Humainologie dialogue Zoom link and book synopsis

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” [Alice asked the Cheshire Cat]

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

- Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Our dialogue is tomorrow, Wednesday September 9, starting at 6:30 PM. The Zoom link provided by Greg is here:

Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/3830471170?pwd=U3lXMnlnR29RWThJYzFXT2c1c1lYZz09 Meeting ID: 383 047 1170 Passcode: 727036

I have appended below this message my synopsis of a book by Richard Wilkinson. Wilkinson’s life and work have been dedicated to understanding how to make sick societies healthier. By better understanding the causes of the ills of our society, we can address those causes and change the course of history. We can turn problems into opportunities for action.

A TED talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndh58GGCTQo by Wilkinson and a 2009 book of his, The Spirit Level (co-authored with his partner Kate Pickett) develop the themes further. Another TED talk on inequality by another author is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tCcoSRZqVY

Do we want greater equality for our society in the future?

Which way should we go from here?

Ask the Cheshire Cat.

Arthur

Book: The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier (Richard Wilkinson, 2005)

Recent interracial violence as reported from Wisconsin does not occur simply because people are not aware that black lives matter. Such violence is one of many consequences of socioeconomic inequality. Anyone who genuinely wants to change such things must understand the root causes of the problems they wish to solve.

As the author explains in Chapter 1, “Affluent Societies: Material Success, Social Failure,” there is massive evidence from published studies to show that socioeconomic inequality is at the very root of the causes of sickness in many forms in our society: violence, drug abuse, depression, impaired ability to withstand disease including cardiac and immune system disease, and more. This is not so much an issue of “poverty” in its narrow financial sense, as one of a lack of social capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital Richard Wilkinson is currently Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham.

Wilkinson is interested in the many published studies that address not only the association of socioeconomic inequality with these illnesses, but also address the causal relationship of that inequality with the malady. Once the cause of a malady is understood, it opens many possibilities for targeting the root cause and thus reducing the prevalence of the malady. Of the more than 200 references he cites, one finds numerous studies and reviews in publications such as the British Medical Journal or the Journal of Neuroscience; as well as occasional classics such as Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (observations from the French visitor on how the American lack of the social hierarchy that was so prevalent in France at the time seemed related to remarkably positive aspects of politics, culture, and society in America in 1831) and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

In Chapter 2, “Inequality: More Hostile, Less Sociable Societies,” the author is interested both in unequal incomes and in unequal levels of social capital. Among the graphs he includes in this chapter, each based on data from published studies, one shows the relationship between income inequality and homicide rates comparing differences among US states as well as Canadian provinces. The graph shows that homicide rates go up as income inequality increases. In another graph comparing social capital index with income equality, we see that as incomes become more equal in US states, the social capital also increases. Vermont has a much more equal distribution of incomes than Louisiana, for example, and much higher levels of social capital than Louisiana.

In Chapter 3, “Anxieties and Insecurities: The Eyes of Others,” Wilkinson emphasizes three particularly powerful “categories of psychosocial influences on population health.” These are low social status; weak social affiliations; and emotional difficulties early in life. To take the second of these: If you have good friends and strong, supportive social connections, you are less likely to succumb to various types of illness. One study, for example, found that when volunteers were intentionally exposed to nasal drops containing five different types of virus associated with the common cold, “over four times the proportion of people who had fewer social ties developed colds compared with those who had many.” Social isolation is associated with lower immunity and poorer health. To stay as healthy as possible, make sure you have good friends. (And, we might add: To improve the health of those around you, learn to be a good friend to others – perhaps especially to those who seem to have few friends.)

What about stress in early life? The published studies strongly indicate that stress during early childhood is associated with negative health outcomes later in life. Even such things as levels of growth hormone are affected, so that the child who is well cared for early in life tends to be taller than the child who is not. Among the studies referred to is one from an orphanage in which some children were fortunate enough to be moved away from a stern caretaker into the care of a more supportive one, with long-lasting positive outcomes compared to the others.

In Chapter 5, “Violence and Inequality: Status, Stigma, and Respect,” the author notes that at least 50 papers have confirmed that violence is more common in societies where income differences (very rich, very poor) are high, compared with those where the income distribution is more equal. This is not violence of the poor against the rich. Instead most of the violence occurs in the poorer districts, with the poor inflicting the violence on each other. Emphasizing that most cases of violence in males arise from the violent person’s experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, Wilkinson cites James Gilligan, who was director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard and a prison psychiatrist who for 25 years talked with violent men almost every day. Women are less violent than men, yet they experience even more disrespect, so they process the humiliation differently. For example, in the same impoverished areas where violence among men is more common, teenage pregnancies among women are more common. Note that when we show respect for others, we also earn respect for ourselves. Here I would mention Richard Sennett’s (Respect in a World of Inequality) three other ways we can earn respect for ourselves: 1) Develop and use your potential; 2) Be self-reliant; 3) Give back to others. Overt violence (such as homicides) is primarily inflicted by the poor on each other, however there is an institutional violence that the rich inflict on the poor. We take it for granted. Gandhi identified poverty as the worst form of violence.

In Chapter 7, “Gender, Race, and Inequality: Kicking Down,” the author explains the “bicycling reaction”: People who must “bow down” to those of higher status (like a cyclist leaning forward) tend to try to recover their sense of worth by kicking down against those of lower status (like a cyclist pushing down on the pedals). He describes a place where there is very little of the “bicycling reaction’ simply because of the equality of conditions there: the state of Kerala in India. It’s on the west coast near the tip of the subcontinent, has a population of about 32 million, and “has long been known as India’s most egalitarian state.” It has over a 90% literacy rate; it is matriarchal, with a high status of women by various measures; life expectancy is only three or four years less than that of the United States; and it subsidizes rice for the poor. There has been extensive land redistribution and there are many cooperatives. It has been likened by one observer to the America described by Tocqueville in the 1800s. Because of the high levels of respect, the civic life is vibrant, but corporations find it a “tough place to do business.” Wilkinson calls Kerala a “society that perhaps shows most clearly how smaller income inequalities can reduce tension across religious, caste, and ethnic divisions.” He adds: “Kerala’s mixture of pride, equality, the high status of women, and good health leaves little room to doubt that these features move together and are related to each other as we have suggested.”

Chapter 9, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Economic Democracy,” is the last in the book. Wilkinson cites Juliet Schor’s 1998 The Overspent American: When Buying Becomes You as one of his sources for the point that as the wealth (GDP) of western society has increased, the inequality of incomes translates into social pressure to spend more in moving toward higher social status. “That we then mistakenly interpret our behavior as evidence of our natural materialistic self-interestedness is a tragedy which shows how deeply caught up in these webs we are.”

In most areas of life, however, the modern productive system is far too complicated to coordinate without buying and selling for profit. We can limit exploitation of people for profit; we can take entire sectors of the economy such as health care, education, and perhaps public transport out of the market, but we cannot do away with capitalism. Even though Wilkinson accepts capitalism as a modern necessity, the evidence-based conclusions that he provides in this book are very much in accord with the ideas expressed by Martin Luther King and Erich Fromm, who had emphasized the extreme challenge that capitalism poses to a healthy society.