Status and Culture | Alessandro Desantis

Highlights

These peculiarities of human behavior can be summarized in a broader enigma I like to call the Grand Mystery of Culture: Why do humans collectively prefer certain practices, and then, years later, move on to alternatives for no practical reason?
The thing we call culture is always an aggregation of individual human behaviors, and if taste were the mere product of random idiosyncrasies and irrational psychologies, culture would display no patterns, only noise. The fact that preferences in these disparate fields follow a similar rhythm of change suggests there must be universal principles of human behavior at work—the presence of a “cultural gravity” nudging humans into the same collective behaviors at the same time.
in seeking to maximize and stabilize status, individuals end up clustering into patterns of behavior (customs, traditions, fashion, fads, taste) that we understand as culture.
Culture is embodied in the products, behaviors, styles, meanings, values, and sensibilities that make up the human experience—and it is status that guides their creation, production, and diffusion.
Elites could once protect their status symbols behind information barriers and exclusive access to products; now nearly everything is available to nearly everyone. Meanwhile, the fragmentation of culture into the “long tail” has diluted the power of taste to serve as an effective means of social exclusion.
Subcultures once provided society with a constant stream of cultural innovations, but the most notable outsider group of the twenty-first century has been the internet trolls rebelling against diversity, equity, and inclusion through revanchist slogans and memes.
First, status denotes a position within a social hierarchy based on respect and perceived importance.
In medieval societies, this hierarchy was explicit: the king and queen at the apex, then aristocrats, then the bourgeoisie, and, finally, the peasants. But as capitalism and democracy enabled individuals to make a name for themselves, status positions became less clearly defined.
The second lesson from Lassie is that every status position comes with specific rights and duties, with the most desirable benefits accruing to those at the top.
The third lesson from Lassie is that status is bestowed by others. Status is a purely social phenomenon; it manifests in the interactions between individuals.
Our status position is always contextual, based on how we are treated in a particular time and place.
“Any organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is ‘flat,’ and in which all members are equal. Unstratified society, with a real equality of its members, is a myth which has never been realized in the history of mankind.”
even if we are seeking esteem rather than superior treatment, we need some form of superior treatment to perceive the esteem. The demand for tangible status benefits thus can’t be separated from a desire for respect. This is why bureaucratic institutions always provide more perks to employees who move up the hierarchy.
All of this demand for higher esteem, however, inherently engenders social conflict: Status is a relative ranking, so not everyone can simultaneously achieve a high position. Status is zero-sum. For every person who goes up, someone must go down.
To “be somebody” in today’s world requires accumulating significant amounts of capital, often across multiple criteria. Graduates of the most exclusive universities (educational capital) become friends with future leaders (social capital), embark on impressive careers (occupational capital), and make a lot of money (economic capital). This clustering is called status congruence, and it works to stabilize the status rankings.
Individuals seek higher status—insofar as its pursuit doesn’t risk their current status level.
In groups where everyone is dedicated to the same status beliefs, there will be strong status integrity. Members see the hierarchy as natural and, thus, legitimate. Deference to elites is automatic, and lower-status members lend their time, energy, and support to superiors for the sake of the group.
As much as we may identify most closely with a single status group, we are all members of many: family, school, workplace, clubs. And since the status criteria and beliefs may differ among them, we behave differently based on the context.
The journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe learned over the years that, “whether they’re intellectuals or stock car racers, [most people] tend to emphasize values that, if they were absolute, would make them special people.”
“People are more attracted to relationships, groups, and communities in which they would have reasonably high status rather than those in which they would be low status.”
From this perspective, membership in alternative status groups appears to be a clever strategy for oppressed and unprivileged individuals to maximize their status.
Research has shown that local status is more important to personal happiness than global status, especially for self-esteem. And life is easier when living among sympathetic peers. But even if we hide in an alternative status group, we can’t escape our global status—the general ranking within broader society.
The wider the gap between the esteem we feel inside our status group and outside in the “real world,” the more we may feel inferior.
Status is thus not just personal but political. “Society,” writes Daniel Miller, “is not to be understood in terms of a simple hierarchy, but as a continual struggle over the hierarchy of hierarchies.” Status is an ordinal ranking, and so even if the economic pie expands and material benefits increase for much of society, this doesn’t equalize status in society.
Four important principles emerge from the internal logic of status hierarchies: Status maximization: We desire high status and fear low status. Status achievement: We can modify our status through talents, contributions, possessions, and virtues. Status integrity: We should not claim more status than we deserve. Status mobility: We can choose to move ourselves to new social contexts that better value our talents, contributions, possessions, and virtues.
earning social approval requires not just making concrete contributions to the group’s goals but also following a particular set of arbitrary practices.
All discussion of culture focuses on the arbitrary aspects of human behavior.
To illuminate the relationship between status and culture, we must become experts in conventions. They are the “molecules” in the chemistry of culture—the individual units of collective behavior that make up the cultural whole.
Once we know how to identify conventions, we’ll find them everywhere. They manifest as customs, the tacit rules of a community. Customs can be so invisible within a group that we notice them only upon encountering alternative ways of life.
Modern life is full of short-term conventions we call fads, such as Hula-Hoops and the Atkins diet. Fashions are conventions that appear in ornamental areas of life that change on a regular basis.
We ultimately follow conventions to gain social approval and avoid social disapproval, and in doing so, they change our behaviors and organize the data we gather from our senses.
Meeting expectations elicits smiles and cheers. When they aren’t met, the sociologist George Homans writes, an individual “has in effect been deprived of a reward, and he repays deprivation with hostility.”
Internalization unlocks the final power of conventions: setting our perceptual framework for observing the world. Our senses may gather information, but that information is then interpreted through a screen of conventional habits, beliefs, and knowledge.
Conventions start as solutions to coordination problems but take on moral dimensions over time.
Conventions create habits and patterns of behavior through carrots of social approval and sticks of social disapproval. Since culture is based on arbitrary behaviors, individuals could always wander aimlessly from practice to practice. Conventions, whether conscious or internalized, explain why people instead cluster around the same patterns. And status is intertwined in the entire process.
Every convention, then, has a differential status value, reflecting how much status can be gained through conforming to it. A convention exclusive to a higher status group has high status value, while a convention associated with a lower status group has negative status value. Widely held customs have neutral status value.
As an extension of status integrity, members of a status group tend to believe that individuals in each tier should consume at their proper level. The rich shouldn’t live like the poor, and the poor shouldn’t pretend to be rich.
High status in modern society thus requires satisfying an additional status criterion: to be distinct. Mindless imitation becomes a low-status act.
Lower-status individuals, if already outside the realm of social approval, may also live more freely because they have nothing left to lose. But lower-status distinction is interpreted as mere rule breaking. Respected distinction is an elite privilege.