The Inner Level

by Richard Wilkinson

  There are several possible causal processes that might account for this finding. Perhaps, in more unequal societies, the arts are more likely to be regarded as the exclusive domain of the better off; or maybe encouraging broader access to the arts is regarded as less important in more unequal societies. Because inequality makes status differences more important, people will more often feel out of place and want to avoid more socially exclusive contexts – just as many people feel more at ease eating in pubs than in up-market restaurants (even when someone else is paying the bill). It is nevertheless clear that the research findings illustrated in Figure 7.1 show that inequality leads to the cultural impoverishment of whole societies.

  Figure 7.1: Museums and art galleries are much more popular in more equal countries.377

  It is hard to imagine how the arts would develop if freed from the burden of having to serve as markers of status and class. Perhaps the expressions of joy at some of the performances of people like Kennedy, Dudamel and Malone are indicative. In a much more equal society, the arts might enjoy an increase in participation and popularity which would spread their creative roots and stimulate development in new directions.

  PERSONAL WORTH

  Many people tend to be evasive about class and status differences, and some deny not only their importance but occasionally even their existence. Personal interactions across class differences are often experienced as awkward and embarrassing. People imagine that the solution is simply for us all to learn to treat each other with the same respect and dignity, regardless of large differences in material circumstances. But even the most considerate of us would find it hard to stop ourselves seeing external status as a guide to internal personal worth, or to rid ourselves of deeply conditioned ideas of superiority and inferiority which are so inextricably bound up with material differences. And even if we imagine that we could somehow prevent our own judgements of others being influenced by external signs of wealth or class, the care most of us give to our own appearance, to our choice of clothing, cars and other conspicuous consumer goods, suggests that we do not trust others to be free of similar biases in their estimation of us.

  We assume that appearances do matter, and not without reason: many studies have shown how strongly social class and ethnicity bias our judgements of people, consciously or unconsciously. Research has shown that this is true whether we consider teachers’ assessments of schoolchildren, employers’ judgements of job applicants, or the evaluation of criminal suspects by the police and courts.378 In each case, there is a tendency to assume that those who appear to be from lower classes are less capable and less trustworthy. Paul Piff’s research – see Chapter 3 and above – demonstrated the tendency among the better-off to show less respect to the majority who are less well-off than them. Our assumption that others will judge us by what we can afford becomes a powerful additional driver of status consumption.

  Our awkwardness when faced with social inequalities leads people to choose their friends from among their near equals. That tendency is so strong and reliable that some sociologists have used friendship networks as a basis for classifying occupations into social class categories, reflecting people’s ‘similarity of lifestyle and of generalised advantage/disadvantage’.379 People are asked about their own occupations and those of their friends, and occupations linked by many ties of friendship and marriage are then classified as being of a similar social standing; for example, solicitors, doctors and similar professionals are much more likely to socialize with each other than they are with unskilled manual workers.

  In his book The Moral Significance of Class, Andrew Sayer, professor of sociology at the University of Lancaster, points out that, when people are asked in interviews what class they belong to, their replies are

  often awkward, defensive and evasive, treating the question as if it were … about whether they deserve their class position or whether they consider themselves inferior or superior to others … Class remains a highly charged issue because of the associations of injustice and moral evaluation. To ask someone what class they are is not simply to ask them to classify their socio-economic position, for it also carries the suggestion of a further unspoken and offensive question: what are you worth?380

  Sensitivity to these issues is clearer still if we imagine having to say what we think we are worth.

  Sayer has done an extraordinarily good job of exposing how morally awkward people find class differences. Most fundamentally, friendship means treating each other as equals, but where that friendship is across class differences, both sides have to pretend the class inequality is either non-existent or irrelevant. They are caught between the equality of friendship and its denial by the class difference that positions one as superior and the other as inferior. In a context where superiority is embarrassing and inferiority shaming, anything which shows up the social superiority of one over the other has to be avoided. As a result, people in conversations across a class divide often attempt to minimize differences in accent, grammar and word choice, and to talk about things which avoid displaying the differences. They must avoid conversation that brings differences in circumstances, incomes, education and status to the fore. If they were to talk – for instance – about rising food prices in the shops, they can only pretend that it means the same to each of them. In a friendship across classes each person has to give an impression of helplessness towards the system which has allocated them different positions in the hierarchy, as if the fact that they come together as employer and employee, richer and poorer, better or worse educated, was natural and inevitable. Any sense that one person is looked down on, pitied or disrespected by the other is offensive and totally inimical to continued friendship.

  The awkwardness of social class divisions shows just how fundamental the opposition – discussed in Chapter 5 – is between the behavioural strategy appropriate to a dominance hierarchy and the strategy of reciprocity and sharing, which is appropriate to friendship and equality. That the two don’t easily mix, and often cause embarrassment when we try, shows how deeply embedded these contradictory social strategies are in our psychology. A human relationship of equality and reciprocity is fundamentally contradicted by the implied inequalities in ‘worth’ that are part of a class hierarchy.

  Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat, writing about his visit to the USA in 1831, argued that people could not empathize with each other across stark differences in their material circumstances. He gave two examples. The first was the French aristocracy, who, he said, would show enormous sympathy for each other when faced with difficulties but appeared to be completely indifferent to the much greater suffering of the peasantry. The second was the contrast between the remarkable willingness of white Americans to help each other out and identify with each other, and their inability to recognize the suffering of slaves.381 What stands out in the record of human callousness and cruelty is the ease with which we can disregard the suffering of any group we regard as inferior, just as we tend to portray as inferior any group we are opposed to.

  An example of the effects of inequality on the relationship between different social groups can be seen in the extraordinarily close correlation between a society’s level of income inequality and the proportion of its population who are imprisoned. In The Spirit Level we showed that in the more equal of the developed countries, only about 4 people in every 10,000 are in prison at any point in time, but this rises to ten times that level – around 40 per 10,000 – in the more unequal countries. As we showed, only a small part of this difference can be explained by the higher crime rates in more unequal societies. Much the most important factor seems to be harsher and more punitive sentencing. More unequal societies create a tougher and less forgiving climate of opinion, so people are sent to prison for less serious offences and given longer prison sentences. The same process can also be seen in the tendency for more unequal countries to hold children criminally responsible at younger ages. We used data from Child Rights International Network and fo
und a statistically significant relationship between inequality and a lower age of criminal responsibility.382 Among more equal rich countries, children younger than fourteen are rarely considered to be responsible for criminal actions, but in Singapore and some US states, children only have to be seven years old (Figure 7.2).

  This more punitive sentencing reflects some combination of increased fear and less empathy towards people who are convicted. This fits the evidence we saw in Chapter 3, showing that people in more unequal societies are much less likely to trust each other.

  The long decline in income inequality from the 1930s to the 1970s in most of the developed countries was accompanied by a slow change in class relations. While class barriers to empathy are still clearly evident, they weakened while income differences were diminishing. This has sometimes been interpreted as an inexorable historical increase in human empathy.383 Gradually, the argument goes, the boundaries of our ‘moral universe’, which once hardly extended beyond the family or local community, have widened to include the nation state, and were beginning to become globalized – at least until the modern rise (from around 1980 onwards) in inequality and xenophobia. The forces of social exclusion – whether organized around divisions of gender, sexuality or race – had weakened. Political campaigns to protect health and safety at work, the rights of employees, the improvement of housing conditions and the rights of tenants transformed living and working conditions. As a result, the systemic insensitivity of the upper classes to the lower became less stark.

  Figure 7.2: The age of criminal responsibility is younger in more unequal countries.382

  But following the general growth of income differences from the end of the 1970s, much of this progress has been undone. Although discrimination by race, gender, disability and sexuality has continued to decline, other forms have been reinvigorated. The position of people renting their homes has become more precarious and homelessness has grown; employees have been pushed into nominal self-employment and on to zero-hours contracts; social security systems have been weakened and the proportion of the population – including the proportion of children – living in relative poverty has increased. All this has coincided with a growing consensus that the influence of money in politics has increased and the democratic process been subverted. With large business corporations and rich individuals escaping much of their tax liability, the public sector is increasingly underfunded. The tendency for inhumanity to march under the banner of inequality is also evident in the rise in more punitive prison sentences, and the younger age at which children are treated as criminally responsible in more unequal countries.

  A CLASSLESS SOCIETY?

  Karl Marx and John Major, the British Conservative Prime Minister who succeeded Margaret Thatcher, are unlikely bedfellows but, in his victory speech after winning the party leadership and the premiership, John Major announced that his government would ‘continue to make changes which will make the whole of this country a genuinely classless society’.384 Almost all politicians in modern democracies at least claim to want to reduce class differences. Major failed in that aspiration because he failed to recognize that larger differences in income and wealth increase both the social distances between people and the importance of markers of class and status. In contrast, the Swedish Social Democratic Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson, who was in office from 1932 to 1946, made real progress towards his objective of making Sweden a ‘classless society’ and ‘the people’s home’. But what made most difference was that these objectives were maintained over a period of forty-four years while the Social Democratic Party remained in power almost continuously, from 1932 until 1976. During that period, the share of income going to the richest 1 per cent of the population was reduced from around 13 per cent to 5 per cent of all taxable income. That the scale of the material differences in a society provides the framework which makes the class hierarchy steeper and more important – or shallower and less important – should now be beyond dispute.

  What makes it difficult for many people to recognize the effects of the material differences between us is that any of the markers of status difference or of a person’s social class are perceived as though they reflected much more fundamental differences between people than they really do. The human tendency to explain other people’s (but not our own) behaviour in terms of their inherent personal characteristics, rather than their circumstances, has been labelled ‘the fundamental attribution error’ by social psychologists.385 You might make that error if, for instance, you regard an example of aggressive driving as a reflection of the driver’s aggressive personality rather than thinking that he or she might have a reason for rushing which would have led most people to hurry. And if you think that you jumped to this conclusion simply because you had no way of knowing what was making them rushed, note that a willingness to put it down to their personality was not deterred by a similar lack of knowledge of the driver.

  These attribution errors play a powerful role in our perceptions of people lower in the social hierarchy. There has always been an unedifying tendency to ignore the force of circumstances and to assume that the poor are poor because they are lazy and stupid – indeed, that is almost the definition of prejudice. This is why the devastating effects of the treatment and marginalization of the indigenous populations of Australia, New Zealand and North America have, in each case, been interpreted as reflections of the inherent characteristics of those minority ethnic populations. Rather than recognizing the consequences of what these communities have been through, the dominant European-origin populations have preferred to believe that the high rates of alcoholism and violence are ‘just the way these people are’.

  GENETIC DIFFERENCES?

  To ascribe the problems that disproportionately affect these communities to their inherent characteristics is to pass the blame from their situation to their genetics. The history of colonialism is full of such assumptions of superiority and inferiority. Wherever colonizers encountered less technologically sophisticated cultures, they assumed that the populations in those societies were inherently less intelligent. The same pattern of prejudice can be identified within all hierarchical societies. Nowhere are these processes as powerful as when they are focused on explanations of inferior social status. The same pattern runs all the way from the history of slavery to Owen Jones’s Chavs, which documents how any marker of low social status, however trivial, invites a deluge of prejudiced assumptions about people’s inferior personal characteristics.386

  Even though we are slowly becoming more aware of these processes, we are still very far from being free of them. Surveys have asked people how important they think genes, the environment and choice are in explaining individual differences in the drive to succeed, in mathematical ability and in tendencies towards violence. They show that European Americans put more emphasis on genetics than African Americans do.387 Despite the racist implications of ascribing ability to ethnicity, if people had been asked about the causes of any ethnic group (rather than individual) differences in these characteristics, it seems likely that white Americans would have shown an even stronger preference for genetic explanations.

  We saw in Chapter 6 that there is a widespread but largely false belief that people’s social status reflects their individual genetic endowments of cognitive ability: the idea that the naturally clever move up and others don’t. Associated with that is the tendency to imagine that racial differences in social status reflect basic racial differences in ability: the idea that some groups are inherently more intelligent than others. Skin colour is assumed to be a marker for a wide range of genetic differences, which somehow explain group differences in social status. Although there is no shortage of evidence that this is what people think, we shall see that modern genetic analysis shows it is not true.

  In a survey of 1,200 Americans designed to explore people’s understanding of genetics and ethnicity, the majority agreed with the (false) statement that: ‘Two people from the same race will always be more gen
etically similar to each other than two people from different races.’388 A much larger majority also believed (wrongly) that: ‘Our genes tell us which race we belong to.’ Since the international collaborative project to sequence the human genome was completed in 2003, we have learned a great deal about our genetic similarities and differences as a species. One of the basic truths to emerge is that, of all the genetic differences between individuals across the world, the vast majority are found within any population or ethnic group rather than between groups. Between 85 and 90 per cent of the small amount of genetic variation which exists between human beings is found within each continent. Differences between ethnic groups account for only the remaining 10–15 per cent of variation.389 Hence, most of the genetic similarities and differences between, for example, a Masai from East Africa and an Englishman, are likely to be individual differences rather than differences between those two populations.

  Skin colour is one of the few genetic exceptions. The main differences in skin colour of the world’s populations are adaptations to climatic differences. But, despite widespread misunderstandings, skin colour is a very poor guide to other genetic characteristics. If all genetic characteristics were as visible as skin colour, we would see that 80–90 per cent of all human genetic variations occur in all geographical populations. That was true even before the massive mixing of populations that has taken place over the last generation or so with the advent of modern travel.