History of emotions news digest

Posted on November 15, 2011 by

There’ve been plenty of good articles on the history of emotions in the media in the last few weeks, some of which were written by or quoted scholars at the Centre.

In the Telegraph, William Leith asked whatever happened to the British stiff upper lip, and interviewed experts including the BBC’s Adam Curtis and the Centre’s own Thomas Dixon. Leith writes:

The academic historian Thomas Dixon, who has studied the history of crying, tells me that the 18th and 19th centuries were very “tear-soaked” – crying in public, particularly at the theatre, and particularly in the cheap seats, was no big deal. Emoting was linked to popular culture – and also to religion. There used to be lots of weeping when people found God, and when they repented their sins. Then came the era of the “stiff upper lip”, an age of stoicism engendered by Empire, the Victorian public schools, and muscular Christianity.

Ah — the stiff upper lip! Even now, it has a huge resonance. Dixon tells me about a British POW appearing unmoved while being tortured by the Japanese in the Second World War. His captors were amazed. “No Britisher ever cries,” he told them – which makes me want to cry. If you were British, you were supposed to keep your emotions to yourself; it was all part of showing what Dixon describes as your “strength and superiority”. But the stiff upper lip was just a blip in history. The expression, possibly American, and probably coined in the 19th century, refers to a time when men had big moustaches, which would magnify any unseemly lip-quivering.

The fashion for keeping your emotions bottled up lasted about 100 years. “Since the Seventies,” says Dixon, “we’ve been returning to something like normality.” In other words, normality is about losing control.

Another Centre scholar, Lindsey Fitzharris, wrote an excellent feature for the Guardian on the history of public displays of corpses, linking in to the widely circulated images of the last hours of Colonel Gaddadi. She wrote:

The display of one’s enemies after death reaches across cultures and across time. In 1540, Henry VIII granted the Barber-Surgeons Company the annual right to the bodies of four executed criminals. With it, he formally bound the act of the executioner to that of the surgeon: one executed the body, the other executed the law. The association of public dissection with crime and punishment was given further sanction with the passing of the Murder Act in 1751, which mandated that all murderers be dissected after death.

In these cases, as with Gaddafi, there was a desire to humiliate the person in death. This could not be clearer than in William Hogarth’s engravings, The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751). In them, we see the moral demise of the fictional character, Tom Nero, torturing animals as an adolescent and eventually murdering his lover, Ann Gill. In the final scene, Nero is laid out on the surgeon’s dissection table, his innards spilling out onto the floor while a dog eats his intestines. There is nothing dignified about this death.

The Centre’s Jules Evans posted an interview with Kalle Lasn, the 70-year-old trouble-maker who set up Adbusters, which in turn came up with the idea to Occupy Wall Street. The interview, from Jules’ blog, was picked up by The New Republic and the New York Times blogs. Kalle told Jules about his background in advertizing, and his expectation of a coming world revolution:

“All of a sudden people will wake up one day, after the Dow Jones has gone down by 7,000 points, and say: ”What the fuck is going on?” They’ll just see their life as they know it collapse around them. And then they’ll have to pick up the pieces and learn to live again.”

BBC News’ magazine had a great article on the history of disgust, and the role it plays in public discourse – did anyone else notice how often the word was used in connection with the News International hacking of Milly Dowler? The same issue covered the Darwin’s Emotions project at Cambridge, looking at a new effort to highlight and prove Charles Darwin’s contention that all humans can innately recognize the emotions behind facial expressions. The Centre’s Thomas Dixon wrote on this subject back in August.

Finally, the Guardian had a good obituary of the philosopher, Peter Goldie. It noted Goldie’s unusual career path, from successful and feared financier of the Thatcher era to leading philosopher of the emotions:

The only link between Goldie’s two careers was his shrewd capacity for spotting a gap in the market – first with the neglected topic of emotions, later with the issue of conceptual art, which philosophy had previously ignored altogether, and then with issues of character, narrative and memory. But in philosophy this was a disinterested astuteness, the result of exasperation at why questions that had always preoccupied him had not been tackled, and at the way philosophers tend to set up polarised stances on any topic. His technique was to reject the polarities offered, yet fruitfully plunder each, ultimately pushing past both to a new resolution.

With emotions, for instance, he was least sympathetic to feeling theories, which tend to make an emotion virtually a self-enclosed bodily sensation, and only uneasily cater for its being essentially about people, actions and events. But Goldie also disliked the corollary deficiency in cognitivist theories, which, in making emotion a matter of judging that people and events are fearful, lovable, offensive or whatever, certainly account for emotion’s outward-directedness, but omit its visceralness.

You could, after all, be quite neutrally aware that someone is lovable without in fact loving them, or that someone’s behaviour is offensive without feeling offended; as (in Goldie’s illustrative analogy) a colour-blind person could have the capacity to accurately pick out colours which the normally sighted person actually experiences.

In order to avoid this awkward “add-on” of feeling to potentially impartial apprehension, Goldie’s neo-cognitivism proposed the notion of “feeling towards” – “thinking of with feeling” so that your emotional feelings are directed towards the object of your thought. Emotions, he said – with a nod both to David Hume and evolutionary theory – are useful in providing immediate practical responses (the flinch of disgust at rotten meat, for instance) that reason would be slower to achieve.

If you see any other articles we should mention, send them in. You can also follow us on Twitter @emotionshistory

Sensibility and history: The importance of Lucien Febvre

Posted on November 13, 2011 by

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at two excellent history of emotions conferences in the last couple of weeks. The Netherlands Historical Society took for the theme of their 2011 conference:  ‘Cool, Calm, and Collected: The Dutch and their Emotions in Pre-Modern Times’. There I learned a great deal – about the pious weeping of Dutch nuns, about Rembrandt as a master of the passions, about the ‘hotter sort of Protestant’ and their bedroom religious experiences, and about the reputation of the Dutch as phlegmatic and stolid on the one hand, and as passionate about profits on the other.

Then, here at Queen Mary, we hosted a conference on ‘Wandering Feelings: The Transmission of Emotion in the Long Nineteenth Century’, co-organised by Tiffany Watt-Smith (QMUL) and Carolyn Burdett of the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies. The emotions under discussion included national feeling, wonder, trauma, empathy, and laughter and the sources analysed ranged from paintings and poems to travel writing, science and philosophy, including George Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s Ethics.

On both occasions I spoke about my current book project – Weeping Britannia – in one case talking about the weeping of eighteenth-century Methodists and men of feeling, and in the other about Victorian theories of tears. And in both talks I also made reference to the work of the French historian, Lucien Febvre (1878-1956).

Febvre is an important figure for anyone interested in the history of emotions. His 1941 essay ‘Sensibility and history: How to reconstitute the affective life of the past’ is widely considered a founding document in the history of emotions. It is discussed by Barbara Rosenwein, for instance,  at the start of her important 2002 essay ‘Worrying about emotions in history’.

For me, Febvre is an inspiring figure. Alongside the overall vigour and vision of his writing, there are three arguments of his about the history of mentalities that I think are particularly worth remembering. First he criticised historians of ideas who wrote as if one philosophical system gave birth to another within an imponderable ether of pure thought rather than as social and cultural products. Secondly, despite his own enthusiasm for the psychological theories of his friend Henri Wallon, he warned historians against the danger of reading contemporary psychological theories and categories back into the minds and experiences of past generations. Febvre asserted (in a 1938 essay about history and psychology) that ‘the science of contemporary psychologists can have no possible application to the past’ and that psychological anachronism was ‘the worst sort of anachronism and the most insidious and harmful of all’ since each human group in the past had its own proper mental system, which worked to produce individual experiences in its own way.

Finally, in his 1941 essay on the affective life, Febvre argued that the sentiments and emotions need to be taken seriously, as complex mental attitudes comprising much more than automatic bodily responses. He issued an invitation to his fellow historians to get to work on this fascinating new field of history; to examine representations of emotions and sensibility in conduct books, court records, paintings, sculpture, music, and novels. ‘I am asking for a vast collective investigation to be opened,’ he wrote, ‘on the fundamental sentiments of man and the forms they take. What surprises we may look forward to!’ In the same essay Febvre made the following intriguing observations about emotional contagion and ritual, which seemed especially relevant to the theme of ‘Wandering Feelings’:

Emotions are contagious. …

They may well arise in the organic structure proper to a certain individual…[but] they very quickly acquire the power to set in train in all those concerned, by means of a sort of imitative contagion, the emotional complex that corresponds to the event which happened to and was felt by a single individual….

The emotions became a sort of institution. They were controlled in the same way as a ritual. Many of the ceremonies practised by primitive peoples are simulated situations with the obvious aim of arousing in all, by means of the same attitudes and gestures, one and the same emotion, welding them all together in a sort of superior individuality and preparing them all for the same action.

In both my recent talks, however, I gave the final word not to Lucien Febvre but to nineteenth-century commentators on the passions and emotions. In the Netherlands I ended with a quote from the English physician, theologian and philosopher Thomas Cogan, author of series of important treatises on the passions in the opening years of the nineteenth century. The quote from Cogan emphaises two important points, first the close connection between thoughts (opinions) and feelings, and secondly the almost infinite varieties of sentiments that can be produced by the action of different national cultures on human bodies:

But the diversities of opinions and manners, with their correspondent predilections and aversions, exceed enumeration. It is these diversities which furnish the amusement derived from the perusal of travels; and as no two nations on the globe correspond in every instance, the peculiarities of each illustrate in a striking manner the truth of our observation. They indicate the inconceivable variety of sentiments and affections, which incidentally take place among beings of the same species, inhabitants of the same sublunary system, conversant with similar objects, and possessing similar powers of mind.

At Queen Mary, I gave the last word to Frances Power Cobbe – a prolific Victorian essayists and campaigner, whose causes included female suffrage and animal rights. Her 1888 Fortnightly Review article on ‘The Education of the Emotions’ is full of interesting observations about emotions and their transmission, but one struck me particularly:

A fundamental difference between the Catholic and Puritan mind seems to be that the former seizes on every available means for producing religious emotion through the senses; the latter turns away from such means with intense mistrust, and limits itself to appeals through the mind. Dark and solemn churches like that at Assisi decorated by Giotto (which the friar who showed it told me was the “best place in the whole world for prayer”) – gorgeous altars, splendid functions, pictures, music, incense – all these are to the Catholic and the High Churchman veritable “means of grace,” i.e. they call out in them emotions which  either are religious, or they think lead to religion. Long Prayers, Hymns, Bible-reading, and preachings; these, on the other hand, are the Evangelicals’ means of grace, and they produce in them emotions distinctly religious.

Again there is a clear understanding of the way that emotions can be produced by the rational mind (as well as by the senses), and I thought the appreciation of the different emotional styles of Puritans and Catholics, and their dependence on different practices and places, was very much in tune with recent work on the history of emotions of the kind I wrote about recently on this blog, with reference to Oscar Wilde, whose wonderful book The Happy Prince and Other Tales, full of sensual Catholic imagery, was published in the same year as Cobbe’s comments.

My experimental ‘Prezi’ presentation from the ‘Wandering Feelings’ event is here:

 

Victorian Philosophies of Weeping: Performance, Sympathy, Emotion on Prezi

A blueprint for ‘Philosophical CBT’

Posted on November 11, 2011 by

Imagine being able to practice philosophy through the NHS. The idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds. In fact, therapists and counselors in the UK are beginning to put together something called ‘Philosophical CBT’, which could radically change how people see philosophy and the wider humanities.

CBT, or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, is now at the heart of the British government’s mental health policy. Successive British governments have committed a combined £580 million to a policy called Improved Access for Psychotherapies (IAPT), which hugely increases the availability of CBT through the NHS, and will train 6,000 new cognitive therapists by 2014. It is the boldest expansion of mental health services anywhere in the world.

While many mental health charities have welcomed this initiative, others in the mental health industry have fiercely criticized it. Therapists from other traditions say it has too much of a ‘one size fits all’ approach, and that 8 to 16 weeks of CBT only offers a short-term fix that ‘papers over the cracks’. Others have criticized CBT’s intense focus on an individual’s thoughts and beliefs rather than their socio-cultural and economic context.

Speaking personally, I found CBT very useful when I had depression and anxiety in my late teens. I went to a CBT support group: there wasn’t actually a therapist present, but we followed a CBT tape course, did the ‘homework’ and, after a few weeks, I stopped having panic attacks and got on the long road to recovery. That experience of CBT piqued my curiosity, because CBT reminded me very much of ancient Greek philosophy.

I started to research CBT, and interviewed the two founders of it – Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck – and discovered they had been directly inspired by ancient Greek philosophy, particularly by Stoicism, which insisted that ‘it’s not events, but our opinions about them, that cause us suffering’. CBT also takes from ancient philosophy the ‘Socratic method’ – Socrates’ idea that humans can be taught to examine their minds, bring unconscious beliefs into consciousness, and then rationally consider and challenge any beliefs that make them sick.

Ellis and Beck took ideas and techniques from ancient philosophy and brought them into the heart of western science, but in doing so, they removed any mention of ethics, values or the ‘higher meaning’ of life. They also removed the social, political and religious aspects of ancient philosophy, and turned it into a ‘tool-kit’ of non-moral, instrumental techniques for the individual. Beck then tested out the therapeutic effectiveness of these techniques with a barrage of empirical tests. This impressive body of evidence for CBT is what convinced our government to put half a million pounds into making it more available.

Yet something was lost along the way. Ancient philosophy wasn’t merely a set of instrumental techniques for the individual. Schools like Stoicism, Epicureanism and Scepticism also offered ethical theories about the good, which linked the personal to the social, cultural, political and cosmic. These schools didn’t agree on whether God existed or whether there was a higher meaning to human existence, but at least they recognized that was a conversation worth having. CBT narrowed the focus down to just the individual, and the result is a somewhat atomized and amoral version of self-help.

What we’re now seeing is the rise of the so-called ‘third wave’ of cognitive behavioural therapies, including mindfulness-CBT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Positive Psychology. These therapies often engage more directly with Eastern philosophies (particularly the mindfulness techniques of Buddhism), and in the case of ACT, they’re less afraid to include questions of values in therapy.

Positive Psychology has also included some mention of the ancient Greek philosophical schools that gave rise to CBT. Jonathan Haidt, for example, includes the Stoics and Aristotle in the course on ‘flourishing’ that he teaches at Virginia University. But on the whole, few cognitive therapists are aware of the links between CBT and ancient Greek and Roman philosophies, sadly. The emphasis is on training new practitioners and putting them to work, rather than teaching them where their techniques come from, or allowing them to question some of CBT’s ethical assumptions.

That’s beginning to change, however, thanks to a handful of therapists and counsellors here in the UK. Last year, a psychotherapist called Donald Robertson brought out an excellent book called The Philosophy of CBT, which expertly traced the many connections between ancient philosophy and CBT. He’s started to give workshops in ‘resilience’ that combine CBT, Positive Psychology and ancient philosophy.

Tim LeBon is another therapist who has championed the integration of CBT with philosophy. His 2001 book Wise Therapy argued for the synthesis of philosophy and traditional therapies – including CBT. Tim was one of the first to set up a philosophical counseling practice in the UK, but found that the market for PC was small and that many clients benefited more from a combination of philosophy and more traditional therapy rather than from philosophy alone. He undertook specialist CBT in training in 2009 and now combines a private practice with NHS work. Tim has successfully run workshops on ‘the good life’, which teach ideas from philosophy within the format of group discussions, and believes such a workshop could be adapted to work successfully within the framework of the NHS. You can read my interview with Tim about philosophical CBT here.

The UK is uniquely well-placed to develop ‘philosophical CBT’. We have in this country a wealth of talented people who are interested in the therapeutic benefits of philosophy – people like Mark Vernon, Antonia Macaro, Clare Carlisle, Alain De Botton, Robert Rowland Smith and others. And we also have a government uniquely committed to mental health services, and to a therapy whose roots are in philosophy. It would be valuable to strengthen the links between these two movements, as people like Donald and Tim are beginning to do.

Philosophical CBT would bring together the empirical, practical focus of CBT, and the more values-conscious, open-ended and participatory approach of philosophy. It would bring together the sciences and the humanities, drawing on the best of both worlds.

It would teach practical and evidence-based techniques for self-management, but also explore the original philosophical contexts for these techniques, and create a space for philosophical discussion about wider questions – what am I seeking? what is the goal of life? what is the good society? – which could be discussed in a non-directive and open way, with a facilitator who drew links to different philosophical answers to these ‘big questions’.

How and where could we practice this ‘philosophical CBT’? First of all, we could provide workshops for cognitive behavioural therapists who are interested in exploring the historical and philosophical roots of CBT, and who want to discuss some of the wider assumptions of CBT – for example, what do we mean by ‘flourishing’ or ‘the good life’?

Secondly, clients and service users could be given access to philosophical CBT workshops on themes like resilience, flourishing and the good life. The NHS already provide ‘self-help workshops’ at their IAPT centres around the country, so there is a space and a precedent for this.

And thirdly, philosophical CBT could inform how we teach well-being in schools. The government has already looked at teaching Positive Psychology in schools: the problem with Positive Psychology is it presents itself entirely as a morally neutral science of the good life. That means it teaches a technocratic, instrumental model of the good life that leaves out goodness. It leaves out the important role of ethics, and of practical deliberation over values and ends. It tells people to seek a ‘higher purpose’, but leaves out any deliberation over whether the purpose you’re serving is good or bad. It tells people to seek ‘flow’ by engaging intensely in an activity, but leaves out the question of whether the activity you’re engaging with is genuinely worthwhile or not.

You can’t teach the good life without bringing in these subjective questions of values and ends. Positive Psychology tries to steer clear of ethical debate (that would be messy and unscientific), but the result is a process where people passively consume happiness techniques and ‘thinking styles’, and are deprived of the possibility of engaging in a conversation about the good life.

And the source material for ‘well-being classes’ is typically badly written, bureaucratic and (I’m sorry to say) soulless. Why not at least mention some of the original source material for these ideas? Philosophers like Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Plato are some of the greatest writers our culture has ever produced – so why not introduce young people directly to them?

It’s exciting that our government is taking well-being and mental health seriously, both in schools and in the wider society. But the danger of the ‘politics of well-being’ is that it becomes technocratic, illiberal and elitist. The scientific experts get to decide what ‘well-being’ means, and the masses are simply conditioned in the correct techniques and lifestyles, rather than being empowered to engage in the ethical conversation as autonomous reasoning persons.

Philosophical CBT could be one way forward, combining the evidence-based approach of CBT with the more open-ended and values-conscious approach of philosophy. And it would introduce people to philosophies that connect the personal to the social and political, and that empower us not merely to overcome emotional disorders, but also to follow richer and more examined lives.

Occupy your heart chakra

Posted on November 5, 2011 by

I saw an interesting debate at the ‘general assembly’ of Occupy London this week, which I visited as a blogger / sympathizer / voyeur . The protestors were debating a motion on whether to grant the Tranquility Centre (a group of people charged with maintaining the well-being of the camp) executive powers to eject anyone from the camp who threatened the physical or mental well-being of any other member of the community.

It was a delicate issue. The activists who set up the camp are anarchists. They want to create ‘a society free from authoritarianism’, as a pamphlet put it at the Climate Camp in 2009, which was set up by the same activists. The camp is the message. They’re not just protesting against authoritarian industrial capitalism: they’re living and showing the alternative. In this sense, they’re descendants of Diogenes the Cynic (pictured right) the 4th century BC Greek philosopher who tried to ‘deface the currency’ of capitalism, and who lived in a barrel in the centre of the Athenian marketplace, to display how liberating such a lifestyle was. The philosopher Epictetus said of the Cynic lifestyle: “Look at me, I have no house or city, property or slave: I sleep on the ground, I have no wife or children, no miserable palace, but only earth and sky and one poor cloak. Yet what do I lack? Am I not free of pain and fear?'”

But it’s one thing to run an anarchist commune in the relative seclusion of Blackheath, where the Climate Camp was pegged. It’s quite another to try and run an anarchist commune in the middle of the city, amid all that noise and pollution, with drunks and tourists wandering through. Imagine trying to run a state with no borders, where everyone has a say, and where the citizenship is constantly changing…During the debate, one of the members of the Tranquility Centre spoke out against the motion: ‘Don’t give us these powers’, he said. ‘We don’t want them. It should be the collective responsibility of the community’.

Despite his concerns, the motion passed, through a mass showing of jazz hands. ‘I’m a gay and from an ethnic minority’, said one Indian protestor. ‘We need to feel safe at the camp’. ‘I block the motion!’ shouted one skinhead. ‘You can’t, we’ve been through the process’, said the facilitator. ‘Yes I can! I can do what I want. There’s no police. So I block it.’ ‘It’s already passed’, insisted the facilitator. ‘Let’s move on.’ And so, with one vote, the commune quietly passed from anarchist to…not quite anarchist, and I had a fleeting vision of ten years hence, once the Occupiers have taken control of England, and we have learnt to fear a bang on the door in the middle of the night, and the cry: ‘Open up! It’s the Tranquility Centre!

In the camp’s Tent City University, I found myself caught up in a two-hour workshop on ‘acknowledging your emotions’. ‘I want you to pair up, and share your feelings’ we were told. It reminded me rather of the Landmark Forum, a self-help seminar I had attended two weekends before, as research for my book. We were often encouraged to ‘share’ there as well. Adam Curtis of the BBC has covered Landmark (or erhard seminar training, out of which it grew) in his documentary, The Century of the Self. He blamed the human potential movement of the 1970s, which gave rise to Landmark, for killing off the Sixties counter-culture, because it turned outward-looking Sixties protestors into the inward-looking self-help freaks of the 1970s. (Watch his take on the human potential movement in the video-clip here, it’s two minutes 16 seconds in).

Yet, looking at Occupy, I realized the two movements have now come together: both the revolutionary anarchism of 1968, and the human potential movement of the 1970s. The protestors take classes in meditation, in well-being economics, in ’emotion work’ and performance theatre. Occupy is now the revolutionary arm of the politics of well-being. The personal is tied to the political.

Or perhaps Curtis is right. Perhaps the Occupy movement is so Utopian that the political takes second place to more unfocused emoting. ‘My name’s Venus, I’ve started a global movement of love’, one protestor shared with me, before breaking down into tears (she’d been in the camp for two and a half weeks, and I think she was suffering from sleep deprivation).

Revolutions have always been deeply emotional affairs. Plato first used the word ‘privatization’ in The Republic, to describe how, in liberal capitalist democracies, our feelings had all been ‘privatized’ – we never feel collective emotions anymore, except when watching Susan Boyle sing I Dreamed a Dream on Britain’s Got Talent. But after the revolution, he suggested, we would all think and feel as one. Rousseau’s revolutionary politics was also a politics of collective emotion – the citizens would be magically fused together in the ‘General Will’. And they were right, sort of: during revolutions, people get brief and intoxicating flashes of that emotional experience – a whole people, thinking and feeling as one. As Wordsworth put it, reflecting on his trip to revolutionary France in 1790:

Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

Perhaps the nitty gritty of reforms doesn’t matter so much. Revolutions are in part a reversion from bureaucratic and technocratic politics to a more primitive emotional feeling of communion. But then, of course, you come down from the high, and go home. Or you might actually gain power…and then you have to work out new bureaucracies, new institutions, new technologies of control when the oxytocin has run away, and the distrust and loathing come back. But sometimes perhaps they still remember those moments…the sacrifice, the discomfort, the camaraderie, the elation: ‘you, who were with me in Paris, in Kiev, in Tahrir, do you remember? Do you still feel it?’

Laughter and Control

Posted on November 3, 2011 by

Pointing and Laughing: Nelson Muntz of 'The Simpsons'

I recently attended a seminar about laughter given by the intellectual historian Professor Quentin Skinner. I was looking forward to a light-hearted ninety minutes – a few jokes, some entertaining examples, and since thinking about laughing invariably makes me smile, I expected to leave with my spirits raised. It was a surprise, therefore, to discover that in the sixteenth century, laughing was primarily understood as a powerful tool of social coercion.

Renaissance scholars argued that the passion giving rise to laughter was not joy or happiness, but instead the sort of pleasure you get from mocking people, something close to the malicious delight suggested by the German word Schadenfreude. Skinner’s claim was that to laugh in this period was to mock, scorn, taunt or deride, a quite intentional act that aimed to humiliate and expose, but above all to reinforce the ideal of the Civile Conversazione.

The notion of Civile Conversazione was an important one for Renaissance scholars. Conversazione did not only imply speaking to one another, but came to include a whole spectrum of social encounters, including sexual ones. In this respect Conversazione is like our own use of ‘intercourse’, and may have been equally snigger-worthy (Skinner’s recollection of reading George Eliot’s immortal line ‘Rosamund and Lydgade made their intercourse lively again…’ provoked the first laughs of the afternoon…). Civile, as you might expect, is the art of being well-mannered and behaving with propriety. It is a virtue defined by its absence. In the work of a number of Renaissance writers, including Baldassare Castiglione, Giovanni della Casa, Stefano Guazzo and Simon Robson, the un-civile appear as boastful, haughty and foolish. Pointing and laughing was, according to these authoritative writers, the most efficient way to check incivility, redress social equilibrium and ward off potential offenders with the threat of public humiliation.

Contemporary comedians often argue that their role is to puncture and deflate, exposing the hypocrisies and over-inflated egos that prop up social hierarchies. It is usually an argument made when some gag or other has got out of hand, but the claim that the jokester stands outside society’s norms to critique them is hardly a new one. From Shakespeare’s riddling fools who speak truth to power, to Rabelais’s intricate fart jokes that inspired Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal work on the carnivalesque, laughter is often equated with social disruption, regeneration and levelling, a force for good.

Skinner’s paper assigned a rather different role for laughter, giving the giggles a faintly Foucaultian twist. In the Book of the Courtier (1561), Castiglione describes how one lady exposed a man with military pretensions to public ridicule on the dance-floor. His un-civile crime? He refused to join in the dancing  insisting that, as a fighting man, he was above such trivialities (he reminds me of Gareth Keenan, the fictional paper salesman and TA lieutenant in The Office). The woman pours scorn on the would-be soldier, humiliating him in the hope that he will learn his lesson:  ‘thus with much laughinge of the standers by she left him with a mocke in his foolish presumpcion’. In this example, as in the many more offered by Skinner, pointing and laughing in public emerges as a distinctive feature of Renaissance social life, one which was not only socially sanctioned but also served to maintain the status quo.

To a modern audience ridiculing offenders in public might seem a cruel and unnecessary tactic – indeed, one of the reasons that Malvolio’s punishment in Twelfth Night is so difficult to stage in modern productions is because it seems excessively nasty. However, not all Renaissance authors agreed that laughter should be used to discipline. Della Casa cautioned his readers not to ‘scorne or scoffe at any man’, suggesting that laughing at others might itself be un-civile. By 1640, the golden age of derision had seemed to have come to an end, when Thomas Hobbes argued that ‘Laughter at the defects of others is a sign of Pusillanimy’. Ever pragmatic, the author of the Leviathan also pointed out that since laughing might be a preliminary to fighting, it should be avoided at all costs.

Despite the fact that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers were obviously fascinated by the efficacy and dangers of derision, I was left wondering how they linked scorn to other sorts of laughing. There is surely a taxonomy of laughter, with multiple and overlapping varieties. What about sniggering at a double entendre? What about nervous chuckles, flirtatious titters, contagious giggles and complicit guffaws? Were these rather more homely sorts of laughter obscured in Renaissance accounts?  Nonetheless, as Skinner’s fascinating paper demonstrated, the way we perform, articulate and think about emotions – even ones so seemingly innocuous as laughter – can reveal important questions about the operation of power in a given culture. Indeed, this very point has been raised in a recent study of contemporary comedy by sociologist Sam Friedman, whose work looks at the relationship between class and taste among audiences of the Edinburgh fringe. Friedman explores the way middle-class audiences assert their intellectual credentials through a taste for whimsical in-jokery (of the Marcus Brigstocke variety, say, rather than Frankie Boyle’s). His account of middle-class comic pleasure suggests, to my mind at least, a further type of laughter too, the kind that drips with cultural capital, the sort of laughing you hear in theatres while Shakespeare comedies are being performed, the ‘I’m letting you know I get the joke’ – type laughter. I wonder if they worried about that in the Renaissance too.

Tiffany Watt-Smith
Quentin Skinner’s paper was given on the 6th October 2011 as part of the QMUL Department of English Postgraduate Research Seminar.

The stuff emotions are made of

Posted on October 31, 2011 by

I was teaching an undergraduate seminar this afternoon on Oscar Wilde and Catholicism. We discussed Wilde’s statement that ‘Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.’ Wilde’s fascination with the sensual materiality of Catholic rituals, especially the mass,  is evident in much of his writing.  There is a description in The Picture of Dorian Gray of the sounds, smells and sensations involved in kneeling on a cold marble floor, watching a priest in his stiff vestments raising the consecrated host in a bejewelled monstrance, while the altar boys, dressed in lace and scarlet, swing censers that fill the air with the smell of fuming incense. Earlier in the book Lord Henry has told Dorian Gray that ‘Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.’

One of the fascinations of the history of the emotions is how it examines the relationship between body and soul as it has been reconstituted in different periods. A lot of the most interesting recent work in this field has shown how emotions are acutely sensitive to place – both to geographical locations with associated national stereotypes, and to physical spaces such as courtrooms, classrooms, clinics, chapels, or churches.

Two recent talks by visiting PhD students at the QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions reinforced this point in interesting ways earlier this month. At one of our regular lunchtime seminars, Alina Danet, an historical sociologist, spoke about organ transplants in Spain and the construction of emotional responses, while Juan M. Zaragoza used examples relating to terminal illness and the history of medicine to argue for the importance of material culture to the production of emotions.

The Two Fridas (1939), by Frida Kahlo

Alina’s research explores the role of the Spanish press, since the early twentieth century, in creating a particular emotional climate in relation to the possibility, and subsequently the actuality, of organ transplantation (the first kidney transplant in Spain was in 1965, the first heart transplant there in 1968). Through national newspaper reports, Spaniards were encouraged to feel a range of emotions: empathy with those in need of transplants, national pride in their country’s scientific and medical advances, anxiety about their own health, shame at their failure to offer to donate their organs, or fear of the medical, moral and even metaphysical implications of organ transplantation.

Juan’s project has also involved researching the medical and emotional history of modern Spain. In his case, the focus is on terminally ill patients and their mental lives. He uses the example of the Spanish poet Juan Ramón and his wife Zenobia.  Ramón had been diagnosed with neurasthenia and Zenobia with uterine cancer. During this difficult period Zenobia founded a new room at Puerto Rico University – a reading room and study for her fragile husband, and others, to use. Zenobia had worked as an interior designer and set to work choosing the tables, chairs, bookshelves, lamps, sculptures and paintings which would create an emotional atmosphere conducive to health. As Juan put it in his talk, places and material objects are integral to the affective life of the past: the historian cannot disentangle ‘the emotions and the stuff ‘.

The Juan Ramón Jimenez – Zenobia Camprubí Room at Puerto Rico University

Lord Henry’s revelation to Dorian Gray that the soul can be cured only through the senses seems particular apt in the case of Juan Ramón and Zenboia’s curative room in Puerto Rico. The awareness of the power of rooms, their contents, and decoration was a recurring theme in Wilde’s work. During his lecture tour of America in 1882, Wilde was reported to have said, in the course of a lecture on the importance of house decoration: ‘Why, I have seen wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a career of crime; you should not have such incentives to sin lying about your drawing-rooms’.

An ’emotional climate’ or ’emotional atmosphere’ of the kind Alina and Juan both discussed in their papers can sound intangible, but historical research can demonstrate the agency of physical stuff, including even wallpaper, in producing such phenomena.

Thomas Dixon

Philosophy on the NHS

Posted on October 28, 2011 by

Havi Carel had everything going for her. At 35, she had recently met the love of her life, she’d just brought out her first book, and she was about to start her dream job, teaching philosophy at the University of West England, in Bristol (UWE). The future looked bright. Then, she started to notice she lost her breath very easily. She had always been fit and healthy, yet suddenly she couldn’t keep up with her aerobics class, or walk up a hill while talking on her mobile. She thought she might be getting asthma.

On a visit to her parents in Israel in 2006, her father, a doctor, suggested she have a CT scan of her lungs. The evening after the scan, her father suggested they stop off at the radiology clinic so he could pick up the results. Havi tells me: “I sat in the car and waited for him to come back. And waited. After half an hour, I knew something was wrong, so I went into the centre. I walked into the lab, where my father and the radiologist were staring at a CT scan of my lungs. My father looked in shock. The radiologist looked surprised and embarrassed to see me there. He said to me: ‘Do you know what you’ve got?’ I said I didn’t. ‘Have a read.’ And he handed me this enormous diagnostic manual, opened at an illness called Lymphangioleimyomatosis (LAM). It was full of dense terminology, but at the bottom it said ‘prognosis: 10 years’. I felt this deep, physical shock, and just kept thinking, I’m going to be dead by 45.”

At first Havi thought it must be some mistake. Then she was furious. She was an atheist, but she still found herself railing against fate. “I didn’t smoke, I didn’t drink, I didn’t take drugs, I’d always been good, and now I get this incredibly rare illness? It seemed deeply unfair. Why me? Then I wondered if I was somehow being punished. I’d just finished my first book, about death. I wondered if writing about that subject had somehow caused the illness. It was really difficult to accept the randomness of it – the fact that it was simply a one in a million piece of very bad luck. Then I had to cope with the social reality of having a life-threatning illness: first of all, you’re often treated by medical staff just as a body with an illness, rather than a person experiencing an illness. And then many of your friends and acquaintances don’t know what to say. So they leave you alone, when in fact, I was terrified of being alone. The first few nights after the diagnosis, I slept in the same room as my sister, with the light on.”

Then, after a few months, Havi decided to use one resource she had: philosophy. “I thought, how will philosophy help me now? If it couldn’t, there was no justification in carrying on with it.” She found Epicurus to be her most helpful mentor. She says: “I knew my future had been curtailed, but I could still find happiness even within illness, by using the Epicurean technique of focusing on the present. I tried to really enjoy whatever I was doing at that moment: yoga exercises, say, or going for a walk, or talking with my husband. Epicurus is right: we don’t need that much to be happy.”

And yet, Havi is less sure about the Epicurean claim that ‘what is painful is easy to endure’. In fact, as her condition deteriorated, she found it harder and harder to endure. “You get used to a stage of the illness, and then suddenly it gets worse, and your world shrinks further. I really found that hard.”

Luckily, in 2007, a new drug treatment stabilized her condition. The clouds have lifted, and her prognosis is much more positive. Havi says she’s incredibly relieved to have come through the experience. Yet she also says: “You think you will never forget it, that you will never forget not to worry about the small stuff and to enjoy each moment that you have like it’s your last. The sad thing is, you do forget it. You get caught back up in the small stuff.”

Nonetheless, Havi seems to have been transformed by the experience – not least, her concept of philosophy has changed. She’s no longer so interested in an “academic, highly specialized” subject that is cut off from ordinary people’s concerns, and is now organizing a pilot programme to provide a ‘philosophical tool-kit’ in the National Health Service for people confronting serious illness.

Havi’s story made me wonder if other philosophers are working within the NHS. I know there are some ‘humanist chaplains’ working in some hospitals, and that a colleague of Theodore Zeldin’s, John Reed, is doing some work in a GP clinic in London. There’s a philosopher at Oxford called Hanna Pickard who is also a therapist at the Oxford Complex Needs Service, using Aristotle to help people with personality disorder. And there’s Derek Bolton of Kings University in London, who’s a philosopher and also a clinical psychologist at the Maudsley Clinic.

And I think we’re beginning to see more ‘philosophical counsellors’ get training in cognitive behavioural therapy, to work within the NHS Improved Access for Psychotherapies scheme. I hear Tim Le Bon recently trained in CBT, for example – I’ll be interviewing him about it next week. On the other side, cognitive psychotherapists are becoming more interested in the ancient philosophical roots of their practice – a great example is Donald Robertson, head of the UK College of Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy, who recently published the impressive book, The Philosophy of CBT.

The ancients, of course, thought of philosophy as a ‘medicine for the mind’ – wouldn’t it be wonderful if the NHS provided brief philosophy classes for cognitive therapists, to introduce them to the philosophical roots of their practice? Even better, people coming through the CBT conveyer belt could be offered a ‘CBT Plus’ class, introducing them to some of the traditions that CBT draws on (Stoicism, Epicureanism, Socratic philosophy, Buddhism) so that they could use these philosophies for life, rather than just for eight weeks. I wonder if doing so would encourage them to practice more often, thereby lowering the risk of relapses?

Havi Carel’s excellent 2008 book, Illness, talks more about her experience.

Greenblatt on Lucretius: madness or therapy?

Posted on October 20, 2011 by

When he was a student at Yale University, Stephen Greenblatt wandered to the local bookstore to pick up some holiday reading, and his eye was caught by a strange-looking book with a painting by Max Ernst on the cover, showing disembodied torsos copulating in the sky. Naturally he bought it. It turned out to be a copy of Lucretius’ poem from the 1st century BC, On The Nature of Things.

Greenblatt tells me: “ The book came to me at a moment when I was intensely receptive to it. It’s an experience that most of us have – a book seems to speak to you directly across a vast chasm of time and culture. It was as if Lucretius was speaking to me.”

The poem is Lucretius’ attempt to put the philosophy of Epicureanism into verse. It’s envisaged as a form of therapy – honey lining the rim of a cup of medicine, as Lucretius puts it – that would spread Epicurus’ therapeutic ideas to a wider audience, revealing to them the atomistic nature of the universe, and freeing them from their deluded fear of death and eternal punishment. As self-help books go, it’s pretty weird, and at times discomforting – leading to accusations by St Jerome and other Christians that Lucretius went insane through love-sickness. But for many readers, the poem is still a moving and therapeutic read.

The young Greenblatt didn’t fear his own death, but he was instilled with a deep fear of his mother’s death, thanks to his mother, who possessed “an absolute certainty that she was destined for an early grave”. Greenblatt writes: “My life was full of extended, operatic scenes of farewell…even when I simply left the house for school, she clung to me tightly, speaking of her fragility and of the distinct possibility that I would never see her again.”

Mrs Greenblatt’s fears turned out to be unfounded – she lived until she was almost 90 – but Stephen was very struck by how the fear of death could make life unliveable. And this Lucretius knew and described well: “The poem crystallized things I’d been grappling with – the impatience that Lucretius gives voice to with excessive anxiety in the face of death. ‘Death is nothing to us’, he wrote. There’s a celebrated passage where he expresses quite powerfully how our endless complaints about death just get in the way of living:

Sometimes the phobia of death can grip a man so tight
He comes to loathe his very life and looking on the light,
And in his mournful heart resolves to die by his own hand,
Oblivious this fear’s the source of what he cannot stand.

In his new book, Swerve: How The World Became Modern, the Renaissance scholar examines the story of how Lucretius’ intensely modern poem was rediscovered in the 15th century by a Florentine book-hunter called Poggio Bracciolini, who brought it back to Florence and re-introduced its scandalous ideas into European culture, thereby helping (Greenblatt suggests) to create the modern world.

I spoke to Greenblatt to discuss Epicureanism, Lucretius’ vivid take on it, and its place in the modern world.

JE: Would you say you’re an Epicurean?

SG: Well, I’m not card-carrying. My card has expired. There are some aspects of it I don’t share. But if being an Epicurean or Lucretian means that I try to enhance pleasure and reduce pain, then yes. If it means that I don’t believe in a personal deity who intervenes in human affairs, or an afterlife where we’re rewarded or punished for our actions, then yes. I share Lucretius’ sense of hilarity at the belief that a deity cares about the outcome of the US election, or a sports match.

JE: What strikes me about the poem is how incredibly modern it is. In the last few years, we’ve had works by secular humanists like AC Grayling and Richard Dawkins that have tried to create a sort of secular poetry or myth to rival religious myths – but Lucretius already did that, 2,000 years ago.

SG: What’s also remarkable and moving is that this person who rigorously denies the efficacy of prayer begins his poem with the ‘Hymn to Venus’, which is one of the greatest prayers to a god ever written. Why? The answer has to be that he understood in a very deep way that humans have a natural longing for wonder and awe. And whatever the consequences of grasping an atomistic universe, it mustn’t be presented to the world as a deep disillusionment. A commitment to secular rationality doesn’t mean that the world is emptied out of wonder and ardour.

JE: The poem seems to me to put forward different views of nature. In the Hymn to Venus, nature is presented as a sort of festival of love, connecting and uniting all things. But in other parts of the poem, nature is scene as an atomistic clash or struggle between warring elements. And then the poem ends with this long and horrific description of a plague, which is like something by the Chapman brothers. Is there an ambivalence there?

SG: Yes, the poem expresses multiple views of nature. It’s one of the things that makes it an interesting work. It’s not a tract. The Hymn to Venus is extraordinary. It’s an erotic frenzy, an ecstatic and weird moment, when all of nature’s creatures feel an intense and ferocious urge to reproduce. They give up their food, they wade across rivers. It’s not a decorous or orderly moment:

Then beasts, the wild and tame alike, go romping over the lush
Pastureland and swim across the rivers’ headlong rush,
So eagerly does each pant after you, so do they heed,
Caught in the chains of love, and follow you wherever you lead.
All through the seas and mountains, torrents, leafy-roofed abodes
Of birds, and greening meadows, your delicious yearning goads
The breast of every creature, and you urge all things you find
Lustily to get new generations of their kind.

And then, at the end of the poem, there is this ghastly account of the plague. I think that Lucretius is looking at the worst that could happen, and attempting to think through it. He’s trying to show that the plague is not some divine punishment, but the outcome of ‘invisible agents’, as he refers to what we’d think of as pathogens.

JE: But it’s not very consolatory. You don’t find many long and graphic descriptions of a plague in self-help books.

SG: It’s not consolatory at all! That’s the hardest idea to grasp in some ways. There’s no reason in principle to think that existence is better in any sense than non-existence in Lucretius. In that sense, you could say his philosophy is Nietzschean. Now, I myself was brought up in a Jewish household that followed the Deuteronomic principle of ‘choose life’. So I’m not fully onboard with Lucretius’ vision of life. But I’d suggest it’s a consistent vision.

JE: Your book makes a juxtaposition, broadly, between the freewheeling and sexually liberal ethos of the ancient world, and the body-hating, ascetic and uptight Christian culture. But is it so black-and-white? Asceticism after all comes from a Greek word, askesis, which was central to Greek philosophy.

SG: Well, the juxtaposition is made grosso modo, so I’m not going to defend it belligerently. It could easily be disputed. But I would argue that, in the early Middle Ages, there was a quite sustained and very impressive collective attempt to reconceive the place of pain. It’s not that the ancients didn’t embrace pain – they had Stoicism in their culture, and the gladiator’s arena. But its quite significant that Christianity in the early Middle Ages erected a battered and bloody divinity at its centre.

JE: But, just to pursue the point, Lucretius himself was very suspicious of sexual love – didn’t he suggest that men should masturbate or go to prostitutes rather than fall in love?

SG: Lucretius is an interesting part of the conundrum. He was wary of sexual love because he understood deeply that certain ecstatic experiences of love are very close to pain [there’s a wonderful analysis of love-bites in Lucretius]. The flip-side of that, as we know of some ascetic practices in the Middle Ages, is that certain experiences of ecstatic pain are very close to pleasure.

[Greenblatt raises an interesting point here, which we didn’t have time to pursue. I wonder if Sado-Masochism, or the Marquis de Sade’s extreme philosophy of pain-pleasure, is a challenge for Epicureanism. Epicurus conceives pleasure as the absence of pain. But what if pleasure is actually mixed up with pain? Epicurus would obviously (and perhaps rightly) say that the Marquis de Sade is hardly a good model of ‘healthy pleasure’. And yet one doesn’t even have to get into S&M to argue the point: perhaps the greatest pleasures of human existence necessarily involve some pain: the ache of love for one’s children, or the music so beautiful it makes you cry. Perhaps Epicurus’ definition of pleasure as ‘the absence of pain’ is simply too dull to be either realistic or alluring.]

JE: Do you think Epicureanism is for the few or can it be for the many?

SG: That’s an interesting question. It’s not just flag-waving on my part that I end the book with Jefferson. Before him, Thomas More imagined a society founded on Epicurean principles in Utopia, but he clearly thought that the only way you can have an Epicurean society is if you insert the idea of punishment in the afterlife, because otherwise the people will behave too badly. It’s not until the Scottish Enlightenment, and Jeffersonian democracy, that the idea of a truly Epicurean society is put forward. The key moment is the Declaration of Independence, when Jefferson inserts that phrase about the ‘pursuit of happiness’.

JE: Do you think we live in an Epicurean society today?

SG: Of course not! But we could live in a more Epicurean society. That’s the hope.

JE: But how would you bring Epicureanism to a wider audience? Would that mean an expansion of the role of philosophy and the humanities?

SG: Well, I hadn’t thought of it in such self-serving terms! I’m not going to climb onboard that particular train. I think if anything we need more sciences as well as the humanities. We need people, including politicians, to come to terms with the implications of the world we live in. Have you read the Book of Mormon? Well…we better not go there.

The Contagious Moment

Posted on October 17, 2011 by

As the credits roll at the end of Rise of the Planet of the Apes a jet carrying a pilot infected with a deadly brain virus traverses the screen. The pilot has already coughed up blood in the departure terminal at San Francisco International airport so we know that the prognosis for mankind is not good, and as the plane traces a path between New York, Frankfurt and other destinations it isn’t long before the globe is ensnared in a web of inter-connecting lines. Like a Lufthansa map iterated to the power of ten, the lines symbolize both the path the virus will take and the technological network that governs the transmission of material and immaterial objects in Rise’s post-modern, and soon to be post-human, world. It is a neat way of signaling the imminent Armageddon and the film’s sequel. Ever since the early 1980s when an Air Canada flight attendant, Gaetan Dugas – aka ‘patient zero’—supposedly introduced AIDS to North America, novel contagions have been difficult to contain. Thanks to international air travel and the ceaseless demands of global trade and commerce, deadly rainforest pathogens are never more than a truck, train, or plane-ride away from the nearest metropolis, which in our highly networked world is the same thing as saying that in an instant they can be everywhere.

Contagion: 'Nothing spreads like fear'.

However, it is not the incursion of nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ into sanitised urban spaces that is the true subject of films like Rise and Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, which gets its long-overdue release in the UK this week, so much as the mayhem wrought by 21st century technological networks. Sure, the posters for Contagion are adorned with biohazard signs, but it is the contaminating effects of panic—what might be termed moral or emotional contagion—that really gets Soderbergh’s creative juices flowing, hence the film’s tag line, ‘Nothing spreads like fear’.

Fear—and the money that can be made from it—is also at the centre of  Robert Harris’s new thriller,The Fear Index, in which the author employs Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) as a none-too-subtle plot device to signal to readers the thrills ahead. ‘The heart beats quickly and violently, so that it palpitates or knocks against the ribs,’ writes Harris quoting Darwin shortly before an intruder bursts into the home of his central character, Dr Alexander Hoffman. ‘As fear rises to an extreme pitch, the dreadful scream of terror is heard. Great beads of sweat stand on the skin…’ However, it is not the physiology of fear that interests Harris so much as its psychology and epidemiology. Hoffman, a brilliant physicist who has quit CERN to set up a hedge fund in Geneva, has devised an alogithm, codenamed VIXAL-4, to monitor fear and its impacts on financial markets. As one would expect from a writer whose ear is tuned to the Zeitgeist, Harris studs the narrative with references to those now familiar bogeys, ‘quants’ and ‘credit-default swaps’. Stripped of financial jargon, however, the principle behind VIXAL-4 is simple: it is a machine that shorts stocks when fear and anxiety are on the up. In a pitch to investors, Hoffman explains that with fear ‘driving the world as never before’, VIXAL-4 is a licence to print money. But why should there be more fear about today than during the Cold War when the world lived with the threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction? Hoffman, or rather Harris’s explanation, is intriguing: ‘The rise in market volatility, in our opinion, is a function of digitalisation, which is exaggerating human mood swings by the unprecedented dissemination of information via the internet’. In other words, writes Harris, ‘digitalisation itself is creating an epidemic of fear’. This notion that digitalisation and the growth of informatics networks tend to propagate fear and other forms of emotional contagion also informs Contagion. As Jude Law, playing a conspiracy-minded blogger, races to uncover the truth about a deadly flu-like virus while officials at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta agonise over how much to tell the public, Soderbergh suggests that in our technologised, network-dependent world, fear and hysteria are impossible to contain. Instead, amplified by social media and bloggers packaging and re-packing rumours and half-truths, disinformation takes on a life of its own. The result is that just as viruses co-opt our DNA to make numerous copies of themselves, so fear ‘goes viral’, endlessly replicating itself and sowing doubt and distrust wherever it lands. But should we employ biomedical metaphors in the context of informatics and social epidemiology? After all contagion is not the same as transmission. Nor is contamination with a living virus—which  presupposes the materiality and mess of actual bodies—the same as a ‘virtual’ infection with an aberrant piece of computer code, which is what Harris is surely talking about when he reduces fear to an algorithm that can ‘infect’ financial markets. Accustomed as we are to thinking of contagion as an epidemiological term that can be metamorphised into non-biological contexts, perhaps this is an abstraction too far and all this talk of computer ‘viruses’ and ‘digital epidemics’ is obscuring what is really going on in informatics networks. There is also another side to the equation. Just as in the world of ‘information security’ biological tropes are used to understand computer ‘viruses’ and design computer ‘immune systems’, so in mathematical epidemiology statistical and probabilistic methods are used to study the dynamics of populations and disease distributions. Thanks to the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert And Response Network (GOARN) and electronic disease reporting systems such as ProMED, search engines now routinely trawl the internet for unusual disease outbreaks at the same time as other computers simulate epidemics and forecast patterns of morbidity and mortality. The result is what the philosopher and media theorist Eugene Thacker calls a‘real-time battle between networks’, one biological, the other informational. Thacker’s argument is that just as particular types of computer behaviour can be understood through the lens of biology, so infectious disease can be understood through the paradigm of mathematics and informatics. But while internet-based disease surveillance systems and statisical modelling can be highly effective—witness, for instance, the WHO’s just-in-time response to SARS in 2003—they can also backfire. Interestingly, this is not only a matter of having accurate data. Although material and biological processes can be abstracted by epidemiology into statistical processes, at the end of their day they are about real, material things. And real viruses, unlike their immaterial, metaphorical counterparts, are messy; no matter how ‘good’ the data there is no guarantee they will behave in the way the mathematical models predict—hence the wildly inaccurate forecasts about the projected deaths from swine flu in 2009.

Jude Law as Alam Krumwiede in Contagion

It is such premature and often erroneous prognostications that explain the public’s growing distrust of science and the popularity of the sort of conspiracy theories expressed by Alan Krunwiede, the character portrayed by Jude Law in Contagion, who spends much of the film obsessively blogging that the CDC is in cahoots with Big Pharma while promoting a dubious homeopathic remedy. The irony, or course, is that in social epidemiological terms this distrust is itself contagious. With the help of Twitter, Facebook and other social media, conspiracy theories now spread as rapidly as any virus, sparking skepticism, fear and, sometimes, hatred of the ‘authorities’, whether they be health officials sitting in Whitehall or police chiefs with a hotline to News of the World. In this respect we should not have been shocked by the response to the shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham in August. After all, as many commentators pointed out, the Arab world had just given us an object lesson in the power of social media to spread contagious ideas. That the London rioters did not appear to share the lofty political ideals of the protestors in Tahrir Square was beside the point. It was the network that enabled the looters to organize and infect others with their criminal intent. For many, this was proof that BBM, Facebook, and Twitter were forces for evil and that the authorities should block social media in times of trouble. But to blame the internet for propagating contagious ideas is a little like blaming trucks, planes and birds for spreading infectious viruses. Without trucks and planes there would be no oranges on British breakfast tables in winter and no summer holidays in Tuscany. Those criss-crossing lines at the end of Rise are what make global trade and travel possible. It is not the fault of the network that it also facilitates the spread of bird and swine flu. But if contagion is not equivalent to transmission in the virtual world of the internet, nor should we conflate viruses with transmission networks in the material world of biology. That is the trap epidemiologists fall into when they try to use mathematical models to make sense of real-life contagions. Just because the CDC was able to trace a pattern of sexual contacts between Gaetan Dugas and men infected with HIV in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other north America cities in the early 1980s, that does not make Dugas ‘patient zero’ any more than it makes the pilot jetting off at the end of Rise the progenitor of the downfall of the human race (for all we know there may well be other ‘patient zeros’ and other pilots). It simply makes them so many nodes in a network. Nor does the frequent recourse to metaphors of ‘financial contagion’ explain the present volatility of world stock markets. While it is tempting to see such volatility as a function of digitalisation, Harris is surely wrong to blame it on the internet’s tendency to exacerbate ‘human mood swings’. Rather, as the Bank of England pointed out in a recent report such volatility flows directly from the increasing complexity of such networks and the interconnectedness of modern financial institutions. By spreading defaults across the system, the bank argues, such linkages reduce the likelihood that the losses of a large institution like Lehman Brothers will trigger similar defaults by other bank and brokerage houses. At the same time, however, such linkages increase ‘the potential for contagion to spread more widely’. The result is what the bank call ‘a robust-yet-fragile tendency’ that makes the probability of contagion low, but the effects extremely widespread when problems arise.

European leaders dither while the Euro burns. Image courtesy of Patrick Blower.

This is the contagious moment we find ourselves in today and explains why, as European leaders dither over the scale of the Greek bail out, every day brings further plunges in the FTSE, Dow and Nikkei. Moreover, while it is true that these plunges may be exacerbated by hedge funds trading on fear much like Hoffman’s VIXAL-4 algorithm, it is the linkages between institutions—not the individual investors themselves—that spread that fear more widely. That is why restoring confidence is so much more of a challenge today that it was in 1932 when Franklin D. Roosevelt issued his famous peroration to the America people that they had ‘nothing to fear but fear itself’. Today, it is our very connectedness that makes us vulnerable to emotional and other forms of contagion, and the networks themselves that are the real source of instability and dread. – Mark Honigsbaum

Dying of nostalgia

Posted on October 13, 2011 by

Susan J. Matt is Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University, and a leading historian of emotions in the United States. Her first book, Keeping Up With the Joneses, was a study of envy in modern consumer society. Her latest work tackles another emotion: homesickness. Susan very kindly agreed to conduct an interview with the History of Emotions blog about her new book – Homesickness: An American History (Oxford University Press, 2011), explaining how homesickness and nostalgia were transformed from deadly maladies to allegedly un-American emotions.

Thomas Dixon [TD]: Hello, Susan, and thanks for talking to us. Perhaps I could start by asking you what got you interested in homesickness?

Susan Matt [SM]: The original impetus was that my own emotional experience of mobility didn’t match up with the mythology of American restlessness. Commentators like Tocqueville and Frederick Jackson Turner as well more modern observers all claimed Americans were naturally restless, that somehow it was in our cultural DNA to leave home. I didn’t find it so effortless or easy to move, and began to wonder if I was alone. Perhaps there was a flip side to American mobility–a hidden history of homesickness. Homesickness also interested me because it seemed in many ways to be the opposite of an emotion I had just been studying–envy. Envy sparks aspirations, pushes people forward, often causes mobility. Homesickness pulls backwards. Both emotions play a role in modern individualism in the U.S.. Americans are encouraged to repress homesickness so they can leave home, be independent, seek more of the world’s goods, act on their envy.

TD: It’s interesting that it was your own emotions that fuelled your desire to revisit their history. I suspect many historians of emotion are in that position. So, what surprised you most about what you discovered when you started digging around in the history of homesickness?

SM: First, how prevalent the emotion was. I thought it would be difficult to unearth, but instead, evidence of homesickness was abundant and easy to find in just about every archive I worked in. Secondly, and perhaps more provocatively, I was surprised at how many Americans died of homesickness, or nostalgia as it was called. I knew there had been European epidemics of nostalgia in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but didn’t know of American ones. But indeed, the disease of nostalgia was widely known in the United States–during the Civil War, there were 74 deaths from it on the Union side, and more than 5,200 cases of it in the Surgeon General’s records.

American sheet music of ‘Home, Sweet Home’ arranged for piano and violin, c. 1870s. Source of image: American History Online

It became such a problem that army bands were sometimes prohibited from playing “Home, Sweet Home,” which at that time, was the most popular song in the country. In peacetime, civilians suffered from nostalgia as well.  The prevalence and intensity of nostalgia and homesickness throughout U.S. history – from the colonial era to the present -ultimately led me to question whether we were and are the individualists that we are so widely reputed to be. I think we’re not.

TD: I’ve been struck too by the great power of the passions in earlier periods – to cause illness, madness or even death. Medical sources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abound with fatal bouts of emotion. Is it possible to pinpoint a date after which this changed – when homesickness and nostalgia became mere feelings rather than powerful and potentially fatal mental conditions?

SM: It gradually disappeared as a dangerous disease in the first half of the 20th century. The U.S. Army provides a useful gauge in its records. One soldier in the American Expeditionary Force reportedly died of nostalgia during World War I. Increasingly during the War, however, many of the symptoms associated with nostalgia came to be defined as signs of the newly established syndrome of shell shock. While the diagnosis of nostalgia stayed on the books up through World War II,  and while there were many reported cases of it among soldiers in that war, there were no deaths. In short, from the early twentieth century on, the number of cases of deadly nostalgia declined, although less lethal cases of homesickness continued (and continue) to abound. It seems worth noting that as nostalgia’s cultural meaning underwent this transformation, the tolerance for the acutely homesick declined, since their condition was now seen as less dire.

TD: Historically you clearly have a really fascinating story to tell about nostalgia and homesickness as modern emotions experienced, as all emotions always are, within a particular geographical and cultural situation, in this case in modern America. I wonder what you think about the contemporary importance of this research, and also of research into the history of emotions more broadly?

SM: The history of homesickness explains a great deal about modern American culture and our national identity. Adults in modern America have learned to repress overt expressions of homesickness, for it has come to connote immaturity, a lack of ambition, and failure. It is out of step with the ethos of modern capitalism, which prizes mobility and individualism. However, while they may not discuss their homesickness publicly, in daily habits and behaviors, American make their feelings about displacement manifest. From ethnic groceries that sell the tastes of faraway homes, to sports teams which symbolize loyalty to a hometown, to our addiction to Facebook, cell phones, and emails, Americans routinely show their preoccupation with staying connected to distant places and people. While we may think of ourselves as an individualistic society, our everyday lives suggest otherwise. And our history – full of people suffering and sometimes dying of homesickness -makes clear that mobility has in fact never been an innate trait of Americans. Instead, they had to learn to leave home, and they have still not completely mastered the art of rugged, restless individualism.

The history of the emotions offers historians and the public a new set of tools to assess the past. Rather than merely judging history on the basis of external behaviors, we can bring in people’s motivations and intentions. These often provide a completely different understanding of social life and revises many of our longstanding narratives about national identity.

TD: Let me end by thanking you very much, Susan, for giving us this extra insight into the thinking behind your important new book, which I’m sure anyone interested in the history of emotions will want to get hold of. And perhaps I could also mention a very useful overview of recent work on the history of emotions that Susan wrote for Emotion Review, which was published in January 2011.