6
The Safety Catch
The Hidden Benefits of Insecurity
Security is a kind of death, I think.
– Tennessee Williams, ‘The Catastrophe of Success’
ON 13 JANUARY 2002, during the edgy, watchful months following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a pilot named Elwood Menear – ‘Woodie’, to his friends – arrived at Philadelphia’s International Airport. The forty-six-year-old was due to fly a routine domestic journey to Minneapolis on behalf of his employer, US Airways, and he had no grounds for imagining that his name might soon be making the headlines alongside that weekend’s other most memorable news story, which involved President Bush choking on a pretzel.
Security screening procedures at Philadelphia, in common with those across America and the rest of the world, were becoming progressively tighter. Less than a month previously, Richard Reid, the would-be ‘shoe bomber’, had been tackled and subdued on board a flight from Paris to Miami, thereby initiating the era of compulsory shoe-checking for all travellers. Pilots were not excused all these rigorous new checks, and when Woodie Menear’s turn came, the security screener expressed concern about the presence of a pair of tweezers in his cabin baggage. As it happened, tweezers – unlike corkscrews, or metal scissors, for example – were not on the list of forbidden items; Menear was not breaching regulations by trying to bring them on board. But the official paused just long enough to spark frustration on the part of the pilot, who, like his colleagues, had been growing ever more exasperated by each new restriction. This time it was too much. Menear did not explode in rage; he merely asked a sarcastic question. But it was one that would lead to his immediate arrest, a night in jail, his suspension by US Airways, and months of legal wranglings before he was finally acquitted of ‘making terroristic threats’ and permitted to return to his job.
‘Why are you worried about tweezers,’ Menear asked, ‘when I could crash the plane?’
Given the time and the place, it was an idiotic thing to say. But the insight that it crystallised was anything but idiotic. As aviation security restrictions grew more and more intricate in the years after Menear’s arrest – culminating in the 2006 European ban on all but the tiniest of quantities of liquids in carry-on luggage – critics grew more strident in pointing out that the logic behind the whole policy seemed flawed. It made sense, of course, to keep guns and other weapons out of aeroplane cabins. But those had been prohibited for years. Beyond that, the new rules seemed destined to cause great inconvenience for millions of innocent passengers while doing very little to eliminate the risks posed by a dedicated hijacker. What 9/11 had shown, these critics argued, was not that light-duty ‘boxcutter’ utility knives were the next frontier in terrorism. What it had shown was that a terrorist who had reconciled himself to suicide would always have the upper hand against people who were unwilling to die – no matter which specific objects had been banned.
Bruce Schneier, an American security consultant who is one of the fiercest opponents of the post-9/11 crackdown, has made a name – and a few enemies – for himself by explaining the many ways in which one could easily hijack or bomb an aeroplane today, in spite of all the new measures. Garottes, for example, can be improvised from fishing line or dental floss, while the snapped-off handle of a wheeled bag makes ‘a pretty effective spear’. Alternatively, you could buy some steel epoxy glue from a hardware store: it comes in two tubes, one containing steel dust and the other containing hardener, which you could combine in-flight, and mould into a stubby steel knife, using a metal teaspoon as a handle. (Neither steel epoxy glue nor metal teaspoons are prohibited on planes – unlike, say, snow globes, which are banned under American regulations.) Schneier’s point is not, of course, that wheeled bags and dental floss should be urgently added to the list of items forbidden in flight. It is that you cannot make air travel significantly safer by banning each new item that a terrorist thinks to use, or that you fear he might, unless you’re willing to ban every item – and perhaps also to force passengers to be strapped into their seats, too, given that hijackers could always use their bare hands. Not long after the 9/11 attacks, a reporter asked Schneier whether any measures could be taken that might guarantee that such a tragedy would never happen again. Sure, Schneier replied: just ground all the planes.
‘There are precisely two things that have made air travel safer since 9/11: locks on cockpit doors, and teaching passengers that they have to fight back,’ Schneier told me. He is forty-nine and ponytailed, and speaks in the quiet tones of someone who is confident of the truth of his opinions, and not especially concerned about winning you over. ‘You can argue that there’s a third – sky marshals. But actually, once you tell people you have them, you don’t really need them. It’s the idea of sky marshals that makes us safer, not the marshals themselves.’
If what Schneier says is correct, then an obvious question follows: why do governments continue to impose these expensive and time-consuming restrictions? Why carry on playing a cat-and-mouse game with terrorists, in which the terrorists will always be one step ahead? There are many possible answers to this question, having to do with the pressure that politicians and safety officials feel to show that they are doing something, and to impress those who elect them or pay their salaries. But at the root of it all, Schneier argues, is the fundamental human desire for a feeling of safety and security – even though this feeling may be only indirectly related, at best, to being more safe or secure. Schneier coined the term ‘security theatre’ to refer to all those measures that are designed primarily to increase the feeling of security, without actually making people more secure. Indeed, it is perfectly possible to argue – Schneier has often done so – that security theatre in fact makes us less secure. It swallows resources that might otherwise be expended on more effective anti-terrorism measures, such as intelligence-gathering, and it makes passengers and security staff less alert to the kinds of suspicious behaviour they ought to be noticing. After all, if everyone’s luggage is being so scrupulously examined that even snow globes are being intercepted, it might be easy to assume that you could let your guard down.
Start to look at security through Bruce Schneier’s eyes, and some of the ways in which society approaches the issue begin to appear profoundly ridiculous. In 2007, for example, Britain’s then prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced a barrage of measures to beef up security at the nation’s airports, railway stations, and other transport hubs, including the construction of blast-resistant barriers. A posting on Schneier’s blog explained that the barriers would be constructed at Liverpool Lime Street, that city’s primary rail station, but that they would not be constructed at less busy suburban commuter stations, a few miles along the same stretch of track. The blog post was headlined: ‘UK Spends Billions To Force Rail Terrorists To Drive a Little Further’. Brown’s announcement was a classic piece of security theatre: a costly way to make travellers feel safer – so long as they didn’t reflect too closely on the details – while doing nothing to deter an even slightly diligent terrorist.
In this book so far, we have seen how some of the most basic doctrines that dominate our thinking about happiness fail to work because we struggle for them too strenuously. It’s easy to see how Bruce Schneier’s critique of air security bears a superficial resemblance to this argument: in reality, many of the things we believe make air travel more secure don’t do so, or make things worse. But the connection goes deeper – because ‘security’ in the context of air travel is really only one facet of a much bigger question that brings us to the heart of the ‘negative’ approach to happiness. The desire for a feeling of security and safety doesn’t only lead us into irrationality in the field of counterterrorism. It leads us into irrationality all the time.
As we’ll see, a staggering proportion of human activity – in politics, business, and international relations, as much as in our personal lives – is motivated by the desire to feel safe and secure. And yet this quest to feel secure doesn’t always lead to security, still less to happiness. It turns out to be an awkward truth about psychology that people who find themselves in what the rest of us might consider conditions of extreme insecurity – such as severe poverty – discover insights into happiness from which the rest of us could stand to learn. And if the most radical proponents of the ‘negative path’ are to be believed, in turning towards insecurity we may come to understand that security itself is a kind of illusion – and that we were mistaken, all along, about what it was we thought we were searching for.
It is easy to feel, these days, that we live in uniquely insecure times, and that things are only going to get worse. Several years ago, the 2020 Project, an initiative of the American intelligence services charged with making broad forecasts about the future, published a report with a chapter bluntly entitled ‘Pervasive Insecurity’. By 2020, the project’s analysts wrote, ‘we foresee a more pervasive sense of insecurity, which may be as much based on psychological perception as physical threats.’ Among the chief causes for anxiety, they predicted, would be ‘concerns over job security’, ‘fears revolving around migration’, ‘terrorism and internal conflicts’, and even ‘conflicts among great powers’. And all of that was written some time before the financial collapse of the late 2000s, which brought a new wave of insecurity to millions.
Yet it is easy, too, to find evidence that people have always believed that they are living in times of unique insecurity. In 1951 – a relatively happy and prosperous moment, all things considered, after the deepest pain of the post-war recovery and before the worst of the Cold War – Alan Watts captured his era’s sense of insecurity well. There was, he wrote, ‘the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years or so, many longestablished traditions have broken down – traditions of family, and social life, of government, of the economic order, and of religious belief. As the years go by, there seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold, fewer things which we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed for all time.’ Then again, that was how plenty of people felt in 634 BC in Rome, as well, when they were convinced that the city was destined to collapse after 120 years of existence. It is how people have felt at countless points in history since then. Try searching Google’s library of digitised manuscripts for the phrase ‘these uncertain times’, and you’ll find that it occurs over and over, in hundreds of journals and books, in virtually every decade the database encompasses, reaching back to the seventeenth century. ‘As a matter of fact,’ Watts insisted, ‘our age is no more insecure than any other. Poverty, disease, war, change and death are nothing new.’
So people have always wanted to feel more secure than they do. Yet as Bruce Schneier’s work in the field of air security helps to demonstrate, there’s an enormous pitfall waiting for us
– because the strategies that are designed to bestow a feeling of security often don’t actually leave us more secure. They may even have the opposite effect. ‘Security is both a feeling and a reality,’ as Schneier puts it, ‘and they’re not the same.’
The feeling and the reality of security diverge in specific and predictable ways. Much has been written in recent years about ‘cognitive biases’ – the ways in which our judgments about reality tend to depart from reality itself – and many of these help explain the chronic mistakes we make when it comes to security. For example, we habitually fear threats from other humans more than threats from the natural world. We fear threats that we can easily call vividly to mind more than those we find difficult to picture – the so-called ‘availability bias’. We fear situations in which we feel as though we have no control, such as flying as a passenger on an aeroplane, more than situations in which we feel as if we have control, such as when at the steering wheel of a car. No wonder, then, that we sometimes risk making ourselves less secure by chasing feelings of security. You’re vastly more likely to be killed as the result of a car crash than an air crash, and vastly more likely to die of heart disease than at the hands of a violent intruder. But if you react to news stories about air terrorism by taking the car when you’d otherwise have taken a plane, or if you spend time and energy protecting your home from attackers that you could have spent on improving your diet, you’ll be letting your biases guide you towards a greater feeling of security at the expense of your real safety.
Psychologists are not unanimous about why these biases should have developed in the first place, but Schneier makes the plausible argument that the explanation lies in evolution – specifically, the discrepancy between the rate of evolutionary change and the rate at which modern society has developed. Adopting the long view of our species, across evolutionary time, it is easy to see that these biases might once have served our survival well – but that they fail us now because we confront situations for which they were never intended. Some animals, surprised by a car’s headlights, may leap wildly from one side of the road to the other, in an instinctive effort to throw off the predator, which doesn’t work when your predator is a 4 x 4. And ‘like a squirrel whose predatorevasion techniques fail when confronted by a car,’ observes Schneier, ‘or a passenger pigeon who finds that evolution prepared him to survive the hawk but not the shotgun, our innate capabilities to deal with risk fail when confronted with things such as modern human society, technology, and the media.’
Take, for example, the availability bias. Caring more about those threats that you can picture vividly might, long ago, have made sense: the reason you could picture them vividly, most likely, was because they occurred a few yards away, in the village where you lived, and very recently. They really did pose a more serious risk, so the bias was a useful shortcut for making an accurate threat assessment. But if the reason that they are mentally ‘available’ to you today is that you’re in the habit of watching a daily news bulletin, the very purpose of which is to scour the globe for the most lurid scenes of mayhem, you will be misled into focusing your worry on threats you don’t actually face. Seeing a television report of a terrorist attack on foreign soil, you might abandon plans for an overseas holiday, in order to hang on to your feeling of safety – when, in truth, spending too much time sitting on the sofa watching television might pose a far greater threat to your survival.
If cognitive biases were the only problem with the quest for safety and security, the solution might be straightforward, if not necessarily easy to implement: it would simply be a matter of bearing the biases in mind, and doing our best to adjust our behaviours accordingly. We would then avoid being misled by our evolved emotional responses; we’d achieve the protection from danger that we had been seeking, and perfect happiness would follow. Needless to say, it isn’t that simple. The more radical possibility – the one that takes us to the core of the ‘negative’ approach to happiness – is that there might be something more fundamentally problematic about the goal of security; and that real happiness might be dependent on being willing to face, and to tolerate, insecurity and vulnerability.
This is a thorny topic. You’d have to be insane to argue that it was preferable to live in conditions of serious danger, or that a certain basic sense of psychological security isn’t a healthy thing to possess. (The terminology creates additional confusion, since you could argue that anyone who is able calmly to tolerate feelings of insecurity and vulnerability must already be, by definition, rather secure to begin with.) But a recurring theme in the study of happiness is that many of the ways in which we try to feel ‘safe’ don’t ultimately make us happy. We seek financial security, yet above a certain threshold level, more money doesn’t translate into more happiness. We protect ourselves from physical danger by moving to safer neighbourhoods, or even locking ourselves inside gated communities, but the effects of such trends on community life have been demonstrated to have a negative effect on collective levels of happiness. We seek the fulfilment of strong romantic relationships and friendships, yet striving too hard to achieve security in such relationships stifles them; their flourishing depends on a certain degree of not being protected, of being open to experiences both negative and positive. It is possible to be similarly protected from terrorism, as Schneier said, so long as you are happy to shut down the possibility of air travel itself. What all these examples have in common is that achieving perfect security would run counter to our interests. We might think we want security more than anything, but when it comes down to it, we don’t.
‘To be vulnerable’, argue the psychotherapists Hal and Sidra Stone, ‘is to be without defensive armour, to be authentic and present … when we are able to feel our vulnerability, we are able to experience the full range of our reactions to the world around us.’ The point, says Brené Brown, a professor of social work who has studied the psychological benefits of vulnerability, is that ‘you can’t selectively numb emotion. You can’t say: here’s the bad stuff; here’s vulnerability, here’s grief, here’s shame, here’s fear, here’s disappointment: I don’t want these.’ In the end, the only way you can achieve protection from the negatives is by achieving protection from the positives, too – whereupon you realise that you didn’t really want such protection at all. Or as C.S. Lewis put it, more poetically:
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no-one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with your hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
Becoming numb to negative emotions, Brown’s research illustrates, doesn’t even work as a way of protecting yourself from negative emotions themselves – for reasons that the Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton expressed in his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain. ‘The truth that many people never understand’, he wrote, ‘is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt.’ Seen this way, it becomes clear that security-chasing is a large part of the problem with the ‘cult of optimism’. Through positive thinking and related approaches, we seek the safety and solid ground of certainty, of knowing how the future will turn out, of a time in the future when we’ll be ceaselessly happy, and never have to fear negative emotions again. But in chasing all that, we close down the very faculties that permit the happiness we crave.
For the American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, insecurity is the essential nature of reality – and all our distress arises from trying to scramble to solid ground that doesn’t actually exist. ‘Becoming a Buddhist’, she says, ‘is about becoming homeless.’ To turn to face reality is to see that we exist in a condition of ‘fundamental groundlessness’. Yet most of us chronically ‘scramble not to feel that groundlessness … my whole training [is] that there is no way to tie up those loose ends’. She goes on: ‘You’re never going to erase the groundlessness. You’re never going to have a neat, sweet little picture with no messiness.’ Chödrön’s most famous book is entitled When Things Fall Apart, which makes it sound as though it might be a manual for getting back on a secure footing when things go catastrophically wrong. In fact, her point is that when things fall apart, however painful the experience, it’s a good thing; the collapse of your apparent security represents a confrontation with life as it really is. ‘Things are not permanent, they don’t last, there is no final security,’ she says. What makes us miserable is not this truth, but our efforts to escape it.
At this point, though, a weighty objection to all this might be troubling you in the same way that it troubled me. It’s all very well for those of us who find ourselves in relatively comfortable situations to praise insecurity and vulnerability. We may be fortunate enough to live out our entire lives without encountering insecurity in its most acute forms. But what do you learn about happiness when insecurity really is the unavoidable background condition of your daily life?
It was a Sunday morning in January, cloudless and hot, and many of the residents of Africa’s second-largest urban slum were dressed for church: the men in well-pressed suits, the women in dresses of fuschia and bright green, children clutching bibles. Here in the poorest part of Kibera – across the rubbish-strewn railway tracks that divided the slum proper from the rest of Nairobi – it was a challenge to keep your church clothes clean as you picked your way along the muddy paths that passed for roads; in many places, the ground was composed of discarded plastic bags and other detritus. Between homes made from scraps of sheet metal and mud, chickens and dogs wandered through gullies that flowed with raw sewage.
Most of the churchgoers were heading up the hill to the big Africa Inland church, or across to the main Catholic one. There were numerous other tiny shop-front churches, too, hidden among the homes – dark one-room shacks in which a minister could be seen preaching to an audience of two or three, or playing hymns on a Casio keyboard. But in the opinion of Frankie Otieno, a twenty-two-year-old resident of Kibera who spent his Sundays not worshipping but attending to his various business interests, these smaller churches were essentially scams. ‘In Kibera, a church is a business,’ he said, his easy smile tinged with cynicism. He was sitting on a tattered sofa in the shady main room of his mother’s house in Kibera, drinking Coke from a glass bottle. ‘A church is the easiest way to get money from the aid organisations. One day, you fill up your church with kids – somebody who’s dirty, somebody who’s not eating – and then the organisation comes and sees the church is full, and they take photos to show their sponsors, and they give you money.’ He chuckled. ‘It’s all about the photos, you know?’
In another part of Kibera, reached by pursuing still narrower paths, deeper into the slum, then rounding a bend past a health clinic, three Kiberan men were starting their work day at the goat-bone recycling facility. It was an open-air compound, arranged in straightforward fashion: a pile of newly cleaned goat bones on one side, various saws and grinding implements in the middle, and then, on the other side, the results of their labours: beer-bottle openers, necklaces and other trinkets, waiting to be transported to central Nairobi to be sold to tourists. A chunky battery-powered cassette recorder was playing classic rock, though if you listened you could hear singing from the church on the hill. The smell of nyama choma, or roasted goat meat, sizzling on an open grill nearby, wafted through the workshop, masking the odour of sewage.
Commercially speaking, Sunday in Kibera was no different to any other day, and that meant it was busy. Past the bone workshop, past the street grills, down along an alley covered with blue plastic sheeting, a gateway marked the official entrance to the slum’s vast market. But the boundary wasn’t obvious, because the whole of Kibera felt like a market. Along every crater-ridden lane, merchants at makeshift tables sold radios, or pineapples, or baby clothes in fluorescent colours; the navigators of wheelbarrows piled with building materials or discarded electronics veered to the left and right to avoid collisions with other people, and other wheelbarrows.
Meanwhile, in an alley leading away from the market, past an establishment showing British Premier League football matches on a satellite television, a man who gave his name as George was at home, working out at the gym he had improvised in his tiny yard. His barbell was a repurposed iron pipe, with concrete poured into cylindrical water vats at each end, in place of weight plates. ‘A hundred and fifty kilograms!’ he claimed, when asked how much he was hefting above his massive shoulders, making the veins in his forehead pulse. His children craned their necks out from behind the cloth covering their home’s main room, and laughed at him.
By the standards of someone from almost anywhere else, the conditions faced by Kibera’s residents – who number anywhere from 170,000 to a million, according to competing population surveys – are almost unimaginably harsh. The slum has no running water, and no electricity, except what its residents ‘borrow’ by clipping wires to the cables that run overhead, bringing power to Nairobi’s better-off citizens. Sexual violence is rampant. Car-jackings and opportunistic murders are a weekly occurrence. With no proper sanitation, Kibera’s primary means of disposing of human waste is what the slum-dwellers wryly refer to as ‘flying toilets’: the practice of defecating into a plastic bag, then flinging it as far from your own home as possible. Flying toilets add diarrhoea and typhoid fever to the neighbourhood’s catalogue of woes, which also includes the fact that, according to some estimates, 20 per cent of the population is infected with HIV.
For all these reasons – and also because it is a conveniently short drive from central Nairobi, with its international airport and comfortable business hotels – Kibera has become a world-famous landmark of suffering. Prime ministers and presidents travel there for photo-opportunities; television news crews come regularly to gawp; and the slum has disproportionately become the focus of hundreds of aid groups, many of them religious, mostly from the United States and Europe. Their names reflect the sense of agonised desperation for which the name ‘Kibera’ has come to stand: the Fountain of Hope Initiative; Seeds of Hope; Shining Hope for Communities; the Kibera Hope Centre; Kibera In Need.
But ask Norbert Aluku, a lanky young social worker, born and raised in Kibera, if his childhood there was one of misery and suffering, and he will laugh at you in disbelief. ‘Of course not! Because, at the end of the day, it’s not about your conditions. It’s about taking whatever you have, and using it as best you can, together with your neighbours. In Kibera, it’s only with your neighbours that you’re going to get by.’ Or ask Irene Mueni, who lives there too, and who speaks darkly of traumatising events in her childhood, yet who still says: ‘Happiness is subjective. You can be happy in a slum, unhappy in a city. The things you need for happiness aren’t the things you think you need.’
This is the difficult truth that strikes many visitors to Kibera, and they struggle for the words to express it, aware that it is open to misinterpretation. Bluntly, Kiberans just don’t seem as unhappy or as depressed as one might have expected. ‘It’s clear that poverty has crippled Kibera,’ observes Jean-Pierre Larroque, a documentary filmmaker who has spent plenty of time there, ‘but it doesn’t exactly induce the pity-inducing cry for help that NGOs, church missions, and charity groups would have you believe.’ What you see instead, he notes, are ‘streets bustling with industry’. Kibera feels not so much like a place of despair as a hotbed of entrepreneurialism.
This awkward realisation – that people living in extremely fragile circumstances seem surprisingly high-functioning and non-depressed – isn’t only applicable to Kibera, of course. It’s so familiar that it has become a cliché, especially regarding sub-Saharan Africa. And it is laden with problems: it coasts close to a number of distasteful generalisations, perhaps even to racism, as well as to poisonous myths about ‘primitive’ people, uncorrupted by modernity. It can lead to questionable political conclusions, too: if people who are suffering from severe poverty and poor health are so happy, certain commentators are inclined to suggest, perhaps they don’t require outside support. And we cringe, surely rightly, when we hear well-heeled celebrities speak in rapt tones about the simple joys of having nothing – as when, for example, Coleen Rooney, television presenter and footballer’s wife, told an interviewer: ‘I find it so inspiring when you see people from poorer countries on TV: they just seem so happy with their lives, despite their lack of material things … in the future, I plan to visit somewhere like Africa.’
The problem with merely dismissing this entire outlook as wrong or misguided, though, is that it appears to be at least partly true. International surveys of happiness – including several reputable research projects such as the World Values Survey – have consistently found some of the world’s poorest countries to be among the happiest. (Nigeria, where 92 per cent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day, has come in first place.) Survey data from the Afrobarometer research project, which monitors more than a dozen African countries, including Kenya, has indicated ‘unusual levels of optimism among the poorest and most insecure respondents’ in those places. Certain specific measures, such as how optimistic parents feel about their children’s futures, actually appear to be inversely correlated with wealth and education: the least privileged report feeling the most upbeat. According to mental health researchers, anxiety disorders and depression are far less common in poorer countries. (Their studies take into account the difference in likelihood of getting diagnosed.) In one recent review of mental health problems around the world, sub-Saharan Africa came bottom in terms of prevalence; the top positions were all occupied by richer, industrialised regions.
‘Look, this is a thing that social scientists have often pointed out,’ Norbert told me, when I made my second visit to Kibera. We were sitting on folding chairs, in the shade cast by his onestorey office building on the outskirts of the slum. ‘Just because you have social problems, it doesn’t mean you don’t have happiness. Do richer people have fewer problems, really? We have politicians going to jail for corruption, and I really don’t think they’re happy compared to me. There are problems at every level. Like heart disease or blood pressure if you’re stressed.’ He shrugged. ‘Isn’t that obvious?’
This is a psychological phenomenon that stands in need of explanation. Even if there is some debate about the methodologies of international surveys of happiness; even if the impressions of Jean-Pierre Larroque and others don’t capture the whole picture – why is it that places such as Kibera aren’t unequivocally at the bottom of every assessment of happiness levels, every time? A multiplicity of answers has been advanced, and none of them are completely satisfying. One is simply that people’s expectations are lower. A related one is based on the (true) observation that happiness is relative: people who aren’t surrounded by examples of more pleasant lifestyles don’t rank their own situation so poorly. The problem with these arguments is that they all too easily drift into the condescending suggestion that slum-dwellers don’t know any better – that they are simply unaware that it might be possible to live with running water, functioning toilets, and lower rates of disease. But this is certainly not the case in Kibera, whose residents live shoulder-to-shoulder with Nairobi’s fancier neighbourhoods; some of them have jobs as domestic workers there. The grand mansion of a senior Kenyan politician sits just a modest walk back up the road from the slum to Nairobi. In a girls’ school in the heart of Kibera, five-year-olds learn to read beneath a giant photograph of Times Square; Hollywood movies on videotape are commonplace. Norbert Aluku had even coined a term – ‘the thirst’ – for the ambition he tried to instill in younger Kiberans precisely by taking them to better areas of Nairobi to show them what could be theirs. Not knowing any better, in this case at least, doesn’t explain the mystery.
I don’t have an answer to the puzzle, either. But it does become a little less mysterious when viewed in the context of the psychology of security and insecurity. We have seen how pursuing our desire for a feeling of security can lead us badly astray; and that vulnerability may be a precondition for the very things that bring the greatest happiness – strong social relationships above all. What the people of Kibera and others in similar situations all share is a lack of access to those things that the rest of us self-defeatingly try to use to quell our feelings of insecurity. The point is certainly not that it’s better not to have money, say, than it is to have it. But it’s surely undeniable that if you don’t have it, it’s much harder to overinvest emotionally in it. The same goes for prestigious jobs, material possessions, or impressive educational qualifications: when you have little chance of obtaining them, you won’t be misled into thinking they bring more happiness than they do. More broadly, living in such desperate circumstances means that shutting out feelings of insecurity is not a viable option. You have to turn and face the reality of insecurity instead. The people of Kibera are vulnerable whether they like it or not.
One American working in Kibera, Paige Elenson, told me she’d been strongly affected by just this realisation. ‘I hate all that romanticism – “Oh, they’re so happy,”’ she told me. ‘In many ways, they’re really not… but when you don’t have access to the good clothes and the nice jobs, when you don’t have any of that to hold onto, you have to let people know you through your way of being, not through what you’re wearing, or your job title. You actually have to be kind to people if you want them to like you! You have to look into their eyes! We don’t have that so much in the US, because it’s, like, ‘look what I’m wearing; look what it says on my business card – I don’t need to be nice to you’. So there is this vulnerability, which is another way of saying that there’s less pretence. I don’t know that that makes you happier, necessarily … But when there’s less to latch onto – when there are choices you don’t have – then it changes things. You have to cut the crap.’
Speaking of crap: one day in Kibera, Norbert took me to see a project he was associated with, which involved recycling human waste into marketable biogas. This offered a new solution to the problem of flying toilets. People would stop flinging bags of the stuff into the street, he figured, once they began to realise they could make money from it. It was typical Kiberan pragmatism, assisted in this case by an American aid group. When Norbert talked about the importance of working with your neighbours, and of working with what you had, he wasn’t speaking in saccharine clichés. The communal activities he was talking about included recycling human waste.
‘Look,’ said Frankie Otieno, drinking Coke on his mother’s sofa, when I asked him about all this, ‘Kibera is not a good place. Big problems, and a million NGOs who don’t do any good. Major, major problems. But you have to manage, because you have to. So you take what you have and you get on with it. And you can be happy like that, because happiness comes from your family, and other people, and in making something better of yourself, and in new horizons … right? Why worry about something you don’t have?’
Above all, living in a situation of such inherent insecurity, while very far from preferable, was clarifying. Nobody would envy it. But living with fewer illusions meant facing reality head on. Not having the option of trying to protect yourself in counter-productive ways made for a resilience in the face of hardship that qualified, in the end, as a modest but extremely durable kind of happiness.
We have seen that security may not always be the benefit we imagine it to be, and that insecurity may be compatible with – or perhaps even, in some sense, conducive to – happiness. But an even more radical suggestion is that our search for security might be based on a fundamental misunderstanding – that security, in the famed words of Helen Keller, ‘is mostly a superstition’. To understand the enormous implications of this idea, we need to return, a final time, to the work of Alan Watts.
Watts begins his slim 1951 treatise, The Wisdom of Insecurity, by pointing out that there is one overwhelming explanation for his era’s feelings of insecurity: the progress of science. Fewer and fewer of us can convince ourselves, if we ever could, that we are headed for an afterlife of eternal bliss; or that there is a God watching out for us; or that the moral rules laid down by the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury are unquestionably the ones we ought to follow. ‘It is simply self-evident’, he writes, ‘that during the past century the authority of science has taken the place of the authority of religion in the popular imagination, and that scepticism, at least in spiritual things, has become more general than belief.’ Watts, it is true, was writing prior to the resurgence of fundamentalist Christianity in America. But he might well have viewed that development as an inevitable reaction to the very scientific dominance he was describing.
It should go without saying – and Watts very much agrees – that scientific enquiry has brought immeasurable benefits. But at the same time, it has left many feeling a spiritual void. By eliminating gods and the afterlife, the scientific picture of the universe seems to have sapped individual human lives of any special meaning; we fit in only as mere organisms, living out our brief lives for no reason, and then perishing. This, he suggests, is the source of the ultimate insecurity, the one that underlies all the others. Yet retreating back under the comforting wing of the old, doctrinaire religions isn’t an option for most of us; you can’t re-convince yourself of claims that you know are untrue. Are we stuck, then, with the choice of living meaningless but scientifically truthful lives, or lives based on superstition and self-deception? Watts insists that there is a third alternative, and it’s what the rest of his little book is about.
The starting-point for this argument is the observation that impermanence is the nature of the universe: that ‘the only constant is change’. It was Heraclitus, living in the fifth and sixth centuries BC, who said that ‘no man steps in the same river twice’, and his contemporary Confucius, in China, who was supposed to have pointed at a stream and observed ‘it is always flowing, day and night’. People, animals, plants, communities, and civilisations all grow, change, and die: it is the most obvious fact in the world, and almost everybody, scientific or religious, agrees with it.
Yet for all the obviousness of this insight, Watts observes, we seem to live in a constant state of fighting against it, struggling to find security, permanence, fixity, and stability. His point is not to scold you to give up the struggle against impermanence – ‘calling a desire bad names’, he writes, ‘doesn’t get rid of it.’ Instead, he wants to make you see that it is an error of a fundamental kind. Attempting to fix change is a contradiction; you can no more fix change than you can make heat cold, or green purple. ‘There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity,’ he writes. Even discussing the subject, he points out, risks a similar contradiction, because it is in the nature of language to try to fix and define. And so the most fundamental characteristic of the universe is therefore the one about which it is most difficult to speak.
But it’s worse than a mere contradiction – because what we are really doing when we attempt to achieve fixity in the midst of change, Watts argues, is trying to separate ourselves from all that change, trying to enforce a distinction between ourselves and the rest of the world. To seek security is to try to remove yourself from change, and thus from the thing that defines life. ‘If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life,’ Watts writes, ‘I am wanting to be separate from life.’ Which brings us to the crux of the matter: it is because we want to feel secure that we build up the fortifications of ego, in order to defend ourselves, but it is those very fortifications that create the feeling of insecurity: ‘To be secure means to isolate and fortify the “I”, but it is just this feeling of being an isolated “I” which makes me feel lonely and afraid.’ This is a strikingly counterintuitive notion: appreciating it entails a mental shift similar to that moment when the famous optical illusion switches from resembling a beautiful young woman to an old witch. We build castle walls to keep out the enemy, but it is the building of the walls that causes the enemy to spring into existence in the first place. It’s only because there are castle walls that there is anything to attack. ‘The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing,’ concludes Watts. ‘To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest, in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.’ Even if we temporarily and partially achieve the feeling of security, he adds, it doesn’t feel good. Life inside the castle walls proves lonely and isolating. ‘We discover [not only] that there is no safety, [and] that seeking it is painful, [but] that when we imagine we have found it, we don’t like it.’
To understand the final flourish that Watts has in store, think back to the end of the previous chapter, and the challenge it presented to our assumptions about the nature of the self. There, we confronted the fact that there seems to be no straightforward place at which to draw the line between ‘self’ and ‘other’ – and that the boundary itself, even if we settle on somewhere to draw it, is more of a meeting point than a dividing line. ‘Self’ and ‘other’ rely on each other for their very existence. If that’s true, it follows that ‘security’ is a mistake – because it implies a notion of separate selfhood that doesn’t make much sense. What does it even mean to separate yourself from an ecosystem that is, in fact, what constitutes you? The point is not to ‘confront’ insecurity, but to appreciate that you are it. Watts writes:
To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, this centre and soul of our being, which we call ‘I’. For this we know to be the real man – the thinker of our thoughts; the feeler of our feelings, the knower of our knowledge. We do not actually understand that there is no security until we realise that this ‘I’ does not exist.
This extraordinary passage, once you grasp the point – and it took me a while – explains in the most complete sense why our efforts to find happiness are so frequently sabotaged by ‘ironic’ effects, delivering the exact opposite of what we set out to gain. All positive thinking, all goalsetting and visualising and looking on the bright side, all trying to make things go our way, as opposed to some other way, is rooted in an assumption about the separateness of ‘us’ and those ‘things’. But on closer inspection this assumption collapses. Trying to flee from insecurity to security, from uncertainty to certainty, is an attempt to find an exit from the very system that makes us who we are in the first place. We can influence the system of which we are a part, certainly. But if we are motivated by this misunderstanding about who we are, and what security is, we’ll always risk going too far, trying too hard, in self-defeating ways. Watts concludes:
The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the ‘I’ out of the experience … Sanity, wholeness and integration lie in the realisation that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate ‘I’ or mind can be found … [Life] is a dance, and when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.
This, then, is the deep truth about insecurity: it is another word for life. That doesn’t mean it’s not wise to protect yourself, as far as you can, from certain specific dangers. But it does mean that feeling secure and really living life are, in some ultimate sense, opposites. And that you can no more succeed in achieving perfect security than a wave could succeed in leaving the ocean.