Middle-Class Children in the 21st Century Morass
Some years back I sat in the audience at the Swedish Book Fair and listened to Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, author of Night, speaking about his life and times. One sentence in particular from that occasion has stayed in my mind. Wiesel commented that the great challenge for those like him who survived the Holocaust, those who had been prisoners in concentration camps, was to convince their children that life was still worth living, even though they themselves feared it was not.
I think the greatest challenge for us in the future may be to give young people and ourselves a sense that life is a rich, worthwhile experience, even though there is much to discourage them and us from holding that view.
‘today is a great day’
When I taught in a primary school in Melbourne, each day began with a session of calisthenics or aerobics, or whatever the current name was. It was taken by one of the parents. At the end of each session he made the students chant in unison ‘Today is a great day’.
I don’t think I’m being unduly sensitive to say that I regarded this as undesirable, not far from fascism. There’s something almost desperate about such a chant. It’s horribly like the Jules Feiffer comic strip of the man who says, ‘I wake up singing and my wife hugs me and kisses me and begs me never to change. I sing on the bus to work and the passengers smile and pat me on the back. I sing at work and the boss has tears in his eyes and gives me a promotion. I sing in the street and a stranger puts a dime in my hand and asks “How in a world full of misery are you the one man who’s happy?” “Who’s happy?” I reply to the stranger. “I sing to drown out my screaming.”’182
To take a student whose grandmother might be ill, whose best friend might have dumped her, who may be suffering from depression, and force her to chant ‘Today is a great day’ makes me wonder what screaming the parent was trying to drown out in his own mind. Perhaps he thought that compelling 200 students to join with him would help his vain attempt to deafen himself to his own screams.
‘Vain’ is probably an appropriate word in both its meanings, because it was vain of him to use 200 children to shout out his view of the world every day, but of course it was also in vain, as no amount of shouting or singing, even at maximum volume, can drown out the truth.
Alice Miller wrote: ‘If I allow myself to feel what pains or gladdens me, what annoys or enrages me, and why this is the case, if I know what I need and what I do not want at all costs, I will know myself well enough to love my life and find it interesting . . .’183
We find ourselves however in a world in which, despite the mindless shouting of ‘Today is a great day’, ‘You are an awesome human being’, ‘Live in the moment’, many people, old, middle-aged and young, are struggling to find joy in their lives.
Whitney Houston sang, famously, about the importance of learning to love oneself. Yet Houston died at 44, in 30 centimetres of water in a hotel bathtub. In her system was a mixture of cocaine, marijuana, Xanax, Flexeril and Benadryl. She sang wonderfully about the importance of teaching children to recognise their inner beauty. Yet her only child also drowned in a bathtub, at the age of 22. The post-mortem found her body contained morphine, alcohol, marijuana, a cocaine related substance and benzodiazepines. Tabloid magazines reported that Whitney smoked crack cocaine in front of their daughter when the child was five years old.184
Helpful slogans, inspiring thoughts, are everywhere. ‘Everyone agrees it’s important to live in the moment . . .’ says Ellen Langer, a psychologist at Harvard and author of Mindfulness, on the psychologytoday.com website.185 Everyone agrees? Put me down as an exception. I like to ruminate on the past, and speculate about the future. I frequently use my imagination to transport myself away from the here and now. Sometimes ‘the moment’ is so banal that I have to escape.
The most common parenting mantra is ‘I just want my child to be happy’. ‘Poor kids,’ I think, when I hear this. ‘What an awful fate to wish on them.’ Happy is a relative term, so unless they experience unhappiness their happiness will be meaningless. In his book The Master and His Emissary (subtitled The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World), Iain McGilchrist tells the story of Hector Berlioz at a concert: ‘Once, when Berlioz sobbed at a musical performance a sympathetic onlooker remarked: “You seem to be greatly affected, monsieur. Had you not better retire for a while?” In response, Berlioz snapped: “Are you under the impression that I was here to enjoy myself?”’ McGilchrist adds a footnote referring to ‘Wittgenstein’s reported comment on life: “I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not in order to enjoy ourselves.”’186
As the Tao proverb puts it: Life is 10,000 joys, 10,000 sorrows. Far better to wish, as Alice Miller emphasises, that children are able to feel fully the range of emotions. Grief, joy, sensual and erotic sensations, love, anger, fear, ecstasy, pride at one’s achievements – we are born with our bodies loaded and cocked, and the potential to experience all of these with full force. But the ability to feel them is quickly trained and educated out of us. This is the cause of neuroticism. Every parent should wish for their child nothing more than ‘I want him or her to experience life to the fullest’. Every child should be able to exult in the 10,000 joys that life brings her or him, and feel with full force the sadness of the 10,000 sorrows.
modern pessimism
Mindless, meaningless slogans are among the forces which conspire to rob our individual lives of joy. But there are plenty of other destructive forces at work. They include, as I’ve mentioned, the daily news. Let me cite another cartoon, from an artist I haven’t been able to identify, which shows a grim-looking couple and their child. All three are staring at a television screen. The child is sobbing, desperately clutching the mother. The mother reassures the child: ‘There, there, darling. It’s only a documentary.’
In 1966, Simon and Garfunkel beautifully juxtapositioned the Christmas carol ‘Silent Night’ with the words of a newsreader reading the 7 pm news. The news bulletin contained stories about racism, the Vietnam War, and Richard Speck, the mass murderer of eight student nurses.187 In 1975, rock band Skyhooks sang about the horrors of the nightly television news.188 Both songs are still topical. The average 30-minute news bulletin consists of stories about Israelis murdering Palestinians, Palestinians murdering Israelis, teenagers burning to death in nightclub fires, families destroyed in car accidents, hospitals in Third World countries bombed by missiles from First World countries, horrific domestic violence episodes, and global warming. In a recent television promotion we were told ‘No one is safe any more’. It was an advertisement for a story on internet security. Such stories give us a sense that we are surrounded by awful viruses that swarm at our doorsteps and threaten to invade our houses and our lives.
There is little to balance these messages, except the compulsory whimsical story at the end of each news bulletin: how a lottery winner has bought a gold-plated toothbrush, or how a goat has been taught to ride a surfboard, or how a 107-year-old lady has a brandy every night. The programmed inclusion of these stories and the tone in which they are delivered, like a 1950s primary school teacher reading an Enid Blyton story to her class, is as patronising and contemptuous as anything on television, adding insult to injury. First we are injured by the violent assaults on our sensibilities, then we’re insulted by the suggestion that a dab with tissue paper will heal those assaults.
The mass of men, and of women, and of children too, may lead lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau famously said189, but they also lead lives of quiet heroism. That is easy to forget when the nightly horror story, the seven o’clock news, erupts into our living room.
The growth in online activity has contributed spectacularly to our exposure to stories, many of which can’t be verified, about badly damaged humans and their alleged behaviour. A quick browse after I wrote the previous sentence revealed offerings like video footage of a man stamping a seagull to death at a railway station, video footage of a disabled five-year-old girl chained to a wall by her mother who had to go to work, a drunk woman evicted from a plane after refusing to sit next to a three-year-old (‘I’m not sitting next to a fucking three-year-old; I’ve been drinking all day’), and a man who raped his wife in front of their five-year-old child. They are all from one (popular) website, and are only a small sample: some of the other featured stories were too horrific for me to cite here.
Another of the obviously damaging forces that disturbs our wellbeing is that of advertising. Few professions defend themselves more vigorously and skilfully against attack than the advertising industry, which shouldn’t surprise us – after all it’s their job to change our thoughts, our beliefs and our perceptions, and it’s hardly any wonder that they do so with particular commitment when the threat is to them. For instance, a few years ago the advertising industry ran a long campaign suggesting that without them the economy would collapse and unemployment would be rampant. Of course, this just isn’t so. What would happen is that without advertising the economy would be different, and that’s a very different thing.
In general, the advertising industry rests upon discontent, which is an unhealthy foundation for any construction. Just as radio shock jocks derive their power from whipping their listeners into a daily frenzy of rage – which must be as exhausting for them as for the listeners – so the advertising industry depends on inciting unhappiness and envy, a sense that unless you have two new cars, regular holidays on tropical islands, a two-storey house and a white kitchen filled with luxury white appliances, you have been cheated. The inevitable outcome is that the great mass of consumers develops a sense of entitlement, which is accompanied by resentment, jealousy and anger.
Perhaps even worse is the underlying message that objects are all you need to fill the gaps in your life. Relationships, giving to others, paying attention to your spiritual life, these are as nothing compared to the true happiness brought into your kitchen by the glow from your new Miele dishwasher. When people display bumper stickers with messages like ‘Born to shop’ and ‘Who dies with the most toys wins’, we can only hope that they do so in a spirit of irony.
In his book The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton discusses the teachings of Epicurus. He writes ‘We receive little encouragement to attend to modest gratifications – playing with a child, conversations with a friend, an afternoon in the sun, a clean house, cheese spread across fresh bread . . .’190
poor leadership
Another cause of discontent in our society is the inadequacy of political leaders. The woeful standard of political behaviour, both federally and at state level, has had a depressing effect on the Australian community. We know that we all have racist, selfish and cowardly aspects. We elect our leaders in the unconscious hope that they will bring out our latent nobility, that they will help us discover the goodness that we also have inside us. It takes no genius to bring out our worst qualities, no vision to appeal to racism, no greatness to ask us to act in a spirit of meanness.
There has been a failure of leadership in many areas: across the spectrum of politics, in institutionalised religions, in education, and in business. To some extent though, failures of leadership are our failures. Perhaps we should strive to be less dependent on that paternalistic model which has the father – who can be male or female in this metaphorical sense – as the omniscient, omnipotent God-like figure at the top of the pyramid and everyone else on lower levels. This model brings us dangerously close to the notion that other humans are superior, that they may be more enlightened beings. Every time we defer to someone, we diminish ourselves.
Teachers seem more amenable to the pyramid-shaped paternalistic structure than people in most other professions. I don’t have any evidence for that statement, just a sense that teachers are more easily intimidated by school principals and forceful parents than people in other occupations are by their bosses and clients. I remember one teacher telling me that if the principal notified her Monday morning that she wanted to see her Thursday afternoon, the teacher didn’t sleep for the next three nights. I remember sitting in the staffroom at Geelong Grammar School as teachers discussed whether they should apologise to the principal for having asked him, at a forum, challenging but entirely appropriate questions about his management of the school. I did not sit there long, but walked out in disgust, saying to my colleagues as I left, ‘You’ve got the leadership you deserve.’
Although there were plenty of times when I confronted the principals of schools where I worked, sometimes aggressively, underneath I was generally nervous of them. From being students in schools, and therefore on the bottom of the pyramid, teachers have returned to schools – at a higher level, true, but it is quite likely that they feel safe and at home in these conservative institutions, with authority figures telling them what to do. This doesn’t of course preclude the possibility that they might at the same time chafe under, and even subvert, the rules and regulations. One of my worst moments as a school principal was when a member of staff burst into tears during a conversation, and then calmed herself, apologising with the words: ‘I’m sorry, but authority figures always have this effect on me.’
‘Authority figures?’ I wanted to say. ‘It’s only me!’ It seemed that the invisible word ‘Principal’ on the door of my office – an office that is a converted storeroom, the size of the average bathroom – had changed me forever in her eyes.
So, media stories, online material, advertising, failure of leadership, materialism, hierarchies . . . all the usual suspects. But we must remain active, even pugnacious if necessary, in monitoring these influences on the lives of our young people, to keep them feeling optimistic and excited about being alive in the 21st century.