On Alan Watts: A Prescient Thinker on Our Current Discontents.

Alan Watts was a major thinker and intellectual of the 1950s and 60s until his death in 1973 who was best known for his attempt to make Eastern philosophy accessible and applicable to Western Civilisation in the wake of the Second World War.

But a small volume he published in 1951 The Wisdom of Insecurity is a masterpiece in trying to come to terms with the kind of sterile consumerist paradise that had grown up in Truman's and Eisenhower's America.

Though very British he migrated to the USA in the 1930s where he lived eccentrically on a houseboat in Sausalito near San Francisco and unfortunately has tended to be seen as a bit of a hippy though he was rigourously unsentimental and did not approve of much "counter-culture".

With the decline of the Protestant ethic, which had animated America into a society dominated by a form of frantic and wasteful consumerism, Watts saw there what was subsequently to happen to the UK by the 1980s until the present.

It was a USA that was and is one dominated by a hypocritical Christian ethic of work in which the substance of God had been emptied into a vaguely Benign Director of the Universe and those who clung to belief that to be rewarded materially as a sign of God's blessing.

This is precisely the form of Christianity now offered by Alpha Classes in Britain, fundamentalism and the form of belief system that was adhered to by tele-evangelical and creepy Utopian fanatics like Prime Minister Blair who kept parroting his "beliefs".

Watts distinguished between faith and belief with the former meaning a willingness to embrace fully doubt and loss instead of "striving" for a God which represented an End directed system of conquest of Nature and that animates the idea of Progress.

Back in 1951 Watts had seen that the inseparability of Man from Nature and his belief that humans could master their environment and live like Gods her on earth would lead to a treadmill of meaningless acquisition for shoddy goods based on working evermore harder.

The afterlife had metastasised into a belief that endless tomorrows would always be better than the present whereas Watts said that the present was the only place to be and hard work in corporations was one way of consoling man in an Age of Anxiety.

"Human beings appear to be happy just so long as they have a future to which they can look forward-whether it be a "good time" tomorrow or an everlasting life beyond the grave....when this "good time arrives, it is difficult to enjoy it to the full without some promise of more to come. If happiness depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will o' the wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves vanish into the abyss of death"

Security might have been gained by material plenitude but Watts was clever enough to see that both the USA then and both it and the UK today were less "materialistic" but trapped in abstract thought categories in which individuals replace the stuff of reality with a fiction.

The danger was that the fiction and the fantasy could develop a dark side, as alienated and atomised societies could lead to a lethal despair, emptiness and boredom which would lead to authoritarianism as personal responsibility was transferred on to the powerful.

As with Freud in The Future on an Illusion, Watts realised that man was unable to live without myths and predicted that conformist societies based on a herd mentality and work hard, spend hard cycle and sorry merry go round were one reason why Fascism had developed.

'...man seems to be unable to live without myth, without the belief that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of this life have some meaning and goal in the future. At once new myths come into being-political and economic myths with extravagant promises of the best of futures in the present world'

Such a predicament is demonstrably evident in the contemporary UK where politics has dovetailed with entertainment and the mindless up beat boosterism of New Labour and Tony Blair encouraging "the feel good factor", though based on amassing colossal debts.

The main myth underpinning both New Labour and the New Conservatives under David Cameron is that progress in ineluctable and, as the old New Labour slogan went, Things Can Only Get Better, the words taken from a corny pop song by the appropriately named D:Ream.

With people immured in frantic consumerism, all politicians and silly vicars maintained the myth of progress which had previously been bound to a belief in a monotheistic God but, deprived on that comfort, would lead to "political religions" which gave,

'...the individual a certain sense of meaning by making him part of a vast social effort, in which he loses something of his own emptiness and loneliness. Yet the very violence of these political religions betrays the anxiety beneath them-for they are men huddling together and shouting to give themselves courage in the dark'.

Nobody prdicted the new charismatic creeps of PR politics who would emerge from the contemporary society of huge shopping malls, absurd non-stop TV channels, football supporter kitsch which affirms a social solidarity ritual in 2010 rather than just watching a game.

Tony Blair was essentially a product of an image making PR machine in which he came to believe himself a "man of destiny" rather than a rather lame leader of a nation whose creative and productive purpose had evaporated almost entirely.

Not only that he presented himself as a "conviction politician" which he was not at all but came to believe in the script created for him by his advisers and 'spin doctors' that he was some Messiah who would save the world if only there was enough will and force.

Watts was alert to the growth of fundamentalism in the 1950s and the kind of spin whereby people made God their Business Partner, rather like the car owner Reg Vardy who wanted to use his money to "charitably" set up "faith schools" in a broken and alienated society.

" ( the ) most forceful arguments for some sort of return to orthodoxy are those who show the social and moral advantages of belief in God but this does nor prove God is a reality. It proves, at most that believing in God is useful. "If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him"

The most brilliant passages in The Wisdom of Insecurity are directly applicable to the absurdity of the "drivenness" of modern life in the UK now, the "belief in believing" that Blair represented when he claimed "I only know what I believe".

That "belief" was the one that led Blair into moral crusades to liberate the world such as Iraq in 2003 that gave New Labour the features of a political religion no less that Communism, which Watts was also critical of as well as the dogmatism of some "anti-war" protesters.

Watts spoke of the anti-Vietnam demonstrators that "they hated the haring of hatred-three instead of one".That was evident in the hatred projected on to Blair and the aggressive political religions which were behind anti-Iraq War demos led by Islamists and relict communists.

What these kinds of protests represented were as much a protest against the society in which the demonstrators lived, though it is impossible to generalise about the make up of a huge demonstration, the slogans seemed to espouse boredom with consumerism.

The will to believe in any fly-by-night messiah was seen in the media career of George Galloway, a once member of the left of the Labour Party sympathetic to dictators and any power just so long as it was sufficiently anti-American.

It was an attempt to break out of this through a collective affirmation of common purpose through embracing Islamism as some other political religion that, paradoxically, mirrored the administration of George Bush II. To break out of the "false consciousness" of consumerism.

As Watts put it,

"....our age is one of frustration, anxiety, agitation, and addiction to "dope". Somehow we must grab what we can, and drown the realisation that the whole thing is futile and meaningless. This dope we call our high standard of living, a violent and complex stimulation of the senses, which makes them progressively less sensitive and thus in need of yet more violent stimulation. We crave distraction-a panorama of sights, sounds, thrills and titillations into which as much is possible must be crowded into the shortest possible time"

Watts also realised the futility of the supposed "work ethic" that was necessary to get people to desire consumer goods not merely as products but into purchasing and buying into these illusions of packaged pleasures,

'To keep up this standard most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work'.

In the UK today, people work in meaningless candy floss jobs that have little meaning other than to keep people consuming through adverts which try to be as noisy and pervasive as possible, with digital walls, constant media encouraging the hard sell for useless products.

The tendency towards binge drinking, drug abuse, and ever greater stimulants or dopes are there to fill in the void, the underlying despair that Freud termed "the death instinct" whereby we feel falsely secure through constant 24 hour diversions and the need for aggression.

The violence done to the body and directed against others was a pathology created by the divided consciousness, the knowledge that something is amiss in life but to continue to act in a way that reflected anxiety and the fear of death as the final end without coming to terms with it.

This is one reason for the desperation behind the craving for security, one taken to logical absurdity in the USA where huge churches are now connected to shopping malls and large shopping malls have become Temples or Cathedrals of Consumerism.

Watts contrasted the instinctual wisdom of the body of being satisfied with small pleasures that do not cost anything, do not constantly intrude and degrade public space with constant incitements to feel that by not consuming to excess one would be "at a loss".

In an argument which was phrased in prose that could be as elegant as Blaise Pascal or Arthur Schopenhauer, Watts defined precisely what is wrong with the way people have made of their lives in the 1950s with unerring contemporary relevance thus,

"Human desire tends to be insatiable. We are so anxious for pleasure that we can never get enough of it. We stimulate our sense organs until they become insensitive, so that if pleasure is to continue they must have stronger and stronger stimulants. In self defence the body gets ill from the strain, but the brain wants to go on and on.

The brain is in pursuit of happiness , and because the the brain is much more concerned about the future than the present, it conceives happiness as the guarantee of indefinitely long pleasures. Yet the brain knows that it does not have an indefinitely long future, so that, to be happy it must try to crowd all the pleasures of Paradise and eternity into the span of a few years'.

The contemporary thinker Oliver James has coined the term Affluenza to define what has now become a mind virus almost in which boredom, aggression, perverted narcissism, a vacuous and sterile non-culture is thwarting and stunting people's genuine capacity for creation.

Briain in 2010 creates little of lasting value beyond media and trivial music and is now in certain ways an even more wretched mini-me version of the USA where private affluence and public squalor are exorcised by being plugged into reality through Facebook or Ipods.

In terms that apply directly to the absurdity of what was termed Britain's "knowledge economy", Watts defined the totally cerebral way of living as the "brainy economy" where intelligent people used higher order skills to pursue lower order ends.

Such people-the rapacious PR manipulators, TV executives churning out trashy telly and promoting tacky showbiz values-were all condemned by Watts not out of so much a puritanical distaste but because they were pursuing self defeating and infinitely frustrating aims that were ultimately meaningless and stupid.

In a tour de force passage Watts wrote,

'....the "brainy economy" ( is ) designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse-providing a constant titillation of of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions.

The perfect "subject" for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind that can go with him at all times and in all places. His eyes flit from television screen to newspaper to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm without release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity-shock treatments-as "human interest", shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings. The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire"

Watts was friendly with Aldous Huxley and it is hard not to see him , as well as the late J G Ballard, as one of the most prescient definers of the "Americanised" civilisation and the near dystopian futures conjured up by Huxley in Brave New World and Ballard in his novels.

As Ballard put it in the 1995 introduction to Crash,

'The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century -- sex and paranoia.

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -- mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality'.

Bibliography

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
J G Ballard, Crash ( 1995 edition ).