The Happiness Industry (3 page)

This description of how pleasure and pain operate physically is more or less what Bentham had already assumed, posing questions as to how successfully neuroscience can ever hope to escape its protagonists' cultural presuppositions. For scientists armed with measuring devices to discover that a bodily organ is also armed with measuring devices sounds like a coincidence to say the least.

The study touches upon one of the great controversies of utilitarianism, of whether diverse types of human experience can all be located on a single scale. The Cornell neuroscientists clearly believe that they can: ‘If you and I derive similar pleasure from sipping a fine wine or watching the sun set, our results suggest it is because we share similar fine-grained patterns of activity in the orbitofrontal cortex'. This is a relatively innocent remark when it is fine wine or sunsets that are at stake. But when profound experiences of love or artistic beauty are rendered equivalent to baser experiences, such as drug taking or shopping, the claim that all pleasures are computed in the orbitofrontal cortex in the same way becomes more problematic.

Philosophers refer to this argument, that all pleasures and pains can be located on a single scale, as ‘monism'. Bentham was the monist par excellence.
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He couldn't deny that we speak of different varieties of happiness and contentment using different words, but the objective underpinning of all these forms was always the same – that is, physical pleasure. We naturally seek ‘benefit, advantage, pleasure, good or happiness, all of which ultimately comes to the same thing'.
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Likewise, suffering, rooted in the physical experience of pain, represents an entity that varies in quantity, but not quality.

Once we accept that there is a single, ultimate and physical sensation underlying all ‘good' and ‘bad' experiences and actions, then it follows that this sensation varies only in terms of quantity. Bentham never conducted any scientific research on the question but proposed a psychological model, detailing the different ways in which pleasure could vary in quantity. In his most famous statement on the topic, ‘Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation', he offered seven of these, most of which were easy to conceive of in quantitative terms.
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‘Duration' of pleasure was one relatively obvious quantitative category. ‘Certainty' of future pleasure is something that we would now see as amenable to mathematical risk modelling. ‘Extent' of the population affected by an action is another simple quantitative yardstick.

The main scientific stumbling block for Bentham's entire enterprise was one category of variation in particular, namely ‘intensity'. How could a scientist, legislator, punisher or policy-maker know how intense a particular pleasure or pain was? Of course one might draw on one's own experience through introspection, but that is scarcely a very scientific approach. Or one might ask people to report on their experiences using their own words. But then wouldn't utilitarianism be drawn back into the hall of mirrors that is philosophical language, the ‘tyranny of sounds' through which we describe what it is like to be human? Measuring the intensity of different pleasures and pains was the technical task on which the Benthamite project would stand or fall.

How to measure?

The eighteenth century was a time of great inventiveness in the creation of measurement tools. The thermometer was invented
in 1724, the sextant (which measures angles between any visible objects, such as stars) in 1757, and the marine chronometer in 1761. The introduction of new measuring tools and standards was one of the first achievements of the French revolutionaries in the 1790s. This involved the commissioning of an original platinum metre, the famous
mètre des archives
, which was placed in a vault in the National Archives in Paris.

The need for reliable standardized measures cut to the heart of the Enlightenment, whose high point coincided with the first half of Bentham's career. As Immanuel Kant defined it in 1784, Enlightenment meant mankind escaping its ‘self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another'.
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Unlike their predecessors, who would allow religious and political authorities to dictate truth from falsehood, right from wrong, the ‘mature' and Enlightened citizen would draw on nothing but his own judgement. The motto of Enlightenment, Kant suggested, was
sapare aude
– dare to know. The critical individual mind was the only authoritative barometer of truth. But for this reason, it was equally important that everybody was using the same yardsticks of comparison, or the whole project would collapse into a relativist babble of subjective perspectives.

Bentham hoped to cast a similarly scientific, sceptical eye over the workings of politics, punishment and law. In place of unquestioned beliefs about justice or common values, Bentham insisted that we should know what will make people happier, and to treat every person's feelings as of equal value. He knew precisely how to frame the scientific question – does this policy, law or punishment create more or less pleasure across society as a whole?

But what type of measuring tool was available to gather the answers? It's all very well feeling empathetic to the suffering of
others, as Bentham undoubtedly did, but without a standard through which different pleasures and pains can be compared, the utilitarian is exercising guesswork. On the other hand, surely the very nature of pleasant or painful sensations is that they are subjective. The search for a common measure of happiness is fraught with difficulty.

Despite being critical to the viability of his political project, Bentham dedicated surprisingly little attention to this problem. Occasionally, he suggested that the ‘greatest happiness' principle of political judgement was just that, a principle, which could never realistically be converted into a quantitative science. But given the appeal to hard empirical reality that is threaded through Bentham's psychology, and his scathing remarks about all forms of philosophical abstraction, one has to take seriously the sense in which he did intend to rebuild politics and law on technical forms of measurement and calculation. If happiness were the only human good on which it is possible to speak scientifically, then it would be strange if we didn't then pursue it using scientific methods. So we return to the problem: How is the intensity of a pleasant or unpleasant feeling to be measured? How does utility manifest itself in such a way that it can be grasped by measurement?

Bentham suggests only two tentative answers to this question, neither of which he pursued in any practical or experimental way. Both involved the identification of proxies for happiness, rather than a claim that feelings themselves could be grasped. But in each case, he unwittingly hinted towards vast zones of scientific enquiry which would later be explored by psychologists, marketers, policy-makers, doctors, psychiatrists, human resources experts, social media analysts, economists, neuroscientists and individuals themselves.

The first of Bentham's answers was that the human pulse rate might provide the indicator of pleasure that could be used to solve the measurement problem.
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He wasn't particularly taken with this idea himself, but he recognized that the body offered certain measurable symptoms of what the mind was experiencing. As happiness is ultimately an assemblage of pleasant feeling, the notion that one might be able to discover happiness levels via the body is not so surprising. In everyday life, we intuitively understand this, in how we read another's facial expression or body language. A science of such signs might therefore be possible. Pulse rate would appear to offer the possibility of a hard, quantitative science of well-being that transcends culture. Words can deceive, but our heart rate does not.

Bentham's second answer, on which he was far keener, was that money might be used. If two different goods can command an identical monetary price, then it can be assumed that they generate the same quantity of utility for the purchaser. By making this claim, Bentham was well ahead of his time. Economists would only catch up with this analysis some thirty years after his death, but since Bentham was interested in what governments could do to influence general public happiness, rather than what occurred in market transactions between private individuals, he had little concern with pursuing this idea as an economist. Nevertheless, by putting out there the idea that money might have some privileged relationship to our inner experience, beyond the capabilities of nearly any other measuring instrument, Bentham set the stage for the entangling of psychological research and capitalism that would shape the business practices of the twentieth century.

These were and remain the options: money or the body. Economics or physiology. Payment or diagnosis. If politics were
to become scientific and emancipated from abstract nonsense, it is through economics, physiology or some combination of the two that the project would be realized. When the iPhone 6 was released in September 2014, its two major innovations were quite telling: one app which monitors bodily activity, and another which can be used for in-store payments. Whenever experts seek to witness our shopping habits, our brains or our stress levels, they are contributing to the project that Bentham had mapped out. The status of money in this science is intriguing. While political and moral concepts are attacked as empty, nonsensical abstractions, somehow the language of pounds and pence is viewed as having some firm and natural relationship to our inner feelings. The exceptional status attributed to economics from the late nineteenth century onwards, as closer to a natural science than a social one, is one legacy of this worldview.

The problem of measurement may seem like a nerdish matter of scientific methodology. Surely we all know what Bentham was getting at when he said that government should pursue the greatest happiness of all. Do we really need to get fixated on the details of how to calculate this? Of course, we can allow Bentham the status of a philosopher and ignore his inventive and technical aspirations. We can look at how utilitarianism works in the abstract, by playing analytical games in the philosophy seminar room.

It is not clear that Bentham would have been very happy with such a legacy. And it is less clear that this is what his most important legacy has actually been. The technical, calculative, methodological problems of Benthamism, in various guises, are arguably the most transformative in how they have come to structure our political, economic, medical and personal lives. For this reason, whether happiness is to be indicated via the body
(such as through pulse rate) or via money may prove to be of the utmost importance for how utilitarianism has actually set about constructing the world around us. However, any systematic attempt to construct quantitative measures of sensation would not begin until a few years after Bentham's death in 1832.

Weight-lifting in Leipzig

On 22 October 1850, a second ‘eureka' moment took place, this time in Leipzig, Germany. Gustav Fechner, a theologiancum-physicist who had recently emerged from a protracted nervous breakdown, suddenly realized that the mind–body problem, which preoccupied so many German philosophers, might be solvable through mathematics. He recorded the date of this breakthrough in his diary.

The relationship of the mind to the physical world, including the body, is the foundational problem of modern philosophy. René Descartes' doubt about the reality of the physical world, combined with his certainty of his own existence, established a dualism between the realm of thought and that of physical things. Dualism is an unwieldy philosophical position to hold, which always runs the risk of a reductionism in one direction or the other. Either the entire world might get reduced to an effect of the thinking mind (idealism), or thinking can be reduced to a merely physical occurrence, subject to natural forces (empiricism), rather as Bentham had assumed. Various Enlightenment thinkers grappled with this, most notably Kant, who believed he had avoided either fate by systematically distinguishing matters of scientific knowledge from matters of moral and philosophical principle. The human mind was, for Kant, something which fell
firmly into the latter category, rendering any science of the psyche impossible.

Fechner was a dualist, but of a peculiar sort. His ideas were formed by a highly eclectic intellectual background, which put him in an unusual position with respect to traditional philosophical problems. Fechner was the son of a pastor, who (like Bentham's father) taught him Latin when he was a small child. He registered to study medicine at the University of Leipzig, but took the opportunity while there to attend lectures in botany, zoology, physics and chemistry. At the same time, he was exposed to many of the excesses of German idealist philosophy, including Schelling's philosophy of nature, romanticism and Hegel. Early in his academic career, he carried out experiments with electricity, while also getting drawn into theological debates about the nature of the soul. The separate domains that we now know as ‘science' and ‘philosophy' remained entangled in the German universities of the 1830s.

Nowadays, Fechner might well be described as a new age thinker. His genius was to find a way of bringing his disparate intellectual interests together, remaining a philosopher and a scientist, a metaphysician and a physician. In the process, he brought questions of the mind (which Kant had stipulated lay beyond the realms of knowledge) into the purview of science. For this reason, Fechner represents one of the key figures in the development of what we now know as psychology.

In what way would mathematics be helpful in solving the mind–body problem? The answer derived from Fechner's engagement with physics. The principle of the ‘conservation of energy' had been formulated by a number of German physicists over the course of the 1840s, with transformative implications for the understanding of basic matter. This stated that energy is
indestructible: it can be altered in its form, but not its quantity. If heat turns into light, or coal into heat, so the principle states, then we can assume that a single quantity of energy has been conserved along the way. This might be seen as another variant of monism. In the context of the industrial revolution, this discovery was a source of tremendous optimism that there was no limit to how efficient technology could become.