Failure (The Art of Living)

by Colin Feltham

  The philosophers focusing on linguistic and discourse analysis have alerted us to the many ways in which language dictates, distorts and limits our experiences and perceptions. In everyday language use, something is successful or unsuccessful, a success or failure, perfect or flawed, orderly or disordered. In reality, things often sit or shift somewhere midway in a grey area, or they fluctuate from pole to pole; experiences are context-dependent. We can say that some things are mediocre rather than excellent or terrible. In some circumstances we assign numerical values to show some subtlety (but not much). For example, British degree classifications are given as 1st, 2:1, 2:2 or 3rd and students’ essays are still often marked in spurious percentage terms as if 67 per cent is really distinguishable from 68 per cent. But language is poor at tracking and representing moving complexities, moods, paradoxes and the fine grain of human subjective existence. One can feel unaccountably free in the midst of disaster, gloomy in the midst of outward triumph, and a whole range of nameless feelings in between. A growing literature of philosophy analysing vagueness looks at just such linguistic phenomena, where non-mathematical discourse fails to be precise. In my own terms, I would call this an aspect of linguistic entropy. As time goes by and complexity increases, the original need for, and clarity of, language becomes disordered: Babelian prattle, misunderstanding, deception and mental chatter increase. Yet we can barely imagine ourselves without language – and thought – or even with a significantly pared-down language.

  We might quip that the best way to deal with failure is simply to avoid it, which in some arenas we may be able to; alternatively we may embrace it. Avoid all obvious risks phobically; or, contrarily, meet risks by throwing yourself at them, counter-phobically; or, wherever possible, insure yourself against risks so that compensation always awaits you. Stories already exist of rich people who are able to insure themselves against many disasters, so that a mere phone call will produce a helicopter to whisk them and any co-insured away from a disaster scene to a five-star hotel where they can recover in luxury. The very concept of fail-safe measures means that failure is expected but damage is limited.

  One “good response” to personal failure is authentic acceptance. Think of the phrase “a good loser”; this captures the sense of being a gracious failure. Instead of complaining at one’s loss of hope and feeling sorry for oneself it is sometimes possible to “take it on the chin”: the best man got the job or the girl. Socrates accepted his death sentence. In the very attitude of gracious acceptance the failure is lightened. The person who genuinely accepts that she or he has no special entitlement to success, who may even be pleased for the winner and who can shrug off emotional hurt, can be regarded as attractively virtuous. This is not the same as feigning acceptance or rolling over defeated, but a wise situation-specific response.

  A common reaction to the topic of failure is to half-deny its existence, massage it away or reframe it positively. An example from neurolinguistic programming is to claim that there is no such thing as failure, but only “feedback’. A failed business enterprise may spur one to investigate the causes of the failure, learn from them and start up another business, this time a successful one. Indeed, masses of business books are built on exactly this premise: that everything is useful information on which to build improvements. Paul Ormerod, in a highly intelligent analysis of failure recognizing the ubiquity and inevitability of failure entitled Why Most Things Fail (2005), concludes that, in business at least, only due action and innovation can be relied upon. Alternatively, at the personal level, you could learn that this business or any business is not the way forwards for you: you have learned that your talents lie in creative pursuits instead. This is a win–win mentality, with the glass always half full or more.

  The engineering response to failure has a feeling of sound pragmatism about it:

  The causes of failures can be as many and as muddled as their lessons. When something goes wrong with a computer program or an engineering structure, the scrutiny under which the ill-fated object comes often uncovers a host of other innocuous bugs and faults that might have gone forever unnoticed had the accident not happened.

  (Petroski 1992: 204)

  Scrutiny is necessary and is as objective as possible in the service of discovery and prevention of future harm. But it can also lead to retrogressive discoveries of multiple, layered failure, here described as bugs and faults.

  It is sobering perhaps to realize that in some domains we need failure. First, some failures are simply inevitable statistically. Second, we cannot have the kind of planet and life forms we have without some risk and error; an imaginary life with absolutely no risk and error would be neither possible nor desirable. Our psychological vigilance and our very immune system, key features for humans and other animals, help to define us. Third, failures and disappointments can teach us humility by eroding pride and hubris; and indeed we may agree with Jacques Lacan’s view that in domains such as psychoanalysis errors are revealing and fertile. But fourth, evolutionary and competitive processes mean that the only way we can select the best people for certain tasks is to subject many to direct rivalry, for example special secret-service agents, astronauts, some surgeons. Those tested for toughness, decision-making and other skills by selective pressures emerge as leaders in their fields, and those who perform in a substandard way will be directed to other tasks and careers. This is often an unpalatable thought but anyone who urgently needs the help of specialists with high-level competencies will appreciate that the less good should be deselected, or failed.

  Discovery-oriented failure investigations often result in useful learning, but not invariably. A medical examination may discover a cancer that is so aggressive and well developed that no practical lessons can be learned. The lesson is frankly one of doom: you are going to die, and very soon. Some may not want to know this and some will deny it or rapidly marshal religious belief to quash its emotional impact. We might say that for some this discovery is useful. Even if it is too late to modify the cancer, there may be time to put affairs in order, to make peace with oneself and others. Discovering the facts behind the thalidomide scandal in the early 1960s could do nothing to reverse the terrible deformities it caused but would help to prevent a recurrence. Police and profiler investigations into serial killers may help to detect future killers sooner.

  This last point does trigger the realization of the problem of risk-elimination as depicted in Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Minority Report”, later made into a film. A process of Precrime utilizes “precogs” (specialized humans wired up to detect imminent crimes) as part of a futuristic scenario of crime prevention in the service of utopian aspirations. Perhaps we would all like to avoid fatal or personally damaging failures but the reality of any total banishment of failure would also have its chillingly dystopian aspects. Vigilance is an understandable and necessary human function but those who are personally hyper-vigilant usually suffer from it. Perhaps this raises the possibility that social hyper-vigilance might ironically also tip over into something dysfunctional. Nazism’s “final solution” to perceived social and ethnic problems is one of the most glaring illustrations of this point. The longing for prelapsarian utopias tends to create dangerous fantasies of the metalapsarian utopia or heavenly city that is finally beyond all failure and disappointment.

  A more down-to-earth response to failure awareness, common in education, the professions and business, is to call for continuous improvement in practice and training. Realistic about the occurrence of failure, especially human error, this approach commends, even insists upon, constant updating of knowledge and skills so as to give the best possible chance of avoiding or minimizing, for example, falling behind in education, losing one’s edge and falling foul of malpractice traps in the professions and staying competitive in product development and sales in business. Now, this very common position seems to sit midway between pragmatism and idealism. On the one hand, hospitals and businesses recognize that identifying and lea
rning from failure is crucial to avoiding disasters and setbacks, therefore non-defensive openness is an important strategy. On the other hand, the cult of excellence and machismo pervading many organizations can work against admissions of weakness and failure. Amy C. Edmondson argues that a new paradigm is needed “that recognizes the inevitability of failure in today’s complex work environment in which mistakes multiply” (2011: 55). This approach stands a good chance of succeeding provided that it doesn’t succumb to empty reification, that is, “Let’s openly learn from failure, admit our mistakes and constantly improve ourselves” should not unwittingly turn into a vacuous mantra.

  One of the ways in which we have always learnt from our design errors and limitations is to improve on ourselves with technology. Toolmaking from earliest times has enabled us to hunt, defend ourselves, store food, transport materials and construct dwellings. The Industrial Revolution exponentially accelerated technology and the information revolution has gone much further still. Computers rapidly, routinely and accurately perform tasks that we perform inefficiently. A large part of this macro-trend in human progress consists of health and medical technological improvement, one part of which is prosthetics, or artificial anatomical aids. Cutting-edge inventions for human enhancement include cyborgs, nano-machines and robots that may augment, repair and replace humans in various ways. Where we contain or are biological kluges, our own conscious designs can greatly reduce or eliminate many of our own flaws. To what extent such developments turn out to be desirable, failure-proof and non-dystopian remains to be seen but the transcendence of human failure is clearly a major goal.

  The topic of perfectibility (or corrigibility) sits uncomfortably alongside the tacit question of what lives are worth. Moral philosopher John Broome, in his Weighing Lives (2004), compares the qualities of individual lives in terms of their well-being, supportive medical costs and matters of population control. He admits that such questions become very uncomfortable and they certainly challenge egalitarian human-rights assumptions, at least hypothetically: are some lives worth more than others, or are some more painful and costlier to maintain than others, and what are we to think about these questions as individuals, citizens and policy-makers? That some of us contain or embody more physical or mental “failings” than others is hard to dispute, yet for obvious reasons open discussion of such issues borders on taboo. However, research progress in genetics and applications in genetic engineering and genetic counselling already force us to confront such matters. In some parts of the world male lives are esteemed more highly than females lives, and practices of gender-selective abortion and (female) infant abandonment are not uncommon.

  Readers hardwired for optimism or freely choosing it will have despaired at the extent to which I have neglected success while presenting failure as ubiquitous. A popular business writer such as Steve McDermott, whose How to be a Complete and Utter Failure in Life, Work and Everything (2007) is built on faith in his own humour, self-promotional savvy, banalities and scathing paradox, is unlikely to be impressed. In so far as success and failure have real meaning, of course, they must share the stage or alternate in some way. It seems only fair that we acknowledge the upside and transcendence of failure. In a sense, all narratives of light conquering darkness speak of this transcendence: that there is something rather than nothing, the winter solstice, the phoenix rising from the ashes, Jesus rising from the dead, good triumphing over evil, hope over despair, human ingenuity and technology over many obstacles. These contain a mixture of myths of defiance and realities. Successful pop stars such as Madonna are said to have constantly reinvented themselves, successful businesses remain innovative, and successful marriage partners work hard at communication and stay on their toes.

  We are told “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” but we can retort that if at first a thing appears not to be broken, just look much more closely: the micro-cracks are always there. Indeed, university students are traditionally encouraged not to take anything at face value but to critique and problematize. Mark Twain wrote in a letter in 1887, “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure”. Failure is often more honest than success, more true to authentic humanness. You may work very hard without it leading to wealth or success. Material success often requires calculating competitiveness, self-distortion, lies and disregard for others. “Failures” often concede that they cannot keep up the pretences required for success. Many philosophers (e.g. Cioran, Nietzsche, Sartre) in fact have specifically sought contexts decoupled from academic institutions so that they might think and write freely. Diogenes today would fail to secure an academic philosophy post, even in the specialism of Cynicism, even if he wanted it! “Successes” may buy themselves better health care and live a little longer but they must also succumb to biological failure. Bigshots and nobodies alike have relatively brief ontic and worldly status before eternal forgottenness and non-being.

  In the longest-term picture of entropic run-down, there is no final redemption: once extinguished, the universe is not going to reassemble itself, God cannot pull anything out of the hat (especially since he himself/it itself is now a depleted symbol). Long term, even though we will not be around to witness, document or lament it, the universe will fail, the earth having failed and the sun died long before that ultimate event. For some philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard, factoring inevitable ultimate solar catastrophe into our thinking presents a “transcendental trauma for philosophy” (Brassier 2003). But somehow we have to hold in mind simultaneously both the personal and social irrelevance for us of solar death some billions of years away and its meaning for us as a forward-looking species. Just as our own deaths usually remain at the back of our minds while we conduct relatively carefree, somewhat successful lives, so it would be ridiculous for solar death to preoccupy us. However, as science produces more success strategies it also suggests probabilistic limitations. We may extend the human lifespan, conquer many diseases and travel further into space, but we will still die, new diseases and challenges will arise, and distant space travel and extraterrestrial settlement seems permanently unlikely.

  One outstanding phenomenon introduces uncertainty into this scenario. Gottfried Leibniz’s question about why there is something rather than nothing continues to nag at philosophy and physics. We can ask where creativity in general comes from, for example in Shakespeare, The Beatles’ music, literature, science, technology and record-breaking sports achievements. Where do great new thinkers and activists “come from”? We can of course make the claim that any team of chimpanzees with the right equipment and sufficient time can match all such achievements but this remains counter-intuitive. It is difficult to refute the notion that behind every significant renewal (rebirth, novelty, creatio ex nihilo, resurrection, invention, discovery, revolution, negentropy) lies some indisputable counter-entropic force. The German term Trotzmacht des Geistes conveys this sense of a vital spirit that opposes negative forces. This phenomenon is not always heroic in character, nor is it always the product of hard work; it may be random, playful and spontaneous. Its big problem, then, is that it cannot necessarily be commanded or made formulaic. Sad to say, while this momentarily counter-entropic triumphant force has perennial characteristics, it is also subject to macro-entropy. Authentic early Christianity succumbed to Roman and subsequent bastardization. The Roman Empire itself perished. The Beatles split up. Democracy has lost a great deal of its meaning. And so on. This cyclical pattern of birth, death and rebirth may be translated into the terminology of successful creation, the prospect of failure and transcendence of failure.

  The inevitability of large-scale collapses need not be greeted with despair. Thomas Homer-Dixon, for example, in The Upside of Down (2006), discusses the concept of “catagenesis” or “renewal through breakdown”: a kind of phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes view. This is not a Pollyannaish minimization of disaster but a recommendation to learn from failure and prepare creatively for new tactics. Similarly to wh
at I have said about entropy, underlying fallibility, faultlines, cracks and major failures, Homer-Dixon suggests that foreshocks (whether regarding the stock market or earthquakes) warn us of impending peril. At a personal level, health scares and marital arguments can alert us to worse trouble brewing; at a global level, rising temperatures, melting glaciers and extreme weather events may warn us that far worse is in store. In both cases, we contributed to the escalating problems but failed to notice or take due responsibility; in both cases we still have the choice to own up and act responsibly, or bury our head in the sand. And in both cases, whatever we do, the worst may materialize and may be temporarily terrible and unsettling. But both could lead to renewal: new relationships or self-discoveries; a new civilization based on new values and technologies. Portents, augurs, omens have existed from antiquity, and they remain highly fallible.

  To my knowledge there is no study of failure as such, no attempt to quantify failure across domains, philosophical studies like those by Ricoeur (1986) and Roberts (2011) notwithstanding. Anecdotally we are well aware that many businesses fail, weather forecasts fail, relationships break down, hopefully composed poetry and novels never see the light of day, and so on. Probably, however, for many of us failure seems an occasional event only: the odd misfortune or even disaster in the domains of relationships, jobs, health. Only occasionally do we get that terrible phone call, see that truck hurtling towards us, hear the bank manager denying us further credit. Many inhabitants of sunny Southern California enjoy such good living conditions that they can ignore the ever-present threat but rare occurrence of deadly earthquakes. Everyday life for many of us probably seems to run fairly smoothly in an uneventful pattern most of the time, except, that is, for what we may call minor hiccups and irritations: your alarm doesn’t wake you up; there’s no cereal; your child is ill; the car won’t start; there’s a traffic jam; you can’t seem to find a parking space.