Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

by W. David Marx

The philosopher Markus Gabriel writes, “Nowadays there is the tendency to misjudge the aesthetic experience as mere entertainment”—but this is not a mistake.

The cultural industry will always have the means and might to dominate our mind-space, and a major point of “indie snobbery” was to provide counterbalance.

The internet opened storytelling to everyone, a development long beheld as a great democratic revolution. But this also has robbed nerds of their longtime monopoly on content creation and gatekeeping.

Rebecca Jennings: “No one follows you because they expect you to be talented. They follow you because they like you.”

Online stars are making millions a year without validation from established institutions. The question is whether these platforms inspire true artistic innovation. Every structural change we’ve noted in this chapter—pay-by-click internet platforms, the rise of a new nouveau riche, the death of cultural capital—incentivizes creators to aim for amassing economic capital rather than cultural capital.

The struggle for higher status—whether striving for basic equality or angling for the very top—shapes individual identities, spurs creativity and cultural change, and forms customs and traditions. Humans may possess an innate desire to create, but their inventions achieve broader diffusion when they fulfill others’ status needs. These mechanisms often lead to structural biases against certain groups but, when given the right parameters, they can also open the path to social mobility and greater cultural diversity. The status upheavals of the twentieth century resulted in an explosion in new artifacts supporting a wide range of new sensibilities, as high-status groups used the conventions of less wealthy communities as cultural capital.

American critic H. L. Mencken wrote, “Do I admire Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony because it is incomprehensible to Congressmen and Methodists—or because I genuinely love music? Do I prefer terrapin à la Maryland to fried liver because plow-hands must put up with the liver—or because the terrapin is intrinsically a more charming dose?” Mencken correctly notes that status value isn’t the only aspect of cultural value, but he’s too confident that he can separate the effects of status from his “pure” contemplation of beauty and pleasure.

Not every human choice is a direct result of status seeking, but when attempting to explain cultural change on a macro level, status value should be considered as the primary factor. Taste is never only about the thing itself—e.g., the flavor of a wine or the mechanical superiority of a car. Civilization is fundamentally symbolic, and every choice communicates social position. This suggests that evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and mathematical modeling, taken in isolation, aren’t sufficient for diagnosing cultural patterns.

creativity tends to prosper with an increase in total artistic activity. Anthropologist A. L. Kroeber surveyed the world’s civilizations and found that “a culture with a content several times as great as another—let us say with a total inventory of items several times larger—has more material to operate on, and ought therefore to be able to produce more combinations of items and richer or more intensive patterns.” Symbols become more complex the more they refer to other symbols, and it helps when more people are involved in creating new ones.

Without any intervention, humans are well primed to create a culture of low symbolic complexity: simple melodies, figurative art, bawdy jokes. And capitalism ensures that established conventional art forms always find large audiences.

Cultural ecosystems that encourage symbolic complexity solve this problem: innovations of high complexity trickle down and “refresh” mass culture.

When ecosystems push toward complexity at the margins, everyone wins.

Smaller, erudite audiences enjoy difficult art, and simplified versions engage less knowledgeable audiences. Complex works endure longer, contributing to future generations’ ecosystems and supporting the potential emergence of geniuses. Kroeber writes that as much as we attribute “great cultural products” to “great men,” they’re always “the composite product of personal superiority and cultural influence.”