The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010)

by Michael Foley

  The key Stoic virtue is detachment – if it is not possible to influence the world, it is at least possible to moderate the world’s influence on the self – but the purpose of this detachment is understanding rather than contempt. And it does not imply withdrawal or fatalistic indifference. The Stoic strategy is not to avoid experience or to accept it passively, but to make something of it: ‘If our inner power is true to Nature, it will always adjust to the possibilities offered by circumstance. It requires nothing predetermined and is willing to compromise; obstacles are merely converted into material for use. It is like a bonfire mastering a heap of rubbish.’60 Complaining is, of course, entirely out of the question – Epictetus: ‘The proper goal of our activity is to practise how to remove from one’s life sorrows and laments and cries of ‘alas’ and ‘poor me’.’61 But Aurelius has the maxim for the coffee mug: ‘To refrain from imitating is the best revenge.’62

  Unfortunately, this fruitful speculation on how to live in the world was obliterated for over a thousand years by Christianity’s rejection of the possibility of terrestrial happiness. Yet Christ, often regarded as the most unworldly of men, was in fact much concerned with the world and offered useful advice on how to deal with it. Firstly, he rejected, with startlingly consistent vehemence, loyalty to family and tribe: ‘a man’s foes shall be they of his own household’.63 Then he considered the phenomenon of the Pharisees, the Scribes. These were men with power but no authority – a crucial distinction. Authority earns respect, power demands it; authority requires no trappings, power needs imposing robes; authority is forthright, power is secretive; authority is the open heart, power is the closed fist. So Matthew says of Christ: ‘For he taught them as one having authority and not as the Scribes.’64 The Scribes believed in rules rather than principles, status rather than achievement, hypocrisy rather than virtue. So they were always trying to drag Christ into case law and make him contravene prohibitions – and Christ always refused rules and insisted that every case be decided from first principles. If a sheep falls into a pit on the Sabbath do you obey the prohibition on work or pull the sheep out?65 And he consistently denounced hypocrisy, a key theme in the New Testament, but rarely mentioned by Christians.

  Christ’s conflict with the Pharisees is permanently relevant because there are Pharisees in every period and culture. Like the poor, the Pharisees are always with us. They rarely seize power or define its supporting ideology, but they will serve any regime and implement any plan. They are the French civil servants who delivered their Jewish fellow citizens to the Nazis, the communist apparatchiks who betrayed their neighbours to the secret police, the righteous zealots who imposed political correctness at the end of the twentieth century – and the colleagues who speak at length in every meeting, in loud confident tones that suggest critical independence, but never deviate from the official line. Pharisees are among the most important transmitters of cultural norms and they will switch effortlessly to new values without even being conscious of the move. So they have learned to be PC in both senses. Where for centuries they were solemn, they are now Professionally Cheerful, although they still have no sense of humour. And, as Christ understood, they can never be defeated because they always hold the power, propagate official ideas and follow official procedure. Christ’s advice was ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s’66 – give to power only the necessary minimum and no more.

  The Pharisee is the type defined by Fromm as the ‘authoritarian character’67, who worships power for its own sake, reveres the powerful and despises the powerless. In other words, the orientation is sadomasochistic – kiss up and piss down. This type will also fear, loathe and seek to suppress those like Christ who have authority and do not need or seek power.

  These ideas – the Stoic belief in making use of inevitable adversity, Christ’s insistence on a morality based on principle rather than prescription, and the Freudian understanding of the sadomasochistic nature of power – came together in the mid-twentieth century in existentialism, one of the few philosophical movements fully to consider the relationship of the self to the world. The key concept is personal responsibility. As Sartre expressed it: ‘Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.’68 But this is not an excuse for withdrawal and isolation. On the contrary, it makes engagement necessary at all levels, from personal relationships to group membership. For responsibility requires the unremitting exercise of choice, which, though frequently painful, is the only way of transcending circumstance and self. But every choice ends in finitude so there can be no question of living in perpetual anticipation. Søren Kierkegaard, the proto-existentialist, wrote, ‘This is the despair of possibility. Possibility then appears to the self ever greater and greater, more and more things become possible, because nothing becomes actual. At last it is as if everything were possible.’69 Kierkegaard argued that the self needs a balance of necessity and possibility – it will suffocate in too much necessity but vaporize in too much possibility. Throughout history, crushing necessity has been the usual problem, but the contemporary self is being driven mad by infinite possibility. Rejection of necessity is the contemporary sickness.

  And Sartre defined not potential but finitude as the essence of freedom: ‘To be finite…is to choose oneself…to make known to oneself what one is by projecting oneself toward one possible to the exclusion of others. The very act of freedom is therefore the assumption and creation of finitude.’70 But the chosen finitude must be fully accepted – it is always necessary to follow through. And this exercise of responsibility rules out grievance: ‘It therefore makes no sense to complain since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.’71

  So the Stoic insistence on making use of what happens is raised to the level of a core belief – whatever you have been made into you can make something out of. Indeed this making is an obligation. Sartre denounced the passive acceptance of social roles and cultural conditioning as ‘bad faith’, lack of ‘authenticity’, the lazy excuse of ‘this is the way I am’. The self must be constantly made and this making becomes a way of transcending the self. Living is perpetual self-transcendence.

  As for relations with others, the freedom of the individual is the crucial factor. So in love there is no question of either surrendering or demanding surrender – masochism or sadism. It is difficult to have a relationship without some element of power struggle but the ideal is that the autonomy of the partner should always be respected; the consequence of following this ideal, though, is not eternal bliss but eternal conflict. Danger and risk are unavoidable but give the relationship intensity – and intensity rather than serenity is the existentialist goal.

  Similarly, in group relations there should be no submission to the group ethos, what Sartre defined as ‘us-consciousness’, nor any use of power to subjugate the freedom of others. As in love, the exercise of power in the group is often sadomasochistic.

  What the authoritarian personality, the Pharisee, usually demands is compliance with hierarchy, regulations and procedure but what it really craves is surrender of internal freedom. So it may always be frustrated by being given only external compliance. This is the existentialist triumph, the preservation of a secret self and personal freedom by rendering to Caesar only the things that are Caesar’s.

  So existentialism rejects team-player malleability, emphasizes finitude rather than potential, advises making use of whatever happens and embraces the difficult because it confers intensity. No wonder this philosophy has gone out of fashion.

  Another key concept is absurdity, again an extension of Stoic thought. If life is insignificant and meaningless, it must be absurd. So this is also the age of absurdity in the philosophical sense.

  For Sartre, always solemn and portentous, absurdity was tragic, even justifying suicide and certainly ruling out happiness. But Albert Camus saw that not only is happiness possible, it is sym-biotically linked to absurdity – each can reinforce the other: ‘Happiness and the a
bsurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness.’72 Camus applied this to the situation of Sisyphus, eternally condemned to push a rock up a hill, a myth with profound resonance for all those obliged to work for a living: ‘Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He, too, concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’73

  Unfortunately the existentialists were entirely humourless. The Myth of Sisyphus is Camus’ classic work on the absurd but it too has portentous moments, especially on the subject of suicide. In fact Camus’ actual death was appropriately absurd. Though intending to return to Paris from Marseilles by rail, he was persuaded to accept a lift from his publisher – who drove off the road and into a tree. So Camus died in a car with a train ticket in his pocket – an absurdist parable on the consequences of accepting someone else’s route.

  It was left to other writers to draw the opposite conclusion to Sartre’s – that absurdity is not tragic but comic, a reason not to reject life but to draw from it a strange new sustenance and relish. As a character in one of Samuel Beckett’s plays remarks: ‘How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?’ The character is Winnie, who is first buried up to the waist and then up to the neck in the play called – what else? – Happy Days. ‘Oh this is a happy day!’ she cries, ‘This will have been another happy day!’74

  4

  The Old Self and the New Science

  You can have anything you desire and become anyone you wish to be. There are no limits to potential, achievement and reward. The universe is an endless conveyor belt of prizes. Such are the seductive claims of the self-help industry in its annual outpouring of books with titles such as: The Joys of Much Too Much: Go For The Big Life – The Great Career, The Perfect Guy, And Everything Else You ‘ve Ever Wanted.

  The covers are brightly coloured, the titles are long and greedy, the tone is frenziedly cheerful and the argument has three basic assumptions: that fulfilment is a consequence of worldly success (God Wants You To Be Rich); that there are a number of simple steps for achieving fulfilment (Life Is Short- Wear Your Party Pants: 10 Simple Truths That Lead To An Amazing Life); and that anyone who follows the prescribed steps will discover vast, untapped potential (Awaken the Giant Within). Self-help must take some of the blame for fostering the illusion that fulfilment is easy.

  Distaste for the fatuous breeziness of self-help has also possibly encouraged a rejection of all psychology as lightweight and worthless. But the message of serious psychology is the opposite of that of self-help – fulfilment is not easy, but exhaustingly difficult. Theorists of the self insist on understanding and transformation but psychology has shown how difficult these can be. Attempts at self-understanding will be strenuously opposed by the id’s cunning use of self-deception, self-justification and self-righteousness. There seems to be no delusion too absurd, no justification too irrational and no righteousness too extreme for the human mind to accept.

  The delusions begin with the very idea of happiness. Everyone everywhere, regardless of age, gender, social status or wealth, reports a happiness level over 5 on a scale of 1 to 10 – and, stranger still, is certain of even greater happiness in the future. The American psychologist Jonathan Haidt claims that there are similar delusions for all the desiderata, that most Europeans and Americans rate themselves above average on a wide range of talents including virtuousness, intelligence and of course sexual performance. This made me think of my self-important teaching colleagues – and, sure enough, Haidt says of college professors, ‘94 per cent of us think we do above-average work.’75 Needless to say, I am among this 94 per cent. And it turns out that teachers are even more deluded than students – a mere 70 per cent of students believe they are above average. The temptation to laugh is checked by another troubling thought: most of my colleagues believe themselves to be terrifically amusing; everyone also has an above-average sense of humour.

  But, as so often, there is an intriguing exception. Haidt observes that the desiderata delusion is weaker in east Asian countries, and possibly non-existent in Japan. Is this evidence of the beneficial influence of Buddhist culture, which attempts to dispel illusion and reduce attachment to the self?

  But we exaggerate only our own virtues. On those of others we are realistic. Two psychologists, Nicholas Epley and David Dunning, asked people to predict whether they would behave selfishly or cooperatively in a game played for money. The result: 84 per cent claimed that they themselves would play cooperatively – but the estimate of cooperative behaviour in others was only 64 per cent. And, in fact, 61 per cent did play cooperatively.76 In other words, as Buddha and Christ said repeatedly, we are hypocrites.

  There is at least the consolation that many of the psychologists’ findings support the insights of religious and philosophical thinkers, in particular the conclusion reached at the very beginning by the Greeks and repeated by everyone since, but still not generally accepted – that success and prosperity alone will not make anyone happy. A certain level of affluence is of course required to provide the basics, as Aristotle acknowledged, but more will do little to increase satisfaction. Many of the experts produce a graph of happiness level against income. This rises steeply at first and then levels off. After a certain point, having more has no effect. There is even an equivalent graph for countries, which shows happiness levels rising at first with stages of economic development but then tailing off – so increasing wealth is as ineffective for nations as for individuals. And the same phenomenon may be observed over time – the increasing affluence of the West over the last few generations has brought no corresponding increase in happiness.77

  There is also evidence that, as Buddha and Spinoza claimed, resisting the desire for immediate gratification can bring long-term fulfilment. In 1970 Walter Mischel sat a succession of four-year-old children in front of a marshmallow on a plate and explained that he had to leave the room for a moment but that, if the marsh-mallow was still uneaten when he returned, the reward would be two marshmallows instead of one. Around a third of the children scoffed the treat straight away, another third tried to hold out but succumbed at various stages, and the final third succeeded in waiting for the double pay-off. When Mischel surveyed the children fifteen years later he discovered that those with self-control had turned out more successful in every way, both educationally and personally, whereas those unable to delay gratification were more likely to be low achievers, to have drug and alcohol problems, and, interestingly, to become bullies, a confirmation that desire for power is a kind of greed indulged by the unfulfilled. Further investigation revealed that the key talent of the self-controllers was not so much willpower as detachment, an ability to think of something other than the treat on the plate.78 It is encouraging to know that a third of four year olds are little Buddhas – but this classic experiment was conducted in 1970, just before the era of rabid consumption. Today’s four year olds would probably wolf down the marshmallow and then complain that marshmallows are rubbish.

  Other experiments have confirmed the age-old insight that the more we have, the more we want; that life is a progression, not from satisfaction to satisfaction, but from desire to desire. The economist Richard Easterlin asked young people to identify the consumer items they thought essential for the good life; sixteen years later he asked the same people the same question. What happened was that they had moved up the scale of desirables – television, car, house, overseas holidays, swimming pool, second home, etc. – and wherever they had arrived it was always the next item that would finally make them happy. No so
oner was one thing acquired than they got used to it, took it for granted and wanted the next.79 This study investigated only attitudes to consumer goods, but the effect applies to everything desirable – welfare benefits, pay rises, promotions, holidays, gourmet food and gourmet sex. As Schopenhauer remarked: ‘With possession, or the certain expectation of it, our demands immediately increase and this increases our capacity for further possessions and greater expectation…to attain something desired is to discover how vain it is.’80 The psychologists’ terms for this are ‘adaptation’, ‘habituation’ and ‘the hedonic treadmill’.

  And it occurs to me that there is also negative adaptation – we think we will be less unhappy if we do less of an unpleasant chore, but the less we do the less we want to do. This happens when you feel atrociously overworked, manage to get the workload reduced but soon once again feel atrociously overworked. In fact the expectation of relief may mean that having to do less is even more vexing.

  And from my own experience I can add that habituation applies not just to money, goods and pleasures, but also to fame. Artistes usually claim to want only a modest level of recognition – publication, exhibition, opportunities to perform – but as soon as this level is achieved they crave more. And there is no upper limit. Even the hugely famous are irritated by a single dissenter. This is a vulnerability worth remembering – by refusing to join in the adulation, even the most insignificant of us can infuriate a celebrity.