Affluenza: How to Be Successful and Stay Sane
by Oliver James
Vermilion £17.99

Money won’t make you happy and grabbing ever more of it may make you mad. That is Oliver James’s more or less unarguable thesis. He makes the point via a conceit. The ever-more-getting-and-spending bug becomes the affluenza virus. Globally, increasing numbers are infected and, as a result, even more people are miserable or mad.

There is a large body of evidence to support his case. Countless surveys show higher levels of dissatisfaction and depression among people exposed to the virus. The pursuit of money produces anomie, dysphoria and, if the behaviour of the hedge-fund kids in Mayfair is anything to go by, sheer brutal vulgarity. My own experience tells me this point is right and, in the course of this book, James makes some sane suggestions about how to cure yourself of affluenza.

However, there are problems. The first is that, in two ways, this book is too long. Stylistically, James is verbose. A simple example: he calls the Beatles “the mop-topped ones”. Why not mop tops? It’s better and shorter. Extended throughout the book, this produces serious reader fatigue. Second, it is too long because it is, basically, an illustration of current psychological research through a number of interviews that James has conducted around the world. Fair enough, except that by the time you get to the 20th person whose life is not quite right for the same reason that everybody else’s life is not quite right, the eyes begin to glaze. Ruthless pruning would have produced a more effective book. Furthermore, James has two ideological prejudices that suffuse almost every page. The first is that nurture is almost everything and nature almost nothing. He does not seem to believe in any heritable effects on our behaviour. “In Britain,” he writes, “academic or professional success is not primarily the consequence of individual capacities but of social class and schooling.”

But, if the middle-class children do tend to get into Oxbridge, this could equally be evidence of the heritability of intellectual talent. This may make them more vulnerable to affluenza, but it does not prove that everybody is equally able to attain the highest academic awards given the right upbringing.

The second prejudice is virulent antiAmericanism. James blames America for the cult of Selfish Cap-italism that is the main cultural force behind the affluenza epidemic. This is trueish, but it does not justify an analysis that portrays America as no more than an infectious swamp of Selfish Captalism. Away from the coastlines, America is the home of some of the most intense, effective and, indeed, supportive communities in the developed world. But, for James, America is simply bad and the hyper-communal Denmark simply good.

In fact, having established the Danes as the inhabitants of an earthly paradise, James seems to change his mind when he visits a Danish kindergarten. He finds the ruthless separation of young children from their parents disturbing. There is also the suppression of play — he finds the same in China — and he thinks the invariable trumping of the individual by the communal may be the source of the eerie blandness of the Danes.

What we are at our best, says James, is authentic, vivacious and playful. But is this condition natural or merely an occasional, blissful interlude enjoyed by all people at one time or another? James, like many therapists (though not, crucially, Freud) seems to think it is natural, and our failure to attain it is a specific contemporary malaise. Freud would be more inclined to interpret our failure as merely the human condition, a product of the war between biology and society that is intrinsic to our psychological development. Addressing this rather than the iniquities of America would have made this a much more important book.

But it is not unimportant. Ever since Wordsworth wrote, “The world is too much with us; late and soon”, in his great sonnet, the western imagination has been gripped by the idea that modernity has deprived us of a more authentic existence, one more in touch with ourselves and our environment. James’s interviews provide plenty of evidence this might be true. And much of the advice he offers is rational, sound and humane. Who could question his insistence that it is stupid to borrow too much money to buy a house you don’t need? He should, however, drop his prejudices and address the big one. How do we find a home for our-selves? Or, more exactly, what is home if it is not here and now?

www.bryanappleyard.com Affluenza is available at the Books First price of £16.19 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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