The Complicated Life

At the Blanchards' everything is topsy-turvy, and truly there is good reason for it! Just think: Mademoiselle Yvonne is to be married on Tuesday, and here we are at Friday!

There is an endless procession of visitors laden with gifts and of tradesmen staggering under their orders. The servants are run off their feet. As for the parents and the engaged couple, they no longer have a life; they no longer have a known address. By day it is the dressmakers, the milliners, the upholsterers, the cabinetmakers, the jewelers, or the apartment that has been handed over to the painters and carpenters. From there, a quick dash through the offices of lawyers and agents, where they wait their turn watching the clerks copy out deeds in the shadow of their mountains of paperwork. After that there is barely time for each of them to rush home and dress for the series of formal dinners: engagement dinners, introduction dinners, the dinner for the signing of the marriage contract, evening parties and balls. Around midnight they come home worn out, only to find all the latest deliveries waiting and a frantic flood of letters. Congratulations, compliments, acceptances and refusals from bridesmaids and groomsmen, apologies from tradesmen who are running late. And then the last-minute mishaps: a sudden bereavement that throws the wedding procession into disarray, a nasty cold that keeps an actress, a star and a friend of the family, from singing in the organ loft, and so on. So much to begin all over again! Poor Blanchards! They will never be ready, though they really thought they had considered everything and foreseen everything.

And that has been their existence for the better part of a long month. No chance to breathe, to collect themselves for an hour, to exchange a quiet word. No, that is no life at all...

Fortunately there is Grandmother's room! Grandmother is nearly eighty. Having suffered and worked a great deal, she has come to look at things with that calm assurance which people of lofty mind and loving heart bring back from life. Almost always seated in her armchair, she loves the silence of long, meditative hours. And so the bustling storm that rages through the house has stopped respectfully at her door. On the threshold of this refuge voices grow quiet and footsteps soften. And when the young engaged couple want to take shelter for a moment, they flee to Grandmother.

"Poor children!" she tells them then. "How frayed your nerves are! Rest a little; belong to each other. That is what matters most. The rest is of little account; it does not deserve to swallow you up!"

The young people feel this keenly. How many times in these last weeks has their love had to give way to all sorts of conventions, demands, and useless things! They suffer from the fate that, at this decisive moment of their lives, keeps pulling their minds away from the one essential thing and driving them through a multitude of secondary concerns. And they readily agree with their grandmother when, between a caress and a smile, she tells them:

"Really, my children, the world is getting too complicated, and all this does not make people any happier... quite the contrary!..."

I am of Granny's opinion. From the cradle to the grave, in his needs as in his pleasures, in his conception of the world and of himself, modern man struggles amid countless complications. Nothing is simple anymore: not thinking, not acting, not amusing ourselves, not even dying. With our own hands we have added a host of difficulties to existence and taken away a good many of its pleasures. I am convinced that at this very hour there are thousands of my fellow human beings suffering from the consequences of a life too artificial. They will be grateful to us for trying to give expression to their unease and for encouraging the longing for simplicity that stirs in them without their quite knowing it.

Let us begin by listing a series of facts that bring out the truth we wish to make visible.

The complication of life shows itself in the multitude of our material needs. One of the universally observed phenomena of our century is that our needs have grown along with our resources. That is not an evil in itself. The birth of certain needs does indeed mark progress. It is a sign of superiority to feel the need to wash, to wear clean linen, to live in a healthy dwelling, to eat with a certain care, to cultivate one's mind. But if there are needs whose birth is desirable and which have a right to live, there are others that exert a baneful influence and sustain themselves at our expense, like parasites. It is the number and the imperious character of these that concern us. If our forebears could have been told that one day humanity would have at its disposal all the devices it now has for sustaining and defending its material existence, they would have concluded, first, that independence, and therefore happiness, would increase, and second, that the competition for the goods of life would greatly calm down. They would then have been entitled to think that the simplification of existence brought about by these improved means of action would make a higher morality possible. Nothing of the kind has happened: neither happiness, nor social peace, nor energy for good has increased. To begin with, does it seem to you that your fellow citizens, taken as a whole, are more content than their ancestors and more secure about tomorrow? I do not ask whether they would have reason to be, but whether they actually are. When I watch them live, it seems to me that most of them are dissatisfied with their lot, preoccupied above all with their material needs and haunted by worry about tomorrow. Never has the question of food and shelter been more pressing or more all-consuming than since people have been better fed, better clothed, and better housed than in the past. He is mistaken who believes that the question "What shall we eat, what shall we drink, what shall we wear?" arises only for the poor, who are exposed to the anguish of tomorrows without bread or shelter. For them it is natural, and yet it is among them that it arises most simply. You must go to those who are beginning to enjoy a little comfort to see how much their satisfaction in what they have is troubled by regret for what they lack. And if you want to observe anxiety about the material future in all its luxurious development, look at the well-to-do, and above all at the rich. The women who own only one dress are not the ones who wonder most about what they will wear; likewise, it is not those rationed to bare necessities who ask themselves most about what they will eat tomorrow. This follows necessarily from the law that needs grow the more we satisfy them: the more a man has, the more he needs.

The more secure his tomorrow is, by the ordinary reckoning of common sense, the more he condemns himself to worry about what he and his children will live on, and how he will establish them and their descendants in life. Nothing could give an idea of the fears of a man of settled means: their number, their reach, their refined shades.

From all this there has resulted, across the different social strata and with an intensity that varies with circumstances, a general restlessness, a very complex state of mind that can best be compared to the mood of spoiled children, at once showered with everything and discontented.

If we have not become happier, neither have we become more peaceable or more brotherly. Spoiled children quarrel often and bitterly. The more needs and desires a man has, the more occasions he has for conflict with his fellows, and the less just their causes, the more hateful these conflicts are. That people should fight for bread, for the necessities of life, is the law of nature. It may seem brutal, but there is an excuse in its very harshness, and in general it is limited to rudimentary cruelties. Quite different is the battle for superfluities, for ambition, for privilege, for whim, for material enjoyment. Hunger has never driven man to the base acts that ambition, avarice, and the thirst for unwholesome pleasures drive him to commit. Selfishness grows more harmful as it grows more refined. And so in our time we have witnessed a worsening of the spirit of hostility among fellow human beings, and our hearts are less at peace than ever.

After this, is there any point in asking whether we have become better? Does not the very sinew of goodness lie in man's capacity to love something outside himself? And what room is left for our neighbor in a life sacrificed to material concerns, to needs that are mostly artificial, to the gratification of ambitions, grudges, and whims? The man who puts himself wholly at the service of his appetites makes them grow and multiply so well that they become stronger than he is. Once he is their slave, he loses his moral sense and his energy, and becomes incapable of discerning the good and of doing it. He is handed over to the inner anarchy of desires, from which, in the long run, outer anarchy is born. The moral life consists in governing oneself; immorality consists in our being governed by our needs and our passions. So, little by little, the foundations of the moral life shift, and the standard of judgment goes astray.

For a man enslaved to numerous and exacting needs, possessing is the supreme good, the source of all other goods. It is true that in the fierce competition for possession, people come to hate those who possess, and to deny the right of property when that right is in the hands of others and not in ours. But this fierce eagerness to attack what others possess is fresh proof of the extraordinary importance we attach to possessing. Things and people end up being valued at their market price and according to the profit that can be drawn from them. Whatever brings in nothing is worth nothing, and whoever possesses nothing is nothing. Honest poverty runs a great risk of passing for a disgrace, and money, even dirty money, has little trouble counting as merit... "So," someone will object, "you condemn modern progress wholesale, and you would like to take us back to the good old days, perhaps even to asceticism?" Not in the least. Trying to resurrect the past is the most sterile and the most dangerous of utopias, and the art of living well does not consist in withdrawing from life. But we are trying to bring to light, in order to find a remedy for it, one of the errors that weigh most heavily on social progress: the belief that people become happier and better through an increase in outward well-being. Nothing is falser than this so-called social axiom. On the contrary, it is a fact, established by a thousand examples, that material well-being without a counterweight diminishes the capacity for happiness and debases character. A civilization is worth what the human being at its center is worth. When that human being lacks moral direction, all progress only makes the evil worse and further entangles social problems.

This principle can be verified in other domains than that of material comfort. Let us mention only those of education and freedom. We remember the time when prophets who had a wide hearing announced that, to turn this wretched earth into a dwelling place of the gods, it was enough to overthrow three old allied powers: poverty, ignorance, and tyranny. Other prophets are taking up the same predictions today. We have just seen that the obvious decrease in poverty has made man neither better nor happier. Has this result been achieved to some degree by the praiseworthy care devoted to education? It does not appear so at present, and that is precisely the concern, indeed the anguish, of those who devote themselves to the education of the nation. "Then we must dull the people's minds, abolish universal education, and close the schools." Not at all: but education, like the whole apparatus of our civilization, is after all only a set of tools. Everything depends on the workman who uses them.

The same is true of freedom: it is harmful or wholesome according to the use made of it. Is it still freedom when it belongs to evildoers, or even to the muddleheaded, capricious, and disrespectful man? Freedom is the atmosphere of a higher life, which we become able to breathe through a slow and patient inner transformation.

Every life needs a law, and human life far more than that of lower beings, for the life of man and of societies is more precious and more delicate than that of plants and animals. For man this law is at first external, but it can become internal. As soon as a man has recognized the inner law and bowed before it, he is ripe for freedom, through respect and voluntary obedience. As long as he has no strong and sovereign inner law, he is incapable of breathing the air of freedom. That air intoxicates him, drives him mad, kills him morally. A man who guides himself by the inner law can no more live under the law of external authority than a full-grown bird can live shut up in its eggshell; but a man who has not yet reached the moral point where he governs himself can no more live under a regime of freedom than a bird embryo deprived of its protective shell. These things are terribly simple, and the series of proofs, old and new, keeps growing before our eyes. And yet we still fail to recognize the very rudiments of so important a law. In our democracy, how many people, great and small, have understood, by testing it, living it, and sometimes suffering it, this truth without which a people is incapable of governing itself? Freedom is respect; freedom is obedience to the inner law, and this law is neither the good pleasure of the powerful nor the caprice of the crowd, but the impersonal and higher rule before which those who command are the first to bow their heads. Shall we say, then, that freedom must be abolished? No, but we must make ourselves capable of it and worthy of it; otherwise public life becomes impossible, and a nation makes its way, through license and lack of discipline, toward the inextricable complications of demagogy.

When we review the particular causes that trouble and complicate our social life, whatever names we may give them, and the list would be long, they all come down to one general cause, which is this: the confusion of the secondary with the essential. Comfort, education, freedom, the whole fabric of civilization form the frame of the picture. But the frame does not make the picture, any more than the habit makes the monk or the uniform the soldier. The picture here is the human being, with what is most inward: conscience, character, and will. While we tended and embellished the frame, we forgot, neglected, and damaged the picture. And so we are loaded with outward goods and destitute in spiritual life. We have an abundance of goods that, if need be, we could do without, and we are infinitely poor in the one thing necessary. And when our deepest being awakens, with its need to love, to hope, to fulfill its destiny, it feels something like the anguish of a living person who has just been buried; it suffocates under the heap of secondary things that weigh upon it and deprive it of air and light.

We must disentangle, set free, and restore to honor the true life, put everything in its proper rank, and remember that the center of human progress lies in moral cultivation. What is a good lamp? Not the most ornate, the most finely chased, the one made of the most precious metal. A good lamp is a lamp that gives good light. In the same way, what makes us human beings and citizens is not the number of goods and pleasures we allow ourselves, nor intellectual and artistic culture, nor the honors or independence we enjoy, but the soundness of our moral fiber. And this, after all, is not a truth of today, but a truth for all times.

In no age have the outward conditions that man achieved by his industry or his knowledge been able to relieve him of concern for the state of his inner life. The face of the world changes around us; the intellectual and material factors of existence are transformed. No one can resist this change, whose abruptness is at times not without peril. But the great thing is that, amid changed circumstances, man should remain a man, live his life, and walk toward his goal. Now, whatever road he has to travel, if the traveler is to walk toward his goal, he must not lose his way in byways or burden himself with useless loads. Let him watch over his direction, his strength, and his honor, and, the better to devote himself to the essential, which is to make progress, let him simplify his baggage, even at the cost of some sacrifices.