Status Anxiety

How high am I?

Alain de Botton is a philosopher. But he is also a professional writer, and with the fabulous sales of works like How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy he has taken philosophy to the kind of readers who might otherwise be overdosing on Bridget Jones, Harry Potter, or Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. The source of his success is his eccentric but ingratiating style: where other media-minded intellectuals offer their readers a diet of know-it-all certitudes garnished with sarcasm and raucous indignation, de Botton is always solicitous, unopinionated and self-deprecating. Like all good philosophers, he keeps well clear of polemic.

The brand is well established by now. A book by de Botton will be illustrated with an engrossing assortment of photos, charts, lists and diagrams, many of them conspicuously odd or amateurish. It will seem less like a magisterial treatise than a child's holiday scrapbook. His prose will be attractive, but never mannered or pretentious, and his sporadic attempts to tie things together with formal "theses" and "definitions" need not be taken too seriously.

His detractors may reproach him for lowering the fine abstractions of philosophy to the level of corny self-help manuals. But they get him wrong. He knows a good deal about Renaissance thought, and his work is a sustained attempt to revive the great tradition of neoclassical moral philosophy — of philosophy as a battle not against ignorance but against pride. For de Botton, the reason for engaging in philosophy is not to know more but to live better — to gain a sense of proportion about life's little ironies and acquire thereby a certain immunity from the rage and passion that dance attendance on them. This is philosophy in the manner of Montaigne or Thomas Browne rather than Descartes or John Locke: a gentle stoicism reminding us that when things do not pan out as we would like, it may be better to amend our desires than to try changing the world.

In his last book, The Art of Travel (2002), de Botton tackled that exquisite source of self-imposed misery, the practice of going away on holiday with those you think you love. From there it is only a short step to the prickly topic of Status Anxiety: the seemingly universal worry about where you stand on the ladder of socially recognized success — your queasy dislike for Top People combined with your earnest desire to be one of them. It is all a matter of love, according to de Botton. "Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories", he says: one being the search for personal love, the other the quest for general admiration, for the love of the world. Private love is the stock in trade of literature and the arts, but public love, he thinks, has till now scarcely dared to speak its name.

The first half of Status Anxiety is an attractive anthology of snippets about the history of snobbery and consumerism and the giddy processes by which the playthings of the rich — motor cars or telephones for instance — become the commodities of the poor, and the luxuries of the older generation become the necessities of the young. It is one of the paradoxes of modernity, nicely picked out by de Botton, that our ideals of democratic equality, far from abolishing status differences, have made them more agonizing than ever. Egalitarianism has sharpened the tooth of social envy, for if we all started off equal, then it seems that your riches and your brilliant career must be due to your talent and hard work, while my misery, redundancy and writer's block are all my own fault.

Rather less convincing is de Botton's way of presenting the whole rigmarole as a love story. The primal experience of love, according to him, is the child's enjoyment of the "unconditional love of a parent". Hence our adult quest for love, whether personal or social, is essentially an attempt to put the psychological clock back and re-immerse ourselves in the adoration that surrounded us when we were small. It is hard to believe, however, that parental love is ever quite so bovine or unambivalent as de Botton makes out. One of the great comforts of parenthood, after all, is the thought that it cannot last very long. Meanwhile, children will not have the remotest idea of what they signify to their parents, at least not till many years later — which is probably just as well, since mums and dads can be as thoroughly Larkined by their kids as their kids undoubtedly are by them. In any case there is more to the arts of love than the knack of winning the affection of others. You also need to open yourself to them and seek out ways in which they may be lovable — a project which will often call for considerable persistence and ingenuity. Love is an action as well as a passion, and when philosophers and theologians have spoken of love of the world, they have surely been thinking more of our attitude to it than its attitude to us.

When he comes to consider "Solutions" in the second half of the book, de Botton devotes a chapter to the "intelligent misanthropy" of philosophers like Schopenhauer, who have tried to ward off anxiety about their public reputation by convincing themselves that people are generally so stupid that their good opinion is not worth having. But it is a rather pointless manoeuvre. An irritable dislike of the world at large will do even less to protect us from what people think of us than indiscriminate affection for it. What we need, as de Botton explains with eloquence and charm, is not hatred of the world so much as a kind of forgiving pessimism — a recognition that disasters are bound to befall us whatever we do. "A firm belief in the necessary misery", he observes, "was for centuries one of mankind's most important assets, a bulwark against bitterness." The task that de Botton sets himself in Status Anxiety is to restore our wavering faith in the necessary misery.

He starts with art, picking out a line of novelistic and painterly realism running from Jane Austen to Zadie Smith, and from Chardin to Thomas Jones, where virtue is portrayed as flourishing not among the great panjandrums but among the humble, the poor and the disregarded. Then he turns to politics, which for him is not so much the art of running the State as the perception of the mutability of social ideals — a perception which should help moderate any impulse to pin our personal ambitions onto some particular version of success as the world currently defines it. And he concludes with religion, making an excellent case for the utility of those intimations of mortality that "lend us the courage to unhook ourselves from the more gratuitous of society's expectations". In the end the philosophical lessons of Status Anxiety get a bit lost amid the wry social commentary. The book starts by promising that if we train our eyes on eternal verities, or rather eternal doubts, we will learn to stop worrying about our public reputation; but it finishes by recommending that we simply spread our risks and take advantage of the vast variety of ways in which success and failure can be defined. If we are depressed by our utter uselessness compared to other people, then we should simply change our reference points. Or if we prefer humiliation (a possibility that de Botton somehow overlooks) we can get plenty of that too, entering ourselves in status contests that we know in advance we will lose. The internet helps (though unaccountably he does not mention it either): you can always be sure of finding an e-group that will either inflate your self-esteem or puncture it, according to taste. And if that seems too boring you can throw yourself on the mercy of fate and indulge in the solitary vice of cyberspace: close the door and try a spot of auto e-searching. Go on: give in to your status anxieties and Google yourself; you can bet that Top People do it too.

Jonathan Rée is a freelance historian and philosopher; his books include Philosophical Tales and I See a Voice.

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