Apes Versus Angels - How Status Determines Sustainability

During a symposium at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, I learnt that whales riff off each other’s songs, that some corvid flocks use tools with their beaks and the many different ‘fashions’ for how gorillas groom each other.

But over the days of academic revelations, perhaps the most fascinating animal behaviour was the scientists themselves -  playing with fidget toys provided on every table. Pipe cleaners, spinners and even Lego waited for us each morning. Because our hosts had long ago discovered that apes concentrate better when their fingers are moving, and that leading scientists are just apes in lab coats.

This is not a quirk of animal scientists. Since we first sequenced the genome of chimpanzees in 2005, we have known that humans share 96% of our DNA with our hairier relatives; similar discoveries were made of bonobos a few years later. And even our more distant relations share traits with us homo-sapiens - male birds in Panama team up with a wingman to woo a female, pigeons gamble, and rats laugh when tickled.

Most of my fellow environmentalists would be the first to agree that there’s nothing special about people. They are quick to emphasise that humans are not separate from the natural world, neither above nor beyond it. We are part of its complex workings, just one node in its global web of species and ecosystems. However, in my own informal study of the sub-culture of environmental beliefs, I’ve noticed a baffling discontinuity. Because those same environmentalists who shudder at the idea of humans being somehow separate to or ‘above’ nature also call on us to change something that is core to our nature as animals.

Status is, of course, the key that unlocks every mammal’s ultimate goal – breeding rights. This we share with much of the animal kingdom. Signals of sexual prowess are, necessarily, wasteful – they show off the excesses of time, resources and energy an individual can afford to spend frivolously to prove their genetic worth. It is nature’s own ‘conspicuous consumption’ and Charles Darwin designated this wasteful behaviour by animals as ‘honest signalling’ - noting that male peacocks display ostentatious feathers to show females they are so good at finding food and avoiding predators that they can grow big, bright, and utterly useless plumage. Male bower birds devote their days to building complex constructions decorated with flashy ornaments from the forest floor. Some deer grow antlers so unwieldy that they become caught in trees and then starve.

And humans, for our part, tend to display our material wealth as our own form of Darwinian honest signalling. Ancient Egyptians adorned themselves with costly gold and jewels; indeed, human jewellery dates back at least 41,500 years. Our palaces – a little bigger than the bower bird’s – include water fountains and gilded ceilings. We buy sports cars and designer shoes, spray champagne and fly private jets.

From the forest floor to the city’s penthouse apartments, all these species are saying:

“I am successful enough to have more than I need. See my superior genes.”

Homo sapiens’ big brains have made our status competition wildly complex and subtle. We have constructed a mammoth architecture of diverse rituals, signs, personal interplay, social contracts and multifaceted rules for prestige display. It’s ubiquitous. Because our species is one of the very few to menstruate rather than experience oestrus – our fertility is not restricted to only occasional periods. That means that our species doesn’t get a time out from a constant demand for status displays. Our societies have coalesced around that need, irrespective of whether or not an individual is personally interested in breeding.

This is truer under capitalism than any other societal structure. We have always organised our societies in terms of ways to organise status (and therefore breeding rights). Under top-down religious feudalism, gender roles and mate choices are methodically disciplined via religious officials, class systems and status set at birth. Breaking these rules results in censure, exile or execution. Communism offers one way out of this – but, looked at through a status perspective, we can see that its attempts to distribute wealth equally become unstable because it tries to circumvent status hierarchy entirely. In doing so, it removes any means by which human beings can compete for status, something that is as evolved into us as it is for every other species. Making it unsurprising that ways to compete, display status and set a breeding hierarchy infected communism with oligarchy.

By making acquisition of material wealth our main status signal, we have avoided many religious rules, caste systems, and the role of physical dominance in reproductive success. Capitalism is ostensibly obsessed with the equal rights of everyone to signal their desirability through material success. Of course, the system is inherently crooked and those with status brutely defend it and wield every weapon to prevent others gaining it. But whether you are at the top or bottom, in a liberal capitalist democracy, ​​everyone – old and young, asexual and allosexual, gay and straight – exist within, and are shaped by, a system that has status baked into its very foundations. We are all swimming in the pheromone pool of a culture built around status displays as natural as a peacocks feathers or baboons red buttocks.

Which is why traditional environmentalism has set up a headscratcher of a paradox: to see humans as part of nature, while asking us to banish our natural instincts for status. Reminding us that we are nothing more than apes yet expecting us to act as angels. And if we are to see meaningful action on climate change, that is a paradox that needs untangling fast.

Because human behaviours play a significant part in tackling the climate crisis. The world’s internationally accepted authority on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), recently included ‘demand side’ reductions in their climate mitigation plans for the first time. They estimate that changing our behaviours could save 5% of demand-side carbon, rapidly. In climate science terms – that could be transformational.

But, it means that what we eat, buy, live in, how we travel, dress and adorn ourselves are going to have to change.  If our behaviours – our fast cars and fancy clothes – are damaging the planet, then different behaviours must undo the harm.

Of course not. But it’s time to truly embrace the realities of being great apes and forget the exhortations to act like angels.  We can’t change our deep programmed desire for status, but we can change the signals we use to display it, and that might just be enough to save us.

Status symbols are malleable, because they are learned, just like whale songs are learned by baby whales. Material consumption is, in today’s Western culture, a much favoured one. But alternatives can be adopted; our status symbols and therefore our consumption behaviours, can change. We can communicate our status with signals that tread more lightly on the planet. To be absolutely clear – we can’t negate these signals, or strip them of power - but we can swap them out for something else.

And trust me when I say, after decades of working in sustainability, that changing status symbols is an altogether easier, quicker and more realistic way to save the planet than expecting humans to change our values.

Happily, status signalling in some parts of society has already started shifting away from materialism.

Eating a plant-based diet has gone from seeming radical/outsider behaviour to being perceived as broadly positive, and in many circles it’s cool to walk around with a Patagonia logo plastered across one’s chest.

Brands have noticed that the apparently infinite desire for more stuff has started to plateau. Millennials are powering the experience economy, which has seen spending on activities (like going to events, eating at restaurants, travelling) grow four times faster than spending on material goods. Successful brands are adding value beyond the idea of owning more, by offering experiences or improving the quality of customers’ interactions. And the sharing economy – in which objects from cars and computers to fashion and furniture are rented rather than owned – is projected to grow from $15 billion in 2014 to $335 billion in 2025.

The fact that buying a Rolex costs the same as attending a TED talk shows us the direction that status symbols are moving in. The latter is a display of your curiosity, of connections, of authority – and you have to be invited. That makes TED a more powerful, and therefore valuable, a status symbol than the flashy watch.

These trends are established but are still only baby steps towards the raft of new status symbols which are desperately needed. The link between status and consumption has by no means been severed: fast fashion hauls and luxury yachts still abound.

The online arena unlocks a world of digital possibilities here – because when it comes to displaying our success, pixels can do exactly what physical products can. NFTs are already showing this to be true (though their benefit to the environment will depend on a swift and widespread transition from operating on the energy heavy ‘proof of work’ principle towards ‘proof of stake’ chains). As does our obsession with likes, retweets and follower counts.

There is more to be embraced. Upcycled or rented clothes could carry a distinctive tag that makes sustainability a status display. Travelling by train instead of plane could earn covetable passport stamps. Recycled or refurbished phones could carry a stylish and conspicuous engraving. And while social media already feels like it has seeped into our lives and minds, there is much further it can go. The future could see your online status and virtual possessions become more important than anything you own in the ‘real’ world. Let me be clear - this world wouldn’t be any kinder or more virtuous and status displays would remain anxiety inducing, hierarchical and unfair – because that’s the point of them. But if we can shift symbols from heavily material/high carbon/disposable to virtual, reused and sustainable then we’ll buy humanity enough time to solve climate change.

And if a bunch of great apes can successfully decouple social status from material impacts, then we might just have the impact of angels.

An excerpt of this article was first printed in New Scientist Magazine in September 2022.