The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010)
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Even the favourite clothes of the age, the T-shirts and tracksuits and fleeces, are lazy, as easy to pull on as to throw off, imposing little constraint and requiring little maintenance. No wonder ties have gone out of fashion. Who, if not obliged by a dress code, would have the energy and patience to knot a tie? I’ve forgotten how to do a Windsor knot myself.
On the intellectual level the news is even more shocking. The last bastion has fallen. Even France has succumbed. The Finance Minister of the country that gave the world the legendary sentence, ‘I think, therefore I am’, has addressed its National Assembly as follows: ‘France is a country that thinks. There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already.’176 And this minister’s boss, the President, proudly declared to a television interviewer, ‘I am not a theoretician. Oh, I am not an intellectual! I am someone concrete.’ To prove the point he poses in dark glasses with the much younger model and singer who has replaced his first wife.
The President is merely doing what is necessary. As the world’s problems become ever more complex and intractable, the world’s leaders are required to make their jobs seem more effortless. Though frequently this is not an illusion – Ronald Reagan genuinely abhorred effort. For a contemporary leader, appearing relaxed is as important as having a full head of hair. (When was the last time a bald man got elected to significant office? Silvio Berlusconi was reinstated as Italian President only after a major hair transplant.)
Difficulty has become repugnant because it denies entitlement, disenchants potential, limits mobility and flexibility, delays gratification, distracts from distraction and demands responsibility, commitment, attention and thought.
So, what is the latest work of a French intellectual to be translated into English? Another impenetrable slab of postmodern theorising? No. How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard, a university professor of French literature who boasts of teaching books he has never even opened.177
Of course, the cultural world has always been almost entirely peopled by chancers, but brazen bragging about ignorance is new, and reveals the extent of the rejection of difficulty and understanding. And open hostility to intelligence itself is new. Now intelligence is satanic and only fools can be holy. One of religion’s greatest triumphs was to portray reason as arrogant and overweening, Lucifer’s sin of intellectual pride. The modern, or rather postmodern, version of this is that reason is elitist and oppressive. But, to think in order to see the self as it really is – a puny, deformed, fearful thing – and to acknowledge the world as it really is – in all its objective abundance and complexity rather than as a theme park for the gratification of the self – these are surely acts of liberation and humility.
Besides, I have never known a fool who struck me as even remotely holy, nor a fool who, as William Blake claimed, became wise by persisting in folly. Nor a thinker who suffered fools gladly. The Old Testament prophets directed much of their wrath at fools, as did compassionate Christ and even benign Buddha (‘If one were never able to see fools, then one could be forever happy’178). The nineteenth-century thinkers were even more scathing, but my favourite quote is from Ecclesiastes: ‘For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool.’179
Rational thought has been successfully discredited – and Francis Wheen, in his book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, has catalogued many of the monsters brought forth by the sleep of reason. Can it really be true, as Wheen claims, that the UK government hired a feng shui consultant called Renuka Wickmaratne to advise on improving inner-city council estates and that the advice they got for their money was: ‘Red and orange flowers would reduce crime and introducing a water feature would reduce poverty. I was brought up with this ancient knowledge? That, as a presidential aide put it, ‘virtually every major move and decision’ made by Ronald Reagan, including the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, was first cleared by a San Francisco astrologer called Joan Quigley, who also provided an astrological analysis of the character of Mikhail Gorbachev? That 48 per cent of Americans believe in UFOs, 27 per cent in alien visits to earth, and that 2 per cent (3.7 million people) claim to have been the victims of alien abduction?180
How have such irrationality and credulity come about? As always, there are many causes, overlapping and interacting, in both high and low culture. There is the postmodern promotion of epistemic relativism, which not only rejected reason but also truth, objectivity, meaning and even reality and fact; the age of entitlement’s demand for qualifications without the tedium of difficult study; the preference for presentation over explanation and image over content; the hatred of science, so cold, remote, inhuman, arrogant and oppressive; and the replacement of rational argument by emotion, so warm, human, humble, positive and liberating.
Thinkers themselves, especially Nietzsche and Sartre, must take some of the blame. Nietzsche’s strident denunciations of morality planted the seeds of relativism and Sartre’s hatred of philosophical systems caused him to reject, along with systems, the reason used to develop them – he denounced reason as an ‘iron cage’. This is like blaming a collapsed house on the builders’ tools – but the idea was enthusiastically taken up and extended by the postmodern project, which used reason to attack reason in an attention-seeking vandalism like that of rock musicians destroying their own instruments on stage.
Once reason has been discredited anything goes. Truth becomes merely relative – everyone has a different version of truth and they are all equally valid. So historians began to argue that anyone’s version of events is as good as anyone else’s, and literary critics that a ‘text’ means anything a reader wants it to mean. The great advantage of these approaches is that they render unnecessary the difficult business of establishing meaning and truth.
So science has been derided for its claim to objective truth – and the valid point that science is influenced by the culture in which it operates has been extended to a dismissal of it as merely one more fictional narrative among many. And the fact that modern physics is strange has been used to justify any wacky belief – if science can be weird then anything weird can be science.
And science has been blamed for bringing disenchantment to the human world and devastation to the natural world – despite the fact that scientists tend to regard their discoveries as a source of wonder, and that it was scientists who first issued warnings on the dangers facing the planet and are now attempting to find solutions. But the prize for most ingenious attack on science must go to the philosopher John Gray who claims that science is not based on reason at all: ‘The origins of science are not in rational enquiry but in faith, magic and trickery. Modern science triumphed over its adversaries not through its superior rationality but because its late-medieval and early-modern founders were more skilful than them in the use of rhetoric and the arts of politics.’181 And: ‘As pictured by philosophers, science is a supremely rational activity. Yet the history of science shows scientists flouting the rules of scientific method. Not only the origins but the progress of science comes from acting against reason.’182 What Gray seems to be suggesting is that rejecting the prevailing orthodoxy, which is often how discoveries are made, is ‘acting against reason’, whereas this is the most important use, the very triumph, of reason. Though, in a rare moment of gratitude, Gray acknowledges some benefits of magic and trickery: ‘Anaesthetic dentistry is an unmixed blessing. So are clean water and flush toilets.’183
As well as being derided from above, science is being eaten away from below. It has come to be regarded as the ultimate difficulty, the most forbidding test of understanding. So the numbers of those willing to study it drop year by year. Why submit to mathematical rigour when you can do a degree in Surfing and Beach Management instead? A few years ago, during a university meeting to devise new courses sufficiently undemanding for contemporary youth, I propo
sed Pizza Studies, a multidisciplinary and highly academic degree requiring students to learn the history of the pizza and at least twenty words of Italian. But life as usual exceeded me with the announcement by McDonald’s that it was awarding academic qualifications. The joke of Pizza Studies was outdone by the reality of Hamburger Studies.
Education’s abandonment of difficulty is a consequence of developments over several decades. As a boy growing up in Catholic Ireland I experienced one educational extreme where arrogant and snobbish, but largely philistine, teachers routinely insulted and beat pupils. This was appalling, a consequence of Ireland remaining in the nineteenth century until the mid-1960s.
I could never have taught in such an environment, but when, in the early 1970s, I came to London to teach, I discovered that English education had gone to the opposite extreme. Instead of being insulted and beaten, pupils were flattered and indulged. Of course there were worthy motives for this – to bring into education those formerly excluded, to attempt to compensate for family and social problems, to give hope to the despairing and initiative to the helpless. And who is to say that this project has not been a success? A proper debate of the issues would require a separate book. But there have certainly been prices to pay. One is the collapse of teacher authority. No pupils enjoy being insulted and beaten but neither do they respect an appeaser. Another price is the rejection of difficulty. The fundamental axiom of teaching is that anything worth saying can be said simply. But expressing difficult ideas simply is itself difficult. How much easier to avoid the difficult altogether. Another axiom is that enthusiastic teaching should inspire pupils to become active rather than passive learners. But, faced with the exhausting business of coaxing pupils to show initiative and work for themselves, how tempting simply to tell them what to do, or even to do it for them. So more and more assessment is by coursework, with assignments regularly brought to teachers for correction of errors and detailed instructions on what to do next. A third teaching axiom is that understanding involves paying attention to explanations. But obliging pupils to listen in silence means exhausting authority battles. So much less stressful to let them talk as they wish and are used to. And teaching means raising pupils to the level of the teacher – but lifting dead weight is arduous and frustrating; it is so much easier to come down to the level of the pupil. The result of all this is an inexorable lowering of standards, which no one in education is allowed to admit.
Then pupils carry these assumptions with them to university and are shocked at being expected to listen in silence rather than chatter as usual, and outraged when lecturers decline to read coursework in advance (‘just to see if I’m on the right lines’).
There has been a gradual change in attitudes to understanding over the years. Once, when students failed to understand, they would ask to have the explanation repeated. Then they began to suggest, often with considerable resentment, that if they had failed to understand, the explanation must have been at fault. More recently, there has been another subtle shift. Now many students do not even mention understanding or its absence. Instead they laugh in a relaxed, tolerant way at the absurdity and redundancy of the entire enterprise, bestowing a smile of amused pity on their ridiculous, obsolete lecturers. Here is another absurd reversal: once teachers patronised students; increasingly it is the other way round.
It is not so much that difficulty and understanding have been rejected as that these very concepts have ceased to exist. In fact, the concept of concepts – the idea of an abstract, underpinning theory that must be understood to grasp a subject – has ceased to exist. Now understanding is instrumental – it is necessary to know how to operate technology but not to know how it works.
So the human animal, long since out of touch with the earth, is now losing touch with the machine. People once opened the backs of television sets and raised the bonnets of cars and understood the technology well enough to carry out repairs (I am not claiming to be one of these – looking at the insides of machines gives me vertigo and nausea). But the built-in obsolescence of gadgets has made the concept of repair also obsolete. Now, hardly anyone understands how anything works. If it breaks down, just dump it and buy the new model. And, with the growth of communication technology, the machines doing the work are often no longer even visible, but somewhere out in the ether, as intangible and mysterious as the mind of God. All that remains is the interface, the screen. So image triumphs over content, presentation over understanding, description over analysis.
For many years I was responsible for supervising postgraduate project students, many mature and in professional jobs, who were required to identify a business problem, analyse it and propose a solution. But, increasingly, what they produced was merely description. In a version of the ‘location, location, location’ mantra, I would repeat ‘analysis, analysis, analysis’, warning that a Masters level project would be failed if it did not have original analysis (actually untrue). So they withdrew huffily and returned a few weeks later (glowing with pride at having finally satisfied this maniac) to hand me thirty more pages of description. Of course, it was beautifully presented description, full of impressive illustrations expertly cut and pasted – but all image and no content.
So face value becomes the only value, and there is no longer any awareness of anything beneath the surface. In fact, the concept of ‘beneath’, like those of difficulty and understanding, is ceasing to exist. There is no longer a beneath, there is only the surface; no longer a complex machine, only a bright interface. The result is astonishment and shock when the affable colleague or neighbour is revealed to be a terrorist or a serial killer: ‘Oh, but he was always so polite and friendly…always smiled and said good morning.’ Likewise when the vibrant interviewee turns out to be a monster of incompetence, resentment and malice, or when the loving romantic who sends roses, chocolates and a teddy bear mutates into a rapist: ‘Oh, but he was so nice.’
And when these gullible people suffer personal difficulties, for instance from a career or relationship betrayal, their lack of per-ceptiveness, foresight and understanding means that the response is shock and outrage. And their lack of a personal ‘beneath’ means that they have no inner life to put the problem into perspective and provide strength and defiance. There is nothing to fall back upon, only depression to fall into.
I was made to understand the new power of the image when I attended the launch of a government publication called ‘Images’. This was when the Northern Ireland conflict was at its most murderous and the purpose of the initiative was not to understand or address the problems, but to counteract them with expensively produced images of all the good things going on in the province: eel fishermen happily lifting a catch; bearded folk musicians ecstatically fiddling; and solemn potters mystically moulding clay on wheels. To help spread this positive message, anyone involved with culture or the media had been invited to the launch. And indeed many had turned up for the free drink and canapes. Suddenly a tremor passed through the crowd – the Minister for Northern Ireland had arrived. A mere politician; we returned to our booze and snacks. But, a while later, there was a disturbance that sent a tsunami through the room. Everyone turned – and remained turned. It was a newscaster …a newscaster from News at Ten. Officials rushed to express gratitude, surrounding him and abjectly babbling thanks for deigning to turn up to such an unimportant function. This spectacle brought a shocking revelation – those who read the news are now more important than those who make it.
Then came a lesson in self-image. I approached a science-fiction writer called Bob Shaw, who struck me as one of the most unhappy-looking people I had ever seen, but was the only face I recognized. I assumed he would be pleased to hear that I had read one of his novels – but not a bit of it. He grunted and looked fretfully around at other groups, focussing eventually on an approaching photographer, who assessed us with a swift glance and moved on by.
I laughed. ‘We’re not famous enough.’
But Bob did not laugh. With a gru
nt of outrage he pursued the photographer and caught his arm. ‘Excuse me, I’m Bob Shaw the world-famous science-fiction writer’
Nor did the photographer laugh. Instead, with a repentant, apologetic expression, he turned and raised his camera. Bob began to pose – then looked in disgust at this nobody by his side who was about to benefit from the proximity of a world-famous writer. Uttering another grunt, he walked to a group nearby and, with a final triumphant and contemptuous glance at me, turned to the camera for the transfiguring flash.
The transfiguring power of celebrity was also behind the most shocking abandonment of reason for emotional indulgence in recent memory – the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Here was a woman of average looks who, if not illuminated by celebrity, would have passed unremarked in the street, now suddenly worshipped as the most dazzling beauty since Helen of Troy; a woman living a life of pampered indulgence suddenly pitied as the most downtrodden of victims; a woman who had left her husband for the playboy son of a wealthy man, suddenly revered as the greatest saint since Teresa of Avila. But anyone who even attempted to suggest any of this was attacked and reviled as a heartless cynic. It seemed as though the entire country – the entire Western world – had lost its mind. Even my wife, whom I had always regarded as a rational sceptic, was swept away on the tide of emotion and went to worship at the flower mountain outside Kensington Palace. And she, too, refused to listen to any attempt to put the death into perspective. It was one of the most disturbing episodes I have ever lived through. In this case the emotion, grief, was harmless, but it was easy to imagine less benign emotions – panic, hysteria, hatred, rage – sweeping aside rational argument in the same way.