Category: social mores and economies

Disparate Economies 4: Power

Warning: this post is even more essayistic than most. A lot of speculation as I drunkenly weave through a variety of topics and musings.

The previous posts on disparate economies have tried to consider how economies of status, love/sex, and fame are structured.  What is the “good” or “goods” that such markets make available, and what are the terms under which those goods are acquired, competed for, and exchanged.  Finally, what power enforces the structures and the norms that keep a market from being an anarchic free-for-all.  Markets (or specific economies among the multiple economies that exist—hence my overall heading “disparate economies”) are institutions, by which I mean they a) have discernible organizational shape, along with legitimated and non-legitimated practices by human agents within them; b) are not the product of any individual actor or even a small cadre of actors but are socially produced over a fairly long span of time; and c) change only through collective action (sometimes explicit as in the case of new laws, but much more often implicitly as practices and norms shift almost imperceptibly through the repetitions of use.)  Institutions exist on a different scale than individual actors—or even collective actors.  A sports team exists within the larger container of the institution that is the sport itself, just as a business corporation exists within the market in which it strives to compete.

It is a well recognized fact that power is among the goods that human compete for.  In one sense, this fact is very odd.  Here is one of Hobbes’ many reflections on power:

The signs by which we know our own power are those actions which proceed from the same; and the signs by which other men know it, are such actions, gesture, countenance and speech, as usually such powers produce: and the acknowledgment of power is called Honour; and to honour a man (inwardly in the mind) is to conceive or acknowledge, that that man hath the odds or excess of power above him that contendeth or compareth himself . . . and according to the signs of honour and dishonour, so we estimate and make the value or Worth of a man. (1969 [1640], 34–35) The Elements of Law: Natural and Politic. Ed. Ferdinand Tönnies. London: Frank Cass and Co.

Hobbes, sensibly it would seem, focuses on what power can “produce.”  For him, power is a means not an end.  Power is capacity.  We know someone is powerful when he is able to produce the ends toward which he aims.  This is power to, the possession of the resources and capabilities required for successful action.  Such power, Hobbes goes on to say, also produces, as a by-product, “honor.”  The powerful man is esteemed by others; in fact, Hobbes states, power is the ultimate measure by which we determine a person’s “value or worth.”  Since, presumably, we want others to esteem us and to think of us as worth something, as having value, it makes sense that we would seek power not only because it yields the satisfaction of accomplishing our aims, but also because it gains us the respect of our peers.

Still, power is instrumental here; it is valuable for what it enables one to get.  There is no sense of power as an end-in-itself.  In that respect, power is like money.  Human perversity is such that something (money or power) which has no intrinsic value of its own, but is only a means toward something else that is of intrinsic value, nonetheless becomes the object of one’s desires.  Power, like money, is stored capacity—and, like money, one can devote oneself to increasing one’s store.  Yes, spending power, like spending money, has its own pleasures, but there is an independent urge, an independent compulsion, to increase one’s holdings.  And that urge can become a dominant, even over-riding, compulsion.

Of course, money and power can be converted into one another. Still, the insanities of current-day American plutocracy illustrate that the conversion is not easy or straight-forward.  Think of the Koch brothers (or any other number of megalomaniac billionaires).  The Kochs think their money should allow them to dictate public policy.  Why, as Gary Will asked many years ago, are these rich people so angry?  Why are they so convinced that their country is in terribly bad shape—when they have done and are doing extremely well?  They don’t lack money, but they believe their will is being thwarted. Their money has been able to buy them power—but not the kind of absolute power they aspire to.  They meet obstacles at every turn, obstacles they can only partially overcome.  And from all appearances, it seems to drive them crazy.  They want to be able to dictate to the nation in the same way they can dictate to their employees.  The thrill of being able to say “you’re fired.” Donald Trump on The Apprentice. Apparently, just the thrill of watching some one else exercise that absolute power is a turn-on for lots of people.

Which reminds us that power is not only capacity, power to, but also domination, power over.  Returning to the issue of “an economy,” in this matter of power, the competition is over the resources necessary to possess power.  On the one hand, power to depends on assembling enough resources (time, money, health, opportunity, freedom) to set one’s own goals and accomplish them.  On the other hand, among the resources one can require, especially for complex enterprises, is the cooperation of others.  One person alone cannot accomplish many of the things humans find worth aiming for.  How to ensure the contributions of others to one’s projects?  Being the person who controls the flow of resources to those people is one solution.  Help me—or you won’t be given the necessities for pursuing your own projects.  Hegel famously reduces this dynamic to its most fundamental terms.  Your project is to live—and unless you do my bidding, you will not be given the means to live.  The calculus of power over, of mastery over another human being, is based on life being valued—and thus serving as the basic unit of exchange—in struggles for mastery.

I have in my previous posts on these different economies attempted to specify the norms (or rules in more formal economies) that structure competition and exchange in each case.  And I have tried to indicate the power(s) that enforce those norms/rules.  Thus in the sex/love market there is an ideal of reciprocity; the partners to an exchange freely and willingly give to each other.  Where that norm is violated (most frequently in male coercion of women) family and/or the state will, in some cases, intervene.  The deck is stacked against women because family and state intervention is imperfect and intermittent.  But there are still some mechanisms of enforcement, even if they are not terribly effective, just as there are recognized ideal norms even if they are frequently violated.  Similarly, the billionaire may have gained his wealth through shady means, but he has still operated in a structured market where violation of the rules can lead to prison (even if it seldom does).  Outright theft, just like rape in the sex/love market, is generally deemed a crime.

How to translate these considerations over into the competition for power? It would seem that slavery is the equivalent of rape and theft—something now universally condemned as beyond the pale.  But it seems significant to me that the condemnation of slavery is not even 200 years old—while slavery as a practice persists.  Of course, rape and theft persist as well.  And I guess we could say that minimum wage laws and various labor protecting regulations/statutes also aim at limiting the kinds of resource withholding that allows one to gain power over another.  So there is some attempt to avoid a Hobbesian war of all against all, with no holds barred.  Still, within any economy that enables—and mostly allows—large inequalities, the ability of some to leverage those avenues to inequality into power over others will go mostly unchecked. 

Where there is no structure and no norms, the result appears to be endless violence.  From Plato on, the insecurity of tyrants has been often noted.  Power might be accumulated as a means to warding off the threat that others will gain the upper hand.  In this free-for-all, no one is to be trusted.  Hence the endless civil wars in ancient Rome and late medieval England (as documented in Shakespeare’s plays among other places), along with the murders of one’s political rivals—and erstwhile allies.  From Stalin’s murderous paranoia to Mafia killings, we have ample evidence that struggles for power/dominance are very, very hard to bring to closure.  Competition simply breeds more competition—and the establishment of some kind of modus vivendi among the contenders that allows them to live is elusive.  Power does seem, at least to the most extreme competitors in this contest, a zero sum game.  If my rival has any power at all, he is a threat. 

In his life of Mark Antony, Plutarch has this to say of Julius Caesar:  “The real motive which drove him to make war upon mankind, just as it had urged Alexander and Cyrus before him, was an insatiable love of power and an insane desire to be the first and greatest man in the world” (Makers of Rome, Penguin Classics, 1965: p. 277.)  There’s a reason we think of men like Caesar—or like some of today’s billionaires—as megalomaniacs.  They harbor an “insane desire” for preeminence over all other humans. If power equals preeminence, then, in their case, it is an end-in-itself.  They desire that all bow before them—which is what power over entails.  There is still the suspicion, however, that power is the means to the “honor” of being deemed “the first and greatest man in the world.”  And there is certainly no doubt in Plutarch’s mind, as there was no doubt in Hegel’s, that killing others is a requirement for gaining such power.  Only a man who “makes war upon mankind” can ascend to that kind of preeminence.

For Nietzsche, of course, the desire for power is primary.  But even in his case, it’s not clear if power is an end or merely a means.  What is insufferable to Nietzsche is submission.  Life is a struggle among beings who each strive to make others submit to them.  It would seem that “autonomy” is the ultimate good in Nietzsche, the ability to be complete master over one’s own fate.  That’s what power means: having utter control over one’s self.  Except . . .  everything is always contradictory in Nietzsche.  At times he doesn’t even believe there is a self to gain mastery over.  And there is his insistence that one must submit completely to powers external to the self; amor fati is the difficult attitude one should strive to cultivate.  We are, he seems to say, ultimately powerless in the face of larger, nonhuman forces, that dwarf us. In short, I don’t think Nietzsche is very helpful in thinking about power.  His descriptions of it and of the things that threaten it are just too contradictory.

Machiavelli is, I think, a better guide.  His work returns us to the issue of security.  When I teach Machiavelli, I always have some students who say he is absolutely right: it’s a dog eat dog world.  Arm yourself against the inevitable aggression of the other or you will be easily and ignominously defeated.  I think this is a very prevalent belief system out there in the world—usually attached to a certain brand of right wing politics.  To ventriloquize this position: It is naïve to expect cooperation or good will from others, especially from others not part of your tribe.  They are out to get you—and you must arm yourself for self-protection (if nothing else).  Your good intentions or behavior is worth nothing because there are bad actors out there.  It is inevitable that you will have to fight to defend what is yours against these predators.  

This right wing attitude often goes hand-in-hand with a deeply felt acknowledgement that war is hell, the most horrible thing known.  But it’s sentimental and weak to think that war can be avoided.  It is necessary—and the clear-eyed, manly thing is to face that necessity squarely.  Trying to sidestep that necessity, to come to accommodations that avoid it (appeasement!) are just liberal self-delusions, the liberal inability to believe in the existence of evil.  Power in this case is the only surety in an insecure world—and even power will still get involved in the tragedy of war, where the costs will be borne by one’s own side as well as by the evil persons one is trying to subdue.  Power cannot fully insulate you from harm. (I think John McCain embodied this view–along with the notions of warrior honor that often accompany it.)

It is a testament to the human desire (need? compulsion?) to structure our economies, our competitions, that there are also “rules” of war.  On the extreme right wing, there is utter contempt for that effort.  There are no rules for a knife fight, as we learn in Butch Cassidy.  It’s silly to attempt to establish rules of war—and crazy to abide by them since it only hands an advantage to your adversary. And certainly it is odd, on the face of things, to try to establish what counts as legitimate killing as contrasted to illegitimate killing when the enterprise is to kill so many people that your adversary can no longer fight against you, no longer having the human resources required to continue the fight. 

I don’t know what to think about this.  Except to say that the specter of completely unstructured competitions scares humans enough that they will attempt to establish rules of engagement even as they are involved in a struggle to the death.  But I guess this fact also makes clear how indispensable, how built in as a fundamental psychological/social fact, morality has become for humans.  On very tricky and speculative grounds here.  But it seems to me that any effort to distinguish between murder and non-murder means that some kind of system of morality is in play.  Murder will be punished, whereas non-murder will be deemed acceptable.  The most basic case, of course, is that soldiers are not deemed guilty of murder.  The killing they do falls into a different category.  What I am saying is that once you take the same basic action—killing someone—and begin to sort it into different categories, you have a moral system.  The rules of war offer one instance of the proliferation of such categories as moral systems get refined; differentiations between degrees of murder, manslaughter, self-defense and the like offer another example of such refinements.  My suspicion (although I don’t have all the evidence that would be required to justify the universal claim I am about to make) is that every society makes some distinction between murder (unsanctioned and punished) and non-murder (cases where killing is seen as justified and, then, non-punishable.)  At its most rudimentary, I suspect that distinction follows in-group and out-of-group lines.  That is, killing outsiders, especially in states of war, is not murder, whereas killing insiders often is.  The idea of a distinction between combatants and non-combatants comes along much later.

Similarly, worrying about “just” versus “unjust” wars also comes much later.  Morality is no slouch when it comes to generating endless complications.

I may seem to have wandered far from the issue of an economy in which the good that is competed for is power.  But not really.  War is the inevitable end game of struggles for power if Hegel is right to say that life is the ultimate stake in the effort to gain mastery over others.  If the economy of power is utterly anarchic, is not structured by any rules, then conquest is its only possible conclusion.  It is the ultimate zero-sum game.  The introduction of rules is an attempt to avoid that harsh zero-sum logic.  Putin out to conquer the Ukraine and Netanyahu out to destroy Hamas are zero-sum logics in action.  As is the Greek practice of killing all the male inhabitants of a conquered city while taking the women off into slavery.  The rules—like negotiated peace deals—try to leave both parties to the conflict some life, to avoid its being a fight to the total destruction of one party. 

The alternative (dare I say “liberal”) model is the attempt to distribute power (understood as the capacity to do things that one has chosen for oneself as worth doing) widely.  This is not just an ideology of individual liberty, of equal worth and its right to self-determination free from the domination of others.  It is also about checks and balances, on the theory that power is only checked by other powers—and that all outsized accumulations of power lead to various abuses.  Various mechanisms (not the least of which is a constitution, but also some version of a “separation of powers”) are put in place to prevent power being gathered into one or into a small number of hands.  The problem, of course, in current day America is that there are not parallel mechanisms to prevent the accumulation of wealth into a few hands—and there are no safeguards against using that wealth to gain power in other domains, including the political one.  That’s why we live in a plutocracy.  Our safeguards against accumulations of power are not capable of effectively counteracting the kinds of accumulation that are taking place in real time.

Recently, on the Crooked Timber blog, Kevin Munger offers this nugget (it appears to be a quote from somewhere, not Munger’s own formulation.  But he does not offer a source for it.)

“There is a great gap between the overthrow of authority and the creation of a substitute. That gap is called liberalism: a period of drift and doubt. We are in it today.”

On this pessimistic reading, power, like nature, abhors a vacuum.  Any situation in which authority/power is dispersed (as it is in the ideal liberal polity) will be experienced as unstable, unsettling, and chaotic.  The desire for order will triumph over the liberties and capacities for self-determination that the “overthrow of authority” enables.  Authoritarianism, the concentration (centralization) of power into a few hands, will rise again. Liberalism is always only a temporary stop-gap between authoritarian regimes. Humans, in this pessimistic scenario, simply prefer the certainties of domination to the fluidity (“drifts and doubts”) generated by less hierarchical social orders.  Just keep your head down and let those insane for power fight it out among themselves, hoping they will mostly leave you alone and let you focus on the struggles of your not-very-capaciously resourced life. 

Unfair as a characterization of a certain form of political quietism that skews rightward?  I don’t know.  But many people are content to not strive terribly hard for riches, power, or fame—and think their moderation of desire is the only sensible way to live.  They just want to be left in peace to make of life what they can with the extremely modest resources available to them.  Here we see yet another great divide in current-day American politics.  (It is hardly the only divide and not, I think, among even the three most important divides between left and right in our time.  But it still exists.) Namely, the idea that it is authoritarian government that will give them the peace they desire, get government off their backs, and curb the chaos of social mores that they feel threatens their children.  Liberal permissiveness, along with the liberal coddling of the unworthy, is the real danger to the country and to their “values”—and a healthy dose of authority is just the remedy we need.

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.