Status Anxiety | 10 January 2009

The recession is not a ‘much-needed reality check’ — it’s a source of great suffering

Puritans love disasters. No sooner has some calamity befallen mankind than some hair-shirted scold emerges from his priest hole and starts wagging his finger. The message is always the same: ‘You are being punished for your immoral lifestyle.’

The latest grist to the puritan mill is, of course, the credit crunch. George Monbiot, the Guardian’s very own Oliver Cromwell, has been looking forward to this moment for years. ‘I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises,’ he wrote in 2007. Now that it is upon us, he and his colleagues can hardly contain their glee. ‘A much-needed reality check’ was how another Guardian columnist recently described the global economic meltdown.

However, none of these prigs has welcomed the disaster quite as joyfully as Oliver James, the broadcaster and clinical psychologist. Last Sunday, I heard him on Radio 4 discussing his most recent book in which he offers ‘scientific proof’ that there is a link between material wealth and mental illness.

‘I absolutely embrace the credit crunch with both arms,’ he said. He went on to denounce ‘Thatcherism, Reaganomics and neo-Liberalism’ which he claimed were responsible for the ‘consumer binge’ that encouraged us to think ‘wide-screen TVs were more important than playing with our toddlers’. ‘With any luck people will actually change their values, they’ll start concentrating on being rather than having and on meeting real needs rather than wants,’ he concluded. ‘It could be the beginning of a radical change in our mental health for the better.’

It is really quite astonishing that someone who prides himself on his sensitivity to human suffering could be so openly enthusiastic about an economic recession.