Failure (The Art of Living)

by Colin Feltham

  After and alongside our viable or non-viable period of intense parenting most of us compulsorily attend school. If lucky we may have experienced unconditional love and nurturant individual attention at home. Most schools are tacitly structured around principles of group conformity, obedience, sedentariness and competition. School is where many of us have learned where we sit in the social pecking order. In some cases young people learn early on that they are academic failures and carry this stigma through their whole lives. School is one arena where we are often assessed according to annual performances in tests and examinations. Low marks, the very term “fail” or euphemisms such as “requires attention” or “needs to work harder” can determine your subjective sense of self and also your life chances.

  Another friend tells me that as an infant he was off school sick for a few days. After he returned he could no longer keep up with spelling because he’d missed a few key lessons. Thereafter, for decades, he had literacy problems and felt stupid. He felt a failure and blamed this on himself; his whole life was coloured by the experience. Such experiences persist. And this is without the problems of bullying by peers and sometimes teachers. Obviously some young people take to school well and it launches them into successful careers later. That was probably the case for me because I passed a major national exam at age eleven (the 11-plus) and went to grammar school. Although this was a moment of success in itself (I was a winner, I was rewarded with presents), it had its downside. As a shy, working-class boy among eight hundred mainly middle-class boys, I struggled. I did very well in some subjects but failed spectacularly at others. Science and sports were a nightmare for me, and an all-male environment hardly succeeded in sensitizing me to the female world. My mother was not a good mother and my education probably exacerbated my inadequacies in male–female relationships. By the age of eighteen I was an anguished young man and could manage to pass only one of my A-level exams, and I left school ill equipped for any career. Should the failure involved be laid at my own, my parents’ or the school’s doorstep? Or possibly at all these, as a compound failure of the kind so common among human beings? Could we not devise, if we so wished, an educational system not constructed around the defining poles of success and failure?

  Most of my working-class peers went to “secondary modern school” and internalized the message that they were second-rate people. In her Educational Failure and Working Class White Children in Britain, Gillian Evans (2006) exposes the ways in which schools themselves similarly fail some of their pupils. Some proportion of young people will do worse than others in any competitive educational system. Perhaps it is part of the tragedy of humanity that we must always choose and our choices are fallible, whether as individuals or as social and educational policy-makers. Is it better to create elitist schools or a comprehensive school system? Is mass education the only economically viable option or do small schools offer better attention and pastoral care? For anarchists, compulsory education fails to respect human rights altogether. For some observers it may seem that an exclusive and expensive education is necessarily flawed in terms of social justice, not to mention its detrimental effects on emotional maturity, the failings of many public schoolboys having been well noted. Or we might suggest that for many the impact of education is minimal. Some of my early peers who failed their 11-plus went on to make much more successful careers and more money than I ever did.

  Compulsory education is said to prepare us for later life, mainly for work. As many critics of education have pointed out, it rarely, if ever, helps us to understand matters of intimate relationships, alongside work a “cornerstone of our humanness”, according to Freud. School rarely helps us with the most practical of matters we face later, such as personal finances, diet and health, how to vote, how to understand ourselves and overcome personal problems, and so on. Instead it usually consists of a few traditional subjects that may be of no use or stimulation to most (physics, geography), perhaps with some fashionable or politically expedient subjects such as citizenship. Mass education decided and imposed from above must commonly fail a large number of unconsulted students who spend years enduring it and have little to show for it. The very assumption that the most intensive education should come early on in one’s life may yet prove to be erroneous, especially with the prospect of ever-increasing longevity. Childhood education is one area in which some philosophers have sharply disagreed, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, finding absurd Locke’s insistence on reasoning, on training children for adulthood, instead of honouring their age-related interests and needs.

  With adolescence come physiological changes, sexual desires and social pressures. We might say that the mismatch between biology and society is irresolvable. It is a cliché to claim that at puberty young people are capable of sexual arousal and activity but that they are emotionally immature. Social and religious policies attempt to steer young people away from sex that could result in pregnancies inconvenient to their educational stage and economic capacity, and from problems of premature commitment and sexual infections. But the tensions between powerful sexual desires and often rather dull educational and career paths cannot be easily dispelled. Biology makes us sexual years before we may be deemed ready for, or wise enough to engage in, the parenting that attends pregnancy and childbirth: a tragic mismatch if ever there was one. In this sense accessible and non-stigmatic contraception may be considered a successful solution to this mismatch.

  Teenagers also commonly experience a maelstrom of anguish, boredom, risk-taking, questioning of adult conventions, confusion and ambivalence about sexuality and social roles, and an array of hormonal disturbances. Acne and menstruation are just two of the blessings of this stage of life. Many first experience sex as a fumbling, unsatisfactory business attended by anxieties about attractiveness, premature ejaculation, orgasmic targets, performance and love. Many of us have by this time been diagnosed with eye problems and some of us are becoming obese or anorexic, or tall and gangly, or have remained unattractively short. Very often society finds adolescents difficult to deal with and has no satisfactory provision for them. It is not surprising, then, that this is a time when some go off the rails into addiction and crime and some experience the onset of mental illnesses. Jean Piaget has it that this is the time when the formal operations stage kicks in and adolescents can reason abstractly. But clearly some are able thus to reason, or interested in doing so, more than others and it is unclear at what point we can consider ourselves truly existentially free.

  Lives are measured in milestones and failure to reach these in a timely fashion is a common cause of anxiety and judgement. Coupling is expected from adolescence onwards, and committed dyadic relationships are usually expected by the twenties or thirties, so that failure to secure such status by then implies an important failed milestone. There is (considered to be) something seriously wrong with you if you’re a forty-year-old virgin, for example, even if asexuality is thought to describe about 1 per cent of the population. Some people fail to get much romantic or sexual interest and may be regarded as being “on the shelf”, left unwanted, distinctly failures in love. Critics of philosophy sometimes allege that a disproportionate number of philosophers are ivory tower bachelors but the sex lives of Foucault, Bertrand Russell and Sartre flatly contradict this view.

  In the world of heterosexual coupledom, living together for some years usually implies a run-up to having children. It probably remains the case that most women who declare they don’t want children are regarded with ongoing sexism as a bit odd. It is reckoned that worldwide one in seven couples experience difficulties conceiving, which frequently leads to distress. This failure to conceive may be rectified but is often accompanied by the belief that “I’m not a proper woman, or man”. Whether childlessness is chosen or biologically dictated, religious attitudes have strongly underpinned the belief that coupling serves a procreative imperative and childlessness signifies a problematic state. Or one may be a priest, monk or nun, or avowedly child-free existe
ntialist (like Cioran, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre et al.) or a moral philosopher like David Benatar, who has explicit moral grounds for not bringing children into this world. Hegel’s view, however, was that the full family life was superior to that of childlessness.

  But having children is not automatically a condition of fulfilment. However delightful, babies can also bring many challenges to couples and growing children generally alter the dynamic of the original couple relationship. Tensions can grow within families, with parents coming to blame themselves (“Where did we go wrong?”) for any negative developments. One popular account of a mother’s exasperated struggles is provided by Stephanie Calman in Confessions of a Failed Grown-Up (2006), the kind of popular text loved for the sense of relief it brings to those who had assumed they were failures as parents. After all, the fairytale expectation many of us inherit is that we will fall in love, stay in love, and have happy, well-adjusted children who will go on to have happy lives themselves. We do not factor in the likelihood that many children will have their failures, will go off the rails or become ill, cause many family conflicts, heartache and sadly, in some cases, die before their parents. This latter scenario is widely recognized as one of life’s most tragic failures of expectation.

  Similar to the expectation of parenthood is the expectation of a consolidated linear career occurring somewhere between the twenties and forties. At the top end of this expectation sit those who were always meant to, were groomed to, succeed in a prestigious and lucrative career such as law or medicine. Quite early on it becomes obvious if you have failed in this trajectory by not getting into the right university, not getting top grades, not getting the right internship, promotion, salary and so on. Nearer the bottom end, it is still important that you show some ability to stick with an identified career for some years, aimless job-hopping on low wages and periods of unemployment usually signalling a slide into “not amounting to anything” or plain failure. Clearly this judgement is contextual. You may have worked hard but got nowhere, you may have struggled with personal problems, or you may be an entrepreneur whose business ventures have crashed, but the fuzzy nameless representatives of society always seem to be watching and worrying (at least in your head).

  I did my share of poorly paid dead-end and temporary jobs in my twenties and thirties – library assistant, kitchen porter, cleaner, residential care worker, administrative assistant – and experienced the frustration, boredom and low self-esteem that usually go with them. I was a drifter who didn’t know where he was going, had missed the boat, had no vision or commitment. I was not competitive, I could not buy into the capitalist dream, and I stewed in a mixture of contempt and depression. Although some well-meaning people will tell you that you’re doing valuable work, that no one should judge you, that being a good and happy person is more important than climbing a career ladder, you know in your heart of hearts that you’re being judged, that you’ve fallen behind, that your chances of success and wealth are getting slimmer by the year. You had your opportunities, you passed some exams, and yet you still blew it. The word “failure” is not required to mark out for you where you stand in the social pecking order. You know what a worthless shit you are. Female grace, parenthood and late opportunities saved me from lifelong occupational, status and financial gloom. I even achieved a turnaround in my fortunes. But many do not.

  An interesting minority of people opt for a lifestyle that rejects mainstream social values. In this group we can find idiosyncratic rebels like Camus’s “outsider” character, anarchists, hippies and others who embrace an alternative lifestyle in the belief that society is the failure, not themselves. Our society does not make space for too many paid thinkers. Or some go through the motions of mainstream citizenship while reserving evenings and weekends for their part-time authentic existence. Much more formally, those choosing to become monks, nuns and celibate priests embody the belief that the standard lifespan expectations regarding ambitions for relationships and careers do not correspond with their personalities or values.

  That group of people who used to be labelled “deviants” – criminals, offenders – can be construed as choosing a life of crime and the risks of imprisonment, social stigma and failure status that usually accompanies it. We do not know what proportion of career criminals are successful in amassing wealth and avoiding detection but some proportion of the Mafia, for example, probably fit this profile. This is one of many subcultures that rejects mainstream social values (or some of them) and does its own thing, which leads to greater success than its members might otherwise achieve. But consider the circumstances of the desperate inmate on death row in an American prison. Convicted of armed robbery and murder, he readily assents to the label of “failure” when he says, “Yes, I’m a failure. I knew what I was doing. There’s no one to blame but myself.” We might accept this at face value but this bid for the dignity of responsibility conceals a childhood filled with abysmal parenting, ubiquitous drug abuse among neighbourhood peers, child abuse and the absence of successful role models. In some circumstances it may be easier to sign up to a belief in (hypothetical) autonomy than to re-experience the terrible emotional pain of having the vulnerable sensitivity of one’s formative years crushed. In principle any of us can walk away from an unsuccessful life trajectory. The view is shared by some philosophers and pragmatic American optimists that “you can do and be anything you choose” but is as unrealistic as the belief in total determinism.

  On some accounts of lifespan development, we are revisited, perhaps tormented, by those earlier tasks we have failed to achieve. Famously, in middle age we are said commonly to experience midlife crisis. This is a time when men who should know better abruptly leave their wives, become promiscuous, take drugs or drink too much, grow a ponytail, buy a fast car and generally simulate the lifestyle of a hedonistic, affluent twenty- or thirty-something. Middle-aged women are either wiser or more modest, perhaps ending a marriage, taking a younger lover and travelling to exotic places. The concept of the midlife crisis was created by Elliott Jaques in 1965 and perhaps had some credence then; 15 per cent of men are said to have had such experiences. But times and fashions change. Life is more liberal than it was in 1965, people change careers and partners more often, and live longer. A so-called quarter-life crisis has been mooted. As a late developer and a kind of non-conformist, I had no midlife crisis; rather, an ongoing, inner, low-level crisis. I suspect that concepts such as this fail to endure for very long. One can witness people having crises at any age, even if there may be some recognizable characteristics of adults who feel trapped by responsibilities and unfulfilling commitments chosen earlier. Certainly it appears to be common enough for people to spurn long-term commitments when they do not feel pleasurable, which represents a large shift in moral values since the early-to-mid-twentieth century.

  What happens very commonly from our teens onwards is that we must recognize some of the choices we may never fulfil if we did not get started early enough and/or had insufficient talent. Many roles in the arts and sports, for example, demand the signs and nurturance of early talent. As we age we are more likely to have to confront the disappointments of unmet dreams and aspirations. You will never become a doctor, an actor, a successful writer, astronaut, scientist and so on unless you are realistically on that trajectory in your earlier decades. This isn’t to say these things can never happen later in life but they become less and less likely. I was quite a talented artist in my late teens but any prospects of becoming a serious artist are long gone. My wry art teacher chuckled as he wrote the “has a brilliant future behind him” line on my final report. Nor am I at all likely to become the poet or the enlightened Buddha I once dreamt of becoming. Most of us make our own discerning judgements concerning defeatism and optimism, and optimism and realism.

  Your strength and co-ordination peak at 19. Your body is the most flexible until age 20; after that, joint function steadily declines. World-class sprinters are almost always in their late teens or
early 20s. Your stamina peaks in your late 20s or early 30s; marathon records are invariably held by 25- to 35-year-olds.

  (Shields 2008: 88)

  So-called broken marriages, growing in number, probably reflect more favourable economic circumstances for women, a decline in religious guilt and fear, increasing longevity and other factors. Probably the biggest losers in these circumstances are children. No longer do so many of us stay together “for the sake of the children” There is some evidence that children of divorced parents may later underachieve in school and career and/or go on to experience failed relationships themselves, but it is far from conclusive. Nevertheless, all such observations challenge myths of the happy marriage. Quite apart from those voting with their feet, there are still many who may stay in “committed relationships” out of inertia, fear or guilt, and some who claim to be happily married in order to avoid the unpleasant cognitive dissonance of realizing they no longer love the person they once loved so passionately. There is a finding that the state of “being in love” typically lasts only about eighteen months to three years, after which entropy perhaps begins to eat away at love and partners must be on their guard and work hard to preserve their relationship. While broken marriages once used to be the stigmatic exception, now they are very common, one recent figure for European countries showing ten to sixteen years as the mean length before divorce. This fact must exert an unwelcome pressure of sorts on everyone in a committed relationship: a constant reminder that relational failure is always possible. Love that is romantically based seems not to lend itself to a phlegmatic “Let’s see how it goes, it may or may not work” attitude, yet it cannot be blind to the failures of others around it. Erotically based love was seen as a kind of madness by early Greek philosophers, with friendship and other forms of love thought of as probably having more durability.