Engaging with Oliver Burkeman: towards a Christian ‘antidote’

When visiting the local Waterstones, and other bookshops, I tend to take a quick glance at the section of the shelves variously marked ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’, ‘Spirituality’ or ‘Self Help’.  That often includes ‘religion’, though I’ve been struck recently by the declining shelf space occupied by Christian material.

My impression is that people are drawn to Christianity sometimes as a result of life problems with which they lacked the resources to deal.  So, I’m naturally curious about which ‘life problems’ currently head the popular agenda, as well as the philosophical or religious basis of the solutions being offered by the books on sale.  I guess, underlying this interest, is a conviction that Christianity, unfashionable though it has become, really ought to have something to offer in this department.

Maybe it was some such interest that motivated Elisabeth Oldfield of the Theos Think Tank, in her recent excellent podcast, to interview Guardian columnist and best-selling self help author, Oliver Burkeman.  She claims on the video to have been drawn by his manner of using people’s everyday life problems as a way of ‘burrowing down’ into deep philosophical and religious issues. 

At all events, all this signalled to me a good opportunity for Christian cultural engagement. So, I duly bought and read Burkeman’s most recent book – The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. I was not disappointed.

The problem with positive thinking ….

What is the ‘antidote’ of the title? The word suggests a medication to counteract a venom or poison. The venom, in this case could be either ‘positive thinking’ itself, or it could be the ethos of ‘intolerance of uncertainty’ and ‘insecurity’ which, according to Burkeman positive thinking seeks to address.

It is the first of these which, on the face of it, offers the structuring idea that holds the book together. The first chapter reports the author’s visit to ‘America’s most popular motivational seminar’ (a chapter almost as boring as the event described, despite the author’s best efforts at humorous treatment).  Subsequent chapters (like their subject matter, vastly more entertaining) focus, in the familiar journalisty way, on a personal ‘story’, emanating largely from an interview or the author’s own experience somehow relating in a negative fashion to positive thinking and its mania for setting personal goals (goalaholicism).  For example, Stoic ‘negative visualization’, presented for us through an interview with the UK’s foremost contemporary Stoic, Dr Keith Seddon, offers us the antithesis of the ‘positive visualization’ dear to Tony Robbins; a lively report of the author’s own participation in an Insight Meditation Society retreat demonstrates the aim of the properly Buddhist practice to be a spiritual ‘detachment’ evidently incompatible with goalaholicism; an interview with ‘the world’s bestselling living ‘spiritual’ author, Ulrich (now Eckhart) Tolle even throws into doubt the very existence of that ‘self’ Robert Schuller would have us setting our goals for.  And so on.

But does the book also purport to be an ‘antidote’ in addressing the underlying problems to which positive thinking provides so evidently spurious an answer? Does it offer anything in the way of an alternative solution? 

Actually, you can’t say much about Stoicism or the true end of Buddhist meditation without getting into some serious thinking – and Burkeman yields happily enough to the temptation.  The reader soon discerns a distinctive authorial angle on the issues considered. This from time to time expands into reflections of a philosophical and religious nature which reveal sufficient consistency over the book to entitle us, I think, to speak of a philosophical and religious perspective that is recognisable enough.  If I had to encapsulate the essence of this position, I could do worse than proffer, in response, the name of the great sixties prophet of the ‘spiritual but not religious’, Alan Watts.

Watts might even have been as appropriate an interlocutor as Oliver Burkeman for the purposes of the present piece.  Be that as it may, I make no apology if the remainder of this blog gives an impression of addressing the high-priest of self-help spirituality through the intermediary of his living disciple. 

Here, then, is the philosophy (whether of Watts or Burkeman, I’m not sure) as presented in passages scattered through the chapters of The Antidote. 

The ‘self’ and its discontents

The first and longest concerns a challenge that Watts sets his readers – to define where ‘self’ ends and ‘everything else’ begins.  This turns out to be less than straightforward.  For a start, it is by no means obvious where such a boundary should be placed.  Should our relationships be considered an aspect of what makes us who we are; or are they part of the ‘out there’ which we inhabit?  And what about the communities in which we belong, or even the things that constitute our physical environment?  Would we truly be what we are, without them?  And so on.

More fundamentally, we will become aware of a certain arbitrariness about the very notion of a boundary:

… it doesn’t make much sense to describe a boundary as something that keeps two things apart.  It makes more sense to describe it as the place at which they meet – or more accurately, the place at which they are exactly the same thing.  The inside of the boundary relies for its very existence on the outside, and vice versa; they are, inextricably and by definition, part of the same whole … the self is best thought of as some kind of a fiction …. (pp. 121-2).

Now this most fundamental of realizations, says B., can help us understand why attempts to achieve happiness through the ‘optimism-focused, goal-fixated, positive-thinking approach to happiness’ are doomed to frustration.  To see precisely why, we need to step back a couple of chapters to the account that B. gives us of the week he once spent at a retreat with the Insight Meditation Society.

Burkeman’s observations on this experience are so helpful in delineating his own position, and so revealing of both its strength and its limitations, that I make no excuse for appearing to embark on what may seem a digression, at this point. Their relevance relevance to our argument will shortly become clear.

So let us consider that experience.

Participants in the retreat, he tells us, were instructed to focus on their breathing.  In the words of the instructor: ‘”Physical sensations, feelings and thoughts will carry us away into distraction.  In meditation, when we notice that happening, we don’t judge.  We just return to the breath.”  It was really that simple, apparently’, B. goes on.  Needless to say, ‘simple’ doesn’t mean ‘easy’, as becomes apparent from what follows in B.’s account.  Yet, by the end of the retreat, something has happened:

My constant efforts to return to focussing on my breath – to avoid becoming attached to thoughts or emotions – seemed to be having an effect.  My vantage point on my mental activity had altered, as if I’d climbed two rungs up a stepladder in order to observe from above. … Much of my thinking concerned the past or the future, but I was no longer being yanked off into daydreams or unpleasant memories; I was absolutely present, there on the cushion, watching the performance with something less like panic and more like interest.

The meditator has become aware of a separation between their ‘vantage point’ as meditator and their own thoughts and feelings.  In more philosophical terms, the ‘subject’ (i.e. that ‘whatever-it-is’ constituting the ‘vantage point’) is revealed to be non-identical with ‘self’ or ‘ego’.

Now this is the realization that B. brings to the critique of ‘goal-fixated’ positive-thinking.  Whereas meditation is about ‘disidentifying’ from our own mental projections of ourselves, positive-thinking is all about identifying with them.  We ‘fortify’ the boundaries of the self by ‘asserting superiority over others, as if we could separate ourselves from them’.  It is easy to see why this is futile and self-defeating, given that what is being asserted here (i.e. the self) is ultimately fictional.  In short, ‘goal-fixated’ positive-thinking is, in B’s view, chasing the wind.  It risks drawing us into a vicious loop whereby the tighter our clasp on ‘reality’, the more it will seem to elude us.

So much then for the philosophical ‘antidote’ Burkeman and Watts appear to be offering us.

What do we make of it?

Is ‘self’ really the problem?

Broadly, there are some aspects that seem to me sound, others I find hard to accept.

Among the first, most important is that sense B. derives from his experience of Buddhist meditation of the ‘subject’ existing independently of the ‘self’ or ‘ego’.  It also follows from B.’s reflection on that experience – as from the more theoretical kind of introspection we find in existentialist philosophy – that the ‘subject’ and the ‘reality’ of its experience exist in co-dependency with each other.  By this I mean that ‘reality’ – at least as we humans know it – can only be apprehended from the vantage point of an experiencing subject; and, conversely, that human subjectivity is thinkable only in relation to a world that opens up to it. 

However, I would disagree with the next move in their argument, namely, that, if the subject and its reality are mutually co-dependent, therefore ‘they are exactly the same thing’; or that, because the notion of a boundary between subject and reality depends on it having two sides, such a boundary has only a notional existence.  Why, in principle, couldn’t two things be ‘inextricably and by definition, part of the same whole’, yet NOT reducible to one another!

The reason, I believe, has to do with a confusion in mind of Burkeman and Watts between two distinct things: namely, the ‘subject’, and the ‘self’/‘ego’ of its projections.  It is perfectly true, of course, that the self (an object in our world like anything else) cannot easily be distinguished from the non-self.  But there is no reason to suppose that this same indistinguishability also applies to the relationship between the subject and its world.  In fact, the lesson to be drawn from B.’s meditation experience is precisely that the subject IS in essence separable from the self of our conscious projections.  In fact, it is precisely this realization that then enables us to recognize the inseparability of self and non-self.  Without that realization, subject and self remain intertwined. As a result, the fundamental ‘over-and-against-ness’ of the subject is imputed also to the self, thus driving that tendency B. observes for us to ‘fortify’ our egos.

There is another aspect of B.’s argument that I cannot accept.  This is that self and ego are any more ‘fictional’, or less real, for not being identical with the subject.  The reasoning of Descartes, which constitutes a point of departure for Burkeman’s discussion, happens to offer an interesting case of precisely the opposite conclusion. Descartes’ reasons from the apperception of the ‘cogito’ (the undeniable reality of the ‘I’ that thinks, or, at least, of the act of thinking that goes on) to the evident reality of those other phenomena of his world which offer themselves to our ‘clear and distinct’ reasonings.  While B. argues from the unreality of the self and its projects to the unreality of everything else (hence for a policy of acquiescence in the transience of life), Descartes moves from its evident reality to the reality of things in the world.  All things considered, I cannot see why the co-dependency of subject and reality should lead us to conclude anymore to the unreality of both terms than to their reality. 

Certainly, if durability in time is a criterion, there appear aspects of the self that would seem more long-lasting and more rooted in the past than the subject.  Social identity, culture and language, through their reproduction and transmission down the generations, would seem to achieve considerable durability.  Cultural systems are all sustained through a struggle against natural transience; indeed, human civilization, taken in aggregate, would seem a remarkably successful effort to achieve a degree of permanence over time – a more or less effectual, if spatio-temporally very localized, resistance to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  In fact, if you want fully to weigh up what that overall human project means for our sense of self – try, as a thought-experiment, to take imaginatively fully on board the notion of an imminent and certain extinction of humanity – or even just of our cultural tradition.  Our sense of self can indeed survive the prospect of personal death, but the very thought of a final catastrophe instantly turns out the light on any human meaning and value.,

So, how do these concerns relate to what B.’s book is saying?  Do they detract in any way from its value?

Not altogether.  B. adduces various interesting and amusing examples of where the fixation on goals, so characteristic of positivity culture, can turn out to be counter-productive.  It is surely true, that, as Steve Shapiro comments ‘you can have a broad sense of direction without a specific goal, or precise vision of the future’.  Given the uncertainties the future presents, there may be much to be said, in many contexts, for the more improvisatory strategy of ‘meandering with purpose’.   Yet, even if precise goals have their place in business planning, the transformation of such strategies into principles for the conduct of our private lives will have implications for our attitudes to failure, uncertainty and insecurity, that hardly be conducive to personal contentment.

That said, the fundamental aspiration, and even need, to ‘control the future’ is surely common to all human projects, collective as much as individual.  It is our human lot to struggle for order in the world – even if perfectionism, the denial of past failures, or an overly narrow focus on very specific goals, turn out to be strategies poorly adapted for success in that struggle. Hence the only alternative to a self clearly defined over-and-against its world, is disengagement from worldly projects.  There are doubtless benefits to a degree of temporary disengagement – as a temporary strategy for challenging our narrow self-definition, perhaps, or, for expanding our definition of self.  Yet, the ultimate purpose of these exercises remains the re-established engagement of an expanded self with broader projects, not a continuation of the disengagement.  Even in the case of the greatest conceivable expansion of our definition of self, that self must remain a ‘self’ (and as such distinct from the subject).  And the purpose ultimately served thereby would be an expansion of self and its engagements, not its elimination.

So, I am suspicious of those more philosophical aspects of B.’s critique of positive thinking that rely on the kind of existential analysis promoted by the likes of Alan Watts, Eckhart Tolle, or Ernest Becker.  I do not believe the self to be a ‘fiction’ – not even a ‘useful’ one.  Yes, it is a social/cultural ‘construct’ – but that is a very different claim.

This leaves us with the question – since the struggle to control the future and maintain self-definition is unavoidable – whether the specific construction of self we find in positivity culture is indeed so unusually prone to ‘insecurity’ and ‘intolerance of certainty’.  If so, then why?

A very modern kind of ‘self’

That was the question going around in my head, as I went to bed one evening.  To my surprise, I woke up about 4 am the following morning clutching at what seemed like an answer.  On this occasion, that answer turned out to be no mere figment of my dreams, but an apparently sensible, if by no means immediately obvious, connection with a train of ideas I had been pursuing for some time in a rather different enquiry.

I am referring here to the notion of self that we find evoked most famously by Charles Taylor in his various explorations of the contemporary culture of expressivist individualism.  Actually, this is a very different meaning of self from the one I have assumed in the above paragraphs.  Taylor’s concept is an ideological – or, more properly, I should say, ideational – one, and is consequently quite specific to what Taylor considers to be the dominant worldview of the contemporary age: namely, expressivist individualism.   To avoid confusion, I shall henceforth use a capital letter (Self) to distinguish this ideational meaning of self from the more general one.

Already, my reading of The Antidote had led me to reflect on a range of terms – ‘ego’, ‘first person’, ‘self’, ‘subject’ – seemingly being deployed by B. as potential synonyms in relation that/those ill-defined entit(ies).  What occurred to me at 4am that morning related to one potential consequence of such terminological ambiguity.  Maybe, I thought, it was the specific understanding of self as ‘Self’ rather than the more general explanations of Watts or Tolle that lay at the existential basis of extreme contemporary attitudes to insecurity and intolerance, especially in positivity culture.  On reflection it became clear to me that this was most certainly the case.      

To explain my conviction, I need to say something about expressivist individualism, and the very specific understanding of self (i.e. as Self) that it tends to produce.

Broadly, much contemporary culture (including positive thinking) defines Self as something ‘inward’ and uniquely precious to each one of us which we discover through its expression in the world.  Expressivist individualism is the belief that such ‘self-fulfilment’ or ‘self-realization’ constitutes the ultimate source of value and the ultimate human good.  Not only does this belief exalt the innerness of the ‘individual’, but also the phenomena of life that are shown to be capable of transformation into something of ultimate value through our experience of them.  

It is hard to flesh out this definition without reference to the practice that is integrally related to it, almost its ‘sacrament’ – notably, that of creativity, especially as embodied in Romantic and post-Romantic notions of ‘epiphanic art’.  In particular, we find exemplified here the idea of a ‘work’ whose outcome cannot be foreseen prior to its accomplishment – hence, the artist’s protestations as to their song/poem etc. not serving to articulate any preconceived message.  Linked to this, we find the value attached to the particularity of the work – hence, the importance of originality.

Expressivist individualism is the application of this notion of ‘creativity’ as a paradigm or model to the whole of one’s life.  Life as a whole is seen as the potential expression of a unique inner self; one’s crucial decisions and whole way of life proceed, ideally, out of a commitment to some inner purpose that is uniquely one’s own, and a value attaches above all to its singularity.

All this is rarely articulated at a theoretical level.  For many, such notions form part of those ideational underpinnings of their everyday lives, the bedrock of their moral commonsense.  For all their inescapably mystical/ideological nature, people rarely question them.  We don’t as a rule question those most fundamental of our ideas which we can’t think beyond, and which determine our thinking about everything else.  An appreciation of their particularity would require of us a degree of de-familiarization and the capacity, as it were, to catch a glimpse of ourselves in the eyes of the cultural other.  This is the exploit we expect of a social anthropologist, the trick we see pulled off by a Mary Douglas, turning an eye recently acculturated in the ways of a tribal people on ritual practices of the North London middle classes, and describing in mystical and religious terms practices that would normally strike us as too banal to be worthy of comment.  But it is a perspective also perhaps available to social and cultural revolutionaries.  At all events, the following extract from a prose ‘novel’ by the

Surrealist Andre Breton, dating from the 1920s, offers the best expression known to me the expressivist individualist mindset.

Over and above the various prejudices I acknowledge, the affinities I feel, the attractions I succumb to, the events which occur to me and to me alone – over and above a sum of movements I am conscious of making, of emotions I alone experience – I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference (‘différenciation’) from them.  Is it not precisely to the degree I become conscious of this difference that I shall have the revelation (‘je me révélerai’) of what I alone have been put on this earth to do, what unique message I alone may bear so as to have to answer for it with my life (‘pour ne pouvoir répondre de son sort que sur ma tête’)

This is almost the definition of expressivist individualism placed in the mouth of a first-person narrator.  However, the mystical nature of the language de-familiarizes what would otherwise strike us as the almost commonplace character of the sentiments expressed.  It was, of course, the explicit intention of the surrealists to de-familiarize the familiar.  But in the context of the novel as a whole – and the surrealist oeuvre more generally – this mystical language of ‘message’ and ‘revelation’ also has a programmatic function, being widely used by the surrealists in reference to the operation of poetic creativity.  We find in this passage an almost total convergence of real-life aspiration with the ideal of poetic creation exemplified by the text we hold in our hands.  In this case, therefore, it requires no great stretch of the imagination to see life patterning itself on art!   

I hope to have said enough about expressivist individualism and its construction of self (i.e. as ‘Self’) for my understanding of both those notions to be clear to the reader.

Now – to return to my own 4am revelation – what would be the implications of the construction of self as Self for our attitudes to ‘insecurity’ and ‘uncertainty’?

On a commonsense level, an absolute commitment to self-realization and to the personal freedom that it requires are hardly conducive to a sense of security or certainty.  So much seems self-evident, and is attested, I would, argue by those feelings of rootlessness and loss of meaning that seem, on general agreement, to be a feature of the modern condition.  Freedom in personal relationships, the decay of the family, the erosion of the institutional structures – such things are surely the price we pay.

In the more philosophical terms of the analysis developed hitherto, I would argue that, through the construction of self as Self, i.e. as something essentially inward and unique to the individual, precisely those social, cultural, and institutional elements that root us in space – and, more importantly, time – are stripped away.  By according a privileged reality to the Self, we de-realize those aspects of our world that we share with everyone else.  This de-realization is precisely what we see in Becker’s attempt to see ‘customs, traditions, and laws that we have designed to hep us feel part of something bigger and longer-lasting than mere human life’ as the ‘immortality projects’ of individuals desiring to ‘break free of death’s gravitational pull’.  Indeed, his view is only comprehensible at all when we limit our self-identification to the relatively narrow compass of the Self, as defined above.  Yet, given that is precisely what increasing numbers of us are doing, Becker’s shockingly individualist conclusions may have come to seem self-evident.

I would add that, on my own – as opposed to B.’s – analysis, the ‘impermanence’ and ‘transience’ he fears may be an inescapable aspect, not so much of ‘life’ itself, as of the world as it presents itself to the subject identified with Self.  It is no surprise that the world of those devoted to freedom and fulfilment should turn out to be a world haunted by insecurity and uncertainty. 

Now the Surrealists, clear-sighted revolutionaries as they undoubtedly were, embraced that world with eyes wide open.  Yet, now their aspirations have become commonplace, just part of the air we breathe, I am not sure their effective spiritual successors are aware of the Faustian bargain they have inadvertently struck, or that has inadvertently been struck by past generations on their behalf, so that a consciousness of insecurity as a moral choice as somehow been lost to view.  One aspires to freedom and self-fulfilment, and unwittingly suffers the inevitable insecurities that come in its train.  Yet, the more those securities elude the grasp, the more frenetically they are sought.  The world of expressivist individualism will of necessity be a world characterized by an anguished relation to insecurity and uncertainty. 

A Christian antidote?

So, what is the antidote that works?  Evidently not, I would say, to accept the ‘impermanence’ of the world, and disengage from our projects.  Rather it would begin by jettisoning expressivist individualism and the exposure of the construct of Self for what it is – a construct specific to a contemporary religious worldview.  But where would that take us?  And (the same question we asked of Burkeman) is there anything we can offer in its place?  Evidently, we are in need of a broader, less individualist construct of self as the basis of a broader engagement with reality.  But where might such a thing be found?  After all, we can hardly just carry on without!

This leads me to ask, inevitably, whether Christianity might have something distinctive to offer here – needless to say, not one of the avenues that B. chooses to explore.

One reason to look in that direction is that my critique of the ‘Watts’-type expressivist individualist philosophy is already grounded, I would argue, in a broadly biblical anthropology, and a broadly biblical style of critique, based on that anthropology – namely, the critique of what we might unfashionably call idolatry.  The essence of both the anthropology and the critique that goes with it is that – whatever Buddhists may tell you – there is no moral alternative to ‘attachment’ and, in a broader sense – to ‘self’.  Rather, the important thing is to have the right ‘attachment’ and the right ‘self’: the intensest possible attachment of the broadest imaginable self.

Before going any further, what I do not mean to propose in the following paragraphs as a Christian alternative response to uncertainty and insecurity of the human condition, is the idea that we take refuge in the absolute certainty and security of a life that awaits us after death, and can thus afford to disinvest in the current world of impermanence.

Aside from whether the Christian hope can be cashed out in this way, I personally just don’t find any spiritual consolation in it – nor do I think it is particularly helpful or conducive to the good life.

What I propose instead is that we being instead with Old Testament responses to the notion of human transience and impermanence – especially in the Psalms, which have been the backbone of Jewish and Christian liturgies alike.

Coping with impermanence in the Psalms