The truth of the matter is more nuanced. The National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, carried out between 2020 and 2022 by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, tells us that 22 per cent of Australians had a mental disorder in the previous twelve months and 43 per cent within their lifetime. Large numbers, no doubt, but no larger than the 20 per cent and 45 per cent figures obtained when the study was conducted in 2007.

But hidden in these aggregated figures is a worrying trend. Among young people aged sixteen to twenty-four, the twelve-month prevalence of mental disorder rose from 26 per cent to 39 per cent, and that increase was especially steep for young women, up from 30 per cent to 46 per cent. When half of this group has a diagnosable mental illness — an underestimate, because the study only counts a subset of the most prevalent conditions — something is clearly very wrong.

A similar story of age- and gender-biased deterioration is told by the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. When an index of mental health is tracked across iterations of the survey from 2001 to 2021, older and middle-aged adults hold relatively steady but people aged fifteen to thirty-four, and especially young women, show a relentless decline beginning around 2014. The pandemic, the usual all-purpose explanation for recent social trends, can’t be held responsible for a rise in psychiatric misery that preceded it by several years, so what can?

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation offers a provocative but compelling answer to this question. Haidt, an American social psychologist known for influential books on well-being (The Happiness Hypothesis), moral psychology and political polarisation (The Righteous Mind) and upheavals on US college campuses (The Coddling of the American Mind, written with Greg Lukianoff), argues that some of the usual explanatory suspects are innocent. They don’t account for why declining mental health disproportionately affects young women, why it is occurring now or why the trendline started to dive in the early 2010s after a period of stability.

The prospect of ecological catastrophe, for example, weighs most heavily on younger people but every generation has experienced existential threats. Wars, natural disasters, and economic crises are conspicuous reasons for distress and despair, but world events have always been terrible. It is not obvious why they should disproportionately make young women anxious and depressed while leaving older and maler people unaffected. The stigma of mental illness may have declined so that people have become more willing to acknowledge it, but increases in the prevalence of mental ill-health among young people are not confined to subjective reports but also found in rates of hospitalisation and suicide.

The chief culprit, Haidt proposes, is technological. Smartphones and social media have rewired young minds to an unprecedented degree, replacing “play-based childhood” with “phone-based childhood.” Portable devices with addictive apps and algorithms engineered to harvest attention and expose children to damaging content have wrought havoc on young people’s mental health. They have done so in ways that are gendered and most severely affect generation Z. Born after 1995, these young people are the first to have gone through puberty in the virtual world.

Haidt marshals high-quality evidence for the decline in young people’s wellbeing over the past decade. Graph upon graph show inflection points in the early 2010s when mental health and related phenomena such as feelings of social connection or meaning in life start to trend downward. These trends are not limited to the United States but occur more or less in lockstep around the Western world. Their timing indicates that it is not the internet or social networking sites themselves that are damaging, but the transformation that resulted from the advent of smartphones, increased interactivity, image posting, likes chasing, algorithmic feeds, front-facing cameras and the proliferation of apps engaged in a race to the bottom to ensnare new users.

Haidt argues that the near-universal use of smartphones in children and especially pre-teens is driving the increase in mental health problems among young people. Coupled with over-protective parenting around physical risks in the real world has been an under-protection around virtual risks that leaves children with near-unfettered access to age-inappropriate sites. Like Big Tobacco, the developers of social media platforms have designed them to be maximally addictive, have known about the harms likely to result, have made bad faith denials of that knowledge, and have dragged their heels when it comes to mitigating known risks that would have commercial consequences.

There are many reasons why phone-based childhood has damaging effects. It facilitates social comparisons around appearance and popularity, enables bullying and exclusion, exposes young children to adult-focused material, and serves individualized content that exploits their vulnerabilities. It fragments attention and disrupts sleep, with implications for schooling as much as for mental health. Smartphones also function as “experience blockers,” reducing unstructured time with friends and the opportunities for developing skills in synchronous social interaction, conflict resolution and everyday independence.

Haidt is emphatic that the problem of phone-based childhood is not just the direct harms it brings but also the opportunity costs: the time not spent acquiring real-world capabilities and connections. Added to a prevailing culture of safetyism that attempts to eradicate risk and prescribes structured activity at the expense of free play and exploration, the outcome is a generation increasingly on the back foot, worried about what could go wrong and feeling ill-equipped to deal with it. Well-documented developmental delays in a range of independent and risky behaviours are one consequence, and the rise of anxiety is another.

When many children and adolescents report that they are almost constantly on their phones we should therefore not be surprised that they feel disconnected, lonely, exhausted, inattentive and overwhelmed. Haidt argues that many of these emotional and social effects are common to young people as a group, but some are gendered. Girls are more likely to be entrapped by image-focused networking sites that promote perfectionist norms, decrease their satisfaction with their bodies, and expose them to bullying, trolling and unwanted attention from older men. Boys are more often drawn into videogames and pornography, which foster social detachment, pessimism and a sense of meaninglessness, sometimes combined with bitter misogyny.

Haidt reminds us not to think of children as miniature adults, but as works in progress whose brains are malleable and developmentally primed for cultural learning. “Rewiring” may be an overstatement — brains never set like plaster and cultural learning continues through life — but the preteen years are a sensitive period for figuring out who and what to look up to, a bias easily hijacked by influencers and algorithm-driven video feeds. Older adults can be moralistic about adolescents who won’t disengage from their phones, but when those phones are where life happens, and when the brain’s executive functions are only half-formed, we should understand why shiny rectangles of metal and glass become prosthetic.

What to do? Haidt has a range of prescriptions for parents, schools, tech firms and governments. Parents should band together to encourage free play, promote real-world and nature-based activities that build a sense of competence and community, limit screen time for younger children, use parental controls, and delay the opening of social media accounts until age sixteen. Schools should ban phones for the entirety of the school day, lengthen recess, encourage unstructured play, renormalise childhood independence and push back against helicopter parenting. There is a social justice imperative here, Haidt observes, as smartphone use seems to disproportionately affect the academic performance of low-income students.

Responsibility for intervening can’t be left to individuals and local institutions alone. Governments and tech firms must recognise their duty of care and come to see the current state of affairs as a public health issue, much like tobacco, seat belts, sun exposure or leaded petrol. Tech firms must get serious about age verification and increasing the age of “internet adulthood” at which young people can make contracts with corporations hell-bent on extracting their time and attention. Governments can legislate these requirements, design more child-friendly public spaces, and remove penalties for healthy forms of child autonomy such as going to a playground without a parent, currently criminalised in the United States as “neglect.”

The Anxious Generation is a passionate book, coming from a place of deep concern, but most of it is written with the cool intonation of social science. The work is accessible and clearly intended for a wide readership, each chapter ending with a bulleted summary of key points. There is a refreshing humility about the empirical claims, which Haidt accepts can be challenged and may sometimes turn out to be wrong, referring the reader on to a website where updates on the state of the evidence will appear.

The part social media plays in mental ill-health is in dispute, for example, although the evidence of a correlation with heavy use is not. Haidt offers up studies supporting the causal interpretation but acknowledges that nothing is straightforward where human behaviour is concerned. Nevertheless, he is justified is arguing that his “Great Rewiring” hypothesis is now the leading account of the origins of the youth mental health crisis. No other contender appears capable of explaining why things seemed to start going wrong around the globe somewhere between 2010 and 2015.

Critics of The Anxious Generation are likely to argue that Haidt’s hypothesis is simplistic or that it amounts to a moral panic. Both charges would be unfair. A single explanatory factor rarely accounts for something as complex as a major social trend, of course, but identifying a dominant cause has the pragmatic benefit of prioritising interventions. If phone-based childhood is the problem then we have a clear target for possible solutions.

As explanations go, Haidt’s isn’t quite as simple as it might seem in any case. The advent of smartphones and all-consuming social media may take centre stage, but earlier cultural shifts that amplified the sense of risk and promote over-protection set the scene and compounded young people’s vulnerability. Haidt’s account of the elements of smartphone use that are most damaging is also highly specified rather than a wholesale rejection of the virtual world.

The mental health field often extols the complexity of its subject matter, which sits at the jumbled intersection of mind, brain and culture, but that recognition can hamper the search for agreed interventions. The usual calls to boost clinical services are understandable, but solutions that address individual distress in the present fail to tackle the collective, institutional and developmental sources of the problem.

Some proposed solutions, such as efforts to build online social connections, may be ineffective because they fail to foster the embodied, real-world connections that matter. Other supposedly compassionate responses, such as accommodating student anxiety with diluted academic requirements and on-demand extensions, may make anxiety worse by enabling and rewarding avoidance. Haidt arguably overlooks how much mental ill-health among young people is being inadvertently made worse by well-meaning attempts to accommodate it and by backfiring efforts to boost awareness and illness-based identities.

The charge of moral panic is equally problematic and doesn’t stick for three reasons. First, evidence for the harmful consequences of phone-based childhood is now documented in a way that past worries about new technologies were not. Second, Haidt’s proposal focuses on the welfare of young people rather than social decay. Although he argues that phone-based life can cause a form of spiritual degradation, his critique is primarily expressed in the register of health rather than morality. Third, although Haidt articulates a significant threat, with the partial exception of social media companies he is not in the business of lashing villains so much as promoting positive, collective responses and a sense of urgency.

The youth mental health crisis is real, and it shows no signs of abating. The human cost is enormous. If rates of mental illness among Australians aged sixteen to twenty-four had remained steady since 2007, around 350,000 fewer young Australians would be experiencing one this year. The Anxious Generation is vital reading for anyone who wants a sense of the scale of the problem and a clear-eyed vision of what it will take to tackle it. •

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
By Jonathan Haidt | Penguin | $36.99| 400 pages

The post Virtual anxiety appeared first on Inside Story.

He’d been born in Mississippi in 1968 and lived there in his formative years, so obviously he was a racist. He’d been raised in New Jersey, where he played centre on his high school football team, and then went on to play rugby in college, so of course he was brutish and crude. He had spent twenty-eight years in the US Army and had been in combat, so surely he had killed people.

Obviously, of course and surely, Brent Cummings eludes these reductive inferences. In An American Dreamer, Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer for the Washington Post, unfurls Brent’s inner complexities and outer contradictions.

Brent appeared fifteen years earlier as an army major in Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, an embedded account of the 2007 troop surge in Iraq, and Finkel’s long connection to him has built the foundation for a work of gripping intimacy. An American Dreamer gets inside Brent’s skull, and those of his wife Laura and neighbour Mike, to capture the emotional landscape of contemporary American life from three diverging vantage points.

Brent is now working stateside at a college with his retirement from the army looming. His soul is troubled. He feels his country has lost its way in the last couple of decades, as if he’s come “out of one war and into another” against enemies on the home front. In a revealing slip, he remarks that the earlier time “felt… clean. No that’s not the right word… It’s slipping.”

What the pollutant might be is not clear to him. Trumpism is part of it. Despite being “probably more Republican than Democrat, probably more conservative than liberal,” he loathes the man for his egotism, ill-discipline and bullying more than for his policies. But the problem runs deeper: Brent has lost confidence in his country’s goodness and shared purpose. “Everything was fraying. That’s what it felt like.”

Brent’s concerns have more to do with meaning than with material or political realities. His belief in American virtue and progress is shaken, and while that abstract dream is disintegrating a real one disturbs his sleep. Not the post-traumatic image of desert horrors we might expect but a chorus of mocking voices from a profound darkness.

His sense that the ground has shifted under him is reinforced by a series of bafflements. He is shocked by the lack of support he receives from colleagues when he challenges the use of a confederate flag on an insignia, upset by activist attacks on his beloved military, appalled by the unthinkable assault on the Capitol. He finds himself in a vanishing middle where the mental habits of a lifetime, grounded in ideas of honour and fair play, have lost their traction. “Am I the one who’s wrong? Am I the one who’s missing something?”

Laura and Mike play second and third fiddle to Brent, but Finkel gives voice to them with the same empathic immediacy. Laura’s main register is anxiety rather than disorientation. She fears violent crime, feels a rising sense of menace in her neighbourhood and worries about the fate of her intellectually disabled daughter when she is no longer around.

Mike, for his part, overlays fear with anger, going full-bore MAGA while railing against the “socialist and communist” treachery of the Democrats. Why Mike, a quadriplegic of modest means, would set aside his early doubts about Trump and come to see him as his infallible saviour is a mystery. His political conversion creates tension with his neighbours, a microcosm of the severing of connections that has played out across the country.

Finkel is a wonderful guide to the inner terrain of his characters. He shows rather than tells, keeping their dialogue and the private thoughts behind it direct and relatable. Brent in particular is brought to vivid life through confrontations with events that confound him. Very occasionally these episodes seem a little forced, notably in the parallels between an encounter with the security wall on a visit to Jerusalem and Trump’s border wall. Mike’s characterisation can also appear ever so slightly two-dimensional by comparison with Brent’s, but the book as a whole is a triumph of compassionate and sympathetic attention.

Finkel inhabits Brent in a rare way, better than a life-long friend could hope to do. More a finely tuned recording instrument than a buddy, he makes no attempt to elevate Brent, hide his flaws or turn him into a morally instructive Everyman. He is an ordinary guy, standing somewhere on the slippery hump of the political bell curve, but he is also a creature of a specific time, place and tradition, not just a symbol of averageness. Witnessing his puzzlement at how things have changed, we might wonder how much his sense of loss comes from occupying a political centre that cannot hold and how much it is a sign that he is getting older and his generation is being unseated.

We hear so much about the growing polarisation of American life. Books like this one help to humanise the conflict, not only by plucking individuals from their political tribes but also by exploring the quieter emotional dimensions of their experience. Beyond the primal fears and hatreds, Finkel suggests, there are people seeking solutions to big, existential questions about purpose, meaning, legacy and value. An American Dream shows us that behind all the yelling and distrust and there is vulnerability and hope. •

An American Dreamer: Life in a Divided Country
By David Finkel | Scribe | $36.99 | 256 pages

The post “Am I the one who’s missing something?” appeared first on Inside Story.

Schreiber is the author of several literary essays and biographer of Susan Sontag. The original edition of this memoir was a bestseller in Germany and stands out among the flood of books addressing our supposed epidemic of loneliness. The idea that social connection is the key to happiness and disconnection the root of mental ill health has become the new commonsense, stamped into our consciousness by lockdowns and compelled distancing. Many writers have offered diagnoses of the problems of loneliness and prescriptions for overcoming it, but few provide such a vivid first-person account and fewer still bring such an erudite sensibility to the task.

The backbone of Alone is life-historical. In 2019 Schreiber has an epiphany that things are going wrong; by Christmas “I stop believing that this life, as I live it, as I live it alone, is a good life.” He is partly restored by a writing trip to Switzerland, struggles through the compounding isolation of the pandemic, and embarks on a trip with friends to the Canary Islands that turns into a sort of sabbatical. Along the way he finds a series of therapeutic diversions, all of them physical activities that relieve some of his self-consciousness: gardening, hiking, knitting and yoga.

Off this narrative spine Schreiber hangs a series of meditations on the solitary condition, heavily supported by big thinkers. His intellectual tastes run philosophical and French, and anyone with a passing acquaintance with the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s will recognise many of his theoretical muses: Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard. At times the insights are rich, especially in contrast to the shallowness of some psychological and sociological accounts of loneliness, but at other times the price seems high. I had hoped never again to encounter the word “phallogocentrism,” but there it was. And do we need a deconstructionist to tell us that we should not insist our friends conform to all of our wishes?

Schreiber’s analysis of friendship is powerful, pointing out its many forms and virtues — it is non-exclusive, voluntary, enduring — but showing how often it is made to defer to coupledom and the “grand narrative” of romantic love. Friendship is often pictured as a stage of life prior to nesting, and Schreiber notes with some disdain how many couples withdraw inward, a dynamic especially evident during the pandemic. Even so, he is scathing about how friendship has been misrepresented in the Western philosophical tradition, in which he claims it is portrayed as a quest for similarity and equality, the perfect friend idealised as “another oneself.” There is an element of straw-manning (and patriarchy-bashing) here, but Schreiber is adamant that friendship needs to be celebrated for its embrace of diversity rather than sameness, a conviction that resonates with his emphasis on the importance of friendship in queer communities.

He is equally incisive and contentious on the topic of loneliness. Drawing the standard distinction between loneliness and being alone, the latter an objective lack of social contact, the former subjective distress over the degree or quality of contact, Schreiber writes of the pleasures and benefits of solitude, admitting to enjoying some aspects of pandemic isolation. Being alone can be good and loneliness is not all bad. Though painful, it is not a disease, and the important lessons about loss and compassion to be learned from it mean it should not be dreaded. Some hand-wringing about the loneliness epidemic is reactionary, he suggests, motivated by nostalgia for the traditional family.

But Schreiber also muddies the conceptual waters. Solitude would normally be understood as positively valued aloneness, but he criticises it as “the presentable, dignified version of loneliness,” a word people use to deny the shameful reality of their true but taboo feelings. Although he sometimes confuses the picture by using solitude and loneliness interchangeably, Schreiber adds some useful complexities here. Loneliness may be distressing but also ethically and existentially desirable, and solitude may be a pathway to self-knowledge but also a cover for self-deception.

Schreiber makes no attempt to hide his ambivalence about being alone. He can present himself as bravely fronting the challenges of solitude and rising above coupled conformity but also admit to holding petty resentments and vulnerabilities. He can clothe his loneliness in grand ideas and social critique but also express his unhappiness with naked honesty. In one breath he flays romantic relationships and claims not to want them anymore, and in the next he confesses to feeling unlovable.

At times these vacillations suggest a cerebral Schreiber who reads the loftiest French theory and criticises the idea of self-care as “the ultimate victory of neoliberal late capitalism” while coexisting uneasily with a visceral Schreiber who likes to watch Friends, loves yoga and acknowledges that his neurotic misery may be due more to a lack of sunshine and exercise than existential angst.

Schreiber is a perceptive and relatable writer. He grapples with many of the same trials of social life that we all face, trials that became significantly more challenging in recent history. As a character in this memoir, he is not so much rounded in the literary sense — deep, complex and many-faceted — as he is jagged. The conflicts and quirks that other writers might edit out are on candid display in this book. It is well worth spending a few hours of quality solitude with it. •

Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living
By Daniel Schreiber | Reaktion Books | $34.99 | 152 pages

The post Jagged solitude appeared first on Inside Story.

The great thing about Joe Biden as a subject is his verbosity. He does a terrible job at suppressing his internal monologue. His staff and friends have a clear understanding of his mind, because they are exposed to so much of it.

Biden’s tendency to bloviate — a word that has failed to establish itself this side of the Pacific despite favourable conditions — and his habit of veering dangerously off-script at critical moments are the stuff of legend. His ascent to the presidency drew a collective eye roll among some Democrats, but also the hope that his ordinariness would bring about a period of dull but competent politics. The nation might at last have a chance to catch its breath and lick its wounds.

Despite that hope, tedium has been in short supply. Beginning shortly after the Capitol riot, his administration had to cope with the continuing Covid crisis, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, not to mention punishing domestic battles over immigration, inflation and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The Last Politician leads the reader through the first two years of Biden’s presidency with an occasionally breathless immediacy. Foer’s liberal use of fabricated dialogue and rapid shifts of perspective among a large cast of key players enliven his book, which has become a bestseller in the United States. The product of around 300 interviews, it offers West Wing–style personal conflict and colour, and the same semi-heroic portrayal of the sleep-deprived governing elite.

Foer conveys the limitations and quirks of his protagonists without falling into easy cynicism or caricature. Criticism of politicians is muted except when their wrongdoing is blatant, the petulant obstructionism of the Trump administration during the transition of power being a case in point. The depiction of Joe Manchin, the senator for West Virginia who repeatedly held his party hostage as the fiftieth vote in the Senate, might have been scathing. Instead, Foer offers a humanising sketch of a self-important geezer with one eye on his legacy and another on his easily bruised sense of honour.

Biden is drawn in an equally generous light. He can be short-tempered when challenged but swallows his pride and breaks bread to bring legislative combatants back to the negotiating table. He is occasionally caught flat-footed, notably in response to the Supreme Court’s dismantling of abortion rights, but quickly finds his way back to clarity. His oratorical aspirations are undermined by faux pas, as when an off-script remark suggested he was seeking regime change in Russia. He owns his administration’s failures in the chaotic evacuation from Kabul and steers a steady course between his party’s progressive wing and what the electorate will tolerate.

To Foer, Biden has been consistently underestimated, partly for reasons of social class. As a “lunch-pail cornball” he lacks Obama’s Ivy League lustre but can arguably connect to people more authentically. (Biden told a friend that his former boss couldn’t even say “fuck you” properly.) For all his chronic “indiscipline and imprecision,” Biden’s term has seen significant achievements. He stood firm against Putin, helped to corral European states in defence of Ukraine, began to restore America’s global reputation as a responsible power, and averted the expected Republican “red wave” in the midterm elections.

The domestic achievement that draws the most attention from Foer but is less well known in Australia is the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides a transformational boost to solar and wind energy and other green technologies. The act’s path was littered with obstacles, and Foer credits Biden with the perspective, farsightedness, persistence and willingness to compromise that made it possible.

In praising these geezerly virtues Foer offers a partial and unconvincing defence of American gerontocracy. Age brings wisdom, but not reliably. Biden may have a rare and insufficiently acknowledged gift for getting things done within the political institutions he loves, but The Last Politician reveals those institutions to be open to abuse precisely because of their reliance on the transactional deal-making at which Biden excels.

Two senators can meet secretly to carve hundreds of billions of dollars from a piece of legislation to meet one senator’s idiosyncratic demands. Vast, nation-shaping agreements can be made on a houseboat over beer and pasta. Deals can be undone by perceived slights to a congressman’s honour. War efforts can be endangered because the leader of an embattled country’s tweets convey insufficient gratitude to his American funders. Members of Congress can be made to demonstrate their trustworthiness by looking one another in the eye.

The denizens of Washington can be divided into hacks and wonks, Foer writes. “You were either a political animal or a policy nerd.” Biden, he says, is an “old hack,” one of the last, wisest exponents of the dying art of congressional horsetrading. The Last Politician mounts a convincing case for Biden’s presidential achievements, but it is less clear that we should mourn the passing of his generation’s style of politics. •

The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future
By Franklin Foer | Penguin Press | US$30 | 432 pages

The post The old hack who could appeared first on Inside Story.

Walter, a British feminist writer and activist, has written an evocative book, Before the Light Fades, that begins as an exploration of the emotional aftermath and turns into an examination of the lives of Ruth and her refugee parents. At first her grief is raw, turning her into “a little scuttling mollusc without armour.” It is compounded by the lingering stigma of suicide, which somehow coexists with a new cultural openness to talking about it.

Walter struggles against the view that her mother had the worst kind of death and that her suicide could only be attributed to mental illness. She bristles at the modern tendency to see all dark emotions through a psychiatric lens, but also worries that towards the end Ruth was in a state of despair rather than Socratic composure.

Friends who use the well-meaning but “off the shelf” language of self-care to comfort her provoke the same irritation. She tries out a range of healing distractions — yoga, swimming, running, gardening — but the idea that we should soothe and coddle ourselves in times of loss seems to her self-absorbed and alien to the generation that is being lost.

The book’s account of the changing seasons of grief is intense and unsparing. Walter has tears, self-reproach and regret, as our current bereavement script leads us to expect, but also times of anger, bitterness and misanthropy. Mourning does not always deepen or ennoble. At times it leads her to resent the living and become hardened, cauterising her empathy to stem the flow of pain. “I am becoming less human, the more I grieve.”

Walter captures the experience of having an ageing parent beautifully. Her relationship with Ruth is about as solid and unambivalent as two strong personalities can have, but she confesses to having experienced a growing annoyance with her mother’s growing vulnerability. Ruth’s preoccupation with dementia, amplified by experiencing her own father’s illness and her work in aged care, seemed out of proportion. Walter is saddened by the loss of Ruth’s independence, fearlessness and rebellious spirit, but her sadness is mingled with an implied criticism of her slide into weakness, as if Ruth should have tried harder to embody the maternal ideal she represented as a younger woman.

Walter reclaims that younger self in a compelling retelling of Ruth’s past, from the horror of her parents’ early life as Jews in Nazi Germany, to their circuitous escape into an unwelcoming England that sent them to internment camps, their shrinking into postwar suburban anonymity, and their upset when the young Ruth resurrects her father’s abandoned radicalism in the fight for nuclear disarmament in the 1960s. Georg knew where dissent could lead.

Ruth’s involvement in Bertrand Russell’s Committee of 100 is a mix of clerical tedium — so much typing, copying and mailing — and daring escapades, peaking when she helps uncover evidence that the British government had built bunkers to house the great and good in the event of nuclear apocalypse.

Ruth’s politics extended beyond the nuclear issue, leading her into a brand of feminism that would later conflict with her daughter’s. Walter recounts how the power feminism she embraced in the 1980s rejected Ruth’s critique of femininity. She believed she could remain glamorous while the last few glass ceilings were quickly shattered. That former self was naive, Walter writes, failing to anticipate that “objectification would be sold back to us as an empty mirage of empowerment.”

This realisation becomes part of a broader and more sympathetic re-evaluation of Ruth’s unorthodox and sometimes puzzling life choices. Even the suicide becomes intelligible, “like leaving a party when you’ve had enough.”

Before the Light Fades reveals not only the courage and creativity of Ruth’s generation of protesters, but also how the disarmament movement’s mission to avert global disaster is echoed in the climate emergency movement of today. Ruth herself comes across as a free spirit who retained her own parents’ sense of displacement and never became entirely settled. Marriage to a fellow activist burns brightly for a while but ends badly. She throws herself into study, social work with refugees, and being a mother and grandmother: “the myth maker of the family, the one who told us who we were.”

Walter’s writerly voice is distinctive without being showy: she is humane, curious and allergic to cliché, but also sceptical, half in the world and half on the sidelines looking askance. She is a deep thinker but not a wallower or a theorist. As her grief starts to lift, she recommits to political action as if carrying forward a family tradition. Her book is a moving meditation on ageing and loss, the persistence of the past, and the necessity of hope in spite of it all.

It’s a funny kind of hope, peeking through a cloud of pessimism, but it seems a fitting tribute to Walter’s lineage of brave and beleaguered radicals. •

Before the Light Fades: A Memoir of Grief and Resistance
By Natasha Walter | Hachette | $32.99 | 256 pages

The post The one who told them who they were appeared first on Inside Story.

Mariana Alessandri’s new book Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves through Dark Moods presents a revived and colourised existentialism. Her philosophical authorities are gender balanced and come, with a few exceptions, from the New World. Alessandri hopes to convince her readers that the tragic vision of the existentialists still has value, and that their embrace of the darker sides of human experience is all the more urgent now.

A Latina philosophy professor and self-described Eeyore, Alessandri tells the reader she feels “pelted by positivity.” She sees a deeply problematic emphasis in American culture on being happy and optimistic at all costs. Her concern is widely shared, as many takedowns of “toxic positivity” attest, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Smile or Die, published in 2009, being the most well known.

Ehrenreich urged her fellow citizens “to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking,” a delusion “that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.” This obligatory uplift turns people inward when they should be changing the world. It removes the safety net of compassionate support when people falter because it makes happiness and success a purely personal responsibility.

Alessandri shares this dim view of a culture that obliges us to be shiny, happy people — a culture that tells those who are miserable to stop moaning, turn their frowns upside down, and try harder to lift themselves up by their hedonic bootstraps. Self-help writers lead the way by promoting the idea that we should strive for happiness above all else and illuminating the true path to self-improvement.

For too long, Alessandri writes, we have associated light with goodness and disparaged and dreaded the dark, including dark moods and dark skins. We should therefore embrace “the truth of darkness” and “turn down the lights and stop smiling.” The central chapters of Dark Vision each take a form of emotional darkness and explore it with existential company.

Sadness and depression, for example, are not negative states to be avoided, stoically endured or reasoned away but elements of what Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno referred to as the tragic sense of life. Mental pain humanises us and enables compassion and deep connection. Alessandri cites feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa’s theoretical and autobiographical writings as rejecting the idea that depression is weakness, brokenness or disease, and offering a pathway to self-knowledge by “seeing depression by the light of the moon.”

Grief receives similar treatment. By Alessandri’s account, our obsession with brightness leads us to expect the bereaved to take action to overcome their loss and to be intolerant when they seem to succumb to it. Grief is often misrepresented as irrational and shameful, especially if it endures. Taking the novelist C.S. Lewis’s stance, detailed in his powerful A Grief Observed, we should “grieve hard” rather than privately stifle the pain of loss.

Kierkegaard is the existentialist guide through anxiety and dread, as he was for the protagonist of David Lodge’s comic novel Therapy. Alessandri criticises mainstream psychiatry for seeing anxiety as evidence of a chemical imbalance or a broken brain, and mainstream psychotherapy for piling shame on top of it by blaming patients who fail to recover. Both critiques attack straw men, but they set up a sharp contrast to a Kierkegaardian view of anxiety as “the dizziness of freedom” and a way of being “excruciatingly alive to the world.”

Anger, perhaps an odd choice for a study of dark moods given its fiery connotations and the undeniable pleasure to be found in righteous indignation, receives its own existential reframing. African-American writer Audre Lorde teaches that anger, unlike hate, enables social progress, and Argentine philosopher Maria Lugones instructs that it preserves our dignity in the face of injustice and grounds us in the reality that something is wrong with our situations, not our selves.

Both thinkers counsel that we should listen to and learn from anger rather than repress it, a conclusion hard to deny. The awkward reality that people tend to see their own anger as morally justified and others’ anger as irrational hatred is overlooked, as is the dissonance between anger’s progressive credentials and its role in fuelling violence.

Night Vision is a useful counterweight to some contemporary styles of thinking that equate mental health with happiness, but it has its own weaknesses. Often the radicalism of its claims is overstated by distorting those it opposes. The book caricatures orthodox approaches to mental ill health as if they amounted to nothing but disease-mongering and patient-blaming. Occasionally it veers into misrepresentation, as when Alessandri claims that psychiatry now defines grief lasting more than two weeks as mental illness and sees any amount of anxiety as dysfunctional.

The idea that mental health workers, avid consumers of popular psychology or everyday folk would find it a revelation to be asked “what if truth, beauty and goodness reside not only in light but also in darkness?” is absurd. The contemporary mental health landscape is arguably as open to emotional darkness as it ever has been. Lived experience is amplified; destigmatisation has progressed to the point where few people think depression reflects weak character, laziness or neurotic wallowing; sympathy and support for people disclosing mental health problems is high and rising; and people enthusiastically and sometimes promiscuously embrace diagnoses that would once have been shameful secrets.

Some writers now worry that the pendulum has swung too far towards valorising mental ill health and raise concerns about the spread of illness-based identities. It is hard to square this view with Alessandri’s analysis of a “nyctophobic” society populated by tough-minded stoics. It is one thing to avoid toxic positivity and seek meaning in suffering, quite another to tell those who suffer that their depression reveals their superior sensitivity and depth of feeling, that their anxiety “is a sign of emotional intelligence,” that attempts to motivate them to recover constitute shaming, or that their troubles stem only from a broken society.

These prescriptions point to one of the ironies of Night Vision. It overtly rejects the self-help genre while co-opting its conventions. Highlighting the author’s relatability through folksy self-disclosure and popular culture references (The Real Housewives of New Jersey, Entenmann’s donuts), repetitively invoking a few Big Capitalised Ideas (Light Metaphor, The Brokenness Story), and cosying up to a few admired self-help writers who supposedly resist the dominant approach while somehow managing to be among its biggest stars (Brené Brown, Susan David), are moves from the self-help author’s playbook.

Some of Alessandri’s meme-able sayings fall a little flat — “diagnosis doesn’t rhyme with dignity” (but neither does “darkness”) — but their mere existence points to her proximity to the self-help genre. This effort to appropriate a successful rhetorical style does at least have the advantage of softening some of the prescriptions a less compromising approach to existential insight might make. Alessandri defends the value of misery and attacks psychiatric reductionism, but she doesn’t want you to stop taking your antidepressants when you start reading Kierkegaard.

As therapy-speak becomes increasingly popular, Night Vision could be seen as offering another dialect with more intellectually elevated influences. That may not be such a bad thing. Philosophical ideas about emotion and suffering offer a perspective on mental health and illness that can complement, challenge and complicate the familiar chatter about diagnostic labels and wellbeing.

Alessandri makes a good case that existentialist writers should have a seat at the table when mental health is discussed rather than continuing to sit at another, smaller table feeling superior and overlooked, as theorists tend to do. If sometimes she engages in caricature and turns her own insights into self-help nostrums, that will at least reach a larger audience than philosophy texts from university presses ordinarily manage. Night Vision is a stimulating and sometimes maddening contribution to broadening the scope of mental health discourse. More please! •

Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves through Dark Moods
By Mariana Alessandri | Princeton University Press | $37.99 | 216 pages

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In her new book, The Power of Hope, Carol Graham, a noted economist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues that hope is a dimension of wellbeing that is too often neglected. The economics of wellbeing — a growing specialisation that aims to expand the scope of the discipline and make its science less dismal — usually examines feelings of life satisfaction or levels of positive and negative emotion. But whereas both those metrics evaluate past happiness from the standpoint of the present, hope looks forward. For Graham, believing we can realise a better future is crucial to thriving.

Hope is a staple of American political rhetoric and has been a reliable feature of its presidential campaigns. It runs from Jesse Jackson’s “Keep Hope Alive” to Bill Clinton’s The Man from Hope biopic, from George W. Bush’s “A Safer World and a More Hopeful America,” through Obama’s The Audacity of Hope and iconic campaign poster, Bernie Sanders’s “A Future to Believe In” and Joe Biden’s “Our Best Days Still Lie Ahead.” As optimistic slogans go, these examples certainly outshine “Make Your Wet Dreams Come True” (a reference to ending Prohibition) from Al Smith’s 1928 run.

Campaigners everywhere are selling a future, of course, but the prominence of the American hope trope can be striking to foreigners. In recent times it is almost as if hope is proclaimed so loudly precisely because the need to restore it seems so desperate.

Graham wouldn’t disagree with that. “Deaths of despair” in the United States — suicides, overdoses, alcohol poisonings — have risen to astonishing levels and life expectancy is tracking backwards, unlike in any other rich country: American exceptionalism in reverse. To Graham, these grim trends reflect a growing wellbeing inequality that is every bit as troubling and socially toxic as more familiar inequalities of income and wealth.

Loss of hope is regionalised and racialised, disproportionately affecting the white working class in the heartland, fuelling disengagement from work and education, and promoting political radicalisation and resentment of coastal elites. Restoring hope is urgent not only to stem general misery and the opioid epidemic, but also to overcome threats to civil society, national security and liberal democracy itself.

The Power of Hope reviews some of the accumulating evidence on the economics of happiness and despair, and presents two new research studies in separate chapters. These studies exemplify Graham’s focus on the racial and cross-national dimensions of hope, and her interest in the fate of young people who, like larval sea squirts, must navigate the currents of life in search of a solid footing.

The first follows late adolescents from a poor district in Lima over a three-year period, assessing their aspirations for education, occupation and migration. These aspirations are strikingly high and stable over time, and they predict what Graham calls “human capital outcomes.” Higher educational aspirations at eighteen, for example, were associated with greater educational involvement and less risk-taking at twenty-one.

The second study was intended to replicate the first with adolescents in St Louis, Missouri, but was disrupted by Covid. Graham finds a stark racial difference: white participants had lower and less parentally supported educational aspirations and less social trust than their African-American peers, despite being materially better off. These findings chime with other research Graham reviews on the greater resilience of African Americans, who are buffered by “communities of empathy” more than low-income Whites, who retain a culture of “stubborn individualism” but have lost the belief that hard work pays off. Unfortunately, the study’s tiny sample of thirty-two provides a flimsy platform for generalisations and makes it a questionable inclusion in the book, although vignette descriptions of individual participants help to personalise the findings.

Before and after these empirical studies, Graham makes a compelling theoretical case for why economists and psychologists should view hope as a unique explanatory factor rather than submerge it within other concepts of wellbeing. Its definition, and how it differs from optimism, aspirations and goals, is left somewhat open, but Graham presents it as a combination of positive expectations for the future and a sense of personal agency in bringing them about.

It is entirely credible that a specific lack of hope in this sense, more than present-focused unhappiness, should undermine motivation to act and emotional investment in the future. It has been well established in clinical psychology that hopelessness is more strongly associated with suicide than is depression, for example.

Despite hope’s plausibility as a driver of positive life outcomes and resilience, though, the evidence mustered by Graham’s studies falls short of demonstrating that it plays a causal role. Having high aspirations may be associated with doing better in life, but other factors, such as realistic assessment of one’s prospects, may give rise to both hope and positive life outcomes without the former influencing the latter. It is important to remember cautionary tales of oversold psychological concepts like self-esteem, which was once seen by advocates as a panacea for all manner of social and psychological pathologies and later shown to be primarily an effect rather than a cause of doing well in life.

A similar point can be made about proposed interventions to restore hope. Graham reviews a range of options, including community-based wellbeing initiatives, scaled-up mental health programs and private–public partnerships. But none of these directly target hope — many focus on building social connection and belonging rather than cultivating optimism — and there are few grounds to infer that a revival of hope is the main active ingredient in any benefits they may have.

Graham makes a strong theoretical case that hope matters and a strong methodological case that it should be measured, but current evidence is yet to justify any claim that hope is the key to unlocking social misery. Hope remains a promissory concept. This is not to criticise Graham’s championing of hope but simply to recognise the need for more definitive research. I suspect researchers who take up that challenge are backing a winner.

Although the book is generally accessible and engagingly written, it has a few imperfections. Statistical jargon (“endogeneity,” “fixed effects”) creeps in occasionally and tables of regression coefficients will glaze many readers’ eyes. Some points become repetitive, and it was an editorial oversight to allow four paragraphs to be repeated with minimal alteration in consecutive chapters.

Even so, The Power of Hope delivers its hopeful message with the passion and gravity the topic deserves. The book will interest academic readers from across the behavioural and social sciences, and anyone curious about the wider social and political relevance of the science of wellbeing. •

The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-Being Can Save Us from Despair
By Carol Graham | Princeton University Press | US$35 | 200 pages

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Freud’s interpretation hinged on the mythology of vultures — including the ancient belief that they were exclusively female and impregnated by the wind — and the frequent depiction of the Egyptian goddess Mut with a vulture’s head and an androgynous body. He argued that Leonardo was preoccupied with vultures and had concealed one in the blue drapery of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, which hangs in the Louvre.

There was one small problem. The bird Leonardo recalled was not a vulture but a kite, a creature with no special mythic significance or any hint of sexual ambiguity. The error, made by a German translator of Leonardo’s writings, undermined Freud’s thesis and demonstrated the challenges of doing psychoanalytic interpretation at a distance. When the subject cannot be put on the couch, the already dangerous work of psychic excavation becomes even more hazardous.

This embarrassment might have led Freud to abandon psychobiography altogether, and indeed the general view has been that he did. In the monumental, twenty-four-volume Standard Edition of his work, his English editor and translator James Strachey wrote that “this monograph on Leonardo was not only the first but the last of Freud’s large-scale excursions into the field of biography.”

But that claim only stands if a notorious study of US president Woodrow Wilson written by Freud with American diplomat William Bullitt is brushed aside. This act of repression has been sustained for more than half a century by charges that Bullitt was a reductive amateur who was driven by personal animus towards Wilson and exaggerated Freud’s involvement.

Patrick Weil’s new book, The Madman in the White House, overturns this received view. Weil, a distinguished French political scientist, has written a captivating analysis of the history of the Wilson psychobiography that doubles as a biography of Bullitt. Along the way it vividly documents the shifts in American engagement with Europe from the first world war through the cold war from the standpoint of high-level diplomacy.

The book combines a masterful grasp of political history with original archival research and a humanising appreciation of the quirks and foibles of the dramatis personae. It does much more than resolve the status of a largely forgotten book about Wilson, also making a case that prevailing beliefs about responsibility for the failure of the post–first world war peace are mistaken. More broadly, Weil demonstrates how much personality matters in politics. “Democratic leaders,” he writes, “can be just as unbalanced as dictators and can play a truly destructive role in our history.”

William Bullitt emerges as a kaleidoscopically colourful and complex personality who witnessed the defining events of the first half of the twentieth century up close. After a brief period as a journalist, he was recruited in his twenties to work under Wilson during the negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles. He served as the first American ambassador to Moscow and as ambassador to Paris, helped to negotiate the Korean armistice and advised Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan. He played major diplomatic and policy roles in both world wars and mingled with the political and cultural A-list: Wilson, Roosevelt and Nixon; Churchill and Lloyd George; Clemenceau and de Gaulle; Hemingway and Picasso; Lenin and Stalin (or “Stalin-Khan,” as he referred to him).

Bullitt’s life wasn’t all memos, starched collars and negotiation tables, and it had many Gatsbyesque elements: tumultuous marriages, hosting a Moscow soirée with performing seals and a champagne-drinking bear, enlisting in his fifties in the French army, landing upside down in a plane in a Leningrad swamp, and being shipped home to the United States from Taiwan in a coffin following a spinal injury.

Woodrow Wilson (standing) in New York after returning from the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Alamy

There was also a dark side, with depressions, impulsive actions and a tendency to self-destruction, including a fall from a horse that he attributed to an unconscious wish. These symptoms led him to meet with Freud in Vienna for personal psychoanalysis in 1926, beginning a long association that saw the two become unusually close and Bullitt playing a role in helping Freud escape the Nazis via the Orient Express.

Their book project grew out of Bullitt’s plan to write a study on diplomacy that would include psychological analyses of world leaders, with Woodrow Wilson as one case. Bullitt had fallen out with Wilson over his failure to have the Treaty of Versailles ratified by the US Senate in 1919, despite Wilson having been a visionary architect of the treaty and its proposal of a League of Nations to secure global peace. He saw Wilson’s apparent inability to make concessions with Republican senators at critical moments as a colossal sabotage of what Wilson himself had created, an exercise in “strangling his own child,” and he ascribed it to Wilson’s character flaws.

This was a widespread view at the time: Keynes described Wilson as a “blind and deaf Don Quixote.” Freud agreed with his general assessment, once describing Wilson as “the silliest fool of the century if not all centuries” and Bullitt as “the only American who understands Europe.” The two men hatched a plan to collaborate on a study that would focus on Wilson alone.

Psychobiography is often viewed — and sometimes practised — as an exercise in armchair speculation and hatchet work unencumbered by evidence, but the dissection of Wilson’s character was anything but. Freud, perhaps stung by the Leonardo fiasco, insisted on collecting and analysing a substantial body of information on Wilson; Bullitt obliged with not only his extensive first-hand working experience but also interviews with several of Wilson’s high-ranking colleagues, hundreds of pages of notes, and countless diary entries from Wilson’s personal secretary. Then, at least on Bullitt’s telling, he and Freud met and communicated frequently over a period of years to formulate a shared understanding of Wilson’s psychodynamics and edit drafts of one another’s chapters.

The essence of their formulation was that Wilson lived in the shadow of his idealised father, a Christian minister, whom he believed he could never satisfy or equal. This father complex was shown in his driven approach to work, his tendency to present a Christ-like persona when defending his views, his moralising streak, his unwillingness to brook criticism or compromise when he took principled stands on issues, and his passivity towards paternal figures — a stance that led to bitter fallings-out with erstwhile good friends that haunted him for decades.

Bullitt and Freud attributed Wilson’s failures in delivering on Versailles and the League of Nations to this incapacity to make necessary accommodations at the last hurdle. They also drew attention to his tendency to defer to some national leaders during the earlier negotiations to the detriment of the treaty, including allowing Britain to make the excessive demands for postwar reparations that contributed to German resentment.

After extensive reworking over a period of years, the Wilson manuscript was completed in 1932, each chapter signed off by both authors. And yet it was not to be published until 1967. The reasons for the delay initially included Bullitt’s desire not to endanger his employment prospects in future Democratic administrations, a wish not to hurt Wilson’s widow, and an awareness that Wilson’s once tarnished reputation had been restored by mid-century, making a critical study unwelcome. Later, in the 1960s, Bullitt found it difficult to find a publisher and to obtain permission to publish from Freud’s estate. Freud’s daughter Anna, whom Bullitt had helped to rescue from Vienna in 1939, was deeply concerned to protect her father’s legacy and sceptical of Freud’s involvement in the book; she insisted on making numerous revisions, which Bullitt refused.

In the end, the book appeared to a chorus of critical reviews. Erik Erikson, the leading light of psychobiography at the time, attempted to block publication on receiving an advance copy. The book was criticised for being spiteful towards Wilson, repetitive, and clumsy in its psychoanalytic formulations and therefore unlikely to have been genuinely authored by Freud. Bullitt, who died only six weeks after publication day, must have felt crushed.

With the reputation of Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study going down in flames, the question of Freud’s co-authorship might have gradually lost what little intellectual interest it still held, especially as the published manuscript appeared lost or destroyed. Enter Weil, who rediscovered it in the archives at Yale University in 2014.

The Madman in the White House reports two significant findings. First, Freud’s heavy involvement in writing the book is now undeniable, established by his signature on all chapters and evidence of extensive revisions and annotations. Weil backs up this textual evidence with other quotes from Freud that express an unambiguous sense of personal ownership of “our book.” Critics who charged that Bullitt had deceptively Freud-washed his own work are mistaken.

Second, and perhaps just as importantly, Weil shows that Bullitt made several hundred revisions to the “final” manuscript prior to publication. Some of these edits are largely cosmetic: omitting one section on a political conflict that no longer seemed topical, updating some psychoanalytic terminology, and removing some very dated ideas about masturbation and castration anxiety. But many edits were substantive, involving removal of references to Wilson’s supposedly homosexual orientation. This inference didn’t imply conscious awareness or overt behaviour on Wilson’s part, and Freud believed everyone was to some degree bisexual, but Bullitt must have judged the claim too contentious to put in print.

Weil presents these discoveries with scholarly thoroughness but also with a light touch that makes the book a delight to read. Despite his implied criticism of the psychoanalytic establishment’s reception of the Wilson psychobiography, he defends the relevance of psychological insight to the understanding of political leadership. He accepts some of the contours of Bullitt and Freud’s analysis but disagrees about the nature of Wilson’s father dynamic. Joseph Wilson was a less perfect father than his son imagined and had a cruel tendency to humiliate him, Weil suggests. In his view, Woodrow’s political and interpersonal conflicts stemmed from his sensitivity to public humiliation more than anything else. Such an interpretation, invoking wounded narcissism and pathological autonomy rather than father or Christ complexes and latent homosexuality, certainly has a more twenty-first-century feel to it.

Whether or not readers are open to this kind of analysis, Weil makes a powerful case for the role of personality in politics. He closes with a counterfactual history of a Europe in which Wilson had not failed to deliver on his idealistic vision. British and French financial and territorial demands on the Germans following the first world war would have been moderated and less punitive, diminishing German bitterness. Squabbling nations would have been dissuaded from armed conflict. American intervention in the second world war would have been triggered earlier by security guarantees to France. So much carnage might have been averted had the men in charge been less damaged and better able to understand and regulate themselves at critical times.

Woodrow Wilson was in no real sense a “madman” and Bullitt and Freud were hardly unbiased observers. Even so, their book was a significant historical attempt to demonstrate how the psychology of individual leaders can have collective reverberations. With some caveats, Weil would probably agree with the basic sentiment he attributes to Bullitt, that “the fate of mankind was determined over millions of years by geography, over hundreds of years by demography, over tens of years by economics, and year over year by psychology.” His book is a brilliant historical investigation of an early attempt to reckon with those year-by-year influences. Both as a work of scholarship and as a sweeping, almost novelistic tour of twentieth-century political affairs, it deserves a wide readership. •

The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson
By Patrick Weil | Harvard University Press | US$35 | 400 pages

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The self-help genre is diverse, ranging from the high-minded to the profane. Some books explore the latest research, bending the scientific branch so that readers can pluck a few peer-reviewed insights. Some give us simple advice, selling in direct proportion to how closely it counsels us to do what we already secretly want, such as not to give a f*ck about anything. All are supremely confident that they hold the key to improving our lives.

The Good Life and How to Live It falls closer to the first end of the spectrum. The evidence on which it rests is unquestionably the largest and arguably the best of any book of life advice. Authors Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz are director and associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a research project that has been running since 1938, and their book reflects on its many decades of findings.

The study is an odd hybrid, composed of 268 sophomores from the male-only Harvard College of the early 1940s; 456 inner-city Boston boys from the same period; and more than 1300 of their descendants. Study participants were followed intensively throughout their lives, with an extraordinarily high retention rate by the standards of longitudinal research.

The focus of assessment reflected the changing preoccupations of the times, from skull measurements, handwriting analysis and questions about being ticklish in the early days, to genotyping and MRI scans today. Throughout the four score and almost seven years, though, psychological assessments have been central.

A study whose original 700-odd participants were all male, all white, a mix of gilded youth — John F. Kennedy was a participant — and tenement dwellers, and deliberately selected for being promising rather than representative, might seem an unlikely source of knowledge about normal human ageing. But one of the compensating virtues of the Harvard Study is that despite its demographic restrictions it revealed the diversity and unpredictability of paths through life. In spite of their advantages, many of the Harvard collegians were failures, especially when considering outcomes beyond conventional accomplishments, and their life trajectories ranged from tragic downturns to hopeful redemptions and everything in between.

The Harvard Study was designed as an inquiry into adult development and ageing, but The Good Life reframes it, not always convincingly but with good market awareness, as an investigation of happiness. Its central message is simple. As George Vaillant, the study’s director from 1972 to 2004, once put it, “the key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships, relationships.” The study consistently found that the quality and quantity of relationships, whether with caregivers, life partners or friends, is at least as strongly associated with health and longevity as well-known risk factors such as high cholesterol, smoking or obesity.

This finding squares with other evidence that loneliness and social isolation kill, that social support cures, and that a tight network of interpersonal connections is both buffer and blanket. Although our societies prize personal achievement, our technologies draw us away from in-person engagement and our lives become cluttered with busyness that takes priority over our social connections (“life is always at risk of slipping by unnoticed”), those connections remain paramount.

People tend to underestimate the benefits of linking up with others, over-value self-sufficiency and misallocate their time to asocial activities at the expense of interaction with loved ones. The happiest and most vital Harvard Study octogenarians have managed to avoid these traps.

Waldinger and Schulz examine the centrality of relationships from several standpoints. They discuss the developmental priorities of different life stages, the challenges and opportunities of intimate, family and work relationships, the special importance of friendships, and the ways of coping with stress that strengthen or weaken these relationships.

Given that the gradual withering away of friendships is a bleak and consequential reality for many people, especially men, avoiding interpersonal challenges or the effort of tending to them is a major risk. The Good Life argues for the importance of “social fitness” as an under-recognised source of good health that must be monitored, worked on and taught in schools.

The take-home message that social connection is the key to health and happiness is now almost common sense. But it was not always so. In the mid twentieth century, when the first wave of the Harvard Study began, the dominant view within the behavioural sciences was solidly individualist. Psychoanalysis, at the zenith of its influence in psychiatry, emphasised conflicts within the person as the source of human misery. Adult relationships were seen more as shadowy re-enactments of childhood dramas than as sources of health and strength. Even the psychosocial turn in psychoanalysis, led by Erik Erikson, saw the main developmental tasks of mid and late adulthood as fundamentally inward: finding a sense of personal contribution and integrity.

The leading psychologist of morality of the time, Harvard’s Lawrence Kohlberg, defined the highest level of moral reasoning as moving beyond social conventions and the social contract to a principled personal ethos. Influential humanistic ideas about motivation, such as Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy, placed the realisation of the unique self above social needs for esteem and love. Considering this intellectual matrix, the Harvard Study’s conclusions about the value of attachment, belonging and intimacy were not preordained, and they helped to shift the study of adult development and health in a relational direction.

Readers of The Good Life who are looking for a work of science communication will be disappointed. The authors provide few detailed reports of research findings and very few numbers. Although the book sits on a vast body of empirical results, Waldinger and Schulz rely much more on extended case studies of a few selected Harvard Study participants. Their professional identities as psychotherapists and, in Waldinger’s case, as a Zen priest, prevail over their identities as researchers.

As self-help books must, this one contains exercises and worksheets for those who wish to carry out their own relationship audit. But it is the life narratives that do the persuasive work by illustrating the uplifting message that relationships matter, that they can be cultivated and that it’s never too late to change them.

Bookish people and those who read quality online magazines often disdain works of popular psychology and self-help. The advice seems simplistic, the science flimsy and over-hyped, the tone annoyingly upbeat. We can understand and fix our unique and complex selves without that kind of asinine assistance. But there is little reason to think that sceptics have their relational house in order more than anyone else. The Good Life offers a useful guide to resisting the pull of self-reliance, personal striving and materialism, and instead investing our time and attention in other people. •

The Good Life and How to Live It: Lessons from the World’s Longest Study on Happiness
By Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz | Penguin | $35 | 352 pages

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Although they may not have reached these heights of nihilism, many people do wish their lives would end, or at least that they could be cut short if they became unbearable. With assisted dying increasingly in the news, Caitlin Mahar’s new book, The Good Death Through Time, presents an enlightening history of the desires of people suffering from terminal illness or planning for a dignified ending, and of the cultural shifts, religious values and medical advances that have shaped, supported or obstructed them.

Before acquiring its more familiar contemporary meaning about 150 years ago, euthanasia simply meant a good death. Dying was seen as a spiritual ordeal to be endured with Christian patience, and thus a test of courage and character. Much emphasis fell on what came after death — salvation or something much worse — rather than its attendant agonies. “For the faithful,” Mahar writes, “a good death was marked by the embrace or overcoming of suffering rather than its elimination.”

Just as well: doctors at the time had no power to alleviate pain. In fact, they believed it was beneficial to health, and were more apt to cause than cure it with their treatments. In any event, preparing the soul for death was judged more necessary than dulling the mind.

Some of this changed in the mid nineteenth century with the advent of opiates and other anaesthetics, prompting the earliest medicalisation of dying. Euthanasia came to refer to deaths eased by a physician’s care with the aid of narcotics. Pain was increasingly seen to lack redemptive qualities; reducing it might even help the dying to focus on spiritual matters. Mahar argues that this shift in attitudes reflected a more general rise in people’s dread of suffering and sensitivity to discomfort.

That rise, which William James characterised as a “strange moral transformation,” drove campaigns to reduce needless pain by outlawing vivisection, corporal punishment and blood sports. But it also provoked a backlash that foreshadowed present-day sneering at thin-skinned progressive “snowflakes.” A British critic of the voluntary euthanasia movement in 1906 ridiculed it as the home of pain-averse “literary dilettanti” and “neurotic intellectuals,” a charge later echoed by an opponent of euthanasia legislation who worried “we were getting too soft as a nation and too sensitive to pain.”

Mahar offers a compelling account of the rise of British voluntary euthanasia activism in the 1930s, a movement that originated within the medical profession and aimed to give doctors the power to accelerate lingering deaths using morphine and other narcotics in strictly limited circumstances. Despite having eminent supporters such as George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, legislation failed after opponents raised concerns about the potential for abuse by relatives, slippery slopes, medical overreach, and the challenges of regulation.

The revelation that the Nazi regime euthanised well over 100,000 disabled people further damaged the voluntary euthanasia cause, reversing prior support within the medical community and undermining public support for the idea that some lives are “not worthy to be lived.” Mahar shows how eugenics-inspired advocacy for involuntary euthanasia of the intellectually disabled — advanced in Australia by University of Melbourne anatomy professor Richard Berry, whose name was permanently scrubbed from a campus building in 2016 — has tarnished the voluntary euthanasia movement.

The Good Death Through Time provides an authoritative examination of euthanasia debates, court cases and initiatives from the 1950s to the present. Mahar identifies shifts in the groups viewed as suitable for euthanasia, including people on life support or in unrelenting pain not linked to a terminal or incurable condition, as well as in the rationales offered for the practice. Although reducing suffering remains paramount and fear of pain may paradoxically have grown with medicine’s rising capacity to palliate it, voluntary euthanasia has been framed increasingly as a matter of rights, dignity and personal empowerment rather than alleviation of distress.

Australia has been near the forefront of legislative developments. Advocates for voluntary euthanasia argue that overly narrow eligibility requirements have led to unnecessarily bad deaths for those excluded. Disability activists, on the other hand, caution against broadened criteria, citing the Dutch experience of rising euthanasia among people with dementia or mental illness. Mahar concludes with a concise epilogue covering this recent context.

The Good Death Through Time is a lucid and well-documented guide to a challenging topic. Mahar provides a sympathetic but clear-eyed picture of euthanasia’s many protagonists and perspectives without forcing a single view onto the reader. The scholarship is global, but the focus on Australia and Britain adds to the book’s local relevance.

Mahar’s work is especially compelling as an account of the medical profession’s role in euthanasia, in all its meanings. The profession’s views on the desirability and scope of euthanasia have waxed and waned, its pharmacological tools enabling the practice while altering popular attitudes and increasingly pathologising pain. There is no better guide than this one to the wider context of current debates about assisted dying.

Philosopher Dean Rickles’s Life Is Short approaches death from a quite different angle, though he would agree with proponents of voluntary euthanasia that how we fashion our lives and deaths should be a profoundly personal choice. In re-visioning Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, he wants to persuade us that although we may dread the end of life and entertain fantasies of eternal youth and immortality, it is life’s finitude that gives it significance.

“To have a meaningful life,” he writes, “death is necessary.” Only by having and recognising limits — “the very stuff of meaning” — can we make purposeful choices to create our selves and realise our futures, rather than being tossed around by life.

Life Is Short takes this idea and runs with it through eight brief but somewhat meandering chapters. Rickles suggests that the desire for immortality, or even just for a longer life, is often driven by a reluctance to foreclose future possibilities by making hard choices in the present. He dissects the difficulties individuals face in dealing with our future, notably temporal myopia — discounting the future relative to the present — and the less familiar but no less destructive favouring of the future at the present’s expense.

The key to overcoming these “diseases of time,” he suggests, is to develop a strong sense of connection with one’s future self rather than seeing it as a stranger. “[O]ur present self just is the future self of our past self! Treat every future time as equally as Now, because it will be Now later, and it will be your Now.”

How we should go about making a more meaningful life comes down to making it a project (“Project Me”), carving out a future by choosing and acting rather than leaving options forever open. Doing this requires us to overcome the sense that life is provisional and not yet quite real, which Rickles dubs “onedayism.” That process of overcoming involves understanding ourselves and our motives better. We must move beyond the childish feeling of being unbounded and invulnerable to a mature commitment to a purposeful life and work, dull as that may sound.

Despite his general breeziness and references to contemporary popular culture, Rickles’s intellectual influences have an oddly mid-twentieth-century flavour. Existentialist writers (Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, early Woody Allen) get guernseys, with their ruling image of solitary individuals creating heroically authentic selves against a backdrop of cosmic meaninglessness.

Carl Jung takes centrestage in the book’s second half; not the kooky, occult Jung of mandalas, the collective unconscious and flying saucers but the wise Jung of personal identity and the process of maturation. Rickles discusses at some length Jung’s ideas about individuation — the development of a coherent self through understanding our unconscious motivations — and how the archetypes of the present-oriented child (Puer) and the prudent elder (Senex) shape how we age.

What is noteworthy about this cluster of ideas is not just how much they have been generationally cast aside, but also how they portray our orientation towards life and death as fundamentally lonely and stoical. To Rickles, the authentic, unprovisional life is one in which individuals exercise their will by making resolute choices, pruning the branches of their tree of possibilities, and committing to a specific future.

There isn’t much room for other people in this vision of autonomous self-creation. They tend to figure primarily as the conformist horde who stand in the way of us becoming authentically ourselves by tying us down with their norms and expectations. Yes, each of us exists as a solo being with a unique beginning and end, but something is missing in an account of life’s meaning when relationships and social life are so apparently incidental.

It is well worth spending one of the last thousand or so Saturday afternoons we have left on Life Is Short, but in some ways it is an odd book. Contrary to its subtitle, it offers few concrete prescriptions for living a more meaningful life, so it is not a self-help book, however highbrow. Despite the amiable, self-disclosing persona of the author, its level of abstraction is too high for it to be accessible in a de Bottonian way, although Rickles sprinkles it with some memorable epigrams (“death anxiety is the ultimate FOMO”). Its intellectual style is too associative and wandering to be a philosophical treatise on the nature of life’s meaning.

All the same, as a meditation on a very big question — perhaps the biggest of them all — Life Is Short achieves its goal of making us think about the unthinkable. •

The Good Death Through Time
By Caitlin Mahar | Melbourne University Press | $35 | 256 pages

Life Is Short: An Appropriately Brief Guide to Making It More Meaningful
By Dean Rickles | Princeton University Press | $34.99 | 136 pages

The post Appointment with death appeared first on Inside Story.

On the ward, older girls considered her “a kind of mascot, an anorexic-in-training” and taught her the tricks of the trade, from compulsive exercising to tracking her weight. Why Rachel was drawn to fasting’s “aura of martyrdom” in the first place was something of a mystery. Therapists guessed it was a response to the divorce, but the young Rachel wrote that “I had anexorea [sic] because I want to be someone better than me.”

People may lack tails, but they have tales in abundance. In her new book, Strangers to Ourselves, Aviv, a staff writer for the New Yorker, meditates on the importance of stories in shaping the trajectories of mental illness. Why did she fall precociously into anorexia before she knew what it was, and how did she escape it? How did she avoid the fate of Hava, one of the older girls who socialised her into the ascetic sisterhood, who dies of complications of the illness in her early forties? What leads some people to take paths through suffering that only deepen and entrench their distress and disability? Might better stories have steered them onto a different path?

Aviv’s contention in this very undidactic book is that the way we make sense of distress influences how it unfolds. Understanding our miseries as products of a chemical imbalance sets off a different response from seeing them as outcomes of disturbed family relationships, unconscious motives, childhood traumas or evil spirits. Each interpretive frame implies a different set of causes, different forms of empathy or stigma, different interventions, different degrees of optimism or pessimism about recovery.

Placing depression in a neurobiological frame tells people they are not to blame for their despair and offers pharmacological solutions. But it can also promote a sense of being fundamentally and enduringly broken and a chronic dependence on medications. Placing depression in a psychoanalytic frame grants more protection to the patient’s agency, but treatment is glacially slow and people, or their mothers, tend to be judged responsible for their suffering. The frames we choose, or that are chosen for us, can determine our psychological fate. “There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which.”

Most importantly, different stories create different identities. Self-understandings crystallise around diagnostic labels, psychiatric formulations, or other identities, spiritual or political, that reject psychiatry’s insights. Aviv’s views on this process of identity construction are nuanced. Labels don’t directly bring disorders into being, as critics of psychiatry used to argue, but they offer scripts for the labelled to follow.

Over time, following these expectations for how to think, feel and act as a person with a certain condition acquires a kind of psychological momentum as the person takes up an illness career. What begins as a diet may cohere into a set of anorexic practices that gradually harden into compulsions, as “a willed pattern of behavior becomes increasingly involuntary and ingrained.” Here Aviv channels the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking, whose idea of “dynamic nominalism” captures how concepts come to shape the reality they appear merely to name.

Aviv is at her best when illuminating the space between two polarised ways of thinking about mental illness. It is not simply a matter of choice and character, where people can be condemned for their bad decisions and personal weakness. But neither is it a matter of “chronic and intractable forces that take over our lives.” People experiencing psychiatric distress can have agency without deserving blame, and they can be in the grip of powerful unseen forces, societal or biological, without lacking all capacity to change the stories of their life.

Aviv largely avoids abstract discussions such as these, preferring to show rather than tell. The bulk of her book presents humane portraits of five subjects who in different ways have “come up against the limits of psychiatric ways of understanding.” Ray sues a psychoanalytically oriented treatment facility for failing to effectively treat his depression but remains stuck in rigid patterns of egocentricity after psychopharmacology takes its turn. Bapu flees her home and family in southern India to live near temples as a holy mendicant, forming an intimate connection to Krishna while struggling against a schizophrenia diagnosis and electroconvulsive treatment.

African American Naomi, imprisoned for killing her baby son under the delusion she was saving him from her country’s cursed racial condition, views her mental state through the lens of oppression rather than illness. Privileged Laura does the opposite, “realign[ing] her life… so it more purely expressed the way she’d been classified,” but is at a loss when her diagnosis is changed. Skilled in therapy-speak but unable to bring about personal change, she accumulates a clutch of prescriptions before embarking on an excruciating process of withdrawal.

And then there is Hava, whose life provides a counterpoint to Aviv’s, a possible past that she somehow evaded. Why did one girl on the ward sink into a chronic and ultimately fatal eating disorder and the other did not? Aviv, who is candid about her own use of anti-depressants, observes that unlike Hava, “I never felt stuck in a particular story that others had created for me.” In her experience, patients who recovered were those who found and lived by a new story.

It is perhaps no great surprise that a writer should believe stories have the power to create, mould and overcome mental illness. All of Aviv’s subjects are avid, even compulsive, writers who are driven to chronicle their experiences in search of insight and uplift. Few everyday patients are quite so literary.

All the same, we are living in a cultural moment when mental illness and the forms of identity it makes possible are being written and talked about as never before. One side-effect of the gradual destigmatisation of mental illness we are witnessing is that diagnoses are increasingly embraced as sources of identity rather than repudiated as sources of shame.

Evidence for a growing hunger for diagnosis is everywhere. TikTok influencers school their followers in how to enact disorders, initiating legions of young Touretters and dissociators. People with autism form online communities that promote pride in neurodiversity, just as sexual minorities established communities in earlier times. Celebrities come out under the banner of newly popular conditions, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder currently having its moment in the Australian sun. People with “lived experience” of mental illness play an increasingly prominent role in mental health practice, policy and education. And on Twitter, mental health workers share stories of patients suing clinicians who fail to render a desired diagnosis.

With mental illness becoming a new hook on which people hang their identities, Strangers to Ourselves is a timely work. It reveals how illness-based identities have implications that can be unanticipated and mixed. They can enable and disable, clarify and obscure, foster growth and community or entrench suffering and loneliness. I can think of no better guide to this strange new reality than Rachel Aviv. •

Strangers to Ourselves: Stories of Unsettled Minds
By Rachel Aviv | Harvill Secker | $35.00 | 288 pages

The post Illness and identity appeared first on Inside Story.

The same strange theatre takes more idiosyncratic forms. In his famous Life, James Boswell recounts how Samuel Johnson would approach every door with “anxious care,” counting out a precise number of steps before taking a great lunging stride across the threshold, always leading with the same foot. Others noted how Johnson “whirled and twisted about to perform his gesticulations” before dramatically entering a house, abandoning his blind housemate Mrs Williams to grope around on the front steps.

Welcome to the world of ritual, where apparently odd and excessive actions are saturated with meaning and obligation. Literal thresholds feature in some cases, but more often the thresholds are figurative: portals between stages of life, social positions, and states of mind, health or sacredness. In his new book, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, the anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas provides a compelling account of the cultural and psychological dimensions of these practices. In the process he reveals a new kind of interdisciplinary science, far from the armchair speculations of an earlier generation of scholars.

Having made a lifelong study of ritual, Xygalatas has come to view it as a fundamental part of human nature. Although ritualistic actions can be observed among birds and mammals, including the scrotum-grasping rites of male baboons, humans alone are “the ritual species.” Archaeological evidence suggests that rituals were enacted by early hominids 400 millennia ago. They serve important psychological and social functions, Xygalatas argues, deepening group solidarity, providing a sense of control over uncertainty, and contributing to wellbeing. We have a profound and innate need for ritual; and by some accounts obsessive-compulsive disorder, which troubled Dr Johnson, is a pathological expression of that urge.

Rituals, to Xygalatas, are “traditions that involve highly choreographed, formalised and precisely executed behaviours that mark threshold moments in people’s lives.” Their key elements are rigidity, repetition and redundancy: ritualistic acts must be performed in a strictly prescribed way, repeatedly, and longer or more frequently than seems practically required.

How rituals produce their effects is causally opaque: people who perform them rarely have an explicit understanding of the mechanisms that connect ritualised acts to desired outcomes or even of the goal of those acts. Instead, they answer the “why” of ritual by appealing to tradition. We have always done it this way.

Although the goals and modes of influence of rituals may be obscure, their functions are not. Xygalatas emphasises two main types, one to do with taming uncertainty, the other with fortifying group cohesion as a form of “social glue.” In the former case, rituals attempt to exert control over a capricious world and reduce anxiety by creating a sense of predictability and order. Ritual flourishes in societies that face greater threats and in zones of everyday activity where uncertainty reigns, such as sport and gambling. Studies find that ritualistic behaviour increases when fear is triggered, and that ritual performance is effective in diminishing it.

Xygalatas gives more attention to the social functions of ritual. He argues that collective rituals reinforce solidarity, mark group identities, and generate strong and enduring feelings of belonging. They demonstrate the loyalty and trustworthiness of group members, especially when rituals are onerous and costly, and promote generosity and mutual helping. Research shows that engagement in rituals has an array of benefits for individuals, from enhanced fertility to tighter and more supportive social networks to better mental and physical health.

These benefits may be especially strong for the extreme rituals that generate what Durkheim called “collective effervescence.” Xygalatas shows how participation in high-intensity rituals, which often involve extravagant pain and are more common in societies facing severe threats, helps to expand people’s sense of self and fuse their personal and group identities. The active embrace of shared suffering is uniquely powerful in strengthening social bonds and in healing the sick and downtrodden, who tend to seek out the harshest ordeals and derive the greatest benefit from them.

Xygalatas illustrates his ideas with many vivid descriptions of rituals, including examples from his own research. This research will be eye-opening for readers who have learned about ritual from ethnographies or journalistic sources. Xygalatas advocates for a new “ritual science” that combines the best aspects of anthropology, psychology and cognitive neuroscience and avoids their weaknesses. Anthropology contributes the virtues of thick description and direct observation in the field, but without the tendency towards theoretical obscurity. Psychology contributes the experimental method and quantification, but its tendency to wrench behaviour from its context is jettisoned. Neuroscience offers a systematic way to examine the embodiment of ritual, but without the reductionist conclusion that ritual is, in essence, merely a set of brain processes.

Aspirationally at least, this synthesis offers a rigorous way to investigate ritual in the field. Xygalatas describes at length his studies of fire-walking rituals in Spain and body-piercing kavadi rites in Mauritius, both conducted onsite with full community engagement. Participants in these studies wore monitors that tracked their heart rate and other physiological signs, and were found to experience extreme levels of arousal, stress and pain while performing the rituals.

More surprisingly, perhaps, people who wore the same devices while observing the fire-walkers showed very similar, synchronised patterns of arousal, with greater similarity the more socially close they were to the walker. Related studies have examined shifts in hormonal activity among participants in wedding ceremonies. Not only is ritual embodied in the physiology of individuals, but that embodiment is embedded in social relationships.

Before reading a book like this one, many of us might be inclined to see rituals as pre-modern oddities and superstitions, things we would need a passport to observe firsthand. Xygalatas makes us ponder the persistence of ritual in our secular times and helps readers recognise that it is all around us.

The ceremonial accession of a new British monarch, and the outrage at people who dare to puncture the membrane of solemnity that surrounds it, make this fact salient in a once-in-a-generation way. If, as Xygalatas maintains, “rituals fulfil primal human needs,” it should be no surprise that we cling to old ones and invent new ones, like the recent Japanese divorce ritual of writing marital grievances on pieces of paper and flushing them down the toilet.

But ritual is also expressed in so many more everyday forms. If rigidity, repetition and redundancy are its hallmarks, we can see it in the choreographed way our football seasons approach their crescendo, in the coming wave of graduation ceremonies, and in any number of celebratory events.

Traces of the same elements can be seen in how we write reference letters, format papers, make apologies, order meals, start conversations, run meetings, and so on and on and on. What justifies itself as efficient, rational and modern often retains a whiff of ritual incense. And, as Xygalatas might say, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We can’t escape ritual, and if we could, we might find ourselves more alone, anxious and alienated than we are already. •

Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living
By Dimitris Xygalatas | Profile Books | $56.50 | 320 pages

The post Threshold moments appeared first on Inside Story.

So what, you might say. Of course time pressure makes us less inclined to help others. But here’s the kicker: the students were seminarians, and the talk was on the parable of the Good Samaritan. It seems that even people called to minister to those in need — people who had just been primed with the virtues of altruism — generally fail to assist someone in distress for the most trivial of reasons.

Studies such as these reinforce a widespread cynicism about human nature. We are a selfish species and there is a canyon-sized gap between our high principles and our unedifying behaviour. We might pretend to be compassionate and concerned for the greater good, but our actions show us to be morally myopic and selfish.

Stephanie D. Preston, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, wants to undermine that cynicism. In her new book, The Altruistic Urge: Why We’re Driven to Help Others, she makes the case that we have an instinct to help the vulnerable that is rooted in an offspring-care system we share with other mammals. That basic motivation is underpinned by shared brain circuitry and expressed in actions to protect those in urgent need. The hero who plunges into a raging torrent or inferno to save lives replicates the rat who retrieves its pup — an ultrasonically squeaky pink jelly bean — when it strays from the nest.

Preston offers the rat’s pup retrieval as a prime example of the altruistic urge she proposes. Its neurobiology is well understood, it is homologous to some human acts of helping, and it has a prototypically vulnerable target, the helpless infant. She argues that at least some human altruism is closely akin to offspring retrieval. It is instinctive rather than socialised, it is action-oriented rather than simply involving empathic feeling, and it doesn’t depend heavily on higher cognition. Although we may flatter ourselves that our altruistic behaviour springs from moral deliberation, it is sometimes simply automatic.

Calling the altruistic urge an instinct might seem to imply it is a rigid tendency applying only to non-human animals. Preston rejects this anthropocentric assumption and clarifies how the contemporary view sees instincts as flexible and open to being overridden. “Even amoebas,” she writes, “exhibit context-sensitive altruism.”

The altruistic urge involves a neural approach tendency deep within the brain that constantly contends with an avoidant tendency not to help. Helping may only happen when the helper is properly prepared — hormonally or through prior experience, in the case of the parental rat — and when the probable effectiveness of action is judged to be high and the risks low. When it happens, helping of this kind is experienced by the helper as rewarding, enabled by dopamine and oxytocin, the so-called pleasure and love molecules of pop psychology.

Preston reviews other accounts of altruism to highlight the distinctiveness of her own “altruistic response model.” Psychologists often explain helping as driven by empathic concern for others or by the desire to relieve vicarious distress at another’s suffering. Preston argues that empathic emotion is not strongly tied to helping actions, that rapid efforts to help sometimes don’t seem to require it, and that many creatures that lack the capacity to imagine themselves into another’s pelt engage in altruistic helping.

Preston acknowledges that some forms of altruism can be explained ultimately by tendencies to help kin (inclusive fitness) and by tendencies to reciprocate helping among non-kin (reciprocal altruism). But these evolutionary accounts fail to specify the mechanisms that give rise to helping, and in any event altruistic acts — even among rodents — often help strangers and have no credible chance of being reciprocated. Preston offers her offspring-care model as one of several potential mechanisms supporting human and mammalian sociality, and proposes that it complements existing evolutionary explanations. Empathy, reciprocity, strategic virtue-signalling, social norms and reflective morality no doubt also have their place.

The Altruistic Urge takes the reader through the many complexities of altruism. Preston clarifies the characteristics of helpers and beneficiaries that make altruistic actions more or less likely. Ideal saviours are confident and possess relevant expertise rather than necessarily a more compassionate personality, and ideal victims are in grave danger, helpless and cute. She rightly criticises psychological and economic research on the topic for studying monetary donations in artificial games rather than more ecologically real and urgent forms of helping.

Preston’s repetitive insistence on the unique strengths of her model, which alone “carves nature at its joints,” can become wearisome. But as a thorough exploration of one basis for human and animal altruism, grounded in but not restricted to parental care, the book makes a strong and scientifically well-supported case.

Preston’s book makes a delightful contrast with another published 120 years ago and reissued this month by Penguin Classics. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, the work of the Russian revolutionary anarchist Peter Kropotkin, is a sweeping account of the development of cooperation and reciprocity across the animal kingdom and through human history. Growing out of Kropotkin’s deep interest in natural history, the book argues against the centrality of competition and selfishness in biological and societal evolution.

Referring to his own expeditions into Siberia and northern Manchuria as a younger man, Kropotkin writes that “in all these scenes of animal life which passed before my eyes, I saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution.”

Friendly to Darwin but antagonistic to social Darwinism, Kropotkin argues, like Preston, that there is something fundamental and deeply rooted about caring for others. Solitude and within-species competition are exceptions in the animal world and individualism is a pathology in that corner of it we humans inhabit. “Sociability,” Kropotkin writes, “is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.”

Mutual Aid begins with lovingly sketched descriptions of cooperative animal behaviour, showing a special fondness for birds but also admiration for insects and mammals. We encounter walruses and vultures, bees and parrots, “the great tribe of the dogs,” and the “egoist she-goose.” The musk-rat is credited with “a very high degree of intellectual development.” These sketches feed into Kropotkin’s key proposition: that sociality is essential not only in obviously relevant activities such as mating and care of offspring, but also in defence, migration, hunting, healing the sick, and play. Being gregarious is grounded not only in the need to reproduce; it is also a way of communal being running through all aspects of life.

Kropotkin was attempting to challenge an influential line of thought that takes the fitness of the individual organism as the driver of evolution and sees individuals engaged in a battle for selfish advantage. He emphasises the collective fitness of animal groups and how the fitness of the groups’ members is entirely dependent on their capacity to coordinate with one another.

This argument prefigures the idea of group selection in evolutionary theory. As the American biologist E.O. Wilson put it, “In a group, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals. But, groups of altruistic individuals beat groups of selfish individuals.” Group selection has been controversial in a field where the unit of fitness is more often understood to be the individual organism or the gene, but it endures as a minority view.

The idea that animals are fundamentally cooperative — that “the war of each against all is not the law of nature” — has political implications for Kropotkin. If humans are cut from the same cloth as other animals, as he emphatically believed, then functional societies will arise spontaneously out of our sociable instincts, and people will not have to be tamed and trampled by government or other authorities to achieve social order.

Kropotkin reserves special scorn for the view that “the so-called ‘state of nature’ was nothing but a permanent fight between individuals, accidentally huddled together by the mere caprice of their bestial existence.” The remainder of Mutual Aid is an extended argument against that pessimistic account of human society associated with the philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

Turning from zoology to ethnology, Kropotkin describes the evidence for cooperation among indigenous people and the tribal groups who invaded Roman Europe (“savages” and “barbarians” respectively, in the language of the day). He finds in their social lives evidence of a primitive form of communism, principled morality, love of peace, and loyalty to ever-broadening social units beyond the family, from clans to villages to confederations to nations.

Extending his historical narrative into medieval Europe, Kropotkin extols the value of social organisation based on guilds, and points to the technological and creative development they made possible. The subsequent rise of centralised power was a backward step, he argues, obstructing the free development of communal self-rule. “[T]he all-absorbing authority of the State” leads to “the development of an unbridled, narrow-minded individualism” and the decay of communal institutions, he writes. Even so, the human need for mutual aid organisations, and the rise of socialism in his time pointed a way forward.

As biology, Kropotkin’s book is no doubt amateurish and anecdotal, and the contrast with Preston’s social neuroscience demonstrates how far biological science has progressed in the past century. But work such as Preston’s supports Kropotkin’s faith in the innate sociability of animals and humans and fills in some of the detail. Altruism driven by a mammalian offspring-care mechanism will account for some fraction of our social motives and capacities.

What is less clear is whether scientific evidence for inbuilt altruism should influence how we think about human nature and its societal implications. Where Kropotkin draws a grand world-historical drama, Preston resists speculation and stays close to the data, as modern scientists tend to do. In different ways, their work shows how there is more Good Samaritan in us than we might have imagined. •

The Altruistic Urge: Why We’re Driven to Help Others
By Stephanie D. Preston | Columbia University Press | $57.95 | 344 pages

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
By Peter Kropotkin | Penguin Classics | $22.99 | 336 pages

The post Even amoebas appeared first on Inside Story.

Alternatively, we could do the unthinkable and return our new seatmate’s volley with a greeting of our own. Joe Keohane’s new book argues that our lives, societies and polities would be much improved if we took this path. Talking and listening to strangers helps to humanise them, to broaden us, and to include us and them in a more expansive we. Connecting to unfamiliar people builds social trust, overcomes loneliness, enhances appreciation of diversity, depolarises attitudes and dissolves group boundaries.

This kind of connection is also a profoundly satisfying experience for individuals, Keohane finds, in an era when technology seems to be replacing the rough and tumble of personal contact with frictionless but impersonal efficiency. Once the initial awkwardness lifts, conversing with people who have different views, stories and backgrounds from our own is enriching, enlivening and enjoyable.

Why then do we avoid these conversations, freezing out our companion in seat 34B? Keohane lets us count the ways. There may be a primal fear of strangers. We may view them through the lens of caricatures and group stereotypes. We may see them as lacking mental complexity, in a banal form of dehumanisation that Keohane calls the “lesser minds” problem.

Our reasons for failing to engage may also reflect how we think they see us as much as how we see them. We may worry about being rejected if we reach out, or assume that the other person won’t find us interesting. People may simply not know how to start the conversation, or feel embarrassed and tongue-tied at the prospect. And there may be a social norm against talking to strangers in some settings.

Despite these obstacles, a raft of social psychology research shows that conversations with strangers tend to go better than people expect and boost our mood and sense of belonging. Indeed, people systematically overestimate the risks of interactions with strangers and underestimate the benefits.

Keohane is not offering a one-sidedly psychological account of the importance of social connection, however. He presents a history of our hypersocial species from the deep evolutionary time of our primate ancestors through to the contemporary reality of urban living. Far from being Hobbesian beasts — we’re more akin to bonobos, the so-called “hippie apes,” than to murderous chimpanzees — humans have evolved to cooperate.

In addition to having a neurochemistry that fosters attachments to those close to us, we have strong tendencies to link up with those more distant by reciprocating their behaviour and extending honorary kinship to them. As early humans settled into agrarian communities and eventually congregated in cities, new ways of welcoming and integrating strangers emerged. Ritualised hospitality became a virtue as trade routes drew people from foreign lands. Religions, for all their bad press, created communities of belief out of mutually suspicious tribes and made a virtue of kindness to strangers.

Mutual suspicion is part of modern life, and withdrawing from unwanted contact is increasingly easy, so Keohane goes in search of people offering solutions. He attends a meeting of a group called Conversations New York, where strangers come together for a supervised discussion of topics of the day. In London he takes part in an extended workshop on how to talk to strangers, complete with an assortment of inhibition-busting homework assignments. In Los Angeles he observes urban confessionals where people offer free listening to passers-by. In the American Midwest he witnesses the convention of an organisation that tries to bring together Democrats and Republicans, identified by blue and red lanyards, for respectful conversations with ground rules that forbid grandstanding and pointscoring.

So much for clubs, classes, eccentrics on street corners and tongue-biting discussions with ideological opponents. Could we produce xenophilia on a grander scale? Keohane implies that this aspiration might be challenging. Many cultural trends are pushing in the other direction, deepening our isolation, accelerating the speed of life, and shielding people from direct human contact. Levels of general trust in others have declined in many societies.

We are warned of the threats posed by strangers while the statistically greater threats tend to be closer to home. Increasingly we communicate impersonally, without the empathy-inducing presence of facial expressions, voice and touch. Our cities create sensory overload that fosters “civil inattention” to others and sends us to the self-checkout lane so we can avoid a perfunctory chat with a bored cashier.

Beyond these social forces, Keohane argues that well-functioning and egalitarian societies may be paradoxically less open to strangers than more unstable alternatives. Research finds greater reserve and lesser hospitality in more highly developed societies, perhaps reaching a peak in Scandinavia, where Keohane observes well-meaning efforts to defrost self-contained Finns. Civility fails to promote openness to strangers because there is little felt need to interact when life is safe and secure. Abstract generosity in the form of strong welfare provision and large refugee intakes can coexist with coolness and incuriosity towards people outside our circles of friends and family.

If wealth and security fail to generate the desire to approach and embrace strangers, what does? Better-designed public spaces have a role in encouraging mixing and sharing, Keohane says. Ultimately, though, we need initiatives that bring diverse people together and do it wisely, fully aware that connecting with strangers requires some orchestration.

Without guidance and new rules of engagement, conversations with people who differ from us tend to descend into excesses of argument and deficits of listening, reinforcing our prior belief that they are fools and villains. Mere contact with people who are different from us will not reliably increase mutual trust and understanding in the absence of shared goals and genuine equality.

But besides new forums for conversations with strangers, we need people of goodwill to emerge from their family burrows, their digital echo chambers and their social inhibitions to take part in them. The Power of Strangers concludes with an exhortation to us all to do just that.

Some readers may be sceptical of Keohane’s bottom-up approach to patching the social fabric and his emphasis on grassroots initiatives to connect strangers. In an age when group identities are so salient, it might seem odd to promote solutions that boil down to individuals having more and better one-on-one conversations.

There is certainly something deeply American about this combination of individualism and communitarianism, not to mention the idealistic impulse behind Keohane’s prescriptions. E pluribus unum could be his motto, albeit with an enlightened awareness that the unum is diverse. Even so, Australian readers should find The Power of Strangers an inspiring and illuminating read. It’s not as if loneliness, tribalism and political polarisation are strangers to us. •

The post Stranger danger appeared first on Inside Story.

Of course, teaching is not as simple as transferring a half century of life lessons into grateful young minds. Even so, the profession exerts a pull on many midlife adults seeking a second career. Studies find that they are often motivated by desires to do more meaningful work, to have more flexible work schedules and to share what they have learned with young people. In the words of Dan, a former winemaker profiled on the website of Teach for Australia, an organisation that helps people make the transition, “It sounds trite, but I genuinely wanted to give back.”

Lucy Kellaway’s new book, Re-educated, is an affecting account of her own fateful decision to leave one outwardly successful life behind and begin another in front of a class at a disadvantaged London school. Working in “an office full of hacks” at the London Financial Times for two decades as the writer of a celebrated column, mother of four children and dutiful daughter of an ageing father (an émigré from 1940s Melbourne’s “cultural desert”), she was inwardly stagnant. Two years later, her father dead, she has quit her job, separated from her husband, bought her dream home and trained as a teacher. Along the way, and before even stepping into a classroom, she co-founded Now Teach, a charity that facilitates the career shift she is navigating.

Kellaway’s description of her pre-revolutionary life is unsentimental. She was more bored than burnt out by her work. “What sustained me all those years was a personality flaw that is common in journalists,” she writes. “I was both insecure and a show-off.” As the status anxiety and fear of failure that sustained her work diminished, she lost interest. At least in the telling, the dissolution of her marriage was equally deflating, more a matter of frustration with her husband’s tendency to clutter up the house than of bitter fighting.

Kellaway recognises herself as someone with a constant need to be busy, and it is her energetic pragmatism that drives her “to do something more useful” as a teacher and to launch Now Teach. Its success in attracting middle-aged recruits is a pleasant surprise to her, although not without wrinkles. One applicant signs up only to withdraw his application the next day after being reminded by his wife that he doesn’t like children.

In her illuminating treatment of the everyday experience of teaching, Kellaway observes that she works harder than she ever did as a journalist, although perhaps not as hard as in her first job as a banker, which she describes as “a lethal combination of stress and boredom.” The challenges of enforcing student discipline and buckling under the institutional discipline of endless forms, guidelines and new educational technologies are made vivid in a chapter that sketches a typical day.

Kellaway is astute on how teaching is both harder and easier for mature-age teachers than for their younger peers, and how the former’s success hinges on feeling comfortable with public failure, being bad at something all over again, and experiencing a loss of status and ambition. Over time, interestingly, she becomes more favourably disposed to aspects of teaching practice that can seem cynical or authoritarian to outsiders, such as teaching to the test and firmly enforcing arbitrary rules of behaviour and dress. Carrots must, at times, be supplemented by (non-literal) sticks.

Re-educated is mainly a story about the concrete realities of becoming a teacher, but much of its charm and heft come from its broader personal narrative. It demonstrates the value of female friendship, the disappointments of midlife dating, and Kellaway’s struggle with abandoning hair dye and going grey, accompanied by some characteristically sharp-witted remarks about “follicle sexism.” Men tend to come off poorly, but the embrace of family is celebrated.

Kellaway’s reflections on educational privilege are telling. “[T]he just-be-happy-darling school of education was a luxury for the middle classes,” who have a safety net in case of underachievement that is unavailable to other students. Her own elevation from indifferent high school student to gilded Oxford undergraduate to overpaid City of London banker is a case in point.

This memoir of reinvention makes an interesting contrast with American journalist David Brooks’s The Second Mountain, which I reviewed for Inside Story in 2019. Like Kellaway, Brooks underwent a midlife career switch and exited a longstanding marriage. His book chronicles a similar experience of stuckness followed by a pivotal decision to follow a new path through the remainder of life. That’s where the similarities end. Where Brooks likens the new path to climbing a second mountain, Kellaway presents it as not so much a grand quest as a process of stumbling through incompetence towards being a good-enough teacher. Her path is not so much up as down or sideways.

Brooks’s second mountain demands a profound moral transformation, in his case accompanied by a spiritual awakening, whereas Kellaway sees herself not so much uplifted as simply more useful. For Brooks, the first mountain represents individualistic achievement, the greying mountaineer leaving it for a second peak of belonging and community. Kellaway’s new life has its social benefits — she enjoys pub nights with her fellow teachers — but part of what motivated it was a desire to escape from the demands of belonging: the decades spent looking after children, husband and ageing parents.

Kellaway scripts her change-of-life direction half as comedy, complete with humiliations and faux pas, and half as factual reportage on the nitty-gritty of daily life in school. Throughout, she avoids generalising her experience to others, let alone pronouncing on the human condition, and she makes few prescriptions aside from recommending we become second-career teachers. She concludes that her life’s sharp turn has not really changed her, but merely changed the settings in which she operates and brought out aspects of herself that had been neglected.

Brooks’s script is more of a romance and a rallying cry. He documents a redemptive personal transformation, theorises it as a moral calling, and advocates it to others. The reader can decide how much these different ways of storying life changes should be attributed to transatlantic cultural differences, and how much to gender or personality.

Re-educated is an enjoyable and edifying read. Without having any of the usual trappings of inspirational writing, it somehow convinces readers of a certain age that life change is an enlivening option, while reminding them that it is neither easy nor reliably fun. Kellaway doesn’t pretend that we can change who we are merely by acts of will, or that all of us can sustain a new calling without disillusionment.

What is refreshing about this story is that it focuses on changing not who we are but what we do. The key is to be “released from the force of habit,” to take the leap into new environments, and to declutter one’s priorities. Her message is heartening: “it is possible, desirable and perfectly natural for people to start again in their 50s.” •

Re-educated: How I Changed My Job, My Home, My Husband and My Hair
By Lucy Kellaway | Ebury Press | $39.50 | 256 pages

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Adam Phillips is a prolific British essayist on matters literary, cultural and psychoanalytic. As a practising psychotherapist and general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud, he has serious credibility as a psychoanalyst, but his style of psychoanalytic writing refreshingly lacks the usual heaviness and homage to the master. In what is a fundamentally interpretive approach to understanding human behaviour, he treats the psychoanalytic tradition as a source of interesting ideas and inversions of common sense. His books have put that approach to work in elegant discussions of everything from tickling to monogamy (“A couple is a conspiracy in search of a crime”).

His new book began as four lectures on conversion, in the sense of a dramatic process of revolutionary change, a rupture or break from the past. It begins with an exploration of our tendency to view conversion as an outcome of seduction or brainwashing. Enlightened folk favour a more gradual and educative approach to change, Phillips argues, rather than what they see as escapes from complexity into submerging group identities. For all the current talk of becoming one’s best self, most of us just want to become better by degrees.

For Phillips, the psychoanalytic notion of conversion, in which the emotion attached to a troubling idea is transformed into a physical symptom while the idea itself remains unchanged, offers an alternative way to think about it. We can then see personal conversions as a kind of substitution rather than a genuine transformation. Apparent conversions may be ways of staying the same.

Phillips’s second chapter continues the theme of our ambivalence towards personal change — wanting but also dreading and resisting it, recalling Freud’s quote that neurotics will defend their neurosis “like a lioness her young” — and our inconsistent beliefs about it. Although we may be sceptical of dramatic positive change, Phillips observes, we increasingly embrace the idea of trauma as a cause of negative transformation. People also wrestle with the competing forces of stability and disruption: biology and fate on the one hand; choice and self-fashioning on the other. They are both changed and un-changed, with a sense of having a true self that is out of reach of the false one they inhabit.

These conflicts and self-doubts sometimes motivate efforts at personal conversion, with results that can be less transformative than advertised: “one of the ways the new makes a name for itself is through the rhetoric of hyperbole; great claims are made, but over time the past begins to show through.” It is difficult to let go of a former identity. Therapy might offer a secular form of conversion, but the change it offers is less than dramatic. Sometimes “people aren’t cured, they just lose interest in their symptoms.” Close studies of famous converts Paul and Augustine round out these explorations.

Conversion in the political sphere comes in for a less satisfying analysis through ruminations on the ideas of French theorist Étienne Balibar and American political scientist Wendy Brown. To Balibar, political transformations involve a conversion of violence into civility. Phillips suggests that believing in such a transformation relies on an optimistic but sometimes naive view of the mutability of human nature. Utopian political ideals depend, he argues, either on the belief that human nature can be reinvented or on the recovery of an idea of human nature that is supposed to have been lost. For people seeking political transformation, what ultimately has to be converted is doubt about the possibility of change.

Phillips’s final essay explores conversion from the standpoint of the outside observer. How much are converts really seeing new truths and how much are they just seeing things as a new group defines them to be? Conversion, he suggests, is often a matter of identifying with someone else, although converts tend to believe they are becoming more truly themselves. Socrates is put forward as an authentic self-fashioner who made himself unique without attempting to become someone else; and the psychoanalytic theory of perversions is examined for clues to what drives some sorts of pathological conversion.

There is something almost hypnotic about Phillips’s writing. He assembles simple words into complex thoughts, cas-ually cites French intellectuals, drops aperçus that demand a second and third reading, and then heads off on new tangents. His writing has a certain cadence as well. The classic Phillipian paragraph starts with a few unshowy statements, follows them with an arresting remark in parenthesis, builds to a conclusion and ends with an aphorism that may not qualify as a grammatical sentence (“Targets that must be missed in order to be met”). The rise and fall of these paragraphs is transporting, and even if they rarely deliver an obvious message or hammer a lesson home, the reader is left with a sense of having been taken on an intriguing journey.

It would be a mistake to read Phillips seeking guidance on how to change oneself or a systematic theory of the nature of conversion. Any reader hoping for an answer to why, at this historical moment, some things are believed to be convertible (sex and gender) and others not (race and sexual orientation) will be disappointed. Phillips has no advice to give or grand theoretical statements to make, just reflections. Those reflections are food for thought, and readers wishing for a second course can look forward to the publication of its sequel, On Getting Better. •

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But a sentence from Herman’s second paragraph rings less true. “In the late twentieth-century United States,” she wrote, “we are likely to believe what psychological experts tell us.” In fact, the opposite has happened: well-publicised instances of scientific fraud and growing evidence that many of the discipline’s most celebrated findings rest on flimsy foundations have given the field some self-administered black eyes. The darkest bruises have blotted the reputation of social psychology, a sub-field that aims to understand how humans think, feel and act in relationships, groups and cultures.

American journalist Jesse Singal’s The Quick Fix is a forensic investigation of this loss of trust, and is likely to contribute to a further erosion. Recalling his time as a behavioural science editor at New York magazine, Singal recounts how the “fire hose of overhyped findings” he received via psychologists’ press releases brought home the scale of the field’s problems.

Singal casts a critical eye over a succession of influential psychological ideas and findings, and catalogues the scientific failings, overheated claims and poorly justified applications that entangle them. Along the way, he explores the downside of fad psychology’s success, and in particular the costs of America’s “ever-intensifying focus on the individual” — a focus, he suggests, that often neglects larger political systems and social structures to the detriment of effective solutions.

The Quick Fix has six main targets: the self-esteem movement, the role of “grit” in promoting academic and career success, “power posing” as a means of boosting women’s self-assertion, resilience training in schools and the military, 1990s predictions of a looming demographic wave of teenage super-predators, and the idea of implicit or unconscious bias. Later chapters tackle psychology’s replication crisis and the place of “nudge” interventions in promoting healthier and more prudent choices.

Singal’s account of self-esteem describes a movement (centred, perhaps not surprisingly, in California) that presented mental illness, criminality, relationship breakdown and academic underachievement as manifestations of a lack of self-love. Its evangelical proponents promoted self-esteem interventions on a grand scale in schools, their enthusiasm extending far beyond the available evidence and at times suppressing findings that should have dampened it. Although healthier, happier and more successful people tend to have higher self-esteem, much of the research indicates that self-esteem tends to play little or no causal role in promoting those outcomes. Trying to enhance it has little benefit, and perhaps some cost in a growing culture of narcissism.

A similar critique applies to the more recently feted concept of “grit,” the capacity to persevere with an unwavering sense of purpose in pursuit of long-term goals. Singal shows that the link between grit and desired outcomes has been exaggerated, and that other known factors explain success substantially better. Nor has it been adequately demonstrated that interventions can boost grit, or that it is meaningfully different from a better-studied personality trait called conscientiousness.

Singal views grit as an especially seductive target for improving educational achievement, partly because it doesn’t demand deeper systemic change in schooling. “[E]ven if things out there don’t improve any time soon,” he writes, “there are traits… we can cultivate in ourselves… to hop back on the upward-mobility ladder.” The fix here is quick and atomistic.

Self-esteem and grit are psychological traits whose real-world implications have been oversold. Power posing and resilience training are psychological interventions that face the same charge. The belief that striking confident poses promotes powerful behaviour and even boosts testosterone levels has crumbled under closer examination, reports Singal. Key research findings have proved hard to replicate, and the co-authors of the original work have confessed to questionable research practices.

Attempts to prevent depression and anxiety among schoolchildren by enhancing their resilience have yet to suffer the same public implosion, but studies reviewed by Singal cast doubt on the efficacy of a leading program developed under the banner of positive psychology. More dubious still, he argues, is the use of the same program to prevent post-traumatic stress disorder in the armed services. More than a million members of the US military have passed through this Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, despite a paucity of good evidence that it is effective and despite the head-spinning extrapolation from children to adults and from preventing depression to preventing post-traumatic reactions.

The idea of super-predators was neither a trait nor an intervention, but rather an errant prediction. The brainchild of political scientists and criminologists in the 1990s, and as such a rather odd inclusion in a book on psychology’s woes, it forecast a surge of remorseless, morally impoverished young criminals — but they simply failed to materialise, and in fact crime rates dropped in the 2000s. Singal discusses the case as an example of a mistaken idea having dire effects — its legacy was tough-on-crime policies that allowed children to be sentenced as adults.

Implicit bias, sometimes called unconscious bias, has been even more consequential. Grounded in the study of implicit attitudes, commonly assessed by the immensely popular Implicit Association Test, or IAT, research indicated that a substantial majority of white Americans held an automatic preference for fellow whites over Blacks, even if they sincerely claimed not to be racist. This bias was heralded as the newly discovered psychological “dark matter” that might explain the persistence of racism despite the public’s steeply declining endorsement of overt bigotry over the past century.

Although he acknowledges that unconscious racial bias exists and is probably responsible for some fraction of current racial disparities, Singal deflates much of the standard case. The IAT, sometimes seen as an X-ray of our racist souls, fails basic requirements of psychological assessment and lacks solid evidence of predictive validity. It remains unclear to what extent apparent bias truly reveals hidden prejudice rather than mere awareness of racial stereotypes or the dread of appearing racist on the test. Singal criticises the idea of unconscious bias for not only its scientific limitations but also its wider implications. As a staple of diversity training programs, it deflects attention from social change efforts to “internal spiritual cleansing,” he argues, but also partially exonerates us of our prejudice and leads us to ignore the degree to which discrimination is conscious and explicit.

How psychology got into this kind of mess and how it might get out are explored in chapters on the replication crisis and “nudging.” The former was sparked by evidence that many published psychological findings — at least half, and more for social psychology in particular — fail to be confirmed in repeat studies. Singal presents the many sources of these failures, including inappropriate statistical analyses, inadequate sample sizes, and questionable research practices that increase the chances of finding something that isn’t there. A research culture of chasing surprising and counterintuitive findings to attract media attention also plays a role.

Singal is searching in his critique but perhaps underplays the degree to which low rates of replication and high rates of dubious research practices afflict many areas of science, and the fact that psychologists have taken the lead in making science as a whole more open and responsible.

The final chapter of The Quick Fix explores “nudges,” those subtle tweaks to “choice architecture” that guide people towards desirable decisions. Making forms simpler is an example, as are telling people how their electricity usage compares to their neighbours’ and offering organ donation as an opt-out rather than opt-in decision. Promoted mainly by behavioural economists and institutionalised over the past decade in many government-supported “behavioural insight units,” nudging appeals to Singal. Its intuitive and often minimalist interventions, and its sober efforts to bring an experimental mindset to reforming everyday practices contrast with the splashiness and over-claiming he documents elsewhere in the book. Even here, though, he acknowledges that nudge techniques don’t invariably work as intended and aren’t entirely free of hype.

My only quibble is with Singal’s frequent description of the products of fad psychology research as “half-baked.” The degree to which the problems he reveals are caused by impatient knowledge-bakers and fix-quickeners is moot. New publish-or-perish imperatives and the old-fashioned lust for recognition can certainly lead researchers to present their work before it has been fully scrutinised and replicated; but time in the scientific oven is only one implicated aspect of the baking process.

The problems of fad psychology are as much about a lack of humility, honesty and concern for truth over novelty as they are about serving up research before it is ready for consumption. And without denying that psychologists bear the primary responsibility, the insatiable appetite of the media and popularisers for counterintuitive and overdrawn findings also plays a role.

Jesse Singal is an exceptional writer on the social and behavioural sciences, and The Quick Fix, his first book, is a showcase of his talents. He has a firm grasp of the technical and quantitative aspects of the research he examines, and he communicates what might have been dry methodological points with unusual lucidity. While he doesn’t shy away from strong claims, he is consistently fair-minded, and the targets of his criticism are invariably given a chance to respond. Free of grandstanding, ideological axe-grinding and pointscoring, a particular strength of the book is its insistence on zooming out from a specific psychological topic or finding to the broader cultural, societal and historical contexts in which it appears. Singal ventures expertly into political science, economics and sociology, repeatedly circling back to remind us of the self-evident but sometimes forgotten fact that individual behaviour is embedded in systems, institutions and implacable economic realities.

This makes him something of a rarity. Many writers expound on psychological ideas while paying the merest lip service to their wider context. Others write about politics and society while either ignoring the place of the human mind and behaviour or treating psychological analyses as reductive and individualistic. Singal offers some scalpel-sharp criticism of psychological research and its popularisation, reminding us, among other things, that the vast US racial wealth gap and current criminal justice policies probably have much more to do with contemporary racial disparities than implicit bias. But he acknowledges that psychology matters and that behavioural science is very hard to do well: human action is multi-determined, deeply contextual, hard to predict and, as the philosopher Ian Hacking observed, a moving target.

Singal’s mission is not to rebuke psychology or chastise it for not being sociology, economics or political science, but to make it better on its own aspirational terms. His prescription is greater humility, more rigour, and a fuller awareness of the limits of psychological interventions in the face of large, constraining systems of power and inequality. Psychology has a part to play in social science–informed responses to social problems, but it must become more modest, reflective and genuinely scientific in spirit.

Psychology doesn’t saturate Australian media to the degree it does in the United States, or have the same cultural cachet, so we might wonder about the local relevance of this book. But the differences are not as great as they might seem. Melbourne has more registered psychologists than New York City and many psychological concepts and practices are growing in influence. Rising concern with mental health is driving increased interest in resilience training in schools and beyond. Many organisations have embraced the notion of unconscious bias, sometimes uncritically, as a basis for equity and diversity initiatives. New behavioural insights units have sprouted within federal and state governments, and the general public remains hungry for popular psychology’s uplifting messages of self-help.

The Quick Fix provides a compelling perspective on these developments. It will leave the reader with a more questioning attitude about psychology’s latest revelations and interventions, and perhaps also with a more hopeful view of the field’s capacity to reform. •

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At first blush boredom might look to be a simple emotion, merely the mind’s response to an unstimulating environment, something that might trouble an embowled goldfish as much as a quarantined human. Not so, say the authors of this fascinating book. Boredom is as psychologically rich as the minds of those who experience it, and it isn’t even an emotion but a “feeling of thinking.” Academic psychologists James Danckert and John Eastwood have written an extended meditation on boredom as feeling and motive, as source of misery and meaning in life, as social pathology and technological predicament.

Danckert and Eastwood aren’t the first to turn their scholarly attention to boredom. Several bewhiskered German and Scandinavian philosophers have also pondered its dull ache. Arthur Schopenhauer declared it one of the two enemies of happiness, Søren Kierkegaard identified it as the root of all evil, Martin Heidegger distinguishing between its superficial and profound variants, and Friedrich Nietzsche speculated on God’s boredom on the seventh day of creation.

Psychoanalysts have weighed in, too, viewing boredom as a way of avoiding desires the person would rather not recognise. As Adam Phillips, epigram-loving author of the memorably titled On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored put it, boredom is “the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire.” In analyses such as these, boredom emerges as complex, conflicted and existential, not merely a reaction to imposed monotony.

So what then is boredom? One of the strengths of this book is that rather than plod didactically through a series of experiments or a simple explanatory scheme, the authors try to capture the subjective feel of boredom in an unreductive fashion. One part of that attempt is a careful dissection of the differences between boredom and other experiences that often travel with it, such as frustration, loneliness and sadness. Another is a deliberate attempt to distinguish what boredom is, in itself, from its causes and effects.

Although Danckert and Eastwood paint a nuanced picture, they resist the easy option of proposing that there is not one boredom but many. Boredom is singular, but it is a conglomerate of thoughts, feelings and wishes and has no single opposite to give it meaning. Sadness may be happiness’s opposite pole, but boredom’s many contrasts include curiosity, interest, relaxation and the sense of flow.

To the extent Danckert and Eastwood develop their own account of boredom, it has two mutually reinforcing elements: a “desire conundrum” and “underutilised cognitive potential.” The former refers to a sense of directionless “wanting to do something but not wanting to do anything,” when we are unable to summon a desire to do any of the things currently available to us. The latter involves the pain of not having our mental capacities optimally engaged, either because the environment is unchallenging or because it is too challenging.

This formulation captures how boredom doesn’t reside in the external reality of our world but in its lack of fit with our mental resources and aptitudes. This is not to say that the state of that world is irrelevant, of course. Monotony and situations that thwart or constrain us promote boredom, but so too do personality traits such as extraversion that make some of us more boredom-prone than others. What bores us is highly individualised, the photographic negative of the idiosyncratic pattern of things that fascinate us.

Out of My Skull clearly demonstrates that boredom has consequences. Research shows that it drives some people to over-eating, substance abuse, self-harm and other forms of impulsive behaviour. It is associated with depression and may be one of its early warning signs. People prone to boredom are especially likely to explode in anger and to engage in delinquency, with psychopaths and narcissists two cases in point. People living in extreme conditions that foster boredom — on polar research vessels, for instance, or in solitary confinement — often suffer severe psychological impacts.

According to the authors, the sense of meaninglessness and disconnection so central to boredom also drives destructive forms of engagement with technology. Although they are sceptical of claims that our societies are experiencing an epidemic of boredom, and they are not issuing yet another denunciation of the evils of social media or excessive screen time, Danckert and Eastwood argue that our devices often encourage and reward quick and easy escapes from boredom. Consuming this “junk food for the mind” is self-defeating as a response to boredom because it is ultimately unengaging and renders us passive. There is a reason why we tend to be least bored when engaged in face-to-face interaction with others.

Although Out of My Skull devotes space to the more negative implications of boredom, it also acknowledges its positive possibilities. Boredom, as Adam Phillips wrote, is a state “in which hope is being secretly negotiated.” Danckert and Eastwood suggest it is a signal notifying us that we are disengaged and prompting us to act. It motivates change and protects us from apathy, especially if we can avoid escapist responses that short-circuit rather than overcome it. In the end, being bored orients us to our agency and our need for life meaning, teaching us that we need a larger life project or perhaps that we gave one up too soon. In one of its many arresting aperçus, the book claims that “to be bored is to fail to be the author of our own lives.” Boredom tells us to pick ourselves up and write something.

Out of My Skull is an enjoyable and enlightening read that explores the many dimensions of boredom deftly but deeply. As notable researchers themselves, Danckert and Eastwood weave in selected research findings while giving at least equal time to philosophy, literature and educated introspection. The book is not an advice manual but offers a great deal of useful leads for those seeking guidance on matters such as why it is pointless to give a bored and whiny child a list of things to do, or why the teenage years are the apex of ennui.

What might this book have to offer to those of us who have succumbed to cabin fever while trying to avoid catching something worse? The authors recognise that isolation and boredom are “unhappy bedfellows,” two forms of disconnection that can have compounding effects. Even so, boredom offers up some opportunities. Out of My Skull tells us not to fear boredom or attempt to avoid or outrun it, but to embrace it instead. The capacity to be bored is an important achievement in our personal development and it spurs us to build self-reliance and find new projects and purposes: “it is good, on occasion,” say the authors, “to be understimulated by the world.”

Many of us don’t have much choice in the matter right now, but this engaging book offers wisdom and perspective on our predicament, both temporary and permanent. •

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Anxiety may have been a constant over the years, but the medical and mental health professions have treated it in radically changing ways. Fin de siècle physicians prescribed rest cures, psychoanalysts favoured lengthy exploration of the childhood roots of neurosis, and the mid-twentieth-century pioneers of psychopharmacology experimented with tranquillisers and sedatives. Later still, an assortment of short-term psychotherapies emerged, some employing the behaviourist language of conditioning, others aiming to reason people out of their dreads and inhibitions using cognitive therapy’s techniques of persuasion.

For the most part, the Antipodes were distant observers of these therapeutic developments. Australia’s nascent psychiatry profession was small, lacking in prestige within medicine, and liable to follow clinical trends dictated from the major centres in Europe and North America. Judith Hoare’s new biography documents an important and under-appreciated exception to this rule. In Dr Claire Weekes we had our own original voice in the treatment of anxiety, one that travelled from the colonial periphery to the centre and had a long and amplified impact around the world.

Contrary to the book’s title, Weekes’s life was in some respects quite ordinary. Hoare offers an intimate portrait of a rather staid and outwardly unremarkable subject who is enmeshed in the usual day-to-day challenges of domesticity and family life. What was extraordinary about Weekes was her circuitous path to expertise in the study of anxiety and the magnitude of her global influence on that field.

Weekes displayed notable intellectual gifts as a child and completed a degree in zoology in Sydney. After overcoming her own severe anxiety disorder, which was initially misdiagnosed as tuberculosis, she proceeded to obtain a Doctor of Science degree, supported by unusually enlightened male mentors. Her work on lizard embryology had an immediate impact, winning her a scholarship to continue her research in England and portending a bright academic future.

Weekes had a change of heart early in her postdoctoral career, however, first hoping to retrain in neurology, then embarking on a lengthy European tour as a singer, accompanied by a female pianist who was to become her long-term companion. She subsequently set up a travel advice bureau, only to see it collapse when war made grand tours of European cultural centres impossible. Finally, Weekes settled into medical training, graduating at the age of forty-two in 1945. Her work as a general practitioner led her to treat vast numbers of people with anxiety conditions and develop the approach to their treatment that would make her internationally famous.

The core of Weekes’s treatment approach was laid out in five self-help books. The first of these, Self Help for Your Nerves, published in 1962, was easily the most influential, and the later books largely ploughed the same furrow. The book, a classic of the bibliotherapy genre, has sold several hundred thousand copies and presents the sufferer with a framework for making sense of their condition — notionally any form of anxiety but especially targeting what is now called panic disorder — and a practical guide to curing it.

The framework is an accessibly written medical explanation based on the bodily basis of fear and on stress-sensitised nerves in particular. The guide provides a set of injunctions, summarised as “face, accept, float, let time pass.” The distinctive gist of Weekes’s approach is that anxiety should be confronted but not fought. The person experiencing intense, debilitating fear should not avoid it but should aim to pass through it in a spirit of present-focused acceptance, confident that it is temporary and that recovery is not only possible but assured.

Hoare has a fierce commitment to giving Weekes her due as a neglected figure in Australian and international medical history. There is no doubt that Weekes has not received the recognition she might have won, a 1979 MBE notwithstanding. Even so, Hoare’s case for the magnitude of the professional neglect she experienced and of the professional contribution she made is occasionally overstated.

Weekes may never have been embraced by the psychiatric or broader medical profession, aside from a few devoted champions, but that cool reception had many sources. Professionals invariably look askance at peers who popularise ideas and simplify them for a general audience in the process, a factor that Hoare emphasises in explaining why Weekes’s work was disregarded, while plainly viewing it as illegitimate. But Weekes did her ideas no favours by failing to present them to specialist audiences in scientific or professional publications, making little reference to competing explanations or treatments in her writing, and providing no meaningful evidence for the efficacy of her treatment approach, one scientifically worthless survey of self-selected patients failing that task by a wide margin.

Coupled with never having formally trained as a psychiatrist and rejecting its diagnostic concepts in favour of the rather quaint and over-general “nerves,” this refusal to engage with the psychiatric profession using its preferred methods for establishing truth and value ensured that many within the profession would see Weekes as merely a dispenser of self-help nostrums, however unfair that perception might seem in retrospect. Weekes’s equal reluctance to engage with the psychology and cognitive therapy communities, with whom she could have made common cause against the Freudians and pill-pushing pharmacologists, had the same result.

Hoare is certainly right to see Weekes as deserving greater repute as a mental health pioneer, but at times her biography overlooks how much the neglect between the mental health professions and Weekes was reciprocal. Weekes was a strong and self-reliant thinker, but her conventional success was likely undermined as much by her insistence on autonomy and her refusal to engage with the contemporary science of anxiety — unfortunate in view of her aptitude as a scientist — as by any prejudice among her medical colleagues against popularisers.

It is also possible to quibble with the book’s claims about the magnitude of Weekes’s contributions to the understanding and treatment of anxiety. Hoare is a passionate advocate for Weekes as a theorist of anxiety and as a therapeutic visionary, but the suggestion that she “cracked the code” of anxiety is hard to credit. Parallels can be drawn between elements of her thinking and later developments in the theory of anxiety, such as the ideas that panic (but not all anxiety) is grounded in fear of fear, that agoraphobia is not in fact fear of the agora but of the panic that tends to strike there, and that distinct neural systems are involved in clinical anxiety. Weekes’s ideas of accepting and floating through anxiety also anticipate in some respects the embrace of acceptance and mindfulness by so called “third-wave” cognitive-behavioural therapies in the early 2000s.

But the suggestion that Weekes was the first thinker to have these ideas, the most farsighted, or the one who grasped anxiety’s essence before others is exaggerated. Similar thoughts and therapeutic approaches and challenges to the Freudian orthodoxy on the nature and treatment of anxiety were being developed around the same time or before by several psychiatrists and psychologists. Many of them presented their ideas in professional forums and with greater scientific support, although they tended to use different vocabulary and lacked Weekes’s enviable capacity for public outreach.

Weekes and her proponents never seemed to grasp that the manifest impact of her books on thousands of readers, communicated in grateful letters by the bagful, did not provide the sort of validation her ideas required for mainstream acclaim. The nomination of Weekes for a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine by her advocates in 1989, despite her having published no scientific work on her theories or on the efficacy of her treatments, has more than a note of pathos to it.

Ultimately, though, Nobel Prizes and scientific firsts are not the point. Weekes deserves our recognition not for making grand discoveries about the nature of anxiety. She deserves it for recognising the vast but often hidden suffering caused by “nerves,” for developing an accessible method for reducing it on a grand scale at a time when most treatment was one-to-one and ineffective, and for having the energy and determination to promote that method around the world.

It is impossible to quantify the human suffering that Weekes’s work has alleviated, but major awards and honours are routinely given for scientific discoveries that have surely had far less benefit. Contributions of this kind — high in influence but low in prestige, because “popular” — are often overlooked. In this fine book, Hoare has rescued the legacy of a great Australian from that fate. •

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Just how radically wrong this skull-braille was is made radiantly clear in Amee Baird’s engaging book. Bumps on the head don’t allow us to read personalities, of course, but the more basic idea that something as rich and complex as human sexuality might sit in a single brain location is also bunk. Baird, an Australian clinical neuropsychologist, shows that sex is sustained by a complex network of brain regions and pathways, and that alterations to any part of this network can influence sexual response. Ironically, the occipital lobe of the brain, where amativeness was thought to reside, is the one lobe that is out of the network.

The neurological case study has become a popular genre through the work of masters such as the late Oliver Sacks and Harold Klawans. Sacks became famous for his humanising portraits of ordinary people living with extraordinary symptoms. In his case studies these symptoms were rarely sexual, with the exception of Natasha K. from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In her late eighties Natasha became, as she remarked, “frisky,” entertaining carnal ideas about much younger men. She proceeded to amaze Sacks by correctly diagnosing herself with “Cupid’s disease,” a loss of inhibition caused by brain infection resulting from syphilis, which she had contracted seventy years earlier while working in a brothel. Sacks’s message here is that the effects of disease are not invariably negative and do not always cause dis-ease. As Natasha said, in appreciation of her late-in-life rejuvenation, “You’ve got to give it to Cupid.”

Sex in the Brain pays homage to Sacks and even discusses at length one of his later cases, but it has a few important differences from previous case study collections. For a start, the book has a single theme, whereas many such collections are jumbles, occasionally carrying a slight whiff of freak show. Although only a fraction of the cases she discusses are her own, Baird displays an intimate acquaintance with her patients that comes from what she calls “the luxury of time” — the fact that her clinical assessments take hours to conduct, so different from the rapid consultations medical clinicians normally deliver. Unlike many writers of case collections, Baird is a psychologist rather than a medically trained neurologist, and perhaps as a result her chapters mingle case details with discussions of contemporary neuroimaging research. Her psychology background also shines through in her gentle skewering of neurosurgeons’ personalities.

The book’s chapters present an array of sexual alterations and aberrations resulting from brain damage or disease. Baird discusses hypersexuality, apparent changes of sexual orientation, erotomanic delusions of being loved by someone famous, paedophilia induced by brain tumours, the effects of pornography consumption on the brain, and the neural basis of love and sexual pleasure. Brain-based sexual complications associated with Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, dementia and autism are explored, as are the ways that some complications are themselves complicated by gender. (One grumpy and taciturn husband becomes warm, appreciative and romantic to his spouse following a left hemisphere brain injury.) As the book progresses, the reader is introduced to onanistic monkeys, brain structures with interesting names (amygdala and hippocampus derive from words for almond and seahorse), grotesque “cures” for homosexuality, safety-pin fetishes, epileptic seizures that cause orgasms, and orgasms that cause seizures and strokes.

One rather surprising revelation is how often sexual disturbances in the context of neurological conditions result from the treatments rather than the conditions themselves. Some people with Parkinson’s disease have developed sexual excesses following dopamine replacement therapy. Others with epilepsy and other neurological disorders are afflicted by an assortment of sexual disturbances following brain surgeries intended to correct the orginal problem. Baird shows how the unending quest to improve medical treatment has sometimes violated the Hippocratic injunction to “do no harm,” and how when those harms have been sexual in nature they have sometimes been neglected. Too often, she suggests, doctors have failed to ask patients, let alone their partners, about bedroom side effects.

A temptation in neuroscience writing is to reduce the person with a neurological condition to their brainhood and to define the condition as a loss of the individual self. Baird, as a seasoned clinician, is sensitive to how social networks matter as much as neural networks, and shows how the sexual disruptions caused by brain disorders influence a patient’s relationships with partners and family members.

Baird is at her compassionate best when she embeds her patients’ sometimes embarrassing or shameful behaviour in the broader context of their frayed lives and social connections. She writes amiably, accessibly and without titillation. Sex in the Brain introduces a very promising new talent in popular neuroscience and deserves to be widely read. •

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In the years that followed, I learned the hard way that authors don’t set book prices and academic writing is not a pathway to wealth. I came to realise that my dislike for Eagleton was immature and irrational. But rather than abandon it, I found grounds for renewal in one of his book reviews:

The cult of the Individual Life is… ultimately self-defeating. For one thing, most individual existences are routine and unremarkable… Biographies cannot help reminding us, in the very act of distilling the uniqueness of their subjects, of just what tediously generic creatures they are… even the most wayward of geniuses have to get themselves born and educated, fight with their parents, fall in love and die.

Eagleton’s disdain for individuality went against everything I believed as an aspiring psychologist. The ways we tell our life stories disclose our complex selves, and to flatten them into a few generic chapters seemed deeply anti-psychological. Our lives are, of course, moulded by our social and economic positions, but there is surely a degree of narrative uniqueness to the autobiographies we spin in our heads.

I was reminded of my pique when reading David Brooks’s The Second Mountain. On its face the book is a guide to living a morally enriched life, but it is inseparable from its author’s autobiography. Brooks, a conservative columnist at the New York Times and author of numerous widely read books, most recently The Social Animal and The Road to Character, will be known to Australian readers through his regular appearances as a political analyst alongside Mark Shields and Judy Woodruff on PBS NewsHour, broadcast locally by SBS. Five years ago, Brooks divorced his wife of twenty-eight years, began a relationship with a much younger researcher who worked for him, and underwent a spiritual transformation that prompted a partial conversion from his natal Judaism to Christian faith. When Brooks writes about the second mountain, it is clear that he is catching his breath from a recent climb.

For Brooks the second mountain is the one we must ascend after falling off the first. In his telling, the first mountain is the struggle for personal achievement and happiness, an individualistic quest for conventional success. The dark side of this struggle is loneliness, depression, a crisis of meaning, distrust, and the social and political tribalism that they breed. When people realise the bleak ecology of the first mountain or have their faith in it shaken by misfortune, they enter what Brooks describes biblically as a valley or wilderness. From there they can make a decision to follow a different path and climb the second mountain.

According to Brooks, this peak is higher than the first and has an entirely different moral system. Instead of “hyper-individualism” there is an ethos of belonging and community, which Brooks dubs “relationalism.” He concludes his book with a relationalist manifesto that lays out, in sixty-four numbered paragraphs, the tenets of this middle way between individualism and collectivism. On the second mountain people strive not only for social connection but also for permanent “moral joy” rather than mere transitory happiness. They aim to transcend rather than enhance themselves, and to offer unconditional care to those who are less fortunate than themselves. What unites them is a set of commitments — to a vocation, to a marriage, to a faith or belief system, and to a community — and the bulk of the book is dedicated to groups of chapters exploring these four commitments.

Brooks writes amiably, openly and without showiness, aside from a tendency to over-season his prose with quotes from the great and good, with a tilt towards Americans and religious figures. There is Lincoln and C.S. Lewis, King and Kierkegaard, Dillard and Dostoyevsky. Most chapters are relatively short and pithy, the main exception being a chapter within a section on faith that pivots to Brooks’s spiritual awakening and remarriage and is twice the length of any other. Here he describes an extended process of religious doubt and dalliance that ends with him committed to a form of Christianity while remaining culturally Jewish. The centrality of personal faith to Brooks’s journey up the second mountain becomes clear here, although it is perhaps less likely to feature in the journeys of most Australian readers. However, any suspicion that The Second Mountain is just another book for elevating solo souls is mistaken. Brooks writes thoughtfully on the dependence of personal development on positive institutions and communities — “second mountain institutions” — and his own efforts to build them.

Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. Indeed, he wrote it twice, once in an essay published in 1932 and once in his posthumously published novel The Last Tycoon. He probably didn’t mean it on either occasion, presenting it on the first occasion as something he once thought. If anything, the idea of second acts is especially prominent in American ways of storying lives, with their frequent themes of relentless optimism, manifest personal destiny and reinvention. Exploring how everyday people compose these personal narratives has been the research focus of the eminent American psychologist Dan McAdams. In some respects an anti-Eagleton, McAdams has devoted his career to understanding how we create personal myths with distinctive character types, themes and trajectories, binding our past, present and imagined future into a coherent sense of personal identity.

In interviews with middle-aged, middle-class Americans, McAdams has found that many life stories conform to what he calls a “redemption narrative.” These narratives contain five common elements. The protagonist experiences early advantage in life, has a precocious awareness of suffering or injustice in the world, develops a strong moral compass, is driven to act selflessly for others, and passes through a period of personal adversity into a redemptive future. Although some might be inclined to view this formula cynically, McAdams has found that adults in midlife whose personal stories match its contours are especially committed to making a positive contribution to future generations, an aspiration the great but unfashionable psychoanalyst Erik Erikson referred to as “generativity.”

Brooks does not cite McAdams, but his first mountain–second mountain scheme has more than a whiff of redemption narrative about it. The second mountain of joyful belonging redeems the first mountain of individualistic striving. In this regard, The Second Mountain is an occasionally inspiring tale of personal transformation and hope that flows along a deeply carved narrative channel in American culture, saturated as it is with religiosity and optimism.

How well this narrative resonates with readers with different backgrounds is open to question. For some, perhaps especially women, personal transformation is less a movement from individualism to relationalism and more the reverse movement from social obligation and embeddedness towards liberation. For people outside the American milieu, this romantic narrative of onward-and-upward overcoming will feel foreign and the constant uplift hard to stomach. I suspect many Australians will relate better to a comic narrative in which the protagonist bounces through a series of ups and downs without an unironic sense of personal mission or heroism.

Most of all, I wonder how distant or illusory the second mountain might seem to young people and others whose economic vistas are less rosy than fifty-something professionals. Creeping casualisation and the gig economy are making it more difficult for people to reach the foothills of a first mountain of conventional career success, let alone ascend it. Brooks is correct in identifying individualism as one element of what is wrong with contemporary American life — the untrammelled rise of the market is a correlated element that he tends to neglect — but we might hope for ways to find social connection and community that don’t require people to pursue self-seeking ambition for the first decades of adult life only to find it wanting in midlife.

It is no criticism of Brooks to observe that his book’s main target audience has a particular age, class and cultural profile. The average second mountaineer may be a well-off late boomer or an early gen Xer, but that is no reason to scoff at their aspirations to joy, community or selfless commitment to others. The world would not be worse off if more people embraced lives of service and altruism. But it is important to remember that some of us live socioeconomically closer to the mountains than others. Terry Eagleton would surely agree. •

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Politicians don’t lose their personalities when they are elevated to leadership positions, and it would be surprising if their idiosyncratic ways of thinking, feeling and acting did not influence their behaviour and decisions. The challenge is to make sense of that influence in a way that is reliable, fair-minded and nuanced. It is easy to carry out psychobiographical hitjobs, caricaturing political enemies with armchair diagnoses and abusing the interpretive licence of psychoanalytic ideas. It is equally easy to pretend that the psychology of political leaders is irrelevant, and that only policy, ideology and economic system matter. The former approach is reductive; the latter ignores the human element.

One way out of this dilemma is to understand the personality of political leaders in a more sober and rigorous manner than most psychobiographers have done. In this fascinating book, Princeton University political scientist Keren Yarhi-Milo shows how this can be achieved. Yarhi-Milo turns to the mainstream psychology of personality traits rather than to Freud, and the result is a compelling investigation of one trait that appears to have very real implications for the fortunes of American presidents from the cold war to the present. Who Fights for Reputation is a substantial but accessible work of scholarship that sets a very high standard for future studies of personality and political leadership.

The trait Yarhi-Milo puts front and centre is “self-monitoring,” a personality characteristic that was introduced to academic psychology two months after Nixon left office in disgrace. The trait captures differences in how people adapt their expressive behaviour to its context. People who are low in self-monitoring are disinclined to present themselves in different ways to different audiences, instead seeking congruence between their beliefs and their behaviour. These low self-monitors value consistency, steadfastness and being true to their (static) selves.

High self-monitors, in contrast, adjust their performances of self to the changing demands and expectations of their situation. Strategic impression managers, they value flexibility and fitting in. High self-monitors see low self-monitors as stolid stick-in-the-muds. Low self-monitors see high self-monitors as inauthentic, status-seeking chameleons. As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim opined during a cameo in Zelig, Woody Allen’s mockumentary about an extreme human chameleon, “one could really think of him as the ultimate conformist.”

Yarhi-Milo uses the concept of self-monitoring to explain how political leaders, and American presidents in particular, respond to external threats. She argues for the pivotal importance of “reputation for resolve” in militarised crisis situations, where leaders must signal a willingness to fight if a red line is crossed and, if it is, must be prepared to fight so that their future signals are to be taken seriously. Fighting for reputation in this manner might appear irrational in the contemporary circumstances, but on the longer view it could be a prudent way of deterring future aggressions. Similarly, deciding that preserving face is not a good reason to fight may be sensible in the short term but create a reputation for weakness that emboldens opponents.

Yarhi-Milo proposes that two factors interact to determine a leader’s willingness to use military force. One is the leader’s hawkishness: hawks who believe in the efficacy of military force are more likely to deploy it than sceptical doves. The other is the leader’s level of self-monitoring. Leaders who are high self-monitors — oriented to how they are perceived by others and concerned about image, face and status — are more likely to act militarily because they have a stronger desire to create a reputation for resolve. (There is an irony here that is unremarked by Yarhi-Milo: the leaders who are most exercised by the desire to appear steadfast are those who are the most mercurial.) The two factors interact because self-monitoring is especially influential among dovish leaders, who are more likely to be Democrats in the American political environment. As a result, high self-monitor doves may be more prone to fight than low self-monitor hawks. This argument has obvious relevance to the military adventures of charismatic liberal or social democratic leaders in recent history.

Yarhi-Milo proceeds to support her predictions using the methodological toolkit of the social sciences, notably a survey of the public, a statistical comparison of the eleven US presidents from Harry Truman to George W. Bush, and intensive historical case studies of how three of them — Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — responded to foreign affairs crises. The extended statistical study is remarkable, and even readers allergic to p-values and negative binomial regression will find it compelling.

Yarhi-Milo recruited sixty-eight presidential historians to rate the self-monitoring levels of presidents they had studied closely, using the questionnaire normally used to assess the trait in psychological research. This is not putting historical figures on the couch so much as putting them to the (personality) test. Most presidents scored relatively high on the trait, with Carter, Ford and G.H.W. Bush relatively low and Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan and most of all Clinton especially high. The presidents’ hawkishness was assessed by a systematic analysis of the content of their foreign policy speeches, with Truman, Eisenhower and Ford adjudged high and Kennedy, Carter and G.H.W. Bush low. Nixon, perverse and pathological in the eyes of Volkan and colleagues, was rather average on both measures.

Strikingly, Yarhi-Milo’s analysis reveals that high self-monitor presidents were twice as likely as their low self-monitor peers to initiate “militarised interstate disputes,” or MIDs. This finding held equally for Republicans and Democrats: high self-monitors Reagan and Kennedy embarked on the most MIDs, and low self-monitors Truman and Nixon the least. These large effects persisted even after assorted historical, geopolitical and demographic factors were statistically controlled. In addition to initiating more MIDs, high self-monitor presidents were more likely to have had them end favourably to the United States, implying that their aggressive resolve may have paid off.

The exhaustively researched case studies that close out Yarhi-Milo’s book put flesh on the statistical bones of her key findings. Low self-monitor dove Jimmy Carter’s travails in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan are placed in the context of his stubborn reliance on principle over persuasion. The battling influences of his advisers Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski are also brought to life, the latter a high self-monitor who urged Carter to pick fights with foreign leaders to project an image of toughness. The military assertiveness of high self-monitor hawk Ronald Reagan, who announced that “our days of weakness are over,” is examined through the escalating conflict in Afghanistan and interventions in Lebanon and Grenada. High self-monitor dove Bill Clinton, of the “dangerous charisma” and the “you-are-the-only-person-in-the-world gaze,” is tracked through actions in Haiti, the Taiwan Strait and Somalia, where his concern for maintaining the American reputation for resolve motivated a continuing presence that became deeply unpopular on the home front.

Throughout this intriguing work, Yarhi-Milo rehabilitates personality as a respectable focus for the study of political leaders, showing that presidential personality matters to an unexpected and highly consequential degree. She not only demonstrates that the personality traits of powerful people are themselves powerful, but also clarifies the image-burnishing concerns through which one such trait has its effects. Nations are led into armed conflict not only by pragmatic calculations of cost and benefit but also by considerations of reputation, and presidents who are more inclined to “fight for face” are more likely to weigh these considerations heavily.

Yarhi-Milo’s dispositional account of presidential behaviour can seem one-note at times, perhaps over-reliant on a single personality trait that has lost some favour in its academic home of personality psychology. But it offers a model for systematic future studies of personality and leadership on the world stage. Whether traits such as self-monitoring have similar effects in political systems where the power of leaders is more trammelled, and whether they predict leaders’ behaviour in domestic contexts as well as in foreign military conflicts remain to be examined. All the same, this illuminating book shows the wisdom of the simple but sometimes forgotten fact that, as Yarhi-Milo reminds us, “leaders are, at the end of the day, humans.” •

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You can see why Greg Lukianoff, a free-speech lawyer, and Jon Haidt, a social psychologist, would be uneasy about the word. To refer to coddling when writing about today’s college students might seem to imply criticism of the students themselves — another instance of the intergenerational sniping about spoiled youth that has been with us since Socrates complained that “the children now love luxury… they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannise their teachers.” But Lukianoff and Haidt primarily target academics, parents and the institutions they have prepared for the current generation of students. Theirs is not another attack on millennial “snowflakes”; it is more an attempt to tease apart the societal and cultural changes that have created young people who believe they are fragile and who have decided that a particular form of “vindictive protectiveness” is the armour they need.

Lukianoff and Haidt may have been queasy about their book’s title for another reason. It deliberately echoes an earlier critique of campus culture, Allan Bloom’s much-debated but little-read The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987. Bloom’s jeremiad took aim at relativist professors, political correctness, the coarseness and shallowness of youth culture and the decline of great books and classical music. A stern, moralising text, it was full of declinism and affirmations of the besieged Western tradition. Although some readers will reflexively slot this new book into Bloom’s mould, it is not fundamentally conservative, although it is certainly critical of some contemporary college mores.

Lukianoff and Haidt are both avowed Democrats, one a self-declared liberal and the other a centrist, and their target is not liberalism so much as a new illiberalism they identify in the campus left. On the surface, not much has changed since Closing became Coddling: we still have humanities departments thick with critical social theorists — fewer “tenured radicals” only because there is less tenure — and we still have the bitter arguments about speech codes and activist teaching. What has changed, Lukianoff and Haidt argue, are the grounds that student appeal to when expressing disapproval of offending views and their preferred means of dealing with the offenders.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I first met Jon Haidt in 1987, not long after Bloom’s book thundered onto the shelves, when we both entered graduate school in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time Jon was an avid liberal who swiftly enlisted me to help out on Michael Dukakis’s doomed presidential campaign against Bush the first. Jon and I shared an office for several years while he conducted his soon-to-be-famous work on the psychology of disgust and the emotional grounding of moral judgement. Since that time, he has written two bestselling books, The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind, shaped the fields of moral and political psychology, and founded Heterodox Academy, an organisation that promotes political diversity on campus. Little did I know back then that I would be name-dropping him three decades later.

The problems that Lukianoff and Haidt wish to explain will be well known to anyone who has followed American universities for the past half-decade. At the extreme end are violent protests in response to challenging ideas. These include a student takeover of Evergreen State College in reaction to a biology academic who refused to leave the campus on a day white students and staff were asked to leave; riots in Berkeley occasioned by a speech by troll-provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos; a physical assault on an academic escorting The Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray from a speaking engagement at Middlebury College; and shocking denunciations of other academics at Yale and Claremont McKenna College whose well-meaning speech gave offence.

Often these events occurred during attempts to prevent invited speakers from speaking, a phenomenon that Lukianoff and Haidt show to have been ideologically balanced in previous decades but is now predominantly carried out by the left. Less extreme but much more common phenomena are the spread of what Lukianoff and Haidt take to be dangerous ways of accommodating student sensitivities, such as the designation of “safe spaces” where they can go to be away from undesired experiences or people, the use of “trigger warnings” to announce that potentially discomfiting material is about to be presented in class, and the rise of training programs to identify “microaggressions,” subtle expressions of supposed prejudice — such as asking an Asian student where she is from, or declaring America to be the land of opportunity — and call out the perpetrators.

Such are the symptoms of the new campus disorder, but what is the underlying pathology? According to Lukianoff and Haidt it is the rising prominence of three “Great Untruths.” There is the Untruth of Fragility (“what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”), the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning (“always trust your feelings”) and the Untruth of Us versus Them (“life is a battle between good people and evil people”).

Before turning to its analysis of the social trends that have generated these damaging beliefs, the book unpicks each of them. The widespread belief in fragility is ascribed to a rising culture of “safetyism” that overvalues comfort, inflates risk and demands protection from bothersome ideas. A better belief, say the authors, is anti-fragility: just as muscles need resistance to grow, personal development requires challenge and difficulty rather than softness and enablement. The excessive reliance on subjective feelings reflects a new focus on emotional impact rather than intention when apportioning blame: it is enough that someone feels offended or traumatised to punish the perpetrator, whether or not they meant harm. The belief in a world divided between good and evil people is driven by theories of power and privilege that license dichotomous thinking about victims and oppressors; it is also associated with a tribal form of identity politics and the apparent embrace of virtuous victimhood that sometimes accompanies it. Lukianoff and Haidt are not opposed to identity-based politics in principle but take issue with forms that undermine a sense of common ground and humanity across group boundaries.

Running through these three untruths is a conviction that today’s students are thinking about familiar concepts in unfamiliar ways. Safety was once understood as protection from physical harm but is now invoked in relation to harmful ideas or emotions. Trauma used to refer to life-threatening adversities but is now used to describe encounters with offending words. Speech can now be violence and right-wing ideologies that were once seen as extreme are now redefined as permeating the political spectrum. In the words of one student chant reported in the book, “liberalism is white supremacy.”

Here the authors cite my own work on “concept creep,” which documents how definitions of harm-related ideas in the social sciences — for example, bullying, prejudice and mental illness — have steadily expanded to include a progressively wider range of experiences and actions. As the concepts inflate, they identify more and more experiences as harmful and more and more people as harmed or harming. Lukianoff and Haidt suggest that emotional fragility, efforts to exclude controversial guest speakers and a readiness to take fierce offence at clumsy turns of phrase might all ultimately result from creeping concepts. Expansive definitions of harm may undermine not only personal resilience but also interpersonal civility.

The bulk of the book examines social trends that may have contributed to the current fractious state of American colleges. Any satisfactory explanation of the coddling phenomenon must reckon with its relatively sudden appearance, but most of the six contributing factors that Lukianoff and Haidt identify do not. One is the rising political polarisation in the United States, another is the rise of student-centred college bureaucracies with their well-intended behaviour codes and awareness-raising social programs, and a third is the growing tendency for an increasingly liberal professoriate to present unequal social outcomes as direct evidence of injustice and prejudice.

A more surprising pair of factors addressed at length are “paranoid parenting” and the decline of free play among school-aged children. The former is driven by exaggerated parental concerns about threats, the resulting over-protection and “helicoptering” impeding the development of independence. The latter partly reflects a parenting philosophy of talent cultivation, supported by an excessive focus on skill development in schools. Students become over-scheduled, often in the service of a “résumé arms race” to enhance applications to the best colleges.

But the factor that gets the most airplay, and the only one that can perhaps account for the timing of the changes on campus, is the use of smartphones. Relying on the work of psychologist Jean Twenge, Lukianoff and Haidt suggest that social media immersion and excessive screen time from a young age amplify common adolescent concerns surrounding peer exclusion and body image. One outcome is increasing rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide among young people, especially, the authors claim contentiously, since about 2010. The heightened tensions on campus from around 2013 might be manifestations of a more psychologically vulnerable student body, especially one jostled by the political turbulence of Trump, Black Lives Matter, Charlottesville and now #MeToo.

Lukianoff and Haidt offer several prescriptions to treat the pathology of coddling. Some are directed to parents and school systems. Children should become more free-range, with less adult supervision. Parents should encourage greater autonomy (but limit screen time), show how to engage in respectful disagreement and how to be charitable in dealing with opponents, and challenge distorted emotional reasoning. Schools should give more time to play and less to homework and the single-minded pursuit of academic success. Universities should demonstrate a genuine commitment to freedom of speech and inquiry and allow protest only when it does not prevent unpopular views from being heard. They should reject the great untruths and the encroachment of safetyism, and actively support viewpoint diversity and civil debate.

Some of these proposals are idealistic, swimming against the rip-tide of ongoing societal changes, but many are refreshingly concrete and actionable.

A key question for Australian readers is whether the book’s arguments are germane to our young people, our polity and our universities. The answer is mixed, but perhaps more yes for our youth and no for our institutions of government and higher learning. It is unquestionably true that many of the cultural trends that Lukianoff and Haidt observe are global rather than uniquely North American. Our children are less physically active than their parents were, spend much more time transfixed by screens, and seem to be afflicted with higher rates of depression and anxiety, although some of the alarmist figures drawn from local surveys are unreliable. Social media is just as much a preoccupation here as in the United States, and online mobbing is no stranger to our digital shores. Indeed, some of the societal changes that feed the generational predicament that Lukianoff and Haidt document are deeply familiar.

In other respects, however, their work resonates less powerfully. Our politics may be rather dire, but they rarely reach the Manichean levels of polarisation that have become entrenched in Trump’s America. Our racial divides are not as inflamed. Our campuses witness the occasional protest when a speaker presents a contrary view on a topic du jour, but these events have yet to spark the anarchic violence of Berkeley or Evergreen. Political diversity among Australian academics is probably similar to our American peers but our ideological differences rarely become a focus of public conflict. Trigger warnings have not caught on widely among lecturers and “microaggression” has not entered most students’ vocabularies.

Meanwhile, the one-dimensionally academic basis for selection into most Australian university courses arguably works against over-involved parenting. Many American parents engage in fevered curation of extracurricular activities to give their children the best shot at the most prestigious colleges, which want evidence of sporting prowess and civic-mindedness as well as sky-high grades. And for Australian students, who generally commute to university from the suburbs and work off campus, higher education is a less total and encompassing experience than it is for students living at America’s elite colleges, where most of the well-publicised campus conflicts have taken place. In a less hothouse environment, the more disturbing dynamics that Lukianoff and Haidt document are perhaps less likely to flower.

And yet we shouldn’t be surprised if the sorts of campus conflict that motivated this book emerge here, perhaps as suddenly as they did in the United States. American trends have a way of becoming ours at a lag. British universities are experiencing their own version of safetyism and the no-platforming of unpopular speech. Campus culture is showing signs of change, especially around the salutary goal of increasing respect and reducing harassment and other forms of maltreatment. Lukianoff and Haidt would not object to that goal, but their book reminds us that some of the means taken to achieve it have a way of transforming into something darker. •

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Let me get off my chest what’s wrong with the Myers–Briggs, or MBTI as it is known in the acronymphomaniac world of personality testing. The MBTI classifies people according to four binary distinctions: whether they are extraverts or introverts, intuitive or sensing types, thinkers or feelers, and judges or perceivers. Three of these distinctions rest on an archaic theory of personality typing proposed by Carl Jung, and the fourth was invented and grafted on by the test’s developers.

The four distinctions bear little relation to what decades of systematic research have taught us about the structure of personality. They are smeared unevenly over four of the five dimensions that most contemporary personality psychologists accept as fundamental, and completely ignore a fifth, which is associated with the tendency to experience negative emotions. The same effort to erase the dark side of personality is evident in the MBTI’s use of sanitising labels to obscure the negative aspects of its four distinctions. In large measure, being a thinking type amounts to being interpersonally disagreeable, and being a perceiving type to being impulsive and lacking in persistence. But in MBTI-world, all personality types are sunnily positive, a catalogue of our “differing gifts.”

The MBTI doesn’t only misrepresent the content of personality. It also gets the nature of personality fundamentally wrong. Despite masses of scientific evidence that human personality is not composed of types, its four distinctions are understood as crisp dichotomies that combine to yield sixteen discrete personality “types,” each with a four-letter acronym such as INTJ or ESFP. In reality, personality varies by degrees along a set of continuous dimensions, just like height, weight or blood pressure. In the face of mountains of research demonstrating that personality is malleable throughout the lifespan, proponents of the MBTI also argue that one’s type is inborn and unchanging. In short, the MBTI presents personality as a fixed essence whereas the science of personality shows it to be a continuous flux.

The MBTI also fails to meet the standard statistical requirements of psychological tests. Its items employ a problematic forced-choice format that requires people to decide which of two statements describes them better. Its scales lack coherence. The typology lacks re-test reliability, which means that people are commonly scored as having different types when they complete the measure on two separate occasions. Evidence that MBTI type correlates with real-world behaviour — known as predictive validity in the trade — is scant.

So why is a test with weak psychometric credentials, based on a musty theory of personality that gets the structure of human personality wrong, so enduringly popular? Arguably its weaknesses from a scientific standpoint are precisely what give it its appeal. Personality may not really form discrete types, but people relish the clarity of noun categories and binary oppositions. Personality may not really come in sixteen flavours, but MBTI types are sweet simplifications. Personality may be mutable, but people find reassurance in the idea that they have an unchanging true self. And the average person could not give two hoots about the statistical considerations that trouble test developers.

What matters to most people, at least those who complete the MBTI as an exercise in self-understanding rather than a compulsory workplace activity, is whether it offers accessible and palatable insight. And the MBTI undoubtedly provides that in spades. Its four-letter codes are readily grasped, its descriptions flatter our strengths, and the fact that its four distinctions bear some relationship to fundamental personality traits ensures that it offers a certain truthiness.

Although the shortcomings of the MBTI have been discussed within academic psychology for decades, a historical analysis has been lacking. Merve Emre’s fascinating new book, What’s Your Type? The Strange History of Myers–Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing, fills that gap stylishly. Emre, a literature academic at Oxford, documents the genesis of the MBTI in the Jungian enthusiasms of Katharine Briggs and the more worldly ambitions of her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. Despite the subtitle’s questionable reference to the “birth” of personality testing — the first test dates back almost another thirty years to the first world war — the book’s recounting of the origins of the instrument is colourful and revealing.

Katharine Briggs emerges as someone single-mindedly devoted to making sense of human individuality and using that sense to guide people in directions to which she believed them suited. As a young mother without training in psychology, she developed a system of personality typing that she used in an informal child guidance, or “baby training,” enterprise, later finding a resonance between her ideas and those expressed in Carl Jung’s Psychological Types, which was published in 1921. Jung became Katharine’s “personal God”: at one point she wrote a hymn to him (“Upward, upward, from primal scum / Individuation / Is our destination / Hoch, Heil, Hail to Dr Jung!”). Encouraged by her correspondence with the great man, and armed with 3ʺ x 5ʺ index cards, Katharine refined her classification system and compulsively typed everyone she encountered, from neighbourhood children to Adolf Hitler.

Katharine’s daughter Isabel Briggs Myers had a more pragmatic cast of mind but inherited her mother’s absorption in types. After writing two mystery novels, she developed an early version of the MBTI while working for America’s first corporate personality consultant in 1943. Soon after, she launched it as a small commercial proposition. In the late 1950s the questionnaire was picked up by the Educational Testing Service, an eminent test developer and publisher in Princeton, New Jersey, giving it a chance at mainstream success and respectability. After endless wrangling between Isabel and staff psychometricians, though, the ETS lost interest and cut its losses. Seeing the instrument as “little better than a horoscope,” ETS staff insisted on conducting the same validation research as any other test would undergo, but Isabel remained resistant and possessive. Eventually a new publisher released the MBTI as a self-scored test and it quickly became a staple of the US$2 billion personality assessment industry, especially beloved by personnel consultants.

As history goes, Emre’s book is compelling and well paced. It presents Katharine and Isabel as rounded characters and places them in a richly drawn cultural and historical context. But as an account of personality testing more generally, the book is flawed. Despite having chronicled the many ways in which the MBTI was a cuckoo in the nest of personality psychology — the product of obsessed amateurs, disparaged by the psychometric orthodoxy at the ETS, popularised rather than professionalised — Emre sees it as emblematic. An emblem it is not. Unlike most other major tests, its use is not restricted to trained professionals and its legacy is protected by an almost cultish organisation that forbade Emre access to most of the Briggs–Myers papers, despite their officially being open to the public. Unlike other tests, the MBTI doesn’t promote itself by appeal to a validating body of scientific evidence. To treat the MBTI as representative of contemporary personality testing is like presenting the primal scream as representative of modern psychotherapy.

Emre is on more solid ground when she describes the functions of workforce personality testing, using the MBTI as an example. Its key purpose in that domain — only one of several in which it is used, it must be said — is indeed to select people who are likely to perform better than others in particular lines of work. Ideally that rationale is backed by evidence that the tests are valid predictors of workplace performance. Whether this purpose is benign or sinister is open to debate. It can be viewed positively as the legitimate application of behavioural science to enhance the wellbeing of workers and the success of organisations, or negatively as a dystopian tool for creating human cogs for the corporate machine.

Emre favours the darker interpretation, writing that personality typing “conscripts people into bureaucratic hierarchies.” This charge is hyperbolic: even if one is critical of the use of the MBTI or other testing, it does not force people into any position against their will, it is not employed exclusively in bureaucratic organisations, and it is used at least as much to differentiate people horizontally according to their strengths as it is to stratify them in hierarchies. The very same charge could be made against any other approach to selecting or assigning people to organisational roles, including interviews, hiring quotas or old boy networks.

The key question has to be whether personality testing selects and assigns people to work roles in ways that are better or worse than its alternatives: whether it is fairer and more valid, efficient or desirable than some other preferred metric. Unless there are grounds for believing that personality tests are worse than these alternatives, to criticise them for conscripting people into bureaucratic hierarchies is merely to express hostility to bureaucratic hierarchies.

Emre also struggles to form a consistent view when she discusses personality testing’s relationship to individuality. At times she presents the MBTI as a tool that promotes individualism by claiming to clarify each person’s specialised strengths and aid in their quest for self-discovery. At others she describes it in over-heated terms as “liquidating” or “annihilating” the self, as if a questionnaire had the capacity to destroy the person’s uniqueness. Here she cites the work of German social theorist Theodor Adorno, fierce critic of commodification (and jazz), who proclaimed that personality tests undermine human individuality.

Emre never quite resolves these antithetical views, but the paradox is only apparent. Receiving a score on a personality test, or even being assigned to an MBTI “type” does not submerge individuality. It simply provides it with a partial description that other people may share. Being described as brunette, overweight, liberal or a typical Taurus does not undermine a person’s selfhood but merely qualifies it, and the same is true when someone is described as being an ENTP. MBTI types, for all their conceptual failings, don’t reduce personal identity to one of sixteen psychological clones. They simply offer people a language for capturing some aspects of their personal distinctiveness.

In passing, Adorno’s critique of the “reified consciousness” involved in personality testing has a certain irony to it. In one of his books he recalled being asked by an American colleague whether he was an extravert or an introvert, writing contemptuously that “it was as if she, as a living being, already thought according to the model of multiple-choice questionnaires.” A few years later, while conducting his influential studies of authoritarianism, Adorno proceeded to create his own multiple-choice personality questionnaire.

Another confusion arises in Emre’s discussion of personality typology. Remembering the horrors of the Holocaust, Adorno rightly condemned the practice of assigning people to categorical types. This is a legitimate criticism of the MBTI, whose proponents view personality types as discrete and unchanging facts of nature. (Emre writes that Isabel Briggs Myers was astonished to find that scores on the MBTI’s scales were distributed in a bell curve, not in the camel-humped way that type theory supposed.) Emre notes this criticism of typology but then mistakenly applies it to personality testing in general. In contrast to the MBTI, almost all personality tests are explicitly anti-typological. These tests assess differences between people along a continuum without invoking bogus categories, and they do not make ill-founded claims that their scores correspond to unchanging personal essences. By failing to recognise that typological thinking is a specific failing of the MBTI, Emre misses the extent to which major criticisms of that instrument do not tarnish personality testing as a whole.

To serious students of personality, the continuing success of the MBTI within the testing industry is a source of bafflement. Emre’s book does not diminish that dismay, but it helps to clarify why the instrument is the way it is. Despite its unpromising beginnings, she demonstrates that it has a powerful appeal, offering an intuitively attractive way to apprehend ourselves as a pattern of distinctive strengths. In Emre’s preferred Foucauldian terminology, the MBTI is an effective “technology of the self.” The fact that it is a rather Bronze Age technology is almost immaterial. •

What’s Your Type? The Strange History of Myers–Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing
By Merve Emre | HarperCollins | $32.99 | 336 pages

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This thought experiment was posed by the great moral philosopher Derek Parfit, who died last New Year’s Day. Parfit, whose ideas on personal identity have a Buddhist flavour – passages of his work are intoned by monks in a Nepalese monastery – queried the rationality of preferring a longer period of concluded pain to a shorter period that is still to come. The two experiences can both be vividly imagined but not recalled, and they differ only in their tense and quantity. It seems odd to favour the option that involves the larger quantum of suffering, as most of us do intuitively. More basically, is it rational to care at all about future pain that will not be recalled, suffering that does not become part of a continuous experience of self?

Kate Cole-Adams’s fascinating Anaesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness reveals that Parfit’s tale is not just a philosopher’s thought-bauble but also an insight into common experiences of surgery. Surgical patients are intensely concerned about the pain they might feel, often more than they care about the possibility of surgical error, infection or the gruesome fact that their bodies will be sliced and perforated. They submit to a chemically induced discontinuity in their consciousness to avoid that suffering in the present and wipe it from future memory. It is even possible that anaesthesia is effective precisely because it induces amnesia: patients under the influence of anaesthetics may experience excruciating pain during surgery but have their memory of it blocked when they awaken.

Cole-Adams’s main preoccupation is not, however, forgetting pain after anaesthesia but becoming aware during it. Some proportion of patients, its magnitude much in dispute, reports emerging into wakefulness during surgery, an experience that is often profoundly traumatic. Cole-Adams describes the experience as one of terror but it is better understood as horror. It is not so much that an awful but uncertain possibility is dreaded; instead, an awful reality has come to pass. In the words of the American scholar Barton Levi St Armand:

Horror overtakes the soul from the inside; consciousness shrinks or withers from within, and the self is not flung into the exterior ocean of awe but sinks in its own bloodstream, choked by the alien salts of its inescapable prevertebrate heritage.

Why becoming aware during anaesthesia should generate this existential horror is easy to comprehend. Searing pain is experienced in a body that is paralysed and unable to communicate, a predicament of deep, invertebrate helplessness. It is no surprise that people who endure it often suffer lasting psychological effects. As Cole-Adams speculates, some reports of alien abduction – being probed by spectral figures while lying immobile under intense light – may represent distorted memories of imperfectly anaesthetised surgery. This horror also explains why preventing awareness during surgery – and denying the inconvenient truth that it sometimes occurs – is a preoccupation among anaesthetists.

Anaesthesia is a topic that most readers will not have explored in any detail. But it is an important and spacious one, despite being almost invisible, just as anaesthetists themselves hover in the background while surgeons hog the limelight. (Anaesthetists’ joke: “The adjustment of an operating light is an immediate signal for the surgeon to place his head at the focal point.”) We should be very grateful to Cole-Adams for bringing the field into the wider consciousness it deserves. Without effective anaesthetics, the surgical revolution would not have been possible, medieval patients having to make do with prayer, herbs and violent restraint. Beyond its enormous practical importance, anaesthesia is also intellectually rich, helping us to understand the complexities of consciousness and unconsciousness.

Take consciousness, for a start. We are accustomed to having our subjectivity, our sentience and our capacity for voluntary movement all marching in lockstep. While awake we are aware, feel pain and emotion, and act on the world, and when we are asleep we are unaware, numb and inert. Anaesthesia can disrupt this alignment. There can be awareness without feeling, thanks to local analgesia; feeling without awareness, in the sense of pain suffered while unconscious; and awareness and feeling without movement, due to muscle-blocking drugs that cause paralysis. By producing these unusual phenomena, anaesthesia opens a revealing window on how the mind reacts to its temporary unravelling.

The nature of unconsciousness is equally complex. The term “unconscious” can refer to many levels of unawareness, which anaesthetists call the “planes of anaesthesia.” Cole-Adams demonstrates how enormously difficult it is, despite great advances in medical technology, to assess in the operating theatre when consciousness ends and unconsciousness begins. “Unconscious” can also refer to knowledge that exists outside awareness but may nevertheless exert an influence on behaviour. Cole-Adams explores at length how events occurring while patients are apparently out cold, and overheard speech in particular, may affect patients after they have come to. “Unconscious” can also have a Freudian meaning, referring not to what merely happens to be outside awareness but to what is forced out of awareness by repression or other psychological mechanisms of defence. The link to anaesthesia may seem tenuous, but Cole-Adams makes a case for some intriguing connections that also illuminate the neural and psychological processes responsible for the unity of normal consciousness.

This is a book of ideas, and Cole-Adams has spent its long gestation talking with a remarkable assortment of practitioners and researchers, and critically observing and mulling over their work. But it is also a deeply personal story. Interspersed with her never-dry explorations of concepts, theories and clinical practice, she relates her own experience of spinal surgery, her neuroses, her troubled relationships with partners, the illnesses and frailties of family members, and her deep resonance with people who have experienced “accidental intraoperative awareness.” Cole-Adams’s sensitive and slightly bruised persona is always present, only occasionally becoming intrusive or distracting. Throughout she writes vividly. During a period of recovering from a nameless fatigue, her voice is “slow and flat, like a mop being dragged across a floor.” As an anaesthetised patient has his false teeth removed, “his lips wilted inwards.”

It has been said that anaesthesia is the half-asleep watching the half-awake being half-murdered by the half-witted. Like surgery it is a troubling, anxious subject that most of us would rather avoid or deflect with dark humour. Cole-Adams has illuminated it in a memorable way. The book is a gift not of oblivion but of awareness. •

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Walt might have had much to talk about with another Wittmann, this one a contemporary German psychologist, who has written a short meditation on the subjective experience of time and its neural foundations. Marc Wittmann’s book is an engaging overview of current thinking about how phenomenal awareness of time arises, how it is embedded in our experience of our bodies, and how mental illness and brain damage are associated with alterations in these processes.

Felt Time is made up of seven essay-length chapters. Each chapter stands on its own as an exploration of one aspect of subjective time, and there is no obvious logical progression from one to the next. The first chapter launches an investigation of temporal myopia, the way in which people neglect or irrationally discount the future, and how that short-sightedness is linked to impulsiveness in conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Wittmann contends that overvaluing our present can lead us to damage our future, but also that overvaluing the future can cheat us of a satisfying present. Being oriented too much towards future events and achievements can deprive us of the chance to live spontaneously and to be fully in the presentness of the moment. Compulsiveness is no more healthy than impulsiveness, in other words, although Wittmann offers no guide to finding the sweet spot between them.

The following chapters explore how time itself is experienced, suggesting that this perception occurs at four levels of granularity. At the finest grain, the present appears to last around thirty milliseconds, the span below which people can’t reliably detect the order of sensations. This level of temporal resolution offers a clue to the sense of time accelerating or decelerating under conditions of normal emotional arousal as well as abnormal neurological conditions. At the second level, the present moment seems to last between two and three seconds, the duration of many conversational turns and musical phrases and also, perhaps not coincidentally, of a human breath. Each short segment of experience represents an integration of perceptual experience into a single unit, and cultivating mindfulness allows us to participate fully in it. The third level, enabled by working memory, knits together moments into more lasting periods, and at the highest level these are assimilated into a narrative sense of self and personal history within long-term memory. Wittmann’s emphasis here and elsewhere is on the lower, shorter levels of time perception rather than the longer frame in which the sense of identity resides.

These chapters on the perception of time lead into chapters on its functions and our fears. Wittmann explains that we still don’t know for certain whether an internal clock or “cerebral pacemaker” exists, although humans and many other creatures can be quite skilled at estimating duration. This skill alerts us to when events are not occurring at the expected pace, as in the aversive experience of waiting. Although there may be no inner metronome, there is a daily (“circadian”) biological rhythm, and individual differences in how it operates have very real consequences. Wittmann presents the intriguing idea that the owl chronotype – people whose physiology impels them to late bedtimes – can experience “social jetlag,” landing blearily each morning in the foreign nation of early-rising larks. All of us, however, share a sense of time as a finite quantity that concludes in death, and the awareness of that regrettable fact may account for the experience of time passing more quickly with age. Wittmann recommends that we seek out novelty and variety as a way to stretch time, and observes that monotony makes time move slowly in prospect but seem to have raced in retrospect.

To conclude the book, Wittmann examines the self-consciousness of time, arguing that subjectivity arises from our sense of embodied persistence. It is not the succession of external events that gives us a sense of self extended through time, but rather the continuous internal awareness of our bodies. Time itself is not experienced directly but is apprehended through bodily rhythms such as the heartbeat, integrated by the brain’s insular cortex.

Felt Time makes for enjoyable and illuminating reading without resorting to gee-whiz sensation or didacticism. Wittmann’s writing, as filtered through Erik Butler’s unobtrusive translation, is neither showy nor self-consciously academic. He accessibly presents a variety of empirical studies in neuroscience and psychology, as well as distillations of philosophers not known for their accessibility, particularly the noted obscurantists Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl. One refreshing element in a book that aspires to present the latest ideas on mind and brain is the attention paid to German research and the broader German intellectual tradition. In a scientific domain where there is a significant bias towards the Anglophone countries, and especially the United States, this book stands as a useful corrective and should give wider exposure to some neglected European ideas and research findings.

For all its virtues, though, this book also stirs a few frustrations. Inevitably, one of these has to do with its omissions. The study of time in the human sciences is a vast and complex territory, and a slender text can’t hope to map it comprehensively. Even so, Wittmann has much more to say about the experience of the present than about how we imagine the future or remember the past. Our subjectivity includes a vivid sense of the moment but it is also wrapped up in forecasting what is possible and making sense of what has come to pass. Felt Time briefly explores how we discount the future or simply ignore it because it lies beyond our time horizon, but it is mute on the important question of how we make predictions about the future and how different imaginings affect us. Our subjective orientation to the past is also neglected almost completely. A sense of narrative continuity through time is essential to personal identity, and memory provides a foundation for it, but the focus of the book remains firmly on the experience of the present moment.

Other limitations of the book are structural. Time offers such a range of topics that the author tends to flit from one to another, sampling each briefly rather than settling for a period of patient exploration. This associative style is well illustrated by a chapter on the self and temporality, which bounces from an examination of the role of the insular cortex in bodily perception to a somewhat immodest solution to the mind–body problem, then on to a short dissection of boredom, and finally to a sociological discussion of the accelerating pace of technological development and the modern crisis of busyness. The pace of this veering intellectual tour will appeal to some readers, but others will find that it induces conceptual whiplash and an intellectual appetite stimulated but not whetted.

The book’s occasionally disjointed structure is symptomatic of a more general uncertainty about its aims. It is in some respects a genre-bending work, part science journalism, part popular philosophy and part advice manual. This hybridity is a departure for MIT Press, which has a proud record of publishing cerebral texts in the cognitive and brain sciences. The mixture can be engrossing. Wittmann moves smoothly between reporting on recent laboratory studies and citing long-dead phenomenologists, rarely falling into the trap of faux profundity that often snares writers of popular neuroscience. At other times, though, the switch from academic language to the language of self-improvement can be jarring. Wittmann’s injunctions to live mindfully in the moment and to exert control over the tempo of one’s life add a sermonising tone that the book could do without. To this reviewer, they called to mind Nicholson Baker’s delicious takedown of advice to “seize the day.” Carpe diem, he observes in The Anthologist, means to “pluck” the day, not seize it. We should “gently pull on the day’s stem” so as not to crush its delicate fruit. “Don’t freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it.”

For all its limitations, Felt Time is a mind-broadening book and one that can be read profitably by humanists, scientists and laypeople alike. Wittmann’s amiable curiosity will inspire readers to continue their own exploration into time’s mysteries, perhaps taking one of the book’s almost 200 notes as a stepping-off point. Time is a limitless topic, but as ours is so limited it is almost a blessing that this fascinating book can be read in an afternoon. •

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