The Happiness Industry (23 page)

Playing God

In 1893, a four-year-old boy sat on top of a rickety mountain of chairs that he and his friends had stacked on top of each other in the basement of his parent's house, on the outskirts of Bucharest near the Danube. The boy, Jacob Moreno, was seizing the opportunity of his parents' absence to play his favourite game. He was ‘God', and the other children from his neighbourhood were his ‘angels'. Perched on top of his chair stack, Moreno instructed his angels to start flapping their wings. They obeyed. ‘Why don't you fly?' one of the angels then asked him. He agreed, launched himself into the air and within seconds found himself lying on the basement floor with a broken arm.

Moreno's desire to play God never really deserted him. The idea of humans as individual gods in their own social worlds, creators of themselves and creators of their relationships, animated his work as a psychoanalyst and social psychologist during his adulthood. His 1920 work, The Words of the Father, outlined a frightening humanistic philosophy, where individuals confront situations of infinite possibility, in which the only limiting factor
upon their own powers of self-creation is that they exist in social groups. But social groups are also malleable and improvable. Every god needs its angels.

A fantasy of ultimate paternity was an abiding feature of Moreno's professional conduct, leading him to create some absurd myths surrounding his own originality. This included some outright lies, such as the claim he repeatedly advanced that he was born on board a ship in 1892, of unknown nationality, with an unknown father, when in fact he was born in Bucharest in 1889, the son of a struggling Jewish merchant with Turkish nationality. In later life, he exerted himself in claiming authorship over various concepts and techniques that were circulating in psychology and psychiatry at the time, with particular hostility aimed at the psychologist Kurt Lewin, who he believed was stealing his ideas. For one so interested in studying social relations, Moreno was unusually paranoid and egocentric.

His family moved to Vienna when he was a child, and it was there that he later enrolled to study medicine at university. This enabled him to attend the lectures of Sigmund Freud shortly before the First World War. Moreno was only marginally impressed by the celebrity psychoanalyst. As he left the lecture hall one day in 1914, he accosted him. ‘Well, Dr. Freud, I start where you leave off,' he told him. ‘You meet people in the artificial setting of your office. I meet them on the street and in their homes, in their natural surroundings.'
¹⁵
The onset of war provided him with his first opportunity to do just this.

His mixed nationality meant that he was unable to serve in the army, so he took a position as a doctor in refugee camps in Austria-Hungary between 1915 and 1918. Observing those who resided in these camps, Moreno began to consider ways in which their happiness could be influenced through altering their
immediate social surroundings. Clearly their objective circumstances were a cause of considerable misery, but Moreno believed that careful observation to patterns of relationships might reveal ways in which psychological satisfaction could be improved, with relatively minor changes. In 1916, he laid down these thoughts in a letter to the Austro-Hungarian minister of the interior as follows:

The positive and negative feelings that emerge from every house, between houses, from every factory, and from national and political groups in the community can be explored by means of sociometric analysis. A new order by means of sociometric methods is herewith recommended.
¹⁶

What was this ‘sociometric' analysis he referred to? And how would it help? Though still undeveloped as a mathematical science, let alone a computational one, ‘sociometry', as Moreno imagined it, laid the groundwork for what later became social network analysis and, consequently, social media. But before this could be developed as a scientific possibility, another part of Moreno's self-fantasy would have to be mobilized.

He claimed that he was always destined to live in the United States. Advancing the myth of his fatherless, nationless origins, he declared, ‘I was born a citizen of the world, a sailor moving from sea to sea, from country to country, destined to land one day in New York harbor.' In 1922, he reported a dream in which he was standing on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, in possession of a new device for recording and playing sound. Not content with giving birth to a whole new branch of psychology, the dream indicated to Moreno that he was also destined to invent the record player. With his collaborator, Franz Lornitzo, he set to work on
such a device over the course of 1924, filing a patent on it in Vienna, resulting in an invitation to Ohio to develop the technology with the General Phonograph Manufacturing Company.

Moreno would be ultimately frustrated by the lack of recognition he would receive for this creation, characteristically refusing to acknowledge that there were multiple similar projects going on simultaneously. Nor were his hosts in Ohio as fawning towards this unlikely inventor as he had assumed they would be. But the invitation to Ohio did nevertheless allow him to realize his vision of himself as a self-parented, nationless
American
. Besides, New York City – the place that had occupied his dreams and fantasies for the previous decade – pointed towards a new model of society that seemed to chime with Moreno's assumption about sovereign selves existing in social groups of their own making.

As Moreno's curt remark to Freud indicated, his problem with psychoanalysis was that it studied individuals as separate from society, without the constraints offered by existing relationships. But what was the alternative? The danger was that the extreme individualism of Freudianism could flip directly into the equally extreme collectivism of Marxism, or else the form of statistical sociology pioneered by Émile Durkheim. In Moreno's eyes, this left Europeans with a bipolar choice, between the enforced collectivity of the socialist state and the unruly egoism of the unconscious self. New York, however, suggested that some sort of third way was possible. Here was a city where individuals lived on top of one another, cooperating in various subtle ways, but without having their individual freedom trammelled in the process. America, Moreno reasoned, was a nation built upon self-forming groups.

The mathematics of friendship

It was in New York that he got his first opportunities to develop the research techniques he had already conceived of as ‘sociometry'. He was judicious enough to abandon the talk of individuals as their own personal gods, but other than that, Moreno was intent on building on the insights he'd acquired in the wartime refugee camps and the psychological theories in
The Words of the Father
. He described the project of sociometry as follows:

It is important to know whether the construction of a community is possible in which each of its members is to the utmost degree a free agent in the making of the collectives of which he is a part and in which the different groups of which it consists are so organized and fitted to each other that an enduring and harmonious commonwealth is the result.
¹⁷

Relationships are there to serve the individual. Spontaneity and creativity derive wholly from each of us individually, but our capacity to release them depends on being in the right social circumstances. The task of sociometry was to place the study of an individual's social relationships on a scientific footing, which would ultimately incorporate mathematics.

Moreno had toyed with various ways of doing this while still in Vienna. He had a hunch that visual diagrams might be the best way of representing complex webs of interaction. Having presented some of these ideas at a psychiatry conference in 1931, he was invited to try out this proposed mode of study on the inmates of Sing Sing prison, New York. Moreno devised a questionnaire
to assess the prisoners according to thirty simple attributes, such as age, nationality, ethnicity and so on. In the age of the survey, there was nothing unusual about that; what he did next was ground-breaking.

Rather than analyse this data in terms of averages, aggregates and probabilities (as the market researchers and pollsters were beginning to do at this time), he compared each and every prisoner to each and every other prisoner, with a view to assessing how well matched they were to one another, individually. Here was the birth of a new form of sociology aimed at capturing the value of one-to-one relationships, in terms of how far they benefited the individuals who were party to them. He wasn't interested in what was normal or typical in general. What he wanted to know was how individuals were influenced by those people they happened to know.

Prior to the invention of computers, the mathematics of this research method was fearsome. To study every relationship in a group of four people involves looking at a maximum of six links. Increase the group size to ten people, and you're looking at forty-five possible connections. Increase it again to thirty people, and the potential number of relationships increases to 465. And so on. It was slow and laborious work. But men could not retain the status of gods in their own social worlds unless their individual autonomy was respected by the social research method.

The following year, Moreno got another chance to implement sociometry, at the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson. This time, he focused more explicitly on individual attitudes towards each other, asking them with whom they would like to share a room and whom they already knew. This study witnessed Moreno produce visual sociometric maps of the results for the first time, marking out webs of common links between
girls in the school in hand-drawn red lines, later to be published in his 1934 work
Who Shall Survive?
The social world had just become visible in an entirely new way. This, arguably, was the means of visualization which would dominate twenty-first-century understandings of the ‘social'.

The vision of social life that fuelled sociometry was undoubtedly a far more individualistic one than that which had inspired sociology up until then. Collective entities emerged only thanks to the spontaneous power of individual egos. They could just as easily be dispensed with again. As far as Moreno was concerned, American culture was founded on specifically this freedom to enter and exit groups. But creating a social science which recognized this individual freedom was far from straight-forward. Two problems in particular presented themselves.

Firstly, the rich, binding, comforting and sometimes suffocating nature of social life gets eliminated from view. The sorts of data that can be included in a sociometric study are necessarily very simplified. Just as social media sites offer users strict limits to how they can define themselves romantically (‘single', ‘in a relationship' or ‘it's complicated') or in relation to each other (‘friend' or ‘unfriend', ‘follow' or ‘unfollow'), Moreno's sociometry would only succeed if nuance were stripped out. The price to be paid for exiting the restricted limits of the Freudian office was that the depths of the human psyche started to disappear from view. To carve a path between a science of society and a science of the isolated individual, sociometry necessarily had to simplify both substantially. Of course such simplification can also be attractive, as Nicholas Christakis's visualization demo in London that day testified. To act scientifically upon the social world, elites need to have nuance and culture removed.

Secondly, what to do with the reams of data that resulted from
viewing society as a web of interpersonal relations? How to cope with it all or make sense of it? Moreno had no answer to this. The fact that social network analysis would not really take off until the 1960s wasn't for want of an adequate underlying theory, but for want of sufficient power to crunch the numbers. As we have seen, the mathematical challenge that Moreno laid down for the social sciences was onerous. Social network analysis developed slowly in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, impeded by the problem of processing complex bodies of data. Algorithms were developed which could discover patterns in social data, but universities lacked the computing power to automate them.

It wasn't until the 1970s that a succession of software packages was developed for purposes of social network analysis.
¹⁸
Of course these still required academic researchers to go and collect data to feed into the computers. This was still a laborious way of analysing the social world, which – compared with statistics – had little hold over the public imagination. All it took was for a broad mass of individuals to become regular users of networked computers, and Moreno's methodology could become a dominant way of understanding the meaning of the term ‘social'. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, this was the very situation which had arisen, the opportunities of which were seized by the ‘Web 2.0' companies which emerged from 2003 onwards. The sociometric studies which Moreno had conducted through interviews with a few dozen people, producing hand-drawn diagrams, could now be carried out in Facebook HQ at the flick of a switch, with a billion participants.

But methods of social analysis are never as politically innocent as they appear. While social network analysis purports to be a simple, stripped-down mathematical study of the ties that bind us, it's worth reflecting on the philosophy that inspired its
founder. As far as Moreno was concerned, other people are there to prop up and please individual egos. A friendship is valuable to the extent that it makes me feel better. Once the study of social life is converted into a branch of mathematical psychology, then this produces some worrying effects on how people start to relate to each other. The narcissism of the small boy playing God surrounded by his angels has become another model for how pleasure is now manufactured and measured.

Addicted to contact

The main charge that has been levelled against the DSM, since the introduction of the DSM-III in 1980, is that it converts everyday forms of sadness and personality quirks into illnesses. This has been particularly pronounced in the identification of ever more forms of addiction. Until the early 1970s, addiction would only have been understood as referring to syndromes which affect the metabolism, such as alcoholism, and even then its social and cultural dimensions would have been recognized. In the era of the DSM-III and since, new addictions have been identified and diagnosed in relation to all manner of hedonistic practices and experiences, from gambling to shopping to sex. Inevitably, the new diagnostic categories lend support to biological explanations that the behaviours are hard-wired into certain brains or genes.