Status Anxiety - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Botton (ч. 17)

Sparta, Greek Peninsula, 400 B.C.

The most honoured members of ancient Spartan society were men—more particularly, aggressive men with large muscles, vigourous (bi)sexual appetites, scant interest in family life, a distaste for business and luxury and an enthusiasm for killing (especially Athenians) on the battlefield. The fighters of Sparta never used money; they avoided hairdressers and entertainers; and they were unsentimental about their wives and children, if they had them. It was a disgrace for such a man ever to be seen in the marketplace; indeed, even knowing how to count was frowned upon, as an indicator of a commercial bent. From the age of seven, every male Spartan was required to train as a soldier, sleep and eat in barracks, and practise battle manoeuvres. Marriage was no impediment: husbands, too, had to live in the barracks, though they were allowed to spend one night a month with their wives in order to perpetuate their kind. Weak and defective infants were commonly taken out to the barren slopes of Mount Taygetus and left there to die of exposure.

Western Europe, A.D. 476–1096

In many parts of Europe, following the collapse of the western Roman Empire, the most revered individuals were those who modelled their behaviour on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. These saints, as the Catholic Church deemed them, refused to take up arms, never killed other human beings and tried not to kill animals, either (like many saints, Bernard was a vegetarian; he is even said to have walked very slowly, keeping his eyes on the ground, so as not to step on ants, for they were God’s creatures, too). Saints shunned material goods; they did not own horses or property. For Saint Hilarion, home was a cell measuring five feet by four. Saint Francis of Assisi claimed to be married to “Lady Poverty” when he and his followers lived in wattle-and-daub huts, had no tables or chairs and slept on the floor. Saint Anthony of Padua ate only roots and grasses. Saint Dominic de Guzman averted his eyes when he passed the houses of rich merchants.

Saints strove to suppress whatever sexual feelings they may have had and were noted for their extreme physical modesty. Saint Casimir sent away a virgin planted in his bed by his family. Saint Thomas Aquinas is said to have been locked up in a tower with a woman who attempted to use her beauty and perfumes to seduce him; though momentarily aroused, he ultimately abstained and accepted from God a “girdle of perpetual virginity.”

Western Europe, circa 1096–1500

In the period after the First Crusade, it was the turn of knights to become the most admired people in Western European society. Knights came from wealthy families; they lived in castles, slept in beds, ate meat and saw nothing wrong in killing those they thought un-Christian (especially Muslims). When they were not killing people, they turned their attention to animals: John de Grailly, for example, boasted of slaughtering four thousand wild boars. Knights were accomplished lovers, too, and wooed women at court, often through the skilful use of poetry. They prized virgins most of all. They were interested in money, but only when it came from land, not through trade. They also liked horses: “Knights have not been chosen to ride an ass or a mule,” explained Gutierre Diaz de Gamez (1379–1450), author of The Unconquered Knight (circa 1431). “Knights do not come from among feeble or timid or cowardly souls, but from among men who are strong and full of energy, bold and without fear, and for this reason there is no other beast that so befits a knight as a good horse.”

England, 1750–1890

In England, by 1750, knowing how to fight was no longer a prerequisite to respectability; more important was knowing how to dance. Status now belonged almost exclusively to “gentlemen.” Well off and not expected to do much more than preside over the management of their estates, they might dabble in industry or trade (particularly with India and the West Indies) but should by no means allow themselves to be confused with the inferior caste of merchants and industrialists. They were supposed to like their families and refrain from leaving their children on hillsides to die. At the same time, it was perfectly all right for them to keep mistresses in town.

Much emphasis was placed on the cultivation of a certain languid elegance. It was important to take care of one’s hair and to visit a barber regularly. Lord Chesterfield, in his Letters to His Son (1751), advised that a gentleman’s conversation should be free of any “misplaced eagerness” that might result in the repetition of “trifling or ill-timed anecdotes with silly preambles like ‘I will tell you an excellent thing.’” Chesterfield also stressed that a gentleman ought to be able to execute a decent minuet: “Remember that the graceful motion of the arms, the giving of your hand, and the putting-on and putting-off of your hat genteelly are the material parts of a gentleman’s dancing.” As for relations with the opposite sex, a gentleman was meant to marry, while bearing in mind that (in Chesterfield’s words) “women are only children of a larger growth.” If seated next to one at dinner, a gentleman was to “prattle” on to her rather than hold his tongue, lest she mistake his silence for dullness or arrogance.

Brazil, 1600–1960

Among the Cubeo tribe of the northwestern Amazon, the highest rung on the social ladder was reserved for men who spoke very little (for babbling was thought to sap strength), and did not partake in dancing or in raising children but were instead, first and foremost, skilled at killing jaguars. Whereas low-status men were limited to fishing, high-status individuals went hunting. Anyone who killed a jaguar would wear its teeth on a necklace, and the more jaguars one could claim as trophies, the better one’s chances of becoming the “headman” or tribal chief. Headmen wore large jaguar-tooth necklaces as well as armadillo girdles. The women of the tribe were meanwhile relegated to growing manioc root in jungle clearings. Few things could bring more shame on a man than being seen helping his wife prepare a root-based meal.

What are the principles according to which status is distributed? Why is it that military men are applauded in one society, and landed gentry in another? At least four answers suggest themselves.

The members of a group may acquire status by threatening to harm others physically, thus bullying a population into offering its respect.

Alternatively, certain people may win status through their ability to defend others, whether by strength, by patronage or through control of food, water and other staples. Where safety is in short supply, as in ancient Sparta or twelfth-century Europe, courageous fighters and knights on horseback will be celebrated. If a community craves nutrients that are available only in the form of elusive animal flesh, as in the Amazon, it is the killers of jaguars who will earn respect and its symbol, the armadillo girdle. In areas where the livelihood of the majority depends on trade and high technology, as in modern Europe and North America, entrepreneurs and scientists will be the objects of admiration. The converse also holds true: a segment of the population that cannot provide a useful service to others will end up without status, in the manner of muscular men in countries with secure borders, or of jaguar hunters in settled agricultural societies.

Elevated status may also be accorded to those who impress others with their goodness, physical talents, artistic skills or wisdom, as happened with saints in Christian Europe and occurs with European footballers today.

Finally, a group may appeal to the conscience or sense of decency of its peers, and so eloquently articulate the justice of its cause that the sheer weight of its moral authority will tip the balance of status towards a redistribution in its favour.

As the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered. Within one group, we may have to worry about our ability to launch a spear into the flank of a moving target, within another about our prowess on the battlefield, within a third about our capacity for devotion to God and within yet a fourth about having what it takes to wrest a profit from the capital markets.

For those made most anxious or embittered by the ideals of their own societies, the history of status, even crudely outlined, cannot but reveal a basic and inspiring point: ideals are not cast in stone. Status values have long been, and in the future may again be, subject to alteration. And the word we might use to describe this process of change is politics.

By waging political battle, different groups may always attempt to transform the honour systems of their communities and win dignity for themselves over the opposition of all those with a stake in the prior arrangement. Through a ballot box, a gun, a strike or sometimes even a book, these factions will strive to redirect their societies’ notions of who is rightfully owed the privileges that accompany high status.

A Political Perspective on Modern Status Anxiety

If a talent for hunting jaguars, dancing a minuet, riding a horse in battle or imitating the life of Christ no longer offers sufficient cause to be labelled a success, what, then, may be said to constitute the dominant contemporary Western ideal according to which people are judged and status is allotted?

We may, without making any scientific claims for the portrait, sketch at least some of the concerns and qualities of our own day’s prototypical success story, the inheritor of the high status variously claimed, in the past, by the warrior, the saint, the knight and the aristocratic landed gentleman.

Requirements of High Status in:

London, New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, 2004

A successful person may be a man or a woman, of any race, who has been able to accumulate money, power and renown through his or her own accomplishments (rather than through inheritance) in one of the myriad sectors of the commercial world (including sport, art and scientific research). Because societies are in practise trusted to be “meritocratic,” financial achievements are necessarily understood to be “deserved.” The ability to accumulate wealth is prized as proof of the presence of at least four cardinal virtues: creativity, courage, intelligence and stamina. The presence or absence of other virtues— humility and godliness, for example—rarely detains attention. That success is no longer attributed, as in past societies, to “luck,” “providence” or “God” is a reflection of the collective secular faith we now place in individual will power. Financial failures are judged to be similarly merited, with unemployment’s bearing some of the shame that physical cowardice earned in warrior eras. Money is meanwhile invested with an ethical quality. Its relative quantity indicates the virtue of its possessor, as do the material goods it can buy. Like the Cubeo’s necklace of jaguar teeth, a prosperous way of life signals worthiness, while ownership of a rusted old car or a threadbare home may prompt suppositions of moral deficiency. Aside from its promise of high status, wealth is promoted on the basis of its capacity to deliver happiness by granting access to an array of ever-changing conveniences and luxuries, the thought of whose absence in the restricted lives of previous generations can invoke pity and wonder.

However natural such a status ideal may appear to be, it is, of course—as a well-considered political perspective must show—only the work of humans, a recent development dating from the middle of the eighteenth century, brought into being by a host of identifiable factors. Furthermore, the political perspective would add, as an ideal, it is occasionally simpleminded, at times unfair and always subject to change.

No aspect of this peculiar modern ideal has come under greater scrutiny than the associations it constructs between, on the one hand, wealth and virtue and, on the other, poverty and moral dubiousness. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Thorstein Veblen considered the emergence of financial worth, in the early nineteenth century, as the central and often sole criterion employed in commercial societies’evaluation of their members:“[Wealth has become] the conventional basis of esteem. Its possession has become necessary in order to have any reputable standing in the community. It has become indispensable to acquire property in order to retain one’s good name … Those members of the community who fall short of [a relatively high standard of wealth] will suffer in the esteem of their fellow men; and consequently they will suffer also in their own esteem.” In such a society, it was, Veblen implied, nearly impossible to conceive of being both virtuous and yet poor. Even the most unmaterialistically minded person must sense an imperative to accumulate wealth and demonstrate possession of it—as the only means of escaping opprobrium—and must feel anxious and blameworthy on failing to do so.

Accordingly, the possession of a great many material goods becomes desirable not principally because such goods provide any abjective or subjective pleasure (though they may do this, too) but because they confer honour. In the ancient world, debate raged among philosophers about what was materially necessary for happiness and what unnecessary. Epicurus, for one, argued that simple food and shelter were all that was needed, and that an expensive house and lavish meals could be safely passed up by every rational, philosophically minded person. However, reviewing the argument many centuries later in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wryly pointed out that in modern, materialistic societies, countless things that were no doubt unnecessary from the point of view of physical survival had nonetheless in practical terms come to be seen as “necessaries,” simply because no one could be thought respectable and so lead a psychologically comfortable life without owning them:

“By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct… . Under necessaries, therefore, I comprehend not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency[,] have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people.”

Since Smith’s day, economists have been almost unanimous in subscribing to the idea that what best defines, and lends such bitterness to, the condition of the poor is not so much the direct physical suffering involved as the shame attendant on the negative reactions of others to their state—in other words, the unavoidable sense that their poverty flouts what Smith termed the “established rules of decency.” In The Affluent Society (1958), J. K. Galbraith proposed, with a bow to Smith, “People are poverty-stricken whenever their income, even if adequate for survival, falls markedly behind that of the community. Then they cannot have what the larger community regards as the minimum necessary for decency; and they cannot wholly escape, therefore, the judgment of the larger community that they are indecent.”

This notion that “decency” must be attached to wealth—and “indecency” to poverty—is the essential focal point of one line of sceptical complaint against the modern status ideal. Why, the system’s critics ask, should a failure to pile up riches be taken as a marker of an unconditionally flawed human being, rather than evidence of a greater or lesser deficit, or even a fiasco, in one particular aspect of the far larger, more complicated project that is the leading of a good life? Why should wealth and poverty be read as unerring signposts for human morals?

The reasons, it turns out, are not mysterious. The very act of earning money frequently calls upon virtues of character. Working at— and keeping—almost any job requires intelligence, energy, forethought and the ability to cooperate with others. And the more lucrative the position, the greater the requisite merits. Lawyers and surgeons not only earn higher salaries than street cleaners; they also typically bring to bear on their work more sustained effort and greater skill.

A day labourer “would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt,” wrote Adam Smith, because (to return to his passage with italics) not having such a shirt must imply a degree of poverty that, Smith’s contemporaries felt certain, “nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.” Only someone who was a congenital drunk, unreliable, thieving or childishly insubordinate would be incapable of securing the modest employment needed to finance the purchase of a linen shirt—given which, the ownership of this article of clothing might indeed safely be taken as a minimum guarantee of good character.

It requires but a short leap of imagination from there to make the assumption that extreme good conduct and an assortment of virtues must lie behind the acquisition of cupboards full of linen shirts, fleets of yachts, myriad mansions and jewels. The very concept of the “status symbol,” a costly material object that confers respect on its owner, rests upon the widespread and not improbable notion that the acquisition of the most expensive goods must inevitably demand the greatest of all qualities of character.

Opponents of economic meritocracy have long believed, however, that true merit must be a more elusive, complex quality than could ever be neatly captured by the parameters of an end-of-year salary. Their scepticism is analogous to that of educationalists who insist that the “intelligence” of students cannot be fairly measured simply by making them sit an examination and then grading their answers to questions such as:

Pick out the antonyms from among these four words:

obdurate spurious ductile recondite

For the most part these critics would not argue, of course, that merit and intelligence are, respectively, everywhere equally distributed or entirely immeasurable. They merely wish to point out that the vast majority of us are unlikely ever to know how to do the apportioning or measuring properly and hence should take infinite care before acting in ways that presume otherwise—for example, in the economic sphere, by abolishing taxes for the wealthy (who, it is occasionally said by extreme defenders of economic meritocracy, deserve to keep all their earnings) or revoking state benefits for the poor (who would thus, these same defenders would add, have the opportunity more fully to experience the depths of deprivation that they must likewise deserve).

Such scepticism does not sit well, though, with the demands of everyday life. It is easy to understand the wish for some system, be it educational or economic, that will assure us of picking out the worthiest few from a classroom or in society and, in turn, passing over the least worthy—that is, the losers—in good conscience.

But an urgent wish is no guarantor of a sound solution. In The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928), George Bernard Shaw concluded that modern capitalist societies had settled on a particularly obtuse means of determining the economic hierarchy: a system whose basic tenet was that “if every man is left to make as much money as he can for himself in his own way, subject only to the laws restraining crude violence and direct fraud, then wealth will spontaneously distribute itself in proportion to the industry, sobriety and generally the virtue of the citizens, the good men becoming rich and the bad men poor.”

Quite to the contrary, continued Shaw, it had been demonstrated all too clearly that under capitalism, any ruthless, ambitious man could “grab three or four million pounds for himself by selling bad whiskey or by forestalling the wheat harvest and selling it at three times its cost or by running silly newspapers and magazines that circulate deceitful advertisements,” even as decent “men who exercise [d] their noble faculties or risk[ed] their lives in the furtherance of human knowledge and welfare” ended up mired in poverty and insignificance.

That said, Shaw did not want to align himself with those sentimental types on the left and the right who liked to claim that in society as it was presently arranged, it was always the good men who became poor and the bad men rich—a formula no less simplistic than its inverse. He sought rather to invoke in his readers a sense of how limiting it was to try to judge anyone morally on the basis of salary, and how much nobler to take some account of the many consequences that might result from differences in wealth.

In Unto This Last (1862), John Ruskin, as intent as Shaw would later be on challenging meritocratic ideas, related in heavily sarcastic terms the conclusions he had reached regarding the characters of the rich and the poor, after hundreds of encounters with representatives of both groups in many countries over four decades: “The persons who become rich are, generally speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive and ignorant. The persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief and the entirely merciful just and godly person.” In other words, in Ruskin’s experience, there was no classifying those who ended up either rich or poor—which means for us, if we follow the message first articulated by Jesus Christ and subsequently repeated in a secular idiom by political thinkers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that it is not our prerogative to ascribe honour principally according to income. A multitude of external events and internal characteristics will go into making one person wealthy and another destitute, among them luck and circumstance, illness and fear, accident and late development, good timing and misfortune.

Three centuries before Ruskin and Shaw, Michel de Montaigne had similarly stressed the importance of contingent factors in determining the outcome of lives. He advised us to remember the role played by “chance in bestowing glory on us according to her fickle will: I have often seen chance marching ahead of merit, and often outstripping merit by a long chalk.” A dispassionate audit of our successes and failures should leave us feeling that there are reasons to be at once less proud of and less embarrassed about ourselves, for a thought-provoking percentage of what happens to us is not of our own doing. Montaigne urged that we keep a tight rein on our excitement when meeting the powerful and wealthy, and on our tendency to judge in the presence of the poor and obscure. “A man may have a great suite of attendants, a beautiful palace, great influence and a large income. All that may surround him, but it is not in him… . Measure his height with his stilts off: let him lay aside his wealth and his decorations and show himself to us naked… . What sort of soul does he have? Is his soul a beautiful one, able, happily endowed with all her functions? Are her riches her own or are they borrowed? Has luck had nothing to do with it? … That is what we need to know; that is what the immense distances between us men should be judged by.”

Uniting the many challenges to the commercial meritocratic ideal is a threefold plea, that we cease investing with moral connotations something as apparently haphazardly distributed as money; that we sever the doctrinaire connections routinely made between wealth and virtue; and that before we begin measuring our peers, we at least attempt to ensure that the taller ones have taken off their stilts, and that the shorter ones are not standing in a ditch.

Aside from the equation it draws between making money and being good, the modern ideal of a successful life posits a further linkage between making money and being happy.

This latter association rests on three assumptions. First, it is presumed that identifying what will make us happy is not an inordinately difficult task. Just as our bodies typically know what they need in order to be healthy, and hence direct us towards smoked fish, say, when we lack sodium or towards peaches when our blood sugar is low, so, too, the theory goes, can our minds be relied upon to understand what we should aim for so as to flourish as whole human beings. They will thus naturally push us towards certain careers and projects. Second, it is taken for granted that the enormous range of occupational possibilities and consumer goods available to modern civilisation is not merely a gaudy, enervating show responsible for stoking desires bearing little relevance to our welfare but is, rather, a helpful array of potentialities and products capable of satisfying some of our most important needs. And third, conventional wisdom holds that the more money we have, the more goods and services we will be able to afford, thus increasing our odds of being happy.

The most suggestive and readable adversary of these several assumptions remains Jean-Jacques Rousseau, most forcefully in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754). In this text, Rousseau begins by charging that however independent-minded we may believe ourselves to be, we are in fact dangerously inept at deciphering our own needs. Our souls rarely articulate what they must have in order to be fulfilled, and when they do manage to mumble something, their requests are likely to be misfounded or contradictory. Rather than compare the mind with a body that is unfailingly correct in its sense of what it ought to consume for its own health, Rousseau invites us to draw an analogy instead to a body that cries out for wine when it needs water and insists that it wants to dance when it should in truth be lying flat on a bed. Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.

Rousseau’s Discourse goes on to sketch the history of the world not as a story of progress from barbarism to the great workshops and cities of Europe, but as one of regress, from a privileged state in which we humans lived simply but were aware of our own needs to a state in which we are apt to feel envy for ways of life that can claim little connection to our true selves. In technologically backward prehistory, in Rousseau’s “natural state,” when people lived in forests and had never entered a shop or read a newspaper, men and women alike better understood themselves and so were drawn towards the more essential features of a happy life: love of family, respect for nature, awe at the beauty of the universe, curiosity about others and a taste for music and humble entertainments. It was from this state that modern commercial “civilisation” pulled us, according to the philosopher, leaving us to envy and yearn and suffer in a world of plenty.

For the benefit of those who might wish to explain this away as the absurdly romantic fantasy of a pastoral author unreasonably offended by modernity, it is worth noting here that if the eighteenth century paid attention to Rousseau’s argument, it was in part because it had before it a single, stark example of its evident truths, in the fate of the indigenous populations of North America.

Reports of Native American society dating from the sixteenth century describe it as a materially modest yet psychologically rewarding culture: communities were small, close-knit, egalitarian, religious, playful and martial. The Indians were certainly backward in the commercial and financial sense: they lived on a diet of fruits and wild animals, slept in tepees and had few possessions. Year after year, they wore the same pelts and shoes. Even a chief might own no more than a spear and a few pots. But there was reputed to be an impressive level of contentment amid the simplicity.

Within only a few decades of the arrival of the first Europeans, however, the status system of Native American society would be turned on its head through contact with the products of European technology and industry. What mattered most was no longer an individual’s wisdom or understanding of the ways of nature, but his ownership of weapons, jewellery and whiskey. Indians now longed for silver earrings, copper and brass bracelets, tin finger rings, necklaces made of Venetian glass, ice chisels, guns, alcohol, kettles, beads, hoes and mirrors.

These new enthusiasms did not develop spontaneously. European traders deliberately sought to foster desires in the Indians in order to motivate them to provide the animal pelts required by the European market. By 1690, an English naturalist, the Reverend John Banister, could note that the Indians of the Hudson Bay area had been successfully tempted by traders to want “many things which they had not wanted before, because they never had them, but which by means of trade are now highly necessary to them.” Two decades later, a traveller named Robert Beverley observed, “The Europeans have introduced luxury among the Indians which has multiplied their wants and made them desire a thousand things they never even dreamt of before.”

Unfortunately, these thousand things, however ardently coveted, did not seem to make the Indians much happier. Without question, they worked harder: between 1739 and 1759, for example, the two thousand warriors of the Cherokee tribe were estimated to have killed 1.25 million deer to satisfy export demands. During the same period, the Montagnais Indians on the northern shore of the Saint Lawrence River turned over between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand pelts a year to French and British merchants at Tadoussac. But their quality of life did not improve as the volume of trade increased. Suicide and alcoholism rates rose, communities were fractured and factions squabbled among themselves over the European booty. The tribal chiefs did not need Rousseau’s commentary to understand what had happened, though they unknowingly concurred with his analysis. There were calls for the Indians to renounce their addiction to European “luxuries.” In the 1760s, the leaders of the Delaware tribes of western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley tried to revive the ways of their forefathers. Prophecies warned that the Delaware would be wiped out if they did not wean themselves from their dependence on trade. But already it was too late: the Indians, no different in their psychological makeup from other humans, had succumbed to the easy lure of the trinkets of modern civilisation and ceased listening to the quiet voices inside, which spoke of the modest pleasures of the community and the beauty of the empty canyons at dusk.

The defenders of commercial society have always had one answer for those sympathetic to the American Indians, and for anyone else who thought to complain of the corrupting effects of an advanced economy: no one forced the Indians to buy necklaces made of Venetian glass, ice chisels, guns, kettles, beads, hoes or mirrors. No one stopped them from living in tepees and made them aspire to owning wooden houses with porches and wine cellars. The Indians abandoned their sober, simple ways of their own accord—which in itself might indicate, this line of reasoning holds, that theirs was perhaps not as pleasant a life as has been made out.

The defence is similar to that embraced by modern advertising agents and newspaper editors, who are fond of asserting that they are not the ones responsible for encouraging the public’s undue obsession with the lives of the famous, changes in fashion or the ownership of new products. No, they merely offer up information related to these topics for anyone who may be interested—while, the implication goes, many more may prefer to help the needy, examine their own souls, read Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or reflect upon the short passage of time left to them before their extinction.

This response illuminates why Rousseau placed so much emphasis, unedifying though it might be, on how difficult humans find it to make up their minds about what is important, and how strongly predisposed they are to listen to others’ suggestions about where their thoughts should be directed and what they should value in order to be happy. Such suggestions evidently carry even greater weight when they appear on newsprint or in giant type on a billboard.

The great irony here is that it should be the advertising agents and newspaper editors themselves who are typically the first to downplay the effectiveness of their own trades. They will insist that the population is independent-minded enough not to be overly affected by the stories they lay before the world, nor taken in for long by the siren call of the adverts they so artfully design.

In protesting thus they are, sadly, being far too modest. Nothing more clearly illustrates the extent of their deprecation than a statistical glimpse of the speed with which what was once a mere possibility will, given sufficient prompting, come to seem a necessity.

Percentage of North Americans Declaring the Following Items to Be Necessities

1970

2000

Second car

Second television set

More than one telephone

Car air conditioning

Home air conditioning

Dishwasher

Criticisms of consumer society have focused not only on the shortcomings and inadequacies of products in general (a point open to overelaboration, for it takes a curmudgeonly spirit not to be struck by, say, the softness of a cashmere pullover or the beauty of a car’s dashboard on a nighttime drive along a motorway) but also, and more fairly, perhaps, on the distorted picture of our needs created by the way these products are presented to us. They can appear essential, blessed with extraordinary powers to bestow happiness on us, because we understand neither their actual identity nor our own functioning.

A car advertisement will, for example, be careful to ignore aspects of human psychology and of the overall process of buying and owning that could spoil, or at least dampen, our joy at coming to possess the featured vehicle. Most notably, it will fail to mention our tendency to cease being excited by anything after we have owned it for a short while. The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy it—just as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry him or her. We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.

Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another—which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver. The new car will rapidly be absorbed, like all the other wonders we already own, into the material backdrop of our lives, where we will hardly register its existence—until the night when a burglar does us the paradoxical service of smashing a window to steal the radio and brings home to us, in the midst of the shattered glass, how much we had to be grateful for.

The advertisement stays quiet, too, about the relative inability of any material thing to alter our level of happiness, as compared with the overwhelming power of emotional events. The most elegant and accomplished of vehicles cannot give us a fraction of the satisfaction we derive from a good relationship, just as it cannot be of any comfort whatsoever to us following a domestic argument or abandonment. At such moments, we may even come to resent the car’s impassive efficiency, the punctilious clicking of its indicators and the methodical calculations of its onboard computer.

We are equally prone to misunderstand the attractions of certain careers, simply because so much of what they entail is always edited out of the description, leaving only highlights that it would be impossible not to admire. We read of the results, not of the labour required to produce them.

If we cannot stop envying, it seems especially poignant that we should be constrained to spend so much of our lives envying the wrong things.

The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves.

Incensed by their wrongheaded prioritising, John Ruskin excoriated nineteenth-century Britons (he had never been to the United States) for being the most wealth-obsessed people in the history of the world. They were never at any moment, he wrote, free of concern with who had what, and where it had come from (“the ruling goddess may be best generally described as the ‘Goddess of Getting-on,’” he grumbled). They felt shame over their own financial state and jealousy towards those whom they perceived as being better off.

Ruskin had a confession to make: contrary to expectations, he, too, felt frantic to become wealthy. The thought of wealth preyed on his mind from breakfast till dinner, he admitted. In fact, however, he was sarcastically playing off an ambiguity in the term wealth to emphasise all the more forcefully how far he felt his fellow countrymen had strayed from virtue. For the dictionary tells us that wealth refers not only, and historically not even primarily, to large amounts of money; it can denote an abundance of anything, from butterflies to books to smiles. Ruskin was interested in wealth—obsessed by it, even—but in wealth of a very different kind than is usually meant by the word: he wished to be wealthy in kindness, curiosity, sensitivity, humility, godliness and intelligence, a set of virtues to which he applied the collective name “life.” In Unto This Last, he therefore entreated his readers to set aside their ordinary monetary conceptions of wealth in favour of a “life”-based schema, according to which the wealthiest people in Britain would no longer automatically be the merchants and the landowners, but rather those who felt the keenest wonder gazing at the stars at night or who were best able to sense and alleviate the sufferings of others. “There is no wealth but life,” he intoned: “life, including all its powers of love, of joy and of admiration. That country is richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others … Many of the persons commonly considered wealthy are, in reality, no more wealthy than the locks of their own strong boxes, they being inherently and eternally incapable of wealth.”

Ruskin was here uttering the plain, unsophisticated truths of the prophets, and when people did not guffaw (the Saturday Review dismissed the writer as a “mad governess” and his thesis as “windy hysterics,” “absolute nonsense” and “intolerable twaddle”), they listened. In 1906, on entering Parliament, Britain’s first twenty-seven Labour MPs were asked what single book had most influenced them to pursue social justice through politics. Seventeen of them cited Unto This Last. Thirteen years later, George Bernard Shaw, speaking on the centenary of Ruskin’s birth, declared that the invective of Vladimir Lenin and the indictments of Karl Marx, when compared with Ruskin’s works, sounded more like the platitudes of a rural dean.(Ruskin himself, however, because he enjoyed teasing label-fixers, had claimed to be a “violent Tory of the old school—Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s”).“I have met in my lifetime some extremely revolutionary characters,” Shaw went on, “and quite a large number of them, when I have asked, ‘Who put you on to this revolutionary line? Wa s it Marx?’ have answered plainly, ‘No, it was Ruskin.’ Ruskinites are perhaps the most thorough-going of all the opponents of the existing state of our society. Ruskin’s political message to the cultured people of his day, the class to which he himself belonged, began and ended in this simple judgement: ‘You are a parcel of thieves.’”

Ruskin was not alone in holding this opinion. There were others in the nineteenth century who hammered home, in tones alternately outraged and melancholy, identical criticisms of money’s deification as the chief determinant of respect, a presumed badge of demonstrable goodness, rather than merely one component, and surely not the most important one, of a fulfilled and fulfilling life. “Men are always apt to regard wealth as a precious end in itself and certainly they have never been so apt thus to regard it as they are in England at the present time,” lamented Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869). “Never did people believe anything more firmly, than nine Englishmen out of ten at the present day believe that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being so very rich.” As Ruskin had done seven years before, Arnold urged the inhabitants of the world’s first and most advanced industrial nation to think of wealth as only one of many means to secure happiness, an end that he defined (to further hoots of laughter from critics at the Daily Telegraph) as an “inward spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life and increased sympathy.”

Thomas Carlyle had earlier made much the same point, if less diplomatically. In Midas (1843), he asked, “This successful industry of England, with its plethoric wealth … which of us has it enriched? … We have sumptuous garnitures for our life, but have forgotten to live in the middle of them. Many men eat finer cookery, drink dearer liquors, but in the heart of them, what increase of blessedness is there? Are they better, beautifuller, stronger, braver? Are they even what they call ‘happier’? Do they look with satisfaction on more things and human faces in this God’s Earth; do more things and human faces look with satisfaction on them? Not so … We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.”

Carlyle was not blind to the benefits of modern enterprise; he even saw the appeal of certain aspects of accountancy (“book-keeping by double-entry is admirable, and records several things in an exact manner,” he conceded). But like Arnold and Ruskin and any number of other social critics before them and since, he could not accept a way of life in which what he termed “Mammon-worship” had apparently subsumed the drive towards “blessedness” and “satisfaction” on “God’s Earth.”

Political Change

However disgruntled or puzzled a social hierarchy may leave us feeling, we are apt to go along with it on the resigned assumption that it is too entrenched and must be too well founded to be questioned. We are led to believe, in other words, that communities and the principles underpinning them are, practically speaking, immutable— even, somehow, natural.

Many distinctive ideas have, over the course of history, been thought of as “natural.” Some of the most peculiar of these flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:

The real fact is that man in the beginning was ordained to rule over woman: and this is an eternal decree which we have no right and no power to alter.

EARL PERCY, 1873

There is more difference, physically and morally, between an educated European man and a European woman than there is between a European man and a negro belonging to some savage Central African tribe.

LORD CROMER, 1911

The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.

SIR WILLIAM ACTON, 1857

As a race the African is inferior to the white man; subordination to the white man is his normal condition. Therefore our system, which regards the African as an inferior, rests upon a great law of nature.

ALEXANDER STEPHENS, 1861

Within a given society, political consciousness may be said to emerge through the realisation that certain opinions paraded as a priori truths by influential figures may in fact be relative and open to investigation. If they have been declaimed with sufficient confidence, however, these truisms may seem to belong to the fabric of existence no less than the trees and the sky, though they have been—a political perspective insists—wholly invented by individuals with specific practical and psychological interests to defend.

If such relativity is hard to keep in mind, it may be because dominant beliefs themselves are typically at pains to suggest that they are no more alterable by human hands than are the orbits of the sun. They claim to be merely stating the obvious. They are, to use Karl Marx’s helpful word, ideological— an ideological statement being defined as one that subtly promotes a bias while pretending to be perfectly neutral.

For Marx, it is the ruling classes of a society that will be largely responsible for disseminating its ideological beliefs. This explains why, in those societies in which a landed gentry controls the balance of power, the concept of the inherent nobility of landed wealth is taken for granted by the majority of the population (including many who lose out under the system), while in mercantile societies, it is the achievements of entrepreneurs that dominate the citizenry’s concepts of success. As Marx posited, “The ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class.”

Ye t somewhat paradoxically, these ideas would never come to rule if they were perceived as ruling too forcefully. It is in the perfidious nature of ideological statements that unless our political senses are well developed, we will fail to spot them. Ideology is released into society like a colourless, odourless gas. It pervades newspapers, advertisements, television programmes and textbooks, always making light of its partial, perhaps illogical or unjust take on the world and meekly implying that it is only presenting age-old truths with which none but a fool or a maniac could disagree.

But the nascent political mind casts off politeness and tradition, refuses to blame itself for adopting a contrary stance and asks, with all the innocence of a child and the tenacity of a trial lawyer, “Does this have to be?”

An oppressive situation that might otherwise have been taken as a sign that nature had condemned certain members of society to suffer—and suffer in perpetuity— may now, by being reinterpreted politically, be attributed to theoretically changeable social forces. Guilt and shame may thus be transmuted into understanding and a striving towards a more equitable distribution of status.

George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (London, 1928):

“You must clear your mind of the fancy with which we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always existed and must always exist. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts. Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations. Children nowadays believe that to spend nine years at school, to have old-age and widows’ pensions, votes for women and short-skirted ladies in Parliament is part of the order of nature and always was and ever will be; but their great-grandmothers would have said that anyone who told them that such things were coming was mad—and that anyone who wanted them to come was wicked.”

The segment of Western society that perhaps most successfully altered its status over the course of the twentieth century was women. The manner in which large numbers of them came to feel entitled to question their position in the hierarchy provides a host of general insights into the development of a political consciousness.

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) begins with a description of a visit the author paid one autumn to Cambridge University. While there, she decided to stop in at Trinity College Library and have a look at the manuscripts of Milton’s Lycidas and Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond. However, just as she was about to step inside, “a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman” appeared and “regretted in a low voice that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.” In a minor key, Woolf had bumped into one of the great stately pillars that propped up the lesser status of women: disenfranchisement from equal rights to higher education.

Faced with a similar situation, many women would have felt stung, but few would have responded politically to the offence. Most would instead have blamed themselves or nature or God—anything but the social construct that condoned such exclusion. After all, never in history had women had the same rights to education as men. Had not many of the most famous doctors in Britain—and plenty of politicians, too—made reference to the biological inferiority of the female brain, a supposed consequence of the smaller size of women’s skulls? What right, then, did any one woman have to question the motives of a gentleman who turned her away from a library, especially if he delivered his message with an apology and a polite smile?

But this particular woman was not to be easily silenced. Performing the quintessential political manoeuvre, she asked herself not, What is wrong with me for not being allowed into a library? but rather, What is wrong with the keepers of the library for not allowing me in? When ideas and institutions are held to be “natural,” responsibility for whatever suffering they cause must necessarily belong either to no specific agent or else to the injured parties themselves. But the political perspective gives the oppressed leave to imagine that it might be the ideal, instead of something in their own character, that is at fault. Rather than wonder in shame, What is wrong with me (that I am a woman/have dark skin/have no money)? they are encouraged to ask, What might be wrong, unjust or illogical in those others who disdain me? And the question may, moreover, be put not out of some conviction of innocence (the stance of those who use political radicalism as a paranoid means of avoiding self-criticism) but in recognition of the fact that there is more folly and partisanship in institutions, ideas and laws than a naturalistic perspective can possibly allow for.

As she made her way back to her Cambridge hotel, Woolf moved outwards from her own hurt to consider the position of women in general: “I pondered what effect poverty has on the mind; and what effect wealth has on the mind and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out and of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and the poverty and insecurity of the other.” She reflected upon, and began to be sceptical of, the feminine role model she had grown up with: the image of a woman who was at all times, “immensely charming and utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she would take the leg; if there was a draught, she would sit in it—in short, she was so constituted that she would never have a mind or a wish of her own, but prefer to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others.”

Later, back in London, she kept posing questions: “Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor?” Wanting to “strain off what was personal and accidental in these impressions” of female subjugation, Woolf went to the British Library (which women had been allowed to enter for the previous two decades) and investigated the history of men’s attitudes towards women down the ages. She found a stream of extraordinary prejudices and half-baked truths propounded with authority by priests, scientists and philosophers. Women were, it was said, ordained by God to be inferior; constitutionally unable to govern or run businesses; too weak to be doctors and, when they had their periods, incapable of handling machinery or remaining impartial during trial cases. Behind all this abuse, Woolf recognised, lay the problem of money. Women enjoyed no freedoms—including freedom of the spirit—because they did not control their own income: “Women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves,” she wrote.

Woolf ’s argument culminated in a set of specific political demands for women, including, at a minimum, dignity, equal rights to education, an income of “five hundred pounds a year” and “a room of one’s own.”

The ideological element embedded within the modern status ideal may lack the shrill obnoxiousness of nineteenth-century pronouncements on race or gender—often it wears a smile and lies in innocuous places, within the bric-a-brac of what we read and hear— and yet it is equally partial and in certain situations equally prejudicial in its conception of what constitutes a good life. For this reason alone, it deserves greater scrutiny than it invites.

Society’s ubiquitous statements and images convey messages to which we are less impervious than we like to admit. We must, for example, severely underestimate the subliminal powers of the Sunday newspaper if we trust that we may take in its contents and move on with our sense of priorities and desires no less altered than if we had spent the same two hours reading a chapter of Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy or Saint Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (the ritual of perusing the Sunday paper having, in the opinion of Max Weber, replaced that of attending church).

What the political perspective seeks above all is an understanding of ideology. It aims to reach a point where ideology may be denaturalised and defused through analysis, enabling observers to exchange a puzzled, depressed response to it for a clear-eyed, genealogical grasp of its sources and effects.

When thoroughly investigated, the modern high-status ideal duly ceases to appear “natural” or God-given. It stands revealed instead as a development stemming from changes in industrial production and political organisation—changes that began in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century and subsequently spread across the rest of Europe and North America. The enthusiasm for materialism, entrepreneurship and meritocracy that saturates the newspapers and television schedules of our own day reflects nothing more complex than the interests of those in charge of the system by which the majority earn their living. “The ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class.”

Unfortunately, understanding does not miraculously forestall any discomforts that may arise from the status ideal. Understanding bears the same relation to many of the difficulties of politics as a weather satellite to the crises of meteorology: it cannot always prevent problems, but it can at the very least teach us a host of useful things about the best ways to approach them, thereby sharply diminishing the sense of persecution, passivity and confusion we would otherwise feel. More ambitiously, understanding may also be a first step towards an attempt to shift, or tug at, a society’s ideals, and thus to bring about a world in which it will be marginally less likely that veneration and honour will be dogmatically or unsceptically surrendered to those who are still wearing stilts.