But stay awhile—O, how beautiful you are!
Goethe, Faust (completed 1832)
Take all your treasure, sell it, give it to the poor; and come, follow me, for you will have treasure in heaven.
St. Mark’s Gospel
Either we discover the old truth about commitment that we explained at the end of the last chapter—about giving and receiving, about sacrifice—or we discover another truth: that we cannot fulfil ourselves in the global marketplace.
Time and again we experience the truth of the old clichés.
We learn, for instance, that ambition for power can deceive. The (perhaps apocryphal) deathbed sayings of the powerful tell a story that resonates well beyond the particular legacies of the people concerned. William the Conqueror—he who triumphed, on the only date in history that all Britons can remember, at the Battle of Hastings, thus inaugurating a reign that lasted twenty-one years and began the radical transformation of England from Saxon communitarianism to Norman feudalism —is alleged to have shown uncharacteristic remorse at the end of it all: “I’ve persecuted the natives of England beyond all reason, whether gentle or simple. I have cruelly oppressed them and unjustly dis-inherited them, killed innumerable multitudes by famine or the sword and become the barbarous murderer of many thousands both young and old of that fine race of people.”
Or there is Cardinal Wolsey, the great prince of the Church and servant of Henry VIII. In disgrace with his king because of his failure to procure the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, he died on his way from York to London and probable execution in 1530. “Had I but served my God as I have served my king, I should now be a happy man” he is alleged to have uttered—the words of a man who has given too much to his career; words that stand for the disappointment of those who lose power in a thousand different circumstances: politicians at the hands of electorates; company chief executives at the hands of boards under pressure from dissatisfied shareholders; those who hitch their wagons to the stars of ruthless tyrants only to be dropped by them when they cease to be useful.
We also know of the driven man who relentlessly pursues whatever goals he sets for himself at the expense of any real relationships with other human beings, often crushing those nearest him in the process, and without finding any peace for himself. Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’s film masterpiece, made in 1941 when he was only 25, is widely accepted to be based on the life story of William Randolph Hearst. It is a fictional account of a newspaper magnate who enjoys all the visible trappings of success, yet whose dark secret is a lonely, unspoken, perhaps not ever acknowledged yearning for his childhood innocence—symbolized dramatically by the toboggan he played with as a child, named “Rosebud.” He dies with the word “Rosebud” on his lips—to the puzzlement of those around his bed. And they miss the only clue to what it refers to or what it means. The final seconds of the film reveal a man for whom driving ambition was never more than compensation for a child’s longing for home.
For the majority of people, of course, the clichés are more mundane. They don’t find themselves at “the top of the greasy pole”—to use Disraeli’s vivid image—and are more at risk from the workaholism or the shopaholism of the global bazaar than from the drive to dominate.
Workaholism is an occupational hazard of recent times. As the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum in the nineteenth century, men, women and children were put to work too young and for too long. Gradually, legislation began to bring humanity to the workplace, and from the late nineteenth century onward trade unions began to offer more and more effective protection. With the rise of the welfare state, of a service economy and of broad-based prosperity, the days of industrial oppression are largely gone in the wealthy countries of the G7. But they have been replaced, for many, by an unremitting market capitalism that has made more people feel middle class—but which has also required the middle class to work harder than ever. “I feel I have missed my children growing up”—the lament is heard time and again in the feverish marketplaces of London, New York, Frankfurt and elsewhere. Technology should have made work easier. It has done the reverse: the e-mail and the Blackberry presumptuously demand immediate responses on an almost literally round-the-clock, global basis.
And then there is the money—either for what it can buy or just for itself. At one level, as Simmel understood, a leveller and a liberator; at another, a seductive addiction about which all the clichés are true. As the sayings go, you cannot take it with you, it doesn’t make you happy, and you can only eat three meals a day. The legends that tell the story again and again go back a long way: King Midas of Phrygia asks the gods to turn anything he touches to gold. They grant him his wish. Everything he touches turns to cold metal. Be careful what you wish for, lest you get it.
We cannot fulfil ourselves in business through power or work or wealth. We learn this in a variety of ways. Events can turn on us: we get passed over for the promotion we covet so much—or we get it and find that we drink from a poisoned chalice. Or tragedy strikes: illness or untimely death in the family, which suddenly reminds us of the transience of it all and of what we have laid on the altar of sacrifice. Or we wake in the middle of the night—that time when all human experience knows that the spirits are at their lowest—and take stock, perhaps, and realize that the clock is ticking. One way or another, we struggle to possess, and fear we have ended by being possessed—or rejected. Is there anyone, successful or unsuccessful by their own lights or in the eyes of the world, who has not sensed this in some way at some time?
It is one of the oldest stories of all. And one of its most powerful embodiments is in the legend of Faust, the man who makes a bargain with the Devil. In one guise or another, the Faust story recurs time and again in European literature. Its enduring fascination into the present age rests precisely on the fact that it is so telling about the besetting sin of the human spirit in the global bazaar.
The original Faust was probably a showman, astrologer and alchemist. He was born around 1480, in Knittlingen, north of Pforzheim in Germany. He was notorious even during his lifetime, being accused of all kinds of misdemeanours—some believable, others plainly mythical. But above all he has gone down in legend as the man who made a pact with the Devil, selling his soul in return for all the pleasures of the world.
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant Germany, Faust was the subject of long sermonizing tracts. He also became a regular subject for popular theatre and puppet performances, presented with plenty of burlesque and colour. He played perfectly to an enduring human fascination with mischief: Faust’s end, in the flames of hell, was the ideal combination of spine-chilling excitement and morality tale for the masses.
But the story became more than that, thanks largely to two works of literature that raised Faust to the status of an enduring archetype of the human condition.
The Faust legend had spread across Europe in the late sixteenth century, and an English-language version was produced in 1592. This was almost certainly the source for Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. In this play, unquestionably Marlowe’s greatest (and an intimation of what might have been if he had not been killed at the age of 29 in a Deptford pub brawl), he lifts the Faust legend out of primitive Lutheranism into the Renaissance.
Marlowe’s Faust is a restless creature who knows that knowledge is power and wealth. His boundless thirst for experience and domination leads him on. In Marlowe’s hands, Faust becomes a titanic figure, determined to bestride the world at any cost. Even Mephistopheles, the servant of Lucifer, the Devil, tries to talk him out of his ambition at first, to no avail: he burns his bridges and signs the contract that gives him twenty-four years of earthly fulfilment, in return for his soul:
Had I as many souls as there are stars,
I’d give them all for Mephistopheles.
By him I’ll be great emperor of the world.
A rumbustious cavalcade follows. Yet all is not well. An old man appeals to Faust to recognize what course he is on. He almost listens. But the addiction gets the better of him again, and as the drama moves to its climax he demands to “glut the longing of my heart’s desire” in an encounter with the ideal of perfect feminine beauty—Helen of Troy. This encounter is his mountain top, his moment of fulfilment, the moment when the Devil delivers fully on his part in the contract:
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships?
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!—
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
From this there is no return. Faust is possessed—not so much by something that is trivial and worthless as by something that is not real. The play ends with a powerfully dramatized, but conventional, finale in which the clock strikes midnight and an agonized Faust is taken away to hell.
What is already, in the hands of Marlowe, a parable of the new human inquisitive/acquisitive drive becomes even richer, subtler and much more ambiguous in Goethe’s extraordinary masterpiece.
Goethe spent much of a lifetime on his Faust. When he began work on the concept, in the early 1770s, he was in his twenties. He completed the whole work in 1832, only months before the end of a long life. He was unaware of Marlowe’s play until he was well advanced on the project. Over half a century, the drama evolved into a two-part magnum opus, over 12,000 lines long (eight times the length of Marlowe’s play). If Marlowe’s Faust is a Renaissance titan, Goethe’s Faust is a giant driven by the Enlightenment. It is rarely performed in full, because of its sheer scale and complexity. I saw Peter Stein’s production in Berlin in 2004: the performance was spread over a weekend and the impact was unforgettable. In its grandeur it is reminiscent of Wagner; in its richly varied content and style it has the genius of Shakespeare; and in its post-Enlightenment open-endedness it resonates with a twenty-first-century human spirit that knows what heights it can scale and what depths it can plumb.
Goethe’s Faust focuses crucially not on a contract but on a wager. Weary of bookish study, like Marlowe’s Faust, he yearns for action and experience. But in his negotiations with Mephistopheles he insists on a crucial condition:
If ever I say to the moment:
But stay awhile—O, how beautiful you are!
Then you may clap me in irons,
Then I will happily be brought down,
Then may the death knell sound,
Then you are free from your service.
Far more sophisticated than a simple contract, this is a challenge to Mephistopheles to provide even just one moment of pure fulfilment. It is the basis for an extraordinary journey in search of experience. Will it ever include a moment that meets this test?
The journey he embarks on has its share of buffoonery, as in Marlowe. But it is far more embracing in its scope. It includes the tragedy of Gretchen: Faust’s seduction of an innocent young woman, their lovemaking, then his abrupt abandonment of her when she becomes pregnant. As the story unfolds in painful intensity and she goes to her death for the murder of her baby, she grows in stature while he is diminished.
But he continues his journey, and as he does so he becomes less a specific flesh-and-blood human, and more a symbolic figure. Not Everyman, but a figure representing the aspirations of the great man of action, who is not content with philosophizing or with time-serving, but whose urge is to experience and have an effect on the world, using Mephistopheles’s services as he goes. Goethe’s Faust has Napoleonic characteristics, as well as echoes in Marx (in his famous critique of uninvolved learning: “Philosophers seek to understand the world: the point, however, is to change it”). He becomes almost the spirit of the age that had already dawned by the eighteenth century and that reached its high noon in the twentieth: restless, this-worldly, enquiring, domineering, acquisitive, action-oriented.
Goethe’s Faust is almost unbelievably full of allusion and allegory. After the tragedy of Gretchen, in the lengthy second part of the drama Faust continues his journey through scenes that are an allegory of the corrupt and decadent world of ancien régime Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (including a fascinatingly prescient scene in which Mephistopheles enables a feckless ruler to deal with his financial straits by printing money and precipitating inflation); through a voyage of discovery around a representation of classical Greece (but can humanity ever achieve satisfaction by looking backward to an alleged golden age?); through his central encounter with Helen of Troy (in whom he discovers a bliss which, in contrast to Marlowe’s Faust, he seems to know cannot endure, because it is ideal and unreal, not part of tempestuous reality); through a return to the real world that plunges into what is in effect an allegory of the upheavals of a nineteenth-century Europe convulsed by the aftereffects of the French Revolution; and then to the final denouement and Faust’s extraordinary apotheosis (quite the opposite of Marlowe’s climactic moment of damnation).
The last act of this huge tableau of the modern human spirit has Faust undertaking a project that at one level seems banal after the superhuman struggles of earlier scenes, and at another level is an emblem of the human desire to engineer the world, to reshape it for its own purposes. Faust’s project to drain marshland and make it fit for human prosperity gives him finally a satisfaction at the end of a long life of searching (he is symbolically a hundred years old), such that he cries out to Mephistopheles, even as death is about to catch up with him:
To stand on free ground with people who are free!
In that moment I could say
“But stay awhile—O, how beautiful you are!
The trace of my earthly days
Will never be lost through eons of time”—
This foretaste of great happiness
Is now my greatest moment.
Mephistopheles has in effect lost his wager. Faust’s admission is not only conditional, but is triggered by the prospect of something that will create human well-being, not by a moment of self-gratification.
There follows a strange, ambiguous apotheosis. Mephistopheles is rebuffed, and the soul of Faust is taken up into a heaven where the figure of God seems absent, but where the Mater Gloriosa, the Queen of Heaven of Catholic piety, receives him and he is transformed and redeemed (as Gretchen has been). Goethe was in no sense a conventional Christian. But this vivid, mysterious ending is certainly not pure irony. His (unorthodox) use of the iconography of grace and redemption is ambivalent and open-ended, as is the very final “mystical chorus”:
Everything transient
Is only an image;
The unattainable
Is happening;
What cannot be described
Is now done;
The eternal feminine
Draws us on.
Faust is a figure for the modern age. Goethe was profoundly ambivalent about what was unfolding in his day (and would have been appalled by where it led to in the twentieth century). His “hero” reflects that ambivalence. As an eminent British scholar of his work, John R. Williams, put it: “[Faust’s] idealism is qualified by his demonic ruthlessness, his satisfaction in achievement is limited by his obsessive covetousness, his altruism is vitiated by his impatience, his prosperity by his crimes, and even his final utopian vision is subverted by a profound irony.” In the end, Mephistopheles loses his hold on Faust. Yet the final transformation offers a hope that is not a simple overlooking of all that has happened, and whose basis and implications are left beguilingly unclear.
Goethe’s Faust seems almost uncontrolled in its luxuriance. Goethe himself more or less explicitly recognized its centrifugal tendencies and open-endedness. The work’s rich allusiveness and allegorical power have spawned a whole industry of literary criticism. Goethe himself time and again refused to be pinned down about its specific meanings. Perhaps, as with all the greatest works of art, its openness to interpretation is a mark of its genius.
Its enduring relevance in the globalized world of the twenty-first century lies surely in the ambiguity of Faust’s experience, in the ambiguity of his flawed final triumph, and in the strange ambiguity of his apotheosis. In the Gretchen story, we see the tragedy of the abuse of the vulnerable. But whose tragedy is it? Just Gretchen’s? Or also Faust’s? In Helen of Troy we see the temptation (and the impossibility) of escape from reality into the realm of ideals and the idyllic. For you can’t live in pleasure groves and be fulfilled; you have to deal in inconvenient realities. And, in the end, satisfaction seems to come—even for the unscrupulous bully—in getting something prosaically material done. What an irony for the man who sets out with limitless ambition to be the colossus of history. (Is this the fate that inevitably befalls politicians in our times?)
And, all the while, Mephistopheles is there: that sense of the presence of evil that at least reminds us of the seriousness of what is at stake. Even in a world that has lost the fear that demons are lurking round every corner, even in a world that finds it hard to hold onto moral absolutes, we retain a sense of the presence of evil. It remains an important source of our discomfort with ourselves.
And then there is that final apotheosis. What is the basis for the redemption that Faust is offered? Where is God anyway? Whatever this all means, it is plainly not simply validation of Faust’s human striving to assert himself. And what exactly does that final mystical chorus tell us? What is the “eternal feminine” that “draws us on”? (But that is a question for the final chapter.)
It is clear that, in the hands of Goethe, Faust has travelled a long way from the simple morality play of the sixteenth century. At the core of Goethe’s drama is the archetype of the individual who asserts his self by doing and having. To be more is the alternative to being nothing: and to be more is to do more and have more. There is a price to pay, but it is a price the individual pays knowingly—at least in part. So it is an archetype that has more and more resonance as the human consciousness becomes more and more individualized, under the impact of globalization.
It should be no surprise that the Faustian bargain recurs again and again in literature through the centuries. The individual—either larger than life or would-be larger than life—who pays the price is an enduring motif. Shakespeare (in whose plays it is said that you can find every human instinct, thought or feeling) offers us one perfect example: Macbeth. In a moving soliloquy of doubt and hesitation before Duncan’s murder, he muses:
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly. If the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here—
But here upon this bank and shoal of time—
We’d jump the life to come ...
This is the Faustian bargain. Urged on by his wife, Macbeth takes it on: the bargain in which he sells his soul to take power, to “make history.” Not many people do this in the grand manner. But far too many people sacrifice too much to ambition and power. And—perhaps—the more mundane the objective, the easier it is to deceive ourselves about what we are doing.
There are other ways, too, of settling for a bargain with what always turns out to be a lesser god. Worship of the pleasure principle is another, of which Don Giovanni is the classic example. This most powerful of Mozart’s heroes blazes a trail of female “conquests”—to use the eighteenth-century euphemism—that takes him, via the murder of the Commendatore, to the confrontation with his victim’s statue in the graveyard, to his refusal to repent or mend his ways, to damnation. To some, his very defiance is cause for sneaking admiration—as if he were some kind of Promethean hero thumbing his nose at the gods (or an existentialist hero who accepts his end as inevitable but not as punishment). But he is in truth the epitome of the utterly selfish pleasure seeker, and has implicitly made the Faustian bargain. And how many people do that? Again, the more mundane the prize, the less obvious, perhaps, is the price.
Then there is the temptation to seek creative fame (and/or wealth) at the expense of real creativity. One of the short stories of Nikolai Gogol, published in his collection Arabesques in 1835 and called “The Portrait,” tells the story of a young, classically poor artist in St. Petersburg. He is fascinated by a strange, apparently unfinished, portrait of an unknown man in an Asiatic robe, which he finds in an art dealer’s shop. The eyes of the man seem to fix themselves on him. He buys the picture with his last twenty kopecks, and then cannot pay the rent on his garret. In nightmarish slumber, he seems to see the man step from the frame and drop rolls of money on the ground, one of which he sneaks away. He awakes to find real money rolled up and hidden in the frame. He resolves to use the new freedom from care and want this gives him to develop his creative talent; but instead he develops a taste for the comfortable life, and a career making more money by doing fashionable society portraits of no artistic merit. But he goes insane with jealousy when a poor pupil produces work that wins real acclaim from the art critics.
The second part of this eerie story focuses on the origins of the portrait in a strange commission to a local artist by a money-lender in a far-off village who was thought to have trafficked with the Devil. Despite the artist’s unease, the moneylender begs him to complete the picture: he seems to sense that he will be doomed if he dies before it is finished. Yet he does die, and the unfinished portrait unsettles the minds of all who own it.
Gogol’s story resonates with a growing nineteenth-century supernaturalism of a kind that would have felt out of place in the eighteenth-century mind-set of Goethe and even of Mozart. But, though the guise is different, the Faustian theme is clearly detectible. Chartkov, the artist, sells out his creative urge for money, respectability and comfort. How many of us, one way or another, do the same?
Yet another guise of the Faustian bargain is displayed in another story of a portrait—this one much better known to the English-speaking world: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1891. The young Dorian’s wish for his portrait to age in his stead is the sinister basis for a life of eternal youth, lived in the selfish pursuit of beauty. The echoes of Faust are striking: Dorian’s rejection destroys a young actress in an obvious parallel to the Gretchen tragedy; he embarks on a series of vices, becoming inter alia a frequent visitor to an opium den; there is even a point of remorse—or rather taking stock—as in Marlowe’s Faust, but not real guilt. And all the while he preserves his extraordinary youth and beauty, while the portrait ages. The denouement as he slashes the portrait—only to fall dead, aged and withered—is Wilde’s fin de siècle alternative to Marlowe’s damnation scene.
Wilde’s story is partly about the pursuit of the pleasure principle (à la Don Giovanni); but it is also, classically, about the refusal to age, the denial of mortality. And what is more characteristic of today’s spirit than that? In ways ranging from the trivial and obvious to the subtle and indirect, so many succumb to this urge. It is of course the psychological basis of the cosmetic-surgery industry; it manifests itself, too, in the often obsessive pursuit of fitness and dietary health. More significantly, it lies behind the determination of many a political or business leader to hang on for too long, wallowing in the conviction that no successor is yet ready. And, more generally, we feed this obsession in society at large by treating long life as a virtue (or even a reward) rather than as a gift.
Faust and the ambition for power; Faust and the pursuit of pleasure; Faust and the monetization of creative genius; Faust and the quest for eternal youth. He has many variants—as many as the ways in which human beings struggle to assert themselves.
And what of the figure of Mephistopheles, the servant of his ambitions? In the world of the urbanized global market, in which we are all increasingly both connected and individualized, it is surely money that becomes the modern Mephistopheles. As economics teaches us, money is both a means of exchange and a store of value. As philosophers have noted, its role as store of value elides into an embodiment of value itself. The means become an end. The lubricating mechanism of investment, production and commerce becomes its own goal. The servant risks becoming the master.
We can see this happening at the level of nation states down the centuries since the Spanish began importing gold into Europe. The mercantilist urge to accumulate gold (and, later, currency reserves) continues to distort international economic relationships into the twenty-first century. Economists and politicians debate the policy issues posed by the global financial imbalances that are the result. We should not forget that these imbalances reflect a deeply rooted human tendency as well.
It is a tendency that operates pervasively in the individual psyche. Money is potentially liberating: it breaks down social barriers, and enables conventions to be flouted for good and for ill. It is the servant that enables us to pursue our dreams. What in the world of Macbeth or Don Giovanni was limited to the aristocracy, and in the world of Goethe’s Faust or Gogol or Wilde to the world of art and the literati, is now increasingly democratized. More and more of us can make the Faustian bargain, and put ourselves in the hands of the modern Mephistopheles. You no longer have to be a titan to do it.
Which brings us to the story of the rich young man. In his time he is an establishment figure. Now his equivalents generally see themselves as middle class. Nameless, but successful and well-heeled, he seems nevertheless to be conscious that all is not well. He is not a man who is ready to say to the passing moment, “But stay awhile ...” He encounters a teacher who is becoming known for being provocative—even disturbing, to say the least—and asks what he should do to inherit eternal life (and—though unstated—find his peace). The teacher’s answer is conventional for the times: keep the moral law, as embodied in the Ten Commandments. The rich young man responds that he has done this from his youth onward (and perhaps he believes he has). At which point the teacher turns to him and to his real need. This story is told more or less identically in the gospel narratives of Matthew, Mark and Luke. But Mark’s version has a telling gloss (unusually since Mark, almost universally regarded as the earliest of the evangelists, is generally sparing of detail, reflection or interpretation). The teacher “looked at him, loved him, and said: ‘One thing you lack; take your treasure, sell it and give the proceeds to the poor, and come follow me. And you will have treasure in heaven.’”
This is ad personam, addressed to a particular man who has a particular need. This is a man addicted to his money as an alcoholic is to drink. And the remedy proposed by the teacher is essentially the same as for any addict: begin by acknowledging what you are; then you can escape into a new life that will be richer than you were able to imagine.
One way of describing the young man’s problem is that he has in fact broken one of those commandments he claims to have kept—one that no self-respecting establishment figure of his time would have considered breaking, and that he would certainly not have accepted that he had broken. The second commandment is a ban on the worship of lesser gods, of idols. But he is possessed by his money, which he thought he himself possessed. He has come to worship his money; his money has become his god.
Another way of putting the point is that he has made the Faustian bargain, and the servant has become the master. Whatever way we look at it, the story has a poignant ending. The man ducks the challenge and turns away—and leaves no further trace. He is in thrall to his servant.
All this is not just a voyage of literary exploration. Faust and the rich young man speak to the real condition of large numbers of people—at all times and in all places, and certainly in the early twenty-first century when so many are so busy in the global bazaar. We live in a world where increasingly everything is for sale—including ourselves.
So how do we avoid the trap? Opt out to avoid the risk of contamination? But if opting out means living a comfortable existence away from the madding crowd on unearned income, then it’s romantic nonsense to imagine that this could ever be an option for more than a pampered few. And in any case, such self-indulgence carries within it the seeds of boredom, dissatisfaction and vacuousness. There are, of course, other paths to choose that may appear to be opting out but that are in reality the reverse. I have stayed on Mount Athos with monks who have chosen to spend the rest of their lives there. For retreat and spiritual refreshment amid natural beauty and a profusion of icons and frescoes that have seen centuries go by, Mount Athos is unsurpassed. But no one would regard the desire to escape the world of money and commerce as remotely sufficient a motive for a lifetime there. Retreat to the mountain top is one thing: life on the mountain is an intensely different matter.
What, then, about the path taken by my ex-banker friend in Kolkata? Isn’t that the route that the rich young man is being challenged to follow?
Well, it may be. But the challenge to the rich young man is ad personam. His experience does not mean that money can never be a true servant—only that we need to be aware of the responsibilities and the risks that it carries. Whether we should follow a path out of the world of money as he is called on to do must be a question for the individual. And it is certainly clear that such a path—with all its discomforts and potential risks—can never be just an opt-out. Those who take it feel drawn to it, not simply repelled by the road more travelled. Those I know who have taken this path and kept going on it are transparently in their element and as engaged in the world as any aggressive trader.
In any case, it is a path that can be taken only by a minority. The fact is that human welfare and development depend on most of us being involved in one way or another in productive exchange. This is what creates the surplus that supports Mount Athos, or Future Hope, or the Familia Moja Children’s Centre (not to mention pensions, educational services, medical care and social services on our doorsteps).
And, as previous chapters have argued, that productive exchange takes place in a global marketplace to which, for all its imperfections, there is no realistic alternative. Many of us have no alternative but to make our way there, living and working in all the ambiguity and imperfection (including our own).
Recognizing and accepting this pervasive moral ambiguity is crucial: otherwise we never get engaged, or we break, or we make a sinister bargain. This acceptance helps us do more than survive. If we want to see life as more than just “one damn thing after another,” we have to begin by seeing we are part of what makes it what it is. We ourselves are both source and victim of these imperfections. We can see that we are caught in the spider’s web, and we have to start from there.
One of the great dangers of having no tolerance for the ambiguity of imperfection is the temptation to go for the Faustian option. The Faustian option is the bargain that grants immediate and undiluted pleasure/power/sex/money in exchange for acceptance of the consequences, whatever they are. We take this option in many small ways all the time, and sometimes we justify it because we can’t bear the ambiguity of imperfection. Why struggle with a difficult and obdurate challenge that is never really going to be solved, when we could forget all about it and go shopping instead? Yet the bargain is illusory. It turns out that we don’t get satisfaction that way either. The pleasure of it just melts in our hands. Hence the pervasive fact of imperfection that seems to bedevil our spirits one way or another—whether we are trying to leave a monument behind us or whether we just want speedboats.
So we need to commit to the challenge, for all the ambiguity it involves. And, as we do so, we will learn that we can avoid the Faustian risk and keep to a path of fulfilment if and only if we are prepared to follow certain guiding principles. These principles are not new—any more than the clichés about money or the legend of Faust are new. In one sense, there is nothing new under the sun; in another sense, the era of globalization has given these principles a greater relevance for more people, and a greater urgency, than at any previous stage in human history.
The first of these principles is simply that of integrity. As argued in Chapters 5 and 6 in respect of businesses, values matter to (long-term) value. For the individual, the parallel principle is that values matter to real satisfaction in working life. This raises the question, What values? Are they different from one culture to another? If so, who is to determine which are the right ones? Can we really say that there is a universal standard of integrity for the world of commerce, when it is precisely the meeting point of every creed, culture and community under the sun?
But this line of questioning has more of the debating tactic about it than any practical significance. For what is striking about life in the global bazaar is just how widespread the consensus is about what it takes to do ethical business. Individuals, as well as whole cultures, can and do disagree on profoundly important moral questions: on abortion, on voluntary euthanasia, on the possibilities inherent in stem-cell research, on habeas corpus as applied to terror suspects—and so on. At a different level, philosophers may choose to debate whether there are any moral absolutes or universals at all—and, if so, what makes them so and how we recognize them. But as a matter of fact the ethics of the marketplace are almost by definition universal, not so much because of some agreed metaphysical truth, but because of the practicalities of doing business on a sustainable basis—and because of the realities of human psychology. Every one knows about the importance of trust and honesty for sustainable business. Everyone knows that, though you can fool some people all of the time and most people some of the time, you can’t fool most people most of the time. Human psychology tells us of course that many will try. But human psychology also tells us—virtually all of us—that this is no way to the enduring success or recognition or fulfilment that most people at some level or other yearn for, for that comes only with an integrity based on honesty, trust and a real desire to exchange value for value.
Other guiding principles could be said to follow from this one. And they are worth spelling out, because they cumulatively enlarge the implications of this first principle of integrity to the point where it embraces the whole person. We learn as we go that integrity in the global bazaar is about something much more than just the global bazaar.
Thus, secondly, the way of fulfilment is clearly one that treats others (colleagues or customers) as ends, not just as means. Both as ends and as means, the human relationships of the workplace are of course important, and in a world of uncertainty and market competition it is naive to imagine that responsibility for them will not sometimes pose painful dilemmas. But we all know also that the history of organizational life is littered with examples of those who manipulate, who pick up and discard, who flatter to deceive, and who run organizations purely by numbers (when they are in fact organisms, not just organizations). And we know, too, that this is the way to a feared, or despised, and lonely end.
Ambition, thirdly, is entirely consistent with fulfilment—real fulfilment—if it is ambition to contribute the most, not to get the most. Nor is ambition necessarily vitiated by being competitive (which is made highly likely given the inevitably pyramidal nature of leadership in so much of organized human endeavour). Competitive ambition becomes destructive only to the extent that it jettisons the above principle that colleagues are ends not just means; and all ambition becomes destructive when the goal becomes the be-all and end-all of life (and that phrase, with its origins in Macbeth, should alert us to the Faustian threat).
Which leads directly to a fourth principle: human beings have a need, and a responsibility, to balance their commitments to different realms of living. These different realms normally overlap: their borders are blurred. These are the realms of family, of work, of friendships and of wider social groupings—and of the inner self. The interrelationship between these realms takes as many forms as there are human beings—the more so in a globalized world of interconnection and individualization. Whole books can be—have been—written on what makes for a healthy balance among them. What matters for the present purpose, however, is not so much the prescription for health—which we should expect to be as varied as people are—but simply the recognition of this balance as crucial to fulfilment and the avoidance of the Faustian trap.
Then, fifthly, there is a vital principle of leadership. It is for business or organizational psychologists to analyse what personal profiles make for successful leadership. But recent years have seen growing recognition of the value of what is sometimes called “servant leadership”—leadership whose essence is not psychological domination, but which seeks to share itself, to set an example, to instil the instinct of leadership in others, and thus to serve the common endeavour. At its best, such leadership knows full well that it cannot shirk the responsibilities of decision making and must often take risks in this (including risks to its own popularity). But it also recognizes the leadership—the contribution—of others. It sees every person as having leadership responsibilities and potential, whatever their position in an organization chart and whether or not they have anyone reporting to them, for everyone is in a position to influence others, for good or for ill. Seen as domination, leadership impoverishes both the leader and the led; seen as service in this way, it enriches both, and is more enduringly effective.
Finally, there is a crucial principle that underpins all the above, and that is too often ignored in all the books on how to get on in life. We need to be able to look ourselves in the mirror and ask two questions about our role in the global bazaar: How is what I am doing contributing to human welfare? And why specifically am I doing it? These questions matter because of the demands made on us by our work. It may not be—should not be—the be-all or end-all of our life; but it is not just a hobby either. For the majority of us, work consumes much or even most of our creative energy and potential. This is too high a price for us to tell ourselves we are just doing it for the money. Nor is it enough to tell ourselves we do it because we can excel in it, or because we have drifted into it, or because we are trapped in it and are serving time. Any of these answers may be true for our particular circumstances; none of them satisfies. Neither money nor ambition nor serendipity is good enough as a work/life principle. We have to find a better answer to the question: Why do I do what I do?—which is really this two-part question: What value is it, and why am I doing it (as opposed to somebody else)?
The answer matters. We have only one life. And at any given point we have only three options for our way forward, for our involvement in the bazaar: the Faustian bargain that puts self at the centre, drift and the search for contribution. And drift is no answer, any more than is the Faustian bargain. Drift is the opposite of the Faustian risk. Since drifters do not try to reach to the stars, they do not crash to earth. There is no danger of their being able to say, “But stay awhile ...” They may perhaps find fulfilment in other realms of life, but not in the work that takes up so much of their time. Drift is a way to desiccation of the spirit, and often to low-level depression. No help from Mephistopheles is needed on such a course.
The crucial truth is that only one of the three options offers a way to fulfilment. So we have to be able to answer these questions: What is the value of what I do? And does it use my gifts and my interests? Does it stimulate me, stretch me, challenge me, teach me? Because if not, why exactly am I doing it?
To be clear, the contribution we make will never be unambiguous. It will often be indirect, and always be flawed. But the questions are there, as generic and specific ones, for each individual. Can the engineer see why her bridge designs contribute to human welfare? Can the banker see why his trade finance business does the same? Or the retailer? Or the corporate lawyer? Or the treasury civil servant? Or the hip specialist? And so on. Where are the invisible boundaries between different shades of grey, between that which contributes and that which is destructive? Much of the time, just asking the question is salutary. Being able to say to the face in the mirror that, taken in the large, the area of activity and the role I play in it contributes—albeit imperfectly—to the development of human welfare; this is a necessary condition for fulfilment. (Necessary, of course, but not sufficient: motives and behaviour count, too.) The alternative—not being able to say at least this much—is a warning signal we ignore at the peril of the wholeness of our being.
There is of course far more to be said ad personam to ourselves and to others as individuals. There are crucial points in life when the questions become acute: for young people as they emerge at the threshold of working life; for those in midcareer who are faced with a crossroads for whatever reason—whether the breakthrough job offer or, alternatively, redundancy (which used to be as rare as divorce once was, and is now as common as divorce has become). And, in these days of longer life expectancy and healthier older years, maybe the questions even present themselves on the threshold of so-called retirement. Are we really going to find fulfilment in a twenty-year period of golf and tourism? Are there not contributions we can still make? Are there not in fact new options to do so directly, rather than in the indirect way that an earlier stage of life in the workplace may have demanded?
The questions are there, too, at points of spectacular failure. What happens when the young CEO of a public company, who has been used to nothing but success in everything he does, is forced out because an acquisition goes wrong and drags down the share price? What happens when a young trader in a bank dealing room covers up his losses with fictitious transactions until they spiral out of control and into the limelight? What happens to the up-and-coming politician brought down by a financial impropriety or a sexual misdemeanour? Or to the social worker who misses the evidence of child abuse that leads to a death? And so on. The rest of us may often have cause to say, “There but for the grace of God ...” But the individual—what does he or she do? There is a whole variety of responses, of course: total or partial denial (it was not my fault; others were to blame, too), or depression and loss of self-esteem, even suicide. Some go hard, others flee (others avoid themselves), yet others implode.
But there’s always another way: there is always the possibility of redemption. John Profumo, a British politician of the early 1960s, famously found his career at an abrupt end after a colourful sex scandal; his redemption came as he quietly went to work for a community-work charity in east London. He ended up running it, and then retiring with honours and respect. What does it take to follow such a path? Coming to terms with yourself and what you have done, for a start; then sensing that you owe something. And then learning through experience that in paying this debt you receive far more than you ever imagined possible in your former life.
And so on. The (rewarding) irony is, furthermore, that as we ask these questions of ourselves and strive to face up to the answers, we enrich our experience of life (which is precisely what Faust sought to do). We continue to learn and grow. We can—need to—learn from what we do wrong, from the mistakes we make, from the failures we suffer. We learn from these experiences to the extent that we are able to offer and accept forgiveness and self-forgiveness. And in the search we may glimpse what Faust is seeking and is doomed never to find—what T. S. Eliot calls “a lifetime burning in every moment.”
One way of describing the prize is completeness—the opposite of that dangerous compartmentalization that divides life into different realms with different rules, and that is the besetting sin of the global bazaar.
And yet to describe the prize in that way is to risk the suggestion that it is perfectly achievable. Which is wrong. Completeness is the unachievable goal. All the above is easier said than done—or rather lived. And we know we will often stumble. We can hope to converge to the goal; we know we will often diverge from it. But it is no accident that the Faust legend includes moments when he could have broken free. In truth, there are always such moments. So we can indeed hope to converge, though not to arrive. But we can always hope.