I was reading recently an article from the Guardian by Adam Philips, a child psychologist, about the pursuit of happiness. What children need, he argues, is not to be happy but to be absorbed: happiness prevails when children are absorbed and interested in what they're doing.
Philips also recounts the story of a young patient who had been torturing animals. The child said that the power this gave him over the creatures made him feel really, momentarily alive - and he associated this ephemeral, horrifying feeling of vitality with happiness. And if we're honest, we can all recall a time of being very angry with someone or something, when the whole world takes on a peculiar intensity.
Mercifully, being angry doesn't make me happy. Nevertheless it is possible to understand how that fleeting intensity might be addictive. In fact, one could argue that all addictions are addictions to momentary experience and that, therefore, momentary experience is the element of the human condition that is addictive. Now here's a challenge: name a pursuit that generates momentary experience that is not, in some way or other, mortally (or morally) dangerous.
Is it the case that the whole point of momentary experience is that it blanks out any consideration of the past or future, and therefore of consequence? Are humans programmed to crave moments in life when they can forget about consequence, and escape the responsibilities of knowledge?
If we define 'functioning addicts' as those who are aware of their addiction, then these are people who utilise the momentary experience as escapism that helps them balance or manage the other, responsible side of their lives that faces up to its consequences. Obviously there is a danger that the pleasure of the escape becomes more attractive, on balance, than the alternative rewards of being in control, respected, responsible and alert to others' concerns. But so long as both aspects have comparable, complementary attractions, then there need be nothing wrong with being a functioning addict.
The trouble is, of course, that society appeals to people to limit their addictive habits by appealing to them to 'take responsibility' - for the effects they have on their health, relationships, and the dangers they pose to themselves and others. Yet often it is the burden of responsibility that the addict is running from. The trick, therefore, is surely not increase people's fears of what happens when they don't behave responsibly, but to make the responsible aspect of their lives a more attractive place to be, so that they instinctively re-balance in the right direction.
The odds are stacked against this being achievable. Not only is 'responsible life' a fairly troublesome place for many people, delaing with financial worries, inadequate housing, unruly children, sick relatives and so on, but the same political and media circus that criticises our irresponsibility also contrives to make the responsible world seem so fractious, tense, gloomy and ultimately doomed that there's very little temptation to get any more involved in it than we already are.
Surely this comes back to Adam Philips's happiness argument. Making the responsible world a happy place might be unrealistic, but making it an interesting place must be entirely possible. If we found living responsibly, empathically and sustainably an interesting, absorbing activity, instead of a chore, then we'd want to spend more time doing it.
Recently a commentator drew on the great environmentalist and technophile Douglas Adams, in countering claims that online social networking was destroying meaningful communication. This argument ran that for a relatively short period of humanity communication has been a one-way street, in which the printing, radio and television ages have broadcast messages to anyone who will listen, but done very little listening in return. I'm doing this now: I have no idea whether anyone will ever read this! What's more, professional journalists always tend to choose their own version of reality and find research and opinion to back it up. By contrast, for all its amateurism, social networking represents the globalisation of one-to-one and many-to-many conversations, with a whole new demand for self-regulating etiquette that people are clumsily learning from scratch without teachers or precedent. And they're finding it absorbing, and yes, addictive.
Whenever a social networking site loses its magic, it happens because the 'broadcasters' - advertisers, record companies, news corporations, have taken over the space that site occupies in people's lives. The public simply zone out and move onto another network.
Uncomfortable though this may be, especially for professionals, the solutions to so many big, intractable challenges, such as fragmented societies, terrorism, unsustainability, anti-social behaviour, may well lie in a world of uncontrolled conversations, momentary experience and addiction. The conversations in social networking cover the full range of views, from cringingly right-on to unpalatably right-wing, from politically correct to offensively hilarious. But I'm pretty sure one factor unifying them all will be a disdain for authority. Most people are quietly rebellious.
Making the world sustainable is not about promoting responsible, clean, well-mannered living. To live more sustainably, more healthily, more ethically, more frugally: these need to be the stuff of everyday acts of quiet rebellion and casual addiction. That is where fun, friendship, creativity and entrepreneurism are born. Ants can be well-organised, but only humans can enjoy being rebellious.
