He basically had my dream job. And he also wrote really well, so I didn’t grudge him his success (well…not much). I read and thoroughly enjoyed Why Proust Was A Neuroscientist, and it was a major influence on my own book, in its clean and strong structure,  its weaving together of scientific evidence and personal stories, its vision that the sciences and the humanities could and should be brought together.

So it’s saddening, and also frightening, to see his fall. It started with reports that he had self-plagiarised himself, using lines from one article again in another article, and also using stuff from his blog in his books. My feelings about that were, OK, I can understand that its wrong to sell the same stuff twice. But so what if he used stuff from his blog in his book – my God, 60% of my book is from my blog. That’s like reprimanding a painter for copying stuff from his sketchbook. The whole point of a blog, for me, is that you sketch stuff out and learn how to say what you want well. And when you’ve said something exactly as you want to say it, it’s not surprising if you then re-use that phrasing in a book.

The new revelations, however, suggest he made up and doctored quite a lot of quotes by Bob Dylan, in his new book Imagine. It’s a bizarre thing to have done, because everyone knows that Dylan fans are complete obsessives and he was going to get busted. Particularly as the Dylan story was the one he told over and over in talks and magazine excerpts. Now, alas, he has resigned from the New Yorker, and his publishers have stopped shipping Imagine, which is a shock as Lehrer must have been paid a socking great advance by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the US and Canongate in the UK (I’m guessing over half a million dollars). In fact, they’re even offering refunds to the 200,000 people who have already bought the book, which seems like overkill to me.

It reminds me of the line of the Greeks (Solon? Aeschylus? Aristotle?) – call no man happy until they’re dead. By which they meant not that happiness is a cold grave, but that there are so many ups and downs in life that you never know how things will turn out. Sometimes great success like Lehrer’s is not all it’s cracked up to be. Would he really have made up quotes, if he wasn’t under extreme pressure to produce another best-seller to support all the hype?

There was a bubble in non-fiction popular psychology…perhaps a bubble in psychology in general, that built up over the last fifteen years, thanks in particular to the incredible success of Malcolm Gladwell, Lehrer’s mentor. His popularity helped stoke a massive public demand for for popular science books that neatly encapsulated some funky idea (Blink, Flourish, Bounce, Moonwalking with Einstein, you get the picture). But the market success obviously led to pressure to condense everything down into tidy TED-friendly ten minute info-bites, which in turn created pressure to simplify and (on some occasions) falsify. And it even turns out that some of the psychology studies of the last ten years were also falsified. So the pop-psych bubble seems to be bursting, somewhat.

Well, I’m sorry for Lehrer, it must be really vertiginous to rise so quickly then fall so quickly. He really is a genuinely talented writer, you can’t fake that. And I don’t know about Imagine or How We Decide, but Why Proust Was A Neuroscientist was simply a great book, which will last. Unfortunately its success, and the timing of it, meant there was too much hype put on him, too young. I wouldn’t wish that sort of success on anyone.

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

So why is he such a great artist? I suggest he has three superpowers:

1) His command of language.

Language is like a mattress. Some people’s language is so used, so tired, it’s like lying on a bed where all the spring has gone. Other people’s language is captivatingly new and springy and bouncy – Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example, or Martin Amis, or Tom Stoppard. Shakespeare’s language is the springiest of them all. He has such a range of registers – from the majestic to the bathetic to the lyrical to the savage. And when the existing words weren’t there, he invented them: addiction, amazement, impartial, rant, lacklustre, remorseless…the list is long. And he created so many golden phrases that have become part of our language – just from Richard II, I noticed ‘a leopard never changes his spots’, and many others. He hugely extended the capacity of the English language, and helped thereby to call the modern world into being.

He also commanded metaphor and simile like no one before or since. They can be very slippery and tricky, and a bad artist conjures up too many and too varied metaphors which end up contradicting each other or simply clogging the sky with their imagery. Shakespeare is incredibly controlled in his metaphors and similes, so that throughout a play he will use particular ones masterfully, weaving together a coherent artistic whole, getting them to complement and comment on each other rather than crashing into each other like planes directed by a bad traffic controller.

Take this one passage from Richard II, where the king confronts Bolingbroke and accuses him of treason. The rhythm, the imagery, the phrasing, it’s all so powerful.

Tell Bolingbroke – for yond methinks he stands -
That every stride he makes upon my land
Is dangerous treason: he is come to open
The purple testament of bleeding war;
But ere the crown he looks for live in peace,
Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers’ sons
Shall ill become the flower of England’s face,
Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace
To scarlet indignation and bedew
Her pastures’ grass with faithful English blood.

It’s just sensational stuff…the way the ‘b’ of bloody explodes like a body hit by a cannonball, the imagery of fallen Englishmen as poppies in a field and anger on the face of a mother. I particularly like ‘bedew her pastures green’, for some reason I can’t put my finger on.

2) His empathy.

Some people have the ability to sing their own world – like Woody Allen, for example, who created one particular persona and sang it repeatedly. Shakespeare had the ability to step inside an infinite variety of characters, to imagine their world, to see the world through their eyes, and give them voice. Kings, grave-diggers, generals, teenage girls, sprites, madmen, widows, clowns, murderers. As Harold Bloom has argued,  Shakespeare called our world into being, by giving us a sense of the sheer range of human experience,  our capacity for suffering, and our capacity to reflect on that suffering and rise above it.

3) His X-ray skepticism.

This is, I think, his real genius, his greatest superpower. He has a sort of x-ray specs ability to see through conventions, and to see the nothingness beneath them. He sees human life in all its pomp, power and glory, and then sees how quickly all that can pass. He sees the insecurity beneath all human experience, and how quickly we are reduced to dust. The most famous instance of this, of course, is Hamlet, and his self-paralysing capacity to see through the illusions that drive us. Nietzsche wrote well about this coruscating skepticism in Hamlet, in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy:

In this sense the Dionysian man has similarities to Hamlet. Both have had a real glimpse into the essence of things. They have understood, and it now disgusts them to act, for their actions can change nothing in the eternal nature of things. They perceive as ridiculous or humiliating the fact that they are expected to set right a world which is out of joint. The knowledge kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion. That is what Hamlet has to teach us, not that really venal wisdom about John-a-Dreams, who cannot move himself to act because of too much reflection, too many possibilities, so to speak. It’s not a case of reflection. No! The true knowledge, the glimpse into the cruel truth overcomes every driving motive to act, both in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian man. Now no consolation has any effect. His longing goes out over a world, even beyond the gods themselves, toward death. Existence is denied, together with its blazing reflection in the gods or an immortal afterlife. In the consciousness of once having glimpsed the truth, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of being; now he understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia; now he recognizes the wisdom of the forest god Silenus. It disgusts him.

This same x-ray skepticism is apparent in Richard II, in the famous speech where Richard comes back to England to discover his authority has been challenged by Bolingbroke. Rather than simply leaping into battle, he suddenly sees through to the heart of the matter, sees the terrible fragility of majesty, sees our cosmic vulnerability, sees death grinning through at him. His courtiers urge him into action, but it’s the capacity to see through all action, to feel that sort of nausea at all action, that makes both Richard and Shakespeare so interesting. Have a listen to his speech:

This nausea reminds of the Buddha, who also sees through the brilliance of material things, and glimpses the skull grinning beneath. But the Buddha left the world and became an ascetic monk. Likewise Tolstoy, another human with extraordinary x-ray skepticism, left literature to become, in effect, an ascetic holy man. It’s interesting to me that Shakespeare, who possessed that x-ray skepticism to a greater degree than any other human, should not have left the world, should not have become a monk. He saw through the illusions of mankind, but perhaps, unlike the Buddha, he saw nothing beyond them. And yet the dignity of his characters lies in their ability to see through their illusions, to confront their condition, and to see that it affects not just them but all of us. Humans can at least know their condition, can reflect on it, can laugh at it or commiserate with each other over it. It reminds me of the lines of Pascal, lines surely inspired by Shakespeare:

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

Last weekend I had a piece in the FT on the rise of philosophy clubs, which included some great quotes from Melvyn Bragg, one of the leading arts commentators in the UK. I thought readers might like to read the whole interview with him, so here it is!

MB: There’s now evidence that over the last 30/40 years, a very substantial minority is prepared to put time and effort into subjects that used to be the preserve of a very small minority. That highly educated minority has grown enormously.

JE: Why?

MB: Three main reasons: the expansion of education, the rise of intellectual leisure activities among the elderly, and mass broadcasting, particularly via the internet.

Firstly, the huge expansion of people going to university. Saul Bellow once said he only wrote for people who went to university, but in the US that’s 30 million people. In the UK, back in 1960, only 5% of people went to university. Now it’s 40%. So it’s something like a 900% increase. It’s colossal. That’s the foundation. It’s one of the reasons the UK is so good at theatre – because we have brilliant theatre schools. So we now have an enormous number of well-trained minds. There are huge sections of the population willing and able to take on ideas. It’s a massive shift.

Secondly, the trend of using your leisure for intellectual activities has gained traction and purpose. It started with older people, who, upon retiring, decided that rather than sweltering on some beach in Spain, they’d rather go to a book festival, or do a course at the University of the Third Age. It started with the elderly and then spread to other age groups and became cross-generational.

Take the growth of book festivals for example. There are now over 300 literary festivals in the UK. When I went to the Edinburgh book festival in the 1960s, around 4,000 people turned up. Now, it’s more like 250,000. People come from all over the world. You also have Cheltenham, Hay, and many smaller festivals which still attract good crowds. We started a festival in Keswick 12 years ago. Initially it attracted perhaps 2,000 people. Now it’s more like 40,000.

And now you’ve quite rightly identified this new phenomenon of ideas clubs and philosophy clubs, which reminds me of the great literary-philosophical societies of the 19th century. People come because they’re interested in ideas, and also to meet other people. It’s a form of community, like going to church. It becomes part of people’s social life.

Then, finally, the third reason for the rise of the mass intelligentsia is the internet and mass broadcasting. I’d like to identify in particular the strange case of Radio 4. I became presenter of Start the Week 21 years ago. Back then, there would be 9 people on it, mainly from the theatre. We completely changed it. We bought in lots of scientists and historians. And the audience went up and up. Then, in 1998, we launched In Our Time, with the aim of providing a platform for public intellectuals at an accessible time. Including scientists in particular – 37% of the contributors were scientists. We were given the Thursday morning slot, called the death slot. And the audience went from 500,000 to 2.5 million. The programmes also went onto a website archive, and have since been downloaded over 20 million times. And I hear from many ideas clubs around the country who use it as a resource for their discussions. The Open University has also used new technology like the internet to reach a bigger audience. It’s one of the great world successes – the leading open university in the world.

So something is going on – I think it’s the rise of a mass intelligentsia. But the government is completely unaware of it. It has no grasp that this is going on, and that it’s not accidental, but built on the expansion of higher education. Our country’s two great success stories are our world class universities and one of the greatest creative economies in the world. And the government is not helping them grow.

Did you enjoy this piece? Hate it? Leave comments! I thrive on feedback. 

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

HTLGI started five years ago, and has done well to establish itself and to get media attention. The Guardian had an editorial this week, suggesting that it showed a ‘new confidence and expansiveness’ in British philosophy, and indicating that philosophy and ethics still had one or two interesting things to say to science. Amen to that. I think the festival could have more audience participation, and younger speakers – the youngest I’ve seen so far is in their mid-40s. I don’t see how you’re really going to have new and edgy ideas from people in the last third of their careers, which is the stage where most thinkers simply churn out the same stuff for bigger advances.

I spoke at the main festival on Tuesday – it was the biggest audience I’ve ever spoken to. I’m sure the majority had never heard of me and turned up on a whim (or because it was one of the few events not sold out in advance). Anyway, it went well, I think – the audience seemed warm and appreciative, except for one fellow who said he’d read the book and decided I was a charlatan! He obviously felt so strongly about this he was willing to come to Hay and sit through my talk just to tell me. The crowd booed him down, but personally I consider him a loyal reader.

The real discovery of the festival for me is Tobias Jones, a 40-something writer who was speaking here yesterday (that’s him on the right). I missed the talk but happened to pick up his book, Utopian Dreams, in the festival bookstore. It’s absolutely brilliant. He goes on a search, with his wife and child, for true alternative communities, and writes six chapters about his time in six religious communities – a Catholic village in Italy where there is no money; a Quaker retirement village, a New Age community in the Alps, and so on.

What makes the book so good is partly his intelligence and ability to weave together journalist accounts of his time in the communities with more philosophical reflection on what sustains and destroys communities. But above all it’s his voice, his sincerity. He’s really searching for community and for a good life, not just doing freaky tourism (which I think is an accusation that could be directed at Jon Ronson) or self-regarding self-parody (which could be directed at Geoff Dyer). Tobias Jones is genuinely searching, not just writing a book. It comes as no surprise to read on the internet that he’s since set up his own commune in the woods of Somerset, where people in crisis can go and stay for free. He finances it from his earnings writing murder-mysteries!

That impresses me – he actually sets up a community, rather than simply preaching community from the safety of the lecture-circuit (as do, say, Jonathan Haidt or Alain de Botton). There’s a giving up of ego there, a willingness to engage with the messy reality of human life.

If a writer puts so much effort into publicity, into marketing, into sales, then they’re probably seeking fame and status rather than real community (I write this to myself – as a person attracted to fame and status). But fame and status are the enemy of community – they turn you into an object to be applauded on the stage, a commodity, a reflection in a mirror, rather than helping you meet other humans and connect with them. De Botton said he wanted to set up the School of Life in the manner of Epicurus’ garden. But is he ever there? Does he make himself available to the people who come there looking for answers? Tobias Jones lives in the same house as the people who come looking for help – he actually pays for them to stay there. That’s making yourself available. That’s serving others.

Reading his book makes me feel a bit immature, to be honest, and makes me question my own values and goals, as a searcher for the good life. Are my own goals, in fact, very conventional and bourgeois: a job I enjoy and for which I get recognition and status, a happy family, a nice home? Should I be giving more of myself, as Jones does? Am I writing about the good life without really taking the risks to find it? But then, another part of me reads Jones’ account of the challenges of running a commune for the emotionally and spiritually broken, and thinks, God, that sounds hard.

Anyway, at the moment my plan is still to develop philosophy courses for the general public in the UK. Not very radical perhaps, but it’s a start. Hopefully I’ll be working with Tim LeBon, the cognitive therapist and philosophical counsellor, to develop a course that combines Positive Psychology with ethics and philosophy. Tim writes here on the need for this balance in this excellent piece.

Talking of Positive Psychology, here’s a piece from two American psychologists criticizing the US Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme (the resilience-training programme designed by Martin Seligman, the inventor of Positive Psychology). The authors say that the programme evaluation failed to test if it had managed to reduce incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression – which surely was the whole point of it.

I also discussed the rise of Positive Psychology, and the danger of an over-instrumentalised and over-automated attitude to the Good Life, in this long essay in American magazine The New Inquiry.

This piece from the Journal of Mental Health, by two academics from the School of Sociology at University of Nottingham, criticises the happiness / mental health initiatives of Lord Richard Layard. The paper argues:

firstly, that Layard’s approach does little to tackle the structural inequalities within society, which are known to be prime indicators of mental ill health. The second critique is that Layard’s proposals form a misguided attempt to use therapy as a way of compensating for a breakdown in community. The third and related critique is that Layard’s proposals suggest a medicalization of social issues in ways that individualize social problems.

Fair enough. As Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan recently noted, the best predictor of depression is poverty. But are the authors saying that people with depression / anxiety / panic attacks need to wait for the complete overhaul of capitalist society before they can hope to stop having panic attacks? They are, it seems to me, making the inner / outer fallacy – either overcoming mental health problems is entirely an inner process (as perhaps CBT seems to suggest) or it’s entirely an external and social process (as the authors seem to suggest). Surely it’s both – you need to do inner work to strengthen yourself and make your self more autonomous and less prey to each compulsion or fixation, in order that you can engage effectively with society and change it. To challenge society, you need an anchored self. When I was emotionally disturbed, I was a passive victim, stuck in a job I hated, precisely because I couldn’t govern myself. Only when I learnt to govern myself more was I able to begin pushing against the conventions I was stuck in.

Nonetheless, the politics of well-being can certainly become too focused on inner work, ignoring social conditions – like housing for example. Happiness gurus often say ‘money doesn’t make you happy’. Perhaps not – but a nice home surely does? A garden does, doesn’t it? A beautiful view from your bedroom window does, doesn’t it? These are things that money buys.  The link between housing and well-being needs to be much more researched, as this article argues – because I think it is, potentially, the really revolutionary part of the politics of well-being.

Ed Milliband has appointed Jon Cruddas MP as his head of policy. Cruddas (that’s him on the left) is a philosopher-MP, who’s very into Aristotle, Thomas Paine, and other thinkers, and who wants to revive a form of Leftist communitarianism. He spoke about the politics of the good life here, and apparently wrote Milliband’s recent speech about the need for a more English sense of national identity, as opposed to Blairite jet-set neo-liberal cosmopolitanism.

Here’s a decent piece in the NY Times’ excellent philosophy blog, on overcoming philosophy’s western bias. Talking of which – do any of you know anything about philosophy in Brazil? I am interested in finding out more, to write a piece on it. It seems to me a country where practical philosophy is really flourishing.

Here’s another piece I did this week, in Wired UK magazine, on why we need to stop automatically pathologising religious or revelatory experiences, and try to find a more pragmatic way of understanding them and helping people to integrate them and find meaning in them.

Finally, I’d like to hear more from you, to hear your stories of whether or how you’ve been helped by philosophy and / or psychotherapy. I’d like to write some of them up, so we can share ideas and strategies for leading good lives. Get in touch if you’d be willing to help with that- your stories can be anonymous or not, as you prefer.

See you next week,

Jules

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -