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

by Michael Foley

  The psychologist Philip Zimbardo has spent a lifetime studying conformity and obedience in a variety of situations ranging from the corporate world to Nazi Germany and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He has conducted many experiments, including the notorious Stanford University prison experiment in 1971, when volunteers were asked to role-play as prisoners or guards and many of the guards became increasingly sadistic. Zimbardo’s conclusion is that group influence may be resisted by a combination of detachment (the exercise of scepticism and critical thinking), humility (willingness to admit personal limitations and mistakes), mindfulness (transforming habitual inattention into habitual awareness), autonomy (preserving independence within groups) and, above all, responsibility: ‘We become more resistant to undesirable social influence by always maintaining a sense of personal responsibility and by being willing to be held accountable for our actions.’151

  Considering the possible consequences of evasion should be enough to establish that personal responsibility is essential and that determinism must be rejected, both in theory and practice. An autonomous, attentive, sceptical and critically minded individual, aware of undesirable personal and group inclinations, can resist these and persuade others to do the same. The human creature is the only animal that knows it is only an animal…and therefore the only animal with the option of not behaving like an animal. We can be entirely determined not to be entirely determined. As Katharine Hepburn said to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, ‘Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are put into this world to rise above.’

  Accepting personal responsibility may also be extended into the development of a personal code. This was the essence of the existentialist philosophy. Of course, it will be hard to justify such a code absolutely. And frequently its demands will appear ridiculous and arbitrary. So why bother? Just for the satisfying difficulty of it. Just for the sheer hell of the thing. As Flaubert exhorted: ‘Since all the alternatives are absurd, let us choose the most noble.’152

  7

  The Assault on Detachment

  Some hard thinking is needed and a proper Italian double espresso would kick-start the sluggish brain – but the Italian café has a giant screen showing models endlessly flouncing along catwalks, while its sound system is playing loud soul music and the two girls behind the counter are discussing photographs of themselves on a night out in high, excited tones punctuated by shrieks of laughter. Then your smartphone announces a text message from one of your several thousand network friends, and investigation, briefly distracted by a pop-up offering a choice of three exclusive picture galleries (rebellious rock vixens, the world’s 100 sexiest women and movie stars embarrassed by wardrobe malfunction), reveals an email from your manager scheduling an emergency meeting in the morning and five other emails from fellow team members wondering what the hell is going on.

  What you need is detachment, concentration, autonomy and privacy, but what the world insists upon is immersion, distraction, collaboration and company.

  A few images of the times:

  A flushed, sweating figure in a tracksuit running furiously to stay in place on a gym machine while watching the French Open tennis championships on a gigantic television and listening to Primal Scream on headphones.

  A woman at the hairdresser’s flicking through the celebrity wedding pictures in HELLO! while having a combined wash and head massage, listening with one ear to the cheery babbling of a radio DJ and with the other to the sad story of the hairdresser whose boyfriend can get an erection only by throttling her to the brink of unconsciousness (‘he’s an ex-soldier and blames it on Afghanistan’).

  A young man lying back on a sofa sipping vodka and Red Bull while watching a double-penetration porn scene and being vigorously fella ted by a kneeling blonde.

  Anyone doing fewer than three things at once is not living to the full, failing to take advantage of the age of simultaneous multiple distractions and permanent multiple connexity – the multitasking, hyperlinked, immersive network world.

  Not only are more and more gadgets demanding attention, their solicitations are ever more cunning. My television and laptop both behave as though they are on first-name terms with their owner and have intimate knowledge of his personality and tastes. So the television service is constantly suggesting programmes to watch, all insanely inappropriate, while the website I use for book ordering has the impertinence to say, to a man of my fastidiousness and discrimination, ‘Michael, we have recommendations for you.’ The obvious next stage is for these gadgets to conspire. Then the smartphone will contact the sat nav: ‘Listen, this asshole is a wine snob who loves Sancerre and raves on about grapefruit notes and vibrant astringency. But he’s also a cheapskate who joins wine clubs for the special offer introductory case and then cancels his membership. It’s just so embarrassing to deliver these cancellations. Anyway, tell him that, on the next left, there’s a shopping centre with a supermarket offering a case of a dozen Sancerre for the price of ten. And when he gets there, mention that Waterstone’s has a three for two promotion on Penguin Classics. The guy is a culture snob as well. He just adores the gravitas of those black Penguin Classics.’

  And the shops will have a multitude of further distractions. Both the real and virtual worlds are becoming jungles of hyperlinks where every distraction is surrounded by multiple enticements to other distractions. So a smartphone with text messaging and email is the essential accessory, because it is a repository of hyperlinks, providing the facility to distract and be distracted anywhere and at any time. The content of the communications is unimportant – the connexity itself is the reassuring message. As the pleasure of shopping has become detached from the purchases, and the pleasure of travel from the places visited, so the pleasure of distraction has become an end in itself, independent of the actual distractions.

  Being constantly the hub of a network of potential interruptions provides the excitement and importance of crisis management. As well as the false sense of efficiency in multitasking, there is the false sense of urgency in multi-interrupt processing.

  In a study of information workers – analysts, programmers and managers – psychologists discovered that all three types of professional were interrupted on average once every three minutes. But the most interesting finding was that they interrupted themselves as often as they were interrupted by others.153 Being constantly interrupted first became normal and then necessary so that the workers ended up doing it to themselves.

  What effect does continuous divided attention have on the brain? The first point is that, as with most forms of greed, multitasking is self-defeating. Psychologists who have studied the phenomenon in detail concluded: ‘Multitasking may seem more efficient on the surface but may actually take more time in the end.’154 And neuroscientists using brain scans of multitasking came to an even more definite conclusion. Performing two tasks one after the other was faster than performing the same two tasks almost simultaneously. It was the prefrontal cortex that processed the multitasking and it turned out to be unable to concentrate on more than one task at a time.155

  Of course these discoveries will deter no one, least of all me.

  I used to read a book to the end before beginning another but, increasingly, I start new books without finishing the old ones – so I have more and more books with strips of newspaper sticking out of them.

  And constantly switching attention may have long-term effects on the brain. Neuroscientists have discovered that, for people in the age range between thirty-five and thirty-nine, electronic interruptions have little effect on concentration on cognitive tasks, whereas for those between eighteen and twenty-one, interruptions cause a marked deterioration in performance.156 The suspicion is that, for the distracted generation, the constant need to process interruptions prevents the prefrontal cortex from developing fully. This is possible because the prefrontal cortex, which can be thought of as the brain’s manager, the ego, is the last part of the brain to mature and is fully formed only after adolescence – one
reason why adolescents are often id-controlled, demanding, impulsive, ungrateful and angry. So the crucial executive controller is not only distracted by interruptions and hyperlinks but may be prevented from developing properly. Chronic distraction weakens the prefrontal cortex – and, with the opposite effect, long-term meditation strengthens it.157

  However, it is becoming impossible to avoid distraction. The new built environment is a text sprinkled with physical hyperlinks. The very concepts of separation and boundaries are becoming obsolete. Airports, railway stations, office blocks, hotels and hospitals have become mini-cities with large, bright, high-ceilinged, open-plan areas offering a distracting range of products and services. And the cities themselves have become increasingly porous, with living, working, shopping, eating and drinking areas leaking into each other. New city developments such as London Docklands are designed according to this principle, known to architects as ‘caves and commons’, which blurs the distinctions between inside and outside, work and leisure, public and private.

  No one wants to be separate. Even the open-plan office cubicle provides too much separation. The new workplaces have no partitions of any kind. Mother, an ultra-hip advertising agency in London’s ultra-hip Shoreditch, has a single giant 250-foot work-table, possibly the largest worktop in the world. And it has removed the old-fashioned separation of a building into storeys by using open ramps like those in a multi-level car park.

  On the other side of London, the Natural History Museum proudly announces a new exhibit in the multimillion-pound extension – its own working scientists exposed to the public like the stuffed animals in glass cases. And visibility is not confined to the professional classes. Rolls-Royce has introduced a glass-walled production line exposed to the world. Many chefs now work in kitchens exposed to the diners. In the most fashionable restaurants diners can pay extra for the privilege of eating in the kitchen with the chef. In the cheaper hip restaurants there are no separate tables and chairs but only communal benches as in school canteens.

  And at these benches the diners of course enjoy fusion cooking, to a background of fusion music, wearing fusion design – and can pay for all this thanks to a fusion education. The new city academies scornfully dismiss as hopelessly old-fashioned the idea of students studying French or History – instead they simply study Napoleon. Museums dismiss as equally dated the idea of displaying art according to period or movement – instead Cezanne is supposed to be involved in an intriguing ‘dialogue’ with conceptual art. (The dialogue actually goes like this – Conceptual Work: ‘You’re so over’; Cezanne: ‘You’re such shite.’). And why should art be confined to museums? So there are artistic ‘interventions’ in buildings everywhere and anywhere. And string quartets play in railway stations, ballerinas dance in department stores, theatre groups perform in shopping centres, writers take up residence not just in universities but in prisons, museums, hospitals, football clubs, corporations, hotels and zoos.

  Everything mixes with everything else – which is why ‘synergy’ is the word of the moment, an impressively pseudo-scientific term for mixing.

  Imagine someone sitting alone in a room without television, radio, computer or phone and with the door closed and the blinds down. This person must be a dangerous lunatic or a prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement. If a free agent, then a panty-sniffing loser shunned by society, or a psycho planning to return to college with an automatic weapon and a backpack full of ammo.

  No wonder the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) defines detachment as a condition known as ‘depersonalization disorder’, a sense of being ‘detached from, and as if one is an outside observer of, one’s mental processes or body’. So anyone capable of detachment is mentally ill, indeed scarcely even a person at all.

  Yet, achieving personal detachment was considered to be a key factor in mental health by every thinker from Buddha to Sartre. Even Christian thinkers have valued detachment, and one of the most passionate endorsements comes from the thirteenth-century Dominican Meister Eckhart: ‘I have read many works by the pagan teachers and the prophets, in both the Old and the New Law, and I have inquired, carefully and assiduously, to find which is the greatest virtue…and as I study all these writings, as far as my reason can lead and teach, I find no virtue better than a pure detachment from all things.’158 Eckhart goes on to place detachment above humility, mercy and even love, adding in a curious but striking phrase, ‘detachment compels God to come to me’. A secular version of this is that detachment from the world compels the world to approach. The paradox is that informed detachment can actually inspire a more intense engagement. It is like standing back from a painting in order to see it more clearly.

  As difficult as detachment from the world is detachment from the self, a form of humility opposed by a culture that instead worships self-esteem. It is a contemporary axiom that lack of self-esteem is the root of all evil, especially social evils such as violence, delinquency and academic underachievement, and that strong self-esteem is the solution to all problems both personal and social. In the USA there is even a National Association for Self-Esteem, NASE, whose mission is ‘improving the human condition through the enhancement of self-esteem’, further evidence that it is impossible to satirize the contemporary world. And, at the personal level, there is a burgeoning sub-genre of self-help devoted to boosting self-esteem (Self-Esteem: Your Fundamental Power, Ten Days To Self-Esteem; The Self-Esteem Bible). There was a time when, in fables, people asked questions of mirrors and waited fearfully for the response. But this is no longer a questioning age. Instead we are encouraged to begin each day by shouting into a mirror the relevant delusion – for sales staff, ‘I am uniquely persuasive. I will meet all my sales targets’; for managers, ‘I am uniquely masterful. I will command universal obedience’; and, for lovers, ‘I am uniquely beautiful. I will inspire eternal love in the object of my desire.’

  The problem with self-esteem is that it has no values or principles and does not even require effort. Self-respect, which is subtly though crucially different, implies achievement worthy of respect, but self-esteem, in its contemporary usage, makes no demands on the self – only on others. Self-respect comes from within and self-esteem from without. Spinoza understood this distinction: ‘Self-respect does not extend to anything outside us and is attributed only to one who knows the real worth of his perfection, dispassionately and without seeking esteem for himself.’159 Self-esteem is narcissistic, demanding that the world reflect back whatever image is presented, and so it can never have any lasting benefit, although few have acknowledged this. Exceptions include Albert Ellis with his book The Myth of Self-Esteem 160, and a study by a group of American psychologists who conclude drily: ‘We have found little to indicate that indiscriminately promoting self-esteem in today’s children or adults, just for being themselves, offers society any compensatory benefits beyond the seductive pleasure it brings to those engaged in the exercise.’161 In fact, these psychologists suggest that pumping up self-esteem may well exacerbate the very problems it is meant to solve. If the world does not comply with the demands of a high self-estimate, and the world is frequently slow to oblige, the outraged self-believer may resort to violence to make the world fall into line. One obvious example is the ‘respect’ obsession in youth culture, where failure to show sufficient respect, such as by bumping into someone in a hamburger queue, can get the disrespectful shot dead. Another example is the total confidence that many parents instill in their children. The problem with this kind of high self-esteem is that it is accompanied by low self-awareness. Such children grow up with no understanding of their own faults – or even go so far as to believe that their own faults are endearing. As the hunchback said happily, ‘On me it looks good.’

  The psychologist Oliver James, in an investigation of depression, was intrigued by a World Health Organization table showing prevalence of emotional distress in different countries during a twelve-month period. At the top was the USA wit
h 26.4 per cent and at the bottom was China (Shanghai) with just 4.3 per cent. The trend in the table was for more developed countries to have higher rates of depression – but Shanghai is a fully developed city. James went to Shanghai to investigate and concluded that a crucial difference was in attitudes to self-esteem. In America government task forces, schools, parents and self-help books promote the boosting of self-esteem but in China the Confucian insistence on modesty produces a focus on personal shortcomings. Furthermore, whereas in America worldly success is the only ratification of self-esteem, the Chinese are satisfied with striving itself. And James also cites studies showing that the most aggressive Americans are those with ‘grandiose self-esteem’, who are likely to become violent if their self-estimate is not acknowledged.162

  Hence a profound irony – the boosting of self-esteem, which is intended to promote a sense of well-being and to discourage aggression, may instead be a cause of depression and violence. And attempts to realize children’s potential by praising them for their talents may instead inhibit or destroy potential. Parents would be wiser to take the Chinese approach and praise their children for effort rather than innate ability.

  The psychologist Carol Dweck actually tested this hypothesis by giving several hundred New York schoolchildren a test and afterwards praising half for effort (‘You must have worked really hard’) and the other half for intelligence (‘You must be smart at this’). Then the pupils were offered a choice of two further tests – one at the same level as the first or another more difficult. Of those praised for effort, 90 per cent chose the harder test and of those praised for intelligence a similar majority took the easier option. So the form of the single short sentence of praise had an enormous effect – showing once again that it is better to concentrate on the striving than the outcome. Dweck’s conclusion was that the intelligence group became scared of failure, while the effort group was encouraged to learn from mistakes. When the two groups were invited to look at the test papers of those who had done better than themselves or those who had done worse, the intelligence pupils almost all chose to boost their self-esteem by comparison with those below, while most of the effort pupils wanted to understand their errors by examining better test papers. And, in subsequent tests, the effort pupils raised their average scores by 30 per cent, while the intelligence average dropped by 20 per cent.163