There was so much that discomforted me about the well-being debate last week - probably because I found myself (using an appropriate mental-health metaphor) feeling like Steve Martin in The Man With Two Brains.
One brain was delighted that the political argument was shifting away from the old narratives about "work", "prosperity" and "consumption" as the main goals of British life. The other brain was horrified at the level of behavioural meddling and social prescription that this shift seems to imply. And both brains were dragging me round the room in different directions, at the same time.
I find Richard Layard's argument more than a little creepy, if you think about his biography. His first claim to fame was as the core adviser to the incoming New Labour government in 1997 on their "welfare to work" scheme - that classic piece of applied Presbyterianism by Gordon Brown, where "them that shall not work, shall not eat" (or in Brown's words, "no fifth option").
Layard's input was to bolster the notion of work - any work - as the essential tool of socialisation. Anything to banish that Brownite spectre of "people sitting around all day, watching television, doing nothing" (a favoure phrase from pre-1997 speeches, and barely changed to this day). This is such a demeaning conception of the human self - that without the compulsion of wage labour, we will simply sink into indolence and passivity.
In that sense, Layard has been entirely consistent as a bureaucrat of bliss: he still thinks the citizen-worker is too weak-minded to know his or her own best interests, and that policy-makers must herd us all to a median state of happiness. It's the implicit paternalism in the wellbeing debate that constantly rings my alarm bells.
So if the stats say "marriage makes them more contented", then let's make divorce harder. If the research says "our media landscape saturates us with perspectives and world views, and leaves us dissatisfied", then we must control the media (or even, in one submission to this series, enforce a national switch-off of the telly at mealtimes).
Every other day I walk by the Hampstead towers where Beatrice and Sidney Webb planned their giant Fabian schemes to "improve the eugenic stock of the worker". I often idly imagine their spectres are twirling happily together at the sight of all these social-scientific shepherds, meticulously planning the micro-behaviour (if not eugenically, then at least neuro-psychologically) of the ex-working-class.
And I mean ex-working-class, because they are now the service class, mostly - which is the deepest problem underlying our angst about wellbeing. How can one have a genuinely happy society where one large chunk of it is in the position of servicing the domestic and hedonistic agendas of another large chunk?
This is the great psychological wound, ever more exacerbated since the workfare reforms of 1997, which causes disillusion and alienation and general grumpiness in this country. Among younger generations, who have now grown up nourished and watered by the globalism and diversity of the internet, this servile future induces a particularly acute form of cynicism.
The book was much derided at the time, but Nick Barham's Dis/connected got something right about youth culture in Britain. Faced with so little real opportunity to realise their cultural and digital sensibilities, many youths are conducting an "exodus" into their own worlds. Which, yes, can include environmental activism as well as gun culture, joyous drug-fuelled raving as well as isolated depression, McWorld as well as Jihad.
The authorities might fret about youth disconnection from the norms of society. But their policy and institutional responses, particularly in education, show no imagination whatsoever. The spectrum of creative life-options that face our energetic millenials, thanks to the dull workfare-ism of Brown and Layard, is pathetic. Add to that the workaholic culture of too many of their parents, neglecting child-care in favour of jobs that seem close to absurdist in their lack of meaning and purpose, and the unhappiness of young people's existence is all too understandable.
Let's push on through to the other side of this debate. As some commenters have acutely noted, the wellbeing merchants are often frustrated old collectivists, looking for a new set of research stats to justify the construction of a solidarity and consensus that was left behind with the industrial era. Never mind trying to restore this lost unity (which was a negative, defensive, bruised-and-battered unity at that). Can't our policy-makers begin to see that their best role is to give us the support and resources to help us navigate our deeply complex societies?
Some great old gurus have been quoted in this debate - Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt - but I'd suggest that we should also be reading Gorz, Rifkin, Negri and Virno. From them, some obvious policy suggestions.
Revive (and destigmatise) social housing, so that we can live well yet cheaply. Make all higher education free at the point of use, in order that the cognitive gap between the "serving" and the "serviced" classes become even more untenable. Strongly regulate capitalism (shorter working weeks, citizen's incomes, powerful public infrastructures and networks) so that men, women and children can experiment with new mixes of the productive and the emotional in our lives.
In short: support our autonomy, don't prescribe our happiness.
It's not well-being our state should be in the business of enabling, but well-becoming - our multitude of life-journeys towards meaning and purposefulness, not some steady-state of managed contentment. The "happ" in happiness comes from the Norse, and it means "luck" or "chance": this week's parade of neo-Webbs should remember that. Help us to be strong and capable, so we can live interesting, surprising, memorable lives. Other than that, get your hands off my soul.
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