Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as quickly as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself
By technical complexity I mean two things; of course there’s technology in the sense of high-tech equipment, the all but self-spawning new-generations of mobile phones, the unthinkably sophisticated white-goods, the fun and useful devices that can tell you your vital statistics from a distance of 100m. But there’s also technology in the sense of abstract rule-governed mechanisms – the latter including for instance the bureaucracy that exists (supposedly) to make rational decisions about social life based on informed deliberation, as well as the order-giving networks and techniques and procedures that regulate life as it goes on in streets and shopping centres, in schools and hospitals, between organisations great and small, locally, nationally and right the way across the globe. Here’s the thought: if the myriad individual devices were all there were to living in a technically complex world – if it weren’t for the All-Encompassing Technical Systems – then human life in the age of global high-tech civilisation would be a breeze. It would simply be a matter of deciding whether the disadvantages of using any or all of the gadgetry outweighed the positives. If it did, then you could abstain from using the stuff – you could choose not to buy the latest iPad, or mood-enhancing hair-care products, you could stay off-line, etc etc. On the other hand, if your cost-benefit calculation came out pretty evenly, you could use all the stuff, or some of it, and just take the risk of being annoyed, over-stimulated, and, probably, over-indebted.
Of course the upside to living in a systematically technified world is not difficult to see. The multiplication of choice and convenience that the gadgets and the systems make possible is obvious to anyone. And in any case, a systematically technically complex world is in many ways a matter of plain necessity: mass societies made up of lots of different sorts of human beings doing lots of different sorts of things simply wouldn’t function on the basis of the straightforward unspoken personal/interpersonal regularities that tended to govern the life of self-contained villages and towns such as they existed until quite recently in the past. If you doubt that that’s the case – think about trying to organise a tax system with liabilities calculated precisely according to income across an entire national territory, or indeed try organising national flood relief, without a bureaucratic apparatus and a swag of complex technical systems in place.
And yet, and yet. If the blessings of Technified Existence are something that are waved before our noses virtually every minute of the day, the downside is something we know in our bones. Consider the big, rapid-fire changes technology makes continually to the conditions of everyday material existence – who doubts that they’re disorienting, even when there’s a palpable sense of excitement in the air? Consider the little-remarked process going on in the realm of knowledge: I’m thinking of the relegation of non-technical, non-technifiable bodies of understanding-and-experience to the status of second-rate superstitious marginalia – from sensitivity towards art to sensitivity towards the rhythms and needs of the human body. Consider the more or less acute sense of powerlessness that every one of us experiences every single day as we’re confronted with the fact that a once accessible, humanly comprehensible corner of our lives has become the preserve of experts whose help we now depend on to perform the most necessary tasks. Or consider the fact that, in dealing with the scattered agencies of a complex social world, we’re confronted with the whole woeful tendency of our frazzled fellow citizens to invoke the naked authority of the Great Nothing in the Machine: yes, once again, THE COMPUTER SAYS NO, and, let’s face it, in day-to-day life, no matter how tech-savvy we are, The Computer, The System, The Agent of Mechanised Necessity – that is, The Computer in the broad sense – does say no to us, time and time and time again. Faced with it all, the choice is seemingly ours – to ruthlessly accentuate the positives, to be mortified or annoyed, or to swallow hard and battle on. But to decouple ourselves in a truly satisfactory way in pursuit of the ideal of peaceable self-containment seems practically impossible; in a lot of instances it would be palpably insane. Grim resignation often looks like the only realistic stance, and increasingly it seems to require heroism. Happiness in the sense of general equanimity, settled contentment, has fled from the world.
So we have a rough answer to the question how it is that happiness eludes most of us even now that the historical sources of misery – disease, back-breaking labour, food shortages – have largely been dealt with, at least in our corner of the global village. It’s a pity David Malouf doesn’t have an answer of his own to give us in QE41 – at least not one that addresses itself directly to the contemporary world and the extraordinary phenomena of misery that often seem to dominate it.
Part of the problem lies with the title and the subtitle of the piece: “The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World”. It’s simply misleading, and I suspect it wasn’t the author’s own choice. Malouf himself is much more interested in what you might call ideal images of happiness, particularly those deriving from the ancient and the early modern world, rather than the world of contemporary modernity – which is what I’m guessing unsuspecting readers will take him to be talking about. And the position from which he wants to meditate on happiness is not in amongst the mind-bending jumble of today’s world, but from his own version of Montaigne’s secluded “little back-shop” where we can be “all our own, entirely free”. In fact, the little back-shop is the place where he wants to gently encourage us to seek out happiness of our own.
However the main problem lies less with QE41’s title than with its overall argument.
Malouf gets himself into trouble early on by making a categorical distinction between happiness, which he says belongs to “our personal interior” realm, and liberty, which is supposedly a social virtue. (Life, to add the third of the rights Jefferson’s American Constitution calls inalienable, belongs for Malouf in a third category, that of Nature.) But dividing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness between three separate existential domains in the way Malouf does generates a pseudo-problem. Modern happiness, insofar as it has been shaped by the American model and by the Enlightenment notion of rational social existence, starts to seem questionable because it looks like it has to involve legislating for an ineffable state of personal being. . .
After teasing out what Jefferson means by the “pursuit of happiness” Malouf goes on two long excursions. The search for contentment in modernity is determined negatively, we learn, by an inner restlessness and positively by the pursuit of bodily pleasure. Restlessness is something like a primordial given of the human condition, and technology on this picture, far from being just a modern fetish, is the trans-historical outward expression of our rollicking human-all-too-human discontent with ourselves and the wider world. On the one side, the modern human being – to use Malouf’s preferred metaphors – complicates his original Promethean condition (in Plato’s Protagoras man is the creature whose natural endowment seems to involve inventively transforming nature itself) by forming a Faustian compact with the machine in order to satisfy his material wants ever more completely. On the other side, he discovers new, or really not so new, modes of pleasure: as the medieval Christian consciousness of sin recedes, carnal appetite comes to be seen, in roughly classical Graeco-Roman terms, as more than just a source of temptation; the art of Rembrandt and Rubens creates its own monuments to the world-historical moment - not to the terrors but to the joys of the flesh, and to the nuances of interpersonal feeling that the joys of the flesh light up.
At the end of this circuitous path, QE41 gives us a peak at “how we live now” – and not a minute too late. Some of what for Malouf are the deeper sources of contemporary human disquiet are turned up at last. The world has grown so big! (In grown-up terms: While human consciousness for most of history hardly extended beyond the distances we could see or walk, it now extends to the ends of the earth.) Yet the world has also grown so small! (Grown-up version: the extension of our consciousness, and our powers, now confronts us with a definite image of planetary life as a limited – decidedly fragile – totality within a much vaster, and indifferent-seeming, universe.) All in all, the big-small out-of-shape world has developed proportions that fail to square with our existence as embodied beings with limited powers of sensory perception and movement.
The problem here is not exactly that Malouf is wrong about any of this; his problem is giving a sense of depth to the homespun wisdom his observations suggest - without it, unfortunately, the observations dissipate into the kind of intellectual haze familiar to us from 1001 newspaper opinion pieces. And without some more details, the observations also seem decidedly gainsayable. Yes, most of us have trouble giving specific meaning to the macroscopic and microscopic worlds that four centuries of unlimited scientific discovery have opened out (though the fans of sci-fi and Steven Spielberg aren’t completely lost for directions here). But, as Malouf himself pretty much says – where the world exceeds the body’s grasp, there the mind and the imagination – concepts and the intuitive rush of feeling – can more than make good our sense of unease – which, of course, was the case long before science and technology put distant galaxies and microscopic creepy-crawlies within the range of sensory experience. (Isn’t it what the human spirit has been up to throughout human history – allowing us to get a metaphorical grip, where a physical one eluded us?)
Then there’s the brain, and . . . genes - oh, and The Economy: more indefinite sources of disquiet. All three worry Malouf because what we’re learning about them suggests they have a will of their own; they play havoc with our conventional notion of ourselves as autonomous agents. The Economy in particular Malouf thinks functions in the mental universe of today roughly the way Fate did in mental universe of the ancients.
Papering his main insights together on the very last page of the essay, Malouf tells us:
For all the scope, both of time and space, that contemporary forms of knowledge have made available to us, what we can fully comprehend – that is, have direct sensory experience of – remains small; and only with what we have fully comprehended and feel at home in do we feel safe.
What is human is what we can keep track of. In terms of space this means what is within sight, what is local and close; within reach, within touch.
What most alarms us in our contemporary world, what unsettles and scares us, is the extent to which the forces that shape our lives are no longer personal – they know nothing of us; and to the extent that we know nothing of them – cannot put a faced to them, cannot find in them anything we recognise as human – we cannot deal with them. We feel like small, powerless creatures in the coils of an invisible monster, vast but insubstantial, that cannot be grasped or wrestled with.
The last bit is fair enough, maybe. It seems to pick out one feature of technology-driven globalising mass society, viz its impersonality, and render it in slightly damp plaster-cast prose. But if you ask me, what immediately precedes that – the idea that what is truly human is what we can touch and see - is simple-minded rustic empiricism: it suggests nothing so much as the muckiness of small-is-beautiful nostalgia. Malouf’s sense that the mind has autonomous powers of reason, speculation, image-making and story-telling that are there to complement the activities of the body seems to have deserted him at this point. And that’s not all that gets left out of the picture. If the rejection of the Christian vision of the body as a source of sin is one of the early modern world’s happier innovations, does it remain an unambiguous one? The body, the life of the nature which we ourselves are, is something that is subject today to a truly miserable range of constraints and pressures whose origins lie far from the ascetic ideals of Christianity: in being liberated for the experience of pleasure, bodies are increasingly treated as mechanical instruments; primed and polished, they become the target of vast commercial campaigns of improvement that seem to leave a lot of people feeling insecure within their own skins in an equally radical, though culturally quite different, sense to the Christian one. The early modern world might, up to a point, make it possible for human beings to experience bodily joy, but the technological civilisation that modernity eventually gives rise to also makes the human body tendentially irrelevant, as more and more work, and more and more social life in general, is conducted without the need for human beings’ physical presence.
Building up to the topic “the way we live now” by surveying some of the key historical moments in the pursuit of happiness from pre-modernity and early modernity might seem like a good idea. But Malouf’s conclusions are inconclusive. There are some ritualised worries about all those medical advances not having cured us of our deeper discontent, and some equally conventional muttering about the bad news delivered to us daily by the media about the health of the planet. But then strangely we’re back with Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian image of man, which suggests to Malouf the classical Graeco-Roman notion of proportion and measure, then, lastly, with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Shukhov – the man who has another 3500 days to spend in a Soviet gulag and who, by the end of Solzhenitsyn’s novel, is able to rest content with a fruitful day’s scrounging and scheming. By an irony that strikes me as rather gruesome, and not entirely willed, Malouf offers up Shukhov as a sort of paradigmatic happy man of modernity. The lesson seems to be that Shukov has discovered a secret that many of us never hit upon – that true happiness is only attainable within limits – in moderation, or, again, in a – kind of – classic proportion.- And that’s pretty much where the deepest problem with QE41 lies. Malouf’s essay continually falls away from the question of happiness in its radical contemporary form in favour of a rather ill-focussed search for the sources of happiness, or the lack of it, in the worlds of literature, art and history. What Malouf manages to uncover in passing in Plato’s Protagoras, in Ovid, Montaigne, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vitruvian Man, etc. has an interest, and a sensitivity, of its own, but a lot of the time it’s simply irrelevant to the question it feels like his editors set him. The problem is that there’s a strict limit – for instance - to the explanatory value of suggesting that The Economy functions like Fate or that Technology is a sign of a primal, a Promethean, human restlessness. The analogies drawn from the art and thought of the past to illustrate those two generic points are all right as they go, but QE41 fails to really pin them down or follow them through. And that makes it decidedly light-on as a piece of analysis or reflection.
All in all, QE41 has a bit of a leaf through the lengthy catalogue of modern misery we keep on adding to at one end and failing to shorten at the other. It demonstrates a low-key awareness that the way the catalogue is filling out so rapidly at the front has something to do with our inability to stop scratching the technological itch, with the super-size free-market economies we’ve created, with all the associated complexity and impersonality and formal rationality, and with the sense that the world presents itself to us as a scatter of piecemeal problems to be solved: Malouf knows our faith that the world is improvable by such gimcrack problem-solving means has itself become problematic. Yet when push comes to shove he’s unwilling or unable to really look into the heart of darkness – for that’s where his swag of images from aesthetic life don’t fit him out with the necessary equipment.
The problem QE41 sets for itself is happiness and the problem Malouf founders on in the end is the key one. The ideal of happiness he is pleading for – the singular life within “our personal interior realm”, a place like Montaigne’s private back-shop where we can settle down and meditate philosophically - is itself something of an antique. The very way he sets up the ideal seems to require ignoring that any contemporary version of Montaigne’s little back shop would by definition already be systematically interconnected – from the inside of the technically primed physical body at its centre all the way outward – to a degree that would’ve been inconceivable to Montaigne – as indeed would the quasi-technical philosophy that the heirs of Montaigne would be sitting down to read should they have set themselves the task of meditating on philosophy as it is mass-produced under contemporary social conditions.
In the end there’s something deeply unchallenging about Malouf’s vision – something as unchallenging as all those Sunday broadsheet pieces about how busy the modern world is, and how insensitive we’ve all become to the beauties of contemplation, stillness, peace and silence. Don’t the authors of all this stuff notice the insistence with which people are exhorted to seek out, and do actually seek out, exactly the thing they’re said to be incapable of? Malouf is roughly in the same boat: gesturing towards an ideal that is already an unsatisfactory, unsatisfying fragment of the real. As for endowing our Shukov-like struggles within the encampment of the planetary economy with a resigned sense of classical proportion – well, in the sketchy form QE41 presents it, the ideal comes across as a bit of a cop-out: it just raises the question why we should settle for anything less than understanding how we got to this dark place where we’re equally the prisoners and the camp-guards and the camp itself. If we understood how we got here, maybe making a break for the gates wouldn’t seem so crazy. Indeed, why should the illuminati of humankind really be happy with anything less?
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