Author: john mcgowan

Disparate Economies (3): Fame (Honor, Meritocracy, Status)

This post will be even more tentative than most.  I am not very certain of how to distinguish fame from status.  Probably I should just accept that they overlap in various ways, even as I resist the idea that they are synonymous.

In any case, let me try to articulate my basic intuitions about what differentiates them while also attending to what they share.  I do want to stick to the notion that status is restricted to circumscribed groups while fame aims for the regard of more heterogeneous and less well-formed multitudes. 

The quest for status is a quest a) for inclusion into a certain group and b) subsequently, for respect within that group.  First one needs to have been granted entry, to become a member.  Then one can strive for a “high place” in the group’s own hierarchy.  With status, social power comes in two forms: a) the power to confer membership on those desiring it, and b) the power that comes with being deemed a particularly esteemed member of the group.

It’s easiest to see how this works with professional cadres.  All professions control their own credentialing procedures, the rites and hurdles that must be endured to be granted membership.  Once within the profession, relative standing is supposed to accrue to the most accomplished, the most competent. But other factors—such as networked relations, where one received one’s credentials, sheer economic resources etc.—can also influence standing.  Such non-accomplishment based “boosts” to status will often be decried as illegitimate, even corrupt, once the notion of meritocracy has taken hold.

Of course, tying status to merit is a new idea historically, dating back to 1750 at the earliest.  Austen’s partial, but fairly fervent, endorsement of meritocracy is evident in her novels, which in many ways trace the transition from other sources of status to claims based on merit.  Once “careers are open to talent” the army and the church will no longer only be open to “gentlemen,” to those who can buy their commissions or convince the local squire to appoint one as the pastor in a parish within his (the squire’s) “gift.”  The transition to meritocracy was long and arduous—and a pure meritocracy never achieved.

The opponents of meritocracy have two major complaints against it.  The first is the Tory Radical distaste for the competition of all against all that “careers open to talent” initiates.  It’s a mad scramble for economic and status once determinants like family origins, whom one knows, and other non-economic and non-accomplishment markers of distinction are cast aside.  This is the traditionalist, conservative case against capitalism—and against democracy.  We get a good taste of it in Tocqueville’s reaction to America.  He is aghast at the way that economic success becomes just about the only measure of a person’s worth once traditional ranks are abolished in favor a general “equality.”  And is equally aghast at the chaos of the generalized competition that ensues once everyone is told they can aspire to anything.  No bars to advancement beyond what the individual can procure for himself (or herself). (I must note that Tocqueville struggles hard to master his antipathy to democratic equality because he is convinced it is the future. Thus we must learn some way to live with it.) A suspicion of what one has solely earned for oneself is Lady Catherine’s objection to Elizabeth.  How dare she presume herself fully worthy of Darcy simply on the basis of her beauty and wit.  Austen allows Elizabeth’s personal qualifications to carry all before them.  The legitimacy of any social impediment to her match with Darcy is fiercely denied. We might call this a rejection of the relevance of any “preexisting conditions.”

The second objection to meritocracy is that it threatens to obliterate “honor” or “character.”  This, of course, is where Austen (to some extent) plays both sides of the fence.  Elizabeth deserves her reward precisely because she is honorable.  She rejects the enormous economic prize that would follow from marrying Darcy because her integrity demands that she marry someone she loves and respects.  Her refusal of his first proposal proves her character.  What appalled Tocqueville, contrastingly, was the shamelessness, the ignorance of and contempt for any form of “honor,” that characterized the (to him, mad) scramble for economic success.  Where such success is the only goal and the only marker of social standing, people will stoop to anything.  All notions of personal integrity as absolutely essential to one’s own self-regard as well as to the regard of others will disappear.  And when we consider the shamelessness of many people of wealth and of many politicians—and of those less successful who ape them—Tocqueville would seem to have a point.  Where success is the only goal, moral considerations are merely an annoyance to be brushed aside whenever and wherever one can get away with it.  To bring up such peccadilloes is to be a killjoy, or a sententious bore (like sister Mary in Pride and Prejudice).  There is nothing quite so old-fashioned as hammering on about integrity or character or how someone should be ashamed of themselves.  Such objections will be easily dismissed as envy, at the scold’s inability to play the game.

It seems to me a fair historical generalization (again in relation to England, France, and the US, the only societies I am in any position to opine about) that “fame” was the prevalent concept used to discuss such matters before 1750 while “status” (although the term itself is not often invoked until the sociologists emerge in the very late nineteenth century) more accurately describes the situation after 1750.  In other words, once some ideology of “equality” (however, imperfect and non-inclusive since women and non-whites were decidedly not “equal”) emerges, the general competition for eminence that Tocqueville observed is on.  That’s what generates the “social” novels of the 19th century (of which Proust’s novel is the great culmination) in which “social climbing” is the master passion of so many characters.  Rastignac in Balzac’s Pere Goriot is not seeking fame; he is seeking status, which means acceptance into a Paris that is closed to him as young man newly arrived from the provinces.  Goriot’s master passion is parental love, which motivates his sacrificing contact with his daughters because they believe they must disavow him to maintain their newly won—and very precarious—toehold in the social circles they wish to be members of.  Swann, by way of contrast, already has membership in the most exclusive circles—and his presence there (as a Jew and a commoner) attests to the fact such circles can be penetrated by outsiders and to the qualities of his character since only its agreeableness (what Austen calls “amiability”—literally lovable) could assure him the access and esteem he enjoys.

Swann shows that, in the informal world of “the social,” as contrasted to the more structured world of “the economic” (where money provides an “objective” marker of success), character can still count.  In other words, the social in the 19th century tries to hold out against the complete triumph of the economic.  Tocqueville is saying, among other things, that the social is much weaker in America than in France.  There is not the prejudice against trade, against the vulgarities of “conspicuous consumption,” against the sharp tricks of commerce in America that there is in France.  Yes, as Edith Wharton shows, there are some pockets of resistance in “old New York” and perhaps in Brahman Boston, but both are reckoned anomalies and doomed to extinction.  Of course, Proust is also an elegist; he knows that the world he describes is not long for this world. 

Meritocracy, as measured by economic success, will sweep all before it. That is actually too monolithic a view.  Sub-groups will continue to form, with different criteria of entry.  And as I noted in the previous posts, those sub-groups in contemporary America are generally distinguished along lines of taste.  Thus, a huge divide between the rich who go in for the competition over who has the biggest, most luxurious, yachts and the rich who scorn such displays.  Or, much further down the economic scale, between those devoted to footballs and NASCAR and those who go to the opera and theater.  To the bemusement of leftists everywhere, contemporary politics in the US and Britain certainly, a bit less so in France, follows the lines of these taste divides, not class divides (where class is a technical term designating whether one earns one’s living primarily from the ownership of capital or primarily as income for labor preformed.)  That members of taste cultures that are deemed less prestigious are “looked down upon” by their presumptuous betters motivates voters more than any economic hurt they receive from those who possess economic power (as employers or as the providers of necessities).  In America, this divide is particularly aggravated by the feeling among less prestigious sub-groups that they are constantly being accused of being “racist,” a charge they vehemently deny and deeply, deeply resent.  The cultural elite are thus perceived as those sanctimonious scolds who moralize as just another way (along with their scorn for NASCAR and Burger King) to assert their (unjustified) belief in their superiority.  When taste is moralized—or to say it another way, when meritocracy extends to taste (i.e. some tastes are more meritorious than others, and tastes themselves become forms of merit)—social and political toxicity/animosity appears to reign almost free of any check.

All of which is to say that the desire to be esteemed by one’s peers is pretty basic.  And that desire encompasses the complexity of determining whom one’s peers are even as scorn is often directed at those who are not deemed my peers—and who, even worse, might be trying to pretend to be or to thrust themselves upon me as my peers.  That’s what snobbery is: I scorn the temerity with which you claim the right to associate with me as an equal.  You are beneath my notice. And snobbery, in contemporary America, rankles with an intensity hard to overestimate.

Fame is a bit different it seems to me.  Crucially, fame like status can only be conferred on someone by others.  All discussions of fame are troubled by this fact: that it is fickle and that it rests on nothing other than being noticed and known by others.  There seems nothing substantial about it—and moralists from the pre-Socratic philosophers to the present day warn us that it is a cheat.  To pursue it is madness—and to believe one’s press notices (as the saying goes) true insanity.  Still, the moralists have no effect on the minority who crave fame.  (How big is that minority?  Who knows? But a desire for fame is among the prime motivators of human agents.) 

Commentators prior to 1750 had more good to say of fame than ones after that date.  Despite warnings about its possible deceptions, the desire for fame has a nobility about it which various writers commend.  It is the spur to ambition, it raises the level of one’s game.  (Is it fair to say that competition is now seen to play that role: as the pathway to upping one’s game?  Of course, competition for fame can be one form competition takes.  In any case, encomiums to the benefits of competition are rare before 1750.)  Just as Austen delineates the positives that come from a “justified” pride in Pride and Prejudice even while denouncing the ill effects of pride and the bad behavior of the prideful, so writers like Shakespeare, Milton, and Edmund Burke offer qualified praise for the desire for fame.

To anchor that praise, of course, one has to try to give fame some substance.  It can’t just be gaining the attention of the fickle crowd.  It must be based on real accomplishment.  And here, I think, is where the difference between fame and status resides.  It’s a matter of scale.  Status is confined to one’s contemporaries and to confined groups identified as one’s peers.  Hence the idea of a “succès d’estime, or of a “poet’s poet.”  Esteem is not fame.  Fame is more general; it is being known beyond the circle of those devoted to your kind of accomplishment.  The sports blogger Joe Posnanski is currently trying to rank the 50 most famous baseball plays of the last fifty years.  His criteria is that these players must be known through their accomplishments on the field, but (crucially) are known to even the most casual fan and even to those who do not follow baseball at all.  Thus he is clear that he is not identifying the 50 “best” players of the stated time frame, but the 50 “most famous.”  To take an earlier example (i.e. prior to 1973) Mickey Mantle was certainly more famous in the 1950s than Henry Aaron or Stan Musial, but it is debatable that he was a better player.  So it was possible that Mantle was less esteemed by his fellow players than Musial even though he was more famous.

Similar effects are often seen in cultural matters.  Mailer is more famous than Roth, but I think it fair to say Roth is more esteemed among the cultural cognoscenti. Of course, such distinctions provide fodder for snobbery.  Those “in the know” can scorn someone who declares Mailer a better writer than Roth. 

Still, especially for the pre-1750 writers, fame’s larger scale recommends it.  The seeker of fame is daring to play in the largest game.  Milton aspires to be one of the immortals, remembered for all time as Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are.  Hence the nobility of the quest for fame: it is to risk all, it is to aspire to be among the greats, and, thus, to hold oneself to the standard set by the greats.  Such ambition is certainly presumptuous, but only such presumption yields the highest results.

A poet friend of mine once remarked that he wrote for posterity; his great desire was that his poetry would “last,” that it would still be read after his death.  The remark made me consider my own ambitions—which upon reflection I had to realize were of a much different cast.  I wanted to be read in my own time, to garner responses from my peers (readers of similar interests) and, in my wildest dreams, of a wider readership.  I would have loved to write a best-seller.  If I wanted to be “known,” it was by my contemporaries.  I have no interest in, no desire for, readers after my death.

Partly that lack of desire is that I won’t be around to enjoy the attention of others once I am dead.  I can’t have a desire for something I will not experience.  But the lack of desire is also diffidence, an inability to take my chances in a larger game.  My poet friend is playing for higher stakes than I am—and that very fact surely shapes how he goes about his work in contrast to how I go about mine.  His ambitions do appear more noble than mine—even if negative words like “grandiose” and “presumptuous” could also be used to describe his aims.

To end by returning to economy.  The competition for fame differs from the competition for status, then, mostly as a matter of scale.  The seeker of fame wants, to be very extreme about it, to be “known” by everyone, even by people who will be alive after he is dead.  The downside of fame (as all the moralists point out) is that is can be empty.  To be famous is not necessarily to be esteemed, while it is certainly true that the more people “know” who you are, the fewer of those among that number are actually in a position to “esteem” you, to judge with any degree of accuracy the quality of the achievements that made you known.  And fame is notoriously self-referential.  Your achievements, after all, may have various effects in the world; they accomplish something.  But fame accomplishes nothing.  It is just a garnish on top of your actual deeds.  And this garnish is something you can strive to bring about, but which you cannot command.  It is offered entirely on the whim of others, manufactured by the various engines of publicity that a given society possesses. 

To be concrete: I can work at and make myself an adept at hitting a baseball.  I can make that happen as a consequence of my actions.  Success in that endeavor is much more under my control than making myself famous, which is more a by-product of my accomplishments than a product.  Of course, I can do various things in the way of self-publicity to achieve fame, but such work is often deemed vulgar.  Which returns us to the issue of shamelessness.  Shameless self-promotion is often scorned—but can still be fairly successful for all that.  As Tocqueville saw with a shiver, shamelessness pays.  Which is why the economy of fame is always viewed with some suspicion.

Disparate Economies (2): Sex and Love

Before I try to talk about economies of sexual selection and of power and of fame (following up on my earlier discussion of economies of status), I really should try to nail down what I mean by an “economy.”

An economist friend of mine once chided me for using the term “capitalism.”  There is no such thing as capitalism, he insisted; there are only “markets.”  Obviously, the markets for higher education, healthcare, and food work in very different ways.  For one thing, they have entirely different distribution methods; for another, each relies on a very different set of subsidies.  Who pays—and for what—differs radically in the three cases.

My title “disparate economies” points in this direction.  I am talking about “an economy” of status, not about “the” economy (an aggregate of the effects of multiple disparate economies/markets).  There is no reason to believe knowing the intricacies of financial markets will yield much in the way of insights that can be carried over in the effort to understand an economy of status.

Still, how do I want to characterize “an economy” in general terms?  Here goes.  “An economy” is a set of actions (or, better, interactions) organized around the effort to secure possession of or access to a defined good. There must be multiple actors for an economy to exist. These actors must share a minimal agreement that the good(s) in question are desirable. (They can vary in the intensity of their desire for those goods, where those variations in intensity may give certain actors an advantage over others.)  The pursued good(s) must be relatively scarce.  That is, there will be a competition to secure the good(s)—a competition motivated by the sense that either a) some people will be derived of that good altogether or b) the good will be unequally distributed.  Where a good is available to all in exactly equal quantities, there is not an economy, just an administrative issue of distribution.  (This logic dictates Marx’s famous—if mostly mistaken—idea that that state will wither away, to be replaced by the “administration of things.”)

This Marxist notion points to the important fact that an economy much be structured; it must have fairly clear delineations of what counts as possession, and what are legitimate means for securing possession, and in the case of alienable goods, what counts as accepted procedures for the transfer of goods from one person to another.  This structure needs to be enforced.  Thus no economy without power.  There must be a location from which the rules are enforced and from which “recognition” of legitimate possession/achievement emanates.  Formal economies are structured legally—with the whole ensemble of contracts, torts, civil court cases etc. 

[This does not mean an economy must be zero sum, only that the good in question must be hierarchically arranged. Think of the housing market. Various markers–size, location, amenities, prestige–mark some houses as more desirable than others. But that doesn’t mean someone must go without any housing at all. It’s not musical chairs where the loser is left with nothing. Granite countertops become de rigueur in even the most modest houses as consolation for the knowledge that, by dint of various intractable exigencies, one has had to settle for something less than one’s dream house.]

Informal economies are trickier since they lack these legal underpinnings.  An economy of status is wonderfully circular.  Those who have the right to confer status on others have never been elected into some formal or official role.  Their power comes solely from their being deemed social arbiters by other players in the game.  (This is a somewhat less true where there is an official aristocracy.  In that case, the state does play some role in designating power to certain players in the game.)  Hence there will be jockeying for positions as social arbiters even as there is also jockeying for being granted status (“recognition’) by those arbiters.  Two competitions are going on at the same time—and the whole thing is much less stable than an ordering that is secured by laws.  Fashion is fickle; those on top today may be deemed “out” (old-fashioned and passé) tomorrow.  The markers of status fluctuate as does membership in the elites that get to determine who has status and who does not.

In sum, there is a common good that participants in an economy are pursuing; there are recognized and accepted protocols/markers of possession and exchange; and some power has the ability to sanction competitors who don’t obey the rules (written or unwritten).  The structure, to be clear, is not immune to change—and that means structures can be ambiguous, neither clearly discerned or free of “grey areas” where the norms of proper behavior are unclear.  The endless jockeying for advantage always includes some players who are trying to bend or change the rules of the game in their favor.  The hoary historical argument is that French society’s deep resistance to changing the social orders of the ancien régime to accommodate non-aristocratic wealth was one cause of the French Revolution, while the English avoided that kind of violent social upheaval by providing a ladder toward political power and social status to its middle classes.

OK. It appears (taking Jane Austen’s novels as our evidence) that the sexual selection market in her England, at least among the top 10 percent (in terms of wealth) was highly formal.  Women eligible for marriage were declared “out” and were paraded in front of prospective spouses in public assemblies, private balls, and other social events.  A man wishing to marry could survey the available women—and make his choice.  Sexual selection outside of this formal system was frowned upon—declassé and scandalous.  From James Boswell’s and Pepys’s diaries (from the 18th and 17th centuries respectively) to Frank Harris’ My Secret Life at the end of the 19th century, we can deduce that sex outside of marriage in England was mostly enabled by class divisions.  Upper class men could impose themselves on lower class women, with a variety of seduction techniques at their disposal (ranging from direct payment to various blandishments that played upon the woman’s desire to rise in social class.)  It is important to note that men who were hanging on to the lower rungs of the top 10% could not expect to marry until well into their thirties (when they would have—ideally—finally secured the economic security to afford a wife and all that a “respectable” home was meant to possess).  An outlet for sexual desire prior to that happy date was needed—and mostly winked at, if one were reasonably discreet and did not prey on women of “respectable” social standing.  As Pride and Prejudice shows in the case of Wickham and Lydia, marriage is expected if dalliance with a respectable woman is discovered.  George Eliot’s Adam Bede offers the opposite case: the lower class woman is abandoned by her squire seducer.

All this, of course, only for the top 10%.  Among the lowest classes in Victorian England (at least), most couples didn’t bother to get married (the cost of a marriage license was one disincentive) to the endless hand-wringing of moralists (who also bemoaned the fact that the urban underclasses, in particular, never went to church).  Sex among the underclasses was a chaotic mess; it would be tempting to call this an entirely unstructured economy.  But the fact of the matter is that we just don’t have deep enough ethnographic insight into the habits and expectations of the London underclass to know how they structured sexual relationships.   That drink and poverty generated lots of sexual and domestic abuse is certain, but we don’t know much more than that. 

On the flip side, there was a tendency among Victorian commentators (I just don’t know much about the discourse around these subjects prior to the Victorian period) to romanticize the rural yeoman class and even the tenancy.  (An exception: the wonderful scene in Middlemarch where Mr. Brooke is given an earful by one of his tenants.)  The temptation to view the rural non-gentry as mostly aping the civilized behavior of their “betters” goes along with the general nostalgia for a non-urban England and general horror at what the Industrial Revolution has wrought.  London is bad enough, but Liverpool and Manchester are completely and utterly unspeakable.

If we turn to the 20th century United States, it would seem that the marriage market (outside of the very rarefied world of debutantes and Philip Barry-like “high society”) has lost all the cohesion of Austen’s novels.  There is no place to view what is on offer.  Meeting a suitable mate is happenstance, a function of opportunities afforded by school, workplaces, neighborhoods, or civic associations like churches.  And there is the additional problem of finding someone unspoken for, since dating (and other forms of pairing off) occurs early in life.  Late-comers to the dating game (for lack of a better term) will have to try to separate out the available from the unavailable—a problem that Austen’s world avoids with its clear identification of which women are available.  In short, there is no clear opportunity to survey a range of choices at a particular moment in time.  Sexual selection is much more determined by what swims into view and is available in particular circumstances at any given moment.  There is not much sense of making a choice among multiple options, since there is never an opportunity to view the “field” simultaneously.  The rationality to which Austen’s women—and other characters in Victorian novels—aspire in making their marital choices seems very foreign to how romance unfolds in the 20th century.  The clear-eyed view of what it would mean to be married to this person was probably not very prevalent in Austen’s world either, but it is not even aspired to by mid-20th century.

As for non-marital sex, practices prior to “the pill” were very class determined.  Bohemians and various underclasses (including the racially stigmatized) had lots more extra-marital sex and had very different attitudes toward it than the respectable middle classes.  The same holds for homosexual sex, which was not a big deal by the 1940s in Greenwich Village, but still mostly unknown—and an object of deep abhorrence when known—among the general population.  We could also do a class typography about attitudes toward adultery and pre-marital sex in the years before 1960.

The pill brought a democratization of sex if we can call it that.  Just as women’s entrance into the workplace with college degrees as a result of “women’s liberation” was one cause for the explosion of divorces. (The disappearance of social disapproval of divorce along with the collapse of legal and financial barriers to dissolving a marriage has transformed the meaning and practices of marriage dramatically since 1960.) I guess you could say that a chaotic market became even more chaotic once the sanctions for non-marital sex, the opprobrium attached to divorce, and even the strictures of “compulsory heterosexuality” were eroded.  The very idea that sexual relations had the telos of marriage and children lost its hold on both practice and the imagination.  Lots of options (all of which, of course, had always existed) were now more openly acknowledged—and had lost most of their stigma.

Enter the internet.  And, oddly, we seem to have moved back toward Austen’s world.  Of course, the market is not only offering suitable and available marriage partners.  Some people use the dating apps in that pursuit, but you can also use them to avail yourself of the other options on the spectrum of sexual relations.  Still, you get to survey a number of available partners at the same instant of time; you get to make a choice among this large number (exactly what I think you could not do in 1950, where not only the number of choices was circumscribed, but more crucially the moment of choice did not reveal a large range of available partners.)  There is now, via the internet, quite literally a market in sexual selection.

Various etiquettes, unwritten rules, have not surprisingly evolved to structure this market.  And the dating apps have worked to find different niches in relation to the different goals of their users.  Your expectations are, to a fairly explicit extent, set by which app you are using.  And then the behaviors that follow if you actually meet in the flesh a person originally met “on line” follow from those expectations.

In other words, although this is an informal economy, it is not an unstructured one. On the behavioral level, it would seem the structure comes from cultural scripts.  Everyone hears about love and marriage in popular lore—songs, stories, movies, poetry—from their earliest days.  There is nothing more common than the adolescent experience of wondering “is this really love?” and “am I in love?”  We have the concept and the narratives that accompany it before we have the experience or the emotions—and so wonder if the experience and emotions are the right fit, are the “real thing.”  When it comes to sex itself, the scripts are less overt, shrouded in mystery, although books and movies offer some suggestions.  Still Bob Seger’s “working on mysteries without any clues” in the attempt to develop one’s “night moves” often fits the case.  Haunted by phrases like “good in bed” and myths/hints about orgasms and ecstasy-producing bedroom practices, it is as difficult to avoid being self-conscious in bed as it is to be “natural” in the social intercourse that leads to bed—and/or to romance and love in all its possible variants.  The poets and the pornographers (representing to the two extremes of a very long spectrum) are always there before us.

[A side-note: another temporal variable is when in life the individual is pursuing sexual and/or romantic relations. I read of a study that said alcohol consumption while in college had no predictive value for habits of alcohol use ten years after college. I don’t know if this is actually true, but it is suggestive. Sexual experimentation and promiscuity mean something rather different in one’s twenties as opposed to one’s forties. It does seem that there is a strong through-line heading to monogamy in contemporary culture, but that there are a significant number of non-monogamous (or serially monogamous) years prior to “settling down.” And, of course, there is a significant minority who never settle into monogamy. My point is only that the percentage of non-monogamous actors is higher among 20 year olds than among 40 year olds–and, perhaps more significantly, approval of non-monogamy (or, at least, a willingness to let it pass) is higher if those involved are 25, not 45. We expect experimentation, some form of “wilding,” among the young, but are less tolerant of it later in life. Note, however, how weak social disapproval is when it comes to sexual behavior; it only rarely influences what people do. They are generally willing to bear the cost of their neighbor’s disapproval.]

The varieties of the scripts out there and the practices they underwrite is one reason the human relations encompassed by the sphere of sex and love appears so chaotic.  Everything from date rape and the use of rape drugs to the most tentative movement toward marriage has its models—and inspires some one.  In Austen’s world that chaos (i.e. the uncertainties that plague every encounter that might or does lead to a sexual relationship) is richly represented.  For women especially, since there is no exit from marriage and almost no power within it, making the wrong choice is disastrous.  And the consequences that follow from being seduced outside the frame of marriage (especially if pregnancy follows) is the stuff of thousands of novels before the 20th century—and of plenty of novels after 1900.

My wife tells me that she heard an interview with a “dating coach” this past week on NPR.  So the chaos of multiple available scripts bedevils participants in the sex/love economy.  How to work out a path for oneself that provides the proper (happy) ending?  Interestingly, in another return to an Austen like economy of such matters, the coach reported that discussions on money, of one’s financial position, are now common on the first date.  The Austen imperative to join prudence (finding a man with the financial wherewithal to support a household) with love (true affection; she frowns upon marrying solely for money) appears to be becoming more explicit if the coach is to be believed.  The previously prevailing squeamishness of talking about money could be as passé as squeamishness of talking about sex.

The individual, then, must pick one’s way through a chaos of possible scripts, of possible forms of relating to another that involve gradations of sexual involvement.  A similar anarchy, it seems to me, is revealed when we ask what power(s) enforce the structures that undergird this economy.  As is the case with many unwritten realms, social censure is one source of sanction.  But when it comes to sex, that sanction is noticeably weaker than it was sixty years ago.  Most parents in 1960 strongly objected to two people living together prior to marriage.  Similar (even more intense) outrage attached to homosexual relations, or relations across racial lines, or various forms of polyamory.  The force of such condemnations (where they still exist) has greatly diminished.  Various arrangements and practices that would have been kept secret in the past are now fully “out of the closet.” 

I think we should actually take the idea of “anarchy” seriously here. Where social sanctions/disapproval are weak and the state enforcement absent–or, at best, reluctant, intermittent, and not to be relied upon–pretty much anything goes. And that, historically, has generally been disastrous for women, whose only recourse is to depend on male benevolence (a slender reed indeed). Abuses of women by men are just about impossible to punish–except (again, historically) if the women’s family intervenes. In Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Bennett’s absurd notion that Mr. Bennett will fight Wickham points to this means of recourse, even as Elizabeth bemoans the fact that her family has neither the financial nor social wherewithal to force Wickham to marry Lydia. Only Darcy has the clout to make the marriage happen–and his coming to the rescue is deus ex machina in action.

Even post-1960, not all practices are now openly displayed. For the most part, however, the practices that are kept secret are also subject to legal, state-enforced, sanction.  The “Me-too” movement is just the latest attempt by women to shore up state support in the fight against practices of which women are disproportionately the victims. Campaigns to publicize the prevalence of rape, incest, and domestic violence—and to follow up those publicity campaigns with pressure on the state to punish these abuses—have been a mainstay of second-wave feminism.  Sexual harassment is another item on that list.  Since women are not just almost exclusively the victims of such crimes, but that the state has rarely ever acted to protect women from them, motivates this effort to change what has up to now been the rule (more accurately, the lack of rule.)  Without the state stepping in, it’s pure anarchy—and women are almost always the losers in that case.  Only state intervention might possibly establish a balance of power between the sexes after thousands of years of female powerlessness.

Of course, marriage itself is the traditional site of the state’s involvement in issues of sex and love.  But even as there are calls for greater state enforcement of some standards of appropriate sexual behavior, the state’s hand in marriage has been greatly weakened.  Barriers to divorce have fallen and criminalization of adultery has entirely disappeared.  (Such sanctions for adultery were rarely strong in either the US or England—and, predictably, tended to punish women more harshly than men in the cases where there was some enforcement.)  So it seems fair to say that the marriage economy is becoming increasingly informal, outside the purview of the state, even as reformers work for greater state regulation of sexual practices deemed harmful and non-consensual. 

There is another way–besides the open display of partners enabled by the internet–in which the current sexual economy mirrors that in Jane Austen’s world. The choice of partners is fairly strictly limited to one’s own social class/milieu. This fact goes hand-in-hand with the “big sort.” Americans increasingly only interact (or even live near) people who share their educational background, their financial resources, and, more generally, their tastes. Long ago, Herbert Gans spoke of “taste cultures.” What he did not foresee was actual geographical segregation according to membership in these different cultures. More consequently, he didn’t predict that political opinions and allegiances would increasingly be dictated by “tastes” (or sensibility) as contrasted to economic interest or commitment to various policies/goals. (Mark Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler’s Prius or Pickup? [Mariner Books, 2018] offers a convincing and succinct account of the cultural divides that now predict and shape how one votes and what position one takes on issues like global warming, vaccines etc.)

That the choice of sexual partners has followed the same kinds of segregation is fairly evident. True, there are some ethnic groups whose members are strongly inclined to only marry other members of the group. So that kind of bias in sexual selection is out there. But now bias as to education, profession, and politics have been added to the mix. Jane Austen would certainly be at home with these latter biases, while taking for granted the ethnic/racial bias. The causes for this narrowing of the pool of “acceptable” partners are many, but certainly the increased access by middle-class women to educational and professional attainment is one. Doctors don’t marry nurses any longer. They marry other doctors. Another is the decline of public education. As elites have abandoned public schools–from kindergarten right through to grad school–spaces for cross-class encounters have disappeared. Social segregation will, almost by default, lead to very few marriages that cross class lines (where “class” is a general term to designate the other people one associates with and not a technical term about relative wealth, power, or status). Whether the same fairly rigid segregation holds for non-marital sexual relations is less clear. As with the Victorians, there is not much social pressure attached to whom one has sex with–even as there is considerable social pressure (and expectation) that one will marry the right “kind” of person.

Despite hysterical fears to the contrary, sexual and social intercourse between the sexes is not going to end. The hysteria is usually driven by three things: a)fear of the biological advances–from the pill to various forms of artificial insemination–that disconnect sex from reproduction; b) a sense that women have increased their share of power in the dynamics of sexual exchanges, with this increased power partly due to their increased ability to be financially independent, partly due to the biological advances just noted, and partly due to the massive shifts in attitude that accompanied “women’s liberation; and c) the greatly increased fluidity of sexual/gender identification and the variety of sexual practices (as well as sexual identities) this has brought into view. The sexual economy appears more multifarious than ever. Whether this is an artifact of visibility, or actually the case is hard to know. We can say with certainty that prevailing attitudes and arrangements of the powers that structure this economy are in a state of flux.  Which is why navigating these waters seems particularly difficult at this moment in time, even as one can go on-line to survey the variety of offers the market puts in front of any individual.

On to thinking about economies of fame and power in future posts.

Disparate Economies

In the course of my reading group’s discussion of Pride and Prejudice the other night, I commented that there are always two economies: one of wealth, the other of status.  The rankings that competition for preeminence on those scales produces do not (in many cases) coincide.  This is particularly obvious in Austen’s world, where fortunes made from “trade” do not secure the kind of social status that gentry like the Bennetts enjoy, despite their fairly modest wealth.

But money and status are not entirely disconnected.  Bingley (who eventually marries the eldest Bennett daughter, Jane) is the beneficiary of his father’s success in trade—and is in the process of “laundering” the substantial wealth that he has inherited.  He will marry a daughter from the gentry (basically, people whose money derives from land and who have the financial wherewithal to not have to work) and is looking around to purchase an “estate.”  His family will move from the world of trade to the status of “landed” in one generation.  The novel makes it clear that Darcy’s family made a similar move a generation or two back.  Lady Catherine (Darcy’s obnoxious aunt) is not “old” aristocracy; her title only goes back two generations.

[An important sidenote: the supposed firewall between money gained through “trade” and the “old money” of the landed aristocracy was more fiction than fact. Those safe five percent returning investments on which the gentry lived only partially derived from their English estates, with their rent paying tenants and agricultural products. Their money was also invested–as Austen registers in Mansfield Park–in the plantations worked by slaves to produce sugar, cotton, and tobacco in the Americas. Similarly, of course, the great textile factories of the Industrial Revolution depended on cotton produced by slaves. On top of all that, until just about exactly the time of Austen’s death, there were the incomes and profits generated directly by the slave trade.]

The relative openness of British society, especially in exactly Austen’s lifetime (1775-1817), to such status enhancement is often cited as one reason the British never suffered the kind of revolution that unfolded in France.  The new wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution could buy status as well as all the other goodies money can buy.  The aristocracy was not closed (as it was in France).  The novel’s example is the Lucas family.  The father is knighted for giving a pretty speech when the king comes to town.  And the novel pokes (fairly gentle) fun at the newly minted Sir William’s pretensions to status—especially since his household is dirt poor. 

The Lucas sub-plot indicates (as does Lady Catherine’s efforts to prevent the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy) that snobbery is rife.  Social climbing (the use of money and marriage to launder one’s declassé origins) is always vulnerable to those who will sneer at the pretensions of the newcomers.  The charge of vulgarity always lurks.  Which is why “manners” are so crucial in the novel—and in its assessment of the character of its characters.  Elizabeth may be technically right when she insists to Lady Catherine that she is Darcy’s social equal in every respect.  But the behavior of her mother and of her sisters, of which Elizabeth is deeply ashamed, puts the lie to that courageous assertion.  One has to act one’s status—or the game is lost.  That’s why the real sting in Elizabeth’s refusal of Darcy’s first proposal comes when she tells him his manner has been ungentlemanly.  Just as Elizabeth cannot gainsay what Darcy has to say about her family in that proposal, he cannot deny, upon reflection, that she is right to say he has not acted like a gentleman.

All of this is to say that for Austen, status has substance.  She is not blind to the absurdities of status—both of the naked efforts to attain it and the pufferies practiced by those who think they have it (pufferies, as in Lady Catherine’s and Sir William’s cases, that stem from insecurity about actually possessing the status they nominally possess.  After all, why would Lady Catherine suffer the obsequies of Mr. Collins unless she needed to be constantly assured of her eminence?)

Still, Austen also respects status even as she mocks how people strive for it—and inhabit it once attained.  She believes in the codes of the gentleman, in the codes of what the French call politesse, because they enable social intercourse along lines that she desires.  She is well aware that civility often masks indifference and even outright hostility (as in the case of Bingley’s sisters and their behavior toward Jane and Elizabeth Bennett), but she greatly prefers that hypocrisy (the tribute vice pays to virtue) to the outright vulgarity of Mrs. Bennett.  A world in which hostility and hatred must be veiled is a better world than one of direct (to the mattresses) competition. 

Everything is doubled in Austen.  She sees the utility (to use a vulgar word she would never use) of the “ways” of her world even as she satirizes the deficiencies of those “ways” and is keenly aware of how people use them to serve selfish, even nefarious, ends.  Thus the novel warns us against taking “manners” at face value.  They can be a mask, as they are in the case of Wickham.  The substance of status can be a lie as well.  Judgment of others is the primary—and incredibly difficult—task for everyone in Austen’s novels, but for no one more than her heroines.  To make a mistake in whom one marries is, particularly for women (but also for men as Mr. Bennett’s case shows), an utter disaster.  But it is incredibly difficult to know who another truly is.  Status and manners are only partial clues and can be deceiving.  Austen is very severe on characters she deems “stupid.”  Stupidity, in her novels, it seems to me, is evidenced most directly in either lacking any interest in judging/interpreting the character of others (Mr. Collins is too self-involved in putting forward his own pretensions to ever see another person) or in blindly accepting at face value worldly markers of character (Mrs. Bennett, for whom a man’s fortune is all you need to know.) To take either money or social status as an accurate marker of character, of someone’s true worth, is a grievous mistake.

How does this translate to today’s world?  Not very directly, but it’s not irrelevant either.  The competition for money is more direct today—and there is not much social stigma attached to the source of one’s wealth or to engagement in direct, undisguised, efforts to accumulate money.  It would be tempting to say that money and status are more directly aligned in today’s America than it was in Austen’s England. That is, because gaining money is not stigmatized, to become wealthy is also to achieve status. To some extent that is true.  But it is still complicated.  There is not a one-to-one correspondence.  We still utilize a concept of “vulgarity”—the obverse of which might be captured in terms like “esteem” or “respect.” And we have our own laundering system, primarily in our prestige obsessed system of higher education. The newly rich want to send their children to the Ivies or other prestigious private universities (with maybe three or four public flagships also acceptable) as markers of having “made it.”

The obvious case for the still incomplete alignment of money and status is Donald Trump.  Long before he got involved in politics, Trump was a by-word for vulgarity.  And there is a decent case to be made that he only got involved in politics out of resentment at being laughed at by Barack Obama.  Certainly, resentment against Obama (a “class act” if there ever was one) is a major motivator for Trump.  Another, somewhat different case, would be Brittney Spears.  If the notion of “nouveau riche” or parvenu haunts Trump, the specter of “white trash” hovers over Spears.  And it seems pretty obvious that philanthropy to prestigious cultural institutions—the Ivy league universities, the operas in NYC and San Francisco, art museums and the like—are a contemporary way to launder money, to use it to attain status, entrance into the right social circles.

I am always befuddled when I read all those “social” novels—by Thackeray, Proust, Edith Wharton among others—where social climbing is the dominant motive driving the characters’ actions.  In the worlds I inhabit, such ambitions seem utterly absent.  In contemporary America, where is “society” of that sort even to be found? If you wanted to “climb,” where would you go and what would you do?  Who (like Proust’s Verdurins and Guermantes) are today’s social arbiters?  Outside of NYC and San Francisco, are there really social hierarchies, exclusive events/salons/balls that outsiders fervently dream of getting access to—and people who do anything and everything to gain that access?  It just doesn’t seem the way life in present day USA is organized.  I have no doubt that some philanthropy is driven by the desire to be associated with other donors whom one wants to hang with, but I have also known and worked with other philanthropists to whom attaining some increase in social status is of no interest to them.

So I am left with the puzzle of how the economies of wealth and status work today.  What are the terms of competition for these goods?  I won’t talk about competition for wealth here today, although that’s an interesting topic to which I would like to return.  Partly because I think some roads to wealth today rely on the kinds of media that have also greatly altered the forms status now takes and the ways to gain it.  (What I have in mind is the competition for venture capital—and the ways in which style over substance can win the day as in the cases of WeWork, FX, and Thanatos.) 

Anyway, here’s my suspicion. The economy of status has been altered drastically by the nature of publicity.  Let’s assume that the desire for status is a desire to be seen, to be known, and to be esteemed.  One wants to be recognized as a member in good standing of a certain social set.  My skepticism about the kinds of social climbing found in the classic novels as existing today stems from the difficulty of identifying social sets in today’s world.  Where is this “society” that you are trying to attain status in? 

One answer to that question is the “set” established by your profession.  An artist strives for respect and standing in the “art world”; a university professor wants standing in her “field”; and business people want esteem among their peers.  There are, in other words, professional hierarchies—and these hierarchies are not primarily tracked by money.  As a business person once told me, the money’s not primary, but it is a way of keeping score.  So money is not unrelated to the rankings in the hierarchy, but non-monetary achievements are (ideally) the “real” determinant of status.  The Beatles and Bruce Springsteen have a standing superior to Neil Diamond irrespective of the fortunes accumulated by each. We don’t reference how much money they each have when ranking them.

Here, however, is where I think the distortions of the media come into play.  In the classic social novels, no one is pursuing fame or celebrity.  Modern media mean that you can play for standing in society as a whole, not in some particular subset.  Everyone knows who Donald Trump is (even long before he ran for president) just as everyone knows who Michael Jackson is.  Competition for standing in that amorphous, but all-encompassing, world is competition for attention.  It has become a cliché, but still true, that we now live in an attention economy.  What is disturbing to old-liners like me is that attention seems substance-free.  No such thing as bad publicity.  Celebrity is being famous for being famous.  The celebrity doesn’t have to bring any goods to market (think of Elizabeth Holmes); she just has to be good at attracting eyes—and in Holmes’ case (as in many others) the money will follow the eyes.

How long can you get away with this?  Crypto is indicating you can get away with it for quite some time.  On the other hand, there are still some (even if feeble) quality controls.  Bruce Springsteen, for the most part, manages to sidestep the attention economy.  He has never descended into tabloid hell the way Brittney Spears has—and the almost universal respect he has garnered remains tied to his achievements, not to his being a celebrity.  Or think of Dolly Parton as contrasted to Tammy Wynette (despite some recent attempts to recalibrate our understanding of Tammy.)  Dolly has slowly but surely moved from being a cartoonish character to a revered one.  That’s partly because of her ability to make fun of her white trash look (“it takes a lot of money to look this cheap”), and her avoiding the tabloid fodder of Wynette’s drug problems and multiple divorces, along with a rise in cultural status of country music over the past forty years.

Taylor Swift is an interesting case along these lines.  There’s a substantial body of work there (even if this old fogey can’t judge the quality of it), but her fame has now thrown her into the media frenzy where her actual music is mostly irrelevant.  Will she be able to avoid descending into tabloid hell?  Will she continue to produce her music?  When you think of it, it is a miracle that the Beatles, once Beatlemania hit, actually continued to develop musically and produced work in 1967 that was superior to the work that gained them fame in 1964.  It’s only worse now in terms of how the attention world will eat its young.  Maybe Taylor Swift will manage not to get swallowed up on the basis of this fame coming to her (unlike the Beatles) relatively late.  She was known before of course, but not “known” like this—and let’s hope the ballast of being 33, not 17 like Brittney Spears, sees her through.

In sum, “status” seems to have exploded in today’s world, having to a large extent collapsed into something better described as “fame” or “celebrity.”  Yet, there are still circumscribed social sets in which people strive for status, in which there are fairly well defined markers for garnering respect.  But there’s now another game in town, one where a person becomes famous not relative to a defined set, but for society in general.  Donald Trump, we might justly say, failed to garner any respect in the closed sets of NYC society or the business world (his skills as a businessman are laughable, non-existent; he fooled no one in that world).  But he was a winner in the other (larger?) game of becoming known, if not quite respected, in society at large.  And you can cash in that kind of success, not just in dollars but in other perks as well.

You can’t have that larger game without the media through which one’s image is offered to millions.  We have multiple media of that type now (not just the newspapers of the 19th century) and the frenzied effort to garner attention feels like the defining characteristic of our era.  That so much of that effort is also light on content (to put it charitably) is deeply disturbing to old fogeys like myself.

I am generally skeptical of claims that our times are radically different than times past—and hate positions that rely on claiming our times are much worse than times past.  So I want to register a caveat at the end of this post—and a promissory note.  The desire for fame as contrasted to status is not a new phenomenon, so I need to think about how fame was understood and pursued prior to the media tools currently deployed in seeking it.  And as long as I am trying to track “economies,” there are at least two other competitive spheres that should be considered:  struggles for power and the competition for sexual success (this last returning us to an Austen focused interest in the marriage market, but influenced now by the Darwinian concept of sexual selection.)  But enough for today.

Arguing with the Darwinians

In the consciousness literature, Darwin is king.  Whatever consciousness is (and there is plenty of disagreement about that), every one in the conversation accepts that consciousness must be a product of a Darwinian process of evolution.  There are various competing versions of an evolutionary narrative for the arrival of consciousness on the scene.

In its most extreme versions, panpsychism tries to avoid the sticky problem of identifying the “before” from the “after” moment.  The problem for any Darwinian account: once consciousness did not exist, but at a certain point in time it emerged, it arrived.  By saying something (just what is unclear) fundamental to consciousness was always already there, the panpsychist tries to sidestep the before/after conundrum; but even the panpsychist has to have a story about how the originating germ of consciousness develops into the full-blown consciousness of humans, higher primates, other mammals, and other creatures.  No one is claiming mollusks have a consciousness as fully elaborated as that in chimpanzees. Or that chimpanzees were there at the origins. There still needs to be a story about the elaboration of consciousness from its primitive beginnings into the sophisticated forms displayed in life forms that arrive on the scene at a much later date.

There are two things it would seem any plausible Darwinian account must provide.  First, it must provide a plausible bio-chemical account of a) how variants are produced for a process of selection to choose among, and b) the physiological/chemical processes that create consciousness itself.  Genetics (most directly random genetic mutations) is assumed to provide most of what is needed to answer the variant question.  As for b, a bio-chemical explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness, that such an explanation must exist is generally assumed in the literature, although everyone (with a few exceptions, as always) agrees that we are still a long way away from possessing anything like a complete and satisfactory bio-chemical understanding of consciousness.

I am going to leave these bio-chemical questions aside in this discussion—as do Veit and Humphrey in their books.  [Nicholas Humphrey, Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2023) and Walter Veit, A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness (Routledge, 2023).]  Instead, I want to focus my attention on the second requirement of any Darwinian account.

Namely, such an account must identify the “advantage(s)” that consciousness would provide to an organism.  Only if there are such advantages would consciousness be “selected” for.  Since (of course) we don’t get to see the competition between creatures possessing different types and/or degrees of consciousness in real time, we must (as both Veit and Humphrey explicitly state in their books) “reverse engineer” the account of how one possible variant is “selected” over another.  Those more skeptical of Darwinian explanations call “reverse engineering” “just-so stories.”  Lacking direct evidence, a narrative is produced that assumes the mechanism of natural selection. 

Essential to such accounts is functionalism.  The writer must identify what consciousness does, what functions it performs, and from that basis argue for those functions as providing advantages in a struggle for existence understood in Darwinian terms.  Veit is what might be called a Darwinian fundamentalist.  He flatly states “the goal of biological systems is ultimately reproduction” (54); and identifies “the real purpose of the organism, which is to maximize its representation in future populations” (55).  Armed with this fundamental and overriding purpose, he can then assess how consciousness would provide a leg up in the effort to “maximize” an organism’s chances for reproductive success.  That such an account of “purpose” seems awfully reductive in the face of the wide variety of behavior exhibited by animals and humans does not seem to bother him a bit.

More interesting is Veit’s holistic understanding of the dynamic nature of the organism.  He calls his approach “teleonomic”: “organisms are goal-directed systems,” that “evolve to value states and behaviors that increase their own fitness and avoid those that are detrimental to their health” (9).  This approach falls in with other recent accounts that rehabilitate an Aristotelean notion of teleological or final causes.  The organism is directed toward something—and that something acts as one cause in the action of natural selection.  As Veit strongly puts it: “the external factors that matter to the evolutionary trajectory of the organism are themselves causally dependent on the organism” (8).  In other words, the organism is not a merely passive recipient of what external environmental and genetic factors produce.  The organism’s active pursuit of reproductive advantage guides its own selection process; the organism evaluates what the larger ecological scene makes available and works to exploit the elements in that scene that will serve its purpose(s). 

Of course, this approach still must posit an overriding purpose present (innate to) all organisms: the drive for reproductive success.  So one complaint I have about such Darwinian theorizing is that natural selection does not get off the ground unless there are randomly produced variants.  If we only have clones, then there is no range of actual variants for selection to choose among.  Yet the theory allows for no variance in the fundamental purpose of organisms.  Everything walks in lock step to the Darwinian command to maximize reproductive success.  And that leads to the absurdities of the endless worries about altruism, music, laughter, and play.  More and more implausible stories must be told about all of these behaviors to make them serve the overriding Darwinian purpose.  Reductionism doesn’t simply haunt Darwinian thought; it appears as absolutely central to such thinking.

Veit cheerfully accepts the hard-core utilitarianism of his approach.  “It is thus not unreasonable to treat them [organisms] as economic agents maximizing their utility (i.e. fitness).  Each individual within a species is fundamentally faced with a resource allocation problem. . . . This is the economy of nature” (19).  Casually swept aside are all the frivolous and downright counter-productive behaviors on view every day in the natural world.  The failure of humans and other animals to be reasonable resource maximizers must be ignored or subjected to torturous (and implausible) explanations.  Surely the simplest approach here would be to concede that the struggle for life and reproductive success doesn’t consume all of the organism’s time and energy—and the surplus is devoted to activities that don’t further Darwinian goals.  But very few of the Darwinian advocates take this easy way out.  Of course, it has been a commonplace that it is rich societies (Renaissance Florence, Elizabethan England etc.) that witness a flourishing of the arts.  The problem is that, in fact, we don’t know of any societies without music and dance. Variety, activities that are hard to account for by a strict Darwinian logic, appear baked in from the beginning.

I am hardly conversant with the vast literature about Darwinian evolution.  But I do know that whole books get written about the “problem” of altruism.  Whereas, as far as I know, no one takes up what seems to me the much more glaring problem of war.  After all, from the standpoint of reproductive success, war (which also seems endemic to all human societies of which we have any record) is a real puzzler.  Here’s an activity that places in danger precisely the (male) members of society who are in their prime years for passing on their genes.  And it would take a lot of ignoring of facts on the ground to claim that wars are primarily about securing resources necessary to life.  Despite the intuitive appeal of the Marxist notion that economics drives everything, wars are not only more often driven by issues of pique, status, and out-group hostility than by the scarcity of resources, but there is also the fact that wars destroy resources rather than augment them.  Wars are costly—more like potlatches dedicated to the wholesale destruction of goods and lives than a reasonable way to secure resources. (A side note: Engels realized that Marx and Darwin are at one in their appeals to economic reasoning and in identifying the pursuit of “interests” as the primary motive of “life.”)  In short, Darwinian reductionism (as well as its Marxist counterpart) offers little in the way of a plausible explanation for this all too frequent form of human behavior.

I want to end by moving on to more technical concerns about evolutionary accounts.  I will quote here from Humphrey’s book. “Since we are discussing evolution, we can assume three guiding principles.  First, there must have been a continuous sequence of stages with no unaccountable gaps.  Second, every stage must have been viable, at the time, on its own terms.  Third, the transition from one stage to the next must always have been an upgrade, adding to the chances of biological survival” (101).

I have trouble with both assumptions one and three. This may come down to semantics, to what exactly is meant by a “new stage.”  But let me state my worries.

On number one, I don’t see how unexpected and random genetic mutations (which are the engine of change, of movement from one stage to the next) are “continuous.”  It’s the discontinuity of mutations that seems much more obvious.  As I say, Humphrey might very well reply that I am misunderstanding the sense in which he is using “continuous.”  And, of course, various evolutionary theorists (most famously Stephen Jay Gould) talk of “punctuated equilibrium” to describe the sudden transformations that a genetic mutation can generate.  Still, Humphrey seems to think there will be an orderly “sequence” from one evolutionary stage to the next.  And that assumption will guide his “reverse engineering” account of the emergence of consciousness.  I think this confidence in an orderly sequence is misplaced—and thus makes the strategy of reverse engineering much more problematic.  It is harder to tell a story that, as Humphrey understands, has “gaps” that are not easily bridged.

The third assumption we might call the “things get better” thesis.  Each stage is an improvement over the last in terms of enhancing “chances for biological survival.”  But that way of stating things dismisses variants.  I had thought one goal of Darwinian theory is to explain diversity.  Variants are produced in the course of reproduction—and some of the variants (hardly all of them, but not just only one of them) prove viable (to use Humphrey’s term).  They are viable either because they exploit different ecological niches to secure the necessary resources to sustain life or because they are “good enough” to sustain life even as they differ from other variants.  Another way to say this: various traits get produced along the evolutionary track that do not undermine the ability to sustain life drastically enough to cause extinction of the organism carrying that trait.  A fairly obvious example is myopia.  Hardly a great asset in the “struggle” to survive, but apparently not enough of a deficit to have been discarded along the evolutionary pathway that leads to today’s humans.  In short, variants get produced all the time that are not “upgrades.”  They are simply not strong enough “downgrades” to prove fatal. 

By a similar logic, just as not all features of the organism necessarily make fully positive contributions to the effort to survive, not all features of the organism need be devoted to that effort.  The issue, once more, is surplus.  Just as the arts (in one reading) can seem irrelevant to the effort to sustain life, so various features of complex organisms may not be contributors to that effort.  A hard core Darwinian can consider them “free riders”—and that way of addressing the issue is fairly common in the literature.  Knowing how to read is not strictly necessary to survival—but humans get that extra ability because it develops from cognitive abilities that are essential to survival.  The problem becomes how do we identify (except by some seat of the pants appeals to what is necessary as opposed to what is “extra”) the abilities required by survival and those that free ride upon it.  Going back to war: perhaps we would want to argue that just like reading is a beneficial free rider, war is a disadvantageous one.  War, in other words, is an offshoot of some fundamentally necessary component of human physiology/psychology and thus can’t be jettisoned as evolution moves us toward “stages” where our chances our survival are enhanced. Even though war itself decreases chances of reproductive success.

I am hardly claiming that Darwinian evolution is a fundamentally mistaken theory.  But I am saying that the ham-handed, reductionist accounts of evolution overlook a number of puzzles that should give prevailing mono-causal biases some pause.  Furthermore, these puzzles should at least disturb any blithe confidence in “reverse engineering” stories.  Introducing a wider array of possible causes into such accounts, along with recognizing the random and disruptive effects of genetic mutations, would certainly complicate matters greatly.  But it also might yield more plausible accounts of how an evolutionary history got us the diversity and complexity of the animal and human worlds we can observe in the wide variety of behavior displayed in the present. 

Addendum (added January 19, 2024). I have just come across this relevant statement by Daniel Dennett on the error of thinking that evolution always produces enhancements of chances for biological success (quoted from Just Deserts: Debating Free Will, Polity 2021, p. 162):

“It is a fundamental mistake in evolutionary thinking to suppose that whatever ways (ideas, practices, concepts, policies) survived this process must have proven fitness-enhancing for the human species, the lineage, or even the individuals (or groups of individuals) who adopted them. Some, even many, of the established ways (of thinking, of acting) may have been cultural parasites, in effect, exploiting weaknesses in the psychology of their hosts.”