The primary force animating political debates among my peers is the tension between the miraculous macroeconomic outcomes produced by our market economy and the inequality and dehumanization it produces on a personal level. On one hand capitalism’s track record of raising our living standard and quality of life is unassailable, and on the other hand it’s self-evident that our society doesn’t embody justice in the Christian formulation that I believe in or even in a purely secular notion.
It’s interesting to me that most of the complaints about our system aren’t objections to the object-level outcomes. Though I’m sure it happens, I rarely hear complaints that Americans are too poor to avoid destitution. Instead most of the complaints I hear boil down to a lack of dignity for those who end up on the bottom of the wealth scale. It’s not a diminishment of the real financial distress many are in, just a reflection that there’s more anger about the relationship between people than about anyone’s financial outcomes in isolation.
Most of the attempts I see to address this tension fall into two buckets.
I reject most of what I see in the first bucket as short-sighted and ahistorical. I prefer the latter bucket, but it’s missing a key piece by framing the problem as purely economic. Our core goal is not to guarantee the absence of financial destitution, it’s to offer a path to dignity. And there’s a second key problem to solve in America: social dignity is slowly converging to socioeconomic status.
This isn’t a measurable assertion, but evidence jumps off the pages of historical accounts as soon as you look for it. We’re in the midst of a decline of religion as a social institution in America. We’re in the midst of a decline in trade unions as an economic and social institution in America. We’re in the midst of a decline in fraternal orders and social clubs and service organizations like Rotary, Elk’s, Lions, Junior League, Freemasons, Kiwanis, etc. - a category with such varying goals and structures that their most striking commonality is their by their association with an older, fading generation. As institutions with their own hierarchies and values fade in salience, our social interactions slide towards the least common denominator of social currency: wealth.
I’ve seen a dozen twitter takes that go something like this.
New York prizes money. Silicon Valley prizes power. Washington prizes prestige.
I think they’re rehashes of a Paul Graham essay and like that essay, while they intend to highlight differences between subcultures in America, they all share remarkably similar visions of what’s admired in a culture. None of them offer a path to dignity for those without some kind of leverage in the market.
Maybe a few generations ago, the least common denominator of social status was honor. Maybe it was religious piety. Maybe it was wealth and power all along. Maybe it will change again and maybe it never changes and either way I’m not optimistic that we can influence our society to change so fundamentally that it’s most basic value becomes anything other that wealth. But I do think it’s very possible to create formal and informal social structures that value something else.
I want social groups, organizations, and institutions with explicit values. I want spheres of life where there’s a path to identity and admiration and a form of social status that isn’t about success in the market. In the same way humility isn’t thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less, I want to humble our current forms of social status not by trying to destroy the underlying wealth, but by existing in social spaces where people aren’t constantly aware of and assessing the wealth and prestige of those around them. Success would look like institutions run by minimum wage workers and social groups where stay-at-home parents are the most admired at the dinner party.
This isn’t just about creating social environments with healthy norms of kindness and treating everyone with dignity or even valuing everyone equally. Those are wonderful notions that miss the unshakeable reality that any social group confers status and dignity onto those most admired within in, and groups whose identity is not tied to a source of value inevitably drift back towards admiring the cultural default values. It ignores that all human social organizations past a certain scale develop implicit and sometimes explicit hierarchies. We have a glut of good intentions for those poorer than us but a void of genuine honor for them.
We still have to argue about wealth redistribution and welfare. This isn’t a substitution. But I’d like to actually have that argument instead of an argument about human dignity dressed up in economic language. That won’t happen until we all believe there actually is a path to social status that doesn’t look indistinguishable from a path to money and power. Differentiated financial outcomes is an unavoidable reality of the market economy we’re all beneficiaries of. I don’t want to prevent those financial outcomes, I want to make those those only financial outcomes, not social, personal and relational outcomes as well.
If your sandcastle is being washed away by the tide, just adding some new sand isn’t helpful and yet that’s exactly what I’ve suggested. A far more helpful approach would be to understand why the societal tide is washing away our social institutions and how to change it. But I’m not doing that because in this case, I don’t believe there’s anything we can do about the current tide. Enough has been written (1, 2, 3) about the deterioration of our social fabric, so I’ll just cherry pick two of the trends I see as irreversible and inevitable. Together, they convince me we’re not in a natural cycle that will return to a more balanced longevity of institutions on its own.
First, like Lasch described in late 90’s, rising disposable incomes and improved transportation technology (primarily the rise of highway infrastructure and later the affordability of commercial flights) untethered upper middle class Americans from their towns of residence. This “touristification” gave people an exit option from problems in their towns and made them less reliant on those towns to provide a sufficient social scene. The core trend was the dispersal of social networks that deprived local social scenes of the critical mass necessary to make them institutions rather than just a group of friends. The internet and social media is an obvious continuation of this trend in that it functions as a social outlet that that doesn’t concentrate social energy into a single place or single organization. I see no reason to expect this trend to tail off.
Second, the scale of our society has driven problems by itself. Against the backdrop of a rising population and improved communication technology making long distance communication instantaneous, existing social institutions naturally grew from tightly connected rings to more loosely connected networks of increasingly diverse backgrounds. While of course this growth conferred many benefits, it’s also natural for any social scene to become more pluralistic and for its language and values to slide towards the cultural least common denominator as it adds more people further from the original core. Paradoxically, the larger, more diverse and more interconnected a population grows, the less diversity there is on an organizational level. It’s happening everywhere. While I admire localism as a political and cultural movement encouraging people to invest energy and authority at the smallest scale possible, I admire it specifically because it’s fighting against entropy, not because I think there’s any chance of mass cultural change.
I see no light at the end of the tunnel of either of these trends, just further consolidation of social energy into social structures that inevitably inherit default cultural values. But there’s one final explanation that I’ve tiptoed around long enough. I hope at least once, the gigantic Church shaped hole has been glaringly obvious to both Christian and secular readers. Exemplifying and embodying countercultural values as well as shepherding organizations of people who profess those values is the core mission of the Church! If we are looking around and don’t notice countless examples of social groups that clearly hold values other than wealth and status, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Church has fallen short. I would extend this indictment beyond the American protestant churches to the Catholic church and I suspect it applies to the other Abrahamic religions as well. I’ve chosen optimism that this tide may recede again, and if you squint maybe there’s some justification for my optimism. But there’s a lot of work ahead.
Insofar as I can work to make institutions value something other than money I want to, but my sphere of influence is mostly centered on my friends, family, and work. And while it sounds much easier to build relationships and social groups that aren’t centered on secular success, I can count on one hand the number of social groups I’ve been a part of where the most deeply admired trait wasn’t career success or before that, perceived potential for career success. First and foremost, my wife and I have adopted an explicit family value to buffer ourselves against this:
Intentionally seek and cultivate communities that do not prize worldly status.
The biggest challenge I run into is that in our demographic, the subject of your work and your feelings about it are the easiest conversation topic. I have no desire to intentionally avoid those topics, but it’s inevitable that if you primarily ask someone about their career, they’ll internalize that you care about career first and foremost. So in practice, this means seeking out topics and areas of life that don’t smell like work, accomplishments or money.
On a larger scale, my answer to this problem is the Church. In fact I believe the Church is the institution-level response. My role in that is as simple as reinforcing Christian beliefs within the Church and helping include others in the fold from without.