Being low status is unpleasant. Sometimes it’s only that, and barely so: when it comes to sports, my athletic abilities mark me as inferior, and won’t get me attention from professional recruiters, but I don’t care. If, however, large majorities perceive themselves as low in status along many important dimensions, that is socially dangerous. It may generate envy, and resentment, and, euphemistically, “social unrest.”
One might hope to prevent this by promoting equality along some important dimensions—wealth, for example. Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State and Utopia, doubts that this will work:
It might appear obvious that if people feel inferior because they do poorly along some dimensions, then ... if scores along [those dimensions] are equalized, people no longer will feel inferior. The very reason they have for feeling inferior is removed. But it may well be that other dimensions would replace the ones eliminated with the same effects (on different persons).
For example,
If, after downgrading or equalizing one dimension, say wealth, the society comes generally to agree that some other dimension is most important, for example, aesthetic appreciativeness, aesthetic attractiveness, intelligence, athletic prowess, physical grace, degree of sympathy with other persons, quality of orgasm [sic], then the phenomenon [of some people being low-status] will repeat itself.
Why would new dimensions replace the role of the now-equalized ones, in determining status? Because
People generally judge themselves by how they fall along the most important dimensions in which they differ from others. People do not gain self-esteem from their common human capacities by comparing themselves to animals who lack them. ("I'm pretty good; I have an opposable thumb and can speak some language.")
It’s a kind of psychic substitution effect: people want status, and if “buying” it along one dimension (by hook or by crook) becomes impossible, they don’t stop wanting it; they just take their business elsewhere.1 Joseph Ellis tells a morbidly amusing story about the Continental Army, wintering out 1777 in Valley Forge. No gold, or fancy food, or ornamented lodgings were available to distinguish the officers, so
While the enlisted men shivered stoically, their officers seemed fixated on petty arguments about their relative status in the military hierarchy, at times resembling, as [John] Adams put it, “apes scrambling for nuts.” Minor arguments around the campfires often escalated to major matters of honor.
They argued about, among other things, whose horse should be allowed to feed first.
Because states used different criteria to establish rank, there was incessant bickering about seniority, and threats to resign rather than serve under an officer considered junior. The smallest gesture of disrespect often escalated into an argument about honor [and sometimes a duel]. (Ellis, The Cause—The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783.)
Ellis says that the officers’ demeanor comes across as almost inexplicably strange. Maybe strange; not inexplicable.
If equalizing positions on important dimensions will not elevate the status of the worse-off, what will? Nozick recommends, not subtracting, but multiplying dimensions along which people may compete. The more ways one may be measured, the more chances there are that, along a few of them, one will measure up. One can then regard those important dimensions as the most important, and think that, overall, one is doing pretty well: I can’t throw a football, but I’m an OK philosopher, and that matters more anyway. Players in the NFL can make a similar speech, with valences reversed. Everybody is happy.
An increase in status brought about by this mechanism need not come at anyone else’s expense. Within a single domain, status is zero-sum—I cannot move up the substack leaderboard without someone else moving down—but status-in-general is not. By multiplying dimensions, new high-status loci may be created out of nothing.
writes,The music industry cannot create more than ten spots in the top ten best-selling jazz albums. But the inherent scarcity of spots on a Top Ten list doesn’t confirm the inherent scarcity of status in general. [What the music industry can do is] create new musical genres and, in turn, new Top Ten lists. Last I checked, Wikipedia listed roughly four dozen subgenres of heavy metal, including something called “cello metal.” (Unequivocal Justice.)
I was reminded of this when I learned, recently, that someone had, for the first time, “beat” NES Tetris.2 This was gigantic news in a narrow social niche, and Blue Scuti’s status skyrocketed—without any cost in status to the Forbes’ richest people, or the champions of the local bowling league.
Nozick is famous as a libertarian, not a social psychologist. What do his psychological speculations have to do with his political convictions? For one, they feed into a common critique of communism. If wealth is equalized, status-determination will shift (or shift more completely) from economic to political dimensions—to one’s position in the Party hierarchy. This, certainly, is not a fairer or a more just basis. Nozick puts the point in a more general way: the multiplication of routes out of low-status
is not to be achieved by some centralized effort...The more central and widely-supported the effort, the more contributions to it will come to the fore as the commonly agreed upon dimension on which will be based people's self-esteem.
See also: Anarchy, State, Dystopia.
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Of course eliminating economic inequality would not reduce status inequality does not entail economic inequality is not bad.
In this world of competitive Tetris, the game must be played on an original 1980s Nintendo Entertainment System.
Yes but the punishment for doing very poorly along the wealth/income dimension for status (as opposed to tetris playing ability and other competitions) seems to be particularly severe; namely, poverty, homelessness and even starvation. Additionally, if you are doing poorly on your Tetris game for whatever reason, you ought to recover in the future. But once you are desperately poor, reversing your fortunes seems incredibly difficult.
So I always thought maybe a safety net for poverty is helpful.
The real trick is being able to shift which dimensions of status matter to you based on context so you always come out on top.
When I am at a philosophy conference i can pretty much always think to myself, with justification, that I could beat up anyone in the room. When I'm at a brazilian jiu jitsu tournament, I can't think that. But I can think "none of these guys are philosophy professors."
More generally, as long as you specialize in two negatively correlated dimensions of status, it's highly likely that for an arbitrary person you'll be able to find a dimension of status you care about on which you rank above them.