Growth As An Opiate, Part 5: Self-Development And The “War On Envy”
The idea that societies with more economic inequality -- whether in terms of income, net worth, or something else -- are less moral is nothing new.
In the past, people have usually made this argument from a philosophical perspective -- for instance, John Rawls' famous argument that, if you designed a society from scratch, with no idea where you personally would end up on the economic scale, you'd choose a society where inequalities were only allowed if they benefited the worst-off.
Today, however, people are increasingly making this argument in psychological terms. The larger the economic inequalities in a society, advocates of this view argue, the more emotional distress and "lack of social trust" -- i.e., envy -- people will feel.
For example, in The Spirit Level, a book Evan pointed out to me, epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson claim that societies with more wealth inequality, and therefore more (if you will) envy per capita, tend to suffer from lower lifespans, more teenage pregnancy, and a host of other problems. Not surprisingly, Pickett and Wilkinson argue that -- at least, in already rich countries -- more wealth redistribution will create a healthier and happier population.
Thinking about this argument raises two interesting questions for me. First, even assuming envy creates social ills, is designing government policy with the goal of reducing envy a good idea? Second, are there other ways to reduce society-wide envy that don't involve the use of state power?
Mission Creep In The "War On Envy"
I'll admit, the argument that the government should act to combat envy is disturbing to me. One reason is that, although The Spirit Level and similar books focus on envy created by inequalities of wealth, there are obviously many other forms of inequality that cause jealousy.
For example, suppose I resent what I see as your biological superiority -- maybe you're taller and have lost less hair than me. Or perhaps I'm jealous of your relationships -- maybe you're married to the woman of my dreams, and I wish she were with me.
If money-related envy causes social ills, I'd wager that other types of envy have similar effects. In other words, if wishing I were as rich as you renders me more susceptible to disease and shortens my lifespan, surely "wishing I had Jessie's girl," or that I had somebody else's athletic talent, will also be debilitating.
You can probably tell where I'm going. Does this mean the government should engage in "sexual redistribution," and compel attractive people (by whatever measure) to accept intimate partners they wouldn't otherwise choose? Should we adopt Harrison Bergeron-style rules requiring, say, people with natural athletic ability to wear weights on their legs?
In other words, if we're willing to redistribute wealth in the name of fighting a "War on Envy," it's hard to see why social policy shouldn't reach into other areas of our lives in ways most people -- regardless of political persuasion -- would find repugnant.
Does Self-Development Soothe Envy?
Earlier in this series, I discussed critics of personal development who cast it as a sort of modern-day "opiate of the masses." These critics argue that practices like psychotherapy, meditation, and affirmations, precisely because they're geared toward relieving human suffering, are socially harmful.
Why? Because, these authors say, the main source of human angst in modern times is economic inequality. At best, self-development practices only offer a temporary "high," because they don't attack the root of this problem. At worst, these practices perpetuate injustice, because -- like "cultural Prozac" -- they distract the masses from the inequality-induced suffering that would otherwise spur them to rise up against an immoral capitalist system.
What if we took this critique at face value for a moment, and assumed that self-development does reduce some of the pain caused by envy? In other words, what if meditating, saying affirmations, or doing similar practices actually can cause people to feel less jealous of others? In my own experience, this has some truth to it -- the more I've kept up my meditation practice, the less I've found myself unfavorably comparing myself to others.
Perhaps the widespread adoption of these practices would make people less interested in redistributing wealth. But if that's true, in all likelihood, these practices would also lessen people's tendency to suffer over other kinds of inequality -- envy about other people's intimate relationships, jealousy over others' looks and natural aptitudes, and so on.
So, if we take Pickett and Wilkinson at their word, and assume envy causes all kinds of social ills, it stands to reason that personal development -- at least, the types of self-development with real emotional benefits -- may help create a happier and healthier society. On balance, maybe a little "cultural Prozac" isn't such a terrible thing after all.
Other Posts in this Series:
Can Politics And Science Cure All Ills?
It’s been a long time since I rock and rolled, but I was inspired to write here again after my recent review, on my other blog, of Robert Augustus Masters’ Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters.
Spiritual Bypassing is about how we tend to use spiritual practice to escape from, rather than confront, our psychological wounds. One thing that particularly struck me in the book was Masters’ statement that, ideally, spiritual practice is about releasing everything in our lives from the “obligation to make us feel better.”
The point is that spirituality is certainly far from the only thing people use to “take the edge off” their pain. Drugs are another obvious example, but there are subtler and more “socially acceptable” examples as well. I regularly notice instances of what I’d call “political bypassing” and “scientific bypassing” in our culture.
To illustrate the former, some people I know came close to hailing Obama as a messiah when he was elected — looking, for the next few days, like they were in a spiritually-inspired state of bliss, and their personal tribulations were healed or at least put out of their minds. (Ironically, the same people usually scoff at the mere mention of spirituality, associating it with evangelical Christians and/or Republicans.)
Most importantly for our purposes, we can also see the embrace of political and scientific “bypassing” among critics of personal growth and spirituality.
Political Bypassing and Personal Growth
I’ve commented before on personal growth critics who basically claim — much like Marx — that the main source of discontent among human beings is economic inequality. Personal development distracts people from this issue, by encouraging them to focus on their private achievements and relationships. Thus, self-development is not only ineffective — it retards social progress.
These critics’ vitriol often obscures the wide-eyed idealism of their basic assumption: that, if everybody only had equal material resources, nobody would suffer again. No more loneliness, depression, or alienation for the human race, ever.
If the notion that spirituality can address all our “issues” is unrealistic, I think, the same can surely be said of the utopian notion that state-mandated “equality” will cure all human ills.
Scientific Bypassing and Spirituality
As for scientific bypassing, I think we can see this in the “New Atheist” critiques of religion that have been so popular over the last few years, by authors such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. These critics say that spirituality and science/reason are in irreconcilable conflict, and we’d have a much better world if we only discarded the former and embraced the latter.
One problem these critics face is that science seems incapable of answering moral questions. Some have no problem with this, and simply deny the existence of objective morality, because “there’s no scientific evidence for it.” But this answer is instinctively unsatisfying for many people — to use a timeworn example, can we really accept the idea that Nazi medical experiments on prisoners weren’t objectively wrong?
Others respond that science can, at least, tell us what actions and policies will advance “human flourishing” — how to eat nutritiously, for example. However, these critics need to explain why our actions should serve the goal of human flourishing at all — why shouldn’t kangaroo or algae flourishing be our priority? Science can’t tell us why we ought to prefer the well-being of one species to that of another.
My point is that I think it’s important to be wary of “bypassing” — relying on one particular practice or institution to “make us feel better” — in all areas of human life. The realm of spirituality and personal development certainly isn’t the only place where this happens.
Self-Help and Selfishness, Part 4: A Postscript On Compassion
In the interest of clarity, I want to add a brief note summarizing what I'm saying in this series.
I believe there are two basic ways to think about compassion. The first is to see it as a way of acting. If you take certain actions in the world, in other words, that makes you a compassionate person.
People, of course, have vastly different ideas about which behaviors are compassionate and which aren't. Some think of compassion in terms of individual acts, such as giving to a person begging on the street. To others, compassion has more to do with a certain distribution of resources in society -- if we work toward a nation where people have roughly equal incomes, perhaps, we are compassionate people.
The second way of thinking about compassion is to see it as an emotion, or a sensation we experience in the body. For me, when I am feeling compassion, I experience a warm, open sensation in my heart area. Some might describe this in more mystical terms as a sense of "union with all that is."
Most People See It As A Behavior
It seems clear that, in Western culture at least, people usually take the first perspective -- that you are compassionate so long as you behave a certain way. It doesn't matter how you feel while you are doing the act. If you give to a charity, but only so that your name appears on the charity's website, you are being compassionate nonetheless.
I think this perspective is one reason why, in the West, we don't tend to see practices for cultivating a felt sense of compassion as particularly important. Why bother doing practices like Buddhist loving-kindness meditation, we might think, when we can go into the world and actually help people?
I think the trouble with this perspective is that it renders the concept of compassion vulnerable to abuse. It enables people who don't actually experience the felt sense of compassion to use the ideal of compassion as a weapon against others, for personal gain.
The Consequences
Look at typical political debates, for example. Each side accuses the other, in venomous and belittling terms, of lacking compassion, honesty, morality and so on. Ask yourself: would they make such accusations against each other if they actually experienced compassion as a feeling -- that sense of warmth and openness in the heart I described?
On a larger scale, many political and religious ideologies have claimed to be rooted in compassion. Christianity is said to be based on the compassionate teachings of Jesus. Marx claimed that communism was a compassionate political philosophy. And yet, of course, people have committed atrocities in the name of both worldviews.
Would these abuses have occurred if the people responsible had genuinely experienced the feeling of compassion, rather than simply believing in the abstract ideal? (I don't mean to pick on Christianity or communism per se -- I think any doctrine or philosophy, in the hands of someone who isn't actually feeling compassion, can be used to justify destructive behavior.)
In other words, when we're in touch with the felt sense of compassion -- not just the philosophical abstraction -- we become far less inclined to hurt others. This is why I think practices that help us actually experience the sensation of compassion are so important.
There are many practices aimed at this, and different approaches work better for different people. In my own case, I know that heart-opening exercises in yoga are particularly helpful. But the point is that these practices, far from being forms of "woo-woo navel gazing," are actually key to creating the kind of world many of us desire.
Other Posts In This Series:
Personal Growth: The New Opiate Of The Masses?
In this series, I'll talk about a common criticism of personal growth that casts it as a veiled form of socioeconomic oppression. I'll spend a chunk of time describing the argument to make sure I do it justice, because I think this is one of the most important controversies surrounding personal development.
The argument goes like this: people usually seek out personal growth books, workshops and so on because they're unsatisfied with some aspect of their lives -- their finances, relationships, stress level, and so on.
Yet, even if they achieve their goal, that same unhappiness, in some form or another, remains. If I get a new relationship, I may still dislike my job. If I get a higher-paying job, I may want more time to relax. And so on.
Unhappiness Comes From Unfairness
In the critics' view, this is because personal development does not address the root cause of this unhappiness: economic unfairness. From this perspective, there is no defensible moral reason why there should be disparities in wealth between people. People's talents and abilities largely result from luck, and thus it is immoral to allow those talents and abilities to determine people's economic situation.
We all feel the impact of this unfairness, the argument goes, regardless of our circumstances. A man in dire financial straits obviously feels it, because he's constantly worried about paying the bills. But a wealthy man feels it as well, though perhaps in a subtler way -- maybe because he's nagged by the feeling that he doesn't deserve what he has.
Personal growth ideas, the critics say, obviously don't address this basic unfairness. Even if I get richer, I'll still envy those with more, and I'll still feel guilty because some have less. Even if I learn how to reduce the stress of my job, I'll still feel the stress of knowing I live in an unfair society. The solutions offered by personal development, then, are temporary at best and useless at worst.
Personal Growth: Part Of The Problem
Worse still, the critics charge, self-development ideas actually help maintain this inequality. By encouraging us to seek happiness through meditation, making money, improving communication in our relationships, and so on, personal growth distracts us from the real source of our unhappiness -- economic unfairness -- which only government redistribution of wealth can ultimately solve.
Thus, Jeremy Carrette and Richard King write in Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, contemporary spiritual practices "seek to pacify feelings of anxiety and disquiet at the individual level rather than seeking to challenge the social, political and economic inequalities that cause such distress."
Similarly, as we saw earlier, Micki McGee writes in Self-Help Inc. that personal growth teachings trap their followers in a futile "cycle of seeking individual solutions to problems that are social, economic, and political in origin."
Marx Redux
We've seen that, to the critics, economic inequality is the real cause of the unhappiness that prompts people to explore personal growth. If this is true, we should expect that doing away with inequality would get rid of the unhappiness -- and thus that, in an economically "fair" society, no one would care about personal growth.
This, of course, is not a new idea -- Karl Marx had pretty much the same to say about religion. As he famously wrote, "religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." In other words, people's reliance on religion to relieve their suffering is misguided. The real cause of their suffering is "oppression," meaning economic inequality.
Only a fair distribution of wealth -- to be achieved, for Marx, through communism -- can alleviate that suffering. Under communism, because wealth would be equitably distributed, people would have no need for religion. Similarly, if the critique of self-development we've been discussing is correct, eliminating economic inequality should also eliminate people's desire for personal growth.
A Brief Detour Into The Real World
Is this true? Not, it seems, in real-life communist countries. There, even though -- at least, in some people's view -- inequality runs less rampant, people still seem interested in activities that, in the West, we'd probably call "self-development" or "spiritual" practices.
In the People's Republic of China, for instance, tens of millions of people -- despite government oppression -- practice Falun Gong, a form of what we know as qi gong in the West. In North Korea, again despite persecution, the underground practice of Christianity continues. Back in the USSR, as Barbara Ehrenreich points out, "positive thinking" was mandatory -- if someone appeared to lack optimism about communism or the future of the Soviet state, they could get in serious trouble with the government.
Marxists might object that modern communist countries don't practice "pure" communism -- Marx, after all, envisioned people peacefully organizing into small communes, not the oppressive regimes communist nations have become. That's the kind of society, Marx might say, where religion, personal growth and similar "opiates" would naturally fall away. Personally, I question whether Marx's utopian scenario is realistic, but let's put that aside for a moment.
A Thought Experiment
Suppose we lived in a society where the government mandated total economic equality. Everyone lived in an identical house, drove an identical car, and had an identical income, regardless of what they did for a living. In this society, would anyone be interested in personal growth or spiritual practice?
For several reasons, I suspect the answer is yes. First, I doubt that total equality of resources would affect many common human problems. What about, say, conflict in people's relationships? Can we honestly believe that the unfair distribution of wealth is the sole cause of, for instance, divorce and child abuse?
Second, a longing for spirituality and the transcendent, in one form or another, has existed in all societies throughout human history -- from hunter-gatherer tribes, to classical Greece and Rome, to communist countries as we saw, to modern capitalist nations. It seems unlikely that total economic equality would reshape human nature so profoundly that it would erase this tendency.
I'll stop here in the interest of keeping this brief, but there's definitely more on this issue in the pipeline.
Other Posts in this Series:
The Responsibility Ethic, Part 5: The Politics of Responsibility
This is the final installment in my series on what I've been calling the "responsibility ethic" in personal development -- the notion that it's best to see ourselves as responsible for our life circumstances, as opposed to seeing our situation as the product of chance or forces beyond our control.
Today, I'll address an argument often made by critics of personal growth that has to do with the relationship between the responsibility ethic and politics. This is a complicated argument, but I think it's an important one, so bear with me as I flesh it out a little.
Is The Responsibility Ethic Anti-Political?
The critics argue that, if I believe I'm responsible for my circumstances, I am unlikely to participate in politics -- to vote, protest, debate issues with others, and so on. In other words, if I think I hold the power to change my life situation, I won't see any need to use the political process to improve my circumstances.
Say, for instance, that I run a business, and a tax imposed by the city is hurting my bottom line. If I believe I have full control over my destiny, I won't see any reason to lobby the city government to reduce the tax. After all, because I have the power to fix the situation, I can solve the problem myself -- by, say, moving elsewhere, or just increasing my revenues to make up for the loss.
To the critics, because it convinces people there's no need to participate in politics, the responsibility ethic is anti-democratic, in that it discourages an informed, politically active public. What's more, the critics argue, we do need the political process to change aspects of our life situation. Critics with a left-wing bent commonly argue that only the government can remedy the economic unfairness in our society, and the responsibility ethic blinds the "have-nots" to this by deceiving them into thinking they, individually, can solve their financial problems.
Thus, they might say, the responsibility ethic serves as a kind of "opiate for the masses." As sociologist Micki McGee writes, personal growth teachings tend to trap their followers in a futile "cycle of seeking individual solutions to problems that are social, economic, and political in origin."
Clearing Up Some Confusion
Simply put, I think this argument misunderstands the responsibility ethic. All the responsibility ethic says is that I am responsible for the situation I'm in, and I have the ability to change that situation if I wish to do so. It does not address the specific actions I should take to improve my situation, or whether "political action" is a good option.
We can understand this by returning to my earlier example, where my city imposes a tax I think is bad for my business. If I accept the responsibility ethic, I will believe I'm capable of improving this situation. But the question remains: what is the best way to change it? Should I move to another city? Try to increase my revenue? Lobby the city council to repeal the tax? The responsibility ethic is silent on this issue.
In other words, it doesn't follow from my belief that I can improve the situation that political activity will not be an effective method of doing so. Supporting a politician who pledges to repeal the tax might indeed be an effective method of getting what I want. Thus, I think it's a mistake to cast the responsibility ethic as inherently anti-political.
The Politics of "Non-Responsibility"
This becomes even clearer when we consider the extreme opposite of the responsibility ethic, which I'll call the "non-responsibility ethic." A person who accepts the non-responsibility ethic (in other words, someone with an external locus of control) sees events in their lives as the product of luck, or of forces they can't control.
Suppose I believe in the non-responsibility ethic, and I'm faced with the same situation where the city tax is hurting my business. If I believe my actions are unlikely to make a difference, what will I do to improve my situation? If I really think I'm a helpless pawn of fate, I'll probably do nothing.
As this example illustrates, it's also a mistake to call the responsibility ethic inherently politically conservative, as left-wing critics of personal growth tend to do. If these critics want to see more redistribution of wealth, it won't help them to have a nation of people with an external locus of control who feel powerless to change the status quo.
In light of this, it's no surprise that some of the most popular personal growth books use political leaders to illustrate their ideas. Even the much-maligned Think and Grow Rich cites Gandhi as "one of the most astounding examples known to civilization of the possibilities of faith." Gandhi's faith in his ability to change the world, writes Napoleon Hill, drove his contribution to ending British rule of India.
The Psychology of Responsibility
I won't harp too much on the psychological evidence, because I've done it a lot in past posts. Suffice it to say that several psychological studies have suggested that people with an internal locus of control -- a belief in their own capacity to affect events -- are actually more inclined to participate in politics.
For example, one study surveyed some newly voting-aged college students, and found that the ones who described themselves as having an internal locus of control were more likely to vote in a presidential election. Another found that people who tended toward an internal locus of control were more likely to participate in political activism.
In other words, it seems that a person's belief that they're responsible for their circumstances leads them to be more politically active, not less, which also belies the critics' claim that the responsibility ethic is somehow anti-political.
In my next post, because I find this issue fascinating, I'll talk more generally about the political implications of personal growth and spirituality.
Other posts in this series:
E-Book: Why Growth Is Good
Most Popular Posts
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Thoughts on the Mankind Project Lawsuit
Personal Development Politics, Part 2: The Elections and Self-Responsibility
Regulating Self-Help, Part 2: What Is a Benefit?
Rainbow Right-Wingers, and Other Myths About Personal Development Politics
Authenticity Answers, Part 1: How Deep Is Your Want?
