This is not a Diary by Bauman Zygmunt;

Author:Bauman, Zygmunt;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

2 January 2011

On finding consolation in unexpected places

The Spirit Level, the eye-opening study by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett that demonstrated and explained why ‘greater equality makes societies stronger’, is at long last beginning to worm its way into American public opinion (thanks to Nicholas D. Kristof’s comment in the New Year issue of the New York Times). The delay is all the more thought-provoking, because in the United States, the country firmly perched at the very top of the global premier league of inequality (according to the latest statistics, the wealthiest 1 per cent of Americans control more wealth than the bottom 90 per cent), and the one that supplied the researchers with the most extreme instances of inequality’s collateral damage, Wilkinson and Pickett’s message should have sounded most urgently and rung a red alarm.

Even at this late stage Kristof prefers to introduce the authors of the study to American readers as ‘distinguished British epidemiologists’ (rather than connecting them to social studies – storytellers guilty, according to American opinion leaders, of a condemnable and contemptible leftist-liberal bias and for that reason dismissed before they can be heard, let alone listened to). Guided probably by the same prudent caution, Kristof mostly quotes from the reviewed study the data concerning macaques and the relations between low-status and high-status macaques and other, unnamed ‘monkeys’. And having quoted in support John Steinbeck’s sentence on the ‘sad soul’ that is able to ‘kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ’, he placates the possible alarm of readers likely to spy out another tax-hike menace, and pre-empts their violent protests, by putting the bad news in a less wallet-threatening order: the toll of inequality, he points out, is ‘not just economic but also a melancholy of the soul’. He admits, though, even if in a somewhat roundabout and so innocuous way, that the toll is also ‘economic’, when he points out that the choice is between less inequality and more prisons and police – both alternatives known all too well to be costly in terms of the tax rate. In Kristof’s rendition, inequality is bad not as such, because of its own injustice, inhumanity, immorality and life-destroying potential – but for making the soul bad and melancholic …

As to its morbid connection with biology, now finally scientifically confirmed, Kristof has the following to say: ‘Humans become stressed when they find themselves at the bottom of a hierarchy. That stress leads to biological changes’ – like the accumulation of abdominal fat, heart disease, self-destructive behaviour and (sic!) … persistent poverty. Now, finally, we know – as endorsed and certified by distinguished scientists unsuspected of wicked sympathies and illicit connections – why some people are sunk in misery and why, unlike us, they can neither avoid sinking into it nor climb out of it once they are there. This scientific finding comes, at long last, as a much-needed sweetener in the bitter reminder of our world record-beating inequality: the silver lining under that particularly nasty and threateningly murky cloud.

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