From Quillette, August 19:
In his 1950 book Unpopular Essays, Bertrand Russell divides the misfortunes that can befall humanity into two general categories—those inflicted by nature, and those inflicted by other humans. As he points out, for most of human existence a good chunk of our suffering was caused by nature—things like famines and disease and the elements. But as civilization evolved, as we got smarter and richer and more organized, harms caused by other people increased, while those due to natural causes decreased. There’s now less famine but more war. More generally, the growth of civilization shifted our concerns from struggles against the elements to trying to deal with other people. Our politics thus went from being focused on survival, to being obsessed with status.
This distinction between survival and status has deep philosophical roots. It goes back at least to Rousseau. In his 1762 treatise Emile, or On Education, he makes a distinction between what he calls amour de soi and amour propre. Both terms translate into English as “self-love,” and each reflects a form of pride or self-respect. Rousseau sees amour de soi, which arises out of the need for survival or self-preservation that drives all animals, not just humans, as the more basic or primitive form of love. The self-respect that defines amour de soi has to do with one’s personal wellbeing; it’s the happy state that arises when you triumph over the elements by providing yourself and your loved ones with food and shelter and security in the struggle for survival.
In contrast, amour propre is the self-respect or pride that comes from comparing yourself with other people. It is a type of ego, or vanity, and is fundamentally about triumphing in any number of status competitions. What feeds your amour propre is not, for example, building a house that keeps you and your family safe and warm, or tending a garden or a farm that keeps you fed. It’s about having a bigger house than your neighbour, a fancier car, a nicer lawn, a bigger barbecue, or going on more expensive or exotic vacations. We moderns regularly and unthinkingly engage in an enormous list of status competitions, to the point where we often don’t realize just how much of our time is spent in a status struggle with other people.
Of course, even the state of nature that Rousseau described isn’t completely free of amour propre—both forms of Rousseauian self-love exist in all human societies, however primitive or small-scale. The status seeking at the heart of amour propre is simply what we call “politics” in the most general sense, as when we talk about “office politics.” It even exists in non-human societies. Anyone who’s read Frans de Waal’s 1982 classic Chimpanzee Politics, about political rivalry and coalition-building within a troop of chimpanzees, can’t help but be struck by how much the primates’ gamesmanship and overlapping struggles for sex, power, and influence resemble what goes on in human affairs.
The course of the industrial age has witnessed the shift identified by Bertrand Russell: we’ve become so comfortable as a society that, for the vast majority of people in the West, mere survival has completely faded away as a concern. Instead, we spend more and more of our time and energy engaged in status competitions with other people. Our behaviours and beliefs no longer affect our survival in any serious way; they impact only our relative social, political, or economic status.
This has two important consequences. The first is that the need for our beliefs to connect or respond to reality has become increasingly unimportant. We are free to believe literally anything, from the wildest alt-right QAnon political conspiracies to the wackiest Gwyneth Paltrow health-nut fantasies of the contemporary wellness movement. None of it really matters—the lights still come on in your house, your car still runs, the grocery stores remain stocked with food. As nanotechnology expert J. Storrs Hall puts it, humans have an enormous capacity to hold beliefs not because they are true, but because they are advantageous to hold. Once upon a time, it was more advantageous to know the facts of the world than not to, so we developed science. Today, our beliefs are less a reflection of our reality than a means of identifying our respective political tribes and negotiating our status within them.
The upshot is that belief has an increasingly Veblenian character. As Hall’s argument is summarized, “The result of this is that we have major social institutions whose support comes in substantial part from virtue signalling rather than from actual useful results … they include health care, education, and environmental and safety regulation, among others.” “Luxury beliefs”—such as the denial of climate change by the Right, or the persistent denial of personal responsibility by the Left—do harm people, eventually. But they tend not to impact the people at the top of the status ladder; it’s those lower in the hierarchy who’ll ultimately suffer....
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