This quite inspiring book is the latest to join the clamour against consumerism revived in recent times by arch polemical psychologist Oliver James, whose bestselling Affluenza (2007) explained how modern life can play havoc with your sanity.
Sue Gerhardt's style is less abrasive (as a career psychotherapist, she is more understanding than condemning) but the diagnosis – that acquiring a lot of stuff doesn't make you happy – is the same. We are rich in material comforts at the price of having become self-centred, self-interested, self-absorbed and self-regarding. Self-contained, too – though also not in a good way, says Gerhardt, as late capitalism succeeded in rotting our emotional links with community, neighbourhood, family and outer world and forced us into making free-market, gimlet-eyed competitors of ourselves. Our relations with one another – in which our forebears found, if not happiness, at least a proper sense of belonging – are shot. Where "selfishness" might once have evoked someone using up the last of the milk, now those proliferating "self" prefixes have eaten away at the moral fabric we used to snuggle under together.
As individuals with the Blitz spirit or ancestral trade union struggles clinging to our DNA, we might still be capable of fellow feeling – most of us would be shocked to learn, for example, that the world spends more on petfood than on keeping everyone in clean water and sanitation – but society no longer encourages us to act upon it. It does, however, encourage us to spend money we don't have on things we don't need, or work like dogs just to keep up with the howling pack. Resistance runs against the grain. We might not love our neighbour but we don't want them to see us without the latest barbecue equipment.
Unsurprisingly, salvaging our emotional selves is not so much a problem to think our way out of than feel our way out of. Gerhardt is persuasive in showing how economic history has messed up our minds – from the agrarian revolution to Thatcherism and beyond – but she saves her real firepower for the science, which worryingly proves that the brain itself is reshaped by changing social conditions and attitudes, and that babies starved of affection will gird themselves neurologically for a less empathetic, less clement, more autonomous world. If this seems dispiriting, Gerhardt is never less than buoyant and has world-saving proposals up her sleeve based on regrowing new generations of children with sound parenting methods and getting a proactive, pro-ethics government to cough up the extra support. These insightful chapters need to be read right now by everyone who is pregnant. In 20 years, people shouting into their mobile phones on trains could be a thing of the past.
