3.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh, 1776): “Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren. [However], it is in vain for him to expect this from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love… . It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self-love.”
4.
According to one thesis, butchers, brewers and bakers were not always so ruthless. They may once have put food and drink before a man not because he was able to offer them payment in return, but because he had a pleasant manner or was an acquaintance of a distant relative. Financial self-interest has not, this theory holds, forever enjoyed exclusive rule; rather, it is a relatively recent historical development, a product of the modern age and of advanced capitalism. In the feudal age, this thesis goes on, such self-interest was well counterbalanced by nonmaterial considerations. Workers were thought of as members of their employers’extended families and commanded a fitting measure of loyalty and gratitude. Christian teachings helped to foster a general concern for the vulnerable and the hungry, promoting a tacit understanding that in difficult times, they should be cared for.
But such patriarchal, communal relationships were, this selfsame thesis alleges, destroyed by the bourgeoisie’s ascent to power in the second half of the eighteenth century. The bourgeois class, hugely powerful through its tight grip on capital and technology, was interested only in wealth. Unsentimental and utilitarian, it viewed employees as nothing more than a means to its acquisitive ends; it cared little for their families and refused to be dictated to by the needs of the sick or the old or the wide-eyed young. At the same time, populations were gravitating towards the larger cities, where neighbourly care was trampled by the competitive, hurried atmosphere of the marketplace. Adding to the woes of the underclass was that Christianity had lost its grip on the imagination of those holding the levers of power, and with it all influence over their treatment of the poor and their sense of community.
In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx, the most forceful proponent of this thesis, described the triumph of financial concerns in visionary and apocalyptic prose: “The bourgeoisie has … pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value.”
In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), Immanuel 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. With reference to Kant, Marx now accused the bourgeoisie, and its new science of economics, of practising “immorality” on a grand scale: “[Economics] knows the worker only as a working animal—as a beast reduced to strictest bodily needs,” he charged in the Manifesto. The wages paid to workers were, he believed, just “like the oil which is applied to wheels to keep them turning … The true purpose of work is no longer man, but money.”
5.
Marx may have been a poor historian, erratically idealizing the preindustrial past and unduly castigating the bourgeoisie, but his theories are of value for capturing and dramatising an inescapable degree of conflict between employer and employee.
Beneath the many regional variations and differences evident in style and management, the rationale for almost all commercial organisations can be broken down into a simple and arid equation:
INPUT OUTPUT
Raw Materials + Labour + Machinery = Product + Profit
To maximise output, every organisation will strive to obtain its necessary raw materials, labour and machinery at the lowest possible cost and combine them to turn out a product that it will then attempt to sell at the highest possible price. From a purely economic perspective, there is no distinction to be made among any of the elements on the input side of the equation. All are commodities that the rational executive will seek to source cheaply and handle efficiently in pursuit of profit.
And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between “labour” and other commodities, a difference that conventional economics does not have a means of representing or giving weight to but that is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: that labour feels pain.
If production lines grow prohibitively expensive, they may be switched off and will not cry at the seeming injustice of their fate. A business can move from using coal to using natural gas without the neglected energy source jumping off a cliff. Labour, by contrast, has a habit of reacting emotionally to any attempt to reduce its price or its presence. It sobs in toilet cubicles, it drinks to ease its fears of underachievement and it may choose death over redundancy.
Such emotive responses alert us to two divergent imperatives that coexist within the arena in which status is accorded: the economic imperative, which dictates that the primary task of business is to realize a profit; and the human imperative, which causes employees to hunger for financial security, respect and tenure.
While these imperatives may for long periods coincide without apparent friction, all but the most deluded of wage-dependent workers knows for a certainty that whenever a company is faced with making a serious choice between the two, it is the economic imperative that will always, by the very logic of the commercial system, win out.
Struggles between labour 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. Whatever camaraderie may be nurtured between employers and employees, whatever goodwill the latter may display towards the former and however many years they may have devoted to a job or task, workers must live with the anxiety of knowing that their status will never be guaranteed but will be forever dependent on both their own performance and the economic well-being of their organisations. They must accept that they are only a means to an end and not, much as they might long to be so on an emotional level, an end in themselves.
6.
Although the fear of being left penniless is a primary reason for our worry over the instability of our employment, it is not the only reason. We also worry—and here we return to our earliest theme— because of love, for our work is the chief determinant of the amount of respect and care we will be granted. It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided.
Unfortunately for our mental health, our capacity to provide a sufficiently elevated answer to the query rarely lies securely in our own province. It depends instead on the peaks and troughs of the economists’ graphs, on struggles in the marketplace and on the vagaries of luck and of inspiration. Meanwhile, for its part, our need for love remains unwavering, no less steady or insistent than it may have been when we were infants, an imbalance between our requirements and the uncertain conditions of the world that constitutes a stubborn fifth pillar on which our status anxieties rest.
PART TWO
SOLUTIONS
I
PHILOSOPHY
Honour and Vulnerability
1.
In Hamburg in 1834, a handsome young army officer named Baron von Trautmansdorf challenged a fellow officer, Baron von Ropp, to a duel. The precipitating offense was a poem that von Ropp had written and circulated among his friends about von Trautmansdorf’s moustache, stating that it was thin and floppy and hinting that it might not be the only part of his physique to which those adjectives could
be applied. The feud between the barons had originated in their shared passion for the same woman, Countess Lodoiska, the grey-green-eyed widow of a Polish general. Unable to resolve their differences amicably, the two men met in a field in a Hamburg suburb early on a March morning. Both were carrying swords; both were still short of their thirtieth birthdays; both would die in the ensuing fight.
In this last aspect, the event was no exception. From its beginnings in Renaissance Italy until its end in the First World War, the practice of duelling claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Europeans. In the seventeenth century, duels were responsible for some five thousand deaths in Spain alone. Visitors to that country were advised to take extra care when addressing the locals, lest they accidentally offend their honour and end up in the grave.“Duels happen every day in Spain,” declares a character in a play by Calderón. In France, meanwhile, Lord Herbert of Cherbury reported in 1608 that there was “scarce any man thought worth the looking on, that had not killed some other in a duel,” and in England, it was widely held that no man could be termed a gentleman unless and until he had “taken up his sword.”
Although occasional duels were sparked by matters of objective importance, the majority had their origin in small, even petty, questions of honour. In Paris in 1678, for example, one man killed another who had said his apartment was tasteless. In Florence in 1702, a literary man took the life of a cousin who had accused him of not understanding Dante. And in France under the regency of Philippe d’Orléans, two officers of the guard fought on the Quai des Tuileries over the ownership of an Angora cat.
2.
For as long as it lasted, duelling symbolised 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 judgements of others. In the dueller’s psyche, other people’s opinions were the only factor in forming a sense of self. The dueller could not remain acceptable in his own eyes if those around him judged him to be evil or dishonourable, 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 unfavourable assessments of him to go unanswered.
Entire societies have made the maintenance of status, and more particularly of “honour,” a primary task of every adult male. Whether called, as in traditional Greek village society, time, as in Muslim communities, sharaf, or as among Hindus, izzat, honour was expected in all cases to be upheld through violence. In traditional Spanish communities, to be worthy of honra, a man had to be physically brave, sexually potent, predatory towards women before he was married and loyal thereafter, able to look after his family financially and authoritative enough towards his wife to ensure that she did not have sex or even engage in flirtatious banter with other men. Dishonour was the penalty not only for infringing on codes oneself but also for failing to respond with appropriate fury to an injuria inflicted by another. If one was ridiculed in the market square or given an offensive look in the street, doing anything short of soliciting a fight would only confirm the offenders’ point.
3.
While we may look askance at those who resort to violence to answer questions of honour, we are nevertheless liable ourselves to share the most significant aspect of their mind-set—that is, an extreme vulnerability to the disdain of others. Like the most hotheaded of duellers, we are likely to base our self-esteem on the value we are commonly accorded. Duelling is merely a helpfully far-fetched historical example of the more universal but equally thin-skinned emotional disposition that almost all of us exhibit in matters of status.
The intense need to be viewed favourably by others may still be foremost among our priorities. The fear of becoming what the Spanish termed a deshonrado, or “dishonoured one”—a category whose contemporary connotations might best be captured by the chillingly contemptuous word loser— may today be no less haunting than it was for the characters in Calderón’s and Lope de Vega’s tragedies. Being denied status—for example, because one has failed to reach certain professional goals or is unable to provide for one’s family— may be as painful for a modern Westerner as a loss of honra, time, sharaf or izzat was for a member of a seemingly more hidebound society.
Philosophy and Invulnerability
Other people’s heads are too wretched a place for true happiness to have its seat.
SCHOPENHAUER,
PARERGA AND PARALIPOMENA(1851)
Nature didn’t tell me: “Don’t be poor.” Nor indeed: “Be rich.” But she does beg me: “Be independent.”
CHAMFORT,
MAXIMS(1795)
It is not my place in society that makes me well off, but my judgements, and these I can carry with me … These alone are my own and cannot be taken away.
EPICTETUS,
DISCOURSES (CIRCA A.D. 100)
1.
On the Greek peninsula, early in the fifth century B.C., there emerged a group of individuals, many of them bearded, who were singularly free of the anxieties over status that tormented their contemporaries. Untroubled by either the psychological or the material consequences attendant on a humble position in society, these men remained calm in the face of insult, disapproval and penury. When Socrates, for example, saw a pile of gold and jewellery being borne in procession through the streets of Athens, he exclaimed, “Look how many things there are which I don’t want.” As Alexander the Great was passing through Corinth, he sought out Diogenes and finally found him sitting under a tree, dressed in rags, with not a drachma to his name. When the most powerful man in the world asked the philosopher if he could do anything to help him, Diogenes replied, “Yes, if you could step out of the way. You are blocking the sun.” Alexander’s soldiers were horrified and steeled themselves for the inevitable outburst of their commander’s famous anger. But he only laughed and remarked that if he were not Alexander, he would certainly like to be Diogenes. Antisthenes, for his part, when informed that a great many people in Athens had started to praise him, demanded, “Why, what have I done wrong?” Empedocles evinced a similar scepticism regarding the intelligence of others. He once lit a lamp in broad daylight and announced, as he went around, “I am looking for someone with a mind.” And Socrates again, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?”
2.
These philosophers had not ceased to draw distinction between kindness and ridicule, success and failure; rather, they had settled on a way of responding to the darker half of the equation that owed nothing to the traditional honour code. They implicitly refuted its suggestion that what others think of us must determine what we may think of ourselves, and that every insult, whether accurate or not, must shame us.
Philosophy introduced a new, mediating element into the relationship between internal and external opinion. This might be visualised as a box in which all public perceptions of a person, whether positive or negative, would first be deposited in order to be assessed, thence to be either sent on to the self with renewed force (if they were true) or else (if they were false) ejected harmlessly into the atmosphere, dispersed with a laugh or a shrug of the shoulders. The philosophers termed the box “reason.”
According to the rules of reason, a given conclusion should be deemed true if, and only if, it flows from a logical sequence of thoughts founded on sound initial premises. Taking mathematics as the model of good thinking, philosophers began to search for an approximation of that discipline’s objective certainties within the context of ethical life. Thanks to reason, one’s status could—these thinkers proposed—be fixed through the agency of an intellectual conscience, instead of being abandoned to the whims and emotions of the market square. If rational examination revealed that one had been unfairly treated by the community, one should be no more perturbed by the judgement than by the ranting, say, of a deluded stranger bent on proving that two and two amo
unted to five.
Throughout his Meditations (A.D. 167), the emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, moving in the unstable world of Roman politics, continually reminded himself that any comment made about his character or achievements had to be subjected to the test of reason before he allowed it to affect his self-conception. “[One’s decency] does not depend on the testimony of someone else,” he insisted, thereby challenging his society’s faith in an honour-based assessment of people. “Does what is praised become better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn’t praised? And what of gold, ivory, a flower or a little plant?” Rather than be seduced by others’ flattery or stung by their insults, Marcus aimed to take his bearings from the person he knew himself to be: “Will any man despise me? Let him see to it. But I will see to it that I may not be found doing or saying anything that deserves to be despised.”
3.
We should not deduce from the foregoing that the condemnation or censure of others is invariably undeserved. Leaving the assessment of our worth to an intellectual conscience is not to be confused with expecting unconditional love. Unlike parents or lovers, who may value us whatever we do and however great our faults, philosophers do seek to apply criteria to their love—just not the shaky, unreasonable ones that the wider world is in danger of resorting to. There may indeed be times when an intellectual conscience will demand that we be harsher on ourselves than others are on us. Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success and failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to the idea that the mainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability. In the case of an injustice, it also helps us to hold on to the thought that we may be lovable even outside the halo of others’ praise.
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