The Inner Level

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by Richard Wilkinson


  The implication (and the explanation best supported by the evidence) is that the more hierarchical a society is, the stronger the idea that people are ranked according to inherent differences in worth or value, and the greater their insecurities about self-worth. This is true despite the fact that there is, as we shall see in Chapter 6 and in Figure 6.7, less social mobility in more unequal countries. Irrespective of individual differences in skills and abilities, in such countries people’s social position is taken even more as indicating their worth as superior or inferior. Inevitably this exacerbates the ‘social evaluative threat’ and people’s status anxieties. Social comparisons become more fraught, increasing insecurities about self-worth.

  Rather than being confined to issues of status as conventionally understood, insecurities and social comparisons spread to include every personal characteristic that can be seen as positive or negative. Everything from physical attractiveness and intelligence to leisure activities, skin colour, aesthetic taste and consumer spending take on greater social meaning in terms of rank and worth. If social comparisons have their evolutionary roots in comparisons of relative strength in animal ranking systems, then they have become much more multifaceted and less one-dimensional among humans.

  In the next few pages we will provide brief, thumbnail illustrations of how people’s sense of self-worth, and their belief that they are inherently superior or inferior to others, can be affected by different kinds of structural change in the nature of the society they live in. These issues are crucial, not only for those who experience varying degrees of social anxiety, but for all of us, who, as the quotation from Charles Cooley at the beginning of this chapter makes clear, are affected by how others see us.

  EGALITARIAN ORIGINS

  Although inequality is central to the differential values we place on each other, and so to the worries about how people judge us, it only began to develop in human societies with the comparatively recent beginnings of agriculture. Fully stratified class systems became entrenched even more recently. These began to appear around 5,500 years ago in more densely populated agricultural societies in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys; in many parts of the world they are even more recent than that.42, 43 Before the development of agriculture, humans lived as hunter-gatherers in remarkably egalitarian communities. Living in small groups, reliant on whatever could be hunted or foraged, might seem an almost animal-like existence. But early human societies avoided the hierarchical structures seen in many animal species, in which the strongest eat first and the dominant males monopolize access to females. As we shall see in Chapter 5, for more than 90 per cent of the time we have been ‘anatomically modern’ (that is to say, looking as we do now, with brains their current size), equality was the norm in human societies. The anthropological evidence suggests that equality in early human societies was maintained by what have been called ‘counter dominance strategies’: people who behaved in domineering ways were put in their place fairly systematically by being ignored, teased or ostracized, as others tried to maintain their autonomy.44

  The modern anthropology of recent hunting and gathering societies shows that being embedded in a community of equals did not mean that people failed to recognize or value differences in individual skills, knowledge and abilities. More talented individuals would be respected and valued, but that did not give them power over others. There was no sense of a social system in which people became richer or poorer, living in comfort or hardship, according to some hierarchy of status and personal worth.

  STATUS HIERARCHIES

  In almost any hierarchical society, the way we see and relate to each other is pervaded not simply by the idea that people vary in their personal worth, but by the assumption that they are ranked from the best at the top to the least valuable at the bottom, from most able to least able, from the most admired to the least admired. And the lower you are in the hierarchy, the more stigmatized you are likely to feel. It’s hard to think of anything better calculated to exacerbate all your insecurities about whether you appear as successful or as a failure, interesting or dull, clever or stupid, well-educated or ignorant, than being ranked by class.

  What other people think of us is filtered through our expectations, fears and tensions about where we come in the scale of personal worth. And as we shall see in Chapter 7, a great many aspects of individual preferences and behaviour – such as aesthetic taste, pronunciation, table manners, knowledge of the arts – serve as markers of status, almost as if they were designed to trip and expose the unwary. Even the issues of body image and weight, about which so many agonize, are drawn into the same arena because people know they affect selection for jobs and marriage: that attractive people are more likely to move up the social ladder.45, 46

  But class distinctions work in different ways in different societies. Haddon Hall, in Derbyshire in England, dates from the twelfth century. It is advertised as ‘probably the finest example of a fortified medieval manor house in existence’. When visitors are shown the main hall, they are told that everyone – including the members of the noble family who owned the Hall and all their servants – would have lived and slept (usually on the floor) in this one huge room. A community of perhaps fifty people would have shared a level of intimacy which we now rarely experience even within the family home. Though normal for the period, this level of mixing and exposure between classes later became unacceptable. At Haddon, a wall was erected some centuries later to separate off rooms where the family owning the Hall could enjoy more privacy. This would have added strongly to the sense of social division between superiors and inferiors.

  By the nineteenth century the degree of social class separation throughout society had become even more pointed. Although almost all upper-middle-class families had servants living in their houses with them, they tried to ensure that contact with them was reduced to a minimum. Servants slept in cramped attic rooms at the top of the house and worked in the kitchen and scullery, usually situated in the basement or ground floor of urban houses. To allow them to get from attic to basement without meeting their employers, these houses usually had a narrow servants’ staircase, as well as a grander main one. The aim was to enable different classes to live in the same house while interacting as little as possible. For the same reason, as well as the front door, they had a separate servants’ and tradesmen’s entrance. And, of course, going with these social distinctions went an ideology that higher classes had breeding and refinement built into them which set them apart from what seemed to be the rough-hewn or ‘common’ nature of those who made up the lower social classes.

  LOSS OF SETTLED COMMUNITIES

  Part of our increased anxiety about what others think of us reflects the fact that most of us no longer live in settled communities with people who have known us all our lives. Instead, for much of the course of daily life we are surrounded by relative strangers. The result is that where the way we were defined in each other’s eyes was once formed over a lifetime and hard to change, there is now a sense that who we are, and how others see us, is always more fluid and subject to constant reassessment. In a society of strangers, outward appearances and first impressions become more important.

  Rarely meeting people outside the immediate community made for a less self-conscious culture in other ways as well. The relative stability of identity and lack of anxiety about social status to be found in close-knit communities is immediately apparent even to outsiders. This was evident in the peasant farmhouses in a French village which one of us (Richard) got to know a generation ago. People were almost entirely without affectation or adornment, unselfconsciously practical. In the absence of outsiders to impress, there was little or nothing inside their farmhouses which was bought or displayed simply for show. This contrasted with the urban culture of families who, despite often living in cramped accommodation, nevertheless tried to keep a ‘front room’ especially for visitors.

  This is not to say that living your whole life in a settled community without modern tra
nsport and little geographical mobility is without its limitations. Not only are opportunities restricted, but it is also much harder to change people’s view of you, to reinvent yourself or escape any stigma. When one of the farmers in the same village was asked what it was like to live in the same small community knowing the same people all his life, he thought for a moment and said wryly: ‘You get to know their faults.’

  The modern high rates of geographical mobility mean that, whether we like it or not, our identity is no longer settled, maintained and confirmed by other people’s lifelong knowledge of us. How others see us does not become less important, only less stably embedded in others’ minds. Secure only in the minds of a few close friends and family members, it is endlessly open to question. As a result, our sense of ourselves becomes less well anchored, more prone to ups and downs, and more at the mercy of passing moods. Without the stabilizing effect of an identity held in the minds of a community of people, it is as if each encounter demands that we try to implant a positive version of ourselves in others’ minds. To them we are simply unknown, and whether we create a good or bad impression is up to us.

  SOCIAL MOBILITY

  How everyone understands and experiences their relatively superior or inferior position in society also differs according to whether people normally remain in the class or caste they (and often previous generations of their family) were born into, or whether their social position can change. This is the distinction between what sociologists call ‘ascribed’ and ‘achieved’ social class. In societies where there is little or no social mobility, class is seen simply as an accident of birth and, although your class or caste may be seen as inferior, there is little sense that you are personally culpable for your low social status: you can’t be blamed for your parentage. But in societies where people are regarded as moving up or down the social ladder according to individual merit and effort, status appears much more as a reflection of personal ability or virtue, so making low social status appear as a mark of individual failure.

  The belief that modern market democracies are ‘meritocratic’, and that class position therefore reflects ability, implies that these societies are in some sense fair: that differences in status are justified. The result is that low social status appears even more as if it were a mark of personal inadequacy and failure. It strengthens the widespread tendency to assess people’s ability and intelligence on the basis of their social position, so making low social status still more demeaning. Nor are these tendencies confined to how we judge others. They also raise or lower people’s belief in their own intelligence and ability.

  The belief that social status reflects personal worth is cemented and heightened at school by our experience of exams and assessments designed to rate us by ability in comparison to others, a process which leaves permanent psychological scars in some, and feelings of superiority in others. And beyond school, whether you went to university, how prestigious it was and what class of degree you got, are all sometimes seen as indications of personal worth. In adulthood, overt processes of social comparison continue through interviews and assessments of many different kinds. One of the benefits of retirement is the knowledge that you will never again have to go through the process of being formally assessed and ranked in comparison to others. But the informal processes by which people assess each other’s position in the hierarchy remain.

  INCOME INEQUALITY

  The scale of income and wealth differences in a society is not just an additional element in status and class differentiation; it now provides the main framework or scaffolding on which markers of social status are assembled. In effect, bigger income differences make the social pyramid taller and steeper. In his book Distinction, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu showed how much we use income to express status – not only through cars, clothing and housing, but also through things which demonstrate ‘taste’, like the books, restaurants and music we choose.47 That tendency means that bigger income differences both enable and motivate more obvious status differences. With that goes the tendency for people who are richer to be regarded as superior and to think they are better than other people. (The reasons for this connection in our evolved psychology will be discussed in Chapter 5.) Greater inequality makes money more important as a key to status and a way of expressing your ‘worth’.

  In The Spirit Level, we showed that income differences make class and status more powerful.1 The problems related to social position, like poor health, violence and low educational performance, which all become more common at each step down the social ladder, also get worse in societies with wider income gaps. The larger the disparities in income, the bigger the differences in lifestyles which express class position, and the more invidious and conspicuous inferior status feels.

  Material differences are a crucial key to status in almost all societies. Ranking systems are fundamentally about gaining access to resources, and that is true whether we are talking about the importance of money in modern life, of land holdings in feudal societies, or even the way dominant animals gain first access to food. Power matters because it ensures privileged access to all the necessities, pleasures and comforts of life. Although it is easy to confuse the trappings of status for its fundamentals, if you either make or lose a fortune it will eventually affect your social position. Even when, in the nineteenth century, people imagined that class was a matter of good breeding, people who drank or gambled their money away may have been regarded as ‘genteel poor’ for a generation, but by the next generation the family was just poor. Similarly, if you made substantial sums of money you might initially have been regarded as ‘nouveau riche’, but by the time your children and grandchildren had picked up a modicum of class culture, they would be accepted among their financial equals. Although it is hard to identify or measure the processes by which the socially mobile become integrated into their new class, the impression is that – at least among the rich nations – they have accelerated over the past century. It is therefore perhaps clearer now than it once was that the scale of differences in income and wealth in a society is a powerful determinant of whether the class social pyramid is very tall, with big social distances between rich and poor, or whether it is much broader and shallower with smaller social distances between people.

  In rich market societies today there is little masking of the importance of money in how we are seen and how we try to influence people’s judgements of us. Few of the most obvious markers of status – from houses and cars, to holidays, brands of clothing and electronic gadgetry – do not involve expenditure. And the more expensive they appear to be, the better they serve the purpose.

  It was the American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen who, in 1899, first put forward the concept of ‘conspicuous consumption’ to draw attention to how people use purchases to express their social status aspirations.48 Modern research shows clearly that as people get richer, they choose to increase their expenditure more on goods and services that express status and can be seen by others, than on ones which don’t and can’t. So, as people become better off, they spend more on what can be seen in public: up-market mobile phones, pedigree dogs, watches, jewellery and cars rather than home furnishings. As we vie for status, what is less publicly visible matters less.49

  Veblen lived during what has been called the ‘Gilded Age’, when differences in income and wealth between rich and poor were very large, and men like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller built their fortunes. His death in 1929 came at the beginning of a long period of narrowing income differences. That narrowing continued until the late 1970s. Since then, however, income differences have widened almost continuously and we have now returned to levels of inequality not seen since Veblen’s day. These long-term changes in income inequality can be seen in Figure 9.1 in the last chapter.

  All the progress towards greater equality which was made in the intervening decades has been lost, and the inflated salaries and bonuses of many bankers and company CEOs have allowed them to foun
d new dynasties in which their children and grandchildren will be able to live on unearned income in perpetuity. In the same way as the yawning gap between rich and poor led to the conspicuous consumption of Veblen’s day, so the rise in inequality since the end of the 1970s has intensified status competition and consumerism in our own societies.

  While low incomes limit what poorer people can buy, they leave status aspirations undiminished – or even heightened – by the desire to escape the stigma of low social status. That is why it was particularly designer-label clothes and high status electronic goods that were stolen by young people who rioted almost simultaneously in many different places in England during the summer of 2011.50

  How strongly we are affected by social hierarchy is increased or decreased not only by the scale of income differences between rich and poor, but also by the ever-widening range of goods that can be used to express status. Both factors make income and status differences more visible. Outward wealth is so often seen as if it was a measure of inner worth. And as greater inequality makes social position more visible, we come to judge each other more by status. With more social evaluation anxieties, problems of self-esteem, self-confidence and status insecurity become more fraught.

  The CEOs of many large multinational corporations are now paid three hundred or four hundred times as much as the least-well-paid full-time workers in the same companies. In a society in which status is increasingly defined by relative income, it is hard to imagine a more powerful way of telling a large swathe of the population that they are almost worthless than to pay them a quarter of 1 per cent of what someone else in the same company is paid. The suggestion made by some commentators that the poor lack self-esteem, as if that was a cause rather than an effect of their circumstances, underscores the strength of the connection between income and status.

 

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