Carpe Diem Regained

by Roman Krznaric

  THE MACHIAVELLIAN WAY TO SEIZE THE DAY

  Amongst the most powerful cultural myths that emerged in the nineteenth century was the idea of the self-made man. One of its champions was Samuel Smiles, author of the 1859 bestseller Self-Help. Holding up figures such as Benjamin Franklin, he argued that success in life – whether as a businessman, politician, inventor or artist – was chiefly a matter of individual industry and application, perseverance and prudence, efficiency and self-improvement. ‘The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual,’ wrote Smiles. ‘Help from without is often enfeebling in its effect, but help from within invariably invigorates.’30

  In what ways was it a myth? Look no further than the post-Civil War economic boom in the United States, in the decades immediately after Smiles published his book. The vast majority of those who achieved worldly success were not self-made but normally started with the advantages of wealth, education and social contacts: a study of 300 US textile, steel and railroad executives in the 1870s showed that 90% came from middle-class or upper-class families.31 But it was also a myth that an essential ingredient of self-help success was to be what Smiles called a man of ‘noble character’ who embodied ‘truthfulness, integrity and goodness’.32 In reality, an overriding character trait of those who managed to rise to the top of the financial heap was that they were seize-the-day opportunists who were perfectly prepared to lie, bribe, steal, exploit and bend the rules in order to amass their personal fortunes. The most famous of them became known as the ‘robber barons’, who presided over an era of economic freewheeling and corruption that historians have referred to as ‘bandit capitalism’.33

  Chief amongst the bandits was the railway magnate Jay Gould, who in 1868 spent $1 million to bribe members of the New York legislature to legalise his issue of $8 million of so-called ‘watered stock’ (stock not representing real value) in the Erie Railroad. Gould’s opportunism made him millions and gave him control of the company.34 Then there was the banker J.P. Morgan, whose profiteering during the Civil War tarnished his later gentlemanly reputation: in a notorious deal, he was involved in purchasing 5000 rifles for $3.50 each from a Union army arsenal and selling them to a general from the very same army for $22 each – while omitting to mention that the rifles were defective and would shoot off the thumb of any soldier using one.35 Morgan was later on the receiving end of such deception when Andrew Carnegie sold him his steel company in 1901 at a vastly inflated price by lying about its profits. As one historian points out, Carnegie cheated and lied ‘egregiously, consistently, and continually’ to become one of the world’s richest men.36 It was an approach to business well understood by Al Capone, who found his own way of expressing the carpe diem ideal: ‘This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.’37

  The bad behaviour of the robber barons does not surprise us today. We can all reel off lists of corporations and businessmen – from Enron to Jordan ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ Belfort – who have grabbed opportunities by using underhand methods ranging from accounting fraud and bribery to tax loopholes and making political donations to gain government favours. Such opportunists who sacrifice integrity for selfishness, greed and personal gain represent a dark side of carpe diem. They are the heirs of Machiavelli’s The Prince – the first ever handbook on opportunism – which advised rulers to ‘learn how not to be virtuous’ in order to maintain their power.38

  If ever we are tempted to indulge in a little opportunism of this kind ourselves, it is worth remembering that it is easy to get our fingers – or our wallet – burned, as happened to Tommy Wilhelm, the lead character in Saul Bellow’s novel Seize the Day. His life is a mess. His marriage has fallen apart, he has failed in his acting career, he can’t get on with his successful father and he is in a big financial hole. It’s all sent him spiralling into malaise. But then he meets Dr Tamkin, a philosophical commodities trader who convinces him to bet all his savings on the stock market, encouraging him with carpe diem fervour: ‘The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real – the here and now. Seize the day… Grasp the hour, the moment, the instant.’39 Tamkin, unfortunately, turns out to be an opportunistic conman rather than a saviour, and swindles Wilhelm out of every dollar he has. Bellow’s story may be a carpe diem parable for us all.

  A SHORT GUIDE TO ESCAPING A RUSSIAN PRISON

  We should not forget a final persona who attempts to see beyond the straitjacket of the self in the search for windows of opportunity. This is the revolutionary, who doesn’t just try to seize the day but aims to seize history itself and radically alter public life. From the rebel slave Spartacus who led a violent revolt against the Roman Empire to the rebel pacifist lawyer Gandhi who challenged the might of the British Empire, the great revolutionary figures of the past have looked to grasp opportunities for fundamental change and catch fresh political winds that blow away power and privilege.

  One of the most fascinating – yet relatively unknown – exemplars of this tradition is the Russian anarchist and geographer Peter Kropotkin. He was born in 1842 into an aristocratic family that owned over 1,200 serfs and several estates, and educated at an elite military academy, where he was chosen as a personal page de chambre of Tsar Alexander II. Yet Kropotkin (unlike Tolstoy) completely abandoned his upper-class background, reinventing himself as a revolutionary activist and intellectual whose prophetic books challenged the image of anarchism as a nihilistic and violent ideology, giving it a serious philosophical and scientific basis. Amongst them was Mutual Aid, which contested Darwinism by arguing that cooperation was a stronger evolutionary force in nature than competition (an idea currently much in vogue), and The Conquest of Bread, which foresaw the totalitarian tendencies of Marxist socialism and argued that true freedom would only come from a society based around worker cooperatives and voluntary organisations (he was a great fan of what became the Royal National Lifeboat Institution).

  In the 1860s Kropotkin held military appointments in Siberia, where he led surveying expeditions that established his reputation as a prominent geographer, and had his first direct contact with peasants living in extreme deprivation, which began to awaken his political consciousness. The death of his overbearing father in 1871 was a liberation; finally he felt free to live his own life. With carpe diem gusto he abandoned the steady job he had acquired in the Russian civil service and travelled to Western Europe, drawn by the political upheavals of the Paris Commune and the growing international workers’ movement. He went to Switzerland, where he read every piece of radical literature he could get his hands on, and spent time with the poor watchmakers of the Jura region, whose political ideals were so inspiring that he adopted them as his own: he became a convinced anarchist, believing – in contrast with the socialists – that society could be organised without a dominant centralised state into a system of decentralised federations.40

  Returning to Russia, Kropotkin saw that growing discontent with imperial rule was creating an opportunity for political change. He made an effort to seize it by joining a secret society, the Chaikovsky Circle, to spread revolutionary ideas amongst peasants and workers.41 Constantly on the run from the Tsar’s secret police, Kropotkin took enormous risks. For example, disguised as a peasant named Borodin, he spoke at clandestine meetings of weavers and cotton workers urging them to agitate and organise. But his luck didn’t last. With members of the Chaikovsky Circle being arrested in early 1874, Kropotkin was about to flee St Petersburg but couldn’t resist staying an extra week to give a scientific paper to the Geographical Society on glacial formation in Finland and Russia. Just hours after his presentation he was arrested. (Never seize the podium when you should be seizing the day.)

  Kropotkin spent the next twenty-one months imprisoned in solitary confinement in the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress. Never a procrastinator, he took t
he opportunity to write a massive two-volume book on glacial periods in his tiny, damp cell. His vigorous intellectual activity did not protect him from contracting rheumatism and scurvy, and his health began to deteriorate rapidly. After being transferred to a prison hospital, he realised that the lax security offered the chance of escape, so he hatched a daring plan, smuggling secret messages to his supporters. He could easily have been shot but, as he wrote in his memoirs, ‘against a certain death in prison, the thing is well worth the risk’.42

  The day for the escape came. He went out for a walk in the prison yard at 4pm. Someone started playing a mazurka excitedly on a violin in a nearby house. That was the signal.

  I turned around. The sentry had stopped five or six paces behind me; he was looking the other way. ‘Now or never!’ I remember that thought flashing through my head. I flung off my green flannel dressing-gown and began to run.43

  It was the perfect carpe diem window of opportunity. He dashed for the open gate with the guard now giving chase, trying to thrust his bayonet into Kropotkin’s back. But Kropotkin just managed to fling himself onto a waiting cart, which quickly galloped away. That night police swarmed across St Petersburg looking for the escapee. But by then Kropotkin had shaved off his beard and, with seize-the-day panache, he went out with a friend for dinner in an elegant coat and opera hat at one of the city’s fanciest restaurants, correctly guessing that the police would never think of looking for him anywhere so obvious.

  After his time in prison, Kropotkin was ready to ‘enjoy the full intensity of life’.44 For most of the next forty years he lived in exile in Europe, constantly hounded by Russian spies, being thrown in jail for his political activities, and working around the clock to build up the international anarchist movement. He deeply believed that he was living at a moment in history when it was genuinely possible to create revolutionary change that would forge a more equal and free society. He might have been overly optimistic. But there is no doubt he thought that the best way to make it happen was to live a carpe diem life of jumping at the now-or-never. And this may be one of his most important legacies for the political and ecological activists of today.

  SCREW IT, JUST DO IT?

  We can now line up before us a parade of characters who reveal some – but by no means all – of the most essential ways of catching the winds of opportunity: experimentalist and death gazer, daredevil and role breaker, opportunist and revolutionary. Some of them you may admire, while others might attract your criticism. Would you really want a mother who suddenly disappears for a year to go dancing around Europe? Or a husband who has a compulsive need to risk his life in war zones while you stay at home looking after the kids? There are probably easier people to live with. Yet rather than judge them, I think their main role is to help us ask questions about who we are and who we want to be. Are we clinging too tightly to security when we might benefit from more winging it like Maya Angelou? Is it time to follow Maude’s lead and let go of the small stuff, all the distractions filling our lives, the things that don’t really matter? Do you identify with Eve Hoare, caught in the narrative of roles that lock you into a life that isn’t really of your own making?

  Seizing opportunities, in whatever form, inevitably involves making choices. It requires shaking off passivity and taking an active decision to shift our direction of travel. One challenge of doing so is that many of us are afraid. We live in fear of freedom. We would rather stick with the security of what we know than take a chance, or just go with the flow and have our choices made for us, and so evade the responsibility and anxiety of making decisions. Yet we cannot avoid this simple fact: not choosing is a choice in itself. To continue coasting along with our existing mode of living is a decision we make and, as Sartre insisted, we must take responsibility for it. ‘What is not possible is not to choose’, he wrote, and ‘I must know that if I do not choose, that is still a choice.’45

  All too often we coast along all the same, because the psychological barriers to carpe diem can be formidable, and in a later chapter I will be delving into the most important of them: procrastination, risk, apathy and overload. Right now, however, I would like to mention a much more practical barrier, over which we may have little control: money.

  It is hardly an issue for some people, like the swashbuckling entrepreneur Richard Branson, whose seize-the-day philosophy of ‘screw it, just do it’ has sent him attempting to circumnavigate the globe in a hot air balloon, kitesurfing across the English Channel, and investing millions in space tourism. ‘Most of Virgin’s successes can be attributed to carpe diem moments spurred by optimism,’ he tweeted to his 5.4 million followers in 2014, alongside a photo of himself beaming his winning smile in front of a Virgin jet.46

  He makes it sound easy. But let’s not fall for the self-help fantasy that we can all be whoever we want to be and seize whatever we want to seize. Our choices and opportunities are limited by circumstance. While it isn’t hard to be a carpe diem optimist if you are a billionaire like Branson, the options are limited for the thousands of entrepreneurial refugees living in Britain and other countries who find it difficult to get a bank loan to start up a business, or whose family obligations mean they can’t afford the risk of giving up their double-shift cleaning job to pursue their career ambitions. They’re even limited for a recent middle-class graduate carrying the burden of £44,000 of student debt (Britain’s national average).47 How much freedom do they really feel to invent their lives?

  While some people resemble Maya Angelou in possessing the confidence and determination to defy the limits of economic circumstance, the truth is that for many, it is most realistic to seize opportunities in realms that are not circumscribed by wealth or power, such as personal relationships, creative endeavours or political action. Even with an almost empty wallet it is generally possible to take the risk of making peace with a sibling you have been fighting with, or to stand up and sing at the open-mic night at your local pub, or to make your voice heard at a community meeting.

  If we grasp the opportunities before us, we will be giving ourselves the greatest carpe diem gift imaginable, while at the same time keeping the shadow of regret at bay. Here we are at the cutting edge of our one and only life, this very second that is about to tip us into an unknown future. What are we going to do? What choices will we make?

  Few people have understood the importance of such questions better than Henry David Thoreau, as revealed in a journal entry from April 1859. With its maritime metaphors, perhaps he knew that the word ‘opportunity’ came from a Latin phrase for a favourable wind that a ship might catch:

  Nothing must be postponed. Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this. Where the good husbandman is, there is the good soil. Take any other course, and life will be a succession of regrets. Let us see vessels sailing prosperously before the wind, and not simply stranded barks. There is no world for the penitent and regretful.48

  Notes

  1 Smith-Laing, Whalen and Krznaric 2015.

  2 Angelou 2009, ix.

  3 Angelou 2004, 232, 310, 460–464.

  4 Angelou 2009, 1.

  5 Angelou 2004, 416.

  6 Angelou 2004, 510–511, 605, 1005.

  7 Angelou 2004, 1163.

  8 http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/412350.html

  9 http://www.theguardian.com/news/oliver-burkeman-s-blog/2014/may/21/everyone-is-totally-just-winging-it

  10 http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/Harold-and-Maude.htm

  11 Tedeschi and Calhoun 2004, 2.

  12 Tedeschi and Calhoun 2004, 6; Ring 1996, 187–190; Yalom 1980,36; Noyes 1980, 235; http://www.ted.com/conversations/2306/what_3_things_did_you_learn_wh.html

  13 Noyes 1980, 237–238; Yalom 1980, 33–40.

  14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPfe3
rCcUeQ

  15 Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynksi 2015, 197.

  16 McCullin 1992, 187.

  17 McCullin 1992, 218.

  18 Morris and Morris 2012.

  19 Morris and Morris 2012; McCullin 1992, 15, 53.

  20 Morris and Morris 2012.

  21 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/aug/06/photography.art

  22 Marsh, James 2008.

  23 Adams 2001, 15–17.

  24 Sennett 1986, 34; Goffman 1956, 11–12.

  25 Personal communication 12.03.15.

  26 Sartre 1969, 59–60; Phillips 1981, 23–24; Vaneigem 2012, 114–116.

  27 Hogg and Vaughan 2005, 304.

  28 Krznaric, Whalen and Zeldin 2006, 328.

  29 Krznaric, Whalen and Zeldin 2006, 338, 340.

  30 Smiles 1968, 11; Josephson 1962, 10; Salecl 2010, 19–22.

  31 Zinn 1995, 248.

  32 Smiles 1968, 247.

  33 Morris 2006, 60.

  34 Zinn 1995, 248; Morris 2006, 65.

  35 Zinn 1995 249; Morris 2006, 27.

  36 Morris 2006, 16.

  37 Quoted in Moore (2008, 11).

  38 Machiavelli 1961, 91.

  39 Bellow 2001, 66, 90; Mathis 1965, 43.

  40 Marshall 2008, 311; Woodcock and Avakumović 1971, 119; Kropotkin 1978, 202.

  41 Kropotkin 1978, 221–229.

  42 Kropotkin 1978, 254.

  43 Kropotkin 1978, 256.

  44 Kropotkin 1978,261.

  45 Sartre 1946, 14.

  46 Tweet by @richardbranson, November 21st, 2014.

  47 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-26954901

  48 http://hdt.typepad.com/henrys_blog/2010/04/april-24-1859.html

  5

  The Hidden Virtues of Hedonism