Tea and Sympathy

The English are supposed to be experts at tea and sympathy. In my experience, and I say this as an insider, they're pretty bad at both.



Let's get the tea out of the way first. It's still a point of some debate how to make a cup of tea in England, the controversy chiefly hinging on when in the procedure to add the milk. These days, hardly anybody bemoans the teabag, described to me once by a Dane as a sachet of dust. In any case, the visitor to England is no more likely to get a good cup of tea there than anywhere else, and might only reflect on the significance of the fact that 180 million cups of the stuff get drunk everyday in the British Isles. It is a minor addiction, perhaps, or else little more than a warm, and distinctly unchallenging, comfort. If you're not convinced, look to the outrage of George Orwell, no less.

Sympathy, meanwhile, has become a rare bird. In political and civil discourse of late, it's been hard to detect. Society has become acrimonious, relations antagonistic. The views of others are not looked into but shut down, ably abetted by a monstrous media that exists seemingly only to foment discord. We might be forgiven, therefore, for thinking that the sympathetic streak has been lost.

I'm not convinced it was ever there, or that anybody ever really knew what they meant by it. At best, the sharing of troubles over tea was perhaps just a variation on breaking bread, the communal sharing of one another's company as a reminder of shared humanity. Problems were never really broached, let alone halved or solved.

My own research on the meaning and practice of sympathy in British history suggests a strongly fluctuating concept, ranging from a deeply self-serving pity (the well-spring of charity de haut en bas) to a clinical calculation about how best to stave off the weak and preserve the strong for the sake of the English 'race'.

Those two extremes overlapped at the end of the nineteenth century, and the latter point is perhaps the most shocking observation of the history of sympathy in England. For the sake of putting an end to social suffering, otherwise well-meaning individuals contrived a social policy of eugenic breeding and framed it in the name, in the feeling, of sympathy.

It did not come to pass, or at least, not there, and not then. But the evidence of the link between sympathy and eugenics is compelling, and has a long reach. This particular story caps a much longer tale, which I'm happy to report now exists in the world.

The Science of Sympathy is published by the University of Illinois Press, and is available now in paperback.

On Sympathy

There are only about six weeks left before Science of Sympathy is unleashed on the world. I’ve been living with this book for years and waiting impatiently for the publication machinery to grind slowly towards its end. My fifth book, it’s certainly been the most interesting from an editorial and production point of view. I’ve nothing but praise for the old-fashioned professionalism on show at the University of Illinois Press. In general, the world of academic publishing has out-sourced copy editing, loaded editorial burdens on to the authors themselves, given up on marketing, and adopted pricing policies that make academic books unaffordable for anyone save well-endowed university libraries. This publishing model can boast success if a title sells 150 copies. Publishers make their profits. Authors make nothing or next to nothing. A standard academic contract for a monograph has a royalty rate of between 0 and 2.5% for the author.

Happily, Illinois is publishing a hardback and a paperback of Science of Sympathy at the same time, hitting that university library market at the same time as making the book affordable for everyone else. Every step of the way I’ve dealt with different in-house employees responsible for copy, marketing, artwork, production, website, and so on. Most impressive from my point of view was the production of the jacket blurb. The vast majority of text you read on the back of books, talking about how innovative and brilliant the contents are, is written by the authors themselves as part of pro-forma marketing questionnaires. It’s tough to do. When you’ve spent seven years putting together a complex argument, it’s often difficult to sum it all up in one paragraph, let alone to find the distance to say why it is good in pithy prose. To my amazement, the person responsible for marketing copy at Illinois actually read my book and wrote the blurb for me. What a strange feeling to have someone else sum up what your book is about and what it does. This is serious, professional, almost lost editorial practice, and I’m a fan!

I’ll post some bits and pieces about the book in the coming weeks, but for now, here’s that blurb:

In his Descent of Man, Charles Darwin placed sympathy at the crux of morality in a civilized human society. His idea buttressed the belief that white, upper-class, educated men deserved their sense of superiority by virtue of good breeding. It also implied that societal progress could be steered by envisioning a new blueprint for sympathy that redefined moral actions carried out in sympathy's name.

Rob Boddice joins a daring intellectual history of sympathy to a portrait of how the first Darwinists defined and employed it. As Boddice shows, their interpretations of Darwin's ideas sparked a cacophonous discourse intent on displacing previous notions of sympathy. Scientific and medical progress demanded that "cruel" practices like vivisection and compulsory vaccination be seen as moral for their ultimate goal of alleviating suffering. Some even saw the so-called unfit--natural targets of sympathy--as a danger to society and encouraged procreation by the "fit" alone. Right or wrong, these early Darwinists formed a moral economy that acted on a new system of ethics, reconceptualized obligations, and executed new duties. Boddice persuasively argues that the bizarre, even dangerous formulations of sympathy they invented influence society and civilization in the present day.

Science of Sympathy is available for pre-order here (US) and here (UK).

A Shot in the Arm

Juggling multiple projects, it is perhaps unsurprising that one sometimes tries to catch all the knives in one hand. The release of a policy position-paper from the World Health Organisation on pain mitigation during child-vaccination procedures brought everything into focus recently, making me think there’s a unifying principle to my work after all.

The release of Edward Jenner is only two weeks away (that makes him sound like a hell hound, which maybe is apt), so I’ve become a sort of vaccine activist in the form of Jenner’s ghost (@EdwdJenner on Twitter). In the meantime I’m finishing off a book on pain for Oxford University Press, due in December. Lurking in the background is the daunting prospect of writing the first textbook on the history of emotions for Manchester University Press, due at the end of next year. And my book on the practical applications of Darwinian sympathy is done, dusted and on its way to the University of Illinois Press, replete with a chapter on the evolutionary rationale for compulsory vaccination.

Concerned that anxiety increases the pain of childhood vaccination, which in turn leads to fall-off rates for immunization programmes, the WHO sets out guidelines for a smooth and pain-reduced process. Interestingly, they don’t think that topical anaesthetics are worth the cost and find no evidence that orally ingested painkillers make any difference to the pain of being injected. Rather, a programme of calmness, distraction and neutral language is promoted. Caregivers are to be present throughout. Where appropriate, infants should be breastfed immediately prior to injection. Vaccinators should be even-tempered and well-informed. They should stick to straightforward speech that neither alarms nor falsely reassures (we can all see through it). There ought to be a plentiful supply of toys. It’s essentially a recipe for anxiety elimination for the reduction of pain.

Probably not what the WHO has in mind: Major and Mrs Padmore inoculating against plague in the bazaar in Mandalay, Burma, now Myanmar, 1906. Wellcome Library, London

What is striking about the WHO’s advice is the degree to which they accept and endorse a working definition of pain that includes, in fact depends on, emotion. I’ve been beating a drum for a while now about the way humans make meaning out of pain, arguing that things hurt according to the extent to which we fear them. Pain is not simply a mechanical nervous circuit, where pain experience is directly proportional to painful stimulus. Humans make pain according to emotional appraisals of the meaning of bodily harm, and this dynamic involves both the affective processes of the brain and an understanding of the world and its particular and contingent articles of anxiety. There is no universal elicitor of fear; no object that is intrinsically fearful. Meaning is made – pain is made – in cultural and historical context.

David Hume knew all this in the 1730s:

Were I present at any of the more terrible operations of surgery, ’tis certain that even before it begun, the preparation of the instruments, the laying of the bandages in order, the heating of the irons, with all the signs of anxiety and concern in the patients and assistants, wou’d have a great effect upon my mind, and excite the strongest sentiments of pity and terror. No passion of another discovers itself immediately to the mind. We are only sensible of its causes and effects. From these we infer the passion: And consequently these give rise to our sympathy.

Watching someone about to endure pain is, in itself, painful to the witness. Anxiety is well known to be ‘contagious’. In turn, the subject of the ‘terrible operation’ sees only victimhood, feeding on the anxious atmosphere at hand. In such circumstances, without something to deaden the sensibilities, doubtless the pain would be heightened. It is heartening to know the WHO has a handle on this, with a complex understanding of the ways in which the management of anxiety will diminish the likelihood of painful experience.

Vaccines, Pain, Emotions: my world to a tee, in an episode from the doctors WHO.