Should we all be popping 'morality pills'?

Over at the New York Times' excellent Opinionator blog, philosophers Peter Singer and Agata Sagan ponder whether we should all be prescribed 'morality pills' to make us more altruistic (I nicked the amusing illustration from that site as well - it's by Leif Parsons). The authors write:

Researchers at the University of Chicago recently took two rats who shared a cage and trapped one of them in a tube that could be opened only from the outside. The free rat usually tried to open the door, eventually succeeding. Even when the free rats could eat up all of a quantity of chocolate before freeing the trapped rat, they mostly preferred to free their cage-mate. The experimenters interpret their findings as demonstrating empathy in rats. But if that is the case, they have also demonstrated that individual rats vary, for only 23 of 30 rats freed their trapped companions.

The causes of the difference in their behavior must lie in the rats themselves. It seems plausible that humans, like rats, are spread along a continuum of readiness to help others. There has been considerable research on abnormal people, like psychopaths, but we need to know more about relatively stable differences (perhaps rooted in our genes) in the great majority of people as well.

Undoubtedly, situational factors can make a huge difference, and perhaps moral beliefs do as well, but if humans are just different in their predispositions to act morally, we also need to know more about these differences. Only then will we gain a proper understanding of our moral behavior, including why it varies so much from person to person and whether there is anything we can do about it.

If continuing brain research does in fact show biochemical differences between the brains of those who help others and the brains of those who do not, could this lead to a “morality pill” — a drug that makes us more likely to help? Given the many other studies linking biochemical conditions to mood and behavior, and the proliferation of drugs to modify them that have followed, the idea is not far-fetched. If so, would people choose to take it? Could criminals be given the option, as an alternative to prison, of a drug-releasing implant that would make them less likely to harm others? Might governments begin screening people to discover those most likely to commit crimes? Those who are at much greater risk of committing a crime might be offered the morality pill; if they refused, they might be required to wear a tracking device that would show where they had been at any given time, so that they would know that if they did commit a crime, they would be detected.

Fifty years ago, Anthony Burgess wrote “A Clockwork Orange,” a futuristic novel about a vicious gang leader who undergoes a procedure that makes him incapable of violence. Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 movie version sparked a discussion in which many argued that we could never be justified in depriving someone of his free will, no matter how gruesome the violence that would thereby be prevented. No doubt any proposal to develop a morality pill would encounter the same objection.

But if our brain’s chemistry does affect our moral behavior, the question of whether that balance is set in a natural way or by medical intervention will make no difference in how freely we act. If there are already biochemical differences between us that can be used to predict how ethically we will act, then either such differences are compatible with free will, or they are evidence that at least as far as some of our ethical actions are concerned, none of us have ever had free will anyway. In any case, whether or not we have free will, we may soon face new choices about the ways in which we are willing to influence behavior for the better.

This may sound like science fiction, but many young neuroscientists are already researching morality pills, including Molly Crockett at the University of Cambridge; and Julian Savalescu & Guy Kahane at the University of Oxford, who are two of the authors of 'Enhancing Human Capacities', published in 2011. I haven't read that book yet, but it looks absolutely fascinating (actually, just reading it now...not that fascinating). People have also considered the use of Ecstasy / MDMA to enhance empathy. And of course, scientists are now researching the use of psychedelic drugs to help people overcome depression and gain greater meaning in life. Hard to know whether to think of that as a resurgence of spiritualism, or the final triumph of mechanism....

As to the morality of 'morality pills'...well, what do you think?

One could argue, perhaps, that many of us use personality enhancers - coffee to make us work faster, wine to make us more social (a sort of morality drug). On the other hand, as a friend of mine pointed out, who decides what is moral? What if such drugs are imposed on us without our consent (as they are often imposed on people suffering from schizophrenia to make sure they fit into our socio-ethical system)? What about the case of Alan Turing, the computer genius who was chemically castrated by the British government to stop him being homosexual?

In my opinion, scientists today, and even many philosophers, are far too happy to give up on the idea of responsibility, free will, human rationality etc. When you do give up on it, it very quickly means handing over power to an elite or 'grand controller' to steer the automatons of the masses in the right direction. It's amazing, and startling, how quickly that idea is becoming mainstream and respectable.

Gene Sharp, master tactician of non-violent resistance

I'm hopefully going to see a documentary tonight about Gene Sharp, the American academic who invented the techniques of non-violent resistance used in the revolutions of Serbia (2001), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), Lebanon (2005), Egypt (2011), Occupy Wall Street (2011), Russia (2011-2012) and, presumably, other places in the future. His ideas have exerted an incredible influence on recent global politics - really incredible.

Nonetheless, it's also become apparent that there are some limits to the technologies Sharp invented. First, they work best in countries that care what the west thinks of them, and which are dependent on western aid. It hasn't worked in Syria or Libya - where the revolutions descended into violent conflict - because the pariah governments didn't care what the west thinks of them, and were more than willing to use violence on their own people.

Secondly, it works best in countries with a decent-sized middle class who are socially networked. This is one reason why the protests in Russia have caught on, to my surprise: Russians were able to share with each other the evidence for widespread electoral fraud, giving the lie to the regime's claims of total popularity. But in other countries, like say Kyrgyzstan, internet use is not so high and the middle class is smaller, so such protests often descend into street fights.

Thirdly, it helps if you have clear aims, such as toppling a dictator. Occupy doesn't have that clear aim or goal, which potentially is a problem for it...although Occupy protestors might say they have successfully given voice to public indignation over inequality and injustice, moving the terms of the public debate.

Fourthly, building a new democratic government has proved harder than bringing down a dictatorship. Not all these revolutions worked. In Georgia, the corrupt dictatorship of Shevardnadze was replaced by the rather more vigorous but nonetheless authoritarian and reckless government of Saakashvili - and the street protests against him have never stopped. In Ukraine, the Orange revolution led to a coalition government that never stopped arguing with itself, and that has since lost power. In Egypt, the revolution has had serious teething problems.

Not to criticise the incredible bravery of the protestors - but the aftermath of democratic revolutions needs to be considered, studied and improved. And amid all the emotion of successful revolution, we also need to remember that those who replace the old tyrants are humans to, imperfect and prone to abuse their position.

Anyway, once again, what a remarkable achievement by this man.

Gene Sharp - How to Start a Revolution Trailer from Gene Sharp on Vimeo.

'Disgust is so hot right now'

An interesting piece in the New York Times, looking at the growing amount of academic interest in the emotion of disgust:

Disgust is having its moment in the light as researchers find that it does more than cause that sick feeling in the stomach. It protects human beings from disease and parasites, and affects almost every aspect of human relations, from romance to politics.In several new books and a steady stream of research papers, scientists are exploring the evolution of disgust and its role in attitudes toward food, sexuality and other people.

Paul Rozin, a psychologist who is an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a pioneer of modern disgust research, began researching it with a few collaborators in the 1980s, when disgust was far from the mainstream. “It was always the other emotion,” he said. “Now it’s hot.”

The article goes on:

The research may have practical benefits, including clues to obsessive compulsive disorder, some aspects of which — like excessive hand washing — look like disgust gone wild. Conversely, some researchers are trying to inspire more disgust at dirt and germs to promote hand washing and improve public health. Dr. Valerie Curtis, a self-described 'disgustologist' from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is involved in efforts in Africa, India and England to explore what she calls “the power of trying to gross people out.” One slogan that appeared to be effective in England in getting people to wash their hands before leaving a bathroom was “Don’t bring the toilet with you.”

Disgust was not completely ignored in the past. Charles Darwin tackled the subject in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” He described the face of disgust, documented by Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne in his classic study of facial expressions in 1862, as if one were expelling some horrible-tasting substance from the mouth. “I never saw disgust more plainly expressed,” Darwin wrote, “than on the face of one of my infants at five months, when, for the first time, some cold water, and again a month afterwards, when a piece of ripe cherry was put into his mouth.” His book did not contain an image of the infant, but fortunately YouTube has numerous videos of babies tasting lemons.

Let's see some of that lemon-eating fun (no babies were harmed in the course of these experiments)...

Skepticism versus the marching band of materialism

Rupert Sheldrake's new book, The Science Delusion, has been getting an unusual amount of media attention. I say unusual because Sheldrake typically operates somewhat at the margins of mainstream science, researching such phenomena as telepathy or the idea of 'morpho-genetic fields'.

Mainstream scientists usually steer clear of such topics, even if they are interested in them, because they're worried about being ridiculed and harming their career. And also science has, over the last 300 years, situated itself against spirituality, vitalism, mentalism or psychic phenomena. Anything outside the materialist paradigm today is condemned as woo-woo, bunkum, bullshit etc.

The aggressive fight against anyone skeptical of materialism is bad news for science, because it means scientists are afraid to consider anything outside the box, for fear of public attack.

Sheldrake's book argues precisely that we need to challenge the dogma of materialism and consider the data that doesn't fit it, such as telepathy. He's spent several years attempting to amass empirical data on telepathic events, exploring for example whether dogs know when their owners are coming home (the evidence suggests they do).

Isn't that an interesting research topic? It suggests, firstly, that dogs have some sort of consciousness; secondly, that there is a relation or connection between human and animal consciousness; and thirdly, if there are links of consciousness between persons, those links are dependent on emotional bonds - so one of the functions of emotional bonds, perhaps, is to enable messages to travel between loved ones at distances. I'm not saying the evidence is unanswerable - but it's definitely an area worth exploring as we try to work out what consciousness is, what it does, and whether it is confined to our bodies.

Nonetheless, working on the taboo area of parapsychology has got Sheldrake labeled a crank by mainstream science. Look, for example, at this incredibly sniffy post about Sheldrake on the New Scientist blog, which dismisses a re-issue of another of his books, without even reading it. The blogger expresses embarrassment that the New Scientist favourably reviewed an earlier edition of Sheldrake's book, ten years ago, and says 'attitudes have hardened against him since then'. Why are 'hardening attitudes' something to be proud of? When attitudes harden, they turn into unexamined prejudice.

When Mary Midgely gave Sheldrake's new book a favourable review in The Guardian this week, the attack dogs of materialism come out, predictably enough, to denounce the article in the comments as woo-woo, bunkum, bullshit. If you look at the comments, many of them see the book as an attack on science. It's not. Sheldrake is a scientist. He merely wants us to have the courage to look at all the data, rather than having a pre-existing narrative that we aggressively defend.

That is the problem about turning secular materialist atheism into a political ideology, as Richard Dawkins and others have done. When you turn Skepticism into a political mass movement, the dogma is what gives the movement its coherence, like a marching band keeping soldiers in step. God forbid anyone who walks out of line. But is that how science has ever progressed? By an orderly march of believers? Isn't it precisely the mavericks, those out of step with the dominant beat, who reveal new worlds to us?

The original Skeptics, in ancient Greece, were against any sort of dogma. They believed in hypotheses, in probabilities, in exploring the unknown. Today, Skepticism is too evangelical for my liking. It has become a set of beliefs to be aggressively defended by its 'champions'. Skeptics go looking on the internet for 'smack-downs' - they love seeing their champions rudely dismiss and destroy anyone who contradicts the dogmas. But the ability to recognise and challenge our own most deeply held convictions is, surely, the definition of Skepticism.

Social anxiety and the escape from life

I had social anxiety for several years. I developed it as a side-effect of post-traumatic stress disorder when I was 18. When you have PTSD, you fear you are broken, and you don't want others to see that, and to think less of you, so it can often develop into social anxiety, where you end up avoiding or fearing social situations - all because you are afraid of being judged, or ridiculed, or rejected.

People suffering from social anxiety fear the pain of rejection, so they preemptively reject themselves. They exile themselves from society, deeming themselves unfit for it - and then project that self-condemnation on to others, seeing them as cruel and insensitive bullies, when in fact it is they who are bullying and condemning themselves. (This is what philosophers call 'alienation' - you create a God, raise it above you, and then cower beneath it.)

And this constant evasion, this attempt to protect oneself from the judgement of others, leaves one cut off from life, cut off from other people. The defences we construct to protect ourselves from pain often turn into prisons, condemning us to an isolation and loneliness that is, ultimately, far worse than the pain we sought to avoid. Kafka said as much:

“You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.”

Social anxiety affects as much as 12% of the population at some point in their life. As the cognitive therapist and expert in social anxiety, Richard Heimberg, told me: 'You can't get nastier than it. Anything that cuts people off from being able to bond with others leads to a very unsatisfying existence.'

Some people think social anxiety is a myth, something Big Pharma invented to sell drugs like Zoloft. But it's not. I had it for years before I'd ever heard there was such a thing as social anxiety. And if you go to a social anxiety support website, you'll see it's full of people amazed and relieved to discover they're not uniquely fucked up, and that millions of other people suffer from the same thoughts and feelings. It seems the mind can get stuck in certain destructive patterns or loops, and social anxiety is one of those patterns.

In that sense, there is a value to diagnoses like 'social anxiety'. These are not always artificial inventions by psychologists and psychiatrists. In the case of social anxiety, I think it is a genuine condition, and it's very helpful to people like me to discover that others fell into the same rut. Because, initially, you think you are uniquely fucked up, which makes you hide your condition even more.

And it's even more useful to discover that some people have escaped from the prison of social anxiety. They got out! And some of those who got out were good enough to come back, and tell others how to get out - like Plato's philosopher escaping from the cave then coming back to try and free the rest of us.

In fact, what helped me most to overcome social anxiety was a CBT tape course called Overcoming Social Anxiety Step By Step, by a man called Doctor Thomas Richards (pictured on the right) . Thomas had really severe social anxiety for many years. He heard about CBT, and used it to get better. Then he founded a social anxiety clinic and made his audio course, which has helped thousands of people escape from the prison of social anxiety. Thanks Dr Richards. You've made a lot of people's lives a lot better.

PoW: Friday highlights from philosophy, psychology and the politics of well-being

Welcome to this week's round-up. First, some good news: the Arts and Humanities Research Council has agreed to fund a project I'm going to run from the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London, to research and encourage the growth of philosophy groups around the world.

The project will involve me writing a report on the rise of philosophy groups and the different forms they take; and will also set up a website where people can find out how to run philosophy groups or locate their nearest group. You can get involved, by keeping an eye out for any philosophy groups near you, wherever you are in the world, and putting me in touch with them. The idea is to help the creation of a global philosophy group network.

Talking of which, here is an article from the Boston Review, looking at the example of Brazil, where philosophy classes are compulsory for children. Some people say it gives them the tools to discuss justice and rights, while critics say it is a well-intentioned mistake when some of these children still don't have basic literacy.

Here is a good TED talk by Julian Baggini considering the nature of the self. Baggini argues that, just because the self isn't some permanent entity, that doesn't mean it's an illusion. Rather, he suggests it's like a waterfall - although the water always changes, the waterfall is nonetheless 'there'. And we can also steer the self, and slowly choose its direction, he says. So we can build our selves over our lifetimes.

I agree - though if you accept the idea of self-authoring, as I do, then you still have to ask: what is that free, conscious bit of us that can choose our direction? Is it always there? Can we develop it?

These questions of the self, consciousness and identity go back at least as far as the Stoics, who, as the Stoic expert AA Long discusses in this talk that I videoed on Monday, helped to invent the modern notion of the self. The Stoics argued that the 'real' self is our free rational consciousness - that part of our personality that observes, considers and chooses what to believe. They thought this part of us was divine - a fragment of the Logos, the 'god within', an inner daemon (this is where the word eudaimonia comes from - it means 'having a kindly daemon within'). But, as Long explores, there are some paradoxes here. If 'I' am really a fragment of the divine consciousness, then who is really calling the shots -'me' or my inner daimon? Who's in charge? Am I authoring myself, or is God authoring me?

Talking of communicating with your inner daemon, here is an article from Time magazine about new research into magic mushrooms here in the UK. The research suggests that, rather than 'expanding' the mind, mushrooms shut down the parts of the brain that make things familiar and habitual, so that the everyday becomes suddenly strange and new.

Is grief a mental illness? The new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM V) which psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illnesses is reportedly considering classifying grieving as a form of depression, which critics say is pathologising something that is quite natural. How long is it appropriate to grieve? How should one grieve - uncontrollably, or with firm Stoic rectitude? I am not sure scientists or philosophers can answer such questions objectively, but that doesn't stop them trying. Here is a great article by Roland Pies, a leading American psychiatrist who has also written books on Stoicism and Judaism, arguing psychiatry needs to scrap the DSM altogether.

The Young Foundation, the East London think tank, is launching a new enterprise called Resilience on February 7th with a talk by Brigadier-General Rhonda Cornum, the director of the US Army's ambitious resilience training programme. I wrote an article in the Spectator about Cornum and the programme, which you can read here.

Finally, some pieces on the crisis in capitalism. Here is a very interesting discussion from C-Span with Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former NYT journalist, about the triumph of the corporate state and the failure of the liberal elite to challenge corporate interests. Hedges is no populist firebrand - he's been a war correspondent, he's trained as a priest, he's very smart and well-read, and his analysis is pretty devastating. Watching the video (all three hours of it) motivated me to read Hedges' 2002 book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which is an excellent blend of reportage, moral meditation, and cultural analysis. A very humane human, by all accounts.

The New Economics Foundation is also holding an event in London this coming Tuesday about the failure of the elite to protect the public interest, in a discussion which includes Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and sociologist Richard Sennett.

The ethical crisis in capitalism is apparently leading to a boom in demand for 'ethical consultants' at corporations. This article complains that few of these 'ethics consultants' have any training in philosophy, and that they're really instrumentalist poodles of corporations rather than genuine ethical guardians. This article, by a leading ethics consultant, puts forward a somewhat rosier picture, and notes how many philosophy departments are now offering degrees and PhDs in ethics consultancy. And this article talks about the venerable ethics consultant Lee Taft, who teaches organisations not merely to cover their asses legally when malfeasance is exposed, but instead to genuinely repent, say sorry and make amends. If only Rupert Murdoch had hired him...

See you next week,

Jules

The Natural History Museum: temple to science, God...or both?

Alain de Botton keeps coming up with new projects for his religion for atheists, and I admire his energy and willingness to put his ideas into practice. It's refreshing. His latest plan takes very concrete form: he wants to build temples for atheists, and is starting off with a pillar in London to give people a sense of perspective: it will show the history of the universe, with a tiny gold band at the bottom showing how recently man came on the scene. Good stuff: though a Stoic theist would think this was just as conformable with theist as atheist beliefs.

But naturally, the more ambitious and serious De Botton gets about his project, the more criticism he will encounter. Sure enough, Steve Rose wrote today in the Guardian that De Botton's project sounds increasingly like a religion. Well, yes, that's the point Steve. That's why he called his book A Religion for Atheists. But we don't need a new religion, says Steve. If atheists need monuments, they already have the Large Hadron Collider, the Natural History Museum, Wembley Stadium, even the Westfield Shopping Centre.

Not sure about that last one, though I guess it is certainly a monument to consumerism. Perhaps Steve is right - perhaps Las Vegas is a monument to atheism, a paradise city where everything is permitted and nothing is sinful. It's where the Sceptics have their annual gathering, appropriately enough. Or is that the 'wrong' kind of atheism for Alain?

Anyway, of all Steve's examples, it struck me that the Natural History Museum was closest to what Alain perhaps has in mind. The central hall of the museum really is very like a cathedral, with a sculpture of Darwin where the crucifix would be, and a giant (fake) skeleton of a diplodocus reminding us of the creation and destruction of nature, and the apparent absence of divine providence.

But is that really the message of the museum?

I looked into it today, and the real story is a little stranger. In fact, the founder of the museum, Sir Richard Owen, believed in transcendental morphology. He believed that a divine creative force moved through evolution, and that God revealed himself through history to man - particularly to scientists. I quote from Nicholaas Ruupke's Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin. Owen believed that:

The history of scientific discovery had been a process of gradual self-revelation by God, not accidental but guided by illumination of 'His faithful servants and instruments', the scientists. 'No scientific discovery collides against any sentence of the divine Sermon on the Mount' [Owen declared].

Owen believed God's self-revelation has been a continuous progressive process, with new insights and information downloaded (as it were) in chunks, and accessed by prophets and scientists through history. He tried to combine belief in a transcendent creator with scientific optimism in evolution, and ended up falling out with both Darwin and the Church of England in the process. In one service of 1876, for example, the priest criticised those who tried to replace God with science. To the shock of the congregation, Owen harangued the priest, declaring: 'My Christian brethren! I trust with God's help, that science will continue to do for you what she has always done, return good for evil!'

When Owen successfully lobbied for the establishment of a Natural History Museum in London, it was designed by the architect Alfred Waterhouse specifically as a 'Temple of Nature' to embody Owen's vision of a nature guided by God's transcendent power. In the words of the journal Architectural History:

The Temple of Nature that Alfred Waterhouse built embodied Owen's belief that the history of the natural world was not a matter of randomness and chance but the creation of a transcendent presence.

So the Natural History Museum is really a monument to a moment in science before it moved in the direction of reductive scientific fundamentalists like Dawkins or Hawking, a moment of broader thinking - represented today by a handful of thinkers working at the cutting edge of science like James Lovelock, Roger Penrose or Rupert Sheldrake, who challenge reductive Darwinism and are able to think outside its narrow atomised functionalism. Owen was a champion not of atheism but of that rare but optimistic belief, that science and theism are not incompatible, that scientists are revealing the transcendent power that moves through creation, and that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in Darwin or Dawkins' philosophy. His statue looked over the hall until 2009, when it was replaced by a statue of Darwin to mark his centenary. Time to bring the original statue back.

Resisting the corporate state

It's an unlikely YouTube hit. Not sneezing pandas or dancing babies, but a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist talking for three hours about the corporate takeover of the world. I haven't heard of him before, but former NYT journalist Chris Hedges gives a remarkable performance, discussing with intelligence and a quiet moral rage the over-reaching of American empire, the triumph of the corporate state, the decline of the left, what's wrong with the liberal elite, the Occupy movement, the role of Christianity, the role of Oprah, the 'pornification' of society...everything really! Very interesting stuff. And since it was posted two weeks ago, it's already got a quarter of a million hits. Lady Gaga must be getting worried.

I started watching, and found myself gripped for the whole three hours by Hedges' analysis, and also the sheer breadth of his experience - he trained as a priest, became a war reporter, was in the siege of Sarajevo, covered the first Iraq war, won a Pulitzer covering the War on Terror...then quit the NYT when he objected to the Second Iraq War. He strikes me as a very moral, intelligent and admirable person. Have any of you come across him before? Into his stuff?

If you get through all three hours of that, watch him defend the Occupy movement on CBC, and how he deals with the moronic shock-jock presenter. Masterfully done.

National happiness measurements don't correlate with anything

The BBC's Sunday ethical debate show, Big Questions, debated the politics of happiness last Sunday. They initially invited me along as a sceptic voice, but I think they chose to go with someone from the Institute of Economic Affairs instead - and actually he did a good job, as you can see here (it starts 30 minutes in - and the show will only be accessible online for a few days unfortunately).

The IEA representative makes the valuable point, also made by Paul Ormerod in the IEA's excellent new book on happiness economics, that it's not just that our happiness levels don't correlate with GDP. They don't apparently correlate with anything.

Many happiness economists, like Richard Layard or Andrew Oswald, argue that governments should pursue more of a Scandinavian economic model of higher job security, lower inequality, and higher state spending - because Denmark often comes out on top of international happiness measurement tables.

But look at these two graphs that Paul sent me, which come from the IEA book (if you can't see the graphs in your browser, they're on page 47 of the book, which you can access here). The first is happiness versus public expenditure in the UK. As you can see, state spending has risen dramatically since the 1980s, while happiness has remained flat.

What about happiness versus inequality? Again - inequality has risen sharply since 1980, while happiness has remained flat.

You see people in the debate trying to use happiness rhetoric to support their particular political or religious positions: 'happiness is about working together', 'happiness is not about money', 'happiness is about Jesus Christ', 'happiness is about equality' and so on. We all have our own understanding of happiness and we're all certain it's true for everyone. Unfortunately, national happiness measurements don't shed much more light on this ancient debate - because the measurement tool is simply too blunt, and because humans adapt to their situation and their level of daily contentment stays more or less the same, except in moments of real chaos.

The guy from Spiked magazine also makes a good point - why should we grant authority to 'happiness experts' to tell us what happiness really is? Why should we be forced into their bureaucratic model of happiness? Mark Williamson of Action for Happiness replies: 'This isn't about clipboard-wielding bureaucrats telling us how to be happy'. Yes, I'm afraid that's exactly what it is - or at least, it's what the politics of well-being can very easily become.

Yet I do believe there are valuable things we can learn from 'experts': psychologists, certainly, but also philosophers, novelists, humanitarians, religious leaders. Why, for example, do people so often come back to great thinkers like Aristotle and John Stuart Mill when they think about happiness? It's because they thought about the same question, and came up with some excellent attempts at answers.

It's a question of finding the right balance between the 'experts' and our freedom to disagree, to challenge their expertise, to find our own definition of well-being. That's what Aristotle tried to do in his Nichomachean Ethics - to find a balance between our common opinions about happiness, and the views of the experts (ie philosophers like him). Perhaps he ended up erring too much on the side of the expert, and didn't find the right balance, but it was a decent attempt. John Stuart Mill also tried to find a balance between the authority of experts and the individual's freedom to disagree. We're still looking for that balance.

I think group discussions like this show are actually a good way to get us to think about these questions. I much prefer group discussions like this about the nature of happiness and well-being to someone telling me they have all the answers.

AA Long on Marcus Aurelius and the Self

Here are some highlights of Professor Anthony Long's talk yesterday at the Institute of Classics in London, on 'Marcus Aurelius and the Self'. A.A. Long is probably the greatest living expert on Stoicism, and one of four people responsible for its remarkable revival in modern life - the other three are the French academic Pierre Hadot, the American academic Martha Nussbaum, and the New York psychotherapist Albert Ellis, who took Stoicism and revived it in cognitive therapy.

These four people are all heroes of mine, whose work has changed my life. They all have very different personalities and approaches to Stoicism. What Long brings to Hellenistic philosophy is a careful exploration of what the ancients meant, and a willingness to grapple with difficult questions, and to tease out the paradoxes and problems within these ancient philosophies (indeed, one of his books is called Problems in Stoicism).

That's a vital role, because, as you'll see in his talk, there are a lot of problems and paradoxes in Stoicism. In his talk, for example, he explores Marcus Aurelius' idea of the self. He shows how the Stoics played a key role in the invention of the self, through their idea of humans possessing a 'hegemonikon' or 'ruling faculty' within our psyche, through which we can become 'master of our soul'. And yet, with typical tenacity, he leads us delve into the paradoxes of this idea of our 'divine ruling faculty'.

Is my hegemonikon, my conscious ethical self, really 'me', while the other bits of me (my body, my passions etc) are not really 'me'? That's a possible interpretation of Stoic thinking. But the Stoics, including Aurelius, also thought that the hegemonikon was a fragment of the divine Logos - of the great cosmic network of consciousness that connects all beings. In which case, is the hegemonikon really 'me' or rather a part of the great Logos, and therefore not 'me'?

Is my hegemonikon really just God dreaming that I exist, or am I dreaming that God exists? Who is really real - me or God? If all our minds are connected through the Logos, then do 'I' exist or am I one little synapse in the Great Brain?

Long explores how Marcus Aurelius tries to delineate the self, reduce it to its bare essentials. Yet he delineates it so much, until it is just a small point of consciousness in a world of flux, that one really has to wonder what is left. And what is the pay-off for this delineation of the self? Why do it?

I suggested that it could be a mystic process - when one has separated oneself from everything (the past, the future, the body, opinions, passions) and become a point of pure separate consciousness, then one can suddenly expand into 'cosmic consciousness'. The isolated consciousness becomes joined to the great ocean of consciousness. Perhaps...But Long wondered if there was much evidence of the attainment of such cosmic consciousness in Aurelius. What he seems to see there is more a sense of pessimism and even desperation.

I tagged on to the dinner afterwards, and had the pleasure of chatting a bit with Anthony and his wife. What great people. Anthony is fascinated by the movement to take Stoicism beyond academia, and fascinated by how people are using Stoic ideas in their lives. He remarked how the great philosopher Bernard Williams was rather scornful of Stoic therapy, and Long said: 'I think the thing was, Williams had never really suffered'.

Long really believes in the value of Stoic ideas in modern culture, and really believes they can help ordinary people's lives. At the same time, he clearly sees the worth in preserving the intellectual rigour of our approach to Stoicism, and really trying to discover what the ancient Stoics meant. That means not only exploring the 'techniques' or 'exercises' of ancient philosophy as Hadot did (and God bless Hadot for his work) but also being prepared to roll up one's sleeves and grapple a bit with some thorny questions. What we see in Long's talk is a great mind who is willing to roll up his sleeves and grapple with ideas.

I've divided the talk into two parts, both are below:

Friday round-up of the best from psychology, philosophy and the politics of well-being

Hi everyone, from now on these newsletters are going to be more what they were originally intended to be: a collection of links to interesting stuff I've read, or written about, in the last week. You can sign up to the newsletter in the box on the right.

Here's an interesting article in The Atlantic about the 'new philosophy of cosmology', looking at a group of rising star philosophers who are taking the fight to Stephen Hawking (remember how he said philosophy was 'dead') and insisting that philosophy can help unpack some of the conceptual issues in cosmology and astrophysics.

Here's an excellent radio show by Robin Ince on Bertrand Russell and how he was the first 'media don', thanks to his appearances on the radio. It includes this funny comedy sketch about Russell from Beyond the Fringe.

Here's an interesting and challenging new report from my friends at the Social Brain project at the RSA, on how to train up 'big citizens' with the mental and emotional competencies to engage effectively with the Big Society. The authors write:

Not everybody is 'up to it' in the same way. Acquiring the relevant competencies is a developmental challenge that requires a level of mental complexity, described by Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan as 'self- authoring', in which we develop 'a relationship to our reactions'. Available evidence suggests this level of mental complexity is not currently widespread in the adult population. For the Big Society to take root, we need to invest more time and energy making sure that the forms of participation and engagement called for as part of the Big Society are supported by formal and informal adult education.

I would pose two questions to the authors, one theoretical, the other practical. Theoretically, are they suggesting that all humans follow one path of development, which Kegan happens to have discovered, and that governments should guide us all along this path? My problem with developmental psychologists is that they all claim to have found the exact map that the mature adult must follow. But I'm not sure human development follows a straight line, or obvious courses. And it's handing a great deal of authority to Kegan to say that he's discovered this path and we all must follow it.

Secondly, the practical problem: how do the authors suggest the adult population would be ushered along the path to maturity? Would there be 'mental complexity booths' outside Tube entrances where adults could go for a quick cognitive re-programming? Is the science of Kegan's developmental psychology so definitely right that the government should intervene into the psyches of the adult population on that scale? What if people refuse to be re-programmed? I look forward to debating these questions next time I see the authors!

Here's a very good new book by the Institute of Economic Affairs, the UK's oldest think-tank, slamming the new politics and economics of happiness. Paul Ormerod's first chapter is particularly good. I agree with him: the politics of well-being often hands too much power to the clipboard-wielding 'experts', who supposedly know better than we do what's good for us.

Here's a good piece by New York City's controller of education, on why children have become over-networked and over-distracted by multi-media, and should be taught the art of solitude and deep reading. Nice quote from Epictetus in there.

Here's a review I wrote of Tali Sharot's new book, The Optimism Bias, which I suggest is overly simplistic, and overly pessimistic about humans' ability to balance out our cognitive biases. I debated Sharot on Radio 3's Night Waves on Monday, there's a link to the discussion in the piece.

Here is a link to Alain de Botton's interesting TED talk on his new book, A Religion for Atheists, and some thoughts of mine on the project. I suggest that if De Botton is serious about starting up a 'religion for atheists', as I think he is, then he needs to move beyond instrumental techniques, and be clearer about the ethics and values that this religion would embrace. A community without shared ethical commitments is not much of a community, in my opinion. He was kind enough to respond generously on Twitter.

Here is a piece by John Gray in the new issue of Prospect, saying Sigmund Freud is unfashionable today because he refuses to flatter mankind. Freud, Gray argues, put forward a sort of 'Stoic ethics' for the modern world. And here is a response where I disagree, and argue that people (ie me) dislike Freud today because he tried to turn his philosophy of pessimism into a rigid, over-dogmatic science, which wasted a lot of money and time, and caused more human suffering than it cured.

Finally, here is a very funny account of the infamous Brindley lecture on erectile disfunction (thanks to Sam Jordison for sharing this).

See you next week,

Jules

I don't dislike Freud because he was pessimistic. I dislike him because he was so dogmatic, and so wrong

Once, a decade ago, when I was about 23, I took a week’s holiday from my job reporting on the German mortgage bond market, and spent the whole week reading Sigmund Freud in the British Library. I wanted to write a book, with a chapter about post traumatic stress disorder, and I figured to understand it, I had better study at the feet of the master. I must have read about six of his books that week.

My god what a depressing week it was. What a terrible holiday. I felt far worse at the end of the week than I did at the beginning. Freud wrote extremely well, there was no denying it, but what a depressing vision of human existence he put forward: we are vicious creatures, trapped in our unconscious Oedipal desires, fated to be ignorant of our selves, and our only hope for some release from anxiety and melancholia is to see a psychoanalyst, every day, for years. At the end of this long journey into the unconscious, led by the Virgil of the psychoanalyst, we won’t be happy, exactly, but we may perhaps be slightly less miserable.

When Freud ruled psychology, from the 1920s until perhaps the 1950s, psychology was bleak. If you’d gone to a psychoanalysis conference in those days, it would have been full of seminars on masochism, sadism, hysteria, melancholy, incest, the death instinct, coprophilia, necrophilia, as each psychoanalyst outdid themselves to delve deeper into the demonic recesses of the Id. Now, by contrast, when CBT and Positive Psychology is king, the conferences are full of chipper presentations on gratitude journals, meditation, flow and positive emotion. Not a necrophiliac in sight.

Freud is back on our screens this month, in David Cronenberg's new film, A Dangerous Method, where he is depicted by Viggo Mortensen (right). Freud still enjoys a following among cultural and literary types, but he's still rather in the wilderness of modern psychology. Writing in the latest issue of Prospect, John Gray argues that the reason Sigmund Freud is so out of fashion today is his ‘heroic refusal to flatter mankind’. Gray writes:

In a well-known passage at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud declared: “I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation…” What is most in demand at the start of the 21st century, in contrast, is consolation and nothing else. What Freud offers is a way of thinking in which the experience of being human can be seen to be more intractably difficult, and at the same time more interesting and worthwhile, than anything imagined in the cheap little gospels of progress and self-improvement that are being hawked today.

It’s true that Positive Psychology has swung far from the dark Teutonic pessimism of Freud, it has over-promised, over-hyped, and become obsessed with the light, the positive, the happy, and ended up demonising other aspects of human experience. Even some Positive Psychologists admit that. I think Gray has a point here.

But this is not, I think, why Freud is out of fashion today. Not all contemporary psychology is relentlessly optimistic. Daniel Kahneman, for example, explores in his new book, Thinking: Fast and Slow, how humans are endlessly deceived by the cognitive biases in their mind, and how, no matter how rational we try to be, we are perhaps fated to remain endlessly deceived. That is Freudian pessimism for the modern age - but grounded on more solid experimental science than Freud ever bothered to use.

No, the reason Freud is out of fashion today is because he over-hyped his ‘science’. I can accept his pessimistic philosophy. I can accept his view that humans are weak, irrational, violent creatures who can’t ever know themselves. I don’t agree with it - but I can live with it. What I object to in Freud is that he then says: only psychoanalysts can access the unconscious, only we, the priestly caste of analysts, can know its secrets, and only we can mitigate your neuroses, for a colossal fee. That’s what I have a problem with.

Gray says that Freud ‘began’ the idea of the talking cure, which ‘had the effect of promoting the idea that psychological conflict can be overcome by the sufferer gaining insight into the early experiences from which it may have originated’. Freud didn’t begin the ‘talking cure’. That goes back to Socrates, who developed the idea that through dialogue and self-examination, we can learn to ‘take care of our psyches’. Socrates taught us that we could all learn to be ‘doctors to ourselves’, as Cicero put it. He put forward an optimistic vision of humans’ capacity to know themselves and change themselves.

Freud, by contrast, took the power to know yourself and change yourself out of the hands of the individual, and gave it to his own self-appointed caste of experts. You can’t know yourself, he told humanity, only we can know you. And you have to pay us for this knowledge. Then he developed a remarkably rigid and dogmatic map of the unconscious, according to which what causes neuroses is almost always the Oedipal desire for a parent. He never put these theories to any kind of empirical test - indeed, he twisted the facts to fit his theory. And he then insisted all of humanity fit into his map. And if they didn’t, they were ‘in denial’, and needed several more years of psychoanalysis, until they confessed their guilt.

Gray argues that Freud put forward a sort of ‘Stoic ethics’, a Stoicism for the modern world, but without the Stoics’ optimistic idea of the Logos. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Stoic student learns how to know themselves, how to change themselves. And, importantly, they learn how to take responsibility for their thoughts and beliefs here in the present, rather than blaming it on the past, on their parents, on their environment. Find me one mention in Stoicism of how our parents are to blame for our emotional problems. Stoic therapy focuses on the present, on our thoughts and beliefs here and now. ‘What is the point of dragging up suffering from the past?’ Seneca asked. ‘Of making yourself unhappy now because you were unhappy then?’

Much closer to the Socratic and Stoic project is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which evolved directly from Stoicism, and which shares their optimistic idea that we can know ourselves, examine our beliefs, change ourselves and become wiser and better adapted people. And we can do this ourselves. We don’t need to pay an analyst caste several thousand pounds for several years’ therapy. We don’t need to sign up to Freud’s bizarre and untested map of the unconscious, and confess our guilt.

I have no problems with Freud’s pessimistic philosophy of human existence. What I object to is that he claimed this philosophy was a science, and then insisted that only by accepting this science and paying through the nose for psychoanalysis can we free ourselves from neuroses. His science was terrible - he lied, he falsified, he failed to test his outlandish conclusions, he ostracised any followers who dared to question him (please read Richard Webster's Why Freud Was Wrong if you think I'm exaggerating). He turned his philosophy into a scientific cult, and insisted that we kneel to the cult leaders and confess our sins.

And it didn’t work. All that money, all those years and years of therapy, all that endless diving into the past and finding that moment Mummy was mean to you...and there is still no scientific evidence that psychoanalysis works. But it did turn into a huge industry, which is still lamely insisting the only way to personal redemption is to pay them several thousand pounds for several years until we come out of denial. Well, I'm sorry, I'm not buying it.

I am surprised that Gray, who is usually so good at seeing the cultish irrationalism of modern theories, should defend him

.

IEA slams the politics and economics of happiness

The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) - the UK's oldest think-tank and a leading source of right-wing thinking in the UK - has published a new book harshly criticising prime minister David Cameron's initiative to measure national well-being. You can read it here. I haven't had time to read it myself yet, I'll try to do so over the weekend, but it looks juicy and thought-provoking. Have a look at the executive summary, below. It says:

• The idea put forward by the British government that economists and politicians pursue policies directed towards maximising GDP is a ‘straw man’. Government has always had a multitude of different objectives and government policy would be very different today if economic growth were the single priority. [This sounds fair enough.]
  

• Explicit attempts by government to control GDP, or rapidly increase GDP growth, have normally failed. Such a target- driven mentality is part of the conceit of central planning. Attempts to centrally direct policy towards improving general well-being will also fail. [One could still have centrally-planned initiatives to improve well-being, such as increasing the number of therapists out there, as this government has done. I'm just not sure such efforts will make much of a difference to 'national well-being' charts, which remain stubbornly flat.]
  

• Contrary to popular perception, new statistical work suggests that happiness is related to income. This relationship holds between countries, within countries and over time. The relationship is robust and also holds at higher levels of income as well as at lower levels of income. This calls into question the assertion that people are on a ‘hedonic treadmill’ that prevents them becoming happier as their income rises beyond a certain level of income. [Well, I'm sceptical of any arguments from national happiness measurements, but I'll have to look into this further.]
  

• This new work, using a data set of 126 countries, shows that the correlation between life satisfaction and the log of permanent income within a given country lies between 0.3 and 0.5. There is a similar correlation between growth in life satisfaction and growth in income.

• There is no evidence that equality is related to happiness. Indeed, the proponents of greater income equality admit that they are unable to cite such evidence and instead rely on very unsatisfactory forms of indirect inference. The clearest determinants of well-being would seem to be employment, marriage, religious belief and avoiding poverty. None of these is obviously correlated with income equality.

• The government is under pressure to bring in further legislation to promote ‘well-being at work’. This includes, for example, legislation on parental leave. The theoretical and empirical case for such legislation is weak. There is no relationship between objective measures of well-being at work and the extent of employment protection legislation, unionisation, and so on. Given the relationship between well-being and employment, any form of employment protection legislation that led to more temporary employment or reduced employment would be detrimental to well-being.

• A comparison across 74 countries finds that government final consumption negatively affects happiness levels and that the negative influence occurs regardless of how effective government bureaucracy is or how democratic the country is. Increasing government spending by about a third would cause a direct reduction in happiness of about 5 to 6 per cent. Centralising government decision-making is likely to lead to more intrusive government and lower wellbeing.

• If people wish to maximise their well-being and are the best judges of their own well-being they will take decisions about how to use their economic resources to pursue their own goals. We should allow people’s preferences for well-being to be revealed by their own actions rather than through surveys of what people say they prefer. [I guess, Cameron, Layard and other 'libertarian paternalists' like Matthew Taylor of the RSA would say that people are not the best judge of their own well-being, therefore they need scientific experts to guide or nudge them towards it.]
  

• Happiness measures are short-term, transient and shallow measures of people’s genuine well-being. [Fair enough - I agree. But the last several points have all been making moral and policy arguments based on happiness measurements. So are happiness measurements shallow and disregardable, or not?]
  

• Those who wish to use happiness economics in public policy have no effective way of determining whether an increase in well-being should be traded against justice, moral values or a decrease in freedom. It is a utilitarian philosophy which applies a principle that many might use in their own lives to the organisation of society as a whole. Applying such an overarching principle to the organisation of society as a whole is very dangerous.
  

I particularly agree with this last point. It's fine for an individual to choose to be a Utilitarian, but I find it incredible, bizarre and worrying that our government should have seen fit to sign the entire country up to Utilitarianism - without even asking our consent! Not even John Stuart Mill agreed with Benthamite Utilitarianism, and he was raised by Bentham. Yet somehow or other, we now live in an officially Utilitarian country with one scientific definition of well-being we all must fit into. And this David Cameron calls 'post-bureaucratic government'...

De Botton's Religion for Atheists: community without commitment

What do you make of it? Obviously a talk full of chutzpah, and he raises some very interesting points, but I think De Botton has to answer the following questions (and maybe he does in the book, which I haven't yet read):

He says he wants the ritualistic and communal aspects of religion without the doctrine. That reminds me of Oscar Wilde loving the incense and costume of Catholic mass without caring at all for its values. It is - or could easily become - a form of dandy-ish aestheticism.

It seems an individualistic, lonely project, for all De Botton's longing for community. If you want the community of religion, then you need to commit, as a group, to a particular set of ethics, beliefs, or 'doctrines'. The word 'community' comes from the same root as 'commitment', and I don't think you can have the one without the other.

If you just want the art of Christianity, you can go to a gallery now, you don't need a 'new religion'. If you want the music of Christianity, you can go to a concert now. If that's not communal enough for you, if you want something deeper, then you need to decide what you believe, find people who share those beliefs, and join together with them to build a community or movement.

Of course you can set up an ethical community which isn't theistic - but that community would still needs to decide what ethics it follows, what it demands from its followers, and decide what is the end it is striving for. Action for Happiness, for example, is committed to a Utilitarian ethics. I don't agree with its ethics, but at least it knows what it believes, and in that sense, it's closer to a religion for atheists than anything De Botton has come up with - although it doesn't really have the rituals yet, or know what its followers should do once they've joined. It's still an incredibly shallow form of community, in terms of the ties between its members and the ethical commitment demanded from them.

De Botton's School of Life, by contrast, does not offer people a particular ethics for them to commit to. That's why it is so far from a church, despite its 'Sunday sermons'. It is a philosophy shop - people pay to listen to various ideas, without having to commit to any of them. Nothing is demanded from them, apart from the entrance fee. I think it's a great organisation, a really valuable addition to the cultural map, but I think we can agree it's a long way from a religion (even if it is now setting up new outposts in other countries).

What De Botton presents in this talk is a set of instrumental techniques taken from religion, unattached now to any particular moral beliefs. He says we should make paintings didactic again, because it's an effective technique for moral instruction. But what morals should they instruct? Mao used paintings to indoctrinate his people in Maoism. Surely you have to decide what morals your 'religion for atheists' is going to implant, rather than focusing entirely on techniques for indoctrination? Otherwise this is not a religion, it's public relations - techniques for propaganda unattached to any particular moral values.

A genuine 'religion for atheists' would have to decide: what does it demand from its members? It would have to go beyond the rather easy market liberalism of the School of Life, and actually ask its members to make ethical sacrifices and commitments. Without that shared ethics and commitment, the community you end up with is inevitably going to be shallow, with much weaker ties than a genuine religion or philosophical movement. Not really a community at all, more a loose collection of strangers.

Emptying religion of ethical commitment and turning it into a set of techniques is like saying 'I want sex without commitment'. OK, you can learn various techniques for good sex, you can even set up places where strangers go to bonk each other, but it's not going to be as deep an experience - for that, you need shared values, and a commitment to each other.

To set up a genuine religious or philosophical movement, you have to have beliefs that people are willing to live for and even die for. People gave their life for Marxism, for Stoicism, for Buddhism. But who would be a martyr for the School of Life?

Any 'religion for atheists', if it is going to be serious and have a set of beliefs rather than personal techniques for personal happiness (which is just atomised self-help, not religion at all) then needs to decide: who sets these beliefs? Who sets the moral agenda? Who decides what values art should didactically spread? Who decides what moral values should be repeated by the followers throughout life? Who sets the creed? Who are the 'experts' or what Coleridge called the 'clerisy'? What if a follower disagrees with the prescribed ethics?

Any religious or philosophical community has to decide on its power structure - that's true even of Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Pythagoreanism, Marxism and so on. If they become more than personal philosophies, if they become communities or movements, they have to grapple with such questions.

I'd like to see De Botton grappling with these difficult questions more. I don't see him sweating, and I think philosophy should involve a bit of grappling, a bit of sweat. Otherwise you're not really challenging yourself and your own arguments.

De Botton seems horrified by the thought of committing to particular beliefs, values, doctrines. He wants to move beyond market liberalism, but he's afraid to, perhaps because he's afraid it would put off his audience and make him seem Victorian and Thomas Carlyle-esque. He wants to keep his tongue in his cheek and his audience chuckling along. He wants to keep it light. No doctrines here, tra la la.

But I think secretly he really does want to start a religion for atheists, he really does want to move beyond market liberalism to a sort of moral paternalism (have a look at this piece he wrote last year, defending moral paternalism). He is Oscar Wilde, secretly longing to be Thomas Carlyle. But if you really want to be a new Thomas Carlyle, Alain, you need to appreciate the importance of being earnest.

To be fair to De Botton, I think he is grappling with these questions, and the School of Life as an organisation is a big step in the right direction. All of us in the grassroots practical philosophy movement are pondering these questions, and they're not easy to solve - partly because no one wants to be accused of running a cult. I personally think he just needs to take the plunge, tell us what he believes, and embrace his inner Thomas Carlyle.

Opening up about mental illness at work

Interesting story on Twitter yesterday, covered in The Telegraph:

Roy Ward gathered thousands of followers on the social networking site after he tweeted: “Dear Twitter, I just opened up to my boss about my depression and she's indicated she might have to fire me. Erm, help?”He later posted a link and a message saying: “Here is my letter of dismissal. FUN TIMES. ‘Dear Roy It is with regret that we must terminate your contract.’”

He added: "’We're a small company, there's no room for passengers’ – My boss after I told her about my depression and how I'm getting help with it.”

Within a few hours his hashtag @badlydrawnroy was trending on Twitter and thousands of users began contacting him to offer their support and advice, including the Tory MP Louise Mensch, former spin doctor Alastair Campbell, and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.Mrs Mensch described the case as “appalling”, while Mr Campbell said that if true, it showed that “we’re still in the dark ages”.

Others, including several users claiming to be lawyers, suggested that he take the company, which has not been named, to an employment tribunal.Mr Ward, from Leeds, last night thanked his new army of followers and said he was “looking at my options” in challenging his dismissal.

The individual versus the system in American New Wave cinema

Yesterday I re-watched for the umpteenth time one of my favourite films - Alan Pakula’s All The President’s Men. It’s one of the great films of the American New Wave of the 1970s, and characterizes the paranoia and claustrophobia of that cinematic movement. The New Wave explored the comedown from baby-boomers’ late 1960s anarchist optimism, from their belief that they could somehow magically free themselves from all their hang-ups and all the corrupt institutions of the state, and throw off the past like they threw off their clothes at Woodstock. It's a very American aspiration: to shake off the past and be born again without hang-up or sin. It's the same belief that led the Pilgrims to leave Europe for the 'New World'.

But that wave of Sixties anarchist optimism hit the rocks and dribbled away. Nixon was re-elected in 1968, Martin Luther King and both Kennedys were assassinated, the Vietnam War continued. The baby-boomer utopians were faced with the brutal fact that there were powerful political and economic forces in America, and they were not about to disappear just because you'd taken LSD. So the baby-boomer artist moved from an anarchist optimism (we can change the world!) to a sense of individual isolation, paranoia, and claustrophobia. The individual is dwarfed by the vast machinery of the state.


Many of the best films of the American New Wave explored the failure of the individual to free themselves from the corrupt institutions of the past. Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather (1972), for example, explores how young Michael Corleone becomes ever more enmeshed in his Mafia family's criminal practices, despite his best intentions to remain free and untainted. Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) shows a private detective failing to protect the woman he loves from the corrupt institutions of the family and the state. He is told, in the film’s last line: ‘Forget it Jake. It’s Chinatown.’ Chinatown is, in the film, a symbol of the limits of our moral idealism.

Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver (1976) shows a man going vigilante because he doesn’t believe the institutions of the state work anymore. Moral idealism has turned vigilante, because the system doesn’t work - a theme explored in another key 70s film, Dirty Harry, about a supra-judicial vigilante. This theme eventually leads to the birth of the superhero movie with Superman in 1978: the superhero is necessary because the state doesn't work. America takes a collective flight into fantasy.

Even a comic jape like Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973) explores an individual desperately - and farcically - trying to resist and escape an all-powerful state...and failing. There is nowhere for him to escape to.

This exploration of the individual versus the system is also an indirect commentary on the relationship between the auteur and the Hollywood system. Because, in fact, the American New Wave of the 1970s was a brief moment of remarkable freedom, when individual auteurs like Scorcese and Coppola were handed a surprising amount of money and power by the Hollywood studios to go off and make big-budget art-house films like The Godfather (this is well-described in Peter Biskind’s excellent book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls).

But this moment was very brief, before the studios lost their nerve after the expensive failures of Apocalypse Now (1979) and Heaven’s Gate (1980). The 1970s ended with the rise of the blockbuster event movie: Star Wars (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Superman (1978). The system won in the end (at least, it won for a decade, until David Lynch rescued independent cinema and the auteur).

All The President’s Men (1976) is a key part of this New Wave exploration of the individual versus the system. The film really developed the aesthetic, thanks to the partnership of director Alan Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis. You might not have heard of Willis (I hadn’t before last week), but he was a defining influence on the New Wave aesthetic, and was cinematographer for All The President’s Men, Klute, Godfather I and II, Annie Hall, and Manhattan. He was nick-named the ‘prince of darkness’ because his shots were so much darker and shadowy than usual - a technique he used to devastating effect in All The President’s Men and The Godfather, films that explore the shadows and corruption at the heart of American power.

In Klute, The Parallax View, and particularly in All The President’s Men, Pakula and Willis developed an aesthetic of paranoia and claustrophobia. It’s the complete opposite of 1960s anarchist optimism - the individual is dwarfed by the huge concrete institutions through which they walk. They are watched, bugged, spied on. Willis often shoots the heroes from high above, or shows them creeping through concrete landscapes (like the garage where Woodward meets his FBI source, shown on the right). In one famous shot in All The President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein are looking for clues in the Library of Congress, and the camera pulls up and up, until they are tiny dots in the great geometric shape of the reading room. Or he shows their car crawling along the streets of Washington like a bug, while they try and track down clues. It’s Kafka-esque - the individual as a bug, lost in the institutions of power.

And yet for all its paranoia, All The President’s Men is an optimistic film. Two junior journalists at the Washington Post stumble across a story, and they track it down, they move through hunches, uncertainty, lies and threats...and they get the story. They bring down the president. It is the Oedipal triumph of the baby-boomer generation - Luke Skywalker defeating Darth Vader, but not in science fiction - for real.

And All the President’s Men also has a more optimistic vision of institutions than most New Wave films. Yes, most of the institutions we meet in the film have gone wrong (the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department, the White House - there’s a great line in the film from their FBI source, Deep Throat: ‘this involves them all’). But one institution comes out of it well: the Washington Post. Bernstein and Woodward, the two reporters who get the story, are helped by the institution of the Post. They are guided by its practices, prevented from making mistakes, and helped by the wisdom and authority of its elders (in particular the Post's editor, Ben Bradlee). So there are some ‘wise elders’ in the film - Bradlee is Obi Wan Kenobi to Nixon’s Darth Vader.

You can see the influence of the 70s aesthetic on many modern movies, but particularly on the work of David Fincher, who is one of my favourite contemporary directors. We see a very similar aesthetic in films like Se7en, Fight Club, and Zodiac. Se7en, for example, shows a man who despairs of the corrupt institutions and practices of society, so he becomes a vigilante murderer - like the hero of Scorcese’s Taxi Driver. The world of Se7en is very much the shadowy, half-lit world of Gordon Willis’ 70s films.

Fight Club, meanwhile, explores the clash between the anarchist-utopian individual and the systems of society. Again, it’s a shadowy, underground world we move through - and Fincher acknowledged the influence of Willis on the film. Again, as in the 70s New Wave, there’s a sort of despair in Fight Club - the individual can’t really win - although it’s more of a violent, nihilist despair. The individual is prepared to resort to blowing society up in order to free himself from it. That’s what it’s come to.

I wonder if the Occupy movement, that sudden swell of anarchist utopian optimism, will lead to more films like these, that explore what happens when the individual meets the system - they usually lose, sometimes they go postal, sometimes they manage to bring down a politician or two. But the system remains.

An account of the infamous Brindley lecture on erectile disfunction

A wonderful article from the British Journal of Urology, by Laurence Klotz:

In 1983, at the Urodynamics Society meeting in Las Vegas, Professor G.S. Brindley first announced to the world his experiments on self-injection with papaverine to induce a penile erection. This was the first time that an effective medical therapy for erectile dysfunction (ED) was described, and was a historic development in the management of ED.

The way in which this information was first reported was completely unique and memorable, and provides an interesting context for the development of therapies for ED. I was present at this extraordinary lecture, and the details are worth sharing. Although this lecture was given more than 20 years ago, the details have remained fresh in my mind, for reasons which will become obvious.

The lecture, which had an innocuous title along the lines of ‘Vaso-active therapy for erectile dysfunction’ was scheduled as an evening lecture of the Urodynamics Society in the hotel in which I was staying. I was a senior resident, hungry for knowledge, and at the AUA I went to every lecture that I could. About 15 min before the lecture I took the elevator to go to the lecture hall, and on the next floor a slight, elderly looking and bespectacled man, wearing a blue track suit and carrying a small cigar box, entered the elevator. He appeared quite nervous, and shuffled back and forth. He opened the box in the elevator, which became crowded, and started examining and ruffling through the 35 mm slides of micrographs inside. I was standing next to him, and could vaguely make out the content of the slides, which appeared to be a series of pictures of penile erection. I concluded that this was, indeed, Professor Brindley on his way to the lecture, although his dress seemed inappropriately casual.

The lecture was given in a large auditorium, with a raised lectern separated by some stairs from the seats. This was an evening programme, between the daytime sessions and an evening reception. It was relatively poorly attended, perhaps 80 people in all. Most attendees came with their partners, clearly on the way to the reception. I was sitting in the third row, and in front of me were about seven middle-aged male urologists, and their partners in ‘full evening regalia’.

Professor Brindley, still in his blue track suit, was introduced as a psychiatrist with broad research interests. He began his lecture without aplomb. He had, he indicated, hypothesized that injection with vasoactive agents into the corporal bodies of the penis might induce an erection. Lacking ready access to an appropriate animal model, and cognisant of the long medical tradition of using oneself as a research subject, he began a series of experiments on self-injection of his penis with various vasoactive agents, including papaverine, phentolamine, and several others. (While this is now commonplace, at the time it was unheard of). His slide-based talk consisted of a large series of photographs of his penis in various states of tumescence after injection with a variety of doses of phentolamine and papaverine. After viewing about 30 of these slides, there was no doubt in my mind that, at least in Professor Brindley's case, the therapy was effective.

Of course, one could not exclude the possibility that erotic stimulation had played a role in acquiring these erections, and Professor Brindley acknowledged this.The Professor wanted to make his case in the most convincing style possible. He indicated that, in his view, no normal person would find the experience of giving a lecture to a large audience to be erotically stimulating or erection-inducing. He had, he said, therefore injected himself with papaverine in his hotel room before coming to give the lecture, and deliberately wore loose clothes (hence the track-suit) to make it possible to exhibit the results. He stepped around the podium, and pulled his loose pants tight up around his genitalia in an attempt to demonstrate his erection.

At this point, I, and I believe everyone else in the room, was agog. I could scarcely believe what was occurring on stage. But Prof. Brindley was not satisfied. He looked down sceptically at his pants and shook his head with dismay. ‘Unfortunately, this doesn’t display the results clearly enough’. He then summarily dropped his trousers and shorts, revealing a long, thin, clearly erect penis. There was not a sound in the room. Everyone had stopped breathing.

But the mere public showing of his erection from the podium was not sufficient. He paused, and seemed to ponder his next move. The sense of drama in the room was palpable. He then said, with gravity, ‘I’d like to give some of the audience the opportunity to confirm the degree of tumescence’. With his pants at his knees, he waddled down the stairs, approaching (to their horror) the urologists and their partners in the front row. As he approached them, erection waggling before him, four or five of the women in the front rows threw their arms up in the air, seemingly in unison, and screamed loudly. The scientific merits of the presentation had been overwhelmed, for them, by the novel and unusual mode of demonstrating the results.The screams seemed to shock Professor Brindley, who rapidly pulled up his trousers, returned to the podium, and terminated the lecture. The crowd dispersed in a state of flabbergasted disarray.

I imagine that the urologists who attended with their partners had a lot of explaining to do. The rest is history. Prof Brindley's single-author paper reporting these results was published about 6 months later [1].Professor Brindley made a huge contribution to the management of ED, for which he deserves tremendous gratitude. He was a true lateral thinker, and applied his unique mind to a variety of problems in medicine. These include over 100 publications that focus on the areas of visual neurophysiology and several other aspects of neurophysiology, including ejaculation and female sexual dysfunction. He also published one remarkable paper studying the effect of 17 different drugs used intracorporally to induce erection. Seven of these (phenoxybenzamine, phentolamine, thymoxamine, imipramine, verapamil, papaverine, naftidrofury) induced an erection. It is not clear to what degree Brindley's own penis served as the test subject for these studies.This lecture was unique, dramatic, paradigm-shifting, and unexpected. It is difficult to imagine that a similar scenario could ever take place again. Professor Brindley belongs in the pantheon of famous British eccentrics who have made spectacular contributions to science. The story of his lecture deserves a place in the urological history books.