Deborah Orr: Hello. Good evening and thanks for coming. I’m Deborah Orr from The Independent. I’m ‘nobody’! This of course is the man we all want to hear about, Alain de Botton, whom I’m sure you’re all familiar with. We’re here to talk about his new book Status Anxiety …
Let’s talk about the causes of status anxiety, which I think we all agree is rampant in society now.
Alain de Botton: (Shall I repeat that question and take it from there?) The question was: Love. One of the themes in the book, talking about status anxiety, why do we care about our status? I kick off really in the book by saying that the key reason is because we want respect. Another way of labelling respect is the word ‘love’. Love and respect are very close. If someone respects you, in a sense what they are extending is at least a portion of what love should contain.
I try and suggest in the book that one of the reasons why people work as hard as they do often is not simply for material goods. It’s not simply to provide food and shelter. It’s to provide love and respect, which is why you get people who have lots of money who carry on working. Also a lot of low-paid work is unpleasant not solely because of the low pay but because of the low respect that comes with that work. There are plenty of examples in history of people who have endured incredibly uncomfortable material situations, people like arctic explorers etc. who live in tents and have very grim lives but find their lives worthwhile. The status side of life is taken care of and I think that helps them to deal with the materially deprived side so it’s not just material deprivation that we fear: it’s also status deprivation that we fear.
[…]
Alain de Botton: Snobbery is a big part of all of our lives. In one of George Orwell’s essays he writes that after 21 it doesn’t matter whether you’re nice. No-one cares after you’re 21 whether you’re nice or not. Presumably what he is talking about there is that after 21 people start to ask you what you do rather what you are or whatever. Then all kinds of anxieties kick in if you don’t have an impressive enough answer. What I call ‘the snob’, a person who is a snob, is basically someone who picks out one aspect of your character and evaluates the whole of your character on that basis. That is why we can sometimes feel terribly enraged, depressed, saddened in the presence of snobs because one feels that whatever it is that you throw at them, if you haven’t got that one thing that they’re looking out for, you simply cannot impress them.
You could be as clever as you like, but if you don’t have a degree: because often what snobs latch on to, because snobbery at some level comes from a lack of self-confidence about one’s own powers of judgement, so snobs are terrifically drawn towards markers of success. So snobs want to know not just whether you’re clever or not, but what university you’ve been to. They cling to the outer symbols of a certain kind of success.
Incidentally, the word ‘snob’ often invokes nowadays still an idea of someone who cares about whether you’ve been to a fee-paying school or whether you go hunting and wear tweeds or whatever. There is still a sort of English aristocratic idea of snobbery. Snobbery is a much more flexible term. It comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes. I think the basic attraction of the snob as I define it is power, because power comes in all forms. You’ll find all kinds of people wearing torn jeans, having accents of one sort or another, now attracting the attention of snobs. So it’s an ever-shifting thing, the kind of people who snobs are interested in.
I try in the book actually to be a bit sympathetic towards snobs because we all have a snobbish side. Also, I think that the reason why we are snobbish is often from a feeling of a kind of trauma. I know a few out-and-out snobs and actually I also know their parents and it is a generational thing. If your parents evaluate you by your achievements, you will end up evaluating yourself by your achievements. So a lot of this has to do with the family structure and how children are taught to evaluate themselves.
If you think of snobbish efforts to, let’s say, buy luxury cars or invest in symbols of status, there’s a kind of sad aspect to them because these status symbols attract people who are essentially trying to say: ‘Please be a bit nicer to me’. So if we focus a bit less on the shiny car and a bit more on the emotional message behind the shiny car which I don’t feel very important, we can discover a kind of sympathy for the snobbish side of other people and ourselves.
Deborah Orr: Which is a dilemma really, because it’s our humanity then that causes those people’s anxiety. Your book though suggests that in the past people didn’t feel the weight of expectation quite so much and therefore didn’t feel the anxiety. Tell us a little bit about that.
Alain de Botton: Yes. I sort of allege in the book that to some extent status anxiety is worse today than it was 200 years ago. This kind of sweeping generalisation sets historians on the edge of their seat. But let me sort of stick with it. I think that what happened in 1776 in the United States was a revolution which created a society where status would be accorded not on a basis of family, of traditional bloodlines, but on the basis of personal achievement. In a sense, this has been wonderful. It has set all kinds of people free to achieve on a more or less level playing field. But what it has also done, of course, is to create a situation where we all expect so much more than ourselves.
Deborah Orr: I think so much more is expected of us too.
Alain de Botton: So much is expected of us: exactly. I write about Alexis de Tocqueville who went to America, in the 1820s I think it was. In his book Democracy in America there is a lovely chapter called ‘Why the Americans are so restless amidst their prosperity’. In a sense, the whole book could have been called ‘Why we are so restless amidst our prosperity’. Essentially, the point that de Tocqueville makes is that it’s all about the level of your expectation. It’s what you consider to be normal that decides what you will be happy with.
I was talking to a friend of mine who I was with at university. I remembered him at university having an incredibly dingy room with just one lamp and a bathroom down the end of a dank corridor. This came to mind because he was showing me around his new flat, which was an incredibly luxurious flat in comparison with his university accommodation. But he was complaining. He was saying, if only he could afford a house and that he didn’t really like this flat because he didn’t have access to his own front door etc. Of course if one had transported him back to his earlier self, he would have probably been amazed to be living in such luxury. But he was no longer amazed. In fact, he was envious of other people who have their own front door.
I think that what goes on there really is that we’re almost inherently ungrateful creatures because we are always comparing ourselves to other people, rather than comparing ourselves to people who came before us a long way back, or the way we were, you know, ten years ago or 50 years ago or whatever. So we’re inherently ungrateful and other people’s achievements have a terrifying ability to make our own achievements and assets seem worthless. I think that this is something that explains why higher living standards seem to not produce the higher levels of happiness that we might expect.
Deborah Orr: I think that now as well we distrust the system that divvies up all these rewards in the past: the wealthy inherited their wealth. Now the idea is that we all have the level of wealth that we have because we live in a meritocracy and we get what we deserve from our efforts. We don’t entirely trust that, I don’t think, though. That is the force of your five causes of our status anxiety. Can you tell us a bit about that, because I think that is a very interesting point?
Alain de Botton: Yes. I mean essentially almost all politicians of all political persuasions agree that the best thing that Britain could become is a fully-functioning meritocracy. The idea of a meritocracy is, on right and left, the current idea. And it’s been the current idea really, I guess, in most parts, for about the last two hundred years. That is, that we should try and create a society where everyone ends up in the place where they deserve to be. Of course there was huge criticism of older societies where people didn’t really end up where they deserved to be. They ended up where the king put them or where their parents put them. The goal of a meritocratic society is to essentially eradicate inherited under-privilege and also over-privilege: to create a level playing field. It is a lovely ideal and it has produced all sorts of wonderful results.
But, there is a problem and the problem is this. That if you genuinely believe that those at the top totally deserve their success, you’ll also have to believe that those at the bottom totally deserve their failure. So what happens in certain quarters when society becomes more meritocratic is that a much harsher tone is introduced towards people at the bottom of society who get moved from being called ‘unfortunate’ to being sometimes called, and one finds this a lot in the United States, ‘losers’. Because it’s a game and it’s a fair game and if you lose you’re a loser. So that’s where that idea comes from and I think that is why the whole concept of meritocracy does have a darker angle.
There is essentially the idea of justice in the distribution of reward and I think that there is a scepticism there missing. One could ask: Well, what’s truly wrong with a meritocracy? I think that there are really two things wrong with a meritocracy. One is that when we talk about a meritocratic society, really what we are talking about is an economic meritocracy. We are talking about where those who merit the financial success get to the top. And this is really the problem, for example, which comes to a head with women raising children who are constantly forced to justify what they do in front of an image of society that says that the only productive person, the only person who merits is the economically productive person.
So in that case one thinks: Well, what is the worth of a mother? We sort of think a mother seems to be important, a mother raising children. But then, it doesn’t make much money. So it challenges the inherent idea of this sort of economic meritocracy. ‘Artist’ is another tricky one. Anywhere where you have to evaluate someone for something more than just their financial ability becomes tricky in our current society.
Then, of course, there’s the idea that so many factors go into one person achieving and another person not achieving and the more we remove that sense of contingency, the more we’ll up with, I think, a very unfair view of why people end up where they end up.
Deborah Orr: So it’s clear that a lot of our status anxiety is driven by the attempt to make all achievement in life somehow ringing the cash register and for everything to be worth a monetary value before it has any value at all.
Alain de Botton: When I was writing the book I got interested in duelling and the history of duelling. It just sort of struck me as very bizarre that for hundreds of years really, if someone gave you a funny look you might challenge them to death for giving you a funny look.
Deborah Orr: In south London, often this still occurs!
Alain de Botton: Well exactly! That’s very interesting, this idea that you might need to lose your life or challenge someone else’s life simply because they have disrespected you. This is an old idea and we think it might just be in south London, but it’s a very ancient idea and of course it’s a very vulnerable idea and if you go through the world thinking that every person who doesn’t like you or doesn’t show you respect is worthy of being put to death, you might have a lot of blood on your hands and you might not live very long. In fact, I think in Spain in the 17th century there were estimated to be something like 5000 duels a year. And that’s really quite a lot when you think of Spain in that time. So, a lot of people going out there and killing each other because one person hadn’t smiled right or had insinuated something nasty, etc.
So that, in a sense, is one tradition that you find running right through history. A very vulnerable tradition whereby I am what you think of me. If you think I’m great, I’m great. If you think I’m not so good, that I’m effeminate, I’m weak, I’m stupid etc., I may try and kill you all or at least be very upset. This idea of being extremely vulnerable to the views of other people, that’s one thread that you can see through history.
But then, fortunately, along come some bearded philosophers and they’ve got something interesting to tell us, and that’s about opposition. That’s about the value of opposition. It’s the emergence in the west of the idea of an internal conscience. The idea that, whatever other people may think, you have an inner judge; you have an inner conscience; you have an inner court. It is what comes out of that inner court that counts, not what happens in the outer court. Because the outer court is full of prejudice: you may have read something nasty about me in the paper; you may not like the way I look; you may have eaten something bad before coming here. So your verdicts of what I’m like shouldn’t, this tradition suggests, influence what I think about me because to follow a sort of philosophical view, I should have thought about what I’m worth and once that was settled, more or less, your opinions quite frankly don’t matter at all.
That explains why someone like Socrates was quite happily able to go to his death drinking hemlock and thinking that the views of the many Athenians who thought him dirty, smelly, stupid, dangerous, corrupt and had blood on his hands, that these people didn’t matter because they didn’t understand the truth. But the idea of a truth, and that truth survives opinion: the idea of truth opinion. It’s a very basic point but I think it stands at the head of all sorts of other thoughts about how we can begin, as it were, to accommodate ourselves to living in society.
It is the first thing that we all face, I guess, from the first day in the school playground: How much weight am I going to give to the verdicts of others? If you give a lot of weight, you might end up in a really difficult place.
Deborah Orr: You make yourself very vulnerable.
Alain de Botton: Very vulnerable. And if you give no weight at all, you may end up very eccentric. So it’s a question of balance.
Deborah Orr: Next on the list of ways in which we can help ourselves to resist the pressure of status anxiety, I think probably is something that the audience is all familiar with. I don’t know about all of you, of course, but I suspect that, like me, if you’ve not got a good book going to look forward to at the end of the day, then you kind of feel a bit down as though something’s missing from your life. For me, literature is a way of escaping from the less attractive aspects of the world and immersing oneself in the better parts of the human soul. And not just literature but art generally, you suggest, is something you can use as a shield against the draining effect of status anxiety.
Alain de Botton: Yes. I think we are all incredibly vulnerable to what we read. We’re incredibly poor at assessing. I think that what we read, what we see as we look around us, we are all the time picking up messages etc. Most of the messages that we pick up, and we may spend a lot of the day reading a newspaper, looking at the news, looking at adverts etc.: the media in general have a huge role to play in shaping how we view the world. It struck me while I was thinking about this book that we also spend some of the time reading novels. If you think about novels, on the whole novels turn the status hierarchy that we live in in the world generally on its head. If you think of most novels, the heroes and heroines of most novels are not those who would feature in the society pages of Yes magazine or whatever it is.
Deborah Orr: Can I just interject? I was one of the hated journalists and suggest that one headline that you might feel … [unclear] and if it was on the front page of the Standard might be: ‘Shopaholic adulteress swallows arsenic after credit fraud’. That is your status anxious media driving the agenda there. But …
Alain de Botton: Yes. Well you’ve put your finger on it. Basically, in the book I try and contrast the way that the media might tell the stories of what we think of as great tragedies. I made a TV programme to go with this and we went to see the Sunday Sport in Manchester and we asked them if they could design some headlines for some of the great works of tragedy. So if you think about works of tragedy, they are all stories of people who’ve lost their status. There are great losses of status: Othello, Madame Bovary, Oedipus etc. We asked them if they could come up with some headlines. So, for Othello they came up with, ‘Love-crazed immigrant kills senator’s daughter’ and for Madame Bovary, as you just heard, it was ‘Shopaholic adulteress swallows arsenic after credit fraud’. But we thought that the killer was the one they came up with for Oedipus, that great tragic story, which was: ‘Sex with Mum was blinding!’
Essentially, the point there is that newspapers on the whole are not very sympathetic. They laugh. If you’ve slept with your mum, they’re not going to be that nice about it. Whereas, a Greek … might be a lot more sympathetic and I think often what we see in great works of literature is not that the baddies get let off the hook or that the goodies are always praised or whatever, but that we see the whole concept of a goody and a baddy dissolve, fracture, become much more complex. So we are unable to say at the end of Othello who is a goody and who is a baddy. The question seems bizarre, whereas it never seems bizarre in many newspapers. Not The Independent, of which I am a loyal reader.
Deborah Orr: Of course!
Alain de Botton: Of course. I genuinely am.
Deborah Orr: Even I’d know. Come on!
Alain de Botton: It’s difficult! It’s a trying relationship! It demands loyalty.
Essentially in newspapers, stories are not told with great sympathy. What I think we can see in works of art is tremendously complex, essentially understanding accounts of terrible failure. But if you want to fail, make sure that Shakespeare is around looking at the story of failure and not the Sunday Sport.
Deborah Orr: Or even an independent journalist?
Alain de Botton: Well nowadays, yes.
Deborah Orr: The great example at the moment is the way in which papers vilify Maxine Carr who is a girl who an awful, awful tragedy has befallen her. You’re primed constantly not to feel sympathy with her.
Alain de Botton: Essentially because people like to have clearcut answers. There are goodies and baddies because it’s much easier. It would be lovely if everyone was a goody and a baddy.
Deborah Orr: I think that in the book as well what you also talk about is how difficult it is for human beings to resist the sort of cheap trappings of status anxiety that are standing in front of us all the time. I think, tellingly, the example you gave of how very quickly the Native Americans were decimated by the dangling of … [? unclear] is very telling.
Alain de Botton: Yes. We hear so much about the evils of consumer society etc. The story of what happened to the Native Americans is absolutely the most sort of tragic story of consumer society. It is the start of one and it is also the one that attracted most attention. If you think of people like Rousseau writing in the 18th century talking about how modern civilisation corrupts us and talking about ‘noble savages’ etc., the reason why in the 18th century there was, in certain philosophical quarters, such sort of nostalgia, I guess, for the simple life was because people had before them the example of what had happened to the native American tribes. They had been living in what was interpreted as sort of idyllic simplicity: very, very, simple lives. And they had, within a few generations, either been wiped out or acquired an almost insatiable taste for luxury drink, for money, for gold etc. The corruption of the Native Americans really stuck in the mind.
We often forget what an example that was to people like Rousseau etc. So when Rousseau tells us in so many words that shopping is bad for us, he is really thinking about what happened over in the United States a generation before he was writing. I look at that point and I think that part of the problem with modern society is that we have an image of ourselves as autonomous and being able to decide independently what we want and what we like. It’s the contribution of people like Rousseau to point out that actually we are not that autonomous. Lovely idea, but actually stick a beautiful poster over there saying, say, ‘This car will make you happy’ and actually all of our thoughts tend to say: ‘Hmm, well I don’t know. Maybe it will’. We are very, very easily influenced and I think that option is not taken into account.
People will often say, “Why is there not more serious stuff on television?” Broadcasters will say, “Well, people don’t really watch it. These programmes that we do show are very popular so that is what people want”. At the heart of a certain kind of philosophical tradition is this idea of the distinction between ‘need’ and ‘desire’. There is the idea that you can desire things that you don’t need and you can need things that you don’t know that you want.
Nowadays there is lots and lots of freedom but often that just means less to choose without any kind of guidance and I think that is a lot of the problem.
Deborah Orr: I think that’s the point at which popular culture becomes very, very insidious because I think while we all understand that it is a quite pernicious influence. Possibly this audience is people who come out to hear about books: but I too find myself watching soap operas, listening to pop music, even a crass novel, watching a bit of reality TV, reading cheap magazines. Even though I do lots of other things as well, these things are attractive and they are terribly light in a pernicious way and you do find yourself quite drawn to them and I think that people do a lot of the time.
A very insidious thing about them as well is that sometimes, just as great literature can subvert and give judgmental ideas, sometimes popular culture is doing that too. So something like The Simpsons, which is a story about a guy who drinks too much and works in a factory and perhaps … who loves him enough, actually can be quite redemptive as well. Again, with something like Frasier, a popular show where you have these guys who themselves are riddled by status anxiety but at the same time you can see that if they stopped doing that, they would be happier, better human beings. So a lot of the time popular culture is itself, in a debased kind of way, performing the same service as proper literature and high culture can do. So it’s a very difficult thing to avoid because it’s not all completely worthless. Frasier mirrors Shakespearean tragedy in its way. The Simpsons mirror the works of … [?] in some respects. So, like the Indians who didn’t see the difference between Venetian glass and precious stones, people are very much drawn to this sort of thing.
Alain de Botton: You’ve picked some great shows, unusually great shows and very profound shows really. I’m all for works of art being accessible, good, funny, lively, etc: part of the problem of messages which have been broadly seen as anti-consumerist, pro-art, pro-the values of goodness, humility and charity, all those nice things. The defenders of those values have on the whole been of a certain sort. They’ve been very conservative often and they’ve spoken in very shrill, conservative voices.
So there has been a sort of dichotomy. Either you have fun with the kids and then it is all very attractive and it’s sexy and it’s cool. Or you go and join the sort of preachers and they are quite dull. They are quite staid: you have tea with them, etc. It is a very unfortunate dichotomy and it’s one I kind of reject. We were talking earlier about why don’t I have more popular cultural examples etc.: I quite like to subvert that. For someone like the philosopher Roger Scruton who sometimes says some very wise things, but unfortunately he is so, I think (he’s not in the audience is he?!) he is so paranoid –
Deborah Orr: How could he be at a ‘highbrow’ event like this?
Alain de Botton: I know, I know. But he is so paranoid and embattled and so thinks that everything that happened after 1950 is terrible, that he undermines the wisdom of his own case. So I think it’s been terribly unhelpful to high culture, as it were, to the defenders of high culture, to adopt a position which is leaden and pompous.
Deborah Orr: One of the quite controversial things I think is in the book is that you select Christianity as an ameliorative: you identified it as something that can ameliorate the modern condition, above any other kind of spiritual guidance at all.
Alain de Botton: Yes. I devote a whole chapter to Christianity.
Deborah Orr: And nothing to any other religion!
Alain de Botton: Nothing to any other religion. Part of the reason, I think, is because I am Jewish and I haven’t been traumatised by Sunday School, by having to go to church.
Deborah Orr: You must go and see The Passion of the Christ: you’ll be traumatised.
Alain de Botton: Right. So I think that in a sense I felt like an outsider to the Christian teaching, the Christian tradition, and I wanted to look at it, as it were, as an outsider and in a way it came as news to me. I grew up with very prejudiced parents who literally would say that if you marry a Christian then they’ll turn round one day and say ‘you dirty Jew!’: literally my poor parents said that. It wasn’t a good thing.
Well of course that gave me great curiosity. What’s this lovely forbidden fruit of Christianity?
Deborah Orr: My parents said the same thing about marrying a Catholic, which is why I married a Jew!
Alain de Botton: Anyway, I felt like exploring Christianity and the Christian message seems very interesting because if you look at the history of status throughout the West, you cannot ignore the history of Christianity which, after all, is obsessed with trying to wrestle with the status problem. Because, in the Christian understanding, we all have two kinds of status: earthly status and heavenly status. Everyone has these two kinds of status. This is present in all religions but it’s brought out especially starkly in Christianity. So there is this whole idea that you can be the king in the earthly city but you can be no-one in the heavenly city and it’s a fascinating distinction. It’s very powerfully written into Christianity. It’s given an extremely seductive feel by Christian art and architecture. And underlying a lot of Christian thought is the idea of community.
I think that a desire to adopt high status is very connected to what the quality of the community is like. The more, I suggest in the book, the more being like everybody else seems like a pretty grim thing, the more we will want high status. Nowadays, there is this idea that to be like everyone else is quite a horrible thing: we must try and be special and different, etc. There is an idea that being like everyone else is actually the noblest destiny and that is the idea that you find for charity, that everyone is blessed. That everyone has the part of the divine with them and it is a fascinating idea really that by trying to ‘place value in the community’ you devalue individual achievement in a very interesting way.
I always think of transport. I actually grew up in Switzerland. I grew up in Zurich which is a Protestant city and you often find this in Christian Protestant communities, the huge emphasis that the whole community is the centre of value. That is why Zurich has one of the best transport systems in the world. Compare that with the situation in Los Angeles, say, which has one of the worst transport systems in the world. That is a meritocratic society where the individual achievement is what counts. You don’t need a car really just to get around Zurich. You do need a car to get around L.A. You need to be a little bit special to get around L.A. You need your own car, whereas you can join the communal tram in Zurich. It’s a tiny example but it nevertheless points us to the idea of the more the community is debased, violent, degraded, ugly, the more we want to separate ourselves, build high walls, get our own car, break free from other people, have fear of the community, etc. That is, I think, a pointer to one of the solutions of status anxiety.
Deborah Orr: You’ve got another situation which is to join the bohemians and throw away your status anxiety in that way. That’s an interesting idea because the idea of being a bohemian has, I think, lately perhaps since the eighties, actually been rather taken up by the image-makers and the marketers and so on … So there is the idea that maybe you can be a bohemian in Christian … No, and you can be a bohemian and get Kelly Hoppen to style your town house in Notting Hill. But at the same time I think it’s refreshing and worthwhile that your book does remind us of some of the more worthy tenets of bohemia, from the Dadaists to kibbutzim and the whole gamut of ways in which people … … in all sorts of different ways and sort of tried sincerely for the good life rather than in a … manufactured way that …
Alain de Botton: That’s right. I think it is very interesting, this distinction between real and false bohemianism. I talk about bohemia. The word ‘bohemia’ arises interestingly in the early 19th century. The other word that grows up at the same time is the ‘bourgeoisie’. And you get this sort of permanent opposition: the bourgeoisie-bohemia, and it says that there is this sort of unhappy couple who are always sparring off each other. Also, the idea of being a bohemian really kicks off at the same time as a certain decline in organised religion. It’s as if once the ability to believe in the sacred starts to wane, people start to believe in art and the value of art, and art becomes incredibly important. People start to define themselves in relation to their receptivity to works of art and their capacity to produce works of art.
In this chapter of my book I look at this tradition of what I call ‘bohemianism’. Nowadays that tradition is very debased. Originally it really meant someone who stood up against the bourgeois idea of success, i.e. the dominantly material idea of success and stood up for what one could broadly call a spiritual idea of success. What’s happened all along, of course, is that the bourgeoisie has become very interested in the glamour of bohemia and keeps appropriating bits of bohemia. So it used to be enough to be a bohemian that you could wear a pair of jeans. It used to be enough that you could dress a certain way, look a certain way, do a certain thing.
Karl Marx would have been very sympathetic to the way that capitalism constantly explores new areas and tries to turn new areas into markets. So, as you hear, Kelly Hoppen, etc. have a jolly good go at commercialising something that was originally a genuine attempt to escape certain commercial pressures. Nowadays we are left with the idea of a much purer kind of bohemia. The only bohemia that is legitimate today has nothing to do with clothes, the appearance of your house, the state of your car, etc. It’s an inner quality and I think that is what is it has always been really at heart. It’s not about what clothes you wear. It’s about an idea of what you find successful.
I don’t want to say in this book that success is per se a bad thing: that we shouldn’t strive to be successful. My concluding message is just that you must be very careful whose idea of success we’re following. We should just submit a lot of the ideas of success that we have, either consciously or unconsciously imbibed, to a kind of process of rational scrutiny so as to make sure that we do have a successful life but that it is on our own terms rather than on the terms of other people.
Deborah Orr: Do you have children?
Alain de Botton: I don’t have children, yet.
Deborah Orr: Because this is what I think perhaps is missing from the solutions and the list of amelioratives that I agree with, that often the most ambitious and material people, once they do have children, find a different focus in their life and do adjust to doing things not for themselves but for their kids. They find a level of escape from that kind of very brittle status anxiety. I mean I think that finding something more spiritual than even your children, which is just a way of putting … [?] at a little bit of a distance. But I still think it really helps people to do things for their kids instead of for themselves, really does check them quite a lot from the most pernicious aspect of modern culture too.
I wonder if the audience has anything to ask about any of the issues that have been raised this evening?
Questioner 1: I just wanted to ask you: in your last book, The Art of Travel, you mentioned how you were in a restaurant and you were with, I presume, a close friend, a girl, and you were having a lovers’ tiff between you over a certain food. And you walk away from this restaurant which is very grand and has an ambience and you were feeling a bit wronged. Then you make up together in a sort of very, very insignificant place but the significance is vested in that place by the fact that you have resolved the conflict between you. What I wanted to know really, in relation to Status Anxiety, is: How do you feel that we as human beings resolve our conflicts on an everyday basis, sometimes to our detriment, sometimes not? How would you advise us, as a race, to solve our own conflicts? Animals solve them very differently. You say that we should inspect ourselves with a rational enquiry. Can we resolve our conflicts with the same rationale as we resolve other things?
Alain de Botton: I think most conflicts reach a sort of fever pitch because people are feeling under a kind of internal pressure. They feel completely unable to be generous. If you look at most lovers, partners, arguing, when a really fearsome fight goes on, what you’ve really got is two very frightened people who can’t say “I’m frightened”. So they are just angry and nasty, etc. and any kind of resolution of conflict on the whole has to do with reducing the trauma on both sides and in reducing the fear on both sides. That’s not a full answer to your question but that’s certainly a start.
Questioner 2: I think what you are talking about was existential anxiety rather than chronic or floating anxiety. But what I am interested in is: How do you think today … [inaudible]
Alain de Botton: Well, I’m not too sure. Almost any religion defines success within the terms of its own values. You want to find out how to be a good Jew? No? I think we all know that there are certain values that are put forward in Jewish texts, certain kinds of values. That I suppose would be success. Certain kinds of belief. Certain kinds of attitude, to the family, to society and to God. That would be the idea of success.
Questioner 3: I wanted also to ask a Jewish question. I would argue that Jews suffer from most kinds of anxiety more, and in particular they suffer from status anxiety more than most because status anxiety is about not knowing your place and few people know their place less than Jews do. Do you think that Jews suffer particularly from status anxiety?
Alain de Botton: Yes I do. I do, I’m afraid. And I think it is for all the reasons that you outlined. There are clear historical traumas that have led many Jewish families, I suppose, to feel this. Because, again, it’s very much something that you are taught in your family: to lack a certain kind of confidence.
I don’t know if I can be personal about this, but I remember that my parents always put me under incredible pressure to succeed. I remember kids around me not being under pressure. What was going on there? Why were my parents putting me under such pressure? Essentially it was because they felt themselves very dislocated. […] So the image of the Jewish high achiever, like all clichés, has a substantial element of truth. It is a thing that we all laugh when we ask that question and I think that humour has a great role to play in it. You don’t find a humorous people without also finding an anxious people: the two go together. As soon as you have an anxious people you’re going to have a people who are also quite attracted to jokes.
There are a few jokes in this book. I came across some New Yorker cartoons. There are two guys in a bar looking very anxious and a little glum office worker. One of them says to the other, “I usually wake up screaming at 6.30 and I’m in the office by 9.00”.
Deborah Orr: I like the guy on the phone saying, “I love you Maddy, I can’t live without you. You’re absolutely marvellous, wonderful. You’re the light of my life, but that’s not why I called.”
Alain de Botton: And then there’s a couple in bed at night and the lights are out and the man can’t sleep. He’s restless and the woman turns to him and says, “Which Microsoft millionaire are you thinking about now?”
Questioner 4 : A friend of mine gave me a nice article of clothing which had a designer logo on it and looked completely bemused when I fetched a razor blade to remove it. I think with you that I don’t have to be a walking billboard to advertise the very deliberately expensive article crocodiles and goodness knows what. I don’t have to make these people rich. I don’t …[inaudible] to imply that I am wealthier than I am that I need to do these things. I can’t help observing that some of the most successful generators of these projects are of our persuasion. …
Alain de Botton: Well, I think that as I suggested earlier, the best way to approach it is to feel relatively sympathetic towards people who are laden with labels etc. They are not nasty. They are just a little bit worried that you’re not finding them very important. That’s why they are wearing lots of labels. I think that once you look at it like that, it ceases to seem like greed, because often an attraction to luxury goods seems like greed. It’s not greed: it’s fear. That’s what lies at the heart of it.
I wear very unshowy clothes. I dress at the Gap and Benetton’s, very unshowy labels.
Deborah Orr: Who are sponsoring this evening, generously!
Alain de Botton: Who have sponsored this event!
Deborah Orr: Well somebody has sponsored us. Who was it? I forgot to mention them.
Alain de Botton: I think snobbery comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes as we know and there’s a kind of a reversal of snobbery. I’m so important that I can just wear Gap trousers! I’m so confident, etc. So the pathways of snobbery are multiple and manifold and fascinating.
Questioner 5: How much do you think is just down to boys and girls’ status? How much is just genetic, trying to impress the other sex? Even the whole ‘No logo’ thing, as Deborah said, is now becoming the new logo. Are philosophers the new rock-and-rollers?
Alain de Botton: You’ve put your finger on an important issue. I think that some of it is connected to boys and girls. But, and this is the key point, that shouldn’t be the end of the conversation because boys and girls are interested in success. But the idea of success keeps shifting. A hundred years ago the boys that were most impressive had inherited their money, went shooting on weekends, rode horses, etc.
Deborah Orr: No change there then.
Alain de Botton: Don’t tell us too much about your dates.
Deborah Orr: I was just thinking about Prince Harry.
Alain de Botton: But you know, nowadays it would be a much more urban, entrepreneurial ideal, etc. So ideals of what is successful keep changing and actually it’s much easier to change the status system than it is to change the economic system. If you think about the huge shift in the status of women over the last hundred years, that’s been done without an economic revolution. Although it’s had economic consequences and some causes, essentially it’s a revolution in status. So revolutions in status are relatively easy to achieve. If we all went out there and decided to promote a certain ideal of a certain kind of person that we thought should be considered successful, boys and girls might start to listen. So boys and girls is only the first bit of a more complex issue.
[…]
Alain de Botton: You’ll never find a society where no-one has status. What you will find is societies where status will be awarded for better or worse reasons and I think that that is the key point.
Deborah Orr: The wisdom of vulgarity. You quite often award status nowadays for sheer vulgarity, I think, and have televisual competitions where the most vulgar person wins. Whereas perhaps even in the earlier days of the BBC, actually the wise people on television were the ones who had the status, nowadays it’s the ones most prepared to be vulgar.
Questioner 6: I’m afraid it’s a Jewish-type question again. Can you apply your thoughts about status anxiety to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Israeli-Arab conflict? I’m sorry: for all those sighing desperately, I would point out that there have actually been quite a few books written about Arabs’ difficulty with the State of Israel, not because of the religion of the dominant group in the State of Israel, but actually because of what it meant to Arab nationalism fifty years ago. I don’t want to go into a huge subject with this: just a few thoughts.
Alain de Botton: I’ll keep the answer short. I think that status does have a big role to play in any nationalism. What a national movement is about is that they are not about economics on the whole. In fact, often national movements have a disastrous effect on the economic life of the people who are subject to them. So essentially it does tend to be about what I guess you could call status: that certain people at certain points say: “I may have a good job and money, etc. but I’m not respected and I will join a political party that will fight for a certain kind of respect. I think that both on the Israeli and on the Palestinian side there is an element of a fight for status and respect: a demand for status and respect from the other side. That is what makes the conflict in a way all the more heart-breaking because this isn’t a conflict about money. This isn’t a conflict even, one could say (a controversial statement), that much about land. It’s about dignity. Both two sides ferociously fighting for dignity and two sides (a very controversial statement) being, in their different ways, too traumatised to unlock themselves from the situation that they are in.
Deborah Orr: Just time for one more question.
Alain de Botton: Let’s take the tube one, because I think that’s a fascinating one. We laugh: your question was ironic. How could one possibly feel that it’s lovely to be part of the community when you get on that crowded, horrible tube? Let me just tell you: I was just in Amsterdam last weekend and I rode on the trams there. I’m not Dutch but I felt, gosh! if I was part of this community I would feel amazingly proud of this tram. It was like a spaceship. It was so beautifully designed. It careered seamlessly through the city. It was genuinely a work of art: a work of true civilisation and it lent dignity to everyone who was on it and everyone who partook in it. Whereas the tube lends humiliation to everyone who is on it. And it is a genuine humiliation and I think we all suffer from it as Londoners. It’s a humiliating process. That’s why we all want cars. That’s why we want to opt out of the system.
Why do people feel suspicious of the NHS? Not because they don’t want to belong to it, but because you go there often and you are humiliated sometimes by the treatment that you receive. So I think that there is a terrible vicious circle in which as soon as things start getting humiliating, everyone wants to opt out. That’s what happened with the education system in this country, etc. So it’s a political problem but it is also one again that is a question of respect and dignity.
My own status? I think that any time that a writer starts to believe in their own good reviews or very negative reviews is a moment of danger. I say this modestly, but I as a writer don’t listen to success or failure. As a human being I do, and as a human being I cry and am happy if people are nice or not nice. But as a writer, insofar as I take my writing seriously, I shut the door and I’m alone with the task and that’s what counts.
Deborah Orr: Can I just finally thank you all very much. I’m sorry that there is no more time for questions as there is another event coming in. However, Alain will be in the Ellis Room next door and one can go in and chat with him further and he will be available to sign books as well. Thanks very much.
[End]
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