Beyond Rivalry

Even from inside the house. Here's why.

Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004).  The book generally aligns with mimetic theory and Girardian ideas; I've added a G near comments that seem to do so particularly.

This is the ninth post on this topic; the first is here.

PART II: Solutions

CHAPTER 3 - POLITICS

"Every society holds certain groups of people in high esteem while condemning or ignoring others, whether on the basis of their skills, accent, temperament, gender, physical attributes, ancestry, religion or skin colour. Yet such arbitrary and subjective criteria for success and failure are far from permanent or universal." G    It's the job of the status quo to make them seem absolutely universal and permanent.

Rather eccentric timeline: of who and what has been held in high status:

400 BC Sparta: Soldiers: Men, aggressive, vigorously bisexual, not family men, not business men.

Western Europe 476-1096: Saints: followers of Jesus Christ, shunning of material goods, suppression of sexual feelings, extreme modesty.

Western Europe 1096-1500 (after first Crusade): Knights: Wealthy, killed people and animals. Lovers, poets. Prized virgins. Loved money but not from trade, only from land.

England 1750-1890: Gentlemen: Dancing, dabblers, not merchants. Supposed to like families but OK to have mistresses. Cultivation of languid elegance. Hair. Women seen as taller children.

Brasil, 1600-1960 (Cubeo tribe): Men who spoke little, did not dance or play a part in raising children, and were good at killing jaguars. High status - hunters; low status - fishermen. Shameful to even be seen helping wife make a root-based meal.

London, Sydney, New York, LA, 2004: Anyone who can accumulate money, power and renown through their own accomplishments in some sector of the commercial world. Because culture is now seen to be meritocratic, financial achievements are understood to be deserved. The ability to accumulate wealth is proof of creativity, stamina, intelligence. Other virtues, like godliness and humility, don't matter much.

By what principles is status distributed?: 

(1) by threatening and bullying 

(2) by defending others (strength, patronage, control of resources, etc.). Where safety is in short supply, soldiers and knights are celebrated. Where the livelihood of the majority depends on trade and high-tech, entrepreneurs and scientists are celebrated.  

(3) by impressing others with goodness, talent, skill or wisdom (saints, European footballers)

(4) by appealing to conscience or sense of decency of peers - by moral authority. 

Ideals are not cast in stone; the process by which they alter is politics. 

For us in the western world now, prosperity = worthiness. And poverty = moral deficiency. Money is ethical. This equation of prosperity and worthiness seems "natural" to us but it only came into being as "the way it is" in the mid-1800s. 

Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (1899): "Wealth has become the conventional basis of esteem." Material goods confer honour (hence conspicuous consumption, to give evidence to one and all of one's 'true' worth).

Some have fought the idea of meritocracy, the idea that wealth = virtue, including most notable John Ruskin, and also  George Bernard Shaw, Michel de Montaigne. 

Modern life also posits a connection between making money and being happy. This connection rests on three assumptions:

(1) that we know what we need to be happy and so we know what careers and projects will help us flourish as humans. Rousseau refutes this (in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 1754):  We are actually, he says, "dangerously inept at deciphering our own needs. Our souls rarely articulate what they must have in order to be fulfilled, and when they manage to mumble something, their requests are likely to be misfounded or contradictory .... Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied...."   G 

(2) that all of the occupational possibilities and consumer goods available to us are actually a helpful array that's capable of satisfying our essential needs.

(3) that the more money we have, the more goods and services we can afford, which increases our odds of happiness.

(de Botton writes more about this here: "Americans Were the First People to Worship Work") 

Current Events Tie-In: "Will economic growth make Americans happier?" (23 June 2008, Chicago Tribune) 

Some posit, in contrast to the money-happiness connection, that those who live in a "natural state" understand themselves much better. (Part of the 'noble savage' idea) E.g., the native Americans, who lived with little yet were reputed to be content. But within only a few decades of the arrival of the first Europeans, what came to matter to the Indians was the amassing of weapons, jewellery and whiskey. This didn't happen spontaneously; the European traders deliberately sought to foster desires in Indians to motivate them to provide animal pelts for the European market.

In 1690, the English naturalist and minister John Banister noted that the Indians of Hudson Bay area had been successfully tempted by traders to want "many things which they had not wanted before."  As the volume of trade increased, suicide rates and alcoholism also rose, fracturing communities. Indian leaders called on tribes to renounce their addiction to European luxuries.

Defenders of commercial society argue that no one forces anyone to buy anything. Rousseau emphasised how strongly predisposed humans are to listen to others' suggestions about how to think and what to value.  G  

Advertisers et al. actually insist that their trades are ineffective because the population is so independent-minded. This is not shown to be true, based on what people once said were luxuries that they quickly came to see as necessities:

Percentage of Americans who say these are necessities: 

2nd car in 1970: 20% / 2nd car in 2000: 59%

dishwasher in 1970: 8% / dishwasher in 2000: 44%

A/C in car in 1970:  11% / A/C in car in 2000:  65%

A/C in home in 1970: 22% / A/C in home in 2000: 70%

more than one telephone in 1970: 2%  / more than one telephone in 2000: 78%

(Salon article about marketing -- "commercial persuasion industry" -- and consumerism: We Are What We Buy: "'We can talk all we want about being brand-proof ... but our behavior tells a different story.'")

"Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another" and we're not aware of it. G   We think achievements and acquisitions will satisfy us but they don't. Not only can we not stop envying, but we envy the wrong things!

John Ruskin excoriated 19th-century Britons for being wealth-obsessed. He said he was, too, but he was obsessed by being wealthy in kindness, curiosity, sensitivity, humility, godliness, and intelligence -- which in the aggregate he called "life."

In his conception, the wealthiest Britons would not be automatically merchants or landowners but rather those who felt the keenest wonder gazing at the stars or who were best able to alleviate the suffering of others. (in Unto This Last) 

Ideology and Political Change 

Lots of ideas have been seen as so immutable as to be 'natural', e.g.,:

• men's rule over women (Earl Percy, 1873)
• European people are better than Africans (Lord Cromer, 1911)
• women don't have sexual feeling (Sir William Acton, 1857)
• Africans are naturally subordinate to whites (Alexander Stephens, 1861)

Dominant beliefs are at great pains to suggest that they are no more alterable than the orbits of the sun. They are ideological -- "a statement that subtly promotes a bias while pretending to be perfectly neutral." The ruling ideas of every age are those of the ruling class; but they can't seem to rule too forcefully. The ideas have to seem natural and unforced, just "the way it is."

Ideology, like a colourless, odorless gas, is pervasive and yet unnoticed as what it is. It makes light of its perhaps unjust or illogical take on the world and meekly implies that it's only presenting age-old truths.

"When institutions and ideas are held to be 'natural,' responsibility for whatever suffering they cause must necessarily either belong to no specific agent or else to the injured parties themselves." 

Virginia Woolf, when not allowed into a college library in England on the basis of being female, became sceptical of the feminine role model she grew up with, the image of a woman who was always charming and utterly unselfish. The model woman sacrificed herself daily. She took the worst piece of meat, the most uncomfortable seat, etc. "She was so constituted that she would never have a mind or wish of her own, but prefer to sympathise always with the minds and wishes of others."

"The enthusiasm for materialism, entrepreneurship and meritocracy that saturates the newspapers and television schedules of our own day reflects nothing more complex than the interests of those in charge of the system by which the majority earn their living."

Video at The Onion News Network's "Today Now!" morning show.

Too funny (because it's true) not to post. I actually do care about the 2008 elections and will vote (as always), but I have no interest in talking about it with anyone, ever.

Watch for the text boxes "About the Candidates."

Ben Jervey (at GOOD magazine) details his travel on Amtrak from New York to San Francisco in "Train in Vain.' I've taken this trip (and the similar one through the south, on both the Southwest Chief  to the Coast Starlight and on The Crescent to the Sunset Limited to the Coast Starlight) 7 or 8 times and can certainly affirm his reporting of the delays and about the rumours, anxious speculation, chatter, and blame-fixing about why there's a delay and how long it will last that hum in the background every moment the train is stopped -- and sometimes start before the delay even occurs, as word of the upcoming halt filters from the staff to the passengers. I think he didn't comment enough about the abiding and oft inbreaking sense of grandeur, beauty, time and space dislocation, relinquishment of control, and the temporary community-forming (for good and ill) that Amtrak travel affords.

I hadn't seen the energy comparisons to air travel and highway travel before.

I recommend the article if you are thinking of making a long-distance Amtrak trip.

I was on a train from Boston to San Francisco (either January 2005 or Nov. 2005) that was stuck for many hours over two days in snowstorms out west, and which looked like it would be at least 6 or 8 hours late into San Francisco (actually Oakland; there is no train station per se in SF); somehow, miraculously it still seems to me, we made up the time through the mountains and arrived almost exactly on time. Another trip, same route in reverse (Jan. 2005), we weren't so lucky; because of some problem with the tracks ahead of Denver (something on them? a freight train stuck on them? can't recall right now ...), we were stopped in Denver and shuttled to hotels for the night, finally continuing in the morning. For at least one person on the train, this delay may have been fatal: she was scheduled at the Mayo Clinic for an appointment concerning her brain tumour, which is why she couldn't fly or drive herself. She had had to make the appointment months in advance and didn't think she could get another one before it was too late for her. We sat at the Wynkoop Brewing Company restaurant bar and she (and her young son, who was travelling with her) cried and tried to figure out what to do. She didn't re-board the shuttle or the train with the rest of us, so maybe she came up with a viable plan.

There's a certain haunting quality about the "relationships" one makes when travelling, when spending 12 or 24 or 48 hours or more sitting beside someone, sleeping beside them (if you have a coach and not a sleeper ticket), sometimes  exchanging salient bits of life history in hours of conversation, sometimes not speaking at all (except 'excuse me' from time to time when crawling across legs or bumping each other) but perhaps reading over their shoulder, watching them do word puzzles, listening to their side of the cell phone conversation, and they you. They aren't relationships in the long-term, but there is an alchemy, a separation and a joining together, that inhabits these transitional, transient, in-transit meetings.

Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the eighth post on this topic; the first is here.

PART II: Solutions

CHAPTER 2 - ART

    Literature                                                                                                                                                        

The history of art is filled with challenges to the status quo.

Mansfield Park, Jane Austen (1814):  The rich and well-mannered are not ipso facto good, and the poor and unschooled are not necessarily bad.

"Almost every great novel of the 19th and 20th centuries stages an assault on, or at the very least harbours scepticism regarding, the accepted social hierarchy, and each offers some sort of redefinition of precedence according to moral worth rather than financial assets or bloodlines."

Examples: Balzac - Le Père Goriot (1834), Hardy - Jude the Obscure (1895), G. Eliot - Middlemarch (1872), Fielding - Joseph Andrews (1742), Thackeray - Vanity Fair (1848), Dickens - Bleak House (1853), Wilkie Collins  - The Woman in White (1860), A. Trollope - The Way We Live Now (1875), Zadie Smith - White Teeth (2000).

    Painting                                                                                                                                                        

(You have to see the book for this, as he reproduces "paintings of the commonplace" -- which elevate the status of the ordinary -- and discusses them) 

    Tragedy                                                                                                                                                       

 "Fear of the material consequences of failure is thus compounded by fear of the unsympathetic attitude of the world towards those who have failed, exemplified by its haunting proclivity to refer to them as 'losers' - a word callously signifying both that they have lost and that they have, at the same time, forfeited any right to sympathy for losing."

Tragedy helps to re-inject empathy into the equation by showing how like everyone else the tragic figure is.  G 

Examples: Oedipus, Antigone, Lear, Othello, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler, Tess, et al.

Tragedy doesn't absolve its subjects of responsibility but does offer and elicit a level of sympathy. 

At the center of tragedy is an ordinary human being with a tragic flaw who makes an error in judgment from which flows a terrible reversal of fortune. Tragic flaws are defects common to humans, such as excessive pride, anger, impulsiveness, etc.  Errors in judgment occur not from evil motives but from lapses in judgment, slips.

Tragedy reflects:

(1) how apparently small missteps can result in grave consequences

(2) the blindness we suffer with regard to the effects of our actions

(3) a fatuous tendency to presume that we are in conscious command of our destiny

(4) the sped and finality with which all that we cherish can be lost

(5) the mysterious forces against which our powers are pitted

Tragedy apportions blame without denying sympathy. We're appalled yet compassionate as we see the universality of the situation. This form of art seeks to plumb the origins of failure.

    Comedy                                                                                                                                                     

More specifically, satire.

"Jokes are an enormously effective means of anchoring a criticism. At base, they are another way of complaining: about arrogance, cruelty or pomposity, about departures from virtue or good sense."

"History reveals no shortage of jokes intended to amend the vices of high-status groups and shake the mighty out of their pretensions or dishonesty." [q.v. George Carlin]

Comedy also can be used to make sense of and mitigate status anxiety: "Comedy reassures us that there are others in the world no less envious or socially fragile than ourselves.

A magazine I read monthly has a reader write-in column titled "Not Many Dead: Important Stories You May Have Missed." The column is made up of headlines or snippets of 'news' stories that are hardly news.

Examples from the magazine include:

"An overheating lightbulb triggered a fire alarm in the City Art Gallery in York yesterday afternoon. Fire crews were not needed."

"Top jockey Frankie Dettori told the Daily Mirror that he had never had sex in a stable."

"Prince Andrew has worn the same tweed jacket twice in five years."

I'd imagine many of us come across these sorts of items ourselves with jarring regularity, these 'news' stories, or tidbits embedded in news stories, that we read and think "wtf?" or "slow news day, eh?"  I'd hate to keep the non-news I stumble across to myself, so I'll share it here from time to time; feel free to contribute others.

"John Mayer admitted on Tuesday night to 'hooking up' with a fan in the past." [10 July]

"Thousands of canceled flights may vex travelers: Fliers should be ready to be flexible as airlines cut capacity and schedules" [10 July]

"Swastika ('卐') tops Google's search list, then disappears" [10 July]

"An initial examination of the plane that had maintenance problems while carrying Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama found no evidence of missing parts or tampering, federal investigators said Thursday." [10 July].

"An elderly Indonesian woman famed nationwide for supernatural skills in lengthening penises has died, reports said Thursday." [10 July]

and  

Court: Wisconsin Law Bans Sex With the Dead, which is unfortunately not as superfluous at it sounds ... [Reported today]

On the face of it, this study (described below) seems to challenge the Buddhist ideas that letting go of distraction (labelling it as such, and not following its threads) and practicing mindfulness are tools towards more compassionate action ... (also, NYT article on distraction and its deleterious effect on creativity and critical thinking), although it seems perhaps that what's actually at stake in this study, and in Buddhism as well, is finding an end-route around habitual thinking (and its attendant fantasies, judgments, status-check-ins, comparisons, opinion-making, ego defenses, etc.) rather than the pure benefits of distraction as one way to do it:

"Why We're All Moral Hypocrites", by Robin Nixon at LiveScience, posits that we are more lenient on ourselves than others, that we "judge others more severely than we judge ourselves. ... [We] are loathe to admit, even to ourselves, that we sometimes behave immorally.  A flattering self-image is correlated with rewards, such as emotional stability, increased motivation and perseverance."

The article describes a recent study in which 42 students were asked to assgn tasks to themselves or to the 'next participant.' The tasks might be "tedious and time-consuming" or "easy and brief." The students could also opt to have a computer assign the tasks, randomly. The researchers found that 85% of the students "passed up the computer’s objectivity and assigned themselves the short task -– leaving the laborious one to someone else" and they characterised their decision as fair. Another group of 43 students, merely observers of all this, considered the actions unfair.

Then the researchers "'constrained cognition' by asking subjects to memorize long strings of numbers. In this greatly distracted state, subjects became impartial. They thought their own transgressions were just as terrible as those of others."

The analysis: "[W]e are intuitively moral beings, but 'when we are given time to think about it, we construct arguments about why what we did wasn't that bad.'" [That explains the hypocrisy, in restrospect, but not the partiality, in the moment -- unless perhaps the partiality is habitual, an action formed and/or strengthened by being justified day by day with a succession of persuasive defensive arguments ...]

The lead researcher even went so far as to say that their research suggests that "ubiquitous Blackberries and iPods may make society more just." 

Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the seventh post on this topic; the first is here.

PART II: Solutions

CHAPTER 1 - PHILOSOPHY 

Dueling! For duelers, others' opinions were the only factor in forming their sense of self. If others judged a dueler effeminate, foolish, a coward, a failure, dishonorable, he could not remain acceptable in his own eyes. He would sooner die or kill than let an unfavourable assessment go unanswered.

We may not duel but we may have extreme vulnerability to the disdain of others.

Socrates, on the being insulted in the marketplace, was asked, "Don't you worry about being called names?" He replied, "Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?"  <-- misanthropy as a response

Socrates and others refute the suggestion that what others think of us must determine what we think of ourselves.

[Socrates' response in this anecdote, though, seems like a reaction to feeling keenly the sting of the other's barb; he may not 'believe' the other's view of him, but he also has to create some kind of defense against it, indicating to me that it matters more than he wants it to, that it infiltrates his psyche at least a bit. Maybe not, though.]

Another idea I have for an occasional series: News stories in which some group is labelled 'the victim' of a group, abstraction, or individual. I think it's educational and interesting to explore who or what are identified as victims and perpetrators in the media.

Recently,

American people are the victims: "The whiners are the leaders. Hell, the American people are victims. ..." [Said by political advisor and former Congressman Phil Gramm, reported today]

Palestinians are the victims of Jewish persecutors: "Touring the somber [Holocaust] museum, it occurred to [Israeli-Arab lawyer] Mahameed that 'we Palestinians are the victims of the terrible things that were inflicted on the Jews by the Holocaust.' [8 July; the article is actually eye-opening, moving, IMO]

Bass and salmon are the victims of mismanagement: "Striped bass are the victims of gross state and federal mismanagement of Central Valley rivers and the Delta, as are collapsing Sacramento River chinook salmon populations." [8 July]

Tuna are the victims of their own success: "Chronically overfished, Mediterranean tuna are the victims of their success with fish lovers, especially with the passion for sushi." [3 July]

Sociopathic politicians, celebrities and sports figures are the victims: "For all the public examples of bad behavior set by politicians, celebrities and sports figures, many young people see these individuals for exactly what they are: spoiled, overrated sociopaths who are the victims of an overly indulgent, disengaged society in search of civilization." [7 July]

Pakistani college women are the victims of cell phone use: "Mostly intermediate students are the victims of mobile mania"  [8 July]

San Diego stores are the victims of shopping cart theft and displacement: "The stores are the victims, Councilman Jack Feller said, and they aren't the ones who should be punished." [12 June]

and finally, the word "victim" isn't used but it's sure implied in this odd story [7 July]:

"A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.

"County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.

"Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections 'has become a black hole' because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

"Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud 'Excuse me!' He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a 'white hole.'

"That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy."

wtf? 

Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the sixth post on this topic; the first is here.

CHAPTER 5 - DEPENDENCE

Status, historically, was tied to what one was at birth, not what one achieved in one's lifetime. [Can you imagine that this is a new concept? It seems so wholly part of what one seems to know.]  Modern societies try to reverse this, to make rank dependent only on achievement -- usually, financial achievement.

The most evident trait of the struggle to achieve status now is uncertainty.

de Button lists five unpredictable elements:

(1) talent - it could desert us or we could find we never really had it

(2) luck - no longer as acceptable to point to as a factor, no moody gods to blame these days. The world is "enamored of rational control."

(3) dependence on an employer (q.v., Machiavelli, Guicciardini, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, et al.)

(4) dependence on an employer's profitability 

(5) dependence on the global economy

Workers' status is never guaranteed, is always dependent on their own performance and on factors that are outside of their control.