The Antidote (15 page)

The problem with merely dismissing this entire outlook as wrong or misguided, though, is that it appears to be at least partly
true. International surveys of happiness – including several reputable research projects such as the World Values Survey – have consistently found some of the world's poorest countries to be among the happiest. (Nigeria, where 92 per cent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day, has come in first place.) Survey data from the Afrobarometer research project, which monitors more than a dozen African countries, including Kenya, has indicated ‘unusual levels of optimism among the poorest and most insecure respondents' in those places. Certain specific measures, such as how optimistic parents feel about their children's futures, actually appear to be
inversely
correlated with wealth and education: the least privileged report feeling the most upbeat. According to mental health researchers, anxiety disorders and depression are far less common in poorer countries. (Their studies take into account the difference in likelihood of getting diagnosed.) In one recent review of mental health problems around the world, sub-Saharan Africa came bottom in terms of prevalence; the top positions were all occupied by richer, industrialised regions.

‘Look, this is a thing that social scientists have often pointed out,' Norbert told me, when I made my second visit to Kibera. We were sitting on folding chairs, in the shade cast by his onestorey office building on the outskirts of the slum. ‘Just because you have social problems, it doesn't mean you don't have happiness. Do richer people have fewer problems, really? We have politicians going to jail for corruption, and I really don't think they're happy compared to me. There are problems at every level. Like heart disease or blood pressure if you're stressed.' He shrugged. ‘Isn't that obvious?'

This is a psychological phenomenon that stands in need of explanation. Even if there is some debate about the methodologies of international surveys of happiness; even if the impressions of
Jean-Pierre Larroque and others don't capture the whole picture – why is it that places such as Kibera aren't unequivocally at the
bottom
of every assessment of happiness levels, every time? A multiplicity of answers has been advanced, and none of them are completely satisfying. One is simply that people's expectations are lower. A related one is based on the (true) observation that happiness is relative: people who aren't surrounded by examples of more pleasant lifestyles don't rank their own situation so poorly. The problem with these arguments is that they all too easily drift into the condescending suggestion that slum-dwellers don't know any better – that they are simply unaware that it might be possible to live with running water, functioning toilets, and lower rates of disease. But this is certainly not the case in Kibera, whose residents live shoulder-to-shoulder with Nairobi's fancier neighbourhoods; some of them have jobs as domestic workers there. The grand mansion of a senior Kenyan politician sits just a modest walk back up the road from the slum to Nairobi. In a girls' school in the heart of Kibera, five-year-olds learn to read beneath a giant photograph of Times Square; Hollywood movies on videotape are commonplace. Norbert Aluku had even coined a term – ‘the thirst' – for the ambition he tried to instill in younger Kiberans precisely by taking them to better areas of Nairobi to show them what could be theirs. Not knowing any better, in this case at least, doesn't explain the mystery.

I don't have an answer to the puzzle, either. But it does become a little less mysterious when viewed in the context of the psychology of security and insecurity. We have seen how pursuing our desire for a feeling of security can lead us badly astray; and that vulnerability may be a precondition for the very things that bring the greatest happiness – strong social relationships above all. What the people of Kibera and others in similar situations all
share is a lack of access to those things that the rest of us self-defeatingly try to use to quell our feelings of insecurity. The point is certainly not that it's better not to have money, say, than it is to have it. But it's surely undeniable that if you don't have it, it's much harder to overinvest emotionally in it. The same goes for prestigious jobs, material possessions, or impressive educational qualifications: when you have little chance of obtaining them, you won't be misled into thinking they bring more happiness than they do. More broadly, living in such desperate circumstances means that shutting out feelings of insecurity is not a viable option. You have to turn and face the reality of insecurity instead. The people of Kibera are vulnerable whether they like it or not.

One American working in Kibera, Paige Elenson, told me she'd been strongly affected by just this realisation. ‘I hate all that romanticism – “Oh, they're so happy,”' she told me. ‘In many ways, they're really not… but when you don't have access to the good clothes and the nice jobs, when you don't have any of that to hold onto, you have to let people know you through your way of being, not through what you're wearing, or your job title. You actually have to be kind to people if you want them to like you! You have to look into their eyes! We don't have that so much in the US, because it's, like, ‘look what I'm wearing; look what it says on my business card – I don't need to be nice to you'. So there is this vulnerability, which is another way of saying that there's less pretence. I don't know that that makes you happier, necessarily … But when there's less to latch onto – when there are choices you don't have – then it changes things. You have to cut the crap.'

Speaking of crap: one day in Kibera, Norbert took me to see a project he was associated with, which involved recycling human waste into marketable biogas. This offered a new solution to the problem of flying toilets. People would stop flinging bags of
the stuff into the street, he figured, once they began to realise they could make money from it. It was typical Kiberan pragmatism, assisted in this case by an American aid group. When Norbert talked about the importance of working with your neighbours, and of working with what you had, he wasn't speaking in saccharine clichés. The communal activities he was talking about included recycling human waste.

‘Look,' said Frankie Otieno, drinking Coke on his mother's sofa, when I asked him about all this, ‘Kibera is not a good place. Big problems, and a million NGOs who don't do any good. Major, major problems. But you have to manage, because you have to. So you take what you have and you get on with it. And you can be happy like that, because happiness comes from your family, and other people, and in making something better of yourself, and in new horizons … right? Why worry about something you don't have?'

Above all, living in a situation of such inherent insecurity, while very far from preferable, was
clarifying.
Nobody would envy it. But living with fewer illusions meant facing reality head on. Not having the option of trying to protect yourself in counter-productive ways made for a resilience in the face of hardship that qualified, in the end, as a modest but extremely durable kind of happiness.

We have seen that security may not always be the benefit we imagine it to be, and that insecurity may be compatible with – or perhaps even, in some sense, conducive to – happiness. But an even more radical suggestion is that our search for security might be based on a fundamental misunderstanding – that security, in the famed words of Helen Keller, ‘is mostly a superstition'. To
understand the enormous implications of this idea, we need to return, a final time, to the work of Alan Watts.

Watts begins his slim 1951 treatise,
The Wisdom of Insecurity,
by pointing out that there is one overwhelming explanation for his era's feelings of insecurity: the progress of science. Fewer and fewer of us can convince ourselves, if we ever could, that we are headed for an afterlife of eternal bliss; or that there is a God watching out for us; or that the moral rules laid down by the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury are unquestionably the ones we ought to follow. ‘It is simply self-evident', he writes, ‘that during the past century the authority of science has taken the place of the authority of religion in the popular imagination, and that scepticism, at least in spiritual things, has become more general than belief.' Watts, it is true, was writing prior to the resurgence of fundamentalist Christianity in America. But he might well have viewed that development as an inevitable reaction to the very scientific dominance he was describing.

It should go without saying – and Watts very much agrees – that scientific enquiry has brought immeasurable benefits. But at the same time, it has left many feeling a spiritual void. By eliminating gods and the afterlife, the scientific picture of the universe seems to have sapped individual human lives of any special meaning; we fit in only as mere organisms, living out our brief lives for no reason, and then perishing. This, he suggests, is the source of the ultimate insecurity, the one that underlies all the others. Yet retreating back under the comforting wing of the old, doctrinaire religions isn't an option for most of us; you can't re-convince yourself of claims that you know are untrue. Are we stuck, then, with the choice of living meaningless but scientifically truthful lives, or lives based on superstition and self-deception? Watts insists that there is a third alternative, and it's what the rest of his little book is about.

The starting-point for this argument is the observation that impermanence is the nature of the universe: that ‘the only constant is change'. It was Heraclitus, living in the fifth and sixth centuries
BC,
who said that ‘no man steps in the same river twice', and his contemporary Confucius, in China, who was supposed to have pointed at a stream and observed ‘it is always flowing, day and night'. People, animals, plants, communities, and civilisations all grow, change, and die: it is the most obvious fact in the world, and almost everybody, scientific or religious, agrees with it.

Yet for all the obviousness of this insight, Watts observes, we seem to live in a constant state of fighting against it, struggling to find security, permanence, fixity, and stability. His point is not to scold you to give up the struggle against impermanence – ‘calling a desire bad names', he writes, ‘doesn't get rid of it.' Instead, he wants to make you see that it is an error of a fundamental kind. Attempting to fix change is a contradiction; you can no more fix change than you can make heat cold, or green purple. ‘There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity,' he writes. Even discussing the subject, he points out, risks a similar contradiction, because it is in the nature of language to try to fix and define. And so the most fundamental characteristic of the universe is therefore the one about which it is most difficult to speak.

But it's worse than a mere contradiction – because what we are really doing when we attempt to achieve fixity in the midst of change, Watts argues, is trying to
separate
ourselves from all that change, trying to enforce a distinction between ourselves and the rest of the world. To seek security is to try to remove yourself from change, and thus from the thing that defines life. ‘If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life,' Watts writes,
‘I am wanting to be separate from life.' Which brings us to the crux of the matter: it is because we want to feel secure that we build up the fortifications of ego, in order to defend ourselves, but it is those very fortifications that create the feeling of insecurity: ‘To be secure means to isolate and fortify the “I”, but it is just this feeling of being an isolated “I” which makes me feel lonely and afraid.' This is a strikingly counterintuitive notion: appreciating it entails a mental shift similar to that moment when the famous optical illusion switches from resembling a beautiful young woman to an old witch. We build castle walls to keep out the enemy, but it is the building of the walls that causes the enemy to spring into existence in the first place. It's only because there are castle walls that there is anything to attack. ‘The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing,' concludes Watts. ‘To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest, in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.' Even if we temporarily and partially achieve the feeling of security, he adds, it doesn't feel good. Life inside the castle walls proves lonely and isolating. ‘We discover [not only] that there is no safety, [and] that seeking it is painful, [but] that when we imagine we have found it, we don't like it.'

To understand the final flourish that Watts has in store, think back to the end of the previous chapter, and the challenge it presented to our assumptions about the nature of the self. There, we confronted the fact that there seems to be no straightforward place at which to draw the line between ‘self' and ‘other' – and that the boundary itself, even if we settle on somewhere to draw it, is more of a meeting point than a dividing line. ‘Self' and ‘other' rely on each other for their very existence. If that's true, it follows that ‘security' is a mistake – because it implies a notion
of separate selfhood that doesn't make much sense. What does it even
mean
to separate yourself from an ecosystem that is, in fact, what constitutes you? The point is not to ‘confront' insecurity, but to appreciate that
you are it.
Watts writes:

To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, this centre and soul of our being, which we call ‘I'. For this we know to be the real man – the thinker of our thoughts; the feeler of our feelings, the knower of our knowledge. We do not actually understand that there is no security until we realise that this ‘I' does not exist.