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

by Michael Foley

  This strategy is of course classic Stoicism, and Ellis’s views and style are remarkably similar to those of Epictetus. Both understood the deviousness of the human brute but believed in rationality and detested whining. And both refused to be respectful towards their illustrious predecessors: Epictetus called Epicurus ‘that foul-mouthed bastard’ while Ellis accused Freud of being ‘full of horseshit’.100 Perhaps their robust pragmatism was a consequence of difficult early lives. Epictetus began as a slave; Ellis was neglected by his parents and, in the Depression era, made a living by buying up second-hand jackets and trousers and reselling them as suits. He came late to the academy and was never affected by intellectual snobbery, publishing books with titles such as How to make Yourself Happy and Remarkably Less Disturbable and How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything- Yes, Anything!

  Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is not universally accepted. The clinical psychologist Oliver James argues that its effects are merely cosmetic and temporary. In particular, it will not solve deep-seated problems caused by childhood maltreatment.101 This is probably true. Buddha, Spinoza and Freud all agree that the process of self-understanding and transformation is lengthy, so a few sessions of CBT are unlikely to be life-changing. But anything that dispels illusion must be worthwhile – and there is evidence that those who have undergone CBT are less vulnerable to the many biases of self-deception and self-justification.102

  Echoing many earlier thinkers, psychologist Daniel Nettle posits the theory that the struggle is the meaning: ‘The purpose of the happiness programme in the human mind is not to increase human happiness; it is to keep us striving.’103 The human creature is designed for striving. Buddha, Spinoza and Schopenhauer, among many others, agreed. Schopenhauer put it with typical clarity: ‘We take no pleasure in existence except when we are striving after something.’104 The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio claims that this striving is based in our neurobiology: ‘The innate equipment of life regulation does not aim for a neither-here-nor-there neutral state…Rather, the goal of the homeostasis endeavour is to provide a better than neutral life state, what we as thinking and affluent creatures identify as wellbeing’.105

  So we are not only born to strive, but to strive for well-being.

  And striving implies effort applied over time, with obstacles, difficulty and the possibility, even likelihood, of failure. If we could feel good without effort we would no longer feel good. Back in the 1970s, before virtual reality had been invented, the philosopher Robert Nozick postulated a machine offering life that felt real in every way but provided only pleasant experiences. And he suggested that no one would want such a life because it would lack authenticity.106 But perhaps the true lack would be effort. The difficulty is crucial. Everything worthwhile has to be earned.

  5

  The Quest and the Grail

  AT LAST SCIENCE DISCOVERS WHY BLUE IS FOR BOYS BUT GIRLS REALLY DO

  PREFER PINK announced the headline in The Times10’’. The story beneath reported a survey that demonstrated that this gender difference does indeed exist. But why? Cue the theory of the moment – evolutionary psychology – which explains human behaviour as survival mechanisms evolved in the Pleistocene era: ‘girls preferred pink because they needed to be better at identifying berries’. The possibility of cultural conditioning was not even considered, either by the authors of the report or the journalist, though it has to be acknowledged that the evidence for cultural influence is in obscure sources. For instance, the Ladies’ Home Journal of 1918: ‘The generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger colour is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.’ The cultural explanation is that tastes changed during the twentieth century when blue became associated with men’s uniforms and workwear and pink with homosexuality. But theories of cultural conditioning are out of fashion.

  Instead, evolutionary psychology is the universal explicator. This is the problem with theories. Every Big Idea is a megalomaniac bent on world domination: Marxists interpreted everything in terms of class; Freudians in terms of childhood; and feminists in terms of gender. In the end, the new way of seeing becomes a new set of blinkers. All three of these big ideas have gone out of fashion – but there are always new contenders for intellectual imperialism.

  Many old contenders are also still striving for dominance. Religions are the most ferocious intellectual imperialists. A religion is by definition a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, providing, for those prepared to offer absolute brand loyalty, a one-stop shop for all intellectual and spiritual requirements (Buddhism is an honourable exception). And what a luxury to have every problem explained and provided with a ready-made solution.

  The temptation to surrender to a system is strong and the prospect of independence can be terrifying. And there is evidence that believers are happier. So why not believe? It is even possible to believe while knowing that the belief is absurd. Kierkegaard’s famous leap of faith was a conscious leap into absurdity.

  But for those incapable of such a leap there is a responsibility to pick and mix ideas. According to Freud: ‘Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.’108 The English philosopher John Armstrong has defined this approach as ‘pandoxy’109 – once again Greek provides an impressive term. So, when asked about belief, it is satisfying to be able to shrug and say, ‘Oh, I’m a pandoxist, of course’. But this does not help with the fundamental problem of what to pick, how to mix and, even more perplexing, in what way to apply the mix to everyday life?

  Buddha’s ideas are attractive – but can enlightenment be attained by anyone in a Western country permeated by the Four Ignoble Truths?

  We can’t sit still.

  We can’t shut up.

  We can’t escape self-obsession.

  We can’t stop wanting things.

  Nietzsche is invigorating – but who would attempt to put his ideas into practice? To live as an Ubermensch would be as impossible as to live as a Christian.

  One of the many absurdities of trying to work out how to live is that the best guides to life have themselves fastidiously refrained from what most people regard as living. Few of them have had wives or children or suffered the indignity of earning bread by the sweat of their brows. Spinoza, for instance, is invariably described as a lens grinder but even he had only a few years of daily grind. As for the family men, Buddha not only abandoned his wife and child but sneaked away during the night – so much for honesty. Socrates did not walk out, but he was notoriously dismissive of his family. And, as German philosopher Karl Jaspers remarked drily of Confucius, ‘His relations with his wife and children were less than cordial.’110 The story of Sartre and his women is even less edifying: Sartre’s existentialist lover, Simone de Beauvoir, seduced young, attractive and impressionable female students and then passed them on to Sartre, who dumped them when he had had his fun. Several of these girls were blighted for life by the experience. There is even a strain of misogyny in thinkers from the axial age on, and it is particularly virulent in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. What have these men to say to those who work for a living, remain with a partner and rear a family?

  And then speculative thought is so elusive, so hard to grasp and retain, never mind apply. It seems to pass through the mind like a breeze through a tree – there is a brief excited stirring and then the leaves return to their dream.

  But re-reading Erich Fromm for the first time in thirty years was a revealing experience for me. I was sure I had retained nothing of his books, but kept coming across sentences that I had been repeating myself almost word for word without being aware they were not my own. So ideas do remain in the mind – but imperceptibly, below consciousness – and must influence behaviour in the same way. It is not a matter of receiving and applying prescriptions, as the self-help books suggest, but of absorbing ideas and permitting them to fertilise
fruitful behaviour unconsciously. The old tree may be stirred in its roots after all. This, too, is an old idea. Socrates believed that merely pondering and discussing concepts like honesty and justice made people more honest and just, an example of Buddha’s insight that any understanding is already a transformation, though the change is likely to be gradual and imperceptible. So it is useful to investigate ideas even if they provide no specific instructions and appear to have no discernible effect. And when the same ideas turn up in widely different periods they are massively reinforced.

  The American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman examined many cultures and traditions to find the virtues believed to be essential for living well. Their aim was to find a consensus; the virtues had to be universally accepted. This proved impossible – but the following six kept turning up: justice, humaneness, temperance, wisdom, courage and transcendence. The list is short but so predictable that many readers will have gone to sleep before reaching the only mild surprise – transcendence. The researchers acknowledge this as the odd one out, ‘the most implicit’111, a sense of meaning or purpose, not necessarily religious, which infuses a tradition. So it is not strictly a virtue in the sense of requiring specific behaviour.

  The problem with the other five is over-familiarity. Everyone accepts these as undeniably good. And the word ‘virtue’ is irremediably associated with humourless piety and righteousness. At the mere mention of this word many will first faint with boredom, then get up and run a mile. Even though virtue is undoubtedly a major factor in finding fulfilment, as much research has demonstrated,112 exhorting people to be virtuous is probably a waste of time.

  The Peterson and Seligman approach is too broad and diffuse, both in searching for something as general as virtues and in looking across entire traditions (including even Boy Scout manuals). If every source is consulted and common denominators sought, the results are likely to be platitudinous. An alternative is to read only original thinkers and writers and to seek only exciting insights. This is the luxury of being an independent seeker. There is no requirement to be comprehensive or to persist with anything boring. And an element of surprise is needed to render an insight memorable and useful, to make it penetrate and lodge.

  There is no guarantee of finding common ground but it is exciting when original thinkers in widely different times, cultures and specialisms come up with the same strategies. When several guidebooks recommend the same restaurant, that’s where you go to lunch.

  The good news is that there are indeed such strategies. The bad news is that all of them are discouraged by contemporary Western culture. The great achievement of the age has been to make fulfilment seem never easier, while actually making it never more difficult.

  Here are the concepts that keep turning up in philosophy, religious teaching, literature, psychology and neuroscience: personal responsibility, autonomy, detachment, understanding, mindfulness, transcendence, acceptance of difficulty, ceaseless striving and constant awareness of mortality.

  Most of these concepts are mentioned repeatedly by thinkers and a few are universally acknowledged. Awareness of mortality, for instance, is urged by everyone from Buddha to Sartre, who believed that only intense and constant consciousness of death exposes the emptiness of convention and breaks the crust of routine; only death is the guarantor of intense life. But even this universal recommendation is being increasingly rejected. Woody Allen was in tune with the times when he explained that he had no wish to achieve immortality through his work; instead he wanted to achieve it by the more direct strategy of never dying. And where there is a will there is a way. We will live forever if we consume enough organic blueberries and pomegranate juice.

  But, for the age that expects everything to be easy, the most crucial revelation is that everything worthwhile is difficult. In fact, attempts to find easy solutions will cause the very problems these attempts were meant to evade. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke understood that the modern age increasingly demands effortlessness: ‘People have sought easy solutions to every problem – and the easiest of the easy. Yet it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; every living creature holds fast to it.’113

  This echoes Spinoza and uncannily prefigures the discoveries of neuroscience. As Rilke explained, he advocated difficulty not because it was noble but because it was necessary. ‘You are mistaken in calling it your duty to take on difficulties. It is your survival instinct that pushes you to do it.’114

  To survive is to strive. The problem is the tendency to strive for the wrong things, especially to emulate those who have found worldly success. The human creature is a search engine of great power and sophistication, but with little idea of how to choose search parameters or evaluate results. So, when misguided striving fails to provide satisfaction, there is a tendency to believe that the alternative must be a rejection of all striving, that the answer is to lie on a Caribbean beach lathered in coconut oil.

  The striving is not only difficult but its goal is obscure – a theme repeated endlessly since the axial age, around the middle of the first millennium BCE, when the human ape accidentally acquired consciousness and began asking the questions which will still be the FAQs on God’s website when He gets around to setting it up. In this period – named the ‘axial age’ by Karl Jaspers because it brought such a profound change in human awareness – there was Socrates in Greece, the Hebrew prophets in the Middle East, in India Buddha and in China Lao Tzu and Confucius. The poet of Ecclesiastes expressed most beautifully the necessity and difficulty of seeking after truth: ‘And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith.’ The result is usually frustration: ‘I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.’ But the poet is unable to abandon the search for understanding: ‘Who is as the wise man? And who knoweth the interpretation of a thing? A man’s wisdom maketh his face to shine, and the boldness of his face shall be changed.’

  These early thinkers expressed the need for striving in abstract form – but it had already found expression in narrative. There is a rich and unbroken tradition of quest literature running from The Epic of Gilgamesh in 1000 BCE to The Wizard of Oz in the twentieth century. The scholar of myth, Joseph Campbell, has shown how the quest saga has been important in every period and culture and always has the same basic structure, though local details may vary. Each saga begins with a hero receiving a call to adventure which makes him abandon his familiar, safe environment to venture into the dangerous unknown. There, he undergoes a series of tests and trials, negotiates many difficulties and slays many monsters. As a reward he wins a magical prize – a Golden Fleece, a princess, holy water, a sacred flame or an elixir of eternal life. Finally he brings the prize back from the kingdom of dread to redeem his community.115

  This is the plot of The Wizard of Oz and also of Gilgamesh three thousand years earlier. The hero, Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian king, becomes disenchanted with his kingdom and life and departs on a quest, which involves dealing with ferocious lions, scorpion men and a beautiful goddess who attempts to detain him with surprisingly modern temptations: ‘Day and night be frolicsome and gay; let thy clothes be handsome, thy head shampooed, thy body bathed.’116 Nevertheless, the hero persists in his quest and, diving to the bottom of a deep sea, plucks the plant of immortality. But the ending has a nasty twist that would have to be changed in any movie version: when Gilgamesh lies down to rest a serpent steals the plant, eats it and attains eternal youth. In mythology the snake is always the villain.

  Campbell argues that these narratives symbolize an essentially inward journey – the hero breaks free from the conventional thinking of his time, ventures out into the dark of speculative thought, finds the creative power to change himself and wishes to share this with others. The prize won after much uncertainty and danger is knowledge: ‘The hero is the one who comes to know.’117 So the narrative has four stages: departure, tria
l, prize, return; these are the same as the goals of the abstract seeker: detachment, difficulty, understanding, transformation.

  A similar four stages are common in the initiation rites of ‘primitive’ cultures: separation, ritual wounding, initiation and return. The young person is taken away from the village, symbolically wounded in some way, instructed in the rites and returned to the community. So becoming an adult requires the same four stages – etachment, difficulty, understanding and transformation. It is only our own culture that believes in prolonging adolescence for life. In the contemporary version of the story the hero remains at home with his parents and ventures out into danger by playing EverQuest online in the basement.

  As Campbell points out, the stories of Buddha and Christ also follow the quest saga structure. Both men reject their families, go forth, endure many trials, experience doubt and despair, but finally win through to transfiguration and return to share their knowledge with the world.

  Only institutionalized religion demands passive conformity. In the iconography Christ is always sorrowfully submissive and Buddha smugly quietist. But neither man was remotely passive. They constantly questioned, prodded, goaded, unsettled and disturbed. Far from advocating passivity, they would let no one rest: Christ: ‘I came not to send peace, but a sword’118; Buddha’s last words: ‘Strive unremittingly’.119