The resilience laboratory

I've spent an enjoyable weekend reading Charles Emmerson's Future History of the Arctic. Charles, a friend of Global Dashboard's, looks at the opening up of the Arctic and the scramble for its natural resources among the great powers of the North, and puts it into the context of the region's history, from the heroic age of 19th century explorers like Nansen and Amundsen, to the present slightly less heroic age of Gazprom and Statoil.

He's a great generalist, by which I mean he really knows his foreign policy, but he's also able to bring in the cultural and literary history of the North Pole, to talk about how it resonates as a symbol and myth in different people's narratives.

One of the things that most interested me in the book is the idea, found in the early chapter on Norway's great Arctic explorers, that the polar regions are somehow a testing ground for character, a laboratory for resilience. Emmerson quotes Fritjof Nansen, the charismatic explorer, and in some ways the father of the Norwegian nation: 'deliverance will not come from the rushing, noisy centres of civilization; it will come from the lonely places'.

This phrase sounds like something one would hear from a hermit monk of the Dark Ages, one of those hardy souls who ventured into the wilderness to found monasteries, battle demons, and push forward the boundaries of civilization.

Perhaps explorers are, in some sense, the secular hermit-saints of our time. They put their minds and bodies through unbelievable austerities, in order to push forward the barriers of civiliation, and also to test their spirits, to see what humans can endure, and to see what they encounter.

We are curious as to whether explorers, when confronted with the worst that nature can throw at us, have any sense of a benevolent deity behind all that natural hostility. Some do. Shackleton, for example, speaks of the constant sense of a fourth man walking beside the party of three who walked across South Georgia to get help during the ill-fated Endurance expedition. He speaks of a 'Divine Companion' who seemed to accompany them:

I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.

Others, however, come out of such experiences with a profound sense of the lack of God and the total indifference of nature to man's sufferings. Joe Simpson, for example, who broke his leg and fell down a deep crevasse while climbing in South America, says in his account of the trip, Touching the Void:

I never thought of some God or some omniscient being that'd lean down and give me help, and I feel, actually, if I had believed that, I just would've stopped and waited for it, and I would've died. And so in a way, that's why that loneliness, I think, came in. I was 25, I was fit, strong, ambitious. I wanted to climb the world and I was dying. There was no afterlife, there's no paradise, there's no heaven. It's just dead. And I really didn't want to lose that.

But whether you believe in God or not, the accounts of such expeditions are inspiring, and useful, because they reveal how the human mind operates in highly adverse situations, and what it takes, mentally, to get through such situations.

In these civilized and well-protected times, we're interested to see how extreme situations change a man, how quickly the mask of civility comes off, and what they reveal about our real selves - how do we treat others, do we keep our own and others' spirits up, do we help the weak and sick or leave them, do we shirk our duties, do we give up? These are not abstract ethical questions in those parts of the world.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard went on the winter journey to gather Emperor penguin eggs during the Scott expedition to the South Pole. Why gather penguin eggs? Well, why not. Secular sainthood, lacking in God and the Devil, needs an excuse to put itself through the austerities: empire is one excuse, science another. But what is really being tested is not penguin eggs but yourself.

The three men on the journey very nearly died, yet still maintained a very English civility and good fellowship with each other. Cherry-Garrard, the only one of the three to survive that expedition, wrote:

In civilization, men are taken at their own valuation because there are so many ways of concealment, and there is so little time, perhaps even so little understanding. Not so down South...These men were gold, pure, shining, unalloyed....Through all those days, and those which were to follow, the worst I suppose in their dark severity that men have ever come through alive, no single hasty or angry word passed their lips.

We're particularly interested in how humans cope when things go wrong - that's why we're much more fascinated by the Scott expedition to the South Pole, where five men died, than in the Amundsen expedition, where no one died. That's why they made a Hollywood film of the Apollo 13 flight, which very nearly claimed the lives of all on board, as opposed to a film of the original moon flight, where nothing went wrong.

We're interested in how the mind works in these laboratories of resilience, and we ask these people to test themselves, find out, and tell us. Then, when we face our own less dramatic trials, we can ask ourselves, what would Dan Snow do?

Mandela's Stoicism

I saw Richard Stengel, editor of Time magazine and the interviewer for Long Walk To Freedom, present his latest book this week at the LSE, called Mandela's Way: Lessons on Life. You can listen to a podcast of the event here.

One thing that particularly struck me was Stengel's description of how Mandela's 27 years in prison made him the man he was. A fine example of 'post-traumatic growth', and reminiscent of the experience of James Stockdale in the Vietcong's POW camp, for you neo-Stoics out there.

Stengel said:

Prison was his great teacher. It burned away a lot of his character, a lot of the youthful impulsiveness and recklessness, and taught him incredible self-control, because in prison that was all he could control. There was no room for outbursts or self-indulgence or lack of discipline.

I used to ask him, over and over, how prison had changed him. This question annoyed him. He either ignored it, went straight to a policy answer, or denied the question. Finally, one day, he said to me in exasperation, ‘I came out mature’.

By maturity, he meant that he learned to control those more youthful impulses, not that he was no longer stung or hurt or angry. It is not that you always know what to do or how to do it, it is that you are able to tamp down your emotions and anxieties that get in the way of seeing the world as it is. You can see through them, and that will see you through.

Mandela thought Africa needed discipline and self-control, and he wanted to be a guiding light for Africa in his own self-conduct. For example, he was extremely punctual. There's an expression in Africa, 'African time', which means very late and casual about appointments. In some ways, he was trying to rebut that racial stereotype. He would look at his watch and sigh 'Africa time' if someone was late for an appointment.

You could compare Mandela to Gandhi or Luther King - all three were trying to rebut racist stereotypes which said their races were incapable of governing themselves, incapable of controlling themselves. And they rebutted this racist stereotype through their own example of self-control and self-government. As Gandhi once put it, 'real home rule is self-rule or self-control.'

By showing that they could control themselves even in such exasperating and provocative conditions, these great leaders took away the excuse that others used to rule them and their people.

Both Mandela and Stockdale, by the way, were inspired in their incarceration by the very Stoic Victorian poem, Invictus. It goes like this:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

On Nature

It was Heraclitus who first articulated the idea in western culture that behind the apparent strife and chaos of Nature lies a divine order, which he called the Logos, which means the Word, or the Law.

Plato and the Stoics developed it: the universe was a beautiful and perfectly symmetrical order, guided by a divine intelligence. Nature was ordered, just and benevolent. Everything was perfectly designed, and designed for man's happiness.

Almost as soon as this idea was invented, it was challenged, by the likes of Callicles, a character in one of Plato's dialogues, who argues there is no higher law in nature than 'might is right', that the strong will always take advantage of the weak, and any appeals to 'cosmic justice' or 'natural law' is either wishful thinking, or something invented by the strong in order to take advantage of the weak.

The great critic of this Stoic-Platonic view of Nature, in the modern age, is the film director Werner Herzog. So many of his films, and his later wildlife documentaries, are really challenges to the view that Nature is ordered, morally just, and benevolent towards human endeavour.

In his work, Nature is amoral, obscene, brutal, and unremittingly hostile towards human endeavour or human pretensions to moral dignity. Against its savage backdrop, civilization appears more and more an insane pantomime.

In his documentary Grizzly Man, he profiles a self-appointed 'bear-whisperer', a man who claimed to have a deep affinity with grizzly bears, and Herzog shows how insane it is to anthropomorphize nature, to think that savage creatures like bears give a damn about us or have any sort of moral affinity with us. Of course, the man is eaten by a bear at the end of the documentary. As Herzog puts it in the film: 'I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder.'

Here is he is talking about the jungle, during the shooting of Fitzcorraldo:

Online CBT

Check out the video for FearFighter, the online CBT programme provided by the NHS for people suffering from anxiety disorders. I love the actors involved - it's like an episode of Casualty!

But here's the question - why the hell is the programme closed to those with a password? I mean, WTF? Provide it to everyone!

'Age of Stoicism' dead, says new report

This from the Guardian:

Britain is turning into a nation of pill-poppers as people become increasingly unwilling to tolerate even the slightest discomfort, according to new research.

The study finds that, in the past two decades, the number of prescribed medicines dispensed per person has risen from eight a year to more than 16. Its author, Professor Joan Busfield, said the age of "stoicism" was dead and claimed that Britain was becoming more like France, with its "long-established tradition of taking medicines to heal problems".

In her paper, A Pill for Every Ill, which is published in the current Social Science & Medicine, Busfield lays part of the blame on the pharmaceutical industry. She finds evidence of:

■ "disease-mongering", with some companies helping to construct new disease categories to expand their markets;

■ industry researchers who ghost-write papers before persuading academics to put their names to them;

■ drug companies "intensively marketing" to doctors by sponsoring conferences, turning up at surgeries with free samples and giving away pens, mugs and Post-it notes.

Busfield, who is professor of sociology at the University of Essex, talks of the industry's "control of the science", with evidence that trials sponsored by drug companies tend to deliver more favourable results. As for doctors, "even small gifts" influence behaviour, she said. "Doctors have not generally acted as a significant countervailing power in relation to the industry and have largely played the role of handmaiden to its expansionary endeavours."

Busfield argued that doctors were tempted to prescribe unnecessarily because they wanted to help patients and to avoid risk. But the general population was also to blame: "Patients are more demanding than they were. The old idea of being deferential and accepting what you are told has gone."

In terms of the explosion of drugs, she pointed to statins (which lower cholesterol) and antidepressants, but added that the problem was across the board. As for new categories that are now seen as diseases, she mentioned high cholesterol, osteoporosis, sexual dysfunctions and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Busfield added: "I think drugs are being overused. The population is getting healthier and healthier, longevity is increasing, but we are using more and more drugs."

Michael Summers, vice-chairman of the Patients Association, agreed. "We are being over-medicated these days. We are getting close to the 'pill for every ill' society. The old stoicism has disappeared.

"The greater availability of drugs via the internet and from pharmacies means more people go out and seek them," added Summers.

Richard Taylor, a doctor who became independent MP for Wyre Forest in 2001 after campaigning on hospital closures, said he wanted to see a culture shift: "We have grown up with a belief that the NHS is there to be used and I think we have got to retrain people that the NHS is there if you need it."

Professor Steve Field, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, pointed to other reasons for the rise in drug use. "Until the 1980s, for example, duodenal ulcers were treated by surgery. But the infection that causes it is now treated by drugs. Similarly, treatment of people with asthma using inhalers has improved the quality of life of patients, reduced hospital admissions and deaths. Statins have reduced the number of heart attacks and led to patients living longer, healthier and more productive lives. So prescribing isn't such a bad thing."