The Hidden Pleasures of Life

by Theodore Zeldin

  The philosophers of the Enlightenment believed they had the answer to that difficulty. They appealed to the masses to share in a dream of a world in which freedom would have no boundaries, redefining patriotism as a sense of community with everyone who believed in freedom, wherever they lived. In place of the ancient model of the citizen of the world as a serene sage who finds harmony within the diversity of languages and tribes, they substituted the activist fighter for liberation from tyranny, in which even the most humble could join. However, in the last two hundred years, national self-interest has won far more adherents. Even Soviet Communism, while inviting all workers of the world to unite, used national feeling to extend its empire. Though the United Nations Organisation supports supranational welfare agencies concerned with universal problems, it is also a guardian of jealous national sovereignties.

  It is no longer possible to behave like the libertine wanderer Fougeret de Montbron, author of Le Cosmopolite (1750), who poured scorn both on those who had never been out of their own country and on those who gave all their admiration to just one foreign country, like the French ‘anglo-maniacs’. When he asked for a passport to visit England, and was told ‘Have you forgotten that France is at war with England?’ he replied ‘No, but I am an inhabitant of the world, and I maintain a perfect neutrality between the belligerent powers.’ It is no longer possible to do what Humphry Davy (1778–1829) did in 1813, and travel to France while the Napoleonic War was raging, to receive a medal from the emperor for his scientific discoveries, insisting that though the two governments might be at war, scientists were not. Cosmopolitanism remains a mirage partly because it is not believed when it insists that it is no threat to national or any other local loyalties, and partly because less than 5 per cent of the world’s population is fluent in a language other than their own. A world government, assuming that one will ever come into existence, would not necessarily be more benign that the ones about which citizens presently complain. Even in the twenty-first century, a majority of voters in the United States have shown that they are not worried about electing as their president a person with only the haziest notions about countries outside his own. The exchange of insults or worse between nations remains a favourite safety valve for many frustrations. Rousseau’s scepticism is still widely shared: ‘Beware of these cosmopolitans who search in books for duties to fulfil in distant parts, which they disdain to carry out at home . . . They love everyone so as to have the right to love no-one.’

  The answer to this is that there is an alternative to the cosmopolitan ideal. I cannot love a person I have never met, or at least heard or read. It is the same with nations: I need to be moved not only by its appearance but even more by its dreams and its memories, and by its ancient and present struggles, and to become strongly aware that the individuals in it are not identical pebbles on a beach. When chance led me to write my doctoral thesis on France, and when I then spent many years trying to understand French people of every sort, both alive and dead, I discovered three Frances: one was an imaginary one, made up of the myths that French people like to believe about themselves; a second one consisted of sixty-five million individuals, each with their own unique peculiarities and different opinions, revealing that there were as many minorities in France as there were inhabitants; while a third France was made up of people of every nationality all over the world who have imbibed something from French culture, and who are many times more numerous than the citizens of France. Anybody whose tastes have been influenced by French ideas, or food, or literature, or art, or any other experience of the country, has an ingredient of France inside them, side by side with ingredients derived from other countries too.

  Beyond the cosmopolitanism caricatured by Rousseau, loving everybody whoever they are, another chemistry of ideas can be envisaged, which each individual concocts with elements from different parts of the world, combining appreciation of particular people and places to produce affections of a unique composition. Unlike the cosmopolitanism that is immediately at home anywhere, this more personal approach is nourished by knowledge that is only gradually acquired, and is sustained by a reciprocal feeling on the part of both the stranger and the native that they have each had their minds opened to new ways of looking and thinking. Like artists who paint a picture of a landscape in which they see features that the natives may notnotice or value, they become catalysts to each other’s imaginations.

  The exception française – the insistence on doing things their own way – though irritating to many – is as significant as the protest against the earth being re-afforested with identical fir trees or its architecture being homogenised with identical glass skyscrapers or its inhabitants all wearing the same style of clothing. It is balanced by the tradition France has inherited from its eighteenth-century thinkers of extracting universal implications from particular or local facts, the most powerful antidote to narrow perspectives. The France that has been a muse to me has therefore not been a jealous muse, but one that has urged me, and made it easier for me, to seek inspiration from other countries. And each one suggests new thoughts, like a dictionary that reveals a multiplicity of nuances to the meaning of each word. Just as a person’s age is not measured simply by the number of years since birth, but by the intensity with which those years were lived, and the variety of the experiences absorbed, from which is deducted all the time spent in vacuous semi-existence, so each human being’s homeland can be made of many fragments and gradations of gratitude, loyalty and inspiration.

  [16]

  Why do so many people feel unappreciated, unloved and only half alive?

  WHY HAVE THE IDEALS OF Liberty, Equality and Fraternity been so difficult to turn into reality? Why have they failed to deliver all that they promised? If ideals inevitably lose their delicate and intoxicating flavour when frozen into laws, what future is there for them?

  There have so far been two ways of keeping ideals alive after repeated disappointment. The first is to insist that it is good to have noble ideals, even if one cannot put them into practice. In Japan, in particular, many have come to this conclusion, that since failure is so much more common than success, the way you fail matters more than failure itself.

  Though Japan has as strong a tradition as the U.S.A. of seeking success in the conventional sense, it has a parallel tradition that exalts noble failures and admires those who bravely defy established authority in the name of a worthy moral cause, ignoring the possibility or likelihood of failure. There was a time when the Japanese had riots or ‘smashings’ almost every ten years, which were often futile, but were repeated nonetheless. Some of the country’s most popular heroes are not the rich and powerful but these noble failures. Oshio Heihachiro (1793–1837) is one of them, a humble police inspector in Osaka who made it his mission to fight against corruption. When the chief magistrate of the city turned out to be corrupt too, Oshio resigned and devoted himself to teaching the public better morals, with the message that it was wrong and cowardly to resign oneself to injustice. Even if the power of authority seemed invincible, one should ‘do right for the sake of doing right’; one should not just know what is right, but act to assert what is right. He gave revolutionary meaning to the Chinese philosopher Wang Yang-Ming’s dictum, ‘To know and not to act is the same as not knowing at all.’ It did not matter if action was ineffective; a sage should not be afraid to act ‘like a madman’, foreshadowing what Mishima wrote a century later, ‘The journey not the arrival matters.’ So when in the 1830s a famine lasting four years had devastating effects and over 100,000 died of starvation, Oshio Heihachiro protested that the bureaucrats were in league with the rich merchants in keeping the price of food beyond the means of the poor. He sold his most precious possession, his library, and gave all the money away to the poor; then he started a rebellion, not to win political power, but to give expression to what most people ‘sincerely’ believed, that the wicked should be punished and that justice should reign on earth. What mattered above all was to act with ‘
sincerity’, rather than to live a lie. He set his own house alight, so as to burn down the houses of the merchants around him, and ultimately 3,300 houses were destroyed and many shops looted. But his rebellion was hopelessly disorganised and easily and brutally quashed. Oshio committed suicide, but he lives on as a hero of all those who believe that life should not, and need not, be ‘hell’, the word he used to describe the lot of the many. Reverence for failure, both heroic failure and that of ‘the little man’, reappeared as a frequent theme in American literature centuries later: The Death of a Salesman echoes the Japanese lament that though the body may live longer, the spirit too often dies an early death.

  The second, more common, response to the demise of ideals is to keep on repeating that ideals rule one’s life, even though one constantly betrays them and even though one is less attached to them than one claims. Ideals salve the conscience. Humans have in practice not been as devoted to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity as the slogan suggests. They have repeatedly abandoned these ideals, often without a struggle. Even the English, justly proud pioneers of free speech and freedom from arbitrary arrest, have demonstrated how readily people will give up their liberties when they get frightened. It does not require a brutal tyrant to destroy liberty. All that is needed is panic. At the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in the space of a single decade, a huge number of new criminal offences were created, supposedly to protect liberty, but sometimes having the opposite effect. The people of England are now watched daily by about five million cameras, under closer surveillance than any other country, to the extent that an average person is apparently observed 300 times a day and the movement of every car is recorded. Freedom of speech and the right of public protest have been curtailed. Individuals have been held in jail without charge, or placed under house arrest without ever being convicted, on the basis of evidence inadmissible in a court of law. Governments have given themselves legal authority to conceal actions which might lose them votes. The media have far fewer resources to reveal the truth than in the past. Trial by jury is under threat, and freedom from libel is available only to the very rich. According to a poll, the majority of British people no longer believe that Human Rights laws increase justice. In the U.S.A., Human Rights have been called ‘the last Utopia’, briefly popular when other ideologies lost their appeal, but already going out of fashion. Amnesty International has only three million members, compared to ninety-seven million Red Cross volunteers. Survival is more highly valued than freedom.

  The message from the U.S.A., despite its dedication to freedom, is that its citizens did not freely choose to be what they have become. They did not voluntarily abandon Benjamin Franklin’s injunctions in The Way to Wealth (1756): ‘Buy only what you need. He that goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing.’ They were carried away by their brilliance in technology, which enabled them to produce far more than they could consume, so they had to seek new markets and entice everyone to buy as much as possible relentlessly, cajoling them into betraying the simplicity and thrift they once cherished. They did not intend to become the world’s most publicly and privately indebted nation. They did not freely choose to be dominated by huge corporations; on the contrary, as a nation of independent pioneers and family businesses, they battled hard to avoid them with anti-trust laws, and failed. They did not decide after careful deliberation to give so much importance to material possessions, and over three-quarters of them still complain that their country is too materialistic, selfish, ungenerous, uncaring; but they have difficulty in following the morality they believe in: when asked what their main ambitions are, the same proportion replies that they want a beautiful home, a new car, nice clothes, and a highly paid job. Desire, possession and distraction govern them willy-nilly as much as liberty, equality and fraternity. John Adams, the second president of the United States (1735–1826), told his wife that he busied himself with politics and war only so that their sons could ‘have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.’ The vision for the grandchildren has still not been reached. Many insist that America’s essential business is business, which was not the original intention.

  These disappointments have not stopped Americans from continuing to pray for success from the graveyard of their moral defeats. What they have done has influenced almost everyone on earth, but what else could they have done? They give expression to their idea of liberty and equality by having as their prime hero the self-made man who delights to sing ‘I did it my way’. America’s gospel is that anyone who works hard can succeed, simply by their own efforts, with the comforting conclusion that all the privileges of the successful are deserved, and there can therefore be no quarrel about inequality of wealth. But the American dream is of course only a dream. In reality, large numbers do not succeed, and those who get to the top do not necessarily work much harder than those who stay at the bottom, certainly not five hundred times harder, as their salaries suggest.

  Bob Dylan said ‘If you try to be anyone but yourself you will fail’, and ‘A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.’ However, it is not that easy to be oneself, and to know what one wants, and what caricature of oneself one is becoming as the years go by. One needs others to speak honestly about how one appears to them, or at least one needs the encouragement that comes from two people finding each other beautiful, despite what the whole world might think. Whatever is believed about relying on oneself, few succeed without the right friends. Most people have only their small families and a few friends to help them, often failures like themselves. So where can they find more friends? ‘I don’t mind failing in this world,’ sang Malvina Reynolds (1900–1978), ‘because those who succeed are the sons of bitches.’ But what is the alternative to devoting one’s energies to joining the ranks of the sons of bitches?

  When ideals become too obviously a sham, a third attitude to them might be to question whether there is something vital missing from them. This became clear when the acquisition of the vote and the control of political power were adopted as the world’s primary goal and as the essential precondition for happiness, directing attention to public debate away from private understanding, and to legal rights away from personal relationships. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity are unable by themselves to provide sufficient emotional sustenance, because they leave too many people feeling unappreciated, unloved and only half alive. Though it is wonderful if the law gives us the freedom to say and do what we please, without hurting others, what if no-one listens to what we say and no-one values what we do? Then increasingly the desire to be appreciated and understood becomes more important than the theoretical possession of constitutional privileges. For everyone to have an equal vote and for all discrimination to be abolished is hugely satisfying, but what if greed, malice, envy and pride take the joy out of equality? Then, increasingly, equality looks like a mirage and instead it is affection that is seen as making the differences between individuals bearable. To know that fraternity will come to one’s aid in moments of difficulty or in old age is a great relief, but what if that help is given impersonally, meanly, grudgingly, with no gratitude for what one has given to others in better times? Then, increasingly, mere survival no longer seems enough, and there is a yearning for a greater sense of being properly alive, to be a source of energy with something valuable to give others, able to animate others and be animated by them.

  Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is a recipe from which an important ingredient has been omitted. The lawyers who draft constitutions do not like to mention facts of life that are too personal or intimate. Though an enormous amount of heroism and sacrifice has been devoted to making each of these three values the real foundations of society, none are anywhere near being so. The French took a century of hesitation before t
hey finally decided on their famous slogan, having previously toyed with Friendship, Charity and Sincerity. The three magic words that decorate the walls of almost every official building in France, accompanying warnings that it is forbidden for anyone else to put up notices on walls, have survived only because they are protected by numerous myths and wildly different interpretations. This may suggest that without myths nothing can endure. But it is precisely because the magic words have been cocooned in myths that they have not changed lives as much as they could have. Today people need Appreciation, Affection and Animation as a supplement to the political, economic and social preoccupations of the past.

  But what about that large part of humanity that is not bothered with ideals and lives passively under dictators, apparently even admiring them? Forgetting that power is a bitter-sweet poison that causes bizarre forms of blindness and deafness, normally sensible people can still be stirred up into handing it to every charismatic would-be messiah promising to solve all problems, even though infatuation with persuasive heroes has repeatedly been followed by disappointment and panic, almost as inevitably as storms and hurricanes bring sunshine to an end.

  ‘When the land is kingless, the rich are unprotected, and shepherds and peasants sleep with bolted doors