Abstract
Not everyone in the world is unhappy. According to the OECD’s Better Life Index 2017 Life Satisfaction rankings, when asked to rate their general satisfaction with life on a scale of 1 to 10, persons surveyed in OECD countries scored their life an average of 6.5. If you were an Australian the score was 7.3. The happiest people in the world live in Denmark. There, the average rating was 7.5. As that’s the mean score there has to be quite a few deliriously happy people lurking among the Danes. On the other hand, if you live in Hungary or Greece many of your compatriots are pretty miserable. The average score for those two countries was 5.3 and 5.2 respectively.
Why so glum? It can be truly said that in modernity humankind has never had it so good. Real GDP per capita across the world has spiralled up. Since 1950 alone the average GDP per capita in constant real 2011 dollars across the entire world has risen from $3,769 to $18,631, a five-fold increase. In 70 years that’s astonishing. Not least because for the two millennia before 1800, real GDP per capita was in most cases stagnant. It didn’t rise. People lived on three dollars a day or less. Most lives were short, nasty and brutish. The promise of modernity was that would change. It did. Far beyond anyone’s reasonable expectations. Life has improved stratospherically. Yet a non-trivial percentage of our fellows think that things have not improved – and in fact are getting worse.
Not everyone is glum. Far from it. Many individuals are happy, and some are very happy. Yet others, enjoying the same standards of living, are not. Irrespective of how much things have improved, a visible portion of almost any country’s population is dissatisfied. And quite a few of them will express that dissatisfaction very loudly. For some, no matter how much things get better, they feel worse. Their glumness is measurable. We can quantify it not only in terms of answers to surveys that ask ‘how happy are you?’ but also by the frequency of the incidence of psychological conditions.
In the 18th century, people rarely reported suffering anxiety and depression. By the beginning of the 20th century, anxiety and depression had become the prime reported psychological syndromes. As prosperity grew, some people got happier. Some got a lot happier. But others got less happy and some morbidly unhappy. This unhappiness expressed itself as feelings of nervous anxiety and in various kinds of melancholy and despair. By the 1910s, we had even coined a term for our most dramatic economic event – namely, depression – after these feelings of moody dejection and despondency.
Scott Doidge traces the ascent of anxiety amidst well-being. His book is an excellent account of the phenomenon. I read endless numbers of academic books. I would place few of them in the un-put-down-able category. Doidge’s book is one of the exceptions. This is his first book. It’s his PhD repackaged. For a first book, The Anxiety of Ascent is unusually good. It is beautifully written. The prose is gorgeous. It doesn’t waste words. It packs a lot seamlessly into a short volume. It is insightful about its theme. When I picked it up, I expected to read a few pages and then go back to another task. Instead, several hours later, I had finished the entire book, carried along by its incessant good writing and the unsettling nature of the social psychology it deals with.
Doidge focuses on Germany and the United States. In the case of Germany, he tells the story of two stories – two 19th-century novelistic epics of family businesses, both best-sellers in Germany at the time, Gustav Freytag’s Debit and Credit (1855) and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901). The subtext of Doidge’s account is the ominous rise in Germany of widespread social anxieties. This is the social-psychological petri dish from which a century of anti-Semitism, paranoia about finance capitalism, revolutionary putsches, authoritarian social engineering, cultural decadence and totalitarianism emerged.
The problem The Anxiety of Ascent deals with can be summed up in one word: angst. Specifically, middle-class angst. When we look back at the last two hundred years, we see a world becoming materially much richer, more technologically sophisticated and better educated than anyone previously in human history could have conceived of. Yet, curiously, along with this has grown anxiety and a lack of confidence. The better-off that societies have become, the more a portion of their population experiences deep feelings of despair, fear, panic, and worry. The greater the material ease, the greater the psychological unease. The edgy part of the population becomes jumpier, tenser, and more apprehensive. For them, amongst society’s plenty, hesitation, dread and misgivings swell up. This is perplexing.
What Doidge’s book does is to analyse a number of novels and television series. These depict the rise of angst amidst modern affluence. The despair he explores is not something that can be explained by a reference to something as glib as ‘affluenza’, the notion that consumerism and materialism makes us sick. Nonetheless, modern societies are dogged by explicit psychological illnesses not just in a clinical sense but also expressed in a multitude of cultural ways, including in the kinds of stories that these societies find popular. Doidge’s book looks to culturally-influential story-telling as evidence of some of the deeper and darker undercurrents in modern life.
It might be objected, though, that such story-telling is misleading, at least from the standpoint of sociological realism. It is pretty well understood that the art and literature of the past two centuries has been dominated by misery and pessimism. Its tone on the whole has been dark, gloomy, desolate and sorrowful. The same applies to the universities in the past half century. Catastrophe now always lies just around corner. Is the intelligentsia’s outlook then a reflection of reality, a shaper of reality, or does it obstruct our clear understanding of reality? That modern life produces a large minority of anxious and depressed people is clear from clinical records. But how much or how little do the arts over-state this? In short, does the use of the flagrantly unhappy consciousness of the arts as evidence of the ascent of widespread social angst suffer from a confirmation bias?
It is true that sometimes reading Doidge’s book I did miss a more fulsome treatment of eudaimonic (aka happy) modernity. Yet it is there in the book. Notably, in his chapter on America in the 1950s (‘Imagining Springfield’). That chapter is a revelatory exploration of writing for television in America’s great suburbanizing decade. Its analysis is heterodox in interesting and surprising ways. It offers an astute, psychologically and socially sophisticated understanding of the ways in which mainstream life is actually lived so as to avoid angst. The positives of this way of life (in its 1950s version), as Doidge recounts it, are the pleasure in small things, innocent optimism, the replacement of declining small-town community with an affable bucolic suburbia, maternal household rhythms, home ownership, and the joy derived from everyday order.
Doidge doesn’t ignore the American culture critics of the 1950s and 1960s like David Riesman and William Whyte. They pointed out that a more independent-minded America was side-lined as corporate employment grew. Doidge explores the psychological consequences of this in his analysis of the television series Mad Men (2007–15), set in the 1960s. The personalities it portrays are successful but unhappy. They struggle to find meaning and purpose in anything. In contemporary academic writing, it is de rigueur that the lives that most people lead are consumed in disappointment, frustration, unhappiness and despair. Things are bad and always getting worse. Relief is only ever temporary. Doidge is more nuanced than this.
He does find a number of more or less happy characters portrayed in the novels and television series he analyses. Among the more interesting ones are the founder of the Buddenbrook dynasty, Johann Buddenbrook, an enlightened deist who is accepting of the world. There’s also Freytag’s character Anton Wohlfahrt, who sums up his life as an existence devoted to ‘the habits of industry and order’ and friendship. The lessons to be drawn from this are not era-specific. Rather they are metaphysical. They hint at the kinds of things that have brought joy and delight – not to forget achievement – to the lives of the untold millions of people who became part of the large, swelling middling section of modern society as prosperity spread across the world – in Europe, North America and Australasia to begin with, and in the past 50 years across much of the rest of the world.
Amidst the ascent of anxiety in these societies, Doidge’s book also usefully reminds us that there are many lives that are not tormented or anxious. There exist confident, independent, stable and content people. We meet them every day. They bring to life the virtues of modesty and finitude, order and trust. It is true that art and academia follow the example of newspapers: if it bleeds, it leads. The question, then, for art in response is: can it create drama out of states of happiness? For sociology, the question is: can it explain the experience of those who are calm and collected and who, in spite of inevitable social tensions, are at ease with the world? In other words, can it explain the majority of people? Doidge’s work suggests that this might be possible. His book is a good start.