So we make a collective agreement not to talk about it because, even if there is a storm on the horizon, it appears to be approaching very slowly, and as a species our minds go very fast. There is a gap between human time and planet time. We’re in a car crash in very slow motion, like the van falling off the bridge in Inception. Deep in our dreams, we are vaguely disturbed by the van’s rotations, but we’ll only really wake up once the van hits the river.

Very occasionally, my mind is aware of climate change. I turn briefly from the amusing cabaret of our culture and glimpse it, leering at me like a skull at a masked ball. Very occasionally, something catches my eye and reminds me of the storm heading this way, perhaps a story buried on page 15, between Kate in the hospital and Nadine in the jungle. Something like: ‘Polar ice-caps melting faster than ever’, or ‘2012 set to be hottest year ever for the US’ and ‘the wettest summer in the UK for 100 years’. I might happen to see a small article on rising food prices or the rapid acidification of oceans.

I read passages like the following, in today’s Economist:

People have started wondering what the world might look like if it were 4°C or 6°C hotter. A new report for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research paints an ugly picture. Oceans, the study says, would rise by 0.5-1 metres by 2100, devastating coastal cities and bearing especially heavily on East and South Asia. Three-quarters of tropical forests could die, including many in Indonesia, India and the Philippines, adding further to global warming. Crop yields would fall overall and droughts would become more common and severe (even if, at the moment, they may not be spreading everywhere, see article). “A 4°C world,” says the report, “can and must be avoided.” Alas, the Doha conference is unlikely to play much part in stopping it.

And I think, wow, this is happening. For real. But it’s too enormous to think about, so I find myself seeking consolation in the trivial. Thanks to the internet, there’s always something trivial with which to distract ourselves, like a cat that looks like Hitler.

Or another who looks like Batman:

Or another who looks like…wait, I’m getting distracted.

We’re not dealing with climate change. Not even close. We’re behaving like an alcoholic who’s been told he better cut down on the sauce if he wants to save his liver, and who instead embarks on one last massive binge, fracking the shale gas, drilling the Arctic. We’ll drink whatever now, lighter fluid, essence of petunia, whatever we can get, just as long as we don’t sober up and have to face the day.

The Theatre of the Absurd

As the Economist put it in the article quoted above, we have entered the Theatre of the Absurd. When you keep the prospect of climate change in mind, everything else seems a bit absurd: my own focus on career advancement, for example.  Our politics seems absurd: no political leader is talking about climate change, in fact, our chancellor just cut tax on petrol. And our culture is far too upbeat, too easily distracted by funny cats and dancing Koreans, to be able to focus seriously on something so downbeat, so intractable to short-term efforts, and so far away (like…40 years or something. Relax!)

Very occasionally, I wonder, how should I live in the face of climate change. And this question reminds me a bit of the existentialist question, how should one be in the face of death and nothingness.

Four existentialists, stuck in a lift.

I am not myself an existentialist: it seems a rather morbid and unhealthy philosophy to me. I actually gave a talk to some existentialist therapists this year, who told me the reading list to train to be an existentialist therapist was Heidegger, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and Kafka. (Can you imagine four more unwell individuals? Imagine being stuck in a lift with them!) As you can guess, the existentialist therapists were not that impressed with my cheery Socratic optimism.

Here, very quickly, is why I grew out of the existentialism of my early 20s, and why I think it’s an unhealthy philosophy. Existentialists believe that we construct selves out of nothingness, and these selves are always rather contingent and arbitrary, and even absurd considering the indifference of the universe and the approach of mortality. And yet somehow we must commit to the selves we construct for ourselves, in constant awareness of the yawning void beneath our choices. If you’re a good Existentialist, you feel a constant nausea, angst or dread at the nothingness beneath us. To be alive is to be unwell.

To deny this dread, to try and forget the void for a second, is to live inauthentically. Somehow you have to construct a bold self from the void, which often means doing some bizarre and idiosyncratic gesture, like shooting an Arab, or becoming a Maoist, or dumping your fiancee like Soren Kierkegaard did. When I was into Kierkegaard and existentialism at 22, I also decided I needed to make some grand idiosyncratic gesture, some leap of faith across the void, so I decided to move to Denmark and become a freelance philosopher. I told everyone I knew I was moving to Denmark. I even held a leaving party. Then I decided not to move to Denmark. That’s what it’s like to be an Existentialist – fairly ridiculous, all in all.

The Greeks, by contrast, were much wiser and healthier than the Existentialists. They agreed that we construct our selves, and that we are often imprisoned by artificial constructions we fashioned and then believe are real. The Greeks agreed that we have a radical freedom to leave these prisons, to choose who we want to be. But they understood that this radical freedom is constrained by nature. They were much better biologists and psychologists than the existentialists, more scientific, more interested in studying human nature and the nature of the cosmos. And they thought we don’t have a nausea-inducing array of choices about how to live. The good life is the life that fits with human nature and the nature of the cosmos.

The Greeks are far more optimistic than the Existentialists, because they think (on the whole) that there is a fit between human nature and the nature of the cosmos, and that even if there isn’t a God we can still achieve fulfillment. We are rational, social, political and spiritual creatures. We can fulfill our natures through the practice of philosophy. We don’t have to decide, every time we get out of bed, what self we want to construct out of the void, in some Lady Gaga fashion. Rather, we try to continue the lifelong project of knowing and fulfilling our nature as humans, which means strengthening the habits we want to strengthen, weakening the habits we want to weaken, engaging with our society, and expanding our consciousness of selves and reality.

Emmy van Deuzen, the leading existential therapist in the UK

Any talk of character and habits seems like bad faith to the Existentialists. When I spoke of the practice of repeating ideas until they became habits, Emmy van Deuzen, the head of the school of existential therapy in London, said all this emphasis on conditioning and habit-reinforcing sounded like cultic brain-washing. But the Existentialists’ lack of understanding of ethical habits is the weak-spot of their psychology. They focus too much on radical free will and not enough on habits. They also have a flawed understanding of what it means to flourish, because they take as their ideals people like Soren Kierkegaard, who was a thinker of rare insight and genius but also, really, an extremely self-conscious, socially incompetent and unwell individual, living inside his own head, divorced from relations with other people or society. We don’t need to make some radical ‘leap of faith’ as Kierkegaard suggested. We need to know our nature, and how to fulfill it. For the Greeks, essence precedes existence.

So, anyway, when Existentialists say ‘how can we live authentically in the face of death and nothingness’, I think ‘what’s the problem?’ I may die but the project of humanity will go on. I can live a happy life despite knowing I’ll die – I’ll write some books, hopefully marry a nice girl and raise a family, and try to leave the world slightly better for my existence. No big deal.

Climate angst
But the prospect of climate change does fill me with angst, dread, nausea or what-have-you. Because existence may become a lot worse for the people who come after us, for children born today. So I feel like it’s difficult simply to live my life and follow my particular projects, knowing that how we’re living now will make things a lot worse for the people who come after us. If mitigating climate change is the major challenge of our generation, then should we all be focusing our attention and energy on that? How should we live, in the face of climate change?

Sarah Connor, eco-mummy

Even if we do take the threat seriously, it’s not entirely clear what we can do. We could express our concerns at the ballot box, try and lift climate change up the political agenda. We could campaign for the Green Party, although it’s against nuclear power. We could focus our attention on communication, try to make books or films that spread the message and help us change our behaviour (but we can’t all do that, can we?) We could try and create a grassroots conversation about the coming storm, like Transition Towns, or the ‘eco-therapy space‘ which Rosemary Randall wrote about this week in Aeon. But that’s not going to stop the storm or help our children. Perhaps we need to train our children for the apocalypse, like Sarah Connor in Terminator II.

I know one person who had a sort of Jerry Macguire moment and decided he had to live more authentically in the face of climate change: Will Goodlad, who was a rising star of British publishing. He’s my age (35 or so), was a director at Penguin, and published non-fiction bestsellers by writers including Malcolm Gladwell and Daniel Kahneman. Then one day Will decided that he had to spend the rest of his life doing what he could to avert the worst-case-scenario for climate change. This was after buying, publishing and presumably being utterly terrified by a book called The Ocean of Life, by the oceanic campaigner Callum Jones. Now, I see, Will’s working at a social enterprise called Digital Explorer, making films about the oceans. Even if he’s not stopping climate change, he’s found a way to live authentically in the face of it, I guess.

New York after Hurricane Sandy

I don’t think what I’m doing is completely absurd in the face of climate change. The politics of happiness could appear quite absurd against the backdrop of a world six degrees warmer (‘think positive, think positive, think….). On the other hand, perhaps we will need Stoic philosophy more and more in the future, to understand how to stay resilient in chaotic conditions, and how to live in harmony with nature. I don’t know. I’m still not sure how to live authentically in the face of climate change. In the meantime, here is a surprised red panda.

*******

In other news…

There is an interesting piece in The Economist this week about a new study from happiness scientists Barbara Frederickson and Bethany Kok, looking at the connection between positive emotions and the vagus nerve, which connects breathing and heart rate. Their research suggests people with higher vagal tone index (ie a stronger connection between their breath and heart rate) are better at modulating negative thoughts and emotions, and promoting positive emotions. It’s not yet clear to what extent we can change the vagal tone we’re born with – hopefully we can, of course.

Here’s two interesting philosophers whose work I’d like to read. Firstly, a New York Times article about Yale political scientist James C. Scott, a farmer, scholar of anarchism, and founder of ‘resistance studies’. I hope to read his book ‘Two Cheers for Anarchism’, over Christmas.

And another new book, by the British philosopher Philip Kitcher, called The Ethical Project, reviewed in the Notre Dame Philosophical Review. Kitcher, who is the John Dewey professor of philosophy at Columbia  attempts to construct a sort of fusion between Aristotle’s naturalism and John Dewey’s pragmatism, which he calls ‘pragmatic naturalism’, in which the natural history of humanity is the history of a millennia-long ethical project to respond constructively to failures of altruism. Kitcher writes:

Ethics is something human beings have been working out together for most of our history as a species. The needs that prompt the cooperative activity of the ethical project lie deep in our human characteristics, and were focused sharply in our human past. Over tens of thousands of years, different human societies have conducted “experiments of living”, in Mill’s apt phrase, trying to find ways of attending to the difficulties inherent in a form of social life to which evolution inclined our pre-human ancestors. As Dewey says, ‘Moral conceptions and processes grow naturally out of the very conditions of human life’.

Joep Dohmen

Here’s a piece in the LA Review of Books, about how there has been a ‘quiet revolution’ in philosophy back towards the idea of the subject as the art of living, particularly through the work of Pierre Hadot. One important figure in that revival is German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, whose latest book, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as Practice, has just been translated into English. Another figure in the revival is Joep Dohmen, a Dutch philosopher who I met in Amsterdam last weekend, whose books alas have so far not been translated into English (although he’s written an article on the revival of philosophy as the art of living for the Journal of Happiness Studies – behind a pay-wall alas). So too is Alain de Botton. And so, preeminently, is Albert Ellis, who to my mind did more to revive the ancients’ idea of philosophy as a way of life than any of the philosophers mentioned above.

Why the art of living shouldn’t be too introspective: a new video by RSA Animate featuring the words of Roman Krznaric, on the need for outrospection and an empathy revolution. I love the Mr Benn sequence.

Talking of RSA Animate, Richard Wiseman teamed up with the RSA to test if animating ideas made them easier to remember and absorb. He randomly ascribed participants to two videos – one in which he talks about some ideas, and one in which his talk is animated by Cognitive Media (the company who makes the RSA Animate videos), and then tested to see which one participants absorbed and remembered better. He found that about 70% of viewers remembered a key statistic when he was giving a talk to camera, compared to 92% of those who watched the same talk as an animation. So images seem to be really useful in our remembering and retaining info. Universities: you need a new faculty of animation!

My friend Ed Pinkney of Mental Wealth UK discovered that undergraduate suicides have doubled in the last five years. Here’s an article in the Times Higher Education supplement on his discovery.

The Young Foundation has a new report out on community resilience, called Rowing Against the Tide.

London Philosophy Club membership has passed the 2500 mark!

Sixty years ago this week, London was covered by the Great Smog or Big Smoke, caused by a combination of weather conditions and coal pollution. It is estimated to have caused the premature death of between 4,000 and 12,000 people. But it helped instigate political action, leading to the Clean Air Act of 1956. Humans are very good at adapting, when they absolutely have to.

See you next week,

Jules

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

Of course, hardcore Stoics might say we shouldn’t share the fruits of our practice – we should ‘tell no one’, as Epictetus puts it. But I actually think it’s good to share your practice with other Stoics, as long as you’re not showing off. My own rather humble practice this week has been to knock off the booze for a week. Small steps, I know – but I’ve stuck to it out of the thought that it’s not just me practicing – there are lots of us out there, committing to this week. We’re stronger when bounded together.

It’s also been a good opportunity for people to say how they’ve been helped by Stoic writings in their life. People like Dorothea from Vancouver, who this week tweeted:

I went through an extremely difficult time a few years ago and one of the things that helped was Stoicism. Reading Epictetus was like having a wise friend sit with me in a situation that no one, not my friends or family, could understand.

Right on Dorothea! As I discovered when I was writing my book, there are loads of people out there who have been really helped by Stoic writings through difficult times, for whom Stoicism means a great deal to them. Everyone from Wen Jiabao, the prime minister of China, who says he has read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations over 100 times, to Elle MacPherson, who named her son Aurelius, to Tom Wolfe, who got into Stoicism a decade ago and is still very into it today (he said he’d write a quote for my book – Tom, if you’re reading this, get in touch…I need your help!)

So here’s my question: is Stoicism really enjoying a revival or a rebirth now? Or is that a gross exaggeration? And if there is a revival happening, where could it go?

I think there is something of a revival taking place, in large part thanks to Albert Ellis and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, but also thanks to the revival of the idea of philosophy as a therapy or way of life. And, finally, I think Stoicism fits quite well with our increasingly crisis-prone era. I’ll go through these three factors, quickly.

Stoicism and CBT

The biggest driver for the revival of Stoicism is its direct connection to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. When I discovered this link, back in 2007, I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t more written about. I found it amazing that ideas and techniques from ancient Greek philosophy should be at the heart of western psychotherapy (2007 was the year the British government started putting hundreds of millions of pounds into CBT and also the year CBT started to be taught in British schools via the Penn Resilience Programme). And no one was writing about it. So I started to write about it. In 2009 I came across Donald Robertson, a cognitive therapist and scholar, who was also writing about it. I interviewed him for my first ever YouTube video.  Check it out and enjoy the trippy special effect at the end illustrating the Stoic idea of the ‘view from above’.

In 2010, Donald published the first ever book properly exploring the relationship between CBT and ancient philosophy. It’s a great book and helped me a lot.

Sam Sullivan, the Stoic mayor of Vancouver, accepting the Olympic flag in Turin

Then, this year, I brought out my book about ancient philosophies and CBT (not just Stoicism, also Epicureanism, Cynicism, Platonism, Scepticism etc),which featured interviews with lots of modern Stoics – Major Thomas Jarrett, who teaches Stoic warrior resilience in the US Army; Chris Brennan, who teaches Stoic resilience in the US Fire Service; Jesse Caban, who is a Stoic in the Chicago police force; Michael Perry, a Stoic Green Beret; Sam Sullivan, the Stoic former mayor of Vancouver, and others. I was helped a lot by the NewStoa community set up by Erik Wiegardt, which helped me get in touch with all these modern Stoics.

Since the book has come out, I’ve done a lot of talks about the connection between Stoicism and CBT, like this one on Radio 4. The book got a nice review in The Psychologist this week (behind a pay-wall alas), and I hope it has encouraged more of a dialogue between psychology and philosophy. The same month my book came out, Oliver Burkeman of the Guardian brought out his book, The Antidote, which also interviewed Albert Ellis and made the connection with Stoicism. We were both interviewed in this Guardian Books podcast talking about Stoicism and CBT.

Then, at the end of this year, Christopher Gill in Exeter’s classics department organised a seminar on Stoicism and CBT, which brought together Donald, me, Tim LeBon, a cognitive therapist and philosophical counsellor;  classicist John Sellars; Patrick Ussher, occupational therapist Gill Garratt and others. The Exeter Project has been a great help in making the connection between Stoicism and CBT a bit more explicit and academically credible.

The revival of philosophy as a practical way of life

Secondly, Stoicism has revived in the last few years thanks to a broader revival of ancient philosophy and the idea of philosophy as a way of life. When Alain de Botton brought out the Consolations of Philosophy in 2000, he was widely reviled by academics for dumbing down philosophy. A decade on, however, more and more academic philosophers have come round to the idea that philosophy can and should be an everyday practice, and even a form of self-help. That’s partly through the influence of de Botton and the School of Life network, but also through the work of academic philosophers like Pierre Hadot and Martha Nussbaum, who have pushed forward a more personal and emotional form of philosophy (by emotional, I don’t mean gushing and sentimental, I mean it works on the emotions, it tries to help people flourish). So academia has played its part in the revival, but I’d suggest self-help writers like De Botton, Eckhart Tolle and Tim Ferriss have been key in bringing Stoic ideas to a wider public.

Stoicism is popular in times of crisis

Exeter during Stoic Week

Finally, I think Stoicism is enjoying something of a revival because it fits with our crisis-prone era. It’s a good philosophy for coping with volatile and chaotic times. You wouldn’t expect it to be that popular during an age of affluence, for example  like we were in from 1955 to 1975, although it was popular then among some officers in Vietnam like James Stockdale. But you would expect it to be popular in times like now, an age of austerity and emergency, when our economies are crashing and our cities are being constantly buffeted by floods and hurricanes. It is appropriate that, in the very week Exeter University hosts ‘Stoic Week’, floods are coursing through the town. Our imagination has become more apocalyptic – whether that be in films like Deep Impact, books like The Road, or TV shows like Derren Brown’s Stoic-inspired Apocalypse. We’ve started to wonder how we’d fare if some of our affluent accoutrements were stripped from us. How would we, poor bare forked animals, cope upon the heath without our lendings?

There has been a growth in nostalgia for the Stoicism of our grandparents – the generation before the baby-boomers, who went through the war with a calm Stoic spirit (or so it seems to us). Hence the popularity of the old war poster, Keep Calm and Carry On. Hence the interest in the history of the ‘stiff upper lip’. Hence the call this week by a Tory MP and GP for a return to the values of ‘post-war Stoic Britain’, when people took care of themselves and didn’t burden the NHS with all their self-indulgent lifestyle illnesses. We are in the midst of an austere reaction to the consumer excesses of the baby-boomers, and Stoicism goes quite well with that reaction. Though of course, the baby-boomers are a part of the Stoic revival too – not least in the increased interest in assisted suicide. The baby-boomers want the freedom to choose their own death, as Seneca put it. If death became the ultimate lifestyle choice, that would be a huge cultural shift, away from Christianity, and back towards Stoicism (the word suicide, by the by, was invented by a 12-century theologian in a tract written against Seneca).

Where could the revival go?

So, there is something of a revival happening. But where could it go?  Well, I think we’re all learning how to take care of ourselves better, learning how to be the ‘doctors to ourselves’ as Cicero put it. I don’t think that necessarily means we’re all going to become card-carrying Stoics, but I do think and hope we’re becoming more intelligent about our emotions and how to heal them, and more DIY about our health in general and how to take care of ourselves.  I suspect and hope that this will involve a continued growth of interest in ancient philosophies – Greek, Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, Sufi and so on. One of the most encouraging phenomena in this difficult era is the synthesis of ancient wisdom and modern empiricism – the Shamatha project in California is one of the great examples of it. I hope that my psychology colleagues in the Exeter project, Donald Robertson and Tim LeBon, can do more empirical work on Stoic ideas.

However, I personally think Stoicism itself is lacking some things. As Martha Nussbaum told me in this interview, it’s part of an ‘anti-compassion’ tradition. It lacks compassion, is too cold, too uncaring. I remember, on Stoic email lists, when someone has said that something terrible has happened to them, no one would say anything consolatory to them. They would just stiffly quote Epictetus – the philosophical equivalent of a punch on the shoulder. And I would feel like giving that person a hug and saying ‘yes, that’s pretty shit, but you’ll get through it’. The Stoic position of ‘nothing is fucked here, Dude’ seems to me too cold. We’re not Gods, we’re humans. I think we should be careful that the revival of Stoicism does not become too libertarian, part of a backlash against the welfare state. We also need to make clear that Stoicism does not mean repressing your emotions. Far from it. Nor should it mean coping entirely on your own with difficulties. Stoicism today should mean taking care of each other, not just of yourself.

A key contemporary challenge is that Stoicism lacks a proper sense of community, and if you look at modern attempts at building a Stoic community – the NewStoa group, or the Stoic Yahoo list, I don’t think either of them have been that successful, because they are too logical and not caring enough, so they end up with men bickering over terminology, rather than humans caring for each other.

Nonetheless, let me end on a positive note: the Stoics taught us some amazing stuff about how to transform the emotions, and how to take care of ourselves.  It’s just that, in my opinion, those lessons are best taught alongside other philosophies of the good life. Again, I come back to the same point I often ask myself: can we build philosophical communities that are genuinely caring, compassionate, nurturing?

*****

Tobias Jones

Next week, hopefully, I am off to meet a hero of mine, Tobias Jones, who runs a community like that in Dorset, for recovering addicts. Tobias wrote a fantastic book called Utopian Dreams, asking the same sort of communitarian questions that we are discussing. Do read it, it’s brilliant. I’ll hopefully be interviewing Tobias for a new podcast I’m putting together for Aeon magazine. Should be a really fun, exciting venture. Here’s a piece Tobias wrote for Aeon on his commune.

Next Tuesday, come to hear Angie Hobbs talking about the future of philosophy at the London Philosophy Club, at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. She’s a fascinating speaker, and it’s a brilliant venue.

This week, my friend Sara Northey arranged a brilliant LPC evening, with a talk by clinical psychologist Peter Kinderman. Peter put forward a radical and (in my opinion) quite persuasive argument about why most psychiatric diagnoses and unscientific and deeply unhelpful, and we should instead switch to a problem-based analysis of emotional problems. Here’s an interesting write-up of the event by Natalie Banner, a philosopher at KCL’s Centre for Humanities and Health.

The accuracy of social psychology studies is under the microscope, after Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel was found to have faked some of his studies, without being found out by the social psychology journals in which he published his results. A new report condemns not just him but the whole field of social psychology for its ‘sloppy’ research culture.

This New York Times article (forwarded to me by Matt Bishop) has been widely discussed in among therapists – it says business is declining for therapists, as people increasingly want problem-fixing rather than long-term counseling (Peter Kinderman would approve!). So therapists are having to hustle to get more business, which means putting more effort into branding. I’ve often thought that therapists should, at the least, put a video of themselves on their website explaining who they are and what sort of problems they can help with (in fact I considered setting up a business to help therapists do this).

Talking of therapists making videos, here is a video of Windy Dryden, a leading cognitive therapist in the UK, doing a song-and-dance version of CBT to the tune of ‘Moves Like Jagger’. Bizarre! Though it did make me think – perhaps I could put together some CBT songs..

Tomorrow, I’m speaking at this conference in Amsterdam along with Alain de Botton, Philippa Perry, Roman Krznaric, Stine Jensen and others. Still a few tickets left I think, if you’re in Holland and fancy coming along. My Dutch publisher, Regine, has been really amazing in promoting my book in Holland, and it’s got into the top 100. She is a force of nature.

The book is now out in Germany. One of my readers, Julia Kalmund, has arranged for me to come and speak at Munich University.  Nice one Julia! She wins this week’s awesomeness prize. It’s also just come out in Turkey….any Turkish readers of the newsletter??

A guy called Ahmad from Pakistan got in touch with the London Philosophy Club this week. He wrote:

Philosophy should be promoted in every community because it is usually above any caste and creed…Unfortunately there are not favorable conditions in Pakistan for such activity, London has a certain attitude for this,as it provided shelter to Volatire and Marx when Europe wasn’t ready to tolerate them…I want to become an active member of London Philosophy Club and to try to go to London for studies,it would be a pleasure for me to remain in the company of such creative social minds.

I find that great and inspiring – that’s why I love philosophy, because it connects us beyond any caste or creed. Good luck to you, Ahmad. Meanwhile the British government has succeeded in lowering immigration…by putting off foreign students from studying here. Doh!

See you next week,

Jules

PS, if you fancy some weekend reading, download my report on Grassroots Philosophy

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

The book is by five Tory MPs who joined the House of Commons in 2010: Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss.  It’s generated a fair amount of headlines, as its central message is a popular one for the right-wing press: “the British are among the worst idlers in the world”. We need, the authors say, to emulate the rising economies of China, Brazil, South Korea and Canada, by working harder, slashing taxes, embracing free enterprise, and no longer paying out such generous welfare benefits.

It all sounds like Mitt Romney speaking off the record and praising Chinese labour camps where the teenage workers sleep on bunk beds. But these young Tories are willing to say the same as Mitt while on the record – witness Kwasi Kwarteng, the intellectual leader of the group, telling the Guardian how impressed he was by a visit to a Chinese factory, where if a worker met their productivity target for the hour, they were allowed two whole minutes to rest.

I read the book because I wondered what it might mean for the politics of well-being. David Cameron has, to some extent, embraced the well-being agenda, and suggested we should not focus so relentlessly on wealth, status and GDP growth, but instead seek higher goals like well-being, fulfillment and the common good. Well, that all sounds incredibly wet to the authors of Britannia Unchained. To them, the well-being agenda is the sickness, not the cure. It’s an example of how the defeatist British have somehow come to think that “business is a dirty word”, economic growth is an illusion, and we should all work less. The new economics foundation, pioneer of the well-being agenda, is not their favourite think-tank, as you can imagine.

Idle…moi?

So what is the book like? Not good. It has a feeling of being dashed off by busy young people. Most of its sources are newspaper articles, as if they’ve just googled their ideas and used the first media source they find to support them. There are typos: on the third page, ‘if we are to prosper in the future, we have to much learn’.

The book’s central claim – that we’re the worst idlers in the world – is made on page two, where the authors insist that “5.7 million people receive some kinds of benefits, which is one of the highest proportions in the OECD”. Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, writes:

What’s wrong with this? Where do I start? What does “some kind of benefits” mean? Not pensions, child benefit or tax credits, I can deduce that, although the average reader won’t know. Does it include disability living allowance and housing benefit (both of which can be claimed by workers)? I think the former but not the latter. Grown since when? It certainly grew rapidly in the 1980s and early 1990s but the number of people claiming out-of-work benefits fell steadily from its peak in 1994 until the 2008 crisis and, despite the recession, is still well below the levels of the mid-1990s. So the drama is less than compelling. As for “one of the highest proportions in the OECD”, the last OECD study on this topic found nothing of the sort.

As the Economist points out in its cover story this week, the UK has the highest employment rate in the G7. Still, unemployment is at 8%, and there are thousands of Brits who were left behind by the bourgeoisification of the working class over the last 50 years. They became ‘chavs’ – an object of fear and hatred for the newly-expanded middle class.  But demonising the underclass is not the solution. I would suggest we need to create the same networks of public services and mutual support groups that helped the first working class to raise itself into the middle class in the 19th and 20th centuries. While Kwarteng slags off the poor, his school-mate and fellow young Tory, Danny Kruger, left politics and set up a charity to work with (and even live with) former prison inmates. That’s doing more good than simply shouting abuse from the ramparts.

The authors are right to worry about the size of the national debt, and to emphasise the need for us to balance the books, as families and as a country. If your debt gets too big, you lose control of your national policy, and are dictated to by foreign lenders. Imagine having Angela Merkel tell us how to live. That’s why we need to reduce our public and private debt over time.

But it’s a bit rich to blame that national indebtedness on the working class, while also claiming that the City is ‘a small pocket where the work ethic still exists’. That’s an obviously inaccurate and unfair description of what’s happened in the last five years. It wasn’t worker welfare that increased the national debt by £1 trillion in two years. It was corporate welfare – bailing out the banks, their shareholders, their private bond holders, their high net-worth investors. That corporate welfare is still going on, through the Bank of England’s cheap lending support for the banks.

The authors say blithely that financial crises are “a fact of life”. If you criticise the bank system for being under-regulated and for rewarding reckless incompetence, you’re giving in to “national defeatism”. Well, that’s just nonsense. The reason trade union militancy has increased in the last two years is not that British workers are idle. It’s that the trade unions, along with the rest of us, think it’s deeply unfair that our public services are being slashed while the private financial sector has received such incredible beneficence from the tax-payer. We want our money back, and we want protection against further crises (in fact, George Osbourne’s bank levy is a good step in this direction).

The BRICs want quality of life too, not just economic growth

Perhaps the most glaring mistake of the book is the way it holds up the rising economic powers as paragons of “individual initiative and free enterprise”. This betrays a serious ignorance about what is driving economic growth in China, Brazil, Turkey, South Korea, Russia, India and elsewhere. These economies are far more state-dominated than ours, and growth has been driven by enormous state companies like Gazprom, Petrobras and Bank of China, or chaebols like Samsung. These are not economies full of plucky individual entrepreneurs. And much of their economic growth comes not because they’re innovating incredible new technology. They’re simply catching up with the West, rolling out pre-existing technology like modern banking, cars, mobile phones, TVs and so on to their large populations.

Once their material quality of life has caught up with ours, much of the new middle class in BRIC economies are asking the same post-materialist questions as we are: what’s the point of working incredibly hard if you make yourself ill, harm your family and damage your environment in the process? Is it worth ruining your mental health for bling and credit card debt? See, for example, this article on South Korea’s existential crisis:

Chief among their concerns is the stress and expense of putting their children through “exam hell”, even in the knowledge that there are too many graduates chasing too few well-paid jobs. No wonder Korea’s birth rate has plummeted — to 1.23, well below the 2.2 replacement rate and lower even than Japan at 1.4.

South Korea is questioning its own obsession with bling

South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the OECD because of pressures at work and in education. It also has very high levels of personal credit card debt (35% of GDP). And Koreans are now asking the same questions about quality of life as we are. The global hit ‘Gangnam Style’ is a satire on South Korea’s obsession with bling, and you see the same sort of anti-bling satires appearing in other BRIC countries. Koreans are looking to ancient sources of wisdom for stress cures, like philosophy: a local publisher paid around $200,000 for the School of Life’s self-help series, my book’s doing well there too, and Seoul recently hosted the 11th International Conference on Philosophical Practice. In the words of Dr Oh Kyung-Ja, professor of clinical psychology at Yonsei University, Koreans are “desperately searching for things to do to divert themselves from stress. They just don’t have a good model.”

Likewise, China may have an unquenchable appetite for bling, but many of the new middle class are also asking questions about what it means to live well: witness the national fondness for the ideas of Confucius and Marcus Aurelius and the government’s interest in the politics of well-being. We also read, in the FT, that the Chinese rich are “starting to spend more on wellness as opposed to luxury goods”.

So I suspect that the new rising powers are moving very rapidly from bling to post-bling. They are rising rapidly up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and arriving at the same quality of life questions we’re asking in the West.

Truss is right that we need to improve science education

Elizabeth Truss: pro-science

The best chapter in the book is Elizabeth Truss’ chapter on the importance of improving science education to help us compete in the global knowledge economy. I agree that too many young people choose arts or social science subjects as cushy options. We may have too many students taking psychology A-Level and psychology degrees, and are in danger of turning into a nation of life coaches (I count myself among the growing ranks of well-being obsessives so mean no offence to life coaches, just…there’s a lot of you!) Some of these psychology grads have a remarkable lack of respect for scientific evidence.

But Truss doesn’t offer radical ideas about how to improve the level of scientific education in this country. I’d suggest, for example, that we reform the undergraduate degree system, so that students don’t study just one subject for three years – that degree of specialisation is harmful to their intellectual growth and to the country’s culture. If you study a humanities subject, you should be expected to take science subjects as well, and vice versa. We have too many arts graduates who leave university like me: desperate to write a novel and with an ingrained prejudice against scientific evidence. I’d also like to see the Baccaulaureate replace A-Levels, which demand too much specialisation too early. And the debate on education shouldn’t be framed as well-being or academic results: critical thinking, reasoning skills and creative thinking are good for both.

The British are good at arts and culture

We should also acknowledge what’s good about our arts culture – how it fosters excellent journalism, writing, theatre, film, art and fashion. Our culture sector is one of the best in the world, so it’s bizarre that it should be so uncelebrated in a book on reclaiming national pride. It’s also a good example of combining creative and technical expertise, as in our flourishing computer games industry, or music production, or film special effects. It may be that the authors ignore our creative economy because it doesn’t fit their Thatcherite model of self-reliant entrepreneurs – instead, it flourishes through a mixture of public and private funding, and through state-sponsored schools like RADA. Or it may be that they are simply deaf to culture, like many old Thatcherites. Hopefully Boris Johnson is less so.

Another point which the book could have made more strongly is the importance of attracting skilled immigrants into our country, including into our universities. The Home Office is doing its best to repel such immigrants from our borders through its heavy-handed treatment of London Met University. And there’s no discussion about the importance of adult education and community learning to a knowledge economy. Nor do the authors consider the one policy that would really improve our education sector: take away public schools’ charity status. That would encourage more middle class people to send their children to academies, and open up social networks of privilege and excellence. If that’s too un-Conservative, then at least insist public schools do more to support academies.

The book does express something in the British national mood. The latest British Social Attitudes survey found that only 28% think governments should spend more on benefits, down from 58% in 1991. More than half think people would “stand on their own two feet” if benefits were less generous, compared to 20% believing that in 1993. But I don’t recognise the book’s claim that Britain is weighed down by defeatism and pessimism. The authors clearly wrote that before the Olympics, which were a resounding affirmation of our country’s strengths – our belief in individual excellence and our belief in fairness, volunteerism,technology, creativity and fun. You can believe in Britain’s greatness without wanting it to turn into a Chinese labour camp.

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In other news:

Here is a great piece from Intelligent Life on the ‘mass intelligent’ – we’re not dumbing down, it argues, we’re wising up. Here is an online debate The Economist did on the subject. And the CEO of the Economist Group referenced it in a recent presentation on the ‘mega-trend of the mass intelligent’ (here’s a slide from it, below).

The young Spanish boy who was chosen as the reincarnation of a Tibetan lama talks of why he left the monastery and abandoned his monastic vows.

Here’s a review of a new book on the Quantified Self movement and the digitization of medicine.

Here’s a good Re-Think pamphlet on recovering from mental illness:

Jimmy Soni, managing editor of the Huffington Post and the author of a new book on Cato, gives five reasons why Stoicism matters today.

More Stoicism: here’s a piece by Ian Hislop on the history of the British stiff upper lip (based on a program which will be on BBC 2 on Tuesday October 2)

Here is a piece on how technology is about to disrupt and transform academia, and here, by way of counterblast, is a good piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education challenging the hype around MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).

Finally, here on the left is an ad from the 1970s offering nude psychotherapy. ‘Be the first on your block to get nude psychotherapy!’ Ah, those were the days.

See you next week,

Jules

PS I have a brief segment about self-help on the Culture Show on Wednesday, BBC 2, 10pm. It’s somewhat ridiculous and may be the last thing I get asked to do on TV, so check it out. And also some American publishers have finally made offers for the book. Hooray! Thanks for your positive thoughts and kind reviews on Amazon (I didn’t write any of them, in case you’re wondering…)

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

Are we heading for a a new Enlightenment or a new Dark Ages? On the one hand, there are signs that climate change is beginning to have serious impacts on our civilisation. As Bill McKibben writes today in Rolling Stone magazine, May was the hottest month on record for the northern hemisphere, and it was the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the globe exceeded the 20th century average. In the Arctic, scientists report that an iceberg the size of Manhattan has broken off the Greenland glacier.

Our political leaders are still no closer to agreeing on CO2 cuts which might limit global warming to two degrees celsius – which is already an extremely risky amount of warming. We can’t just blame our leaders either. McKibben writes: “Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement against yourself – it’s as if the gay-rights movement had to be constructed entirely from evangelical preachers, or the abolition movement from slaveholders.”

McKibben thinks that if the environmental movement is really going to gain traction, it needs enemies. So he wants to turn fossil fuel companies and its CEOs into the sort of public hate figures that investment bankers have been for the Occupy movement. In other words, the green movement needs to switch sentiments, and hope that hate for enemies will succeed where love for our planet has failed.

Meanwhile, pessimistic philosopher John Gray reads Cormac McCarthy’s bloody western Blood Meridien, and uses it to consider the roots of violence. He suggests that humans often commit violence out of a desire for safety and security rather than some inherent blood-lust. Once civilisation breaks down, membership of gangs and participation in gang violence offer, paradoxically, a form of security and belonging. And eras without basic law and order can last for several centuries: ‘Civilisation is natural for human beings’ he writes. ‘But so is barbarism.’

German philosopher Jurgen Habermas suggested back in 2010 that the European Union could collapse. He has warned that democracy is always in tension with capitalism, and that the Eurozone seems to have chosen technocratic managerialism over democratic deliberation and consent. But in his new book, The Crisis of the European Union (reviewed here in The Nation), he thinks the European project could still triumph and lead to a supranational cosmopolitianism. We don’t need the emotional consolation of ethnic nationalism, he says, as long as we have common institutions of deliberation and consent. Well…maybe.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. In some ways, things are getting better. In the UK, crime rates have fallen to their lowest level for two decades, and homicide is at its lowest for 30 years. Why does crime keep falling, despite the worsening economic climate? The BBC’s Home Affairs editor, Mark Easton, ponders the question, and decides that it’s not just about better policing or improved car security – we’re all simply behaving better. We’ve become less tolerant of violence, and Easton thinks it may be because levels of education have risen over the last 30 years. Now there’s an optimistic idea.

I’ve written before about the rise of informal learning and the new ‘mass intelligentsia’. Here’s some great examples of it I came across recently. Firstly, young mums want to keep their minds active, so we’re seeing the rise of new ‘mum clubs’ to hear talks, discuss books, visit galleries and so on. Last month saw the launch of Mumsnet Academy, a partnership between Mumsnet, the Faber Academy and the School of Life. Lucky mums can, for example, take a weekend course studying Roman history with Mary Beard.

For my money, the great champion of the mass intelligentsia is Jamie Oliver – I’m serious, I think Oliver and Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall have done more to promote learning and shift ethical attitudes in our culture than 99% of academics. Chefs have become the philosophers of our society. Anyway, the latest addition to the Oliver empire is a new drop-in cookery school in Notting Hill Gate. Good idea.

And one final example of the mass intelligentsia – check out this cool online book club, BOOKD, complete with starter videos of experts giving their view of a new book. Part of the THNKR YouTube channel.

In China, an article on the French Baccalaure’s philosophy section sparked a nation-wide debate on whether the Chinese exam system should incorporate more philosophy and open-ended critical reflection. Yes!

In Italy, my uncle John Hooper reports on the mayor of a town in the south of Italy, who has created the new post of ‘municipal philosopher’, who is available for public consultations between 3pm and 7pm on Fridays. The head of the local psychologists’ association has condemned the move as “utterly perilous”. Why??

In the UK, Wellington College headmaster Anthony Seldon suggested public schools have lost their moral compass. Maybe…or did they lose their bearings from the start, based on their elitist economic model?  Will Hutton puts the case against them, noting how they have frozen social mobility and kept a small class in power.

In the LA Times, a columnist provoked the ire of psychologists by suggesting that psychology is not a science, because it deals with nebulous and hard-to-define things like emotions. What an idiot.

A couple of stigma-busting stories. Firstly, Channel 4 in the UK has a whole series of programmes challenging mental health stigma next week, called…er…’4 Goes Mad‘. Fingers crossed it’s not 4′s usual freak show. Meanwhile, one of the biggest stigmas of all – being gay in the homophobic world of hip-hop – took a hit when R&B singer Frank Ocean announced he was bisexual, shortly before launching his excellent new album. I bet Kanye West jumps on the bandwagon now – his next hit will be called ‘I snogged a dude (and I liked it).’

Finally, what happens when all the fireworks for a major fire-work show accidentally go off at once? Over in San Diego, they found out. Kaboom! Wait…is that it?

See you next week,

Jules

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -