In a recent tweet, which he later expanded into a Substack post, Aaron Renn wrote about the importance of ‘picking the right ladders to climb’. One of our most critical life decisions, Renn argues, is that of choosing the right ‘status hierarchies’ to which we will commit ourselves; to do this we need to have some sense of what status hierarchies exist and what rewards they offer. Where we lack awareness of key status hierarchies, our ambitions can be thwarted by the fact that the ladders we are climbing will not reach the levels we wish to attain.
Renn gave his own life path as a cautionary example. Having excelled in high school, he pursued a Midwest status hierarchy: Indiana University, moving to Chicago after graduation, and a job with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). While he achieved career success beyond what he could have imagined as a young man, in his thirties and forties he came to realize that the ladder he had chosen to climb limited his potential and opportunities for influence. He has subsequently achieved some level of influence, not least through his recent work, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture (which I recommend that you read—like so much of Renn’s work it is highly perceptive), yet few people within the status hierarchy he initially chose to climb were able to break through into elite circles. By tarrying within the wrong status hierarchies, he limited his capacity for wider cultural influence.
Renn’s original tweet provoked many reactions and responses—by his own account chiefly positive, yet with a significant minority of negative ones—and sparked extensive conversation. In his Substack post, Renn seemed to clarify, qualify, and soften some of his original remarks, so as to address some of the criticisms leveled against his tweet. For instance, his Substack stresses that he is not claiming that everyone should try to pursue access to elite institutions and provides a case for the importance of status rightly pursued, insisting that ‘it’s a good thing if men of good character and competence seek and achieve positions of commensurate power, responsibility, influence, and status.’ Many of Renn’s clarifications are helpful and a welcome corrective or counterbalance to less qualified statements in his original tweet. Nevertheless, even with such clarifications, Renn’s account of status and its pursuit is one I find neither persuasive nor appealing.
Where Ladders Won’t Get Us
Although I can understand it, treating the climbing of status hierarchies as a favored master metaphor for one’s life purpose strikes me as unhelpful, narrowing, and even damaging. Such master metaphors can invite a broader set of assumptions, pictures, and beliefs that fill out their implied pictures of the world. They are not neutral and, especially when we employ them as the dominant lenses for our imagination of various issues, can constrain or distort our vision. Consequently, they must be chosen and deployed with care.
The point of ladders is to climb up—no one is supposed to aim to go down. When you think in terms of ladder-climbing, you are most likely thinking chiefly in terms of up and down, higher and lower. What is the best way for me to move up? Is this person higher or lower status than that person? The metaphor does not even focus on a particular destination. The point of the ladder is simply to attain the greatest possible height, wherever that height might be. Even though you might choose between different ladders, ascending different status hierarchies, the tendency is still to consider which of the status hierarchies is higher than the other.
The ladder implies a movement away from certain things and towards others. To climb ladders, you want to be unburdened, footloose, and unattached, free to ascend without entanglement or encumbrance. You need to be able to leave behind the lower levels on which you initially find yourself and ascend to something higher. Such a metaphor privileges a detached individual without bonds or loyalties, whose social and personal connections might even be a function of his climbing—moving to this city best advances his career, marrying this woman solidifies his social standing, attending this church offers him a good place to network.
When climbing ladders, your situation also typically becomes more precarious the higher you ascend. Climbing hierarchies also tends to suggest a zero-sum game. You are a detached individual and other climbers are your rivals. The room at the top is very limited.
In his follow-up post, Renn tries to downplay the significance of his metaphor:
I misremembered Cowen’s quote as about “status hierarchies.” A lot of people reacted against the term “status.” Although everyone, and I do mean everyone, is playing some sort of status game, it’s considered gauche to directly mention it. That’s one reason our society is so cynical today. (I should note, Cowen says that focusing too much on pure status games is actually a negative indicator. Things like mastery of craft really matter).
While status is involved in every hierarchy, if you don’t like that word, don’t use it.
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.
It would be possible to remove much of the weight from the ladder-climbing metaphor, distributing that weight across several complementary metaphors, each of which prevents the others from being pushed too far. There are occasions and contexts when a metaphor of ladder-climbing might be useful, even though it is a very poor master metaphor for our broader life purpose. However, Renn seems to be suggesting that it is a matter of indifference which of several different metaphors we choose to privilege.
The alternative metaphors Renn mentions cannot in most cases be substituted for that of climbing status hierarchies without broader changes in the ways that we conceive of ourselves and our actions. For instance, the different metaphors Renn mentions do not equally imply the same element of individual choice and autonomy that ladder-climbing privileges: while my choice may be foregrounded when considering what ladders to climb, the same is not true for the metaphor of an ecosystem. Such a metaphor might more easily foreground my largely unchosen context, commitments, communities, class, background, station, place, and relationships. Further, while the metaphor of climbing status hierarchies might focus our attention upon those people and networks who are above us and direct our individual action towards attempts to advance ourselves into them, the metaphor of an ecosystem might expand our field of concern, highlighting the interconnectedness and interdependence of many groups within our society and our common interest in the protection and flourishing of our shared environment. Both encourage mindful consideration of and engagement with our worlds, yet of rather differing kinds.
‘Status’
‘Status’ is something that can be correlated with many things worthy of our pursuit: with an honor reputation, with respectable and responsible standing in our communities, with recognized mastery of our vocations, with access to peers who will stretch and improve us, with participation in important decision-making. However, like speaking of money or power, there are dangers in thinking of and pursuing status as such. Like money and power, status can be approached largely as an instrumental means: as something that is of great usefulness, increasing our potential for action considerably. However, like power and money, status is the sort of thing that can be decidedly ambivalent to ends. People can devote their lives to the pursuit of money and power, while losing sight of higher ends these must serve: the same can easily happen with status. Endeavors in which instrumental means—like money, power, and status—and their pursuit are prioritized are inherently dangerous and can easily become corrupting. We must never stop pressing the question of what ends our status serves.
Truly to ascend to the top of many status hierarchies, you have to be utterly dedicated, sacrificing much else to the pursuit. That pursuit so easily becomes the dominating end of your existence, squeezing out so much else—family, church, community, thought, etc. If you attain to the top of the hierarchy, it is highly likely that, in the pursuit, you will have narrowed yourself to the point that you have lost any deep sense you might formerly have had of a higher end that your status could serve. This has happened to so many. When it comes to fields that offer money, power, and status, there is a persistent tendency for means to displace ends.
Further, ‘status’ isn’t a fungible or commensurable thing. We need to consider the nature of the various statuses that we enjoy and with whom we enjoy them. Status can take radically different forms. For instance, the ‘status’ or standing that a man has with his family is one in which he can excel, but he cannot be replaced. Such a status or standing does not really develop through climbing a hierarchy or competing against rivals, but through the practice and demonstration of enduring presence, love, and stability.
The pursuit of ‘status’, as commonly conceived, is also one for which many of the meaningful things we can do with our lives can be a drag or threat: marrying and starting a family, living lives entangled with relatives and neighbors, being rooted in a community and place.
Ironically, the pursuit of status can also be a great obstacle to significant vocational achievement. It can make you preoccupied with petty resumé-extending goals, rather than with work that is meaningful in itself, inherently worthy of pursuit. It can encourage safe conformity for the sake of advancement. Money, power, and status are not merely means that can be mistaken for ends, they can easily masquerade as measures of value. John Ruskin, for instance, criticized such notions of value in his classic work Unto This Last, encouraging his readers to appreciate the difference between ‘wealth’ and ‘illth’:
Wealth, therefore, is “The possession of the valuable by the valiant”; and in considering it as a power existing in a nation, the two elements, the value of the thing, and the valor of its possessor, must be estimated together. Whence it appears that many of the persons commonly considered wealthy, are in reality no more wealthy than the locks of their own strong boxes are, they being inherently and eternally incapable of wealth; and operating for the nation, in an economical point of view, either as pools of dead water, and eddies in a stream (which, so long as the stream flows, are useless, or serve only to drown people, but may become of importance in a state of stagnation should the stream dry); or else, as dams in a river, of which the ultimate service depends not on the dam, but the miller; or else, as mere accidental stays and impediments, acting not as wealth, but (for we ought to have a correspondent term) as “illth” causing various devastation and trouble around them in all directions; or lastly, act not at all, but are merely animated conditions of delay, (no use being possible of anything they have until they are dead,) in which last condition they are nevertheless often useful as delays, and “impedimenta,” if a nation is apt to move too fast.
As the famous cartoonist Bill Watterson once observed,
In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential—as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
Money, power, and status are each pervasive social measures that can dull our awareness of those things that are inherently valuable and worthy of pursuit.
The pursuit of status also readily sets us up for lives of constant comparison with others, haunted by what could have been but was not, and rumination upon what we once had but lost. If we become accustomed to such ways of thinking and allow them to shape our lives, we will be careering towards a bad mid-life crisis and an ugly late-life one too. This is also fertile soil for pride, envy, bitterness, discontent, rivalry, ressentiment, and despair.
The Self-Made Man
The idea that life is largely a matter of climbing the ladders of status hierarchies is one whose history we should consider. In Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians, Tara Isabella Burton discusses the history of an especially American vision of a society of self-made men. Whereas the Old World was one in which one’s social station was inherited from one’s father, in the New World everyone could determine his own standing through diligent application.
The self-made men of Europe achieved their status through an aristocratic aesthetic self-fashioning, Beau Brummell being a key example, yet America’s vision of self-making was one that existed, at least in principle, for the everyman. Burton quotes Frederick Douglass: ‘we have as a people no past and very little present, but a boundless and glorious future… Our moral atmosphere is full of the inspiration of hope and courage. Every man has his chance. If he cannot be President he can, at least, be prosperous. In this respect, America is not only the exception to the general rule, but the social wonder of the world.’
In this democratized vision of self-fashioning, one’s station in life, formerly largely attributed to providential circumstance, is now in the hands of the individual himself. With an expanded sense of possibilities, however, can come an increased burden of potential blame. If one’s prosperity reflects one’s virtuous effort, one’s poverty is an indictment upon one’s character. Such meritocracy could readily serve as a self-congratulatory ideology for the successful, and absolve them of a duty of concern for those formerly regarded as ‘less fortunate’. Burton writes:
[S]elf-creation was, at least theoretically, open to everybody willing to work hard and claim property, particularly land, for themselves. Therefore, those who failed to do so must in some way deserve their socially inferior positions. The democratic promise of self-making came with a troubling corollary that would prove foundational to modern self-creation narratives: you could blame the people that didn’t make themselves. Like the aristocratic tradition of Sade and Brummell, the seemingly more democratic narrative of self-creation also neatly divided the world into robust self-makers and barbarous children. Whereas the aristocratic tradition assigned little ethical weight to this distinction—people were either special or they weren’t—the democratic tradition loaded self-making with morality. You were supposed to shape your own fate, so if you didn’t, it meant that you had failed.
America provided fertile soil for the development of a huge industry devoted to ‘self-improvement’, ‘self-cultivation’, ‘self-expression’, ‘self-actualization’, and other forms of self-making. With a vast territory with an expanding frontier, countless opportunities for the enterprising to make fortunes, rapid urbanization, a democratic society, high social mobility, weaker settled society and established custom, immense emerging markets, ease of relocation, and without a strong established aristocracy, in America, as Burton puts it, men could be ‘their own fathers’. The individual did not inherit his station and was expected to venture forth in pursuit of it.
While such an ideology is not altogether without its positive elements, it provides neither an accurate description of society, nor a helpful prescription for action. It dulls us to that which is given and unchosen, to filial duties, communal and family bonds, to what we inherit, to the virtues of contented settled life, to the dangers of its individualistic vision and priorities, to the typically very limited capacity people have radically to alter their situation in life, and to the vices such a pursuit can encourage. Where a society truly believes and commits to such an ideology, it can sacrifice much upon the altar of autonomy. The self-made man will tend to worship his creator, but aspirational individualism is a cruel and demanding master.
An Alternative Vision
So what is the alternative? Here are some considerations that I have found helpful.
We should seek to live more integrated lives, within which, as much as lies within us, we do the things that we do wholeheartedly. We should find truly worthwhile things to be about and try to draw the rest of our lives into fuller correspondence with these where possible.
We should seek honor from honorable people, and from those who most matter. Here we should recognize the immense significance of those statuses within which you are least fungible—for instance, as a son, brother, husband, father—and seek most to excel there. We could become one of the most powerful leaders in our field of business and yet be largely forgotten within a few years of our retirement. However, our parenting will probably continue to have ramifications long after we have gone.
We should pursue increased social status where and to the extent that it serves, is congruent with, and is subordinated to higher well-integrated ends for our lives. We should practically commit yourself to such ends in ways that hold in check and can frustrate mere pursuit of status. The value of the status, power, or money we possess is radically contingent upon what they exist for.
Rather than thinking in terms of climbing hierarchies, perhaps an Edenic image would be a better privileged metaphor. We should protect the core garden of our lives well (our heart, our marriage, our family, etc.), make it fruitful and joyful, and a place where we know real communion with God and others.
We should seek to extend our life out and down from that ‘garden’ into a wider world. Corresponding to this movement out should be a movement in, bringing our activities and their fruits further up and further in, connecting them with the life at the heart and the core values that motivate and integrate all that we do. Such lives need not be devoid of aspiration, of mindful deliberation concerning our life’s path, of personal growth, or expansion of influence. However, these will be guided and tempered by, and ordered towards, the values enshrined in the ‘garden’ of our life, and will resist the lure of an impossible and destructive autonomy that typically infects our societies’ visions of the pursuit of status.
We should deepen our roots, and spread out our branches.
The most fruitful networks for us will almost certainly not be competitive and rivalrous hierarchies, but networks of trust and generosity. These break zero-sum-game dynamics, make collaborators of rivals, and compound the fruit of our labors.
We should resist comparison, whether with what could have been for us or what others have or have not achieved. A life of constant comparison breeds pride, envy, and dissatisfaction. Rather, we should practice contentment, joy, generosity, and thanksgiving, considering how the lines have fallen for us in pleasant places. It is no accident that, in treating the principle of the tenth word of the Law—‘you shall not covet’—Deuteronomy 26 encourages practices of thanksgiving, generosity, and contentment as the antidote for this sin.
We should practice humility, not thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought. While we should seek to excel in what we do, too many have forsaken a modest station in life in which they could have excelled for pursuit of high station in which they were doomed to mediocrity or failure.
We should cultivate confidence in providence and consistently entrust our life, its course, and its labors to God in prayer. We should be more appreciative of how little power we have to determine our paths or discern their destinations. Without succumbing to fatalism or passivity, we should resist pervasive ideologies of self-making and autonomy, learning the goodness of putting our lives in the hands of God and our neighbor. Although the modern world might tempt us to think otherwise, we are neither our own creators nor our own masters. The course of our lives is not in our own disposal. And a deeper freedom is to be found in the appreciation of those truths.