It’s interesting the way British public policy is beginning to bring together unemployment policy with mental health policy. The British government today brought out a 10-year strategy for dealing with depression, which includes the key strategy of doing more to get the mentally ill back into work. For example, under the new strategy, job centres will now have mental health advisors.
The same day the government released its report, the Young Foundation – one of the main think-tanks behind the British ‘politics of wellbeing’, released its own report, suggesting that the welfare state needed to transform to be more focused on well-being, including helping the out of work cope with the emotional problems that often go with unemployment.
The head of the think-tank, Geoff Mulgan, says: “The welfare state that was built up after the great economic crisis of the 1930s was designed to address Britain’s material needs – for jobs, homes, health care and pensions. It was assumed that people’s emotional needs would be met by close-knit families and communities. Sixty years later psychological needs have become as pressing as material ones – the risk of loneliness and isolation, the risk of mental illness, the risk of being left behind.”
We already saw the beginning of the merger of unemployment policy with mental health policy in 2005, when Lord Layard, the government advisor, justified the government spending £173 million on training 3,000 new cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) professionals by arguing it would pay for itself by getting many of the 1 million people claiming incapacity benefits because of mental illness in the UK off the couch and back into work.
You can criticise this shift in policy thinking from the Left or the Right. From a Leftist perspective, this is Thatcherism masquerading as therapy. The reason the government supported the Layard report’s 2005 report on depression, a Leftist sceptic could argue, is that the government hoped by spending a bit more on CBT, it could spend a lot less on incapacity benefits. You get people off the sofa, off Prozac, off the dole, and back into work. It’s Sigmund Freud meets Norman Tebbit.
This fusion of therapy with ‘on your bike’ Thatcherism reduces therapy to a mere band-aid for capitalism, argue Left-leaning therapists like Oliver James: you patch people up, give them a pep talk, and send them off into mindless low-paid jobs. It’s somewhat comparable to the First World War psychologist W.H Rivers complaining that he was treating people for shell-shock only to send them right back to the front line to die, one could argue.
Alternatively, you can criticize the new well-being state from the Right as the nanny state gone mad: it’s crazy to think the government can take the place of the family or the church, and can whisper sweet nothings into our ear until we feel happier. At best, it’s a huge waste of money. At worst, it’s Brave New World.
What do I think about it? I think it could potentially be an interesting example of ‘joined up politics’, but it’s quite early days, and we need to see more concrete policies. There’s no doubt that the ability to work and support ourselves gives us a sense of autonomy and self-efficacy, and therefore well-being, while relying on handouts can decrease that sense. But there’s a danger in using mental health policy to try and decrease welfare spending – not all the unemployed are mentally ill, some just can’t find work. And not all the mentally ill can be cured in a few weeks.
My concern with the Improved Access For Therapies programme (which is what Lord Layard’s CBT initiative is called) is not that it is a good idea – I think it’s a great idea – but that it has promised too much, by saying it will reduce the number of depressed people by 60%, and therefore dramatically reduce the number of people on incapacity benefits by that amount.
It’s not that easy. I know that some studies suggest CBT can cure 60% of depression, and 55% of social anxiety cases – but did the people who take part in these randomised-controlled trials all volunteer? If so, I think the results could be skewed to the positive, because if you volunteer for such a trial, you have already shown an above-average desire to try and recover.
My personal experience overcoming social anxiety, and working with other people trying to overcome it, tells me it is pretty hard to do, and it takes a lot of work. By no means everyone is willing to put in that work – they will find excuses not to, for example, blaming their therapist, or complaining that the therapy is not for them, because to get better you have to confront your fears and change your habits, and that is very difficult. It’s even more difficult if ‘getting better’ means you no longer get welfare payments that allow you to sit at home watching TV, so instead you have to go and get some low-end job.
Have a look at some of the support websites for mentally ill people in the UK, like www.social-anxiety-community.org, and you see that the mentally ill at the moment feel like Native Americans about to be moved off their land in the name of ‘progress’. They sense a new stringency in incapacity benefit assessments, but they complain that the assessments are done very quickly and without any reference to input from GPs or psychiatrists.
One person on the social anxiety forum I link to above, for example, said he filled in a two-page questionnaire, after which the person at the job centre decided he wasn’t mentally ill, and therefore didn’t merit incapacity benefit. Others say they have had similar experiences.
Many worry that if they admit they have a history of mental illness at the job centre or to an employer, they will be treated as second class citizens. It’s like getting ex-convicts back into work – do you set up special programmes to get them jobs? If so, the risk is that the employers treat them worse than ‘normal’ workers, and this only aggravates mentally ill people’s low self-esteem.
At the moment, there’s this great government push to get people better from depression and other emotional disorders, and to get them off incapacity benefits, and the risk is that this feels like a push off a cliff to the mentally ill. ‘All the government cares about is getting us off benefits’, is how one social anxiety sufferer put it.
This is the risk of explicitly linking mental health policies to unemployment policies – the mentally ill (who are typically a rather suspicious and paranoid constituency) start to think CBT is just a way to cut benefits. Which it isn’t, or shouldn’t be.
December 7, 2009 at 4:31 pm | More on UK | 1 Comment
At the beginning of this year, there was a lot of concern about whether the government bond markets could absorb the record amounts of debt being issued by sovereigns. As one banker told me: ‘Governments became the borrowers of last resort. If they hadn’t been able to access the market, it would have had a huge impact.’ Indeed, it would have meant we were in a genuine 1930s style financial collapse.
But luckily, despite a failed auction here and there, sovereigns were able to access the markets and to sell trillions in debt – Eurozone sovereigns sold €950bn this year, the UK £220bn, the US $1.9tn and so on. As Paul Spurin, head of government bond trading at RBS, and vice-chair of the European Primary Dealer Association, told me: “The market has been through the biggest stress test imaginable.”
Well, get ready for an even bigger test. Sovereign issuance is likely to be at the same levels next year – but this time, without the benefit of central banks buying up most of the debt.
This year, for example, the Bank of England has bought up three quarters of all Treasury issuance. The Fed has bought up a similar amount of US Treasuries. The ECB’s Quantitative Easing programme, it turns out, is not quite as big as I’ve suggested here before, but the ECB has still lent hundreds of billions to banks at 0.5% via its liquidity auctions.
Stuart McGregor, head of public sector syndication at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, says: “There’s no question that QE has helped considerably in getting auctions done. When that stops, it will become more difficult. Everyone assumes that for debt to be sold next year, sovereigns will have to pay higher yields.”
I interviewed Robert Stheeman, CEO of the UK’s debt management office, who says he is confident that the UK will be able to meet its borrowing demands next year – he points out that yields are still at historical lows – but he’s worried about an orderly transition from a QE environment to a post-QE environment. He says: “Any big buyer distorts the market. But as the Bank slows down and yields may move up, presumably our debt will be more attractive to other investors. My main concern is that any market adjustment happens in as smooth, orderly and frictionless way as possible.”
On the positive side, the appetite for government debt is quite big, partly because the $3tn securitisation market has more or less disappeared, so there’s a lot of demand for AAA debt, even if western central banks are no longer buying.
But traders say the risk is that central banks will wait too long to put up rates, and that inflation will suddenly pick up. If that happens, expect to see demand drop suddenly for long-term sovereign bonds, at the very moment that sovereigns are trying to borrow less in short-term debt and more in longer-term bonds.
We could be in for a bumpy few months in the sovereign debt market.
November 23, 2009 at 11:04 am | More on Economics and development | Comments Off
Wow, who says democracy is dead? The nay-sayers should check out this incredible debate on the crucial issue of the day – climate change – which happened on November 5 in 2009. And like that famous day 404 years ago, the debate threatened to blow the roof off parliament!
Well, er, not quite. In fact, the video which the BBC’s Democracy Live website has helpfully put up begins with a surreal three minutes of mind-crushing banality, in which the Speaker goes through a list of 20 questions and asks of each one, ‘Debate to be resumed on which day?’, at which a grey-haired lady stands up and says ‘Thursday week, Mr Speaker’, and so on, and on, and on.
Finally, Ed Miliband stands up and we get the big debate on what the UK is going to do to help developing countries cope with climate change, and the combined members of the House – all fifteen of them – engage in half an hour or so of completely dismal and uninterested debate. Electrifying.
November 8, 2009 at 1:21 pm | More on Climate and resource scarcity | 1 Comment
‘Call it the power of inevitability’, scroll the white letters on a black background, as a woman wails in Islamic fervour. ‘You know you have to be here.’ Cut to a speedboat racing across the bay towards a mighty skyscraper. ‘Believing is seeing’, flash the white letters. A sports car approaches the skyscraper, and a dapper figure climbs out. It’s…it’s Tyler Brûlé!
No, it’s the latest advert for the Trump Tower in Dubai, one of the many vanity real estate projects announced in the boom years, that have now hit the rocks. ‘The thrill that every whim will soon become a reality’, the advert coos. Well, maybe not that soon. Local developer Nakheel, owned by the Dubai emirate, is struggling to pay back its $10bn in debt, and may have to be bailed out by the UAE government. Its Palm Deira and Waterfront projects, once planned to be bigger than Hong Kong, have also been delayed.
So too has the Pad, a high-tech residential complex built by Omniyat, in which each apartment would be ‘intelligent’, which means, apparently, it would monitor residents’ body temperatures and their taste in entertainment, so your apartment would know when you bring back a girl, and would intelligently turn up the temperature, dim the lights, and play Barry Manilow. Alas, the developers proved slightly less intelligent than the apartments, and the project has been delayed.
So many new properties are coming onto the market in the next two years, that Nomura estimates 150,000 jobs would need to be created to fill all the new office space. Alas, the trend is going the other way – Jones Lang La Salle estimates the population of Dubai will fall 10% this year.
Still, analysts are optimistic that Dubai will remain the main financial and trading hub for the Middle East, despite the best efforts of Riyadh, Doha, Beirut and Manama to challenge it. There’s no booze in Riyadh, Doha is incredibly boring, Manama is even less financially transparent, and Beirut is constantly being dragged to war by Hesbollah.
So the Biblical prophecies of the collapse of Dubai are unlikely to come true in the near future, much to the disappointment of Simon Jenkins, who started foaming at the mouth at the prospect earlier this year:
This off-the-shelf city state has been built on laundering the profits of oil, drugs, arms and western aid, he raved [western aid? shurely not]..the towers of Dubai will become casualties not of human greed but of architectural folly. Their lifts and services, expensive to maintain, will collapse. Their colossal facades will shed glass. Sand will drift round their trunkless legs. Animals will inhabit their basements.
Thousands of residential properties, if occupied at all, will be squatted by a migratory poor, like the hotel towers of the Spanish littoral or Corbusier’s blockhouses of Chandigarh in India. Refugees will colonise the camps where Indian workers have lived as they built Dubai. Gangs will seize the gated estates and random anarchy will rule the soulless boulevards.
If it is lucky Dubai will at least be a refuge from the political cataclysms that could engulf countries such as Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. But mostly the dunes will reclaim the place. In centuries to come, tourists will share with Ozymandias the message: “Look on my works ye mighty and despair.’” With Shelley they will see how, “round the decay /Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare /The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Not a big traveller, are you Simon?
November 6, 2009 at 11:41 am | More on Economics and development, Middle East and North Africa | 1 Comment
David Miliband is in Russia, the first visit there by a British foreign minister since 2004, though Lord Mandelson was there last year, and did relatively well at cleaning up the mess that the FCO had made of Anglo-Russian relations.
I wonder if this trip, rather than having anything to do with serving our national interest, is actually aimed at furthering Miliband’s ambitions to become the new EU foreign secretary (a New Labour minister using office to further their own private interests? Shurely not!)
One of the key – if not the key – jobs of the new EU foreign minister will be managing relations with Russia. This will be a very difficult role, with the EU’s need for Russian gas and a friendly relationship with its largest neighbour needing to be balanced against New Europe’s desire for a strong, assertive stance against Russian authoritarianism and in support of NATO eastward expansion.
So far, the British political elite, with the exception of Mandelson, has shown itself incapable of nuance in their approach to Russia. During the Russo-Georgian War, for example, Miliband penned an article for The Times which was incredibly one-sided, putting all the blame for the situation squarely on Russia’s shoulders, and casting Saakashvili’s Georgia as the poor democratic victim in the war.
It was a bizarrely undiplomatic letter from a foreign secretary, and very much suggested Miliband was, again, serving his own interests (this was during his failed leadership bid in the summer of 2008) rather than the interests of his country.
In the last few weeks, the EU has released its report into the war, deciding that, actually, Georgia started it, and that the war was as much about Georgian nationalist aggression against the Ossetians as it was about Russian meddling in Georgia. That’s not to say that the Russian government was in any way innocent – it is in many ways an odious regime – but it shows that Miliband’s article was the sort of one-sided naive polemic one would expect from, say, a New Statesman columnist rather than the serving foreign secretary.
A month later, Miliband again showed his diplomatic nous by getting Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov into such a rage that, during a phone conversation, Lavrov apparently descended into a ‘four letter tirade’ against our young secretary of state, saying ‘who the fuck are you to lecture me’, and questioning what exactly Miliband knew of Russian history. Bad enough – but then Miliband released the story of Lavrov’s tirade to the press!
It was like getting into a fight, and then running to mummy to say that so-and-so had called you names. Again, Miliband seemed to be trying to improve his own domestic image, as the incredibly courageous defender of human rights in distant lands, rather than genuinely serving his own country’s interests.
For Miliband, as with much of the British political elite, it is simply too easy and too tempting to score domestic political points by railing against Russian authoritarianism. It costs them nothing. It makes them feel brave. And it helps them forget how the British government approved the torture of British citizens.
And now, after all this grand-standing, all this name-calling, and after absolutely no change in Russian foreign policy, Miliband is off to Moscow, simpering all the way about ‘common ground’ and ‘the need for mutual respect’.
This, it seems to me, is an attempt by Miliband to show the Germans that he could be an effective EU negotiator with the Russians. But to me, it shows once again why he is simply unfit to manage anyone’s foreign relations, ours, theirs, anyone’s.
November 2, 2009 at 11:53 am | More on Conflict and security, Global system | 9 Comments
Here in Tbilisi, where I’ve come to attend a friend’s wedding, the city is filled with nervousness and excitement. A few days ago, the police sealed off Freedom Square and Rustavali Avenue, in the heart of the city, then an official government calvacade arrived, and president Saakashvili hurried to a podium and told the gathered crowds that the country was being occupied by enemy forces. “The forces of occupation are at our gates!” he cried.
Bemused tourists were sent scurrying back to their hotels to find out what the hell was going on, and if they should get the next plane out of there. Eventually, they discovered it wasn’t actually president Saakashvili, it was the Hollywood actor Andy Garcia, playing him in new film. And the cheering crowd at Liberty Square turned up, not to cheer Saakashvili, but simply to see a famous Hollywood actor.
Watch the scene here – I love the way the crowd cheer wildly when he says ‘the forces of occupation are at our gates’. Woo hoo! Andy Garcia!
Yes, barely has the dust settled on the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, barely has the EU released its official report into the war (which said that Georgia started it), than Hollywood has seen fit to produce its own version of events. The director is Remmy Harlin, whose previous work includes Die Hard 2.
He says: “I’ve waited a long time to find something with substance and reality. Even if only a few people see this and feel its impact and its anti-war message, then I will have done something important be proud of it.”
The film has financing from the Georgian National Film Board, and has the solid support of real president Misha Saakashvili, who has lent the crew his presidential palace to shoot key scenes, as well as some Georgian military equipment. Alas, though, the crew has had to turn to outside help – Russians – for their expertise in pyrotechnics. “So here we go again”, as one crew member put it. “Just like during the real war, the Russians are again the ones who are doing the explosions part.”
The Georgians I’ve spoken to are fairly bemused by the situation – Saakashvili is very unpopular here, and most people think, quite rightly, that the war was a disaster for Georgia. The country is now smaller, poorer, less attractive for foreign investors and far less likely to join NATO or the EU. Misha took a gamble by invading South Ossetia, and lost badly.
And you might think, if ever there was a poor choice for an anti-war hero, it is Saakashvili, who according to the EU kicked the war off in the first place, only to retreat into a position of craven victimhood when his army showed itself incapable of resisting the Red Army for more than a day. He’s not anti-war, he’s just very bad at it.
But what’s that to Hollywood? Some Georgians suspect there is US government money behind the project (there is US government money behind everything in Georgia), but I can’t find proof of that. But it would be a delicious irony if so: when Saakashvili most needed help, the US failed to send troops. Now, a few months later, they send…Andy Garcia. In Hollywood, there is always a happy ending.
I should add, by the way, that the Russians are just as dumb in their cinematic propaganda. The state-owned Channel One produced its own TV film of the war last year, just a few weeks after the war, and the Kremlin has since tried to sign up Emir Kusturica, the Serbian film-maker, to make an international film of the war. He refused, sensible fellow.
October 24, 2009 at 9:41 am | More on Conflict and security | 5 Comments
How does the army of a liberal, multi-cultural and often secular society develop in its soldiers the spiritual resilience to cope with war, to face trauma, death and bereavement, and to fight opponents who have the advantage of a strong and common religious faith?
That’s the question the Pentagon has been grappling with, as it tries to cope with the record numbers of veterans returning from the front line of Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder, drug problems and other emotional disorders. In October, it came up with a response, called the ‘Comprehensive Soldier Fitness’ programme, which will aim to strengthen the emotional, psychological and, yes, spiritual resilience of each of the 1.1 million soldiers serving in the US army.
The programme is being organised and rolled out by Brigadier-General Rhonda Cornum, who was kind enough to give me an interview. She told me:
The US Army has never provided training to soldiers for their emotional and psychological strength. We thought that being in the Army, and adhering to the Army’s values of ‘mission first’, ‘never quit’, ‘never leave a fallen comrade’ and so on, would lead to emotional and psychological strength simply emerging. But after eight years of war, with much of the Army going to the front-line every other year, we’re very stressed. So we realised we would probably be better served if we had a preventative programme for psychological and emotional strengthening, rather than a reactive one that only began after someone had developed a problem.
Brigadier-General Cornum is herself an example of emotional resilience. She was captured and tortured during the first Iraq War, but seemed to have come through the experience with her powers of agency strengthened rather than traumatised. She says: “When you’re a POW, your captors control pretty much everything about your life: when you get up, when you go to sleep, what you eat, if you eat. I realised the only thing I had left that I could control was how I thought. I had absolute control over that, and was not going to let them take that too.”
In other words, she approached a situation in which she had minimum control not from the perspective of being a passive victim, but from the perspective that this adverse situation was actually an opportunity to exercise her agency, to assert her autonomy.
She says:
There are people who are just naturally resilient, who look at problems as challenges to be overcome. Some people even see adversity as opportunities to excel. I recognised that I had those skills, and others didn’t. What we have learnt since then, mainly thanks to the work of Penn University’s psychology department, is that these thinking skills that lead to resilience can be taught. And that’s what we’re trying to do with the new programme: teach resilience.
The Penn psychology department’s pioneering work began in the 1950s, when professor Aaron T. Beck developed ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’ – a type of therapy that taught people to become aware of how they interpret events through their ’self-talk’ , and how their habitual interpretations of the external world lead to their habitual emotional responses.
In other words, our beliefs about ourself and the world lead to our emotional responses. We choose what we believe, so we also choose what we feel – though often our beliefs are unconscious and highly irrational. CBT tries to make the beliefs that colour our world-view more conscious, and more rational.
CBT sounds simple, but it’s based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy of Stoicism, which taught its students that ‘it’s not events, but our interpretation of them, that causes suffering’, in the words of the philosopher Epictetus. Stoics taught their students resilience – the ability to cope with exile, imprisonment, bereavement, torture, death, and all the other occupational hazards of a political career in the Roman Empire, without losing their cool.
Stoics could cope with adversity because they constantly reminded themselves that the world was an unpredictable and often frustrating place, and the only thing truly in our control was our own thoughts and opinions. They took an attitude of indifference to externals – it didn’t matter if you were emperor of Rome or a prisoner in a cell, what mattered was using each situation that came your way as an opportunity to exercise your moral agency, your ability to rise above your circumstances.
Epictetus said:
It is circumstances which show what men are. Therefore when adversity falls upon you, remember that God, like a trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough young man…that you may become an Olympic conqueror; but it is not accomplished without sweat.
Stoic resilience didn’t mean just ’sucking it up’. It didn’t mean just repressing your emotions behind a ’stiff upper lip’. It’s far more subtle than that. It’s about learning how your beliefs lead to your emotions, and then learning to challenge and dismantle any beliefs that don’t make sense and are leading to destructive and pointlessly negative emotions.
CBT drew on many of the ideas and techniques of Stoicism. Both Beck and the other founder of CBT, Albert Ellis, were directly influenced by Stoicism, as they’ve told me in interviews. What CBT showed was that the therapeutic techniques of Stoicism could be used even if one didn’t share the religious beliefs of Stoicism. Indeed, Albert Ellis was a rabid atheist. You might not accept the Stoic idea that all externals are morally indifferent and the only thing worth pursuing is the development of your moral agency, but you could still use Stoic techniques to overcome emotional disorders, by becoming aware of how your habitual interpretations of the world lead to your emotional responses, and you could still learn how to change those interpretations when they were irrational or self-defeating.
So CBT adapted Stoic therapy to the needs and requirements of a multi-faith society. It used the techniques of Stoicism, but without Stoicism’s moral dogma – although it still retained some of the vestiges of Stoic ethics, in the idea that our emotions are our responsibility, and that the ‘good life’ is ultimately a life of Socratic self-knowledge and Stoic moral autonomy.
But most of the people who use CBT, and most of the people who teach CBT, have little or no idea of the connection of CBT to Stoicism. It’s been kept quiet, because Stoicism is a religious philosophy, and anything that smacks of religion wouldn’t go down well in the public sector. So CBT’s Stoic roots had to be kept slightly quiet for the psychotherapy to gain widespread acceptance.
A colleague of Beck’s at Penn University, Martin Seligman, then took the ideas and techniques of CBT and showed how they could be taken from the hospital or psychiatric ward, and taught to healthy individuals, such as children in schools, in order to strengthen their health and resilience before they ever developed an emotional disorder. So he made what was originally a therapy into an educational course. This, of course, is what Stoicism always was: an educational course, for young leaders.
Both CBT and positive psychology managed to gather a large body of evidence that showed that CBT was the most successful therapy at combating depression, social anxiety, PTSD and other emotional disorders; and that positive psychology, if taught in schools, reduced the likelihood of children developing depression in their teens.
The results started to impress government officials, and to make an impact on public policy. The UK’s government developed a particular enthusiasm in the last few years, thanks to the public support of government advisor Lord Layard for all things CBT. He was sufficiently impressed by CBT’s success at treating survivors of the Omagh bombing, that he successfully lobbied for the government to ear-mark around £150 million to train over 1,000 new CBT therapists to work in the NHS.
Layard also campaigned to get Seligman’s team to create a pilot ‘resilience programme’ in UK state schools. Some aspects of CBT are already included in the new curriculum subject, Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning.
Meanwhile, in the last couple of years, the Pentagon has, independently, become interested in the work of Penn, and its possible uses in helping it cope with the stress of eight years of war. It had already, controversially, used Martin Seligman’s theory of ‘learned helplessness’ to inform its interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay. Now, General George Casey, Chief of Staff of the US Army, decided to contract Seligman and his team to teach the entire army ‘learned optimism’. The Pentagon began working on the programme in August 2008, and launched it in October 2009.
The $125 million programme will mean that every American soldier has to take a questionnaire, every two years, which will assess his or her cognitive skills in five domains: physical, social, family, emotional and spiritual. The results are only shown to the soldier. If the soldier is below optimum in a domain, he or she is encouraged to take classes to strengthen their cognitive skills in that domain. The junior soldiers will be “required” to do the training. Most of the classes are online – they use hand-outs and videos to show different ways of thinking about and approaching difficult situations.
So how can a publicly-funded programme improve the ’spiritual’ strength of an army, without conflicting with the pluralist ethos of a multi-faith society in which the government is supposed to be secular?
Brigadier-General Cornum says: “The spiritual strength domain is not related to religiosity, at least not in terms of how we measure it. It measures a person’s core values and beliefs concerning their meaning and purpose in life. We assess their self-awareness, their sense of ownership and responsibility, their self-regulation of thoughts and feelings which they can control, that those things don’t randomly appear, that self-motivation is important, and social awareness is important. It’s not religious, although a person’s religion can still affect those things.”
She adds: “Spiritual training is entirely optional, unlike the other domains. Every time you say the S-P-I-R word you’re going to get sued. So that part is not mandatory. The assessment is mandatory though, and junior soldiers will be required to take exercises to strengthen their other four domains. Because there’s no question that the most vulnerable populations are the younger people, whether we’re looking at stress or drug use. That’s partly because they’re ‘emerging adults’, with all the problems that go along with that. And it’s also because they’re the people we’re asking to do the most difficult things.”
So the spiritual training is not mandatory, but the other aspects of the course will still teach the country’s soldiers the techniques and ideas of CBT and Stoicism, and so are, in a sense, spiritual training (or what the Greeks called askesis).
This sort of spiritual training isn’t totally new to the US Army. The military elite have already been trained in this way for some time. West Point’s Cadet Leader Development System, for example, trains its students in six domains – intellectual, military, physical, social, moral-ethical and ‘the domain of the human spirit’, the latter of which models itself on Plato’s education of the elite Guardian class. It regularly invites top philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum to come and lecture to the cadets on Aristotle, the Stoics and other ancient ethicists.
The US Navy has also used ideas and techniques from ancient Greek philosophy in its officer training programme – indeed, the inaugural holder of the Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the United States Naval Academy, Nancy Sherman, went on to write a book called Stoic Warriors, discussing how Stoicism continues to inform the ethos of the American military.
She paid particular attention to the example of Vice-Admiral James Stockdale, who famously used his knowledge of Stoicism to survive seven years of imprisonment and torture during the Vietnam War. Stockdale learnt first hand, as a POW, the value of the Stoic idea that most things are not in our control, but one thing is in our control – our thinking, our moral purpose – and no one can take this from us, even if they kill us.
Stockdale’s experience, and his use of Epictetus, is still taught to US Special Forces cadets at the Green Berets’ survival school in Fort Bragg. Michael, a 47-year-old major in US Army Special Forces, tells me:
We were taught how to survive prisoner-of-war experience, and one of the things we were taught was James Stockdale’s experience in Vietnam. Afterwards, I found out more about him online, and gradually became more and more interested in Stoicism. Eventually, I thought we should change our Special Forces training to simply a course in Hellenic philosophy – because so much of Stoicism is about understanding humans and why they make the decisions they do, which is a crucial part of Special Forces operations.
So the elite of the US military have often drawn on the ideas and traditions of ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Stoicism, to train and develop themselves. But this is the first time such ideas and therapeutic techniques have been rolled out to the entire army, from the bottom to the top.
Of course, other armies, which have the benefit of a common religion, can draw on that to teach their own recruits resilience. Take the example of the Lebanese guerrilla movement Hesballah’s training of its soldiers. I’m quoting from Alaister Crooke’s recent book, Resistance:
Hesballah’s strengthening of the individual comes from contemplation within him or her of the concept of God’s attribute of ‘power’, and through a personal ‘drawing’ of this attribute, the acquisition of an inner mental ’strength’, a Hesballah Sheikh explained. This quality enables a person to contrive the willpower and spirit with which to confront and overcome disproportionate force used against him or her…From this same attribute of ‘mental strengthening’, the Sheikh suggested, it was possible to cultivate a steadfastness and resilience that ‘will drive a superior adversary to despair at being able to inflict a psychological defeat’.
At times, indeed, the Hesballah resilience training programme sounds positively touchy-feely: “Building individual self-esteem is seen as an element of developing resilience…one activist described is as ‘a process of personal coaching of individuals’.”
But of course Hesballah has the advantage of a common religious faith. In a liberal, democratic, multi-faith society, in which the government is secular, it is a thorny question as to how far the state can go in the development of character and virtue, before it steps over the line and is interfering in an individual’s personal moral choices.
I personally think CBT has done our society a great service by allowing us to draw on the spiritual traditions of western culture, particularly Stoicism, without getting into dogmatic debates over metaphysical beliefs in the after-life, providence, the existence of God and so on.
This, to me, is what Richard Dawkins and others miss in the debate over the value or vice of religion. Religion isn’t just dogma, though of course millions of people have been killed over disagreements about religious dogma. But at its most useful, religions are the ancient storehouses of knowledge of the human mind, the human spirit, and knowledge of the techniques one can use to strengthen the mind and spirit. Many of these techniques can be used even if one doesn’t believe in God. This is what CBT has discovered through its debt to Stoicism.
At the same time, I think the public sector (whether schools, armies, prisons or the NHS) have to be careful not to be too prescriptive in their assertion of what makes one ‘happy’ or ‘resilient’ or any of the other virtues and character-traits that positive psychology teaches. There is no one scientifically-proven path to happiness and virtue. All the great spiritual traditions – Stoicism, Buddhism, Islam, and also secular traditions like Epicureanism – have important points of disagreement. I don’t think positive psychology should paper over those disagreements and pretend that ’science’ can arrive at some perfect and unarguable path to happiness and resilience. We can’t escape that we live in a pluralist society, and we always will.
And you can never force people to be free, or happy, or resilient. You can lead the soldiers to the revitalising water of ancient philosophy. But, unlike the theocratic states of the Middle East, you can’t force them to drink.
October 19, 2009 at 8:49 pm | More on Conflict and security, Key Posts | Comments Off
Just watched a rather depressing Dispatches programme about post-traumatic stress disorder in UK troops – guys coming home and expecting to be attacked at any moment. One guy slept with a machete next to his bed and could still only get to sleep after drinking a bottle of vodka. Apparently the UK military will only give PTSD counselling if the soldiers ask for it. And none of them ask for it.
Meanwhile, the US military has just launched something called the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme, which has been developed by Penn University’s psychology department. Every two years, each US soldier will take some questionnaire to test their aptitudes in five areas: physical, emotional, social, family and spiritual. If they are not doing well in a particular area, they’re encouraged to take courses to up their score in that area (I don’t know what this involves…’your homework today: go out and find God’).
Anyway, supposedly it teaches the soldiers resilience, making them less likely to develop PTSD in the first place. As Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum (one tough old soldier, who was captured and abused during the first Iraq War, and said her abuse was “discomforting, nothing more”) puts it:
“It was developed because we recognized that we really did not have a good preventive and strengthening model for psychological health. It’s just a recognition that we spend an enormous amount of energy and resources on people after they’ve had some negative outcome, but we’re not doing anything deliberately as a preventive measure.”
This means more kudos for Martin Seligman of Penn Uni, who invented the resilience training programme and has already persuaded the UK government to try it in our state schools (hey if it can work there, it can work in Afghanistan). He was the pioneer of the idea of ‘learned optimism’, having previously pioneered the idea of ‘learned helplessness’, when he showed that if you electrocute a dog for long enough, they will be unhappy.
The US military liked that idea too – they used it to develop interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay, much to Seligman’s annoyance.
Anyway, I’m all for this Comprehesive Soldier Fitness course, but I bet you one thing – nowhere in the course do they mention Stoicism. And that’s what it is – it’s teaching you to change your perspective on things, to get a ‘philosophical angle’ on traumatic events. Seligman took his ideas from another Penn psychologist, Aaron Beck, who took them directly from Stoicism – as he’s said to me in an interview.
But then, I guess if you admitted your ideas were directly lifted from a 2,000-year-old philosophy, you wouldn’t get such a fat cheque from the Pentagon…
September 7, 2009 at 8:34 pm | More on Conflict and security | 1 Comment
I went to the Climate Camp yesterday, on Blackheath, next to Greenwich Park, a brick’s throw from the Royal Observatory. The camp is maybe a 150m-diamater circle, with a metal fence around it, filled with tents. You have to enter through a steel gate, over which hangs a sign saying ‘Capitalism is crisis’, and under which crusties sit on straw bales, perusing the new entrants like monkeys outside a Hindu temple.
They are on ‘gate watch’, to make sure the police don’t enter. The Camp for Climate Action handbook, which you pick up as you enter, tells you: ‘Whatever you have to offer, from vegan cakes to tripods, do come to the defence centre and be a part of making our vision of a community free from authoritarianism a reality.’
You then enter a welcome tent on the left, where a lady in her late 40s gives you a brief induction. She tells the new recruits about the various ways you can join in. First, pitch your tent in the neighbourhood you’re from – there’s a London area, a Midlands area, a West Country area, a Scotland area, and one guy on his own next to the fence who I think is from the Isle of Man. You camp with people from your own area so you can network and start an ‘affinity group’ for local direct action.
You can also be on food duty , washing up duty, (’but not if you’re ill, we don’t want everyone to get diarreah’), wellbeing duty (’going round, checking out the tranquility centres, checking on the welfare of the camp’), dismantling duty (the tents, not the state, sadly), and so on. She also took pains to point out you have to pee in one place and poo in another. Bladder control is key to the revolution.’Any questions?’
‘So what are you trying to achieve?’ I asked, like the snotty little journalist I am.
‘Well, it’s not ‘you’. Hopefully it’s ‘we’, she replied. ‘We’re here in London, the centre of the financial system, because we’re opposed to the financial system. We think it sucks. We don’t want to reform it, because as soon as we start to debate that, we get into arguments, and it hurts my head.’ She banged her head to illustrate this. ‘But we agree that we would rather the present system…’ collapsed? ‘…went away’.
She was a veteran of direct action. She’d helped set up – and dismantle – the Kingsnorth camp, protesting against E.on’s plans for a new coal-fired power station there. ‘My personal favourite’, she confided, ‘is superglue. I like gluing myself to things’, she said, as if confessing a fetish. ‘I’ve always wondered about that’, said a well-spoken lady on her right. ‘How do you come unstuck?’ ‘Turn that video camera off and I’ll tell you’, said the woman. A young black man videoing the induction dutifully turned his camera off. ‘You use soap and water’, said the woman.
Next to me, John, a young revolutionary from Northampton, shook his hands. I looked at him. ‘Just practicing my hand signals’, he explained. He pointed to a page in the handbook – Hand Signals for Group Discussions. Waving both your hands expressed consent. Imagine a whole revolutionary group doing it. Mass jazz hands. Trostsky, Lenin, Stalin. Jazz hands.That old revolutionary rag.
A T shape meant you wanted to make a technical point. The largest moon of Jupiter is Ganymede. That sort of thing. Your two index fingers raised meant a direct response. Two fingers up the nose meant a blocked sinus.
‘We used these in Manchester Uni’, John told me, ‘when we occupied a lecture room to protest against the occuption of Gaza. Took us six hours to draft a letter. But we won.’ You won? ‘We got the university to agree to send all their spare stationary to the university of Gaza, which had been reduced to…rubble, I believe is the appropriate word.’ Jazz hands.
I wandered around the camp with John.We looked out at Canary Wharf in the distance. ‘Beautiful’, said John. ‘I know it’s the centre of capitalism, but it’s still beautiful.’ A plane flew overhead. ‘Amazing. I love planes. I know they cause climate change, but I still love them. I mean, that plane should not be in the sky. It’s a miracle.’
I think John suspected I was an evil undercover capitalist and so was trying to ingratiate himself by appreciating every visible manifestation of capitalism. ‘What…political persuasion are you?’ John asked furtively. ‘Centre left’, I said. ‘That’s a good place to be’, he nodded. Phew!
Reggae played from a bicycle-powered sound system. The various neighbourhoods were gathering to have lunch: plates of brown rice with vegetables. Others were assembling to put up the main tent, in which bands would play, ideas would foment, and discussions would be held on such topics as ’seedbomb making’, ’sing and dance for change’, and ‘Greenwich Common: Rape, policing and prostitution’.
There was a legal advice tent, a police monitoring tent, a bicycle-powered smoothie-maker. ‘Amazing’, said John. It was like a mini-festival. But where was the beer tent, the burger van? No burger van. That’s capitalism. Capitalism is crisis.
‘Yeah, but, you say capitalism is crisis’, a press photographer asked his media chaperone (a boy who could be no more than 22, but already had a beard and a fiery Daniel Cohn-Bendit-esque demeanour), ‘but when your parents die and leave you a nice house, what are you going to do, give it away?’
‘I think you’ve got a false impression of the people here’ said Cohn-Bendit junior. ‘Most people here aren’t rich.’
‘Yeah, I can’t relate to that at all’, said a girl media chaperone.
‘I mean, my father’s a counsellor and my mother’s a nurse’, said Cohn-Bendit. ‘And if I was rich, I’d rather be rich and against coal-fired power stations than rich and not.’
‘Yeah, but this must have all cost something’, said the photographer.
‘It cost about £40,000′, said Daniel coolly.
‘So that’s capitalism.’
‘Capitalism is about more than money.’
‘Well, what is it?’
‘Capitalism is the complete exploitation and subjugation of every living thing on this planet’, said Daniel with terrifying certainty.
Hmmm…problem with taking on ‘capitalism’ is you need a serious alternative. And the campers don’t have one, not since the collapse of Marxism. You can take on lots of specific things – the bail-out of the banks, the destruction of the environment – but to blame all of these things on ‘capitalism’, without having a systematic alternative to ‘capitalism’, seems to be tilting at windmills. The USSR wasn’t a capitalist system, China is not a free market system, but these systems give (or gave) just as much of a f*ck for the environment or human rights as the West. Probably less of a f*ck.
If the protestors really wanted to smash the system, I pondered, why didn’t they smash up the Royal Observatory nearby. What more oppressive imperalist symbol could there be than the Greenwich Meridian? Who were we to enforce our own rigid sense of ‘Universal Time’ on the assorted tribes and tribulations of the world? Smash the observatory, end time.Capitalism would be thrown into disarray. Job done.
Still, the camp looked fun. There were some radical cuties there. John pointed me out one pretty girl, bright eyes, heart full of hope, jumper full of cleavage. ‘She showed me how to work the bicycle-smoothie maker’, he said.’Amazing’ I said.
And for a second, I was jealous of John spending the next few nights in the camp. I bet he meets some really hot women, I thought. A bit of cider, a bit of Antonio Negri, who knows what could happen. Indeed, the camp has already got the nickname ’shag camp’ from some NGO workers. How many people, I wondered to myself, join sects, cults, and radical cells not out of a serious belief they will radically alter society, but just because they want to get a bit of lovin’.
August 28, 2009 at 8:17 am | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks, UK | Comments Off
The Bank of England today decided to inject another £50bn into its asset purchase facility. Since February, it has already spent £125bn buying bonds from UK investment banks to try and support the credit markets.
Thanks to this and other quantitative easing by the Fed (spending $1.25tn on MBS alone), the ECB (won’t say how much its spending) and other central banks, this has been the best six months ever for investment banks’ fixed income teams.
JP Morgan, for example, made $2.2bn in investment banking fees in the second quarter, which is a record on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs made about $6bn in fixed income trading in the first six months. Barclays Capital made £1bn in profit in the second quarter. Its head of investment banking, who I interviewed a few weeks ago, told me ‘It’s been a phenomenal six months for fixed income.’ HSBC also made the most its ever made in investment banking, making $6.3bn in profit in the first six months. Happy days are here again.
So our present economic system is quite simple really: central banks print money, then give it to private investment banks.
And no one criticizes this enormous free lunch. No one is really even aware it’s going on. Evan Davis on the Today show this morning discussed the BoE’s asset purchase facility, and his two interviewees were a person from the British Chamber of Commerce, and the UK economist of Goldman Sachs. Both were in support of the programme, surprisingly enough. At no point did Davis suggest the facility was a huge free lunch for investment banks. Instead, he concluded ‘it doesn’t seem to do any harm’.
In fact, the only criticism I can find of the asset purchase facility comes from the unlikely source of the head of fixed income research at Schroders, Jamie Stuttard, who says in passing that one of the unintended consequences of the facility will be:
New sellside profits as a direct result of government policy (riddle me this: what will happen to bonuses of RBS traders linked to trading book performance when those traders should be making very neat turns out of the gilt & corporate bond programs ??)
Quite.
August 6, 2009 at 7:25 am | More on Economics and development | 1 Comment
As you probably know, one of the main causes of the huge debt bubble of the last few years was the fact banks created Special Investment Vehicles (SIVs) – or off-balance-sheet virtual companies – which then bought trillions of dollars in securitized debt (or asset-backed securities – ABS).
This enabled banks to lend like mad – in loans, mortgages, credit cards etc – then securitize the loans into ABS, take them off their balance sheet, insure them, then buy them back via the SIVs.
This led to the growth of a $60 trillion – yes, a $60 trillion – securitization market, according to ECB estimates, with average issuance every quarter of $900bn.
Then the market collapsed, because it turned out a lot of the mortgages that had been securitized were dodgier than thought, and the rating agencies had got the ratings wrong, and the insurers didn’t have enough capital to cover the losses, and, well, it got a bit messy.
Then no one wanted to lend to the SIVs anymore, so they went bust or were unwound. That meant suddenly there was no demand left for ABS in the securitization market, so no financing for all those mortgage and credit card lenders out there.
Faced with the prospect of the collapse of retail lending, US and European central banks stepped in and agreed to buy banks’ mortgage-backed bonds from them, to try and get demand going in the securitization market.
The Fed, for example, has said it will buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed bonds from the market. Its buying around $20 billion in mortgage bonds a week.
The ECB has also agreed to buy ABS and MBS from the market, via its repo auction system – essentially, banks can use ABS as collateral for ECB liquidity, as long as the ABS was once rated AAA and is now rated no lower than A (or, at one point, BB -).
European banks have leapt on this magnanimous gesture from the ECB, and raced to re-securitize their toxic waste and swap it with the ECB for something worth a bit more.
I rang up the ECB to ask them how much ABS it had accepted as repo collateral from European banks. I was told:
‘Oh, we don’t tell people. You won’t be able to find it out. We don’t reveal that information.’
Can you imagine – this is a public bail-out of private European banks for their bad decisions in buying so much asset-backed debt, and we can’t even find out how big the bail out is, or what sort of price the ECB paid for the debt.
All we know is that, in contrast to the UK Treasury’s programme, banks have fallen over themselves to participate, suggesting the ECB’s terms are more than generous to the hapless banks.
And we also know that many banks – Barclays Capital, HSBC and others – have posted record profits this quarter…
But we have no way of knowing quite how much we have helped the banks to their record profits, because the ECB won’t reveal the terms. I rang up some securitization analysts at investment banks to find out how much the ECB had bought, but funnily enough, they wouldn’t tell me either.
This isn’t democracy. It’s a financial oligarchy.
August 3, 2009 at 2:12 pm | More on Economics and development, Global system | Comments Off
Deutsche Bank Asset Management, which is one of the leading investors in renewable energy, last month put up a 50 foot electronic counter in Times Square, showing how much greenhouse gases are being put into the atmosphere every second. Here’s a short video of the launch:
July 7, 2009 at 3:56 pm | More on Climate and resource scarcity | 1 Comment
I enjoyed Andrew’s post below, though I’d dispute the assertion that Adam Smith and the other ‘great theorists’ of capitalism thought it was amoral.
That’s not true, they thought capitalism in general made us more moral, more civilised, though they also saw this wasn’t always infallibly the case. But if you read Smith, Hume, Shaftesbury and the other great theorists, you’ll see they tried to make a moral case for capitalism and commerce.
In terms of the ethical implications of the crisis, the basic ethical point, which others have discussed but which is still unaddressed by governments, is this: our present economic system is palpably unfair, in that the financial services sector is allowed to live by different rules to the rest of the economy.
The financial sector has, for the last 30 years, subjected the rest of the economy to its pitiless attention, privatizing it, stripping off assets, selling off assets, and imposing ‘market efficiency’ (ie job cuts), with an evangelical zeal.
If a company was failing, we were told, it should be carved up, sold off, or allowed to fail. This was the efficient way.
Now, banks right across the world are failing. But we are told they are too big to fail, they are of ’systemic importance’, and so they are propped up with our money, and allowed to continue their reckless activities until the next bail out, in a few years time.
The financial sector created a whole new moral lexicon – ’shareholder value’, ‘rationalisation’, ‘market efficiency’, ‘transparency’ – which we absorbed to an extent we perhaps haven’t realised. Now, this rhetoric has been exposed as self-interested, and hypocritical.
Our societies reward bankers for gambling, often gambling badly, with the highest salaries in the economy, with the possible exception of a handful of equally juvenile Premiership footballers. Meanwhile, teachers, nurses, social workers – people who are genuinely contributing to the public good – are paid a fraction of that.
Our present economic system rewards gambling and greed, and punishes altruism and self-sacrifice.
And we let bankers get away with it – as soon as they go bust, we bail them out, get them back to the poker table, and applaud them for their pluck and acumen when the stock markets go up.
It is, as others have pointed out, a captured system, rigged to serve the interests of those in the financial sector.
A genuinely ethical economic system would value teachers, nurses and social workers as among the most important figures in a society, and they would be paid accordingly, or at the very least better than the pittance they earn today.
Thatcherism has left us a system where we hold the financial services sector up as a paradigm of excellence, a beacon leading the rest of us to prosperity. It is not. It makes us both spiritually and literally poorer, and if we have to subsidize it because it’s of ’systemic importance’, that means our system as it presently exists is broken.
June 30, 2009 at 3:11 pm | More on Economics and development | 1 Comment
News in the FT today that three environmental groups have filed a suit to make sure the Royal Bank of Scotland does more to promote renewable energy, foregoing its traditional dominance in oil and gas projects.
Ian Leggett, People & Planet’s director, said: “The government now controls RBS and has an exceptional opportunity to drive investments in low carbon jobs and infrastructure, not to repeat the recklessness of the past.”
As I’ve argued before, state-owned development banks have a key role to play in transforming our economies from a high to a low carbon footprint.
Modern project finance – particularly the use of the special purpose vehicle – was of great use in the 1970s to drive the development of the North Sea oilfields. It has been fundamental in creating the hydrocarbon society of the last 50 years.
We now need it to help us develop the post-hydrocarbon society.
While the development of the north Sea oil sector was mainly done by private oil companies and banks, although with some tax incentives from the government, I would suggest the construction of the post-hydrocarbon society is better driven by state-owned banks and retail investors than private banks, because these are capital intensive projects aimed at protecting the public good rather than private wealth.
RBS, with its expertise in project finance, is a good place to start.
June 30, 2009 at 11:27 am | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development | Comments Off
If you want to see Sir John Sawers, the new head of MI6, in action, check him out in this steely confrontation with Iran’s foreign minister, from Norma Percy’s recent excellent documentary, Iran and the West. The incident is 1 minute 15 seconds in.
I recommend watching the whole episode by the way – fascinating interviews with Putin, Khatami, Straw, Armitage, Fischer, Bolton and others. Sawers is one of the main interviewees, and later in the programme tells of a secret deal Iran offered him in London: let us enrich uranium, and we’ll stop killing your soldiers in Iraq.
June 17, 2009 at 12:14 pm | More on Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa | 1 Comment
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