Failure (The Art of Living)

by Colin Feltham

  This defect has perverted our very language and social values. We can and we do engage in sophistry in the midst of personal immorality and global disorder. We can and we do ignore fellow human beings who suffer terribly, and we condone fellow culprits, when it suits us to do so, which is much of the time. The semantic perplexity we run into here must be closely related to a primal unwillingness or inability to be honest and straightforward. We might call it an epidemic akrasia. It is unfashionable and unattractive to speak in such terms but this does not render the position untenable.

  If I call myself a failure it can let me off the hook. “Don’t expect anything better from me, you can see what a mess I am.” If I want to distract you from focusing on my moral faults, dubious actions and corrupt lifestyle, I can “scapegoat” others, subalterns, by pointing to their (sometimes more visible) failings. If I want to “big myself up” in one way or another, I can demonstrate my cleverness, beauty, athletic prowess or commercial success and downplay other, less attractive aspects of myself. Many systems of psychotherapy and management coaching rely on reframing failure as success. I do not intend to take this enquiry down a convoluted nihilistic route but to suggest that we have many ploys at our disposal for talking our way out of our collective moral failure. Often we apprehend what has gone awry via non-l inguistic means: silence, emotion, genuine dialogue, bodily states. Gemma Corradi Fiumara (1990) for example, drawing from Wittgenstein among others, criticizes “the secret arrogance of logocentrism” (the predominant linguistic assertiveness of Western, and male, thought) and pleads for listening to be accorded greater respect.

  This position chimes well with that of David Bohm (1994), whose promotion of disciplined dialogue aims to examine thought-in-action between individuals. Bohm believes that a “systemic fault” is at work in thought and language; in other words, that thought itself (not particular lines of thought), which we so much take for granted as our inevitable guide to almost all human affairs, is deeply flawed, and compounds our various problems while apparently attempting to address them objectively and constructively. Put differently, we commonly fool ourselves by failing to observe that our best-intended efforts mislead us. But our everyday language fails us too when we append labels of failure to one person or another, or one or another group, nation and so on, instead of seeking authentic understanding and real justice.

  Unless one is all-wise and magnanimous, perhaps we all have our favourite nominations for failure. I like to think I am morally above the act of looking down on others but I often catch myself indulging in mental put-downs. I enjoy the secretly politically incorrect free zone of guilty pleasures inside my head, as I imagine many do, where one can undetected scoff at diverse pariahs, bums, white trash, chavs, bimbos, untouchables et al. (I know a teacher who openly refers scathingly to the “plebs, peasants and pond life” he encounters in the rough area of the city in which he works.) But another of my recurring targets, highly suitable for shy, non-entrepreneurial, poor underachievers, is the kind of person who is outwardly successful but easily consigned to the category of superficial, greedy, empty airhead. Almost any celebrity will do but watch the wide array of television programmes dedicated to competitive cookery, property development and entrepreneurialism for good examples. All these ambitious people chasing money and fame should know as I do that what comes out of your mouth matters more than what goes in (Jesus) and that property is theft (Proudhon); they should know, as Diogenes and Spinoza pointed out, that worldly ambition is vulgar and pointless. But they don’t know these things because they are, unlike me, intellectual failures with no depth of moral insight at all! Now, given that I have some theological awareness of the holier-than-thou syndrome and some grasp of psychoanalytic principles of projection, I should have transcended such meanness of spirit and hypocrisy at my age, but yet again I have failed.

  Against the view that each of us has a precious and real ego that must be boosted and protected from failure is the novelist John Fowles’s argument, stemming from Heraclitus and the notions of chaos and hazard, that the nemo sits at the centre of our human existence and its illusions:

  The nemo is a man’s sense of his own futility and ephemerality; of his relativity, his comparativeness; of his virtual nothingness … All of us are failures; we all die … Nobody wants to be a nobody. All our acts are partly devised to fill or mask the emptiness we feel at the core.

  (1965: 51)

  Human beings think they survived some past wreck, are cast adrift from a golden age, and consequently they cling to symbolic rafts but in reality all is chance and eventually all is non-being; and we know but deny this.

  The ultimate in being a self-perceived failure in the context of the language of non-being is suicide, self-annihilation. Another side of this is what we can provisionally call being intentionally failed. Being rejected, demoted and excluded are common experiences related to failure. As Sartre has suggested in his discussion of the origins of negation, some lives are dedicated to negation. The gaoler, the executioner, the assassin, and in a lesser way the police officer and the traffic warden, all these work partly to negate (some) others’ being or to thwart their freedoms. In Roman gladiatorial times the organized spectacle of a fight to the death was said to be ended in the thumbs down that immediately preceded the loser’s public humiliation and killing. In cases of psychopathological murder, torture and rape, the perpetrator wishes to impose on the victim an acute taste, often a terminal taste, of their own failure of autonomy, dignity, self-defence, biological continuity. The hatred that accompanies the humiliation of another may lead to their annihilation or, in the case of genocide, to mass murder intended to annihilate a whole people. Actively, aggressively negating others may be characterized by psychological torment (“I’ll make you wish you’d never been born”), and by torture, dismemberment, triumphant cannibalism and disposal. Such extremes are usually associated with males, let us note.

  Less extreme forms of other-annihilation include rejection and enjoyment of others’ failure (Schadenfreude). Television talent shows necessarily entail a degree of public humiliation for contestants eliminated at an early stage, and then for the disappointed runners-up in the final stages. “I wish I’d never met you” is a common expression of the partner who has reached a terminal hatred in a failing relationship or marriage and annulment may be the legal end-point. “I wish I’d never had you” may be uttered by the exasperated or cruel mother to the child, who may carry this trace of rejection for a lifetime. “You’re such a loser” rubs the other’s nose in their failure. There are occasional instances of psychological sadism on the part of a mean-spirited teacher, say, who wants to see a certain pupil fail.

  Suicide, murder and hatred embody extreme forms of negation, of personal annihilation. Lest we are tempted to imagine that the extreme feelings that go with these acts and intentions belong only to others, some psychological research reminds us that probably most of us sometimes entertain such fantasies and might well be capable of extreme acts given sufficient provocation. In a philosophical survey of various forms of active and passive nihilism centring around Nietzschean thought, Keith Ansell Pearson and Diane Morgan (2000) include references to and images of the skinning of a human being. We may discuss these matters according to the principles of failure of empathy and dignity, of human rights, but destructive impulses do not conveniently disappear. Somewhere deep inside lurks the beast in us all, the death instinct, the failure of “civilization”. In Sartre’s terms, “nothingness haunts being” (1958: 16).

  The category of “being a success” should not be dismissed. Perhaps most people canvassed by researchers would sign up to belief in the importance of success and consider themselves quite successful. I shall leave defence of success to other writers, however. Here, let me bring on to the scene those characters from religious scriptures and the arts who appear to be failures and outcasts in mainstream social terms, yet who are often endorsed by the likes of Jesus as closer to genuine transcendental
values. It is baffling to understand how so many right-wing fundamentalist American Christians can interpret Jesus’ words in the New Testament as a prescription for or defence of capitalist affluence. As the psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm (1979) declared, it is being rather than having that points the way to personal and social welfare and justice. Fromm condemned as an outright failure “the Great Promise of Unlimited Progress” created largely by the industrial revolution and boosted by post-Second World War economics and the mistaken “radical hedonism” that goes with it. Small wonder that William Desmond (2008) regards the original Cynics in the mould of Diogenes as so similar to later ascetics, anarchists, tramps, hoboes, beats, hippies and New Agers.

  It is also ironic that in a poll of modern Indians, while Mahatma Gandhi was admired by a fair number, Bill Gates had a much higher approval rating (even before his philanthropy). Those who advocate voluntary poverty are clearly no longer cool. The loincloth is out, designer suits rule: failure is failure! We could however turn this example on its head. Gandhi has been criticized for not being the kindest of family men and his advocacy of non-violent resistance is considered a naive and dangerous policy for many other contexts (Tenembaum 2011). On the other hand, Gates’s implementation of a vaccination programme against childhood diseases in Africa might potentially effect more durable, benevolent change than Gandhi’s politics did. In the calculus of comparative moral success and failure it is not always clear who will turn out to be the real hero.

  Back at the individual level, we can remember that becoming a failure – occasionally, somewhat or dramatically, in one or several domains of our being – may be good for us. The main character in Elia Kazan’s novel and film The Arrangement, Evangelos Arness, is a highly successful advertising man with all the trappings of the economic good life, the rewards of the American dream. But something in him unconsciously recognizes the emptiness of his lifestyle and a car accident (or unconscious suicide attempt) leads him gradually to a complete transformation towards a much humbler but happier kind of existence. Stories of cancer in which people say “cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me” (the cyclist Lance Armstrong is a well-known example) attest to the transformational value of a failure event, sometimes referred to as post-traumatic growth. My own experiences of failed relationships, jobs and projects, however painful at the time, have probably all taught me something about life’s unpredictability (and hubris) and about my (and human) resilience. One’s fortunes in life can go up and down. It is unlikely to be any other way in the world of flux and chaos that governs our moral luck.

  6.

  Learning from failure

  At first sight it seems that we might want to distance ourselves from failure altogether, as if it is bad luck or tempting fate to even think about it. As the very title of Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (2007) makes plain, denial is a common stance. Alternatively, it is easy to fall for platitudes about “learning from our mistakes”. Almost at the other end of the spectrum, when we seriously attempt to learn from catastrophes we have the call to “look the worst full in the face” (Clarke 2006: ix). The almost in the previous sentence points to the domain beyond learning, where failure is so terrifying or apocalyptic that some will envisage the end of the world in religious terms (the “end times”) or in such dark personal terms that suicide appears the only possible response.

  In one sense, perhaps the grimmest scenarios are unavoidable and cannot properly be learned from so as to effect improvement or escape. Here I mean human biological entropy, resulting in everyone’s inescapable individual death, the future demise of the entire biosphere itself, of the earth and the universe. Scientists are confident that all this is inevitable: everything ultimately must fail to endure. This is, of course, denied in some quarters. Many religions insist on the reality of a life after death in some viable form. A minority of “extreme scientists” researching the causes of ageing (and rightfully monitored by critical ethicists) believe that sooner or later human death will be postponed by up to hundreds of years by new discoveries. There are, too, those scientists committed to developing the means to travel to other planets so that when the earth’s resources are depleted we can continue as a species elsewhere.

  The religious case for an afterlife is not disprovable, it is simply extremely implausible, but a high level of scepticism seems warranted. Scepticism, as a lifelong philosophical sceptic like Paul Kurtz (2010) conceives of it, is not a flat-out or dismissive rejection of such beliefs but contains a diversity of thoroughgoing analytical attitudes to enquiry. As for the above scientists who seek to discover life-extension technologies, we may adopt either a precautionary ethical analysis of their aims or an interested “wait and see” attitude but the hoped for outcomes of these projects, lying so far in the future, cannot be disproved as possibilities either. What we surely must keep in mind, however, is that humans have previously been incorrect about many things (the flat earth, the sun revolving around the earth); and common human imagination has often failed until a pioneer creates or discovers something previously inconceivable.

  We cannot prevent our own deaths nor guarantee against the eventual dissolution of all our parts but we can improve the quality of our lives, dodge some diseases and slightly delay death by means of timely medical screening and treatment, avoidance of toxic substances and high-risk situations, good nutrition and exercise. (I am conscious that the “we” here does not apply to millions of people in the developing world.) Many failed to see the dangers of cigarette smoking and died prematurely as a consequence, for example. Here, learning from failure is very clear. Smoking involves the failure to resist short-term pleasure, the moral failure of tobacco companies and governments to be honest and to act accordingly, and perhaps the moral failure of bystanders to speak out and to act. But even in the midst of a decades-long period of learning, some smokers wish to assert their right to the civil liberty to smoke and determine their own health risks. Fair enough, perhaps, since we do not forbid boxing, hang-gliding, mountaineering, high-level alcohol consumption, anorexia nervosa and other high-risk activities, although we do hold as illegal the consumption of many drugs. I think we must conclude that we fail as a society to draw up and agree on fair and comprehensive ethical and legal attitudes to risk assessment, responsibilities and costs. We are largely confused and hypocritical, as if we do not have the collective moral will or are torn between optimal freedoms and the outlawing of risks.

  Each of us may ask: does life itself meet my hopes and expectations or fail to do so? What are the failures I see around me – moral, social, economic, political – that need not continue as failures? In what ways have I failed and how do I propose to address these? Does it make sense for me to think of myself as a failure? Who do I know or who do I look up to as an example of success? Do I accept success and failure as two sides of the same coin of life? Is there some way out of failure altogether? Who can I trust to guide me?

  It’s possible to consider two extreme attitudes towards failure. First, one can adopt a philosophy of negation or total overcoming of failure. Here, we could turn to Christian Science and its doctrine of complete faith in Jesus Christ, which permits of no doubt and promises complete deliverance from sickness and death. Indeed, evil, error and death are regarded as illusions. While Christian Science isn’t taken seriously as a rigorous philosophy, some categorize it as a form of philosophical idealism. Jarringly, Nietzschean philosophy can also be placed in this failure-transcending position in its refusal to accept the Christian and Western submission to weakness and a master–slave morality. Nietzsche’s “That which does not kill me makes me stronger” has become a popular exhortation to overcome fear. Both the above views espouse a superhuman aspiration. Both are unrealistic in so far as occasional accidents and illnesses are unavoidable and often early wounds leave us weaker rather than stronger.

  The alternative extreme is represented by those philosophies, philosophers an
d intellectuals who find life so flawed that it should be disappointedly or nihilistically written off in one way or another. Beckett, Benatar, Camus, Cioran, Houellebecq and Schopenhauer might all belong here, if with different takes on life’s absurdity and painfulness. Benatar’s analysis of the “self-deceptive indifference to the harm of coming into existence” (2006: 225) and his conclusions regarding the harmfulness of having further children (“the duty not to procreate”) lead him to a position far too extreme for most people’s tastes. Falling roughly in the same pessimistic camp, however, Joshua Foa Dienstag’s book Pessimism (2006) includes Camus, Cioran, Miguel de Cervantes, Freud, Giacomo Leopardi, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Schopenhauer and Miguel de Unamuno, and denies that pessimism is identical with cynicism, nihilism and scepticism (or unhappiness); rather, it contains a fortitude comparable with Stoicism. Acknowledging that life (or large chunks of it) is a failure results in an array of negative views, not simply one!