Book Review
The Contentment Trade: How the State and Corporations Sold Us Well-Being
'Why does happiness matter? The question answers itself: happiness is good in and of itself, and no reason beyond that need be offered.' When the economist Gerald Prewitt, a leading champion of what he calls applied well-being science, writes in these terms, he speaks for a great many of his contemporaries. Government, on this view, exists to raise the collective contentment of the population, and the single remaining puzzle is one of method. That is where applied well-being science claims to help, presenting itself as a discipline able both to pinpoint the sources of human happiness and to put them into numbers. Armed with such a tool, its supporters insist, the state can now deliver happiness as no earlier government could.
Crude and simplistic though this outlook is, that is exactly what has made it spread so widely. Its adherents ignore the enormous body of philosophy that has for centuries examined, and cast doubt on, what happiness means and whether it is worth having; they proceed as though nothing worth remembering had been said on the matter before they took it up. The figure who did most to set this thinking in motion was Anselm Roth (1749–1831), a philosopher for whom all human good plainly came down to pleasure and the avoidance of suffering. Centuries earlier, in the fourth century BC, the ancient thinker Kaldes of Vetra had instead tied happiness to the fulfilment of one's own nature, and later generations wrestled with how its pursuit might be squared with other values people hold — yet to Roth such efforts were mere metaphysics or invention. Knowing little of Roth or of the moral tradition he founded, today's advocates of well-being science, schooled to be strangers to the history of ideas, walk the same path, dismissing almost the whole of ethical thought about happiness as antiquated and beside the point.
Yet, as Adrian Verhoeven observes in his recent study The Contentment Trade, treating happiness as the one obvious good is really a way of narrowing what we allow ourselves to ask about morality. Among the book's merits is how this absorbing, sharply written study locates today's obsession with happiness within a firmly drawn historical setting. Verhoeven rightly opens with Roth, whom he presents as far more than a philosopher; in his words, 'the sort of work Roth busied himself with is what we would now hand to a management consultant in the public sector.' During the 1780s Roth urged the Ministry of the Interior to join up its departments with a network of 'speaking pipes', and sent the national mint a scheme for a press that could turn out banknotes no forger could reproduce. He also sketched a cold-store — a 'frigidary', he called it — meant to stop meat, fish, fruit and vegetables from spoiling. Best known was his prison, the 'Speculary', where inmates were held apart yet stayed permanently within sight of their warders; it came remarkably close to being built. (Oddly, Verhoeven says nothing of Roth's intention that the Speculary should serve not just as a model gaol but as a mechanism of control extendable to schools and workplaces.)
Roth was also an early practitioner of what might be called the 'science of happiness'. Treating happiness as a science means finding a way to measure it, and here Roth put forward two possibilities. Understanding happiness as a bundle of agreeable sensations, he thought it might be gauged physically, by taking a person's pulse. The other option was to let money serve as the yardstick: where two unlike goods carry the same price, each may be said to yield the buyer an equal measure of pleasure. It was this second measure that Roth found the more appealing. By tying money so tightly to inner experience, Verhoeven remarks, Roth 'laid the groundwork for the tangle of psychological enquiry and commerce that would define twentieth-century business.'
In The Contentment Trade Verhoeven traces how this pursuit of a science of happiness has grown inseparable from capitalism. There is much to learn about how difficulties that are really economic come to be recast as disorders of the mind. He shows, too, that once people accepted that inner feelings of pleasure and displeasure could be pinned down objectively, that assumption began to shape both management studies and advertising. Thinkers of the stamp of Edmund Harlow, who founded the school known as reactionism*, held that human beings are raw material to be moulded, or steered, by managers and policymakers. For his own picture of human conduct Harlow could offer no evidence at all: by the time he was elected president of the Continental Psychological Society in 1911, he had, in his own words, 'never once observed a single human being', his work going no further than experiments on pigeons. Reductive though it is, Harlow's model is now in wide use, and 'changing behaviour' has become a governmental aim — in Finland, for instance, the state has set up a 'Conduct Guidance Office' to work out how citizens might be nudged, at the least possible cost to the public finances, into living in ways officially judged desirable.
It seems that modern industrial societies cannot spur their members to work without dangling before them the prospect of ever-growing happiness. But wherever the notion comes from, and however respectable its ancestry, making governments answerable for promoting happiness will always endanger human freedom.
