A history lesson

Implied but unspoken in the title to the blog are the words "these days". The central hypothesis is that we are unhappy now, and more unhappy than we used to be. So it was interesting to read this article in the Guardian today.

I'm probably not the only person who looks at the mental health of the nation(s) and looks for a recent cause - post industrial decline, consumerism, collapse of the family etc and so on. This article offers some history, going back to the Enlightenment and even earlier. As with the Adam Curtis doc, I love grand sweeping ideas, so I loved much of this article.

We go back to the 16th and 17th Centuries and "an intensification, and a fairly drastic one, of the universal human capacity to face the world as an autonomous "I", separate from, and largely distrustful of, "them"". With this came the sense of isolation and loneliness, and the realisation that "reality has no meaning other than what a person chooses to impart to it". So we see the seeds of existentialism. This led to an epidemic of depression, then given the somehow more comforting name of melancholy, accounting for "one-third of the complaints of the people of condition in England".

I'm always looking for a socio, poliical but especailly economic explanation for these things, and was drawn in particular to the author's observation that this increasing sense of indiviualism came as a result of increasing soical mobility. A person's place in life was no longer ordained from birth, and with this opportunity to advance came the concern of how other people perceived you. Mirrors became popular in the homes of the bourgeosie, books were published on how to behave like someone of a higher stature. There were ways to behave, and anxieties about how to do so.

The whole point of the piece was that, in the middle ages, there were dances, festivities, feast and merry meetings which would leave people "refreshed & comforted" and "gladded with instruments of musick". These rituals were religious in nature, designed to please god, but the spread of Calvinism in the 16th and 17th Century changed their nature and threatened their existence. Calvinism is fundametally depressing in any case, full of references to man as a wretched, fallen creature and the usual stuff about damnation. Po faced and austere, it did not accommodate the kind of drunken, loud and hugely fun celebrations that would glad with instruments of musick, and so they died away. With them, argues the author, died the very thing that would help alleviate the increasing mellancholy of the time. And of course we cannot help but see the echoes today, as people get unhappy when they can't get tickets to Glasonbury .