Failure (The Art of Living)

by Colin Feltham

  (Ibid.: 67)

  That natural inequality is vastly better than forced equality is now the widely accepted view in most countries, in spite of the ongoing democratic farce of typical pseudo-choices between left- or right-leaning political parties. We also create dead-end notions of “third way” politics. My inference from the long history of political philosophy and our current plight is that we fail to overcome the deep-seated pluralism in human nature (with some philosophers such as Berlin and Gray arguing the wisdom of pluralism being accepted); and that the serious flaws of brute tribalism, competition, inequality and war seem unlikely to reduce significantly in a hurry.

  The political philosopher John Dunn asks why we have politics at all. Drawing on theories of “original sin or moral error” (which he also refers to as “radical fatalism”), he asks if “there is a way in which human beings should behave but in which most of them conspicuously fail to” (2000: 19). This is in contrast to

  the view that all human beings, now and for the rest of their earthly existence, will continue to be driven to act in a manner deeply malign towards one another, and that what will compel them to do so is the cruelty, greed, pride and treachery at the very core of their personalities.

  (Ibid.: 347)

  For Dunn, modern democracy for all its shortcomings is at least the beginning of a possible solution. I do not subscribe to quite such radical fatalism but I suspect that entrenched human moral failure and folly will indeed persist indefinitely.

  For the vast majority of us, our environment is our house (if we have one), neighbourhood and country. Our experience of the environment is the “concrete jungle” for urban dwellers, and villages and farmlands for a dwindling minority. We are affected by our local climate and daily weather and in certain areas many millions are deeply affected by droughts or other extreme weather events. Many live choicelessly close to volcanoes, earthquake zones and areas subject to flooding; some have little choice but to live uncomfortably close to airports, noisy major roads and nuclear power plants. Those of us lucky enough to take holidays to exotic, paradise-like locations, usually spread more than our share of carbon emissions in the process. A tiny and disproportionately rich minority own many houses and live and move where they choose. Despite significant migration, the vast majority live close to where they were born.

  The “environment” means different things to each of us. Those unlucky enough to live in endangered areas already experience the real threat of climate change as they lose their livelihood owing to flooding, droughts and inhospitable temperature increases. Perhaps most of us feel a mixture of worry, responsibility, guilt, helplessness, hope and some scepticism about climate change. The information about it comes from distant scientists or popular media sources; politicians appear to fail to respond to it with due urgency; capitalism has always relied on economic growth that increases carbon emissions; world population increases and most people dislike being told how many children they can have, but population is a causative factor in climate change. By definition, anthropogenic climate change is “our fault” and our failure to address its possibly devastating consequences in a timely manner may lead to a gravely compromised future habitat. Yet this is a conundrum if we follow the evolutionary logic that human beings are simply doing what all life forms do: adapting, playing to our advantages, surviving, flourishing. Some religions have told us that we are masters of creation and should multiply. We appear to be at a historical point where we must pull together internationally and embrace austerity, when intergroup conflict and affluence pursuit are our norms. Even Gardner (2011), as a debunker of most prophecies, agrees that we can’t afford to judge this climate-change scenario incorrectly.

  The moral philosopher Stephen Gardiner (2011) employs the metaphor of a “perfect moral storm” for the three sites of moral corruption that coincide in this gathering storm of climate-change catastrophe: the buck-passing of costs to the developing world by the affluent nations; buck-passing the problem to future generations; and our failure to grasp and combine key scientific knowledge and issues of international justice. Gardiner is quite clear in his highly detailed ethical analysis that our glaring failure to address the climate-change problem is a radical moral failure at both political and personal levels.

  At the everyday sub-political level, work of one kind or another is almost universal. For the majority, work means the “9 to 5” or variations on that. It is hailed by capitalists as an engine of economic growth and by moralists and others as the thing that gives us purpose, makes us human, yet for many work really is wage slavery. Picture those millennia of evolution leading to complex human consciousness, and all that parental care and education for each individual, and what does it amount to? How many millions of us spend every day commuting, then spending eight hours or so in sedentary prostration before the computer, scanning the screen, clicking the mouse, attending to emails, bureaucratic demands, invoices and so on? Of course, work isn’t like this for all, and some say they enjoy it. For a few very privileged businesspeople, entertainers and sportspeople, work is altogether a different matter. Compare the egregiously overpaid footballer, for example, occasionally successful in kicking a piece of leather between two posts, or assisting in this operation, with the world’s hard-labouring masses living in poverty. If that isn’t an absurd moral failure, what is? Not only religion but football too is the opium of the people.

  For millions, work is what most of their time is dedicated to, and often for up to fifty years or more. How did humanity come to this state of mind-bogglingly boring, imprisoning and degrading activity? Bound together by work, mortgages, television and so-called leisure, most of us, in spite of Sartrean principles of freedom, appear to have little choice but to become institutionalized, doing what we do not wish to do, while paradoxically longing to escape.

  Plato and Aristotle had a lot to say, often in derogatory and ambivalent terms, about work and different kinds or levels of workers. Christianity bequeathed us the idea of work as curse and duty, even converting it via the writings of Luther and Calvin into the Protestant work ethic, the selfless dedication of effort to God. Marx contextualized and critiqued work differently yet again, recommending its reconceptualization into community needs, creative individual fulfilment and leisure. It may appear romantic and impractical to many to call for an overhaul of the dehumanizing nature of modern institutions’ work cultures. On observing how so often the joyful and curious young person is dulled by compulsory education and desk-bound routines from their late teens or twenties into their sixties (the “toil-filled years”), I think it is necessary, however, that we at least ask whether work fails us in our needs and aspirations. Are the twenty-first century’s work routines really the best we can come up with? The capitalist juggernaut and sheer unimaginative tradition crushes the human spirit in millions of cases. The mismatch between the development, feelings and needs of the soft machine and the daily demands of a capitalism indifferent to these (“bioderegulation”, some call it) is arguably a flaw in our lifestyle so immense that we barely pause seriously to consider alternatives.

  Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus ([1942] 1975) dwells on the absurdities of human existence, many of them found in the daily routines of pointless work. We are, says Camus, carried along by time, occasionally realizing that we are merely growing older. The world is made up of illusions, irrationality, futile repetitions and absurdities that force us to ask why we don’t commit suicide. Writing of the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, Camus argues:

  He knows that we can achieve nothing that will transcend the fatal game of appearances. He knows that the end of the mind is failure. He tarries over the spiritual adventures revealed by history and pitilessly discloses the flaw in each system … in this ravaged world.

  (Ibid.: 29)

  In the domain of close relationships we might cynically speak of ourselves as flawed people seeking perfect understanding and acceptance from others. Few of us can live entirely alone and yet t
he jocular “can’t live with them, can’t live without them” observation reveals just how fragile desired relationships can be. Here we probably have a curve of very successful through tolerable to terrible relational experiences, many coming to painful ends. We can analyse this and offer couple counselling for it with some success but it seems that a substantial element of relationship failure will always be with us. Entropy seems to account for the state of being in love converting into a range of states of intermittent happiness, compromise and conflict. Basic faults and flaws in either partner often spell long-term failure, as if unconsciously some had advertised “Irredeemably fucked-up sinner/failure seeks similar”! Indeed, despite all the hard work put in by many relationship partners, it is as if unconsciously one or both of them were always going to sabotage it. Yet the institution persists and alternative arrangements and experiments appear to have had no greater success rate. Many early Greek philosophers warned against the madness and frenzy of sex and its consequences, celibacy is a key characteristic for many Christian and Buddhist priests, and Schopenhauer, while recognizing “the madness of carnal desire”, regularly frequented a brothel rather than marrying.

  We fail to understand whether it is life itself or the kinds of societies we construct that fosters so much cruelty and suffering. But we do know that personal psychological suffering is widespread. For well over a hundred years now we have had various talking therapies and well before those we have had psychiatric endeavours. We still flounder in trying to pin down the real causes of depression and anxiety, and hundreds of other forms of psychological pain. The clinical psychologist Richard Bentall says of medical psychiatry:

  More than a century of endeavour has not led to improvements in outcomes for patients with severe mental illness. People experiencing psychotic symptoms in countries with few mental health professionals do better than patients in countries with well-resourced psychiatric services.

  (2010: 24)

  Interestingly, Bentall uses theological language to further indict psychiatry when he says “psychiatry’s greatest sin has been to crush hope in those it has claimed to care for” (ibid.: 288).

  Passionate and damning though they are, such words conceal much. The “virtue of kindness” that Bentall sees in some forms of psychotherapy and in service users’ involvement in their own support does not reveal the sheer, stubborn suffering that is often helped by nothing and by no one, or is only partly ameliorated in a hit-or-miss way. Concealed is our ignorance about or failure to concur on the complex causes of mental distress. Concealed here are the ongoing turf wars over status and salaries between psychiatrists and clinical psychologists and between the hundreds of different talking therapies and their advocates. (I have, for example, seen some people helped by free drugs when expensive talking therapy did not work.) Concealed or denied is the probability, shall we say, that psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors, however well meaning, psychoanalysed and professionalized themselves, are at root as fucked-up as anyone else: how could it be otherwise in this vale of tears? Of course this dim view can be and is refuted as cynicism (with a small “c”) by those who profit from keeping false hope alive. But arguably it is only by allowing in the darkest data of the human condition that we have any chance of real progress; and, after all, there may well be no “final solution” to psychological suffering.

  How do all the above considerations affect the individual? Perhaps most of us get along without much sustained thought about cosmological, evolutionary, historical, political, economic and other matters. It is certainly argued by many philosophers and psychologists that the typical human being has poor reasoning and makes many cognitive errors. We might also suggest that our universe, although knowable, can be fully understood only via the details of specialized disciplines that most of us cannot or do not have time to master. One can garner only the barest, flimsiest gist of cosmology, evolution, religion and so on. Knowledge grows and accumulates rapidly and one cannot keep up with it. It is hardly surprising if the average human mind fails to grasp accurately the sweep of history, religion and similar phenomena. Even experts disagree, of course. Yet we tend to say that all this doesn’t matter, that everyone’s opinion is equally valuable, for example on issues of religion and politics. We hate the idea – or at least we disown it – that the knowledge and judgement of some people may be inferior to that of others.

  Regardless of whether we do spend much time in such thoughts, arguably we are always deeply affected by what they refer to. Indeed, for Sartre and many other philosophers it may become unthinkable that one would shut out claims on one’s social consciousness. You may decide to become a Jehovah’s Witness or Scientologist on the basis of a chance meeting with an enthusiast, and your life course takes a commensurate turn (when a comprehensive analysis of world religions would have better enlightened you). You may decide that this is a failed universe and an absurd existence and become depressed or kill yourself (when certain philosophical texts can offer both disputatious and consoling perspectives on such matters). You may assume as many do that you are a failure because you have promiscuous thoughts or hate work (when many texts might offer you explanations from evolutionary psychology or Marxism, or even occupational psychology, that suggest these are extremely common sentiments that can be accounted for).

  Finding our lives a little too bewildering, stressful or unsatisfying, many of us turn to religion, counselling, hedonistic escapism, the lottery. It seems very likely that we do what Marcus (2008) says we do: like evolutionary adaptation, we take whatever is to hand in the context in which we live and we fallibly use it to help us get by, and often we become attached to such adopted beliefs and practices and fail to outgrow them even when they are no longer useful; indeed we often cling to beliefs and institutions all the more as we anxiously sense their fallibility. The bits and pieces of half-digested knowledge we pick up in our lives serve as kluges. They work in a fashion and may help us to feel that we are coping successfully.

  My own chance bricolage of beliefs includes atheism, which is not merely a swipe at the religious but standing up for all that life, reading and reason tells me. It includes a strong sense of absurdity, negativity and humour, which is probably a personality trait compounded by early-life experiences but also drawn from many Sisyphean job situations. I am, politically, passively left-leaning in so far as I despise the greed, deceptiveness and other madnesses of consumerist capitalism, and this I learned from my father. Increasingly, I am an armchair anarchist. I have something like an old-hippie leaning towards a laidback lifestyle, moderate hedonism and mysticism (particularly Krishnamurti), which is all to do with when and where I was born and what I have accidentally read. I have some fondness for the world of counselling and psychotherapy, not for its crazier theories, romantic clichés and wild claims or for its self-importance but for the simple compassionate pragmatism of its best practitioners and the fact that little else is available for many who suffer.

  My flaws have made it hard for me (whatever the true distinction between “my flaws” and “me” may be) to change my views and behaviour in later life. Having mostly lived in lower-middle-class England, I have no deep, authentic feeling for those who live in oppressed areas and conditions. I have struggled through an era of sometimes militant feminism and have often failed to appreciate women’s angrier claims. But I am increasingly persuaded – mainly by observation and reading, partly (incidentally) by primal therapy – that millennia of patriarchy are responsible for much human immiseration; perhaps even that patriarchal emotion-suppression and empathic failure is one of the main roots of chronic human pathology and that a return to an emotion-freeing and emotion-respecting culture is necessary.

  I infer from my own experiences, correctly or incorrectly, that much of what is wrong with human beings and human affairs is not corrected by education, reason or exhortation but by time, necessity and gradual insight. It has been said that although we sometimes admit to retrospective error,
no one ever admits in mid-sentence, “Oh, I am wrong!” Unfortunately, this default tactic of blustering on as usual may not work in the case of climate change, where time is running out. I also realize, as we all must, that frequently we do not, apparently cannot, see eye to eye: individuals and groups have their own stubborn bricolage of experiences, beliefs and affiliations and many of these are in serious conflict with others’. Yet even if (and this will never happen) we agreed to a system of universal rational education that included a philosophical analysis of common cognitive errors, something deep within us would probably remain resistant to any radical change.

  Personally, I am convinced that in spite of our countervailing virtues and partial progress we human beings have a serious, chronic, unaddressed failure at our core. We may baulk at calling it original sin or a species flaw but there is arguably something curiously rotten or warped deep down inside most of us: our readiness to lie, to dissimulate, to let our integrity crumble, to avoid speaking the truth. Augustine propounded the view that all lying is sinful, yet probably all humans lie. Wittgenstein recognized the rarity of honesty and was known to often be unusually truthful. Like most of us, my nerve fails me in many everyday situations that call for parrhēsia (freely speaking one’s mind) for fear of causing offence or incurring serious social costs. The Cynic Diogenes referred to this outspokenness as “mankind’s most beautiful thing” and Nietszche and Foucault also explicitly espoused it. Socrates, Jesus and many others have paid with their lives for speaking what they considered the truth regardless of consequences. Many contemporary protestors and whistle-blowers have lost their lives or jobs for speaking out.