The Paradoxes and Frustrations of Being Human
Human beings are proud of many things that we believe set us apart from eels, hamsters, quolls and crows. Among these are the ability to walk on two legs, which can be useful at times (if you don’t believe me, ask an eel), adaptable digestive systems and the possession of opposable thumbs.
I often taunt our dog about her lack of opposable thumbs. When I’m opening the door to the house, as she waits beseechingly to get in, I tell her, ‘If you had opposable thumbs, you could have let yourself in hours ago.’
The application of the can opener to her Pedigree Casserole with Beef and Gravy provides another opportunity for gratuitous mocking.
our tiny huge brains
We humans also pride ourselves on having large and efficient brains. It is by virtue of our brains that we have come to regard ourselves as masters of the universe, or something close to it. However, the limitations of these same brains can cause us much disappointment – which is another of the fascinating and frustrating paradoxes that underlie our lives.
Take imagination, for instance. For all we know, imagination is an exclusive attribute of the human brain. Imagination allows us to hypothesise, speculate, daydream and, perhaps most importantly, empathise. It’s unclear whether cows or sardines can pretend that they are racetrack drivers or American presidents or geese. We don’t know whether they can dream of trips to the moon, jungle adventures, or fights with pirates in the eighteenth century.
We do know that humans are capable of all these thoughts. John Dewey wrote, ‘Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.’220 We pride ourselves on the fact that our imaginations lead us to great discoveries, great understandings. But we are in the annoying position of having brains that are big enough for us to get glimpses of concepts that those very same brains are not big enough to understand. Our knowledge that we have powerful imaginations is tempered by a truth that we don’t like to acknowledge or confront. Our imaginations are limited, and the result can be frustration. For example, we know from scientists, mathematicians and our own common sense that large numbers exist. But we are incapable of imagining them. We talk about grains of sand, billions of light years, stars in the sky, but whether we are talking about sand or stars, Jeff Bezos’s daily income, the 15-million-plus teachers employed in more than half a million schools in China,221 or leaves in the forest, we can’t really understand what these figures mean.
This is the case even though we try to render big numbers in concrete terms, in an attempt to imaginatively understand them. Hence, we are told that ‘they could have filled the MCG twice over’, ‘their turnover is equal to the GNP of Australia and New Zealand combined’, ‘the number of miles she’s covered in her cycling career would have taken her around the world three times’. These are worthy attempts, but even with their help we cannot visualise or properly imagine these figures.
Years ago, I read about a teacher in America who decided to give his students a real understanding of the number ‘one million’. He set his class to collecting bottle tops. Eventually, the whole school, the whole town, the whole district got involved, and after eight years, he had a million bottle tops. I admire his vision and his persistence. I’m not sure whether he achieved much really, but there is something nice about being able to show people ‘a million’, to help overcome this failure of our imaginations, this inability to imagine anything more than a couple of hundred.
I’ve been told – but don’t know whether it’s true – that Australian Aboriginal people had only six numbers: one, two, three, four, five, and ‘a lot’.222 ‘There are two kangaroos on the other side of the hill, there are three kangaroos, there are a lot of kangaroos.’ If true, this may well represent a pragmatic accommodation of human difficulties in contemplating numbers of any significant size.
Imagination fails us in even more important ways though. We are intelligent enough to know that our lives will move through a number of stages and eventually we will die. Again, this may be a unique human understanding. It is argued that only humans are aware of their own mortality. Does an active young gerbil know that one day it will be dead? We can’t answer that question, but we do know that awareness of our mortality has a critical effect on the way we live. We have a scientific understanding of death and we sometimes get glimpses of its meaning, but again our imagination is too limited to get a grip on this most powerful of all experiences.
I think this is probably related to the fact that we can’t understand the biggest ‘number’ of all. If we could really grasp the concept of infinity, then death might become more meaningful. As it is, we can talk about the universe stretching for an infinite distance, the concept that pi can be calculated to an infinite number of places, the notion of infinite time, but we just get a big headache if we try to get our brains around these concepts in an imaginative way.
And those stages we go through along the roads of our lives . . . the imagination tries to make the jump to future years, but it falls short every time. For example, it doesn’t matter how much clinical information we give children about puberty, so that they can rattle off the facts about body hair and genital changes and growth spurts. Although it’s good to give them information, we need to be aware that they can never understand the way they will feel and live and be when they at last arrive at adolescence. It is incomprehensible to them that they will want to do those crazy things they see teenagers doing – behaviours most young kids see as deeply unattractive.
I am in my late 60s, and I look at people in their 80s and 90s and I wonder what it will be like if I reach that age: how will it feel and how will it impact on me to have less mobility, fewer life choices; perhaps to be dependent on others; perhaps to be in a nursing home; perhaps to have dementia or Alzheimer’s?
I can talk to older people. I can read articles about the impact of ageing, and books like Ellen Newton’s memoir of life in a Melbourne nursing home, This Bed My Centre. I can relate my ageing to the fact that already I am slower and creakier than I was. But I cannot understand what old age will really be like. The future is effectively incomprehensible to the imagination.
Perhaps this is a kindness the brain does us. But perhaps if our brains were a little bigger more people would believe in an entity that we can discuss rationally and that some people claim to know intuitively.
Perhaps we could at last, imaginatively speaking, touch the face of God.
winning and losing can make losers of us all
There’s a great moment in The Simpsons. Well, actually, there are thousands of great moments in The Simpsons, but this particular one is in the episode where the family moves to a new community. Everything seems perfect. Homer has a brilliant job, Marge’s housework is polished off by new technology that takes five minutes a day, Lisa and Bart are enrolled in their new school.
Bart is quickly identified as ‘learning disabled’, and put in the Leg-Up class, a remedial group designed to help children overcome academic difficulties. Bart quickly realises that this is not his scene. He says to the teacher, ‘Let me get this straight. We’re behind the rest of the class, and we’re going to catch up to them by going slower than they are?’223
I have never heard a better distillation of the problems facing schools when they work with students who are struggling academically.
At one stage in Bart’s very nice group, with his very nice teacher, the students play musical chairs. However, this is musical chairs for kids with low self-esteem. This is musical chairs with more chairs than players. When the music stops, everyone dashes to a chair – and everyone gets one.
The teacher says ‘Hooray, everyone’s a winner!’ Bart rolls his eyes.
The musical chairs lesson makes an interesting contrast to the reality of sport in our society, where everybody is a loser. Well, not quite everybody. There’s one winner. But sometimes that seems almost inconsequential when you start counting the losers.
Here’s a typical scenario: eight runners in the blocks, the starting pistol fires (or an electronic device beeps), the athletes run as fast as they can, one reaches the line before the others, throws his or her hands in the air, dances with joy, gets congratulated, draped with a flag perhaps, presented with trophies, hugged exultantly by relatives and friends. The other seven hang their heads, walk away, and reassuring remarks like ‘Well, you did fine, I thought you ran a good race’ or ‘You came fourth; that’s great’ mean little.
The Australian Open tennis championship has 128 starters in each of the men’s and women’s singles. At the end of the fortnight, one man and one woman feel fabulous. The rest are losers. Some console themselves with the knowledge that they have achieved beyond their previous levels or picked up some useful prize money. Or won a match against a higher ranked player. But ultimately, nothing can protect them from the fact that they have lost.
Isn’t this a strange structure for a society? Constantly setting up situations where there is one winner and 127 losers? What kind of people are we that we find this so gratifying and attractive?
Perhaps it’s worth educating winners to understand that their win can only be achieved if other people lose: that their success is made possible through the failures of others, that their happiness is built on the sadness of others. This might help them – and everyone – to put sport and winning into a more meaningful context.
At the start of a football season every player is bubbling with optimism and confidence. The clubs and supporters are excited and hopeful. But in the Australian Football League (AFL), for example, eighteen teams compete for the premiership. Statistically, this means each supporter should only hope for four premierships in his or her lifetime. Each team can expect an average of seventeen years of failure for every one year of success. So at the end of each season there is nothing but bitter, crushing disappointment for nearly everybody. When the full-time siren blasts across the ground at the Grand Final, the players from the team that came second collapse, looking crushed, devastated. They may weep openly, with grief and a sense of failure. Only one club’s supporters feel good.
Coaches are sacked, players are sold, excuses are made, promises for next year are offered. No one seems to question the essential lunacy of this structure and its destructive effect on the many people who are classified as ‘failures’ because of it.
Years ago I coached high jump. One of the strange things about high jump is that everybody ends up a loser. One by one each competitor is eliminated, and walks away feeling disappointed. Eventually there is a winner. But he or she keeps jumping, trying to beat a previous best, or break a record. Eventually even the winner has three misses, at which point the event concludes. There is a curious sense of anticlimax in a high jump competition, because it always ends on this rather dismal note.
I’m not suggesting that we do away with all competition, or completely change the structure of sport in Western society. One, it’s not going to happen anyway, and two, competition can bring some benefits. But perhaps we should consider – at the very least – a few changes.
For example, why are we so afraid of saying that people are equally good in a competition? Why does a soccer match have to continue through extra time, and then, if the teams are still equal, into penalty shootouts? Why does a Grand Final have to go into extra time, to find one winner? Why can’t we declare two teams joint premiers if they are equal after the 80, 90, 100 minutes allocated to the match? To answer my own question, it’s because we are conditioned to the idea that sport has to find a winner, no matter how meaningless the process ultimately becomes.
If we were conditioned differently, if we were taught in infancy that to share victory is as exciting and wonderful as a victory that is exclusively ours, then as adults we would have no problem accepting the idea of joint premiers. The line ‘It’s like kissing your sister’, so often used by players when a match is drawn or tied, might disappear from the sporting lexicon.
To go even further, victories in sports are sometimes essentially meaningless, because they have depended upon luck. Of course, the bounce of the ball, the umpire missing a call, the opponent stumbling, is part of every sport. But when the bounce of the ball is combined with the artificiality of time, we have a meaningless situation. I’m talking about the sprint, where the position of the runners’ heads determines the winner. Is an AFL team that wins by one point better than the other team? Does a margin of .001 of a second mean anything? Is a team that scores 366 runs in a game of cricket superior to a team that scores 365? If a basketballer tosses the ball from one end of the court to the other, in a frantic attempt to beat the full-time siren, and the ball happens to drop in the basket, does that make her team better than the other team, and therefore the ‘deserved winners’?
It would be a nice step forward if we had margins established in sports, such that where two or more competitors are within a certain ‘zone’, they are declared equal winners. Traditionalists will be outraged, arguing that margins like these will kill the excitement. But there will be no difference in excitement. The tension will now come from seeing whether one team can get into the same zone as the other team.
American high school baseball and softball games have a concept called the ‘mercy rule’. If a team is, for example, 20 runs ahead in three innings, or 10 runs ahead in five innings, the match is terminated, as the position of the losing team is recognised as hopeless.
I have coached teams of children or teenagers who won games by huge margins, and I have coached teams who lost by huge margins. Nothing is gained in either instance. When a team gets an impossible distance ahead, their play falls apart, they become smug and cocky and unpleasant. Players get selfish. When a team is behind by a huge margin, their play falls apart, they become clumsy and demoralised. Heads hang lower and lower.
At every level of sport, from five-year-olds to professionals, a mercy rule would be, as the name suggests, a kindness to everyone. If a high school Australian Rules team is 50 points ahead at the end of the third quarter, it’s time to stop. If an AFL team is 60 points ahead at three-quarter time, the match should be called off. In soccer, four or five goals is enough. When teenagers play basketball, if one team gets 30 points ahead, that should be full time.
After all, what does it mean when one team beats another by a huge margin, or a runner wins a 1500 metre race by 300 metres? Unless it is for a world championship or an Olympic title, they should not have been competing against each other in the first place. They’re in the wrong division. (And if it was for a world championship or an Olympic title, the winner needs to be drug tested!)
I love sport, but not when it’s a mismatch, and the result is an artificial construct.
There are two types of success we can have in life. There is the success built on other people’s misery, and the success that does not depend on the performance of others. In the first category are sporting contests and matches, as well as contests in academic fields, music, writing, art, and so on. In the second category are the acquisition of skills, like reaching a high standard in playing a musical instrument or learning another language, and personal achievements like climbing a mountain, completing a hike, writing a concerto, cooking a remarkable meal for friends or family, running a marathon. The quiet satisfaction to be derived from successes within the second category can be sweet indeed, and it is this we should concentrate on when raising children.
the strife within
Whoever was mucking around in the laboratory late one Saturday night and ended up creating the ‘human being’ obviously had a sense of humour. Or maybe time was running out, with the Day of Rest getting close, and so, with only a couple of minutes left before midnight, He or She or It had to settle for a creation that wasn’t quite ready. Well, we are what we are, and we’re not likely to evolve in a hurry into a new and better model, with that third arm or extra eye or simian tail we sometimes covet.
One of the Creator’s little jokes was to put inside us a couple of organs that were always going to be in conflict, and, surprise surprise, they always have been. They are the brain and the heart, although it might be a bit more meaningful to call them reason and emotion. We’ve all heard thousands of comments like ‘If only I’d listened to my heart’, ‘Why didn’t you use your head?’, ‘You never think, do you?’ But the conflict is quite a profound one, with serious implications, and worth looking at more closely.
Babies operate largely from feelings. Hunger, loneliness, pain and frustration are strongly felt and immediately expressed, if screams, bulging eyes, and globules of dribble flying around the room are any guide. At these times, the adult often offers comfort based on logic: ‘The bottle’s heating up, darling, it’ll only be a minute’, ‘Oh, your poor teeth are hurting, well, that won’t last long’, ‘Mummy will be here soon’. Feelings are the province of the present; logic is largely the province of the future. The baby only understands the present, but adults console it with the future. The baby is not impressed.
As we grow up, we internalise the battle, until it becomes a minute-by-minute affair. The annoying thing is that the two sides rarely agree. When the alarm clock goes off, it’s the heart that says ‘I want to stay in bed’, but the brain says ‘If I don’t get up I’ll be late for work’. Oddly enough, when we are sick, the two opponents often swap positions. It is the heart that might now say, ‘I want to get out of bed’, but the brain that argues, ‘It’d be sensible to stay right here’.
The conflict really flares when it comes to life’s big decisions, like entering a relationship, choosing a house or taking a job. When heart and brain agree, a sense of jubilation suffuses us.
We put a lot of labels on these opposing forces, and I’ve done that already by calling them ‘brain and heart’, ‘feelings and logic’. But perhaps the most controversial labels are ‘male and female’.
In the past, popular culture in the West has, without much thought, endorsed the male and female labels. This conditioning began early. From my childhood I remember such examples as the Blondie comic strips, where Blondie, the dizzy woman, acted on impulse, rushing around buying new hats, whilst her husband did the maths and agonised over the bills. Dagwood referred to Blondie with labels like ‘my little wifey’. Mr and Mrs Darling, the father and mother in Peter Pan, already discussed, are not too dissimilar. Television sitcoms like Dennis the Menace, My Three Sons, The Donna Reed Show and I Love Lucy perpetuated similar stereotyping, and examples abound even today. Women are impulsive, instinctive, empathetic, good at recognising and communicating feelings. Men are logical – to the point of coldness. Men are the planners, the go-to people for common sense or strategic advice.
In Western society, overtly dominated by men, logic is the big winner. We have all (nearly all) taken on this cultural belief. ‘It is impossible to love and to be wise,’ said philosopher Francis Bacon.224
In the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Gondoliers, the beautiful young woman Casilda is in love, but finds to her horror that she was betrothed by her parents to the Crown Prince of Barataria, when she was just six months old. ‘I shall, of course, be a dutiful wife,’ she announces, obedient to the commitment made on her behalf by her parents, ‘but I can never love my husband.’
‘I don’t know. It’s extraordinary what unprepossessing people one can love if one gives one’s mind to it,’ says her father, the Duke of Plaza-Toro.
Her mother interjects: ‘I loved your father.’
The offended Duke responds: ‘My love – that remark is a little hard, I think? Rather cruel, perhaps? Somewhat uncalled-for, I venture to believe?’
The Duchess, in her usual imperious fashion, refuses to back down. She says: ‘It was very difficult, my dear; but I said to myself, “That man is a Duke and I will love him.” Several of my relations bet me I couldn’t, but I did – desperately!’225
Her desperation remains ambiguous, but given the sly wit of the lyricist William Gilbert we can assume the worst. Apparently, if the brain is given enough logical incentive to fall in love, the heart can be made to follow.
In our society, emotion is too often viewed with suspicion. It is sometimes belittled as dangerous, unreliable and even treacherous. Sometimes the heart seems to be treated as a place of ambush, as though the forces inside it are constantly preparing big holes, covered by leaves, with spikes at the bottom, so that as we walk along the path, we risk falling through the leaves to be impaled. It’s an extraordinary idea that the hearts within us, the centres of our emotional being, are constantly trying to do us harm, that they cannot be trusted but instead need minute-by-minute monitoring by the auditors in our skulls.
‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ ‘Have you thought this through?’ ‘I don’t think he’s the one.’ When the logicians really get going, they can be nasty: ‘Are you crazy? This is madness? You’re throwing your life away.’
The heart never gets as nasty as that. Imagine if your heart said to you, ‘It’s too sensible! You’ll destroy yourself. Be impulsive!’
We sometimes say ‘Just do it’, but usually as advice to others – or to sell footwear.
Did evolution, or the Creator, really set us up this way? Are we wrong to be so suspicious of our hearts? One of the unspoken functions of Australian schools is to promote logic and diminish emotion. Students learn that the brain is infinitely superior to the heart. We must all adopt the so-called masculine approach, as the ‘feminine’ approach is wily, weak and unreliable.
Maths is a powerful presence in the Australian school curriculum. Most of the material taught in the last two years of school is of value only to future scientists, engineers and maths teachers, but I suspect one reason for its primacy is that unconsciously those politicians and bureaucrats who determine the culture of schools, and therefore the nature of our society, feel that maths is a valuable agent in the coveted victory of logic. Subjects that come from a place closer to the heart, like art, music and creative writing, have always had to fight for space. By the middle years of secondary school they have almost disappeared, except for the fortunate few students who are allowed or even encouraged by their parents to specialise in them. When I taught at Geelong Grammar, the school had a weekly activities program, where teachers nominated cooking or film study or Latin or chess or whatever. When I was issued with my form to fill in, I wrote ‘Love’, as my nomination for an activity, thinking that this would be a worthwhile subject to investigate and explore. The head of Senior School sent for me, and a short, frosty discussion ensued, in the course of which she made it clear that this was totally unsuitable and Love would not be tolerated as a subject at Geelong Grammar. I suspect that she thought we would be engaging in an orgy of Free Love on the football oval every Friday afternoon.
Her response was particularly ironic given the views of the headmaster of Geelong Grammar School during its finest years (when, incidentally, it was still a single-sex school).
Dr James Darling wrote:
I know from my own experience, if you will forgive me, that you can do nothing for a boy if you do not first love him. This is not sentimentality. Love means caring for him at the necessary moment more than you care for anything else and desperately trying to understand him. On this sort of love, discipline depends. It is remarkable what children will take, even of punishment, if they know in their hearts that in your heart you really hold their best interests. Of this sort of creative love a large portion of the population has no experience at all, at least after kindergarten, if they were lucky enough to have it then. But it is this which the school must try to supply. There can be no blueprint for its application in one’s personal dealings, let alone in the whole machinery of the school, but it must be there. The teacher must always put the child first, not his own ambition or reputation, not his own pride, nor even his own principles and rules of life. How can this be? Only by his own understanding of God, and by the grace of God working through him, has he a chance.226
For Darling to write that a teacher must be prepared to put aside ‘even his own principles and rules of life’ if those threatened to be an impediment to the unconditional love of the child made his position in the head versus heart debate very clear.
However, in the climate in which I am writing these words, the heart is not doing very well. The victory of the head can be seen in the results of state and federal elections. For the highest positions we keep choosing people who are coldly logical, people in whom the brain has achieved supremacy over the emotions; people whose hearts have long since given up the struggle, packed their bags and slunk from the battlefield. I have strong memories of Sir Garfield Barwick, federal Attorney-General, and later Chief Justice of Australia, who was at one stage considered a chance for the prime ministership. In his autobiography he described a time in his adolescent years when his mother contracted tuberculosis so severely that she was mute. As a result, the family was broken up: the mother went to a sanatorium in the Blue Mountains, the father went to work in western New South Wales, and the kids, including young Garfield, were farmed out to various families. Barwick summed up the experience in these words: ‘It was a troublesome time for me.’227 As an adult, he appeared to be as dry as desiccated donkey dung, but the causes for his emotional emptiness are not difficult to discern.
At some level, huge numbers of people are not happy with the cold and dispassionate ‘leaders’ who have been holding power in Western countries for so long. Like travellers blinded by sandstorms in a desert, people seek with outstretched arms an empathetic, alive maverick who will save them. Unfortunately, in their despair, they clutch on to false prophets who promise to lead them to a rich and lush oasis: people like Donald Trump and Pauline Hanson, and, arguably, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.
In 2018, New Zealand elected Jacinda Ardern as Prime Minister. From her first days in office she attracted an unusual amount of attention, partly because she appeared to be compassionate and honest. When addressing the United Nations in 2018, she said: ‘In the face of isolationism, protectionism, racism – the simple concept of looking outwardly and beyond ourselves, of kindness and collectivism, might just be as good a starting point as any.’228 Her response in 2019 to the murders of 50 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, by a man with high-powered automatic rifles, a man who apparently felt justified in killing unarmed people aged from three to 77, showed remarkable integrity and understanding. In Australia, it seems that we have great difficulty bringing ourselves to trust a politician who is passionate, affectionate, empathetic and tender.
Gosh, imagine where we’d be if we did that!
why we will always have conflict
The Swiss educational psychologist Jean Piaget facilitated, through his work, important understandings about the growth and development of babies, infants, children and adolescents in their progress towards adulthood. Piaget’s ideas were particularly fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s, and in many important respects are still valid today.
In particular, Piaget argued that we go through stages as we mature, and each stage becomes a necessary building block for the next. The first stage he called ‘sensorimotor’, which lasts for about eighteen months or two years – although Piaget emphasised that we should not be too pedantic about the chronological ages cited for these classifications.229
As babies progress through the sensorimotor stage, they start to realise they are separate from the world; the world does not begin and end with them. One of the ways this awareness shows is that they start to acquire a sense of object concept, or object permanence. Objects continue to exist whether the infant perceives them or not. An object placed in a cupboard vanishes from the child’s sight but does not vanish from the world, and can be rediscovered by opening the cupboard. As the child gets a grasp of this concept, he or she develops reversibility: the sense that if an action is reversed, the original state can be restored.
For Piaget, childhood is the period from about age two to eleven or twelve. The preoperational stage of childhood is from about two to seven. During the preoperational stage, which begins at about the time children start using the language of their parents, reasoning is taking place, but the child’s worldview is still essentially ego-driven. The child sees objectives in terms of practical success. Symbols are used frequently, for example, in drawings of the family, who may be depicted as stick figures, and in play, where dolls represent babies, boxes can represent furniture, leaves can represent money.
Children in the early stages of preoperational thinking are not able to conserve, as demonstrated in Piaget’s classic experiment, which showed that a child presented with, for example, two identical jugs containing the same amount of water, and having agreed that the amounts of water are the same, will, after watching the contents of Jug B poured into a flat dish, then contradict themselves and say that there is now more water in Jug A than is contained in the flat dish.
From ages four to seven, approximately, children are famous for their ‘Why?’ questions, which come thick and fast, as they acquire the desire to understand the world in which they live.
Children continue to mature, and become concrete operational thinkers, so that they are less egocentric and more logical, have a more sophisticated understanding of groups and their characteristics, and range more widely with their thinking. Unlike children at the sensorimotor stage, they are now not only interested in practical success, but in understanding how success can be achieved. However, they function best when working with the tangible. They understand what can be seen and heard and felt, but are still unable to think in abstractions. Abstract concepts can only be understood if presented in concrete terms. If children at this stage are presented with difficult theories, they need practical examples – assuming we want them to achieve a meaningful understanding of the subject.
Piaget asked children this question: ‘Edith is fairer than Suzanne. Edith is darker than Lili. Who is the darkest?’230
If a ten-year-old is allowed to use dolls, or to draw the girls, he or she can usually find the correct answer. But somewhere between the ages of eleven and sixteen, many children mature into what Piaget termed the formal operational stage, and become capable of solving the problem ‘in their heads’, by using thought processes.
To put all this very simply: if I asked a child in the sensorimotor stage for her thoughts about war, she might gurgle, dribble and wave a rattle. If I asked a child in the preoperational stage, he might pick up a tennis racquet, point the handle at me, and shout ‘Bang! Bang!’ Or he might draw stick figures holding guns and shooting at each other, without being troubled by the lack of reality in the drawing.
If I asked a child in the concrete operational stage to write something about war, she might compose a story about soldiers in the trenches dealing with rats and mud before launching an attack on the enemy and winning a medal for bravery. These are all concrete, tangible matters that can be understood relatively easily. But if I put the same question to a child in the formal operational stage, he might write an essay about the morality of war, grappling with questions like: Can war ever be justified? How can wars be reconciled with religious teachings about peace? Are some weapons more moral than others? Can someone be both an ethical person and a soldier? What are the causes of wars?’
Piaget’s work has been criticised, for example by Jerome Bruner, who began with the hypothesis that ‘any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development’.231 He argued for a spiral curriculum, in which subjects were taught at a simple level to the youngest children, but revisited at a more complex and sophisticated level as the child grew older. Bruner saw development as a continuous process that could be accelerated – he believed that teachers should not wait for the child to reach the next level.
This is not the place to discuss the contrast in the approaches taken by Piaget and other educational researchers and thinkers like Bruner and Lev Vygotsky, although my own view is that Piaget’s and Bruner’s approaches can be easily reconciled. The crucial issue that Piaget’s work raises for me is the distinction it helps us make between concrete thinkers and formal, or abstract, thinkers. And the critical factor here is that some people never reach the final stage of development: they never become formal, or abstract, thinkers. If we accept this proposition, then much in the world that has previously been inexplicable and bewildering becomes easier to understand.
When a formal thinker tries to have a discussion about politics or religion or life with a concrete thinker, the result will almost inevitably be frustration on both sides. And frequently the frustration leads to rage – even, in extreme circumstances, to family estrangements, divorces, assaults or murders. The problem is that the people are speaking a different language. It is not much better than trying to have a conversation in Bulgarian with someone who understands only Thai.
If the topic is law and order – which often incites strong feelings – the conversation may go something like this:
Concrete thinker: You know what’s wrong with this country? Crime is out of control. The streets aren’t safe any more.
Formal thinker: Why do you say that?
Concrete thinker: Well, my neighbour was coming home from work last Tuesday, when two young blokes ran up to her. One pushed her over and the other grabbed her bag, and they ran off. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.
Formal thinker: That’s terrible. But the crime figures show that there is much less violent crime than ten years ago. Assaults are down, I think, 16 per cent, and theft 22 per cent.
Concrete thinker: I don’t care what the crime figures say. You can’t believe them. My grandfather got burgled last year, about two o’clock in the afternoon, and the police still haven’t caught the people who did it.
Formal thinker: On the other hand, I live two streets away from your grandfather, and we’ve never been burgled. We don’t even lock the door when we go out.
Concrete thinker: What they need to do is round these blokes up, stick them in prison for twenty years, and let them rot. That’d put a stop to it.
Formal thinker: Unfortunately, the research shows that longer prison sentences have little or no deterrent effect on crime.
Concrete thinker: All I know is that when I was growing up, the streets were safe and there were none of these bashings and robberies and murders.
Formal thinker: Actually, in 1980, when I was three, our next-door neighbour was murdered. We might feel less safe nowadays, partly because the media covers crime much more extensively and explicitly. And there are more crimes, because the population is so much bigger. But per head of population, the crime rate is way down. And of course crime detection is far more efficient. People can call police quickly on mobile phones, police training is more sophisticated, there are CCTV cameras everywhere, DNA testing is catching a lot of criminals . . . We’ll never get rid of crime altogether, but we can reduce it. And if we try to understand the real causes of crime, that would surely help. It might also be useful to understand why people feel more fearful nowadays, even though they have less reason for their fear.
Concrete thinker: What a lot of rubbish. They ought to bring back the death sentence.
I met a young woman a while back who told me, and the other people seated around the table, that she didn’t give a damn about the refugees who come to Australia. ‘I don’t feel one ounce of pity for them. They’ve broken the law, so they can suffer the consequences. They should have come here in the proper way like everyone else.’
Watching and listening as people at the table pointed out how ugly and silly and wrong all these statements were, I couldn’t help but admire her creativity. Faced by arguments based on both humanity and logic, employing both the brain and the heart, she had to keep reinventing her position. She did so without much hesitation and without much obvious discomfort.
‘What about the people on Nauru?’
‘Oh yes, well, I don’t think they should have been sent to Nauru, that was going a bit far.’
‘What about the children in prisons?’
‘Ah yes, well, maybe not the children.’
‘What about the women?’
She started to realise that she could not concede this point as well, or she would have lost too much ground. So she ignored that question.
‘They haven’t committed any crimes,’ someone suggested.
‘Just in coming here they’re breaking our laws,’ she replied.
‘But they are exercising their legal rights. Anyone has the legal right to arrive in a country and ask for refugee status.’
‘Well, they probably committed crimes to get here.’
Such dodging and weaving! She was as quick on her feet as Cristiano Ronaldo.
‘Anyway, there’s no proper procedure for these people to get here,’ someone said. ‘They’ve got nothing because they’ve lost it all in wars.’
‘Well, that’s what I mean. They shouldn’t be coming here in the first place.’
She was, I am sorry to report, a primary school teacher . . . but not at one of my schools.
In my lifetime, a couple of politicians have shown remarkable cunning in their understanding of concrete thinking, and their ability to capitalise on that understanding by speaking directly to voters in language that concrete thinkers understand. Three who stand out are the late Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Premier of Queensland for 21 years, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and US President Donald Trump.
Many people were mystified by the election of Trump to the presidency, but it is not difficult to understand when analysed from the point of view of formal (abstract) thinking and concrete thinking. For example, a Washington Post story on 21 February 2017 included an interview with a 42-year-old woman who was an ardent Trump supporter. Commenting on a presidential order signed by Trump that allowed coalmines to dump debris in nearby streams – thereby counteracting a regulation introduced by the previous president, Barack Obama, which had banned the practice – the woman was quoted as saying ‘If he hadn’t gotten into office, 70,000 miners would have been put out of work. I saw the ceremony where he signed that bill, giving them their jobs back, and he had miners with their hard hats and everything – you could see how happy they were.’232
This is a textbook example of the concrete thinker. There is the attractive simplicity of a direct cause–effect relationship, expressed by the words ‘If he hadn’t gotten into office, 70,000 miners would have been put out of work’. This ignores all other aspects of employment in the coal industry, such as the global trend away from the use of major pollutants, competition from other countries that have coalmines, increasing use of automation in mining, and the high costs of labour in the United States relative to many other nations. The number quoted, 70,000, seems inherently unlikely, but is an attractively high figure to bandy around. The energy policy director of Sightline Institute, an American environmental agency, said, in relation to Trump’s boasts of resurrecting coalmining: ‘He can’t bring back coal jobs in any meaningful way unless he’s capable of inventing a Time Machine . . . Waving your hands and saying you’re going to bring the coal industry back is misleading at best, malicious at worst . . . The vast majority of coal is mined in the West [of the USA] and is done in highly-mechanised ways. That’s not really reversible.’233
The woman’s next statement: ‘I saw the ceremony where he signed that bill, giving them their jobs back . . .’ evidences the overreliance concrete thinkers place on what can be seen or heard or touched. She saw it, therefore it must be real. It’s reminiscent of Philip Ruddock, Australia’s Minister for Immigration in the Howard Liberal government, producing a photo of some children in water, and thereby claiming to have proved that the children were thrown into the ocean by their parents in order to force Australian naval personnel to rescue them and take them on board an Australian naval vessel. It was later established that the photographs were comprehensively misrepresented. A Senate select committee found that no children from the boat were thrown overboard in the circumstances described by Ruddock, and that the photographs were taken after the refugee boat sank. The committee reported:
On 7 October 2001, the Minister for Immigration, Mr Philip Ruddock, announced to the media that ‘a number of children had been thrown overboard’ from a vessel suspected of being an ‘illegal entry vessel’ just intercepted by the Australian Defence Force. The ‘children overboard’ story was repeated in subsequent days and weeks by senior Government ministers, including the Minister for Defence, Mr Peter Reith, and the Prime Minister, Mr John Howard. The story was in fact untrue.234
Trump was signing a presidential order, not a bill, and he was not ‘giving people their jobs back’; he was allowing coalmines to continue to pollute creeks. In doing so, he was no doubt reducing the cost of waste disposal for the coalmining industry, which in turn could be expected to lower the costs of production, which might then lead to higher wages or the opening of new mines and hence a growth in the work force – or instead to higher returns to shareholders. But we can reasonably assume there would be a cost resulting from the continued pollution of the streams: a financial cost to re-purify the water – and that cost would quite likely be borne by taxpayers, including the woman interviewed by the Washington Post. As well, there are other more abstract costs, such as the danger to public health, the damage to flora and fauna, and the aesthetic and spiritual harm resulting from such reckless behaviour.
The interviewee seems to have been deeply impressed by the hard hats, which may to her have evoked old-fashioned images of honest, industrious manual workers covered with coal dust as they emerged from the mines, doing their bit to keep the wheels of industry turning by fuelling the mighty furnaces that in turn power the factories etc., etc. To her, the hard hats seem to have had strong visual impact. And the fact that the men, to her, looked happy, was very powerful, and provided the final proof that whatever the president was signing must have been a Good Thing.
Abstract thinkers are aware that facial expressions are not a reliable indicator of feelings. If the men looked happy, it does not mean that they were happy; if they were happy, it could have been as a result of many factors. For some people, being in close proximity to someone powerful and famous is enough to induce ecstatic smiles.
Much was made of the fact that a significant number of people who voted for Trump to become President were college graduates. In Piagetian terms, this means nothing, as a concrete thinker can achieve a college degree in most disciplines. Only success in a few subjects, like philosophy, is likely to elude them.
Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the corrupt long-serving Premier of Queensland who held the position from 1968 to 1987, was himself a concrete thinker who seemed to understand instinctively that many voters were concrete thinkers. Aided by spectacular gerrymanders that favoured country voters, he won election after election, using language that concrete thinkers could understand and with which they could identify.
He said, ‘I have always found . . . you can campaign on anything you like, but nothing is more effective than Communism.’ He banged the communist drum repeatedly, to shore up his political base.235 The federal Labour government was ‘communist-inspired’. A selection of his public statements gives a sense of his command of concrete language: ‘Don’t put one foot on the sticky paper, because pretty soon you will end up with two feet stuck’,236 ‘You don’t tell the frogs anything before you drain the swamp’,237 ‘You can’t sit on the fence, a barbed wire fence at that, and have one ear to the ground’,238 ‘The greatest thing that could happen to the state and the nation is when we get rid of all the media. Then we could live in peace and tranquillity and no one would know anything.’239
When running for prime minister, he said, ‘I’m a bushfire raging out of control.’240 His comment about Chinese leader Mao Zedong was ‘Red is red wherever it is – and I don’t trust any of them.’241
He had no compunction in looking for other scapegoats, frequently warning that a conspiracy of ‘southern homosexuals’ was a threat to Queensland. Homosexual people were ‘insulting evil animals who should go back to New South Wales and Victoria where they came from in the first place’.242
When Tony Abbott was an aspirational young politician, spoken of in the Liberal Party as a ‘man of the future’, he and I, and half a dozen other men who had public profiles in different areas, met for several hours with well-known journalist David Leser in Sydney to discuss topical issues. Not infrequently during the conversation we had to pause or slow down to explain or unpack various comments to Abbott, so that he could keep up. I left the meeting convinced that he would go no further in politics: he would be forever limited by his intellect. Then he became prime minister.
One of the exchanges at the meeting, which was recorded, transcribed and published in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, was about the status of men and women in our society. It went like this:
Abbott: But what if men are by physiology or temperament more adapted to exercise authority or to issue command?
Costa: Well, see, I don’t believe that . . . In terms of the power structure, I think it’s very hard to deny that there is an underrepresentation of women.
Abbott: But, now, there’s an assumption that this is a bad thing.243
When he became prime minister, Abbott awarded himself the portfolio of Minister for Women.
In late 2017, Abbott went to London to speak about climate change. He began his speech with a series of extravagant statements, unsupported by evidence but attractive to concrete and superficial thinkers: ‘Our businesses campaign for same-sex marriage but not for economic reform. Our biggest company, BHP, the world’s premier miner, lives off the coal industry that it now wants to disown. And our oldest university, Sydney, now boasts that its mission is “unlearning”.’244
These kinds of broadbrush statements, in which unconnectable issues are connected, progressive thinking is mocked and dishonesty pervades every phrase (do all our businesses campaign for same-sex marriage? Do all our businesses oppose economic reform? Does BHP ‘live off’ the coal industry? Don’t its 2018 financial results suggest that its main revenue source is the iron ore industry?245 Is ‘unlearning’ now a major force driving Sydney University?), are much favoured by demagogues.
With unconscious irony, Abbott went on to advocate the need for ‘an honest facing of facts and an insistence upon intellectual rigour’. A couple of paragraphs later, after condemning ‘some green activists whose ideal is an Amish existence, only without reference to God’, he said, ‘Beware the pronouncement, “the science is settled”. It’s the spirit of the Inquisition, the thought-police down the ages. Almost as bad is the claim that “99 per cent of scientists believe” as if scientific truth is determined by votes rather than facts.’
So much for intellectual rigour. Abbott glibly ignores the fact that the ‘votes’ of scientists on climate change are somewhat more meaningful than the votes of volleyball professionals, plasterers or commercial lawyers. When scientists come to conclusions based upon research and evidence, they are not ‘voting’, they are coming to conclusions based upon research and evidence.
People who support populist leaders, as so many concrete thinkers do, are fond of saying: ‘He (or she) is just saying what everyone else thinks.’ What they mean is that the populist leader is using the same concrete language they use and understand: so different from the abstractions articulated by more erudite and sophisticated leaders. Wisely has it been said ‘Don’t trust people who want to make you angry’, because anger is such a simple and powerful emotion to evoke from concrete thinkers, who may well be feeling frustrated by the discourse around them, and who may believe that they are disadvantaged by the way in which society functions. Most politicians have now worked out that waving a country’s flags to appeal to patriotism, and standing in front of multiple flags whilst speaking of ‘national values’, goes down well with concrete thinkers, even though the politicians rarely define national values, or if they do, they define them in terms that are meaningless or even ludicrous.
In early 2017, One Nation Party leader Pauline Hanson was taken to an area of the Great Barrier Reef, as part of a climate-change-denial campaign. Hanson, in true concrete-thinker style, looked around and saw that the area in which she stood appeared to be in good condition. She then projected from this and denied with confidence that the reef was suffering from any serious bleaching problem. ‘We can’t have these lies put across by people with their own agendas,’246 she said, ignoring the fact that beyond the horizon, vast areas of the reef were dying. She was unable to ‘see’ beyond the range of her eyes.
In 2018, a Queensland school student refused to stand for the national anthem at her school assembly, pointing out that by describing Australians as ‘young’, the song was offensive to Indigenous Australians who through generation after generation have been here for over 50,000 years. Calling the child a ‘nine-year-old brat’, Hanson’s response was: ‘Here we have a kid who’s been brainwashed and I tell you what, I’d give her a kick up the backside . . . Take her out of the school.’247
When the salary of the CEO of Australia Post was publicly disclosed, and thought by some to be unreasonably high, an unsigned statement about his salary was posted on the One Nation website. Here it is, unedited:
Recently Australia Post which is totally government owned and has been for 200 years, announced the loss of 900 jobs, being part of a cut back program. This is due to the decline in letters being sent and that’s true as email has further reduced letter writing and in many ways understandably. A hand written letter is a wonderful thing and contains the hand writing of a friend or loved one and that’s a blessing plus the effort required to put pen to paper and then to post it.
The CEO of Australia Post is Ahmed FAHOUR who was born in Lebanon and came to Australia in 1970. In 2009 he was made Managing Director and CEO of Australia Post. His salary package was estimated to be worth $4.8 million last year. Of this he donated about $2 million to the Islamic Museum of Australia located in Melbourne.
I have a big problem with this fellow’s salary package and so let’s get some perspective here.
The top ten executives in Australia Post combined earn around $20 million each year.
That’s simply immoral and clearly the CEO can afford to give away nearly half his takings to an Islamic museum so he doesn’t need it and surprise, surprise, its tax deductible . . .
How can the CEO of the Post Office earn so much especially when the postal service is bleeding money from letter delivery. No employee is worth five million a year and especially not from a government owned business . . . What a country full of mugs we are to sit by and let all this happen. I would have run the big game of Post Office for a lot less and still done a reasonable job and in fact if the best of we seniors applied ourselves we could run the damn post office better and for nothing except a kiss and a free lunch now and again.
You had better believe it too.
There is an unpleasant and some would say sinister unbalanced agenda in Australia which in the end preys on the average citizen, we the people. We are no longer the lucky country and we are no longer wealthy and this particular game of Post Office reveals major fractures and faults on a number fronts in our society and culture.
Who is running the country, who is pulling the levers and who is going to win? We the Mugs need to know.
Among the comments that might seem to be irrelevant or unjustified are the ones about the joys of receiving a handwritten letter, the mention of the CEO’s country of birth, his decision to (apparently) make a donation to a museum, the speculation as to whether he ‘needs’ his salary or not, the implication that something is wrong with a donation to a museum being tax-deductible, the assertion that Australia is no longer lucky or wealthy, and the assertion that the person making the statement could run the ‘damn post office’ better than the incumbent. Throughout the statement is a sense that a mass of ‘ordinary’ people, including the writer and his/her readers, are being exploited by a sinister, well-placed group of conspirators.
It is easy for demagogues and populists to first, provoke rage, and then to tap into it and take advantage of it for their own purposes. Talkback radio hosts on tabloid radio programs do it every day. The continuing frenzy of rage against the machine that they foster is energy-sapping. But it’s also addictive, in the same unhealthy way that bodybuilding, ballet, jogging or drugs can be for some people. Listeners to these radio stations are kept in a highly stimulated state. Every second caller begins with the forceful words ‘What people need to understand is . . .’ or ‘What people need to know is . . .’ or ‘What people don’t realise is . . .’
The phrase ‘People need to wake up’ recurs frequently.
The dominant personality type in Australia is passive-aggressive. David Attenborough could have a wonderful time peering into our schools, shopping malls, surf clubs and dental surgeries, observing the habits and mannerisms of that notorious critter, the passive-aggressive personality. One reason for their prevalence in Australia is our emphasis on politeness, good manners, ‘niceness’. Etiquette books sold strongly in the second half of the twentieth century, and the Queen of Etiquette, June Dally-Watkins, achieved national celebrity. But, as someone once said, ‘beware the sweet person: there is a lot of anger beneath the façade’. A fermenting soup of ugly feelings simmers inside them. Although they do not outwardly show any expectation of power or authority, their fantasies are of domination. They believe they can do everything better than anyone else . . . including running Australia Post.
In his brilliant, vile, fictional creation Uriah Heep, Charles Dickens captured the passive-aggressive personality at its worst. William S. Burroughs Jr wrote, ‘If a small mind with power begins to feel inferior, all Hell is going to pay’,248 but Uriah had already proved the truth of that adage. Teaching children strategies to manage people like this, and doing all we can to help ensure that our children don’t become such people, is important work for parents and teachers.
It is something of a cliché to say that the stock market runs on fear and greed. But many people run their whole lives on just five powerful emotions: fear, greed, rage, guilt and love. Only one of these is generally regarded as a ‘positive’ emotion. The default setting for hundreds of millions of Westerners is summed up nicely in a Washington Post review of a book lavishly praised by Donald Trump. Green Card Warrior is a 110-page essay by a young Australian named Nick Adams, who wanted to emigrate to the United States, and who styled himself as a ‘warrior’ on the basis of his campaign to get a Green Card. In the book, Adams describes his journey as ‘a phenomenal story of human endurance’, akin, presumably, to the ordeals of Antarctic explorers in the early twentieth century. ‘My extraordinary ability,’ he says, ‘was indisputable.’ He sums up his suffering in these words: ‘For ten months, in the prime of my life, my career was stalled. My personal life put on hold. I almost ran out of money. Hundreds of opportunities were missed . . . Lifelong dreams like attending the Republican National Convention missed. My tireless work in getting on the radar of Fox news executives was for nothing.’249
The book is described in the Post review as written by a man who feels ‘misunderstood and victimised, full of self-generated rage and imagined grievance’.250 These ten words concisely capture the state of mind of many Westerners in the 21st century. Living in this period of unprecedented affluence, where most households have electronic and electrical devices equivalent to a large staff of servants, and most members of the vast middle class enjoy varied diets, excellent healthcare, frequent travel and multiple means of entertainment, we seem to be a society of resentful, angry people who feel we are entitled to much more – even if we are unable to articulate what it is we want. Using his powerful political connections, the author of Green Card Warrior got what he wanted – a work permit for the United States – but that didn’t stop him writing his bile-filled rant. ‘My own conservative party [in Australia] was full of little totalitarians doing everything they could to silence me. It was the cruellest non-criminal behavior imaginable.’251
Why are we like this? It has become de rigueur to blame the media for everything, so of course I will cheerfully jump on the bandwagon. Before doing so, however, I should say that I have great respect for the media. The best newspapers, and TV and radio networks, seem, in my lifetime, to have covered big stories in depth and with care. The writing has usually been well researched, thoughtful and stylish. The people in media outlets, more than almost any other individuals or groups in our society, have been quick to correct their mistakes and to apologise for them. Given the abandonment of principle by major political parties, and the difficulty in distinguishing between them on such major moral issues as the treatment of refugees and the destruction of the planet, the media has operated over countless years as the de facto opposition in Australia. Sadly, that role has been badly weakened by recent cost-cutting at media companies. This is a dangerous situation, for the media is vital to us: without it we would be in an even more precarious position than we find ourselves.
Naturally, however, as public or private companies committed to making a profit, they are tempted to take a populist line. We, the people, blame the media for running superficial and sensationalist stories, but as has been said many times, if ungrammatically, the media is us. On any day of the year, if one looks at the list of ‘most popular stories’ on the websites of major media outlets, articles which attract people are not particularly inspiring. For example, according to the Brisbane Courier Mail’s online list, on 13 February 2019 its five most popular stories were:
‘Mum’s nightmare diagnosis adds to family heartbreak’
‘Judgy (sic) virgin publicly kink-shames wife’
‘“I was slut shamed for wearing this on flight”’
‘Student’s torture of kitten truly sickening’
‘Bizarre find in abandoned wildlife Park’
And this was on the eve of Valentine’s Day. But apparently, these are the stories a large number of people choose to read. Complex analyses of Middle Eastern politics, changes in economic policy, threats to journalism in totalitarian countries . . . we do not expect to find these stories in the top five, and we are rarely surprised.
In more than 30 years of writing books, I have had countless encounters with media of all kinds, and have found the stories to be accurate, the treatment positive and fair, and the journalists generally well informed. Only once have I known a journalist (a radio broadcaster) to lie; only once have I been treated unethically. Only once was I asked by a reporter, in Shepparton, ‘Er . . . sorry if this is a stupid question, but what is the difference between prose and poetry?’ Only once have I been misquoted or misrepresented in the media in any significant or damaging way, and that was by a fellow novelist, who was not a professional journalist, and who was not acting maliciously.
However, the media, in gratifying us by serving up a relentless diet of stories about celebrities, and stories about injustice, including economic inequality, have probably contributed to our sense of victimisation and our feelings of grievance. When we read of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, we are reminded of the banality of our own daily routines, and are made to feel that we have been sorely deprived. Stories of injustice – constant screams of outrage from state premiers, for example, about the ways their states are ‘ripped off’ by the Commonwealth government, or stories about schools with leaking roofs, or reports of long waiting times for ambulances – make us feel that the cards are stacked against us and that we are the victims of conspiracies. Many people in five of the six states of Australia (excluding, arguably, New South Wales) are convinced that their states should get more money from the federal government and that they experience needless suffering as a result of this unfair distribution.
As I’ve mentioned, tabloid newspapers and radio talkback ‘shock jocks’ shamelessly use anger to manipulate their audience, in cold-blooded awareness that by doing so they can increase their personal power and ratings, and thereby attract advertisers.
Some people, however, believe the media should be like a parent who denies a child a constant diet of lollies and soft drink, on the grounds that ‘such a diet is not good for you’. But surely, as adults, we should be responsible for our own reading and viewing, just as we are responsible for our own food intake.
Every day I deal with furious children who are convinced that they have been treated unfairly. ‘He’s been on the trampoline for ages and he won’t give anyone else a go.’ ‘She had the last two biscuits and I didn’t get any.’ ‘The teacher gave me a detention for homework that I didn’t even know we had.’ Sometimes parents are all too ready to join in. ‘Why didn’t he get a bigger role in the play?’ ‘He got left out of the chess team and he’s heartbroken.’ ‘She only got this homework yesterday and she’s expected to have it all done by tomorrow!’
It is a rare soul who is not weighed down by a sense of entitlement and who is not angered by perceived inequalities. ‘There’s no progress without discontent’, and if we are to have a more equitable society we need to be discontented with the existing order. The problem is that many people go beyond this, developing such an obsession with what they believe to be persecution that they become poisoned by greed and rage. So many adults are infantile in their expectations of life – if not on their own behalf, then on behalf of their children. And certain family groupings increase the risk that children will not acquire a good sense of perspective as they grow. Parents who have just one child may need to work harder to help that child understand the ‘ladder of injustices’, which has trivial, forgettable incidents at the bottom and tragic, traumatic events at the top. Children with siblings are likely to recover relatively quickly when their sister has eaten the last of the Coco Pops without sharing, or their brother has borrowed their comb without asking. Having a sibling lose your footie scarf or push you off the computer when you are about to win an online game or flick your bare skin with a wet towel is certainly unfair, but so is being booked for speeding because your cruise control is not working properly, or missing out on a job because the road was blocked by an accident and you were late for the interview, or having a severely disabled baby as a result of a genetic abnormality. Life is so often random. We cannot control the universe. When things go wrong, sometimes no one is to blame. A life of tranquillity and comfort is not a life in any meaningful sense of the word. Even the most benign creatures on the planet, teddy bears, sometimes get kicked, bashed, torn and abused.
In our polite society, feelings like fear, greed and rage are regarded as unseemly and unattractive, and are supposed to be concealed i.e. repressed. We might do better were we to acknowledge in a thoughtful and considered way the strength and power they have, and be open about their influence. We need to bring a sense of perspective to our assessment of the many frustrating situations in our lives, in the world at large. Which issues are worth our rage and which are trivial or ephemeral? In striving for greater balance, and edging towards that balance, we might reduce the likelihood that we will continue to elect concrete thinkers to leadership positions, where their inability to understand the complexities of situations, to empathise, to protect those not of their tribe or class, and to communicate in subtle and nuanced ways can cause considerable harm.
i want to be alone! let me into the group!
There was a scene in a British comedy a few years ago where John Cleese played the role of a doctor. He was treating a patient, of whom he asked, ‘Do you breathe?’
The patient replied, ‘Yes, quite frequently, actually.’
Dr Cleese instructed him, ‘Well, breathe in, then. Breathe out again. Breathe in, blow out, breathe in, blow out. In out, faster, in out, in out, keep going. Sorry I have to make you do this, but the electric fan has broken down.’
Humans have a lot of instincts and needs and drives, and the urge to breathe is top of the list. Then there’s the urge to drink, and the urge to eat, and the desire or need to be safe. It’s hard to rank these though, because circumstances and context make a powerful difference. If you’re in a war zone, and bombs are falling around you, you’ll probably ignore or tolerate your thirst for a while.
Other human wants or needs include the lust for status and power, the desire for comfort, the quest for good health, the urge for sex, the longing for admiration, the drive to be part of a group, the drive for individual fulfilment. The number of human needs and wishes no doubt falls within the ambit of that big quantity we call ‘infinity’!
Unfortunately, these needs and drives often get in each other’s way. Our desire for comfort may result in our purchasing items that impact negatively on our health. The manufacture of these products may have contributed to global health problems. The desire to accumulate possessions and money, in order to increase our comfort and sense of security, may be incompatible with our need for spiritual succour. Many Americans were shocked in 1975 when Mother Teresa told an English journalist that ‘the spiritual poverty of the Western world is much greater than the physical poverty of the people of Calcutta’.252
It seems that certain human drives can’t be controlled. This may not apply to the need for air and water. You don’t get too many people overdosing on oxygen, or drinking water until they bloat. But the other needs can get out of control pretty quickly, as we see from the obesity epidemic. We have a lot of human Labradors in our midst. In 2016, the British medical magazine The Lancet reported a study showing that on a worldwide basis, obesity is now more common than the condition of being underweight. In the 186 countries surveyed, it was found that the number of obese people had risen from 105 million in 1975 to 641 million in 2014. The number of underweight people had risen from 330 million to 462 million during these 39 years.253
When it comes to comfort, we suffer from obesity. I would be embarrassed to count the number of labour-saving devices we have at home, including the dishwasher and the vacuum cleaner, the rice cooker and the heaters, the computers and printer, and the cars.
There’s another, conflicting pair of desires that also seems to know no bounds. On the one hand, we have to belong to groups. It’s not just the group connected by blood, or the groups connected by friendship, or the tribes that we belong to by virtue of our jobs or our interests or the football teams we support. That drive even attracts us to certain television programs, like Seinfeld, Friends, Sex and the City or lifestyle shows. I suspect a powerful element in the success of these programs is the feeling that the regulars on the show are a special, happy, united group. There’s a sense of warmth, camaraderie, that makes these shows more powerful and popular than others on television. Maybe a lot of lonely people watch them because they feel that the cast members share a special relationship. The cast becomes a kind of de facto family for the viewers. That would explain why viewers hate it when there’s real-life fighting among the stars of such programs.
Yet at the same time we move away from other people at every opportunity. If there’s a chance to get a seat to ourselves on the train, if we see an empty table at the coffee shop, if there’s a block of unoccupied seats in the cinema, then that is where we head. New suburbs crawl across the countryside like a skin disease, with everyone wanting their quarter-acre, resulting in cities that spread outwards instead of upwards. Good farming land disappears, with greater pressure on the intensive production of food, and further irreparable destruction to the habitats of native animals, birds and insects.
One of the differences between Western society and the rest of the world is the emphasis we in the West place on individualisation. In recent centuries, we have moved away from prioritising membership of a group or tribe that sets social obligations and commitments over individual rights, to a society where each person goes out after his or her personal fulfilment, and the needs of the group are ranked as less important.
The romantic ideal of the individual carrying out a series of acts that brings him fulfilment, happiness and success may be misleading. The problem with becoming separate individuals is that it puts us at risk of stepping into limbo.
In his book Oh, What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me!, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter describes the effect on highlanders in Papua New Guinea when photographed by Irving Penn in 1970. These men were accustomed to being filmed by tourists, and indeed often made funny faces for their cameras. But when Penn set up a portable studio, with one wall open, so that the studio created its own space – a space without background – the impact on the highlanders was colossal.
Carpenter writes:
The moment the subjects stepped across that threshold, they changed totally. All confusion and excitement ceased. Even those outside became still. A sudden intensity possessed everyone. Their bodies became rigid, their muscles tense; their fingers tightly gripped whatever they touched . . . Their eyes fixed unwaveringly on that single point, no matter how long the session. That point was the point men enter when they leave this world behind and step alone, absolutely alone, into limbo. That was the source of their terror and exaltation and intense self-awareness. The technology that lifted man out of both his environment and his body, allowing him to enter and leave limbo at will, has now become so casual, so environmental, we make that trip with the numbness of commuters, our eyes unseeing, the mystery of self-confrontation and self-discovery gone.254
He’s talking about us! We are daily commuting in and out of limbo, but we nearly all do our utmost to avoid any meaningful encounters with such a powerful phenomenon. In recent years, mobile phones, electronic tablets and computers have given considerable help to our avoidance tactics. But the list is pretty much infinite: alcohol, drugs, sporting teams, relationships, religion, movies, family life, gambling and so on. And so on. It seems from Carpenter’s description that interactions with tourists were one of the ways people in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea had become desensitised, or deterred from exploring the possibilities that could await people who are prepared to step ‘absolutely alone, into limbo’.
Perhaps everything depends on our being able to overcome our need for individualisation, but at the same time being enabled to enter limbo and subsequently leave it; on being capable of leaving and later rejoining the real world, a world that Mother Teresa recognised in the dirty streets of Calcutta but that can’t be found in the spacious housing estates of America and Australia.