An Overview of the Argument
This book is about the difficulties involved in trying to experience wellbeing in todayâs world. I take as straightforward facts that people are having difficulty living well and that they are having these difficulties irrespective of claims by some that, on all sorts of dimensions, the human world is better than it has ever been. To put it at its starkest, there may well have been a reduction in all forms of physical violence (Pinker 2011) but, irrespective, that has not been matched by a reduction in psychological harm or pain. I argue that these difficulties are not like technical problems that require some kind of piecemeal technical solution. Instead, the explanation for what some see as a paradox (e.g., Easterbrook 2004) involves seeing that our wellbeing concerns are principally about personsâand being clear about just what a person is should therefore be central to understanding wellbeing. It is persons who are the enduring, identifiable subjects of experience and so they must also be the subjects of any experience of wellbeing . Yet, crucially, personsâperhaps unlike individual biological members of the human speciesâare intimately associated with the social and the cultural worlds that generate them. They are perhaps best expressed as âdoingsâ in that worldârather than beings or entities (though I will refer to them as âentitiesâ and âbeingsâ for simplicityâs sake). This connection to the sociocultural world is probably why psychology in general, and the psychology of wellbeing in particular, has had a deal of difficulty incorporating, or even acknowledging, persons in theory. Psychology is all about the person, but the person is nowhere to be seen in psychological theory (with some notable exceptions, as we will see).
Given these points, the way we are typically concerned with wellbeing cannot be understood without also understanding the kinds of cultures within which persons arise. And, to add some complexity, wellbeing also cannot be understood fully without some understanding of the typical life tasks (Cantor et al. 1987, 1991) a particular culture sets before the persons that it generates. The extent to which these tasks are mastered will determine the extent to which that person is found to be in good standing as a person in that culture. For a person, being in such good standing is a large part of living a good life; a life of wellbeing . But a person is not passive in these assessments of her standing. The skills we each develop and can draw upon to present ourselvesâto both ourselves and othersâas being in such good standing are crucial tools we bring both to achieving our life tasks and to our presentation of our success, or lack of success, at them.
The argument of this book is straightforward and has two parts. The first part is the claim that work on wellbeing âespecially within psychology âhas omitted from consideration a fundamentally important question: âThe wellbeing of what?â As already mentioned, I argue that the answer to that question is âpersonsâ. Much of the theoretical and conceptual importance of what follows therefore concerns understanding what persons are and why such curious entities came to be. That is, I make an argument for the basic functional features of persons and personhood and, hence, why and how persons evolved and also why they are one of the main targets of human development.
The second part follows from the first, though, in truth, the order in which these occurred to me was the reverse. Given that persons are principally âsociocultural artefacts ââto use Rom HarrĂ© (1983) phrasingâno understanding of (human) wellbeing is complete without consideration of the particular features of the culture within which persons emerge. Personâs emerge as both a concept that concerns a fascinating form of life, and as an outcome of the development of individual human beings as they become, to one degree or another, persons. For several reasons I focus on what I call âaspirational cultureâ to explain these links between personhood and wellbeing . The term is my own and I take it to mean that particular aspect of todayâs culture that most markedly informs the âlife projectâ of persons within it insofar as it bears on those personsâ wellbeing . Our individual and collective âprojectâ is, at base, to aspire.
In one sense I am using the term âaspirational cultureâ as a synonym for the equally imprecise term âtodayâs worldâ. That is, whatever âaspirational cultureâ might be, it is also an increasingly pervasive and even dominant cultural form that is making its presence felt in more and more places on the planet . Globalisation would not be globalization in the form we have it if it did not also effectively âaspirationaliseâ the economies, societies and people of the world. But there is another, more technical sense , in which I want to use the term âaspirational cultureâ. Persons are the âpivotsââor index pointsâfor the navigation of multiple aspects of a (personal) life. Aspirational culture makes its presence felt in each of these aspects: the personal; the social; the political; and, the economic. These aspects have nested and overlapping features that, roughly and with some inevitable friction, maintain a culture of aspiration in a self-reinforcing and self-referencing manner.
One reason for focusing on cultures that are aspirational, in this sense, is that they appear to be spreading fast. A second reason is more substantive: Aspirational culture has a fascinating and complicated relationship with the wellbeing of people (persons). As I hope to show, that relationship provides especial insights into just what wellbeing is and what it involves. Third, there is a sense in which this notion of âaspirationâ is also not a recent feature of human cultures; it is baked into our culture because of the fateful turn to an agricultural way of life. It was only after that recent turn to agricultural production that the now familiar parade of various and sometimes vast societies, civilisations and even empires began. The tell-tale signs of this evolutionarily unusual form of human sociality include proliferation in the division of labour, increasingly focused specialisation of the skills and knowledge of individuals, and hierarchical social organisation. Wherever we look in human history (from about 12,000 years ago to the present) we find more of this form of society and culture and less of its egalitarian , socially âflatâ, hunter-gatherer predecessor with its broadly skilled and knowledgeable members. Finally, aspirational cultures themselves seem to be the ones most responsible for generating the very interest in wellbeing that provides such a wide audience for books such as this. That interest, for my purposes, is a piece of dataâa datumâused in evidence for my argument.
While it is not central to my argument, I also suggest that this âaspirationalâ aspect of todayâs culture (certainly of the one I spend my time in) is pervasive and works as a structuring ideology. By âstructuring ideologyâ I mean that it has a direct âchannellingâ influence at the level of personhood development and, therefore, in the lives people leadâin their material , social and psychological aspectsâand in the wellbeing outcomes that attend those lives. Increasingly, it is being expressed throughout our social, political, legal, financial and economic institutions. It is the air we breathe. My conclusion with respect to such a culture is that it isâoverall and despite common suppositionâharmful to the wellbeing of the persons who are its constitutive entities. In other words, and far more simply, todayâs aspirational culture works against the wellbeing of the personsâand the notion of personhood âit helps constitute.
One only has to be passingly acquainted with the various streams of popular intellectual culture to realise that this conclusion is not original; but the theoretical explanation that leads to the conclusion is original, so far as I am aware. Further, I intend to show that the conclusion results from a well-integrated conceptual account of wellbeing that is informed by a range of disciplines including, to varying degrees, the philosophical, psychological, evolutionary, social, cultural and economic literatures. I should add that I also expect this conclusion to be provocative in the sense that many researchers may well feel a strong desire to oppose it on any number of grounds and so, hopefully, will do so. I also hope, however, that it is provocative in the sense that it provokes novel research and theoretical directions for those interested in understanding the processes of human wellbeing . The final chapter provides some of my own thoughts and suggestions about how we might begin to explore those novel directions.
This book, then, is about wellbeing. To that extent, it is in numerousâif not always âgoodââcompany. A fascinating feature of todayâs world is that when something becomes popular it often becomes very popular. âWellbeingâ and its variants (e.g., âwellnessâ, âliving wellâ) have undeniably become âhot topicsâ and, evidenced by their increasing ubiquity, socially âviralâ. No doubt many wellbeing researchers have their own pet list of oddâor at least unexpectedâdomains in which the word âwellbeingâ has been rhetorically recruited (Who, for example, would have guessed that your local dental care outlet would also be one of your many guides for how to âlive wellâ?). For anyone living in the kinds of aspirational cultures on the march today, it would also be hard to miss the emergence of an industry almost entirely focused on delivering wellbeing options to individuals through the increasingly global âmarketplaceâ (and that notion of an emergent industry ignores older industriesâsuch as the pharmaceutical industryâthat have repositioned themselves as, at least to some extent, wellbeing providers).
The following is a brief overview of the basic argument to be developed in this book. The first point to note is that this book is not just a collation of what we know about our wellbein...