It may not be a very scholarly term, but for think tank fashion and versatility, you can't beat the word brittle. A few months ago, in a report called "Resilient nation", Demos proclaimed that "British society is increasingly brittle". That kind of brittleness originated in things such as unpredictable food supply and sewerage systems and in pretty much anything else that looked dodgy: "The environment itself is becoming more brittle." And so, it appears, are all of us. Last week, the Young Foundation scattered the word throughout a new report.
"Too many parts of British society are brittle, vulnerable to shocks, stressed… and in some cases close to the edge," the authors began, in this 250-page addition to the literature on wellbeing. By the end of the report, you gathered that the whole country is afflicted with galloping osteoporosis.
"Britain is a brittle society, with many fractures and many people left behind," it says. Their bad personal experiences are "often connected to having small or brittle networks of social support". You could understand the temptation. Where "broken" sounds too hysterical – and has in any case been contaminated by David Cameron – and "frangible" won't alliterate, "brittle" conveys the right impression of debility along with the suggestion that, with some decent care, British society might regain its toughness. Or as Geoff Mulgan, the director of the Young Foundation, put it in a summary of the findings, people could learn to "bounce back" from their setbacks. Resilience, his report says, can be taught to those without the resources to generate their own and it should be: "To the public, it is obvious that psychological needs are as important as material ones, that love, care, peace of mind are as vital to a good life as having enough heating or enough clothes to wear."
But is it equally obvious that it is the state's business to meet those psychological needs as well? It is to the authors. Although they are to be congratulated for not proposing, as some have done, that our government emulate Bhutan's "gross national happiness" arrangements, the Young Foundation authors argue that prosaic forms of welfare support are no longer enough. "In a society with relative material abundance," it says, "the critical issues of welfare have become as much about psychology and relationships as material need."
Since no nice person would want to set their face against general wellbeing, the readiness of politicians of all sides to respond to such demands with happiness-building schemes should no doubt be considered enlightened, rather than creepy or simply credulous. David Cameron obliged some time ago with a plea for "joy in people's hearts" and improved "GWB" (general wellbeing).
The government has announced happiness lessons for children and, last week, the arrival of New Horizons, a "programme of action to help improve everyone's mental wellbeing". "This is about more than preventing mental illness," said Gordon Brown, that constant reminder that being prime minister doesn't bring you happiness. "It is also about helping individuals and communities to bring the best out of themselves."
No doubt he is already complying with official advice for promoting the greatest mental wellbeing of the greatest number: "This includes socialising regularly, exercising, enjoying nature and learning new things." But what about people who like to sulk quietly at home? You wonder if he would not see a wider, much more immediate surge in collective pleasure by, say, placing the Blairs under house arrest or forcing the bankers who ruined us to undergo a form of painless but televised humiliation, maybe involving Ant, Dec and the private parts of a dead kangaroo.
Though I learn from Wikipedia that John Stuart Mill took a dim view of schadenfreude, however many people got the happiness benefit.
Brown's timidity has also been noted by the happiness community. After the publication of New Horizons, Dr Lynne Friedli, author of the World Health Organisation's influential report "Mental health, resilience, and inequalities", told the BBC that, if the government were serious about mental health, "we have to tackle injustice".
Like many of her colleagues in wellbeing, she believes that the increases in inequality are connected to parallel increases in the incidence of mental illness. "We have to face up to the fact that individual and collective mental health and wellbeing depend on reducing the gap between rich and poor," she said, on the publication of her report.
But what seems so obvious and so desirable to specialists, such as Dr Friedli, will have to convince the public – many of whom probably feel quite happy with current levels of brittleness, inequality and mental ill-health. Even if you share, as I do, their aversion to gross inequality, it's possible to find the confidence of these happiness engineers almost surreal.
Friedli describes the case for therapeutic social justice as "overwhelming". But isn't human behaviour – in all its perversity, greed and irrationality – more complicated than this? Critics of happiness advocates routinely stress the problems of measuring wellbeing, the lack of reliable data and report yet more difficulties when it comes to correlating crude, subjectively reported findings with fluctuating economic inequality (of which the extent is, in itself, disputed).
Happiness advocates who agree on the social origins of mental ill health may still disagree on the significance of other, misery-inducing factors, such as cruelty, boredom, ignorance. Lord Layard, for instance, has been attacked for advocating, as well as progressive taxation, a massive increase in cognitive behaviour therapy; practitioners of rival cures object that it is useless or a way of keeping unhappy people quiet. Layard is also, of course, a prominent admirer of Bhutanese ways, which include, as any gap year student will tell you, quaint sumptuary laws of a kind not seen in Britain since George II banned the kilt. Bhutan's were introduced in 1989.
"Bhutan seems much happier than countries that have a materialist rather than moral ethos," Layard told the Guardian last year. This endorsement, from the man synonymous with modern utilitarianism, can only add to doubts about a programme that presumes that something as private and elusive as individual happiness can be defined, designed and tax-adjusted for. "Ask yourself whether you are happy," Mill wrote, "and you cease to be so."
Even supposing they are much wiser than Mill, our happiness scientists could surely have done more, considering the scale of their planned experiments, to reassure the relevant laboratory animals that their schemes are not self-aggrandising exercises, based on hazy or disputed evidence, whose suspect nature is repeatedly betrayed by the terminology. "Gross national happiness", for God's sake. And as for "brittle": is that any more telling than Cameron's salesman-like "broken"? And even if it were, would it compare, for national urgency, with "illiterate", "unemployed" or - even now – "cold"?
