Taking Care, by David Smail (1987)

Each David Smail book has me flirting more and more with the fringes of a full-on existential crisis. I barely made it through forty pages before the urge to curl up in the fetal position and stare into space for a few hours got me.

I first read The Origins of Unhappiness (1993) late last year, the central theme of which was the misidentification of the causes of our suffering as sources close to us rather than the distal forces of power that proximal sources only mediate. Then, I read Illusion and Reality (1984) earlier this year, which examined the way our subjective experience is undermined by objectification in every aspect of our lives. Both books connect our suffering to the commodification of human experience and to capitalist ideals disintegrating any obstacles that threaten its endless expansion, as well as looking carefully at the role and efficacy of psychotherapy as a remedy for any of it.

This book, published in 1987, is a bit harder to pin down. It casts a wider net and is less discrete in its identification of the external causes of our suffering and instead concerns itself more with our behaviour and how we approach relationships, marriage, sex, the distinction between our private and public lives, etc.

As with the others, it is full of profound realisations about our conduct, the influences and interests that shape us, and articulations of the experience of personal suffering that give language to what would otherwise remain very diffuse sources of confusion and misery. Almost every page describes in detail some obscure feeling of discontent I’ve always felt but could never quite put my finger on.

It’s brutal in that there aren’t any solutions to be had for any of it. It’s not that you feel frustrated because they aren’t to be easily found, or annoyed that you aren’t handed them conveniently on a plate and so have to begrudgingly work for them; they just don’t exist, at least not for you or me, given the way the world is set up.

As enlightening and strangely comforting as it is to have everything that’s wrong with the world laid out and sympathised with, it’s also the psychological equivalent of someone putting a terminal diagnosis on a dull ache and then just giving you a slap on the arse for good luck and sending you on your way.

To be fair, this book—especially compared to the other two—has hints of actionable advice, among them are; stop inflicting our wide repertoire of violence on each other, “grow up” and shed our false hopes of a return to the “blissful easy of infancy” which we cling to in the form of a heedless pursuit of the illusion of “happiness” and instead face the world with an understanding and acceptance of its difficulty and uncertainty, and recognise the countless ways we commodify each other and to renounce them in the hope that we might leave a more humane and caring social world for our children.

Still, the cumulative effect of David Smail’s works so far has been to leave me like a rabbit in the headlights. I’m eternally grateful to see more clearly the forces that shape our experience so that I might navigate some in ways that cause less harm to others, but I still have to engage with a social fabric that I now understand to be more dysfunctional and harmful than I once only suspected it might be.

Notes

If there is a central theme to be found, it would be our false hopes of attaining “happiness”—which he claims to be an illusion born out of a desire to return to the safety and protectedness of childhood. Our acceptance of the idea of happiness as a commodity leaves us vulnerable to exploitation and stuck in an endless pursuit of something unattainable. Much of the behaviour that feeds into modern life can be understood by this motive. It’s best summed up with:

The very unrepeatability of that first experience of radical protectedness and passivity, the effortless achievement (for a while) of unlimited warmth, gratification and love, has been exploited in our culture to fuel an endlessly tantalizing hope. [...] But the actuality of its nature as an illusion, the fact that our infantile experience is unrepeatable, ensures that we do not attain it, and so we are left in unending and empty pursuit. All the time we see as just beyond our grasp what is in fact not there at all.

One of the compounding negative consequences of modern culture he identifies is the reduction of our agency and usefulness as embodied beings. Mentions of this are scattered throughout, but start with an early assertion that we cannot escape neither our physical embodiment in a world fraught with dangers nor the risks associated with it.

Although he stresses the importance of literal physical embodiment: the mind and body as one; past experiences built into our organic tissue, etc., more interesting are the consequences of a loss of meaningful bodily engagement with a social world through which we can ascribe meaning and value to our existence. He states:

If the possibility is denied you of doing anything of value in the world, you have to use your ingenuity in order to feel alive while passing the time. If your activity counts for nothing your person is likely to become salient – it will become important what you look like [...] and what you feel like.

So that nothing may stand between us and the consumption of happiness, we are stripped of our functional activity and, like battery animals, lifted from the course of time to be located in an endless present.

This is the second time I’ve seen mention of a “endless present” or a breakdown of experience as a consecutive narrative sequence in favour of “a series of pure and unrelated presents in time”, the first was in Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009), and both times I’ve found it painfully relatable.

He also makes a profound observation of the public demonstration of discontent at an environment that does not provide opportunities for meaningful bodily engagement:

The hatred of the less privileged for their enslaving environment is obvious – spray paint and urine are fitting enough adornments for the walls of battery housing,

The devaluing of our function as human beings able to contribute to our surroundings is also linked later in the book to the commodification of relationships:

The fate of our ‘relationships’ provides another example of what happens when human beings are deprived of a function in the world – when, that is, the possibilities open to people to act on their environment are, so to speak, drained out of their embodied existence and re-presented to them as mechanized commodities for their consumption. Those things which we could do together are done for us and sold back to us in the form of entertainment, spectacle or consumer goods.

And concludes with the recognition that denying people a meaningful public function causes a “collapse” towards a life concerned entirely with private impulses, which bleeds into our relationships with others.

The greatest violence that is done to people in our society is to rob them of a public life. As people are persuaded by an unremitting barrage of commercial propaganda that their happiness lies in the indulgence and satisfaction of their private needs and impulses, they are simultaneously stripped of the possibility for developing and using talents, resources and interests which they can place at the disposal of others and enact for the public good.

Throughout, when referring to the practice of psychology in particular, he draws connections between the “magical” thinking that we generally consider consigned to the past and the “scientific” method that backs modern psychology. He introduces this concept early on with:

Magic, indeed, is not at all a relic of the past, but is found at the very kernel of our enthusiasm for science.

And later likens modern psychology’s “magical solutions” to unscientific practices like astrology. He claims that having used scientific rhetoric to introduce ideas they felt were helpful, and subsequently carve out a credible professional industry, they have now moved away from the rigorous exactions of the scientific method for fear of undermining the legitimacy of the profession:

Having largely succeeded in both these aims, psychologists have now for the most part abandoned the ‘tough-minded’ scientific stance by means of which they bought their respectability, and which would indeed now work against their interests because there is in truth so little scientific evidence that their procedures do in fact work.

He looks at the origins of the scientific method, showing that it evolved out of magical practices like astrology and divination for the same goal; the pursuit of knowledge, not for its own sake, but increase man’s domination and control over nature. In doing so, he convincingly argues that the two are not diametrically opposed, but two adjacent ventures to make quantifiable accounts of the natural world in order to control it, and that modern psychology is more akin to divination which, despite having no scientific grounding, effectively “dispensed comfort” to the patient and provided a sense of agency in situations where they had none.

Highlights