If growing up is a matter of holding the is and the ought in balance, it will never be a stable position: each will always seek the upper hand. Hence growing up is not a task that ever stops. (Perhaps Peter Pan’s Mr Darling thought of himself as grown-up, but no one I know thinks they are.) The sections in this chapter are devoted to the kinds of experiences that are central to the process. Education, travel and work are fixed parts of the lives of most of us. Some ways of going about them will help us in the task of growing up, others will not. The central message of the last chapter – that growing up requires recognizing the gap between is and ought while trying to preserve both – means that no way of acquiring these experiences will be entirely the way it should be. The same parents who anxiously seek the ideal kindergarten for their children will usually acknowledge, not many years later, that whatever they get will be compromise. Not every compromise is rotten, of course, but to decide which ones are acceptable you must look at each case on its own.
Although ‘no’ is a word that toddlers learn early, they have little choice but to accept the choices their parents made; adolescents do their best to reject every one. Growing up is a process of sifting through your parents’ choices about everything: the music you couldn’t help hearing because it was playing on a stereo you couldn’t reach, the religion you couldn’t help believing because you were taken to sermons, or holidays in a car you couldn’t drive, the neighbourhood they set up home in or moved to when they changed jobs, and a host of general values you will not even recognize as values until you are old enough to get out in the world and encounter other ones. Sometimes when you’re sifting, with any luck at all, you’ll be able to say that’s just what I’d have chosen had I been able to choose myself, and thank your parents for it one way or another, if only by living in a way that proves them right. On the other hand, if you don’t reject any of their choices you are not grown-up – if only because their choices were made in a time that isn’t this one, and not all of them fit into the world you now inhabit.
The early years of education, in particular, are up to someone else. Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future contains a wonderful description of education’s goal:
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, not to strike from their hands the chance of undertaking something new, something foreseen by no one, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world. (‘The Crisis in Education’, in Between Past and Future, p. 285)
Blessed is the child who falls into the hands of more than one teacher who sees her task that way; even one can be enough to salvage the experience. For most of us, schools are something different: institutions that do a great deal to break rather than further the natural urge to explore the world that any baby’s eyes reveal. (If Kant is right, those eyes reflect the Unconditioned, that idea of a world that makes sense as a whole that drives us to ask why.) To be sure, some of the worst parts of formal education – rote learning, corporal punishment – have been largely abolished, and some of Rousseau’s ideas on education have been taken up so thoroughly that we no longer recognize them as his. In 1992 the Scottish educator John Darling wrote that the history of child-centred educational theory is a series of footnotes to Rousseau.20 Not everyone views this as commendable, and I’ve argued above that even Emile cannot work. Still we owe to its author the idea that much of traditional education is not simply inadequate but counterproductive, killing the very desire to learn it is meant to sustain – as well as the suspicion that this death is not accidental. As Rousseau pointed out in 1763, schoolchildren who are used to sitting still while a bored teacher’s jabber washes over them are unlikely, as adults, to stand up when a politician lies. Thomas Jefferson wrote that the chief political function of society is to educate its young. He may have had in mind a school system that produced active, vibrant, enlightened children, but as they are now, most schools produce docility and dull resentment. Small wonder so many children experience them as prisons.
The fact that children like Malala Yousafzai are willing to risk their lives to enter one is not simply due to the fact that forbidden fruits are the sweetest. They know that even a limited education will give them access to parts of the world that are otherwise closed. Malala is particularly admirable, but she is not entirely unique. In countries where access to schooling can be limited by a family’s ability to pay for shoes or pencils, schoolbooks are treated like treasure. These facts should make those of us who live in more fortunate circumstances pause, but they should not make us complacent. Traditional schooling may be better than none at all, just as rice and beans are cherished by a child who is starving, but neither can provide the nourishment body and soul need to flourish.
Thus it’s no surprise that educational reform has been a central goal of every progressive movement since the Enlightenment. This isn’t a matter of improving efficiency or test scores, but of confronting the ways in which so many schools are organized to reduce human potential rather than develop it. In the most surprising of Kant’s remarks on education, he takes it as given that a major function of schooling is to make us sit still.
Children are sent to school initially not with the intention that they should already learn something there, but rather that they may grow accustomed to sitting still and observing exactly what they are told, so that in the future they may not put into practice actually and instantly each notion that strikes them. (Lectures on Pedagogy, p. 438)
As the final clause makes clear, Kant is not endorsing the practice as a means of driving the child into submission; elsewhere he inveighs against the then-common idea that education is a matter of breaking the child’s will. Rather, he thinks such training important to encourage the child to develop self-discipline, for the alternative is a creature like Peter Pan, who is helplessly at the mercy of every passing whim. Children do need to be taught that not everything worth learning can be learned by following natural inclinations. Languages and music, for example, require tedious exercises that must be repeated in order to get to the point where the violin stops squeaking and the sentences no longer clunk. The exercises are not merely dull but regressive, returning us to the bare-bones achievements of earliest childhood. Even adults who cherish Peter Pan fantasies will baulk when reduced to linguistic toddlerhood – one reason why both languages and music should be learned as early as possible. (A second reason has to do with neurobiology rather than psychology, and is equally important. Our brains are shaped by experience, but never so much as in early childhood. The brain of a child who has learned a second language by the age of ten has been moulded in ways that make it much easier to learn a third or a fourth.) Children do not know the pleasures that will come with those delays of gratification, and someone needs to tell them, usually rather often. Kant sees discipline as a means to greater freedom, which is the subject of most of his discussions of education.
He was particularly interested in the work of Johann Bernhard Basedow, the German pedagogue who founded the first school in Europe that was explicitly based on Rousseau’s educational principles. Opened in 1774, the Philanthropinum, Basedow’s school in Dessau, was the subject of Kant’s most fulsome prose:
Perhaps never before has a more just demand been made on the human race, and never before has such a great and more self-extending benefit been more unselfishly offered, than is now the case with Herr Basedow, a man who, together with his praiseworthy assistants, has solemnly devoted himself to the welfare and betterment of human beings.21
Thanks to the ‘fiery and constant enthusiasm of a single astute and sprightly man’, he continues, the creation of an educational institution which is fitted to nature is no longer a dim and distant wish but a reality. Europe has no dearth of schools, but they were all ‘spoiled at the outset, because everything in them works against nature, the good to which nature has given the predisposition is far from being drawn out in the human being’.22 Given that traditional schools are spoiled at the outset, Kant demands not ‘slow reform but swift revolution’: the entire organization and the teachers themselves must be transformed. For this, he believed, nothing more was necessary than one school that was established in a radically new way.
Kant’s extravagant prose had a purpose, for Basedow’s school in Dessau attracted not only his admiration but his only known foray into fund-raising. Kant’s words were constructed to encourage his audience to reach into their pockets:
We … look forward to numerous subscriptions, from all gentlemen of the clerical and teaching professions, from parents in general, to whom nothing that serves the improved formation of their children can be indifferent, yes even from those who, although they do not have children, still formerly as children received an education and because of this will recognize the obligation to contribute their share, if not to the reproduction then at least to the formation of human beings. Subscriptions to the monthly publication of the Dessau Educational Institute, under the title of Educational Treatises, are now being accepted for 2 Reichstaler 10 Groschen of our currency. But since some additional payments might be demanded at the end of the year due to the as of yet indeterminable number of sheets, it would perhaps be best (but this is left to each person’s discretion) to dedicate a Ducat, in the way of a subscription, to the furtherance of this work, whereupon the surplus is to be paid back correctly to each person who should demand it.23
Though fund-raising pitches look rather different nowadays, Kant’s Lectures on Pedagogy displays a savvy concern for the relationships between funding and control. His only criticism of Basedow had to do with the school director’s reliance on royal support.
For experience teaches that the princes have not so much the best for the world in mind but the well-being of their state, so that they may reach their own goals. If, however, they provide the money, then the design of the plan must be left in their hands. (Lectures on Pedagogy, p. 443)
Kant concludes that private funding is the best guarantee for educational transformation, since ‘all culture begins with private individuals and extends outward from there’ (Ibid). Like other aspects of fund-raising, private funding in Kant’s day was not what it is in ours. He could not envision a world in which large businesses make large contributions to public education in order to sell their products to a quite literally captive audience. In the United States, for example, 80 percent of public high schools have signed contracts for ‘pouring rights’ with Coca-Cola or Pepsi, which require the schools to buy a certain amount of soda in exchange for donations that support educational activities that cash-strapped school boards cannot fund. Kant warned against the undue influence that princes might exercise on educational institutions that depended on their funding. How could he imagine that private corporations, two centuries later, might exert more subtle forms of control? It’s a development of which any country that values education for some reason other than producing new consumers should beware.
Basedow never succeeded in raising enough private subscriptions to do without princely subsidies, and the Philanthropinum closed after twenty years. Basedow himself seems to have been better at conceiving educational theory than in managing a school, and left considerably earlier. But the Philanthropinum inspired a host of similar institutions across Europe and in North America, and was reopened in Dessau after the end of the Second World War, where it exists to this day. You can find it on Facebook. Progressive schools rarely last as long as traditional ones – something usually gets lost when their original founders quit or retire – but tireless and hopeful educators and parents continue to create new ones. In this they may be sustained by Kant’s thought that good education must be the work of generations, for we are all the products of education we did not choose, and each must work to bring posterity further than we ourselves have gone. This won’t give much comfort to the parent who is leery of leaving a child in the hands of those who are unable or unwilling to keep her best interests in mind, still less to the child who is stifled and bored in too many classrooms, day after long day. Those with time and resources may choose to educate their children at home, but most of us will scrounge for the best alternative at hand. We’d prefer a school that cultivates our children’s autonomy, following Kant’s three principles:
1. From earliest childhood the child must be allowed to be free in all matters (except in those where it might injure itself, as, for example, when it grabs an open knife).
2. The child must be shown that it can only reach its goals by letting others also reach theirs.
3. One must prove to it that restraint is put on it in order that it may be led to the use of its own freedom, that it is cultivated so that it may one day be free, that is, so that it need not depend on the care of others. (Lectures on Pedagogy, pp. 447–8)
And we may agree with Kant that experiments in education are necessary in order to discover, through experience, which methods are most suited to carry out those principles, and that ‘since experiments matter, no one generation can present a complete plan of education’ (Ibid, p. 445).
Sometimes we will see signs of progress. In many places, methods have become more open, teachers more attuned to children’s different needs. The textbooks my children used were better than my own, which discussed American history without even mentioning the genocide of Native Americans, or suggesting that girls could aspire to be much besides mothers. But signs of progress are only useful if they show that progress is possible, thereby sustaining our efforts to make more. For more is absolutely necessary. Most politicians pay lip service to claims like Kant’s, for whom ‘good education is exactly that from which all the good in the world arises’ (Ibid, p. 443). But apart from notable exceptions like Finland, teachers continue to be underpaid and undervalued, and schools continue to languish. Parents who find themselves agreeing with Kant, or simply remembering the simmering frustration of their own school days, can despair at their failure to offer their child the education she deserves.
They will seek the best alternative available, and do what they can to be active in improving whatever school they find. (Or found, if they’re really ambitious.) They will try to offer shelter by validating some of their child’s perceptions about what is going wrong in the formal education they have chosen for them. And then they’ll have to face it: they are not raising Emile. Whether or not they read the book, they are likely to have begun their lives as parents gripped by its message: nothing in the world is more important than raising a free and happy child. Then the rest of the world kicked in. Unlike Emile’s tutor, their knowledge and power are both limited – sometimes very limited, as anyone who has raised children will know. Measured by the ideals they had for their child on the day she was born, they will fail. They may take heart from British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s theories. Winnicott’s attention was focused on infants, for whom a perfect parent would be a problem. If the infant never experiences anxiety, she will never experience herself as an autonomous being who can act in the world. By contrast,
The good-enough mother … starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant’s growing ability to deal with her failure. Her failure to adapt to every need of the child helps them adapt to external realities.24
Winnicott’s view that the growing child needs to experience her parents’ failings in order to gauge and develop her own strength lends weight to the criticism we saw of Emile. The tutor (or mother or father) who creates a world in which the child only experiences things working as they ought to will not be fit for this one. And so we might aspire to a different goal: Kant said that good parents have a duty to raise a child who is glad to have been born.
* * *
For many children, the experience of formal education is the experience where the gap between is and ought begins to yawn. Yes, there was teething, and a hundred other pains and frustrations that made no sense. But usually, it’s school that presents the first institutionalized instance of dramatic conflict between the ideals that are stated and the experience that is lived. In earlier times, Jewish boys as young as three were sent to cheder, where they learned the Hebrew alphabet from wooden blocks dipped in honey. In today’s Germany, children are given large paper cones filled with candy on their first day of school. Kant, for whom it is always a mistake to provide external rewards for something that should be done freely, would have blanched at such customs. For the children are not free, and they soon come to suspect that the sweets are meagre compensation for the bitterness of the fact that what they’re told isn’t true. The step into the world of education will not – or not only – help them grow and flourish; it will also stunt and wither them.
All right then: the education your parents could provide was flawed. All the more reason to take it into your own hands as soon as you can. The time of reaching legal maturity – somewhere between eighteen and twenty-one these days, though research suggests that our brains don’t reach maturity until we’re about twenty-five – may be the hardest time of your life. For it’s the first time your choices stand in the foreground. Too much in the foreground: since it’s likely to be the first time you made any significant ones, every choice has so much weight as to feel immovable. The pressure to get it all right is enormous: this course of study, this job, this love will determine your fate ever after. It takes another decade to learn that few mistakes are irrevocable. In the meantime, improving on the education you did not choose by making choices of your own can only be of use. Here are a few thoughts on how to do so.
Avoid places where you are the smartest person in the room, and seek out those where you aren’t. This could stand as a rule for getting an education, but it doesn’t always happen in schools or even universities, and it certainly shouldn’t stop with them. Minds need at least as much exercise as bodies, but all too many people get stuck lifting light weights. Nor can you know in advance who has knowledge or wisdom that you might need. The smartest people I know are those who can quote classics from multiple traditions and learn from the astute street vendor on the corner.
About those classics: there’s a reason they’re still around. Invent what you like, but the wheel has been in evidence for about six millennia, and it needn’t be invented again. Reading The Republic should make many a latter-day Thrasymachus stop short. He may have discovered something troubling, but he hasn’t discovered anything new. If he wants to move the conversation about morality and power forward, he’d better know what Plato had to say about it. (At a time when so many questions about sexual relationships are up in the air he might also be interested to know that Plato banned monogamy from his ideal state, on the grounds that fathers who don’t know exactly which children are theirs will be committed to raising each one.) War and Peace will open a window to nineteenth-century Russia, as Middlemarch does to nineteenth-century England, but either book will make you think differently about love and loss and integrity, and growing up with all of them. You may be an atheist, but if you never read the great texts of religion you will not understand the world’s history, nor many parts of its present.
The last few decades have seen fierce debate about what is called the canon. The very word suggests ecclesiastical decree, as if a corpus of old texts were handed down by fiat, and could be ignored as soon as you’ve decided that authorities no longer dictate what you read. But though the canon may need to be widened, most of its contents hold up, and few things are more misguided than the attempts of some educators to appeal to their students by doing away with classic texts, often in the name of avoiding Eurocentrism. They would do better to look to the Enlightenment, often wrongly thought to be the source of Eurocentrism itself. Quite to the contrary, its authors knew how to value both universal principles and particular differences, and they knew how to tell one from the other. They were steeped in classical Western literature, though they were more likely to read Latin than Greek, but they were well aware of how much they had to learn from other cultures. Montesquieu’s Persian Letters criticized Europe from a Muslim perspective, over Voltaire’s desk hung a portrait of Confucius and Rousseau pleaded for knowledge of Africa that was not written by travellers ‘more interested in filling their purses than their minds’. A grown-up relationship to your culture is no different from a grown-up relationship to your parents. You must decide which parts of the inheritance you want to make your own – but you have to examine it first. De Beauvoir put the matter eloquently: to abandon the past is to depopulate the world.25
I have argued that the work of Immanuel Kant – though harder to read than that of Tolstoy or Eliot, or even Plato and Rousseau – is a bequest to be particularly cherished, though I’m well aware that some will find my emphasis not only on reading classics, but on reading at all to be out of date. Even for those of us who grew up with a love for words on pages, more reading takes place on screens these days than off them. This is not the place to survey the debate about what the internet is doing to our minds; there is much we don’t know. I believe that the internet appeals to human needs for activity. When you read on the web you are not held in place by an author’s intentions; you can always decide to click, click again. It’s activity that can feel exhilarating, but also frenetic, and its relation to real action is no different from the relation between fast food and a warm, well-cooked stew. Reading a book demands passivity, the willingness to open yourself up to an author’s design, before you use your imagination and your reason to think with her.
Plato deplored the invention of writing, which he feared would ruin our memories. How very good their memories must have been can be seen by recalling that we have no texts by Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey, the first two great works of Western literature, are transcriptions from bards who sang them from memory centuries after they were composed. Still I’m not about to echo Plato. I spend hours most days in cyberspace, and am grateful for many of its resources; I even click on most of the links I receive from Amnesty International or Avaaz, and no longer wince at return mails that thank me for taking action. I am simply suggesting you limit your time in cyberspace, and experience action more palpable than making a cursor click. Even a week off the web can work wonders for your imagination, and your sense of being in the world.
A whole week without the internet?
When I’ve spoken of the good it’s done me, most people have baulked. Nice work if you can get it, but mine depends on the web. So does much of mine. Thankfully, most of us have some form of vacation, but studies show that most of us stay connected even then. In fact, work often serves as a pretext; these days you’re lucky if only half of the mail you receive is spam. For the rest of it, there are internet cafés most everywhere if you need to send a sign of life to whomever you left behind, but you needn’t stay much longer than it takes to drink an espresso. This usually entails nothing worse than ignoring the magazines in your inbox that lure you with the promise of understanding something important. How often does that promise turn out to be a decoy that keeps you hooked on stories about the sleaziest romance or the most lurid crime of people you will never meet? Unless you’re the foreign minister of a major country, even real news can go on without you for a while. And my job? If you have done it well thus far, you need not be at its mercy, and scientific investigation is hardly required to prove that the web is not only a means to productivity: honest introspection will do. But there are scientific investigations, with variations in the numbers. A recent German study estimated that we waste, on average, two working days each week writing emails that nobody needs; a recent American study concluded that 80 percent of work time spent online is unproductive; and a recent British study estimated the annual cost of cyberloafing to be billions of pounds.
Once again, just for emphasis: I’m not suggesting that we do without the web entirely, just that we refuse to let it rule. You can only find out how much it rules your life if you do without it on occasion. Doing so should leave your mind less cluttered, your thoughts more focused, and lead you to acknowledge that Rousseau’s lesson still holds true: less is necessary, and more is possible, than we are ever led to believe.
But education hardly stops with book learning – or screen learning, as the case may be. To be sure, the advice to consider travel as part of an education is also advice to stay unplugged for a while. If you stay online long in Sicily you might as well stay home and look at someone else’s postings.
In the fourth century of the Common Era, Augustine introduced a metaphor: ‘The world is a book, and those who do not travel know only one page.’ Augustine read widely, to follow his own metaphor. The man who recorded his life as a sinner and went on to become a saint was born in today’s Algeria, moved on to Carthage and lived in Rome and Milan before returning to his homeland to become bishop of Hippo. It’s an estimable itinerary, particularly when compared with others. Even Kant, as we saw, wrote that travel is a good means of broadening one’s knowledge of the world, though it’s hardly surprising that he wrote less enthusiastically about it than others. He also wrote that the right to visit other countries should become a condition of perpetual peace. His Lectures on Pedagogy suggest that schools begin with geography when teaching children, and point out that even small children are fascinated by maps.
One can’t help but wonder: when reading Emile did he have a moment of envy? It’s not an emotion we have reason to ascribe to the sage of Königsberg, though he did describe himself as a melancholic. Could he have sighed with longing when he reached Book V, where Rousseau insists that Emile must travel through Europe for two years, learn two or three of its principal languages in addition to his native one, and see everything there that is truly of interest, whether in nature, in government, in the arts or in men? For Rousseau was explicit: ‘I hold it to be an incontestable maxim that whoever has seen only one people does not know men; he knows only the people with whom he has lived’ (Emile, p. 451).
This remains as true in an era when we can watch Korean rap videos as it was in Rousseau’s time. Indeed, perhaps more so: globalization gives us the illusion of knowing other cultures far better than we do. Nor is cultural ignorance confined to the less educated. I’ve met educated Americans who were firmly convinced that the German subway system, which doesn’t require travellers to present a ticket to enter, could not possibly work (it does, relying on an honour system with occasional controls); educated Britons who couldn’t imagine Nazis as ordinary people who might eat apple crumble (they did, and they also drank, slept and defecated like anyone else); educated Germans who were quite certain that Americans were incapable of understanding irony (how should an ironically functional American respond to that?). The fact that some of them were professors is not only a comment on the self-incurred immaturity of scholars, of whom Kant remarks
Scholars usually are glad to allow themselves to be kept in immaturity by their wives with regard to domestic arrangements. A scholar, buried in his books, answered the screams of a servant that there was a fire in one of the rooms: ‘You know, things of that sort are my wife’s affair.’ (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, p. 104)
A less educated man might be better at putting out local fires, but he will often be just as helpless in confronting the rest of the world. What counts as rude and what counts as vulgar, which gestures are threatening and which are encouraging, what is kind and what is overbearing will likely be different from one land to the next. If you do not travel you are likely to suppose your own cultural assumptions to make up human reality – for you can only recognize what those assumptions are if you have lived in a place that runs on different ones. Travel is as important for learning about yourself and your own culture as it is for understanding others.
So Rousseau holds travel to be a crucial part of coming of age. But ‘To become informed, it is not sufficient to roam through various countries. It is necessary to know how to travel’ (Emile, p. 452). To travel simply to inform oneself is too vague an aim; young people should have a palpable interest in becoming informed. Emile is told to travel in order to study different forms of government, so that he may decide which one he wants to live under. This is not, Rousseau warns, a matter of studying ‘the apparent form of a government disguised by the machinery of administration and the jargon of administrators’ but of going into the country and seeing the government’s effects on people’s lives. (Had the aforementioned American professor observed the way subsidized public transportation actually functions in Germany he could hardly have remained convinced it was impossible.) Emile should examine the ways in which ordinary lives are affected by different political systems, so as to choose a home for his future family ‘where one is always permitted to be a decent man’ (Ibid, p. 457).
Rousseau is explicit not only about the goal of Emile’s travels but equally about their form. Having crossed the Alps by foot himself, he was adamant that no other kind of travel is better:
To travel on foot is to travel like Thales, Plato and Pythagoras. It is hard for me to understand how a philosopher can resolve to travel any other way and tear himself away from the examination of the riches which he tramples underfoot and which the earth lavishly offers to his sight. Who that has some liking for agriculture does not want to know the products peculiar to the climate of the places he has passed through and the way in which they are cultivated? Who that has some taste for natural history can resolve to pass by a piece of land without examining it, a boulder without chipping it, mountains without herborizing, stones without looking for fossils?… I see all that a man can see, and depending only on myself, I enjoy all the liberty a man can enjoy. (Ibid, p. 412)
Other means of travelling earned Rousseau’s scorn and pity; those who do not walk, sit ‘sadly, like prisoners, in a small, closed-up cage’. It’s a mercy he didn’t live to witness the railroad that shocked later generations. In an 1837 letter the French writer Victor Hugo described a train journey:
The flowers at the edge of the field are no longer flowers but specks of colour, or rather red and white stripes; there are no longer any points at all, just streaks; the cities, the church towers, and the trees perform a dance mixed up in a crazy way with the horizon. (Quoted in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise, p. 54)
Hugo was not alone. Countless numbers of his contemporaries complained that train journeys had made the landscape evaporate. By the mid-nineteenth century, a means had been found to compensate travellers for the railways’ unnerving speed: the book. W. H. Smith received its first concession to sell books in London’s Euston Station in 1848. The assumption that trains are good for reading (as well as the proliferation of station bookstores) quickly spread across Europe – in order to politely avoid conversation with other passengers as well as to console for the loss of landscape that disturbed Hugo, and would have inflamed Rousseau. It’s interesting to imagine what they would have said about easyJet.
Rousseau was not the last philosopher to cross swathes of Europe by foot. Simone de Beauvoir did it often, both with and without Sartre, and her descriptions of the experience are as rapturous as Rousseau’s. In 1934, for example, she
walked solidly for three weeks, keeping away from main roads and taking short cuts through woods and fields. Every peak was a challenge. Eagerly my eyes drank in the magnificent scenery – lakes, waterfalls, hidden gorges and valleys. I carried all my possessions on my back, I had no idea where I would sleep each night, and I was still on the move when the first star pierced the sky … Often I could not bear the thought of being cut off from grass and trees and sky: at least I wanted to keep their scent with me. So instead of taking a room in the inn, I would trudge on another four or five miles and beg hospitality in some hamlet, and the smell of hay would drift through my dreams. (The Prime of Life, p. 217)
I can’t shake a feeling somewhere between envy and melancholy when reading such lines, or de Beauvoir’s descriptions of exploring the Colosseum in the Roman starlight, seeking traces of Shakespeare and Dickens in London, playing Greek music on the deck of a boat from Santorini. Their journeys were frequent, long, and intensive in ways that are nearly impossible to replicate now. Those journeys, said Sartre, not only made him wild with delight; they gave him an extra dimension.26 Such travel undoubtedly brings you closer to everything you left home to see, be it the glories of the natural world or the curiosities of those who people it. But the Colosseum was jammed last time I saw it, and it’s hard to find places where you could walk for three weeks without running into barriers (or shotguns, if you tried to do so in some parts of the United States). Several northern European countries guarantee the right to roam with few restrictions; Scotland, Norway and Estonia are among the nations whose laws protect public access to land. But with increasingly less of it available, and increasingly more travellers to share it with, few of us will be able to imitate Rousseau and de Beauvoir even if we’re so inclined. Travel on foot, like Rousseau’s second-best option, travel on horseback, largely belongs to the past.
By contrast, Rousseau’s description of the wrong way to travel feels remarkably contemporary. Travel is a crucial part of Emile’s education, but it isn’t right for everyone. For those who are missing the openness and powers of observation that Emile’s education provided, travel can be worse than useless:
What makes it still more unfruitful for young people is the way they are made to do it. Governors, who are more interested in their own entertainment than in their pupils’ instruction, lead them from city to city, from palace to palace, from social circle to social circle; or if the governors are learned and men of letters, they make their pupils spend their time roaming libraries, visiting antique shops, going through old monuments and transcribing old inscriptions … The result is that, after having roamed Europe at great expense, abandoned to frivolities or boredom, they return without having seen anything which can interest them or learned anything which can be useful to them. (Emile, p. 468)
This could serve as a comment on most of the thousands of university programmes that send young people abroad with the promise of learning in and from another culture, and keep them in conditions under which they cannot possibly do so. They are given just enough language training to allow them to order a beer or a bread loaf, taught other subjects by (usually underpaid and often underqualified) instructors in their own language, and kept busily separate from all but chance encounters with the young people of the country in which they are staying. The cocoon thus created is far tighter than the one they inhabited at home. Even in the protected environment of an American college, the student’s native cultural competence permits her to have a conversation with a baker or a bartender that could bring her into contact with a wider world, or get a job as a waitress that will teach her even more. Not every student will take advantage of those opportunities, but the typical foreign exchange student does not have them at all. She returns from Rome or Paris worse off than when she left, for she is likely to believe that she was given the foreign experience the university advertised – when she was simply transferred from one cloister to another. The vague sense of disappointment she may feel on her return will likely be felt as another disappointment with the world itself, which turned out to be no different than what she already knew. For there it is on her CV: she has lived in France.
Travel is meant to help us come of age, but it often turns out to be another form of infantilization. This is just as true of most adult ways of travelling. The American philosopher George Santayana was generous in writing:
The latest type of traveler, and the most notorious, is the tourist. Having often been one myself, I will throw no stones at him; from the tripper off on a holiday to the eager pilgrim thirsting for facts or for beauty, all tourists are dear to Hermes, the god of travel, who is patron also of amiable curiosity and freedom of mind. There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.27
Born in Spain to a diplomatic family, the multilingual Santayana would have been a rather different tourist than most. Even more important, he wrote these lines at the turn of the last century. In 2012, the World Tourist Organization counted 1.035 billion foreign tourists. Most of them travel in groups with their country-folk, shepherded by guides who rush them through a list that consists less of sights to be seen than of backdrops for photographs, before depositing them at shops whose wares they could have bought at home. It’s an experience that positively precludes real encounters with the country they are visiting, for the very sight of such a group causes native inhabitants to depart – unless they have something to sell them, hiding snickers with smiles just long enough for money to change hands. Pace Santayana, it’s hard to imagine such tourists are any dearer to Hermes than they are to the people whose capitals they clog.
Mass tourism presents a democratic veneer, allowing millions at least a glimpse of the experiences that were formerly restricted to people of privilege. But travel is not about glimpsing, and only partly about seeing; it’s a matter of keeping all your senses open to other ways of being in the world. Nor is it only mass tourism that prevents the experience it professes to offer. Any honest traveller annoyed by the mobs that prevent her from being alone with Michelangelo or bartering in a souk will admit that she’s part of the problem. For those for whom a modicum of wealth or fame provide the access, there are ways of travelling that are more exclusive and less noisy, but they rarely provide insight into anything foreign. David Lodge’s brilliant descriptions of scientific conferences could apply with minor changes to international art fairs, psychoanalytic congresses, or the world economic forum at Davos.
Whheeeeee! Europe, here we come! Or Asia, or America, or wherever. It’s June, and the conference season is well and truly open. The whole academic world seems to be on the move. Half the passengers on transatlantic flights these days are university teachers. Their luggage is heavier than average, weighed down with books and papers – and bulkier, because their wardrobes must embrace both formal wear and leisure wear, clothes for attending lectures in, and clothes for going to the beach in, or to the Museum, or the Schloss, or the Duomo, or the Folk Village. For that’s the attraction of the conference circuit: it’s a way of converting work into play, combining professionalism with tourism, and all at someone else’s expense. Write a paper and see the world! I’m Jane Austen – fly me! Or Shakespeare, or T. S. Eliot, or Hazlitt. All tickets to ride, to ride the jumbo jets. Wheeeeeee! (Small World, p. 231)
Such tours are better packaged: the guardians more deferential, the sights more exceptional and the food assuredly better than what’s offered by student exchange programmes or mass excursions, but the packaging remains. Hence they feed even bigger illusions (If some institution or other is willing to pay for me to get from here to there, aren’t I really a grown-up now?) while doing little more to expand the experience of new worlds.
Nostalgia isn’t helpful, though it would be stupid to deny that we have lost a part of the world we should have tried harder to keep. With one-sixth of the world’s population choosing to be on the move, travel cannot be what it was in earlier times. No doubt eighteenth-century travellers had other causes for worry besides crowds – that is, other travellers – like the highwaymen who appear when the roads are empty. Still it’s hard not to miss the days when travellers were fewer and less guarded, their destinations bare of branches of multinational corporations bent on making every place look like every other. Then again, not every eighteenth-century traveller was able to see the unfamiliar. Despite a considerable amount of time spent in a France that was far more different from his Britain than it is to ours, Hume could write:
Should a traveller, returning from a far country, bring us an account of men, wholly different from any with whom we were ever acquainted … we should immediately, from these circumstances, detect the falsehood, and prove him a liar, with the same certainty as if he had stuffed his narration with stories of centaurs and dragons. (Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, p. 84)
Wholly different from any with whom we were ever acquainted. But that’s just what you travel to find out. Are we moved by the same passions, do we have the same dreams? Are there universal principles of human nature? Differences that do not translate? Every good traveller is a nascent anthropologist, seeking to understand what is similar and what is distinct in peoples and cultures. The only feasible way for mortals to do so is to spend real time in one or preferably two cultures that are significantly different from their own. (Two are more than twice as good as one. If you have only lived in one foreign country, you’ll be inclined to split the world into two ways of being, and seesaw forever between them. Living in a third brings home the idea that there are many ways to diverge.) Global capitalism has reduced cultural contrasts, but it hasn’t erased them. To watch a German waiting for a McDonald’s on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz and an American in the same queue is to see all the differences: how the German orders, how the American stands, how they count their change and take their bags and depart with their friends is to see how much culture remains even where it might seem lost.
Living in another culture means working in it, preferably not in the foreign branch of your current employer. Diplomats are usually transferred every few years to prevent their going native. I’m suggesting, by contrast, that you do so, as far as it’s humanly possible. Working lets you learn what tourists cannot know. For taking responsibility and avoiding it, how goals are set and tasks divided, what is collective and what is independent all look somewhat different in different cultures. None of those are things that can be learned quickly. It requires at the very least a year, which also gives you a sense of the rhythm of seasons, and how differently changes of light and heat and foliage change ordinary lives. Ideally you should live in a place that requires you to learn a language that is not your mother tongue, for every language conveys presumptions that are concealed until compared with another one. How do you think about gender in a language where all the objects have one, or where none of them do? What about all the verbs? How do you deal with intimacy in a language that addresses people differently according to distance, or with hierarchies when it distinguishes according to age? What to do when you find their form of expression to be ponderous or flowery, and they find yours to be rude?
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: ‘A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about.’28 Travelling wisely preserves just this state, and part of the reason it helps in growing up is that it requires a return to positions you left as a child. You do not know how far your standing – your success at school or work, your place in a family or a town – keeps you grounded until you give it up. You will smile and nod too often at all the things you do not understand. You will be helpless before tasks that once seemed so easy you never stopped to reflect how many kinds of competence they require. You will feel overwhelmed and lonely, and you may find comfort in the French philosopher Camus’s remark that what gives value to travel is fear. You will also feel the small child’s wonder at the most everyday pieces of your new world, for the trash bins on the road to Marrakesh and the trees on the streets of Odessa reveal stories about the people who live, and lived there. (Substitute, at random, your favourite points of wonder.) But you will likely conclude – as Kant said of Adam and Eve, on some accounts the world’s first travellers – that however comfortable it was to stay in the garden, the departure from home was the first step to freedom, and thence to progress. Like any departure, it is also a loss.
It’s easy to hear the grumble: this is all very well for those who can afford it, but few people have the means for that kind of travel. Neither Rousseau nor the young de Beauvoir could afford to travel in style, and each of them told stories of being stuck in foreign towns without a sou, dining on bread and onions or sleeping in abandoned huts. Travelling without money is one thing the internet has made easier since their days. If you’re willing to work for food and lodging, you can pick tea in India, teach Ugandan orphans to dance, staff the office of a chocolate factory in Guatemala, plant grapes in Albania, dig with archaeologists in Siberia, construct sustainable farms in Morocco. Those looking for tamer stuff can care for the very young or very old in Cornwall, or tend a restaurant garden in southern France. These are a fraction of the possibilities found in a few minutes’ search of a single website, and they are open to people of any age. All it costs is a ticket to get there and the decision to reject the voices that tell you such journeys are impossible. Perhaps they do not want you to understand where you came from: for that’s the greatest gift that travel will give you.
For the ancient philosophers, work was something done by slaves or women, and therefore not worthy of interest. Despite the many differences between them, both Plato and Aristotle believed that a life devoted to contemplation was the highest form of living. One hallmark of modernity was a reversal of this value: not contemplation but activity came to be seen as most fundamentally human. Chalk it up, if you like, to changing conceptions of property. John Locke was the first philosopher to write seriously about labour. His Second Treatise of Government, published in 1689, asked how private property can be justified if the Bible tells us that God gave the earth to humankind in common. His answer was simple: even in the state of nature we own our bodies, and if we mix the labour of our bodies with something, we own that thing too. The farmer who tills the earth, plants a seed, tends a sapling and harvests its fruits has every right to have them – as long as he only takes as much as he can eat before they rot, and leaves enough and as good for others. It’s such a sweet account of private property that Rousseau sets Emile to plant a bean patch in order to understand it. But Locke’s conditions on accumulation were circumvented by the invention of money, which unlike plums or apples, never rots, and it’s been argued that Locke’s theory was actually developed in order to justify early capital accumulation. Contemporary industrialists are happy to use the view to argue for lower taxes, as if founding a company (dependent on workers who actually make things as well as the schools that train them and the roads they use to reach the factory, not to mention the police who keep others from stealing it) were equivalent to working one’s own little plot of land. But for all the ways in which Locke’s labour theory of property may be inadequate it did have the advantage of moving labour to centre stage.
For Kant it is action that gives life meaning, so much so that action becomes a duty. His Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals considers a rich man who has no need to work and is inclined to let his talents rust and give his life over to idleness, amusement and procreation ‘like the South Sea islanders’. Should he do it, Kant says, he would neglect his duty to his own humanity, since he, like the rest of us, was born with faculties that were made to be developed.
Just as false is the idea that if Adam and Eve had only remained in paradise they would have done nothing there but sit together, sing arcadian songs, and observe the beauty of nature. Certainly boredom would have tortured them just as much as it does other people in a similar situation. The human being must be so occupied that he is filled with the purpose that he has before his eyes, in such a way that he is not conscious of himself at all, and the best rest for him is one that comes after work. (Lectures on Pedagogy, p. 461)
Hegel’s paean to labour went considerably further. In his account of the epic struggle for recognition with which the consciousness of our own humanity begins, work has the upper hand. History, in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), begins with a battle in which the defeated man becomes the other’s slave. But the master’s triumph is short-lived, for the slave who is forced to work for him is actually doing something, which makes him the motor that pushes world-history forward. Indeed in giving form to matter, he’s the living image of God. Hegel’s dialectic was the starting point for Marx’s view that our capacity to work is what distinguishes us from animals, making us the creative beings we project onto the heavens. A few higher animals do make occasional products, but only humans produce the means of production themselves. Thus the alienation of labour – the fact that most of us sell our capacity to labour to someone who owns the means of production – not only deprives workers of the fruits of their labour by paying them 1/200th of the salary that goes to their CEO (the international average as of this writing, not including bonuses and stock options); it deprives workers of the very meaning of labour itself – that human activity that makes us free of nature, hence almost divine. In a truly human society, Marx thought all our capacities to work would develop: we would hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and do philosophy after dinner.
Arendt was so convinced that activity is essential to being human that she gave her book The Human Condition a Latin title: Vita Activa. She ties activity to natality, which we saw she viewed as the central category of political thought:
Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species. Work and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history. Labor and work, as well as action, are also rooted in natality insofar as they have the task to provide and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers. (The Human Condition, pp. 8–9)
Arendt wanted to make the general Enlightenment claims about human activity more specific, and criticized Marx, in particular, for failing to distinguish between labour and work. Labour is the sort of thing we do of necessity, the repetitive production of – chiefly edible – goods that we need to survive. It is never entirely free, for its demands are made by nature, nor does it produce anything that lasts. Work, by contrast, is the activity that has the free and divine qualities glimpsed by Hegel and Marx. For work is the creation of lasting objects, from tables to artworks, that create a world that allows us to determine a place in the universe that would otherwise be as inconstant and impermanent as we are. Very early, we learn we will perish:
The task and potential greatness of mortals lie in their ability to produce things – works and deeds and words – which would deserve to be, and at least to a degree, are at home in everlastingness, so that through them mortals could find a place in a cosmos where everything is immortal except themselves. (Ibid, p. 19)
You do not need philosophy to see that work that transforms some piece of the world is central to being human. Watching a toddler make mud-pies might be enough. She is so very serious. Children begin to make things as soon as they’ve gained sufficient control of their fingers to hold a shovel or a crayon, and will do so without stopping unless they’re put in front of one or another transfixing screen. In Margaret Mead’s Samoa, and in poor countries around the world, children as young as five are expected to labour at tasks that make real contributions to their families’ lives. In the developed world, work is the province of adults, indeed the paradigmatic activity of adulthood. You may drop out of school, you may never yearn to travel, but learning how to work is crucial to growing up.
So it’s not surprising that Rousseau devoted a considerable amount of thought to it. (No, we are not entirely done with Rousseau, who will shadow us anywhere we go with Kant. This fact by itself should give the lie to those who caricature Kant as a soulless, rule-driven formalist.) Rousseau worked as an engraver’s apprentice, a servant, a sign painter, a secretary and a music teacher until literary success, and the ensuing noble patronage, allowed him to live by his pen. His fictitious Emile is born into property, so nothing compels him to work for a living. But Rousseau is adamant that he owes others more than he would were he born without property, since he was so favoured at birth. Since no father can transmit to his son the right to be useless to others, anyone who eats in idleness what he does not earn himself is no better than a brigand.
Outside of society isolated man, owing nothing to society, has a right to live as he pleases. But in society, where he necessarily lives at the expense of others, he owes them the price of his keep in work. This is without exception. To work is therefore an indispensable duty for man. Rich or poor, powerful or weak, every idle citizen is a rascal. (Emile, p. 195)
Thus Emile is to learn a trade. He already knows how to cultivate the land; Rousseau had him plant a bean patch not only to give him a tangible lesson on Locke’s theory of property, but to make sure he could grow his own food. But the farmer is subject to vicissitudes of fortune, be it bad weather, war, or a lawsuit that takes away his field. The artisan, by contrast, can go where he will. He has no need to fear or flatter. As long as he can create things of value, he will be fed and he will be free.
‘A trade for my son! My son an artisan! Sir, are you in your right mind?’ I am thinking clearly, more clearly than you, madame, who wants to reduce him to never being able to be anything but a lord, a marquess, a prince, and perhaps one day less than nothing. I want to give him a rank which he cannot lose, a rank which does him honor at all times. (Ibid, p. 196)
Rousseau considers a number of trades before settling on carpentry. It is clean, it is useful, it can even be elegant, and it keeps the body strong while requiring diligence and skill. Best of all, since carpentry is a trade that will always fill genuine needs, it is entirely independent of false ones, and the dependence they create and require.
You are an architect or a painter. So be it. But you have to make your talent known. Do you think you can just start out by showing a work at the Salon? Oh, that is not the way it goes! You have to belong to the Academy. You even have to have pull in it in order to obtain some obscure place in the corner. Leave your ruler and brush, I tell you. Take a cab and run from door to door. It is thus that celebrity is acquired … Count on its being more important to be a charlatan than a capable man if the only trade you know is your own. (Ibid)
This is, Rousseau notes, just as true of those who intend to teach, work as political advisers, or fill most of the positions that confer any status at all today. Most parents still prefer that their children learn to work with words or numbers – preferably the latter – than with their hands, never realizing that this is likely to keep them in positions of permanent dependence. A trade, by contrast, may allow them to triumph over fortune itself. Rousseau’s advice remains wise, even if today’s Emiles are less likely to stand in rustic backyard sheds than in workshops filled with power saws so loud they’re required to wear earplugs. They will always be able to earn their living where they choose. If you can build a table or fix a house, there are people in Provence or Tonga who’d be glad to hear from you.
Rousseau was not alone in taking carpentry as a paradigm for honest, useful work. Arendt’s discussion of work versus labour mentions tables rather often. But the world doesn’t need that many tables; not everyone can follow Emile’s example. And today’s advice to learn multiple, portable skills will be less likely to focus on the satisfaction that you gain when you cultivate all your talents and the freedom you enjoy when you exercise them, and more on the spectre of unemployment. For we have other problems. Rousseau introduced the idea of false needs, and showed how the systems we live in work against our growing up: they dazzle us with toys and bewilder us with so many trivial products that we are too busy making silly choices to remember that the adult ones are made by others. These ideas are still subversive, important and worth repeating. But things have got worse than the most prescient eighteenth-century thinker could have imagined.
Paul Goodman described the problem more than fifty years ago. While Goodman too accepted the Enlightenment’s ‘philosophical truth that except in worthwhile activity there is no way to be happy’, his Growing Up Absurd argued that what troubles adolescents is the fact that there is no decent work to grow up for (p. 45). Grown-up work would be unquestionably useful, and it would require energy, spirit and the use of our best capacities; work, that is, that can be done with honour and dignity. Fewer jobs than ever meet these criteria; most involve doing things that are patently useless, possibly harmful, certainly wasteful and demeaning and dumb to boot. And Goodman was writing in an era of full employment; these days millions of qualified young people are glad to find any job at all. Their choices are often worse than those available to young people in Goodman’s day. Those who choose manual labour are likely to find themselves making products that are designed to fail. Those with verbal skills may go into teaching, a notably honourable calling, but are likely to find themselves ground down by educational institutions that undermine the very goals they claim to serve. The rest are likely to end up as salespeople, business managers or advertisers. Goodman’s scorn for the latter is especially chilling. His focus is not on the economic and political problem of the synthetic demand created by advertisements ‘but the human problem that [the actors] are human beings working as clowns; that the writers and designers of it are human beings thinking like idiots; and the broadcasters and underwriters know and abet what goes on. Alternately, they are liars, confidence men, smooth talkers, obsequious, or insolent’ (Growing Up Absurd, p. 32).
Advertising has become more subtle and ubiquitous since Goodman wrote, so that we are less aware of its impact, and liable to forget that it was not always part of the landscape. One of Henry James’s last novels predicts that ‘the new science’ of advertising will change the world. A hundred years later we no longer perceive these changes, nor the ways in which advertising invades our lives. Perhaps the only way to do so is to spend time in a place, like Cuba, where it’s absent. Landing in Havana you notice at once the absence of billboards, and you no longer need consider whether the studied contortions they depict are clever or silly. Suddenly you’re aware of questions you ask yourself elsewhere: is it better than what I’ve got? Will it look like that on me? Make him happy? Make her envious? Can I get there before the sale ends? Those questions arise on the thin edge of consciousness. Somewhere underneath it, advertising entangles emotion. The models it pictures are sleek, and impossibly hot. They are meant to make your self-assurance crumble. If I had one of those, could I ever look as stunning? If I had one of that, could I snag another heart? The fact that the advertising industry uses the term ‘creatives’ to designate people who spend their lives seeking new ways of seeping into our brains in order to convince us to buy things we don’t need is just the cherry on top of a travesty.
Without better models of adult work that is meaningful, our reluctance to grow up is hardly surprising. Goodman asks us to be astonished at facts we’ve come to take for granted: most of us no longer have the luxury of asking whether a job is genuinely productive, but only whether it pays well and has tolerable conditions. ‘The question is what it means to grow up into such a fact as: during my productive years I will spend eight hours a day doing what is no good’ (Ibid, p. 35, original italics). These conditions make no sense, yet we have come to believe that they are naturally a part of the way the world is. Or the way the world was; in an era of weakened unions, declining wages and permanent electronic availability, most of us would be glad if only eight hours of our day were devoted to something senseless.
There are many ways in which work has become harder and less satisfying over the last century, but I will focus on one. Goodman and other critics of his generation mentioned planned obsolescence, and the foregoing discussion of philosophies of work should allow us to understand what a horror it is. Many oppressive features of the social world arose without deliberate design, making conspiracy theories look silly, but this one was actually the work of a cartel. In 1924 the Phoebus Cartel, an association of manufacturers including General Electric, Osram and Philips, held a meeting in Switzerland. They agreed to reduce the life of light bulbs – at the time proudly averaging 2,500 hours, though light bulbs exist that have burned for 100 years – to 1,000 hours, thereby more than doubling the number of light bulbs that would be sold. Members of the cartel controlled their subsidiaries firmly, and those who did not reduce the quality of their light bulbs were fined. The cartel was successful, within a decade, in making the thousand-hour light bulb the standard. But it probably required no conspiracy; the idea was in the air. In 1928 the young advertising journal Printers Ink proclaimed ‘an article that refuses to wear out is a tragedy for business’. The manufacture of goods designed to decay was hardly limited to light bulbs. The auto industry discovered it early, allowing General Motors to dominate the market by 1931, edging out Henry Ford, who clung to the obsolete idea that goods should be built to last.
The phrase ‘planned obsolescence’ was first used in a pamphlet written in 1932 by American entrepreneur Bernard London, who argued that in order to reduce unemployment during the Great Depression, the government should make planned obsolescence compulsory. In an age that had yet to develop environmental concerns, the solution looked simple: the more often a product decays, the more products need to be made, the more workers needed to make them. There was no need to be explicit about the greater profit created for corporations. London’s proposal for compulsory planned obsolescence proved unnecessary, for the advertising industry was learning that seduction was more effective than legal force. Convincing consumers that their things were unfashionable before they actually broke down began in the 1950s in earnest. Occasionally a product still needed tinkering: after DuPont invented nylon stockings strong enough to tow a truck, it sent its chemists back to the laboratory to design ones that ran when snagged by a fingernail. Today’s products often hide computer chips that ensure their demise, and we now expect to replace most of the things we depend on every few years. Nor does the maintenance of this system of production any longer require cartels or fines. In 1981, the East German light-bulb manufacturer whose products lit up half Beijing tried to peddle its longer-lasting wares at a West German trade fair. No company was interested in stocking them. The factory was closed shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall ended travel restrictions for Eastern Europeans, and business restrictions for Western companies.
Critics as different as Goodman, Vance Packard and David Riesman deplored the introduction of planned obsolescence, and other features of the burgeoning consumer culture of the early 1960s. That’s probably the reason the term went out of use and was replaced by the woollier ‘product life cycle’. Life cycles sound normal, part of an organic process of birth and decay. We now find it natural that most of the objects we use will need replacement before we have finished paying for them. Arendt’s analysis reveals just how unnatural this assumption is:
Without taking things out of nature’s hands and consuming them, and without defending himself against the natural processes of growth and decay, the laboring animal could not survive. But without being at home in the midst of things whose durability makes them fit for use and for erecting a world whose very permanence stands in direct contrast to life, this life would never be human. (The Human Condition, p. 135)
Arendt’s account in The Human Condition extends and refines modern philosophy’s conviction that human life is not passive. To use another sort of language, we are formed in the image of the Creator, a Being who could make a world. Contemporary life turns this upside down, for it is based on an economy that is not only vastly unequal, and destructive to the planet; it undermines the fundamental human value itself, the desire to create something of value. We want our labours to bear fruits that have nothing to do with paying the rent. Sometimes you can see it: the satisfaction on the face of a craftsman who wants to carve a table, cobble a shoe, form a sentence, bake a loaf that will last. (Since the loaf cannot last without getting mouldy, Arendt would demote its production to the realm of labour rather than work. Still a great baker wants you to remember the taste of that loaf after it’s gone.) But though not a few young people are returning to the world of craftsmanship, the very word ‘craft’ has become associated with ‘hobby’, something done as diversion by young children or Alzheimer’s patients precisely because they produce nothing of value. Words often mask even more than they reveal.
Why do grown-ups want to produce something of value? Call it an act of gratitude: we want to give something back to the world as thanks for the gift of having lived in it. You could also call it narcissism: the desire to leave a mark on the world. The two may come together as a part of our sense of dignity: as this particular human being I want to put something in the world, with a signature. This is some of who I am. (As Arendt noted, part of the curse of slavery is to pass through the world with no trace of having existed in it.) That dignity is negated in an economy that is driven by the production of junk. Products designed to rapidly become waste are usually called by other names, but it is telling that the world’s highest-earning business sector, the financial industry, succeeded in calling a product ‘junk bonds’ and has yet to be punished for the wasteland it left behind.
Some words have become more explicit, and some more obscuring, since criticisms like these were made in the 1950s, when Goodman could describe this vision of the future as exaggerated:
Conceive that the man-made environment is now out of human scale. Business, government, and real property have now closed up all the space there is … Public speech quite disregards human facts. There is a rigid caste system in which every one has a slot and the upper group stands for nothing culturally. The university has become merely a training ground for technicians and cultural anthropologists … The FBI has a file card of all the lies and truths about everybody. And so forth. (Growing Up Absurd, p. 123)
We may envy his fears. They would have been preferable to the world we have come, fifty years later, to take as given. There is so little space left that what began as protest against these conditions – think rock ’n’ roll and blue jeans – became commercial opportunities, and the internet that was meant to connect and liberate us has connected us, all right, to forms of surveillance of which Goodman’s FBI could only dream. Still there are many for whom the connections do liberate, enabling groups of critical activists to form international bonds to act in concert against these conditions. Some have become active in order to save the planet. They are not wrong in thinking that this is the condition on everything else we may want, but many environmental activists have misplaced the blame. It’s easy to find denunciations that blame the Enlightenment for climate change, for example, because it valorized restless acting upon, rather than peaceful coexistence with nature. Such denunciations endorse a return to earlier ways of living, often valorizing pre-Enlightenment cultures.
Others see a larger picture: our current condition is not the fulfilment of Enlightenment attitudes but the subversion of them. The behaviour that is threatening life on earth is a perversion of everything life should be. We are born with the urge for a life that embraces every kind of activity, be it learning or travel or work. Yet we’re both caught and complicit in a world that turns human needs upside down. The problem is not the grown-up recognition that reality never quite matches the ideals we have for it. It’s far worse, and more systemic, than that. We tell children that all the questions they ask, and many they’ve yet to think of, will be answered in school, and we send them to institutions that will dull their desire to pose questions at all. We want to find out more about the world than can be found in any one piece of it, but our travels are mostly regressions: either touring under conditions more protected than anything we experience in the adult world, or escaping from it altogether – otherwise known as playing in the sunniest heap of sand you can afford. We want to make an impact on the world, but we end up making or selling playthings that are developed to keep us distracted and designed to deconstruct. We have turned the activities that were meant to be the stuff of life into mere means of subsisting in it. In sum: the ways of life we have learned to take for granted are a twisted inversion of life itself. Who wants to grow up to that?
I’ve been using philosophy to show something about the conceptual horror of the world we have come to, in the hope that understanding the depth of its violation of our own natures will be of use in acting against it, but none of the facts I mention is new. They are so screamingly apparent that the German writer Ingo Schulze compares those who express thoughts like these to the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’.29 Everyone knows that the rulers stand naked, but nobody cares to say it – for fear of no punishment greater than being called childish or dumb. (Perhaps it’s just me who fails to understand the necessary complexities of financial markets?) Schulze was amazed when the financial crisis revealed policies far worse than anything he’d been taught about capitalism in school – sometime in the 1970s, in communist East Germany.
What happened in 1989 affected far more than Eastern Europe. The sight of thousands streaming through the Berlin Wall seemed to make any comparison of the two systems beside the point. Since the end of the Cold War, neo-liberalism – the view that free unregulated markets producing ever-increasing amounts of shoddy goods are the basis of human happiness – has assumed not merely religious but absolutist tones. Those who seek alternatives are glibly dismissed as old hippies or closet Stalinists, and Margaret Thatcher’s famous statement – there is no alternative – is accepted even by those who think: that cannot be right. It cannot be an accident that evolutionary psychology, which predicates natural and constant competition as the basis of human action, became the most popular explanation of human behaviour at just the same time.
It is certainly not an accident that religious fundamentalism exploded at the same moment when market fundamentalism became the leading global ideology, though it is a tragedy that it has become the most popular alternative to it. The winners of the Cold War were certain that other ideologies would be replaced by their own neo-liberalism, in which the bottom line is the measure of all value. Against such predictions, the past decades have witnessed the rage in rejection of the idea that material needs are what move us, and everything else is expendable fluff. That idea was succinctly attacked by Marx long ago:
The bourgeois … has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour … in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. (Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848)
But at a time when every promise of Marxism seemed undermined by the failures of real existing socialism, the shortest road to idealism was traditional religion. Every serious study of jihadis confirms that the bitterest opponents of contemporary Western culture are those who had some access to it.30 Osama bin Laden was not revered for his organization – far less powerful, and more chaotic, than often assumed – but for the fact that he scorned all the things his vast wealth could buy him and went off to live in a cave.
Fundamentalism has been on the rise in all major religions, for it seems to offer something of value that cannot be bought or sold. Even where it does not lead to violence, its tragedy is its inability to offer the kind of dignity it seeks. There is nothing grown-up about behaviour that’s dictated by religious authority. But what alternatives do we offer? A world in which former mayor Rudy Giuliani’s idea of an uplifting – no, heroic – response to the terrorist attack on New York was to tell its citizens to go shopping, is a world that has incorporated a slogan once meant to be ironic: whoever dies with the most toys wins. Where children can no longer see that growing up has more meaning than increasing your collection of playthings, some will look for the simplest substitute at hand.
Fortunately, in the past several years, other people have begun to develop alternatives. None of them are as yet mass movements, but small groups determined to find other means of production and consumption, labour and work, are arising all over the globe. They are committed to determining the world, not simply being determined by it, to consume some things wisely rather than being consumed by them. It doesn’t take great insight to see that our present conditions are unfit for grown-up human beings. If Schulze’s parable is right, it takes no insight at all, just the courage not to fear that the truths that need to be spoken will be dismissed as childish. But is anything less grown-up than worrying about whether others think you are?