We're all going on a soma holiday. On the teaching of happiness.

"you do look glum! What you need is a gramme of soma."

Many years ago I sang in a folk choir at church (I'm guessing that any last vestiges of my street credibility are now gone). One of our standards was a song called "The Happy Song" - it's lyrics were along these lines:

People ask why I sound so happy
And why I always sing a happy tune
It's only happy songs they hear in heaven
I'm singing so that God can hear me too

And so on in that vein all to one of those annoyingly cheery and catchy tunes essential to modern hymns (or 'Praise Songs' as I believe they're known now). The whole message of the song - and I can't vouch for the theology here - is that God wants us to be happy so dammit we're going to be happy by singing this song.

In the years since I was last caught singing "The Happy Song" the world's attitude to happiness has evolved into something of an industry. We have Bhutan's 'gross national happiness' (unless of course you smoke or happen to be from the Nepali minority). We had the flirtation of David Cameron with happiness measures as an alternative to dull old 'gross domestic product'. And we have a whole area of pretty dodgy academic study into 'happiness' led by former New Labour cheerleader, Lord Layard.

Now Lord Layard has teamed up with everyone's favourite health fascist, Lord Darzi to publish a really important study and to call for every child in the world to be taught how to be happy.

Children of all ages should be given an hour’s “happiness lessons” every week to nurture their development and stop schools behaving as “exams factories,” a major report will warn this week.

Indeed the good Lords argue that this sort of teaching must be given "the same attention as reading and writing". Indeed, the Lords say, our schools, far from being the happy and smiling places they should be, have become stress-filled exam factories full of children in need of counselling. So therefore we should teach children a set of approved 'lifeskills' and have counsellors on tap in case little Johnny or Mary get a bit sad.

The problem with this (and the term "well-rounded" is thrown around here) is two-fold. Firstly, we don't send children to school to spend an hour-a-week "discussing their emotions, setting positive life goals, and learning how to cope with everyday pressures and social media". And secondly - as teacher and education writer Tom Bennett has observed - one of the lifeskills that children need to learn is that some stuff is very hard and pretty stressful:

The business of education intrinsically requires many actions that are, dare I breathe it, difficult. Learning is hard work; better learning is often very hard work indeed. Nobody became a Professor of Electronics by playing the Xbox. There are often fun ways of learning, and if you’re good at your job, you’ll be good at implementing them. But there is often the point where you concede, willingly, that in order to get anything done, then elbow grease must be applied. 

Rather than making clear that learning how to do arithmetic and geometry is both essential and hard, we allow children to believe that there's a cop out - "I'm excused your hard maths lesson sir, my counsellor says it's too stressful for me".

Imagine a world where a vaguely defined happiness is deemed to be the primary aim. Not the rollercoaster, football supporter sort of happiness - ecstasy at Adrian's penalty to defeat Everton in the cup is replaced with a deep and abiding gloom at the team's abject surrender to West Brom. Rather it's a soma sort of happiness - a lowest common denominator contentment:

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.” 

It is a misplaced idea that human children lack the strength to deal with the stress of taking examinations and the expectations of family, friends and society in general. This is not to say that some children really do struggle with the pressure but to observe that, of the 700,000 or so young people who take GCSEs each year, only a handful really need help.

Instead of focusing on identifying the child with a problem, what Layard and Darzi propose is a vague sort of new age version of sitting in a circle of hands singing Kum Ba Yah.

...schools must address the emotional and spiritual needs of their children, as well as their intellectual development...

The effect of all this isn't to make for stronger adults or a better society but rather is to gentle young people - in one respect in the original meaning of the word:  "touch (a person or animal) gently, typically in order to make them calmer or more docile". But it might also be in the brutal manner of Robert Jordan's 'Wheel of Time':

When a man is severed it is referred to as gentling. This term came about sometime after the Age of Legends and reflects the view that male channelers are like wild animals (due to their eventual madness) that must be controlled.

The world that Layard and Darzi want is a place where risk is eliminated, where challenge and assertiveness are sins, and where (and I'm grateful to Andy Bower on Twitter for this) narcissism and introspection are seen as essential 'life skills'. This sort of society is one where a benign, motherly state holds contented citizens to her bountiful bosom, where those citizens are discouraged - even forbidden - from doing things that might result in hurt or upset, and where the greatest achievement is a contented nothingness, a sort of perpetual infanthood.

This is the world of prizes for all, of dumbed down exams everyone passes, where games don't have winners and in which people look to the state's supposed bounty before their own enterprise. It's a world of citizen's income where folk can live out their lives as supine drones contributing nothing except the contented humming of "The Happy Song". It is a profoundly depressing prospect, a world where edge, excitement, speed, risk and challenge are frowned on - where they're not actually banned.

The object of government isn't to smooth and still everything so no-one is ever unhappy but rather to create the circumstances where we can, in the words of the American Declaration of Independence, engage in the 'pursuit of happiness'. If my happiness and pleasure comes from things that are risky that's my business. If I choose to do something hard, dull and stressful because of the happiness it will bring me in the future, again that is my business. But it is no business of government to, in effect, declare some things too stressful, too hard. Nor is it the business of government to pretend that a successful life can be conducted without risk, stress and difficulty because that is quite simply a lie.

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I like choice - and so should you

Vivienne's masterpiece salmon

We hear often of the sin that is "consumption". Not the 18th and 19th century killer of literary genius but the preference that many of us have for spending a fair old chunk of the limited time we get on stuff we actually like doing. If you want to call that decadent, uncaring or planet-threatening that's fine by me. But I intend to carry on consuming.

And I am not swayed by the righteousness of some folk who, having failed to persuade us - the consumers - that consuming is a bad thing - have shifted the attack. The problem, they tell us, is choice - there's too much of it, it is making us anxious, stressed and meaning that we are no longer "organising ourselves and making a critique of society".

This little animation from RSA (entitled "Choice") peddled all this stuff - including the quote in the above paragraph. We have here all the regular left-wing anti-choice arguments including jolly little stories about how some bearded professor was uptight about which wine to buy in a restaurant or how some self-indulgent journalist wrote that sex life wasn't like the sex lives described in the pages of Cosmopolitan. Plus the usual rubbish about the stress we get from being over faced by the range on offer in the supermarket.

I feel so sorry for all these sensitive folk living in their convenient little anecdotes. But the argument - so typical of pop psychology - is founded in story and prejudice rather than in the reality of consumer behaviour. Yes, consumers will tell you they don't like choice. But consumers also use heuristics to mange and moderate choices - mostly they're called brands although they may also be choices about shopping location or, today, the use of comparison web-sites. There is an entire academic discipline - consumer behaviour - that studies such stuff.

More substantially, however, the argument against choice presented here tiptoes towards anti-capitalism - not just through an ignorance of what, precisely, we might mean by capitalism (it is presented as the creator of our consumer society) but through the contention that choice is used by "capitalism" to prevent us from achieving "social change". I have to smile at the manner in which "capitalism" is anthropomorphised - made to have an existence as master of an "ideology of choice".

But what is the alternative to this "ideology of choice"?  Logic tells us that the only alternative must be an "ideology of choice denial". Our choices - whether of wine with dinner, of places to live or of clothes to wear would be constrained, limited and even stopped entirely (bit like healthcare really). And one presumes - although this isn't stated - the limitation of choice would require mandation. Somebody will have to set out the choices we can have - assuming that "somebody" actually thinks we should have any choice at all.

So the argument presented - for all its wit and literacy - is profoundly illiberal, requires a mechanism for limiting choice (so we are not stressed or otherwise pained by our choices) and represents the continuation of the Nancy Klein attack on that choice. Or rather on the "wrong sort of choice" (as we can characterise Ms Klein's argument) - the idea that the brand "McDonalds" is essentially different from "Liberal " or indeed from "Chateau Lafitte Rothschild". All are those pesky heuristics - short-cuts to decision-making - that enable a complex consumer society to work.

Although the RSA do not present any alternative - "organising to achieve social change" is as far as it goes - the vision, characterised by the use of bees as a metaphor, owes more to Aldous Huxley than to a happy vision of the future. Indeed it could be this:

"Our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel-and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get."

Please let it not be so. Let us be free. Stop speaking of some idea of social change as if "social change" is absolutely desirable. And stop offering excuses that permit governments to control our lives, to remove our choices. And stop already with this angst, this post-millennial ennui, this pseudo-guilt trip - choice is good, it makes us happier, healthier, wealthier and, each day, the chance to do it differently means that innovation, change - even social change - takes place.

However, the sad little assault on choice will continue, partly because some folk makes choices that people who do cute animations for the RSA disapprove of (you know getting drunk, smoking and eating the wrong food) but mostly because the social change that is driven by choice isn't the "social change" such people want. Rather than the controlling hand of the benevolent masters directing the ignorant towards enlightenment, we get a messy, exciting, chaotic mish-mash of changes - some fantastic, some problematic but all of them driven by the individual actions, initiatives and, yes, choices of men and women doing stuff they like doing.

Choice is good. And don't ever forget it!

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"Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?"

So we’re back to pursuing happiness – or rather to the government’s appointed counters of stuff asking us questions about our state of happiness.

"Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?" We learned this week that that is one of four new questions being inserted into the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Household Survey as the UK's official number crunchers try to assess the well-being of the nation.

The purpose of this exercise is not to get Britain thinking happy thoughts as the axe falls: the determination to measure well-being pre-dates both the coalition and the age of austerity. The real point is to find a better way of measuring social progress than simply how much stuff we have got.

Or that’s what the BBC says about the measurement of happiness – apparently increased material well-being doesn’t make us any happier. We may be a whole load richer, healthier and less stressed than our forebears. We may have things to make our lives better even than the richest 1950s plutocrat. But, as the song goes:

I can't get no satisfaction,
I can't get no satisfaction.
'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try.
I can't get no, I can't get no.

However, our government wants to know just how dissatisfied – how pissed off and grumpy we are – so as to...well, I guess try to make us happier? And perhaps it will be like this:

"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand." (Huxley, ‘Brave New World’ Ch16)

Of course, for Huxley’s dystopic paradise happiness and stability came at a price – liberty. And a dulling of life’s edge:

“You can't make flivvers without steel-and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get."

Get the drift? The Government wishes to measure something called “social progress” – which is measured not through “citius, altius, fortius” but through contentment, mere satisfaction.

...governments could be judged by how happy they make us.

An adviser to the Prime Minister*, David Halpern, told us that within the next 10 years the government would be measured against how happy it made everybody.

*Note this was an advisor to Mr Blair

And how do you make people content? By removing risk, by creating stability and by providing pane et circenses – bread and circuses. Independence of thought, the challenging of norms, questioning life’s sacred cows – these things do not make us happy. And worse, by undermining our neighbour’s contentment they run counter to the cause of well-being.

Government has no responsibility or duty or right to ask me as to my happiness – that is my bother and worry. What is worse though is that Mr Cameron’s happy world contains a brutal attack on my pleasures and the pleasures of my friends:

But he said the government also had to focus on the long-term and he said "the country would be better off if we thought about well-being as well as economic growth".

GDP was too "crude" a measure of progress as it failed to take into account wider social factors - he cited the example of "irresponsible" marketing to children, an immigration "free for all" and a "cheap booze free for all", which had all boosted economic growth at the expense of social problems.

Measuring happiness becomes an instrument of social control – intervening in the choices of parents, ripping cans of lager from the clutches of 19-year-old skinheads and make poorly old women stand out in the rain and cold to have a fag. The message is that clever people with clipboards, spreadsheets and fancy formulae know better how to make us content, how to create the stability of a dead society.

I do not wish for the deadening stability of a content society. A society so content is loses creativity, spark, has all the fight removed – not through aggression but through a hideous, soft blanket of comforting social drugs. A place where nothing’s our fault, where child-rearing is the state’s role, where our governors consider our silence to be satisfaction – and where happiness, the goal of government, is purchased with banal, dumbed-down events and the drug of conformity.

“Overall, yesterday...I was grumpy!”

Welcome to Will Hutton's cuddly fascism - his Brave New World

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Will Hutton wrote an article in last Sunday’s Observer arguing in his inimitable, terribly reasonable way that “class” still matters. And what a piece!

Dear old Uncle Will starts with the usual left-liberal stuff about private education – all of which is, of course, just like Eton (not only an exceptionally good school but an exceptionally unusual one even for the private sector). But Will says:

“Britain is a chronically unfair and increasingly closed society and private education plays a central role.”

And he’s clever and important so must be right (and can afford to move to the posh places that have good schools – even grammar schools - as well). But all OK so far, just the usual left wing, politics of envy stuff, nothing new or momentous.

But Will goes further he wants to pull down those who have had the luck to be born into families with engaged parents, rich parents or just plain bloody-minded parents who insist their kids get a good education. Why? Because it’s not fair! We have to chop down all the oak trees so the maples can get more light.

The truth about Will’s article is that there is only one way to achieve the levelling he desires – to abolish parenthood. To declare that only the state has the power to make life fair – and to do this by ensuring that all children are brought up in the same environment, unaffected by the positive or negative influence of biological parents. Here’s Will:

“We owe it to them to create social structures that deliver that (fairness), not structures that manufacture good luck for those who can pay for it and close down opportunity and openness for everyone else.”

There are the words – “create social structures” – the social engineering that the left loves. What Will Hutton seems to want is little different from the frightening social control of “Brave New World”, where parenthood is either wholly constrained or de facto abolished, where Government defined “fairness” is enforced by social services, the police and schools. Where a tiny elite – dominated by the likes of Will Hutton – believe they are bettering mankind.

Well Will, I don’t want your 21st Century social model, your cuddly fascism – I don’t want private provision and initiative emasculated because the state has failed. I want a free society where people stand or fall on their own. And I will not allow my choice and my freedom to be removed for the sake of your misplaced idea of fairness.

As I said earlier Will – life’s not fair.

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