Nice to know what your undergraduate loans are paying for……….and you thought it was supposed to be about education. Silly you!

You may have noticed earlier this week that Prof Edith Hall, a renowned classicist, has resigned from the University of London. This is taken from her letter of resignation as published in the Observer newspaper of 27 November:

“The intense stresses of a professional environment in which the senior management do not in my view uphold the values definitive of a university, and whose fiscal competence I do not trust, make it impossible for me to continue teaching and conducting research at Royal Holloway.”

I have never met Prof. Hall but, in her comments, she describes perfectly the feelings of many present and past academics whose universities have decided to turn their backs upon academe and focus on simple profit (the word used is “sustainability”). Sadly, this is a situation that has become all too common. If you’ve looked at any of several pages on this site, you’ll be aware that I used to work for Middlesex University. I spent much of my career there and at the various colleges that formed both it and its predecessor, Middlesex Polytechnic. Much of that time was exciting, happy and stimulating: I was honoured to meet and work with some fantastic people whose ideas were an inspiration to me and I had a number of unique opportunities for which I’m ever grateful. However, the time has now come for me to disassociate myself from my former University. Here’s why:

I retired from Middlesex in July 2010 – on my birthday, actually, since this was the earliest day upon which I could claim my pension. You might take this a being an indication that the shine had worn off my relationship with my employer and you’d be dead right: over the years, Middlesex has transformed from being an exciting, forward-looking and academically inspiring centre of excellence into a thoroughly degraded institution whose academic and human standards have deteriorated to a point where, in my opinion, its claim to be a university is the latest thing to be found to be unsustainable. Over a period of years, a number of important subject areas have been thrown out: engineering, history, philosophy (including the internationally regarded Centre for Modern European Philosophy) and much research. With wholesale compulsory redundancies under way, many other subjects are threatened, especially in the arts and humanities. Why? You guessed it – sustainability!

So, in order to be “sustainable” high profile overseas developments and vanity building projects have become the focus of investment. Staff no longer have offices in which to deal with confidential matters, in part perhaps because the University finds them inconvenient or, more likely, threatening.  However, a greater threat comes from abandonment of its own regulations during the latter part of my time there: potentially inconvenient rules relating to quality assurance were repeatedly ignored with the result that academic standards in some areas declined drastically.

As Prof. Hall wrote: “…… the senior management do not in my view uphold the values definitive of a university ……” and, in recent times, this has certainly become true of Middlesex too. Philosophy and research underpin all of academic learning and teaching and, by throwing them out, Middlesex fatally undermined its own validity as a university. In my opinion, it is now acting dishonestly in  continuing to lay claim to such a title.

From the window, I can see the huge forces of the sea at work, industriously reducing this seemingly invulnerable material to the finest of sand. This process, though relatively slow, takes place within a span of time that is at least comprehensible in human terms whereas the bending of strata requires inconceivably deep time. Geologists analogise the process by using toffee as a model for a material that, while being naturally brittle, can, through gradual application of consistent force be deformed in the dramatic ways that I see before me now. What we forget is that time is similarly analogised in this model and that it takes millions of years to bend a rock.

So how old is the land in which I sit? The rocks are sedimentary which means that they were formed gradually at the bottom of antediluvian seas and, hence, that they were created over an inhumanly long period before they began to be subject to the elemental forces that distorted them so hugely. Once formed and then distorted, the effects of external environment – wind, waves and weathering – began slowly but surely to erode and change them until what I now see before me was brought into being.

So I argue that this coastline has no age and even that it has no single existence. Rather, we are witnessing an ongoing process that, today, has reached a certain stage. The process is far from complete, indeed even the grains of sand that we see being born today will not be the end of the processs: they too will be changed, aggregated and processed into other forms. The play of forces over a diversity of timescales makes the coastline dynamic at a number of levels. In some, the timeline is humanly comprehensible but in others it is all but inconceivable. We have only the capacity to apprehend that which is reasonably close to our own mortality and events and processes that lie outside of this range are neccessarily perceived as either impossibly transient or so slow as to not be dynamical at all. We and the worlds that we create for ourselves are inescapably as bounded in time as they are in geography. The aeroplane or the spaceship can stretch our horizons by a substantial factor but, on a cosmic scale, we remain pitifully close to home and distances not easily measured in miles or kilometres are, to all intents and purposes, meaningless: who can grasp the scale of an angstrom or a light year when they can see neither within a useful frame of reference?

As with space, so with time. To a one year old child, twelve months is a lifetime but to a septugenarian, it is a brief period indeed, the pages of the calendar blowing away with alarmingly cinematic speed. The perception of time is far from fixed within our mortal span and, in this respect we have much in common with the nature (if not the durational aspects) of many natural processes.

As these cliffs have formed, been transfigured and wasted away, so it is with our experiences and memories. Like the cliffs, our memory is not a fixed entity but rather a process in which change inevitably occurs. Take for example our memory of spaces and particularly of rooms that we have known in past times. Even when our recollection is of an adult experience, a revisitor will always experience a room smaller than that of memory: perception has not changed in such a case but, slowly and inevitably, time has worked a transformation upon the data. Whether this is a result of movement between short, medium and long-term memory or whether, even when in the ostensibly stable state of the latter, some processing still occurs is uncertain. However the observed reality tends to suggest that our memory is not a passive thing but that it too is subject to change and, indeed, that it should rightly be regarded as a dynamical process.

My argument is that, if we are the sum of our experiences and these are part of the content of memory and hence are far from immutable, we must regard not only seaside cliffs but ourselves as processes rather than objects: all that stands in the way of this realisation is our inability to understand things that take place over non-human durations.

In short, it’s just a matter of time.

Its symptoms can be both tragic and hilarious, its consequences entertaining or crippling and in any manifestation, its origins are almost invariably obscure. To a dedicated hypochondriac, the convictions of imminent mortality that their condition generates can, in extremis, subsume all normal thought and activity and lead to a psychological paralysis whose reality is even more substantial than the condition of hypochondria itself.

One cannot but wonder what purpose this condition might serve: most psychological malfunctions appear to be enlarged and/or distorted forms of a “normal” process that is nominally designed to generate positive outcomes. Hypochondria goes far beyond being an exaggerated manifestation of concern for ones own health and wellbeing. One can see, for example, obsessive washing as a simply exaggerated extension of a healthy concern for hygiene but, in my argument, hypochondria can become so all-encompassing that it goes substantially beyond obsessive-compulsive conditions in its impact.

The dominant sensation is of fear, often not of the suspected ailment itself but of its possible consequences and those of the anticipated treatment, not to mention a more abstract sense of foreboding. One might extend this idea to suggest that hypochondria is a specific and focussed manifestation of a more generalised state of fear: rational fear is, after all, manifested in different ways by different people so why not so with irrational fear?

This begs the somewhat obvious question as to the origin of such generalised fear. In some cases, the source may be external – one thinks here of post-traumatic conditions – but, more usually, there is no apparent external source and we are forced to conclude that it is the output of an internal process. Once again, fear is the process outcome of a normal reaction to danger and, unsurprisingly, some experience it more than others. The over-production of fear could be seen as being analogous to an obsessive disorder: this, however, implies an almost mechanistic (and hence quite specific) process like the over-activity of an important gland. This explanation does not address the condition of chronic and pervasive non-specific fear that rides shotgun on the hypochondriac psyche. What is the source of this fear if it is not the product of a normal but distorted process?

Clinical psychologists will often seek answers to this kind of question through a reductionist approach that tries to identify (and subsequently treat) specific causes. Childhood trauma and other clinical conditions or external events may be blamed but this approach, though understandable, seems to me to be unduly simplistic. If I have a backache, I can take an aspirin and, with luck, the pain will go away. I have cured the symptom but not even begun to address the underlying causes of my pain. So too with fear: I have a sense of fear or foreboding that is not justified by circumstances so, logically, I look for its immediate source and apply a treatment designed to correct the anomaly. I may use psychoactive medication or I may enter a form of therapy designed to modify my responses.

Logically, these responses address the consequences of fear (its psychological and physical manifestations) but do not seek out its origins, let alone endeavour to confront them. This involves a more profound psychology altogether, one that goes far beyond the gamut of conventional practice as recommended by statutory regulating bodies such as the all-powerful National Institute for Clinical Excellence. The pain caused by my back problem may itself be a symptom of something else and to treat the pain alone may be an unduly simplistic response too. A competent doctor will always look beyond immediate symptoms and will consider possible underlying causes so why does clinical psychology, as it is practiced, stop so far short of a similar response? For example, conventional wisdom has it that sufferers from depression have incorrect responses to the world outside. They may have these by reason of neurochemical imbalance (in which case, have a course of Prozac) or by reason of inappropriate thinking (sign up for a course of cognitive behavioural therapy). Both these treatments seek to change the patient’s responses into conformity with the broadly accepted model for correct responses to the world at large and thereby devalue or even deny the reality of their experience. (I may think the outside world is shit because my responses to it are wrong or, just possibly, it may actually BE shit!).

In much the same way, we can consider fear in both its generalised form and in the specific form that is hypochondria. This is not to say that someone with an obsessive fear of, say, cancer must necessarily be suffering from it but it is a dreadful disease and fear is an entirely appropriate response. Few sufferers from serious diseases are able to confront their condition without fear and, for many this will be obsessive and overwhelming. The difference between the actual sufferer and the hypochondriac lies not in their common fear but in their objective clinical states. This is where hypochondria and fear diverge: a physical clinician can offer a range of diagnostic procedures that can confirm that there is or is not something of which to be fearful whereas the clinical psychologist cannot make any such offer.

He never said it in so many words but I suspect that the pioneering analytical psychologist Carl Jung was aware of this critical shortcoming and sought a solution. In his work, he used himself as a subject and simply allowed his mind to go where it would, penetrating deep into that part of ourselves of which most of us are unaware most of the time. He found deeper layers of experience, archetypal figures and symbols to which we are all subject even though we are rarely aware of them. He also discovered a shared pool of existence below the level of day-to-day awareness which he christened the “collective unconscious” and reasoned that this lies below consciousness at a depth that varies from person to person. By this argument, a collectively held belief, response or other phenomenon can logically impact to a different extent upon different individuals. Hence, where the collective unconscious is in a state of fear, excitement, joy or whatever, there will be some individuals who will feel this state more readily and perhaps to a greater extent.

If, in a fearful age, this is the primary source of generalised fear, then existing treatments given to the individual can never do any more than paper over the cracks in a damaged psyche that is subject to incontinent leaking of toxins from the collective unconscious. Hypochondria may be just one such crack but more generalised fear is real in everyone and simply more dominant in some than in others. No amount of medication or behaviourist therapy can hope to address more than the superficial symptoms: the fundamental problem therefore lies not with the individual but with the world that we have collectively built and it is that that must change if we are all to be able to live without fear.

]]> http://www.tonygibbs.org/wordpress2/?feed=rss2&p=1498 0 http://www.tonygibbs.org/wordpress2/?p=1470 http://www.tonygibbs.org/wordpress2/?p=1470#comments Wed, 26 Jan 2011 10:00:55 +0000 admin http://www.tonygibbs.org/wordpress2/?p=1470 One of my favourite authors, the late WG Sebald wrote what some critics regarded as a spectactularly depressing book, “The Rings of Saturn” about his travels through Suffolk. However, as was so often the case with his work, all is not quite as it seems: Sebald creates his own realities from a combination of exterior and interior worlds and what one reads, however subjectively real for Sebald, is not to be taken as measurably objective truth for anyone else. “The Rings of Saturn” represents (for me at least) the mourning process that we go through following the conclusion of a major creative endeavour, a kind of post-coital tristesse that can easily descend into genuine melancholia.

Quite how one can manage this situation is hard to say. At one extreme, there are those amongst us who simply shrug things off and dive into the next project and, at the other, some people dread this phenomena so much that they never finish a piece of work and so, never have to let it go and experience the sadness of completion and parting. When I finally handed a finished book over to my then publisher I felt very little satisfaction or pride in a job well done but rather a huge emptiness and a painful sense of loss that has never quite gone away to this very day (nearly 4 years later). My creative offspring grew up and, no longer needing my support, left home : a part of me went away and has never come back. How odd for an author to suffer from a variety of parental “empty nest syndrome”.

This is a paradoxical situation that seems little understood but needs consideration as a significant factor influencing the creative life. Over an entire career, letting go of one’s work and coping with melancholic detumescence can become a major problem and this, consciously or not, may be part of the reason why so many people delay their retirement for as long as possible. It may, in some measure, provide an  explanation for the depression suffered by so many artists, writers and composers – obviously one cannot generalise too far but perhaps we have here a new factor previously unconsidered but significantly contributing to a difficult and often lifelong condition.

Sebald set off through familiar countryside and this may well be a deliberate choice: knowing much of the consensual reality that surrounded him, he was freed from the need to observe objectively but, instead, was able to turn his focus inwards towards the healing powers of subjective thought and response. In such a modality, what does it matter if a historic train never actually came from China? What counts is the internal process that conceives that it could have done so and what this imparts to the possible meaning of the story. Sebald is often accused of promiscuously mixing fact and fiction but this is too simple an explanation. What he wrote was a holistic story, one that told the provable facts along with the imaginative impact that they had upon a creative mind caught in loss and grief.

Put more simply, Sebald wrote a travelling book. His approach mirrors exactly the reflective way one’s thoughts shift around when out walking or travelling as a passenger on a train or aircraft. Reality merges imperceptibly with subjectivity and what emerges is a highly personal synthesis that is neither real nor imaginary. Quantum physics tells us that, when we observe something, we change it in small but important ways: it also tells us that there are things we cannot know. More arcane theorists tell us that we each create our own individual reality and that what appears to be objectively true is only that part where our own reality overlaps with someone else’s.

If Sebald left us a message it was to tell us to believe in our own worlds and to treasure them. In common with Jung, he felt no need to separate objectivity (if indeed such a thing exists) from subjectivity. To others, our worlds are not truth but to ourselves, they are far from fiction.

School sport has its place along with other similar activities and it may be shown to be beneficial in certain respects. However, there is much that is far more widely and profoundly beneficial to schools and to society as a whole that has been brutally cut without the possibility of compromise or reinstatement – take, for example the arts and humanities, higher education and welfare payments. One is driven to ask, therefore, what quality school sport has that has led to its exemption from emasculation. A writer in a national newspaper has suggested one possible reason – competition. In successive statements about its apparent change of heart, government spokesmen have repeatedly referred to competitive sports in schools as being exempt from the process.

As our columnist observes, competitive sport in schools has traditionally condoned and often enshrined the active or passive bullying of the less able in much the same way as the present government now seeks to bully the poorer and less advantaged members of our society. Small wonder that it has become apparent even to persons of such overwhelming insensitivity that for them to scrap support for competitive sporting activities would be as logical as a leading Nazi withdrawing his support for the Hitler Youth. The culture of the bully epitomised by the swagger of the Bullingdon Club exists as widely in competitive sports as in any other sector but is here more easily supported in such a way as to appear to be well-intentioned by being disguised as desirable achievement. On the contrary, it seeks to perpetuate a world view that prioritises one’s own perceived superiority over others as a target to which to aspire. There is no suggestion here that individual merit or achievement is of any worth or deserving of recognition: what counts is beating (down) and feeling justified in celebrating ones apparent superiority over someone who is less able.

This was a hateful and thuggish regime that was all too common in my schooldays: we can hardly be surprised that a hateful and thuggish regime now promotes it as the epitome of its ideology.

French railway stations always seem to me to be of a certain age, younger than Victorian English ones but older than their shiny modern German counterparts. They seem somehow to be stuck somewhere around the 1940s with a few hastily added updates and even these manage to avoid being as contemporary as they really are. Plasma display screens may bristle but, unlike their English cousins with their massive steelwork, galvanised trunking and armoured cables, their bristling is done with Gauloise-stub-stuck-to-bottom-lip French blue-collar nonchalance from elegantly corroded wrought iron columns where they have the sense of coming from an earlier and qualitatively different time to their cousins in equally French but temporally different airport lounges. Here they are truly modern and form a signature part of the environment in which they operate but, back at the station, in their bleu de travail, they simply fail to integrate and remain an anomalous part of a time-warped place.

I like French railways: in fact I like continental railways in general. One of my favourite journeys is on the overnight tourist train from Calais to Brive-La-Gaillarde, the main access point to the Dordogne for English holidaymakers. The station at Brive has this strange quality of being somehow outside of time with its plasma screens juxtaposed with mechanical clocks from the 1930s. In the mist of an early summer morning, the power of light in the beginnings of the day is already apparent. Stepping down from the Calais train, sleepy holidaymakers straggle along the platform to what was once the engine shed but is now the breakfast room for overnight travellers, overdressed from the North and berated by restless children.

This post-industrial hangar retains the original focus of an engine shed with all structures pointing to where the massive turntable once stood – so finely balanced that a shed-boy could rotate a massive steam locomotive by his own hand – but where now the machineries of volume catering have taken its place. Principal among these on my last visit was an almost equally massive Italian espresso machine boasting a bewildering complexity of gleaming pipe work and valves and other less identifiable devices of un-guessable function. This magnificent steam-driven behemoth could hardly have been better placed for its resemblance and almost painfully exact evocation of the bewildering complexity of the even more massive yet oddly similar locomotives that had once occupied its space.

As a child, I had been fascinated by continental steam engines with their mass of exposed pipe work, compressors and other mysterious and arcane systems none of which were to be found on the austerely simple English equivalents whose numbers I vainly strained to collect as they flew through my local station. It was a technology so similar yet so different that it was hard, from the perspective of an eight-year-old to begin to understand how or why it could come to be so different and yet serve the same purpose. The idea that technologies enjoyed a diversity of manifestations was something of which I had become aware but of which I had only the dimmest of comprehensions. Such subtlety was, for me, wholly subsumed by the hugeness, the loudness, the sheer intensity of the technology that forced itself upon me.

This, my earliest recollection of such an encounter was, to a child’s eyes, on an epic scale. A hundred odd tons of thundering, hurtling, burning steel impresses, to the eyes and, indeed viscera of an adult. To a child it was terrifying yet magnificent, representing as it did, huge power and immense sophistication, way beyond my ability to comprehend. Only much later did I discover that what I was witnessing was the last gasp of a tired and barely functional system. The railways of England were, in the days of the late 1950s, on their last legs: the technology, like so much of post-war England was tired, backward looking and unimaginative. Not so to the youthful trainspotter whose enthusiasm enjoyed a fine and delicate balance with his abject terror. It is often so: we admire and fear in almost inevitably equal measure as if this balance is a natural state to which others converge.

So it was that the exoticism of the continental steam locomotive with all its complexity and sophistication became alluring and so it was that a railway station espresso machine evoked a nostalgia and the sense of an almost romantic relationship with technologies that had remained nigh-on dormant for many years. This is a dormancy perhaps unexpected in the context of the work that I have recently proposed: however, a lifelong fascination does not necessarily take the form of an obsession and may wax and wane in a cycle of indeterminable length and for reasons that can be wholly obscure.

There is, however, the almost unavoidable need to re-visit, re-examine, re-consider and finally to re-present ideas as they cycle through various forms, contexts and incarnations. It is, by the lights of many, verging on criminally neglectful not to find a means by which one’s ideas and other creative output may have public expression. The purposeful public exposure of one’s work is, a former colleague once argued, the principal distinguishing quality between the “artist” and the amateur. Most of us don’t mind being referred to as artists in our chosen media but few would welcome the alternate apellation!

I worked at a polytechnic until it became a university. Then I carried on working and puzzled that nothing appeared to have changed except for the letterhead.  Some of the new universities adopted practices and standards that were appropriate to their new status but, sadly, others – mine included – did not. We still had much the same staff and the same courses but suddenly we had become something different, something greater and, remembering the exclusivity of my teens, I was proud of my new status as a university employee.  When my own children went to university, I was equally proud of their achievements at “proper” universities and it so was not until some years later that a worm of doubt began to gnaw away at my certainties. I don’t have a degree myself and I was astonished when the university for which I worked appointed me as a senior lecturer and course leader. To a certain extent, this was disingenous since I had long argued for the recognition of experiential qualification  as the equal of academic certification. Finally it seemed that my battle for recognition had been won and I had a career as a university lecturer, something I had never thought possible in even my wildest imaginings.

My employer was not a good one and we had a number of conflicts over the years but it was only in the last years before my retirement that I came to realise that I had grounded my career in an illusion: what I had accepted as being a university was, in truth, no such thing. The very fact of my own appointment served to confirm the absence of sufficient academic gravitas and, as the recession of the so-called “noughties” began to bite, from the casual way in which management allowed successive disciplines to be hung out to dry and allowed to wither and die, it became increasingly apparent that my university had no real committment to scholarship or to anything that the teenage me would have recognised as the qualities or standards of a real university.

Philosophy as a study has always eluded me: abstract cognition is not my forte and I struggle with obscure terminology. One thing I knew with certainty however was that real universities did philosophy and that it informed the entire process by which students acquired, consolidated and applied their learning. Consciously or not, it was a key part of undergraduate life and no subject could be studied at degree level without it. So when my university abruptly closed its philosophy department, I realised that the game was up: it had abandoned a key component that gave it its academic qualification and, in so doing, had ceased to be a university in anything but name.

And of course that was it for my academic career: while it may have been real and have felt substantial for a time (by now I had a commissioned book and other scholarly works to my name), all of this had been bestowed upon me under false pretences by a charlatan organisation that had no intellectual or academic right to do so. I was de facto exposed as a fraud, an imposter and, in due course, as my university retreated headlong from any semblance of academic integrity, I could continue the charade no longer. As managers twisted the truth and denied the reality of the situation by refusing to listen to anything not glowingly positive and confirmatory, it became increasingly apparent to me that things were no longer (to use a hated piece of management-speak) sustainable.

As luck would have it, I was just old enough to retire so that’s what I did. The good news is that my conscience is now clear and that I no longer have to lie to prospective students about their academic future. I sat here earlier today and watched the riots outside Parliament over the latest increase in tutition fees and reflected to myself that, if those rioters knew the half of it, the mounted police that charged them wouldn’t stand a chance against their fury.

But what, really, is the fuss about? Does anyone in the UK not know that at least one  member of the British monarchy is a foul-mouthed, parasitic simpleton whose main activity revolves around retaining his own prime seat on the gravy train? Are we really unaware that our last Prime Minister was somewhat less than successful and that the American government might just have noticed? Did we not notice that Iran is unpopular with certain Middle-Eastern regimes? I pride myself on staying reasonably ill-informed but even I’ve noticed all these and several other “revelations” besides. The argument that damage has been done is specious: as far as I can ascertain, nothing much classified above “Secret” has been published and this is a trivial level of classification to which millions of people worldwide have routine access. More interesting, however, is the grinding triviality of most of the released material and this, in itself raises concerns: have our servants really got so little to do with their so-called “intelligence” that they resort to filling dull hours generating such spurious non-sequitors?

However, on a positive note, the powers-that-be have shown that they can still command widespread public support. Unfortunately that support isn’t for them but for the courage and determination of Wikileaks to publish and be dammed: the utter failure of attempts to take their website down is a tribute to the independent spirit that still exists on the Internet. The main mechanism that is being used to achieve this is known, with stunning appropriateness as a “denial of service attack”. In other words, dear reader, your government is denying you service!

Let’s just be grateful that, in this attempt, they have been no more successful than in their attempts to, for example, curb the excesses of bankers or  bring about a rational response to climate change or, more obviously, to safeguard the security of their own correspondence. Better still, by their incompetence, they have empowered many people to act: by this afternoon, I was able to find a list of at least 200 sites hosting the Wikileaks archive and, most surprisingly, none of those that I visited appeared to lead to pornography. There are still decent folk out there who are determined to see truth and openness upheld. Amazon and PayPal may meekly capitulate but the frontier spirit of the early days of the Internet endures and, on this showing, is growing by the minute. Governments may yet find their subjects less  browbeaten and compliant than they had imagined: all of a sudden, the frontier just got wilder!

STOP PRESS : I wrote this post on December 6. As of today (December 15) the list has grown from 200 mirror sites to over 2000!

One could reasonably argue that, in this area of endeavour, our idealised objectives equate to nirvana, enlightenment, transcendence or other such concepts of Eastern philosophies whereas the processes by which they are to be realised reflect an action-based and materialistic approach that is characteristic of the Western, Cartesian modality. Here the thrill of the chase overwhelms the satisfaction of its accomplishement. The supporters of bloodsports relish the hunt and its bloody cruelty but discard their quarry to the hounds – a classic instance of process versus product. Likewise, in academe, we cshould rightly concern ourselves with the means by which knowledge is acquired, contextualised and presented and regard the knowledge itself and its application as of secondary concern.

This is at odds with the precepts of capitalism which, for most of us in the West, set on high the achievement of material wealth, the acquistion of power and status as being our given objectives. It’s a tribute to the system that a significant number of us achieve at least some of the perceived targets: we have successful employment, we own houses, cars and the like and we have leisure when the day’s work is done. Yet as David Cameron’s proposed new survey seems destined to confirm, having achieved these targets relatively few of us seem happy or satisfied. One cannot but suspect that, notwithstanding our protestations of hating the job or the boss, it is the thrill of the capitalist chase from which most of us derive most of our satisfaction.

Instead of being able to set a goal and work towards it, we appear constrained permanently to do exactly that and yet be denied the satisfaction of achievement or the opportunity to enjoy our accomplishment. This is a subtle and somehow tragic aspect of the treadmill that Western society has become: obsessed with its own internal processes, it has lost sight of any meaningful objectives that it may have once had and demands of its members that they toil in perpetuity but yet are denied the ability to relish the fruits of their labour. In the midst of prosperity, the most ostensibly successful amongst us find ourselves in a very real form of poverty.