The Hidden Pleasures of Life

by Theodore Zeldin

  Since so many hotel workers want to learn a new language, why are they not also language schools? Not just because chambermaids have to clean fourteen rooms a day, after which they are too exhausted to study, but more because the middle managers in charge of them do not think that is what hotels do; as one said, ‘I teach chambermaids to be chambermaids.’ Since hotels are often situated near universities, and employ students part-time, why have they not investigated what they could do together, for both guests and students? Why do they not have more active relations with professional, cultural and charitable organisations? At present they are at best only mildly flirtatious with them; they would be very different if they had the courage to couple with them and publicly assert an ambition to become a source of moral, cultural, spiritual or intellectual inspiration, to be recognised as a muse, and not simply as a Michelin recommendation. A good night’s sleep is a wonderful boon, but a good conversation remains in the memory much longer and can bear more precious fruits.

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  What more can the young ask of their elders?

  IN 1831, WHEN TRIESTE WAS an important and prosperous free port, a sort of Mediterranean precursor of Hong Kong, a group of men of many nationalities held a momentous meeting. They were there to do business, but business, as so often happens, was not what they cared about most deeply. One wrote poetry in Hebrew, which was described as being ‘of some merit’; two were Italian revolutionaries who went on to participate actively in overthrowing the governments of their country; one, who originated from Frankfurt, had ambitions to become an aristocrat and eventually ended up as a baron in Hungary.

  Their great business idea was that it was time to insure ‘the security of the life of man in all its ramifications’. They wanted to protect not just against maritime losses or natural disasters – as they and others had done before – but to remove worry about the future in general. They founded the Generali Insurance Company, which within a couple of decades had branches all over the world, from Alexandria to China and the U.S.A. Very little is known about the personal lives of the original founders; they have disappeared into almost total oblivion even amongst those who work for the company. Still less is known about what difference the company has made to the happiness of each of the individuals – numbering 85,000 today – who spent their lives in its offices. The only one of its employees the world remembers is Franz Kafka (1883–1924), one of the rare people to describe what it feels like to be a cog in the great machine that is the insurance industry. W. H. Auden called Kafka ‘the Dante of the twentieth century’, and indeed insurance is more than an industry; it is almost a religion, dedicated to exorcising fear, and a large part of humanity willingly makes regular votive offerings to it.

  Kafka found insurance ‘highly interesting’: he specialised in factory accidents, and was well regarded by his colleagues, whom he admired as ‘models of stability and conscientiousness’; he was himself very conscientious too, performing his duties with exceptional efficiency.

  But he also hated his job, ‘this horrible occupation’. In vain did he try to console himself by saying ‘I suppose one must earn one’s grave.’ After a year he moved to another insurance company because he was disgusted by a colleague being ‘upbraided in a particularly offensive manner’. His employers did not understand and explained his resignation as ‘enervation connected with extreme cardiac excitability’. But the new job was no better, despite its shorter hours; Kafka still complained of sleepiness in the office and being exhausted at the end of each day, even though he spent a lot of time gazing out of the window, fantasising about girls, joking and discussing literature. He had obtained qualifications in law only because he had not known what to do with his life, but this work was not life. ‘Every morning coming to the office I used to be overcome with such despair that a stronger, more consistent character than mine might have committed suicide quite cheerfully.’ His dream that insurance might take him to foreign parts so that he could ‘look out of the office window }at sugar-cane fields or Moslem cemeteries’ never became reality. And yet his energy was not destroyed. Once he got out of the office, though ‘the depression of having to go back was already beginning’, he had a busy social life, numerous affairs, visited brothels, enjoyed pornography, while remaining, as his best friend noted, ‘tortured by sexual desire’. He had a particular passion for cabaret: ‘I believe I have a deep, an immensely deep understanding for it and enjoy it with my pulse racing.’ But it was in literature that he found his ‘blood-brothers’ and through literature he revealed the absurdities and nightmares that haunted him. ‘It is through writing that I keep a hold on life’, and ‘writing means revealing oneself to excess.’ Or else it was ‘a form of prayer’.

  Working in insurance did not cure Kafka of his fears, or the dread that whoever he met would find him ugly, but it allowed him to meditate on what he could do in response to fear. He concluded that his fears were ‘probably the best part of me’. Insuring against them might not be the best answer, though he appreciated that for some it was ‘often safer to be in chains than to be free’. Is it possible that that insurance has still not found its full vocation?

  If insurance is almost a religion, why has it not had a Reformation? Insurance companies are still following in the footsteps of their eighteenth-century founders. They are the children of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, bravely abandoning the conviction that whatever happened was God’s will, and that to challenge God was to invite divine punishment. They espoused the new scientific attitude, seeking to win mastery over nature and to defeat its unpredictable whims. But at the same time as offering rational, mathematically calculated guarantees of security, they anchored their appeal in a deep emotion: fear. Insurance mitigated fear. Insurance has become the protector against an ever-widening range of fears, and also a stimulant of anxieties never before imagined. Almost every human activity is now held up as potentially dangerous and needing insurance. More profit can predictably be made from insurance against fear than from the occupations and objects that are insured.

  However, newly educated generations are increasingly being moved by other emotions and ambitions which compete against fear. As the young win more independence and are encouraged to seek the immediate satisfaction of every desire, their attachment to the age-old faith in thrift, on which all previous civilisations have been based, has weakened. They may want security, but many also want adventure and excitement, now, today, and they cannot be easily interested in pensions or prudence. Moreover, money is no longer enough. They want, even more, what money cannot buy – which means, above all else, fulfilling lives and warm personal relationships.

  That is something the insurance industry has not yet caught up with. It has minimal contact with the young. It assumes the young are in any case too poor to be worth soliciting for investments. But the young are making large investments in other industries – music, fashion, mobile phones, video games – because these help them to develop personal relationships. Insurers have forgotten the long history of the efforts of rebellious young people to obtain a sense of self-worth and appreciation from their elders, to win more freedom, to expand their horizons and to satisfy their hunger for friendships that their families often judge to be unsuitable. Nor has the insurance industry made use of the energies that inspired so many of humanity’s inventions. It offers a negative protection, promising monetary compensation after the event, with no relevance to juvenile aspirations. Why has it not invented a more proactive kind of insurance that would interest the young and also respond to the changes in contemporary ambitions? Why instead of Disaster Insurance, which palliates fears about property and old age, does it not offer Opportunity Insurance, when more and more people yearn for access to opportunities closed to them?

  Before insurance companies were invented, there were other kinds of insurance systems which contained proactive elements, with advantages (and disadvantages) over those which exist today. Families, churches, fraternities and friendly soci
eties provided several of the services that are now so costly. What they had in common was that they placed personal interaction, and not money, at their heart. They offered practical help, emotional comfort, sociability and ritual. But now in many countries where the family is smaller and more self-contained than it used to be, and where religions have lost their once-dominant position, the friendly societies which gave the poor mutual aid and a sense of belonging have been destroyed by the impersonal welfare state. That is why fundamentalist religious organisations are the most rapidly growing insurance groups today, attracting all age and occupational categories, offering not a written contract, nor a mass solution, but face-to-face personal help to each individual’s particular needs for work, housing, friendship, social acceptance, meaning and purpose. The insurance industry, by opting to become impersonal, corporate, anonymous, bureaucratic, and demanding that everything should be transacted with precise documentation and accountancy, cut itself off from its convivial past.

  Kafka’s verdict was not that of a hostile outside critic but of one who had played the insurance game successfully according to its own rules and could understand why it had evolved the way it did. He protested that bureaucracies ‘transform living, changing human beings into dead code numbers incapable of any change’, and that though people could enjoy their secure office jobs, they could also hate them for imprisoning their imagination. Serious limitations resulted from the arbitrariness and irrationality concealed behind supposedly fixed rules, and from indifference to the absurd injustices these could perpetrate. In what other direction could insurance go if it took more heed of the frustrations of its own and its customers’ imaginations?

  Insurance companies invented a money equivalent of chloroform that promises peace of mind, based on mathematical calculations which guaranteed them a profit, and they did well throughout a long period of prosperity accompanied by the flourishing of many anxieties. The more possessions people have, the more they have to lose; the more comforts they enjoy, the more they want them to continue; so laws were passed making certain kinds of insurance compulsory and others more seductive through taxation privileges. Insurance and pension funds became highly influential investors, determining the shape of civilisation, using the criterion of safe monetary returns but without asking their customers what else they might want. Their focus was money, assuming money could put right what went wrong, and could ensure that life went on ticking like clockwork. But half the world’s population is under twenty-five and has no money, or very little, and has rather different passions. How can insurance and youth cease to inhabit separate planets?

  No established industry can be expected to change its staid habits, but when such large numbers are alienated from it, when the aged become too numerous to be supported by those who work, and when therefore the continued viability, the very existence of insurance is threatened, there is a case for trying out something different; it would be no threat if carried out on a small scale, side by side with traditional procedures, just to see what alternatives there are. Science and technology are always experimenting, but organised professions are often prisoners of the vested interests of their members. And yet, though insurers are the embodiment of caution, they have been adventurous in their own way over the past 150 years, without offending the values of respectable society. Assicurazioni Generali moved on from being a marine insurer to become a landowner, a banker, an asset manager, an adviser to industry, a supplier of personal domestic assistance, and even an educationalist when its German branch established Europe’s largest technical university. However, neither it nor any other insurer imagined that its function might be to get involved in the seemingly trivial ambitions of the young. So instead it was the mobile phone industry that offered insurance to young people against their most dreadful fears, which were boredom, loneliness and lack of appreciation. When in 2006 the value of the youth mobile phone market passed a hundred billion dollars, insurers did not appreciate the relevance to their own future of this milestone, which indicated that vast numbers of young people were now desperately searching for friends and allies on the social networks, and that what they needed most urgently was liberation from their frustration at finding it so difficult to get satisfying jobs, better education and exciting foreign travel. Money was not enough: by itself it could not introduce them to strangers with influence who could help them and make their future more interesting. The more they looked beyond their own countries, the more they needed personal contacts to help them. But nowhere could they get Opportunity Insurance that would guarantee them access to the kind of life they craved.

  An insured person has so far never been expected to have anything to say to another insured person, apart from complaining about a company’s finding bureaucratic reasons to wriggle out of its promises. But it is possible to imagine Generali (or its competitors) realising that there might be advantages if they did talk. It has thirty million policy holders who are unused assets, because they have knowledge, experience and networks capable of helping the young with many of their most pressing concerns. The redistribution of knowledge between the generations requires not a revolution but a rethinking of how people spend their waking hours.

  The advantage that insurance companies have over social internet sites is that they can survive only by being trusted to support the life expectations of their customers, but they have so far restricted themselves to a narrow interpretation of that purpose, defining themselves as financial institutions engaged in monetary transactions. Yet even if they only communicate with customers annually or when a claim is made, their success depends on deepening mutual trust. Nothing fosters trust so much as appreciation of one’s talents. All policy holders have talents of one kind or another, but they are not given a chance to demonstrate or use these within the company, to feel that they have joined a community where they can exchange their knowledge among themselves, not just for mutual benefit but also for the public good.

  Of course, companies feel safer sticking to their ‘core’ business, but airline companies have been bold enough to envisage offering air travel that is completely free, earning income instead from selling other services to their customers. Major oil companies make more money from the shops they have added to their filling stations than from the sale of petrol. Google’s income comes not from its brilliant search engines, but from its attractiveness to advertisers. Cinemas rely on profits from selling confectionery in the interval, not just from tickets.

  Insurers have not yet recognised that they command a huge and unused repository of information about three of the vital ingredients of life, a job, education and travel. It is universally acknowledged that many jobs are obtained indirectly, through knowing the right people, and that the attractiveness of a particular job cannot be discovered without inside information. And yet insurance policy holders are not given the opportunity to be useful to one another, and to the next generation whose sights are on more immediate matters than insurance. The more difficult it is for the young to obtain work that suits them, the more they need the aid of those with personal experience of the realities behind the façades. As job seekers deliberately avoid committing their whole life to one employer, the need for contacts becomes ever more important: Why cannot Generali’s customers break the silence that separates those who have work and those who do not?

  Or indeed the silence between the educated and those struggling to become educated? Increasing numbers are keen to study outside their home country, but have access to only very limited local guidance, and when they arrive friendless in a strange land, they often end up consorting mainly with their own compatriots. Official brochures become not just inadequate but even misleading for the sophisticated choices that need to be made. While students can safely postpone worrying about what will happen to their dependants when they die, they urgently need better ways of solving their immediate problem of being short of money, and of finding someone who will help them get full or part-time work, ideally interesting work. I
n China, four million students (a quarter of the student population) are classified as living in poverty. In India a bank has established that personal advice is more valued and more beneficial than mere cash or loans. The managers of insurance companies insist that this is none of their business. But are the young really none of their business?

  When young people become more adventurous in their travels, whether searching for the exotic or the thrill of unexpected challenges, insurance against danger is not their main preoccupation. When they set out to explore the unknown, to penetrate the secrets of strangers, and to consciously take risks, they are not interested in mass-produced tourism for tired workers, in safe hotels and on safe beaches, in pre-booked packages, guaranteed by travel insurance. They need to know on whose door they can knock in whatever place they find themselves. So too do the elderly. One-third of Britons aim to retire abroad, and four-fifths want to travel abroad after retirement. Compensation for catastrophe is not enough; hope is more important, especially the kind of hope that money cannot buy, the hope that one’s knowledge and experience might be useful to people one would not ordinarily meet, and the hope that one could learn from others what one never imagined could be interesting.