The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) (3 page)

So the ad woos the id in the traditional way – by impressing, flattering and stimulating.

The ad smiles in satisfaction, as well it might. Never have ads been more numerous. The average American is now subjected to over 3,000 adverts per day.
14
Never have ads been more inclusive. Having learned the lesson of the Jesuits – get them early and you have them for life – the ad has already colonized childhood and will soon be seeking techniques for establishing brand loyalty in the womb. And never have ads been more cunning. Is this a documentary? No, an ad. A news feature? No, an ad. A famous London stadium? No, an ad for an oil-rich Middle Eastern country keen to develop its brand.

Is this a cinema urinal? Yes, but, as your head tilts back to enjoy relief, there comes into view on the ceiling a red plastic urinal bearing the legend,
Spider-Man 3…Coming Soon
. So, to gaze at the ceiling is no longer safe – but at least the sky is still free. Ah, a little aeroplane! Someone has escaped into the infinite. No, it is merely a tow truck for an advertising banner. At least there is nature. No, an enterprising Dutch hotel chain has begun placing ads on live sheep. So the ad, which has become increasingly good at pulling the wool over our eyes, now also pulls our eyes over the wool.

Never has the ad been more sneakily aggressive. There is ‘targeted marketing’, ‘ambush marketing’, ‘guerrilla marketing’, ‘viral marketing’. The ad has no scruples about using biological warfare. Most sneaky of all is neuromarketing, which uses neuroscience to infiltrate the brain, study its defences and find ways around them.

Never has the ad been more entertaining. One of the most rancorous disputes I have had with my daughter was over my habit of muting the television during ads. When she objected I gave her the standard lecture about ads making us want things we don’t need. She snapped back angrily that, of course, she understood this and was entirely impervious to such persuasion, but had to see the ads because they were discussed by her friends as entertainment just like the programmes. Only a crank would wish to deprive her of this.

And, no longer content merely to match entertainment, the ad has begun to infiltrate films and television programmes through ‘product placement’; increasingly the product determines the story rather than the other way round. Surveys have shown that making the product seem an integral part of the story is more effective than any direct advertising because it cunningly evades the brain’s resistance.
15
‘Content marketing’ takes this approach to its logical conclusion by creating so-called entertainment solely for the purpose of advertising.

And the ad is no longer content to be passively observed. You no longer decode the ad, it decodes you. The latest digital billboards have concealed cameras and software that establish who is looking and display the appropriate ad – so a young man will see a bimbo advertising beer and a middle-aged woman will get details of a pampering-day offer at a health spa. Eventually these billboards will be able to recognize individuals and personalize the offering – seducing me with great 2-for-l deals on Chinese poetry and hard-bop jazz. Then it may be necessary to go about in disguise, perhaps even to cross-dress, to bamboozle the ad.

Such bamboozlement would be an example of ‘culture jamming’, the new resistance movement dedicated to sabotaging consumer culture. This resistance is coordinated by websites such as the BADvertising Institute and the Canadian magazine
Adbusters
, which publishes anti-consumerist articles and spoof ads (for example, for a vodka called Absolut Nonsense) and sponsors initiatives such as Buy Nothing Day and Watch No Television Week. In the UK an organization known as Modern Toss arranges subversive events and produces T-shirts, carrier bags, posters and coffee mugs with salutary injunctions such as
BUY MORE SHIT OR WE’RE ALL FUCKED.

These ventures are excellent fun but unlikely to start a revolution. Rather than attempting to defeat the ad, it would be wiser to work from the other end and attempt to control the id.

This is not easy either. The contemporary id is rampant and in no mood to be tamed. Never have so many wanted so much so badly. Never has the id been so flattered and indulged. This is the golden age of the id.

Once upon a time the id was despised and feared. For Plato it was the bad horse in the team, a ‘companion to wild boasts and indecency, he is shaggy round the ears – deaf as a post – and just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined’.
16
For Marcus Aurelius it was ‘the secret force hidden deep within us that manipulates our strings’.
17
For Buddhists it was projected outwards as Mara, for Christians as Satan. For the Sufis it was the ‘al-nafs al-amara’, the bitter lower soul that ‘knows only how to sleep, eat and gratify itself’.
18
In medieval Europe it was the violent, greedy ogre of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and other tales. For Arthur Schopenhauer it was the will-to-live and for Nietzsche the self. Kafka personified it as the dark figure that suddenly appears on deck and wrests the helm from its legitimate guardian. And for our own age there is a materialistic explanation – it is the old reptile brain lurking at the base of the new brain. The names of the id vary – but everyone agrees on its nature. It is greedy, impulsive, angry, cunning and insatiable. No amount of gratification is ever sufficient.

Two and a half millennia before Freud, Buddha recognized that the core problem for the self is unconscious desiring. There is a striking myth of the confrontation between Buddha and Mara, the personification of the id, who appears mounted on an elephant brandishing a weapon in each of his thousand arms and, when this fails to intimidate, calls down nine frightful storms that make even the gods flee in terror. Buddha is left alone – but sitting in the ‘unconquerable position’ so Mara is obliged to enter into dialogue: ‘Arise from this seat which belongs not to you but to me.
19
Buddha stays put, delivers an analysis of Mara’s ugly character and concludes that he is more entitled to the seat than Mara.

This is like a dramatisation of Freud’s project: ‘Where there was Id there shall be Ego.’
20
The ego ejects the id and takes its seat. Mastery of the unconscious is the crucial victory.

According to Buddha, the root problem is ignorance, which encourages attachments that lead to desires and cravings, which bring dissatisfaction and discontent. And, if ignorance is the problem, the solution must be knowledge. So insight is redemption. Understanding is salvation.

The first requirement is the difficult work of self-knowledge. Long before Christ, Buddha realized that we see the faults of others clearly, but are conveniently blind to our own. And Buddha’s version of the insight is better because it recognizes the endless ingenuity of self-justification: ‘One shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one’s own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice.’
21

The problem of ignorance can be appreciated rationally, but Buddha’s solution requires a deeper, total understanding achievable only through meditation – which is not the heavy-lidded, somnolent trance suggested by Buddhist icons, but an intense mental activity described as ‘mindfulness’, ‘wakefulness’ and ‘watchfulness’.
The Dbammapada
, the collection of aphorisms attributed to Buddha, has several chapters devoted exclusively to these concepts: ‘Those who are watchful never die: those who do not watch are already as dead.’ So the goal of meditation is not quietude and indifference but awareness, alertness, keen purposeful clarity – Buddha’s metaphor for the liberated mind was a sword drawn from its scabbard.

From the practice of meditation Buddha developed a theory of consciousness like that of contemporary neuroscience. Consciousness has no substance or direction but is an endlessly flickering, fluctuating shadow play of perceptions, fantasies, delusions, associations and memories. ‘The mind is wavering and restless, fickle and flighty’ – the mind has the caprice of a monkey that ‘grabs one branch, and then, letting that go, seizes another’. And so the idea of a unified self is an illusion: ‘There is no one invariable self. What is subject to change is not mine, it is not I, it is not my self.’ This recognition of ceaseless change was another central insight. All is flux. Everything is transient – ’ All things are on fire.’
22

As a consequence there is no permanent self to attack or repress. The greed, the cravings and lusts, are as fleeting as everything else and will simply wither away in the bright light of intense and prolonged scrutiny. To recognize them for what they are makes them impossible to indulge. So Buddha did not denounce vice but dismissed it as ‘unskilful’ behaviour. Buddhism has none of the self-loathing so common in Christianity, the hatred and fear of the body and frenzied mortification of the flesh.

Hence a radical extension of an already radical idea – knowledge is not just the beginning of a solution but
the entire solution
. Understanding is itself transformation. But the transformation is neither immediate nor easy – nor even perceptible: ‘Just as the ocean slopes gradually, with no sudden incline, so in this method training, discipline and practice take effect by slow degrees, with no sudden perception of the ultimate truth.’
23
The secret is to persist in the method until ‘reasoned, accurate, clear and beneficial’ behaviour becomes habitual. To be is to become – so the seeker of enlightenment must be ‘energetic, resolute and persevering’. Buddha’s last words were: ‘All accomplishment is transient. Strive unremittingly.’
24

Another key word is ‘method’. Buddhism is not a creed but a method, a set of procedures for dealing with the chain of consequences following from ignorance. But Buddha refused to speculate on the cause of ignorance itself. So there is no theory of the fall of man, no original sin. In fact he refused to answer any metaphysical questions, not because he himself did not speculate but because such speculation was unhelpful: ‘It is as if a man had been wounded by an arrow thickly smeared with poison, and his friends were to procure for him a physician, and the sick man were to say, ‘I will not have this arrow taken out until I have learnt the name of the man who wounded me’.’
25

This refusal to construct a Great Unified Theory of Everything was profoundly wise. For, if there is no dogma, there can be no doctrinal disputes, no heresies, no schisms – and so no inquisitions, no torturing, no burning at the stake. The two main Buddhist sects, the Theravada and Mahayana, have always coexisted in harmony – compare and contrast with the history of Catholicism and Protestantism. And in Buddhism there are no supernatural interventions, no gods, no miracles, no divine revelation, no divine grace or divine incarnation. So there is no need for faith. In fact, Buddha expressly rejected the idea of faith as an abdication of personal responsibility – no one should believe anything just because someone else says so. Each individual must work out a personal solution.

It is ironic that Christianity, the religion of the rational West, is, in fact, completely
irr
ational, inconsistent and even absurd, whereas Buddhism, the religion of the mystical East, is completely rational, consistent and even practical – not a creed requiring a leap of faith into absurdity, but a method that can be shown to work. And it is even more ironic that the attractive features of Buddhism make it unattractive to the modern age; while the other major religions are all gaining believers, Buddhism is losing ground.
26

Christian doctrine blamed the flaw in man on original sin, which could be redeemed only by the mysterious workings of divine grace. For over a thousand years this ruled out any investigation of the self or belief in terrestrial fulfilment. It was not until the Enlightenment that thinkers gave the individual hope and scope.

The ideas of the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch de Spinoza were startlingly similar to those of Buddha. The Enlightenment thinkers worshipped reason, but Spinoza realized that reason was riding a tiger, that human nature is driven by largely unconscious ‘appetites’ which enter consciousness as ‘desires’. His expression of this insight could have come from
The Dhammapada
or the writings of Freud: ‘Desire is man’s very essence.’
27
And his views on consciousness could have come from a contemporary neurobiologist: ‘The human mind is the very idea or knowledge of the human body.’
28
However, like Buddha, he believed that drives may be controlled by being understood: ‘An emotion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear idea of it.’
29

And, like Buddha, Spinoza is often dismissed as a mere seeker of tranquillity – but what he valued most was joy, which he defined as a sense of empowerment created by the understanding mind. But, again as in the teachings of Buddha, understanding is not a passive, final state, but a process requiring ceaseless effort. In another insight prefiguring neurobiology, which defines living organisms as systems for optimizing life conditions, Spinoza suggested that our very nature is to strive. His Latin word for human nature,
conatus
, means ‘striving’ or ‘endeavour’: ‘The striving by which each thing attempts to persevere in its being is nothing other than the actual essence of the thing.’
30
And the striving has to be difficult to be valuable: ‘If salvation were readily available and could be attained without great effort, how could it be neglected by almost everyone? All that is excellent is as difficult to attain as it is rare.’
31