Status Anxiety Read online

  By 1791, the geographer Jedidiah Morse could describe New England as a place “where every man thinks himself at least as good as his neighbours, and believes that all mankind have, or ought to possess, equal rights.” Even etiquette was democratised. Servants (though not slaves) had ceased addressing their employers as “master” or “mistress,” and in Charleston, South Carolina, the city council had banned the use of the titles “Esq.” and “His Honour.” All American states legislated against primogeniture and granted equal property rights to daughters and widows. The physician-historian David Ramsay, in his “Oration on the Advantages of American Independence,” delivered on 4 July 1778, proposed that the goal of the Revolution had been to establish a society in which “all offices lie open to men of merit of whatever rank or condition. Even the reins of state may be held by the son of the poorest man, if he is possessed of abilities that are equal to this important station.” In his autobiography, Thomas Jefferson avowed that his own energies had been directed towards creating “an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent” to replace the old culture of privilege and, in many cases, brute stupidity.

  Decades later, in Leaves of Grass (1855), Walt Whitman would identify the greatness of America specifically with equality and its citizenry’s native lack of deference: “The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlours, nor even in its newspapers or inventors …but always most in the common people …the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors …the terrible significance of their elections—the President’s taking off his hat to them not they to him…”

  6.

  Still, even enthusiastic admirers of consumer and democratic revolutions could not help but notice a particular problem that seemed to be endemic to the equal societies they created. One of the first to point it out was Alexis de Tocqueville.

  Touring the young United States in the 1830s, the French lawyer and historian discerned an unexpected ill corroding the souls of the citizens of the new republic. Americans had much, he observed, but their affluence did not prevent them from wanting ever more or from suffering whenever they saw that another had something they themselves didn’t. In a chapter of Democracy in America (1835) entitled “Why the Americans Are Often So Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity,” he provided an enduring analysis of the relationships between dissatisfaction and high expectation, between envy and equality:

  “When all prerogatives of birth and fortune have been abolished, when every profession is open to everyone …an ambitious man may think it is easy to launch himself on a great career and feel that he has been called to no common destiny. But this is a delusion which experience quickly corrects. When inequality is the general rule in society, the greatest inequalities attract no attention. But when everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed …That is the reason for the strange melancholy often haunting inhabitants of democracies in the midst of abundance and of that disgust with life sometimes gripping them even in calm and easy circumstances. In France, we are worried about increasing rate of suicides. In America, suicide is rare, but I am told that madness is commoner than anywhere else.”

  Familiar with the limitations of aristocratic societies, Tocqueville felt no nostalgia for the social conditions that had prevailed in America prior to 1776 or in France before 1789. He knew that the populations of the modern West boasted a standard of living far higher than that of the lower classes of medieval Europe. Nevertheless, he suspected that these deprived classes had also had the benefit of a mental calm that their successors would be forever denied:

  “When royal power supported by aristocracies governed nations, society, despite all its wretchedness, enjoyed several types of happiness which are difficult to appreciate today. Having never conceived the possibility of a social state other than the one they knew, and never expecting to become equal to their leaders, the people did not question their rights. They felt neither repugnance nor degradation in submitting to severities, which seemed to them like inevitable ills sent by God. The serf considered his inferiority as an effect of the immutable order of nature. Consequently, a sort of goodwill was established between classes so differently favoured by fortune. One found inequality in society, but men’s souls were not degraded thereby.”

  Democracy, by definition, tore down every barrier to expectation. All members of a democratic society perceived themselves as being theoretically equal, even where the means was lacking to achieve material equality. “In America,” wrote Tocqueville,“I never met a citizen too poor to cast a glance of hope and envy toward the pleasures of the rich.” The poor citizens observed rich ones at close quarters and trusted that they too would one day follow in their footsteps. They were not always wrong. A number of fortunes were made by people from humble beginnings. Exceptions did not, however, make a rule. America still had an underclass. It was just that, unlike the poor of aristocratic societies, poor Americans could no longer see their condition as anything other than a betrayal of their expectations.

  The differing notions of poverty within aristocratic and democratic societies were especially evident, Tocqueville felt, in the attitude of servants towards their masters. In aristocracies, servants often accepted their position with good grace; it was not impossible for them to harbour, in Tocqueville’s words, “high thoughts, strong pride and self-respect.” In democracies, by contrast, the propaganda of the press and public opinion relentlessly promised servants that they, too, could reach the pinnacles of society and make their fortune as industrialists, judges, scientists or even presidents. Although this sense of unbounded opportunity could initially excite a surface cheerfulness in them—particularly in the younger ones—and though it did encourage the most talented or luckiest among them to fulfil their goals, as time passed and the majority failed to raise themselves, Tocqueville noted that their mood darkened, bitterness took hold of and choked their spirit, and their hatred of themselves and their masters grew fierce.

  The rigid hierarchy that had been in place in almost every Western society until the late eighteenth century, denying all hope of social movement except in the rarest of cases, the system glorified by John of Salisbury and John Fortescue, was unjust in a thousand all too obvious ways, but it offered those on the lowest rungs one notable freedom: the freedom not to have to take the achievements of quite so many people in society as reference points—and so find themselves severely wanting in status and importance as a result.

  7.

  It was an American, William James, who, a few decades after Tocqueville’s journey around the United States, first looked from a psychological angle at the problems created by societies which generate unlimited expectations in their members.

  James argued that one’s ability to feel satisfied with oneself does not hang on experiencing success in every area of endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing at things, he suggested; we are humiliated only if we invest our pride and sense of worth in a given aspiration or achievement and then are disappointed in our pursuit of it. Our goals dictate what we will interpret as a triumph and what must count as a catastrophe. James himself, for example, as a professor of psychology at Harvard, took a great deal of pride in being a prominent psychologist. If he should discover that others knew more about psychology than he did, he would, he admitted, feel envy and shame. Conversely, because he had never set himself the task of learning ancient Greek, the knowledge that someone else could translate the whole of Plato’s Symposium whereas he struggled with the opening line was of little concern to him. He explained:

  “With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities. Thus:

  James’s equation illustrates how every rise in our levels of expectation
entails a rise in the dangers of humiliation. What we understand to be normal is critical in determining our chances of happiness. Few things rival the torment of the once-famous actor, the fallen politician or, as Tocqueville might have remarked, the unsuccessful American.

  The equation also hints at two manoeuvres for raising our self-esteem. On the one hand, we may try to achieve more; and on the other, we may reduce the number of things we want to achieve. James pointed to the advantages of the latter approach:

  “To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified. There is a strange lightness in the heart when one’s nothingness in a particular area is accepted in good faith. How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young or slender. ‘Thank God!’ we say,‘ those illusions are gone.’ Everything added to the self is a burden as well as a pride.”

  8.

  Unfortunately for our esteem, societies of the West are not known for their conduciveness to the surrender of pretensions, to the acceptance of age or fat, let alone poverty and obscurity. Their mood urges us to invest ourselves in activities and belongings that our predecessors would have had no thought of. According to James’s equation, by greatly increasing our pretensions, these societies render adequate self-esteem almost impossible to secure.

  The dangers of disappointed expectation must further be increased by any erosion of a faith in a next world. Those who can believe that what happens on earth is but a brief prelude to an eternal existence will offset any tendency to envy with the thought that the success of others is a momentary phenomenon against a backdrop of an eternal life.

  But when a belief in an afterlife is dismissed as a childish and scientifically impossible opiate, the pressure to succeed and find fulfilment will inevitably be intensified by the awareness that one has only a single and frighteningly fleeting opportunity to do so. In such a context, earthly achievements can no longer be seen as an overture to what one may realize in another world; rather, they are the sum total of all that one will ever amount to.

  Resignation regarding the necessary hardships of life was for centuries one of mankind’s most important assets, a bulwark against bitterness that was to be cruelly undermined by the expectations incubated by the modern worldview. In his City of God (A.D. 427), Saint Augustine consolingly codified unhappiness as an immutable feature of existence, part of “the wretchedness of man’s situation,” and poured scorn on “all those theories by which men have tried hard to build up joy for themselves within the misery of this life.” Under Augustine’s influence, the French poet Eustache Deschamps (circa 1338–1410) described life on earth as a

  Time of mourning and of temptation,

  An age of tears, of envy and of torment,

  A time of languor and of damnation …

  Te mps de doleur et de temptacion,

  Aages de plour, d’envie et de tourment,

  Te mps de langour et de dampnacion …

  When informed of the death of his one-year-old son, Philippe the Good (1396–1467), duke of Burgundy, replied in a tone characteristic of many voices in the premodern period: “If only God had deigned to let me die so young, I would have considered myself fortunate.”

  9.

  But the modern age has been less liberal—and less kind—with its pessimism.

  Since the early nineteenth century, Western writers and publishers have endeavoured to inspire—and in the process have unintentionally saddened—their readers with autobiographies of self-made heroes and compendia of advice directed at the not-yet-made, morality tales of wholesale personal transformation and the rapid attainment of vast wealth and great happiness.

  Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (left incomplete at his death, in 1790) was perhaps the progenitor of the genre, recounting how a penniless young man, one of seventeen children of a Boston candle maker, had ended up accruing, entirely by his wits, not only a fortune but the friendship and respect of some of the most important people of his day. Franklin’s history of self-improvement, and the analects he drew from it (“Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise;” “There are no gains without pains”), belonged to a vast literature intended to edify readers possessed of modest means and grand ambitions. Among the countless later titles in this category were William Mathews’s Getting On in the World (1874), William Maher’s On the Road to Riches (1876), Edwin T. Freedley’s The Secret of Success in Life (1881), Lyman Abbott’s How to Succeed (1882), William Speer’s The Law of Success (1885) and Samuel Fallows’s The Problem of Success for Young Men and How to Solve It (1903).

  The trend has not abated. “Right now you can make a decision,” explained Anthony Robbins (Awaken the Giant Within, 1991),“to go back to school, to master dancing or singing, to take control of your finances, to learn to fly a helicopter… . If you truly decide to, you can do almost anything. So if you don’t like the current relationship you’re in, make the decision now to change it. If you don’t like your current job, change it.”

  Robbins offered his own story as evidence that radical transformation was possible. He had risen from humble and unhappy origins: in his early twenties, he worked as a janitor and lived in a small, dirty apartment. Forty pounds overweight, he had no girlfriend and spent his evenings alone at home listening to Neil Diamond. Then, one day, he abruptly resolved to revolutionise his life and discovered a mental “power” that would enable him to do so:

  “I used [this power] to take back control of my physical well-being and permanently rid myself of thirty-eight pounds of fat. Through it, I attracted the woman of my dreams, married her and created the family I desired. I used this power to change my income from subsistence level to over one million dollars a year. It moved me from my tiny apartment (where I was washing my dishes in the bathtub because there was no kitchen) to my family’s current home, the Del Mar Castle.”

  Anyone, Robbins assured his audience, could follow his example, but most particularly those lucky enough to live in democratic and capitalist societies, in which “we all have the capability to carry out our dreams.”

  Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within, 1991

  10.

  The burgeoning of the mass media from the late nineteenth century helped to raise expectations even higher. At his newspaper’s launch in 1896, Alfred Harmsworth, the founder of Britain’s Daily Mail, candidly characterised his ideal reader as a man in the street “worth one hundred pounds per annum” who could be enticed to dream of being “tomorrow’s thousand pound man.” In America, meanwhile, the Ladies’ Home Journal (first published in 1883), Cosmopolitan (1886), Munsey’s (1889) and Vogue (1892) brought an expensive life within the imaginative reach of all. Readers of fin de siècle American Vogue, for example, were told who had been aboard Nourmahal, John Jacob Astor’s yacht, after the America’s Cup race, what the most fashionable young ladies were wearing at boarding school, who threw the best parties in Newport and Southampton and what to serve with caviar at dinner (potato and sour cream).

  The opportunity to study the lives of people of higher status and forge a connection with them was also increased by the development of radio, film and television. By the 1930s, Americans were collectively spending some 150 million hours per week at the cinema and almost a billion hours listening to the radio. In 1946, 0.02 percent of American households owned television sets; by 2000, the figure stood at 98 percent.

  The new media created longings not only through their content but also through the advertisements they imposed on their audiences. From its amateurish beginnings in the United States in the 1830s, advertising had by the end of the nineteenth century grown into a business worth $500 million a year. In 1900, a giant Coca-Cola sign was erected on one side of Niagara Falls, while an advert for Mennen’s Toilet Powder was suspended over the gorge.

  11.

  When defenders of modern societies have sought to make a case to sceptics, their task has not been difficult: they have had only to point to the enormous wealth that modern societ
ies are able to generate for their members.

  In his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith sarcastically compared the awe-inspiring productivity of proto-industrial societies with the bare subsistence of primitive hunting-and-gathering ones. The latter were, by Smith’s account, steeped in terrible poverty. Harvests rarely yielded enough food, there were chronic shortages of basic necessities and, in times of serious crisis, children, the elderly and the poor were often left “to be devoured by wild beasts.” Modern societies, in contrast, thanks to their innovative mode of production—described by Smith as “the division of labour”—could provide for all their members. Only a romantic ignoramus could wish to live anywhere else; in such a society “a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.”

  12.

  However, twenty-two years before the publication of Smith’s treatise, a lone, shrill, eccentric yet unsettlingly persuasive voice had been raised in defense of an unlikely hero: the savage. Was it possible, asked Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), that it was in fact the hunter-gatherer and not, as everyone had grown used to believing, the modern worker who was the better off?