| It�s common to assume that what motivates people to work hard (and to achieve fame and power) is always principally money. But it might be fairer to say that perhaps the most powerful of all our motivations is a search for a rather elusive and rarely mentioned quality: status. To have status is to feel nothing short of �loved.� Perhaps we could define love, at once in its familial, sexual and worldly forms, as a kind of respect, a sensitivity by one person to another�s existence. To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern. Our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are administered to. And under such care, we flourish. There may be differences between romantic and status forms of love � the latter has no sexual dimension, it cannot end in marriage, those who offer it usually bear secondary motives � and yet the beloved in the status field will, just like romantic lovers, enjoy protection under the benevolent gaze of others. Why do we need the love of others so badly? Because it seems we are very bad at remaining confident in ourselves without signs that other people like us. The American psychologist William James once wrote: �No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no one turned around when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met �cut us dead�, and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would before long well up in us, from which the cruellest bodily torture would be a relief.� But what exactly does happen to us emotionally without love and status; without attention, praise, smiles and compliments? William James suggested rage and impotent despair. Half a century later, another psychologist, the Austrian-born Ren� Spitz, considered the question by comparing the development of babies looked after by a loving mother with that of babies in a number of orphanages. Both groups lived in hygenic surroundings, with good food and medical care. But whereas the babies with mothers were kissed, stroked, stimulated and held, the ones in Spitz�s orphanages lived in near solitary confinement. Sheets were hung around their cribs; all they could see was white linen and the ceiling. Nurses came to see them only twice a day and always fed them by bottle. No one cooed at or tickled them. The consequences were dramatic. Thirty four out of ninety one cases studied died before their second year. In one orphanage, the death rate was ninety percent. Even when the babies lived, their development was distorted. Among surviving two and a half year olds, most could not speak, few could eat alone, all were incontinent. A typical child from an orphanage had, wrote Spitz, �wide open, expressionless eyes, a frozen immobile face and a faraway expression as if in a daze�, symptoms of what the psychologist called �hospitalism� or �anaclitic depression�, a literal demonstration, were one to need it, that humans do not live by food alone and that clean, well-lit places are not enough. The truth extends beyond humans. To return to the animal kingdom, two decades after Spitz�s study of orphanages, a third psychologist, the American Harry Harlow placed two newborn rhesus monkeys in separate cages. One newborn was accompanied by its mother, the second, by a wire dummy made to look a little like a mother. Both small monkeys had plenty of food, from the mother�s breast or from a teet fixed to the upper body of the dummy. Dr Harlow, newborn Newborn and its mother and wire monkey [photos from Harry Harlow � Learning to Love] The experiment confirmed the paramount of importance of emotional proximity. In Harlow�s words: �the actions of surrogate-raised monkeys became bizarre later in life. They engaged in stereotyped behaviour patterns such as clutching themselves and rocking constantly back and forth, and exhibited excessive and misdirected attention.� Both male and female monkeys had difficulties having sex, and if they happened to become mothers, were incapable of looking after their young properly, being either indifferent or abusive to them. Love and status matter to us in part because they offer us protection - way beyond that offered by sturdy walls, food and warmth. We are frail creatures unable to survive on our own against the challenges of nature and the aggressions of social life and therefore need allies on whom we can depend, people who will defend us against our enemies and shelter us in our crises. Having status could be viewed as a sign that we will have access to such allies - and that we are as a result significantly less likely to meet with an ugly and premature end. It follows that our sadness at the disapproval or neglect of others (and hence our anxiety about low status) is a natural response to a potential increase in danger. To be ignored is not only unpleasant, it is also, from an evolutionary perspective, unsafe. We are programmed to sense how a community perceives us; to be saddened by its censure and pleased by its love. We are the descendants of people who kept a close eye on what others thought of them. In the words of William James: �I should not be alive now had I not become sensitive to looks of approval or disapproval on the faces among which my life is cast.� There is perhaps another more psychological reason why we require the love of those around us: how we feel about ourselves depends to an awkwardly large degree on how others feel about us. The world�s approval promotes self-acceptance, its condemnation self-hatred. We need others to like us in order that we may like ourselves. Such malleability seems a strange, regrettable quirk of our make-up. Ideally, what someone thought of me would not affect what I thought of me. If I had carried out an an honest appraisal of my character and concluded that I was intelligent, another person�s suggestion of my idiocy would be of no great import. But only a few characters in history have managed to maintain such an unwavering attitude towards themselves in the face of the suspicions of others. Socrates and Jesus come to mind. The former was derided by the majority of his community for being dirty, unwashed, stupid and weird. The latter was derided for being mad, a heretic, stupid, na�ve, blasphemous and delusional. Yet in both cases, others� perceptions did not fundamentally impact on their self-perceptions. The good voices within were not muffled by the bad voices without. Self-perception Others� Perception I am clever You're Crazy I am the Son of God You're idiotic You're blasphemous You're malodorous You're weird You're badly dressed Most of us cannot manage such steeliness. We have within us a greater range of options about the kind of people we are. There may be evidence of cleverness, but there are other possibilities besides. There is also stupidity and sentimentality. Some mornings, there is nastiness and paranoia too. And on a bad day, we are wholly absurd, a cosmic mistake, and it would be best if we were quickly and quietly thrown into a bin. If the hatred of others is so devastating, it is because it grips like a barnacle to latent negative feelings we already hold about ourselves. However, a declining mood may be reversed if others smile at us, if they compliment us on a piece of work or report a flattering comment made in passing by a third party. The love of others can highlight the best of the many available verdicts about who we are and dim the bad ones. It shores up a happy story about our identity and so delays our relegation to a dustbin. Self-perception Others� Perception I am clever You're nice I am mad You're very generous I�m absurd You're a catch I�m ugly I�m OK-looking I�m a loser I�m kind Our �ego� or self-conception might be pictured as a fine but leaking balloon, forever needing others to add air to it with their love and vulnerable to the smallest pin-pricks of neglect. There is something astonishing, even absurd in the extent to which we can be cheered by the attentions of others and damaged by their disregard. We are capable of finding life worth living because someone has remembered our name or sent us a basket of fruit. And we may be sent into despair because a colleague has given us a blank look in a corridor or we have been badly seated at dinner. It is not surprising, therefore, if we are concerned with what place we occupy in society. Our place is what will decide how much love the world offers us, and in turn, in light of the fragility of our ego, whether we can be satisfied with ourselves or must fall prey to humiliation and shame. Our rung on the ladder holds the key to a commodity of unprecedented emotional importance: a love without which we will be as sad as monkeys with wires mother and orphans in the hands of cold, unsmiling nurses. Alain de Botton�s new book (which inspired this article) is called �Status Anxiety� and is just published by Penguin. A TV programme of the same name, presented by de Botton, is on Channel 4, March 6th, 7-9pm. |
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| The Philosopher |
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| The Psychology of Status Anxiety |
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