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On the Nature of Status

by ank

"At the sunset end of the Landscape line there is a world of reward and status that may not be encapsulated by any general concept of 'culture'. Let me illustrate what I mean by the following stories from my own experience."

"Reward? Are you saying that the economic system of capitalism is a feature of your Landscape?" "In a way, yes. Really, it's all about positioning yourself with respect to others, and capitalism is a crude way of establishing status in the community - there are many other ways, like traditions and so on. But money and the values of things lie on the Landscape and are intimately related to status. There was a guy called Veblen who had a rather extreme view of this. He thought the principal meaning of life was the 'lust for status'. He thought that no action has any meaning unless it can be associated, positively or negatively, with status. He thought that relationships, outside of sex for reproduction, are for measuring our basic worth in society.

"He didn't anticipate Aristotle Onassis who must have been thinking more about sex when he said that without beautiful women all the money in the world wouldn't mean anything.

"But status has little to do with the kind of competition that Capitalism suggests. The competition in the sunset realm is about competing for acceptance and justification rather than a form of competing to win or to overcome. The sunset realm actually intensifies distinctions rather than demolishes them.

As you rise up the levels or classes of society the competition for status, and the energy you need to maintain it, becomes more intense not less. And rather than being merged into one by the rarefied atmosphere of the elite, the various levels of distinction become increasingly subtle and more significant. One of the King George's - I forget which one - said that he could tell if a man was a gentleman simply by the way he flicked the tails of his coat when he sat down. This is subtle stuff, and if you are out of your level of society, you will betray yourself in innumerable ways, from the vocabulary you use to forms of address to the way you eat.

"Parvenus and the nouveaux riches are really proving their fitness when they try to enter such a world, because it is not a relaxing task. There have to be many other ways to enjoy your success and financial rewards than to try to enter the higher reaches of class and to find a way to belong there.

"The jostling for position in an aristocracy is a good illustration of sunset end Landscape behaviour. Titles hark back to the feudal times of overlordships when individuals were given power over land and the people on it, and the drive to join the vestiges of this system is still very strong. The willingness of those to enter the rarefied levels of high status and to do almost anything to be let in maintains a powerful hold over society in general whatever happens to titles and hereditary privilege."

"Yet the sunset end of the Landscape line is not really about the power to rule, it is about the power of reward and the kind of self-belief that is derived from an external evaluation.

"It's clear, certainly, that the most important thing about status is that everyone knows and understands how a particular status is positioned with respect to every other status. Somewhere in a huge handbook of social protocol - and I am talking about England here but the principles operate in every society - it is said to be written in the instructions of how to seat people at dinner, 'The Aga Khan is held to be a direct descent of God; an English Duke takes precedence.' ...

"You cannot exaggerate the subtleties of status and the degree to which it requires agreement. How about this? I was at an informal lunch one time, not even in England - helping my hostess serve out the lunch in a cramped dining room to two seated male English guests, one of whom I knew well. The other guest had been a British colonial judge and, on retirement, had received the usual knighthood for services rendered. We had been having a grand old time talking, and in the awkward space, I carelessly handed the first plate to the person I knew, sitting against the wall on my hostess' left. There was a scene. The judge putt puttered in an offended way and the person I had handed the plate to was embarrassed. Both of them believed in something that I had not been aware of: that social status works in the smallest context possible - two people."

"So your Landscape embodies the status and privilege that goes with the ruling classes."

"I was trying to explain that we don't simply exist in society, we exist in a place and with a scope of action not simply imposed by the authorities within it but one that is agreed upon by all the players. But my Landscape is not all about elite status and ownership. In the intellectual realm, it's about occupying fields of knowledge, solutions, practicality, it's about what actually gets done in the end, rather than hoped for or dreamed. The principal word here is 'orthodoxy' because the last thing that levels of status and ownership like is to be disturbed by the unorthodox. Knowledge and opinon is pretty much driven by the orthodox, not the other way around."

An extract from Decyphering Souls: How to recognise friends, lovers, rivals and allies
©2005Andrew Kennedy