23 Jan Measure his height with his stilts off. (ALAIN DE BOTTON)
In Unto This Last (1862), John Ruskin, who had been as concerned with challenging meritocratic ideas, described in sarcastic tones the conclusions he had reached about the characters of rich and poor on the basis of hundreds of encounters with both groups in many countries over four decades: ‘The persons who become rich are, generally speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive and ignorant. The persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the wellinformed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief and the entirely merciful just and godly person.’
In other words, an unclassifiably wide range of people ends up both rich and poor – which means, to follow the message first articulated by Jesus Christ and repeated in secular language by political thinkers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that it is not our prerogative to start to ascribe honour principally on the basis of income. A multitude of outer events and inner characteristics will go into making one man wealthy and another destitute. There are luck and circumstance, illness and fear, accident and late development, good timing and misfortune.
Three centuries before Ruskin and Shaw, Michel de Montaigne had in a similar vein stressed the role of contingent factors in determining the outcome of lives. He had advised us to remember the role played by ‘chance in bestowing glory on us according to herfickle will: I have often seen chance marching ahead of merit, and often outstripping merit by a long chalk’. A dispassionate audit of our successes and failures should leave us feeling that there are reasons at once to be less proud of and less embarrassed by ourselves, for a thought-provoking percentage of what happens to us is not of our own doing. Montaigne asked that we keep a rein on our excitement when meeting the powerful and wealthy and on our judgements when encountering the poor and obscure. ‘A man may have a great suite of attendants, a beautiful palace, great influence and a large income. All that may surround him, but it is not in him … Measure his height with his stilts off: let him lay aside his wealth and his decorations and show himself to us naked … What sort of soul does he have? Is his soul a beautiful one, able, happily endowed with all her functions? Are her riches her own or are they borrowed? Has luck had nothing to do with it? … That is what we need to know; that is what the immense distances between us men should be judged by.’
Uniting the many challenges to the commercial meritocratic ideal is a plea that we cease bestowing something as haphazardly distributed as money may have been with moral connotations; that we cut the doctrinaire connections routinely made between wealth and virtue – and that we attempt to ensure that we have taken the stilts off before we begin to judge.
STATUS ANXIETY
Alain de Botton
