BOOK OF THE DAY: The Selfish SocietyBy Sue Gerhardt, Simon & Schuster, 374pp. £12.99
PHILIP LARKIN does not make an appearance in The Selfish Society, but he states its theme directly: "They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad /They may not mean to, but they do".
In this wide-ranging, somewhat impressionistic, book, Sue Gerhardt argues that we live in a selfish age where caring for others is systematically devalued.
Modern society rewards people who look out for Number One. It is filled with (and led by) materialistic narcissists who, when they think of emotions at all, consider only their own feelings.
They may shower their children with material things, but they remain emotionally neglectful, dropping the kids off at some subpar daycare centre as they rush to satisfy their own need for fulfilment at work or at play. In the process, they raise another generation of similarly detached, emotionally stunted brats.
Gerhardt is appalled by this and has an alternative vision of how things should be. First though she wants to diagnose our present ills. Larkin again provides the answer: your parents, too, “were fucked up in their turn /By fools in old-style hats and coats”.
Gerhardt’s training as a psychotherapist permeates her analysis, though not always in a good way. She cannot resist seeing society as a person and history a sort of collective voyage of self-discovery.
The result is some pretty sketchy explanation-by-synecdoche. We hear, for example, that “the medieval world view and the toddler world view had much in common” as the former saw the church as the latter sees the parent. The state, these days, “has many of the same functions as the higher brain”, doing things for society that the prefrontal cortex does for the individual.
Unequal societies generate pathologies and “may not develop into a mature form”, just as poorly developed individuals make bad decisions or ignore symptoms of physical illness.
This is fine as far as it goes, but the fact remains that a society is not a person and there is no couch big enough for it to lie on and tell you about its childhood.
Parts of the book hint at something more substantial. Gerhardt’s hope is that we are at the end of a long adolescence that began with the industrial revolution and are now finally ready to leave behind consumerism and become more emotionally mature as a society.
She argues for an “ethic of care” that values interpersonal empathy in general and attentiveness to the emotional needs of children in particular. It is hard to disagree with the general sentiment.
When it comes to recommending specific policies, though, the book’s psychotherapeutic point of view shows signs of strain.
Notwithstanding the subtitle, Gerhardt shows repeatedly that it is not wealth but rather poverty that places the most stress on child development and emotional wellbeing, even if there is a limit to how happy material goods can make you.
It is the social organisation of work and family life, rather than some personal failure of will, that gets in the way of society-wide provision of good childcare. These are structural problems, not psychological ones.
Larkin’s solution to all the misery was to hit the eject button: “Get out as early as you can /And don’t have any kids yourself”.
Gerhardt, to her credit, is pushing for something better. Many of the symptoms she identifies are real and pressing problems, even if the means of curing them cannot be just in our heads.
Kieran Healy is associate professor of sociology at Duke University.
