Dear Ezra, I loved your interview with Elizabeth Currid-Halkett! It really resonated with my personal experience. I thought her analysis was spot on.
However, I must confess I cringed when I heard her recommendationto make cultural status more widely acessible. Getting more people to play a game that is stacked against them only makes the existing players more powerful; you remember the Case Against Education, right? The only solution, IMHO, is to come up with a better status game. I agree we humans are Status Monsters; I also agree that the status symbols we have now are generally better than the ones for most of human history. But I believe we can (and need to) do better. We need status markers that are more: - non-zero-sum - approachable by those outside the Western intellectual tradition - closely aligned with actual social good, rather than personal vanity metrics I don't claim to have found one yet, but I've picked up a few clues. One of the best was your conversation with Andrew Sullivan. The most common failure mode of status games is privileging the elitist in-group over the out-group in the guise of meritocracy. I don't think we can ever get away from tribalism; it seems intrinsic to the human experience. But perhaps we can subvert it. What if we could create a tribe (or perhaps meta-tribe) where the highest status was "demonstrating our moral superiority through intellectual hospitality towards those outside our tribe." Podcasts like yours and Alan Alda's very much seem to already be playing that status game. What if we could formalize that, and build a tribe around it? Yours truly, Dr. Ernie www.RadicalCentrism.org --- https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2019/11/14/20964420/whole-foods-yoga-npr-elite-ezra-klein-elizabeth-currid-halkett-inequality How Whole Foods, yoga, and NPR became the hallmarks of the modern elite Elizabeth Currid-Halkett explains why today’s rich are far less materialistic, but a far greater threat to equality. Sent from my iPhone -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/RadicalCentrism/CED2AA06-D466-44FD-8DEF-34B751E2006B%40radicalcentrism.org.
