Status Anxiety Read online

  Later that same evening, Nixon was invited to appear live on Soviet television, an occasion he used to expound on the advantages of American life. Shrewdly, he did not begin his speech by touting democracy or human rights; instead he spoke of money and material progress. Nixon explained that in just a few hundred years, Western countries had managed, through enterprise and industry, to overcome the poverty and famine that had gripped the world until the middle of the eighteenth century and continued even up to the present day to plague many other nations. Americans had purchased 56 million television sets and 143 million radios, he informed his Soviet listeners, a large number of whom did not have private bathrooms or possess so much as a kettle. The members of the average American family could buy nine new dresses and suits and fourteen new pairs of shoes every year, he noted, and some 31 million families owned their own homes. In the United States, houses could be had in a thousand different architectural styles, most boasting greater square footage than the television studio they were broadcasting from. Sitting next to Nixon, an infuriated Khrushchev clenched his fists and mouthed,“Nyet! Nyet!”—adding under his breath, according to one account, “Ëb’ tvoyu babushky” (“Go fuck your grandmother”).

  2.

  Khrushchev’s protestation notwithstanding, Nixon’s statistics were accurate. In the two centuries preceding his speech, the countries of the West had witnessed the fastest and most dramatic elevation of living standards in human history.

  The majority of the population of medieval and early modern Europe had belonged to the peasant class. Impoverished, undernourished, cold and fearful while alive, they were usually dead—following some further agony—before their fortieth birthday. After a lifetime of work, their most valuable possession might have been a cow, a goat or a pot. Famine was never far off, and disease was rife, among the most common conditions being rickets, ulcers, tuberculosis, leprosy, abscesses, gangrene, tumours and cankers.

  3.

  Then, in early-eighteenth-century Britain, the great Western transformation began. Thanks to new farming techniques (including crop rotation, scientific stock breeding and land consolidation), yields began to increase sharply. Between 1700 and 1820, Britain’s agricultural productivity doubled, releasing capital and manpower that flowed into the cities to be invested in industry and trade. The invention of the steam engine and the cotton power loom modified not only working practices but social expectations. Towns exploded in size. In 1800, only one city in the British Isles, London, could boast a population of more than a hundred thousand; by 1891, twenty-three English cities would make that claim. Goods and services that had formerly been the exclusive preserve of the elite were made available to the masses. Luxuries became decencies, and decencies necessities. Daniel Defoe, travelling around southern England in 1745, noted the proliferation of large new shops with enticing window displays and tempting offerings. Whereas for much of recorded history fashion had remained static for decades at a time, it now became possible to identify specific styles for every passing year (in England in 1753, for example, purple was in vogue for women’s gowns; in 1754, it was the turn of white linen with a pink pattern; in 1755, dove grey was the rage).

  The nineteenth century expanded on and spread the British consumer revolution. Gigantic department stores opened throughout Europe and America: the Bon Marché and Au Printemps in Paris, Selfridge’s and Whiteley’s in London, Macy’s in New York. All were designed to appeal to the new industrial middle class. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony marking the opening of a twelve-storey Marshall Field’s in Chicago in 1902, the manager, Gordon Selfridge, proclaimed, “We have built this great institution for ordinary people, so that it can be their store, their downtown home, their buying headquarters.” It was not intended, he emphasised, just for the “swagger rich.”

  Central staircase, Bon Marché department store, Paris, 1880

  A host of technological inventions helped to stretch mental horizons even as they altered the patterns of everyday life: the old cyclical view of the world, wherein one expected next year to be much like (and just as bad as) last, gave way to the notion that mankind could progress yearly towards perfection. To list only a few of these inventions:

  CORNFLAKES, patented by J. H. Kellogg in 1895 (Kellogg had hit upon the concept by accident, when the grain mixture he served to inmates in his sanatorium unexpectedly hardened and then shattered into flakes)

  the CAN OPENER, patented in 1870

  the SAFETY PIN, invented in 1849

  the SEWING MACHINE, developed by I. M. Singer in 1851 (ready-made clothes would become more common from the 1860s; machine-made underclothes would be introduced in the 1870s)

  the TYPEWRITER, invented in 1867 (the first full-length manuscript to be typed was Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883)

  PROCESSED FOODS: By the 1860s, the British company Crosse & Blackwell was producing twenty-seven thousand gallons of ketchup a year. In the early 1880s, the chemist Alfred Bird came up with an eggless custard powder. Blancmange powder was developed in the 1870s, and jelly crystals in the 1890s.

  LIGHTING: Stearic candles were used from the 1830s, replacing the much shorter-lived tallow-dip candles of old.

  SANITATION: In 1846, Doulton began manufacturing glazed stoneware pipes, which sparked a revolution in metropolitan sewerage. By the late 1870s, public toilets had begun to spring up in Europe and America. George Jennings’s famous “pedestal vase” of 1884 stunned the public with its ability to wash away, as its advertisement put it, “ten apples and a flat sponge with a two-gallon flush.”

  George Jennings, pedestal vase, 1884

  the TELEPHONE, invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1875

  DRY CLEANING, invented in 1849 began manufacturing glazed Jolly-Bellin, who accidentally spilt turpentine on a tablecloth and found that on the patch the spill covered, stains had disappeared (by 1866, Pullars of Perth was offering a postal two-day dry-cleaning service anywhere in the British Isles and had improved on Jolly-Bellin’s cleaning fluid with a formula combining petroleum and benzine).

  4.

  Material progress accelerated still further in the twentieth century. In his English Journey (1934), J. B. Priestley observed that a new England had taken shape, a country of arterial roads and bungalows whose inhabitants, for the most part ordinary workers, read tabloid newspapers, listened to the radio, spent their leisure hours shopping and looked forward to rising incomes year after year. “In this England, for the first time,” he asserted,“Jack and Jill are nearly as good as their master and mistress.”

  George Orwell, in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), sketched a similar picture of the Western material revolution:“Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoy the use of good roads, germ-free water, police protection, free libraries and probably free education of a kind. To an increasing extent the rich and the poor read the same books, and they also see the same films and listen to the same radio programmes. The differences in their way of life have been diminished by the mass-production of cheap clothes and improvements in housing. The place to look for the germs of the future England is in light-industry areas and along the arterial roads. In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes—everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great towns—the old pattern is gradually changing into something new. In those vast new wildernesses of glass and brick there is a rather restless, culture-less life, centring round tinned food, Picture Post, the radio and the internal combustion engine.”

  When Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked what one book he would give the Soviet people to teach them about the advantages of American society, he singled out the Sears, Roebuck catalogue.

  Amid the economic expansion that followed the Second World War, Westerners, and in particular Americans, became the most privileged, and most harried, consumers on the planet.

  A democratic consumer revolution: Hoover advertisement, February 1933

  Sears, Roebuck catalogue, spring 1934

  Across the United St
ates, new longings were created by the development of shopping malls, which enabled citizens to browse at all hours in climate-controlled environments. When the Southdale Mall opened in Minnesota in 1950, its advertising promised that “every day will be a perfect shopping day at Southdale.”

  By the 1970s, Americans were estimated to be spending more time at the mall than anywhere else other than their workplaces and their Taj Mahals.

  Andreas Gursky,99 cents, 2000

  Equality, Expectation and Envy

  1.

  The benefits of two thousand years of Western civilization are familiar enough: an extraordinary increase in wealth, in food supply, in scientific knowledge, in the availability of consumer goods, in physical security, in life expectancy and economic opportunity. What is perhaps less apparent, and more perplexing, is that these impressive material advances have coincided with a phenomenon left unmentioned in Nixon’s address to his Soviet audience: a rise in the levels of status anxiety among ordinary Western citizens, by which is meant a rise in levels of concern about importance, achievement and income.

  A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense or fear of deprivation. Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough.

  2.

  Such feelings of deprivation may seem less peculiar if we consider the psychology behind the way we decide precisely how much is enough. Our judgement of what constitutes an appropriate limit on anything—for example, on wealth or esteem—is never arrived at independently; instead, we make such determinations by comparing our condition with that of a reference group, a set of people who we believe resemble us. We cannot, it seems, appreciate what we have for its own merit, or even against what our medieval forebears had. We cannot be impressed by how prosperous we are in historical terms. We see ourselves as fortunate only when we have as much as, or more than, those we have grown up with, work alongside, have as friends or identify with in the public realm.

  If we are made to live in a draughty, insalubrious cottage and bend to the harsh rule of an aristocrat occupying a large and well-heated castle, and yet we observe that our equals all live exactly as we do, then our condition will seem normal—regrettable, certainly, but not a fertile ground for envy. If, however, we have a pleasant home and a comfortable job but learn through ill-advised attendance at a school reunion that some of our old friends (there is no more compelling reference group) now reside in houses grander than ours, bought on the salaries they are paid in more enticing occupations than our own, we are likely to return home nursing a violent sense of misfortune.

  It is the feeling that we might, under different circumstances, be something other than what we are—a feeling inspired by exposure to the superior achievements of those whom we take to be our equals—that generates anxiety and resentment. If we are short, say, but live among people of our same height, we will not be unduly troubled by questions of size:

  But if others in our group grow just a little taller than us, we are liable to feel sudden unease and to be gripped by dissatisfaction and envy, even though we have not ourselves diminished in size by so much as a fraction of a millimetre.

  Given the vast inequalities we are daily confronted with, the most notable feature of envy may be that we manage not to envy everyone. There are people whose enormous blessings leave us wholly untroubled, even as others’ negligible advantages become a source of relentless torment for us. We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like—we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our ostensible equals.

  3.

  David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (Edinburgh, 1739): “It is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others which produces envy, but on the contrary, a proximity. A common soldier bears no envy for his general compared to what he will feel for his sergeant or corporal; nor does an eminent writer meet with as much jealousy in common hackney scribblers, as in authors that more nearly approach him. A great disproportion cuts off the relation, and either keeps us from comparing ourselves with what is remote from us or diminishes the effects of the comparison.”

  4.

  It follows that the greater the number of people whom we take to be our equals and compare ourselves to, the more there will be for us to envy.

  If the great political and consumer revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused psychological anguish while vastly improving the material lot of mankind, it was because they were founded on a set of extraordinary new ideals, a practical belief in the innate equality of all human beings and in the unlimited power of anyone to achieve anything. For most of history, the opposite assumption had held sway, with inequality and low expectations being deemed both normal and wise. Very few among the masses had ever aspired to wealth or fulfilment; the rest knew well enough that they were condemned to exploitation and resignation.

  “It is clear that some men are by nature free and others are by nature slaves, and that for these latter, slavery is both expedient and right,” Aristotle declared in his Politics (350 B.C.), voicing an opinion shared by almost all Greek and Roman thinkers and leaders. In the ancient world, slaves and the members of the working classes in general were considered to be not truly human at all but a species of creature, lacking in reason and therefore perfectly fitted to a life of servitude, just as beasts of burden were suited to tilling fields. The notion that they might have rights and aspirations of their own would have been judged by the elite no less absurd than, say, an expression of concern for the thought processes or level of happiness of an ox or an ass.

  The belief that inequality was fair, or at least inescapable, was also subscribed to by the oppressed themselves. With the spread of Christianity during the later Roman Empire, many fell prey to a religion that taught them to accept unequal treatment as part of a natural, unchangeable order. Notwithstanding the egalitarian principles embedded within Christ’s teachings, there was little suggestion on the part of Christian political theorists that the earthly social structure could or should be reformed so that all members of the Church might share more equitably in the wealth of the land. Humans might be equal before God, but this offered no reason to start seeking equality in practice.

  For these theorists, a good Christian society instead took the form of a rigidly stratified monarchy, a design said to reflect the ordering of the celestial kingdom. Just as God wielded absolute power over all creation, from the angels down to the smallest toads, so, too, his appointed rulers on earth were understood to preside over a society where God had given everyone his and her place, from the nobleman down to the farm-hand. To have accused a medieval English aristocrat of “snobbery” for his attitudes to those below him in the hierarchy would have made no sense. A derogatory term for segregation could make an appearance only once a more egalitarian way of looking at people had come to seem a possibility.

  A medieval vision of hierarchy: Jacobello del Fiore, The Coronation of the Virgin in Paradise, 1438

  Sir John Fortescue, a fifteenth-century English jurist, was merely restating an idea taken for granted throughout the medieval period when he explained, “From the highest angel down to the lowest, there is no angel that is without both a superior and inferior; nor from man down to the meanest worm is there any creature which is not in some respect superior to one creature and inferior to another.” To challenge why some were compelled to till the soil while others feasted in banqueting halls was, in the dominant ideology, to challenge the Creator’s will.

  With his Policraticus (1159), John of Salisbury had become the most famous Christian writer to compare society to a human body and to use that analogy to justify a system of natural inequality. In Salisbury’s formulation, every element in the state had an anatomi
cal counterpart: the ruler was the head, the parliament was the heart, the court was the sides, officials and judges were the eyes, ears and tongue, the treasury was the belly and intestines, the army was the hands and the peasantry and labouring classes were the feet. This image reinforced the concept that every member of society had been assigned an unalterable role, a scheme that made it no less ludicrous for a peasant to wish to take up residence in a manor house and have a say in his own governance than for a toe to aspire to be an eye.

  5.

  Only in the middle of the seventeenth century did political thinking begin to venture in a more egalitarian direction.

  In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes contended that the individual predated society and had formed and joined it for his own benefit, willingly surrendering his natural rights in exchange for the protection offered by a group or sovereign. This seminal point would be reiterated a few decades later by John Locke in his Tw o Treatises of Government (1689). God had not, Locke reasoned, bestowed on Adam “private dominion” over the earth; rather, he had given the world “to mankind in common,” for the enjoyment of all. Rulers were the instruments of the people and were fit to be obeyed only insofar as they served their subjects’ interest. Thus was born an astonishing new idea: that governments justify their existence only by promoting possibilities for prosperity and happiness among all those they rule over.

  The theoretical impulse towards political equality and more equitable social and economic opportunities for all, after being in the ether for a century and a half, finally found dramatic, concrete expression in the American Revolution of 1776. Perhaps more than any other event in Western history (even the French Revolution that would succeed it), the “War for Independence” altered forever the basis upon which status was accorded. In a stroke, it transformed American society from a hereditary, aristocratic hierarchy—a sphere in which upward mobility was restricted and a person’s status depended exclusively on the lineage and distinction of his or her family—into a dynamic economy in which status was awarded in direct proportion to the (largely financial) achievements of each new generation.