One of the most important things that we learn as children is to distinguish what it means to be high status.
As a child, here are a few things I recognized as elite:
- America. I believed that American represented the pinnacle of civilization. Specifically, I believed that American style democracy and capitalism (and in general, liberty) were superior to other social arrangements.
- Mormonism. I believed that Mormons held a certain important Truth that others lacked (i.e., that Mankind is divine, and that Eternal Life is a creative process).
- Intelligence. I believed that knowledge and innovation drive progress, and that I, in particular, was more intelligent than my peers and therefore more capable of contributing to the sum of human knowledge.
- Beauty. Per my genetic programming, I was obsessed with beauty. However, I did not feel beautiful.
- Money. I believed that wealth was the primary way that society distributed status among its citizens, and that it should follow intelligence. However, I felt like my family struggled financially and that we deserved better.
The first two things on this list represent something like cultural superiority, the second two represent something like individual superiority, and the last one is something like cultural recognition of individual superiority.
One thing that is not on this list is family. I loved them, but I didn’t really have a sense that my family was a separate cultural unit from America and Mormonism.
America
I grew up confident that America was the world’s most advanced and perfect society. For me, this was confirmed by facts like America has the world’s highest GDP, and America has by far the world’s most impressive military, and America defeated the Nazis and Communists.
I figured the main reason for America’s success was Liberty. In America, intelligent and bold people could come up with better ways of doing things, and would be rewarded for doing so. In other places, either there wasn’t sufficient infrastructure for intelligent people to succeed (as I viewed Africa) or the government kept people down to ensure that some people didn’t succeed too far above their peers (as I viewed Europe).
Because I thought Liberty was essential to America’s success, I wasn’t too worried about inequality. It was a necessary consequence of Liberty, and was mostly a result of differences in natural ability.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t think that America was perfect. I just thought it was better than any alternative. I didn’t have complete faith that intelligent and productive people would get their due. I just thought that at in America, at least you have a chance.
My wife grew up in Canada. In my experience Canadians are also very proud of their heritage, but they don’t internalize national superiority in quite the same way as we do in the US. Paradoxically, a significant portion of Canadian pride lies in in not being so arrogant as the Americans. However, they also know that many of their most intelligent and ambitious will leave for the US because there is generally more opportunity down South.
These days my views on America are more nuanced, and my point isn’t to argue here whether we live in the greatest country on Earth. My point is just to illustrate the type of thing a person can learn to identify as high status. Specifically, for me, America represented a superior form of social arrangement.
Mormonism
My desire to engage in a debate about the virtues of Mormonism is even less than my desire to debate America. However, I do want to point out a few things. A key indicator of a successful culture (i.e., one that will continue to propagate) is one that people are proud of. When I started to think of examples of cultures that people are proud of, America was the first thing that came to mind.
But then it occurred to me that I had another great example right under my nose. Mormons believe that they belong to the One True Church. If that’s not a sense of moral superiority, I don’t know what is.
Even as a child I recognized that declaring yourself to be a member of the One True Church is offensive to most of humanity. However, I didn’t really see any other rational approach to religion. Doesn’t everyone adhere to the set of beliefs they think are better than all other sets of beliefs?
A famous quote by Dostoevsky comes to mind:
The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular.
But I want to warp it to apply to cultural relativism. There are many people who profess to respect all cultures in the abstract, but really despise every particular culture (other than perhaps their own post-modern meta-culture). Anyway, I always suspected that those who don’t profess any moral superiority are just being coy. Really, deep down, they think that their belief system is superior.
These days, I think things are starting to change and people are becoming a little more explicit (preachy?) about their sense of moral superiority. One of my favorite terms for this is The Great Awokening. Anyway, I welcome this change. A successful culture is a proud culture. If you’ve got it, flaunt it.
Genetics, Culture and Education
At this point, rather than excite you with any juicy details about my childhood arrogance and anxiety, I want bore you with some abstract framework building. Specifically, I want to make sure we are clear about the distinction between genetics and culture. In a sense, the difference is obvious. But it’s also critical to the overall point of this essay (which I will get to eventually, trust me).
Basically, there are three level of evolution going on in every individual:
- Genetic
- Cultural
- Education
I am going to assume you understand the basics of genetics. DNA stores some instructions for how to build a person. Successful people survive and produce more of their DNA. This leads to more intelligent and beautiful people.
Now let’s skip culture and talk about education. What I mean education is the process of training that great neural network that is our brain. Our brain takes in a bunch of input, produces some output, receives some feedback, and develops some patterns of behavior for how to survive and reproduce.
DNA evolves because it has the ability to retain information, but it gradually changes over the course of generations. Our brain also retains some information (i.e., our individual personality) and it changes over the course of an individual lifetime. So what about culture? Where is it stored and how does it maintain/reproduce itself?
Memes are a good example of cultural reproduction. Here is how they work:
So, brains store culture, brain comes across better culture, new culture takes over. Right? Well, not exactly. A culture is not just a meme. It is a meme (or set of memes), but a very particular kind of meme. A meme is any set of ideas capable of being propagated across a large number of humans. A culture is capable of organizing human behavior.
Specifically,…wait for it…here is my big reveal: my working definition of a culture:
A culture is a coherent set of memes that includes instructions for organizing human behavior and defining status relationships
In other words, a culture tells you what it means to be elite. In some ways, a culture is comparable to a method of education. People crave status, and our education is guided by an attempt to achieve more status.
In other words, education is made possible by our DNA (which includes instructions for making a brain), but it is guided by our culture (which tells us how and when to reward each other for our behavior).
So let’s return to America for a moment. One of the key American ideas is economic liberty. That is, rewards and status (specifically, money) should be distributed based on something like a market economy. This is part of our culture because it tells us how to reward each other and how to achieve status.
Same for Mormonism. Mormonism isn’t just a set of ideas about God, it’s a set of ideas about God that includes the concept that if you believe these ideas and act accordingly, you are part of the One True Church which means 1) you get to feel morally superior in this lifetime, and 2) you will go to a better heaven when you die.
Rewiring
Ok, let’s return to my list of 5 things. I would argue that America and Mormonism are examples of cultures, but that intelligence, beauty and money are not. They are cultural concepts, but they are not cultures. So, for example, part of American culture is to tell us what it means to be intelligent, and that this is a good thing. American culture also tells us what it means to be beautiful, and that this is a good thing. American culture also tells us what money is, how to get it, and that it is a good thing.
Of course, the basis of our desire for status (and lust for beauty) is in our DNA. Culture doesn’t really create these concepts, it just rewires our particular interpretation. There is a nice general exposition of this concept in Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. That book expounds on the Moral Foundations Theory, which says that there are five main hardwired foundations for morality:
- Care: cherishing and protecting others; opposite of harm
- Fairness or proportionality: rendering justice according to shared rules; opposite of cheating
- Loyalty or ingroup: standing with your group, family, nation; opposite of betrayal
- Authority or respect: submitting to tradition and legitimate authority; opposite of subversion
- Sanctity or purity: abhorrence for disgusting things, foods, actions; opposite of degradation
Culture rewires our brains so that these basic moral foundations are triggered by different criteria. The basis for feeling these things is already there, and the ability to rewire them is also there. But I think this concept can be generalized beyond moral foundations. Culture doesn’t just rewire our sense of morality, it rewires our sense of beauty, competence, and overall definition of status.
Family
Earlier I pointed out that my family wasn’t on the list of things I was proud of as a child. That’s not entirely true. If I look carefully I have distinct memories of being proud of some of my father’s accomplishments. Also, at times I remember looking down on some of my neighbors for being lower status than my family. So I did have some concept of family pride. It just wasn’t as distinct as my individual pride, or my pride in America and Mormonism.
One of the main issues is that I didn’t really know what it meant to be a part of my family. There wasn’t a very distinct cultural difference between my family and other Mormon American families. It was there…just not very distinct. I kind of knew what it meant to be American, or Mormon, but other than genetic relationships, I didn’t really know what it meant to be a Carey.
One of my primary interests recently has been to understand how to create or strengthen a family community. Part of this is developing a shared sense of identity. So for me, the ideas outlined here regarding the relationship between status and culture provides, if not an instruction set, a litmus test for family identity.
A strong family culture will include a distinct mental concept about what it means to be a member of that family, as well as the ability to generate a sense of pride or moral superiority for members of the family. In particular, I would like to point out that in order for a family identity to be robust, it should be distinguishable from the prevailing culture.
So, for example, if your family culture is based on being intelligent, beautiful and wealthy in a manner encompassed by the prevailing American culture, you might feel a sense of pride, but it won’t really be family pride (even if you share it with the whole family). In order to have family pride, you need some family secret sauce, like American Liberty or Mormon Doctrine.
So with this in mind, it’s worth asking yourself. What is your family’s secret sauce?
