AutoBioPhilosophy: An intimate story of what it means to be human
Robert Rowland Smith
AutoBioPhilosophy is an astonishingly frank and original autobiography that explores the fundamental question of what it means to be human.Robert Rowland Smith’s life story involves a love triangle, office politics, police raids, illegal drugs, the academic elite and a near-death experience. It sees him grappling with the tragic fate of his father, going through a double divorce and encountering a living divinity. We witness him confronting his demons but also looking out for angels.A former Oxford don, Robert uses these deeply personal experiences to generate philosophical insights that will resonate with everybody. What are the recurring patterns, unconscious motives and social forces that govern our behaviour? Through his experiences, and referencing writers from Shakespeare to Freud, he offers new models and ways into human psychology.As we are led into Robert’s private world, we gain an understanding of what it means to be human that is relevant to all.
Copyright (#ulink_e63faee4-6e62-5ae7-8170-e2dd9766c345)
4th Estate
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First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018
Copyright © Robert Rowland Smith Ltd 2018
Robert Rowland Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is based on the author’s experiences. Some names, identifying characteristics, dialogue and details have been changed, reconstructed or fictionalised.
Cover photograph by James Fulton.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780008218461
Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008218485
Version: 2018-04-10
Contents
Cover (#u838447e2-0f2a-500e-8cc2-27a4d7fb89b3)
Title Page (#u0a0be6c6-79d3-5d73-8a4d-41308060a75c)
Copyright (#uab18c74d-b6b2-5c37-ac41-8a1972e1d9ab)
Foreword (#u7b30b35d-9346-5247-acd4-9bd38336eca1)
Author’s Note (#u1053db3a-22fa-54f2-8c9b-6a50e5d8bf24)
1 Blood and Water (#u3a0b125e-5ee9-5ea9-b5d6-3e8818a078c6)
2 The Dream of Three Daughters (#u5e5902e2-e5c0-5f02-93a6-99c8d138574d)
3 The Keys to the Tower (#uc7736465-fd18-5a32-b8c4-6bebef6e05c9)
4 A Love Quadrangle (#u96faddaf-8495-5a5d-b87e-a99bd44fd075)
5 Going to California: a case of aller-retour (#ub2c212ad-b3df-5d2b-8c25-99019d5b53c2)
6 Office Politics (#u4d616270-eab4-5af1-a7d0-05594421fc92)
7 Near Death (#u0a705b92-2b65-597a-955b-361d86d4bb9f)
8 The Forms of Things Unknown (#u12ce64c0-6d49-56bf-8cc2-f388a18348ca)
9 Portraits of Love (#u4d191c33-ac5d-5502-8ead-72a9c2137854)
Afterword (#u6fe13c48-bd7d-5393-9c49-c85d3f03b87b)
Acknowledgements (#ubd57e21a-320d-5148-9642-86aa1d206c3c)
Epitaph (#uafade3d7-23b0-52fc-9bb6-deb7c8104e65)
Illustration Credits (#uc076315a-6c96-52d0-9148-a52df2720350)
Footnotes (#u41b3557d-6bf5-52c7-9178-866a0352726a)
By the same author (#u504ffd96-f77e-5f55-bd65-d44c5e3dae7d)
About the Publisher (#uf812fb3f-48fb-5d6f-b1b0-3dc376db8467)
Foreword (#ulink_f39648fe-d181-5bab-b034-925f2b23c6fa)
When such a spacious mirror’s set before him
He needs must see himself.
William Shakespeare
What is it to be human? That is the question. This book offers nine answers, each mapping on to one of the nine chapters. Being human means:
1 Dealing with our fate
2 Standing in the flow of time
3 Needing a purpose
4 Living amongst others
5 Making mistakes
6 Belonging to groups
7 Facing mortality
8 Not knowing it all
9 Looking for love
Needless to say, there are far more potential answers than those on the above list. The nine offered here correspond broadly to the nine phases of my own life, from my origins to the present day. For I have used my own experience as the source material for answering the question of what it is to be human. To arrive at the general, I go via the specific.
What results is an autobiographical narrative that serves up philosophical insights along the way. But I should stress that the narrative has many gaps. It is not supposed to be a complete life story. My criterion for selecting content was how fertile it appeared to be from a philosophic point of view. If people or periods are represented unevenly, that is why. For example, because of circumstances unique to him, my father Colin plays a more leading role in the text than does my mother. In real life, she is no less important. This book is dedicated to them both.
Author’s Note (#ulink_e2c97c6a-7d62-51f0-aeb7-861699732d01)
In the vast majority of cases, I have changed people’s names for the sake of anonymity. When talking about individuals, disguised or otherwise, I have been as even-handed as I can be. I recognise that judgements are hard to keep out of one’s descriptions of other people, but the agenda here is philosophical rather than personal. Besides, it is the flaws in my own character that will be the most conspicuous by far.
The specific weight of the soul is equal to the weight of what has been dared.
Bert Hellinger
1 (#ulink_a6b9c181-8fcc-5750-8822-c61ab707ce5b)
Blood and Water (#ulink_a6b9c181-8fcc-5750-8822-c61ab707ce5b)
My formula for greatness in a human being is ‘amor fati’: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it … but love it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
At the brow of a hill in Norwood, south London, stands an imposing red-brick building. It is called The British Home and Hospital for Incurables. The word ‘incurable’ sounds strikingly Victorian, and indeed it was during Victoria’s reign, in 1894, that the building was officially opened. Just as striking is the word’s directness. Incurable. The people who come here aren’t going to get better, it says. We might mock the Victorians for their stiff upper lips and prudery, but in their choice of this word, they showed a frankness that we would balk at today.
Among the seventy-odd residents of this Victorian terminus is my father, Colin Rowland Smith. His particular incurability is multiple sclerosis. It is his story that will provide the framework for this first chapter.
The reasons for choosing my father are threefold. First, he represents the origin, along with my mother, of my own life. He is therefore the starting point of my story, which unfolds in the chapters ahead.
The second reason is that, by bringing a real person into the picture, we can gain some initial purchase on what a human being might actually be. For a human being is always a particular human being, not some vague notion of a human being. I often think of an article by the British novelist Zadie Smith, reflecting on the process of writing. She talks about how you always start out with the ambition of penning the perfect book. From the moment you write the first word, however, it becomes this book and no other.
Behind the idea lies, I suppose, a simple logic. That first word limits the range of options for the second word, the second for the third, and so on, until you have a paragraph which determines the next paragraph which determines the next, until you have a chapter. Then each chapter conditions the chapter after it, until the whole thing is done. A book has to follow an internal sequence to reveal its own identity. By definition, this identity will differ from the identity of other books, and so become unique.
As the book, so the human being. None of us has an ideal, perfect or general self. We have the self that we have, with its irreducible specificity, its one-of-a-kind combination of history, biology and character. What’s more, our choices narrow as we grow older, making us even less likely to deviate from who we are. The golden thread that leads from the beginning to the end of our lives only becomes finer along the way. So that is why in this chapter I’m looking at a human being in all his book-like individuality.
The third and most important reason for choosing my father is that his story gives us a first answer to the question that will serve as a prompt to all the chapters ahead. The question is: ‘What does it mean to be a human being?’ Each chapter will offer a different response. In the case of my father, that response goes something like this: ‘Being human means dealing with our fate.’
My father’s fate was a heavy one. It wasn’t just the MS with which he had to contend. Yet how he contended is what matters. It matters for us all. Whether our fate is lucky or unlucky, we are dealt a hand. We might be born into poverty or affluence, good or bad health, peace or war – but the playing of that hand is up to us. And so it is that tension between being determined by our circumstances and determining ourselves which is an essential part of being human.
Mutiny in the body
The ‘sclerosis’ in multiple sclerosis or MS refers to lesions resulting from damage done to the sheaths encasing the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. This damage affects physical coordination, speech, ability to concentrate, memory and more. Maybe all diseases are strange, travelling as covertly as spies and silently infiltrating our systems. What makes MS especially mysterious is that it seems to result from a mutiny in the autoimmune system. Rather than do its job of protecting the body, the autoimmune system revolts and attacks. But not only that:
women get it more than men;
you’re more susceptible to it the further your origins lie from the Equator;
there is no available cure; and
its causes are unknown.
Unknown but not unguessed at. The medical literature points to both genetic and environmental factors, though the evidence for either remains inconclusive. It is not a lifestyle disease. Nor is it considered heritable, even though there’s some debate about your increased likelihood of getting it if you’re related to a sufferer. As Colin’s son, I am acutely aware of this possibility, though I’ve never shown any symptoms and have reached an age at which they’re less likely to appear. That does, however, raise the question of just how closely related he and I are.
Institutionalised
Colin’s parents, Rowland and Beatrice, divorced early in his life. At the tender age of eight, Colin, an only child, was packed off to an English boarding school in leafy Sussex, called Hurstpierpoint College. This was in 1945, just as the war was ending. I picture the school as a rural haven from the disarray in cities to the north. It was set, as if to a metronome, to the consoling tempo of public-school life – cricket matches, prayers, tea, weekly baths. But rationing was still in force, those baths were cold, and the school will have had its share of bullies. Female presence was limited, and academic study came a long way ahead of emotional development.
Beatrice, his mother, went to live a hundred and fifty miles away in Birmingham. Rowland took a new wife and had four more children. To begin with, they set up in Hove, adjoining Brighton, and a mere ten miles from Hurstpierpoint. Later, they moved to handsome surroundings in Bungay, Suffolk, which was scarcely any nearer than Birmingham, and required of my grandfather a lengthy commute into Liverpool Street station.
Hurstpierpoint College
So, from the age of eight to eighteen, the Neo-Gothic flint castle of Hurstpierpoint College would have been my father’s entire world, a colony unto itself. Apart from school holidays, that is. These he spent with his mother in Birmingham. There, as a fifteen-year-old, Colin met his wife-to-be, Patricia. A year younger than Colin, Patricia had already left school, and was doing a clerical job in the Midland Bank not far from the Bull Ring. As a girl in the 1940s and 50s, her education wasn’t deemed important, though that didn’t suppress her aspirations to improve her working-class lot. She dreamed about one day having a son and sending him to Dulwich College, the famous public school of which she had once heard as in a legend. With his Queen’s English, shiny bicycle and public-school credentials of his own, Colin appeared in Patricia’s life like the key to a door. For his part, he found a first meaningful female connection. The relationship flourished.
Trouble in paradise
Thanks to the class divide, however, neither family approved. By the time the couple reached their late teens, and Colin too had left school, Rowland, his father, was ready to take action.
With a view to splitting them up, he packed Colin off again, only this time much farther afield. Colin was dispatched to an outpost of the family food business in Canada.
The plan backfired. From his exile Colin wrote to Patricia, imploring her to join him. He enclosed a ticket for the Atlantic sea crossing. The letter landed on the doormat of a terraced house in Bell Hill, Northfield, one of Birmingham’s less well-to-do districts. Patricia opened it, made up her mind and set sail. Some months later, at a United Reformed church in Hamilton, Ontario, in a ceremony attended by no more than a handful of well-wishers, they married.
Colin and Patricia might have settled in Canada for life, but a combination of factors drew them back to England. Here my mother was grudgingly accepted and subsequently patronised by her in-laws. The newlyweds set up home in south Croydon, then a still desirable suburb of London. Colin began commuting to the family business’ head office on Tooley Street, opposite London Bridge station. Patricia gave birth to three children, two girls and one boy. She sent me to Dulwich College.
My two sisters were privately educated also. The combined fees can’t have been cheap, but the business was doing well and paying Colin a tidy salary. In 1970 the family moved to a much-extended house with a large garden on a private road further into the suburbs. I had a pine tree outside my bedroom window. Colin bought himself Jaguars, Daimler Double Sixes and BMW 7 Series. For Patricia there was a gold Ford Escort, then a cherry red Opel Manta. The pinnacle was a white two-seater Triumph Spitfire with detachable roof. I would beg her to collect me from school in it. My parents shopped for clothes on Bond Street. One year we went on holiday to Chewton Glen in the New Forest, then the UK’s fanciest hotel.
Yet by the end of that decade a serpent had slithered in. The economy was tanking. The family business was running out of the steam that had powered it since its heyday in the late 1960s. A major factor had been the death of ‘Uncle Bob’. He had been the company’s driving force. Robert Rowland Smith – after whom I was named – was my grandfather Rowland’s brother, and my father’s uncle. Tall, talented and magnetic, Uncle Bob was a legend. With no children of his own, he invested his energies not only in the firm but also in his extended family. So whilst he was happy to splurge on himself – a mansion in St John’s Wood, a Rolls Royce – it was he who had bought Colin and Patricia that first house in south Croydon. What with his passing and the weather in the market turning squally, the business began to founder.
From Colin’s perspective, the squeeze on company revenues wasn’t the only challenge. Without Uncle Bob’s mediating influence, Colin found himself working directly to a father whose modus operandi with his son was criticism. ‘Useless’ was his put-down of choice. Colin was conscious that his father had gone on to have a second family. The youngest of four among that second batch of children was another son, also named Rowland. This new Rowland was about fifteen years my father’s junior and an incipient rival. My father was jealous not just in the way that any brother might be jealous of a half-brother, but also because Rowland – known as Rowley – was taking his own first steps in the family business.
The axe falls
There was a third man for Colin to worry about. This was David Cooke. As is obvious from his surname, Mr Cooke wasn’t part of the family. He was an outsider. Like the owners of many family businesses, I suppose, the proprietors of Rowland Smith & Son Ltd. were aware that family ties could be a liability as well as an asset. They saw the value in an external perspective. Besides, David Cooke came with a reputation as a marketing genius. Before long, Colin perceived his father to be favouring the interloper over him, just as he had suspected his father of transferring his favour to young Rowley. Colin might have been made a director of the company, but psychologically he found himself twice displaced.
Meanwhile, in his thirties, Colin had been diagnosed with MS. He would complain of pins and needles, and of a recurrent ache down the left side of his body, starting in his shoulder. He acquired a slight limp. Mercifully, the disease stabilised at a low level, barely impinging on his capacity to function. Until, that is, the storm clouds that had been gathering over the business finally broke. The money began running out and desperate measures had to be taken. As the big boss, my grandfather decided on cuts. Having tallied up the golden salaries paid to the directors, particularly to my father and David Cooke, he chose to delete one. He sacked his son.
That was in 1979, when Colin was forty-three. He made some half-hearted efforts to set up a marketing enterprise. But, having been given a house and a job and a salary just by virtue of belonging to the Rowland Smith clan, he couldn’t muster the initiative to make anything happen. Perhaps he had also internalised his father’s verdict on his uselessness. He never properly worked again. He sold the big house and gave himself up to his disease.
His eyes were one of the first things to go. He developed a squint and had to wear an eye patch. He had trouble forming sentences. One day he lost control of the accelerator pedal on the Citroën to which he had downgraded. He rammed the vehicle in front, causing a minor accident. With great reluctance, he agreed not to drive again. The limp that had been with him since his thirties became unignorable. The staircase at home had become an abyss into which he risked tumbling from the top. Before long, the walking stick was traded for a wheelchair. Colin would trundle this contraption around the downstairs of the gingerbread cottage he now lived in with Patricia, smashing against the door jambs until they were splintery and raw. By the late 1990s he would fall down regularly getting in and out of it, and my small-framed mother was losing the strength to haul him up again. It was then that she approached the British Home and Hospital for Incurables.
Man’s character is his fate
Colin’s story shows just how singular was his fate. In its details it belongs to nobody else. That is what makes him different – different even from me, his son. The truth is that, having witnessed the onset of his MS, which terrifies me, I’m glad of it. For all the compassion I feel towards him, that his fate differs from mine is something for which I can only be thankful.
Maybe it would be nobler if I felt the urge to take on his disease in order to spare him. That would be a grand filial sacrifice. It is what sacrifice is, at heart – the loving instinct to take over somebody else’s fate, to bear their cross. But that is a fantasy, and in any case doing so is impossible. We can never really stand in for anybody else. Even in the extreme case of offering up our own life to save another’s, it is still our own death that we will die, not theirs. We can’t actually spare them, we can merely buy them some time. What’s more, sacrifice seems to flow more appropriately in the other direction. If anything, parents sacrifice themselves for their children, not the other way round, at least in the West. They cede to the flow of time, giving priority to newer life over older. Incurable is incurable, as the Victorians said.
Wrapped up inside fate is another element that makes family members other to us. It was identified by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. In a precious fragment of text from the ancient world, Heraclitus is quoted as saying that ‘man’s character is his fate’. Who we are, as much as the action of any external influence, determines what will happen to us. To change our fate, therefore, requires changing who we are. But changing who we are is never easy. The drive to carry on being ourselves counts among the most powerful forces in the universe, rivalling gravity. After all, our character is what stops us from becoming other people. As if it were a repelling magnet, our character keeps others at arm’s length, insisting on its own space.
I saw first hand just how much my father’s character shaped his fate. Despite his education, his money, his family, and his luck in being given both a job and a house, he experienced life as a series of calamities. The slightest thing would vex him. If the traffic was bad, if he couldn’t open a jar, if a utility bill arrived in the post, if the sink got blocked, if the lawnmower ran out of petrol, if the television picture went fuzzy – in all cases, an almost existential despair would wash over him. It was as if every red light on the road was a monstrous unfairness trained deliberately on him. In little things he saw large tragedies. Fate had seen that Colin’s character was tragic, and decided to follow suit.
What overwhelmed him, I believe, was the sense of confronting his own resourcelessness. It wasn’t just that he had been given a lot, but that both boarding school and the family business were institutions that ran life for him. True, he had shown initiative in bringing Patricia to Canada. But she was expected to be a stereotypical 1950s wife, managing his domestic infrastructure. In other words, he’d had precious few opportunities to develop agency of his own. So whenever something less than advantageous occurred, he looked into his cupboard of personal supplies for dealing with it, and saw that it was empty.
In such tiny moments, Colin exhibited a brief but bottomless despair. He would let out what the English Gothic writer Thomas de Quincey called a ‘suspiria de profundis’, a sigh from the depths. I remember this sigh filling the house like the exhalation of a wounded animal. So when something truly terrible finally did happen – his own father ousting him from what was purportedly a family business – one can only imagine the hollowness into which he stared. If it was hard enough for Colin to roll with the mishaps of everyday existence, how frightening it would have been to behold this once-in-a-lifetime tsunami.
In the jargon, Colin lacked the necessary ‘coping mechanisms’. The want of resilience that he had shown in allowing minor inconveniences to flummox him became, when he was fired, his condition of being. Cruelly, it also provided the ideal environment for the MS to thrust upwards from beneath the ground, where it was only half buried, into the light. For whatever else multiple sclerosis might be, it is a disease that deprives its victims of the ability to cope. To someone whose coping mechanisms are already feeble, an incurable disease such as MS, mixed with unemployment, produces a fatal concoction. Paralysis was the result.
Other people might have responded differently. Stories abound of those who conquer or at least subdue their MS through a combination of attitude, diet and exercise. But my father responded in the way that only he could. He met the emptiness that faced him with an emptiness of his own. That was his character, and it became his fate.
Our parents are foreigners in time
Both character and fate set Colin apart. They even set him apart from me, his biological offspring. The straight genetic pipe from him to me contained leaks, so not everything got transmitted. Besides, there was another pipe coming in from the maternal side, although with leaks of its own, to be sure. It is by these twin leaky conduits that we’re connected to our biological inheritance.
What that means in terms of our parents is that we’re both the same and different. Such is the mystery of generation. When the human organism divides, it issues a copy of itself that’s not quite perfect. The uncanny thing is to look into the face of anyone we know and see three people. Both parents flutter in the movements of that face, along with the unique combination of them that produces the third person, the person whom we erroneously think of as a discrete self.
That leakiness is not just biological. It also applies to what gets transmitted by way of narrative about our parents’ lives. We hear a few details and they take on a magical quality, like photographs found in an attic. But so much of their lives leaks away, and we have to rely on their memories, which are leaky themselves. These memories can feel strange because they are both near and far. They are highly intimate and yet unavailable. They have a warm otherness to them, like a soil.
That soil is where we come to be planted. It is because they concern our own origin that our parents’ stories, about their lives before us, take on the quality of fable. Origins are always mysterious. We hear this mystery in Colin’s narrative. We get a picture of the 1950s, for example. It contains a post-war mixture of bereavement and hope; the recognition of a modernity finally burying the Victorian past; and a sense that the triple-towered edifice of class, gender and religion is cracking. But that is a historical view. Through it, the 1950s seem to be part of an objective account that people can write books or make documentaries about. This account is available to anyone who’s interested. The other is the view of a child – me – learning about the time in which my parents lived, before the child was born. This view is far more private, and the time period it gazes at has a different feel. Different and more enigmatic.
The stories about our parents aren’t quite history, therefore, even where there is plenty of historical data, because they produce in us a state of wonder. This wonder makes those parents all the stranger to us. Indeed, as much as those stories draw us in to the lives of father and mother, we can’t help feeling a trace of repugnance. For all our natural, biological proximity to them, they are foreigners in time. Children come after their parents, by necessity, and we all live in a flow of time that none of us can interrupt. Time is like a motor beneath an hermetically sealed bonnet, always running.
So if our parents are strangely ‘other’ to us, their children – if their fate separates them from us, their closest kin – it’s not just because the stories are exclusively theirs. It is also because those stories hail from a time that is not ours. Our parents are not of our generation, and so a quantum of alienation runs beneath every experience that we have of them. Even these twin origins of our becoming, our parents, remain other to us. In this respect, they are no more special than every other person on the earth – even the remotest, the never thought-of, those who come and go without us even having been aware of their existence.
Perhaps this semi-disconnect from the past of our parents is why our own lives can at times feel so random. In Existentialist philosophy, which examines the big questions of life and death, insisting on the arbitrariness of our birth is a commonplace. Martin Heidegger, for example, writing in the hush of the Black Forest in the 1920s, talks about how we are ‘thrown’ into the world. It is as if we were literally cast into a pine forest, fenced in by the tall, dark shapes of the trees and the silhouettes of strangers threading between them. There’s nothing apparently necessary about how we got there. Whenever we get an intimation that, thanks to the separating effects of time and fate, some distancing even from our own parents is inevitable, it’s little surprise that this sense of randomness can seize us so strongly.
Performance versus belonging
Colin himself would hardly have been unaware of all the factors that created distance between him and the members of his family. First, there was the divorce of his parents. Though divorce wasn’t unheard of at the time, it was scarcely the norm. Another half-century would have to pass before its stigma faded.
Second, there was being sent to boarding school. Again, this wasn’t uncommon. It was even considered a reputable form of education for a boy – ‘character-building’ was the term used to endorse and/or excuse it. Wartime had in any case necessitated all sorts of makeshift arrangements for children, who were often dispatched to live with distant relatives or friends. Colin himself had been evacuated to sleepy Gloucestershire during the war proper. But emotionally, boarding school was a wrench. Just as other families whose fathers had come back from the war were reuniting, he, an only child, was torn away from parents who had torn away from each other.
Third, there was Rowland generating a second family to which Colin both did and didn’t belong. Or rather, he continued to belong to his father as a son – that was his right – but belonging to the second family as a whole was something that would have to be done by invitation, as it was never quite a right in the same way.
Finally, there was the family business, where Colin’s experience of separation would have been the most complex. The very phrase ‘family business’ holds a tension, even a contradiction. A family has no purpose beyond the affirmation of blood ties and the circulation of love. It can simply be and nobody has to justify its existence. Most importantly, everybody in a family has a right to belong. The sole entry requirement is being of the same blood. With a business, it’s different. There is a test involved in joining a business: belonging is never automatic. As a commercial enterprise, the right to belong to it must be earned by supporting that commercial aim.
So when you merge ‘family’ and ‘business’ into the entity known as a ‘family business’, a circle has to be squared. Do you have a right to belong to the family business just because you’re a part of the family? Or do you have to prove yourself first, as anyone joining a conventional business would have to do?
Colin was tipped straight into the mesh of that ambiguity. He had been brought into the business as a young man by virtue of belonging to the family, even though his ‘belonging’ had already been rattled after his father remarried. But that was when the economic weather was still fair. When it turned foul, Colin was judged on his merits and found wanting. Now his card was set next to that of the non-family member, David Cooke, and his scores looked poor. No longer was being part of the family enough; performance was the new measure, and Colin’s fell below par. When the chips were down, water was thicker than blood.
Put another way, businesses have an easier time excluding people than families do. It doesn’t test their conscience in the same way. Unlike the right to belong to a family, which is granted once and for ever through the definitive act of birth, in a business you have to keep demonstrating how valuable you are. It never lets up. Belonging is secured by the collateral of performance; and explicitly or implicitly, performance is continuously monitored. Take the performance away, and the belonging falls apart too.
Of course, there are those individuals in certain businesses who become so much part of the furniture that, long after they have ceased to hold their own commercially, they’re kept on like pets. But that is an indulgence. The only legitimate exception to the rule of belonging-conditional-upon-performance would be if the business were one that you founded. As the originating spirit, you are central. And you will be largely exempt from the scrutiny applied to the performance of those who come after. You created the enterprise, which makes you its ‘father’ or ‘mother’ in a more than metaphorical way. You gave it life. Where there had been nothing, you made something.
As acts of creation, these inaugurating gestures of the founding father share a life instinct with the making of a family. Which is why, in those rare cases when a company does turn on its founder and relieve him of his duties, everybody feels its moral portent. There is an unspoken question as to how natural it can be, like watching an eclipse. Nobody is totally sure that it’s a legitimate move, even if the business reasons for the removal are sound. Taking such a dramatic step leaves a mark on the conscience of those who unseated the founder, as if they had committed parricide. (In the later chapter about organisations called ‘Office Politics’, I will say more about this uncanny power of the founder.)
No wonder the concept of a family business holds so much tension. Most of the time that tension remains obligingly latent, but when, as in the case of Rowland Smith & Son Ltd., market forces enjoin on the company the taking of drastic action, it appears like an unspeakable black animal on stage. It has to be addressed. Do you get rid of Colin or David? Between family and business, which comes first?
We know which way my grandfather, Rowland, called it. He chose in that moment to see my father less as his son than as an employee to be judged on a level playing field with his rival. No more was Colin an alternative but sympathetic expression of the same genetic wave, a variant of Rowland’s own subjectivity. Rather, Colin had become an objective human asset to be evaluated against other human assets. To say that Rowland ‘disowned’ Colin would be a clear distortion, despite the feelings of abandonment that Colin must have suffered. Nevertheless, Rowland shook the family tree with sufficient vigour to make Colin fear that, like a rotten fruit, he would fall.
The diagram above describes the situation in graphic form. ‘Colin 1’ and ‘David 1’ refer to the starting positions, the point at which David was brought into the business. ‘Colin 2’ and ‘David 2’ refer to the later point at which Rowland, my grandfather, chose between them. This choice was made against two criteria: performance and belonging. In position one, David’s performance was seen as strong, but as someone with the surname Cooke rather than Smith, his belonging could only be weak. In contrast, what was perceived as weak about Colin was his performance.
The fundamental problem was that even at the start Colin’s belonging was less secure than it could have been. We know that Rowland’s ‘ownership’ of his son had always been circumscribed. He was barely involved in Colin’s childhood, and not for purely psychological reasons. For six of the eight years before Colin was sent to boarding school, 1939–1945, Rowland was at war, stationed in India and Burma. Not long after his return, he divorced, remarried and began his new family. In other words, Colin’s belonging never was assured. It wasn’t as if he had a full tank that got emptied: the tank peaked at around 70 per cent. Colin’s aggregate score, even in position one, fell short.
What’s most striking, however, is that despite his different blood, David actually increases his level of belonging. This is, first, because he replaces Colin: doing so makes David a stand-in son, a family member. The second reason is that David doesn’t carry the same baggage as Colin did from Rowland’s previous marriage. That makes David a less problematic proposition when it comes to slotting him in. These two reasons facilitated the miracle that Rowland performed of turning water into blood.
That miracle doesn’t have to happen under such special circumstances. There is a perfectly ordinary example of it. In the early 1930s, Rowland and Beatrice are a couple, and Colin is not even a glimmer in the eye. In order to marry, they must by law come from separate families. Marriage represents what anthropologists call ‘exogamy’. Exogamy means that matrimony occurs with a spouse chosen from outside the family. Nothing unusual about that. And yet on the day of the wedding, husband and wife become each other’s family. When Rowland and Beatrice tie the knot, they transmogrify into each other’s next of kin. That happens despite and because of the absence of blood ties. It is an act of social alchemy. In marriage, water not only becomes blood: it can become blood only if it is water. To extend the metaphor, one could say that Colin’s issue was that his blood and water were mixed. The result was a dilute mid-liquid that embarrassed all concerned.
The irony is that Rowland’s own belonging might have been the tiniest bit in doubt too. I say this because stories about my grandfather suggest he was never quite the man that legendary Uncle Bob – Robert, his brother – had been. Bob always seemed the more able. There is a suspicion, then, of what Freud called ‘projection’. This is the idea that we transfer onto other people those aspects of ourselves we find least congenial, thereby restoring a sense of our own flawlessness. In couples psychotherapy, for example, a wife might say of her husband, ‘I don’t trust him.’ But unconsciously what she is indicating is, ‘I am not to be trusted.’ So if, as second fiddle to Robert, Rowland felt inadequate, it’s possible that he saw in the pairing of David and Colin an echo, psychologically speaking, of his own situation. Thus David was the superior and Colin the inferior partner. Expelling Colin represented the purging of an inferiority that was Rowland’s own.
If that hypothesis is credible, then berating my father for his ‘uselessness’ was for Rowland an unconscious way of railing at a deficiency of his own, relative to his brother. It was a personal deficiency that he dealt with by contaminating his son with it. He then cited his son’s deficiency as a justification for banishing that son like a leper. Unluckily, however, you do not get rid of a disease by passing it on to someone else. It sticks. In any case, Colin had already been invaded by a disease of his own that would derange him more completely.
The madness of decision
On the other hand, we could say that Rowland took the tough decision. From this perspective, he was acting like a true leader. After all, when decisions require little discretion, we are not really deciding at all. We are pushing at an open door. Say I’m checking into the Grand Hotel in Brighton and am offered a choice between two rooms at the same tariff. One is at the front with a sea view; the other is at the back, overlooking the car park. It is obvious which one I should take.
But when I quiz the receptionist further, I discover that the sea-view room is poky. Between it and the sea runs a noisy road. The back room, by contrast, is spacious and quiet. Now I have a genuine dilemma, which calls for a true decision. Choosing between family and business is a genuine dilemma too, because the arguments on both sides can never be exhausted. The decision can always be deferred. What’s more, families and businesses are not two hotel rooms but apples and oranges. We are not comparing like with like, so how on earth are we to weigh them up?
So tricky are such genuine dilemmas that reason can take us only so far towards resolving them. That is why the Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida, for example, writes about the ‘madness of decision’.
Whatever the logical steps involved in the run-up to it, the decision itself marks a leap into the dark. That leap is the point at which reason can no longer help, because now it’s a matter of acting. You close your eyes and jump.
That’s what Rowland did. He acted with the unavoidable madness of all action. By not ducking the decision, he was, for good or for ill, accepting accountability. Was this something that he had learned in wartime? He had won an OBE for his actions. If Colin was the poorer performer, keeping him on might have put the business at risk. That would have impacted everyone. We can choose to see Rowland’s decision not as the cold-hearted rejection of his firstborn, but as a judicious move for the greater good. After all, the gravity of the decision can’t not have affected him.
The contribution sextant
An organisation perishes if it doesn’t work, so ultimately it has to put its own prosperity above the individuals in it. There is no autonomic system operating in a business such as there is in a human body. A business has no respiratory function that carries on regardless of the will of its owner. It must remember to breathe.
This need on the part of a business to keep its purpose at the front of its mind has an impact on the relationships among the individuals in it. We’ve seen how the roles played by Colin and David were reversed. Where the semi-son became the outsider, the outsider became the semi-son. That reversal took place because David’s input was perceived as more vital to the company’s commercial aims. A valuation took place. But such valuations take place in any situation where we bind together with others in a joint endeavour. The endeavour could be trivial, such as assembling a flat-pack wardrobe with a friend, or hold national significance, like starting a political party. No sooner do we find ourselves in such partnerships than a third element comes and stands over the relationship between us, like a master with its back to the sun. This third element is the goal that we’re trying to attain. It’s this goal that has convened us, and both of us have a duty to fulfil it. No matter how close the bond between the individuals involved, it takes second place to the goal that has brought them together.
As soon as the work begins, however, we become highly sensitive to the level of contribution that we are separately making. In particular, we are attuned to whether our partners are doing their share. We carry a secret measure, like a microscopic, translucent gauge within us, from which we’re always taking readings, working out who’s showing the greater commitment to the joint goal. I call it the ‘contribution sextant’. If, at any moment, we judge that our partner is more distant in his or her heart from that goal, we rate them as less valuable than we are. A draught of estrangement passes between us. To begin with, we ignore it. Generally, we’d rather get on with people than point out their failings, especially if we’re supposed equals before the same goal. Over time, however, the tolerance dries up, becomes brittle. Sooner or later it snaps and, with an aggression that’s more or less passive, we’ll call out the difference between their contribution and ours.
Compare the two triangles below. The first is equilateral, so we see a perfect balance. The distance between my partner and me is the same as the distance between each of us and our shared goal. The shared goal stands above us. We both have a duty to fulfil this goal. Like ladders, our separate efforts lean up towards and converge upon it. Meanwhile, a horizontal line runs between me and my partner, representing the equality that we experience as we labour at our joint task. Neither of us is supposed to give more or less than the other. The horizontal line helps us to feel we are in it together. These two factors, a shared goal and a sense of equality before it, create a bond. It feels right, and because it feels right, it feels good.
In the second triangle, by contrast, we see a less perfect configuration. Immediately, we sense relative disorder. My line to the shared goal is shorter, and my partner’s correspondingly longer. That indicates a greater commitment on my part to the shared goal. The shorter line has the inevitable consequence of lifting me higher up the picture than my partner. This elevated position is in effect the moral high ground. From here I can look down on my partner.
My partner’s perspective is altered in proportion. Now he is in a position of inferiority relative both to me and to the shared goal. How will the new configuration affect our relationship? We no longer have the line of equality keeping us in balance. What’s more, the distance has grown, and the new angle means we can’t see as much of each other. Our relationship suffers from the asymmetry, and we both know it. The disjointing of the triangle leads to an inner knowledge, shared by us both, of damage done.
That second triangle throws light on intimate relationships too. If you replace ‘our shared goal’ with ‘our relationship’, and interpret the lines as representing how much each partner is committed to that relationship, you have a triangle where the same dynamics apply as in the work scenario. The question is who feels worse. Is it me because I’m giving more and observing my partner giving less? After all, I’m the one being ripped off, picking up the slack. The diagram suggests that it’s actually worse for my partner. Not because she’s giving less per se, but because she’s located in the inferior position. She is looked down on both by me and by ‘the relationship’ as a concept. That makes matters less tolerable for her than they are for me. It also means that she’s more likely to leave than am I.
Soul knowledge
I believe we all carry such images within us. They might not assume the form of triangles, but we’ll have our way of figuring the balance or imbalance in any mutual enterprise. We know when things are off kilter. I call it ‘soul knowledge’.
Soul knowledge is deeper but simpler than psychological understanding. In tracking the complexities of human interaction, psychology sometimes loses touch with the underlying realities. Such realities aren’t always as complex as we imagine. Sometimes they are so simple that they can indeed be represented by a form as basic as a triangle. The danger, in other words, is that psychology can’t see the forest for the trees. Where psychology aims to quantify all sorts of data – tendency to agree or disagree, response to reward, frequency of relapse – soul knowledge measures the essentials. In this case, it takes a reading of the give-and-take in a relationship. Where the give-and-take is skewed, the result is a warping of the system as a whole, like a picture frame ruined by damp. It feels wrong. And because it feels wrong, it feels bad.
In other words, soul knowledge is a form of systemic awareness. It maps the tacit geometry of our connections with other people. We live in systems all the time, be they family systems, work systems or intimate relationship systems – and even fleeting systems like the audience we’re part of at a concert, or the queue we stand in at the post office. In all cases, we are switched on to our place in it and the place of others. When the system is in order, it feels right. The soul has an eye for the system as a whole, and unlike the self, which wants to stand out, is always ready to slot into its place.
What’s so very challenging about a family business is that two systems have to be reconciled. A family system has to be reconciled with a business system. At Rowland Smith & Son Ltd., the partners in the triangle, Colin and David, were not partners in the way that most colleagues might be, for the simple reason that one belonged to the family and the other did not. Strictly speaking, the former half-belonged to the family and the latter did not belong. I’m not sure it would be possible to chart this system, because Colin stood at once closer to, and further from, the shared goal understood as the family’s commercial interests, while also standing above, below and on the same level as David.
Systemically, it was a mess, and I think it had an impact on Colin’s soul. All his soul could have known was confusion. It might be pushing it to say that his MS was the direct result of this scrambling of his soul knowledge – being deprived of the chance to see a clear whole – but I find it hard not to draw at least a metaphoric parallel between the neurological misconnections in his body and the eccentric wiring in the system of the family business. In both cases, there’s a tragic failure of coherence.
Frenemies
Although David Cooke turned into, or was turned into, Colin’s nemesis, I do recall a period when one or two faltering attempts at a friendship were made by my father. It must have been a big deal for Colin, because although he came across as gregarious, handsome and jocular, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that he had no friends. Life consisted of his office, our home and the commute between the two termini. I have more fingers on one hand than the number of times I remember my parents going out for the evening, and I have no recollection at all of any friend making a visit. The double bed in the commodious spare bedroom remained cold from 1970 when we moved in, right the way through to 1983 when we moved out.
I say the attempts were faltering, as if they could have been otherwise. But how could they, given that clash of the two systems, family and business? Even without such entanglements as those affecting Rowland Smith & Son Ltd., work friendships are rarely without complications. You don’t become friends with somebody through work unless the work was there in the first place to bring you together. The work provided the environment in which you met, and both of you will have gained entry to the organisation on the understanding that you would contribute to the shared goal. Work is the context of your friendship. So when you meet outside work as friends, the most you can do is to put that context in brackets. You can’t erase it altogether. Even if you never talk shop, your awareness of each other as co-workers remains in the back of your mind.
Why is that a problem? The presence of a shared goal acts like an alloy, thinning out the friendship’s integrity. Obviously, friends often do come together to perform a shared task, like putting up a tent or cooking a meal. The point is that the friendship doesn’t depend on such tasks in order to survive. That’s how friendships differ from relationships in the workplace, where the lack of a goal leaves people at a loss as to what to do. It is also how friendships resemble family relationships: both are an end in themselves. Friendships should consist in no more than that horizontal line between two people, with no tip of the triangle representing a goal. That horizontal line is also the line of equality. No friendship will be authentic if there’s any inkling of one friend feeling superior or inferior to the other. Both positions are bad for the soul.
The test comes when one of the friends quits the organisation. The deeper the friendship, the longer it can survive without the binding of work. We know we were never really friends if we lose touch soon after one of us has moved on. Needless to say, Colin and David did not remain friends in the wake of Colin’s sacking. Even when working together, the friendship never got off the ground. Ulterior motive was too much in play. For Colin, befriending David would have been, at least subconsciously, a way of neutralising a potential threat. For David, currying favour with another Rowland Smith could only bolster his position. The most they could have ever been to one another was ‘frenemies’.
What’s in a name?
The biggest stumbling block, therefore, was the name. Like a bell, my father’s surname had a resonance in Rowland Smith & Son Ltd. that David’s did not. Until Colin was removed, that is. Then the roles reversed. David became an honorary Rowland Smith, while Colin – sidelined from business and family alike – effectively forfeited his name. An acquired namelessness, like a reverse baptism, was one of the many facets of his plight.
But we shouldn’t let the peculiarities of the Colin/David scenario lead us into thinking that having different names is always a problem in friendships. Quite the reverse. Like marriage, friendship is exogamous. It involves making a bond with somebody outside the family. That requires you to choose a friend with a different surname. I mean by different surname ‘coming from a different lineage’, even if the actual word – Jones or Patel or Blanc or Diaz or Khan – is the same. If it were really the same family name – the same patronymic or matronymic, to give it its technical title – then you would be making friends with somebody from your family, which is unnecessary. Unnecessary because the bond already exists. If we think of friendship as the reducing of the otherness of other people, or as making the strange familiar, then in a family this labour of familiarisation has been done in advance. It’s implicit in the word ‘family’. Regardless of how much you like the person, befriending a family member is ever so slightly ingratiating. Ingratiating because superfluous.
It cuts the other way too. The superfluousness of befriending a family member gives us an excuse not to make an effort. With friends there’s always a subtle pressure for that effort to be made. I am not saying that one shouldn’t bother to be friendly with family. But ‘friendly’ is different from ‘friends’. Family is a blood system, friendship water. Although the two can be mixed, they are intrinsically different. Mixing them evokes a subtle sense of aberration.
So Colin and David did not remain friends after the former left the company. Whether Colin’s departure in 1979 really helped the business to recover is debatable. In 1983 Rowland Smith & Son Ltd. was sold to a Dutch enterprise. The following year Colin’s father, my grandfather, died.
Incurable souls
Over time, Colin’s metaphorical namelessness has become all too real. Now when I visit him, he’s not sure what his own name is, let alone mine. Addressing him in his fleece top, sweat pants and Velcro slippers – he hasn’t worn shoes for fifteen years – I ask, ‘Am I Robert?’ Sometimes he shakes his head. Other times he says yes. Or rather he whispers yes, because that’s the best his un-exercised larynx can do. His mouth hangs open most of the day, revealing the few teeth that are stuck like plugs of dark sap onto his gums. It’s an effort for him to close his mouth in the way that enunciating syllables requires, so the ‘y’ and the ‘s’ at the beginning and end of the word ‘yes’ barely have any definition. The lack of consistency in his replies suggests that he just doesn’t know who I am. He’s guessing. It seems that I, his only son, have become a stranger.
Often he won’t reply at all. But then, language consists of more than words. Whenever I appear, his face lights up. After this initial burst, he will zone out, adrift in some time outside time. But during it, he is stirred. He may not be recognising me as Robert; he may not even be recognising me as his son. But that he is recognising somebody is beyond dispute. Only recognition could trigger such elation. I smile back and, for those first few seconds, we are communicating.
We are communicating, but as to what underpins the communication, I cannot say. It’s not just he who is unsure about me. To be frank, even though I know rationally that he is my father, being with him is so strange that I feel it like a vertigo. That’s partly because I’m in a state of protracted shock, both about his disease and about being related to him as its victim. But it is also because that disease has refashioned him to such an extent that I’m not sure who he is either.
If we can communicate despite having no normal basis for it, it’s possible that something else is going on. Not only is the mutual strangeness no bar to communication, it might even be what allows a more immediate form of communication to take place. When two people know each other well, or are each sure of who the other person is, the quality of the communication can actually decrease. How so? The familiarity causes us to rely on our inner picture of that other person, rather than seeing them as they truly are. We become too habituated to properly notice. But, as when a wave recedes and leaves the pebbles on the beach gleaming, when the familiarity recedes and we become strangers once more, we see the other person afresh.
It is more like an encounter between two souls than two selves. Souls don’t need to know in the way that selves do, because in the realm of the soul everything essential gets communicated in advance. When two souls come together they ‘always already’ know each other. That is why, for example, the process of falling in love is instantaneous, and why a new couple will often attest to the uncanny feeling of having known each other before. Their souls arrived at the love-place ahead of their selves.
The key condition for this soul knowledge to occur, therefore, is the dislodging of the mask of the self. In Colin’s case, it was knocked from his face for him. He certainly didn’t ask for it. Like most of us, his preference would surely have been for a life of presence, identity, connection and value, for the embroidery of the self to weave its threads until it had assumed the form and colour that most people are able to enjoy. And yet it’s precisely because his self grew so threadbare that his soul was able to shine through in large smooth patches. Perhaps that’s what’s so jolting about visiting Colin and seeing the other incurables drooling in their food, or hearing the unidentifiable sounds they make echoing down the long, wide parquet corridors. It’s the absence of selves and, in their place, the presence of their naked souls.
Happiness
Given his aphasic state, Colin’s medical file lists ‘Dementia’ next to ‘Multiple Sclerosis’. Whilst those categories might work on paper, in the flesh they can’t be told apart. The dementia is merely extending the process of effacing Colin’s identity begun long ago by the MS, just as the MS itself picked up the work of erasure that had commenced in his psyche at an early age. It is as if the gift of presence, which is what makes life life, was fumbled at his birth. It broke as a glass sphere brimming with light would break. I remember that in the wheelchair period, he would simply sit at home, with the lights and the heating turned off to save money, as if he needed no more sustenance than the objects around him. As if he saw himself as something other than alive.
In this doleful example, we come across perhaps the deepest sense of what it means to be a human. Having a fate, as we all do, means being vulnerable. It calls us away from others and into a future that we can never completely predict. In extreme cases, like that of Colin, it can even separate us from who we are. I say this because Colin’s self has come so close to being scrubbed away that there’s nothing for him to reflect on. It’s as if there is not even an interchange between a conscious and an unconscious self. There’s nothing for an unconscious to split off from and no ocean for the shipwreck of his self to sink into.
Is that a good or a bad fate in the end? Perhaps that is the wrong question. It is more a matter of how we play the hand we are dealt. Where others might have reinvented themselves after losing their job, or, as I suggested earlier, summoned their inner resources to keep the MS at bay through diet, exercise and will, my father appeared to let fate take its course. But then, all that he had known from a young age was his life being directed by others. His real tragedy was that he never developed a sense of his own agency. The capacity for self-determinism was always going to be weaker than the forces acting upon him. The final irony, if that is the right word, is that he appears to be happy at last.
Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.
Niklas Luhmann
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