Pleasure Pushers
KELLEHER, T. J.
Pleasure Pushers American Mania: When More Is Not Enough By Peter C. Whybrow Viking. 338 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by T.J. Kelleher Senior editor, "Natural History" AT FIRST glance, American...
...They eschew leisure and consider work their highest calling...
...Peter C. Whybrow, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, is aware of the data those authors used to draw their gloomy pictures of 21st-century America...
...After a breakdown forced him into a Florida rehabilitation center predominately serving drug addicts, Tom discovered he had become "an addict of the technological age," of what he calls the great American casino...
...They will contend that the epitome of the final stage of American capitalism, and Adam Smith's ideas, is Enron's Kenneth Lay, who fraudulently enriched himself at the expense of the company's shareholders and employees...
...I'm a happy man...
...The goal is to make a profit__But there's more to life than the market...
...Schwartz' remedies include such gems as redistributing wealth so that consumers will lack the money to worry which expensive shampoo to buy...
...Although modern multinational capitalism can create much that is good by forsaking its local aspect, the people who participate in it risk losing their moral anchors, innate and learned...
...Tom cites Thomas Jefferson's famous revision of John Locke's "life, liberty, and property" to the grander sounding "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" of the Declaration of Independence...
...Otherwise, the task will fall to society's larger entities, such as corporations, who have spawned so much of what is unhealthy about the Fast New World, and who, despite their being good at pressing the buttons of our dopamine-pleasure system, too often function as little more than gussied-up pushers...
...In fact, he is opening centers dedicated to showing burned out executives how to "make it" in style without sacrificing the traits that make us human: our personal interactions with others and our capacity for empathy and emotion...
...Dopamine is released by certain brain cells with new experiences and grants a feeling of pleasure...
...So here's to pleasure...
...Ultimately, Whybrow has no ready concrete answer for what alternative course we should create...
...and by their diets, consisting of a large-scale intake of caffeine from before dawn to well after dusk and an extreme reliance on prepared foods...
...the resultant need to choose makes them unhappy...
...With a somewhat infelicitous nod to Aldous Huxley, Whybrow describes such people as participants in the "Fast New World...
...They can be identified by their perch, in front of a laptop computer...
...As Whybrow laments, modern businessmen "persist in promoting the self-interest and competition of the marketplace, not as the valuable tool that it is, but as an end in itself—as an ideology...
...Perhaps that is why good bars are locally owned, and nothing is more dismaying than drinking alone in an airport...
...Ay, I know/ But who fights ever hoping for success?/ I fought for lost cause, and for fruitless quest...
...Again he quotes Tom, who emerges as the hero of the latter sections ?f American Mania: "Business is business...
...The Gascon cries out, "What say you...
...Relying on the moral and economic philosophy of Adam Smith, as well as insights from the burgeoning fields of neurobiology and evolutionary biology, he maintains that what has made the United States great—the immigrant's desire for liberty, plus his drive for self- and familial improvement—will save us, immigrants all, from the stress, cupidity and obesity that are today's threats...
...Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, in his last throes, challenges Death himself to a duel...
...Of the two it's by far the more attainable...
...To rehumanize capitalism, however, it will not be enough merely to work toward resuscitating the past, for, as the psychiatrist readily admits, family farms and the stuffof Norman Rockwell paintings are not on their way back...
...What they share, the author contends, is the immigrant temperament he attributes to one crucial neurobiological correlate: the disposition of receptors for the neurotransmitter dopamine...
...Kelleher Senior editor, "Natural History" AT FIRST glance, American Mania seems a retread of Swarthmore College psychologist Barry Schwartz' argument in The Paradox of Choice (2003): Americans have too many options...
...Gregg Easterbrook, in his The Progress Paradox (2003), sounded a similar alarm...
...Moreover, an individual 's sensitivity to it is highly heritable, so the progeny of American immigrants of yesteryear—whether 1995 or 1607— have the same inclination toward novelty-seeking...
...According to Whybrow, cocaine addiction and playing the game of "who wants to be a millionaire...
...He believes (and Whybrow agrees) that this is one of the worst mistakes of American philosophical writing, because it has convinced generations that property and happiness are one and the same...
...are opposite sides of the same coin...
...But when the object is conviviality, with portraits of customers on the walls and sincere concern when someone has been sick or has not stopped by for a while, then we see the kind of capitalism Whybrow is looking for...
...Instead, he maintains that responsibility for restructuring the market lies with individuals, both as consumers and agents...
...pleasure...
...But Whybrow traces the dopamine system deep into the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens and argues that it has always led immigrants, whether ancient hominids or modern humans, to venture into unknown territory and try strange things...
...During an afternoon session of drinks and conversation at Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel, Tom explains, "Happiness and pleasure, I've decided, are entirely different beasts...
...In building these programs [for corporate burnouts] I'm doing well by doing good, and I like that...
...And in that realization he found a new calling— helping people "learn how to play the casino without getting hooked...
...Annie, a former graduate student of Whybrow's who is chief of staff to a Washington politician...
...But pleasure, he asserts, even the pleasure taken in doing a difficult task well, is not the same thing as happiness...
...Their badges of honor are the size of their checking accounts and the darkness of the rings under their eyes...
...Rightly, though, the author does not call on the government to abolish the marketplace...
...These are also some of the elements Adam Smith identified as mechanisms that would prevent the market system from becoming brutal...
...He implores individuals to identify and seize their own human qualities...
...and Kim Phan, a 40-something refugee from Vietnam who has become a highly respected international lawyer...
...It is useless...
...and the government ought to do something about the situation...
...But Smith, as Whybrow points out, imagined a free market system that was more rooted in local communities...
...Whybrow, assuming the role of a field zoologist, interviews several specimens...
...He distrusted all central planning by bureaucracies, whether in corporate or government chambers...
...Some will be tempted to dismiss Whybrow as the mooneyed dupe of the modern world, or at least a person who has taken upon himself an impossible task...
...Nevertheless, he is fundamentally optimistic...
...So, I got lucky...
...Just ask a cocaine addict, or talk to one of the members of Whybrow's Fast New World...
...by their vocalizations, which include conspicuous public use of cellular telephones and handheld Blackberry e-mail devices...
...That many Americans have become work-obsessed should come as no surprise to anyone who has spent time with a lawyer, consultant, investment banker, or executive at a large multinational—or even to someone who has ever walked past a Starbucks...
...THE DOPAMINE SYSTEM, though, is ripe for hijacking...
...If life as a music teacher rapidly becomes boring, as it did for Kim Phan, then life as a highflying international lawyer—where every day brings a new challenge impossible to prepare for—offers plenty of opportunities for dopamine stimulus, i.e...
...This causal reduction of human behavior to its biological substrate is not new, even if it still raises the hackles of mind-body dualists in the mold of René Descartes...
...When the sole intention of a business is to sell pleasure, the undertaking is at best functional and likely to fall flat...
...They include Tom, a lawyer and "turnaround specialist" who rehabilitates failing companies...
Vol. 88 • February 2005 • No. 1
