Getting Radical About Inequality

"Getting Radical About Inequality" is the title of a recent excellent David Brooks column in The New York Times. The column lets us in on a key feature of the human psyche that predisposes all of us to creating situations of inequality in a society.

French Sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu

The insight comes originally from the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu held that each person possesses two important things, a "habitus" and one or more sources of social power which Bourdieu called "social capital."

A habitus, says Brooks, is simply, "a body of conscious and tacit knowledge of how to travel through the world, which gives rise to mannerisms, tastes, opinions and conversational style. A habitus is an intuitive feel for the social game. It’s the sort of thing you get inculcated with unconsciously, by growing up in a certain sort of family or by sharing a sensibility with a certain group of friends."

You could call the habitus a personalized, idiosyncratic "lens" through which each of us perceives all social relations in our society. This lens gets shaped for each individual person by virtue of his or her upbringing and life experiences. And none of us views how social relations ought to transpire in exactly the same way: "You say toe-MAY-toe and I say toe-MAH-toe."

Social capital is anything we bring to the marketplace of social relationships that helps us

• get ahead
• gain power
• attain "distinction, prestige, attention and superiority"

Brooks talks of various categories of social capital:

We all possess, [Bourdieu] argued, certain forms of social capital. A person might have academic capital (the right degrees from the right schools), linguistic capital (a facility with words), cultural capital (knowledge of cuisine or music or some such) or symbolic capital (awards or markers of prestige). These are all forms of wealth you bring to the social marketplace.

Brooks adds:

We vie as individuals and as members of our class for prestige, distinction and, above all, the power of consecration — the power to define for society what is right, what is “natural,” what is “best.”

It is, accordingly, our arsenal of social capital with which we must vie. All of the things we truly seek in our society, in the view of Bourdieu, require us to compete with the soft weapons of social capital in order to sell ourselves in a "symbolic" marketplace.

Boosting our own status necessarily implies that as we rise, someone else has to, relatively speaking, lose ground. Inequality is an expectable outcome of the dynamics which Bourdieu identified. Brooks:

... Bourdieu reminds us that the drive to create inequality is an endemic social sin. Every hour most of us, unconsciously or not, try to win subtle status points, earn cultural affirmation, develop our tastes, promote our lifestyles and advance our class. All of those microbehaviors open up social distances, which then, by the by, open up geographic and economic gaps. 

Bourdieu radicalizes, widens and deepens one’s view of inequality. His work suggests that the responses to it are going to have to be more profound, both on a personal level — resisting the competitive, ego-driven aspects of social networking and display — and on a national one.

Here, then, is the deep lesson we all need to learn, if we are to quell the political chaos and offset the economic injustice that plague our society today.