Madeleine Bunting writes in the Guardian about the rising credibility of happiness indicators as a factor in social policy in Britain. I've written about this before, feeling more than a little constrained by some of the normative assumptions of happiness research. Madeleine repeats the core analysis of consumer capitalism that much of it is based on:
The problem is, as Richard Layard argues in his book Happiness: Lessons From a New Science, that the decline of both religious belief (which is a strong predictor of happiness) and the social solidarity movements of the 20th century has left a vacuum of understanding about what constitutes a good life and how to be happy.
The church has lost sway, and the state has retreated behind the single rationale of promoting economic competitiveness with its overtones of Darwinian selection (a major source of unhappiness in itself with its vision of life as a competitive struggle). That leaves the market a free rein to describe happiness - the new car, new sofa, new holiday - and to manipulate our insecurities around status.
Leave things as they are and the state will increasingly have to pick up the bill for how consumer capitalism effectively produces emotional ill-health - depression, stress, anxiety. Leave things as they are and the state is part of the problem, promoting a set of market values that produce emotional pollution.
Yet there's surely a gap between market and state - call it network culture, civil society, friendship, the commons, whatever - wherein our "descriptions of happiness" can also take place. And the more I observe how UK politician after politician invokes 'citizens service' or 'social enterprise' or 'voluntary sector' - David Cameron being the latest in quite a long line - the more I want to defend this space of autonomy from sclerotic party-political opportunism. A place - I've called it a 'ground of play' - where citizens can suspend the twin duties of social order and economic functionality, and literally come to their own decisions about what gives their life meaning.
Both the state and the market can build and resource these spaces, sometimes by deliberation (the public park, Tate Modern), sometimes by accident (the Web, the mobile phone, a cafe in Borders). My line in the Play Ethic book was 'a visionary investment in the public sector'. But the visionary element would be to resource people's capacity to construct their own lives, not to regulate them according to some current neuroscientific or psychological consensus on happiness. The French 35-hour week is as near as anyone has gotten in Europe to the kind of social regulation that simply gives free time, and doesn't prescribe what's done with it. Very French of course. (As some reviewers of Layard book note, happiness research also implies making divorce harder, and increasing the powers of experts. Yeah, right).
Yes, ads are bad and make us neurotic and unhappy. But can't we configure our telly in the broadband age to be as customisable and two-way as the internet is, thus giving us the power of self-expression and participation to cancel out the seduction of advertising? And should we be open to the possibility that, at some point, the second might fund the first (witness Channel Four's E-Word project)?
As I put it in my Independent article
Happiness is not a warm gun, contrary to what John Lennon sang. But it might well be widespread access to some powerful tools for living - whether social, technological or educational. Our fretting legislators, and their gurus, should provide these, then stand well back and let the multitude decide their own paths to joy, rather than seek to impose a presumptive "common good". We need to remember the "happ" in happiness - which means, in the old Norse, "luck or chance". Sustain the conditions for happiness, sure. But let happiness happen, too.
