status – Diabasis

You don’t screw enough, Part 2

Jul 032011

I maintain that even if we’re lucky in our social norms and evolved psychologies there will still be a lot of sexual misery. Why?

Consider these theses:

(1) Human beings are obsessed with status. Every known society has a system of differential status for its members, with those who have high status receiving admiration, respect, and deference and and those who rank lower having a pretty miserable time of it. So people work very hard to maintain and perhaps to advance their statuses.

(2) We ain’t getting rid of status. Sure, we can get rid of any given system of rankings, but people are really good at inventing new status systems. (This is a large part of the reason why the aftermaths of revolutions range from disappointing to disastrous.)

(3) Status is determined in large measure by who you successfully affiliate with. The old saying is that “it’s who you know, not what you know” that matters in the this world, and it’s largely right. It matters a great deal who your friends and allies are. Having more of them raises your status, but perhaps more importantly, having ones who are themselves high in status raises your status (and having ones who are low in status, lowers it). It’s not an accident that a large part of what we think of as social class isn’t just how much money you make but what clothes you wear, where you went to school, how you spend your leisure time, how you talk, and where you live. These are indicia of affiliation.

(4) Sex has a high degree of social visibility. Dorothy Parker once wrote

As I grow older and older

And totter toward the tomb,

I find that I care less and less

Who goes to bed with whom.

This little quatrain is striking because most of us care rather a lot about who goes to bed with whom, and we can usually form pretty shrewd judgments based on not overtly sexual behavior of other people (nudge nudge wink wink you know what I mean). For those who we (or our friends) can’t observe directly, there are always the tabloids and related media, which I understand to be doing a perpetually brisk business.

(5) Having sex with someone is about as successfully affiliated as you can get with then. Probably I don’t need to spell this out.

With an understanding of (1-5) in mind, it becomes pretty easy to see how sex is going to get enmeshed in all sorts of status gamesmanship. There are many possible games, of which I’ll suggest two while inviting you to think of your own. Before doing so, however, a caution. I am not interested in having an episode of Angry Gender Wars breaking out here at Diabasis, so let me be clear that neither of these proposed games is a “male” strategy or a “female” strategy. They are human strategies played in various ways by all genders and orientations (asexuals possibly excepted). That said, here they are.

Too Good for You. Obviously it generally will not do to be known to be having sex with someone of lower status, although there are some exceptions to this if you can some keep the sex socially invisible (e.g. through patronizing prostitutes). In a sexist society it appears to be the case that women suffer more stigma from having sex with the “wrong” partners (or with “too many” partners), but there’s some for men as well. (Try to say “he married that floozy” in tones that sound anything but disdainful). Conversely there are status benefits to having socially visible sex with someone of higher status: you’re a stud, or you’ve made a catch.

Now this gives people a fun incentive to reject sexual offers, playing the game of Too Good for You. If A rejects the overtures of the at least nominally attractive B, A is signaling that (1) A is confidant enough to suggest that A really is somehow better than B and (2) A might really be better than B, because A can (probably) get the sex A wants without having to get it from B. All the merrier of knowledge of the rejection travels in common social circles of A and B.

Naturally this game cuts into sex both directly (giving people an incentive to reject otherwise attractive offers).and indirectly, because people will often decline even to advance offers for fear of the humiliation (i.e. status lowering) of receiving rejection. Big-time awesome Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates once put it memorably (though you should mentally substitute your preferred gender-neutral terms of choice for “man” and “woman” in the passage):

No one likes rejection. No man walks into the bar and says “You know what will be awesome? If I strike out repeatedly tonight.” Very often, men…don’t approach the woman they’re most attracted to–they approach the woman who they think they have the best shot at.

And so people spend lots of resources trying to look more impressive so they don’t get Too Good for You played at them. But since everyone else is likewise spending resources, it’s a treadmill, or perhaps more accurately an arms race, during which all sorts of people spend time not having sex with each other and working too hard too boot to generate the resources consumed in the status competition that results in not having that much sex. Ugly. Very ugly.

But of course the ugliness doesn’t stop there. Human beings an ingenious in the ways of misery. Consider another possible game.

Monogamy for Thee. Having access to rare things is good for status, but ownership, the ability to exclude others, is even better. You get a lot more social mileage out of having Old Master in your study than just going to see one in a museum, owning beachfront property has far more cachet than just being able to go to the beach, and your securing admission to Princeton is made all the sweeter by knowing that for every applicant who got in, eleven are rejected.

There are many things that make people sexy. Some appear to be universal or nearly so — youth, health, wit, artistic and athletic ability and so on, while others are more local, having perhaps to do with the prevailing standards of beauty or talent particular to one’s culture. But all of these things are at least somewhat scarce, and their combination in a single person is scarcer still. Nature is grossly inegalitarian in how it distributes favors.

Now if people are actually fairly promiscuous, then how socially awesome must you be if you can somehow monopolize the sexual attentions of a very attractive person? Impose a sacrifice of sexual opportunities on them? (Or at the very least, push their sexual alternatives into socially invisible spaces — the tryst with the gardener, the dalliance with the call girl.) At the extreme end of human societies we have potentates (marvelous word!) constructing harems with enforced monogamy for many, but even our humble middle classes have their own version of this, grabbing what little status they can by imposing monogamy on each other.

And if you can’t make it work monogamously? If you think you have a monogamous relationship but are cheated on, or if you can’t establish any monogamous relationship? Then you’re an object of pity and contempt, and woe is you. But woe is you anyway, because given your promiscuous nature, monogamy really ain’t all that much fun for you.

Thus the games spin on, and so does the misery.

You work too hard

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Jun 182011

People who count as middle class and above in advanced industrial societies enjoy a level of material prosperity and comfort far exceeding human historical norms and should have really good lives, right? Well…

Let’s face an unpleasant fact to begin with. For most people work ranges between pretty unpleasant to very unpleasant. For some of the most privileged people in the professional middle class, it is shockingly unpleasant. People often say they like their jobs, and there are senses in which this is true. They like having incomes and the social status (or which more anon) attached to their jobs, and they might like some aspects of their work, like being able to interact with people on a day-to-day basis. But I’m pretty sure they don’t like what goes on from minute to minute in a workplace, much of which is an unpalatable combination of tedium and fear, rather like being an infantry grunt only much more slowly fatal. If you think people really like their jobs, ask yourself how many of them would keep doing them were it not for pay. And yet they spend shockingly large amounts of time on them. Even if directly only 40 hours a week they spend large amounts of time commuting to and from them, lying exhausted in front of the TV after them, spending time getting credentials to obtain them, and so forth. Kind of a nasty existence, if you look at with an appraising eye. Why?

We certainly can’t appeal to brute physical necessity. We’re way beyond that. I remember quite well that during the last part of my life in which I enjoyed extended happiness I had an income more than an order of magnitude less (yes, I did control for inflation!) than what I have now, and I don’t recall any sense of significant physical discomfort or deprivation back then. Many older readers of this blog might recall something similar in their own lives.

Given my huge rise in productive possibilities, shouldn’t I be working an order of magnitude fewer hours? After all, George Jetson worked only nine hours a week. Why isn’t the future as good as it used to be?

I’m pretty sure the answer has to do with status. It’s a complicated concept, but I hope not too hard to grasp. It clearly has a first order component of being admirable somehow: smart, beautiful, capable, talented, rich, etc. It also has a second-order component of affiliation. Be friends, allies, associates, or even just hangers-on to those high in status and your own status goes up. The dreaded converse also applies.

It’s just awful of us (and I am afraid I can’t exempt myself) to care about status, but we do. A lot. Even people on the very brink of subsistence will make sacrifices in their material well-being and those of their nearest and dearest to maintain status. Sister Y links to an account of how even people suffering severe malnutrition will still spend parts of the meager budgets on things like alcohol and tobacco of the purposes of maintaining status and social affiliation. Perhaps even more astonishingly, Katja Grace points to an example of how in rural Bolivia, people refuse to use a cheap method of disinfecting water, even when it means more of their children will die of diarrhea, because doing so means signaling comparative poverty to their neighbors.

But even in a rich society like ours, status matters. Pretty much all the time.

High Status	Low Status
“I’m sure we can help you with that, ma’am.”	“Your call is very important to us. Please remain on the line and it will be answered in the order received.”
“I’d love to have coffee with you some time! What works for you?”	“Gee, I’m really busy for the whole next month.”
“May I see your license and registration please, sir?”	“Out of the car, hands on the hood, legs apart. NOW!

You know the drill. You can add your own examples. To be low in status, or to lose status, is to bleed from a thousand tiny cuts.

What has this to do with work? As the Bolivia example above shows, people put a lot of effort into signalling their status to others. If you want people to treat you as higher in status, and if you want people to affiliate with you on the basis of your status, you’d better be able to show people that you have a higher status. These signals are often pretty costly. Consider an example that a lot of ordinary middle-class people in my neighborhood face: live in a forty year-old split-level or a new McMansion. The McMansions are costlier and thus a more reliable signal to the world of your ability to pay for something more costly, and thereby indirectly a signal of your ability to earn more, and thus a signal of some desirable attribute on your part — you’re smart or hard-working or good at office politics or have a fancy degree from a fancy school or something.

Now if you happen to live in one of the older split-levels (which are perfectly comfortable houses, by the way), you could try to convince people that you just prefer living more modestly. But doing so invites invidious inferences. Maybe you just can’t afford enough to buy the McMansion. Maybe you’re just not smart enough to get a higher-paying job. Maybe you’re just unsociable and just weird. So if you don’t want to bleed from those thousand little cuts, you end up trying to buy the McMansion. Better put in those hours at the office! Hope you enjoy them…

And so people engage in their consumer status arms races against each other while slaving away. A good book to read in some ways on this is Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Human Behavior. His diagnosis, at least at the level of individual human psychology, is good.

His proposed policy solution won’t come even close to working. The race for status — and the corresponding misery it generates — is one which very few if any can escape.

Status and human unhappiness

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May 312011

Optimists like to point to certain non-zero-sum aspects of human existence as evidence that things can get better. They’re entirely wrong: wealth is not zero sum. Incremental technological change can make more wealth, and with sound institutions and public policy we can even hope to have that wealth distributed in ways that make it beneficial to lots of people (rather than just a small elite).

Unfortunately, people care an awful lot about status. And status, pretty much by its very nature is zero-sum. And not only is it zero-sum, but the fact that people use resources trying to get it means that the scramble for it will burn up a lot of the wealth that our incremental technological change generated for us.