How to be unconditionally happy

Forgive me for coming across as very “self-helpy” in this post. Occasionally (usually), because I teach at a university, I write to respond to actual problems I see right before my eyes, rather than just to political concerns. Maybe one or two people will find this helpful, even though it doesn’t cover every facet of the issue it’s addressing.

Disclaimers aside, though, it’s an amazing and unsettling fact that most people I know do not want to be unconditionally happy. They want to be happy when they’re in a relationship or when they’re not, or when they have their dream job or when they are the picture of perfect health. Most people attach a great deal of their happiness to some form of success: in relationships, in their studies/careers, in the high opinions that others have of them or should have of them. And this results in insisting that happiness is always somewhere else but never here. It is always predicated upon some if but never a state of mind or being. There is, in short, a stubborn resistance to joy, which is expressed as its reverse. Saying “I just want to be happy” can be accompanied by the actions and thoughts that sabotage the very possibility of happiness. This probably happens unconsciously, but it happens nonetheless.

I locate the problem in a little thing called “ego.” I’m using the term in its common rather than Freudian sense. The ego is the “container” of the self—it is the sense of self-worth, self-esteem and self-importance that people mistake for being their true identity. It is the false self. (The true self is something like the soul, which I’m not going to go into much here, but I do presume—against an enormous body of bad modernist metaphysics—that it is a real thing).

The false self, the ego, is pretty easy to locate it. It’s in the labels that people give to themselves (“I am athis or a that“) and in the emotional reactions they have to petty and insignificant things like when someone cuts them off in traffic or if they ordered a salad with fries and ended up with only the salad. Ego is easily offended, hurt, belittled. It is a terribly fearful thing. And this is because ego is ever expanding. Large things are always vulnerable. It’s easier, for instance, to shoot an elephant than a rat. It’s the large things that are really the weak things. Empires crumble faster than families. A bird is swift because a bird is light. A boulder falls because it’s big and heavy.

Chesterton calls this ever-spreading ego phenomenon “panegotism”—the idea is that ego can grow out of proportion with reality, and when this happens, you have misery.

Why misery? Well, the main reason, as I see it, is that people tend to live in at the edges of their own existence, in the things that they have no actual influence over. They will complain, for instance, when others think less of them, even though they cannot control the mind of anyone else. Or they will be upset when the world doesn’t conspire to make them get what they want, despite what Paulo Coelho told them in The Alchemist. “Damn you, Paulo!” they say, but it’s not Paulo’s fault. He was just being poetic, and they were being morons.

Enter the Stoic philosopher Epictetus with some strong, wise words: “I must die, but must I die bawling?” There is, he seems to say, that which is real (I’m going to die) and then there is how we react to it (Do I have to die bawling?). We may have no control over the first thing (what is going to happen or what is happening), but we can affect how we react to it since we are not, if we choose to be, simply machines caught in a stimulus-response reaction. We can insert something like will (or good old fashioned silent contemplation) between the stimulus and the response. Epictetus expresses the idea more succinctly as follows: “There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will.”

There’s what we can control and what we cannot. And misery happens when the ego presumes that what it cannot control is in fact within the scope of its authority.

Happiness begins when we are able to step back from the mayhem and ask the simple question: “What can I actually do?” Happiness, then, is an issue of self-mastery and personal responsibility. Misery, on the contrary, is the cry of the absolute victim: the person who refuses to take responsibility for their own reactions to things. People who constantly point fingers at others—blaming the government, the system, the chef, the waitress, the doctor—are really just announcing their egotism; they expected that the world was in their control even though it isn’t.

And yet, the great irony is that the miserable person will claim to want to be happy when he or she clearly doesn’t. What egotists believe and what they live are at odds. I suppose that this may have something to do with the fact that it is somewhat pleasant to have an enormous ego. Think of the people of Ancient Rome or the British Empire who loved to brag about their ever expanding borders, as if it was a good thing. Having larger borders just means you have more to defend and more to lose. I don’t see how it’s a good thing.

Maybe there’s a kind of pleasure to be found in being able to view yourself as somehow large and important. But we all know what happens to empires: the collapse of the ego is just as inevitable.

Most people are aware of the negative ego: the arrogant ego. But few seem to be aware that there is a negative side to even the positive ego: the ego that wants to do more, achieve more, grow more, learn more and (ahem) burn out more. Whenever we give into the drug of panegotism, whether for positive or negative reasons, it spells trouble. It’s also a way to ensure that we cannot see/perceive things very clearly. Chesterton writes this in The Defendant:

The most brilliant exponent of the egoistic school, Nietzsche, with deadly and honourable logic, admitted that the philosophy of self-satisfaction led to looking down upon the weak, the cowardly, and the ignorant. Looking down on things may be a delightful experience, only there is nothing, from a mountain to a cabbage, that is really seen when it is seen from a balloon. The philosopher of the ego sees everything, no doubt, from a high and rarified heaven; only he sees everything foreshortened or deformed.

It takes a concerted effort to be genuinely humble—and humility is worthwhile because, as much of this little meander through thought has indicated, it is the key to happiness (“The secret of life is in laughter and humility,” Chesterton writes in Heretics).

It takes an act of humble concentration: a focus on our very human and very real limitations to free us from our egotism (It takes other things too, butwill is one of the tools we actually have control over). William Desmond says this thing that I just love: “The discipline of finitude will keep us in check.” It’s is an awareness of our finitude that will stop us from perceiving the world in entirely distorted terms. I have this up on my office wall: a drawing of a jug, which symbolises “Everything you want to achieve” x10 to the power of 29 and a tiny bottle x1 labeled “How much time you actually have.” It’s not just time that is at issue here, but it’s a pretty good indicator of our finitude.

I’m reminded of the beautiful movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower, in which we find a bunch of teenagers being teenagers, trying to figure out their place in a very mad, troubled world. And the main character, in a moment of ecstasy, talks about having a feeling of being “infinite.” But, of course, even the feeling of being infinite is something that can only happen in a “moment.” And the moment passes. And we know that we are this, right here, right now. We can influence things, but we certainly cannot control everything. In in this moment, I swear, we are terribly finite.

That, I think, is the beginning of any journey into genuine joy and genuine freedom.

Originally posted on duncanreyburn.com  on July 24, 2015

Open letter to my students

Dear Student,

I think I may have stumbled upon the secret to learning and it’s one of those secrets that shouldn’t be kept: The best way to learn something is to assume that you don’t know it yet. I wish more of my students were not just cognisant of this fact, but utterly possessed by it. Learning begins with ignorance. In fact, it is only in this sense that I can agree that ignorance is bliss. It is bliss if it it gives way to surprise, insight, understanding, enlightenment.

The greatest struggle any teacher has, though, is probably that he or she is usually in the company of minds that are already filled: sometimes with half-chewed, second-hand ideas, shoddy prejudices, uncritical preconceptions, answers without owners, and the kind of ignorance that is the very opposite of bliss—ignorance of ignorance.

The first job of the teacher, then, is not really to teach, but to unteach; just as the first job of the student is not to learn but to unlearn. I’m not here to make your life make sense. I’m here to force you to make sense of the fact that the sense you thought was sense is not quite the sense you’ve made of it. Yes, that’s a real sentence.

It is my primary job, as I see it, to point out that the thing you’re looking at is not the thing itself but your perception of it (and I’m not a mind-body dualist, so there’s even more to this than what meets the eye). So, really, what you’re likely to see is not an answer to your question, but an affront to or an agreement with your preconceptions. I may irritate you by challenging these preconceptions, but that’s part of the deal. You signed up for this, whether you knew what you were getting into or not.

What I’m getting at about the importance of open ignorance is beautifully illustrated in that wonderful old movie Being There, which centres on a man who has no discernible personality and no sign of any real intelligence. His mind works like Google, but with only very few search results possible. And yet people see in this blank slate of a man, this man without a personality, whatever they want to see: a genius economist, a wise philosopher, an advisor to a business mogul and the President of the USA, the perfect lover, a visionary. People seem incapable of recognising his blank stares as signs of disconnection and instead see him as a vast ocean of profundities. This occurrence is what psychoanalysts call transference, which can be summed up in the idea that we don’t see the world the way it is, but the way we are. We see everything through ourselves.

To see things, to encounter them as clearly as we possibly can given the limits of our perception and the inescapability of mediation, we have to make a concerted effort to get ourselves out of the way. We will never succeed entirely in this aim, but the attempt to succeed is what matters. We have to build great towers of open-mindedness with whole rooms to furnish with wild and wonderful ideas and epiphanies that are not of our own making. If we do not do this, all we will have is ourselves and our ignorance of our ignorance—our non-knowledge masquerading itself as knowledge. In a sense, we have to demolish the mythic fortress of our own panegotism, which encloses a tame, palatable reality that has been entirely constructed to suit our own image. Truth is a wild thing, and we need to let it be wild in order to be changed by it.

So whatever it is that can help you to be confronted with the limits of your perceptions, that is what education is about. Education is whatever tells you that, at the very least, what you know is horribly incomplete or, at most, completely wrong. Education is the expansion of insight and the reduction of self.

Ah, yes, the reduction of self. I should probably say something about this.

I know you have all kinds of plans. You have your dreams. And they, too, have their place. But you are not here to say important things in your research papers or in your artwork or design work. You are not here to demonstrate to the world how significant and amazing you are, or to wow your professor/lecturer/teacher with your brilliance. Because you are still a student. You are not here to expand your own sense of self-importance. You are here to learn how to feel small. You are here to learn the meaning of awe. The same is true for me, by the way. I’m here to learn as much as you are.

Often, as a sort of mediation, I like to visit the University Library, where I will walk through the shelves, moving towards the Dewey numbers that will take me to the book that I am looking for; and I will think to myself as I look at row upon row of books, packed from floor to ceiling: I know almost nothing ofall this. A whole lifetime will not afford me the chance to gain all the understanding that is possible. And then, with this thought in my mind, I find the book I am looking for, and in time I take it to my desk, open it, and begin reading. It is here, of course, that I discover a confirmation to my intuition about what it means to learn: to learn a thing, you have to first understand that you do not know it. Perhaps, probably, you will never know it fully. 

The glorious thing, for me, is that being a student is not a matter of three or four years, or however many years you are at school or a university. It is a state of mind, a way of life. It is the recognition that we are never too old, clever, wise, handsome, ugly, intelligent, stupid, ignorant, knowledgeable, or whatever, to learn. We are never too anything to learn, unless we are too arrogant to learn.

Where I would start, though, is with this recognition that the ignorance that is the best place to start includes ignorance of self. For all the labels you attribute to yourself, you are a mystery to yourself, just as I am a mystery to me. You contain, as Walt Whitman said it, multitudes. So start by being always a student of human nature, of your own sense of self. Sit at the feet of psychologists, theologians, anthropologists, philosophers, novelists and comedians. Figure out what it means or could mean to be human, fully human. Because the self is the ground, and all other areas of study are the seeds that are to be planted in this ground.

You are the dirt, as Adam was the dirt. And it is in this dirt—this insignificant, dark, ignorant, dirty dirt—that the trees of good knowledge will grow. So, please, take on ignorance so that you will not be ignorant. Become small, for it is then that you will discover just what kind of giant you really are.

Sincerely,

Duncan

Originally posted on duncanreyburn.com on July 29, 2015.

The beauty of offense

You've heard it said that the best offense is a defense, but I'm going to suggest that the best offense is an offense. The thing that a sleeping world in love with the status quo needs is not another tolerant dismissal of the beautiful violence caused by difference in opinion, for that kind of tolerance is really just indifference; instead, a sleeping world needs a frying pan against the head, the clanging outrage of a provocation and the subversive voice of a carefully configured opinion. Such provocations force us to consider where we are, how we see the world, and where we think we ought to be going. They offer a dialectical solidity against which we can process both our ignorance and our wisdom. They give us the concrete in order to suggest that the absolutisation of the concrete has its shortcomings.

I'm very grateful for those in the world whose opinions differ from my own, since it is often by this kind of conflict that I am able to sharpen my wits and reconsider the stability of my own perspectives on things. If you want to test how good your arguments are, it's not going to help you to hand them on a silver platter to someone who is only going to agree with you. The best way to sharpen a blade, after all, is to have it grind against something solid: a stone or a piece of metal. If you want to dull a blade, keep using it on things that are softer than the blade. Eventually, it'll stop being a blade and start being, well, just a little boring.

Homer Simpson, Coke and consumerism

In one of the earlier Simpson's episodes, Marge, who is desperately trying to make a case for the glory of love, tells her family to "ask what your heart what its fondest desire is". This gets Homer started on one of his usual reveries: a lengthy musing upon all the things his heart desires, and love doesn't seem to be one of them. Finally, bewildered by the list of things he desires, he simply concludes, "Mmmm — something". This, as Chris Turner in his book Planet Simpson explains, is "one of the most succinct summations anywhere of the insatiable desire lodged in the sclerotic aorta of the consumer ethos".

Homer — the quintessential, contradictory, blue-collar everyman — has never had enough. At any all-you-can-eat special, he's the one with a bottomless stomach. In another episode of the Simpsons, the devil tries to feed Homer doughnuts in the hope that he will, at some point, beg for mercy. But he never does. Despite swelling up well beyond his usual size, he keeps demanding more. Mmmm — doughnuts. Of course, one way to see this consumerist exercise is to assume that the consumer is never satisfied: he or she is greedy beyond belief. And, while this makes some sense, another way of seeing it is that consumers aren't satisfied precisely because 'consumer goods' (a name loaded with mocking irony) can never satisfy.

Take Coke Zero for example, not just as a drink but as a symbol. There are a few reasons why you'd want to drink anything: for its taste, for its thirst-quenching properties, for its nutritional value and perhaps (like beer) for its mind-numbing side-effects. But Coke Zero doesn't taste that great, it makes you thirstier the more you drink, has no real nutritional value, and provides very few pleasant side-effects. Sure, there's caffeine in it, but there really are more pleasant, more nutritious sources of caffeine out there. Coke Zero, then, promises Coke (The real thing, apparently, because 'Coke is it') but delivers nothing: that is, it is an idea without the proper substance. It promises satisfaction and delivers dissatisfaction.

If Coke Zero is taken as a symbol of what consumerism is, one may argue that it is simply another name for nihilism. Consumerism never satisfies because it is simply another name for the Big Nothing — it is a philosophy without doctrines, mist and thin air disguised as a materialist essentialism. The more you eat, the hungrier you get; the more you drink, the thirstier you get; the more you consume, the more you are consumed. Consumerism is Rene Magritte's C'est ne pas une pipe: semblance without substance.When asked for bread, it offers a stone.

Two kinds of power

Postmoderns like me tend, almost as a rule, to be suspicious of power. I think this is right. After all, human history is littered with examples of just how badly wrong things go when power is the main point of attention.  This, I think, is the subtle implication of the old adage that says "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely": it is not just 'bad' power that is the problem (the power of the Hitlers and Maos of the world) but rather power itself. This is why every attempt in human history to build a utopia has ended in tears and why every power struggle between the Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of culture end up in despair. Power itself is the problem.

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. Perhaps it is too simple to say that power itself is the problem. After all, isn't such assertive language simply a symptom of an underlying power-struggle? To nuance the idea, then, I'm going to suggest that there are two kinds of power: the right hand of power, and the limp, weak left hand of power. The first is the kind of power that dominates, overthrows and imposes. The second is a more profound kind of power: it is the power that gives up power. The first kind of power sets us up for the ruin of Empires; the second sets us up for compassion and forgiveness. After all, forgiveness, etymologically speaking, carries the idea of "giving away" similar to the Koine Greek aphesis, meaning "send away".

Take, for instance, the end of apartheid in South Africa. Okay, I know that the "end of apartheid" is an optimistic way of putting it, for even though the politics of apartheid has ended, the reality of apartheid is still felt in every corner of South Africa. But, well, let's just assume the "end" for the sake of argument. Nelson Mandela really had two options when he set up his rule: the the dialectical right hand of power (the violent calculus of blood to pay back the white race for their (our) horrific crimes of intolerance) or the left hand of power (a deep desire to give up the right for vengeance or recompense in order to embrace the idea of reconciliation). Mandela, with Desmond Tutu, chose the latter when he embraced the idea of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

This made political history. Instead of the Hegelian thesis (apartheid) / antithesis (new apartheid), we had a beautiful abandonment of power (the left hand of power). We seemed to skip the dialectic and move right on into synthesis. The point, however, is not that Mandela relinquished his position of power, or overthrew a capitalist system in order to establish a communist one, but rather assumed the position of power even while he gave his power away. You see, the left hand of power is paradoxical: it is strong precisely because it is weak. It conquers by losing. It succeeds by failing.

But the left hand of power, in order to perpetuate an ethic of reconciliation and forgiveness, needs to be continuous. The TRC was profound but it should have remained open, not just as a means for dealing with racial incongruity, but for dealing with all kinds of intolerance and misunderstanding. Forgiveness, as Jesus of Nazareth pointed out, is never a once-off act, but is a continuous, ongoing process. We forgive, not once, but all the time. And we don't just forgive people wrongs, we forgive them (send them away) by relinquishing our power over them at every moment of the day. Of course, I know the left hand of power is the more difficult route. It's always easier to go the eye-for-an-eye route until everyone is blind than raise a white flag to the power we have been given.

The good and bad of discrimination

A friend of mine ta few days ago asked me what my views on 'race' are. "You know," he said, "The whole issue of 'black versus white'". In South Africa, this is a touchy subject. We have a sordid history of racial intolerance, so talking about race is pretty much like juggling a conceptual atomic bomb. But, just because it's a dangerous subject doesn't mean it isn't worth talking about. Accordingly, at the risk of turning myself into the next Hiroshima, here's what I think:

To begin with, I'm a big supporter of difference. God, as GK Chesterton suggests, cut the world up into pieces because that is what love does: love is only possible because otherness is a reality. Love in the absence of otherness is just narcissism. So, well, instead of being one big ball of sameness and monotony, the universe is one big collection of differences. And, let's be honest, difference is what makes us who we are. Identity is not a singular event but collection of fragments; it is a drama of interactions between othernesses.

Consequently, insofar as the construct of 'race' is a means to affirm difference and the humanity of the other— that is, to celebrate his being different — I think we're on good, solid ground. Insofar as 'race' is the absolute negation of difference — the loudspeaker announcing the terror of otherness — I think it is of no use to anybody. And this, in short would be my view on race, except that even this is not that simple ...

Because the whole issue of 'black versus white', as my friend calls it, is a terrible simplification. It takes missing-the-point to a level that is difficult to even believe. It is never just an issue of black and white. More often than not, differences in opinion are cultural, religious and political rather than simply racial. And even then, such differences, or "styles of being" tend to operate on a complex dialogical continuum rather than in clear dialectical terms.

The main problem with confusing race with styles of living or with confusing the surface (skin-colour) with the substance (beliefs, identity and ideologies) is that discrimination on the whole is deemed evil. Sure, discriminating on the basis of race (and thus personhood) is wrong, but surely we are allowed to discriminate on the basis of ideas and ideologies? After all, your cup may be the same colour as mine, but yours may hold water while mine holds poison, and surely we should be able to speak up about such differences? And if someone, who has a different culture or skin colour from mine, is stealing from the poor and giving to the rich, then surely the issue is not race, but simply that he is doing what is wrong?

In the name of racial tolerance and acceptance, then, we should be careful not to discard the necessity of discriminating against bad ideas.

Labelling a straw man

When I get into an argument with someone, I've noticed that it's terribly easy to turn the person I'm arguing with into a straw man. I see myself, then, as this complex, three-dimensional being with intricate webs of thought and experience and my opponent (or friend) as a kind of mathematical equation that needs simply to be figured out rather than loved or understood.

Typically, the phrase "straw man" refers to an argument that has been misrepresented in some way so as to be easily defeated, but here I'm using it to refer to the misrepresentation of actual human beings. And typically "to attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of intellectual superiority over a particular proposition, idea or philosophy without actually ever taking that proposition, idea or philosophy on its own terms. Here I'm suggesting that "to attack a straw man" also refers to when we turn people into cardboard cut-outs like those you find at a shooting range in order to suggest that we are in some way better, more together and just generally more astute than the people we debate with.

How we turn multi-dimensional human beings into straw men is simple: we put a label onto the person in question, thereby substituting the label for the person. In other words, we take the idea being discussed, remove it from the context of the human being in front of us and then, at least on a conceptual level, discard the person in front of us. I remember watching a journalist do this to the philosopher Slavoj Zizek (See below for Part 1):

It's not that labels are avoidable, but they are merely words, not people. They are ideas, not people. They are just labels, nothing more really. I remember reading Anthony De Mello's 'Awareness' a few years ago. In that book, he talks about the necessity of dropping our labels. He says, if I remember this correctly, that the problem with labels is that sometimes they become a dirty lens through which we view everything. In other words, they can stop us from seeing. Even when we label ourselves as smart, empathetic, stupid, lazy, active or whatever, we are in danger of living in a kind of unreality.

What I'm trying to learn now is just to live: not to make judgments about people and their ideas, just to listen; not to decide that I know what I'm talking about, but to question; not to be so concerned with the destination that I forget the present moment. In short: to see, hear, taste, smell, and touch without worrying too much about how well any of my experiences fit into my theories. I don't want to be the kind of person who changes the facts to fit the theory, but rather the kind of person whose theory fits with my experience of reality. Yes, of course, we need to make decisions at some point, but even those decisions ought to be seen in the context of our whole human story, rather than as a destination that prevents us from ever going anywhere else ever again.