Nowhere is the fundamentally social nature of all human behaviour more visible than in fashions. An area we…
Nowhere is the fundamentally social nature of all human behaviour more visible than in fashions. An area we at the same time say is our own ‘subjective taste’ at work, ‘each to their own’. Nothing could be further from the truth. /1 https://t.co/V4y84yslp2
If you watch a lot of home renovation shows, something not much commented on is the sameness of what tends to be produced. The stunning rooms people gasp at increasingly look all the same. What we like, what we desire, is fundamentally social. /2
The thrill which produces the gasp is the thrill of experiencing a social transformation. Of seeing an individual home transformed into a high status design. A status defined socially. Literally a ‘makeover’. The owners of these homes now have higher social status. /3
The aesthetics is entirely a social thing here. It’s not any objective beauty, within 10-15 years some new show will arrive at these homes and chuckle at how ‘dated’ they all look. Fashion is always like this, a mediator of social relations. Status is degrees of luxury. /4
And that’s variable too, because sometimes the highest status individuals will adopt a minimalist aesthetic, to create a contrast with the desperate rush of those who emulate them towards luxury. It’s always, all of it, about social differentiation. /5
Weaving this back into a passion of mine, the recognition of a sweeping transformation of all adult culture into an adolescent high school culture, through the establishment of mass schooling decoupled from adult life. The greatest passion of an adolescent? /6
We’re still in the Beatles era of cultural transformation. That passion is music. But musical acts play the same social role as fashions, they’re social differentiators. The acts people like are a fundamental part of their identities. /7
Call a person’s favourite musician crap and watch the violence of the response. Music has become a social battlefield, it marks out social territories more strongly than just about anything else. Getting back to gigs was a fundamental driver of anti-lockdown protests. /8
And it’s not that we used to be less fashion-conscious and this now marks a shift to a dumb, shallow culture. It’s that the fundamentally social processes underlying *everything* humans do is now much more visible. We see this with Covid. /9
It’s horrifying to many (including me) that experts in infectious disease can now adopt lunacies like living with pandemics. But that’s very fashionable, and science has always been as driven by fashion as anything else. It’s just now much more visible. /10
Good scientists have always been sidelined socially, by waves of popularity in the field, by fashions. Planck again, recognising that the leaders of these fashionable waves have to die before change occurs. Social media has made all of this stuff visible, to all. /11
It’s no longer happening behind closed doors, the fashion-leaders now build their followings in full view of everybody. The only thing that interrupts this social process, as I Tweet about a lot, is catastrophe. natural or human-made disasters. Wars, plagues, volcanoes etc. /12
Catastrophes that sometimes promote humans to create institutions to manage those catastrophes, which can then shape our social behaviour for generations. Until the pressures of social life strips them away again. Until the next catastrophe arrives. /end