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.
III
MERITOCRACY
Three Useful Old Stories about Failure
1.
To occupy a low position in the social hierarchy is rarely pleasant from a material point of view, but it is not everywhere and at all times equally psychologically painful. The impact of poverty on self-esteem will to an important extent be decided by the way that poverty is interpreted and accounted for by the community.
While the material progress of the West over two millennia is incontestable, explanations for why one might be poor and what one’s value to society might be, could be said to have grown notably more punitive and emotionally awkward in the modern era, an evolution contributing a third explanation for any anxiety about having or acquiring low status.
2.
From approximately A.D. 30, when Jesus began his ministry, to the latter half of the twentieth century, the lowest in Western societies had to hand three stories about their significance, which, while they could be believed, must have worked a profoundly consoling, anxiety-reducing effect on their listeners.
First Story:
The Poor Are Not Responsible for Their Condition
and Are the Most Useful in Society
If one had asked a member of a Western medieval or pre-modern society on what basis society was divided into rich and poor, peasant and nobleman, the question would most likely have seemed bizarre: God had simply willed the division.
A representation of the three orders of society—clergy, nobility and peasantry—from the Image du Monde. French school, thirteenth century
Yet alongside this inflexible belief in a three-class structure— clergy, nobility and peasantry—came an unusually strong appreciation of the way that the different classes depended on each other and hence an unusually strong appreciation of the value of the poorest class. A theory of mutual dependence held that the peasantry was no less vital and hence no less worthy of dignity than the nobility or clergy. The lives of peasants might be hard (unalterably so), but it was known that without them the other two classes would soon founder. It might have seemed ungenerous of John of Salisbury to compare the poor to a pair of feet and the rich to a head, but this otherwise insulting metaphor had the benefit of reminding the wealthy to treat the poor with respect if they wanted to stay alive just as they knew to treat their feet with respect in order to walk.
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. Medieval art and literature were therefore peppered with liberal, if condescending, praise of the peasantry, and it was not forgotten that Jesus himself had been a carpenter.
In his Colloquy (circa 1015), Aelfric, the abbot of Eynsham, argued that peasants were the most important members of society by far, for though the rest could survive without the nobility or the clergy, no one could do without the food supplied by the ploughman. In 1036, Bishop Gerard of Cambrai preached a sermon asserting that while such rough labour was dull and hard, it made possible all other, intellectually more elevated, kinds of work. Good people must thus honour the peasantry. Hans Rosenplüt of Nuremberg was one poet among many who felt moved to pay homage to the “noble ploughman.” In his poem “Der Bauern Lob”(circa 1450), he intoned that in all God’s creation, none was more exalted:
It is often hard labour for him when he
wields the plough
With which he feeds all the world:
lords, townsmen and artisans. But if there were no peasant, our
lives would be in a very sad
condition.
A peasant reaping wheat, from a psalter calendar, England, circa 1250–1275
Such words may not have softened the earth through which the peasants had to drive their plough, but when considered together with the attitude underlying them, they must nevertheless have helped to foster in the peasantry a welcome sense of their own dignity.
The Limbourg Brothers, Peasants at Work on a Feudal Estate, 1400–1416
Second Story: Low Status Has No Moral Connotation
Scripture provided another comforting perspective for those of low status. The New Testament demonstrated that neither wealth nor poverty was an accurate index of moral worth. 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.
Insofar as Christianity ever strayed from a neutral position on money, it was in favour of poverty, for in the Christian schema, the source of all goodness was the recognition of one’s dependence on God. Anything that encouraged the belief that a contented life might be had without God’s grace was evil, and wealth fell into that category, promising both worldly pleasures and a frowned-upon sense of freedom.
The hardships to which the poor were subject, meanwhile, made them turn more naturally to God for assistance. In the soothing parables of the New Testament, they witnessed the rich failing to fit through the eyes of needles, learned that they would inherit the earth and were assured that they would be among the first through the gates of the Heavenly Kingdom.
Third Story: The Rich Are Sinful and Corrupt
and Owe Their Wealth to Their Robbery of the Poor
There was a third story available to soften the blow of poverty and a low social position. According to this narrative, which assumed its greatest influence between approximately 1754 and 1989, the poor were reminded that the rich were thieving and corrupt and had attained their privileges through plunder and deception
rather than virtue or talent. Moreover, they had rigged society in such a way that the poor could never improve their lot individually, however capable and willing they might be. Their only hope lay in mass social protest and revolution.
In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave the story one of its earliest recitals: “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!’”
A hundred years later, Karl Marx would take up the same cry, casting in apparently scientific terms what had in Rousseau’s hands been a cry of social protest. There was, for Marx, an inherently exploitative dynamic within the capitalist system, for employers would always try to hire workers for less than they made from selling their products, then would pocket the difference as “profit.” 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. In the first volume of Capital (1887), Marx addressed the bourgeoisie in the voice of the worker: “You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and have the odour of sanctity to boot, but you are a creature with no heart in its breast.” Evidence of this callousness could be found in any nineteenth-century mill, bakery, dockyard, hotel or office. Workers were diseased and very often died young of cancer or respiratory illness; 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. As The Communist Manifesto (1848) thundered, “Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!”
Not long before the publication of the Manifesto, Marx’s associate Friedrich Engels had travelled to Manchester and seen at first hand the suffering of the poor in one of the new cities of the Industrial Revolution. 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 bourgeoisie depicted in Engels’s account of his sojourn, The Condition of the Working-Class in England (1845), took self-interest to sobering extremes: “It is money gain which alone determines them. I once went into Manchester with a bourgeois, and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful condition of the working-people’s quarters, and asserted that I had never seen so ill-built a city. 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.’ It is utterly indifferent to the English bourgeois whether his working-men starve or not, if only he makes money. All the conditions of life are measured by money, and what brings no money is nonsense, unpractical, idealistic bosh.”
Life may not have been pleasant in the slums of Manchester in the 1840s, but for a labourer, being advised that what had landed him there was the monstrosity of his employer and the endemic corruption of the economic system (against which it was vain for the poor ever to try to act singly) would have offered a sustaining sense of his moral superiority and mitigated any shame he might have felt at his haggard condition.
3.
In their different ways, these three stories afforded consolation for low status over nearly two millennia. They were by no means the only stories in circulation, but they had power and were widely credited. They oriented the less fortunate towards three sustaining ideas: that they were the true creators of wealth in society and therefore were deserving of respect; that earthly status had no moral value in the eyes of God; and that the rich were in any case not worth honouring, for they were both unscrupulous and destined to meet a bad end in a series of imminent and just proletarian revolutions.
Three Anxiety-Inducing New Stories about Success
1.
Unfortunately, three other, more troubling stories began to form around the middle of the eighteenth century and steadily gained in influence, challenging the previous stories in public opinion.
The rise of these stories may have been accompanied by momentous material improvements across society, but at a psychological level, their contribution was to make low status all the harder to endure and all the more worrying to contemplate.
First Story: The Rich Are the Useful Ones, Not the Poor
Writing in circa 1015, Aelfric, the abbot of Eynsham, had emphasized that wealth was created almost exclusively by the poor, who rose before dawn, ploughed the fields and collected the harvests. The critical nature of their work gave them a right to be honoured by all those above them in the hierarchy. The abbot was not alone in thus recognising ordinary workers: for centuries, economic orthodoxy held that it was the working classes that generated society’s financial resources—which the rich then dissipated through their taste for extravagance and luxury.
This theory of who could be credited for creating national wealth survived almost unassailed until the spring of 1723, when a London physician named Bernard Mandeville published an economic tract in verse, The Fable of the Bees, which irrevocably altered the way rich and poor were perceived. 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 labourers. In judging a man’s value, one had to look not at his soul (as Christian moralists were inclined to do) but at his impact on others. Judged by this new criterion, those who amassed riches (in trade, industry or agriculture) and spent liberally (on absurd luxuries or on the construction of unnecessary storehouses or country seats) were without question more beneficially engaged than the poor. As the subtitle of Mandeville’s opus put it, it was a case of “Private Vices, Public Benefits.” He explained: “It is the sensual courtier who sets no limit to his luxury, the fickle strumpet who invents new fashions every week … the profuse rake and the lavish heir [who most effectively help the poor]. He that gives most trouble to thousands of his neighbours, and invents the most operose manufactures is, right or wrong, the greatest friend to society. Mercers, upholsterers, tailors and many others would be starved in half a year’s time if pride and luxury were at once to be banished from the nation.”
Although Mandeville’s thesis shocked his initial audience (as he intended it to do), it would go on to persuade almost all the great economists and political thinkers of the eighteenth century and beyond. In his essay “Of Luxury” (1752), Hume repeated the Mandevilleian argument in favour of the pursuit of riches and the
ir expenditure on superfluous goods, asserting that it was these initiatives, rather than the manual labour 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.”
Seven years later, Hume’s countryman Adam Smith would take the proposition even further in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, perhaps the most beguiling defence ever assayed of the utility of the rich. 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.” He went on caustically to dismiss those foolish enough to devote their entire lives to chasing “baubles and trinkets.” Nevertheless, he was, he noted, immensely grateful that such creatures abounded, for the whole of civilisation, 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.”
In economic theories of old, the rich had been condemned for consuming too large a share of what was thought to be a finite pool of national wealth. But tempting though it might seem, Smith wrote, to regard man of “huge estate” as a “pest to society, as a monster, a great fish who devours up all the lesser ones,” to do this was to forget that there was no predetermined limit to the pool of wealth, which could always be expanded through the efforts and ambitions of entrepreneurs and traders. The great fish and his brethren, far from devouring the lesser fish, in practice helped them by spending money and ensuring them of employment. The rich might be arrogant and coarse, but their vices were transformed, through the operations of the marketplace, into virtues—or so Smith claimed in what has become possibly the most famous passage in the literature of capitalist economics: “In spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own convenience, though the sole end which they propose from the labours 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.”
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