Emotional Pollution

Introduction

I have used the emotional pollution a few times on this site. It looks like the first time was in my journal writing from March 11 of last year. Then I used the term a few days later. Here is what I found on the net today when I searched for the term. Here are the top three results

1. Article from India which says that someone said emotional pollution has spoiled nature. But it doesn't say much about the idea of emotional pollution. Almost nothing really.

2. This poem to President Clinton

3. Copy of article from buzzle.com - (originally from the Guardian)

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That's it for now.
S. Hein
March 8, 2006

Early writing about emotional pollution - March 11, 2005

Here is some of what I wrote on that day:

Too bad there is not a litmus test for emotional poison. Too bad there is not some kind of a breathalyzer. Something that could just measure the emotional toxicity of a culture, or a home or a classroom. Now there is an interesting idea. A powerful idea.

They had these things in Texas, you hook them up to the exhaust pipe on your car. And it tells you how much pollution your engine is creating. If it is too much, you didin't pass inspection. Why don't we have that for classrooms and homes? If we did, most homes and classrooms would fail the test.

Later I wrote about how I didn't think David Caruso would be able to design a good emotional pollution test because he would think something is healthy, normal and good when it isn't. And this is the danger of any test of this sort.

Later that day I wrote this...

The world needs that test I was talking about. It is more important than an EI test. An EI test only measures one person. But an emotional pollution test, let's call it, would measure the damage being done to millions of people. Hundreds of millions.

If only someone could go to the USA...Travel around and take readings. Say, "In Florida the average level of emotional pollution is x. In New York it is y." Then they could go to Canada and take measurements. This is an incredibly powerful idea. But I will probably never live to see it realized. Still, maybe someone will read this and think "He is right. It is a very powerful idea."

What is more dangerous really? Air pollution or emotional pollution? Toxic gases or toxic emotions? And toxic communication?

If the USA wants to look for weapons of mass destruction, they might start looking at the toxic emotions being spread in the American schools, and on the American TV shows and in the American movies.

Copy of a blog from http://albaal.blogspot.com/2006/01/emotional-pollution.html

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Emotional Pollution

This is my letter to a certain President of a certain country...you know who you are. Happy New Year. Try avoiding blowing us all up in the air this year, I am sure there are other ways to entertain yourself, how about go-cart?

Article from buzzle.com

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Copy of http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/12-4-2005-83101.asp

Originally from http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1657879,00.html

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By Madeleine Bunting

Having done so much damage to the self-image of Slough in The Office, the BBC had to make amends. So they made a series about trying to make Slough happy. Tomorrow, in the final episode, we get to hear if they succeeded. It has been a cheerful but loopy series that left happiness to be defined by a collection of endearing "experts" indulging their own idiosyncrasies, from dancing in woodland to launching a choir. They didn't achieve their aim (although it didn't stop them from claiming they had) but along the way, they made a fair bid at introducing a mainstream audience to a fascinating emerging territory of public debate.

The funny thing was that, while the series may not have been gripping TV, it ended up making you feel, well, rather happy. It's heart-warming to see a woman who has always hated her voice singing lustily on stage, and to see the 50 volunteers for the project making new friendships and enjoying themselves. It generated the kind of feelgood factor you get from the school summer fete: not a thrill, but a gentle glow.

The hunt for happiness is an ancient human preoccupation, so there is nothing new in all this, but it is being reframed in order to challenge our prevailing political assumptions. The argument starts from the fact that Britain may have got very much richer in the past 40 years but it has not got happier. In fact, by measures such as depression, crime, obesity and alcoholism, we have got very much unhappier. So isn't the preoccupation with rising GDP misplaced? Shouldn't politics be focused around more than just economic growth? Shouldn't politics be as concerned with measures of human happiness?

Second, research has established more clearly than ever what the most likely predictors of happiness are, and there are now proven methods to treat unhappiness - particularly cognitive behavioural therapy which aims to break cycles of negative thinking. Happiness is no longer an elusive fuzzy feeling; a body of data gives us the tools to analyse what it is and what causes it. Happiness has gone respectable, and it's been tagged to intellectual disciplines - the science of happiness, happiness economics - so it will be taken more seriously.

But neuroscientists and psychologists apart, there is an even more pressing reason to take happiness seriously and this is what is grabbing the attention of Whitehall - unhappiness is an expensive business. Most striking is the huge chunk of claimants who are on incapacity benefit because of mental health problems: a whopping 900,000 or 38% of the 2 million total. Mental ill-health is the biggest single cause of incapacity and costs the country an estimated £9bn in lost productivity and benefits. The weight on the NHS is enormous: GPs spend a third of their time on mental health and the prescription cost of drugs is rising.

Plus, there is a whole range of political issues which have roots in mental ill-health, from obesity and alcoholism, to parenting, the respect agenda and antisocial behaviour among children and young people. The combination of incapacity-benefit reform and this "behaviour" politics is giving unprecedented impetus to mental health, the long-time Cinderella of the NHS.

The most dramatic development of the "therapy state" will come with the announcement, expected later this week, of a big increase in the availability of cognitive behavioural therapy on the NHS. But there has been a rash of smaller initiatives as government departments grapple with how to integrate this new dimension into policy. The Department for Education and Skills launched new guidelines earlier this year on the social and emotional aspects of learning (Seal). The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is now proposing to introduce indices of welfare and life satisfaction and how they relate to sustainability.

Most of it is piecemeal and still relatively small-scale, but the old liberal concept that the emotional life of citizens is no business of the state is crumbling. It raises the prospect of a future politics where emotional wellbeing could be as important a remit of state public health policy as our physical wellbeing. In 10 years' time, alongside "five fruit and veg a day", our kids could be chanting comparable mantras for daily emotional wellbeing: do some exercise, do someone a good turn, count your blessings, laugh, savour beauty.

We might also be discussing how to regulate emotional pollution in much the way we now discuss environmental pollution. Top of the list would be advertising, which is bad for our emotional health. It induces dissatisfaction with its invidious comparisons with an affluent elite. Television is not much better for us with its disproportionate volume of violence and fraught relationships. It makes people unhappy, less creative and cuts them off from emotionally healthy activities such as sport or seeing friends. Meanwhile, there would be a strong rationale to increase subsidies for festivals, parks, theatres, community groups, amateur dramatics, choirs, sports clubs and lots of other lovely things.

To some, these kinds of interventions represent a nightmare scenario of a nanny state, an unacceptable interference in personal freedom. If people want to pursue their own unhappiness, then the state has no right to stop them. Critics conjure up the nightmare prospect of Brave New World and its soma-imbibing placid citizens.

But the problem is, as Richard Layard argues in his book Happiness: Lessons From a New Science, that the decline of both religious belief (which is a strong predictor of happiness) and the social solidarity movements of the 20th century has left a vacuum of understanding about what constitutes a good life and how to be happy.

The church has lost sway, and the state has retreated behind the single rationale of promoting economic competitiveness with its overtones of Darwinian selection (a major source of unhappiness in itself with its vision of life as a competitive struggle). That leaves the market a free rein to describe happiness - the new car, new sofa, new holiday - and to manipulate our insecurities around status.

Leave things as they are and the state will increasingly have to pick up the bill for how consumer capitalism effectively produces emotional ill-health - depression, stress, anxiety. Leave things as they are and the state is part of the problem, promoting a set of market values that produce emotional pollution. Take education for example, where the needs of the labour market have been the driving influence for more than a generation. Has the regime of testing, league tables and competitiveness had a cost in emotional health? Layard cites an international study of schoolchildren in which the 11-15 age group were asked whether they agreed that "most students in my class are kind and helpful". England came last of eight developed countries, below Russia.

The huge ambition of the small but growing happiness lobby is that the state resumes a role in promoting the good life, not just to chivvy us along in the global rat race, anxious and insecure.