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 societies 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?
Rousseau’s argument hung on a radical thesis. Being truly wealthy, he suggested, does not require having many things; rather, it requires having what one longs for. Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires. Modern societies have done the former spectacularly well, but by continuously whetting appetites, they have at the same time managed to negate a share of their success. For the individual, trying to make more money may not be the most effective way to feel wealthy. We might do better, instead, to distance ourselves, both practically and emotionally, from those whom we consider to be our equals and yet who have grown richer than us. Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.
Insofar as advanced societies supply their members with historically elevated incomes, they appear to make us wealthier. But in truth, their net effect may be to impoverish us, because by fostering unlimited expectations, they keep open permanent gaps between what we want and what we can afford, between who we might be and who we really are. Such disparities may leave us feeling more deprived even than primitive savages, who, insisted Rousseau (his argument here reaching the limits of plausibility), felt themselves to be lacking for nothing in the world so long as they had a roof over their heads, a few apples and nuts to eat and the leisure to spend their evenings playing on “some crude musical instrument” or “using sharp-edged stones to make a fishing canoe.”
Rousseau’s comparison of the relative levels of happiness of primitive and modern man returns us to William James’s emphasis on the role of expectations in determining our quotient of self-esteem. We may be happy enough with little if little is what we have come to expect, and we may be miserable with much when we have been taught to desire everything.
Rousseau’s naked savages had few possessions. But, unlike their successors in their Ta j Mahals, they were at least able to feast on the great wealth that comes from aspiring to very little.
13.
The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
III
MERITOCRACY
Three Useful Old Stories about Failure
1.
To occupy a low position in the social hierarchy is rarely pleasant from a material point of view, but it is not everywhere and at all times equally psychologically painful. The impact of poverty on self-esteem will to an important extent be decided by the way that poverty is interpreted and accounted for by the community.
While the material progress of the West over two millennia is incontestable, explanations for why one might be poor and what one’s value to society might be, could be said to have grown notably more punitive and emotionally awkward in the modern era, an evolution contributing a third explanation for any anxiety about having or acquiring low status.
2.
From approximately A.D. 30, when Jesus began his ministry, to the latter half of the twentieth century, the lowest in Western societies had to hand three stories about their significance, which, while they could be believed, must have worked a profoundly consoling, anxiety-reducing effect on their listeners.
First Story:
The Poor Are Not Responsible for Their Condition
and Are the Most Useful in Society
If one had asked a member of a Western medieval or pre-modern society on what basis society was divided into rich and poor, peasant and nobleman, the question would most likely have seemed bizarre: God had simply willed the division.
A representation of the three orders of society—clergy, nobility and peasantry—from the Image du Monde. French school, thirteenth century
Yet alongside this inflexible belief in a three-class structure— clergy, nobility and peasantry—came an unusually strong appreciation of the way that the different classes depended on each other and hence an unusually strong appreciation of the value of the poorest class. A theory of mutual dependence held that the peasantry was no less vital and hence no less worthy of dignity than the nobility or clergy. The lives of peasants might be hard (unalterably so), but it was known that without them the other two classes would soon founder. It might have seemed ungenerous of John of Salisbury to compare the poor to a pair of feet and the rich to a head, but this otherwise insulting metaphor had the benefit of reminding the wealthy to treat the poor with respect if they wanted to stay alive just as they knew to treat their feet with respect in order to walk.
Patronisation was accompanied by its more advantageous twin, paternalism: if the poor were like children, then it was the task of the rich to assume the role of loving parents. Medieval art and literature were therefore peppered with liberal, if condescending, praise of the peasantry, and it was not forgotten that Jesus himself had been a carpenter.
In his Colloquy (circa 1015), Aelfric, the abbot of Eynsham, argued that peasants were the most important members of society by far, for though the rest could survive without the nobility or the clergy, no one could do without the food supplied by the ploughman. In 1036, Bishop Gerard of Cambrai preached a sermon asserting that while such rough labour was dull and hard, it made possible all other, intellectually more elevated, kinds of work. Good people must thus honour the peasantry. Hans Rosenplüt of Nuremberg was one poet among many who felt moved to pay homage to the “noble ploughman.” In his poem “Der Bauern Lob”(circa 1450), he intoned that in all God’s creation, none was more exalted: