Carpe Diem Regained

by Roman Krznaric

  Before you stock up on laudanum, the tincture of opium that became Coleridge’s constant companion and maybe even his inspiration, know first that it was this ‘milk of paradise’ that destroyed him. Once he was under its spell, the dazzling and excitable literary genius that he displayed in his youth went into sorry decline. Coleridge spent years fighting his addiction, which, by his early forties, became so acute that he even hired burly men to forcefully stop him from entering pharmacies. Over time, he became a self-absorbed, self-doubting and depressed man who could still be an entertaining talker (when on a drug high) but whose creative juices had long been spent. Although eventually gaining a public reputation as a philosophical sage, he spent his final years skulking around the back door of a chemist in Highgate desperate for his next fix.42

  Despite such stories, I believe there should be a place for mind-altering stimulants in our lives, not just because of the pleasures they can bring, but because they can be such a powerful catalyst for social change. Think of the drug-fuelled counter-culture of 1960s America. While any hippy worth their salt was turning on, tuning in and dropping out on a psychedelic bus tour across the country, taking drugs was just as much an act of defiance against the political establishment. Anti-Vietnam protesters turned their backs on the draft and joined Berkeley sit-ins where they lit up joints instead. Experimenting with peyote while living on an ashram was a fun way to spend a summer of love but also a rebellious gesture aimed at a consumer society that wanted its citizens wearing business suits and buying a nice house in the suburbs in imitation of the American Dream. It was after taking LSD in 1966 that the visionary thinker and activist Stewart Brand was struck by a question: Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet? It was the beginning of what became the Whole Earth Catalog, a publication that helped ignite the country’s environmental and simple living movements.43 While there is no need to romanticise the lives of self-destructive drug addicts like William Burroughs, there is no doubt that the anti-authoritarian and progressive politics of the 1960s was, to a significant degree, produced and sustained thanks to drug-induced hedonism. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm commented, Sixties drugs culture was a route to ‘shattering bonds of state, parental and neighbours’ power, law and convention… personal liberation and social liberation thus went hand in hand’.44

  These liberating effects of drugs are perhaps best understood by the Dutch. The Netherlands has long had a pragmatic and tolerant approach to drugs, which was initially driven by commercial interests. In the nineteenth century the Dutch cultivated coca on the island of Java, and in 1900 the government even established its own cocaine factory in Amsterdam, the Nederlandsche Cocaïnefabriek, which enabled it to dominate the global cocaine market within just ten years.45 While recreational drug use was banned for much of the twentieth century, popular pressure to legalise it emerged in the 1960s, driven by groups such as the radical Provo movement.46 In 1975 the Dutch unveiled one of their greatest inventions since the telescope in the seventeenth century: the ‘coffee shop’, where anyone was free to buy and consume cannabis in its various forms. Today there are hundreds of them scattered around the country, used by locals and tourists alike.

  The Dutch have developed a unique model of state-approved mind-altering hedonism, where the government effectively tolerates soft drug use. The policy, known as gedogen (legal toleration), generally works. Cannabis use in the Netherlands is around the European average (some 25% of people have tried it, with 7% being ‘recent users’), and much lower than in North America, where there is far stricter prohibition. Also, while Holland has its fair share of addicts, Dutch cannabis users are less likely than their US counterparts to have tried hard drugs like cocaine and heroin.47

  My own limited experience of Amsterdam’s coffee shops – strictly for research purposes of course – has convinced me that the Dutch have got it about right. After my first small experiment, which involved puffing my way through a poorly rolled joint on a bleak autumn afternoon, I ventured out to visit some Van Gogh paintings. I normally get bored extremely quickly in art galleries, but not on this occasion. The colours, the frames, the people walking past them, all possessed an astonishing intensity of being, as if I had shoplifted the experience straight out of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, where he describes the ‘Istigkeit’ – the ‘is-ness’ – of everyday objects after taking mescalin in 1953.

  As I drifted around with a somewhat inane smile on my face and a feeling of being absolutely in the moment, I mused that it would probably be a bit exhausting to be a top-flight Buddhist monk permanently in such a state of heightened awareness. Still, it was a useful reminder of how infrequently I give that much attention to the present, or to anything really, and that too much of my life is filled with emails and other distractions that prevent me from being in the here and now. While I can’t pretend that my afternoon wanderings were a radical anti-authoritarian act that could rival 1960s counter-culture, it still felt like a fundamental experience of imaginative liberty.

  Certainly we should beware of the dangers of drug abuse and addiction. Yet let’s not rule out a chance of returning, if only occasionally, to the hedonistic ecstasy of our childhood whirling on the grass.

  ON THE PLEASURES OF A FRIED EGG SANDWICH

  In her 1949 classic An Alphabet for Gourmets, the revered food writer M.F.K. Fisher makes the following confession in the chapter ‘G is for Gluttony’:

  As often as possible, when a really beautiful bottle of wine is before me, I drink all I can of it, even when I know I have had more than I want physically. That is gluttonous. But I think to myself, when again will I have this taste upon my tongue? Where else in the world is there just such wine as this, with just this bouquet, at just this heat, in just this crystal cup? And when again will I be alive to it as I am this very minute, sitting here on a green hillside above the sea, or here in this dim, murmuring, richly odorous restaurant, or here in this fisherman’s café on the wharf?48

  There may be no more eloquent defence of carpe diem hedonism: this very moment and everything it contains is set to disappear into oblivion – a little death never to be revived – so pour another glass. Yet there is the hint of elitism lurking beneath her words. How many people can really afford to drink such glorious wines in crystal cups? Isn’t there something inherently exclusionary in the seize-the-day philosophy of the refined gourmand, just as there was in the dining habits of wealthy ancient Romans?

  Thankfully Fisher is aware of this dilemma, which is why her books not only contain recipes for fancy dishes like quails à la financière but are also abundant with more down-to-earth delicacies. One of the most delicious is her recipe for Aunt Gwen’s Fried Egg Sandwiches: cook the eggs so they are as tough as leather, add plenty of dripping, wrap the sandwiches in grease-proof paper, then pop them into your pocket until they are nice and soggy, ready to be eaten at the top of a hill at sundown.49 Another concerns her discovery, while living in Strasbourg in the 1930s, of how to eat tangerines. ‘My pleasure in them,’ she wrote, ‘is subtle and voluptuous and quite inexplicable.’ The trick is to peel the tangerine in the morning, separate out each segment, tear off the white strings, then place the segments on newspaper on top of a hot radiator, where they should be forgotten about until the afternoon. They should then be eaten slowly, one by one, your teeth cracking through their little shells, ‘thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl’.50

  Such recipes are an ode to modesty rather than moderation. Fisher is not an advocate of restraint and self-control like the Stoics: her credo is to indulge yourself in the full-blown pleasures of the senses. Yet we can choose to do so, she believes, with a modesty that does not break the bank. Nearly everyone – at least in the West – can fry an egg or get their hands on a fresh tangerine. She is a culinary apostle of what I think of as ‘democratic hedonism’, a worthy ambition to spread hedonistic pleasures such as food and sex in an unequal world.

  There is one further step we can take to d
eepen the democratic potential of carpe diem gourmandism: to share the tangerine segments instead of hoarding them for ourselves. Sharing food, cooking it for others and extending hospitality are ancient forms of gift-giving that transcend the hyperindividualism of our market societies. When I was living for a short time in a refugee settlement in Guatemala, where food was scarce, I was invited one day to a community feast. Having eaten virtually nothing but corn tortillas with black beans for three weeks, I was given a small bowl containing some chicken stewed with tomatoes. The whole village ate together amidst the jungle mosquitos and stifling heat, perched on logs in the boggy mud. It was a modest affair. It was generous. It was deliciously hedonistic. And I felt, for the first time, a part of their community. I learned what anthropologists have known for over a century: that food rituals are a form of social exchange with the capacity to create relationships and empathy.

  BEYOND THE NEW PURITANISM

  Hedonism offers a powerful counter to the growing puritanism of today’s happiness industry, which threatens to turn us into self-controlled moderation addicts who rarely express a passionate lust for life. As we have seen, hedonism in its many forms can bring multiple benefits, from helping us explore our imaginations to being an expression of individual freedom. It is an essential ingredient of human wellbeing that should be part of any recipe for the good life.

  Like anything, hedonism can be taken too far. Nobody should want to end up like Elvis in his final years: drugged-up, vastly overweight and dead at forty-two. It might be best to cultivate a variety of hedonisms and not become addicted to any one type, helping to spread a healthy diversity of consciousness in society.51 And a useful rule of thumb would be to do so in short, intense bursts or pulses with plenty of breaks in between (everyone needs recovery time) rather than live for the bland moderation of little and often.

  Let’s not condemn hedonism as a doctrine worthy only of swine. We need it as a potent elixir of personal and social liberation. Hedonism puts us in touch with an experiential approach to living that goes to the core of what it means to be human. ‘Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end,’ wrote the Victorian cultural critic Walter Pater. ‘To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.’52

  Notes

  1 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J398v01n03_03

  2 Mill and Bentham 1987, 278; Veenhoven 2003, 437.

  3 Gilead 1985, 133–153; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7e6RRtAZkw

  4 Beard 2010, 216; https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2005/oct/29/television; Edwards 1988, 134; Fagan 2002, 36.

  5 Ehrenreich 2006, 46–56; Walton 2002, 25.

  6 http://www.u.arizona.edu/~afutrell/republic/web%20readings/livy39week11.html

  7 McMahon 2006, 55; Seneca 1932, Section 7; Blackburn 2004, 44–45.

  8 McMahon 2006, 54–57; Klein 2015, 9.

  9 Blackburn 2004, 44–53; Sorabji, R., 2000, 55–75; http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism/; Prose 2003, 9–10.

  10 Blackburn 2004, 51; Dabhoiwala 2013, 7.

  11 St Augustine’s moral thought was also influenced by the Greek Neoplatonists. Colish 1985, 143–144, 207.

  12 Walton 2002, 69, 147–151.

  13 Walton 2002, 140–141.

  14 Kringelbach 2009, 181.

  15 Blackburn 2004, 5; http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/publications/publications-a-z/409-the-truth-about-abstinence-only-programs

  16 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224499.2011.565429; https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-sexual-continuum/201112/how-often-do-men-and-women-think-about-sex

  17 Dabhoiwala 2013, 146–147.

  18 Gay 1984, 6; Foucault 1990, 3–5.

  19 Gay 1984, 3-5; Cannadine 1984, 1–9.

  20 Gay 1984, 461.

  21 Gay 1984, 82–83, 461.

  22 Gay 1984, 82–83, 461.

  23 Gay 1984, 90–96.

  24 Gay 1984, 81, 98, 107, 111, 133–137, 141, 144, 169, 172, 176, 197; Cannadine 1984, 1–9; Zeldin 1993, 295–297; Dabhoiwala 2013, 1–4.

  25 Burton 1963, 133–134.

  26 FitzGerald 2014, 7; Behtash 2012, 203.

  27 FitzGerald 2014, quatrain 35.

  28 For an interesting comparison of the Rubáiyát and Horace’s Odes, see Mierow (1917, 19–21).

  29 Behtash 2012, 203–205, 211.

  30 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/470/470-h/470-h.htm

  31 Gray 2013, 28, 33; Behtash 2012; 213.

  32 Wilde 1985, 45–46, 66.

  33 http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/wilde/Wildelibeltranowcross.html; Wilde 1985, 8; Muriqi 2007, 3.

  34 Comfort 1996, 7–11.

  35 Walton 2002, 9–10, 208–209.

  36 Quoted in Walton (2002, 145); Letcher 2006, 73–80.

  37 Walton 2002, 86–87.

  38 Walton 2002, 243.

  39 De Quincey 1862, v–vii.

  40 De Quincey 1862, 234, 268.

  41 Holmes 1989, 10.

  42 Holmes 1998, 354, 429, 502, 519; De Quincey 1862, 9–10; Walton 2002, 255.

  43 Wolfe 1989, 224.

  44 Hobsbawm 1995, 333.

  45 Grund and Breeksema 2013, 15.

  46 Shorto 2014, 287–301.

  47 Grund and Breeksema 2013, 3–4, 13, 16, 22, 47–48.

  48 Fisher 1963, 449.

  49 Fisher 1963, 452–456.

  50 Fisher 1963, 27–28.

  51 Walton 2002, 16.

  52 Pater 1924, 249–250.

  6

  Beyond the Now of Mindfulness

  In the final scene of Richard Linklater’s coming-of-age film Boyhood, two college students are sitting quietly on a rocky outcrop, staring out across a sparse, stony landscape. One of them, Nicole, turns to her companion Mason and remarks thoughtfully, ‘You know how everyone’s always saying “seize the moment”? I’m kinda thinkin’ it’s the other way around. Like the moment seizes us.’ ‘Yeah, I know,’ he replies, ‘it’s constant, the moments… it’s like it’s always right now.’

  This brief exchange marks an important shift: over the past two decades carpe diem has become increasingly associated with being in the here and now. Ask a roomful of people what ‘carpe diem’ or ‘seize the moment’ means to them, and you will be surprised by how many bypass the most common interpretation to date – that it’s about grasping the fleeting opportunities that life offers – and will instead say it involves being immersed in the present. The database developed for this book shows that this new usage was virtually non-existent in the media and other public sources before the 1990s, and around three-quarters of references to carpe diem as ‘presence’ have occurred since 2000. While the majority of people still associate seizing the day with taking advantage of windows of opportunity, around one in five today use it to mean experiencing the ‘now’, a timeless instant where we are unencumbered by memories of the past or thoughts of the future.1 The day itself no longer matters and has been reduced down to a single moment.

  How has this happened? How could such an ancient philosophy of living have gained such a radically new additional meaning in such a short space of time?

  There is one overriding explanation: the rise of the mindfulness movement. Since the turn of the millennium, mindfulness – by which I mean the modern, secularised practice rather than the ancient Buddhist tradition of mindfulness meditation on which it is based – has become a major international success story. Hundreds of thousands of people (myself included) have taken mindfulness courses in community centres, hospitals, businesses and schools, learning techniques to calm the mind and focus attention on the present. A flood of scientific studies has inundated the media, proving its impact on tackling multiple maladies from anxiety and depression to violent behaviour and heart disease. It can even help you stop smoking. Mindfulness, says one of its leading researchers, Jon Kabat-Zinn, ‘has the potential to ignite a universal or global renaissance… that would put even the European and Italian Renaissance into the shade.’ It
may, he believes, ‘be the only promise the species and the planet have for making it through the next couple of hundred years’.2

  It sounds almost too good to be true. And it is. Because the very real positive effects of mindfulness have been accompanied by collateral damage that its adherents rarely recognise. Mindfulness has ridden such a wave of popularity that it is seldom subject to critical reflection. It’s time to inject more intellectual honesty by exploring three problems. For a start, the popular secularised version of mindfulness – as opposed to the centuries-old Buddhist tradition – has ended up focusing too much on the self, leaving it thin on moral foundations. Second, in placing so much emphasis on attending to the present moment, it overlooks how much human beings thrive on striving for meaningful future goals. Finally, mindfulness as it is typically practised today has increasingly come to overshadow other existentially rewarding ways of being in the now, namely exuberance, flow, wonder and collective ecstasy. There’s a difference between the sense of presence that comes from quieting the mind during a meditation session in your local community hall, and the feeling of exhilarating presence you can get while playing a high-energy basketball match or dancing ecstatically with the crowd at a music festival. In other words, mindfulness is just one amongst many varieties of now.

  More fundamentally, the modern mindfulness movement has – largely unintentionally – hijacked the carpe diem tradition: opportunity, hedonism, spontaneity and politics are all at risk of being displaced by the power of now. Indeed, many books and courses explicitly equate Horace’s ideal with mindfulness itself. According to the website of one university medical clinic that uses mindfulness in its treatment programmes, ‘Mindfulness is an innate ability to be present in the moment and seize the day.’3 While carpe diem can become a richer philosophy by including mindfulness as one of its approaches, we should ensure that this approach does not come to dominate over all the rest.