The peacock tail of literate culture

I’ve just finished reading Geoffrey Miller’s Spent, now over 15 years old, and, whatever its limits as evolutionary psychology, it gives you a genuinely mischievous lens through which to look at almost everything we do with our leisure and our money, including, it turns out, our books. And including this very Substack.

Miller’s argument, loosely, is that much of what we consume and display functions as a fitness signal, advertising our genetic and cognitive qualities to potential mates and rivals. Fine, yes, everyone nods at the Veblen stuff around conspicuous consumption. But apply it to the history of writing and things get interestingly uncomfortable.

Because writing has always been, among other things, a mating display. Not exclusively, not reductively, but undeniably. Human cognitive ornaments, language, wit, complexity, the capacity for sustained abstraction, evolved partly because they were attractive. They signal fitness. And nowhere is this more legible than in the history of the written word.

Cicero knew this, probably more viscerally than he’d have admitted. The architectonics of the Ciceronian period, the long, suspended, clause-within-clause construction that builds like a wave and resolves only at the very end, was not just elegant. It was a demonstration. It said: I can hold many things in my head simultaneously, I can subordinate, I can control. Decorum and aptum, yes, Cicero believed deeply in adjusting style to context and audience, but the elaborate periodic sentence was also a fitness indicator, costly to produce, difficult to fake, therefore credible as a signal. The educated Roman reader would have felt what we might now call intellectual arousal encountering it.

Fast forward to Dante, who invented terza rima not only because the Trinity demanded a tripartite formal structure, though he was perfectly happy to say so, but because formal innovation within a highly competitive literary culture was exactly the kind of conspicuous display that generated social and erotic capital for an ambitious Florentine male. The dolce stil novo poets were competing with one another for the attention of aristocratic circles, for patronage, for the admiration of women who represented, in the courtly idiom, the ultimate evaluative tribunal. The metaphysical justification was genuine and also, entirely conveniently, status-serving. Dante was showing off. The form itself was the plumage.

This pattern of citation-as-status is deep and persistent. When writers invoke Virgil, Aristotle, Aquinas, Montaigne or Kant, they are not purely engaged in the transmission of ideas. They are performing acculturation. They are saying: I have read these people, I belong to the community that reads these people, I know what to cite and when. The footnote is a genealogy of taste. To quote an authoritative name in the right register signals something very like what a Roman toga or a Florentine hat once signalled: I know the code.

Here’s another one. Book design entered this status and fitness indicator game long ago. The Penguin Great Ideas series, with its spare typographic covers, made an aesthetic argument that real intelligence does not require decoration, that severity of design is itself a mark of seriousness.

Buying and displaying multi-volume books like Encyclopedia Britannica or the Loeb Classical Library collection on a shelf visible during video calls is, by Miller’s logic, straightforwardly a fitness display, a costly signal of openness, conscientiousness, the Big Five traits flickering in the spines.

The hardback, the limited edition, the book launched at a venue chosen precisely because it is not obvious, these are not accidental decisions, although they are likely made unconsciously. They are stage sets for a performance of who one is or aspires to be.

Vocabulary has always carried this charge. Johnson’s dictionary was in part a project of linguistic ownership. Latinate polysyllables in English prose signal education, signal membership of a class that received instruction in the classical languages or at minimum their derivatives. When someone writes quotidian instead of everyday, pellucid instead of clear, they are making a class gesture, a small badge of the literate tribe.

Grammar correctness, meanwhile, operates as a kind of border control. The split infinitive debate, the subjunctive, the relative pronoun whom clinging to survival mostly as an indicator of anxious over-education, these are mechanisms by which communities police themselves, expel the suspect and promote the credentialled.

And, as the last piece in my rant, innovation. Eliot’s The Waste Land, assembled from fragments, polyglot, footnoted by the poet himself in a gesture of supreme self-referential audacity, was a text that demanded an educated reader and implicitly humiliated anyone who couldn’t follow.

The demand for effort is itself the signal. Difficulty is conspicuous consumption of the reader’s time. To finish War and Peace, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (I’m displaying some indicators just by quoting the title in French right now) or Finnegans Wake, or to claim to have done so, is to announce something about yourself that has almost nothing to do with Tolstoy, Proust or Joyce.