As sales assistants become more educated and ambitious but are also constantly threatened by staff cuts in the interest of efficiency, they want more scope to express their unused talents. In the exploratory trial, the woman in charge of bedding, who was formerly a bank clerk and school domestic bursar, and who has travelled widely, voluntarily began spending her lunch hour reading to young children; the man selling office furniture who had a master’s degree in horticulture was eloquent about the tropical plants he grows at home; the woman on the cake stand whose real expertise was dressmaking, the head of marketing whose passion was spiritual healing, they all had much more to offer than a sales pitch. IKEA could be providing a new kind of international education to its young sales assistants if it gave them the chance to work in each of the forty-odd countries in which it operates. Commerce is inevitably focused on finance, but it also depends on reputation, and the reward to the manager of this store was the feeling that he was serving the community in a way that made him and his staff significant figures in the lives of more and more individuals. Commerce does not have to abase itself in flattery, repeating that ‘the customer is always right’; on the contrary, it can inspire the customer with new ideas. The mission of retail marketers need not be confined to establishing a relationship just between customers and the anonymous corporation, rather than between the customers themselves. Cities may not be doomed to become ever more similar, with identical branches of international retail chains and endlessly repeated brand slogans. A shopper is a person, not a purse.
To be relentlessly pressured to work harder so as to be able to afford a never-ending stream of desirable things is a depressing kind of freedom. The big corporations have not yet devised ways of renewing themselves so that they can be a source of the personal liberation and individual creativity that so many people are now forced to search for outside their day jobs. The Consumer Society was originally a revolution against destiny and meek submission, a protest against the teaching that people had to accept their lot and that complaining would change nothing. It proclaimed the supremacy of individual desire. But desire did not necessarily liberate, it could also enslave. Business can only become an integral part of a full cultural life, rather than just a means towards other ends, when it raises its sights above giving customers what they can be persuaded to want and imposing on its workers the mundane servitudes of earning a living. Successful business people who have risen to honours and comfort may not be bothered that they have missed out on intellectual, artistic, spiritual or moral attainments, but when they see their children determined to avoid following in their footsteps, and floundering at a loss to know what to do, they realise that the system that sustains them has become meaningless to many in the next generation.
It is precisely such collapses of meaning that, in previous centuries, have spurred youth to new adventures – though not all youth, far from it, for it is always minorities who take dangerous initiatives. ‘Going back to nature’ is no longer an option: even H. D. Thoreau (1817–1862), the pioneer advocate of simple living in natural surroundings, had to admit that nature can be ‘mean’ as well as ‘sublime’. However, the growing panic about the destruction of the environment revives nostalgic memories of forests where everyone could freely gather food and raise animals, and of cities which grew their own food. Henry Daniel (c. 1315–1385), who grew 252 different plants in his garden in Stepney, London, is a reminder of what a civilisation of offices and factories loses by its segregation from nature and by the divorce of town and country. Making the earth sustainable is only a beginning; then comes the more difficult task of avoiding having to earn so much money just to stay alive and keep warm.
Already, however, technology is giving hints that there may be other ways of feeding, housing and clothing oneself. For city dwellers, it has conceived high-rise buildings which are vertical hydroponic or aeroponic gardens, stack upon stack of automatically irrigated plants, yielding twenty times more crops than plants grown in open fields, while using 8 per cent of the water that conventional agriculture requires. NASA’s Controlled Ecological Life Support System enables astronauts to be self-sufficient in food on barren planets in space. Just as the twentieth century devoted itself to installing a bathroom in every house, so it may be that eventually the smallest apartment may feel incomplete without its own internal vertical vegetable garden, possibly in that same bathroom. So many edible plants have yet to be discovered, so many have been discarded unnecessarily by fashions which limited taste to just a few staples, that there is a food revolution waiting to be started, and many untried ways of responding to hunger and appetite to be found. That could mean not only changing what people eat, but also where they eat it and with whom. ‘We do not sit down at table to eat, but to eat together,’ wrote the Roman biographer Plutarch (A.D. 46–120). Since most people spend their whole lives eating with such a minute selection of human beings, the future of food is not just a problem of physical resources and increased productivity but also of conviviality. The Incredible Edible experiments – growing fruit and vegetables communally in towns and villages on every spare scrap of land – now spreading in Europe are just one sign of the desire to be free of the constant pressure that earning a living entails and the social segregation it brings with it.
Finding a place to live often involves spending a third of one’s wages for twenty-five years on a mortgage, the equivalent of undergoing a seven-year prison sentence. In Japan it has sometimes even meant taking out a loan repayable by one’s descendants over a hundred years, a new version of inherited serfdom. Vast discrepancies in house prices have divided poor and rich into separate ghettoes. Commuting between separate commercial, industrial, recreational and residential spaces has shortened the days, as though wage earners must live in a permanent arctic winter. Lenin promised that communism would bring rent-free homes, but got no further than cramming his Soviet families into a single room in shared apartments. The housing famine intensifies inevitably each year as populations grow and expectations rise. Neither suburban villas nor tower blocks can be the ultimate achievement of architectural creativity, nor can concrete and glass be the ultimate materials. Who will pioneer new kinds of shelter created with new materials, or new patterns of migration, or new forms of transport to replace those invented for a bygone age? And what about clothing, which awaits rejuvenation from century-old methods? Is a textile revolution on the horizon? Since most people have never had enough money, the ultimate test for technology is whether it can free them from the menace of hunger and homelessness, the tyranny of money and the drudgery that earning a living often entails.
When in previous centuries the young could not find work, they migrated to other continents. Today when they cannot find work they have to invent it where they are. They increasingly think: they do not want to copy their elders because the jobs on offer do not suit every temperament, do not allow the flowering of every talent, and there are never enough desirable ones to go round. When they are told that no-one has any use for them because they have no experience or the wrong qualifications, the only course open to them is to use their imagination to create new ways of living. Just as people invent new games, new gadgets, new songs, they can also invent new jobs. Dropping out is not a new way.
They may demand that work need not be dominated simply by the needs of agriculture, industry or services – whether commercial or philanthropic – but rather by a human right that has yet to be promulgated, the legitimate ambition to see the world and the infinitely varied forms of life it contains, to experience more of the innumerable skills that humans have developed, to be brought out of one’s cocoon and to feel that one has had a full life and helped others to have one too. Though to be a respected professional is wonderful, it is no longer possible to keep up with knowledge in a single profession unless one can understand the ideas, language and methods of several other disciplines. Specialisation has been responsible for innumerable improvements in skill and knowledge, but it now only bears f
ruit when it is pollinated by seemingly unconnected visitors from other specialities, and when it can escape being paralysed by overdoses of bureaucratic medication. To be assured that one is particularly suited to a single career is too reminiscent of older traditions that each person belongs to a caste or has a preordained destiny. And business may outgrow the military ideals it still cultivates, with results being counted in terms of territories conquered, competitors defeated and booty brought home. It does not have to have such ambiguous relations with private life. It may prefer the analogies of gastronomy, which is about clarifying what is and what is not worth desiring. appreciating unfamiliar tastes and eliminating inherited prejudices.
It is possible for business schools which sit on the periphery of universities to be the intermediaries that could give students of all faculties, whatever their subject, a chance to converse with people in many different occupations, as a basis for a reconsideration of what work has been doing, is doing and could possibly do differently in the future, to minds and hearts as well as pockets. Instead of just preparing the young for careers, universities and business schools could become laboratories which engaged in experiments by people of all disciplines and all occupations to make the search for a ‘better life’ more comprehensive and more imaginative. Nothing is more difficult than introducing change into institutions, but there have always been brave souls who like to think the unthinkable.
[24]
What else can one do in a hotel?
ALL THOSE WHO LISTEN TO THE wisdom of their contemporaries are constantly urged to be themselves, to know themselves and even to love themselves. At the same time, innumerable experts tell them that they are mistaken about themselves, that there is a lot wrong with them, and that they need help to repair themselves, educate, enrich, civilise, socialise themselves, and improve their appearance too. However, these experts are profoundly divided as to the right remedies for these many faults, and even as to what a fault is. What should one do in the face of so many contradictions? What is one supposed to make of all the people one knows, or thinks one knows, about whose characters and qualities one so often has contradictory information? Whether one agrees with Pascal that humans are ‘only falsehood, duplicity and contradiction’, or with Mao Zedong that all contradictions can be resolved, contradictions are part of life, and it is more interesting to know them than to close one’s eyes to them.
So I turn to Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), who devoted his life to making sense of human contradictions and of the vacillations of his own mind. I choose him because he espoused, one after another, a whole series of incompatible ideals. He treated them like lovers between whom he could not definitively choose, discarding them but not forgetting them, and remaining powerfully aware of their attractions, even of those he had come to detest. His novels are conversations between characters grappling with contending diagnoses of human dilemmas, and never being wholly satisfied for long with any one. Few have described so meticulously a sky dark with different shades of doubt, gloom and guilt briefly illuminated by fireballs of hope which die out too soon. He has apparently been translated into 170 languages, which suggests that countless thoughtful people all over the world remain torn, like him, between fascination, bewilderment and repulsion in the face of Western Europe’s contradictory ideologies. What other response can there be to this confusion?
Having been condemned to death at the age of twenty-eight and reprieved just minutes before the firing squad was about to execute him, Dostoyevsky concentrated with extraordinary intensity on the question of what it means to be alive. After being spared from death, he felt a ‘great surge of love for life’, a desire ‘to immerse myself in it’, a conviction that life meant ‘not to lose hope, however hard things may be, that is what life is, that is its purpose’.
Four years in a Siberian prison gave him another rare experience, of being able to mix with people very different from himself, ‘coarse, bitter and irritable’ criminals who hated him for being a member of the ruling class that had punished them and for being unsmiling, taciturn and suspicious, suffering, as he made plain, the ‘terrible torment’ of never being alone for a single minute, feeling that he was ‘buried alive and closed in a coffin’. But gradually he made friends with some, and got to understand others. Instead of complaining that he was surrounded by ‘a hundred and fifty enemies’ who never tired of persecuting him, he began to think that the educated elite had much to learn from the uneducated. ‘I learned to discern the human beings among the bandits, strong, beautiful natures among them, and what pleasure it was to find gold under a rough cover . . . What wonderful people; on the whole my time has not been wasted . . . so many types of the common people did I carry away . . . there’s enough for volumes and volumes.’ And in imagination, he became convinced, for a time, that they, uncontaminated by education, could save the world from its decadence and corruption.
Dostoyevsky’s many lives included being a romantic, a socialist, a conservative, a nationalist, an orthodox Christian appreciating both faith and unbelief, inspired by European thought but also condemning it as diseased. He despised materialism but his life was dominated by money, being always short of it, writing furiously to pay the bills, even writing two stories at the same time to meet the deadlines of newspaper serialisation, but also addictively gambling his earnings away. ‘Without money you cannot take any step in any direction.’ He calculated the cost of everything, and was fascinated by how those who cannot make money by conventional methods can acquire it through crime; but at the same time he deplored the obsession with money as a betrayal of Russia’s tradition of generosity, brotherhood and spirituality. He was an admirer of traditional values but he also questioned the traditional family and highlighted the tragic misunderstandings to which it gave birth. Your father ‘conceived you and you are his blood and therefore you must love him’. But, he replies, ‘Did he love me when he was conceiving me, did he really conceive me for my sake? He did not even know me. Why do I have to love him just because he conceived me and then failed to love me my whole life?’ On the one hand Dostoyevsky has a character saying, ‘Is there anyone who does not want his father to be dead?’ On the other hand he insists, ‘It is our duty to love our family, even though we may dislike them. That teaches us how to love all human beings.’
‘I am a child of doubt and disbelief,’ he wrote. ‘I have always been and shall ever be (that I know) until they close the lid of my coffin.’ But he was always desperately thirsting to believe in something, and yet the stronger this thirst became, the stronger the arguments against believing became. As a journalist he was decisive and dogmatic, preaching fervent nationalism, rejecting reliance on reason and scientific method: Russia’s task was to civilise Europe, bring to fruition Europe’s unfinished vocation, synthesise the ideas of its diverse peoples, and liberate it from atheism and socialism. But when Russia lost a war and went bankrupt, he concluded that ‘Europe despises us’ and turned his back on it: Russia must pursue its civilising mission in Asia instead.
As a novelist, however, he was the opposite of dogmatic, seeing all sides of every problem, the potential saintliness in the sinner, the cruelty of suffering and its universal pervasiveness but also its power to ‘redeem’. Crime he regarded as one of many forms of transgression, which could be an expression of freedom, curiosity or courage: ‘We are all transgressing every day; we often have to choose between two goods or two evils.’ Evil was not a curable disease but inherent in the human condition. No argument could yield the truth, and truth was too elusive to be put into words. That is why he had to be an artist, who finds some kind of truth by learning how to look at things in a way that reveals their beauty. ‘It is amazing what one ray of sunshine can do for a man.’
Dostoyevsky is the poet of complexity, the painter of unresolvable dilemmas, the sculptor, in melting ice, of humanity’s timid hopes. Since his death, everything has become even more complicated, with more knowledge, more diverse expectations and less conviction that
any one group has the monopoly of wisdom. So I am going to approach the problem of the inscrutability and contradictions of individuals in a more prosaic way, by asking whether they are using all the opportunities available to them to penetrate into the labyrinths of unspoken thoughts. It so happens that in the year 2012 the number of tourists in the world reached one billion, which means that never before have so many strangers passed each other by, usually in silence, without revealing or enquiring what they think of each other, and of themselves. Hotels are the nearest they have to a parliament, where each one is more or less misjudged on the basis of their nationality or appearance and other trivial evidence. It may seem that only superficial encounters of brief duration are possible in them, unlike prisons where the inmates can gradually discover one another’s deeper complexities concealed behind their crimes. But if the appreciation of people’s contradictions is one of the necessary foundations on which fruitful human relations are built, then it is worth considering whether, now that such huge numbers are passing through hotels, they could become a significant force in promoting a better understanding of enigmatic strangers and mysterious neighbours. The idea is not too far-fetched, because hotels were once dominating monuments in many cities.
In the nineteenth century Americans recognised what an important function hotels could have in a new country. They imagined them as the equivalent of the Greek agora, where all citizens could meet. Their early hotels were hailed as Palaces for the Public, giving architectural expressions to democratic ideals by providing vast assembly halls open to everyone, with dining and entertainment spaces as well as business libraries containing shipping reports, price lists and newspapers. Whereas authoritarian monarchies were fearful of both private and public meetings, imagining revolutionary conspiracies everywhere, Americans saw themselves as a nation of strangers who had given themselves the constitutional right to meet and combine with whom they pleased to pursue common goals. They were conscious of the loneliness of The Man of the Crowd, portrayed by Edgar Allan Poe in 1840, where a stranger is followed all day and all night through a city, to find that he has not met any acquaintance or exchanged a word with anyone, and not even acknowledged a single person. Already in 1818 people in Pittsburgh were complaining that they rarely knew their next-door neighbour. So hotels became meeting places for every form of activity. Dinner was served at a common table, with the same food for everyone, bringing together guests and local residents. ‘The charm of going to the city is dining with two hundred well-dressed people in a splendid drawing room.’ Eating together in public was the pleasure the hotel offered, in contrast with the European preoccupation with safeguarding privacy and emerging only to display one’s refinement. Though the hotel meal was often ‘devoured with a rapidity which a pack of foxhounds after a week’s fast might in vain attempt to rival’, interest in one’s fellow was not restrained by genteel decorum. Domingo Sarmiento (1811–1888), who later became the president of Argentina, was amused by the ‘unselfconscious curiosity’ of guests: ‘If the buttons on your overcoat have deer, horse or boar’s heads in relief, everyone who spies them will come up to you and go over them one by one, turning you about left and right to better examine the walking museum.’ An English traveller wrote, ‘The hotel system is the most levelling of all American institutions.’ There was no ‘flunkeyism’ and no room for the ‘assertion of individual importance’. And this was in keeping with the way many of these hotels were (for a time) financed: owned by all classes, with shares being bought by artisans as well as the rich.
The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 29
