The Happiness Industry Read online

  Something important is lost along the way. In the monistic worldview of Bentham and Fechner, experiences differ in terms of their quantity, sitting on a scale between extreme pleasure and extreme pain. One thing that this necessarily discounts is the possibility that human beings may have their own considered reasons to be happy or unhappy, which may be just as important as the feelings themselves. In order to credit individuals with ‘critiques’ or ‘judgments’ or ‘demands’ (or, for that matter, with ‘gratitude’ or ‘acclaim’), we have to recognize that they possess authority to speak for their own thoughts and bodies. This means understanding the difference between, say, ‘despair’ and ‘sadness’, and the ability of the person using those terms to do so deliberately and meaningfully. Were, for instance, someone to describe themselves as ‘angry’, a response focused on making them feel better might entirely miss the point of what they were saying. It might even be deemed insulting. Were someone to be unhappy about the fact that income inequality in Britain and the United States has reached levels not seen since the 1920s, the advice – as given by some happiness economists – that one is best off not knowing what other people earn would seem like a form of hopelessness.20 In a monistic world, there is merely sentiment, experiences of pleasure and pain that fluctuate silently inside the head, with symptoms that are discernable to the expert eye.

  This has profound implications for the nature of political and moral authority. The rational, enlightened society imagined by Bentham was one in which all institutions were designed in such a way that they were perfectly attuned to the vagaries of human psychology. The job of governing a modern, liberal society comes to appear as the confrontation between two types of material thing. On the one side, there is the mechanics of the mind, governed by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, which is no more deniable than the need to eat or sleep. And on the other, there are various material forces designed to influence that psychology. Monetary incentives, social reputation, physical punishment and confinement, aesthetic seductions, rules and regulations, and so on, serve no purpose unless they are geared towards the calculations of the individual.

  In this society, political authority lies with those who are most expert to measure and manage individuals. There is no reason why administration of this nature should be handled by the state directly, as so many neoliberal regimes have more recently discovered. Anticipating Thatcherism and workfare nearly two centuries beforehand, one of Bentham’s policy recommendations was for the state to establish a National Charity Company (a joint stock company, modelled on the East India Company), which would alleviate poverty by employing hundreds of thousands of people in privately managed ‘industry houses’.21 His proposal for the Panopticon also included a recommendation for private firms to build and run the prisons, with a license provided by the state. Not content with reconceiving the very basis of legal authority, Jeremy Bentham can be viewed as the godfather of public sector outsourcing.

  Fechner pointed the way to a more intimate micromanagement of individuals. In representing the relationship between mind and world as a numerical ratio, he implicitly offered two alternative ways of improving the human lot. If a certain physical context (such as work or poverty) is causing pain, one progressive route would involve changing that context. But another equivalent would be to focus on changing the way in which it is experienced. Many of the experts who followed in Fechner’s footsteps were psychiatrists, therapists and analysts, whose critical eye was turned upon the subject having the feelings, rather than the object that seemed to be causing them. If lifting weights becomes too painful, you’re faced with a choice: reduce the size of the weight, or pay less attention to the pain. In the early twenty-first century, there is a growing body of experts in ‘resilience’ training, mindfulness and cognitive behavioural therapy whose advice is to opt for the latter strategy.

  The job of intervening, to alter the psychological calculations and feelings of individuals, can be distributed across various types of institution and expert.22 We classify some as ‘medical’ or ‘managerial’, others as ‘educational’ or ‘penal’. But really, these terms are just further abstractions and fictions. All that matters is how effectively they administer their task, of offering the carrots and sticks which alter human activity and experience for the better.

  The (in)visibility of happiness

  In 2013, the Cheltenham Literature Festival in Britain introduced an innovative form of evaluation in an effort to capture the value that it delivered to its attendees. Using a technology developed by the company Qualia, it set up cameras all around the site to track the smiles on the faces of visitors as they wandered around. Computers were taught to interpret these smiles and to convert them into a form of value. This was a more high-tech version of an experiment undertaken in the town of Port Phillip, Australia, which carried out an experiment in happiness measurement by stationing researchers around the streets who sought to record how much smiling they witnessed on the faces of those around them. A ‘smiles per hour’ value was produced from one day to the next.

  Qualia’s technology is still clumsy; a computer’s ability to tell an ‘authentic’ smile from an ‘inauthentic’ one is not nearly as good as a human’s. However the science of smiling is advancing rapidly in various directions, both psychological and physiological. The physical practice of smiling has been shown to accelerate recovery from illness.23 The experience of seeing smiling faces has been shown to lower aggression.24 Experiments show that ‘real’ smiles achieve different emotional and behavioural responses from ‘social’ smiles.25

  A smile is another potential indicator of (and influence on) what is going on under the surface, along with pulse rate, use of money or a ‘just noticeable difference’ between two weights. To these, a long list of recently developed measures could be added, from the ‘smart’ watches developed by Apple and Google to monitor stress, to psychometric affect questionnaires used to assess depression. These are all means of rendering subjective experience tangible and visible, and therefore comparable. Like the sonar technologies which are used to map the ocean floor from sea level, these tools aim to mine the depths of our feelings and bring them out into the daylight for all to see.

  Yet there is a perpetual uneasiness about this project. With something as important as happiness, no measure ever seems quite adequate to the philosophical importance of the matter. We are generally content to accept that the map of the ocean floor is not the same as the ocean floor itself, but merely a representation with various advantages and disadvantages. But with happiness, there always remains a frustration. The sense that quantified smiles, heart rate, money and ‘just noticeable differences’ miss something crucial about the nature of emotional experience is overwhelming. A smile may indeed reveal something of the person – but surely not as a scientific representation.

  Let’s consider again the foundation of Bentham’s political science. ‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure’. By making this claim, Bentham hoped to strip out abstract, unscientific bases for political programmes. But in what sense is his claim about ‘nature’ really any less metaphysical? Since when did nature involve erecting ‘sovereign masters’ over certain species? That sounds suspiciously like metaphysics after all. No matter how scientific his portrait of motivation may claim to be, in its epic generality it is guilty of the same abstraction that Bentham deplored in philosophy. And if it weren’t, then the notion of happiness as the ultimate purpose of government would not be able to hold.

  Here’s the paradox. If happiness is granted its grand, philosophical and moral status as a ‘sovereign master’, we might agree that this is ultimately what life is all about. But then how could such an entity ever be measured scientifically? Whereas if happiness is anchored firmly in the physical, sensory experience of pleasure and pain, who is to say that such a mundane matter carries any fundamental or political importance? It becomes just a grey mushy process inside ou
r brains. Too often, the utilitarian route out of this dilemma is simply to duck it altogether. As the influential British economist and positive psychology advocate Lord Richard Layard writes, ‘If we are asked why happiness matters we can give no further external reason. It just obviously does matter.’26 Is happiness measurement really a way of resolving moral and philosophical debate? Or is it actually a way of silencing it? Once the technocrats are in charge, it is too late to raise any questions of intrinsic meaning or collective purpose.

  Happiness science is a science like no other, because it is always reaching beyond a mere object. What it grasps for is something meaningful, but it grasps for it via tools and measures that are too cold to adequately capture that meaning. Fechner’s bizarre efforts to access transcendent truths via weight-lifting have become an exemplar of how psychological management works today. Neurological, physiological and behavioural monitoring devices are clamped together with meditation practices and pop existentialism. The philosophical deficit in the science of happiness is dealt with by importing ideas from Buddhism and new age religions. Somewhere in between the quantitative science and the spiritualism sits happiness.

  The cultural effect of this is that certain indicators and measures of happiness take on a moral luminosity of their own. While happiness itself may remain invisible, a smile or a diagnosis of positive health acquires a sort of iconic value. The material symptom or indicator becomes a doorway into some inner being, granting it a magical quality. When Bentham idly wondered whether pulse rate or money might be the best measure of utility, he could scarcely have imagined the industries that would develop dedicated to asserting and reinforcing the authority of particular indicators to represent our inner feelings. Among these, no indicator has acquired a greater authority than money, an object that straddles the abstract and the material like no other.

  2

  The Price of Pleasure

  The accident and emergency unit of the Royal London Hospital in East London is never the most salubrious of environments. But on a Saturday night, it turns into a cross between a warzone and a Hammer horror movie. Drunk people stumble around, bruised and beaten from bar brawls. Ambulance staff and police officers compete for access to suspected drink-drivers. The fear or grief on the faces of visiting family members is the most disturbing sight of all.

  It was into such a scene that my wife and I arrived with our screaming daughter when she was less than a year old. We actually had no idea if there was anything wrong with her or not. That’s the problem with babies: they won’t tell you. The question perennially asked by doctors of parents with babies – ‘But does she seem OK in herself?’ – is another way of saying, ‘Trust your instinct.’ On this occasion, she’d woken up at an unusual time and was screaming in a way we’d never heard before, coupled with a rash and a temperature. She really didn’t seem ‘OK in herself’.

  Amid the predictable chaos of the waiting area at 2 a.m., I noticed three young men who appeared to be plotting something with urgency. They were clustered around a form, onto which one of them was writing details in consultation with the other two. They pointed at parts of it, advising him on what to write, checking with each other for agreement before encouraging him further. He scribbled away while his two friends appeared to debate what he should do next, occasionally looking up to check if they were being watched. There was a great deal of nodding and pointing, as if some plan were being hatched. This went on for about twenty minutes or so, while our by now infuriatingly cheerful daughter was enjoying playing with some NHS leaflets.

  After a while, a nurse came out and called the name of the young man who was filling in the form. The effect this had on him surprised me. His shoulders drooped, his face went into a grimace and he very, very slowly got to his feet, while his two friends suddenly became a picture of concern and pity. As he inched towards the nurse clutching his form, he held his head angled sharply down to one side and supported his neck, to suggest that he was now suffering a great deal. He walked slowly and – apparently – painfully towards the nurse, who led him off to a treatment area. After he’d gone, his two friends cheered right up and returned to their furtive discussions.

  The young man had clearly suffered a neck injury. Or at least, he had clearly experienced some mishap that could have caused a neck injury. Whatever had happened, it had resulted in slightly more enthusiasm among the three young men than one would normally associate with accidents or emergencies. From where I was sitting, this was an obvious case of an insurance scam being plotted. I immediately felt angry that these time-wasters were holding us up, quite apart from the apparent fraud going on. No doubt a car accident had occurred, and one of them had then immediately recognized an opportunity to make some money. The only question was whether the ‘injured’ party could get through the necessary medical examination without fluffing his lines.

  Maybe my reaction was grossly unfair. Maybe it wasn’t. As with babies, so for whiplash: there is no possible way of knowing. Whiplash is a curious type of medical phenomenon for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the term itself technically refers to an event that has befallen the sufferer, and not to a medical condition as such. Thus, if someone has experienced sudden straining of the neck muscles, as often occurs with rear-end car collisions, it makes sense to say that she has ‘suffered whiplash’. Secondly, to the extent that whiplash has any symptoms, they are only detectable to the sufferer. Evidence that ‘whiplash’ has occurred (other than a smashed car bumper) consists in the fact that the victim experiences long-term pain in the neck and back. But as with some psychiatric disorders, there is no identifiable disorder underlying this symptom.

  Medical researchers have studied whiplash since the 1950s, in search of some physiological explanation for it, but without luck.1 It first entered the Cumulated Index Medicus (the database of American medical journals) in 1963, as experts struggled to come to terms with this mercurial syndrome. During the 1960s, American scientists conducted a series of experiments on monkeys which simulated extreme rear-end collisions, in the hope of then being able to discover the precise way in which these accidents damaged neck tissue. Too many of these caused paralysis or brain damage to the monkeys, without doing much to unravel the mystery of whiplash in humans.

  One thing which is well known about whiplash, however, is that it is very unevenly distributed internationally. Rates of whiplash diagnosis are far higher in the English-speaking world than in most other nations, and have been growing sharply since the 1970s. Given that whiplash is chiefly associated with car accidents, and that cars have been getting progressively safer over this period, this increase is clearly associated with other factors to do with insurance claims. In Britain, for example, whiplash is responsible for a 60 per cent rise in personal injury claims related to car accidents between 2006–13, to the point where whiplash payouts are now equivalent to 20 per cent of the cost of every car insurance premium.

  In other countries, the syndrome is far less well known, and extracts far less money from the insurance industry as a result. While whiplash featured in 78 per cent of all personal injury claims made in Britain in 2012, across the channel in France the figure was only 30 per cent.2 In the early 2000s, Norwegian neurologist Harald Schrader noticed that the incidence of long-term neck pain resulting from car accidents in Lithuania was zero. After studying this phenomenon and publishing his findings, he was met with fury from the Norwegian whiplash disability patient group (which boasted 70,000 members in a nation of 4.2 million people), who took umbrage with what they assumed he was implying.

  The bizarre philosophical status of whiplash as a form of entirely invisible pain makes it unusually amenable to fraudulent insurance claims. Intuitively, this explains how rates of whiplash diagnosis vary so sharply from one country to the next: in countries such as Britain and the United States, where it is a well-known phenomenon, drivers who have suffered a rear-end collision will be that much more likely to spot the opportunity for some monetary reward. The three you
ng men in the Royal London accident and emergency unit were a case in point. They obviously realized that they had to work out their version of events straight away and then get the victim to report the right sort of pain, even though a ‘whiplash’ diagnosis would require the pain to persist for some time. The number of lawyers specializing in representing such claims has grown dramatically since the 1970s. In the United States, lawyers can even attend specialist training seminars, organized by fee-hungry doctors, on how to construct a viable medical case.

  Yet for the same reason that this syndrome is attractive to the fraudster, it is impossible to ever know how much fraud is really going on. Expert estimations of the rate of fraud vary wildly, between 0.1 per cent and 60 per cent, indicating the depth of the fog obscuring this issue.3 Insurance companies are struggling to know how to cope. Some have introduced somewhat mediaeval-sounding ‘Truth Statements’, which accident victims and their lawyers are required to sign, to confirm the discomfort that they claim to be suffering.