The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) (6 page)

What can be done? There is little prospect of changing the culture. One of capitalism’s greatest strengths has been its ability to co-opt everyone into its project by encouraging them to become property owners, shareholders and entrepreneurs. And to its promise that anyone can be a millionaire has recently been added the promise that anyone can be a celebrity. Its other great strength is the ability to neutralize dissent by absorbing it. So capitalism effortlessly assimilated the working class, as it later swallowed the 1950
s
beats, the 1960
s
counterculture, the 1970
s
punks and, more recently, the culture-jamming movement. The Adbusters company now manufactures a running shoe and of course advertises it in
Adbusters
. Will you be punished for transgression if you publish a novel on the pleasures of hanging young boys, exhibit a partly decomposed skull supporting a bluebottle colony or pelt a concert audience with pig intestines and then bite the head off a live bat?
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No, instead you will be rewarded with wealth and fame. Capitalism actually seeks counterculture to consume as the roughage in a healthy diet.

Similarly, television and advertising have learned to defuse opposition by ironic self-mockery. One of the most successful recent TV sitcoms featured a stupid, passive family who do nothing but slump in their living room watching television. But, of course, the families in their living rooms watching on television the family in its living room watching television did not feel stupid and passive but knowing and superior – they had been let in on the joke. And advertising offers parodies of ads and even mocks the very idea of advertising. This is the trick of the sophisticated conman who ensures complicity by winking at you throughout the con.

Do thinkers offer any advice on resisting the conditioning pressures of the world? Rarely. Thinkers tend to withdraw in contempt and horror – Buddha’s solution to the world was to abandon it.

But the Greek and Roman Stoics – Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius – were very much in the world. Aurelius was an emperor, Seneca was a wealthy banker, possibly the only banker to write philosophy, and Epictetus was an ex-slave. And the world they moved in was a late, affluent civilization with many similarities to our own. Their writings are also surprisingly lively, not at all ‘stoic’ in the word’s contemporary meaning of grim resignation to adversity. These three were neither grim (Seneca: ‘It is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it’
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), nor resigned (Marcus Aurelius: ‘The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing’
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) and as much concerned with surviving prosperity as enduring adversity (Seneca: ‘While all excesses are in a way hurtful, the most dangerous is unlimited good fortune’
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). The problem, they argued, is not that affluence is bad in itself but that it encourages character defects such as self-importance, contempt, resentment, impatience, restlessness, and, worst of all, desire for yet more wealth. They understood all too well the madness that makes too much never enough. Epictetus compared this to a fever that creates a thirst no amount of water can slake. Seneca cites Alexander the Great’s insatiable need for new lands to conquer: ‘He still desired to pass beyond the Ocean and the Sun.’
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The problem, then as now, is the spell of potential in an affluent society. As Seneca put it: ‘The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which depends upon tomorrow and wastes today.’
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So, as though written expressly for the twenty-first century, the Stoic works abound in reminders of the futility of attention-seeking, shopping, anger, taking offence and travel for its own sake (‘Nothing here is any different from what it would be up in the hills or down by the sea’
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).

The key Stoic virtue is detachment – if it is not possible to influence the world, it is at least possible to moderate the world’s influence on the self – but the purpose of this detachment is understanding rather than contempt. And it does not imply withdrawal or fatalistic indifference. The Stoic strategy is not to avoid experience or to accept it passively, but
to make something of it
: ‘If our inner power is true to Nature, it will always adjust to the possibilities offered by circumstance. It requires nothing predetermined and is willing to compromise; obstacles are merely converted into material for use. It is like a bonfire mastering a heap of rubbish.’
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Complaining is, of course, entirely out of the question – Epictetus: ‘The proper goal of our activity is to practise how to remove from one’s life sorrows and laments and cries of ‘alas’ and ‘poor me’.’
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But Aurelius has the maxim for the coffee mug: ‘To refrain from imitating is the best revenge.’
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Unfortunately, this fruitful speculation on how to live in the world was obliterated for over a thousand years by Christianity’s rejection of the possibility of terrestrial happiness. Yet Christ, often regarded as the most unworldly of men, was in fact much concerned with the world and offered useful advice on how to deal with it. Firstly, he rejected, with startlingly consistent vehemence, loyalty to family and tribe: ‘a man’s foes shall be they of his own household’.
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Then he considered the phenomenon of the Pharisees, the Scribes. These were men with power but no authority – a crucial distinction. Authority earns respect, power demands it; authority requires no trappings, power needs imposing robes; authority is forthright, power is secretive; authority is the open heart, power is the closed fist. So Matthew says of Christ: ‘For he taught them as one having authority and not as the Scribes.’
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The Scribes believed in rules rather than principles, status rather than achievement, hypocrisy rather than virtue. So they were always trying to drag Christ into case law and make him contravene prohibitions – and Christ always refused rules and insisted that every case be decided from first principles. If a sheep falls into a pit on the Sabbath do you obey the prohibition on work or pull the sheep out?
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And he consistently denounced hypocrisy, a key theme in the New Testament, but rarely mentioned by Christians.

Christ’s conflict with the Pharisees is permanently relevant because there are Pharisees in every period and culture. Like the poor, the Pharisees are always with us. They rarely seize power or define its supporting ideology, but they will serve any regime and implement any plan. They are the French civil servants who delivered their Jewish fellow citizens to the Nazis, the communist apparatchiks who betrayed their neighbours to the secret police, the righteous zealots who imposed political correctness at the end of the twentieth century – and the colleagues who speak at length in every meeting, in loud confident tones that suggest critical independence, but never deviate from the official line. Pharisees are among the most important transmitters of cultural norms and they will switch effortlessly to new values without even being conscious of the move. So they have learned to be PC in both senses. Where for centuries they were solemn, they are now Professionally Cheerful, although they still have no sense of humour. And, as Christ understood, they can never be defeated because they always hold the power, propagate official ideas and follow official procedure. Christ’s advice was ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s’
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– give to power only the necessary minimum and no more.

The Pharisee is the type defined by Fromm as the ‘authoritarian character’
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, who worships power for its own sake, reveres the powerful and despises the powerless. In other words, the orientation is sadomasochistic – kiss up and piss down. This type will also fear, loathe and seek to suppress those like Christ who have authority and do not need or seek power.

These ideas – the Stoic belief in making use of inevitable adversity, Christ’s insistence on a morality based on principle rather than prescription, and the Freudian understanding of the sadomasochistic nature of power – came together in the mid-twentieth century in existentialism, one of the few philosophical movements fully to consider the relationship of the self to the world. The key concept is personal responsibility. As Sartre expressed it: ‘Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.’
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But this is not an excuse for withdrawal and isolation. On the contrary, it makes engagement necessary at all levels, from personal relationships to group membership. For responsibility requires the unremitting exercise of choice, which, though frequently painful, is the only way of transcending circumstance and self. But every choice ends in finitude so there can be no question of living in perpetual anticipation. Søren Kierkegaard, the proto-existentialist, wrote, ‘This is the despair of possibility. Possibility then appears to the self ever greater and greater, more and more things become possible, because nothing becomes actual. At last it is as if everything were possible.’
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Kierkegaard argued that the self needs a balance of necessity and possibility – it will suffocate in too much necessity but vaporize in too much possibility. Throughout history, crushing necessity has been the usual problem, but the contemporary self is being driven mad by infinite possibility. Rejection of necessity is the contemporary sickness.

And Sartre defined not potential but finitude as the essence of freedom: ‘To be finite…is to choose oneself…to make known to oneself what one is by projecting oneself toward one possible to the exclusion of others. The very act of freedom is therefore the assumption and creation of finitude.’
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But the chosen finitude must be fully accepted – it is always necessary to
follow through
. And this exercise of responsibility rules out grievance: ‘It therefore makes no sense to complain since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.’
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So the Stoic insistence on making use of what happens is raised to the level of a core belief – whatever you have been made into you can make something out of. Indeed this making is an obligation. Sartre denounced the passive acceptance of social roles and cultural conditioning as ‘bad faith’, lack of ‘authenticity’, the lazy excuse of ‘this is the way I am’. The self must be constantly made and this making becomes a way of transcending the self. Living is perpetual self-transcendence.

As for relations with others, the freedom of the individual is the crucial factor. So in love there is no question of either surrendering or demanding surrender – masochism or sadism. It is difficult to have a relationship without some element of power struggle but the ideal is that the autonomy of the partner should always be respected; the consequence of following this ideal, though, is not eternal bliss but eternal conflict. Danger and risk are unavoidable but give the relationship intensity – and intensity rather than serenity is the existentialist goal.

Similarly, in group relations there should be no submission to the group ethos, what Sartre defined as ‘us-consciousness’, nor any use of power to subjugate the freedom of others. As in love, the exercise of power in the group is often sadomasochistic.

What the authoritarian personality, the Pharisee, usually demands is compliance with hierarchy, regulations and procedure but what it really craves is surrender of internal freedom. So it may always be frustrated by being given
only
external compliance. This is the existentialist triumph, the preservation of a secret self and personal freedom by rendering to Caesar only the things that are Caesar’s.

So existentialism rejects team-player malleability, emphasizes finitude rather than potential, advises making use of whatever happens and embraces the difficult because it confers intensity. No wonder this philosophy has gone out of fashion.

Another key concept is absurdity, again an extension of Stoic thought. If life is insignificant and meaningless, it must be absurd. So this is also the age of absurdity in the philosophical sense.

For Sartre, always solemn and portentous, absurdity was tragic, even justifying suicide and certainly ruling out happiness. But Albert Camus saw that not only is happiness possible, it is sym-biotically linked to absurdity – each can reinforce the other: ‘Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness.’
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Camus applied this to the situation of Sisyphus, eternally condemned to push a rock up a hill, a myth with profound resonance for all those obliged to work for a living: ‘Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He, too, concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’
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Unfortunately the existentialists were entirely humourless.
The Myth of Sisyphus
is Camus’ classic work on the absurd but it too has portentous moments, especially on the subject of suicide. In fact Camus’ actual death was appropriately absurd. Though intending to return to Paris from Marseilles by rail, he was persuaded to accept a lift from his publisher – who drove off the road and into a tree. So Camus died in a car with a train ticket in his pocket – an absurdist parable on the consequences of accepting someone else’s route.

It was left to other writers to draw the opposite conclusion to Sartre’s – that absurdity is not tragic but comic, a reason not to reject life but to draw from it a strange new sustenance and relish. As a character in one of Samuel Beckett’s plays remarks: ‘How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?’ The character is Winnie, who is first buried up to the waist and then up to the neck in the play called – what else? –
Happy Days
. ‘Oh this
is
a happy day!’ she cries, ‘This will have been another happy day!’
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