RESTORE HIERARCHY:

Culture Of Discontent: As a society we have access to more wealth and material goods than at any time in history, so why are we so miserable? Author Alain de Botton investigates the modern phenomenon he calls ‘status anxiety’ (Alain de Botton , 29 February 2004, Sunday Herald)

In so far as the modern world has created anguish for its citizens, it is because of an extraordinary new ideal (found in almost every newspaper, magazine and TV programme one cares to look at) around which it is founded: a practical belief in the unlimited power of anyone to achieve anything. For most of history, an opposite assumption had held sway: low expectations had been viewed as both normal and wise. Only a very few had ever aspired to wealth and fulfilment. The majority knew well enough that they were condemned to exploitation and resignation.

The rigid hierarchical system that had held in place in almost every Western society until the 18th century, and had denied all hope of social movement except in rare cases, 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.

It was a freedom because, of course, it remains highly unlikely that one will ever reach the pinnacle of society. It is perhaps as unlikely that we could today become as successful as Bill Gates as that we could, in the 17th century, have become as powerful as Louis XIV. Unfortunately though, it no longer feels unlikely – depending on the magazines one reads, it can in fact seem absurd that one hasn’t already managed to find a business idea to revolutionise global trade.

It was Alexis de Tocqueville who first and best understood that societies which promise much to their citizens will also torture them with expectations. Travelling around the young United States in the 1830s, the French lawyer and historian discerned that Americans were, quite literally, dying of envy. They had much, but this affluence did not stop them from wanting ever more and from suffering whenever they saw someone else with assets they lacked.

In a chapter of Democracy In America (1835) entitled Why The Americans Are Often So Restless In The Midst Of Their Prosperity, he observed: “In America, a land of so-called equals, I never met a citizen too poor to cast a glance of hope and envy toward the pleasures of the rich.”

A firm belief in the necessary misery of life was for centuries one of mankind’s most important assets, a bulwark against bitterness, one cruelly undermined by the expectations incubated by the modern world-view.

It's interesting to apply the same analysis to moral status, where many are either incapable or unwilling to try to conform to traditional morality, but rather than just accept their moral inferiority insist instead that the moral hierarchy be leveled--or, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it, that deviance be defined downward.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 3, 2004 8:35 AM