Brazil, 1600–1960
Among the Cubeo tribe of the northwestern Amazon, the highest rung on the social ladder was reserved for men who spoke very little (for babbling was thought to sap strength), and did not partake in dancing or in raising children but were instead, first and foremost, skilled at killing jaguars. Whereas low-status men were limited to fishing, high-status individuals went hunting. Anyone who killed a jaguar would wear its teeth on a necklace, and the more jaguars one could claim as trophies, the better one’s chances of becoming the “headman” or tribal chief. Headmen wore large jaguar-tooth necklaces as well as armadillo girdles. The women of the tribe were meanwhile relegated to growing manioc root in jungle clearings. Few things could bring more shame on a man than being seen helping his wife prepare a root-based meal.
2.
What are the principles according to which status is distributed? Why is it that military men are applauded in one society, and landed gentry in another? At least four answers suggest themselves.
The members of a group may acquire status by threatening to harm others physically, thus bullying a population into offering its respect.
Alternatively, certain people may win status through their ability to defend others, whether by strength, by patronage or through control of food, water and other staples. Where safety is in short supply, as in ancient Sparta or twelfth-century Europe, courageous fighters and knights on horseback will be celebrated. If a community craves nutrients that are available only in the form of elusive animal flesh, as in the Amazon, it is the killers of jaguars who will earn respect and its symbol, the armadillo girdle. In areas where the livelihood of the majority depends on trade and high technology, as in modern Europe and North America, entrepreneurs and scientists will be the objects of admiration. The converse also holds true: a segment of the population that cannot provide a useful service to others will end up without status, in the manner of muscular men in countries with secure borders, or of jaguar hunters in settled agricultural societies.
Elevated status may also be accorded to those who impress others with their goodness, physical talents, artistic skills or wisdom, as happened with saints in Christian Europe and occurs with European footballers today.
Finally, a group may appeal to the conscience or sense of decency of its peers, and so eloquently articulate the justice of its cause that the sheer weight of its moral authority will tip the balance of status towards a redistribution in its favour.
As the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered. Within one group, we may have to worry about our ability to launch a spear into the flank of a moving target, within another about our prowess on the battlefield, within a third about our capacity for devotion to God and within yet a fourth about having what it takes to wrest a profit from the capital markets.
3.
For those made most anxious or embittered by the ideals of their own societies, the history of status, even crudely outlined, cannot but reveal a basic and inspiring point: ideals are not cast in stone. Status values have long been, and in the future may again be, subject to alteration. And the word we might use to describe this process of change is politics.
By waging political battle, different groups may always attempt to transform the honour systems of their communities and win dignity for themselves over the opposition of all those with a stake in the prior arrangement. Through a ballot box, a gun, a strike or sometimes even a book, these factions will strive to redirect their societies’ notions of who is rightfully owed the privileges that accompany high status.
A Political Perspective on Modern Status Anxiety
1.
If a talent for hunting jaguars, dancing a minuet, riding a horse in battle or imitating the life of Christ no longer offers sufficient cause to be labelled a success, what, then, may be said to constitute the dominant contemporary Western ideal according to which people are judged and status is allotted?
We may, without making any scientific claims for the portrait, sketch at least some of the concerns and qualities of our own day’s prototypical success story, the inheritor of the high status variously claimed, in the past, by the warrior, the saint, the knight and the aristocratic landed gentleman.
Requirements of High Status in:
London, New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, 2004
A successful person may be a man or a woman, of any race, who has been able to accumulate money, power and renown through his or her own accomplishments (rather than through inheritance) in one of the myriad sectors of the commercial world (including sport, art and scientific research). Because societies are in practise trusted to be “meritocratic,” financial achievements are necessarily understood to be “deserved.” The ability to accumulate wealth is prized as proof of the presence of at least four cardinal virtues: creativity, courage, intelligence and stamina. The presence or absence of other virtues— humility and godliness, for example—rarely detains attention. That success is no longer attributed, as in past societies, to “luck,” “providence” or “God” is a reflection of the collective secular faith we now place in individual will power. Financial failures are judged to be similarly merited, with unemployment’s bearing some of the shame that physical cowardice earned in warrior eras. Money is meanwhile invested with an ethical quality. Its relative quantity indicates the virtue of its possessor, as do the material goods it can buy. Like the Cubeo’s necklace of jaguar teeth, a prosperous way of life signals worthiness, while ownership of a rusted old car or a threadbare home may prompt suppositions of moral deficiency. Aside from its promise of high status, wealth is promoted on the basis of its capacity to deliver happiness by granting access to an array of ever-changing conveniences and luxuries, the thought of whose absence in the restricted lives of previous generations can invoke pity and wonder.
2.
However natural such a status ideal may appear to be, it is, of course—as a well-considered political perspective must show—only the work of humans, a recent development dating from the middle of the eighteenth century, brought into being by a host of identifiable factors. Furthermore, the political perspective would add, as an ideal, it is occasionally simpleminded, at times unfair and always subject to change.
No aspect of this peculiar modern ideal has come under greater scrutiny than the associations it constructs between, on the one hand, wealth and virtue and, on the other, poverty and moral dubiousness. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Thorstein Veblen considered the emergence of financial worth, in the early nineteenth century, as the central and often sole criterion employed in commercial societies’evaluation of their members:“[Wealth has become] the conventional basis of esteem. Its possession has become necessary in order to have any reputable standing in the community. It has become indispensable to acquire property in order to retain one’s good name … Those members of the community who fall short of [a relatively high standard of wealth] will suffer in the esteem of their fellow men; and consequently they will suffer also in their own esteem.” In such a society, it was, Veblen implied, nearly impossible to conceive of being both virtuous and yet poor. Even the most unmaterialistically minded person must sense an imperative to accumulate wealth and demonstrate possession of it—as the only means of escaping opprobrium—and must feel anxious and blameworthy on failing to do so.
Accordingly, the possession of a great many material goods becomes desirable not principally because such goods provide any abjective or subjective pleasure (though they may do this, too) but because they confer honour. In the ancient world, debate raged among philosophers about what was materially necessary for happiness and what unnecessary. Epicurus, for one, argued that simple food and shelter were all that was needed, and that an expensive house and lavish meals could be safely passed up by every rational, philosophically minded person. However, reviewing the argument many centuries later in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wryly pointed out that in modern, materialistic
societies, countless things that were no doubt unnecessary from the point of view of physical survival had nonetheless in practical terms come to be seen as “necessaries,” simply because no one could be thought respectable and so lead a psychologically comfortable life without owning them:
“By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct… . Under necessaries, therefore, I comprehend not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency[,] have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people.”
Since Smith’s day, economists have been almost unanimous in subscribing to the idea that what best defines, and lends such bitterness to, the condition of the poor is not so much the direct physical suffering involved as the shame attendant on the negative reactions of others to their state—in other words, the unavoidable sense that their poverty flouts what Smith termed the “established rules of decency.” In The Affluent Society (1958), J. K. Galbraith proposed, with a bow to Smith, “People are poverty-stricken whenever their income, even if adequate for survival, falls markedly behind that of the community. Then they cannot have what the larger community regards as the minimum necessary for decency; and they cannot wholly escape, therefore, the judgment of the larger community that they are indecent.”
3.
This notion that “decency” must be attached to wealth—and “indecency” to poverty—is the essential focal point of one line of sceptical complaint against the modern status ideal. Why, the system’s critics ask, should a failure to pile up riches be taken as a marker of an unconditionally flawed human being, rather than evidence of a greater or lesser deficit, or even a fiasco, in one particular aspect of the far larger, more complicated project that is the leading of a good life? Why should wealth and poverty be read as unerring signposts for human morals?
The reasons, it turns out, are not mysterious. The very act of earning money frequently calls upon virtues of character. Working at— and keeping—almost any job requires intelligence, energy, forethought and the ability to cooperate with others. And the more lucrative the position, the greater the requisite merits. Lawyers and surgeons not only earn higher salaries than street cleaners; they also typically bring to bear on their work more sustained effort and greater skill.
A day labourer “would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt,” wrote Adam Smith, because (to return to his passage with italics) not having such a shirt must imply a degree of poverty that, Smith’s contemporaries felt certain, “nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.” Only someone who was a congenital drunk, unreliable, thieving or childishly insubordinate would be incapable of securing the modest employment needed to finance the purchase of a linen shirt—given which, the ownership of this article of clothing might indeed safely be taken as a minimum guarantee of good character.
It requires but a short leap of imagination from there to make the assumption that extreme good conduct and an assortment of virtues must lie behind the acquisition of cupboards full of linen shirts, fleets of yachts, myriad mansions and jewels. The very concept of the “status symbol,” a costly material object that confers respect on its owner, rests upon the widespread and not improbable notion that the acquisition of the most expensive goods must inevitably demand the greatest of all qualities of character.
4.
Opponents of economic meritocracy have long believed, however, that true merit must be a more elusive, complex quality than could ever be neatly captured by the parameters of an end-of-year salary. Their scepticism is analogous to that of educationalists who insist that the “intelligence” of students cannot be fairly measured simply by making them sit an examination and then grading their answers to questions such as:
Pick out the antonyms from among these four words:
obdurate spurious ductile recondite
For the most part these critics would not argue, of course, that merit and intelligence are, respectively, everywhere equally distributed or entirely immeasurable. They merely wish to point out that the vast majority of us are unlikely ever to know how to do the apportioning or measuring properly and hence should take infinite care before acting in ways that presume otherwise—for example, in the economic sphere, by abolishing taxes for the wealthy (who, it is occasionally said by extreme defenders of economic meritocracy, deserve to keep all their earnings) or revoking state benefits for the poor (who would thus, these same defenders would add, have the opportunity more fully to experience the depths of deprivation that they must likewise deserve).
Such scepticism does not sit well, though, with the demands of everyday life. It is easy to understand the wish for some system, be it educational or economic, that will assure us of picking out the worthiest few from a classroom or in society and, in turn, passing over the least worthy—that is, the losers—in good conscience.
But an urgent wish is no guarantor of a sound solution. In The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928), George Bernard Shaw concluded that modern capitalist societies had settled on a particularly obtuse means of determining the economic hierarchy: a system whose basic tenet was that “if every man is left to make as much money as he can for himself in his own way, subject only to the laws restraining crude violence and direct fraud, then wealth will spontaneously distribute itself in proportion to the industry, sobriety and generally the virtue of the citizens, the good men becoming rich and the bad men poor.”
Quite to the contrary, continued Shaw, it had been demonstrated all too clearly that under capitalism, any ruthless, ambitious man could “grab three or four million pounds for himself by selling bad whiskey or by forestalling the wheat harvest and selling it at three times its cost or by running silly newspapers and magazines that circulate deceitful advertisements,” even as decent “men who exercise [d] their noble faculties or risk[ed] their lives in the furtherance of human knowledge and welfare” ended up mired in poverty and insignificance.
That said, Shaw did not want to align himself with those sentimental types on the left and the right who liked to claim that in society as it was presently arranged, it was always the good men who became poor and the bad men rich—a formula no less simplistic than its inverse. He sought rather to invoke in his readers a sense of how limiting it was to try to judge anyone morally on the basis of salary, and how much nobler to take some account of the many consequences that might result from differences in wealth.
In Unto This Last (1862), John Ruskin, as intent as Shaw would later be on challenging meritocratic ideas, related in heavily sarcastic terms the conclusions he had reached regarding the characters of the rich and the poor, after hundreds of encounters with representatives of both groups in many countries over four decades: “The persons who become rich are, generally speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive and ignorant. The persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief and the entirely merciful just and godly person.” In other words, in Ruskin’s experience, there was no classifying those who ended up either rich or poor—which means for us, if we follow the message first articulated by Jesus Christ and subsequently repeated in a secular idiom by political thinkers across the nineteenth and twentieth cent
uries, that it is not our prerogative to ascribe honour principally according to income. A multitude of external events and internal characteristics will go into making one person wealthy and another destitute, among them luck and circumstance, illness and fear, accident and late development, good timing and misfortune.
Three centuries before Ruskin and Shaw, Michel de Montaigne had similarly stressed the importance of contingent factors in determining the outcome of lives. He advised us to remember the role played by “chance in bestowing glory on us according to her fickle will: I have often seen chance marching ahead of merit, and often outstripping merit by a long chalk.” A dispassionate audit of our successes and failures should leave us feeling that there are reasons to be at once less proud of and less embarrassed about ourselves, for a thought-provoking percentage of what happens to us is not of our own doing. Montaigne urged that we keep a tight rein on our excitement when meeting the powerful and wealthy, and on our tendency to judge in the presence of the poor and obscure. “A man may have a great suite of attendants, a beautiful palace, great influence and a large income. All that may surround him, but it is not in him… . Measure his height with his stilts off: let him lay aside his wealth and his decorations and show himself to us naked… . What sort of soul does he have? Is his soul a beautiful one, able, happily endowed with all her functions? Are her riches her own or are they borrowed? Has luck had nothing to do with it? … That is what we need to know; that is what the immense distances between us men should be judged by.”
Uniting the many challenges to the commercial meritocratic ideal is a threefold plea, that we cease investing with moral connotations something as apparently haphazardly distributed as money; that we sever the doctrinaire connections routinely made between wealth and virtue; and that before we begin measuring our peers, we at least attempt to ensure that the taller ones have taken off their stilts, and that the shorter ones are not standing in a ditch.
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