The Happiness Industry Read online

  The main scientific stumbling block for Bentham’s entire enterprise was one category of variation in particular, namely ‘intensity’. How could a scientist, legislator, punisher or policy-maker know how intense a particular pleasure or pain was? Of course one might draw on one’s own experience through introspection, but that is scarcely a very scientific approach. Or one might ask people to report on their experiences using their own words. But then wouldn’t utilitarianism be drawn back into the hall of mirrors that is philosophical language, the ‘tyranny of sounds’ through which we describe what it is like to be human? Measuring the intensity of different pleasures and pains was the technical task on which the Benthamite project would stand or fall.

  How to measure?

  The eighteenth century was a time of great inventiveness in the creation of measurement tools. The thermometer was invented in 1724, the sextant (which measures angles between any visible objects, such as stars) in 1757, and the marine chronometer in 1761. The introduction of new measuring tools and standards was one of the first achievements of the French revolutionaries in the 1790s. This involved the commissioning of an original platinum metre, the famous mètre des archives, which was placed in a vault in the National Archives in Paris.

  The need for reliable standardized measures cut to the heart of the Enlightenment, whose high point coincided with the first half of Bentham’s career. As Immanuel Kant defined it in 1784, Enlightenment meant mankind escaping its ‘self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another’.12 Unlike their predecessors, who would allow religious and political authorities to dictate truth from falsehood, right from wrong, the ‘mature’ and Enlightened citizen would draw on nothing but his own judgement. The motto of Enlightenment, Kant suggested, was sapare aude – dare to know. The critical individual mind was the only authoritative barometer of truth. But for this reason, it was equally important that everybody was using the same yardsticks of comparison, or the whole project would collapse into a relativist babble of subjective perspectives.

  Bentham hoped to cast a similarly scientific, sceptical eye over the workings of politics, punishment and law. In place of unquestioned beliefs about justice or common values, Bentham insisted that we should know what will make people happier, and to treat every person’s feelings as of equal value. He knew precisely how to frame the scientific question – does this policy, law or punishment create more or less pleasure across society as a whole?

  But what type of measuring tool was available to gather the answers? It’s all very well feeling empathetic to the suffering of others, as Bentham undoubtedly did, but without a standard through which different pleasures and pains can be compared, the utilitarian is exercising guesswork. On the other hand, surely the very nature of pleasant or painful sensations is that they are subjective. The search for a common measure of happiness is fraught with difficulty.

  Despite being critical to the viability of his political project, Bentham dedicated surprisingly little attention to this problem. Occasionally, he suggested that the ‘greatest happiness’ principle of political judgement was just that, a principle, which could never realistically be converted into a quantitative science. But given the appeal to hard empirical reality that is threaded through Bentham’s psychology, and his scathing remarks about all forms of philosophical abstraction, one has to take seriously the sense in which he did intend to rebuild politics and law on technical forms of measurement and calculation. If happiness were the only human good on which it is possible to speak scientifically, then it would be strange if we didn’t then pursue it using scientific methods. So we return to the problem: How is the intensity of a pleasant or unpleasant feeling to be measured? How does utility manifest itself in such a way that it can be grasped by measurement?

  Bentham suggests only two tentative answers to this question, neither of which he pursued in any practical or experimental way. Both involved the identification of proxies for happiness, rather than a claim that feelings themselves could be grasped. But in each case, he unwittingly hinted towards vast zones of scientific enquiry which would later be explored by psychologists, marketers, policy-makers, doctors, psychiatrists, human resources experts, social media analysts, economists, neuroscientists and individuals themselves.

  The first of Bentham’s answers was that the human pulse rate might provide the indicator of pleasure that could be used to solve the measurement problem.13 He wasn’t particularly taken with this idea himself, but he recognized that the body offered certain measurable symptoms of what the mind was experiencing. As happiness is ultimately an assemblage of pleasant feeling, the notion that one might be able to discover happiness levels via the body is not so surprising. In everyday life, we intuitively understand this, in how we read another’s facial expression or body language. A science of such signs might therefore be possible. Pulse rate would appear to offer the possibility of a hard, quantitative science of well-being that transcends culture. Words can deceive, but our heart rate does not.

  Bentham’s second answer, on which he was far keener, was that money might be used. If two different goods can command an identical monetary price, then it can be assumed that they generate the same quantity of utility for the purchaser. By making this claim, Bentham was well ahead of his time. Economists would only catch up with this analysis some thirty years after his death, but since Bentham was interested in what governments could do to influence general public happiness, rather than what occurred in market transactions between private individuals, he had little concern with pursuing this idea as an economist. Nevertheless, by putting out there the idea that money might have some privileged relationship to our inner experience, beyond the capabilities of nearly any other measuring instrument, Bentham set the stage for the entangling of psychological research and capitalism that would shape the business practices of the twentieth century.

  These were and remain the options: money or the body. Economics or physiology. Payment or diagnosis. If politics were to become scientific and emancipated from abstract nonsense, it is through economics, physiology or some combination of the two that the project would be realized. When the iPhone 6 was released in September 2014, its two major innovations were quite telling: one app which monitors bodily activity, and another which can be used for in-store payments. Whenever experts seek to witness our shopping habits, our brains or our stress levels, they are contributing to the project that Bentham had mapped out. The status of money in this science is intriguing. While political and moral concepts are attacked as empty, nonsensical abstractions, somehow the language of pounds and pence is viewed as having some firm and natural relationship to our inner feelings. The exceptional status attributed to economics from the late nineteenth century onwards, as closer to a natural science than a social one, is one legacy of this worldview.

  The problem of measurement may seem like a nerdish matter of scientific methodology. Surely we all know what Bentham was getting at when he said that government should pursue the greatest happiness of all. Do we really need to get fixated on the details of how to calculate this? Of course, we can allow Bentham the status of a philosopher and ignore his inventive and technical aspirations. We can look at how utilitarianism works in the abstract, by playing analytical games in the philosophy seminar room.

  It is not clear that Bentham would have been very happy with such a legacy. And it is less clear that this is what his most important legacy has actually been. The technical, calculative, methodological problems of Benthamism, in various guises, are arguably the most transformative in how they have come to structure our political, economic, medical and personal lives. For this reason, whether happiness is to be indicated via the body (such as through pulse rate) or via money may prove to be of the utmost importance for how utilitarianism has actually set about constructing the world around us. However, any systematic attempt to construct quantitative measures of sensation would not begin until a few years after B
entham’s death in 1832.

  Weight-lifting in Leipzig

  On 22 October 1850, a second ‘eureka’ moment took place, this time in Leipzig, Germany. Gustav Fechner, a theologiancum-physicist who had recently emerged from a protracted nervous breakdown, suddenly realized that the mind–body problem, which preoccupied so many German philosophers, might be solvable through mathematics. He recorded the date of this breakthrough in his diary.

  The relationship of the mind to the physical world, including the body, is the foundational problem of modern philosophy. René Descartes’ doubt about the reality of the physical world, combined with his certainty of his own existence, established a dualism between the realm of thought and that of physical things. Dualism is an unwieldy philosophical position to hold, which always runs the risk of a reductionism in one direction or the other. Either the entire world might get reduced to an effect of the thinking mind (idealism), or thinking can be reduced to a merely physical occurrence, subject to natural forces (empiricism), rather as Bentham had assumed. Various Enlightenment thinkers grappled with this, most notably Kant, who believed he had avoided either fate by systematically distinguishing matters of scientific knowledge from matters of moral and philosophical principle. The human mind was, for Kant, something which fell firmly into the latter category, rendering any science of the psyche impossible.

  Fechner was a dualist, but of a peculiar sort. His ideas were formed by a highly eclectic intellectual background, which put him in an unusual position with respect to traditional philosophical problems. Fechner was the son of a pastor, who (like Bentham’s father) taught him Latin when he was a small child. He registered to study medicine at the University of Leipzig, but took the opportunity while there to attend lectures in botany, zoology, physics and chemistry. At the same time, he was exposed to many of the excesses of German idealist philosophy, including Schelling’s philosophy of nature, romanticism and Hegel. Early in his academic career, he carried out experiments with electricity, while also getting drawn into theological debates about the nature of the soul. The separate domains that we now know as ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’ remained entangled in the German universities of the 1830s.

  Nowadays, Fechner might well be described as a new age thinker. His genius was to find a way of bringing his disparate intellectual interests together, remaining a philosopher and a scientist, a metaphysician and a physician. In the process, he brought questions of the mind (which Kant had stipulated lay beyond the realms of knowledge) into the purview of science. For this reason, Fechner represents one of the key figures in the development of what we now know as psychology.

  In what way would mathematics be helpful in solving the mind–body problem? The answer derived from Fechner’s engagement with physics. The principle of the ‘conservation of energy’ had been formulated by a number of German physicists over the course of the 1840s, with transformative implications for the understanding of basic matter. This stated that energy is indestructible: it can be altered in its form, but not its quantity. If heat turns into light, or coal into heat, so the principle states, then we can assume that a single quantity of energy has been conserved along the way. This might be seen as another variant of monism. In the context of the industrial revolution, this discovery was a source of tremendous optimism that there was no limit to how efficient technology could become.

  The power of mathematics to explain all forms of change was greatly increased as a result of this breakthrough in physics. An underlying quantitative stability had been unearthed. Fechner’s innovation was to extend this same principle to questions that had previously resided in the terrain of philosophy. If the physicists were right, then even the mind could be included in this mathematical framework. What is interesting about Fechner’s breakthrough was that it didn’t simply propose a form of biological reductionism. He was adamantly not suggesting that the mind was constituted by physical matter, but that ‘the will, the thought, the whole mind may be as free as it may be, yet it will be able to exercise its freedom only by means of, not counter to, the general laws of kinetic energy’.14 Energy, as Fechner understood it, traversed the border between mind and body, obeying laws of mathematics as it did so.

  The doctrine that Fechner proposed, known as ‘psychophysics’, argued that mind and matter are separate entities but must nevertheless have some stable, mathematical relationship to one another.15 In certain respects, Fechner’s theory of psychology was similar to Bentham’s. He too was convinced that people pursued pleasure, although less as a matter of natural cause and effect and more as a matter of spontaneous libidinous desire. (He coined the term ‘pleasure principle’, which Sigmund Freud later adopted.)16

  Fechner distinguished himself from Bentham’s English empiricism in two respects. Firstly, philosophy held no threat for him. Words such as ‘soul’, ‘mind’, ‘freedom’ or ‘God’ referred to real things, albeit not in any physical or measurable sense. This was evidence of Hegel’s influence. The philosophical innovation of psychophysics was to suggest that these entities could become known via the physical body in certain ways. The conservation of energy, as it passed between physical and non-physical realms, meant that philosophical ideas must sit in some stable mathematical relation to material and bodily things.

  Fechner was therefore a dualist, in the sense that he maintained a belief in two parallel realms, one of philosophical ideas, the other of scientific facts. What distinguished him from philosophical dualists, such as Descartes and Kant, was a somewhat mystical belief that the two were in some mathematical harmony. Industrial metaphors were helpful here, which speaks of the economic context in which he was working. A steam engine involves intangible forces at work within a physical entity; likewise, a human being must be understood as an alliance of the immaterial mind and the material body.17

  Secondly, Fechner was intent on discovering how this mathematical relation actually worked in practice. From 1855, he set about this with a series of arcane experiments, in which he lifted objects of subtly different weights, to test how changes in physical weight correlated to changes in subjective sensation. If I lift two very similarly weighted objects, precisely how big must the difference between them be before I can tell for sure which is the heaviest? The unit of measurement that Fechner introduced to assess this was what he referred to as a ‘just noticeable difference’.

  Alternatively, if I am already holding a weight of one size, how much additional sensation does it cause me if someone adds another weight of half that size? Does it alter the sensation by half again (as one might expect), or by less than that? Once the relationship between psychic and physical realms was properly measured, the questions of philosophy would be scientifically answerable. The scale of ambition that drove psychophysics was vast, even if the experiments which it rested on were comparatively primitive.

  Bentham may have designed various schemes and policies, blueprints for prisons, proposals for ‘conversation tubes’, and so on, but he had never set to work upon the human body itself or tackled the problem of measurement beyond his theoretical speculations about pulse rate and money. English philosophers tended to be biased towards privileging the physical, sensible world of things over the metaphysical world of ideas – but they maintained this bias from the comfort of their armchairs. It is interesting that it was Fechner – the idealist, mystical, romantic – who really dragged metaphysics down to earth, by probing the body, measuring sensations, conducting experiments.

  Precisely because he didn’t simply presume that the physical was prior to the psychological (as Bentham did), he needed to set about testing how one related to the other. This wasn’t a theory stating whether mental processes were really driven by biological ones, or vice versa. It was the opening up of a new field of scientific enquiry, which, by the end of the nineteenth century, would be populated by psychologists, economists and a nascent industry of management consultants. The quantitative and economic psychology in which theories of mind would be replaced by
scales and measures, and which Bentham had merely speculated about, was now being assembled. The idea that individual feelings and behaviour might be amenable to expert adjustment was also now a technical, mechanical possibility.

  A democracy of bodies

  In the age of the fMRI scanner, it has become increasingly common to speak of what our brains are ‘doing’, ‘wanting’ or ‘feeling’. In many situations, this is represented as a more profound statement of intent than anything which we could report verbally. A 2005 article published by the Oxford neuroscientist Irene Tracey is titled ‘Taking the Narrative Out of Pain’.18 The marketing guru Martin Lindstrom, who has studied the brains of thousands of consumers using fMRI, has built his career on the notion that ‘people lie, but brains don’t’.19 In the less high-tech reaches of mental management, such as mindfulness training, people are taught to notice what their minds and feelings are doing in the present moment, as a way of alleviating anxiety. Meditation helps them to observe and accept these silent processes.

  This poses a number of questions. How can some particular part of our bodies or selves possess its own voice, and how can experts claim to know what it is saying? Underlying these types of claims are some of the arguments and techniques that were first introduced by Bentham and Fechner. First and foremost is the distrust of language as a medium of representation. Bentham’s fear of the ‘tyranny of sounds’ casts doubt on the capacity of individuals to adequately express themselves. To be sure, Bentham recognized that each person was the best judge of her own private pleasures and happiness in her own life. But for the purposes of a public politics, some other means of knowing what was good for people needed inventing.

  Variants of mind-reading technology are invented only to get around the apparent problem that language is inadequate to communicate feelings, desires and values. Whether that technology involves money and prices, or measurements targeted at the human body (such as pulse, sweat or fatigue monitors), the science of our inner sensations seeks forms of truth that might eventually bypass speech altogether. One of the most striking cases of this ideal in action was reported in 2014, with the news that scientists had successfully achieved ‘telepathic’ brain-to-brain communication for the first time, using EEG neuroscanners. The final destination of such developments is a form of silent democracy, peopled only by mute physical bodies. Bentham had little idea of how extensive the measurement of pleasure and pain would become, while Fechner was limited to running experiments on his own body rather than anyone else’s. But taken to their logical conclusions, the work of these two polymaths points to a society in which experts and authorities are able to divine what is good for us without our voices being heard.