De Botton, Alain. The School of Life: An Emotional Education. School of Life, London 2019. NF; 8/23.

One of my favourite authors is at it again. From googling I see that de Botton with others has started this “School of Life” as a kind of institute based in London where I think they publish literature and practice psychotherapy, and there’s a faculty of dozens of people helping develop this writer’s philosophy and approach to life and love.

There’s a subtitle “Introduced by Alain de Botton” so I wondered who wrote the content beyond the Introduction. I think it’s de Botton himself but there was for me a change in style and impact in two of the later sections, “Work”, and “Culture”. I didn’t get there the same brilliant combination of the author’s ideas and illustration of them with fearless personal examples:

(Other people) may look adult and composed, but the truth will be reassuringly more complicated. They will, beneath the surface, be intensely confused about many things, in great need of comforting and play, filled with regrets, embarrassed about their bodies, troubled by peculiar urges, and beset by a sense of failure.

What we find in this book is the same radical and comforting thinking I saw in The Course of Love and Religion for Atheists. We all have doubt, fear, embarrassment, confusion, and anger. Emotional intelligence and getting to be a better adult consist in finding comfort with these bad things in ourselves so we get to start seeing others as similarly messed up and take the kind of forgiving kindly approach to them that we probably are hoping for ourselves.

I was interested in de Botton’s take on romanticism. He doesn’t like it because it has postured for us an absurdly ethereal version of romantic love that we somehow feel we should be living out ourselves. If we were kids subject to romantic fantasies à la Walt Disney we tend to turn into adults who believe some magic will deliver to us the very one destined to play this charade out with us. Of course a real psychobiological “love-at-first-sight” event can happen, but that’s glitter on the surface which is a promise that hides the fact real life is a whole different ball of wax.

Reflecting on the history of Romanticism should be consoling because it suggests that quite a lot of the troubles we have with relationships don’t stem (as we normally, guiltily, end up thinking) from our ineptitude, our inadequacy, or our regrettable choice of partners. Knowing the history invites another, more useful idea: We were set an incredibly hard task by our culture, which then had the temerity to present it as easy.

De Botton says that childhood experiences shape our adult inner lives and this is nothing new. But he tells us it’s possible and necessary to see these early-life good and bad experiences as not always applicable to our adult selves, and that we can get humbly and kindly real with others about it: “The love we received from a parent can’t ever be a workable model for our later, adult, experience of love. The reason is fundamental: We were a baby then, we are an adult now—a dichotomy with several key ramifications” and “We are sorrowful not because we have landed up with the wrong person but because we have, sadly, been forced to grow up.”

I teach medical students that although we have to know the rules, there is what I call “a right time to do the wrong thing”, and similarly in life what we are taught is right (like truth-telling) has exceptions. “Keeping secrets can seem like a betrayal of the relationship. At the same time, the complete truth eventually appears to place the union in mortal danger.”

We are so impressed by honesty, we have forgotten the virtues of politeness, this word defined not as a cynical withholding of important information for the sake of harm, but as a dedication to not rubbing someone else up against the true, hurtful aspects of our nature.

I sensed an abrupt change in a later section of the book where we get some political philosophy. There is a suggestion that capitalism which has brought wonderful benefits could next start providing more altruistic products: problem-solving, creativity, acceptance of facts, self-esteem, respect of others, friendship, etc. I found the wonderful practical guidance in the earlier part of the book compelling. But this dreamy walking off the deep end about the Right being put to work on the Left’s agenda seemed a wee bit foolish.

I also wondered if personally assuming humility and reciprocal kindness could drift toward a trauma-victim approach to ourselves if we decided to get overly obsessed with adverse childhood experiences. Or even make them up. Of course dreadful things happen to a lot of children and that’s the frightening social-inheritence mechanism that makes it so difficult for many to escape from the shadow of troubled parents. But we humans are inclined to swing widely away from reality under the spell of popular ideology and see ourselves by default as helpless. I believe it’s the thesis of this and other similar books that we can do better.

De Botton’s success for me comes from a brilliant balance where human frailty is just slightly exaggerated, so its absurdity helps us to see our own weaknesses with a touch of irony. Real though they are. Another author might invite many of us to despair at how fragmented and evasive our inner train of experience sometimes is.

I wonder if it’s a peculiarity of mine that I finish this writer’s books seeing a potential way forward. I get a bit more tentatively optimistic about my sloth, anger, emotional incontinence, prurience, fear, narcissism etc being in their way… not okay exactly, but real and so deserving of attention. Accepting that I can understand and if only occasionally practice a way to consistency and humility about what’s going on in my mind, might even help with a start to having better relationships.

It seems to be what I’m looking for these days anyway.

9.6/9.3