THE ORDINARY, DISCIPLINED SELF
My interviewees told me they spent anywhere from $120,000 to $800,000 per year, usually without sticking to or even drawing up a budget.12 But they interpret their consumption as basic and family-oriented and draw boundaries against excess, materialism, and ostentation. They work to suppress unruly desires. They frame “ridiculous” expenditures as special “treats” or situate them in relation to the choices of others who spend more, not less. Therefore they can continue to see themselves as living an “ordinary” life, even as their spending ratchets inexorably upward. As I described in chapter 2, the desire to be ordinary and reasonable further illuminates their wish to be morally worthy, complementing the desire to be productive, and thus legitimately entitled.
It might be tempting to read these interpretations solely as justifications of spending that is “really” motivated by status competition or materialism. And there are likely more elements of status consumption in these spending habits than my interviewees were willing to recognize in talking with me. But status is not their only motivation or the only dimension along which they relate to others. Certainly their repeated negative characterizations of those who spend more suggest that Veblenian conspicuous consumption is not at work. Although we see some evidence of the more Bourdieuian idea that they seek distinction—which can be indicated by consuming less or differently—the story remains more complicated. These accounts are marked by deep ambivalence about legitimate needs. Consumption is at least sometimes driven by fears of being judged by others and a wish to fit in with peer groups. And these groups help the wealthy to define what kind of lifestyle is “normal,” not only to set parameters for competition.
Indeed, in their allusions to basic needs and “normal” lifestyles, these consumers are trying to avoid seeming different. By eschewing the most visible and morally transgressive elite lifestyles—those of “real” housewives or wolves of Wall Street—they can almost be seen as not wealthy (a word many would never use to describe themselves) because they don’t occupy the symbolic space of wealth. Instead, they move to occupy the moral legitimacy of the middle class. This idea of the disciplined, hard-working, “normal” self thus begins to split off from particular practices of consumption. If one can claim to have the right affect—to be an ordinary person with the “mindset” of working hard and spending with care—the fact that one has so much more than others comes not to matter. Yet, as I show in chapter 4, sometimes the morally worthy self also has to acknowledge privilege.
4
“GIVING BACK,”
AWARENESS,
AND IDENTITY
Frances, as we have seen, is a stay-at-home mother with three children and assets in the tens of millions. Asked if she deserved her lifestyle, she responded, “I couldn’t say that I deserve this, no. … I don’t know that anybody does. I mean, the amount of money that—once you have money and can invest that money, the returns get so much bigger over time. There just is such a disparity. You know, when you look at how much money CEOs are paid in America—do they deserve that? Absolutely not. But is that what the market bears? Yes. Do I think that the government should be taxing them? Like, I don’t agree that they should necessarily have to—I mean, I understand we pay slightly higher tax. But should our tax rate be 75 percent, and everyone else’s 5? I think that’s wrong. Because I do believe in a market economy. But I definitely am aware that it’s insane how much more money—I mean, the fact that I don’t have a budget, or don’t think about—I recognize that that’s incredibly privileged and foreign to most people. And, I don’t know, I hope that by us giving back and doing volunteer work, you know, we help to spread it back around.”
Nadine, her partner, and their two kids lived primarily on wealth that came from Nadine’s family. Nadine told me, as we saw in chapter 2, “I still feel guilty about having money. I feel a lot less guilty than I did. Because I think guilt is, like, unproductive. You know what I mean?” She continued, “I mean, I’m lucky I have it. I should be happy. I should try and do something with it. I should try and give back in whatever way I can. I feel like we’ve done that in a whole series of ways, through [paid] work for ten years, for both of us. And through creating a gift fund, and giving back. And just trying to be really generous in the world. … I mean, there’s a difference between guilt and, like, being aware, and conscious, and having a conscience.”
In many ways, Frances and Nadine are very different. Frances is politically conservative and lives mainly on wealth her husband accumulated through paid work. Her belief in the “market economy” helps her justify the earnings of CEOs and, by extension, her own household income, even though she doesn’t think anyone “deserves” the kind of wealth she has. She is opposed to paying higher taxes. Nadine is a progressive inheritor, with more conflicts about having money and a more critical view of inequality, who says she’d be happy to pay higher taxes. But both articulate the same key condition for deserving their wealth: “giving back.”
In fact, nearly all my respondents alluded to giving back in their implicit and explicit descriptions of worthy personhood.1 This obligation constitutes the third dimension of the legitimately entitled self, along with working hard and consuming prudently. But in contrast to these imperatives, giving back might acknowledge privilege more explicitly, because one must receive something in order to owe something. Implicit and explicit allusions to “middleness” become more difficult. This chapter looks at how my interviewees understood giving back and at the extent to which their understandings and practices involved recognizing privilege.
“Giving back” is a fairly general, and generic, cultural value in the United States, one not limited to wealthy people. The concept had various meanings for my respondents. For some it meant “contributing” in a general sense (echoing the emphasis on contribution we saw in chapter 2). Justin said, for example, “I feel a sense of an obligation to society, just to contribute. Not necessarily financially. Just to add something, instead of taking it away.” Some parents also described raising children as a contribution to society.
Such descriptions do not link giving back to having privilege. But some of those I spoke with did make this connection. Caroline had grown up in a wealthy family and inherited several hundred thousand dollars. She said, “I think [money] comes with responsibility! We have opportunities other people don’t have. So that’s great! Take advantage of it!” I asked, “What exactly is the responsibility?” She responded, “To contribute. I mean, everyone has to figure out their own way, right? What are you good at, and what calls to you. … Generally, to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.” Her idea of giving back had to do with a nonprofit she had started to support community development. Some others I talked with—like Nadine in the opening vignette—similarly saw paid work in socially responsible occupations as their way of “giving back” and compensating for their privilege.
Beyond allusions to work and parenting, two central aspects of giving back stood out across my interviewees’ accounts: first, traditional philanthropy and volunteerism, and, second, “awareness” of privilege. Asked what “giving back” meant, Sara, the inheritor, described both facets: “I guess it means different things to me in different ways. I mean, on a very basic level, just being a good—sort of, giving back financially. Giving of your time. Very traditional, basic, like, volunteering kind of stuff.” She hesitated, and then continued: “More broadly, I would [say] having a consciousness about, particularly, you know, class issues and wealth and money. … So I guess what I mean by ‘giving back’ is, like, just some awareness. … Some recognition.” Both of these elements also appear in Frances’s and Nadine’s accounts.
As I’ll show, the practices and affects associated with awareness and philanthropy fall along a continuum of public recognition of privilege. Awareness recognizes privilege very explicitly, but it is internal, and therefore essentially private. In interaction with others, being “aware” means not making other pe
ople feel bad about having less or treating them differently. This imperative is a variation on the Golden Rule, to treat others as you want to be treated, which is a prominent cultural norm in the United States (and elsewhere). But this reciprocity usually means treating everyone the same. Thus the transmutation from private awareness to public egalitarianism silences difference rather than acknowledging it. Although the social norm of equal, reciprocal treatment serves to avoid shaming those who have less by not drawing attention to their status, its function of obscuring difference also serves to mitigate discomfort in those with more.2
Traditional practices of philanthropy and volunteering, however, are likely to be more public acknowledgements of advantage. Many of the people I spoke with gave away significant amounts of money and time and saw philanthropy and volunteering as important aspects of their identities. But here, too, they recognized privilege in different ways and with varying degrees of public visibility. People in more upward-oriented earner families, especially stay-at-home mothers, tended to be relatively public about their philanthropy and volunteerism, which was taken for granted in their communities, even though they tended to talk with me less freely about their social position. In contrast, inheritors, especially the more “downward-oriented,” were often very generous philanthropically, but they described having to come to terms with their identities as wealthy people in order to develop a philanthropic practice. That is, even though they recognized their privilege more openly in conversation with me, their very consciousness of privilege made them more conflicted about public philanthropy. Very few practiced the traditional volunteering of the stay-at-home mothers. Finally, a significant proportion of my interviewees, in contrast to both these groups, gave away relatively small amounts of money and did not see charitable work as central to their identities, although it seemed possible that they would become more philanthropically active in the future.
I also ask in this chapter whether it is possible, or desirable, from the perspective of these interviewees, to use giving back to challenge structural arrangements that ultimately benefit them. Sociologists have tended to question the motivations and functions of philanthropy and volunteerism, often arguing that these actions both depend on and justify class privilege and that philanthropy essentially reproduces class divisions.3 People I interviewed in the more traditional group bear out this skepticism, as they tend to focus their giving and volunteering either on their own communities, especially their children’s schools, or on organizations that help the very poor (thereby ameliorating the worst effects of capitalist inequality rather than changing the system). However, donors I interviewed who are more politically critical articulate a sense of helplessness about challenging the conditions of their own privilege. They are attuned to and frustrated by the limits of their own capacity to make meaningful change.
AWARENESS AND APPRECIATION
To begin with, then, my interviewees often invoked “awareness” as a responsibility of privilege. This concept meant, first, not taking their advantages for granted. When I asked Frances, for example, “Has it been hard for you to get used to being more well-off than you were growing up?,” she said, “I hope I’m never used to it. … I would never want to take any of this for granted.” Penny told me she and her husband were a bit torn about buying a second home rather than renting, as they had been in the summer. The house they really wanted cost $5 million, which they found “ridiculous”; they had seen another place they liked, but they weren’t sure the owners would sell it. She said, “These are amazing problems to have. I never want to lose sight of that.” To become “used to” or “lose sight of” privilege means somehow to become embedded in it, perhaps to have it become too much of one’s identity.
Awareness not only entails knowing intellectually that one is privileged but also feeling lucky, appreciative, and grateful. Gary told me that he and his wife shared “fundamental values,” including “that you should never forget the privilege that you have, and be aware. Thankful.” Nicole told me she sometimes talked with her cousins about her extended family’s advantaged financial situation. She said, “I mean, we’re incredibly grateful. To be able to go to [her prestigious college], without having to work your ass off? It’s like, that is huge. And I knew it at the time. I know it now. Like, knowing more people who, like, had to work their butts off. Or who have student loans. I mean, all that kind of stuff is just such a big deal. So, we are, all of us, incredibly grateful.”
Nicholas articulated the moral imperative of appreciation very explicitly. He told me, of his Manhattan townhouse, “I sit around and I appreciate it. … I go, ‘Wow. I don’t deserve it. This is amazing. Like, nobody deserves this. No one should feel entitled to such luxury.’ Not like, ‘I’m worthless, I don’t deserve it.’ Like, generally speaking, how dare anyone feel entitled to such space and light and wonderfulness? … I feel super, super lucky.” He also said, “A pox on anyone who would feel entitled to such things and not feel appreciative of them.” Though he doesn’t think anyone deserves what he has, Nicholas clearly suggests that to feel entitled rather than grateful is to be especially undeserving. Penny told me, “I don’t think the money has changed us, in our core, that dramatically. I think we still think, ‘Oh my God. This is so crazy.’ Like, we don’t feel entitled, at all.” Again, maintaining this distance between one’s core self and one’s privilege serves somehow to keep illegitimate entitlement at bay. This affective stance also echoes the desire not to “need” this lifestyle, which I explored in chapter 3.
The people I talked with also contrasted themselves more explicitly with wealthy people who did not express this kind of mindfulness about privilege. As I mentioned in chapter 1, Betsy and her friends jokingly referred to themselves as the “working class” because their lifestyles depended on continued earnings and hard work. She also distinguished her level of awareness from theirs. She said, of her friends, “I feel like that group of people cares more about groundedness. And understanding that [ours] is an outlier situation. This is not how the vast majority of the people of the world live.” As we have seen, the notion of “groundedness” implies some kind of symbolic link to the reality of those with less.
My interviewees also tied consciousness of privilege to thoughtful, prudent spending of the sort I discussed in chapter 3. Nadine, for example, said, “When you have more money, it’s tempting to stop thinking about it. And to be like, ‘Well, boy. [I have], like, millions of dollars. So I don’t really need to think about this, and this handbag’s nice. Why do I need to torture myself over whether or not I should get it?’” But, she said, “I still think that it’s really important to kind of interrogate every—especially every expensive—thing you’re doing. Like, is this really worth it?” Warren told me that his financial caution came partly from his working-class upbringing. He added, “I also think it’s important not to piss away money. Because we have a lot of money. And people don’t have money. And you’ve got to, sort of, act respectfully and responsibly with it.” To act “respectfully” with money appears to mean being both prudent with it and aware of those with less, and thus constitutes a moral obligation.
Wendy, the corporate lawyer, similarly connected an awareness of privilege to her consumption decisions. She described herself and her husband as “struggling with how we feel about the type of money we’re spending, and trying to be conscious about it, like, careful, and be grounded and have the right values—you know, recognize how lucky we are—but also not live life with a hair shirt.” Here “conscious” connotes both prudent (“careful”) and “grounded,” with the “right values.” Wendy also explicitly contrasts her awareness of “how lucky we are” with the behavioral practice of “not living life with a hair shirt.” That is, thinking about being fortunate is like the compromise point between a lack of awareness and concretely giving up enough to cause discomfort.4
In some cases, awareness intensified and began to feel like conflict. A few of my subjects seemed almost to “tortu
re” themselves, to use Nadine’s word. But, perhaps counterintuitively, experiencing this internal struggle sometimes seemed to help them feel better about their privilege. As we have seen, Beatrice had inherited wealth from her family, and she was struggling to decide whether to buy a second home and whether to send her child to private school. She and her husband could afford it, though it would have meant spending some of her inherited wealth rather than living on their combined income of about $250,000. Having grown up around people she thought cared only about money, Beatrice strongly disliked this orientation. Living on their income was important, she said, because “I feel like it’s a commitment to the life choices we’ve made.” By “life choices” she mainly meant her choice to work in a nonprofit, which she characterized as a decision “not to make my life about the earning of money.”
Beatrice added, “I feel like it was like an ethical commitment, to choose the kind of career that I chose, and that suddenly giving myself freewheeling access to this [the private school and the second home], without some sort of wrestling with it, is a little bit of a betrayal to my ethic.” I asked, “If you had chosen to be an investment banker, then it seems like you would think it would be more legitimate to have this money …” She interrupted me, saying, “Yes, you know why? Because I’d be an asshole.” I responded, “So does it make you an asshole to spend the money that you do have without conflict?” After a long pause, she responded, “Yes, I think it does. I think that that’s what I’m concerned about.” I asked, “Are you concerned that other people think that, or just you think that?” “No,” she said, “it’s really mostly what I think.” Beatrice seems to feel that her entitlement to spend this money rests on “wrestling with” these decisions—on imagining that she might make a different choice—which means she is not taking her advantages for granted. The struggle itself is a moral obligation. But ultimately she and her husband did send their child to private school, and they did buy the second home.
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