Been fascinated by the recent convergence on wellbeing and happiness between the main political parties in the UK. This op-ed article for the Guardian comment page (here's a lovely PDF of it) explores the hidden affinities between conservative philosophy and the more normative aspects of the happiness agenda (which I've explored elsewhere in this blog, here and here and here). If you've come from reading the article, I'd love to hear your comments below.
Guardian, June 1st, 2006
If you’re happy and you’re Tory, clap your hands. So skilfully is the young pretender, David Cameron, pressing buttons on wellbeing, quality of life,and happiness that charges of superficiality and empty trendiness are coming thick and fast. But a deeper examination of his recent speeches shows an underlying rigour that his political opponents would be foolish to underestimate
Read his recent musings on general wellbeing and you’ll find a coherent piece of conservative thinking – the old-school version, not the neo-liberal one. “What makes us happy, above all, is a sense of belonging”, says Cameron, “strong relationships with friends, family and the immediate world around us. That's about permanence, not change. It's about the personal, not the commercial.”
Compare this with the definition of conservatism given by the doyen of 20th century Tory thinkers, Micheal Oakeshott: “a propensity to use and enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be … To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss”.
To me, that sounds exactly like the war-cry of our salvific army of current happiness gurus, in which David Cameron and his ideas team now have to be included. Indeed, to prefer “the sufficient to the superabundant”, to “delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be”, sums up almost perfectly the advice of figures like the UK’s happiness mandarin, the Labour-aligned Richard Layard.
When Layard argues (in his recent book) for restrictions on advertising, discouragement of easy divorce and a stern ‘reform’ of youth culture, on the basis of studies of reported happiness levels, you can begin to see our new ‘third way’ forming - a new ‘middle-ground’ between the main political contestants.
It’s a lot like the old ‘third way’. The originator of the concept, Anthony Giddens, wrote before the rise of New Labour about the need for a “philosophic conservatism”. This would emphasize the values of “protection, conservation and solidarity”, a program that could transcend left and right. Look at Cameron’s hot-topics over the last few months – chiding businesses for retailing padded bras to youngsters, ostentatiously greening his lifestyle, repudiating Thatcher’s axiom of “no such thing as society” – and the match is almost perfect.
The ‘Blameron’ charge is old news. But what fascinates me is how the enduring tensions of third-way politics – indeed, of market democracy – are literally irrepressible, no matter the political patina. The happiness and well-being agenda, whether peddled by Brown or Cameron, will not escape them either.
It’s a delicious irony, for example, that Cameron’s speech was delivered at a conference organised by Google. Is there any force in the world which so thoroughly subverts a ‘philosophic conservatism’? Every one of the Oakenshottian virtues is unravelled by the things that blandly-designed web page can do. Want to access the unknown, the untried, the mysterious, the possible, the unbounded, the distant, and most certainly the superabundant? It’s literally only a few keywords and an icon-click away.
To borrow an old image from Angela Carter, the internet is (among many other things) a ‘universal desiring machine’. For Cameron to cite the San Franciscan online community Craig’s List as an example of “restoring the human voice to the Internet, in a humane, non-commercial environment” was an immediate hostage to fortune. Headlines a few days later about prostitutes soliciting through Craig’s List’s web pages were, to seasoned cyberculture watchers, almost inevitable.
The network society, resting on our ever-multiplying channels of communication, is built for restlessness and yearning, not satiety and stability. Unless (like Google, Yahoo and every other search engine operating in China), you design in a few limits to its unboundedness.
It would be logical for happiness reformers to argue for a few relevant filters in our domestic use of the internet, in order to dampen down our those urges to invidious comparison, or utopian bliss, that make us so unhappy. (Though hopefully, we could still search for the word ‘democracy’ without a word-block). Are we ready for that? Who would stand up for the open net, in the face of these well-adjusted well-beings?
I’m similarly intrigued by Cameron’s critique of ‘the Protestant work ethic’ as a barrier to true happiness – and his advocacy of ethical work as an alternative. In the Google speech, Cameron trashes Charles Handy’s idea of the ‘portfolio career’, but deliberately misrepresents it in the process.
Handy was arguing that the ‘job for life’ is over, because of the need for permanent reskilling in the information economy – but he wasn’t arguing that this means a chaotic tumble from job to job instead. A portfolio career was, ideally, a life of simultaneous possibilities – where one’s technical skills, civic aspirations, emotional commitments and creative urges could find their purchase in the marketplace and society. We modern people “contain multitudes”, as Walt Whitman once put it. To that extent, the duteousness and passivity implied by the Protestant work ethic is truly dead.
Against this, Cameron implicitly lines up with yet another Labour-friendly academic, Richard Sennett. In his recent book The New Culture of Capitalism, Sennett calls for companies to recognise that people want their lives to have a narrative, in which they feel in charge of their overall existence. If it wants to make the best of us, business should not treat us as purely slaves to globalised competition: they should provide (as Cameron puts it) “opportunities that balance work with the personal relationships and the personal values that actually make us happy.”
But my doubts are that modern people really do want only one, single, strong narrative in their lives – or that if they do, the dangers of a new paternalism are at hand. Cameron cites Asda as an example of the win-win of flexible working. The more measures introduced by the company that responded to family exigencies like childcare and school holidays, the better its rates of absenteeism and performance.
All well and good. But I once spent a day at Asda’s Leeds HQ, ten years ago, observing their operations from morning till evening. Maybe it’s the intellectual and bohemian in me, but I was alarmed and chilled by the kind of corporate mind-control on display. I watched a morning team session, the where staff were whipped into a state of flushed excitement about that day’s sales targets or shelf-arrangements. The passions raised seemed absurdly, almost cruelly incommensurate to the tasks outlined.
So Cameron’s “capitalism with commitment” and “ethical work” might be about a partial return to the days of Company Man (and Woman). A 21st century update of a 1950’s-era dream state, where strong, co-parented families and noble, efficient labours compose a stable, contented society. Sound familiar? Brown will hardly be peddling anything much different when his ascension is complete.
In a world where systemic global crises – from terrorism to disease, immigration to environmental degradation – meet us daily on our doorsteps, our streets and our inboxes, does a politics of happiness really give us the strength of character to match those challenges? Both Brown and Cameron carefully maintain global perspectives, whether economic or environmental, as a part of their electoral pitch.
But surely a degree of unhappiness – maybe even of angry dissatisfaction – is required from us, as a response to the global horrors and tragedies that the media (an institution implicitly distrusted by the happiness gurus) thankfully bring to our attention? Otherwise, these “well beings” will not be ethical beings. However secure their family lives, however fulfilling their jobs, however “happy” they feel.
Recent Comments