The Happiness Industry Page 24
If we know most of this, why does this critical discourse not achieve more political bite? If we want to live in a way that is socially and psychologically prosperous, and not simply highly competitive, lonely and materialistic, there is a great deal of evidence from clinical psychology, social epidemiology, occupational health, sociology and community psychology regarding what is currently obstructing this possibility. The problem is that, in the long history of scientifically analysing the relationship between subjective feelings and external circumstances, there is always the tendency to see the former as more easily changeable than the latter. As many positive psychologists now enthusiastically encourage people to do, if you can’t change the cause of your distress, try and alter the way you react and feel instead. This is also how critical politics has been neutralized.
This is not to say that altering social and economic structures is easy. It is frustrating, unpredictable and often deeply disappointing. What is hard to deny, however, is that it becomes virtually impossible to do in any legitimate way once institutions and individuals themselves have become so preoccupied by measuring and manipulating individual feelings and choices. If there are to be social and political solutions to the problems which cause misery, then the first step must be to stop viewing those problems in purely psychological terms. And yet the utilitarian and behaviourist visions of an individual as predictable, malleable and controllable (so long as there is sufficient surveillance) have not triumphed merely due to the collapse of collectivist alternatives. It has been repeatedly pushed by specific elites, for specific political and economic purposes, and is experiencing another major political push right now.
Scientific tramlines
Since the 1980s, there has been a succession of ‘decades of the brain’. George Bush Snr announced that the 1990s would be the ‘decade of the brain’. The European Commission launched its own equivalent ‘decade’ in 1992. In 2013, the Obama administration announced a new decade-long programme of investment in neuroscience. Each of these has ratcheted up the amount of public investment in brain research to an ever-higher level. The Obama BRAIN Initiative, as it is known, is projected to cost $3 billion by the time it has run its course. The European Commission’s ‘FP7’ research funding round saw nearly €2 billion invested in neuroscientific projects between 2007–13.
The ‘military industrial complex’, as President Eisenhower named it in 1961, has been the major driver of the neurosciences in the United States. The Pentagon sees new opportunities to influence enemy combatants and produce more ‘resilient’ US soldiers. The neuroscientist Paul Zak, whose work has focused on the social and economic importance of oxytocin, includes the Pentagon among his various consultancy clients. In that case, the interest is in how US soldiers can behave in ways more likely to win trust from civilians in countries they’ve invaded. Zak offers advice on the neural underpinnings of moral engagement on the ground.
That industry is heavily invested in brain research is unsurprising. The pharmaceutical industry has some very obvious incentives to push the boundaries of science in this area, while neuromarketers maintain the hope that the brain’s ‘buy button’ will eventually be identified once and for all. It is then only a question of working out how such a button might be pushed by advertising. The implications of neuroscience for anyone seeking to influence and control people – be they employees, delinquents, soldiers, ‘problem families’, addicts or whatever – are quite obvious, even if they are occasionally exaggerated. Crudely causal explanations of why an individual took decision x, as opposed to y, and how to alter this in future, have a lucrative market among the powerful.
The political focus upon the brain as an individual organ may only date back to the early 1990s, but it is in keeping with a much longer-standing tradition which has been producing alliances among university researchers, governments and businesses since the late nineteenth century. It is well known that a great deal of research investment in behavioural science and ‘decision research’ during the 1950s was driven by military imperatives of the Cold War.14 The University of Michigan, which has been a leading centre of this research since World War Two, and occupies a central place in the evolution of behavioural economics, is a regular recipient of defence-related research contracts, to better understand teamwork and decision-making in combat situations.
The science of ‘social contagion’, to which the 2014 Facebook mood manipulation experiment contributed, also has links to US defence interests. The Pentagon’s Minerva Research Initiative was launched in 2008 to gather social scientific knowledge on issues and regions of strategic importance to the United States.15 This included a contract with Cornell University to investigate how civil unrest spreads as a social contagion. One of the recipients of Minerva funding at Cornell was communications professor Jeffrey Hancock, who was also one of the researchers on the Facebook study. This is not to imply ‘guilt by association’ but simply to point out that certain types of knowledge are useful to certain types of agency, with particular strategic interests.
Pop behaviourism, offering to reveal the secrets of social influence, has become a booming area of non-fiction publishing, making minor celebrities of psychologists such as Dan Ariely and Robert Cialdini and behavioural economists such as Richard Thaler. Speaking fees for these academics range between $50,000–$75,000 a day, giving an indication of the types of network that their knowledge is fed into.16 The circuit of behavioural expertise feeds directly into the marketing and advertising industries, as it has done pretty much ever since the American visitors to Wilhem Wundt’s laboratory returned home at the end of the nineteenth century.
Few of these examples are concerned with happiness or well-being as such, although neuroscientists now profess to ‘see’ emotions, affect, depression and happiness as embodied and behavioural phenomena. In that respect, happiness is being finally emptied of its subjective dimension once and for all, and becoming rendered an objective, behavioural event, to be inspected by experts. Whether or not the concern is explicitly Benthamite, in the sense of maximizing a positive emotion within the individual, what all of these traditions share is a certain political co-option of psychological science, in which human activities and feelings are studied so as to better understand how they might be predicted and controlled.
Utilitarian, biological and behaviourist representations of human life have acquired a near-monopoly on plausibility in the West today. But this is because the greatest sources of power and wealth in human history have been mobilized towards ensuring that this is the case. We might well describe this as ‘ideology’. But to bracket it in this way is to risk ignoring the ways in which a certain vision of individual freedom is theorized, developed, sustained and enforced, thanks to extensive technological and institutional apparatuses. This does not occur simply in some ghostly way thanks to the market or capitalism or neoliberalism. It requires a lot of work, power and money in order to be as successful as it is.
The greatest successes of behavioural and happiness science occur when individuals come to interpret and narrate their own lives according to this body of expertise. As laypeople, we come to attribute our failures and sadness to our brains or our troublesome minds. Operating with constantly split personalities, we train our selves to be more suspicious of our thoughts, or more tolerant of our feelings, with the encouragement of cognitive behavioural therapy. In ways that will baffle cultural historians a century from now, we even engage in quantified self-monitoring of our own accord, volunteering information on our behaviours, nutrition and moods to databases, maybe out of sheer desperation to be part of something larger than just ourselves. Once we are split down the middle in this way, a relationship – perhaps a friendship? – with oneself becomes possible, which when taken too literally breeds loneliness and/or narcissism.
Mystical seductions
What would an escape from this hard psychological science look like? If politics and organization have been excessively psychologized, reducing every soci
al and economic problem to one of incentives, behaviour, happiness and the brain, what would it take for them to be de-psychologized? One answer is a constant temptation, but we should be wary of it. This is to flip the harsh, rationalist objective science of the mind (and brain) into its opposite, namely a romantic, subjective revelling in the mysteries of consciousness, freedom and sensation.
Confronted by a social world that has been reduced to quasi-mechanical natural forces of cause and effect, the lure of mysticism grows all the greater. In the face of the radical objectivism of neuroscience and behaviourism, which purport to render every inner feeling visible to the outside world, there is a commensurate appeal in radical subjectivism, which claims that what really matters is entirely private to the individual concerned. The problem is that these two philosophies are entirely compatible with one another; there is no friction between them, let alone conflict. This is a case of what Gustav Fechner described as ‘psychophysical parallelism’.
For evidence of this, see how the promotion of mindfulness (and many versions of positive psychology) slips seamlessly between offering scientific facts about what our brains or minds are ‘doing’ and quasi-Buddhist injunctions to simply sit, be and ‘notice’ events as they flow in and out of the consciousness. The limitation of the behavioural and neurosciences is that, while they purport to ignore subjective aspects of human freedom, they speak a language which is primarily meaningful to expert researchers in universities, governments and businesses. By focusing on whatever can be rendered ‘objective’, they leave a gap for a more ‘subjective’ and passive discourse. New age mysticism plugs this gap.
Many happiness advocates, such as Richard Layard, work on both fronts simultaneously. They analyse official statistics, draw on the lessons of neuroscience, mine data and trace behaviours to produce their own objective view of what makes people happy. And then they push for new ‘secular religions’, meditation practices and mindfulness, which will provide the narrative through which the non-scientist can master his own well-being. The result is that the powerful and the powerless are speaking different languages, with the latter’s consequently incapable of troubling the former’s. Nothing like a public denunciation or critique of the powerful is possible under these conditions.
The language and theories of expert elites are becoming more idiosyncratic and separate from those of the public. How ‘they’ narrate human life and how ‘we’ do so are pulling apart from each other, which undermines the very possibility of inclusive political deliberation. For example, positive psychology stresses that we should all stop comparing ourselves to each other and focus on feeling more grateful and empathetic instead. But isn’t comparison precisely what happiness measurement is there to achieve? Doesn’t giving one person a ‘seven’ and another person a ‘six’ work so as to render their differences comparable? The morality that is being offered by way of therapy is often entirely insulated from the logic of the science and technologies which underpin it.
This problem is exacerbated in the age of ubiquitous digital tracking and the big data that results. In his book Infoglut, the critical media theorist Mark Andrejevic looks at how the phenomenon of excessive information requires and facilitates new ways of navigating knowledge. But, as he shows, these have extreme forms of inequality built into them. There are those who possess the power of algorithmic analysis and data mining to navigate a world in which there are too many pieces of data to be studied individually. These include market research agencies, social media platforms and the security services. But for the rest of us, impulse and emotion have become how we orientate and simplify our decisions. Hence the importance of fMRI and sentiment analysis in the digital age: tools which visualize, measure and codify our feelings become the main conduit between an esoteric, expert discourse of mathematics and facts, and a layperson’s discourse of mood, mystical belief and feeling. ‘We’ simply feel our way around, while ‘they’ observe and algorithmically analyse the results. Two separate languages are at work.
The terminal dystopia of Benthamism, as touched on in Chapter 7, is of a social world that has been rendered totally objective, to the point where the distinction between the objective and the subjective is overcome. Once happiness is understood completely, the scientist will know where and when it takes place, regardless of the person supposedly experiencing it. The need to learn from the ‘verbal behaviour’ of the person being studied will be eliminated once and for all by sophisticated forms of mind reading. Our faces, eyes, body movements and brains will communicate our pleasures and pains on our behalf, freeing decision-makers from the ‘tyranny of sounds’. This may be an exaggeration of any feasible political society, but it represents an animating ideal for how particular traditions of psychological and political science progress. Mysticism may provide private philosophical succour in such a society, but also a final political quietism.
‘I know how you feel’
Witnessing someone else’s brain ‘light up’ is something that costs a lot of money. A state of the art fMRI scanner costs $1 million, with annual operating costs of between $100,000–$300,000. The insights that such technologies offer into mental illness, brain defects and injuries are considerable. Gradually, our everyday language of moods, choices and tastes is being translated into terms that correspond to different physical parts of our brains. Neuromarketers can now specify that one advertisement causes activity in a given part of the brain, while a different advertisement does not. This is believed to have significant commercial implications. But to what extent does so much technological progress aid us in a more fundamental problem of social life, that of understanding other people?
When Bentham wrote that ‘nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure’, and declared that these entities were potentially measurable, he affirmed a certain philosophical approach in which the questions of psychology were not significantly different from those of the natural sciences. Indeed, psychology (and politics) would become truly scientific once it was grounded in matters as ‘natural’ and ‘objective’ as biology or chemistry. By the same token, human beings have nothing to distinguish them from other animals other than their particular biological features. All animals suffer, and humans are no different. In various ways, many of the characters explored over the course of this book have shared this philosophical prejudice. Our concepts have been shaped accordingly. Our notions of ‘behaviour’, ‘stress’ and ‘learned helplessness’ all originate with animal experiments using rats, pigeons and dogs.
But what if this philosophy is grounded in a mistake? And what if it is a mistake that we keep on making, no matter how advanced our brain-scanning, mind-measuring and facial-reading devices become? In fact, what if we actually become more liable to make this mistake as our technology grows more sophisticated? For Ludwig Wittgenstein, and those who have followed him, a statement such as Bentham’s about our ‘two sovereign masters’ is based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of psychological language. To rediscover a different notion of politics, we might first have to excavate a different way of understanding the feelings and behaviours of others.
To understand what a word means, Wittgenstein argued, is to understand how it is used, meaning that the problem of understanding other people is first and foremost a social one. Equally, to understand what another person is doing is to understand what their actions mean, both for them and for others who are involved. If I ask the question, ‘What is that person feeling?’ I can answer by interpreting their behaviour, or by asking them. The answer is not inside their head or body, to be discovered, but lies in how the two of us interact. There is nothing stopping me from being broadly right about what they are feeling, so long as that is recognized as an interpretation of what they are doing and communicating, or what their behaviour means. I am not going to discover what they are feeling as some sort of fact, in the way that I can discover their body temperature. Nor would they be reporting a fact, should they t
ell me what they’re thinking.
This points towards the unusual quality of psychological language. And neuroscientists and behaviourists repeatedly tie themselves in knots over precisely this.17 To understand a psychological term such as ‘happiness’, ‘mood’ or ‘motivation’ is to understand it both in terms of how it appears in others (that is, as behaviour) and in terms of how it occurs in oneself (that is, as an experience). I know what ‘happiness’ means, because I know how to describe it in others, and to notice it in my own life. But this is an unusual type of language. If one ever believes that ‘happiness’ refers to an objective thing, be it inside you, or inside me, I have misunderstood the word.
‘Psychological attributes’, Wittgenstein argued, ‘are attributes of the animal as a whole’. It is nonsense to say that ‘my knee wants to go for a walk’, because only a human being can want something. But due to the hubris of scientific psychology and neuroscience, it has become a commonplace to say, for example, ‘Your mind wants you to buy this product’ or ‘My brain keeps forgetting things’. When we do this, we forget that wanting and forgetting are actions which only make any sense on the basis of an interpretation of human beings, embedded in social relations, with intentions and purposes. Behaviourism seeks to exclude all of that, but in the process does considerable violence to the language we use to understand other people.