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    How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times
    How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times
    How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times
    Ebook326 pages4 hours

    How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

    By The School of Life

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    A guide to modern times that explores the challenges living in the 21st century can pose to our mental wellbeing.

    The modern world has brought us a range of extraordinary benefits and joys, including technology, medicine, and transport. But it can also feel as though modern times have plunged us ever deeper into greed, despair, and agitation. Seldom has the world felt more privileged and resource-rich yet also worried, blinkered, furious, panicked, and self-absorbed.

    How to Survive the Modern World is the ultimate guide to navigating our unusual times. It identifies a range of themes that present acute challenges to our mental well-being. The book tackles our relationship to the news media, our ideas of love and sex, our assumptions about money and our careers, our attitudes to animals and the natural world, our admiration for science and technology, our belief in individualism and secularism – and our suspicion of quiet and solitude. In all cases, the book helps us to understand how we got to where we are, digging deeply and fascinatingly into the history of ideas, while pointing us towards a saner individual and collective future.

    The emphasis isn’t just on understanding modern times but also on knowing how we can best relate to the difficulties these present. The book helps us to form a calmer, more authentic, more resilient, and sometimes more light-hearted relationship to the follies and obsessions of our age. If modern times are (in part) something of a disease, this is both the diagnostic and the soothing, hope-filled cure.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe School of Life
    Release dateOct 7, 2021
    ISBN9781912891993
    How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times
    Author

    The School of Life

    The School of Life is a groundbreaking enterprise which offers good ideas for everyday living. Founded in 2008, The School of Life runs a diverse range of programmes and services which address questions of personal fulfilment and how to lead a better life. Drawing insights from philosophy, psychology, literature, the visual arts and sciences, The School of Life offers evening classes, weekends, conversation meals and other events that explore issues relating to big themes such as Love,Work, Play, Self, Family and Community.

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      How to Survive the Modern World - The School of Life

      1 Consumer Capitalism

      The most significant aspect of modernity that separates it from every era previously known is a relatively humdrum and apparently inconsequential activity: shopping. For most of the history of humanity, shopping was straightforward: there was nothing to buy. Ninety-eight per cent of the income of a Northern European peasant in the twelfth century went on food: porridge, bread, cabbage, peas and, in a good week, mutton (in China, it was rice, millet, turnip, yams and, at favourable points, a duck). There was next to nothing left to spare thereafter; inventories of the dead in fifteenth-century England show that a person might pass away owning nothing at all besides the clothes they had collapsed in and a stool or a knife. It would have been a sign of true prosperity to lay claim to a candlestick.

      Then, in the middle of the seventeenth century, in the countries of the North Atlantic seaboard, an astonishing phenomenon started to unfold: thanks to incremental improvements in farming techniques, ordinary people began to have just a little more money at the end of the month than they needed in order not to starve. The sums were modest and the items for purchase equally so: a belt, some brass buttons, a chest, a copper pan, a night hat. But demand led to increased manufacturing, which then — in a virtuous cycle — fed back into employment. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, average wages in Northern Europe were on a gentle upward curve. Products that only a few generations back would have been inconceivable were slowly becoming more affordable. Cottages acquired hardwood floors, women might buy a second dress and men a waistcoat for Sundays, a child might have a doll, a family a padded chair.

      Northern Europe was witnessing the world’s first consumer revolution, in which goods that had once been luxuries were becoming affordable to an expanding public. An emerging middle class began to buy embroidered linens, cutlery and crockery, sideboards, dining chairs, divans, coffee, cookbooks and pictures. Fashion magazines allowed people in provincial towns to see — with only a few weeks’ delay — what the most elegant women in London were wearing in the evening. In the two centuries that followed, the consumer revolution spread to every region of the world, becoming ever more significant. In 1893, the newly launched Sears catalogue gave ordinary Americans access to a previously inconceivable array of goods. With an improved postal service and a nationwide chain of warehouses, one could order — and within only a few days receive — anything from hair curlers to lawnmowers, toilets to firearms — as well as more esoteric items like a pump to develop one’s breasts and a cream to enhance one’s chest.

      illustration

      Advertising in the Sears catalogue, 1897.

      In the cities, enormous sums were invested in the construction of department stores, baroque palaces of consumption that presided over new shopping boulevards. In 1882, Hermann Tietz opened Berlin’s first emporium, whose sumptuousness was designed to loosen shoppers’ hold on reality and induce them into a trance-like state in which they might more readily return home with a giraffe-skin sofa from the third floor or an Amazonian parrot and cage from the menagerie in the basement. A globe above the door was decorated with carved ostrich feathers, pearls and brocades; there was a vaulted ceiling, skylights, protruding angels and a dramatic open atrium lined with gargantuan plate-glass windows through which Berliners might peer and dream, as if at an aquarium.

      illustration

      Tietz Department Store, Berlin, 1910.

      In Paris, the Galeries Lafayette opened its first palace in 1912. It had a tearoom, a smoking room, an oriental bath and a forty-three-metre-high stained-glass dome.

      It seemed almost normal when the department store announced a 25,000-franc prize to the first pilot who could successfully land on a twenty-metre-long runway specially constructed on its roof. This manoeuvre was accomplished in January 1919 by a veteran of the First World War, Jules Védrines, to the wonder of a global newspaper audience and a 10,000-strong crowd in the streets below.

      illustration

      Landing by Jules Védrines, Galeries Lafayette, Paris, 1919.

      A paradoxical element of the consumer revolution was how serious apparently ‘small’ things became in its wake. The most minor items — shirt collars, shampoo, scrubbing brushes, margarine — contributed to fortunes unprecedented in size and scope. Sums of money that could once have been sequestered only through the conquest of nations or the edicts of kings could now be peacefully accumulated through the skilful merchandising of chocolate bars and hair creams. As a consequence, new types of people began entering the upper ranks of society. Someone who might have made his money offering the public chocolate ices or fairground rides could be richer than Amenhotep III of Egypt or live more grandly than the Inca emperor Atahualpa. One of the most powerful men of late-nineteenth-century England, William Lever, built his fortune selling soap — bars of Lux and tubs of Sunlight.

      illustration

      William Strang, William Hesketh Lever (1851–1925), 1st Viscount Leverhulme, 1918.

      The newly wealthy might not obey the standard etiquette expected of elites, however. They might use the wrong fork, blow their noses too loudly, and, in speeches at white-tie dinners, refer in an unvarnished way to what they had learnt from Ma back at the homestead — to the sniggers of old landed money.

      But economists understood that ices and soaps were no laughing matter. If a country wished to be prosperous, it needed to engage in the buying and selling of modest consumer items on a mass scale. High-minded ideals were very well, but it was malls and home-shopping catalogues that underpinned a nation’s wealth and strength. A moral case for mass consumption began to be made. The sale of coloured hair clips and lemon soda might not be elevated in itself, defenders proposed, but this was what provided the tax receipts to pay for the maintenance and welfare of the poorest in society, for the schools and orphanages, for the universities and the technical colleges. How heavily a nation was involved in the trade of so-called ‘silly’ things determined how much it would have to spend on hospitals and nursing homes.

      It might once have seemed impressive to intone biblically against the absurdities of commerce, but it was more short-sighted and cruel to leave a nation without the money to shelter its weakest members. Churches could wax lyrical about charity; only businesses could generate the money to pay for it.

      The growth in consumer society was accompanied by an enormous expansion in education. By the mid-nineteenth century, most Northern European countries were schooling their populations up until the age of fourteen. Alongside reading and writing, they offered maths and geography, science and literature. A powerful nation needed an educated citizenry. And yet there was one subject in which no instruction was ever offered or even thought necessary: the business of shopping. The assumption was that all the difficulties would lie in trying to accumulate money; spending it would be the easy part.

      illustration

      Oscar Bjorck, Madam Henriksen’s School for Girls in Skagen, 1884.

      But the matter may not have been so simple. It has been a bedrock of philosophy ever since Socrates that human beings are exceptionally bad at distinguishing correctly between what they need and what they desire, between what they require to flourish and what merely seems enticing yet might in fact injure or impair them. So long as, for most people, there was simply nothing available to be desired other than an extra serving of cabbage or a slice of cocker spaniel, the decision was chiefly theoretical. Yet in the new conditions of modernity, when the entire purpose of the economy came to be that of raising disposable incomes in order to facilitate non-essential consumption, the matter of how to spend fruitfully and accurately moved from being an issue of academic obscurity to an existential priority.

      We too often frame the chief problem of consumption in terms of price (a failure to pick a bargain), but the errors can be more fundamental. Spending successfully depends on grasping the intimate links between what we acquire and how we feel. When we choose an unhelpful item (it might be an eclair or a house, a pair of shoes or an education), it is because we lack sufficient knowledge of our own natures. We make for imperfect consumers for the same reasons that we slip up in multiple areas of our lives: because we are untrained amateurs in the art of making ourselves happy; because we lack self-knowledge.

      None of this would necessarily matter if the stakes weren’t so high. The tragedy of consumerism is that we have, over a couple of centuries, rearranged the world in the name of a privilege we may be unsuited to. We have diverted rivers, felled ancient woodlands, chained workforces to cubicles, darkened the skies and encouraged ourselves to spend the majority of our waking hours away from our loved ones in pursuit of ever greater incomes, all in the hope that we might, over time, come to smile more regularly.

      Yet so often, on the way back from the department store or the kitchen design shop, the estate agency or the water park, we privately acknowledge that we have once again not been able to lay our hands on the nerve centres of our own pleasure and might, all things considered, perhaps be in a mood to start crying.

      It is one thing to be miserable; it is more poignant to be so when our sole underlying ambition was to achieve contentment. This is the irony we pick up on in images of modern funfairs and holiday resorts, whose existence is premised on their ability to deliver satisfactions that may elude us. Our failures to have fun are a greater indictment of modern consumer culture than the miseries of work. The sweatshops, the rubbish dumps, the waste waters, the exhausted commuters — all these are to be lamented, but the real targets of puzzlement and rage lie elsewhere: in the fractious atmosphere inside luxury sedans, in the heartbreaks inside gated compounds, in the dissatisfactions of the family of the coal-mining tycoon, in the sicknesses of the soul at the fun palace.

      illustration

      Rob Ball, Funland, Weston-Super-Mare, 2015.

      As consumerism gained momentum in the eighteenth century, there was a degree of recognition that money couldn’t just be spent, but had to be spent wisely.

      However, the focus of concern tended to be narrow, centring on two activities in particular: drinking and gambling. Reformers pointed out how quickly lives might be ruined in gin alleys, and how much one might lose sight of one’s true allegiances in gambling dens. To combat these allurements, moralistic posters and prints spelt out the consequences of addiction. One might beat up one’s loved ones after a few bottles, or, as in Robert Martineau’s The Last Day in the Old Home (1862), need to sell all one’s belongings after a compulsive run at poker.

      illustration

      George Cruikshank, sixth illustration from the series The Bottle, 1847.

      illustration

      Robert Martineau, The Last Day in the Old Home, 1862.

      The problem with such moralism is not so much its high-handedness as its scope. It isn’t only drinking and gambling that might need to carry warnings; unfortunate consumption has a far greater sway upon us than this. To the extent that we are drawn into any kind of expenditure that prevents us from flourishing and that cuts us off from sources of true nourishment, we are the victims of commercial seduction. It isn’t surprising that we should often be so; huge interests are at work, seeking to persuade us of the wisdom of following certain prestigious ideas: of believing that happy people drink champagne; that a partner is not serious unless they buy their beloved a diamond ring; that we cannot be good parents until we have taken our children skiing…. It can take uncommon strength to stand up to a trend.

      We get a hint of the bravery required when we see artists making a protest against prevailing notions of beauty and good taste and lodging talented objections in the name of their own divergent visions. In mid-eighteenth-century France, the dominant artistic trend was the Rococo style, which emphasised idealised romantic scenes, aristocratic grace, luxurious prettiness, ribbons, gauze and lots of pastel-coloured flowers. It would have taken a great deal of self-awareness and inner confidence to say that, on reflection, this was not one’s own idea of fun and that beauty and interest might lie in a very different place.

      illustration

      Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Prayer Before a Meal, 1744.

      The French painter Chardin had the imperative to record a different register of enthusiasms. At considerable cost to his reputation, he explained over a succession of canvases that happiness as he understood the term lay elsewhere: in quiet and rather serious domestic scenes, in kitchens and parlours; in preparing tea for the children or in reading a book before bedtime; in a simple vase on a sideboard or in a loaf of bread broken open on a table.

      illustration

      Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Happy Lovers, c. 1760–1765.

      We can seldom match such bravery. The fear of being thought strange prevents most of us from taking our less socially endorsed tastes seriously. We go with Rococo in one era, flared shirts in another. We might not want to follow the script on how to dress ourselves, go on holiday, evaluate a book, celebrate a child’s birthday, honour a loved one, run a marriage, prepare a dinner party or lead a life, but we meekly go along with expectations for fear of standing out. Far from being dogmatic, self-centred creatures, we are often touchingly tentative about our own intuitions; we lead most of our lives firmly within a web of assumptions created for us by others.

      It isn’t that our tastes are entirely simple and that all consumption is, for that reason, idle; more that our tastes are varied and anomalous. It might be well after middle age that we finally abandon the dominant story of what we’re meant to wear, eat, admire or ignore and arrange our affairs as we had long secretly hoped. Part of the problem is that we lack the ability to know, looking back over our experiences, what in fact brought us pleasure. Our brains aren’t keen on taking apart their own satisfactions and therefore plotting how to recreate them more reliably. We may know that we like a given film or friend, but it can be hard to say why. We’re not natural critical dissectors of our experiences; therefore it can feel strange and difficult to comb through the details of a holiday or a party, the purchase of a jacket or a bicycle in a rigorous search for the pleasing or painful elements that would ideally guide our expenditure henceforth.

      Modern governments are often interested in consumer demand. They carefully track how much of it exists, panic at any decline and may move to stimulate it when it fails, aware that fluctuations in the total sums that people spend have enormous consequences for employment patterns and tax revenues. And yet the high-level emphasis on demand falls squarely on its quantity, not on its quality. From a government point of view, it doesn’t matter whether people are buying poetry classes or handguns, salads or iced doughnuts, psychotherapy sessions or sports cars. All that counts is that the total spend should be elevated.

      Yet, in a deeper sense, it does matter what we spend our money on, because the combined consumer choices of billions shape the kinds of societies we live in and the sorts of lives most of us will be able to lead. Contrary to what economists tell us, there are better and worse kinds of demand. Demand for guns may really be less ‘good’ than demand for education. Demand for health-giving food truly might be ‘better’ than that for corn-syrup rich desserts.

      Consumer society has not been short of critics who have suggested that we should try to unwind advanced capitalism in order to return to the simpler lives of our ancestors — and in the process rediscover a happiness that we lost in the global shopping mall. But the issue is not whether to consume or not (we have plenty of genuine needs to satisfy); it is how we might consume well — that is, in line with our best understanding of the preconditions for individual and collective flourishing.

      We are at the dawn of the consumer age. In the context of the history of Homo sapiens, only in

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