The Politics of Well-Being

The rise of hubs

2012-02-16T02:19:00.004-08:00

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.

Adam Curtis on the history of ideas, the limits of academia, and the importance of trash

2012-02-16T00:15:00.011-08:00

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.

Self-help: a religion for capitalists

2012-02-13T23:56:00.015-08:00

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.

Roman Krznaric on overcoming our addiction to love

2012-02-13T10:08:00.000-08:00

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.

PoW: Friday round-up of philosophy, psychology and politics of well-being

2012-02-10T06:01:00.000-08:00

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.

Here's a funny article in the NYT about how young life-coaches are becoming.

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.

See you next week,

Jules

Does Shame over-medicalise the human condition?

2012-02-09T02:50:00.001-08:00

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.

Aldous Huxley on the politics of well-being

2012-02-08T02:57:00.000-08:00

'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

Stanford's course in the Art of Living

2012-02-08T00:40:00.000-08:00

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.

Have a look. All the lectures are available here.

1 - "Introduction to The Art of Living" from Stanford Humanities on Vimeo.

Liberalism and social anxiety

2012-02-07T04:27:00.000-08:00

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.

More on cognitive enhancements

2012-02-06T10:08:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting piece by Ross Andersen in the Atlantic on cognitive enhancements and trans-cranial direct current stimulation, which I wrote on in last Friday's newsletter. It's interesting how science fiction films have thought out these questions ahead of most academics - so they are the maps and symbols that guide us as we try and engage with the future.

I also think the philosopher Allen Buchanan makes a very good point, in the Atlantic piece, when he says perhaps what defines human nature is precisely the desire to advance and develop human nature. In other words, the nature of man is, by its nature, unstable, dynamic, over-reaching. That's certainly how Genesis describes it.

The floating university

2012-02-06T07:51:00.001-08:00

Following on my penultimate post about the future of academia, I guess this is what Larry Summers had in mind in terms of the digital / networked university of the future:

The pursuit of happiness

2012-02-06T06:39:00.000-08:00

This song should be the anthem for the politics of well-being.

The future of academia: thinking, wide and deep

2012-02-05T02:42:00.000-08:00

The universities of tomorrow need to be places of both deep thought and wide connections.

Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard, thinks universities need to shake up their act. He says:

the world is changing very rapidly. Think social networking, gay marriage, stem cells. Yet undergraduate education changes remarkably little over time. With few exceptions, just as in the middle of the 20th century, students take four courses a term, each meeting for about three hours a week, usually with a teacher standing in front of the room. Students are evaluated on the basis of examination essays handwritten in blue books and relatively short research papers. Instructors are organized into departments, most of which bear the same names they did when the grandparents of today’s students were undergraduates. A vast majority of students still major in one or two disciplines centered on a particular department.

It may be that inertia is appropriate...Nonetheless, it is interesting to speculate: Suppose the educational system is drastically altered to reflect the structure of society and what we now understand about how people learn. How will what universities teach be different?

Here are his six hopes / predictions:

1) Education will be more about how to process and use information and less about imparting it...in a world where the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalog, factual mastery will become less and less important.

2) An inevitable consequence of the knowledge explosion is that tasks will be carried out with far more collaboration. As just one example, the fraction of economics papers that are co-authored has more than doubled in the 30 years that I have been an economist. More significant, collaboration is a much greater part of what workers do, what businesses do and what governments do. Yet the great preponderance of work a student does is done alone at every level in the educational system.

3) New technologies will profoundly alter the way knowledge is conveyed...it makes sense for students to watch video of the clearest calculus teacher or the most lucid analyst of the Revolutionary War rather than having thousands of separate efforts. Professors will have more time for direct discussion with students — not to mention the cost savings — and material will be better presented. In a 2008 survey of first- and second-year medical students at Harvard, those who used accelerated video lectures reported being more focused and learning more material faster than when they attended lectures in person.

4) Universities need to switch from passive learning to a more active, dynamic model...“Active learning classrooms” — which cluster students at tables, with furniture that can be rearranged and integrated technology — help professors interact with their students through the use of media and collaborative experiences. Still, with the capacity of modern information technology, there is much more that can be done to promote dynamic learning.

5) The educational experience will breed cosmopolitanism — students will have more international experiences, and classes in the social sciences will draw on examples from around the world.

6) Courses of study will place much more emphasis on the analysis of data. Of course, we’ll always learn from history. But the capacity for analysis beyond simple reflection has greatly increased (consider Gen. David Petraeus’s reliance on social science in preparing the army’s counterinsurgency manual).

Many of these changes are about opening academia up and making it more networked and digitally connected - so that students have access to the best lectures from around the world online, so that they work together more, so that they are more connected to other thinkers and cultures, so they are trained to locate and analyse the latest research and data. Is this a worrying vision: turning the students of tomorrow into vociferous informavores who process vast chunks of information like computers without necessarily taking any of it in? Where's the heart, the soul? Where's the humanity?

That's certainly the reaction of Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, a former professor of education at Harvard, who responded in the New York Times with a piece called What Would Aristotle Think? He writes:

For economists like Mr. Summers, the education debate in America is simply about job skills, competition and getting ahead. Aristotle is turning in his grave! The idea of education as the foundation for an engaged, mindful, citizenry to intelligently deliberate and decide the pressing issues of the day is being ignored in today’s education debate. America’s preoccupation with whether our students are keeping up with their peers in Hong Kong, Shanghai and South Korea overlooks other fundamental purposes of education, confounding “doing well” economically with being fully and productively engaged with the world.

Stefan Collini from the University of Cambridge apparently argues a similar point in his new book on universities, where he warns that we're losing sight of the idea of a university as a public guardian of the best ideas. Instead, he says, the Browne report on higher education has put forward a vision of university as a economic marketplace where the student is consumer, and therefore king, and the universities tussle with each other to provide the most customer satisfaction. This is like turning schools into candy stores, he warns. It's not just about what students say they want. It's about what they ought to learn.

What we have here are two contrasting vision of the university. Summers' vision is of the university as networked digital experience built around the desires of the student and the requirements of the marketplace. Let's call this the university as user-driven digital hub model. The other vision is of universities as place of deep research, deep thinking, and as the guardian of the best and highest culture and learning. Let's call this the sacred groves of academe model.

Neither of these models are perfect. With the university as digital hub, thinking can become shallow and superficial. Deep thinking is replaced by the Twitter retweet. The latest fad gets all the funding, and both student and academic float along on the trending topics of the day, without the necessary distance, quiet, or solitude for deep and sustained thinking.

With the sacred groves of academia model, by contrast, deep and sustained thinking can degenerate into obtuse, over-specialised research that disappears up one particular alley. For example, I'm amazed how some academic classicists are completely unaware of how people are trying to follow ancient philosophy in modern life. They are astonished to hear there is any relationship between Stoicism and cognitive behavioural therapy, for example. They seem rather threatened when you tell them a bit about all the developments that are happening outside of their department. They are less the guardians of culture, and more like gargoyles, resisting any attempts to open academia up, to take it online, to make it more accessible and connected.

I think the university and the academic of the future needs to be able to think both wide and deep. They need to be informavores, able to network, make connections and keep track of the latest developments in other disciplines and cultures, and the ways their research touches other fields. But they also need to be able to disconnect from the tweeting crowd, to engage with the great thinking of the past, to think deeply and quietly.

One of the most popular courses at Harvard is Michael Sandel's course on Justice. That is a great model for the course of the future: it introduces students to some of the key philosophical approaches, it shows them how these ideas feed into contemporary real life situations, it draws students in and puts their own thinking and debating at the centre of the course, and it puts the whole experience online. Sandel is both a deep thinker, in his engagement with the great philosophers of the past, and a wide thinker, in his awareness of how these ideas feed into current affairs and modern concerns and his emphasis on student participation.

The pleasure students obviously take in Sandel's course show that there needn't be a conflict between teaching the greats and taking student satisfaction seriously. I think there is a huge student demand for great ideas and great culture that will enrich people's lives, not just make them more employable. Students want to be prepared for the marketplace, but they also want to be prepared for life. And if universities can't provide that, they will find other networks and organisations that can.

Labour lays out 'resilience agenda' versus Cameron's 'happiness agenda'

2012-02-04T02:09:00.000-08:00

It seems Ed Miliband's Labour opposition have decided David Cameron's fondness for the politics of well-being is something of an achilles heel. This week, Rachel Reeves, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, got a negative story into The Sun (as well as the cartoon, above) about how the costs of Cameron's happiness measurements policy have 'soared' to £8 million:

DREAMER David Cameron's Happiness Index has got bigger — and the cost has soared to £8MILLION. His much-ridiculed probe has been expanded to cover "the meaning of life". And the bill will end up being FOUR TIMES the original estimate after the Government admitted that the Office of National Statistics has a £2million-a-year budget for it every year until 2015.

When the PM unveiled his pet project in 2010, he said it was to probe what makes the nation happy or sad — studying the effect of things like unemployment, family, education and crime. But it has been expanded into deeper philosophical issues. The "Measuring National Well-being" survey — to be sent randomly to 200,000 households — will now include four "subjective" questions:

1. How happy did you feel yesterday?
2. How anxious did you feel yesterday?
3. How satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
4. What extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?

They were unearthed by Shadow Chief Treasury Secretary Rachel Reeves. She said: "It's shocking. Cameron needs to get a grip."

I'm not sure of the truth of this story - is it saying that the ONS spent £8 million just last year, or that it will spend £8 million in total by 2015, in which case it's on target? Anyway, it shows Labour is looking to ridicule the policy. It follows a story in the Observer the week before, where shadow health secretary poured scorned on Cameron's 'happiness agenda':

"Cameron and Clegg have done this whole thing about happiness, and I am not against the principle, but I think that is the wrong word. There is a slight danger that it sets people up: 'You have got to be happy. If you are not happy, you are failing'," he said. "So talking about mental health in terms of happiness has become the modern way of talking about mental health: 'Mental health is happiness'. And I don't think it is. It is slightly in danger of being a middle-class construct there, builds a bit of materialism into it. I think what we are talking about is resilience. Are you coping? Are you getting by? That is the bottom line."

Some Labour figures support happiness measurements, such as Alastair Campbell, Richard Layard and Geoff Mulgan (the last two are two of the founders of the movement Action for Happiness). But they are notably New Labour figures. Miliband's Labour seems to want to find a grittier rhetoric, around the idea of resilience, coping with adversity and so on (perhaps more Brownian than Blairite?) And they know that Cameron is vulnerable on this issue: some of Cameron's senior advisors warned him not to personally attach himself to the policy of measuring well-being, which is the brain-child of his floaty policy guru, marketeer Steve Hilton. But Cameron and Hilton are best mates, and Cameron seems to really believe his well-being agenda.

Labour can score some easy points here, not because well-being is a bad goal for public policy, but because happiness measurements are so crude and unresponsive that they're a useless compass for policy-makers. That will become increasingly obvious as, year after year, our happiness levels stay flat. Every January, the ONS will unveil the latest figure for our national happiness, and every year, it will be a seven. Eventually, even supporters of national happiness measurements, like the BBC's home affairs editor Mark Easton, will start to ask what's the point of these measurements if they never move.

Nonetheless, there are many aspects of the politics of well-being that I would expect Labour to support, seeing as they started them in the first place. National happiness measurements are the silliest bit of the politics of well-being, though sadly it's the part that gets the most attention. The two crucial areas are, firstly, mental health policy, and secondly, if and how to teach well-being in schools.

On the first issue, Cameron's coalition has protected the funding for the Labour policy, Improved Access for Psychotherapies (IAPT), which looks to train 6,000 new cognitive therapists by 2015. The IAPT staff are seeing thousands and thousands of mentally ill people each month, but I've heard from therapists that other parts of mental health services are being cut - such as the counsellors and therapists for more seriously disturbed patients. That's putting a lot of stress on IAPT staff, who are not trained to cope with serious conditions like manic depression.

On this issue, Labour are not directly opposing Cameron, but trying to out-flank the government - by making mental health policy more of a priority. Andy Burnham followed up that interview in the Observer with his first major speech as the new shadow health secretary this week, in which he said mental health should become the core focus of the NHS, in terms of policy and funding.

He said:

People are living longer, less stable, more stressful and isolated lives. But public services are still, by and large, working on a post-war model when people’s lives were shorter and the dangers we faced were physical. And the danger is that our national tendency not to talk openly about mental health means we will be slow to make the changes we need to see. This stiff upper-lip culture is ingrained across our society, Government and Parliament.

He focused on three needed changes:

First, if people are to get the support they need from the NHS to live full and economically active lives, and if it is to be sustainable in the 21st century, then mental health must move from the edges to the centre of the NHS.

Second, we can no longer look at people’s physical health, social care and mental health as three separate systems but as part of one vision for a modern health care system.

Third, change in our public services will only be successful if matched by a wider change in attitudes towards mental health. A country which has so often led the world in challenging discrimination needs to recognise that we’ve got much to learn from other countries when it comes to the stigma of mental ill health.

What does this mean in terms of policy? It means increasing funding further for mental health services:

Mental ill health will soon be the biggest burden on society both economically and sociologically, costing around £105 billion per annum. By 2030, the World Health Organization predicts more people will be affected by depression than any other health problem. But we spend a fraction of our overall health budget on mental health. Mental health research only receives just 6.5% of total funding in the UK compared with 25% for cancer, 15% for neurological diseases and 9% for cardiovascular conditions.

It also means improving the awareness of NHS staff (in particular GPs) at dealing with mental health issues. Many GPs are still very insensitive, and uncomfortable with mental health issues, which they tend to treat as a biomedical issue to be treated with drugs. And it means joining up mental health policy with social care, prison policy, and education policy:

this isn’t just a job for the Department of Health. It’s a job for the Treasury, the Home Office, DWP, Education, DCLG – indeed the whole of Government throwing its weight behind it. Perhaps there needs to be a senior Minister for Mental Health, even possibly at Cabinet level, to lead this coordinated drive.

Finally, it means working to overcome stigma and discrimination, particularly in the workplace:

We should work together to give a lasting legacy to the Time to Change campaign by repealing these archaic and discriminatory laws. Lord Stevenson has put forward a Private Members’ Bill to end these discriminations and I can say today that it will have Labour’s support, even if it needs to be re-introduced.

This is a pretty good agenda, and I'm really pleased to see mental health put at the centre of Labour's health policy - though we should be careful not just to focus on services for people with depression, anxiety etc, but also to try and improve the woeful services for the seriously mentally ill, including with new research. Because we still don't really know how to treat schizophrenia, the drugs we use don't work, and the human cost is really terrible.

So Labour is trying to outflank the Coalition on mental health policy. What of education policy - and the whole initiative to teach well-being in schools which New Labour began in 2002 with the introduction national curriculum subject Social and Emotional Aspects of Well-Being?

In this area, too, it could be possible to outflank the Coalition government. The minister for education, Michael Gove, seems much less keen on national well-being classes than Cameron, and SEAL is currently the subject of an independent review which may well abolish it. So what is Labour's policy?

The truth is, neither party is quite sure what policy to take forward in this area. Labour financed a three-year pilot programme designed by Martin Seligman, called the Penn Resilience Programme, which taught emotional resilience to children in three local education authorities. But the initial results are not that good: it only seemed to make a difference to the well-being of the most vulnerable children, and made no noticeable difference to academic performance. So both policy makers and the main parties are still somewhat looking around for a way to teach well-being in schools that works.

By the way, one area of policy to keep an eye on is mental health in the military. Next week, Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum is coming to the UK to give a talk at the Young Foundation on teaching resilience in the Army. She was in charge of a $125 million programme, also designed by Martin Seligman, to teach resilience to every soldier in the US Army, to help prevent the incidence of PTSD in the troops.

It's possible that the UK Army could follow suit, though to be honest I don't expect it will go for anything on the scale of the US Army, for the simple reason that PTSD is, strangely, not nearly as big a problem in British troops as in their American counterparts. This data could be wrong, or it could reflect the fact American troops are expected to serve much longer tours.

It's interesting, though, that the very week that Labour seems to launch a new 'resilience agenda', the Young Foundation launches its long-planned but much-delayed 'resilience centre'. This is the great thing about the politics of well-being - it can be adapted to fit all political persuasions...

How to become a super-enhanced philosopher (instantly, or your money back)

2012-02-03T03:30:00.001-08:00

Could we use technology and drugs to enhance our cognitive, emotional and physical capacities and become super-humans? This idea, or dream, is certainly riddled through contemporary popular culture, from the Bourne Supremacy to Iron Man, from Limitless to the transhumanist computer game Deus Ex.

But now the idea seems to be leaping effortlessly from comic books into academic philosophy. Even the sober dons of Oxford have been caught up in the enthusiasm. Here, for example, are Guy Kahane and Julian Savulescu, two members of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, from the introduction to their 2011 book, Enhancing Human Capacities:

It appears that soon we will be able to radically enhance human capacities well beyond the normal range. In some circles, there is even talk about an approaching post-human era, a prospect that is horrifying to many, but enticing to others.

I can't help but hear that paragraph in a Dr Strangelove voice...We're at this strange moment in human history, where we're facing the prospect of climate change and serious human casualties, and this prompts a sort of millenarian last-gasp optimism: 'Zis may be the end of man, but perhaps it is ze dawn of...SUPERMAN!'

Despite the transhumanist fever, there is some interesting research being done amid the superhype. Among cognitive enhancements, two promising lines of research are transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), and the smart-drug Modafinil.

This week's New Scientist cover story, for example, is called 'Zap your brain into the zone: fast track to pure focus' (sounds like they're properly plugged in at the New Scientist offices), and it looks at a US Army DARPA research programme which suggests tDCS improves people's learning ability and their ability to detect threats. Last week, Radio 4's Today show also explored tDCS. And this feature from Nature magazine lays out several of the research projects under way today. Apparently, a mild electric current from a tDCS helmet improves our brain's plasticity and thus our ability to learn new habits and aptitudes (God knows how...by heating and softening the brain like wax?). The Army is now experimenting with tDCS helmets for troops, and I came across one report of an advertizing executive who used a tDCS device to overcome writer's block.

There's a similar buzz (sorry) around the cognitive enhancement possibilities of the smart drug Modafinil, or Provigil as it's sometimes called, which apparently enhances working memory, wakefulness, attention, reaction time and even humour. Oxford's Anders Sandberg suggests we should prescribe Modafinil in schools to enhance human intelligence and make the entire species a bit smarter. 'Surely', he says, 'anything that improves the ability to learn is a good thing.'

Armies, schools and corporations have experimented with the use of stimulants in the past: German soldiers and Japanese factory workers were given amphetamine to improve performance during the war, and the US Army still gives soldiers and pilots amphetamine to improve wakefulness (this came out in a 2003 law case, when it emerged that two American pilots in the Iraq war had mistakenly bombed a Canadian unit while themselves bombed on speed).

In fact, my great-grandfather, Charles Moran, who was Churchill's doctor during and after the war, prescribed Churchill both barbituates to help him sleep, and amphetamine to keep him awake (Churchill nick-named these pills 'Morans'.). It seems that, in both politics, the military, sports and show-business, the greater the demands we make on high performers, the more we turn a blind eye to providing chemical assistance to power their superhuman performance. Though of course, these super-powered humans often crash spectacularly, Icarus-like, from over-dosing.

Masters of ourselves?

While there are obvious side-effects to amphetamine (like psychosis), Modafinil apparently has fewer side effects. Still, this line of thinking somewhat gives me the shivers. I prefer the Socratic idea that we can become masters of our own souls using our reason, rather than depending for our well-being on some pharmaceutical corporation or government, handing out the happy pills at the factory gates.

This may be because of my personal history. When I was 18, I developed post-traumatic stress disorder after doing too many drugs (LSD, ecstasy, amphetamine). For the next six years or so, I suffered from depression, anxiety and panic attacks - and I also saw many of my friends suffering the mental and emotional consequences of drugs. I was terrified that I had permanently damaged my neural wiring, and that the only solution was to take mood enhancing drugs like Prozac for the rest of my life (as some of my old drug buddies now do). I found that prospect depressing, because it undermined my sense of autonomy and meaning.

Eventually I came across Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), a form of therapy based on Socratic and Stoic philosophy. Through this, I learnt that my emotions weren't completely out of my control, that they followed my beliefs, and that I could learn to examine my beliefs and change them if they were irrational or self-defeating. After a few weeks of CBT, the panic attacks stopped and my confidence started to come back. I carried on practicing for the next few years, and my life is a lot better now than it was.

Because of that experience, I'm a strong advocate of the healing power of philosophy, 'whose aid', as Cicero wrote, 'need not be sought, as in bodily diseases, from outside ourselves'. I like the idea that we can heal ourselves, that we don't need pharmaceutical companies to heal us while boosting their own enormous profits.

But I also recognise that CBT is not a magic wand. It doesn't work for everyone. In my CBT support group for social anxiety, some of us recovered, some of us didn't. And it's not like I recovered entirely through my own efforts: I had in-built advantages, such as a loving family, good friends, and quite a rational and logical mind (despite the fact I'd gone a bit crazy). What about people who don't have those advantages?

This question goes, in fact, to the heart of Socratic philosophy. Socrates claimed that everyone could practice philosophy, to know themselves and become wiser and happier. But his descendants were much less optimistic. Aristotle, for example, thought that only those with the proper mental and psychological 'equipment' could practice philosophy and achieve the good life. You needed to come from a loving family and have been educated well. Without that psychological and ethical grounding, he believed, philosophy was impossible.

I know many people who came through really adverse upbringings and still practiced philosophy effectively. So I think one can be too pessimistic about the 'equipment' needed for philosophy. But it's certainly true that some people find it harder than others to rationally examine their beliefs and challenge their habits.

Enhanced CBT

So is the Socratic ethos of CBT necessarily in conflict with the enhancement ethos of transhumanism?

Not necessarily, no. In fact, the last chapter in Kahane and Savulescu's 'Enhancing Human Capacities' looks at CBT and Positive Psychology, and the entire book frames the idea of cognitive and emotional enhancement in the context of well-being and flourishing. I think one person who brings the two worlds together is self-development guru Tim Ferriss (pictured left), who I have called 'Seneca on steroids'.

It seems to me that it might be possible to use some cognitive and emotional 'enhancers' to help people in the initial two months of CBT, where they are going through the hard work of challenging their habits and creating new habits. In fact, this already happens. GPs prescribe CBT with Prozac for people trying to overcome depression. Studies have also found CBT and Modafinil are effective together in the treatment of insomnia. I don't know of any studies yet that have explored whether CBT works better when accompanied by transcranial direct current stimulation, but I suspect it would. CBT depends on neural plasticity, so if tDCS boosts plasticity, it should boost CBT too.

This may seem Strangelovian. But it's the same idea as, for example, keeping your sucrose level up to boost your will power, or using nicotine patches when you're giving up smoking. I don't think it's a black-and-white question of genuine morality versus chemical short-cuts. Self-knowledge and self-transformation has never been easy, so perhaps we should explore ways of helping people along the way (as long as they want the help, of course).

In other news:

Back in 2005, Albert Ellis, the great psychotherapist and inventor of CBT, was kicked off the board of the Albert Ellis Institute by the president of the board, Lyle Stuart (who was also his publisher). This caused a big schism in the cognitive therapy community. Ellis died an unhappy man in 2007. Well, in the latest twist, the man Stuart appointed as his successor, Jeffrey Bernstein, has been accused of stealing $2.5 million from the Institute. A sorry end to a sorry tale.

Here's an interesting piece from the New York Times about a young man who was initially diagnosed as suffering from Asperger's, and who turned out simply to be a slightly awkward teenager. He writes: "The biggest single problem with the diagnostic criteria applied to me is this: You can be highly perceptive with regard to social interaction, as a child or adolescent, and still be a spectacular social failure. This is particularly true if you're bad at sports or nervous or weird-looking."

Here's a review in the Economist about Stefan Collini's new book on universities, which apparently harks back to Cardinal Newman's The Idea of the University.

Here are two pieces about John Rawls and the Occupy movement. The first is from the Atlantic monthly, and the second is a podcast of Stanford's Joshua Cohen discussing how John Rawls might see the Occupy movement.

Finally, here's some great footage of Richard Dawkins debating God (again), but this time at the Jaipur literary festival, surrounded by swamis, amid the controversy of new death threats against Salman Rushdie. Quite an atmosphere.

See you next week,

Jules

When Dawkins came to Jaipur

2012-02-02T09:59:00.000-08:00

Here's a video of a debate including Richard Dawkins at last month's Jaipur literary festival, a festival that was almost thrown off the rails by the controversy around Salman Rushdie's planned attendance (Rushdie cancelled after word came out that a Muslim hit squad had been dispatched from Mumbai). My friend, who works at the Jaipur festival;, said: 'It was hilarious - Dawkins was up there with a swami on one side and a fakhir on the other, and he was being very forthright that God doesn't exist. People hardly ever say that in India!' As you can see, people seemed to find his ideas refreshing.

The politics of cancer care

2012-02-01T01:24:00.000-08:00

I went on a date with an oncologist last night. Not a very good date - she showed no interest in me or what I do ('you're a blogger?' she asked incredulously, as if I said I was a plate-spinner) - but she was quite interesting talking about herself and what she does. So I let her talk!

She told me that cancer patients get all their prescriptions free, as of 2009. This isn't the case for patients with any other disease - heart disease, motor neurone disease, AIDS. Only cancer patients. Why is that, I asked. 'Because Macmillan [the leading cancer charity] successfully argued that cancer is the worst thing that can happen to someone, so cancer patients should be treated differently to any other patients'.

In fact, if you are on benefits and can't pay your prescriptions, you only have to pay £100 a year for all prescriptions, so under the new cancer prescriptions law, patients save £100, but it will still cost the NHS £13 million a year altogether. And it is built on the strange suggestion that cancer patients are somehow more stricken and more worthy of care than patients suffering from other serious illnesses.

How did this come about? Through lobbying. Macmillan is a very powerful organisation, with an income in 2010 of £133 million, of which £43 million comes from wills and legacies. And that, in turn, comes from a neat strategy that Macmillan pursues, of putting its own lobbyists and fund-raisers inside hospitals: they're called Macmillan nurses.

Macmillan goes to NHS oncology departments and offers them the use of their specially-trained Macmillan nurses for free, for three years - as long as they are branded as Macmillan nurses. After three years, the NHS has to pay for the nurses themselves if they want to continue employing them, but they must still be branded as Macmillan nurses. Around 3,500 of the 6000 cancer nurses in the UK are branded Macmillan nurses.

This has a huge impact on Macmillan's income. When a person survives the trauma of cancer, and has been cared for by a Macmillan nurse (even if that nurse is actually being paid for by the NHS), they typically leave a lot of money to Macmillan - it received £43 million in legacies in 2010.

All this income gives Macmillan a huge amount of lobbying clout. When lobbying to get cancer patients free prescriptions in 2008, Macmillan used nearly 1000 active campaigners, sent letters to 4,100 local newspapers, secured 474 pieces of media coverage, held 28 meetings with 'public influencers', and secured the support of 125 MPs in the 'early-day motion' in the House of Commons. The lobbying was actually nominated for an award at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, and has since been held up as an example of 'good lobbying'.

But is it? I am sure readers in the UK will know of people who have been greatly helped by Macmillan nurses. But why should cancer patients be treated differently from any other patients, like those with Alzheimer's, motor neurones disease, or schizophrenia - diseases where the patients are not necessarily in the financial or mental position to lobby, fund-raise or advocate for themselves as powerfully as Macmillan?

Is our health policy being distorted by the power of a non-governmental organisation, which acts to protect both cancer patients but also itself? 'Most oncologists think the policy is nonsense', I was told. 'But no one's going to stand up and say that.'

I know this is a very emotive area, and am not saying I know the answers - I am interested to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Should we all be popping 'morality pills'?

2012-01-30T06:14:00.001-08:00

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

2012-01-30T02:42:00.001-08:00

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'

2012-01-29T04:25:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-29T00:26:00.001-08:00

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

2012-01-28T05:17:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-27T07:33:00.000-08:00

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?

2012-01-26T05:31:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-25T03:00:00.001-08:00

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

2012-01-24T23:59:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-24T09:56:00.001-08:00

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

2012-01-20T04:06:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-20T03:02:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-19T05:39:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-18T09:58:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-18T08:41:00.001-08:00

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

2012-01-18T04:13:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-17T08:37:00.000-08:00

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.

The Cameron / Gove 'chasm' on well-being classes

2012-01-17T04:04:00.000-08:00

This is an excellent piece in the Guardian on well-being classes. It suggests there is a "chasm between David Cameron and Michael Gove" on the issue, "and it's going to get wider":

When the prime minister set up the National Wellbeing Project in 2010, he said that finding out what improved lives was a serious business for government. Cameron's commitment to wellbeing is shared by, among others, the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Children's Fund. But what about his own Department for Education?

While the Office for National Statistics is busy compiling the country's first wellbeing tables, the DfE has written it out of the new inspection framework...The new framework requires them to check on behaviour and safety, but not how a school cares for its pupils. It does not refer to health or emotions. It mentions relationships only as potential hazards and friends only as "critical" ones. Gone is the need to make sure that pupils have a "strong voice in decisions relating to their learning and wellbeing".

Indeed, the word "wellbeing", which ran like a river through the previous Ofsted framework, has disappeared. The education secretary, Michael Gove, has said the new framework will allow inspectors to concentrate on what matters and forget the"peripherals". Thus, wellbeing has been cast into Ofsted's dustbin at a time of soaring youth unemployment, when teenagers routinely hear themselves described as a "lost generation".

Debbie Watson, whose book Children's Social and Emotional Wellbeing in Schools is published tomorrow [the book is actually authored by Watson, Phil Bayliss and Carl Emory], says there has been a policy void with regard to wellbeing in education since the coalition came to power. "There's a chasm between Cameron and Gove," she says, "and it's only going to get wider."

Watson, who is director of childhood studies at Bristol University, argues that wellbeing is a "poorly understood, rather nebulous concept". It should, she says, start with individual children, celebrating and respecting their rights and needs. "It's subjective and individual, and not about universal standards and norms."Watson says that two key initiatives introduced by Labour and still in use – Every Child Matters and the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (Seal) programmes – have flaws because they are "top-down rather than roots-up". Nevertheless, "the concept of wellbeing must not be allowed to disappear".

I don't think Michael Gove is necessarily against the idea of well-being classes per se - one of the new 'free schools' that have been set up under his education policy is called the Maharishi Free School, where all students take meditation classes. He's just wary of top-down diktats. He's a liberal, in other words, or a conservative-liberal, and believes head-teachers and parents should be given the power to set the moral agenda of their schools for themselves - rather than them being forced to follow a moral, psychological and emotional programme set by psychologists and bureaucrats in Whitehall.

Cameron, by contrast, is more of a paternalist Conservative - he appears to think a handful of experts should define well-being and then teach or nudge the nation towards it. Cameron called for an age of 'post-bureaucratic government' - but it strikes me that it's Gove's policies, not Cameron's, that are more post-bureaucratic here.

It's too early to say exactly what the Coalition's attitude to well-being classes is - the Department of Education is in the middle of an independent review of the subject Personal and Social Health Education (PSHE), which includes Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (ugh, these endless acronyms!) So when that report is finished and the government responds, we'll have a better idea of the lay of the land.

But, contrary to the academic Neil Humphrey in that article, I would suggest that well-being classes are not just about finding what 'works' scientifically - because well-being can't be defined purely scientifically. It's about finding the right balance between liberalism and choice, and the science of the Good Life - or between Gove's pluralism, and Cameron's paternalism. We haven't quite found that balance yet.

The Optimism Bias - overly pessimistic?

2012-01-17T01:40:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I got the chance to meet the neuroscientist Tali Sharot, and discuss her new book, The Optimism Bias, on Radio 3's arts and ideas show, Night Waves. It was my first time on the wireless (thanks to my boss at the Centre for the History of the Emotions for setting it up) and it was good fun - turning up at Broadcasting House at 9.45, waiting in the 'green room' (the...er...lobby of the building, where the various guests milled around), then going in and watching an interesting discussion about Ralph Fiennes' new film, Coriolanus (I was struck by how high brow the discussion was - apparently Radio 3 in the evening is much more highbrow than Radio 4), before Tali and I went and joined the presenter, Matthew Sweet, and discussed her book for 10 minutes or so. You can listen to the show here - it's the last segment.

I enjoyed Tali's book, and enjoyed meeting her, but I tried to express a polite scepticism about Tali's thesis, which I characterised as:

1) We are hard-wired to see the world through the rose-tinted spectacles of delusion

2) This causes us lots of benefits - it means we live longer, are happier, are not crippled with angst at the prospect of death. Optimistic people are also more likely to achieve their goals. The bias also causes us some problems however - like the Credit Crunch or over-optimistic wars like Iraq.

3) Even if we wanted to take off these rose-tinted spectacles, we probably couldn't. Because they're neurally wired into our brains, we are destined to make the same mistakes, 'every single time'

4) And this is a good thing, because if we saw the world as it actually was, we'd be clinically depressed

I put it to Tali that this was a very pessimistic view of human existence. She countered that I'd misread the book, and that actually the last chapter recognised the pitfalls of the optimism bias, which is why she suggests we need to recognise the bias and try to balance it out.

But I don't think I did misread it. She hardly discusses ways to balance out the optimism bias at all, besides one sentence saying optimism is like red wine - one glass is good but drinking the whole bottle is bad (a line she got from two other optimism experts, Manju Puri and David Robinson). Most of the rest of the book she argues that the optimism bias is ingrained in our brains, involuntary, automatic and unchangeable - and that it is good that this is so.

Throughout the book, she uses the deterministic, mechanistic, fatalistic language of neuroscience - she talks about our 'seemingly automatic inclination to imagine a bright future', argues optimism is 'hard-wired' into our brain, 'it takes rational reasoning hostage'...'these defects are overpowering'...'No matter how hard we try, some mental and emotional processes are likely to remain hidden', 'you are still fooled. Every time. Every single time.'

Even when she explores how people find the 'silver lining' to catastrophic events like being paralysed, she says that this is a 'trick' the brain plays - as if learning to accept being paralysed is not a choice, or effort (in other words something voluntary, difficult, brave and noble) but rather an automatic and involuntary delusion. I think this is unfair to people who recover from trauma. Some people don't recover from trauma. They kill themselves. Those who do recover have to really work hard to accept their situation. It's not a 'trick' their brain plays on them. It's a conscious, rational choice to see the facts of the situation, and accept them.

Tali insists in the book it's good that our eyes are covered by automatic illusion blinders, because if we saw the world as it really was, we'd be clinically depressed and would die quicker. We need our illusions, she argues. She very briefly discusses the theory of 'defensive pessimism' - the idea that for some people, it's adaptive and useful to think through what could go wrong, so that they can prepare for it. But just a few sentences later she insists 'negative expectations can - literally - kill us'.

This is a startling claim. Get optimistic now or you will die! But her evidence for this very broad claim is just one study. It found that people who had a heart attack and were sure they were going to die, did indeed die before too long. Well, we can all agree that if you are very ill and are certain you are going to die very soon, it will negatively affect your chances of survival. But that isn't pessimism - that's outright fatalism. Some other forms of pessimism - or tempered expectations - might be adaptive in other circumstances.

Her shakiest claim is that optimism is good because it creates self-fulfilling prophecies that make things happen. She gives very little evidence for this claim, which is perilously close to the notorious 'Law of Attraction', other than one instance where the coach of the LA Lakers said they would win the championship two years in a row, and hey presto, they did. She says: "Believing that a goal is not only attainable but very likely leads people to act vigorously to achieve the desired outcome."

Well, sometimes, but not always. Sometimes optimism means we don't prepare properly - I'm reminded of Pompey the Great before battle with Caesar, who was so confident of victory he held a big banquet the day before the battle (which he lost). I'm also reminded of a 2003 study of maths qualifications among the students of 29 developed countries. It found that American students were the most confident in their maths abilities of the 29 countries, but nearly the worst in reality. Asian students were much less optimistic in their abilities, but actually much better than their complacent American rivals.

Sharot argues that positive expectations make us happier by 'making us believe success is just around the corner'. Well, sometimes but not always. The Danes usually appear in happiness surveys as the happiest country in the world, and one researcher believes this is because of their low expectations - they expect each year to be worse than the last, and are pleasantly surprised when it's not.

In one eyebrow-raising passage, Tali suggests optimism developed at the evolutionary moment we became capable of imagining death, to protect us from this terrifying prospect through 'false beliefs'. That is a damning account of the last 5,000 years of human culture. Yes, a lot of the time humans hide the fact of mortality from themselves - as TS Eliot put it, 'humankind cannot bear very much reality'. But a great deal of the best art, literature, philosophy and religion is an attempt to confront the grim facts of life, including death. I don't think you can sum all that up as consolatory 'false beliefs'. Is Hamlet consoling? Yes - but not in a simplistic and delusive way. It tries to find a tragic wisdom born out of an acceptance of the brutal facts of life. Stoic philosophy, which we briefly discussed in the show, is also an attempt to accept and adapt to the hard facts of life. So is Buddhism.

'Ah, but isn't adaptation very optimistic?', Tali asked me. Not according to her definition, no. Adaptation to the facts of life is realism. Optimism, according to her, is denying the facts of life.

So I think her book has a too pessimistic view of human reason, and our ability to overcome biases - including the optimism bias. CBT helps people overcome gambling addiction, for example, by getting them to keep track of their losses to see how over-optimistic they are being. I think she has too pessimistic a view of humans' ability to face up to the grim facts of life, and fails to take account of the role of art and culture to balance out our inherent optimism (is this, perhaps, the adaptive social role of pessimists - and are a disproportionate number of pessimists writers, artists, historians and philosophers?)

Above all, I think her book bends the messy facts of life into too simplistic a narrative (a bias psychologists call 'the narrative fallacy'). She fits the complexity of human experience into the overly neat little categories so beloved of social scientists - on the one side, there are optimists, who are the heroes of her story, on the other, there are the pathological pessimists, who are clinically depressed and who need help.

Why should we accept these simplistic categories and divide humanity into two neatly separated tribes? Flesh-and-blood humans defy such easy categorisation. My father, for example, has an almost apocalyptic pessimism when it comes to Arsenal football club. He is absolutely sure they will lose, every match - and is pleasantly surprised if they don't. But in other areas of his life, he is quite cheery. My brother, to take another example, is a climate change expert - he thinks the world is heading for an environmental armageddon. But in his personal life, he is also a cheery soul. I myself am optimistic about some things, and pessimistic about others. And my positions are not hard-wired into me - they change over time.

To misquote Walt Whitman, we are large, we contain multitudes. We should resist social scientists' attempts to herd us into pens and label some of us good and some of us bad.

The Genesis theory of consciousness

2012-01-16T02:03:00.000-08:00

Human consciousness gives us the ability to ask 'why?' You know how children go through that stage of constantly asking 'why?' Well, that's a uniquely human capacity (as far as we know), and it comes from consciousness, that thing inside us that makes the everyday seem suddenly weird and unfamiliar, that makes us look at the way things are, scratch our head, and ask:'yes but...why?'

Human consciousness turns on itself, like a snake eating its own tail, and asks: 'why are we conscious? Why do humans ask questions, and not other animals? Who or what gave us this capacity...and is it a blessing, or a curse?' I love these questions. Because they're so fundamental, yet so hard to answer...yet such fun to ask. And most religions and philosophies are built around attempts at an answer.

Let's explore some answers that have been offered throughout history. We might as well start with Genesis. This book is, among other things, a fascinating attempt to answer the 'why' of human consciousness.

Genesis tells us that God put man in the Garden of Eden, along with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The tree, in other words, of moral consciousness and ethical philosophy. God tells man that he may eat the fruit of every tree in the garden, except the Tree of Knowledge, 'for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die'.

So why make that tree in the first place? And why put it right next to man, who God knows is not the brightest spark, and say 'whatever you do, don't eat this'. It's like telling a child not to eat the marshmallow. Of course man was going to eat the tree of knowledge!

Then God creates Eve, and Eve meets the subtle serpent. Again, why did God create the serpent, and put it right next to Adam and Eve? Christians would presumably say, 'because He wanted to test Adam and Eve'. Well, sure enough, the serpent tempts Eve and tells her that if she eats of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, 'ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.'

Sure enough, Eve eats the fruit, and gives some to Adam. 'And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they [were] naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.'

The first thing to note is that humans' very first act after attaining moral consciousness is to make aprons. Think about that, the next time you put on an apron. That was our first step in conscious evolution. The mighty apron. We are gods of the kitchen! We bake cakes!

Secondly, for all his reputation as a deceiver, the serpent isn't lying - the fruit doesn't kill Adam and Eve, it opens their eyes. The serpent is telling the truth.

Thirdly, Eve apparently had knowledge of good and evil before eating the fruit - she knew it was wrong to eat the fruit according to God, but was able to consider an alternative moral view from the serpent. So she was already morally conscious before eating the fruit. If she didn't have knowledge of good and evil before consuming the fruit, how could she be tempted? Temptation depends on moral consciousness.

Anyway, Eve eats the fruit first. This condemns womanhood to an eternity of second-class citizenship in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Woman is the tempter, the deceiver, the weak one, the one whom Satan persuades. Yet actually, from another perspective - Eve is the first to attain moral consciousness. She is the awakener, while Adam is the slow-developing dufus.

So Adam and Eve eat the fruit, and their eyes are opened, their consciousness heightened. They evolve from homo dufus to homo sapiens. Yet alas there are some serious glitches to Humanity 2.0, which the serpent failed to mention. Consciousness doesn't entirely make humans 'as gods', as the serpent suggested. It also makes them ashamed, frightened, self-conscious, uneasy. They cover themselves up, and hide from God. The birth of consciousness is a painful falling into separateness, and paranoia, and a sense of our smallness and disconnection from the rest of nature.

The expulsion from Eden that follows is merely an objective correlative for an exile that has already happened subjectively. The painful birth of consciousness has already divorced us from the world of nature, and given us a terrible sense of our separateness, our solitude, our nakedness, our mortality, and a bitter awareness of how hard our life is and will be. God tells us that because we are conscious, we are cursed. And he's right - consciousness is a curse, it curses us with a restless dissatisfaction with our life of toil, a sense of our separateness and loneliness, and a terror of approaching mortality.

So we and the serpent are cursed by God. We and the serpent were the only creatures in Eden that were conscious, that asked questions, that challenged God's authority.

Isn't the implication that human consciousness is a crime against the natural order? That we were never meant to be conscious? That we stole consciousness, as Prometheus stole fire, and like Prometheus this has condemned us to a life of agony, torment, fear and suffering?

This vision of human existence, it seems to me, is Gnostic. In this vision, the God of Genesis is the Demiurge, a being who wants to maintain the status quo on Earth - and human attainment of consciousness was a rupture of that order. God didn't give us moral consciousness - the Serpent did! Or rather, the Tree did.

But, then again, God created the Tree and the Serpent, knowing presumably that humans would obey the snake and eat the fruit. So God is the creator of human consciousness, but a reluctant creator...

It's all very strange.

It reminds me - and I hope you won't mind if we take a leap into the psychedelic here - of the theory of the late Terence McKenna, as expressed in his Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, that the fruit of the tree of knowledge is really some sort of naturally occurring psychedelic substance, like mushrooms or peyote, one of these strange plants that humans have ingested for time immemorial, which seem to expand our consciousness and give us both a god-like sense of the expanse of the cosmos, and also a terrifying sense of our own smallness, nakedness and separateness. Heaven and Hell, in other words, or Good and Evil.

Is it possible that human consciousness really was an accident, that humans happened to munch on psychedelics over the course of thousands of years, thereby developing consciousness? Is it possible that this was somehow a crime against the natural order? But if it was a crime...then who planted the mushrooms?? Perhaps, as some forms of Gnosticism suggest, there are various powerful beings jostling for supremacy up there - one of them tries to keep human consciousness down and to preserve the status quo, while the other sneaks around planting mushrooms hoping we will free ourselves.

Forgive these wild speculations - but it's fun to ask such questions (or is it a crime?)

Finally, I want to consider Genesis chapter six:

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,

That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they [were] fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.

And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also [is] flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare [children] to them, the same [became] mighty men which [were] of old, men of renown.

What's going on here?? There are, apparently, two different species interbreeding - the 'sons of God', and the 'daughters of men'. Where did the 'sons of God' come from? Are they angels? Extra-terrestrials? Some higher species of hominid who didn't survive but genetic traces of whom remain in us?

Whoever they are, their interbreeding creates giants or 'mighty men' (compare this, by the way, to the Greek idea that heroes are created by the interbreeding of gods and humans). And with the birth of this new species - let's call it Humanity 3.0 - God seems to lay off His jealous rivalry with humans for bit ('My spirit shall not always strive with man') and to give humans a bit of a break (by extending their longevity somewhat).

But then God decides that, in fact, He hates this new upstart semi-divine half-breed version of Humanity 3.0:

And God saw that the wickedness of man [was] great in the earth, and [that] every imagination of the thoughts of his heart [was] only evil continually.

And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

Again, quite weird. Human advancement in consciousness comes from the interbreeding of angels / aliens...and this creates a breed of 'mighty men'. Yet once again, God deeply resents this advancement in human consciousness and capability, and wants to wipe us out.

God, in Genesis, is like a jealous boss who is constantly trying to keep us down, yet somehow various other figures in the organisation - the serpent, the sons of God - help us to advance. He's the anti-Bill Gates, bitterly resisting any upgrade to his creation.

That's just my reading of Genesis, I hope I haven't cause offence. I think Genesis is an interesting early attempt to answer the questions: 'why are humans conscious?', 'why does consciousness give us a god-like sense of the cosmos, but also a bitter sense of our own terrible separateness and exile from nature?', 'is consciousness a blessing or a curse?' As we've seen, its answers are pretty weird..but at least it attempted an answer. Or rather, there are lots of answers in these few verses - and lots of questions.

One thing that strikes me in particular is that Genesis seems to put forward an evolutionary theory of consciousness. Man is not created conscious. We attained consciousness through a series of stages or upgrades - the eating of the fruit, then perhaps the interbreeding with the sons of God - and God bitterly resisted each upgrade in consciousness. Each upgrade widened our eyes, yet also deepened our capacity for suffering.

Have I completely misinterpreted Genesis? Tell me your interpretations, or your own answers to the big questions: 'why are we conscious, and is it a blessing or a curse?'

CBT...the TV channel!

2012-01-15T01:50:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Tim Le Bon for drawing my attention to the Beck Institute's YouTube channel. It's full of great videos of Aaron Beck talking about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Here are two of them - the first, Beck talks about CBT treating post-traumatic stress disorder in soldiers. The second, Beck talks about who influenced CBT, including particularly Albert Ellis.

PoW: Can we measure the well-being impact of the arts?

2012-01-13T08:06:00.000-08:00

The British arts and culture sector is in a flap. The Office of National Statistics is about to finish its consultation defining the domains of well-being, and guess what...arts and culture aren't in there! Shit! Cue some desperate lobbying of the ONS to make sure they include arts and culture in their official definition of well-being, otherwise the arts piglet won't be at the well-being trough when all that public funding is poured out.

Paul Allin, the nice chap at the ONS (pictured on the right) who is in charge of Defining National Well-Being (quite a task you've been handed there Paul), says: "I am aware of the impact of the arts on wellbeing and social inclusion, and encourage those involved in the sector to make the case for this by responding to the consultation. This will give us the most comprehensive evidence possible on which we can base the further development of the Well-being programme." He's aware of the impact! He likes us! Just a bit more lobbying and maybe the arts can get into the definition of Well-Being. It's like Paul is Noah and we're all animals desperately scrambling to get on the Ark before it sets sail.

There's a lot of other things left out of the Official National Definition of Well-Being, by the way. Like religion. Holy shit! They left out God! Quick, call the Archbishop. And sex. They left out sex! Call Jordan! And chocolate. Call Willy Wonka! (etc). But let's focus on arts and culture this week. Because there is a more serious point behind these concerns about how to evaluate the impact of the arts.

We live in an age that has ever more faith in empirical evidence, an age of facts and non-fiction, of statistics, graphs, experiments and surveys. If you want to influence public policy, you need graphs, evidence and data in a pretty Power Point presentation. As the former head of the civil service, Sir Gus O' Donnell, said: 'If you treasure it, measure it.' His successor, Sir Jeremy Heywood, this week suggested launching a body to scientifically evaluate social policy interventions, in the same way that NICE evaluates pharmaceutical interventions. Policy-makers want facts, bar charts, pie graphs. Otherwise they stumble in the darkness of ethical confusion. There's a sort of Positivist revival happening at the moment, which poses a real challenge to the arts and humanities: how do we measure their impact, to prove to the bureaucrats we deserve our funding? What's the point of the arts, and what sort of arts should receive public funding?

State funding of the arts goes back to Renaissance Florence, which had an official buildings fund that commissioned artists for major state works (it seems to have chosen pretty well). But in the UK, state funding of the arts only really began after World War II, with the launch in the late 1940s of the Arts Council, the RSC, the 'Third Programme' on BBC Radio, and so on.

The Arts Council was designed, in the words of one chairman of the Council, 'as a protection of the best in our culture against the barbarians'. In other words, a protection of elitist art against the threat of populism, commercialism and philistinism. The first chairman of the Arts Council, the very elitist John Maynard Keynes (shown in a painting on the left by his lover Duncan Grant), launched it with a speech on BBC Radio which ended with the rallying war cry: 'Death to Hollywood!'

But the Arts Council quickly turned into not just a protection of past culture, but a financier for new art and new organisations.This led to arguments. Should subsidies support artistic excellence, or mass popular engagement? How much independence should organisations like the Arts Council have from politicians? And what kind of arts should it support? What is the 'value' of the arts? Who should set the nation's cultural agenda?

The consensus on what sorts of arts should get public financing has shifted over time. According to an interesting article by David Edgar in the Guardian this weekend, in the 1960s and 1970s, public funding of the arts often went to quite edgy, radical and political arts projects, but this changed under the Thatcher government. Some Tories didn't think any arts should get public funding, while others thought public subsidies should protect our 'cultural heritage' and thereby promote tourism and foreign trade. Culture should be valued for its ability to make money from foreign viewers and foreign tourists (for 'foreign' read mainly 'American'). Less John Osborne, more Jane Austen.

This week, David Cameron outlined a vision for public financing of the film industry which was very close to this Thatcherite conception of the arts as tourism-promoter. The British Film Institute and Lottery Fund should, he said, help companies 'make commercially successful pictures that rival the quality and impact of the best international productions' - like The King's Speech.

What this means is that the arts should sell a certain vision of Britain to foreigners - a Britain where all the men are posh and floppy-haired and say 'um' a lot, like Hugh Grant, and all the women look like Diana and say 'gosh' a lot, like Kirsten Scott Thomas, and all the houses are gorgeous country mansions. Downton Abbey, basically. In fact, Julian Fellowes, the writer of Downton Abbey, is the lead author of the report behind Cameron's comments.

So much British film, it seems to me, is still stuck in this idea of selling an anachronistic version of England to foreigners - think of Richard Curtis' films, from the enjoyable Four Weddings and a Funeral to the increasingly awful Notting Hill and Love Actually. I don't feel those films were made for us. They're a self-demeaning dance put on for Americans.

Anyway, during the years of New Labour, again to quote the David Edgar article, a new idea arose among policy-makers that you could measure the value of the arts through their impact on things like social exclusion, literacy, health and well-being. The idea of 'evidence-based policy making' began in medical policy in the 1990s, and then spread to other areas of policy, including the arts. In 2007, for example, the Arts Council published a report together with the Department of Health, called 'The arts, health and well-being', promoting all the health benefits got from, say, seeing a nice painting in a hospital, or singing in a choir.

But some were sceptical about taking this instrumental and evidence-based approach to the arts. The former chairman of the Arts Council, Christopher Frayling, said on his resignation in 2009: "Evidence-based policy-making...assumes that everything is measurable in quantitative terms. Since then there's been a lot of research - actually it has mainly been advocacy masquerading as research - full of unexamined assumptions desperately trying to prove all sorts of things about the power of the arts in relation to the economy, society and public value, even the individual. But we all know that evidence-based policy, resting as it does on a relatively narrow range of measurable indicators - has serious limitations when applied to the arts."

Likewise, New Labour's minister of culture, Tessa Jowell, published a very interesting pamphlet in 2004, called 'Government and the Value of Culture', in which she warned against over-instrumentalising the arts: "Too often politicians have been forced to debate culture in terms only of its instrumental benefits to other agendas - education, the reduction of crime, improvements in wellbeing - explaining - or in some instances almost apologising for - our investment in culture only in terms of something else."

So why, then, should government subsidise the arts? Jowell writes (and it's a long quote, but worth reading in full):

We live in a complex world; the result is that we prize, and perhaps sometimes even suspect, those who understand its complexities. We not only celebrate the genius of great scientists or technological pioneers, but we make daily use of their inventions...But the internal world we all inhabit - the world of...love or pain, joy or misery, fear and relief, success and disappointment - that, too, has its genius discoverers and inventors, people who can show us things we could not see for ourselves, and experts who can help us to understand them. Their insights are no less accessible than the workings of the internal combustion engine. Society seems to take for granted that learning complex skills about the external world is within the range of far more people than developing an appreciation for the insights of great art. But there is no reason why that should be so.

Those who have had the transcendent thrill of feeling the power of great art in any medium, have gained the use of a sense to add to those of touch, taste, smell, sound and sight. And grappling with the complexity is almost always the necessary condition of access to that enriching sixth sense. I am not saying that culture has to be complicated, or that what is not complicated cannot have cultural value. But I do believe that the rewards of grappling with great art in any medium are enormous. The reluctance of so many to attempt that challenge is a terrible waste of human potential, with a concomitant loss of human realisation.

That is why, in a nutshell, subsidy for 'high culture' activities is a proper task for government: not to provide the "cultured" wealthy with a night out cheaper than it might be but because if great works of art are not exposed, the chance of acquiring that sixth sense may not be on offer at all. Complex cultural activity is not just a pleasurable hinterland for the public, a fall back after the important things - work and paying tax - are done. It is at the heart of what it means to be a fully developed human being.

I completely agree with Jowell's argument, and think she has put it very well. Great art introduces us to the complexity of human experience. It broadens our emotional palette, our sense of the interestingness of life. It should broaden our minds, not reduce them, and raise questions, not answer them. That's why I don't think it's appropriate to try and reduce its impact and value to some box-ticking scientific definition of well-being.

Great art is, by its very nature, complex, and not readily reduced to a well-being questionnaire. Alas, though, when we're curious about our inner worlds today, we so often turn to social science popular books of non-fiction like Malcolm Gladwell or Martin Seligman - authors who don't increase our sense of the complexity of human experience, but rather reduce it to neat little ideas supported by neat little Power Point graphs. They reduce experience to 20-minute upbeat TED talks, which is really the ruling format of this Positivist age. I think novels, plays, or even great TV dramas like The Sopranos, give us a sense of the complexity of life better.

But, you say, if we can't scientifically measure the value of the arts, then won't we have to make subjective judgement calls about what constitutes great art? Well, yes. But I think to some extent we have to trust the taste of 'curators' to guide the cultural agenda in a country - while always reserving our right to disagree with the curators and to oppose their judgements. Even populist shows like X-Factor or Strictly Come Dancing are not completely populist - they still have the 'judges' table, who are supposed to know a bit better than the public what is 'good'. The Arts Council is, basically, the judges table for the nation. They should balance a sense of what the public wants to see with a judgement of what is really worth making and worth seeing. That may be elitist - but it's an open, inclusive elitism for everyone. As Joan Littlewood, the great leftie theatre director, once said: ''If you offer the public anything less than the best, you're just being patronising'.

Let me temper that: I also believe that engaging in the arts is good for our well-being, regardless of the quality of the art produced. Being in a choir is great for our well-being. Reading together is great for our well-being. Writing or painting is great for our well-being, on the whole. So I guess we can evaluate the health impact of those activities and use that evaluation to justify public funding.

But public subsidies to the arts can't just be about getting more people involved in arts production for their own well-being. It also needs to support great art, by virtuosos, because their art also has a really important human impact - although one that's harder to measure. But contrary to what Sir Gus O' Donnell said, not everything worth treasuring can be measured.

Bowie's Magic Dance

2012-01-11T12:24:00.000-08:00

I'm going to write something proper later this week, I swear, I'm just finishing off the editing of the manuscript. In the meantime, here is what I think is an unrecognised classic by David Bowie (65 this week, happy birthday to the Thin White Duke!) . It's Magic Dance, from the film Labyrinth. Bowie + Henson muppets. What could be better.

Daniel Pinchbeck and Russell Brand on mysticism etc

2012-01-10T05:20:00.001-08:00

I love Russell Brand. Here he is chatting with Daniel Pinchbeck, author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Modern Shamanism, about God, consciousness, mysticism and quantum physics, in a tent.

Everything is a remix

2012-01-09T11:00:00.000-08:00

Last year I read Reality Hunger, David Shields' manifesto for a 'cut-and-paste aesthetic' of essay writing, an aesthetic that is happy to borrow, remix, mash up and recycle other people's work in an essay format, rather like Geoff Dyer remixed and mashed up DH Lawrence in Out of Sheer Rage.

Well, check this out. It's part of a four-part series of videos by the New York film-maker Kirby Ferguson, called Everything Is A Remix. This is exceptional work, and really a new genre - the YouTube essay. I'm really impressed, and a bit intimidated. And a fascinating financial model as well - no traditional publishers, no TV channel, no magazine editors to deal with. He makes it himself, and asks for donations. Must take a long time to get permission for all the clips though? Anyway, great work. Also check out the video on the Matrix's borrowings, below, made I think by a friend of Kirby's, Robert Grigsby Wilson.

Alastair Campbell on the politics of happiness

2012-01-08T04:26:00.001-08:00

Here's a nice piece by Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's spin doctor, on the politics and philosophy of happiness. Campbell has bravely been very open about his struggles with depression, and I think he's done a lot to change perceptions of mental illness - because he is so well-known as a bruiser / tough guy / big gorilla of Westminster. What I mean is, he has shown that mental illness can go side-by-side with strength and high functioning, and has made it easier for other men to admit to depression without being perceived as weak.

An interesting passage from the article:

By asking the question "Am I happy?", and via the answer setting out what I mean by happiness, there is a political route that can be taken, by asking another question – "Can politics deliver happiness, and should it try?" It is a question that, among others, the prime minister, David Cameron, has been asking. There is much I disagree with Cameron about. I think some of his policies will directly cause unhappiness among some of his electorate. But the idea that happiness should at least be considered when putting forward a policy proposal is a good one. About halfway through Tony Blair's premiership, his policy advisers tried to interest him in this agenda, presenting him with a paper, "Life satisfaction and its policy implications" [does anyone know where I can find this report?]. He didn't really go for it. It is Cameron who is taking up some of the ideas presented to the predecessor on whom he sometimes models himself. There will be scepticism about his commitment. But I hope he is serious.

Interesting that Blair should have rejected the idea of measuring well-being. Nonetheless, I would argue that the 'politics of well-being' really started during the New Labour years, and was very much a product of its post-Thatcheritee touchy-feely ethos. I would say one key moment in the emergence of the politics of well-being was the publication by the New Labour think-tank, Demos, of a pamphlet called The Good Life in 1998. Demos was set up by Tony Blair's former head of policy, Geoff Mulgan, who became a real champion for the politics of well-being, both at Demos and subsequently at the Young Foundation - he's also one of the founders of the organisation Action for Happiness.

Another key moment in the emergence of the politics of well-being was the establishment of the national curriculum subject, Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL), which started off as a school subject in Southampton in 1997, before becoming a national subject in primary schools in 2003, then in secondary schools as well in 2007.

The third key moment for the emergence of the politics of well-being was the publication of Lord Richard Layard's depression report in 2006, which laid the foundation for the establishment of a national mental health service in 2007, involving the training of 6,000 new cognitive therapists - though I believe this policy, known as Improved Access for Psychological Therapies (IAPT) was finally enacted under Gordon Brown's premiership rather than Tony Blair's.

Finally, the fourth key moment in the emergence of the politics of well-being was the publication of the Sen-Stiglitz-Fitoussi report in 2009, which led to the decision by the French government, and subsequently the British government, to measure national well-being and make it a stated goal of public policy.

This last step happened under David Cameron, who has been quite explicit in his support of well-being as a policy goal. Cameron's Coalition government also stumped up £400 million in support of IAPT. However, it's worth noting that Cameron's education secretary, Michael Gove, is much less enthusiastic about Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning in schools than his New Labour predecessors, and that it looks likely this subject will be scrapped in a review due to be released this year.

Anyway, back to Campbell's article. He suggests: "we cannot know if we have lived a truly happy life until the very end." That is, in fact, exactly what Aristotle said as well. Call no man blessed until his life has ended - because fortune can come and kick you in the nuts. Well, he didn't say those exact words, but words to that effect.

That's why I don't think you can really measure a person's eudaimonia through questionnaires. To really evaluate a person's eudaimonia, you'd have to wait until after they died - in fact, you'd have to wait until several decades after their death, until the dust of history has settled, and you can try and see their life as a whole, and all its impacts and consequences.

Alan Turing, for example, one of the inventors of the computer, had a fairly miserable end to his life - he was chemically castrated by the British government for being a homosexual, and later killed himself. No one celebrated his life or noted his death, and if you'd asked him how happy he was, in the last weeks of his life, he would probably have answered 'not very happy'. It is only in the last few years that his genius and his contribution to society has been recognised. He lived a good life, even if it wasn't recognised at the time.

Positive Psychology for the entire country?

2012-01-07T02:14:00.000-08:00

Anthony Seldon, the headmaster of Wellington School, has brought out a pamphlet laying out a vision for a new 'politics of optimism'. It’s a vision that draws heavily on ancient philosophy and on Positive Psychology, and is worth a read.

Seldon argues that only a handful of British governments have genuinely shaped the nation, while most of them simply responded to events. The Coalition government, he argues, has so far failed to shape the national agenda, but it could do so, if it revitalised the much-derided concept of the ‘Big Society’, and used it to focus on building four key values: goodness, trust, optimism and forward-thinking. We are going to be materially poorer over the next decade, he argues, but we can become mentally, morally and spiritually richer, if the government pursues the right policies.

Seldon is one of the key figures in the politics of well-being - the political movement that I have written about for the last four years or so - because he brings together in his own person the world of politics (he has written biographies of Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown), education (he is the headmaster of Wellington), and the psychology of well-being (he was the first headmaster to introduce well-being classes, and is also one of the founders of Action for Happiness, which campaigns to spread Positive Psychology in British society).

I confess that I am slightly wary of Seldon: he is too confident that he knows the meaning of life. This is probably a necessary trait in a headmaster, but a dangerous trait in a policy-maker. I fear he treats British citizens too often as school-children, who need to be drilled in the basics of well-being (and for him, well-being is a very obvious and basic concept), then everyone will be happier and better-off. He often complains that British education is too mechanical, too focused on passing tests - but he never considers that ‘well-being classes’ can themselves become overly mechanical and robotic, if young people are not enabled to debate and decide for themselves what well-being is.

Nonetheless, there are many areas where I agree with Seldon. The reason I first got into the politics of well-being, many years ago, is because I fell into depression and social anxiety in my last year at school, and remained very depressed and anxious all the way through university. It took me several years to work out what was wrong with me, and how to escape that dark valley, using ancient philosophy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. I wish I had come across the ideas and techniques of ancient philosophy and CBT at school and university - it would have saved me a lot of suffering - and my hope is that future generations will have this possibility.

Seldon agrees so far. He writes that British universities suffer from

often poor levels of pastoral care, especially for students in their difficult first year away from home. More than 76,000 students who started at universities in 2008 failed to graduate in the summer of 2011, a national drop-out rate of 21%. Depression and anxiety amongst undergraduates is increasing at an alarming rate: the numbers who reported mental health difficulties rose by 270% in the first five years of this century, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency [actually, the latest figures show a rise of 450% in students reporting mental health difficulties over the last decade] . Much greater emphasis needs to be placed on providing appropriate levels of pastoral care for undergraduates, and to ensuring that the quality of student support, as well as academic enrichment, equals the best universities in the US, if the trickle of British students currently crossing the Atlantic to study at university is not to become a torrent....Universities, like schools, need and shape young hearts and minds, not give them a sludgy amalgam.

He likewise thinks schools need to focus not just on academic achievement, but also on building ‘character’:

Education Secretary Michael Gove, and still more his Department for Education have locked themselves into a view of schools: either they promote ‘educational standards’ or all-round or ‘holistic’ education. Trying to do the second will be at the expense of the first. In fact, as the evidence of successful schools in Britain clearly shows, it is those schools that focus firmly on values and breadth of educational experience which secure the best results and educate their young people to the full. David Brooks, author of The Social Animal (2011), allegedly ‘required reading’ for the cabinet, said of schools: “If you don’t focus on character and behaviour, then the results of handing out money are always going to be disappointing”. State schools like West Kidlington primary school in Oxfordshire or King’s Langley, a secondary school in Hertfordshire, show that embracing values and ‘character’ education can transform a school and its results. South Korea is one of many countries whose education systems have been redesigned to embrace character development and creativity, not as a bolt-on, but as an integral part the school experience for its young people.

And he thinks this sort of character-building should carry on in adult life. The government, he suggests, should roll out a large-scale programme of Positive Psychology to teach ‘optimistic thinking’ to the nation’s six million public sector workers:

In 2009, Martin Seligman with his team from the University of Pennsylvania began to introduce positive thinking to the US Army. A ten-day master resilience trainer (MRT) course provides face-to-face resilience training, imparting the skills to sergeants for their own use as well as for them to teach the skills to their soldiers. This ‘train the trainer’ model has been evaluated and has been found to be successful in enhancing the mental health of the US Army, the cause of widespread concern.

There are six million public sector workers in Britain. The government should trial the resilience techniques which Seligman is teaching the US Army on selected groups of them. Prison guards, the police or NHS staff could be the place to start. School teachers too would benefit from learning more about this thinking. It involves learning how to detect ‘inaccurate’ thoughts, evaluating the value of those thoughts and how to challenge negative beliefs by considering alternative patterns of thinking. It teaches a variety of strategies useful in solving problems, and coping with difficult and stressful situations and emotions. Participants learn techniques to enhance assertiveness, to improve their negotiating skills, to boost decision-making and deepen their ability to relax and simply ‘let go’. Seligman’s programmes have been extensively evaluated, and while his approach has detractors in the academic world and beyond, the training would nevertheless be valuable in bringing greater optimism and human warmth into public services.

This is certainly a bold vision. But I really can’t see that last idea flying. Can you imagine - the Coalition government is cutting public sector budgets across the board, but it finds (let’s say) £1 billion to give to Martin Seligman and the University of Pennsylvania, to train public sector workers to think optimistically? 'Sorry, guys, we're cutting your pensions, but hey, here's a free course in thinking positively'. I can't see Unison signing up to that.

For one thing, the course which Seligman designed for the Pentagon was designed to prevent soldiers from getting post-traumatic stress disorder. Is PTSD a big problem in the British public sector as well? The Pentagon’s resilience-training course, which cost around $180 million, hasn’t even been properly evaluated yet. It was rolled out without a pilot programme, such was the Pentagon’s eagerness to cope with its epidemic of post-conflict suicide among veterans. Despite this lack of hard evidence, and despite the fact the course was designed to combat PTSD, Seldon wants to roll out resilience training to the entire nation - children, undergraduates, public and private sector workers. Well, you have to admire his optimism.

There’s no need for me to be overly-cynical. I myself was greatly helped by Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and as I’ve said, the reason I got into this whole area was a belief that CBT - and the ancient philosophy that inspired it - should become more widely known and available. Positive Psychology is, to a large extent, repackaged CBT. So I agree with Seldon that our schools and universities shouldn't just prepare people for the marketplace - but should teach young people some ideas, techniques and approaches to the good life.

But it’s all a question of how you do it.

My problem with Positive Psychology is that it tries to turn ancient philosophy into too rigid and prescriptive a science. Where CBT aims merely to remove the symptoms of mental illness and to teach people how to transform their emotions, Positive Psychology claims to be an objective science of flourishing. That's a much bolder claim. The US Army’s resilience course, for example, makes every American soldier take a battery of computerised questionnaires, which supposedly measure their ‘emotional and spiritual fitness’. And if the soldiers score too low, a box appears saying: ‘Spiritual fitness may be a problem area for you. Please study the relevant self-development modules’. The priest is replaced with the spiritually-enlightened laptop.

Positive Psychology over-instrumentalizes well-being, has too reductive and amoral a definition of well-being, and relies too heavily on simplistic questionnaires in its efforts to measure well-being. It replaces human relationships with automated box-ticking. Politically, it grants too much authority to the 'scientific expert', and takes away too much autonomy from the citizen, who is forced to fit into a pre-fabricated version of well-being. It leaves no room for the individual's reasoning, or choice, or consent - which in my opinion are an important part of the good life. The political roll-out of Positive Psychology carries real risks of being illiberal and intrusive, and if Seldon is to be taken seriously, he needs to deal with those concerns head on.

My vision is not so far from Seldon’s, but it tries to find a better balance between the ancient idea of the good life or eudaimonia, and a modern, pluralist and liberal politics. It recognises that well-being is not a simple concept that can be easily defined and measured by empirical science. Rather, it embraces the plurality of philosophical definitions of well-being, and asks that we treat citizens as rational adults, who deserve the right to be brought into the conversation as equals, and shown some of the various different approaches - then left to make up their own minds as to how to define the good life.

We can still teach people the basic techniques of well-being - meditation, for example, or the Socratic method used in CBT - while also empowering them to discuss the various different approaches to well-being: Buddhist, Christian, Stoic, Epicurean, Aristotelian - and the arguments between those approaches. Well-being is not a straightforward concept which we can define scientifically and objectively, and the world would be a much more boring place if we could.

My ideal course in the good life would combine two of the most popular courses at Harvard: Tal Ben Shahar's course on Positive Psychology, and Michael Sandel's course on Justice. It would combine the well-being science of Ben Shahar's course, with the opportunity for ethical reasoning found in Sandel's course. Empiricism balanced with practical reasoning. Science balanced with the humanities. Not one version of the good life, but many. That's what I would like to see taught in schools, universities, and adult learning centres.

A longing for belonging

2012-01-06T08:37:00.000-08:00

Over at the Centre for the History of the Emotions blog, my former tutor, the wonderful Lesel Dawson, reviews Simon May's Love: A History. My favourite passage:

As May’s book makes clear, a number of traditions require that the lover achieve psychic distance from the beloved in order to attain higher goals. Looking across various approaches, I cannot help but wonder if the very process by which the human beloved is elevated to a higher ideal (or seen to embody abstract notions such as beauty and truth) might secretly depend upon not knowing the person all that well. In the Renaissance one of the best cures for lovesickness was sex, not only because it allowed the (usually) male lover to satisfy his desires, but also because intimate knowledge of the beloved was thought to disabuse the lover of his dreams. By actually getting to know the mistress, the suitor would have to relinquish his private self-created fantasy of the beloved in favour of a living, breathing human being.

Unfortunately, some men didn’t find this a very good exchange; for them intimacy with the beloved led, not to an appreciation of her particular qualities, but rather to a sense that they had been duped into believing that someone disgusting was beautiful. Many Renaissance poems, which oscillate between elevating and vilifying the mistress, reproduce this tension, demonstrating the ways in which idealization and misogyny are really two sides of the same coin. Although May does not focus on gender, one can imagine how some of his arguments could be used to demonstrate the ways in which idealistic constructions of love have helped to foster unrealistic ideas of women, contributing to the ways in which women have alternatively been seen as objects of veneration or disgust.

That's true of many forms of love - not just the love of a man for a woman, but likewise sometimes the love of a woman for a man, or the love of a child for their parents, or a parent's love for their child, or a friend's love for another friend. There is a move from idealisation to a clearer-eyed recognition of the other's faults, flaws and limits. And yet that can lead to a deepening of the love, when one recognises that the other is imperfect, vulnerable, fragile, and mortal. Sometimes the deepest love a child feels for their parent is when they see signs that they are getting old and a bit frail - and it is our turn to return all the care and love they provided to us.

The flip-side of this is: can one really love something that is perfect and immortal, like for example God? If God is perfect, why does He need our love?

Suicide and the law: Stoics versus Christians

2012-01-05T02:55:00.000-08:00

In the UK, the Commission on Assisted Dying published the results of its year-long inquiry today, and it recommended that English law be changed so that it is legal to assist the suicide of anyone over 18 suffering from a terminal illness with a prognosis of less than a year.

Prime minister David Cameron has said he has no intention of changing the law, which at present treats any assistance as murder or manslaughter. He's set out his stall as a Christian prime minister, so doesn't want to wade into such a contentious moral issue. But nonetheless, the Commission's recommendation is another blow in the centuries-old tussle between the Stoics and the Christians over the right to take your own life.

Socrates is sometimes taken as a champion of suicide, because he drank the cup of hemlock after being sentenced to death for impiety: indeed, one of the leading campaign groups for the right to die in the US was called the Hemlock Society. In fact, in the Phaedo, which describes Socrates' last moments, Socrates argues that suicide is a crime against God, because our lives belong to God, not to us, therefore we're harming something that doesn't belong to us - a position that would later be adopted by St Augustine. He doesn't think he's killed himself, rather he's obeyed the execution order of the Athenian court.

It was really Socrates' descendants, the Stoics, who insisted on humans' moral right to end their own lives. For the Stoics, suicide is (or can be) an expression of our autonomy and dignity as rational humans. It is the ultimate lifestyle choice. Seneca wrote: "Just as I choose a ship to sail in or a house to live in, so I choose a death for my passage through life." We may have little control in our lives, but we always retain the final option of taking our own lives, if the circumstances of our life become too unpleasant - though naturally, as Stoics, we would take our lives with calm efficiency rather than stormy passion.

And yet the Stoics were also theists - their ethics are based on the idea that we should calmly accept whatever circumstances God sends us. So how could they justify suicide? They seem to get round this paradox by arguing it's acceptable to kill oneself if God sends you a sign or a summons that it's time to shuffle off. Thus Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic school, killed himself after he tripped and broke his toe in his old age. He took this as a sign from God summoning him to end his life, and killed himself by either holding his breath or starving himself, according to different reports. His successor, Cleanthes, likewise killed himself in advanced old age by starving himself. Stoics seemed to think it was acceptable to kill yourself if you were either very old, or are facing the prospect of torture, imprisonment or execution by a tyrant. In that instance, suicide is an expression of autonomy - you are denying the tyrant the ability to imprison you or take your life by ending it yourself, on your own terms.

Thus Cato the Younger, after losing a key battle in the Roman Civil War, killed himself rather than be taken prisoner by Augustus Caesar. Likewise Seneca kills himself when accused of treachery by the emperor Nero (as shown in the painting by Rubens above). Both Cato and Seneca try to stage-manage their deaths, to be the 'authors of the script of their dying', as the thinker Charles Leadbetter puts it. They both follow the script laid down by Plato in the Phaedo - Cato actually spends his last hours reading the Phaedo (obviously skipping over the passage condemning suicide) - and both their suicides became famous scenes, often portrayed in paintings since, as instances of pagan virtue and courage.

And yet it's worth noting that, in both instances, death eluded their ability to stage-manage it. Cato failed to kill himself outright, and spent his last moments in agony. Seneca slit his wrists, but the blood flowed too slowly to kill him. So he slit veins and arteries in his legs, but that didn't work either. So he took a poison, but again it took too long to take effect. So finally his servants carried him into a steaming hot bath. There, he dripped water onto his servants, saying he annointed them. I find that pathetic, in the old meaning of the word: Seneca desperately trying to maintain his dignity while his carefully stage-managed death keeps on going wrong. The steam from the bath finally suffocated him, apparently.

The Stoic defence of suicide was accepted by Roman law, and suicide remained legal under Christian law, until the 4th century BC, when St Augustine returned to the Platonic position that our lives were not ours for the taking. By the 12th century, Christian theologians, while celebrating many aspects of Stoicism and revering the likes of Seneca as quasi-saints, were careful to point out that the Stoics got the issue of suicide very wrong. In fact, the word 'suicide' comes from a Christian tract written against Seneca in the 12th century. During the Renaissance, when Seneca and Stoicism enjoyed a big revival, thinkers again pondered whether the Stoics or the Christians were right about suicide. The most famous speech in the English language is, in fact, a consideration of just this issue:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them?

By the eighteenth century, as Christianity declined as a cultural force in Europe, and people’s belief in the supernatural began to weaken, philosophers and writers dared to voice their support for people’s right to kill themselves, should life become unbearable. David Hume, for example, attempted in an essay called On Suicide, written in 1755, to ‘restore men to their native liberty by showing that [suicide] may be free from every imputation of guilt, or blame, according to the sentiments of the ancient philosophers’. Hume argues that ‘such is our natural horror of death no man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping’. But Hume did not dare to publish his defence of suicide in his lifetime - his essay was published posthumously in 1783.

Today, the Stoics seem to be winning the argument. The baby-boomer generation, like the Stoics, are increasingly demanding the right to stage-manage their own deaths, and to make their deaths the ultimate lifestyle choice.

Suicide finally became legalised in the UK in 1961, while assisted suicide was effectively decriminalised in 2010 by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). Since then, there have been around 40 instances of assisted suicide in England and Wales which were not prosecuted. But the area is still murky: the DPP says it is OK to assist suicide if the final act is taken by the dying person, but if the assistant gives the final injection, they can be (and are) tried for manslaughter.

It's one of the most difficult, painful areas to consider and discuss. Perhaps today the debate is moving beyond the Stoic versus Christian argument about 'whose life is it anyway', and is particularly focused on how we can protect the vulnerable from being pressured into dying by others.

Greatest hits 2011

2011-12-30T01:33:00.000-08:00

Here are a top ten of either the most read, or my favourite, posts from the last year.

At number 10, it's the interview with Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut and sixth man to walk on the moon, talking about the epiphany he had in outer space. Far out!

At number 9, from February, it's a piece on 'how to make philosophy epic'.

At number 8, from one of the newsletters, it's a piece on DH Lawrence and the Dionysiac tradition, which got turned into the final appendix in my book.

At number 7, it's one of the many pieces I've written on measuring well-being, and why I am sceptical of it, called A technocratic solution to a spiritual problem.

At number 6, it's my interview with Stephen Greenblatt about how Lucretius helped him overcome his fear of death.

At number 5, a piece on teaching the Good Life in schools.

At number 4, it's some philosophy self-help posters I designed.

At number 3, it's an account of my visit to the Skeptics conference in Las Vegas.

At number 2, it's an account of my visit to Occupy London.

And at number 1, it's a history of philosophy...in tattoos!

Hope you've enjoyed following the blog this year, and you keep reading and spreading the word in 2012 - I really appreciate your comments, support, links, re-tweets etc. Have a great 2012,

Jules

'A beloved community that circles the world'

2011-12-23T12:22:00.000-08:00

I posted a piece about a month ago, called Occupy Your Heart Chakra, which gently suggested that the Occupy movement privileged inarticulate and unfocused emoting over actual policy suggestions - a classic symptom of a Utopian anarchist project. Today, radical journalist Rebecca Solnit posted a piece called, yes, Occupy Your Heart. Have a read - what do you think? Is a 'politics of affection' compatible with a more thought-out systemic attempt at change, or is it a descent into irrationalism?

Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed -- and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names, and obliging the media and politicians to do the same.The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based.

Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas. The amiable-looking elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.”The photo of the two of them offers just a peek into a single moment in the remarkable period we’re living through and the astonishing movement that’s drawn in… well, if not 99% of us, then a striking enough percentage: everyone from teen pop superstar Miley Cyrus with her Occupy-homage video to Alaska Yup’ik elder Esther Green ice-fishing and holding a sign that says “Yirqa Kuik” in big letters, with the translation -- “occupy the river” -- in little ones below.The woman with the stolen-votes sign is referring to them. Her companion is talking about us, all of us, and our fundamental principles. His sign comes straight out of Genesis, a denial of what that competitive entrepreneur Cain said to God after foreclosing on his brother Abel’s life. He was not, he claimed, his brother’s keeper; we are not, he insisted, beholden to each other, but separate, isolated, each of us for ourselves. Think of Cain as the first Social Darwinist and this Occupier in Austin as his opposite, claiming, no, our operating system should be love; we are all connected; we must take care of each other. And this movement, he’s saying, is about what the Argentinian uprising that began a decade ago, on December 19, 2001, called politica afectiva, the politics of affection.

If it’s a movement about love, it’s also about the money they so unjustly took, and continue to take, from us -- and about the fact that, right now, money and love are at war with each other. After all, in the American heartland, people are beginning to be imprisoned for debt, while the Occupy movement is arguing for debt forgiveness, renegotiation, and debt jubilees.Sometimes love, or at least decency, wins.

...The other morning at the Oakland docks for the West Coast port shutdown demonstrations, I met three members of Occupy Amador County, a small rural area in California’s Sierra Nevada. Its largest town, Jackson, has a little over 4,000 inhabitants, which hasn’t stopped it from having regular outdoor Friday evening Occupy meetings.A little girl in a red parka at the Oakland docks was carrying a sign with a quote from blind-deaf-and-articulate early twentieth-century role model Helen Keller that said, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart.” Why quote Keller at a demonstration focused on labor and economics? The answer is clear enough: because Occupy has some of the emotional resonance of a spiritual, as well as a political, movement. Like those other upheavals it’s aligned with in Spain, Greece, Iceland (where they’re actually jailing bankers), Britain, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Chile, and most recently Russia, it wants to ask basic questions: What matters? Who matters? Who decides? On what principles?

Stop for a moment and consider just how unforeseen and unforeseeable all of this was when, on December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian vegetable vendor in Sidi Bouzid, an out-of-the-way, impoverished city, immolated himself. He was protesting the dead-end life that the 1% economy run by Tunisia’s autocratic ruler Zine Ben Ali and his corrupt family allotted him, and the police brutality that went with it, two things that have remained front and center ever since. Above all, as his mother has since testified, he was for human dignity, for a world, that is, where the primary system of value is not money.“Compassion is our new currency,” was the message scrawled on a pizza-box lid at Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan -- held by a pensive-looking young man in Jeremy Ayers’s great photo portrait.

But what can you buy with compassion? Quite a lot, it turns out, including a global movement, and even pizza, which can arrive at that movement’s campground as a gift of solidarity. A few days into Occupy Wall Street’s surprise success, a call for pizza went out and $2,600 in pizzas came in within an hour, just as earlier this year the occupiers of Wisconsin’s state house had beencopiously supplied with pizza -- including pies paid for and dispatched by Egyptian revolutionaries.

...Occupy has also created a space in which people of all kinds can coexist, from thehomeless to the tenured, from the inner city to the agrarian. Coexisting in public with likeminded strangers and acquaintances is one of the great foundations and experiences of democracy, which is why dictatorships ban gatherings and groups -- and why our First Amendment guarantee of the right of the people peaceably to assemble is being tested more strongly today than in any recent moment in American history. Nearly every Occupy has at its center regular meetings of a General Assembly. These are experiments in direct democracy that have been messy, exasperating and miraculous: arenas in which everyone is invited to be heard, to have a voice, to be a member, to shape the future.

Occupy is first of all a conversation among ourselves.To occupy also means to show up, to be present -- a radically unplugged experience for a digital generation. Today, the term is being applied to any place where one plans to be present, geographically or metaphorically: Occupy Wall Street, occupy the food system,occupy your heart. The ad hoc invention of the people’s mic by the occupiers of Zuccotti Park, which requires everyone to listen, repeat, and amplify what’s being said, has only strengthened this sense of presence. You can’t text or half-listen if your task is to repeat everything, so that everyone hears and understands. You become the keeper of your brother’s or sister’s voice as you repeat their words.It’s a triumph of the here and now -- and it’s everywhere: the Regents of the University of California are mic-checked, politicians are mic-checked, the Durban Climate Conference in South Africa had occupiers and mic-check moments.

Activism had long been in dire need of new modes of doing things, and this year it got them. Before the Occupy movement arrived on the scene, political dialogue and media chatter in this country seemed to be arriving from a warped parallel universe. Tiny government expenditures were denounced, while the vortex sucking our economy dry was rarely addressed; hard-working immigrants were portrayed as deadbeats; people who did nothing were anointed as “job creators”; the trashed economy and massive suffering were overlooked, while politicians jousted over (and pundits pontificated about) the deficit; class war was only called class war when someone other than the ruling class waged it. It’s as though we were trying to navigate Las Vegas with a tattered map of medieval Byzantium -- via, that is, a broken language in which everything and everyone got lost.

Then Occupy arrived and, as if swept by some strange pandemic, a contagious virus of truth-telling, everyone was suddenly obliged to call things by their real names and talk about actual problems. The blather about the deficit was replaced by acknowledgments of grotesque economic inequality. Greed was called greed, and once it had its true name, it became intolerable, as had racism when the Civil Rights Movement named it and made it evident to those who weren’t suffering from it directly. The vast scale of suffering around student debt and tuition hikes, foreclosures, unemployment, wage stagnation, medical costs, and the other afflictions of the normal American suddenly moved to the top of the news, and once exposed to the light, these, too, became intolerable.If the solutions to the nightmares being named are neither near nor easy, naming things, describing reality with some accuracy, is at least a crucial first step. Informing ourselves as citizens is another. Aspects of our not-quite-democracy that were once almost invisible are now on the table for discussion -- and for opposition, notably corporate personhood, the legal status that gives corporations the rights, but not the obligations and vulnerabilities, of citizens. (One oft-repeated Occupier sign says, “I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas puts one to death.”)

The Los Angeles City Council passed a measure calling for an end to corporate personhood, the first big city to join the Move to Amend campaign against corporate personhood and against the 2009 Supreme Court Citizens United ruling that gave corporations unlimited ability to insert their cash in our political campaigns. Occupy actions across the country are planned for January 20th, the second anniversary of Citizens United. Vermont’s independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who’s been speaking the truth alone for a long time, introduced a constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United and limit corporate power in the Senate, while Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL) introduced a similar measure in the House.Only a few years ago, hardly anyone knew what corporate personhood was. Now, signs denouncing it are common. Similarly, at Occupy events, people make it clear that they know about the New Deal-era financial reform measure known as the Glass-Steagall Act, which was partially repealed in 1999, removing the wall between commercial and investment banks; that they know about the proposed financial transfer tax, nicknamed the Robin Hood Tax, that would raise billions with a tiny levy on every financial transaction; that they understand many of the means by which the 1% were enriched and the rest of us robbed.This represents a striking learning curve. A new language of truth, debate about what actually matters, an informed citizenry: that’s no small thing. But we need more.

We Are the 99.999%

I was myself so caught up in the Occupy movement that I stopped paying my usual attention to the war over the climate -- until I was brought up short by the catastrophic failure of the climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa. There, earlier this month, the most powerful and carbon-polluting countries managed to avoid taking any timely and substantial measures to keep the climate from heating up and the Earth from slipping into unstoppable chaotic change. It’s our nature to be more compelled by immediate human suffering than by remote systemic problems. Only this problem isn’t anywhere near as remote as many Americans imagine. It’s already creating human suffering on a large scale and will create far more. Many of the food crises of the past decade are tied to climate change, and in Africa thousands are dying of climate-related chaos. The floods, fires, storms, and heat waves of the past few years are climate change coming to call earlier than expected in the U.S. In the most immediate sense, Occupy may have weakened the climate movement by focusing many of us on the urgent suffering of our brothers, our neighbors, our democracy. In the end, however, it could strengthen that movement with its new tactics, alliances, spirit, and language of truth. After all, why have we been unable to make the major changes required to limit greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? The answer is a word suddenly in wide circulation: greed.

Responding adequately to this crisis would benefit every living thing. When it comes to climate change, after all, we are the 99.999%. But the international .001% who profit immeasurably from the carbon economy -- the oil and coal tycoons, industrialists, and politicians whose strings they pull -- are against this change. For decades, they’ve managed to propagandize many Americans, in and out of government, into climate denial, spreading lies about the science and economics of climate change, and undermining any possible legislation and international negotiations to ameliorate it. And if you think the eviction of elderly homeowners is brutal, think of it as a tiny foreshadowing of the displacement and disappearance of people, communities, nations, species, habitats. Climate change threatens to foreclose on all of us.The groups working on climate change now, notably 350.org and Tar Sands Action, have done astonishing things already. Most recently, with the help of native Canadians, local activists, and alternative media, they very nearly managed to kill the single scariest and biggest North American threat to the climate: the tar sands pipeline that would go from Canada to Texas. It’s been a remarkable show of organizing power and popular will. Occupy the Climate may need to come next. Maybe Occupy Wall Street and its thousands of spin-offs have built the foundation for it.

But perhaps the greatest gift that it and the other movements of 2011 have given us is a sharpening of our perceptions -- and our conflicts. So much more is out in the open now, including the greed, the brutality with which entities from the Egyptian army to the Oakland police impose the will of rulers, and most of all the deep generosity of spirit that is behind, within, and around these insurgencies and their activists. None of these movements is perfect, and individuals within them are not always the greatest keepers of their brothers and sisters. But one thing couldn’t be clearer: compassion is our new currency.

Nothing has been more moving to me than this desire, realized imperfectly but repeatedly, to connect across differences, to be a community, to make a better world, to embrace each other. This desire is what lies behind those messy camps, those raucous demonstrations, those cardboard signs and long conversations. Young activists have spoken to me about the extraordinary richness of their experiences at Occupy, and they call it love.In the spirit of calling things by their true names, let me summon up the description that Ella Baker and Martin Luther King used for the great communities of activists who stood up for civil rights half a century ago: the beloved community. Many who were active then never forgot the deep bonds and deep meaning they found in that struggle. We -- and the word “we” encompasses more of us than ever before -- have found those things, too, and this year we have come close to something unprecedented, a beloved community that circles the globe.

Fukuyama on the need for a new ideology

2011-12-22T03:17:00.000-08:00

Francis Fukuyama, the philosopher who declared the 'End of History' in the 1990s (by which he meant that liberal capitalist democracy had triumphed and there was no longer any reasonable alternative) has published an interesting new essay suggesting democracy and free market capitalism are parting ways, and that we should embrace the former and abandon the latter.

His essay in Foreign Affairs, called The Future of History, looks at the importance of the middle class to liberal capitalist democracy, and how that middle is being squeezed in western democracies by falling GDP, falling output, slower technological innovation, and increased competition from emerging markets. What puzzles him is why, when the liberal capitalist model is so under siege, the Left should have failed to come up with a popular alternative. He writes:

The deeper reason a broad-based populist left has failed to materialise is an intellectual one. It has been several decades since anyone on the left has been able to articulate, first, a coherent analysis of what happens to the structure of advanced societies as they undergo economic change and, second, a realistic agenda that has any hope of protecting middle class society.

The Left, Fukuyama argues, disastrously replaced Marxism "with postmodernism, multiculturalism, feminism, critical theory, and a host of other fragmented intellectual trends that are more cultural than economic in focus....It is impossible to generate a mass progressive movement on the basis of such a motley coalition: most of the working and lower middle class citizens victimised by the system are culturally conservative and would be embarrassed to be seen in the presence of allies like this."

I get his point, but one can overdo the attack on postmodernism and the other -isms of the 1990s. Feminism, for example, is hardly marginal, nor are minority or queer rights. These movements made important advances in the 1990s and 2000s, and have shifted the centre ground. I don't think the working classes and lower middle classes would be so embarrassed by such allies.

He goes on:

when existing social democratic parties come to power, they no longer aspire to be more than custodians of a welfare state that was created decades ago; none has a new, exciting agenda around which to rally the masses.

So what's the alternative? What could be 'an ideology of the future', as he puts it? He writes:

Imagine, for a moment, an obscure scribbler today in a garret somewhere trying to outline an ideology of the future that could provide a realistic path toward a world with healthy middle-class societies and robust democracies. What would that ideology look like?

It would have to have at least two components, political and economic. Politically, the new ideology would need to reassert the supremacy of democratic politics over economics and legitimate a new government as an expression of the public interest. But the agenda it put forward to protect middle-class life could not simply rely on the existing mechanisms of the welfare state. The ideology would need to somehow redesign the public sector, freeing it from its dependence on existing stakeholders and using new, technologically empowered approaches to delivering services. [I'm not quite sure what this means, to be honest.]

Economically, the ideology could not begin with a denunciation of capitalism as such, as if old-fashioned socialism were still a viable alternative. It is more the variety of capitalism that is at stake and the degree to which governments should help societies adjust to change. Globalization need be seen not as an inexorable fact of life but rather as a challenge and an opportunity that must be carefully controlled politically. The new ideology would not see markets as an end in themselves; instead, it would value global trade and investment to the extent that they contributed to a flourishing middle class, not just to a greater aggregate national wealth.

It is not possible to get to that point, however, without providing a serious and sustained critique of much of the edifice of modern neoclassical economics, beginning with fundamental assumptions such as the sovereignty of individual preferences and that aggregate income is an inaccurate measure of national well-being. This critique would have to note that people's incomes do not necessarily represent their true contribution to society. It would have to go further, however, and recognize that even if labour markets were efficient, the natural distribution of talents is not necessarily fair and that individuals are not sovereign entities but beings heavily shaped by their surrounding societies.

Fukuyama concludes that a genuinely populist left would need to begin by attacking elites:

there are a lot of reasons to think that inequality will continue to worsen. The current concentration of wealth in the United States has already become self-reinforcing: as the economist Simon Johnson has argued, the financial sector has used its lobbying clout to avoid more onerous forms of regulation. Schools for the well-off are better than ever; those for everyone else continue to deteriorate. Elites in all societies use their superior access to the political system to protect their interests, absent a countervailing democratic mobilization to rectify the situation. American elites are no exception to the rule.

That mobilization will not happen, however, as long as the middle class of the developed world remain enthralled by the narrative of the past generation: that their interests will be best served by ever-freer markets and smaller states. The alternative narrative is out there, waiting to be born.

What's interesting about the essay is that Fukuyama, once the champion of liberal capitalist democracy, appears to be coming down squarely on the side of social democracy and against free market capitalism. He's on the side of Occupy, against Goldman Sachs. But Fukuyama neglects to mention the environment or climate change. Most political thinkers or futurologists under 40 would put climate change, and the need for some sort of response to it, at the centre of a progressive ideology.

Perhaps we can try and flesh out the picture a little. I want to draw a contrast between liberal cosmopolitan politics, and civic republican politics - or a contrast between Aristotle and Diogenes.

There are two versions of the state that descendants of Socrates imagined. Aristotle imagined a state where every citizen was educated and trained in philosophy, and deeply involved in the running of the state. The citizen achieves their flourishing (a word Fukuyama employs as the proper end of the state) partly through scholarship, learning, religion and the arts, and partly through politics.

Diogenes the Cynic, by contrast, imagined the individual as a 'cosmopolitan', cut free from the state and become a citizen of the world rather than any particular country. Aristotle's vision of the state involved deeper ties, deeper commitments, and deeper demands of citizens. Diogenes the Cynic' political vision, such as it was, led to a cosmopolitan politics of wider but shallower ties. Aristotle's vision is local and communitarian, while Diogenes' vision is internationalist, individualist and cosmopolitan. (This is not quite fair to Diogenes' radical anarchist politics, but it is true in so far as he was the father of the idea of cosmopolitanism).

For a long time, the UK has been enamoured of a more liberal cosmopolitan vision of politics, embracing free trade, open borders and low taxes. I would suggest the left, and the UK, moves to a more Aristotelian conception of society, which provides more for its citizens in terms of education and housing , but which also demands more of them, in terms of taxes and political participation. It would be a more local vision, in which citizenship means more and costs more. It's not far from what Maurice Glasman envisaged with his Blue Labour project.

There are four important areas for this shift from a liberal cosmopolitan to a civic republican politics: taxes, education, housing and finance.

Firstly, it would demand we all pay our taxes. It would condemn and shame corporations that dodge taxes, just as harshly as it condemned individuals and families who tried to fiddle the system. We will only accept paying higher taxes if we feel the system is fairer, and less easy to abuse. We can already see this shift happening: look at how UK Uncut's campaign last week against corporate tax-dodging garnered support from right across the political spectrum, including front page support from the Daily Mail.

Secondly, education. In place of the knowledge economy, we need to build a learning economy, which creates opportunities for life-long learning, and for life-long teaching, and measures success in human development rather than GDP. The cartels of academia need to be opened up, so that academics connect with wider communities and satisfy the popular demand for learning and ideas. Academics will complain 'this will damage the quality of research we can do'. I don't agree. At the moment, so much academic research is frankly boring and over-specialized. The more academics feel connected to their societies and the concerns of ordinary people, the more they will be inspired to raise their heads from their tiny corner of research and to start to address some bigger and bolder questions.

Thirdly, property. One of the key ways that living standards are dropping is the rising cost of buying a flat or (perish the thought) a house. My parents bought a small house in Islington in the late 1970s for £30,000. Such a house now would cost around £600,000. This is partly the result of banks encouraging buy-to-let speculation over the last 20 years. It is also partly the result of foreign capital flooding into UK property (particularly London), and of foreign bankers working in the City. Housing is so important to individuals' quality of life, that we need to look seriously at limiting the amount of foreign and speculative capital in the property market.

Fourthly, finance. A civic republican society would be very wary of financial interests and of over-leveraged families and societies. It would condemn usury. It would make the point that, if financial interests are allowed to grow too powerful, they becomes a parasite, dictating the actions of the host in their own interests rather than the interests of the host. Rather, an Aristotelian economics would focus on the end of human flourishing rather than the means of the market. That could mean embracing 'national well-being measurements', but readers of this blog will know how little I rate such measurements. I would rather governments focus on a broad range of human and social indicators, particularly looking at quality of life in education, housing and work. The market should support the learning economy - which means giving people more opportunities to learn, study and pursue other interests.

But all of this leaves out the question of how to cope with any major global changes arising from climate change. I think an Aristotelian response would do its best to engage with the international system to mitigate such catastrophic climate change - but it would also prepare for a world where that change happens, and we, as a society, focus on protecting our republic, our citizens, our learning and our values in the midst of a new Dark Ages. Or is that a wretched embrace of a 'Lifeboat Britain' mentality...

To be honest it is hard to plan a coherent politics when one really has no idea to what extent the Doomsday scenarios foretold us by climate scientists are accurate and inevitable.

Lego's 'Civil Unrest' collection

2011-12-21T09:12:00.000-08:00

The UK curriculum review: end of citizenship classes?

2011-12-20T02:26:00.001-08:00

The Department of Education's curriculum review is out. It recommends separating the curriculum into three parts: national, basic and local. National curriculum subjects would be compulsory for all schools. Basic curriculum subjects would be recommended for schools but it's up to schools how (or if) they teach them. And the local curriculum is a space for schools to innovate.

It looks like citizenship classes, which have been a part of the national curriculum since 2002, could be shunted down to the basic curriculum. The report says:

Despite their importance in balanced educational provision, we are not entirely persuaded of claims that...citizenship has sufficient disciplinary coherence to be stated as discrete and separate National Curriculum ‘subjects’. We recommend that, while Citizenship is of enormous importance in a contemporary and future-oriented education...we are not persuaded that study of the issues and topics included in citizenship education constitutes a distinct ‘subject’ as such. We therefore recommend that it be reclassified as part of the Basic Curriculum.

This would mean that schools have a lot of discretion on how or if they teach citizenship. There have been complaints about citizenship classes before. An Ofsted investigation in 2006 found that a quarter of all English secondary schools offered inadequate classes in citizenship, with teachers working "far from their normal comfort zone". Ofsted decided that only a minority of schools taught citizenship "with enthusiasm".

David Blunkett, who was Home Secretary back in 2002 and who seems to be one of the champions of citizenship classes, has warned that the subject was struggling in the past and needed more supporters. Last week, he warned David Cameron in Prime Minister's Question Time that: “It would be perverse, in fact it would be absurd, to be requiring those coming from abroad to settle in Britain to learn about our democracy, to take citizenship courses, whilst withdrawing the teaching of citizenship and democracy to our own children in our own schools.”

The decline of citizenship classes is something of a blow for philosophy. The classes were intended to be part of an Aristotelian training of future citizens, as David Hargreaves put it in a Demos pamphlet in 1994:

Civic education is about the civic virtues and decent behaviour that adults wish to see in young people. But it is also more than this. Since Aristotle, it has been accepted as an inherently political concept that raises questions about the sort of society we live in, how it has come to take its present form, the strengths and weaknesses of current political structures, and how improvements might be made... Active citizens are as political as they are moral; moral sensibility derives in part from political understanding; political apathy spawns moral apathy.

Now, that Aristotelian vision of civic education seems to be fading.

What about Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL), the 'well-being' and 'emotional literacy' classes which at the moment is part of Personal, Social and Health Education? PSHE is itself under review, and it looks likely that SEAL could be quite slimmed down. The Coalition government is much less enthusiastic about it than New Labour was, and wants to make SEAL in general more evidence-based.

The report does provide some room for philosophy classes in the local curriculum. It says:

The local curriculum should also provide opportunities for schools to innovate and to develop particular curricular interests or specialisms insofar as they decide they are appropriate. For example, a specific focus might be developed for a school’s provision or for a phase of learning, either as separate elements e.g. ‘philosophy for children’ or integrated across the school curriculum, such as ‘thinking skills’.

That opens the door for schools to 'innovate', but doesn't totally welcome philosophy into the classroom.

It strikes me that these three subjects - citizenship, well-being, and philosophy - used to be one subject. They were all a part of ancient Greek philosophy. They all emerge from a Socratic and Aristotelian foundation. I think they should be brought back together. I also think they should be combined with Religious Education, which is an increasingly popular A-Level subject - and which incorporates ancient Greek philosophy and ethics. I don't think you can teach well-being without some discussion of the meaning of life - and whether or if there is a God. This is one of the fallacies of the 'science of well-being' which is behind SEAL: it leaves no room for moral reasoning about the end or goal of life.

I would like to see Religious Education changed into a new subject, called 'The Good Life' or 'Flourishing', which combines ideas and techniques from the science of well-being, with ethics, philosophy, and an examination of some of the practices and beliefs of religious traditions like Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. Such a class would also look at the Good Society - and how our personal ethics of flourishing are tied to different conceptions of the state and of citizenship.

Herman Van Rompuy on the power of positive thinking

2011-12-19T04:10:00.000-08:00

Herman Van Rompuy is thinking positive. He is staring into his mirror each morning, and repeating to himself: 'I am a strong, confident, powerful currency. I am A TIGER!' He's so positive, he's sent out a hefty tome called The World Book of Happiness to 200 world leaders, with this extraordinary letter. I'm quoting from the letter he sent to Barack Obama:

Dear Mr President Barack,

I am very happy to present you with this copy of The World Book of Happiness...with my best wishes for a 'Happy New Year' but also with my request to you as world leaders to make people's happiness and well-being our political priority for 2012 [um...what about preventing the catastrophic collapse of the euro? No?]

Positive thinking is no longer something for drifters, dreamers and the perpetually naive. Positive Psychology concerns itself in a scientific way with the quality of life. At stake are not only the happiness and well-being of individuals, but also those of groups, organisations and countries. And above all, in today's global world [today's global world?] we can all learn from one another. It is time to make this knowledge available to the man and woman in the street...

People who think positive see more opportunities, perform better, possess greater resilience, take more often correct and sound decisions [sic], negotiate better, have more self-confidence, maintain better relations, take greater responsibility, have more trust placed in them and so on. In short, they give more hope to others because they can experience it themselves. In order to release this positive energy, people need oxygen. Society can offer this oxygen. Positive education, positive parenting, positive journalism and positive politics play a crucial role here. This oxygen we can also create ourselves by a balanced existence or a religious or philosophical rooting.

[I love this paragraph. My favourite line is 'to release this positive energy, people need oxygen', though I also like the idea of 'a religious or philosophical rooting' - 'rooting' is a slang Australian word for shagging].

Why not address women and men from all angles of their multiple intelligence? [Why not indeed!]...By addressing men and women who are on a growth path [eh?] we all become better and happier people. We then do not turn every incident into a trend and every anecdote into a general truth. [You've lost me Herman]. As a consequence our governing will stimulate self-knowledge, reflection, sense of responsibility and commitment.

Positively inclined people see everything in its right proportions. [etc etc for a few more sentences.]

Happy New Year!

Herman Van Rompuy

Chairman of the European Council

Woohoo! I love his cheery upbeatness in the face of chaos. And quite a plug for the book itself. The author, another Belgian called Leo Bormans, blogs excitedly: 'Will Barack Obama and Angela Merkel in the near future read in the World Book of Happiness before going to sleep?' You betcha Leo!

Now, a cynic might suggest Herman lecturing the world's leaders on the power of positive thinking while Europe desperately tries to find enough money to bail itself out is reminiscent of Aguirre, the hero of Werner Herzog's movie, dreaming of new empires while monkeys swarm over his sinking raft. But that's a cynical thought. Think positive. Think rich. Find a happy place!

Fake quotes

2011-12-18T02:02:00.000-08:00

I was copy-editing my book this week, which is about ancient philosophy. To my surprise, and mild horror, I discovered that one of my favourite quotes is mis-attributed to Aristotle. The quote is:

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

It sounds like something Aristotle would say. He, like other ancient Greeks, insisted on the importance of habit in ethics (in fact, the word 'ethics' comes from the word 'ethos', which means habit). But he never wrote that phrase. It's actually a paraphrase of Aristotle's ideas by a modern writer called Will Durant, in his 1926 book, The Story of Philosophy. Durant so successfully translated Aristotle's ideas into a modern catchphrase, that you can now find that phrase in any number of self-help, business coaching and counseling books (type it into Google books and have a look). And I was about to pass it on. Oops!

So what other famous quotes are actually misquotes? Remember this one by Martin Luther King going round the internet after the assassination of Osama bin Laden:

I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.

Moving words, shared by hundreds of thousands of people through social networking sites in the days after Osama's death. Except MLK didn't say them. As a journalist at the Atlantic magazine discovered, they were said by a 24-year-old graduate of Penn State University, Jessica Dovey, who wrote them at the beginning of a genuine MLK quote which she posted as a Facebook update. The whole quote was then shared by thousands of people and attributed to MLK:

I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. [The next lines are by MLK] Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

Or what about this enchanting little quote:

Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

This is a favourite quote for self-help and happiness books, and authors either attribute it to John Stuart Mill or Nathaniel Hawthorne. But I can't find it in either of their books. It's too neat, too much of a jingle, for either of them - but perfectly compact to be circulated ad infinitum on the internet and in self-help manuals and presentations.

Or you might know this dazzling quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The secret is the answer to all that has been, all that is, and all that will ever be.

Rhonda Byrne uses this quote in her blockbuster self-help book, The Secret, to support her claim that all the great minds of the past - Emerson, Newton, Plato etc - believed in the Law of Attraction. Except, again, the quote is made up, or mis-attributed. There's no record of Emerson saying or writing it - nor any of the other Emerson quotes in Byrne's book.

How about this feel-good quote, often attributed to Nelson Mandela:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

Fabulous huh? But once again, Mandela never said that. Read it again: is it likely a hard-boiled former guerrilla would give a speech telling us all to be fabulous children of God? It actually comes from a New Age guru called Marianne Williamson, from the Course of Miracles movement. But it sounds better if it comes from Mandela.

Gandhi is another 'wise old man' archetype who's had a lot of quotes attached to his name to help their circulation. For example, one of the most popular catchphrases for self-help gurus -

Be the change you wish to see.

- actually comes from an interview with Mahatma's grandson, Arun. There's no record of Mahatma saying it.

Perhaps the most popular quote among self-help authors is Shakespeare's 'to thine own self be true'. It is, in fact, an authentic quote, from Hamlet. But it is said by one of the more pompous characters in Shakespeare - Polonius, a foolish courtier who spends most of the play lying, dissembling, and being untrue to himself and everyone else. The quote in its original context is soaked in irony. But that doesn't matter. It's a perfect little soundbite for our impatient age to circulate.

Any other popular mis-attributions you can think of?

Russell Hoban RIP

2011-12-14T23:59:00.001-08:00

Russell Hoban died this week: he was the author of Riddley Walker, one of the great post-apocalyptic novels of the last 30 years (along with The Road, The Kraken Wakes...what else?). I read Riddley Walker quite recently, and loved its rough Anglo-Saxon language, its mysticism, its vivid sense of a new Dark Ages, of a time when most knowledge and even basic literacy has been forgotten. Imagine living for centuries surrounded by reminders of a civilisation obviously far superior to yours. That's how people lived for centuries after the Roman Empire, and perhaps it's how we'll live again.

Here's an excerpt from the Guardian's obituary:

Riddley Walker established his extremely high reputation as a deeply original novelist. It is an enormously eloquent and demanding science-fiction tale set in the UK perhaps three millennia after a nuclear war has ended civilisation. The survivors inhabit what is often referred to by science-fiction critics as a "ruined earth", a ravaged, resource-poor, constantly threatened world whose inhabitants are unlikely to be literate, or long-lived.

It is a difficult world to portray, except sentimentally, or in terms of Grand Guignol. Hoban solves this problem by having his young protagonist tell his story, in his own words. The astonishment is in the words, a deeply ingenious and poetic representation of what English might actually sound like in such a world. The first sentence of the book has become famous: "On my naming day when I come 12 I to gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long before him nor I aint looking to see none agen." By the end of this novel the attentive reader dreams in that tongue.

[...]

Hoban was a short, compact man with a clear cold eye and a sometimes forgiving smile. He drank quite a bit, but there was never an embarrassment of self-exposure that acquaintances might marvel at. He was intensely sharp and seemed, as well, to be in control of his body, despite an array of illnesses. He enjoyed picnicking on Hampstead Heath, but one felt, seeing him gaze at the view across London, that what he saw was the end of the world.

And here is an excerpt from Riddley Walker, to give you a flavour of its weirdness:

Lorna said to me, 'You know Riddley theres some thing in us it dont have no name.'
I said, 'What thing is that?'
She said, 'Its some kind of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you dont take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up suddn in the middl of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex youre on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it wernt you put that spear in your han it wer that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it don't even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.'
I said, 'If its in every 1 of us theres moren 1 of it theres got to be a manying theres got to be a millying and mor.'
Lorna said, 'Wel there is a millying and mor.'
I said, 'Wel if theres such a manying of it whys it lorn then whys it loan?'
She said, 'Becaws the manying and the millying its all 1 thing it dont have nothing to gether with. You look at lykens on a stoan its all them tiny manyings of it and may be each part of it myt think its sepert only we can see its all 1 thing. Thats how it is with what we are its all 1 girt big thing and divvyt up amongst the many. Its all 1 girt thing bigger nor the worl and lorn and loan and oansome. Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the arm hoals and it tears us a part.

How I learned to stop worrying and love self-employment

2011-12-14T02:20:00.000-08:00

The latest figures that 168,000 people became self-employed in the UK this year, which is a record. This is the story of how I unwillingly became self-employed, and learnt to love it.

Back in 2007, I persuaded my employer, a financial magazine called Euromoney, to send me to Russia to be their first full-time Moscow correspondent. I'd worked for Euromoney for three years or so, hated most of it, but had clung on because it was the first job I got after university, and I was terrified of getting fired and somehow not fitting in with the capitalist economy.

After I'd been in Russia for three months, my editor emailed me to say he was coming out to Moscow. I thought this was rather strange - he didn't say he was coming out for a story or a conference, just that he was coming out. But I put aside my paranoid concerns, and went to meet him. As soon as I saw him approaching, I knew things looked bad. He looked incredibly sheepish and downcast. We went to a local cafe, and he came out with it: "I'm really sorry Jules, but we're going to let you go."

I couldn't believe it. I was 26. I had turned down another job in London, with Reuters, to move to Moscow; I had moved most of my possessions, learned the language for six months; I had found a flat; I had bid farewell to all my friends. And now they were firing me after three months? "It's not my decision, Jules, it's the publisher [Richard Ensor, seen on the left giving one of Euromoney's endless awards to a Croatian businessman called Darko Marinac, shortly before Darko was arrested for fraud. It was an award for 'excellence in corporate governance']. Ensor is worried about the payment protocols, controlling expenses, that sort of thing." I looked at my editor in shock and growing disgust. "Believe me, I wanted to resign over this", he said. "But I've got two kids and my pension to think about." Uh-huh.

And so I became a freelancer.

For a couple of weeks, I was in shock. I really didn't want to return to England with my tail between my legs. But I had no idea if I would be able to stay afloat and make it in this new and strange land. But I discovered, very quickly, that I could. Partly, I was helped by the fact I kicked up the mother of all fusses about how Euromoney had treated me, and got several leading bankers and even the owner of the Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere (he also owns Euromoney) to write to the publisher and complain. They were mugging me, and so I drew as much attention to their assault as possible. Sure enough, they got ashamed, and paid me half a year's salary to shut up.

But I also discovered that freelance life suited me. There were hardly any other freelancers in Russia covering the business and financial sector, and before long I had a whole string of clients, from all over the world. I made far more money than I used to do with Euromoney, and worked for better-known clients: The Times, The Economist, The Spectator, Foreign Policy.

But the biggest reward was emotional. For three years, I had worked for Euromoney, and been terrified of getting fired. I felt I had to fit in with the office environment, which I hated; and that I had to gain the approval of my superiors, some of whom were OK but some of whom were less so.

Suddenly, I didn't have one guvnor, but several. This changed the power dynamic utterly. If one boss was being too difficult or demanding, I simply worked with them less. I was in control. I could choose how much I worked, and when. I could choose what time I went into the office, or if I went into the office at all. The freedom and autonomy was delicious.

I loved that first year of freelancing. I would work a bit, do some interviews, play some video games, stay out late with friends (why not? no need for an early start in the morning). I was playing Grand Theft Auto at that time, and it struck me: this is my model of employment. In Grand Theft Auto, you are a self-employed hustler from Eastern Europe, trying to make it in New York. You have a range of different employers you can work for, some of whom you meet, some of whom are just voices at the end of the telephone. You go around the city doing jobs and missions for them, cash magically appears in your bank account, and your credibility rises at the same time (unless you mess a job up).

This aptly described my new life (though I was from the West, trying to make it in Eastern Europe, and sadly with less bazookas involved). I probably worked for over 30 different titles and organisations in my time in Russia. Some paid very well for boring work. Some paid less well, but the jobs boosted my credibility because they were well-respected titles. I never met some of my regular clients - just received jobs by email, and then the money appeared in my account.

As the knowledge economy expands, more and more people will be following the Grand Theft Auto model of employment. They will also organise into hubs or syndicates to protect their interests. They will go co-op on missions when it suits them. They will find ways to make the game more social, for example by hiring out office space together.

You can criticise this model of employment: first of all, not everyone has the particular transferable nomadic skills for that sort of market. And that market isn't suitable for everything: you can't build a dam or an airplane using freelance consultants. It works particularly well for people in the media. But that isn't - nor should it be - the whole of the economy. For one thing, I don't employ anyone. And just because it turned out OK for me, we shouldn't forget how tough and demoralising unemployment can be, and should do our best to protect people from that experience. And perhaps the GTA model is rather atomised and lonely: what happened to corporations and corporation man?

But keeping those criticisms in mind, I've found that the GTA model is fun. And judging by the latest employment figures, it's catching on: this year, there are 168,000 new additions to the ranks of the self-employed, which is a record. I'm sure that many of them were, like me, unwillingly shoved into self-employment. But hopefully some of them will learn to love it.

Now, I occasionally receive offers of full-time employment from publications. And I'm sometimes tempted to accept. I worked for one magazine for a year, which was fun, but I still couldn't help feeling that a lot of the time in the office is just killing time. You know that sort of dead atmosphere in an office, when everyone is just watching the clock? You've basically sold your whole day, five days a week, to someone else. I get a lot more done in my own time. And I can go for a walk in the park, play sport, have leisurely meetings that I actually enjoy. Life is better.

You think you'll miss the office banter. That's why we like sit-coms like 30 Rock, which portray an idealised version of an office, where everyone helps each other and laughs together, and the CEO is a friendly father-figure. But, like a lot of sit-coms, 30 Rock is selling a version of community that no longer exists: or at least, I haven't found it (if you have, let me know! I'll put together a wall of fame of companies people actually enjoy working at.)

I went to work full-time at one title last year, and I couldn't believe how bad the atmosphere was. There was no banter at all, just desultory descriptions of PR events and conferences, and the occasional row over responsibilities, like caged animals biting each other. I handed in my notice after three days, realising I far preferred working for myself. I know that some offices are much more fun, but we can build our own places of work - where free people come together out of choice and passion to work together. Places like the Hub Westminster, for example.

As The Office put it: 'All you've got in common is that you walk around on the same bit of carpet for eight hours a day'. So why do it? Why not connect with people who really want to be there, who really share your passion?

Wild Man

2011-12-13T09:10:00.000-08:00

I like this Kasabian album cover: the wild, Dionysiac violence of it.

It reminds me a bit of this amazing cover from a few years back, from an Andrew WK album. I had the idea of a similar cover for my book, Philosophy for Life and other Dangerous Situations - a photo of me or someone else with their face really bruised and bloodied, like they'd just survived an earthquake. Not sure Rider Books would have gone for it!

On a slightly different note, I also like the trailer for the BBC 4 series, the Medieval Mind, which I think captures quite how trippy it must have been to be alive in that crazy era.

How to bridge the Two Cultures?

2011-12-12T10:54:00.000-08:00

Lisa Jardine, centenary professor of renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London, put forward an interesting essay on Radio 4 on Sunday, looking at CP Snow's 'Two Cultures', and the rise of technocratic government (you can read her essay here). She said:

The scientist, novelist and British civil servant CP Snow is probably best remembered for his controversial lecture The Two Cultures And The Scientific Revolution, on the gulf of incomprehension separating the arts and sciences, delivered in 1959. In it he argued that in spite of the increasing importance of science, British intellectual life continued to be dominated by the traditional humanities. Today his argument continues to resonate, though perhaps now economics has joined science as a specialist field which baffles those who have received only an arts education.

A year after his Two Cultures lecture, Snow expanded on his argument and gave it an added sense of urgency in his 1960 Science and Government lectures, delivered at Harvard. He warned that at a time when specialist scientific understanding was indispensable, those charged with taking vital political decisions had no proper grasp on the issues. "One of the most bizarre features of our time," he wrote. "Is that the cardinal choices have to be made by a handful of men who cannot have a first-hand knowledge of what those choices depend upon or what their results may be."

She continued:

[I]t is, in my view, high time that we renewed and intensified our efforts to realise Snow's as yet unrealised goal. Because as I see it, the issue today is not whether the sciences or the humanities get more funding out of the shamefully small pot currently allocated to higher education. It is rather whether the educated elites in both sectors are prepared to stand side by side to insist that informed, educated debate is needed wherever political policy has to be formed in so-called "technical", "specialist" areas of life. Which today means those number and formula driven disciplines with which the humanities-trained struggle to engage.

In current debates about GM crops, nuclear energy and climate change, the public at large - including governments and senior administrators - are liable to be swayed by the most persuasive of the advisers or interest groups, because they are not equipped with the knowledge or the reasoned strategies needed to judge. Many of them are dismayed by any argument that involves number and maths.

Currently, this tendency to be swayed by experts is most clearly to be seen in the field of economics. Recently two nations within the European Union, Greece and Italy, have replaced their elected prime ministers by so-called technocrats - men with a significant track record in finance, but not experience of government at local or national level.

In the case of Italy, the entire cabinet consists of financial specialists. The non-elected prime minister's people head "governments of national unity" which pursue policies for which nobody in the electorate voted. Indeed, they are not expected to consider the interests of the public, except insofar as introducing austerity measures sufficiently swingeing to satisfy the international markets is supposed ultimately to ensure the solvency of the nation as a whole.Are we really comfortable leaving grave political decisions to technocrats whose successes have been measured in terms of investment yields?

The rule of a few wise men is oligarchy, not democracy. So democracy depends upon our being able to sustain informed debate in the fields of science and economics. Each and every one of us has to take responsibility for the decisions that shape the future of the nation as a whole. But we will only be able to do that if those we have elected to govern us can master the technical aspects of difficult decision making - and if we in our turn are able to follow their arguments.

How could we create a better dialogue between the two cultures? I would suggest the divorce begins at A-Level and continues at university, and is the product of over-specialisation forced on young people too early. Focusing entirely on one subject throughout university leaves people unprepared for the complexity of life. It reduces the richness of their experience, denying them the opportunity to consider ideas and research from other disciplines. And it inspires the ridiculous 'culture wars', where the sciences and humanities see each other as rival countries to be attacked or raided, because there are so few people who are comfortable in both worlds.

One solution might be to move to a system closer to the American model, where students can major in one subject while still being able to study and attend lectures on other subjects. It could even become compulsory for undergraduates in sciences to take one course in humanities, and vice versa.

And we need more generalists, more people able to see the benefits, and to understand the aims and language, of both cultures. We have many excellent examples of that at Queen Mary. Another great example is Jonah Lehrer, the writer of Proust was a Neuroscientist. If you haven't read the book, I very much recommend it: he looks at 12 or so figures from modernist literature, and shows how their ideas anticipated recent advances in neuroscience. His aim, explicitly, is to build a 'third culture' that bridges the arts and sciences. (The image at the top is from Scientific American, and is designed by Matt Collins).

PoW: On toes, feet, pilgrimages, Europe, and xenophilia

2011-12-09T02:57:00.000-08:00

I feel like a polar bear who wakes up to discover the piece of ice they went to sleep on has broken free of the mainland and floated far out into the sea. Or is that disappearing iceberg the EU, and we’re the ones on solid ground? The Economist put it well: “We journalists are probably too bleary-eyed after a sleepless night to understand the full significance of what has just happened in Brussels. What is clear is that after a long, hard and rancorous negotiation, at about 5am this morning the European Union split in a fundamental way.”

Has the UK just left the EU? Has the UK put national interests willfully and foolishly before the wider collective good? As far as I can tell, this is what happened: David Cameron went to the summit with the intention of supporting it. He made clear that he couldn’t sign up to a Tobin tax, and that he thought a Tobin tax was beside the point to the immediate challenge of saving the eurozone from collapse - something he very much wants to do. I think he fully expected to be able keep the UK out of a Tobin tax while signing up to this treaty, and was prepared to stand up to those in his party who wanted a referendum on the new treaty.

However, it seems France and Germany are sick of the UK’s exceptionalism. They felt that they could go ahead without the UK, or perhaps they expected the UK to fold at this point and sign up to the Tobin tax. But Cameron didn’t fold. Neither side would budge - all on this frankly irrelevant matter of the Tobin tax. It’s irrelevant to the immediate project of saving the eurozone from a crisis of investor confidence. And so Cameron walked away, Europe went ahead, and the treaty already looks weaker to the markets. That’s a disastrous outcome - it makes the treaty less likely to save the eurozone, which is in everyone’s interest.

How did the diplomacy fail so terribly? Why couldn’t a simple opt-out of the Tobin tax clause be built into the treaty? It seems ridiculous bloody-mindedness on Sarkozy and Merkel’s part - unless Sarkozy is betting that a smaller eurozone will survive the collapse of the euro, and Paris will be its financial capital. Bagehot of the Economist quotes two French politicians, who tell him that "France wants to use the euro crisis to deepen integration around a core of countries that use the euro, under the political control of a handful of big national leaders."

That doesn't sound a great project: anti-democratic, anti-smaller countries, pro-French banks, pro-Serkozy's ego. But who knows? Right now, the future is so murky (or should I say Merkozy) it’s anyone’s guess how this will resolve itself.

********

Last night, the London Philosophy Club turned its attention to humbler matters: the big toe. Matthew Beaumont, a talented lecturer in the English department of University College London gave a witty talk on the dignity of the big toe, that most reviled and ridiculed part of the anatomy, which Matthew saw as a metaphor for the lumpenproletariat. And yet doesn’t the big toe, ugly and misshapen as it is, support the whole human enterprise? Doesn’t it allow us to spring forward? It was an impassioned ‘manifest-toe’, as he put it.

Matthew reminded me of the Marxist novelist China Mieville - they’re both crew-cut Leninists, both fascinated by the city, its domination by capitalism, and the possibilities for rebellion and resistance within the city. Matthew runs the ‘city project’ at UCL, while China Mieville wrote the excellent The City and the City about, well, the city. It turns out China is one of his good friends - they’re in the Socialist Worker’s Party together, and Matthew was even China’s treasurer when he ran for MP. Here's a pic of him at last night's event.

********

Listening to Matthew’s encomium of the big toe as an exaltation of the humble, the base, the material versus the exalted and idealistic, I was reminded of Christianity, that prototype of Marxism. Didn’t Christ also radically reverse power categories: a reversal symbolised in the act of washing his disciples feet?

I was also reminded of the pilgrimage, that act of devotion where a person puts their feet through all kinds of hardship, in order to get closer to the ground, closer to reality, closer to God. I walked the Camino de Santiago last year, it was one of the best experiences of my life. I’m not a Christian, but I loved the pilgrimage’s combination of walking, contemplation and fraternity. I wrote about the experience in the last chapter of my book, in the chapter about Aristotle (a philosopher known as the ‘peripatetic’, because he wandered around a lot). I wrote: ‘To go on a pilgrimage is to make yourself vulnerable, to put yourself at the mercy of others. You learn to accept the gift of others’ help, and to accept your own dependency.” [Below is a pic of one pilgrim getting a foot tended to by a fellow pilgrim!]

A pilgrim is at the mercy of strangers’ friendship and hospitality (a word that comes from the ‘hospitallers’ who helped the pilgrims along the route). The pilgrimage asserts a shared humanity with people from other cultures and countries: going on pilgrimage across Europe used to be an assertion of Christians’ common, supranational identity. It’s an assertion of the opposite of xenophobia: xenophilia, or love for the stranger, which comes from the ancient Greek cult of Zeus Xenos, or Zeus the Stranger. Zeus was thought to appear sometimes as an itinerant, so Greeks thought it always wise to offer hospitality to itinerants, just in case they were a god in disguise.

******

I’ve had the pilgrimage in mind the last few days, as I’ve been reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his youthful walk across Europe, A Time of Gifts. He set off when he was 18, with just a back-pack and a copy of Horace, to walk across Europe in 1933. Despite encountering the occasional Nazi brownshirt, his overwhelming impression was of Europeans’ hospitality and generosity, taking the young English stranger into their homes, feeding him, giving him a lot of wine and schnapps, and showering him with gifts (his backpack was stolen at one point, and a Bavarian count made up for his loss of Horace with the gift of a priceless 17th century edition).

Fermor seems to be, unconsciously perhaps, recreating the pilgrimage for secular times, and searching for a common European identity beyond tribal differences. He tells the story of when he was involved in the kidnapping of a German general during the War. They took him on escape trek across the Alps. One dawn, the captured general looked out on the mountains, and quietly quoted Horace to himself, in Latin (I’ve used Dryden’s translation):

Behold yon Mountains hoary height,
Made higher with new Mounts of snow:

Fermor, who seemed to know a huge amount of poetry off by heart, hears him, and quotes the rest. The General looks at him and nods sadly, and a bond is formed between them, amid all that wintery war and disunity:

Behold yon Mountains hoary height,
Made higher with new Mounts of snow:
Again behold the Winter's weight
Oppress the lab'ring Woods below;
And Streams, with Icy fetters bound,
Benum'd and crampt to solid Ground.

With well-heap'd logs dissolve the cold
And feed the genial hearth with fires;
Produce the Wine, that makes us bold,
And sprightly Wit and Love inspires:
For what hereafter shall betide,
God, if 'tis worth his care, provide.

Let him alone, with what he made,
To toss and turn the World below;
At his command the storms invade,
The winds by his Commission blow,
Till with a nod he bids 'em cease,
And then the Calm returns, and all is peace.

To morrow and her works defie,
Lay hold upon the present hour,
And snatch the pleasures passing by,
To put them out of Fortune's pow'r;
Nor love nor love's delights disdain;
Whate're thou get'st today is gain.

Secure those golden early joys
That Youth unsowr'd with sorrow bears,
E're with'ring time the taste destroys
With sickness and unwieldy years!
For active sports, for pleasing rest,
This is the time to be possessed;
The best is but in season best.

The pointed hour of promis'd Bliss,
The pleasing whisper in the dark,
The half unwilling willing kiss,
The laugh that guides thee to the mark,
When the kind Nymph wou'd coyness feign,
And hides but to be found again;
These, these are the joys the Gods for Youth ordain.

****

Talking of the gift economy, here is behavioural economist Dan Ariely talking at this year’s Burning Man festival, dressed in a natty cape.

And here is a new article by Stanford University’s psychophysiology of emotion centre, also on the emotional effects of the Burning Man festival.

Here is something I wrote recently on the idea of ‘dancing mania’, its history, and how it survives in the arts.

Here is proof that walking beats flying: a terrifying account of the Air France crash, why it happened, and the mixture of technical fault and simple human error that caused it. Edge of your seat reading.

Here is a study of why cheerfulness is negatively correlated to academic achievement, by Ed Diener and others.

Finally, one of the interesting things I discovered in Fermor’s book was that Alan Watts, the great western authority on Zen, wrote his first book on Zen while still a teenager at Kings College Canterbury (he was a schoolmate of Fermor’s). Here is a funny animation of some of his Zen talks, done by the creators of South Park.

See you next week.

Jules

Uncontrollable dancing

2011-12-06T06:23:00.000-08:00

I’m fascinated by the idea of uncontrollable dancing. It seems a world away now, but it was once a familiar cultural phenomenon. In ancient Greek culture, for example, we read of the wild followers of Dionysus, also known as ho lysios or ‘he who grants release’. His followers were, apparently, released from all the prohibitions of civilisation, and would whirl and dance around until they achieved a state of mind called enthousiasmos, or ‘having the God within oneself’.

In the Middle Ages, there were frequent outbreaks of dancing mania, also known as St Vitus’ Dance or dancing plague, because the mania was sometimes thought to be a curse sent by St Vitus, patron saint of dancing. Those afflicted would end up dancing in front of his shrine, praying to be released from their ordeal. In 1278, 200 people were seized by the mania in Germany, and danced on a bridge over the river Meuse, causing it to collapse. There was a particularly bad outbreak in 1518, when a lady, Frau Troffea, started to dance in a street in Strasbourg. Within a week, 34 people joined her, and within a month, there were around 400 dancers, some of whom eventually died from exhaustion.

Psychologists now think these outbreaks are an extreme example of ‘social contagion’, or perhaps a reaction to adverse circumstances like economic depression: think of the acid house parties that spread across the country in the recession of the early 1990s. I remember seeing people at nightclubs in the 1990s who literally could not stop dancing, though of course they were on a lot of drugs.

We still see remnants of this idea of uncontrolled ecstatic dancing in our own more straight-laced times. Musicians used to say someone 'got the funk’ - a word which historians think comes from the African word lu-fuki, meaning sweat, as if 'the funk' is some sort of sweat-lodge shamanic training. People also speak of ‘getting loose’, ‘getting down’, ‘working it out’, ‘getting into the groove’: all of this suggests, to me, that when we dance, we somehow re-connect with what contemporary psychologists call our automatic-emotive thinking system, which seems to respond particularly to patterns, beats or loops. Perhaps dancing allows us to re-connect to this system and somehow ‘work out’ emotions or drives that our rational civilisation forces us to inhibit.

Even if we don’t see many examples of uncontrolled or involuntary dancing on the streets, alas, we still see references to it in the arts. Here, for example, is an example of a Dionysiac-esque outbreak from the BBC comedy, The Mighty Boosh.

There's the enthousiasmos of the Blues Brothers in a church run, appropriately enough, by the godfather of funk, James Brown.

The famous T-Mobile advert is, from one point of view, a recreation of a medieval outbreak of dancing mania:

My favourite example is Baloo losing control of himself in the Jungle Book. Other examples?

The Secret can save your life!

2011-12-02T22:46:00.000-08:00

I love the main review of Rhonda Byrne's The Secret on Amazon. I can't tell if it's for real - it's satire, right? Judge for yourself.

Please allow me to share with you how "The Secret" changed my life and in a very real and substantive way allowed me to overcome a severe crisis in my personal life. It is well known that the premise of "The Secret" is the science of attracting the things in life that you desire and need and in removing from your life those things that you don't want. Before finding this book, I knew nothing of these principles, the process of positive visualization, and had actually engaged in reckless behaviors to the point of endangering my own life and wellbeing.

At age 36, I found myself in a medium security prison serving 3-5 years for destruction of government property and public intoxication. This was stiff punishment for drunkenly defecating in a mailbox but as the judge pointed out, this was my third conviction for the exact same crime. I obviously had an alcohol problem and a deep and intense disrespect for the postal system, but even more importantly I was ignoring the very fabric of our metaphysical reality and inviting destructive influences into my life.

My fourth day in prison was the first day that I was allowed in general population and while in the recreation yard I was approached by a prisoner named Marcus who calmly informed me that as a new prisoner I had been purchased by him for three packs of Winston cigarettes and 8 ounces of Pruno (prison wine). Marcus elaborated further that I could expect to be raped by him on a daily basis and that I had pretty eyes.

Needless to say, I was deeply shocked that my life had sunk to this level. Although I've never been homophobic I was discovering that I was very rape phobic and dismayed by my overall personal street value of roughly $15. I returned to my cell and sat very quietly, searching myself for answers on how I could improve my life and distance myself from harmful outside influences. At that point, in what I consider to be a miraculous moment, my cell mate Jim Norton informed me that he knew about the Marcus situation and that he had something that could solve my problems. He handed me a copy of "The Secret". Normally I wouldn't have turned to a self help book to resolve such a severe and immediate threat but I literally didn't have any other available alternatives. I immediately opened the book and began to read.

The first few chapters deal with the essence of something called the "Law of Attraction" in which a primal universal force is available to us and can be harnessed for the betterment of our lives. The theoretical nature of the first few chapters wasn't exactly putting me at peace. In fact, I had never meditated and had great difficulty with closing out the chaotic noises of the prison and visualizing the positive changes that I so dearly needed.

It was when I reached Chapter 6 "The Secret to Relationships" that I realized how this book could help me distance myself from Marcus and his negative intentions. Starting with chapter six there was a cavity carved into the book and in that cavity was a prison shiv. This particular shiv was a toothbrush with a handle that had been repeatedly melted and ground into a razor sharp point.

The next day in the exercise yard I carried "The Secret" with me and when Marcus approached me I opened the book and stabbed him in the neck. The next eight weeks in solitary confinement provided ample time to practice positive visualization and the 16 hours per day of absolute darkness made visualization about the only thing that I actually could do. I'm not sure that everybody's life will be changed in such a dramatic way by this book but I'm very thankful to have found it and will continue to recommend it heartily.