Watch out folks. There is a murky world lurking behind the scenes, a sinister cabal of policy-makers, psychologists, CEOs, advertizers and life-coaches, watching you, measuring you, nudging you, monitoring your every smile, all to try and make you happy. We must resist. This, broadly, is the message of sociologist William Davies’ book, The Happiness Industry: How Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being.
I opened Davies’ book expecting a historical critique of the so-called ‘politics of well-being’, a movement which arose in the last decade. Cognitive psychologists like Aaron Beck, Martin Seligman and Daniel Kahneman found ways to measure how our thoughts can make us miserable, and how cognitive behavioural interventions can help us to be wiser and happier. The evidence-base they built up persuaded policy-makers – particularly in the UK, but increasingly around the world – that governments can and should try to measure and improve citizens’ well-being.
The science of flourishing became a way for policy-makers to move beyond the cultural relativism bequeathed us by Nietzsche, through a marriage of ancient wisdom (Buddhist, ancient Greek) and empirical science. Governments could then try and improve citizens’ ‘flourishing’ without being accused of imposing their version of the good life on every else. ‘It’s not our version’, they could say. ‘It’s science.’
The politics of well-being is still quite an undeveloped movement, but in England it’s led to specific policies, particularly to the collection of well-being data to guide policies; an on-going attempt to teach ‘well-being’ and ‘character’ in schools; and the expansion of free talking therapies on the NHS.
Davies has written well on this movement for the New Left Review. But what we get in this book is a much more sprawling narrative, which looks at the history of the attempt, in economics, psychology, statistics and neuroscience, to measure moods and emotions, and to use that data either to ‘nudge’ us towards policy-outcomes, or sell us things, or keep us working. The story meanders from Bentham to JB Watson via whiplash, social networks theory, the DSM, the history of management consultancy, the Chicago school, the history of stress and the Quantified Self movement. It risks becoming a history of everything, and could more coherently have concentrated on the last decade (although oddly he doesn’t mention Kahneman, or happiness economist Ed Diener, or the various attempts to teach well-being in schools, or Martin Seligman’s attempt to teach ‘resilience’ to the entire US Army).
The ‘enemy’ of his book seems to be an overly-mechanistic or behaviourist model of the mind, in which scientific experts measure our mood-machine and try to steer it without asking people what they mean or care about. Certainly, the politics of well-being can be anti-democratic and positivistic. When our government came up with a national definition of well-being, for example, it did so via a small panel of experts, entirely made up of economists and psychologists.
However, Davies’ story risks confusing the behaviourist with the cognitive behavioural. Much of the politics of well-being sprung from the success of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which arose in the 1960s as a critical response to behaviourism. In CBT, people’s beliefs, meanings and values are all-important, so it’s more humanistic and potentially more democratic. It’s true that CBT can over-emphasize people’s agency, and turn into individual pathology what may be normal responses to adversity and poverty. But people are developing more collective forms which equip us to change our circumstances (like being in debt to loan sharks) as well as our inner lives.
Probably the biggest impact of the politics of well-being so far has been to increase public funding for talking therapies, and to put mental health on the political map – there is a new campaign in the UK for ‘parity of esteem’ between physical and mental health in the NHS. But Davies ignores this. Instead, he focuses on the possibility of therapy or life-coaching being forced onto benefit-claimants in England and Wales. The Department for Work and Pensions denies therapy is ever mandatory, although it may be on occasion, and this should be vigorously opposed as an ethical breach and a waste of tax-payer money. But we also need to vigorously defend and expand free therapy for those who need it and want it. Davies doesn’t lift a finger in support.
Instead, he lays into corporate wellness programmes and the booming wellness industry, and slams the proliferation of ‘chief happiness officers’ and ‘happiness apps’ monitoring our every smile. Are they? Does your company have a chief happiness officer? Have you ever used a ‘happiness measuring app’? It’s true that a handful of companies are taking well-being seriously (a few, like Zappos, take it too seriously). On the whole I think this is a good thing, and could mean companies take employee satisfaction and corporate ethics more seriously as well. But at the moment, most companies’ well-being programmes amount to little more than a salad option at lunch, cheap gym membership, and one away-day a year for some wacky team-building and half-baked resilience-training. Hardly Brave New World.
The over-riding tone of Davies’ book is the hermeneutics of suspicion – he is constantly expressing ‘unease’, ‘disquiet’ and the need for ‘critical resistance’ to the ‘hidden agenda’ of the elite. This is left-wing academics’ favourite posture, but it’s not really radical in that it undermines people’s agency: the ‘well-being agenda’ in this narrative is always something the elite imposes on us, never something we develop for ourselves (as is actually the case with the Quantified Self movement). And his ‘perpetual unease’ doesn’t change anything. What are you actually for?
It turns out Davies is for co-operatives, for co-owned companies in which decision-making is shared. Such companies make us happier, according to research. He’s also for local community mental health initiatives like therapeutic gardening, which research suggests make us happier. And he’s for more equal and less competitive societies, which some research suggests make us happier. So on the occasions he’s arguing for something positive, Davies also turns to well-being data for support.
At the extreme of his argument, he says governments should ignore people’s moods and feelings altogether, and focus on the serious business of improving material circumstances. That’s exactly the argument successive governments have used to deprive mental health services of funding. Hopefully, this is finally changing, but Davies’ book does little to help the cause.
Jules Evans writes about the philosophy and psychology of well-being, and has taught it in organizations including Saracens, Arsenal FC and HMP Low Moss.