IT’S 1996 and millennial malaise is settling over us. In The Age of Anxiety,
editors Sarah Dunant and Roy Porter invite 10 prominent thinkers and writers to share
their understanding of this apprehension and their visions of life after 2000.
I found the result depressing, a dismal book from the disillusioned — with the
glorious exception of poet and novelist Fred D’Aguiar.

Most of the essays fail to inspire hope. Susie Orbach encourages us to tolerate
contradiction and ambiguity while Geoff Watts seems content to wait another 20 years for
science to provide an explanation of brain function and emotions.

But first, let’s define our terms. Anxiety is to my mind a disease which, like pain, has
no great intrinsic merit. First aid for anxiety is, above all, reassurance. Yet it gets
none here. The reader is left feeling that anxiety is incurable.

D’Aguiar’s delightful essay shines out against the prevailing gloom. With precision
and sensitivity, he writes about racism, which after sexism is our most damaging social
prejudice. This essay should be required reading for all concerned with how society can
transform itself—especially his fellow essayists.

I have waited a long time to hear what D’Aguiar boldly states—that racism can be
cured. And I believe this applies to any irrational rage or violence and its consequences.
His description delineates almost exactly the process I find works best in dealing with
irrationality—in all cases it is essential to acknowledge past pain and to
recognise that those experiences are now over.

What this book really brought home to me, however, was the need for a basic belief in
human values and social progress to take us into the next century. If these don’t exist at
the core of society, you can forget about the whole concept of mental health. Only by
vigourously deploying these neo-Enlightenment values can we leave the Age of Anxiety
behind and contemplate the next millennium, confident of finding some peace of mind.

The title – Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Press, $23.95, ISBN 0 553 09503 X) – mixes apples with pears, a point Goleman never covers fully. IQ tests measure (erratically) how well we think; emotions determine whether we bother in the first place.

For example, the wing psychologist on the special prison unit I work in assured me that all lifers have low IQs. But despite their poor scores in intelligence tests, some of these prisoners have the sharpest minds I have come across.

Goleman’s opening story gives the game away. He describes meeting a “cheerful” bus driver just after he had graduated in psychology, and notes sadly that he had never been allowed to explore either cheer or gloom. My own psychology degree was even more hamstrung – our professor shunned emotions like the plague – a common failing among objective positivists which has bedevilled our understanding of emotion. Any science of consciousness cannot be fully realised without a reliable, repeatable grasp on the rascally emotions.

Despite advances in detailing the chemical activity of the brain, there is still no sign of a measuring system for emotions. Why is it so long in coming? If, instead of marginalising emotions as positivists must, we place them at centre stage, then remarkable things begin to happen. A whole series of other paradoxes fall into place. Inmates at Parkhurst responded delightedly to a post-positivist approach by reducing their physical assaults by 90 per cent, and their consumption of medication by 94 per cent?

This is an exciting time for emotion hunters. By putting emotions into the same category as any subjective clinical symptom, such as pain – we find that emotions are not that strange. Clinicians have been making sense of these “unmeasurables” for millennia. They don’t describe what they do as post-positivist – yet – but if we hitch a philosophical ride on their pragmatic approach, we can begin to reintegrate such clinically vital symptoms as rage and terror into everyday psychology.

When post-positivism prevails, it will inevitably emphasise the early childhood socialising and education Goleman advocates. Until then, you may find books like this somewhat disappointing.