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Failure (The Art of Living)

Page 16

by Colin Feltham


  In my grand (“grandiose” if you want to put the boot in, to fail me) scheme, the universe is at best a chaos of intertwined or alternating forces of success and failure, of viability and fallibility, vitality and morbidity. Human life is always ambiguous. Being is indeed “haunted by non-being” in Sartrean terms. We should probably learn not to be surprised by failure or necessarily to take it too personally. Failure is pervasive, from original and continuing entropy, through geological and climatological phenomena, through all animal life including our own, and throughout all human epistemologies, inventions, institutions and relationships. Exactly how failure is distributed is unknown, probably unknowable, but chance and chaos vie with justice and order, randomness with rationality.

  In our own lives, any of us may be affected to one degree or another by natural disasters and man-made catastrophes. Any of us in the wrong place at the wrong time is susceptible to the impact of randomly collapsing bridges, faulty aeroplane engines and badly driven cars. (The odds against such events are mercifully small, except for the victims.) Each of us carries a set of psychological tendencies, a casino-like biology, and experiences supportive or non-supportive social networks that will help determine our happiness or otherwise, our good and bad luck, and our eventual death. Misfortunes can strike from outside and from within. Each of us perhaps knows more or less the faults and failings we carry with us and inflict on others. At particular times through life we may become aware of near misses, warning signs, cracks in our career. Problems will be mitigated by reason and will, by friends and others.

  The art of living with failure is, perhaps, built from self-knowledge, mindfulness, humour, resilience and reflection on the guidance offered by Buddhism and Stoicism. Even an atheist can derive some moral direction from Jesus; even someone weary of being called a cynic can derive inspiration from the original Cynics of antiquity. However pessimistic, one can remain open to the personalities and arguments of one’s optimistic fellow human beings. Life is messy and we each take up the kluges that seem to serve us best.

  By way of final personal example and to encourage readers’ similar self-reckoning, my own failure calculus is roughly as follows. Entropy-wise, of course, as someone in his sixties I am not at my biological best; I cannot escape the effects of lifelong wear and tear on the body and its invisible inner lottery of failings. The basic fault bequeathed by my mother has left a modest (by some comparisons) trail of broken relationships and disappointments behind me. I may never know what sum of failings my own parenting leaves behind me long term in my sons’ lives, nor can I readily disentangle my parenting errors from parenting behaviour that was beyond my noticing or correcting. My pathologically butterfly mind has created a trail of things half done, uncompleted, failed projects, if you will. One of these, for example, is an unwritten book entitled The Imperfect Integrity of the Faint-Hearted Nihilist.

  My flaws are many: some have been modified by the years and by experience and insight, and some have probably increased. I haven’t had unqualified success in my efforts to diet, exercise or change other bad habits involving money management and domestic order. Several of my household appliances and items (CD-player, gas fire, printer, complicated lightbulb fittings, etc.) still await repairs for months, even years. The boiler has just packed in, the house is cold and my small financial cushion against such events is just getting smaller. Diogenes didn’t need all these comforts and luxuries but we seem to. Although my childhood shyness receded with the years and practice, occasionally even now in a social situation I will still suddenly dry up and shrink anxiously into myself, shyness operating like the break-out of a mostly dormant geological fault. I don’t think I have been an outstanding moral success, in so far as I have not led a life of self-sacrifice, huge altruism or political action: I have failed to speak and act courageously. Like millions of my peers I have been a bystander as runaway capitalism and a culture of consumerism and technical-rationality with a shrinking respect for feelings, or empathic failure, has left billions poor and climate change perhaps verging on the catastrophic.

  The logic of my own belief in an original-sin-like anthropathology or fallenness means that like almost all my fellow human beings I shall have lived and died with a false or “fallen” consciousness or what Slavoj Žižek refers to as cynical reason. In Buddhist terms I have remained in samsara and not known nirvana. Occasionally I imagine the true self I have failed to be, my authentic alter ego; where I am cowed by lifelong habits and fearfulness, he is free, innocent, fearless. Actually, he doesn’t agonize over the moral problems of the world, he just doesn’t dwell in or add to them; he is “without sin”. But perhaps even that thought is no more than a shard of the cultural religious conditioning I cannot have altogether escaped.

  It is an irresistible fantasy to imagine what a spokesperson might say at my (or your) funeral as to the balance of my (or your) success and failure. I hope I have been kind enough and that I have passed on some modest positive moral values to my children. I hope I may at last have found and given real and durable love in my closest relationship. I hope that however mistaken I may be in my analysis in these pages, I have not thereby caused any actual wilful harm. Perhaps I should hope that I am proved wrong in my negative reckoning by the social, environmental and global outcomes of the years ahead.

  Further reading

  While few texts can be found directly on the philosophy of failure, when failure is interpreted more broadly as sin, evil, error, inauthenticity, catastrophe and so on, much wider resources become evident. For its relative rarity and philosophical weight, Paul Ricoeur’s Fallible Man (1986) ranks very highly. For an original and contemporary philosophical look at the theory of error across the domains of science, psychoanalysis, history and politics, and art, which also suggests significant distinctions between error and failure, John Roberts’s The Necessity of Errors (2011) is essential reading. Alan Jacobs’s Original Sin (2008) provides a very good overview of human moral corruption. While it is clearly not my “thing”, anyone wanting a thorough theological exposition of original sin and its forgiveness will benefit from reading James Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong (1998). For those with an appetite for the idea that life itself is an irredeemable failure and disappointment, philosophers such as Schopenhauer ([1851] 1970) and aphorists such as Cioran (1998) are musts. A text making interesting links between philosophy and psychotherapy relevant to self-esteem, in self-help form, is Albert Ellis’s The Myth of Self-Esteem (2005). Neel Burton combines psychiatric and philosophical insights into the standard distorted image of success in his The Art of Failure (2010).

  Scott Sandage’s Born Losers (2005) is an excellent historical account of the development of the idea of personal failure in the USA. Readers interested in a thoughtful analysis of business failure will gain much from Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail (2005), as well as from a special edition of the Harvard Business Review (April 2011). Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel’s Blind Spots (2011) is an interesting study of business ethics incorporating references to common individual cognitive errors, unethical business practice and faulty politics. Henry Petroski provides insights into engineering failures in To Engineer is Human (1992). Those with an interest in failure reflected through art will welcome Lisa Le Feuvre’s fascinating book Failure (2010). Douglas Murphy’s The Architecture of Failure (2012) looks at and into selected architectural failures past and present. In an expanding literature on critical thinking, cognitive errors and human misjudgements, Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong (2010) stands out, and similarly (although with the added interest of an evolutionary and psychological take) Gary Marcus’s Kluge (2008) offers explanations for the ubiquity of errors. I am bound to suggest my own What’s Wrong With Us? (2007) as a hypothesis for universal human pathology. For those wanting a more light-hearted look at failure, I can recommend Stephen Pile’s The Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures (2011). Readers will also find within the text of the present book many references to failure in relation to spe
cific domains, such as US foreign policy, UK education, religion, politics, relationships, psychiatry and so on.

  While, as I have said, there is no interdisciplinary academic study of failure as such, perhaps the nearest we get is the study of risk, and here I can recommend Baruch Fischhoff and John Kadvany’s Risk (2011) for its concise examination of a wide array of risks, and of judgement and decision-making.

  Given the sometimes contentious nature of a subject like failure, it is well worth reading a scholarly account such as Drexel Woodson’s “‘Failed’ States, Societal ‘Collapse,’ and Ecological ‘Disaster’” (2010), which critiques grand theories of societal failure, including Jared Diamond’s catastrophe theory.

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