We are Such a Joyless Society

5 August 2001, 12:06am IST
John Humphrys.

In an age when entertainment is the third biggest industry in the world, one would think that joy would be fashionable. if only it were. take a look around and you will see the opposite. the faces of our most successful young pop stars are almost uniformly glum - more like the tubercular romantic poets of a couple of centuries ago, though without the talent. our most famous sportsman, david beckham, may have prodigious footballing talent, millions in the bank and the ultimate iconic marriage, but he looks more like some poor old sod who’s just been fired from barry town and can’t afford a pint of mild to drown his sorrows. and then there are the models. what’s with them? is it the knowledge that they’ll have to find something to do with the 50 grand they earn every time they sashay down the catwalk that makes them look as though a nail is sticking though the sole of their manolo blahnik shoe? no, joy is not fashionable. everyone seems to want to express a sort of depressed solemnity. it’s not hard to see why. joy comes unmediated. it is spontaneous. but our society is too sophisticated for its own good, our culture too managed and fabricated. spontaneity is mistrusted. you get an idea of spontaneous joy watching a very small child at play, but i suspect we are all capable of it long after we have reached the age of self-consciousness. even surly old gits like me, who make a living from bringing misery to a certain type of politician. i happen to be very fond of bumble bees. no particular reason, i just like watching them going about their business. it’s always depressing to read that they are disappearing from the countryside and to see them staggering around on the floor when they’ve run out of food and don’t have the energy to make those tiny wings carry their large bodies aloft in search of more. i saved one this week by feeding him a tiny blob of honey. he revived after a while and flew away. i felt like a combination of mother teresa and gerald durrell. then i realised i was going to be late for my next self-imposed deadline. to have a stab at joy we need a bit of space. the great american novelist herman melville put it nicely. our problem, he said, was that, when we tried to create a “larger liberty”, all we ended up doing was extending the “empire of necessity”. in our society the larger liberty is defined almost entirely in materialistic terms. we need more money for it. so the empire of necessity encroaches on the space in which we should be living our lives, in which we are open to experiencing spontaneous joy. in the more prosaic language of modern sociologists and policy-makers, self-imposed pressures knock our work-life balance askew. we are all familiar with the picture. our working hours increase as the stress of our working lives becomes more intense. we sacrifice aspects of our family life. we make sure we are always on call. we cannot imagine survival without a nasty little mobile phone bleeping or vibrating in our inside pocket or handbag. if we think about it at all, we reckon that all this is probably necessary because we can have our larger liberty only if we remain competitive, if we work harder than the next guy who’s trying to work harder than us. necessity allows no ifs and buts. because we cannot protect the space where ordinary joy might thrive if we gave it a chance, we compensate by buying distractions. we buy “enjoyment” - a tepid version of spontaneous joy, especially when it is supplied by the mass entertainment industry. we indulge in consumer therapy. then, of course, we need more money to pay for it all. and now we are extending that empire into the lives of our children. we impose on them our own frenetic regimes. school is not for enjoying; it is for remorseless testing: a permanent preparation for exams rather than a preparation for life with plenty of space for joy. how else will they be able to compete, we ask? and then we wonder why teachers complain that there is no “joy” left in teaching. occasionally we need to defy the empire of necessity - if only to prove that we can. it might even help put a smile back on our faces.