The Inner Level

by Richard Wilkinson

  Sweden, which used to be seen as a model for high-quality education, has in contrast seen a steep decline in its PISA rankings and an increase in educational inequality. In the 1990s, it started to experience rapidly increasing income inequality and, despite strong international evidence that comprehensive schooling narrows educational inequality gaps,299 began to allow private (‘free’) schools to compete with public schools for government funds. A 2015 report from the OECD urged the Swedes to undergo ‘a comprehensive education reform’, limiting parental and pupil choice, to restore their previously high educational standards.358 The report called for higher teacher salaries, better training, more rigorous inspection of schools and a focus on integrating immigrants into the educational system. Sweden has also seen a decline in child well-being significantly related to its increasing income inequality.190

  At best, educational institutions can only partly offset the damage caused to children by wider inequalities in society, but they can avoid adding to it. Schools need to be based on a much broader concept of ability than they have been in the past. They should aim to introduce children to such a wide range of activities that they can all discover something they are particularly good at and are therefore likely to enjoy. Despite the advantages of developing an area of ability that coincides with some natural aptitude, the biggest constraint on almost any form of ability is a culture in which children come to see themselves as failures in almost every area of education and, so often, learn that they are socially inferior as well.

  FLAKES AND CORNFLAKES

  It is now widely accepted that lower family social class, education and income are important predictors of lower levels of educational achievement at all ages.307 In their report, A Comprehensive Future, Melissa Benn and Fiona Miller conclude that ‘one of the biggest problems facing British schools is the gap between rich and poor, and the enormous disparity in children’s home backgrounds and the social and cultural capital they bring to the educational table’.357 The same is true of US schools, or schools in any highly unequal society. Benn and Miller write: ‘The comprehensive ideal is a powerful one, challenging as it does deep and often unconsciously held notions about class background, motivation, innate ability and those who are considered to “deserve” or merit a good education and those who are not.’ Of course, on top of the effects of different school systems and educational policies comes the dead weight of inequality. The greater that weight, the more class and status matter, and the greater are the inequalities in children’s opportunities, educational performance and outcomes.

  As we come to understand how the health, development and happiness of children are compromised by forces beyond their or their families’ control, jokes about the cleverest cornflakes rising to the top when we shake the cereal box of society seem inappropriate as well as inaccurate. Privilege begets privilege, ever more forcefully in more unequal societies. Inequality, like poverty, creates intergenerational cycles of disadvantage, and wastes vast swathes of human capabilities, talents and potential.

  7

  Class Acts

  To understand why differences in income and wealth matter, we must understand how they are used divisively to express social distinctions which foster feelings of superiority and inferiority. That is the subject of this chapter. To see how the cultural processes of social division work, it is often easier if we are not too close to the issues to see them dispassionately. We will therefore begin by looking at processes of class distinction in previous centuries, where we have the benefits both of detachment and hindsight.

  MANNERS AND CIVILIZATION

  Though they have changed beyond all recognition over the centuries, differences in personal styles, conduct and behaviour are often taken as markers of class differences. In the thirteenth century, Bonvicino da Riva wrote an etiquette book – Fifty Table Courtesies – to provide advice on ‘proper’ behaviour. He thought it necessary to warn his readers that blowing your nose on the tablecloth during meals was a sign that you were ill-bred. In the mid-sixteenth century, when handkerchiefs had started to gain popularity, Giovanni della Casa felt the need to point out that it was unseemly ‘after wiping your nose, to spread out your handkerchief and peer into it as if pearls and rubies might have fallen out of your head’. In 1530, Erasmus instructed people to ‘Turn away when spitting, lest your saliva fall on someone. If anything purulent falls to the ground, it should be trodden upon, lest it nauseate someone. If you are not at liberty to do this, catch the sputum in a small cloth. It is unmannerly to suck back saliva.’

  ‘That man is not our superior – he’s just our boss’

  These examples are all cited in Norbert Elias’s classic book The Civilizing Process, published in 1939.359 Elias was a sociologist, a refugee from Germany, who worked in England. He made a careful analysis of books on etiquette and other sources of advice on manners published over many centuries, to identify the forces behind what he called ‘the civilizing process’. The picture which emerged is far from being a continuous process of improvement as the lower orders sought to imitate their betters. At many points in history, those at the top of society behaved at least as disgustingly as everyone else. For example, Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-century English aristocrat and man of letters, described the Palace of Versailles as:

  a vast cesspool, reeking of filth and befouled with ordure … The odour clung to clothes, wigs, even undergarments. Worst of all, beggars, servants, and aristocratic visitors alike used the stairs, the corridors, any out-of-the-way place to relieve themselves. The passages, the courtyards, the wings and the corridors were full of urine and faecal matter. The park, the gardens and the chateau made one retch with their bad smell.360

  This was despite an earlier ordinance, issued shortly before Louis XIV’s death in 1715, that had decreed that faeces left in the corridors of Versailles would be removed once a week.361

  We might have expected hygiene considerations to have been a powerful driver of behavioural change, but Elias argues that there was little or no rational basis for changing manners and customs. Instead, he emphasizes that notions of ‘acceptable behaviour’ were shaped by class distinctions, social aspirations, shame and embarrassment.

  When explaining why ‘the civilizing process’ progressed more rapidly and consistently from the sixteenth century onwards, Elias points to the growing involvement of the upper classes in the court, which, he says, intensified social comparisons and led to a shift in what he calls ‘the frontier of shame and embarrassment’. Self-control became more important as people were drawn closer together and saw more of each other. Courtly life heightened interpersonal sensibilities, their corresponding social prohibitions and the reasons for shame and embarrassment.

  Elias suggests that a decline in interpersonal violence was part of these changes and came about as a result of the gradual transformation of the warrior nobility into a courtly aristocracy. The feasting, dancing and ‘noisy pleasures’ in which the former had indulged were often dangerously disruptive because they frequently gave way to ‘rage, blows and murder’. As a result, people had to develop more self-restraint. The nobility’s respect for each other’s strength had to be replaced, and some other basis of merit found; self-control and the ability to avoid touching on each other’s vulnerabilities and causing offence became increasingly encoded into aristocratic behaviour. In Elias’s words: people became ‘sensitive to distinctions which previously scarcely entered consciousness … The direct fear inspired in people by people has diminished, and the inner fear mediated through the eye and through the super-ego is rising proportionately.’ He goes on to say:

  The very gesture of attack touches the danger zone; it becomes distressing to see a person passing someone else a knife with the point towards him. And from the most highly sensitized small circles of high court society, for whom this sensitivity also represents a prestige value, a means of distinction cultivated for that very reason, this prohibition gradually spreads throughout the whole of civilized
society.

  Social dominance and subordination came to depend less on overtly resorting to force and more on cultural expressions of the superiority of one class over another. During the sixteenth century the concepts of ‘civility’, and being ‘courtois’, were repeatedly used by those writing about the distinction between good and bad manners. The nobility of the Middle Ages had not regarded the gestures, or the depiction in art, of lower-class people as objectionable; however, as they developed a distinct culture of superiority themselves, they began to feel – or at least claimed to feel – repulsed by anything ‘vulgar’. Maintaining the cultural barricades between themselves and the social ranks immediately below required ‘affect-laden gestures of revulsion from anything that “smells bourgeois” ’. It was in the fifteenth century that noble families began to establish their own private quarters, and stopped sleeping in the great hall with everyone else. The nobility became more sensitive to any markers of the lesser sensibility of lower-ranking classes. Elias describes the constant aristocratic attempts to remain distinct from the bourgeoisie as a ‘tug of war’ motivated by a

  permanently smouldering social fear … [which] constituted one of the most powerful driving forces of the social control that every member of this court upper class exerts over himself and other people in his circle. It is expressed in the intense vigilance with which members of court aristocratic society observe and polish everything that distinguishes them from people of lower rank: not only the external signs of status, but also their speech, their gestures, their social amusements and manners.

  But, again and again, manners and behaviour that initially served to distinguish the aristocracy from their inferiors became useless as they were adopted by the bourgeoisie. Customs that were once ‘refined’ became ‘vulgar’, forcing new elaborations as the ‘embarrassment-threshold’ advanced. Elias suggests that this process only lost its force with the French Revolution and the downfall of the absolutist court society of the Ancien Régime. The general pattern is, however, clear: the refined self-presentation of a superior class, despite appearing as second nature, is driven by continual pressure from below.

  The constant shifts in what was acceptable, and the deep-seated revulsion at practices which had once been accepted as normal, seem to amount almost to a change in human sensibilities. Against the belief that class behavioural codes are merely an expression of superior aesthetic standards, Elias argues that ‘many of the rules of conduct and sentiment implanted in us as an integral part of our conscience, of our super-ego, are remnants of the power and status aspirations of established groups, and have no other function than that of reinforcing their … status superiority’. This is true of the observance of many of the most trivial markers of social position in speech and manners.

  A core component of the changes in what was previously deemed acceptable behaviour was what Elias refers to as ‘the weeding out of natural functions from public life’. A gradual ‘intimization of bodily functions’ and the ‘concealment of drives and impulses’ seems to have coincided with long-term economic and social development over the centuries. As a result, people were ‘increasingly split between an intimate and a public sphere, between private and public behaviour’. People hid aspects of their nature because it became shameful not to do so and, to this day, people in ‘polite society’ continue to demarcate themselves from the rest of society partly by concealing their sexuality and other bodily functions more completely than others. One of the inevitable consequences of the requirement that adults hide bodily functions more strictly than people once did is that children have to undergo a more comprehensive social transformation – involving repression, shame and embarrassment – in order to become adults able to behave in ways acceptable to society.

  The historical changes that have produced modern social norms and lengthened the psychological journey which children have to make to become acceptable adults indicate the extraordinary power status inequalities have over us. They shape our being and self-presentation in such detail that denying their importance begins to look like the wilful repression of how far we are subject to social pressures. We should not, however, forget that the desire to create a good impression and enjoy the approval of others pushes us in different directions in different kinds of society. We saw in Chapter 5 that in a highly egalitarian society it might serve primarily to push us towards being less selfish, more considerate of others and keener to be seen as helpful. But in societies marked by large status differences, the same desire for approval becomes muddied by the quite contrary desire for self-advancement, for superiority and to avoid the shame of lower status: we become more attentive to our own and other people’s use of status indicators. To quote Elias once more, ‘The feeling of shame is … a kind of anxiety … [a] fear of social degradation or … of other people’s gestures of superiority.’

  Looking back on the transformation of our sense of disgust and need for privacy over the generations, it seems plausible that, alongside the various behavioural affectations driven by status aspirations, there were changes driven by practical hygienic considerations that represented real, objective progress. It is easy to imagine that we would have continued without washing, without lavatories, still spitting indoors and blowing our noses on tablecloths until hygiene began to be understood in the middle of the nineteenth century.

  Insofar as real progress often depended on greater wealth, the rich would usually have been able to afford improvements before the poor. But we should note that the imitation of our superiors was not the source of piped water supplies, flush lavatories and sewerage systems. The sanitary reforms of the second half of the nineteenth century were instead responses to the appalling squalor, health and hygiene problems that resulted from rapid urbanization. The absence of plumbing does, after all, have very different implications in rural and urban settings. The provision of sewers and water supplies depended not on private provision driven by emulation, but on public infrastructure and expenditure, which, because it tended to be opposed by the better-off, was not forthcoming until after the franchise had been extended and more democratic local government brought to big cities. Change depended on technological advance, on social reform, on the growing understanding of the relationship between health and hygiene and, above all, on public expenditure.362

  MANNERS AND SOCIAL DISTINCTION

  Different layers of society continue to be so strongly marked by differences in manners, style and aesthetic taste that people who move up the social ladder – for instance, from working-class backgrounds to professional occupations – usually feel they have to change their social identity, and often feel themselves to be imposters, constantly at risk of being found out. In her memoir, Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide,363 Lynsey Hanley describes how, after going to university, having someone correct a malapropism was such an embarrassment that she wished the ground would swallow her whole, yet using words that had become normal from mixing with members of the middle classes led former friends and family to ask if she had ‘swallowed a fucking dictionary?’ She explains that when she fluffed exams, it was not because of any lack of ability but instead because she felt that anyone marking her work would see it as she did – as ‘a half-baked, cringeworthy, autodidact’s attempt to pass as someone who’d always known the stuff’.

  For people taking a different path into the upper echelons of society there are still a couple of dozen guides to modern etiquette in print today. They include several general guides to etiquette and ‘modern manners’ from Debrett’s, guides for the ‘modern girl’ or ‘gentleman’, as well as specialist guides to etiquette for entertaining, for weddings, for business and golf. Along with Bluffer’s Guides to wine, management, opera, poetry, etc., there is also a Bluffer’s Guide to Etiquette.364 The title is apt, acknowledging as it does the status-driven motives for learning the mores of a different class. It offers advice on the right choice of words, table manners, pronunciation, dress codes, ‘good’ manners and social graces – a
ll to help people pass as if they were naturally ‘well spoken’, ‘from a good family’ and long-term members of the social class they aspire to. It begins by stating that good manners and etiquette are almost the same thing. But the practices the book recommends are never justified as kindnesses or as ways of putting people at ease, of making them feel welcome and appreciated or showing that you care about them. Instead, the underlying justification for the recommended behaviour is almost exclusively unalloyed snobbery. Practices are recommended because they are ‘an easy way to identify good breeding’. At various points readers are told that the ‘wrong’ behaviour will show you up as ‘an imposter’, or that it amounts to ‘social suicide’. This or that practice is said to be ‘beyond the pale’ or ‘a clear sign to everyone that you are parvenu and not to be trusted’. Various things are described simply as ‘ghastly’, ‘to be avoided at all costs’ or because the upper classes ‘abhor and shun them’. The book ends by claiming to have offered ‘a code of behaviour with which you will need to be very familiar if you seek to join the upper echelons of high society’.

  What is ‘ghastly’, however, is the extent to which these behavioural trivialities remain the basis of social judgements and rankings of personal worth – matters as insignificant as which of several words with the same meaning you use (toilet, loo, lavatory, ladies’/men’s room, convenience, bathroom, WC, etc.), or how you hold your knife when eating. These gain their power simply as signifiers of class. And even while most people profess to hate snobbishness and the idea that some people are worth more than others, many are still highly attentive to these markers of social superiority and inferiority, knowing that they serve to trip up the unwary. Even if we regard ourselves merely as creatures with fixed habits, unable to change our own use of many of these class signifiers, or imagine that they are aesthetic rather than social choices, few people are unaware of the class prejudices which might be aroused in others towards ourselves if we were to make different choices of words or behaviour. Worries about showing yourself up through aspects of self-presentation make a central contribution to the social evaluation anxieties that are a focus of this book. Though we might credit ourselves with being egalitarian and unprejudiced, we are often unwilling to risk others’ judgements of us.