I have, however, known others for whom the religious option is a way of escaping responsibility. ‘I asked God to find me a job,’ said one young man. ‘He didn’t, so I assume that He wants me to remain unemployed.’ For others a slavish interpretation of the rules of their religion is what life is about. Do the right thing always and everything will come out all right. Theirs not to reason why, to argue with Pope or Archbishop, or to question the views of the hierarchy. This unquestioning obedience is what has given organized religions their power, both for good and, too often, for evil, down the ages.
The increasing interest in revivalist and charismatic religions may be one response to the increasing uncertainty of the modern world. It is a search for another sort of certainty, one unconnected with the material universe. Some would even argue that the only proper concern of religion is this other universe, an argument which becomes an invitation to detach oneself from things and money and jobs. Those in charge of this more mundane world are often only too happy to encourage this other-worldly stance, wanting no transcendent values to intrude into their pragmatic concerns.
My understanding of religion is different. Religion offers a second order certainty, an assurance that there is a purpose to our lives. It does not, and should not, offer any first order certainty, any prescription of what that purpose should be. That remains our individual responsibility. The freedom to choose is our splendid prerogative, God-given or not, along with the freedom to choose wrongly. Choice and the chance of sin go together. You can’t have one without the other. To be sure, there have always been great exemplars and great teachers in all the religions, and there is much that can be learnt from them. The Bible is as good a philosophical textbook as you will find anywhere. The rule books of the religions, however, have been as much about social order as about the right purpose of our lives. They are not to be despised for that but they are what they are – rule books, not invitations to stop thinking.
It is because religions can stop one thinking for oneself that they can mislead, turning people into zealots, even into terrorists on occasion. In that sense they are akin to the geranium view of life. Our life, they suggest, is not our responsibility. Our duty is but to go where we are bidden, or where we think we are bidden. That is religion as false certainty, as escapism not engagement. It is, for that reason, misleading and dangerous.
Properly understood, the religious approach offers us ways to get in touch with our true selves, in particular with the good that lies in each of us. I have been in places which resonate with holiness – once, a lonely chapel attached to a farmhouse in Tuscany where monks had prayed for generations but had left not a visible mark or ornament behind, just the trace of their presence and their prayers. You cannot be in such places without examining your conscience and reflecting on your life. To be quiet and still, somewhere, each day, as a discipline, purges the mind. Call it prayer or meditation if you wish. Beauty in all its forms, great music, fine buildings, these all uplift the soul, and can’t be bad. Religious rituals reinvigorate you, at their best. They pull you in, allow you to cleanse yourself of the things you are ashamed of, lift you up and push you out into the world again, Turkish baths for the soul.
Religion like this is a great aid to self-responsibility. It might even be essential. But it is religion without the creeds and without the hierarchies. It is the religion of doubt and uncertainty, offering one the strength to persevere, to find one’s own way in a world that is, inevitably, very different from any world that was known to those who went before.
I find it necessary to reject the false certainties of both religion and science in order to discharge what I feel to be the responsibility for my own destiny. I believe this to be a responsibility which falls on every one of us. We cannot duck out of it.
FIVE
PROPER SELFISHNESS
I SPENT THE early part of my life trying hard to be someone else. At school I wanted to be a great athlete, at university an admired socialite, afterwards a businessman and, later, the head of a great institution. It did not take me long to discover that I was not destined to be successful in any of these guises, but that did not prevent me from trying, and being perpetually disappointed with myself. The problem was that in trying to be someone else I neglected to concentrate on the person I could be. That idea was too frightening to contemplate at the time. I was happier going along with the conventions of the time, measuring success in terms of money and position, climbing ladders which others placed in my way, collecting things and contacts rather than giving expression to my own beliefs and personality.
I was, in retrospect, hiding from myself, a slave to the system rather than its master. We can’t, however, discover ourselves by introspection. We have to jump in before we learn to swim. That is hardly a new discovery. The idea that true individuality is necessarily social is one of the oldest propositions in philosophy. We find ourselves through what we do and through the long struggle of living with and for others. ‘I do therefore I am’ is more real than ‘I think therefore I am’.
It was Pascal who said that all the ills in the world come about because a man cannot sit in a room alone. But also all the good things, surely, because most of the delights of life come from our association with other people. To be ‘shut up in the solitude of his own heart’ – what de Tocqueville saw as the danger of extreme individualism in America – is not something to be desired. As Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher, puts it, to be completely self-absorbed and self-sufficient is equivalent to spending your life writing your autobiography – there is nothing to write about, except writing the autobiography. To be ourselves we need other people.
What I term a ‘proper selfishness’ builds on this fact that we are inevitably intertwined with others, even if sometimes we wish that we weren’t, but accepts that it’s proper to be concerned with ourselves and a search for who we really are, because that search should lead us to realize that self-respect, in the end, only comes from responsibility, responsibility for other people and other things. Proper selfishness is not escapism. Paradoxically, as I have suggested, we only really find ourselves when we lose ourselves in something beyond ourselves, be it our love for someone, our pursuit of a cause or a vocation, or our commitment to a group or an institution. Forced to be selfish by the changes in the world around us, we have the choice to make it proper. If more of us so choose, we can make the systems work for us rather than the other way round.
In the third part of this book I shall explore some ways in which, by applying this philosophy to the institutions of society, we could make some practical changes and improvements to our world. But the philosophy has to start with us. What that means in practice is the subject of these next chapters.
THE HUNGRY SELF
It is our duty to get a life, as they say in America. To choose life, says Timothy Gorringe, the theologian, is the only ethical imperative, but that begs the question nicely – what is this thing called life?
Life is a chance to make the best of ourselves. We owe it to everybody to give them that chance. There is in each of us a tendency towards good and a tendency towards evil. We could argue whether these tendencies come from God or from our genes, but perhaps, if you believe that God is the mastermind behind the universe, it comes to the same thing. The proper, or decent, self is one where the good is revealed and the evil restrained. Most of us are hungry for a self of which we can be proud. More and more people, especially the young, in the affluent societies of the West, share this hunger. Paul Ray, an American sociologist, calls these hungry people Transmoderns and believes that they account for a quarter of all Americans. Walk into any American bookstore and marvel at the number of books which include the word ‘soul’, even in the business section.
Proper selfishness starts by reinterpreting self-interest, insisting that it is more than economics. Margaret Thatcher, in her heyday, talked of self-responsibility, not selfishness. But, because she failed to define what the self could or should be,
she was understood to mean self-interest, and short-term monetary interest at that, financial selfishness. That was unfortunate, because self-interest cannot be seen simply in monetary terms, even by the most materially minded. It is important to correct the definition, because if our self is more than an economic item, then growth based on self-interest has to mean much more than economic growth.
One tradition, the Christian one, has it that life is not about the satisfaction of needs, although that is inevitably part of it, but the chance to test oneself against all the challenges and so to prove oneself. Money will form a part of this type of self-interest, but only a part.
THE WHITE STONE
The journey towards self-knowledge is a long and tough one. It needs a jolt to start it, the sort of jolt that comes from a brush with death, divorce or redundancy. Luke was lucky in a way – he had such a jolt early in his life.
Luke is a young man of West Indian parents. Last year he was down and out and living in London. He had no job, no home, no money and no hope. There seemed to him to be little point in living. The market economy and the freedom that capitalism offers meant nothing to him. He was outside all of that. By the time I met him, however, there was no trace of that defeatism and depression. He was enrolled in a college now, he told me. He was upbeat, charming, interesting in his views – we met at a conference on the future of work – and interested in ours. ‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Well, when things were at their worst, I rang my dad and told him how I felt. All he said was, “Think about this; when you get to heaven you will meet the man you might have been”, then he put the phone down. That was all I needed. I went away, thought about it, and applied to the college.’
You don’t have to believe in a literal heaven to get the point. I keep a small white stone on my desk to remind me of the same point. It refers to a mysterious verse in the Book of Revelations in the Bible, a verse which goes like this: ‘To the one who prevails, the Spirit says, I will give a white stone . . . on which is written a name, which shall be known only to the one who receives it.’
I am no biblical scholar, but I know what I think it means. It means that if I ‘prevail’, I will, eventually, find out who I truly ought to be, the other hidden self. Life is a search for the white stone. It will be a different one for each of us. Of course, it depends on what is meant by ‘prevail’. It means, I suspect, passing life’s little tests, until you are free to be fully yourself, which is when you get your white stone.
James Hillman, one of the most respected of America’s philosophers of ‘soul’, talks of there being an ‘acorn’ in each of us which contains the seed of our destiny. The Greeks spoke of our daemon and the Romans of each person’s genius. Jesus said the kingdom of God was within us. Today we use words like ‘spirit’, ‘soul’ and ‘heart’. These ideas suggest that our soul is what drives us, if we can only get in touch with it. I favour the symbolism of the white stone because it suggests that we have to take the initiative. To lie back and hope that our soul will lead us to nirvana is not an option.
We have today the opportunity, which is also the challenge, to shape ourselves, even to reinvent ourselves. Our lives are not completely foreordained, either by science or by our souls. We can make of our lives a masterpiece if we so wish. It is an opportunity that ought to be available to all humans. It could be. It is the fortunate combination of liberal democracy and free market capitalism that gives us this opportunity, as long as we make these two our servants, not our masters.
If we knew what was on the white stone to start with, what it meant to be fully yourself, it would all be easy. Since we don’t know what it is until we have it, we can only proceed by constant exploration. It is always a long search. Many give up or never start. If it be true, as some hypothesize, that we only discover 25% of our potential talents by the time we die – a hypothesis that must remain a conjecture because who would ever know the truth – then the sooner we start experimenting with ourselves the better. I like the idea of a self which can lift itself to unknown heights, a self which exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification, and stops short of aggression in order to discover the very peaks of life. The thought that this might all be preordained by our genes or by our daemon is, to me, depressing. It removes any point from life.
‘Know Yourself’, the ancient Greek admonition, should, logically, be the first step on the way to the white stone. It often, however, turns out to be the end of the quest, not the beginning, because we are growing and changing all the time. It’s a wise man that knows his own father, the cynic said, but it’s an even wiser one that knows himself before the closing of his days. ‘To thine own self be true’ was Polonius’ advice to Laertes, an uncomfortable charge to lay on a young man, who probably had not the slightest idea of who he was at that age and who would have done better to heed the advice of the old Roman, Paracelsus, who advised that if we can’t be who we are we should at least not be who we are not – advice I failed to hear myself.
This start on the road to the white stone is not, therefore, an invitation to endless navel-gazing, but a warning not to wear clothes that don’t fit you. Stop pretending, in other words, or you waste your life. ‘Where I am folded in upon myself,’ said the poet Rilke, ‘there am I a lie.’ Look outside first, to find yourself, and do not expect to find the full truth until you have exhausted most of the possibilities, until you are near the end. Death is welcomed by many, because it is the end of searching. Arthur Miller, the playwright, put it like this:
I see it [life] as an endless, truly endless struggle. There’s no time when we’re going to arrive at a plateau where the whole thing gets sorted. It’s a struggle in the way every plant has to find its own way to stand up straight. A lot of the time it’s a failure. And yet it’s not a failure if some enlightenment comes out of it.
THE PUZZLE OF IDENTITY
We cannot wait for the approach of death to start the search, however; so how do we go about defining ourselves to start with?
Work has always been a major strand in people’s self-description, and, therefore, a major component of their identity. Some years ago, my son, then seven, was given a class assignment to write a description of what their fathers did. While disapproving of the assignment on the grounds that it might be discriminatory, I was nevertheless intrigued to know what my son had written. My job at the time, a Professor at a Business School, was not, I felt, part of his conscious world.
‘I said you were a painter,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ I replied, rather startled by his imagination, because I had never put brush to canvas, but flattered all the same, ‘what do I paint?’
‘Walls,’ he said, as indeed I had been doing that weekend.
Deflated by his image of me as a painter/decorator, I spent a little time wondering whether it mattered, in his young life, what he thought I did at work. I decided that it didn’t. It shouldn’t matter to me either.
I was, however, taken aback by the headmaster’s reaction when I told him that we were moving, because I had accepted a post as the head of an academic institution in another town. He looked at me, puzzled: ‘But, how interesting [meaning, how strange]. I thought that you were a decorator.’
Was that why, I asked myself, we had received such scant attention from him in the past two years?
Our work role defines us, but only partially. To a degree we are as we are seen by those to whom we are connected – our family, tribe, and friends and colleagues. When I meet my relatives, or my long-standing friends, I am conscious that I am not really interested in their work or career unless it is causing them personal problems. In fact, if they are successful I almost resent it, because it means that they have less time for me. The same is true in reverse – they don’t want to hear about books published or lectures delivered. I know and cherish a more personal side of them. My identity, and theirs, is rooted in mutual affection and a shared history. They see a different ‘me’ to the one that others see.
&nbs
p; However much we may deny it, the way other people see us does influence the way we see ourselves. Proper selfishness requires that we take our identity into our own care, provided that we give it a reality check with those who know us. We define, for ourselves, who we are and what we stand for. Some people do this with a devil-may-care arrogance, which often conceals a deeper sense of doubt. Others, like myself, are too ready to accept the characterization that others give us – another sign of doubt.
We are all different people in different situations. In one series of portraits my photographer wife shot David, a general, first in his uniform, then in civilian clothes with his wife, and finally in casual garb with his children in the garden. Three very different images of the same person. It is tempting to ask which is the real David. The answer has to be that they are all real at that time, but which one, or which blend, will emerge at the end, imprinted on the white stone, must be for him to find out. It is when the images are too different that life gets confusing. Most of us find that the images come together as we get older, until we become one person, not several.
The moment will arrive when you are comfortable with who you are, and what you are – bald or old or fat or poor, successful or struggling – when you don’t feel the need to apologize for anything or to deny anything. To be comfortable in your own skin is the beginning of strength. Derek Walcott, the Nobel prize-winning poet from the Caribbean, sums up what it feels like when you reach that goal:
The Hungry Spirit: New Thinking for a New World Page 8