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imomusRun a google image search on Oliver James and you'll find the website of a luxury home electronics store on the King's Road, Chelsea.
"Picture the scene," it purrs, "you’ve arrived home at the end of a tiring day, in need of some relaxation. As you enter the house, you turn to a touch-screen near the door, press a few buttons and at once a host of possibilities arises… Music and DVDs can be played in any room of the house. You can unwind in your personal home cinema. Lights of all colours can bathe your home. Visitors can arrive safely through your gated entry system.... Style. Comfort. Taste. Opulence... Oliver James."
The other Oliver James, child psychologist and writer Dr Oliver James, must find this website hilarious. He's dedicated his life to the proposition that it's precisely this sort of materialistic "opulence" -- this obsession with the latest status-enhancing gadgets -- that makes us deeply unhappy. His book Affluenza came out in 2007, but it's only now, post-financial meltdown, that the book's post-materialist message (which The Times perversely misinterpreted, in 2007, as proof that "we should take the shackles off the capitalist juggernaut") is really hitting home. James appeared on Sunday's Bookclub, for instance, talking about "affluenza".
His arguments go like this. The habits of modern industrial societies -- acquisition, competitive wealth-making, organised greed -- far from producing happiness are the source of misery, stress and a greatly increased incidence of mental illness. Over-emphasis on money, possessions, appearances and fame is linked with depression, anxiety, substance abuse, personality disorder.
Interestingly enough, affluenza is an affliction of the Anglosphere. A World Health Organisation study of mental illness showed that there's twice as much mental illness in the English-speaking nations as in mainland continental Europe. In continental Europe 11.5% have suffered from mental illness in the last 12 months. In the Anglosphere -- UK, US, Canada, Australia -- 23% have. The rate for the US on its own is 26.4%. The Gini rates (measuring the gap between the richest and poorest ten percent, in other words measuring inequality and failure to redistribute income) are also different in and out of the Anglosphere: Denmark's Gini is low, at 0.247. Wealth redistribution is a widely-accepted Danish priority. Gini in the UK is higher, at 0.36. In the US it's 0.408.
James thinks there's a clear reason why the Anglosphere suffers from higher rates of mental illness. His book The Selfish Capitalist lays the blame squarely at the feet of the neo-liberal Anglo-Saxon capitalism of the past thirty years, the culture ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan. It's -- we should use the past tense, because this culture has now ended -- it was a culture fixated on short-term share prices, a culture which believed the market could fix any problem, which pushed through massive privatization and tolerated massive inequality, which fostered job insecurity, deregulation, and a consumerism based on high rates of personal debt.
The good news is that the credit crunch has wiped out neo-liberalism. There will be some short-term pain and anxiety as people worry about money and their jobs, but with any luck, says James, there will now be a shift from having to being, from wants to real needs. People will stop thinking about widescreen TVs and start playing with their toddlers instead. Values like authenticity, vivacity and playfulness will replace acquisition, competitiveness and greed. Mental health levels will start improving.
One thing that can make us instantly happier, says James, is to stop watching TV. Studies have shown that the more TV you watch, the less happy you tend to be. TV fosters insecurities and wants, and shows models of "success", that make us feel worse about ourselves. James points us in the direction of Aric Sigman's book Remotely Controlled for more on the toxic effects of television. He also recommends Tom Hodgkinson's How To Be Idle, which is actually not about being idle but about being happy and relaxed and using your time constructively. (Hodgkinson founded The Idler magazine, whose parties I used to attend when I still lived in the Anglosphere.)
Reviewing The Selfish Capitalist a year ago, The Guardian said: " James is charting the new frontiers in psychology which have the potential to be the most significant indictment yet of the form of market capitalism that has held sway across the English speaking world for the past generation. As the burgeoning happiness-book industry - led, curiously, by economists such as Richard Layard, and political scientist Robert Lane - have well established, our hugely increased wealth over the past half century has done nothing to increase our happiness. Where James now develops the argument further is in pointing out that not only does market capitalism have little impact on improving levels of happiness, but it actually increases certain types of mental illness."
If capitalism really does make you sick, there's a possibility that the strange new world we've been living in for the past three or four months -- a world in which the gearbox of the Anglospheric capitalism we've known since 1979 has been thrown into reverse -- might make us healthy.
"Picture the scene," it purrs, "you’ve arrived home at the end of a tiring day, in need of some relaxation. As you enter the house, you turn to a touch-screen near the door, press a few buttons and at once a host of possibilities arises… Music and DVDs can be played in any room of the house. You can unwind in your personal home cinema. Lights of all colours can bathe your home. Visitors can arrive safely through your gated entry system.... Style. Comfort. Taste. Opulence... Oliver James."
The other Oliver James, child psychologist and writer Dr Oliver James, must find this website hilarious. He's dedicated his life to the proposition that it's precisely this sort of materialistic "opulence" -- this obsession with the latest status-enhancing gadgets -- that makes us deeply unhappy. His book Affluenza came out in 2007, but it's only now, post-financial meltdown, that the book's post-materialist message (which The Times perversely misinterpreted, in 2007, as proof that "we should take the shackles off the capitalist juggernaut") is really hitting home. James appeared on Sunday's Bookclub, for instance, talking about "affluenza".His arguments go like this. The habits of modern industrial societies -- acquisition, competitive wealth-making, organised greed -- far from producing happiness are the source of misery, stress and a greatly increased incidence of mental illness. Over-emphasis on money, possessions, appearances and fame is linked with depression, anxiety, substance abuse, personality disorder.
Interestingly enough, affluenza is an affliction of the Anglosphere. A World Health Organisation study of mental illness showed that there's twice as much mental illness in the English-speaking nations as in mainland continental Europe. In continental Europe 11.5% have suffered from mental illness in the last 12 months. In the Anglosphere -- UK, US, Canada, Australia -- 23% have. The rate for the US on its own is 26.4%. The Gini rates (measuring the gap between the richest and poorest ten percent, in other words measuring inequality and failure to redistribute income) are also different in and out of the Anglosphere: Denmark's Gini is low, at 0.247. Wealth redistribution is a widely-accepted Danish priority. Gini in the UK is higher, at 0.36. In the US it's 0.408.
James thinks there's a clear reason why the Anglosphere suffers from higher rates of mental illness. His book The Selfish Capitalist lays the blame squarely at the feet of the neo-liberal Anglo-Saxon capitalism of the past thirty years, the culture ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan. It's -- we should use the past tense, because this culture has now ended -- it was a culture fixated on short-term share prices, a culture which believed the market could fix any problem, which pushed through massive privatization and tolerated massive inequality, which fostered job insecurity, deregulation, and a consumerism based on high rates of personal debt.The good news is that the credit crunch has wiped out neo-liberalism. There will be some short-term pain and anxiety as people worry about money and their jobs, but with any luck, says James, there will now be a shift from having to being, from wants to real needs. People will stop thinking about widescreen TVs and start playing with their toddlers instead. Values like authenticity, vivacity and playfulness will replace acquisition, competitiveness and greed. Mental health levels will start improving.
One thing that can make us instantly happier, says James, is to stop watching TV. Studies have shown that the more TV you watch, the less happy you tend to be. TV fosters insecurities and wants, and shows models of "success", that make us feel worse about ourselves. James points us in the direction of Aric Sigman's book Remotely Controlled for more on the toxic effects of television. He also recommends Tom Hodgkinson's How To Be Idle, which is actually not about being idle but about being happy and relaxed and using your time constructively. (Hodgkinson founded The Idler magazine, whose parties I used to attend when I still lived in the Anglosphere.)
Reviewing The Selfish Capitalist a year ago, The Guardian said: " James is charting the new frontiers in psychology which have the potential to be the most significant indictment yet of the form of market capitalism that has held sway across the English speaking world for the past generation. As the burgeoning happiness-book industry - led, curiously, by economists such as Richard Layard, and political scientist Robert Lane - have well established, our hugely increased wealth over the past half century has done nothing to increase our happiness. Where James now develops the argument further is in pointing out that not only does market capitalism have little impact on improving levels of happiness, but it actually increases certain types of mental illness."
If capitalism really does make you sick, there's a possibility that the strange new world we've been living in for the past three or four months -- a world in which the gearbox of the Anglospheric capitalism we've known since 1979 has been thrown into reverse -- might make us healthy.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 12:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 01:02 am (UTC)I think that, if the U.S. were, say, half the geographic size or less, we would see far fewer sprawling homes going on the market. The admirable thing about Korea is that, because the country is so geographically tiny, people have to live in relatively tiny domeciles. More than that, people actually like to live in apartments. It's a cool thing here. Having a house is old-fashioned and rustic. People love their small, spare, but very sharp, very clean, and very modern apartment units. And it doesn't matter if these units are small, because Koreans don't really entertain in their apartments anyway ... things get messy if you have parties at home. They go out and do things on the town (eat out, go drinking, go to norebang--their version of karaoke--and take the taxi home).
In short, I don't think it's "capitalism" that does it. I think it's attitudes about money and things that does it. In the case of America, the permissiveness of the credit and loan industry is merely a reflection of the average Joe's own desires, which are based firmly in the fundamental philosophy of American life, which is to overestimate your manpower, stretch out on the vast amounts of advance capital it can get you, and then worry about paying up later.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 01:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 01:26 am (UTC)I think the problem has much more to do, as is usually the case, with how people live their lives, not how they make their money. Of course, how one makes his money can and does condition his life to a certain extent, but people all over the world make cash by working. It's how they spend their cash and live their lives that makes the real difference.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 01:28 am (UTC)I think that's always a good call. It's one of those lovely unwords -- like renaissance, democracy, and so on. (Unless one is a Marxist, but that's another story altogether.)
competitive un-consumption
Date: 2009-01-09 01:29 am (UTC)There is an amount of truth to this, and yet, being only second cousins once removed from the great apes, we still have social hierarchies, pecking orders, mating displays, aggressive, dominant and submissive behaviours (think about all those different ways to pronounce Chinese words, depending on the social status gap between the conversants). How do we square up the desire for a more equitable world with the consequent idea that we have to greatly reduce our id and ego in the process?
I've never bought into the model of human consciousness that makes people into lumps of plasticene, to be molded by whatever random media we happen to be watching or reading. I'm also offended by the way that some on the Left buy into this argument when it bolsters their arguments about people's desire for unearned riches (from watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, no doubt), but then they decry this same impulse when the Right want to slap 'Explicit Lyrics' stickers on CDs. Which is it to be, then?
I think it is rather the reverse -- our choice of television programmes, pop music poses and reading material reflects our own concerns about the world, or class-consciousness, or status desires. And there seems to be an infinitely sliced variety of this on offer, which just makes it another long-tail product of a relatively free market, doesn't it?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 01:29 am (UTC)Yes, and I think James is at pains to see a sliding scale. The worst thing for mental health has been a specific sort of neo-liberal, Anglospheric short-termist credit-oriented capitalism which we can now confine quite specifically between the dates 1979 and 2008.
The meltdown of that sort of capitalism has hit the Anglosphere much harder than other places -- like Berlin, where Poor-but-sexy Berliners shrug as crisis hits rivals (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=an6Kj39GDBd8&refer=home), according to one recent article (which I don't disagree with -- I think Berlin has been a laboratory for post-capitalism for some time now, and I think the rest of the world might now start listening to some of the discoveries we've made here over the last decade or so).
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 01:30 am (UTC)I'd also add blaming "capitalism" for societal malaise is misleadingly specific; ideology itself seems to be the issue. I can't think of a strictly-applied "ism" worth living under.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 01:33 am (UTC)A lot of people here in Korea are apparently "feeling the crunch," but I'm in the recession-proof industry of government-funded education and I've never owned a stock or a home in my life, so I don't feel it at all, unless I send money back to the U.S.
Re: competitive un-consumption
Date: 2009-01-09 01:36 am (UTC)For instance, I didn't watch any TV today. I did, though, read a lot of articles on the internet, and I played a lot of Wii tennis. If I'd chosen to watch TV, I'd have been subjected to more normative and, I think, anxiety-creating messages about myself (for instance, compared with the people on TV I'm a pretty weird guy with a weird lifestyle, and I might have started to feel, well, weird about that). Instead, I feel rather good for having beaten my computer rivals at tennis, and read some articles that made me feel smart and informed. My mental health levels are better than they might otherwise be. (Watching The IT Crowd (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDLImFSDUJ8) makes me happy, though.)
Re: competitive un-consumption
Date: 2009-01-09 01:43 am (UTC)There's no doubt some element of it out there, but to another degree, you have to be desirous / insecure enough to buy into that model. If there's anything I've learned in my life it is that the people who are secure in their own skins (no matter what their material circumstances) can view the world through a more equanimous lens.
I spend 99% of my day on the Internet as it's my job, and it's equally easy to fall into the jealousy and desire trap when you're behind a desk in an office, and reading other people's Twitter tweets about how wonderful their lives / jobs are. The grass is always greener on the other side of the modem, of course. ;)
Re: competitive un-consumption
Date: 2009-01-09 01:44 am (UTC)As far as media messages of the moment, however, I agree with you that those are largely ephemeral, more a reflection of what people (or a certain segment of people) desire than any kind of overt mind control meant to make people change their desires.
Re: competitive un-consumption
Date: 2009-01-09 01:46 am (UTC)Re: competitive un-consumption
Date: 2009-01-09 01:48 am (UTC)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUKOebCbINc
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 02:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 03:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 03:48 am (UTC)Anyway, there was also an Australian book called Affluenza (http://www.amazon.com/Affluenza-When-Much-Never-Enough/dp/1741146712/) published. It was authored by two economists with a history of involvement in somewhat left-wing think tanks, and is more or less a polemic attacking spiralling consumer debt and supporting a social movement it alleges to exist and refers to as "downshifting". In the same vein as James perhaps with less of an emphasis on individual psychology and more on Freakonomics-esques statistics and survey results.
Interestingly, one of the authors, Clive Hamilton, is now coming under fire from the generic left-progressive-green cohort in Australia for being a somewhat wowserish "communitarian", a chap who tends to attribute any social ill to the breakdown of traditional social networks, the nuclear family, extended family, labour movement, social clubs etc. He's also one of the prime movers behind the socially conservative Rudd Labor government's plan to censor the Internet at the ISP level, which you would probably find as disturbing as most net users do.
As a personal anecdote, after nine months of "colonial tourism" backpacking around the world, I am back in my old cultural context but still haven't reconnected the TV after nearly a month. It's feeling good.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 04:05 am (UTC)Be careful with these stats - they are likely (you don't provide a link to the study - could you?) based on self-disclosure. In some societies (perhaps English speaking ones?) it is more acceptable to 'come out' as mentally ill than it is in others. America in particular has a culture of self-improvement which probably skews the results.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 04:24 am (UTC)I'm with you up to a point on this, but I remain wary that the ruthless, selfish expediencies of late capitalism not be traded in for a dour, roundhead puritan ethic of self-denial. Just as there's a slippery slope from epicurean to hedonistic, there's also a slippery slope from austere to bleak.
And the use of "authenticity" when outlining one's values always throws off red flags.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 04:58 am (UTC)Fleet Foxes (unrelated)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 05:52 am (UTC)also, the fall of the bubble economy didn't seem to stop capitalism in its march at all -- certainly it must have had a major effect on practices of banks etc. but it's very much a capitalist society still.
how overextended are japanese, anyway? you certainly see adverts for credit cards and, much more so, personal loans, but i'm under the impression credit is relatively rarely used there.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 08:56 am (UTC)nani desu ka?
Date: 2009-01-09 09:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 09:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-09 09:06 am (UTC)