I debate selection and streaming with Katherine Birbalsingh on the BBC. Listen here if you are interested. Go straight to Chapter 6.…
Monthly Archives: February 2012
A few thoughts on the conflict between happiness and achievement….
Over the past couple of weeks i Have been reading and listening to some of the new Happiness Gurus. Last weekend The Guardian gave away Happier, a slim, aggressively yellow book by Tal Ben-Shahar ; this morning, I watched a TEDX speech on line given by an American psychologist, Shawn Anchor, who really should be – is, already – a stand up comedian, on the same subject.
What strikes me, increasingly, is how much these happiness messages run directly counter to the values, both explicit and covert, that young people are taught to hold, particularly at this rather mean spirited point in our society, and particularly within schools. These are, that results matter above all else; only A stars really count: Oxbridge or a Russell Group university are the only places worth aiming for etc
In terms of paid work, the goals are similar. What is prized? Work in some highly visible occupation such as politics, law, media or banking ( yes, even now, although, personally, I have yet to understand what any of these milk-round graduates are actually doing in these glass palaces of post crash capitalism.) And these careers are only worth something if you climb to the top. ( Who salutes a back bench MP who has campaigned hard over many decades to create a fairer society?)
Leave aside the massive issue of inequality of access to these same so called goals; is Super Achievement worth aiming for at all?
Not according to the Happiness Gurus. Ben-Shahar urges us to throw off the Rat Race mentality while Shawn Anchor claims that concern for success actually blocks productivity. (An interesting footnote: only those who have succeeded in the Rat Race can repudiate it. So Shawn Anchor’s talk carefully emphasises his Harvard career while Ben-Shahar begins his book with a story about winning a top athletics tournament as a highly driven, and unhappy, sixteen year old.)
Still, there’s a lot of sense in what they say. It is hard to learn to relish the ordinary moments of life when culture rewards only those ‘mountain top moments‘ of an extraordinary goal achieved.
But what neither the Stressed Over Achievers nor the Laid Back Happy Ones seem to address is the question of meaning. Neither seem to ask: what does happiness or achievement mean if neither are grounded in a life, or actions, based on the things that really matter: strong, honest relationships: kindness ( ‘the ruling principle of nowhere’ as the writer Jan Morris once memorably observed) and deeply held moral and political values, even those these might well lead you far from the centres of power, status or money.…
Latest writing
THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY
The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War
PETER MANDLER, 2020
Oxford: Oxford University Press
361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145
Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.
In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.
On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…
Latest news & events
A Cold War Tragedy
Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’
Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.
More information here.
…
