Status (part 3)

elephant hunting & egalitarian opulence

Hello! This is an unplanned third installment to (what is now) a little series on status. Here’s the first, and the second:

X. Honest deception

Could art’s deceptive honesty spring directly from the mirror nature of our minds? Our evolutionary tendency to self-deceive is the titular elephant of Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson’s The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.

Simler and Hanson’s key insight sits on the back of a few familiar ones. They cite Veblen; they cite

Paul Bloom

; they cite Mlodinow (whose Subliminal I really should have included in The Portrait of a Mirror’s “Anxieties of Influence”). More coincidentally, they cite “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” the Keynes essay grounding Abigail’s talk in The Guest Lecture. And not coincidentally at all: their “parable of the redwoods” illustrates the exact same type of inefficient positional arms race as Robert H. Frank’s big racks.

But where Frank’s focus is on how we humans fail to account for positional status in designing our incentives and institutions, Simler and Hanson also tell us why. Our big racks are our brains—“This is what’s known in the literature as the social brain hypothesis, or sometimes the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis. It’s the idea that our ancestors got smart primarily in order to compete against each other”—and protecting ourselves from the awareness of our own machinations is part of the package. The elephant is not a bug, but a feature. Self-deception is a selected trait:

Our minds are built to sabotage information in order to come out ahead in social games. When big parts of our minds are unaware of how we try to violate social norms, it’s more difficult for others to detect and prosecute those violations. This also makes it harder for us to calculate optimal behaviors, but overall, the trade-off is worth it.

Of all the things we might be self-deceived about, the most important are our own motives. [. . .]

“We deceive ourselves,” as Robert Trivers says, “the better to deceive others’—in particular, to make it harder for others to catch and prosecute us for behaving badly.

Together, these instincts and predispositions make up the elephant in the brain. They’re the facts about ourselves, our behaviors, and our minds that we’re uncomfortable acknowledging and confronting directly. It’s not that we’re entirely or irredeemably selfish and self-deceived—just that we’re often rewarded for acting on selfish impulses, but less so for acknowledging them, and that our brains respond predictably to those incentives.

The second half of the book relentlessly exposes our buried aims across many of the same spheres Alain de Botton plumbs for relief in Status Anxiety—religion, politics, etc.

These examples often boil down to shielding ourselves from our individual benefits in favor of more collective, pro-social rationales for our decisions. The chapter on charity, for instance, spells out out our underlying personal incentives for generosity like visibility and peer pressure, and had me remembering my visceral undergraduate disdain for “Alternative Spring Break”—a program wherein students would go “help” an underprivileged community in some otherwise appealing tropical locale for a week and then list on their résumé forever.

But no surprise, the chapter that interested me most was the one on art.

XI. All art is quite useless

The “fitness-display theory” of art Simler and Hanson advance supports the assertion of Oscar Wilde from which this newsletter gets its name by way of Veblenite conspicuous waste:

WHY ART IS IMPRACTICAL

The fitness-display theory helps us understand why art needs to be impractical in order to succeed as “art”

Consider a well-made kitchen knife: sturdy, solid, and sharp. As many commentators have pointed out, there’s something delightful, even beautiful, about an object perfectly suited to its purpose. And yet, however exquisite the knife’s craftsmanship, however pleasing it is to the senses, it doesn’t qualify as “art” unless it has decorative, non-functional elements.

The fitness-display theory explains why. Art originally evolved to help us advertise our survival surplus and, from the consumer’s perspective, to gauge the survival surplus of others. By distilling time and effort into something non-functional, an artist effectively says, “I’m so confident in my survival that I can afford to waste time and energy.”

The waste is important. It’s only by doing something that serves no concrete survival function that artists are able to advertise their survival surplus.

Simler and Hanson argue that “human artists don’t need to be conscious of” their desire to show off—but I’m not so sure this is true, at least when it comes to novelists. Painters and sculptors might create as blithely as bowerbirds, but probing our egoically unflattering motives is basically the literary novelist’s remit (“1. Success generally rests on disarming the very cognitive defense mechanisms designed to protect one’s fragile psyche”). As Girard says, “The great novelists reveal the imitative nature of desire”—but also any number of other psychosocial phenomena, the “elephant in the brain” itself.

Simler and Hanson call my “cognitive defense mechanisms” the brain’s “Press Secretary” (love it; so cute) and self-awarely articulate their similar desire to thwart it:

For those of us who want to understand what’s really going on in our minds, the Press Secretary module poses a problem. It acts as a gatekeeper, an information broker, helping the rest of the brain (the “administration”) conceal its secrets by presenting the most positive, defensible face to the outside world. We’d like to peer inside the mind—to understand what the administration is up to—but the Press Secretary controls so much of the information flow, and it’s a notorious spin doctor.

It’s a fun little paradox: Simler and Hanson and Flaubert and Proust and I and perhaps you, too, are all trying to show off precisely by overriding the self-deceptive apparatus that helps us to show off.

Maybe this is why “3. When you write about writing, the bar is higher.” The display has to be extra-impressive to justify its self-reflexive waste!

XII. All things are too small

Which brings me to

becca rothfeld

’s magnificent debut All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, which I emphatically did not expect to begin with John Rawls. Silly me; of course it does. Rawlsian egalitarianism is the closest thing we have to an anecdote to positional arms races, to aligning individual and collective incentives so we can direct life’s superfluities to more pleasurable aims. Rothfeld beautifully articulates the harmony of economic justice and aesthetic excess in ways I’ve danced around but never landed on so neatly:

My book does not argue against egalitarianism in every incarnation, much less against redistributive efforts in the economic domain. Rather, it is an argument in favor of a careful interrogation of the proper limits of the egalitarian project—limits that keep attitudes proper to the political sphere from crossing over into aesthetic and emotional realms. Economic justice would surely improve the quality of art, for all the reasons Marx and Schiller identified. Talented people would be less frequently stymied and have more opportunities to hone their gifts. Aesthetic culture as a whole would improve if audiences had the time and the education to cultivate their tastes. But if democratizing politics would go some way toward improving culture, the reverse does not hold: democratizing culture has gone no way toward improving politics. It has only left consequential inequalities intact, while depriving us of the extravagance that is our human due.

We can more or less visually superimpose this argument onto the status framework from part 2:

When properly limited to the politico-economic sphere, the egalitarian project directly mitigates the material plight of mutable status—uncertainty—in establishing a social floor without unduly limiting the ceiling (Rawls’s “difference principle”). Facing reduced uncertainty and thus lower status anxiety, talent can be more, by which I actually mean less efficiently allocated, which is indeed how we get better, more beautiful art. And what art form benefits more from boundless time and bourgeois stability than the novel?

I should note that due to my apparent desperation to show off in making things as hard for myself as possible, I’ve focused on status rather than the far sexier topic of sex, but basically all of these lines of thinking also apply to the latter. The “fitness-display theory” is inclusive of sexual fitness, erotic play the quite-useless decoration of evolution’s sharpest knife. Rothfeld defends superfluous, biased sex as effectively as superfluous, biased art. Status is still the overarching “mother doll” to my mind—but in this very role, I think it’s fair to say the sex is at least implied.

Perfect cover feat. one of my all-time favorite paintings, The Garden of Earthly Delights (a jumbo print hung above our NYC sofa for the better part of my twenties)

XIII. . . . except status

All things are too small, except status. Status is too big. Elephantine. Titanic—no, Olympian. Like Zeus in the house of Semele:

     Her mortal body

Could not endure that rush, and in that mating,

That gift, burned utterly.

And so we carefully paint over it. Status, I mean. Whether in its artistic or sexual incarnations—and in line with the unusually gorgeous cover All Things Are Too Small so richly deserved—our intense, overarching desire for status functions like a sort of psychic trompe l’œil.

Despite the squirmy discomforts of our egoic motives, our instinct to deceptively obscure them, our counter-instinct to painstakingly exhume what we’ve obscured, the selfish quest for status is responsible for the best as well as the worst of human achievement. For beauty, and pleasure, and insofar as we can bear to look closely—to run our fingers through the chips in the paint—even the refracted satisfactions of truth.

Simler and Hanson seem to agree:

If many of our motives are selfish, it doesn’t mean we’re unlovable; in fact, to many sensibilities, a creature’s foibles make it even more endearing. The fact that we’re self-deceived—and that we’ve built elaborate institutional structures to accommodate our hidden motives—makes us far more interesting than textbook Homo economicus. This portrait of human nature hints at some of the depth found in the characters of the world’s great novels: Moriarty, Caulfield, Ahab, Bovary, Raskolnikov. Straightforward characters aren’t nearly as compelling, perhaps because they strike us as less than fully human.

Wishing you an excessive, fully human weekend,

ANJ

PS—Not to strategically undercut myself again, but I’m actually with Forster, who I recently learned coined the terms “flat” and “round” characters, in thinking the straightforward ones also have their narrative place . . . but that is a topic for another newsletter!