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Sue Gerhardt
© Sue Gerhardt 2007
Personal happiness and the quality of life is back on the agenda, largely thanks to Richard Layard. This is a welcome development, which opens a new era of political thinking - the "politics of well-being"- but also returns us to some old debates from the 1960s and 1970s about the links between the personal and the political.
Although the happiness agenda puts quality of life back on the map, what is still not being sufficiently addressed by thinkers on the left is that the way we live and relate to others is shaped by our inner world. There is still too large a gap between thinkers who deal with external, practical realities (politics, economics, sociology) and those who deal with internal, personal realities (psychology, psychotherapy). We appear to be stuck in a Cartesian world in which rationality and emotionality are split apart. But there is now a whole new body of evidence that was not available in the 1960s and 1970s which tells us much more about how mind and body are related. The neuroscientific evidence is that conscious choice and action are only a small part of our reality. We mostly run on unconscious brain programmes. How we feel inside affects our behaviour, often more than our rational mind. George Lakoff has applied this to the political sphere, noting that how people vote is often more strongly affected by the mental images created by political parties than by their reasoned arguments. Images (eg of David Cameron in his kitchen) tap in to people's internal reality, and their idea of how the world should be, based on their own family experience.
These inner factors need to be acknowledged. How people feel inside determines how they interpret the social world. But these factors are not innate. They too arise from the social sphere, in particular from the earliest relationships we have which shape our expectations of social life. This applies to men as much as to women. Our earliest experiences overdetermine the way we manage ourselves emotionally; it's our repeated interactions with significant others, particularly those in babyhood when unconscious emotion programmes are set up, that bring a social self into existence. Later on in development, wider cultural factors also come into play to shape and construct the self in other ways.
1970s feminism broke new ground in recognizing some of these more cultural factors and their impact on women's sense of self. The Women's Liberation Movement argued that how women felt inside - their lack of confidence, in particular - was shaped by a sexist culture. How women felt was no longer a purely personal matter, arising from individual psychic development, but was a political matter - arising from a shared experience of being powerless and devalued - which required political, collective solutions. Consciousness raising groups helped women to re-frame their experience and to support each other in entering the public arena and making political demands. These activities changed society and the position of women.
However, they also loosened the links between biological motherhood and child-care, propelling women towards an equal place in the world of employment. Child-rearing was often seen as a trap, part of the dread role of "housewife", a drudgery to be escaped by demanding nurseries for children. Although some feminists wrote movingly of their attachments to their children, on the whole there was little concern about the children's own needs, particularly their emotional needs. Several decades on, women's place in the labour market is assured and most women carry on working when they become mothers and, increasingly, expect to place even very tiny children in substitute care. In 1980 (when I had my first baby) around three-quarters of mothers were at home with their babies for the first year. Currently it is more like a quarter.
Yet now we are learning that children in the UK don't feel good. According to the recent UNICEF report (2007), they have the worst relationships in the developed world, they are the worst behaved in Europe, and feel "left out, awkward, and lonely" in a world full of other children who they perceive as neither "kind" nor "helpful". Why is this the case? Is it because of the neoconservative agenda, the decline of public services, or just living in an intensely competitive world? I would suggest instead that there is a clue in the fact that of all rich countries, Dutch children are the happiest. Dutch society has long been a child-centred one, and many mothers spend considerable time at home in the early years. They now have "working time accounts" which increase job flexibility and allow part-time working to be guaranteed.
Fiona Williams, in her contribution to Soundings, argues that we too need these practical measures to enable us to care better for children (and others). She breaks away from the dominant thinking of the last 40 years focused on integrating women into the workforce, and challenges the "work ethic" so dear to the current government, in suggesting that we should ask how we fit work around our care needs, not vice versa. In some ways this revives another old strand of feminist thinking, inspired particularly by Carol Gilligan. This line of thought argues that women have a different way of being, which values relationship above achievement. Both urge a move away from the "work ethic" (or rights-based thinking) towards an "ethic of care". (I entirely support this shift in thinking, although I feel wary of its tendency to idealise women's capacity for relating).
However, an ethic of care embodied in more practical support for parenting and more time spent caring for others rather than working, only takes us so far. It doesn't address the problem that the people who are supposed to be doing this caring already have an inner life and a way of managing their needs that fitted in to a workaholic society. Nor that those who have been emotionally neglected or maltreated have strong impulses to repeat this with their own children. Flexible working and community facilities will not by themselves change this. We need to interrupt the cycle of emotional disadvantage.
When people start off not getting the attention and support they need to flourish early in life, they feel deprived inside. Then they may become teenage parents looking desperately to their baby for love (as so many of our teenagers do compared with other countries in the UNICEF survey), or they may get drunk to blot out their inner pain, or they may pursue their City bonuses as a balm, or pursue goals that take no account of others. It is hard to care about others if you don't feel cared for. This applies at any age or stage of life. As Philip Zimbardo showed in The Lucifer Effect (2007), when you put young soldiers into an abusive environment like Abu Ghraib prison, and mistreat and ignore them, even apparently pleasant and inoffensive individuals can turn into abusers. So treating people well is an ongoing requirement of any "caring" society. However, inner security (which is established in infancy) generally goes a long way in anchoring social norms in less extreme situations.
But inner security is not a given, it is a social construct. It arises from the early experience of secure relationships with others, and the expectation that others will pay attention to your needs. This is mirrored in a physiological organization which manages stress reasonably well, along with a brain capable of self-control and the ability to direct one's attention.
Although these developmental achievements are not class-specific, clearly those people who live in high stress environments can sometimes have a greater difficulty in establishing these capacities in their children, if they themselves can't cope. In these situations, harsh parenting can be more common. But it is not unique to those who live in socially deprived conditions. It is also an intergenerational phenomenon, passed on through the mental organization of the parent to the child. Harsh parents who deny emotional needs tend to produce people who in turn are harsh and deny others' needs. Inconsistent parents who are preoccupied with their own difficulties tend to produce children who are uncertain of how to get their needs met. The way parents reproduce their own inner life in their children has a huge impact on the social fabric. It plays a major part in our capacity for empathy and concern for others, or lack of it. It also plays a major part in laying the groundwork for future criminal behaviour and mental illness of varying degrees, both rooted in poor emotional regulation. (See my book Why Love Matters: how affection shapes a baby's brain, 2004, Routledge, for a fuller picture of the links between early experience and these types of outcome.)
Ending poverty, redistributing wealth, and other socialist goals will not necessarily create happier individuals if these cycles of emotional disadvantage are not challenged. As a relatively rich society, most of us are not going to get happier by increasing our material wealth further. Although poverty is still an issue, it may now be time to think beyond the pursuit of material equality and "rights" for various excluded groupings in society, to consider emotional equality. How do we create equal emotional opportunities for all? How can we free children from the place in society that their parents give them at an emotional level? We should not allow children's life chances to be blighted by the parents they happen to have, any more than the socio-economic class they happen to have - as Adam Swift and Harry Brighouse have argued, "relationship goods are among the goods that our society should seek to distribute more fairly". The huge response to the happiness agenda suggests that we may be ready to address some of these questions.
If we manage to do this, we will be freeing up a huge energy to find productive solutions to our current problems, energy that is currently wasted and frittered away in misery and dead-end attempts to regulate inner pain. Personal misery is political. It turns people against each other, as we are already seeing with the schoolchildren who don't believe their peers are either kind or helpful. Who and what will such children vote for in the future? Will they be drawn to an "ethic of care"? It seems doubtful.
Any solutions must take the inner life into account, and recognize how new selves are produced. The care and attention we receive in early life shapes our brains and our ability to be "happy". Emotional "wealth" or well-being is produced through relationships themselves, in particular the earliest relationships - which form the self. This means that we need specifically psychological interventions to achieve psychological change, to enable parents to meet their children's emotional needs as well as their material and educational needs. This is what will open the door to a more empathic society and true "well-being".
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