Books: Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

Stressed for success

By John Ziebell

Over the past few years Alain de Botton has been working steadily at creating a niche for himself as the spokesmodel of pop philosophy. The author of How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy comes across as the guy who can offer readers an Everyman's perspective on ideas that have significant intellectual weight. De Botton isn't creating new schools of thought or reinventing any intellectual wheels in his books, but he does provide engaging, plain-language discussions of some fairly brainy subjects. His explanations avoid the arcane, jargon-laced verbiage that infects the work of so many self-proclaimed postmodernists. He's smart and actually fun to read.

"Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another," the author proposes in his most recent work. "If we cannot stop envying, it seems especially poignant that we should be constrained to spend so much of our lives envying the wrong things."

The tenets of his argument are these: First, that as humans who constitute the culture that we do, our greatest desires are love and recognition; second, how we have come to measure those desires, and their fulfillment, is at the root of our deepest dissatisfaction.

After defining status as a concern that has "exceptional capacity" as a social driver, de Botton divides his book into two sections to discuss the concept: causes and solutions.

The early causes of status-based disharmony were mainly, as one might guess, economic in nature. De Botton surveys the rise of capitalist culture from the American and French revolutions and serves up an interesting mix of contrasting critical reflections, from Mandeville, Locke, Hume and the Spencerian social Darwinists to the New Testament, De Tocqueville, Ruskin, Marx and Veblen. Pragmatic assertions granting a moral imperative to an elite graced with status are counterbalanced not only by critical prose, but by the criticisms of art--the unfairness of status-based imbalances outed in the fiction of authors like Austen, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dickens. In the end, the exploration is less about pointing specific fingers of blame than admitting the inadequacy of a society that can disenfranchise entire sectors of itself based on the perception of their value to others.

What are the solutions? Well...maybe thinking about why we do the things we do? How about that? Society won't recast its values unless we, as individuals, insist upon it by reshaping our own. And to paraphrase Rousseau, our greatest problem might be dealing with the difficulty humans have in deciding what is important. Philosophy can help us figure out what we really want, de Botton argues; so can art, politics, religion and even embracing the attributes of the bohemians--all those practices that constitute, in the words of Matthew Arnold, "the criticism of life." The author's exhaustive catalogue of examples and illustrations runs the literary and artistic gamut, from the classics through comedy, but all the solutions might be as simple--or as complicated--as "know thyself."

De Botton's approach--collating arguments that should be recognized by most thinking people, supported by the perspectives of canonical Western writers--has earned him the animosity of critics at home in England, where the most insufferable status whores are not the wealthy but the effete, more-literate-than-thou snobs given editorial space in papers like The Guardian. Sure, the author's presentation is less academically complex than it could be. And one might certainly learn more from reading the original texts of all the authors de Botton discusses only briefly. But face it, the audience for this book is a culture that grants credibility to media constructs like Dr. Phil. If Status Anxiety does nothing more than make readers take a questioning look into a mirror, however briefly, the book has earned its keep.