Happy Birthday to Us! Top 10 Posts

Posted on May 14, 2012 by

The History of Emotions Blog was launched in May 2011, with this welcome message from Tiffany Watt-Smith and myself. Since then Tiffany has moved on to become a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, and we have been joined by Jules Evans as our Policy Director and Blog editor.

As a birthday present to ourselves, we’ve compiled this list, a top 10 of the most read posts on the History of Emotions Blog in the last twelve months. The blog currently gets between 4,000 and 5,000 page-hits per month .

It seems that historically informed reviews of books, films, and shows, as well as general information about developments in the field, have proved particularly popular. Thank-you to everyone who wrote (and read!) these posts. Here’s the countdown:

10. Jules Evans’s review of Wayne McGregor’s show at Sadlers Wells: Roy Porter: the Musical!

9. Grave Emotions by visiting PhD student Jenny Nyberg

8. Several entries from shame week, including The Shame of the Philosophers and Shameless

7. An interview with Susan J. Matt – Dying of Nostalgia

6. History of emotions new-year round-up 2012

5. Stephanie Downes’s Review of Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears

4. History of emotions conferences 2012

3. Sally Holloway on the material culture of romance: Love Darts and Broken Hearts

2. Katherine Angel’s Review of Steve McQueen’s film Shame

1. Åsa Jannson’s Review of the Lars von Trier film Melancholia

Introducing the Centre for the History of the Emotions

Posted on May 9, 2012 by

Colin Jones is Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London, and a member of the steering group of the Centre for the History of the Emotions. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and is currently President of the Royal Historical Society. This article originally introduced a series of articles by members of the centre in the latest issue of Wellcome History magazine.

The Centre for the History of the Emotions, drawing its members from a range of schools and departments at Queen Mary, University of London, was established in 2008. Its founders were all recent appointees at QMUL: Dr Thomas Dixon (who continues to serve as the Centre’s Director), Dr Rhodri Hayward and I from the School of History and Dr Elena Carrera from the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film. Dr Fay Bound Alberti, as Wellcome Trust- funded Senior Research Fellow, also contributed significantly, before recently leaving for a position at the Wellcome Trust. The Centre’s activities came to focus on the histories of passions and emotions in the contexts of science, medicine, psychiatry, education, drama and performance. Its projects and events in London now attract national and international attention. And its interdisciplinary History of Emotions email list has almost a thousand subscribers (primarily research scholars) worldwide.

The particularly strong history of medicine element within the Centre was apparent from the start and in 2009 the Centre won a Wellcome Trust Enhancement Award for a programme entitled ‘Medicine, Emotion and Disease’. The medical history component within the School of History continued to develop, boosted in 2010 by the relocation of Professor Tilli Tansey from the old UCL Wellcome Trust Centre. She has established the Modern Biomedicine Research Group, and will draw on a Trust Strategic Award to support a new phase of development of the celebrated Wellcome Witness Seminars. The programme extends the strong interdisciplinary links which the historians of medicine enjoy across the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences towards the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry (Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry).

These developments have within a few years made the QMUL group into one of the most substantial, lively and dynamic communities of historians of medicine in the UK, with a burgeoning and diverse series of lectures, seminars, conferences and events. During 2011, for example, a committee of PhD students at the Centre, chaired by Tiffany Watt-Smith (now British Academy postdoctoral fellow within the Centre), organised two highly successful events funded by the Wellcome Trust: an international conference on ‘Mastering the Emotions’ with Sally Shuttleworth and Allan Young as keynote speakers, and a postgraduate summit for history of medicine students from across the UK. Other recent initiatives include a series of workshops co-organised with the Warwick Centre for the History of Medicine on the recent history of mental health, illustrated discussions with the US performance artist Ron Athey, symposia on emotions and health and emotional transmission, outreach events with the London Philosophy Club, and a project with local schools in the East End on the embodiment of emotions.

These activities take place within the context of QMUL’s enhanced international standing. It was ranked 11th in the Guardian’s RAE2008 rankings, and Times Higher Education considered that its leap of over 30 places in the RAE rankings made it “the biggest star among the research-intensive institutions”. QMUL has invested heavily in the humanities and social sciences, and in 2011 the School of History moved into a dedicated £12 million new building.

To the five core staff (Dixon, Hayward, Tansey, Carrera and me), can currently be added three funded postdoctoral fellows and nine funded postgraduates. In addition, there are many other associated staff across the Faculty with history of medicine interests, including Professors Miri Rubin and Amanda Vickery and Dr Sue Edgington in History, Ali Campbell and Suzy Willson in Drama, Professors Lisa Jardine and Evelyn Welch in English, and Professor Alison Blunt and Dr Bronwyn Parry in Geography. Many of these individuals have secured Wellcome Trust funding in the past, though the Centre has also been successful with the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust and the Carnegie Trust. The grant value of awards to core staff in the area is now approaching £4 million.

The international outreach of the Centre is secured partly by its email list and partly by a recently established blog, which seeks to connect QMUL research to public policy, popular culture and current affairs. A visiting doctoral scheme develops links with related research centres in Britain and overseas, with notably close links to the Centre for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Along with Professor Ute Frevert of the latter institution, Thomas Dixon has established a monograph series on the History of the Emotions, to be published by Oxford University Press. The Centre has recently appointed Jules Evans as Policy Director, who is already contributing actively to supporting and extending the Centre’s programmes. A high point this year will be in September, when the Centre will host the biennial international conference of the Society for the Social History of Medicine, on the theme ‘Emotions, Health and Wellbeing’.

A Fungal Education

Posted on May 8, 2012 by

Over at the excellent Mind Hacks blog, is what appears to be the first recorded account of a psychedelic mushroom experience in Britain, from 1799. A forty year-old father of four, JS, collected wild mushrooms in London’s Green Park and cooked them as a stew for breakfast for himself and his four young children. The apothecary Everard Brande described what happened then:

“Edward, one of the children (eight years old), who had eaten a large proportion of the mushrooms, as they thought them, was attacked with fits of immoderate laughter, nor could the threats of his father or mother refrain him. To this succeeded vertigo, and a great deal of stupor, from which he was roused by being called or shaken, but immediately relapsed. […] he sometimes pressed his hands on different parts of his abdomen, as if in pain, but when roused and interrogated as to it, he answered indifferently, yes, or no, as he did to every other question, evidently without any relation to what was asked. About the same time the father, aged forty, was attacked with vertigo, and complained that everything appeared black, then wholly disappeared”

Mind Hacks comments that it’s strange this first recorded instance of a mushroom trip should be so late, considering other cultures made psychedelic plants the centre-piece of their religions many centuries or even millennia earlier. Why did the British forget their magic fungi?

Philosophical Communities

Posted on May 1, 2012 by

Thomas Dixon and I are working on an AHRC-funded project called Philosophical Communities, which examines the history and contemporary rise of philosophy groups, clubs and associations. The Independent mentions the project in this piece today on the rise of philosophy clubs, which also mentions the London Philosophy Club, who are loosely affiliated with the Centre.

My book Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations (published this week, by the way, might as well get that in there!) looks at the rise of these philosophical groups, and how people are using ancient philosophies to create modern communities. In the book, for example, I visit the Skeptics annual gathering in Las Vegas – the modern Skeptics aren’t exactly like the ancient Skeptics, they’re more dogmatic than that and more scientific. But they’re a fascinating movement. Here is a short video I made of my time among the Skeptics:

And, while we’re at it, here’s a video of my experience among the Stoics. Not quite so many of them as the Skeptics. Though they do have a good Facebook page.

Jerome Kagan: finding a balance between the sciences and humanities

Posted on April 29, 2012 by

I’m a great fan of Professor Jerome Kagan, the eminent Harvard psychologist, who has done important work on the role of the amygdala in emotional disorders like social anxiety. I admire his humane appreciation for both the sciences and the humanities, and his awareness of psychology and psychiatry’s dangerous tendency to ignore the role of culture, values, language and context in human emotional experience.

Kagan is clearly deeply concerned about the direction of western intellectual life, and in particular about “the dramatic ascent of the natural sciences in the years following World War 2, which intimidated the other two scholarly communities” – ie the social sciences and the humanities. He feels we in the West have become out of balance, overly fixated on a biologically materialist view of the human condition, with serious consequences for our societies.

He expresses his concerns about our culture’s tendency to simplistic scientific materialism in his new book, Psychology’s Ghosts, which he discussed last month on Radio Boston. He said that psychology and psychiatry focus too much on the symptoms of emotional problems, while ignoring the causes – and, in particular, ignoring the cause of poverty:

If you think about all the physical diseases, they are diagnosed not by the symptoms you tell your doctor, but by the cause. Malaria means not that you have a fever but that you have the malarial parasite. Psychiatry is the only sub-discipline in medicine where the diagnoses are only based on the symptoms. You tell your doctor you can’t sleep and you have no energy and he says that you’re depressed. You’re treated for depression on the basis of your symptoms when your depression could come on for a half a dozen different reasons and the reasons are important in how you treat the patient.

There is inadequate research being done on the life history causes. In medicine, if you have a disease, immediately several hundred or a thousand investigators start at once — take AIDS — to find out what was the cause. There is very little research going on on the role of class, on the role of life history, on the role of who you identified with, your religious identification, your ethnic identification. In other words, there’s a whole complex set of causes; they are not being studied.

The problem is that biology made extraordinary advances, both in genetics and in ways to measure the brain. Because that technology is available, people rushed over to that side and hoped that that would solve the problem, abandoning the other half. To put it briefly, biology says you’re likely to be vulnerable to this envelope of illnesses. Your environment, your setting, your class, your culture, where you live disposes and selects from that envelope the symptoms you might develop.

As I read the literature, and I have many people on my side — the best predictor today in Europe or North America of who will be depressed is not a gene and it’s not a measure of your brain; it’s whether you’re poor. And that makes sense.

If, in a country like ours with an enormous range of income, you’re poor and you’ve been poor since you were a child, which means that your medical care is less adequate, your diet’s less adequate, you’re probably fighting some low level infections and you’re poor — that’s a pretty good reason to be depressed.

That then is taken out because we’re looking for the genes. Now, in fact, there probably is 10 percent of depressed who do have a specific genetic vulnerability and then we’re missing the 80 percent who don’t have a specific genetic vulnerability — they have a very good reason for being depressed […]

We’re hoping that we will discover the biological causes and treat the biological causes and we won’t have to worry about the societal causes and the individual lifestyle circumstances that people deal with. That’s the hope. My own view — and I’m not alone — is that is denying the problem.

Continue reading →

The politics of happiness

Posted on April 27, 2012 by

On 30 November 2011, Britain witnessed its largest strike in nearly three decades as an estimated two million public- sector workers protested against the degradation of their pensions. One day later, the Office for National Statistics released the results of the first official British ‘happiness survey’, which showed that 76 per cent of the British population rated their life satisfaction with a score of seven out of ten or above.

The disparity between these events was widely remarked upon. While some argued that the index revealed the fundamental contentment of the population, others questioned the methodological basis of the findings. Few, however, commented on the more fundamental tension revealed over these two days. The strike and the happiness index brought into sharp relief the disparity between two forms of politics that now coexist in Britain. The strike was played out across a traditional terrain on which the principles of action are established through reference to rights, expectations and duties.

The happiness index, by contrast, describes a very different world in which the principles of action are established through reference to the inner feelings or psychological well-being of the population.

I am examining the rise of this new form of politics through a study of the history of psychiatric epidemiology in Britain. Psychiatric epidemiology is a rather modest and often fiercely self-critical discipline. In the UK, under the guidance of Aubrey Lewis, Michael Shepherd, David Goldberg and others, it has avoided political grandstanding and has largely concerned itself with the refinement of diagnostic systems and planning service provision.

Yet at the same time the language of epidemiology, and that of psychiatric epidemiology in particular, has been seized upon by proponents of the ‘happiness agenda’. In the writings of the economist Richard Layard and Tony Blair’s former Downing Street Policy Director Geoff Mulgan, the emotions are held up as the new benchmarks of political life. David Cameron has enthusiastically embraced this new rhetoric, declaring that the pursuit of ‘gross domestic product’ should be supplemented by a search for ‘gross national happiness’. The fact that our inner feelings may now be captured and represented through epidemiological techniques is seen as making possible a new kind of political dispensation.

Some of course will argue that the happiness agenda is mere window- dressing and that reference to the population’s happiness has formed a staple of philosophies of government from Plato’s Republic through to Mill’s Utilitarianism. But the combination of these ‘psychological goods’ with epidemiological techniques marks a new departure. It is part of a shift towards ‘evidence-based politics’, a phenomenon that first began to take shape just before World War II.

New theories of psychosomatic illness were then used to interrogate the sickness returns made available through the administration of national insurance schemes. Changing patterns of morbidity could be read as an index of the psychological health of the population. In the writings of insurance investigator James Halliday and the psychiatrist-turned-politician Stephen Taylor, factors as diverse as the decline of breastfeeding and suburbanisation were blamed for a national rise in the rates of asthma, ulcer, hyperthyroidism and related anxiety disorders.

By the end of the 1930s, such epidemiological insights had begun to play a central role in political and industrial disputes. The Coronation Bus Strike of 1937 (pictured right), in which 27,000 London transport workers protested against their intensified working conditions, was only resolved through reference to Austin Bradford Hill’s study on the relative rates of gastric disorders in busmen and tramwaymen.

Knowledge of the population’s emotions became central to national planning during the War. Stephen Taylor was appointed Director of Home Intelligence in the Ministry of Information and, with colleagues, devised a number of measures for assessing levels of anxiety on the home front. These measures of popular anxiety underpinned the rhetoric of the welfare state. As Aneurin Bevan argued, the provision of social security was a crucial element in the nation’s pursuit of “serenity”. Psychiatric epidemiology and the language of stress and insecurity worked to sustain the postwar political settlement.

It is striking that these concepts of anxiety and serenity are largely absent from the new psychological politics promoted by the happiness agenda. We are no longer concerned with rising rates of insecurity but national levels of depression. The reasons for this substitution are complex and deserve further investigation. It seems to be bound up in part with the rise of new forms of psychopharmaceutical intervention.

But the change is significant. In the writings of some of the most interesting contemporary epidemiologists, including Michael Marmot and Richard Wilkinson, depression has been presented as a pathology determined by problems of autonomy and social rank. Such theories embody a new vision of social justice – an egalitarian vision that, although it has yet to be realised, informs current health programmes and early-years schemes. It is a vision made possible not through philosophical authority but through a diverse range of elements from cortisol assays to evolutionary psychiatry. Disentangling the political uses of affect and the complex interrelationship between biological, psychological and classical forms of politics now operating in modern Britain is an urgent task as much for political historians as for historians of emotion.

This article originally appeared in Wellcome History magazine.

Jerome Bruner and the cultural construction of emotions

Posted on April 22, 2012 by

Professor Jerome Bruner

I just finished a fascinating small book by Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner (that’s him on the right), called Acts of Meaning. Although it was published in 1990, I don’t think it’s widely known among lay-people, and I think its ideas are worth briefly discussing – because they offer an interesting critique of cognitive science, including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and a call for it to become more culturally aware.

Let me say at the outset that CBT helped me enormously and that what follows is not a rejection of CBT but an exploration of how it could be expanded to include more from the arts and humanities.

Bruner was one of the pioneers of the cognitive revolution, which transformed psychology from the 1950s on. The cognitive revolution was a rebellion against behaviourism, which insisted that all human behaviour could be described by a very simple process: Stimulus – Response. There was no need, behaviourists said, to inquire into human thoughts or beliefs or values. We simply respond to external stimuli, and change our automatic responses accordingly, like automatons, or rats in a laboratory.

The psychologists of the cognitive revolution rebelled against this view of human psychology, and countered that humans’ internal thoughts and values play a powerful role in defining how we experience reality, how we feel about it, and how we respond to it. Between the Stimulus and Response lies a person’s beliefs and values – and we can change our beliefs and become the ‘authors of ourselves’.

This, of course, is a very different view of humanity. We go from being helpless automatons passively reacting to stimuli, to autonomous beings, actively creating meaning from our experience, able to choose how we respond to life’s challenges.

Part of the cognitive revolution is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which was invented by Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck in the 1950s. Both Ellis and Beck were inspired by their reading of ancient Greek philosophy, particularly of the Stoics, who declared that humans create their experience of the world through their beliefs. As the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Life itself is but what you deem it.”

The Stoics were the vanguard of the cognitive revolution, 2000 years before it happened. Humans, they insisted, were “disturbed not by events, but by their opinions about them”, as Epictetus wrote. Therefore, to heal yourself of emotional disorders, you should simply become aware of your beliefs, see how they cause your emotions, and then change your beliefs if you decide they are false and irrational.  Eventually, the Stoics believe, we will be able to perfectly match our beliefs to external reality (or God), and nothing that ever happens will ever upset us.

The therapeutic process is, the Stoics believe, entirely individual. We can’t expect society to change its foolish ways. Rather, the lone Stoic heroically separates themselves from their toxic culture, and makes of themselves a perfect little fortress of calm rationality amid the irrationality of their society.  CBT might not believe in God, but apart from that, this is pretty much a description of CBT’s therapeutic approach. We must rationally examine our beliefs, and reject any that are false, until we become perfectly adapted to reality and nothing truly upsets us anymore. As in Stoicism, this recovery process is entirely individual.

Clearly the Stoics got something right – our emotions do follow our beliefs, and if we change our beliefs we change our emotions. Realising this helped me personally to overcome depression. But perhaps both CBT and Stoicism are too individualist, and ignore the importance of culture both in emotional disturbances and in the recovery process. Other Greco-Roman philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, agreed with the Stoics that our emotions are caused by our beliefs. But they had a much keener sense of how our beliefs are shaped by our culture and political system. So the process of recovery is not just individual – it is also cultural and political. Continue reading →

Images, emotions, and medical history

Posted on April 17, 2012 by

As a historian, the four words in front of me made my heart skip a beat – and not in an ‘our eyes met across a crowded room’ sort of way. Pencilled in the archival catalogue was a note about one of the items in the collections of a Victorian psychiatric hospital: ‘This item contains very disturbing images and is not to be produced’. The item that I had looked at on my last visit was now an object under some scrutiny, and I possibly suspected of possessing a distasteful prurient curiosity.

The document in question was a scrapbook of photographs kept by the hospital’s pathological laboratory at the end of the nineteenth century, remarkably similar to that kept at Colney Hatch Asylum (recently discussed by Barbara Brookes in Exhibiting Madness in Museums). The homogeneity of the albums testifies to their importance within the history of psychiatry, with two asylums simultaneously cataloguing pictures of brains at autopsy and cases of physical deformity during life. On one page, the asylum mortuary is draped with black cloth against which a deceased patient is photographed, limbs contorted, their mouth a silent ‘O’. On another, a female patient lies in bed as the hands of a doctor or nurse out of shot hold her frail arm upright. There are pictures of patients in the wards and asylum gardens: a shot of two women seated in the garden in neat dresses and aprons, one smiling meekly at the other. A nude male patient with a skin condition is photographed against an elaborate backdrop of a woodland scene. ‘Dr Boddington’ poses for the camera during a post mortem, the patient’s skull resting on their knees.

A page from the album: brain section, photomicrograph, patients outdoors, a patient's skin condition.

For me, the scrapbook’s usefulness was in highlighting what the asylum’s doctors considered especially worthy of note. Of the 118 photographs in the book, 43 showed a concern for muscular or limbic deformities and the microscopic examination of nerves and muscles (in photomicrographs). As a consequence, my research into masculinity in the asylum took a corporeal turn which proved immensely rich and would not have occurred had I not had the opportunity of examining the scrapbook.

However, I can equally understand that it is a document that could prove as upsetting to some observers as it did fascinating to me. The lack of any explanation of the content gives the book a sense of voyeuristic, morbid curiosity – a fetishistic collecting of patients and their bodies. Jennifer Green-Lewis, author of Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism, emphasises how photographs acted as evidence documenting the natural world. Photographs of people however, especially those in an institutional context, tend to arouse our suspicions. The nineteenth-century images that we are attached to, says Green-Lewis, are those which indulge our romantic idea of ‘how it used to be’: the photographs collected in the scrapbook speak of times and experiences that modern sensibility would much rather forget. As a result, the initial reaction to the pathological laboratory’s album is that it is wrong, sinister, or questionable.

Pages from Colney Hatch Asylum's photo album.

That a photograph possesses the ability to arouse our emotions does not, however, render it irrelevant to the historical record. The presentation of the scrapbook, with its neatly written captions, suggests the importance attached to these particular patients and their conditions, even if we can discern no emotional investment in their staging. Like the subjects of American memorial portraits, they and their bodies were commodified by asylum doctors, not as loved ones wreathed in flowers but as objects of scientific investigation. As disagreeable as it may be to envisage these patients as ‘objects’, the spirit of late nineteenth-century asylum research was intensely driven by the prospect of harnessing the mysteries of the mind and, as in many other areas of science, photography proved an exciting new tool. Many of the patients depicted in the scrapbook were the subject of contemporary journal articles – interesting cases that were seen as having something to contribute to clinical and pathological knowledge of mental illness. One of the most powerful images in the album is a post-mortem photograph of 16 year old George P., who was the subject of an 1890 Journal of Mental Science article, ‘The Morbid Histology of a Case of Syphilitic Epileptic Idiocy’. Reading the article gives his photograph further emotional force as the author describes George’s condition: he smiled and nodded his head when taken notice of (though screamed passionately when physically examined) and was pleased by coloured pictures or playthings such as a bunch of keys. It is notable that despite referring to the photograph in the text of the article (‘Contractures of lower extremities … as depicted in illustration’), the image of George after death was omitted. We can only speculate on the reasons for this – poor image quality, a picture lost in the post, lack of space – but it is impossible not to wonder if George’s picture was considered too harrowing even for readers of the Journal of Mental Science.

Thankfully, the archive that holds the album is aware of its uses for the historian, and calmed my initial panic at that pencilled notation: whilst they would be wary of producing the item to the casual visitor, it is available to those who understand what they might see upon leafing through its pages. ‘It would be a case of reminding the user of the record they had, what to expect and that they may find it upsetting. I’d also advise that they keep the volume in a corner, facing away from other users, and to be mindful that it may upset other people’, one of the archivists told me. Whilst parts of the Colney Hatch album can be viewed by researchers online via Wellcome Images, in a small county archive that is largely utilised by family historians it’s certainly wise to make users aware of the potentially disturbing nature of the items available, some of which may pertain to their own (albeit distant) relatives. It’s easy to become slightly blind to the impact of medical images when seeing them on an almost daily basis as part of our research, and reminding ourselves of the very real people depicted in them doesn’t necessarily detract from their historical value. These were, as the archivist observed, ‘all real people who once had families and a whole life of their own. [We] have to respect their memory and the life they led’.

Jennifer Wallis

The political management of ecstasy

Posted on April 13, 2012 by

I had the pleasure of meeting Jonathan Haidt on Monday at the RSA. Haidt, as you all know, wrote The Happiness Hypothesis, which really inspired me. I gave him a copy of my new book, so if you see it in a bin near the Strand, it’s yours!

Haidt’s own new book is called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics. It’s a very interesting and quite ideas-packed book. A lot of ‘intelligent non-fiction’, particularly in psychology, can be easily boiled down to a 10-minute TED talk (indeed many books should have stayed as TED talks), but Haidt’s book – shock horror! – has more than one idea in it. It talks about the emotions beneath different political ideologies, how our brains generate sacred values, and how religions help societies to cohere and bond.

It’s this last idea that Haidt discusses in his very slick TED talk on religion and ecstasy (I love the animated slides – it’s lecture-as-movie-experience). His talk begins with William James, and a brief look at revelatory ecstatic experiences – those moments where, as Haidt puts it, a door seems to open in our heads, and we are suddenly lifted from the profane to the sacred. Haidt talks about how such revelatory experiences can involuntarily happen to us (we are seized by forces, as the young Wordsworth feels himself to be), or we can voluntarily engineer them by taking psychedelic drugs, as shamans did (or do).

Then Haidt moves, quite rapidly, to a social or Durkheimian explanation of religion. Sacred values, he says, give societies something to cohere around, to coalesce around. They help us bond, and help our societies endure and resist external shocks. He shows us the fascinating work by the anthropologists Richard Sosis and Eric Bressler, who studied American communes in the 19th century, and found that the religious communes which demanded a lot more from their members survived far longer than the secular communes which demanded less (see the graph below).


So, and this is Haidt’s main point, perhaps there’s an evolutionary purpose to religions. Perhaps they evolved at a certain period in human evolution, around 10,000 years ago, to help human tribes to cohere and cooperate, making them more adaptive and resilient. They are the product, he suggests, of ‘group selection’ – apparently a rather controversial idea in biology.

You can be an atheist, as he is, and still have respect for the sacred and its socially adaptive function. ‘And you don’t need the supernatural for a sense of the sacred’, he insists. ‘You could get it from your country, or from nature.’ Well, maybe, though I’d suggest if people get really worked up about their country, there’s probably a bit of the supernatural mixed in – think of how American nationalism is often mixed in with a sense of manifest destiny.

Haidt is certainly right that religions can bond societies together and help give them a collective sense of meaning, and that this can help them respond to shocks and threats. Others have also argued this recently – from the philosopher Charles Taylor to Robert Wright to Alain De Botton. At a time of riots and revolutions, it’s unsurprising that liberals suddenly start talking about how religions create social stability, as Edmund Burke and William Wilberforce did after the French Revolution.

But I think the Darwinian social function theory of religion leaves something out. It leaves out the phenomena that Haidt begins his TED talk with – the sheer strangeness of revelatory and ecstatic experiences. In such moments, humans feel invaded by external powers, filled with the holy spirit, possessed, overwhelmed. There is something extremely wild, psychotic even, about some religious phenomena, and I think both Haidt and De Botton, in their eagerness to rehabilitate religion for a polite secular bourgeois audience, leave some of that wildness out.

Haidt presents a nice evolutionary story: at a certain stage of evolution, humans came up with religion to help our tribes cohere. But the story is weirder than that. At a certain stage in evolution, humans became conscious, and felt bombarded by messages from gods and angels. We tripped into consciousness, and this must have been both an awesome and a completely terrifying experience. It seems to me that William James appreciated the savage rawness and weirdness of the revelatory experience. Haidt does to some extent, but not sufficiently. (That’s St Theresa on the right, by the way, getting slapped around by some angel. Take that Theresa!)

I put this to Haidt, and he began by saying that James was a depressive recluse, so was focused very much on the individual aspects of religious experience rather than the social. Fair enough, though a bit harsh on James.

Haidt then suggested that homo sapiens believed the universe was full of spirits as a side-effect of evolving a theory of mind. It was very adaptive to be able to infer other humans’ intentions, and as a result, we started to infer intentions everywhere – the sky thunders because God is angry etc (this is a theory known as the Hyper-Active Agency Detection Device, which Jesse Bering ably explored in his book The God Instinct).

But, again, I don’t think this adequately explains revelatory experience. The experience of hearing voices, seeing visions, feeling suddenly filled with the holy spirit etc is simply far more powerful and immediate than inferring divine agency when you hear some thunder. It’s a feeling of being actively invaded and overpowered by an external agency.

Such experiences can certainly be socially cohesive, but they can also be highly socially disturbing. They are weird, uncanny, abnormal, frightening. The people who experience them are, traditionally, weird, frightening figures, half in the tribe and half out of it (half in the profane world and half in the sacred, as Mircea Eliade put it in his study of shamanism). They might be revered by their tribe and followed. Or they might be executed for being demonically possessed.

Haidt emphasizes the social cohesion role of the sacred, and seems to suggest our Enlightenment cultures need a bit more of the sacred in our lives and societies. But the sacred is notoriously hard to manage, politically, as King Pentheus knew (he’s the hero of Euripides’ Bacchae, who tries to ban the ecstatic cult of Dionysus and even tries to imprison Dionysus, but the god of ecstasy escapes and sends Pentheus into madness – he ends up getting ripped apart by the maenads).

What I admire about ancient Athens in the fifth century BC is its ability to balance the rationalist with the irrational and daemonic: Socrates and Sophocles, two sides of the human personality balancing each other out. But our Enlightenment societies have far more difficulty in seeing any value in the ecstatic, the revelatory or the daemonic. It simply terrifies us. It’s too weird, too uncivic, too impolite.

The last generation to be genuinely OK with revelatory experiences was the civil war generation of Oliver Cromwell, the Quakers and John Milton. In some ways, you could read Milton’s Samson Agonistes as the swan-song for revelatory experience in western culture. Samson sits in jail, wondering why God isn’t sending him any more messages. Well – we’re all wondering that now Samson. Why aren’t we getting any messages? What’s up with our reception!

After the prophetic violence of Milton’s generation, England settled down to a calmer and more polite culture that was very suspicious of religious ‘enthusiasm’. And with good reason: the ‘voice of God’ often told people to kill, as God tells Samson to do. Such experiences have to be controlled and even banished in a multicultural rational commercial society. (Check out this excellent video of Stanley Fish discussing the inherent weirdness and illiberal savagery of Samson Agonistes, by the way).

Soren Kierkegaard was right, I think, to insist on the strangeness and irrationality of religious experience in his 1842 book Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard was surrounded by 19th century Deists and Hegelians trying to turn religion into something nice, polite, rational and civic (as Haidt and De Botton are trying to do today). And he responds, forget all that – religion is God telling Abraham to kill his son, and Abraham agreeing.

Religions certainly fulfill an important social role. But they also grow out of the fact that, as a species, we sometimes feel invaded and possessed by external forces. Religions make sense of such experiences and give them a structure and meaning. And perhaps they give us a way to tell the good messages from the bad ones – the pro-social from the anti-social.

Bhutan’s well-being measurements (or ‘how Buddhist are you?’)

Posted on April 6, 2012 by

The UN Happiness Conference last week looks to have been a fascinating event. The Prime Minister of Bhutan sent me a giant Willy Wonka-esque invitation, for which I’m grateful, but wouldn’t pay my air-fare, for which I’m lingeringly resentful (not really). Anyway, I didn’t go, but have spent this morning reading through some of the material that came out of it.

The main event was the publication of The World Happiness Report, edited by Jeffrey Sachs, Richard Layard and John Helliwell. Interesting that Sachs, once a champion of ‘shock therapy’ and the neo-liberal Washington Consensus, should have climbed on-board the happy train.

In fact, Sachs seems to be making a bid to be the train-driver – he wrote the intro to the report, which seems odd, seeing as he’s a recent convert to well-being economics, while Layard has been banging on about it for over a decade. Anyway, Sachs (who says he’s an Aristotelian) has clearly reigned in Layard’s ultra-utilitarianism. There are five or so references to Aristotle and the Stoics in the report, many more to the Buddha, and not one to Layard’s beloved Jeremy Bentham. Sachs opines loftily in the introduction that western economists’ pursuit of GDP is “completely at variance with the wisdom of the sages”. Oh really Jeff? Do we need shock cognitive therapy?

Despite Sachs’ attempt to put himself forward as the global guru of love, the conference really marks another huge success for Richard Layard, who to my mind is by far the most influential British intellectual today – partly because of his success in British mental health policy and the spread of CBT, but also because of the global influence of the happiness agenda he has pushed.

Although there are many aspects of Layard’s agenda that I welcome (its support for CBT in particular) I remain wary of the agenda because I think utilitarianism and positivism can be too monist and authoritarian: they force an entire country to follow one particular philosophy of the good life, which they insist is ‘scientific fact’. That’s what John Stuart Mill warned in On Liberty, where he spoke of the danger of a ‘tyranny of the majority’, and insisted we need to encourage diversity, experimentation, non-conformity, and the right of people to pursue their own good in their own way. Layard, I suspect, would see all that as rank individualism.

The happiness movement often seems a bit bullying to me: the happy / extrovert / optimistic majority telling the introvert / pessimistic minority to get with the programme…or else! Like Tali Sharot, author of The Optimism Bias, saying that the 25% of the population who aren’t naturally optimistic are, basically, sick. Look, for example, at this cartoon, The Pig of Happiness, made by David Cameron’s former room-mate after he had a breakdown (no, really). Notice in the video how the entire farm converts to the pig’s vision of happiness. It’s the utilitarian version of Animal Farm.

The warning about too monist an approach to well-being was made well by Martin Seligman, father of Positive Psychology, in his little presentation at the UN conference. He writes that his own well-being theory is plural: he puts forward five different definitions of well-being (he calls it PERMA: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaningfulness, Achievement), and adds: “This plurality of well-being is why economist Richard Layard’s important argument that “happiness” is the final common path and the gold standard measure for all policy decisions does not work.”

I welcome Seligman’s more pluralist approach to well-being. But I disagree with him that meaningful happiness, achievement, engagement etc can be objectively and scientifically measured using simple automated questionnaires, as he thinks it can. What the Greeks called eudaimonia is quite a subtle concept – it takes a lifetime to think about it and learn to practice it in one’s life. If you think that governments can easily measure it using computer questionnaires, then you’re opening the door to a quite intrusive, bureaucratic and coercive politics of well-being, which forces people to fit into boxes rather than encouraging them to think for themselves.

Look at the example of Bhutan, the host of the UN Happiness Project conference. Bhutan has, since the 1970s, measured Gross National Happiness (GNH). A paper in the World Happiness Report from the Centre for Bhutan Studies explains to us how Bhutan has defined and measured GNH.

We discover that a third of Bhutan’s ‘psychological well-being’ indicator is constituted by measurements of a person’s spirituality: ‘The spirituality indicator is based on four questions – they cover the person’s self-reported spirituality level, the frequency with which they consider karma, engage in prayer recitation and meditate. The indicator identified 53% of Bhutanese people as adequate in terms of spirituality level.’

This is obviously problematic. Firstly, there’s the practical question of whether you can accurately measure a person’s genuine level of spiritual attainment simply by asking them how spiritual they are (the same problem applies to measuring the meaningfulness of their life by asking them how meaningful it is). Such a measurement rewards the smug and complacent – how would Socrates score on such a questionnaire?

Secondly, there’s a liberal problem: Bhutan’s GNH measures people’s well-being according to how far they accept Buddhism. If you don’t accept Buddhism, you’re unwell.

We also read that Bhutan’s GNH includes measurements of Bhutanese people’s ‘cultural diversity and resilience’. This measurement is reached by measuring to what extent the interviewee speaks the mother tongue, to what extent they agree with ‘good values, eg Buddhism’, and to what extent they agree with Driglam Namzha, or The Way of Harmony, which is the majority culture’s ‘expected behaviour of consuming, clothing, moving’ etc. So it’s not a measure of cultural diversity at all – quite the opposite!

Around one eighth of the population, the Nepalese ethnic minority, failed to speak the mother tongue fluently and failed to follow the Way of Harmony, and they were forced into refugee camps in the 1970s and 1980s – many of them are still there. That’s a clear example of how utilitarianism can lead to a tyranny of the majority, as John Stuart Mill warned.

And before we declare that ‘we’d all be happier in Bhutan’, as the Guardian did rather exuberantly, let’s remember that only a third of Bhutan’s population has had even six years of schooling. This is a rural, semi-educated, semi-literate monoculture (well, it is now the ethnic minority has been kicked out). You will never get an entire western, liberal, educated country to sign up to one philosophy of well-being – not without using the army anyway.

We need a more pluralist approach to well-being, one that balances the science of well-being with the philosophy of well-being, which recognises it’s not enough simply to have ‘meaning’ in your life – the question is whether the meaning you have is worthwhile. It’s not enough to have relationships – are they good relationships? It’s not enough to have ‘engagement’ – is it worthwhile engagement? This is what philosophy can teach us – how to exercise the practical reasoning to arrive at appropriate ethical life-decisions.

I’ve been reading the Pragmatist philosophers this week – John Dewey, William James, Charles Sanders Pierce and others – and they really understood the need to find the right balance between experimental psychology and ethical philosophy (or practical reasoning, done alone and especially in groups or ‘communities of inquiry’). Dewey wrote:

A moral situation is one in which judgment and choice are required antecedently to overt action. The practical meaning of the situation–that is to say the action needed to satisfy it–is not self-evident. It has to be searched for. There are conflicting desires and alternative apparent goods. What is needed is to find the right course of action, the right good. Hence, inquiry is exacted: observation of the detailed make-up of the situation; analysis into its diverse factors.

Matthew Lipman, the father of Philosophy for Children (P4C), wrote:

it was Dewey who, in modern times, foresaw that education had to be defined as the fostering of thinking rather than as the transmission of knowledge… reasoning is sharpened and perfected by disciplined discussion as by nothing else and that reasoning skills are essential for successful reading and writing; and that the alternative to indoctrinating students with values is to help them reflect effectively on the values that are constantly being urged on them.

That’s why I think Positive Psychology, and the ‘happiness agenda’ in general, really needs more philosophy in it. Well-being can’t be ‘transmitted’. It has to be reasoned towards.

I honestly think the evidence-based science of well-being from CBT and Positive Psychology can be balanced with more practical / communal reasoning in the model of Dewey and Lipman. That’s what I argue in my book (out in less than a month!) As a great example, here is a new course from Yale’s Open University, which combines ancient philosophy with insights from cognitive and positive psychology.

I’d love to see this kind of course freely available for all undergraduates (in fact, we just pitched for pilot funding to do that at Queen Mary).