According to David T. Courtwright, author of the new book “The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business,” capitalism is to blame for the human proclivity for addiction. Specifically, he blames what he terms “limbic capitalism,” which “refers to a technologically advanced but socially regressive business system in which global industries encourage excessive consumption and addiction.”
“The Age of Addiction” lays out the case, and Courtwright provides his readers with a sweeping, compelling and eminently readable work, detailing the history of vice all the way back to the invention of agriculture. Courtwright gives example after example throughout history of businesses taking advantage of the human condition called “hormesis,” wherein substances or inputs that are helpful for survival in small doses end up doing great harm when taken in larger ones. Advertisers have been taking this into account for a long time, skirting around our brain’s rational functioning and taking direct aim for our baser selves (i.e., our limbic system).
Courtwright’s history is fascinating, as he tells a story of the rise (and sometimes fall) of various vices, from ancient viticulture and poppy abuse, through mass production of cigarettes after World War II, all the way to slot machines and, of course, online pornography. Don’t pick up this book looking for a solution, which the author does not even attempt to provide. This is actually admirable, and more of this type of problem-identifying book would be better off sans the half-baked proposal inevitably tacked on after the last chapter of research and analysis.
At the end of “The Age of Addiction,” Courtwright addresses the two critiques he most often received when sending out his manuscript. One is his lack of an cure-all, while the other is his inability to ever nail down a definition of what he actually means by “addiction.” He does a good enough job tackling this criticism, pointing to an earlier chapter he devotes to the scientific disagreements over whether it is possible to be “addicted to food.”
Regardless of where one stands in that debate, it is easy to see the similarities between overindulging on sweets, alcohol and tobacco and the modern scourge of society, those digital addictions that monopolize our time. That said, Courtwright comes dangerously close to making some false equivalencies. Sugar may be bad for us, but can one really “equate confectioners with drug and alcohol traffickers,” as he attempts to? More to the point, the author spends an entire section explaining how Walt Disney World is functionally the same as Las Vegas or any other den of sin.
The derision of Walt Disney raises another problem with “The Age of Addiction,” since discussion of the man’s motives begins with this segue: “Disney devoted the 1950s and early 1960s to conquering a new entertainment medium, television, and a seedy old one, the amusement park.” Savor it, because that sentence is one of only eight times the word “television” appears in the book.
Six of the other seven times television is mentioned, it is merely regarding the fact that its existence allowed advertisers to reach more eyeballs. In the seventh, he notes digital slot “machines’ televisions themes and resemblance to consumer gadgets gave them an aura of entertainment innocence and attracted a new generation of prey.” He does not address why similitude to TV programs is useful in keeping “anxious, depressed women” at the slot machines? After going in great detail over the history of booze, smokes, sugars, gambling and the like, Courtwright jumps straight to smartphones and the Internet, without acknowledging the role of televisions in our long march to digital serfdom. This crucial step in the human story paved the way for the slavish screen devotion that keeps our attention affixed to Facebook, Instagram and YouTube for hours on end.
Half a century before the current panic over children not wanting to set down their “short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops,” children (and adults) began to struggle spending their time in ways that did not involve sitting in front of the TV. It was not so long ago that children rushed out of the school bus and into their homes so they could plop down and watch Nickelodeon. Nowadays, that function is largely filled by iPads, but screen “addiction” was not invented by Steve Jobs, and this book would have benefited from a study into why it was (and still is) difficult to sit in a room with a television without turning it on. Unlike video games and iPhones, televisions’ pull over us may not be easily ascribable to dopamine science (and in no possible way can be demonstrative of hormesis), but something certainly happened to our brains since the 1950s, and I bet it would not have taken too much effort for Courtwright to find a way to place culpability at the feet of the “limbic capitalists.”
Despite this omission, “The Age of Addiction” is very much worth your time. Sooner or later we as a society are going to have to confront the role that Big Business plays in kneecapping us, especially since, as Courtwright mentions, the Silicon Valley types themselves refuse to let their offspring anywhere near the addictive tech products they foist upon us. To the extent that he suggests any sort of next steps, Courtwright implores his readers to operate “against excess.” That is all well and good, but that advice will be no match for the moneymaking machine designed to promote excess in all aspects of life. Parents and policymakers alike need constant vigilance in order to confront the system of “limbic capitalism,” establishing more limits than currently exist and curbing the influence of this destructive system on future generations. Vice and bad habits may be inescapable, but as Courtwright’s history shows us, they can be fought.
