Status Anxiety

by Botton, Alain De

  5.

  Aside from the equation it draws between making money and being good, the modern ideal of a successful life posits a further linkage between making money and being happy.

  This latter association rests on three assumptions. First, it is presumed that identifying what will make us happy is not an inordinately difficult task. Just as our bodies typically know what they need in order to be healthy, and hence direct us towards smoked fish, say, when we lack sodium or towards peaches when our blood sugar is low, so, too, the theory goes, can our minds be relied upon to understand what we should aim for so as to flourish as whole human beings. They will thus naturally push us towards certain careers and projects. Second, it is taken for granted that the enormous range of occupational possibilities and consumer goods available to modern civilisation is not merely a gaudy, enervating show responsible for stoking desires bearing little relevance to our welfare but is, rather, a helpful array of potentialities and products capable of satisfying some of our most important needs. And third, conventional wisdom holds that the more money we have, the more goods and services we will be able to afford, thus increasing our odds of being happy.

  The most suggestive and readable adversary of these several assumptions remains Jean-Jacques Rousseau, most forcefully in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754). In this text, Rousseau begins by charging that however independent-minded we may believe ourselves to be, we are in fact dangerously inept at deciphering our own needs. Our souls rarely articulate what they must have in order to be fulfilled, and when they do manage to mumble something, their requests are likely to be misfounded or contradictory. Rather than compare the mind with a body that is unfailingly correct in its sense of what it ought to consume for its own health, Rousseau invites us to draw an analogy instead to a body that cries out for wine when it needs water and insists that it wants to dance when it should in truth be lying flat on a bed. Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.

  Rousseau’s Discourse goes on to sketch the history of the world not as a story of progress from barbarism to the great workshops and cities of Europe, but as one of regress, from a privileged state in which we humans lived simply but were aware of our own needs to a state in which we are apt to feel envy for ways of life that can claim little connection to our true selves. In technologically backward prehistory, in Rousseau’s “natural state,” when people lived in forests and had never entered a shop or read a newspaper, men and women alike better understood themselves and so were drawn towards the more essential features of a happy life: love of family, respect for nature, awe at the beauty of the universe, curiosity about others and a taste for music and humble entertainments. It was from this state that modern commercial “civilisation” pulled us, according to the philosopher, leaving us to envy and yearn and suffer in a world of plenty.

  For the benefit of those who might wish to explain this away as the absurdly romantic fantasy of a pastoral author unreasonably offended by modernity, it is worth noting here that if the eighteenth century paid attention to Rousseau’s argument, it was in part because it had before it a single, stark example of its evident truths, in the fate of the indigenous populations of North America.

  Reports of Native American society dating from the sixteenth century describe it as a materially modest yet psychologically rewarding culture: communities were small, close-knit, egalitarian, religious, playful and martial. The Indians were certainly backward in the commercial and financial sense: they lived on a diet of fruits and wild animals, slept in tepees and had few possessions. Year after year, they wore the same pelts and shoes. Even a chief might own no more than a spear and a few pots. But there was reputed to be an impressive level of contentment amid the simplicity.

  Within only a few decades of the arrival of the first Europeans, however, the status system of Native American society would be turned on its head through contact with the products of European technology and industry. What mattered most was no longer an individual’s wisdom or understanding of the ways of nature, but his ownership of weapons, jewellery and whiskey. Indians now longed for silver earrings, copper and brass bracelets, tin finger rings, necklaces made of Venetian glass, ice chisels, guns, alcohol, kettles, beads, hoes and mirrors.

  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 market. By 1690, an English naturalist, the Reverend John Banister, could note that the Indians of the Hudson Bay area had been successfully tempted by traders to want “many things which they had not wanted before, because they never had them, but which by means of trade are now highly necessary to them.” Two decades later, a traveller named Robert Beverley observed, “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.”

  Unfortunately, these thousand things, however ardently coveted, did not seem to make the Indians much happier. Without question, they worked harder: between 1739 and 1759, for example, the two thousand warriors of the Cherokee tribe were estimated to have killed 1.25 million deer to satisfy export demands. During the same period, the Montagnais Indians on the northern shore of the Saint Lawrence River turned over between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand pelts a year to French and British merchants at Tadoussac. But their quality of life did not improve as the volume of trade increased. Suicide and alcoholism rates rose, communities were fractured and factions squabbled among themselves over the European booty. 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 of western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley tried to revive the ways of their forefathers. Prophecies warned that the Delaware would be wiped out if they did not wean themselves from their dependence on trade. But already it was too late: the Indians, no different in their psychological makeup from other humans, had succumbed to the easy lure of the trinkets of modern civilisation 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.

  6.

  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 defence is similar to that embraced by modern advertising agents and newspaper editors, who are fond of asserting that they are not the ones responsible for encouraging the public’s undue obsession with the lives of the famous, changes in fashion or the ownership of new products. No, they merely offer up information related to these topics for anyone who may be interested—while, the implication goes, many more may prefer to help the needy, examine their own souls, read Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or reflect upon the short passage of time left to them before their extinction.

  This response illuminates why Rousseau placed so much emphasis, unedifying though it might be, on how difficult humans find it to make up their minds about what is important, and how strongly predisposed they are to listen to others’ suggestions about where their thoughts should be directed and what they should value in order to be happy. Such suggestions evidently carry even
greater weight when they appear on newsprint or in giant type on a billboard.

  The great irony here is that it should be the advertising agents and newspaper 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.

  In protesting thus they are, sadly, being far too modest. Nothing more clearly illustrates the extent of their deprecation than a statistical glimpse of the speed with which what was once a mere possibility will, given sufficient prompting, come to seem a necessity.

  Percentage of North Americans Declaring the Following Items to Be Necessities

  1970

  2000

  Second car

  20

  59

  Second television set

  3

  4

  More than one telephone

  2

  7

  Car air conditioning

  11

  65

  Home air conditioning

  22

  70

  Dishwasher

  8

  4

  Criticisms of consumer society have focused not only on the shortcomings and inadequacies of products in general (a point open to overelaboration, for it takes a curmudgeonly spirit not to be struck by, say, the softness of a cashmere pullover or the beauty of a car’s dashboard on a nighttime drive along a motorway) but also, and more fairly, perhaps, on the distorted picture of our needs created by the way these products are presented to us. They can appear essential, blessed with extraordinary powers to bestow happiness on us, because we understand neither their actual identity nor our own functioning.

  A car advertisement will, for example, be careful to ignore aspects of human psychology and of the overall process of buying and owning that could spoil, or at least dampen, our joy at coming to possess the featured vehicle. 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 fulfil 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.

  The advertisement stays quiet, too, about the relative inability of any material thing to alter our level of happiness, as compared with the overwhelming power of emotional events. The most elegant and accomplished of vehicles cannot give us a fraction of the satisfaction we derive from a good relationship, just as it cannot be of any comfort whatsoever to us following a domestic argument or abandonment. At such moments, we may even come to resent the car’s impassive efficiency, the punctilious clicking of its indicators and the methodical calculations of its onboard computer.

  We are equally prone to misunderstand the attractions of certain careers, simply because so much of what they entail is always edited out of the description, leaving only highlights that it would be impossible not to admire. We read of the results, not of the labour required to produce them.

  If we cannot stop envying, it seems especially poignant that we should be constrained to spend so much of our lives envying the wrong things.

  7.

  The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves.

  Incensed by their wrongheaded prioritising, John Ruskin excoriated nineteenth-century Britons (he had never been to the United States) for being the most wealth-obsessed people in the history of the world. They were never at any moment, he wrote, free of concern with who had what, and where it had come from (“the ruling goddess may be best generally described as the ‘Goddess of Getting-on,’” he grumbled). They felt shame over their own financial state and jealousy towards those whom they perceived as being better off.

  Ruskin had a confession to make: contrary to expectations, he, too, felt frantic to become wealthy. The thought of wealth preyed on his mind from breakfast till dinner, he admitted. In fact, however, he was sarcastically playing off an ambiguity in the term wealth to emphasise all the more forcefully how far he felt his fellow countrymen had strayed from virtue. For the dictionary tells us that wealth refers not only, and historically not even primarily, to large amounts of money; it can denote an abundance of anything, from butterflies to books to smiles. Ruskin was interested in wealth—obsessed by it, even—but in wealth of a very different kind than is usually meant by the word: he wished to be wealthy in kindness, curiosity, sensitivity, humility, godliness and intelligence, a set of virtues to which he applied the collective name “life.” In Unto This Last, he therefore entreated his readers to set aside their ordinary monetary conceptions of wealth in favour of a “life”-based schema, according to which the wealthiest people in Britain would no longer automatically be the merchants and the landowners, but rather those who felt the keenest wonder gazing at the stars at night or who were best able to sense and alleviate the sufferings of others. “There is no wealth but life,” he intoned: “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 … Many of the persons commonly considered wealthy are, in reality, no more wealthy than the locks of their own strong boxes, they being inherently and eternally incapable of wealth.”

  Ruskin was here uttering the plain, unsophisticated truths of the prophets, and when people did not guffaw (the Saturday Review dismissed the writer as a “mad governess” and his thesis as “windy hysterics,” “absolute nonsense” and “intolerable twaddle”), they listened. In 1906, on entering Parliament, Britain’s first twenty-seven Labour MPs were asked what single book had most influenced them to pursue social justice through politics. Seventeen of them cited Unto This Last. Thirteen years later, George Bernard Shaw, speaking on the centenary of Ruskin’s birth, declared that the invective of Vladimir Lenin and the indictments of Karl Marx, when compared with Ruskin’s works, sounded more like the platitudes of a rural dean.(Ruskin himself, however, because he enjoyed teasing label-fixers, had claimed to be a “violent Tory of the old school—Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s”).“I have met in my lifetime some extremely revolutionary characters,” Shaw went on, “and quite a large number of them, when I have asked, ‘Who put you on to this revolutionary line? Wa s it Marx?’ have answered plainly, ‘No, it was Ruskin.’ Ruskinites are perhaps the most thorough-going of all the opponents of the existing state of our society. Ruski
n’s political message to the cultured people of his day, the class to which he himself belonged, began and ended in this simple judgement: ‘You are a parcel of thieves.’”

  Ruskin was not alone in holding this opinion. There were others in the nineteenth century who hammered home, in tones alternately outraged and melancholy, identical criticisms of money’s deification as the chief determinant of respect, a presumed badge of demonstrable goodness, rather than merely one component, and surely not the most important one, of a fulfilled and fulfilling life. “Men are always apt to regard wealth as a precious end in itself and certainly they have never been so apt thus to regard it as they are in England at the present time,” lamented Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869). “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.” As Ruskin had done seven years before, Arnold urged the inhabitants of the world’s first and most advanced industrial nation to think of wealth as only one of many means to secure happiness, an end that he defined (to further hoots of laughter from critics at the Daily Telegraph) as an “inward spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life and increased sympathy.”

  Thomas Carlyle had earlier made much the same point, if less diplomatically. In Midas (1843), he asked, “This successful industry of England, with its plethoric wealth … which of us has it enriched? … We have sumptuous garnitures for our life, but have forgotten to live in the middle of them. Many men eat finer cookery, drink dearer liquors, but in the heart of them, what increase of blessedness is there? Are they better, beautifuller, stronger, braver? Are they even what they call ‘happier’? Do they look with satisfaction on more things and human faces in this God’s Earth; do more things and human faces look with satisfaction on them? Not so … We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.”