Meg Barker asks: should we open our minds to all emotional states, not just happiness, in order to have fulfilled lives?

On Tuesday (22 May) the magazine DIVA and the mental health charity PACE are holding an evening event called The H-word. The H-word in question is happiness, and the plan is to have a discussion about happiness, health and well-being and about how people can support each other towards 'happier, more meaningful lives', with a particular focus on lesbian, bisexual and queer women.

The focus on these groups is appropriate because both women, and lesbian, bisexual and queer people, are particularly highly diagnosed with mental health problems such as depression and anxiety (when compared with men, on the one hand, and heterosexual people on the other). They also self-report higher levels of distress and lower levels of happiness and well-being than other groups. 

My brief presentation at the event will focus on the social aspects of such suffering. Women's experiences of depression have been linked, for example, to the ways in which women are socially expected to demonstrate distress (sadness and fear, rather than anger), and to aspects of conventional femininity such as having identities which are strongly bound up with other people's well-being and feeling a lack of agency over their own lives. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) people have higher rates of such problems because of the challenges of living within a heteronormative world and related experiences of homophobia, biphobia and transphobia. Recent research has found that rates of depression, self-harm and suicide are particularly high amongst bisexual and queer people, which is likely linked to their lack of visibility in wider culture. It is difficult indeed to have one's identity questioned, ridiculed, and/or disregarded by heterosexual and lesbian and gay communities alike.

Suffering is often exacerbated when distress which has such a strong social component is regarded as being something which is internal to the individual themselves. Currently there is a powerful cultural tendency to see all distress as being internally caused. Many people believe that when they are depressed or anxious there are only two possible ways of understanding this: Either they are ill, and they need help, but at least this means that it is not their fault. Or they are not ill, and therefore don't need help, but this means that they are to blame for their own suffering (the 'pull your socks up' attitude). 

Both of these understandings are internal: either there is something physically wrong, or there is some kind of personal deficiency on the part of the individual. Such understandings can prevent us from seeing – and addressing – any social element to our suffering. They also catch us in a double bind whereby we have to accept that there is something wrong with us or that we are blameworthy, neither of which is a great outcome, and both of which continue to haunt the other even if we dismiss them. 

 

'there is a powerful cultural tendency to see all distress as being internally caused'

An alternative to this internal perspective is to see all forms of human distress as complexly biopsychosocial. Of course there are some physical vulnerabilities which we have to experience distress in certain ways, and social experiences like being the victim of prejudice write themselves on our psychology and biology in various ways (affecting brain chemistry, thought patterns, and the way neurons wire up, for example). However, our biology is intrinsically interwoven with the ways in which we experience the world, and the ways in which in which it treats us. The statistics on mental health problems in women and LGBT people alert us to just how important these social aspects can be, and may leave us asking whether 'depression' or 'oppression' is the more useful word to apply. Opening up the possible role of social forces also opens up potential for other ways of addressing struggles than the common individual modes of drugs or therapy. Both community involvement and activism because important possibilities to consider.

This finally leads us to the H-word and why I find it somewhat troubling. We hear a lot at the moment about the importance of individuals achieving happiness through positive psychology. However, there is a real danger that this throws us back into an internal understanding of such things: 'Everyone should be happy and here are some techniques you can use to achieve it. If you can't achieve it then there is something wrong with you'.

In her book, The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed talks about the ways in which happiness may be more available to some rather than others (often those who can more easily conform to the 'norm'). She suggests that we require 'feminist killjoys' and 'unhappy queers' if we are to reach a more equal society where pleasure isn’t always found at the expense of others, or by conforming to problematic power hierarchies.

There is a related idea in the mindfulness approach which I find useful. Buddhists believe that it is actually the craving for happiness which is the cause of suffering. Our consumer culture constantly tells us what we need to be happy (more money, fame and success, the perfect partner, the ideal body, the product they are selling, etc.). As Sara Ahmed points out, such things are more accessible to some than others, but even for those who can get them, they are never enough. Mindfulness advocates an alternative approach of bringing our attention to the here-and-now, rather than constantly striving after whatever we think we need to be happy. It also advocates being with whatever emotions we're experiencing rather than privileging one (happiness) over all others.

I was interested that the H-word event description talked about finding 'happier, more meaningful lives' as if these two things necessarily go together. From another perspective we might regard constantly grasping after happiness as the very thing which will prevent us from achieving it. It might be that in order to have a meaningful life we need to let go of the quest for happiness. If we turn our focus to welcoming all emotional states and what they have to tell us, and to compassionately seeking to improve society through mutual support, perhaps we may find that happiness sneaks up on us after all.

Meg Barker 21 May 2012

Meg Barker is an Open University lecturer teaching mainly on counselling modules,  and is also a therapist specialising in relationships. Find details of her other blogs here. 

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

 

Cartoon by Catherine Pain

 

 

 

Dr Donna Smith is dismayed by the Government’s vacillation over gay marriage in the face of mid-term electoral blues.

When the Coalition Government announced it would hold a consultation on opening up marriage to include gay civil marriage, it suggested that one half of the Coalition, the Conservative Party, had become much more socially liberal since the Party’s opposition to many of Labour’s gay rights policies in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron made it clear that he supported gay marriage, with the Lib-Dem Equalities Minister, Lynne Featherstone, stating gay marriage was a “change for the better”.

But a lot changes in six months. Cameron’s Conservatives are on the ropes, after a dodgy budget and local election hammering. Some backbench Tory MPs have suggested that it’s support for gay marriage that has damaged the Conservative brand – a view shared by various right-leaning newspapers, who have deemed the change irrelevant and unimportant in the current economic climate. Post-local elections the Conservative Chancellor, George Osborne, said that the Government would take care to focus on the things "that really matter”, the suggestion being that this isn’t gay marriage.

But, hang on a minute. Who says gay marriage doesn’t matter? It certainly matters to many gay people, their friends and families. In fact, it could be said to matter to society as a whole, as an issue of equality and fairness. And don’t governments have a duty to focus on issues whether they affect the ‘majority’ or ‘minority’? If the Government doesn’t look out for people, who will?

Perhaps Government should just go ahead and legislate. That is, after all, what they have been elected to do. Doesn’t consultation give the wrong message on this one? If a government believes something is morally right, there is no need to consult. Especially as the consultation was not about whether gay civil marriage should be allowed, but rather the best way to go about it. Just make a decision and legislate! (By comparison, on the day of the Queen's Speech that failed to mention gay marriage in the Coalition's plans for the next year, President Barack Obama affirmed his support for same-sex marriages in a nation where 29 States oppose it).

The previous Labour Government faced huge opposition to some of its equality measures, but pushed on nevertheless, resulting in a fairer and kinder society. Of course, we have to accept that not everyone will be in favour of gay civil marriage. Their opinions should be heard, without the need for shouting by either ‘side’. But by consulting, the Government weakens its stated belief in gay marriage. It leaves room for the policy to be picked apart by the media, with opponents in the Conservative Party having room to blame it for the Government’s current woes.

It seems unlikely that the Coalition’s stance on gay marriage had that much of an impact at the polls; high unemployment, lack of consumer confidence, petrol prices and the perception (fair or unfair) that the Conservatives are a party for the rich, not poor, are higher on most people’s agendas, surely.

So, stand up for gay marriage, Cameron and Osborne, if it’s what you support. You’ll be stronger and more respected for it.
Donna Smith 8 May 2012
twitter: @Dr_DonnaSmith

Donna Smith is a tutor on the Open University modules Introducing the social sciences - part one (DD131) and Living political ideas (DD306), and is based in the East of England. She is the author of Sex, Lies and Politics: Gay Politicians in the Press and talks to Platform about gay politicians and the media here

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain

Social Science Bites is a new podcast series, launching in May 2012, and is brought to you by the team behind the enormously successful Philosophy Bites: Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds. The series is produced in association with SAGE – the world’s leading independent academic and professional publisher. Watch this space for more information!
 

Professor Tim Chappell, Director of the OU Ethics Centre, writes about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport. Is there a place for them? Should athletes be putting their health at risk to achieve medals? And will competing become more about the size of your wallet than your physique?

With the  Olympics bearing down on us, and with the sprinter Dwain Chambers and the cyclist David Millar appealing their lifetime bans in order to be eligible for the London 2012, perhaps it's time to have a think about the place - if any - of performance-enhancing drugs in sport.

We  all know the usual arguments in favour: “Everybody's doing it anyway.” “Bring it out into the open so you can regulate it.” “Whatever helps you win is fine.” “It's up to you what you take.” Or even: “The athlete who stops eating pies and the athlete who starts taking steroids are both altering their diets in the interests of good performance - where's the real difference?”

Before we look at these arguments more closely, I think we should step back to ask ourselves - what are we doing in sport anyway?

Whether as competitors or as spectators, we're looking for glorious, exceptional, superlative physical performances. But that doesn't mean that we want to see (or run) the fastest 100m sprint that anything can do. (If it did, we'd go and watch a jaguar, or get in a Jaguar.) It means that we want to see the fastest 100m sprint that a human can do.

With drugs in the picture, is it really about what humans can do any more? I'd say not. I'd say watching a drugged performance is more like watching what drugs can do, and the money that buys them. I'd say it’s about taking things away from the competitors and giving them to the market. Where's the glory in that?

Or think of it another way. Remember when you were two, and your game was to try and jump across a puddle two feet wide? This game is fine if you’re toddler sized, boringly easy if you’re an adult-sized adult. The logical conclusion of enhancing athletes' performance is that at least some of our games will go the way of the toddler's puddle game. Do we want that? Do we want to outgrow the games we play?

Climbing is a case in point here. If you stick bolts in it, you can get up any rock. This is what makes climbers get so angry on the subject of bolts. If you want to rattle a climber's cage ask him what his favourite climb is, then tell him you think it should be bolted. Provided it hasn't been already, of course.

Of course, if we did outgrow our current games by drugs or magic or whatever, no doubt we’d invent some other games. Fine. No more football - time to switch to quidditch... But the point for the moment is just this: athletics with drugs is, at best, a different game from athletics without. And when some of the competitors are playing one game and others the other, the whole activity gets into hopeless confusion.

Not just confusion, though; corruption as well. It's quite easy for the participants in a sport to be fairly severely exploited. Here's something that can happen: a naïve young boy from the slums with no prospects at all is taken up by a rich promoter and turned into a boxer. The boy makes some money, sure. The promoter makes more. And the promoter doesn't end up brain-damaged. If this happens (and I'm not saying it does, just that it can), then it seems to me that the boy has been pretty severely exploited for the enrichment of the promoter, and the entertainment of those who like watching boxing.

'In practice, if there is no regulation, individuals will not be free to decide. They will have no choice but to take the drugs because everyone else is taking them'

So compare the case in athletics where someone achieves fantastic performances by taking steroids for 20 years. Think about the kind of horror-stories we used to hear regularly from the Soviet Union about 50-year-old steroid-raged moustachioed ex-shot-putters with cataracts, duodenal ulcers, and severe weight problems. These people have been sacrificed for our entertainment. Are we happy with that? I don't think we should be.

Of course, athletes in the Soviet Union were forced to take performance-enhancing drugs. That doesn't mean it's a whole lot better to “leave individuals free to decide” what drugs they take. In practice, if there is no regulation, individuals will not be free to decide. They will have no choice but to take the drugs because everyone else is taking them. Here as elsewhere, by regulating the state serves the role that it's there for in a genuinely liberal settlement. It can regulate in a way that actually increases citizens' freedom, rather than decreasing it.

Also of course, not all performance-enhancing drugs are bad for you. Or like caffeine, they're a bit bad for you, but not very. Or their long-term effects are unknown. And there are drug therapies which involve not taking things rather than taking them, which seems just like giving up alcohol to perform better... surely some of these therapies must be all right?

Yes, there are grey areas. But there are often are grey areas in life. The fact that some things are grey doesn't mean that nothing is black or white. We can be quite clear about the kinds of performance-enhancing drugs that we most want to eradicate, and work backwards from those cases to the less obvious ones.

I suggest that the two things most worth eradicating are really harmful drugs and really expensive drugs. We should ban the harmful ones because, well, because they're harmful; we should ban the expensive ones because they turn what ought to be a competition between physiques into a competition between wallets. And once we know what we think about the clear and easy cases, we may find ourselves in a better position to think about the marginal and difficult ones.

 

Find out more:

• Professor Tim Chappell
• The OU Ethics Centre
• Free study unit: The Ancient Olympics: Bridging past and present
• More about philosophy on OpenLearn
• Study with the OU: Philosophy
   

Picture credit: Thinkstock

At a time when funders, activists, policy makers, scholars and others are increasingly calling for forms of publicly engaged social science research, the OU's Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) launches a new research project: Creating Publics. The project, driven by Research Fellow Dr Nick Mahony, will investigate what is at stake in public engagement, reassess how it is being conceptualised and collectively test-out and innovate new approaches to practice. Here, Nick Mahony, explains the project...

The aim of the new Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) research project Creating Publics is to innovate new and more theoretically and empirically informed ways of conceptualizing and practicing public engagement with social science research.

The starting point of this project is the proposition that, in order to create the publics of social science research in the 21st century, it will be necessary to let go of the idea that publics are pre-existing or autonomous entities and – perhaps more controversially – also the idea that social research and scholarship can ever be an entirely isolated or autonomous forms of practice.

By instead viewing publicness/publics and social research as each being distributed activities that exist in relations of interdependency with one another, the Creating Publics project sets out to systematically analyse, collectively discuss and set up experiments to investigate the forms of public support and infrastructure required in different contexts to facilitate processes of critical and creative interaction and innovation between them.

How, the project asks, might forms of contemporary social science research more effectively summon and support publics and forms of publicness? And how, by extension, can 21st century publics and emerging forms of public infrastructure, better support the innovation of new and emerging forms of social research?

'It is an agenda centred on a set of contemporary questions and debates about how we understand what social science research does in the world'

The Creating Publics project builds on and is working to contribute to two increasingly important research agendas. The first of these is the ‘public engagement’ agenda. Whether it is pressure coming from the 'top down' (from funders or government) or from the 'bottom up' (from activists and scholars), the increasing visibility of debates about 21st century public engagement are also focusing greater attention on the issues of how the publics and the public role of social science research should be enacted, understood and further innovated.

The second research agenda that Creating Publics is working to contribute to is a slightly different but closely connected one. It is an agenda centred on a set of contemporary questions and debates about how we understand what social science research does in the world; the relationship between its methods, approaches and outcomes and forms of social change; and, questions about what ‘the public’ and forms of publicness are in 21st century contexts of practice?

To address this agenda the Creating Publics project is drawing on and extending a strand of research that has been highly active in CCIG over the last few years. This research, in conversation with other parallel developments, has re-visited and re-conceptualised what publics are, how they form in different contexts as well as begun to trace some of the array of resources and forms of support that publics require in practice for their mediation, creation and sustenance.

The Creating Publics project is therefore for all those who are interested in engaging critically and creatively with the work of innovating and developing more theoretically and empirically understandings of public engagement with social research in the 21st century.

'In time the project will also therefore be in a position to generate a set of public resources about public creation, public creativity and creating publics'

Working collaboratively with pre-existing social science research projects in CCIG, the Creating Publics project is already beginning pilot new ways of conceptualizing public engagement with social research and experiment with new forms of practice. It is also beginning to collectively explore, debate and reflect on what is at stake when it comes to engaging and creating publics and forms of publicness in these and other contexts, both now and in the future. In time the project will also therefore be in a position to generate a set of public resources about public creation, public creativity and creating publics.

The launch of Creating Publics in March 2012 at The Open University was an occasion to inaugurate the Creating Publics keynote lecture and event series, another of the key strands of activity this project will be supporting. For this series we’ve scheduled three events that will run between 26 March and 28 June 2012. Each of these events has been set up so as to support forms of substantive and innovative thinking and collective conversation – live and in public (albeit in ways that are inevitably not equally accessible to all). As well as being free to register, each of these events will be webcast, so as to open out possibilities for people to participate in ways than would be possible otherwise.

On May 16 we look forward to welcoming the geographer Professor Rachel Pain from University of Durham who will be giving a Creating Publics keynote address about the politics of public engagement; and then on 28 June we will be fortunate enough to host to the sociologist Professor John Holmwood, from the University of Nottingham.

However, beginning this series of keynote events and helping to launch the Creating Publics project on Monday 26 March was Professor Lawrence Grossberg, one of the world’s pre-eminent cultural studies scholars who whos keynote was entitled ‘Practices of Knowledge in a Complex World: Experiments in collaboration and conversation’. You can watch it here.

Regular updates and ongoing discussion of this project can be accessed via the Creating Publics blog and details about all forthcoming events will be posted on the CCIG website.

 

Dr Nick Mahony
March 2012

Please contact Sarah Batt (a.s.c.batt@open.ac.uk) if you’d like to be added to the project mailing list.
 

What many may have suspected – that the upper classes of society are more likely to cheat, lie, and behave badly – has been confirmed by an investigation by psychologists at the University of California.

The research, based on a combination of covert observation and laboratory studies, concluded that selfishness was a shared cultural norm among societal elites and this tendency results in a range of unethical conduct. Because they are less aware of others, privileged people are far more likely than other social classes not to stop at pedestrian crossings, and to cut up other road users.The research builds on previous work into class behavioural differences which suggests that upper classes are worse at reading other people's emotions, less cognisant of other people's needs and rights, and far less altruistic than people from the lower classes. 

Worse for the elite, the researchers identified a greater capacity for greed-directed activity which is closely linked to social status – simply put, the higher your social status, the more greedy you may be. 

It reminds me of the creed of Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street: 'Greed is good'. And the findings, published in the US Journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, strongly suggest that this behavioural trait among the elite helps to establish and sustain the economic gap between rich and poor.

The authors argue that people who inhabit the higher echelons start to see themselves as more entitled, and develop a heightened self-focus. "Your social environment is likely more buffered against the impact of your actions, and  you might not perceive the risks of your behaviour because you are better resourced, you have the money for lawyers and so on," said report author David Piff. He concluded that the main difference between the classes is in terms of what the researchers called 'default tendencies towards unethical conduct'. 

The field work, in the Bay area of San Francisco, ranked a driver's social class on a scale of one to five depending on the age, model and appearance of the vehicle. The researchers found that drivers in the better-quality vehicles cut people up a third of the time, compared to only one in ten for older, lower-quality vehicles. This is not a surprising finding to me as I have often wondered why it is that most of the cars that stay in the outside lane at junctions before cutting you up to leave the motorway are nearly always 4-by-4s or prestigious German vehicles.

The researchers also found that at pedestrian crossings better-quality cars and their owners ignored  pedestrians on 45 per cent of occasions, while the majority of lower-quality cars stopped and gave way. 

Five laboratory studies tested respondents' capacity to lie and cheat, and people from the elite behaved far more badly than the lower classes.The researchers also found that people's endorsement of unethical behaviour rose with socio-economic status, which they ranked by income, education and occupation. 

Would these findings fit into a British context? Do they help explain banker's greed? Can they shed light on the growing sense that the Government, with its Bullingdon Club Cabinet of millionaires, is losing touch with the people most affected by the drive towards austerity? Or is the research damned by a flawed methodology, in which the desire to state what seemed obvious led to the conclusion? 

You decide. Me? I think the research should be on the good Lord Leveson's  reading list. It may assist his understanding of the corruptive processes under his remit.

Dick Skellington 5 March 2012

Cartoon by Catherine Pain