21 Letters on Life and Its Challenges Read online

  LETTER 2

  THE HUMAN IMPERATIVE

  Despite what I said in my first letter there are some parts of life that don’t change, and in many ways they are the more important things. Think about this: there are, as I write, three separate productions of Shakespeare’s play Macbeth playing in London as well as one opera of the same name. Last year the Oresteia of Aeschylus was performed in London to a packed theatre and enthusiastic applause. Shakespeare was writing his dramas in the time of Queen Elizabeth I, Aeschylus, in Greece, almost 500 years before Jesus Christ was born. Novels by Tolstoy, Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy are perennial favourites for television adaptations. Many would say that George Eliot’s Middlemarch, written 150 years ago, is still the best English novel ever written. I could go on to list many more books and plays in many different languages that have stood the test of time and are still seen as relevant today.

  Why is this? Yes, these works are well written and well performed on stage or screen, but there must be something more if what they were writing about all those centuries ago still interests us today. The answer, I’m sure, is that these works deal with the things that never change, with the way people relate to each other and the way they feel and think about life. Put two or more people together and stuff happens, not all of it good although much of it nice. People have been loving and unloving each other, fighting and quarrelling, celebrating and laughing together since the days of Adam and Eve. The human condition hasn’t changed for thousands of years, despite all the technological and political upheavals those years have seen.

  Those upheavals are themselves the work of humans. We have no one to blame or thank but ourselves, even if our best intentions sometimes go wrong. Most wars, even those of this century and the last, have been caused, as much as anything, by the ambitions and lust for power of particular individuals. There was no logical or compelling need for either Alexander the Great or Hitler to set out to occupy and rule over so many countries. They each had quite enough to occupy them at home. Nor, on another plane, is there any necessary economic reason for huge businesses to get ever bigger, sweeping up smaller enterprises as they grow. It is all due to the ambitions of the individuals in charge, however well intentioned they may think they are. Why, too, do the so-called captains of business continue to expect to be paid multi-millions of dollars that they will never be able to spend? What can be the point, other than to have a mark of their success, an expensive certificate of achievement?

  On the more positive side, when Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, which he then generously gave to the world for free, he had no desire to change the world the way his invention did. He wanted to improve the communications between researchers in his field of work, to make things function better, not to make more money or to find fame. When Mark Zuckerberg and his college room-mates developed the first versions of Facebook he cannot have known that he would eventually be affecting the lives of so many or of accumulating so many billions of personal wealth.

  Both these people and many entrepreneurs like them are driven by a creative urge to make something different or better. That they get rich or famous as a result was not, in most cases, the primary motive. They were just humans doing what some humans have always done: tinkering with things. Or with ideas: Einstein wasn’t thinking of atomic bombs when he came up with his idea of relativity; he was trying to unravel a puzzle. Artists paint, compose or, like me, write, mostly because that is what they feel compelled to do. If they do it solely for a more utilitarian motive, like money, it often will not come out as well. Money and fame can often be the end result but not the original driving purpose. The different things that drive people have puzzled and intrigued me throughout my life. I know now that none of that is new; it is just the context that changes. What once drove the Medici banking family in Florence in the fifteenth century is no different from the ambitions of the Royal Bank of Scotland in this century: to become the biggest bank in the world, with, ultimately, the same result – they overreached themselves. People don’t change, even while the world does. The really big questions of life remain the same, even in the midst of a technological revolution.

  What is just? What is fair? Who gets what? Does he/she love me? Whom can I trust? Who are my real friends? Should I/we forgive or forget a wrong? Am I better/stronger/ more successful than him or her or them? Even in families these questions lurk beneath the surface, quietly ignored but festering away. If that is true in families who are locked into a common heritage, how much more probable are such questions in organisations of strangers? I have often thought that I would like to be a hermit, isolated from people and all the complications that they bring with them. But then I would miss all the consolations and affections that they also bring. Loneliness is the disease of old age and one that pills can’t cure. Other people are a necessary part of life. You have to work out how to live with them, like them or not.

  The first thing, therefore, to remember when any one of that list of questions crops up in your own life, is that neither you nor the question are unusual. Whatever it is, it has happened before, many times to many people. History and great literature are there to reassure you if you bother to look, read and study them. Great novels and the biographies of the great are the best guides to human situations. When I was writing my first book, on the ways and habits of organisations, I looked for examples of the ideas and concepts that I was exploring. I had shut myself away in a farmhouse in the South of France to do it and had packed the boot of the car with piles of American textbooks and research papers, for this was long before the days of the internet. Books and papers were all I had. I quickly found that most of the research relied on experiments with graduate students to illustrate their points, experiments that seemed to me to have little connection with real life. Luckily the farmhouse had a large library with a rich collection of Russian novels. Tolstoy, I discovered, had much more to say about the problems of life in organisations than any of the student experiments. The book, my first, went on to become a worldwide bestseller, partly because the stories from literature brought it to life.

  I have spent most of my years without most of the technological aids that your generation take for granted. They make life easier, or can do, but an understanding of the human condition is the best preparation we could have for meeting the challenges that life throws in our path. The good news, too, is that humans have always been the same, with the same urges, desires, frustrations, quirks and charms. You don’t have to reinvent them. As I discovered, you only have to read Tolstoy, and maybe Dostoevsky, to know most of it. I often think that if more politicians had read history they would not have tried to invade Iraq or Afghanistan or topple dictators in alien countries. History holds lessons that we ignore at our peril. At a personal level, my own rule is to think the best of people until you are proved wrong. It has led me down some false alleys but also produced some wonderful experiences. I like, therefore, the old rule of the Cold War negotiations: ‘Trust but verify’.

  You might like to try it.

  LETTER 3

  LIFE’S BIGGEST QUESTION

  By the time you get round to reading this, if you ever do, you will be close to ending your long years of education and stepping out into the world. That is when, if you are like me, you start to ask yourself: What happens now? or, What am I now qualified to do? or, more fundamentally, What is life about? and Why am I here? If you are like me, or like most of us, you will keep coming back to these questions as you move through life, but you will have to start now at the beginning of the journey or you won’t know where you are heading.

  Of course, a decent education should have helped you to answer these questions before you left the cloistered world of school or university but, sadly, these topics are not part of any core curriculum, while a career adviser, if such a person came your way, is primarily concerned with fitting you into a slot where you might be useful enough to earn a living wage. That, however, is only ever part of the answer to
those bigger questions. Why do I need to turn philosopher right now? you will ask. All I need is a job and some money. Yes, that is the How? But the Why? will keep nudging at the back of your mind until you tackle it. I had only two concerns when I left university – never to go to church again and never to be poor. I soon discovered that these negative ambitions were not enough to build a life on.

  Why are we here? I began to ask myself. Are we just the result of an (often unplanned) conception, the chance union of a sperm and a waiting egg? If so, does this mean that we have no responsibility to anyone for anything? Are we any different from a cabbage in the vegetable patch or a lily in the garden, something that just happens to be there? Or are we, as humans, something different? We have consciousness. We, alone of all other species, are aware of ourselves; we can consciously choose our futures, think conceptually and work out reasons for things and events. Does this give us a special responsibility to do something with our lives, or is it just another burden?

  Maybe you are religious and see the mysterious hand of God in our creation. If so you do have an obligation, I suggest, to live up to God’s expectations, if you can work out what they are. The works of the different religions will give you guidance on this and even a list of commandments. For many of the faithful this is very helpful because this guidance sets down the rules and purposes of life, which – if you accept them – remove all doubt and anxiety. It’s a big if, however, because you do have to accept the original starting point, that God is at the heart of things.

  Some people duck that first step of belief but are content to accept the rules laid down by the religions as if they were true believers. That works well for them until they come up against the really difficult decisions. At that point their lack of belief in the underlying assumption that God is at the centre of everything will weaken their resolve to keep to God’s rules. I suspect that this unstated half-belief is the way most people run their lives. There is a shared consensus between all the major religions on what are the basic rules of behaviour, starting with the so-called ‘golden rule’, to treat others as you would like them to treat you. Most people in the West go along with the basic rules of Christianity but would not call themselves Christian because they can’t buy into the underlying premise. Britain, as a result, still feels like a Christian country although only 2 per cent of us go to church.

  You could, alternatively, take the evolutionary route and say to yourself that you are part of a long trail of genes, that your only essential task is to pass on your genes to the next generation without adulterating the trail. To survive and procreate is enough. Evolution is not about progress or direction. It is only about adapting to the world around us in order to have a better chance of the gene trail surviving through your offspring and subsequent generations. That lets you off the hook of any need to have a deeper purpose. Your main duty is to live as long and as healthily as you can and take care to procreate – provided, that is, you think your genes are good enough to stand the test of time. If you do that then there is no other obligation. It is my sense that quite a lot of people think like that without knowing anything about the theory of evolution.

  Such thinking, however, is dangerous. If everyone believed that our only duty was to maintain the process of evolution it would leave us with a society without any sense of direction or clear principles. This is why religions became necessary. They provided society with a form of social control by setting down a purpose for life and some guidance of how to live it. With the decline of religion in many societies we risk falling back into a directionless evolution. That would be dangerous and is why the question What is life about? is so important.

  It’s a small step from evolution to existentialism. Popularised by people like Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialism maintains that we are each responsible for our own values and for finding our own meaning in life, because we are human. ‘Existence precedes essence’ was the credo of these philosophers, meaning that we are all unique and different individuals who alone can decide why and how to live our lives. It is a tempting but, in the end, tough option. It is tempting because it sets you free from all the rules and dogmas of society. You are free to be yourself. That, however, is the tough bit because you have to work out who you are and what you think are the important values in life. ‘Man needs meaning,’ said Sartre, ‘but he must create his own.’ At first sight, this is a recipe for selfishness, unless you agree with Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, that anything you decide for yourself ought also, logically, to apply to everyone else. He called it the categorical imperative.

  My version of the categorical imperative is less rigid. I call it ‘proper selfishness’ or a modified version of existentialism. To look after your own needs and wants is right and proper, I argue, because you have to feel good about yourself before you can be of any use to others. If you only work to please yourself you won’t be of any use to man or beast and won’t feel proud of it in the end. On the other hand, if you haven’t invested in yourself to begin with you will also be of no use to man or beast. Love your neighbour as yourself, in other words. Real satisfaction, I have found, comes from seeing the satisfaction in those whom you have affected. We seem to have been born with altruism in our genes; generosity is inbred in us. It would be inhuman to stifle it. It was Churchill who said that you earn your living by what you get, you justify it by what you give.

  If existentialism sounds too difficult as a way to run your life, you could go with the sixth century BC Chinese philosopher Confucius, who did not believe in any gods and was writing and teaching 500 years before Christ. He said:

  You are humane if you can practise five things in the world – respectfulness, magnanimity, truthfulness, acuity [intelligence], and generosity. If you are respectful you won’t be despised; if you are magnanimous you will win people; if you are truthful you will be trusted; if you have acuity you will be able to employ people.

  These are good rules for living but they don’t tell you what life is for.

  Or you could look to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher of the natural life who defined the good life as follows:

  To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded.

  I find much to agree with in this but to me it is the very least we can do with our one and precious life. We could and should do more.

  In the end I turned to Aristotle, whose ideas have stood the test of 2,500 years. He was more ambitious in describing the meaning of the good life. He believed that our first priority is to be virtuous in our daily lives but then to seek for what he called eudaimonia. This is a tricky concept. Strictly, it means well-being or happiness. But Aristotle did not mean a sort of passive happiness or idle pleasure. Happiness and pleasure are very different things. You should not confuse them. Aristotle’s idea of happiness was more active, more like self-fulfilment. Life, he felt, has to be about more than enjoying oneself. I sum up his philosophy as: ‘Doing the best you can with what you are best at.’ That’s often quite hard to work out. What are you best at? And are you doing your best with it? Even then there is one more snag. Aristotle insisted that you must also be a good person; a ‘virtuous’ one, he called it. You may be a whizz on the computer but that does not mean that you can use your skill to hack into my bank accounts. Aristotle had a very precise idea of what virtue was which I will discuss in another letter. His point was that we are social animals and cannot live in isolation. Our deeds inevitably affect others. It’s ‘proper selfishness’ again.

  In my own life I have gone through all the stages. I started life in a rectory where I was told and believed that God had a purpose for me in life. If I trusted him and follo
wed his rules I would find it. I gave up that idea in my late teens. Then, when I left university, I found that I had no idea what to do with my life. I had studied the classics and philosophy. That qualified me for nothing. All I wanted to do was to earn enough money to support myself and to enjoy life – the selfish existential option. I did enjoy myself for a few years and I did make money but the pursuit of selfish pleasure soon palls and I found that I was only a small cog in a big machine called an international business. Anyone could do my job. I wanted a way to express myself usefully but with more freedom.

  It was time to go back to Aristotle. I now believe that we each have in us what I call a ‘golden seed’: a special talent, skill or aptitude. If you know what it is, or if someone close to you can spot it, if you then fertilise it and give it room to grow, it will eventually allow you to be the best at what you are best at, and if you do so while being a good and honest person, you will have a purposeful and fulfilling life. You will be an Aristotelian. In my case I had no idea what my golden seed might be, but as I said goodbye to my mother when I set off for South East Asia and my first job, she, who did not at all approve of my choice of career, said, ‘Never mind, dear, it will all be great material for your books.’ ‘Books, Mother?’ I replied. ‘I’m going to be an oil executive; there will be no time for books.’ ‘Yes, dear,’ she said, as mothers do when you know they mean ‘No, dear’. Fifteen years later I had left Shell and my first book had been published. Sometimes mothers are the best at spotting golden seeds, although teachers are also good at it, or godparents if you are still in touch with them.