Do you think your life would be better if you lived in a bigger house or drove a more expensive car? Would you like to see your name in the press? Do you see friends as a way of getting ahead in life?
If the answer to these questions is ‘yes’, you have probably contracted the affluenza virus. You are likely to be suffering from some, perhaps still mild, form of depression and anxiety. Do not be lulled into believing everything is OK and that this is the way the world just is. You should consult a clinical psychologist, Oliver James for example, as soon as possible.
Affluenza is the name and subject of James’ third book charting the ills of modern ‘Western’ culture. It is defined on the front cover as ‘a contagious, middle-class virus causing depression, anxiety, addiction and ennui.’ It has many proximate causes but they are all, somehow or other, rooted in a dysfunctional relationship with money.
Affluenza is not a new ailment. 2,500 years ago the Teacher of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes lamented that, ‘Whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income.’ 600 years later St Paul made a similar point, if less poetically, to his young charge, Timothy: ‘People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires.’ Affluenza, like so many of the diseases that afflict humans, is as old as civilisation.
What is new, is its scale. According to James, we – meaning predominantly we in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ West – have never been so depressed. ‘To fill the emptiness and loneliness, and to replace our need for authentic, intimate relationships, we resort to the consumption that is essential for economic growth and profits. The more anxious or depressed we are, the more we must consume, and the more we consume, the more disturbed we become.’ We have mistaken the poison for the cure, and the result promises to be a slow, painful death.
Although Affluenza is unlikely to persuade anyone who is not already ‘on side’ – the book is too popular and journalistic in style to convince sceptics – the data on which James draws are impressive. Not only has he travelled the planet interviewing 240 or so people from eight different countries to assess their emotional well-being but (more persuasively) he corroborates his interviews with numerous surveys and statistics detailing levels of national depression, anxiety, emotional distress, family breakdown, eating disorders, medication, etc. Ultimately, it is all too much to ignore. We really do have a problem.
What, then, are we to do about it? James has a two-pronged approached: personal and political. The personal advice is sound. Although he strenuously denies it, Affluenza does, at times, read like a self-help book. It is full of advice – called ‘vaccines’ throughout – that could be found in any manual on how to change your life, lose eight stone, give up smoking, and reduce your golf handicap in a month or your money back. Some of it is wise, some trite – ‘Scale down your interest in people you have never met’, ‘Play with small children’, ‘Stop reading women’s magazines’, ‘Be honest with yourself about your dealings with others’ – but all of it sounds a little like the efforts of someone trying to haul themselves up by their emotional bootstraps.
It is politically, however, that the wheels come off his cart. James claims that affluenza is caused by ‘Selfish Capitalism’ rather than capitalism per se, and that he himself does not have a problem with capitalism. But several of his proposals suggest otherwise. When he advocates that the government reduces every house price by 90 per cent, fixes them at that level ‘in perpetuity, regardless of inflation and rising earnings’, and then nationalises estate agency, replacing it with ‘a government estate agent’s office’ you worry less for his attitude to capitalism than for his sanity.
Less bizarre, although not necessarily less problematic, is his proposal to encourage parents to stay at home longer looking after their infant children. James does not idealise or yearn for the golden, post-war days of perfect family life, but insists that it is almost always better for parents to look after their own young children. Thus, to encourage this, he suggests that ‘parents should be given the option of one of them being paid the national average wage while they give up work to care for any children under the age of three.’
Leaving aside the mechanics of his idea (which is what James does: ‘I shall leave it to others to squabble over the funding of such a plan…’) this raises the question of how far government should interfere/ help (delete according to political persuasion) with family life. More broadly, it raises the question of whether government should engage with issues of human wellbeing at all.
If that sounds odd, it is worth noting, as James does, that religiosity is one of the most powerful vaccines against affluenza. No religious apologist himself, James is honest enough to admit that ‘wherever I went I found that religion seems to be a powerful vaccine. I should not have been surprised,’ he continues, ‘because the scientific evidence has long been there: much to the consternation of social scientists, on average, regular churchgoers suffer less depression or unhappiness than unbelievers.’
Does this mean that government should encourage belief in God or attendance at religious services? Thankfully few people (in the UK at least) would concur but the question highlights the whole business of proper limits and of the Catch-22 that any modern (Western) government faces. If it continues to ignore issues of human flourishing and, as a result, the deleterious affects of affluenza multiply, it will (at best) be accused of indifference and (at worst) lose its democratic mandate altogether. If, on the other hand, it takes them seriously and eagerly legislates to ‘encourage’ whatever makes for human flourishing – whether that is stay-at-home parents, collocation of relatives, or (heaven forbid) religious observance – it will be accused (at best) of nannying or (at worst) of would-be totalitarianism.
Ultimately, however, something must be done. The strength of James’ approach is that it does not load all the responsibility for action onto one agent. The personal and political must act in tandem if the affluenza virus is not to spread more widely and its affects not to become more destructive.
In itself, this is not so far from what Christian theologians have long recognised as, in Oliver O’Donovan’s words, ‘the doctrine of the two’. ‘Church’ and ‘state’ are both legitimate authorities with legitimate roles: the former to serve the latter in ‘by instructing it in what it means to be a “humble state”’, the latter to serve the former in making possible its mission of proclaiming Christ’s humanising rule on earth.
This, though, is only the first step in response. If self-help is never going to be enough…, if the Church (or, for that matter, any moral body) is not called to rule, still less determine human well-being…, if, in other words, government has some theoretical duty (not to mention much practical necessity) to fight the spread of the affluenza virus, the question remains: what should it do?
Nick Spencer is Director of Studies at Theos.
