The Hidden Pleasures of Life

by Theodore Zeldin

  When the land is kingless, the son does not honour his father, nor the wife her husband’

  wrote Kamban in the ninth century, in his Ramayanam, the national epic of the Tamil people about the god Rama, who came down to earth to ‘chasten, uplift and guide men’. This faith in all-powerful rulers has survived even though kings – and those who imitate them, whether petty domestic tyrants or masters of vast conglomerates – have, as often as not, brought less security and order than they promised. War, for long the sport of kings, has also become the sport of politicians desperate for popularity, while competition, purged of physical violence, is the sport that animates innumerable aspects of life, work and play. ‘As soon as a king has established himself on the throne, he should, as a matter of course, attack his neighbours,’ said an Indian treatise on the ‘science of politics’ (the Arthasastra), probably written in the second century A.D. Every civilisation has had otherwise intelligent men urging kings to place aggrandisement above morality; even the brilliant first master of Arabic prose, Ibn al-Muqaffa (720–756) did that, despite his father’s having been tortured and crippled by royal command. ‘The king who is weaker than the other should keep the peace, he who is stronger should make war’: Machiavellianism came to be accepted all over the world as the unavoidable method for maintaining oneself in power, however devoted to virtue one might be. It was not that Machiavelli wanted princes to be ruthless, he simply observed that they had to be ruthless to remain princes.

  Though governments have thwarted Liberty, Equality and Fraternity by usurping the tradition of absolute obedience to the divine, in practice they have often not had as much control of their subjects as they pretend: they are sabotaged by bureaucratic resistance, and those expected to obey laws have through long practice become expert in evading them. More important has been the encouragement given to the ambitious to seek prosperity as a compensation for being excluded from government, because eventually the prosperous conclude that winning small personal favours from those who monopolise political power is more advantageous than entering the struggle for power, for that struggle has time and again had more losers than winners.

  Liberty as a unique goal has suffered many defeats because it exhorts individuals to go their own way, with the unintended side effect that the differences between them increase. Disagreements and rivalries multiply. Minorities are side-lined and cry out for appreciation, which liberty by itself does not give. Few humans feel sufficiently appreciated and fully understood, and many meekly agree to wear the labels given to them by others. There are so many obstacles in the way of knowing the truth about anyone, so many disguises worn to create an illusion of respectability, so much increase in the lies and half-truths told by governments and businesses, so much imaginative fiction masquerading as publicity, that the isolated and ignored individual suffers more poignantly from being misunderstood than from being powerless. Only intimate private relationships can provide the reassurance that one is not the caricature one is taken for, but private life has been denigrated as a distraction from civic engagement, so little thought has been given to how private and public life could collaborate rather than compete.

  One alternative to expecting politics to supply all the kinds of dignity that humans desire is to investigate what can be achieved outside the election voting booth, in the places where colleagues, customers, strangers, rich and poor meet, namely at work. So far most people have not invented their own way of earning their living. They have not freely decided that working for an employer is the best of all possible methods of avoiding starvation. They do not often remember that commercial companies were once regarded with such suspicion that, following one of the financial crashes into which they periodically fall, for a whole century (between 1720 and 1825) it was a criminal offence to start a company in England, which was a period of great prosperity nonetheless. Humans are mistaken if they imagine that agriculture and industry and the service society are part of the natural order, rather than inventions for purposes they may no longer share. They are not taught at school that the reigning corporations of today owe their existence to an accident of history, that there were once two kinds of corporations in the land of liberty that America aimed to create, those that were established to carry out specific tasks democratically deemed to be of public interest, like building canals (Ohio was the state that was most noted for ensuring that corporations did not abuse their privileges for private gain), and those that obtained charters that allowed them to do whatever they liked (charters which were granted most easily in New Jersey). Gradually the New Jersey system prevailed and the public lost control over what corporations did. But corporations are a system that is only a century old, not necessarily the only one that can nurture prosperity or pleasure. Likewise, agriculture was not invented to please everybody equally; and the peasants who have laboured at it have consistently failed to get as much benefit as the townspeople they fed. It was not from free choice that the unemployed flocked into the grim factories of industrial civilisation. There was no free vote to approve that speculators should be the minority that derived most profit from humanity’s toil.

  Surprisingly few people now have a completely free choice in how they earn their living, but even for them, liberty is being undermined by the kind of work they do. It is not only governments who panic and invite their citizens to panic. Employers panic that their profits might be reduced if their workers allow their minds to stray from their allotted tasks. Their panacea has been to use technology to oversee every movement their employees make, exercising far greater control than has ever been possible in the whole of history. There is no reason to believe that liberty will gradually spread throughout the world, in imitation of the few countries which became famous for valuing it in the past. The idea that free markets encourage appreciation of the value of liberty has been disproved by many countries which combine economic competition with authoritarian rule. Investors panic when they are not manic, destroying savings and jobs. Pericles said that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous. But society has not been constructed to make people courageous.

  Too many forms of work seem to have been invented to grind the mind into pulp and drain the body of energy; too few have the goal of making people more lively, interesting and fully awake. One of the most important ways of feeling more alive is by winning appreciation for what one contributes to society through one’s work, exercising a valued skill with talent and artistry, and doing something more than simply being obedient to the whims of the more fortunate. But awareness of this need has penetrated into organisations only as a tranquilliser to minimise the stress they generate. In ancient Athens employment was for slaves; it was dishonourable for a free person to kow-tow to another by working for wages; but today it is shameful to be unemployed and regarded as an achievement to sell oneself into part-time slavery, meekly accepting as natural that one is not free for half one’s waking hours; and this despite the fact that the more prosperous a country becomes, the more its inhabitants dream of being free humans in their work, choosing how they use their talents and their time without having to grovel and flatter. A huge terrain for exploration has opened up in which to search for ways of being in control of one’s own work, to be inventive, to be indispensable, to be appreciated. Many forms of work do not allow that. Quite a lot of people do not even demand it, because they assume that work has to be the way it is and they have acclimatised to the limited rewards it offers, or because they have learnt to find their satisfactions outside it. Very few realise that they are being forced to fit into patterns created centuries ago, sacrificing themselves on the altar of efficiency.

  However, work can be reconceived instead as an entrance ticket into a fuller life. In the Revolution of 1848 the Right to Work was proclaimed, but it is possible to go beyond the idea that any kind of employment is better than none. There will soon be another billion young people demanding not just the right to work, but the right to work at jobs that w
ill neither stupefy nor bore them. Who is going to invent a billion new kinds of fascinating, mind-enhancing, purposeful jobs? Every occupation and every profession is waiting to be re-thought to discover how such expectations can be met. Without a Reformation of Work the wonderful aspirations of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity cannot grow to be more than an incomplete slogan. Work is just one activity which can generate Appreciation, and also some Animation. Affection is more difficult. I shall now look at how women and men have grappled with its mysteries, before going on to explore what new ways of working can contribute.

  The Japanese police inspector may not have found the final answer to the problem of how to achieve worthy aims, but he raised the most important question: What ideals are worth dying for, or working for, or living for? Politics is the art of putting ideals into practice. Unfortunately, once turned into realities, ideals cease to be beautiful butterflies with multi-coloured wings fluttering among the flowers, and become mere worms that eat the corpses of hope. It is time to rescue ideals from the grave where they do not rest in peace.

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  How else might women and men treat one another?

  WHICH IS THE CRUELLEST and most long-lasting of all wars, which has made the most victims? The war of the sexes has, in varying degrees, disabled half the world’s population, and impoverished the other half’s sensitivities and imagination. It is the war that has mattered most to me because friendship with women has been so decisive in my own life. Changing the law, winning the vote, obtaining an education, organising a mass movement, challenging male monopolies in the professions, breaking the glass ceiling, should by now have changed men’s attitudes towards women. But the weapons women have used in their struggle have been largely those that men have used before them, forgetting that men have never won anything like the amount of liberty, equality and fraternity they expected.

  In Islamic countries women have likewise used traditional methods such as reinterpreting holy books, but still with very limited results. When the Soviets decreed the abolition of gender inequalities, they discovered that legislation was not enough to dislodge ancestral habits. In the U.S.A., ever since the pioneering Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) proclaimed that ‘there is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman’, there have seldom been advances without subsequent retreats and backlashes, and withdrawals from reality, like Fuller’s saying, ‘I now know all the people worth knowing in America and I find no intellect comparable to my own.’ The status of women has gone down as well as up over the centuries, and there is no certainty that it will always improve in the future. The suggestion that if only women ruled the world, gentleness and kindness would prevail forgets how inexorably power corrupts. After so much discouragement, should I conclude that it is futile to imagine that the war of the sexes can ever be ended, any more than the war of predators in the natural world?

  The struggle for privilege and power has so far distracted attention from something much more elusive. The war of the sexes has been like a battle on land, with bitter hand-to-hand fighting for territory, gaining or losing a few yards, while the command of the air remained unchallenged.

  By the air I mean the atmosphere surrounding the relations of men and women, the dream-clouds they live in, the mentalities that refuse to change. So what other kinds of battles still need to be fought? This is not a war that can be won by battles. I am more interested in three pollutants that are very difficult to avoid breathing, and which have had a profound effect on humanity’s energies.

  The first is the idea that ‘the human condition’ is unalterable. Writing my Intimate History of Humanity liberated me from that illusion. But mind-sets that have existed since the beginning of time never vanish completely and it is dangerous to forget about what keeps them alive.

  You, whether male or female, and I have the same name, Homo sapiens, given to us by Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778). Despite the apparent compliment suggesting that we were wiser than other creatures, his esteem for men was low, and for women lower still. After a long career devoted to careful study of thousands of plants and animals, this is how he defined the human race: ‘Our daily task is to prepare from our food disgusting shit and stinking piss. In the end we must become the most foul-smelling corpses. Why did God create us more miserable than any other animal? . . . For his own enjoyment, not for man’s.’

  Linnaeus is famous for inventing the system by which each plant and animal is classified as belonging to a genus and a species. He found a way of satisfying the need most people feel to be identified as belonging to a group of one kind or another, and to be able to place everything around them in clearly labelled categories – on the assumption, still widely held, that this makes life simpler. The criterion Linnaeus chose to separate plants was their sexual characteristics. At first, prudes condemned him as a ‘botanical pornographer’ advocating ‘loathsome harlotry’, but his classification became universally accepted, because he brought an easily understood order into nature’s confusing diversity. When every plant had a name which everyone used and agreed on, ordinary people could feel they could make sense of nature. Linnaeus was hailed as a liberator: just as the metric system freed people from the chaos of innumerable local weights and measures, his system created a consensus about the relations between different forms of life. However, his passion for simplification was not a liberation designed to encourage independent thought. He felt comfortable only when he could label each creature on the basis of one easily established characteristic. This is the attitude of mind that has continued to have a profound effect on how men and women treat one another. It limits their expectation of what each can do for the other.

  Linnaeus came from a family that had been Lutheran pastors for five generations, and he regarded the study of botany as performing the same task – teaching that there was a divine order, and that everything had to be the way it was, as God had made it. His mission was to reveal the law of nature, fixed for all time; his scientific books were written like sermons, and indeed he described himself as a new Luther. Having obtained a medical degree after eight days’ stay at an obscure Dutch university, by writing a dissertation thirteen pages long, he become a doctor, specialising in syphilis. He believed that epilepsy was caused by washing one’s hair, and was unable to prevent his own health being ruined by gout, migraine, rotting teeth and numerous small strokes. However, he was a brilliant exponent of taxonomy, the science of classification, as well as an impressive preacher, who won popularity also for the enjoyable plant-gathering outings he organised. Collecting and naming plants became a universal hobby. He democratised science, as Luther had democratised theology.

  But when science popularises a particular approach to the world, it also directs attention away from other approaches. Linnaeus illustrates how people value limits on curiosity. Mostly, they do not welcome new ideas. New ideas are disturbances. When they seem to accept them, it is usually by modifying them so that they appear to be old ideas. The brain is constructed to fit unfamiliar ideas into familiar categories. Changing mind-sets, and particularly about something so ingrained as the relations between men and women, cannot be done by law or by mere persuasion; it is a slow process that grows from example, experiment and experience.

  Far from wishing to change mind-sets, Linnaeus’s ambition was to reinforce his own basic assumptions. He wanted to use his knowledge of plants for practical ends, to bring stability to his life and to his country. He proposed that Sweden should become self-sufficient economically, that it should start growing rice, tea and spices, and that instead of venturing for exotic produce in the West Indies, it should be content with what it could find in Lapland. He urged his compatriots to adopt the simple diet of the Lapps, promising that it would make them live twice as long. Determined to make everything less complicated, he held up the ‘noble savage’ as a model and the courtly sophistication of the European elite as a plague, and he stopped travelling abroad. To speak only his native Swedish and academic Latin was enough for him. Li
fe he saw as a long tragedy of sin. He was an avid collector not only of plants, but also of horror stories, of villainies and tribulations of all sorts, and of ‘whores’ who were punished by fire or boiling water. In his world, men and women would always be worlds apart, in the same way as good and evil, and that opinion was locked in by all his other convictions. His outlook and temperament survive. Having security, certainty and a clearly defined order is still a top priority for a large part of humanity, even though, and doubtless because, security remains as elusive as ever. A different kind of relationship between the sexes is impossible without a very different vision of the world as a whole.

  Could a dose of urbanity and enlightenment bring that about? This is the second assumption most people have made about what is needed to make a society truly civilised. Linnaeus’ arch-critic, the French scientist Buffon (1707–1788), whose imagination was less dark, had broad interests and artistic tastes. He ridiculed Linnaeus for using only one characteristic to place animals and plants into fixed categories. Superficial resemblances, he insisted, were less significant than the ‘profound reality’ that lay behind them, which comprised all that enabled each creature to live and reproduce and degenerate, and to form relationships of many kinds. ‘We cannot know any object in isolation; it must always be seen in relationship to others.’ So he described in minute detail not just the physical structure, but all the peculiarities and habits of each species, and also how humans could use and connect with them. He expanded the study of the world so that it stimulated thoughts about how to view nature and to meditate on the suffering that each creature has experienced, from the ‘ass’s misfortunes’ and the ‘horse’s servitude’ to the ‘black slave’s misery’. He accepted the contradictions of existence: ‘Everything works because with time everything collides with everything.’ His thirty-six volumes of Natural History, General and Particular were bestsellers throughout Europe, outstripping Voltaire and Rousseau, though his success annoyed the experts who despised him for being popular with ‘women and children’. He was a master of literary style, a painter in words, delighted by the nuances and infinite variety of nature, which was, above all else, charming. Nature was there to inspire wonder.