One position in society; the word derived from the Latin statum or standing.
In a narrow sense, the word refers to one’s legal or professional standing within a group. But in the broader — and here more relevant — sense, to one’s value and importance in the eyes of the world.
Different societies have awarded status to different groups: hunters, fighters, ancient families, priests, knights, fecund women. Increasing since 1776, status in the West has been awarded in relation to financial achievement.
The consequences of high status are pleasant. They include resources, freedom, space, comfort, time and, as importantly perhaps, a sense of being cared for and thought valuable — conveyed through invitations, flattery, laughter (even when the joke lacked bite), deference and attention.
High status is thought by many (but freely admitted by few) to be one of the finest of earthly goods.
More regrettably still, status is hard to achieve and even harder to maintain over a lifetime. Except in societies where it is fixed at birth and our veins flow with noble blood, our position hangs on what we can achieve; and we may fail due to stupidity or an absence of self knowledge, macro-economics or malevolence.
And from failure will flow humiliation: a corroding awareness that we have been unable to convince the world of our value and are henceforth condemned to consider the successful with bitterness and ourselves with shame.
To what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world? What is the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth, of power and pre-eminence? Is it to supply the necessities of nature? The wages of the meanest laborer can supply them. What then are the advantages of that great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition?
To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it. The rich man glories in his riches because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world. The poor man on the other hand is ashamed of his poverty. He feels that it places him out of the sight of mankind. To feel what we are taken no notice of necessarily disappoints the most ardent desires of human nature. The poor man goes out and comes in unheeded, and when in the midst of a crowd is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel. The man of rank and distinction, on the contrary, is observed by all the world. Everybody is eager to look at him. His actions are the objects of public care. Scarce a word, scarce a gesture that fall from him will be neglected.
How may a word, generally used only in relation to what we would expect or hope for from a parent, or a romantic partner, be applied to something we might want from and be offered by the world? Perhaps we can define love, at once in its familiar, sexual and worldly forms, as a kind of respect, a sensitivity on the part of one person to another’s existence. To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
While there will inevitably be economic ramification, the impact of low status should not be read in material terms alone. The gravest penalty rarely lies — above subsistence levels, at least — in mere physical discomfort; it consists more often, even primarily, in the challenge that low status poses to a person’s sense of self-respect. Provided that it is not accompanied by humiliation, discomfort can be endured for long periods without complaint. For proof of this, we have only to look to the example of the many soldiers and explorers who have, over the centuries, willingly tolerated privations far exceeding those suffered by the poorest members of their societies, so long as they were sustained throughout their hardships by an awareness of the esteem in which they were held by others.
The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves.
In an ideal world, we would be more impermeable. We would be unshaken whether we were ignored or noticed, admired or ridiculed. If someone praised us insincerely, we would not be unduly seduced. And if we had carried our a fair assessment of our strengths and decided upon our value, another’s suggestion that we were inconsequential would not wound us. We would know our worth.
Our “ego” or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated, and ever vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect.
And we are capable of thinking life worth living because someone remembers our name or sends us a fruit basket.
Later that same evening, Nixon was invited to appear live on Soviet TV, 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 manage, through enterprise and industry, to overcome the poverty and famine that had gripped the world until the middle of the 18th century and continued even up to the present day to plague many other nations.
Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoyed 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.
When FDR was asked to what one book he would give the Soviet people to teach them about the advantages of American society, he singled out the Sears catalogue.
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 this 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.
Blessed with riches an 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.
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 coporal.
“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, 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.
John of Salisbury had become the most famous Christian writer to compare society to 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.
The genius of the US 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…
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.
“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 when 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.”
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 fulfill 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When informed of the death of his one-year-old son, the Duke of Burgundy replied in a tone characteristic of many voices int he premodern period: “If only God had deigned to let me die so young, I would have considered myself fortunate.”
Since the early 19th 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.
Robbins offered his own story as evidence that radical transformation was possible. He had risen from humble and unhappy origins. Anyone, Robbins assured his audience, could follow his example, but most particularly those lucky enough to live in a democratic and capitalist societies, in which “we all have the capacity to carry out our dreams.”
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.
Patronisation was accompanied by its more advantageous twin, paternalism: if the poor were like children, then it was the task of the rich to assume the role of loving parents.
After all, Jesus was the highest man, the most blessed, and yet on earth he had been poor, ruling out any simple equation between righteousness and riches.
The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: “Do not listen to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”
Such profit was invariably hailed in the capitalist press as the employers’ reward for “risk-taking” and “enterprise,” but Marx insisted that these words were mere euphemisms for theft.
The bourgeoisie, by this account, was merely the latest incarnation of a master class that had unjustly held sway over the poor since the beginning of time. However humane its members might seem, a civilized surface concealed a calculating ruthlessness.
Their jobs denied them any hope of a proper family life, left them no time to develop an intellectual understanding of their position and left them anxious and without security: “for all its stinginess, capitalist production is thoroughly wasteful with human material.” So Marx urged the “human material” to rise up against its masters and reclaim what it was rightfully owed.
Engels shared his colleague’s conviction as to why society was split into classes: the rich were rich, he believed, not because they were clever or energetic or diligent but because they were cunning and mean. And the poor were poor not because they were idle or drunk or dim but because they had been blindfolded and abused by their masters.
The man listened quietly to the end, and then said at the corner where we parted: “And yet there is a great deal of money made here. Good morning, sir.”
Mandeville posited that, contrary to centuries of economic thinking, it was the rich who in fact contributed the most to society, insofar as their spending provided employment for everyone below them and so helped the weakest to survive. Without the rich, the poor would soon be laid out in their graves. Mandeville did not wish to suggest that the rich were nicer than the poor — in fact, he gleefully pointed out how vain, cruel and fickle they could be. Their desires knew no bounds, they craved applause and failed to understand that happiness did not have its origins in material acquisition. And yet their pursuit and attainment of wealth were of infinitely greater use to society than the patient, unremunerative work of laborers.
In his essay “Of Luxury”, Hume repeated the Mandevilleian argument in favor for the pursuit of riches and their expenditure on superfluous goods, asserting that it was these initiatives, rather than the manual labor of the poor, that produced wealth: “In a nation where there is no demand for superfluities, men sink into indolence, lose all enjoyment of life, and are useless to the public, which cannot maintain or support its fleets and armies.”
Smith began by admitting that great sums of money did not always bring happiness: “Riches leave a man always as much and sometimes more exposed than before to anxiety, to fear and to sorrow.” Nevertheless, he was immensely grateful that such creatures abounded, for the whole civilization, and the welfare of all societies, depended on people’s desire and ability to accumulate unneeded capital and show off their wealth. Indeed, it was this “which first prompted men to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths and to invent all the sciences and arts which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence.”
The rich might be arrogant and coarse, but their vices were transformed, through the operations of the marketplace, into virtues: “In spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own convenience, though the sole end which they propose from the labors of all the thousands whom they employ be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, the rich divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus, without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.”
Like many 19th-century reformers, Carlyle dreamt not of a world in which everyone would be financially equal, but of one in which high and low alike would come by their inequalities honestly. “Europe requires a real aristocracy,” he wrote, “only it must be an aristocracy of talent. False aristocracies are insupportable.” What he was imagining was a system whose name had not yet been coined: a meritocracy.
This American ideal did not, of course, entail actual equality but merely an initial period of strictly policed equal opportunity. If all citizens had the same chance to go to school and find the antonym among a list of words and enter university, there would be justice in any aristocracy that ultimately emerged among Americans.
Right through our national life we have got to fight against privilege, against the notion that a halfwitted public-schoolboy is better for command than an intelligent mechanic.
American Protestant denominations preached that God demanded of his followers a life of achievement both temporal and spiritual; the possession of riches in this world, it was suggested, was evidence that one deserved a good place in the next. Wealth came to be described as a reward from God for holiness. Rockefeller was unabashed to state that it was the Lord who had made him rich.
With the rise of the economic meritocracy, the poor moved, in some quarters, from being termed “unfortunate,” and seen as the fitting object of the charity and guilt of the rich, to being described as “failures” and regarded as fair targets for the contempt of robust, self-made individuals, who were disinclined to feel ashamed of their mansions or to shed crocodile tears for those whose company they had escaped.
There could have been no more telling expression of the idea of a just distribution of wealth and poverty than the 19th-century philosophy of Social Darwinism. Its adherents proposed that all humans began by facing a fair struggle over scarce resources such as money, jobs and esteem. Some gained the upper hand in this contest not because they enjoyed improper advantages or were unfairly lucky but because they were intrinsically better than their rivals. The rich were not better, however, from a moral point of view; rather, they were, intimidatingly, naturally better: they were more potent, their seed was stronger, their minds were cannier. They were the tigers of the human jungle, predestined biology — a new, godlike concept before which the 19th century genuflected — to outpace others. It was biology that wanted the rich to be rich and the poor to be poor.
The weak were nature’s mistakes and must be allowed to perish before they could reproduce and thereby contaminate the rest of the population. Just as the animal kingdom spawned its share of malformed creatures, so, too, did mankind. The most humane thing was to let the feeble die without misguided mercy.
On a triumphant tour of America in 1882, Spencer was cheered by gatherings of business leaders, who were flattered at being compared to the alpha beasts of the human jungle and relieved to be absolved of any need to feel guilty about or charitable towards their weaker brethen.
In his book Self-Help, the Scottish doctor Samuel Smiles, after encouraging deprived young people to set themselves ambitious goals, get a proper education and be careful with their money, inveighed against any government that might seek to aid them in such pursuits: “Whatever is done for men takes away from the stimulus and necessity of doing things for themselves. The value of legislation as an agent in human advancement has been much over-estimated. No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident or the drunken sober.”
Up until a certain age, no one minds much what we do, existence alone is enough to earn us unconditional affection. We can burp up our food, scream at the top of our voice, throw the cutlery on the floor, spend the day gazing blankly out of the window, relieve ourselves in the flower pot — and still know that someone will come and stroke our hair, change our clothes and sing us songs. We begin our time on earth in the hands of a mother, who asks little more of us than we continue to live. Even those who are not our own mothers, be they men or women, behave as indulgently: they smile when they see us on a family shopping trip, they comment on the pretty patterns of our clothes and, on a lucky day, bring us a flurry animal, a few rails of wooden track or a signal box as a reward for just being ourselves.
But this idyllic state is fated not to endure. By the time we have finished our education, we are forced to take our place in a world dominated by a new kind of person, as different from a mother as it is possible to be and whose behavior lies at the heart of our status anxieties: the snob.
It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility), or “s.nob,” next to the names of ordinary students on examination lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers.
This conditional attention pains us because our earliest memory of love is of being cared for in a naked, impoverished condition. Babies cannot, by definition, repay their caretakers with worldly rewards. In so far as they are loved and looked after, it is therefore for who they are, identity understood in its barest, most stripped-down state.
The problem is compounded by newspapers. Because snobs combine a weak capacity for independent judgment with an appetite for the views of influential people, their beliefs will, to a critical degree, be set by the atmosphere of the press.
“I’m told they’re dying to know us. Hadn’t we better call?”
“Certainly not, Dear. If they’re dying to know us, they’re not worth knowing. The only People worth Our knowing are the people who don’t want to know us!”
Yet it is hard to renounce snobbish tactics on our own, for the disease is a collective one to begin with. A youthful resentment of snobbery isn’t enough to save us from gradually turning into snobs ourselves, because being insolently neglected almost naturally fosters a hunger to gain the attention of our neglectors (disliking people rarely being a sufficient reason for not wanting them to like us).
It may be tempting to laugh at those afflicted by urgent cravings for the symbols of status. The name-droppers, the gold-tap owners. The history of Victorian furniture, for example, was dominated by the sale of some candidly tasteless items.
Before ridiculing anyone who bought such a piece, it would perhaps be fairer to wonder about the wider context in which this kind of furniture was made and consumed. Rather than teasing the buyers, we may blame the society in which they lived for setting up a situation where the purchase of ornate cabinets felt psychologically necessary and rewarding, where respect was dependent on baroque displays. Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma.
In traditional societies, high status may have been inordinately hard to acquire, but it was also comfortingly hard to lose. It was as difficult to stop being a lord as, more darkly, it was to cease being a peasant. What mattered was one’s identity at birth, rather than anything one might achieve in one’s lifetime through the exercise of one’s faculties. What mattered was who one was, seldom what one did.
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
If our status depends on our achievements, then what we may need most in order to succeed is talent and, where peace of mind is a priority, reliable control over it. In most activities, however, talent is impossible to direct as we please. It can make an appearance for a time and then unapologetically vanish, leaving our career in pieces. We cannot call the best of ourselves to the fore at will.
It was the ancient Greeks who came up with the most acute image to evoke our distressingly volatile relationship with talent, when they named the Muses.
In the US in 1907, a book entitled Three Acres and Liberty seized the imagination of the reading public. The author began by taking for granted the awkwardness of having to work for someone else, and so advised his readers that they could win their freedom by leaving their offices and factories and buying three acres apiece of inexpensive farmland int he middle America. This acreage would soon enable them to grow enough food for a family of four and to build a simple but comfortable home, and best of all, relieve them of any need ever again to flatter or negotiate with colleagues and superiors.
According to traditional Marxist analysis (strongly challenged by historians but revealing nonetheless), the enclosure movement heralded the birth of a modern industrial proletariat, defined as a group of people unable to be self-sufficient and hence left with no option to but sell themselves to an employer at a rate and under conditions heavily weighted in the employer’s favor.
Compounding the misery is the fact that because achievement in most fields is difficult to monitor reliably, the path to promotion or its opposite may have an apparently haphazard relationship to performance. The successful alpinists of organizational pyramids may not be the employees who are best at their tasks, but those who have best mastered a range of political skills in which ordinary life does not generally offer instruction.
The world more often reward outward signs of merit than merit itself.
Studies soon showed that one ATM could do the work of no fewer then 37 human tellers (and, into the bargain, rarely fell ill).
Kant had argued that behaving morally towards others required one to respect them “for themselves” and not use them as a “means” to one’s own enrichment or glory.
Struggles between labor and capital may no longer — in the developed world, at least — be as bare-knuckled as they were in Marx’s day. Yet despite improvements in working conditions and advances in employment legislation, workers de facto remain tools in a production process to which their own happiness and economic welfare are incidental.
Visitors to that country were advised to take extra care when addressing the locals, lest they accidentally offend their honor and end up in the grave. “Duels happen every day in Spain. Scarce any man thought worth the looking on, that had no killed some other in a duel.”
For as long as it lasted, dueling symbolized a radical incapacity to believe that one’s status might be one’s own business, a value one decided on and did not revise to accord with the shifting judgments of others. In the dueler’s psyche, other people’s opinions were the only factor in forming a sense of self. The dueler could not remain acceptable in his own eyes if those around him judged him to be evil or dishonorable, a coward or a failure, foolish or effeminate. So dependent was his self-image on the views of others that he would sooner die of a bullet or stab wound than allow unfavorable assessments of him to go unanswered.
Entire societies have made the maintenance of status, and more particularly of “honor,” a primary task of every adult male.
When we begin to scrutinize the opinions of others, philosophers have long noted, we stand to make a discovery at once saddening and curiously liberating: we will discern that the views of the majority of the population on the majority of the subjects are perforated with extraordinary confusion and error. Chamfort, voicing the misanthropic attitude of generations of philosophers both before and after him, put the matter simply: “Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.”
Only that which is both damning and true should be permitted to shatter our esteem. We should forever forswear the masochistic process wherein we seek another’s approval before we have even asked ourselves whether that person’s views deserve to be listened to — the process, that is, whereby we seek the love of those for whom, as we discovered upon studying their minds, we have scant respect.
“There is in the world only the choice between loneliness and vulgarity.” All young people, he believed, should be taught “how to put up with loneliness… because the less a man is compelled to come into contact with others, the better off he is.”
What is art good for? That question was in the air in Britain in the 1860s, and according to many commentators, the answer was, Not much. It was not art, after all, that had built the great industrial towns, laid the railways, dug the canals, expanded the empire and made Britain preeminent among nations. Indeed, art seemed capable of sapping the very qualities that had made such achievements possible, prolonged contact with it appeared to encourage effeminacy, introspection, homosexuality, gout and defeatism.
But far from being a mere salve, great art was in fact an effective antidote for life’s deepest tensions and anxieties. However impractical it might seem, it was capable of presenting its audience with nothing less than an interpretation of and solution to the deficiencies of existence.
Every great work of art was marked (directly or not) by the “desire to remove human error, clear human confusion, and diminish human misery,” just as all great artists were imbued with the “aspiration to leave the world better and happier than they found it.” They might not always realize this ambition through overtly political subject matter — indeed, might not even be aware of harboring it at all — and yet embedded within their work, there was almost always some cry of protest against a status quo, and thus an impulse to correct the viewer’s insight or teach him to perceive beauty, to help him understand pain or to reanimate his sensitivities, to nurture his capacity for empathy or rebalance his moral perspective through sadness or laughter. Art, he insisted, was “the criticism of life.”
Austen once modestly and famously described her art as “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labor.”
Standing witness to hidden lives, novels may act as conceptual counterweights to dominant hierarchical realities. They can reveal that the maid now busying herself with lunch is a creature of rare sensitivity and moral greatness, while the baron who laughs raucously and owns a silver mine has a heart both withered and acrid.
It art does not enlarge mens’ sympathies, it does nothing morally.
At the very top was historical painting, with its canvases expressing the nobility of ancient Greek and Rome or illustrating biblical morality tales. Second came portraiture, especially of kinds and queens. Third was landscape, distantly followed by what was dismissively described as “genre painting,” depicting scenes from the domestic lives of commoners. This artistic hierarchy corresponded directly with the social hierarchy of the world beyond the artist’s studios, where a king sitting on a horse and surveying his estates was deemed naturally superior to a plainly dressed woman peeling an egg.
Fear of the material consequences of failure is thus compounded by fear of the unsympathetic attitude of the world towards those who have failed, exemplified by its haunting proclivity to refer to them as “losers” — a word callously signifying both that they have lost and that hey have, at the same time, forfeited any right to sympathy for losing.
There were two additional, more telling requirements. A tragic hero had to be someone who was neither especially good nor especially bad, an everyday, regular kind of human being at the ethical level, someone to whom the audience could easily relate, whose character combined a range of good qualities with one or more common defects — for example, excessive pride or anger or impulsiveness. And finally, this figure must make a spectacular mistake, not out of any profound evil motive, but rather due to what Aristotle termed in Greek a hamartia (an “error in judgment”), a temporary lapse, or a factual or emotional slip. And from this would flow the most terrible peripeteia, or “reversal of fortune,” over the course of which the hero would lose everything he held dear before at last almost certainly paying for his blunder with his life.
Pity for the hero, and fear for oneself based on an identification with him, would be the natural emotional outcome of following such a tale. The tragic work would educate us to acquire modesty about our capacity to avoid disaster and at the same time guide us to feel sympathy for those who had met with it. We were to leave the theatre disinclined ever again to adopt an easy, superior tone towards the fallen and the failed.
Rather, the story moves us insofar as it reflects shocking aspects of everyman’s character and condition: the way apparently small missteps can result in the gravest of consequences; the blindness we often suffer with regard to the effects of our actions; our fatuous tendency to presume that we are in conscious command of our destiny; the speed and finality with which everything we cherish may be lost to us; and the mysterious and unvanquishable forces — fate — against which our weak powers of reason and foresight are pitted.
Tragedy leads us artfully through the minuscule, often innocent acts that connect heroes’ and heroines’ prosperity to their downfall, disclosing along the way the perverse relationships between intentions and consequences.
Louis-Philippe and Napoleon would likely not have responded so vehemently if humor were just a game. In fact, as humorists and their targets have long recognized, jokes are an enormously effective means of anchoring a criticism. At base, they are another way of complaining: about arrogance, cruelty or pomposity, about departures from virtue or good sense.
The most subversive comedy of all may be that which communicates a lesson while seeming only to entertain. Talented comics never deliver sermons outlining abuses of power; instead, they provoke their audiences to acknowledge in a chuckle the aptness of their complaints against authority.
We laugh at what is outsized and disproportionate. We laugh at kings whose self-image has outgrown their worth, whose goodness has not kept up with their power; we laugh at high-status individuals who have forgotten their humanity and begun abusing their privileges. We laugh at, and through our laughter criticize, evidence of injustice and excess.
Beyond being a useful weapon with which to attack the high-status of others, humor may also help us to make sense of, and perhaps even mitigate, our own status anxieties.
A great deal of what we find funny has to do with situations or feelings that, were we to experience them in our own, ordinary lives, would likely cause us either embarrassment or shame.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, much humor comprises an attempt to name, and thereby contain, anxiety over status. Comedy reassures us that there are others in the world no less envious or socially fragile than ourselves; that other fellow spirits wake up in the early hours feeling every bit as tormented by their financial performance as we do by our own; and that beneath the sober appearance society demands of us, most of us are daily going a little bit out of our minds, which in itself should give us cause to hold out a hand to our comparably tortured neighbors.
Of course they’re clever. They have to be clever. They haven’t got any money.
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 honor 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 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. Because societies are in practice trusted to be “meritocratic,” financial achievements are necessarily understood to be “deserved.” The ability to accumulated 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.
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.”
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 man may have a great suit 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.
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 markets. 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.
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 tried to revive the ways of their forefathers. But it’s already too late: the Indians, no different in their psychological makeup from other humans, had succumbed to the easy lure of the trinkets of modern civilization 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 great irony here is that it should be the advertising agents and newspapers 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.
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 fulfill 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.
They were never at any moment free of concern with who had what, and where it had come from. They felt shame over their own financial state and jealousy towards those whom they perceived as being better off.
Ruskin was interested in wealth of a very different kind than is usually meant by the word: wealthy in kindness, curiosity, sensitivity, humility, godliness and intelligence, a set of virtues to which he applied the collective name “life.”
There is no wealth but life. 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.
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.
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.
Within a given society, political consciousness may be said to emerge through the realization 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 posisted, “The ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class.”
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 colorless, odorless gas. It pervades newspapers, advertisements, television programs 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.
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?
Ivan Ilyich has long since fallen out of love with his wife. His children are a mystery to him, and he has no friends besides those who can advance his career or whose elevated positions will lend him some reflected glory. Ivan is a man overwhelmingly concerned with status. The pleasures Ivan derived from his work were those of pride; the pleasures he derived from society were those of vanity; but it was genuine pleasure that he derived from playing whilst.
For his part, Ivan, with only a few weeks left to him, recognizes that he has wasted his time on earth by leading an outwardly respectable but inwardly barren life. He scrolls back through his upbringing, education and career and finds that everything he has ever done has been motivated by the desire to appear important in the eyes of others, with his own interests and sensitivities always being sacrificed for the sake of impressing people who, he only now sees, do not care a jot for him.
It is merely his status that those around him love, not his true, vulnerable self.
Tolstoy’s keen understanding of this phenomenon had its origins in personal experience: only a few years before writing Ivan Ilyich, he had questioned his own deepest concerns in the context of a newfound awareness of his mortality. At the age or 51, with the publication of War and Peace and Anna Karenina behind him, world-famous and rich, he came to realize that he had long been living his life not by his own values, not even by God’s, but by those of “society,” which had inspired him a restless desire to be stronger than others, more renowned, more important and richer. In his social circle, he noted, “ambition, love of power, covetousness, lasciviousness, pride, anger and revenge were all respected.”
Very well; you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Moliere, or than all the writers in the world — and what of it? I could find no reply at all.
The idea of death brings an authenticity to social life: there may be no better way to clear our calendar of engagements than to speculate as to who among our acquaintances would make the trip to our hospital bed.
Whatever other differences there may be between them, Christian and secular concepts overlap substantially on the subject of what is meaningful in life when viewed from the perspective of death. There is a striking similar positive emphasis on love, authentic social relations and charity, and a common condemnation of the pursuit of power, military strength, wealth and glory. These and certain other ends and activities seem almost universally inconsequential beside the thought of death.
We may observe a mother teaching her dimple-cheeked child to tie his shoelaces, and find ourselves haunted by an image of both of their eventual funerals.
There might be flowers, coins, a guitar or a mandolin, chess pieces, a book of verse, a laurel wreath or a wine bottle: symbols of frivolity and temporal glory. And somewhere among these would be set of the two great symbols of death and the brevity of life: a skull and an hourglass.
It’s the rich, the beautiful, the famous and the powerful for whom death has in store the cruelest lessons — the very categories of people, that is, whose worldly goods take them, in the Christian understanding, furthest from God.
He went so far as to declare that the Colosseum was more attractive in its present, crumbling state than it ever could have been when newly built.
Ruins reprove us for our folly in sacrificing peace of mind for the unstable rewards of earthly power. Beholding old stones, we may feel our anxieties over our achievements — and the lack of them — slacken. What does it matter, really, if we have not succeed in the eyes of others, if there are no monuments and processions in our honor if no one smiled at us at a recent gathering? Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.
Vast landscapes can have much the same anxiety-reducing effect on us as ruins, for they are the representatives of infinite space, as ruins the representatives of infinite time. Against them, or within them, our weak, short-lived bodies must seem of no greater consequence than those of moths or spiders.
A fine remedy for our anxieties over our low status in society may be to travel — whether literally or figuratively, by viewing works of art — through the gigantic spaces of the world.
There are few more disreputable fates than to end up being “like everyone else” — for “everyone else” is category that embraces the mediocre and the conformists, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people, so this argument goes, should be to distinguish themselves from the crowd and “stand out” in whatever way their talents will allow.
Christianity bids us to look beyond our superficial differences in order to focus on what it considers to be a set of universal truths, on which a sense of community and kinship may be built. Whether we are cruel or impatient, dim or dull, we must recognize that we are all of us detained and bound together by shared vulnerabilities. Beneath our flaws, there are always two driving forces: fear and the desire for love.
In deed, we may find that some of our ambitions for personal glory fade when the public spaces and facilities to which we enjoy access are themselves glorious to behold; in such context, ordinary citizenship may come to seem an adequate goal.
Saint Augustine explained that all human actions could be interpreted from either a Christian or a Roman perspective, and that the very accomplishment that were esteemed most highly by the Romans — amassing money, building villas, winning wars and so on — counted for nothing in the Christian schema, in which a new set of concerns, including loving one’s neighbors, being humble and generous and recognizing one’s dependence on God, offered the keys to elevated status.
In the first ring of the seventh circle, the poet finds himself by a river of boiling blood in which Alexander the Great and Attila the Hunt struggle to stay afloat while, from the riverbank, a group of centaurs fire arrows over their heads to force them back under the sickening froth.
But far from merely asserting the superiority of spiritual over material success, Christianity also endowed the values it revered with a seductive seriousness and beauty, accomplishing this in part through the magisterial use of painting, literature, music and architecture. It employed works of art to make a case for virtues that had never before figured prominently — if at all — in the priorities of rulers on their subjects.
In the four centuries between 1130 and 1530, in towns and cities all over Europe, more than a hundred cathedrals were erected, their spires coming to dominate the skyline, looming over grain stores, palaces, offices, factories and homes. Possessed of a grandeur that few other structures could rival, they offered a venue in which people from every walk of life could gather to ponder ideas that were, at least in the context of the history of architecture, highly unusual: ideas about the values of sadness and innocence, of meekness and pity. Whereas a city’s other buildings were designed to serve earthly needs, the cathedral had as its unique functions to empty the mind of egoistic projects and lead it towards God and his love.
At the beginning of the 19th century, a new group of people started to attract notice in western Europe and the US. They often dressed simply; they lived in the cheaper parts of town; they read a lot; they seemed not to care much about money; they were frequently of melancholic temperament; their allegiances were to art and emotion rather than to business and material success; they sometimes had unconventional sexual lives and some of the women were their hair short before it was the fashion. They came to be collectively described as “bohemian.” Traditionally used to refer to Gypsies, the word evolved to encompass a wider range of people who did not, for one reason or another, fit into the bourgeois conception of respectability.
Such destitution was, for a bohemian, vastly to be preferred to the horror of wasting his life on a job he despised.
The active, hardworking, eminently respectable and positive life of a privy councillor, a textile manufacturer or a clever banker reaps its reward in wealth but not in tender sensations. Little by little the hearts of these gentlemen ossify. People who pay 2,000 workmen at the end of every week do not waste their time like this; their minds are always bent on useful and positive things.
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. Man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can do without.
In the bourgeois lexicon, any financial or critical failure in business or the arts rises to the level of a significant indictment of an individual’s character, given the bourgeoisie’s ideological assumption that society is essentially fair in distributing its rewards. Bohemians, however, refute this punitive interpretation of outward failure by pointing out how often the world is governed by idiocy and prejudice. Human nature being what it is, they reason, those who succeed in society will rarely be the wisest or the best; rather, they will be the ones who are able to pander most effectively to the flawed values of their audiences. There may indeed, bohemians hint, be no more damning marker of a person’s ethical and imaginative limitations than a capacity for commercial success.
Ambition was not of our age… and the greedy race for position and honors drove us away from spheres of political activity. There remained to us only the poet’s ivory tower where we mounted ever higher to isolate ourselves from the crowd. In those high altitudes we breathed at last the pure air of solitude; we drank forgetfulness in the golden cup of legend; we were drunk with poetry and love.
The excesses of bohemia are hardly difficult to discern. It is only a short step from valuing originality and emphasizing the nonmaterial aspects of life to feeling that almost anything that could surprise a judge or a pharmacist must be important.
Their whole doctrine was spiritual, but they always ended up saying, “Could you please send us some more money?” Just six months after Fruitlands’s high-minded inauguration, the community dispersed in acrimony and despair, adding a new chapter to the familiar bohemian tale of idealism gone sour thanks to an unbending refusal to submit to even minimal bourgeois disciplines.
Like Christianity, for which it has in some sense functioned as an emotional substitute — having first emerged, after all, in the 19th century, around the very time when Christianity was beginning to lose its grip on the public imagination — bohemia has articulated a case for a spiritual, as opposed to a material, method of evaluating both oneself and others. Like Christianity’s monasteries and nunneries, bohemia’s garrets, cafes, low-rent districts and cooperative businesses have provided a refuge where that part of the population which is uninterested in pursuing the bourgeoisie’s rewards — money, possessions, status — may find sustenance and fellowship.
To the role-models of the lawyer, the entrepreneur and the scientists, bohemia had added those of the poet, the traveler and the essayist. It has proposed that these characters, too, whatever their personal oddities and material shortfalls, may be worthy of an elevated status of their own.
A mature solution to status anxiety may be said to begin with the recognition that status is available from, and awarded by, a variety of different audiences, and that our choice among them may be free and willed.
However unpleasant anxieties over status may be, it is difficult to imagine a good life entirely free of them, for the fear of failing and disgracing oneself in the eyes of others is an inevitable consequence of harboring ambitions, of favoring one set of outcomes over another and of having regard for individuals besides oneself. Status anxiety is the price we pay for acknowledging that there is a public distinction between a successful and and unsuccessful life.