The Happiness Industry (30 page)

The terminal dystopia of Benthamism, as touched on in
Chapter 7
, is of a social world that has been rendered totally objective, to the point where the distinction between the objective and the subjective is overcome. Once happiness is understood completely, the scientist will know where and when it takes place, regardless of the person supposedly experiencing it. The need to learn from the ‘verbal behaviour' of the person being studied will be eliminated once and for all by sophisticated forms of mind reading. Our faces, eyes, body movements and brains will communicate our pleasures and pains on our behalf, freeing decision-makers from the ‘tyranny of sounds'. This may be an exaggeration of any feasible political society, but it represents an animating ideal for how particular traditions of psychological and political science progress. Mysticism may provide private philosophical succour in such a society, but also a final political quietism.

‘I know how you feel'

Witnessing someone else's brain ‘light up' is something that costs a lot of money. A state of the art fMRI scanner costs $1 million, with annual operating costs of between $100,000–$300,000. The insights that such technologies offer into mental illness, brain defects and injuries are considerable. Gradually, our everyday language of moods, choices and tastes is being translated into terms that correspond to different physical parts of our brains. Neuromarketers can now specify that one advertisement causes activity in a given part of the brain, while a different advertisement does not. This is believed to have significant commercial implications. But to what extent does so much technological progress aid us in a more fundamental problem of social life, that of understanding other people?

When Bentham wrote that ‘nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure', and declared that these entities were potentially measurable, he affirmed a certain philosophical approach in which the questions of psychology were not significantly different from those of the natural sciences. Indeed, psychology (and politics) would become truly scientific once it was grounded in matters as ‘natural' and ‘objective' as biology or chemistry. By the same token, human beings have nothing to distinguish them from other animals other than their particular biological features. All animals suffer, and humans are no different. In various ways, many of the characters explored over the course of this book have shared this philosophical prejudice. Our concepts have been shaped accordingly. Our notions of ‘behaviour', ‘stress' and ‘learned helplessness' all originate with animal experiments using rats, pigeons and dogs.

But what if this philosophy is grounded in a mistake? And what if it is a mistake that we keep on making, no matter how advanced our brain-scanning, mind-measuring and facial-reading devices become? In fact, what if we actually become more liable to make this mistake as our technology grows more sophisticated? For Ludwig Wittgenstein, and those who have followed him, a statement such as Bentham's about our ‘two sovereign masters' is based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of psychological language. To rediscover a different notion of politics, we might first have to excavate a different way of understanding the feelings and behaviours of others.

To understand what a word means, Wittgenstein argued, is to understand how it is used, meaning that the problem of understanding other people is first and foremost a social one. Equally, to understand what another person is doing is to understand what their actions mean, both for them and for others who are involved. If I ask the question, ‘What is that person feeling?' I can answer by interpreting their behaviour, or by asking them. The answer is not inside their head or body, to be discovered, but lies in how the two of us interact. There is nothing stopping me from being broadly right about what they are feeling, so long as that is recognized as an interpretation of what they are doing and communicating, or what their behaviour means. I am not going to discover what they are feeling as some sort of fact, in the way that I can discover their body temperature. Nor would they be reporting a fact, should they tell me what they're thinking.

This points towards the unusual quality of psychological language. And neuroscientists and behaviourists repeatedly tie themselves in knots over precisely this.
¹⁷
To understand a psychological term such as ‘happiness', ‘mood' or ‘motivation' is to
understand it both in terms of how it appears in others (that is, as behaviour) and in terms of how it occurs in oneself (that is, as an experience). I know what ‘happiness' means, because I know how to describe it in others, and to notice it in my own life. But this is an unusual type of language. If one ever believes that ‘happiness' refers to an objective thing, be it inside you, or inside me, I have misunderstood the word.

‘Psychological attributes', Wittgenstein argued, ‘are attributes of the animal as a whole'. It is nonsense to say that ‘my knee wants to go for a walk', because only a human being can want something. But due to the hubris of scientific psychology and neuroscience, it has become a commonplace to say, for example, ‘Your mind wants you to buy this product' or ‘My brain keeps forgetting things'. When we do this, we forget that wanting and forgetting are actions which only make any sense on the basis of an interpretation of human beings, embedded in social relations, with intentions and purposes. Behaviourism seeks to exclude all of that, but in the process does considerable violence to the language we use to understand other people.

Psychology is afflicted by the same error, time and time again, of being modelled on physiology or biology, either by force of metaphor or by a more literal reductionism. Of course, this attempt to either reduce psychology to the physical, or at least base it on mechanical or biological metaphors, is one of the main strategies of power and control offered by the various theorists explored over the course of this book. For Jevons, the mind was best understood as a mechanical balancing device; for Watson, it was nothing but observable behaviour; for Selye, it could be discovered in the body; for Moreno, it was manifest in measurable social networks; marketers now like to attribute our decisions and moods to our brains; and so on.

And yet we needn't (and mustn't) return to the dualism of Fechner or Wundt either. To assert the subjective, transcendent, intangible nature of the mind, in opposition to the physical body, is to keep flipping the same dualism on its head, like preaching a mindfulness doctrine that is one half neuroscience and the other half Buddhism. To return to a vision of the mental realm as entirely private and invisible to the outside world is to remain trapped in a state of affairs where we keep asking ourselves neurotic and paranoid questions, such as ‘What am I really feeling?' or ‘I wonder if he is truly happy'. It is in this sort of confused philosophical territory that the owner of the brain scanner can promise to resolve all moral and political questions, once and for all.
¹⁸

At its most fundamental, the choice between Bentham and Wittgenstein is a question of what it means to be human. Bentham posited the human condition as one of mute physical pain, to be expertly relieved through carefully designed interventions. This is an ethic of empathy, which is extrapolated to a society of scientific surveillance. It also views the division between humans and animals as philosophically insignificant. For Wittgenstein, by contrast, there is nothing prior to language. Humans are animals which speak, and their language is one that other humans understand. Pleasure and pain lose their privileged position, and cannot treated as matters of scientific fact. ‘You learned the concept “pain” when you learned language', but it is fruitless to search for some reality of consciousness outside of the words we have to express ourselves.
¹⁹
If people are qualified to speak for themselves, the constant need to anticipate – or to try and measure – how they are feeling suddenly disappears. So, potentially, does the need for ubiquitous psychosomatic surveillance technologies.

How else to know people?

Psychology and social science are perfectly possible under the sorts of conditions described by Wittgenstein; indeed they are much more straight-forward. Systematic efforts to understand other people, through their behaviour and speech, are entirely worthwhile. But they are not so different from the forms of understanding that we all make of one another in everyday life. As the social psychologist Rom Harré argues, we all face the occasional problem of not being sure what other people mean or intend but have ways of overcoming this. ‘The only possible solution', he argues, ‘is to use our understanding of ourselves as the basis for the understanding of others, and our understanding of others of our species to further our understanding of ourselves'.
²⁰

One implication of this, when it comes to acquiring psychological knowledge, is that we have to take what people say far more seriously. Not only that, but we have to assume that for the most part, they meant what they said, unless we can identify some reason why they didn't. Where behaviourism always attempts to get around people's ‘reports' of what they're feeling, in search of the underlying emotional reality, an interpretative social psychology insists that feeling and speaking cannot be ultimately disentangled from each other. Part of what it means to understand the feelings of another is to hear and understand what they mean when they use the word ‘feeling'.

Techniques such as surveys may have a valuable role to play in fostering mutual understanding across large and diverse societies. But again, there is too much misunderstanding as to what is going on when a survey takes place. Surveys can never be instruments which represent some set of quasi-natural, objective facts; rather they are useful and interesting ways of engaging with
people, probing them for answers. As the critical psychologist John Cromby has argued with respect to happiness surveys:

Happiness does not exert a determinate force that always makes all human participants tick the boxes on a … scale in a particular way. There is not the law-like relation between happiness and questionnaire response that exists between, say, the volume of a quantity of mercury and its temperature.
²¹

This doesn't mean that a happiness survey doesn't communicate anything. But what it conveys cannot be disentangled from the social interaction between the surveyor and the surveyed. The ideal of discovering something more objective than this, through stripping out the self-awareness of the respondent (for instance, analysing Twitter sentiment instead) is a chimera. It also involves forms of trickery and manipulation which open up a breach between the researcher and everybody else.

Another way of understanding this argument is that psychology, clearly understood, is a door through which we pass on the way to political dialogue. This is in contrast to the Benthamite and behaviourist traditions explored in this book, which view psychology as a step towards physiology and/or economics, precisely so as to shut the door on politics. Unless something goes wrong, the core questions of psychology are relatively simple. ‘What is that person doing?' ‘What is that person feeling right now?' For the most part, the answers to these questions are relatively unproblematic, and the first and most important ‘methodology' for answering them is one that we all use every day: just ask them.

That this methodology is not taken more seriously by
managerial elites is scarcely surprising. It requires processes of deliberation. It credits people with their own legitimate interpretations and critiques of their own circumstances. It also requires skills to listen, which become submerged in societies that have privileged the power to observe and visualize. Management and government are more secure with the notion of brains ‘lighting up' or thinking being ‘no less observable than baseball', than they are with the prospect of people intentionally expressing their emotions and judgements. For various reasons, making our minds visible seems safer than making them audible. Entire organizational structures would need to change if the behaviourist vision of an automated, silent mind were abandoned in favour of an intelligent, speaking one.

In a society organized around objective psychological measurement, the power to listen is a potentially iconoclastic one. There is something radical about privileging the sensory power of the ear in a political system designed around that of the eye. The clinical psychologist Richard Bentall argues that even quite severe forms of ‘mental illness', which are routinely treated with drugs in the West today, can be alleviated through a patient, careful form of engagement with the sufferer and their life history. He suggests that:

If psychiatric services are to become more genuinely therapeutic, and if they are to help people rather than merely ‘manage' their difficulties, it will be necessary to rediscover the art of relating to patients with warmth, kindness and empathy.
²²

Listening and talking will not ‘cure' them, because they are not ‘treatments' in the first place. But behind the symptoms of
psychosis and schizophrenia there are stories and emotional injuries which only a good listener will discover.

The rediscovery of listening is a priority that permeates other fields of social science. The sociologist Les Back argues that ‘listening to the world is not an automatic faculty but a skill that needs to be trained', noting it is this which gets lost in a society of ‘abstracted and intrusive empiricism' of endless data, exposés, facts and figures.
²³
To know others is to engage with their stories and how they tell them. In the past, critiques of ‘ideology' have proposed that most people labour under a ‘false consciousness', not knowing what their real interests are. There is a certain irony, in the age of ‘nudges' and clandestine Facebook experiments, that it may now be more radical to highlight precisely the ways in which ordinary people
do
know what they're doing,
can
make sense of their lives,
are
clear about their interests. For this, researchers need to learn some humility.