The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) (12 page)

Of course, this story is only one extreme example – but it would be difficult to imagine an attitude like Hart’s in an earlier era.

Parallel to the refusals of responsibility are the claims to
deserve
. Everyone now
deserves
a holiday (meaning not just a break but a trip abroad to a desirable location); students invariably
deserve
higher grades (regardless of assessment criteria, the argument is always, ‘but I spent x hours on this’); employees
deserve
promotion (even when they meet none of the requirements for the new level); artistes
deserve
more recognition (everything written
deserves
to be published, everything painted
deserves
to be exhibited, every performer
deserves
a stage); lovers
deserve
a dream partner next time (not despite but
because of
‘all the past failures they themselves probably caused but for which they accept no responsibility). Failure is an obsolete concept. No one is willing to accept that few are worthy of high grades or artistic recognition and that there is no such thing as a dream partner. So failure is the new taboo F-word. In an initiative comparable to that of the
British Medical Journal
, my own university has come up with an imaginative solution. Students achieving less than 40 per cent in a module are recorded as having not taken it – which not only avoids the F-word but suggests that the embarrassing lapse never happened at all.

This sense of deserving has surely been a factor in the growth of debt. The development of entitlement since the 1970
s
coincides exactly with a steady rise in personal debt. If you are entitled to a certain lifestyle then borrowing the money to fund it is simply claiming what is rightfully yours – and there is no obligation to pay it back. So the lender attempting to recover money is an ugly bully harassing an innocent victim. Attitudes to debt are a great example of how cultural conditioning can change: not so long ago debt was a sin, then an unpleasant necessity for buying a home, then the way to fund a deserved lifestyle and finally something so obviously good that only a fool would refuse it. At this stage the debt house of cards became so ridiculously huge that the removal of one card was almost enough to destroy the world’s financial systems. And, of course, everyone blamed the bankers for the disastrous consequences. Drag out the bankers and hang them!

The problem with an overwhelming sense of entitlement is that it promises satisfaction but usually delivers its opposite. Entitlement encourages all three of Albert Ellis’s disastrous ‘musts’ – ’ I must succeed’, ‘Everyone must treat me well’, ‘The world must be easy’. And when none of these happens, the conclusion is not that the demands were unjustified but that malign, powerful, hidden forces are denying them. So the sense of entitlement becomes a sense of bitter grievance.

Another consequence of entitlement is the contemporary worship of ‘diversity’ and the, often concomitant, belief that the demands of all groups are equally valid. The problem is that there are two types of diversity – diversity of opportunity, which is a question of rights, and diversity of ethics, which is a question of values – and the necessity of recognizing the first has led to unthinking acceptance of the second. Demanding justice for minorities who have suffered discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation is entirely valid. But ethical diversity is a contradiction in terms. If the values of others are valid, then one’s own must be equally arbitrary and therefore without value. The inevitable consequence of this relativism is a fatal loss of nerve – it becomes impossible to uphold values and make value judgements. On contentious issues we murmur that there is much to be said on both sides. About political conflicts we say, ‘One side is as bad as the other’, and about politicians, ‘One is as bad as the other’. We see people making foolish decisions that will inevitably lead to disaster but we say nothing to them; to ourselves we say, ‘I have no right to intervene’, ‘The advice would be rejected’, ‘It would only cause divisiveness’, and ‘What do I know about anything anyway?’

This leads to abdication of authority and the bizarre but common reversals of children bullying their parents, students assessing their teachers and employees exploiting their bosses.

And, in the absence of values and principles, ethics becomes merely legalism, restricted to situations and transactions, a matter of resolving dilemmas and drawing up contracts – I agree to do this if you agree to do that.

Another problem with ‘celebrating diversity’ is that it aims to promote inclusiveness but often promotes its opposite, separatism. The groups who feel deprived of rights blame other groups and demand to be separated from them. If the group is ethnically or religiously based it will demand its own country. And, if not its very own country, then at least a substantial chunk of some other group’s country. But separatism, rather than easing divisions, reinforces and exacerbates them. Sartre described the ugly consequences of Us-and-Them consciousness, and psychology experiments have demonstrated that even artificial and arbitrary separation can cause conflict. In fact, the resulting conflicts were so serious that this type of experiment is now considered too dangerous. One of the last was undertaken in 1966 by Muzafer Sherif on a group of eleven and twelve year olds living harmoniously in a large cabin on a holiday camp. Sherif divided this group into two, with pairs of friends deliberately split up, and put each of the new groups in a separate cabin. Soon there was tension between the cabins, with taunting and insults becoming common, and even former friends coming to hate each other. Over time aggressive leaders emerged in each cabin.
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So an entirely arbitrary separation produced a division, which became increasingly bitter. The lesson is that separatism causes the very problems it is supposed to prevent, which is then used as evidence for the bigotry that motivated the separation in the first place, so making the separatism even more strident.

But perhaps the worst consequence of entitlement is a sense of grievance – which encourages the human tendency to whinge. To my knowledge no major thinker has ever recommended or endorsed whingeing. Philosophy from the Stoics to the existentialists rings with denunciations of complaint. Has anyone ever become happier by whingeing?

There is often a temptation to think that one could be happier if only responsibility could be evaded or transferred to someone else, which explains the growing numbers of consultants, advisors, instructors, gurus, therapists, counsellors, personal trainers and, the inevitable development, life coaches. In Don DeLillo’s satirical novel
White Noise
, the narrator’s wife teaches an adult course on ‘Standing, Sitting and Walking’, which is such a success that she is asked to develop another course on ‘Eating and Drinking’. When the narrator suggests that this might involve labouring the obvious, she explains that people need to be reassured by someone in a position of authority.
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Being instructed may seem a luxury, but philosophers and psychologists agree that only personal responsibility brings fulfilment. This was demonstrated by a famous study in which elderly residents on two floors of a care home were given plants for their rooms. On one floor residents were permitted to choose and water plants; on the other floor the plants were distributed and maintained by staff. On the floor with control the residents became happier, more active and alert and required less medication. And similar results were observed in other studies involving choice of films and timing of visits from volunteers. Conversely, loss of control caused unhappiness and depression. (But would it have been different if they had been card-carrying stoics? Is awareness and acceptance of lack of control itself a form of control?) Even more surprisingly, it was discovered in the six-month follow-up to the plant study that twice as many no-control as control residents had died (30 per cent compared to 15 per cent). So personal responsibility may be a matter of life and death.
147

The less personal responsibility is exercised, the greater the likelihood of conformity. A series of classic experiments on conforming was conducted in 1955 by the psychologist Solomon Asch. Volunteers were required to perform a simple matching test. When left alone, they got it right 99 per cent of the time. But when assigned to a group (all the experimenter’s accomplices except for the single volunteer) that every so often gave a unanimous wrong answer, volunteers agreed with the incorrect group answer 70 per cent of the time. And, when informed of the deception afterwards and invited to estimate the extent of their conformity, all the volunteers underestimated it.
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The interesting question, of course, is the mental process of conforming – how do people convince themselves to accept things they would otherwise reject as wrong? When the Asch experiments were repeated recently using brain imaging on the volunteers, the incorrect group-influenced judgements caused changes in the brain areas dedicated to vision and spatial awareness but no changes in the areas for monitoring and resolving conflict. So the alarming conclusion was that no self-convincing seemed to be needed – the volunteers
actually saw
what the group
only claimed to see
. As Gregory Berns, the neuroscientist who conducted the new research, concluded, ‘We like to think that seeing is believing, but the study’s findings show that seeing is believing what the group tells you to believe.’
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As for independent judgements consciously disagreeing with those of the group, these caused activity in the brain area associated with emotion, suggesting that autonomy and opposition are stressful. This stress was shown to be justified in other experiments simulating jury discussions where a minority opposed a majority verdict, the scenario in the film
12 Angry Men
. The minority view prevailed if it was expressed consistently, confidently and undog-matically – but no one liked the minority people. This is evidence of the crank effect: promoting principle and truth may eventually be effective, but the promoters will be dismissed as cranks.

Even more shocking were the Milgram experiments on obedience where, at the behest of a grave authoritarian figure in a laboratory coat, volunteers administered what they believed to be electric shocks of increasing intensity to people (middle-aged and mild-mannered) who answered questions incorrectly. Before the experiment Stanley Milgram invited forty psychiatrists to estimate the level of volunteer compliance. Their view was that only 1 per cent of sadists would continue to the maximum shock level. In fact 65 per cent went all the way to 450 volts, despite hearing what they believed were appeals to desist and even screams of pain. And, if the volunteers were permitted to delegate the actual operation of the shock lever to someone else, the compliance level rose to 90 per cent. The only good news was that the level could be reduced to 10 per cent if volunteers saw someone else refusing to administer shocks.
150
These variations demonstrate once again the power of example, good and bad.

The psychologist Philip Zimbardo has spent a lifetime studying conformity and obedience in a variety of situations ranging from the corporate world to Nazi Germany and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He has conducted many experiments, including the notorious Stanford University prison experiment in 1971, when volunteers were asked to role-play as prisoners or guards and many of the guards became increasingly sadistic. Zimbardo’s conclusion is that group influence may be resisted by a combination of detachment (the exercise of scepticism and critical thinking), humility (willingness to admit personal limitations and mistakes), mindfulness (transforming habitual inattention into habitual awareness), autonomy (preserving independence within groups) and, above all, responsibility: ‘We become more resistant to undesirable social influence by always maintaining a sense of personal responsibility and by being willing to be held accountable for our actions.’
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Considering the possible consequences of evasion should be enough to establish that personal responsibility is essential and that determinism must be rejected, both in theory and practice. An autonomous, attentive, sceptical and critically minded individual, aware of undesirable personal and group inclinations, can resist these and persuade others to do the same. The human creature is the only animal that knows it is only an animal…and therefore the only animal with the option of not behaving like an animal. We can be entirely determined not to be entirely determined. As Katharine Hepburn said to Humphrey Bogart in
The African Queen
, ‘Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are put into this world to rise above.’

Accepting personal responsibility may also be extended into the development of a personal code. This was the essence of the existentialist philosophy. Of course, it will be hard to justify such a code absolutely. And frequently its demands will appear ridiculous and arbitrary. So why bother? Just for the satisfying difficulty of it. Just for the sheer hell of the thing. As Flaubert exhorted: ‘Since all the alternatives are absurd, let us choose the most noble.’
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The Assault on Detachment

S
ome hard thinking is needed and a proper Italian double espresso would kick-start the sluggish brain – but the Italian café has a giant screen showing models endlessly flouncing along catwalks, while its sound system is playing loud soul music and the two girls behind the counter are discussing photographs of themselves on a night out in high, excited tones punctuated by shrieks of laughter. Then your smartphone announces a text message from one of your several thousand network friends, and investigation, briefly distracted by a pop-up offering a choice of three exclusive picture galleries (rebellious rock vixens, the world’s 100 sexiest women and movie stars embarrassed by wardrobe malfunction), reveals an email from your manager scheduling an emergency meeting in the morning and five other emails from fellow team members wondering what the hell is going on.