On his book The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business
Cover Interview of December 04, 2019
The wide angle
I wrote the Age of Addition to explain why addiction has
become so widespread, conspicuous, and varied. When I entered the field in the
1970s, as a doctoral student studying opiate history, “addiction” referred to
drugs like heroin. By the 2010s it also referred to compulsive overeating,
sugar consumption, machine gambling, social-media use, internet pornography, shopping,
and habitual tanning.
Though behavioral addictions remain controversial, they are,
at a minimum, social facts. When I told people that I was writing an updated
history of addiction, they said without prompting that I had to include kids glued
to their smartphones. What had once been a peripheral nuisance had become a
real worry, given the dangers of distracted driving and reports of increased
bullying, anxiety, and academic failure among heavy users.
I knew something about addictive products. In 2001 I
published Forces of Habit, a global history of psychoactive drug use,
commerce, and regulation that went beyond my early work on opiates. Over the
next seventeen years I became convinced, thanks to anthropologists like Natasha
Schüll and journalists like Michael Moss, that drugs were not the only things with
drug-like effects. Mesmerizing video slots and foods loaded with sugar, salt,
and fat could also do the trick. Psychologists like Bart Hoebel and
neuroscientists like Nora Volkow made similar arguments. So did behavioral
economists like George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, who showed how corporations
used habituating, brain-rewarding products to “phish for phools.”
When I joined the addiction-research peloton I found myself
pedaling alongside other historians. One was the late John Burnham, author of Bad
Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and
Swearing in American History (1993). Burnham’s brief was that the vices of
the Victorian male underworld had gone mainstream. Repeal of Prohibition, World
War II, consumerism, the upheavals of the long 1960s, and countercultural and libertarian
activists had undermined the crumbling façade of traditional morality.
Burnham’s book appeared in 1993, before processed foods and
digital technologies featured in discussions of addiction. Seeing a chance to
update and globalize his pioneering study, I cast The Age of Addiction as
a sequel to Burnham’s Bad Habits as well as to my own Forces of Habit.
Injecting neuroscience into world history and arguing that
an emerging economic system cuts across cultural differences raised some academic
eyebrows. Against this, foreign journalists immediately grasp limbic capitalism
when they interview me. “Hey, that’s us too.” Limbic Capitalism almost
became the book’s main title, some editors preferring its edginess. Familiarity
with brain regions being less universal than awareness of addictions, the
current title won out.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
The wide angle
I wrote the Age of Addition to explain why addiction has become so widespread, conspicuous, and varied. When I entered the field in the 1970s, as a doctoral student studying opiate history, “addiction” referred to drugs like heroin. By the 2010s it also referred to compulsive overeating, sugar consumption, machine gambling, social-media use, internet pornography, shopping, and habitual tanning.
Though behavioral addictions remain controversial, they are, at a minimum, social facts. When I told people that I was writing an updated history of addiction, they said without prompting that I had to include kids glued to their smartphones. What had once been a peripheral nuisance had become a real worry, given the dangers of distracted driving and reports of increased bullying, anxiety, and academic failure among heavy users.
I knew something about addictive products. In 2001 I published Forces of Habit, a global history of psychoactive drug use, commerce, and regulation that went beyond my early work on opiates. Over the next seventeen years I became convinced, thanks to anthropologists like Natasha Schüll and journalists like Michael Moss, that drugs were not the only things with drug-like effects. Mesmerizing video slots and foods loaded with sugar, salt, and fat could also do the trick. Psychologists like Bart Hoebel and neuroscientists like Nora Volkow made similar arguments. So did behavioral economists like George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, who showed how corporations used habituating, brain-rewarding products to “phish for phools.”
When I joined the addiction-research peloton I found myself pedaling alongside other historians. One was the late John Burnham, author of Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History (1993). Burnham’s brief was that the vices of the Victorian male underworld had gone mainstream. Repeal of Prohibition, World War II, consumerism, the upheavals of the long 1960s, and countercultural and libertarian activists had undermined the crumbling façade of traditional morality.
Burnham’s book appeared in 1993, before processed foods and digital technologies featured in discussions of addiction. Seeing a chance to update and globalize his pioneering study, I cast The Age of Addiction as a sequel to Burnham’s Bad Habits as well as to my own Forces of Habit.
Injecting neuroscience into world history and arguing that an emerging economic system cuts across cultural differences raised some academic eyebrows. Against this, foreign journalists immediately grasp limbic capitalism when they interview me. “Hey, that’s us too.” Limbic Capitalism almost became the book’s main title, some editors preferring its edginess. Familiarity with brain regions being less universal than awareness of addictions, the current title won out.