“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.” Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Is it conceivable that we could exchange our dreams for ones that are sustainable?  Is it possible to take the question seriously without being distracted or offended?

Communication today: distraction and outrage

Throughout history, keeping a person’s attention has always been difficult.  I suspect even Cicero, the great Roman orator, had trouble preventing some people from drifting off in the middle of one of his speeches.  Maybe he was tempted to deliver them standing on his head, a tactic once threatened (but sadly never executed) by a former university lecturer of mine frustrated by the inability of us not-especially-bright students to understand what he was saying.

But in the age of electronic media, the task has become a lot harder.  Many of us spend our waking hours going from one interruption or distraction to the next, in the lulls between them waiting to be interrupted.  It is a pattern of consciousness familiar to those with office jobs trying to cope with their e-mail, news addicts, and anyone on Facebook.  With so much to occupy our thoughts and desires, it is not so easy to concentrate all the way to the end of a sentence, let alone the end of an entire article, e-mail, conversation or report.

Cicero made enemies, Mark Antony being the most obvious example, through the reliable but relatively laborious strategy of writing and delivering in public a series of disrespectful speeches.  Today, he could achieve the same effect with a quick tweet.  Electronic communication has made it amazingly easy to give offence, and to lose a receptive audience in the process.  As Americans say, it ‘reads cold’ in the absence of a human voice or visual expression; and if the topic is related to something moral or ethical, the reader is quick to sniff out an odour of superiority emanating from the writer.  And if readers feel criticized, in addition to having numerous other calls on their attention, the writer has an even more difficult job to maintain their focus.

By being quick to reject a message if it seems moralistic, we make ourselves impervious to any insight it might otherwise, albeit painfully, provide.  For example, whatever one’s views on organized religion, the following sentence offers food for thought in spite of the clumsiness of its metaphor: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”  No doubt, each quotation of this ilk halves the readership of a blog post in an instant, as it triggers psychological defense mechanisms against moralizing, misogeny, hypocrisy, do-good-ism, kill-joy-ism, …

Can’t buy me love

And yet – if we can manage to put these emotional triggers to one side – it is an interesting comment about what does, or does not, make us happy.  Back in the 1960s, Paul McCartney penned a simpler version: “money can’t buy me love”.  But money is only one of the ways by which a person can become rich.  Without necessarily owning a large house or boasting a large bank balance, we can travel the world, try lots of novel experiences, read lots of interesting books and learn all sorts of stuff, see great films and shows, eat amazing foods, meet lots of wonderful people, …

The previous sentence probably articulates the ‘purpose of life’ for many of us.  It is what our education system and media jointly endorse.

Stimulation and response

There is though a problem: the yawning gap between what we experience and what we assimilate.  It is possible for the onslaught of data (factual or otherwise), and visual imagery, to impair creativity and sensitivity, judgement and reason.  In one of his books (does it matter which one?), Alain de Botton comments that most ‘well-educated’ Westerners today are better read, in the sense of having read much more, than ancient philosophers like Cicero.  We are not necessarily wiser than them as a result.  Many science graduates know more physics than Einstein with arguably less to show for it.  Einstein could not be bothered to remember anything that was easy to look up in a textbook, but today our values are different and we measure ‘intelligence’ in terms of a person’s ability to answer factual questions quickly.  Television programmes like University Challenge, Eggheads, Pointless, Mastermind, QI and so on might seem to be just fun and not serious, but they reveal what we think it means to have a ‘good brain’.  It seems to mean a smattering of knowledge on a very wide range of subjects, combined with rapid recall.  The zeitgeist refuses to countenance the possibility of being ‘over-educated’ like Wilde’s character Algernon, or Dickens’ M’Choakumchild in Hard Times.

In a similar vein, we assume it is impossible to be too well travelled, to know too many people, or to have had too many experiences.  And yet our energy, devotion and capacity to make sense of the world are not without limit or invulnerable to fatigue.  Just as soil can become depleted from over-use, so we can become depleted and depressed from over-stimulation.  Maybe this varies from one person to the next; and we should be taught to recognize our individual limits.

Otherwise, we start to miss the value within.  We become a bit like Lady Dedlock in Bleak House: bored and irritable at spending time in the country away from the glitz and glamour of London high society.  Boredom is telling, because it often (usually?) manifests a dulled sensitivity, a temporary failure to be enthused by the qualities of the person/place/experience that we perceive to be dull.  The problem may lie with the observer, not the observed.

Environment

So what does any of this have to do with the environment?  I think that our high octane way of life contributes to a low boredom threshold and depression if we are not ‘on the go’.  So we seek happiness through a combination of buying stuff, homes, travel, rich food, and big parties.  All of this requires a lot of energy, land and resources; and leads to a high level of pollution and destruction.

Is our education system helping?  In many ways, it encourages the dream.  In addition to loading us with plenty of information about the external world, maybe it would do well to teach us how to be kind to ourselves and see the value in the seemingly ordinary.  That life is ‘in here’ and not just ‘out there’.  That the ordinary person next to us, and the one inside us, is not only as important but as intrinsically interesting as a politician, sportsman or celebrity in the news.

Maybe it is as important to learn about ourselves as it is to learn about numbers bond and spellig.  Why are we so restless?  Is a lot of it about fear – fear of death, immigrants, sexual predators, financial loss?  Is some of it personal dissatisfaction, because we are exposed to celebrities, fashion models and sports stars, and it is hard not to compare ourselves unfavourably against them; and because our education system tells us the world is our oyster, so we are failing if we do not make the most of it?

This is speculative, because I do not know what I’m talking about.  But nor through history have some of our best novelists, artists and poets, who have relied more on thoughts and feelings than encyclopaedic knowledge.  Perhaps the latter is better suited to computers than people.

And perhaps, with an increased emphasis on caring and psychological and physical health, our education system could help us to develop more of a sense of security and belonging, and dreams that are commensurate with sustained life on our planet.