Little is truly known about the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (sometimes also known as Laozi or Lao Tze), who is a guiding figure in Daoism (also translated as Taoism), a still popular spiritual practice. He is said to have been a record keeper in the court of the central Chinese Zhou Dynasty in the 6th century B.C., and an older contemporary of Confucius. This could be true, but he may also have been entirely mythical—much like Homer in Western culture. It is certainly very unlikely that (as some legends say) he was conceived when his mother saw a falling star, or was born an old man with very long earlobes – or lived 990 years.

Lao Tzu as a deity, carving from the 7th or 8th century

Lao Tzu is said to have tired of life in the Zhou court as it grew increasingly morally corrupt. So he left and rode on a water buffalo to the western border of the Chinese empire. Although he was dressed as a farmer, the border official recognised him and asked him to write down his wisdom. According to this legend, what Lao Tzu wrote became the sacred text called the Tao Te Ching. After writing this, Lao Tzu is said to have crossed the border and disappeared from history, perhaps to become a hermit. In reality, the Tao Te Ching is likely to be the compilation of the works of many authors over time. But stories about Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching have passed down through different Chinese philosophical schools for over two thousand years and have become wondrously embellished in the process.

Lao Tzu leaving the kingdom on his water buffalo

Today there are at least twenty million Daoists, and perhaps even half a billion, living around the world, especially in China and Taiwan. They practise meditation, chant scriptures, and worship a variety of gods and goddesses in temples run by priests. Daoists also make pilgrimages to five sacred mountains in eastern China in order to pray at the temples and absorb spiritual energy from these holy places, which are believed to be governed by immortals. 

Daoist pilgrims visit a temple on Mount Tai, one of the five sacred mountains in Daoism

Daoism is deeply intertwined with other branches of thought like Confucianism and Buddhism. Confucius is often believed to be a student of Lao Tzu. Similarly, some believe that when Lao Tzu disappeared, he travelled to India and Nepal and either taught or became the Buddha. Confucianist practices to this day not only respect Lao Tzu as a great philosopher but also try to follow many of his teachings. 

A 12th-century Song Dynasty painting entitled ‘Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism are one’ is artistic evidence of the way these three philosophies were mixed over time, and often believed to be fully compatible.

There is a story about the three great Asian spiritual leaders (Lao Tzu, Confucius, and Buddha). All were meant to have tasted vinegar. Confucius found it sour, much like he found the world full of degenerate people, and Buddha found it bitter, much like he found the world to be full of suffering. But Lao Tzu found the world sweet. This is telling, because Lao Tzu’s philosophy tends to look at the apparent discord in the world and see an underlying harmony guided by something called the ‘Dao’. 

“The Vinegar Tasters”

The Tao Te Ching is somewhat like the Bible: it gives instructions (at times vague and generally open to multiple interpretations) on how to live a good life. It discusses the “Dao,” or the “way” of the world, which is also the path to virtue, happiness, and harmony. This “way” isn’t inherently confusing or difficult. Lao Tzu wrote, “the great Dao is very even, but people like to take by-ways.” In Lao Tzu’s view the problem with virtue isn’t that it is difficult or unnatural, but simply is that we resist the very simple path that might make us most content.

In order to follow the Dao, we need to go beyond simply reading and thinking about it. Instead we must learn wu wei (“flowing” or “effortless action”), a sort of purposeful acceptance of the way of the Dao and live in harmony with it. This might seem lofty and bizarre, but most of Lao Tzu’s suggestions are actually very simple.

An immortal (here walking on water) has certainly mastered wu wei, living in harmony with the Dao

First, we ought to take more time for stillness. “To the mind that is still,” Lao Tzu said, “the whole universe surrenders.” We need to let go of our schedules, worries and complex thoughts for a while and simply experience the world. We spend so much time rushing from one place to the next in life, but Lao Tzu reminds us “nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” It is particularly important that we remember that certain things—grieving, growing wiser, developing a new relationship—only happen on their own schedule, like the changing of leaves in the fall or the blossoming of the bulbs we planted months ago.

An 11th-century Chinese painting depicts a scholar practising stillness by studying nature in a meadow

When we are still and patient we also need to be open. We need to be reminded to empty ourselves of frivolous thoughts so that we will observe what is really important. “The usefulness of a pot comes from its emptiness.” Lao Tzu said. “Empty yourself of everything, let your mind become still.” If we are too busy, too preoccupied with anxiety or ambition, we will miss a thousand moments of the human experience that are our natural inheritance. We need to be awake to the way light reflects off of ripples on a pond, the way other people look when they are laughing, the feeling of the wind playing with our hair. These experiences reconnect us to parts of ourselves.

An open, decorated metal pot from the time of Lao Tzu

This is another key point of Lao Tzu’s writing: we need to be in touch with our real selves. We spend a great deal of time worrying about who we ought to become, but we should instead take time to be who we already are at heart. We might rediscover a generous impulse, or a playful side we had forgotten, or simply an old affection for long walks. Our ego is often in the way of our true self, which must be found by being receptive to the outside world rather than focusing on some critical, too-ambitious internal image. “When I let go of what I am,” Lao Tzu wrote, “I become what I might be.”

Deified Lao Tzu looks peaceful because he knows who he really is. A sculpture from between the 8th and 11th century

What is the best book about philosophy one could look at? For Lao Tzu, it wasn’t a volume (or a scroll) but the book of nature. It is the natural world, in particular its rocks, water, stone, trees and clouds, that offers us constant, eloquent lessons in wisdom and calm – if only we remembered to pay attention a little more often.

In Lao Tzu’s eyes, most of what is wrong with us stems from our failure to live ‘in accordance with nature’. Our envy, our rage, our manic ambition, our frustrated sense of entitlement, all of it stems from our failure to live as nature suggests we should. Of course, ‘nature’ has many moods and one can see in it almost anything one likes depending on one’s perspective. But when Lao Tzu refers to nature, he is thinking of some very particular aspects of the natural world; he focuses in on a range of attitudes he sees in it which, if we manifested them more regularly in our own lives, would help us find serenity and fulfilment.

Lao Tzu liked to compare different parts of nature to different virtues. He said, “The best people are like water, which benefits all things and does not compete with them. It stays in lowly places that others reject. This is why it is so similar to the Way (Dao).” Each part of nature can remind us of a quality we admire and should cultivate ourselves—the strength of the mountains, the resilience of trees, the cheerfulness of flowers.

Daoism advises us to look to trees as case studies in graceful endurance. They are constantly tormented by the elements, and yet because they are an ideal mixture of the supple and the resilient, they respond without some of our customary rigidity and defensiveness and therefore survive and thrive in ways we often don’t. Trees are an image of patience too, for they sit out long days and nights without complaint, adjusting themselves to the slow shift of the seasons – showing no ill-temper in a storm, no desire to wander from their spot for an impetuous journey; they are content to keep their many slender fingers deep in the clammy soil, metres from their central stems and far from the tallest leaves which hold the rain water in their palms.

Water is another favourite Daoist source of wisdom, for it is soft and seemingly gentle and yet, when it is given sufficient time, is powerful enough to mould and reshape stone. We might adopt some of its patient, quiet determination when dealing with certain family members or frustrating political situations in the workplace.

Daoist philosophy gave rise to a school of Chinese landscape painting still admired today for awakening us to the virtues of the natural world.

At one level, it seems strange to claim that our characters might evolve in the company of a waterfall or a mountain, a pine tree or a celandine, objects which after all have no conscious concerns and so, it would seem, cannot either encourage nor censor behaviour. And yet an inanimate object may, to come to the lynchpin of Lao Tzu’s claim for the beneficial effects of nature, still work an influence on those around it. Natural scenes have the power to suggest certain values to us – mountains dignity, pines resolution, flowers kindness – and in unobtrusive ways, may therefore act as inspirations to virtue.

The idea that the contemplation of nature is a source of perspective and tranquility is well known in theory, but so easy to overlook because we take it for granted – and never give it the time and focus required.

Lao Tzu in stone, near Quanzhou in China

Often our heads are filled with unhelpful phrases and ideas: things that have wormed their way into our imaginations and, by stirring up anxieties, make it harder for us to cope. For example, ‘Have the courage to live out your dreams,’ ‘Never compromise,’ ‘Fight until you win…’ These can (in certain cases) be a kind of poison, for which Lao Tzu’s words – combined with natural scenes – are the ideal antidote.

Nature does not hurry
yet everything is accomplished.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes.
Do not resist them.
That only causes sorrow.

The words of Lao Tzu set a mood. They are peaceful, reassuring and gentle. And this is a frame of mind we often find it difficult to hold onto, though it serves us well for many tasks in life: getting the children off to school, watching one’s hair go grey, accepting the greater talent of a rival, realising that one’s marriage will never be very easy…

Be content with what you have.
Rejoice in the way things are.

It would be a mistake to take Lao Tzu’s sayings literally in all cases. To rejoice in the way everything happens (a mediocre first draft, a car crash, a wrongful imprisonment, a brutal stabbing…) would be foolish. But what he says is, on certain occasions, extremely helpful: when your child has a different view of life from you but one which is full of unexpected insight nevertheless; when you are not invited out but have a chance to stay home and examine your thoughts for a change; when your bicycle is perfectly nice – even though its not made of carbon fibre.

We know that nature is good for our bodies. Lao Tzu’s contribution has been to remind us that it is also full of what deserves to be called philosophical wisdom; lessons that can make a particular impression on us because they reach us through our eyes and ears, rather than just our reason.

This 12th-century painting depicts a Daoist temple nestled in nature

Of course, there are issues that must be addressed by action, and there are times for ambition. Yet Lao Tzu’s work is important for Daoists and non-Daoists alike, especially in a modern world distracted by technology and focused on what seem to be constant, sudden, and severe changes. His words serve as a reminder of the importance of stillness, openness, and discovering buried yet central parts of ourselves. 

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is teach us how to suffer. It can do so by evoking scenes that are dark, melancholy or painful, and that normalise and lend dignity to the suffering we may ourselves be experiencing in isolation and confusion. They reveal – with grandeur and technical skill – that grief belongs to the human condition.

Caspar David Friedrich, a painter of sublime sadness, was born in 1774 in Greifswald, an ancient trading town in the far north of Germany, on the Baltic coast. It was a beautiful place in a severe, northern sort of way. As a child he loved the way the pinnacles, spires and towers of the town loomed up above the trees in the haze of very early summer mornings. 

Meadows near Greifswald, 1822

His father was a modest artisan of few words and little warmth. His beloved mother died when he was only a young child. When he was thirteen, he saw his younger brother, Johann Christoffer, fall through the ice of a frozen lake and drown.

Self-Portrait, 1800

He grew up taciturn, intense and shy. He was trained as a painter from an early age, but it was many years of poverty and hardship before his own distinctive style began to emerge. The taste of the era favoured sunny, classical landscapes. Italy in summer was the ideal. But Friedrich was drawn to aspects of nature that – up to that point – people had thought of as disagreeable and uninteresting: cold damp mornings; glacial nights by the sea; the pale hour before the sun rises; the flooded fields of late spring. 

The Grosse Gehege, near Dresden, 1832

Friedrich’s first mature work – the first big picture in which he started to present his own view of life – was a shock to his contemporaries. Instead of the conventional angels, weeping saints and soldiers he depicted the crucifixion of Jesus as happening on top of a mountainous crag amidst Teutonic fir trees, with the sun’s rays striking the clouds behind.

Cross in the Mountains, 1808

Friedrich realised then that nature could express many of the solemn moods previously associated with a literal rendition of the Christian story. With time, he dispensed with direct references to Jesus altogether, but he kept the atmosphere of tragedy and grief associated with his life and death. He found that tall trees, mountains, mists, jagged reefs, the rising of the moon, the stillness of water at night, open heathland and fog could carry many of the same messages about pain, love, suffering and redemption as Christian theologians had once found in the Gospels. He remains a painter uniquely suited for those who no longer believe, but are attracted to the serious emotions that accompany belief.

Landscape with Graves, 1835-7

In 1818, when he was 44, Caspar David married 25-year-old Christiane Caroline Bommer. They had three children: two daughters, Emma and Agnes Adelheid, and a son, Gustav Adolf. It seems to have been, on the whole, a good relationship. Caroline appears in many of his pictures, but always alone. He was drawn to painting men and women on their own, as if what is most important about us only comes to the surface when we are away from the chatter of civilisation. He himself had only a handful of friends and almost never left his simply furnished studio.

Woman before the Rising Sun, 1818-20 

Woman at a Window, 1822

The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1817-18

Instead of solitude being something to evade (with business, drink, or sexual fantasies), Friedrich suggests it as a state that brings us into contact with our deepest possibilities.

He also believed that the harshness of nature could put the sorrows of the human condition into a consoling, redeeming perspective.

The Sea of Ice, 1824

Humans can be as cruel, fate can be as remorseless, but contemplating the ineluctable collision of ice packs takes us out of ourselves, beyond the particular envy, wound or disappointment that is tormenting us, reducing our sense of personal persecution.

Moonrise over the Sea, 1822

Works like Moonrise over the Sea, make us aware of our insignificance, exciting a sense of how petty man’s disasters are in comparison with the ways of eternity, leaving us a little readier to bow to the incomprehensible tragedies that every life entails. From here ordinary irritations and worries are neutralised. Rather than try to redress our humiliations by insisting on our wronged importance, we can – through the help of a great art work – endeavour to apprehend and appreciate our essential nothingness.

Rocky Reef on the Sea Shore, 1824

Here Friedrich uses a striking, jagged rock formation, a spare stretch of coast, the bright horizon, far away clouds and a pale sky to induce us into a mood of redemptive sadness. We might imagine walking in the pre-dawn, after a sleepless night, on the bleak headland, away from human company, alone with the basic forces of nature. The smaller islands of rock were once as dramatic and thrusting as the major formation just beyond. The long, slow passage of time will, one day, wear them down as well. The first portion of the sky is formless and empty, a pure silvery nothingness, but above them are clouds which catch the light on their undersides and pass on in their pointless, transient way, indifferent to all of our concerns.

The picture does not refer directly to our relationships or to the stresses and tribulations of our day to day lives. Its function is to give us access to a state of mind in which we are acutely conscious of the largeness of time and space and of the insignificance of our situation within the greater scheme. The work is sombre, rather than sad; calm, but not despairing. And in that condition of mind – that state of soul, to put it more romantically – we are left, as so often with Friedrich’s work, better equipped to deal with the intense, intractable and particular griefs that lie before us in the days ahead.

Like many artists, Friedrich was not terribly successful. He was admired and his work purchased by a small number of serious people (and two of the most delightful painters of the era, Kersting and Dahl, were his friends). He died in his mid-sixties, in 1840, almost forgotten.

Georg Friedrich Kersting, Caspar David Friedrich in his Studio, 1819

He did not know how that, in the distant future, his work would be deeply admired – not because it cheers us, but precisely because it knows how to reframe and express the saddest parts of all of us.

Cairn in Snow, 1807

Max Weber is one of the four philosophers best able to explain to us the peculiar economic system we live within called Capitalism (Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Adam Smith are the others).

Born in Erfurt in Germany in 1864, Weber grew up to see his country convulsed by the dramatic changes ushered in by the Industrial Revolution. Cities were exploding in size, vast companies were forming, a new managerial elite was replacing the old aristocracy. Weber’s father, successful in business and politics, prospered greatly from this new era, leaving his son with a fortune that would allow him the independence to be a writer. His mother was a sober, withdrawn figure, who mostly stayed at home practising an extremely pious and sexually-strict version of Christianity.

Weber became a successful academic at a young age. But when he was in his mid-thirties, during a family get-together, he fell into a grave quarrel with his father over the latter’s treatment of his mother. Weber senior died the next day and the son believed he might inadvertently have killed him. This catapulted him into severe depression and anxiety. Weber had to give up his university job and lay more or less mute on a sofa for two years.

Max and Marianne Weber in 1894

His wife, Marianne, turned out to be unhelpfully similar to his mother. The marriage was unconsummated and filled with neurotic complaints on both sides. Weber’s path to intellectual recovery began after he had a liberating affair with a sexually-progressive 19-year-old student, Else von Richthofen (whose sister, Frida, comparable in temperament, was married to the novelist D. H. Lawrence). Max Weber had the sort of life that his contemporary, Freud, was born to address.

Weber was largely unknown during his lifetime. But his fame has grown exponentially ever since – because he originated some key ideas with which to understand the workings and future of Capitalism.

1. Why does Capitalism exist?

Capitalism might feel normal or inevitable to us but, of course, it isn’t. It came into existence only relatively recently, in historical terms, and has successfully taken root in just a limited number of countries.

The standard view is that Capitalism is the result of developments in technology (particularly, the invention of steam power).

But Weber proposed that what made Capitalism possible was a set of ideas, not scientific discoveries – and in particular religious ideas.

Religion made Capitalism happen. Not just any religion; a very particular, non-Catholic kind of the sort that flourished in Northern Europe where Capitalism was – and continues to be – particularly vigorous. Capitalism was created by Protestantism, specifically Calvinism, as developed by John Calvin in Geneva and by his followers in England, the Puritans.

In his great work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in 1905, Weber laid out some of the reasons why he believed Protestant Christianity had been so crucial to Capitalism:

i) Protestantism makes you feel guilty all the time:

Catholics have it – relatively – easy in Weber’s analysis. Believers who have strayed are able to confess their transgressions at regular intervals and can be ‘cleansed’ by priests and thereby recover a sense of their good name in the eyes of God. But no such purifications are available to Protestants, for only God is thought able to forgive and He won’t make his intentions known until the Day of Judgement. Until then, Weber alleged, Protestants are left with heightened feelings of anxiety as well as life-long guilty desires to prove their virtue before a severe, all-seeing but silent God.

ii) God likes hard work

In Weber’s eyes, Protestant guilt feelings were diverted into an obsession with hard work. The sins of Adam could only be expunged through constant toil. To rest, relax and go hunting – as the old Catholic aristocracy liked to do – was to ask for divine trouble. Not coincidentally, there were far fewer festivals and days of rest in Protestantism. God didn’t like time off. Money earnt wasn’t to be blown in feasts celebrating the here-and-now. It was always and only to be reinvested for tomorrow.

iii) All work is holy

Catholics had limited their conception of holy work to the activities of the clergy. But now Protestants declared that work of any kind could and should be done in the name of God, even jobs like being a baker or an accountant. This lent new moral energy and earnestness to all branches of professional life. Work was no longer just about earning a living, it was to be part of a religious vocation connected with proving one’s virtue to God. The clerk was meant to approach his work at the office with all the seriousness and piety of a monk.

iv) It’s the community, not the family, that counts

In Catholic countries, the family was (and often still is) everything. One would regularly give jobs to relatives, help out indolent uncles and lightly swindle the central authorities for family gain without too much compunction. But Protestants took a less benevolent view of family. The family could be a haven for selfish and egoistic motives, running counter to Jesus’s injunctions that a Christian should be concerned with the family of all believers, not his or her specific family. For early Protestants, one was meant to direct one’s selfless energies to the community as a whole, the public realm where everyone deserved fairness and dignity. To stick up for one’s family over and against the claims of the wider group was nothing less than a sin; it was time to do away with narrow vested interests and clan loyalties.

v) There aren’t miracles

Protestantism turned its back on miracles. God wasn’t thought to be lever-pulling behind the scenes day-to-day. One couldn’t get prayers directly answered. Heavenly power didn’t intervene in a fantastical, childish way. Weber called this ‘the disenchantment of the world.’ Instead, in the Protestant philosophy, the emphasis fell on human action: the day to day world was ruled by facts, by reason and by the discoverable laws of science. And therefore, prosperity was not mysteriously ordained by God and couldn’t be won through imploring prayers. It could only be the result of thinking methodically, acting honestly and working industriously and sensibly over many years.

Taken together, these five factors created, in Weber’s eyes, the crucial catalytic ingredients for Capitalism to take hold. In this analysis, Weber was in direct disagreement with Karl Marx, for Marx had proposed a materialist view of Capitalism (where technology was said to have created a new capitalist social system), whereas Weber now advanced an idealist one (suggesting that it was in fact a set of ideas that had created Capitalism and given the impetus for its newfound technological and financial arrangements).

Karl Marx in 1875

The argument between Weber and Marx pivoted around the role of religion. Marx had argued that religion was ‘the opium of the masses’, a drug that induced passive acceptance of the horrors of Capitalism. But Weber turned this dictum on its head. It was religion that was in fact the cause and foremost supporter of Capitalism. People didn’t tolerate Capitalism because of religion, they only became capitalists as a result of their religion.

2. How do you develop Capitalism around the world?

There are about 35 countries where Capitalism is now well developed. It probably works best in Germany, where Weber first observed it. But in the remaining 161 nations, it arguably isn’t working well at all.

This is a source of much puzzlement and distress. Billions of dollars in aid are transferred every year from the rich to the poor world, and are spent on malaria pills, solar panels and grants for irrigation projects and women’s education.

But a Weberian analysis tells us that these materialist interventions will never work, because the problem isn’t really a material one to begin with. One has to start at the level of ideas.

What the World Bank and the IMF should be giving sub-Saharan Africa is not money and technology but ideas.

In the Weberian analysis, certain countries fail to succeed at Capitalism because they don’t feel anxious and guilty enough, they trust too much in miracles, they like to celebrate now rather than reinvest for tomorrow and their members feel it’s acceptable to steal from the community in order to enrich their families, favouring the clan over the nation.

Weber didn’t believe that the only way to be a successful Capitalist country was actually to convert to Protestantism. He argued that Protestantism had merely brought to their first fruition ideas which could now subsist outside of religious ideology.

Today Weber would counsel those who wish to spread Capitalism to concentrate on our equivalent of religion: culture. It is a nation’s attitudes, hopes and sense of what life is about that produces an economy that either flourishes or flounders. The path to reforming an economy shouldn’t hence wind through material aid, it should go through cultural assistance. The decisive question for an economy is not what the rate of inflation is, but what is on TV tonight.

3. Why is Capitalism not going so well in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the poorest country on earth)?

Because, Weber would tell us, this unfortunate nation has the wrong mentality, one far removed from that of Rhineland Germany. They believe in clans, they have magical thinking, they don’t believe that God would Himself command them to be an honest mechanic or hairdresser…

Weber’s point is that if Capitalism is going to take root in developing nations – and bring the advantages of higher productivity and greater wealth – then we will need to look to changing mentalities, instilling something akin to an updated version of the attitudes of Calvinism.

Weber’s views on global development emerged in two books he wrote on two religions that he felt were extremely unhelpful to Capitalism, The Religion of India and The Religion of China. For Weber, the caste system of the Hindus assigns everyone to a status they can’t escape and therefore makes any sustained commercial effort futile. The belief in samsara – the transmigration of souls – also inspires the view that nothing substantial can change until the next life. At the same time, a Hindu ideology of the clan takes pressure off individual responsibility and encourages nepotism rather than meritocracy. These ideas have economic consequences; they are why nowadays, Weberians would argue, there are many excellent public hospitals in Geneva and Erfurt and not too many in Chennai or Varanasi.

Weber noted similarly unhelpful factors in China. There Confucianism gives too much weight to tradition. No one feels able to rethink how things are done. The devotion to bureaucracy encourages a static society – whereas entrepreneurship arises from a fruitful mixture of anxiety and hope.

4. How can we change the world?

Weber was writing in an age of revolution. Lots of people around him were trying to change things: communists, socialists, anarchists, nationalists, separatists.

He too wanted things to change, but he believed that one first had to work out how political power operated in the world.

Anton von Werner, The Proclamation of Prussian king Wilhelm I, 1877

He believed that humanity had gone through three distinct types of power across its history. The oldest societies operated according to what he called ‘traditional authority.’ This was where kings relied on appeals to folklore and divinity to justify their hold on power. Such societies were deeply inert and only rarely allowed for initiative

These societies had subsequently been replaced by an age of ‘charismatic authority’, where a heroic individual, most famously a Napoleon, could rise to power on the back of a magnetic personality – and change everything around him through passion and will.

But, Weber insisted, we were now long past this period of history, having entered a third age of ‘bureaucratic authority.’ This is where power is held by vast labyrinthine bureaucracies whose workings are entirely baffling to the average citizen. It’s not obvious what all the functionaries actually do in meetings and at their desks. Bureaucracy achieves its power via knowledge: only the bureaucrats know how stuff works, and it will take an outsider years to work it out (for example, how housing policy or the educational curriculum are actually structured). Most simply give up – usefully for the powers that be…

The dominance of bureaucracy has major implications for anyone trying to change a nation. There is often an understandable, but misguided, desire to think one just has to change the leader, who is imagined as a kind of super-parent personally determining how everything goes. But in fact, removing the leader almost never has the degree of impact that is hoped for. (The replacement of Bush by Obama did not lead, for example, to all the changes some people expected; Weber would not have been surprised).

Weber knew that today one can’t bring about significant social change just by charisma. It can feel as if political change should be driven by fiery rhetoric, marches, fury and grand, exciting gestures, like publishing a bestselling revolutionary book. But Weber is pessimistic about all such hopes, for they are misaligned with the reality of how the modern world works. The only way to overcome the power lodged within bureaucracy is through knowledge and systematic organisation.

Weber encourages us to see that change is not so much impossible as complicated and slow. If we are to get things to go better, much of it will have to come through outwardly very undramatic processes. It will be through the careful marshalling of statistical evidence, patient briefings to ministers, testimonies to committee hearings and minute studies of budgets.

Conclusion

Weber, though personally a cautious man, is an unexpected source of ideas on how to change things. He tells us how power works now and reminds us that ideas may be far more important than tools or money in changing nations. It is a hugely significant thesis. We learn that so much which we associate with vast impersonal external forces (and which hence feels entirely beyond our control) is, in fact, dependent upon something utterly intimate and perhaps more malleable: the thoughts in our own heads.

We live in a world saturated with false glamour. In truth, the problem does not lie with glamour itself, but with the things we have collectively agreed to regard as glamorous. Progress wouldn’t be found in eradicating the whole idea of glamour from our lives. Instead, what we need to do is direct our admiration and excitement more wisely: to turn it upon the things which genuinely do deserve prestige.

One of the fundamental things artists can do for us is turn the spotlight of glamour in the best – and most helpful – directions. They can identify things that we tend to overlook but which, ideally, we should care about a great deal. And by the tenderness, beauty, skill and wisdom with which they portray these things, we too can come to see their true worth.

The Milkmaid, 1657-8

Serving women – and bread and milk – were not regarded as especially exciting in the late 1650s, when Johannes Vermeer painted this picture. He didn’t seek out a model who was already highly admired. Instead he spent his time looking very carefully at a scene which he happened to love, but which most people at the time would have considered boring and not worth a moment’s consideration.

Vermeer saw in the serving woman pouring milk something that he felt deserved prolonged contemplation and admiration. He thought something really important was going on. By worldly standards, it’s a pretty humble situation. The room is far from elegant. But the care with which she works is lovely. Vermeer is impressed by the idea that our true needs might be quite simple. Bread and milk are really rather satisfying. The light coming through the window is beautiful. A plain white wall can be delightful. 

Vermeer is redistributing glamour by raising the prestige of the things he depicts. And he’s trying to get us to feel the same way. The milk maid is a kind of propaganda (or an advert) for homely pleasures. 

The Lacemaker, 1669-1671

Consider the painstaking, skilful – and commercial – business of making lace: Vermeer paints the self-employed business woman with the devotion and care that would, traditionally, be paid to a military hero or a great political leader. 

Vermeer was born in 1632 in the small and beautiful city of Delft, where his father was a modestly successful art dealer-cum-innkeeper. Vermeer stayed there most of his life. He never travelled away from Delft after his marriage (aged 21). He hardly even left his pleasant house. He and his wife, Catharina, had ten children (and many more pregnancies) and he did a great deal of painting in the front rooms on the upper floor. Vermeer was a slow painter and – in fact – not only a painter. He continued the family businesses of innkeeping and art dealing and he became the head of the local guild of painters. In contemporary terms, his career was not a huge success. He wasn’t especially famous during his lifetime. He didn’t make a lot of money. 

He was in fact an exemplary member of (in those days) a newly important kind of person: the middle-class individual. Vermeer was in his teens when Holland (or technically the Seven Provinces) became an independent state – the first ‘bourgeois republic’ in the world. In contrast to the semi-feudal aristocratic nations that surrounded it, Holland gave honour and political power to people who were not at the pinnacle of society: to merchants, administrators, prosperous artisans and entrepreneurs. It was the first country in the world to be recognisably modern. 

The Girl with the Pearl Earring, 1665

A great insight of Christianity – which is ultimately detachable from the surrounding theology – is that everyone’s inner life is important, even if on the outside they do not seem particularly distinguished. The thoughts and feelings of an apprentice tailor count for as much (from a spiritual point of view) as those of a General or an Emperor. 

Vermeer paints The Girl with the Pearl Earring with the same kind of consideration. She isn’t anybody famous or important in the eyes of the wider world. She isn’t rich. The earring that she wears is nice, but it is a minor trinket by the standards of the fashionable world. It is the one rather pricey thing she owns. But she’s not in need of justice – she’s not downtrodden or badly treated by the world. She is (for want of a better term) ordinary. Yet, of course, in herself she is (like everyone) not in the least ordinary: she is uniquely, mysteriously and profoundly herself. 

The Little Street, 1657-8

The picture which best sums up Vermeer’s philosophy, The Little Street, has become one of the most famous works of art in the world. It has pride of place in Amsterdam’s great Rijksmuseum; it is insured for half a billion euros and is the subject of a mountain of learned articles. 

Yet the painting is curiously – and pointedly – out of synch with its status. Because, above all else, it wants to show us that the ordinary can be very special. The picture says that looking after a simple but beautiful home, cleaning the yard, watching the children, darning cloth – and doing these things faithfully and without despair – is life’s real duty. 

It is an anti-heroic picture: a weapon against false images of glamour. It refuses to accept that true glamour depends on amazing feats of courage or on the attainment of status. It argues that doing the modest things, that are expected of all of us, is enough. The picture asks you to be a little like it is: to take the attitudes it loves, and to apply them to your life. 

If a good, decent society had a founding document, it could be this small picture. It is a central contribution to the world’s understanding of happiness. 

Vermeer did not live long. He died in 1675, still only in his early forties. 

View of Delft, 1660-1

But he had communicated a crucial – and hugely sane – idea: much of what matters to us is not exciting, urgent, dramatic or special. Most of life is taken up dealing with things which are routine, ordinary, humble, modest and (to be honest) a touch dull. Our culture should focus on getting us to appreciate the average, the everyday and the ordinary. 

When Vermeer painted the town where he lived he didn’t choose a special day; the sky is neither very overcast nor especially sunny. Nothing is happening. No celebrities are around. Yet it is, as he has taught us to recognise, all very special indeed.

Most people agree that we need to improve our economic system somehow. It threatens our planet through excessive consumption, distracts us with irrelevant advertising, leaves people hungry and without healthcare, and fuels unnecessary wars. Yet we’re also often keen to dismiss the ideas of its most famous and ambitious critic, Karl Marx. This isn’t very surprising. In practice, his political and economic ideas have been used to design disastrously planned economies and nasty dictatorships. Frankly, the remedies Marx proposed for the ills of the world now sound a bit demented. He thought we should abolish private property. People should not be allowed to own things. At certain moments one can sympathise. But it’s like wanting to ban gossip or forbid watching television. It’s going to war with human behaviour. And Marx believed the world would be put to rights by a dictatorship of the proletariat; which does not mean anything much today. Openly Marxist parties received a total of only 1,685 votes in the 2010 UK general election, out of the nearly 40 million ballots cast.

Nevertheless, we shouldn’t reject Marx too quickly. We ought to see him as a guide whose diagnosis of Capitalism’s ills helps us navigate towards a more promising future.

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Germany. He was descended from a long line of Rabbis, but his family converted to Christianity when he was six in order to assimilate with German society. At the posh and prestigious University of Bonn, he racked up huge debts, was imprisoned for drunkenness and disturbing the peace, and got into a duel. He also wanted to become a drama critic. Displeased, Marx’s father sent him to the more serious University of Berlin, where he joined a group of philosophers known as the Young Hegelians who were extremely sceptical of modern economics and politics.

Karl Marx as a young man

Soon Marx became involved with the Communist party, a tiny group of intellectuals advocating for the overthrow of the class system and the abolition of private property. He worked as a journalist and secretly became engaged to a wealthy young woman, Jenny von Westphalen. Due to his political activity, the young couple had to flee Germany and eventually settled in London.

Marx with his wife, Jenny von Westphalen

Marx wrote an enormous number of books and articles, sometimes with his friend Friedrich Engels. Some of the most important are Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), The Holy Family (1845), Theses on Feuerbach (1845), 1844 Manuscripts, The German Ideology (1845), The Communist Manifesto (1848), Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), and the very long Capital (1867-1894).

Mostly, Marx wrote about Capitalism, the type of economy that dominates the western world. It was, in his day, still getting going, and Marx was one of its most intelligent and perceptive critics. These were some of the problems he identified with it:

One: Modern work is “alienated”

One of Marx’s greatest insights, delivered in an early book known as the 1844 Manuscripts, is that work can be one of the sources of our greatest joys. It is because Marx had such high hopes for work that he was so angry at the miserable work that most of humanity is forced to endure.

In order to be fulfilled at work, Marx wrote that workers need ‘to see themselves in the objects they have created’. At its best, labour offers us a chance to externalise what’s good inside us (let’s say, our creativity, our rigour, our logic), and to give it a stable, enduring form in some sort of object or service independent of us. Our work should – if things go right – be a little better than we manage to be day-to-day, because it allows us to concentrate and distil the best parts of us. 

Think of the person who built this chair: it is straightforward, strong, honest and elegant. Now its maker would not always have been these things: sometimes he or she might have been bad tempered, despairing, unsure. Yet the chair is a memorial to the positives of his or her character. That’s what work is ideally, thought Marx. But he also observed how in the modern world, fewer and fewer jobs have this characteristic of allowing us to see the best of ourselves in what we do.

Part of the problem with modern work is that it is incredibly specialised. One can tell because people have very weird-sounding job titles: you find packaging technology specialists, beverage dissemination officers, gastronomical hygiene technicians and information architects. These jobs take years of training to master, which makes the modern economy highly efficient, but we end up with a situation where it is seldom possible for one’s real nature to find expression in what one is doing day-to-day.

In Marx’s eyes, all of us are generalists inside. We were not born to do one thing only. It’s merely the economy that – for its own greedy ends – pushes us to sacrifice ourselves to one discipline alone, rendering us (in Marx’s words) “one-sided and dependent” and “depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine.” It was in the 1844 Manuscripts that Marx first argued that modern work leads to “alienation” – in German, Entfremdung.

In our hearts, we are far more multiple, and promiscuous than the modern economy allows: beneath the calm outward facade of the accountant might lie someone pining to have a go at landscape gardening. Many a poet would want to have a go at working in industry for a few years.

Marx recognises our multiple potentials. Specialisation might be an economic imperative but it can be a human betrayal.

Marx also wants to help us find work that is more meaningful. Work becomes meaningful, Marx says, in one of two ways. Either it helps the worker directly to reduce suffering in someone else or else it helps them in a tangible way to increase delight in others. A very few kinds of work, like being a doctor or an opera star seem to fit this bill perfectly.

But often people leave their jobs and say: I couldn’t see the point in working in sales or designing an ad campaign for garden furniture or teaching French to kids who don’t want to learn. When work feels meaningless, we suffer – even if the salary is a decent one. Marx is making a first sketch of an answer to how we should reform the economy; we need an economic system that allows more of us to reduce suffering or increase pleasure. Deep down we want to feel that we are helping people. We have to feel we are addressing genuine needs – not merely servicing random desires.

Marx was aware of a lot of jobs where a person generates money, but can’t see their energies ‘collected’ anywhere. Their intelligence and skills are dissipated. They can’t point to something and say: ‘I did that, that is me’. It can afflict people doing apparently glamorous jobs – a news reader or a catwalk model. Day-to-day, it is exciting. But over the years it does not add up to anything. Their efforts do not accumulate. There isn’t a long-term objective their work is directed towards. After a number of years they simply stop. It’s the reverse of an architect who might labour for five years on a large project – but all the millions of details, which might be annoying or frustrating in themselves, eventually add up to an overall, complete achievement. And everyone who is part of this, participates in the sense of direction and purpose. Their labours are necessary to bring something wonderful into existence. And they know it.

A factory worker spends all day mechanically bottling ketchup. Circa 1901

Two: Modern work is insecure

Capitalism makes the human being utterly expendable; just one factor among others in the forces of production and one that can ruthlessly be let go the minute that costs rise or savings can be made through technology. There simply is no job security in Capitalism. And yet, as Marx knew, deep inside of us, we long for security with an intensity similar to that which we feel in relationships. We don’t want to be arbitrarily let go, we are terrified of being abandoned. Marx knows we are expendable, it all depends on cost and need. But he has sympathy for the emotional longings of the worker. Communism – emotionally understood – is a promise that we always have a place in the world’s heart, that we will not be cast out. This is deeply poignant.

Three: Workers get paid little while capitalists get rich

This is perhaps the most obvious qualm Marx had with Capitalism. In particular, he believed that capitalists shrunk the wages of the labourers as much as possible in order to skim off a wide profit margin (he called this “primitive accumulation” or in German Ursprüngliche Akkumulation. It was very difficult for the labourers to protest or alter their circumstances. Not only were they in desperate need of employment, but their landlords and employers could conspire to keep them desperate by raising the price of living along with any rise in wages. Modern life also brought new challenges that kept the proletariat weak: crowded quarters, disease, crime-ridden cities, injuries in the factory. In short, Marx wrote, the workers could be almost endlessly exploited.

A mural by the Mexican Marxist artist Diego Rivera shows the workers inside a vast machine-like system of modern production

Four: Capitalism is very unstable

Long before the Great Depression or the computer-traded stock market, Marx recognised that capitalist systems are characterised by series of crises. This is partly because capitalists seek increasingly big risks in order to make even bigger profits, and this speculation disrupts prices and employment. But Capitalism isn’t just volatile because of competition and human frailty. In Marx’s view, it is inherently unstable–a force that constantly overpowers itself, a “sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” 

Ironically, Marx pointed out, we have crises in Capitalism not because of shortages, but because of abundance; we have too much stuff. Our factories and systems are so efficient, we could give everyone on this planet a car, a house, access to a decent school and hospital. Few of us would need to work. But we don’t liberate ourselves. Marx thinks this is absurd, the outcome of some form of pathological masochism. In 1700, it took the labour of almost all adults to feed a nation. Today a developed nation needs hardly anyone to be employed in farming. Making cars needs practically no employees. Unemployment is currently dreadful and seen as a terrible ill. But, in Marx’s eyes, it is a sign of success: it is the result of our unbelievable productive powers. The job of a hundred people can now be done by one machine. And yet rather than draw the positive conclusion from this, we continue to see unemployment as a curse and a failure. Yet, logically, the goal of economics should be to make more and more of us unemployed and to celebrate this fact as progress rather than as failure.

Marx believes that because we don’t distribute wealth to everyone, nor seek and celebrate unemployment, we are plagued by instability, unhappiness, and unrest. “Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism,” he wrote. “And why? “Because there is too much civilisation…too much industry, too much commerce.”

Five: Capitalism is bad for capitalists

Although Marx sometimes called the capitalists and bourgeoisie “vampires” and “hostile brothers”, he did not think they were evil at heart. In fact, he believed that they were also victims of the capitalist system. For example, he was acutely aware of the sorrows and secret agonies that lay behind bourgeois marriage. Affluent people of his day spoke about family in the most reverent and sentimental of ways. But Marx argued that marriage was actually an extension of business. Marriage concentrated money in the hands of men, who used it to control their wives and children. The idealised bourgeois family was in fact fraught with tension, oppression, and resentment, and stayed together not because of love but for financial reasons. Marx didn’t think the Capitalists wanted to live this way. He simply believed that the capitalist system forces everyone to put economic interests at the heart of their lives, so that they can no longer know deep, honest relationships. He called this psychological tendency “commodity fetishism” (Warenfetischismus) because it makes us value things that have no objective value, and encourages us to see our relationships with others primarily in economic terms.

Are mum and dad in love, or are they in it for the money?

This is another important aspect of Marx’s work: he makes us aware of the insidious, subtle way in which an economic system colours the sort of ideas people will have about all sorts of matters. The economy generates what Marx termed an ideology. In his 1845 work The German Ideology, he wrote, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” A capitalist society is one where most people, rich and poor, believe all sorts of things that are really just value judgements that relate back to the economic system, for example: that a person who doesn’t work is practically worthless, that if we simply work hard enough we will get ahead, that more belongings will make us happier and that worthwhile things (and people) will invariably make money.

In short, one of the biggest evils of Capitalism is not that there are corrupt people at the top—this is true in any human hierarchy—but that capitalist ideas teach all of us to be anxious, competitive, conformist, and politically complacent. 

An exaggerated, visual version of capitalist ideology from the science fiction film They Live

***

Marx wrote remarkably little about what a communist system should look like. He believed his writings were mostly descriptions, rather than prescriptions, about what was to come. When criticised for his rather vague predictions (that there would be a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” for example), he scoffed that he did not wish to write recipes “for the cook-shops of the future.” Perhaps he wisely sensed how hard it is to guess future tastes, both culinary and political. 

Nevertheless, we do get little glimpses of Marx’s utopia hidden in his writings. The Communist Manifesto describes a world without private property, without any inherited wealth, with a steeply graduated income tax, centralised control of the banking, communication, and transport industries, and free public education for all children. Marx also expected that communist society would allow people to develop lots of different sides of their natures. In the German Ideology, he wrote that “in communist society…it is possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” We’d get to explore all the different parts of ourselves–our creativity, our intellect, our gentleness, and our ferocity–and everyone would have a bit of time to do philosophy. 

***

After Marx moved to London he was supported—rather ironically for an anti-capitalist!—by his friend and intellectual partner Friedrich Engels, a wealthy man whose father owned a cotton plant in Manchester. Engels covered Marx’s debts, made sure his works were published, and (in order to divert the suspicions of Mrs. Marx) even claimed paternity for a baby who was likely Marx’s illegitimate child. Moreover, the two men wrote each other adoring poetry.

Karl Marx, his daughters and their unofficial family member, Friedrich Engels

Marx was not a well-respected or popular intellectual in his day. He spent much of his time puttering around the reading rooms of the British Museum slowly writing an interminable book about capital. He and Engels were always trying to avoid the secret police (including Marx’s brother-in-law, who ran the Prussian secret service). When Marx died in 1883, he was a stateless person; fewer than a dozen people attended his funeral.

Marx’s library pass for the British Museum reading rooms, now the British Library

Respectable, conventional people of Marx’s day would have laughed at the idea that his ideas would remake the world. Yet just a few decades later they did: his writings became the keystone for some of the most important ideological movements of the 20th century.

Marx had an unusually broad view of modern problems. He coined fancy-sounding terms like “dialectical materialism” because he wanted to challenge us to connect our daily experiences and choices to vast historical forces, to help us see ourselves as part of a larger, morally-important struggle. His work is sometimes confusing, not only because he changed his mind over the course of his life but also because he wanted to develop his own language to describe modern problems in a way that was neither prescriptive nor strictly scientific. 

We should resist a dismissive reading of Marx on the basis of what happened to his ideas in the 20th century, because he is particularly useful to us in this present moment. Like many of us, he wanted to understand why the modern economy seemed to produce so much misery along with its material wealth. He was astounded by the power of Capitalism, the way that it allowed for the “subjection of Nature’s forces to man…clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground.” But he also could see that Capitalism does not make us happier, wiser, or kinder–it cannot inherently lead us to be more human or more fully developed.

The house of the Bulgarian Communist Party, now abandoned

Considering the failures of previous Marxist-inspired regimes, we’re unlikely to improve things by implementing the kind of revolutions Marx predicted. But we should think very seriously about what he tells us about the deeper problems of Capitalism. For too long, being a Marxist has meant you agree with the least impressive part of Marx’s ideas: his solutions to the ills of the world. And because they look so odd, everything else he has to say falls by the wayside.

But Marx was like a brilliant doctor in the early days of medicine. He could recognise the nature of the disease, although he had no idea how to go about curing it. He got fixated on some moves that might have looked plausible in the 1840s but which don’t offer much guidance today. At this point in history, we should all be Marxists in the sense of agreeing with his diagnosis of our troubles. But we need to go out and find the cures that will really work.

Tantalisingly, they are truly out there, scattered in this and that research paper and economic book sidelined by the mass media. We need to consider how to build an economy that not only brings us greater prosperity but also a better relationship to nature, to money, to each other, and to ourselves. We don’t need a dictatorship of the proletariat, but we do need to reconsider why we value work and what we want to get out of it. We shouldn’t get rid of private property, but we do need a more thoughtful, authentic relationship to money and consumption. And we must begin to reform Capitalism not by simply deposing heads of banks but by upending the contents of our own minds. Only then will we truly be able to imagine an economy that is not only productive and innovative, but also fosters human freedom and fulfilment. As Marx himself declared, “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

Democracy was achieved by such a long, arduous and heroic struggle that it can feel embarrassing – even shameful – to feel a little disappointed by it. We know that at key historical moments people have made profound sacrifices so that we can, every now and then, place a cross next to the name of a candidate on a ballot sheet. For generations across large parts of the world democracy was a secret, desperate hope. But today, we’re likely to go through periods of feeling irritated and bored by our democratically-elected politicians. We’re disappointed by the parties and sceptical that elections make a difference. And yet not to support democracy, to be frankly against democracy, is not a possible attitude either. We appear to be utterly committed to democracy and yet constantly disappointed and frustrated by it.

Perhaps the best guide to some of these feelings, and to modern democracy in general, is a French 19th-century aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, who – in the early 1830s – travelled around the United States studying the political culture of the world’s first truly democratic nation and then compiled his thoughts in one of the greatest works of political philosophy, Democracy in America, published in France in 1835. For de Tocqueville, democracy was a highly exotic and novel political option. He’d been born in 1805, when Napoleon was the populist dictator of half of Europe. After Waterloo, the Bourbon Kings came back – and while there were elections, the franchise was extremely limited. But, de Tocqueville presciently believed, democracy was going to be the big idea of the future all over the world. What, he wanted to know, would that be like? What would happen when societies that had been governed for generations by small aristocratic elites and who inherited their wealth and power, started to choose their leaders in elections in which pretty much the whole adult population could vote? 

That’s why de Tocqueville went to America: to see what the future would be like. He got there courtesy of a grant from the French government, who wanted him to study the American prison system and compile a report from which it could learn some lessons. But de Tocqueville wasn’t so interested in prisons and made it clear in letters to friends that his real reason for going was to study American morals, mentalities and economic and political processes. He arrived in New York, together with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, a magistrate, in May of 1831 – and then embarked on a long journey around the new nation that was to last nine months, until February 1832. 

De Tocqueville and Beaumont went as far west as Michigan, which was then frontier country and there got a sense of the vastness of the American Midwestern landscape. They also went down to New Orleans, but most of their time was spent in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. They met everyone: presidents, lawyers, bankers, cobblers, hairdressers… – and even shook hands with the last surviving signatory of the Declaration of Independence, a man called Charles Carroll.

The observations that de Tocqueville made on America are droll, often funny and frequently very acerbic. Here he is on New York:

‘To a Frenchman the aspect of the city is bizarre and not very agreeable. One sees neither dome, nor bell tower, nor great edifice, with the result that one has the constant impression of being in a suburb’.

On native pride:

‘I doubt if one could extract from Americans the smallest truth unfavourable to their country. Most of them boast about it without discrimination, and with an impertinence disagreeable to strangers… Generally speaking there is a lot of small-town pettiness in their makeup… We have not yet met a really outstanding man.’

On the middle class spirit:

‘This country illustrates the most complete external development of the middle classes, or rather that the whole of society seems to have turned into one middle class. No one seems to have the elegant manners and refined politeness of the upper classes in Europe. One is at once struck by something vulgar, and a disagreeable casualness of behaviour…’

On attitudes to the native Americans:

‘In the midst of this American society, so well policed, so sententious, so charitable, a cold selfishness and complete insensibility prevails when it is a question of the natives of the country. The Americans of the United States do not let their dogs hunt the Indians as do the Spaniards in Mexico, but at the bottom it is the same pitiless feeling which here, as everywhere else, animates the European race. This world here belongs to us, they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilised; it is necessary that they die. Besides I do not want to get mixed up in it. I will not do anything against them: I will limit myself to providing everything that will hasten their ruin. In time I will have their lands and will be innocent of their death. Satisfied with his reasoning, the American goes to church where he hears the minister of the gospel repeat every day that all men are brothers, and that the Eternal Being who has made them all in like image, has given them all the duty to help one another.’

Then again, he wasn’t so keen on native Americans himself:

‘I was full of recollections of M. de Chateaubriand and of Cooper, and I was expecting to find the natives of America savages, but savages on whose face natured had stamped the marks of some of the proud virtues which liberty brings forth. I expected to find a race of men little different from Europeans, whose bodies had been developed by the strenuous exercise of hunting and war, and who would lose nothing by being seen naked. Judge my amazement at seeing the picture that follows. The Indians whom I saw that evening were small in stature, their limbs, as far as one could tell under their clothes, were thin and not wiry, their skin instead of being red as is generally thought, was dark bronze and such as at first sight seemed very like that of Negroes. Their black hair fell with singular stiffness on their neck and sometimes on their shoulders. Generally their mouths were disproportionately large, and the expression on their faces ignoble and mischievous. There was however a great deal of European in their features, but one would have said that they came from the lowest mob of our great European cities. Their physiognomy told of that profound degradation which only long abuse of the benefits of civilisation can give, but yet they were still savages.’

But there was a lot to admire in America as well: the prettiness of the women, the healthy simplicity of the food, the jovial frankness of conversations, the comfort of the hotels. Above all, Tocqueville loved the wilderness of America:

‘It is impossible to imagine anything more beautiful than the North or Hudson River. The great width of the stream, the admirable richness of the north bank and the steep mountains which border is eastern margins make it one of the most admirable sights in the world… We are envying every day the first Europeans who two hundred years ago discovered for the first time the mouth of the Hudson and mounted its current, when its two banks were covered with numberless forests and only the smoke of the savages was to be seen…’

When de Tocqueville arrived in New York he was setting foot in the only large scale, reasonably secure democracy on the planet. And he saw himself as advancing a highly nuanced and helpful enquiry: what are the social consequences of democracy? What should one expect a democratic society to be like?

De Tocqueville was particularly alive to the problematic, and potentially dark sides of democracy. Five issues struck him in particular: 

One: Democracy breeds materialism 

In the society that de Tocqueville knew from childhood, making money did not seem to be at the forefront of most people’s minds. The poor (who were the overwhelming majority) had almost no chance of acquiring wealth. So while they cared about having enough to eat, money as such was not part of how they thought about themselves or their ambitions: there was simply no chance. On the other hand, the tiny upper stratum of landed aristocrats did not need to make money – and regarded it as shameful to work for money at all, or to be involved in trade or commerce. As a result, for very different reasons, money was not the way to judge a life.

However, the Americans de Tocqueville met all readily believed that through hard work, it was possible to make a fortune and that to do so was wholly admirable and right. There was hence no suspicion whatever of the rich, a certain moral judgement against the poor, and an immense respect for the capacity to make money. It seemed, quite simply, the only achievement that Americans thought worth respecting. For example, in America, observed de Tocqueville, a book that does not make money – because it does not sell well – cannot be good, because the test of all goodness is money. And anything that makes a profit must be admirable in every way. It was a flattened, unnuanced view that made de Tocqueville see the advantages of the relatively more subtle, multi-polar status systems of Europe, where one might (on a good day) be deemed good, but poor; or rich, but vulgar. 

Democracy and Capitalism had created a relatively equitable, but also very flat and oppressive way for humans to judge each other.

Two: Democracy breeds envy and shame

Travelling around the United States, de Tocqueville discerned an unexpected ill corroding the souls of the citizens of the new republic. Americans had much, but this affluence did not stop them from wanting ever more and from suffering whenever they saw someone else with assets they lacked. In a chapter of Democracy in America entitled ‘Why the Americans are Often so Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity’, he sketched an enduring analysis of the relationship between dissatisfaction and high expectation, between envy and equality:

‘When all the prerogatives of birth and fortune have been abolished, when every profession is open to everyone, an ambitious man may think it is easy to launch himself on a great career and feel that he has been called to no common destiny. But this is a delusion which experience quickly corrects. When inequality is the general rule in society, the greatest inequalities attract no attention. But when everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed… That is the reason for the strange melancholy often haunting inhabitants of democracies in the midst of abundance and of that disgust with life sometimes gripping them even in calm and easy circumstances. In France, we are worried about increasing rate of suicides. In America, suicide is rare, but I am told that madness is commoner than anywhere else’.

Familiar with the limitations of aristocratic societies, Tocqueville had no wish to return to the conditions that had existed prior to 1776 or 1789. He knew that inhabitants of the modern West enjoyed a standard of living far superior to that of the lower classes of medieval Europe. Nevertheless, he appreciated that these deprived classes had also benefited from a mental calm which their successors were forever denied:

‘When royal power supported by aristocracies governed nations, society, despite all its wretchedness, enjoyed several types of happiness which are difficult to appreciate today. Having never conceived the possibility of a social state other than the one they knew, and never expecting to become equal to their leaders, the people did not question their rights. They felt neither repugnance nor degradation in submitting to severities, which seemed to them like inevitable ills sent by God. The serf considered his inferiority as an effect of the immutable order of nature. Consequently, a sort of goodwill was established between classes so differently favoured by fortune. One found inequality in society, but men’s souls were not degraded thereby’.

Democracies, however, had dismantled every barrier to expectation. All members of the community felt themselves theoretically equal, even when they lacked the means to achieve material equality. ‘In America,’ wrote Tocqueville, ‘I never met a citizen too poor to cast a glance of hope and envy toward the pleasures of the rich’. Poor citizens observed rich ones at close quarters and trusted that they too would one day follow in their footsteps. They were not always wrong. A number of fortunes were made by people from humble backgrounds. However, exceptions did not make a rule. America still had an underclass. It was just that, unlike the poor of aristocratic societies, the American poor were no longer able to see their condition as anything other than a betrayal of their expectations.

The different conceptions of poverty held by members of aristocratic and democratic societies was particularly evident, Tocqueville felt, in the attitude of servants to their masters. In aristocracies, servants often accepted their fates with good grace, they could have, in Tocqueville’s words, ‘high thoughts, strong pride and self-respect’. In democracies, however, the atmosphere of the press and public opinion relentlessly suggested to servants that they could reach the pinnacles of society, that they could become industrialists, judges, scientists or presidents. Though this sense of unlimited opportunity could initially encourage a surface cheerfulness, especially in young servants, and though it enabled the most talented or lucky among them to fulfil their goals, as time passed and the majority failed to raise themselves, Tocqueville noted that their mood darkened, that bitterness took hold and choked their spirits, and that their hatred of themselves and their masters grew fierce.

The rigid hierarchical system that had held in place in almost every Western society until the eighteenth century, and had denied all hope of social movement except in rare cases was unjust in a thousand all too obvious ways, but it offered those on the lowest rungs one notable freedom: the freedom not to have to take the achievements of quite so many people in society as reference points – and so find themselves severely wanting in status and importance as a result.

Three: The tyranny of the majority 

Typically, we think of democracy as being the opposite of tyranny. It should, in a democracy, no longer be possible for a clique to lord it over everyone else by force; leaders have to govern with the consent of the governed. But de Tocqueville noticed that democracy could easily create its own specialised type of tyranny: that of the majority. The majority group could, in principle, be very severe and hostile to minorities. De Tocqueville wasn’t simply thinking of overt political persecution,  but of a less dramatic, but still real, kind of tyranny in which simply being ‘in a minority’ as regards prevailing ideologies starts to seem unacceptable, perverse – even a threat. 

Democratic culture, he thought, could easily end up demonising any assertion of difference, and especially of cultural superiority or high mindedness, which could be perceived as offensive to the majority – even though such attitudes might be connected with real merit. In a tyranny of the majority, a society grows ill at ease with outstanding merit or ambition of any kind. It has an aggressively levelling instinct; in which it is regarded as a civic virtue to cut down to size anyone who seems to be getting above themselves. 

This, he thought, was part of the natural price one could expect to pay for living in a  democracy. 

Four: Democracy turns us against authority

De Tocqueville saw democracy as encouraging strong ideas about equality, to an extent that could grow harmful and dispiriting. He saw that democracy encourages ‘in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which always impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level’.

It’s line of thought that sounds almost brutal today because we instinctively see equality as desirable. But what disturbed de Tocqueville was the way in which, in the United States, people of no distinction, in terms of education, skill, experience or talent would refuse to defer to what de Tocqueville called their ‘natural superiors’, as he put it. They were inspired – he believed – by an unwillingness to bow before any kind of authority. They refused to think that someone could be better than them just because they had trained to be a doctor, studied the law for two decades or had written some good books. A healthy and admirable reluctance to defer to people fatally encouraged a deeply unhelpful refusal to accept any kind of submission to anyone of any sort. And yet, as he saw it, it simply must be the case that some people are wiser, more intelligent, kinder, or more mature than others and for these very good reasons should be listened to with special attention. Democracy was, he thought, fatally biased towards mediocrity. 

Five: Democracy undermines freedom of mind 

Instinctively, you’d suppose that democracy would encourage citizens to have an open mind. Surely democracy encourages debate and allows disagreements to be resolved by voting, rather than by violence? We think of openness of mind as being the result of living in a place where lots of opinions get an airing. 

However, de Tocqueville came to the opposite conclusion: that in few places could one find ‘less independence of mind, and true freedom of discussion, than in America’. 

Trusting that the system was fair and just, Americans simply gave up their independence of mind, and put their faith in newspapers and so-called ‘common sense’. The scepticism of Europeans towards public opinion had given way to a naive faith in the wisdom of the crowd. 

Furthermore, as this was a commercial society, people were very conscious of not wanting to step too far out of line with their neighbours (who might also be customers). It was better to trot out clichés than to try to be original – and never more so than when there was something new to sell.

***

Back in France de Tocqueville pursued a political career. Although France was nominally a democracy at this point, the electorate was very tightly restricted – less than five percent of adult males were entitled to vote. He was a deputy and, for a few not very glorious months, Minister for Foreign Affairs. But in 1851 the elected President, Louis Napoleon, declared himself Emperor and tore up the constitution. De Tocqueville, then in his mid-forties, left the political field and led a quieter life on his family estates. He suffered long bouts of tuberculosis and died in 1859, aged 53.

***

Although he says a lot of quite grim things about democracy, De Tocqueville isn’t anti-democratic. He’s not trying to tell us that we shouldn’t have democracy. On the contrary, he was convinced that democracy would prevail over all other forms of political organisation. Rather, his aim was to get us to be realistic about what this would mean. Democracies would be very good at some things and really rather terrible at others. 

By highlighting the inherent drawbacks of democracy, he was showing why living in a democracy would be, in some key ways, deeply annoying and frustrating. He is teaching the stoic lesson that certain pains need to be the expected; they are the likely accompaniments of political progress. He’s preaching an anti-provincial, worldly lesson: of course there are going to be quite bad things about democratic politics and society, don’t be too surprised or shocked; don’t come with the wrong expectations… 

Frustration and irritation are secretly fuelled by hope (that is, by the conviction that things really could be very different). By telling us soberly and calmly that democracy has major defects de Tocqueville is trying to get us to be strategically pessimistic. Of course, politics is going to be pretty awful in major ways. It’s not that we’re doing anything terribly wrong. It’s the price you pay (and should be willing to pay) when you give ultimate authority to everyone. 

Augustine was a Christian philosopher who lived in the early 5th century AD on the fringes of the rapidly declining Roman Empire, in the North African town of Hippo (present day Annaba, in Algeria). He served as Bishop for over thirty years, proving popular and inspirational guidance to his largely uneducated and poor congregation. In his last days, a Germanic tribe known as the Vandals burnt Hippo to the ground, destroyed the legions, made off with the town’s young women but left Augustine’s cathedral and library entirely untouched out of respect for the elderly philosopher’s achievements.

He matters to us non-Christians today because of what he criticised about Rome, its values and its outlook – and because Rome has so many things in common with the modern West, especially the United States, which so revered the Empire that it wanted its capital city on the Potomac to look as if it might have been magically transported from the banks of the Tiber.

The Romans believed in two things in particular:

i: Earthly Happiness

They were, on the whole, an optimistic lot. The builders of the Pont du Gard and the Coliseum had faith in technology, in the power of humans to master themselves, and in their ability to control nature and plot for their own happiness and satisfaction. In writers like Cicero and Plutarch, one finds a degree of pride, ambition and confidence in the future which, with some revisions, would not be out of place in Palo Alto or the pages of Wired. The Romans were keen practitioners of what we would nowadays call self-help, training their audiences to greater success and effectiveness. In their eyes, the human animal was something eminently open to being perfected.

The Emperor Augustus,  1st century

ii: A just Social Order

For long periods, the Romans trusted that their society was marked by justice: ‘justitia.’ Although inheritance was a major factor, they also believed that people of ambition and intelligence could succeed. The army was trusted to be meritocratic. The capacity to make money was held to reflect both practical ability and also a degree of inner virtue. Therefore, showing off one’s wealth was deemed honourable and a point of pride. Consumption was conspicuous; and fame a wholly respectable ideal.

Luca Giordano, Allegory of Justice, c. 1680

With these two attitudes in particular, Augustine disagreed furiously. In his masterpiece, The City of God, he dissected each one in turn in ways that continue to prove relevant to anyone who might harbour doubts of their own about them – even if his proposed solutions, drawn from Christian theology, will only ever appeal to believers. Augustine’s rebuttals ran like this:

i: We’re all lustful, mad, erratic, deluded deviants with no earthly chance of happiness

It was Augustine who came up with the idea of ‘Original Sin’. He proposed that all humans, not merely this or that unfortunate example, were crooked, because all of us are unwitting heirs to the sins of Adam. Our sinful nature gives rise to what Augustine called a ‘libido dominandi’, a desire to dominate, which is evident in the brutal, blinkered, merciless way we treat others and the world around us. We cannot properly love, for we are constantly undermined by our egoism and our pride. Our powers of reasoning and understanding are fragile in the extreme. Lust – a particular concern of Augustine’s, who had spent much of his youth fantasising about women in church – haunts our days and nights. We fail to understand ourselves, we chase fantoms, we are beset by anxieties… Augustine concluded his assault by chiding all those philosophers who ‘have wished, with amazing folly, to be happy here on earth and to achieve bliss by their own efforts.’

Jan Brueghel the Elder and Pieter Paul Rubens, Adam and Eve, 1615

It might sound depressing, but it may turn out to be a curious relief to be told that our lives are awry not by coincidence but by definition, because we are human, and because nothing human can ever be made entirely straight (perfection being an exclusively prerogative of the divine). We are creatures fated to intuit virtue and love, while never quite being able to secure them for ourselves. Our relationships, careers, countries are necessarily not as we’d want them to be. It isn’t anything we have done – the odds have been stacked against us from the start.

Augustinian pessimism takes off some of the pressure we might feel (especially late at night, on Sunday evenings and at any time after forty) when we slowly come to terms with the imperfect nature of pretty much everything we do and are. We should not rage or feel that we have been persecuted or singled out for undue punishment. It is simply the human condition, the legacy of what we might as well, even if we don’t believe in Augustine’s theology, call ‘Original Sin’.

ii. All hierarchies are unfair; there is no social justice; those at the top naturally won’t all be good or those at the bottom bad – and vice versa

Romans had – in their most ambitious moments – thought themselves to be running a society with some strongly meritocratic features.. Family tended to influence opportunity but you couldn’t get near the top just on that, you had to rely on the genuine virtues and abilities of your own. Above all they saw the grandeur of the Roman State as a sign of the collective merits of the Roman population. They ruled large parts of the earth because they deserved to. Their Empire was the reward for their virtue. It’s a hugely tempting view today for those on the inside of successful corporations or states –  to see their great prosperity and power as the just reward for collective merit.

Thomas Couture, Romans during the Decadence, 1847

What arrogant, boastful and cruel claims, responded Augustine. There never was nor could ever be ‘justitia’ in Rome or anywhere else on earth. God didn’t give good people wealth and power – nor did he necessarily condemn those who lacked them to poverty. The social order was a complete muddle of the deserving and the undeserving – and moreover, any attempt by human beings to judge who was a good person and who a bad one, was a gross sin, an attempt to appropriate a task that only God could carry out, and would do so only at the end of time, on the day of Judgement, to the sound of trumpets and phalanxes of angels.

Augustine distinguished between what he called two cities, the City of Men and the City of God. The latter was an ideal, a heavenly paradise, where the good would finally dominate, where power would be properly allied to justice and where virtue would reign. But men could never build such a city, and should never believe themselves capable of doing so. They were condemned to dwell only in the City of Men, which was a pervasively flawed society, where money could never accurately track virtue. In Augustine’s formulation: ‘True justice has no existence save in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ.’ That is, the fully fair distribution of reward is not something we can or should expect on earth.

Jaume Huguet, The Consecration of Saint Augustine, 1460

Again, it may sound bleak, but it makes Augustine’s philosophy extremely generous towards failure, poverty and defeat – our own and that of others. Unlike what the Romans might claim, earthly failure is no indication of being an inherently bad person – just as success can’t mean anything too profound either. It is not for humans to judge each other by outward markers of success. From this analysis flows a lack of moralism and snobbery. It is our duty to be sceptical about power and generous towards failure.

We don’t need to be Christians to be comforted by both these points. They are the religion’s universal gifts to political philosophy and human psychology. They stand as permanent reminders of some of the dangers and cruelties of believing that life can be made perfect or that poverty and obscurity are reliable indicators of vice.

The story of the Buddha’s life, like all of Buddhism, is a story about confronting suffering. He was born between the sixth and fourth century B.C., the son of a wealthy king in the Himalayan foothills of Nepal. It was prophesied that the young Buddha — then called Siddhartha Gautama — would either become the emperor of India or a very holy man. Since Siddhartha’s father desperately wanted him to be the former, he kept the child isolated in a palace with every imaginable luxury: jewels, servants, lotus ponds, even beautiful dancing women.

Young Prince Siddhartha with his bride and servants

For 29 years, Gautama lived in bliss, protected from even the smallest misfortunes of the outside word: “a white sunshade was held over me day and night to protect me from cold, heat, dust, dirt, and dew.” Then at the age of 30, he left the palace for short excursions. What he saw amazed him: first he met a sick man, then an aging man, and then a dying man. He was astounded to discover that these unfortunate people represented normal—indeed, inevitable—parts of the human condition that would one day touch him, too. Horrified and fascinated, Gautama made a fourth trip outside the palace walls—and encountered a holy man, who had learned to seek spiritual life in the midst of the vastness of human suffering. Determined to find the same enlightenment, Gautama left his sleeping wife and son and walked away from the palace for good.

A Chinese painting from the Tang Dynasty shows Buddha discovering illness and old age

Gautama tried to learn from other holy men. He almost starved himself to death by avoiding all physical comforts and pleasures, as they did. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it did not bring him solace from suffering. Then he thought of a moment when he was a small boy: sitting by the river he’d noticed that when the grass was cut, the insects and their eggs were trampled and destroyed. Seeing this, he’d felt compassion for the tiny insects.

Reflecting on his childhood compassion, Gautama felt a profound sense of peace. He ate, meditated under a fig tree, and finally reached the highest state of enlightenment: “nirvana,” which simply means “awakening”. He became the Buddha, “the awakened one”.

A second-century carving of the Buddha receiving enlightenment under a fig tree, surrounded by admiring members of creation

The Buddha awoke by recognising that all of creation, from distraught ants to dying human beings, is unified by suffering. Recognising this, the Buddha discovered how to best approach suffering. First, one shouldn’t bathe in luxury, nor abstain from food and comforts altogether. Instead, one ought to live in moderation (the Buddha called this “the middle way”). This allows for maximal concentration on cultivating compassion for others and seeking enlightenment. Next, the Buddha described a path to transcending suffering called “the four noble truths.”

The first noble truth is the realisation that first prompted the Buddha’s journey: that there is suffering and constant dissatisfaction in the world: “Life is difficult and brief and bound up with suffering.” The second is that this suffering is caused by our desires, and thus “attachment is the root of all suffering.” The third truth is that we can transcend suffering by removing or managing these desires. The Buddha thus made the remarkable claim that we must change our outlook, not our circumstances. We are unhappy not because we don’t have a raise or a lover or enough followers but because we are greedy, vain, and insecure. By re-orienting our mind we can grow to be content.

The fourth and final noble truth the Buddha uncovered is that we can learn to move beyond suffering through what he termed “the eightfold path.” The eightfold path involves a series of aspects of behaving “right” and wisely: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. What strikes the western observer is the notion that wisdom is a habit, not merely an intellectual realisation. One must exercise one’s nobler impulses. Understanding is only part of becoming a better person.

Seeking these correct modes of behaviour and awareness, the Buddha taught that people could transcend much of their negative individualism—their pride, their anxiety, and the desires that made them so unhappy—and in turn they would gain compassion for all other living beings who suffered as they did. With the correct behaviour and what we now term a mindful attitude, people can invert negative emotions and states of mind, turning ignorance into wisdom, anger into compassion, and greed into generosity.

Art being invited to support philosophy: a beautifully carved eight-spoke wheel commonly used as a Buddhist symbol. The eight spokes represent the eightfold path

The Buddha travelled widely throughout northern India and southern Nepal, teaching meditation and ethical behaviour. He spoke very little about divinity or the afterlife. Instead, he regarded the state of living as the most sacred issue of all.

After the Buddha’s death, his followers collected his “sutras” (sermons or sayings) into scripture, and developed texts to guide followers in meditation, ethics, and mindful living. The monasteries that had developed during the Buddha’s lifetime grew and multiplied, throughout China and East Asia. For a time, Buddhism was particularly uncommon in India itself, and only a few quiet groups of yellow-clad monks and nuns roamed the countryside, meditating quietly in nature. But then, in the 3rd century B.C., an Indian king named Ashoka grew troubled by the wars he had fought and converted to Buddhism. He sent monks and nuns far and wide to spread the practice.

Buddhist spiritual tradition spread across Asia and eventually throughout the world. Buddha’s followers divided into two main schools: Theravada Buddhism, which colonised Southeast Asia, and Mahayana Buddhism which took hold in China and Northeast Asia. The two groups sometimes distrust each other’s scriptures and prefer their own, but they follow the same central principles passed down through over two millennia. Today, there are between a half and one and a half billion Buddhists following the Buddha’s teachings and seeking a more enlightened and compassionate state of mind.

Modern monks meditate under a fig tree near the place the Buddha first attained enlightenment

Intriguingly, the Buddha’s teachings are important regardless of our spiritual identification. Like the Buddha, we are all born into the world not realising how much suffering it contains, and unable to fully comprehend that misfortune, sickness, and death will come to us too. As we grow older, this reality often feels overwhelming, and we may seek to avoid it altogether. But the Buddha’s teachings remind us of the important of facing suffering directly. We must do our best to liberate ourselves from our own tyrannous desires, and recognise suffering as our common connection with others, spurring us to compassion and gentleness.

He described himself as an obsessional neurotic.

For although the father of modern psychology told us so much about our inner lives, he was touchingly vulnerable himself.

Sigmund Schlomo Freud was born to a middle-class Jewish family in 1856, in what is now the Czech Republic. He had a deep love for his mother, who called him her “golden Sigi”, and an equally deep hostility to his father, who may have threatened to cut off little Sigi’s penis if he didn’t stop touching it.

His professional life was not an immediate success. As a young medical student, he dissected hundreds of male eels in an unsuccessful attempt to locate their reproductive organs, and ultimately failed to publish on the topic. He then turned his attention to a new exciting anaesthetic drug, trumpeting its amazing properties. But unfortunately cocaine turned out to be dangerous and addictive, and Freud had to stop advocating its medical use.

A few years later, he began at last to outline the discipline that would ultimately make his name: a new psychological medicine he called psychoanalysis. The landmark study was his 1900 book The Interpretation of Dreams. Many others followed, most importantly The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), The Cases of ‘Little Hans’ and the Rat Man’ (1909), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930).

Despite his success as a doctor, author, and psychological expert, he was often unhappy. He was a workaholic and confided to a friend, “I cannot imagine life without work as really comfortable.” During a particularly strenuous part of his research he recorded, “The chief patient I am preoccupied with is myself…”

He could be very jealous of his colleagues. He once fainted watching Carl Jung give a talk, and he forbid nearly all his students from even seeing Alfred Adler. He was convinced he would die between 61 and 62 and had great phobias about those numbers. He once panicked during a stay in Athens when his hotel room’s number was 31, half of 62. He soothed himself with his beloved cigar, but he was also very self-conscious about it, because he thought it was a replacement for his earlier masturbation habits.

Freud with some of his colleagues. He was especially jealous of Carl Jung (far bottom right)

Yet his private sorrows and anxieties were in fact part of his greatest contribution: his investigation into the strange unhappiness of the human mind. His work shows us that the conscious, rational part of the mind is, in his words, “not even master in its own house.” Instead, we are governed by competing forces, some beyond our conscious perception. We should attend to him-–however strange, off-putting, or humorous some of his theories may seem–because he gives us a wonderfully enlightening account of why being human is very difficult indeed.

PLEASURE VS. REALITY

Freud first put forward a theory about this inner conflict in his essay “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” written in 1911. There he described the “pleasure principle,” which drives us towards pleasurable things like sex and cheeseburgers and away from unpleasurable things like drudgery and annoying people. Our lives begin governed by this instinct alone; as infants we behave more or less solely according to the pleasure principle. As we grow older, our unconscious continues to do the same, for “the unconscious is always infantile.”

Babies mostly follow the pleasure principle and directly seek pleasure while avoiding pain.

The problem, Freud said, is that as we get older we can’t simply follow the pleasure principle, as it would make us do crazy things like sleep with members of own family, steal other people’s cheeseburgers, and kill people who annoy us. We need to take into account what he called “the reality principle.”

Ideally, we adjust to the demands of the reality principle in a useful, productive way: “a momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, is given up, but only to gain along the new path an assured pleasure at a later time.” This is the underlying principle of so much of religion, education, and science: we learn to control ourselves and put away short-term pleasure to achieve greater (and usually more socially-acceptable) pleasure in the long run.

But Freud noticed that in practice, most of us struggle with this. He believed that there were better and worse kinds of adaptations to reality; he called the troublesome ones neuroses. In cases of neuroses, we put aside–or repress–the pleasure drive, but at a cost. We become unhappy or even–in a sense–crazy, but we don’t understand the symptoms.

For example, we might struggle to repress our attraction to people who are not our partner. However, this struggle is too painful to experience directly all the time, so we’ll unconsciously repress it. Instead, we’ll experience delusions of jealousy about our partner, and become convinced they are cheating on us. This is a projection of our true anxiety. It will quell some of our guilt about our wandering eye, but it may also drive us mad. It’s an adaptation to the challenges we face–but, of course, it isn’t really a very good one.

Freud thought that life was full of these kinds of neuroses, brought on as the result of a conflict between our “id” , driven by the pleasure principle, and the “ego” , which rationally decides what we should do about the drives of the id. Other times neuroses come about because of a struggle between the ego and the superego, which is our moralistic side.

In order to understand these dynamics, we’ll usually need to think back to the time in our lives that generated so many of our neuroses:

CHILDHOOD

Childhood is really the time when we learn different adaptations to reality, for the better or (often) for the worse. As babies, we emerge full of raw, unprincipled desires. As we are raised, however, we are “civilised” and thus brought into line with social reality. If we don’t adjust well, trouble will emerge.

First in our psychological history comes what Freud termed the “oral phase,” where we deal with eating. We’re born wanting to drink from the breast whenever we want. Yet over time, we have to be weaned. This is very difficult for us. If our parents aren’t careful (or worse, if they’re a little sadistic) we might pick up all kinds of neuroses: internalised self-denial, using food to calm ourselves down, or hostility to the breast. Most of all, we struggle with dependence. If our mothers wait too long, we may grow up to be very demanding and surprised when the outside world doesn’t provide everything we want. Or, we may learn to distrust dependence on others altogether.

Then comes the “anal phase” (more commonly known as “potty-training”) where we face the challenges of defecation. Our parents tell us what to do and when to go–they tell us how to be good. At this phase we begin to learn about testing the limits of authority. We might, for example, choose to withhold out of defiance. We may then, as adults, become “anally retentive” and excessively tidy. We also might hold back from spending money. Alternatively, if our parents are too permissive, we may test authority and other people’s boundaries too frequently. This leads not only to “making messes” as a toddler, but also to being spendthrift and inconsiderate when we are older.

Freud says that the way our parents react matters a great deal. If they shame us when we fail to comply, we may develop all kinds of fears and anxieties. But at the same time we need to learn about boundaries and socially-appropriate behaviour. In short, potty training is the prime time for navigating the conflict between our own pleasure seeking and the demands of our parents. We have to adapt to these demands appropriately, or we’ll end up with serious problems.

Freud and his family; the family as the focal scene of neurosis formation.

Next comes the “phallic phase” (it goes until about age 6), where we address the problems of genital longings and newly-emerged, impossible sexual wishes. Freud shocked his contemporaries by insisting that little children are sexual: they have sexual feelings, they get erections, they masturbate, they want to rub themselves on various objects and people (even now, the idea makes people uncomfortable). In Freud’s time, the kid would be told to stop it violently; now we tell them this gently. But the point is the same: we can’t permit childhood sexuality. For the child, this means that a very powerful part of their young self is firmly repressed.

This is even more complicated because children direct their sexual impulses towards their parents. Freud described what he called the Oedipus complex (named after the Greek tragic figure), in which we are all unconsciously predisposed towards “being in love with the one parent and hating the other.” It sounds very strange, but it’s worth attending to all the same.

It starts like this: as children, most of us are very attached to our mothers. In fact, Freud says that little boys automatically direct their primitive sexual impulses towards her. Yet no matter how much she loves us, mum will always have another life. She probably has a relationship (likely with our dad) or if not, a number of other priorities that leave us feeling frustrated and abandoned as children. This makes our infant selves feel jealous and angry – and also ashamed and guilty about this anger. A small male child will particularly feel hatred towards the person who takes mum away and also be afraid that that person might kill him. This entire complex–now the word makes sense–provides a huge amount of anxiety for a small child already. (In Freud’s view, little girls have it no easier–they just have a slightly different complex).

Childhood is fraught with jealousy and related attachment issues, especially towards our mothers.

Then comes the problem of actual incest. Adults should not have sex with children; this is a very serious incest taboo on which society depends. We’re not supposed to have sex with people we’re related to either. But even though we claim to all be horrified by it, as if incest were simply the last thing on our mind, Freud reminds us that things are never made into a taboo unless quite a lot of people are keen on breaking the taboo in their unconscious. This explains all the hysteria around incest and sex with children–the idea of it is lurking somewhere in the back of our minds.

In order to prevent sex in the family, the child has to be weaned off the desire to have sex with mum or dad. Mum or dad need also to be kind and not make them feel guilty about sex. But all kinds of things can go terribly wrong.

Most of us experience some form of sexual confusion around our parents that later ties into our ideas of love. Mum and dad both give us love, but they mix it in with various kinds of troubling behaviour. Yet because we love them and depend on them, we remain loyal to them and also to their destructive patterns. So for example, if our mother is cold and makes belittling comments, we will be apt nevertheless to long for her or even find her very nice. As a result, however, we may be prone to always associate love with coldness.

ADULTHOOD

Ideally, we should be able to have genital sex without trouble, and in the long term, fuse love and sex together with someone who is kind. Of course, it rarely happens.

Typically, we can’t fuse sex and love: we have a sense that sex doesn’t belong with tender feelings. “A man of this kind will show a sentimental enthusiasm for women whom he deeply respects but who do not excite him to sexual activities,” noted Freud, “and he will only be potent with other women whom he does not ‘love’ but thinks little of or even despises.” 

Freud compared the issues we so often have with intimacy to hedgehogs in the winter: they need to cuddle for warmth, but they also can’t come too close because they’re prickly. He borrowed this analogy from another Great Thinker, Schopenhauer.

Neuroses aren’t just created within individuals. The whole of society keeps us neurotic. In his book Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), Freud wrote that a degree of repression and psychological dysfunction is simply the cost of living in a society. Society  insists on regulating sex, imposes the incest taboo, requires us to put off our immediate desires, demands that we follow authority and makes money available only through work. A non-repressive civilisation is a contradiction.

ANALYSIS

Freud attempted to invent a cure for neurosis: psychoanalysis. But from the outset, the offering was very limited. He thought the patient should be under fifty, or else their minds would be too rigid. It was very expensive, especially since he thought his patients should come four times a week. And he was quite pessimistic about the outcome: he believed that at best he could transform hysterical unhappiness into everyday misery. Nevertheless, he thought that with a little proper analysis, people could uncover their neuroses and better adjust to the difficulties of reality.

Freud’s office in London, with a couch for his patients to sit or lie on as they were analysed

Here are some of the things Freud sought to “analyse” in his sessions:

DREAMS

Freud believed that sleep was a chance for us to relax from the difficulties of being conscious, and especially to experience what he called wish-fulfilment. It might not seem obvious at first. For example, we might think we dream about failing our A-levels simply because we’re stressed at work. But Freud tells us that we actually get these kinds of dreams because some part of us wishes that we’d failed our A-levels, and thus didn’t have all the responsibilities of adulthood, our job, and supporting our family. Of course, we also have more intuitive wish-fulfilment dreams, like the ones where we sleep with a beguiling co-worker we had never, in the day, known we liked.

Once we wake, we must return to the world and the dictates of our moralistic superego–so we usually repress our dreams. This is why we quickly forget the really exciting dreams we had. 

PARAPRAXES

Freud loved to notice how his patients used words. He thought it was particularly telling when they had a slip of the tongue, or a parapraxis (we now call these revealing mistakes “Freudian slips”). For example, Freud wrote of a man who asked his wife (whom he didn’t actually like) to come join him in America. The man meant to suggest that she take the ship the Mauretania, but in fact he wrote that she should come on the Lusitania – which was sunk off the coast of Ireland by a German submarine in WWI, resulting in the loss of all on board.

JOKES

Freud thought that humour was a psychological survival-mechanism. In his Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, he explained: “Jokes make possible the satisfaction of an instinct (whether lustful or hostile) in the face of an obstacle that stands in its way.” In short, jokes–like dreams–allow us to bypass authority and satisfy wishes.

**

In 1933, the Nazis rose to power. “What progress we are making,” Freud told a friend. “In the Middle Ages they would have burnt me; nowadays they are content with burning my books.” Even he failed to see what the world was up against with the Nazis. Elite friends and a sympathetic Nazi officer helped him and his family escape to London, where he lived for the rest of his life. He died in 1939 of jaw cancer.

Following in Freud’s footsteps, other analysts developed new psychoanalytic techniques, and eventually the wide and varied field of modern psychiatry. Much of modern therapy is very different from Freud’s, but it began with his premise of discovering the dark and difficult parts of our inner lives and unwinding them, slowly, under the guidance of a trained listener.

We may think we’ve outgrown him, or that he was ridiculous all along. There’s a temptation to say he just made everything up, and life isn’t quite so hard as he makes it out to be. But then one morning we find ourselves filled with inexplicable anger towards our partner, or running high with unrelenting anxiety on the train to work and we’re reminded all over again just how elusive, difficult, and Freudian our mental workings actually are. We could still reject his work, of course. But as Freud said, “No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.”

Jane Austen is loved mainly as a charming guide to fashionable life in the Regency period. She is admired for portraying a world of elegant houses, dances, servants and fashionable young men driving barouches. But her own vision of her task was radically different. She was an ambitious – and stern – moralist. She was acutely conscious of human failings and she had a deep desire to make people nicer: less selfish, more reasonable, more dignified and more sensitive to the needs of others.

Born in 1775, Jane Austen grew up in a small village in Hampshire where her father was the Anglican rector. They had quite a high social status but were not at all well-off. She started writing young: at only twenty-one she had a novel turned down by a major publisher. During most of her adult life, Britain was at war with Napoleon. Two of her brothers became admirals. She did much of her writing at a tiny octagonal table. She was a very good dancer and very interested in being well-dressed. She was neat, elegant and lively. She never married, though on a couple of occasions she was tempted. Mostly she lived in pleasant small houses in the country with her sister Cassandra.

The novel was her chosen weapon in the struggle to reform humanity. She completed six: Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion.

Some of the main things she wants to teach you are:

One: Let your lover educate you

In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet start off heartily disliking each other and then, gradually realise they are in love. They make one of the great romantic couples. He is handsome, rich and well connected; she is pretty, smart and lively. But why actually are they right for one another?

Jane Austen is very clear. It’s for a reason we tend not to think of very much today: It is because each can educate and improve the other. When Mr Darcy arrives in the neighbourhood he feels ‘superior’ to everyone else, because he has more money and higher status. At a key moment, Elizabeth condemns his arrogance and pride to his face. It sounds offensive in the extreme, but later he admits that this was just what he needed:

What did you say of me that I did not deserve? … The recollection what I then said, of my conduct, my manners, my expression is inexpressibly painful to me. Your reproof, so well applied, I never shall forget. You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you I was properly humbled.

Elizabeth shares this view of love as education. They suit each other because: 

It was a union that must have been to the advantage of both; by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved; and from his judgement, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance.

It’s a lesson that sounds strange because we still tend to think of love as liking someone for who they already are, and of total acceptance. The person who is right for us, Austen is saying is not simply someone who makes us feel relaxed or comfortable; they have got to be able to help us overcome our failings and become more mature, more honest and kinder – and we need to do something similar for them.

In Pride and Prejudice, Darcy and Elizabeth improve one another and then the novelist lets them get engaged. The story rewards them because they have developed well. That’s why the novel feels so beautifully constructed. It’s not merely ingenious. It illustrates a basic truth: marriage depends on maturity and education. 

Two: We shouldn’t stop judging people; but we have to judge more carefully

Mansfield Park starts when quiet, shy Fanny Price goes to live with her much richer cousins, the Bertrams at Mansfield Park, their big house in the country. The Bertrams are smart, fashionable, confident and well-off. In social terms they are stars and Fanny is a very minor character indeed (her cousin Julia looks down on her because she doesn’t know where the different European countries are). But Jane Austen judges people by a completely different standard.

Austen exchanges the normal lens through which people are viewed in society, a lens which magnifies wealth and power, for a moral lens, which magnifies qualities of character. Rather than focus on who has the nicest dress, the best carriage, or the most servants, she examines who is vain, selfish or cruel; who has integrity, humility and true dignity.

Through this lens, the high and mighty may become small, the forgotten and retiring figures may grow large. Within the world of the novel, virtue is spread without regard to material wealth: the rich and well-mannered are not (as in the dominant status schema) immediately good nor the poor and unschooled bad. Virtue may lie with the lame ugly child, the destitute porter, the hunchback in the attic or the girl who doesn’t know the first facts of geography. Certainly Fanny has no elegant dresses, has no money and can’t speak French – but by the end of Mansfield Park, she has been revealed as the noble one, while the other members of her family, despite their titles and accomplishments, have fallen into moral confusion.

Jane Austen is not the enemy of status. She just wants to see it properly distributed and at the end of her novels it always is. Fanny is raised up, and will become the mistress of Mansfield Park. Her selfish, empty-headed cousin Julia, is disgraced.

Three: Take money seriously

Jane Austen is quite frank about money. She tells us the details of people’s financial status: In Pride and Prejudice she explains that Mr Bingley has an income of GBP 4000 a year (which is clearly rather a lot); while Darcy has more than twice that. Rather than feeling that it is not quite polite to go on about people’s money or lack of it, she thinks that money is an eminently suitable topic for high-brow literature. Because how we deal with our finances has a huge effect on our lives.   

She takes aim at two big mistakes people make around money. One is to get over-impressed by what money can do. In Mansfield Park, Maria Bertram gets married to Mr Rushworth (the richest character in all Jane Austen’s novels) but they are miserable together and their marriage rapidly falls apart. But, equally, she is convinced that it is a serious error to get married without enough money. At one point in Sense and Sensibility, it looks like Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars, who are otherwise well suited, won’t be able to get married: “they were neither of them quite enough in love to think that three hundred and fifty pounds a year [a little below the middle-class average] would supply them with the comforts of life.”

Elinor takes the view that “wealth has much to do with happiness” – though by wealth she doesn’t mean great luxury, just enough to live carefully in moderate comfort. Marriage, without a reasonable economic basis, is folly.

Jane Austen is steering her way towards an elusive – but crucial – attitude. Money is in some ways extremely important and in other ways unimportant. We can’t just be for it or against it. It sounds simple, of course, to assert this; and yet we are continually going wrong in practice.

Four: Don’t be snobbish

In Emma, the heroine – Emma herself – takes Harriet Smith a pretty girl from the village under her wing. Harriet is a very pleasant, modest and unassuming young woman. But Emma decides she should be much more than this. She wants Harriet to make a impressive match with the smart vicar. Harriet is swept off her feet by Emma’s excessive praise. She turns down a very suitable offer of marriage from a farmer, because she thinks him not good enough, though in fact he is thoroughly good hearted and quietly prosperous. The Vicar turns out to be horrified at Emma’s idea and Harriet has her heart broken. 

It’s droll in the novel, but the underlying point is serious: Emma is unwittingly, but cruelly, snobbish. She is devoted to the wrong kind of hierarchy. Jane Austen does not think that the cure for snobbery is to think that everyone is equal. In her eyes, that would be immensely unjust. Rather, the real cure is to pay attention to true merit. The farmer is essentially a better person than the vicar; but social conventions and manners make it easy to ignore this.

Few people are deliberately snobbish. And Jane Austen is careful to give this fault to Emma, who is in many ways an enchanting character. But eventually Emma is corrected. We see her recognise her error, feel very sorry and learn a life-long lesson. In other words, Jane Austen does not mock snobbery as the behaviour of ghastly and contemptible people.  Instead, she regards the snob with pity – as someone who lives a blighted life (however materially comfortable); they are in need of instruction, guidance and reform. But mostly, of course, they don’t get this help.

But Austen does not simply assert her concept of true hierarchy with the bluntness of a preacher, she enlists our sympathies for it and marshals our abhorrence for its opposite with the skill and humour of a great novelist. She does not tell us why her sense of priorities is important, she shows us why within the context of a story which also happens to make us laugh and grips us enough that we want to finish supper early to read on (as an early critic of Austen, Richard Whately, later the Archbishop of Dublin, put it in the Quarterly Review of 1822: “Miss Austen has the merit of being evidently a Christian writer: a merit which is much enhanced, both on the score of good taste, and of practical utility, by her religion being not at all obtrusive. She might defy the most fastidious critic to call any of her novels a ‘dramatic sermon’.”) Upon finishing one of the novels we are invited to go back into the sphere from which Austen has drawn us aside and respond to others as she has taught us, to pick up on and recoil from greed, arrogance and pride and to be drawn to goodness within ourselves and others.

***

During her late thirties, Jane Austen had several productive years, living in a congenial and well-ordered house in the little village of Chawton in Hampshire. Her novels were increasingly well-received and she started making some money from them (though she never became famous because they were always published anonymously during her lifetime). In 1816, when she was forty, her health declined rapidly. She died the following year and was buried in Winchester Cathedral.

Austen modestly and famously described her art as “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour,” but her novels are suffused with greater ambitions. Her art is an attempt, through what she called a study of “three or four families in a country village” to criticise and so alter life. She is the usual assumption that the exciting, important things are going on somewhere else and that we, unfortunately, are missing out.

Austen might have written sermons. She wrote novels instead. Sadly, we refuse to read her novels as Austen would have wanted. The moral ambition of the novel has largely disappeared in the modern world, yet it is really the best thing that a novel can do. The satisfaction we feel when reading Austen is really because she wants the world to be a certain way which we find immensely appealing; it’s the secret, largely unrecognised, reason why she is so much loved as a writer.

The Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus was born in 341 BC, on the island of Samos, a few miles off the coast of modern Turkey. He had an unusually long beard, wrote over three hundred books and was one of the most famous philosophers of his age.

What made him famous was his skilful and relentless focus on one particular subject: happiness. Previously, philosophers had wanted to know how to be good; Epicurus insisted he wanted to focus on how to be happy.

Few philosophers had ever made such a frank, down-to-earth admission of their interests before. It shocked many, especially when they heard that Epicurus had started a School for Happiness. The idea of what was going on inside was both entirely shocking and deeply titillating. A few disgruntled Epicureans made some damaging leaks about what was going on in the school. Timocrates said that Epicurus had to vomit twice a day because he spent all his time on a sofa being fed luxurious meats and fish by a team of slaves. And Diotimus the Stoic published fifty lewd letters which he said had been written by Epicurus to some young students when he’d been drunk and sexually obsessed. It’s because of such gossip that we still sometimes now use the adjective ‘Epicurean’ to describe luxury and decadence.

But such associations are unfounded. The truth about Epicurus is far less sensational – but far more interesting. The Greek philosopher really was focused on happiness and pleasure, but he had no interest in expensive meals or orgies. He owned only two cloaks and lived on bread, olives and – as a treat – the occasional slice of cheese. Instead, having patiently studied happiness for many years, Epicurus came to a set of remarkable and revolutionary conclusions about what we actually need to be happy, conclusions wholly at odds with the assumptions of his age – and of our own.

Epicurus proposed that we typically make three mistakes when thinking about happiness:

1. We think we need romantic relationships

Then, as now, people were obsessed with love. But Epicurus observed that happiness and love (let alone marriage) almost never go together. There is too much jealousy, misunderstanding and bitterness. Sex is always complicated and rarely in harmony with affection. It would be best, Epicurus concluded, never to put too much faith in relationships. By contrast, he noted how rewarding most friendships are: here we are polite, we look for agreement, we don’t scold or berate and we aren’t possessive. But the problem is we don’t see our friends enough. We let work and family take precedence. We can’t find the time. They live too far away.

2. We think we need lots of money

Then, as now, people were obsessed by their careers, motivated by a desire for money and applause. But Epicurus emphasised the difficulties of employment: the jealousy, the backbiting and frustrated ambitions.

What makes work really satisfying, Epicurus believed, is when we’re able to work either alone or in very small groups and when it feels meaningful, when we sense that we’re helping others in some way or making things that improve the world. It isn’t really cash or prestige we want, it’s a sense of fulfilment through our labour.

3. We put too much faith in luxury

We dream of luxury: a beautiful home, elegant rooms and pleasant views. We imagine trips to idyllic locations, where we can rest and let others look after us…

But Epicurus disagreed with our longings. Behind the fantasy of luxury, what he believed we really want is calm. Yet calm won’t possibly arise simply through changing the view or owning a delightful building.

Calm is an internal quality that is the result of analysis: it comes when we sift through our worries and correctly understand them. We therefore need ample time to read, to write, and most of all, to benefit from the regular support of a good listener: a sympathetic, kind, clever person who in Epicurus’s time would have been a philosopher, and whom we would now call a therapist.

With his analysis of happiness in hand, Epicurus made three important innovations:

- Firstly, he decided that he would live together with friends. Enough of seeing them only now and then. He bought a modestly priced plot of land outside of Athens and built a place where he and his friends could live side by side on a permanent basis. Everyone had their rooms, and there were common areas downstairs and in the grounds. That way, the residents would always be surrounded by people who shared their outlooks, were entertaining and kind. Children were looked after in rota. Everyone ate together. One could chat in the corridors late at night. It was the world’s first proper commune.

- Secondly, everyone in the commune stopped working for other people. They accepted cuts in their income in return for being able to focus on fulfilling work. Some of Epicurus’s friends devoted themselves to farming, others to cooking, a few to making furniture and art. They had far less money, but ample intrinsic satisfaction.

- Thirdly, Epicurus and his friends devoted themselves to finding calm through rational analysis and insight. They spent periods of every day reflecting on their anxieties, improving their understanding of their psyches and mastering the great questions of philosophy.

Epicurus’s experiment in living caught on. Epicurean communities opened up all around the Mediterranean and drew in thousands of followers. The centres thrived for generations – until they were brutally suppressed by a jealous and aggressive Christian Church in the 5th century. But even then, their essence survived when many of them were turned into monasteries.

Epicurus’s influence continues into the modern age. Karl Marx did his PhD thesis on him and thought of him as his favourite philosopher. What we call Communism is at heart just a bigger – and rather more authoritarian and joyless – version of Epicureanism.

Even today, Epicurus remains an indispensable guide to life in advanced consumer capitalist societies because advertising – on which this system is based – functions on cleverly muddling people up about what they think they need to be happy.

An extraordinary number of adverts focus on the three very things that Epicurus identified as false lures of happiness: romantic love, professional status and luxury.

Adverts wouldn’t work as well as they do if they didn’t operate with an accurate sense of what our real needs are. Yet while they excite us by evoking them, they refuse to quench them properly. Beer ads will show us groups of friends hugging – but only sell us alcohol (that we might end up drinking alone). Fancy watch ads will show us high-status professionals walking purposefully to the office, but won’t know how to answer the desire for intrinsically satisfying work. And adverts for tropical beaches may titillate us with their serenity, but can’t – on their own – deliver the true calm we crave

Epicurus invites us to change our understanding of ourselves and to alter society accordingly. We mustn’t exhaust ourselves and the planet in a race for things that wouldn’t possibly satisfy us even if we got them. We need a return to philosophy and a lot more seriousness about the business of being happy.

‘Stoicism’ was a philosophy that flourished for some 400 years in Ancient Greece and Rome, gaining widespread support among all classes of society. It had one overwhelming and highly practical ambition: to teach people how to be calm and brave in the face of overwhelming anxiety and pain.

Bust of Seneca, Museo del Prado

We still honour this school whenever we call someone ‘stoic’ or plain ‘philosophical’ when fate turns against them: when they lose their keys, are humiliated at work, rejected in love or disgraced in society. Of all philosophies, Stoicism remains perhaps the most immediately relevant and useful for our uncertain and panicky times.

Statue of Marcus Aurelius, Musei Capitolini, Rome

Many hundreds of philosophers practiced Stoicism but two figures stand out as our best guides to it: the Roman politician, writer and tutor to Nero, Seneca (AD 4-65); and the kind and magnanimous Roman Emperor (who philosophised in his spare time while fighting the Germanic hordes on the edges of the Empire), Marcus Aurelius (AD 121 to 180). Their works remain highly readable and deeply consoling, ideal for sleepless nights, those breeding grounds for runaway terrors and paranoia.

Stoicism can help us with four problems in particular:

1. Anxiety

At all times, so many terrible things might happen. The standard way for people to cheer us up when we’re mired in anxiety is to tell us that we will, after all, be OK: the embarrassing email might not be discovered, sales could yet take off, there might be no scandal…

But the Stoics bitterly opposed such a strategy, because they believed that anxiety flourishes in the gap between what we fear might, and what we hope could, happen. The larger the gap, the greater will be the oscillations and disturbances of mood.

To regain calm, what we need to do is systematically and intelligently crush every last vestige of hope. Rather than appease ourselves with sunny tales, it is far better – the Stoics proposed – to courageously come to terms with the very worst possibilities – and then make ourselves entirely at home with them. When we look our fears in the face and imagine what life might be like if they came true, we stand to come to a crucial realisation: we will cope. We will cope even if we had to go to prison, even if we lost all our money, even if we were publicly shamed, even if our loved ones left us, and even if the growth turned out to be malignant (the Stoics were firm believers in suicide).

Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1784

We generally don’t dare do more than glimpse the horrible eventualities through clenched eyelids, and therefore they maintain a constant sadistic grip on us. Instead, as Seneca put it: ‘To reduce your worry, you must assume that what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen.’ To a friend wracked with terror he might be sent to prison, Seneca replied bluntly: ‘Prison can always be endured by someone who has correctly understood existence.’

The Stoics suggested we take time off to practice worst-case scenarios. We should, for example, mark out a week a year where we eat only stale bread and sleep on the kitchen floor with only one blanket, so we stop being so squeamish about being sacked or imprisoned.

We will then realise, as Marcus Aurelius says, ‘that very little is needed to make a happy life.’

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Diogenes, 1860

Each morning, a good Stoic will undertake a praemeditatio, a premeditation on all the appalling things that might occur in the hours ahead. In Marcus Aurelius’s stiffening words: ‘Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth. So you must reckon on everything, expect everything.’

Stoicism is nothing less than an elegant, intelligent dress rehearsal for catastrophe.

2. Fury

We get angry – especially with our partners, our children, and politicians. We smash things up and hurt others. The Stoics thought anger a dangerous indulgence, but most of all, a piece of stupidity, for in their analysis, angry outbursts are only ever caused by one thing: an incorrect picture of existence. They are the bitter fruits of naivety.

John William Waterhouse, Cleopatra, 1888

Anger is, in the Stoic analysis, caused by the violent collision of hope and reality. We don’t shout every time something sad happens to us, only when it is sad and unexpected. To be calmer, we must, therefore, learn to expect far less from life. Of course our loved ones will disappoint us, naturally our colleagues will fail us, invariably our friends will lie to us… None of this should be a surprise. It may make us sad. It must never – if we are Stoics – make us angry.

The wise person should aim to reach a state where simply nothing could suddenly disturb their peace of mind. Every tragedy should already be priced in. ‘What need is there to weep over parts of life?’ asked Seneca, ‘The whole of it calls for tears.’

3. Paranoia

It is easy to think we’ve been singled out for terrible things. We wonder why it has happened to us. We tear ourselves apart with blame or direct bitter venom at the world.

The Stoics want us to do neither: it may neither be our, nor anyone else’s, fault. Though not religious, the Stoics were fascinated by the Roman Goddess of fortune, known as Fortuna, whom they took to be the perfect metaphor for destiny. Fortuna, who had shrines to her all over the Empire, was popularly held to control the fate of humans, and was judged to be a terrifying mixture of the generous and the randomly wilful and spiteful. She was no meritocrat. She was represented holding a cornucopia filled with goodies (money, love etc.) in one hand, and a tiller, for changing the course of life in the other. Depending on her mood, she might throw you down a perfect job or a beautiful relationship, and then the next minute, simply because she felt like it, watch you choke to death on a fishbone.

Statue of the goddess Fortuna

It is an urgent priority for a Stoic to respect just how much of life will always be in the hands of this demented character. ‘There is nothing which Fortuna does not dare,’ warned Seneca.

Understanding this ahead of time should make us both suspicious of success and gentle on ourselves around failure. In every sense, much of what we get, we don’t deserve.

The task of the wise person is therefore never to believe in the gifts of Fortune: fame, money, power, love, health – these are never our own. Our grip on them must at all times be light and deeply wary.

4. Loss of Perspective

We naturally exaggerate our own importance. The incidents of our own lives loom very large in our view of the world. And so we get stressed and panicked, we curse and throw things across the room.

To regain composure, we must regularly be reduced in our own eyes. We must give up on the very normal but very disturbing illusion that it really matters what we do and who we are.

The Stoics were keen astronomers and recommended the contemplation of the heavens to all students of philosophy. On an evening walk, look up and see the planets: you’ll see Venus and Jupiter shining in the darkening sky. If the dusk deepens, you might see some other stars – Aldebaran, Andromeda and Aries, along with many more. It’s a hint of the unimaginable extensions of space across the solar system, the galaxy and the cosmos. The sight has a calming effect which the Stoics revered, for against such a backdrop, we realise that none of our troubles, disappointments or hopes have any relevance.

Nothing that happens to us, or that we do, is – blessedly – of any consequence whatsoever from the cosmic perspective.

Conclusion:

We need the Stoics more than ever. Every day confronts us with situations that they understood and wanted to prepare us for.

Their teachings are dark and sobering yet at the same time, profoundly consoling and at points even rather funny.

They invite us to feel heroic and defiant in the face of our many troubles.

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Seneca, 1773

As Seneca reminded us, ‘Look at your wrists. There – at any time – lies freedom.’

To counterbalance the enragingly cheerful and naive optimism of our times, there is nothing better than the bitter-sweet calming wisdom of these ancient sages.

Adam Smith is our guide to perhaps the most pressing dilemma of our time: how to make a capitalist economy more humane and more meaningful.

He was born in Scotland in Kirkcaldy – a small manufacturing town – near Edinburgh in 1723. He was a hard working student and very close to his mother. In his childhood, he was briefly kidnapped by gypsies. As an adolescent, though from the middle class, he toured France with the grandest young aristocrat of his time, with whom he’d struck up a close friendship. He then became an academic philosopher, wrote a major book about the importance of sympathy and lectured on logic and aesthetics. He had a charming smile. His study was usually very messy.

He was also one of the greatest thinkers in the history of economics – in part because his concerns went far beyond the economic. He wanted to understand the money system because his underlying ambition was to make nations and people happier. In his time, that would normally have meant getting interested either in religion or in government. Intellectual debate was dominated by passionate discussions about the role of the church and the foundations of the state. But Smith insisted that what philosophers should really worry about is the economy: how money is earned, how it is spent and who gets how much for doing what.

Smith remains an invaluable guide to four ideas, which can help us to create a better kind of capitalism:

1. Specialisation

When one considers the modern world of work, two facts stand out:

- modern economies produce unprecedented amounts of wealth (for the elite).

- many ordinary people find work rather boring and, a key complaint, meaning-less.

The two phenomena are (strangely) intimately related, as Adam Smith was the first to understand through his theory of specialisation. He argued that in modern businesses, tasks formerly done by one person in a single day could far more profitably be split into many tasks carried out by multiple people over whole careers.

Smith hailed this as a momentous development: he predicted that national economies would become hugely richer the more specialised their workforces became. A country where people made their own bread for breakfast, had a go at building their own houses in the morning, tried to catch fish for lunch and educated their children themselves in the afternoon was doomed to poverty. Far better to split everything up into individual areas of expertise and encourage people to trade their needs and talents.

One sign our world is now so rich, Smith could tell us, is that every time we meet a stranger, we’re unlikely to understand what they do. The mania for incomprehensible job titles – Logistics Supply Manager, Packaging Coordinator, Communications and Learning Officer – prove the economic logic of Smith’s insight.

But there is one huge problem with specialisation: meaning. The more jobs are subdivided, the less likely every job is to feel meaningful, because what we call meaning emerges from a visceral impression that one is engaged in something which is making a difference to someone else’s life. When businesses are small and their processes contained, this sense of helping others is readily available, even if one’s doing nothing grander than running a small clothes shop or a bakery. But when everything is industrialised, one ends up as a tiny cog in a gigantic machine whose overall logic (though present, and available to the management) is liable to be absent from the minds of people lower down in the organisation. A company with 150,000 employees distributed across four continents, making things that take five years from conception to delivery, will struggle to maintain any sense of purpose and cohesion.

So horrified were some thinkers by the implications of specialisation, they argued we should go back to an artisanal economy (the great fantasy of philosophers in the 19th century). But Smith was more inventive. He discerned that what many workers in advanced economies lack is a satisfying story about how their individual efforts fit into the bigger scheme; how they are helping other people and serving society.

Bosses of the specialised corporations of modernity therefore have an additional responsibility to their workers: reminding them of the purpose, role and ultimate dignity of their labour.

2. Consumer Capitalism

Smith’s age saw the development of what we’d now call consumer capitalism. Manufacturers began turning out luxury goods for a broadening middle class. Shopping arcades sprang up, as did fashion magazines and homeware brands. Some commentators were appalled. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wished to ban ‘luxury’ from his native Geneva and return to a simpler way of life. He was a particular fan of ancient Sparta and argued that his city should copy its austere, martial lifestyle.

Disagreeing violently, Smith pointed out to the Swiss philosopher that luxury goods and stupid consumerism in fact had a very serious role to play in a good society – for it was they that provided the surplus wealth that allowed societies to look after their weakest members. Yes, consumer societies might not have the surface moral rigour of Sparta, but they qualified as properly moral on a different score: that they didn’t let young children and the old starve, for they could afford hospitals and poor relief. All those embroidered lace handkerchiefs, jewelled snuff-boxes and miniature temples made of cream for dessert were unnecessary and flippant no doubt, but they encouraged trade, created employment and generated immense wealth – and had to be defended on that score.

If Smith had ended it there, it would have made for an uncomfortable choice (either the silliness of consumer capitalism or the oppressive austerity of Sparta – or North Korea). But Smith held out some fascinating hopes for the future: consumption didn’t invariably have to involve idiotic and frivolous things. He observed that humans have many ‘higher’ needs that are in fact very sensible and good, and yet that currently lie outside of capitalist enterprise: among these, our need for education, for self-understanding, for beautiful cities and for rewarding social lives.

The capitalism of today still hasn’t quite got around to resolving the awkward choices Smith and Rousseau circled. But the hope for the future is that we won’t forever merely be making money off degrading or superficial consumer needs (pumping out ever more greetings cards or sneakers). We’ll also learn to generate sizeable profits from helping people in truly important, ambitious ways. Psychotherapy should, for example, rightly be one of the gargantuan industries of the later 21st century.

3. How to treat the Rich

Then as now, the great question was how to get the rich to behave well towards the rest of society. The Christian answer to this was: make them feel guilty; show them the sufferings of the poor and appeal to their consciences. Meanwhile, the radical, left-wing answer was: raise taxes. But Smith disagreed with both approaches: the hearts of the rich were likely to remain cold and high taxes would simply lead the rich to flee the country.

He arrived at more original and more subtle recommendations thanks to a theory about what the rich really want. He proposed that, contrary to what one might expect, it isn’t money the rich really care about. It is honour and respect. The rich accumulate money not because they are materially greedy, but because they are emotionally needy. They do so primarily in order to be liked and approved of.

This vanity provides wise governments with a highly useful tool. Rather than taxing the rich, these governments should learn to give the rich plenty of honour and status – in return for doing all the good things that these narcissists wouldn’t normally bother with, like funding schools and hospitals and paying their workers well.

As Smith put it, “The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.”

4. Educate Consumers

Big corporations feel very evil to us now, the natural targets of blame for low-paying jobs, environmental abuse and sickening ingredients. But Adam Smith knew there was an unexpected, and more important, element responsible for these ills: our taste. Collectively, it is we, the consumers, who opt for certain kinds of ease and excitement over others. And once that basic fact is in place, everything else follows in the slipstream. It’s not companies that primarily degrade the world. It is our appetites, which they merely serve.

As a result, the reform of capitalism hinges on an odd-sounding, but critical task: the education of the consumer. We need to be taught to want better quality things and pay a proper price for them, one that reflects the true burden on workers and the environment.

A good capitalist society doesn’t therefore just offer customers choice, it also spends a considerable part of its energies educating people about how to exercise this choice in judicious ways. Capitalism needs to be saved by elevating the quality of demand.

Conclusion

The economic state of the world can seem at once so wrong and yet so complicated, we end up collapsing into despair and passivity.

Adam Smith is on hand to lend us confidence and hope. His work is full of ideas about how human values can be reconciled with the needs of businesses. He deserves our ongoing attention because he was interested in an issue that has become a leading priority of our own times: how to create an economy that is at once profitable and civilised.

Aristotle was born around 384 BC in the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedonia, where his father was the royal doctor. He grew up to be arguably the most influential philosopher ever, with modest nicknames like ‘the master’, and simply ‘the philosopher’. One of his big jobs was tutoring Alexander the Great, who soon after went out and conquered the known world.

Aristotle studied in Athens, worked with Plato for several years and then branched out on his own. He founded a research and teaching centre called The Lyceum: French secondary schools, lycée, are named in honour of this venture. He liked to walk about while teaching and discussing ideas. His followers were named Peripatetics, the wanderers. His many books are actually lecture notes.

Aristotle was fascinated by how things really work. How does an embryo chick develop in an egg? How do squid reproduce? Why does a plant grow well in one place, and hardly at all in another? And, most importantly, what makes a human life and a whole society go well? For Aristotle, philosophy was about practical wisdom. Here are four big philosophical questions he answered:

1. What makes people happy?

In the Nicomachean Ethics – the book got its name because it was edited by his son, Nicomachus – Aristotle set himself the task of identifying the factors that lead people to have a good life,  or not. He suggested that good and successful people all possess distinct virtues, and proposed that we should get better at identifying what these are, so that we can nurture them in ourselves and honour them in others.

Aristotle also observed that every virtue seems to be bang in the middle of two vices. It occupies what he termed ‘the golden mean’ between two extremes of character. For example, in book four of his Ethics, under the charming title of conversational virtues and vices – wit, buffoonery and boorishness – Aristotle looks at ways that people are better or worse at talking to one another.

Knowing how to have a good conversation is one of the key ingredients of the good life, Aristotle recognised. Some people go wrong because they lack a subtle sense of humour: that’s the bore, ‘someone useless for any kind of social intercourse because he contributes nothing and takes offence at everything’. But others carry humour to excess: ‘the buffoon cannot resist a joke, sparing neither himself nor anybody else, provided that he can raise a laugh and saying things that a man of taste would never dream of saying’. So the virtuous person is in the golden mean in this area: witty but tactful.

In a fascinating survey of personality and behaviour Aristotle analyses ‘too little’, ‘too much’ and ‘just right’ around a whole host of virtues. We can’t change our behaviour in any of these areas just at the drop of a hat. But change is possible, eventually. Moral goodness, says Aristotle, is the result of habit. It takes time, practice, encouragement. So Aristotle thinks, people that lack virtue should be understood as unfortunate, rather than wicked. What they need isn’t scolding or being thrown into prison, but better teachers and more guidance.

2. What is art for? 

The blockbuster art at the time was tragedy. Athenians watched gory plays at community festivals held at huge open-air theatres. Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles were household names. Aristotle wrote a how-to-write-great-plays manual, The Poetics. It’s packed with great tips: for example, make sure to use peripeteia, a change in fortune when, for the hero, things go from great to awful. And anagnorisis, the moment of dramatic revelation when suddenly the hero realises their life is going very wrong – and is, in fact, a catastrophe.

But what is tragedy actually for? What is the point of a whole community coming together to watch horrible things happening to lead characters? Like Oedipus, in the play by Sophocles, who by accident kills his father, gets married to his mother, finds out he’s done these things and gouges out his eyes in remorse and despair. Aristotle’s answer is: catharsis. Catharsis is a kind of cleaning: you get rid of bad stuff. In this case, cleaning up our emotions, specifically, our confusions around the feelings of fear and pity.

We’ve got natural problems here: we’re hard-hearted, we don’t give pity where it’s deserved, and we’re prone to either exaggerated fears or not getting frightened enough. Tragedy reminds us that terrible things can befall decent people, including ourselves. A small flaw can lead to a whole life unravelling. So we should have more compassion or pity for those whose actions go disastrously wrong. We need to be collectively retaught these crucial truths on a regular basis. The task of art, as Aristotle saw it, is to make profound truths about life stick in our minds.

3. What are friends for?

In books eight and nine of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle identifies three different kinds of friendship: there’s friendship that comes about when each person is seeking fun, their chief interest is in their own pleasure and the opportunity of the moment, which the other person provides. Then there are friendships that are really strategic acquaintances. They take pleasure in each other’s company only insofar as they have hopes of advantage of it.

Then, there’s the true friend. Not someone who’s just like you, but someone who isn’t you, but about whom you care as much as you care about yourself. The sorrows of a true friend are your sorrows. Their joys are yours. It makes you more vulnerable, should anything befall this person. But it’s hugely strengthening too. You’re relieved from too small orbit of your own thoughts and worries. You expand into the life of another, together you become larger, cleverer, more resilient, more fair-minded. You share virtues and cancel out each other’s defects. Friendship teaches us what we ought to be: it is, quite literally, the best part of life.

4. How can ideas cut through in a busy world?

Like a lot of people, Aristotle was struck by the fact that the best argument doesn’t always win the debate or gain popular traction. He wanted to know why this happens and what we can do about it. He had lots of opportunity for observations. In Athens, many decisions were made in public meetings, often in the agora, the town square. Orators would vie with one another to sway popular opinion.

Aristotle plotted the ways audiences and individuals are influenced by many factors but don’t strictly engage with logic or the facts of the case. It’s maddening and many serious people can’t stand it. They avoid the market place and populace debate. Aristotle was more ambitious. He invented what we still call rhetoric, the art of getting people to agree with you. We wanted thoughtful, serious and well-intentioned people to learn how to be persuasive, to reach those who don’t agree already.

He makes some timeless points: you have to soothe people’s fears, you have to see the emotional side of the issue – Is someone’s pride on the line? Are they feeling embarrassed? – and edge around it accordingly. You have to make it funny because attention spans are short, and you might have to use illustrations and examples to make your point come alive.

We’re keen students of Aristotle. Today, philosophy doesn’t sound like the most practical activity, maybe that’s because we’ve not paid enough attention recently to Aristotle.

Modern life is, in many ways, founded around the idea of progress: the notion that as we know more (especially about science and technology), and as economies grow larger, we’re bound to end up happier. Particularly in the eighteenth century, as European societies and their economies became increasingly complex, the conventional view was that mankind was firmly set on a positive trajectory; moving away from savagery and ignorance toward prosperity and civility. But there was at least one eighteenth-century philosopher who was prepared to vigorously question the “Idea of Progress” – and who continues to have very provocative things to say to our own era.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the son of Isaac Rousseau, an educated watchmaker, was born in Geneva in 1712. Almost immediately, Rousseau suffered the first of what he would later call his “misfortunes” – just nine days after giving birth, his mother, Suzanne Bernard, died from complications which arose from a traumatic and complicated labour. When Rousseau was ten, his father got into a legal dispute and the family was forced to flee to the city of Bern where Isaac would later marry for a second time. From that point on, Rousseau’s life was marked by instability and isolation. Throughout his teenage years and adulthood, he changed homes frequently; sometimes in search of love and acclaim; sometimes just to escape persecution.

As a young man, Rousseau went to Paris and there was exposed to the opulence and luxury that was the order of the day in ancien regime Paris; the aspirational bourgeoisie did their best to emulate the tastes and styles exhibited by both royalty and aristocracy, only adding to the competitive spirit that fuelled the burgeoning Parisian social scene. The Paris Rousseau was exposed to was a far cry from his birthplace of Geneva, a city that was sober and deeply opposed to luxury goods.

A theatre in Paris during Rousseau’s time.

Rousseau’s life was shaped by some key chance turning points. One of the most significant of these occurred in 1749 as he read a copy of a newspaper, the Mercure de France, that contained an advert for an essay on the subject of whether recent advances in the arts and sciences had contributed to the “purification of morals”. Upon reading the note placed there by the Académie de Dijon, Rousseau experienced something of an epiphany. It struck him, seemingly for the first time, that civilisation and progress had not in fact improved people; they had exacted a terrible destructive influence on the morals of human beings who had once been good.

Rousseau took this insight and turned it into the central thesis of what became his celebrated Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, which won the first prize in the newspaper competition. In the essay, Rousseau offered a scathing critique of modern society that challenged the central precepts of Enlightenment thought. His argument was simple: individuals had once been good and happy, but as man had emerged from his pre-social state, he had become plagued by vice and reduced to pauperism.

Rousseau went on to sketch a history of the world not as a story of progress from barbarism to the great workshops and cities of Europe, but of regress away from a privileged state in which we lived simply, but had the chance to listen to our needs. In technologically backward prehistory, in Rousseau’s “state of nature” (l’état de nature), when men and women lived in forests and had never entered a shop or read a newspaper, the philosopher pictured people more easily understanding their own minds, and so being drawn towards essential features of a satisfied life: a love of family, a respect for nature, an awe at the beauty of the universe, a curiosity about others, and a taste for music and simple entertainments. The state of nature was also moral, guided by pitié, (pity) for others and their suffering. It was from this state that modern commercial ‘civilisation’ had pulled us, leaving us to envy and long for and suffer in a world of plenty.

Rousseau was aware of just how controversial his conclusion was – he anticipated “a universal outcry” against his thesis and the Discourse indeed prompted a considerable number of responses. Rousseau had found fame.

What was it about civilisation that he thought had corrupted man and produced this moral degeneracy? Well, at the root of his hostility was his claim that the march toward civilisation had awakened in man a form of “self-love” – amour-propre – that was artificial and centred on pride, jealousy, and vanity. He argued that this destructive form of self-love had emerged as a consequence of people moving to bigger settlements and cities where they had begun to look to others in order to glean their very sense of self. Civilised people stopped thinking about what they want and felt – and merely imitated others, entering into ruinous competitions for status and money.

Discourse on the Origins of Inequality 

Primitive man, noted Rousseau, did not compare himself to others but instead focused solely on himself – his objective was simply to survive. Though Rousseau didn’t actually employ the term ‘noble savage’ in his philosophical writings, his account of natural man unleashed a fascination with this concept. For those who might see this as an impossibly romantic story to be explained away as the fancy of an excitable author with a grudge against modernity, it is worth reflecting that if the eighteenth century listened to Rousseau’s argument, it was primarily because it had before it one stark example of its apparent truths in the shape of the fate of the native Indian populations of North America.

Reports of Indian society drawn up in the sixteenth century described it as materially simple, but psychologically rewarding: communities were small, close-knit, egalitarian, religious, playful and martial. The Indians were undoubtedly backwards in a financial sense. They lived off fruits and wild animals, they slept in tents, they had few possessions. Every year, they wore the same pelts and shoes. Even a chief might own no more than a spear and a few pots. But there was a distinct level of contentment amidst the simplicity.

An early depiction of life in a Native American village.

However, within only a few decades of the arrival of the first Europeans, the status system of Indian society had been revolutionised through contact with the technology and luxury of European industry. What mattered was no longer one’s wisdom or understanding of the ways of nature, but one’s ownership of weapons, jewellery and alcohol. Indians now longed for silver earrings, copper and brass bracelets, tin finger rings, necklaces made of Venetian glass, ice chisels, guns, alcohol, kettles, beads, hoes and mirrors.

These new enthusiasms did not come about by coincidence. European traders deliberately attempted to foster desires in the Indians, so as to motivate them to hunt the animals pelts the European market was demanding. Sadly, their new wealth didn’t appear to make the Indians much happier. Certainly the Indians worked harder. Between 1739 and 1759, the two thousand warriors of the Cherokee tribe were estimated to have killed one and a quarter million deer to satisfy European demand. But rates of suicide and alcoholism rose, communities fractured, factions squabbled. The tribal chiefs didn’t need Rousseau to understand what had happened, but they concurred totally with his analysis nevertheless.

Contemporary portrait of Rousseau.

Rousseau died in 1778, aged 66, while taking a walk outside Paris. He’d spent the last years a celebrity, living with his common-law wife. But he also was constantly on the move fleeing persecution in Geneva after some of his more radical ideas, especially about religion, caused controversy (the stress of this had also caused a series of mental breakdowns). He is now buried in the Pantheon in Paris, and the Genevans celebrate him as their most famous native son.

In an age such as our own, one in which opulence and luxury can be deemed both desirable and exceedingly offensive, Rousseau’s musings continue to reverberate. He encourages us to sidestep jealousy and competition and instead look solely to ourselves in identifying our self worth. It is only by resisting the evil of comparison, Rousseau would tell us, that we can avoid feelings of misery and inadequacy. Though difficult, Rousseau was confident that this was not impossible, and he thus leaves behind a philosophy of fundamental criticism, but also one of profound optimism. There is a way out of the misery and corruption produced by the mores and institutions and modern civilisation – the hard part is that it involves looking to ourselves and reviving our natural goodness.

Athens, 2400 years ago. It’s a compact place: around 250,000 people live here. There are fine baths, theatres, temples, shopping arcades and gymnasiums. Art is flourishing, and science too. You can pick up excellent fish down at the harbour in Piraeus. It’s warm for more than half the year.

Leo von Klenze, The Acropolis, 1846 

This is also home to the world’s first true – and probably greatest – philosopher: Plato.

Born into a prominent and wealthy family in the city, Plato devoted his life to one goal: helping people to reach a state of what he termed:

εὐδαιμονία

Eudaimonia: this peculiar but fascinating Greek word is a little hard to translate: it almost means ‘happiness’ but is really closer to ‘fulfilment’, because ‘happiness’ suggests continuous chirpiness – whereas ‘fulfilment’ is more compatible with periods of great pain and suffering – which seem to be an unavoidable part even of a good life.

How did Plato propose to make people more fulfilled? Four central ideas stand out in his work.

1. Think harder

Plato proposed that our lives go wrong in large part because we almost never give ourselves time to think carefully and logically enough about our plans. And so we end up with the wrong values, careers and relationships. Plato wanted to bring order and clarity to our minds.

He observed how many of our ideas are derived from what the crowd thinks, from what the Greeks called ‘doxa’, and we’d call ‘common-sense’. And yet repeatedly, across the 36 books he wrote, Plato showed this common-sense to be riddled with errors, prejudice and superstition. Popular ideas about love, fame, money or goodness simply don’t stand up to reason.

Plato also noticed how proud people were about being led by their instincts or passions (jumping into decisions on the basis of nothing more than ‘how they felt’), and he compared this to being dragged dangerously along by a group of blindfolded wild horses.

As Freud was happy to acknowledge, Plato was the inventor of therapy, insisting that we learn to submit all our thoughts and feelings to reason. As Plato repeatedly wrote, the essence of philosophy came down to the command to:

γνῶθι σεαυτόν

‘Know yourself.’

2. Love More Wisely

Plato is one of the great theorists of relationships. His book, The Symposium, is an attempt to explain what love really is. It tells the story of a dinner party given by Agathon, a handsome poet, who invites a group of his friends around to eat, drink and talk about love.

Anselm Feuerbach, The Symposium, 1874

The guests all have different views about what love is. Plato gives his old friend Socrates – one of the main characters in this and all his books – the most useful and interesting theory. It goes like this: when you fall in love, what’s really going on is that you have seen in another person some good quality which you haven’t got. Perhaps they are calm, when you get agitated; or they are self-disciplined, while you’re all over the place; or they are eloquent when you are tongue-tied.

The underlying fantasy of love is that by getting close to this person, you can become a little like they are. They can help you to grow to your full potential.

In Plato’s eyes, love is in essence a kind of education: you couldn’t really love someone if you didn’t want to be improved by them. Love should be two people trying to grow together – and helping each other to do so. Which means you need to get together with the person who contains a key missing bit of your evolution: the virtues you don’t have.

This sounds entirely odd nowadays when we tend to interpret love as finding someone perfect just as they are. In the heat of arguments, lovers sometimes say to one another: ‘If you loved me, you wouldn’t try to change me.’

Plato thinks the diametric opposite. He wants us to enter relationships in a far less combative and proud way. We should accept that we are not complete and allow our lovers to teach us things. A good relationship has to mean we won’t love the other person exactly as they are. It means committing to helping them become a better version of themselves – and to endure the stormy passages this inevitably involves – while also not resisting their attempts to improve us.

3. The Importance of beauty

Everyone – pretty much – likes beautiful things. But we tend to think of them as a bit mysterious in their power over us and, in the greater scheme, not terribly important.

But Plato proposed that it really matters what sorts of houses or temples, pots or sculptures you have around you.

Portrait of Sappho

No one before Plato had asked the key question: why do we like beautiful things? He found a fascinating reason: we recognise in them a part of ‘the good’.

There are lots of good things we aspire to be: kind, gentle, harmonious, balanced, peaceful, strong, dignified. These are qualities in people. But they are also qualities in objects. We get moved and excited when we find in objects the qualities we need but are missing in our lives.

Beautiful objects therefore have a really important function. They invite us to evolve in their direction, to become as they are. Beauty can educate our souls.

It follows that ugliness is a serious matter too, for it parades dangerous and damaged characteristics in front of us. It encourages us to be like it: harsh, chaotic, brash. It makes it that much harder to be wise, kind and calm.

Plato sees art as therapeutic: it is the duty of poets and painters (and nowadays, novelists, television producers and designers) to help us live good lives.

Plato believed in the censorship of the arts. It’s not the paradox it seems. If artists can help us live well, they can, unfortunately, equally give prestige and glamour to unhelpful attitudes and ideas. Just being an artist doesn’t guarantee the power of art will be wisely used.

That’s why Plato believed that artists should work under the command of philosophers, who would give them the right ideas and ask them to make these convincing and popular. Art was to be a sort of propaganda – or advertising – for the good.

4. Changing society

Plato spent a lot of time thinking how the government and society should ideally be. He was the world’s first utopian thinker.

Edgar Degas, Young Spartans Exercising, 1860

In this, he was inspired by Athens’s great rival: Sparta. This was a city-sized machine for turning out great soldiers. Everything the Spartans did – how they raised their children, how their economy was organised, whom they admired, how they had sex, what they ate – was tailored to that one goal. And Sparta was hugely successful, from a military point of view.

But that wasn’t Plato’s concern. He wanted to know: how could a society get better at producing not military power but eudaimonia? How could it reliably help people towards fulfilment?

In his book, The Republic, Plato identifies a number of changes that should be made:

a) We need new heroes

Athenian society was very focused on the rich, like the louche aristocrat Alcibiades, and sports celebrities, like the boxer Milo of Croton. Plato wasn’t impressed: it really matters who we admire, for celebrities influence our outlook, ideas and conduct. And bad heroes give glamour to flaws of character.

Plato therefore wanted to give Athens new celebrities, replacing the current crop with ideally wise and good people he called Guardians: models for everyone’s good development. These people would be distinguished by their record of public service, their modesty and simple habits, their dislike of the limelight and their wide and deep experience. They would be the most honoured and admired people in society.

b) We need censorship

Today censorship makes us anxious. But Plato was worried about the wrong sort of freedom: Athens was a free-for-all for the worst opinion-sellers. Crazy religious notions and sweet sounding, but dangerous, ideas sucked up mass enthusiasm and lead Athens to disastrous governments and misguided wars (like a fateful attack on Sparta).

Pericles’ Funeral Oration

Continuous exposure to a storm of confused voices was – Plato thought – seriously bad for us, so he wanted to limit the activities of public orators and dangerous preachers. He would – nowadays – have been very sceptical about the power of mass media.

c) Better Education

Plato believed passionately in education, but wanted to refocus the curriculum. The primary thing we need to learn is not just maths or spelling, but how to be good: we need to learn about courage, self-control, reasonableness, independence and calm.

Plato’s Academy

To put this into practice, Plato founded a school called The Academy in Athens, which flourished for over 400 years. You went there to learn nothing less than how to live and die well.

It’s fascinating and not a little sad how modern academic institutions have outlawed this ambition. If a student showed up at Oxford or Harvard universities today seeking to be taught how to live, the professors would call the police – or the insane asylum.

d) Better Childhoods

Families try their best. And sometimes children strike lucky. Their parents are well balanced, good teachers, reliably mature and wise. But pretty often parents transmit their confusions and failings to their children.

Minoan youths boxing (BCE 1500), Knossos fresco 

Plato thought that bringing up children well was one of the most difficult (and most needed) skills. He was acutely sympathetic to the child who is held back by the wrong home environment.

So he proposed that many children would in fact be better off if they could take their vision of life not from their parents but from wise guardians, paid for by the state. He proposed that a sizeable share of the next generation would be brought up by people more qualified than their own parents.

Conclusion

Plato’s ideas remain deeply provocative and fascinating. What unites them is their ambition and their idealism. He wanted philosophy to be a tool to help us change the world. We should continue to be inspired by his example.

Thomas Hobbes was a 17th century English philosopher who is on hand to guide us through one of the thorniest issues of politics: to what extent should we patiently obey rulers, especially those who are not very good – and to what extent should we start revolutions and depose governments in search of a better world?

Hobbes’s thinking is inseparable from one major event that began when he was 64 years old – and was to mark him so deeply, it coloured all this subsequent thinking (remarkably he died when he was 91 and everything he is remembered for today he wrote after the age of 60).

This event was the English Civil war, a vicious, divisive, costly and murderous conflict that raged across England for almost a decade and pitted the forces of King against Parliament, leading to the deaths of some 200,000 people on both sides.

Hobbes was by nature a deeply peaceful and cautious man. He hated violence of all kinds, a disposition that began at the age of 4, when his own father, a clergyman, was disgraced, and abandoned his wife and family, after he’d got into a fight with another vicar on the steps of his parish church in a village in Wiltshire.

The work for which we chiefly remember Hobbes, Leviathan, was published in 1651. It is the most definitive, persuasive and eloquent statement ever produced as to why one should obey government authority, even of a very imperfect kind, in order to avoid the risk of chaos and bloodshed. To understand the background of Hobbes’s conservatism, it helps to realise that across western Europe in the 17th century, political theorists were beginning to ask, with a new directness, on what basis subjects should obey their rulers.

For centuries, way back into the Middle Ages, there had been a standard answer to this, contained in a theory called the Divine Right of Kings. This was a blunt, simple but highly effective theory: stating that it was none other than God who appointed all kings and that one should obey these monarchs for one clear reason: because the deity said so – and He would send you to hell if you didn’t agree.

But this was no longer proving quite so persuasive to many thoughtful people, who argued that the right to rule ultimately lay not with Kings, but with ordinary people, who gave kings power – and therefore should only expect to take orders from kings so long as, but only so long, as things were working out well for them. This was known as the Social Contract theory of government.

Hobbes could see that the Divine Right of Kings theory was nonsense and what’s more, was going to be increasingly unpersuasive as religious observance declined. He himself was, privately, an atheist. At the same time, Hobbes was deeply scared of the possible consequences of the social contract theory, which could encourage people to depose rulers whenever they felt a little unhappy with their lot.

Hobbes had received a first hand account of the beheading of King Charles I, on a scaffold in front of the Banqueting Hall at the Palace of Whitehall in 1649 – and his intellectual labours were directed at making sure that such ghastly, primitive scenes would never be repeated.

So in Leviathan, he put forward an ingenious argument that tried to marry up social contract theory with a defence of total obedience and submission to traditional authority. The way he did this was to take his readers back in time, to a period he called ‘the state of nature’, before there were kings of any kind, and to get them to think about how governments would have arisen in the first place.

Key to Hobbes’s argument was that the state of nature could not have been a pretty place, because humans, left to their own devices, without a central authority to keep them in awe, would quickly have descended into squabbling, infighting and intolerable bickering. It would have been a little like the English civil war, but with people in bear skins bashing each other around with flint tools. In Hobbes’s famous formulation, life in the state of nature would have been: ‘nasty, brutish and short.’

As a result, out of fear and dread of chaos, people were led to form governments. They had done this willingly, as social contract theorists maintained, but also under considerable compulsion, fleeing into the arms of strong authority, which they therefore – Hobbes argued – had a subsequent duty to keep obeying, with only a few rights to complain if they didn’t like it.

The only right that people might have to protest about an absolute ruler, or Leviathan as he called him, was if he directly threatened to kill them.

However, if the ruler merely stifled opposition, imposed onerous taxes, crippled the economy and locked up dissidents, this was absolutely no reason to take to the streets and demand a change of government.

‘Though of so unlimited a power, men may fancy many evil consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetuall warre of every man against his neighbour, are much worse.’

He admitted that a ruler might come along with an ‘inclination to do wicked deeds’ but the people would still have a duty to obey as ‘humane affairs cannot be without some inconvenience.’ But this inconvenience is the fault of people, not the sovereign, because: ‘if men could rule themselves, there would be no need at all of a common coercive power.’ As Hobbes went on: ‘He that complaineth of injury from his Sovereign, complaineth of that whereof he is the author himselfe; and therefore ought not to accuse any man but himselfe.’

Hobbes’s theory was dark, cautious and not especially hopeful about government. In our more optimistic moment, we want him to be wrong. But  it seems Hobbes’s name will always be relevant and fresh again when revolutions motivated by a search for liberty go horribly awry. Hobbes was not against revolution for any sinister motives. He just maintained, as he put it in the preface to Leviathan, that he felt compelled:

‘…to set before men’s eyes the mutuall relationship between protection and obedience.’

Our assessment of politicians is torn between hope and disappointment. On the one hand, we have an idealistic idea that a politician should be an upright hero, a man or woman who can breathe new moral life into the corrupt workings of the state. However, we are also regularly catapulted into cynicism when we realise the number of backroom deals and the extent of the lying that politicians go in for. We seem torn between our idealistic hopes and our pessimistic fears about the evil underbelly of politics. Surprisingly, the very man who gave his name to the word “Machiavellian,” a word so often used to describe the worst political scheming, can help us understand the dangers of this tired dichotomy. Machiavelli’s writings suggest that we should not be surprised if politicians lie and dissemble, but nor should we think them immoral and simply “bad” for doing so. A good politician – in Machiavelli’s remarkable view – isn’t one who is kind, friendly and honest, it is someone – however occasionally dark and sly they might be – who knows how to defend, enrich and bring honour to the state. Once we understand this basic requirement, we’ll be less disappointed and clearer about what we want our politicians to be.

Niccolò Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469. His father was a wealthy and influential lawyer, and so Machiavelli received an extensive formal education and got his first job as a secretary for the city, drafting government documents. But soon after his appointment, Florence exploded politically, expelled the Medici family, who had ruled it for sixty years and suffered decades of political instability, as a consequence of which Machiavelli experienced a series of career reversals.

Santi di Tito, Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli

Machiavelli was preoccupied by a fundamental problem in politics: is it possible to be a good politician and a good person at the same time? And he has the courage to face the tragic possibility that, given how the world really is, the answer is no. He doesn’t just think that political advancement comes more easily to the unscrupulous. he gets us to contemplate a darker possibility: that doing rightly and well what a political leader should and fulfilling the proper duties of political leadership is at odds with being a good person. 

Machiavelli wrote his most famous work, The Prince (1513), about how to get and keep power and what makes individuals effective leaders. He proposed that the overwhelming responsibility of a good prince is to defend the state from external and internal threats to stable governance. This means he must know how to fight, but more importantly, he must know about reputation and the management of those around him. People should neither think he is soft and easy to disobey, nor should they find him so cruel that he disgusts his society. He should seem unapproachably strict but reasonable. When he turned to the question of whether it was better for a prince to be loved or feared, Machiavelli wrote that while it would theoretically be wonderful for a leader to be both loved and obeyed, he should always err on the side of inspiring terror, for this is what ultimately keeps people in check.

Girolamo Savonarola

Machiavelli’s most radical and distinctive insight was his rejection of Christian virtue as a guide for leaders. Machiavelli’s Christian contemporaries had suggested princes should be merciful, peaceful, generous, and tolerant. They thought that being a good politician, in short, was the same as being a good Christian. But Machiavelli argued differently with energy. He asked his readers to dwell on the incompatibility between Christian ethics and good governance via the case of Girolamo Savonarola. Savonarola was a fervent, idealistic Christian who had wanted to build the city of God on earth in Florence. He had preached against the excesses and tyranny of the Medici government, and had even managed for a few years to lead Florence as a peaceful, democratic, and (relatively) honest state. However, Savonarola’s success could not last, for – in Machiavelli’s view – it was based on the weakness that always attends being ‘good’ in the Christian sense. It was not long before his regime became a threat to the corrupt Pope Alexander, whose henchmen schemed, captured and tortured him, hung and burned him in the centre of Florence. This, in Machiavelli’s eyes, is what inevitably  happens to the nice guys in politics. Eventually they will be faced with a problem which cannot be solved by generosity, kindness or decency. Because they will be up against rivals or enemies who do not play by those rules. The unscrupulous will always have a major advantage. It will be impossible to win decently. Yet it is necessary to win in order to keep a society safe. 

Rather than follow this unfortunate Christian example, Machiavelli suggested that a leader would do well to make judicious use of what he called, in a deliciously paradoxical phrase, “criminal virtue.” Machiavelli provided some criteria for what constitutes the right occasion for criminal virtue: it must be necessary for the security of the state, it must be done swiftly (often at night), and it should not be repeated too often, lest a reputation for mindless brutality builds up. Machiavelli gave the example of his contemporary Cesare Borgia, whom he much admired as a leader – though he might not have wanted to be his friend. When Cesare conquered the city of Cesena, he ordered one of his mercenaries, Remirro de Orco, to bring order to the region, which Remirro did through swift and brutal ways. Men were beheaded in front of their wives and children, property was seized, traitors were castrated. Cesare then turned on de Orco himself and had him sliced in half and placed in the public square, just to remind the townspeople who the true boss was. But then, as Machiavelli approvingly noted, that was enough bloodshed. Cesare moved on to cut taxes, imported some cheap grain, built a theatre and organised a series of beautiful festivals to keep people from dwelling on unfortunate memories.

Giuseppe Lorenzo Gatteri, Cesare Borgia leaving the Vatican

The Catholic Church banned Machiavelli’s works for 200 years because of the force with which he had argued that being a good Christian was incompatible with being a good leader. But even for atheists and those of us who are not politicians, Machiavelli’s insights are important. He writes that we cannot be good at or for all things. We must pick which fields we want to excel in, and let the others pass—not only because of our limited abilities and resources, but also because of the conflicts within moral codes. Some of the fields we choose—if not being a prince, then perhaps business or family life or other forms of loyalty and responsibility—may require what we evasively call “difficult decisions”, by which we really mean ethical trade-offs. We may have to sacrifice our ideal visions of kindness for the sake of practical effectiveness. We may have to lie in order to keep a relationship afloat. We may have to ignore the feelings of the workforce in order to keep a business going.. That – insists Machiavelli – is the price of dealing with the world as it is, and not as we feel it should be. The world has continued to love and hate Machiavelli in equal measure for insisting on this uncomfortable truth.

Machiavelli is prey to a natural misunderstanding. It can sound as if he is on the side of thuggish or slightly brutal people. That he’s cheering on those who are mean or callous. But actually his stern advice – about being ruthless – is best direct to those who run the risk of losing what they really care about because tat key moments they are not ruthless enough.

The fiercely individualistic spirit of our age tends to take a dim view of two big ideas: having any sort of rules governing everyday life; and pooling resources to live together in a communal way.

We’ve come to see ourselves as, each one of us, needing to invent our own unique way of life, governed by our instincts and what we most feel like doing in the moment. As for the idea of community, though it might cross our minds every now and then (especially when we contrast how fun it was at college and how rather arduous and lonely it might be now), nothing in modern capitalism enables us to imagine how we’d ever manage to make the group, rather than the ‘I’, the centre of things. Everything from domestic appliances to mortgages to romantic love enforces the idea of the lone or couple-based unit. We’re influenced by an ideology of personal freedom, where pursuing private ends is seen as the only path to happiness – though the results do not necessarily match the hopes. The joys of being part of a gang are simply not on the radar.

These attitudes, which we take for granted today, contrast so strongly with an idea which flourished for very long periods in many parts of the world and continue to have much to teach us about our real longings: monasticism. Monasticism puts forward the bold thesis that people can actually lead the most fruitful, productive and happy lives when they get together into controlled, organised groups of friends, have some clear rules and direct themselves towards a few big ambitions. Even if you’re not planning on setting up a secular version of a monastery any time soon (though we believe – as you’ll see – that this would be no bad idea), monasticism deserves to be studied for the lessons it yields about the limits to modern individualism.

One of the earliest and most influential figures in the history monasticism – in its Christian, Western guise – was a Roman nobleman living at the end of the 5th century, by the name of Benedict. In his twenties, Benedict studied Philosophy in Rome. For a time, he shared the dissipation, wastefulness and lack of genuine ambition of his wealthy fellow students until he suddenly became weary and ashamed and went off to the mountains in search of a better way of living. Other people soon joined him and he naturally found his way to starting a few small communities. From there, it was a natural step to write an instruction manual for his followers, with a simple and emphatic title: The Rule.

Within his lifetime, hundreds of people signed up to live in communities governed by his principles. And for over a thousand years, hugely impressive institutions founded in his name played a central role in European civilisation.

Benedict was an intensely devoted Christian. But it’s not necessary to share his beliefs in order to recognise that his recommendations tapped into something fundamental about human nature. His insights into communities are – in fact – detachable from the particular religious environment in which they were originally developed.

One: The Pleasures of Rules

The rules for living drawn up by Benedict were beautifully precise and detailed. His starting point is a pessimistic view of human nature. He’s acutely aware of how readily our lives go off the rails in big and little ways when we just do whatever comes to mind.

His rules include instructions on:

Eating

Rule 39: Except the sick who are very weak, let all abstain entirely from eating the flesh of four-footed animals.

Benedict was very concerned about eating the sort of foods that make you sluggish, self-pitying and slow. He recommended that one should consume modest but nutritious meals only twice a day. (An occasional glass of wine was allowed.) Lamb and beef were to be avoided, but chicken and fish in small quantities were ideal. Benedict was wise enough to see that being an intellectual was entirely compatible with thinking a lot about what one should eat – and his search was for the sort of food that would best nourish and nurture our minds. He thought that everyone should sit together at long tables, but he was also aware of how much idle banter there can be at meals, so he advised that diners should generally listen to someone reading from an important and interesting book while they made their way through lemon chicken with courgettes and beans. If they needed something, they should make a signal with their hands.

Silence

Benedict knew the benefits of silence. When you’ve got a big task on, concentration is key. He knew all about distraction: how easy it is to want to keep checking up on the latest developments, how addictive the gossip of the city can be… That’s why his communities tended to be set up in remote locations, often close to mountains, and his buildings featured heavy walls, quiet courtyards and beautifully serene living quarters.

Benedictine Arch Abbey of Pannonhalma, Hungary. Contemplation room.

Hair and Clothing

Fashion was, in Benedict’s time, as in ours, a huge source of interest, expense and attention. Benedict was himself a handsome man, but he was keen to put a limit on how much he or anyone else would think about what they had to wear every day. That’s why he recommended that everyone in his community wear the same clothes: plain and useful, not too expensive and easy to wash. What’s more, everyone should have their hair cut the same way – very, very short.

Balance

Rule 35: Let the brethren serve one another, and let no one be excused from the kitchen service except by reason of sickness

If you are going to be concentrating quite a lot on ideas and intellectual activities, Benedict knew it could be really helpful also to do some physical activity everyday; something repetitive and soothing might be ideal, like sweeping the floor or weeding a row of lettuces. You might also occasionally take your turn preparing a meal or doing the washing up – everyone does. But mostly it will be other people’s turns so you’ll be free – and guilt free.

Early Nights

You have to go to bed early and get up very early, Benedict knew that. Routine is crucial. You don’t suddenly want to be engaging in a conversation that starts at 11pm, gets rather heated around midnight and leaves you tossing and unable to sleep at 1pm. Get used to winding down systematically, focusing your thoughts and arranging your mind for the next day (a lot of good thinking happens when we’re asleep).

Monk’s bedroom, designed by John Pawson, Monastery of Novy Dvur, Czech Republic.

No porn addiction

Benedict knew that sex gets in the way. But it’s no use thinking endlessly, in repetitive cycles, about naked people when you’ve got really key things to get on with. He wasn’t a prude, and had a great deal of fun as a student, but he knew how short life was and how much he had to do. That’s why he recommended that in the ideal community, everyone should dress in a fairly demure way and that there should be no encouragement given to sexual feelings. Sex simply plays havoc with any attempts to concentrate.

Art/Architecture

At many strategic points in Benedict’s buildings, you’ll see beautiful or dramatic works of art that remind you of some important idea or help you get into a useful mood. Benedict didn’t think that good art and architecture were luxuries: these were vital supports for our inner lives. He understood that we were likely to take our cue about how to be inside ourselves by looking around at the moods emanating from the walls around us. That’s why Benedictine monasteries have long employed the best architects and artists, from Palladio and Veronese to John Pawson in our own times. If you’re going to live together, it makes sense to create a home that is as uplifting and as calming as can be.

Wedding Feast at Cana, Veronese, Monastery of San Giorgio, Venice

Archabbey of Pannonhalma, Hungary, John Pawson

The point isn’t so much that we should particularly embrace the specific rules drawn up by Benedict; rather he is showing us something more general: the potential for rules to help us live well. 

There are periods in life (and history) when it seems as if gaining freedom is the key to a great time. To a four-year-old, who has always been told when to get up, when bath time is and when the lights go out, it’s natural to suppose that it’s wonderful to be old enough to decide for oneself.  But rules about how to live – and the authority to get us to stick with them – start to look more important, even wise, when we have a more urgent sense of the problems to which wise rules are possible solutions, when we realise how prone we are to distraction, dissipation, weakness of will and late-night squabbles. At that point, we may learn that rules – far from being interruptions of our native good selves – are really the restraints that safe-guard our best possibilities. They make us truer to who we want to be than a system which allows to do anything whatsoever.

Two: The Highlights of Community

Benedict established his first monastery at Monte Cassino – about halfway between Rome and Naples. It’s still there (although it had to be rebuilt after it was damaged by allied bombing in 1944).

The lofty – and rather inaccessible – location wasn’t an accident. The point of going to a monastery was to avoid the distractions that might take one’s attention away from what’s really important. We might not share Benedict’s idea of what’s important, but we deeply share the underlying concern: how to focus effectively on what we really want to accomplish and not get distracted all the time.

Benedict acknowledges that it’s hard for creatures like us to ponder the nature of God, examine our own failings or decode the meaning of some obscure Biblical passage – when our natural instincts draw us to eating too much, having sex, scratching our bottoms, getting drunk and gossiping.

Under Benedict’s inspiration, monasteries made a range of dazzling innovations in the field of non-distraction studies. Benedict proposed that to avoid distraction, one might need to live far removed from towns and cities. The architecture should be rather grand and imposing – as a continual reminder of the importance of what one is doing. One should live on-site and not commute in. The walls are going to have to be high and thick. There can’t be lots of doors or big picture windows looking out onto the wider world. Walls, cloisters and being a good few miles from the local tavernas certainly help in the fight against distraction.

Library, Benedictine Abbey of Admont, Austria

The ideal of the monastic community is that living collectively enables people to accomplish more than would be possible by individual effort.

Some aspects of how Benedict imagined that going – like the segregation of the sexes – don’t seem so compelling. But we still need some of the advantages of communal living.

It’s something we can see in action in the housing market. The Royal Crescent in Bath, for instance, is an example of collaboration around accommodation and architecture. Today, around two hundred people live in this building, mostly in modestly sized flats. If, for roughly the same money, they each had a small house it would look something like this:

However, by pooling the fabric of their homes, they collectively share one of the world’s greatest urban structures. Individually, they all have to deal with phone plans, wifi systems, electricity bills, council taxes, plumbing emergencies. But quite possibly one administrator could do it all for them – with an immense saving in terms of frustration. We’d all gain so much by giving up a little of our famed, but actually rather exhausting, individualism.

Monasteries frequently evolved into successful business centres, operating the major industries of the day: farming and mining, schools, hospitals and the early versions of hotels.

Layout of a Benedictine monastery showing factory, offices, workers’ accommodation, boardroom, restaurant. The hotel is on the lower left.

We think we understand collaboration in business. But actually, we are generally only looking at quite a limited range of options. We still assume that in a medium sized company, 157 people will all need to travel in by slightly different routes, all park their cars and in the evenings, all spend their money individually on chicken noodles, rent, a sofa bed and going to a bar.

Many big undertakings of the modern world could be pursued so much more effectively from within a monastery: a great graphic design company, a biotech corporation, a television production firm.

Conclusion:

Communal life can be much more enjoyable and less stressful than the nuclear family, with all its disappointments and pressures. We keep imagining that happiness lies in finding one other very special person (then rail against them for not being perfect enough) or else that it must be about becoming something extraordinary ourselves – rather than joining lots of other very ordinary people to make something superlative. We’d generally be so much better off joining a team. We’d be able to do things on a grander scale and get them done more easily – and more often have our minds in proper focus. That’s why Benedict remains a provocative and useful thinker.

Marcel Proust was an early 20th-century French writer responsible for what is officially the longest novel in the world: À la recherche du temps perdu – which has 1,267,069 words in it; double those in War and Peace.

Marcel Proust (seated), with Robert de Flers (left) and Lucien Daudet (right), ca. 1894

The book was published in French in seven volumes over 14 years:

Du côté de chez Swann, 1913

À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 1919

Le Côté de Guermantes, 1920

Sodome et Gomorrhe, 1922

La Prisonnière, 1923

Albertine disparue, 1925

Le Temps retrouvé, 1927

It was immediately recognised to be a masterpiece, ranked by many as the greatest novel of the century, or simply of all time.

What makes it so special is that it isn’t just a novel in the straight narrative sense. It is a work that intersperses genius-level descriptions of people and places with a whole philosophy of life.

The clue is in the title:

À  la recherche du temps perdu

In Search of Lost Time

The book tells the story of one man – a thinly disguised version of Proust himself – in his developing search for the meaning and purpose of life. It recounts his quest to stop wasting time and start to appreciate existence.

Adrien Proust

Marcel Proust wanted his book to help us. His father, Adrien Proust, had been one of the great doctors of his age, responsible for wiping out cholera in France. Towards the end of his life, his frail, indolent son Marcel, who had lived on his inheritance and had disappointed his family by never taking up a regular job, told his housekeeper Celeste: ‘If only I could do for humanity as much good with my books as my father did with his work.’ The important news is that he amply succeeded.

Proust’s novel charts the narrator’s systematic exploration of three possible sources of the meaning of life.

The first is: SOCIAL SUCCESS. Proust was born into a comfortable bourgeois household; but from his teens, he began to think that the meaning of life might lie in joining high society, which in his day meant, the world of aristocrats, of dukes, duchesses and princes. We shouldn’t think ourselves superior for having no interest in these types. We’re much more likely to be implicated if we convert this category to its present day equivalent: celebrities and business tycoons.

Élisabeth, Countess Greffulhe, 1905, who served as the model for the character of the Duchesse de Guermantes

For years, the narrator devotes his energies to working his way up the social hierarchy; and because he’s charming and erudite, he eventually becomes friends with lynchpins of Parisian high society, the Duke and Duchesse de Guermantes.

Count Henry Greffulhe, 1881, who served as the model for the Duke of Guermantes

But a troubling realisation soon dawns on him. These people are not the extraordinary paragons he imagined they would be. The Duc’s conversation is boring and crass. The Duchesse, though well mannered, is cruel and vain.

Marcel tires of them and their circle. He realises that virtues and vices are scattered throughout the population without regard to income or renown. He grows free to devote himself to a wider range of people. Though Proust spends many pages lampooning social snobbery, it’s in a spirit of understanding and underlying sympathy. The urge to social climb is a highly natural error, especially when one is young. It is normal to suspect that there might be a class of superior people somewhere out in the world and that our lives might be dull principally because we don’t have the right contacts. But Proust’s novel offers definitive reassurance: life is not going on elsewhere. 

The second thing that Proust’s narrator investigates in his quest for the meaning of life is: LOVE.

In the second volume of the novel, the narrator goes off to the seaside with his grandmother, to the vogueish resort of Cabourg (the Barbados of the times).

There he develops an overwhelming crush on a beautiful teenage girl called Albertine. She has short hair, a boyish smile and a charming, casual way of speaking.

For about 300 pages, all the narrator can think about is Albertine. The meaning of life surely must lie in loving her. But with time, here too, there’s disappointment. The moment comes when the narrator is finally allowed to kiss Albertine:

“Man, a creature clearly less rudimentary than the sea-urchin or even the whale, nevertheless lacks a certain number of essential organs, and particularly possesses none that will serve for kissing. For this absent organ he substitutes his lips, and perhaps he thereby achieves a result slightly more satisfying than caressing his beloved with a horny tusk…’

The ultimate promise of love, in Proust’s eyes, is that we can stop being alone and properly fuse our life with that of another person who will understand every part of us. But the novel comes to dark conclusions: no one can fully understand anyone. Loneliness is endemic. We’re awkward, lonely pilgrims trying to give each tusk-kisses in the dark.

This brings us to the third and only successful candidate for the meaning of life: ART

For Proust, the great artists deserve acclaim because they show us the world in a way that is fresh, appreciative, and alive.

Now the opposite of art for Proust is something he calls habit. For Proust, much of life is ruined for us by a blanket or shroud of familiarity that descends between us and everything that matters. It dulls our senses and stops us appreciating everything, from the beauty of a sunset to our work and our friends.

Children don’t suffer from habit, which is why they get excited by some very key but simple things like puddles, jumping on the bed, sand and fresh bread.

But we adults get ineluctably spoilt; which is why we seek ever more powerful stimulants (like fame and love).

The trick – in Proust’s eyes – is to recover the powers of appreciation of a child in adulthood, to strip the veil of habit and therefore to start to look upon daily life with a new and more grateful sensitivity.

This for Proust is what one group in the population does all the time: artists.

Artists are people who strip habit away and return life to its deserved glory, for example, when they lavish appropriate attention upon water lilies or service stations.

Proust’s goal isn’t that we should necessarily make art or be someone who hangs out in museums. It’s to get us to look at the world, our world, with some of the same generosity as an artist, which would mean taking pleasure in simple things – like water, the sky or a shaft of light on a roughly plastered wall.

It’s no coincidence that Proust’s favourite painter was Vermeer: a painter who knew how to bring out the charm and the value of the everyday. 

The spirit of Vermeer hangs over his novel: it too is committed to the project of reconciling us to the ordinary circumstances of life – and some of Proust’s most compelling pieces of writing describe the charm of the everyday: like reading on a train, driving at night, smelling blossom in spring time and looking at the changing light of the sun on the sea.

Proust is famous for having written about the dainty little cakes the French call ‘madeleines’. 

The reason has to do with his thesis about art and habit. Early on in the novel, the narrator tells us that he had been feeling depressed and sad for a while when one day he had a cup of herbal tea and a madeleine – and suddenly the taste carried him powerfully back (in the way that flavours sometimes can) to years in his childhood when as a small boy he spent his summers in his aunt’s house in the country. A stream of memories comes back to him, and fills him with hope and gratitude.

Thanks to the madeleine, Proust’s narrator has what has since become known as A PROUSTIAN MOMENT: a moment of sudden involuntary and intense remembering, when the past promptly emerges unbidden from a smell, a taste or a texture.

Through its rich evocative power, what the Proustian moment teaches us is that life isn’t necessarily dull and without excitement – it’s just one forgets to look at it in the right way: we forget what being alive, fully alive, feels like.

The moment with the tea is pivotal in the novel because it demonstrates everything Proust wants to teach us about appreciating life with greater intensity. It helps his narrator to realise that it isn’t his life which has been mediocre, so much as the image of it he possessed in voluntary memory.

“The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgement, ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life – and therefore we judge it disparagingly.”

That’s why artists are so important. Their works are like long Proustian moments. They remind us that life truly is beautiful, fascinating and complex, and thereby they dispel our boredom and ingratitude.

Proust’s philosophy of art is delivered in a book which is itself exemplary of what he’s saying; a work of art that brings the beauty and interest of the world back to life.

Reading it, your senses are reawakened, a thousand things you normally forget to notice are brought to your attention, he makes you for a time, as clever and as sensitive as he was – and for this reason alone, we should be sure to read him and the 1.2 million life-giving words he so deftly assembled.