helped to bring in the Improved Access for Therapies policy, which will hugely increase the number of therapists working for the NHS. That's a genuine achievement.

Anyway, back to Serpa. Anna's father is a short, stocky man who used to be a bullfighter. In Portuguese bull-fighting, they don't kill the bull - instead, at the end of the fight, one plucky fellow walks slowly towards the bull, then when the bull charges, he jumps on the bulls horns, and the rest of his crew pile up behind him until they stop the bull in its tracks. Anna's dad was that plucky fellow. Mike, meanwhile, is a very keen ultimate frisbee player. Wonder what the dad makes of that.

The service was, thankfully, Anglican - I was grimly prepared for a four hour Latin epic. One of the readings was St Paul's Letter to the Corinthians:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child. Now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things.

I thought of my friends who have got married over the last two or three years, and indeed, they do seem to have grown up, to have changed, become more serious. I, meanwhile, have yet to put away childish things.

It's strange going to weddings in your early thirties. I went to a wedding two weeks ago, and I was one of about four single people there. It was slightly better yesterday, but only just. I spent about an hour trying to chat up one of the few unmarried women there, only to be told by Mike she was a lesbian.

The guests included a lot of people I was at school and university with, including some I haven't seen for a decade or so. I found myself humming Mad World: 'All around I see familiar faces / Worn out faces', but in fact, people seem to have aged well, and I found them all as charming and fun as ever. My school produced some likeable people.

Most of them are married. I got mixed reports about its blessings. One newly-wed seems to be quite startled by it - he says his wife is far more neurotic now than she ever was in the five years they were dating before they got hitched. On the other hand, I got a lift with another couple, from Faro to Serpa, and the wife called back to London to check on their five-month-old baby (it was the first time they'd left him for the night), then after the call, her hand quietly went over to her husband's hand, and held it. It was very beautiful, and I felt a lonely old bachelor in the back.

Another couple showed me photos of their four-year-old girl, who looked charming. I think it will get harder and harder, not having a family, when my friends' children are all around that age - at the moment, most of them are a year old or so, and there's not much to envy in having a kid at that age, frankly. They just cry, eat and shit. When they're three or four, however, they're little personalities, saying funny things and being amusing. You get to see their personalities develop. I'm sure I'll be very jealous.

It's funny though - I'm sure half the pleasure of having children is that, actually, you get to be a child again, to enjoy the pleasure of childhood play. So in fact, when you're married, you actually dust off your 'childish things' and use them again. What did St Paul know, anyway.

I was struck, this evening, by the words 'bride' and 'groom'. It's never hit me before, but where do those words come from? Is it implying that the lady is a horse, who when she gets married takes the bridle, to be led around by the groom? So marriage is, what, the equivalent of breaking in a filly?

It sadly rained yesterday during the wedding, but it was a beautiful, hot day today, and I enjoyed the long (long) bus drive from Serpa to Faro. It took an hour and a half in the car on the way up, but a mere four and a half hours on the way back down, on the 'Express bus'.

Still, it was a lovely drive, winding around the green fields, past the horses grazing and nuzzling each other, past a falcon soaring over a field, past a stork in its metre-wide nest, past the swifts breaking over the long grass, the clouds watching over us, the sun bleeding out into the great wide sky. How wonderful it is to be alive.

I felt particularly good to be alive because I thought I had cancer last week. I'm a complete hypochondriac - this is the second time I've thought I had cancer this year. My GP, Doctor Malik, is beginning to smirk when I walk through the door. Anyway, once again my fears were proved wrong. Hooray, I'm healthy! That's the good thing about being a hypochondriac - the constant fears of your imminent demise mean you gain a constantly-renewed appreciation for existence.

On the bus drive down, I listened to Calvin Harris' new song, which is great (video below), and to the latest edition of In Our Time, about Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which features my old tutor from Worcester College, Oxford - David Bradshaw. Good to hear his voice again, I have completely lost touch with him.

The discussion reminded me what a fine book it is. David pointed out that, in many ways, it is more utopian then dystopian: Huxley was genuinely worried about the collapse of European civilisation, and thought society needed to become much more controlled, including controlling population through eugenics.

I wonder if climate change will force us to live in more controlled societies. If the population of the UK rises to 100mn, as we take in climate refugees, and we are all crammed into mega-cities, and forced to control our eating, reproduction, travel and energy consumption, how would we cope with that level of social complexity, without serious outbreaks of crime and violence? Perhaps state-sponsored soma is the answer. We can all sit back, shoot up, and think of England.

Well, enough ponderings, here's Calvin Harris:

Some thoughts...

...in no particular order.

1) Am reading Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene. If the closest parallel for what the UK will be like in an era of climate change and scarcity is war-time London, then I figure we should all be reading Greene, particularly Brighton Rock and The Third Man.

Why? Because an era of rationing will also be an era of gangsters and racketeers. Shortages and quotas will lead to huge global black-markets in energy, water, food and other commodities, and the rise, at the local and international levels, of new Pinkies (he's the gangster anti-hero of Brighton Rock), who control the flows.

2) Philosophers like Plato have tended to juxtapose the body with the soul, and implied that to free the latter we have to detach ourselves from the former. A physical existence, including love-making, is supposedly opposed to a spiritual existence, according to Plato and his ilk.

I disagree. Nothing makes me feel more that our bodies are souls in motion than being in bed with a naked woman. Love-making is two souls in intimate conversation.

3) The next Google, the next Microsoft, will be an IT company that makes software for the human brain. We will be able to download applications that run directly to our neural systems, giving us real-time information feeds. Tribal identity will be defined by the operating systems that we have. Memory crashes and viruses will be fatal.

4) One of the best ideas of the Stoics was alienation - the idea that we make ourselves slaves (which is what alienation literally means, from the Latin alienus, for slave) to other people by giving a fuck what they think of us.

Modern asceticism

The Archbishop of Canterbury used his Easter address to call for a renaissance of Monasticism in the West, as an antidote to the borrow-consume model of industrial capitalism.

"The present financial crisis has dealt a heavy blow to the idea that human fulfilment can be thought about just in terms of material growth and possession," he told the congregation at Canterbury Cathedral.

"Accepting voluntary limitation to your acquisitiveness, your sexual appetite, your freedom of choice doesn't look so absurd after all as a path to some sort of stability and mutual care. We should be challenging ourselves and our church to a new willingness to help this witness to flourish and develop."

I think he has a point.

The dominant economic model all around the world is based on promoting consumption, which means both governments and corporates trying to increase consumer demand - trying to make us want more, in other words. More goods, more, food, more housing, more travel.

This is unsustainable environmentally. We're fast using up our natural resources, and heading for a food crisis. As a species, we will have to learn to limit our desires - to travel less, to eat less (and particularly to waste less), to learn to live according to the limits of natural law.

We should also ask ourselves why we are on this planet? Is it purely to maximize our own pleasure-seeking? Or is human consciousness really the unique aspect of human existence, the unique difference with the rest of the animal world?

Perhaps the reason the Earth has seen fit to produce us is precisely because of our consciousness, our capacity for self-awareness and awareness of our environment.

If that is the case, as I believe it is, then our task as humans is to develop our consciousness to its highest level, which is exactly what monasticism was intended to do. Monks were (and are) spiritual athletes, the flower of human consciousness, who use spiritual exercises (or askesis, in ancient Greek) to develop their minds and train their self-awareness and self-control, just as modern athletes train their bodies in the gym.

Asceticism came to be a dirty word during the 18th century Enlightenment attack on monasticism, where it came to have connotations of sexual repression, ignorance and fanaticism.

It can certainly be warped into this. But at its heart, at its origin, it is simply the idea of training the mind to its greatest capacity for self-awareness and self-control, which also means making it as aware as possible of its obligations to and interdependence with the rest of the world.

That is what asceticism literally means: exercise.

As a culture, we are increasingly absorbed in exercising our bodies, in making the 'body beautiful'.

But we are also beginning to learn that we can train our minds, and make ourselves happier, in part by wanting less.

The modern psychotherapy and self-help movements are now full of such mental exercises. 'Seven steps to happiness', 'Training in the Mind Gym', 'How to Change Your Thoughts' and so on, are really asceticism, in the sense of spiritual exercises, for the masses.

The cognitive exercises they teach invariably come from Stoicism, which developed the idea of askesis, before the Christian Church picked up the idea, and housed it in monasteries.

Is there not, then, an argument for having centres that train virtuosos, top athletes, in these spiritual exercises, in part so that they can then teach them to the rest of us?

Oh Dearism

The highlight of last night’s Newswipe - Charlie Brooker’s rather weak British answer to the Daily Show in the US - was a brief video by Adam Curtis, the maker of such brilliant documentaries as The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares.

Curtis, in a typically bold narrative, argued that the hippy counterculture had changed the way we see global events, leading us to see situations like the famine in Ethiopia or the Kosovo War through the simplistic hippy framework of innocent and heroic individuals versus corrupt political systems.

The global ’solution’, in this hippy framework, is for direct aid that side-steps corrupt political frameworks - the Blue Peter aid project to Biafra in 1969 launched this, and Live Aid was the culmination of it.

But the simplistic vision broke down, he argued, during the Hutu / Tutsi wars of the 1990s - first the Tutsis were portrayed by the western media as the innocent heroes, but then the Tutsi massaces of Hutus, and the ensuing civil war, showed the story to be much more politically complex, with no obvious ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’.

But the media can’t handle such complexity, so the result is we’re shown repeated images of evil and suffering, without any political framework in which to comprehend it. The end is ‘oh dearism’ - the attitude of a depressed hippy.

It really reminds me of the western world’s response (including my response at the time) to the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine: kids in tents and good-looking rebel politicians standing up to corrupt political leaders, what’s not to like?

Then the Orange leaders spend the next five years arguing and fighting, and the country descends into a major economic crisis. Oh dear.

South Wales, the best for drugs

Apparently South Wales GPs are giving out anti-depressants like they're going out of fashion. The BBC found that one GP was prescribing anti-depressants to one in every ten patients who visited the practice.

I like those odds.