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Summary
Summary
In this sweeping and provocative work, political economist William Davies draws on a four-hundred-year history of ideas to reframe our understanding of the contemporary world. He argues that global trends decades and even centuries in the making have reduced a world of logic and fact into one driven by emotions--particularly fear and anxiety. This has ushered in an age of "nervous states," both in our individual bodies and our body politic.
Eloquently tracing the history of accounting, statistics, science, and human anatomy from the Enlightenment to the present, Davies shows how we invented expertise in the seventeenth century to calm the violent disputes--over God and the nature of reality--that ravaged Europe. By separating truth from emotion, scientific, testable facts paved a way out of constant warfare and established a basis for consensus, which became the bedrock of modern politics, business, and democracy.
Informed by research on psychology and economics, Davies reveals how widespread feelings of fear, vulnerability, physical and psychological pain, and growing inequality reshaped our politics, upending these centuries-old ideals of how we understand the world and organize society. Yet Davies suggests that the rise of emotion may open new possibilities for confronting humanity's greatest challenges. Ambitious and compelling, Nervous States is a perceptive and enduring account of our turbulent times.
Author Notes
William Davies is a political economist at Goldsmiths, University of London, the author of Nervous States and The Happiness Industry, among other books, and a contributor to publications including the Atlantic and the New York Times. He lives in London.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The failures of scientific rationalism have produced a surge of emotional, anti-intellectual, nationalist, and populist ideologies, according to this wide-ranging, sometimes tenuously argued treatise. Davies, a University of London political economist, goes back to 17th-century philosophers Thomas Hobbes and RenAc Descartes to trace the rise of a Western epistemology of governance that champions scientific expertise and objective evidence as a basis for forming political consensus. That rational, deliberative model falters, he contends, under the pressures of modern war (which feeds on nationalist passions and fast, decisive action despite imperfect knowledge) and free-market doctrines that celebrate bold entrepreneurs who eschew expertise in favor of gut-instinct risk-taking. Worse, he argues, persistent economic inequality and rationalist policies' lack of emotional appeal have made voters distrustful of technocratic elites and their statistics, and hungry for emotional engagement with demagogues like Donald Trump. He concludes that advocates of peace will have to work with, rather than try to eradicate, the feelings that are an inevitable part of politics. Intricately but not tightly argued, Davies's book shoehorns everything from the opioid epidemic to transhumanism into his analysis, which will appeal most to those concerned about technology, put off by claims of objectivity, and interested in insights about the role of emotion in politics. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
A wide-ranging book explores the way in which emotion rules current politics and the fraught contest between experts and the people When Michael Gove announced before the Brexit vote that the British public had had enough of experts, he was thought to have introduced something new and shocking into our politics. As his interviewer Faisal Islam responded incredulously at the time, Gove sounded like an "Oxbridge Trump". Davies 's book wants to give us a sense of perspective on this feeling of outrage. We shouldn't really be so shocked, because what Gove said is at some basic level true: the claim to expertise is deeply alienating to many people. And for that reason it is nothing new - the battle between the experts and their critics has been going on for centuries. Davies traces it back to the 17th century and to two key developments in the evolution of modern politics: the attempt to distinguish reason from emotion and the desire to separate out war from peace. A peaceful politics built on reason created the space for expertise to flourish, including the birth of modern science and the launch of learned societies to champion its cause. Experts depend on stable politics to make their case - if everyone is fighting no one has time to listen to what the boffins are saying - and stable politics depends on the authority of the state. The problem is that these categories can quickly get jumbled up. Experts start to present themselves as the ultimate authorities and to view their specialist knowledge as the voice of reason. Instead of politics making expertise possible, experts come to assume that they are the ones making politics possible. That arrogance is what alienates people, and it helps to undermine the basic distinction between reason and emotion on which modern politics depends. It makes us feel bad. Experts depend on stable politics to make their case - if everyone is fighting no one has time to listen to what the boffins are saying This book does a good job of showing that the two-way contest between experts and the people is really a three-way relationship: both are fighting to claim the authority of the state. Davies also identifies many of the reasons why this fight has become so fraught in recent years. Some of it has to do with the pace of change. Expertise depends on our ability to fix the world in place long enough for an agreed version of the facts to take hold: it needs time to stand still for a moment. That doesn't happen any more. As Davies writes: "The promise of digital computing, by contrast, is to maximise sensitivity to a changing environment." Disruption is the watchword of Silicon Valley and it spells the death knell of conventional expertise. The other great advantage that the new breed of data analysts has over technocrats and bureaucrats is that it appears to be on the side of our emotions in an increasingly emotional age. "The hostility directed towards experts stems from a deep-lying sense that, in their attention to mathematical laws and models, they are not really interested in individual people, their desires, fears and lives. Facebook doesn't suffer the same alienation because its 'front end' and 'back end' are so utterly different. Its users express themselves in their own words and feelings." Unlike analogue expertise, the digital version hides behind a touchy-feely interface, notwithstanding that what lies underneath is more technically complex than ever. "As the maths has become more and more sophisticated, the user no longer even experiences it as mathematical." These are sparkling insights, but Nervous States can't decide whether we are living in unprecedented times or not. As a publishing strategy, it makes sense to talk up the novelty of the current moment, but the argument frequently cuts against that. Just as the idea of post-truth starts to lose its edge when we try to find an age of truth to contrast it with (there aren't any), so the notion of a world struggling to cope with feeling sounds more like a part of the modern human condition than a distinctively 21st-century phenomenon. For an account that is rightly sceptical of many inflated claims to expertise, Davies's argument is often based on versions of the same. In one instance, he uses surveys to describe the current state of popular opinion without saying anything about the limitations of such an approach. He cites a 2017 survey that showed that while 53% of Ukip supporters believe torture works, 56% think it should be permitted, meaning 3% of Ukip supporters think that we should torture people just for the hell of it. "This is a political vision," Davies writes, "in which the infliction of physical pain, and even death, is how authority should work, whether that be in the criminal justice system, school, security services or the family." But that is a big claim to base on the views of such a tiny number of people (given Ukip supporters in this survey would have been a minute fraction of the whole, since almost no one was voting Ukip in 2017, we are talking about only a handful of respondents). What four or five people might think doesn't sound like the basis of a political vision to me. The notion of a world struggling to cope with feeling sounds more like a part of the modern human condition than a distinctively 21st-century phenomenon Where it is useful to his account, he uses factual evidence to bolster his case, yet he often undercuts it at the same time. He draws on the statistical work of the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton to show that falling life expectancy in the US is driving feelings of insecurity, particularly in regions that voted for Trump. But he also wants to argue that these same people feel more insecure because experts routinely ignore their bodily experiences. No doubt evidence of suffering and ignorance of suffering are both part of the story. But Davies does not explain how they are related. Sometimes the facts he uses are simply wrong. He states that we now live in societies where "around 50% of people go to university and 50% don't", something that divides us down the middle. But while it is true that around half of young people now go to university, among older generations the figures are much lower, which means that the large majority are still not university educated. Brexit is inexplicable unless this fact is taken into account. This is an ambitious book with plenty to commend it, which covers many concerns in our age of political upheaval - from drone warfare and safe spaces to imperialism and the Anthropocene. It represents an attempt to join up the myriad dots of our anxieties, but I could not see a way through its maze of facts and feelings, authorities and counter-authorities. - David Runciman.
Kirkus Review
A cogent argument for why scientific and political debates must account for feelings of victimhood, fear, and betrayal.Clashes between "cold objectivity" and "emotive falsehood," between knowledge-based fact and visceral feeling, pervade contemporary discourse. Davies (Politics and International Relations/Goldsmiths, Univ. of London; The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, 2015, etc.) offers a penetrating analysis of 21st-century politics and culture in the U.S. and the U.K. Tracing the history of ideas beginning in the Enlightenment, the author transcends the familiar dichotomy of educated/uneducated, urban/rural, cosmopolitan/tribal that has come to explain combative political debate and elections that resulted in Brexit and Donald Trump's presidency. Davies sees a deepening crisis of trust in science, political representatives, and the professional media, whose practitioners are attacked as "elites" who favor the perspectives of "their own cultural and educational background." Because the "civil and gentlemanly dimension of expert knowledge never includes everyone as a participant," expertise has become associated with oppression and exploitation. Libertarians, among others, criticize scientific consensusabout climate change and vaccines, for exampleas a "monopoly" and threat to free thought; instead, they promote the market as a valid discriminator between truth and lies: "Reality is all in the eye of the investor, creditor, or shopper." Along with distrust of experts, Davies notes an erosion of the dichotomy between mind and body, rational thinking and emotive feeling, validated by discoveries in neuroscience and psychology. Feelings of pain, loss, and defeat have spurred the rise of populists, as well as conspiracy theorists, among those who feel disenfranchised and marginalized. Digital networks, rather than supporting "scientific ideals of factual consensus or objectivity," instead delude users with the belief that the world "will become more obedient" to them. The author sees no prospect that defenders of science and rationality will regain widespread trust as "heroic scientific truth-seekers," but they can contribute to fulfilling "simple, realistic, and life-changing promises" and creating "new institutions of social contracts and peace."A fresh, astute examination of current events and urgent challenges. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
In this interdisciplinary masterpiece (available next month), Davies, a political economist, seeks to solve a major mystery in electoral history: How did a sleazy Croesus sway enough blue-collar workers to be chosen president of the world's greatest democracy? This political dyslexia was at first simply attributed to racial animus and/or economic anxiety. But the recent rise of elected authoritarians around the world has inspired several authors to dig deeper into what motivates such voters and whether democracy itself is "dying." One pioneering effort into illogical thinking was Jonathan Haidts "The Righteous Mind." Now comes "Nervous States" to seamlessly blend psychology, biology, economics, philosophy, advertising and religion - from Hobbes to Freud - to illuminate how centuries of unreason have spawned our current president. Davies thinks that right-wing populism is (mis)leading millions to substitute emotions for evidence because of impulses "deep in our psyches and bodies beyond matters of fact: physical pain, fear of the future, a sense of our own mortality." Demagogues, blaming various villains (Jewish bankers, immigrants), can then convert distress and disempowerment into hatred and a "rejection of progress." This emphasis of fear over facts creates crowds for whom "it really doesn't matter... what is said, but merely how it makes them feel." The stakes in 2020 appear as high as in any election since 1860: Will emotional appeals built on nationalism and disinformation - with social media as an accelerant - threaten our 230-year experiment in self-government? Or could a failed Trumpism spur a progressive backlash that restores our original Enlightenment values of science, facts and law? Davies urges rational leaders to better deploy "imagery, sound and speech" to elevate reason over emotion, democracy over reaction. Imagine the epic irony if President Trump paves the way for a Democratic president who then becomes a 21st-century version of Franklin Roosevelt cleaning up after Herbert Hoover's elephantine mess. mark green is the author or editor of 23 books, including "Losing Our Democracy" (2006). He was New York City's first public advocate.
Library Journal Review
From Americans increasingly experiencing chronic physical pain that impacts their daily life since the mid-20th century to the start of nationalism with the political left during the French Revolution, Davies (political economist, Goldsmiths, Univ. of London; The Limits of Neoliberalism) explores these and other seemingly disparate possible causes of how Western populations came to their current political environment and disregard for scientific study on polarizing issues. Not solely considering external factors, Davies takes an introspective look at why politicians are increasingly listened to instead of experts for presentation and analysis of issues, and if movements such as the March for Science help or hinder this and how trends can be changed. This is all tied in to early research on crowd mentality, Hobbesian thought, PTSD, and economic hardship to determine what may have caused the rifts and unsettledness across populations today and how to move past it. VERDICT Academic, though accessible and of interest to all readers given the range of topics.-Zebulin Evelhoch, NC LIVE, Raleigh © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. ix |
| Part 1 The Decline Of Reason | |
| 1 Democracy of Feeling | p. 3 |
| 2 Knowledge for Peace | p. 29 |
| 3 Progress in Question | p. 62 |
| 4 The Body Politic | p. 92 |
| Part 2 The Rise Of Feeling | |
| 5 Knowledge for War | p. 123 |
| 6 Guessing Games | p. 149 |
| 7 War of Words | p. 176 |
| 8 Between War and Peace | p. 202 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 227 |
| Notes | p. 229 |
| Index | p. 239 |
