Visions of Order - Chapter 2

Status and Function

The preceding chapter has suggested that although every culture is unique in substantive content, it exhibits a certain formal nature which is common to all cultures. This nature reflects basic laws, and when the tendency of a culture to follow these laws is frustrated, either by ignorant popular attitudes or by social derangements, its capacity to offer satisfactions declines. This decline leads to further skepticism regarding its value. If critical thought is to be of use in the reconstructing of a culture, we must isolate the causes that prevent its formal realization(22).

We have noted the damage that can be done when a political concept breaks loose and spreads lawlessly, imposing its demands in an area where a different principle of ordering is proper. Another serious failure is to be traced to an ontological confusion by which a certain indispensable balance is upset. This is seen today in our failure, both in intellectual outlook and in social regime, to preserve the necessary relationship of status and function. Modernism is everywhere stressing function at the expense of status, and the more the imbalance grows, the more precarious and therefore dissatisfied we feel, because we are surrendering a condition essential to the preservation of all cultural attitudes and ideas. The reason for saying this takes us to the nature of things(22-3).

Whether we turn either the natural or the introspective eye, we find objects presenting the two general aspects of status and function. By "status" we mean the feature of permanence and by "function" that of change. These properties are the two broadest headings under which we denote our conception of the world. Whatever the field we gaze upon, we see things maintaining their identity while changing. Things both are and are becoming. They are because the idea or general configuration of them persists; and they are becoming because with the flowing of time, they inevitably slough off old substance and take on new. The paradox of both being and becoming is thus continuously enacted. We say that there is a "nature of things," but this nature ever appears in a changing embodiment, so that if we attended only to the latter, we should no sooner say of a thing that "it is" than we should be obliged to say "it was" or "it is now something else." It is an ancient observation that "no man steps in the same river twice," yet we continue to conceive it as a river and to call it by one name. At one and the same moment permanence holds us enchanted and change urges us on.

The oak tree in the forest is none the less an oak tree though it passes, in a century and a quarter, from a tiny shoot to the sturdy giant of seventy feet. Through all its seasonal dormancy and growth, its interchange with water and air, it remains an oak tree, a fixed kind in nature. It possesses status in a world of change. The physicist's account of the whirl of molecules that make it up will not cause us to refer to it as anything but "that oak tree."

We look upon the individual person and see him maintaining his persona all the while he passes through the seven stages of life. Despite changes, he is the same: one man legally identifiable under one name, through all his natural and mental processes of assimilation and elimination. He grows in size, alters in appearance, and he may even change somewhat in personality, but the thread of his selfhood persists and he never undergoes amalgamation with the circumambient world. Our dealings with him are conditional upon our understanding that from year to year he is one individual, preserving a self amid the flow of materiality(23).

So it is with art styles. We have a Greek art, a Byzantine art, an art of the Italian Renaissance. They have their developments and periods, their identifiable creations of individual artists, yet they remain an art form, with typical features of perspective and emphasis. This is their character, their formative principle, which allows us to discriminate them. The individual works participate in a common idea.

The same process is visible even when we look at the political state. It persists under one name, and it may even affirm in its organic law that it is indestructible. But its old leaders pass on or are removed, and new ones appear. After a twenty-year absence, one would come back and find the leaders looking different in almost any country. But while these individual particles are being shuffled and replaced, "the state" goes on, maintaining some character and identity through all the changes. The most conservative state must yield something to the pressure of historical increment, and the most "progressive" one conserves something that it considers its special form and spirit(23).

The duality of permancence and change is the universal appearance of existing things, and it seems to express an ineluctable condition of fulfillment. It is an original provision, ubiquitous and profound, which we are compelled to respect even in maintaining our human creations. To see how they are manifested in cultures, we need to study each more closely(24).

The status of a thing is its attained nature and quality or its possession of being. It is repugnant to mind as well as to feeling to think of the world as pure becoming or as something which never is because it is forever in process. We feel intuitively that things have a being, that they show a certain definable essence which we can grasp through the intellect. The world may be constantly flowing, yet it is a world. The very idea of existence is frustrated if we imagine only a continuous stream or if we think of a thing as surrendering itself before a self can ever be established. We could never become attached to something that never is. If reality were merely a flux, "selves" and "natures" would be illusions, and we could never consciously deal with the world. Both theory and observation prove that there are perdurances. Our existence is such that we alternate between expectation and fulfillment, and without fulfillment, expectation would cease. Therefore status, or the achieved state of things, is ontologically a necessary ground for our activity. It is one half of this lawful dichotomy of existence(24).

It is this half which today needs the attention of the critical mind. But to avoid appearance of neglecting the other, let us first acknowledge that the world in which man is born to seek out his salvation is in part a world of historical process. Religious, philosophical, and literary studies of man concur in teaching that he is born to a condition of "action and liability" where he must work out the "awful experiment of time." The continual becoming of things forever confronts us with challenge, testing our quality and our sense of direction. Even while man has status, he is under the absolute necessity of functioning, as each sequent heartbeat makes plain. He is actor and creator, and indeed the mere conservation of status calls for action. The functioning of man is in his adaptation to change, his dealing with the incessant transiency of things in such a way that some line of meaning in his conduct is preserved. Function is the role of homo faber, or as this could be translated into a modern equivalent, "man the engineer."

The particular urgency with which this essay deals is an unbalancing in which man represents himself too exclusively as engineer and supposes that the finding of means to practical ends should be the whole of existence . For today function increasingly displaces status, and people can be found to say that there is no value in status or that status only clogs activity. These people are often self-styled proponents of culture and they may even give a large amount of time and energy to what they conceive to be cultural activities. But because they are mistaken in principle, there is small hope of saving such culture as we have inherited unless they can be awakened or somehow checked by others. They are the "functionalists," and they bring us to the threshold of this cultural crisis.

It will be found that every culture which creates rewarding social structures and works of the imagination has its existence through an equipoise of function and status. This is a condition of equilibrium, a delicate balancing of opposites for which, on the lower levels, there are analogies in the ways in which an organic body maintains an equilibrium of matter. In its healthy state it takes in enough to sustain and to offset; it preserves a balance. A living body must have salt, but too much salt would act as a fatal poison. On its own level of existence, culture accommodates things likewise; it utilizes things which in unmeasured quantities would prove deadly. These are the terms in which we have to think of such antithetical components as status and function(25). These can be destructive to each other, if either gets beyond measure, but held in the right proportion, they sustain the cultural body. Too much status will obstruct function, and too much function will disrupt and destroy status. Yet these hostile principles meet to advantage, and the task of the prescriptionists of our culture is to discern what changes are necessary to get them back into a proper relation. It is just this coming to terms with the round of life, this domestication of the whole range of needs that puts man in position to express and satisfy himself with cultural creations.

Many cultures of the past have come to suffer from an excess of status which leads to petrifaction. They have done this through too much reliance upon forms and styles as achieved and as not needing the alert attention that is required for a living continuance. Status has to prove continually that it has meaning to avoid over formalization. It is thus not excused from responsibility. It has to meet new conditions, to absorb into itself something of changed conditions while maintaining that identity which is its stuff. This necessity can be illustrated in the following way. We are at liberty to think of a title in itself as an empty thing, a mere cipher. Like ciphers, no number of titles can really dignify where active worth is absent. But if the cipher is placed after a digit, it has the power of multiplying that by ten. So in a manner with status. If it is in conjunction with genuine worth, ability, or achievement, it tends to raise these. It changes the man's representation in his own eyes and in that of others; it lifts him and braces him for still greater achievement. Title is a sign of status; when it combines with function, it produces a value which either alone is incapable of producing. The reference here is not to titles of nobility, although in real aristocracies these have served in the same way. The very fact that in the traditional societies of the West we retain civil and professional titles shows a continuing sense that they have some positive value as indicators of achieved status. Those sans-culottes and egalitarians who are incensed by the very idea of titles and badges, insisting that everyone be merely "Mister" or "Comrade" or "Joe," are failing to see one of the chief incentives to self-direction and self-discipline. This is the very human desire to have one's achievement recognized, classified, and represented to the world.

Those aristocracies of the past, whether bearing titles or merely surrounded by some deference to status, justified their role by both being and doing. They enjoyed status, but when emergencies arose,(26) they took the field and showed that they were not afraid to meet a test. Most importantly of all, their recognized status provided a kind of sanctuary from which they could defy public opinion when they thought that opinion wrong, and the willingness to do this is essential to the idea of leadership. Men like George Washington and most of the other leaders of the American Revolution were not afraid to step into perilous circumstances. They risked their extensive property holdings and they acted counter to a strong and perhaps majority opinion in conducting a revolutionary movement. Washington is our finest example of the type which combines consciousness of status with capacity for action. He was a patrician and an heir to status. Yet we see him surveying the western wilderness at sixteen, fighting with Braddock against the French and Indians, and finally leading American arms to success in a seven year struggle against Britain. We may assume that Washington in his latter years felt no embarrassment over being addressed as "Your Excellency." He had elevated himself through character and action. This type of role, with its subsequent self-representation, gave this nation the purest and ablest group of patriots it has ever known.

To be contrasted with this is the kind of aristocracy which does not keep itself alive by function. In his discussion of the social condition of France in the years before the French Revolution, De Tocqueville emphasizes the fact that the French nobility had degenerated from an aristocracy into a caste. The truth of this appeared in two circumstances: the nobility no longer performed any type of service, and it was isolated from the communal life of the nation. Thus it was functionless and it was out of organic relationship with the society which supported it. This nobility possessed only status, and therefore its days were numbered. Caste may well serve as a name for a condition of mere status, a condition in which half of existence is given up in blind engrossment with the other half. Thus caste is always an evidence of imbalance and a sign that the human situation has been misconceived somewhere along the line of development. De Tocqueville goes on to contrast with this the British nobility, which, for all its selfishness, maintained a role of leadership and service. That it survived the French nobility and kept the respect of the world into present times proves that its combination of status and function preserved it as a part of organic society and of a viable culture(27).These are some of the dangers of status. But the society which tries to put forward function as the sole criterion runs equally grave dangers, and these are the dangers we are faced with today.

To understand the defect of a society which tries to insist upon function as the single standard of measure, we must note that it seeks to base itself upon instrumentalism. There is no way, however, in which instrumentalism can provide an ideological basis for society. Its one test for any individual or any institution is success, but we cannot judge how well a thing works in the absence of goals of working. Activity is not the judge of its own appropriateness and achievement. There must always be something against which the activity is measured, and this can be provided only by intuition and philosophical reasoning. Basically, the failure of the purely functional society lies in its unwillingness to ask, "What is man?" Unless man has some definite idea of what he ought to be, no amount of activity can serve him for the simple reason that the activity cannot be organized. Just as it is logically impossible to have practice without theory, so it is impossible to have social and cultural activity in the meaningful sense without some idea of a valued state of being. The functionalist refuses to bring consciousness and mind to bear upon the state of things because these imply criteria that direct function, encouraging it here but checking it there. This is a position which recognizes the independency of thought.

A purely functionalist or activist society is likely to pride itself upon judging people solely by "what they can do." This seems appealing, and it is true that no man should be exempt throughout life from some real testing of his capacity for function. But function is simply too partial to serve as the sole criterion, and it probably never would have gained such acceptance as it has now if our times had not done so much to discourage reflective thinking. Even so, it does not require a great deal of reflection to discover as a starting point that there are two categories of persons who cannot be judged simply by "what they can do": these are children and the elderly. Neither can justify themselves in competition with people who are in their prime, and therefore they have to be protected by acknowledgment of their status as human beings.

You cannot kill a child because he is weaker than you, and you cannot turn an elderly person out to starve because he is no longer capable physically or mentally of the work expected of a vigorous adult. Both have rights which do not depend upon a purely instrumental view of their natures. Society in general has admitted this without even raising the question, which is evidence that the principle is basic. But modern (28) society in its practice is doing many things which obscure or weaken the principle of status.

One of the most obvious of the imbalances thus created is the modern deification of youth. The whole trend of our commercial, political, and social world is toward giving youth the primacy. The rhetoric of advertising, the cult of political "liberalism," and the preference of activity over contemplation are manifest products of this trend. By youth I mean of course those who are in the health and strength of young manhood and womanhood - let us say eighteen to thirty-five. Now this virile group has its status too and its special virtues, but it is not the thoughtful part of mankind. Its physical senses are at their most acute, but it has not acquired the wisdom which comes from watching this passing show for several decades. It is characterized by exuberance, appetite, keen passions, and sanguinity. It has not had time to generalize its experiences and to learn that the panaceas of the hour are often very ancient things in some newly got up dress. But if we do judge people by "what they can do" and understand by "doing" the kind of outward and physical thing which is most easily measured, this group will inevitably get too large a share of attention.

In summation, the greatest weakness of a function-oriented culture is that it sets little or no store by the kind of achievement which is comparatively timeless - the formation of character, the perfection of style, the attainment of distinction in intellect and imagination. These require for their appreciation something other than keen senses; they require an effort of the mind and the spirit to grasp timeless values, to perceive the presence of things that extend through a temporal span. Mere speed of reflexes and quickness of vision are not the prime necessities for this kind of appreciation. A society which tends to hand its leadership over to those who perform best on the functional scale inclines naturally to make physical measure a more decisive factor than it ought. This is an emphasis that discourages intellectual attainments in the culture(29).

It will be instructive to turn to a historical example of these two cultural imbalances we have described. We have had in the United States during the latter half of our history convincing illustrations of what happens when this principle of equilibrium is ignored. The North-South polarity of our American culture must be understood in these terms. North and South have consistently opposed one another; each has charged the other with unreasonableness and perversity in its attitudes and institutions. Moreover, each is puzzled and indignant over what it regards as the groundlessness of the other's charges. This opposition can be referred to the cause we are now considering.

The South has attached too much weight to status. The North, or in general that part of the country to which the sobriquet "Yankee" is applied, has attached too much importance to function.

From early times the Southerner enjoyed a condition of life which gave him an awareness of status. The owner of lands and the inheritor of the medieval idea of station felt conscious of rank. For a considerable period he was somebody in the functional sense, as is shown by his part in our Revolution and in the expansion of the nation down through the presidency of James K. Polk. Even in highly aristocratic Charleston, there were men who took pride in being self-made and who urged the value of practical experience as a part of education. At some point, however, status seems to have passed beyond the line of equilibrium. It began to be thought of as something sufficient in itself. To be born into the owning class was supposed to confer all that one needed. Social status came almost to play the part of royal blood in other societies, and out of this there developed a dangerous kind of presumption, blinding to those who held it and irritating to most who encountered it.

This disposition to rely upon what one was supposed to be, rather(30) than upon what one could be effectively, had undeniably a weakening influence upon Southern manhood of this class. This truth became evident following the Civil War, when many Southern men turned over the struggle even to make a living to their more valiant mates and lived idle and pointless lives, while the political power they had once wielded was seized by the poor white leaders and the demagogues. The loss of initiative following enemy domination had much to do with the fact, but the truth remains that a more rigorous kind of ideal might have enabled them to fashion more than they did out of the prevaling chaos.

There is, of course, another side to this picture, for belief in status contributed a great deal that was admirable in Southern society. It contributed the valuable element of stability, without which happiness is but doubtfully secured. It contributed much to the freedom and independence of the individual, because the man who "knows where he stands" is always more confident in approaching others and in declaring his opinions than the man who neither knows who he is nor where he is from. It kept the individual from being intimidated by public opinion. Like the judge portrayed in Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (which is unerring in its knowledge of Southern psychologies), this type of man did not care what people thought about him, for "he knew that he was a great man." This attitude can issue in an insufferable conceit, but this should not be allowed to blind us to the element of noble self-confidence which is its proper origin. Finally, it imparted a spirit to society which rebuked slothfulness of manner and thought and encouraged emulation. Carl Bridenbaugh, not a particularly sympathetic student of Southern society, has remarked that "the very fact of status, accepted as a yard-stick, regulated their [the Southerners'] behavior and gave it tone." The fact that Southern culture has reminded European visitors of European culture more than any other in the United States seems definitely related to this belief in status. More than any other section, the South tended to be a culture of estates. In this way it was a conservative order, in some degree comparable to the European establishment(31).

But if the South put too much weight on this side to maintain the proper balance, its great opponent the North put too much on the other.

Northern society has been described by those who admire it as dynamic and by those inclined to question it as restless and overly aggressive. Both descriptions suggest that its lack of equilibrium comes from an overemphasis of function. Much of the criticism leveled at this section concerns the dominance of the businessman type. The North has in general taken the view that it is the duty of man to carry on an unceasing work of exploitation, which is variously denominated "business," "development," and "progress." It may be recalled here that Calvin Coolidge, that narrowest and least imaginative of all American Presidents, who was in many ways representative of this outlook, once declared from the White House that "the business of America is business." The winning of the West was largely a northern enterprise, and the industrialization of the country was almost exclusively such. Almost everything in the North, including social alignments, has been geared to an expanding business "civilization." The stories of young men who started out with only their bare hands and became immensely wealthy have been the most approved American sagas. There occurred, consequently, an extraordinary adulation of function or capacity to show results, and with it the creation of a class of "functionalists" called "businessmen." A few years ago Professor Elijah Jordan pointed out in his original book entitled Business Be Damned that never before in history had this type of person formed a class enjoying social prestige. There have always been activists and gain-getters, but it was reserved for the modern age, under American leadership, to give the successful gain-getter an honorific in the form of "businessman." Professor Jordan has characterized the mentality of this new class, whose status is all function, in these terms:

"In business intelligent and serious interpretation of facts is never called for; intelligence is not involved at all. Only the individual with the strongest motives, motives least checked by moral sensitiveness, can survive. The psychological make-up of the business "mind" is therefore a mere collection of disconnected motives, impulses entirely without conscious direction or moral unity of purpose, hence without intelligence. A "decision" of such a mind is merely the triumph of one motive, the worst, over the rest, particularly over any impulse to sympathetic appreciation of another's stake in the situation. The latter impulse is "inefficiency.(32)"

The description is bitter, but the author states an essential truth. If it is taken as a picture of the mind which develops when all the virtues are subordinated to successful gain-getting, it is historically authentic. For a long period, industrial and plutocratic society elevated this narrow and undeveloped type of mind to positions of social and intellectual leadership. Indeed, it has often been mentioned that the Civil War, which secured for the North hegemony over the Union, put an end to the leadership of the minister and the lawyer, whose status involved some degree of cultural attainment, and replaced it with that of the business entrepreneur.

It is true that men of this class in many instances tried to atone for their partialness by lavishly endowing universitites, art galleries, museums, and other such institutions for the propagation of culture. But these things are externals. They are useful vehicles and receptacles, but in themselves, they cannot engender the spirit which creates culture. Meanwhile, the adulation of function does constant damage to that spirit. It cultivates a mood of aggressiveness which is unwilling to let anything be, perhaps out of a subconscious fear of its enemy, status. It inaugurates the infinite series of progress, which is fatal to stability. It is hostile to the mood of contemplation, which nourishes both the aesthetic and the religious life. Finally, it accompanies all of these things with material distractions which only the most self directed can overcome. Those Americans who went to Europe in great numbers during the final quarter of the last century and the first quarter of this one, and whose exodus has often been satirized, were fleeing from a very real danger. They were fleeing a society so dedicated to function that it left little opportunity for those quieter moments which a man must have to create or to ponder what living is for. A disequilibrium had been set up and institutionalized. It was called the life of progress and success.

That the North attached excessive importance to function and the South to status is a basic diagnosis of American culture. It was a cultural tragedy that after the Civil War the two sides hardened in their attitudes. Border states like Maryland and Kentucky have given a taste, if only a taste, of what an attractive and genial culture could spring up on American soil when the two conditions of status and function are kept in relative balance. If this had prevailed generally and if there had been a development of the theoretic and literary sides, the United States as a whole might have produced a culture of the first rank by now. But the majority of the nation succumbed to the imbalance of function, and if this discussion is to be more (33)than academic, we must examine the possible means of getting back to an equilibrium.

This directs our inquiry to the ultimate source of status, the offsetting concept to the incessant change of the world.

The idea of status is created by the mythopoeic consciousness of man; and in the decay of myth, which has been recognized by many social critics as a major feature of modernity, one can identify the forces that are working against status.

Myths are great symbolic structures which hold together the imaginations of a people and provide bases of harmonious thought and action. They posit a supersensible world of meaning and value from which the least member of a culture can borrow something to dignify and give coherence to his life. Obviously the myth is not born of calculation, nor can its "function" ever be measured. As Ernst Cassirer points out, myth defies the analytic process which is used with empirical data. Most important of all, mythical time has no definite structure; it is always "eternal time." From the point of view of the mythical consciusness, then, the past has never passed away; it is always here and now. Therefore myth is the greatest of all conservators of the significance of things against forces which would make significance contingent upon a present, topical urgency. Whatever has become myth has acquired a status invulnerable to two things: the positive point by point corrrespondence of empirical testing, and the likewise empirical testing of present function.

The mythopoeic faculty of man, like his ability to create symbols, is a distinctively human attribute, and its exercise is a satisfying of one of his deepest psychic hungers. Man creates myths because he feels that, in the language of Goethe, "all before us that is passing, sign and symbol is alone." His myths are the distillation of this meaning, a humanized quintessence of the great pageant. In myth, which is timeless, which expresses some idea of value, and which cannot be dealt with or destroyed by the method of analysis, man expresses a reality which is subjective but which is nevertheless part of the totality. It is his highest response to the insistent question of his own significance. Thus the truth of myth, like the quality of status, is something that must be seized intuitively. Either it is seen in its persuasiveness as one of humanity's archetypal ideas or it is not grasped at all.

All idea of status, it can now be said, depends on the presence of this overriding mythic consciousness(34). For cultures always attach value to what they wish to attach value to. If this seems meaningless, we must remember that there are ways of "demonstrating" that some attachments are "unreasonable." That is to say, one can step outside the lines of desire and say that this or that thing would be a better object of desire than the particular one in question. But this is like saying that men ought to value a quantity of iron above a quantity of gold, which leaves out of account the fact that affinity goes where it will in obedience to some paralogic of value. In similar fashion culture has its own ways of valuing status, which is not always apart from function, but is never a simple exponent of it. This does not mean that it is completely irresponsible, as I propose to show in the chapter on "Forms and Social Cruelty." Our subjective world is part of the whole world and is linked up with the remainder of the totality. This imposes certain obligations which preclude a pure autonomy. The point here is that a merely ponderable measurement always endangers status, and there is ground for saying, by way of a general observation, that an individual's position in society is higher in proportion to his belief in imponderables.

Now the creation and preservation of myth itself are linked up with an acceptance of the poetic nature of all language. Language is poetry in a valid sense because it isolates and defines out of the variety of our perceptions the things that have human importance. It is the essence of the mystery of naming that to name a thing is somehow to domesticate it and to give it a place and a rank in our humanized world. But to do this with belief in what we are doing calls for a confidence in language which some contemporary theorists are seeking to undermine.

In the past few years there has developed a great self-consciousness about language, which seems to proceed from a feeling of discomfort in the presence of it. The feeling itself comes in turn from a notion that man is a prisoner of language. This has prompted students imbued with the scientific temper to try to put language through the same mill that is used to reduce other things to scientific manipulatability. Their work takes the form of studying language from the outside and drawing up a behavioral report. The process actually fractionates language by breaking it down into its ultimate physical constituents, whereafter the recurrence of these is tabulated and correlated. Normative and prescriptive ideas are rigidly excluded, with the result that there is no explanation of why the elements of language leap together into meaningful configurations(35). The Gestalten of language thus become as irrelevant as the compulsive figurations of the myth.

This has an important effect upon the idea of status for the reason that language, once created, is a great indicator and conservator of value. The names of things for one generation are by and large the names of things of the next generation and those following. Names themselves do not share, except to a slight extent, in physical evolution. We know this has induced some to declare that language therefore falsifies or that it imprisons the dynamic world in a fixity which is an illusion. For these people language becomes a source of error the moment it imposes the stasis which all names carry upon the phenomena of the world. The extreme of this theory would make impossible language in the conventional sense; there would be in its stead something registering and transmitting like a photoelectric cell.

It is clear that this theory stands in the way of axiological realism. It offers no account of how language can give insight into the enduring value of things. If language is sometimes partial in its description of referents, it is also additive in the respect that it contributes to our perception of their value. There is no basis for insisting that it be a physical replica of the thing symbolized, but there is basis for insisting that it be expressive of our "imagination" of the thing, which will carry some element of feeling. The theoretical aim of the functionalist is to make language special for every situation; the desire of the traditionalists is to have it carry a tradition of meaning which make the thing named intelligible in the framework of culture.

This case needs to be urged because words are the designations of status. Any view which reduces them to mere exponents of special situations takes away the power they have as a specifically human means of expression to confer something that has its origin in the imagination. For words are relative to thoughts, not to things; it is impossible to show that a word has the same kind of connection with the thing it is standing for that it has with the mind of the user. In fact it is impossible to show at all that a word has connection with the thing for which it stands. The only connection that can be demonstrated is with other words in the vocabulary, and this must be done through a poetical operation. Language is peculiarly intimate with mythpoeic value, and scientistic attempts to view it as only a part of behavior would deprive it of its capacity to serve the myth(36). An axiolgocial view of language is, therefore, necessary to recover the source of status.

The very fact that language has a metaphorical function , and indeed, metaphorical orgina, is a further illustration of the necessity. For the perception of likeness is essentially an imaginative tnerprise, and the likeness of that is perceived is a first step toward generalization. To say that something is like something else is to affirm a certain basis of continuity. The conservatizing and stabilizing function of language is thus being utilized whever we make the transference of meaning which is embodied in a metaphor. The tendency of metaphor is plainly toward a unity of conception whereas that of simple denotation is toward diversity. In order to have meaningful status we must have something ascending up toward an ultimate source of good. Otherwise status is random and singular, and the various statuses which a society recognizes would not be capable of offering resistance in depth to whatever would collapse them. Consequently culture's "mythic cover" and its power to create status are aspects of the same feature.

The decline of myth in modern societies and the ensuing decay of status are related also to the disappearance of "place." This is a truth at once obvious in its occurrence and difficult for analysis. It must be evident to all, however, that certain facts of technological development have worked to diminsh the separateness of places. Modern man has acquired an excessive mobility, so that it means nothing, as compared with yesterday, for him to be in one place or to go to another. The automobile and the airplane whirl him about with such velocity that it now has little significance to be in or from a place: one's situation can soon be altered. In the book of modern progress this is, it hardly needs saying, listed as a credit, yet there is much to make us feel that it is a debit when all things are considered. There is something protective about "place"; it means isolation, privacy, and finally identity. We cannot rationally wish to be nowhere or everwhere at once. To be somehwere is necessary to our standing - to our status.

For essentially the same reason, this terrible mobility is fatal to mythical constructs. Myths have always developed among a people occupying one region for a long period of time and developing a strong provincial consciousness. The heroes and demigods of these great crations are always dwellers somewhere (as the gods of Greece on Olympus), and the idea of a cosmopolitan (37)mobility and interchangeability is foreign to them. To take away place is to take away the locus of myth. I am convinced that nothing has done as much to weaken the myth-making faculty of man as this modern pressure against the idea of place, epxressing itself even overtly in a desire to "annihilate" space.

It may indeed seem the height of futile protest to argue against anything as highly prized by modern man as his mobility. But this is not the place to be gingerly practical; the purpose of this writing is to isolate the real cause of modern disintegration and to see whether the effort that would be required to halt it is within our civilization's capacity for renewal.

To summarize the situation: the hope of bringing status back into the intellectual and moral life of our time depends upon an expansion of consciousness. We must admit again to full standing the kind of knowledge that mythical representation embodies. This calls for giving up the false notion that we can find the meaning of life by searching out the composition of the material world. (Of course when a trend becomes as powerful as this none of us are likely to avoid being trapped into some of its false position.) The modernistic searcher after meaning may be likened to a man furiously beating the earth and imagining that the finer he pulverizeds it, the nearer he will get to the riddle of existence. But no synthesizing truths lie in that direction. It is in the opposite direction that the path must be followed, toward those broad, speculative, coherent, and heuristic ideas which tell us indeed nothing of the structure of the atom, but cause us to see that these images, feelings, events, intuitions, and dreams which fill our lives have some meaning beyond their mere presence. This will be knowledge of transcendental ideas, and it will bring with it the now largely lost conviction that man is somebody.

Then we must again become sensitive enough to realized that "place" means privacy and dignity, and that it is against the interests of our highest feelings to destroy the idea of station.

Man is not created to live without space or place any more than he is designed to stand on the point of a needle, and the confusion of categories which permitted this notion to arise is one of the problems for the student of intellectual culture. The recovery of the principle of status involves a series of retrievals. The reiver of knowledge must sometimes turn back on itself; now it needs to return to show us that myth and language are joint sources of expressing and conserving value, and that the value of a place to stand, which was hardly questioned until the present, has its analogical expression in the world of cultural consciousness(39).

Richard Weaver, Visions of Order, Chapter 2 - Status and Function
Louisiana State University Press. Baton Rouge: 1964