The paramount concern of man, Wolfe believes, is status: how to achieve it, how to display it. “Status groups, Weber contended, are the creators of all new styles of life,” Wolfe said in his 2007 Thomas Jefferson lecture. He’s made a career of investigating these cliques of status competition and the novel manners and rituals they produce—stock car racing, Las Vegas casinos, surfers, strip clubs, the counterculture, race hustlers, the hermetically sealed insane asylum that is the college campus. His reporting isn’t an end in itself. It’s a seismograph, detecting social tremors before they reach the borders of American middle class life.
That life has been radically altered. It’s been transformed by two shocks: postwar affluence and declining religiosity. “By the year 2000,” Wolfe writes in Hooking Up, “the term ‘working class’ had fallen into disuse in the United States, and ‘proletariat’ was so obsolete it was known only to a few bitter Marxist academics with wire hair sprouting out of their ears. The average electrician, air-conditioning mechanic, or burglar-alarm repairman lived a life that would have made the Sun King blink.”
This explosion of wealth not only improves human wellbeing. It expands and heightens status competition. There are more fields in which you can prove your virtue, your prowess, your strength, your virility. And there are more opportunities for sin and folly.
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