Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the ‘Experience’ piece for the week. These are personal essays and/or ruminations on something or other that’s come up in daily life.
Best,
Sam
ON SHIFTS IN STATUS
I was very struck by a line from Casey Stengel - this was in my sports addict phase. Stengel was asked about his life and he replied, “I’m a man that's been up and down.”
That really surprised me, since nobody was a winner like Stengel was a winner. The obvious question was what he could possibly have meant, when was he ever really down - not winning the pennant in 1954 despite winning 103 games because another team had been even better than his? the handful of years between his playing career and managing career when Stengel was out of baseball? But that’s what he said - and even his biographer, Robert W. Creamer, reacted to the line as if he had misheard him. Creamer quoted Stengel at greater length: “It only goes to show you that good luck is as sure to stumble your way as bad luck. You’ve got to learn how to take both. You have to remember that nothing lasts - neither the good nor the bad.”
Stengel was a very wise man and his life summary made a certain intuitive sense to me. Of course, if you really got into it, Stengel’s status was changing all the time. There were periods when he was slumping, when he was nearly out of baseball, periods when he had retired and thought he would never work again, periods when he was under intense scrutiny and acutely aware of the precarity of the job market for major league managers - as well as any number of personal challenges. And Stengel - who won as much as anybody has ever won - knew not to take his high status particularly seriously.
What’s surprised me as much as anything over the course of my life is how little the contemporaries I’ve encountered share that attitude. The prevailing belief is that there are winners and losers, and that winning or losing is a kind of permanent, ironclad condition. This is reflected in all sorts of examples - the political terminology that breaks the world down into the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’; a work like Anand Giriharadas’ Winners Take All, which perceives our society as having moved into a casino culture in which winning becomes the be-all and end-all; a talk like Jordan Peterson’s on Pareto distributions, which perceives winning (i.e. hierarchy) as a virtually mathematical law by which those who have inevitably accrue even more; a mentality, shared by I’m pretty sure everybody I know, that having a Wikipedia entry or a good Google search result is as inalienable a reification of status as a person can possibly have right up until the moment of death when an obituary in the right publications cements it.
All of this is a long way removed from Stengel’s ‘I’m a man that’s been up and down’ summation and a long way removed from the ancient sense of fate, memorialized most famously by the Greeks in a line like Solon’s “call no man happy until he is dead” - a sense of fate as ever-turning and status as ever changeable - and a long way too, actually, from the aristocratic sense of status, which is a bit more playful, tends to see status as a game devised for a convenient social purpose (the idea being that a society can function more smoothly if everybody knows their place from the moment of their birth).
And it’s a long way from how I’ve experienced status in my own life, which has been very fickle and changeable. Very often, I’ve found, my status seems to shift depending on which email account I use - if with a known production company, I can count on a reply from virtually anyone within a few hours and for the reply to be flustered and apologetic; if with some scrappy independent production company a response from the same type of person will be slower and haphazard; if sending out emails as myself I can expect to get polite refusals or no response at all. This is all sort of amusing because the work I’m doing - sending out pitches, requests for interviews, etc - is identical regardless of the email address I’m writing from, and I’m often copying-and-pasting emails from one account to the other, and I’m often getting paid more, and have higher status within, the scrappy production company that’s getting a slower rate of response. And everybody I work with has learned to treat status in the same bemused way - the DPs, for instance, know that the fancy commercials they get paid tons of money for are rubbish, that the documentaries they work on sometimes for no money and have to edit themselves are deeply worthwhile; that work can rain down from the skies for them and then, for no rhyme or reason, the phone will be quiet for weeks. And I’ve noticed that the ‘higher up the food chain’ people are - producers or venture capitalists, for instance, people who deal with capital rather than salaries - the more attuned they tend to be to the flukiness of it all, and to spread their chips wider, hedge their bets ever more carefully.
But this sense of variability that’s shared by the professionals seems for some odd reason not to extend farther than that in the culture-at-large - and for people who don’t know better there tends to be a superstitious reverence for success, a belief that if a person has hit it once, is associated with some prestigious institution or other, then they have proved themselves, their merit is established. The sense I get is that we are wandering into one of the worst of all systems for measuring status - a ‘meritocracy’ in which merit is understood to be a fixed and immutable quantity almost regardless of the actual worth of a person’s work. The way out is to remember other approaches for understanding status - the ‘I’ve been up and down’ wisdom of the professional journeyman; the wheel of fate concept that animated so many ancient cultures and is so sorely missing from our own; even the somewhat playful method of social construction that’s at the heart of aristocracy. What these all have in common is the understanding that status is largely a matter of chance rather than intrinsic worth, and that real worth is found elsewhere.
On Shifts In Status
Great read and good food for thought especially now after the crazy few years we’ve had. Thank you.
Really interesting article and made me think of the "success to the successful" archetype in system dynamics (and in societies), in which success breeds more success: https://thesystemsthinker.com/success-to-the-successful-self-fulfilling-prophecies/
I do think US society used to be more fluid; both geographical and socioeconomic mobility seem to be decreasing, and I feel (though can't prove) that reinvention used to be... easier? More socially accepted? Maybe it just costs more now and that stops a lot of people from trying?