A READER has troubled to send me a link to a piece by a New York Timescolumnist Nicholas D Kristof, by way, I imagine, of a riposte to my column last week about equality and the recent British riots. Kristof's column was really a review of a book entitled The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, by British epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.
I am unsure whether my correspondent intended to support my point that the unqualified promotion of materialism creates social unease, or to dispute my contention that the promotion of equality is part of the problem. I suspect the latter, although I should reiterate that my argument was not that equality was unnecessary, or even undesirable, but that, being impossible, it should not be rendered a moral imperative.
The Spirit Level, published on this side of the Atlantic in 2009, advances a conventional and widely held "left-wing" view: that social justice is a matter not of addressing absolute issues of poverty or deprivation, but of eliminating inequality because of the negative feelings this state imposes on those it afflicts.
Kristof quoted approvingly from The Spirit Level: "If you fail to avoid high inequality, you will need more prisons and more police. You will have to deal with higher rates of mental illness, drug abuse and every other kind of problem."
Wilkinson and Pickett cited a longitudinal study of British civil servants, which found that messengers, doormen and other people of “low status” were much more likely to die of numerous diseases and suicide. They also cited research conducted with macaque monkeys involving placing “high-” and “low-status” monkeys in cages with levers which allowed them to obtain cocaine. Monkeys at the bottom of the hierarchy consumed more of the drug than those higher up.
Other research cited found that “low-status” monkeys tended to get fatter, this being pointedly linked to research indicating that American men on reduced incomes gained an average of 5.5 lbs.
The most obvious fallacy in this reasoning relates to the fact that human beings, unlike monkeys, have the capacity to reflect on their own desires and to change their understandings of these.
Moreover, experience suggests that any attempt to intervene in the way human beings distribute and exchange resources is doomed merely to manipulate the shapes of inequality rather than to cure the problem.
Redistribution shifts resources around, depositing a new set of people at the bottom. Thus, there will always be a “bottom”, and always the potential for those deposited there to make unhelpful and unhealthy comparisons between themselves and those “higher up”.
Additionally, the method conventionally adopted by society to achieve greater equality tends, if anything, to make the self-esteem problem worse.
This week, a UCD survey of unemployed people painted a deeply dismaying picture of the condition imposed by dependence on State handouts. A majority of those surveyed described their experiences as degrading and lamented the absence of incentives to come off State benefits and take up part-time or low-paid work. Thus, in the name of helping people, the State succeeds mainly in dehumanising them. Perhaps, then, the issue we need to focus on is our cultural tendency to link social status with material aspiration in a way that provokes envy rather than ambition?
The British psychologist Oliver James has graphically proposed one of the core cultural changes in post-war Britain as being the expansion of the pool of status comparisons available to the average person.
Back in the 1950s, the average citizen “knew” perhaps a couple of dozen people, with whom he had the occasion to compare himself. Moreover, the intimacy of his cohort group enabled a degree of perspective to mitigate such comparisons: he could discount his own inadequacies against perceived deficiencies in the attainments or resources of the other. His neighbour might have had a bigger car, but was not so handsome, and so forth.
By the end of the 20th century, however, the pool of comparison available to the average citizen had become virtually unrestricted. Every waking moment, he was confronted by comparisons with celebrities, royalty, even fictional characters, who seemed to possess everything the culture adjudged to render human beings fulfilled.
James linked this phenomenon to the growing unease of British society, as expressed by various indicators, including what is called depression.
This insight does not render the problem more amenable, but it certainly changes the argument, implying that what is necessary is a change of cultural values to reduce the significance our culture attributes to particular forms of achievement and the rewards that accompany these.
This means not the creation of an ascetic culture in which materialism has no part, but changing the emphases of our culture to nurture a healthy sense of material aspiration by valuing talent, work, creativity, imagination and social contribution, and developing a disapproving sense of forms of material acquisition which are devoid of these characteristics.
Thus, the shoemaker again comes to be valued for his craft, while the speculator needs to prove himself otherwise.
It is by no means an easy objective, but it has the benefit, unlike the aspiration to “equality”, of not being impossible.