Rousseau,Happiness and Human Nature

Rousseau and Amour Propre

In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau paints a happy picture of human beings in their natural state, as he sees it, prior to the formation of society or politics. This was necessary, he thought, because so many writers had projected negative attributes on to human nature that were actually products of society, distorting and disfiguring the image of man, like the statue of Glaucus, ‘to the point of being nearly unrecognizable’ (Rousseau, 1992a, p. 12 [OC III, p. 122]).

When all of these ugly accretions are stripped away, we find a simple, contented, peaceful creature (l'homme sauvage) leading a more or less solitary existence. However, Rousseau claims that, when these naturally isolated individuals were forced by accidents such as floods and earthquakes to cooperate with others in the state of nature, they began to compare themselves with each other, as a result of which the natural differences between them became increasingly apparent, with fateful consequences.

Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit or the most eloquent became the most highly considered; and that was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. From these first preferences were born on the one hand vanity and contempt, on the other shame and envy; and the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence (Rousseau, 1992a, p. 47 [OC III, pp. 170-1]).

Unlike natural selfishness (amour de soi-même), which is a condition of benign self-absorption that exists when human beings have little or no awareness of one another in the state of nature, an aggressive new social form of selfishness (amour propre) emerges when we are forced together by circumstances. Rousseau writes that ‘the first glance he [man] directed upon himself produced in him the first stirring of pride [d'orgueil]; thus, as yet scarcely knowing how to distinguish ranks, and considering himself in the first rank as a species, he prepared himself from afar to claim first rank as an individual’ (Rousseau, 1992a, p. 44 [OC III, pp. 165-6]). Our expanding self-awareness and consciousness not only of others, but more importantly of their awareness of us, has resulted in an obsessive ‘being-for-others' with whom ‘one is forced to compare oneself at each instant’ (Rousseau, 1990, p. 100 [OC I, pp. 789-90]). This growing self-consciousness fuelled an insatiable desire for greater standing in others' eyes, leading to a competition for social esteem and recognition. Rousseau describes this invidious personal comparison in the following terms in his Discourse:

Amour-propre is only a relative sentiment, artificial and born in Society, which inclines each individual to have a greater esteem for himself than for anyone else, inspires in men all the harm they do to one another, and is the true source of honour … in our primitive state, in the genuine state of Nature, amour-propre does not exist; for … it is not possible that a sentiment having its source in comparisons he is not capable of making could spring up in his soul (Rousseau, 1992a, p. 91 [OC III, p. 219]).

According to Rousseau, this obsessive and ceaseless comparison with others has led to divisive social competition and even warfare while increasing our dependence on others as we compete for their esteem and recognition. Social life gave birth to an unnatural ‘need’ for status and position, leading us into fierce competition for their satisfaction. In one of his last works, the ‘Dialogues' (completed in 1776), he describes this transformation in our natural sentiments as we enter society as follows:

The primitive passions … focus us only on objects that relate to it, and having only the love of self as a principle, are all loving and gentle in their essence. But when they are deflected from their object by obstacles, they are focused on removing the obstacle rather than the object; then they change nature and become irascible and hateful. And that is how the love of self [amour de soi], which is a good and absolute feeling, becomes amour-propre, which is to say a relative feeling by which one makes comparisons (Rousseau, 1990, p. 9 [OC I, p. 669]).

Because of the advent of amour propre, Rousseau believed that, left to their own devices in society, individuals would be plunged into a condition of conflict identical to that which Thomas Hobbes had attributed to the pre-social state of nature, which was a war of all against all. Rousseau adopted this dire Hobbesian view of the natural relations between individuals as a description of modern civilisation. According to his Discourse, the species moved from the peaceful state of nature to a state of social war via the transitory ‘golden age’ of nascent society. ‘Nascent society gave way to the most horrible state of war’, he writes, inverting Hobbes. ‘[T]he human Race, debased and desolate, no longer able to turn back or renounce the unhappy acquisitions it had made, and working only toward its shame by abusing the faculties that honor it, brought itself to the brink of its ruin … a perpetual war’ (Rousseau, 1992a, p. 53 [OC III, p. 176]). Thus Hobbes' mistake ‘is not that he established the state of war among men who are independent and have become sociable, but that he supposed this state natural to the species and gave it as the cause of the vices of which it is the effect’ (Rousseau, 1994, p. 81 [OC III, p. 288]).

In his Constitutional Project for Corsica (written in 1764, although not published until 1861), Rousseau distinguishes between two branches of amour propre, which he calls vanity (vanité) and pride (orgueil). The former, which he denounces harshly, exists when a person ‘lays great store by frivolous objects' that are devoid of intrinsic value, such as social status. It is, by its very nature, individual, and as such ‘cannot be the instrument of so great an enterprise as the creation of a national body’, unlike pride, which is a ‘good’ form of amour propre which, under the right circumstances, such as those outlined in his Social Contract (1762), can be employed to offset the disadvantages of collective life, as Rousseau saw them (Rousseau, 1953, p. 326 [OC III, p. 938]). So although he believed that there is no road back from amour propre once human beings have entered society, and that it has been a predominantly negative force in human history and a key factor in our present misery, as Rousseau saw it, he claimed that under exceptional circumstances it can take a positive form. A well-ordered society is one that maintains institutions, practices and beliefs that ‘lead us out of ourselves’, diffusing our individual selfishness throughout society and minimising the distance between our particular interests and the common interests we share. By uniting individual wills and interests with the social will and the common interest in this way, amour propre becomes an extended form of social, rather than individual, selfishness; love of oneself becomes love of ourselves. ‘Let us extend amour-propre to other beings’, Rousseau writes in Émile (1762). ‘We shall transform it into a virtue’ (Rousseau, 1979, p. 252 [OC IV, p. 547]). This extension of amour propre is not meant to negate the interests of the individual, or to subordinate those interests to the community. Rather, he wished to redefine the individual good in terms of the public good, to turn individuals into citizens through an extension of individual amour propre. This involves an enlargement of each person's affections and a reshaping of his or her interests and identity. For Rousseau, the most virtuous citizens, as found in ancient Sparta for example, are those for whom the distinction between the individual and the community cannot effectively be made. However, he also warns that a global diffusion of amour propre would be unable to generate a sufficiently strong bond of attachment between individuals to preserve social unity. ‘[T]he feeling of humanity evaporates and weakens as it is extended over the whole world’, he wrote in his Encyclopédie article on ‘Political Economy’ (1755). ‘Interest and commiseration must in some way be confined and compressed to be activated’ (Rousseau, 1992c, p. 151 [OC III, pp. 254-5]). The optimal extension of amour propre, one that mitigates the divisive effects of individual selfishness without completely dissipating it through overextension, focuses on the small patrie or city state. Rousseau maintains that a strong sense of patriotic identity is crucial to counteract the strength of divergent wills by redirecting them, rather than actually repressing them, towards a common end. Henri d'Aguesseau s claim in his 1715 address ‘L'Amour de la patrie’ that in republics the ‘love of the patrie becomes a species of l'amour-propre’ perfectly expresses Rousseau's view (Aguesseau, 1819, p. 230). ‘By combining the force of amour-propre with all the beauty of virtue’, for Rousseau, ‘this sweet and ardent sentiment gains an energy which, without disfiguring it, makes it the most heroic of all the passions. It produced the many immortal actions whose splendour dazzles our weak eyes' (Rousseau, 1992c, p. 151 [OC III, p. 255]). Thus it was to amour de la patrie, modelled on the small, cohesive city states of antiquity rather than the sprawling nation states of modernity, that the republican Rousseau pinned what little hope he had for a politics of virtue in the modern age. He believed that this ideal extension of amour propre is both unnatural and extremely improbable, so improbable that, in eighteenth-century Europe, there was only one place where he thought it might occur: Corsica (Rousseau, 1992b, p. 162 [OC III, pp. 390-1]). Rousseau did once believe that his native city of Geneva might be a rare modern example of a ‘republic of virtue’ with a sufficiently strong sense of public spirit to prevent the corrupting spread of individual amour propre, but this belief did not survive the city's decision to ban and burn publicly his Émile and The Social Contract in 1762. He later set out principles and prescriptions for a constitution for Poland, a large nation state, at the request of Count Michal Wielhorski, although this was not published until after his death. This suggests that he may have softened his position somewhat on the prospects for extending amour propre in modern Europe, although even in these Considerations on the Government of Poland Rousseau says that the Poles would only be able to maintain their virtue and independence with the greatest difficulty and constant effort.

At the opposite extreme from Corsica was Paris, which Rousseau depicts in his novel Julie (1761) as a vast repository of vice and iniquity. His main objection to large, sophisticated cities like Paris is that in them ‘men become other than what they are, and society imparts to them, as it were, a being other than their own. This is true, especially in Paris, and especially with respect to women, who derive from the way others look at them the only existence that matters to them’ (Rousseau, 1997, p. 223 [OC II, p. 273]). In the French capital, Rousseau complains in his Letter to d'Alembert (1758), ‘everything is judged by appearances' (Rousseau, 1960, p. 59 [OC V, p. 54]). By contrast, in a small city state like Geneva, where Rousseau was born and raised, ‘the people are less imitative’ and the mind is ‘less spread out, less drowned in vulgar opinions, elaborates itself and ferments better in tranquil solitude; because, in seeing less, more is imagined’ (Rousseau, 1960, p. 60 [OC V, p. 55]).

The social struggle for relative position is endless, according to Rousseau, because, unlike natural desires, those generated by society are limitless and insatiable. ‘Self-love [amour de soi], which regards only ourselves’, Rousseau writes in Émile, ‘is contented when our true needs are satisfied. But amour-propre, which makes comparisons, is never content and never could be, because this sentiment, preferring ourselves to others, also demands others to prefer us to themselves, which is impossible’ (Rousseau, 1979, pp. 213–4 [OC IV, p. 493]).

Central to Rousseau's account of amour propre is the role of inequality, which inevitably follows from the obsessive desire for esteem and standing in the eyes of others. He distinguishes between natural inequalities of strength, intelligence, stamina and the like on the one hand, and artificial inequalities of wealth, social position, status and power on the other. The former are essentially benign and, being natural, inescapable. The latter, however, are only found in society and are the primary source of human unhappiness. ‘[T]he first source of evil’, Rousseau wrote to the king of Poland, ‘is inequality’ (Rousseau, 1992b, p. 48 [OC III, p. 49]). Private property is the principal expression of this form of inequality. The second part of Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality begins with the famous statement that the ‘first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society’ (Rousseau, 1992a, p. 43 [OC III, p. 164]). His depiction of society as a ‘perpetual war’ is based on this account of the growth of inequality consequent on the emergence of amour propre:

It is for this reason that Rousseau would later advise the Corsicans to make equality the fundamental law of their constitution.

For Rousseau, the rich and powerful suffer from this situation almost as much as the poor and weak. Whereas the latter are subordinate and oppressed by the former, the rich and powerful depend on the poor and weak to maintain their superior status, and so are beholden to them and not free. Virtually everyone in an unequal society dominated by amour propre suffers from status anxiety to some degree, since even those who enjoy high status are, with very few exceptions, outranked by others who look down on them. In the great chain of being, dukes outrank earls, who disdain mere barons, who condescend to the masses below. Even the very rich depend on those below them for recognition, are constantly threatened by those beside them, and feel an ever-present sense of inferiority towards the few above them.

The Centrality of Status

There is quite a lot of evidence to support Rousseau's view that status and relative position are overwhelmingly important to most people, probably even more important than absolute wealth. Above a fairly low level, what seems to matter most is not the absolute amount of wealth and goods individuals possess, but how such goods affect their position relative to others within a given context. Such ‘positional goods' (Hirsch, 1977, p. 11) have value less for their intrinsic properties and more for the extent to which they confer rank or status on those who possess them. Many studies have shown that people will trade off absolute wealth for relative position above a certain level. For example, economists Sara Solnick and David Hemenway asked individuals to choose between living in a world in which they earned $50,000 a year while others earned $25,000, and another in which they earned $100,000 while others earned $250,000. Fifty-six per cent chose the first, in which their relative position would be higher even though they would be materially worse off in it. In another study, most executives surveyed preferred lower salaries in return for higher status to higher salaries and lower status. Most recently, a British study in the journal Psychological Science found that an individual's rank within a group was a stronger predictor of happiness than absolute wealth. The researchers – Chris Boyce and Gordon Brown from the University of Warwick and Simon Moore from Cardiff University – based their conclusions on data about earnings and life satisfaction from seven years of the British Household Panel Survey, which is a representative longitudinal sample of British households. According to this study the actual amount of money people earned had relatively little relevance to overall life satisfaction. What individuals really cared about was ‘whether they are the second most highly paid person, or the eighth most highly paid person, in their comparison set’ (Boyce et al., 2010, pp. 471-75). There are many such studies that repeat much the same result (Frank, 1999, pp. 162-3).

The possession of positional goods has also been associated with measurable levels of increased well-being, while their absence has been linked with increased stress, status anxiety and other adverse psychological and physical effects such as depression and heart disease. Low social status and the absence of such relative goods typically spur additional efforts at advancement, which often leads to an exhausting and debilitating ‘positional treadmill’ where most people end up feeling increasingly frustrated and unhappy, even when their absolute material wealth increases. The apparent paradox of rising absolute wealth alongside flat or declining levels of subjective well-being is most closely associated with the economist Richard Easterlin, after whom it is named (Easterlin, 1974; 1995). One convincing explanation for it, which Rousseau discerned 250 years ago, is that it overlooks the centrality of positional goods and status, which are typically valued more than absolute wealth. Little wonder, therefore, that there is a connection between lower average levels of happiness in wealthy countries with high levels of income inequality, such as the United States and Britain, than in more egalitarian societies (Blanchflower and Oswald, 2004, pp. 1359-86).

Recent technological advances have made it possible to measure links between status relationships and physiology. For example, one study found higher heart rate and blood pressure readings among subjects interacting with people who outranked them than among subjects interacting with people of equal rank. Also, some experiments have found a connection between status orderings and blood concentrations of the hormone testosterone in mammals, including humans. High base levels of testosterone, which is naturally many times higher in males than in females (on average), have been associated with secondary sexual characteristics such as dominant behaviour, risk taking and aggression in mammals, including humans (Rosen, 2005, pp. 71-98). On average, ‘increases in testosterone levels in individuals do seem to be linked with increases in dominant behavior’ which seeks to ‘enhance one's status over other people’ (Rosen, 2005, p. 87, p. 83). According to some primate studies, heightened levels of testosterone have been found to promote behavioural dominance, while reduced levels inhibit it.

There is some evidence of a connection between blood concentrations of the neurotransmitter serotonin – the so-called ‘happiness hormone’– and dominance. Unusually high levels of serotonin have been found in officers of college fraternities, athletic team captains and officers and crew members on an extended sailing voyage (Frank, 1985, pp. 23-8). Richard Wilkinson has linked being in a subordinate position with heightened levels of stress and depressed levels of serotonin (Wilkinson, 1996). Increased levels of the central stress hormone cortisol, which can be measured in blood and saliva, have been found in individuals whose self-esteem and social status are threatened, and stress has been positively linked to poor health and increased obesity. Low or declining social status has also been associated in some studies with poor cardiovascular health (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009, p. 38, p. 191). One study of vervet monkeys, with whom we share most of our genes, has shown large differences in their serotonin levels depending on their place in dominance hierarchies: the dominant animal in a group usually has the highest serotonin level by as much as 50 per cent. Low levels of serotonin have also been linked to depression in some animals, including humans (Volvaka, 1999, pp. 307-14).

These biochemical differences appear to be both the cause and the effect of dominance relationships. Individuals with naturally high levels of serotonin and testosterone appear to have a greater predisposition to engage in dominant behaviour. And in turn, the level of these chemicals is boosted by engaging in successful social competition, which primes them for yet more efforts to achieve or maintain status, resulting in a positive ‘bio-social feedback loop’. In the experiment with vervet monkeys, after the dominant members of the group were removed, other monkeys became behaviourally dominant within 24 to 48 hours. After 72 hours, serotonin concentrations in the newly dominant monkeys rose steadily to the levels of the formerly dominant members of the group. And once the formerly dominant monkeys were returned to their groups, they quickly re-established their paramount positions and experienced steady increases in their serotonin levels. This process works in both directions, which may explain why depressed levels of testosterone and serotonin tend to make individuals less disposed to compete, which further lowers measurable levels of these chemicals.

The Nature of Status

As I have shown, the principal cause of human misery for Rousseau is rampant amour propre. While there is some evidence that he was more or less right about this, it seems as though our preoccupation with status and relative position is rooted in our natures which, according to evolutionary psychology, are ‘adaptive responses shaped by man's biological nature and situation on earth’ (Hirschleifer, 1978, p. 321). Unlike Rousseau's isolated and contented l'homme sauvage in his ‘hypothetical’ state of nature, in the small, nomadic, hunter-gatherer societies of the unforested African savannah, dominance and high relative position were instrumental to the acquisition of the scarce resources that enhanced prospects for survival and genetic transmission for our Palaeolithic ancestors. This was the so-called ‘Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness' where, for 2 million years before the advent of settled agricultural societies in the Neolithic period around 10,000 years ago, the brains of our hominid ancestors underwent adaptive changes – tiny, incremental changes over countless generations – that tended to favour those instincts and psychological propensities most likely to increase our chances of genetic survival in the intense ongoing competition for scarce resources (Symons, 1987, pp. 91-125). Within this environment, each individual's position within a dominance hierarchy was closely linked to his or her prospects for survival and reproductive success. The lower one's position relative to immediate rivals, the less access one typically had to scarce resources, which in turn limited one's likelihood of producing offspring and thereby passing on one's genes. ‘[T]he farther an individual fell in his local pecking order’, according to economist Robert Frank, ‘the more serious were the threats to his survival’, which typically provoked feelings of stress and anxiety affecting levels of testosterone and serotonin, as we have already seen (Frank, 1999, p. 136). In such a setting, ‘low social status is an evolutionary dead end’, to put it bluntly (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009, p. 204).

For most of human history having high relative standing was therefore instrumental in helping individuals to acquire the limited resources that increased chances of passing on genes. Our brains have changed relatively little in the roughly 10,000 years since we left this ‘ancestral environment’. According to psychologists Alan Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa, this explains the persistence in modern societies of behaviours that appear to be dysfunctional. ‘The human brain’, they write, ‘has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment’ (Kanazawa and Miller, 2007, p. 21). ² In other words, our brains are maladapted to the conditions in which most of us now live, at least in the West, producing many behaviours that often seem inexplicable, harmful or even pathological. For example, our Stone Age ancestors developed a craving for sugary and fatty foods which boosted energy levels and thereby enhanced the odds of survival, yet were very scarce on the savannahs of Africa half a million years ago. Most humans retain a taste for these foods now, even though they are easily acquired and, when consumed in large quantities, can be harmful. The same may be true of violence, which has been hard-wired in our brains by evolution to some degree. This is because it was ‘adaptive’ for our Pleistocene ancestors when food was scarce and reproductive competition among males in particular was normally very intense, which often led to violence. ³

Natural selection favoured risk taking and aggression in males who could assert themselves and thereby pass on their genes. That is one reason why war ‘has been part of our human and prehuman heritage for millions of years’, as evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond notes (Diamond, 1992, p. 297). ⁴ In large, complex, technologically advanced societies, direct violence is often self-defeating because it leads to antisocial behaviour, crime and decreased status. Yet like our taste for certain foods that are damaging to our health when consumed in large quantities, we find it difficult to resist the natural urges to fight and compete, particularly over issues of status. Diamond argues that, whereas in primitive, hunter-gatherer societies and among our primate cousins, outbreaks of violent aggression caused by competition for resources and status were limited affairs, such behaviour under modern conditions has developed ‘to the point of threatening to bring about our fall as a species' because of the destructive power of weaponry – the ultimate maladaptation (Diamond, 1992, p. 201).

What appears to have been decisive in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness was one's position within a specific, relatively small reference group rather than some larger contexts such as society as a whole, let alone in comparison with other nations, or the entire species. What mattered for survival in this environment was one's position relative to local rivals with whom individuals and groups were in direct, immediate competition for food and sex, ‘whereas comparisons with others who are distant in time and space are typically irrelevant’, from an evolutionary perspective (Frank, 2007, p. 57). One of Frank's central findings is that most people today are relatively indifferent to the wealth and status of people far removed from them, whereas they ‘care deeply about where they stand in their various local hierarchies' (Frank, 1985, p. 107). Hence our persistent obsession with ‘keeping up with the Jones's' who live next door and our relative indifference to the wealth and goods of those who are remote from us. When it comes to status, out of sight really is out of mind. As the writer H.L. Mencken put it, wealth is ‘any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband’ (Mencken, 1962, p. 126).

However, what counts as a ‘reference group’ is constantly changing with social, economic and technological changes. Recently, it has expanded in ways that are historically unique and have exacerbated our natural (if that is indeed what it is) hunger for status. For example, a process of what the sociologist Juliet Schor calls ‘upscaling’ has been occurring in the consumer culture of the West since the 1980s and 1990s, whereby almost everyone has ended up ‘gazing at the top of the pyramid’ which has become increasingly visible through television, advertising, films and other social media. Owing to this change, the ‘upper-middle group’ (the top 20 per cent of households) is now ‘widely watched and emulated. It is the group that defines material success, luxury, and comfort for nearly every category below it’ (Schor, 1998, p. 13). Whereas previously the ‘reference group’ for most individuals consisted of people more or less like themselves with whom they lived and worked (very roughly the same class, ethnicity and education), now the average American or European is ‘more likely to compare his or her income to the six-figure benchmark in the office down the corridor or displayed in Tuesday evening prime time’ television (Schor, 1998, p.13). This has led to a huge intensification of competitive spending on goods that are conspicuous symbols of status such as cars, jewellery, houses and clothing, as people desperately struggle to keep up with the top quintile which, as Schor points out, ‘is not easy, because they keep getting richer’ (Schor, 1998, p. 13). Not surprisingly, what counts as ‘the good life’ for most people now is far more focused on the acquisition of material goods, status symbols and luxuries than it was a generation ago (Schor, 1998, p. 15).

Status-oriented positional goods are typically ‘conspicuous’, serving as outward visible signs of wealth and status. They belong to what Frank calls the ‘visibility index’ or ‘vindex’ (Frank, 2007, p. 68). Examples are cars, jewellery and clothes. In his book Falling Behind, Frank (2007) cites the example of the median size of newly constructed houses in the United States, which had expanded from 1,600 square feet in 1980 to 2,100 square feet by 2001, even though the median family's real income had changed little over the same period, and levels of subjective well-being were static. Yet when everyone's house grows larger, ‘the primary effect is merely to redefine what qualifies as an acceptable dwelling. So, although the recent tax cuts have enabled the wealthy to buy more and bigger things, these purchases appear to have had little impact on their happiness' (Frank, 2007, p. 112). He calls this ‘the rising cost of adequate’, which puts ever greater pressure on more and more people to divert their limited resources from non-positional to positional goods in endless ‘expenditure arms races' that often leave many people worse off and less happy. Many families face a hard choice where the quality of state schools is closely linked to local property taxes and real estate prices, as it is in many parts of the United States and Britain: ‘They can either send their children to a school of average quality by purchasing a house that is larger and more expensive than they can comfortably afford, or they can buy a smaller house that is within their budget and send their children to a below-average school’ (Frank, 2007, p. 45). Such trends are apparent throughout advanced consumer societies. According to Marla Grossberg, director of tracking studies for Teenage Research Unlimited, ‘the coolest brands are often fashion brands or “brand items” that kids can wear and relay a message about themselves' (Schor, 1998, p. 47). This is something that Rousseau correctly anticipated, and explains why, ‘if we measure our satisfaction by how well we are doing compared to others, general increases in affluence do not raise personal satisfaction’ (Schor, 1998, p. 100).

Conclusion

While much of the evidence to which I have referred here in a somewhat sketchy and limited way is contested, some of it quite hotly, it would be rash simply to ignore or dismiss it, and it is mounting at a growing rate with advances in science and technology. Suffice it to say, if our natures have evolved ‘not to make us happy but to make us more likely to succeed against the competition’, in the words of Robert Frank, then we might at least be able to minimise the likelihood that we will exacerbate our natural unhappiness, even if we cannot easily attain happiness (Frank, 1999, p. 135). We are not, after all, simple slaves of our natures, although we do seem naturally to seek competition and status, contra Rousseau.

For example, the voluntary simplicity movement seeks to overthrow ‘the god of positional consumption’ (Schor, 1998, p. 61) in the name of reduced consumption, antimaterialism and sustainable development. Such a policy of deliberate ‘downshifting’ typically involves working less, earning less and consuming less so that there is more time to enable people to pursue other goods in a better way. Such a lifestyle would be materially poorer than now but richer in non-material, non-positional goods, and therefore happier. To the extent that it is possible to reduce the speed of the consumption treadmill so that less time and fewer resources are expended on the joyless pursuit of positional goods and status, we may be able to devote ourselves to more intrinsically satisfying activities and forms of consumption that actually improve the quality of life, such as higher air quality, more urban parkland, cleaner drinking water and reduced violent crime and antisocial behaviour (Frank, 1999, p. 11). The time and effort that people increasingly expend on the acquisition of ‘positional goods' also comes at the cost of social and even ‘spiritual’ goods (broadly defined), such as spending more time with family, cultivating friendships, doing volunteer work, developing intellectual virtues and aptitudes and pursuing aesthetic tastes and interests, all of which take time that might otherwise be taken up in the competition for status and relative position. Unfortunately, as I have sought to show, this is often as difficult for us as resisting the natural urge to consume large quantities of unhealthy foods, which our own natures dispose us to want.

Undoubtedly, Rousseau would not only sympathise with all of this, but advocated it consistently in his published works and practised it in his own life (with some success, and several notable failures). He was among the first writers of note (if not the first) to identify status as central to the problem of human happiness. This may explain why his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality has had enormous influence on successive generations of thinkers and is still in print, and widely read, today. However, he lacked our knowledge of evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience and behavioural genetics, and so was only able to speculate on these matters, with mixed results (as I have shown). In the absence of such knowledge he underestimated the extent to which our own natures may conspire against our own happiness.