In the last few weeks, I’ve been following the trail of the New Left, a group of left-wing thinkers who coalesced at Oxford in the 1950s, including Stuart Hall, Charles Taylor, Raymond Williams, EP Thompson and others.I first came across them when I read EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class a couple of months ago, as part of my research into philosophy groups. Thompson wrote brilliantly on 19th century adult education clubs like the London Corresponding Society and Mechanics Institutes, and the role they played in the development of a working class political consciousness. The word ‘pub philosopher’ came from the early 19th century, as a term of abuse for working class artisans getting together in pubs to read Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (itself written in a London pub).

I also realised, through my research into adult education (particularly the work of Roger Fieldhouse), that many modern universities grew out of informal learning clubs like Mechanics Institutes. Birkbeck College began as the London Mechanics Institute, meeting in the Crown and Anchor tavern on the Strand, while Queen Mary, University of London, where I work today, began as the New Philosophic Institute (later re-named the People’s Palace) in the East End.

What I then discovered (and wrote about on Monday) was that this history of grassroots ideas clubs fed into a vision among New Left thinkers (and particularly Edward Thompson) for citizen education in the 1960s. Thompson hoped to start a network of New Left clubs around the country, where the working class could debate, discuss, learn and self-organise. New Left figures including Raymond Williams and Eric Hobsawm were also actively involved with the Workers Education Association (the WEA), and taught WEA extra-mural courses at Oxford and other universities. As the first issue of the New Left Review put it: ‘We have to go into towns and cities, universities and technical colleges, youth clubs and Trade Union branches and–as William Morris said–make socialists there.’

Well, that failed, sadly. The New Left clubs didn’t last long – as Stuart Hall wrote in the NLR, a division grew up between the clubs and the journal, and between the intellectuals at the centre and the grassroots periphery. Formal adult education through the WEA, extra-mural courses and residential colleges like Toynbee Hall also declined steeply from the 1970s to the 1990s. This morning, I interviewed Derek Tatton, director of the Raymond Williams Foundation, who painted quite a bleak picture of the state of formal adult education:

The kind of adult education we’re talking about – in politics, philosophy and so on – declined quite catastrophically. And in general, the number of adult learning courses provided by the WEA or universities or local education authorities has declined steeply, and the number of adults involved with adult education courses has declined by several million people in the last few years. All Local Education Authority-funded residential colleges that I know of have either closed or are threatened with closure. And most universities provide no extra-mural courses anymore. [The one ray of sunshine in this rather dismal scene is, of course, the Open University...]

However, the picture for informal learning is rather more optimistic. Derek says:

In one sense, adult education as Raymond Williams thought of it is virtually dead, because of political and social changes and the rise of a rampant capitalism not interested in education for its own sake. But we are seeing the rise of informal learning, partly through the rise of new technologies like the internet. By informal I mean it’s not publicly-funded, and is often self-run by volunteers. In that sector, there’s a lot of activity. We’ve seen the rise of informal, grassroots organisations like the University of the Third Age, Philosophy In Pubs, Cafe Philosophique or Socrates Cafes, book groups and so on, which are doing for free what funded organisations like the WEA were doing in the 1960s.

Derek rightly points to the internet as one of the factors helping the rise of informal learning. His discussion circle in Staffordshire, for example, uses In Our Time as a learning resource for its talks. Melvyn Bragg has, in fact, spoken of the rise of ‘the mass intelligentsia’, which I think is a great and inspiring description for what’s going on.

I’d love to explore the ways that universities and academia can be freed from their prison of managerial paperwork and REF reports to genuinely have connect with their communities. Why is the present Higher Education framework so inhospitable to adult learning and extra-mural activities? How can we help connect academics to adults who want to learn? How can we help academics get more pleasure and sense of purpose from their work? As Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton says in this interview, “most academics I know are desperate to get out”.

Here, by the way, is a piece by the National Institute for Advanced and Community Education (NIACE) on the Occupy movement’s Tent City University and other alternative forms of learning that are springing up at the moment.

One of the philosophers who came to talk at Tent City University was Lord Robert Skidelsky, who I saw speak at Hay a fortnight ago. He and his son Ed have a new book out calling for a new politics and economics rooted in a vision of the good life. They outline that vision in this article.

The rise of informal learning is one of the topics being discussed at EdgeRyders, an EU project that’s hosting an online and offline conference at the moment in Strasbourg. It’s connecting young social entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to improve the world (while also making a living). You can follow their discussions on Twitter at #LOTE.

I’m speaking at a similar sort of event this coming Monday, called A Good Week. Come along if you’re free – I’m doing the opening talk (gulp!). I think I’ll be talking about combining inner work on the self with outer work on society.

The BBC’s ‘New Elizabethans’ series, celebrating the lives of great modern Brits, had a programme on pioneering social entrepreneur Michael Young, who did a lot for adult education by setting up the Open University. You can hear it here. Interesting highlights: he wrote Labour’s 1945 manifesto when he was 29, and at the end of his life he was working on plans for a colony on Mars!

Here’s a great example of an informal learning model that draws on new technology: Think Cafe, from South Korea.

I gave a lunchtime talk on the politics of well-being at the London think-tank IPPR yesterday. You can read the notes for it here. Thanks to everyone who came – it was a real boost that more experienced experts in the field like James O’Shaughnessy and the new economics foundation’s Juliet Michaelson come along and contributed to the discussion. James is working with Wellington College and speaking at their Festival on Education next weekend, which promises to be a great event. I’ll be there on Saturday, not speaking, just mooching around.

Juliet works at the new economics foundation’s well-being centre, which yesterday brought out its annual Happy Planet Index report, measuring nations’ well-being and ecological footprint, asking which countries’ achieve happiness most efficiently, from an environmental point of view. Central America seems to do best.

The economist and social historian Deirdre McCloskey poured scorn on happiness economics in a New Republic cover story this week. She argues that there are some areas of human life into which social policy should not intrude. I critiqued her critique here, arguing that she simplified the movement and that she espoused a naive belief in a bourgeois liberty somehow independent of social policy. She replies briefly in the comments.

I was sorry to hear of the death of Alan Saunders, a British philosopher who presented ABC’s philosophy show on Australian radio. Sounds like he did a great deal to bring philosophy into everyday life.

Finally, some wise advice:

See you next week,

Jules

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

Very briefly, neo-Aristotelianism grew out of the revival of virtue ethics from the 1950s, in the work of Anglo-Saxon philosophers including GEM Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Philippa Foot, and more recently Martha Nussbaum and the current philosophe-du-jour, Michael Sandel. From Anscombe on, virtue ethicists tried to construct an Aristotelian ethics founded on a functional psychology of intention, will, emotion, habit and capacities. The good life, Aristotle argued, is the life that develops our nature to its fullest potential, so that it achieves flourishing or eudaimonia. Ethics, therefore, needs to be based on good solid psychology. The Ought of the good life needs to be based on a solid Is of empirical research.

GEM Anscombe

At the same time that Anscombe called for a ‘philosophy of psychology’, cognitive psychologists were also coming back to the Greeks and their cognitive theory of the emotions, which is basically the idea that emotions are value judgements about the world and how it should be. We can change these judgements, and thereby change our emotions, even chronic emotional habits like depression or anxiety. This Socratic idea was taken up in the 1950s by the pioneers of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis. Later, it fed into Positive Psychology, which was described by one of its leaders, Christopher Peterson, as ‘the social science equivalent of virtue ethics’.

So you have this useful dialogue emerging from the 1950s onwards between virtue ethics and cognitive psychology, and a renewed optimism in the power of reason to change the self and achieve flourishing. You see this dialogue in the works of Martha Nussbaum, for example, or Robert Solomon, or Jerome Bruner.  It’s also something I try to explore in my book, in my own middle-brow journalistic fashion. You also get a renewed optimism in the power of public policy to cultivate eudaimonia among citizens. From around the mid-1990s, around the same time as Positive Psychology was appearing, you start to see Neo-Aristotelians influencing and steering public policy. If you ever hear a politician or policy wonk talk about flourishing, character, civic virtue or the common good, the chances are they’re a Neo-Aristotelian.

The Neo-Aristotelians on the Left include Geoff Mulgan, formerly director of policy at Number 10 under Tony Blair, then founder of Demos, now at Nesta – who I think has really driven this policy shift forward and shaped public policy in the last 20 years. If you read his essay in the Demos collection, The Good Life, back in 1998, it starts with a quote from Aristotle, and an insistence that there exist ‘eternal values’ which public policy and social entrepreneurship can promote. They also include Leftist communitarians like John Cruddas , Liam Byrne and Lord Maurice Glasman, who often cite Aristotle as a key influence on their politics of virtue; Richard Reeves, formerly head of Demos and now chief advisor to Nick Clegg, who edited a Demos report on character; Matthew Taylor, head of the RSA and another head of the Number 10 policy unit; Anthony Seldon, headmaster of Wellington and champion of ‘character education’, who I put on the Left because he’s a biographer of Blair and Brown; and Lord Richard Layard, who is really an out-and-out Benthamite but who nonetheless has done a lot to promote the politics of eudaimonia, particularly through the expansion of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

The other story was that the Templeton Foundation has given a multi-million-pound grant to Birmingham University to set up a Jubilee Values and Character Centre. The press release says:

How does the power of good character transform and shape the future of society? What would be the wider social, cultural and moral impact of a more grateful Britain?  What personal virtues should ground public service?  How can fostering character traits like hope and optimism be help working towards a better British society? The Centre will initiate a national consultation on a proposed curriculum policy for character building in schools, and will run a 10-year project at Birmingham called ‘Gratitude Britain’.

These are the two latest trumpet-blasts from a movement which has been dubbed the New Paternalism. The phrase originally appeared from Nudge psychologists like Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, who call their nudge policy interventions ‘libertarian paternalism’. They want to nudge people in pro-social directions without them realising it (hence it’s ‘libertarian’ – because the citizens are so dumb they don’t realise they’re being guided).

But there are other New Paternalists who are much bolder. They want to instil good values in the citizenry, create good habits, foster good character. They are similar to Victorian paternalists like Matthew Arnold, but they take his lofty Hellenic philosophy and try to put it on a firm evidence base, to create a science of resilience, optimism and other ‘character strengths’.

I call this movement the Vickys, after the tribe in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. It’s a steam-punk novel about a future society that has fragmented into a collection of tribes or ‘phyles’, each with their own culture and moral code – including a Nation of Islam tribe, a neo-Confucian tribe, and the Vickys, who are cyber-engineers and who follow Victorian customs. Success in this society is all about what phyle has accepted you.  Your character’s flourishing depends on your phyle’s network and moral culture – - and if you don’t have a phyle, you’re screwed. In the plot, the leader of the Vickys hires a nano-engineer to code an interactive ‘gentleman’s primer’ to cultivate the character of his niece – except it gets stolen and discovered by a street orphan, who subsequently rises to the top of her society.

So the real-world Vickys include, in the US, Martin Seligman and the Positive Psychologists, who have got enormous backing from Templeton for their research into character strengths and resilience training, and who launched a $125 million course in resilience-training for the US Army. Like Stephenson’s Illustrated Primer, they want to create a computer-automated course in moral education – an app for character. The Vickys also include  include self-control psychologists like Roy Baumeister, and champions of ‘social and moral capital’ like Jonathan Haidt and Robert Puttnam.

The UK Vickys include Wellington headmaster Anthony Seldon and his new colleague, James O’Shaughnessy, who left the Number 10 policy unit last year to set up a chain of Wellington academies; Matthew Taylor of the RSA; Matthew Grist and Jen Lexmond of Demos; the Young Foundation; David Goodhart of Prospect Magazine; Danny Kruger, another former Tory advisor who wrote Cameron’s ‘hug a hoodie’ speech and who now runs a charity for former prison inmates; Lord Richard Layard of the LSE; and, more speculatively, Alain de Botton, whose recent writings have called for a shift beyond liberalism and back to a more interventionist paternalism. Anthony Seldon described the New Paternalist ethos in the Telegraph this week:

Character, and specifically its neglect, is the number one issue of our age. A society that is not grounded in deep values, that doesn’t know who its heroes are and that lacks a commitment to the common good, is one that is failing. Such we have become… The riots in British cities in August 2011 were the catalyst for the creation [of the new Jubilee Centre for Character and Values]. As the fires subsided, a call was heard across the nation for a renewed emphasis on communal values and ethical teaching, which would discourage such events happening again. It is an indictment of us all that such a centre should ever need to have been established…The development of a sense of gratitude among people in Britain will be at the heart of the work. The character strengths it will advocate are self-restraint, hard work, resilience, optimism, courage, generosity, modesty, empathy, kindness and good manners. Old-fashioned values, maybe. Some will sneer, and ridicule them as middle class or “public school”. But these are eternal values, as advocated by Aristotle and countless thinkers since.

I am interested in this movement, and attracted to some aspects of it. My book is very much about the new fusion of ancient virtue ethics with modern empirical psychology, and how this new fusion is being spread by public policy in schools, the army and beyond to foster character, resilience, eudaimonia and other such ideals. I got into the scene when Cognitive Behavioural Therapy helped me overcome depression in my early 20s, and I then found out how much CBT owed to ancient Greek philosophy. I’m a huge fan of Greek philosophy and its practical therapeutic use today, so a part of me loves the renaissance of virtue ethics in modern policy.

But we have to be aware of the ideological and political context of these efforts in mass character education. It can all too easily seem like rich people telling poor people to buck up and be a bit more moral. It can ignore the economic and environmental context and how that dynamically feeds into character. I’m not saying character is entirely caused by economic context. But it’s certainly a factor – Aristotle himself knew that. He insisted eudaimonia was as much made up of external factors like wealth and the kind of society you live in. If you’re too poor or your society is too unequal, he warned, it would be very difficult for you to achieve eudaimonia or for your society to find the ‘common good’.

Jeffrey Lebowski

Rich people tend to attribute their success entirely to their character, as if they simply have the right values, and poor people are poor because they don’t.  Very rich people like Sir John Templeton or Andrew Carnegie love to think they became incredibly wealthy because they worked out the primal ‘laws of the universe’ – and then they go around giving money to people like Napoleon Hill or Birmingham University to prove it. They insist that anyone can become as rich as them, they just need to follow these basic cosmic laws. It’s the philosophy of Jeffrey Lebowski, the millionaire in the Coen Brothers’ film, who turns out to have married into money. This laissez-faire / law of attraction philosophy goes down fairly well in America, because some millionaires like Carnegie really were self-made men – although look closer and you’ll see that an awful lot of America’s billionaires had the benefit of going to Yale or Harvard, like Templeton, Gates, Zuckerberg and others.

In the UK, it’s a lot harder to sell this emphasis on values and character, because we have a much more obviously class-ridden society, that is still to some extent dominated by the 7% who went to private school. And many of the New Paternalists went to private school. It becomes hard to sell, basically, when a privileged clique insists that social instability is purely a consequence of bad values. Let’s face it: it’s easier to have values like optimism when you grow up in an environment that tells you from the start that you are special, an environment that is filled with opportunities to develop your talents, that rewards effort, that creates the expectation of success, that gives you a sense from the start that you can influence your society and be listened to by your government. To create such an environment takes money (an average of £15,000 per pupil a year in independent schools, as opposed to £6,000 a year in the other 93% of the country. The most expensive schools cost over £30,000 a year).

On the other hand, if you grow up in (let’s say) a deprived inner city environment that is physically ugly, crowded, occasionally violent, where there’s never enough money, where crime pays (at least in the short-term), where the government is seen as an intrusion and threat, where your school tells you to rein in your expectations, where you are immersed in a media that celebrates everything you don’t have, that’s going to affect your values. As Jerome Kagan, the great neuro-psychologist, recently put it, the best prediction for depression is poverty. (On the other hand, you may very well end up with more resilience than someone from a more protected background, and a driving ambition to either reform your community, or escape it – both quite different to the ‘gratitude’ the Templeton Foundation wants to foster).

So I think that if you want to sell values / character education, you need to be aware of this problem. You need to be aware of the dynamic interplay between environment and values, rather than focusing exclusively on the one or the other. And you need to ask yourself: what is the connection between values and politics – or between the cultivation of a good character, and the cultivation of a good society? In the service of what political ideology are you teaching values? And you can’t say ‘character has nothing to do with politics’. That in itself is a political, libertarian, laissez faire response.

I worry (and I’m not the only one) that a character education course that emphasizes optimism and gratitude is going to be laissez faire and in the service of the status quo. The emphasis on public service can also be quite laissez faire. It’s a public school ethos dedicated to serving Queen and Country – serving, rather than trying to reform. However, character education is not necessarily in the service of the status quo. There’s also a great tradition of values education on the Left, which tries to train young people both to engage with their society and change it – like the Joseph Rowntree Trust, for example.

Ideally, character education would not drill young people in any one ideology, whether that be laissez-faire capitalism or Quaker reformism. It would give them the capacity to critically reflect on all such values, to be aware of their flaws, to try and choose the best path for themselves and their society. It wouldn’t ignore politics (we’re trying to create good citizens after all) but it wouldn’t become mindless propaganda either. That sort of nuanced approach is not easy. It takes money and leisure – and the sort of confident teacher who thrives on challenging feedback from their well-informed students. That’s why Aristotle thought philosophy could only the pursuit of propertied gentlemen – it’s hard to do well on a mass scale.

West Point cadets

There’s a danger, again, of a class divide in our approach to values education. Take the US Army, which has long tried to teach values and character. The officer class study Hellenic philosophy at West Point, as part of the Cadet Leader Development Studies course. They get the opportunity and leisure to consider and reflect on values in a manner worthy of autonomous sovereign agents (or gentlemen). The privates, meanwhile, get drilled in resilient thinking by Martin Seligman’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness course. Their spiritual fitness is evaluated by a computer questionnaire and given an automatic score. There is no leisure to reflect on or criticise the values in which they are drilled. You couldn’t have an entire army of autonomous philosophers, could you? That has to be confined to the officer class (so the argument goes).

But a democratic society of equals is different to an army. Are we prepared to try and educate a whole society of autonomous citizens capable of critical and reflective thought? Or is that just for the lucky few, while the masses get drilled in unquestioned good habits?

I’ll end with a quote from Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, where Nell, the young orphan, learns the meaning of intelligence:

[Nell says:] “The Vickys have an elaborate code of morals and conduct. It grew out of the moral squalor of an earlier generation, just as the original Victorians were preceded by the Georgians and the Regency. The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code– but their children believe it for entirely different reasons.”

“They believe it,” the Constable said, “because they have been indoctrinated to believe it.”

“Yes. Some of them never challenge it– they grow up to be smallminded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel– as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw.”

“Which path do you intend to take, Nell?” said the Constable, sounding very interested. “Conformity or rebellion?”

“Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded – they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.”

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

What concerns me is less the prospect of bad reviews, and rather the prospect of no reviews. There are quite a few books out at the moment either on philosophy in general or on the philosophy of the good life in particular, so my book may well slip under reviewers’ radars. Well, if that’s the case, hopefully it will be a slow-burning firework that will eventually go off just when you least expect it (not sure where I’m going with this metaphor, sounds dangerous). Anyway, if you enjoy this blog, and you buy the book and enjoy it, do please tell your friends. In fact, my readers are really good at spreading the word, so thanks for that.

The good side of this situation is that there are some great books on the philosophy of well-being out now. Michael Sandel, probably the best-known philosopher at the moment, has a book out on the commodification of everything, which criticizes market ideology from an Aristotelian perspective, suggesting we need to reflect on the limits of what we are prepared to sell. Here’s a great article he wrote in the Atlantic on this topic.

Robert Skidelsky and his son Edward also have a book out on the politics of the good life, which also calls for a move beyond market fundamentalism and a return to Aristotelian virtue ethics, while ridiculing politicians’ present obsession with happiness measurements. The Archibishop of Canturbury, Rowan Williams, wrote a fantastic review of these two books in Prospect magazine, do give it a read, he’s my favourite contemporary Marxist.

By the way, two conferences coming up look at the rise of Neo-Aristotelianism, and the contemporary importance of notions of well-being/ eudaimonia in politics (particularly from the perspective of the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre). Details here.

The  trend of national well-being measurements continues apace: Japan has apparently reported the first results of its national happiness measurements. And it’s… 6.6! Ha, we’re happier than you Japan, in your face. Still, Japan is happier than last year, when it was only 6.5 (though I thought this is the first year it’s done the survey? Oh well.)

Elsewhere, charities are learning to get on the well-being bandwagon. Oxfam Scotland has launched a ‘humankind’ index to help the Scottish government ‘focus on what really matters’. It constructed its definition of ‘prosperity’ through discussions with 3,000 Scots in focus groups, community meetings, street stalls, a YouGov poll and other stuff, and has come up with a weighted indicator based on what people said mattered to them. No reference to God in the index, I see, or football. All seems a bit nebulous – wouldn’t it be more useful not to conflate the various life-factors into one number but to give us all the separate measurements?

This is more interesting: charities are getting better at using well-being measurements to measure the impact of smaller local interventions, says the Guardian. I think this is where well-being measurements could actually be useful – at the local rather than national level, to measure the impact of smaller interventions. I can imagine myself using well-being measurements for this, to try and dazzle funders if nothing else.

Harvard’s Jerome Kagan, a wonderful and humane neuro-psychologist, has written a book called Psychology’s Ghosts, which explores four simplifications and distortions contemporary psychology is prone to. The first is the neural correlate fallacy – that human experiences can be simplified to bits of the brain lighting up on fMRI scans. Carol Tavris’s review in the WSJ notes:

If we can find which area of the brain lights up when we think about love or chocolate or politics, we assume we know something. But what, exactly, do we know? Sometimes less than we think. “An adolescent’s feeling of shame because a parent is uneducated, unemployed, and alcoholic,” Mr. Kagan writes, “cannot be translated into words or phrases that name only the properties of genes, proteins, neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, receptors, and circuits without losing a substantial amount of meaning”–and meaning is as fundamental to psychology as genes are to biology. Many psychological concepts, he notes, including fear, self-regulation, well-being and agreeableness, are studied without regard to the context in which they occur–with the resulting implication that they mean the same thing across time, cultures and content. They do not.

The importance of meaning, value and cultural context in human psychology is also very emphasised by cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, as I discussed last week. Bruner is critical of cognitive scientists being so over-attached to a computational model of the brain that they end up ignoring people’s values, beliefs, culture and even their free will. In other words, they ignore the reasons people give for doing what they do, dismissing it as ‘folk psychology’. Here’s a great example of that sort of thinking – arch-computationalist Patricia Churchland, being interviewed by Julian Baggini.

Jonathan Haidt is one psychologist  who pays attention to the role of culture and values in human psychology. Yet, while his evolutionary account of the adaptiveness of religion may tell us that religion binds societies together, it fails to help us distinguish between ‘good’ forms of group-bonding and ‘bad’ forms like, say, fascism, argues John Gray in this excellent review in the New Republic. That’s the problem with evolutionary psychology as a moral guide – it’s descriptive rather than normative. It tells us what is, not necessarily what should be.

And when Haidt tries to decide what positive values he’d actually prescribe for a society, he is dishearteningly utilitarian, says Gray:

When Haidt considers what the normative element in morality should be, his conclusion is simple-minded to an extraordinary degree: “When we talk about making laws and implementing public policies in Western democracies that contain some degree of ethnic and moral diversity, then I think there is no compelling alternative to utilitarianism.” There is no sign that he is aware of the difficulties of utilitarianism as a moral theory. He cites Isaiah Berlin’s defense of pluralism in ethics without seeming to grasp that, if true, this pluralism was fatal to utilitarianism (as Berlin intended it to be).

Haidt assumes a connection between utilitarianism and the values of liberal democracy that dissolves with a moment’s critical reflection. Jeremy Bentham, the founder of modern utilitarianism, believed that utilitarian ethics applied universally, and advocated enlightened despotism throughout much of the world. Haidt’s belief that utilitarianism offers an effective way of making public policy in ethnically and morally diverse societies is equally unfounded. One of the problems of morally diverse societies is that utilitarian understandings of harm may not be widely enough shared to form an agreed basis for public policies. This is nowhere more clearly true than in the United States. Issues such as abortion and gay marriage are not bitterly disputed because legislators have failed to apply a utilitarian calculus. They are bitterly disputed because a substantial part of the population rejects utilitarian ethics.

I have to say, I’m surprised to hear Haidt comes out with such a utilitarian position. When I met him at the RSA a fortnight ago and asked him how we could find the right balance between liberal individualism and a more collective sense of the common good, he replied: “The first thing to do is make sure you keep rational utilitarians far away from public policy, because they have no understanding of human nature.” Well, quite…

Talking to yourself helps you achieve tasks, says a new experimental study that was widely reported. It found people who spoke to themselves while looking for an object were more likely to find it. Personally, I passed my driving test on the third time by talking to myself out loud while I was driving (though I think this may have so unsettled the examiner that he gave me a pass out of sheer terror).

I didn’t see Louis Theroux’s documentary about a ‘dementia village’ for the elderly in Arizona, but I was moved by this article he wrote about the two weeks he spent there.

Here’s an interesting article suggesting that botox may reduce people’s ability not just for facial expression of emotions, but also for actually feeling emotions. Yikes. Talk about affective flattening.

My colleagues at the Centre for the History of the Emotions wrote most of the articles in this issue of Wellcome History, including pieces on the politics of happiness, the history of crying in public, and other great stuff.

Meanwhile I started a column / blog on the Huffington Post UK site this week, with this first attempt, exploring how universities are not going nearly enough to care for their students’ mental health and well-being. I suggest universities need to embrace the liberal education mission of educating the whole person, not just their pre-frontal cortex.

Finally, here’s comedian Jon Stewart’s very funny take on this week’s revelations from the Murdochs at the Leveson Inquiry.

See you next week, wish me luck!

Jules

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -