Flourish

Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being and How to Achieve Them, by Martin Seligman, Nicholas Brealey, RRP£14.99, 408 pages

In 1998, when he was president of the American Psychological Association, Martin Seligman did the world a service by focusing his profession’s attention away from correcting negatives and towards promoting positives. “The goal of understanding well-being and building the enabling conditions of life,” he later wrote, “is by no means identical with the goal of understanding misery and undoing the disabling conditions of life.” The hard question is how “positive psychology”, as it became known, should build on that insight.

In 2002, Seligman proposed in Authentic Happiness that the answer was to discover what promoted not just the “positive emotion” of feeling good but engagement with people and projects, as well as a sense of meaning and direction in life. He argued that we can learn ways to increase all three and that, by measuring life satisfaction through self-reported scores, we could assess how far we had come.

Seligman gained plenty of detractors but won even more devotees, some in David Cameron’s government, which is looking for advice on how to put together a national well-being index set to be up and running next year. So, almost a decade on, it is politically important as well as interesting to see just how far Seligman has moved on from authentic happiness theory. The answer, unfortunately, is not nearly far enough.

In headline terms, Seligman appears to have executed a complete volte-face. “I actually detest the word happiness,” he says, because it is associated only with positive emotion, and as numerous philosophers have argued for millennia, you do not achieve the highest human good simply by feeling good. So instead of happiness, Seligman now talks of “well-being” or “flourishing”.

This isn’t as much of a radical departure as it seems. In fact, Flourish only makes two substantive changes from Authentic Happiness. First, it defines well-being with the mnemonic “Perma”, adding “positive Relationships” and “Accomplishment” to the old triad of “Positive emotion”, “Engagement” and “Meaning”. Second, it rejects life satisfaction as a measure of the whole package, since it turns out 70 per cent of the score a person gives him or herself is determined by mood at the time of asking.

The broadening out of authentic happiness into flourishing is to be welcomed. The deep problem is that, in so doing, Seligman has made it even more difficult to maintain the illusion that his enterprise is truly scientific. When, for instance, Seligman says meaning “consists in belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self”, how can that be an objective scientific claim rather than a contentious philosophical one? Nor can we objectively assess whether someone’s projects or values have meaning by seeing whether others endorse them, as he claims we can. That just tells us what people think, not what is true. In a fundamentalist society, all might agree that it is meaningful to martyr oneself in suicide for the glory of God. And if meaning can’t even be defined or identified objectively, it certainly can’t be measured.

Seligman’s aspiration to scientific objectivity is constantly undermined by the gushing, sensationalist pop prose that mars Flourish. Time and time again he treats what studies show is generally true as though it were universal law. For instance, on the basis of evidence for the importance of positive relationships, he says that he knows that the last time you laughed uproariously, felt indescribable joy or felt enormously proud of an accomplishment, you were “around other people.” Similarly, he says that if you write someone a letter of gratitude and read it to them personally, “you will be happier and less depressed one month from now”. He doesn’t seem to appreciate that if you simply try to show appreciation because studies show it makes you feel better, you might actually distort and transform what was good about thankfulness in the first place.

Treating well-being as though it were scientifically tractable leads only to absurdities. For instance, one of Seligman’s colleagues has claimed that by analysing with mathematical precision the proportion of positive to negative statements you can calculate something called the “Losada ratio”. It turns out that businesses are more successful, marriages more harmonious, and people happier when that ratio is strongly positive. Interesting, but the conclusion is then drawn that we should aim to “improve” our Losada ratios. Well, in my notes for this review, the ratio stands negatively. Does that mean writing this has decreased my well-being or that I should have been more positive? No, because flourishing can also involve the pursuit of knowledge, truth and wisdom for their own sake, along with numerous other things Perma leaves out.

It would be unfair not to praise some of the good work Seligman highlights in Flourish. He draws attention to poor evidence for the benefits of psychiatric drugs and also suggests some behavioural changes and strategies that, if used wisely, can be very helpful, such as learning to respond more actively and constructively to what friends, family and colleagues say.

Whether all or any of these interventions are the business of the state is another matter. We should always be cautious about allowing governments to meddle with the inner workings of our psyches, and there are already warning signs. To take the clearest example, Seligman talks in Flourish about how he is developing a “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness” programme with the US military. Some of this is just good mental health. But part of the assessment includes “spiritual fitness”, since “there is considerable evidence that a higher level of spirituality goes hand-in-hand with greater well-being, less mental illness, less substance abuse and more stable marriages”. Though Seligman does not believe spirituality has to be religious, there are lots of reports that suggest, in practice, this is creating problems for non-believers in the armed forces. Even if it is not a matter of religiosity, if someone chooses not to be spiritual, isn’t that their right, even if it does make them less happy, which the evidence is not so clear on anyway? When you consider that government well-being initiatives are also being considered for schools, liberals have every reason to be concerned.

Perma is simply too ill-defined and loose a framework to provide a scientific basis for well-being. It is certainly not robust enough to start building public policy around. There is a lack of evidence that the interventions he promotes work in the long term, with studies he cites typically pointing only to time-frames of one to six months. Even Seligman admits, in a rare passage of modesty, that “the science is quite new, and the evidence, if not scanty, is far from irresistible”. Yet as his friend and colleague Sir Richard Layard is quoted as saying: “Science makes it into public policy when the evidence is sufficient and the political will is present.” The worry in the UK now is that it is the presence of political will, not the facts, that is determining the judgment that the evidence is, indeed, sufficient.

Julian Baggini is editor-in-chief of The Philosophers’ Magazine and author of ‘The Ego Trick’ (Granta)