The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) (16 page)

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-1960
s
.

I could never have taught in such an environment, but when, in the early 1970
s
, 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 grunt 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.

Most of these dangerous emotions are based on fear – and a hedonistic culture, concerned as much with the avoidance of pain and difficulty as the pursuit of pleasure, is always fearful. The citizens of Western democracies have never been more healthy and safe – and have never felt more unhealthy and unsafe. We now fear the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the people who smile at our children, the local streets we walk on, the public transport we take to work and the buildings we work in, which may be sinisterly and toxically ‘sick’. The less visible the threat the more frightening it becomes.

This is not an argument against emotion. Without emotion there would be no possibility of happiness, compassion or love. Even rational decision-making would be impossible. But emotion must be balanced by thinking. And the negative emotions are so much more powerful than the positive that it takes a constant effort of understanding to keep them at bay.

The alternative to thinking is not emotion but thoughtlessness. Failing to think may sound like a harmless form of abdication – but Hannah Arendt was vouchsafed a profound insight while attending the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Attempting to understand his motivation, she considered – but was forced to reject – the traditional idea of evil as a positive, demonic force i.e. the original sin or Manichean explanation. Then came the insight: Eichmann’s most notable characteristic was not ideological conviction, nor was it evil motivation, but
thoughtlessness
. In the Israeli court he functioned, as he had done in Germany, by sticking to the cliched, conventional language that protects against reality and renders thinking unnecessary. Arendt’s conclusion: ‘Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever comes to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually ‘condition’ them against it?’
184

So thinking may make the difference between good and evil. It may even make the difference between life and death. Primo Levi, the concentration camp survivor, has written that the one quality survivors had in common was intellectual curiosity.
185
Even the extreme suffering of the camps was an object of study for the active mind, and attempting to understand it conferred a crucial sense of worth. Wholly bourgeois people, reliant only on status and possessions, had no such resource and were the first to die. So curiosity may have killed the cat but it has saved many human lives.

And the Levi experience is just one example of how understanding can not only ease but
make use of
adversity, as the Stoics and existentialists advised. Anyone not consumed by self-pity, anger and blaming can try to turn to advantage whatever happens. For those willing to learn, pain is an excellent teacher.

But Hannah Arendt’s ‘thinking attention’ and thinking ‘regardless of results and specific content’ refer to undirected mental activity rather than thinking in the generally understood sense of purposive thought i.e. thinking with a specific goal, such as establishing a truth, making a decision or choosing from a range of options. Thinking attention is a purely enjoyable form of thought. But directed thought, while frequently necessary, has always been difficult and is becoming increasingly so. How to establish anything as true without the support of theology or tradition, in a culture of epistemic relativism? How to make crucial life decisions in a culture without constraints and almost unlimited personal freedom? How to choose anything when the range of options is huge and constantly changing and growing? Sartre, who insisted on the necessity of choice, also acknowledged that it was ‘agony’. The price of autonomy is the agony of choice.

The psychologist Barry Schwartz has studied choice and reached sobering conclusions. We all believe we love choice and demand as much of it as possible but we actually hate having to choose. We demand the widest possible range of options but, in fact, the wider the range, the longer and more stressful the choosing and the lower the possibility of eventual satisfaction; we are exhausted by evaluating trade-offs and haunted by the missed opportunities of rejected alternatives. Frequently we become so confused that we no longer even want to make the choice – the fate of the holiday restaurant menu reader who is thrilled by the first menu, intrigued by the second, interested in the third…but by the tenth is too bewildered to decide and is no longer even hungry. And we prefer decisions on choice to be reversible but, in practice, we rarely reverse them and are nearly always less satisfied with a reversible choice.
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This is evidence for Sartre’s view that we can be happy only in finitude – making choice final and following through.