The Doubter's Companion (21 page)

President de Gaulle responded to pressure from his ministers to give in to policies which might be popular in the short run, but were fundamentally damaging, by retorting that “happiness is for idiots.” He wasn't proposing unhappiness or a loss of material comfort. Much of his time in power was spent creating social services and prosperity. Rather he was protesting the confusion of happiness with a state of mindless contentment. He was arguing against happiness and in favour of consciousness which, the world being what it really is, might not involve contentment, but would involve
RESPONSIBILITY.

Nothing has happened in the last quarter-century to clarify this confusion. As economic and social conditions have gradually sunk, happiness, with its twisted meaning at the ethical and legal centre of our society, has seemed increasingly lugubrious and out of place. In a more practical world, there would be a formal process for retiring a word from active use until it finds itself again.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY
   An international symbol of English-language culture.

With the gradual decline of those Western religious and liberal systems of belief which were central to the creation of modern society, only the debris of civilization remains. This is rich and complex matter, but it has no particular shape.

Public celebrations are the flowering of unquestioned traditions, and so in a civilization of debris few of them remain valid. Many of the mediaeval, Renaissance and early-modern ceremonies and pageants continued well into the twentieth century, when electronic communication finally put most of them to death. There was then an attempt to fill this void with celebrations manufactured for spectators by that same electronic communications industry, helped along by advertising experts. But the public still desires group expression and they understand this to mean events in which they, as individuals, participate and which they therefore share. Spectators are not celebrants.

Restaurants, until recently, were places of refuge for people excluded from the mainstream or seeking to escape it—poor students, aging unmarried men not rich enough to have themselves fed at home, richer men seeking sex not wives, and the proverbial artists leading their irresponsible lives. Over the last half-century, restaurants have risen in importance to fill the void left by the decline of the old public celebrations. They now provide the leading forums of public participation.

One of the restaurant's principal functions is to host birthdays. At this very moment, thousands of waiters and waitresses around the world are standing over slightly embarrassed clients and singing “Happy Birthday” to them in English. These employed choirs invariably substitute, wherever the words “dear Cathy” or “dear Sue” ought to be sung, the universal words “to you.”

They resemble the professional mourners who not very long ago were regularly hired to weep at funerals. But why is it that they exclude the client's name? It is often spelled out in sugar on the cake the waiters are carrying and, if their singing were merely a commercialized gesture intended to satisfy the customer, then chanting out the name would be an easy way to earn more satisfaction and therefore more money.

But this is not an individual celebration. Given our inability to deal with
DEATH,
these singing waiters are the new professional mourners. The birthday client is being drawn into the great public process of continuity to which each of us belongs. The song “Happy Birthday” has evolved into an incantation sung endlessly throughout the West and beyond, in the way that the Christian mass once constantly echoed in Latin over the born, living, dying and dead twenty-four hours a day.

When Senator Benigno Aquino was murdered in suspicious circumstances on his return from exile to Manila in 1983, the Filipino government attempted to deal with national and international outrage by holding an inquiry. Mrs. Imelda Marcos was called to give evidence because her husband was suspected of direct or indirect involvement. Her appearance happened to fall on her fifty-fifth birthday. Everyone in the courtroom rose to sing “Happy Birthday.”

HAPPY FAMILY
   The existence and maintenance of which is thought to make a politician fit for public office. According to this theory the public are less concerned by whether or not they are effectively represented than by the need to be assured that the
PENIS
es and vaginas of public officials are only used in legally sanctioned circumstances.

The production of children is a basic animal function which involves no intellectual or ethical skills. The successful raising of children and the long-term maintenance of a contented marriage are mysteries so impenetrable that they have kept generations of poets, playwrights, novelists and social scientists continuously employed.

The relationship of marriage and children to the application of public policy is an even greater mystery. Nothing in history indicates that happily married leaders have been wiser, more humane, courageous, effective or intelligent, any more than personal moderation or respectability in themselves have led to good government. The list of happily married liars, thieves, cowards and monsters in public office is as long as that of the admirable drunkards and humane philanderers. The private lives of most first-class leaders seem to have been catastrophic.

Our modern insistence on a balance between private respectability and public policy therefore has nothing to do with leadership. Not only is it irrelevant to the democratic process, it may even be aggressively anti-democratic. Either the leader is an effective representative of the citizen's interests or he is a lifestyle model. If the latter, then we have slipped back into the traditional religious and dictatorial archetypes of noble sacrificial heroes, vestal virgins, wives of Caesar, saintly kings and virgin queens. In a democratic society, these are false standards which can't help but put the wrong people in office.

HAPPY HOUR
   A depressing comment on the rest of the day and a victory for the most limited Dionysian view of human nature.

HARD WORK
   The work ethic remains a popular explanation for the success of the West. This doubtful argument relies heavily on comparing humans to insects such as ants. Above all, the work ethic has a feel about it of low-level morality aimed at the poorer end of society.

There are lots of poor in the world who work all the time, often with great skill, and remain poor. On the other hand, large deposit banks, although non-productive, have been among the most profitable institutions over the last half-century. Their executives continue to work relatively short hours. The executives of large, publicly traded corporations work longer hours than the poor. And they compete with each other—not with other corporations—to work ever harder, by spending more of each day at their desks processing paper and developing relationships. This benefits their reputations and their careers. There is no proof that it has an effect on productivity or profits for the corporation.

Entrepreneurs are quite different. They usually have to work very hard in order to create their enterprise in order not to have to work hard later on in their lives. In other words, they create in order not to work.

To the extent that the West has succeeded, it is probably the result not of work but of innovation—not just technological, but social, intellectual, political, verbal, visual, acoustical, even emotional. In order to innovate some have spent a great deal of time thinking and experimenting, perhaps more than any other civilization in history.

Technological innovation in particular continues as if we were on an unstoppable roll. Yet our structures do not as a rule reward either thinking or innovation. And they don't reward physical hard work. What they do favour is a narrowly defined type of intense labour best described as white-collar slogging. See:
INDOLENCE.

HARVARD SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
   See:
CHICAGO SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS
and
TAYLORISM.

HELL
   The abolition of hell has created major problems in the maintaining of a general ethical standard. The eighteenth-century philosophers condemned the threat of hell as a cynical device used against the less powerful. But they regretted the loss of hell's real purpose, which was to deal with serious crimes, particularly those of the powerful and rich.

Voltaire in his dictionary noted that, “As soon as men lived in society they must have noticed that some guilty men eluded the severity of the laws. It was possible to punish public crimes. But how could you put a brake on the secret variety. Religion alone could provide that brake.”
¹

The philosophers believed that law and disinterested administration would take care of this problem. However, the more complex and sophisticated the laws became, the more they actually protected the powerful. And once administration had been raised to the level of a moral value, those with power began to convert unethical behaviour into administrative regulations.

For example, it is common for senior managers to increase their income by a quarter to a third through what are known as “benefits.” This is legalized fraud. It is common to hide serious errors in the public service behind security regulations. This also is legalized fraud. (See:
DENIAL.
) It is common to justify poverty and exploitation through reference to the rules of
COMPETITION.
(See:
HOLY TRINITY—LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
) The Encyclopaedists were already concerned about this in the eighteenth century. “The means for enriching oneself can be morally
criminal
even though permitted by law; it is against natural law and against humanity that millions of individuals are denied the necessary in order to feed the scandalous luxury of a small number of comfortable citizens.”
²
Again the philosophers assumed that rational reform could solve this problem. And there have, indeed, been improvements. But recently the pendulum has begun to swing back. And this time exploitation is justified not by divine right or class privilege, but by expertise and law.

We have failed to replace hell with a viable code of ethics. That is because we slipped into a rational approach to society when we had intended to follow the road of
HUMANISM.

HEROES
   An illusion of leadership.

The modern Hero is the descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte. With the development of communications technology it has become possible to sell Heroic attitudes as being more important than actual heroism.

The Hero is the rational substitute for democratic leadership. To bypass the genuine complexities of the public place, technocratic expertise has been allied with the distracting excitement of leadership on horseback. By the late twentieth century this Napoleonic image had been refined to such attitudes as film-inspired Reaganite war stories, talking
TOUGH,
selling the leader's “character” via the mechanism of public relations and confusing the idea of the Hero with that of the celebrity.

Given that one of the roles of the Hero and the
FALSE HERO
is to distract the citizenry from their role, appearances are of primary importance. From 1800 to 1945 these false populists dressed up in military uniforms. This was the Napoleonic model, even though few of them were soldiers. After Hitler and Mussolini, the uniform was no longer possible.

A period of confusion followed as a new model was sought. It began to emerge in the 1980s through a blending of the B-movie actor with the entrepreneur. The need was for the concentration of a one-tone character role. The tough, decisive general was thus transmogrified into the tough, decisive businessman. The military uniform into the heavy, expensive, dark, double-breasted suit.

Reagan and Mulroney were early attempts at this image. It was perfected in Italy by the new prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, former nightclub singer, wearer of five-centimetre heels, owner of a hair transplant, who advanced in public behind permanent make-up, even when greeting starving children rescued from Rwanda. He was, of course, an entrepreneurial Hero and wore the appropriate suit.

HISTORY
   A seamless web linking past, present and future.

Contemporary Western society attempts to limit history to the past, as if it were the refuse of civilization. Individuals who hold power tend to see history only as mythology which can be manipulated to distract the citizenry, but is not useful in itself.

Among the different humanist areas of education, history has nevertheless survived best the pseudo-scientific reduction of non-scientific learning to theoretically objective standards. The other cornerstones of humanism—literature and philosophy—have been severely damaged by the drive to quantify and objectify everything in sight. Intellectual accounting is not a synonym for thinking. Driven by this vain search for objectivity, literature and philosophy have come to resemble the obscure and controlling scholasticism of the Middle Ages.

If the historical approach has been able to resist these trends, it may be because power structures require a comforting background of mythology and mythology requires a sweep of civilization. Thus, history is welcome as a superficial generalization viewed in a hazy distance.

Our technocracy is frightened by the idea that ideas and events could be part of a large flow and therefore less controllable than expertise would like to suggest. For them, history is a conservative force which blocks the way to change and to new answers. In reality, history only becomes an active force when individuals deform it into a weapon for public manipulation. By that very process it ceases to be history.

The twentieth century has been dominated by a catastrophic explosion of ideologies of which communism and fascism have been the most spectacular.
NEO-CONSERVATISM
is a recent minor example. The fleeting success of these ideologies has been made possible in part by the denial of history—or rather, by freezing history into narrow bands of logic, the sole purpose of which is to justify a specific ideology.