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?
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