The Commission on Improving Dignity in Care published a report today based on its work over the last year, looking at "the extent and root causes of the failure to provide appropriate levels of care to older people" in the NHS and care homes. We're just not good enough at how we treat the elderly, and the improvement of such services is becoming a priority as more and more people live into their 80s and 90s, and often develop dementia.
What is interesting about the report for me, from a philosophy angle, is the emphasis it puts on the role of values and ethics within the medical system. One of its core recommendations is:
Hospitals should recruit staff to work with older people who have the compassionate values needed to provide dignified care as well as the clinical and technical skills. Hospitals should evaluate compassion as well as technical skills in their appraisals of staff performance.
It was a point repeated by Sir Keith Pearson, one of the authors of the report, when he appeared on the Today show this morning. He said: "Recruiting for values and then training for skills is enormously important." He said people considering a career in nursing needed to be aware that 60% of patients in hospitals were over the age of 65 and they needed to be able to show compassion and kindness to elderly patients.
The report also says the system needs to put more emphasis on care-givers' responsibility and personal judgement, that they have the power to challenge practices they see as harmful, and that the dignity and autonomy of the patient is paramount.
It just reminds me a lot of Aristotelian philosophy and of the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, who often warns that our society is becoming over-instrumentalised, over-obsessed with skills and technologies, and losing sight of the ethics, values and human warmth needed to guide any bureaucratic system. I think this report confirms and complements that view. It's also a point made by David Buchanan, the director of the Institute of Global Health, in this presentation that I saw him give at an AHRC event last September.
I like Alain De Botton's energy and chutzpah, but I also think ideas are better when they're challenged and thinkers are prodded to consider the possible holes in their thinking. So here is what I think is a serious hole which De Botton needs to consider in his 'religion for atheists'. At the moment, it seems to me pretty much exclusively a religion for the haute bourgeosie.
I was particularly struck by the class-bound restrictions of his religion yesterday, when he tweeted suggesting that hotels need to learn lessons from religions, and be places of solace and consolation for the soul rather than superficial 'holiday spots'. He wrote:
The tradition of religious retreats reveals a need for a new kind of establishment, a secular hotel for the soul, devoted to satisfying with intelligence and artistry the psychological as well as physical needs of its clientele. Such a hotel would humbly study the extraordinarily structured ways in which Buddhism approaches the topic of relaxation, as well as casting an eye across other faiths and psychological schools in order to arrive at programmes for the care of our troubled minds that would extend beyond the lamentable solutions currently on offer.
So we propose a solution in the form of a Hotel for the Soul. The needs of the mind, or to use an old-fashioned but evocative term, 'the soul' remain generally ignored by holsteries. While pampering our bodies, the typical hotel comes up with no more sophisticated response to the needs of the soul than minigolf, the Sunday newspapers and a DVD library. The new institution, positioned either on the slopes of a Swiss alp or to the side of a volcano in Tenerife, will skilfully attend to the needs of both body and soul - and will thereby mark the natural evolution from the luxury spa hotel to the hotel dedicated to the well-being of the whole person and humanity more broadly.
Now this is less radical than Alain might think. In fact, there have been 'holistic hotels' for a long time now, where earnest well-being entrepreneurs cater to our spiritual needs. In fact, an article I read recently told me that bookings for 'holistic holidays' were up 250% last year. But it's not the unoriginality of the idea that concerns me - it's the exclusivity.
A religion worth its name caters for everyone: not just the rich suffering from affluenza and status anxiety, but the really poor, the sick, the destitute. Alain is comparing monasteries to hotels, but monasteries were alms-giving institutions which supported local communities. They weren't holiday resorts in Tenerife.
If Alain is serious about starting a 'religion for atheists', using a blend of psychotherapy and philosophy, and using places like the School of Life as hubs, then he needs to face this class / wealth problem. The School of Life, based in Bloomsbury, offers life-classes costing £30 or so a pop. How socially diverse is the audience? Entirely middle class? That's fine if the School of Life is a retail organisation, but not if it's a religious organisation. A religion, in my opinion, needs to extend beyond Bloomsbury.
This is a problem philosophy has long faced. Epicureanism, Stoicism or Platonism were attractive to the wealthy elite, but what about less educated people, people who simply didn't have the leisure to follow an extended course of philosophy? Where is the consolation for them? If philosophy only caters to the well-off, then it becomes the cultural equivalent of a gated community - withdrawing from society into private and exclusive communes like Epicurus' Garden or De Botton's Tenerife resort.
What Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism did so well is create systems of belief and practice for the intellectual and the masses, for the rich and the poor. That meant using some of the cultural practices that Alain has identified - paintings, hymns, architecture etc. But it also meant charitable activities, running hospitals, schools, homeless shelters. Above all, it means a commitment to try and help all of humanity, not just the well-off. It meant a willingness to get one's hands dirty. The only philosophy that came anywhere close to that was Marxism.
People criticise Alain for inheriting a lot of money. So what? He could have not worked at all, but he spent his life working hard, producing books that millions have found helpful, setting up worthwhile institutions like the School of Life, all of which, ironically, have been very successful (ironic because unlike every other philosopher he doesn't need the money). But that well-off background may have made him diffident about going beyond his own class and his possible reception in other parts of society.
But the practical philosophy movement needs to go beyond the affluent. That might be an awkward process, but it will also be fulfilling, rewarding and inspiring. We need to combine the intelligence of Alain De Botton with the spirit of Jamie Oliver, who has that sleeves-rolled-up willingness to go into rough schools or poor neighbourhoods and try to improve them. Otherwise, philosophy becomes a lifestyle column in the FT's How To Spend It.
What could be a first step? Well, how about a pro bono initiative involving School of Life faculty and others, to go beyond Bloomsbury and run workshops in local London schools? Or in the NHS? Or in homes for the elderly?
By the by, another of his suggestions is to have high-street therapists as a new caste of priests. He admits there is an economic problem here too - therapy tends to be the preserve of the middle class - and acknowledges the efforts of Lord Layard to make CBT more available through the NHS, but he says 'progress is slow and vulnerable'.
Really? Layard got half a billion in funding for 6,000 new cognitive therapists. That's pretty amazing. I'd actually say that of all the real-world impacts by British intellectuals over the last decade, that is the most significant and laudable. It's taken therapy beyond the middle class.
De Botton writes: 'Therapists are hidden away. You don't see them on the high street'. Well, you increasingly do see NHS Psychotherapy and Well-Being Clinics all over London now. But that's not the main point. The main point is: what is the role of philosophy in all this?
The answer is that the Socratic philosophy that De Botton so often aludes to - Stoicism, Epicureanism, Scepticism and so on - is the source of the CBT now being mass-disseminated by Layard's National Mental Health Service.
So that's another way that philosophy can be taken beyond the middle class - by providing classes within the National Mental Health Service that re-contextualise CBT in its original philosophical context, giving people an ability not just to learn instrumental techniques for well-being, but also to consider broader questions of what it means to flourish and live a good life.
What I have made here are not flat-out criticisms but attempts to take the project forward. Oh, and another thing. Drop the name. Why restrict your project to atheists? That's immediately going to put off people in poorer neighbourhoods, for whom God is a deeper consolation than any philosophy book. Socratic philosophy has room for both theists and atheists, and the same ideas and techniques can provide consolation for both sides. So why restrict your philosophy to 30% of the population - a 30% who are typically middle class? Does The School of Life only cater to atheists? Are believers not welcome?
The New Inquiry has a great piece asking if TED has jumped the shark:
So many of the TED talks take on the form of those famous patent medicine tonic cure-all pitches of previous centuries, as though they must convince you not through the content of what’s being said but through the hyper-engaging style of the delivery. Each new “big idea” to “inspire the world” and “change everything” pitched from the TED stage reminds me of the swamp root and snake oil liniment being sold from a wagon a hundred years past. As Mike Bulajewski pointed out in a Tweet, “TED’s ‘revolutionary ideas’ mask capitalism as usual, giving it a narrative of progress and change.”
At TED, “everyone is Steve Jobs” and every idea is treated like an iPad. The conferences have come to resemble religious meetings and the TED talks techno-spiritual sermons, pushing an evangelical, cultish attitude toward “the new ideas that will change the world.” Everything becomes “magical” and “inspirational.” In just the top-ten most-viewed TED talks, we get the messages of “inspiration,” “astonishment,” “insight,” “mathmagic” and the “thrilling potential of SixthSense technology”! The ideas most popular are those that pander to a metaphysical, magical portrayal of the role of technology in the world.
There are consequences to having this style of discourse dominate how technology’s role in society is understood. Where are the voices critical of corporatism? Where is there space to reach larger publics without having to take on the role of a salesperson, preacher, or self-help guru? Academics, for instance, have largely surrendered the ground of mainstream conversations about technology to business folks in the TED atmosphere.
The feeling that you may have just boarded a Scientology cruise ship is not accidental. It’s rooted partly in Silicon Valley’s techno-Rapturist soil, and partly in [Chris] Anderson’s own evangelical yearnings. Those invited to speak at TED are mailed an actual stone tablet engraved with “The TED Commandments.” (One is “Thou Shalt Not Sell From the Stage.”) June Cohen, who runs TED’s media operation, told an audience two years ago that her sister-in-law calls the TED Talk “a secular sermon.” The atheist Daniel Dennett suggested that TED could “replace” religion, observing that it “already, largely wittingly I think, adopted a lot of the key design features of good religions,” including giving away content.
I love TED talks, I love how they're free, accessible, and have brought interesting ideas to millions of people. But these articles makes some valid points that needed to be made.
TED is a really interesting part of the Zeitgeist. It's an expression of a culture which emerged in the 1990s, which has huge confidence and optimism in the power of social science and technology to improve the world instantly. It's very much the Malcolm Gladwell view of the world, as expressed in books like The Tipping Point or Blink. It turns ideas into business pitches, and says, if you can't express your idea in ten minutes, and make it sound shiny and new, your idea is not worth expressing.
I'm all for making ideas accessible, but what this basically means is we're drowning in non-fiction social science books that should have remained as 15-minute TED talks. Careful academic work has been replaced by the over-hyped business pitch.
And TED has contributed to our culture's chronic, deluded optimism in social science and tech. One example is Jane McGonigal's TED talk: 'Gaming can make a better world'. This is a classic example of TED's religious optimism in tech. McGonigal makes some nice points, but she seriously thinks gaming is going to solve our major global problems like climate change - and her optimism for this is based on one climate change game she devised. I'm sorry, but she's still living in a 90s bubble of delusion. Gaming is not going to stop climate change.
TED talks often show a deep faith in measurements, data and statistics. The arch example is Hans Gosling's talk on statistics, which is very entertaining, but for the TED audience it's statistics-as-religious experience. It taps into their positivist faith in science: all we need to do is measure stuff, put it on a graph, observe the trends, then use this data to create a better world. We can even use such measurements to enhance global well-being (another popular TED talk is Nic Marks from the UK's new economics foundation on well-being measurements).
Martin Seligman's talk on Positive Psychology, again, is another example of TED's deluded optimism in social science, and of how academic pysychology got drunk on the TED Kool-Aid and the $$$ that follow a TED talk. We can make the entire world more spiritually flourishing, thanks to the magic of science! We just measure it, find the tech that improves the data, then roll it out - and guess what folks, we already got our first seed funding. Woo-hoo!
We face some really serious problems: mass unemployment, an unjust economic system, a global population heading for nine billion, and a planet struggling to support us. But if you can't get your idea into a neat ten minute business pitch with the word 'new' in it, that makes the audience feel good about themselves, then sorry pal, get off the stage. I just invented a new machine that can solve depression and do your ironing! How about that folks!!!
I went to church today, with my parents, to St Vedast, a Wren-designed chapel near St Paul's in London. It was the second time I'd been to a church service voluntarily, as it were. The first was a few weeks ago, also in St Vedast. I'm not exactly a Christian, but I do believe in God, and I want to worship God among other people. And (hopefully I don't sound too like Alain De Botton here) I love the culture of Christianity, the music, the churches, the stained glass windows, the psalms...and the close relationship between Christianity and Hellenistic philosophy. So I go to church occasionally, don't take communion, and don't say the whole of the creed. I don't know if this makes me a complete imposter...I told one of the congregation after the service I was a 'Unitarian', which left me just as confused as him.
The service was the first Sunday of Lent. I like the way there's a Christian calendar, a sense of the seasons of the spiritual life. We don't have that in the Socratic tradition, which is pretty crap on things like rituals, hymns and customs. Anyway, the first hymn we sung was about Lent, and the words were written by St Gregory the Great in the seventh century AD. I mean, that's pretty amazing. You're singing a hymn written by Pope Gregory fourteen centuries ago! Its first verse is:
Give us the self-control that springs From discipline of outward things That fasting inward secretly The soul may purely dwell with thee.
This made me think of the cultural practice of Lent as a way of developing self-control. Today we are very impressed with psychologists like Roy Baumeister who have developed a 'science' of self-control. Baumeister thinks there is a connection between self-control and glucose levels - if your self-control gets depleted, you may need a cookie or a Lucozade. Yeah, maybe...you don't often see Jesus quaffing a Pepsi-Max, but who knows.
The ancients wouldn't have thought of fasting and self-control in such biochemical terms. Gregory talks of 'the fruits of penitence'. The early Christians, and the ancient Greeks, would have thought of fasting and self-control as increasing our spiritual capital, our reserves of spiritual strength. It's not just glucose levels, it's something we can't yet measure, something invisible and ineffable but still very powerful.
One of the readings today was a rather beautiful passage from St Mark, about Jesus going into the wilderness:
'And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.'
I love the line 'and the angels ministered unto him'. There is Jesus, alone in the desert, in a barren wilderness, and the angels are ministering to him, as if he were at a banquet. It's a beautiful image. And I think there's a truth to it: there is a spiritual wealth that can grow from those tough years when we find ourselves in the wilderness. Sometimes, those difficult passages of our life, when we find ourselves externally the most bereft, alone and impoverished, are the periods of our life when we access the best ideas, the most creative projects, the deepest inner resources.
To take an example from my personal experience: my book which is finally being published this year was begun many years ago when I was pretty alone and unhappy. I don't know if the book is good or bad, but I do know it grew out of those wilderness years. Often, when people become successful and are celebrated by their society, they actually do very little new or original work. Everything genuinely worthwhile they produced was produced when they were in the wilderness. It's not a cast-iron rule, but it's an interesting thing to think about if you find yourself in the wilderness. If you have the courage not to despair, the wilderness can be the place you find the greatest resources and the most interesting ideas.
By the by, that phrase, 'and the angels ministered unto him', reminds me of an older myth, the myth of Cupid and Psyche. When Psyche comes to Cupid's castle, she sits at a table and is served food by invisible hands. The image appears again in the fairy-tale Beauty and the Beast, which evolved from the Cupid and Psyche myth. Beauty goes to face the Beast in his castle, she sacrifices herself to go into the wilderness and confront the Shadow, and the 'fruit' of this is that she achieves grace, spiritual wealth, the spiritual riches symbolised by Beauty being served by invisible hands:
When they sat down, invisible hands passed them things to eat and to drink, and they ate and drank to their heart's content. And when they arose from the table it arose too and disappeared through the door as if it were being carried by invisible servants.
This phrase, 'the invisible hand', appears in Sophocles too, in the final scene of Oedipus at Colonus when Oedipus is carried up to heaven by 'hands invisible'. Like Jesus, Oedipus has left his civilisation, gone into the wilderness and stripped down to his barest essence, and his reward is grace and spiritual wealth.
Then Adam Smith took the symbol from its religious context, and used it to mean the law of supply and demand in the consumer economy. Really, it means something much more mysterious and spiritual than that. It means there is an invisible economy, behind the material economy of money and goods, an invisible economy of spiritual wealth and spiritual debt. And if you give up goods in the outer economy, you gain riches in the inner economy, and the angels minister unto you. So the story goes, anyway - not that I know the first thing about sacrifice or self-control.
Before those lines about Jesus in the desert, the reading from St Mark told us:
'And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him'.
This reminded me very much of this abduction scene from the sci-fi film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which I happened to watch yesterday. It is an incredibly religious film, translated into the language of sci-fi, UFOs and aliens. It shows how we still use the myths and symbols of Judeo-Christian culture, even if we're not aware of it (though I think Spielberg must have been aware of it).
Bloomberg (of all places) has a piece on Criolo, a new Brazilian musician hitting it big this year, whose lyrics are socially conscious, and whose mum runs a philosophy cafe in the favelas of Rio:
Criolo, the 35-year-old Sao Paulo rapper, is ensconced on the cover of another fashionable magazine, this time, a glossy monthly called Trip that focuses on surf, street culture, music and scantily clad young women. The accompanying article sums up a good year for Criolo:
Author of the most praised album of the year, lionized by reviews and a devoted mass of fans, nominated for five Brazilian MTV Awards, crowded shows. Criolo is on top, there's no discussion.
There's no discussion that he's on top, but plenty of discussion about what Criolo's unique blend of musical genre-bending and powerful, socially conscious lyrics says about how Brazil's culture is changing. Criolo is fast becoming the first hip hop artist to cross into what's called musica popular brasileira, or MPB -- that is, mainstream pop success. But, as Trip noted:
His success is anything but sudden. He is just reaping the fruits of more than 20 years in rap and of 35 of a dedicated and improbable story of family education.
The magazine's cover features the rapper in front of a wall painted with a graffiti stencil of a wheelbarrow full of books. The painting is in the sprawling Grajau favela on the poor edges of Sao Paulo -- where Criolo is from and still lives. His interview accompanied a special about education in Brazil and was published alongside one with his mother, Dona Vilani, a teacher who runs the Philosophy Cafe in their favela. Criolo too, Trip revealed, was once a teacher:
I worked with children and adolescents for 12 years. It’s one thing to know about things that happen, another to be there. Because my function a lot of the time wasn’t to give classes, teach. It was on the street, to make the first approach, to create a link. To open a dialogue.
Creating dialogue is both a key theme in his music and a motivation. Criolo's songs do not shy away from controversial subjects like the inequality of life in a favela like Grajau. But his attitude toward communicating these subjects outside the favela is positive: pro-education, pro-understanding. On stage he holds up signs reading "More Love Please," praises his parents, and calls for the end of prejudice.
Philosophy is getting huge in Brazil - in fact, it's actually compulsory in Brazilian schools. Practical philosophy in South America tends to be much more socially conscious than in, say, the UK - less focused on tranquility, more focused on inequality and social justice. Anyway, check out Criolo in action (by the way, Bloomberg, this isn't hip hop, it's jazz. Seriously.)
The NYT has been doing a good job keeping track of a new market trend in well-being: apps for self-tracking and self-quantification. It wrote in 2010:
At a health innovation and investment conference in California earlier this month, there was a lot of energy and excitement about the emerging health and wellness industry...New technology — low-cost computing, sensors, the Web and genetics — will play a crucial role in the transition.
Dr Eric Topol's new book, “The Creative Destruction of Medicine,” lays out his vision for how people will start running common medical tests, skipping office visits and sharing their data with people other than their physicians. Dr. Topol, a cardiologist and director of Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, Calif., is already seeing signs of this as companies find ways to hook medical devices to the computing power of smartphones. Devices to measure blood pressure, monitor blood sugar, hear heartbeats and chart heart activity are already in the hands of patients. More are coming.
An entire marketplace is evolving that marries the can-do attitude of hacking devices with the fervor of the wellness movement.
The most prevalent diseases and the biggest markets are getting the tools first. Devices to monitor heart disease are already available.
A French start-up, Withings, has created a blood pressure cuff for $129 that connects to an iPad or an iPhone. The cuff will automatically inflate, deflate and then record the pulse rate and the blood pressure. The app will graph the pressure over time, making trends easier to see.
Withings also includes a connection to its Web site so users can share their data with their doctors either directly through their password-protected pages or through third-party sites like digifit.com.
The growing incidence of diabetes is by many estimates the biggest public health challenge today, so companies are developing tools to help people with the disease manage their blood sugar.
Tom Xu, the founder of SkyHealth in El Cerrito, Calif., created the Web site glucosebuddy.com to help people keep track of the sugar in their blood. The numbers must be entered manually. The site works with an app for the iPhone to gather the blood glucose level and some information about when it was taken. “Our main goal of glucosebuddy is not to just record numbers. That’s the boring part,” he said. “Once you know how your diet affects your blood sugar, you take your health more seriously.”
Other companies are beginning to integrate the hardware and software. AgaMatrix, a company that makes a blood glucose monitor, iBGStar, that attaches to the iPhone, worked with Sanofi, the pharmaceutical giant, to develop the tool. In December, the Food and Drug Administration approved the device for sale in the United States.
Its tool, like many other pocket meters, measures the amount of glucose in the blood, but it also transfers the data to the smartphone, which helps patients to track their glucose levels over time. It is not much different from a piece of paper and a pen, but it is faster and cleaner, and it is easy to share these values with doctors and friends.
Johnson & Johnson has also spoken publicly about developing a similar device. The ultimate goal is replicating the full-body diagnostic “tricorder” from the “Star Trek” TV show, a goal that is being encouraged by a $10 million prize put up by Qualcomm, the smartphone chip maker, through the X-Prize Foundation.
I've been busy the last couple of weeks, moving house, and working on a new AHRC-funded project, The Philosophy Hub, which will launch in May. It will be a network and map of philosophy groups around the world. I need your help with it: if you come across philosophy groups around the world, get in touch and I'll add them to the map. This will be the first global survey of the grassroots philosophy movement, so it's a fun project to be working on, and hopefully will help the movement grow.
Here's a couple of stories to show how international the politics of well-being is becoming. First, in South Korea, a piece looking at how all the main candidates in the presidential election have pledged to improve the happiness and well-being of the country's citizens. As the journalist notes, however, 68% of South Koreans said in a recent poll that the main cause of misfortune in the country is...politicians.
Meanwhile, over in the US, Rick Santorum, the back-to-basics Republican candidate, shows how much of the politics of well-being depends on your definition of happiness. In a recent speech, he discussed the Declaration of Independence's famous phrase about the right to 'the pursuit of happiness'. He suggests that happiness actually had a different definition "way back at the time of our founders...Go back and look it up. You'll see one of the principle definitions of happiness is 'to do the morally right thing.' God gave us rights to life and to freedom to pursue His will. That's what the moral foundation of our country is." Um...wasn't Thomas Jefferson, the author of that phrase, an Epicurean? Not sure he would have defined happiness as the freedom to do God's will - although other Founding Fathers may have.
While politicians may make more and more grand speeches about improving our well-being and happiness, the fact is, western governments are broke, and that's playing out in mental health services.
Here are two stories about that: the first from the US, where a military psychiatry unit is being investigated for allegedly urging Army doctors to think of the cost to the tax-payer before diagnosing soldiers with PTSD. Such a diagnosis apparently means $1.5 million in benefit payments over a soldier's lifetime. With 20% of soldiers coming back from Afghanistan with PTSD, no wonder the Army is spending big on its preventative resilience-training course.
Secondly, here is a story from the UK, looking at how the British government is protecting funding for its new Cognitive Behavioural Therapy service, while cutting funding for longer-term psychotherapy services. What that means is patients with serious mental health problems are being passed to CBT units who aren't trained to treat them. I spoke to one cognitive therapist recently who was handed over a patient with manic depression, who then killed herself. It's not fair on anyone to expect cognitive therapists to shoulder the nation's entire mental health problems.
Another way governments are trying to improve mental well-being without spending too much, by the by, is using new technology and apps, like this new 'Buddy app' which the NHS is using to connect patients with online therapists.
Jonah Lehrer, the Wired and WSJ columnist, is one of my heroes. He has a book out on creativity in April, which I think is going to be excellent. Here's a recent New Yorker piece he wrote, based on the book, on why brainstorming often doesn't work, why the expression 'there's no such thing as a bad idea' is wrong, and why groups whose members criticise each other are more creative.
Two pieces on my blog that have been getting a lot of hits. The first looks at an interview by BBC documentary maker Adam Curtis, another of my heroes, on why he left academia and why cultural trash is important to the history of ideas. The second is something I wrote on self-help, and how it uses techniques from ancient philosophy in the service not of God but of capitalism (financial success, corporate promotion, closing the deal etc), making it something akin to a 'religion for capitalists'.
Two good pieces on the history of emotions and behaviour, which show how a historical perspective can add value to discussions on well-being. The first, from the BBC's website, challenges the idea that we must have eight hours consecutive sleep, by looking at different sleeping patterns through history, when it was accepted to sleep for a bit, wake up and do stuff in the middle of the night, then have another sleep. That's pretty much how I sleep now. The second article, by a historian from George Mason University, looks at the history of happiness.
Here's a documentary / interview from 1988 that Ernst Gombrich did with Sir Karl Popper, one of the most important post-war philosophers.
The New Statesman has a new issue packed full of philosophy, including an interview with Charles Taylor, a review of Simon Critchley's new book on the religion of political ideology, and a piece by Alain de Botton reviewing James Miller's new book on philosophy outside of academia.
The Economist has a piece on an interesting debate going on now on whether dolphins and whales are 'persons', and therefore have rights.
Finally, I've been loving the American TV show Friday Night Lights, about a football coach and a high-school football team. Coach Taylor is a great example of the figure of the sports coach as a moral leader or 'moulder of men'. The show, despite or perhaps because of its old school morality, has proved a hit with liberals, including this lesbian feminist academic, who imagines Coach Taylor as her PhD supervisor. Here's one of her creations, to celebrate the birthday of feminist philosopher Judith Butler.
Check out this new app called Buddy App. Look's a pretty smart CBT app, designed by the South London and Maudsley Foundation Trust. Apparently already being used by several NHS and IAPT services around the UK.
Martin Seligman is undoubtedly a genius at attracting funding. But how good is his history of psychology?
His funding pitch usually begins with the insistence that he radically altered the direction of psychology when he launched Positive Psychology in 1998. In his inaugural speech as president of the American Psychology Association in 1998, he insisted that psychology had, since World War II, paid "almost exclusive attention" to pathology and illness. It's a claim he repeats in his 2011 book, Flourish, where he writes that Positive Psychology marked a "tectonic upheaval" in psychology, rescuing it from its exclusive focus on misery and illness.
This sounds so radical, so historically significant, that no layman or funder could resist letting out a whoop and signing a cheque: 'Of course psychology has always been too focused on illness and suffering! Just think of Freud and Krafft-Ebing. What a great idea, to set a bold new course for the heart of happiness and flourishing. Sign me up!'
But how accurate is Seligman's reading of the history of psychology?
I'm not an expert, not even close, in the history of psychology. But even to my layman's eyes, it seems obvious to me that this is an inaccurate and self-serving reading of the history of psychology, which vastly over-states the originality of Seligman's work.
In fact, as my friend Oliver Robinson recently pointed out to me, many of the greats of psychology were deeply interested in what constituted health, wellness and fulfilment. Think of Carl Jung's work on actualisation and individuation. Think of Abraham Maslow's work on the hierarchy of needs. Think of Galton's work on genius. Think of the work of developmental psychologists like Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg and Robert Kegan on maturity and wisdom. Think of existentialist psychologists like Erich Fromm and Viktor Frankl's interest in love, meaning and transcendence. Think of William James' work on religious experience. All these psychologists were deeply interested in the question of what constituted mental health, wellness and fulfilment, and how to achieve it.
Seligman might make the argument that Aaron Beck's Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, to which Seligman owes so much, was exclusively focused on treating illnesses, and that Positive Psychology used CBT techniques for the new goal of wellness or flourishing - and this is what makes Positive Psychology truly original and historically significant. But actually, Albert Ellis and his colleagues were using cognitive therapy to build resilience, thriving and mental health for several decades before Positive Psychology - and they were already teaching these techniques to kids in schools in the 1970s.
So much of Positive Psychology strikes me as marketing and hype, and this claim to historical originality is just another example of it. When historians look back at what was really useful and valid in Positive Psychology, I think they will decide it was mainly Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, invented back in the 1950s. I don't think Seligman has added anything genuinely original or new since then - though he certainly has attracted a huge amount of money and media attention.
Nice video here from the Hub Vienna, a new open space office / network for social entrepreneurs. There are a few such places here in London - Hub Kings Cross, Hub Westminster, Hub Old Street - and other Hubs appearing across Europe, like Hub Amsterdam. I like them....a good solution for freelancers looking for community, although when I briefly joined the Hub Kings Cross I found you didn't necessarily talk to the people sitting at your table, so maybe it was just an expensive internet cafe with a meeting room? But I guess the idea is you strike up conversations, find connections and gradually build up a community of like-minded people. Certainly the Hub Westminster is a really awesome space which seems to be attracting a lot of interesting people.
Anyway, I think they might all be set up by the same organisation...or perhaps they're a franchise? The main site is www.the-hub.net, which tells me:
The idea of the Hub has been spreading like wildfire and resulted in the emergence of a global movement to create Hubs across all five continents. To date, there are 26 open Hubs and many more in the making, ranging from Melbourne to Johannesburg and Sao Paulo. The ambition is clear: To become a truly global network of thriving Hubs all over the world, building a vibrant community of entrepreneurial people who work at the leading edge of social innovation through collaborative action. Locally embedded and globally connected.
The online journal e-flux has a great interview with BBC documentary maker Adam Curtis, who is one of my heroes (thanks to @lelaissezfaire for the link). As usual, Curtis' subjects range far and wide, but two things caught my eye. Firstly, I didn't know that Curtis was originally an academic at Oxford:
When I was a student, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I knew that politics and power were interesting. I didn’t mind the academy as a student, because you made friends and you had time and space to explore things. But after continuing up at Oxford, doing a PhD and starting to teach politics, I very quickly realized that I hated academia. To get a PhD, you have to find something that no one else has done, possess it, and then build a ring fence of quotations and references around it to protect it. In the 1980s, the academic world was facing uncertainty and because of that becoming increasingly cynical and corrupted. So I decided to leave, but without knowing what to do next.
Someone suggested I apply to the BBC, so I did, at random, and they gave me a job. I made a very silly film for one of the BBC training courses, comparing designer clothes in pop music videos to the design of weapons—I literally got a designer to discuss fashion with a weapons designer who made weapons that killed people. I was being silly, and the man who was running the training course thought it was so ridiculous that he sent me to work on the silliest program in the whole world, which was called That’s Life! with a woman called Esther Rantzen. And I ended up making films about talking dogs. So there wasn’t a moment of epiphany, but it was more like a strange drug-induced experience of lurching from one extreme to another, from teaching politics at Oxford and getting bored to making films about talking dogs and dogs that could sing. But I loved it, I just thought it was simply wonderful. My mother hated it. She thought I should be a serious academic. I had done very well at Oxford, so all the academic people there thought I had gone completely mad, leaving to make films about talking dogs.
Secondly, Curtis describes himself as a historian of ideas. He says: "if you had to reduce what I do, I spend my whole time just looking at how ideas have consequences, not necessarily what the promoters of them intended, because I think that’s a really big thing in our time. " I have my reservations about Curtis, which are well-encapsulated by this video piss-take of him, but I think he shows what a proper cultural historian of ideas needs to be and do today. If you want to study the impact of ideas today, you need to go beyond academia, beyond the study of academic authors, and be able to study aspects of popular or trash culture too. Curtis says:
I entered academia at the moment when the way power works in the modern world was basically becoming much wider and far more intricate. It flowed through culture and consumerism and public relations. It flowed through scientific ideas, and how those scientific ideas were then taken up and turned into technocratic dreams—and dystopias. It flowed through modern ideas drawn from psychotherapy and how to express yourself as an individual. I instinctively recognized that this had happened, but I had no idea how to deal with it, because academia hadn’t realized it yet. So in a way I turned my back on academia and went into television, went to the other extreme. I learned how to do trash. A few years later I worked out that one of the the ways you could tell stories about the workings of modern political power, in ways that political journalists didn’t understand, is through bolting it together with trash techniques. I put jokes in, silliness, self-referential bits about modern culture, and storytelling and emotion—all things I learned through doing trash television.
If you want to explore the history and impact of ideas on contemporary culture, you need to bring together a feel for the intellectual with a feel for the popular and trashy, and have a genuine interest in and even love for both sides. You can't just study the 'great books'. You need to see how these ideas play out in real life, and the strange popular movements and communities they lead to. Curtis does that. So does Tom Wolfe - his essays from the Sixties and Seventies and books like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test are masterpieces of the history of ideas. So does the cultural critic Greil Marcus. So does Geoff Dyer.
I think Charles Taylor does this to some extent in books like The Ethics of Authenticity, where he talks about the human development movement of the 1970s (one of Adam Curtis' favourite subjects) but he's still pretty cut off. I don't think he ever went and actually attended an Erhard Seminar Training course, for example - he watches it from his ivory tower with a telescope (then again, I'm not sure Curtis ever attended one either, he just watches footage of it in his TV archive bunker. Only Tom Wolfe actually goes to these things and watches with his own eyes). At the other extreme, think of Allan Bloom, and how ridiculous and out-of-touch he sounds when writing about popular culture and sneering at the Rolling Stones in The Closing of the American Mind. He's an example of how not to do the history of ideas.
One of the things that fascinates me, and which I write about in my book, is whether and how we can turn ancient philosophy into a way of life today, and whether we can make this way of life the foundation of a community, movement or even a religion. It's a question that Alain De Botton has also recently asked, in his book A Religion for Atheists.
There are risks to this attempt to turning philosophy into an ideology or a religion , as I explore in my book. We know all too well how religions can degenerate: through the human lusts for power, money and sex. Well, these abuses can all happen to philosophical and personal transformation movements as well.
What I want to look at today is 20th century self-help, and how it took some basic principles from ancient philosophy, and turned them into something new and strange...and very close to a religion.
Our story begins with Dale Carnagey, an unemployed failed actor, living in the YMCA on 125th street New York, who one day convinced the manager of the YMCA to let him hold a self-help seminar. It went well, and Carnegay started to re-invent himself as a success guru (he changed his name to Carnegie, which sounded much more successful). He distilled his tips on success into his 1936 bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People. In that book, Carnegie tells us about 'eight words that can transform your life'. They are: 'Life itself is but what you deem it', which as you may know is a quote from the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius.
Carnegie uses the Stoics' idea that you can change your world by changing your attitudes as the foundation for his can-do philosophy. But he ties it to a capitalist and sales-driven value system. He thought we should transform ourselves not in the service of God, but in the service of the Dollar - or rather, in the service of our careers. Self-improvement was inextricably tied to financial self-advancement. The proof of your advancement would not be inner peace, as it was in ancient Greek philosophy, but external wealth and corporate promotion.
Carnegie didn't just spread the word through his bestselling book. He also held seminars, up and down the country, through an organisation called Dale Carnegie Training. These seminars had a huge influence on later self-help gurus, including L. Ron Hubbard and Werner Erhard. Sadly, there's no footage of Carnegie teaching available on YouTube, but you can see the testimony of one former student, Warren Buffet, talking about how he got over his shyness after attending one of Carnegie's seminars, on his journey to becoming the world's richest man.
In the 1970s, the 'human potential movement', which included figures like Werner Erhard, L. Ron Hubbard and Anthony Robbins, embraced Carnegie's book-and-seminars format, and took it to the next level, creating mass coaching sessions that were intense, emotional, and very like an evangelical church experience.
Below, for example, is a video of Werner Erhard, the inventor of erhard seminars training (est), which was a huge success in the 1970s and 1980s. Erhard (his real name is Jake Rosenberg - like Carnegie he reinvented himself) would hold sessions with as many as a thousand people crammed into a hotel conference centre to achieve 'personal breakthroughs'. The participants would stand up, one by one, and share their problems in front of the entire audience. Then Erhard would rip their 'racket' apart, showing them, brutally, the difference between reality and their 'story' about reality, in order to guide them into a 'new realm of possibility'.
Erhard Seminar Training was a sort of shock Socratic philosophy, but with all moral values emptied out. You wouldn't learn to be 'good' or anything like that, you would learn to be 'effective', 'efficient', to achieve whatever it was you wanted to achieve - money, sex, whatever. So in a way, as Erhard said, est didn't teach people anything. It had no dogma, no values, no creed - a perfect 'religion for atheists'.
Or rather, a perfect 'religion for capitalists'. Erhard's 'value-less religion' was perfectly suited to late capitalism. It was a conveyer belt creating the technocrat-manager that Max Weber dreamed of, who has no ethics or values, only efficiency, rationality and technology. Such an amoral Nietzchean technocrat is perfectly adapted to the modern corporation (and indeed est became very popular with corporations like Lockheed or Monsanto, who would send their managers to its courses). They are efficient, capable, and they don't let anything soggy like 'pity' get in the way of making the rational capitalist decision.
est was itself an incredibly capitalist organisation. A great emphasis was put on 'enrolling' others in your breakthrough. It was a sort of pyramid scheme: to get the benefit of the process, you must sign others up to the organisation.
Then there's Anthony Robbins, who ramped up the mass coaching techniques of Dale Carnegie to even greater heights of intensity, emotion and spectacle. Have a look at one of his events, which he does week-in, week-out all over the world. Notice how close it is to a 'mega-church' event: the breakthroughs, the epiphanies, the tears, the hallelujahs. Again, it's a strange blend of spirituality and business coaching. Notice in the video how one of the interviewees mentions she's been promoted since attending a seminar. Awaken the giant! Move up the managerial pecking order! Close the sale!
Or look at this seminar by Zig Ziglar, in some ways the modern Dale Carnegie. I came across a Zig Ziglar audio course in the public library when I was really depressed, back in 2001. I thought it was the most awful thing I'd ever heard. As with Carnegie, it used the ideas and techniques of ancient philosophy, but all in the service of the dollar, making you the best salesperson you could possibly be. 'We're all in the business of selling', Ziglar tells his rapt audience.
But now, when I watch it, I see that the old man has some sensible things to say, that he's probably helping his audience, teaching them how to take a 'positive attitude' and so forth. I just wish there was some hint that there is a world beyond the market, that life is not just about hitting your sales target. It's another 'religion for capitalists': Zig is the priest, standing in front of his own religious symbol - the Z made to look like a dollar symbol - preaching his own gospel of self-advancement. And after a seminar, you will be reprogrammed. You will love your job, you will love capitalism, you will go out there and make that sale. You will be a winner.
I think Tom Cruise is a really interesting figure in the self-help movement. Jerry Maguire, for my money his best film, is in some ways a film about self-help. Jerry is a salesman, he has an epiphany, he remembers the cheesy self-help slogans of his Carnegie-esque mentor, and he changes his business plan and his life plan. And he gets it all - the quon - more success, more love. On the other hand, Cruise explores the dark side of the self-help scene in Magnolia, where he plays a Nietzchean 'seduction guru', who appears on stage to the sound of Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra. Seduction gurus are a whole other part of the self-help scene which I don't want to get into here. But, very briefly, they also are Weberian value-less technocrats. They don't teach their devotees any values. They teach techniques (hypnotism, self-affirmation, NLP, behaviouralism) to achieve the capitalist end of maximising your sexual capital.
And of course, Cruise is himself an acolyte of the weirdest and most successful self-help religion of all: Scientology. L. Ron Hubbard invented what is in many ways a form of mass coaching similar to est, Carnegie Training or Anthony Robbins' thing. At its heart is the same Stoic idea that you can change your reality by changing your attitudes. But he took it one step further. Fuck it, he thought, why not invent a religion. So he took various crazy ideas from his science fiction books, and created a new religion - partly, I think, for tax reasons, because religions don't have to pay tax. I don't think he really expected his followers to believe all the stuff he came up with. But they did. They completely bought it. And so now we have millions of people believing in Xenu, level VII thetans, and all that stuff.
Anyway, what I wanted to show in this post was how self-help took some basic ideas from ancient philosophy, and turned them into a movement and a mass coaching experience that looks very like a religion. For millions of people, this has been an incredibly useful phenomenon. It has given them the techniques to become more effective, more efficient, to achieve personal breakthroughs. It has done this, often, without requiring them to sign up to any particular dogma.
Yet the result has often been strange and unsettling. From the value-less instrumentalism and personality cult of erhard seminar training, to the cult of the salesman in Zig Ziglar; from the charismatic emotion-fests of Anthony Robbins, to the aliens and dianetics machines of L. Ron Hubbard. These are religions for capitalists - they provide epiphanies and communities of a sort. But if you want to stay in the community, you have to keep paying, keep signing up for new courses, new breakthroughs, new emotional hits.
And the often relentless promotion of the guru in self-help makes me uneasy too: look in the Tony Robbins video above, for example, at how Robbins ties himself to any world leader or reputable organisation that he can. The video opens with shots of him next to Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Ronald Reagan...but it doesn't tell us if any of them actually agree to any of Robbins' ideas. It all speeds past in a rapid sales pitch. Whatever happened to the humble, self-effacing guru - the Yoda figure, who turns students away, who hides their wisdom? I guess that's not a very good marketing strategy. In the self-help market, it's about he who shouts loudest.
Religions tap into some of the deepest, and darkest, parts of the human psyche: our yearning for transcendence, our desire to obey and follow a leader. You can take God out of that equation, easily enough, and still create something that people will flock to in their thousands. You can even take moral values of the equation. But you can't remove human irrationalism. You can't take out the desire for mindless obedience and conformism in many humans. And you can't take out the lust for power, sex and money in leaders.
So, if you want to start up your own movement, you need to build in mechanisms to protect your movement from the abuses and excesses that religions are liable to: financial abuses, sexual abuses, and excessive veneration for a charismatic leader. I personally think the 'religion' that has done that most successfully in modern times is Alcoholics Anonymous, which I write about here.
This week, I'm going to do some posts on love, to consider and carry ourselves through Valentine's Day. The first post is a short talk by Roman Krznaric.
Roman was our speaker at the London Philosophy Club last week (and an excellent speaker at that). He's an interesting figure in both the contemporary history of emotions and in the flourishing practical philosophy movement. He was a sociologist at Cambridge, and then left academia in his twenties to work with Theodore Zeldin, author of the classic Intimate History of Humanity. Krznaric worked on Zeldin's 'feast of strangers' project in Oxford, which aims to initiate conversations among strangers at specially-arranged dinners, to enhance empathy, self-reflection, and more examined lives. We're actually aiming to start up something similar at the London Philosophy Club next month.
In 2008, Krznaric became a founding member of the School of Life, the philosophy school / shop in London which has been a rallying point for practical philosophers including Mark Vernon, Robert Rowland Smith and Alain De Botton. There are so many 'practical philosophers' these days that their work can seem similar to the casual observer, but in fact they're quite distinct. Mark Vernon, for example, is particularly interested in issues of religion, spirituality and atheism, as one might expect from someone who once trained as a priest. Roman Krznaric is more historically minded - his new book, The Wonderbox, is fashioned as a curiosity cabinet exploring the archeology of our emotional attitudes through objects, artefacts, moments. A sort of Pitt Rivers of the emotions. He tells me his next project may be a traveling 'museum of empathy', which will tell the history of empathy through curious objects.
In this talk, Krznaric explores the Greeks' taxonomy of love into six types. He suggests we foolishly demand today that one person fulfil all six types of love, and that this is to set our expectations hopelessly high.
On Tuesday I went to talk by Brigadier-General Rhonda Cornum (pictured right), who used to be in charge of the US Army's $125 million resilience-training programme. The event was also the launch of the Young Foundation's Resilience project. It was held at Macquarie Bank in the City, in a penthouse office-room full of funders, NGOs and policy wonks. A huge amount of interest in resilience, clearly.
I've long had an interest in the Army's resilience programme - I interviewed Cornum back in 2009, and the interview is in the second chapter of my book. The programme was designed by Martin Seligman and his colleagues at University of Pennsylvania, based on techniques from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Positive Psychology.
It was rolled out by the US Army in rather a hurry, in an attempt to cope with the epidemic of post-conflict suicides among the troops. According to this useful report from the Centre for the New American Security, 18 American veterans kill themselves every day - that includes veterans who served decades ago, but still, it's an awful statistic. The US Army lost 164 active duty soldiers to suicide in 2011, and a Freedom of Information act recently obtained by a US newspaper found that 2,200 soldiers died within two years of leaving the military - half of whom were being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder.
The Army, to its credit, is taking this problem seriously and trying to do something about it, by rolling out a CBT / Positive Psychology resilience programme which has been shown to reduce the incidence of depression in school children.
I got over PTSD myself through CBT, so I support the idea of making it more available in the Army, but there are aspects of the Comprehensive Solider Fitness programme (as it is called) that I don't support. First of all, Seligman added the idea of teaching 'optimistic thinking', one of the features of which is to learn to take credit for things when they go well, but to blame your external circumstances when they go badly. I'm generalising - but not much. I think that's a terrible thing to teach young people. It's teaching them irresponsibility. Sometimes things go badly because you screwed up, and you need to be able to recognise that.
Secondly, I don't like the programme's claim to have discovered a scientific model for emotional and spiritual flourishing, which everyone must fit into, and which can be measured by a computer questionnaire. That's a crude, vulgar and narrow-minded idea. By all means, help people avoid depression and PTSD, but don't tell them you can measure a person's 'spiritual fitness' with five questions in a computer questionnaire. This isn't Cosmopolitan magazine, this is life!
Anyway, perhaps it is worth accepting these really dumb bits of the programme in order to get CBT out to the troops. The proof will be in the evidence. There wasn't a pilot programme done (which is strange when you think how expensive the programme is), but the initial results are in, and they show that soldiers who took the course are about 1% more 'emotionally fit' than soldiers who didn't take the course (I'll post the slides that show this once the Young Foundation makes them available). That's a pretty tiny impact for such an expensive intervention. Suicides, meanwhile, continue to rise among active troops: they were higher in 2011, two years after the introduction of this course, than they were in 2010 and 2009.
I hope the results of the programme improve - but I would be wary of defining resilience as strength and PTSD as weakness, as Cornum repeatedly did. So Cornum didn't get PTSD after she was shot and captured. Good for her. But some people go through awful experiences and do get PTSD. That's not necessarily because they're weak. It could be because the US Army puts its soldiers through tours that are, on average, twice as long as the tours of British soldiers, which in turn might explain why PTSD is apparently so much rarer in UK troops. It could be because they experienced some awful, awful things. It could be because war is an ugly and corrupting experience that leaves scars, real and hidden, on all who are immersed in it. We are not going to make it a perfectly hygenic and healthy experience with a bit of CBT.
As for teaching resilience in schools, well, we tried that here in the UK, in a government sponsored pilot programme designed by Seligman, the results of which were also disappointing: no long-term impact on children's well-being or academic achievements. And I have even more ethical concerns about how technocratic, automated, rigid and prescriptive the Penn resilience course is if we start to teach it to children in schools. We shouldn't claim there is only one scientific answer to the question 'how to flourish' - there are many answers to that question, and children should learn to be sceptical of experts who appear before them claiming to have all the answers. They should be trained to see the flaws in people's arguments and to find their own response.
We need to find the right balance between the sciences and the humanities, between the wisdom of the ancients and our freedom to choose our own path. I personally think we should develop 'art of living' classes that combine the cognitive techniques of CBT with open discussion about the ethics and philosophies from which those techniques came.
On the philosophy side of that equation, here are some videos from an excellent sounding course in the Art of Living which Stanford University recently launched. And here is an article in the Telegraph, of all places, calling for compulsory philosophy in schools. That's a decent idea - but, again, I think it could be very usefully combined with insights from the social sciences, and with an introduction to some of the basic techniques of well-being, like meditation or Socratic self-examination. Philosophy isn't just about conceptual discussion, it's also about learning really useful techniques and practices for living, some of which have now been tested out by science.
While we're wondering whether CBT can be automated, here is Aaron Beck, one of the two inventors of CBT, discussing that very question recently at the Beck Institute. His answer is, yes, maybe.
Here in the UK, it looks like the government's NHS bill is in trouble. Even Tory journalists are now calling for it to be dropped. Meanwhile, a new report from the King's Fund says that the NHS needs to do more to recognise and treat mental illnesses among the severely ill. Meanwhile, Labour's shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, gave a fascinating speech calling for mental health to become the core focus of the NHS, and even perhaps of government as a whole.
Talking of the King's Fund, I was at their offices in Cavendish Square last night to talk at a Psychologies Magazine event called 'Make It Happen'. It was the first sort of self-help talk I'd given. It was really fun: I basically approached it like a London Philosophy Club event and tried to get people to offer solutions to other people's problems. The attendees were really good at it. Kind of crowd-sourced therapy. I met a lot of people there who were trying to write a novel or get published. I can't recommend The Literary Consultancy enough - they were a huge help to me in getting published.
Here's a good article in the New York Review of Books, which suggests something I also have thought: that the Occupy movement is as much a spiritual movement as a political one. It reminds me rather of some sort of pre-modern cult, which expects a new Age of Love to arrive.
Taiwan has become the latest country to measure national well-being.
Here is an eyebrow-raising video of one parent's reaction to finding an anti-parent rant on his daughter's Facebook page.
Finally, just to put all this well-being stuff in context, here is a news story about the people of Homs in Syria, saying goodbye to each other as they prepare for the ground assault on their town. I hope they can stay safe, and that Assad and his security advisors have to answer for their actions.
Over at the Centre for the History of the Emotions blog, we're holding a Shame Week, in which various historians of the emotions consider shame. Today, Katherine Angel of Warwick University has posted an excellent review of the Steve McQueen film, Shame. She loves the film, but wonders why Steve McQueen and Michael Fassbender have, in interviews about the film, very much pushed the angle that it's a film about the medical condition, sex addiction:
The film is subtle and complex – something that contrasts somewhat with the Steve McQueen’s gloss on his own film in interviews.The film, he says, is about sex addiction – analogous to alcohol or drug addiction, but less recognised than these. The film was made in New York, he says, partly because of difficulties finding interviewees to discuss sex addiction in the UK; in the US, doctors and patients abounded. A model of sex addiction analogous to alcohol addiction, with similar 12-step programmes, has been around longer in the States than in the UK, and is a lay model that circulates increasingly widely.
But sex addiction is not an uncontested category. It is not listed as such in the current DSM, the manual of the American Psychiatric Association, although individuals can be and are categorized under Sexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. In the controversial process to revise DSM for its fifth edition due in 2013, Hypersexual Disorder is being discussed for inclusion. The criteria include excessive time consumed by sexual urges, and planning and engaging in sexual behaviour; repetitive engaging in sexual behaviour as a response to dysphoric mood states, or to stressful life events; repetitive engaging in behaviour while disregarding risks to self and others – all with the proviso that the behaviour must cause significant personal distress or impairment in functioning. (The International Classification of Disease is less loquacious than the DSM on this and other matters; but it includes Excessive Sexual Drive as a category, specified as satyriasis in men and nymphomania in women – preserving an older sexological language that the DSM’s nomenclature has sought to replace.)
Proponents of the disorder suggest that there is a significant clinical need for it, with many individuals seeking treatment – regardless of diagnosis - in psychotherapy and 12-step programmes. Moreover, they emphasise, those manifesting compulsive and high-volume sexual behaviour are at higher risk of acquiring and disseminating sexually transmitted diseases, as well as suffering the destructive impact on relationships and marriages. The public health implications of sexual appetite, of impulse control, and of internet pornography are key figures in concern about compulsive or addictive sexual behaviours.This terminology of sexual addiction, hypersexuality, or sexual compulsivity is controversial, with debates abounding over a pathologisation of sexuality and the norms of sexual behaviour embedded within them.
This is, as ever, a question of language – and McQueen’s insistence on sex addiction as the theme of the film is a strangely blunt tool to describe his work. Shame is a remarkable portrait of suffering – suffering that primarily manifests in, and is temporarily resolved through, though never entirely dislodged by, intense sexual activity. It ‘s about how suffering can be expressed; about the limited outlets for experience and suffering that Brandon allows himself. It’s about exquisite pain, and it’s testament to both McQueen and Fassbender that when we watch this portrait, we feel it too.
McQueen has also said that people struggle to understand the idea of a film about sex that is not sexy; that does not aim to excite or titillate. Here again, his own glossing of his work is a surprising contrast to it. To insist that Shame is not at some level erotic is to underplay how it brings to life both the intense pull and satisfaction of sex, and its shadow - its capacity to stand in for other kinds of pleasures, longings and disappointments, to obscure and muffle other feelings. The film both shows us how compelling the fulfilment of sexual desire can be, and shows us how desire, more widely understood, can get distributed within a person. Brandon doesn’t really want anything; at a restaurant, he is indifferent to his choices. His life feels anonymous, his apartment bland, inexpressive of anything he might want or love. And yet it is only within sexual desire that his desire in general can come alive.
McQueen’s work as an artist is complex and resonant, but his statements about his film are disappointing. This makes me think that he is either not fully cognizant of the beauty and complexity of his creation, or adopting a particular language – a medical language - through which compassion can be channeled, and through which discomforts about portrayals of both suffering and sexuality can be managed, in order to negotiate the press circus and to render the film more palatable.
'The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored enquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists will call "the problem of happiness" -- in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude.'
From his 1947 foreword to the second edition of Brave New World
Progress! Humanities departments appear to be heeding calls to return to their original goal of helping students live better lives. Stanford now has a freshman course in the Art of Living, launched I believe in 2009.
Professor Lanier Andersen asks:
"What is actually for sale at this university? What are you paying all that money to purchase? Liberal education is about freedom not just in the negative sense of freedom from work. It's about a positive freedom, which allows a person to do something, be something, become a certain person - it's about what W.E.B DuBois called 'the soul's freedom for expansion and self-expression'. Liberal training is not about learning a trade. It's about learning to live in the first place. DuBois said: 'The riddle of existence is the college curriculum...The true college will ever have but one goal: not to earn meat but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes."...'We cannot make you happy. The item for sale is not happiness, but the possibility of happiness. That requires an art for living.'
The second speaker, Professor Kenneth Taylor, is hilarious. 'I'd like to welcome you to the ownership of your life.' Awesome.
Secular liberalism, which was born in Athens in the fifth century BC, replaced the Olympian gods with the god of Public Opinion. According to the fifth century philosopher Protagoras, who is perhaps the father of liberal philosophy, what drives us to obey the law and fit in with the manners of civilisation is not fear of divine punishment but rather our natural sense of shame and justice. These are the sentiments that enable us to live together in cities. Shame and the desire for public approval are the bedrock of liberal civilisation.
What really matters to humans, according to Protagoras, is not what the gods think of us (who knows if the gods really exist or not) but what other people think of us. 'Man is the measure of all things', he claimed, therefore the measure of our true worth is our public standing. This radical idea, which is the kernel of liberalism, introduces a new volatility and insecurity into public life. The old caste divisions are less certain, more fluid. To rise to the top of society, all one needs are the rhetorical and PR skills to win the attention and the approval of the public, and to avoid their censure. One's ascent could be swift, but so could one's fall.
Cicero, for example, manages to rise into the senate class of the Roman Republic on the wind of his rhetorical ability, and his ability to network, win friends and influence people. He is the archetypal liberal, deeply driven by the desire for public approval, and at the same time, wracked with the fear of making a fool of himself in front of the public (we hear a description of how Cicero suffered what sounds like a panic attack once when giving a major speech, and he says in De Oratore that the better the orator, the more terrified he is of public speaking).
It is interesting, in this respect, that the first recorded instance of social anxiety is during the Athenian enlightenment, at the birth of liberalism, at the very moment when the public is being deified into an all-powerful god. We read in Hippocrates of a man who 'through bashfulness, suspicion, and timorousness, will not be seen abroad; loves darkness as life and cannot endure the light or to sit in lightsome places; his hat still in his eyes, he will neither see, nor be seen by his good will. He dare not come in company for fear he should be misused, disgraced, overshoot himself in gesture or speeches, or be sick; he thinks every man observes him'.
There is, I suggest, a profound connection between liberalism's deification of public opinion and this terror of making a fool of oneself in public.
Later theorists of liberalism built their ethics on the same natural foundation of our desire for status and our fear of shame and humiliation. Adam Smith, in particular, built his Theory of Moral Sentiments on this idea that humans' over-riding drive is to look good to others, and to avoid looking bad. We imagine how our actions look to an 'impartial spectator', we internalise this spectator, and conduct our lives permanently in its gaze - and that's what keeps us honest, polite and industrious. We constantly perform to an audience - in fact, his ethics are full of examples taken from the theatre. When pondering the morality of an action, Smith often asks himself what looks good on the stage, what wins applause. Morality becomes a theatrical performance.
It's a similar ethics as one finds in Joseph Addison's Spectator and Tatler essays, where Addison imagines a 'court of honour' that judges the behaviour of various urbanites: this person snubbed me in the street, that person behaved abominably in the coffee-house, and so on. The All-Seeing God is replaced by the thousand-eyed Argus of the Public, which spies into every part of your behaviour, judges you, and then gossips. Unsurprising, then, that Mr Spectator himself should be a shy, self-conscious, retiring character - we long to observe the foibles of others, yet are frightened of our own foibles being found out.
This liberal, Whiggish ethics celebrates the city, because the city is where we are most watched, most commented upon, and therefore where we are most moral. The city makes us polite (from the Greek polis) and urbane (from the Latin urbs). It polishes off our rustic edges and makes us well-mannered. Liberal ethics also celebrates commerce and finance, for the same reason. The man of business must carefully protect their reputation, because his financial standing, his credit, depends on the opinion others have of him. Therefore, commerce makes us behave ourselves. This theory, popular in the 18th century, is tied to the development of the international credit markets - governments have to behave themselves now because they need to maintain the approval of investors (this is well-explored in Hirschman's The Passion and the Interests).
We can still see this liberal ethics of status and shame today, particularly in the neo-liberalism of the last few decades. It was believed that countries and companies are kept honest by 'market discipline' - by the gaze of shareholders and investors. If a finance minister or a CEO behaves badly or shamefully, if they fail to govern themselves or to apply fiscal discipline, they will be punished by the market. Likewise, our culture is ever-more dedicated to seeking the approval of that god, Public Opinion, whose attention we seek through blogs, tweets, YouTube videos, reality TV shows, through any publicity stunt we can keep up. The greater your public following, the greater your power.
Yet, right at the very birth of liberalism in the fifth century BC, a critique of it arose, also based on shame.
Plato insisted that liberal democratic societies had produced a false morality, a morality of spectacle. We only care about looking good to others, rather than actually being good. He illustrated this with the myth of the ring of Gyges, which makes its wearers invisible. If we had that ring, and were protected from the gaze of others, would we still behave ourselves, or would we let ourselves commit every crime imaginable? If all that is keeping us honest is the gaze of other people, then what really matters is keeping your sins hidden from the public.
Civilisation, Plato suggested, had made us alienated, which literally means 'sold into slavery'. We have become slaves to Public Opinion, before which we cringe and tremble like a servant afraid of being beaten. We contort ourselves to fit the Public's expectations, no matter how much internal suffering and misery it causes us. It's far more important to look good to the Public than to actually be happy and at peace within. So we put all our energy into tending our civilised masks, our brands, our shop-fronts, while our inner selves go rotten.
One finds a similar critique in the Cynics and the Stoics, both of whom lambast their contemporaries for being pathetic slaves to public opinion, who tremble at the prospect of advancement or being snubbed. A man of virtue, the Stoics and Cynics insist, cares only for whether they are doing the right thing, they don't care how that looks to the public, how it plays on the evening news. Against the spin and sophistry of liberalism, the Stoics and Cynics emphasise the steadiness and self-reliance of virtue.
The Cynic takes the revolt against liberal morality to an extreme. It's a hypocritical morality, the Cynic insists, that divides our public from our private selves, and which makes us hide behaviour that is in fact perfectly natural. The Cynic breaks down the wall between the public and the private self. Anything which one is happy to do in private - such as defecation, say, or farting, or masturbation - one should be equally happy to do in public. Cynics trained themselves to de-sensitise themselves to public ridicule, not just for the hell of it, but so that they could move from a false ethics based on looking good to others, to a true ethics based on obedience to one's own ethical principles.
Today, perhaps, we are more than ever obsessed with our public standing, and terrified of public ridicule. As Theodore Zeldin wrote: 'Creating a false impression is the modern nightmare. Reputation is the modern purgatory.' We live, as Rousseau put it, ever outside of ourselves, in the opinions of others (this, in fact, is the meaning of paranoia - existing outside of oneself). This desperate need for public approval, and terror of shame or obscurity, is, I would suggest, at the heart of many of the discontents of liberal civilisation - social anxiety, depression, narcissism.
Yet we don't have to accept these discontents as an inevitable part of civilisation, as Sigmund Freud or Norbert Elias argued. We can in fact modulate shame. We can reprogramme shame by reprogramming the attitudes and beliefs which direct it. As Plato, the Stoics and the Cynics suggested, we can challenge the values that give so much importance to status and reputation, and learn to embrace new values, which focus less on public opinion, and more on being true to our own principles. Many of the Greeks' techniques for cognitive change are found in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy today - including a technique specifically designed to help people overcome a crippling sense of shame or self-consciousness. It's called 'shame-attacking', and involves intentionally drawing attention and ridicule to yourself in order to de-sensitise yourself to the experience, just as the Cynics did 2400 years ago.
Meanwhile, over in the US, Rick Santorum, the back-to-basics Republican candidate, shows how much of the politics of well-being depends on your definition of happiness. In a recent speech, he discussed the Declaration of Independence's famous phrase about the right to 'the pursuit of happiness'. 
