Status.<\/p>\n
Human beings are apes.\u00a0 We’re social animals, prone to creating hierarchies.\u00a0 We do this a lot<\/em>, and we have several ways of looking at it.\u00a0 We have formal and informal structures and terminologies; we talk about rank, pecking order, social position, alpha males, dominant and submissive, corporate pyramids, and on and on.\u00a0 There seems to be a desire to keep it all simple, to reduce everything to, “I’m at THIS LEVEL, and she’s above me, and he’s below me, and I want to move up.”<\/p>\n Except that it isn’t really simple at all.\u00a0 We don’t each have a single level.\u00a0 Even in formal hierarchic structures like the military, there may be complications.\u00a0 My father was a TSgt in the U.S. Army during World War II — that’s “Technical Sergeant,” and I suspect that would be some sort of Specialist in modern terminology — which theoretically meant that he had to obey the orders of any commissioned officer in the chain of command, except where those orders conflicted with other orders.\u00a0 In practice, it didn’t work that way, and more than once he found himself giving orders to a full colonel and expecting them to be obeyed, with the full weight of Army regulations saying they had to be obeyed.\u00a0 Humans specialize, and that conflicts with simple hierarchies.\u00a0 In a life-or-death situation, a doctor gives orders; in cosmetic surgery, the patient does.<\/p>\n But we still want to know where we rank in our hierarchies.\u00a0 We want to define our status.<\/p>\n There are lots of ways to measure status:\u00a0 money, education, birth, occupation, manners, formal rank, popularity, accomplishments, awards, accolades, appearance.\u00a0 In relatively primitive societies these tend to bunch up — the right birth gives you rank and access to education, bestows wealth, keeps you well fed so that your appearance isn’t marred by malnutrition or disease, gives you the time and training to learn formal manners, etc.\u00a0 In modern society this is less true — not gone, certainly, but less definite.<\/p>\n This is the change that led some folks to proclaim the U.S. a classless society — we no longer had all these status markers concentrated in one small group at the top of a social pyramid.\u00a0 Instead they’re strewn about all over the place.\u00a0 It’s very confusing.<\/p>\n Some people, when considering the issue of class, simply choose one scale of status markers and use that to define class — wealth and birth are the most common ones, I’d guess, though occupation and education are in there.<\/p>\n I don’t think that works.\u00a0 Remember, I’ve said before that I think class is defined more by attitudes than anything else, and those attitudes are influenced by all these factors, but not determined entirely by any<\/em> of them.<\/p>\n The attitudes themselves don’t work well as status markers because they’re not immediately obvious enough, by the way, but I think they do<\/em> influence how people respond to you and perceive your status.<\/p>\n And how do the members of various classes look at the various status indicators?\u00a0 Well, that’s where this series of essays bogged down when I first wrote it, six or seven years ago, but let’s take a look.<\/p>\n For the lower class, it seems to me that the major status markers are clothes, style, and success with the opposite sex.\u00a0\u00a0 If a man’s got it goin’ on, got the threads and the looks and the ladies, then he’s a success, even if he can’t hold a job or pay his rent.\u00a0 Being seen as dangerous, as someone people don’t mess with, is also a plus.<\/p>\n For the working class, I’m not sure.\u00a0 For some people it seems to be a matter of character, of playing by the rules — if you’re seen as a solid citizen, a good spouse, a good parent, a good worker, someone who does his duty, then you’re respected and recognized as having high status, but is that it?<\/p>\n For the middle class, it’s money.\u00a0 Money is how you keep score, and you show how well you’re doing by buying expensive stuff.\u00a0 You buy the biggest house you can, in the best neighborhood you can, to show how well you’re doing, how you’re climbing up the status ladder.<\/p>\n For the professional class, it’s education and peer recognition of professional success — which is often reflected in money, but not always.\u00a0 For the professoriate, publications are as important as pay.\u00a0 Degrees count — if you have a doctorate, you’re higher status than someone with a mere master’s.\u00a0 For a lawyer, the prestige of your firm is a marker, and you can collect status points by handling high-profile cases.\u00a0 Addressing the Supreme Court bestows more status upon you than a mere raise in pay.\u00a0 Awards and honors, speaking engagements — these are all ways to count coup.<\/p>\n And for the upper class — well, you get to choose.\u00a0 You’re already in the top bracket, just by being who you are, and you can decide how you want to compete — or if<\/em> you want to compete.\u00a0\u00a0 Some people do it with family connections, some by going into politics or philanthropy, etc.<\/p>\n Me, I decided to write.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Status. Human beings are apes.\u00a0 We’re social animals, prone to creating hierarchies.\u00a0 We do this a lot, and we have several ways of looking at it.\u00a0 We have formal and informal structures and terminologies; we talk about rank, pecking order, social position, alpha males, dominant and submissive, corporate pyramids, and on and on.\u00a0 There seems… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-generalities-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":804,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions\/804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}