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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you next week, wish me luck!

Jules

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

Their vision is unique and fascinating, partly because they see it as their mission to spread philosophy beyond academia, beyond the affluent classes, and to introduce a ‘thinking culture’ in the working class. It’s an extension of the grass roots ‘education of the working man’ mission which used to be part of Marxism (both Paul and Arthur have long relationships with the Communist Party, and Arthur was chairman of the British Communist Party in the 1980s). What can Socialists or Communists do in a society which stubbornly clings to its capitalist values and structures? They can practice philosophy, spread the practice of philosophy, and bide their time.

Now this is a noble and very necessary mission – necessary, because philosophy is still an overwhelmingly middle class past-time, and if it is genuinely going to transform society, then it needs to reach other parts of society, particularly those parts that don’t necessarily have the clearest voice yet in modern politics.

So is the role of grass roots philosophy to develop ‘class consciousness’ in the working class, to empower them to engage with the power structures of their society in a more intelligent, conscious and coherent way? Well, it could be that. But I would argue that it’s not just that – and I think Paul would agree with me. In some ways, grass roots philosophy today looks more to the ancient Greeks than to Marx, and it’s worth teasing out the differences in their attitudes to the practice of philosophy.

For both the ancient Greeks and Marxists, the aim of philosophy is the development of consciousness. However, the aim of ancient Greek philosophy is the development of ‘cosmic consciousness’, while the aim of Marxism is the development of ‘class consciousness’.

What does ‘class consciousness’ mean? Can a ‘class’ be ‘conscious’? Could a city be conscious? Could a country be conscious? The idea of ‘class consciousness’ seems to come from 19th century German Romanticism, from the idea in Herder that communities could have a particular ‘spirit’ or geist , which could be discovered in folk-tales or stories or even in historical figures. From there, Hegel developed the idea that national consciousness could develop through historical dialectic, finally evolving into ‘world spirit’. Marx took this Hegelian idea of the development of consciousness through dialectic, and tied it to economics. He introduced the idea that economic history was the dialectic process of class war, with different classes coming into existence, and fighting it out with other classes. Except ‘consciousness’ doesn’t really play a decisive role in Marxism. It’s just an epiphenomenon of impersonal and inevitable economic processes. If Marxism had really worked as an economic theory, there would be no need to go out and educate the working man in philosophy: the revolution would simply happen of its own accord. Marxism doesn’t really require grass roots philosophy…history should follow its course regardless of any well-meaning philosophy groups.

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -