It’s become an unlikely YouTube hit. No, not sneezing pandas or puppies on skateboards…but Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges talking on C-Span for three hours about the triumph of the corporate state, the failure of liberals, the over-reaching of US empire, the cost of war, climate change, Christianity, the Occupy movement…everything really! Quite a performance. Posted online in January and it already has a quarter of a million views. Difficult to turn off once you start watching.
January 25, 2012 at 12:19 pm | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Global system | Comments Off
January 8, 2012 at 1:16 pm | More on What we're watching | 1 Comment
Herman Van Rompuy is thinking positive. He is staring into his mirror each morning, and repeating to himself: ‘I am a strong, confident, powerful currency. I am A TIGER!’ He’s so positive, he’s sent out a hefty tome called The World Book of Happiness to 200 world leaders, with this extraordinary letter. I’m quoting from the letter he sent to Barack Obama:
Dear Mr President Barack
I am very happy to present you with this copy of The World Book of Happiness…with my best wishes for a ‘Happy New Year’ but also with my request to you as world leaders to make people’s happiness and well-being our political priority for 2012 [um...what about preventing the catastrophic collapse of the euro? No?]
Positive thinking is no longer something for drifters, dreamers and the perpetually naive. Positive Psychology concerns itself in a scientific way with the quality of life. At stake are not only the happiness and well-being of individuals, but also those of groups, organisations and countries. And above all, in today’s global world we can all learn from one another. It is time to make this knowledge available to the man and woman in the street….
People who think positive see more opportunities, perform better, possess greater resilience, take more often correct and sound decisions [sic], negotiate better, have more self-confidence, maintain better relations, take greater responsibility, have more trust placed in them and so on. In short, they give more hope to others because they can experience it themselves. In order to release this positive energy, people need oxygen. Society can offer this oxygen. Positive education, positive parenting, positive journalism and positive politics play a crucial role here. This oxygen we can also create ourselves by a balanced existence or a religious or philosophical rooting.
[I love this paragraph. My favourite line is 'to release this positive energy, people need oxygen', though I also like the idea of 'a religious or philosophical rooting' - 'rooting' is a slang Australian word for shagging].
Why not address women and men from all angles of their multiple intelligence? [Why not indeed!]...By addressing men and women who are on a growth path, we all become better and happier people. We then do not turn every incident into a trend and every anecdote into a general truth. [You've lost me Herman]. As a consequence our governing will stimulate self-knowledge, reflection, sense of responsibility and commitment.
Positively inclined people see everything in its right proportions. [etc etc for a few more sentences.]
Happy New Year!
Herman Van Rompuy
Chairman of the European Council
Woohoo! I love his cheery upbeatness in the face of chaos. And quite a plug for the book itself. The author, another Belgian called Leo Bormans, blogs excitedly: ‘Will Barack Obama and Angela Merkel in the near future read in the World Book of Happiness before going to sleep?’ You betcha Leo!
Now, a cynic might suggest Herman is reminiscent of the conquistador hero of Werner Herzog’s movie Aguirre Wrath of God, who dreams of ruling over new empires while monkeys swarm over his sinking raft. But that’s a cynical thought. Think positive. Think Belgian. Find a happy place!
December 19, 2011 at 1:08 pm | More on Global system, Influence and networks | Comments Off
December 13, 2011 at 9:02 am | More on What we're watching | 1 Comment
Here’s a piece I wrote for the Wall Street Journal Europe about six months ago, about the effect of the internet on Russia’s stagnant politics:
In November 2010, Leonid Parfyenov, a well-known Russian journalist, took to the stage at a black-tie Russian television awards dinner. Visibly nervous, he embarked on a 10 minute critique of everything that was wrong with Russian media. The bravest print journalists are targeted with impunity, he said, while reporters on state-owned television are “no longer journalists, but rather state employees who worship submission and service”. No state television channel transmitted his remarks.
State control of television news is a core pillar of the so-called managed democracy that Vladimir Putin has built since he became president in 2000. As Mr. Parfyenov said in his speech: “News and life in general are categorized as [either] suitable or unsuitable news for television.” The state directly controls most of the national channels, and is suspected indirectly to control many others.
However, while television remains the main source of news for 80% of Russians, the internet is rapidly catching up. Internet penetration is soaring in Russia and it is a median that the state has little or no influence over. Social networking is on the rise and websites like Facebook and Twitter are becoming hugely influential forms of communication for more and more Russians.
For many, like Natalia Rostova, media correspondent for online news site Slon.ru, the increase in internet penetration will act as a balance to the perceived bias of the traditional media. “The television news is always positive about Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev”, she says.”It says that ‘today Putin met an important person and had important discussions’, and that’s it.”
On the rare occasions that television news attacks a Russian politician, it appears to be under the orders of the Kremlin. An example of this was the treatment of former mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov. “Newspapers had written for many years about Mr. Luzhkov and the political patronage that his wife’s construction company enjoyed in Moscow,” says Ms. Rostova. “National television news never mentioned any of that, until Mr. Luzhkov fell out with president Medvedev. Then, overnight, the television news was full of attacks on Mr. Luzhkov.”
The state is less present in the print media, where quality print newspapers like Kommersant, Vedomosti,Moskovskie Novosti and Novaya Gazeta are not afraid to hold government structures to account. However, the total readership of these papers only amounts to around 5 million people, or 3% of Russia’s population. Furthermore, many papers are owned by Russian oligarchs, whose fortunes ultimately depend on the good favor of the state.
Despite the rise in the use of the internet by ordinary Russians, the state’s control of the main television channels continues to affect all aspects of Russia’s cultural life, from pop music to cinema. Artemy Troitsky, Russia’s leading rock critic, says: “Russian pop stars are economically dependent on the government, because it controls the biggest television stations. Many pop stars are therefore willing to appear in television appearances with Putin, or take part in electoral campaigns.”
Occasionally a pop star criticizes the government, as Yuri Shevchuk, Russia’s most famous rock star, did in a televised meeting with Mr. Putin in 2010. Mr. Putin looked furious, and asked Mr. Shevchuk: “Who are you?” “It would be like the American president asking Bob Dylan who he was”, says Mr. Troitsky. State television did not show Mr. Shevchuk’s criticisms, only Mr. Putin’s answers, and he has not appeared on state-controlled television since.
However, the state’s tight grip on traditional forms of media is being undermined by the increasing number of Russians who get their news from the internet, either from news sites like Gazeta.ru or Slon.ru, or from social networking sites like LiveJournal and from the blogosphere. According to Russian polling firm the Levada Center, the percentage of Russians who get political news from the internet rose from 13% in 2007 to 31% in 2011.
Some political bloggers, like lawyer and shareholder activist Alexei Navalny, enjoy bigger readerships than national newspapers, and use the internet to share documents and video footage that highlight officials’ corruption and abuse of power in Russia. Mr. Navalny has become famous for dubbing the ruling party, United Russia, a party of “thieves and swindlers”.
“It’s much harder to manage public opinion because of the internet,” says Mr. Troitsky. “The internet’s growing popularity is a huge hole in the wall of state control.”
For example, one grass roots opposition movement, the Blue Buckets, uses the internet to post video footage of Russian politicians’ chauffeur-driven cars, which cause long traffic jams by demanding clear lanes for their own private use. The Kremlin’s press spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, declined to be interviewed for this piece.
December 10, 2011 at 7:33 pm | More on Global system | 1 Comment
I was dismayed to read the Telegraph’s account of the Foreign Office’s forward planning for the collapse of the eurozone. Apparently, ministers are telling embassies to expect riots on the continent, and a flood of British citizens heading home for Blighty, in tubs and dinghies and pedalos. There was cheeriness from the FT’s Wolfgang Munchau as well, who wrote on Monday, in an upbeat piece called ‘The Eurozone only has days to avoid a collapse’:
If the European summit could reach a deal on December 9, its next scheduled meeting, the eurozone will survive. If not, it risks a violent collapse. Even then, there is still a risk of a long recession, possibly a depression.
The Guardian’s political blog tells me the Treasury is already ‘hard at work’ on a contingency plan:
They are losing sleep over fears of a run on the banks in Italy and some of the other troubled eurozone members. This is what one Treasury source told me: “The five to midnight scenario will be a run on the banks in Greece, Italy and Portugal. Spain is fine. There is already a drawdown from banks. But we haven’t got to a run on the banks yet.” [Why is this official so confident that 'Spain is fine'?]
So what will happen if the unthinkable occurs and the eurozone does collapse? I’d like YOU, the well-informed Global Dashboard community, to tell me, so I can prepare in my London bunker.
Here are my rash predictions:
1) The further rise of far-right nationalist political parties and xenophobia towards immigrants. You’re already seeing this happen in Greece.
2) The Russian government exploits the power vacuum. I’m not saying Russian tanks will be rolling down the Champs Elysees anytime soon. But one of the main ‘points’ of Europe, it seemed to me, was to act as a collective bargaining bloc with Russia, and as a collective buffer against Russia’s imperialist ambitions. What happens when that buffer disintegrates? Keep an eye on the EU’s eastern border next year, particularly Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia.
Any other predictions?
November 28, 2011 at 10:39 am | More on Europe and Central Asia | 3 Comments
November 1, 2011 at 10:12 am | More on Global system | Comments Off
Yesterday, I went to the British Academy to hear Richard Easterlin, the father of happiness economics, present his latest thinking, together with Andrew Oswald of Warwick University. Sir Gus O’Donnell, head of the civil service, was also there – and made an interesting interjection.
Easterlin asked the provocative question: does higher income raise happiness in poorer countries? His answer was ‘no, as far as the evidence goes’. He showed graph after graph of transition economies where the income has been rising sharply over the last decade, while the happiness levels remained flat. He focused on China, a country “where the rate of economic growth has been completely unprecedented, at almost 10% a year for the last decade. If any country would show an improvement in happiness, it would be China.” But it doesn’t. Another flat line. The only countries which showed noticeable drops and rises in happiness levels, as far as I could tell, where post-Communist countries, whose happiness levels showed a clear (and understandable) drop after the collapse of communism, and then a steady rise after that, only to flatten out again.
This famous flattening of average happiness levels despite rises in income has been called the Easterlin Paradox, and is perhaps the single most influential graph for happiness economics. It is used, over and over again, as evidence that governments should not be focusing on raising income, but instead on raising happiness.
I asked Easterlin: do any policies have any clear impact on national happiness levels? Perhaps the happiness flatlines we see in country after country is evidence not that we’re pursuing the wrong policies, but simply that our daily happiness levels are not very sensitive to major policy changes. Think about all the different political, economic and cultural changes over the last 50 years in the UK, and yet our happiness levels remain flat. Why is that? I suggest it’s because the measurement technique – asking people to rate their happiness between one and ten – simply isn’t good enough to pick up changes in quality of life over time. We adapt to our situation, and except in moments of extreme crisis, we always say ‘oh, about a seven’.
What do happiness economists expect? Do they think that, if governments pursue the right policies, the public will go from a seven, to an eight, until eventually, after say 30 years, we will all be shouting ‘Ten!’ before ascending in rapture unto heaven? Of course, given such a bounded numerical scale, people are going to say ‘about a seven’, even if their lives have actually got better or worse over time. We forget the bad times, and we also forget the good times. Our daily well-being is probably protected by our forgetfulness and our ability to adapt.
Happiness economists try to get around this by using country comparisons. ‘Look’, said both Oswald and Easterlin, ‘how Scandinavian countries are typically happier than Anglo-Saxon countries. This is because they spend more on health, education and unemployment benefits. If we did the same, we’d be happier.’ I’m paraphrasing, but that’s basically what they both argued. Now I’m personally all for higher education and health spending. But that sort of cross-country comparison completely ignores cultural differences.
To be convinced, I’d like to see examples within a particular country where particular policies have led to a clear rise or fall in national happiness levels. Do such examples exist, I asked. “Yes”, Easterlin replied. “There are clear links between employment and happiness levels in countries. Unemployment in the US has dropped markedly in the last three years, and happiness levels in 2010 were at their lowest for many years.”
At that point, the head of the civil service, Sir Gus O’Donnell, who was listening attentively in the audience, joined the debate. He said: “One of the things we’re trying to figure out is the adaptation effects. There’s a new paper out by Angus Deaton, which looks at the effect of the recession of US happiness levels, and it shows that happiness levels are already back to their pre-crisis levels, despite unemployment still being much higher than it was. There’s even evidence that people adapt quite quickly to traumas like losing an arm. So what does that mean for public policy?”
It’s worth having a look at the paper O’Donnell mentioned (it’s also written up in the new issue of The Economist) because it is quite damning for happiness economics. It finds, for example, that subjective well-being measurements seem only very slightly correlated with the doubling of unemployment in the US, while there are clear spikes on Valentine’s Day and Christmas. Deaton notes that subjective well-being levels seem to be very correlated with stock market levels, and that perhaps they are driven by the same short-term sentiment factors, like headlines, holidays or the weather, rather than serious policy changes.
He writes: “While it is conceivable that, as is sometimes argued for the stock market, the SWB measures are giving an accurate take on expected future well-being, it seems more plausible that, like the stock market, they have actually very little to do with well-being. As McFadden suggests in comments on this paper, we may be looking at “cognitive bubbles” that are essentially irrelevant for any concept of well-being that we care about…[SWB measurements] still have a long way to go in establishing themselves as good time-series monitors for the aggregate economy. In a world of bread and circuses, measures like happiness that are sensitive to short-term ephemera, and that are affected more by the arrival of St Valentine’s Day than to a doubling of unemployment, are measures that pick up the circuses but miss the bread.”
Strong words – and interesting that O’Donnell should have picked up on them. It shows, I would suggest, the Civil Service’s own queries about the mission they have been set by the Coalition Government – but it also shows how seriously O’Donnell is taking this mission, and his own interest in it. I would suggest that empirical studies of what factors lead to flourishing can and should influence policies. I’m just not convinced by broader arguments based on national happiness levels. The measuring instrument is simply too blunt to be of any real use to policy makers.
October 7, 2011 at 12:31 pm | More on Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks | 2 Comments
Martha Nussbaum has another book out. Does she never sleep? This one is called Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach
, and looks at the necessity of moving beyond GDP by measuring a broader range of human ‘capabilities’, such as education, health etc. Professor Nussbaum developed the ‘capabilities approach’ together with the Cambridge economist Amartya Sen, who then went on to advise the French government on its launch of national well-being measurements in 2009. But, unlike her former colleague, Nussbaum seems determinedly sceptical about the value or point of national measurements of subjective well-being. She says, in an interview on the Freakonomics podcast:
It’s all a question of what you think happiness is. And this is a question that philosophers have asked for centuries. And the minute that Jeremy Bentham said that we should look at happiness in terms of pleasure and satisfaction, John Stuart Mill immediately said, “Now wait a minute, it’s better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” And so he then insisted that we had to think about happiness as containing many different kids of experiences, many different kinds of activity. And well, Mill wasn’t the first to say that. He was really getting all of that from Aristotle. So I’m with Mill, and I think that the Benthamite approach, where we just think of happiness as a single feeling, has got very little going for it. If you just think about a daily experience, the pleasure I get from writing is very different from the pleasure that I get from going out and buying a very nice dress. They’re just very different things. And the pleasure that somebody might get from bringing up a child is different again. So I think that’s not a good idea. And I think we should have a much more Millian rather than Benthamite conception of happiness.
Very well, I agree so far. Others – like Charles Seaford of the New Economics Foundation, have noted this contemporary clash in well-being policy between Benthamite and Aristotelian definitions of well-being. The question for Nussbaum is, does she think this more Aristotelian definition of well-being can be measured in individuals or nations using social science? If you look at the list of capabilities Nussbaum came up with, it includes some rather intangible things like ‘play’, ‘practical reason’, ‘senses / imagination’, ‘emotional attachment’, ‘control over one’s environment’. When I say they’re intangible, I’m not denying they exist. But does Nussbaum think these capabilities can be measured for an individual, or for a society? Or does she think this more Aristotelian idea of human flourishing simply isn’t readily measurable using social statistics?
A second interesting area to think about in Nussbaum’s thinking is the relationship between capabilities and virtues. Does Nussbaum believe that politics can or should promote a particular conception of the good life? This is a key question, because Nussbaum is trying to find a balance between the ancient Greek idea of the good life, and the liberalism and pluralism of John Rawls, JS Mill, and other liberal theorists.
Aristotle’s concept of the good life, or eudaimonia, is grounded in a functionalist account of human nature. Humans, Aristotle argues, have a unique nature. It is rational, ethical, political and religious. Eudaimonia (human flourishing) is the fulfillment of this uniquely human nature, in virtuous activity, in political engagement, in the contemplation of God. Politics should promote well-being or eudaimonia in the people. So it should educate the people and instil habits of virtue in them both through state education, and through creating spaces and institutions in which they can practice the virtues – for example, the university, parliament, perhaps even monasteries. So what Aristotle gives us is a state-backed model of the good life. This particularly inspired Karl Marx, who intended to be a lecturer on Aristotle, and who also came up with a state-backed model of the good life. The Marxist project obviously went a bit wrong. And it should alert us to the dangers inherent in Aristotle’s political philosophy – it is illiberal, anti-pluralist, mono-culturalist, and potentially an excuse for a intrusive and coercive government to meddle in our minds (for our own well-being, of course).
So what is Nussbaum’s solution? She suggests governments should protect human capabilities, rather than impose a particular model of the good life. Her capabilities are not virtues, she insists. They are the basic opportunities which each human deserves to have. They create the space for the pursuit of our different conceptions of the good life. For example, if we’re a Stoic, Muslim or Buddhist, our conception of the good life might involve some ascetic practices, such as fasting, designed to develop our agency and moral freedom. We might choose to follow such practices. But this doesn’t give the state the right to impose these practices on the people, through a Ramadan-style official month of fasting, for example. On the contrary, the state should protect humans’ access to basic nourishment. If they choose to go without food some days for moral purposes, that is their choice.
Another example: if we’re Stoic or Buddhist we must strive to free ourselves from emotional attachments in order to attain tranquility and freedom from desire. But the state should not strive to free us from our emotional attachments through some enforced Platonic or Stoic regime (for example, by taking children away from their parents at the age of five as Plato suggested). On the contrary, Nussbaum argues the state should protect our basic right to form emotional attachments. If we choose, then, to work to free ourselves from these attachments, that’s our choice.
Another example: our conception of the good life might include God. But that doesn’t mean the state should back one particular conception of God’s existence (or absence). But it should protect our opportunity to follow our particular religion, if we want to. So really the state should not be in the business of telling us how to live our lives, but should merely protect our opportunities to follow our own good.
But there remains the question of state education. Nussbaum follows Aristotle in believing the state should play a bigger role in providing education both to young people and to adults, to develop their capacities, such as their capacity for practical reason, imagination, debate, citizenship and so on. She also, however, criticizes the notion of some forms of art being ‘higher’ than others. So she’s quite wary of the state subsidizing opera, for example – such elitism goes against her liberal, Rawlsian, pluralist instincts. She herself was brought up in aristocratic family, and she has self-consciously rebelled against that elitism ever since – this is why she hated Allan Bloom’s very elitist book on higher education, The Closing of the American Mind.
Still, I wonder if there’s a contradiction here. Doesn’t her Aristotelian and Millian rejection of the utilitarian definition of happiness commit her, as it committed Mill, to the idea that some forms of happiness and beauty are simply higher and better than others, and that it is the job of education to guide us, to some extent, towards these higher conceptions of happiness, justice and beauty?
Nussbaum’s own work – such as The Therapy of Desire
, Cultivating Humanity, and Upheavals of Thought – put forward a Greek conception of education, arguing that through philosophical education we can move from lower conceptions of the good (based, for example, on money, status, power, tribe etc) to higher conceptions of the good (for example, the good of the whole of humanity rather than our particular tribe).
But doesn’t that mean the state should teach people some conception of the good? Particularly with the education of young people – surely the state has to teach children some conception of the good life? With adults, ie people over 16, obviously there should be more room for debate, disagreement and critical reasoning. But still, isn’t the whole idea of higher education that it involves, in some sense, an education of our emotions, and a guiding of them to higher conceptions of the good and the beautiful?
I think it’s possible to negotiate our way round this problem. What Nussbaum does in her books, and what I’ve tried to do in the book I’m writing at the moment, is show how Greek philosophy offers not one but several models of the good life. These models share some basic Socratic conceptions of human nature, but take it in different directions – Stoic, Epicurean, Sceptic, Cynic and so on – with different conceptions of the emotions, of politics, of God and so on. So perhaps we could teach young people these various different models of the good life, these different approaches, without trying to usher them down one particular path? That, it seems to me, would be one compromise between an Aristotelian idea of the good life and a Millian defence of individual choice.
I remain, like Nussbaum, wary of the idea of national well-being measurements, and sceptical of the ability of social science to numerically quantify the goodness of a life. It is much easier to measure well-being in a Benthamite or hedonic sense than in an Aristotelian or eudaimonic sense. So when people like Richard Layard enthuse about national well-being measurements, what they are really saying is that our government should embrace a specifically utilitarian conception of well-being and then use it to guide public policy. Approached with this level of naivité, General Well-Being could be as distorting a measurement as Gross Domestic Product.
Too many economists, in their enthusiasm to get with the well-being programme, are rushing to promote national well-being measurements. For example, Jeffrey Sachs, in his new book The Price of Civilization, seems to make the same mistake as so many other happiness economists, of trying to marry Aristotle and Bentham’s conceptions of well-being. He claims that the solution to the international financial crisis is a return to “personal and civic virtue”, and he holds up Aristotle as the lodestar for this revival of virtue. Well and good. But then he also says the solution is ‘the measurement of Americans’ well-being’. Does Sachs really think that simplistic questionnaires can measure well-being in an Aristotelian sense? Does he think you can find out how good a person’s life is, simply by asking them how happy they are, or how satisfied with their life they are?
Aristotle thought we could only really know how good a person’s life was when they were dead, and we could consider their life as a whole in all its dimensions and consequences. He also said: ‘It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the subject matter admits’. That is why he is a far greater philosopher than Bentham – because he realizes the complexity of the subject of well-being, and to what extent we should look for precision in our analysis of it. Bentham, by contrast, clearly exhibited ‘the empiricism of one who has not experienced very much’, as JS Mill put it, which is a wonderful description of many modern ‘happiness experts’.
September 26, 2011 at 9:49 am | More on Economics and development, Influence and networks | 11 Comments
Two years ago, the CIA set up a Centre for Climate Change and National Security. The Centre would “do more than bring together in a single place expertise on an important national security topic. It will also be aggressive in outreach to academics and think tanks working the issue. The goal is a powerful asset recognized throughout our government, and beyond, for its knowledge and insight.”
Two years later, and the Centre responded to a Freedom of Information request by National Security Archive scholar Jeffrey Richelson with a letter saying: ““We completed a thorough search for records responsive to your request and located material that we determined is currently and properly classified and must be denied in its entirety.” Yes, the Centre’s entire research, if it has any, is classified. How’s that for aggressive outreach!
Set up a year after president Obama’s election, in a brief moment of euphoria when it appeared the US might do something (anything!) about climate change, the Centre rapidly found itself under attack from a resurgent Republican party, including Senator John Barrasso, who tried to get the Centre’s funding scrapped in 2010, declaring “The CIA’s resources should be focused on monitoring terrorists in caves—not polar bears on icebergs”. The Centre’s response, alas, appears to have been to bunker down and keep schtum. Climate change? Shhhh.
September 24, 2011 at 8:05 am | More on Climate and resource scarcity | 1 Comment
August 20, 2011 at 10:45 am | More on What we're watching | Comments Off
Global Dashboard had its summer drinks party last night – thanks to Alex and David for hosting us, it was great fun. I particularly enjoyed talking to some of the civil servants who attended, as I’ve been thinking about bureaucracy and morality, and the question of whether it’s possible to have a ‘good society’ in a bureaucratic age. Can politics promote the good life, and if so, what is the role of the civil service in pursuit of that goal?
When the modern civil service was set up in the 19th century, via the reforms of Macaulay, Northcote and Trevelyan, it was modeled on the Chinese imperial civil service – this is why senior British civil servants are still called ‘mandarins’. The Chinese civil service was founded on Confucian philosophy, and part of that philosophy was the meritocratic idea that anyone could become a good person through the proper philosophical training: ‘By nature men are similar, by practice men are wide apart’, as Confucius put it.
So the Chinese civil service had an open exam entry system, which tested civil servants’ intelligence and aptitude in various subjects, including their knowledge of the Confucian philosophy. The imperial civil service played a central role in shaping the Confucian moral values of Chinese society. Civil servants were, in effect, the public intellectuals of Chinese society.
When it came to the British civil service, Thomas Babbington Macaulay, who set up the prototype of the modern civil service in the Raj, embraced the Chinese idea of the civil service as a meritocracy, but thought the civil service should embrace an empirical, scientific model of statecraft rather than also being guided by ancient ethical philosophy like Chinese mandarins. In an essay on Francis Bacon, he unfavourably compared the ancient Greek approach to the modern, English approach: “For Plato, the end of legislation is to make men virtuous”, he wrote, while for Bacon, the end of legislation is “the well-being of the people”, by which Macaulay means making “imperfect men comfortable”, supplying their “vulgar wants”, improving their material circumstances.
Macaulay was deeply scornful of the way ancient philosophy focused entirely on creating inner virtue rather than trying to improve the material circumstances of society. He believed philosophy had failed in its project of creating character or virtue, while the new philosophy of science had, in a few centuries, invented such wonders as the steam-engine. He wrote: “The wise man of the Stoics would no doubt be a grander object than a steam-engine. But there are steam engines. And the wise man of the Stoics is yet to be born.”
So Macaulay thought that the aim of the civil service, and of politics in general, should be improving the well-being of the people by making life more comfortable, through science and technology. Modern statescraft should deal in facts, not airy-fairy ‘values’. And later reformers, such as Northcote and Trevelyan, agreed that the civil service should be both meritocratic in the Chinese model, and should also strive to be impartial, non-political, technocratic. This vision of the civil service abides: when Whitehall came to codify its values (this only happened last year) it enshrined the values of integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality.
But is there a contradiction here? If a civil service is impartial and non-political, does that also mean its amoral? If it is purely technocratic, then is it value-less? If a government wanted to go to war on a trumped-up cause, for example, would it be the job of the civil service to find the most efficient way of administering its masters’ will?
If the civil service aims, as Macaulay says it should, at the ‘well-being of the people’, does that not imply some moral vision of the good, or can one have a purely scientific and non-moral definition of well-being and human flourishing?
These questions are at the heart of the modern bureaucratic state – and they came back to the surface this week in the UK, when the head of the British civil service, Sir Gus O’Donnell (pictured on the left, behind David Cameron), embraced Cameron’s idea that the end or goal of government policies should be well-being. Also this week, the Office of National Statistics published a report called Measuring What Matters, which argued that statisticians could measure and quantify both the well-being of individuals, and even of whole societies. This year, the ONS has started to measure our well-being, so that civil servants and ministers can use this data to guide their policies and steer the vessel of the state towards the harbour of well-being.
Sir Gus told the media: “We need to teach children that there is more to life than material goods.” That’s a very interesting remark, if you consider Macaulay’s dismissal of ancient Greek philosophy. The original aim of the civil service, we remember, was to improve our well-being by improving our material circumstances. Macaulay was deeply contemptuous of the ancient Greeks’ suggestion that philosophy could nourish our virtue, character or spiritual well-being. That was all bosh. Create more steam engines, that was the important thing. Yet now, the civil service is trying to promote well-being in a non-material sense – and one of the main policies by which it hopes to do that is through the increased provision of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which is based on…ancient Greek philosophy! Ha, Macaulay. Right backatcha.
So the project of the modern state seems to have hit a bit of a brick wall. There seems to be a recognition that a purely technocratic conception of government, focused on the provision of material circumstances and the supply of our ‘vulgar wants’, is insufficient as a political ethos and a guide for public morality.
And yet the civil service still seems to hope that we can define, measure and encourage well-being through a valueless, objective, technocratic science. The entire model of modern government is based on the idea that the civil service can measure, quantify, and track our progress towards goals on neat powerpoint graphs. So we’re trying to use the old tools of social statistics towards this new goal of non-material well-being. We’re so married to the Baconian idea that if you can’t measure something, it doesn’t exist. So if some sort of non-material well-being exists, we must be able to measure it, right? We must be able to track our progress towards it, otherwise we might just end up going round and round in circles.
Does this remind anyone else of the Hunting of the Snark?
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There is a danger that we have become not just trapped in the ‘prison of GDP’, but trapped in the prison of statistics. We have become trapped in the idea that something can only be a serious goal if we can quantify it, measure it, and track our progress towards it on a neat Power Point graph. And we want to use this approach to find well-being. We want a technocratic solution to a spiritual question.
The argument often put forward as to why governments should start to measure well-being is that it will free us from what one British minister calls “the prison of GDP”. We have become ‘trapped’, it is said, in narrow and overly-reductive economic measurements, which don’t capture what truly matters to us. The solution to this, we are told, is to measure what does matter to us: positive emotion, social relations, well-being. But can one really measure well-being? First of all, you need to define it.
Charles Seaford, co-head of the Centre for Well-Being at the new economics foundation in London, said recently that the high-level British policy debate over how to define well-being divided into two camps: the Benthamites and the Aristotelians. The Benthamites, followers of the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, define well-being as ‘feeling good’, and want to measure it by asking the nation how they feel. The Aristotelians, followers of the 4th century Greek philosopher, define well-being as ‘optimal human functioning’, or what Aristotle called eudaimonia. They want to measure it by asking the nation how autonomous they feel, how socially engaged, how fulfilled, and so on.
The Benthamite approach
I have several problems with the Benthamite or Hedonic approach, of defining well-being as merely ‘feeling good’. Briefly, because others have made these criticisms at greater length and in better prose:
It is overly-simplistic. The Benthamite approach suggests that happiness is one single, homogeneous experience, and that instances of it differ only in intensity and duration. Only statisticians could believe this. This belief displays, in the words of John Stuart Mill, “the empiricism of one who has not experienced very much”. It tries to take the many multi-faceted, multi-cultural, nuanced and subtle experiences of well-being and reduce them to one experience, that can be measured in one question – ‘how happy are you on a ten-point scale?’ Because it’s a bounded scale, people will typically reply ‘about a seven’. Their general levels of well-being may rise over time, but they will still typically reply ‘about a seven’, because they will adapt to their higher levels of well-being. That’s why happiness levels have not risen in the last 30 years – not because our society is broken, but because the method of measuring happiness is limited and cannot reflect absolute rises.
It is vulgar. Bentham, Mill said, suffered from a “deficiency of imagination”. So do his followers. Bentham insisted that only things that make us feel pleasant are worthwhile, therefore ‘pushpin is better than poetry’, because pushpin, a trivial parlour game, creates more pleasant feelings in the masses than poetry. He had no sense that some types of happiness are higher and better than others, and so we should be educated to appreciate them. He also didn’t appreciate that some worthwhile experiences – like watching a tragedy – will actually make us feel sad. The best arts – Shakespeare, Sophocles, The Sopranos – connect us to the full range of human experience, the dark as well as the light. Utilitarianism, by contrast, tries to turn everything into a moronic happy face. Imagine a TV show or a novel where everyone was happy all the time. It would be unbearably boring.
It fails to recognize the appropriateness of negative emotions. Nature gave us a range of emotional experiences for a reason. Sometimes, it is appropriate to be sad, or angry, or disappointed, or restless. Deifying one feeling is counter-productive, and reduces the rich complexity of life.
It is ignoble. If the goal of life, and the goal of society, is simply ‘pleasant feelings’, then why shouldn’t the government give every citizen a ration of MDMA or Prozac, to lift the general level of good feelings? The reason we dislike that idea, is because we recognize there is more to life than ‘bovine contentment’. We don’t want just to feel good. We want lives of genuinely rich activity, engagement, striving, achievement and fulfillment. Feeling good is the bonus to those experiences – it shouldn’t be the goal itself. In fact, an important part of the striving life is moments of dissatisfaction and restlessness. Those emotions have their place in human experience.
It is self-absorbed and anti-civic. Utilitarians think that, if ‘feeling good’ is made the goal of society, everyone will naturally work for other people’s happiness. But why should they? ‘Because it will make them feel good’. But what if it doesn’t? What if visiting my sick mother in hospital actually makes me feel bad? What argument can a Utilitarian make in that instance? Our own pleasant feelings are not a strong and lasting enough guide for sustained moral and civic behaviour.
What about the Aristotelian approach?
I have more respect for the Aristotelian approach. It captures the fact that human well-being is (in my opinion) about more than simply feeling good. Rather, the ‘feeling good’ is a consequence of fulfilling certain human drives or needs: the need for social engagement, for meaning and purpose, for autonomy, for creativity, and so on. But can we empirically measure this more nuanced and multi-faceted idea of eudaimonia?
Yes, say the Neo-Aristotelians. They include the economist Amartya Sen and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who have come up with a ‘capabilities approach’ to human flourishing, which defines ten core human capabilities. Sen and Nussbaum claim that statisticians can measure the extent to which a society enables a person to fulfill those capabilities.
Another, related approach uses the Self-Determination Theory of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. Deci and Ryan say that humans have three core needs or drives: the need for autonomy, social connectedness, and mastery. And again, they insist that statisticians can measure the extent to which an individual or a group has achieved fulfillment in these areas. Their approach has been very influential for the new economics foundation (nef), which describes it as “a modernised, empirically-based version of Aristotle’s theory of eudaimonia.”
And finally, Martin Seligman, inventor of Positive Psychology, also insists that well-being is a multi-faceted experience, which he separates into four domains: hedonic happiness, engaged happiness, achieving happiness and meaningful happiness, each of which can be empirically measured, he insists.
Measuring eudaimonia
So the Neo-Aristotelians insist that eudaimonia can be measured, just like the Benthamites’ more simplistic idea of happiness. But are they right? Let’s start with Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory, which has been taken up by the new economics foundation (nef). There’s a lot to like about the theory. It has defined eudaimonia as the fulfillment of three core needs: autonomy, mastery, and social connectedness. But SDT leaves out something pretty fundamental to Aristotle’s idea of eudaimonia: virtue. Aristotle said that happiness is “an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue”. But there’s no mention of virtue in SDT, or in nef’s approach.
One can imagine a person who feels a deep sense of autonomy, mastery and social connectedness, but who is nevertheless morally rotten. A Nazi party functionary in 1930s Germany might feel autonomy, mastery and social connectedness, but we might still insist there was something lacking in their well-being, namely, sound morality. But you can’t measure the soundness of a person’s moral beliefs empirically or scientifically.
Nussbaum and Sen try to introduce some moral capacity into their ten core capabilities. The capabilities include the capacity for emotion – feeling appropriate emotions and attachments – and also the capacity for ‘practical reasoning about the Good’. But can you really scientifically measure the extent to which a person feels appropriate emotion? That involves a subjective moral judgement about what emotions are appropriate, and an Aristotelian would give a different answer to, say, a Stoic, or a Buddhist, or a Freudian, or a Methodist. Again, you can’t measure this empirically and scientifically, because it’s a question of moral belief.
Likewise, you might be able to test a person’s capacity for practical reasoning about the Good, in a philosophy exam for example. But I really don’t see how such a test could be applied to an entire country without being utterly simplistic. And, to really test a person’s level of eudaimonia, you’d need to see not just how well they can reason about the Good, but how well they actually follow their reasoning and translate it into their lives. How could you test that empirically for an individual, let alone for a nation?
Martin Seligman, finally, insists that science can empirically measure both hedonic happiness, and engaged happiness (or ‘flow’) and meaningful happiness. Perhaps science can measure how good someone feels at a particular moment, but to rely just on hedonic measurements is “morally and politically imprisoning”, he says. I agree. But can science measure engaged happiness and meaningful happiness?
You can measure the extent to which a person is absorbed in an activity. But it is easy to imagine instances where a person is completely absorbed in an activity that is nonetheless unhealthy and toxic – a heroin addict is utterly absorbed in their addiction, for example, as is a video game addict. We have to make some moral judgement about the worth of the activity one is engaged in. A person might dedicate their lives to a novel for example. But is that a worthwhile activity, if they are working on a very bad novel? And one can also easily imagine many instances where a person’s obsession makes their life very unbalanced and myopic. Isn’t an important part of well-being having a balanced life of various different pursuits and fulfillments?
Secondly, Seligman defines meaningful happiness as ‘the feeling of working together with others to serve a higher cause’. But doesn’t a great deal depend on the moral worth of the cause you are serving? You could be marching for the civil rights of minorities, or you could be marching against them with the Ku Klux Klan. Both marchers would feel a sense of meaning, purpose and social engagement -but to decide which of these people is experiencing genuine well-being, we’d need to move beyond empirical measurements of their feelings and make moral judgements about the cause they are serving.
Seligman thinks we can assess how ‘meaningful’ a life is by empirically assessing a person’s own judgement, their friends’ judgements, and ‘some objective societal measure’. But assessing all the tangible and intangible impacts of a person’s life would take a God, not a statistician. To truly weigh up the meaning of a person’s life, you’d have to look centuries into the future after their death…and you’d have to have some idea of what, if anything, awaits humans in the afterlife. Science and statistics can’t tell us anything about our fate after death, which means there is a vast area of uncertainty at the heart of the ‘science of well-being’.
For most humans around the world, personal assessments of our life’s meaning involves beliefs about God and the after-life. Aristotle, Socrates,Plato, the Stoics – they all thought that the ‘purpose’ of man was to contemplate God and serve God. But the Neo-Aristotelian science of functioning tries to cut out this idea of man’s divine purpose, because statistics can’t measure the existence of God. So man, in modern functioning theory, doesn’t really have a function. ‘Man’s function is to fulfill human needs’. But what is the point of that?
The limits of empiricism
There is a danger that we have become not just trapped in the ‘prison of GDP’, but trapped in the prison of statistics. Statistics are the foundation of modern government. They are the cornerstone of the modern faith in the power of technocrats and bureaucrats to control nature, mitigate risk, and make life better. We are realizing now that one can become trapped in statistics, that they can distort and mislead. But our panacea for this sickness is….more statistics.
We have become trapped in the idea that something can only be a serious goal if we can quantify it, measure it, and track our progress towards it on a neat Power Point graph. This is the sacred belief at the heart of our technocratic societies. And we want to use this approach to cure our spiritual malaise. We want a technocratic solution to a spiritual problem.
But it’s just not that simple, sadly. We can’t just clear up the uncertainty and suffering of life with a Power Point presentation, rapturously as such a presentation would be received at TED talks and in the halls of power. There can never be a science of well-being because science can never prove what the purpose of life is, or if it has a purpose, partly because it can never prove what happens after death. Science can measure the quantifiable, but not everything can be reduced to a number. Could you put a number on how much you love your child?
Of course, no one wants a world of rampant moral relativism. I also would like to believe that there is such a thing as a good life, that some lives are better-lived than others. And I recognize that science can help us a great deal in our search for good lives. But, in the words of Aristotle, we should look for precision in such matters “only so far as the subject admits”.
The dangerous unintended consequence of this search for a perfect ‘science of happiness’, this search for ‘facts’ about well-being as opposed to ‘beliefs’, is that the ‘happiness science’ becomes a dogma – with governments telling their citizens ‘this is the way to happiness, and you should follow it’. Governments can of course make moral arguments to their citizens. But I don’t think they can say they have scientifically proven that their model of life is the best – because there is a limit to what can be measured and tested scientifically. And insisting that there is a ‘science of happiness’ takes the search for happiness out of the hands of the individual and puts it in the hands of ‘happiness experts’. Part of the Good Life is finding the Good Life for myself, not simply following some instant happiness recipe handed out by the ministry of happiness.
The constant repetition of the phrase ‘science of happiness’ is in danger of giving the public the impression that science has, or ever could, clear up the question of the meaning of life once and for all. Such is the eagerness of psychologists, economists and policy-makers to affect public policy and win funding, that exalted and inflated claims for this young field are being made in the media, conferences and policy meetings.
But if the politics of well-being is going to be more than a passing fad, if it is going to be legitimate in the eyes of the public and of posterity, then we need to be more humble and more honest, and to admit the limits of our certainty and empirical ability. Socrates suggested that wisdom consists in admitting the limits of our knowledge. Let’s admit what we don’t know and can’t measure.
March 2, 2011 at 3:51 pm | More on Influence and networks | 1 Comment
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