Thanks for the comments on the post about happiness the other day. I’ve been mulling over the idea of happiness, and why we are perhaps the most unhappy society ever, and linking it to a new direction my thinking seems to be being drawn in.

As I’ve written before, I’m really interested in the charred remains of what we might see as the grand failed projects of Eastern Europe and the West: Communism and Christianity. Both have been superceded by the steamroller of Capitalism, which burns all, consumes all and turns all to waste…

The vacuum which Consumer Capitalism has come into concerns the failure of Christianity and Communism to deal with the root problem of the human condition: alienation – unhappiness by another name.

I’ve been reading The Philosophy of Marx, and in it the author discusses Feuerbach:

Feuerbach sought to explain ‘religious alienation’, i.e. the face that real, sensuous men represent salvation and perfection to themselves in another supra-sensuous world (as a projection of their own ‘essential qualities’ into imaginary beings and situations – in particular, the bond of community or love which unites ‘humankind’). By becoming conscious of this mistake, human beings will become capable of ‘re-appropriating’ their essence which has become alienated in God and, hence, of really living out fraternity on earth.

He goes on to say that thinkers like Marx:

attempted to extend the same schema to other phenomena of the abstraction and dispossession of human existence. They sought, in particular, to extend it to the constitution of the political sphere, isolated from society, as an ideal community in which human beings were said to be free and equal.

Alienation, in other words, is a problem identified by Feuerbach and Marx. For Feuerbach religion actually functions to perpetuate alienation because it is a projected fantasy that prevents us entering into proper fraternity. Marx then took this principle and applied it to alienation from our labour.

The problem I am pondering – and doing so as a total amateur needing some better thinkers to get to grips with this – is that Christianity and Communism have both failed because they have both failed to understand the mulitple dimensions of our alienation – as I set out in the first post on happiness.

So what should we do in response to these twin failures? What we cannot do is fill the gap with stuff – and the endgame of consumerism has shown this. What we must work towards is a synthesis built out of the lessons of the twin failures of Communism and Christianity.

I’ve been intrigued by the launch video for GoogleWave that is going round at the moment. It’s an impressive geek-fest, for one one thing. And the product does seem pretty impressive too. The phrase that has particularly caught my attention though is ‘Googlewave is what email would be if we were inventing it now.’ And it’s on this that I think it will eventually fail, no matter how brilliant.

Why? Because email already has been invented, and I don’t like moving house.

If I look around the places I dwell: my home, my classroom at work, I see spaces that are only partly intentional. I have full control over them – I can decorate them how I wish and fill them with whatever furniture I choose. But instead of spaces that are radical statements about who I am, I see ornaments that I don’t know why I keep, tiling that I don’t really like. The boards in the floor creak, and I guess I’ll get round to fixing them someday. But not yet.

I inhabit spaces and make them home, not because they are perfect, but because I am comfortable with them. And there has to be a really good reason for me to go through the rigmarole of turning everything on its head and packing it in boxes if I’m to inhabit a new space.

The same is true technologically. I use applications that are imperfect. I’m sure there are better ones out there. But I tolerate them because I am comfortable with them. [ Check out Charlie Brooker on why, despite knowing Windows is terrible, he continues to use it. ]  I am constantly being sent new software packages to use in education. I very rarely use any of them, not because they are useless but because the time it will take me to really inhabit them – to move in to them and make them part of my everyday comfort – is too long.

And this is the trouble with Googlewave. It may well be what email would be if we invented it now. But email already has been invented, and I am comfortably at home with it. So no matter how brilliant, I can’t see myself – or a critical mass of people – moving house to inhabit a new space.

This was not the issue with email. We moved from typewritten letters to email with ease because the space was so obviously and radically new and improved. It was worth the move. It will take a lot to convince me to make that form-move again, not from paper to computer, but from computer to computer.

Which is a shame, because the guy who invented it has clearly spent ages on it, and come up with some great features. But it’s just not a killer like his previous work Google Maps – which was so immediately inhabitable because no one had a room like that before anyway.

May be that just makes me lazy. Or may be it’s something that developers will have to think more carefully about as our lives become more full.

See you all at Apple tomorrow. 7:30pm.