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Anne D. and I sat down to lunch on the verandah of a rustic inn
overlooking Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Creek. We had just signed
the papers for our new century-old house, and my Neanderthal brain
still twitched from its recent encounter with closing costs and
escrow accounts, points and fixed rates, security instruments and
land transfer companies. Now I looked out at the sparkling creek and
its leafy green gorge, and at the way the sun pierced the canopy and
sprinkled the scene with glittering patches of light. It was one of
those Monet days. This was life to my liking: a good meal enjoyed
out of doors in a nearly natural landscape, in the company of a
bright and comely woman I was about to marry. Only a scoundrel or a
chain-smoking newspaper reporter could be cynical in such a
salubrious setting.
Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about the convoluted details of
our recent real estate transaction. It had been like one of those
sweaty nightmares in which you have to solve some impossible
equation relating to the square root of Norway and the hypotenuse of
cheddar cheese. (Which do you divide into which? I KNEW the answer
to this one, I swear I did!)
"Why do we make life so incredibly complicated for
ourselves?," I asked Anne. "We’re just a higher breed of
ape. We should be climbing trees and picking fruit, and here we’ve
put ourselves through this mindboggling experience so we can be in
debt for the next thirty years. Why do we bother?"
Anne’s reply was quick and terse: "It’s all about
status."
I thought about her answer, and I wondered why it had never
occurred to me; those of us with Neanderthal brains are generally
slow to grasp life’s realities. Yes, we tangled ourselves in the
snarly web of real estate brokers and mortgage lenders so that we
might attain the exalted status of property owners. But, in a larger
sense (and an inquiring mind always looks for the larger sense), you
could say, as Anne finally did, that nearly every significant human
action is motivated by a quest for status.
The nameless prehistoric citizen who first tamed fire probably
burned his hand and singed both eyebrows in the effort. So why did
he bother? To attain upward mobility within his cave community, of
course. The rewards of primitive life being what they are, he
probably ended up with a wooden crown and his choice of nubile
Paleolithic maidens. He would have been the equivalent of a Nobel
laureate or a rock star, depending on whether he came from a
highbrow or lowbrow cave. How he must have smirked as his hairy
comrades eyed him with dumb and smoldering envy.
If the fire-tamer happened to be a woman, she undoubtedly
expected to be heaped with rare sabertooth furs (and was probably
stoned to death) for her efforts. In either case, the individual who
advanced the technology would have been singled out for special
treatment.
Show me any evidence of progress in human society, and I’ll
show you an ambitious soul in search of status. Whoever decided to
take the first flying leap from hunter-gatherer society to
agriculture couldn’t have had an easy time convincing his cronies.
Try to imagine the feedback as they assembled around the tribal
fire: "So what you’re proposing, essentially, is that instead
of sitting around telling stories and hunting for food now and then,
we have to slave away in a field from dawn till dusk. What exactly
is the upside here?" The answer, of course, was that working in
a field would elevate them above the backward folk who still chased
after big game and tasty roots. No matter that their lives would
become more laborious, complicated and spiritually unrewarding, and
that their leisure time would dwindle to that of a Silicon Valley
code-cruncher; what mattered is that they’d be seen as achievers.
When another ambitious soul, thousands of years later, proposed
moving from the fields to the first town, the prospect of bourgeois
life might have been an easier sell ("You say we can get rich
off the labor of others? Let’s do it!"). But those first
urbanites soon found themselves ensnared in the cramped and
convoluted labyrinth known as city life. Progress, like any serious
disease, brings with it an assortment of nasty complications. Why
did the townsfolk put up with the noise, squalor and ugliness of
their new environment? Aside from being able to enrich themselves
without moving a muscle, they could socialize more readily with
friends and strangers, enjoy the esteem of their respectable
neighbors, gain access to a wide selection of unnecessary consumer
goods and snicker at their rustic brethren. As you can see, nothing
much has changed in the past eight thousand years.
The vast undertakings of our most ambitious individuals almost
defy belief. Why would Alexander the Great march thousands of men
across the stark landscapes of the old Persian Empire, beyond the
desert and into the far mountains of Hindu Kush? So that future
generations of schoolchildren would be forced to learn Greek
conjugations? It wasn’t as if he was pushing across some untrodden
wilderness; the lands he conquered already had perfectly legitimate
governments in place. So why did he bother pursuing a megalomaniacal
dream that eventually cost him his life at 32? For the glory. For
the power. For the STATUS. After all, how many of us can legally
affix the word "Great" to our signatures?
What ordeals we put ourselves through in the name of
accomplishment! Think about the strangely motivated folks who
invented grammar and algebra. Ponder the Crusaders going off to
liberate Jerusalem and pocket some choice booty from the coffers of
Constantinople. Reflect upon the numberless merchants traveling on
ships to China in search of spices and fortunes, so they could build
a more impressive house than their next-door neighbor. Contemplate
the aspirations of writers and composers, who create for the service
of art but keep an eye open to every opportunity for fame and
applause. Even Mother Teresa, tirelessly establishing missions for
the poor, seemed to bask in her photo opportunities with world-class
celebrities. Or was it the other way around? Maybe both sides gained
something: Mother Teresa reaped recognition as a living saint while
her celebrated companions grabbed at the chance to cleanse their
public images. This was no zero-sum game; both sides were able to
boost their status.
You might say we’re looking at an entire species infatuated
with status. And this infatuation isn’t even exclusive to our
particular breed of ape. A hyena recognizes that some hyenas are
more prestigious than others within the pack; even a peacock knows
that it stands to gain by putting on a memorable display for the
ladies. The quest for status is natural to any social creature above
the level of an earthworm.
What puzzles me is that all this status-seeking effort goes
contrary to one of the prevailing rules of the universe -- the law
of entropy. Things are supposed to run down and get terminally messy
over time, much like my old apartment. That’s simply the way the
universe is constructed, at least according to the physicists.
Matter dissociates into randomness; stars burn out like middle-aged
poets; the great celestial wristwatch eventually stops ticking. I
can identify with entropy because inaction seems to be my natural
element. Yet here we have not only human beings, but an entire
parading pageant of gaudy life forms, continually jockeying for rank
within their social circles. Why do they bother?
It's a fact of life that high status translates into better
mating opportunities, ensuring a copious quantity of high-quality
offspring. Successful men don't nab trophy wives simply because
they're jerks. Such men ARE jerks, but they also recognize
intuitively that their climb to the top entitles them to the
choicest fertile females. It's pointless to chastise them for their
wandering proclivities; you have to take it up with Mother Nature.
Besides, successful women are routinely taking up with trophy
husbands, at least in Hollywood -- just read the tabloids.
So it comes down to this: we drive ourselves into mazes of
mindboggling complexity, like real estate transactions or law school
or working twelve hours a day, because we're on a lifelong quest for
status. We love status because it promises good sex with desirable
mates who can produce worthy offspring. And if we're too old or wise
to be playing the field, our status ensures that at least our
children -- our own genetic stock -- will be pursued by genetically well-endowed suitors who can land the best
table at the trendiest restaurant.
Nature presupposes that high-status individuals are the crown of
creation, and, like any good corporation, she showers them with
outlandish rewards. Not surprisingly, most of us grind ourselves
into a powder trying to make the grade. That's fine for some, but
surely the more enlightened of us will agree that we can lead
perfectly commendable lives without winning trophy spouses every
five or ten years. We can spend our lives in the manner of Thoreau
at Walden, dwelling apart from the corruptive influence of society,
indifferent to status, gazing serenely at the azure depths of the
pond with its pristine mantle of evergreens, subsisting simply and
naturally on beans we grow with our own earthy hands. Of course, it
pays to remember that Thoreau got a book out of the deal.
