Be not afraid!

Posted on June 15, 2011 by

There has been a series of fear-related British news stories during the last week.

Rowan Williams: "Government badly needs to hear just how much plain fear there is around such questions"

First there was the Archbishop of Canterbury, in an editorial for the New Statesman, warning the coalition government about the effects of their policies in such areas as education and youth services: ‘Government badly needs to hear just how much plain fear there is around such questions at present.’

Rowan Williams seems to want present-day politicians to tell voters not so much ‘I feel your pain’ as ‘I feel your fear’. But what work can the feeling of fear really do in any political argument? It has been notoriously misused by politicians in the past, more than any other emotion, to whip up suspicion, even hatred, of minority groups and immigrants.

Clearly aware of fear’s dodgy past as a political emotion, Williams adds an evasive rider: ‘To acknowledge the reality of fear is not necessarily to collude with it. But not to recognise how pervasive it is risks making it worse.’ In case there were any doubt as to whether the Archbishop really thinks that the goal of government is to manage the population’s emotions, he ends his piece with a vision of a better kind of democracy in which the key question about any policy would be whether it equips people to ‘engage generously’ with their community to build resourcefulness and ‘well-being’.

Then a few days later came another two newsworthy occurrences of fear. The Today Programme, on Monday morning, featured an interview with the dashing octogenarian racing driver, Sir Stirling Moss, announcing his retirement from competitive driving. The 81-year-old explained to John Humphrys how an unexpected feeling had come over him while driving his Porsche in a qualifying session at Le Mans over the weekend: ‘If I go as fast as I need to go, then I’m going to be scared; and I don’t want to be frightened’. Moss said this was the first time he’d felt fear behind the wheel of a racing car and he instantly decided to retire from competitive racing, getting out of the car and walking away at the end of that very lap.

Zeno of Citium: the founder of Stoicism who committed unassisted suicide

This wonderful story put me in mind of the ancient Stoics. Not only does Moss’s previous imperviousness to fear capture the Stoic ideal of mental calmness and freedom from all the troubling passions of the soul. His sudden and unhesitating decision to put an end to his career recalls the similarly final and immediate decisions taken by some of the great Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece to end not just their careers, but their lives. It was said, for instance, that the founder of the Stoic school, Zeno, lived to the age of 98 (or in some accounts 89, or in others 72) before interpreting a wound on his thumb (or his finger, or his toe) as a warning that it was time for him to depart and committing suicide on the spot.

The Stoics acknowledged that it was better to be healthy than ill, but ultimately they taught that it was not necessarily better to be alive than dead, especially if staying alive meant a loss of rationality and autonomy. It was for this reason that suicide was a common end for the true Stoic in the ancient world, and for this reason that Christians, despite sharing many moral ideals with the Stoics, always treated them with suspicion.

And it was the modern version of this ancient debate between Stoics and Christians which formed the background to the final appearance of fear in the news this week. Sir Terry Pratchett presented a controversial BBC television documentary about the final moments of a 71-year-old man suffering from motor neurone disease who had travelled to the famous Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to end his life by assisted suicide. Individuals who decide to die this way may be considered courageous, even fearless. But disability campaigner Liz Carr’s response was to say that she and other disabled older and terminally ill people are ‘quite fearful’ of what legalising assisted suicide would mean in terms of making vulnerable people feel pressured to ask for their lives to be ended. And so we are back with Rowan Williams’s suggestion: the fear felt by the vulnerable should alter public policy.

There are many possible moral, political, and religious reactions to fear. Most would agree that freedom from fear is one of the most valuable kinds of freedom, and one of the hardest to attain. While differing drastically in their attitudes to suicide, Christians and Stoics have always shared this aspiration to be free from fear. While the Stoic sage achieves it by letting go of their attachment to material goods and even to life itself, the Christian believer is encouraged to trust that there is a greater good beyond everything, even in the face of pain, injustice and death.

One of the phrases most frequently attributed to Jesus in the gospels is ‘Be not afraid’. Someone should tell Rowan Williams.

Thomas Dixon

Can we learn resilience?

Posted on June 3, 2011 by
Definition of Resilient

Building a resilient generation?

The Department for Education has just released a report which evaluates the effectiveness of ‘emotional resilience classes’ in British schools. The classes were designed by Martin Seligman, professor at Penn University and the inventor of Positive Psychology, and rolled out in 22 secondary schools in the UK in 2007, then evaluated over the following three years. If the classes were shown to reduce children’s emotional problems, there was a good chance they would be introduced into the national curriculum.

Unfortunately, the final report is not exactly a home run. It found a “significant short-term impact” on students’ depression symptom scores, but that impact faded off soon after the classes finished. There was no impact on life satisfaction scores, on academic scores, on behaviour scores or absence scores. The only area the classes seemed to have a significant and lasting impact was on the worst-performing children – who may have simply benefitted from receiving special attention.

This latest report follows on the heels of another report into the British curriculum’s existing emotional well-being subject – Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL). The SEAL report, produced by the University of Manchester and published in October 2010, also found no significant impact of SEAL classes on either students’ emotional well-being or their academic scores.

That report has led the Department of Education to question whether any new funding should be put into SEAL classes. The DoE has been looking around for alternate approaches to teaching well-being, which are more evidence-based and scripted than the rather free-form SEAL approach. There was hope that the emotional resilience (ER) classes would provide a strong alternative to SEAL. The ER classes enjoyed strong political backing, through Richard Layard of the LSE, Geoff Mulgan of the Young Foundation, and Anthony Seldon of Wellington College – the three founders of Action for Happiness.

However, it now looks unlikely that the ER classes will become part of the national curriculum, at least in their present form. Richard Layard told the RSA last month that he was examining various different approaches to teaching well-being from around the world, suggesting the search is not over for an effective way to teach well-being.

The report hasn’t been reported yet in the UK press, though I wonder if the US press will get hold of it eventually. The Pentagon recently introduced Seligman’s resilience classes to the entire US Army, at teh cost of $125 million, without ever doing a pilot programme.  The fact this latest pilot study found little emotional impact of the classes is potentially embarrassing for the much more ambitious and expensive US programme.

Still, a three-year pilot programme is not exactly measuring ‘resilience’, is it? For that, you’d need to see how the students responded to major life challenges over the course of several years. You’d also need to see the effects of the ER classes over the long-term, particularly to study the incidence of depression or other emotional problems in ER students when they’re 16-22, which is when emotional disorders typically hit. This study only looked at children from the ages of 11 to 13.

Personally, there is much that I like about Seligman’s resilience classes. They teach young people the ABC model of emotions – the idea, taken from CBT, that our emotions follow our beliefs, and therefore we should learn to Socratically examine our beliefs, to see whether they are coherent and rational, and to understand how they lead to our emotions.

This approach was derived by the inventors of  CBT from ancient Greek philosophy, particularly from Socrates and the Stoics. Indeed, Aaron Beck, one of the founders of CBT, says that CBT teaches people the ‘Socratic method’ for scrutinizing their own beliefs and assumptions. So in some ways, emotional resilience classes take education back to its classical roots. They re-connect us to the classical idea that young people should be taught not just how to pass exams, but how to govern themselves, how to live good lives.

However, in some ways the ER classes are very different from the classical model of philosophy. The ER classes are a tightly-scripted programme, which presents itself as a science, and which adolescents are expected simply to learn and absorb, without question or debate.

By contrast, philosophy in the ancient world trained young people how to think, how to debate, how to dispute. They depended much more on the personal relationship between the teacher and the student, rather than on any pre-prepared ‘script’. A good teacher did not force-feed answers to the student, but rather taught the student how to arrive at their own conclusions.

There is another movement in the UK, to teach ‘critical thinking’ or ‘reasoning’ skills in schools. It’s being spear-headed by the Philosophy Shop, a charity run by philosophy graduates Peter and Emma Worley. Their approach is much less explicitly aimed at emotional well-being, and more at sharpening young people’s reasoning skills to help them become ‘independent learners and thinkers’. In other words – it tries to train young people how to be critical, rational and autonomous, rather than merely ‘happy’. However, the roots of this approach are not so different from the classical Socratic roots of the ER classes – both teach the ‘Socratic method’, but they take that method in different directions, present it differently, and have different stated goals: one tries to teach ‘well-being’, the other to teach ‘critical thinking’ and ‘independence’.

A third movement argues that you can’t teach ‘emotional resilience’ just in the classroom, that we learn it by doing, not thinking. We learn it through volunteering, through outdoor challenges, through sports, through social services, even through military service – all of which, it is argued, train us to face challenges and to work together for the common good. This is the approach of the Scouts, the Raleigh charity, the Duke of Edinburgh award, and the government’s new National and International Youth Volunteering Service. This approach also has its roots in classical culture, particularly in the pedagogical ethos of Sparta, and its method of training young people to be resilient by taking them out of the classroom and putting them into challenging situations.

I wonder if the merits of all three approaches can be combined. You train young people how to rationally examine and consider their own beliefs about themselves (the emotional resilience approach). And you train them to critically examine and debate broader arguments about society, ethics and the Good Life (the critical thinking approach). And, finally, you get young people to put their resilience skills to the test in challenging situations (the outdoor challenge approach).

A combined approach would, perhaps, score better both in improving young people’s emotional well-being, and their academic scores. It should train young people both how to consider an argument, how to detect illogical or biased arguments in politics and the media, how to argue a point-of-view in a debate. But it would also turn these critical skills inward – teaching young people how to consider their own beliefs and see how they lead to their emotional reactions. The classes would teach them to look both inward and outward with the same rigorous Socratic enquiry. That, it seems to me, would be the best approach.

Jules Evans

http://www.politicsofwellbeingcom

Emotional Animals No. 1

Posted on June 2, 2011 by

Do animals have emotions? The histories of science, literature, philosophy and religion have offered up a range of answers.  This series of occasional essays on emotional animals in history offers some materials with which to think about the question.

No. 1. A Weeping Horse in Augsburg, 1705

George Stubbs, 'Mares and foals in a landscape', 1768

A popular travel book of the mid-eighteenth century by a certain Monsieur de Blainville, includes the tale of a wonderful little horse, encountered in the German city of Augsburg in 1705. This creature outdid even Alexander the Great’s famous horse, Bucephalus, for its ingenuity and ability. It was, Blainville trumpeted, “the greatest rarity of its kind in the world”.

This creature could do standard horse-like things such as jumping through very narrow hoops, but additionally could dance all sorts of dances, whether lively or more grave, including the Minuet and the Saraband; could march on two, three or four legs; could simulate lameness and death; and could discriminate between red and white wine, as well as playing “an infinity of other pranks”. The wonderful horse’s powers of reason and intelligence were proved by his ability to tell the time on a watch, or the number of points on a playing card, by stamping his foot the requisite number of times.

Most remarkably of all, the wonderful horse of Augsburg wept. When his first owner had died, the “poor beast showed such grief that he shed tears, would not eat for three days, and had almost died of hunger”. “What more is necessary”, Blainville asked, “to entitle this animal to be called a prodigy?”

The idea that horses shed tears of grief when their masters died was an ancient one, affirmed by both Pliny and Aristotle, also appearing in medieval bestiaries, and in the thirteenth-century text De Animalibus, by Thomas Aquinas’s teacher Albertus Magnus.

Blainville’s account reveals that the idea persisted well into the modern period, even after René Descartes had asserted, in the seventeenth century, that animals were automata with no mental life at all. Indeed, Blainville ends his account of the wonderful horse with an explicit attack on those philosophers, including Descartes, who dared to claim that animals were mere clockwork machines.

Blainville’s plea for the mental life of the “brutes” was couched in empiricist terms: it was a matter of observation. Philosophers might think they had constructed a clever theoretical system proving human reason and brute instinct were completely distinct, and showing that animals had no consciousness, no reason, and no soul, Blainville wrote, but “I must believe what I see”. And he knew what he had seen in Augsburg: a weeping and reasoning horse that could join with a chorus of other animals in retorting to Descartes: “We think, and therefore we are.”

Blainville’s argument in favour of animal minds moves on, at this point, to consider the amazing cunning displayed by monkeys thieving collaboratively at the Cape of Good Hope.

Thomas Dixon

A Sentimental Journey

Posted on May 24, 2011 by

Royal Wedding Memorabilia. The future historian’s conundrum.

On my way to the US to escape the Royal Wedding, I killed time by selecting the King’s Speech on the in-flight movie. Having somehow conspired to miss Colin Firth’s Oscar winning portrayal of George VI the first time round I was keen to see it for myself and judge whether he deserved his garlands.

I don’t consider myself a blubber, but by the time Firth emerged from the sound studio at Buckingham Palace I don’t mind admitting I was in tears. The odd thing was the following morning my lachrymosity had worsened. Awaking bleary-eyed at 6am to catch a glimpse of ‘that dress’, I wept buckets as Michael Middleton escorted his daughter up the aisle before offering her up to Wills and a grateful nation.  In my semi-comatose state I was even prepared to overlook Piers Morgan’s disingenuous commentary for CNN and his ludicrous declaration that ‘the British monarchy was back’.

As a republican and someone who studies emotions for a living, I ought to be immune to such sentimental claptrap. That I am not cannot simply be put down to jet-lag and being far from home.

Royal weddings, like Firth’s artful portrayal of George VI, are a performance. To succeed they must persuade us not only to suspend disbelief but to invest in the delusion that but foran accident of birth we too could be walking up the aisle or, in my case, giving away my daughter’s hand in marriage.

Just as the hypnotist uses suggestion to achieve mastery over his mesmeric subject, so the Windsors beguile us, their subjects, with an artful combination of pageantry and a narrative rich in symbolic portents. No matter that we have been here before. Unlike in 1981 when Charles married Di, this time we are told the fairytale really has come true.

I have no idea whether it is true romance this time but on April 29th, like billions of others watching around the globe, I suspended disbelief and surrendered to the emotion of the occasion. Though isolated and alone in my hotel room, thanks to the magic of TV I felt intimately connected to the crowds camped outside the Abbey and along the Mall – hence when they cried, I cried too.

Such emotional expressions, I would argue, are mere reflexes, involuntary responses to the power of ceremony and ritual to move us in mysterious ways. As the King’s Speech showed, communications technology is crucial to this process. The advent of radio massed people in new ways, allowing both the house of Windsor and Adolf Hitler to reach out to and manipulate what Gustave le Bon called the ‘crowd mind’. By contrast, in the Victorian era, when news of a royal marriage or death was conveyed by the electric telegraph mass outpourings of joy or grief were less predictable — and usually delayed until the following morning.

In the modern era, of course, thanks to television and the internet, the process is virtually instantaneous. When Charles married Di, for instance, it is said that during the dull bits, such as the signing of the register when people got up to boil their kettles, the National Grid became ‘a barometer of national feeling’. In April 2011 the best barometer was You Tube’s ‘Royal Wedding channel’ where at time of writing Kate and Wills’s kiss on the Buck palace balcony has registered in excess of two million views. Like the Westminster Abbey verger Ben Sheward’s spontaneous cartwheels of joy along the red carpet (544,000 views to date), these ‘moments’ of emotion now appear on an endless loop, captured for posterity. Watching them in 100 years time, I wonder what historians will make of them and whether they will weep in sympathy or shake their heads with incredulity.

Mark Honigsbaum

Welcome to our blog!

Posted on May 21, 2011 by

Welcome to our blog!

The Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions was set up in 2008 to bring together scholars, writers and artists exploring the ways our feelings have changed over time.

The idea for a blog arose because members of the Centre were keen to find a medium for sharing their ideas with a wider public, responding quickly to current events and inviting the contributions of others.

From reflections on contemporary politics of feeling (Cameron’s Happiness Index anyone?), to quirky microhistories in the Museum of the Emotions, this blog is a collective endeavour in which we put our attitudes towards emotions –  and explanations for why we have them at all – into historical context.

We hope you enjoy reading and participating in it. If you would like to contribute, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Thomas Dixon and Tiffany Watt-Smith