If there is a time and context
that shows dramatically how stark economic inequality can be, the years
immediately following the Wall Street crash of 1929 cannot be beat. Wealthy men
in the financial sector saw their wealth disappear overnight; the sudden move
to the street from comfortable housing doubtless triggered many suicides. The
1936 film, My Man Godfrey,
demonstrates the mental and reputational depravity of even once-wealthy investors
(and stock brokers) relative to the still-rich, who look down with disdain such
men as if they were no longer human beings. The stark change in the economic-determined
normative stance is artificial and yet in terms of getting a job, it was very
real. In the film, Godfrey maintains
good graces in using his low status even in the employment of a rich family as
an opportunity to practice humility. He even saves the family, financially, and
marries one of the daughters. Godfrey, she knows, is her man even in
spite of his lowly station.
When the film opens, Godfrey
is living at a city dump in a shanty-town. Before long, he is able to get
himself hired as a butler because he had been willing to be the butt of a joke
for five dollars. As if such treatment by the family were not bad enough,
insults continue even as he is serving as the butler very well, and with the
epitome of politeness. One of the daughters even tries to frame him so her father
would terminate Godfrey’s employment. Faced with returning to the slum at the
dump, Godfrey has a lot riding on avoiding being framed, which he does. He even
maintains his politically-astute politeness to everyone in the family even so. It
is as if he were a fiddler on a roof—poised in a way that he could fall at any
moment.
Such precariousness being a
function of economics is hardly novel, even if it is much more difficult to
justify in a modern state that is capable of seeing to it that the poorest of
the poor do not perish simply for lack of economic wherewithal. Even though
Godfrey went to Harvard and is proficient enough to short the stock of the
company in which Alexander Bullock, the head of the family, is too heavily
invested, he could find himself, if fired, having to return to the city dump. That
anyone would realistically fear having to live on the street is
psychologically so ruinous that it could be said that any society without a safety-net
capable of preempting such an existential fear could be considered not adequately
civilized in the modern sense of the word.
In spite of my high
educational pedigree, I have known such fear and have even experienced it being
actualized in my case. I have witnessed the abject failure of even the spotty “safety-nets”
of the U.S. member-states, including being the butt of passive-aggressive
ethical lapses by employees in “social services” and even the medical
profession. The fear being actualized can indeed have medical repercussions,
especially for someone like Godfrey, who went to Harvard and worked in finance.
I know Godfrey’s fear, and, intellectually, I understand furthermore that the existential
fear of running out of money without a governmental safety-net to prolong life extends
to every American whether one is conscious of it or not, and whether one is
rich or poor. Even though this existential fear subtly saps “quality of life” throughout
a person’s adult years, few Americans realize it and the enervating toll it
takes on a person psychologically.
Underlying the insufficient
safety-net in the American states, especially relative to the E.U. states, is
the tolerance for having so much hinge on employment. For example, private
health-insurance is typically contingent on remaining employed, as if the
unemployed are necessarily healthy and thus do not need health insurance. The
pegging of insurance to a job can be viewed as dogmatic in the sense of being
arbitrary, for the need for health-care does not have anything to do with
whether a person has a job or not. Yet so many Americans seem to take the artificial
link for granted. In the film, Godfrey insightfully laments, “I discovered that
the only difference between a derelict and a man is a job.” Behind the public
policies that hinge so much in terms of sustenance to whether a person is
employed is the pejorative normative stance that an unemployed person is tantamount
to being sub-human. In the film, the family’s insults lobbed at Godfrey even
though he is employed suggest just how low an unemployed person is in the eyes
of the rich; not even being a very polite and effective butler can completely
remove the taint of having lived at a dump in order just to survive.
Context can ensconce and even perpetuate the stark economic divide that takes advantage of the normative negative connotations of being unemployed (i.e., a derelict). In the film, Godfrey points out the extreme inequality in there being luxury apartments even as the unemployed starve. Even though the former may seem to evinced a civilized society, it is actually the tremendous economic and psychological distance between the two poles that undermine any claims that a society is civilized. Godfrey attended Harvard, a university that seems to be the epitome of civilized society (i.e., of learning), but that he had no other choice after the Wall Street crash but live at a dump belies such claims of civilization. The irony is that Godfrey personifies civilization by being polite to the family and even saving it financially with help from his old Harvard classmate even though he has sufficient reason to harbor inner resentment of the rude family and the cruel society that is fine with unemployed people living on the street to survive. Perhaps Godfrey’s financial help, amazingly out of gratitude to the family for having hired him and thus saved him from the dump, can be turned around as the question: why isn’t the enormous wealth of a society willing help the poorest of the poor who must live in a Hobbesian state of nature? On such a question civilization itself hinges.
