Arguably the most powerful latent teaching in
many faith traditions is the exhortation to avoid preoccupation
with wealth and materialism. Excessive consumption is the engine
that runs the world's most powerful economies, and the arguments
used to resist it—it is bad for the environment, and often
bad for human health—have made only small dents in the trend.
Religions are in a position to weigh in more strongly with the
spiritual and moral case against excessive consumption: that it
diverts attention from the most important goals of life, and that
it squanders resources that might be used to help the poor. And
beyond preaching, they could become more active in the community by
sponsoring neighborhood groups that seek to promote simplicity and
by otherwise offering support to those who seek to live
simply.
Whether we have religious tendencies or not,
Alain de Botton says it is worth dwelling on just how much
Christianity has always had to say about status, and how consoling
its message has long been for many of those most beset by status
worries. Christianity bids us look beneath our surface differences
and focus on a number of universal truths.
At the centre of the Christian thesis is the
curious-sounding claim (entirely alien to a modern, secular
world-view) that one's status carries no moral connotations, that
what you do. In other words, says strictly nothing about who
you are. Jesus was the highest man, but he was a carpenter. Pilate
was an important imperial official, but a sinner. It therefore made
no sense, Christianity argued, to believe that one's place in the
social hierarchy reflected actual qualities.
Another helpful, status-anxiety-reducing feature
of Christianity is its emphasis on the vanity of earthly things.
Because this life is only a prelude to a far more important next
life, Christian writers have tended to downplay the importance of
what happens on earth: who gets what job, who goes to what party
and so on. In Christian lands during the 16th century, it became
fashionable for people to buy pictures that featured skulls and an
hourglass, laid down in the middle of symbols of frivolity and
worldly glory (soap bubbles, candles, mandolins). The purpose of
these 'vanitas' paintings was to remind their owners of their
(relatively) imminent deaths and so encourage them to give up
pursuing fame and riches, while at the same time to push them to
attend more seriously to love, goodness, sincerity, humility and
kindness. It's true that before a skeleton, others' opinions do
have a habit of shedding their powers of intimidation. The thought
of death can bring authenticity to social life.
Aside from reflecting on our own mortality, it
can also be a relief from status anxiety to dwell on the death of
other people, in particular on the death of those whose
achievements are now apt to leave us feeling most inadequate and
envious, However forgotten and ignored we are, however
powerful and revered others may be. we can take comfort from the
thought that everyone will ultimately end up as that most
democratic of substances: dust. The message might seem a melancholy
one. but arguably more so for those currently anchoring their lives
around the pleasures of a high-status position than for those
ignored by society and therefore already well acquainted with the
oblivion that their privileged counterparts will eventually be
accorded. It is the rich, the beautiful, the famous and the
powerful to whom death has the cruellest lessons to teach, the very
categories of people whose worldly goods take them, in the
Christian understanding, furthest from God.
Christian moralists have hence long understood
that to reassure the anxious it may be best to emphasise that we
will die, everyone we love will vanish and all our achievements and
even our names will be stamped into the ground. If the idea brings
comfort, it may be because something within us instinctively
recognises how closely our miseries are bound up with the
grandiosity of our ambitions. To consider our petty status worries
from the perspective of a thousand years hence is to be granted a
rare, tranquillising glimpse of our own insignificance.
Christianity has a final consoling line to offer.
According to one influential wing of modern secular society, there
are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone
else'; for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the
mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal
of all right- thinking people should be to mark themselves out from
the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow. But
being like everyone else is not, to follow Christian thought, any
sort of calamity, for it was one of Jesus's central claims that all
human beings, including the slow-witted, the untalented and the
obscure, are creatures of God and loved by Him - and are hence
deserving of the honour owed to every example of the Lord's work.
Christianity bids us look beneath the surface differences between
people in order to focus on what it considers to be a number of
universal truths on which a sense of community and kinship can be
built. Some of us may be cruel or impatient, dim or dull, but what
should detain and bind us together is the recognition of
shared vulnerabilities. Beneath our flaws, there are always
two ingredients: fear and a desire for love.
To encourage fellow-feeling, Jesus urged us to
learn to look at grown-ups as we might look at children. Few things
can more quickly transform our sense of someone's character than to
picture them as a child. From this perspective, we are more ready
to express the sympathy and generosity we almost naturally display
towards the young, whom we call naughty rather than bad, and cheeky
rather than arrogant. Nothing could be more noble, or more fully
human - the Christian line goes - than to perceive that we are
indeed fundamentally just like everyone else.
Christianity did not, of course, ever succeed in
abolishing worldly values. However, if we retain a distinction
between wealth and virtue and still ask of people whether they are
good rather than simply important, it is in large part due to the
impression left upon Western consciousness by a religion which, for
centuries, lent its resources and prestige to the defence of a
handful of extraordinary ideas about the rightful distribution of
status.
In so doing, Christianity helped to lend
legitimacy to those who, in every generation, will be unable or
unwilling to follow dutifully behind the dominant notions of high
status, but who may yet deserve to be categorised other than under
the brutal epithets of 'loser' or 'nobody'.