Quantifying the Self

OK, that's it, Christmas is over, time to cut down on the amount of alcohol I drink. I've kicked smoking this year, but drinking is trickier. I'd rather not give it up entirely, but how can I go about reducing my alcohol intake by, say, 50%?

First off, I need to find a way of tracking my intake, so I can see if I really am drinking less. I can't rely on my intuitions about how much I'm drinking, because they might be wrong. We're not that great at knowing ourselves or keeping track of ourselves. That's why we need help from technology.

In the old days, trainee-philosophers would have tracked their habits in a journal. Seneca, for example, wrote: "Every day, we must call upon our soul to give an account of itself. This is what Sextius did. When the day was over and he had withdrawn to his room for his nightly rest, he questioned his soul: 'What evils have you cured yourself of today? What vices have you fought? In what sense are you better?' Is there anything better than to examine a whole day's conduct?’"

Likewise, Epictetus advised his students to 'keep account' of their good and bad habits: "If then you wish to free yourself of an angry temper...count the days on which you have not been angry. 'I used to be seized by an irrational emotion every day, now every second day, then every third; then every fourth.'"So the journal was a way of keeping account of the self, tracking it, like a microchip in the ear of a marauding elephant.

The journal was a great example of what Michel Foucault called a 'technology of the self'. In this brave new digital age, these kinds of technologies of the self have really blossomed, via self-monitoring apps for iPhones. So, this morning, I downloaded the NHS' free alcohol unit tracker, which lets you input how many units you consumed yesterday (15) and see how close you are to the recommended daily amount (4...oops), and see your progress in your aim of reducing your intake.

There are hundreds of such tools on iphones and similar devices. Apps for quantifying your diet, your sleep patterns, your menstruation cycles, your sex life, your mood levels, your heart-rate, the distance you've jogged, your progress towards career goals, even the number of times you have prayed. If you think about it, a rosary is just another way of keeping count - well, now there's a rosary app.

This self-quantification craze might seem the height of narcissism. But it's also the best way of turning your self-help aspirations from vague dreams and passing fads into genuine, observable progress. You have to take an empirical approach to it, a self-experimental approach. You can get hold of data from your life, and crunch it in various ways to see, for example, how your mood is affected by different diets, how your drinking affects your productivity, and so on. And being able to see the real progress you're making is a huge incentive to keep going, and increase your efforts.

Of course, some self-quantifiers take self-measurement to bizarre lengths, tracking, say, 40 different things about themselves: calories, moods, hours working, exercise, and so on. Too much. How about 'hours spent quantifying the self'? And they also post all this data online. I don't think other people care that much, and I don't want them knowing all my personal data. But if you've set yourself a self-improvement goal, the best way to see if you're really making progress, is to record the data.

Here's a good essay by Seth Roberts, professor of psychology at University of California, on the value of self-experimentation and self-quantification for self-improvement.

And here's a short TED talk by Gary Wolf, one of the founders of the Quantified Self movement:

Google's Ngram machine

This is fun: check out Google's new Ngram machine, which lets you graph the incidence of words in Google's books archive going back centuries, and also to plot the incidence of different words against each other.

I don't know how accurate it is as a barometer of public interest, but you can see, for example, the rise in the use of the word 'economy' over the last 200 years:

And the decline in the use of the words 'heaven' and 'death' over the last 200 years (death is the red line):

Surprisingly, the use of the word 'happiness' has dropped since 1900:

While the use of the word 'wellbeing' has risen over the same period:

And, while mention of God has been sinking since 1800, mentions of 'sex' have been rising - so I guess we've found some consolation in the Twilight of the Gods:

Bruce Parry, modern shaman?

What happens when you send a Royal Marine to the Amazon and give him large quantities of hallucinogenic plants? He becomes a meditating hippy!

That, at least, seems to be what's happened to Bruce Parry, the TV presenter and former Marine, who went and lived with various indigenous tribes for the BBC series, 'Tribe', and also took part in their shamanic rituals, including taking plants like ayahuasca. I read an interesting interview with Parry in the Sunday Times - sadly it's now behind a firewall - which suggested the man has been very altered by his experiences. When he came back from the Amazon, he went off and meditated in a cave for several weeks with a religious group, who insisted he give up alcohol and sex, which he says he did. He says in the interview 'I figured if there was one group of people who could bend spoons with their minds, it was these guys'. Then he carried on meditating and experimenting with hallucinogenics in Ibiza.

He's now just finished another BBC series in which he explores the Arctic. He is wondering whether to stay in the mainstream TV entertainment business, or to go off and make humanitarian / New Age films for a smaller audience. I personally hope he stays in mass broadcasting. He's such a great, unique presence on TV - we need him to carry on expanding our minds.

**Update: since I wrote the above, a friend from the expeditioning community has painted a rather different picture of Parry, suggesting I do him too much credit, and that he is more a showman than a shaman. Apparently the likes of Ray Mears and Benedict Allen are held in greater respect among expeditioners. Still, Parry does make for a good TV presenter. **

***Update 2: someone else who knows him says he's a nice guy. Maybe I should stop commenting on things about which I know nothing. But then...what would I write about??***

The End of History and the Invention of Happiness

Here's something juicy to get your teeth stuck into over the New Year. It's a long essay, which I plan to put in the appendix of my book, that looks at the rise of the politics of wellbeing, and governments' growing confidence that they can stimulate the happiness of their citizens. Then it looks at the role played by ancient Greek philosophy in this new politics of wellbeing. The third part looks at the backlash to the politics of wellbeing, from philosophers (of all people). Finally, the essay asks if governments should teach the Good Life to children in schools, and answers with a qualified yes. It's an expanded version of my essay 'Beyond Liberalism', which some of you might have read earlier in the year. Here's the essay.

Happiness is...

The Atlantic's cover story is the first article to publish the results of the Grant Study, a 72-year psychological study of 268 men who entered Harvard in the late 1930s, following their inner and outer lives to try and discover the secret of the Good Life. Participants included Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post when it broke the Watergate story; and John F. Kennedy. The study doesn't seem to draw too simplistic conclusions, and appreciates that each life is a unique holistic experience rather than merely a set of data, though I can't say I like the rating of the subjects in a scoring system of high functioning to low functioning. How can you call any life happy, until the life is finished? Our lives take so many twists and turns...and who's to say that death is really the end of life, and not one more turn in the road? And how can you really look into a man's inner life, and score it? What makes your scoring system so universally valid?

Still, I like this line: 'The youth that the old envy is accompanied by the miserable process of getting from 25 to 35. We've got all this health and all this youth, and you're scared stiff that when it's all said and done, you're not going to amount to a hill of beans. And if you just wait, virtually all the men, by the time they reached 45 or 50, amounted to something. Knowing that is such a relief. But you just don't know it at 30." I hear you brother!

Here's a short video of the programme's wise old research director, Dr George Vaillant, and below that is a response, from Woody Allen's film Love and Death.

PWC's new personal wellbeing audit

When I heard that Pricewaterhouse Coopers had launched a 'personal wellbeing audit' service, I knew I had to try it out.

The audits are carried out by PWC's new 'happiness unit', run by its very own 'Dr Feelgood', Professor Hans Schwartz (pictured). For a princely sum, Schwartz and his team follow you around for two weeks, observe you in a range of different situations, interview you and your friends, colleagues and family, subject you to a number of psychometric, physical and neurological tests, and then finally present you with your own personal wellbeing audit for the year.

I somehow persuaded PWC to give me a free audit. Thanks to all my friends and family who put up with Dr Schwartz and his team following me around for a few weeks to observe and gather data - I hope it wasn't too off-putting. And now, finally, the audit has arrived! Here it is.

PWC 2010 happiness audit for Jules Evans

Summary: Despite not yet having achieved his all-consuming goal of becoming a published author, or indeed finding a long-term partner, Mr Evans appears to consider himself happy, and even lucky. Dr Schwartz speculates this could be because the subject suffers from advanced self-delusion or "is simply not that bright".

Highlights of 2010: Mr Evans was happiest in 2010 during the spring and early summer, when he was walking the Camino through Spain, and then travelling through France. He seems to have re-discovered the pleasure of back-packing, and plans to go on another long trek in 2011. He also met a Texan-Mexican girl on his walk, which seems to have raised his happiness levels significantly. He spent the last quarter of the year making up for his idleness earlier in the year, and achieved some progress in his fledgling philosophy career. He seems happy in his living circumstances, in a converted church in Tufnell Park described by Dr Schwartz as "bohemian", and enjoys playing tennis in the nearby courts. He fell in love with an American Spaniel earlier in the year, an inter-species infatuation which caused his friends some concern. His happiness was also raised significantly by the arrival of his niece, Isabel, in March.

Lowlights of 2010: He received six rejections from literary agents for his book on philosophy, which brings the total number of rejections he has received for book pitches over the last three years to around 23. He also ends the year as he began it - single.

Work: This year, Mr Evans spent an inordinate amount of time blogging, which meant he was able to double his readership from 5,000 hits a month to 10,000. He has dipped a toe into academia, starting a visiting fellowship at the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University. He has also started doing public talks on philosophy, and he organized the first international Stoic conference in San Diego in April. None of this makes him any money. Around 90% of his revenues still come from writing about finance. One promising future avenue was an article he wrote on behavioural economics, which he may explore further in 2011. The freelance life suits Mr Evans' disordered and somewhat loose lifestyle. His caffeine addiction continues to spiral.

Romance: Our love expert, Dr Curtis Bentweiner (pictured), reports that Mr Evans is a lover of limited professionalism, and that the average duration of his love-making is a mere three minutes and 14 seconds, although Mr Evans claims he was put off by Dr Bentweiner standing next to the bed with a stopwatch. Dr Bentweiner reports that Mr Evans remains 'something of a loner', although he did spend several weeks travelling around Europe with a Texan girl, which was the longest continuous time he has spent with a girl for some years. In November, he spent a great deal of time internet dating, with limited long-term success. He remains optimistic for 2011, which Dr Bentweiner says is 'kind of sweet'.

Leisure: Mr Evans claims to get more pleasure from playing tennis than any other activity, which says a lot about his sex life. He plays several times a week, and the highpoint of the year was beating an Italian 'professional', and listening to the Italian's colourful obscenities as he lost. He also gets significant satisfaction from walking on Hampstead Heath. He spends too much on books, and struggles to finish novels.

The best books he read this year:

South, by Ernest Shackleton. He spent much of the beginning of the year reading and being inspired by tales of polar exploration. This was his favourite of the bunch.

The Little Book of Behavioural Investing, by James Montier. A good introduction to behavioural economics.

Justice, by Michael Sandel. A brilliant work of philosophy, accompanied by an equally brilliant website with videos of Sandel's exceptional Harvard lectures.

After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre. A revelatory book on Aristotle and the virtues, which Evans discovered very late (it came out in 1980). Still hugely influential.

Experiments in Ethics, by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Good introduction to experimental philosophy.

The Lucifer Effect, by Philip Zimbardo. A fascinating account of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Becoming Human, by Jean Vanier. Interviewing Vanier was a highlight of the year.

Atomised, by Michel Houellebeq. Again, Evans was late to this, but enjoyed it.

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantell. Everybody read this book in 2010, and then banged on about it.

The best albums he heard this year:

Kanye West: My Beautiful Twisted Dark Fantasy

Miike Snow: Miike Snow

Arcade Fire: The Suburbs

Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? (not released in 2010, but very good)

Hot Chip: One Life Stand

Tinie Tempah: Disc-overy

Richard Hawley: Truelove's Gutter (also not released in 2010)

The best film he saw this year:

The Social Network

The best TV he saw this year:

Mad Men

Outlook for 2011: He is excited about the coming year, which is set to begin with a bang: an interview for his blog with Philip Zimbardo, one of the great social psychologists. He's then going to Texas for the Social Psychology conference in late January, where he will be blogging, and seeing the great Roy Baumeister and John Bargh debate about free will. He wants to learn how to carry out experiments, and then to carry out some of his own in London. He is supposed to be organizing a Stoic conference in London in April, and wants to do lots more public speaking. One way or another, he plans to bring out his philosophy book in 2011.

Conclusion: Despite the occasional bouts of binge drinking, junk food, casual sex and consumer spending, Mr Evans maintains a weak and flickering desire to become a better person. Midway through his life, he is not necessarily wiser, but he is perhaps slightly less insecure. He remains driven by an obsessive desire to 'make something of himself' as a writer, which is much fear of failure as desire for self-actualisation. He still possesses an above-average level of self-obsession and narcissism, manifested in his obsessive blogging and an annoying tendency to talk about himself in the third person.

Thanks for reading the blog everybody. Hope you have a great Christmas and New Year, see you on the other side.

Gordon Brown and the fundamental attribution bias

This is great, from Iain Martin at the Wall Street Journal, who has been given the grim task of reviewing Gordon Brown's 'I saved the world' saga: Beyond the Crash, which he says is 'as much an unwitting psychological self-study as it is a history of the crash'. He gives what is a great example of the fundamental attribution error - attributing events to your own or other people's actions, when they're actually caused by external events. A bias politicians are particularly prone to...

Brown takes us back to mid-2008 when it looked like boom was turning to bust (which wasn’t supposed to happen). It’s not just the state of the banks that suddenly concerns the then prime minister:“Volatilities other than the financial also dominated my discussions with global counterparts. I could see that rising food prices, highly volatile energy prices, and the disruptions on the stock markets and in bank lending were not isolated events.”He grows increasingly concerned by rising oil and gas prices. So what does he do? In his book he gives the impression that he took charge.

“I spoke by video and telephone with the Saudi, French, Australian, and German governments and on video link and then in person with President Bush. I addressed other European leaders at the European Council meeting on June 19th and oil producers and consumers at the Jeddah oil summit. The oil summit, held at my initiative, took place when oil was trading at record-high prices; by May 10 it was $125 a barrel, by May 21st at $135, before soaring to its peak of $147 in early July. When we met in Jeddah we did secure a small victory via an agreement on more supply of oil production, so that oil prices were to peak at $148 a barrel two weeks later, before falling by 75 percent by December.”

I love that little line tucked in at the end. Oil prices fell “by 75 percent by December.” The implication, from the juxtaposition of top-level summitry with the prices, is that his personal intervention stalled the rise in oil prices and that having been dealt with by Gordon they went on to right themselves.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth…The reason oil prices collapsed by 75% by the end of that year? Could it have anything to do with the world economy suffering a massive heart attack? Economic activity plummeted (that’ll have been the credit-driven asset bubble boom turning to bust), so demand for oil plummeted, so the price of the stuff went down.

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Paul Ekman...the video game!

Rockstar, the game company behind Grand Theft Auto, is releasing a new game in 2011 called LA Noire, which uses cutting-edge new technology to create what they say is the most lifelike computer animation of the human face yet. This is crucial for the game, in which you play a detective trying to work out if people are lying. Time to dust off your Paul Ekman and study those micro-expressions!

The philosopher's first-aid kit

Here's an excerpt from a talk I did in November at the London Philosophy Club, on philosophy as self-help / therapy. In this bit, I talk about how philosophy in the ancient world was like a 'first-aid kit', made up of different therapeutic techniques you could use to cope with various emotions and situations. Dunno why I decided to wear that silly sleeveless jumper.

Can we develop free will and consciousness through training?

This is a video of a talk I gave at a mad but wonderful event last night, run by a friend of mine, called the Oliphant Street 6X9 talks - where six speakers talk for nine minutes on various things (I went slightly over my allotted nine minutes...) Last night we had talks on Cardinal Newman, contradiction, Renaissance parties, the Lord's Prayer, and I gave a talk on how experimental psychology has undermined the idea, from Greek philosophy, of the rational autonomous self, but perhaps we could still develop such a self through philosophical training.

The video is about 15 mins long, in two parts.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Christian versus pagan practice

I saw a fascinating discussion on agnosticism between theologian Karen Armstrong and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger this evening, held in the wonderfully atmospheric crypt of St Paul's Cathedral (check out my low-fi photo). It was one of those great London evenings - brilliant minds, in an amazing location...and free!

Armstrong gave a fluent and erudite talk - she's obviously very familiar with her subject matter, and she weaves together ideas from a multitude of spiritual traditions like a magician spinning plates. Her thesis, which I think comes from her latest book, The Case For God, is that the New Atheists have got religion all wrong. True religion is not about beliefs, nor about facts. That's a distortion which she traces to the 17th century. Instead, "religious knowledge is a form of practical knowledge, like swimming or driving. You can't learn how to swim by sitting on the side of the pool theorising. You have to get in. Religions are programmes for action. They're about changing your behaviour at a profound level."

So, Rusbridger asked her, what would this practice consist of? She said: "The greatest religious sages all say, the heart of the practice should be compassion. It's the Golden Rule: treat others as you would wish to be treated. It's a question of constantly stepping out of your ego and putting yourself in another person's shoes. And it doing it all day and every day. You can't just say 'that's my good deed for the day'."

Rusbridger said: "I thought you meant something else by practice, rather than compassion, which seems like something different." He returned to the comparison of religion with musical practice: "I play the piano, and I'm actually writing a book about practicing the piano - I'm practicing the same piece every day, and there are moments where all the practice pays off and I'm not thinking but just playing, maybe that's something like it."

As I was listening, it struck me that the two were talking about different forms of practice. Armstrong was talking about Christian practice, which is really about the practice of charity, compassion, good works, self-abnegation and so on. And Rusbridger was talking about practice in the Greek or Aristotelian sense: you practice something over and over until you become a virtuoso at it, and it becomes 'second nature'. One path is about abnegation and humility, and the other is about achieving excellence at something - it's not really self-denial at all, it's self-development.

John Stuart Mill wrote about these two different concepts of practice in On Liberty. He wrote: "There is a different type of human excellence from the Calvinistic: a conception of humanity having its nature bestowed on it for other purposes than merely to be abnegated. 'Pagan self-assertion' is one of the elements of human worth, as well as 'Christian self-denial'." The Pagans were into the practice of self-denial as well, of course, but they practiced it for the sake of self-mastery, autonomy and moral excellence - not for the sake of others, exactly, though perhaps for the sake of achieving harmony with God.

In fact, there's a suspicion of charity in Greek philosophy, which I have some sympathy with. The idea is that nobody can put you on your feet except you. Nobody can love you back to health when you're broken. You have to put yourself back together. 'Don't smother me with charity. Show me how to stand on my own feet and then let me be my own boss'. Such is the spirit of pagan practice. It's a kind of proud self-sufficiency, summed up in the philosopher-hobo Diogenes' response to Alexander the Great, when the dictator asked him if there was anything he wanted from him. He replied 'Only that you stop standing between me and the sun'.

I personally found that path helpful, when I was coming out of mental illness and emotional turmoil in my early twenties. I didn't try to get rid of my ego through selfless love and charitable works for my fellow man. Well, actually, I did, but it didn't work. I couldn't bury my own problems beneath a forced love for my fellow man. I had to learn how to stand on my own two feet, which in my case meant learning not to need other people's approval. I needed more autonomy and self-possession, not less.

Karen Armstrong also spoke about her own tough times, and how she'd suffered a breakdown after leaving the Catholic nunnery where she enrolled as a teenager. She said: "When I left the convent, I was broken. I had tried and failed to be a good nun. I would try to meditate on the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius, but my mind would race off down every conceivable alley. God was not there. And I hated the idea of this god who was always peering over our shoulder, totting up our sins, marking down our faults. That god felt prurient and intrusive. I decided it was all nonsense. I even felt ill when I saw people reading religious books. But then, when I left the convent, I lived in depression for six years, I suffered from anorexia, I was suicidal. It wasn't that I wanted to die, it was that I didn't know how to live."

So I asked her: what got her through that dark time? She replied: "What got me through was study." She wrote a book on her experience as a nun. It did well. Then she made some documentaries about religion. She was good at it and her scholarly curiosity was excited. Then, when the TV company she worked for went bankrupt, she lived alone in a small flat in East Finchley, read a lot, and wrote some other books, which became very successful, and established her as a world-renowned scholar and religious expert.

Armstrong described her scholarly practice as a form of compassion - she was practicing compassion and understanding towards other people's spiritual practices. Maybe. But perhaps, I suggested to her, what really got her through her dark times was not so much that she felt compassionate towards others - though that may have been a part of it - but that she became a really good writer, and a really good expert on the world's religions, with something important to say to the world, to whom the world eventually listened. She got her shit together. She got good at something, having 'failed', as she put it, at being a nun. And being good at it gave her a reason for living.

Nobody was with her in that lonely flat in East Finchley. Nobody loved her back to wholeness. She did it for herself. So, really, that could be more like the pagan idea of arete, or excellence. You practice something, you stick to a discipline, you train yourself, and eventually perhaps you achieve excellence in it, as Armstrong achieved excellence at being a writer.

Armstrong replied: "It's not like I sat there thinking how great my books were. I always want to get better. Any practice involves going beyond your ego, going beyond the rat-race of worrying about yourself, waking up at 3am feeling insecure. Your practice could be athletics, it could be music, it could be study, but it involves that going beyond yourself."

Now, this may be true for the practice of being a Christian, but it clearly isn't true for the other sorts of practice she mentioned. Great athletes tend to have big egos. They tend to wake up in the middle of the night, worrying about the big game the next day. Think of Jonny Wilkinson, practicing and practicing and practicing because it's the only way he knows to stop himself worrying. Think of the big egos of the great musicians, or writers, or film-makers, who dare to break the rules, to flout tradition, to re-invent their form - and of their moments of profound self-doubt and insecurity.

Of course, as Aristotle knew, becoming excellent at a practice involves the virtues: discipline, self-control, detachment, the ability to cope with setbacks and defeats. It also involves discernment: the practical knowledge of when to follow the tradition and when to go beyond it. And I guess there are also those precious moments when you become so at one with the practice that you experience something like ego-lessness. But you wouldn't say that compassion is at the heart of the pagan idea of practice. At the heart of it is the effort to be the best you can be.

Perhaps you need both kinds of practice. I'm reminded of Jean Vanier, who I interviewed earlier this year, who talked wisely about what is missing in the pagan path, which he studied as a young philosopher. He says, rightly I think, that it focuses too much on the idea of self-actualization, self-perfection, self-containment and the self-sufficiency of our reason. You follow it too far, you end up a perfectly self-sufficient island, cut off from others, because you won't admit your need of others, or your inevitable weakness and frailties as a human being.

What I love in Vanier's teaching is the idea of the encounter with others, the idea of meeting the other person, learning from them, opening up to their weaknesses, and accepting your own weakness in return. There's an idea of giving and receiving in his philosophy which is absent in Greek philosophy. Vanier is what I would call a virtuoso in humility and compassion. Or is that a contradiction?

Technologies of the Self

[This is a piece I wrote for the latest issue of Psychologies magazine, about the self-help industry's discovery of smartphone apps]

The rise of smart-phones is changing how humans interact, shop, travel, read, and now, they’re even changing how humans feel. Jules Evans plugged in and went on a month-long search for appiness.

If someone had told you ten years ago that your phone would monitor your moods, your social activities, your diet, your menstrual cycle, your sleep patterns, even your voice patterns, and then suggest activities or therapies to lift your mood and improve your well-being, would you have believed them? Thanks to the rapid rise of smart phones, your phone could, to all intents and purposes, became your pocket therapist.

“We’re just beginning to realize how much smartphones can do,” says Ran Zilca, CEO of Signal Patterns – who has developed apps for leading self-help experts such as Deepak Chopra and Sonja Lyubomirsky.

“The difference between a self-help app and a self-help book is that an app is interactive”, says Zilca. “You don’t just read about keeping a gratitude journal - there’s one in the app that you can fill in. An app can collect information from you, monitor your progress, and suggest different therapies.”

Deepak Chopra, who launched an app called Stress Free in 2009, says: “Mobile apps are especially interesting because they accompany the person wherever they go, and can truly help one transform their life and find more meaning and completeness."

So how can apps help us? One obvious way is by helping us monitor our moods throughout the day. Margaret Morris, a clinical psychologist at Intel, designed an app called Mobile Therapy, which pops up a ‘mood map’ throughout the day asking users how they feel, and suggests ways of relaxing or seeing a situation differently if the user is stressed or angry.

Morris says: “Phone apps are a great way to collect data, mapping your moods with things like your diet, your exercise regime, your social network, and seeing where the trouble spots are.”

Ran Zilca agrees: “These devices continually collect information about users, so they can suggest the best therapies and interventions. Your phone could realize you haven’t been out of the house for a few days, or it could know that your voice sounded a bit blue in your last phone call, so it could pop up with a suggested activity to improve your mood.”
Apps can also provide therapists with more information about how their clients are feeling. Some therapists are already building tailored apps for particular clients, which are designed around an individual’s habitual thoughts and behaviour.

Apps are an easy way for psychology research departments to collect data too. In fact, the London School of Economics recently introduced an app called Mappiness, which tracks how happy people feel in different neighbourhoods in the UK, and sends the data back to the LSE for analysis. You can imagine the government using the technology to build a happiness supercomputer: ‘Quick, depression levels are rising in Liverpool...Send Boris Johnson!’

My Pursuit of Appiness

I decided to try out some wellbeing apps for myself. I downloaded five apps and tried them out for a month, to see if they improved my mood. My favourite was Sonja Lyubormirsky’s Live Happy, an app based on her best-selling book, The How of Happiness.

I liked the way Live Happy combined many different self-help techniques, like the gratitude journal or a happiness photo album, in one easily-accessible place. Keeping track of how many ‘random acts of kindness’ I had done each week actually encouraged me to do more. But the app’s mood questionnaire is pretty simplistic. It asked me how happy I was, between 1 and 7. I replied 4. It came back with the insight: ‘You are moderately happy.’ Tell me something I don’t know.

Deepak Chopra’s Stress Free had similar features - it also has a gratitude journal, for example - but includes more New Age features such as relaxation music and guided meditations. I found it overly prescriptive - one feature is called ‘Is it my ego?’, which analyses whether one of your life goals is ego-based, according to five simple questions. After these five questions, it tells you whether your goal is ego-based, and therefore unworthy of you, or not. It seems pretty presumptuous for a computer programme to make such grand spiritual pronouncements based on five questions.
In general, I found apps a great way to access information - videos, podcasts, ideas, therapies. That’s one of the good things about apps. “They bring therapy to the millions of people who either don’t have access to it or who might feel stigmatized about getting it”, says Margaret Morris.

The downside of that wider accessibility is that you can’t be sure your if app is designed by experts or charlatans. “There are some pretty flaky apps out there”, admits Morris. I also felt uncomfortable entering private information about my moods and goals onto a machine that I leave lying around, that others can quite easily access, and that I might easily lose. I’d suggest app designers introduce password protection for wellbeing apps.

It seems to me that apps can and will play a bigger role in therapy, and that the more tailored and personalized they can be, the more effective they will be. But I don’t think machines can ever replace the therapy of human contact.
Roberta Galluccio Richardson, a clinical psychologist working in London, says: “A machine can’t feel sympathy or empathy, or build up a rapport with someone, which can be a strong motivating factor to work harder at the therapy.” New technology can help us in our quest for happiness and fulfillment, but ultimately whether we stick to our goals is still down to us.

Just as a bonus for blog readers, here is some more of the interview I did with Ran Zilca, the CEO of Signal Patterns, which developed the apps for Deepak Chopra, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Anthony Robbins and others. Ran has some interesting things to say, not just for psychology, but also for the publishing industry. Follow his blog, by the way - he's set off on a motorbike tour of the States.

JE: So tell me a bit about Signal Patterns.

RZ: Signal Patterns has been around for around four years. It was founded on the notion of marrying technology and psychology. Before I set the firm up, I was working at IBM, in its marketing department, building psychometric tests.
I realized there's a huge gap in terms of using technology for psychology assessments. Psychology as a research field is very technologically illiterate. So I started by making online assessment tools, and then moved on to designing mobile phone interventions.

JE: So you've worked with many famous self-help writers to change their books into apps. For example, you worked with Sonja Lyubomirsky to change her best-seller, The How of Happiness, into an app called Live Happy. What can an app do that a book can't?

RZ: The bigger value comes from allowing users to actively do something to change. Using an app is very different from reading a book. An app has the potential of intervening in real-time. A book is more linear.
For example, let's take someone who feels they're a negative person, and who wants to develop a more positive view. They could read a book, or go see a coach, and they might feel better when they're in a session or when they're reading the book. But then they have to leave the session or close the book, and take what they learn out into the world. With an app, they always have their phone with them. They can turn the app on, go through a sequence of activities. It's almost like a therapist in your pocket.

And an iPhone is an open environment. You can choose to connect a wellbeing app to your contacts list, to your social network, to your email, to your location. Your phone knows a lot about you. Phone apps are great ways of mapping your mood, and seeing how your mood connects to your location, activities, work, diet and social network. So your phone could know that you haven't left home for a week, and haven't spoken to your friends in a while. It could know that whenever you go to a particular location (like your parents' home), your mood deteriorates. And all this can be done in a non-intrusive way.

JE: It sounds like apps are really going to transform the self-help publishing industry, and perhaps the wider book industry as well. Are publishers working on pushing the boundaries of digital publishing?

RZ: I think publishers are still trying to get their heads round the internet and what that is doing to their industry. They're still in shock. And publishers are not traditionally the most tech-savvy people. So no, I don't get the sense the publishing industry has totally taken on board everything that apps can do.

JE: So in some ways, we're still learning how to use new technology like apps and iPads for publishing?

RZ: At the moment, the potential of the technology outstrips the imagination of the people designing for it.

[By the by, I see that David Eagleman, the neuroscientist and tech visionary, has published his new book as an iPad app - he thinks they're the future of books. I agree!]

London's burning

Amazing AP photo from the student demos in London yesterday.

Welcome to the era of DIY philosophy

Here's a very brief history of philosophy.

1) The first era of philosophy was the era of Street Philosophy, which ran (very roughly) from the life of Socrates to the first council of Nicaea in 325 AD.

Street philosophy was open source. It was, literally, taught in the open: in street locations like the marketplace, the gymnasium or underneath the colonnades of Athens. Anyone could come along, listen and try its teachings and exercises: men, women, freemen, slaves. The goal of philosophy was the training of one's awareness and the transformation of the self. It taught its followers how to take care (therapeia) of the soul (psyche). Philosophy was not something one merely discussed or wrote about - that would be as pointless, the ancients suggested, as a medicine that was entirely theoretical. Philosophy was a daily practice (askesis), made up of a set of practical techniques (techne) to be used in all the different situations that life threw at one, with the aim of achieving eudaimonia, or human flourishing and fulfilment.

Michel Foucault called these techniques 'technologies of the self'. They included visualization exercises, meditations, physical exercises like fasting or sleeping rough, behavioural exercises, and also the use of resources like the journal and the handbook. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is an example of the former. Epictetus' Enchiridion is an example of the latter. Students shared information on these techniques through letters - Seneca's Letters from a Stoic is an example of this sort of information-pooling.

2) The second era of philosophy was the era of Academic Philosophy.

As soon as Socrates invented street philosophy, his disciple Plato tried to institutionalize it. He was St Peter to Socrates' Jesus. He invented the Academy: a school which would teach philosophy, but only to rich young Greek men. Platonic philosophy was only for the elite. Likewise, Aristotle insisted philosophy was only for the rich, male, Greek elite, and should be taught within closed specialist academic schools like the Lyceum. Plato and Aristotle aren't the 'villains' of the story - they still believed philosophy was something you practiced to transform the self and achieve eudaimonia - but they started a trend which would snowball.

The Christian Church initially absorbed Hellenistic philosophy's idea of philosophy as an askesis, which led to the early proliferation of ascetics and gnostics: guerrilla philosophers who practiced extreme experiments in self-transformation. But the Church increasingly sought to institutionalize philosophy and theology, even declaring some field philosophers and self-experimenters as heretics. Philosophy should be taught behind the walls of universities, to the male clerical elite. It should consist in the professional discussion and interpretation of philosophical systems and theories. One showed one's proficiency in philosophy by one's ability to quote older philosophers and combine their quotations in interesting new arrangements.

When philosophy broke free of the Church, it remained within the confines of the university. Even during the Enlightenment, philosophy was seen as the preserve of the elite, and of little use to the mob. David Hume wrote: "the empire of philosophy extends over a few". Some philosophers rebelled against the institutionalization of philosophy and sought to re-connect it with ordinary life and ordinary people - Rousseau, Thoreau, Marx - though other rebels like Nietzsche were just as elitist as the academics they rebelled against. Meanwhile, ordinary people lost all interest in philosophy, and turned instead to psychology or self-help for advice and consolation.

3) The third era of philosophy, which is gathering pace now, is the era of DIY Philosophy.

It began in the early 20th century, when the growing self-help movement started to return to ancient philosophy's advice and techniques. One part of this was cognitive therapy's re-discovery of the ancients, and the introduction of their theories and techniques into psychology. CBT also empirically tested out the ancients' prescriptions for emotional therapy, and produced a firm evidence base for them. This gradually led to a new 'science of well-being', or eudaimonics. CBT showed that, actually, the masses could get a benefit from philosophical therapy, regardless of education, wealth, gender or ethnicity. It was also DIY - you didn't even need to see a therapist to practice it (I healed myself from PTSD in my early twenties through a CBT course I boot-legged off the internet).

Slowly (in the mid-1980s) academic philosophy woke up to cognitive therapy's rediscovery of Hellenistic philosophy, and started to re-embrace the idea of philosophy as therapy, and as a set of exercises one practiced to achieve eudaimonia. But academics still tended to merely discuss these exercises, rather than actually practicing them.

Then, in the 1990s, came the Internet, which changed everything. First of all, it made academic philosophy more open-source once more. Websites like Philosophy Bites, TED talks and the RSA opened up academic philosophy to a much wider audience and made academics realize there was a huge popular demand for philosophy.

The internet also provided networks which could connect ordinary people who were practicing philosophy as a way of life. A good example is NewStoa, a 'cyber-city' of modern Stoics, whose first conference I helped organize this year. Facebook, Yahoo Groups and Meetup.com also helped to bring together people interested in practical therapeutic philosophy. Blogs started to spring up in which people shared their own experiments in living. The internet was like rain after a long drought, and very quickly green shoots started to appear all over the world, as the memes of ancient philosophy began to bud once more.

The next stage of this is the use of intelligent software to create genuine 'technologies of the self'. In the latest issue of Psychologies is an article by me on how smartphone apps are changing psychology and self-help. They will transform philosophy as well. People will soon be able to download apps which provide simple exercises they can practice - the Journal and the Handbook, for example, are perfectly designed to be transformed into phone or iPad apps that one can carry around and fill in, quantifying the self, keeping account of one's thoughts and moods, and downloading techniques and interventions one can use to transform one's beliefs. The philosophy book will also be transformed by new technology, becoming much more interactive, more open-ended, more dynamic, and more intelligent.

The new revolution in philosophy is a DIY revolution, in which ordinary people share stories, techniques and findings in their 'experiments in living'. The ethos of the new movement could be summarized as: 'Don't just quote philosophy. Live it.'

I can see four main challenges or questions for the new era.

1) For philosophers, the game has changed. In the new era, public speaking is an important as writing, just as gigs are now just as important as recording for music artists. We're also seeing the proliferation of philosophy festivals and conferences as philosophy becomes more of a live experience. The challenge is how to present one's ideas in a short talk, without reducing philosophy to soundbites. But living your philosophy is also as important as talking about it - if not more so. How embodied and actualized is your philosophy? What have you practiced yourself? How has philosophy changed you?

2) The new open-source era raises questions of authority and legitimacy. First, to what extent do we follow the advice of the ancients (Eastern or Western), and to what extent do we feel free to innovate and experiment? Secondly, as we produce scientific evidence bases for philosophical techniques, to what extent do we feel bound by the authority of science? Is there a limit to empiricism? And finally, if a marketplace in philosophy starts to boom, who do we trust? Whose ideas do we download and install? How do we make sure our engagement with philosophy is deep and transformative, rather than superficial 'window-shopping'? How do we avoid charlatans and exploitative gurus (sharing experiences on the internet helps here). And as philosophy returns to its original therapeutic role, how do we protect those who need more serious medical help?

3) The new era also raises questions about our relationship with technology. There's a danger of us relying on shiny flashy gadgets to do the work of self-transformation. They can help, but you can't outsource moral choice and effort. The new era of philosophy will also involve techniques aimed at lessening our dependence on technology and our addiction to information - such as information fasts and technology fasts.

4) Finally, how do you prevent philosophy in the age of YouTube from becoming just another part of our narcissistic self-exposing culture? Epictetus said the trainee philosopher should 'take a little water in your mouth when you're thirsty, spit it out, and tell no one'. There's a danger that, in the era of DIY philosophy, that becomes 'tell everyone'. No sooner do we practice an exercise, then we blog it, tweet it, Facebook it, YouTube it, and shout our philosophical achievements to the rooftops. We need to find the balance between sharing information and techniques, and boasting or working merely with an eye to self-advertisement.

Attack therapy and the Landmark Forum

This weekend, I was thinking of going on a Landmark Education weekend course in London, in order to do some research for a piece I'm writing on resisting social pressure. I was intending to go along to see if, with the help of ancient philosophy's resilience techniques, I could survive three days of the Landmark's highly emotional encounter sessions without getting affected by the group hysteria. My brother pointed out it wouldn't really prove anything, and I might actually get conditioned. Plus it cost £330. So I didn't sign up.

I'm glad I didn't, after hearing from a fellow psychology and philosophy blogger, Adam, who I met yesterday evening for a beer in Kings Cross. Adam told me a remarkable story about how one of Landmark's encounter sessions triggered a psychotic episode in him, leaving him completely disorientated and having to be institutionalized for six weeks.

He says he went to Landmark after he left university, when he was at a low ebb - he was depressed, had low self-esteem, was in a job he didn't like. He signed up for Landmark, hoping it would turn his life around. He gathered with the other recruits into a large hall, and as soon as the group leader spoke, Adam felt something wasn't right.

'The first thing the group leader said was 'I need your total commitment. If you have any doubts at all, or are only going to give half measures, I want you to leave now.' It sounded culty to me. He was basically saying you're either 100% with me or you should get out. He didn't leave any room for people's doubts or criticisms. I thought about walking out there, but I stayed. I think I was embarrassed at the thought of being the only one in a room full of people to get up and leave.'

Adam goes on: 'Landmark practices something called Attack Therapy. It involves attacking someone verbally, ridiculing and belittling them, calling them names, to try and break down their defences and help them breakthrough to the leader or therapist's way of seeing things. The leader insisted that 'you can do whatever you want to do'. And, throughout the three days, various people stood up, shaking with rage, and revealed all the terrible things that had happened to them that meant they couldn't do whatever they wanted to do - people had been raped, or abused, or one person had killed their father by mistake. And the leader would shout back at them, and ridicule them for their self-pity or their hypocrisy or whatever, until eventually they accepted the leader's point of view, had a 'breakthrough', and converted to a new way of seeing reality.'

'I was the first person to stand up. I remember, I was absolutely terrified. My hands were shaking. I was standing up in front of all these people, challenging the leader's authority, but I felt I had to do it. I said: 'what if the one thing you want is that everyone in the world admits that not everything is possible?' And the leader just sneered at me: 'The thing about you is you like to play clever little games'. And I felt crushed. I suddenly wondered if it was true, if I was really a worthless person clinging on to my intellect. I sat back down. It wasn't that I'd had a breakthrough...I just didn't have the guts to leave. I wanted to prove I could stay the course. But for the whole three days, I became more and more stressed. I couldn't look anyone in the eye.'

After the course, Adam found himself unable to make sense of the world. He suffered an extreme stress reaction, which meant his brain was pumped full of adrenalin and cortisol, as if he was in extreme danger (after all, he felt his ego was in extreme danger). Too much of these stress chemicals damages our ability to make sense of the world, leading us to make unusual or deluded interpretations of reality in an effort to re-find some control (one study found that the more unhappy and stressed people are, the more they're likely to hold on to superstitious beliefs).

Adam started to suffer from advanced paranoia, and to think everyone was speaking in code about him - even the TV News - and that some sort of global cataclysm was about to happen. He says: 'Landmark had basically broken my ego defences, but it hadn't put anything in its place. They're nihilists - they think there's no meaning to life, other than doing what you want to do.'

He ended up being put in a mental home for six weeks, as he tried to figure out where he was and what was happening to him. 'For a while, I thought that we were all patients with mad cow disease, except some of us didn't have it, and the game was to figure out who had it and who didn't'. He gradually came back to reality, but then had to embark on the slow work of reintegrating with life. He says: 'I realised that I needed to get some friends, and get a job'.

He managed to counteract his paranoia through the method of evidence checking. He held the strong belief - 'everyone is looking at me, thinking about me and talking about me' - which he decided to check by simply looking up and looking around to see if other people were in fact looking at him. And he found they weren't. That was a key step in challenging his distorting beliefs and coming back to reality.

This morning I did some research into Attack Therapy. It seems to have grown up out of the encounter session technique pioneered by evangelist religious organizations, and first used in therapy by quasi-religious groups like Alcoholics Anonymous.

At AA, members' attachment to the group and its ethos was cemented with 'sharing sessions', where members would share their deepest, darkest stories and receive sympathy and acceptance in return.Attack Therapy took this group dynamic and gave it a twist. Instead of receiving sympathy and approval, patients are ridiculed, humiliated and shamed. Their individual ego defences are broken down by the experience of intense public ridicule, and to overcome the stress of ostracism, they let go of their individual beliefs and embrace the beliefs and view-points of the group.

The Attack Therapy technique was made famous by a California drug rehabilitation centre called Synanon, set up by a former AA patient, Chuck Dederich, in the 1960s. The Synanon members, including drug offenders sent there by California courts, went through a weekly ritual called 'The Game', in which recalcitrant or rebellious members were humiliated and their inner foibles exposed to the Group. Synanon was eventually disbanded because of tax fraud, the violent beatings of people who'd left the group, death threats of anyone who criticized the group, and the suspected murder of members.

The teachnique was also used by other California encounter session-based therapies, such as Erhard Seminars Training (est), which is the progenitor of Landmark, and also Byron Katie's The Work. These groups followed the same formula: you take a group of vulnerable individuals, put them in a large hall for three or four days, during which time you restrict their movements and their freedoms and then subject them to 'marathon sessions' of very emotional and confrontational therapy, in which patients are encouraged to stand up and 'share' their deepest hang-ups with the group - to be ridiculed by the leader, before ultimately being accepted by the group.

The est trainer Peter McWilliams calls this technique 'pressure / release' - you subject the initiates to the pressure of intense ridicule and ostracism, before the release of group acceptance and re-integration. A similar sort of method is used in the Army, I suppose, through hazing rituals.

Byron Katie's encounter sessions apparently use a similar method - not exactly 'attack therapy', but certainly the method of getting people to share their darkest secrets with the Group. Here's one account of a Byron session:

In the Shame unit, we were instructed to write down the thing we'd done in our lives that we were most ashamed of, then take the mike and tell the whole group, then do The Work on it with a partner. Shaming is a subtle but powerful component of psychological abuse used in every torture and mind control process. People stood up and, sobbing or preening, revealed everything from bestiality and zoophilia to embarrassing physical features, infidelity to poor parenting that bordered on abuse. Many people told of having been abused and shamed by that. The reward for producing a novel or particularly painful shame experience was Katie's cooing, warm approval and attention. This was such a powerful exercise that, for the next few days, Katie would interrupt whatever exercise was in process to say that so-and-so desired to tell about their shame. Folks who had kept quiet during the Shame module apparently could not resist being part of it all, taking that microphone, and joining Katie's 'family.'

This sort of pressure cooker group therapy sessions works for some people, but many have an adverse reaction: one study of 200 college students who went through encounter sessions found that 9% suffered psychological damage that lasted at least six months. That's quite a cost. And yet groups like Landmark and The Work are still able to perform this sort of gung-ho extreme therapy, without even checking if any of their participants are borderline or vulnerable to psychosis. One account I read of Byron Katie's The Work says that participants were actually encouraged to hand in their medication at the beginning of the weekend, and that some participants suffered psychotic reactions during the course of the weekend.

The Attack Therapy technique reminds me very much of the 'struggle sessions' used by the Red Army during the during the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1970s, in which Red Army propagandists would fire up crowds and then get them to denounce and publicly shame any supposed rebels or dissidents.

For all the talk of Communist 'brainwashing techniques', it's really quite a simple mechanism. You brainwash people through group dynamics. We're such social animals, and so biologically programmed to be conformist and to seek the approval of the people around us (however strange or abhorrent their ethics), that it only takes a few days before most of us instil the ethics of whatever group we're in and seek the group's acceptance - even when the group abuses and ridicules us, or perhaps particularly when the group abuses and ridicules us. We like to think we're rational, autonomous individuals who can think for ourselves, but maybe we're all just a few days away from Nuremberg.

Vote for the title of my book

I need your help to pick a title for my book. Forget any stuff of mine you've read before - all I want you to do is tell me which of the following titles would most pique your interest and make you want to pick up and read the book.

Please re-tweet or share with your friends: the wider the data pool the better. Thanks :)

OK here are the titles:

The DIY Philosopher

The Philosopher's First-Aid Kit

The Gonzo Philosopher

Philosophy for Life

The Naked Philosopher

The Extreme Philosophy Club

Eudaimonia

You can vote in the comments, or tweet me @julesevans77. The 100th person to vote wins a free personalized copy (I'll be amazed if 100 vote but hey, aim high).

Adam Smith and the morality of spectacle

I want to write a brief post about Adam Smith, because I think he's one of the most important philosophers for modern culture (not just economics), and also one of the points at which modern culture went wrong. You can trace the meme that is making our culture sick back to his Theory of Moral Sentiments, which came out 251 years ago.

Smith was one of a number of Enlightenment philosophers who sought to create a new rational and 'natural' moral system, to replace old-fashioned systems based on Scripture, dogma, and superstition. Smith's moral theory, one of the best of the bunch, is based on the idea of the 'impartial spectator'.

The theory goes like this:

1) Nature, who is wise and benevolent, placed in our breasts the natural desire for approval. We naturally want others to sympathise with and approve of us, and this desire for approval is the moral mechanism by which wise Nature fits us for society.

2) The best test of the propriety or impropriety of an action or emotion is whether it wins the sympathy of the 'impartial observer', by which Smith means an ideal sort of spectator who watches us and judges us calmly and wisely. More generally, he means the Public, although he warns that the Public will not always be entirely wise and calm in their judgements.

3) We learn to command ourselves out of the desire for the sympathy of others. We learn that we must control our behaviour, temper our sentiments and discipline the violence of our inner states if we are to win the sympathy of other people.

4) This natural system of morality is wise and good, because it naturally leads to good people being happy and successful, because the good win the most approval of others, and therefore tend to do the best.

That is Smith's theory of moral sentiments in a nutshell. It's a great idea - sleek, catchy, and it clearly passes the feasibility test. Human behaviour is clearly driven by the desire for approval and status, and this strong evolutionary desire obviously leads us to obey social rules and to civilize our anti-social tendencies.

So it fits with our evolutionary nature. And it also fits with the culture we have created. Smith was writing near the birth of the financial markets, and yet his moral theory fits beautifully with financial markets.

Our success in society, he tells us, depends on the manner in which others perceive us and the extent to which they approve of us. That is particularly true in the financial markets, where CEOs must bear themselves politely and impressively if they are to win the respect of market investors. All it takes is for a CEO to let slip his polite front, as the CEO of Enron did when he called an analyst an 'asshole' during a conference call, and the markets could suddenly lose confidence in you and your company would go bankrupt. So Smith invented the idea of 'market discipline' as a moral check on individuals' and companies' behaviour.

Here's what's wrong with Smith's moral theory:

1) It leads to a morality based on performance and spectacle.

If you read Smith's book, almost every one of his ethical examples are taken from theatre. Morality becomes, in his system, a question of performance, an act, from the pitch of your voice to the trembling of your lower lip. His book is less a moral theory and more a work of theatre studies. When wondering what is appropriate or inappropriate in human behaviour, Smith constantly asks himself 'what looks good in the theatre? what do we sympathise with there? what wins our applause?'

In creating a moral system that doesn't rely on God, Smith has made the Public the ultimate judge of what is right and wrong - just like the Sophist Protagoras did in the fifth century BC. But as Plato wrote in response to Protagoras, if you do that, then people will not try to be good, merely to look good. Morality will become a question of spin.

In fact, in a culture where value is based on winning the approval of the Public, you will end up with millions of people pathologically obsessed with getting the attention of the Public, however they can, for their five minutes of fame. You'll end up with an X Factor culture, in which a girl changes her identity every week in an attempt to win the Public's vote, before her grandmother tries to win the Public's attention by announcing that she is a prostitute; with celebrity couples getting married, not because they're in love, but because it will boost their ratings. And when they inevitably get divorced, they are advised not by marriage therapists or even lawyers, but by PR agencies, telling them how to spin it so they retain the sympathy of the Public. You'll end up, in other words, with where we are today.

2) The Public gets it wrong

The Public is not a reliable arbiter of right and wrong. They often don't have the full information and are basing their judgements on superficial appearances. This much was repeatedly affirmed by the Stoics, who insisted that the applause of the Mob was worthless. Think about the people who win it. Think about the people who rise to the top in our culture. Are they the most moral people?

Behavioural economics has shown quite how wrong our judgements of others can be. We're affected by all sorts of arbitrary criteria: we think just because someone is good-looking, or good at sports, they are likely to be reliable sources of information (behavioural economists call this the 'Halo effect'). We tend to give our approval to people with charisma, even if they turn out to be frauds or psychopaths, like Hitler. We tend to give our approval to the rich, and to despise the poor, the homeless, the mentally sick - although their misfortune may be through no fault of their own, and the good fortune of the rich may likewise by through luck.

Older moral systems recognized that people could be outcasts, and yet still be good people. That's what the story of Oedipus told us. It's what the story of Christ told us. These moral narratives challenge us to go beyond the morality of spectacle, to see the worthwhile human beings behind loathsome exteriors. With Smith, the surface is all. He says: "We despise a beggar...he is scarce ever the object f any serious commiseration" because the misfortune of becoming homeless "can seldom happen without some misconduct, and some very considerable misconduct too, in the sufferer".

Nature teaches us to respect the rich and to despise the poor. And Nature is always wise. Therefore, Smith concludes, the rich are usually virtuous, and the poor are usually vicious.

3) Nature gets it wrong

We may agree that we have a strong natural desire for the approval of others. But this desire can fuck us up. It can make us extremely anxious about how other people are perceiving us, and this anxiety can actually make us so inhibited that we clam up, with the result that other people judge us badly. This is what happens to people with social anxiety, which affects between 5-10% of the population today. Their natural desire for approval and fear of disapproval has become so overgrown, so exacerbated by growing up in a culture obsessed with public approval, that they have become pathologically sick.

The point here is that our idea of our selves and other people's perception of us can become stuck in feedback loops which diverge from reality - this is true at the market level as well. So you can't always rely on other people's judgements, because those judgements get affected by self-fuelling booms and busts.

Alternately, we may become so obsessed with winning approval and status, that we devote our whole lives to becoming rich, famous and glamorous. And yet, Smith admits, we may find at the end of our exhausting search for richness, that we are no happier than we were at the beginning of our journey. Perhaps we are even less happy.

So Nature has fooled us, by making us think that fame and wealth would make us happy. The desire for others' approval, far from making us self-possessed, seems instead to make us wretched alienated creatures who, as Rousseau put it, "live constantly outside ourselves, in the opinion of others". We end up becoming the slaves of Public Opinion, devoting our entire lives to winning the good opinion of people we may never meet, and who care little for us.

Smith admits this, and yet goes on to say "it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind." Nature, then, leads us with "an invisible hand" on a deluded rat-race that will ultimately make us miserable nervous wrecks, all for the sake of....GDP growth? Does Nature care more for industrial output than human wellbeing? And if so, why?

Smith's admission that Nature deceives us and makes us miserable for some inscrutable and apparently economic goal of its own undercuts his argument that his natural moral system naturally makes people good and happy.

The problem, then, and this is a problem typical of Enlightenment moral theories, is that Smith tries to create a moral system based on Nature, but in so doing, he has tended to look for how humans typically and naturally behave, and he then says 'this is good'. Humans typically seek status and approval. Therefore 'this is good'. But it isn't always good. In fact, it's often bad, in the sense that it often leads to human suffering, alienation, and an empty morality of spectacle.

Smith should have read his Greek philosophy closer. It's not enough just to base your moral system on how man conventionally is. You have to ask: what is the best in human nature? What deserves cultivation? What is human nature at its most flourishing and how do we get there?

If you want to find out more about Adam Smith, you might enjoy this podcast interview from Philosophy Bites with Nick Phillipson, who recently brought out a new biography of Smith.