Another 'expert' on happiness

It appears we have an addition to the gaggle of academics supposedly able to tell us what happiness is, and how to get it, this time a trained philosopher: A.C. Grayling, writing in the Telegraph.

Fortunately, we get at least a soupçon of scepticism about the notion that happiness is a suitable object for facile ‘scientific’ study and for the generation of similarly facile conclusions.

''happiness'' is too vague and baggy a notion to be truly helpful. It is like an old pair of knickers that has lost its elastic and become over-capacious and shapeless.

Unfortunately, Grayling's scepticism on the topic seems to begin and end with the above extract.

The lack of relationship between wealth and happiness has long been common knowledge ...

It has? Is it like the “common knowledge” that the US government is suppressing information about extraterrestrials? Surely Professor Grayling is familiar with the concept of argumentum ad populum, so it's sad that he does not demonstrate a more critical attitude to it. I suspect he is not even basing this statement on social evidence (e.g. survey results showing that a majority answer 'no' to a question like 'does more money make you happier'), though even that wouldn't make it 'knowledge'.

The data provided by the latest edition of Social Trends, on which Grayling's comments are based, seems to be limited to people's answers to the question "how satisfied are you with your current standard of living?". Using these answers to measure changes over time in happiness (assuming this concept even has a precise meaning) requires a series of questionable leaps of logic.

Given the observation 'real income has increased but reported satisfaction has not', there are plenty of other possible explanations to consider before concluding that money does not make you happy. For example, the fact that in a mediocracy, certain things may become inexpensive (e.g. clothes, toys) but certain other things become more or less unobtainable, e.g. genuinely reliable service in areas such as air travel. Or, it could be because restrictions on personal liberty have been inexorably increasing over the last twenty years. Or perhaps because contemporary ideology encourages people to feel angry and resentful.

If mere happiness were the point, we could easily achieve it for everyone by suitably medicating the water supply.

A rather sweeping and tendentious assertion. There may well be a general assumption that feelings of happiness could, at least in theory, be engendered by appropriate medication, but the evidence for this is mixed to say the least.

The other confusion concerns wealth. If a person has a million pounds in the bank and never touches a penny of it, or a huge mansion and never occupies it, it is the same as if he had neither the money nor the house. What this shows is that wealth is not so much what one has, but what one does with it … If you would like to know how rich a person is, you need to ask not how much money he has, but how much he has spent. [my emphasis]

This is utter nonsense. It's understandable though, in the light of the prevailing anti-bourgeois ethos, according to which storing up for a rainy day is regarded as dubious.

This idea is associated with the wise teaching that the philosophers and poets of antiquity never tired of repeating: that a rich person is he who has enough. If his needs are modest and his habits frugal, then so long as his resources provide enough to meet both, he is rich.

Really. But weren’t the philosophers and poets of antiquity often independently wealthy? Otherwise, how could they afford to indulge their philosophical and poetic activities? Perhaps their supposed advice about “having enough” and “modest needs” needs to be seen in that context.

Further lyrical waxing about the rewards of being poor, but satisfied, follows.

Ruskin tellingly remarked ''a man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel'', and this, alas, characterises too many people. The limited surface area of such parcels does not attract much of the golden dust of satisfaction.

The true equation between happiness and wealth is this: that happiness is wealth. Unlike wealth in the form of money and possessions, such happiness can never be quantified, only felt; and if one has it, it does not matter if the level of it always stays the same.

I beg to differ. You might as well say that wealth is happiness. It enables you to get most of the things you need. And a prerequisite for being happy is having one's needs satisfied.

One of my needs is to be a productive intellectual. Sadly, this turns out to be a need which the British academic system will no longer provide for, except in distorted ways — though it appears to do so adequately for Professor Grayling’s requirements, as far as this can be inferred. The only way I appear to be able ever to satisfy my need is if I can build up sufficient savings from investment activities to finance an institutional environment. I wonder what Professor Grayling would make of my situation. Perhaps he would counsel me against the accumulation of wealth, and urge me to scale down my needs and habits, so that they are "modest" and "frugal".

Trivialising Orwell

In December, the Sunday Times carried a column by Minette Marrin in which she wrote that

we all need as much seasonal cheer as possible so I suggest a new Christmas word game. It’s called Political Lexicon ... The idea is to come up with as many examples as possible, preferably new, of government Newspeak ... [Something you will find helpful in playing the game] is the Centre for Policy Studies’ 2008 Lexicon, a guide to contemporary Newspeak. I feel slightly proprietorial about this. The Centre for Policy Studies is a think tank and, at a lunch there recently, I suggested they might consider publishing a Political Lexicon. They have rapidly done so, inviting contributions from various writers, including a few from me. This useful document will appear next week.

Judging by Ms Marrin’s examples, the “useful document” sounds like a repeat of the Dictionary of Dangerous Words produced by the Social Affairs Unit in 2000 — a mildly amusing rant against the habitual use of words such as ‘counselling’ or ‘fascist’ in a leftist direction.

What happened to the word 'institutional', as in 'institutional racism' in the Macpherson report, is alarming. Institutional means something that is part of an institution, as Christianity is institutionalised in the Church of England. Now it means something vague and subjective that is genuinely hard to define, but is a useful term of condemnation.

So the word ‘institutional’ is now supposed to have slightly sinister overtones. I’m not actually convinced this is so, except in very specific cases, but does this represent Newspeak? Surely the point is not that ‘institutional’ is an invalid expression, but that what it’s expressing may be an invalid claim: e.g. the claim that racism is not only endemic in the police force, but in some ways is actually built into that institution’s structures.

In rather the same way 'mental health' these days actually means 'mental illness'. A distinguished public figure wrote a letter to The Times mentioning the stigma of a 'mental health diagnosis'.

Is there something sinister about using the world ‘health’ to denote deviations from health? I find it hard to get worked up about that one.

Children in the care of the state are now officially called 'looked-after children'. In fact, looked-after children means children who are not looked after, owing to the incompetence of the relevant authorities, and who are far more likely than other children to be lost, prostitute, illiterate, unemployed or in jail.

There is more of a point here, but I’m not sure it is made particularly well. By referring to children in its care as ‘looked-after’, the state creates the automatic presumption that they are, indeed, looked after, when this should be treated as something which needs to be questioned and empirically demonstrated. It’s not that one should assume that children in care are treated badly, but rather that it should never be automatically assumed that they’re treated well.

'Address', as in address the real issue, means avoid the real issue.

Well yes, possibly. But haven’t governments always tended to use this kind of euphemism?

'Celebrate', as in celebrate achievements, means to use taxpayers’ money to promote the government ... 'Celebrate', as in celebrate diversity, means compulsory approbation. If you feel doubtful about diversity in any approved forms you are an unperson.

An example of anti-PC, expressed a little dogmatically. Worthwhile saying, and mildly amusing, but hasn’t this joke been made a number of times before?

There seems to be a mixture of two things here. A) Relatively tame euphemisms. We can all shake our heads and mumble about the misuse of language by politicians, without actually thinking about the more serious ways in which our worldview is being fundamentally shifted. B) Assertions that the official line is a lie: e.g. children are being abused by the state; references to ‘celebrating’ British culture are really about promoting the Labour government. While these assertions may be true, do they make people think about the broader misuse of language by all members of the cultural establishment, not just by Labour politicians?

Orwell’s point in 1984 wasn’t just about the corruption of words, it was about how a complete transformation of meaning can be used to prevent criticism. Cartoonising this observation — to make it something about how euphemisms can be used to conceal — blurs the issue, and detracts attention from the more important idea.

It is interesting, incidentally, to compare the position of organisations such as Oxford Forum with that of think tanks such as the Centre for Policy Studies. Oxford Forum has no political position, and it certainly has no ties with any political party. It exists to give a voice to intellectual perspectives which are being neglected or suppressed. The CPS, like most think tanks, has links to one of the political parties, and a fairly clear agenda. So explicitly right wing culture actually finds it easier to survive in a mediocracy than culture which is merely sceptical about the dominant ideology.

The CPS’s pamphlet seems a relatively unhelpful contribution to the debate, and one whose material doesn’t really deserve the description ‘Newspeak’.

I have more time for Steven Poole’s Unspeak, which at least shows evidence of analytical thought, even if it mostly seems to be of a blatantly politically motivated kind. E.g. from his chapter on ‘freedom’ (p.209):

markets, being essentially consensual hallucinations, depend on confidence, but calls to ‘reassure’ them on one point or another are often made for unstated ideological reasons, if not to disguise a simple motive of private profit.

Poole makes an interesting observation here, but misses the point. In an entirely free market, the state would not intervene at all, and ‘reassurance’ would be irrelevant. It’s the fact that there is a good deal of intervention by relatively opaque government agencies such as the Federal Reserve which leads to the need for clarification of their intentions from time to time, in order to avoid uncertainty. Information (provided it’s reliable) is generally a good thing, uncertainty/ignorance a bad thing, and information asymmetries may require a good deal of signalling where markets are concerned.

George Orwell died 58 years ago today.

Update
Steven Poole replies.

New Labour, New Liberty

I am surprised anyone was taken in by Dr Brown's recent speech on civil liberties. Even the sceptics seemed disinclined to doubt his sincerity. Martin Kettle deemed Brown to be genuinely concerned about the decline in liberties, but reluctant to follow through because of the "long shadow Blair cast over liberal values with his conviction that liberals have no effective answers to the public's fears and anxieties." A C Grayling opined that "so major a speech on liberty is too big and emphatic a marker of intent, and it is evident that he means what he says in honouring the tradition of liberty that defines this country."

There is a much better explanation to hand. Brown's team understands that Blair's open contempt for libertarian values was too risky and unnecessarily blatant. Far better to pretend to be supporting liberty by suitably redefining it.

The transformation from old-liberty (= right not to be interfered with) to new-liberty (= right to be interfered with) takes place, as Dr Brown showed us, in 13 easy steps.

1) First, remind your audience about the association of old-liberty with 'selfishness'.

... a distinctly British interpretation of liberty - one that ... rejects the selfishness of extreme libertarianism and demands that the realm of individual freedom encompasses not just some but all of us.

(New-liberty isn't liberty if not everyone has the same amount of it.)

2) Remind people that new-liberty is 'positive liberty', i.e. freedom to get stuff which the state provides using taxpayers' money.

Too often the political debate has become polarised between a new right that has emphasised laissez-faire more than liberty and an old left that has mistakenly marginalised liberty by seeing it as the enemy of equality.

3) Stress that new-liberty has much more to do with community than was previously thought.

the progress of the idea of liberty has gone hand in hand with notions of social responsibility: 'the active citizen', the 'good neighbour', and civic pride, emphasising that people are not just self interested but members of a wider community - sustained by the mutual obligation we all feel to each other.

4) Remind everyone of J S Mill's (much-abused) let-out clause.

John Stuart Mill did not, in the end, call for unfettered freedoms, but argued that 'there are many positive acts for the benefit of others which he may rightfully be compelled to perform'.

5) Start talking more and more about new-liberty, citing Mill's rival T H Green ...

liberty [is] best advanced in the modern world when we recognise the responsibilities we owe to each other; and now as a new generation expands the frontiers of liberty, also increasingly about empowering the individual to make the most of their potential. As T. H. Green put it: 'when we speak of freedom as something to be so highly prized, we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying, and that, too, something that we do or enjoy in common with others'.

6) ... Hobson, Hobhouse, and Tawney.

from more than a century ago, in the view of British thinkers - not just Green but Hobson, Hobhouse and Tawney - freedom could only be fully realised when society was prepared to overcome the barriers that prevented people from realising their true potential. ... in this modern view freedom comes to mean not just freedom from interference, but also freedom to aspire - the opportunity and the chance to live a rounded life

7) Follow with further scathing references to libertarianism and naughty old 'license'.

liberty has been reduced to a simplistic libertarianism in which freedom and licence assumed a rough equivalence

8) Talk more about free speech:

Indeed, the components of our liberty are the building blocks for such a society: our belief in the freedom of speech and expression and conscience and dissent helps create the open society ...

carefully avoiding reference to an earlier incident in which you

intervened after an all-white jury decided that BNP chairman Nick Griffin broke no law when he condemned Islam as “a wicked, vicious faith” at a secretly filmed meeting,

by pledging

to bring in tougher powers to raise the chance of convictions in similar cases.

9) Begin to shift the discussion by pointing out (more in sorrow than in anger) that new-liberty has to be weighed up against other objectives, e.g. security.

we need to consciously and with determination found the next stage of constitutional development firmly on the story of British liberty. This will only be possible if we face up to the hard choices that have to be made in government. Precious as it is, liberty is not the only value we prize and not the only priority for government.

10) Suggest that it is the people themselves who are demanding greater government intrusiveness.

citizens themselves are recognising that it is in their interests to have a modern and secure means of identification which better protects against crime, fraud and illegal immigration and also protects each of them as individuals, their property but also their privacy.

11) "The debate has moved on, get used to it."

the issue for the future is not whether biometrics are used - they are now already being used by companies, by retailers, on new laptop computers in place of passwords to protect personal security and privacy: the question is how they will be used and under what protections for the rights of the individual.

12) Everything will be fine as long as we have sufficient 'transparency', 'scrutiny' and 'accountability'.

it is right that the Information Commissioner - independent of Government - should continue to have, on behalf of the public, oversight of how Government collects, hold and uses data - testing it against the best data protection laws and ensuring individuals will have the right to see the information held on them. ... we must always ensure that there is - as we have legislated on ID cards - proper accountability to Parliament, with limits to use of the data enshrined in parliamentary legislation, the exercise of responsibilities in this area subject to regular and open scrutiny by Parliament, with detailed reports on any new powers published and laid before it.

13) But we do need that national collective debate about what citizenship and new-liberty are to mean in the Glorious New Era. Leading to a Bill of Rights Bill of Rights and Duties.

Jack Straw is signalling the start of a national consultation on the case for a new British Bill of Rights and Duties ... This will include a discussion of how we can entrench and enhance our liberties - building upon existing rights and freedoms but not diluting them - but also make more explicit the responsibilities that implicitly accompany rights. We will also examine the rights and responsibilities that flow from British citizenship, informed by the work being carried out by Peter Goldsmith on citizenship.

The government will research the matter, then tell us what our new rights and responsibilities shall be. Don't be surprised if they are radically different from what they were before, and focus more on the rights of the collective. The government may decide that new-liberty turns out to be considerably less aligned with bourgeois values than old-liberty.

The meaning of 'liberal'

Those wondering about my (and others') use of the term il-liberal might like to check out the new collective blog Liberal Conspiracy. On the current front page, we have three articles giving us clues about the contemporary meaning of 'liberal'.

First, the Labour Party's Mike Ion struggles to understand "why anyone on the Left of British politics could oppose Gordon Brown’s moves, mentioned in the Queen’s speech yesterday, to raise the education leaving age to 18."

Mr Ion appears to have difficulty understanding the difference between correlation and causation. The fact that people who currently stay on longer in education have higher earnings or other distinguishing characteristics doesn't mean that everyone else will share those characteristics just because they are forced to stay on longer.

But these putative practical benefits probably aren't the important point. The real motive may be that of "promoting greater equality ... Raising the education leaving age to 18 is a progressive, bold and socially just policy." Guardian columnist Sunny Hundal helpfully adds: "there was a study done on Denmark on raising the marriage age for people who bring over brides from foreign countries. Illiberal, some call it, but a study showed that it raised education levels amongst immigrant populations and made them richer in the long term." Reduces the inequality of those it coerces? Must be okay then.

Second, we have a post (the very next post, in fact) about why it is perfectly liberal to have banned smoking in public places.

Calls to liberty ... are spurious on this one. As much as hard hats on a building site, or breathing apparatus down a mine, smoking legislation is about workplace safety. I suppose any staff who object to a pub pea souper could always work somewhere else. Your average Victorian mill owner would have agreed. Tell that to the student working off his overdraft, or the single mum who needs employment that fits round school hours, or the 50-something asthmatic roadie who’s plain forgotten how to do anything else. ... Can any of these make a meaningful choice, a free weighing of the alternatives, before selecting their place and conditions of work? That we don’t always have a real choice is a cornerstone of left thought; it’s all about the power, stupid.

Yes, liberty is only real liberty if it is freedom on terms which il-liberals approve of. Otherwise the choices which people make aren't real choices, they aren't meaningful.

Third, we have Chris Dillow in relatively extremist mode, demanding that the Left "give less priority to equality of opportunity", and that there be more redistribution to achieve equality of outcome, in line with the Rawlsian model* of 'fairness'.

So much for the current state of 'liberalism'. (Fortunately, Chris partially redeems himself at S&M with two posts that challenge Mr Ion's dubious argments in favour of conscription.)

* roughly: "If you might not have agreed to a system before you knew your life circumstances, it isn't fair."

Today's reading: "rights"

What is a "right"? Are there natural rights? Are any rights inalienable? You can argue till the cows come home, with little likelihood of generating useful insights.

I think the concept is best seen as an instrument of conflict between competing sources of power. In particular, the meaning of 'rights' at a given time represents the ideological position at that time on the issue of state-versus-individual. When we had absolutism, talk was of the absolute rights of the state (monarch). As civil liberties developed during eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the language of 'rights' was increasingly used to express the idea that each individual has their own territory or area of sovereignty.

In the twentieth century, the concept swung back towards expressing the claims of the collective (in effect, the state) on individuals. In some cases, spurious terms such as 'Volk' or 'proletariat' were used to denote the collective.

We see this swing continuing today under Blairism, a philosophy which — for all the criticism directed at it by now from every corner — can readily be interpreted as an ideal expression of the prevailing Zeitgeist. The idea that the individual has a claim to be left alone by society (e.g. to smoke, or to eat supposedly unhealthy foods) has become, it appears, outmoded.



Other takes:
Stumbling & Mumbling: "Rights, if they are to be meaningful, are not merely something that governments grant to people through legislation. They have moral force ..."
Westminster Wisdom: "Often it strikes me that most who use the term and ferociously argue about it have different definitions of the word, right, but because no one defines that term, persist in thinking that they should agree and can't really work out why they do disagree."
Chris Dillow (commenting on WW): "What you say of rights is true of other categories - justice, liberty and efficiency. Incoherence afflicts almost all popular thinking about moral and political philosophy. ... MacIntyre said it was because we have inherited multiple, conflicting traditions - a sociological fact as much as a philosophical one."

More government cosmetics

Following the proposal to make nurses grin inanely at their customers, the latest contribution to improving the world by means of altering appearances is to relabel part of the Home Office as "Ministry of Justice".

Another day in la-la land. Smile, please!

John Reid has confirmed that the Home Office will be split up and pass responsibility for prisons, sentencing and probation to a new Ministry of Justice. The Home Secretary said the department was being divided to meet the "challenges of today's world". Mr Reid told MPs: "The Home Office will be refocused towards the realities of today's world and priorities of today's people."

He said the changes were designed to produce a "step change" in … "winning the central battle, which is the struggle for values and ideas".

The Home Office has lurched from crisis to crisis over the past 12 months. Earlier this year it emerged that more than 27,000 case files on Britons who had committed crimes abroad, including rape and murder, had not been entered on the police computer. When he took over last year, Mr Reid said there were so many problems with the immigration directorate that it was "not fit for purpose".

When it was set up in 1782, the Home Office was run by a staff of about 20. Today, it has 35,000 employees with headquarters in a brand new £300 million building in Westminster. (Daily Telegraph)

So, it's going to be one of the Home Office's remits to fight a "battle of ideas". Sounds rather like it will be joining other departments, then, (Education, Health, Culture) in waging ideological warfare on behalf of the il-liberal elite.

I find the use of the word "justice" a bit sinister. See also here about courts being rebranded as "justice centres".

Phoney consultation: I told you so

A couple of months back I wrote a post satirising the government's latest "public consultation" exercise. I suggested this was a prime example of phoney pseudo-egalitarianism — one of the key themes of mediocracy.

Appearance: The people in power are being "inclusive"; the establishment cares what ordinary people think.

Reality: Your answers are welcome, so long as they agree with what has already been concluded.

The exercise took place last Saturday. An article in today's Guardian by Liam Curtin, one of the members of the public chosen to take part, provides support for my suspicions. For example, I said the way the questions were framed could easily bias the answers in a particular direction. Curtin reports that one of the questions was "Should people who harm themselves by smoking, etc, be allowed hospital treatment?", with the possible answers being "strongly agree", "tend to agree" or "not sure".

I don't think the results of this type of questioning would be considered meaningful by anyone familiar with social survey methods. Certainly not meaningful in the way they will probably be taken to be, by our friendly, caring, accessible government.

Update

Ben Page of MORI (the firm which organised the exercise) has left a comment, reproducing his response to Liam Curtin’s criticisms. He denies Curtin’s claim that the range of possible answers to questions were skewed towards agreeing.

He also argues that "people mostly tell us that they don’t want to start from a completely blank sheet of paper". I do wonder slightly whether this is a euphemism for offering people pre-determined attitudes which they can either take or leave, but without scope for them to suggest a completely different attitude. We know that Mr. Blair thinks the model of the state/individual relationship should be changed in a particular way; is it too cynical to think this aim was incorporated into the agenda of the consultation?

What might have been more useful, but no doubt at variance with the kind of ‘democratisation’ aimed at by New Labour, and in any case too threatening, is to have done precisely that: give members of the public a completely blank sheet and see what they come up with.

Ooh, why don't we redefine the word "pollution"!

If final proof were needed that the New Tories are acolytes of Blairism, here it is. The redefinition of terms for left wing propaganda purposes, which I highlighted in my book Mediocracy: Inversions and Deceptions in an Egalitarian Culture, is now being applied by the Cameroons.

I didn't have an entry for "pollution" in the book, but here is one, free of charge.



Here's what the "Corporate Responsibility Working Group", set up by our dear Tory leader himself, has to say in a recent paper about naughty companies who manufacture the things we all love to eat, e.g. choccie bars. (My emphasis.)

The concept of environmental pollution is widely understood – the emission of toxins into the natural world in such a way as to cause damage to the eco-system. Polluters are increasingly expected to clean up the pollution that they cause.

It seems logical therefore to apply the term ‘pollution’ to emissions into society of things that cause harm. Obesity might be seen as an effect of social pollution in the same way as global warming is the effect of environmental pollution.

In the case of obesity, the pollutants are numerous. Of course they include the sale by food and drink companies of foods that are high in salts, sugars and fats and lack nutritional value. They also include the glamorising of these products through advertising and product placements.

However, pollutants that lead to obesity also include poor education about healthy eating, and the provision in schools of often poor quality food. Pollutants also include parenting that fails to provide children with an understanding of the need for a balanced diet; and the personal choices that place convenience and comfort above health and well-being.

Note to the Cameroons: please don't corrupt the English language. We already have enough people doing that for us, thanks. It's nothing more than propaganda to equate:
(a) making chocolates available for those who want to buy them
with (say) (b) building a nuclear power station near a country town.

The same goes for trying to treat:

• the state not providing education about approved dietary habits, or

• parents letting their children have fizzy drinks

as types of pollution.

Perhaps all politics has a propaganda element, but is this the kind of propaganda you want associated with the "Conservative" brand? Or the kind which will persuade voters that you're a genuine alternative to Labour?

And re your "Question for consultation: Does the analogy of ‘social pollution’ with environmental pollution work?"

The answer is "no".