AutoBioPhilosophy: An intimate story of what it means to be human

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.