Ursula le Guin, in her short story “The ones who walk away from Omelas” (le Guin, 1976), imagines a glorious summer festival in a shining city full of celebrants. The universal civic happiness has one exception. A child in rags is kept in a cellar, in misery, fear, and suffering. When the children of Omelas come of age, they are shown the child and must choose to stay in Omelas, accepting that there will always be one child treated like this – or they must walk away.
Ursula le Guin’s father was the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, an expert on American culture. He met and eventually employed a native American who was said to be the last of the Californian Yahis. The Yahis had kept away from the prevailing American culture, and had been killed and driven off their land by successive waves of gold miners and others until, so the story goes, only one Yahi was left, who was called Mr. Ishi (Mr. “person”) by his protector. Mr. Ishi joined the staff of the anthropological museum that Alfred Kroeber set up.
The dilemma that his daughter posed in her short story could be reframed as “To be a Yahi and commit to traditional values, or to give in and join the prevailing culture (which was responsible for exterminating the Yahis).” Le Guin suspends judgment as she was wont to do in her stories, but there are interesting dimensions to the dilemma which make it gripping, even though we are not directly invited to take sides either with “The ones who walk away” or with the ones who stay.
Who but a glutton for punishment would walk away? A happy, free, joyful life; a child who will suffer anyway, whatever we do; is there really a choice? Which of us could leave the sanitized, convenient, sensual Californian world, and go and live with the Yahis? Just to reinforce this, what would our friends say if we did walk away from Omelas? That we were a bit sick in the head, perhaps; a bit masochistic? Suppose the child were oneself at a much earlier age, and the cellar was not really a cellar, but a memory? The positive psychology response is clear and inspiring: Go for post-traumatic growth, not post-traumatic stress (Cryder, Kilmer, Tedeschi, & Calhoun, 2006). Walk away from your past.
My questions in the previous paragraph were put from a hedonistic perspective. To be fair, that is not the starting point of serious positive psychology. Positive psychology starts from an Aristotelian take on well-being: that it is about flourishing. Given that there is no one positive psychology dogma, I will take this Aristotelian perspective as the touchstone of positive psychology values. Aristotle himself lived in a city-state that was not unlike Omelas, reliant as it was on the labour of a caste of slaves, including slave children. Citizens of Athens, as Aristotle was for many years, did, as a result, have the time to think, and the power to choose. Le Guin has a way of placing her characters in worlds that allow them to make thoughtful, self-controlled decisions. That is not the world most of us live in. We are not so much tempted to follow our own self-interest, but almost required to. Le Guin lived the life of a wealthy Californian and her academic world may have been closer to Athens. Her short story certainly puts us in the shoes of the educated Athenian, some of whom did, like Diogenes, make the decision to walk away, at least after a fashion.
Aristotle’s theoretical unconcern for the slaves of his household (and for disabled people, and women) arose because he thought that they were a kind of person who is incapable of well-being. One explanation for this is that a slave is not free to choose, and cannot therefore exercise “phronesis” or practical wisdom (Heath, 2008). It is obviously true that slaves are not free and, for Aristotle, the fundamental consequence was that they are not therefore free to make choices (although one might argue, as Sartre did when asked about the well-being of prisoners, that some freedom survives coercion). It would follow that an approach to well-being that is derived from Aristotelian eudaimonia will inevitably place great emphasis on choice and, perhaps not quite so explicitly as Aristotle, rule out the possibility of well-being for those who cannot choose. There is empirical support for this. A study by Savani, Stephens, and Markus (2011) manipulated the extent to which participants could exercise choice. Increasing their sense of being able to choose was associated with the participants expressing less support for policies combating diversity or the quality of the environment. Adding desire into the mix also decreases responsibility for the impact of actions (Nevala, Gray, McGahan, & Minchew, 2006).
Walking away from Omelas might be a repudiation of the joy that Omelas can give, but it is also a denial of responsibility for the child in the cellar. From a Sartrean perspective on freedom, it is a completely free action, as it is autonomous. But his partner, Simone de Beauvoir, gave a rather different account of freedom, according to which the freedom of others is also a constraint on one’s own freedom. How else, one might suppose, was she able to tolerate so much freedom to roam on the part of her partner? I write this not as a dismissal, but an almost involuntary expression of the masculine perspective on freedom. De Beauvoir repeatedly argued that freedom for a woman was incomplete if it was at the expense of those to whom she was connected (Pettersen, 2015).
The concept of “flourishing” is at the core of positive psychology. Flourish is the title of one of the books of a co-founder of positive psychology (Seligman, 2011). It was Fredrickson and Losada’s (2005) attempt to measure flourishing that triggered one of the editors of this book (see Brown, Chapter 12 in this volume) to question their methods (Brown, Sokal, & Friedman, 2013), leading eventually to a partial rebuttal (Fredrickson, 2013).
Omelas is a flourishing city, full of flourishing people (all except one). Does le Guin’s thought experiment tell us anything about there being a downside to flourishing in the real world? And, if so, does this have implications for positive psychology?
“Flourishing” harks back to the Aristotelian concept of “eudaimonia,” sometimes also translated as “living well,” although literally meaning “good spirits.” Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander the Great. Contrary to his tutee, who absorbed Persian administrators into the civil service of his empire, Aristotle had the traditional view of Persians. They spoke as if they were saying “bar bar” the whole time, and were only fit to be slaves, he wrote in his Politics (part 1.2). Aristotle lived for much of his life in Athens, which, like other contemporaneous city states in Greece, only included citizens in the political process. Women were restricted in their movements outside their homes. Slaves, of which there were many, were excluded, as were the class of “idiots.” Aristotle’s formulation of the pre-requisites for flourishing (in both of his books of ethics whose provenance is fully accepted, the Eudemian and the Nicomachean Ethics) excluded women, slaves, and people with chronic illnesses and disabilities. So from an early period in the pre-history of positive psychology, flourishing and political freedom were restricted to male aristocrats who were reliant on women and slaves, but denied them the same freedom and possibilities.
This raises the question of whether flourishing as it is defined by positive psychologists today is similarly possible only at the expense of people who contribute to the health and wealth of their superiors (it is difficult to avoid language about status here), but who do not themselves have the freedom to pursue happiness. This might seem counter-intuitive. The persuasive rhetoric of positive psychology is that it frees people to use their strengths rather than focusing on a supposedly restrictive focus on the negative. People “learn” resilience so that they can bounce back from adversity or trauma rather than becoming “trapped.” Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) set the scene in their editorial introduction to a special issue of the American Psychologist:
Practitioners need to recognize that much of the best work they already do in the consulting room is to amplify strengths rather than repair the weaknesses of their clients…. No longer do the dominant theories view the individual as a passive vessel responding to stimuli; rather, individuals are now seen as decision makers, with choices, preferences, and the possibility of becoming masterful, efficacious, or in malignant circumstances, helpless and hopeless…. Science and practice that rely on this worldview may have the direct effect of preventing many of the major emotional disorders.
(p. 8)
Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi each gave a personal introduction to the paper in which they summarized what led them to move towards a positive psychology. For Seligman, it was a five-year-old daughter who said that she had given up whining. For Csikszentmihalyi, it was a revulsion against those of his relatives who had given up after the invasion of Italy by Germany and then its defeat in the Second World War.
It was implied by Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) that flourishing is a characteristic rather than a state. In other words, that there are flourishers and non-flourishing people rather than situations in which people do or do not flourish. Many positive psychologists have begun to use measures of flourishing (Hone, Jarden, Schofield, & Duncan, 2014) that treat flourishing as a single dimension. Ratings are based on the frequency of particular instances of “hedonic” and “eudaimonic” well-being over some extended period, such as a month. Low scores on this dimension are often termed, after Keyes (Gerstein, Mayton, Hutchison, & Kirkpatrick, 2014), “languishing.” Keyes, in a further analysis of the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) survey, analysed the answers of 3,032 people to a telephone interview and their responses to a variety of questionnaires. He categorized 297 respondents as “languishers” without mental health problems and 484 others as having a “pure mental illness” (i.e., respondents who were not languishers but who had a DSM-III-R mental disorder such as depression or an anxiety disorder). The proportion of “languishers” and the “mentally ill” who had a reduction in activities of daily living was similar, but twice as high a proportion of people who were “mentally ill” had lost working days and more than twice as many had given up a goal in life. On the other hand, the proportion of “languishers” who felt helpless, felt that they could not change bad situations for better, could learn from difficult situations, or who felt really cared for by a friend was twice or more the proportion of “pure mentally ill” respondents who felt that way.
There is considerable evidence in support of Keyes’s observation that “languishing” or the absence of positive happiness (as I have termed it; Tantam, 2015) is distinct from “negative happiness” or mental suffering due to depression, anxiety, or chronic pain (Howell & Buro, 2015), the latter combination of which, in one large Dutch survey, almost completely excluded a person being very happy (Spinhoven, Elzinga, Giltay, & Penninx, 2015). But there is a strong tendency for positive psychologists to deny this and to focus on the positive, and to deny the negative. This tendency is gradually suffusing the remainder of the mental health field, too. Johnson and Wood (2016) advocated that clinical psychologists focus on “positive psychology constructs,” and in a recent article about child mental health in a psychiatry journal, Vidal-Ribas, Goodman, and Stringaris (2015) concluded that “Children’s positive attributes are associated with significantly less psychopathology across time and may be a target for intervention” (p. 17). The authors were reporting on two waves, three years apart, of a community-based assessment of British children aged 5–16. The correlation between positive attributes (e.g., being generous or caring) in the first wave and positive attributes in the second was fairly high at .56. That between the first wave positive attributes and the second wave psychopathology score was −.10: statistically significant, but of minimal explanatory significance.
It is more pleasant to spend time discussing how people might think more highly of each other, or better ways to show gratitude. But there is a limit to what will be spent on “mental health” (in the UK, this limit is already recognized to have been set too low) and spending professional interest, time, and resources on positives will, inevitably, result in reduced spending on anxiety and depression. The impact of increasing a child’s generosity on their later depression is, as the study indicates, minimal. Yet, Vidal-Ribas et al. (2015) advocated focusing on the child’s positive moral qualities, and not on their suffering, and justified this by linking the one to the other, even though their own findings were that the linkage is slight.
There are several disturbing features about the kind of mental suffering that we call mental illness or psychological disorder. It can be unremitting and prolonged. The suffering can be excruciating, with the resultant quality of life being considered worse than death. It is undeserved. We are not very good at relieving it.
All of this makes it hard to be around people who are suffering mentally, and mental suffering can lead to alienation from other people. “Flourishing,” on the other hand, is – like happiness – associated with both extraversion and conscientiousness (Schotanus-Dijkstra et al., 2015), both socially commendable characteristics, and indeed, social integration and sociability are common features of all of the main recent definitions of flourishing (Hone et al., 2014). Extraversion and conscientiousness might make people easy to be around, just as it is easy to be with people who are happy (the latter is, after all, infectious). But it would be false to conclude that people who are introverted or impulsive or unhappy choose to be alone – or at least that they choose to be alone in the first instance, for they may choose to be so after they have been criticized or marginalized often enough. It is quite possible that the people that Keyes calls languishers also end up alone because they are rejected by other people, and not out of choice.
Positive psychology practitioners encourage clients to replace negative, depressing talk with positivity. This is itself a kind of unfreedom in that shortcuts to happiness are notoriously unsuccessful: a point made by Socrates, amongst many others (Gray, 2006). Placing a high value on happiness actually reduces the pleasure of being free of worry (Mauss, Tamir, Anderson, & Savino, 2011), too – another argument against seeking happiness, and certainly against seeking happiness above all else.
Positive psychology may result in people who feel negatively being less free to express their feelings. Furthermore, having negative feelings may become branded as a failing (van Deurzen, 2009). A “second wave” of positive psychology (Lomas & Ivtzan, 2015) is responding to these criticisms by reclaiming a place for the expression of the full range of what van Deurzen calls the “emotional compass,” which includes negative as well as positive feelings. This “second wave” approach is not so very different from the first wave’s approach to “flourishing,” however, since that has always included so-called eudaimonic happiness in its definition, and eudaimonia can only be achieved by practising of living skilfully, a practice that will inevitably lead to some pain or frustration.
Good spirits may be infectious, and may lull us into a sense of false security. But people whom we see as kind or generous may, for reasons that they see as good, limit our freedom. They may, for example, tell us palatable lies rather than the unvarnished truth. In fact, they may be less honest across the board (Vincent, Emich, & Goncalo, 2013). Goodly people are more likely to make unfair resource allocations if their sympathies are engaged by a single case. Negative feelings such as anxiety may be more reality-focused, pointing us to real dangers or threats. McNulty and Fincham (2012) provided empirical evidence that the interpersonal behaviours associated with flourishing, such as forgiveness, are associated with less marital satisfaction in troubled marriages, although they are associated with more satisfaction in less conflictual marriages. Flourishing, they argued, is context-determined. The most flourishing marriages, contributing to the most flourishing partners, require the situation to allow for flourishing. Making the best of a more rocky marriage, though, requires skills that are not advocated by positive psychologists, and indeed would be seen to be negative. The freedom to flourish is only granted to those who find themselves in a non-conflictual marriage, just as the freedom to flourish in ancient Athens was only open to those who were free of want, servitude, or ill health (and who were male). One of the conclusions that McNulty and Fincham reached is that “studying flourishing cannot tell us how to improve or prevent suffering” (p. 107).
Duarte et al. (2015) argued that psychology has lost its former political diversity, becoming more and more imbued with liberal values. They used the definition of these values given by a sociologist:
Once upon a time, the vast majority of human persons suffered in societies and social institutions that were unjust, unhealthy, repressive, and oppressive. These traditional societies were reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation, and irrational traditionalism … But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality, and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression, and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic … welfare societies.
(Smith, 2003, p. 83)
This statement would not look amiss in a positive psychology statement of values, having the same meliorist perspective.
What meliorists do not accept is that injustice, inequality, ill-health, repression, and oppression are ever-present and will remain ever-present. Conservatives are more pessimistic about change (Baradat, 2011). The evidence supports the conservative prejudice. Status differentials are one building block of social structure that have been present in every society, even in experimental anarchist ones. Yet they institutionalize inequality. Repression of free speech is routinely justified when that speech is hate speech. Imprisonment may seem to the judge to be deserved punishment, but to the criminal, it is oppression by an unfair society. Telomere length, a predictor of longevity, is already shorter in disadvantaged children by the age of nine (Mitchell et al., 2014). Fifty percent of our well-being has been attributed to the hereditary set of our hedonic balance (Lyubomirsky, Dickerhoof, Boehm, & Sheldon, 2011), and life satisfaction will remain highly heritable unless we deliberately alter our genes (Konkolÿ Thege, Littvay, Tarnoki, & Tarnoki, 2015). Someone will always have meaningless work (Veltman, 2015). And the poor are always likely to be with us.
Aristotle attributed these inequalities to “moral luck.” In his discussion of Aristotle’s position on moral luck, Kenny (1992, pp. 90–98) likened it to the Christian doctrine of grace, and contrasted it with the Christian principal of proportionality: that, for example, a small offering may be as valuable as a large offering if they are proportional to what could be given in total. This might well be the positive psychology position, too, but it seems flawed. A person who is struggling with starvation does not just have a little less to give than someone who is living off the fat of the land. They have a very different set of priorities.
Generosity, gratitude, optimism, and other virtues associated with flourishing and positive psychology are out of place when every minute is a struggle to survive. But to assume that people who are struggling to survive are, as Aristotle thought, not free to find their own way of flourishing is tyrannical. Positive psychology risks imposing the values of the comfortably off, educated classes in developed countries on other cultures, other classes, and other situations, and in so doing fetters these other groups in the entanglements of its own peculiar value system.
Happiness is an emotion that almost all of us can recognize. We know when we are happy. But we do not know if we will be happy tomorrow, although we know that it will matter to use if we are not. So we rely on nostrums, formulae, wise sayings, guidance from priests and theologians, and advice from our grandmothers, media pundits, philosophers, or psychologists to tell us how we should secure our future happiness. To the extent to which we rely on them, we give up our own freedom to choose, albeit willingly. Sartre wisely refused to give this kind of advice, only warning that whatever we do, we have to live with the consequences. Positive psychologists are not so reticent.
Choices like this are not made in social isolation, even if we are alone. There is a chorus of voices in our heads that accompany them, even then. Our relationships to other people when it comes to flourishing are complex. “Living well” generally encompasses the consequences of our actions for other people as much as for ourselves. Definitions of flourishing run parallel to definitions of sociability. Hone et al. (2014) compared four measures of flourishing. All of them include positive relationships as a criterion, two include social contribution, and one lists a number of other dimensions of sociability such as social acceptance. Encouraging flourishing by these criteria means encouraging social conformity.
In many circumstances, the interests of the individual and that of his or her group or family march together, and indeed it is right that they do so; otherwise flourishing would become a very selfish activity. But there are occasions when they do not, when, for example, a non-conformist champion for a cause becomes a nuisance to those around them and suffers personal fear or unhappiness as a result. We might be happy to say that this person is not flourishing and, given that the situation that they are in is not one that allows flourishing, this would be true in the short term. But would we be right to say that they would have a better life if they just gave up their protest? Is the person who puts themselves at risk to hide neighbours on the run from persecution, and lives in fear that they will be discovered, flourishing? Or is the person who decides to live the traditional injunction of the church to give a tithe of their income as flourishing as his or her peer who has this extra 10 percent to spend?
Maybe these cases are too obviously noble. Perhaps we could ask instead whether the chronic protester or the curmudgeonly hermit is flourishing, or the feckless spendthrift. The former two are likely to be low in extraversion, and to not have positive relationships. Both are part of the awkward squad. The latter does not show the conscientiousness, self-control, or social responsibility that flourishing appears to demand.
It seems to me that under certain circumstances all of these people might consider themselves satisfied with their lives; even, perhaps, happy. The definition of “flourishing” rests too heavily on social conformity, on the values of a small group of intellectuals sharing a similar liberal culture, and on having something of the same attachment to conformity. Its adoption restricts the freedom of others to lead the lives that they want, even lives that are shorter and harsher than they otherwise might be.
I have enumerated several links between positive psychology and unfreedom:
There will always be shadow where there is the brightest light. Seeking to live only in the light means in practice living in the overcast, where there are no shadows. I do not say that is a bad choice, but it is not the only choice. Some may think, as I do, that suffering through the shadows is worth it if at other times we can experience our world in its brightest light.
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