James Riley – Well Beings: How the Seventies Lost its Mind and Taught Us to Find Ourselves (Icon Books)
“Wellness”, as opposed to “health”, was a term coined by Halbert L. Dunn in his 1961 book High-Level Wellness. “Health”, Dunn argued, had been fashioned under a medical model that saw the term as synonymous with “not sick”. “Wellness,” meanwhile, encouraged us to see our physical being in relation to a spectrum of wellbeing; starting at “not sick” as a baseline and then progressing ever upward in an intertwining series of incremental improvements to mind, body, and soul.
It took another fifteen years for this concept to catch on. In his expansive study, Riley draws out the many historical roots and consequences of the 1970s inward turn. In his last book, The Bad Trip, he dealt with the burnout of 1960s utopianism, and its spiralling into chaos and disorder: political, economical, and, particularly in relation to widescale drug addiction, physical.
In Well Beings, he continues his odyssey, tying together dozens of narrative strands in pursuit of the enigmatic wellness concept, and the attendant development of a wellness industry.
There are moments of knowing irony. The opening image of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop “brand ambassadors” taking a trip on the Celebrity Edge: a luxury liner providing wellness cruises.
There is anger here too. A discussion of public pools in San Francisco digresses into a sub-plot featuring the Black Panther party, zoning issues, firearms and access to healthcare in Oakland.
The strength of the book lies in its fragmentary, digressive nature. Similarly to David Hepworth’s 1971, the writings of John Robb, or the documentaries of Adam Curtis, Riley foregrounds the complexity of his era by spiralling around but never fully landing upon his core concept.
Most satisfying (as closest to the title of the book) are the earlier and later sections, where we meet a panoply of gurus, shamans and scheisters – from the well-meaning to the positively sadistic – who manage to create an industry out of their quasi-spiritual takes on “wellness”.
John C Lilly, who spend the 1950s working on mind control techniques for the CIA, begins communicating with dolphins in the 1960s and produces one of the many books of that era advertising a sort of neo-neoplatonist “higher consciousness”: The Centre of the Cyclone (1972).
He becomes a mentor to the lost and alienated computer programmer, Glenn Perry, and together they invent the floatation tank. The Esalen Institute, an experimental multi-treatment spa retreat that had recently opened on the Californian coast, agreed to showcase their invention. Sure enough, the rich, famous, and stressed, all wanted one, and the orders roll in…
Meanwhile, self-help for businessmen explodes as a mass industry. Primal screaming an encounter sessions, limited to assorted hippies and far-out celebrities like John and Yoko in the early 1970s, are part of the standard package at business conferences by the end of the decade.
It’s easy to forget that Patrick Bateman, flexing in the mirror while repeating success mantras, is an end point of a trajectory beginning with Zen Buddhism and the Beat poets and somehow finding its was through Napoleon Hill and “Think it! Dream it! Do it!” to produce the modern “sales guru” concept.
Riley’s kaleidoscopic approach to cultural history is rife with pleasing moments of incongruity like this. It’s the core strength of this kind of approach: one is left with a very strong impression of an era, one’s underlying connective structures are challenged and rearranged, although, ultimately, one never quite touches solid ground.
A suitable form, then, for a subject such as this.
Well Beings is a highly readable, alternative history of a well-publicised decade. As such, it should appeal both to specialist and general audiences. I’m certainly going to be getting my dad a copy for his birthday.
– Joe Darlington
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