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 19^th 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.