Oh No! I've Decided That Status Was Something To Be Pursued!

An Occasional Advice Column, Vol. 3

On the perennial pursuit of status. Some reading recommendations. A reading poll. An experiment in supporting writing. Please read to the end!

Aaron Renn is a commentator that I don’t regularly engage with, but today, I’ll make time. His “negative world” thesis was one of the most read pieces online in Christian circles, but it’s full of holes, historically and conceptually. Nonetheless, his readership has gone bonkers since. His sweet spot is a kind of managerial spirit-meets-Christian ethos column, if that’s what you’re after.

His writing drives me bananas because, on the one hand, it’s practical advice, but often the kind of bad advice that Christians should avoid. There have been a number of these that should be avoided, but yesterday’s piece was a humdinger.

What Ladders Are You Climbing?

You can read the whole thing, but up front, he spells out the animating thesis:

Everybody is climbing some ladders. Everybody is playing some game in some league. Everybody is fishing in some pond. Everybody is part of some networks of people. Everybody is part of an ecosystem. Pick the term that makes the most sense to you.

They key is: are you picking the right ladders for what you want to achieve? Are you even conscious of this ladders you’ve chosen to climb?

Choosing the ladders to climb, choosing the game and league to play in, has an enormous impact in where you are going to end up in life. It doesn’t determine what you can achieve, but plays a huge role in it.

Something can be descriptively true and normatively false at the same time. It is true that the world, in bureaucratic fashion, is increasingly gamified, such that to do most work is to do it competitively and in a way which places us on certain hierarchies of power, influence, and money. Even if you’re self-employed, you will find yourself in competition with others, such that the “ladder” he describes is more diffuse.

Abilene has this weird tic where, if you ask people for recommendations, you’ll see a consistent theme: there’s the one pediatrician to go to, one school to get your kids into, one neighborhood to live in, one team to cheer for, and so forth. Some of it’s just sorting excellence from mediocrity. But c’mon: Abilene is 140,000 people: there’s more than one of everything that is good and worth your consideration. When people do this, it’s very much the status mode that he describes. And it’s also a false modality to live in.

Imagine, if you will, someone of no influence, who commits their life to being excellent at something that few people will care about. This, for Renn, is the engaging the wrong ladder, or engaging the right ladder wrongly. One can certainly choose a quiet life, and that’s fine. But what’s really good is status:

But let’s not kid ourselves that status and ladders don’t matter. They matter a lot. For example, when I wrote my original three worlds framework for my own newsletter, it went viral. But when I wrote a version for First Things magazine, a very high status publication within its ecosystem, it went nuclear viral and had enormous impact it would not otherwise have had. Had I thought I shouldn’t consider the venue I was publishing in, I would have forgone an incredible opportunity to make a difference in the world.

It should be evident that status isn’t value-neutral. Some ladders are bad ones to climb altogether! Being a Tik-Tok status symbol, even if lucrative and influential, is a pretty terrible ladder to climb! I ran with a friend this morning who quit a higher-paying job to go work at a private practice where he doesn’t work on weekends: by Renn’s lights, this is abandoning an opportunity to shape and mold a larger area of influence. But guess who’s not working on weekends and still providing for his family?

It should also be evident that status largely isn’t your fault. To do something excellent for a long period of time and for it to be exalted by peers and outlets are two entirely different things. The list is long of unsung savants whose work is recognized post mortem, or of influential figures whose work is ignored in their lifetime. Part of what’s most fun about my own work is encountering one of these undeservedly ignored figures and realizing that there’s been a diamond at your feet for years. But status is a magical mixture, and largely a social mixture that can’t be gamed, except at great cost to audience and creator alike.

Is it wrong to honor the honorable? By no means! But to actively seek the conditions in which one may be honored is to ultimately make the excellence of one’s work subservient to a much more ephemeral aim: to be honored. He presumes that one can pursue status for disinterested reasons, that one can do it for even noble, field-shaping reasons, but even these are not for the sake of excellence, but because he assumes that being at the top means that one has influence:

..wanting to achieve positions of leadership, authority, influence, etc. is a good thing if we are the kind of person that society should want to see in those roles. To believe otherwise is to abandon the playing field and the commanding heights of society to bad people who don’t share our values. I saw someone quote Augustine that, “There could be nothing more fortunate for human affairs than that, by the mercy of God, they who are endowed with true piety of life, if they have the skill for ruling people, should also have the power.” People who think being in the game is illegitimate aren’t in a position to be complaining about what the people who end up in charge are doing.

Anyone who has ever worked in an organization knows that “the people in charge” often aren’t the ones with real power, and are also often not the most competent. I’ve had the extremely great fortune to be batting 1.000 when it comes to direct administrators that I’ve worked under: Randy, Dennis, Carson, Ken, Chris, Bob, blessed be their names. But everyone knows that the ones holding the real keys are people are people who most people do not know by names: office administrators who work for thirty years and who know where the keys are and where the bodies are buried. But I digress.

The real error here is commending influence as the aim to be sought, which for the reasons described above, is largely an illusion. If Renn had read a different passage from Augustine, this might have been a different examination. From Letter 118:

"This way is first humility, second humility, third humility and no matter how often you keep asking me I will say the same over and over again."

As Katherine Sonderegger has argued, (and as Augustine also knew), God’s presence to us is one of humility, presence to a world which persists in unbelief. We can say, following this, that humility is characterized by this combination of presence, excellence, and rejection: that the perfectly good is the perfectly humble, which is also frequently rejected by precisely these kinds of ladders of Babel which Renn describes rightly, but commends wrongly. If you succeed in your chosen field and find wide acclaim in it, it will be largely out of your control. Pursue excellence, but the ladder is the real waste of your life.

---

Reading Recommendations:

Lore Wilbert has published a piece reflecting on her own ectopic pregnancy, and how is shaped her political commitments. From Wilbert:

And if I vote that way, then it follows that my work as someone with strongly held pro-life convictions, from conception to natural death, who will vote for the party who protects my right to have the freedom of choice in those convictions, that I will work to talk about the image of God in all as much as I can.

I do not believe this is a political issue. I do not believe it belongs to the states to legislate. I believe that as an American, with the freedom of thought that being an American affords me, I have the right to wrestle in a hospital room with my husband and my doctor and a few close friends, while I decide what is viable and what is valuable and what is a life.

It’s not so much that she holds that abortion should be licit in all cases, she says, so much that we should be able to choose what constitutes value, life, and viability. Matt Anderson has written a compelling response (paywalled), but which I think is worth reading in full:

Wilbert’s defense of “choice” is not even primarily about the choice to abort, but rather the choice to believe: she wants us to “to choose when you believe life begins” and to “choose” our convictions—as though we were picking our beliefs and convictions off the rack at the mall. Such a description radically distorts how we relate to the world: the point of convictions is that we are convinced by them, that they have conquered us and that we cannot choose but to think otherwise. 

Wilbert’s piece builds from commendable empathy, but I think the form of reasoning here is deeply mistaken, for it supposes that while empathy moves us, empathy should be the chief mover of our moral reasoning. It is the hallmark of modern emotion theory that emotions do things, that they have agency over us which should then be made clear in our reasons¹. As Matt puts it, “what she is describing is not an morally complicated case, even if it is an emotionally complicated one.”

---

A Poll and an Experiment

THE POLL, for our next reading group:

The Experiment:

Substack currently has limited options for supporting writers, so I’m trying this out: a virtual tip jar for a particular piece. If you don’t want to support monthly, no problem!

But I’ll start attaching this in the event that you want to toss a quarter in the virtual guitar case for individual pieces.

Buy me a coffee!

1. This is Jonathan Haidt’s prime point: our reasoning is post-hoc to our gut responses.