The politics of unhappiness

Plus: The origin of the blues, juvenile Jane Austen and more

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In the latest issue of First Things, the physician and political scientist Ronald W. Dworkin takes a closer look at the politics of unhappiness. Negative feelings, he writes, have come to be attributed to specific causes, even if it is impossible to treat them as the result of such:
An unpleasant sensation gets the mind churning, and we reach for something in our lives to blame. A man feels an unpleasant sensation. In a flash he ponders a thought he has had before: Maybe he should have started his own business, or married later in life, or traveled…

In the latest issue of First Things, the physician and political scientist Ronald W. Dworkin takes a closer look at the politics of unhappiness. Negative feelings, he writes, have come to be attributed to specific causes, even if it is impossible to treat them as the result of such:

An unpleasant sensation gets the mind churning, and we reach for something in our lives to blame. A man feels an unpleasant sensation. In a flash he ponders a thought he has had before: Maybe he should have started his own business, or married later in life, or traveled more — something. He blames his unpleasant sensation on one of these causes and declares himself ‘”unhappy.” But he errs, for the explanation followed the sensation — so fast that he imagines that the explanation “caused” what preceded it. The drive to explain unpleasant sensations, to understand them, to have reasons for feeling the way we do, is so powerful that sometimes we reverse the order in which unpleasant sensations and the explanations for them appear.

We fall into this way of thinking because so ­many unpleasant sensations do have specific causes. I stub my toe, and it hurts. I drink too much, and I get a hangover. The cause-and-effect relationship is clear. But generalized bad feelings are different. Without an obvious explanation for them, we fall back into the habit of finding and blaming a specific cause, such as work trouble, money trouble, health trouble, or love trouble, at which point we pronounce ourselves unhappy.

This desire to isolate causes of our unhappiness was transformed, Dworkin writes, in 1952 with the chance discovery of the antidepressant iproniazid:

A second breakthrough came in 1957 with Roland Kuhn’s chance discovery of the antidepressant imipramine. These drugs gave rise to the two classes of antidepressants that dominated depression therapy until Prozac came along in 1987: MAO inhibitors and tricyclics. They quickly replaced opium as the primary treatment for depression. In an important way, however, they hardly differed from opium, just as opium hardly differed from alcohol. Alcohol, opium, and ­antidepressants stupefy people. They induce a pleasant sensation, independent of what is ­actually going on in a person’s life. TIME magazine’s description of patients taking ­iproniazid — how they grew festive and danced on the wards — could just as easily apply to people who are drunk or high.

The invention of the spectrophotofluorimeter in the 1950s led to a new causal theory of unhappiness altogether. This device revealed an association between the new antidepressants and increased levels of neurotransmitters in the brain. Researchers concluded that neurotransmitters must somehow mediate the improvement in mood caused by antidepressants.

The idea that our brains cause us to feel unhappy, which can only be regulated through stupefying drugs, has had relatively significant “political and economic repercussions”:

Economically, the model spawned a new branch of pharmaceuticals. Politically, it reinforced a longstanding belief that brain matter determines our thoughts, actions, and behaviors. That belief ramifies throughout society, for instance, in law, where it undercuts traditional notions of individual responsibility. Yet the neurotransmitter model — or at least its failure — also feeds into today’s political dysfunction.

He goes on to argue that politics itself became a kind of stupefaction, promising to transform one’s feeling of well-being through a transformed (that is, more just, less racist) society. Stupefaction may be a bit of a stretch, but give the whole thing a read.

In other news

Did the blues originate in New Orleans, Texas, West Africa? Ted Gioia writes that “there are other theories about the blues, linking its origins to a whole host of other precedents: the Islamic call to prayer, vaudeville acts, Native American traditions, etc. Every one of the hypotheses has some evidence to support it, although not every case is equally convincing.”

In defense of the autonomy of art: John Banville reviews Jed Perl’s Authority and Freedom.

review Robert B. Shaw’s eighth volume of poetry. If you are going to buy one volume of Shaw’s work, make it this volume: “What Remains to Be Said: New and Selected Poems collects poems from all of his seven previous books and includes 28 new poems. His topics are local and familial, and his poems often begin with whatever is at hand or crosses the eye or mind of the speaker — a bait shop, a bookmark, a wind chime, an old church, a memory, a walk with his wife or cooking alone after his wife has passed away. For Shaw, the natural world is neither mere source nor reflection of human hope or despair but a participant in life’s joys and suffering. It is the poet’s task to acknowledge and express what is there rather than to superimpose, à la Wallace Stevens, an idea or sentiment on it.”

Speaking of poetry, Francesca Peacock is not too impressed with Ocean Vuong’s latest:

Vuong, rightly, won the T.S. Eliot prize in 2017 with Night Sky With Exit Wounds. The collection had flashes of brilliance and was a mark of a young poet making his way in the world. It also won the Forward Prize for best first collection, and, in 2019, Vuong was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant. This is a man who knows how to write — or so the literary world thinks . . . Time is a Mother should have been a return to what Vuong is best at: the slim, contained, intense volume of poetry. All he had to do was improve a little since his T.S. Eliot-winning moment, and he’d be guaranteed that rarest thing for poets: literary fame, riches, and glory. The collection begins well. “The Bull” stands alone at the beginning of the volume . . . innocent readers would be forgiven for assuming they had opened a new, original book of poems. Unfortunately, they would be wrong. Over the next eighty-five pages, we are treated to twenty-seven poems of difficult parental relationships, the alienation of being a gay man in America, and — worst of all — the difficulties of being a famous poet.

David Mamet’s American Buffalo returns to Broadway with an ingenious set: “‘The stage is essentially a capsule shape,’ Pask says, with wedges of new seats added upstage and rows along the sides, to reach a maximum count for each performance. The extra seats draw the audience into the dilapidated shop to a degree that makes the final, bloody showdown among the gang even more jarring. ‘It’s as if the walls of the junk shop are the audience,’ Pepe says, and those walls feel as if they’re constantly on the verge of collapse.” The cast includes Laurence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss.

A thirty-year dispute over a fresco by Piero della Francesca continues: “Mayor of Monterchi, Tuscany, rejects court’s ruling that painting by Piero della Francesca be put back in hilltop chapel.”

The bawdy prose of the juvenile Jane Austen:

Think twice before crossing the threshold into Jane Austen’s unpublished writings. She will become unknowable. Gone will be Jane the purveyor of perfectly calibrated romance in muslin frocks, the font of gently corrective satire and plain good sense, the dispenser of worldly wisdom on every topic from grammar to dating. You will lose your soulmate and solace. The earliest compositions, mostly written before the age of seventeen, were carefully preserved in the form of three slender notebooks, leather-bound and grandly announced on mock title pages: Volume the FirstSecond and Third. The neat handwriting that emulates typescript, and the elaborate dedications to family and friends, belie the contents. Enter and you will find the world associated with her turned upside down, as the young apprentice undertakes a rip-roaring demolition of the sentimental tradition of fiction she inherited: mantraps in the shrubbery, elopements and adultery in abundance, assault and battery, murder and suicide, civil war and even cannibalism.