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Smile now, cry later
Anna Minton, New Statesman
During the late 1950s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow coined the term “positive psychology”. The “major mistake of psychology is that it has a pessimistic, negative and limited conception of what people can attain”, he concluded. Accordingly, he formulated “a system” for individual growth that he believed could bring happiness to the American people and lead to the overthrow of the Soviet Union.
“The way in which the cold war will be won or will tip one way or the other will be in terms of the human products turned out by the Russian society and the American society,” he wrote. “If Americans can turn out a better type of human being than the Russians then this will ultimately do the trick.”
Although the unpalatable language of “human products” has no place in contemporary discourse, an updated version of Maslow’s message has quietly become the dominant force in psychology in Britain today. That our government is taking an interest in happiness is surely a good thing, reflecting the idea that there is more to life than GDP. Why, then, are most therapists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts up in arms about it?
Today, Maslow is best known for his “hierarchy of needs” – a staple of every management manual. His “positive psychology” was dismissed as unscientific by his contemporaries. But in 1996, the psychologist Martin Seligman was elected president of the American Psychological Association and, echoing Maslow, proposed a focus on healthy individuals rather than “the disease model”, which only looks at neurosis and suffering. Seligman reinvented positive psychology, opening up a new field of research into the “science of happiness” from his base at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Centre and spawning hundreds of university-level courses throughout the United States.
Since Seligman founded his centre in 2000, positive psychology, which relies on cognitive therapy to treat depression, has revolutionised approaches to mental health in the US, galvanising support because it is believed to work. Rooted in conscious thought, rather than the unconscious motivations that interest psychoanalysts, its guiding principle is that self-defeating and negative thoughts are responsible for mental health problems and that depression can be overcome by monitoring and correcting them. Seligman’s “learned optimism” is not only taught in schools, colleges and offices, but has been taken up by the US army, which has introduced a $117m “Resilience” programme based on his courses.
…But while the general mood is upbeat, not everyone is happy – least of all those who work in mental health. Andrew Samuels, chair of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, describes the policy about-turn as a “putsch”. Del Loewenthal, professor in psychotherapy at Roehampton University, wonders: “Is it science or ideology?” And the psychoanalyst Darian Leader goes as far as to draw a comparison with China’s Cultural Revolution, which taught that depression is just “wrong thinking”.
Rights and responsibilities
Although the controversy is substantial, it has been drowned out by the main defence that positive psychology “works”, with evidence, including randomised controlled trials, giving credibility to the claim that it is a science. With depression and anxiety costing the government roughly £12bn a year, a solution that equips individuals with a simple formula for turning their lives around at just £750 a head seems like a good deal. The other big attraction for a government so committed to “rights and respon sibilities” is the emphasis it places on personal responsibility to turn things around.
But the evidence that this conflation of positive thinking and CBT works is at best very mixed. Studies show that positive thinking can help with depression in the short term, and the techniques taught are effective with specific problems, such as phobias. However, there is no evidence that it has beneficial effects on depression in the longer term; indeed, a number of studies, including a multimillion-dollar trial in the US, show that it does not. So, abandoning all other approaches in the NHS is causing uproar among therapists. Others claim that suppressing negative thoughts, rather than addressing their real causes, fuels anger and violence.
Perhaps most worrying is the accusation that positive psychology promotes unrealistic thinking by fostering a permanently positive spin. In her recent book Smile or Die, the American writer Barbara Ehrenreich posits the idea that the culture of positive thinking is responsible for the global financial collapse. Market fundamentalism was based, she argues, on little more than the delusion that the only way was up for property prices and soaring salaries…
(12 March 2010)
Perils of the Stationary State
Adam K. Webb, Front Porch Republic
When economic growth finally levels off, what kind of world comes after? Shall we be unchained from the mad rush for money of the last century? Or will other but equally chafing chains weigh us down instead?
In 1930, Keynes wrote that “For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.” Keynes has not been the only person to predict that the modern rise in living standards will come to an end, and that a better kind of society will follow. Marx thought universal abundance would usher in socialism. And those who predict a running out of resources like oil are predicting a move to more sustainable, and thus more humane, ways of living.
It is these cultural and political aspects of an end to growth that I find most interesting. For the merely material side of our industrial takeoff has got most of the attention so far. Even the poorer people in rich countries now have food-filled fridges and gadgets that their great grandparents could hardly have imagined. And folk elsewhere are catching up. The modern world has surely inflicted a kind of rat race on us. But even though the rat is running on a wheel, he is plumper than before. And free-market types tend to like looking at plump rats. For both the plump rat who has long been on the wheel, and the gaunt rat just climbing on to it, they dangle in front of him the same lump of enticing cheese: given time, growth will bring him closer to paradise. Such optimism conveniently distracts from the fact that some rats are fatter than others, of course.
The rise in living standards has been real. But having more plump rats does not change the fact that modern capitalism has tended to cultivate rat-hood. This was just Keynes’s point about “avarice and usury” going together with growth, at least until growth has served its purpose after a few generations. So does an end to growth get the rat off the wheel and lead to less rat-hood?
This depends, first, on what we expect an end to growth to look like. Classical economists of the early nineteenth century, including David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, predicted that growth would taper off eventually. Saturation of capital and technical innovation would bring us to what they called a “stationary state.” It would be a society at a higher living standard than before the industrial revolution, but done with its upward trajectory.
…But there is a much darker alternative. What if zero growth just tightens up present concentrations of power? There have been many societies in history that look like stationary states, and some of them have been quite vast and hierarchical. China through much of its history was one of them.
And what do we get in a stationary state on a large scale, with institutions that endure generation after generation? We get the inertia and soft despotism that Tocqueville saw in China and feared would come to the West. He wrote of “a Chinese novel in which the hero, after many ups and downs, succeeds at last in touching his mistress’s heart by passing an examination well.” This might not be the rat race to get ever more baubles from consumer culture. But it is a rat race of petty hierarchies, status-consciousness, credential-seeking, and obedience to authority. It is the stuff of stable and complacent élites. It is the kind of order that one historian of civilisations said the whole world is likely to end up with, based on past experience: “a unitary, authoritarian, bureaucratic, peaceable, élitist, and sterile world state.” Hardly the stuff of FPR dreams…
(1 March 2010)
Erik Assadourian: our society needs some serious cultural engineering (interview)
Erik Assadourian, the ecologist
Matilda Lee: Humans are social animals competing for status, which, in our consumer society, is displayed largely through the things on which we spend our money. How can we ever sate our appetite for status without these things?
Erik Assadourian: Culture defines what gives one status. In our consumer culture, status is equated with stuff. In some cultures, it is not a status symbol to keep buying new stuff, but to take care of the stuff we already have. Changing status symbols will not happen without serious cultural engineering. This may be uncomfortable for some, but cultural engineering has been happening for consumer interests for the last century or more.
For example, in order to spread the car the automobile industry had to ‘normalise’ the idea that roads are for cars and not people. It did this not only through advertising and marketing, but also by working with schools to get children to sign petitions not to play in the streets. In some cities, they bought up trolley systems and dismantled them to destroy the competition.
The environmental community, if it really expects to create a sustainable society, needs to start using these same tactics more effectively, rather than just fighting at a political advocacy level.
ML: Western consumerism has become an almost unstoppable force around the globe. Just as many in China and India are starting to lead lives closer to the average American, environmentalists are saying they mustn’t. Doesn’t this smack of unfairness?
EA: First of all, this assumes that people strive to be consumers just because it is a better life. Chinese individuals and families aren’t taking on these consumer trends because they are better, but because there is a huge effort to market these ideas as better. It’s a manipulative process to get people to be consumers.
This isn’t about developing countries not following in our mistaken footprints, but the fact Western countries have to willingly let go of our consumer culture. Consumer interests have a high level of regulatory capture. The answer to me becomes that those individuals who already understand what is looming ahead of us need to take an active role in transforming cultures.
(10 March 2010)
Who negotiates for nature?
Rex Weyler, blog
Two years ago, in 2008, the environmental movement was rocked by journalist Christine MacDonald’s book, Green, Inc. After working for Conservation International (CI), MacDonald felt that corporate money had too great an influence on CI strategy. She concluded, “Not only do the largest conservation groups take money from companies deeply implicated in environmental crimes; they have become something like satellite PR offices for the corporations that support them.”
This month, in The Nation, UK journalist Johann Hari documents the evolution of this trend in “Wrong Kind of Green,” an expose of how some environmental groups have gone soft on polluters after receiving corporate money.
“By pretending the broken system can work,” writes Hari, “and will work, in just a moment, after just one more Democratic win, or another, or another – the big green groups are preventing the appropriate response from concerned citizens, which is fury at the system itself. They are offering placebos to calm us down when they should be conducting and amplifying our anger at this betrayal of our safety by our politicians. … when green groups cheer them on, they are giving their approval to a path to destruction–and calling it progress.”
Other serious ecologists and environmentalists are sounding an alarm. “We’re close to a civil war in the environmental movement,” says Charles Komanoff, after 30 years with the U.S. Natural Resources Defense Council. “For too long, all the oxygen in the room has been sucked out by this beast of these insider groups, who achieve almost nothing. … We need to create new organizations that represent the fundamentals of environmentalism and have real goals.”
Given the threats we now face – global heating and large scale habitat overshoot – Hari asks, “How do we retrieve a real environmental movement, in the very short time we have left?”…
(10 March 2010)
