Three Anxiety-Inducing New Stories about Success
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Unfortunately, three other, more troubling stories began to form around the middle of the eighteenth century and steadily gained in influence, challenging the previous stories in public opinion.
The rise of these stories may have been accompanied by momentous material improvements across society, but at a psychological level, their contribution was to make low status all the harder to endure and all the more worrying to contemplate.
First Story: The Rich Are the Useful Ones, Not the Poor
Writing in circa 1015, Aelfric, the abbot of Eynsham, had emphasized that wealth was created almost exclusively by the poor, who rose before dawn, ploughed the fields and collected the harvests. The critical nature of their work gave them a right to be honoured by all those above them in the hierarchy. The abbot was not alone in thus recognising ordinary workers: for centuries, economic orthodoxy held that it was the working classes that generated society’s financial resources—which the rich then dissipated through their taste for extravagance and luxury.
This theory of who could be credited for creating national wealth survived almost unassailed until the spring of 1723, when a London physician named Bernard Mandeville published an economic tract in verse, The Fable of the Bees, which irrevocably altered the way rich and poor were perceived. Mandeville posited that, contrary to centuries of economic thinking, it was the rich who in fact contributed the most to society, insofar as their spending provided employment for everyone below them and so helped the weakest to survive. Without the rich, the poor would soon be laid out in their graves. Mandeville did not wish to suggest that the rich were nicer than the poor—in fact, he gleefully pointed out how vain, cruel and fickle they could be. Their desires knew no bounds, they craved applause and failed to understand that happiness did not have its origins in material acquisition. And yet their pursuit and attainment of wealth were of infinitely greater use to society than the patient, unremunerative work of labourers. In judging a man’s value, one had to look not at his soul (as Christian moralists were inclined to do) but at his impact on others. Judged by this new criterion, those who amassed riches (in trade, industry or agriculture) and spent liberally (on absurd luxuries or on the construction of unnecessary storehouses or country seats) were without question more beneficially engaged than the poor. As the subtitle of Mandeville’s opus put it, it was a case of “Private Vices, Public Benefits.” He explained: “It is the sensual courtier who sets no limit to his luxury, the fickle strumpet who invents new fashions every week … the profuse rake and the lavish heir [who most effectively help the poor]. He that gives most trouble to thousands of his neighbours, and invents the most operose manufactures is, right or wrong, the greatest friend to society. Mercers, upholsterers, tailors and many others would be starved in half a year’s time if pride and luxury were at once to be banished from the nation.”
Although Mandeville’s thesis shocked his initial audience (as he intended it to do), it would go on to persuade almost all the great economists and political thinkers of the eighteenth century and beyond. In his essay “Of Luxury” (1752), Hume repeated the Mandevilleian argument in favour of the pursuit of riches and their expenditure on superfluous goods, asserting that it was these initiatives, rather than the manual labour of the poor, that produced wealth: “In a nation … where there is no demand for superfluities, men sink into indolence, lose all enjoyment of life, and are useless to the public, which cannot maintain or support its fleets and armies.”
Seven years later, Hume’s countryman Adam Smith would take the proposition even further in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, perhaps the most beguiling defence ever assayed of the utility of the rich. Smith began by admitting that great sums of money did not always bring happiness: “Riches leave a man always as much and sometimes more exposed than before to anxiety, to fear and to sorrow.” He went on caustically to dismiss those foolish enough to devote their entire lives to chasing “baubles and trinkets.” Nevertheless, he was, he noted, immensely grateful that such creatures abounded, for the whole of civilisation, and the welfare of all societies, depended on people’s desire and ability to accumulate unneeded capital and show off their wealth. Indeed, it was this “which first prompted men to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths and to invent all the sciences and arts which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence.”
In economic theories of old, the rich had been condemned for consuming too large a share of what was thought to be a finite pool of national wealth. But tempting though it might seem, Smith wrote, to regard man of “huge estate” as a “pest to society, as a monster, a great fish who devours up all the lesser ones,” to do this was to forget that there was no predetermined limit to the pool of wealth, which could always be expanded through the efforts and ambitions of entrepreneurs and traders. The great fish and his brethren, far from devouring the lesser fish, in practice helped them by spending money and ensuring them of employment. The rich might be arrogant and coarse, but their vices were transformed, through the operations of the marketplace, into virtues—or so Smith claimed in what has become possibly the most famous passage in the literature of capitalist economics: “In spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own convenience, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, the rich divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus, without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.”
Indeed, in societies in which the wealthy were given sufficient opportunities to trade and develop industry, “so great a quantity of everything is produced,” wrote Smith, “that there is enough both to gratify the slothful and oppressive profusions of the great and at the same time abundantly to supply the wants of the artisan and peasant.”
Here, then, was an unexpectedly delightful story for the better off. The villains of economic theory since the early days of Christianity, they now found themselves recast as its heroes. It was the wealthiest who deserved praise for helping all the other social classes; it was the rich who housed the poor and fed the needy; it was the great fish that provided for the little fish swimming in their wake. Furthermore, they did all this even when they were personally reprehensible—in fact, the greedier they were, the better.
The story was less flattering to the poor. While the rich were hailed as creators of national prosperity, the poor were credited with only a modest, functional contribution; on occasion, they were even accused of draining resources through their excessive numbers and reliance on welfare and charity. Already freighted by material deprivation, they now had added to their burden the implicit contempt of many above them in the social hierarchy. In such an atmosphere, it seemed rather less fitting for poets to devote their verses to celebrating the nobility of ploughmen.