The Happiness Industry (5 page)

Yet there is a perpetual uneasiness about this project. With something as important as happiness, no measure ever seems quite adequate to the philosophical importance of the matter. We are generally content to accept that the map of the ocean floor is not the same as the ocean floor itself, but merely a representation with various advantages and disadvantages. But with happiness, there always remains a frustration. The sense that quantified smiles, heart rate, money and ‘just noticeable differences' miss something crucial about the nature of emotional experience is overwhelming. A smile may indeed reveal something of the person – but surely not as a scientific representation.

Let's consider again the foundation of Bentham's political science. ‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure'. By making this claim, Bentham hoped to strip out abstract, unscientific bases for political programmes. But in what sense is his claim about ‘nature' really any less metaphysical? Since when did nature involve erecting ‘sovereign masters' over certain species? That sounds suspiciously like metaphysics after all. No matter how scientific his portrait of motivation may claim to be, in its epic generality it is guilty of the same abstraction that Bentham deplored in philosophy. And if it weren't, then the notion of happiness as the ultimate purpose of government would not be able to hold.

Here's the paradox. If happiness is granted its grand, philosophical and moral status as a ‘sovereign master', we might agree that this is ultimately what life is all about. But then how could such an entity ever be measured scientifically? Whereas if happiness is anchored firmly in the physical, sensory experience of pleasure and pain, who is to say that such a mundane matter carries any fundamental or political importance? It becomes just a grey mushy process inside our brains. Too often, the utilitarian route out of this dilemma is simply to duck it altogether. As the influential British economist and positive psychology advocate Lord Richard Layard writes, ‘If we are asked why happiness matters we can give no further external reason. It just obviously does matter.'
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Is happiness measurement really a way of resolving moral and philosophical debate? Or is it actually a way of silencing it? Once the technocrats are in charge, it is too late to raise any questions of intrinsic meaning or collective purpose.

Happiness science is a science like no other, because it is always reaching beyond a mere object. What it grasps for is something meaningful, but it grasps for it via tools and measures that are too cold to adequately capture that meaning. Fechner's bizarre efforts to access transcendent truths via weight-lifting have become an exemplar of how psychological management works today. Neurological, physiological and behavioural monitoring devices are clamped together with meditation practices and pop existentialism. The philosophical deficit in the science of happiness is dealt with by importing ideas from Buddhism and new age religions. Somewhere in between the quantitative science and the spiritualism sits happiness.

The cultural effect of this is that certain indicators and measures of happiness take on a moral luminosity of their own. While happiness itself may remain invisible, a smile or a diagnosis of
positive health acquires a sort of iconic value. The material symptom or indicator becomes a doorway into some inner being, granting it a magical quality. When Bentham idly wondered whether pulse rate or money might be the best measure of utility, he could scarcely have imagined the industries that would develop dedicated to asserting and reinforcing the authority of particular indicators to represent our inner feelings. Among these, no indicator has acquired a greater authority than money, an object that straddles the abstract and the material like no other.

The accident and emergency unit of the Royal London Hospital in East London is never the most salubrious of environments. But on a Saturday night, it turns into a cross between a warzone and a Hammer horror movie. Drunk people stumble around, bruised and beaten from bar brawls. Ambulance staff and police officers compete for access to suspected drink-drivers. The fear or grief on the faces of visiting family members is the most disturbing sight of all.

It was into such a scene that my wife and I arrived with our screaming daughter when she was less than a year old. We actually had no idea if there was anything wrong with her or not. That's the problem with babies: they won't tell you. The question perennially asked by doctors of parents with babies – ‘But does she seem OK in herself?' – is another way of saying, ‘Trust your instinct.' On this occasion, she'd woken up at an unusual time and was screaming in a way we'd never heard before, coupled with a rash and a temperature. She really didn't seem ‘OK in herself'.

Amid the predictable chaos of the waiting area at 2 a.m., I noticed three young men who appeared to be plotting something with urgency. They were clustered around a form, onto which
one of them was writing details in consultation with the other two. They pointed at parts of it, advising him on what to write, checking with each other for agreement before encouraging him further. He scribbled away while his two friends appeared to debate what he should do next, occasionally looking up to check if they were being watched. There was a great deal of nodding and pointing, as if some plan were being hatched. This went on for about twenty minutes or so, while our by now infuriatingly cheerful daughter was enjoying playing with some NHS leaflets.

After a while, a nurse came out and called the name of the young man who was filling in the form. The effect this had on him surprised me. His shoulders drooped, his face went into a grimace and he very, very slowly got to his feet, while his two friends suddenly became a picture of concern and pity. As he inched towards the nurse clutching his form, he held his head angled sharply down to one side and supported his neck, to suggest that he was now suffering a great deal. He walked slowly and – apparently – painfully towards the nurse, who led him off to a treatment area. After he'd gone, his two friends cheered right up and returned to their furtive discussions.

The young man had clearly suffered a neck injury. Or at least, he had clearly experienced some mishap that could have caused a neck injury. Whatever had happened, it had resulted in slightly more enthusiasm among the three young men than one would normally associate with accidents or emergencies. From where I was sitting, this was an obvious case of an insurance scam being plotted. I immediately felt angry that these time-wasters were holding us up, quite apart from the apparent fraud going on. No doubt a car accident had occurred, and one of them had then immediately recognized an opportunity to make some money.
The only question was whether the ‘injured' party could get through the necessary medical examination without fluffing his lines.

Maybe my reaction was grossly unfair. Maybe it wasn't. As with babies, so for whiplash: there is no possible way of knowing. Whiplash is a curious type of medical phenomenon for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the term itself technically refers to an event that has befallen the sufferer, and not to a medical condition as such. Thus, if someone has experienced sudden straining of the neck muscles, as often occurs with rear-end car collisions, it makes sense to say that she has ‘suffered whiplash'. Secondly, to the extent that whiplash has any symptoms, they are only detectable to the sufferer. Evidence that ‘whiplash' has occurred (other than a smashed car bumper) consists in the fact that the victim experiences long-term pain in the neck and back. But as with some psychiatric disorders, there is no identifiable disorder underlying this symptom.

Medical researchers have studied whiplash since the 1950s, in search of some physiological explanation for it, but without luck.
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It first entered the Cumulated Index Medicus (the database of American medical journals) in 1963, as experts struggled to come to terms with this mercurial syndrome. During the 1960s, American scientists conducted a series of experiments on monkeys which simulated extreme rear-end collisions, in the hope of then being able to discover the precise way in which these accidents damaged neck tissue. Too many of these caused paralysis or brain damage to the monkeys, without doing much to unravel the mystery of whiplash in humans.

One thing which is well known about whiplash, however, is that it is very unevenly distributed internationally. Rates of whiplash diagnosis are far higher in the English-speaking world
than in most other nations, and have been growing sharply since the 1970s. Given that whiplash is chiefly associated with car accidents, and that cars have been getting progressively safer over this period, this increase is clearly associated with other factors to do with insurance claims. In Britain, for example, whiplash is responsible for a 60 per cent rise in personal injury claims related to car accidents between 2006–13, to the point where whiplash payouts are now equivalent to 20 per cent of the cost of every car insurance premium.

In other countries, the syndrome is far less well known, and extracts far less money from the insurance industry as a result. While whiplash featured in 78 per cent of all personal injury claims made in Britain in 2012, across the channel in France the figure was only 30 per cent.
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In the early 2000s, Norwegian neurologist Harald Schrader noticed that the incidence of long-term neck pain resulting from car accidents in Lithuania was zero. After studying this phenomenon and publishing his findings, he was met with fury from the Norwegian whiplash disability patient group (which boasted 70,000 members in a nation of 4.2 million people), who took umbrage with what they assumed he was implying.

The bizarre philosophical status of whiplash as a form of entirely invisible pain makes it unusually amenable to fraudulent insurance claims. Intuitively, this explains how rates of whiplash diagnosis vary so sharply from one country to the next: in countries such as Britain and the United States, where it is a well-known phenomenon, drivers who have suffered a rear-end collision will be that much more likely to spot the opportunity for some monetary reward. The three young men in the Royal London accident and emergency unit were a case in point. They obviously realized that they had to work out their version of events straight
away and then get the victim to report the right sort of pain, even though a ‘whiplash' diagnosis would require the pain to persist for some time. The number of lawyers specializing in representing such claims has grown dramatically since the 1970s. In the United States, lawyers can even attend specialist training seminars, organized by fee-hungry doctors, on how to construct a viable medical case.

Yet for the same reason that this syndrome is attractive to the fraudster, it is impossible to ever know how much fraud is really going on. Expert estimations of the rate of fraud vary wildly, between 0.1 per cent and 60 per cent, indicating the depth of the fog obscuring this issue.
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Insurance companies are struggling to know how to cope. Some have introduced somewhat mediaeval-sounding ‘Truth Statements', which accident victims and their lawyers are required to sign, to confirm the discomfort that they claim to be suffering.

Adding to the confusion is a further philosophical and cultural riddle. As even some critics of the whiplash industry will admit, it is perfectly possible that drivers in Britain or America will, on average, genuinely suffer greater long-term neck pain following a rear-end collision than those in continental Europe. An accident victim who is aware of whiplash, and its possible monetary value, will consult a doctor, wear a neck brace, take rest, recuperation and time off work, and generally act like a victim. The psychosomatic aspects of back and neck pain mean that this person may indeed find herself with long-term problems. Meanwhile, the accident victim who dusts herself off, swaps numbers with the other driver, and sets about getting her car repaired, is likely to feel far less discomfort over the long term. Observable behaviour and subjective sensation eventually bleed into each other.

The medical or neurological response to this sort of problem,
encouraged by the insurance industry, is to carry on looking even harder for the physical reality of neck pain. Fraud will be eliminated once the truth of pain has been uncovered. Until that point, truth statements and the like will have to do. This assumes, as per Bentham's gambit, that accident victims experience a certain quantity of pain that could in principle be scientifically known to an observer, if only an appropriate method could be found. Such a method would likely have to focus on the body in some way. Bentham's preferred route for measuring utility – using money as a proxy for it – is ruled out on this occasion, seeing as it is precisely the pursuit of money that appears to be generating the problem in the first place.

But what if whiplash is necessarily entangled with the pursuit of monetary compensation? And what if fraud of this sort is not some unfortunate, exceptional and eradicable element of our compensation culture, but an entirely inevitable feature of how our sense of justice and injustice has been colonized by monetary calculation? Deep within the whiplash syndrome, there is the idea of equivalence between the sensations produced via the nervous system, and money. The principle states that a certain quantity of subjective feeling can be counterbalanced by an appropriate quantity of money. Admittedly, this principle may be widely abused, in some societies far more than others. But the very fact that it is impossible to know whether it is being abused, or by how much, tells us something about the absurdity of this presupposition. Maybe, instead of searching harder for the ‘truth' of physical pain, we should explore if money could ever serve as some neutral, honest and mathematical representation of our feelings.

The authority of mathematics

Joseph Priestley, the man whose work had led Bentham to shout ‘Eureka!' in Harper's coffee shop that day in 1766, was a strong influence over the emerging middle class of industrial England. In 1774, he helped to establish the first Unitarian church in the country, which was still an illegal religious movement at the time. Unitarians rejected the orthodox Christian belief in the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, arguing instead for a single God. Varieties of Unitarianism had been in existence across Europe since the sixteenth century, though never politically accepted. The English practitioners had been an underground movement until Priestley formally established his church. Understandably, given the suppression they had experienced, they were avid Enlightenment optimists and campaigners who argued for freedoms of speech and religious association.

They were also scientific optimists who placed great faith in the power of mechanics and engineering to advance the progress of humanity. Popular among industrialists, this coincidence of faith with machinery was convenient. A number of Mechanics' Institutes were founded by Unitarians in the early nineteenth century, in an effort to connect engineering progress to the public good. Mathematics was viewed as especially valuable, where it helped to construct useful machinery and transform the physical world for the benefit of mankind. But it needed pushing beyond the study of the natural world or engineering and into social and political realms. It is scarcely surprising that they immediately viewed Bentham as a kindred spirit.

William Stanley Jevons was born into a Unitarian family in the outskirts of Liverpool in 1835. His father was a successful iron merchant, and the family was comfortably off. Unitarian
principles dominated the family and dictated the young Jevons's education, within which mechanical devices and geometric reasoning were constantly recurring features. As a child, he played with a balancing device as a toy, and such instruments would retain a fascination for him throughout his later career.
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He received his first introduction to economics as a nine-year-old, through the children's textbook Easy Lessons on Money Matters, authored by the Archbishop Richard Whateley, which was read to him by his mother.
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Aged eleven, he attended the Liverpool Mechanics' Institution. Throughout this, he was taught to view mathematics as the mark of ‘true' science, no matter what the object might be.

In the early 1850s, Jevons enrolled to study chemistry at Bentham's alma mater, University College London (UCL). This also gave him the chance to attend the lectures of another famous Unitarian, James Martineau, a Benthamite who taught a course on ‘mental philosophy'. It was during the 1850s that a distinctive tradition of English psychology was emerging that had parallels with what Fechner was doing in Leipzig at the same time. The use of introspection, to study the inner life of the mind, gained respectability through the mid nineteenth century, especially following Alexander Bain's 1855 work,
The Senses and the Intellect
. Bentham's influence was important to this tradition too, but it was more the speculative, philosophical Bentham, who created theories of pleasure, rather than the technocratic Bentham, who wanted to actually ground politics in physical equipment. With his Unitarian and industrial background, Jevons was more naturally inclined to hard, geometric mechanics. Psychology was all very well, unless it could not be rendered mathematical.

Jevons would have remained at UCL for longer, but in 1853, with his family suffering financial difficulties, his father obliged
him to accept a job in Sydney, Australia, as a gold assayer. This required the use of very finely tuned instruments and scales to test the quality and weight of gold, a practice that appealed to Jevons's mechanical sensibility. Here was a practical challenge, which involved the application of mathematics to the physical world and saw Jevons returning to his childhood hobby of using balancing devices. Not only that, but the object in question would prove to be the critical one in shaping Jevons's later intellectual career: money. It is interesting to consider that at precisely the same time as Fechner had begun his weight-lifting experiments to look at the mathematical relationship between physical objects and psychic feeling, 10,000 miles away Jevons was working with another form of weight-lifting instrument to test the monetary value of a precious metal. If the three different entities of mind, matter and money could be fixed in some mathematical relation to each other, the implications for the understanding of the market economy would be profound.