Status Anxiety

II

EXPECTATION

Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon outside the kitchen of the “ Taj Mahal,” at the American National Exhibition, Moscow, 1959

Material Progress

1.

In July 1959, the American vice president, Richard Nixon, travelled to Moscow to open an exhibition showcasing some of his country’s technological and material achievements. The highlight of the exhibition was a full-scale replica of the home of an average member of America’s working class, equipped with fitted carpets, a television in the living room, two en suite bathrooms, central heating and a kitchen with a washing machine, a tumble dryer and a refrigerator.

Reporting on this display, an incensed Soviet press angrily denied that an ordinary American worker could conceivably live in such luxury, and advised its readers to dismiss the entire house as propaganda after mockingly baptising it the “Taj Mahal.”

When Nixon led Nikita Khrushchev around the exhibition, the leader was comparably sceptical. Outside the kitchen of the model home, Khrushchev pointed to an electric lemon squeezer and remarked to Nixon that no one in his right mind would wish to acquire such a “silly gadget.”

“Anything that makes women work less hard must be useful,” suggested Nixon.

“We don’t think of women in terms of workers—like you do in the capitalist system,” snapped an irate Khrushchev.

Later that same evening, Nixon was invited to appear live on Soviet television, an occasion he used to expound on the advantages of American life. Shrewdly, he did not begin his speech by touting democracy or human rights; instead he spoke of money and material progress. Nixon explained that in just a few hundred years, Western countries had managed, through enterprise and industry, to overcome the poverty and famine that had gripped the world until the middle of the eighteenth century and continued even up to the present day to plague many other nations. Americans had purchased 56 million television sets and 143 million radios, he informed his Soviet listeners, a large number of whom did not have private bathrooms or possess so much as a kettle. The members of the average American family could buy nine new dresses and suits and fourteen new pairs of shoes every year, he noted, and some 31 million families owned their own homes. In the United States, houses could be had in a thousand different architectural styles, most boasting greater square footage than the television studio they were broadcasting from. Sitting next to Nixon, an infuriated Khrushchev clenched his fists and mouthed,“Nyet! Nyet!”—adding under his breath, according to one account, “Ëb’ tvoyu babushky” (“Go fuck your grandmother”).

2.

Khrushchev’s protestation notwithstanding, Nixon’s statistics were accurate. In the two centuries preceding his speech, the countries of the West had witnessed the fastest and most dramatic elevation of living standards in human history.

The majority of the population of medieval and early modern Europe had belonged to the peasant class. Impoverished, undernourished, cold and fearful while alive, they were usually dead—following some further agony—before their fortieth birthday. After a lifetime of work, their most valuable possession might have been a cow, a goat or a pot. Famine was never far off, and disease was rife, among the most common conditions being rickets, ulcers, tuberculosis, leprosy, abscesses, gangrene, tumours and cankers.

3.

Then, in early-eighteenth-century Britain, the great Western transformation began. Thanks to new farming techniques (including crop rotation, scientific stock breeding and land consolidation), yields began to increase sharply. Between 1700 and 1820, Britain’s agricultural productivity doubled, releasing capital and manpower that flowed into the cities to be invested in industry and trade. The invention of the steam engine and the cotton power loom modified not only working practices but social expectations. Towns exploded in size. In 1800, only one city in the British Isles, London, could boast a population of more than a hundred thousand; by 1891, twenty-three English cities would make that claim. Goods and services that had formerly been the exclusive preserve of the elite were made available to the masses. Luxuries became decencies, and decencies necessities. Daniel Defoe, travelling around southern England in 1745, noted the proliferation of large new shops with enticing window displays and tempting offerings. Whereas for much of recorded history fashion had remained static for decades at a time, it now became possible to identify specific styles for every passing year (in England in 1753, for example, purple was in vogue for women’s gowns; in 1754, it was the turn of white linen with a pink pattern; in 1755, dove grey was the rage).

The nineteenth century expanded on and spread the British consumer revolution. Gigantic department stores opened throughout Europe and America: the Bon Marché and Au Printemps in Paris, Selfridge’s and Whiteley’s in London, Macy’s in New York. All were designed to appeal to the new industrial middle class. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony marking the opening of a twelve-storey Marshall Field’s in Chicago in 1902, the manager, Gordon Selfridge, proclaimed, “We have built this great institution for ordinary people, so that it can be their store, their downtown home, their buying headquarters.” It was not intended, he emphasised, just for the “swagger rich.”

Central staircase, Bon Marché department store, Paris, 1880

A host of technological inventions helped to stretch mental horizons even as they altered the patterns of everyday life: the old cyclical view of the world, wherein one expected next year to be much like (and just as bad as) last, gave way to the notion that mankind could progress yearly towards perfection. To list only a few of these inventions:

CORNFLAKES, patented by J. H. Kellogg in 1895 (Kellogg had hit upon the concept by accident, when the grain mixture he served to inmates in his sanatorium unexpectedly hardened and then shattered into flakes)

the CAN OPENER, patented in 1870

the SAFETY PIN, invented in 1849

the SEWING MACHINE, developed by I. M. Singer in 1851 (ready-made clothes would become more common from the 1860s; machine-made underclothes would be introduced in the 1870s)

the TYPEWRITER, invented in 1867 (the first full-length manuscript to be typed was Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883)

PROCESSED FOODS: By the 1860s, the British company Crosse & Blackwell was producing twenty-seven thousand gallons of ketchup a year. In the early 1880s, the chemist Alfred Bird came up with an eggless custard powder. Blancmange powder was developed in the 1870s, and jelly crystals in the 1890s.

LIGHTING: Stearic candles were used from the 1830s, replacing the much shorter-lived tallow-dip candles of old.

SANITATION: In 1846, Doulton began manufacturing glazed stoneware pipes, which sparked a revolution in metropolitan sewerage. By the late 1870s, public toilets had begun to spring up in Europe and America. George Jennings’s famous “pedestal vase” of 1884 stunned the public with its ability to wash away, as its advertisement put it, “ten apples and a flat sponge with a two-gallon flush.”

George Jennings, pedestal vase, 1884

the TELEPHONE, invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1875

DRY CLEANING, invented in 1849 began manufacturing glazed Jolly-Bellin, who accidentally spilt turpentine on a tablecloth and found that on the patch the spill covered, stains had disappeared (by 1866, Pullars of Perth was offering a postal two-day dry-cleaning service anywhere in the British Isles and had improved on Jolly-Bellin’s cleaning fluid with a formula combining petroleum and benzine).

4.

Material progress accelerated still further in the twentieth century. In his English Journey (1934), J. B. Priestley observed that a new England had taken shape, a country of arterial roads and bungalows whose inhabitants, for the most part ordinary workers, read tabloid newspapers, listened to the radio, spent their leisure hours shopping and looked forward to rising incomes year after year. “In this England, for the first time,” he asserted,“Jack and Jill are nearly as good as their master and mistress.”

George Orwell, in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), sketched a similar picture of the Western material revolution:“Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoy the use of good roads, germ-free water, police protection, free libraries and probably free education of a kind. To an increasing extent the rich and the poor read the same books, and they also see the same films and listen to the same radio programmes. The differences in their way of life have been diminished by the mass-production of cheap clothes and improvements in housing. The place to look for the germs of the future England is in light-industry areas and along the arterial roads. In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes—everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great towns—the old pattern is gradually changing into something new. In those vast new wildernesses of glass and brick there is a rather restless, culture-less life, centring round tinned food, Picture Post, the radio and the internal combustion engine.”

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked what one book he would give the Soviet people to teach them about the advantages of American society, he singled out the Sears, Roebuck catalogue.

Amid the economic expansion that followed the Second World War, Westerners, and in particular Americans, became the most privileged, and most harried, consumers on the planet.

A democratic consumer revolution: Hoover advertisement, February 1933

Sears, Roebuck catalogue, spring 1934

Across the United States, new longings were created by the development of shopping malls, which enabled citizens to browse at all hours in climate-controlled environments. When the Southdale Mall opened in Minnesota in 1950, its advertising promised that “every day will be a perfect shopping day at Southdale.”

By the 1970s, Americans were estimated to be spending more time at the mall than anywhere else other than their workplaces and their Taj Mahals.

Andreas Gursky,99 cents, 2000

Equality, Expectation and Envy

1.

The benefits of two thousand years of Western civilization are familiar enough: an extraordinary increase in wealth, in food supply, in scientific knowledge, in the availability of consumer goods, in physical security, in life expectancy and economic opportunity. What is perhaps less apparent, and more perplexing, is that these impressive material advances have coincided with a phenomenon left unmentioned in Nixon’s address to his Soviet audience: a rise in the levels of status anxiety among ordinary Western citizens, by which is meant a rise in levels of concern about importance, achievement and income.

A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense or fear of deprivation. Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough.

2.

Such feelings of deprivation may seem less peculiar if we consider the psychology behind the way we decide precisely how much is enough. Our judgement of what constitutes an appropriate limit on anything—for example, on wealth or esteem—is never arrived at independently; instead, we make such determinations by comparing our condition with that of a reference group, a set of people who we believe resemble us. We cannot, it seems, appreciate what we have for its own merit, or even against what our medieval forebears had. We cannot be impressed by how prosperous we are in historical terms. We see ourselves as fortunate only when we have as much as, or more than, those we have grown up with, work alongside, have as friends or identify with in the public realm.

If we are made to live in a draughty, insalubrious cottage and bend to the harsh rule of an aristocrat occupying a large and well-heated castle, and yet we observe that our equals all live exactly as we do, then our condition will seem normal—regrettable, certainly, but not a fertile ground for envy. If, however, we have a pleasant home and a comfortable job but learn through ill-advised attendance at a school reunion that some of our old friends (there is no more compelling reference group) now reside in houses grander than ours, bought on the salaries they are paid in more enticing occupations than our own, we are likely to return home nursing a violent sense of misfortune.

It is the feeling that we might, under different circumstances, be something other than what we are—a feeling inspired by exposure to the superior achievements of those whom we take to be our equals—that generates anxiety and resentment. If we are short, say, but live among people of our same height, we will not be unduly troubled by questions of size:

But if others in our group grow just a little taller than us, we are liable to feel sudden unease and to be gripped by dissatisfaction and envy, even though we have not ourselves diminished in size by so much as a fraction of a millimetre.

Given the vast inequalities we are daily confronted with, the most notable feature of envy may be that we manage not to envy everyone. There are people whose enormous blessings leave us wholly untroubled, even as others’ negligible advantages become a source of relentless torment for us. We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like—we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our ostensible equals.

3.

David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (Edinburgh, 1739): “It is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others which produces envy, but on the contrary, a proximity. A common soldier bears no envy for his general compared to what he will feel for his sergeant or corporal; nor does an eminent writer meet with as much jealousy in common hackney scribblers, as in authors that more nearly approach him. A great disproportion cuts off the relation, and either keeps us from comparing ourselves with what is remote from us or diminishes the effects of the comparison.”

4.

It follows that the greater the number of people whom we take to be our equals and compare ourselves to, the more there will be for us to envy.

If the great political and consumer revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused psychological anguish while vastly improving the material lot of mankind, it was because they were founded on a set of extraordinary new ideals, a practical belief in the innate equality of all human beings and in the unlimited power of anyone to achieve anything. For most of history, the opposite assumption had held sway, with inequality and low expectations being deemed both normal and wise. Very few among the masses had ever aspired to wealth or fulfilment; the rest knew well enough that they were condemned to exploitation and resignation.

“It is clear that some men are by nature free and others are by nature slaves, and that for these latter, slavery is both expedient and right,” Aristotle declared in his Politics (350 B.C.), voicing an opinion shared by almost all Greek and Roman thinkers and leaders. In the ancient world, slaves and the members of the working classes in general were considered to be not truly human at all but a species of creature, lacking in reason and therefore perfectly fitted to a life of servitude, just as beasts of burden were suited to tilling fields. The notion that they might have rights and aspirations of their own would have been judged by the elite no less absurd than, say, an expression of concern for the thought processes or level of happiness of an ox or an ass.

The belief that inequality was fair, or at least inescapable, was also subscribed to by the oppressed themselves. With the spread of Christianity during the later Roman Empire, many fell prey to a religion that taught them to accept unequal treatment as part of a natural, unchangeable order. Notwithstanding the egalitarian principles embedded within Christ’s teachings, there was little suggestion on the part of Christian political theorists that the earthly social structure could or should be reformed so that all members of the Church might share more equitably in the wealth of the land. Humans might be equal before God, but this offered no reason to start seeking equality in practice.

For these theorists, a good Christian society instead took the form of a rigidly stratified monarchy, a design said to reflect the ordering of the celestial kingdom. Just as God wielded absolute power over all creation, from the angels down to the smallest toads, so, too, his appointed rulers on earth were understood to preside over a society where God had given everyone his and her place, from the nobleman down to the farm-hand. To have accused a medieval English aristocrat of “snobbery” for his attitudes to those below him in the hierarchy would have made no sense. A derogatory term for segregation could make an appearance only once a more egalitarian way of looking at people had come to seem a possibility.

A medieval vision of hierarchy: Jacobello del Fiore, The Coronation of the Virgin in Paradise, 1438

Sir John Fortescue, a fifteenth-century English jurist, was merely restating an idea taken for granted throughout the medieval period when he explained, “From the highest angel down to the lowest, there is no angel that is without both a superior and inferior; nor from man down to the meanest worm is there any creature which is not in some respect superior to one creature and inferior to another.” To challenge why some were compelled to till the soil while others feasted in banqueting halls was, in the dominant ideology, to challenge the Creator’s will.

With his Policraticus (1159), John of Salisbury had become the most famous Christian writer to compare society to a human body and to use that analogy to justify a system of natural inequality. In Salisbury’s formulation, every element in the state had an anatomical counterpart: the ruler was the head, the parliament was the heart, the court was the sides, officials and judges were the eyes, ears and tongue, the treasury was the belly and intestines, the army was the hands and the peasantry and labouring classes were the feet. This image reinforced the concept that every member of society had been assigned an unalterable role, a scheme that made it no less ludicrous for a peasant to wish to take up residence in a manor house and have a say in his own governance than for a toe to aspire to be an eye.

5.

Only in the middle of the seventeenth century did political thinking begin to venture in a more egalitarian direction.

In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes contended that the individual predated society and had formed and joined it for his own benefit, willingly surrendering his natural rights in exchange for the protection offered by a group or sovereign. This seminal point would be reiterated a few decades later by John Locke in his Tw o Treatises of Government (1689). God had not, Locke reasoned, bestowed on Adam “private dominion” over the earth; rather, he had given the world “to mankind in common,” for the enjoyment of all. Rulers were the instruments of the people and were fit to be obeyed only insofar as they served their subjects’ interest. Thus was born an astonishing new idea: that governments justify their existence only by promoting possibilities for prosperity and happiness among all those they rule over.

The theoretical impulse towards political equality and more equitable social and economic opportunities for all, after being in the ether for a century and a half, finally found dramatic, concrete expression in the American Revolution of 1776. Perhaps more than any other event in Western history (even the French Revolution that would succeed it), the “War for Independence” altered forever the basis upon which status was accorded. In a stroke, it transformed American society from a hereditary, aristocratic hierarchy—a sphere in which upward mobility was restricted and a person’s status depended exclusively on the lineage and distinction of his or her family—into a dynamic economy in which status was awarded in direct proportion to the (largely financial) achievements of each new generation.

By 1791, the geographer Jedidiah Morse could describe New England as a place “where every man thinks himself at least as good as his neighbours, and believes that all mankind have, or ought to possess, equal rights.” Even etiquette was democratised. Servants (though not slaves) had ceased addressing their employers as “master” or “mistress,” and in Charleston, South Carolina, the city council had banned the use of the titles “Esq.” and “His Honour.” All American states legislated against primogeniture and granted equal property rights to daughters and widows. The physician-historian David Ramsay, in his “Oration on the Advantages of American Independence,” delivered on 4 July 1778, proposed that the goal of the Revolution had been to establish a society in which “all offices lie open to men of merit of whatever rank or condition. Even the reins of state may be held by the son of the poorest man, if he is possessed of abilities that are equal to this important station.” In his autobiography, Thomas Jefferson avowed that his own energies had been directed towards creating “an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent” to replace the old culture of privilege and, in many cases, brute stupidity.

Decades later, in Leaves of Grass (1855), Walt Whitman would identify the greatness of America specifically with equality and its citizenry’s native lack of deference: “The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlours, nor even in its newspapers or inventors …but always most in the common people …the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors …the terrible significance of their elections—the President’s taking off his hat to them not they to him…”

6.

Still, even enthusiastic admirers of consumer and democratic revolutions could not help but notice a particular problem that seemed to be endemic to the equal societies they created. One of the first to point it out was Alexis de Tocqueville.

Touring the young United States in the 1830s, the French lawyer and historian discerned an unexpected ill corroding the souls of the citizens of the new republic. Americans had much, he observed, but their affluence did not prevent them from wanting ever more or from suffering whenever they saw that another had something they themselves didn’t. In a chapter of Democracy in America (1835) entitled “Why the Americans Are Often So Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity,” he provided an enduring analysis of the relationships between dissatisfaction and high expectation, between envy and equality:

“When all prerogatives of birth and fortune have been abolished, when every profession is open to everyone …an ambitious man may think it is easy to launch himself on a great career and feel that he has been called to no common destiny. But this is a delusion which experience quickly corrects. When inequality is the general rule in society, the greatest inequalities attract no attention. But when everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed …That is the reason for the strange melancholy often haunting inhabitants of democracies in the midst of abundance and of that disgust with life sometimes gripping them even in calm and easy circumstances. In France, we are worried about increasing rate of suicides. In America, suicide is rare, but I am told that madness is commoner than anywhere else.”

Familiar with the limitations of aristocratic societies, Tocqueville felt no nostalgia for the social conditions that had prevailed in America prior to 1776 or in France before 1789. He knew that the populations of the modern West boasted a standard of living far higher than that of the lower classes of medieval Europe. Nevertheless, he suspected that these deprived classes had also had the benefit of a mental calm that their successors would be forever denied:

“When royal power supported by aristocracies governed nations, society, despite all its wretchedness, enjoyed several types of happiness which are difficult to appreciate today. Having never conceived the possibility of a social state other than the one they knew, and never expecting to become equal to their leaders, the people did not question their rights. They felt neither repugnance nor degradation in submitting to severities, which seemed to them like inevitable ills sent by God. The serf considered his inferiority as an effect of the immutable order of nature. Consequently, a sort of goodwill was established between classes so differently favoured by fortune. One found inequality in society, but men’s souls were not degraded thereby.”

Democracy, by definition, tore down every barrier to expectation. All members of a democratic society perceived themselves as being theoretically equal, even where the means was lacking to achieve material equality. “In America,” wrote Tocqueville,“I never met a citizen too poor to cast a glance of hope and envy toward the pleasures of the rich.” The poor citizens observed rich ones at close quarters and trusted that they too would one day follow in their footsteps. They were not always wrong. A number of fortunes were made by people from humble beginnings. Exceptions did not, however, make a rule. America still had an underclass. It was just that, unlike the poor of aristocratic societies, poor Americans could no longer see their condition as anything other than a betrayal of their expectations.

The differing notions of poverty within aristocratic and democratic societies were especially evident, Tocqueville felt, in the attitude of servants towards their masters. In aristocracies, servants often accepted their position with good grace; it was not impossible for them to harbour, in Tocqueville’s words, “high thoughts, strong pride and self-respect.” In democracies, by contrast, the propaganda of the press and public opinion relentlessly promised servants that they, too, could reach the pinnacles of society and make their fortune as industrialists, judges, scientists or even presidents. Although this sense of unbounded opportunity could initially excite a surface cheerfulness in them—particularly in the younger ones—and though it did encourage the most talented or luckiest among them to fulfil their goals, as time passed and the majority failed to raise themselves, Tocqueville noted that their mood darkened, bitterness took hold of and choked their spirit, and their hatred of themselves and their masters grew fierce.

The rigid hierarchy that had been in place in almost every Western society until the late eighteenth century, denying all hope of social movement except in the rarest of cases, the system glorified by John of Salisbury and John Fortescue, was unjust in a thousand all too obvious ways, but it offered those on the lowest rungs one notable freedom: the freedom not to have to take the achievements of quite so many people in society as reference points—and so find themselves severely wanting in status and importance as a result.

7.

It was an American, William James, who, a few decades after Tocqueville’s journey around the United States, first looked from a psychological angle at the problems created by societies which generate unlimited expectations in their members.

James argued that one’s ability to feel satisfied with oneself does not hang on experiencing success in every area of endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing at things, he suggested; we are humiliated only if we invest our pride and sense of worth in a given aspiration or achievement and then are disappointed in our pursuit of it. Our goals dictate what we will interpret as a triumph and what must count as a catastrophe. James himself, for example, as a professor of psychology at Harvard, took a great deal of pride in being a prominent psychologist. If he should discover that others knew more about psychology than he did, he would, he admitted, feel envy and shame. Conversely, because he had never set himself the task of learning ancient Greek, the knowledge that someone else could translate the whole of Plato’s Symposium whereas he struggled with the opening line was of little concern to him. He explained:

“With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities. Thus:

James’s equation illustrates how every rise in our levels of expectation entails a rise in the dangers of humiliation. What we understand to be normal is critical in determining our chances of happiness. Few things rival the torment of the once-famous actor, the fallen politician or, as Tocqueville might have remarked, the unsuccessful American.

The equation also hints at two manoeuvres for raising our self-esteem. On the one hand, we may try to achieve more; and on the other, we may reduce the number of things we want to achieve. James pointed to the advantages of the latter approach:

“To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified. There is a strange lightness in the heart when one’s nothingness in a particular area is accepted in good faith. How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young or slender. ‘Thank God!’ we say,‘ those illusions are gone.’ Everything added to the self is a burden as well as a pride.”

8.

Unfortunately for our esteem, societies of the West are not known for their conduciveness to the surrender of pretensions, to the acceptance of age or fat, let alone poverty and obscurity. Their mood urges us to invest ourselves in activities and belongings that our predecessors would have had no thought of. According to James’s equation, by greatly increasing our pretensions, these societies render adequate self-esteem almost impossible to secure.

The dangers of disappointed expectation must further be increased by any erosion of a faith in a next world. Those who can believe that what happens on earth is but a brief prelude to an eternal existence will offset any tendency to envy with the thought that the success of others is a momentary phenomenon against a backdrop of an eternal life.

But when a belief in an afterlife is dismissed as a childish and scientifically impossible opiate, the pressure to succeed and find fulfilment will inevitably be intensified by the awareness that one has only a single and frighteningly fleeting opportunity to do so. In such a context, earthly achievements can no longer be seen as an overture to what one may realize in another world; rather, they are the sum total of all that one will ever amount to.

Resignation regarding the necessary hardships of life was for centuries one of mankind’s most important assets, a bulwark against bitterness that was to be cruelly undermined by the expectations incubated by the modern worldview. In his City of God (A.D. 427), Saint Augustine consolingly codified unhappiness as an immutable feature of existence, part of “the wretchedness of man’s situation,” and poured scorn on “all those theories by which men have tried hard to build up joy for themselves within the misery of this life.” Under Augustine’s influence, the French poet Eustache Deschamps (circa 1338–1410) described life on earth as a

Time of mourning and of temptation,

An age of tears, of envy and of torment,

A time of languor and of damnation …

Te mps de doleur et de temptacion,

Aages de plour, d’envie et de tourment,

Te mps de langour et de dampnacion …

When informed of the death of his one-year-old son, Philippe the Good (1396–1467), duke of Burgundy, replied in a tone characteristic of many voices in the premodern period: “If only God had deigned to let me die so young, I would have considered myself fortunate.”

9.

But the modern age has been less liberal—and less kind—with its pessimism.

Since the early nineteenth century, Western writers and publishers have endeavoured to inspire—and in the process have unintentionally saddened—their readers with autobiographies of self-made heroes and compendia of advice directed at the not-yet-made, morality tales of wholesale personal transformation and the rapid attainment of vast wealth and great happiness.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (left incomplete at his death, in 1790) was perhaps the progenitor of the genre, recounting how a penniless young man, one of seventeen children of a Boston candle maker, had ended up accruing, entirely by his wits, not only a fortune but the friendship and respect of some of the most important people of his day. Franklin’s history of self-improvement, and the analects he drew from it (“Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise;” “There are no gains without pains”), belonged to a vast literature intended to edify readers possessed of modest means and grand ambitions. Among the countless later titles in this category were William Mathews’s Getting On in the World (1874), William Maher’s On the Road to Riches (1876), Edwin T. Freedley’s The Secret of Success in Life (1881), Lyman Abbott’s How to Succeed (1882), William Speer’s The Law of Success (1885) and Samuel Fallows’s The Problem of Success for Young Men and How to Solve It (1903).

The trend has not abated. “Right now you can make a decision,” explained Anthony Robbins (Awaken the Giant Within, 1991),“to go back to school, to master dancing or singing, to take control of your finances, to learn to fly a helicopter… . If you truly decide to, you can do almost anything. So if you don’t like the current relationship you’re in, make the decision now to change it. If you don’t like your current job, change it.”

Robbins offered his own story as evidence that radical transformation was possible. He had risen from humble and unhappy origins: in his early twenties, he worked as a janitor and lived in a small, dirty apartment. Forty pounds overweight, he had no girlfriend and spent his evenings alone at home listening to Neil Diamond. Then, one day, he abruptly resolved to revolutionise his life and discovered a mental “power” that would enable him to do so:

“I used [this power] to take back control of my physical well-being and permanently rid myself of thirty-eight pounds of fat. Through it, I attracted the woman of my dreams, married her and created the family I desired. I used this power to change my income from subsistence level to over one million dollars a year. It moved me from my tiny apartment (where I was washing my dishes in the bathtub because there was no kitchen) to my family’s current home, the Del Mar Castle.”

Anyone, Robbins assured his audience, could follow his example, but most particularly those lucky enough to live in democratic and capitalist societies, in which “we all have the capability to carry out our dreams.”

Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within, 1991

10.

The burgeoning of the mass media from the late nineteenth century helped to raise expectations even higher. At his newspaper’s launch in 1896, Alfred Harmsworth, the founder of Britain’s Daily Mail, candidly characterised his ideal reader as a man in the street “worth one hundred pounds per annum” who could be enticed to dream of being “tomorrow’s thousand pound man.” In America, meanwhile, the Ladies’ Home Journal (first published in 1883), Cosmopolitan (1886), Munsey’s (1889) and Vogue (1892) brought an expensive life within the imaginative reach of all. Readers of fin de siècle American Vogue, for example, were told who had been aboard Nourmahal, John Jacob Astor’s yacht, after the America’s Cup race, what the most fashionable young ladies were wearing at boarding school, who threw the best parties in Newport and Southampton and what to serve with caviar at dinner (potato and sour cream).

The opportunity to study the lives of people of higher status and forge a connection with them was also increased by the development of radio, film and television. By the 1930s, Americans were collectively spending some 150 million hours per week at the cinema and almost a billion hours listening to the radio. In 1946, 0.02 percent of American households owned television sets; by 2000, the figure stood at 98 percent.

The new media created longings not only through their content but also through the advertisements they imposed on their audiences. From its amateurish beginnings in the United States in the 1830s, advertising had by the end of the nineteenth century grown into a business worth $500 million a year. In 1900, a giant Coca-Cola sign was erected on one side of Niagara Falls, while an advert for Mennen’s Toilet Powder was suspended over the gorge.

11.

When defenders of modern societies have sought to make a case to sceptics, their task has not been difficult: they have had only to point to the enormous wealth that modern societies are able to generate for their members.

In his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith sarcastically compared the awe-inspiring productivity of proto-industrial societies with the bare subsistence of primitive hunting-and-gathering ones. The latter were, by Smith’s account, steeped in terrible poverty. Harvests rarely yielded enough food, there were chronic shortages of basic necessities and, in times of serious crisis, children, the elderly and the poor were often left “to be devoured by wild beasts.” Modern societies, in contrast, thanks to their innovative mode of production—described by Smith as “the division of labour”—could provide for all their members. Only a romantic ignoramus could wish to live anywhere else; in such a society “a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.”

12.

However, twenty-two years before the publication of Smith’s treatise, a lone, shrill, eccentric yet unsettlingly persuasive voice had been raised in defense of an unlikely hero: the savage. Was it possible, asked Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), that it was in fact the hunter-gatherer and not, as everyone had grown used to believing, the modern worker who was the better off?

Rousseau’s argument hung on a radical thesis. Being truly wealthy, he suggested, does not require having many things; rather, it requires having what one longs for. Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires. Modern societies have done the former spectacularly well, but by continuously whetting appetites, they have at the same time managed to negate a share of their success. For the individual, trying to make more money may not be the most effective way to feel wealthy. We might do better, instead, to distance ourselves, both practically and emotionally, from those whom we consider to be our equals and yet who have grown richer than us. Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.

Insofar as advanced societies supply their members with historically elevated incomes, they appear to make us wealthier. But in truth, their net effect may be to impoverish us, because by fostering unlimited expectations, they keep open permanent gaps between what we want and what we can afford, between who we might be and who we really are. Such disparities may leave us feeling more deprived even than primitive savages, who, insisted Rousseau (his argument here reaching the limits of plausibility), felt themselves to be lacking for nothing in the world so long as they had a roof over their heads, a few apples and nuts to eat and the leisure to spend their evenings playing on “some crude musical instrument” or “using sharp-edged stones to make a fishing canoe.”

Rousseau’s comparison of the relative levels of happiness of primitive and modern man returns us to William James’s emphasis on the role of expectations in determining our quotient of self-esteem. We may be happy enough with little if little is what we have come to expect, and we may be miserable with much when we have been taught to desire everything.

Rousseau’s naked savages had few possessions. But, unlike their successors in their Ta j Mahals, they were at least able to feast on the great wealth that comes from aspiring to very little.

13.

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.