Rousseau, Amour-Propre and Modern Society
We need not care about what people think about us as much as we did in the past
Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued in ‘A Discourse on Inequality’ that man in modern society is plagued by amour-propre, i.e., the desire for the esteem of others, which makes us all miserable. Contrastingly, this Genevan philosopher claimed amour propre was largely absent in the state of nature. I’d agree with Rousseau amour-propre very often inhibits our true flourishing, but, against Rousseau, I will argue that modern society actually gives us the greater potential to overcome the problem of amour propre, and, that prehistoric society and premodern society definitely didn’t embody Rousseau’s ideal of no one caring about what other people thought of them. This is yet another reason to welcome the modern world of urban society and capitalism over the backward state of life before the Industrial Revolution.
According to Rousseau, hunters and gatherers in the late state of nature in their ‘rustic huts’ only experienced the ‘first stirrings of pride’, or, amour-propre. According to him each person was ‘hardly as yet knowing how to distinguish between rank’. In other words, there was no status hierarchy. If we take Rousseau to be referring to that period between 50,000 years ago when fully articulate modern language began and 10,000 years ago when agriculture emerged, we find he was right in predicting there was an egalitarianism in tribes. But Rousseau was wrong to think there was little concern for status and the thoughts of others about oneself. Both mental concerns were rife.
Professor Paul Bloom writes: ‘Egalitarian lifestyles of the hunter-gatherers exist because the individuals care a lot about status. Individuals in these societies end up roughly equal because everyone is struggling to ensure that nobody gets too much power over him or her.’ When it comes to simply thinking about what others thought about you, Professor Richard Wrangham states hunters-gatherers ‘lived or died by their willingness to conform’. Why? Because it was only a strong sense of purpose and teamwork which enabled mankind to take down the big cats and be successful in hunting large animals. Dissenters would die at the claws of predators or face starvation. F. A. Hayek puts it well: ‘An isolated man would soon be a dead man’
Contrary to Rousseau then, we have established that in the hunter gatherer tribes of about 60 to 100 people amour-propre fully filled the bosom of everyone. Despite his poor anthropology (and, to be fair, this wasn’t a developed field in the 18th Century), Rousseau was entirely right in musing that agriculture revolutionised humanity and created a steeper status hierarchy. Maybe it increased the concern each person had for the thoughts of others about themselves too. The development of private property in land about 10,000 years ago by enabling a status hierarchy perhaps created ‘the burning passion to enlarge one’s relative fortune…to put oneself ahead of others’, which, clearly for Rousseau, could never be satisfied in society because higher status is necessarily scare. Rousseau condemned 18th Century France for the same reasons, and, I suspect, he’d strongly condemn Western countries today for the same reasons still.
A satisfied desire for the esteem of others is not necessarily a good thing for people: I strongly doubt it is. Very often it can pull the individual away from work or activities they truly enjoy simply so they can say they have a high paying job when they are introduced to people. (The higher self follows the lower self). A desire for higher status is open to debate as constituting wellbeing, because, as Nozick observes, it appears ‘self-esteem is based on differentiating characteristics’, i.e. ‘we evaluate how well we do something by comparing it to the performances of others’. I will now argue the problem of amour-propre concerning the simple desire to be esteemed by others is less of a problem in today’s urban society of capitalism than in tribes of old, or, smaller villages and towns of the preindustrial world.
Before I do though I want to comment on amour-propre concerning status. A status society need not condemn the majority to misery, because, one, everyone can be at the top at some point in their life, and, two, there can be multiple status hierarchies enabling a majority to be in the top half of at least one at any single time. In a modern capitalist economy, the number of these status hierarchies’ multiplies greatly making such a prospect more realisable. Rousseau claims this amour-propre is responsible for our prosperity and many bad things such as ‘our vices…our mistakes…our philosophers…that is to say, for a multitude of bad things and very few good things’. If he’s right about the source of our prosperity being status seeking, I’m happy to say he’s plain wrong. In 1820 global extreme poverty was 80% plus, now it’s less than 10%. Our prosperity today outweighs any of the psychological problems we may have due to it, and, I reckon that was even true in 18th Century France too. Sometimes there is truth in the phrase: ‘Graph goes up world more gooder’
The chief reason to believe amour-propre is potentially a lesser worry in urban society under capitalism is the cost of ignoring the thoughts of others about you are dramatically less, so, people today can pursue their true good where it conflicts with others’ thoughts more easily than they could do in preindustrial and prehistoric times. In the prehistoric tribe going your own way entailed death because hunting by yourself was very difficult and even a capable hunter would need the insurance of meat sharing. Fast forward to life before the Industrial Revolution in the mediaeval period though and we still find about 80% of Europe’s population living in villages of about 100 people; little different to a tribe’s size. Now this situation can create the following problems for strange people; people who want to engage in Mill’s ‘experiments in living’.
Should you want to invent something which will put local labourers out of work everyone will know who you are and shun you. Should you want to choose divergent moral, political or religious beliefs you’d be shunned too and have to stop holding them, or, move to another place. Should you want to choose different marital arrangements the limited pool of housing controlled by landlords would prohibit you. The social pressure from everyone you know to choose an esteemed career, e.g. blacksmith or shoemaker, would be far greater too, plus, the psychological urge to seek status and esteem would be greater within your mind when you are always in the presence of people you personally know. The cost of being strange is simply very high in tight knit societies where everyone knows everyone on a personal basis.
In an urbanised society with great populations all the costs to taking lesser trodden paths are lessened. Thanks to towns containing tens of thousands of people and cities, millions of people, individuals need not come into the personal contact of people they know on as regular a basis. Plus: Strange people who in the past may have given up in their alternative pursuits due to constant social pressure can now find fellow travellers in big cities with greater ease and thus resist that force. They can pursue their own good with a lesser concern for amour-propre. When Rousseau talks about ‘our burning desire to be talked about [well]’ as being ‘fatal to happiness’, I’d say that was far more important in premodern societies where personal connections mattered a lot more to our material wellbeing than they do today, or, even increasingly in Rousseau’s time in expanding towns and cities. To convince you this is not just uninformed armchair anthropology, I’d point to this quotation from Desmond Morris’s The Human Zoo:
‘This de-personalizing [from urbanisation] does help to support the rebels and innovators who, in a smaller, tribal community, would be subjected to much greater cohesive force. They would be flattened by the demands of conformity’
Great evidence of this impersonality of urban society is 51% of people cannot give their neighbours’ first name and 36% of people would not recognise their neighbour in person. This would be unheard of before the Industrial Revolution. Any embarrassment or displeasure felt from being different are greatly reduced due to this. How though is a lesser concern for amour-propre ensured by capitalist society as opposed to simply an urbanised society? In a socialist society, or, one in which social positions rely on state granted privileges, power is more concentrated in elites which grants each normal person less of it. In a socialist society, a metallurgy innovator who irritates the Chief of Metal Procurement is over. In a capitalist society, a metallurgy innovator who irritates one funder can simply find another one.
In Britain the planning system no doubt stops some people from doing things differently because they don’t want to upset political elites who will deny them building on their own land too; a factor which would be absent without it. Indeed: An issue with today, unlike the 1930s, where a terraced house in London could be bought for 2.4 times average income, is the cost of housing stops seriously different ways of living, e.g., being an artist for three days a week and working in a supermarket for two, because, the cost of housing is so high at 8 times average income.
Having written this defence of urban society under capitalism, I cannot but think of a conversation I had with an Egyptian at Wetherspoons many years ago. He was blue and lamenting how little he saw his parents while in London. I suspect in that mindset he would’ve have said this about my thoughts: ‘Sure, I grant the benefits of modern society you outline, but what it suffers from as a result is a lack of community; community which epitomised the days before the Enlightenment. We’ve lost that and that is a bad thing’. Maybe! Yet I would note nothing stops the formation of communities in modern society, but, perhaps unlike the past, you have to actively go out and seek them. (The same goes for social media; no one need interact with it in the way people used to have to interact with their village.) Communitarians should not expect their laziness in doing so to warrant restricting individual freedom to make it easier for them to live in such communities.
Contrary to Rousseau, urban society under capitalism does not have a greater problem with amour-propre relative to the state of nature or premodern times, rather, the problem of amour-propre is greatly reduced in modern society. People simply do not need to worry about what people think about them as much as they once did (even if they still do). To my mind, this is a good thing as it enables an easier pursuit of what truly ensures our flourishing, which dubiously includes what other people think of us in a noninstrumental way.
Very interesting read. I'm also interested in noting that Western society and hunter gatherer society are _more_ similar to each other in their individualism than either are to pretty much every non-Western large/agrarian society. Does fit very well with Henrich's kin-structure idea of society. Agrarian societies are larger and more stationary than hunter gatherers, and complex kin affiliations and hierarchies emerge. These remain restrictive until society is large enough and the political will there to break these up through the mingling and pairing up of people from different clans.
Interesting to read (between the lines, perhaps) ithat you appear to find modern society less judgemental and conformist. From where I sit, the view is somewhat different. In my youth, homosexuality was illegal. Today it is almost compulsory if one wishes to engage in certain spheres.
Being 'different' has always been embraced by some and shunned by others. The few who live and behave without regard to social mores don't care what conformists think or say about them. The latter, whilst publicly accepting the idea that we are all individuals, are careful not to stray from the mainstream thinking of the day. They subtly vie with one another to be the most politically correct, regardless of evidence against the ideas they endorse and support, as the opinion of others is no less important to them now than it has ever been and laws are continually being created to reinforce their stance. Those who think for themselves also vie with one another to produce solid evidence in support of the facts which the conformists of today are instructed to shun. At least to some extent, I'd say that both groups are evidence of a continuing desire to be admired by others, just not for the same things that motivated people half a century and longer ago.
On the material plane, many men still judge one another by their ownership of more or less coveted vehicles and property whilst many women focus on each other's fingernails, hair and clothing. The advertising industry's output relies to a great extent on people's desire to impress one another as do the sprayed 'tags' of graffiti 'artists' (or vandals, depending on ones point of view) in hard to reach places in cities and towns.
In my opinion, individual members of our species still judge their self worth by their perceived effect on each other.