Say Goodbye to Happiness: Uncertainty, Insecurity and the Quality of Lives

8/6/2019 Say Goodbye to Happiness: Uncertainty, Insecurity and the Quality of Lives

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Say Goodbye to Happiness: Uncertainty, Insecurity and the Quality of Lives1

Chris Groves

ESRC Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGEN)Cardiff Universitywww.genomicsnetwork.ac.uk/cesagen/

Championed by New Labour, the happiness agenda has been taken up within policydebates not only nationally in the UK, but internationally as well. Representing nothing lessthan a new vision of social progress, it has found an enthusiastic supporter in the OECD,whose Better Life Index, launched last May, includes an assessment of subjective wellbeingor life satisfaction. Yet some have suspected that the reason for widening adoption lies notin what it includes, but in what it leaves out. Its focus on a particular definition of well-being,as Pat Kane and William Davies have suggested in previous contributions to this series, maymean that it tends not to consider the wider social conditions which both enable and

constrain the life-chances of individuals. Does happiness research therefore fall victim to thecharge typically leveled by sociologists at economists, namely that they view individuals onlyas isolated consumers, interested in obtaining the most bang for their hedonic buck?

A version of this charge is made by the political philosopher John ONeill. To understand thehappiness agenda, an obvious philosophical point of comparison is often assumed to beJeremy Benthams utilitarianism. As ONeill points out, however, Benthams hedonism, hisbelief that happiness and social progress depends fundamentally on the promotion ofpleasurable experiences is too indiscriminate for happiness advocates like Richard Layardand Geoff Mulgan. These thinkers typically aim to identify kinds of pleasurable experienceswhich have a more durable, longer-term link to subjective reports of happiness. These theydistinguish from other kinds which are associated with the infamous hedonic treadmill

effect. For example, buying luxuries may result in more intense pleasurable experiencesthan experiences of, say, social interaction. Yet over time, it is the latter kinds of experiencewhich reliably provide more pleasure, whereas the individual enamored of luxury goodsneeds a bigger and bigger hit of consumption to achieve the same effect.

ONeill suggests, therefore, that the best comparison for the new happiness advocates is notBentham, but the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, who also attempted to distinguishgenuine objects of desire from illusory ones. By enumerating the kinds of goods whichallegedly contribute most to authentic happiness, Layard et al are being Epicurean. It istheir basic Epicureanism, ONeill argues, that is the source of the happiness agendaslimitations. If the problem is one of illusory versus true beliefs (the City trader falselybelieves I want a yacht; the Big Societys ideal citizen rightly believes I want to volunteer),

then more durable pleasure, more happiness, and eventually more social progress isfundamentally dependent on what individuals believe, or what their values are.

Happiness, by this account, depends on people valuing the 'right' things in life. As Layardputs it, people's values will be the main force that determines the outcome of socialchange. The obvious policy conclusion is, then, that to make positive social change requiresnothing less than massive psychological change: a cultural revolution. ONeill describes thisas the ethicists fallacy, the nostrum to which philosophers and politicians alike are prone,of prescribing a shift in values as the cure to any number of ills with complex causes. What

1 [completed 23 June 2011; to be published as part of Open Democracys Happiness Debates,

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/collections/happiness-debate)]


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is left out of consideration here are what ONeill refers to as the structural and systemicconstraints on individual behaviour.

Further, he suggests that Layard et als Epicurean definition of happiness as a feelingmisses out something vital about subjective experience and its relation to quality of life.Measuring happiness, for Layard, means aggregating experiences of happiness. The sumand duration of experiences are important, but the chronological orderof the experiences isnot. But, ONeill points out, the order of experiences is vitally important for how we judge thequality of lives, precisely because it changes the meaning of those experiences. One mightdesire a moment to go on forever, yet depending on what happens next (and what follows inthe morning), one might change ones assessment of that feeling quite radically.

So, we have two objections here: one to the happiness agendas disregard for structuraland systemic constraints, and the other to its disregard for the meaningof experience. Toaddress these two omitted concerns, a better starting point than happiness is the place of

insecurity and uncertainty in human lives, and in the human condition as such. If we startfrom here, then the kind of story we tell about how policy can and should aim to improvepeoples lives will change. If we tell a story about uncertainty rather than happiness, we willno longer be talking about individuals as consumers of momentary experiences and norwill we be reduced to wistfully wishing for a bloodless and endlessly postponed revaluationof values.

First, generally speaking how we act in the present is always modulated by what we expectof the future, and by our beliefs about what kinds of knowledge are reliable guides to whatwill happen. This concern with the future reaches into the most intimate corners of everydaylife, and encompasses the broadest international concerns. Reading a horoscope, taking agenetic test to discover ones susceptibility to heart disease, writing a report on national

pension provision, or forecasting the extent of climate change - all rely on different kinds ofknowledge to tame and domesticate an uncertain future, and to increase our resilience tonasty surprises. Uncertainty is, if you like, an element in which we live, just as fish live inwater. Social structures, norms, practices and so on bear within them a record of collectiveexperiences of how humans have dealt with uncertainty.

To enlarge on these general observations, a good starting point is the work of the sociologistPeter Marris, a colleague early in his career of Young, Willmott and Townsend at theInstitute of Community Studies, which later became The Young Foundation under GeoffMulgans leadership. Marris work offers a series of sustained reflections on how individualsdraw on this cultural record in learning to deal with uncertainty. His investigations of thestrategies people use to make sense of an intrinsically uncertain future in different contexts

bereavement, slum clearance, unemployment and so on showed how the success orfailure of these strategies both depends on and shapes wider social relationships and,moreover, reflects the inequalities of power underlying these relationships. Distilled in hisbook The Politics of Uncertainty(1995) is a succinct and penetrating social-psychologicalaccount of how peoples capacity to cope with uncertainty depends on two things.

First, individuals strive to maintain an identity that remains stable in the face of uncertainty,one that can allow them to make sense of continual change. Such an identity is dependenton relationships with others influenced by psychologists like John Bowlby, D. W. Winnicottand Daniel Stern, Marris sees the most defining of these relationships as grounded inemotional attachments.


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Second, a crucial component of a stable identity is the individuals belief that she or he isable to control or at least influence his or her own future. This, like identity, is not a purelyindividual achievement. Marriss many rich accounts of how widows, uprooted African

entrepreneurs, planners, industrial labourers, religious believers and so on live with anuncertain future and insecure present detail how human lives are stories which are wovenfrom the warp of autonomy and the weft of dependence. Individuals can only act on thebasis of reliable expectations about the future. These depend on social norms and structureswhich can render predictable their behaviour and that of others. Yet their adaption to thesestructures depends on forming a wide range of emotional attachments to, amongst otherthings, other humans (beginning with ones caregivers), to places, to institutions, and toideals. Their sense of what they can do is, as much as their sense of who are they are,shaped both by social structure and their individual biographies, in which emotionalattachments provide themes, recurring motifs and breakpoints.

The importance of identity and agency is underlined, for Marris, by the way in which

individuals can adapt to situations utterly beyond their control by adopting fatalistic beliefs, oreven whole belief systems. By renouncing any hope of influencing ones future, one is ableto make a final gesture of control, and secure a minimal share of certainty in the face ofinsecurity. Such a shift in values might even make one feelhappier as a result. Butconsidered as part of the life story of the individual, this episode has been issued in by socialupheavals which have shattered supposedly reliable expectations about the future, and is,Marris suggests, a sign of an increase in vulnerability to future shocks rather than ofincreased resilience. This raises profound questions about projects such as Action forHappiness in the UK, with their emphasis on individual feelings and objects of value.

Marris gives an example of such a social upheaval, in the shape of the decision of GeneralMotors to consider relocating from a US city as part of the great upheaval in the motor

industry ushered in by the crises of the 1970s. In need of the jobs brought by the company,the city authorities tried a number of strategies to persuade it to remain. They offered arange of incentives that even included relocating a working-class community. Nonetheless,the company left.

Caught in a tsunami of insecurity, autoworkers and their families struggled with economicvulnerability, loss of purpose and self-worth brought by unemployment, as well as guilt attheir perceived failure to look after the families, prevent the company from leaving, and soon. Those evicted from their homes and those displaced by the city lost theircommunities in the process. And uniting workers with citizens otherwise unaffected by therelocation was a sudden shattering of trust in a range of institutions, including the company,historically thought inseparable from the city, along with the municipal authorities. The

psychological effect of this kind of disruption, for Marris, shares its general character withbereavement. Bereavement and grief, born of the loss of an attachment to a loved one,entail a massive reorganisation of ones sense of who one is. As Martha Nussbaumdescribes it, successful grieving is, to no small degree, a recovery of ones self, arevaluation of what fundamentally matters. At the same time, it is one which labours overand eventually settles accounts with the unerasable fact of loss.

For Marris, an experience akin to that of grief is equally characteristic of the situation of anautoworker, forced to move with family into low-quality rented accommodation while seekingcasual employment in a lower-wage job. The shift of values such an experience wouldrequire is, as in more conventional bereavements, an attempt to make ones place in theworld again. Yet at issue here is the incremental loss of, potentially, large clusters of


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attachments, including an individuals home, her community and her ideals and with them,her place within any wider social context. It is an experience, as Seth Moglen puts it, ofsocial loss. Not only are a large number of people caught up in an event like this, what is

lost is a range of structures which have allowed them, collectively, to live with an intrinsicallyuncertain future. To get at the individual and social significance of any story about how thosewho have suffered are able to flourish again requires more than aggregating reports ormeasurements of happiness, in the manner of the new happiness advocates such asLayard. And how the story goes will likely depend on quite other values, beyond Epicureanbeliefs about what one truly desires such as whether a community can deal with loss byleading a struggle for social justice, and how its fight turns out.

Ultimately, the happiness agenda imagines progress as something which can only happen toidealised consumers, who, lacking any biography beyond a data curve, also lack any livinglink to history. Putting the experience of uncertainty and insecurity at the heart of anunderstanding of the quality of lives reawakens us to the importance both of biography and

of history. Theorists of capitalism, from Marx onward, have shown how the production ofuncertainty and insecurity by the economically and politically powerful shapes the conditionsof our lives and produces unequally-distributed wealth in the process.

We now find ourselves dealing with the fallout of two decades when the production ofsystemic uncertainty was thought to be the best way both of guaranteeing economicprosperity and of extending the security of home ownership to the poor. In this age ofinsecurity, what is required of politics are new visions of resilience built on social justice.Progress, in such a vision, would be about how to build into social structures expectations ofreciprocity and mutual commitment, leading away from forms of life based on precarity andthe competitive production of uncertainty. To merely prescribe a shift in values as the goalof public policy means retreating to the position of Marris fatalist, who mourns without end:

melancholically renouncing faith in shaping the future, along with the possibility of beinganything other than a consumer.

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Say Goodbye to Happiness: Uncertainty, Insecurity and the Quality of Lives