Identity

9 INVISIBLE MAN

Economists assume that human beings are motivated by what they label “preferences” or “utilities,” desires for material resources or goods. But they forget about thymos, the part of the soul that desires recognition by others, either as isothymia, recognition as equal in dignity to others, or megalothymia, recognition as superior. A great deal of what we conventionally take to be economic motivation driven by material needs or desires is in fact a thymotic desire for recognition of one’s dignity or status.

Take the issue of equal pay for equal work, something that has been at the core of the women’s rights movement for decades. While women have made huge gains over the past fifty years in the labor force, considerable attention has been paid to the glass ceilings that have kept women out of senior management positions or, more recently, from the upper ranks of tech firms in Silicon Valley. Much of the agenda of modern feminism has been set not by working-class women hoping to get jobs as firefighters or Marine grunts, but by educated professional women seeking to rise closer to the top of the social hierarchy.

Among this group, what is the real motive driving demands for equal pay? It is not economic in any conventional sense. A female lawyer who is passed over for partner or is made vice president but at a salary 10 percent lower than that of her male counterparts is in no sense economically deprived: she is likely to be in the very top of the national income distribution and faces little economic deprivation. If she and her male counterpart were paid twice their relative salaries, the problem would still remain.

Rather, the anger felt in such situations is not so much about resources as about justice: the pay she is awarded by the firm is important not so much because it provides needed resources, but rather because salary is a marker of dignity, and the firm is telling her that she is worth less than a man even though her qualifications and contributions are equal or even superior. Salary is a matter of recognition. She would feel equally aggrieved if she was given the same pay, but told that she would never hold a coveted title simply because she is a woman.

The connection between economic interest and recognition was well understood by the founder of modern political economy, Adam Smith, in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Even in late-eighteenth-century Britain, he observed that the poor had basic necessities and did not suffer from gross material deprivation. They sought wealth for a different reason:

The rich man “glories in his riches.” If one thinks about the class of global billionaires and asks what gets them out of bed every morning, the answer cannot be that they feel the lack of some necessity but cannot have it if they do not make another $100 million in the coming months. One can only have so many houses, boats, and airplanes before one loses count. Rather, they want other things: to have the biggest collection of Francis Bacon paintings, or to skipper the winning America’s Cup yacht, or to build the largest charitable foundation. What they seek is not some absolute level of wealth, but rather status relative to that of other billionaires.

Something similar can be said of poverty in a wealthy country such as the United States, Germany, or Sweden. As conservatives never tire of pointing out, people living below the poverty line in the United States enjoy a remarkable level of material wealth, far higher than that of a poor person in sub-Saharan Africa: they own televisions, automobiles, and Air Jordans; they tend to suffer not from malnutrition but from obesity because they eat too much junk food.

There is of course material deprivation in the United States, in the lack of access to good education or health care. But the pain of poverty is felt more often as a loss of dignity: as Smith notes, the poor man’s situation “places him out of sight of mankind,” such that they have no fellow feeling for him. This was the basic insight of Ralph Ellison’s classic novel, Invisible Man, about a black man moving from the American South to Harlem. The real indignity of racism in the North was that African-Americans were invisible to their white peers, not necessarily mistreated but simply not seen as fellow human beings. Consider that the next time you give money to a homeless person, but fail to make eye contact with him or her: you are relieving the material want, but failing to acknowledge the shared humanity between the beggar and you.

The connection of income to dignity also suggests why something like a universal guaranteed income as a solution to job loss from automation won’t buy social peace or make people happy. Having a job conveys not just resources, but recognition by the rest of society that one is doing something socially valuable. Someone paid for doing nothing has no basis for pride.

The economist Robert Frank notes the connection between wealth and status and points out that the latter is often desired not for its absolute but for its relative value. He calls this a “positional good”: I want that Tesla not because I care so much about global warming, but because it is trendy and expensive, and my neighbor is still driving a BMW. Human happiness is oftentimes more strongly connected to our relative than to our absolute status. Frank points out that in surveys, people with higher incomes report higher degrees of happiness. One might think this is related to absolute levels of income, except that people with comparable relative status report comparable levels of happiness regardless of their absolute wealth: upper-income Nigerians are just as happy as their German counterparts, despite the economic gap separating them. One compares oneself not globally to some absolute standard of wealth, but relative to a local group that one deals with socially.^{2}

A great deal of evidence coming out of the natural sciences suggests that the desire for status—megalothymia—is rooted in human biology. Primates that achieve dominance or alpha male status within their local hierarchies have been widely observed as having higher levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Serotonin is associated with feelings of well-being and elation in human beings; that is why selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac and Zoloft are widely used in treating depression and low self-esteem.^{3}

A further psychological fact suggests that certain things in contemporary politics are related more to status than to resources. One of the clear findings from experimental behavioral economics is that people are much more sensitive to losses than to gains. That is, they are likely to spend much more effort to avoid the loss of $100 than to receive an extra $100 in income.^{4} This may explain a historical phenomenon noted by Samuel Huntington, namely that the most politically destabilizing group tends not to be the desperate poor, but rather middle classes who feel they are losing their status with respect to other groups. He cites Alexis de Tocqueville, who noted that the French Revolution was not triggered by indigent peasants, but by a rising middle class that suddenly saw its economic and political prospects sink in the decade before the Revolution. The poor tend to be politically disorganized and preoccupied with day-to-day survival. People who think of themselves as middle class, by contrast, have more time for political activity and are better educated and easier to mobilize. More important, they feel that their economic status entitles them to respect: they work hard at jobs that are useful to society, they raise families, and they carry out their responsibilities to society such as paying taxes. They know that they are not at the top of the economic heap, but they also have pride in not being indigent or dependent on government help to survive.[3] Middle-class people do not feel themselves to be at the margins of society; rather, they typically feel that they constitute the core of national identity.

Loss of middle-class status may explain one of the most bitter polarizations in contemporary politics, which has emerged in Thailand. The country has been riven by an intense polarization between “yellow shirts” and “red shirts,” the former upper-class supporters of the monarchy and military and the latter supporters of the Thai Rak Thai party, led by Thaksin Shinawatra. This conflict, which closed down much of Bangkok in 2010 and resulted in a yellow-shirt-supported military coup, has alternatively been seen as a fight over ideology based on the redistribution programs that Thaksin and his sister Yingluck, prime minister from 2011 to 2014, provided to rural Thais, or else a fight about corruption. Federico Ferrara argues, however, that it is better seen as a fight over recognition. Traditional Thai society had been rigidly stratified based on perceived “Thai-ness,” the geographical and ethnolinguistic distance of people from the elite in Bangkok. Decades of economic growth had raised up many of Thaksin’s voters, who began to assert their provincial identities in ways that enraged the Bangkok elite. It was often middle-class Thais who became the most politically engaged, and that explains why an apparently economic conflict became a zero-sum game driven by thymos.^{5}

The perceived threat to middle-class status may then explain the rise of populist nationalism in many parts of the world in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

In the United States, the working class, defined as people with a high school education or less, has not been doing well over the past generation. This is reflected not just in stagnant or declining incomes and job loss noted in the previous chapter, but in social breakdown as well. This began in the 1970s for the African-Americans who had migrated north in the years following World War II to cities such as Chicago, New York, and Detroit, where many of them were employed in the meatpacking, steel, or auto industries. As these sectors declined and men began to lose jobs through deindustrialization, a series of social ills followed, including rising crime rates, a crack cocaine epidemic, and deteriorating family life that helped transmit poverty from one generation to the next.^{6}

Over the past decade, this kind of social deterioration spread to the white working class, as documented by two social scientists at opposite ends of the political spectrum, Charles Murray and Robert Putnam.^{7} An opioid epidemic has broken out in rural and working-class communities that in 2016 led to more than sixty thousand deaths through drug overdoses, more than the number of Americans killed in traffic accidents each year. Life expectancies for white men have consequently fallen, something remarkable for a developed country.^{8} The number of children growing up in single-parent families has significantly risen; the rate for white working-class children is now 35.6 percent.^{9}

But perhaps one of the great drivers of the new American nationalism that sent Donald Trump into the White House (and Britain out of the European Union) has been the perception of invisibility. Two recent studies of conservative voters in Wisconsin and Louisiana by Katherine Cramer and Arlie Hochschild, respectively, point to similar resentments. The overwhelmingly rural voters who supported Republican governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin explained that the elites in the capital, Madison, and in big cities outside the state simply did not understand them or pay attention to their problems. According to one of Cramer’s interlocutors, Washington, D.C., “is a country unto itself… They haven’t got a clue what the rest of the nation is up to, they’re so absorbed in studying their own belly button.”^{10} Similarly, a Tea Party voter in rural Louisiana commented, “A lot of liberal commentators look down on people like me. We can’t say the N-word. We wouldn’t want to; it’s demeaning. So why do liberal commentators feel so free to use the R-word [redneck]?”^{11}

The resentful citizens fearing loss of middle-class status point an accusatory finger upward to the elites, to whom they are invisible, but also downward toward the poor, whom they feel are undeserving and being unfairly favored. According to Cramer, “resentment toward fellow citizens is front and center. People understand their circumstances as the fault of guilty and less deserving people, not as the product of broad social, economic, and political forces.”^{12} Hochschild presents a metaphor of ordinary people patiently waiting on a long line to get through a door labeled THE AMERICAN DREAM, and seeing other people suddenly cut in line ahead of them—African-Americans, women, immigrants—aided by those same elites who ignore them. “You are a stranger in your own land. You do not recognize yourself in how others see you. It is a struggle to feel seen and honored. And to feel honored you have to feel—and feel seen as—moving forward. But through no fault of your own, and in ways that are hidden, you are slipping backward.”^{13}

Economic distress is often perceived by individuals not as resource deprivation, but as a loss of identity. Hard work should confer dignity on an individual, but that dignity is not recognized—indeed, it is condemned, and other people who are not willing to play by the rules are given undue advantages. This link between income and status helps to explain why nationalist or religious conservative groups have been more appealing to many people than traditional left-wing ones based on economic class. The nationalist can translate loss of relative economic position into loss of identity and status: you have always been a core member of our great nation, but foreigners, immigrants, and your own elite compatriots have been conspiring to hold you down; your country is no longer your own, and you are not respected in your own land. Similarly, the religious partisan can say something almost identical: You are a member of a great community of believers who have been traduced by nonbelievers; this betrayal has led not just to your impoverishment, but is a crime against God himself. You may be invisible to your fellow citizens, but you are not invisible to God.

This is why immigration has become such a neuralgic issue in many countries around the world. Immigration may or may not be helpful to a national economy: like trade, it is often of benefit in the aggregate, but does not benefit all groups within a society. However, it is almost always seen as a threat to cultural identity, especially when cross-border flows of people are as massive as they have been in recent decades. When economic decline is interpreted as loss of social status, it is easy to see why immigration becomes a proxy for economic change.

Yet this is not a fully satisfactory answer as to why the nationalist right has in recent years captured voters who had formerly voted for parties of the left, both in the United States and in Europe. The latter has, after all, traditionally had a better practical answer to the economic dislocations caused by technological change and globalization with its broader social safety net. Moreover, progressives have in the past been able to appeal to communal identity, building it around a shared experience of exploitation and resentment of rich capitalists: “Workers of the world, unite!” “Stick it to the Man!” In the United States, working-class voters overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party from the New Deal in the 1930s up until the rise of Ronald Reagan; European social democracy was built on a foundation of trade unionism and working-class solidarity.

The problem with the contemporary left is the particular forms of identity that it has increasingly chosen to celebrate. Rather than building solidarity around large collectivities such as the working class or the economically exploited, it has focused on ever smaller groups being marginalized in specific ways. This is part of a larger story about the fate of modern liberalism, in which the principle of universal and equal recognition has mutated into the special recognition of particular groups.