The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
For a long time I sheltered behind my formal title of Professor. It was something of which I was greatly proud when I first gained it at the age of 39, although I remember that my mother’s only comment at the time was the hope that this might mean that I would have more time for her grandchildren. By the time I was 60 I was a very part-time Professor. My wife urged me to give it up and ‘grow up’, but I feared that I would be in some way naked without a title of some sort to describe me. At conferences they expected both a title and an affiliation to some organization, I told her. When eventually I resigned my Professorship and emerged as just ‘Charles Handy’ it was, to my surprise, a great relief.
Women do not seem to have the same hang-up about work titles. Until recently, they had, however, to contend with another tradition, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon countries, under which they were expected to assume their husband’s name on marriage, and with it, part of his identity. An important boost to Proper Selfishness for women came when the assumption of his name became a matter of choice. Out from the shadow of the man, women now have the same problems as men, in shaking off the expectations and stereotypes of society and discovering who they really are. At least, today, they are freer than they were to choose.
Some choose not to choose a life. Victoria Wood, the British comedienne, describes her own life thus:
Born in the North,
Told a few jokes,
Spoiled two bras in the tumble drier,
Died.
The irony hits a chord, and people laugh, too often recognizing themselves, and a life unexplored. Rachel Lindsey’s poem expresses the sadness of that:
It is the world’s one crime that its babes grow dull.
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap.
Not that they serve, but that they have no God to serve.
The tragedy is not death. The tragedy is to die
With commitments undefined, with convictions undeclared and with service unfulfilled.
To experiment with one’s life is not going to be everyone’s choice. It is too risky. That is sad, because we are then condemned to live in the boxes that we make for ourselves, or let others make for us. I first saw Ibsen’s great play The Doll’s House fifteen years ago. The play is about a marriage, a transparently happy one with a successful husband and an attractive, adored and adoring wife, busying herself, when the play opens, with the gifts and arrangements for Christmas with their three children. In the final denouement, however, that happiness turns out to have been shallow pretence. Nora, the wife, suddenly realizes that she has always been only her husband’s doll, a pretty plaything without any identity of her own. It was a role she was happy to accept until she realized what was happening to her. ‘Yes,’ she agrees, ‘I have a duty to my husband and my children, but my first duty is to myself.’ She departs to make a new life for herself. It would be an interesting exercise to write the sequel.
Great theatre shines a mirror on life. I saw some of myself reflected in that mirror. I, too, had a happy marriage but it was very centred on myself. It was time, I belatedly realized, that my wife had more opportunity to explore her own white stone and to escape from the box that we had both unwittingly created for her. She took a degree in photography, receiving her results on the same day that our son heard his. She has since developed her own individual approach to portrait photography, one which happens to be pertinent to the puzzle of identity.
In one series of portraits she gave the person being photographed a range of prints to choose from. That person chose quite different ones for her mother, her partner, her children and herself. Unconsciously she was revealing the different faces of herself – her different boxes. In another instance Elizabeth did it the other way round, asking the different members of the family to choose the image of their relation that they liked best. None of them chose the same, because each had a different image of who she was. For this woman, the exposure of her different faces became the start of a journey in search of herself.
In the large Japanese organizations they don’t promote the best and the brightest of their young people as fast as we do in the West. Instead they rotate them through a variety of jobs on the same level. I christened it their horizontal fast track. They want these talented people to have the chance to experience a range of options and a variety of superiors so that they will not necessarily be defined by their education as an engineer or a lawyer when their real skills lie elsewhere. It is an opportunity to escape from the boxes into which they have slipped, perhaps without a great deal of thought. In these days of independence, young would-be managers use the MBA degree partly as a qualification but also as a chance to redefine themselves, to escape from the box of their past.
Consider, however, the plight of the unemployed man whom I met as one of a series of people I was interviewing for a radio programme. He had no job, no family, and, as far as I could ascertain, no friends and no permanent home. He had a name and a very positive personality, but no reference points in society. He was completely free to compose his own identity but had nothing and no one to bounce it up against, no data to work on, no portraits to give and no one to give them to. As far as he knew, his view of himself might be a complete fantasy. There was no sense of Proper Selfishness there, no basis for any further exploration of life. His only box was one labelled ‘unemployed’, which is a difficult one to escape from. Perhaps the first step is to relabel that box – as self-employed, maybe.
For me, his experience contained an important clue. Identity requires responsibility, because without responsibility there is no self-respect. You do not know whether you could handle anything, deliver any result or take care of anyone else. You don’t know if your sense of ‘you’ works, because there is no reality check. Work, of some sort, therefore becomes almost essential. It doesn’t have to be formal work in a job. A friend describes how the birth of her baby daughter with severe cerebral palsy gave her real responsibility for the first time in her life, a feeling of true worth and the experience of unconditional love. The practical problems, for she is a single mother, are immense, but she now knows who she is and what her life is for. Exhausted though she is, for most of the time, she has never looked happier.
If personal responsibility is the key to identity and self-respect there are important educational and policy issues which follow. They will be discussed in the third part of the book.
THE THREE STEPS
No one finds the white stone all at once, or early. There is, it seems, a necessary sequence which we have to experience.
Francis Kinsman, in a book too little noticed at the time, called Millennium, Towards Tomorrow’s Society, written at the end of the materialistic Eighties, used three psychological types developed by the Stanford Research Institute to describe the world as he saw it. The three types are:
Sustenance Driven
Outer Directed
Inner Directed
Ugly words for important truths. So ugly, in fact, that at first I misunderstood them. ‘Outer Directed’ I assumed meant concerned for other people. In fact, as we shall see, it means being concerned with what other people do or think, their values and their preoccupations. ‘Inner Directed’ turns out to be what Jung would call Individuation and what I think of as
Proper Selfishness, an ability to work out your own values and purposes. Technical terms are good, however, once you understand them, because they are unemotive. For my own ease of understanding and everyday usage I have relabelled the Stanford categories as Survival, Achievement and Self-Expression, but these terms don’t have the same precision as Stanford’s. Here are the Stanford definitions:
• Sustenance Driven
The prime objective of sustenance driven people is security, both financial and social. Although some of them are poor and/or unemployed, others are comfortably off but want to cling on to what they have. Such people are clannish, set in their ways and resistant to change. They are, says Kinsman ‘the left-over philosophical products of the agricultural era – the top, middle and bottom of the feudal heap’.
• Outer Directed
Outer directed people are high achievers. They are searching for esteem and status, as the outward symbols of their success in life. They want, therefore, to have the best, or at least the right, things in life. They are usually intelligent, well educated and ambitious. They are materialistic, except in those circles where it is smart not to be materialistic. They are the driving force behind economically successful societies.
• Inner Directed
The driving force of these people is to give expression to their talents and beliefs. This does not imply that they are withdrawn or aloof or, even, unambitious, but they tend to be less materialistic than the other two groups, more concerned with ethics and the way society is run. Their values are based on personal growth, self-fulfilment, sensibility and the quality of their and other people’s lives. The others call them ‘wimps’, says Kinsman, yet some others find them dangerous. ‘How can we identify these people – and stamp them out?’ asked one authoritarian manager.
Kinsman uses these categories to draw pictures of society as it might develop in the new millennium. Taking data from international surveys, he sees a gradual shift from Sustenance to Outer Directed and from Outer to Inner Directed, although countries differ markedly. In 1989 Inner Directed individuals accounted for 36% of the British population and 42% of the Dutch. The Germans, however, had more Outer Directeds than any other country, while Italy and France, still with strong agrarian cultures in some areas, were strikingly Sustenance Driven. The British, in my words, are becoming more interested in Self-Expression, in the search for the white stone.
But it is also possible to use the categories as dimensions of our personal development. Maslow, the American psychologist on whom these categories are based, insisted that the categories nest inside each other, like Chinese boxes. We are never completely one or the other, and it is a mix which changes at different times throughout life. I can well recognize periods when I was largely Sustenance Driven, concerned with my very Survival at the start of my career. Then came the period of Achievement in very worldly terms, when I was concerned to prove myself. I still find myself casting envious glances at the smart houses advertised for sale in the glossy magazines, so I am not at all immune from the symbols of success of the Outer Directed world. I like to think, however, that now, well into my third age, I am anchored in the values of the Inner Directed group and searching for a way to express my real self and to make a contribution of some sort.
To say this implies that there is a ladder of progression from Sustenance Driven, through the Outer Directed to the Inner Directed. This would be consistent with the teaching of people like Maslow and other developmental psychologists, and it rings true of the experience of many people as they progress through life. If we want control over our own destinies, which, I am arguing, is the only choice we have, then we would be foolish to make our wishes subject to the fashions of others, which is what drives both of the first two dimensions. We would be well advised to shift as quickly as we can to a view of life which is predominantly Inner Directed.
I recognize, however, that this is asking a lot of people who have never tasted the freedom that comes with this state of mind, nor is it easy to enjoy the inner directed life without first embracing large chunks of the first two dimensions. Yet to say, as some do, that inner direction, or self-expression and the control of your own life, is only possible for middle-class, middle-income and middle-aged individuals is to be ridiculously patronizing. The young and the poor may not find it easy, but to allocate them automatically to the ranks of the Sustenance Driven, is to assume that they have no wish to be responsible for their own future, however difficult that might be.
Who, then, are all these Inner Directed ones? If over one third of the British fall into this category it seems strange that we do not hear more of them and from them. That remains the challenge – to carry a Proper Selfishness into the public domain. It is an issue addressed in the third part of this book. It is probable, however, that the Inner Directed or Properly Selfish ones have quieter voices than the Outer Directed ones, and so receive less attention. The noise of the public debate may conceal a more private simplicity. Edmund Burke once said, two hundred years ago:
Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate clink, while thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field, that they are many in number, or that, after all, they are anything other than little, shrivelling, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.
Caught up in the rhetoric of the material age, we may hear only the grasshoppers. We should listen more carefully to the quieter sounds.
THE MORALITY OF SELFISHNESS
Selfishness at its worst is individualism carried to extremes, unconcerned and intolerant of others. Proper selfishness spreads beyond oneself. It is properly moral, in the sense in which Kant, the great German philosopher, understood morality. Kant held that we were all born with a moral impulse but that we had to work out for ourselves what that meant in practice. His rule was that whatever you felt was right for you must also be right for everyone else. If I can steal your property, annoy you by my intemperate behaviour or disobey the laws if it suits me, then so can you, and I shouldn’t complain. There should not be one code for the rich and another for the poor. Morality, in other words, starts with oneself, but has to work for everyone else too.
If one thinks about this long enough and hard enough some sort of recipe for a decent society will emerge. The process starts with ourselves, and is progressively moderated as the impact of what would be right for us is extended to everyone else. In the end some approximate definition of justice, of what is fair, emerges. Were schools to give Kant’s exercise to their students it might be the most effective way of helping them to understand what morals meant in practice, instead of asking them to accept what was handed down to them by their elders. My own experience suggests that Kant is right and that there is an innate sense of justice, or a moral impulse, in all of us, even the very young, and that it is not difficult for them to agree on some fundamental principles of right and wrong if the question, not our answers, is put to them.
We should not imagine, however, that the pursuit of proper selfishness is a purely rational process. We must also listen to our emotions and our instincts if we are going to be really true to ourselves. In his book, Descartes’ Error, Antonio Damasio describes twelve patients who lost the pre-frontal part of their brains, the part which controls our emotions. These people were ‘rational fools’. They were normal in every respect, had no paralysis and no damage to their general intelligence, and performed just as well in psychological tests as they did before their accidents. But their lives seemed to fall apart. They could not hold down jobs, show affection or take decisions. They were completely cold-blooded, showing no response to either good news or bad, to love or to hate. Despite their rationality, they had lost control of their lives, were no longer hungry for the truth about themselves and could no longer be properly selfish.
One of the worst aspects of s
ome business studies courses is the assumption that business people are rational fools, devoid of emotion or any sense of responsibility. I have known such people. They are hard to deal with because they have no conscience, regard concepts such as loyalty or trust as wimpish and suspect, look only at the numbers and care only for themselves. They sometimes die rich, but always friendless. Thankfully they are rare in most businesses. We should not encourage them.
Attach too much importance to rationality, or attribute too much to our genes, and altruism will become a meaningless concept, something which has always been the worry of rational economists. Robert Frank, one economist who has tried to integrate economics and biology, has said that ‘Adam Smith’s carrot and Darwin’s stick have by now rendered character development a completely forgotten theme in many industrialized countries.’ Since character, and its development, is the essence of proper selfishness, we must be careful not to make the same mistake. Frank’s argument is that altruism, or acts of genuine goodness, are the price we pay for having moral sentiments. It is possible, of course, to argue that giving blood, for instance, or coins to beggars, or volunteering for relief work, are rational acts even though there is no obvious payoff, because they make us feel good about ourselves. But, more benevolently, it may be that acts of true generosity are aspects of ourselves revealed in action. Proper selfishness would want to see as many of those aspects revealed as possible.
We have long been urged to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’. For many neighbours this could be rather bad news, since few of us have much love for ourselves. The first part of a proper selfishness, therefore, is a readiness to come to terms with ourselves as we are, and to move ourselves towards what we would like to be. Only when we are comfortable in our own skins will we be of much use to anyone else. A decent society has, annoyingly perhaps, to start with us, with each one of us, and with what we, individually, believe we could be, and what we believe a decent society ought to look like.
The Hungry Spirit: New Thinking for a New World Page 9