Status Anxiety
by Alain de Botton
Pantheon

If "Middlebrow" were an actual brand name, Alain de Botton would be its official spokesman. Cheeky and endlessly simplifying, this gadfly has mastered the rare task of extolling to the provinces the virtues of a soft cosmopolitanism. Ready your envy: this means, among other things, that he sells books by the crateful. Previous efforts, including the charming "How Proust Can Change Your Life," and the less original but equally readable "The Consolations of Philosophy," rescued the Best of the West tradition from isolation on the campuses of St. John's College, mixed it with a dollop of self-help rhetoric, added a respectable dash of liberal politics and convinced your educated neighbor to splurge on a copy for her mother. Mortimer Adler surely turns in his grave — thank the gods for that, by the way.

De Botton returns to this well-plowed field in his new book, "Status Anxiety," where he dissects, in typically broad fashion, a straightforward but stubborn problem: our need to be loved. Not coincidentally, given the title, de Botton's question — why, when everything else is outwardly fine, are we concerned that we aren't loved enough? — is the same one that the discipline of psychoanalysis evolved to answer. The ghost of Freud flits through the book's pages, directly mentioned once but present everywhere. It is a typical omission of the Best of the West genre; whereas Marx and Nietzsche are shoehorned, however uncomfortably, into the grand narrative of Western Philosophy, Freud, plumbing as he does the irrationality of the unconscious, remains the ultimate bogeyman. de Botton fixes this problem but substituting psychoanalysis with self-help. Karl, Friedrich? Meet Dr. Phil.

This is by no means an original recipe. But it is worth separating de Botton from some of his antecedents who have taken up the Best of the West genre in the past. Legions of scribblers from Oswald Spengler to Pat Buchanan have made prognoses along the following theme: The modern age marks the death throes of an irrevocably decadent Western culture, rotting from within and besieged from without. De Botton differs from the doyens of cultural decline because he is shy enough not to ask big questions with a straight face, and bold enough to treat seemingly small matters as if they were big ones. He doesn't go in for scathing indictments of institutions; rather, he measures the success or failure of culture by the yardstick of personal well-being:

The benefits of two thousand years of Western Civilization are familiar enough: an extraordinary increase in wealth, in food supply, in scientific knowledge, in the availability of consumer goods, in physical security in life expectancy and economic opportunity. What is perhaps less apparent, and more perplexing, is that these impressive material advances have coincided with a rise in the level of status anxiety among ordinary Western citizens, by which is meant a rise in levels of concern about importance, achievement and income.

In other words, the success or failure of Western Civilization depends not on such impersonalities as the history of the bond market or even the development of the bildungsroman but rather on this: Are we happy, today, tomorrow, the day after? It's not an original focus — Freud, Max Weber, Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown have all been here before, and Jonathan Lear is still there — but we can welcome pop-analysis home to Barnes & Noble again, especially in an era when the words "crusade" and "empire" have lost more than a touch of their irony. It is not a crime to be chronically endearing.

De Botton gallops through the anxieties of modern Western citizens — think the upwardly mobile cast of urbane professionals in Love Actually — alighting on a few salient categories: lovelessness, expectation, meritocracy, snobbery and dependence. In each case, the origins of these problems are glossed from historical and psychological standpoints. The discussion of meritocracy is particularly delightful. Free of the customary politically correct shackles, de Botton actually has the balls to tell us that meritocracy creates as many problems as it solves: If all really is fair, if, as policy wonks are wont to say, the playing field really is level and everyone succeeds and fails on their own merits, then the losers aren't just people who don't win, they're people who are born to lose. Score too low on your SAT's? Fail to get into your first-choice college? Didn't get that plumb job? It's your own damn fault. Meritocracy provides the illusion of progress by allowing all sorts of people to tear each other to bits for spots in the same few elite lifeboats. Or, as de Button would put it: "To the injury of poverty, a meritocratic system now added the insult of shame."

How do we overcome our slights by snobs, our mothers' unreasonable expectations or our embarrassing second-place finish in the annual Nantucket regatta? De Botton, soberly optimistic Vergil to his reader's sweating, scrambling Dante, offers a few places to look for solace: philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia. Of philosophy, de Botton has written a good deal, and a good deal of it repeats this remarkable notion: Don't trust public opinion. Eureka! That he cribs his own work on Socrates and Schopenhauer in "The Consolations of Philosophy" is forgivable; but that he leaves his reader with the following is a capital crime of substance if not style: "To heed the misanthropic philosophical counsel, we must surrender our puerile obsession with policing our own status and settle instead for the more solidly grounded satisfactions of a logically based sense of our worth." Why yes, of course, let me adjust my puerile obsessions and sense of worth with this handy Allen's wrench. Voila — philosophy in action.

Like more run-of-the-mill self-help authors, de Botton's pages are replete with vague proscription. But, while bursting with erudite references (lacking proper citation, mind you) and diverting graphics, the book has no riveting descriptions of personal change. His reluctance to offer narratives of modern people who have actually used the solutions he suggests makes the insights he offers supremely forgettable. At least with Proust, de Botton could point to the memorable neuroses of his modern citizen par excellence to illustrate his points. But here, specificity is cast away. We know that religion can afford some measure of comfort to the anxious — everyone from armchair anthropologists to evangelical preachers relies on this intuition. But how much comfort, and to whom, and for what psychological price, are topics that do not come up. Though brave in his assessment that Christianity can still make a positive contribution to the modern world, he tells his readers to visit cathedrals that "furnish an imaginative holding space for the priorities of the spirit." OK — but what happens when we leave the sacred world and return to the profane? What if we aren't Christians to begin with?

Some more appreciation for the adversary would have gone a long way here. Anxiety cannot always be wished away, or prayed away, or banished through reading Stendhal, or forgotten amidst the hushed rooms of a museum, or voted out of office (though we are free to hope for this last bit). In fact, the very solutions that de Botton suggests are actually popular sources of anxiety themselves. Are we to subscribe to the fantasy that all philosophers, artists, politicians, Christians and Bohemians stride through life supremely confident of their status in society? Comforting as it may be to imagine that the same culture that drives us to distraction can also save us, there is something profoundly unnerving about a question that answers itself. Not to mention a book on anxiety written by an author whose voice never strays beyond a mild, bemused sense of calm. Were that Alain de Botton had actually shared some of his anxieties with us. Talking about this kind of thing can help.

— Joshua Adams (joshua at uchicago dot edu)