Thursday 21 April 2016

Addiction or false consciousness?

I recently read an article about gaming addiction, which inevitably got the usual questions bubbling around my head.  What might this person mean by 'addiction'?  What does this sort of issue have in common with 'drug addiction'  or 'substance misuse'?

If we take the DSM V definition of a substance use disorder, then it's certainly possible to identify that people can play games to the detriment of family and wider relationships, personal finances, career and so on.  And that the activity chosen at some level gives some kind of pleasure or release - even if by the point of dependence that's tinged with guilt or shame, or only amounts to feeling 'normal', not excited, euphoric or 'high'.  That's why I'm never surprised by (or interested in) academic studies or media stories identify how particular activities, or a new substance (such as cheese), stimulate the same receptors as heroin or cocaine.  That's just the body's way of saying you're getting something out of the activity.

So why bother writing about gaming 'addiction'?

Well, the key for me was this article linked this type of addiction with neoliberalism - a brilliant coming together of my two academic interests.  I wouldn't disagree with the writer that lots of people in today's society or economy don't get a sense of meaning, purpose or achievement from their work or wider life.  And that sense of purposelessness doesn't necessarily cause addiction or particular patterns of behaviour, but it can give less of an incentive to break them.  I've just been reading Geoffrey Pearson's The New Heroin Users, and that ends on the note that it's hard to address heroin use in an neighbourhood where use of the drug is widespread and there is mass unemployment.

That unemployment of Lancashire and Yorkshire in the early to mid 1980s could be seen as a direct (even deliberate) consequence of public policy (and let's set aside the fact that the economic policy specifically might be better labelled monetarist than neoliberal).  But it's not immediately clear that 'gaming' addiction is rooted in conditions or policy analogous to this form of (apparently problematic) substance use if the underlying issue is meaning (whether as a result of an unrewarding job or no job at all) or social/community and family connection.

There is certainly a tendency in social policy and related academic fields to say that Thatcherism ripped the heart out of communities, and to link this with close community identity.  And such an interpretation fits with the idea that addiction is a response to a lack of purpose caused by 'neoliberal' economic policy.

The thing is that the image of close-knit communities, held together by work, didn't operate in the same way in all places.  Mining villages were always exceptional in having a single employer, and even the dominance of Raleigh in Nottingham, or Ford in Dagenham didn't represent the life of most people in work under the postwar 'consensus' supposedly destroyed by Thatcher.  There's a reason academics felt the need to conduct ethnography of mining villages, and the idea that 'Coal is Our Life' was a striking title for a book.

This isn't peculiarly 'neoliberal', and might have more in common with the concerns of social commentators and academics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century - people losing their community and social ties (and mores) by moving to cities to take industrial work.  Think of Dickensian tales of London, or Marx's idea of alienation, or Durkheim's idea of anomie.  These were seen to some extent as originating in the division of labour and the loss of traditional community purpose and solidarity particular vocations had given, along with direct, personal, mutual interdependence.  The idea that interactions are based on the nexus of cash owes more to the era of Adam Smith than that of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

And this rings true if we think about the history of addiction or substance use.  Public panics about drunkenness were often tied up with broader concerns about the lawlessness of developing industrial cities, and alcohol had a starring role in Engels' description of the hopelessness of life in industrial Manchester.

Misuse of alcohol and other drugs plays a starring role in plenty of literature of the pre-neoliberal world too, notably (though much later than Engels) in the work of Thomas Hardy (at least it's notable for someone who lives in 'Casterbridge').  And computer games hadn't been invented, so we can't find many characters 'addicted' to those.  But we can find people, as in George Eliot's Silas Marner, where a key plot point revolves not so much on a person's dependence on alcohol as what might be called a 'gambling addiction' in modern parlance.  Dunsey's gambling debts as much as his drinking lead him to deception and theft.

And the problems described in literature, media, or medical reports of the period don't sound so different from our own today.  I wouldn't deny that public policy affects the prevalence of misuse, the harmfulness of the consequences, and how easily people can 'recover'.  In fact, I've written about how neoliberalism as an ideology limits the way we approach issues of substance misuse.  But if we label 'gaming' as an addiction, which I might be able to agree with, we can't really see it as a consequence of 'neoliberalism'.  If we do, we risk failing to identify useful, practical solutions.

I have no doubt that many people could live a life more full of 'meaning' - and that, as shown by plenty of addiction treatment programmes, might be achieved as much through religion or philosophy as changing government economic or social policy.  Perhaps it might also be solved, as Marx envisaged, by a communist revolution.  Or perhaps by a return to small, self-sufficient communities as envisaged by the 'Diggers' in the seventeenth century or more recent utopian groups.

But whether that is more desirable than remaining engaged in society as we find it, tweaking our own relationship with it perhaps, and being aware and somewhat detached and cynical is a personal and philosophical question, not one where the causes of addiction are particularly relevant.  (You can perhaps guess where my natural sympathy lies.)

Addiction is more a human failing than one of neoliberalism.  I'm not convinced this search for meaning is something we particularly suffer with under 'neoliberalism'.  In fact, neoliberalism's most vocal critics wouldn't argue that people fail to find meaning under neoliberalism; they just argue that people find it in the 'wrong' things, like consumer products.  And if you're frustrated or sad that people are finding meaning in computer games or trainers, that's not an 'addiction' problem; that's a political or moral problem.  It's when people aren't finding meaning or connection that we should be talking about 'addiction' rather than false consciousness.

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