Author: Mark Hannam

Quickness of understanding is a mental faculty, but right doing requires the practice of a lifetime.     Goethe

I was sitting alone in the restaurant – which serves informal French cuisine with a good selection of regional wines – immersed in the New York Review of Books, when two young men – mid-twenties, one starting out in finance the other in politics – sat at the table next to me.  Their discussion was brisk and uninhibited, hard to ignore despite my best intentions.  After several minutes of gossip about mutual acquaintances, one changed the subject abruptly.

“Have you read this book by Daniel Kahneman?” he asked, “it’s called Thinking Fast and Slow.”  “No.  Is it any good?”  “Not really.  It’s far too long.  The basic idea is obvious could have been summarised in 25-pages.  He keeps repeating himself and includes endless stories and anecdotes.”  “OK that’s good to know, I won’t waste my time reading it.”

Momentarily, I was tempted to interrupt their conversation, to explain to them that if they were both to take a week off work, carefully to study Kahneman’s book and the wider literature he describes, it would be an investment that would repay them multiple times over the course of their lives.  I resisted the temptation and now I fear that both their careers will forever be blighted by loss.

These two men –still young but already in too much of a hurry – were thinking fast rather than thinking slow; which is to say, they were not really thinking at all.  When we apply our minds without reflection, without checking carefully for bias, for lack of relevant information in sufficient quantity, and for over-confidence, we tend to apply rules-of-thumb to cases for which they might not be applicable; it is quick but lazy.  Some people like to call this “intuition”, but I think “prejudice” is the better term.

Heuristic tools, which give standard answers in response to standard questions, are useful when the problems we face are minor and quotidian.  However, when things start to get harder, the quick responses soon become inadequate and a more considered approach is required.  And when we encounter problems about the most important questions in life – of freedom and duty, of value and meaning, of friendship and happiness – thinking fast is wholly unreliable.

Thinking slow – which is to say, really thinking – takes time and energy, which for evolutionary reasons we are disposed not to want to expend, even when we recognise that the standard answers will not work in this instance.  Nonetheless, without investing in the skills and disciplines of careful, reflective thought, we are condemned to rely on the first idea that lodges in our mind, which is often someone else’s fast thought, circulating around society like a virus, which we have picked up unknowingly simply through our proximity to those already infected.

What to do about lazy thinking?  Hard work seems to be the right answer.

I conceive of slow thought – that is, careful, reflective, unprejudiced thought – as a skill, which we should spend our lifetime acquiring, exercising and improving.  When we are young, we are often impatient to learn, and we have the capacity to pick up skills and ideas with great speed.  But learning to think is harder than learning to play chess or solve Sudoku puzzles.  It is harder than learning to play the piano.

Listening to Glenn Gould’s recording of the Goldberg Variations from 1955, when he was 22 years old, and comparing it to the recording he made in 1981, the year before he died aged 50, it seems to me that when he was young he knew how to play Bach well, but when he was older he had also learned how to interpret Bach well.  Unsurprisingly, his first recording of the work lasts for less than forty minutes, the second for more than fifty: he was playing fast and slow.

Learning to think is hard for two reasons.  First, most difficult situations we face in life are unique, even though the challenges are ubiquitous.  Learning how to support our children as they grow up, or how to manage our relations with our parents as they grow old, or how to maintain friendships over the years as the ties that once bound us together loosen apart, are experiences common to many of us; but that does not mean that there are simple, standard solutions.  Each version of the problem has its individual complexities which make it relevantly unlike other versions of the problem.  That’s one reason why books that set out ten rules for success, or seven principles that will lead to happiness, are so obviously misleading: there are no generic answers to life’s important questions.

A second reason is that as we grow older, we keep learning; indeed, one might go so far as to say (with Jürgen Habermas) that a characteristic of the human species is our inability not to learn. While all of us think differently when we are fifty to how we thought when we were twenty-five, some of us exhibit this trait more reliably than others.  As we learn, so we find better answers to questions that perplexed us when we were younger, and we also discover that some answers we previously accepted are in fact not so compelling.  Our judgement improves with use, which means that we need to keep building on its successes and working to reduce its failures.  Growing old is unavoidable, but becoming wiser is a choice, requiring time and effort.

One thing that doesn’t improve with age is our speed of thought.  Quickness is a gift of youth, and we will always celebrate the brilliance and inventiveness of the prodigy.  There is no reason to condescend just because we can no longer keep up with the generations that follow on from us.   But as Goethe came to understand – having himself been the youthful genius of German culture in the second half of the eighteenth century – the mental agility of clever young minds needs to give way to the patient accumulation of good practice, which over time constitutes a life well lived.

I recommend Kahneman’s book.  It is beautifully written, erudite and insightful.  It is both a critique of our tendency to rely on quick, immediate thoughts, and a paean to the cultivation of slow, careful, evidence-based reasoning.  It is a thorough presentation, using modern psychological research, of the case that Aristotle made more than two thousand years ago, that a lifetime devoted to good thinking is the most reliable route to happiness and the best protection against failure.

Everyone has a character of their own choosing, it is chance or fate that decides our choice of job.

Yesterday my team lost and consequently I was unhappy.  (Not least because they were beaten by the team my daughter supports).  I’m not unfamiliar with the experience of losing, which happens often enough.  The top English football teams will probably play more than fifty competitive games in a season and even the very best will lose around ten per cent of those in most years.   But being a fan – in my case, supporting the same team since I was eight years old – dictates that I will be happy when they win and unhappy when they lose.  Their successes and failures become mine, by proxy.  If I were indifferent to my team’s results, then I would no longer be a fan.

This being so, why be a fan?  Why put myself in the position that I allow events over which I have no control – no influence whatsoever – to determine my feelings, my mood, my sense of well-being?  Why risk the possibility of happiness in this way?   To understand my rationale, consider the words of a celebrated former manager of Liverpool Football Club, who once explained:  Someone said to me, ‘To you football is a matter of life or death!’ and I said, ‘Listen, it’s more important than that’.  It’s instructive to reflect on why this might be true.

Among the famous schools of classical Greek philosophy, the Stoics were renowned for their claim that happiness was to be achieved by living a virtuous life, and that those who were virtuous were happy, whatever befell them.   They taught that we should strive to cultivate a virtuous character and that if we did then, irrespective of our place in society, the circumstances under which our life passed, and the good or bad luck that we encountered day by day, we would be happy.   Since virtuous actions and dispositions are within our power to choose – everyone has a character of their own choosing, says Seneca – it follows that our achievement of happiness is consequent solely upon decisions we make for ourselves.   Fate might cause us all sorts of problems, but it cannot remove our power to determine our happiness.

This has always been a controversial claim, and not just because of the employment choices that fate allowed Seneca to make.  Well before the Roman Stoics set out the case for being indifferent to fate, Aristotle had noted – in the Nicomachean Ethics – that when external events turn out very bad for us, as was the case for King Priam of Troy, it is hard to see how we can continue to be described as happy.  Aristotle accepts that small pieces of good or bad fortune that are outside of our control clearly do not weigh down the scales of life one way or another.  It is possible for someone to experience modest bad luck from time to time, but to live an active and virtuous life and to achieve happiness.

However, whether the big events of our lives turn out well or badly for us will have a material impact on our ability to live well and to be happy.  If we enjoy many major strokes of good fortune, they will add beauty to our lives and enable us to demonstrate nobility in our actions; conversely, if many important events turn out badly for us, they will crush and maim our happiness, through the pain they bring us, and because they hinder our ability to act virtuously.   Even in these cases, Aristotle thinks that the noble character of a virtuous person will shine through, visible in the way that misfortunes are borne.

Aristotle’s argument – that we achieve happiness through our pursuit of virtue, but that external circumstances might constrain our ability to live a good life and achieve lasting happiness – has a parallel with the more recent argument that Karl Marx made, that we make our own history, but we do not make it as we please but under the circumstances that we inherit from the past.   The point for both philosophers is that context is material and, therefore, the belief that our destiny and our happiness are wholly within our own control is illusory.

This is a lesson that is easy to forget, especially when for lengthy periods nothing significantly bad happens to us.  When context is persistently benign, we disregard its threat.  Few of us ever undergo a transformation in the circumstances of our lives of the magnitude that King Priam witnessed, and many of us manage to avoid serious episodes of bad luck for decades.   We are thus seduced into forgetting the fragility of our pursuit of happiness.  We might work hard at living well, we might believe that we are happy, but then, one day, things fall apart.  Due to circumstances beyond our control, and irrespective of the virtues we have cultivated for many years, our grasp on happiness is gone, perhaps not lost forever, but certainly damaged irreparably.

My team losing is not a disaster.  The result was bad rather than good news for me, but it did not weigh down the scales of my life.  My sadness will be very temporary, but the reminder is valuable.  Every time my team plays, they risk losing and I risk a modest bout of unhappiness; but every day, my happiness is in jeopardy, for it might be snatched away from me, subject to the vagaries of ill-fortune.  That’s why sport might well be more than a life and death matter: because it reminds us that achieving happiness is never fully in our control, that we are vulnerable to fate, that contingency must be accommodated and borne with dignity.

There’s a further lesson here too, that should encourage us to be suspicious of Seneca’s over confidence.  He believed in his power to isolate himself from fate but, famously, was forced to kill himself at the insistence of Nero, his former pupil, who suspected his involvement in a plot.  A noble death?  Perhaps, but also an unhappy end to a long and rich life.

Aristotle shows greater wisdom, both in his appreciation of the nuanced relationship between the virtuous life and happiness, but also in his reminder of our permanent vulnerability to having our happiness snatched away from us.  We can be better prepared for whatever the future holds if we avoid hubris and wishful thinking.

 

A certain difference is found among ends; some are activities, others are products apart from the activities that produce them.  Where there are ends apart from the actions, it is the nature of the products to be better than the activities.

Somebody once explained to me that the difference in social attitude that distinguishes North Americans from Europeans, can best be summarised by considering the different ways in which representatives from these two cultures attempt to explain certain feature of their society.  Europeans, it is said, explain the present in terms of the past: “we do it this way because …”, is followed by some history, providing the antecedent causal story.  North Americans, by contrast, are said to explain the present in terms of the future: “we do it this way because …”, is followed by setting out some purpose, the pursuit of which orientates both current and subsequent actions.

I’m not really persuaded by this story of alleged cultural difference.  Among people I know, conservatism is common but evenly spread on both sides of the Atlantic, and pragmatism, although rarer, also exists on both continents.  Nonetheless, while dismissing the simplistic generalisation, it is worth noting that the character of this social attitude is important, since it helps shape many of our values and major life decisions.   Do we try to stay true to something in our past – whether personal, ancestral or cultural – or is our loyalty tied up with some aims and objectives that are not yet achieved, but that we are working towards?

At one extreme, there are people who believe in fate or destiny: we can but fulfil what was determined for us before we were born.  Our future is simply the unfolding of some genetic or astrological blueprint, from which there is no escape.  At the other extreme is a form of radical existentialism, which says that every morning we start our lives anew, and each choice we make, while it might be influenced or shaped by the past, should be a point of radical departure.   Most of us do not inhabit these extremes: we value the past, and acknowledge its influence on us, but we also want to be free to choose the most important goals that we work towards in life.

I think – indeed, I hope – that I am not greatly influenced by or beholden to the past. I find the study of history interesting, not least because it helps to show – in a precautionary way – the extent to which so much of contemporary life is held tight by the clutch of tradition, and the extent to which so many of my contemporaries are dulled by the ‘anæsthetic effect of custom’ (to borrow a phrase from Marcel Proust).  In the main, many of us, by default, avoid becoming the masters and mistresses of our own destiny, too easily satisfied with keeping the world more or less as we inherited it from our parents.  Today is much like yesterday, tomorrow will be much like today.

I am increasingly tempted by the pragmatist extreme, to want to make the world anew every day.  My conviction is growing that habit is death.   Last January, I visited the Kilauea volcano in Hawai’i, which has subsequently entered a phase of more vigorous eruption (please note, logicians consider post hoc ergo propter hoc to be a fallacy).  The hard, black volcanic rock that covers the lava belt, which runs from the crater to the sea, appears as ancient as the earth itself, but is in fact only thirty-five years old at most.  Walking across this lava, I realised that the earth’s crust is, in places, being made anew every day.  The creation story is still not over.

Living each day without regard for anything that went before seems impractical.  We cannot make everything new every day, just as we cannot re-build a boat at sea all at once.  We need to work gradually, one part of our lives at a time, holding some things stable while other things are changed.   The question is whether we work hard to re-fashion and improve the major things – our character, our values, our friendships, life goals – or whether we limit ourselves to the superficial – our clothes and hair, our phone company, the music in our earphones.

In his writings on ethics, Aristotle – cited above – observes that there are some activities that are valuable in themselves and others that are valuable because they are means by which to achieve a more valued goal.  When we pursue a course of action that leads towards a desired outcome, the outcome is better than the actions that led us to it.   Well, maybe.  There are some cases – simple examples, like queuing to buy a ticket, and life changing examples, like under-going chemotherapy – where no-one would willingly undertake the action unless it held out the promise of a benefit upon completion.  There are many means that are valued only for being means.

But there are other parts of our lives, where the means and the ends are entwined in more complicated fashion, where the pleasure and the value come from the pursuit of the goal as much as from the achievement of the goal.  The pleasures of exercise, or work, of friendship, are not to be found in some elevated teleological purpose, but in the activity itself.  These are goals that cannot ever be achieved, completed, perfected or consumed: they are like the horizon line, ever receding as we make progress towards it; they are the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the absence of which detracts nothing from the beauty of refracted light.

To put this another way, the problem with goals or purposes is that either we achieve them – in which case our lives are left bereft of meaning, without challenge and structure – or we fail to achieve them – in which case we are left unhappy.   To be purposeful, in the truest sense, not only do we need to set our own goals, but we need to set some important goals that are unattainable, whose value lies in their pursuit rather than their achievement.   We need to create some of our world anew every day and we need to be sure never to complete it.

The seventh day can only be a fast lane to unhappiness.

 

To live is not like walking through a field

I like to run.  Not as fast as I used to, but even a modest challenge to heart, lungs and muscles still feels good.   In London I run on Hackney Marshes: there are no cars, not many other runners or cyclists competing for space, and badly-behaved dogs are a rare annoyance.  (To be fair, it’s generally the owners whose behaviour demands censure for their failure to control; the dogs’ exuberance is only natural).   Hackney Marshes has good pathways, a mix of tarmac and hardened earth, which are useable all year unless there is ice.

By contrast, when I’m at my house on the west coast of Ireland, I run on a beach, around 2.5km in length and generally deserted.  If the tide is out, the sand near the water, beautifully flat and compact, is as springy as a modern athletic track, and a joy to run on.  When the tide is in, I am forced to run nearer the dunes on the soft sand, which is more forgiving for my knee and ankle joints, but much more demanding of my leg muscles.  Progress is slow and, when there’s a strong westerly wind, wearying.

Yesterday the autumn sun was bright in an almost cloudless sky, the wind was calm, the temperature mild for November, the tide was low and the sand firm.  Running was exhilarating.  I have no complaint.   It was an hour well spent.  But on other days, when dark clouds are streaming in from the Atlantic, when the wind is strong and the rain near horizontal, and the waves are lapping at the foot of the dunes, then I know I will have to work my muscles hard, every step of the way.   Perhaps I should defer exercise until tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, when conditions have improved?

This question is very familiar to me, and not just because of the average annual rainfall in County Donegal.  For it is a question both about running but also about living: do I wait for low tide or will I brave the soft sand?

“To live is not like walking through a field”.  I came across this Russian proverb while reading some of Pasternak’s poetry, skilfully woven into his reflections on the burden of living dutifully in difficult times.  The immediately preceding line reads: “Alone. / Now is the time of Pharisees.” (From: “Hamlet”).  For Pasternak, as for many other Russian writers, composers and painters, the 1930s, 40s and 50s were bleak, risky years.  To stay loyal to one’s vocation as an artist, to speak with a true, untimid voice, carried a high price, for oneself and for one’s family and friends.  Something was very rotten in the state of the soviets.

I am fortunate not to have lived in that place at that time.  I have no reason to fear that what I write today, in this post, will put my life in danger, nor that of my family, nor will I be sent into internal exile.   The situation in Russia has improved since Pasternak’s time, but is by no measure as safe as Western Europe.  Poets are no longer the principal victims of today’s Pharisees, who have turned their attention to journalists and dissidents in exile.  Now it is those who report facts who face the gravest threat, rather than those who offer meanings.

And yet, however much freedom we enjoy in the wealthy countries of Europe, North America and Australasia, however easy it is to secure a reasonable standard of life, with more than sufficient food, shelter, warmth and leisure, it remains the case that to live is not like walking through a field.  Because living is more than subsisting.  For Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak’s great fictional creation, the Russian Revolution and the early years of the Bolshevik government provided the tumultuous context in which he lived, worked and wrote.  But the great questions he asked – What is love?  What is duty?  Why are certain places important to us?   How and where is happiness to be found?   What does it mean, for me, to live a good life? – are real and difficult, resisting easy answers in all times and in all places.

Perhaps it is true that when life is precarious, these existential questions of meaning and purpose become more evident.  When the threat of arbitrary arrest, of punishment, exile and death are ever present, when simply keeping alive is the hardest of work, then we are more attuned to the consequences of not attending closely to questions of ultimate value.  Harshness breeds sharpness.  The converse, that the comfortable consumerism of the richer nations leads to sloppy thinking about what the real point of living might be, seems also to be true.  Jaded appetites tend to moral apathy.

As our material lives continue to improve – and for almost everyone in the world they have continued to improve significantly over the past two or three decades, whether we notice or not – the risk is that we increasingly forego the soft sand.  In our material summertime, the living is easy.  However, the great questions – about love, duty, place, happiness and goodness – are always hard to answer honestly.  And as we grope towards answers, whoever and wherever we are, they make great demands upon us, which are often not easily satisfied.  Every affirmative answer is always, at the same time, a rejection of other options.   Every yes implies many noes.

For me the need to confront these questions, regularly and genuinely, without self-deception or bad faith, is what it means to strive.  It is not that I choose a hard way in life for its own sake, as if difficulty is its own reward.  Rather, it is that some days if you want to run, the only option is the soft sand; and if you want to live well, the only answers to awkward questions are tough, demanding, chastening.

If a good life matters, then strive we must.  Not just for the pleasure of upsetting the Pharisees – although that matters too and brings its own reward – but because there is so much less of lasting value to be found along the easy way, the comfortable life, along which progress can be quick, but is achieved without attaining any deep sense of purposefulness.

 

 

 

 

She knows there’s no success like failure/ And that failure’s no success at all.

I was fifteen when I first heard these lyrics, although they had been written more than a decade earlier, during the miraculous mid-60s, when Dylan released an album every year, each one full of greatest hits.  By the time I discovered his music he was playing in a large band with backing singers, and some of the immediacy and tenderness of his early love songs was lost from the music; but never from the words.

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