The Foreign Service Journal, April 2006

appetites and interests, and by his many accomplishments. On the other hand, I noticed that he had a leg or two up on the rest of us in achieving these feats, thanks to a team of servants catering to his every personal need, both at home and dur- ing his constant travels around the globe. Somehow I doubt Churchill even once, for example, made his own bed or even a sandwich. It also comes across clearly in the biography that he devoted little time to being a father, and probably never saw, much less changed, a diaper. And he was able to dictate to an ever-present personal assistant a number of his famous speeches while soaking in his cher- ished bath. Could it be, I asked myself, that I, too, might accomplish more by taking full advantage of a similar opportunity to hire household help? Now that I am living in the heart of South America and have two full-time maids and even a gardener (who tends to our yard once a week), shouldn’t I be achieving more than I did before hav- ing all this help? Dealing with Cognitive Dissonance I suspect I’m not alone in my dis- comfort at the existence of a large class of people who live at the beck and call of a much smaller elite. However attractive the lure of the easy life, I suspect that the still-strong egalitarian sentiments of many Americans — our discomfort with explicit and entrench- ed class distinctions and the marked social and economic inequalities that necessarily accompany them — com- pel us to focus on that other side of the coin. For those of us accustomed to per- forming our own daily household chores and attending to the more pro- saic dimensions of child-raising while living in the U.S., whether out of eco- nomic necessity or choice, the pres- ence in one’s home of actual servants can be quite unsettling. No matter how well we treat them, we feel that we are somehow betraying our egali- tarian roots. This is especially true in societies where the existential identity of the maid or the nanny is defined by that work, and doubly so when the work (as is mostly the case) offers little or no hope of advancement, of breaking out of that identity and moving toward something better. The aver- age monthly salary of a maid or nanny in many poorer countries is less, sometimes much less, than the cost of dinner for two at a decent restaurant in San Francisco (wine not included), a room for a night at an adequate hotel in Miami, or movies and pop- corn for a family of four at your typi- cal suburban multiscreen complex. International economists will insist that such comparisons are misleading because the cost of living in such countries is often dramatically lower than in the U.S. But somehow, such reassurances fade when measured against the seemingly unbridgeable social and economic chasm between those on the higher rungs like us, who can afford such things of leisure — and the many down below, including our household help, who cannot even dream of affording them. Simply put, for them there is no way up, or out. For me and no doubt for many others, to live within a social structure characterized by deep-seated and seemingly immovable structural in- equalities causes what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. I enjoy the tangible benefits of living on the right side of the social divide, but at the same time I feel first-hand the injus- tice of it all, and the feeling gnaws at my conscience. There are various strategies for dealing with such feel- ings, some of which have the advan- tage of violating both the hidden and the visible codes of the unjust order. For example, you can, as we do, pay your maid or nanny more than the going salary rate (“distorting the mar- ket,” as economists would say), give generous gifts at holidays and so forth. That still may not amount to much by U.S. standards, but it at least demonstrates your conviction that the so-called market in this case is cynically distorted to begin with. (Is a dinner with friends at a good restau- rant really worth the same as one month of loving, dependable child- care services offered by your nanny?) You can also encourage your household assistants to develop their professional prospects by studying English, cooking, first aid or the like, and thereby help them open further and greater possibilities for them- selves or their children in the future. Or, most radical of all in some soci- eties, you can treat them with respect and, to the degree possible, as equals. Doing What We Can There is one other approach that can be helpful, which is to give our- selves credit for good intentions and not get hung up on changing the world. After all, we pay our household help a living wage, often well above the national average, and sometimes better than that of teachers, office workers and other educated profes- sionals in the local economy. Accord- ingly, refusing to extend employment 62 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 6 When I joined the Service, I was stunned I could afford a maid; not long before, I could barely pay my rent.