In 1967, Norman Podhoretz, then the 34-year-old editor of Commentary, published a memoir, Making It, in which he confessed to a powerful drive for status, money, and other conventional forms of success. What’s more, he asserted that other New York intellectuals, who customarily disclaimed interest in such matters, secretly felt exactly as he did. The book was a minor scandal: Podhoretz spoke a forbidden truth. As he should have known, a good deal of an intellectual’s cultural capital comes from his implicit claim to be more high-minded than other people. In revealing that the residents of Ivy League English departments and the offices of “serious” magazines were made of essentially the same human material as advertising executives and bond salesmen, he had given away the game. Yet much as they hated to hear it, few people from inside those worlds could bring themselves to say that Podhoretz was wrong.
The intensity of status competition in America may, somewhat paradoxically, be a function of the openness of our society. With no royal family, no hereditary peerage, and a robust immigrant tradition, we have felt freer than any people in history to remake ourselves after our own gaudiest conceits. This means that the truly creative, enterprising, and perhaps shameless can pan for status gold without being accomplished in any traditionally recognized field. The corollary is that one cannot assume that those people one meets are what they appear to be, or say they are. Imposters to wealth like “Clark Rockefeller” and, more recently, “Anna Delvey,” push our buttons because they expose a basic flaw in the status system. If you have won your cultural capital through hard work, you will likely resent such people. If you regard the entire system of status as essentially fraudulent, you may regard them as heroes of a sort. Either way, they get your attention.
This intense focus on status seems to be a problem of the professions in particular. A carpenter may feel that his work is not as good as it might be. He may have clients who are slow to pay. But there are no league tables for carpenters, no partnership chase, no anxiety over degrees and certifications. The carpenter also has tangible evidence of the efficacy of his work: that armoire, or those custom shelves. Programmers, bankers, and other symbolic workers do not enjoy this tight correspondence between labor and outcome. No wonder they can gnaw their own limbs off in search of status rewards: that’s often the only evidence they can find that they are doing anything at all.
Here’s where the real trouble starts, because the sorting process of any status hierarchy leaves most people somewhere in the middle. On my first day of law school, my Contracts professor, a harsh but not entirely humorless man, told us, “A few of you will prove to have special aptitude for the law. A few will prove yourselves catastrophically inept. The rest of you will sink into the vast, undifferentiated middle.” That vast middle might not seem like the worst place to be. The average lawyer still earns a comfortable living and enjoys the protections of guild membership. (Set aside for a moment the fact that everyone hates lawyers, which itself is a kind of status tribute.) But the truth is that the middle is not as comfortable, both materially and spiritually, as it was a generation ago. Star performers command higher salaries than ever before, leaving everyone else further behind. And also-rans don’t get much respect in America. As late Yankees owner George Steinbrenner said, “Second place is really just the first loser.” Most of us wouldn’t care to be identified with Steinbrenner, but our cultural logic tends to align with his worldview. Life is short—who wants to fly coach?
We all know this is a trap. Even the most conspicuous winners of the status game must sometimes find themselves singing, “Is That All There Is?” So we try to tell ourselves that we’re really playing another game. We say we’re pursuing excellence. And mastery of a craft is one of the most durable rewards there is. That elusive sense of mastery, however, is often entwined with status recognition. You might believe that you’re serving your customers well, but there’s only one Salesperson of the Month, just as there’s only one shift commander, one prima ballerina, and one National League MVP. Even Mark Rothko, a Belarusian Jew, an avant-gardist, and a political radical, wanted recognition. Or rather, he wanted it and didn’t want it; he withdrew his Seagram Murals, originally intended for the walls of the Four Seasons restaurant, because he disapproved of the kind of people he believed would dine there. Status turns out to be a complicated problem.
The status game taps into something unflattering in human nature—the competitive, insecure, unimaginative, small-minded side of us. Like many, I’m eager to disavow any concern for status, to claim the authenticity of the inner self. Yet, as Philip Larkin wrote about work, “something sufficiently toad-like squats in me, too.” I find myself at least sociologically interested in status—seeking to understand how the world works and the likely motives of the stranger beside me on the subway. If we hope to know an individual, we first must fix him in place, if only temporarily—as lepidopterists mount their butterflies on a board, the better to observe them. Social or professional status is not where we ought to end in understanding others, but it is a reasonable place to start.
There is not one status hierarchy in America but an almost infinite number, each with further intricate refinements and subcategories. Almost all of us therefore have some basis for bragging, even if our bragging is unintentionally comical. “My son is the fourth-ranked 10u padel tennis player in the Pacific Northwest”; “I can whistle ‘Rhapsody In Blue’”; “my dog is a purebred Havanese.” Rising affluence plays a role here. With more money, people chase niche forms of status, and the spending itself becomes a marker of status. If you spend enough on your daughter’s show horse, it hardly matters whether she wins.
I myself have had a typical American status arc. I started in the middle, moved through school successfully but without great distinction, and began a professional apprenticeship. Fortuitously, I found myself working in a brand-name law firm, though without the same educational credentials as many of those around me and without much expectation that I would ever rise far beyond the lower ranks. This left me in a curious position as both insider and outsider. I enjoyed a vicarious glamour derived from my employer’s name but paid for it with constant insecurity, knowing I’d always struggle to be taken seriously there. But my salary kept going up, and I was getting better at my job.
And then, as happens for many, just when I was finally beginning to feel competent, I hit a professional ceiling. I could have taken more risks, given up a good job in hopes of eventually getting a better one, but I didn’t. I had children and obligations; I had made promises. In short, I was afraid. Another problem of status is that, while you try to accrue more, you also risk losing what you already have. Some push their chips to the middle of the table, over and over. Perhaps they are more alive than the rest of us, who are mostly content to live out the Benjamin Franklin virtues and cultivate the respect of our neighbors.
A friend who started in the lower middle class and has since achieved enormous financial success once told me, almost ruefully, “What I’ve learned is that there is almost no end to the ways in which it is nicer to be rich than poor.” Status is the gift that keeps on giving—all day every day, and then into the next generation, too, in the form of private schools and tennis lessons and the kind of deeply internalized sense of belonging that success later in life never quite delivers. Conversely, low status comes with a cascade of challenges, both financial and emotional. From the Book of Matthew: “For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.” Matthew may not have had the American meritocracy in mind, but he captured the phenomenon beautifully.
One occasionally meets people who claim not to care about status. They are either trying to fool us or fool themselves. And you can bet that when they do a good job parallel parking or find an authentic Thai restaurant, they will want you to notice. And that’s all status is, in the end—an overly complex, gamified, all-too-human need for the kind of recognition that as children we could count on from our mothers. We all want to be told, “Good job!”
If we cannot hope to escape the status game, can we make peace with it? As I entered my fifties, I found that life’s small slights began to bother me less; the urge to restore some kind of vanquished order in which my virtues were recognized waned. Suddenly, I could let things go, and not only did the world not end, I gained in honor in exactly the proportion that I once feared losing. The dangerous games that young men play to defend their reputations no longer attracted me quite so much. And once I stopped looking for trouble, even unconsciously, trouble stopped finding me. This may be the major perquisite of age: fewer threats to contend with, and therefore more freedom to behave generously, to treat everyone the same regardless of status, to give freely without expectation of return.
Occasionally, I meet a younger man who already has this equation mapped out, and as a feature of character, this impresses me more than anything—more even than intelligence or learning. “Respect to all and deference to none.” It’s unfortunate that I had to learn this lesson the hard way. So much wasted time.
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