Young people, and others who were disenchanted with the futility of political engagement and resentful of the repression of dissent, and who wanted more freedom for their imaginations and their wit, began organising what they called ‘Pure Conversations’. These were early precursors of Europe’s eighteenth-century salons (they did not exclude women) and in some ways of the twentieth-century counter-culture. Participants were consciously aiming to upset the established order, and sometimes deliberately engaged in outlandish behaviour, assisted by much wine drinking. Their goal was to search for the truth rather than self-interest, to encourage openness and independence, the discussion of poetry and sex, and to reach what they called the Profound, the possibility of more meaningful change. This movement died in due course and the grey clouds of obedience returned to shield society from the dangerous light of independent thought. But sparks of independence have continued to reappear sporadically ever since.
The belief that only the West has been interested in the individual is also belied by the history of many religions, which beyond collective allegiance have also encouraged the cultivation of personal spirituality, each individual engaging in a unique search for an understanding of the truth, with each having to give an account of their choices and behaviour. The early Muslim Sufis often liked ‘to shock their contemporaries by outrageous behaviour and paradoxical statements calculated to bring out the moral irrelevance of conventional institutions’, sometimes deliberately neglecting their appearance and inviting the contempt of others, ignoring gender and social distinctions, saying that ‘freedom is freedom of the heart, nothing else.’ A Sufi followed his own ‘path’, which historically has varied from near-atheism to solipsism, from asceticism to political ambition, participation in government, and military and worldly pursuits, from self-denial to using music, dance, drugs and drink as aids to becoming a ‘friend of God’, a ‘mirror in which others see their own faults reflected’. And Sufis were divided into a multiplicity of fraternities which appealed to numerous opposing temperaments. The Egyptian Sufi saint Dhu’l Nun al-Misri (c. 796–859) mocked the establishment and its claim to having a monopoly of learning, saying, ‘I have learned true Islam from an old woman and true chivalry from a water carrier.’ The 60,000 lines of poetry and song that Rumi (1207–1273) wrote rejected imitation and conformity: ‘If you want certainty, jump into the fire,’ he sang, and concluded: ‘To open windows, that’s religion’s role.’ Sufism is the hidden side of Islam that is the counterpart to outward conformity. The more minutely a civilisation is examined, the more deviations are revealed. In The Argumentative Indian Amartya Sen has shown how disputation has been refined so that it becomes one of the pleasures of sociability, and there are many other countries where having your own opinion is celebrated.
By the sixteenth century European painters and sculptors were increasingly making portraits of individuals designed to show them as unique, as opposed to mere representatives of a type. Now photography is officially used to prove that no-one looks exactly like anyone else. Literature has delighted in the description of distinctive characters as opposed to types. Nobody would dare repeat what the poet Pope once wrote, that ‘most women have no characters at all’, or what Karl Marx said about French peasants, that they were like ‘potatoes in a sack’, with ‘no diversity of development, no variety of talent, no wealth of social relationships’. It is no longer taken for granted that people are forever stuck with the aptitudes and peculiarities with which they were born, or that they cannot throw off the pretences they put on for the world.
It is true that the world has always been organised, and, despite all the talk about the triumph of liberty, is increasingly organised to prevent too much independence or at least its open public expression. When the Chief of Staff of the British army questioned the wisdom of his government’s persistence in keeping troops in Iraq, he hastened to add that he was ‘not a maverick’, and that his very conservative aim was to save the army. At the same time, when one of the world’s most successful investment bankers was called a maverick, his public relations team sprang to his defence, terrified that it would damage his reputation. Only in private will he reveal that he is bored by office routine and management meetings. Only on holiday or in free moments can he indulge his interest in art, philosophy or theology, and reconnect with his youthful passion for choreography; but all that is private, it is dangerous to be a maverick in public. When a boss lectures his employees on the need for creativity, but says in private that there must be limits to that creativity because he does not want them to challenge his own position, why do they not call his bluff? Why is a tycoon compassionate only in private but unforgiving at work?
The reason is that institutions were invented to inject predictability into human waywardness, and most are still based on the assumption that people are neither unique nor unfathomable, but categorisable and needing to be categorised, if no longer by the old measures of class, gender or race, then by psychological tests and other ‘behavioural markers’. So job descriptions are now written to suit a professional ideal, to which people have to approximate as best they can, forgetting their individual tastes or temperaments, and accepting that their independence might be squeezed out of them. Classifying humans (at school, at work, and in every social encounter), rewarding them according to the category to which they are assigned, and then consoling them for being wrongly classified, still consumes a large part of every national budget. Admiration for originality may be growing, but it has been counterbalanced by new inducements to pretend to be like everyone else, or at least like people who are admired, and a whole industry is devoted to urging people to believe and buy as others do. Climbing the social ladder has been raised into the ultimate ambition, which means adopting the obsessions of those higher up.
However, while the desire to ‘belong’ to a group of some sort remains as profound as ever, traditional loyalties are fragmenting or dissolving. In Britain, while governments insist that ‘Britishness’ needs to be inculcated and celebrated by every child learning the names and dates of every English king that ever reigned, only 13 per cent of Britons say they feel they belong to the community in which they were born. Less than half (44 per cent) consider that they are best described as British. One-third say that their sense of belonging has changed significantly in the course of their lives. Only 22 per cent believe that it would be relevant for them to mention their occupation when introducing themselves. Commitment to voluntary activities is often short-lived and changeable. Only 15 per cent of men and only 5 per cent of women regard the political party they support as an important element of their lives. Only 15 per cent are proud to belong to a trade union. To be a fan of a football team is often a more significant affirmation of allegiance than religious belief. But the real cement of society for 65 per cent is friendship, finding and keeping friends being a permanent preoccupation; 88 per cent say that the family is their most important attachment, but the family is increasingly taking on the characteristics of friendship, needing constant maintenance and repair and reinvention as affections grow cool or warm.
The war between conformists and nonconformists, which has dominated all history and caused so much havoc, is running out of ammunition. There are no longer two opposing armies, but seven billion guerrilla fighters, or guerrilla victims, with shifting grievances, uncertain aims, never wholly predictable. Being an ordinary person, just like everyone else, now has a new meaning – being different from everyone else. The whole of history has been a huge effort to deny or postpone or avert the implications of this fragmentation, but it is now possible to imagine how something more interesting might be constructed from the pieces.
The first implication is that the most fundamental, enchanting and puzzling of human needs, the desire to find a permanent partner, has not become any easier to satisfy. Though 55 per cent of marriages in the world today are, according to UNICEF, still arranged by parents, with a divorce rate of only 6 per cent, this majority is dwindling,
as ever more people in different countries search for partners independently of parental guidance. It is as momentous a change as 50 per cent of humans moving into cities. It means that humanity is parachuting itself into an open sky and over unknown territory without any clue as to where it will land, for never has there been so much disagreement about what a perfect partner is, or what a soul-mate is. A soul-mate used to be the person chosen in heaven or by destiny who was one’s other half and who made one complete. But losing oneself in another being is no longer a universal ambition; the safe retreat into a cocoon of mutual admiration, despite all its pleasures, can end in claustrophobia, when couples find they have nothing new to say to each other and routine replaces excitement. Excitement is not what everyone wants, far from it, but the more education stimulates criticism and curiosity and the more culture becomes exploration of the unfamiliar and not just reassurance from habitual rituals, the more individuals seek to discover others, to acquire from them capacities and sensitivities they never had, and to be recognised as being interesting persons in themselves, rather than half of someone else.
Sociologists say that those who believe they have found their soul-mate are breaking up more often than anyone else, because as soon as they clash with some fault in the chosen one, they decide they must have made a mistake, and try again and again, endlessly repeating the discovery that they cannot find their elusive ideal. Psychologists add that women are attracted by the odour of men different from themselves, but when they are on oral contraceptives they prefer men similar to themselves, as though they need a different partner to conceive a child from the one with whom they can cohabit harmoniously. All these uncertainties have only reinforced the popular wisdom that to fall madly in love and to be idolised as the most wonderful and beautiful person in the world by at least one person is the foundation of the good life.
Concentrating attention on how to find love, how not to lose it, how to cope with desire, possession and compromise, has resulted in much less being known about how the experience of love can deepen understanding of the vast numbers whom one does not love but whom one wants to know nonetheless. Love can be an introduction into seeing the world through another’s eyes and also a foretaste of what experiencing other people’s feelings does to one. There is room for more experiments in human relationships, rather than just repairing those that break down. Love between two people is the first step in the expansion of compassion beyond concern for oneself, and then beyond the selflessness that children provoke, until it becomes the source of the courage that no individual ever has enough of, to confront alone the fears that are the bane of life, the fear of rejection, of loss, of inadequacy, and all the fears concealed behind happy façades.
The Renaissance ideal of proud individual originality no longer suffices because it is often too fragile, tortured by an insatiable desire for approval and applause. The Romantic ideal, a thrilling liberation from the constraints of calculating or rigid reason, can often end up as slavery to figments of the imagination. The twentieth century’s antidote for its debilitating uncertainties – self-absorption in self-definition – is the Identity ideal that leaves introspection pacing unceasingly round its animal cage unable to free itself from its doubts. So not finding a soul-mate of the traditional kind need not be a cause for lament. Safeguarding one’s peculiarities by surrounding oneself with those who agree with one and resemble one leads only to this question: What prevents people from being interested by every form of life, since life is what is most precious to them? The answer is that humans are so often inscrutable that the instinctive, elementary response is to treat them as buzzing, biting insects best swatted away indiscriminately. The search for consensus and harmony has resulted in far less attention being devoted to appreciating difference than to instilling obedience and encouraging imitation.
The domain in which difference and inscrutability has won the right to be celebrated is gastronomy, though habit still rules within it. Yet only the brave follow the example of the Boston lawyer Jeffrey Steingarten (born 1942), who, on abandoning his profession to become a food critic, immediately recognised that he could not succeed until he got rid of his ‘intense food preferences, whether phobias or cravings’; and he then systematically and perseveringly ate a lot of what he hated and learned, if not to love it, at least to appreciate it. Most people are still avoiding what they do not like, as the ancient Greeks did when they used perfume on a lavish scale to conceal their faults and enhance their attractiveness. Men as well as women anointed each part of the body with a different scent: each ‘steeps his feet in rich Egyptian unguents; his jaws and breasts he rubs with thick palm oil; and both his arms with extract of sweet mint; his eyebrows and his hair with marjoram; his knees and neck with essence of ground thyme’. Guests at dinner were not only fed but sprayed with many perfumes, as were spectators at theatres, and dogs and horses too. It was the aroma of a kiss that was held to be most memorable, while the Greek gods fed on scent. King Darius III of Persia (380–330 B.C.) kept fourteen perfumers in his retinue. It was only when equality became the supreme virtue that deodorants triumphed to prevent discrimination on the grounds of smelling foul or different. Only when masculinity felt threatened did it proclaim that perfume should be reserved for women.
The hope of finding a soul-mate is the hope that there must be somebody, even if it is only one person, who understands one. There are all sorts of obstacles, and not the least is that people are encouraged or intimidated into pretending to be what they are not. Private life should be the one refuge from that pressure, but no statistic reveals how often it is or is not.
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Is another kind of sexual revolution achievable?
IN 1763, IN SUCHOW, NOT FAR from Shanghai, Shen Fu married Chin Yun. They were both seventeen years old. ‘We lived together’, he wrote, ‘with the greatest mutual respect for three and twenty years and as the years passed we grew ever closer . . . We were inseparable.’ She said, ‘I wonder whether there is another couple in the world as much in love as we are.’ On her death-bed she told him, ‘I have been happy as your wife . . . You have loved me and sympathised with me in everything, and never rejected me despite my faults. Having had for my husband an intimate friend like you, I have no regrets.’
He had resolved to marry her the moment he saw her, when they were only thirteen, not because he was overwhelmed by her looks – all he ever said about them was that she had beautiful eyes, which compensated for her protruding teeth – but because he admired her poetry. She had taught herself to read and to love poetry using her brother’s books, but she could not step out of the limitations imposed on her by her sex, and had to spend most of her time using her skill in embroidery to help her family survive; the word ‘woman’ in Chinese is written as a picture of a person with a broom, as though women are eternally condemned to domestic tasks. Only later did Fu discover her generosity, her gentleness, and also how emotional she could be, ‘too sensitive to be completely happy’.
Fu failed his examinations, never completed his studies, was unemployed for long periods, and gave up what jobs he had because he disliked his employers or colleagues. The little shop he opened was unsuccessful, as was his attempt to earn a living as a painter. He quarrelled with his parents and was ashamed that he ‘seldom gave his father any happiness’. Poverty haunted him to the extent that he once had nothing left to pawn but his underclothes. However, ‘the sorrows of misfortune’ did not weigh heavily on him. ‘I like to have my own opinion and not pay attention to other people’s approval or disapproval.
In talking about poetry or painting, I am always ready to ignore what others value and to take some interest in what others ignore. And so it is with the beauty of famous scenery . . . There are famous scenic spots which I do not feel are anything extraordinary, and there are unknown places that I think are quite wonderful. A man’s honour lies in being able to stand on his own two feet . . . All my life I have been honest.’ He remembered best not his many woes but
whole days discussing the great works of literature with Yun, roaming through the countryside with her, admiring the flowers ‘competing amongst themselves over which was the most beautiful’, holding hands with her in the moonlight, drinking wine and laughing loudly. ‘She understood what my eyes said and the language of my brows. She did everything according to my expression, and everything she did was as I wished it.’ So he too, by assuming his wife was there to do his bidding, was unable to escape from the traditional masculine role, but at the same time he failed to do what a man was supposed to do: be the financial provider for his family. Nevertheless, in the end, he did do something extraordinary, turning failure into inspiration by writing down his ‘true feelings’ about their life together, the ‘joys of the wedding chamber’ and ‘the delights of roaming afar’. When his manuscript was published sixty years after his death it became and has remained one of China’s favourite love stories, because it suggests that the love of two people is enough to blot out adversity.
The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 22