Selfish Whining Monkeys: How we Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy. Rod Liddle
is, on the surface at least, politically neutral. This is why it is so hard to deal with our malaise; because it is the product, in part, of two schools of political thinking which are usually regarded as in opposition to one another – and also of stuff that fits into neither political camp very comfortably. It is a waywardness, then, which muddies all the established paradigms. And, furthermore, all of it contained within a paradox: peace, freedom, affluence, comfort and security are all, you would argue, agreeable entities. But they have caused us a lot of problems, and – as we shall see – they have not made us terribly happy. Peace has made us complacent, freedom has made us irresponsible, affluence has made us acquisitive, comfort has made us neglectful of others, and security has made us – oddly enough – tremblingly insecure. I suppose you could advance the argument that our selfishness has been imposed upon us, much as obesity has been imposed upon the hulking fat tattooed chavmonkey standing in the queue at Burger King for his two supersize cardiocheeseburgers with bacon, double fries and vat of Coke. That would be a very now argument, very 2014; that none of it is our own fault, but it has happened ineluctably, and it could not be otherwise, and perhaps the government should give us some help as a consequence, maybe send us on a course, sort out some counsellors or give us some more money to deal with it. Well, fuck that. We are not totally powerless, not entirely at the mercy of external forces. Our existence precedes our essence, and not the other way around, yes? It is pointless and, I think, cowardly to try to exculpate ourselves on the grounds that we are passive recipients of cultural change which has been imposed upon us, without our connivance. The philosophies we cheerfully embraced came from somewhere; they did not manifest themselves, unbidden, out of the ether. But one way or another, there is something lacking in us; something which previous generations possessed.
Are we as rank as I make out, this generation – the ones born between about 1950 and 1970, the Cold War kids? It is a perverse and narcissistic conceit, that one’s own generation is exceptional in some way, usually a bad way. A similar narcissism to that which afflicts the whacko millennialists with their mad pamphlets and their mad fervour, hungry for annihilation, the end-time Christians and the strange people hunkered down in caves awaiting deliverance. And the similarly transfixed end-time ecomonkeys, waving aloft their forlorn polar bears, no less convinced that a more congenially secular annihilation is just around the corner. Every generation thinks that it is in some way the worst, or the best, or the last, or the first, has been singled out in some way – conclusions drawn from imperfect memories of how things once were, and usually addled by a treacly gallon or two of personal guilt and private misgivings. Personal guilt will undoubtedly intrude here, too, because in many ways I am typical of my generation, in my own selfishness: did I mention the divorce, the lawyers, the money, that stuff? The broken family? And this is a book drawn rather more from anecdotal evidence than from science.
It is possible, then, that this selfishness I’m talking about is actually only my own, which through some convenient psychological process I have extended to an entire generation as a long-winded attempt at exculpation. But I don’t think so. You’ve seen our balance of payments, heard about the vast ocean of personal debt, are aware that marriages don’t last very long these days, that our schools are not as highly regarded as once they were, that there is much less sense of community in your neighbourhood, a dumbed-down culture blaring out of your idiotbox, a nagging dissatisfaction and acquisitiveness at large, and probably inside your own skull. It comes from us, from me, all that stuff; our generation. You might be inclined to blame the bankers, or the politicians, or the divorce courts, or the teachers, or any one of a number of convenient social groups habitually given a kicking by the red-top press. But it’s not them, primarily. It’s us.
The next year for Christmas I got a large tinplate garage which had a manually-operated lift to take the toy cars to the top floor, and a ramp down which they exited onto the carpet. That was shit too, now I come to think of it. We never learn.
* Actually, having said that, rickets is back. According to the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health there was a fourfold increase in this disease of malnourishment (basically, a lack of vitamin D) in the fifteen years leading up to 2010. Also, the Daily Mail reported in March 2013 that some bloke in San Diego got a ‘smallpox-like disease’ as a consequence of doing something jiggy with someone who had been inoculated against smallpox. But that’s probably just the Daily Mail being deranged.
2
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us
Shelley
If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he has to say, and make fun of it.
Thomas Carlyle
In January 2012 the bald but perfectly formed philosopher Alain de Botton proposed the building of a huge tower somewhere in London to commemorate atheism – or, as he put it, Atheism. This suggestion immediately caused a schism in the new church of atheism – perhaps as momentous as that which rent apart Christianity in the eleventh century, when West and East were divided over stuff like the understanding of the Trinity and how long beards should be. (That particular schism is still in existence, despite centuries of attempts at reconciliation.) For immediately Britain’s most senior, gilded atheist cleric, Professor Richard Dawkins, stamped all over Botton’s tower idea, saying words to the effect that it was fucking stupid and unnecessary, and in any case ‘a contradiction in terms’. The whole spat had a wonderfully Pythonesque whiff to it, these fabulously self-regarding monkeys arguing about the appropriateness of a Tower of Babel which would undoubtedly be situated in someplace achingly secular and similarly self-regarding, like Hoxton or Islington, until God blew it down and smote anyone who had been inside, as you will find detailed in the Sibylline Oracles.
The Tower of Botton would, the philosopher revealed, stand precisely 151 feet tall, and its exterior would be inscribed with a binary code denoting the human DNA. Its height would be demarcated precisely into the various geological periods of the earth, with a ‘narrow band of gold’ representing the comparatively brief time that creatures almost as brilliant as Alain de Botton, i.e. humans, have been in existence. Gold, you will note; a metal which humans have worshipped on account of its supposed scarcity and irreducibility, although it is rather less scarce than was formerly believed. There are many, many much scarcer elements, including those which mankind has created by itself, in the manner of a flawed and somewhat reckless deity. I would suggest, if Alain is still intent upon building his fucking stupid tower, that he replace the gold band with one made of Einsteinium, a synthetic and extremely rare and short-lived element which was discovered in the cheerfully toxic debris left over from the first ever hydrogen bomb explosion, back in 1952. Something, then, that mankind, in its insuperable genius, made for itself, and of which it can be suitably proud. People visiting the tower would probably be advised to wear NCB gear and get scrubbed down afterwards, almost certainly by low-paid Eastern European babes – but then this would serve only to enhance the overall visitor experience; it would be a positive selling point. And it might also add a subtle counterpoint to the very premise of the tower: not everything we have done has necessarily been wonderful and uplifting. Quite often we’re just left with questionable stuff like Einsteinium, which of course was named in honour of a man almost as clever as Alain.
Can you imagine anything more self-regarding than a tower built to worship oneself? Because that’s what it is, really – a bit like the marble palace of some Soviet Bloc tyrant beholden to nobody but himself (well, maybe except for the whims of Moscow). An edifice which, even in de Botton’s description, celebrates merely an absence of something, i.e. an absence of God – hence Richard Dawkins’s correct analysis that it would be self-contradictory. This is what happens when we are freed from the requirement to be humble, to bow down, to accept that we are deeply flawed and are inclined – when liberated from the suspicion that someone powerful and vengeful and probably bad-tempered is watching everything we do – to behave rather badly, and with a consuming arrogance. We build things to praise ourselves,