The School of Life

by The School Of Life

  RITUAL

  Our problem isn’t just that we are in the habit of shirking important ideas. We are also prone to forget them immediately even if we have in theory given them our assent. For this, humanity invented ritual. Ritual can be defined as the structured repetition of important concepts, made resonant through the help of formal pageantry and ceremony. Ritual takes thoughts that are known but unattended and renders them active and vivid once more in our distracted minds. Unlike standard modern education, ritual doesn’t aim to teach us anything new; it wants to lend compelling form to what we believe we already know. It wants to turn our theoretical allegiances into habits.

  It is, not coincidentally, also religions that have been especially active in the design and propagation of rituals. It is they that have created occasions at which to tug our minds back to honouring the seasons, remembering the dead, looking inside ourselves, focusing on the passage of time, empathizing with strangers, forgiving transgressions or apologizing for misdeeds. They have put dates in our diaries to take our minds back to our most sincere commitments.

  We might interpret rituals negatively, as symbols of an old-fashioned attempt to control and direct our thoughts by appointment. However, the best rituals don’t so much impose upon us ideas that we are opposed to but take us back to ideas that we are in deep agreement with yet have allowed to lapse: they are an externally mandated route to inner authenticity.

  In the course of secularizing our societies, we may have been too hasty in doing away with rituals. An education system alive to the wisdom of religions would perceive the role of structured lessons that constantly repeat what we know full well already – and yet so arduously and grievously forget. A good ‘school’ shouldn’t tell us only things we’ve never heard of before; it should be deeply interested in rehearsing all that is theoretically known yet practically forgotten.

  FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS

  Part of what stops us addressing our emotional knots is a background belief that they are too small to be worth bothering with. Our will to tackle what may, in reality, destroy our lives is sapped by a background fear of being self-indulgent. A lingering puritanism kicks in at precisely the wrong moment.

  But there is (sadly) nothing especially laughable about the problems unfolding in the world’s richest countries. People may not starve, life expectancy is high and child mortality almost eradicated, but populations remain beleaguered. The issues are not the sob stories of the well-to-do, begging for sympathy on account of an incorrectly chilled wine, but comprise extremes of loneliness, anxiety, relationship breakdown, rage, humiliation and depression – problems that culminate in the greatest indictment of advanced societies: their exceptionally high suicide rates.

  The priority of modern politics is economic growth. But humanity’s struggle towards material security will only be worthwhile if we understand and find ways to attenuate the psychological afflictions that appear to continue into, and are sometimes directly fostered by, conditions of abundance. The problems of the thirty or so rich countries described as First World are the ones that the whole of our species will, according to current trajectories, be facing in 300 years’ time. The issues that currently wreck people’s lives in Switzerland and Norway, Australia and the Netherlands are the problems that will be rife around the globe in 2319. First World problems aren’t an unnecessary oddity. They are a form of time travel. They are a glimpse into what will one day bedevil all humankind – unless we learn to view them as more than the tantrums of the spoilt.

  IMPERFECTION

  The single greatest enemy of contemporary satisfaction may be the belief in human perfectibility. We have been driven to collective rage through the apparently generous yet in reality devastating idea that it might be within our natural remit to be completely and enduringly happy.

  For thousands of years, we knew better. We might have been superstitious and credulous, but not without limit. All substantial endeavours – marriage, child-rearing, a career, politics – were understood to be sources of distinctive and elaborate misery. Buddhism described life itself as a vale of suffering; the Greeks insisted on the tragic structure of every human project; Christianity interpreted each of us as being marked by a divine curse.

  First formulated by the philosopher St Augustine in the closing days of the Roman Empire, ‘original sin’ generously insisted that humanity was intrinsically, rather than accidentally, flawed. That we suffer, feel lost and isolated, are racked with worry, miss our own talents, refuse love, lack empathy, sulk, obsess and hate: these are not merely personal flaws, but constitute the essence of the human animal. We are broken creatures and have been since our expulsion from Eden, damned – to use the resonant Latin phrase – by peccatum originale. Even without subscribing to the precise details of Augustine’s logic, we can appreciate his conclusion.

  Peccatum originale – original sin

  Of course we are sad: detail from Lucas Cranach the Elder, Adam and Eve, 1526.

  This should feel not like a punishing observation, but more like relief from the pressures of 200 years of scientifically mandated faith in the possibility of progress.

  There can wisely be no ‘solutions’, no self-help, of a kind that removes problems altogether. What we can aim for, at best, is consolation – a word tellingly lacking in glamour. To believe in consolation means giving up on cures; it means accepting that life is a hospice rather than a hospital, but one we’d like to render as comfortable, as interesting and as kind as possible.

  A philosophy of consolation directs us to two important salves: understanding and companionship. Or grasping what our problem is – and knowing that we are not alone with it. Understanding does not magically remove the pain but it has the power to reduce a range of secondary aggravations and fears. At least we know what is racking us and why. Our worst fears are held in check, and tears may be turned into bitter knowledge.

  It helps immensely too to know that we are in company. Despite the upbeat tone of society in general, there is solace in the discovery that everyone else is, in private, of course as bewildered and regretful as we are. This is not Schadenfreude, simply profound relief that we are not the only ones.

  SANE INSANITY

  Basic sanity should also be assumed to be beyond us. There are too many powerful reasons why we lack anything like an even keel. We have complex histories, we are heading towards the ultimate catastrophe, we are vulnerable to devastating losses, love will always leave us wanting, the gap between our hopes and our realities is always going to be unbridgeable. In the circumstances, it makes no sense to aim for sanity; we should fix instead on the goal of achieving a wise, knowledgeable and self-possessed relationship with our manifold insanities, or what can be termed ‘sane insanity’.

  What separates the sane insane from the simply insane is the honest, personable and accurate grasp they have on what is not entirely right with them. They may not be wholly balanced, but they don’t have the additional folly of insisting on their normalcy. They can admit with good grace – and no particular loss of dignity – that they are naturally deeply peculiar at myriad points. They do not go out of their way to hide from us what they get up to in the night, in their sad moments, when anxiety strikes, or during attacks of envy. They can – at their best – be drily funny about the tragedy of being human. They lay bare the fears, doubts, longings, desires and habits that don’t belong to the story we commonly tell ourselves about who we are.

  The sane insane among us are not a special category of the mentally unwell; they represent the most evolved possibility for a mature human being.

  IN PRAISE OF MELANCHOLY

  Melancholy is not rage or bitterness; it is a noble species of sadness that arises when we are properly open to the idea that suffering and disappointment are at the heart of human experience. It is not a disorder that needs to be cured; it is a tender-hearted, calm, dispassionate acknowledgement of how much agony we will inevitably have to travel through.

  Modern society�
�s mania is to emphasize buoyancy and cheerfulness. It wishes either to medicalize melancholy states – and therefore ‘solve’ them – or to deny their legitimacy altogether. Yet melancholy springs from a rightful awareness of the tragic structure of every life. We can, in melancholy states, understand without fury or sentimentality that no one truly understands anyone else, that loneliness is universal and that every life has its full measure of shame and sorrow. The melancholy know that many of the things we most want are in tragic conflict: to feel secure and yet to be free; to have money and yet not to have to be beholden to others; to be in close-knit communities and yet not to be stifled by the expectations and demands of society; to explore the world and yet to put down deep roots; to fulfil the demands of our appetites for food, sex and sloth and yet stay thin, sober, faithful and fit.

  The wisdom of the melancholy attitude (as opposed to the bitter or angry one) lies in understanding that our suffering belongs to humanity in general. Melancholy is redolent with an impersonal perspective on suffering. It is filled with a soaring pity for our condition. There are melancholy landscapes and melancholy pieces of music, melancholy poems and melancholy times of day. In them, we find echoes of our own griefs, returned back to us without some of the personal associations that, when they first struck us, made them particularly agonizing. The task of culture is to turn rage and forced jollity into melancholy. The more melancholy a culture can be, the less its individual members need to be persecuted by their own failures, lost illusions and regrets.

  THE SIMPLE AND THE OBSCURE

  We could expect humans to display a powerful reflex for simple over obscure explanations. Yet in many areas of intellectual and psychological life, we observe a stranger, more unexpected phenomenon: a prejudice in favour of abstruseness, density, enigma and the esoteric. Our respect for explanations that come close to incomprehensible, that provoke puzzlement, that employ uncommon words suggests an implicit belief that the truth should not come in a form that is easily fathomable. We too readily assume that we are approaching a person of genius when we stop understanding anything of what they’re saying.

  It is problematic, therefore, that so many of the central truths of emotional life have an elemental simplicity to them that violates our predilections for difficulty and maintains some of the innocent plainness of a parable. To hear that we should understand rather than condemn, that others are primarily anxious rather than cruel, that every strength of character we admire bears with it a weakness we must forgive: these are both key laws of psychology and entirely familiar truisms of the sort that we have been taught to disdain. Yet despite their so-called obviousness, simple-sounding emotional dynamics are aggressively capable of ruining extended periods of our lives. Three decades devoted to the unhappy pursuit of wealth and status may turn out to be driven by nothing more or less than a forgotten desire to secure the attention of a distracted parent more interested in an older sibling. The failure of a fifteen-year relationship, a thousand nights of pain and fury, might have originated in an avoidant pattern of attachment established in one’s fourteenth month on earth. Emotional life is never done with showing us how much we might have to suffer for ‘small’ things.

  We should gracefully acknowledge how much of what nourishes and guides us, how much of what we should be hearing is astonishingly, almost humiliatingly, simple in structure. We should not compound our problems by insisting on elevated degrees of mystery, or allow our emotional intelligence to be clouded by a murkiness that would be legitimate only in the advanced sciences. Our vulnerability to basic psychological error is no more absurd, and no less poignant, than the fact that an adult can be killed by a well-aimed pebble or that we can die for want of a glass of water. Simplicity should never insult our intelligence; it should remind us to be nimble in our understanding of what intelligence comprises.

  We need to be sophisticated enough not to reject a truth because it sounds like something we already know. We need to be mature enough to bend down and pick up governing ideas in their simplest guises. We need to remain open to vast truths that can be stated in the language of a child.

  THE SCHOOL OF LIFE

  There is a deliberate paradox in the term ‘the school of life’. School is meant to teach us what we need to know to live and yet, as the phrase ruefully suggests, it is most often life – by which we really mean painful experience – that does the bulk of the instruction for us. The real institution called the School of Life therefore carries within it a hope and a provocation. It dares to believe that we might learn, in good time and systematically, what we might otherwise acquire only through many decades of stumbling. And it gently criticizes the current way we set about equipping ourselves with the skills we need to thrive.

  We aren’t ever done with the odd business of becoming that most extraordinary and prized of things, an emotionally mature person – or, to put it a simpler way, an almost grown-up adult. In an ideal society, it would be not only children who were known to need an education. All adults would recognize that they inevitably required continuing education of an emotional kind and would remain active followers of a psychological curriculum. Schools devoted to emotional intelligence would be open for everyone, so that children would feel that they were participating in the early stages of a lifelong process. Some classes – about anger or sulking, blame or consideration – would have seven-year-olds learning alongside fifty-five-year-olds, the two cohorts having been found to have equivalent maturities in a given area. In such a society, the phrase ‘I’ve finished school’ would sound extremely strange.

  We have collectively left to chance some of what it is most important to know; we have denied ourselves the opportunity to systematically transmit wisdom – reserving our belief in education to technical and managerial skills. The School of Life is a modest attempt to try to spare us a bit of time.

  I : SELF

  * * *

  1 Strangers to Ourselves

  THE DIFFICULTY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE

  One of our greatest challenges is to understand the peculiar content of own minds. We may look like the ultimate owners of our skulls but we remain practical strangers to too much of what unfolds within them. A casual acquaintance may, in a few minutes of conversation, deduce more about our psyches than we have been able to determine across many decades. We are frequently the very last people to know what is at work within ‘us’.

  We suffer because there is no easy route to introspection. We cannot open a hatch and locate ‘ourselves’. We are not a fixed destination, but an eternally mobile, boundless, unfocused, vaporous spectre whose full nature can only be retrospectively deduced from painfully recollected glimpses and opaque hints. There is no time or vantage point from which to securely decode our archives of experience. There is too much data entering us at every moment for us to easily sift and arrange our sensations with the care and logic they deserve.

  Symptoms of our self-ignorance abound. We are irritable or sad, guilty or furious, without any reliable sense of the origins of our discord. We destroy a relationship that might have been workable under a compulsion we cannot account for. We fail to know our professional talents in time. We pass too many of our days under mysterious clouds of despair or beset by waves of persecution.

  We pay a very high price for our self-ignorance. Feelings and desires that haven’t been examined linger and distribute their energy randomly across our lives. Ambition that doesn’t know itself re-emerges as panic; envy transforms itself into bitterness; anger turns into rage; sadness into depression. Disavowed material buckles and strains the system. We develop pernicious tics: a facial twitch, impotence, a compulsion, an unbudgeable sadness. Much of what destroys our lives can be attributed to emotions that our conscious selves haven’t found a way to understand or to address in time.

  It is logical that Socrates should have boiled down the entire wisdom of philosophy to one simple command: ‘Know yourself.’

  EMOTIONAL SCEPTICISM

  Yet he also added,
‘I am wise not because I know, but because I know I don’t know.’ The eventual result of a quest for self-knowledge might be presumed to be a confident understanding of the corridors of the mind. But a truly successful outcome might involve something rather different. The more closely we introspect, the more we start to appreciate the range of tricks our minds play on us – and therefore the more we appreciate the extent to which we will continually misjudge situations and the feelings they provoke. A successful search for self-knowledge may furnish us not with a set of newly mined rock-solid certainties, but with an admission of how little we do – and ever can – properly know ourselves.

  This critical attitude towards our own thought processes can be called emotional scepticism. It was the ancient Greek philosophical sceptics (from the Greek word skepsis, meaning ‘questioning’ or ‘examination’) who first concentrated on showing up how flawed and unreliable our minds can be, in both large and small ways. The average pig is – as Pyrrho, the founder of the sceptical movement, liked to point out – cleverer, sharper, kinder and distinctly happier than its human counterpart.

  The sceptics emphasized a range of cognitive malfunctions and blind spots. We are notoriously bad judges of distances, wildly misreading how far away a distant island or mountain might be, and easily fooled in our estimations by small changes of light and moisture in the air. Our sense of time is highly inaccurate, influenced chiefly by the novelty or familiarity of what happens rather than by strict chronological duration. We desire excessively and inaccurately. Our sexual drives wreak havoc on our sense of priorities. Our whole assessment of the world can be transformed according to how much water we have drunk or sleep we have had. The instrument through which we interpret reality, our 1,260 or so cubic centimetres of brain matter, has a treacherous proclivity for throwing out faulty readings.