Don't worry, be happy

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues for a return to the wisdom of the ancients in The Happiness Hypothesis. Forget metaphors of information processing, says James Flint, it's all a question of horses and chariots

The Happiness Hypothesis
by Jonathan Haidt
320pp, William Heinemann, £18.99

The idea of the "divided self" is nothing new. Forget RD Laing: Buddha compared the experience of being human to that of a trainer (rationality) sitting astride an elephant (animal impulse); Plato to that of a charioteer (the rational mind) trying to control two horses, a noble one pulling to the right and a libidinal one pulling to the left. And of course there's Freud's Victorian version: the mind as buggy in the bucket seat of which "the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver's father (the superego) sits on the backseat lecturing the driver on what he's doing wrong".

In the late 20th century these pictures were dismissed by many in the social sciences and replaced with metaphors of information processing and rational consumption, metaphors which in turn reflected the preoccupations of their time. When Jonathan Haidt suggests that we now abandon these and return to the idea of elephant and rider as a template for the workings of the mind, it seems at first blush rather an unpromising start to a book purporting to tell us how to be happy. But unlike so many of the world's purveyors of self-help and lifestyle philosophy, not to mention its economists and computational psychologists, Haidt knows what he's talking about. Thanks to having taught psychology at the University of Virginia for 20 years he has a deep understanding of his subject. He adds to that the distinction of being broadly right.

What horses and chariots and elephants with riders draw attention to, he argues, is something that psychologists have only recently begun to realise: "that there are really two information processing systems at work in the mind at all times: controlled processes and automatic processes".

You can do a lot with automatic processes. You can navigate by the stars (migrating birds), fight wars and run fungus farms (ants), even make tools (early hominids). The mechanism central to all of these highly specialised automatic systems is dopamine release, little bursts of this neurotransmitter being the way the brain rewards animals for doing things (like eating, building nests and having sex) that are good for the survival of our genes.

Controlled processing, however, is an altogether more slippery - and rarer - beast. To start with, it requires language. "You can have bits and pieces of thought through images, but to plan something complex or to analyse the causes of past successes and failures, you need words."

But automatic processes have been around for millennia, giving them plenty of time to perfect themselves. Higher cortical functioning came on the scene only around 40,000 years or so ago, and is weak and buggy by comparison. This, Haidt points out, "helps to explain why we have inexpensive computers that can solve logic, maths and chess problems as well as any human can" but no robot that can walk in the woods as well as a six-year-old child.

So here we are: not charioteers in charge of wild horses, but a self-reflexive rider sitting atop a large and lumbering automatic elephant that has plenty of its own ideas on how to do things. What has this got to do with happiness?

The answer to that is at the crux of this marvellous book. Haidt's key insight is that emotion is just the expression of the mechanisms by which rider and elephant interact. Happy people are the ones in whom the interaction is smooth, in whom the gears mesh, in whom the different levels add up to a more or less coherent whole. Unhappiness occurs when rider and elephant have major differences about how to do things, a fairly common situation since, while the rider tends to be more interested in happiness, the elephant is bent on achieving prestige and the possibilities for gene dissemination and survival that it brings.

It doesn't help that, despite being big and lumbering and bent on being alpha animal, the elephant is also a total scaredy-cat. A "negativity bias" against strange people and new experiences is built into the actual structure of the brain (in the way the amygdala and thalamus are wired), but though this might be annoying, it does make sense: "If you were designing the mind of a fish, would you have it respond as strongly to opportunities as to threats?" Of course not. Miss a chance for a meal and the likelihood is that another one will be along in a while. Miss the sign of a nearby predator and it's game over.

Having thus developed his metaphor into a detailed and robustly argued picture of the mind, Haidt then takes us on an extraordinary journey. On the way he explains why meditation, cognitive therapy and Prozac are all extremely sensible ways to treat depression, why Buddhism is an over-reaction to the state of things, in what way religion is a canny cultural solution to the problems of group selection in evolution, why lovers often behave like children and what this means, how gossip is the key to human culture, and why journalists are miserable. He also has a stab at explaining the current political divide in US politics, though this is one of the very few moments in the book when things begin to sound a little glib. That aside, I don't think I've ever read a book that laid out the contemporary understanding of the human condition with such simple clarity and sense.

· James Flint's The Book of Ash is published by Viking