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November 2, 2024 - January 1, 2025
The thing we call culture is always an aggregation of individual human behaviors, and if taste were the mere product of random idiosyncrasies and irrational psychologies, culture would display no patterns, only noise. The fact that preferences in these disparate fields follow a similar rhythm of change suggests there must be universal principles of human behavior at work—the presence of a “cultural gravity” nudging humans into the same collective behaviors at the same time.
The best parallel may be chemistry: not every molecule moves the exact same way, yet we can still draw inferences about the properties of gases.
Our status position is always contextual, based on how we are treated in a particular time and place.
To “be somebody” in today’s world requires accumulating significant amounts of capital, often across multiple criteria. Graduates of the most exclusive universities (educational capital) become friends with future leaders (social capital), embark on impressive careers (occupational capital), and make a lot of money (economic capital). This clustering is called status congruence, and it works to stabilize the status rankings. An individual’s minor achievement in one area may not lead to a significant jump up the ladder; a multifront effort is required to prove greater importance.
The wider the gap between the esteem we feel inside our status group and outside in the “real world,” the more we may feel inferior.
Four important principles emerge from the internal logic of status hierarchies: Status maximization: We desire high status and fear low status. Status achievement: We can modify our status through talents, contributions, possessions, and virtues. Status integrity: We should not claim more status than we deserve. Status mobility: We can choose to move ourselves to new social contexts that better value our talents, contributions, possessions, and virtues.
All styles, in the form of distinctive modes of expression, are conventions.
Art relies on convention to create aesthetic experiences. There are accepted guidelines that shape the creation and consumption of an artwork—the three-act structure and happy endings of Hollywood films, repeating choruses in pop songs, the fact that fans can sing along at a rock concert but not at a classical performance, the use of “[Catchy Phrase]: [How Something Did Something]” in the subtitles of nonfiction books. Recent Hollywood films deploy the convention of a “yellow filter” in postproduction to make footage from Central America and India look more squalid and sinister. And as we’ll
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Conventions are not just floating molecules that make up culture but also wield remarkable powers over humans in three key ways: (1) they regulate our behavior; (2) they become internalized as habits; and (3) they change our perception of the world. And from whence do conventions draw their power? Status. We ultimately follow conventions to gain social approval and avoid social disapproval, and in doing so, they change our behaviors and organize the data we gather from our senses.
The principle of detachment means all status symbols require alibis—reasons for adoption other than status seeking.
“One must remember,” writes Waters, “that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste.”
For many centuries, Western elites followed the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s clear and authoritative definition: taste was “the faculty of estimating the beautiful.” Someone with good taste could properly and virtuously identify beautiful things as beautiful things. And in those years, beauty was found in complex pieces of classical music, venerated artworks in museums, and the intricate craftwork of skilled artisans. A person with bad taste, on the other hand, found allure in the vulgar, ersatz, and wretched. Bad taste, thought Voltaire, was a “sickness of the spirit.”
For our purposes, taste is a crucial concept in providing a direct link between status seeking and the formation of individual identities. Taste involves choice, and from what we’ve learned so far, we make our aesthetic choices within the context of status. Our particular tastes may have genetic and psychological elements, but they manifest only in social activity. Our habitus provides the unconscious conventions that decide what we find pleasurable.
Susan Sontag’s famed line “Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste.”
The vanilla “mainstream” sensibility opts for blockbuster action films, Top 40 radio, reality television, famous athletes and celebrities, casual clothing, and sensible automobiles.
Up until the 1950s, American culture contained three taste worlds: the highbrow of wealthy elites and intellectuals (classical music, abstract art, serious literature), the middlebrow of the upper middle classes (urbane popular culture with intellectual undercurrents), and the lowbrow of the lower middle classes (schmaltzy songs, popular cinema).
This clear relation between taste worlds and social position makes taste a very useful classifier in status appraisals. But if we return to Kant’s definition—the faculty of estimating the beautiful—taste also involves skill. To have good taste means making better choices than others.
While having good taste qualifies us for normal status, we can aim for higher status by developing great taste. We can “cultivate” ourselves over time to make more advanced choices that will garner more respect. To develop a sophisticated taste for wine, the oenophile Allan Sichel says, the student should first “trust his own palate.” But after that point, there must be a conscious desire to learn more. Then, “as experience grows and perception becomes keener, his taste is certain to change and wines which at first pleased may now bore or actively displease.” To gain status from great taste
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Great taste first requires a deep knowledge of potential choices.
Kantian taste requires us to find pleasure in things that take time and effort to appreciate: classical music, avant-garde art, postmodern novels, and gourmet cuisine.
Since deep knowledge opens up a wider range of appreciation, we see how elite taste engages with more difficult art forms—and why educational capital often correlates with cultural capital.
We learn taste congruence through expert combinations: the interior design suggestions found in furniture stores, the kitchen arrangements in appliance ads, and the styling recommended in fashion magazines. These established groupings of products are called constellations, and each taste world contains distinct sets. Congruence in taste means replicating these constellations or making well-balanced adjustments to the predetermined formulas.
Deep knowledge opens the door to better taste, and congruence reveals our commitment to a high-status sensibility. But the truest marker of excellent taste is bounded originality. As we learned before, the highest-status individuals can’t imitate anyone lower on the hierarchy and, therefore, must make distinctive choices. Great taste requires uniqueness.
Scholar of Kantian aesthetics David Berger writes, “To like what one ‘ought’ to like is not to exercise taste.” This idea holds across most taste worlds.
Great taste needs to be more than a regurgitation of high-status clichés. Choices should express the individual’s exceptional character. They must surprise and delight.
Originality is much easier with granular knowledge and expertise, because knowing what is distinctive requires knowing what is common.
Those looking to improve their taste can always learn more about the full range of choices, each choice’s meaning, and their former and current status value. This provides individuals with the confidence to go beyond the well-known and into exciting new directions, perhaps even unearthing unforeseen pleasures in commonplace items.
The movies of director Quentin Tarantino pay direct homage to older films, and yet in 2018 the Oxford English Dictionary recognized “Tarantinoesque” as a term describing a distinct cinematic style.
A critical point about originality, however, is that choices never need to be original on an absolute, universal scale. They must merely be surprising within the community.
Since taste reveals our personal feelings, communicates our cues and signals, and offers a canvas for self-improvement, it inevitably plays a role in status claims and appraisals.
For most, self-expression takes the form of attempting to classify oneself in aspirational communities: e.g., “I’m goth” or “I’m an entrepreneur.” When we do tiptoe into more distinct choices, we make sure they conform to the standards of detachment, congruence, and authenticity. For whatever freedom we have to craft personas, status value makes some options more attractive than others. We can always make idiosyncratic choices, break conventions, or stubbornly ignore social pressures, but the social punishments may be strong enough to bring us back to the norm.
Modernity has democratized the aristocratic propensity toward individual distinction. But uniqueness remains an easier action for those at the top, which means that the easiest way to resolve the fundamental tension between being original and getting along in society is to acquire high status.
the emphasis on being yourself overlooks the fact that self-definition is a continual process. We are writing a novel of identity for others, and the persona is simply the latest draft.
And in a world of permanently shifting symbolic meanings, we’ll surely have to make changes, regardless of whether we want to or not.
From social science research we know that even the paltriest personal trivia—stances, accents, clothing choices, furniture arrangements—can offer clues to status. At the same time, appraisers identify us through the signals, cues, and significant absences they find important. We may have control over what others observe, but we have no control over how they classify us. Nor do they: their means of perceiving and identifying us is based on their habitus. So, for all practical purposes, questions of identity are bound up with status.
Status seeking is like weight loss: we’d love to be slimmer without having to eat right and go to the gym. Also, status through achievement is useful only for an accomplished few. If all achieve the same exceptional feat, it’s no longer exceptional.
We can gain status by persuading society to value our particular status criteria and beliefs. Artists, prophets, and philosophers have succeeded in expanding society’s natural focus on money and power toward more intellectual attributes like creativity. New criteria can also be deployed as a defense.
the sensibilities underlying taste are never random, independent results of idiosyncratic and irrational minds.
Humans may be born with a creative instinct, but the need for status-related differentiation motivates individuals to pursue counterintuitive, idiosyncratic, and outrageous inventions. These new ideas form as the shared culture of small communities, and then those groups’ global status determines the degree to which they influence the taste of broader society.
Max Weber warns, “A class itself is not a community.” Individual members of classes pursue the same goals for themselves, not necessarily for the group. Taste arises within a class because individuals with the same status assets agree on shared values that emphasize the importance of those assets.
In Distinction the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu accused contemplative Kantian aesthetics of being a scheme to emphasize exclusionary cultural capital. “A work of art,” writes Bourdieu, “has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded.” This means there is an “unequal class distribution of the capacity for inspired encounters with works of art and high culture in general.” In previous eras Old Money became subscription audiences of symphonies and ballets, and the most illustrious served on the boards of museums. The
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Their most valuable signals, then, are not based on money or time being rich, but the exclusive possession of privileged information. The resulting professional class sensibility thus focuses on intelligent, high-quality, and unusual choices—a strong belief in taste itself.
In the more artistic fringes of the professional class, there has been a strong consumption of high culture, with a social life rich in opera and symphony performances, art gallery openings, and museum exhibits.
The other faction is the creative class, a term coined by the sociologist Richard Florida to describe those who find stable middle-class incomes through “creative” occupations such as writer, journalist, magazine editor, graphic designer, photographer, fashion buyer, and interior decorator. In their proximity to celebrity and the high-status milieu, creative-class jobs offer more in the way of status than in financial rewards. Being an obscure novelist doesn’t provide enough income to thrive but can lead to esteem and other material benefits.
And since information is free, professionals see this form of high-status signaling as the most meritocratic means of status competition. Anyone can have good taste if they work at it. But the advanced aesthetic choices of the professional class never come to fully dominate the culture—because those at the bottom of the status ladder aspire to much simpler, bolder statements.
In the 1950s the Color Research Institute of Chicago found that the highest income and education segments preferred “muted and delicate colors” while lower classes liked “brilliant hues and large doses.”
The wealthy creative classes can play in musty and decaying garments as a means of detachment, but these goods just reinforce the stigma of poverty for those lacking capital. Minimalism is always a privilege; in signaling, the poor can’t afford to look generic. The goal instead is maximal ornamentation on even the cheapest objects.
Subcultures are a clear example of the alternative status groups introduced in chapter 1: collections of individuals lacking global status who form new hierarchies around status beliefs other than capital and mainstream virtues.
Disadvantaged ethnic minorities also form their own alternative status groups—crafting cultural oases of music, fashion, and leisure to escape structural discrimination.
A less extreme middle-class version of the alternative status group is the hobbyist group: pods of individuals building mutual respect networks based on common interests.
