The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) (14 page)

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.
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So the way to success is to focus on failure. And in general it would be wiser to concentrate on our shortcomings. But it is supremely difficult to see ourselves as we really are. The mind shies away from its own insignificance as strenuously as from the prospect of its own extinction. It takes a kind of wilful, unnatural act, a leap of anti-faith, to understand that one’s own self is a raw, quivering, insecure, fearful and puny thing. The inner giant is really a trembling dwarf – and a half-crazed, neurotic, greedy, enraged, deformed dwarf at that. All that distinguishes one dwarf from another is the nature and strength of its disguises and self-deception (whose final task is to erase all the ingenious processes of self-deception).

The good news is that we can summon help in the heroic task of exposing our unheroic natures. Literature abounds in reminders of our laughable paltriness – Shakespeare, for instance: ‘The fool doth think he is wise but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.’
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The further good news is that this exposure is liberating, even exhilarating. Hence another exquisite paradox – the inner giant may be awakened only by recognizing it as a dwarf.

However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss – Solitude, Stillness and Silence – and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise. Commotion is life, repeat these new faithful; solitude, stillness and silence are death.

Already the word ‘solitude’ has an archaic ring to it, as though it were some weird ascetic practice of the Desert Fathers, like taking a vow of chastity or wearing a hair shirt. When a team of psychologists asked people to rank common activities in order of preference, spending time alone came out second last, just ahead of being interrogated by the boss.
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There are many possible reasons for this. Like detachment, solitude can be frightening. It may expose the insignificance, ugliness and emptiness we are trying so hard to conceal. And, within relationships, a desire for solitude may be interpreted by a needy partner as rejection or a failure to provide the constant company craved, or both, and this partner will scheme, bully and intrude to prevent the other being alone. Then there are the demands of relatives, colleagues and friends, the last two categories being increasingly significant. In the survey cited above, spending time with friends was by far the most popular activity.

Has anyone researched the phenomenon of contemporary friendship? My feeling is that young people have increasingly large circles of friends, spend increasingly large amounts of time in their company, communicate with them increasingly often when apart, and increasingly regard them as of equal or greater importance than relatives and partners. The American poet Robert Bly blames this on what he defines as ‘the sibling society’, a culture of semi-adults who reject responsibility and maturity for a narcissistic self-indulgence sanctioned by allegiance to fellow siblings.
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One of the most popular TV sitcoms of recent times was called simply
Friends
, and promoted the idea of friends as the new family; where the old unit was demanding and troublesome, the new version provides wacky group fun forever – no one need grow up or leave the fold.

So the siblings require constant communication – and technology is happy to oblige with mobile phones, Skype, texting, chat rooms, email and social networking websites. It is beginning to seem as though everyone is friends with everyone else and everyone is in constant communication with everyone else. One of the new reality TV celebrities in the USA, Tila Tequila, famous for putting her affections out to competitive tender between 16 straight men and 16 lesbians in
A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila
, boasts of having 1,771,920 friends.
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The trend is to have more and more friends and to share more and more with them. So little remains private. Until fairly recently, sexual practice was unmentionable in public. Now, last night’s sex is discussed as casually as last night’s TV – one reason why the power and the glory of sex have so diminished. And the last of the taboo private matters, money, is also increasingly public, though in this case any diminishment of the power and the glory of the subject is welcome.

And this leisure phenomenon has its work parallel in the worship of ‘collaboration’. This new idol is celebrated in a recent slew of books such as
Crowdsourcing; We Are Smarter Than Me; Here Comes Everybody; The Wisdom Of Crowds; Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
and
We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production
(by Charles Leadbeater and 257 other people). This form of collaboration is an extension of the team ethos of the last century. According to its visionary advocates, the entire population of the world will eventually be one giant team collaborating happily on a multitude of exciting new projects. Already television is increasingly collaborative, with the outcome of many reality shows decided by the public. And online TV is based on the concept of collaboration, with the audience directly influencing the content of drama shows and even participating in them.

All this has brought about a curious development in late individualism – a diminishing of faith in the individual.

Yet the advice from all the thinkers is that redemption comes not from others but from within the individual. And, to find strength from within, it is necessary to spend time alone. Here is Rilke: ‘The essential thing is only this…to be solitary, in the way one was solitary as a child, when the grownups went back and forth around us absorbed in things that seemed important and grand because they themselves looked so businesslike and we children had never the slightest idea of what they were doing.’
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The solitary child knows intuitively that the busyness and babble of the Big Ones are absurd, but grows up, is sucked into busyness and babble and forgets about enchantment. The world demands continuous, total immersion – but there is a form of happiness that depends on holding back something vital, as the child protects a secret self from nagging, intrusive parents. And this withholding is nurtured and strengthened by solitude, when the clamour and the years fall away and something like the old childhood rapture may be experienced once again. Contemporary disapproval may actually make solitude even more exciting – forbidden, illicit, transgressive, like snorting coke but entirely free from concerns about expense, dangerous criminals, the police or a disintegrating nose.

A secret self is such a protection against the world and its vicissitudes, armour all the more effective for being interior and invisible, the chain mail providing greater security on the soul than the body.

Then there is stillness. ‘Teach us to sit still,’
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T.S. Eliot prayed – but his prayer went unanswered. Instead the age has been increasingly dominated by the superstitions of activity and movement. Mere activity has always been worshipped, but the obsession with movement is new, driven by restlessness and facilitated by cheap transport. ‘I want to
travel
, ’ people say nowadays, with a solemn, mystical, faraway look. But, if you respond with, ‘Where to and what for?’ the mysticism dissolves into irritated incomprehension. For there is no burning desire to see anything in particular, merely to get going, to be on the move. Like sharks, we must keep in motion to stay alive and, as with sharks, the grin is false but the teeth are real. American culture is permeated with this worship of movement as the universal redeemer and renewer. Any failure may be erased by going elsewhere and reinventing oneself as the Great Gatsby. Even if there is no Gatsby rebirth, the movement itself will be exhilarating, for movement is the physical expression of potential.

No wonder ‘dynamic’ has become one of the highest terms of praise. Dynamic is wonderful. Static is terrible. So buildings have a serious problem in being mostly chunky cuboids obviously rooted to the spot. Contemporary architects get around this with designs that create the illusion of movement. The sexiest new buildings look as though they are stretching, leaning, twisting, turning, falling apart, about to burst into sail, about to take off, already in flight or even dancing, like Zaha Hadid’s Dancing Towers in Dubai, which resemble three inebriated clubbers late on a Saturday night. The obvious next stage is a building that is not an illusion but actually moves – and the appropriately named Dynamic Group has proposed a tower for Dubai where each of the residential floors turns on its axis so everyone can be on the move even while watching TV at home.

Perhaps the mania for holidays is really only an excuse for movement – as is perhaps the mania for second homes. There is, of course, the colonist’s thrill of filling the virgin territory of a second home with all the possessions in the first, but the unconscious pleasure may be the obligation to move constantly between the two. And a common vision of bliss is life as a permanent holiday or, more precisely, an endless succession of holidays. With so many striving towards this ideal, tourism has had to become increasingly resourceful. So there is Sex Tourism, Adventure Tourism, Eco-Tourism, Space Tourism, Drug Tourism, Slum Tourism and now Dark Tourism, which is defined on the website for Lonely Planet guides as ‘travel to sites associated with death, disaster and depravity’. Now Heart of Darkness Tours will transport you in comfort to the German concentration camps, the Cambodian killing fields and the slave dungeons of West Africa.

Then there is the superstition of busyness, where the equivalent of ‘I want to travel’ is the mantra, ‘I like to be active’. Activity is another means that has become an end because it provides relief from anxiety, and the illusion of significance and meaning. But thinkers have always extolled the plenitude of inactivity, for instance Cicero quoting Cato, ‘Never is a man more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.’
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Yet the version for the T-shirt is, surprisingly, by a contemporary American, the poet Charles Wright: ‘Don’t just do something, sit there.’
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And when people are obliged to sit there they sometimes enjoy it. Waiting areas are often surprisingly serene, given the raging impatience of the times, even those in hospitals and airports where the wait can stretch into hours. More encouraging still, hardly anyone looks at the inevitable screen.

But it is harder to resist the assault on silence. As far back as the 1880
s
the French poet Jules Laforgue cried out in despair: ‘the modern world has embarked on a conspiracy to establish that silence does not exist’.
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What would he have made of a world with constant music in bars, cafes, restaurants, hotels, department stores, boutiques, supermarkets, buses, trains, foyers, lifts and toilets? It is becoming difficult to enjoy even a quiet ruminative pee. Nowhere is safe now. I visit my dentist where, for decades, the only distraction has been dog-eared old magazines with missing covers, and find a music centre going behind the reception desk, a television on in the waiting room and a radio playing in the surgery. No sanctuary is beyond assault. Even the fish in the oceans are being driven mad, according to
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
: ‘Since the 1960
s
there has been a tenfold increase in underwater ocean noise.’

But the ultimate abomination is canned music in
bookshops
. Imagine trying to browse Chinese poetry about sage recluses having deep thoughts on mountain tops – only to be deafened by loud music. And the nature of this background music has also changed. At first public places played only muzak, created to be blandly unobtrusive, and the occasional bookshop might have baroque music noodling harmlessly in the background. Now there is thumping soul, rock or drum and bass (an example of the contemporary fondness for music with no beginning, middle or end, that just seems to go on and on). This destroys not only attention, but music itself. Anything played as background becomes only background, as meaningless as the humming and singing of a refrigerator.

Also obsolete is the idea of libraries as havens of solitary reading in silence. Imagine being a librarian, increasingly faced with uninhibited talk, laughter and mobile-phone use in the library, and then attending a library conference to hear the government Culture Secretary,
the Culture Secretary
, declare that libraries are far too ‘silent and sombre’ and should be full of ‘joy and chatter’.
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This Culture Secretary believes that ‘libraries should be the places where real social networking happens’. They should offer shared learning, family history research, foreign language lessons and, of course, reading groups. Now people can’t even read a book without network support.