The Hungry Spirit: New Thinking for a New World

by Charles Handy

  This sounds like hard work. It would be more convenient if others did the philosophizing for us. Isn’t that, some may say, what we pay governments for? But that is to misunderstand democracy. Democracy assumes that individuals must be allowed to be the best judge of their own interests, even if they often seem to be misguided. Governments are not there to tell us what to believe or think, they are there to represent our beliefs, and to translate them into laws or regulations. Socrates also sought the meaning of truth, justice, beauty and the decent society, but he did it by questioning people about how they understood those words. It is inadequate to borrow beliefs. We have to work them out for ourselves.

  In 1996 Britain was swept by a wave of oral indignation, sparked by some tragic incidents of violence, by an increase in cases of child abuse and by the breakdown of discipline in some schools and neighbourhoods. The government had no option but to respond, and to go even further in some of the measures proposed than they felt was practical. In representing the people they had to go where the people wanted. It was interesting that this outpouring of feeling was sparked by concerns for the sort of society we were creating. If more people knew what they felt about life and society, governments would have no choice but to respond. If we sit silent only Edmund Burke’s grasshoppers will be heard.

  SIX

  THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

  THE SEARCH FOR the best in ourselves is only the beginning. We need a purpose for these selves.

  There is, first, the elusive question of where we are heading, of what success might mean. Nietzsche said that those who have a Why can endure any How, but it is the Why that is difficult. The mother of the child with cerebral palsy could testify to the truth of that. We all need a ‘telos’, a dream of what might be, to give us energy for the journey.

  Secondly, there is the paradoxical doctrine of ‘Enough’. You cannot move on to a different track unless you realize that you have gone far enough on the present one. If you don’t know what enough is, in material or achievement terms, you are trapped in a rut of your own devising and will never learn what might be outside that rut.

  Thirdly, we all need a taste of the sublime, to lift our hearts, to give us a hint of something bigger than ourselves and of the infinite possibilities of life. The Department of Education in Britain sums it up rather well, in their official definition of spirituality: ‘The valuing of the non-material aspects of life, and intimations of an enduring reality.’

  Fourthly, and lastly, there is the challenge of immortality. No, we can’t live for ever, at least in this world, and we can’t take anything with us, but we can leave a bit of ourselves behind, as proof that we made a difference, to someone. That only happens, I believe, by concentrating on others, the ultimate paradox of proper selfishness.

  Put the four elements together and you have a reason for living, even though it does end up as a perpetual quest, with an uncertain ending. The journey is the point, not the arrival. To settle for anything less is to accept that one is content to be a happy cabbage.

  I will argue, later, that these four requirements apply to institutions and to businesses as much as they do to individuals, but our first concern is properly with ourselves.

  THE DREAM

  At one time, I was under considerable stress. Work was difficult and that meant less time and energy for my family or for other interests, which created yet more problems. After some persuasion I went to a psychotherapist. He asked me what I was trying to do with my life. A good question, and one I was ready for. With appropriate humility I said that I was trying to improve the world a little bit, through my work. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘that’s wonderful, so now we have this grand quartet – Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Karl Marx . . . and Charles Handy.’ I was indignant that I should be paying good money for this mockery from someone who was supposed to be on my side. It took a week or two, but when I quietened down, I eventually realized that he was telling me that if you want to change the world you have to start with your own life. As the Aborigines in Australia put it, ‘You must become the change you want to see in the world.’

  There is a passage in the Gospel of Thomas, one of the non-official Gnostic Gospels which you won’t find in the Bible. It goes like this: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, then what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’ To that add a remark by the Director of the Boston Fine Arts Museum. He said, ‘We used to think that it was a special sort of person who became an artist or an actor or whatever. Now I think that’s wrong. I think that every person is an artist in some way.’ We don’t have to change the world, it is challenge enough to live up to our dream of what kind of person we could be. That, in itself, will make a difference. I also like the Japanese idea that life is a game, not a trivial child’s game, but a serious game, a challenge. It is our job to excel in this game of life with whatever skill or expertise we have.

  I can’t say that I find it easy to walk my own talk. I come from a long line of preachers, and preaching comes easier to me than practising, but a part of life is crossing things off a list, until you are left with what is real and genuine at last. As Michelangelo said, the perfect form lies concealed in the block of stone; all that is needed is to chip away until it is revealed. I was fortunate. I got some things out of my system early on. Posted by my company to what had been an outpost of the old British Empire, I was the manager of the sales company in Sarawak in my twenties – my own command. I also lived what was, by the standards of my vicarage upbringing, a life of luxury, with servants, chauffeur and even an armed sentry at night. These people were all paid by the company. I had no personal wealth but all the appurtenances of wealth at an indecently early age.

  Needless to say, I am now deeply ashamed of all that self-indulgence in a country that was, at that time, poor but proud. It was, however, a chance to indulge all my more materialist needs, and, thereafter, to begin to move on, first from a state of Sustenance (I began to have confidence that I would survive) to an Outer Directed life, where I could pursue achievement in different fields, and finally to one more Inner Directed. The material things that some hope to find towards the end of their working life, I chanced upon early in my career. Three years later I was back in London on promotion, living in a basement flat, unable to pay the gas bill.

  The dream later changed, after the death of my father. I realized that to be truly worthwhile it had to be directed beyond myself, and had to be decently modest in ambition if it was to be fulfilled. These days, as I revisit my life in my Sixties, I would settle for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s definition of success:

  To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you lived; this is to have succeeded.

  Too pious? Maybe. And I still have those occasional worries about survival and the desires for public recognition which go with Sustenance and Outer Directed values. But maybe we underestimate the simple decency of most people’s ambitions. I first came across Emerson’s words in a small art gallery in the back streets of Mumbai, which used to be called Bombay. I was struck how something written more than a century ago can still find resonance in parts, at least, of both old India and modern Britain.

  Our dream for ourselves is not entirely rational. It is certainly not defined only in monetary terms, as we have seen, even though money is often a means of recognition, not just a way of satisfying material needs. Entrepreneurs don’t want their millions because they need to buy things with them, they want them because they are the outward sign of their success in venturing, in adding new value to the world. Top professionals don’t physically need all the money they can earn; they want it to show how successful the
y are. They want the recognition that they have been an artist in their own way in the great game of life.

  Rationality doesn’t explain our occasional willingness to fight for those we hold dear, be they people or causes – our impetuous leap into a river to save a drowning child, a lifetime of dedication to helping incurables or a desire to work among the poor for little thanks and no public recognition. Yet, for some, these actions or callings are the stuff of their lives, and we should be grateful that it is so. The heart has its reasons, said Pascal, which reason knows not of. There is no universal criterion for success or for individual dreams. For each their own, and hence the hunger.

  For many years I used the obituary exercise. I worked out, from medical tables, that, unless I met with an accident or abused my body too much, I was statistically likely to live to the age of 77. I then composed the short memorial address that I should ideally like to be given at my funeral by one of my oldest and best friends. This sort of exercise forces you to look back on your life and pick out the things of which you are most proud. It is a way of focusing on your dream. The exercise, after a time, became too familiar. It had served its purpose. These days I keep a sealed envelope with a letter to my two children to be read by them after my death. I try to review it every year. In it I find myself spelling out the values by which I have tried to live my life, and my hopes for them. It is another way of creating the talk which I must then try to walk.

  THE DOCTRINE OF ENOUGH

  ‘Roses need pruning if they are to flower,’ a friend replied when I complained of being overstretched. With great reluctance, because I was enjoying the spread of my activities, although conscious that nothing much was coming out of them all, I resigned from seven different committees and groups on the same day. Only two of them replied to my resignation letter. Obviously the rest did not notice, or mind, whether I was there or not. It was my first introduction to the Doctrine of Enough, or what we might, more elegantly, call a Decent Sufficiency, or, more academically, a Theory of Limits.

  In most of life we can recognize ‘enough’. We know when we have had enough to eat, when the heating or the air conditioning is enough, when we have had enough sleep or done enough preparation. More than enough is then unnecessary, and can even be counterproductive. We could, with advantage, recognize when the level of enough has been reached in other fields. Those who do not know what enough is, cannot move on. They do not explore new worlds, they do not learn, they grow only on one dimension. They are, I believe, unlikely to earn their white stone. They are trapped in the rut of their own success, always wanting more of the same, always dissatisfied, never knowing the feeling of abundance. Asked what enough was, John D. Rockefeller replied ‘just one more!’ In this philosophy more is not necessarily better. We have to travel what the ancients called the via negativa. We have to learn to say ‘no’ in order to move on. Arguably, in fact, the lower you define your level of enough, the sooner you will taste abundance and the freer you will be.

  On the other hand, in another sense, enough is never enough. I remember being chided by my teacher after one examination.

  ‘That was a poor performance,’ he said, ‘I expected more of you.’

  ‘I passed, didn’t I?’ I replied indignantly. ‘Isn’t that good enough?’

  ‘But you could have done better. Enough is never enough where your personal standards are involved. You let yourself down.’

  Personal growth, the search for the white stone, has no limits. Everything else does.

  Growth does not have to mean more of the same. It can mean better rather than bigger. It can mean leaner or deeper, both of which might improve rather than expand the current position. Businesses can grow more profitable by becoming better, or leaner, or deeper, more concentrated, without growing bigger. Bigness, in both business and life, can lead to a lack of focus, too much complexity and, in the end, too wide a spread to control. We have to know when big is big enough.

  Businesses, for instance, which aim to match or exceed last year’s growth rate give themselves a harder task each year: 10% this year is the equivalent of 11% last year. Like Sisyphus, in the Greek myth, no matter how hard they push the stone they will never get to the top of the hill. Even if they do, they will by then be so large that they will be dismembered, by choice or force, and will have to start all over again. Look at ICI or Hanson in the UK, both of which grew only to split when they got too big. There is an alternative. Once big enough they can grow better, not bigger. It is a formula which Germany’s Mittelstandler, their small family firms, have tried and tested to great advantage, content to corner and dominate one small niche market, through constant improvement and innovation. Rich enough, and big enough, they concentrate on the pursuit of excellence, for its own sake as much as anything.

  Society, too, has the same choice – bigger or better. We could choose to trade off some efficiency in exchange for more fairness, because the other side of the philosophy of enough is the right of everyone to taste the possibility of enough. Take Japan, where some domestic industries, such as petrol sales, are rigorously price controlled. The companies are forced to compete on service, not price, which is kept high. The result is that a visit to a service station in Japan is like a visit to a beauty parlour with attendants swarming all over the car. Compare that to the price competitive, cost efficient world of the West where you usually have to fill your own vehicle, where to make the customer do the work is seen as smart business, and where any young people to be seen are more likely to rob you than to help you, being unemployed, envious and resentful. Yet we still pay for these young people, through our taxes.

  Many would prefer the Japanese way, which recognizes that there can be proper limits to price competition in the interest of a decent society. Better, not richer. We can’t do it in our export industries but we could in the domestic sphere, and we certainly could in the public sector. Higher prices domestically but more jobs seems a reasonable trade-off for a fair society, but one that runs against conventional wisdom, which argues in favour of lower costs, and prices, to make more jobs. Japan has recently changed her mind and decided to deregulate her domestic economy in order to stimulate growth. We might predict that more unemployment, every and violence will soon be seen in Japan as more people lose the chance of defining their own level of enough.

  More broadly, a society that does not recognize the morality of ‘enough’ will see excesses arise which verge on the obscene, as those who have first choice of society’s riches appropriate them for themselves. Democracy will not long tolerate such an abuse of the market. We are, as I have already observed, in the midst of what has been called the ascendancy of the Professionals. Historically, in the Agrarian Revolution, our hunter-gatherer ancestors were replaced by a land-owning class, who were, in turn, replaced in the Industrial Revolution by the owners of the mills and the factories. In each case, it was the self-indulgence of the current ruling class that ultimately led to their replacement. The Professionals of today – a classification which includes top managers, consultants and financiers as well as lawyers, doctors and other older professions, need to be aware of the danger. It was Edmund Burke who said, ‘Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.’

  When senior executives of companies earn fifty, sometimes even one hundred, times the pay of their own workers, it is hard not to feel that it is an affront to those workers. The executives compare their exotic salaries and benefits to the rewards given to the stars of sports or films or music, but these have earned their rewards by their own individual efforts, whereas the executives are supposed to be members of a team. Would the team, one often wonders, do so much worse if that particular player was absent?

  ‘I couldn’t run my company on the basis of this doctrine of enough,’ one chief executive told me. ‘No one would want to work there.’ I could not help replying that if material greed was the main basis for people choosing to join his company
it must be a very uninspiring place. Money is sometimes a substitute for other things.

  The philosophy of ‘enough’ cannot be imposed on a society. It is a matter of norms, not laws. But norms are set by the elite, whose example sets the fashion. What the top does today, the middle imitates tomorrow, and the bottom aspires to, some day. Noblesse oblige, as always, but laws can help to nudge the noblesse in the right direction. A progressive consumption tax, for instance, which taxes expenditure not income, but which increases with the price of the goods, would make conspicuous consumption too expensive to be worth it, while keeping cheap things cheap. Alternatively, a tax regime which permitted top salaries to be tax deductible only up to a certain limit, would make some of today’s executive remuneration packages more obviously a theft of shareholders’ funds. But laws only work if they reinforce what society feels to be right. There is, in the end, no way that laws can substitute for values.

  I have always been interested in the stipendiary principle. This principle, long adopted by religious organizations, seeks to guarantee their people enough to live on, leaving them free of worry about their material needs and, therefore, free to concentrate on their real work, their calling or vocation. It is a principle that used to apply to all public servants, including politicians, but which has now become eroded, partly because inflation mucked up the calculations and partly because people started comparing the standards of ‘enough’ across occupational groups, thereby effectively entering the market society with all its implications for a change in the measuring stick. My father, as a country parson, lived on a stipend. We weren’t rich, but we never starved. Money was never the measure of anything he did and his life was the freer for it.