Saturday 19 November 2022
Wooden Horse
To govern simply by statute, and to reduce all to order by means of pains and penalties, is to render the people evasive, and devoid of any sense of shame.
Analects of Confucius
The other day, Mrs H and I were talking about people we know of our generation and their adult offspring, many of whom are now middle-aged.
What strikes us as odd, is how many of those offspring are making a mess of their lives, at least by our standards. Not a huge number of people and not disastrous messes by modern standards, but it is still remarkable how big a mess people can make of their lives.
Of course, a favourite media story is the person making a mess of their life. TV soaps and celebrity gossip are full of it, so this is fairly familiar territory for most of us. Yet we pretend that the adult world is basically well-adjusted even though it quite clearly isn’t.
Apart from endless anecdotes I’m not sure what we can say about it, but it does lead a chap to wonder if there is an effect created by too many laws and regulations, too much hectoring communicated too effectively, too frequently and too insistently. Maybe too much official emphasis on pains and penalties has made us evasive.
As B.F. Skinner said long after Confucius - punishment leads to avoidance behaviour. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? What are people avoiding as governments aim to reduce all to order by means of pains and penalties?
One obvious answer to that is self-awareness - hence the messed-up lives. We’re almost toying with a G.K. Chesterton kind of paradox here, but emphasis on personal empowerment has risen strongly during a marked decline in just that - personal empowerment. Maybe our modern emphasis on personal empowerment is the Wooden Horse, the escape attempt.
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7 comments:
I seem to recall when I was a lad that there was commonly held stereotype about the pattern of life. You went to school, got a job (for life), found a spouse, had children, aspired to owning a car and you own house, then a few years of leisurely retirement. Now peoples' lives didn't all happen this way but they had a standard to judge themselves against. In some ways it was quite restrictive.
Then the Sixties happened. Youth became energised by their music and less deferential to their betters (who often turned out to be hypocrites). God was dead, love was free, peace was everything.
So now there is no common stereotype and without the restrictive signposts people can wander off track and harm themselves without realising it.
Is is better to live free and make mistakes or to live constrained but untroubled? Maybe yes, maybe no - but the genie is not going back into the lamp.
DJ - to my mind there are just as many stereotypes, but they are more likely to be political or media creations rather than evolved social stereotypes. Just as restrictive but in different ways and less easy to see without the benefit of decades of hindsight because they are current.
As D.J. says, things were far simpler in the past and the increase in affluence and personal freedom means that there are more ways to muck your life up.
There may be something in the idea of avoiding control and regulation, but I tend to think it is more the other way around. People are led by incessant nudging by the media to think of chaotic and "experimental" lifestyles as desirable. Celebs are addicts, emotionally incontinent, divorced, or depraved. Since the 19th century being sociopathic and self-centred have been seen as signs of individuality and creativity. The media now push this as hard as they can. Probably because it means that we consume more products. We are a society of "individuals", and self-consciously so.
If you can: find something you enjoy and are good at and make a career of it.
Find an angel: marry her.
Like SV I think what underpins todays social trends is the sudden and dramatic shift to mass consumerism and affluence in the late 1950s, something that had never occurred previously. It affected society in a way too complex for most to understand and had serious ramifications to this day.
Mrs Tammly says 'in what sort of ways are they making a mess of their lives?' She thinks generations always have.
Sam - the post came about after hearing about a divorce caused by the husband devoting all his spare time to his computer. We could say that he had made his life quite simple - mostly work and computer. In the modern world, I suppose people could lead fairly simple lives and still experience what feels like creativity and individuality through their computers.
dearieme - I'm reading a Gissing novel at the moment where the theme is just that. Find an angel: marry her.
Tammly - yes, the complexities of it do have serious ramifications. I agree with Mrs Tammly, generations have always made a mess of their lives, but in spite of our prosperity and even though potential causes are widely disseminated and understood, it seems to have made no difference to the prevalence of it.
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