Status Anxiety

by Botton, Alain De

  Carlyle was not blind to the benefits of modern enterprise; he even saw the appeal of certain aspects of accountancy (“book-keeping by double-entry is admirable, and records several things in an exact manner,” he conceded). But like Arnold and Ruskin and any number of other social critics before them and since, he could not accept a way of life in which what he termed “Mammon-worship” had apparently subsumed the drive towards “blessedness” and “satisfaction” on “God’s Earth.”

  Political Change

  1.

  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.

  2.

  Many distinctive ideas have, over the course of history, been thought of as “natural.” Some of the most peculiar of these flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:

  The real fact is that man in the beginning was ordained to rule over woman: and this is an eternal decree which we have no right and no power to alter.

  EARL PERCY, 1873

  There is more difference, physically and morally, between an educated European man and a European woman than there is between a European man and a negro belonging to some savage Central African tribe.

  LORD CROMER, 1911

  The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.

  SIR WILLIAM ACTON, 1857

  As a race the African is inferior to the white man; subordination to the white man is his normal condition. Therefore our system, which regards the African as an inferior, rests upon a great law of nature.

  ALEXANDER STEPHENS, 1861

  3.

  Within a given society, political consciousness may be said to emerge through the realisation 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 posited, “The ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class.”

  Ye t somewhat paradoxically, these ideas would never come to rule if they were perceived as ruling too forcefully. 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 colourless, odourless gas. It pervades newspapers, advertisements, television programmes 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.

  4.

  But the nascent political mind casts off politeness and tradition, refuses to blame itself for adopting a contrary stance and asks, with all the innocence of a child and the tenacity of a trial lawyer, “Does this have to be?”

  An oppressive situation that might otherwise have been taken as a sign that nature had condemned certain members of society to suffer—and suffer in perpetuity— may now, by being reinterpreted politically, be attributed to theoretically changeable social forces. Guilt and shame may thus be transmuted into understanding and a striving towards a more equitable distribution of status.

  5.

  George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (London, 1928):

  “You must clear your mind of the fancy with which we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always existed and must always exist. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts. Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations. Children nowadays believe that to spend nine years at school, to have old-age and widows’ pensions, votes for women and short-skirted ladies in Parliament is part of the order of nature and always was and ever will be; but their great-grandmothers would have said that anyone who told them that such things were coming was mad—and that anyone who wanted them to come was wicked.”

  6.

  The segment of Western society that perhaps most successfully altered its status over the course of the twentieth century was women. The manner in which large numbers of them came to feel entitled to question their position in the hierarchy provides a host of general insights into the development of a political consciousness.

  Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) begins with a description of a visit the author paid one autumn to Cambridge University. While there, she decided to stop in at Trinity College Library and have a look at the manuscripts of Milton’s Lycidas and Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond. However, just as she was about to step inside, “a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman” appeared and “regretted in a low voice that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.” In a minor key, Woolf had bumped into one of the great stately pillars that propped up the lesser status of women: disenfranchisement from equal rights to higher education.

  Faced with a similar situation, many women would have felt stung, but few would have responded politically to the offence. Most would instead have blamed themselves or nature or God—anything but the social construct that condoned such exclusion. 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? What right, then, did any one woman have to question the motives of a gentleman who turned her away from a library, especially if he delivered his message with an apology and a polite smile?

  But this particular woman was not to be easily silenced. Performing the quintessential political manoeuvre, she asked herself not, What is wrong with me for not being allowed into a library? but rather, What is wrong with the keepers of the library for not allowing me in? When ideas and institutions are held to be “natural,” responsibility for whatever suffering they cause must necessarily belong either to no specific agent or else to the injured parties themselves. But the political perspective gives the oppressed leave to imagine that it might be the ideal, instead of something in their own character, that is at fault. Rather than wonder in shame, What is wrong with me (that I am a woman/have dark skin/have no money)? they are encouraged to ask, What might be wrong, unjust or illogical in those others who disdain me? And the question may, moreover, be put not out of some conviction of innocence (the stance of those who use political radicalism as a paranoid means of avoiding self-criticism) but in recognition of the fact that there is more folly and partisanship in institutions, ideas
and laws than a naturalistic perspective can possibly allow for.

  As she made her way back to her Cambridge hotel, Woolf moved outwards from her own hurt to consider the position of women in general: “I pondered what effect poverty has on the mind; and what effect wealth has on the mind and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out and of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and the poverty and insecurity of the other.” She reflected upon, and began to be sceptical of, the feminine role model she had grown up with: the image of a woman who was at all times, “immensely charming and utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she would take the leg; if there was a draught, she would sit in it—in short, she was so constituted that she would never have a mind or a wish of her own, but prefer to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others.”

  Later, back in London, she kept posing questions: “Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor?” Wanting to “strain off what was personal and accidental in these impressions” of female subjugation, Woolf went to the British Library (which women had been allowed to enter for the previous two decades) and investigated the history of men’s attitudes towards women down the ages. She found a stream of extraordinary prejudices and half-baked truths propounded with authority by priests, scientists and philosophers. Women were, it was said, ordained by God to be inferior; constitutionally unable to govern or run businesses; too weak to be doctors and, when they had their periods, incapable of handling machinery or remaining impartial during trial cases. Behind all this abuse, Woolf recognised, lay the problem of money. Women enjoyed no freedoms—including freedom of the spirit—because they did not control their own income: “Women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves,” she wrote.

  Woolf ’s argument culminated in a set of specific political demands for women, including, at a minimum, dignity, equal rights to education, an income of “five hundred pounds a year” and “a room of one’s own.”

  7.

  The ideological element embedded within the modern status ideal may lack the shrill obnoxiousness of nineteenth-century pronouncements on race or gender—often it wears a smile and lies in innocuous places, within the bric-a-brac of what we read and hear— and yet it is equally partial and in certain situations equally prejudicial in its conception of what constitutes a good life. For this reason alone, it deserves greater scrutiny than it invites.

  Society’s ubiquitous statements and images convey messages to which we are less impervious than we like to admit. We must, for example, severely underestimate the subliminal powers of the Sunday newspaper if we trust that we may take in its contents and move on with our sense of priorities and desires no less altered than if we had spent the same two hours reading a chapter of Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy or Saint Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (the ritual of perusing the Sunday paper having, in the opinion of Max Weber, replaced that of attending church).

  8.

  What the political perspective seeks above all is an understanding of ideology. It aims to reach a point where ideology may be denaturalised and defused through analysis, enabling observers to exchange a puzzled, depressed response to it for a clear-eyed, genealogical grasp of its sources and effects.

  When thoroughly investigated, the modern high-status ideal duly ceases to appear “natural” or God-given. It stands revealed instead as a development stemming from changes in industrial production and political organisation—changes that began in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century and subsequently spread across the rest of Europe and North America. The enthusiasm for materialism, entrepreneurship and meritocracy that saturates the newspapers and television schedules of our own day reflects nothing more complex than the interests of those in charge of the system by which the majority earn their living. “The ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class.”

  Unfortunately, understanding does not miraculously forestall any discomforts that may arise from the status ideal. Understanding bears the same relation to many of the difficulties of politics as a weather satellite to the crises of meteorology: it cannot always prevent problems, but it can at the very least teach us a host of useful things about the best ways to approach them, thereby sharply diminishing the sense of persecution, passivity and confusion we would otherwise feel. More ambitiously, understanding may also be a first step towards an attempt to shift, or tug at, a society’s ideals, and thus to bring about a world in which it will be marginally less likely that veneration and honour will be dogmatically or unsceptically surrendered to those who are still wearing stilts.

  IV

  RELIGION

  Death

  1.

  The hero of Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) 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 Ilyich is a man overwhelmingly concerned with status. He lives in Saint Petersburg, in a large apartment decorated according to the fashionable taste of the day, and gives frequent soulless dinner parties at which nothing warm or sincere is ever said. He works as a high court judge, a post he enjoys chiefly for the respect it brings him. Sometimes, late at night, Ivan Ilyich reads a book that is the “talk of the town,” but only after he has discerned from magazines what line to take on it. Tolstoy sums up the judge’s life in a single sentence: “The pleasures Ivan Ilyich 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 whist.”

  Then, at the age of forty-five, Ivan experiences a pain in his side that gradually spreads over his entire body. His doctors are at a loss to diagnose it: they talk vaguely and pretentiously of floating livers and inharmonious salt levels, and prescribe him a range of ever more expensive and ineffective medicines. Soon he is too tired to go to work; his intestines feel as if they were on fire; and he loses his appetite for food and, more significantly, for whist. It slowly dawns upon Ivan and all those around him that he will shortly be dead.

  This is not, as it turns out, a wholly unwelcome prospect for many of Ivan’s colleagues in the judiciary. Fyodor Vasilyevich predicts that with Ivan gone, he himself will probably get Shtabel’s post, or Vinnikov’s—a promotion worth an extra eight hundred rubles plus an allowance for office expenses. Another jurist, Pyotr Ivanovich, imagines that he will now be able to get his brother-in-law transferred from Kaluga, a move that will please his wife and ease tensions at home. The news is a little harder on the Ilyich family. Ivan’s wife, while not directly regretting his imminent death, nevertheless worries about the size of her pension, while their socialite daughter fears that her father’s funeral may play havoc with her wedding plans.

  For his part, Ivan, with only a few weeks left to him, recognises 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. One night, as he lies awake in the early hours, racked by pain, “it occurred to him that those scarcely perceptible impulses of his to protest at what people of high status considered good, vague impulses which he had always suppressed, might have been precisely what mattered, and all the rest had not been the real thing. His official duties, his manner of life, his family, the values adhered to by people in society and in his profession—all these might not have been the real thing.”

  Ivan’s regret at having squandered his brief life is compoun
ded by the realisation that it is merely his status that those around him love, not his true, vulnerable self. He has won respect by being a judge, a wealthy father and a head of household, but with all of these assets about to be lost, in agony and afraid, he can no longer count on anyone’s love: “What tormented Ivan Ilyich most was that no one gave him the kind of compassion he craved. There were moments after long suffering when what he wanted most of all (shameful as it might be for him to admit) was to be pitied like a sick child. He wanted to be caressed, kissed, cried over, as sick children are caressed and comforted. He knew that he was an important functionary with a greying beard, and so this was impossible; yet all the same he longed for it.”

  Once Ivan has breathed his last, his so-called friends come to pay their respects, though grumbling all the while at the disruption this obligation has caused in their card-playing schedule. The sight of his colleague’s waxy, hollow face in the coffin is enough to make Pyotr Ivanovich consider that death may one day claim him, too—a fate that could have stern implications, especially for the logic that at present allows him to spend most of his time on whist: “ ‘Why, the same thing could happen to me at any time now,’ thought Pyotr Ivanovich and for a moment he felt panic-stricken. But at once, he himself did not know how, he was rescued by the customary reflection that all this had happened to Ivan Ilyich, not to him, that it could not and should not happen to him; and that if he were to grant such a possibility, he would succumb to depression.”

  2.