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This week’s highlights from the philosophy, psychology and politics of well-being

Jules Evans — Fri, 11 May 2012 11:10:58 +0000

Welcome to new subscribers – lots of you have subscribed in the last week. Hope you enjoy the newsletter, it typically veers between interesting links on the philosophy, psychology and politics of well-being, and the occasional brief essay about something that’s caught my eye. This week will be mainly links (phew!)

On Wednesday we had our biggest-ever meeting of the London Philosophy Club, in the main hall at Conway Hall.We discussed the relationship between ancient philosophy and modern cognitive therapy (which I also discussed in this article in The Times this week) and more generally the tricky relationship between science and ethics. It was great – you can read a brief write-up here. There will be a brief segment about it on the BBC World Service on Saturday, on the World Today Weekend show (I’ll post the link on the blog). LPC also got a write-up in a Spanish paper this week.

The Skeptic movement had a major policy success this week, when they managed to get libel reform into the British government’s legislation programme. This means Skeptic journalists like Ben Goldacre or Simon Singh can say that a bogus health remedy is bogus without getting sued. Congrats to the Skeptics – that’s a great result and shows what an organised and committed movement can do. I had the pleasure of meeting Sid Rodrigues at Conway Hall, who runs Skeptics In the Pub, and has just started working at Conway Hall. I also got to meet Neil Denny, host of the Skeptic podcast Little Atoms, when I was on his show last week. Two people who have helped the Skeptic movement grow in the UK.

Conway Hall has a festival coming up on philosophy and film by the way, at the end of June, at which London Philosophy Club is doing some events. Details here.

Facebook has got into social engineering – it’s launched a feature where people can announce they have agreed to organ donation, as a sort of online organ donor card and also as a way to encourage other people. Networked empathy, it has been dubbed, or ‘easy virtue’. Meanwhile, the Atlantic covered an academic conference that brought together some stars of viral YouTube videos, including that anesthetized kid after the dentist and Two Rainbows Guy. Love that guy! One of the topics the conference explored was how internet memes can spread racial prejudices, or challenge them – like ‘shit white girls say about black girls‘, which I enjoyed.

Some education stories: Michael Gove, UK education minister, gave a speech warning our society was becoming more and more unequal because the 7% who are privately-educated get all the best jobs – even the radicals are posh, like George Monbiot (who reacted with wonderful indignation and a call to close all private schools). One could, at least, take away their charity status.

Private schools like Wellington are trying to spread the success of the private school model by setting up chains of academies, which is more than some other independent schools are doing. But the success of such schools is not just a question of ethos or teacher skill. It’s a question of wealth, of how much money is spent per pupil, and the inequality of the social and economic environments in which British children grow up. I don’t think you can dodge the inequality problem by focusing entirely on character and values (as David Cameron has tried to do).

The New York Review of Books has an interesting review of a new book on the problems facing US universities at the moment (not enough money for public universities and community colleges, while wealthy private colleges perpetuate social inequalities through their admission policy).

Meanwhile, I recently discovered the brilliant 1980s BBC TV comedy, A Very Peculiar Practice, thanks to a Guardian article about the best TV shows ever, which puts it at number 5. It’s about a medical practice at a British university during the Thatcher era (inspired by the writer’s time at Warwick University), and is so funny and intelligent about campus life, eccentric academics and the various competing philosophies of higher education and well-being. The doctors in the campus practice include a drunk Scottish disciple of RD Laing who wrote a book called Sexual Anxiety and the Common Cold and who finds a psycho-sexual cause for any health complaint (even appendicitis); a bisexual feminist doctor who attacks the phallocentrism of the patriarchal university system (‘illness is something men do to women’); a neoliberal doctor who takes consultancy fees from Big Pharma to prescribe students tranquillizers; and a bleeding heart liberal who isn’t sure what he believes. It’s so good! There’s an episode on YouTube, but I’d go ahead and order the DVD, it’s such an intelligent and funny take on higher education.

The importance of a balanced diet

Time magazine caused a big kerfuffle with its cover photo this week of a mom breast-feeding her four-year-old son – the story is about ‘attachment parenting’ ie letting your children breastfeed and sleep with you until they’re six or so. Sounds like something from Martin Amis’s London Fields. It’s a pretty funny cover (not sure the child will thank his mother for the publicity in later years) although mothers complained it has sensationalised an important and sensitive issue.

The Occupy movement has published is May manifesto – less work, more benefits, higher taxes. How will we pay for it? Tax the 1%, Jeffrey Sachs tells the US government in his new book, The Price of Civilisation, and stop spending $900 billion a year on the military – six times what it spends on education.

In the UK, government education spending is being cut to cover the deficit, particularly on higher education (tuition fees) but also on youth services and early care services, where there is not private money to step in. The City needs to do more to pay its social debt or it can expect more protests. One bit of good news is a new youth academy being set up in Hackney by Plan B – why are twenty-year-old rappers leading the way and not rich British businesspeople?

Maurice Sendak, the author of Where the Wild Things Are, sadly passed away this week. Here’s an article considering his work from a psychoanalytic viewpoint.

Congratulations to the School of Life on its new series of self-help books which launched this week. I’m speaking at the School of Life this coming Tuesday about ancient philosophy, cognitive therapy and the politics of well-being. Come along!

Here’s a good example of citizen journalism: one girl at primary school has started to photo-blog her school’s lunches (see right). Shocking stuff. Jamie Oliver has already tweeted his support for her fearless campaign.

No more newspaper reviews of the book so far this week, hopefully one in Observer on Sunday, although Richard Layard did say something nice about it, which is very kind of him considering I take a few jabs at his Utilitarianism in the book.

Finally, something for the weekend: lovers of dance music might enjoy this archive of radio mixes from DFA (the label set up by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem and Tim Goldsworthy of UNKLE). Some wonderful mixes for you to bop to.

Right, that’s enough for this week. Usually it’s more about philosophy and psychology, there was just more good stuff on education this week.

See you next week,

Jules

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

PoW: Friday highlights from philosophy, psychology and the politics of well-being

Jules Evans — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 05:00:00 +0000

Hi, welcome to another issue of the PoW digest. The Journal of Medical Ethics found itself in hot water this week when it published an article in which two Australian philosophers said that ‘after-birth abortion’ should be permissible in a wide variety of cases (in fact, pretty much in any case) because new-born babies aren’t really persons. The editor of the journal, Oxford transhumanist Julian Savelescu, seemed surprised by the subsequent furore, and says the authors have since received death-threats by ‘fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society’.

OK, I’m against death-threats. But what was Savelescu thinking? ‘Afterbirth abortion’? The whole point of the young field of medical ethics is to try and give science and medicine some moral grounding and prevent it from ethical abuses like the Nazi eugenics programme – not to urge science on in that very direction. This will not do much for transhumanism’s reputation.

Here’s a piece on a better example of medical ethics – the new report from the Commission on Improving Dignity in Care for Older People, calling for a values-based approach to elderly care.

Some better news from Oxford: the founder of Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegun, has left £26m in his will to humanities research at Oxford, the biggest ever grant for humanities research.

The positive psychologist and social intuitionist Jonathan Haidt has a new book coming out soon on the emotional and psychological roots of different political ideologies, arguing that our brains have particular emotive buttons around issues like justice, purity, fairness and so on, which political parties need to learn to ‘push’. Here, he applies this thinking to contemporary American politics:

America is in deep fiscal trouble, and things are going to get far worse when the baby boomers retire. Normally, when a nation faces a threat to its very survival, a leader can press the shared-sacrifice button. Churchill offered Britons nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” John F. Kennedy asked us all to “bear the burden of a long twilight struggle” against communism. These were grand national projects, and everyone was asked to pitch in.

Unfortunately, President Obama promised he would not raise taxes on anyone but the rich. He and other Democrats have also vowed to “protect seniors” from cuts, even though seniors receive the vast majority of entitlement dollars. The president is therefore in the unenviable position of arguing that we’re in big trouble and so a small percentage of people will have to give more, but most people will be protected from sacrifice. This appeal misses the shared-sacrifice button completely. It also fails to push the share-the-spoils button. When people feel that they’re all pulling on different ropes, they don’t feel entitled to a share of other people’s wealth, even when that wealth was acquired by luck.

If the Democrats really want to get moral psychology working for them, I suggest that they focus less on distributive fairness — which is about whether everyone got what they deserved — and more on procedural fairness–which is about whether honest, open and impartial procedures were used to decide who got what.

Interesting stuff – although Haidt seems to be putting forward a brand of ethics called emotivism – what’s right is what feels right. Or perhaps he’s really putting forward a version of rhetoric, which is the ancient art of emotion-button-pushing. But, to raise the old Platonic criticism of rhetoric: what’s to prevent anyone using such manipulative techniques for any ideology?

Ulric Neisser, pioneering psychologist and the man who reportedly coined the term ‘cognitive psychology’ in the 1960s, died last week. Here’s an NYT obituary of him, and here’s a good piece by Mind Hacks about how he came to criticise cognitive psychology’s narrow focus on the individual in favour of a more social, networks or Gestalt model of psychology. Thanks to the BPS blog for those links. And here’s an old but interesting piece on Steven Hayes, founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Didn’t know he’s a graduate of Erhard Seminars Training!

Here’s a piece where I climb on my soapbox and rail against the normalisation of violent pornography and demand that the global porn corporation chiefly responsible for this, Manwin, cleans up its act and stops making money from the glamorisation of rape. The CEO of Manwin is a young entrepreneur who apparently cares about social responsibility so I think we can get him to stop this line of business – our society shouldn’t accept it, in my view. Tweet him and challenge him to stop making money from rape-porn websites like PunishTube.

Here’s a piece where I suggest that Alain De Botton’s ‘religion for atheism’ has a class problem. Religions help the poorest and most vulnerable, while De Botton’s project seems to be closer to a retail company selling well-being to the middle classes. The School of Life, which he set up, has done wonders for making philosophy more accessible – I’m just suggesting it needs to go further.

On that topic, here’s a piece about a ‘philosophy-rapper’ in Brazil, whose mother runs a philosophy cafe in Rio’s favelas. And here’s a brief video of Richard Holloway, a former bishop and now a self-proclaimed ‘expectant agnostic’, on God’s crazy love for losers (and also on why agnostics should learn to ‘raid institutions’ for meaning, which is quite in line with De Botton’s project). I like that phrase ‘God’s crazy love for losers’. Too much self-help seems a religion purely for winners (in the material sense).

Talking of which, here’s a good piece from New Inquiry about what’s wrong with TED talks, and how they often express a sort of religious optimism in the power of social science and tech entrepreneurship to solve all the world’s problems, in fifteen minutes.

Here’s a piece where Slavoj Zizek considers The Wire.

Here’s the last thing Christopher Hitchens wrote – a nicely balanced piece on GK Chesterton.

Richard Layard is doing a talk next week on mental health as ‘the new frontier of the welfare state’. Could be interesting…could be weird! Will unemployment end up in the DSM? What would Ulric Neisser say?

That’s all for this week, see you next week,

Jules

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

Moral values in the NHS

Jules Evans — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 06:19:00 +0000

The Commission on Improving Dignity in Care published a report today based on its work over the last year, looking at “the extent and root causes of the failure to provide appropriate levels of care to older people” in the NHS and care homes. We’re just not good enough at how we treat the elderly, and the improvement of such services is becoming a priority as more and more people live into their 80s and 90s, and often develop dementia.

What is interesting about the report for me, from a philosophy angle, is the emphasis it puts on the role of values and ethics within the medical system. One of its core recommendations is:

Hospitals should recruit staff to work with older people who have the compassionate values needed to provide dignified care as well as the clinical and technical skills. Hospitals should evaluate compassion as well as technical skills in their appraisals of staff performance.

It was a point repeated by Sir Keith Pearson, one of the authors of the report, when he appeared on the Today show this morning. He said: “Recruiting for values and then training for skills is enormously important.” He said people considering a career in nursing needed to be aware that 60% of patients in hospitals were over the age of 65 and they needed to be able to show compassion and kindness to elderly patients.

The report also says the system needs to put more emphasis on care-givers’ responsibility and personal judgement, that they have the power to challenge practices they see as harmful, and that the dignity and autonomy of the patient is paramount.

It just reminds me a lot of Aristotelian philosophy and of the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, who often warns that our society is becoming over-instrumentalised, over-obsessed with skills and technologies, and losing sight of the ethics, values and human warmth needed to guide any bureaucratic system. I think this report confirms and complements that view. It’s also a point made by David Buchanan, the director of the Institute of Global Health, in this presentation that I saw him give at an AHRC event last September.

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

PoW: Bring on the wall!

Jules Evans — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 07:24:00 +0000

I went to my first ever humanities academic conference at the start of this week – a three-day event called ‘Connected Communities‘ run by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in Cardiff. It was quite a baptism of fire. The conference took a new experimental format, bringing together about 60 academics working in the medical humanities. These 60 academics were then encouraged to spontaneously coalesce into groups, come up with a three-year research project that involves them all, and then pitch at the end of the conference for up to £1.5 million in funding.

The AHRC compared the process to Dragon’s Den or X-Factor, but to me it resembled the TV show ‘Hole In The Wall’, where teams have a few seconds to assume unusual positions to fit through a hole, otherwise they end up in the cold water. The academics came from every part of the UK, from the highlands of Scotland to the badlands of London, and specialized in every conceivable type of arts and humanities research – touch and dementia, migration and medicine, depression among young British muslims, digital media and the BDSM community. Now imagine them coming together with people they’ve never met, in groups that sometimes included 10 people, to try and find a common project to work on for the next three years. Um….how about performance narratives about BDSM among elderly Hassidic Jews with Tourettes…on ice?

The participants were really lovely people – as a former business journalist, I’m used to going to investment banking conferences, and I can tell you, arts and humanities conferences are much warmer and more congenial affairs, and I really felt at home. But you can also imagine, a room full of arty types like me, some of whom are more comfortable communicating visually or through movement, manically trying to brainstorm a three-year business proposal. The walls were soon covered with strange diagrams and illustrations, including lots of flip-charts with various large words on them: ‘Engagement. Loneliness. Stories. Togetherness.’ There were lots of sentences along the lines of: ‘There’s something here to do with connectedness…but also dis-connectedness…I want to use the word…inter-mingling. Can I just bring that into this space?’ Okay!

By the end of three intense and quite tiring days, the conference had formed itself into six proposed projects, all of them strange chimeras incorporating the head of a sociologist, the body of a philosopher, the legs of a performing arts therapist and the tail of a gerontologist. The teams managed to get through a ten minute pitch without descending into in-fighting, and put forward surprisingly coherent projects – and they almost all got the green light from the AHRC to take a shot at the Big Cash Prize, in a live final which will be filmed in front of a studio audience at the Millennium Stadium (not really), so some exciting and genuinely cross-disciplinary research may emerge.

My group, full of lovely people, decided not to go forward for the Big Cash Prize, but instead to pitch for smaller ‘follow-on funding’, and I also teamed up with David Hunter, a philosopher at the University of Birmingham, to pitch for smaller funding to research the rise of philosophy groups around the UK and indeed around the world. I know of several such groups, but let me know if you know of others. There’s as yet no central website where people can find such groups near them – perhaps we should set one up. Brendan Stone at the University of Sheffield very helpfully told me about the Philosophy In The City project at Sheffield – a group of young post-grads in their philosophy department, who take their practice out into schools and adult communities. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to meet them soon. Tracy Robbins, the programme manager for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s excellent programme investigating loneliness, also told me about a young man in York teaching philosophy in a housing project – I would love to meet him and find out about any similar endeavours.

I also met the wonderful Dr Josie Billington from the University of Liverpool’s English Literature department, who told me about the research being done in Liverpool on ‘bibliotherapy’, particularly by Jane Davis. The clinical research on bibliotherapy started with a study of the effect of reading David Burns’ CBT book, Feeling Good. But, as Jane has investigated, the idea of reading for health goes back to the Renaissance and further, all the way back to the ancients’ use of handbooks and therapeutic poems like Lucretius’ On The Nature of Things. Jane’s work also explores communal reading, and the pleasure and health that comes from reading aloud together. Read this beautiful Guardian article by Blake Morrison about her work.

An area of practical philosophy that I have never written about or, to be honest, thought much about is the work of science ethics committees. I recently heard this interesting lecture by AC Grayling at the LSE, bemoaning the over-specialization and institutionalization of philosophy. He noted the existence of amateur philosophy clubs on the continent but alas seemed unaware of such clubs here in the UK – but he does, very usefully, flag how philosophy has become much more applied in real-life settings through the rise of bioethics committees in hospitals, research academies and government departments since the 1960s.

Ethics committees are fascinating creatures. In a pluralist society, we are all supposed to be allowed our own view of the good life. What that means, as Alasdair MacIntyre has written, is that we don’t really have a common moral language, and mean very different things by words like freedom and justice. And yet ethics committees have to arrive at collective moral decisions which often have life and death implications.

Grayling says: ‘Medical ethics is now one of the richest areas of serious thinking in contemporary philosophy’, and there were some great bio-ethicists at the conference in Cardiff, including David Buchanan, director of the Institute for Global Health. David gave an impassioned talk, very inspired by MacIntyre’s After Virtue, arguing that we need to discover a common language of morality and a common conception of justice if we are to arrive at ethically sound conclusions about health policy. He writes here about what he calls ‘the justice project’, and the need for philosophy clubs, essentially, to bring ordinary people into the bio-ethical discussion. Have a look, it’s a fascinating example of philosophy and ethics applied to real-life decision-making. And also look at the Open University’s excellent website on bioethics, which has links to the Radio 4 show, Inside the Ethics Committee, which is co-produced by the OU and the BBC.

So, no £1.5 million cash bonus for me, but certainly a very rich few days, and a wealth of fascinating introductions and conversations (thanks AHRC).

See you next week,

Jules

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -