In The Weariness of the Self, Alain Ehrenberg offers a cultural history of depression. He writes:
Depression began its ascent when the disciplinary model for behaviors, the rules of authority and observance of taboos that gave social classes as well as both sexes a specific destiny, broke against norms that invited us to undertake personal initiative by enjoining us to be ourselves … Depression presents itself as an illness of responsibility in which the dominant feeling is that of failure. The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself.1
In the 1960s, personal liberation—from the authority of parents, teachers, bourgeois laws, the uterus, the draft, the bra—happened to coincide with a period of upward mobility in a booming economy. These developments seemed, for a moment, to herald the arrival of the strong one prophesied by Friedrich Nietzsche. Ehrenberg quotes from The Genealogy of Morals: “The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over himself and over fate, has sunk right down to his innermost depths, and has become an instinct, a dominating instinct.” For some decades now, this sovereign individual has been the stock character described in commencement speeches. It is the background picture of the self that informs daytime talk shows and advice columns. It is what a high school guidance counselor falls back on when his blood sugar is low.
The sovereign individual has become our norm but, as Ehrenberg says, “instead of possessing the strength of the masters, she turns out to be fragile,… weary of her sovereignty and full of complaints.”2
THE CULTURE OF PERFORMANCE
Our weariness is understandable. With radical responsibility comes a new emphasis on personal initiative, and a corollary “culture of performance” in which you have to constantly marshal your internal resources to be successful, as Ehrenberg says. This is reflected in, for example, the heightened competition of the middle-class educational trajectory. Significant social sorting is understood to be operating at every stage, from preschool to the GREs. With our presumption of meritocracy—that is, of a fair and frictionless mobility, a system without any systemic rigidities that would block our way—failure carries a deeper stigma than it would if we had a more realistic view of our society.
If there are no external constraints, what you make of yourself depends on your gumption and mental capacities. Are you a high-performance person? In a culture of performance, the individual reads the status and value of her soul in her worldly accomplishments. Like the Calvinist, she looks to her success in order to know: Am I one of the elect or am I damned? With radical responsibility comes the specter of inadequacy.
In Calvin’s time, one might have had a hereditary occupation. And as recently as the 1970s, it was possible to compose a working life centered around the steady accumulation of experience, and be valued in the workplace for that experience; for what you have become. But, as the sociologist Richard Sennett has shown in his studies of contemporary work, it has become difficult to experience the repose of any such settled identity.3 The ideal of being experienced has given way to the ideal of being flexible. What is demanded is an all-purpose intelligence, the kind one is certified to have by admission to an elite university, not anything in particular that you might have learned along the way. You have to be ready to reinvent yourself at any time, like a good democratic Übermensch. And while in Calvin’s time the threat of damnation might have been dismissed by some as a mere superstition, with our winner-take-all economy the risk of damnation has acquired real teeth. There is a real chance that you may get stuck at the bottom.
MOBILITY AND THE DEMOCRATIC SOCIAL CONDITION
When Tocqueville came to America in the 1830s, he was struck by our “democratic social condition,” in which “new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition.” Social mobility represents a possibility, a powerful idea of equality that carries psychic force even if you find yourself (for now) near the bottom.
In our daily intercourse there is a fairly easy mixing of people of different fortunes, without set rituals of deference and condescension. A certain democratic amiability is expected of all. “How’s it going?”—thus does the valet address the guy whose Ferrari he is about to park. For his part, the Ferrari owner feels flattered rather than offended by the familiarity. He prides himself on being a regular guy, and is put at ease by the exchange. He should leave a fat tip; the valet has done him a psychic favor. But wait—a big tip would draw attention to the economic inequality, and thereby undermine the whole exchange, which is a mutual performance of social equality. It’s complicated in America. (To get by in the service industry here, you have to learn to finesse this stuff to your advantage. You have to play on the Ferrari owner’s democratic virtue before handing him back the keys.)
Recent opinion surveys indicate that Americans still “have a greater faith in their country being a meritocracy than citizens of nearly every other country on earth,” according to The Huffington Post. Yet recent measures of equality of opportunity and social mobility from one generation to the next place us dead last among the advanced nations studied, which include the United States, the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Australia, Finland, Denmark, and Canada.4 Our faith in mobility persists in the face of such facts; without it the public rationale for a culture of individual initiative would collapse.
Tocqueville wrote:
As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who … owe nothing to any man, [and] expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.5
Given our resolutely individual experience of ourselves, we should not be surprised that organized labor has collapsed, or that the social safety net is under constant pressure toward privatization, or that the company pension has given way to the Individual Retirement Account. The point is this: our cherished economic individualism has become a somewhat dysfunctional ideal, in light of the systemic inequalities that have gotten locked into our economy. Yet that ideal persists. If anything it has become more extreme as a point of reference on our political compass, and less tolerant of critique. It must certainly contribute to our experience of individual inadequacy, rather than collective discontent of the sort that gets expressed politically.6
Ehrenberg’s book allows us to connect some big dots. The liberation of the individual from various identities, obligations, and allegiances in the 1960s gave a new flavor to our economic individualism. The economics of the right became infused with the moral fervor of the youthful left in a grand synthesis of liberation that gave us the figure of the bohemian entrepreneur as the exemplary human type. One effect of this trajectory has been the clinical explosion of depression (as well as a shift in how we understand our unhappiness).
Once upon a time, our problem was guilt: the feeling that you have made a mistake, with reference to something forbidden. This was felt as a stain on one’s character. Ehrenberg suggests the dichotomy of the forbidden and the allowed has been replaced with an axis of the possible and the impossible. The question that hovers over your character is no longer that of how good you are, but of how capable you are, where capacity is measured in something like kilowatt hours—the raw capacity to make things happen. With this shift comes a new pathology. The affliction of guilt has given way to weariness—weariness with the vague and unending project of having to become one’s fullest self. We call this depression.
Depression is especially threatening in a culture of performance, as it is a pathology in which one has difficulty initiating action. Somehow, at just the right moment in the evolution of our economic culture, we discovered in the 1980s that “a particular molecule can facilitate the ideals of autonomy, self-realization, and the ability to act by oneself,” as Peter Kramer wrote in Listening to Prozac. We were now able to adjust ourselves to the collective demands peculiar to an assemblage of sovereign individuals.
One of the ironies of this situation is the unexpected harmony we find between a deterministic biochemical picture of the human being and the ideal of autonomy. Recall that Kant offered that ideal by way of defending the freedom of the will against material causation, by hiving it off from anything empirical and locating our freedom in a separate realm of the ideal here. But the flip side of determinism is self-manipulability, and Kant doesn’t seem to have anticipated the appeal that this holds for a person raised in a cultural idiom of autonomy. To regard oneself as a collection of synapses and neurotransmitters is to take a certain stance toward oneself. I don’t think “I am in despair because I lost my job,” I think “My serotonin levels are low, and there’s a pill for that.” This is to shift from a first-person perspective in which I inhabit my own experience and interpret it, giving reasons for it that refer to events in the world, to a third-person perspective in which I objectify myself and the reasons I invoke are material causes located inside my head.7 This naturalistic determinism would have horrified Kant, but note that such inwardness gets apparent warrant from his insistence that we conceive our will as free of all those sources of heteronomy that arise from our external circumstances.
THE USES OF CONFLICT
On Freud’s understanding, there is a fundamental conflict between the self and the world; that is essentially what the experience of guilt tells us. Such conflict is a source of anxiety, but it also serves to structure the individual. The project of becoming a grown-up demands that one bring one’s conflicts to awareness; to intellectualize them and become articulate about them, rather than let them drive one’s behavior stupidly. Being an adult involves learning to accept limits imposed by a world that doesn’t fully answer to our needs; to fail at this is to remain infantile, growing old in the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
Of course, there is a hazard in the Freudian cure. There used to be a certain type: someone in interminable analysis who intellectually fetishized his conflicts and became hyperarticulate about them. Think of the characters played by Woody Allen in his early movies such as Sleeper and Annie Hall. But sometime in the late 1980s the neurotic was replaced, as a cultural type, by the depressive, who understands his unhappiness not in terms of conflict but rather in terms of mood. Mood is taken to be a function of neurotransmitters, about which there’s not much to say. Inarticulacy is baked into any description of the human being that we express in neuro-talk.
Corresponding to this shift, Ehrenberg points out, is a new emphasis on well-being. In the old Freudian dispensation, to be psychoanalytically “cured” was not to achieve well-being; it was to be clear-eyed about oneself and about the human condition. Unlike many of his intellectual heirs, Freud offered a tragic view that resisted dreams of a final liberation. The interdictions of society aren’t simply repression; they are formative of the kind of individual who inhabits that society. Nor is this to be understood simply as conformity. Rather, the individual is a creature who comes into being only through conflict, in some historical setting (as in Hegel). Civilization comes at a high personal cost, but the alternative would be something less than human.
Freud’s thought can help to illuminate the psychological appeal of our ideal of autonomy. That ideal seems to have at its root the hope for a self that is not in conflict with the world.
To adopt a brain-centered perspective on oneself is perfectly suited to this hope, as it expresses the corollary hope that the self is manipulable by mood-brightening molecules that maximize well-being without reference to a person’s situation: his biography, relationships, or wider cultural and economic setting.
Ehrenberg writes that the “pharmacohuman” would “no longer be subject to the usual condition known as limits.” Similarly, the pioneers of virtual reality research were animated by a wish to explore the possibilities of experience without the limits that define us as humans.
What sort of self shall we choose to be? The way psychoactive drugs are currently used indicates that the “choices” we face tend to get highly funneled by societal pressures. Anecdotally it seems to be the case that, for example, junior faculty at high-powered research universities are taking as much Adderall as their students, and this is perfectly understandable. As Ehrenberg argues, a culture of self-responsibility is a culture of performance, which is a culture of competition. In light of that competition, there is really only one kind of self that is going to be successful: the high-performance kind. This starts to feel less like something chosen in a shining moment of existential freedom and more like something obligatory.
Perhaps we have merely shifted the source of our lack of freedom from identifiable external authorities (the kind one can challenge) to a net of scientistic explanations and economic pressures. Both the explanations and the pressures are predicated on an atomized picture of the self. The binding character of this net is hard to see and hard to take issue with, because it fits so comfortably. If it could speak, it would do so in the deep grammar of autonomy.
UP FROM FREEDOM
If we can put aside for a moment our centuries-long preoccupation with liberation, we might think differently about authority. The key would be to conceive authority in a way that is free of those metaphysical conceits that provoke an allergic reaction in the modern mind. Recall once more Iris Murdoch’s description of learning Russian. The “authoritative structure” she invokes as a counterweight to the self is not the law of a punishing Jewish god, nor the promiscuous love of a Christian one. Rather, it is the authority of a skilled practice that “commands my respect” for reasons internal to the practice, requiring no further foundation or metaphysical support. These reasons are progressively revealed as one goes deeper into the practice.
The moral psychology Murdoch offers is entirely this-worldly. Its basic stance is one of gratitude; she speaks of “love of Russian.” It is guided by a kind of pleasure: “Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality,” she says. The role played by love in this account indicates that attention may be at bottom an erotic phenomenon.