The question of why, if one was in any way good, clever or able, one was still poor became more acute and painful for the unsuccessful to have to answer (to themselves and others) in a new meritocratic age.
Third Story: The Poor Are Sinful and Corrupt and Owe Their Poverty to Their Own Stupidity
There was no shortage of people willing to answer the question on behalf of the poor during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For a certain outspoken constituency, it was clear (and scientifically provable) that the downtrodden had only their own degeneracy and lack of intelligence to blame for their lot in life.
With the rise of the economic meritocracy, the poor moved, in some quarters, from being termed “unfortunate,” and seen as the fitting object of the charity and guilt of the rich, to being described as “failures” and regarded as fair targets for the contempt of robust, self-made individuals, who were disinclined to feel ashamed of their mansions or to shed crocodile tears for those whose company they had escaped.
There could have been no more telling expression of the idea of a just distribution of wealth and poverty than the nineteenth-century philosophy of Social Darwinism. Its adherents proposed that all humans began by facing a fair struggle over scarce resources such as money, jobs and esteem. Some gained the upper hand in this contest not because they enjoyed improper advantages or were unfairly lucky but because they were intrinsically better than their rivals. The rich were not better, however, from a moral point of view; rather, they were, intimidatingly,naturally better: they were more potent, their seed was stronger, their minds were cannier. They were the tigers of the human jungle, predestined by biology—a new, godlike concept before which the nineteenth century genuflected—to outpace others. It was biology that wanted the rich to be rich and the poor to be poor.
The Social Darwinists furthermore insisted that the sufferings and untimely deaths of the poor benefitted society as a whole and should therefore under no circumstances be prevented by government interference. The weak were nature’s mistakes and must be allowed to perish before they could reproduce and thereby contaminate the rest of the population. Just as the animal kingdom spawned its share of malformed creatures, so, too, did mankind. The most humane thing was to let the feeble die without misguided mercy.
In his Social Statics (1851), the English Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer asserted that biology itself was opposed to charity: “It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of beneficence—the same beneficence which brings to early graves the children of diseased parents… . Under the natural order of things society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, faithless members. If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well that they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.”
Such doctrines found a receptive audience among the self-made plutocrats who dominated American business and the American media. Social Darwinism provided them with an apparently unassailable scientific argument with which to rebut entities and isms that many of them were already suspicious of, not to mention threatened by on the economic leveclass="underline" trade unions, Marxism and socialism. On a triumphant tour of America in 1882, Spencer was cheered by gatherings of business leaders, who were flattered at being compared to the alpha beasts of the human jungle and relieved to be absolved of any need to feel guilty about or charitable towards their weaker brethren.
Even many who did not expressly adopt a Social Darwinist perspective supported one of the philosophy’s key assumptions, agreeing that it was unnecessary and possibly even wrong to provide welfare to the poor. If all had the power to become successful by their own efforts, then political action to assist the lower classes served only to reward failure.
In his book Self-Help (1859), the Scottish doctor Samuel Smiles, after encouraging deprived young people to set themselves ambitious goals, get a proper education and be careful with their money, inveighed against any government that might seek to aid them in such pursuits: “Whatever is done for men takes away from the stimulus and necessity of doing things for themselves. The value of legislation as an agent in human advancement has been much over-estimated. No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident or the drunken sober.”
The Scottish-American industrial magnate Andrew Carnegie, despite his philanthropy, was at heart similarly pessimistic about the ultimate benefits of welfare: “Of every thousand dollars spent in so-called charity nine hundred and fifty of them had better be thrown into the sea,” he remarked in his Autobiography (1920). “Every drunken vagabond or lazy idler supported by alms is a source of moral infection to a neighbourhood. It will not do to teach the hardworking, industrious man that there is an easier path by which his wants can be supplied. The less emotion the better. Neither the individual nor the race is improved by alms-giving. Those worthy of assistance, except in rare cases, seldom require assistance. The really valuable men of the race never do.”
Andrew Carnegie, self-made industrialist and the world’s wealthiest man, 1835–1919
In the harsher climate of opinion that prevailed in certain strata of meritocratic societies, it now became possible to argue that the social hierarchy rigorously reflected the qualities of those on every rung of the ladder, and that conditions already in place ensured that the worthy would succeed and the undeserving flounder. Any tendency towards charity, welfare, redistributive measures or simple compassion was thus rendered—conveniently—unnecessary.
2.
Michael Young, The Rise of Meritocracy (London, 1958):
“Today all persons, however humble, know they have had every chance … If they have been labelled ‘dunce’ repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend… . Are they not bound to recognise that they have an inferior status, not as in the past because they were denied opportunity, but because they are inferior?”
3.
To the injury of poverty, a meritocratic system now added the insult
of shame.
IV
SNOBBERY
1.
Up until a certain age, no one minds much what we do, existence alone is enough to earn us unconditional affection. We can burp up our food, scream at the top of our voice, throw the cutlery on the floor, spend the day gazing blankly out of the window, relieve ourselves in the flower pot—and still know that someone will come and stroke our hair, change our clothes and sing us songs. We begin our time on earth in the hands of a mother, who asks little more of us than that we continue to live. Even those who are not our own mothers, be they men or women, behave as indulgently: they smile when they see us on a family shopping trip, they comment on the pretty patterns of our clothes and, on a lucky day, bring us a furry animal, a few rails of wooden track or a signal box as a reward for just being ourselves.
But this idyllic state is fated not to endure. By the time we have finished our education, we are forced to take our place in a world dominated by a new kind of person, as different from a mother as it is possible to be and whose behaviour lies at the heart of our status anxieties: the snob. Though certain friends and lovers will remain immune from snobbery, will promise not to disown us even if we are bankrupted and disgraced (on a good day, we may even believe them), in general, we are forced to subsist on a diet of the highly conditional attentions of snobs.