an embarrassment of RICHES
In response to What if Adam Smith was Right About Poverty?
According to a model of human nature proposed by David Hume and Adam Smith (among other philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment), wealth is an object to be admired, envied, emulated by the lower classes. Representations of wealth – witness today’s cult of celebrity, with its tantalizingly glimpsed lifestyles of the rich and famous – are reckoned vital to the establishment and maintenance of social order, in the form of an immutable hierarchy. As a society, Smith wrote, “we make parade of our riches, and conceal our poverty” – and that consequently, “we pursue riches and avoid poverty.” But this parade of riches is nothing more than a mirage, a fantasy which captivates the complacent masses:
When we consider the condition of the great, in those delusive colours in which the imagination is apt to paint it, it seems to be almost the abstract idea of a perfect and happy state. It is the very state which, in all our waking dreams and idle reveries, we had sketched out to ourselves as the final object of all our desires. We feel, therefore, a peculiar sympathy with the satisfaction of those who are in it. We favour all their inclinations, and forward all their wishes. What pity, we think, that any thing should spoil and corrupt so agreeable a situation! We could even wish them immortal; and it seems hard to us, that death should at last put an end to such perfect enjoyment.
Public displays of wealth serve an ideological, propagandistic function. Because of them we are all the more inclined, Smith argues, “to go along with all the passions of the rich and powerful. … Our obsequiousness to our superiors more frequently arises from our admiration for the advantage of their situation, than from any private expectations of benefit from their good-will.” It is through ostentatious display and the inculcation of idyllic fantasies that the wealthy harness the sundry energies and aspirations of the relatively poor, subjecting these lower classes to their will, that is to say, to various wiles and schemes by which to propagate further wealth. Relative poverty, on the other hand, is ideally concealed from public scrutiny:
Nothing is so mortifying as to be obliged to expose our [economic] distress to the view of the public, and to feel, that though our situation is open to the eyes of all mankind, no mortal conceives for us the half of what we suffer. … The poor man … is ashamed of his poverty. He feels that it either places him out of the sight of mankind, or, that if they take any notice of him, they have, however, scarce any fellow-feeling with the misery and distress which he suffers. … The poor man goes out and comes in unheeded, and when in the midst of a crowd is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel. Those humble cares and painful attentions which occupy those in his situation, afford no amusement to the dissipated and the gay. They turn away their eyes from him, or if the extremity of his distress forces them to look at him, it is only to spurn so disagreeable an object from among them. The fortunate and the proud wonder at the insolence of human wretchedness, that it should dare to present itself before them, and with the loathsome aspect of its misery presume to disturb the serenity of their happiness.
That social pain, alienation, discrimination so keenly felt by the poor – but practically non-existent as far as the wealthy are concerned – too often goes undiagnosed, much less remedied. A medical practitioner or social worker (i.e., a professional person who can offer, at best, palliative care) is of little help. The poor must treat themselves, “self-medicate” in the modern parlance, even if such a course merely exacerbates economic and social inequality, in a vicious circle or downward spiral.
Relative poverty sucks. Social pain is real. But we disagree with Smith’s view of human nature and principle of social cohesion, since culture (art and religion both spring to mind) generates countless reversals of this “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition.” Neither do we believe that this cult of human sentiment is at all necessary “to establish and maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society” – itself an ethically dubious (if not downright dangerous) goal.
What remains unchanged over 250 years since Smith wrote his Theory of Moral Sentiments is that the mainstream of society continues to respect, admire and worship wealth, instead of wisdom and virtue. Conversely, poverty – but not human vice or folly – is met with utter contempt, severest moral judgment, and corresponding punishment.
Might it not be said that wealth – and not religion as Marx believed – is the true opiate of the masses? Or perhaps it is that we have, in the absence of religion, made of wealth a veritable cult.
Time to wake up Australia!
According to a model of human nature proposed by David Hume and Adam Smith (among other philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment), wealth is an object to be admired, envied, emulated by the lower classes. Representations of wealth – witness today’s cult of celebrity, with its tantalizingly glimpsed lifestyles of the rich and famous – are reckoned vital to the establishment and maintenance of social order, in the form of an immutable hierarchy. As a society, Smith wrote, “we make parade of our riches, and conceal our poverty” – and that consequently, “we pursue riches and avoid poverty.” But this parade of riches is nothing more than a mirage, a fantasy which captivates the complacent masses:
When we consider the condition of the great, in those delusive colours in which the imagination is apt to paint it, it seems to be almost the abstract idea of a perfect and happy state. It is the very state which, in all our waking dreams and idle reveries, we had sketched out to ourselves as the final object of all our desires. We feel, therefore, a peculiar sympathy with the satisfaction of those who are in it. We favour all their inclinations, and forward all their wishes. What pity, we think, that any thing should spoil and corrupt so agreeable a situation! We could even wish them immortal; and it seems hard to us, that death should at last put an end to such perfect enjoyment.
Public displays of wealth serve an ideological, propagandistic function. Because of them we are all the more inclined, Smith argues, “to go along with all the passions of the rich and powerful. … Our obsequiousness to our superiors more frequently arises from our admiration for the advantage of their situation, than from any private expectations of benefit from their good-will.” It is through ostentatious display and the inculcation of idyllic fantasies that the wealthy harness the sundry energies and aspirations of the relatively poor, subjecting these lower classes to their will, that is to say, to various wiles and schemes by which to propagate further wealth. Relative poverty, on the other hand, is ideally concealed from public scrutiny:
Nothing is so mortifying as to be obliged to expose our [economic] distress to the view of the public, and to feel, that though our situation is open to the eyes of all mankind, no mortal conceives for us the half of what we suffer. … The poor man … is ashamed of his poverty. He feels that it either places him out of the sight of mankind, or, that if they take any notice of him, they have, however, scarce any fellow-feeling with the misery and distress which he suffers. … The poor man goes out and comes in unheeded, and when in the midst of a crowd is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel. Those humble cares and painful attentions which occupy those in his situation, afford no amusement to the dissipated and the gay. They turn away their eyes from him, or if the extremity of his distress forces them to look at him, it is only to spurn so disagreeable an object from among them. The fortunate and the proud wonder at the insolence of human wretchedness, that it should dare to present itself before them, and with the loathsome aspect of its misery presume to disturb the serenity of their happiness.
That social pain, alienation, discrimination so keenly felt by the poor – but practically non-existent as far as the wealthy are concerned – too often goes undiagnosed, much less remedied. A medical practitioner or social worker (i.e., a professional person who can offer, at best, palliative care) is of little help. The poor must treat themselves, “self-medicate” in the modern parlance, even if such a course merely exacerbates economic and social inequality, in a vicious circle or downward spiral.
Relative poverty sucks. Social pain is real. But we disagree with Smith’s view of human nature and principle of social cohesion, since culture (art and religion both spring to mind) generates countless reversals of this “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition.” Neither do we believe that this cult of human sentiment is at all necessary “to establish and maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society” – itself an ethically dubious (if not downright dangerous) goal.
What remains unchanged over 250 years since Smith wrote his Theory of Moral Sentiments is that the mainstream of society continues to respect, admire and worship wealth, instead of wisdom and virtue. Conversely, poverty – but not human vice or folly – is met with utter contempt, severest moral judgment, and corresponding punishment.
Might it not be said that wealth – and not religion as Marx believed – is the true opiate of the masses? Or perhaps it is that we have, in the absence of religion, made of wealth a veritable cult.
Time to wake up Australia!
Post-script on Advertising
That the human being is a social animal, craving recognition, approval and respect as much as it needs physical sustenance, points to one of the reasons why advertising works so well. It thrives on social pain as it feeds on its own corruption of human moral sentiment. But it does the (for Smith, fundamentally important; to us, ethically suspect) ideological work of establishing and maintaining social hierarchy. In the realm of representation and imagination with which Smith is frequently concerned, wealth performs this ideological work most efficiently; the distinction between wealth and poverty is the foundation of social order. But there is no intrinsic reason why social ordering must be hierarchical; nor indeed, why “wealth” should be an object of veneration at all. Indeed, humanity continuously purges itself of this delusion, by enacting countless reversals (inversions, subversions, perversions): in literature, in art, and in other, more mundane, materially embedded cultural practices. But not advertising, which in furnishing the tantalizing object of desire – lifestyle perfection as represented by wealth – merely engenders what Smith called “obsequiousness” – obedience or attentiveness to an excessive or servile degree – among the (relatively) poor. Advertising, to be clear, maintains the greatest disparity between rich and poor, thereby facilitating the basest ambitions of the wealthy – even as it drives consumption to dangerous new levels. Advertising promotes the all-too-costly pursuit of relative (among the poor) and absolute (among the rich) wealth;– and conversely, the avoidance at all costs of poverty, whether relative or absolute. Even advertisements for non-profit and other ostensibly worthy causes – such as animal and human rights, environmentalism, etc. – far from challenging wealth, merely serve to reassure viewers of its ultimate privileges, comforts and freedoms.