The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) (15 page)

But the Culture Secretary need have no fear of sombre silence. The last time I went into my university library it sounded like a bar on Saturday night.

Even the office is no longer a sanctuary. The colleague I share with puts on music the moment I leave and refrains in my presence only from the fear that I will rip out my workstation keyboard and batter him to death with it. Not that his fearful forbearance makes much difference: the guy in the office next door plays music constantly and the partitions are made of thin cardboard. And one of the most shocking stories I have ever read in a newspaper was on the installation by the BBC of a ‘chit-chat machine that provided soothing artificial office noise for employees working in a quiet office’. This device was installed after staff complained that their office was ‘so silent it was hard to concentrate’.

Then, after a stressful day, I get home to find the television blaring in the living room and the radio blaring in the kitchen. Who?
Who?
My niece, currently in the bathroom taking her second shower of the day. She comes home, switches everything on and makes for the bathroom. Later, like so many students, she has to have a radio playing while she studies. Claims it helps her to concentrate. And other adult guests turn up in dressing gowns as I prepare for bed. There is no radio in the guest room and they can’t get to sleep without it.
Could I possibly
…?

So employees are unable to work without noise, students are unable to study without noise, guests are unable to sleep without noise.

Of course the ubiquitous background music is not music in the traditional sense. It is not meant to be enjoyed, or even properly heard. Its only function is to abolish silence. And silence must be abolished because it is a reminder of the silence of the void – cold, remote, inhuman and terrifying. So people arrive home and switch on televisions and radios as automatically as they would heating in winter and for the same reason – to keep out the cold.

And those who enjoy silence must also be cold, remote and inhuman. At least these cranks can draw comfort from the poets, for instance the Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez: ‘Unity is the noble daughter of silence; dispersion, the mad stepchild of noise.
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How Jimenez would have suffered in contemporary Spain! Two families are sharing a holiday home at a resort in Spain. My friend wants to discuss a thesis he is planning to write but, of course, there is noise everywhere in the house. We go out to find a quiet bar. It’s eleven o’clock in the morning so many are empty – but all throb with loud music. Eventually we find a silent bar, order coffee and settle down. But, just as I open my mouth to speak, I’m drowned out by thunderous disco pop. The proprietor has switched on his sound system. My friend rushes up to the bar, grimacing. Could he turn it off, we’re trying to talk. The man refuses, outraged. We have to abandon the coffee and leave. The significant thing is that the bar owner would rather lose customers than please them by turning off the music presumably intended to please them in the first place – because music in bars is normal and these customers are cranks.

The tragedy is that he has a point. Even those who hate music in public places begin, unconsciously, to register it as normal and its absence as abnormal. I go into the London Review Bookshop, one of the last to preserve sacred silence, and the atmosphere seems unnatural, tomblike. Other customers may well feel the same – there are fewer of them. This beautiful shop may well close, validating the music policy of other bookshops and reinforcing the customers’ belief that universal canned music is natural. So the age, relentlessly, inexorably, imposes its will.

What to do? Let it go – or quarrel with colleagues and relatives, and complain to dentists and managers of bookshops? This way lies the self-indulgent crankiness of Schopenhauer who, enraged at having his marvellous thoughts interrupted by a seamstress chattering outside his door, rushed out and threw her downstairs. This episode is instructive in another way, illustrating not just the intolerance and aggression of the despisers but the benefits of what they so violently despised – the enlightenment demand for universal rights. The seamstress took Schopenhauer to court, won her case and obliged him to pay her a quarterly stipend for the rest of her life.

And Juan Ramon’s obsession with silence was also cranky, even farcical. He continually moved apartments to escape noise that would scarcely even register with many contemporary city dwellers – the landlady singing below, Cuban ladies playing the piano above, street vendors, trolley lines and troublesome sparrows outside. In one apartment he attempted the Proust solution of soundproofing a room – hiring carpenters to insulate a wall with a cushion made from sacking and esparto grass. It failed to work so he had to move again. On another occasion he was driven wild by a cricket kept in a cage by the concierge’s son. This time he offered to buy the noisy pest to get rid of it. The boy considered this but failed to understand the cranky motive. As far as he was concerned, noise was good. ‘For twenty-five pesetas,’ the boy said, ‘I will bring you five of the finest crickets imaginable.’

The Rejection of Difficulty and Understanding

I
t is shocking and profoundly regrettable, but, apparently, sales of oranges are falling steadily because people can no longer be bothered to peel them.
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As soon as I read this I began buying oranges more frequently and eating them with greater pleasure. Now I peel an orange very slowly, deliberately, voluptuously, above all
defiantly
, as a riposte to an age that demands war without casualties, public services without taxes, rights without obligations, celebrity without achievement, sex without relationship, running shoes without running, coursework without work and sweet grapes without seeds.

Even the favourite clothes of the age, the T-shirts and tracksuits and fleeces, are lazy, as easy to pull on as to throw off, imposing little constraint and requiring little maintenance. No wonder ties have gone out of fashion. Who, if not obliged by a dress code, would have the energy and patience to knot a tie? I’ve forgotten how to do a Windsor knot myself.

On the intellectual level the news is even more shocking. The last bastion has fallen. Even France has succumbed. The Finance Minister of the country that gave the world the legendary sentence, ‘I think, therefore I am’, has addressed its National Assembly as follows: ‘France is a country that thinks. There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already.’
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And this minister’s boss, the President, proudly declared to a television interviewer, ‘I am not a theoretician. Oh, I am not an intellectual! I am someone concrete.’ To prove the point he poses in dark glasses with the much younger model and singer who has replaced his first wife.

The President is merely doing what is necessary. As the world’s problems become ever more complex and intractable, the world’s leaders are required to make their jobs seem more effortless. Though frequently this is not an illusion – Ronald Reagan genuinely abhorred effort. For a contemporary leader, appearing relaxed is as important as having a full head of hair. (When was the last time a bald man got elected to significant office? Silvio Berlusconi was reinstated as Italian President only after a major hair transplant.)

Difficulty has become repugnant because it denies entitlement, disenchants potential, limits mobility and flexibility, delays gratification, distracts from distraction and demands responsibility, commitment, attention and thought.

So, what is the latest work of a French intellectual to be translated into English? Another impenetrable slab of postmodern theorising? No.
How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
by Pierre Bayard, a university professor of French literature who boasts of teaching books he has never even opened.
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Of course, the cultural world has always been almost entirely peopled by chancers, but brazen bragging about ignorance is new, and reveals the extent of the rejection of difficulty and understanding. And open hostility to intelligence itself is new. Now intelligence is satanic and only fools can be holy. One of religion’s greatest triumphs was to portray reason as arrogant and overweening, Lucifer’s sin of intellectual pride. The modern, or rather postmodern, version of this is that reason is elitist and oppressive. But, to think in order to see the self as it really is – a puny, deformed, fearful thing – and to acknowledge the world as it really is – in all its objective abundance and complexity rather than as a theme park for the gratification of the self – these are surely acts of liberation and humility.

Besides, I have never known a fool who struck me as even remotely holy, nor a fool who, as William Blake claimed, became wise by persisting in folly. Nor a thinker who suffered fools gladly. The Old Testament prophets directed much of their wrath at fools, as did compassionate Christ and even benign Buddha (‘If one were never able to see fools, then one could be forever happy’
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). The nineteenth-century thinkers were even more scathing, but my favourite quote is from Ecclesiastes: ‘For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool.’
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Rational thought has been successfully discredited – and Francis Wheen, in his book
How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
, has catalogued many of the monsters brought forth by the sleep of reason. Can it really be true, as Wheen claims, that the UK government hired a feng shui consultant called Renuka Wickmaratne to advise on improving inner-city council estates and that the advice they got for their money was: ‘Red and orange flowers would reduce crime and introducing a water feature would reduce poverty. I was brought up with this ancient knowledge? That, as a presidential aide put it, ‘virtually every major move and decision’ made by Ronald Reagan, including the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, was first cleared by a San Francisco astrologer called Joan Quigley, who also provided an astrological analysis of the character of Mikhail Gorbachev? That 48 per cent of Americans believe in UFOs, 27 per cent in alien visits to earth, and that 2 per cent (3.7 million people) claim to have been the victims of alien abduction?
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How have such irrationality and credulity come about? As always, there are many causes, overlapping and interacting, in both high and low culture. There is the postmodern promotion of epistemic relativism, which not only rejected reason but also truth, objectivity, meaning and even reality and fact; the age of entitlement’s demand for qualifications without the tedium of difficult study; the preference for presentation over explanation and image over content; the hatred of science, so cold, remote, inhuman, arrogant and oppressive; and the replacement of rational argument by emotion, so warm, human, humble, positive and liberating.

Thinkers themselves, especially Nietzsche and Sartre, must take some of the blame. Nietzsche’s strident denunciations of morality planted the seeds of relativism and Sartre’s hatred of philosophical systems caused him to reject, along with systems, the reason used to develop them – he denounced reason as an ‘iron cage’. This is like blaming a collapsed house on the builders’ tools – but the idea was enthusiastically taken up and extended by the postmodern project, which used reason to attack reason in an attention-seeking vandalism like that of rock musicians destroying their own instruments on stage.

Once reason has been discredited anything goes. Truth becomes merely relative – everyone has a different version of truth and they are all equally valid. So historians began to argue that anyone’s version of events is as good as anyone else’s, and literary critics that a ‘text’ means anything a reader wants it to mean. The great advantage of these approaches is that they render unnecessary the difficult business of establishing meaning and truth.

So science has been derided for its claim to objective truth – and the valid point that science is influenced by the culture in which it operates has been extended to a dismissal of it as merely one more fictional narrative among many. And the fact that modern physics is strange has been used to justify any wacky belief – if science can be weird then anything weird can be science.

And science has been blamed for bringing disenchantment to the human world and devastation to the natural world – despite the fact that scientists tend to regard their discoveries as a source of wonder, and that it was scientists who first issued warnings on the dangers facing the planet and are now attempting to find solutions. But the prize for most ingenious attack on science must go to the philosopher John Gray who claims that science is not based on reason at all: ‘The origins of science are not in rational enquiry but in faith, magic and trickery. Modern science triumphed over its adversaries not through its superior rationality but because its late-medieval and early-modern founders were more skilful than them in the use of rhetoric and the arts of politics.’
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And: ‘As pictured by philosophers, science is a supremely rational activity. Yet the history of science shows scientists flouting the rules of scientific method. Not only the origins but the progress of science comes from acting against reason.’
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What Gray seems to be suggesting is that rejecting the prevailing orthodoxy, which is often how discoveries are made, is ‘acting against reason’, whereas this is the most important use, the very triumph, of reason. Though, in a rare moment of gratitude, Gray acknowledges some benefits of magic and trickery: ‘Anaesthetic dentistry is an unmixed blessing. So are clean water and flush toilets.’
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As well as being derided from above, science is being eaten away from below. It has come to be regarded as the ultimate difficulty, the most forbidding test of understanding. So the numbers of those willing to study it drop year by year. Why submit to mathematical rigour when you can do a degree in Surfing and Beach Management instead? A few years ago, during a university meeting to devise new courses sufficiently undemanding for contemporary youth, I proposed Pizza Studies, a multidisciplinary and highly academic degree requiring students to learn the history of the pizza and at least twenty words of Italian. But life as usual exceeded me with the announcement by McDonald’s that it was awarding academic qualifications. The joke of Pizza Studies was outdone by the reality of Hamburger Studies.