A man was selling oranges in the middle of a road. He was illiterate, so he never read newspapers. He put some signs along the road and spent the whole day praising the flavor of his wares.
Everyone bought from him and the man thrived. With the money he placed more signs on the road and began to sell more fruit. Business was growing fast!
One day his son – who was educated and had studied in a big city – asked him:
“Father, don’t you know that the world is going through very hard times? The economy of the country is in an awful state!”
Worried by this, the man reduced the number of signs and began to sell fruit of inferior quality because it was cheaper. Sales slumped immediately.
“My son is right,” he thought. “Times are very hard.”
Hard Times (paulocoelhoblog.com)
‘I entered a tiled cubicle. There was a bed covered with a rubber sheet
and beside the bed some sort of apparatus with a handle.
“So you’re going to give me electric shock treatment,” I said to Dr
Benjamim Gaspar Gomes.
“Don’t worry. It’s far more traumatic watching someone being treated
than actually having the treatment yourself. It doesn’t hurt at all.”
I lay down and the male nurse put a kind of tube in my mouth so that my
tongue wouldn’t roll back. Then, on either temple, he placed two electrodes,
rather like the earpieces of a telephone.
I was looking up at the peeling paint on the ceiling when I heard the
handle being turned. The next moment, a curtain seemed to fall over my eyes; my
vision quickly reduced down to a single point, and then everything went dark.
The doctor was right; it didn’t hurt at all.’
The scene I have just described is not taken from my book, “Veronika
Decides to Die”. It comes from the diary I wrote during my
second stay in a mental hospital. That was in 1966, the beginning of the
blackest period of Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1989), and, as if by
some natural reflex of the social mechanism, that external repression was
gradually becoming internalised (not unlike what is happening in the United
States today, where a man doesn’t even dare look at a woman without having a
lawyer by his side). So much so that good middle-class families found it simply
unacceptable that their children or grandchildren should want to be ‘artists’.
In Brazil at the time, the word ‘artist’ was synonymous with homosexual,
communist, drug addict and layabout.
When I was 18, I believed that my world and that of my parents could
coexist peacefully. I did my best to get good marks at the Jesuit school where
I was studying, I worked every afternoon, but at night, I wanted to live out my
dream of being an artist. Not knowing quite where to begin, I became involved
in an amateur theatre group. Although I had no desire to act professionally, at
least I was amongst people with whom I felt some affinity.
Unfortunately, my parents did not share my belief in the peaceful
coexistence of two such diametrically opposed worlds. One night, I came home
drunk, and the following morning, I was woken by two burly male nurses.
‘You’re coming with us,’ one of them said.
My mother was crying, and my father was doing his best to hide any
feelings he might have.
‘It’s for your own good,’ he said. ‘We’re just going to have some tests
done.’
And thus began my journey through various psychiatric hospitals. I was
admitted, I was given all kinds of different treatments, and I ran away at the
first opportunity, travelling around for as long as I could bear it, then going
back to my parents’ house. We enjoyed a kind of honeymoon period, but, after a
while, I again started to get into what my family called ‘bad company’, and the
nurses reappeared.
There are some battles in life that have only two possible outcomes:
they either destroy us or they make us strong. The psychiatric hospital was one
such battle.
One night, talking to another patient, I said:
‘You know, I think nearly everyone, at some point in his life, has
dreamed of being President of the Republic. But neither you nor I can ever
aspire to that, because our medical record won’t let us.’
‘Then we’ve got nothing to lose,’ said the other man. ‘We can just do
whatever we want to do.’
It seemed to me he was right. The situation I found myself in was so
strange, so extreme, that it brought with it something unprecedented: total
freedom. All my family’s efforts to make me the same as everyone else had
exactly the opposite result: I was now completely different from all the other
young men of my own age.
That same night, I considered my future. One option was to become a
writer; the other, which seemed more viable, was to go properly mad. I would be
supported by the State, I would never have to work or take on any
responsibility. I would, of course, have to spend a great deal of time in
mental institutions, but I knew from my own experience that patients there do
not behave like the mad people you see in Hollywood films. Apart from a few
pathological cases of catatonia or schizophrenia, all the other patients were
perfectly capable of talking about life and had their own highly original ideas
on the subject. Every now and then, they would suffer panic attacks, bouts of
depression or aggression, but these did not last.
The greatest risk I ran in hospital was not of losing all hope of ever
becoming President of the Republic, nor of feeling marginalised or unfairly
treated by my family – because in my heart I knew that having me admitted to
hospital was a desperate act of love and over-protectiveness on their part. The
greatest risk I ran was of coming to think of that situation as normal.
When I came out of hospital for the third time – after the usual cycle
of escaping from hospital/travelling around/going back home/enjoying a
honeymoon period with my family/getting into bad company again/being readmitted
into hospital – I was nearly twenty and had become accustomed to that rhythm of
events. This time, however, something had changed.
Although I again got into ‘bad company’, my parents were growing
reluctant to have me readmitted to a mental hospital. Unbeknown to me, they
were by then convinced that I was a hopeless case, and preferred to keep me
with them and to support me for the rest of my life.
My behaviour went from bad to worse, I became more aggressive, but still
there was no mention of hospital. I experienced a period of great joy as I
tried to exercise my so-called freedom, in order, finally, to live the
‘artist’s life’. I left the new job my parents had found for me, I stopped
studying, and I dedicated myself exclusively to the theatre and to frequenting
the bars favoured by intellectuals. For one long year, I did exactly as I
pleased; but then the theatre group was broken up by the political police, the
bars became infiltrated by spies, my stories were rejected by every publisher I
sent them to, and none of the girls I knew wanted to go out with me – because I
was a young man without a future, with no real career, and who had never even
been to university.
So, one day, I decided to trash my bedroom. It was a way of saying,
without words: ‘You see, I can’t live in the real world. I can’t get a job, I
can’t realise my dream. I think you’re absolutely right: I am mad, and I want
to go back to the mental hospital!’
Fate can be so ironic* When I had finished wrecking my room, I was
relieved to see that my parents were phoning the psychiatric hospital. However,
the doctor who usually dealt with me was on holiday. The nurses arrived with a
junior doctor in tow. He saw me sitting there surrounded by torn-up books,
broken records, ripped curtains, and asked my family and the nurses to leave
the room.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
I didn’t reply. A madman should always behave like someone not of this
world.
‘Stop playing around,’ he said. ‘I’ve been reading your case history.
You’re not mad at all, and I won’t admit you to the hospital.’
He left the room, wrote a prescription for some tranquillisers and (so I
found out later) told my parents that I was suffering from ‘admission
syndrome’. Normal people who, at some point, find themselves in an abnormal
situation – such as depression, panic, etc. – occasionally use illness as an
alternative to life. That is, they choose to be ill, because being ‘normal’ is
too much like hard work. My parents listened to his advice and never again had
me admitted into a mental institution.
From then on, I could no longer seek comfort in madness. I had to lick
my wounds alone, I had to lose some battles and win others, I often had to
abandon my impossible dream and work in offices instead, until, one day, I gave
it all up for the nth time and I went on a pilgrimage to Santiago de
Compostela. There I realised that I could not keep refusing to face up to my
fate of ‘being an artist’, which, in my case, meant being a writer. So, at 38,
I decided to write my first book and to risk entering into a battle which I had
always subconsciously feared: the battle for a dream.
I found a publisher and that first book (The Pilgrimage – about my
experience on the Road to Santiago) led me to The Alchemist, which led me to
others, which led to translations, which led to lectures and conferences all
over the world. Although I had kept postponing my dream, I realised that I
could do so no longer, and that the Universe always favours those who fight for
what they want.
In 1997, after an exhausting promotional tour across three continents, I
began to notice a very odd phenomenon: what I had wanted on that day when I
trashed my bedroom seemed to be something a lot of other people wanted too.
People preferred to live in a huge asylum, religiously following rules written
by who knows who, rather than fighting for the right to be different. On a
flight to Tokyo, I read the following in a newspaper:
According to Statistics Canada: 40% of people between 15 and 34, 33% of
people between 35 and 54, and 20% of people between 55 and 64 have already had
some kind of mental illness. It is thought that one in every five individuals
suffers from some form of psychiatric disorder.
I thought: Canada has never had a military dictatorship, it’s considered
to have the best quality of life in the world, why then are there so many mad
people there? Why aren’t they in mental hospitals?
That question led me on to another: what exactly is madness?
I found the answers to both those questions. First, people aren’t in
mental institutions because they continue to be socially productive. If you are
capable of getting in to work at 9.00 a.m. and staying until 5.00 p.m., then
society does not consider you incapacitated. It doesn’t matter if, from 5.01
p.m. until 8.59 a.m. you sit in a catatonic state in front of the television,
indulge in the most perverted sexual fantasies on the Internet, stare at the
wall, blaming the world for everything and feeling generally put upon, feel
afraid to go out into the street, are obsessed with cleanliness or a lack of
cleanliness, suffer from bouts of depression and compulsive crying. As long as
you can turn up for work and do your bit for society, you don’t represent a threat.
You’re only a threat when the cup finally overflows and you go out into the
street with a machine gun in your hand, like a character in a child’s cartoon,
and kill fifteen children in order to alert the world to the pernicious effects
of Tom and Jerry. Until you do that, you are deemed to be normal.
And madness? Madness is the inability to communicate.
Between normality and madness, which are basically the same thing, there
exists an intermediary stage: it is called ‘being different’. And people were
becoming more and more afraid of ‘being different’. In Japan, after giving much
thought to the statistical information I had just read, I decided to write a
book based on my own experiences. I wrote Veronika Decides to Die, in the third
person and using my feminine ego, because I knew that the important subject to
be addressed was not what I personally had experienced in mental institutions,
but, rather, the risks we run by being different and yet our horror of being
the same.
When I had finished, I went and talked to my father. Once the difficult
time of adolescence and early youth was over, my parents never forgave
themselves for what they did to me. I always told them that it really hadn’t
been that bad and that prison (for I was imprisoned three times for political
reasons) had left far deeper scars, but my parents refused to believe me and
spent the rest of their lives blaming themselves.
‘I’ve written a book about a mental institution,’ I said to my
85-year-old father. ‘It’s a fictional work, but there are a couple of pages
where I speak as myself. It means going public about the time I spent in mental
hospitals.’
My father looked me in the eye and said:
‘Are you sure it won’t harm you in any way?’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘Then go ahead. I’m tired of secrets.’
Veronika Decides to Die came out in Brazil in August
1998. By September, I had received more than 1,200 e-mails and letters relating
similar experiences. In October, some of the themes touched on in the book –
depression, panic attacks, suicide – were discussed in a seminar that had
national repercussions. On 22 January 1999, Senator Eduardo Suplicy, read out
passages from my book to the other senators, and managed to get approval for a
law which they had been trying to get through the Brazilian Congress for the
last ten years, a law forbidding arbitrary admissions into mental institutions.
Paulo Coelho
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
5 MIN
READING: “Daddy, I am going to talk about my experience in an asilum”
(paulocoelhoblog.com)
Many of us interested in spirituality and healing
have been wounded in our lives – physically, emotionally, or at a soul level.
Whether this wounding takes form by way of relational or attachment trauma, or
through personal and archetypal betrayal, it has a way of coloring our
perception and affecting our capacity to feel safe.
Our increasingly speedy and fragmented culture has come to pathologize valid
human experience such as grief, melancholy, anger, and uncertainty, giving rise
to a psychiatric and self-help community determined to “cure” or “transcend”
dimensions of the psyche that contain important (and even holy) data for our
unique paths of individuation, creativity, and meaning.
For some, initiation occurs only by way of transition, dissolution, and loss,
through an embodied confrontation with the unconscious and the unlived life.
These experiences are not signs of error or mistake, but calls to depth and
evidence of how our wounding can serve an initiatory function.
At times, deeper healing will require that the wound disclose itself in more
subtle ways within the psyche and the body, where it can seem like things are
getting worse. Tending to this organic unfolding of the healing process
requires newfound levels of courage, patience, and trust.
It is not an easy life, that of the wounded healer – one that we do not choose
consciously – but is the honorable and noble inheritance of many who are called
to the path.
It requires that we walk in this world against the grain and remain open to
further wounding and revelation of shadow, and to dare to consider that radical
possibility that the ally will appear in infinite ways. Not to harm, but to
reveal.
Even though it may seem as if we are alone – and in part we must walk this path
by ourselves – we are never truly alone, as unseen helpers, friends, and
companions are always nearby. But at times will take forms that are not always
immediately recognizable.
But the silence in the mind
is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence
we call God. This is the deep
calling to deep of the psalm-
writer, the bottomless ocean
we launch the armada of
our thoughts on, never arriving.
It is a presence, then,
whose margins are our margins;
that calls us out over our
own fathoms. What to do
but draw a little nearer to
such ubiquity by remaining still?
by R.S. Thomas, from the collection Counterpoint, 1990
But the
silence in the mind | Faithful to Science (grievingturtle.com)
In March 2020, Europeans started
gathering on balconies and by windows to cheer, applaud and show gratitude to
their healthcare workers providing life-saving services during the pandemic.
The regular cheering and clapping became a symbol of hope: human solidarity
triumphing over fear and enforced isolation. Contrast that scene with another.
Following the remission of her COVID-19 symptoms in July, Jazmin Grimaldi
(daughter of Albert II, Prince of Monaco) told her thousands of followers on
Instagram: ‘I am so thankful that I am starting to finally feel like myself
today … I am grateful to be alive and healthy at this present moment.’
How were these situations different? Why is it
inspiring to hear about the people of Europe shouting thankfulness from their
rooftops, whereas Grimaldi’s message, while it induces sympathy, doesn’t
inspire?
Besides the obvious discrepancy in the magnitude of
the two displays, another clue is found in the question: to whom were
these people thankful? The gratitude of the European public toward their
healthcare workers is highly relatable. We understand the sacrifices that
medical professionals make, and know that we owe them a debt that can never be
paid in full. Our inability to adequately reciprocate their efforts only
increases our gratefulness. By contrast, Grimaldi’s gratitude, however
heartfelt, lacked an addressee – as do similar public utterances made by
countless others. It wafted into digital space and dispersed, clinging to no
one in particular. Grimaldi’s message conveyed an understandable sense of
happiness and relief, but her sentiment didn’t necessarily establish a bond
with other people.
Grimaldi’s style of gratitude is part of a wider
societal pattern. The disappearance of benefactors (or donors) from scenes of
thanksgiving has become particularly endemic to current American thought about
gratitude, as its focus has shifted from the interpersonal function of
thankfulness to its personal advantages. This is partly down to the influence
of positive psychology: in the past two decades, scientists have grown
increasingly attuned to the contribution of gratitude to both personal and
interpersonal flourishing, crediting it
with improving emotional wellbeing and promoting prosocial behaviours, changing our
brains to help emotion regulation, and even with relieving symptoms of asthma. However, only a minority of
studies have highlighted the social nature of gratitude, with most focusing on
its benefits for the grateful subject. The aforementioned studies privileged
personal rather than interpersonal aspects of gratitude. Test subjects were
instructed to keep a written record of things for which they felt grateful or
to perform a gratitude meditation, rather than to share their thankfulness with
anyone else.
Seen as a personal emotion with considerable
benefits, gratitude is increasingly marketed as a self-help instrument, as
epitomised in the popularity of gratitude journals such as Good Days
Start with Gratitude (2017): diaries designed to keep track of events,
people and circumstances for which one feels grateful. With promises that they
will bring a host of personal benefits, these journals translate some of the
scientific findings about thankfulness and wellbeing into a wellness practice.
And since the journal is a private document meant only for the writer’s eyes,
any benefactors mentioned in it will probably never learn about the
journal-keeper’s feelings.
The contemporary preoccupation with gratitude
as an individual experience, and viewing it as a path to psychological
wellness, is significantly different from how the emotion was understood
historically. Whereas earlier theories of gratitude also concentrated on the
importance of gratitude as an inward disposition, such theories nevertheless
emphasised that gratitude derived its value from its interpersonal nature. In
his treatise on religious affections, the 18th-century American preacher
Jonathan Edwards described gratitude as a natural affection felt toward another
who has benefited us. The power of gratitude is so great, according to Edwards,
that it can momentarily induce positive feelings even toward our enemies
(Edwards gives an example from the Old Testament with Saul’s thankfulness to
his enemy David for sparing his life). By this view, although our gratitude
might be rooted in a basic concern for our personal interests, its effect is
decidedly interpersonal. Edwards considered gratitude one of the ‘better
principles of human nature’ and viewed ingratitude as an especially heinous sin
for its unnaturalness.
Recognition of the importance of gratitude as an
interpersonal sentiment extends into antiquity, when bestowing gifts and
reciprocating them was a central aspect of economic life. The Stoic philosopher
Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s book On Benefits (composed after the
year 56 CE, and newly translated by Miriam Griffin and Brad Inwood in 2011)
offered the most extensive discussion of gratitude in the ancient world, and it
continued to shape the Western concept of gratitude for centuries. In it,
Seneca treats gratitude as a virtue that ought to be cultivated for social
purposes:
That gratitude is an attitude to be chosen for itself follows from the
fact that ingratitude is something to be avoided in itself, because nothing so
dissolves and disrupts the harmony of mankind as this vice. For what else keeps
us safe, except helping each other by reciprocal services? Only one thing
protects our lives and fortifies them against sudden attacks: the exchange of
benefits.
Seneca argues that the generosity of benefactors
and the gratitude of recipients are the glue that holds society together and
guarantees its survival. As a Stoic thinker who prioritised inner dispositions
over outward circumstances, Seneca emphasised that feeling gratitude was more
important than acting to reciprocate benefits received, but that the feeling
was morally virtuous only insofar as it was directed at a benefactor. This
interpersonal aspect of gratitude is essential: if a person only feels fortunate
without crediting anyone for their good fortune (as in the social media
messages and gratitude diary entries written by so many), they are not really
being grateful at all. Contemporary philosophers even propose that being grateful for general states of
affairs, rather than to any specific person, is a misnomer: when I am grateful
for my general health, or grateful that it didn’t rain on my wedding day, what
I’m actually feeling is not gratitude but appreciation.
Aside from positive psychology’s influence, why
else is gratitude coming to be understood as a personal rather than
interpersonal emotion, and even less as a virtue? Another part of the answer is
surely that the interpersonal bonds and duties with which true gratitude
saddles us are not always pleasant.
I remember a time when I was visiting my hometown
in Israel and ran into a relative with whom I had a strained relationship. I’d
popped into a coffee shop to change a large bill for coins for the bus, and she
was there waiting on her order. Surprised but happy to see me, my relative
insisted on giving me the change herself. It was a modest act of goodwill on
her part but I found myself struggling to receive it: as I suppressed my
instinct to refuse the gesture and cupped my hands to take the coins, an image
of holding burning coals flashed through my mind. Why was I reacting so
dramatically to such a small kindness? It wasn’t the monetary value of the gift
that made me reluctant to accept it, but rather the interpersonal bond that
accepting it would imply.
The French sociologist Marcel Mauss captured the
essence of my predicament when he wrote in 1950 that a gift is received ‘with a
burden attached’ because it binds the recipient to the donor. My mother tongue,
Hebrew, reflects this hold of benefactors over their recipients in the
expression assir todah – the equivalent of the English word
‘grateful’, it means literally a prisoner of thankfulness. The coins my
relative gave me had little value, but taking them placed me in a debt of
gratitude that, given the history of our relationship, I found hard to accept.
On this occasion, gratitude did not feel good.
Literature too sometimes pushes against
the claims of positive psychology about the personal benefits of gratitude. For
example, in Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy (1951), the titular
protagonist, old and disabled, is apprehended by the police and interrogated
aggressively at the police station. At last, he is approached by a woman whom
he suspects to be a social worker. When she offers him a cup of tea, Molloy
reflects:
Against the charitable gesture there is no defence, that I know of. You
sink your head, you put out your hands all trembling and twined together and
you say, Thank you, thank you lady, thank you kind lady.
The feeling that Molloy identifies with effusive
thanksgiving is not gratitude in the contemporary sense, nor appreciation even,
but rather humiliation. Even if he hadn’t wanted a cup of tea in the first
place and preferred to be left alone, the cultural expectation to reciprocate
the social worker’s kindness with an equal or greater measure of gratitude
placed him in her immediate debt. To be grateful, Molloy says, is to cede power
to the benefactor. By extension, Beckett’s protagonist offers a troubling
alternative to Seneca’s egalitarian vision: for Seneca, gratitude offers a way in
which even the poorest members of society can reciprocate the greatest benefits
bestowed on them, simply by being thankful. But Molloy suggests that the
expectation of gratitude risks deepening existing social gaps, since the less
powerful in society will be forced into perpetual humiliating indebtedness,
with the more powerful left to enjoy the role of charitable benefactors.
A similar concern about this aspect of gratitude is
blown to an epic scale in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667).
After leading an unsuccessful rebellion against God that cost him his heavenly
position, Satan is on the brink of repentance:
What could be less than to afford him [God] praise,
The easiest recompense, and pay him thanks,
How due! Yet all his good proved ill in me,
And wrought but malice; lifted up so high
I sdeign’d subjection, and thought one step higher
Would set me high’st, and in a moment quit
The debt immense of endless gratitude, …
Satan faces a difficult problem: he understands
that he ought to be grateful to God for everything he has received from him,
but he can’t bear the emotional consequences. To be grateful would mean being
burdened by the endless, joyless debt he owes his creator.
The recent popularity of gratitude as
an instrument for enhancing personal wellbeing has obscured some of the
complexity of this mental phenomenon: far from being only a personal emotion
that points us to our blessings, it is primarily an interpersonal emotion that
points us to our benefactors. This doesn’t mean that gratitude can’t feel good.
More often than not, it does feel good to acknowledge others’ kindness toward
us. But like any emotion that connects us to other people, gratitude can also
be psychologically challenging. If as a society, we can recover the
interpersonal significance of gratitude, it will confront us with the extent of
our dependence on other people and their power over us. At the same time, and
as Seneca argued, recognising this aspect of gratitude has the potential to
bind us closer to one another, to strengthen our communities and relationships.
True gratitude is a communal emotion, not a wellness practice | Psyche Ideas
Iris Murdoch is best-known as
a novelist but she was also a professional philosopher. Here she is in The
Sovereignty of the Good (1970), reflecting on the transformative power
of attention, in this case attention to the natural world:
I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind,
oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my
prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is
altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is
nothing now but kestrel.
The passage looks back to a long tradition of
reflections about the restorative powers of nature, but it also looks forward
to what has, in recent years, become a torrent of public affirmations of nature
as therapy. The idea is now almost a commonplace: confirmed by the moving
testimony of many personal memoirs; supported by scientific research that
quantifies the effects on our mental and physical health; and enthusiastically
endorsed by all the big wildlife and conservation bodies. Indeed, the UK
government itself confidently announces in its new Environment Bill: ‘Nature
plays a vital role in public health and wellbeing.’ So, it’s official. Nature
is good for you. But is it really so simple? Are they all talking about the
same ‘nature’ and the same human needs? And where does ‘human nature’ come into
it? I think Murdoch points us to a different and deeper insight.
It’s easy to believe in a general way in the
positive benefits of nature. Don’t we all instinctively feel better for a walk
in the fresh air, a view of some greenery and the sound of bird song? Even more
so, surely, if we actively explore the natural world and engage with it in some
way. I feel that myself, very strongly. Indeed, I’m co-author with two other
naturalists, Michael McCarthy and Peter Marren, of a recent book, The
Consolation of Nature (2020), sharing just such experiences.
But in writing for this book, even as I found myself more than ever absorbed in
the wonders and delights of nature, I grew increasingly sceptical about its
proclaimed status as primarily a medical commodity.
To begin with, can nature really provide
experiences that are either a necessary or a sufficient condition of enjoying
good health?
Not a necessary condition, surely, since we can all
think of people in excellent physical and psychological health who have little
interest in nature. Nor a sufficient condition either, since conversely there
are many people devoted to nature who are not thereby protected from serious
illness, depression or stress. Richard Mabey’s book Nature
Cure (2005) is regularly invoked as the inspiration for a whole genre
of ‘nature therapy’ memoirs, celebrating the healing power of nature against
various forms of bereavement, depression, addiction and despair. But,
in fact, though Mabey’s work is a literary classic by a great naturalist, its
title is somewhat misleading. His severe depression prevented him
from responding as he usually did to nature, and it was only after he
began to be cured that he could again enjoy what had been a lifelong passion.
The other titles, too, all tell more complicated personal stories, with a range
of (sometimes unhappy) outcomes. The idea of a genre of effective nature cure
books, in short, is more of a publisher’s invention than a reliable medical
library.
What these books do demonstrate, however, is that there’s no ‘nature pill’ or ‘green Prozac’ you can simply take for a quick fix. It doesn’t work that way. Which way it does work, though, is much harder to say. If we’re now considering the much more modest claim that it helps some people, some of the time, and in some respects, we need to be more specific. Does it make a difference, for example, which part or aspect of nature we’re exposed to? Are plants and birds better for us than mammals or insects? Some birds better than others? Wild or tame? Helen Macdonald, after all, the author of another literary tour de force, H is for Hawk (2014), found her solace in a captive bird. How about slime-moulds, snakes and spiders? Or bacteria and viruses – all part of nature? And a key theme in much current environmental rhetoric is to emphasise that we ourselves are also inextricably a part of nature. But aren’t other people part of what we’re trying to avoid in getting more in touch with nature and the wild …?
Ever since Roger Ulrich’s paper was
published in the journal Science in 1984, demonstrating that
patients recovering from gall bladder surgery made substantially quicker and
better recoveries if they had a view from their beds looking outward to trees
and greenery rather than inward to the brick walls of the ward, scientists have
been trying to isolate such variables. Ulrich himself pointed to some of the
difficulties in identifying the crucial factors, however. His paper is now more
cited than read, but he was careful to emphasise its limitations. Would it have
made a difference if those brick walls had attractive pictures on them? Was it
the trees that made the difference to the lucky patients with an outside view,
or would a view of inanimate nature – sky, mountains or water – have done so as
well? How would they have reacted to a busy urban street scene? Was their main
problem boredom or anxiety?
Subsequent studies have gone some way to answering
such questions, in particular through the measurement of associated
physiological phenomena such as blood-pressure levels and neurochemical rewards
in the form of serotonin, dopamine and endorphins. It’s become something of an
industry, in fact. If you Google ‘scientific studies of nature and health’, you
will in less than a second get more than 1 billion results,
referencing research in universities worldwide, both in mainline departments of
biological, medical and environmental studies and in such emerging
sub-disciplines as ecopsychology and ecotherapy. To the extent that such
studies rely on patients’ own reports of their sense of wellbeing, however, the
headline results remain very generic. What does it really mean, for example, to
be told: ‘Go Wild – And Feel 30 Per Cent Healthier And Significantly
Happier’, as The Sunday Times said on 31 May 2020,
reporting on research from
Derby University? Or ‘How Much Nature Is Enough? 120 Minutes A Week,
Doctors Say’ as The New York Times said on 13
June 2019, reporting the study done
at Exeter University? We are still a very long way from a functional analysis
of what specific items in ‘nature’ produce what effects.
But there’s a larger problem,
too, in this line of thought. It treats such medical rewards as just one more
of the ‘services’ we receive from the natural world, alongside the pollination
of our crops, waste recycling, carbon capture, flood protection, ecotourism and
so on. The environmentalist Tony Juniper wrote a very persuasive book, What
Has Nature Ever Done for Us? (2013), quantifying such benefits in
monetary terms in order to attract the sympathetic attention of policymakers.
The demonstration of these natural services has become another minor publishing
industry, establishing important evidence for conservationists to deploy in
their campaigns.
These might indeed be the only arguments that have decisive political force, but effective arguments aren’t the same as real reasons. These utilitarian considerations are not why we thrill to a nightingale’s song, a peacock butterfly’s fragile beauty or a bluebell wood in spring. As individuals, we respond to such things directly and for their own sakes, not after or because of some financial calculation. To appreciate the natural world in a sense of wonder, awe, curiosity, joy or affinity is to recognise an intrinsic value, not an instrumental one. Henry David Thoreau made a similar point in his graduation address at Harvard College in 1837:
This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is
convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and
enjoyed than used.
It’s the same with creative work in art, music,
poetry and science, surely. They can all be demonstrated to bring quantifiable
public benefits, ranging from cultural tourism to various practical
applications. But such beneficial consequences are far from fully explaining
the motivations of the practitioners themselves.
Indeed, logic itself requires that there must be
goods with intrinsic value that need no further justification. Something can be
good as a means only if there are some other things that are good as ends,
otherwise the question ‘Good for what?’ leads to an infinite regress. Beauty,
truth and happiness are all examples of intrinsic goods. And it’s the common
experience, as well as the credo of naturalists, that the natural world offers
us one form of direct access to such values.
But there’s a final catch, Murdoch’s catch. She
goes on from the passage I quoted at the beginning to say:
A self-directed enjoyment of nature seems to me to be something forced.
More naturally, as well as more properly, we take a self-forgetful pleasure in
the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and
trees.
The authors of the ‘nature cure’
books were discovering that nature could offer some balm for their ills. But,
to find that relief, they had to attend directly to what they could see, hear,
touch or smell; and then, if they were lucky, the psychological and other
benefits might follow. It’s a corner-of-the-eye thing. There’s no point in
putting beauty, wonder, inspiration, understanding and the other positive experiences
we rightly associate with nature on some sort of ‘to do’ list. They are what
philosophers call ‘supervenient’ on the experiences themselves. Try too hard
and you’ll fail. It’s a subtle distinction but a fundamental one. It’s the act
of attention, as Murdoch says, that takes you out of yourself and so delivers
delights that a preoccupation with self would deny you. You have to lose
yourself to find yourself.
Nature is good for you. That doesn’t mean we should prescribe it | Psyche Ideas
