The School of Life Dictionary

By The School of Life

• A COMPREHENSIVE DICTIONARY OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
• A REFERENCE BOOK FOR KEY TERMS from The School of Life.
• A GUIDE TO THE VOCABULARY WE NEED to live emotionally intelligent lives in today's world.
• ILLUSTRATED with full color images throughout.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The School of Life
• Release date: Jul 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781999747183

The School of Life

The School of Life is a groundbreaking enterprise which offers good ideas for everyday living. Founded in 2008, The School of Life runs a diverse range of programmes and services which address questions of personal fulfilment and how to lead a better life. Drawing insights from philosophy, psychology, literature, the visual arts and sciences, The School of Life offers evening classes, weekends, conversation meals and other events that explore issues relating to big themes such as Love,Work, Play, Self, Family and Community.

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Introduction

A dictionary is a guide to language. This is a dictionary for the distinctive language that the School of Life ‘speaks’, which is that of emotions. It is a selection of words and phrases that sheds light on our feelings about ourselves, other people and the workings of the modern world.

Too often, we’re left fighting for a way to explain our emotional intentions; this dictionary is a tool to help us convey our meanings with economy and precision.

The School of Life is an organisation with a simple mission: to increase the amount of Emotional Intelligence in circulation. We seek more emotionally intelligent kinds of relationships, workplaces, economies and culture.

What structures our thinking – found in the dictionary entries in the pages ahead – are eight central themes, which unfold as follows:

1. Self-Knowledge

Socrates, the earliest and greatest of philosophers, summed up the purpose of philosophy in one resonant phrase: ‘know yourself’. A capacity for self-knowledge is at the heart of our inclinations to forgiveness, kindness, creativity and wise decision-making, especially around love and work. Unfortunately, knowing ourselves is the (always unfinished) task of a lifetime. We are permanently elusive and mysterious to ourselves. We have to catch our real intentions and feelings obliquely, with some of the patience of a lepidopterist.

One of the tasks of culture is to offer us tools to assist us with the task of self-knowledge. We need a vocabulary to name feelings and states of mind; we need encouragement to be alone with ourselves at regular moments; we need friends and professionals who will listen to us with editorial precision and sympathy, and we need works of art that can illuminate elusive aspects of our psyches.

Above all, we need to be modest about our capacity easily to understand who we are and what we want. We should nurture a stance of scepticism towards many of our first impulses and beliefs and submit all our significant plans to extensive rational cross-examination.

Failures of self-knowledge lie behind some of our gravest individual and collective disasters.

2. Other People

Having to live around other people can severely challenge any desire to remain calm, kind and good. The School of Life takes seriously the ambition of being polite and nice, despite the lack of prestige that surrounds these concepts and the constant frictions and misunderstandings that attend communal life.

At The School of Life, we also know that kindness is a skill that has to be learnt – and that we must put unexpectedly intense energy into the task of overcoming our first responses to other people, which often veer (quite understandably) towards rage, paranoia and defensiveness.

Two manoeuvres stand out. We must expect less of people – not in order to do an injustice to them, but so as to be readier to forgive and accept problems when they arise. And we must learn to see that bad behaviour almost always stems not from evil but from pain and anxiety. We need to direct sympathy and imagination towards a very unfamiliar target: those who frustrate us most.

3. Relationships

Relationships are perhaps our single greatest source of both happiness and suffering. Unlike people in previous ages, we don’t merely seek a partner we can tolerate; we seek someone we can love, usually over many decades, at an intense pitch of desire, commitment and interest. We dream of someone who will understand us, with whom we can share our longings and our secrets, and with whom we can properly be ourselves.

Then the horror begins. We need to understand why. Some of it is because our childhoods leave us with a legacy of trouble around relating to others. We have difficulties trusting or being close, achieving the right distance or staying resilient. We cannot comfortably express what we feel, and are prone to ‘transfer’ a lot of emotions from the past on to present-day scenarios where they don’t quite belong.

We need to chart our own psyches and offer maps of our madness to partners early on, before we have had the chance to hurt them too much with our behaviour.

Our current relationship difficulties stem in part from a cultural source that we call ‘Romanticism’. In the background, we operate with a deeply problematic Romantic picture of what good relationships should be like: we dream of profound intimacy, satisfying sex, an absence of secrets and only a modicum of conflict. This faith in love is touching, but it carries with it a tragic flaw: our expectations turn out to be the enemies of workable mature relationships.

At The School of Life, we are drawn to what we call a Classical approach to love. The Classical view is in certain ways cautious. Classical people pay special attention to what can go wrong around others. Before condemning a relationship, they consider the standard of partners across society and may interpret a current arrangement as bearable, under the circumstances. This view of people is fundamentally, but usefully, dark. Ultimately, everyone is deeply troubled and hard to live with. The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t know very well.

4. Sexuality

At the School of Life, we are aware of the scale of the hopes and challenges around sex. Although we often believe ourselves to be living in a liberated age, it remains difficult not to feel shame around many of our sexual impulses. It is especially tricky to communicate what we want to those we are drawn to.

The School of Life believes in laying out a sober understanding of what drives desire and in removing some of the shame around fantasies, revealing that many of our more outlandish wishes belong to complex quests for intimacy.

5. Work

One of the distinctive ideas of modern times is that we don’t expect work to be simply a drudgery that we have to undertake to survive. We have high expectations of this huge part of our lives. Ideally, we want work to be ‘meaningful’, which involves the belief that we are in some way either reducing the pain or increasing the happiness of other humans.

Three big reasons stand out for why meaningful work has become difficult to secure:

Firstly, it is perilously hard for us to locate our true interests in the time we have before sheer survival becomes an imperative. Our interests don’t manifest themselves spontaneously; they require us to patiently analyse ourselves and try out a range of options, to see what feels like the best ‘fit’ for us. Unfortunately, schools and universities, as well as society at large, don’t place much emphasis on helping people to understand their authentic working identities. There is far more stress on simply getting ready for any job as opposed to identifying a job that would be particularly well suited to us. This is a pity – not just for individuals, but for the economy as a whole – because people work more imaginatively and more fruitfully when their deep selves are engaged.

Secondly, many jobs are relatively meaningless because it’s very possible, in the current economy, to generate profits from selling people things that don’t fundamentally contribute to well-being, but prey instead on their appetites and lack of self-command.

Thirdly, a job may have real meaning while not feeling as if it does day to day because many organisations are so large, so slow-moving, and so split up over continents that the purpose of everyone’s work gets lost amid meetings, memos, conference calls and administration.

This diagnosis helps to point the way to how we could make work more meaningful:

Firstly, pay a lot more attention to helping people find their vocation – their authentic working selves.

Secondly, the more we, as customers, support businesses engaged in meaningful work, the more meaningful jobs there will be. By raising the quality of demand, we raise the number of occupations that answer to humanity’s deeper needs.

Thirdly, in businesses that do carry out meaningful work, but on too large a scale over too long a period for it to feel meaningful, there is scope to narrate stories of the organisation’s purpose that offer a more tangible sense of every individual’s contribution to the whole.

Ensuring that work is meaningful is no luxury. It determines the greatest issue of all in modern economics: how contentedly and how skilfully people will work – and therefore how successful and fruitful societies can be.

6. Capitalism

Economies look as if they are driven by huge material elements, as if they are about oil fields, communications satellites, huge retail complexes and vast entertainment districts. But behind these impressive factors, the economy is, to an extraordinary extent, a psychological phenomenon driven by our collective appetites, imaginations and longings. What we call capitalism is, in the end, the result of the way our minds work.

Up till now, capitalism has tended to focus on supplying our more basic needs. The School of Life is interested in a kind of capitalism that can target higher needs: that is, a capitalism that is as efficient at meeting our needs for understanding as for sweet things to eat; that is as great at helping us live wisely as it is adept at uniting us with the ideal confectionery or garment.

The task is to expand the economy so as to help it engage with humanity’s real internal issues, which have usually lain outside the area of commerce as commonly defined.

7. Culture

People who want to express admiration for culture often say it is valuable ‘for its own sake’. We propose that it is valuable because of its capacity to address our needs for education, guidance, consolation, perspective, encouragement and correction.

The School of Life is drawn to the idea that culture is therapeutic. This doesn’t mean it should primarily help us with very urgent mental health issues. However, it can assist us with managing the normal troubles of everyday life: the tendency to become irritated with people we like; to lose perspective over minor matters; to abandon sympathy for people who deserve our compassion; and to take too harsh a view of our own mistakes.

The School of Life believes that the world has, up to now, not properly made use of the true therapeutic potential of culture, paying it reverence without learning how to make use of it systematically.

8. Religion

The School of Life is both a secular organisation and interested in many of the moves of religions. Some faith-based ideas (for example, the claim that the soul can be reincarnated, that Christ rose from the dead or that the creator of the cosmos made specific promises about land rights at the eastern end of the Mediterranean) have clouded some highly important psychological practices that religions were adept at promoting. Religions have been machines for addressing a range of important emotional needs, which endure even into a scientific era.

At their best, religions tried to keep ideas about forgiveness at the front of our minds; encouraged compassion; insisted that certain forms of worldly success were misleading ways of assessing the worth of people; got us to recognise our own capacities to hurt others and to feel sorry for doing so; nudged us to be tender and understanding towards the secret sufferings of others; and gave us helpful rituals and beautiful works of culture to keep important ideas before us throughout the year.

We see The School of Life as picking up many of the tasks of religion and creating secular substitutes for a range of religious ideals and practices. We believe in the idea that culture can and should replace scripture.

***

This organisation is, ultimately, a school that believes that the ability to learn is one of the most basic things about human beings. The range of things that we can learn to do better, via instruction, is very wide – far wider than we tend to think.

The powerful influence of Romanticism, which is convinced that better emotional responses cannot be taught, means the current education system fails to pass emotional intelligence down the generations as it should.

The School of Life takes the more Classical view that all important human achievements, especially around emotions, can be transmitted: how to control rage; how to have a conversation; how to be a loving parent; how to be calmer or less inclined to bitterness.

Nevertheless, we at The School of Life are aware of how easily people are turned off by anything that appears too preachy and by a fatal tendency for what is worthy to come across as dull. Our commitment to education makes us profoundly interested in the task of seduction: the need to get and hold people’s attention artfully in a highly individualistic world filled with distractions and demands.

Because education is so central, The School of Life is ambitious about what learning should be like. It should not only be children who go to school. All adults should see themselves as in need of education pretty much every day. One should never be done with school. One should stay an active student, learning throughout life. In the adult section of schools, there should be courses on how to converse with strangers or how to deal with the fear of getting old; how to calm down and how to forgive. Schools should be where a whole community gets educated, not just a place for children. Some classes should have seven-year-olds learning alongside fifty-year-olds (the two cohorts having been found to have equivalent maturities in a given area). In the Utopia, the phrase ‘I’ve finished school’ would sound extremely strange.

What follows are the key words and terms that underpin the project of emotional education to which we have given the name: The School of Life.

A

¶ Addiction

We operate with some stock images of the addict: a person with a heroin needle in a park, or who nurses a bottle of gin in a paper bag at nine in the morning, or who sneaks off at every opportunity to light up another joint of marijuana.

However dramatic and tragic such cases of addiction might be, they are simultaneously hugely reassuring to most of us – because they locate the addict far from ordinary experience, somewhere off-stage, in the land of semi-criminality and outright breakdown.

The School of Life defines addiction in another way: as the manic reliance on something, anything, to keep our darker or more unsettling thoughts and feelings at bay. What properly indicates addiction is not what someone is addicted to, because we can get addicted to pretty much anything. It is the motives behind a reliance on a certain element – and, in particular, our attachment to it as a way of avoiding encounters with the contents of our own minds and hearts.

For most of us, facing up to ourselves is a deeply anxiety- inducing prospect. We are filled with thoughts we don’t want to entertain and feelings we are desperate not to feel. There is an infinite amount that we are angry and sad about that it would take an uncommon degree of courage to face. We experience a host of fantasies and desires that we have a huge incentive to disavow because of the extent to which they violate our self-image and our more normative commitments.

We should not pride ourselves because we aren’t injecting something into our veins. Almost certainly, we are doing something else to take us away from ourselves. We are checking the news at four-minute intervals to keep the news from ourselves at bay. We’re doing sport, exhausting our bodies in the hope of not having to hear from our minds. We’re using work to get away from the true internal work that we’re shirking.

To overcome addiction, we need to lose our fear of our minds. We need a collective sense of safety around confronting loss, humiliation, sexual desire and sadness.

On the other side of addiction is philosophy – understood as the patient, unfrightened, compassionate examination of the contents of our minds.

See also: Faulty Walnut, The; Monasteries; News from Within; Overeating; Philosophical Meditation; Unprocessed Emotion.

¶ Advertising

Adverts wouldn’t work as powerfully as they do if they didn’t operate with a very good sense of what our real needs are and what we really require in order to live good lives. Their emotional pull is based on their wise understanding that we are creatures who hunger not so much for material goods as for sexual love, good family relationships, connections with others and the feeling that we are respected. Advertisers build their most compelling campaigns by tapping into their intimate knowledge of our psyches.

An advert for a car might not tell us much about the quality of the suspension or the technology that went into the metallic paint because it realises that such things (mostly) don’t touch our souls. Instead it shows us what we really want: a family coping well with the ups and downs of life or a dignified grey-haired man who knows how to greet the challenges of existence with stoic strength. An advert for jewellery will mainly be about a couple who are still close after ten years of marriage; a chocolate bar or a cashmere jumper might be brought to our notice by means of a touching evocation of friendship.

This approach can look cynical, but there is a touch of tragedy in the situation – the tragedy that our manufacturers lag so far behind our advertisers. These manufacturers know how to make rather good car suspensions and can produce utterly reliable timepieces; the jumpers may be elegant and the chocolate delicious. However, none of these manufacturers make much headway in delivering the things we really would love to be getting: the good family life, the self-belief, the warm marriage and the better friendships that currently painfully elude us and whose exquisite portrayal cleverly tricked us (perhaps) into buying a sedan or a barbecue set.

In a stern mood, we might think that, in an ideal society, advertisers would be banned from hinting that the right bag or oven-ready meal could help us to find love and companionship. But the real solution goes in a different direction. We should want manufacturers and businesses to become much more ambitious about solving our real problems and to generate products that might actually help us with our big, underlying longings.

In most adverts, the pains and the hopes of our lives have been superbly identified, but the products on the shelves remain almost comically at odds with our real needs. The task is not to ban advertisements but to create an economy that lives up to their deepest promises.

See also: Glamour; Good Business; Good Demand; Higher Needs; Utopia.

¶ Akrasia

A central problem of our minds is that we know so much in theory about how we should behave, but engage so little with our knowledge in our day-to-day conduct.

We know in theory about not eating too much, being kind, getting to bed early, focusing on our opportunities before it is too late, showing charity and remembering to be grateful. Yet in practice, our wise ideas have a notoriously weak ability to motivate our actual behaviour. Our knowledge is embedded within us and yet is ineffective for us.

The Ancient Greeks were unusually alert to this phenomenon and gave it a helpfully resonant name: akrasia, commonly translated as ‘weakness of will’. It is because of akrasia, they proposed, that we have such a tragic proclivity for knowing what to do but not acting upon our own best principles.

There are two central solutions to akrasia, located in two unexpected quarters: art and ritual. The real purpose of art (which includes novels, films and songs as well as photos, paintings and works of design and architecture) is to give sensuous and emotional lustre to a range of ideas that are most important to us, but that are also most under threat in the conditions of everyday life. Art shouldn’t be a matter of introducing us to, or challenging us with, a stream of new ideas so much as about lending the good ideas we already have compelling forms – so that they can more readily weigh upon our behaviour. A euphoric song should activate the reserves of tenderness and sympathy in which we already believe in theory; a novel should move us to the forgiveness in which we are already invested at an intellectual level. Art should help us to feel and then act upon the truths we already know.

Ritual is the second defence we have against akrasia. By ritual, we mean the structured, often highly seductive or aesthetic, repetition of a thought or an action, with a view to making it at once convincing and habitual. Ritual rejects the notion that it can ever be sufficient to teach anything important once – an optimistic delusion by which the modern education system has been fatefully marked. Once might be enough to get us to admit an idea is right, but is nothing like enough to convince us it should be acted upon. Our brains are leaky, and, under pressure of any kind, readily revert to customary patterns of thought and feeling. Ritual trains our cognitive muscles; it makes a sequence of appointments in our diaries to refresh our acquaintance with our most important ideas.

Our current culture tends to see ritual mainly as an antiquated infringement of individual freedom; a bossy command to turn our thoughts in particular directions at specific times. But the defenders of ritual would see it another way: we aren’t being told to think of something we don’t agree with; we are being returned with grace to what we always believed in at heart. We are being tugged by a collective force back to a more loyal and authentic version of ourselves.

The greatest human institutions that have tried to address the problem of akrasia have been religions. Religions have wanted to do something much more serious than simply promote abstract ideas: they have wanted to get people to behave in line with those ideas, which is a very different thing. They didn’t just want people to think that kindness or forgiveness were nice (which we generally do already); they wanted us to be kind or forgiving most days of the year. They invented a host of ingenious mechanisms for mobilising the will, which is why, across much of the world, the finest art and buildings, the most seductive music, the most impressive and moving rituals have all been religious. Religion is a vast machine for addressing the problem of akrasia.

This has presented a conundrum for a more secular era. Bad secularisation has lumped together religious superstition and religion’s anti-akrasia strategies. It has rejected both the supernatural ideas of the faiths and their wise attitude to the motivational roles of art and ritual.

A more discerning form of secularisation makes a major distinction between (on the one hand) religion as a set of speculative claims about God and the afterlife and (on the other hand) the always valid ambition to improve our social and psychological lives by combating our notoriously weak wills.

The challenge for the secular world is now to redevelop its own versions of purposeful art and ritual so that we will cease so regularly to ignore our real commitments and might henceforth not only