In Review: Quarterly Essay 41

David Malouf, "The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World"
 

Let me go out on a limb and say that the greatest source of unhappiness in the contemporary world – or at least in the Australian corner of the contemporary world – is . . . wait for it . . . the long-term variable-rate home mortgage. Maybe that’s being a little unfair to the purveyors of home-loan products. Let’s say it’s not just mortgages, but the long-term debt-servitude which mortgages impose on a hefty proportion of the population. Hm, maybe “debt-servitude” is a bit strong. How about indebtedness in general? Or how about indebtedness combined with the whole increasingly unstable all-pervasive nature of contemporary work? Frankly, isn’t it just insane to think that people are going to feel happy in a world in which they are saddled with decades of debt and in which the permanent revolutionising of economic life simultaneously makes the very means by which they pay off that debt (work) ever more piecemeal, short-term, part-time, round-the-clock, and, possibly within a couple of years, obsolete? Add to it all what you might call the systematic technical complexity of contemporary life and Phillip Larkin’s boldly miserable counsel:


Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as quickly as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself

can start to seem like plain old-fashioned good sense.

By technical complexity I mean two things. Of course there’s technology in the sense of high-tech equipment - the all but self-spawning new generations of mobile phones, the unthinkably sophisticated white-goods, etc. But there’s also technology in the sense of abstract rule-governed mechanisms – the latter including the bureaucracy that exists (supposedly) to make rational decisions about social life based on informed deliberation, as well as the order-giving networks and techniques and procedures that regulate the lives of individuals and institutions, right the way round the globe.

Here’s the thought: if the individual gadgets were all there were to living in a technically complex world – if it weren’t for the All-Encompassing Technical Systems – then human life in the age of global high-tech civilisation would be a breeze. It would simply be a matter of deciding which of the gadgets makes a big enough positive difference to your life; where potential benefits seemed doubtful – you could choose not to buy the latest iPhone, or the mood-enhancing hair-care products. On the other hand, if your cost-benefit calculation came out pretty much evenly, you could buy all the new products and just take the risk of being annoyed, over-stimulated and, probably, over-indebted.

Of course the upside to living in a systematically technified world is not difficult to see. The multiplication of choice that all the gadgets and systems make possible is obvious, their convenience undeniable. And in any case, a systematically technically complex world is in many ways a matter of plain necessity: mass societies made up of lots of different sorts of people doing lots of different sorts of things simply wouldn’t function if all there were to hold the show together were the sorts of unspoken rules and rhythms that governed most of life until quite recently in the past. If you think that the world could be made to function much more simply than it does, then think about trying to organise a progressive tax system with liabilities calculated precisely according to income across an entire national territory, or indeed try organising national flood relief. Without a bureaucratic apparatus and a swag of complex technical systems in place both of these things, and many others we acknowledge to be good and necessary, would be simply unthinkable.

And yet, and yet. If the blessings of Technified Existence are something that are waved in our faces virtually every minute of the day, the downside is something we all know in our bones. Consider the big, rapid-fire changes technology continually makes to the conditions of everyday material existence – who doubts that they're disorienting, even when there’s a palpable sense of excitement in the air? Or consider the little-remarked process of technification going on in the realm of human knowledge: I’m thinking of the relegation of non-technical bodies of understanding-and-experience to the status of superstitious nonsense; whether it's sensitivity to art or sensitivity towards the rhythms and needs of the human body, living in a technified world seems to lead to non-scientific ways of grasping reality being written off as insubstantial or simply a waste of time. Consider the more or less acute sense of powerlessness that every one of us experiences every single day as we’re confronted with the fact that a once accessible, humanly comprehensible corner of our lives has become the preserve of experts whose help we now depend on to perform the most necessary tasks. Or consider the fact that, in dealing with the scattered agencies of a complex social world, we’re constantly confronted with the abysmal habit of our fellow human beings to invoke the naked authority of the Great Nothing in the Machine: yes, once again, the computer says no, and, let’s face it, in day-to-day life, no matter how tech-savvy we are, The Computer, The System, The Agent of Mechanised Necessity – that is, The Computer in the broad sense – does say no to us, time and time and time again.

Faced with it all, the choice is seemingly ours – to ruthlessly accentuate the positives or to swallow hard and battle on. But to decouple ourselves in a truly satisfactory way - to pursue some sort of ideal of quiet self-cultivation without the help of the machines and the wider systems seems practically impossible; in a lot of instances it would be palpably insane. Happiness in the sense of settled contentment has fled from the world.

So we have a rough answer to the question why happiness eludes most of us, even now that the historical sources of human misery – disease, back-breaking labour, food shortages – have largely been dealt with, at least in the Australian corner of the global village. It’s a pity David Malouf doesn’t have an answer of his own to give us in QE41 – at least not one that addresses itself directly to the contemporary world and the extraordinary phenomena of misery that often seem to dominate it.

Part of the problem lies with the title of QE41: “The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World”. It’s simply misleading, and I suspect it wasn’t the author’s own choice. Malouf himself is much more interested in what you might call ideal images of happiness, particularly those deriving from the ancient and the early modern world, rather than the world of today; the position from which he wants to meditate on happiness is not in amongst the jumble of today’s world, with its gadgets and products and systems, but from his own version of Montaigne’s secluded “little back-shop” where we can be “all our own, entirely free”. In fact, the little back-shop is the place he wants to encourage us to seek out happiness of our own.

However the main problem lies less with QE41’s title than with its overall argument.

Malouf gets himself into trouble early on by making a categorical distinction between happiness, which he says belongs to “our personal interior” realm, and liberty, which is supposedly a more social virtue. (Life, to add the third of the rights Jefferson’s American Constitution calls inalienable, belongs for Malouf in a third category, that of Nature.) Dividing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness between three separate existential domains in the way Malouf does generates a pseudo-problem. If happiness is largely personal and liberty largely social, how can you square the demands of the two except by a sort of legislation that is bound to detract from the former? Happiness turns out for Malouf to be a strangely ineffable state of personal being impervious to the social duties and constraints that liberty brings with it.

After teasing out what Jefferson means by the “pursuit of happiness”, Malouf goes on two long excursions. The search for contentment in modernity is determined negatively, we learn, by our inner restlessness and positively by the pursuit of bodily pleasure. Restlessness is something like a primordial given of the human condition, and technology on this picture, far from being just a modern fetish, is an expression of a rollicking human-all-too-human disquiet that has been with us since the start of human history. On the one side, modern man complicates his restless, technically inventive nature by forming a Faustian compact with the machine in order to satisfy his material wants ever more completely. On the other side, he discovers new, or really not so new, modes of happiness: as the medieval Christian consciousness of sin recedes in the early modern world, sex and bodily pleasure come to be seen, in roughly classical Graeco-Roman terms, as more than just a source of temptation; the art of Rembrandt and Rubens creates its own monuments to the world-historical moment - not to the terrors but to the joys of the flesh, and to the nuances of interpersonal feeling that the joys of the flesh light up.

At the end of this circuitous historical path, QE41 gives us a peek at “how we live now” – and not a minute too late. Some of what for Malouf are the deeper sources of contemporary anxiety are turned up at last. The world has grown so big! (While human consciousness for most of history hardly extended beyond the distances we could see or walk, it now extends to the ends of the earth.) Yet the world has also grown so small! (The extension of our consciousness, and our physical powers, now confronts us with a definite image of planetary life as a limited – and decidedly fragile – totality within a vast and indifferent-seeming universe.) All in all, the big-small out-of-shape world has developed proportions that fail to square with our existence as embodied beings with limited powers of sensory perception and movement.

The problem here is not exactly that Malouf is wrong about any of this; his problem is giving a sense of depth to the homespun wisdom his observations suggest - without a bit more analysis, the observations dissipate into the kind of intellectual haze familiar to us from 1001 newspaper opinion pieces. And without more details, the observations also seem decidedly gainsayable. Yes, most of us have trouble giving specific meaning to the macroscopic and microscopic worlds that four centuries of unlimited scientific discovery have opened out (though the fans of sci-fi and Steven Spielberg aren’t completely lost for directions here). But, as Malouf himself says elsewhere in the essay – where the world exceeds the body’s grasp, there the mind and the imagination can more than make good our sense of unease; concepts and the intuitive rush of feeling are part of a deft existential move that we've been making since long before science and technology put distant galaxies and microscopic creepy-crawlies within the range of sensory experience.

Then there’s what science has been discovering about the brain and genes and . . . oh, and The Economy: more indefinite sources of disquiet. All three worry Malouf because what we’re learning about them suggests they have a will of their own; they play havoc with our conventional notion of ourselves as autonomous agents. The Economy in particular Malouf thinks functions in the mental universe of today roughly the way Fate did in mental universe of the ancients. Economic events are often spoken about as if they are both absolutely vital to our survival and taking place way above our heads. Whether The Economy lifts us up to the pinnacles of wealth or shoves us all the way down to misery, It/She/Whatever it is often seems inscrutable and cruel. Again, it all seems broadly true, but a tad unilluminating.

Papering his main insights together on the very last page of the essay, Malouf tells us:

For all the scope, both of time and space, that contemporary forms of knowledge have made available to us, what we can fully comprehend – that is, have direct sensory experience of – remains small; and only with what we have fully comprehended and feel at home in do we feel safe. . . What is human is what we can keep track of. In terms of space this means what is within sight, what is local and close; within reach, within touch. . . What most alarms us in our contemporary world, what unsettles and scares us, is the extent to which the forces that shape our lives are no longer personal – they know nothing of us; and to the extent that we know nothing of them – cannot put a face to them, cannot find in them anything we recognise as human – we cannot deal with them. We feel like small, powerless creatures in the coils of an invisible monster, vast but insubstantial, that cannot be grasped or wrestled with.

The last bit is fair enough, maybe. It seems to pick out one feature of globalizing, technology-driven mass society, viz its impersonality, and render it in slightly damp plaster-cast prose. But if you ask me, what comes before – in particular the idea that what is "truly human" is what we can touch and see - is simple-minded rustic empiricism: it suggests nothing so much as the muckiness of small-is-beautiful nostalgia. Malouf’s sense that the mind has autonomous powers of reason, speculation, image-making and story-telling that are there to complement the activities of the body seems to have deserted him at this point. And that’s not all that gets left out of the picture. If the rejection of the Christian vision of the body as a source of sin is one of the early modern world’s happier innovations, does it remain an unambiguous one? The body is something that is subject today to a truly miserable range of constraints and pressures whose origins lie far from the ascetic ideals of Christianity. In being liberated for the experience of pleasure, bodies are increasingly treated as mechanical instruments; primed and polished, they become the target of vast commercial campaigns of improvement that seem to leave a lot of people feeling insecure within their own skins just as radically as Christian puritanism did. The early modern world might, up to a point, make it possible for human beings to experience bodily joy, but the technological civilisation that modernity eventually gave rise to also makes the human body tendentially irrelevant, as more and more work, and more and more social life in general, is conducted without the need for human beings’ physical presence.

Building up to the topic “the way we live now” by surveying some of the key historical moments in the pursuit of happiness from pre-modernity and early modernity might seem like a good idea. But Malouf’s conclusions are inconclusive. There are some ritualised worries about all those medical advances not having cured us of our deeper discontent, and some equally conventional muttering about the bad news delivered to us daily by the media about the health of the planet. But then strangely we’re back with Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian image of man, which suggests to Malouf the classical Graeco-Roman notion of proportion and measure, then, lastly, with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Shukhov – the man who has another 3500 days to spend in a Soviet gulag and who, by the end of Solzhenitsyn’s novel, is able to rest content with a fruitful day’s scrounging and scheming. By an irony that strikes me as rather gruesome, and not entirely willed, Malouf offers up Shukhov as a sort of paradigmatic happy man of modernity. The lesson seems to be that Shukov has discovered a secret that many of us never hit upon – that true happiness is only attainable within limits – in moderation, or, again, in a – kind of – classical proportion. And that’s pretty much where the deepest problem with QE41 lies. Malouf’s essay continually falls away from the question of happiness in its radical contemporary form in favour of a rather ill-focussed search for the sources of happiness, or the lack of it, in the worlds of literature, art and history. What Malouf manages to uncover in passing in Plato, Montaigne, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vitruvian Man, etc. has an interest, and a sensitivity, of its own, but a lot of the time it’s simply irrelevant to the question it feels like his editors set him. The problem is that there’s a strict limit – for instance - to the explanatory value of suggesting that The Economy functions like Fate or that Technology is a sign of a primal human restlessness. The analogies drawn from the art and philosophy of the past to illustrate those two generic points are all right as they go, but QE41 fails to really pin them down or follow them through. And that makes it decidedly light-on as a piece of serious reflection.

All in all, QE41 has a bit of a leaf through the lengthy catalogue of modern misery we keep on adding to at one end and failing to shorten at the other. It makes clear that the way the catalogue is filling out so rapidly at the front has something to do with our inability to stop scratching the technological itch, with the super-size free-market economies we’ve created, with all the associated complexity and impersonality and formal rationality, and with the sense that the world presents itself to us as a scatter of piecemeal problems to be solved: Malouf knows our faith that the world is improvable by such gimcrack problem-solving means has itself become problematic. Yet in the end he’s unwilling or unable to really look into the heart of darkness – for that’s where his swag of images from aesthetic life don’t fit him out with the necessary equipment.

The problem QE41 sets for itself is happiness and the problem Malouf founders on is the key one. The ideal of happiness he is pleading for – the singular life within “our personal interior realm" where we can settle down and meditate philosophically - is itself something of an antique. The very way he sets up the ideal seems to require ignoring that any contemporary version of Montaigne’s little back shop would by definition be systematically interconnected to a degree that would’ve been inconceivable to Montaigne – from the inside of the technically primed physical body all the outward.

In the end there’s something deeply unchallenging about Malouf’s vision – something as unchallenging as all those Sunday broadsheet pieces about how busy the modern world is, and how insensitive we’ve all become to the beauties of contemplation, solitude and silence. Don’t the authors of all this stuff notice the insistence with which people are exhorted to seek out, and do actually seek out, exactly the thing they’re said to be incapable of? Malouf is roughly in the same boat: gesturing towards an ideal that is already an unsatisfactory, unsatisfying fragment of the real. As for endowing our Shukov-like struggles within the fateful encampment of the planetary economy with a resigned sense of classical proportion – well, in the sketchy form QE41 presents it, the ideal comes across as a bit of a cop-out: it just raises the question why we should settle for anything less than understanding how we got to this dark place where we’re equally the prisoners and the camp-guards and the camp itself.

If we understood how we got here, maybe we'd actually be less miserable - and maybe making a break for the gates wouldn’t seem so crazy. Indeed, why should the illuminati of humankind really be happy with anything less?