The Inner Level

by Richard Wilkinson

  Over the decade 2000–2009 some rich countries, such as Ireland and Sweden, became more unequal, while others, such as Italy and Belgium, became a bit more equal and many, such as Denmark, the Netherlands and Japan, didn’t change much. When we looked at these changes in income inequality in relation to changes in child well-being over roughly the same period, we found that countries that had become more unequal tended to have declines in well-being, whereas those that had become a little more equal tended to have improvements. This was a significant link, not due to chance.190

  Figure 4.3: Child well-being is worse in more unequal rich countries.190

  On the publication of a 2015 report based on 55,000 children in 15 countries, which once again ranked child well-being in the UK below that of many other nations, Jonathan Bradshaw, professor of social policy at the University of York, said:

  Their wellbeing matters to us all. As a nation we pay enormous attention to the wellbeing of our economy, the state of the weather, sporting league tables, the City and the stock market. Indicators of these take up pages of the media every day. We need to make more effort to monitor the wellbeing of our children and we need to devote more resources to understanding how they are doing and to ensuring that their childhood is as good as it can be.196

  A series of studies – including controlled experiments, such as giving adolescent children an educational programme designed to steer them away from spending and towards sharing and saving – shows that materialism is related to low self-esteem, depression and loneliness. Commenting on these studies, journalist George Monbiot wrote that materialism is ‘a general social affliction, visited upon us by government policy, corporate strategy, the collapse of communities and civic life, and our acquiescence in a system that is eating us from the inside out’.197 But ‘materialism’ is surely a misnomer for this affliction – it is not a sign of our natural acquisitiveness but instead a very alienated form of communicating our self-worth to others, driven by the status competition that is intensified by inequality.

  JUST THE RIGHT AMOUNT

  As well as pursuing goals that are unlikely to improve our well-being, excessive materialism and consumerism driven by status insecurity and competition has led to increased indebtedness for many families in developed countries. As well as the onerous mortgages needed to buy somewhere to live in today’s inflated housing markets, wages have been stagnant over long periods for most workers. The only way to keep up with the Joneses has been through credit.

  Before the global financial crisis, levels of household debt were rising rapidly, in line with rising income inequality (Figure 4.4 shows this relationship for the United States). Between 2005 and 2009, household debt levels increased in all EU countries except for Germany, Austria and Ireland. After the crisis, the number of households reporting arrears in housing, credit and utility payments increased, while governments cut welfare spending and public benefits.198

  Although the relationships between debt and poor health, including poor mental health, are complex, most researchers and commentators trace a vicious circle from debt to increased stress and its effects on health and back again: people with poor health struggle with debt because illness compromises their ability to cope, as well as their ability to increase their income and assets. Household debt also has an impact on children. In debt-stressed families, children and adolescents are acutely aware of the stress being experienced by their parents, raising their vulnerability to mental health problems.

  Figure 4.4: Household debt rises with income inequality in the USA, 1963–2003.199

  There is a rich literature on the nefarious activities of corporations, especially the big multinationals. Many of them contribute to the hollowing out of societies and communities by paying low wages to their workers and excessively high salaries and bonuses to their senior management, and then aggressively market the message that we can fill that hollowed out space with meaning by buying into their brand lifestyles. Books such as Naomi Klein’s best-selling No Logo have exposed this strategy to a wide audience.200 We know corporations play on our desires and fears, and we have the studies to show how empty their promises are. We repeat the old maxim ‘money can’t buy happiness’, and yet still we keep spending.

  Whether for religious, ecological or other reasons, there has always been a minority who reject the pursuit of money and materialistic values. But improving the well-being of whole populations is going to require wholesale change and alternative ways of living for the vast majority. Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston College, describes a way forward that she calls ‘plenitude’: a way of life that focuses on relationships rather than things.201 Robert and Edward Skidelsky, a father-and-son team of economist and social philosopher, make a similar point in their book, How Much is Enough?202 The newly fashionable Swedish ideal of lagom, meaning ‘just the right amount’, captures the same concept.203 But change, and a transition to a sustainable alternative that nurtures us more effectively, might feel to some like an intractable and insurmountable difficulty, perhaps even in conflict with human nature. How have we evolved into creatures so sensitive to status that in some circumstances we’ll pursue it to our own detriment? In the next chapter we examine how it is that status can matter so much, and why other people’s judgements of us affect us so deeply.

  Part Two

  * * *

  MYTHS OF HUMAN NATURE, MERITOCRACY AND CLASS

  5

  The Human Condition

  Larger income gaps make normal social interaction increasingly fraught with anxiety, and, as we have shown, stimulate three kinds of response. Some people are overcome by low self-esteem, lack of confidence and depression; others become increasingly narcissistic and deploy various forms of self-aggrandizement to bolster their position in others’ eyes. But, because both are responses to increased anxiety, everyone becomes more likely to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol and falls prey to consumerism to improve their self-presentation. As social life becomes more of an ordeal and a performance, people withdraw from social contact and community life weakens. Crucially, we have seen that the bigger the income differences between rich and poor, the worse all this gets.

  So what is the source of this deep-seated anxiety about what others think of us? Why are we so sensitive to each other’s judgements? Why do we have this raw nerve which inhibits some of us and almost incapacitates others? Understanding where these sensitivities come from might put us in a better position to combat their dysfunctional effects – not only in ourselves as individuals, but also, through policy, across whole societies. Though modern prosperous societies are particularly plagued by social anxieties, the story of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ suggests they are not a modern invention. Best known through the Hans Christian Andersen version published in 1837, its origins go back at least to the medieval period. It is a cautionary tale about vanity and status in which everyone, including the Emperor, makes a fool of themselves for fear of being thought stupid. Even after a little boy has blurted out the truth, the Emperor prefers to maintain the pretence that he is clothed and continues his parade. He makes an idiot of himself to avoid the shame of being thought an idiot.

  Although we enjoy seeing the Emperor – at the pinnacle of society – humiliated, the reason that the story has attained the status that it has, translated into dozens of languages and with equivalents in numerous cultures, is that he is responding to something common to all of us: embarrassment, and our strong aversion to it. The story also mirrors the widely experienced dream of being naked in public. A common thread in the dream is that we hope other people won’t notice our nakedness and we will escape the shame of being exposed for what we are. It clearly reflects our fears and anxieties that people will see through our attempts to present ourselves positively. In his book The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud was unusually naïve about dreams of being naked in public, suggesting that they might be triggered simply by our bedclothes slipping off during sleep, or that they are a memor
y of being naked as a baby. But Freud was always blinkered when it came to the psychology of class and status, even though his own self-presentation was so accurately tuned to his class and period.

  The American sociologist and psychologist Thomas Scheff described shame as ‘the primary social emotion’.204 He included under this heading all the familiar self-conscious emotions running from pride to shame, including embarrassment, humiliation, shyness, awkwardness and feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. Scheff sees shame as arising from the fear of others’ negative evaluations, whether real or imagined. He describes how we constantly monitor our actions in each other’s eyes to avoid rejection, and cites Charles Cooley, the influential early American sociologist quoted at the beginning of Chapter 1, who taught that: ‘The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind.’5 We monitor how others react to us for fear of any negative evaluations which might lead to rejection.

  Our sensitivities about how we are seen and what might make us feel embarrassed or shamed are clearly not restricted to the more overt markers of status such as income or position within a hierarchy. Beauty, knowledge, attractiveness, intelligence, ability and all their components are also part of the picture. That is because there are dimensions of each which allow us to rank people from positive to negative, from pretty to ugly, from clever to stupid – in short, from better to worse. They contribute to people being valued differently. Status and all the reasons why we may be liked or disliked become entwined.

  Our awareness of the power of these valuations drives our fear of falling foul of them, of being perceived negatively by others. Despite this, it is hard to be fully conscious of how important other people’s opinions of us really are, and it is worth recalling Cooley’s invitation to think about what we would feel if, after some failure or disgrace, people suddenly showed coldness and contempt towards us rather than the kindliness and deference we were used to.5 Although Cooley suggests that the withdrawal of others’ approval would make everyone aware of its importance, he does not go on to consider how difficult it must be for those who live permanently, if not as outcasts, then with few outward signs of success that would gain the respect of others and prevent them experiencing rejection more often than approval.

  Like a string of illustrious sociologists before him (including Charles Cooley, Norbert Elias, Erving Goffman, Robert Lynd, Helen Lewis and Richard Sennett), Thomas Scheff considered the way we experience ourselves through each other’s eyes as such a normal and fundamental part of social interaction that, barring mishaps and moments of acute embarrassment, we are sometimes as unaware of it as a fish might be of water.204 It is just part of the social medium in which we exist.

  Helen Lewis, who was a psychoanalyst and professor of psychology at Yale University, is credited with being the first person to have identified and drawn scientific attention to the almost continuous behavioural signs that an undercurrent of embarrassment – or anticipation of it – plays an important role in almost all conversations.205 She painstakingly reviewed, word by word, transcripts of hundreds of her psychoanalytic sessions and found that what her clients said was not only peppered with words indicating underlying shame, but that their speech also had frequent indications of awkwardness, self-consciousness and embarrassment, including uneasy laughter, pauses, disruptions to the flow of speech, changes in manner, tone of voice or saying things almost inaudibly. Lewis provided the evidence of what others had surmised and her work was soon taken up more widely.206 Once pointed out, our susceptibility to shame and embarrassment can be seen manifesting itself in endless slightly stilted or awkward conversations.

  But why is it that we experience ourselves so much through each other’s eyes – as what Cooley called a ‘looking glass self’ – desiring the good opinion of others and fearful of being seen as odd, inadequate, stupid or inferior?

  THE SOCIAL BRAIN

  To answer this question we need to consider the way social and economic relationships have become intertwined during the course of human evolution. Our evolution has not been driven only by selective forces in the natural environment. Survival has long been about more than our ability to escape predators, endure extreme temperatures, withstand hunger or resist disease. The social environment, and our relationships with others, have also been powerful selective forces.

  A remarkable example of this is the evidence that coping with the complexity of social life played a key role in the expansion of the human brain. The part of the brain which grew most recently in human evolution is the outer layer called the neocortex. Its greater size in humans is the main reason why our brains are so much larger than those of other primates. Robin Dunbar, director of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group at Oxford University, has shown that the percentage of the brain made up of the neocortex is closely related to the typical size of the social group among primate species. Among solitary species like orangutans the neocortex makes up only a small proportion of the brain, but in more social species it is much larger.207 Humans not only have the largest neocortex, as a proportion of brain size but, in their prehistoric existence as hunters and gatherers, they also had the largest average group size among primates. The relationship is shown in Figure 5.1.

  Figure 5.1: The volume of the neocortex as a proportion of the whole brain is related to average group size in different primate species.208

  The main explanation for this relationship is that social interaction is mentally very demanding, and becomes even more so as group size increases. You not only have to recognize individuals and know everyone’s position in the hierarchy, you also have to know who your friends and enemies are and who their friends and enemies are. You have to know who you can trust and who you can’t. Above all, you have to be good at reading other people’s minds, interpreting facial expressions and body language as clues to their intentions. Since Dunbar first formulated this ‘social brain hypothesis’, further research has found that among non-human primate species, those with larger group sizes do indeed perform better on tests of social intelligence.209

  Clearly, the human brain is, in a very real sense, a social organ. Its growth and development have been driven by the requirements of social life. This is the case because the quality of our relationships with each other has always been crucial to survival, well-being and reproductive success.

  FRIENDS OR RIVALS

  Among members of the same species there is almost always the potential for conflict. Members of the same species have the same needs, so competition and conflict can arise over access to food, nesting sites, territories, sexual partners, places to relax in the shade – potentially everything. Human beings are, however, unique in the extent to which we also have the opposite potential: to provide each other with what is often crucial support, security, help, love and learning. In contrast to other species, human beings are able to take care of the sick or incapacitated, to help those who would otherwise be unlikely to survive.

  Whether we look after each other, and how we share and exchange the material necessities of life, is inextricably bound up with the nature of our social relationships. Sharing and friendship are linked because they constitute one end of the spectrum that runs from competition to co-operation and structures our access to resources and other necessities. The word ‘companion’ – ‘compañero’ in Spanish or ‘copain’ in French – combines the Latin com (with) and panis (bread). Companions are people with whom we share food. The connection between social relationships and material life was also summed up by the American social anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. When discussing the use of gifts and systems of gift exchange in hunter-gatherer societies, he said ‘gifts make friends and friends make gifts’.210 He also pointed out that to refuse a gift is, in some societies, tantamount to a declaration of war: it is the rejection of a friendly relationship. Gifts are such powerful symbols of friendship because they sho
w in concrete terms that, rather than fighting over access to material necessities, we recognize each other’s needs, and share.

  The use of gifts to express or consolidate friendship remains an important part of social life in modern societies. Eating together – whether family meals or with guests – is another indication of the continued psychological and symbolic importance of sharing basic necessities. Many different religious practices attest to the deep roots of this link: food is provided for visitors at all Sikh gurdwaras, and Sikh worshippers share food. Similarly, the sharing of bread and wine in the Christian communion service symbolizes that sharing the necessities of life is the foundation of life. The Prophet Muhammad taught that food should be shared. Likewise, communal eating and food sharing has always been important in Judaism. As well as being enshrined in moral teaching everywhere, the need to co-operate is part of our evolved psychology.

  The link between our material interdependence and the nature of social relationships is one of the unconscious givens for human beings everywhere. Exchanging gifts, sharing things or eating together are powerful expressions of close social bonds and friendship. If, instead, people keep what they have to themselves, regardless of each other’s needs, it demonstrates a lack of concern for each other’s welfare which precludes close social bonds. If they go still further and cheat and steal from each other, that material antagonism leads to conflict. At a macro level, access to resources is a major cause of war between nations. From sharing to preying on one another, material and social relationships speak with one voice. Although the study of economic and social life have tended to be largely separate disciplines, it is clear that rather than being a domain on its own, material life is inextricably bound up with the structure of social relations. We see over the course of this book that different kinds of exchange relationships, and the way goods are distributed across society, have powerful social and psychological implications.