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Archive for the ‘from the reading room’ Category

Three Ages of Knowledge and Understanding

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy, science on June 24, 2009| Leave a Comment »

The contemporary French philosopher, Luc Ferry’s book, “What is The Good Life?” (ISBN 978-0226244532), is an interesting but quite difficult read. I’m not sure I’ve really grasped the whole of his argument, but it seems to involve developing awareness of the “singularities” in life, by which he means the unique, particular events, which draw our consciousness out to farther horizons so we see the transcendent in the immanent.
I won’t rehearse the detail of his arguments here, but the final section of the book considers the idea of two “modernities” as (apparently) described by Ulrich Beck in his “Risk Society” (ISBN 978-0803983465) (another one for the reading list). I haven’t come across this before and I think it was a particularly interesting take on the progress of science and society.
Ferry describes three ages of science, with only the latter two covering “modernity”. The First age was a time where the “contemplation of the order of the world and comprehension of the structure of the cosmos” were linked. The consequence of this link was that knowledge and values were intrinsically connected, “in the sense that, in itself, the discovery of the intimate character of the universe implies an emphasis on certain practical aims for human existence.” The Second age began with the Enlightenment, and, he says, was characterised by an indifference to values – “science describes what is, it does not speak of what should be”. This age, says Ferry, has only begun to decline in the last few years of the twentieth century. I’ve certainly read a perspective like this before, but the next stage is where it gets especially interesting. If you read my post about “Metaphors we live by”, the contrasting of an “objectivist” position with a “subjectivist” one (this latter exemplified by the Romantic focus on feelings and passions) does, I think, describe these two contrasting worldviews. In fact, as Luc Ferry also points out, there is a reaction against science from people who are still more attracted to the agenda of the Romantics. The point he goes on to make is one I haven’t read anywhere else. It is that the Third age (or second “modernity”) is characterised by self-criticism or self-reflection.
His argument is this – in the Enlightenment thinking scientific rationalism –

….promised to free people from the religious obscurantism of centuries past and at the same time to provide them with the means to make themselves, in Descartes’ famous phrase, into the “masters and possessors” of a universe that they could use and exploit at will in order to realise their material well-being.

This way of thinking easily contributed to the politics of democracy and nation-states –

The chief business of the new scientifico-democratic nation-states was the production and distribution of wealth. However, we are now witnessing a significant change because –

Today it is no longer nature that engenders the major risks for humankind, but scientific investigation; thus it is no longer nature that we have to tame, but rather science. For the first time in history, science furnishes the human species with the means for its own destruction

Even if we don’t feel threatened by the potential harms of nuclear and chemical technologies, we are afraid of what might happen if they were to fall into the hands of terrorists. “Control of the uses and effects of modern science is slipping out of our hands, and its unbridled power is worrisome.”

This “process without a subject” in a globalised world of technology that no worldwide governance has yet managed to control makes the framework of the nation-state and, along with it, the traditional forms of parliamentary democracy seem strangely cramped. No republican miracle caused the clouds of Chernobyl to stop at the frontiers of France. For their part, the processes that govern economic growth and the financial markets no longer obey the dictates of the people’s representatives, who now struggle to keep the promises they have made to the electorate.

It’s interesting that he wrote this about seven years ago, before we experienced the current crisis in the world economic system.
What does he advocate, in terms of the project to spread the good life amongst human beings?

A re-integration of values and knowledge, and, especially a renewed focus on what’s special about human life as a part of nature, not apart from it. This strikes me as very true.
There’s definitely a part of me drawn to the Romantic values of the subject, to a respect for feelings and a belief that a life without passion is a life only half lived (at best!), but there’s also a part of me keenly drawn to science. (It’s just that I find the current flavour of materialistic scientism desperately empty and unsatisfying). I think that’s why I’m drawn both to the Lakoff and Johnson “experientialist” idea, and this idea in Luc Ferry’s book about the scientific method developing through self-criticism and self-reflection. Both are attempts to understand what it is to be human, fully immanent within nature, but with a constant capacity for transcendence.

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How extroversion improves the body’s defences

Posted in from the reading room, life, personal growth, psychology on June 18, 2009| 2 Comments »

Here’s an interesting study published in the journal, “Brain, Behaviour and Immunity”. In a nutshell, they’ve found a relationship between personality traits of extraversion and the levels of an inflammatory chemical in the blood (Interleukin-6). The more extraverted, the lower the levels of this chemical. Why’s that a good thing? Well, the higher levels are indicative of increased inflammatory activity (in aging women the difference between high and low levels can result in a two fold increase in mortality over five years). Many serious chronic conditions are thought to result from increased inflammatory activity.

There’s a reassuring increase in studies of this type (in PNI – “Psychoneuroimmunology”) and they’re beginning to give us a better scientific understanding of the interconnectedness of all our body systems, and to break down the rather naive idea that the body and the mind are separate.

This particular study has hooked my attention because of its focus on extraversion. I suppose neither extraversion, nor intraversion, seem, on the face of it, to be healthy characteristics, so I was keen to understand exactly what the psychologists were interpreting as extraversion. Apparently Karl Jung described extraverts as focused on the world around them and happiest in the presence of others. Psychological models of character have come a long way since his day and this particular group of researchers worked with a model known as the “Five Factor Model” of personality. The five factors are –

  1. Extraversion
  2. Emotional Stability
  3. Agreeableness
  4. Conscientiousness
  5. Openness to Experience

Here’s one definition of extraversion

Extraversion is marked by pronounced engagement with the external world. Extraverts enjoy being with people, are full of energy, and often experience positive emotions. They tend to be enthusiastic, action-oriented, individuals who are likely to say “Yes!” or “Let’s go!” to opportunities for excitement. In groups they like to talk, assert themselves, and draw attention to themselves.

The particular element of extraversion associated with the lower inflammatory markers is “dispositional activity” – which the researchers are also dubbing “life force” (its the extent to which you wholeheartedly engage with life really)

I think that’s fascinating. As you know, my three key characteristics of health are adaptability, creativity and ENGAGEMENT, and my palette of factors for a good life includes a sense of wonder in the everyday (“emerviellement” in the “quotidien”)

I was intruiged to learn more about the Five Factor model. Wikipedia, as usual, has a good entry. But if you want to find out what the five factor analysis says about your own personality, try here where they have an excellent, free online, instrument.


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Storytelling, the basis of understanding

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, tagged , on June 16, 2009| 2 Comments »

This blog is called heroes not zombies because I believe we all tend to sleepwalk through life (in a kind of zombie way), but that we have the opportunity to wake up and be the heroes of our own stories. So, I was especially struck by the following passage in “Metaphors we live by” –

Self-understanding requires unending negotiation and renegotiation of the meaning of your experiences to yourself……It involves the constant construction of new coherences in your life, coherences that give new meaning to old experiences. The process of self-understanding is the continual development of new life stories for yourself.

I think this is SO on the button. It grasps the dynamic, creative, ever-changing, ever-growing process of understanding which comes about through telling, editing, revising and re-telling our life stories. These stories are not fantasy of course. Rather they are the process of creating meaning from our experiences. They do this by developing coherences. We continuously strive to make sense of our experiences, and making sense means building on the existing coherent stories we tell about ourselves to make them more coherent in the light of our newest experiences. Additionally, this passage hits the nail on the head by pointing out that the new coherences cast a new light on older experiences. This is the healing potential of understanding.

Myths are the key stories which create our lifeworlds. Myths are not false stories. They are our most fundamental ones.  As Lakoff and Johnson say

Myths provide ways of comprehending experience; they give order to our lives. Like metaphors, myths are necessary for making sense of what goes on around us. All cultures have myths, and people cannot function without myth any more than they can function without metaphor.

Are you aware of the metaphors, the myths, the stories which you use to comprehend your experience?

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The significance of metaphors

Posted in from the reading room, life, philosophy, science, tagged , , on June 15, 2009| 7 Comments »

“Metaphors we live by” written by Lakoff and Johnson. (ISBN 0-226-46801-1) ……..
I often muse about what makes a human being, human? Or what makes a human being fully human? Consciousness is clearly one of the characteristics. Language is another. And imagination is a third. Perhaps it’s because I’m interested in these phenomena that some time back I bought “Metaphors we live by”. Our ability to handle metaphors and symbols intrigues me, and I wanted to understand better how we use metaphors so the title caught my eye. However, when I flicked through it, it struck me as a bit technical and even dry. I thought it was a book about linguistics, an area of study which does interest me, but one which I find can be difficult to grasp. So I put the book aside in my giant collection of “interesting books to get round to reading one day”. I’m not quite sure I pulled it off the shelf recently. Oh, yes, actually I do remember why, but the explanation is going to have to wait till another post. (cryptic, huh?) I guess that old adage of there being a right time for everything must apply to books, because this time, I started into it and couldn’t stop. I’ve marked it up. I read and re-read chapters. I’ve skipped to the back, delved into the middle, read it from cover to cover. I find it compelling and convincing. And I can’t figure out why I didn’t take to it first time round.
It’s actually an incredibly difficult book to summarise. Usually when I write a review like this I paste in a few passages from the book to illustrate what it’s like. But I’ve collected so many passages I find it hard to pick only a few!
Here’s the gist of their argument. By studying human communication they claim to have discovered that metaphors are not simply a word or language game, but much more fundamentally, they are conceptual. By that they mean we think in metaphors, we understand using metaphors, and, indeed we understand the world and our place in it through metaphors. I didn’t need convinced about that. I already thought that metaphors were the basis of thought. However, they take the whole project to an entirely different level by studying the types of metaphors which are most prevalent in our thinking and communicating. With way too many examples to share here, they illustrate clearly and convincingly that the basic, fundamental metaphors we use haven’t appeared randomly, but are developed out of our interactions with the physical and the cultural worlds in which we exist. In other words, they are develop from our interactions with time and space, and our interactions with other people and creatures. This, I think, is the key. It allows them to develop an argument they call “the experientialist myth”, proposing it as a better way to understand life than the opposing myths of “objectivism” and “subjectivism”. (Time for a quote or two from the book)

The myth of objectivism reflects the human need to understand the external world in order to be able to function successfully in it. The myth of subjectivism is focused on internal aspects of understanding – what the individual finds meaningful and what makes his life worth living. The experientialist myth suggests that these are not opposing concerns.

Within the myth of objectivism, the concern for truth grows out of a concern for successful functioning. Given a view of man as separate from his environment, successful functioning is conceived of as mastery over the environment. Hence the objectivist metaphors KNOWLEDGE IS POWER and SCIENCE PROVIDES CONTROL OVER NATURE.

The principal theme of the myth of subjectivism is the attempt to overcome the alienation that results from viewing man as separate from his environment and from other men. This involves an embracing of the self – of individuality and reliance upon personal feelings, intuition, and values. The Romanticist version involves reveling in the senses and feelings and attempting to gain union with nature through passive appreciation of it.

The old myths share a common perspective: man as separate from his environment.

The experientialist myth takes the perspective of man as part of his environment, not as separate from it. It focuses on constant interaction with the physical environment and with other people. It views this interaction with the environment as involving mutual change. You cannot function within the environment without changing it or being changed by it.

Do you get the idea? It’s a kind of division between the rationalists and the Romantics, with the claim that metaphor builds a bridge between reason and the imagination and gives us a third way. One which neither denies objective reality, not gets lost in subjective relativism. In the process, this “experientialist” way, shows how there are no Absolute truths out there discoverable without an understanding based on cultural systems, but keeps the project of the imagination and feelings grounded in our interactions with the world.

Objectivism takes as its allies scientific truth, rationality, precision, fairness, and impartiality. Subjectivism takes as its allies the emotions, intuitive insight, imagination, humaneness, art, and a “higher” truth.
The proportions of our lives governed by objectivism and subjectivism vary greatly from person to person and culture and culture. Some of us even attempt to live our entire lives totally by one myth of the other.

How do you think it is for you? Are you more drawn to objectivism’s allies, or subjectivism’s?

I find both main strands of their case very convincing. The more you look for it, the more you become aware of the pervasiveness of metaphor, and the more you study it, the clearer it becomes that conceptual metaphors are grounded in our experiences and interactions. Their experientialist myth appeals to me much more than either of the other two older myths. It strikes me as more true. I also think it allows a much more robust defence against scientism than romanticism ever did.

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The commodification of health care

Posted in from the reading room, health on June 10, 2009| Leave a Comment »

The NHS Confederation has produced a report highlighting a potential “shortfall” in the NHS in England’s budget by 2011. I heard one of their spokeswomen on the BBC news this morning and she summarised the Confederation’s message. They are recommending more “efficiency”, better “productivity” and a reduction in the range of services offered by the NHS. In their report they make it clear that the changes will require reducing the number of NHS staff and having clinicians perform more doctor-patient interventions.
Another way of putting this is to say they think the answers lie in less staff providing a greater number of uniform interventions to more people.

I find these conclusions dehumanising. They turn subjects into objects. Health and illness are experiences. They are not events or products.

I’ve just finished reading The Postmodern Prince by John Sanbonmatsu. It covers an area of academic activity  I’m not familiar with – political critical theory. However, a few passages struck me loud and clear.

Holbach and Helvetius had portrayed “Man” as a rational, self-interested subject – and manipulable object. This rationalist view sharply separated culture and nature, subject and object, thought and feeling, and so on,

In the 1920s, Georg Lukacs elaborated Marx and Engels’ critique in his brilliant work, History and Class Consciousness, with his famous description of reification – the cultural process in capitalism by which subjects are turned into objects, and objects into seeming “subjects”, under the twin pressures of commodification and rationalisation.

What all forms of idealism, past, present, or future, have in common is the suppression of experience as the basis of human knowledge and practice.

Ethical relations, broadly speaking, depend on what Daniel Brudney calls “attentiveness to the other”. Without this attentiveness, we risk mistaking a “who” for a “what” – that is, a being or a subject for a thing – and so come to justify all manner of political violence.

Empathy – this powerful natural capacity of ours – must be held at bay, sublimated into the rationalist’s passion for dispassion.

One of the hallmarks of modernity is rationalisation, the progressive reduction of the lifeworld to quantifiable procedures and methods. But in stripping nature of its mystery, the Enlightenment disfigured the nonhuman. This, in turn, has led to our own disfigurement, a “disenchantment” as technological innovation and scientific revolution yielded ever more powerful ways of controlling human beings, and not “only” other animals.

These quotes capture, for me, the essence of something fundamentally important. Our systems are falling apart, and it strikes me that the greatest failure of our current political, economic and social systems is the way they de-humanise, the way they turn the “subject” into an “object”. It’s life-denying.

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Hunter gatherers and farmers

Posted in from the reading room, life, science on June 6, 2009| 5 Comments »

Human history, as best we know, dates back around 200,000 years. For 190,ooo of those years we were hunter-gatherers and for the last 10,000 we’ve had agriculture.

I suppose I’d read about the hunter-gatherer phase long since but the significance of it never really struck me, and certainly the fact that so much of human history was in that phase was something that really didn’t register. For some reason, I’ve stumbled upon a number of different references to this in recent reading. I was musing about what characteristics have been to the fore in the two phases, and I wondered if the hunter-gatherer phase demanded a greater focus on co-operation, whilst the agriculture phase led to ownership and competition. But maybe that’s too simplistic. These thoughts have been around for me during these crises of recent times – the economic, environmental and political ones. There’s a feeling just now that we could be witnessing the crumbling of whole global system, and it leaves us wondering what might emerge to take its place. Which characteristics are we going to need to deal with these current, and future challenges?

I don’t have the answers in place, but here’s a couple of interesting articles to throw into the mix. First off, I read a post on Deric Bownd’s blog. He titled the post “Civilisation has caused the decline of human health“. Well, that caught my eye! He was referring to a presentation by Ann Gibbons at an Americal Assoc. of Physical Anthropologists meeting. 72 researchers studied the data on the remains of 11,000 individuals who lived from 3,000 to 200 years ago in Europe. Here’s the conclusion –

…the health of many Europeans began to worsen markedly about 3000 years ago, after agriculture became widely adopted in Europe and during the rise of the Greek and Roman civilizations. They document shrinking stature and growing numbers of skeletal lesions from leprosy and tuberculosis, caused by living close to livestock and other humans in settlements where waste accumulated. The numbers of dental hypoplasias and cavities also increased as people switched to a grain-based diet with fewer nutrients and more sugars…After a long, slow decline through the Middle Ages, health began to improve in the mid-19th century. Stature increased, probably because of several factors: The little Ice Age ended and food production rose, and better trade networks, sanitation, and medicine developed… But take heed: Overall health and stature in the United States has been declining slightly since the 1950s, possibly because obese Americans eat a poor-quality diet, not unlike early farmers whose diet was less diverse and nutritious than that of hunter-gatherers.

So a bit of a mixed picture but an interesting analysis of the impact of agriculture on our species.

Then I read an article in the Independent on Friday. The article was subtitled “Scientists explain how altruism evolved over 200,000 years of conflict”. This piece described the work of Samuel Bowles, of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico who is challenging the common “Darwinian” theory that altruism is not a characteristic which would be selected for (the “selfish gene” theory) Bowles argues that during the time of hunter-gatherer tribes –

Warfare was sufficiently common and lethal among our ancestors to favour the evolution of what I call parochial altruism, a predisposition to be co-operative towards group members and hostile towards outsiders.

He argues that selection worked on groups, not just individuals and the groups which developed this “parochial altruism” did best. He does admit this is not the only possible explanation for altruism –

[The] willingness to take mortal risks as a fighter is not the only form of altruism… more altruistic and hence more co-operative groups may be more productive and sustain healthier, stronger, or more numerous members, for example, or make more effective use of information

Other scientists are supporting this challenge to the selfish gene theory, arguing that selection effects on groups may be more apparent in a species like humans because our species is a “cultural” one.

It’s interesting to take this longer view of human history. Such a change of perspective can help you see the wood for the trees I think. In particular I find this stimulates my thought about the relative merits of co-operation vs competition (as well as stimulating my thought about how we feed ourselves!)

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Infections are about more than bugs

Posted in from the reading room, health, science on June 1, 2009| 2 Comments »

If someone has an infection caused by a particular bug, and the doctor prescribes the best, most appropriate drug to kill that bug, what does the drug do?

The correct answer is “it kills the bug”.

The incorrect answer is “it cures the infection”.

You see, bugs and infections are not the same thing. Certainly a bug may “cause” an infection. You don’t get TB without the TB “bacillus” being involved. The TB bacillus can be isolated and grown in a laboratory, but it isn’t an infection until a person has it growing inside them. That might sound totally obvious but you’d be surprised how little doctors and patients think about this. There is no doubt that discovering the role of microbes in causing infection was a breakthrough in understanding and the availability of drugs to kill bugs is a real boon but the problem is thought often stops there. How do we help an individual to recover after the bug has been killed? Exactly how does a person repair their damaged body after an infection, and how can they increase their chances of defending themselves more effectively against future infections? How do we reduce the burden of infection on populations? Antimicrobials are only part of the solution, not the whole solution.

This is not a new thought. I’ve recently become a fan of Cabinet magazine (a magazine based on the idea of wonder rooms) and in the current issue there’s an article about Professor Max Joseph von Pettenkofer, a Bavarian chemist-apothecary who lived from 1818 until 1901 (when he shot himself in the head). He was a very colourful character who disputed the theory that germs cause infections. Koch and Pasteur’s discoveries were convincing the world that the cause of infections were microbes but Pettenkofer thought their theories were simplistic. He maintained that infection involved the interaction of three factors – factor x – germs, factor y – some condition of the region where the infection occurred, and factor z – susceptibility on the part of the patient. To prove his point, he conducted a very public, very dramatic experiment where he had a fresh culture of the germ which caused cholera (called at that time the “comma bacillus”) prepared in a laboratory. He then drank enough of this culture to kill a village and survived. (He claimed he did not suffer from the cholera at all but he did have stomach pains and some diarrhoea for a few days.) Despite this performance nobody was convinced. Pettenkofer ended up committing suicide. However, his conclusion that the way to prevent cholera was through sanitation to deal with factor y – the condition in the region, was actually spot on.

There’s a lesson here about the limits of reductionism. The simplest explanations are attractive, but in the real world, are often just too, well, simplistic. And there’s also a lesson about “this or that” or “black or white” ways of thinking. Often “and” is a better explanation than “or”. Narratives need not cancel each other out. They can complement each other and produce a greater, instead of a lesser, understanding.

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How trustworthy are scientific researchers?

Posted in from the reading room, science on May 29, 2009| 1 Comment »

Can we have confidence in bankers? Can we have confidence in politicians? We have a wee phrase in Scots “A hae ma doots” (“I have my doubts”). Well in the middle of this breakdown of trust and confidence in our economic and political institutions, along comes a piece of research from Edinburgh University which has performed a meta-analysis of surveys and studies into fraud and malpractice by scientific researchers. Here’s the conclusion –

On average, across the surveys, around 2% of scientists admitted they had “fabricated” (made up), “falsified” or “altered” data to “improve the outcome” at least once, and up to 34% admitted to other questionable research practices including “failing to present data that contradict one’s own previous research” and “dropping observations or data points from analyses based on a gut feeling that they were inaccurate.” In surveys that asked about the behaviour of colleagues, 14% knew someone who had fabricated, falsified or altered data, and up to 72% knew someone who had committed other questionable research practices.

As the author points out, everything we know about scientific fraud tells us that it is grossly under-reported. These figures are pretty certain to be underestimates. To what extent, we don’t know. But even as they are, they are worrying. Scientists make great claims for themselves as the discoverers of “The Truth”. I’m always wary of people who claim only what they know or believe is true. However, let’s accept the hypothesis that the scientific method is THE best method for uncovering the truth about reality. The trouble is, there’s no such thing as “the scientific method”, there’s only what “scientists” do, and scientists, surprise, surprise, turn out to be as human as the rest of us. This study is of deliberate, conscious, admitted knowledge of fraudulent or questionable practice. The rates found, even if accepted as accurate (which would be foolish), are worrying. Add to that all the actions which are unintentional, unconscious and/or kept secret and what does that make you think? Can we trust scientists to be the beacons who show us the Truth, the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth?

One particular phrase certain struck me – “In both kinds of surveys, misconduct was reported most frequently by medical and pharmacological researchers.” – is that because these particular researchers are more honest than others, admitting their behaviour more? Or is it because such practice is more frequently found in medical and pharmacological research than it is in other areas?

“Evidence Based Medicine” (EBM), is undermined by the “evidence” produced by these researchers.

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“Hidden illness” – MS as an example

Posted in from the reading room, health on May 28, 2009| 3 Comments »

Yesterday the BBC site posted an item about a patient’s experience of having MS. It was entitled “Living with a hidden illness”

This patient, Alison Potts, says this –

The boldest outward evidence of the disease appears in my MRI scans, but no one sees those. Together they tell the story of the last 15 years, each one showing an increasing forest of lesions in my nervous system – tiny white pin pricks running up and down my spine, like the mangled sheath of a damaged electric cable interrupting the flow of nerve signals around the body. They are the roadblocks on the map of my life. The kind of MS I have does not cause paralysis or hinder my mobility. On bad days I do have problems with balance and dizziness and numbness in my hands and feet. I have difficulty doing up the buttons on my five year olds clothes and everything falls through my hands. Crockery and glassware never last long in our house. My main symptoms are hidden. The most prevalent one is fatigue. I rarely wake in the morning feeling rested – but more like I have run a marathon with a bout of heavy flu, particularly if my sleep has been disturbed. Fatigue is not another word for tiredness. It is a total shutting down of the mind and body – a barrier comes down past which you cannot move on. It puts everything I plan to do under threat.

I think this is a great piece of writing. She makes it very clear that for her (as it also is for many patients with MS) it’s invisible symptoms which cause the greatest problem – dizziness, numbness, clumsiness and fatigue, in her case. As she says, the “boldest” evidence for her disease is in the MRI scans and nobody can see them (apart from the radiologist of course!). I’ve posted before about the dubious and non-linear relationship between scans and symptoms.

How do we address a patient who has these problems? A patient whose problems are “invisible“? At least in Alison’s case there are lesions which can be revealed by technology – the “tiny white pin pricks running up and down my spine” – and this will be her ticket to being taken seriously. Sadly, countless patients present to their doctors with equally disturbing and problematic symptoms, but in the absence of “lesions” they are dismissed as “the worried well”, or the problem somehow being a psychological one. I believe this is naive. Don’t we often see a disorder of the system? of the person? (of the “complex adaptive system“?) Such problems maybe only can be known through the patients’ narratives.

If Alison didn’t tell her story nobody would have any idea what she is experiencing. Don’t we need to acknowledge that in health care, and accept that health cannot be reduced to a simple materialistic “objective” phenomenon?

I think this little example is a great one and makes a clear case for the importance of addressing the phenomena of illness rather than the lesions of disease.

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Putting people first….what should we measure?

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, personal growth, tagged , , on May 19, 2009| Leave a Comment »

While away on a trip to Japan recently I came across a news item about Bhutan’s development of a national happiness index. I’d read about this a few years ago and thought it was interesting but maybe just a gimmick or a passing fancy. I think it was the King of Bhutan who decided that instead of measuring and reporting the “GDP” (“Gross Domestic Product”) of the country each year, it would be more useful to measure and report the “GNH” (“Gross National Happiness”). Well, apparently others, including the IMF asked the rulers of Bhutan exactly how they thought they could measure such a thing, and this has encouraged a wide-ranging and elaborate process of developing and experimenting with “tools” to measure the GNH.
They decided that happiness involved significant achievements in each of nine core dimensions of which happiness and well-being were constituted.

1.    Psychological Well-being
2.   Time Use
3.   Community Vitality
4.   Culture
5.   Health
6.   Education
7.   Environmental Diversity
8.   Living Standard
9.   Governance
Each of these domains is made up a number of indicators and you can read descriptions of each of these dimensions and their indicators here

This work is way too vast to reproduce in a blog post but I encourage you to follow the link to the Bhutan government’s site about this and have a browse. The range of questions they ask is astonishing, comprehensive and holistic. They have a distinct cultural flavour which is appropriate to Bhutan but the general principles are certainly transferrable to other cultures. What fascinates me is the emphasis given by the this approach on the subjective experiences of the population. It seems a serious attempt to put the sum of personal experience above the sum of material goods and wealth.

When I returned home, I stumbled on the “New Economics Foundation”  who have produced an interesting report entitled “National Accounts of Well-being” which compares quality of life indices across 22 European countries. This work covers some similar domains to the Bhutan work, but it reads almost like a subset of that latter project. In particular they consider Personal well-being, Social well-being and Work well-being. Social well-being is split into Supportive relationships and Trust and belonging, whilst Personal well-being is split into Emotional well-being, Satisfying life, Vitality, Resilience and self-esteem, and Positive functioning (each of which are further subdivided)
The results of this European work can be explored in a fascinating interactive website here

I find both of these projects fascinating. They demonstrate serious attempts to value human experience over that of indicators of material production and consumption. What do you think?

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