"I was astonished to realize that Scottish-ness and Irishish-ness, similar to the Anglophilia in many upper classes - thinking of William Buckley's accent now - had become posh in some contexts in the States. I was late coming to this realization and it's still weird."
I don't know much about the upper class, but a lot of middle-class Americans are very proud that some ancestor came from Ireland or Scotland.
"Lobster used to be low-class" is an overstated meme. In PG Wodehouse's "Code of the Woosters", Bertie Wooster agrees to do a favour (being thrown into gaol) for his Aunt Dahlia in exchange for a meal to be cooked by her (comedically amazing) personal chef Anatole, and immediately sets to setting out his dream menu. The fish course? Sylphides a la Creme d'ecrivesses: lobster with crayfish sauce (baked in pastry with brandy and cream). That was 1938.
Maybe not lobster so much, but things like oysters and shellfish in general were working/lower class cheap food. Oysters are now fancified, but nobody (so far as I know) has yet produced an upper-class version of a bag of whelks or jellied eels (though give them time).
And there's a certain irony in French food being considered high-class, since a lot of the recipes come from "we need to find ways to cook every part of the animal". Rural and farm cooking. The attitude behind Hogarth's The Roast Beef of Old England (the English are wealthy enough that even the common man may dine on beef rather than frogs' legs and snails): https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hogarth-o-the-roast-beef-of-old-england-the-gate-of-calais-n01464
"Numerous xenophobic references indicate Hogarth's low opinion of the French. The huge side of British beef at the exact centre of the picture, destined for the English inn at Calais, is neatly balanced by the scrawny French soldier at the other side of the drawbridge. A fat friar, the only well-nourished Frenchman in the picture, covetously pokes the beef."
And indeed a patriotic ballad prior to that:
"When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman's food,
It ennobled our veins and enriched our blood.
Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good
Oh! the Roast Beef of old England,
And old English Roast Beef!
But since we have learnt from all-vapouring France
I read the X Class a little more broadly: it's academics, people who might have become academics if they'd played their cards right, and young people who still could.
I'd be very hesitant about drawing conclusions about past living standards from TV shows. Think about the oft-remarked difference between the apartments we saw on 'Friends', and the sort of New York apartments people in that income group would actually have been able to afford.
I actually disagree a bit here. I think academics have more potential than the average person to be X Class (especially younger academics), but also many academics are living out the upper-middle class dream of being a respectable professional.
The X Class is what every person believes he is: "The other people are poseurs and sheep. But I transcend all this and make choices independently on the merits. My choices reflect how unique and smart and independent I am. I am an X person."
Seriously, do you think anyone self-identifies as a "High-Prole?"
Mid-to-high prole, in the HOUSE! Like... if your grandpa wasn't a lumberjack, and your grandma didn't have plastic swans in the strawberry garden out in front of their mobile home, next to the potted geraniums, then what the hell are you even doing, calling yourself a Real Amurican? (I'm kidding here of course... sort of. No wait... Yes. Yes, I'm definitely totally kidding.)
One of the things I loved about Fussell's bullshit book was how it widened my hypothesis space for understanding why most people doing "white collar" work nearby to my aughties-era datascience gigs were so insecure. They like: *intrinsically cared* about how strangers who weren't even their family *saw them* for like... reasons OTHER than "not-unethically convincing a big boss type into granting one permission to play with super expensive toys". After reading Fussell, I started sometimes purposefully wearing purple because it was funny.
Sadly, I'm effortlessly svelte, even though my diet is mostly pizza and cheezburgs.
I believe they are probably neurotic and anxious (the women) and thus fidgety and restless, and with good reason, because their husbands are keeping the weight off by banging the mistress. Also, the men golf and sail a lot.
Actually you don't need to be neurotic or anxious to be fidgety.
Source: am highly fidgety but emotionally on the chill side (and live a comparatively stress-free life), but do have ADHD. Wouldn't say I'm effortlessly svelte, but definitely don't watch my weight much and yet maintain normal BMI.
My maternal grandfather was a very small scale farmer who wouldn't have known the term "prole" (in fairness it probably wasn't coined yet). In his view there were two kinds of people: "regular people" and "the rich." The former were good, the latter were thieves. He had zero desire to be rich, cared nothing about appearances, and was probably the happiest guy I ever met.
It's the same word - "prole" is short for "proletarius" or later "proletariat" who were originally just the people in the Roman census who didn't own anything so the censors just counted their kids.
Right, but it would be a mistake to count appearances of "prole" in Latin text (perhaps in quotations?) as if they were appearances of "prole" in the modern English sense.
A long time ago I read an article about the two middle classes, the Academic Middle Class and the Commercial Middle Class. All I can find of it now is this quote by Freeman Dyson:
> In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status. As a child of the academic middle class, I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher and have been gloomy ever since.
This sounds broadly correct to me, as one who awkwardly straddles both sides of the fence. The Commercial Middle Class can be seen in their BMW X5s, the Academic Middle Class in their Subarus or on their bicycles (with the occasional Tesla at the upper end). The commercial middle class are richer (per unit social status) than the academic middle class, so the academic middle class has to work harder on signalling in order to compensate.
Lawyers, bankers, and most types of engineers are Commercial Middle Class, while well-paid public-sector types tend to be Academic Middle Class (along with academics, of course). Silicon Valley seems to be largely Commerical Middle Class with a lot of Academic Middle Class pretensions, and much of the conflict you'll find inside big Silicon Valley companies is just AMC vs CMC posturing; it seems like the best way to get promoted is to have the ability to mouth AMC values while getting paid a CMC salary.
The AMC thinks the CMC is beneath them, because it goes around spending money on flashy crap like fancy cars and nice houses with swimming pools, and we all know that only lower-class people feel the need to signal like that. The CMC meanwhile thinks the AMC is beneath them because they don't even have flashy cars or nice houses with swimming pools, and that's just sad.
Fussell's Class X basically sounds like a description of the sorts of things that were becoming popular among the Academic Middle Class in 1983.
What you're describing sounds kind of like Moldbug's "Brahmin" (AMC) vs "Vaisya" (CMC), although it's hard to be sure of the identification. Seems a bit different from what Fussell is going for though; the AMC you describe definitely does not sound like Class X to me, instead sounding more just like his "upper-middle"...
There are several ways this distinction has been described, Piketty's Brahmin left & merchant right, I've also heard priestly class & merchant class. Either way, plus ça change... (indicating my frightful British middle class-ness by using French there, see Nancy Mitford's "U and non-U" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
Having spent time at a mid-size OLD Connecticut law firm, I'd say they are a definite mix. There were attorneys there that were old money, didn't need to work, but being an attorney was respectable and allowed them to help fellow upper-class people. Good firms need to have people like this because some old money people don't want to work with CMC people - ever. But this was disappearing when I entered the profession (mid 2000's). All the young associates were striver CMCs and there were no old money young lawyers. This is likely because the grind of being a young lawyer is not something someone with nothing to prove would ever do now.
My mostly-indirect exposure to 'real old money' (upper class) people was similarly enlightening – you've got the maybe upper-middle class people that do the work, the middle and lower class people that do the 'real' work (i.e. drudgery), and a few figurehead lower-upper class people being (AFAICT) 'punished' by being 'requested' to hold down an 'important' position at one of the family's concerns.
(The specific old money people I got some glimpses of were pretty scary in some ways too!)
In England, it's waaaay more complicated than this.
The Upper Class are proper hereditary peers, their families, the Royal Family, and the odd hanger-on who doesn't have a peerage but is clearly in the general milieu. Unlike other European countries, this was historically possible to enter through inter-marriage. This still happens a bit, but rarely in one step (e.g. Jeff Bezos sends his kids to Eton, and one of his granddaughters marries a marquess). All class movement (at least in England) is cross-generational, so you can't change class but your children can be a different class to yours.
The Working Class are people who work in factories, labourers, plumbers etc. There's a perennially unemployed underclass, who have now largely branched off but aren't quite a separate class as it's still possible to move between the two within one lifetime.
Historically, the middle class embraced industrial tycoons, lawyers, doctors, accountants and the better sort of "clerks" (white collar workers - Bob Cratchett and Scrooge were both middle class, but represent the farthest ends). A huge number of people moved up into this category after WWII, and particularly under Thatcher (when Blair was talking about "Mondeo man," this is who he was talking about.
The post-war movers represent the bulk of the middle class, and are people doing "office jobs" - salesmen, actuaries, solicitors (one type of lawyer), the sort of banker who might be a "trader" etc.* This is the Lower Middle Class and Middle Middle Class, although they seem to have more of a gradient between them than a line. This is the CMC. They're status-conscious, confrontation-averse and child-rearing-oriented, but in terms of accent and (physical) appearance aren't distinct from the working class.
The Upper Middle Class contains academics, the better sort of army officers, barristers (the other type of lawyer), doctors, senior civil servants (and the junior civil servants who are on track to become them), and the sort if banker who wouldn't be a "trader." They usually went to private schools or public schools (a confusing English term which means "expensive private school" and is what Hogwarts is a pastiche of), but some went to grammar schools (selective state schools). Within this class, there's a clear divide:
AMC (plus socially mobile people whose kids will be AMC): Most academics, a majority of senior civil servants, a majority of (white, gentile) doctors (including almost all male ones), roughly half of barristers, most people who work for NGOs, a few rich people living off their money, and some of the non-trader bankers. These people have their own public schools (e.g. Highgate, St Pauls) and private schools. They are more likely to be non-conformist or low-church (most are still Anglican by extraction), although they're mostly atheists. They were historically the old civilian middle class (merchants, clerks etc.), the sort of people who backed Cromwell in the civil war and became the American puritans. They're naturally Lib Dems politically but the Labour moderates (e.g. Starmer, Blair) come from this class. They probably instinctively think the roundheads were the good guys in the civil war (possibly with hand-wringing about Ireland). Historically, Barclays and Lloyds were run by them, banking seems to be mixed far more thoroughly now. If in doubt, ask yourself whether you'd believe they have a brother who teaches political science at KCL. Anyone who rises into the upper middle class through education (grammar schools or comprehensive>Oxbridge) ends up on this side of the aisle. Facially, think John Oliver.
[Martial?] Upper Middle Class: the better sort of army officers, some female doctors, a minority of the senior civil service (basically the rest of the Upper Middle Class). Eton is their Harvard, but somewhere like Rugby or Uppingham would be more typical. They tend to be high-church Anglican by extraction, and are far more likely to have a Norman surname or a weird Scottish connection than is typical in England. They're largely derived from the old rural gentry, or the eighth son of the fifth son of a ninth son of the Upper Class. These people *are* the Conservative Party, barring the occasional hanger-on like Hague or Gavin Williams. Historically, banks then ran were HSBC and funny like Arbuthnott's. If in doubt, ask yourself whether you believe they have a brother who's a captain in the Blues and Royals. To a man, they think the cavaliers were the good guys in the civil war. Anyone who rises into the Upper Middle Class from having parents who just randomly got rich enough to send their kids to public schools (businessmen, athletes etc.) tends to end up on this side of the aisle. Facially, think David Cameron.
I'm fairly sure both upper middle classes are roughly the same size, but I could be off by about an order of magnitude (especially as by educational footprint, the MUMC looks much larger).
The Moldbug parallel should be apparent - the MUMC are basically sub-optimates, the AMC are Brahmins, the bulk of the Middle and Working Class are Vaisyas. This all interacts with race in very complicated ways, and English jews have their own byzantine internal class structure I don't entirely understand, but seem to have at least one equivalent to every group.
*There are two types of bankers. Some of them are "traders" and these are always the lower-class type but are in a broader category. I'm fairly fuzzy on what any of these people do so can't draw the line occupationally, but socially the distinction is obvious. "M&A" is possibly on the upper side of the line...?
"The Upper Class are proper hereditary peers, their families, the Royal Family, and the odd hanger-on who doesn't have a peerage but is clearly in the general milieu."
I was under the impression that the old aristocracy regarded the Royals as rather middle-class, although not to their faces.
Another complication in the English class system is where Catholics fit, especially those who would have a claim to be in the Upper Class.
They're a bit "bourgeois" (in the condescending aristocratic sense): they like to seem like they uphold slightly old-fashioned middle-class "Victorian" values, aka, what middle-class people think "they're betters" should be like.
Because the contemporary branch of the reigning family stems from tiny Germany duchies, which at the time were ruled by small German grocers, and the family name until the WWI was Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. There are titled families in the UK with genealogical trees to William the Conqueror, and that is considered to be way more interesting than small German grocers. Diana once said to Charles, that her (original) title is older, which also was true.
I think your description of the Martial Middle Class is a bit off. The description implies a certain kind of old Englishness of public schools, long family history, and tradition "a brother in the Blues and Royals". But then you contradict yourself and inlcude "Anyone who rises into the Upper Middle Class from having parents who just randomly got rich enough to send their kids to public schools (businessmen, athletes etc.) tends to end up on this side of the aisle."
A quick look at the Tory cabinet suggests the latter is more fitting than the former as defining the Conservative party. Gove, Priti Patel, Hancock, are all children of business people, and Raab's parents were white collar employees. Except Gove, they're all second generation immigrants, none of them are descended from old rural gentry. In fact they all seem urban not rural.
In contrast Boris Johnson definitely strikes me as someone who oozes Englishness, though not the kind of Englishness you'll see in a Holywood film. I could very much see him as the village eccentric in a crowd of old rural gentry. Sunak's parents are probably AMC (doctor and pharmacist) but he went into banking (I think non-trading) but also seems to be turning into a bit of a country squire ever since he partially moved to the country.
I'd make two modifications to your taxonomy. First add an upper commercial middle class; this is where successful business people's children go and is is a backbone of the Tory party. The Martial/Country Squire upper middle class remains as a smaller (this might be my urban bias showing) group in the Tory party that has adapted to Thatcher-ism and now remains a firm ally of the commercial middle class (even if they might gripe about globalism now and then, or capitalism optimising away a nice institution or Victorian architecture).
Secondly your taxonomy doesn't have a place for everyone who defines themselves by education but didn't get the kind of degree that leads to a good graduate job. I'd say this is a new influx into the AMC that's got far less capital but is still changing it by weight of numbers plus some strong ideological weapons. Starmer vs Corbyn is an illustration of this fight.
The first "M" in MMC is probably an overstatement, but is just what distinguishes them from the AMC. My point is more "typical public school types" rather than "St Pauls/Highgate" types and that there's a clear distinction within them. It's more that Cameron and Osborne were clearly a different class to the self-made business types, but the self-made business types' kids would be almost indistinguishable by the time they left Eton; that's why I don't think the Upper CMC is a thing - it's not sustainable inter-generationally, and their socially merged with the country squire types in the surrounding countryside (for London, the home counties). The Tories, politically, are clearly aiming for the broad middle class (and now the working class), as voters. The people who are the MPs and most of the constituency associations are generally much more MMC.
I 100% agree that the long family tradition isn't close to universal (although within a couple of generations they all have it from inter-marriage). However, Britain being what it is, there really aren't enough self-made businessmen for them to have formed their own class.
Johnson is much more of an outlier but he's largely acting. His father and brother are much more conventionally MMC.
Corbyn and co are an odd bunch, who don't quite fit into a category. Corbyn in particular seems to be a hereditary left-wing campaigner, McDonnell's father came up from the unions and he went straight into politics, and Benn was upper class. I agree that the more general group you're referring to would be in the AMC.
> but the self-made business types' kids would be almost indistinguishable by the time they left Eton; that's why I don't think the Upper CMC is a thing - it's not sustainable inter-generationally, and their socially merged with the country squire types in the surrounding countryside (for London, the home counties).
You raise a good point. But I still think that if CMC (including upper) is looked at as a whole then it is inter-generationally sustainable. Your dad is a self made businessman and you've got an MBA and a management job. This roughly describes my and my bothers life paths. Our parents ran companies and sold them making good money but not stupid money. In practical terms, enough to contribute significantly to both of our first homes, but not enough to buy them for us outright (they could if they sold their second home, but they don't want to).
We were both supported and encouraged into education. But I went into computer science and got a white collar programming job, my brother now works at a hedge fund. We're both clearly distinguishable from the working class, but also clearly not Eton types, are would be repulsed by Corbyn even if we weren't Jewish (we weren't raised in the community).
I do agree about intermarriage with country squires. When we got the second home in the countryside my brother immediately developed a taste for fishing. The two classes are allied and the division is porous but I think the division is real. The average self made businessman who sends his kids to a good school probably sees his class and peer group as various other business people and his employees; not country squires unless he lives in the country and does squire things (but if he buys a country home he's high risk for getting typical hobbies). And while there's the potential for them to send kids to Eton or Rugby and produce little Camerons, most will send them to whatever local school is good with the intention of school->university-> white collar professional or the rich doctor / prestigious professor type of AMC.
> Corbyn and co are an odd bunch, who don't quite fit into a category. Corbyn in particular seems to be a hereditary left-wing campaigner, McDonnell's father came up from the unions and he went straight into politics, and Benn was upper class. I agree that the more general group you're referring to would be in the AMC.
I was thinking more about the general movement around Corbyn. Young, university educated, eager participants in imported American culture wars. But I think you got that from your last sentence?
I think you're in the group I'd be rounding off into the MMC (your brother particularly). I've never met a white-collar professional who didn't seem on one side of the line or another, but I'm slightly worried I might just be conflating a partisan divide with a broader social one. I've also no idea what the children of successful techies will be like!
I'm reluctant to type this, and am completely willing to defer if I'm very wrong, but I've also noticed that Jews seem to filter into the MMC less. This may be small sample size, but the handful of Jewish MMC I've met have all been at least third-generation. It must happen, but I suspect (possibly based on lazy stereotyping) that the slight contempt for academia that partly drives the division from the MMC side may generally be absent if your Jewish, so assimilation becomes more gradual absorption and hence more multi-generational...? I base that only on the fact that business-people whose kids I was at school with (massive selection bias there) would be horrified if their children went into academia.
The Corbyn clique themselves are very weird. I'd argue the Corbyn-supporting young are distinct from them (cf. Europe, coal-mining, Russia etc), and I'd assume are just young AMC and the political divide rounds off to age - young Liberal Democrats do exist, but they tend to make Young Conservatives seem normal by comparison.
Exactly. Almost every other culture has more complicated class system than America. There are really no classes in America, compared to UK, or Asia, or any other country except Canada and Australia. In America, the difference between top and the bottom class is like the difference between a white poodle and a black poodle. Everywhere else, it's like the difference between an ant and an elephant.
I think the CMC often looks down on the AMC also because of a view that they don't expose themselves to the risk and rewards of the market. That is certainly the case for my personal corner of the CMC filled with people who could have been academics but chose business. The view is that AMC develop theories without testing them in the real world like the CMC. The CMC has skin in the game.
Pragmatically, you couldn't film a show in a typical NYC apartment. You wouldn't be able to get more than a couple of people in the frame without a room that's deeper (along the camera--subject axis" than the frame is wide.
True, but take a look at the apartment that Jackie Gleason's bus-driver salary afforded him in the 1950s "Honeymooners." I've lived in apartment buildings with nicer laundry rooms.
Americans got a lot richer between, say, 1945 and 1970.
Academia is now a 100% class signals game. The research activity does matter only via the number and place where the articles are published. Everything is optimized for the profit of publishers, in exchange for signals of value, as measured by academic bureaucracy.
On a tangent, even the (relatively) new phenomena, like Open Access, are already rotten by this class game. For those working in academia, how many time have you heard that huge article processing charges are OK, because why? if you can't pay the APC it means that your project is not funded, therefore not valuable. What if I don't want to pay the APC, when is clearly money for nothing? Class signals.
Fussell's Class X is more or less what we used to call bohemians. The closest modern equivalent are hipsters, but even that term is faded. What he's picking up on are traits of well-educated countercultures like ironic poverty.
"Sure I'm the Assistant Director of Student Affairs for *InsertCollegeName*, but I'm cool and reuse my bags at the Organic Farmer's Market, and take 3 intercontinental/international trips by air per year (which totally cancelled out any benefit of not using plastic bags several times over at least in terms of CO2 Emissions). Last year we went to the Amazon and saw Pachamama statues..."
I think NPR subscriber. Although maybe the X Class has been subsumed into the UMC.
That Simpsons reference is deeply bubbled imo. There is a generation/subculture of people who grew up, went to a useless college, and don't have good jobs, but 65 percent of Americans are homeowners and the Simpsons are not astonishingly wealthy or anything by current standards, just by journalist/media studies person standards
The story of small town America on Big Media is written by people who hated it, left, and nurse a grudge against the place they left. How many there genuinely like where they live? Those people aren't storytellers.
The only exception that comes to mind (which might reflect the fact I've not watched many shows set in small town America) is Stargirl. Blue Valley is portrayed as a very friendly place if slightly retro whose only major problem is supervillains; which are of course entirely necessary for the show to exist. I'd even say the show has some modest red-tribe coding (alongside plenty of blue). Pat Dugan strikes me as a small c-conservative. A mechanic who likes old cars and makes his son get a paper route to teach him responsibility; and sticks a Made In Detroit Stars&Stripes shield on his homemade giant robot.
Now granted (rot13 encoded spoilers) Gur fhcreivyynvaf ner jul gur gbja vf guevivat. Ubjrire gur fhcreivyynvaf ner irel oyhr pbqrq (fb ner zbfg bs gur urebrf; jura gurl urne jung gur ivyynvaf cyna gb qb gurve ernpgvba vf "ner lbh fher jr'er ba gur evtug fvqr"; hagvy gurl ernyvfr zvyyvbaf jvyy qvr).
All that said: for pro-small town America stories I strongly recommend Stargirl.
Agreed. Homer has a union job watching dials at a nuclear power plant, and does not live in a major metropolis. His kids go to public school, and his entire savings is often in a jar maintained by Marge.
I'm not surprised he can make the payments on a modest sized suburban home, even on one income. (It was less modest thirty years ago, but it hasn't gotten any bigger or, AFAIK, added any bathrooms since.)
technically it has gotten bigger over the years because simpsons continuity is not super well tracked so they've accidentally added rooms when people making episodes felt the need
The "does not live in a major metropolis" thing is big. People don't have to kvetch nearly as much about housing prices in Urbana as they do in Chicago.
Homer's basic lifestyle isn't unreasonable for someone who got in on a good union job in a boom (when they first built the nuclear plant), particularly when he was given the down payment. Sure, he's got two cars the whole time, but neither is new (and we don't know if he bought either new). One's a Plymouth (a "Junkerolla") the other a Chevrolet.
That he can somehow keep making payments and keep his job despite his extreme irresponsibility and incompetence is another matter, but if you take that away you have no show.
A replica Simpsons' house was built in Las Vegas and sold for $120k in 1997. But at 2200 square feet, it's clearly smaller than the one on TV, which I would guess is a little under 3000 sf.
The Simpsons house is at 742 Evergreen Terrace, presumably a reference to Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA where Matt Groening went to college. The most similar house in Olympia that I could find on Zillow in 2019 was a 2755 sf house on a 10,500 sf lot. It looks a little smaller than the TV house. It had recently sold for $500k.
You need to pick a town that contains a nuclear plant maybe? I know here in Canada the housing around these places is crazy expensive because you’ve got all these high wage workers moving into a town far enough from a big population.
In the Lisa's First Word, it is indicated that Grandpa sold his house so that he could give Homer the money to buy his. So the no-inheritance is a bit of a stretch.
Also in Homer's Enemy, Grimy/the writers rub in our face just how fantastical it is for Homer to have the lifestyle he has. Even just the size of his house, his two cars, and the number of kids was realistically unfeasable. This was Season 8, so maybe the change happened between Seasons 1 and 8 or the better explanation is the TV shows have always shown the characters being able to afford a better dwelling than they'd reasonably be able to.
I think some of it depends on what you consider home ownership.
My dad was a Silent Generation Department of Transportation Engineer with only a HS Diploma and a few college courses the state put him through as part of job training, my Mom was a hairdresser with a cosmetology degree who had to retire in her 40s due to arthritis. In the Early 70s, they moved into a 3 bedroom, 2 bath Ranch with my older siblings, then about 5 and 1. They would host my maternal grand parents for the last few years of their lives, and by the tim I came along in the mid-80s and had grown old enough to be aware of my surroundings, the house had been expanded with a three-car garage with a second floor "mother-in-law's apartment over it and a large den on the back with a large back porch... From the time I turned 4 in 1990 to the time we lost the house to foreclosure in 2012, my dad was the primary bread winner, and for most of that time, the house was home to on average 7 people(My parents, me and my older sister, my brother-in-law,my sister's 2 daughters) and sometimes hosted as many as 12 during holidays. We didn't live high on the hog, but we lived comfortably for the most part, and while my mom drew disability, and I drew disability once my father started drawing social security and my sister was consistently employed, it was always my dad's income that provided the safety net for the rest of the family.
In a technical sense, my Dad never owned that house, having taken out a second mortage to build those additions and probably refinancing at least one other time, was about 31 when my family moved in, and while he was like the only government employee I can ever recall reporting a good wage, he made as much as he did thanks in large part to having worked for the NCDOT from his late teens until retirement... and then went back to work for them part time while drawing retirement pay until he was laid off. He was already in his mid-40s when I came along, and by the time he retired, he had just shy of 40 years after tacking on unspent sick leave.
Admittedly, my father was far more competent(and persumably, the only reason Homer keeps his job from an in-universe standpoint is that Burns doesn't want a competent safety inspector as having to keep the plant up to code would cut into profits), but aside from Homer and marge being maybe10-20 years younger than my parents, based on the stated dates of the earliest flashback episodes, as originally concieved, I don't think the Simpson's situation when they first moved on to Evergreene Terrace is too dissimilar from my own family's situation when they moved into my childhood home. Of course, this is ignoring the show's sliding timeline and that time stamps on flash backs and flash forwards always seem to assume the show's present is when the episode aired(E.g. Early episodes gave 1984 for when Bart was a preschooler and Lisa was a baby, while later episodes put Marge and Homer's college years in the 90s(and arguably retconning Homer from highschool drop out to college drop out)... and i'm pretty sure the show has increased the amount of debt the Simpsons struggle with over time. The show's always played a bit loose with reality, but the original premise doesn't seem all that outlandish fora older 30s couple with two school-aged children and a baby circa the early 90s.
For homeownership, millennials are "still 5 to 10 percentage points behind where Generation X and baby boomers were at the same age."[0] Homer and Marge don't have college degrees, which makes them even less likely to own a home, 48% in 2015 versus 58% in 1995 [1], with much of that remaining fraction being older people. Plus it's a single income household, which I'm sure drops the fraction again, although I don't have statistics.
48% of people without a college degree own a home, but 80% of baby boomers own a home (and people even older are presumably even more likely)[0] while baby boomers and older are much less likely to have a college degree [1]. That 48% is going to be largely baby boomers and older who bought their house when it was much more plausible.
So if you sample one group defined by age and another group defined by a social marker who average out younger, which group do you expect to display higher levels of homeownership, an attribute that is correlated to age since you can save more money if you are older?
OK, there's more to it, but your comparison lacks rigour if it doesn't correct for age. Or the fact that a young person today is more likely than a young boomer to have a degree, so that's not a like-for-like comparison either. There's a reason why good social science is difficult and agitpop opinions are easy.
So long as you can show that the price of housing has increased versus earning power, your underlying point is likely valid though.
The amount of time it takes to save up for a down payment has also gone up significantly due to various factors (rising home prices, increased rent, more money going to student loans), so we can expect this trend to continue. https://www.zillow.com/research/how-many-years-down-payment-21734/
So it's not just that older people own homes more often because they've had more time to accumulate wealth, it's also become more difficult for younger generations to accumulate the wealth needed.
Does that 48% actually own their homes, or does that include those paying on a mortgage? If it refers to true ownership, it makes some sense that older people would be ahead in ownership, they've had time to actually pay of their mortgages... if that includes people paying on a mortgage, I wonder how much of the discrepency is income going to student loan repayments eating up income previous generations would have put towards a mortgage.
By my understanding it includes mortgage holders, or else I'd expect the home ownership number to be essentially zero for millennials (given that most mortgages have a 30 year payoff period and millennials are all under 50)
Since a mortgage is a secured loan, not a staged purchase, mortgage lenders do not own property other than where a default has occurred. On that basis I think you are correct.
Also I have a mortgage but am legally a homeowner (e.g. it is me, not my bank, who is primarily responsible for the maintenance of the boundaries of the property).
I wonder how many of that percent *purchased* the home they own, versus whether they inherited it?
If there is a substantial proportion of the younger generation who have hand-me-down housing, then it's not unthinkable that purchasing housing now might be more difficult than 48% sounds.
I would be very interested in reading about how much of the boomer/millennial wealth gap can be explained by longer life expectancy. (and possibly the potential for people today to spend that wealth living the retirement dream)
I think we are comparing apples and oranges here. Millennials have different priorities now. They marry significantly later than older generation, they want to "explore themselves" by traveling and buying nice things and by living in vibrant urban centers as opposed to smalltown suburbs with wife as the older generations did. The millennial lifestyle is better suited to living in rented place with roommates.
As another example: homeownership rate varies widely from country to country. In former eastern bloc countries the homeownership rate often exceeds 90%. In Switzerland it is 43.36. On the other hand for instance Swiss have vastly higher financial wealth than Eastern Europeans.
A lot of these statistics reflect changes in preferences which are vast over last few generations to put it mildly.
I don't have any statistics at hand here, but an informal survey of the millennials I know shows that it's not a change in preference but a feeling of inability to own a home. If you don't think you'll be able to own a home, then you'll prioritize goals that don't require owning a home, but that doesn't mean you don't want to own a home.
And I'm not sure the Eastern European example helps you here, since the reason for higher homeownership rates in Eastern Europe is that the USSR (and other Eastern European communist governments) provided essentially free housing to almost everyone. Everyone owns a home because it's easy to own a home, while in Switzerland owning a home is expensive and so Swiss people don't prioritize it
I can comment on Eastern bloc as I am from Slovakia. Now it is true that people owned their homes during socialism - but that was more than 40 years ago. The culture in my country is definitely aligned with the concept that the true independence also means owning your own house/condo. It also has a lot of good downstream effects: people care more about what is happening in the neighborhood and more active in local politics.
The Simpsons is also a fantasy cartoon. Despite what the author of that tweet says, it was never believable that someone with a high school degree could become a safety officer at a nuclear plant, let alone retain that job while being caught on camera sleeping all the time.
It's completely useless to use the world of the Simpsons as a measure of income inequality.
It is completely *true to life* even if not believable by you.
I worked at a Fortune 500 medical devices company with lots of fancy lab in Boulder, CO. 500+ employees working onsite, a big machine shop with 2 full-time union machinists, plus loads of fun chemicals and drill presses/emergency showers/cutting lasers sprinkled all around the campus, and literally dozens of PhD engineers at the top of their game making prototype battery-powered sonic cut-and-cauterize tools with exotic metals like tungsten.
The lead "materials safety" guy (in his own special lane, a dept that tracked all the active chemicals/dangerous equipment onsite, responsible for safe disposal I think) separate from a bigger team of folks who handled safety for *spaces* like this-or-that-lab space. He had been there for decades, no way he'd get hired there now (and in fact they didn't hire me directly, but as a temp, and would never since I don't have an engineering degree.) He got hired on the strength of having previously been a lead materials safety guy at... Rocky Flats, a nuclear weapon assembly facility in Colorado. He had his high school diploma only.
Interesting, and laudable (credentialism sucks). Was this recent?
In my defense, though, I'm guessing he didn't sleep on the job and narrowly avoid a meltdown using eeny, meeny, miny, moe :-)
(Also, *technically* Homer hadn't even graduated from high school when he was hired because he failed remedial science -- he just showed up the day the opened the panner plant and he got the job)
Of course Homer's mannerisms and level of incompetence is exaggerated. Wouldn't be much of a show if he didn't. But his material wealth relative to his occupation and social class is not exaggerated - that part is plausible.
He wasn't Homer, no... but IDK whether it's a small difference or a large one. He did have a huge gut and seemed to have no actual responsibilities and spend all his time doing nothing. Once in a while a PhD would deputize the lowest-ranking person available for the job of going to hassle him until he'd give the OK to change the assignments/passcodes so a different team of engineers would have access/authority over this or that lab space. One time I got that job, of going and asking him for something, which is the main reason I ever interacted with him enough to have an impression. My impression was... I have no idea what this guy's job is or why he's the person I'm asking about this. He seems... mean and sleepy?
I have no idea if the guy I'm talking about was generally competent or not--it was a big enough company that had for a very long time been "growing research team of kindly dorky nerds in HR environment that gives them toys and lets them play". I was only at the company a year, as a lowly tech.
Also, do you know very much about Rocky Flats? They pretty commonly noticed a room had become so dangerous there'd be no safe way to clean it, so they'd just brick up the doorway. Started causing cascading problems when things started dripping through walls & etc. At different points there was a big fire affecting floors w/ plutonium, a serious ground-water contamination concern, and more.
Agreed. My father left college (football scholarship) after one year to get married and support a family. He worked in the stockroom for about a decade, and then was promoted to Facilities Manager without completing so much as an Assoc Degree.
As you say, it was indeed possible in that era. The responsibility of training and certifying him was borne by the institution, not by him personally, so any training in dealing with chemicals, security, etc. was paid by his employer.
For background, he was at the tail end of the Silent Generation.
Correct. That Homer is rankly unqualified is one of the show's central gags; he's the only person to be fired when the plant is bought by Germans, and his workplace successes own either to dumb luck or the intervention of others. It's made quite clear that he was not hired on merit.
Yeah, I grew up in a town called Springfield—capital of Illinois! plenty of stuff to do there, two huge hospitals, University of Illinois branch—and you can absolutely become Homer Simpson if you want. There's even a power plant (coal, alas). Here's a three-bedroom house near where I was born for under $100,000: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1121-N-5th-St-Springfield-IL-62702/75499034_zpid/ . If you're patient and can get up to $150k you've got a ton of options; you can buy a house near a park in a beautiful old neighborhood filled with tall trees, etc.
It's not Detroit, either—there was no huge boom and no huge bust, and there are no emptied-out neighborhoods where the houses are falling down—it's just a place that both housing bubbles mostly ignored. (All the expensive houses, because it's a fairly red city that hasn't had the millennial move-back-to-the-city, are big mcmansions on the historic edges of town, which got built out in the 80s.)
As someone who’s driven through Springfield countless times: yes, there is absolutely a power plant of some sort in the city. It’s really hard to miss.
Maybe, but you can get the true Springfield effect in one of the few areas of Pennsylvania there isn't a Springfield. US 422 West heading towards Reading, you go up a small rise and...
Assuming that Homer got the job and the house when the show started in 1989 makes the whole thing a lot more plausible. Standard union pay scale for a 40+ year career and staying in the same house for that long would be enough to let anyone live comfortably.
While not 'rap' specifically, there's a large literature on the migration of lower class language to the middle and upper class. Particularly African-American English. From 'high-fives' to 'cool' to the word 'rap' itself, not to mention 'straight up', 'lit', 'woke'. These have all migrated to standard English, through what linguists call 'covert prestige'. Put simply (and crudely and simplistically), it's cool to be gangsta, even for rich people.
Also on the level of accent. In the U.K., while Received Pronunciation is replacing a lot of regional languages among the middle classes, it’s also been very much affected by features of those accents, and that applies to the RP of even the high aristocracy. Prince William’s accent has numerous features like widespread glottal stops and l-vocalisation that traditional TO lacked, and others like linking /r/ that we’re present but disparaged. Interestingly (possibly?) Kate Middleton has a somewhat more traditional version of the accent, suggesting maybe that as an upper-middle-class person she is having to “try harder”, to echo the book under review here.
And of course "traditional" RP is just mid-late 20th Century BBC English, which in turn would differ from the upper and upper middle class accents of earlier periods. If you read The Forsyte Saga, you'll find Galsworthy (via one of his characters) musing on the differences between the accents of members of different generations of the same upper middle class family and their close associates in the 1920s.
Absolutely. I think the version you hear in period dramas is usually the mid-century version you describe - with /əʊ/ for the GOAT vowel rather than the earlier /oʊ/. But the version in some textbooks and online sources can still be pretty close to the early 20th-century version described by Daniel Jones. It can have weird results - I once met a Polish film director whose flawless English was in an accent that I don't think I had ever heard from a living English person, only from old Pathe news broadcasts!
As for modern RP, I think Geoff Lindsey describes it right -
What is southern Britain if not the Home Counties?
Pure RP accents are a thing of the past, but there are still recognisable public school accents (that is, what you get after attending a given public school followed by Oxbridge, or being socialised to speak as if you did).
My issue with it is that British doesn't make sense as a description of a group of accents. Obviously people talk about British accents in normal usage, but in linguistics it's not very coherent: RP has more features in common with Australian accents than with Highlands Scottish accents, and Northern Irish accents have more in common with North American ones than with southern English. Contrast this with North America, for example, where there is a wide variety of accents but the vast majority share more features with each other than they do with any other major accent group.
British English <I>grammar</I>, on the other hand, is a coherent category, so I dare say I'm fighting a losing battle on this one.
Elleston Trevor, who also wrote as Adam Hall for the Quiller books, once mentioned that after living in the US for decades and thinking the British Upper Class was still what he'd grown up with. he listened to the Queen on television in the 1990's and- she didn't quite sound upper class any more.
Interestingly (or not) I don't think this is conscious modulation on her part as a result of coaching from PR types. I grew up in the village where Diana Cavendish (Claire Foy's character from Breathe) lives, and she sounds pretty similar to the Queen now and I suspect sounded pretty similar to the queen 50 years ago.
Oh I'm certain that's right. Most people's accents change a fair bit over the course of their lives. Hardly anyone has the RP of the 1950s anymore, so it would be hard to maintain it.
I don't understand the technicalities of this stuff, but here's a story that backs up Geoff Nathan's take fairly well: My closest grad school friend is pretty posh: private (though not "public" i.e. super-elite) school in Cambridge, successful academics for father and uncle (at least one of whom was Oxbridge at one point I think), can trace her ancestry back to major 18th century Scottish aristocrats who were disposed after backing the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, her aunt once tried to donate the family sword that she will inherit to a museum. After schooling in Cambridge, she went to University College London (to do Classics, perhaps inevitably). A few years later, when she met up with high school friends again, they, who had all also been to university in London had all mysteriously managed to acquire *London* accents. Which is to say, relatively speaking, more working class accents. (In the UK, the more your accent is tied to a place and the more specific that place is, the more working class your accent, generally speaking.) She knew that this was obviously not just a natural process, since she sounded as posh as ever. (I can confirm that she does not remotely have anything like a London accent.)
This isn't the only incident of accent suspiciously failing to match class background I can remember from Oxford either. The poshest sounding guy I met there was a second-generation Greek immigrant from, by his own account, a pretty rough area of Birmingham. Meanwhile, there was at least one pretty damn rich guy from Brighton was a suspiciously strong London accent. Having said that, traditional snobbery DEFINITELY still exists as well. A philosopher of maths from Glasgow (so very strong working-class accent, even though her family weren't all *that* badly off) told me that she was teased mercilessly at Cambridge as an undergrad. (This would have been maybe 2003-11 depending on exactly when she went.) And also told by friends that since she could pull of a convincing imitation of RP, it was a mystery why she didn't choose to speak that way all the time.
I don’t really get what your friend means by not a natural process. It’s completely typical to pick up the accent of people around you. I started at a state school and had a somewhat North London accent, then moved to a posh-ish school and developed a modern RP. I may switch a bit depending on setting, but the basic process is largely subconscious for most people.
The fact that it affected your friend less could be less “natural”, not more! She may be deliberately resistant to change. But of course it also just affects different people differently. I knew a woman from
California who lived in London for 30 years and never, to my ear, lost her accent at all.
You're right of course that I can't *prove* my friend is right. But 3 years is really quite a short amount of time for a big shift. And I don't think she meant that they had absolutely consciously switched exactly, as that they were driven by a desire to sound cooler, even if that wasn't conscious. It's worth saying here that specifically London accents would not necessarily be all THAT dominant at a good London university, given how international they are.
I see your point. Three years is plenty, but I think it's probably impossible to disentangle "desire to sound cooler" from being subconsciously influenced by the accent of people who you think are cool. My hunch remains that it's largely subconscious, just because most language change is, but I don't know.
One thing I've noticed is that the younger brothers and sisters of my privately-educated peers tend to have accents much more touched by Multicultural London English (MLE), the working-class London accent that has largely displaced Cockney and other traditional ones within the city. MLE emerged in the late 70s / early 80s, and affected that cohort from around the mid-nineties, while leaving us (inevitably less cool) older siblings with unaffected modern RP accents. Modern RP includes things like lots of glottal stops and l-vocalisation (something like "animu" for "animal" before a consonant) but lacks many of the distinguishing MLE features. At the time I assumed that the younger siblings were "trying to sound cool," but I think that was oversimplifying the dynamic a lot.
My best friend - who I met at Oxford - is the son of a motor mechanic from the North-East. When I met him in his first year, his Northumbrian accent was fairly mild (certainly milder than his father's) but very much noticeable. Over the course of the following couple of years in Oxford, his masters year in Cambridge, and his professional career in the arts in London, it's receded to the point of being a barey noticeable twinge - except when he speaks on the phone to his parents, at which point (without any conscious choice on his part) it returns. People who meet him now assume he's just posh. I also knew a Canadian girl who went to an English boarding school from 13. She sounded RP as all get-out until she phoned home, when she started abooting like a South Park character.
Is there a hypothesized mechanism here? Countersignalling? ("I'm using this word to demonstrate that I can use the word and still be unambiguously considered high class")
I think it's just kids growing up. 30 years ago, I was all about Snoop smoking blunts and talking about how much he didn't love hoes. Now I'm the boss and kids think I'm a nerd. Whatever they're into now will be boring and bougie in 2050.
I wonder if this is perhaps an example of what's called Nostalgie de la Boue:
<i>"Nostalgie de la boue is a nineteenth-century French term that means, literally, ‘nostalgia for the mud.’" "Nostalgie de la boue tends to be a favorite motif whenever a great many new faces and a lot of new money enter Society. New arrivals have always had two ways of certifying their superiority over the hated ‘middle class.’ They can take on the trappings of aristocracy, such as grand architecture, servants, parterre boxes, and high protocol; and they can indulge in the gauche thrill of taking on certain styles of the lower orders. The two are by no means mutually exclusive; in fact they are always used in combination.”</i>
"Likewise, there are typical working-class vacations (cruises), gadgets (those watches with all the dials), and so on and so forth. None of these seem too weird on their own, but taken together they suggest a picture where lots of working-class people have lots of money and go on Caribbean vacations all the time."
Bias disclosure: I'm likely in Fussell's upper upper, so claiming that I'm more in touch with the working class than you is laughable. That said, I think Fussell is right here; working-class people *do* go on cruises. They just go into credit card debt to do it. A good treatment of class in the modern day would have to have an entire chapter on debt, and each class's treatment of it.
The upper class refuses to go take loans, since they have no need to. The middle class is extended credit and treats it carefully and responsibly. The working class is extended credit and abuses it. The lower class is not extended credit at all.
Huh? There is an entire class of bail bondsmen, appliance salesmen, used cars, and payday lenders that make a mint off loans to the "lower" class. I can see you've never had a neighbor who had to stop parking his car in his driveway to avoid it being repossessed.
I'm new to posting on this blog and...wow. It's true, you people really do have no idea whatsoever how the other half lives. You just make something up and believe that. :-(
Hi, new person. Phrases like “you people” are basically verboten here. Also, “I can see you’ve never...” is bad form. You can’t actually see that: you just get the sense that this person is out of touch. But they said that: the identified as upperest class. So being aggrieved at their ignorance doesn’t add a lot to the discussion. It’s sufficient and preferable just to point out they they’re substantially wrong, and explain why.
I think that would be a serious misread. There are communication norms in this space that can be adhered to by anyone of any class, and they’re certainly not native to any particular class. I’m pretty much doing the opposite of othering you: I’m taking the time to inform you of the social norms, and trusting in your fundamental reasonableness and good faith. You’re rather othering crotchety crank by taking one silly thing he said and creating a grand theory of “you people” out of it. Baseless assumptions are the heart of objectification
Uh, this is tricky. Harland isn't wrong. In "prole" culture you say it loud and brash and then fight about it. Metacogging about social and conversational norms while going out of your way to carefully signal welcomeness is a class marker from Harland's perspective.
I feel rather like a longhaired greasy freak who just drove into town with out-of-state license plates, and got pulled over right away by Cletus the county mounty. "Bwah, y'ain't from 'round here, are ya, bwah?" he says, shining his maglite into my eyes to check if they're bloodshot. Having had my license run through the computer and a momentary detention while a K-9 unit is called so it can sniff over my car, I'm being released with a friendly admonition that "this how we do things in this-sheah parts." Thanks kindly for your time, officer! I then immediately proceed to the nearest convenience store to purchase a "Blue Lives Matter" bumper sticker.
To be frank, almost everything you've described in this thread is a class norm. You think conflict, brashness, "rude" behavior, etc. are inimical to the development of healthy discourse. Taking a measured, faux-polite rhetorical position that is desperate to signal its rationality, calmness, and willingness to engage is at the absolute core of the educated elite's conception of the world. Those norms get elided on the internet, where a counter-norm of genuine acrimony and animosity on the part of the educated *young* elite is more predominant, but it doesn't mean what you describe is not a traditionally higher-class phenomenon.
The difference between the *young* elite's version (which is characterized by GENUINE disdain) and the "prole" perspective on discourse is that in the latter, being strong, brash, and having fights about everything is just... normal. People do it all the time. You and your best friend have furious arguments, maybe even physical fights on occasion. That's just life. Doesn't mean you don't like somebody -- in fact, you probably do it most with the people you love.
If I'd been writing more carefully, I would have added "...by banks." I was thinking of "loan" in the sense of mortgage rather than payday lending or used car loans, although you'll see in my response to Lexie that as soon as this other group of creditors was pointed out, I acknowledged it.
The upper middle class is extended credit and treats it responsibly. The middle class varies a lot in that department, which is one reason they're precarious.
> The upper class refuses to go take loans, since they have no need to.
The upper class doesn't *take* loans, they are *given* loans, which are used (by financial planners and other "servants") to turn illiquid wealth into funding for day-to-day expenses. Most importantly, the upper class and upper-middle class have no need of *unsecured* credit (a true upper probably having no concept of it; upper-middle knowing about it but avoiding it), putting them almost entirely out of reach of the kind of debt spiral that can ruin other classes.
Actually, the truly wealthy use quite a lot of debt, because as you acquire assets, many of them are illiquid. It's a middle-class conceit that economic safety is being debt-free.
This is right! Similarly only the middle class are obsessed with owning everything. The proles can't afford to and the upper often can't be bothered with the upkeep!
While I hardly grew up in the upper-upper world Fussell is describing (though my grandparents and to a lesser extend parents surely did), a lot of the particulars stood out to me as right on the money (the food, names, boring social scene almost by design, locations, house/furniture descriptions). However, in my life I've seen less of the "nothing to prove" attitude, as even the upper class scene I'm a part of is full of social jockeying (particularly around marriage) among people who don't have to ever think about money. I'd also anecdotally report sky-high high rates of alcoholism and depression that I vaguely theorize stem from most people being poorly equipped to handle a completely vacuum of purpose or financial drive to succeed.
This is a concern I've had about UBI in the future as well. People seem to assume freedom from work will lead people to commit their time to artistic passions or other virtuous ends, but the (admittedly not at all representative of the general populace) people we currently see experiencing freedom from work are hardly living this utopia, despite their piles of money.
Sigh...artistic passions. Only a tiny number of us humans have such desires, those of us high in the personality trait of Openness. The rest of us might make things, but according to our wants and needs, not because we have some burning passion inside. The real tragedy occurs when discussion is dominated by high Openness individuals who assume that anyone who doesn't feel the need to create art must be some kind of soulless insect. :/
In my career I’ve had periods of intense pressure when you’re super busy and periods of downtime, both at the same compensation level; as well as periods of genuinely worrying about money. Of the three, well compensated downtime is in my experience the most likely to result in depression and substance abuse.
I suspect in the UBI laden u/dys-topia, some clever entrepreneur would gamify daily life in a manner that would give people meaningful goals to shoot for in cases where people are not creative enough to fill their time in useful ways. Ideally something smarter than "how many likes can I get on instagram".
Here's a video by The History Guy about John B. Calhoun and the real Rats of N.I.M.H. Fascinating research that predicted the rise of hypersexuality, sociopathic elites, soyboys, incels and ultimately the end, as young rats didn't learn courtship behaviors and could not breed. Afterwards the rats never recovered, even when introduced to a healthy society.
I've read some heavy criticism of thatt experiment; that Calhoun only got that result once in all his rat and mouse experiments, and that particular one started with four mice that were already closely related and all he ended up with was some unlucky effects of inbreeding and mutational load.
You mean like the legions of starving artists, pre-tenure academics and other people who - in present day - sacrifice status and material comfort to work on things they're actually interested in?
I think we'll manage just fine, really, though there'll probably be a "lost generation" of people who were so used to getting orders they'll have no idea what to do with themselves.
This is a good reason why we need to legalize hallucinogenic drugs. At least you can alter your state in a manner that doesn't cause your liver permanent damage or send you into a bad addiction spiral.
>even the upper class scene I'm a part of is full of social jockeying (particularly around marriage)
I'd be interested to hear more about this
>I'd also anecdotally report sky-high high rates of alcoholism and depression that I vaguely theorize stem from most people being poorly equipped to handle a completely vacuum of purpose or financial drive to succeed.
I think there's actually a surprisingly large gap between the amount of wealth that precludes one or one's children and grandchildren from needing to work and the amount of wealth that can sustain philanthropy as a full-time, decades-long endeavor.
Specifically, a US stock market index fund can historically get you, say, 3.5% return on average after inflation, meaning that you you can invest $4M in one and live forever on the increases, but only if you're willing to live on $120k/year. Of course, the stock market is high variability, so you'll have smarter forms of wealth management (which means more money to start with). You also will probably want more than that total if you want to live the upper class life style. But it's still in the range of $10M to live a very comfortable life without ever working. However, that amount will not fund a charity for very long, especially not indefinitely.
Fair enough... maybe they could volunteer for philanthropic organizations full time? Making the world a better place is a great way to acquire a sense of purpose ;-)
They absolutely could! But that might put other class signals at risk, such as 'not looking like you're trying' and 'not getting too much education'. Plus, ignoring what a mess the world is in, and especially ignoring the people who are suffering the most from that mess is also a long-standing highest-class tradition. Stepping out of that bubble is a slippery slope ....
I suspect Fussell has a lot of blind spots due to his own middle class position. It might look like the Upper Class has nothing to prove, but that's not true, it's just that they have nothing to prove to the likes of _you_. Their status games are invisible and incomprehensible to your middle-class mind.
I'm thinking that the Lower Class and Upper Class have just as many status games going on as the Middle Class, but Fussell is only sensitive enough to detect Middle Class signals.
The way Scott describes Fussell describing the upper class gives the impression that they often have no conception of money whatsoever. It seems like this could lead to an embarrassing situation where, for example, someone with a net worth of $50 million accidentally buys a $100 million Pollock painting because they don't realize that they don't have $100 million. Have you ever heard of something like this happening? Or is there a mechanism to prevent it?
I think the mechanism is that the uppers don't really _do_ anything themselves, so whomever it is that handles their money (or the team of people that do, or even the several _companies_ that do) would prevent a faux pas like you describe (mostly).
And at that level – buying million dollar paintings – you definitely _can_ return it if, somehow, you couldn't pay for it. And there would be lawyers on retainer to protect against any consequences (tho possibly by paying the aggrieved 'merchant' off for their trouble).
Update: both generations above mine have already read it! One referred affectionately to "old fussy Fussell." They read it as somewhat satirical, and certainly inaccurate/unfair in places (for example, one person specifically objected to the "bland food" quip), but unfair in the same way that the Onion is unfair to the targets of its satire: even when it's exaggerated, it's exaggerated in a revealing direction. Could say much more, but maybe I'll save it for an open thread.
Some of my family were definitely in Fussell's working-class, especially back in the 80s, and it seems to be 100% accurate to me. They'd go to Vegas instead of on a cruise, but just about every description matches perfectly.
These days Vegas has been transformed until it resembles nothing as much as a stationary cruise ship. The buffets, the casinos, the shows, the comedians, the foreign underpaid labor...they're scarily alike.
I think Vegas also draws from plenty of middle class as well - at least compared to somewhere like Atlantic City or Reno. But lots of aspects of Vegas do seem to be the pinnacle of upper-prole.
Cruises and Disney vacations are certainly affordable (in the literal sense) for Fussell's "proles." It's just something you save up for over a longer time horizon or a special treat rather than something you just sorta do without putting much prior thought or planning into it.
I'd have to agree. Growing up in a very prolley household we went on vacation every year, but only to Disneyland twice. At the time (and still now, in my heart of hearts) I considered it the apex of all possible vacation destinations. You certainly can't afford to go there every year!
Working at Disneyland was my first real job and the employees (who are largely quite poor) go on Disney vacations themselves all the damn time because they can get into the parks for free and get gigantic discounts on hotels, flights, and yes, cruises (lest people forget that Disney also owns a cruise line).
I've never been to Disney Land... but my older brother worked at Disney World when I was a young child and my family went to Disney World several times during his tenure. I was too young to really remember much of those trips, but when me and my parents went in my teens, I remember it being a lot of quantity over quality... I personally find A day at Bush Gardens a superior vacation to a week at Disney World, or at least my teenaged self did... and being from North Carolina, Williamsburg is a much shorter car ride than Orlando.
I'm pretty sure at least some people do it – and I mean go several times a year – without quite 'saving up' for it in the normal way I think you intended. But I could be wrong – there are lots of ways to live more frugally, if one is willing to ignore at least some 'class expectations' (even as a prole).
There are of course different cruise lines for different classes. Carnival or Disney is different to Cunard or Viking, say.
Non-prole cruises are generally filled with 80+ year olds who still want to travel to exotic destinations but find that air travel and dragging suitcases everywhere is getting a bit too exhausting at their age.
I don't think a working class person, even if poor and a high school dropout, is necessarily "low" class. As I said in another comment, the restraint in what you do...speech, clothes, decor...all that defines class.
Trump, for example, was wealthy and had (on paper) a fancy education. His manners, speech, tweets...these were what made him "low class". He showed no restraint.
Important line: "Donald Trump is not, like, a *rich man*. He's what a hobo imagines a rich man to be." So, "working class aesthetics" with "upper class" results.
Interesting - I interpreted amusement instead of disdain. Maybe that's just because it was communicated through comedy. I agree that he doesn't express any kind of understanding for a class perspective outside his own.
Trump talks and acts like a kid from Queens. That's part of why the elite hate him so much. He may have gone to Wharton and be a billionaire who lived on Central Park but he still acts like the guy in a working class bar who will slap the shit out of someone who gives him lip or disrespects him.
To many progressives and indeed elites of all persuasions, Trump is also the Prince of Anti-culture: mindlessly naïve American boosterism; conspicuous, 1980s-style unapologetic Democrat patriotism; repetitive and limited vocabulary; fast-food culinary tastes; Queens accent; herky-jerky mannerisms; ostentatious dress; bulging appearance; poorly disguised facial expressions; embracing rather than sneering at middle-class appetites; a lack of subtlety, nuance, and ambiguity.
In short Trump's very essence wars with everything that long ago was proven to be noble, just, and correct by Vanity Fair, NPR, The New Yorker, Google, the Upper West Side, and The Daily Show.
On the other hand, if Trump represents working-class culture (I don't think he really does) just why shouldn't that be a mark against working class culture? Like, Trump is someone who boasted about using the fact that he is famous to sexually assault people! That really is shameful, and if working class people really are more likely to ignore it in their judgment of him *as a person* (I'm not talking about deciding in whose interests he'd govern) then surely this reflects badly on working class culture. Ditto his attempts to constantly belittle and dominate everyone around him. These aren't neutral-in-themselves status signals that happen to be considered gauche because they have been adopted by particular social classes, but behaviors that genuinely and predictably hurt others.
I find a lot of people on the populist right *love* to entertain 'shocking' generalizations about the culture of various groups that liberals and social justice types consider oppressed, but then try to leverage exactly the same sort of 'don't punch down' norm that they otherwise mock when the criticism is aimed at the white working class. So you get a lot of 'but black people in cities really do have a culture that tolerates crime!' 'Muslim are more likely to be terrorists', but then moralistic shock about how snobby Jon Stewart is if he suggests people in West Virginia often believe dumb conspiracy theories. (This cuts both ways obviously, a lot of liberals want everyone to respect the 'don't punch down norm' except when liberals are talking about the white working class, which is equally hypocritical.)
Punching down is a concept in which you're assumed to have a measurable level of power and you're looking for a fight. Now, you can either go after the big guy who might hurt you, or go after the little guy who has absolutely no shot. Either way, you've picked a fight, but one fight is remarkably more noble and worthwhile than the other. Going after the big guy, punching up, is an act of nobility. Going after the little guy, punching down, is an act of bullying.
You comfort the afflicted, not the other way around!
Donald Trump is not afflicted, he's comfortable. He's not "the little guy," he just claims to represent them. Like every politician does. Dismissing criticism of a famous former president as "punching down" just because he shares an aesthetic with the working class makes no sense.
I wasn't slagging off the idea of punching down by being bad (often you shouldn't punch up either-i.e. judge-y tabloid gossip about the rich and famous is often just gross), just it's hypocritical deployment in a 'don't punch down against the groups I like, but it's fine if you do it against the ones I don't like'-way.
In any case, even if my reading is wrong, I'm not *lying*, I merely have a different interpretation than you do, of a remark which everyone knows the original of and can decide for themselves whether my reading is correct.
> Trump is someone who boasted about using the fact that he is famous to sexually assault people!
I really don't think that's an accurate (or charitable) interpretation of his statement, but I understand why 'everyone' jumped to it. (It certainly does _read_ and sound bad, especially weighed against present-day norms.)
But, yes, the literal interpretation of what he 'claimed' to do is in fact sexual assault.
Just to point out, other status-signals can also similarly genuinely and predictably hurt others. Like the Professional-Managerial Class trying to instead pull peoples' licenses or incite a SJW hatemob, or trying to snitch on you if you're doing something illegal but not necessarily unethical or in a 'grey zone' or morality ("so how old was she again?" or "that's a lot of cocaine to be doing before your surgery")
Class isn't about Upper is better than Middle is better than Pole. Class is about different ways of acquiring status. At a big university, who is better? The dean of the law school, the head of the archeology department or the head football coach?
If you answered law school, you're middle class. If you answered archeology, you're upper class. If you answered football, you're a prole. No answer is objectively right.
Trump had tons of Prole status (money, reality TV stardom, his name on buildings, hot women, conspicuous consumption), decent Middle class status, and almost no upper class status.
Agreed, I too share your read on cruising working class people.
Very interesting re your background. Is there still a live separate old money upper class culture? Or has it culturally largely merged with high upper-middle-class? Like, is there a class of younger people (not just old remnants) who have very different status signals than the high upper-middle-class? And if so, how is it different - eg still a fondness for things that require servants and British things?
Credit card debt? I can tell you never go on any cruises. You can get them for as cheap as $400. If you shop around and do a couple a year $800 each is not at all out of the question.
But you're right though, the cheaper cruises *will* have working class people on them. And so many of our proper folks feel nothing but disgust upon gazing on the faces of those lower than them in society, and will never voluntarily associate with them.
I'm pretty familiar with all the classes described here except for the 'upper upper'. I don't think I've ever met anyone like that. Maybe they're just very rare? Or wouldn't interact with me?
So to someone who is claiming to be in or close to that group I've never seen, is it real? And are Fussell's generalizations about it accurate? (I think his generalizations of the other classes I'm familiar with are reasonably accurate)
I imagine Fussell was inspired by a 1955 book by Nancy Mitford called "Noblesse Oblige" that drew attention to what was "U and non-U" in England: e.g., upper class people said "scent" while non-U people said "perfume." The book came with contributions from Mitford's snobby friends like Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and Peter Fleming.
Also I can't help but notice that ever since I moved to New England for my well paying professional job that was the result of high education, I've really been thinking of getting into sailing. And here I thought that was just Patrick O'Brian's influence.
That is kind of a mistake, though a typo on Scott's part or an honest to goodness faux pas, and I mean faux pas, as in what does it say about him, on Fussel's part. A Chris Craft is the genteel boat, though a new one is a bit declasse. A wooden one, the only kind really, from 1951 is the epitome of genteel. Especially if inherited.
There are three references to Chris-Craft in the book:
p.66: "Go-to-hell in spirit also are the sports or playtime trousers which identify the upper-middle class, especially the suburban branch. One common type is white duck trousers with little green frogs embroidered all over them. A variation: light-green trousers, with dark-blue embroidered whales. Or signal Rags. Or bell buoys. Or lobsters. Or anything genteel-marine, suggesting that the wearer has just strolled a few steps away from his good- sized yacht. Thus also the class usefulness of Topsider shoes, the ones with the white soles "for gripping wet decks." The same with windbreakers displaying lots of drawstrings. The Chris- Craft mail-order catalog will show you the look to imitate, but classes much below the upper middle should take warning that they're unlikely to affect this yachtsman's look with much plau- sibility. A lot depends on a certain habitual carelessness in the carriage, a quasi-windblown calculated sloppiness. It's almost im- possible to imitate, and you should have a long thin neck, too."
p.112: "Because it's the most expensive, yachting beats all other recreations as a theater for upper-status exhibition. But certain inviolable principles apply. Sail is still far superior to power, partly because you can't do it simply by turning an ignition key and steering-you have to be sort of to the manner born. (Probably the most vulgar vessel you can own is a Chris-Craft, the yachting equivalent of the Mercedes.)"
p.191/192 ("Indicate the class of each of the following: ... 2. A 50-year-old man on the deck of a 35-foot Chris-Craft, drinking from a can of Bud and attended by three luscious girls wearing halters and inexpensive white yachting caps. ... He's a high prole, and he's saved all his life for that horrible boat. If he'll take the caps off the girls and pour his beer into a glass, he might pass for middle-class, or even upper-middle if he gets the girls into men's old shirts with the tails hanging out."
He's right about having to know how to sail, the best being an amateur racer. The sort of boat a real deal old money upper class wasp, who was still living off the fortune piled up by his 19th century ancestors, in 1983, or in the dwindling numbers they still are around in now, would need to have is one of these, the ones from the 40's and 50's.
See, that's the boat you use to get to the cottage on the little island in the middle of the lake. Said cottage should have no electricity, although running water is good, and be weather-beaten. But quite large, with some 'bunkies' to put all the extra kids or visiting young people in.
And of course, both boat and cottage will be maintained by local people, not 'the family'.
Hmm, sounds like you're talking about the Thousand Islands or some 'camps' that are up in the woods away from the coast in Maine. The ones in Maine, I hear, usually grouped together, as in one will have neighbors.
I know one guy who got invited to go to one of those camps in Maine, and though I've read about the Thousand Island scene, I've never actually met anyone who knew anything about the Thousand Islands firsthand. I've driven through there though, and one can almost smell the old money if you look around from the bridges.
Sailboats don't fit under bridges. They're for people who live in houses next to the ocean and own their own marina slips. If you know how to sail though, you can get some good jobs if you hang around in Florida...rich people burn through deck hands fast and they always need someone new. You can travel for free and make some decent money if you can put up with being shouted at a lot. I knew a dude who got to spend a couple years up and down the Caribbean sailing other people's boats, and he said it was great being a fit single man in an ocean of old fat rich guys.
Owning a boat on Cape Cod or Long Island is very different from owning a boat on the gulf shore or a lake in the South-East. One significant difference is cost, plus the people who live in the location. Plus there's the type of boat, where a boat in New England is often going to be a sailboat, while the Trump-fan-owned boat is probably a motorboat.
I think that's one of the eye-popping ways I'm finding that readers of this blog are so monumentally out of touch with the rest of America that they mentally interchanged the word "boat" with "luxury yacht" or possibly "sailing vessel".
Boating isn't for the poor, but a 16 foot jonboat with a 30 horse ain't that expensive. You can save up a couple of paychecks and get one. People sell them on Craigslist all the time. Or some uncle is upgrading his boat and will sell you his old one cheap. Once you bought the boat, your only expenses are gas, bait and beer, and you can have a ton of fun fishing and generally being out in the sunshine. If you want a 25 foot center console, they cost about as much as a family car and aren't out of reach for plumbers or other deplorables. And if you actually are poor, or are just a tightwad, or the water is too rough that day, you go fish from the jetty. Lots of people do.
A lot of us *are* out of touch. If I read the dynamics correctly, the blog readers here mostly consist of people who either failed or refused to absorb current white-collar culture. We're less in touch with the white-collar class, and by nature of being rejects we tend to know even less about the working class than they do.
That said, I think most of us are pretty interested in learning more about the working class. We might be ignorant, but about this topic at least I don't think most of us are deliberately so.
If you're out of touch with current white-collar thinking, at least as expressed on the internet, you are odds on to be better connected to the working class than them to be honest. Other than honestly believing the working class to be the incarnation of Tolkien's orcs or so incapable of looking after themselves that they have to be institutionalized it's hard to see how you could find a more hostile viewpoint anyway. There seems to be a resentment that these people with their historical tendency to socialistic ideas and their rejection of modern liberal governance are a block to progress regardless of your political position within the middle class.
And yes, I'm strawmanning a lot there, but I think as a caricature it has some truth.
I remember the first time I spoke to an upperclass person in grad school. She told me about a $5000 Piano her parents got her for Christmas, and I was shocked. She asked me what I would spend $5000 on and I replied a boat. She said you can't get a boat for $5000, and I just replied, "You can't, but I can find a decent one on Craigslist for that." We clearly were picturing different boats.
Gotta be near water to have a boat - West Coast / North East have limited water and high population, so only the top e% can have them. In other parts of the country with more lakes and fewer people, boats can be more common.
Yeah...I mean here in Europe (Germany), boating certainly is a thing for the rich, but in the US or Canada it's more associated with the working-class...
My eyes lit up when I saw you were reviewing THAT book! I mention it all the time in my classes (particularly the sections on drinks, sweet being low class, and balls, smaller is better). I thought I was alone in remembering it.
I got "Class" many years ago and loved it then and still enjoy reading my dog-eared copy now. I like the strange combination of joking and semi-serious skewering of the American class system. He has a keen eye but also clearly isn't taking himself or his views too seriously.
And yes, Chapter 9 is weird and jarring. Either it's being ironic in a super subtle way or Fussell lost his bearings and fell into the trap of thinking you can escape class. His X Class are kinda like hipsters, thinking they're cool, which makes them even sillier than the other classes. I think he's being sincere, which makes Chapter 9 the weakest in the book. I find it almost painful to read in its oblivious sincerity. Still, overall the book is a fun read, I just ignore the last chapter.
The only way I can identify "good" wine is by asking two questions: "does it taste good?" and, if so, "would it still be good if it weren't sweet?" If yes to both, it's "good wine."
Good wine costs less than $10 and comes in two varieties, red and white. Some identifiable brand name is ideal but not required. Going for some specific type of wine signals nothing, because its presence alone signals a fancy occasion; otherwise you’d be drinking beer.
You should still shop around. My friends buy bottles for how they look when they could be buying good cheap bottles instead. It's not the money, it's the attention. Abandon your beerful ways, young padawan, and embrace the grape :>
Wine connoisseurship is woefully outdated in this time and era. We drink wines today that put the wines of yesteryear to shame. Instead of laying them down for years, we can drink them right away and they're fantastic. A $12 bottle of wine is better than what the kings of Europe drank a century ago. A $25 bottle is excellent and a $90 bottle is out of this world. Once you get above $100 a bottle, it doesn't really make much difference.
Just find out what you like and drink that. My family used to make fun of me for only drinking white wine - "it's like fruit punch!" Once I found out that what I didn't like wasn't red wine, but tannins, suddenly a whole new world opened up. Merlot! Pinot Noir! Malbec! And there's even a very good wine called Red Zinfandel that is nothing like that prole horror White Zinfandel. If you live in America we are now making the best wines in the world (just like we're making the best beer - fight me), and to heck with that French stuff. All the chateaux are being sold off to Chinese anyway.
The fact that he even has an X class might imply that he does not think the upper class (as he defines it) is worth aspiring to belong to. The X class is what he thinks one should want to belong to.
I think that one cannot aspire to become upper class (but one can set things up for one's children or rather grandchildren to become upper class) and Fussil knew it very well.
Yeah exactly. I kind of thing I myself might be a "X class", since I do not see myself fitting into any of these classes...ro for that matter, any subcultures or other "tribes"...
The preferences of intentional non-conformists becoming in-group signals for a new version of entrenched class structure seems to be as guaranteed and dependable a phenomenon as has ever existed.
Where does a critical mass of intentional nonconformists with uniform enough preferences come from? Is this just describing the genesis of new fashions within a class, since trendsetters are technically sort of nonconforming?
I’m from NYC and fairly young, basically everyone I know is aggressively nonconforming (which is an oxymoron, obviously). Half of my friends are rich kids pretending that they’re not rich. It was only when I went off to college that I met people from places like Miami and Los Angeles and learned that overt displays of wealth were common and non faux pas in other cities. No one I know would be comfortable flashing a new sports car.
No one actually intentionally nonconforms with the people they like - they just intentionally react counter to the people they think they don't like. All it takes is some young adults that live near each other to notice each other reacting against the same thing, start to like each other, and then start to subconsciously conform, and then you've got a nucleus for a new fashion to crystallize around.
I think this is describing one common method of the genesis of new fashions, though there's also another version where an existing fashion just develops and becomes a more baroque version of itself (with maybe the next generation slightly reinterpreting which aspects are the core that need to be elaborated as it continues to develop).
Weirdly, the word bobo that David Brooks invented has become a common word in french, you hear it all the time in casual conversation and it's in the dictionary despite the book never being translated in french.
[Totally pulling this out of the nether regions...] Maybe because at least one of the words it's made up from is actually French, so it was easier to preserve its meaning? In English, "Bobo" sounds like a clown or something. (As I just learned on Googling, in French, "Bohemian" actually seems to mean "Romani", or that other term for them that is now deprecated. And then again, "La Boheme", which is French even though the actual libretto is in Italian.)
Michael Lind’s article in The Bellows is pretty good on the contemporary politics of class https://www.thebellows.org/the-double-horseshoe-theory/ but that has less to do with the cultural signifiers you mention. (I’d phrase things slightly different than Lind but cashing out to the same thing: social positions can be mapped on a potestas axis and an auctoritas axis and those with both rule securely by variously allowing alternation between the Potestas Party and Auctoritas Party.)
Bourdieu did a bunch of shit with this (the cultural signifiers thing), all backed by statistics rather than individual observation, which probably means fewer things that are totally a figment of his imagination but probably less brilliant leaps like “Superb Owl”-type jokes being a thing forever. I assume it’s been endlessly updated but I haven’t followed the literature; I am *definitely* sure marketers have mapped this shit down to the inch and minute but that research likely isn’t public-facing.
Came to the comment section to see a Bourdieu mention, 10/10 not disappointed. If I recall correctly, he used multidimensional scaling or some other dimension reduction technique similar to factor analysis, which makes sense to me.
Also came here for the Pierre Bourdieu! It sounds like this Fussell guy read Distinction and decided he could apply the same conclusions to American culture while omitting any pesky citations to fussy French post-modernists. Which, fair.
IIRC, the thesis of Distinction is the (extremely French Marxist) argument that taste (in everything from paintings to food to flowers) is not just a function of class but a function of class *struggle* — i.e., the lower classes define themselves by liking the opposite of what the middle & upper like, the middle as the opposite of the lower, and the upper as the opposite of the middle. Also, Bourdieu describes an intellectual class not dissimilar to Fussell’s Class X, the entire aesthetic mantra of which seems to be fear of being seen as either middle or upper (but interesting, not lower) class — thinking of “Class X” as basically grad students and profs really clarifies this abstract category for me.
Indeed, their approaches are pretty similar. I haven't read Distinction (still need to finish Outline of a Theory of Practice lol), but my impression is that Bourdieu didn't lionize the intellectual class/"Class X" the way Russell did. He called them "the dominated of the dominant class" or something like that but better sounding and French.
Oh ha yes, that’s right! The whole dominant/dominated confusion matrix — I forgot all about that (it’s been over 10 years since I read it), but yeah, def you’re right that no class gets away with being “the best” in Bourdieu’s view. They’re all trapped in the same relational signaling game.
That book really blew my mind when I read it, for both the theory and the extremely determined empiricism. You should read it! Everyone should read it. I rant & rave about it to some unwitting victim at least once a month :)
"It sounds like this Fussell guy read Distinction and decided he could apply the same conclusions to American culture while omitting any pesky citations to fussy French post-modernists. Which, fair."
Almost certainly Fussell read Vance Packard's "The Status Seekers."
Trial and error can lead very much in the right direction, as long as there is fairly immediate and clear (works/doesn't work) feedback. Marketing is just a very very long series of experiments, with often tiny changes being tested out.
I've actually seen some marketing research up close, and I have to say, most of it is crap. They're still asking small samples (via surveys) about their motivations and behaviour (insert psychologist eye-rolling).
I read another 'statistical' class book after reading "Class" – I don't think it was by Bourdieu.
It was terrible in comparison. For one, there were too many clusters and not enough 'dimensions' (with a handful of fairly distinct categories in each).
It just didn't seem informative or insightful at all to learn 'you might be on average 63% like one of several dozen statistical clusters'!
Steve Sailer has shared some good info about this kind of thing – he apparently _did_ do a bunch of market research work in a past career life.
Wow this post takes a book that I thought was an absolute joke and actually says a lot of interesting things about it! God I've missed SSC.
(I didn't actually read the book myself, a housemate did, and then she had us take the living room class quiz, which is where I got my impression that the book was an absolute joke. But like, also it was really fun to Goodhart on that quiz – an indoor citrus tree was worth hella class points, so now we have a lemon tree....)
Our group house did the same thing (took the quiz communally - not bought a tree). Our minimax strategy was to tile the house with pictures of the United Kingdom.
You realise for those of us here in the UK you've just made us incredibly classy so long as we don't draw the curtains. However, whilst my bedroom window looks over a tree-filled valley to the parish church on the hill opposite, the views of the windscreen glass factory from other windows might be less than classy?
What’s the story with the UK usage? In the US I a associate it with a particularly absurd flavor of pretentious snootiness. Unsurprisingly I think I first encountered it in academia.
It's pretty pretentious in the UK as well. I use it because I prefer the flow at the start of a phrase to the monosyllabic while, so it's a marker of my education I guess. In some northern dialects I think it's normal usage though.
It's also usual usage for Indian formal documents, which indicates a certain status (Indian English being a great mirror in which to try and understand "proper" English).
I've been told that in British usage "whilst" is deprecated, but extremely common, while in American usage it is uncommon and looks like a Britishism. Looking it up a bit more now, I see that it is deprecated in British academic contexts because it looks pretentious (and is common in the same sort of student essays that begin "Since the dawn of time, ...")
It really depends on flow, as Watchman says below. If it fits the meter of the sentence and the register of the text then it’s not pretentious, just tasteful. If not, it’s really jarring.
I think whilst in the UK is just a synonym of while which people use idosyncratically. It's not particularly indicative of class or whatever. I've seen people describe semantic differences they use to determine whether to use while vs. whilst but these aren't consistent from person to person.
I've recently been house shopping and couldn't help but have Fussell's voice in the back of my head as I looked around. One house was nice, but it had a cathedral ceiling in the living room. How many points does that lose me, again?
And I've never even read the whole book, just the quiz.
> the simpsons has been on so long that they went from a fairly standard single income middle class family with a house and three kids to an impossible fantasy world where a thirty four year old high school grad with no inheritance can have any of those things and still be ‘lazy’
The absurdity of the Simpsons' wealth was lampshaded in Homer's Enemy, season 8:
> Grimes: Good Heavens! Th-this is a palace! How c-- how can, how in the world can you afford to live in a house like this, Simpson?
>
> Homer: I dunno. Don't as me how the economy works.
Granted, Simpsons started as a parody of older sitcoms that played the trope unironically. But things haven't changed that fast.
The "premium mediocre" essay is a good window into exactly where the author sits in the class hierarchy, but I don't think it's much of an analysis in itself.
For the most part, the author uses "premium mediocre" to mean "things that seem fancy to proles, but which you and I know are actually naff", like "the finest bottle of wine at Olive Garden" or "Starbucks".
But the concept becomes fuzzy, because "extra legroom seats in economy" don't actually seem fancy to anyone but do offer tangible benefits. And the author sometimes claims to be premium-mediocre himself, but I'm sure still wouldn't be caught dead at Olive Garden.
There is a restaurant in Las Vegas, I think it is the steakhouse at the Four Queens, that is ripe for the New Yorker to do a rip-roaring roast ridiculing the working class. I went there and it was a parody of what poor people think rich people eat. They had the salad cart, the comically oversized pepper grinder, the white coated waiter, all of the things you never see in high end restaurants.
The menu was hilarious, with tired old dishes deplorables might have seen in a movie once, like Oysters Rockefeller and Bananas Foster. The salad was iceberg lettuce, thousand island, cherry tomato. My mother ordered her prime rib medium well. The wine list had a plethora of $75+ wines that were obviously there for show, along with the $14 chardonnay that you were supposed to get. They had a Beaujolais nouveau at $25 that I snapped up immediately because I love that stuff and have the tannin-avoiding wine palate of a teenager. The whole time I kept thinking what a secret this place would always be because anyone who could successfully ridicule it would always choose to dine somewhere better, missing a golden opportunity to punch down. Sort of the opposite of the Dunning-Krueger Effect.
The first part definitely ventures into meme/just-for-fun territory, like an overwrought tweet-thread. However, I do think he gets into more interesting territory once reaching the different class levels around, and adjacent to, premium mediocre, along with the 'psychology' that led to the voluntarily creation of these classes
I agree, and I also thought that Rao got most of the signalling part of it a little off - I'm not sure that "convincing my parents I'm ok" would really be much of a factor outside of a narrow children-of-immigrants demographic and puts the cart before the horse - what he's trying to do is justify upper middle class signalling values to parents who think success=money.
"I like Venkatesh Rao’s work, because it gives me a feeling of reading something from way outside my filter bubble. Like it’s by a bass lure expert who writes about bass lures, secure in the knowledge that everyone he’s ever met considers bass lures a central part of their life, and who expects his readers to share a wide stock of bass-lure-related concepts and metaphors. But Rao writes about modern culture from a Bay Area techie perspective, which really ought to be my demographic. I guess filter bubbles extend along more dimensions than I thought. Anyway, everybody’s talking about The Premium Mediocre Life Of Maya Millennial, and people who know more about bass lures than I do assure me it’s really good (it also says nice things about me!)"
> I would kill for somebody as keen-eyed and trustworthy as Fussell writing about the 2020 class system.
Talk to any halfway-competent marketer or read the NYT Style section or even Forbes—this stuff is all over the place and not especially hard.
Tressie McMillan Cottom writes moderately insightful things about the beauty industry in particular.
Read anyone who uses the term “petty bourgeoisie” or people who complain about gentrification or cultural appropriation.
Some right-wing critiques of the meritocracy also note some of the things you’re talking about. I’m thinking of a couple essays by Helen Andrews but there’s better stuff out there.
Unfortunately I can't downvote this. NIMBYs, scolds, and hall monitors are are our most trenchant cultural critics? I routinely see such people among the first rank of stultifying, status-obsessed groupthinkers who pollute discourse with yass qweens and claims
that they're committed to doing the work.
Granted, I've never heard of any of the people you cite, but I sincerely doubt they have anything like the craft that Scott attributes to Fussell.
lol @ getting so mad then saying you’ve never heard of any of those people.
Saying that people are status-obsessed and pointing out associated behaviors and constructing taxonomies based on cultural signifiers is hardly “most trenchant cultural [criticism]”—that’s the point. This is basic ethnography plus snark. I guess to a certain audience that’s the most satisfying sort of intellectual material to consume, but the level of understanding of culture and society being demonstrated here is hardly extraordinary. Again, marketers and trend-followers are fully competent in this kind of analysis.
I think you're right that the _info_ is there, somewhere, in all of the 'data' that you mention, but it's _not_ laid out in clear, and hilarious, prose like in this book.
I've read a few blog posts that got pretty close, and all riffing on the same theme as the book (or even reacting to others blogging about this particular book IIRC).
What Scott wants – and I'd also enjoy – is a good insightful synthesis of the raw data that you're pointing at.
Great review of a great book. I will offer an anecdote I have of a friend who's actually "upper class" in the sense that he (and his girlfriend) comes from real money. His parents are industry leaders from several decades ago, so you'd assume their kids acclimated a bit to that wealth. However he still does, of course, display some upper-middle class behaviors, like hanging out with me (heh).
He went to an old money school down south. He works in NYC mostly because his job seems fun and he feels the need to prove something to their parents, but it's clear given his family that he doesn't really need the money. He supported Trump in 2016 on uncertain-if-ironic-or-not grounds (I met him through a college friend, and he would insist to my college friend's face that the Trump banners were ironic, but admitted to me later that they were totally serious and he thought it was funny to tell people they were ironic). He would throw parties occasionally where nobody comments on anything ever, except maybe some tacky photos on the wall he put up as jokes. The people, mostly other investment bankers, would hang around and talk about god knows what. One time he came to a party I threw and used my point & shoot camera to take photos of his butthole (hilarious but crude, like how Fussell describes the upper class as "barbarians").
When he and I hang out, we never talk about money, he might tell me about a fun tax evasion scheme. When we talk about work, it's always about the content and never about how we feel we're being treated, etc. We went to see the Belmont (classic horse race in Long Island) once on an extremely hot day. He bought a bunch of property in coastal New Jersey after Katrina because it seemed like a fun thing to do, to become a slumlord. Stuff like that.
So hopefully this is a bit of a picture of what class ascendancy looks like in contemporary times -- acknowledging upper middle class taste, and then ignoring it, mostly because it's a fun thing to do, and doesn't matter at all to you personally. It may be worth comparing this to what I feel like the current "Class X" is: weird internet and twitter users who do their own thing and attempt to form their own alternate subcultures away from media consumption. The shallowest level might be Elon Musk and crypto fanboys who deviate just a little bit from consensus (although I assume that's more common in the Bay Area), leading to weirdo NRx types and eventually becoming hard to classify because that's exactly the goal, to avoid "class-ification".
I do think that it's on-the-money, though, to draw a relationship between "Class X" and "upper middle class", in that countercultural leanings do not necessarily cut across preexisting class lines. I see it as more of an affordance permitted by having the opportunity and capital to really cut away from one's familial position. The lower classes must, by nature of their material constraints, remain closer to their community, so the potential cost of deviating and ignoring the things their family and friends value is higher. This isn't to say that it doesn't happen--plenty of lower class people can and do cut away from their communities, plenty of middle and upper-middle class people stay onboard with what their families believe--but that it's harder to really "carve your own path" if you have a good reason not to.
There’s likely no way to overcome the kind of snobbishness talked about here, but I should say that being aware of how closely a lot of my habits track my class has made me way less moralistic about taste, politics, etc. An older white business owner who talks up QAnon is just as much executing his script as overeducated-underemployed me is. I think Marvel movies are lame (he said, anxiously signaling) but my normie friends who like them have probably just experience less online brain damage than I have. And so on.
There’s something discomfortingly antihumanistic about internalizing this but it’s also a nice turn down the heat to the endless feeling of anxiety differentiation enmity &c.
I think looks outside like Fussell's book and the resulting conversation here are immensely valuable, and if anything help in meeting other people as people and not shallow caricatures.
So when someone takes the time to build a taxonomy of class, isn’t the point to then do something with that model? In industry there’s a lot of effort that goes into customer segmentation because it helps sell the right things to the right people. What do people like Fussel seem to do with their class model?
Some would say that a greater understanding of the world is its own reward. Moreover I think there's three great benefits to understanding class:
Firstly, you start to recognise that many of the strongly-held opinions that you hear around you about whether things like cathedral ceilings or Oxford commas or Marvel movies or Hamilton or Donald Trump are very good or very bad are not _really_ about the object-level issue at hand but simply about the speaker asserting their place in the class hierarchy. You can be a lot more chilled out about these sorts of arguments when you recognise this.
Secondly, you can start to recognise these patterns in your own thoughts and start to compensate for them. Do you _really_ want to write that thousand-word screed about how bad it is that Hugo Boss clothes increasingly insist on having "Hugo Boss" logos visible on the outside, or is that just a waste of time that your brain is telling you to do because it's dreadfully insecure that someone might mistake you for a member of a slightly lower class?
Thirdly, with enough understanding of class you just _might_ be able to occasionally and very poorly pass yourself off as a member of a class that you're not, with possible tangible benefits. With a lifetime of dedicated effort you can learn to pass for one class lower or higher (e.g. lower-middle to middle-middle, or vice versa if that's what floats your boat).
Upper class here, which is definitely middle class to say but I think it's ok since I'm anonymous. I would say that the one big change to the class system he outlined is that new money can definitely buy its way to the upper class. This was unthinkable for centuries but in the money obsessed current age is quite doable. Of course there is a world of difference between the my pillow guy and Henry Kravis so it's far from axiomatic that great wealth equals great class prestige. But where you used to see museum, presitigious university and music hall boards stuffed with Cabots and Astors those seats have been completely occupied by billionaires with maybe one or two exceptions for old times' sake. Get on a couple of those and you have risen to the top of the class hierarchy.
Old money types like me will always have an honorary place in the upper classes but the other reason that the upper classes have opened up for the billionaires is that the traditional old money is in the process of drying up. Old money used to be defined as 19th century or earlier in origin, and was eventually opened to make way for the descendants of the robber barons of the Gilded Age. But with relatively few exceptions, it stopped opening up after that, and fortunes made in the latter half of the twentieth century really don't get you much status (look no further than Trump). Meanwhile those proper old money fortunes continue to get divided generation after generation so I guess it was inevitable that the billionaires with some decent taste would have to refresh the ranks.
One last quibble I don’t think the observation that education doesn’t matter to the upper classes rings true. Perhaps it’s a New England thing, but almost all proper old money families have gone to the same boarding schools and ivy colleges for at least a century or two. It ‘s more out of respect for tradition than being considered brilliant, so maybe that’s the distinction with the upper middles.
Yeah, for the upper class it seems that higher education is more about an acculturation process (i.e. becoming a good, upstanding Harvard Man or something) rather than strictly a process of shoving as much information in your brain as possible in 4+ years.
It'd be interesting to test this by looking at what proportion of graduate students are upper class vs middle class (obviously proles will be rare, though I know one personally). My guess is that you'll mostly see middle class students (tending to upper middle class); the upper class kids are instead going to an elite school for the 4 years of networking and culture, and then peacing out of academia
From what I've read, ivy league colleges have two types of students, who do not socialize with each other. The rich kids who are there to meet other rich kids (and also get an education if they feel like it), and the smart kids who are there on scholarships. Only the very rich can afford the tuition without a scholarship.
I was one of the "smart" Ivy Leaguers, and it's true that I didn't have much contact with the real upper class. However, I did have an eye-opening moment when one of my team members pulled out some Gucci-branded thing that looked somewhere between a wallet and a handbag. (The fact that I don't know what it's properly called no doubt speaks volumes.) He made it clear that his father just buys him expensive things like that for no particular reason, since conspicuous consumption is the in thing among the Chinese upper class.
The British system is of course ideal for the eldest, less so for the rest. And we can do that here, it's just not generally the done thing. You can always cut out those who annoy you but it's fairly common to distribute the assets relatively equitably.
But the problem with division of property through equal inheritance is so obvious that you've already pointed it out -- it's much worse for the *family*, driving them into poverty when they could have lasted at the top indefinitely.
And the technology to avoid this wasn't exactly unknown; it was already an ironclad template from the source of all classiness, Britain. What happened?
I think (but don't know for certain) that the difference stems from the indivisibility of the British estate. There was only one primary title and one great estate, which generally held the bulk of the family fortune. It's just not practical to divide that up. The bulk of the American fortunes were made say from 1850-1920. They were of unprecedented size and divisibility. So a father sitting down to provide for his descendants probably envisioned giving each child a fortune with plenty to spare. And by tying up the assets in trusts looked after by conservative Boston money managers, it was expected that the system would last for a very long time. And for the most part it has, because most trustees have always worked off the cardinal rule of distributing only the income of the trust, not the principal. So most of the great New England fortunes are still in existence, they just pale in comparison to the neighbors who are managing a hedge fund. I would say the New York old money has dissipated more rapidly though. Greater extravagance, fewer restrictions on withdrawals, and more speculative ventures have tended to weaken many of the big New York families.
> I think (but don't know for certain) that the difference stems from the indivisibility of the British estate. There was only one primary title and one great estate, which generally held the bulk of the family fortune. It's just not practical to divide that up.
I think this gets the causality backwards. There's nothing difficult or impractical about dividing family wealth held mostly in land; this is how China operated. Equal inheritance there was compelled by law, and regularly drove the greatest familial landholdings into insignificance.
(Chinese titles of nobility are, to our eyes, weird. As far as I've seen (not that far), they don't attach to any particular lands. They also don't inherit in what you would think of as the normal way; all sons of a man who holds a particular title receive a different, lesser, title, until eventually the title is wiped out.)
So I would say that the "indivisible" estates and titles are technology the European nobility developed in service of the goal of not dividing their property through inheritance, not causes that created the effect of not dividing noble landholdings through inheritance. Look at all the effort expended in early modern Europe on preserving estate entailments, so as to prevent the estates from being divided through sale!
> by tying up the assets in trusts looked after by conservative Boston money managers, it was expected that the system would last for a very long time. And for the most part it has, because most trustees have always worked off the cardinal rule of distributing only the income of the trust, not the principal.
I've been wondering how this applies to modern stockholdings. If you own a lot of land or buildings, it's easy to say that the "real estate" is principal and rental income is income, and this makes a great rule of thumb for not impoverishing yourself. As long as you follow the rule, you'll always own a lot of land, even if some other harder-to-follow strategy might technically have been better. And if you own a lot of dividend-paying stocks, it's easy to say that the stocks are principal and the dividends are income.
But if you own stocks that return value solely through price appreciation, there is no distinction between income and principal.
I think your second point, or rather your reply to my second point, is quite interesting. Unfortunately it also gets far too close to money matters, which are strictly off limits. It's hard to believe, but really we mostly just get checks sent to us and the amount rarely varies. What goes on within the bank is pretty hard to tamper with. I'd assume it guides the manager to buy more utility stocks and less Tesla, which is understandable but regrettable.
Charlemagne's empire split up because Frankish law required partible inheritance, and no one had the authority to change the law. Later French kings figured out a workaround: The king appointed his oldest son co-king. When the father died, the son would become sole king, with inheritance laws never coming into play. After a while this practice took on the force of tradition and therefore law, and they dropped the pretense of having co-kings.
Rather than China, my mind immediately went to Timur Kuran's description of the Islamic world (more specifically, the Ottoman empire). In "The Long Divergence" he claims that egalitarian inheritance law (which pre-dated Islam but was set in stone afterward) prevented something like the Western European rediscovery of incorporation (originally a Roman institution, you can read about that in Harold Berman's "Law & Revolution"). The European tradition of primogeniture meant that there were entities with large, enduring amounts of wealth outside the state. In the Islamic world, wealthy men were more likely to marry polygamously, which meant even more division. The only way to keep a large amount of money was in a charitable "waqf", but those were much more restricted than corporations. I go more in depth on the book here:
This is where you run up against the deep water differences between America and Britain. Despite everything, there is still a democratic ethos in the bedrock over here.
One of Thomas Jefferson's prouder accomplishments and one of the first things he helped push through in Virginia after Independence was the abolition of Primogeniture (what you're talking about) and Entail (what prevented a dissolute heir from parceling up the family fortune in his lifetime).
There's probably more to it, but it's telling that partible inheritance is how the Republican French do it, too.
"Meanwhile those proper old money fortunes continue to get divided generation after generation"
Is that still as much of an issue as it was 40 years ago? With various asset classes doing so well and people having fewer or no children it seems like the fortunes could be growing on a per capita basis.
I think that's a fair comment, but remember the money was generated a long time ago and for the most part locked up in trusts. The rules of the trusts vary widely but as you'd expect they're invested conservatively and have had to sit through the Depression, the seventies, the GFC etc. So it's really case by case, but no matter what the growth in the original family fortune divided by a generally increasing number of descendants will never keep up with the new Silicon Valley/Wall Street fortunes.
Long term stock returns controlled for inflation are what, 3% per year? If so, the assets only double every 25 years. That's about one generation. So you need to have at most 2 kids on average and ~0 spending to preserve a family's wealth...
Can you describe some of your upbringing? What are some things that your parents tried to teach you about your place in the world and how to maintain it?
your question actually got me thinking/reminiscing a bit, which has been interesting. I can't get into too much detail, but I think what might make my "story" different from some others is that we are a very New England family. That's generally where the oldest of old money comes from, but it's quite a distinct upbringing. We were brought up quite strictly, managed by governesses during the day and shipped off to boarding school from the ninth grade. But we saw a lot of our extended family, and really by now almost all the old money families in New England are at least distantly related. So while our family was very social contacts were also fairly isolated to a pretty small group. There was never any talk of money, and anything like a sports car or designer labels would never fly. And I guess to Fussell's point, it wasn't like my family said we're rich so we should drive station wagons instead of Porsches. Understatement was just naturally more appealing and flashiness has always repulsive. Another New England "oddity", in addition to the understatement, is the general (though oft ignored) desire to be productive. You weren't supposed to go into business and be a success, but you were supposed to carve out your purpose in life. That traditionally was being involved in politics and charities, or developing an intellectual passion. So I'd say that's what my parents tried to instill in us. That, however, is increasingly difficult. The time when names like Saltonstall and Winthrop would be an electoral asset are over, and as per above, charitable endeavors are becoming constrained by the size of the trust funds, and in any event could never compete with the likes of the Gates Foundation.
That probably didn't answer your question and it was certainly meandering, apologies for that.
That "productive" instinct is called Conscientiousness, and is one of the Big 5 personality traits. High conscientiousness is tightly associated with being politically conservative.
My upbringing was fairly proletarian in character, though my parents were never financially unstable.
My parents emphasized the importance of stable family structure, retirement planning, and respecting authority figures. Though my parents are politically moderate, they hold activists and non-profits in contempt as "vain" and "indulgent" people. This distaste makes sense in light of my parents' disinterest in the public square – they feel that all unstructured time should be directed towards home and family life.
My parents' aspirations for their progeny include property ownership, spouse (NOT a "partner"), grandchildren, and a comfortable salary. Enormous material success or cultural capital do not exist in this vision. Obligations to kin and legacy are the values necessary for success.
I did not take social class seriously until my freshman year at a local high school, when I realized that my classmates's parents had (1) actual intergenerational wealth (2) advanced degrees from boutique institutions, cultural capital, and a global perspective. Feeling ashamed, I acquired as much cultural capital as I could. My performed mien was the only thing I could alter, and I managed to sport a carefully understated wardrobe of New England "preppy" attire by purchasing the right second-hand clothes. Of course, I never repudiated my humble roots (my classmates did not let me forget my origins.) I did blend with the WASP-y wallpaper, though, and often went unnoticed, which I preferred. I'm sure that few people have the experience attending a public high school this homogeneous, but the experience certainly altered me. I remember falling hopelessly in love with a girl – at this point I had improved my attire but not my attitude – and after some fun dates I irked her with a comment about how " 'X Chain Restaurant' is great" and immediately became single again. Her father holds several prestigious literary prizes; it is for the best that I did not meet him, as I doubt I could hold a conversation with a member of the literati when I was fifteen. (I could at this point in my life, though). I still experience simultaneous attraction and revulsion towards the upper-middle class.
Unless the fertility rate is higher among old money families than the general population or old money families are having children outside old money networks, that money will be concentrating, not dispersing. In developed countries, legacy populations are having so few children that they are shrinking, not growing.
One thing I have often wondered about the American class situation is how seriously to take the whole Daughters of the American Revolution thing. I'm not American and when I was a child, I remember a family gathering in which a big deal was made about a handshake between a distant relative of mine and another distant relative who fought on opposite sides of the Revolutionary war. They took a picture for the local paper. I often wonder what happened to all the Royalists who staid behind in America rather than repatriate and whether there are hints of those Royalist sympathies in the families today. Or, does everyone claim to have a "fought with" George Washington story?
Sorry for the late reply but just saw this. The DAR and Mayflower Society, and several other of these sorts of ancestral societies, is usually a marker of middle class. Having ancestors that came over on the Mayflower or fought in the Revolution is somewhat common among the upper classes (I have both) but joining societies to boast about it (or taking the somewhat cringeworthy photo you mention) is not. The Mayflower Society is particularly tricky, since naturally it's much smaller than the DAR since it was just one boat full of ancestors rather than a war full. But the religious zealots who arrived on the Mayflower came mostly from the merchant class, or their associated servants. I don't believe there was any nobility. So they were decidedly downmarket roots. Of course once they settled their descendants had a whole continent to exploit so many made great fortunes afterwards. The DAR folks are much more heterogenous, and certainly there were many wealthy families involved in the war. But those 18th century fortunes, while nice, were almost never enough to keep a family in the upper classes for long. The great fortunes were almost all made in the ca 1870-1920 period. So proper upper class members today invariably tie their ancestry back to the fortune makers of that period. If the founder of the family fortune had Revolutionary or Mayflower ancestry, then that was a small added bonus. The big bonus was finding noble or royal ancestry rather than American colonial ancestry. That rarely happened though, so industrious early generations following from the fortune makers almost always invented these connections and wrote detailed ancestries bragging about them. The New England Genealogical Society's library is positively groaning with these faux ancestries, which did grant the families lots of class points. Today there are mostly viewed as the butt of jokes, though.
Thanks for all those insights. It's fascinating to get it first hand. Every so often you hear about the DAR on US tv shows and it was hard to know what to make of them. It sounds a bit like our United Empire Loyalist who are granted a few honours such as a post-nominal UE to their name. I have only one friend who uses it and it does look a bit odd, but then I live in a very urban liberal milieu and maybe it's a real status symbol along the north shore of lake Ontario.
The Mayflower business and being able to trace your family back to it always seemed to be very confusing. I think as an Anglican, I have a bit of a bias against the idea of "nonconformists" in the upper class and certainly wealthy merchants from the 1800s. But I also remember spending time with a distant relative who's family had been rich since the 17th Century in Virginia. In grade 8, I remember being impressed that he had a guy who was hanging around with him who's job was to travel ahead to open up his house for his arrival, but looking back, he had the coat of arms of his aristocratic european for-bearers engraved on the hubcaps of his Cadillac. It's hard to imagine something more gauche than that. I remember that my grandfather wouldn't let me hang out with them.
Your grandfather was a very wise man! The hubcaps really do sound dreadful, although you'll find many old ancestral homes in the US festooned with the purported family crest. Unfortunate since it's almost always a false connection.
What's quite remarkable is that this fellow did, in fact, have the ancestral link to the coat of arms. I guess he had the right to use it after a fashion as someone in direct male descent from the arms holder. I don't know if you Americans really recognize those things. It's just remarkable how tacky it had become. Without getting too philosophical, our family experience has reminded me how ephemeral this concept of the upper class can be. Four generations from an English title or an Emerican fortune (being generous it's probably 2 generations) and you might be hanging on to the middle class by your finger nails. What you are left with is the grandchildren of the old upper class telling stories to college kids in bars about what it was like when they were kids and their grandparents were on top of the world.
It reminds me of someone who read Wodehouse and then translated that into observations about socioeconomic strata.
The curious part is the observations that seem to match some of the real world behaviour. I feel it's more akin to astrology though, there's always enough signs to point to an understanding just about accurate enough, but with enough holes that the standard deviations are crazy wide!
Loved this. Really wasn't sure where you were going to take this but the very end is quite an interesting perspective on how class shifts/is defined in our modern society.
Also the right hand picture in the profiles is Reagan, surely?
Lastly a quick diversion on rhododendrons - The comedian who observed that is does not sound like a flower. It sounds like a siege engine - "My Liege they have rhododendrons! All is lost!"
It's shockingly accurate when you think about it. Indeed much of our current political realignment is driven by the change in relative status between these groups.
a child of an scotts-irish engineer and a mother with a bryn mawr education, i had the pleasure and privilege of taking Fussell at UPENN for 18th century English lit. (lots of Boswell and Johnson).
I think its interesting his son Sam Fussell, went into bodybuilding.
however, some people are aware of the whole "bodybuilders aren't necessarily good at fighting" thing. My grandfather (a former boxer) said basically that bodybuilding is a form of posturing or "showboating" and not really useful in a fight.
Sam Fussell’s book Muscle is really good and worth checking out. He would tell bodybuilding friends that his father had worked in a nail factory and was dead instead of admitting he was a Princeton professor. After graduating from Oxford, and starting bodybuilding because he was intimidated by city life, Sam started cosplaying the working class.
A 2021 version would be unlikely to repeat Fussell's complete neglect of the question of race (an omission I already found remarkable when I first read it in the mid-'80s).
I suspect it would make the model *vastly* too complicated - races tend to operate in part as sets of classes (e.g. the African American middle class), and as a (non-behavioural) class marker (Americans (unfairly) tend to assume black=underclass (poor scary criminals) until proven otherwise). I think (although I'm white so I'm not sure) they also have their own internal class-like structure while people also get categorised into the closest majority-race class. With some mutual exceptions you'd expect (you can't be in the African American working class and the white majority upper class), but not all (you can be a Bengali Dalit upper-middle class neurosurgeon), because the internal boundaries are defined differently. Attitudes to race are probably also a class marker (hence, as always, Trump).
What seems interesting to me about this is that class seems to be defined almost entirely by taste. Perhaps that's just the lens he chose to explore it, but class as I'd defined it always had a relationship with power and status.
Surely Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, as people with immensely vast fortunes and high profile businesses, must have more power and influence than many of the people he is defining as upper class. Could no amount of that break them into the high class category, even if they imitated high class taste and manners?
And if this upper class is largely invisible to us all, is their standing as cultural elites only supported by the opinions of their own insular groups? If the basis of class is social consensus then I think most people would perceive the social status of a highly successful and well known person who acted with some amount of decorum as upper class. Does the dissenting opinion of the secret upper class automatically exclude them from it?
I'm tempted to think of this invisible upper class as not the upper class at all, but some other subculture that while surely having money and power through personal connections, by excluding themselves from the public and influence in general societal messaging, loses out on the upper class definition.
Otherwise we cede them the power to define upper class, which is a lot to surrender to people with brass door knobs.
That said, taste can be an interesting subject in itself, so as long as we know that any given meaning of “class” is or isn’t just referring to consumption signifiers, you can still have a decent conversation using it
I think this is just another way of saying that not all forms of privilege yield the same sorts of power. All the male privilege in the world won't give you white privilege. All the white privilege in the world won't give you male privilege (or female privilege, in the many contexts where that is significant). None of that is to say that it's impossible for a non-white person to pass as white and get white privilege, or for a trans person to successfully transition in a way that gets them that gender privilege (in at least many contexts). Money and class are two more dimensions of that. They're two separate ways of getting certain kinds of power and authority, and money is usually more significant than class. But that's not to say that class in the sense discussed here doesn't matter.
Avoiding this sort of confusion is why you need a monarch. Senior royals are paradigmatically upper class, and the question of the status of any particular billionaire can in principle be resolved with reference to the opinions of Her Maj (unlikely to be directly forthcoming, but sometimes discernible) or Phil (apt to not merely come forth but knock them about the head).
I think that there are exceptions in the case of Musk and Bezos with their $100+ billion fortunes giving them power as individuals in their own right, but there are probably less than 50 such people in the US. Once you get down even to single digit billionaires, their wealth and power is dwarfed by the aggregate of the old money upper class around them.
Part of it is also that that upper class set used to be in more positions of genuine power (look at the Kennedys and other political dynaties), and over time that has decreased, but they still have the patina of power by cultural inertia
"Destitutes and bottom-out-of-sights eat dinner at 5:30, for the prole staff which takes care of them wants to clean up and be out roller skating or bowling early in the evening."
My reaction: Huh! Growing up we always ate dinner at 5:00, and we weren't destitute. My mom was a schoolteacher, were were middle class!
"Fussell describes cruises as the working-class vacation par excellence and griping about them as a popular form of middle-class signaling."
Huh...growing up I saw a cruise as one of the coolest, most extravagant vacation I could think of. We never went on one because that was for "rich people." When my parents finally went on a cruise for their 25th anniversary I thought it was the kind of luxury that sort of event called for. When I went on a cruise for the first time I was kind of embarrassed about it, not because cruises are lame but because who did I think I was, spending all this money on a fancy cruise when I'm still in my twenties and have student loans left to pay? I was worried my family would be a bit scandalized.
"Closely related: the more technology something has, especially weird gimmicky "Space Age" technology, the lower-class it is."
Hmmm...*Remembers time we bought Dad a space age "Turbo Cooker 5000" that we saw in an infomercial for his birthday.*
"These are people who...visit Disneyland (and accept its mystique at face value)"
But it's the happiest place on Earth!
I went into the post thinking class in the US is all hooey, but it's become more and more obvious that I grew up in a very prole household, and am still pretty prole today even though I work in a white collar job.
Cruises DID used to be high-ish class. In that "Love Boat" era, when the jumbo jet replaced the steamship, but luxury cruise ships still existed. By modern standards those ships are dull and tiny.
In the 90s marine construction techniques took off and they learned to build gigantic floating hotels holding thousands. Economies of scale became applicable and you could get a 4 day cruise for $400 if you sign up for their marketing lists.
Second the recommendation to look at David Brooks' Bobos in Paradise. He nails the value attached to natural / organic persisted until the noughties, the Veblenian signaling of sheer inconvenience to maintain is evergreen, the elevation of factory built environments, and more. Also, the nonce term "Bobo" has stuck
A very specific study of Washington DC's status-ranking is This Town (Mark Leibovich, 2013). Given that politics requires eagle-eyes for detecting even slight shifts in power, it's a pleasure to read all about the fine details of what's sometimes called Hollywood for Ugly People
I really like Scott's book reviews because I'm interested in the content but don't like reading books very much.
I think Scott does justice to the author, while also providing salient counter points. It feels like a discussion he is having with the author, and indeed, I feel like when Scott writes like this, the authors have replied in the past.
I have to be careful to decide what I believe between Scott and the author. If I only read Scott's review, it is so incredibly persuasive, that I just become his Follower and only consuming content without learning.
While I think this book is fun and interesting, I do not see preferences by class as a very telling concept. I think most people choose the entertainment, style of boat, or clothes based on learned preferences (stemming from upbringing) or availability within their budget.
Humans find patterns in anything and we love grouping things and people into imaginary groups. But I don't think upper class person Z does things for any reason other than "growing up I liked it" or "it's what makes practical sense given my budget". Ditto for lower class people. Enjoying bowling, while typically enjoyed by lower class people, is probably done because it's fun and they were exposed to it. I think upper class people would enjoy it just as much. Ditto for going on cruises.
Where Scott adds his own thoughts is on patterns of classism in the way we look down on people with bad grammar, or that aren't being environmentally conscious. While I agree that looking down on others is not good, I would not say that this is evidence of a class divide (I know lots of grammar snobs of the lower class) and rather that this is just based on each individual (not arbitrarily grouped into classes) person's own upbringing. Perhaps the perceived class differences are the Barnum effect at play here.
Don't get me started on my thoughts on generational differences and their uses (and misuses) in marketing.
I read this book right around the time it came out. One of the largest enduring effects was that when I speak of someone dying, I always use the word, "died." I never say "passed away" or use any other euphemism. Thank you for that, Paul Fussell.
The thing I remember about Class X was the mention of expats. The rest of that "bobo" stuff was just passing fancy, but being an expat was and is a bit more of a timeless designator of something than what you wear or how you play team sports or how you carry your baby.
I liked Fussell's observations and style at the time, but I wouldn't read it again, and I don't think of it as a terribly serious book. I'm surprised you put the effort you did into reviewing it, just as I was when you reviewed "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." I read both when they came out...I enjoyed both at that time in life...and each had a mild influence that makes me smile when I think about it. But neither -- in my opinion -- warrant this level of critique. I don't get it.
What exactly makes Fussell's "upper class" the upper class, as opposed to a specific clique of mostly-irrelevant rich snobs? Do they collectively control more wealth than the nouveau riche? Do they have a lot of pull with government and/or the media?
(I guess one possibility is, they were the upper class in 1983 but their influence has significantly diluted since then.)
I don't think its as much about how much money they have, but how they behave. It's not that the nouveau riche control less money than the "upper class" its that the "upper class" behaves in a certain way, has certain mores, and is recognizable as a distinct subculture.
I'm not contesting at all that they have a recognizable distinct subculture. My question is, what makes them "upper" and the middle class "middle", when most of the richest and most politically powerful people in the country are what Fussell would call middle class?
I guess the middle class come from the middle. Bezos parents had much less money than he does now. Old money upper class families have been that for a generations.
In Britain the Upper Class is very clear and defined. The Queen at the top, then Dukes, then Marquises, then Earls, then Viscounts, then Barons (then Baronets, then Knights, but that barely counts as U). If you don't have one of these titles yourself then you can at least point to a nearby family member with one; if you can't, then you're not the Upper Class.
The Upper Class in America is based on desperately trying to imitate this kind of structure without having the benefit of formal titles or a monarch to give it all legitimacy. I am assured that an American Upper Class does exist, but I've never seen it myself.
They're the upper class by pure definition, not necessarily by actually having more influence or control. They're descended from people who definitely had more influence or control, and they definitely still have some (or else they wouldn't be able to maintain that lifestyle), but they're not definitionally the people with the most influence or control.
That makes some sense but using the term that way puts it a bit at odds with what I think most people would think of when they hear the "upper class". If it's purely a matter of subculture something like "old money" would convey it more clearly.
Yeah I feel like if this is a set of people nobody else knows about or interacts with then it almost makes more sense to describe them as an insular subculture mostly outside the main class system than as occupying an apex position within it.
One of the weird notions in contemporary cultural life, particularly among self-described geeks/nerds, is that upper crusters are going to the opera and listening to Mahler all the time. Which is just... not real. They watch capeshit and Star Wars the same as everyone else.
In the UK, Covent Garden is U, the Coliseum is non-U. Cadogen Hall is U, the Royal Festival Hall (with the whole of the South Bank) is non-U. The Proms are more U than one might expect, partly because of the geography.
Don't the Circle, District and Picadilly lines rather squash that geography? I don't see how that could overcome the fact that tickets start at £6.50 (for the mosh pit).
A significant part of the prom queue lives within walking distance. Indeed, when I lived in Kensington, I prommed a lot more than I do now. Apart from anything else, one can pop round to take a look at the state of the queue.
The Royal Albert Hall itself is rather vulgarian, and of course the point of the Proms is to make music available to the masses. Then again, the point of Eton is to educate poor people. There's something about promming which appeals to a certain sort of upper class person.
I suspect that it depends a bit on the programme. One should avoid anything too overtly populist but also anything which shows too serious an interest in music.
Nice review! I loved this book when I read it (at UCSC in about 1984-5, that should say enough) and I found that—at the time—it really did open my eyes quite a bit. I think the one thing that I take from it that sticks with me still, regardless of the specifics of class signaling, is that *wealth does not really allow one to transcend class*. In both directions, though "poor nobility" probably don't get very far on their friends anymore! Watching US media in the past decades, there are always more examples of low class with money trying to "be classy" and proving their original status, just in greater scale.
I read "The Cult of Smart" and it makes a good case that intelligence is hereditary. One might expect that "grit" or whatever may also be hereditary. So I wonder if class stratification is just the expected end state for any meritocratic society(?)
The book you're looking for is "Coming Apart" by Charles Murray (I haven't read it but I've absorbed bits by osmosis).
This fits awkwardly with Fussell's work. First, because he's claiming the upper upper class have very few redeeming features. Second, because he's claiming that wealth/success doesn't really cause class transition - to some degree, a prole who succeeds on merit will just end up a rich prole, marry another rich prole, and have prole kids.
On some level I'm afraid to read a book by Charles Murray. What happens if I end up agreeing with him on something? (And I'm only half joking.)
FWIW, I grew up in a blue collar home. I'm now a pretty high earner at a tech company. My wife is a second generation immigrant -- her parents were doctors. So I've definitely moved class from an income perspective. I guess, arguably, I'm still a prole though.
But this is probably why I find these topics so important.
Educated people who are scared to learn things. My goodness gracious this blog is an eye-opener. Aren't authors supposed to challenge you? There's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything.
I think this isn't so much about being scared to learn things as being scared of the reputational consequences of being known to believe things: Charles Murray is best known for "The Bell Curve", which argued among other things that differences between the IQs of people of different races in America are partly genetic, so he is seen as racist and therefore Evil, at least among the conspicuously anti-racist progressives who are common in the middle class, so being seen to agree with him at all can be taken to imply that you are likewise racist (cf. some of the discussion of the New York Times article on SSC, e.g. https://twitter.com/mattficke/status/1360638327830032384 or https://twitter.com/_moonstorms/status/1360638974268637184 ). (Since TimG is commenting on this blog, I assume he doesn't think this way himself.) Also, while "challenging" the reader is seen as positive, in political terms (at least in middle-class progressive social contexts), it's expected that people will be challenged in that way by leftists in particular: being challenged by socialism or the latest form of anti-racism is seen as positive, since you're at least learning new things in a socially or politically unthreatening way and at best becoming more moral (again, in a middle-class progressive moral worldview that sees racism as evil), but being challenged by ideas on or past the conservative edge of the Overton Window indicates to such people that you're too stupid to understand Progress and possibly an ideological enemy. (Scott made this last point a while ago with the "fifty Stalins" analogy in https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/ , and I think this is correct and endorsed by him even if much of the rest of that post isn't.)
"Delores is a big supporter for equal pay for equal work. This is the same policy that all those extreme feminist groups support. Extremists like Delores should not be taken seriously -- at least politically."
> Also, while "challenging" the reader is seen as positive, in political terms (at least in middle-class progressive social contexts), it's expected that people will be challenged in that way by leftists in particular
They’re not scared to learn things, they are being conditioned to avoid wrongthink by a handful of bullies who see them as excellent victims because of their openness to ideas and lack of social inhibitions.
It requires a bit of doublethink, when you know someone can convince you of something yet you choose not to believe it.
When such a person's personal interest is at stake, they get cured of doublethink real quick. Same thing with the ostentatiously religious (but I repeat myself).
Just to be clear: this was a joke. The NY Times "profile" of Scott made him out to be a white-supremacist by linking him to Charles Murray and "The Bell Curve."
One of the most worthwhile ideas I've come across is "interestingly/entertainingly wrong". There are people who I've read, who haven't changed my mind, but I've still learned something seems-true-to-me from them, or gained a new interesting way to look at things, even if it's an ultimately wrong one.
Staying away seems like overt cleanliness. You don't develop perspective and turn into the intellectual equivalent of an allergic.
I used to teach philosophy, and I'd tell my students to let themselves be persuaded by the author's argument. That's how you come to understand things at a deeper level. So many of them were afraid that they'd never climb back out. The Queen in "Through the Looking Glass" may have believed six impossible things before breakfast; I've believed some really horrifying things for weeks or months at a time, til I could find a way to argue myself out of them (or let smarter people argue me out of them).
If that's what he's implying, I think he's very wrong about the kids in particular. Those rich proles are quite likely to send their children to elite educational institutions that acculturate them into an entirely different class. If you went to Eton (or Westminster, or Cheltenham Ladies College) and Oxford (or Durham, or St. Andrews) and your friends are aristocrats and you largely share their mores, you are probably not a prole, and I'm sure there are analogues for the US. Now, certainly this kind of transition into the true upper class is rare, but that's probably mostly because the upper class is very small. Other family transitions are far more common.
Oh come on. Rich proles are not sending their kids to Eton and St. Paul's, and if they did they'd likely have a bad time and wouldn't come out with upper-class mores. That's a tough enough journey for ordinary middle-class kids. That move takes two generations (or more).
It sort of depends how you measure. My paternal grandparents came from prole backgrounds, but were no longer proles by the time they started to have children and make a lot of money (I think it's almost impossible to remain a prole in Britain while being as academically gifted as they were). Their sons went to Westminster; I'm not sure about my aunt but it will have been somewhere analogous. Their descendants are mostly upper middle, but I think a pretty good case could be made for at least one uncle and his two children as upper, and a stronger one for my great uncle's descendants (my grandfather's brother; they made the bulk of their money in business together). So people who were born proles absolutely do, in some cases, send their kids to those schools.
People who are still proles even after being wildly financially successful, I honestly don't know. Frank Lampard Senior sent his son to a minor public school, and leading footballers in his day did not make close to the money their present day counterparts do. Would it really be so surprising to find Harry Kane's kids attending Westminster or St. Paul's in fifteen years' time, assuming they could pass CE, or some school for upper class thickos if they couldn't?
This would be an edit if such things were possible here: I think it's also worth noting that my grandfather retained significant prolish traits throughout his life: he was brash, boastful, reckless, ostentatious and extremely fat - almost Trumpy in presentation (though very different in his character, which was exceptionally warm and generous with a sincere interest in other people). He had to make three fortunes because he lost or spent the first two; his social connections with the elite were almost all rooted in the shared high/low love of horse racing. I hesitate to call him a lifelong high prole because he qualified and for a while worked as a chartered accountant, and because he loved classical history almost as much as the gee-gees. If my grandmother had never met him, she would have followed an absolutely classic high IQ high conscientiousness prole child-middle class adult path.
I actually played against Frank Lampard for my minor public (or rather “independent”) school.
He was... better than me.
Given that the wages are now higher than that of most bankers, let alone lawyers and doctors, I wonder if we’ll start to see the phenomenon of the upper-class footballer? I.e. with traditional upper-class attributes that someone like Lampard lacks (or hides). I’d guess not, because the culture of football will still militate against displaying those features.
Lampard comes across to me unlike most other English footballers, and like many English cricketers and rugby players. Certainly not upper class, but perhaps upper middle and certainly not prole. The actual poshest English high level footballer I know of is Patrick Bamford, but his poshness is unrelated to football (the B in JCB stands for Bamford). The poshest person in football anywhere is probably Luís André de Pina Cabral e Villas-Boas, and I'm pretty sure his upper classness is part of the reason he failed as a manager in England but succeeded everywhere else (where they don't care as much).
I can only imagine what playing against Lampard as a kid was like. When I was in my early 30s and in good shape (and quite good by the standards of random people) I played in a Sunday 6-a-side league. One week, our opponents showed up with only 3 players due to hangovers. However, those players were two kids from the Southampton youth team and a county U19 player. We got absolutely, embarassingly destroyed. I also played quite regularly in my gap year with a guy who'd been in the Galatassaray youth system. You could leather a ball in his general direction from a couple of yards away and he'd stop it dead in front of him like it was nothing, every time. And I assume the gap between guys like that and a future Ballon d'Or runner up is at least as big as between them and me.
Definitely not. Both my grandparents were what Fussell would call "high prole" (my grandfathers were a shopkeeper and a tradesman). Most of their children and the majority of their grandchildren ended up UMC professionals or MC.
A prole who succeeds on merit can imitate middle class mannerisms (first awkwardly, but it's a skill like any other), pass them to their children, then after a generation or two nobody can tell the difference.
Getting to an upper class on merit seems difficult, but I actually think it advances one funeral at a time - the old upper class becomes increasingly irrelevant and gets replaced by the noveau riche, who get increasingly snobby.
There's also significant intermarriage between the upper and upper middle. I think it's fair to say that the Middleton girl's kids are, on balance, upper class.
Class stratification is the expected end state for class-stratified society. Attributes you inherit (both through genes or socialization) place you at a certain stratum. It's not some sort of justification for stratification, it's just tautological.
Note: this is completely different from "best qualified for the job" motte of meritocracy. Doing the specialist job you're uniquely qualified to do does not yet make you a different social class from your unskilled labor peers. Class stratification makes you a different social class. If you conflate the two, don't be surprised when opponents of class stratification also feel justified to conflate the two and rally against meritocracy. (Especially when in an ossified class-stratified society the merit required for positions is often really just class standing anyway.)
This only works if the main determiner of success is competence. But starting point wealth makes a bigger impact, and even more so in the past. If you randomly give money to people a few hundred years ago you'd see their descendents being wealthier, purely by having the ability that others don't to make investments and leverage that capital
This kinda sounds like it's the sort of thing that is based on six people the guy knew in high school, but one part made me chuckle, because these are the names of the cross streets in Back Bay (the neighborhood where Tom Brady used to live):
I read that book early on and thought it was hilarious. I still do. It's less a social commentary than a humorous description of how the "classes" he defined see each other, and of the various classes' sense of how the other classes view them.
I loved "prole collar gap" and the accompanying illustration, without even bothering to ask myself whether it's a real thing. And blue and and pink shirts (oxford button-down, of course) are better the paler they are, and if you really want to flaunt your upper-classness, especially to other upper-class people (i. e., if you you are looking to impress the elite at a cocktail party, even if you are not one of them), make sure that those shirts don't have pockets. Because upper class people hire people to carry pens around and write things down. And if you were really one of them, of course, you wouldn't have to be told.
Those are all 35-year old memories, and I think I'm remembering correctly, although the last few lines are my restatements of what I took from the book, though he did not state them all explicitly.
And I thought his description of upper-out-of-sight and lower-out-of-sight were poignant. His description of the diet of the uppers in general was hilarious and in its own way pitiful.
A few notions: The upper upper class *has* to be conformist and have stable preferences. It's a way of constraining behavior in the hope of keeping its members from burning their fortunes on personal whims. Relatively cheap eccentricity is alright (British but not American?), but building wild new mansions and getting tired of them isn't.
Delany claimed (probably in Babel-17) than new culture comes from criminals and artists. See above about upper upper class conformity plus what you said about middle class fear. Teenagers would also be sufficiently outsiders to have a chance of being inventive.
Do people really care about what others think as much as Fussell says they do? This is an honest question -- it's not an attempt to signal that I'm part of the "don't care what people think" class.
I would expect that in practice a lot of the norms end up being internalized. For example, when I proofread my own writing and find misplaced apostrophes (or the wrong the[re/ir/y're]), I cringe not because "someone else might see if and judge me" but because It's Just Clearly Wrong And How Could I Do Something Like That.
It's possible that he is trying to signal this while fooling himself into thinking that he's not, if you accept Robin Hanson's theory of self-deception as having evolved to help with self-serving norm-bending (this is described at https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/homo-hipocritus.html ).
The amount people care about what other people think is a primary impact of 3 of the big 5 personality traits: Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Which means that the amount someone cares about what others think varies tremendously based their personality. Someone extroverted, agreeable, and neurotic will spend an enormous chunk of their energy worrying about it. Someone introverted, disagreeable and emotionally stable will have to actively make themselves care enough to be marginally socially acceptable (or not, and simply be known as a curmudgeon with the associated consequences.)
There are very practical reasons to care. Your ability to successfully perform class behaviours determines job opportunities, potential friends and partners, how well you are treated in a number of contexts. A purely self interested rational actor would adopt those habits as a result, before you even get into psychology
"I would kill for somebody as keen-eyed and trustworthy as Fussell writing about the 2020 class system."
Fussell's writing style reminded me of 'Spent' by Geoffrey Miller (though that's a decade old now, and about signalling psychological traits rather than class).
The "less"/"fewer" shibboleth is an interesting one for me. My super-"classy", super-British education somehow completely failed to teach it - perhaps I just missed the relevant couple of days at school - meaning I was completely unaware of its existence until college.
As a result, it feels even more artificial to me than most of the prescriptive rules, but unlike those I also struggle to code-switch into applying it. If I'm in a formal setting I can Susie-and-I and whomever with the best of them if I have to, but "fewer" takes real effort, at least in speech. This to me supports the idea that the rule is still somewhat unnatural to English and has to be consciously learnt.
Also I've started noticing a tendency (though this could easily be the Recency or Frequency Illusion) for people to use "greater" in a parallel way with non-count nouns, rather than using "more" for both - perhaps in an attempt to make the system more symmetrical? Though it can't be fully implemented - "We should buy greater cheese" clearly isn't possible, or at least not with the right meaning.
There's a UK supermarket (I think it may have been Waitrose or Sainsbury's) that changed its "10 items of less" checkouts to "10 items or fewer" after customer complaints.
It was both Tesco and Marks and Spencer’s! There were a couple of posts at the time about the ridiculousness of the decision from syntacticians at Language Log:
Since then, though, my feeling is that it has become more and more common to apply the distinction with numerals. My kids’ maths textbooks say things like “more or fewer than 10”.
This is my impression also. Similarly, 20 years ago, "whom" was almost never heard in speech, whereas now I seem to hear it reasonably frequently. The other day I heard someone say something like "The person to whom I'm giving it to", which suggested to me that they were adopting a speech pattern which didn't come naturally to them.
These would seem to be instances contrary to "prole drift", although my understanding is that historically linguistic changes have in fact often percolated down society as one might expect (e.g. Spanish "z"). Perhaps cultural changes can start with different social groups and this author merely notices "prole drift" because it's contrary to his expectations. Certainly it's easy to think of examples of Multicultural London English words entering the mainstream. I myself say "innit" sometimes.
I agree on "whom" - it certainly *feels* like it's having a resurgence, especially in the US but also the UK. Among educated US speakers I even hear "whomever" fairly often. I also agree that the usage is often erroneous (by traditional lights). Hypercorrections like "She's the one whom I think will succeed" and "The funds will go to whomever needs them" are common even in prestige publications/platforms like the NYT, VOX and the BBC.
Whether our intuition is correct is another question. If you squint you can maybe see a bit of an uptick in the US:
Funny, a friend just used “whomever” in a Facebook post today and I thought this was a little strange. I wasn’t aware that “whomever” was having a moment here in the US.
Hypothesis: the "whom" resurgence is essentially globalization. Modern English is analytic and its users naturally perceive he/him, she/her, etc. distinction as a meaningless relic, just a rule to be learnt, so when there appeared to be no such rule for "who", they don't even notice, much less care. However, the growing contingent of foreign speakers coming from inflected languages not only intuitively understands the difference in meaning between the two, it also finds it useful and expects it to be applied consistently across all pronouns. It discovers "whom", starts using it (with little trouble), internet brings us closer together and the natives start noticing the resurgence, so now they struggle to learn to use it at all.
But which languages would be driving the need for an accusative, aside from some on the Indian subcontinent? I don't think many major African languages like Igbo or Swahili mark case on relative pronouns.
It's not the case that English speakers perceive pronoun case to be meaningless. Errors like "Him went to the shop" are almost unheard of for native speakers of the standard English dialect. And the use of accusative forms in non-object position is systematic, not random - for many speakers the accusative is basically the default form all positions except for the whole, unmodified subject of a finite verb.
I am currently reading a witness statement (drafted by a solicitor) which contains the sentence, "He then introduced me to [redacted] whom was the previous proprietor."
Maybe, now that our light informal interactions are much more in text form than before (twitter, whatsapp, predictive keyboards, etc), some features of written text have naturally moved to oral for some people, without them coming out unnaturally. (and the other way around, as this blog shows)
Text can also reveal language changes in progress that are hidden in speech. For instance, there are some reasons to think that the tendency to use “of” instead of “-‘ve” to form perfects with modal verbs - as in “would of”, “should of” - is more than a widespread typo... that it reflects the preposition genuinely being grammaticalised as a perfect marker in speakers’ minds. But in speech “of” and “-‘ve” usually sound identical so the change is only noticeable in text, and it’s only now that everyone, whatever their education level, writes text publicly the whole time that the change becomes visible.
Right. Its vowels are also fairly different from Cockney.
One of its most interesting features is a version of /k/ pronounced pretty far back in the throat, before back vowels, especially among male speakers. There's some thought that it might derive from Arabic /q/.
Yes. What I’ve noticed is people substituting “greater” for “more” with non-count nouns. So for instance “greater fuss” or “greater controversy” where you might expect “more”.
This would bring (greater!) parallelism to the grammatical structure -
More : Fewer :: Greater : Less
It also helps allay most obvious objection to the prescriptivists’ central case for the rule: that we do perfectly well with one *positive* comparative - “more” - for all types of noun, so it’s not credible that it’s unclear or ambiguous to use “less” in the same way (as indeed it has been used, since Old English).
Not that I’m suggesting people are really doing it for conscious reasons - there’s often a tendency in language change for grammars to become more symmetrically organised. And they may not be doing it at all, I may be imagining it! And if they *are* it won’t work anyway in most cases, as in the cheese example.
My education failed to teach it too, it's something that my parents taught me, and that's what makes it a good class signal. Though it's possible that some of my more persnickety English teachers might have mentioned as well.
Midwit pedant: actually it's "ten items or fewer" because items are countable
True pedant: actually the use of "less" with countable objects is attested to the ninth century; the rule against it was no more than the personal taste of an 18th century grammarian that has since become etc., etc...
Yes that's surely right! And very relevant to Scott's article in terms of status signifiers.
I mean, I think I have some pretty good syntactic arguments as to why coordinated accusative pronouns in subject position are #actually natural English and "Ashley and I are blathering in the comments" is not... but my psychological motivation is probably identical to that of the pedant who corrects people's grammar in the more traditional direction.
I'm less Strunk & White prescriptivist than I once was, but singular "data" in particular still really rustles my jimmies. I like your exploding galaxy brain approach due to metacontrarian bias though.
Scott's yearning for an observer as sharp as Fussell for modern times (which I think I share, but maybe not lest I feel too seen, as I have by Scott's summaries of the yearly SSC survey) made me think about the article I read earlier today (randomly) on Jesse Singal's substack:
You know, I think he is right that America is NOT a classless society. I might be oblivious to these details, but I did cringe when I saw the decor in Trump's family photos (massive gold colored lions etc).
If you read 1850s British literature, it is primarily about understanding what class is.
A friend and I (who often discuss this) concluded that it has nothing to do with education, wealth or even if you have geraniums instead of rhododendrons. Class has everything to do with the restraint you show in different areas of life. An upper class person is very reluctant to ask personal questions, for example. Trump's decor could also be considered a lack of restraint.
Regarding decor, there was a snub recounted by Alan Clark in his diaries:
"Michael Heseltine: "An arriviste, certainly, who can't shoot straight and in Jopling's damning phrase 'bought all his own furniture', but who at any rate seeks the cachet. All the nouves in the party think he is the real thing."
The "Jopling" here was Michael Jopling, former Chief Whip, but the phrase was attributed to Clark and re-cast as "The trouble with Michael is that he has had to buy all his own furniture".
From The Economist, explaining why this is so damning: "Being the sort of person who 'buys his own furniture', a remark that Alan Clark, a former minister and diarist once reported as directed at Michael Heseltine, a self-made Tory colleague, is still worthy of note in circles where most inherit it."
In the US, the generational division is as much or more pronounced than the one between the classes. If there is someone to blame for the generational split, I'd point my finger at advertises (entertainment, clothes styles, etc.) in the past and unis and media presently.
PS I only add that in the US, in contrast with the European class system, the division is neither financial nor inherent but cultural and to some degree geographical.
At the risk of showing a classical education, -ensis is a marker of geographical origin, so this name explicitly identifies Prole as the place from which proles come.
The word comes from Latin in the first place; why not "H. sapiens proletarius"?
There’s a lot to say about Class X but it might be necessary for me to read the book in order to say it right.
I was 9 when that was published and there was something beginning to gather force, it pulled from PBS viewers, people who grow their own vegetables, early adopters of computers, Whole Earth Catalog readers, and academia; sometimes it bought Laura Ashley fabrics, did not own soft puffy furniture, played Trivial Pursuit and derided MTV. Liked Sting, identified center-left or center-right politically, veterans underrepresented. Middle class behaviors but it fed into Silicon Valley, which then boomed and which brought some of them enough wealth and cachet that their tastes became - well known? Targets of aspiration? Having the correct ideas, the correct tastes - it was influenced by counterculture but not at all identical. It also coincided with explosion of media and tech, and so their particularities were all over TV. They went to Disney so they would know more about it than the proles; or they went five times, depending on their caste roots. Wore birkenstocks, vacationed to Asia and Africa (not Europe); They owned Volvos, bought hardcover books, played ultimate frisbee and popularized mountain biking. This is just the side I saw; portions of multiple castes went to form it. A common feature of them is thinking they are correct; they may be blind to the range of choices available to them and not understand that not everyone has all those options. Choosing all the “best” stuff. So for those who look back and say, doesn’t everyone do those things, the answer to that is, there was a sort of hard fork in the 1990s, some got on the X train but some who maybe could have, did not, for a variety of reasons.
X also professed great love for basketball in order to signal racial inclusivity; read the Harlem Renaissance, listened to Putumayo (but not Santana), liked Janet Jackson but not JLo. Their descendants are the Colbert fan base, health food store snobs, early EV adopters and... sure in their correctness... the academia side of wokeology. Pro-internationalist, pro-US economic roots of world peace, anti-war but not into the details; older now, NIMBY.
More and less than a class, maybe a wave that drew from several and broke over society. It had other forks. The techie ones passed through it like a fog and came out the other end.
Common feature, lack of appreciation of ambiguity.
OK, hasn't Scott written about this before? Anyone getting deja vu? Or maybe I read something similar somewhere else - all this stuff about status signalling and how people of a certain class will adopt the mannerisms of the class above them but they're seen as try-hard and the real high-class people don't even bother with it. Why does this sound familiar? Can anyone help?
I was going to comment on the same thing. I'm especially surprised that Scott is surprised in which direction fashion trends travel as he wrote about it in depth in "Right is the New Left".
"I'm probably what the book considers middle-to-upper-middle class, but by nature I'm not a very classy person"
You don't think of yourself in a class-rrelated manner because, as you say later, "The upper-middle class has made it; they're fine".
And so upper-middle people aren't really aware of their class because it's not something they grew up seeing anyone around them worrying about it, or publicly thinking about it.
Yours, another person from an upper-middle background.
By "I'm not a very classy person" I don't intend some kind of deep commentary. I mean "I go out in sweatpants that are colored to look like jeans, because I can't be bothered to wear actual jeans".
Fussell would probably say you are only able to do that because of your secure class position. And that if you were lower class you'd have to pay more attention to your appearance
This book sounds hilarious, because coming from the 80s the references and attitudes are dated , but also because the English have been doing dissections of this sort of thing for decades - be it Nancy Mitford's appropriation of U and Non-U https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English, Betjeman's poem poking fun at the earnest middle-middle class social striver (see below), or "Keeping Up Appearances" where Hyacinth is indeed exactly the sort of person who *would* plant rhododendrons rather than gladioli because one is considered more "common" than the other. (My late father, a prole by this definition and "rural working class" by mine, loved that show and found it absolutely hilarious). I admit, I'd like to hear his opinion on "room for a pony", I bet he would have had one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjkFKY2pddc
How To Get On In Society by John Betjeman
Phone for the fish knives, Norman
As cook is a little unnerved;
You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes
And I must have things daintily served.
Are the requisites all in the toilet?
The frills round the cutlets can wait
Till the girl has replenished the cruets
And switched on the logs in the grate.
It's ever so close in the lounge dear,
But the vestibule's comfy for tea
And Howard is riding on horseback
So do come and take some with me
Now here is a fork for your pastries
And do use the couch for your feet;
I know that I wanted to ask you-
Is trifle sufficient for sweet?
Milk and then just as it comes dear?
I'm afraid the preserve's full of stones;
Beg pardon, I'm soiling the doileys
With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.
The profiles cartoon is just poking fun at the perennial "chinless wonder" view of the upper classes ("The term is derived from the characteristic recessive chin of some aristocrats, popularly thought to be caused by inbreeding and associated with limited intelligence") and the rest of it is mix of honesty - yes, there is a class system in the USA - and the usual sort of thing I'd expect in a coffee-table book like this (apologies if the late gentleman did intend it to be an academic study, but the extracts sound like they fall squarely into that particular genre of British middle-brow book like Lynne Truss' "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" - in that liminal space occupied by pop science/pop history books which aren't fluffy enough to be simply throwaway but not a rigorous study either).
Class conventions get muddled when historical lag happens. "Lavatory" is upper-class? But I'm working to lower middle class and I was taught that word. I pronounce "envelope" and "garage" in the French pronunciation because that's how I learned it from my Victorian-born grandmother. Country people in Ireland eat their dinner in the middle of the day - like 17th century royalty:
"Reflecting the typical custom of the 17th century, Louis XIV dined at noon, and had supper at 10 pm. But in Europe, dinner began to move later in the day during the 1700s, due to developments in work practices, lighting, financial status, and cultural changes. The fashionable hour for dinner continued to be incrementally postponed during the 18th century, to two and three in the afternoon, and in 1765 King George III dined at 4pm, though his infant sons had theirs with their governess at 2pm, leaving time to visit the queen as she dressed for dinner with the king. But in France Marie Antoinette, when still Dauphine of France in 1770, wrote that when at the Château de Choisy the court still dined at 2pm, with a supper after the theatre at around 10pm, before bed at 1 or 1.30am.
At the time of the First French Empire an English traveller to Paris remarked upon the "abominable habit of dining as late as seven in the evening". By about 1850 English middle-class dinners were around 5 or 6pm, allowing men to arrive back from work, but there was a continuing pressure for the hour to drift later, led by the elite who did not have to work set hours, and as commutes got longer as cities expanded. In the mid-19th century the issue was something of a social minefield, with a generational element. John Ruskin, once he married in 1848, dined at 6pm, which his parents thought "unhealthy". Mrs Gaskell dined between 4 and 5pm. The fictional Mr Pooter, a lower middle-class Londoner in 1888-89 and a diner at 5pm, was invited by his son to dine at 8pm, but "I said we did not pretend to be fashionable people, and would like the dinner earlier".
The satirical novel Living for Appearances (1855) by Henry Mayhew and his brother Augustus begins with the views of the hero on the matter. He dines at 7pm, and often complains of "the disgusting and tradesman-like custom of early dining", say at 2pm. The "Royal hour" he regards as 8pm, but he does not aspire to that. He tells people "Tell me when you dine, and I will tell you what you are"."
I probably am a natural prole by inclination and nature, not alone nurture, as I drink Coca-Cola *because I like it*. Though I just ordered a selection box of posh crisps off Amazon - how posh are they? They will take 2-4 weeks to deliver, that's how posh they are!
The British housing estates names makes me laugh because this was exactly the same thing that went on in Ireland during the boom construction times, though it wasn't just for hoity-toity estates. There was one name, something like "Belbury Downs", that annoyed me because *we don't have downland in Ireland*. But the rule of thumb seemed to be "if it sounds like you could be living in Surrey, it'll sell".
Regarding Class X, isn't that just boho reheated? Bohemianism is an old tradition now, and add in trustafarians for the more modern angle. In Chesterton's time, they clustered around Bedford Park (going under the name "Saffron Park" in "The Man Who Was Thursday"), and I can do no better than quote from the opening of that novel:
"The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not “artists,” the whole was nevertheless artistic.
...More especially this attractive unreality fell upon it about nightfall, when the extravagant roofs were dark against the afterglow and the whole insane village seemed as separate as a drifting cloud. This again was more strongly true of the many nights of local festivity, when the little gardens were often illuminated, and the big Chinese lanterns glowed in the dwarfish trees like some fierce and monstrous fruit."
I rather fear Class X would today be denounced as "gentrifiers".
Class is a strange beast, and the signifiers are subtle but potent. When BBC "Sherlock" was first broadcast, I amused myself by assigning probable schools to Inspector Lestrade, Dr. Watson and Holmes as follows - "Comprehensive, grammar school, public school" and I felt vindicated when a screenshot of Watson's CV for his job application revealed he had indeed attended a grammar school. The subtle social and economic scaling comes through even if you're not deliberately looking.
Hey, I've seen "Keeping up Appearances" too! Because here in America, watching the BBC is a class marker. What Hyacinth attempts, my mother has actually accomplished.
he spelled Featherstonhaugh wrong. I lost all respect... (no, I didn't but I was compelled to comment) the curious on this subject may enjoy "Watching the English" which is an interesting anthropogist does her own country sort of a book. I am certainly middle-middle, but in a nerdy/techy # way that makes my "look at my excellent stuff" game look odd to some, but that's not to say I'm not at it.
I echo the sentiment that we need an updated version of this book - notable shifts:
* relationship to technology (Whoop seems to be taking a higher class position than the Apple Watch, likely because lack of screen, fitbit seems to be prole because android)
* platforms as signaling (Clubhouse seems middle-middle for the FOMO anxiety but could quickly shift classes as it grows. Substack is...?)
* travel (internet broke the Class X monopoly on exploration, with instagram providing middle-middle signal boosts, but now how you finance travel, how long you travel, and what you pack carries a lot of signal)
Still seems valid: dog breeds, dog names, choice of housing and landscaping
The class distinction in garden flowers is not as arbitrary as Scott makes it sound. The "prole" flowers are all annuals - exotic tropical flowers that have to be replanted every year in most of the US because they can't survive freezing temperatures. They are the Caribbean cruise of garden flowers. They are also cheaper than perennials in the short run but have to be replaced every year. Perennials, the upper-class flowers, are theoretically cheaper in the long run because they keep coming back year after year, but you only save money if you plant them in the right conditions, take good care of them, and stay in the same house long enough to reap the rewards. (Basically, perennials save money in the same way that a "timeless" wardrobe of quality pieces saves money.)
The fashion in upscale gardens has almost completely changed since the book was written. Low-maintenance is in, which the upper classes achieve through sleek minimalist landscaping and the lower classes achieve by not maintaining their yards.
In _Second Nature_, Michael Pollan does a class/regional analysis of seed catalogues.
From memory: Upper class New England-- blue and white flowers, photographed just before they're fully open.
Upper class southern-- very bright colored flowers, photographed a little after full bloom. The age of the variety is a big selling point. I wish I could remember what the selling point for New England was.
Lower middle class, possibly middle class-- Burpee. Novelty is a selling point. A cucumber which produces slices big enough to cover a hamburger is a big deal. This is the company which had a big contest to create a white marigold.
Weird: a company with a mission that I can't remember. Something idealistic but unusual.
Weird: something like Baker Creek, perhaps? Their stated goal is to preserve and supply all manner of heirloom varieties. Finding an almost-lost old variety to reintroduce is a big deal, especially if they had to travel overseas to find it.
The part about the flowers made me laugh because my grandfather had intense opinions about which flowers were “common” and thus undesirable. He was a first-generation American, and on what he earned as a traveling salesman my grandparents could barely keep the lights on for a good chunk of their lives. They slept on a pull-out sofa for 25 years, but he’d be damned before he put carnations on HIS buffet table.
In more boreal climates, you also got the tradition of orangeries, where the upper class could signal wealth by building expensive greenhouses for mediterranean flora. (between improvments in glassmaking, looser regulation on conservatories and refrigerated ships full of exotic fruit, this doesn't seem to be a thing any more)
Yes! For example, this passage in Raymond Chandler's "The High Window," where annual flowers are used as part of his depiction of a nouveau riche household:
He went along the brick path under the tunnel of roses and through a white gate at the end. Beyond was a walled-in garden containing <b>flowerbeds crammed with showy annuals</b>, a badminton court, a nice stretch of greensward, and a small tiled pool glittering angrily in the sun. Beside the pool there was a flagged space set with blue and white garden furniture, low tables with composition tops, reclining chairs with footrests and enormous cushions, and over all a blue and white umbrella as big as a small tent.
A long-limbed languorous type of showgirl blond lay at her ease in one of the chairs, with her feet raised on a padded rest and a tall misted glass at her elbow, near a silver ice bucket and a Scotch bottle. She looked at us lazily as we came over the grass. From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away. Her mouth was too wide, her eyes were too blue, her makeup was too vivid, the thin arch of her eyebrows was almost fantastic in its curve and spread, and the mascara was so thick on her eyelashes that they looked like miniature iron railings.
I think your theory corresponds to the omnivorousness hypothesis in cultural sociology. What sets the upper class people apart today is that they consume ALL cultural products. The most high brow thing you could say nowadays is something like "The harmonies in this new Kanye West album are eerly reminiscent of Scriabines's Étude in D-sharp minor, don't you think?".
It would be interesting if someone could sum up some relevant ideas from Bourdieu's Distinction here, which is kind of the scientific version of Fussell's book. Habitus, structural homologies, cultural and symbolic capital etc.
Highbrow is quite different from upper class, and that sort of statement is one I would expect from Fussell's Class X/the upper middle class counterculture, not the upper class.
On the subject of a class X that were fully counterculture, until the counterculture started to win, there's the great lyrics of "The Rebel" by Allan Sherman:
When I first started reading this my mind went straight to wealth, as I'm sure many others have, and I kind of scoffed at the idea. I know many very wealthy people who don't fit into the typical class structure, but the more I read the more I see his argument in a 1950s style way (some examples given are silly though). The only class signaling I see now seems to be trying to signal you aren't some out of touch upper class individual, but just another normal person. I can't help but wonder what affect the internet has had, where in many places class isn't obvious. Though you can argue Twitter has it's own class system of the upper verified class and the dirty unwashed unverified masses. Of course my views are probably that of some prole, seeing as how my hometown is Tampa, and therefore can't be trusted. But hey, my team won the Superbowl AND the Stanley Cup, in your face Paul Fussell.
I feel like the poor class teaches us how to enjoy the moment and cope with impossible circumstances. The working class teaches us to be rugged and capable and enjoy straightforward things. The middle class teaches us that you can carefully build up wealth over time.
What I really want to understand is what the upper class has figured out. Supposedly it's how to manage intergenerational wealth, knowing how to use the real levers of power, staying out of the limelight, etc. But I suspect it's much more nuanced than that, and nobody can ever tell me where to learn more. Like, I've heard stories about young princelings being expected to learn how to get their horses to jump over obstacles, as a way to teach leadership. Which makes me think there are deliberate traditions I could be learning from.
If I had to guess (and I'm extremely unqualified to) what the upper class has figured out is Epicureanism. How to preserve their wealth and enjoy life without ruining you life. I didn't grow up with money, so when I imagine having millions and millions of dollars I imagine building that giant, crazy mansion full of all the things I always wanted: which is a great way to lose millions and probably not be much happier in the end. Money is a great help, but it can be toxic as well. The successful upper class members are likely those who have learned how to live a life of monied leisure without falling into destructive hedonism or succumbing to nihilistic ennui.
At each stage you describe, your identity is defined by certain things. Where you live. What school you attend. What you do for work. Where you do it at. What your hobbies are. I suspect but being somewhere in the middle-middle-to-upper-middle-ish space cannot prove that the upper class lesson is to be able to disassociate their sense of identity from the stuff the plebs rely on.
And you can't just decide that you're going to do it differently either. Seriously. Try going 10 minutes at a party where you don't know many people without the topic of your occupation or hobbies coming up. You'll find out what class you're enmeshed in real quick, and it is a total social faux-pas to duck the question if you decide that's not how you roll.
It's not about having hobbies, it's about not being defined by them. Conspicuously showing your hobbies and interests is a prole/middle thing. I would also toss being defined by relationships in there too. Uppers *have* those things, middles and proles *are* those things, and lowers don't have/aren't.
Historically, the primary justification (in response to the Enlightenment and the rise of liberalism) for hereditary aristocracy and privilege and so on (other than being ordained by God, which we'll leave to one side) was that they alone had the breeding, wealth, and leisure to devote themselves to politics and other public services. Facially, this makes a kind of sense. In a complex society, it requires more than mere hobbyists and amateurs to instantiate an effective government with all its necessary accoutrements. Those who don't have to work for a living, and who aren't beholden to anyone for their next meal (or their next 30,000 meals), should have the ability take the time to learn the intricacies and become effective leaders who don't have a reason to suck up, flatter, or lie, and who aren't vulnerable to corruption due to their wealth.
And as to 'breeding' (beyond its eugenic connotations, which were often hilariously contradicted by European aristos' predisposition to things like hemophilia), I think they mean growing up in households where many of the (male) members had been in such vocations and being able to learn from their experience and example.
As to how well this has worked in practice, not great by any stretch of the imagination. But it's not crazy, and certain exemplars of the type really did try to live up to these kinds of expectations. But even the best had their vices. Take George Washington. He agreed to command the Continental Army for no salary as long as his expenses were covered. What a bro, right? Wrong. At the end of the war, he presented Congress with a bill of expenses of over a quarter million dollars (or something to that effect; I'm not positive on the number), a titanic sum at the time, considerably more than he'd have earned on even a generous salary, and which included all the luxuries he thought were surely 'his due.' As Stannis Baratheon says, a good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad the good.
Regardless, this is by far the best justification I can think of for the 'upper' class. And it's completely gone today. Most governments today are run by amateurs or by career civil servants whose salary is their daily bread. Or worse, by revolving-door apparatchiks. There are only something like 50 hereditary peers (the seats rotate among the surviving noble houses, or something) left in the British House of Lords, which has something like 800 members and is the most irrelevant legislative house in the western world. All remaining European monarchies are, at best, a kind of theme park (Elizabeth II), or at worse even less relevant and purely parasitic (looking at you Harald V of Norway). They don't even do philanthropy anymore. That's the noveau billions.
This class serves no useful function whatsoever. If they have anything to teach us, it may be how to make yourself irrelevant and despised. We can use those lessons and do the opposite, maybe?
Jokes aside, what does this mean? We need to exterminate this class by jacking up estate taxes to 100% on fortunes larger than, say, $5 million. I believe that, in the USA, the estate tax is minimal and is inapplicable to all but the largest fortunes.
"This class serves no useful function whatsoever."
Who ever said it had to? Just because something doesn't serve a function doesn't mean it needs to be destroyed. Society exists for people, not people for society.
I think serving some kind of useful function is implicit in the social contract. To be part of society, you must contribute to it. The 'upper' class does not. In fact, it doesn't even fulfill the function that it designed for itself.
Also, the 'functionless' things that we typically tolerate at least generate some kind of utility, no matter how marginal. Take Hummel figurines. Unquestionably functionless, they nevertheless persist because some people enjoy them. Someone makes them and someone buys them. That's enough for me, and it's more than I can say for the 'upper' class.
I might be being hyperbolic here, but I really do fail to see what the 'upper' class can do that the 'upper middle' can't. Your example, above, about epicureanism is unpersuasive.
My family are upper middle. I'm a lawyer, and I earn a lot of money. I managed to buy a single-family home with no student loan debt at age 29. I own nice things, but not ostentatious things, and typically only one of each (Just last night I chastised myself for wanting to buy another moderately high-end bluetooth speaker (JBL) so I wouldn't have to schlep it up and down three flights of stairs and/or inevitably forget it in my office or kitchen when I want to listen to audiobooks at bedtime and then run back down and up the stairs). I have no other debt (other than my mortgage and credit cards I keep below $1000 balance to pay every month to pad my credit score). I am far from being eaten alive by my wealth, which grows appreciably every day. A ton of that has to do with, yes, inherited privilege, but I had that because my parents (again, themselves upper-middle) so embodied the qualities you ascribe as being the area in which the 'upper' at least have a comparative advantage that it was almost trivial for me (with a side of hard work and two jobbing degrees from mid-tier schools) to achieve this.
"Society exists for people, not people for society." A platitude. Society and people are in a mutual relationship. What happens to one affects the other, and no one can have the relationship all their own way. The question of which precedes the other, like labor and capital, might be a fun way to dunk or score points, but is meaningless.
And you're overselling what I mean by 'exterminated.' Firstly (and using the oversold meaning of 'exterminated'), if all we have to do to destroy a class completely is pull on one pretty esoteric tax lever, that's a pathetically weak and despicable class. Second, and to emphasize, I'm talking about concentration camps or eating them. I just think society should tell them to use it or lose it. We definitely need the revenue.
"I think serving some kind of useful function is implicit in the social contract. To be part of society, you must contribute to it."
I think this is the source of our disagreement. What do you think about the homeless, or criminals? Are they not members of society?
I just don't think that not contributing to society is a problem that society has a right to "correct." What's more, if you are correct and in order to be a part of society you have to contribute to it, and the upper class contributes nothing, then obviously the upper class is not part of society. If they are not part of society, then what right does society have to do anything to them?
Bruh. Please stop being so pedantic. Regardless, I agree with your actual point. Society has no right to 'correct' a lack of participation. Society (or rather the people) does have the right to make policy that encourages participation. So for instance, let's say the Astor-Cabot-Molluscs are facing a $100 million estate tax bill when ol' George Henry VII dies. What can they do? They could knuckle under and let the next generation go on welfare. Or, they could liquidate assets to generate that sum and then put it to a productive use. They might donate a grand old house to the state government to be maintained as a museum and receive a nice tax break in exchange, or even a life estate and they could keep living in part of it. They might sell it to some grasper. Then they invest whatever cash they've raised by being confronted with said tax bill and become even richer than before, and all their money is in productive, diversified portfolios and safe from inheritance taxation. I'm not saying this is necessarily how it would go. I'm saying that this is a legitimate policy end (putting money to work and avoiding hereditary aristocracy) that the people and their representatives can pursue, including by (you might say) excessive estate taxes.
As criminals and the homeless, you're right (and also prove too much) that society isn't free to straightforwardly control the boundaries. So for rich people, we can't keep them out (because they still have money, and money is the ticket), even if they don't contribute. As to your jab about them 'not being part of society,' that's hogwash and you know it. There's another comment somewhere on here about members of that class (and perhaps specifically those with the storied surnames like Astor) having a handful of reserved seats on the boards of old-school cultural institutions for the sake of continuity, while billionaires fill out the rest of the seats. That's membership in society.
For the homeless and criminals, society can't chuck them out just because they don't contribute. For criminals, I'm sure you've heard the phrase 'paid their debt to society.' Criminal penalties are a means by which we incentivize criminals to become productive members of society, and the punishments are supposed to rehabilitate them. They largely don't, and we need a better way of doing this, but that is the goal. So criminals are unquestionably part of society, and will remain.
For the homeless, there are lots of reasons one might be homeless, but usually the reasons are more than just 'they're lazy.' Certainly, we as a society are not prepared to reach that conclusion. On humane grounds, then, they remain. There are no humane grounds on which to tolerate unproductive rich people.
"As to your jab about them 'not being part of society,' that's hogwash and you know it."
I do know it. You're the one who proposed that those who do not contribute to society are not part of it. That seemed wrong to me, which is why I pointed out the contradiction. I'm glad you agree. People are part of society regardless of whether they contribute to it: in other words, society does not have membership dues. Just as we do not choose the society we are born into, society does not choose the members that make it up. At least, big S society. Private societies can do as they like.
"Criminal penalties are a means by which we incentivize criminals to become productive members of society, and the punishments are supposed to rehabilitate them."
I disagree. Criminal penalties are the means by which we carry out justice (that is, giving people what they deserve). If you steal someone's property, or wound them, or rape them, then you deserve punishment: justice demands it. We try to structure the punishments so that they will deter further crime, and potentially rehabilitate, but deterrence and rehabilitation isn't the purpose of criminal penalties. If it was then we could accomplish those goals in much more effective ways: for example, summary execution without trial of all thieves would be an extremely effective deterrence: we don't do that because it would be unjust (ie, the punishment is far more harsh then what the crime deserves).
(This is all a bit of a tangent, but the deterrence and rehabilitation theory of punishment is a pet peeve of mine.)
"For the homeless, there are lots of reasons one might be homeless, but usually the reasons are more than just 'they're lazy.' Certainly, we as a society are not prepared to reach that conclusion. On humane grounds, then, they remain. There are no humane grounds on which to tolerate unproductive rich people."
So under your theory society has the right to find ways to force people to contribute, but we do not force the homeless to contribute because there are good reasons that they do not contribute. Yet are there not good reasons why the unproductive rich do not contribute? It's certainty not because they are lazy: it's because they are rich. And they certainly contribute far more to society than a homeless person simply through employment of others (I assume many are involved in charities and patronizing the arts, but even if they don't they certainly invest, which is a contribution in itself). I don't see any real difference between your attitude towards the homeless and the upper class except that you think the homeless have an excuse for idleness and the upper class doesn't. You remind me of a manager who would remind all the employees "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean! Everybody should always be working!" Even if there was nothing to do, we had to at least look busy or face a tongue lashing. That's reasonable enough in an employee-employer relationship where you are being paid to perform work, but I don't see how it applies to society as a whole. Who gave anyone the right to be a societal middle manager and yell at anyone who wasn't keeping busy? Why does someone need a permission slip from society to be idle?
"Jokes aside, what does this mean? We need to exterminate this class by jacking up estate taxes to 100% on fortunes larger than, say, $5 million. I believe that, in the USA, the estate tax is minimal and is inapplicable to all but the largest fortunes."
So successful family companies are just forbidden now? Or are you thinking solely of financier types here?
A local widget factory is pretty certainly over $5mil in value but a productive member of society.
Second, if that was put into place, you can bet your ass the rich people would come up with schemes to dodge it - money going abroad, of course, but also things like setting up trusts, selling them to a manager with strings attached but in a way the manager makes profit, etc.
You'd just make everything a stupidly opaque hell to manage and figure out who owns what, even moreso than today.
Please educate yourself on the estate tax. It in no way 'forbids' anything. It just applies an incentive to a particular kind of transfer (via inheritance). I am in favor of all those dodges. They achieve the same result: the money doesn't sit, it works.
We already live in a stupidly opaque hell of property ownership, and we all seem to get along just fine. The effect on that of tuning one policy lever is going to be minimal no matter what.
Building a local widget factory and passing it to the next generation to run would seem pretty forbidden unless you jumped through a whole bunch of hoops to achieve the same end state and essentially create more jobs for parasitic financial advisers who exist only due to government inconvenience. Set up a corner store, be amazing at your job, expand, oops, better be careful to be too successful lest you run into Eöl tax. And we're still just talking ordinary merchants running a shop. Does buying physical things, putting them on shelves for people to find and meet their needs with cease to be a contribution to society past a certain point? If it stays a corner store, it may be able to be passed on from father to son,
It'd basically eliminate non-crooked, productive people's ability to pass on what they have if they were too successful, and a wealth transfer from crooked uppers to the CMC, and specifically crooked-ish parts of it.
Basically, I can understand the impulse that there are people who inherit a pile of money and smoke weed all day, but there's also people whose wealth is bound up in real enterprises doing concrete things that they take part in. And your tax basically says "evade this or goodbye".
What's the qualitative difference between someone inheriting $4mil and smoking weed all day and someone inheriting a hardware store and selling people hammers?
> They don't even do philanthropy anymore. That's the noveau billions.
The British royal family still does, along side various government functions. Queen Elizabeth is known to be a very effective diplomat, but sparingly deployed. She helped get us the olympics for example.
They do philanthropy with money that belongs to the British people. And how did the Olympics really work out for London? My impression was that it wasn't quite as bad as it could have been, but there's still a bunch of stadia in the city that are totally disused, crumbling, and blighting the city. If I'm wrong about that second one, please do correct me. Regardless, excuse me if I don't bow and scrape.
The Olympics were a great showcase for the nation with a spectacular opening ceremony and a huge haul of medals. So it worked out great in my book. Also I'm not sure the success/failures of the stadiums has any relevance on the Queen's skills as a diplomat.
Also the Queen has her own money. There's an odd arrangement where the government gets the profits from her estates and gives her money that dates back to a king going bankrupt; but the government is profiting from that exchange. You'd have to go back generations to say it's the British people's money, I'm not sure how far back but I wouldn't be surprised if it's far enough that the king was directly spending that money to run the government.
It is absolutely relevant to her skills as a diplomat. If she's using those skills to bring things to the UK that are on net detrimental to the nation, that's pretty poor judgment and deployment of those skills. Fortunately, there's a growing consensus that the Olympics are extremely detrimental to the cities that it parasitizes every two years, and I'm heartened to see many cities slamming the door in the IOC's face. The Olympics requires huge facilities to be built and then never used again (despite the normal promises that they will be) and then almost all the new tourism dollars go right into the pockets of the IOC. As I said, I don't think it was as bad in London as it might have been, but I believe it was still pretty bad. Hopefully, we'll eventually get a permanent location (or a few), and stop this nonsense.
I'm happy to go back as far as you want. Let's crack open the Domesday Book, when William stole all the land in England from its native inhabitants and their indigenous nobility and handed it back out to his cronies, and then massacred the ones who resisted, noble or common.
I understand your opinion, but I'm not ever going to be convinced that any 'royal' has 'their own money.' I'm familiar with the arrangement you describe, and all I can say is that it exists at the sufferance of Parliament and the people. The best argument that can be made is that it (the arrangement) is ratification by Parliament of past abuses, thefts, and extractions. The government may be 'profiting,' but that is firstly beside the point and not entirely true. Some portion of those profits go back to the Queen and her family, which need not be the case.
> It is absolutely relevant to her skills as a diplomat. If she's using those skills to bring things to the UK that are on net detrimental to the nation, that's pretty poor judgment and deployment of those skills.
That's only true if she picks where to deploy her skills. On the other hand if the government decides to ask the Queen to speak to the Olympics committee it's on the politicians if the Olympics is a bad idea; and the Queen is simply judged on whether she succeeded in wowing the committee.
> I'm happy to go back as far as you want. Let's crack open the Domesday Book, when William stole all the land in England from its native inhabitants and their indigenous nobility and handed it back out to his cronies, and then massacred the ones who resisted, noble or common.
Why stop there? Many of the Anglo-Saxons that William stole his land from in turn stole it from the native Celtic Britons in the 5th century? And how many of *those* Britons got their wealth because of Roman imperialism?
And why start there. How many of the ordinary British citizens who'd get money back from redistributing the Queen's wealth owe money to people from the Empire? (And that includes non-white citizens, there's plenty of money to be made working for the British and richer people find it easier to immigrate). Surely we should look at recent history before medieval history.
Redistributing the Queen's money is not a consistent principle about writing past wrongs, but starting with a conclusion of disliking the monarchy then working backwards.
My favorite explanation for why "low class" signals become high class over time is twofold: it's the ultimate expression of having nothing to prove, but at the same time is a conscious effort to prove you're not the n-1 class; as middle class people try to copy high class things, high class people look for new signals. With three groups it's a stable cycle, because the high class can always choose to pick up low class signals and know the middle wouldn't dare for fear of someone being confused. Hence athleisure and Silicon Valley faux-casual wear.
For all that, though, I'm really not sure about the starting claim that this represents a more entrenched or odious class system than European nations have (or had when foundational American thinkers were thinking). If the book actually makes that argument, it did not make it into the review.
There also used to be a lot of non-class-based barriers bundled up with class, which you can see in the rise and slow fall of exclusively minority fraternities and country clubs. Not just visible minorities like skin color, but also minorities like Jews and Catholics. These minority-exclusive clubs only existed because minorities weren't allowed in the majority equivalents, but as those barriers came down now very few are left. So Fussel may say that those differences don't show, but someone people figured out how to send and receive those signals anyway.
This seems like the sort of topic that we could talk about forever in a non-rigorous way and never get anywhere due to its nebulosity. What would it mean to make progress at understanding class, and what could we do with that knowledge?
There's an outstanding and very entertaining documentary about the same questions: How America is stratified into classes, the taste preferences and attitudes that signal one's class status, and what Americans of different classes think about the class system and their place in it. It's called "People Like Us: Social Class in America." Produced in 2001, it also feels dated, but it's mid-way between Fussell's observations and our own time. It's available in its entirety on Kanopy, and in pieces on YouTube.
Conjecture: the middle-middle and upper classes are mostly defined negatively (what you are not) and the prole and upper positively (what you are).
Prole: we're Packers fans. We're a union family. We're baptists.
Middle-middle: we don't do that in this household. We're not like those people. We can't let anybody see/know about X. Have to keep up appearances, unlike those losers.
Upper-middle: we're doctors/lawyers/high-status profession-havers. We're team Harvard/Yale/Stanford.
Upper: we're not anything, because that would imply we have something to prove, and we don't. But we definitely aren't those nouveau riche who have something to prove.
An anecdote illustrates the Upper-Upper mentality better than anything: when Rockefeller Center was built, Nelson Rockefeller (IIRC) was showing off the family office to his dad John Jr. At the end, he exclaimed "Pretty impressive, huh?", too which his father replied: "Son, who are we trying to impress?"
I am continuously amazed to learn how different America was just 40-50 years ago. I would read someone just recounting everything has changed, in terms of culture, norms, etc.
I remember reading a story somewhere about how at some tech-savvy place (MIT?) in a more traditional time (the 50s to 70s) there was one nerdy guy who just never dressed up the way everyone else did, and wore a beard, and that was a big deal. Now it's unthinkable for it not to be normal to dress how you want!
As a random anecdote:
> They are weirdly obsessed with cowboys
I can confirm that this was a thing. I've met them. Some of my friends' fathers are cowboy-people, with giant collections of cowboy boots and hats and the like. These are otherwise suburban family people (a doctor, in the case I'm thinking of) in a non-remotely-western part of the country. It was some expression of culture that is completely alien to us now but has held on in its adherents. It's so.. _weird_.
Makes you wonder what of our generation will seem so out of place in 30 years.
>I can confirm that this was a thing. I've met them. Some of my friends' fathers are cowboy-people, with giant collections of cowboy boots and hats and the like. These are otherwise suburban family people (a doctor, in the case I'm thinking of) in a non-remotely-western part of the country. It was some expression of culture that is completely alien to us now but has held on in its adherents. It's so.. _weird_.
>Makes you wonder what of our generation will seem so out of place in 30 years.
Might I suggest possibly that the middle-middle class version of this is an obsession with the culture of the urban black ghetto? And for much the same reasons (an ultra-romanticised admiration for a culture which seems much freer than their own?)
>A friend urges me to think of these not as "rich/successful people" vs. "poor/unsuccessful people", but as three different ladders on which one can rise or fall. The most successful proles are lumber barons or pro athletes or reality TV stars. These people are much richer and more powerful than, say, a schoolteacher, but they’re still proles, and the schoolteacher is still middle class. Likewise, a very successful middle class person might become a professor or a Senator or Jeff Bezos, but this doesn't make them even a bit upper class.
I agree this sounds like a helpful model (it's very similar to your "tribes" model), but doesn't it kind of ruin the book's whole thesis if there are multiple equally-valid ways to signal your classiness depending on which peer group you hang out with, and class isn't actually related to socioeconomic status in a useful way?
Like, I have one friend who is a very stereotypical jock. Unironically likes football, works out, invited me out to grill and have a few beers, talks casually about how hot he finds various women, etc. But he's also a computer science major, went to the same college as me, ended up in a similar upper-middle-class career. Would Fussel really categorize him as a "prole"?
I feel like "class" ought to mean more than "stuff a group likes" - we wouldn't consider white people to be a class even though "stuff white people like" has become a meme. We wouldn't consider rationalists to be a class even though you could probably come up with some eerily specific cultural markers to describe them, like "enjoys Harry Potter fanfiction."
However, it's interesting that in 1983 these classes were fairly universal, enough that Fussel could say "obviously the CEO is going to have a teakwood desk and his subordinates will have mahogany," rather than some companies being traditional mahogany-desk places and others being full of geeks whose desks have computer gadgets and anime figurines.
The titular White People of the blog (and books) are very much a culture (the author even points out that they can be of any race). And they seem to hew pretty closely to Class X. For example dressing at all times as though they might suddenly have to go hiking. The author also refers to “the wrong kind of white people” as roughly the High Proles described here. The blog was definitely tongue in cheek but honestly opened my eyes a bit that I do belong to a class/culture and also that it feels kind of bad to be stereotyped (before I had realized that it was written self-deprecatingly I was honestly a little offended by it).
> doesn't it kind of ruin the book's whole thesis if there are multiple equally-valid ways to signal your classiness depending on which peer group you hang out with
Where do you get the notion that the ways are equally valid? The whole point is that, from the perspective of the other classes, success on one ladder isn't valid or admirable, it's tacky, pitiful, or empty.
Because that's equally true for all three ladders. There's no particular reason to prefer success on one ladder to another - being a Rockefeller doesn't seem better than being a Bezos or a Trump, they're just sitting on top of a different ladder.
Factory workers! In what factories‽ There aren't any more factories.
How about nursing aide, childcare worker, or a grueling job at an Amazon warehouse shipping goods you can never afford to people who would never want to meet you.
Even a small city like the one I hail from still has 200+ manufacturing operations as of now. The death of manufacturing in the US has been greatly overstated. The death of union manufacturing and high employment manufacturing is the reality - it's given way to non-union shops for overseas companies (for instance, Toyota), and many manufacturing operations of varying sizes that employ relatively few people (from large factories run by a handful of technicians, to small workshops that employ a handful of very skilled craftsman making high-end boutique devices). We've shipped away anything that's low skill that can't be automated.
Mildly O/T: Paul's son Sam Fussell wrote the criminally underappreciated _Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder_, which I suspect at least a few regular AST readers will enjoy.
"He says you can measure the unclassiness of a place in number of bowling alleys per capita, number of megachurches per capita, or (perhaps), some kind of joint bowling alleys plus megachurches index."
FWIW, I grew up as a prole in a prole family, entered college in 1980, and from then until 1990 or so -- right around the time of Fussell's analysis -- transitioned to upper middle. Fussell's analysis rings very true. My movement was semi-conscious. I made some changes intentionally but for most did not realize that my taste or behavior changed until after the fact. I do remember when I realized that artificial fabrics were not approved of by the right people and finding that annoying and stupid, because they were just useful, but I went along. Then there was a Cheers episode in 1988 in which lower-middle class character Norm had a secret and surprising talent for interior design, which itself plays on this idea in full, and he made a contemptuous remark about glass and chrome furniture, which embarrassed me because I owned some.
I don't know how this experience plays into Fussell's theory. I note that as I've gotten older, and more independent both socially and economically, I have fully re-embraced many of the value-type markers of my prole background: I'm very much an outlier among my current peers in being more conservative in faith, cultural norms, and politics. OTOH, I know several people, mostly from my high school, who made a similar journey and during the same period, and as best as I can judge they have not had a similar turn back on value type issues, or any markers that I am aware of. So nothing is predetermined.
Again, not sure what if anything this tends to prove or if it sheds any light, but thought it worth sharing on the chance it could help someone understand better.
Also, that most likely William Buckley on the left and definitely Ronald Reagan on the right.
That's kind of inherent to one's choice of values, no? I suppose the upper middle thing to do is to deny that one set of values is better than another, but I don't think most of them believe it. I think they believe it is polite rather than true, which is, in effect, elevating that value above the others.
Also, to be clear, I'm understanding you to mean "value" related to the faith and cultural norms I mentioned, not more generally. Also I should mention that though I would consider myself an edge case in terms of someone who is upper middle on the cultural values scale, I wouldn't say I'm fully prole either. That's a detailed discussion we don't need, but I'm somewhere between the two camps, and yes, I'm picking particular value sets I believe are better because that's the only way that makes sense to me.
I've only just started reading, I'm up to the lists of things like flowers. And I wanted to quickly note that there's lots of similar content in Watching the English: the hidden rules of English behaviour Kate Fox; which isn't specifically about class but does cover it. (IIRC she explicitly says it's so all compassing that she'll address class in every section rather than it's own section).
It's been ages since I read it, but I remember she talks about how class has different gardens (so a dead match for flowers), cars, home layouts. One I distinctly remember was that (was it upper class, or upper middle) always put things like the kids sports medals in the downstairs toilet because:
1) It signals humility, we put the medals in the toilet of all places.
2) Where are guests going to sit down with no one to talk to and nothing to do but look at what's on the wall?
Displaying your kids' sports medals _anywhere_ seems fairly lower-middle-class to me. If my kids win any medals they're welcome to put them on display in their own bedrooms.
She's not talking about kids sports medals. She's talking about serious awards like a BAFTA (the British equivalent of an Oscar) or the like:
"The Brag-wall Rule
Another helpful class-indicator is the siting of what Americans would call your ‘brag wall’. In which room of your house do you display prestigious awards you have won, or photographs of yourself shaking hands with famous people? If you are middle-middle or below, these items will be proudly on show in your sitting room or entrance
hall or some other very prominent place. For the upper-middles and above, however, the only acceptable place to exhibit such things is the downstairs loo.
This trick is ‘smart’ in both senses of the word (posh and clever): visitors are highly likely to use the downstairs loo at some point, and to be impressed by your achievements, but by displaying them in the loo you are making a joke out of them (taking the piss, even) and thus cannot be accused of either boasting or taking
"But it seems obvious to him that successful working-class people can have yachts if they want."
It seems obvious to me today that working-class people own boats if they want. Boat ownership in the U.S. for those earning less than $50K is 5%, for those earning more than $100K it is only 9.4%,
Although media like to portray the working class as worse off than they were in 1980, by most standards they are better off. I expect they are just as likely to be able to afford a Chris-Craft today as they were then, even if tastes have changed and they may be more likely to spend their discretionary income on electronic gadgets (flat screen TVs, smartphones, etc.) than boating. Of course they also have many other cool options that didn't exist then, BMX, three-wheelers, tons of cool outdoor stuff for the weekends.
A few years ago Reason showed the surprise of French people watching American plumbers and carpenters spending the weekend driving to the lake and putting their boats in the water. In France it is a valid stereotype that only the well-to-do generally engage in recreational boating. But across the midwest, millions of working class Americans routinely go fishing or water skiing on their boats whenever they can.
Relatedly contra the stereotypes of American poverty,
"82% of poor American adults say they were never hungry during the last year because they couldn’t afford food; 96% of poor American parents say their children never went hungry because they couldn’t afford food. Half of poor Americans live in a single-family home, and 41% own their own home. Poor Americans have 60% more living space than the average European. 82% of poor Americans have air conditioning. 64% have cable or satellite t.v. 40% own a dishwasher. 34% have a t.v. that would have made billionaires drool in 1990. "
Americans below the poverty line have more living space than the AVERAGE European, and are more likely to own most goodies.
It is not at all obvious to me that fewer low income people own boats today than did back in 1980. I didn't find a convenient data source to document that directly, but I see Scott's
Yeah. As a European, I definitely agree that the average American has a higher average living standard then the average (Western) European...(I won't even mention Eastern Europe here). SO why does the "liberal" left-wing in the US (generally wealthy people) admire Western Europe so much? Is it counter-signaling? I mean, it could be - e.g. material luxuries don't matter and immaterial benefits which EU countries provide (Healthcare, better urban planning, environmental consciousness) do matter - but then the liberal professional class in the US doesn't seem to want to live like the average European does, do they now?...
This makes me wonder about the upper-upper-class motifs in "Tenet", depicting both visually and narratively a world that is largely invisible to most of us in the middle/prole tiers, yet is completely normal to its inhabitants. Is Nolan subtly implying they've captured the rest of us in a "pincer movement"? That they play a quasi-pointless game amongst themselves, which makes no sense to anyone else? A game that bidirectionally bridges the corporate cyberpunk future with the aristocratic past, in a joyless unfolding of Calvinist determinism?
Or: perhaps I'm reading too much into it, and Nolan is just strip-mining upper-upper class aesthetics because it looks good on film to all us temporarily-embarrassed millionaires.
I came here to comment on Tenet as well. It is worth noting that Andrei Sator wears simple flip-flops and nylon. His watch is expensive and simple, but he never really dresses up, because he is always ready for business. His preferred locales are the Amalfi coast and the shores of Vietnam. His yacht is a military looking ice-breaker. His contacts are mostly military. https://robbreport.com/motors/marine/superyacht-star-christopher-nolans-action-flick-1234572078/ Sator, despite his leisurely malice, is still an evil member of the Bezos/Musk class of strivers. Musk wants Mars for humanity; Sator wants to undo the future past of humanity. Both have some mission.
By contrast Kat, however, is a member of a different class, the real rich, a more refined type, she has nothing to prove, but she does have a skill (because every Penelope needs a skill of some sort, whether its weaving or art assessment (come to think of it, Kat is very much like a Penelope in reverse. Held captive in a marriage, in which her 'betrayal' has been found out, she must help the Protagonist, our new Odysseus, free the household of humanity from her husband's grip). But her skill has nothing to do with purpose; her purpose in life is just her son. That's it. She has nothing else to prove or live for.
As social/tribal creatures we will always find the cultural nuances that separate and unite groups to be endlessly fascinating. But trying to shoehorn them into a useful hierarchical taxonomy of "class" or "caste" seems like a fool's errand, certainly at this point in the culture. There are just too many cultural signals, by too many people, which are changing too rapidly.
Maybe it would be more useful to look at this kaleidoscope of social signaling under a theory of "fashion," rather than social class. Has anyone even tried to develop a rigorous social science theory of fashion?
Some of the dynamics would obviously include: (a) What message people are trying to send about themselves (e.g., I am smart, rich, reliable, fun, sophisticated, unpretentious, morally virtuous, etc.); (b) What medium they are using to send their signals (dress, speech, consumer consumption, political positioning, aesthetics); (c) Whether they are trying to signal their membership in an in-group or their distance from an out-group; (d) Whether they are signaling conformity or non-conformity (which may of course include signaling conformity with the norms of the non-conformist group); and (e) Whether they are self-aware that they are signaling.
Also interesting would be: (e) The role of the majority's un-self-conscious behavior as the foil for signaling behaviors. (For example, people who watch football simply because they find it entertaining and buy Honda Accords simply because they are reliable transportation within their budgets); and (f) The role of "authentic eccentrics" (like the odd guys who chose to wear handlebar mustaches before, and after, it was a hipster thing to do).
Can we ponder the distinction between 'Class' and 'Caste' a bit more? I've generally intuited that one significant distinction between the two terms is the degree to which status is heritable (i.e. Caste 100%, Class < 100%). Fussell apparently treats them as more interchangeable. Curious what others believe.
Also, I have not read Isabel Wilkerson's book (Caste - The Origins of Our Discontents) but I gather from reading interviews that she views race as simply variable that best fits inside the taxonomy of caste, rather than as an alternate ranking system itself. She said: "Caste focuses in on the infrastructure of our divisions and the rankings, whereas race is the metric that's used to determine one's place in that."
My question is basically Linnaean in nature: what is the most apt terminology / framework to describe the socioeconomic hierarchies of contemporary America?
I want to read Wilkerson’s book but have not yet done so. NYT excerpted it though I think in the review of books. Caste seems to work. Class means too many things now.
Castes don't outbreed. If you look at a bunch of the jatis in India (basically, the tiny individual sub-castes), the majority of them have been endogamous for thousands of years. People didn't marry outside of the jati, much less into a different caste. Europe has had two major castes in historical memory, Jews and Gypsies (maybe the Cagots as well). Everyone else interbred with everyone else, to a lesser or greater extent.
I suspect Fussell wanted to use a word that sounds like "class" but isn't, because in American usage "class" tends to mean income bracket. The actual difference should probably be that "caste" is rigid and endogamous to an extent that "class" isn't.
"You have never heard of any of these people, although you might recognize the last name they share with a famous ancestor (Rockefeller, Ford, etc)."
Rockefeller? Ford? Aren't these people new money? If Wooster & Jeeves taught me anything it's that you're not upper class unless you can trace your ancestry to the Norman invasion (or regional equivalent).
Yeah, I just said below the west coast has no old money. We're all loser as far as the Rockefellers are concerned, but all North Americans are losers as far as the British are concerned. At best, the petty shit nobility, but more likely religious fanatics and idiotic adventurers that couldn't hack it in the home country. Hell, half of our old money here were slaveholders. That went out of style in England when? 800 years ago?
Given the general destruction of the plantation system and the supporting infrastructure during the Civil War I'd guess little to none of our current "old money" ever owned slaves, unless you mean old money prior to that time. But yeah, provincialism is always local, if it happened before 1620 AD it doesn't count.
Yeah, I mean during colonial and early post-revolution times, though I imagine at least some of the present-day cotillion class in Georgia and what not is descended from the original plantation class, though the New Englanders presumably look down on them as much as Englanders look down on New Englanders.
Greg Clark would say family lines always tend to revert to their old class status. In the U.S there was an interesting natural experiment dating back even prior to the Civil War:
In 1833, the British government used £20m, 40% of its national budget, to buy freedom for all slaves in the empire. The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015. Which means that living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade.
It's not obvious to me that anyone has mentioned this, but Douglas Coupland named "Generation X" after Fussel's X class. the important thing to keep in mind about his x class idea is that it represents the idea of "opting out" of a power structure: you stop trying to fit in with the cool kids and smoke with your buddies under the bleachers instead.
I think where fussel's idea falls flat is the idea that there is just one "american class system": IMO there are multiple sources of power that each have their own class system. The silicon valley class system looks different from the new york class system: both in terms of aesthetics and values.
take something like the movie "legally blonde": an upper class LA girl moves to the east coast to chase after her boyfriend at harvard law school, and suddenly finds herself at the bottom of the food chain. Her previous high status means nothing here. She befriends an actual prole who shares her aesthetics (a hairdresser), and learns enough about how the new rules work to climb back to the top (ending the movie as valedictorian). this shows two class systems (Beverly Hills vs Harvard) but I would argue there are as many as there are different american cultures (Like in that Collin Woodard book "American Nations" where he tries to boil it down to 11)
LA doesn't have an upper class. We're all crass proles to the east coast snobs. I was definitely a prole growing up (I mean, did some genealogical research on the Mexican immigrants I'm descended from last year and found from census records they were overwhelmingly farm hands and domestic help), but was good-looking and confident enough that every now and then a former child actress or daughter of a record exec would slum it with me for a few months. Enough to sometimes get into a party in Beverly Hills and the kind of people this guy is talking about wouldn't even step foot in one of these places, and there is no way in hell they would let someone like me into one of their parties. That's as good as it gets on the west coast. Wealthy maybe, but gaudy and classless. Hell, half these people probably made their money from the mob. There is no old money. There wasn't even really a city there until 1920 or so.
I agree that, in the context of this book's definition of "class" (which definitionally sets New York at the center of the universe), that you are correct. But if you think in terms of power, it's not clear to me that LA is less powerful than New York is, and there are people who are insiders and outsiders to that power in a way that's roughly analogous to how fussel's "class" works. The west coast's powerful people are certainly more willing to meet and mingle with less powerful people in a way that the east coasters are not, but IMO this is a reflection of a different set of values.
The classy friend I described in the post comes from LA. She seemed classy to me because she knows a lot of celebrities, some generic Rockefeller-type rich people, and has strong opinions about the relative desirability of various LA neighborhoods/restaurants/architecture. She also went to an Ivy and most of her LA friends are the sort of people who did/could go to Ivies. Her family works in show biz making shows whose names you'd probably recognize, and she's absorbed enough show biz knowledge by osmosis that "make a show and pitch it to studio executives, despite no previous experience" is one of the potential life plans she's considering, with high likelihood of success. All of this seems really classy to me, if class is a network of connections, social knowledge, social power, etc.
The reference to a Silicon Valley class system is also interesting. Surely there has to be one and it would be an obvious bias for me to say there isn't - but it's hard for me to think of what it would be (other than the obvious one where the programmers are a different class from the janitors, secretaries, and other support personnel). I think a lot of the billionaires know each other and are friends, but I don't know if that's enough to call it a class system. Despite my brand I don't actually know that much about Silicon Valley society - I live in the East Bay, don't program, and mostly hang out with rationalists who (if they're like any other community) are probably selected mostly from one specific class - so I'd be interested in hearing from people who know more.
I can't say much about how SV works because I don't live there, but the Paul Graham essay on cities seems relevant: http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html
I can talk more about how the game is played in Seattle though from the time i lived there (i imagine it's somewhat interconnected): in seattle everyone is conspicuously into hiking and rock climbing, spend a lot of time in the gym, and wear patagonia and functional athletic gear to signal. wearing "business casual" is definitely a signal of lower-to-middle class, you have to be wearing the right kind of shlubby clothes/tech company hoodie, unless you're even higher up and you're wearing tailored suits from nordstrom. There is also a big tech/not tech split: you're either working in tech or you are on the outside looking in and scowling. If you went to the right schools, it's incredibly easy to move from job to job, get meetings with investors and incubators, not hard to get a seat at the table. If you did not go to the right schools, it's hard to be employed in tech at all (even if you are talented).
I think that it hard for most people to appreciate that there can be huge gaps above (or below) them. They see someone far above them in wealth, class, athletic ability, etc, but don't realize that there is another gap just as large above that and perhaps another above that.
Gen X, though, "opts out" because it's not an option; as a small generation sandwiched between two large ones, power and cultural influence transitioned more or less smoothly from the Boomers to the Millennials.
Millennials weren't a thing yet when the book Generation X was written. Some of them weren't even born. Whatever characteristics Coupland attributed to Generation X were a function of itself and its predecessors, but not of its successors.
It's pretty short and a quick read. And Fussell is an entertaining writer. It's also an interesting snapshot of a time: I remember the 80's through the eyes of a child, it's a fascinating commentary on the things I lacked the depth to understand at the time.
I forget where I first read it, but someone somewhere once wrote that the best way to learn about class in America is to watch Gilmore Girls. Almost all of the conflict in that show comes from the tension between conflicting class norms.
My mother had an upper middle to upper background (DAR type), my dad was lower middle (all grandoarents immigrants).
He did well but used to tease her by doing "lower class" things like putting turnips in soup when he started cooking (turnips are a big no) or wearing a baseball cap with a logo (double no).
"Limo" no. "Car"
"Chauffer" no. "Driver"
"Classy" no. "No one who has it says it"
A lotvof it is funny and useless but there have been / are serious divisions based on this stuff.
Migration: In the UK, posh people used to speak with (hi-class) "Received Pronunciation," but now even the likes of Prince Harry have dropped that for (low-class) "Estuary English."
Fussell's "Class X" maps directly onto David Brooks's "Bourgeois Bohemians," Robert Reich's "symbolic analysts," Ehrenreich's "professional managerial class," Young's "meritocracy," etc. College-educated Boomers having no attachment to their inherited traditions, they "invent" a new class for themselves."
Prince Harry is a weird example, he seems to be actively working to drop out of the Upper Class and awkwardly into the American Upper Middle to be with his wife. From my perspective it's sad and awkward to watch.
There's a floor to how low Harry can sink in my book, since he served in Afghanistan incognito and tried to serve in Iraq, but wasn't allowed. That's some high-conscientiousness shit right there, and it deserves to be remembered.
I think people underestimate how much all accents change over time. It's at the point where if you listen to FDR or Truman, they have a recognisably 1930s accent that no-one sounds like today. This may well have been happening throughout history, but we don't have old enough recordings.
Counter-argument: that's just the sound of crappy 1940s recording equipment
Now try Gervais Principle's "Clueless" or "Gentry" with Michael O' Church and Curtis Yarvin. For fun, the "Sacrificial Hero" and "Creatives" in An American Manifesto by Christopher Chantrill.
Some of these things are highly regional. Landscaping, for instance. In the Maryland suburbs I once lived in, middle and upper middle class, you definitely had the whole stereotypical US suburban lawn thing going on. Probably you could make some inferences based on flowers.
But where I live now in northern New Jersey, in a mostly upper middle class neighborhood, most people seem to not give a flying fuck about their lawns and landscaping. The few that do are pretty varied, and there's at least one person with poinsettia. Most, though, hire a landscaper (one of which lives in the neighborhood, so I guess we have some high proles as well, though probably wealthy high proles) to keep the yard from turning brown or being overgrown, and that's it. Shift over to the next town which is UMC and plain old upper-class, and you see the upper class have meticulously landscaped estates all right... but the UMC over there still don't seem to care.
Also regional: I spent much of the 80s in the DC suburbs. Except maybe the old money, EVERYONE went to or held Super Bowl parties.
Good post overall, but to quote one commenter there:
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> "A thing that has been very frustrating to me is that most books and other discussions I have been able to find that really address that social classes are cultures have come out of the Right. Again this pattern: the Right, at least, admits the phenomenon exists, mostly so they can hate on people (also see "culture of poverty"); the Left engages in Orwellian doublethink, insisting the problem doesn't exist and shouldn't be spoken of."
>
> A thing that is very frustrating to me is that any discussion of class in America that I run into tends to make this sort of assertion about how the "Right" in America views social classes. The Left totally acknowledges some social classes, much of the complaining on the political right about this is accurate.
>
> The right in America is mostly very low class rank and very low status as a result, and they are painfully aware of this, so they tend towards flattened class as an ideal, but what you term "hate on people" is really about the kinds of fine-grained distinctions necessary to ego preservation that Orwell covered in his writing about the lower tiers of the upper class, those who knew in the abstract what to tip a servant but would never be able to afford one.
>
> One of the big class markers is how defining Right views of class as essentially evil or bad is considered utterly neutral. The left, far from ignoring class, has been quite expert at utilizing class markers that don't involve money to position class status as something you can gain levels of if you assert or support (some) of their political views. I see it frequently among working class people who don't have strong political views of any kind. They do know that saying you agree with left-leaning things is higher-class though, so they will agree if it comes up.
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Funny when she admits to being classist, and more than a little irritating to be on the receiving end of. Books like Theodore Dalrymple's "Life at the Bottom" would undoubtedly get categorized as hating on people, but in places you can see in your mind's eye at how he's throwing his hat on the ground and stomping on it in sheer frustration at the bullshit some of his patients have had to deal with, and the whole book is essentially about how broken telephoning upper/upper-middle class fashions down to proleland breaks proleland and makes it a dysfunctional shithole. He doesn't like it being a dysfunctional shithole.
Reminds me of a book I read in the early 1980s by Jilly Cooper, called Class. Cooper wrote about the English, but made many of the same points that you attribute to Fussell. I believe that the book was considered satire at the time, but I personally recognized many traits that I had seen around me (in Canada).
At the price of great over-simplification, the best indicator of class forty years ago was education. The upper class often sent their children to university, but it was generally to study subjects that had no applications or usefulness in real life, such as anthropology or obscure languages or the history of remote corners of the globe. Some became academics or politicians. Upper middle class families intended their children for the professions, medicine, law and dentistry being popular, with the occasional accountant. Of course, the boundaries were permeable: if the family had enough financial security, many upper middle class children headed for the humanities. Others simply were not cut out for university and might enter family businesses or drift into quiet eddies of hobbies considered to be "work".
Neither Jilly Cooper nor Paul Fussell define middle middle class particularly well, or perhaps there were none around me, so I don't know what their educational preferences were. But lower middle classes wanted their children to finish high school at least, and maybe go on to "college", although few did. The working class people I knew despised higher education -- book learning -- and often thought that the sooner their children left school and got a job where they could get real-world experience, the better.
Also, I just had one of the weirdest Baader–Meinhof phenomenons I ever had. Today, I started thinking about Douglas Coupland and his book Generation X which I last read many years ago. So I checked its wiki entry to see what were the inspirations, and this exact book was there. I saw that for the first time in my life and said "huh, that's an interesting book". Fast forward a couple of hours and I come across this article. Weird.
The Class X chapter did seem to be very disjoint with the rest of the book, which was basically about how it was very difficult to escape from the class you were born into. I've seen speculation that it was a chapter that the editors forced Fussell to write, so the book could end on an "optimistic note", which honestly seems pretty believable as far as conspiracy theories go
Loving the more frequent content but don't burn yourself out. And don't feel you have to because some of us have paid to subscribe. Lots of less interesting writers charge more for less posts.
Paul Fussell was definitely being tongue in cheek with the physiognomy, but I think it is or was a stereotype among WASPy types of WASP and like unwashed masses.
Another person the American ruling class never forgave for his prole origins. The son of a salesman and a housewife, who lived above a store. What kind of political office does Eureka College qualify anyone for! Other than dogcatcher.
No, the ruling classes didn't embrace Thatcher at all. But, in part because of larger changes, and in part because of the policies she pursued, those ruling classes changed. The kind of patricians who dominated politics before the 80s just don't exist any more as a coherent force. Priti Patel gets the same class-based prejudice for the same reasons, but it's much weaker now because the upper ranks of our institutions have now got enough strivers to be a counteracting force.
As far as "prole drift" goes: I think this is a product of tastemakers in favor with the upper classes appropriating things they find personally appealing. Fussell mentions Picasso as something the upper class would buy, but 100 years before this book was published, no upper-class person in America would've dreamed of buying Cubist art. It wasn't until Kahnweiler started buying Picasso's art - and that of other impressionist/abstract artists - that it became popular among the upper classes. Kahnweiler wasn't exactly upper class at the time, being Jewish, but as far as I understand, he was quite influential and connected among the upper classes, and he was able to popularize Cubism effectively using those connections.
I think the classes are more about culture than about money. Scott hints this already when he thinks about the main classes could be just different ladders to climb and every class has its own (more or less) rich and poor people. At least for the low and middle class this is described clearly. Just the upper class is left out, but it is harder to observe, as they don't have to show off.
I think class X is just the upper class with less money. So upper class would be all people who just live for fun, sense or purpose and don't (have to) worry about resources or status. Or say, its the ones living by intrinsic motivation instead of external motivation and fear. So the best example of poorest upper class would be the hermit in the woods who owns almost nothing but is happily living his chosen way. Going all the way up along the artist living his dream with minimal money, to perhaps someone like current Scott, being able to earn a living by following his passion with helping people and writing. And the top being the old money who could cultivate this 'finding and living their passions' for generations. @arrow63 is kind of confirming this in his comment. (By the way, how do you link to a specific comment here? There has to be a way.)
It all just rings to me, as i was kind of thinking about this for a while. A good part of my family and friends somehow do not fit in the usual pattern of classes so they could be class X: judged by money and jobs they are lower middle class maximum, but by culture and interests they are definitely not. Many are freelancers, and have relatively little money because they just don't see the point in working more, and they don't care about status signaling. Many have had the chance to higher education but dismissed it in free choice because being happy and following the own interests was more important. Having not much money, because it's secondary as long as ends meet is perhaps similar to not caring about money because you inherited a lot. I know people having typical lower class jobs like craftsmen or bus driver, but they do not share most of the lower class culture of their colleges, just because its boring to them.
I suppose low to middle upper-class in this sense was growing fast the last 60 years or at least getting much more visible. This is strongly interconnected with the raising living standard in multiple ways:
1) giving many people the chance to live the dreams of generations like having a family and a save home without much worry.
2) freeing resources for hobbies and other interests so letting more people experience intrinsic motivation.
3) seeing that wealth alone does not make happy, makes them ask 'What does?'
Children growing up in this environment are more likely to question society, usual (class) culture or ask for the sense of live generally. This leads to counter culture, spiritual seeking and political activism at the same time. Some get the transition to upper class or at least plant the seed in their kids, that it's not the outside that counts and that are no longer guided by fear.
This also explains why it is much more likely to change from middle class to class X without being the same.
So, if Fussel's "upper class" actually existed, is there a reason any of the rest of us should even care? They hold title to some of society's productive capital, I'm guessing mostly real estate and older blue-chip industries, but they almost certainly delegate the active management to the same people who are managing capital owned by e.g. mutual funds and who would be managing that capital under just about any plausible socioeconomic system. They siphon off a bit of the income from that to fund their mansions and yachts, but that's a small parasitic load in the grand scheme of things. They explicitly *aren't* the Bill Gates/Jeff Bezos types who command even greater fortunes and use them in a way that actively transforms the economy. They might still count a few Senators among their ranks, but they haven't had a President in generations. They throw invisible parties, fund operas and charities, and basically seem to have isolated themselves from every part of the universe that I live in. Unless I'm missing something, even one chapter telling me how to identify them by the flowers in their garden is too much.
"Class X" seems to be self-congratulatory twaddle about how the author and people like him, from his immediate perspective, are above all of this. And it's almost certainly long obsolete; at least Scott's "Grey Tribe" is describing something that presently exist (and may sprout a future Bezos or two).
So Fussel writes a book on class as it was forty years ago, but all of the class distinctions that are actually relevant to me seem like they're being compressed into "some sort of middle class" or "some sort of prole". If someone wants to revisit the subject for 2021, I'd rather they look more at the class distinctions that matter. In particular the classes that actually and actively wield great power, like whatever class it is that Jeff Bezos does belong to. And, yeah, it would help if they weren't so flippant that we can't tell when they're joking.
We should care because the upper upper class is taxable, and I'd rather squeeze them than the entrepreneurs. Alas, inheritance tax is understandably quite unpopular.
I doubt you can get enough tax revenue out of them to matter, but even more importantly, you can't tax them without also taxing the entrepreneurs. The whole point of Scott and Fussell is that class is fundamentally not economic, but tax law fundamentally *is* economic. I can accept an argument that there's a real sense that Bezos, Musk, et al aren't "upper class". But to the IRS, they're going to look exactly like the upper class.
Including the part where, when they die, much of their money and assets will go into a trust or similar entity crafted by the finest lawyers money can buy to ensure that the taxman gets the smallest possible bite.
"The Simpsons were a prole family who absolutely seemed rich enough to take frequent cruises and maybe even save up for a yacht if they got lucky. This puts the recent rise in wealth inequality in a new and starker light than I'd thought about much before."
Really? I always thought the Simpsons were borderline poor and struggling to get by. I definitely didn't get the impression they would ever go on a cruise, let alone regularly. Certainly not that they would be in a position to buy a yacht.
Wealth inequality may have increased, but in general everyone is much better off now than in the late '80s, early '90s. How much has consumption inequality increased? At all? I feel like there has been incredible compression in the day-to-day life of different classes. Bill Gates may have thousands of times as much wealth as you, but is his daily life thousands of times better?
It is astonishing to find so much lack of cultural literacy among such obviously highly literate people. I don't think I've seen a single misplaced apostrophe in this entire discussion thread.
I’m glad I’m not the only one confused by all the talk of “yachts”. According to the internet, there’s no standard definition for yachts, but any boat with a cabin that you could sleep in might count. Which is a lot of boats.
And cruises might be one of the cheapest vacations you can get if you’re savvy and flexible. Friends of mine with very little spare cash managed to take a vacation every year by booking a cruise under specific conditions. There aren’t many other vacations where you can get transport somewhere sunny, a week’s worth of accommodations, almost unlimited food and entertainment for $600.
Yachts (boats that have sleeping quarters) are astronomically expensive to maintain and store. Cruises might not be expensive FOR YOU, but for the Simpsons, who would have to drive to a port and pay for 5 people, it would be totally out of reach.
My friends did the cruise for $600 *for two adults*. It was not a small thing for them; they saved all year for it.
This family did a cruise for a family of 4 out of Nebraska including airfare for around $1500 in 2018. My blue-collar parents scraped together about that much for our vacations in 1990s dollars. I don’t know how many people can corner deals like this, but I know my relatives did it on multiple occasions in the past decade. He’s a construction worker and she’s a teacher’s aid. Maybe grandma threw them a few bucks? In any case, “ordinary” families can take cruises.
I'm sorry, I just don't see the Simpsons as a savvy couponing family that steals great travel deals and "goes on frequent cruises" as Scott says. My impression was that they struggled to get by. I don't see that the Simpsons cast modern inequality in a new light because we have it so much worse now than the Simpsons did. I would guess that cruises are less expensive now than when the Simpsons began and more accessible for the average family.
Depends where you are standing yourself, I suppose (and since it's a very long running show, any realism gets sacrificed for plot convenience. If Homer can afford to splash out hundreds on a dumb device for the sake of a joke, they'll do that, even if in a much earlier episode he couldn't afford to buy Christmas presents for his kids).
The Simpsons seemed solidly lower-middle/upper-working class to me. Marge doesn't have to work (unlike if they really were struggling to get by, where she'd be working in the local supermarket or wherever) and Homer has a decent union job which he will never lose, no matter how badly he performs it. Lisa can have an instrument and music lessons. They can afford two cars - Homer's sedan which is the family car, and Marge's station wagon which she uses while Homer is at work, and which the entire family uses to pack up in when going on vacation.
The kids have their own bedrooms, the house is in a decent neighbourhood and has a back garden. They're not rich or even "comfortably well-off" but they have a good standard of living and are not poor (though granted, if Homer ever does lose his job and/or something like a medical emergency eats through their savings, they'll fall down that step of the ladder).
There's a state of mind that I call unself-conscious self-consciousness (UCSC). An acute awareness of where you stand in relation to other people- their habits, their hierarchies, combined with an acute unawareness of where you stand in relation to the things that give meaning. A supremely aware life, filled with comparision and cataloguing, but totally unreflective in the sense Socrates meant when he said "the unexamined life is not worth living". The cause is a great deal of time thinking about what everything signals, and so little time thinking about what everything means.
I can't help but think that the best way to try and escape is to cultivate unawareness of class. I know, that on reflection, I have a lot of the traits associated with the upper-middle and middle class, even as that kind of game playing I associate with that class disgusts me. I'm never going to be able to think my way out of it. If I analyse my consumption choices to avoid looking like a good middle-class boy, I'll just end up looking like a bad middle-class boy who wants everyone to know how very rebellious he is. Rebellion becomes its own conformity as countless people have remarked, and the cycle starts again. So I must just stop using this lens altogether.
It's hard though because self-consciousness in relation to cultural categories like this is a trap that keeps luring you in. I don't want to correct people's grammar because it just seems snobby. But hang on! Does that just make me a special kind of meta-snob who looks down on those foolish grammar Nazis who haven't grasped the truth of descriptivism? How can I escape?
The best "trick" I've found for escaping this spiral to just try asking myself what a decent person would is. do, and think through that in a way that doesn't refer to snobbiness or counter snobbiness at all. A decent person would probably avoid correcting people unnecessarily because being corrected hurts. Ergo that's what I'll do. A decent person would also not over scold people who are having a little fun laughing at grammatical mannerisms, so that's what I'll do as well. Neither dogmatic prescriptivism nor descriptivism in practice, and whatever feels right in my own writing.
What I came to learn then was that there was some truth to the authors who said that cultivating virtue- even if, like me, you're not very good at it, is a path to freedom. Only by having values that aren't contingent on the game can you avoid being tossed around by its winds.
Now it may turn out that, on some analysis, this is just more game playing at a deeper level, that this kind of cultivated ignorance is actually a very common strategy for men of the academic subculture in their early thirties, and really I'm just a typical example. I don't know. The comfort I have here is not so much about not playing the game, it's about having a basis on which to think it doesn't matter so very much if I am or am not playing it.
Another way to put this is that in interpersonal life I've found the best strategy for being fully alive is to be oriented to other people and myself, rather than to the situations and contexts and conventions we find ourselves embedded in. It sounds like a distinction without a difference, and maybe in the final limit it is, but I've found it a helpful North Star.
Following your incentives leads to being eaten by Moloch in short order. You need to break free from status games for the same reason you need to break free from a game-theoretic dollar auction. Also, breaking rules grants you a certain kind of charisma by itself.
The older I am, the more social status seems to me like something claimed (it's just lying there! grab it!) rather than bestowed upon you by people. The people don't have a clue who you are anyway, they'll adjust to whatever you present as.
"Our era is the opposite: when you read someone's social media account, you can't tell what shirt they wearing, but you can scroll down and see every political position they've ever endorsed or condemned" you can infer the shirt from the politics. We're pretty sorted by class politically at this point.
I've never read Fussell's book, but most of what I know about class comes from a tiny book called "The Bluffer's Guide to British Class", part of a "Bluffer's Guide" series that was popular in the 90s. Of course this was about Britain, not America, but I'm Australian and nobody has ever written a decent book about class in Australia anyway (no obvious jokes please, I assure you it's just as complicated as class anywhere else).
Anyway, a few of my main recollections from that book:
1. It had twelve classes instead of nine: the main classes were Upper, Middle, Working, and Lower, and each of these was split into Upper, Middle, and Lower. This seems a key difference between US and UK class, there's no acknowledged "working class" in the US, and the people in this role (respectable steadily-employed blue collar or administrative types) are treated as either part of the lower or the middle class.
2. I had thought of myself as Upper Middle, but the book was very firm in putting me back in my place as Middle Middle. Now this is okay, because Middle Middle is well above average, only a few percent of society would be considered above Middle Middle.
3. Class has nothing to do with money. A penniless Duke will always be Upper Class, and a boorish used car salesman who makes millions of pounds a year will always be Lower or Working class, and there's nothing that can be done about that. Through concentrated effort over an entire lifetime you might be able to squeeze yourself up by one class (say from Lower Middle to Middle Middle).
4. Lower Upper is a very weird place, and if I recall correctly consists mostly of headmasters of sufficiently fancy schools, and certain types of bishop.
"Lower Upper is a very weird place, and if I recall correctly consists mostly of headmasters of sufficiently fancy schools, and certain types of bishop."
Belloc's Nordic Man! Though some confluence with Upper Middle as well:
"The Nordic Man is born either in the West End of London or in a pleasant country house, standing in its own park-like grounds. That is the general rule; he is, however, sometimes born in a parsonage and rather more frequently in a Deanery or a Bishop’s Palace, or a Canon’s house in a Close. Some of this type have been born in North Oxford; but none (that I can discover) in the provincial manufacturing towns, and certainly none east of Charing Cross or south of the river.
The Nordic Man has a nurse to look after him while he is a baby, and she has another domestic at her service. He has a night and a day nursery, and he is full of amusing little tricks which endear him to his parents as he grows through babyhood to childhood.
Towards the age of ten or eleven, the Nordic Man goes to a preparatory school, the headmaster of which is greatly trusted by the Nordic Man’s parents, especially by the Nordic Man’s mother. He early learns to Play the Game, and is also grounded in the elements of Good Form, possibly the Classics and even, exceptionally, some modern tongue. He plays football and cricket; usually, but not always, he is taught to swim.
Thence the Nordic Man proceeds to what is called a Public School, where he stays till he is about eighteen. He then goes either to Oxford or Cambridge, or into the Army. He does not stay long in the Army; while from the University he proceeds either to a profession (such as the Bar, or writing advertisements) or to residence upon his estate. This last he can only do if his father dies early.
The Nordic Man lives in comfort and even luxury through manhood: he shoots, he hunts, he visits the South of France, he plays bridge. He hates the use of scent; he changes for dinner into a special kind of clothes every day. He is extremely particular about shaving, and he wears his hair cut short and even bald. The Nordic does not bother much about Religion, so when he approaches death he has to distract himself with some hobby, often that of his health. He dies of all sorts of things, but more and more of the cancer; after his death his sons, nephews, or cousins take up the role of the Nordic Man and perpetuate the long and happy chain.
Such is the life-story of the Nordic Man. I have only given it in its broadest line, and have left out a great many sub-sections; but what I have said will be sufficient to indicate places in which he is to be surprised and the kind of things which you will there find him doing. As for his character, which lies at the root of all this great performance, that is less easily described, for one might as well attempt to describe a colour or a smell; but I can attempt some indications of it.
The Nordic Man dislikes all cruelty to animals, and is himself kind to them in the following scale: first the dog, then the horse, then the cat, then birds, and so on till you get to insects, after which he stops caring. Microbes, oddly enough, he detests. He will treat them in the most callous manner.
In the matter of wine the Nordic Man is divided; you cannot predicate of him that he will drink it, or that if he drinks it he will know what it is. But in the matter of whisky you may safely say that it is his stand-by, save for a certain sub-section of him who dare not touch it. These stand apart and are savage to their fellows.
The Nordic Man is very reserved, save in the matter of speech-making. He hates to betray an emotion, but he hates still more the complete concealment of it. He has therefore established a number of conventions whereby it may be known when he is angry, pleased or what not; but he has no convention for fear, for he is never afraid. This reminds me that the Nordic Man despises conflict with lethal weapons unless it be against the enemies of his country; but he delights in watching, and will sometimes himself practise, conflict conducted with stuffed gloves. As for fighting with his feet, he would not dream of it; nor does he ever bite.
The Nordic Man is generous and treats all men as his equals, especially those whom he feels to be somewhat inferior in rank and wealth. This is a very beautiful trait in the Nordic Man, and causes him to believe that he is everywhere beloved. On the other hand, the Nordic Man prefers to live with those richer than himself. The Nordic Man detests all ostentation in dress, and detests even more the wearing of cheap clothes. He loves it to be known that his clothes were costly. No Nordic Man wears a made-up tie.
The Nordic Man boasts that he is not addicted to the Arts, and here he is quite right; but he is an excellent collector of work done by the inferior Mediterranean race, and is justly proud of the rare successes of his own people in this field. In the same way the Nordic Man will tell you with emphasis that he cannot write. Here he tells the truth. Yet, oddly enough, he is convinced that no one has ever been able to write except Nordic Men; and this article of faith he applies particularly to True Poetry, which (he conceives) can only be inspired in his own tongue.
The Nordic Man does everything better than anybody else does it, and himself proclaims this truth unceasingly; but where he particularly shines is in the administration of justice. For he will condemn a man to imprisonment or death with greater rapidity than will the member of any other race. In giving judgment he is, unlike the rest of the human species, unmoved by any bias of class or blood, let alone of personal interest. On this account his services as a magistrate are sought far and wide throughout the world, and his life is never in danger save from disappointed suitors or those who have some imaginary grievance against him.
The Nordic Man is a great traveller. He climbs mountains; he faces with indifference tropical heat and arctic cold. He is a very fine fellow.
I must conclude by telling you all that I am not obtaining these details from any personal observations, as the part of the country in which I live has very few Nordic Men, and most of them are away during the greater part of the year staying either in the houses of other Nordic Men or in resorts of ritual pleasure upon the Continent. But I have had the whole thing described to me most carefully by a friend of mine who was for a long time himself a Nordic Man, until he had the misfortune to invest in British Dyes and crashed. He guarantees me the accuracy of his description."
The crazy thing is that by definition, my grandma (who inherited all her money and has basically never worked) ought to be upper class. However, she seems to hit all the prole descriptions: she loves going on cruises all the time, she owned a powerboat at her summer home for a while, she's very into state pride for Nebraska of all places, and she tends to like whatever is popular/mainstream. I don't know anyone else IRL who ticks any of those boxes, so it's distinctive how many she hits. I had assumed that cruises and powerboating were an upper class thing, mostly because of how expensive they are.
In some respects, Fussell's "Class" is a slightly updated and much more humorous re-spin of Vance Packard's "The Status Seekers" (1959). I highly recommend the Vance Packard book if you care enough to understand where Fussell gets a lot of his data/opinions.
"Someone named H.B. Brooks-Baker claims that saying "tux" is lower-class and "tuxedo" higher-class. But actually "tuxedo" is middle-class and real upper-class people say "dinner jacket"."
Since buying a Jaguar, I've discovered that mechanics always call them "Jags", the middle class calls them "Jag-wahrs", and Jaguar owners always call them "Jag-oo-ars".
But most people call fraternities "frats", while fraternity members call them "fraternities". This suggests these lexical "class" divisions signify ownership or membership in a club rather than a broad social class. "Tux" might be used by people who don't own tuxedos, and "dinner jacket" by people who wear them so often that they might actually wear them to dinner.
Oh gosh, you are bringing me back to primary school elocution lessons, where one of the sample sentences we had to recite was "Father's car is a Jaguar, and Pa drives rather fast".
That was pronounced "Jag-u-ar" so far as I recall, so close to your "Jag-oo-ar". The purpose of the lessons was to get us pronouncing such a sentence with the long "a" sound etc. rather than our native style of "Fadder's karrrrr [we have very strong and prolonged 'r' sounds in my native wood notes wild] izza Jag'yar an' Paaah drives radder f'st [the "a" here is so short it practically disappears]"
That's because American English doesn't have many yods (the little y before the oo in jaguar). British English is losing them (its more-or-less lost them in evolution and revolution already).
"The counterculture were the only people with remotely modern norms. Compared to the hyperconformist society Fussell talks about, they really were as superior as he thinks they were."
The definitive book on what Fussell calls the upper class is Tad Friend's _Cheerful Money_ which is absolutely hilarious, beautifully written, and highly recommended. Gilmore Girls also gets an awful lot right. (Personal bias/perspective: I grew up in a mixture of what Fussell calls upper-middle and "X" but have family members and high school classmates who are legit upper class in Fussell's sense).
In particular, both Cheerful Money and Gilmore Girls explore how there are indeed gradations of success within the upper class despite the "nothing to prove" thing. Basically the most successful upper class people are the ones who are known *among their own kind* as pillars of the community, by doing lots of upper-class-pillar-of-the-community things like endowing scholarships and serving on boards without ever making a vulgar display of it. The least successful are the "black sheep" who can't keep their indulgences, vices, and/or mental health problems from interfering with their conformity to class standards of appearances.
Something I've wondered: is there a developed country that can accurately be described as "classless?" In the Anglosphere we tend to think of Northern European countries as having this property, but if you search for "<any country>" and "classless society" you just find peoples scoffing and saying "as if!"
New Zealand stands out to me as feeling much less class-bound than other developed countries I've been to, which was one of the pleasant things about it. Notably, the architecture, dress, and general material style of life seemed much more unpretentious and less obviously status-seeking than elsewhere. But that's a tourist's perspective, and those who live there might well feel differently.
In white South Africa (which to me feels like NZ) even apart from the racial stuff, there was very clearly class.
In NZ I expect that proles admit they enjoy Shortland Street, middle class claim they watch it ironically, and upper class claim they have no idea what it is.
"None of these seem too weird on their own, but taken together they suggest a picture where lots of working-class people have lots of money and go on Caribbean vacations all the time."
I took a Caribbean vacation once, in the Dominican Republic. It cost me $250 in airfare and about $100/day for drinks, food, cab fare, windsurfer rentals, and a room on the beach at a resort with two pools (one with an open swim-up bar, and one without). Although this was during hurricane season.
Yeah, if you try you can get very good deals on this sort of thing. My parents went on cruises and they were nothing if not blue-collar; my dad was a postal worker and my mother worked retail in a sporting goods store. But she researched the hell out of vacations until she found one they could afford.
As to your discussion of "three ladders", this was pretty interestingly, though somewhat poorly, described in this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25892897 (Hacker News link for comments). I found the discussion of communication styles between the ladders somewhat more interesting than the existence of the ladders themselves, which seems relatively uncontroversial. I found this particularly compelling with regard to the way the high corporate leaders seem to be socially signalling on a variety of topics from electric vehicles, carbon neutrality, social justice, DEI, etc, but I'm not sure I entirely agree with some of the distinctions he makes on the individual members of the various groups. This melds nicely with the ranking of engineers as specifically lower-middle class, especially as I see no promotion beyond a certain very low level in my future without going into people managing, even at one of the big 3 automakers.
"Here are the three classes, all pathetic in their own way..."
"But just in case you aren't introspective enough to recognise that, yes, you belong to one of these classes and are carried along by the inherent biases, here is a special class just for *you* and all the people you like so you don't have to be bothered by it."
Or perhaps I'm wrong, and it's not just a safe escape-route! I'd have to read the book to make a proper opinion about it (not that that's ever stopped me before)
The pitch to the publisher must have gone something like:
Fussell: It will be about class in America. The tone will be like it's about 19th century France but it will be satirical. It will be true but funny. Funny because it's true.
Publisher: But why do people want to hear about class in America? Don't you realize that nobody wants class in America? Why would they want to hear about it?
Fussell: I was getting at that. You see, the whole point is... there's this new group... this new class... so to speak... I call the class... X.... They defy class. So the book is about how Americans defy class. They didn't defy it in the past. That's a myth. Old Americans are just as classist as any old European. But there's this new generation of Americans. They defy class. I want to write about them. It's an amazing story but I first have to explain what makes this new generation so amazing by putting it into the historical context by explaining how classist America was until this new generation came along.
Publisher: That sounds like total bullshit. The answer is "yes".
Am I being too unkind if I imagine the pitch went more like:
Fussell: I want to write a book about class in America
Publisher: But don't you realise that nobody wants class in America? Why would they want to read such a book?
Fussell: *throws several copies of British books written in such a mix of humour and pop-sociology on the desk* Like these but American
Publisher: Ah, an American version of a British book! Great, you've convinced me!
That last brought to you courtesy of the Wikipedia article on Lynne Truss' "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" and 'the usual practice':
"The book was a commercial success. In 2004, the US edition became a New York Times best-seller. Contrary to usual publishing practice, the US edition of the book left the original British conventions intact."
I find the diagram of the two faces as fascinating as they are creepy. Everyone is rightly disturbed by the idea of defining "classes" by head shape, facial feature etc. due to the baggage from things like phrenology and Nazism, but when it comes down to it...facial types do seem to strongly correlate with social position. I wonder if this could be due to the hyper-selective marriage mores that stretch back from the early 19th century to perhaps the middle ages and earlier, wherein the groups that would later rise to become the commercial and aristocratic classes in the modern-day kept their marriages to a tight genetic group. It's uncomfortable to think about, but western society basically did have a caste system in so far as marriages were concerned. Noblemen married noblewomen, shopkeepers married other shopkeepers and tradesman daughters, and so on for generation after generation. Hence why the range of faces you see in a silicon valley start-up varies from the range you'd see in a body shop. (Sidenote: this has no racial aspect. The faces you'd see in an Indian start up vs. an Indian bodyshop seem to be different in the same way) Anway this is totally non-rigorous spit balling.
True, but the head on the left is also relying on the chinless wonder stereotype of the "effete, over-bred aristocrat who has receding features due to his family all marrying their cousins for the past two hundred years" and the face on the right relies on the "strong jaws are more masculine" idea. So there's a joke in there as well as any pretensions to scientific physiognomy (and indeed mocking the whole idea of scientific physiognomy).
"A third correspondent — who signs her letter ‘Onyx’ — is troubled about her children. There are five: three charming boys and two delightful girls. She has measured their heads with her husband’s calipers (he is an architect in full employment) and he finds that her eldest and her youngest are quite unmistakably Mediterranean; her second eldest painfully Alpine, only her second youngest clearly Nordic; while the one in the middle, a boy (by name, she tells me, Ethelred), seems to be a strange mixture of all three.
I cannot reply personally to this correspondent, as she does not give her address; but I trust that these lines will meet her eye. I would have her note that in the first place the skulls of children are no index to the shape they will have when they fossilize in mature years; and next, that even if three varied types appear in her family, it is not remarkable, for all three types are present in England. Moreover, she may have travelled."
I don’t think there is a need to update the book since basically everyone you meet in America is working class or middle class of some sort. I hate the Prol term for it condescension towards very good people who just happen to lack a certain type of financial or social capital. But, if you have a reasonably good job and a house or prospects of buying a house AND you are trying to keep up with the joneses then you are middle class (I.e. you care what people think of you and your choices). I think the only tension here is whether you are middle class or upper middle class. Upper middle class people care a lot about where theIt school ranks in USA News rankings (I.e. Weslyian), they subscribe to the NYTimes or the WSJ depending on their politics. The smartest go to Harvard and maybe clerk with a Supreme Court judge and the golden ring is to become President of the United States. The reason you don’t know any upper class people is because there are very few of them, but if you want to find them you should attend services in old Episcopal churches, go to horticulture fairs, or garages that specialize in old prestige cars ( not fixing them up but but keeping them running). You can learn more about them by watching the film Metropolitan. Upper class people almost never go to Harvard or Oxford because they can’t get the grades to get in. They go to old schools with lax entrance standards. I bet a bunch go to St John’s College Annapolis. They don’t want to be famous and they don’t want to know famous people. They just want quiet lives and for their kids not to get fleeced by social climbers marrying them to climb the social ladder.
Oh and the mention in the article about the classy friend who knows the guy with the cat named Spinoza, she is definitely upper middle class. If you meet an upper class person they will not be the classiest person you know. They wear their clothes too long and they mend them. Prince Charles still wears suits he had as a young man. They likely wear their parents clothes. Their babies wear christening gowns worn by their great grandparents, and the mothers of the bride wear the dress their mother wore to their wedding. They aren’t classy, they are your annoying friend who has threadbare couches that they inherited from their great aunt that was shipped over from England. They do things that, if viewed by the middle class or even upper class, would seem ridiculous and silly.
I think you can slice the definitions a little more finely so that there's a lower upper-class and an upper upper-class. I think the Spinoza cat is definitely lower upper-class, maybe trembling on the margin between upper middle and lower upper.
It's a very fine shade of meaning, I agree, but it's more like the difference between the squire (who is technically a commoner), the baronet (who has a hereditary title, is part of the aristocracy, but the lowest rank) and the duke (royalty are their own case).
A duke and a baronet are on the same social scale, but there's a big difference between Peregrine Cavendish and George Osborne. You may well meet the duke going around in a pair of wellies (particularly since he is involved in horse racing) but if he has any cats I imagine they're named things like "Smudge", and I'm quite sure Osborne would think a cat named "Spinoza" would be the business and would only be enticed into a pair of wellingtons with great awkwardness. (Osborne is definitely regarded as upper-middle class rather than lower-upper, and for the Duke of Devonshire there's no question as to where he's situated).
What you mention about clothing etc. is behind the quip about Heseltine having to buy his own furniture, and the Sam Vimes Economic Theory of Boots:
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
Except that the rich person likes to buy designer boots. And the extra cost of the designer boots compared to the $50 pair outweighs the savings from the efficiency of the $50 pair compared to the $20 pair.
Not everyone makes enough money to save; that's the point. Also not everyone who does have money is interested in designer goods. There really is a market for cheap stuff that wears out quickly, and for quality goods that aren't ostentatious.
I think we need to stay away from rich and poor when it comes to class, though. Also, you really save money if you wear your father's boots and watch your great aunt's tv will reclining on your 1st cousin twice removed's couch. All of which you were "gifted" when you bought your first house. And with all of those costs taken care of, you might be able to buy a nice watch that you will give to your granddaughter in 70 years.
George Osborne's cat is called Freya (I'm taking this as 100% proving your point), and has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freya_(cat) (which must prove some sort of point about something, but I dread to think what)
I didn't even know he had a cat! But I did know the Norse goddess Freya had a chariot pulled by cats, so this may be him being clever-clever in the naming
These are all great points regarding the English situation. The one quibble is over baronets who are still commoners because they are eligible to sit in the HofC instead of the Lords. It's a quibble because so are the oldest sons of Barons, Earl's etc, but no one would deny that any of them are upper class.
But the trick is in applying this to an American situation, since there is no House of Lords or royal family to create an officially sanctioned pecking order. That's why I think it's tricky to identify an upper class in the US, but an upper middle class UMC seems so obvious. I certainly agree that there are gradations in the UMC with different people looking down on others who in turn are looking down on them. For example the tech billionaire visits a Vanderbelt and thinks, "They don't even own a private jet." and they look down on him and think, "Look at that ridiculous Tuxedo designed by Tom Ford he keeps going on about as though we are supposed to be impressed."
As for naming a cat Spinoza, you would really need to talk to the person to know what it all means. Did she name the cat Spinoza because it sounded impressive or because she did her PhD on Spinoza. It would be really impressive if her grandfather did his PhD on Spinoza and went on and on about him while she was a girl and so she named the cat after him as a way to tease her grandfather.
Probably the best way to define the American UC would be to borrow from the English idea of the gentry. People who have had property for a long long time. Many of them look down on the aristocracy because they were ennobled in 19th century for selling beer and donating generously to the Conservative party whereas, the old gentry families are descended from people in the doomsday book. Perhaps an American version would be having a mother who was in the Daughter of the American Revolution and a house that has been in the family since, ... well since the American Revolution.
I'm not crazy about how it handles the "global elite" (in part because that's the group of which I have the least reliable knowledge of any form, and I feel that to some extent at least the author's biases are taking over) but overall I think it gets the US (the whole "modern world") in 2021 essentially correct, more so than Fussell and standard sociology/marxism.
I *suspect* that these three ladders are in a sense the result of the "excess of 'people with university degrees'" phenomenon that Fussell sees as already underway; the Gentry crowd are the people who learned in higher ed how to judge and be judged by standards convenient for those who went through higher ed.
To me Fussell's magical Class X is basically High Gentry/Bobo's in Paradise, nothing less and (absolutely!) nothing more. He even admits that it's defined by the High Gentry wrapper of "I'm better than you because I have the right tastes and display them in the right way; not because I'm richer or because of my family name or because of anything I've achieved".
If Fussell were still alive, he'd be High Woke.
I think there IS actually a Class X in America, and (hah, what a surprise, bet you didn't see that coming!) it's defined by the kinds of people who read Astral Codex Ten. It's the STEM folks who understand the *Theory* of Fashion, who have read On Human Finery or Oswald Veblen, but have zero interest in putting it into practice. It's the Silicon Valley folks whose homes simultaneously hold $100,000 artworks and furniture made of the most practical materials available. It's people who cared that the house looks nice (however they define nice) but who also care very much that it's functional along every dimension, from quiet AC to having a hot water recirculating system to having solar and a battery backup.
It's the people who have (mostly -- these things are always a spectrum) liberated themselves from concern with what *most* people think of their lifestyles and tastes (though they probably still care about their peers -- that Silicon Valley engineer can probably be pigeon-holed as to his TV/movie tastes, though maybe less so his music or reading tastes).
A second interesting version of this crowd are the true cosmopolitans, the people who have seriously lived in enough different places to realize just how ridiculous it is to limit one's tastes, and who likewise have no particular reason to care what other people think. Think for example of the wealthy Asians buying multi-million-dollar homes in Los Angeles. Yes you can peg these as nouveau-riche, but they're much more interesting than that. They don't care about the fakery (the Shakespeare on the coffee table, the name dropping of which college you went to) of the American nouveau-riche; they simultaneously wear absolutely gorgeous clothes (and wear them well), and are happy to admit that their favorite TV show is some declasse sitcom, or their favorite restaurant is some chain.
I think if one wants to understand America (and "the modern world") the Three Ladders theory is more useful in that in explains more and explains it better. If one wants start judging people (or judging/positioning oneself) I think the next step is to start asking the question of "why does it work this way", not in the Theory of Fashion sense, but in the "why does anyone care how other people are decorating their yards" sense.
For people who want to explore that, one option is Rene Girard and mimesis ("people don't know what they want, they don't even know what they like; so they latch onto role models and construct their tastes from those exemplars").
A second option is Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning stuff ("life is so complicated that the only way any of us can survive is by being able to ignore almost all of it almost all the time. This requires constant, policed, agreement as to almost every aspect of social life because the alternative is impossible; we can get nothing else done if *every* interaction has to be parsed in every aspect because we do not understand anything about why the other person dressed as they did, stood as they did, paced themselves as they did, mentioned these issues and not those, etc etc").
Finally I'll add my contribution to this genre, my theory of fundamentalisms. ("Every group's leaders make TACTICAL decisions at any time about some issue that comes along. The decisions are unprincipled, chosen for convenience. BUT
- almost by definition the issues are salient, get lots of press time, are talked about much more than the background group issues
- the next generation of group members hears about these tactical decisions constantly (and the background decisions much less) and so imbibes the idea that 'we are defined by these particular claims')
Hence there is always fundamentalism (a belief in the literal truth of claims that were made at a earlier time for convenience, as metaphor, or as aspiration), it just changes every two generations or so exactly what the contents of that fundamentalism are. Always same psychology, but differing earlier tactical decisions that have become sacralized. Once you realize this pattern you see it throughout history, from early Christianity to the Reformation to the reception of Darwin (or Marx) to abortion in the 80s, to Woke today.
One thing that pushes Fundamentalism forward is mediocre (but not terrible) minds going to college.
Brilliant minds at college develop new ways of looking at the world.
Good minds at college compare different versions of these systematizations and try to strengthen them.
Mediocre minds at college fixate on whatever is the current fashionable System of the World, and fetishize into a Fundamentalism.
The tell is, as usual, the response when a contradiction (apparent or real) is pointed out in the system; the Brilliant, the Good, and the Mediocre minds each have their characteristic responses.
> I think there IS actually a Class X in America, and (hah, what a surprise, bet you didn't see that coming!) it's defined by the kinds of people who read Astral Codex Ten.
What/how would they become in their calcified rigid phase (assuming nothing remains forever young, that is)? What could possibly follow them as the new condensing Class X+1?
It seems like Fussell's "upper class", if it exists, is an epiphenomon with no effect on the rest of society. Upper class people would presumably not run businesses or run for election, because then it might seem like they have something to prove, which they don't. So all the people will practical power will be in Fussell's upper-middle class.
No, Scott conflated Fussell's Top Out-Of-Sight with Fussell's Upper class. Fussell thinks there is both a group of people who are more or less in hiding since the Great Depression who don't work and inherited all their money (Top Out-Of-Sight), and another, larger group, who inherited most of their money but still work (Upper class). Neither want compliments, etc., but the Upper class works in politics and business.
p.31 "It's likely to make its money by controlling banks and the more historic corporations, think tanks, and foundations, and to busy itself with things like the older universities, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Association, the Committee for Economic Development, and the like, together with the executive branch of the federal government, and often the Senate. In the days when ambassadors were amateurs, they were selected largely from this class, very seldom from the top-out-of-sight. And secondly, unlike the top-out-of-sights, the upper class is visible, often ostentatiously so. Which is to say that the top-out-of-sights have spun off and away from Veblen's scheme of conspicuous exhibition, leaving the mere upper class to carry on its former role."
"Upper class people would presumably not run businesses or run for election, because then it might seem like they have something to prove, which they don't."
They don't run businesses, they have wealth managers to do that for them. They don't run for election, they are the wealthy donors to whom the candidate goes cap-in-hand begging for funding, and/or they are the behind-the-scenes advisers who have the ear of the selection committees choosing candidates.
Governor Jones of Wotta State knows that it'd be very bad for his career if he gets on the wrong side of Mrs Coffin van Rental, even though the only thing you might ever hear about the lady is a discreet article in 'Town and Owns Half The Country' magazine about the white garden at her little holiday getaway estate so charmingly modelled by her husband's great-grandfather on a French chateau in the Dordogne which he saw on his Grand Tour in 1867.
You can still find them at Wal*Mart, as you'd expect, though the webbing comes in all sorts of colors now. The slightly higher-class version has a single piece of material instead of ribbons of mesh.
The memory of those chairs fills me with nostalgia, but weren't they mostly considered beach and picnic chairs? I have trouble believing it was prole to sit in those on the beach in 1983, but maybe it was. Maybe it is prole to sit on the beach?
What about for an 80-year-old? I mainly remember those chairs being for my grandparents to sit in at the beach.
Full disclosure: I grew up on the Gulf Coast, which is prole but also warm. I dunno if old people in New England sit on the beach, whether by towel or chair.
On the whole I think it holds, but you are correct that politically there is a *significantly* deeper split atm between the proles and the middle than 30-40 years ago. Which is relevant to both aims, actually.
I started this book once, and was immediately put off by stuff like that rhododendron paragraph.
The comedically excessive level of precise detail, the ever-present hedge that he might be joking (if you notice something just plan wrong), the schoolyard logic of "oh, you disagree? ha, typical American status anxiety" ... it just felt like bullshitting to me. Neither an honest attempt to relate facts not an honest observational comedy routine, but a cowardly mixture of the two, using each as a defense against its failing to accomplish the other.
You seem more confident than me about your ability to extract real insight from this book, but I'm confused why. You write
> I've previously found Fussell intelligent and trustworthy, at least when I can figure out how serious he's being.
But how do you figure that out? He's always at least half-jokey in tone. In content, he says a mixture of things that are recognizably true and things that aren't. If you figure he's joking when he says something that rings false, and figure he's being serious when he says something that rings true ... then all you get at the end is what you already knew going in.
Well, and stuff that rings true but which you had never noticed before. Are you gauging Fussell's trustworthiness by the frequency of that stuff?
I also sometimes write halfway between joking and serious, so it didn't feel so offensive to me. I agree there's a sense in which you only get what you had going in, but class is unusually suited for this - in a lot of ways you already know things about the class system, and just need a guide to point it out to you and say "yeah, that's class" (eg the anti-Superbowl party)
I am so glad that you reviewed this. I was confused by the Class X chapter, but it makes sense considering that nowhere in the book does the author talk about himself and what it says about him writing about class. He does not possess self-awareness, and it is very upper-middle-class of him to do the meta-thing of being a snob about snobbery.
I've socialized the book over a couple of years, and I've concluded that the class descriptions are just as rigid as he claims they are, but people have varying degrees of sensitivity and awareness. Some people wear their class uniform down to the T, but they have no sense that they are doing so.
People are so offended by the suggestion that these class groupings exist. Assuming the data was there, it would be trivial to prove it with factor analysis.
I am working on new class terms because the linear rankings of "upper," "middle," and "lower" offends the American Way. What if we reduce class to its essential kernel, which is how you make your living. My class distinctions would be:
Transcendent: no concern for money, i.e., hires the "rentier"
Capitalist: make money from money, i.e., the "rentier"
Expert: profits from expertise (doctors, lawyers, top scientists)
Working: people who worry about pay raises and such
Broke: no money or very inconsistent labor
Broken: those in prison or unable to work
I'm a signals-all-the-way down guy, so I believe very few people, maybe on the order of 1%, are immune to falling into class patterns
I also disagree with his notion that the movement of culture is exclusively from lower to upper. It is a two-way street. For example, it is now kind of low class to play golf. Also, having flashy cars was something only the wealthy could do until it became more affordable, and now it's gaudy.
Upper-borrowing-from-lower is the standard pattern of subculture co-option. (I recommend reading Subculture: The Meaning of Style by Dick Hebdige; also, we all speak vulgar English). However, yes, the lowers are trying to emulate the uppers constantly. As the economics of consumption change, the upper classes have to push back the goal-post of exclusive taste. The lower classes have strength in numbers, so in some ways, they are the easiest go-tos for defining mainstream culture.
"It is a two-way street. For example, it is now kind of low class to play golf. "
But it was always the way that culture (taste/fashion/etiquette) trickled down from the rich/upper-class to the classes beneath them. There's a wonderfully bitchy bit in Hilary Mantel's "Bring Up The Bodies":
"Anne the queen wears yellow, as she did when she first appeared at court, dancing in a masque: the year, 1522. Everyone remembers it, or they say they do: Boleyn’s second daughter with her bold dark eyes, her speed, her grace. The fashion for yellow had started among the wealthy in Basle; for a few months, if a draper could get hold of it, he could make a killing. And then suddenly it was everywhere, in sleeves and hose and even hairbands for those who couldn’t afford more than a sliver. By the time of Anne’s debut it had slid down the scale abroad; in the domains of the Emperor, you’d see a woman in a brothel hoisting her fat dugs and tight-lacing her yellow bodice."
I trust the comparison of Anne to a fat cheap whore is not lost on anyone? It's also a comment on how England, for all Henry's pretensions, is behind the times just slightly but significantly in comparison to Europe; part of Anne's initial attraction when she first appeared in court was the French polish (ha! unintended pun) and up-to-the-minute fashion and culture she brought with her.
That the fashions of the town penetrate to the provincial centres over time, so that last season's style or even two or more years ago is only now making a stir in the sticks, is a commonplace. Cultural influence trickling *upwards* is much more recent.
And that again has more to do with the pastoral idyll poetry notion, from Virgil on down, than it has to do with being a genuine small landlord (or shepherdess). This wasn't something that came up from 'the people', the way rap music etc. became an appropriated cultural signal.
Refinement: Asset class difference might hint has different subtlety of class e.g. "landlords" are often themselves serfs to the real estate investment class. capacity, stake, and "passive income" are all from different classes. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1277262959828283392
Fantastic review. Enjoyed reading it, and it gave me a lot to think about. Seems pretty much right.
But I've become very confused at the prevalence of the idea that someone is *either* serious or joking. It is very common human behavior to make actual ("serious") points in a humorous or playful way. I noticed that a lot of historians could not understand this concept, and would cite jokes from old newspapers as literal facts. But they weren't "just jokes," either--the joke was intended to make a broader reality-based claim. I notice this overly-literal reading more frequently.
Maybe I'm being overly literal myself, but aren't lines like this exactly why your writing is popular? "The upper-middle-class likes New England, Old England, yachts, education, good grammar, yachts, chastity, androgyny, the classics, the humanities, and did I mention yachts?" I understand this to be a serious assertion, but one that is also joking/playful. You are using certain words and emphases to playfully convey a sensibility most readers will understand perfectly.
From the review, it also seems like this book, which I have not read, is sort of parodying a 19c treatise. The illustrations and the playful, florid style go with that. The idea is probably showing that such an off-putting, archaic formula, with all its fixation on categorization and labeling minute aspects of people, can be quite seamlessly applied to our own society. The casualness is part of the joke...the awkwardness of both attempting to dissect people like this, and the fact that we're not all that different from any society in terms of structure and behavior. He is both serious and playful at all the points you highlight.
I can't judge the final chapter without reading the book. Your explanation that he really saw the class as different, in ways that have since been obscured, may be correct. But the change in tone suggests to me that he knew what he was doing. After putting everyone under the microscope, he was going to write from the perspective of one inside a class, naturally oblivious to it, as most are. That reinforces his general point about how class works, and how it's off-putting to be dissected by experts like that, partly because we can't see our own class markers even when they are obvious to others. He may well have been mocking the culture of academics who write such treatises while not realizing their own habits, since they'd be most likely to read this. From the serious writing, I definitely suspect he was intentionally demonstrating what this kind of class signaling looks like. Calling it out would have killed the effect. But he may have been pretty serious about Class X being different due to its escape from the market, though the detailed specifics are odd. There *are* individuals who kind of do their own thing, and they do have commonalities, but not really the ones described. I think the bigger issue is that they are always a very small and dispersed group, and therefore do not really act as a class in the same way the others do. They do some signaling, but it is somewhat different because they lack a clear community and opposition. I'll have to read it before I can say more...I'm a little confused why he ends up focusing on the ethic of buying and selling, when it seems like the upper class is not fixated on that either, exactly, and that Class X is escaping a lot of indirectly related social logic as well.
What he's having is that class is not just about the money you have.
Same way thing like continent names have geographical meanings but also geopolitical meanings (and often point to different borders and include/exclude different populations when used in the latter way).
Jeff made his own money in trade, no less, rather than inheriting a trust fund set up by grandfather. That's the difference.
Yeah, most of us would take the billions and never mind if we eat with our elbows on the table, but when you're mingling with people who also have billions, then there has to be a new pecking order and class is it. Bezos and the tech billionaires may not care about class having sufficient 'fuck you' money to tell actual governments to go fuck themselves, so that may be a new development: formerly, the newly-rich aspired to be accepted into the upper class but now that fortunes can be spun like gold out of straw, the exceedingly wealthy may be happy enough to regard themselves as a class of their own and the old upper class are not so desirable a state as before.
Fussell was writing a generation ago about a world that was rapidly disappearing even then. The world that Edith Wharton had so meticulously dissected. It is really and truly gone now.
I cannot think of an institution that would not grovel to to get Bezos in the door. You name it: college, art museum, opera, country club. Or even a mere single digit billionaire.
The only real rule is the Golden Rule.
Not only that, but in the real world of political power, the man who owns the loudest megaphone in the capital city is at the top of the heap, no matter what his upbringing is.
I'm not sure the upper class have billions. A will with $100 million in assets divided among 8 grand children and after inheritance taxes have been paid is quite nice but none of those grandchildren is likely to run it back up even to the amount they inherited in their lifetime. This is my problem with Thomas Piketty.
The descriptions of Upper Upper sound a lot like (my understanding of) Scandinavian culture: humble conformity, distaste for those who stand out aesthetically or through economic ambition. It also reminds me of French culture in its profoundly confident yet insular perfection of taste. And, as mentioned, Old England is regarded as the pinnacle of taste.
Is it fair to generalize that American culture is Middle Class writ large whereas European culture is Upper Upper?
"this was another one of the sections where I had trouble figuring out where Fussell was and wasn't joking."
This constant questioning of "is he joking or not" gives me a sense that you're like an alien trying to understand human customs, but not quite there yet.
Fussell is obviously writing freely, and with a frivolous spirit here and there. He is not downright ha-ha joking like a comedian, nor is is downright serious like an academic.
He merely has a light tone - and these "wild" passages, are just using the hyperbole or ultra-specificness to make his point. They are not written that way because it's some 100% provable and accurate description of the world, but because it shows a social truth through a stereotype.
A few years ago I visited Boston and noticed the performing arts center there had changed names again. It had been the Wang Center, after the founder of a long-defunct computer company, and then the Citi Center, after a bank that bought naming rights. It is now the Boch Center, after the owner of a car dealership known for his frequent ads on local radio and television imploring us to "come on down."
Having your name on a cultural institution used to be reserved for the upper class, or at least people who are now seen as upper class in retrospect. (Was Andrew Carnegie upper class? Cornelius Vanderbilt? Both came from modest backgrounds, Vanderbilt was from Staten Island for cripe's sake.) Owning a car dealership is the zenith of the working class, setting aside the Trump family. So what am I to make of the Boch Center? Is live entertainment declasse now, or is Ernie Boch classier for his patronage of it?
How do the upper-uppers entertain themselves anyway? They used to go to the opera and the symphony, but that's more of a UMC thing now. Actually I have no idea what an upper class person is like these days. I've met some wealthy people - I'm talking private jet wealthy - and their tastes didn't seem to out of whack with mine and my UMC cohort... on the other hand they were all "new money" and (perhaps more importantly) largely Jewish.
When a name changed once every 50 years, you could know what a building was. "The Sears Tower" lasted a long time, but jow many people outside Chicago could tell you its current name?
When people assume the names will change every few years, they never bother to learn the new names, so there is no real point in getting a name on something now.
These days a young upper class person is probably a curate a Trinity Church Wall Street or some such place, or doing a PhD in Astronomy or Classics that they are paying full tuition on because it seems unfair to take a scholarship from someone who needs it. They probably play hockey or tennis or sail on the weekends. I'm sure that you can still find them at the opera or the symphony but definitely not in the box seats, and they are probably sitting with their grandmother and a cousin.
I worked for a wealthy prole for several years. He had a prominent potbelly, a handlebar mustache, and an assortment of flannel shirts. Though indistinguishable from the average yokel, he wielded enormous influence over state-level politics, endowed several artistic institutions, and often had upper-middle class professionals groveling before him in order to fund their nature conservatory, theater, gallery, or new academic building. Such professionals viewed him with a combination of resentment and fear.
Many are questioning the concept of “class” as distinct from the usual American notion of class as a socio-economic descriptor. Apparently Fussel would have preferred the word “caste”.
Allow me to get rude for a moment. Unstated here is *why* (I could have used all-caps but in this community hypertext for bold signals higher class) anyone cares about class. Perhaps--and this is the rude part--it is because women care about class, and yes, Jeff Bezos has more money and political power, but are women more attracted to an Upper Upper male than they are Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates? I think so.
Who keeps track of these class rules in the first place? In my experience, it is generally women. I don’t mean that as a bad thing, I mean it as a thing. Who is generally choosing what flowers grow in the garden and the furniture and paintings in the living room and the schools the kids go to?
A male Princeton professor half-understanding and somewhat-explicating the system seems brilliant only because he half-penetrated what so many more women already know but due to modesty and reasons of class won’t reveal.
Class would be a meaningless concept, perhaps, if the females among us didn’t care so much about it. I don’t mean that as a bad thing. But you can’t pretend there are a dozen different ways of thinking about class and that it’s all sort of arbitrary if women rank their marriage prospects based upon class, and they don’t see class as at all arbitrary.
Look at how Trump was regarded, spoken of, written of. Class was something that was used to bash him over the head, even if it wasn't crudely stated in that direct a way. But little scribblers for online magazines who were working gig economy piece-rate jobs wrote gleeful pieces about how low-toned and déclassé he was for eating well-done steak with ketchup. This wasn't simply "doesn't he know the best way to eat good steak is cooked like this to most appreciate the flavour?" food criticism, this was "for all his money, he's a prole and he'll NEVER be One Of Us". There was a line in one of these articles about the type of person you could be confident in bringing to a good restaurant, and it was heavily implied this was not Trump.
I found this very patronising and indeed insulting, because I'm sure these people would have fallen over themselves to signal the right attitudes towards "women'n'minorities" and gush about equality and diversity and uplifting the working class and "no-one is illegal". So the immediate question that sprang to my mind was "And would you be inviting as your dinner guest to one of these good restaurants, say, the undocumented immigrant lady who works as a contract cleaner in the office building you work at?" I don't imagine they would because Sonía (if they even know her name) may be a *wonderful* brown person but can you be sure she won't drink out of the finger bowl so, you know...
It certainly wasn't just women making class judgements on Trump and a lot of men were very eager to demonstrate that they were fully aware he was a jumped-up vulgarian even if he went to Fordham and Wharton. John Oliver's "Drumpf" skit is relevant here, as there's also class implications buried in with the 'reminder that he is of immigrant roots' (and coming from a Brit who immigrated to the US, that's rich). I think the reason that took off so much and was so popular was precisely because of the class implications; anyone with enough self-awareness to realise that mocking someone for being the descendant of immigrants sat badly with support for Dreamers could console themselves that it wasn't about that, it was about him being Not One Of Us.
I moved to the UK to study, and spent quite a bit of time around upper-class British people. One of the most noticeable traits they had in common was a certain performative attitude. Being authentic was passé; everything had to be tinged with self-aware irony.
Perhaps this helps explain why Fussell keeps blurring the line between serious and ironic.
"This is one reason for the emergence of a wholly new artistic enterprise, which some call "postmodernism" but which might better be described as "preemptive kitsch." Having recognized that modernist severity is no longer acceptable—for modernism begins to seem like the same old thing and therefore not modern at all—artists began not to shun kitsch but to embrace it, in the manner of Andy Warhol, Alan Jones, and Jeff Koons. The worst thing is to be unwittingly guilty of producing kitsch; far better to produce kitsch deliberately, for then it is not kitsch at all but a kind of sophisticated parody. (The intention to produce real kitsch is an impossible intention, like the intention to act unintentionally.) Preemptive kitsch sets quotation marks around actual kitsch and hopes thereby to save its artistic credentials. The dilemma is not: kitsch or avant-garde, but: kitsch or "kitsch." The quotation marks function like the forceps with which a pathologist lifts some odoriferous specimen from its jar.
And so modernist severity has given way to a kind of institutionalized flippancy. Public galleries and big collections fill up with the predigested clutter of modern life, obsolete the moment it goes on permanent display. Such is the "art" of Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili (winner of this year's Turner Prize), Gilbert and George, and all the other poseurs who dominate the British art scene. Art as we knew it required knowledge, competence, discipline, and study. Preemptive kitsch, by contrast, delights in the tacky, the ready-made, and the cut-out, using forms, colors, and images that both legitimize ignorance and also laugh at it, effectively silencing the adult voice—as in Claes Oldenburg and Jeff Koons. Such art eschews subtlety, allusion, and implication, and in place of imagined ideals in gilded frames it offers real junk in quotation marks. It is indistinguishable in the end from advertising—with the sole qualification that it has no product to sell except itself."
Fussell was a literary critic. Having been wounded in combat in WWII, his great subject was young men at war. His most famous serious book is "The Great War and Modern Memory" about WWI's influence on literature.
The one book by him that I have read was "Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars," with chapters on travel writers like Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming's brother Peter, and the like. 1930s novelists tended to search out material for novels by taking adventurous trips which they could write up as travel articles and then a travel book. Evelyn Waugh, for example, famously went to Ethiopia in 1930 to cover the Emperor's coronation for the papers, then turned it into his novel "Black Mischief."
British novelists like Waugh were obsessed with the class system and were brilliant at depicting it. Some American novelists have been similarly obsessed with class, such as John O'Hara. Tom Wolfe made his career by searching out and enthusiastically explaining obscure status systems, such as those of hot rod customizers, surfers, and test pilots.
I presume "Class" is a hybrid between criticism and a satirical novel. Maybe it started out as an attempt at fiction with amusing characters from different classes expressing all these over-the-top opinions?
I suspect it's also a bit of a provincial's exaggeration of the class structure of the East. Much like how "The Great Gatsby" is in part about an upscale Minnesotan's resentments of the Eastern rich, Fussell was from about as nice a background as you could be from in Southern California: his father was a lawyer for the top L.A. firm of O'Melveny & Myers, they lived in classy Pasadena, and he went to Pomona College, the top small liberal arts college in Southern California. But he made his academic career in the East and perhaps he was amused and a little hurt that nobody back east knew this background was highly respectable by L.A. standards.
I don't know what it's like to read as a non-Brit, but 'Watching the English' by Kate Fox does a lot of the same work analysing the English class system and was published in 2004, so rather more up to date. The most glaring conceptual difference I spotted between the US and British systems from your review is that in the UK, it's totally possible for someone to be non-rich and upper-class, whereas in your description it seems like American upper-class people aren't showy, but are universally rich. Otherwise the principles seem very similar.
A while ago I read a webcomic which had American characters talking about class as something purely determined by savings and income, and it was staggering to me how alien I found that idea; it really underlined to me how much I'd internalised the British system. This, by contrast, feels much more natural.
I think the British system, being much older, has gone through a development where class was originally tied very much to property, status and wealth - a gentleman could be known as such by his landholdings. The notion then began to evolve where a gentleman was as much or more a possessor of certain qualities as of plain wealth, and so you could have poor gentlemen and rich commoners.
Take the example from Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby" where the decadent aristocrat Sir Mulberry Hawk is trying to seduce (and once repulsed, force himself upon) the virtuous Kate Nickleby. Her brother challenges him to a duel and Hawk refuses on the grounds that he's a gentleman and they don't duel commoners, but Nicholas retorts that he too is a gentleman by birth and breeding (so even if he and his sister now have to earn their living, being an impoverished ex-school master has nothing to do with that status).
"‘I am the brother of the young lady who has been the subject of conversation here,’ said Nicholas. ‘I denounce this person as a liar, and impeach him as a coward. If he has a friend here, he will save him the disgrace of the paltry attempt to conceal his name—and utterly useless one—for I will find it out, nor leave him until I have.’
Sir Mulberry looked at him contemptuously, and, addressing his companions, said —
‘Let the fellow talk, I have nothing serious to say to boys of his station; and his pretty sister shall save him a broken head, if he talks till midnight.’
...‘Will you make yourself known to me?’ asked Nicholas in a suppressed voice.
‘No,’ replied the other fiercely, and confirming the refusal with an oath. ‘No.’
‘If you trust to your horse’s speed, you will find yourself mistaken,’ said Nicholas. ‘I will accompany you. By Heaven I will, if I hang on to the foot-board.’
‘You shall be horsewhipped if you do,’ returned Sir Mulberry.
‘You are a villain,’ said Nicholas.
‘You are an errand-boy for aught I know,’ said Sir Mulberry Hawk.
‘I am the son of a country gentleman,’ returned Nicholas, ‘your equal in birth and education, and your superior I trust in everything besides. I tell you again, Miss Nickleby is my sister. Will you or will you not answer for your unmanly and brutal conduct?’
‘To a proper champion—yes. To you—no,’ returned Sir Mulberry, taking the reins in his hand. ‘Stand out of the way, dog. William, let go her head.’"
And in Britain, there was (and maybe still is) the soothing influence of time. You are a wealthy Yorkshire ironmaster who grubbed his way up from being a yokel living in a hut to "pots of money due to the Industrial Revolution". Nobody, including yourself, regards you as a gentleman for all your piles of dosh. But you can now afford to send your son to the good schools. Maybe he'll go on to run the business, but he's on the right ladder to ascend into the upper class. His son, your grandson, will certainly be regarded as a gentleman, having been raised as a rich man's son, gone to the right schools and university, mingled on equal terms with the sprigs of the gentry, and all traces of the horny-handed son of toil from Grand-dad have been successfully erased.
Your daughter will make a successful marriage to an impoverished nobleman, if he hasn't manage to snaffle an American heiress, in the good old bargain of "we've got the cash but no rank, you've got the rank but no cash, let's merge our forces" and will be accepted as a lady, and your grand-daughter will certainly be such.
The same forces may be at work in America. Jeff Bezos may be self-made man nouveau-riche and not 'really' of the upper class, but his grandchildren? A different story.
The notion that character and manners can be class-defining is much older, though. Boccaccio's Decameron is full of tales of men with beautiful gentlemanly manners who are impoverished by circumstance-- and often as not, eventually elevated in formal status and in property through being recognized by established grandees as gentlemanly. Fairy tales to be sure, but likely reflective of cultural assumptions of the time.
Interesting! So, for a Polish post-communist perspective instead, where all class boundaries have been rolled over by Soviet tanks...
Perhaps the most important thing that separates Eastern bloc culture from e.g. British culture is the concept of intelligentsia - a class materially poor but mentally rich, the artists and writers and academics. There is a strong implicit understanding that such a class is the heart of society, responsible for its "spirit" and the safekeeping of its values. Between WW2 and the subsequent Soviet occupation, this class has been essentially gutted, to a large extent physically (see e.g. Katyn massacre). In parallel, the communist effort to separate kulaks from both their holdings and the mortal coil has been successful, and there are no pre-war fortunes whatsoever. Communism falls, and now we have a tabula rasa society.
Yes and no. It turns out that when your entire country is privatized overnight, a clever person with connections - social capital, the best kind of capital - can acquire a ridiculous amount of money and power while nobody's looking. Moreover, aristocratic families keep their descendants educated (usually abroad, if possible), as well-connected as the previous generation, and ever eager to help each other out. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. So that's the old money, with some noveau riche mixed in who got lucky playing politics.
The lower class works basically as described in the book. The middle class is stuck in a curious position. Do we aim to be the new intelligentsia, perhaps inspired by our own grandfathers? Do we enthusiastically jump in the rat race and attempt to out-earn and out-Instagram everybody else (cf. the lower middle class of the book)? Do we ostentatiously drop both status ladders and do our own thing? The middle class is fractured and occupied by sneering at everybody climbing a different ladder than themselves.
The weirdest thing is that all societies converge to a similar stratification, regardless of the starting conditions. I'm sure ancient Romans were very busy displaying (or not) their rhododendrons.
Great post. And this gets me wondering in a dangerous way to what extent class is simply genetic.
Scott talks about the 3 ladders. Isn't that saying "you are in one of three classes, you can go up or down the ladder, but you can't switch ladders"?
I find the focus on taste interesting, because to what extent are these tastes genetic? I would think taste is more genetic than most things. Prefer sweet liquor or a complex wine? That's probably genetic.
Math skills, business skills are genetic but that's a banal observation.
What I find interesting is that these upper class traits require both male and female to make them robust. There's no upper class without men with supurb math and people skills, but whether to plant the rhododendrons or not, maybe some men are good at that, but I suspect women are better at this.
Taste is one of those genetic shortcuts. Taste is sexy because it means good breeding and healthy genes.
Taste seems to be this quality that is hyper IQ that women smell out. Sure women have better taste than men, perhaps, but a man with good taste is super sexy & probably really smart.
Perhaps smart women are even able to infer multiple qualities at once from a man's taste. How smart they are, how likely they are to cheat, how likely they are to succeed. For instance, one with Donald Trump's taste is both likely to both succeed and cheat. Some women will accept that and others won't.
My point is that for the nuanced observer maybe the flowers your parents plant outside your childhood home reveal much about you that is true in a multitude of ways. .
I think opting out of class and countersignalling ("class X") is extremely genetic - both low agreeability and high g factor predispose you for it.
Taste is proxy for both cognitive style (in particular high/low openness in the OCEAN model) and the social circles you frequent, so having people mate along taste lines makes sense.
This section of the Satyricon, regarded by classicists such as Conte and Rankin as emblematic of Menippean satire, takes place a day or two after the beginning of the extant story. Encolpius and companions are invited by one of Agamemnon's slaves, to a dinner at the estate of Trimalchio, a freedman of enormous wealth, who entertains his guests with ostentatious and grotesque extravagance. After preliminaries in the baths and halls (26–30), the guests (mostly freedmen) enter the dining room, where their host joins them.
"Extravagant courses are served while Trimalchio flaunts his wealth and his pretence of learning (31–41). Trimalchio's departure to the toilet (he is incontinent) allows space for conversation among the guests (41–46). Encolpius listens to their ordinary talk about their neighbors, about the weather, about the hard times, about the public games, and about the education of their children. In his insightful depiction of everyday Roman life, Petronius delights in exposing the vulgarity and pretentiousness of the illiterate and ostentatious wealthy of his age."
Well goodness me, and in the Notes to a translation of the Satyricon I find the following piece of edification (warning, if it be needed, for period-typical language of a racial character):
"“Drawing his hunting-knife, he plunged it fiercely into the boar’s side, and some thrushes flew out of the gash.”
In the winter of 1895 a dinner was given in a New York studio. This dinner, locally known as the “Girl in the Pie Dinner,” was based upon Petronius, Martial, and the thirteenth book of Athenaeus. In the summer of 1919, I had the questionable pleasure of interviewing the chef-caterer who got it up, and he was, at the time, engaged in trying to work out another masterpiece to be given in California. The studio, one of the most luxurious in the world, was transformed for the occasion into a veritable rose grotto, the statuary was Pompeian, and here and there artistic posters were seen which were nothing if not reminiscent of Boulevard Clichy and Montmartre in the palmiest days. Four negro banjo players and as many jubilee singers titillated the jaded senses of the guests in a manner achieved by the infamous saxophone syncopating jazz of the Barbary Coast of our times. The dinner was over. The four and one half bottles of champagne allotted to each Silenus had been consumed, and a well-defined atmosphere of bored satiety had begun to settle down when suddenly the old-fashioned lullaby “Four and Twenty Blackbirds” broke forth from the banjoists and singers. Four waiters came in bearing a surprisingly monstrous object, something that resembled an impossibly large pie. They, placed it carefully in the center of the table. The negro chorus swelled louder and louder--“Four and Twenty Blackbirds Baked in a Pie.”
The diners, startled into curiosity and then into interest, began to poke their noses against this gigantic creation of the baker. In it they detected a movement not unlike a chick’s feeble pecking against the shell of an egg. A quicker movement and the crust ruptured at the top.
A flash of black gauze and delicate flesh showed within. A cloud of frightened yellow canaries flew out and perched on the picture frames and even on the heads and shoulders of the guests.
But the lodestone which drew and held the eyes of all the revellers was an exquisitely slender, girlish figure amid the broken crust of the pie. The figure was draped with spangled black gauze, through which the girl’s marble white limbs gleamed like ivory seen through gauze of gossamer transparency. She rose from her crouching posture like a wood nymph startled by a satyr, glanced from one side to the other, and stepped timidly forth to the table."
WW2 ends and we do have a new ruling class - originating from pre-war socialist/communist activists. We also have a lot of intelligentsia left, it's respected, deemed useful, allowed to run a lot of things, and most of all, culturally reproduce. They represent knowledge, science and progress, after all, and those are both good in principle and needed to rebuild the country.
The two converge into Đilas's New Class. You can divide them into bureaucratic apparatchik and free-thinking intelligentsia currents, but they're not a direct continuation of pre-war party cadres and intelligentsia, respectively, but of post-war factions within the current elite (the latter often coming out of the stalinist faction, increasingly pushed into opposition after nationalists win internal struggles for power). Also, eventually both conspire to dismantle the old regime, and share the spoils. The socially well-positioned can now acquire private fortunes they couldn't hold in the previous regime, just as keikaku.
But dismantling the regime does open things up. Turns out capitalism requires a different set of skills, and not every bureaucrat or academic can make the cut. Meanwhile educated youngsters in big cities can quickly make a professional-managerial career in newly opening branches and counterparts of western industries, while talented merchants can build trading empires out of a marketplace booth. Our new post-1990s elite is a combination of these three groups.
The career opportunities dry up after a decade or so, while the old industries and public services are dismantled, leaving both the working class and the new aspiring educated elites pretty much where they are in the west. And that's not weird. We've converged to the western system because (and only after) we've adopted the western system. The old regime had a different system, and different class divisions, too.
The communist-era "ruling class" was temporary and consisted mostly of lucky sociopaths and their spineless minions. Some of them were clever enough to build a power base that lasts them up to now, but they're an exception rather than the rule. The _opposition_ made a comfortable niche for themselves, indeed.
There is an "old money" class and they're pretty good at avoiding the limelight, though if you're inclined to go through the biographies of the elites you can find a lot of interesting coincidences - especially among the opposition figures! There are old families that still keep their traditions alive and provide favors for each other, across some hundreds or even thousands of members - I have met some, actually.
Totally disagree on educated youngers rising to elite status - being a middle manager in a corporation makes you, at best, lower middle class. Being a successful businessman sometimes makes you upper class, and sometimes everyone is laughing at you (see e.g. Filipiak, and his famous painting).
I'm still not convinced we have converged to the western system - not enough emphasis on money as a determinant of class. See discussion below about commercial vs academic middle class - a member of intelligentsia is, I think, best portrayed stereotypically as HBO's Chernobyl's physicist MC, when it comes to the standard of living he/she enjoys! Money is for the rubes, which is not really the case in the West.
(also, there's not enough money to go around, so most people who try to impress others with their riches are pretty pathetic, especially once you compare their "fortune" with old EU)
Well, "lucky sociopaths and their spineless minions" is how I'd describe ruling classes in general.
But I think you may mean that we've lost genuine "no need to work" upper classes, and I agree. A couple of successful business tycoons, and that's it. When I think of our modern elites, I picture UMC, and you could certainly get there from a management job at a 1990 startup / newly opening western corporation branch. We're talking about C*Os opportunities here. (Sure, this dried up quickly, by the late 1990s you're stuck at middle management, by now you're stuck in the cubicle.)
But the real class-unifying force is what happened with the children of those people. It's universal across the three groups I mentioned, and it's also inclusive of academics and media people, politicians and bureaucrats, possibly even of (some) middle management. I speak of western education (as in literally western universities), building western connections, adopting western globalist values. After all, in comparison with the US, UK and EU elites, they're all just aspiring upstarts. (This, I guess, is also why money may not be all that important at this point. Everyone's in the same boat, with the same catching up to do. But at the same time, this strengthens the case for convergence on the western system, even if the upper crust isn't there yet. But I mostly spoke of and care about the middle and the bottom in the first place.)
This is a great point, and I often wonder what happened to the upper class in communist countries. My guess is that many of their grandchildren now that communism has fallen will begin to revert to those older values having been quietly told what was the appropriate thing to do, quietly by their relatives. I think those values start to reassert themselves and many of them will assert values different from the upper middle class.
You forgot that good part of the new upper class, your "clever person with connections", were part of the former nomenclatura, who had their connections built during late communism. Hence the ostentatious pretending by the right-winger well-doers that they are not part of elite and not part of upper class.
Most of this isn't the least bit American. Half of it could come straight out of the Duke of Bedford's Book of Snobs or Nancy Mitford's U and non-U from 20 years before. It's not an accident that Albemarle, Berkeley, Cavendish, etc, would be classy street names in England too.
Speaking of cartographic interior-design-based countersignalling, what map should I ironically get to hang on a wall? I'm thinking a pre-mediatisation HRE with all the tiny little states and enclaves and exclaves. Or maybe a print of one of these Soviet military maps of the local area, with all the british place names lovingly transliterated into Cyrillic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ
I have a pressing need to order a beautifully illustrated map of Hanseatic League cities, given that I live in one and feel, at best, lukewarm about its allegiance to its nation-state. I'm not sure if it counts as signalling or countersignalling, though.
The difference between "middle class" and "working class" can to some extent be generated from a classification of jobs. Where the variability of productivity between people is low or easily observable (and thus pay is flat or largely comes in the form of a commission, respectively) there is little role for CVs to play. If there is some professional certification (possibly in-house) then check that, but otherwise there's no reason to ask more questions.
On the other hand, if individuals vary greatly in productivity but this is difficult to observe, employers care about past performance, hence CVs and the emphasis on formal education.
A weakness of the above is that it classifies schoolteachers as working-class, seeing how they are a typical union job (near-identical productivity, etc.).
Just a note: "they will quickly get covered with unsightly fingerprints unless polished everyday." 'Everyday' is an adjective that means daily. You probably wanted a space in there.
Is there an extent to which Fussell just, like, didn't actually know any upper class people? It seems notable that he exhaustively dissects the habits and mores of the people he would be likely to come across, but the upper classes get reduced to "they don't play signalling games".
Humans being humans, it seems likely that the upper classes do indeed play their own class signalling games -- but maybe because they are such a rare species (and they are generally outside the public eye) it's harder to actually get a handle on what form those games take.
To completely invent an example, an upper class person might be secretly very proud of their early-Georgian dining table (as opposed to the gauche Regency era dining tables that their friends own), in just the same way that a middle class person might be proud of the literary books they own, or a working class person might be proud of their LED TV. But unless you actually *know* that world, it's all going to look like 'upper class people own antiques but don't make a big deal of it'.
I kind of recognize Class X from the 1980s, when I was in my 20s. But I find it odd to elevate them as the classless class who choose everything according to some objective measure unconcerned with class markers. I was moving from prole to upper middle around then and game recognizes game. These were upper middle people who aspired to the real upper class. The very idea that wearing LL Bean and Lands End flannel shirts and hiking boots is not a class based style choice is laughable. It's an upper middle variant on the shabby chic of the truly upper. They were working very hard to signal that they they were not trying to signal.
It's incredible how much explanatory power the description of middle class (not its particular cultural markers, the general psychological portrait from the beginning of section II) has when combined with Turchinian structural-demographic theories.
Widening inequality means less people at the bottom can be content with where they are, and less people "make it" to the top either. The former try to escape into, and the latter get squeezed into the middle (aspirant) class, growing its ranks to the point where it's now a dominant segment of society, able to shape its culture in its image. (This is, of course, not the same middle-class-as-defined-by-income that gets hollowed out. But defining classes by income was always an obfuscation.)
Conformism and norm-enforcing, snobbery, status anxiety and the need to impress others, optimism and glorification of individual achievement, etc. don't even intuitively fit together as one coherent package, and yet look around.
There's a problem with the interface-- replies I've already read are being listed as "new reply". My computer hasn't rebooted and I haven't reloaded the tab.
I'm a relative oldster, here, reporting on a perception of the book from a time closer to its publication. I bought and read _Class_ somewhere around 1992 or 93. The person who recommended it to me considered it to be humor of the "ha ha, only serious" variety. He said, "You'll love the part about bumper stickers."
Regarding Class X: This seems to be an obvious bit of "reader service" to me. You and I, dear reader, are on the outside observing these other classes who lack self-awareness. Not us. We know the rules of the game and will now proceed to hack them to our advantage.
As for "prole drift" topic - I am surprised Scott did not remember his own article about mechanism how fashion changes based on something akin to cellular automata game between classes: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
I will also talk a little bit about one way I look at the Culture War topic. I think it is interesting to me that basically the modern liberal take on Cultrure War is the equivalent of the "table manners" of old. There was always this type of small "c" conservativism for upper middle class. You see it in the movie Titanic. Leonardo di Caprio was totally out of his elements. He did not know how to dress and how to move and what type of cutlery to use and when and what to talk about. Upper middle class people had to expend a lot of energy watching the fashion trends from time immemorial: "don't you know that Her Serene Highness Adelheid Louise Theresa Caroline Amelia did wear dress of vivid blue color? Silly you coming in this drab dress that is so 1815".
Only now it is more about reading the NYT and knowing perfectly what words to use and most importantly not use, having extensive knowledge of the latest superfood or that the theme of the black history month in 2021 is "The Black Family: Representation, Identity, and Diversity" so you better watch a debate on "From the Continent to Americas: Foodways, Culture and Traditions in the African American Family" so you can dazzle guest around the table with proper factoids. But of course you need to have vegan and gluten free options on the table. You cannot - I have to emphasize CANNOT - have plastic cutlery anywhere - even if some random guests decides to rummage through your kitchen shelves. You should avoid leather components in your dress and in general and you should make sure to have some some sprezzaturra skills and unobtrusively arrange some "fair trade" or "organic" packaging somewhere in the kitchen so everybody is at ease. You know the drill.
Missing word ('middle'?) near the end of '100% practical subjects (with engineering and business at the top, and hospitality and agricultural studies at the bottom) are or high-prole.'
In his autobiography Doing Battle, Fussell explicitly says we shouldn't be taking Class seriously:
"This was hardly a serious book, for often the presentation was conducted in the comical voice of an excessively earnest, pedantic professor of sociology, accustomed to rigid classifications and pseudo-scientific method. Among other things, the book was a satire on academic solemnity."
In 2009. Sandra Tsing Loh tried to update Fussell's classifications in the Atlantic:
Fussell would not have equated his class X with the counterculture. The counterculture of the 1960's and 70's was hippies, communes, acid, peyote, weed, new age mysticism, beads, very long hair, the Grateful Dead, etc. Not L. L. Bean at all.
The book 'The Authenticity Hoax", by Andrew Potter, 2nd ed from 2011 and therefore already outdating, gives and EXCELLENT summary of how the counterculture co-opted and was co-opted in class signaling, mixed into discussion of how the 'need to be unique' has been amplified by SM.
I dated the wealthiest person I knew in college. She had a doctor father and a two-story house in a neighborhood of two story houses, but watched the super bowl, went to Disneyland and Alaskan cruises, voted for Sarah Palin, and had "Go Jesus" opinions.
I'm a Brit, so we had class indicators fed to us with our mother's milk (breast = middle class, bottle = prole, nanny = upper), and much of Fussell's descriptions are accurate for modern 21st century Britain. The inheritance system has done a better job of reducing upper class wealth, perhaps, so old money often means falling down mansions and clothes with patched holes. Middle class and prole class are spot on, except for religion, which is more a middle class than a prole hobby over here. And mostly we don't desire yachts.
I feel like this explains an awful lot of things about US culture that I didn't understand before. The two political parties are explained much more by class than by wealth or race or anything. Feels like the upper-upper is solid Republican (because tradition and securing money), upper-middle is solid Democrat (because education, science, counterculture), and proles lean Republican (Go Jesus/Being rich is nice) but have some Democrat sympathies (getting money is nice). The middle-middle and middle lower confuse me (that's where I am, so probably some bias). I can see elements of prole appeal in both Obama and Trump, but not Hillary, McCain or Romney- so maybe that's a good prior for predicting election winners.
The Game of Thrones TV show bored me to tears, but I know it was super popular in NYC- and I could see how an audience of status-signaling, class-resenting Middles could have gotten really invested in it. This also could explain the controversial Daenerys ending- the audience was *against* the class system, so they wanted to see Daeny rise up through hard work and talent. But the showrunners were (I assume) higher-class and *for* the class system. For them class consciousness was just an interesting hobby, and the ending was decided by a snobbish, "proles gonna prole" determinism.
And I suddenly realize I don't know much about Middle religion.
A tangent from your mention of Obama. President Barrack Obama went to one of the most expensive private high schools in America, and his grandmother retired as the VP of her bank. Is this not very well known in America?
to black people at least, not very known. even among white people its not really well known. the right-wing thought he was less class-based than he actually was.
This isn't quite right, for one I don't think "the upper-upper is solid Republican". These are _really_ strange people, especially without any direct familiarity, and my own is mostly only second-hand anyways. They're mostly not political at all, or only in a very direct 'go ahead and protect my particular interests if you would' kind of way. They're _definitely_ not Republican (or Democratic).
I think you're a little uncharitable in jumping to thinking of GoT as a show where "an audience of status-signaling, class-resenting Middles could have gotten really invested in it". It really was good – when the writing was based on the existing books! The end sucked mostly because there wasn't sufficient setup for Daenerys's heel-faced turn. I would bet money, at long odds, that the show-runners are solidly middle or upper-middle class. (Upper class people don't work in any typical sense.)
Daeny isn't a prole. She inherited that throne, and is outraged that she also has to work for it.
I didn't see the later seasons, but from what I've heard the surviving heroes at the end decide to ditch hereditary monarchy and start electing kings. To an American, that message doesn't signal any particular class.
"This applies even to yachts, where the average yachters uses a fiberglass boat but the very classiest use all-wood boats (which have no advantages, but are much harder to maintain)."
First of all, people who own boats don't generally refer to them as "yachts." Perhaps that changes when the boat under discussion is one that needs a paid crew; ie a very large boat.
Second, boats (both power boats and sailboats) are available in all price ranges, from free to 9 figures. Certainly someone with a union factory job can afford to own a boat if they choose. I share a sailboat with someone who's a handyman, and he has a powerboat on top of the one we share. So boat ownership is not an indicator of economic status at least. Also lots of boats are owned in the service of fishing rather than boating.
It's almost impossible to buy a new wooden boat of any kind (except perhaps a rowboat or a sculling boat), unless it's custom-built and designed, and thus out of the range of anyone with serious money. So owning a wooden boat, while it can be expensive to maintain, becomes more a signifier of regarding a boat as a collector's item rather than simply something to use. Perhaps old money prefers old boats, and anything pre-1960 is going to be a wooden boat.
It's not the yacht, it's the yacht club 😀 Mega-yachts are things that very rich but vulgar and not really upper class (unless you're a Saudi prince) but more "Russian oligarchs who made tons of money and want to show it off" thing. Yacht that you sail in the Fastnet Race - upper class or close enough. Being a member of a yacht club with "Royal" in the name. That sort of thing.
"My extremely classy friend who knows the Spinoza cat gets classified as upper-class by everyone I know, but is closer to the book's description of upper-middle."
Without in any way wanting to be a douche about it, this is just because of your own position on the ladder. You think of her as upper class because you can tell she's above you, and you can't actually see the real upper class from where you are, and have no experience of them, since they take care to keep well clear of you.
Well, yeah, they take care (actually they don't, it 'just happens') to keep well clear of everyone, except their peers and servants, not just Scott or people like him.
Prole: Earnest expressions of religion and politics without any defensiveness or aggression. Keeps up with all their friends from high-school. Sometimes leaves their spouse for their former high-school sweetheart after a chat.
Lower Middle: Constantly outraged over politics.
Middle Middle: Constantly complains about how sensitive people are these days, and constantly outraged over politics.
Upper Middle: Constantly says outraging things about politics.
Upper Class: Not on social media. Sometimes in politics.
You said that Fussell appears to be half-joking and half-serious. You're reading him wrong. It is not an attempt at irony. Every single word is dead serious and meant to be taken literally, no matter how ridiculous it seems to you from our vantage point in 2020.
Donald Trump is High Prole. He doesn't act like a rich man, he acts the way a poor man imagines he would if he had a lot of money. He's tried to break into the upper and upper-middle class New York City society throughout his life, has failed miserably because he has "vulgar" lower-class taste, and has recently discovered that if you can't get respect, you can still try to get a dictator's power and demand people pretend to respect you at the point of a gun.
Trump being High Prole also explains his success at appealing to the working class as a populist politician - he acts like a poor man who happens to have a lot of money, not like a rich snob, so he codes as "one of us who made it" rather than "one of them rich bastards who think they're better than us."
Incidentally, the reason it seems like the Simpsons can't afford their house is because, as a matter of fact, they actually couldn't. Homer's father Abraham "Grampa" Simpson sold his own house to give Homer the money to buy it.
Consider the following Straussian reading of Chapter 9/Class X:
This is what class membership feels like from the inside. When you're truly a member of a class in your heart, its norms are indistinguishable from true objective values.
I'm not sure if Fussell intended this reading but I think it's the correct one either way.
(I'm not above this effect either; I still think my cats' literary names are adorable)
Should we feel bad about participating in class signaling games? It's a little weird that an author who only knows your occupation automatically knows your opinion on cruises and apostrophe usage. But I don't think it follows that "I ought to do less class signaling."
Signaling can be good! I get pretty angry when cars make turns without doing it. And it's nice when people convey useful information. If somebody invited me to an anti-Super Bowl party, I'd probably attend: these are my people. But if my neighbor who wears hunting jackets and has religious iconography displayed on his house asks me to a barbecue, I know to decline graciously.
It's hipsterdom all the way down, and I'm happy about it. When my co-worker makes a sly reference to the Red Scare podcast, I'm not worried that they're going be causing problems on the work Slack channel. When I make a joke about "Dr. Who," I can signal that (a) I am the type of person who enjoys geeky stuff, but (b) I'm not a _that_ much of a geek.
The US has socio-economic strata. But it doesn't have a class system the way that Britain does (or used to).
George W. Bush's grandfathers were a New York magazine publisher and a Wall Street banker. Al Gore's grandfathers were both Tennessee dirt farmers. If the US had a class system, those family origins would outweigh the prole affectations of the one and the intellectual aspirations of the other in making their images. Instead, they're hardly thought of.
You know I've been kind of wondering why we don't see more rich people just funding megaprojects they're interested in (or came up with), e.g. Bezos's providing funding for the Clock of the Long Now. I don't imagine this is a big contributor to that, but I guess it's something...
I think one of the most interesting points in your summary of this book has been the idea that a prole can be as wealthy and powerful as a member of the upper- or middle class, without joining that class. I hadn't thought about it like that before. It implies several culture streams running in parallel more than anything else to me.
It makes me very curious how that would line up with the analysis you're asking for in your last paragraph. Or how a person or family migrates from one stream to the other and on what kind of time-scale that happens (since I assume that these classes didn't spring into being fully formed from the brow of Zeus).
And having read back the comment, I do realise that I am heavily signaling my own reading of the classics and, sod it, I'm just leaving it in because I don't feel like coming up with a different phrasing that would make me feel like less of a pretentious git.
What does it say about me that my first instinct about a cat named Spinoza is anger that someone would name a pet after someone who believed animals were either incapable of suffering or their suffering is morally meaningless (I don't remember which)?
Richard Grant has a great line in his book Dispatches From Pluto about leaving Manhattan and metropolitan liberal culture: "If one more person told me smugly what they weren't eating now, I was going to scream."
To avoid any connotations with high / low / middle my friends have taken to calling them "Pine class" "Oak class" and "Teak class" after my furniture hobbyist friend perfectly reproduced the desk-wood ranking
So even if all of these stereotypes are 100% true, is there anything inherently wrong in enjoying the same things as one's class? Is watching a baseball game better or worse than watching Broadway? It seems like people will gravitate toward whatever culture their friends already have, and there's nothing wrong with that.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0uzc34803lawby6/AAC8oc3JR8AD_O5DbA73hCi7a?dl=0 The book Class sprung out of an essay Paul Fussel wrote “Notes in Class” in the book of short essays called the “Boy Scout handbook and other observations” The essay is available at the link above. Shorter and just as funny. Scott left out a funny line regarding the time people eat dinner. “uppers and top out of sights eat dinner at 8:30 or 9 after nightly protracted cocktail sessions.Sometimes they forget to eat at all”
There was a review of Class shortly after it came out, I forget where, suggested Fussell was talking up the aesthetic of academics as his "class X." A Washington Monthly review was less charitable, describing the book as "an extended sneer." (That's the review that induced me to buy the book.)
For some reason, David Brooks's bourgeois bohemians argument exists as if in a parallel universe, with no acknowledgement of Class.
This appears to be the kind of rigid pigeon-hole thinking Brits and Euro elites enjoy. Unsaid, of course, is the opinion that Euros posses infinitely more class than their American counterparts. They can't tolerate the notion of social mobility.
It had some amusing, keen insights - although Wartime was much better - right up until the end, where it walked straight off a cliff.
Well how about that, I remember thinking, it turns out the only authentic people are those like Fussell himself, his higher-ed faculty pals and certain Arts & Crafts types he approves of.
My grandfather was full on upper class. Like a parody of what you describe here. Lived in an inherited mansion on a money-losing farm in the nice suburbs of one of the UC cities you list. Hosted big not-too-exciting parties. Did some unremarkable work as a lawyer before he was appointed head of a non-profit for some reason. The family had cooks and maids growing up, but my mother considered spaghetti exotic until she went to college.
That lifestyle has gone extinct in the past 50 years. I think it was just prole-drifted away, to use your terminology. His children are indistinguishable from the UMC descriptors here. The family property has been sold -- partially because the money is running out, but even mostly just because no one wants to live there because the whole lifestyle is an anachronism.
The upper & upper-middle-class had, or may still (since I'm a lower-middle-class prole professional I don't know anymore) affected a slight Americanized WASPy British accent pushed through clenched jaws. I had the pleasure/displeasure of meeting this cohort when I lived and worked in the D.C. area and met the landed gentry-class who participated in steeplechasing, 3-day eventing, and thoroughbred racing. And by "participated" I mean they owned but had full-time staff to attend and ride their hobby horses.
At these horse events, the upper-class would arrive in fully-restored, classic cars - Jags and Benzs and the occasional 'working farm' restored Land Rover. The decidedly upper-middle-class striving for upper-class approval drove the more proletarian BMWs, Volvos, and new Range Rovers. They would all tailgate with well-appointed picnic baskets with oysters, caviar and chilled magnums of champagne. Meanwhile, the lower-middle and lower class proles would park far away and trudge to the fence-lines with plastic coolers filled with Coors light and ham sandwiches with the only common ground where these classes mixed was an appreciation of watching horses do their thing.
Class X is alive and well and can be identified by their simple, and universal, assertion that the problem with American society is that no one ever queues anymore.
I've had a thought that this article has brought to the forefront. I attended undergraduate (lower Ivy equivalent, think Duke, WashU, Georgetown) and graduate institutions (T10 law school) of basically equivalent prestige, selectivity, and student intelligence. Yet at my undergraduate institution, I (a textbook upper-middle) almost exclusively knew other upper-middles and various sorts of uppers, with literally one or two middles or lower-middles I can think of in my social circle. Now in graduate school, the class mix is skewed noticeably lower. Still lots and lots of upper-middles, sure, but not a single truly upper class person. And then there's (refreshingly!) quite a lot of middles and lower-middles. I think it's because no true upper class person would subject themselves to the rigors of a legal career (why?) and because its more socially normalized to strive for the absolute highest ranked law school you can get into and borrow money to go there, then it is for undergraduate, where people more often go where they can afford.
I'm not a regular reader of this blog, so I suppose I have come a little late to the party for this discussion, but here are a few comments from me (British, upper-middle class, from a family that has at various times occupied every step of the ladder).
First and foremost, Fussell did not invent the idea of 'Class X'. I say that with confidence, not because I have made any great study of the subject, but because the BBC (Radio 4 - very middle class) happens at the moment to be broadcasting an adaptation of the 1939 novel 'Rogue Male' by Geoffrey Household. I don't have the book to hand, but I have transcribed the below (presumably abridged) segment, in which the unnamed protagonist discusses 'Class X':
--
'The cook, who was peeling potatoes on a hatch cover, looked up from the bucket between his knees. "I'll see, sir."
'That "Sir" was curious and comforting. In spite of my shabby foreign clothing and filthy shoes, the cook had placed me at a glance in 'Class X'. He would, undoubtedly, describe me as a 'gent', and My Vaynor would feel he ought to see me.
'I say 'Class X', because there is no definition of it. To talk of an 'upper' or 'ruling' class is nonsense. The upper class, if the term has any meaning at all, means landed gentry, who probably do belong to Class X, but form only a small proportion of it. The ruling class are, I presume, politicians and servants of the state - terms which are self-contradictory.
'I wish there was some explanation of Class X. We are, politically, a democracy - or, should I say that we are an oligarchy, with its ranks ever open to talent, and the least class-conscious of nations in the Marxian sense. The only class-conscious people are those who would like to belong to Class X, and don't. The suburban old-school-tie brigade and their wives - especially their wives. Yet we have a profound division of classes, which defies analysis since it is in a continual state of flux.
'Who belongs to class X? I don't know till I talk to him, and then I know at once. It is not, I think, a question of accent, but rather of the gentle voice. It is certainly not a question of clothes. It may be a question of bearing.
'I'm not talking, of course, of provincial society, in which the division between gentry and non-gentry is purely and simply a question of education. I would like some socialist pundit to explain to me why it is that, in England, a man can be a member of the proletariat by every definition of the proletariat - that is, by the nature of his employment and his poverty - and yet obviously belong to Class X, and why another can be a bulging capitalist or cabinet minister - or both - and never get nearer to Class X than being directed to the saloon bar if he enters the public?'
--
Household's definition of 'Class X' is interesting, but I reality I think it largely constitutes a dotted line drawn around the upper and upper-middle classes, and the various groups which those two (in any event overlapping and interlinked) classes comprise: the aristocracy, the landed gentry, county society, and the wider pool of educated, well-off and/or urbane types who exude self-confidence and demonstratively lack self-consciousness.
Beyond that, speaking as an outsider who has spent time in the States, the caricatures which Fussell draws seem to be spot on (and very applicable to the UK, with minor tweaks). They are instantly recognizable, and demonstrate accurately the way in which our identities, interests and preferences are subconsciously (or consciously) a product of our social class.
That so many in the States cling to the idea that the USA is a 'classless' society has always struck me as odd. Firstly because class distinctions are so utterly transparent, but also because class provides a framework and a language to discuss the ways in which groups perpetuate power and influence (and exclude/manipulate other groups to that end). Class also establishes guardrails and boundaries for conduct - even if we rarely talk now about 'noblesse oblige'.
I see the same trends happening in the UK. It has been one of the greatest victories of the upper-middle classes (and their high-prole hangers-on) to largely convince the country that class is no longer relevant - or rather, that we are all middle class. I recently read an interview with a television presenter, Kirstie Allsop. The Hon. Kirstie is the daughter of Lord Hindlip, 6th Baron Hindlip*. Kirstie Allsop is, in the most literal, blue-blooded sense, a born-and-bred member of the upper class, and yet in the interview, without irony, she breezily refers to herself as 'middle class'.
Similarly, some years ago I watched a documentary set in a call centre. There can be no job, in this post-industrial age, more working class than being a call centre operative: it is low-skilled, low-paid, low-security drudgery. And yet, when asked what class they were, these operatives each defiantly asserted that they were middle class. Simply because they worked in an office, rather than down the pit or in a factory.
And, of course, if a call-centre operative on minimum wage, and a fabulously-wealthy aristocratic TV presenter, can both be called 'middle class', then there is absolutely no organising principle around which to build a political movement which serves the needs of those at the bottom of the food chain.
Perhaps the best way to think of class is as a heuristic. Whether or not we use the term, we know what class someone is the moment we see them, or the moment they speak. We know what names are upper or lower class, and if we were to guess that person's character, opinions, interests, then we know that we would be close to the mark most of the time. Let me therefore turn to the classes as I see them.
Historically, we thought of the working class as 'horny-handed sons of toil' (as Salisbury had it). People of simple interests and simple tastes. People for whom poverty did not mean indignity - their houses may be small, but they were scrupulously clean; their outfits few, but always immaculately turned out. As Fussell notes, these are people whose little front gardens would be heaving with carnations and geraniums (Dahlias cut across classes, as they require the sort of tending that either a working-class man or upper-class chatelaine tend to enjoy), and whose mantlepieces (above a gas/electric fire) would be crammed with glazed porcelain figurines or commemorative royal mugs. They are socially conservative, but not nearly as much as people often assume. They were historically very effective at progressing their class interests (think e.g. Attlee '45). And they value education as the best way for their children to get on - meaning many did, in the mid 20th century, move into the middle classes.
Undoubtedly this group still exists, but anecdotally they seem to be overwhelmingly outnumbered by what may be thought of as an underclass (or, in the Marxist sense, the Lumpenproletariat). It is stereotypical to suggest that these people don't work. Yes, many do make a good living by pumping out children and playing the state for all it is worth. But most have jobs. What defines them, I think, is a sort of diffuse and inarticulate rage. Society has infantilised them - they dress like children (wearing pyjamas to the supermarket), they resolve disputes like children (fighting), they have a child's level of self-restraint (fast food), and, like a child, they are easily manipulated (by populists and charlatans). The Lumpenproletariat has been encouraged to think of themselves as victims - albeit almost never in the true manner in which they really are victims (lack of education etc.).
This sense of victimhood, which is emotionally very satisfying, strips them of the dignity of the Working Classes. Because it is decoupled from its true causes, the victimhood of resentment can be pointed in any direction, and they relish every opportunity of getting one over on their true enemies (the middle classes) - even to their own detriment. Brexit is the most obvious example in the UK - a revolt of the plebs, which hurts them most of all, in the service of people who wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire.
The middle classes are hated by the Lumpenproletariat, because they think themselves superior, whereas the upper classes, so long as they remain at a distance (the Royals) or pander to them (blue-blooded Brexiteers) are revered, because the proles know them to be superior.
Street names are mentioned in the article, and it is worth noting that the council estates, on which the lower classes tend to live, usually comprise streets which each have a vaguely patriotic theme ("King Edward Avenue" leading onto "Queen Victoria Parade", or "Australia Crescent" connecting to "Falkland Way").
Should a member of the working class attain a greater level of income or financial stability, then they will tend to become lower-middle class (or in exceptional circumstances middle-middle class - this depends much more on character than on income). Even when very wealthy, most will remain lower-middle class, though in the first generation will heartily assert their working class credentials. The Lumpenproletariat, even when stratospherically wealthy (e.g. Footballers) will tend to remain Lumpenproletariat. They don't think of themselves as belonging to any class.
THE MIDDLE CLASSES
*The Lower-Middle Class*
The archetypal lower-middle-class profession is that of the estate agent, recruiter, conveyancing solicitor, or perhaps a supermarket manager or the owner of a trade business (e.g. plumber). The bulk of lower-middle-class people occupy the lowest grade of clerical roles. The lower-middle classes cling to their middle-class identity - they may be many things, but they are not working class. They see no distinction between themselves and the other middle-class tiers, and they look up to the upper classes with a positive fervour - because, anyway, we're all middle class nowadays.
At lower income levels, the lower-middle class person will live in a new-build house in an estate called 'Carnation Drive' or 'Privet Lane' (think of the Dursleys in Harry Potter). At higher income levels, they will move to a large but cheaply-made new-build house with a name like "The Ascot" or "The Carnarvon", also in an estate with neat lawns and American-style picket fences, which they will unironically call 'posh' and consider the next best thing to Pemberley.
'Posh' is the ultimate lower-middle-class word, and is always meant positively. "That's a posh phone", "It's very posh here". They love Downton Abbey. For the lower-middle classes, aping the upper classes is an occasional entertainment to be enjoyed lightheartedly - taking mum to the Ritz for afternoon tea on her 60th, gaily snapping photos as she poses with the posh teacup (little finger extended, of course, because that's posh). They particularly enjoy musicals, which they consider very posh.
More broadly, lower-middle-class language is unquestioningly non-U. Couch, lounge, serviette, etc. They read the Daily Mail, which they consider to be a 'proper newspaper' compared to the working-class tabloids, and are thus fanatically right-wing.
*The Middle-Middle Class*
The middle-middle classes feel the precarity of their position. They wish to put as much distance between themselves and the ghastly lower-middle classes as possible, and are desperate to be accepted by the upper-middle and upper classes. Consequently, it is within this group that we find those who expend the most energy learning how to talk and how to act. Hyacinth Bucket ('Bouquet') from 'Keeping up Appearances' is the perfect exemplar, and it seems to cause them a great deal of stress.
There is another branch of the middle-middles which resents this. After all, are they not as good as anyone else? It is from these serried ranks that the frenzied supporters of Jeremy Corbyn hail. It is this group which is most performatively 'woke' (a term which I dislike, but the sense of which is understood). Most academics (outside the donnish Oxbridge types) fall into the middle-middle.
And then, of course, there is the great bulk of the middle-middles - perfectly ordinary people leading perfectly-ordinary lives, living in perfectly-ordinary nice little houses in towns and villages up and down the country. The provincial Tory types who read the Telegraph and sit on the Parish Council, the Green Party vegetarians who keep a few rescue chickens in the back garden, or the schoolteachers and nurses who go to All Bar One after work for a couple of cocktails with the girls. The archetypal middle-middle house is a 17th century thatched cottage. They will knock down all the walls, paint everything white, and install a kitchen with two ovens. It will have a very twee name. Everything middle-middle is twee. Cath Kidston everywhere.
The middle-middles love cinema. They enjoyed Bridgerton for its colourblind casting. Nowadays, they also like graphic novels. Don't call them comics.
Between the middle-middles and upper-middles there exists a gulf perhaps greater than between any other two class groups. This is not a gulf of income, so much as of perspective, taste, interest, etc. The upper-middles are dons, Deans and Archdeacons, barristers, those at the top of the professions, the public-schooled, certain officers, Whitehall mandarins, minor country squires, senior doctors, etc.
The overriding trait of the upper-middles is self-confidence. They know that the world is set up for them, and they know the people that matter within it. True, there are some at the lower end of this group who seek to act as gatekeepers (there is a certain accusatory tone to 'what school did you go to?' which one can spot a mile off) - but this act of gatekeeping only highlights the precarity of that individual's own position - they are on the cusp of sliding down to the middle-middle. The true upper-middle-class person does not need to justify their right to belong by reference to some bauble or other. Conversely, in fact, the only factor which truly matters to fellow members of this class is whether you are "the right sort"; in a word: clubbable.
I do not believe it is possible to be upper-middle class without belonging (or your husband belonging) to a Gentlemen's Club (the vast majority of which are open to women, I should stress). True Gentlemen's Clubs are the last bastion to have withheld the onslaught of the global nouveau-riche. Owned by their Members, they cannot be bought, as the top golf clubs have been (hello, Trump). It matters not how rich you are - if you're not clubbable, you're not getting in. Of course, the rich proles have created their own pseudo-clubs - a pale imitation of the real thing.
This is the great power of the upper-middle classes. Its rules are unwritten and unspoken - inculcated from youth, and frequently ignored (after all, knowing how and when to break the rules is part-and-parcel of being upper-middle). The middle-middles who try to ape it (language, table manners, snobbery) show themselves up immediately by their desperation. The distinctions pass the lower-middles by - after all, they too can dress up and go to Ascot, even if it's not the Royal Enclosure. The middle-middles do not go to Ascot, as that would be to acknowledge their separation from the upper-middles.
The upper-middles' cultural tastes are much as you would expect: theatre, opera, ballet, cricket, rugby.
The upper-middles, when young, will live in a smart flat in an expensive London postcode. You may later find them in a fine Victorian or Georgian townhouses, which will be elegantly decorated. More likely, they will be in the country, where they will own a characterful, rambling property with a few acres. They will ride with the local hunt and give generously to fund repairs to the church roof. They are staunchly Anglican (if not actually Christian).
THE UPPER CLASSES
By definition, the upper classes are the aristocracy and the wider reaches of the landed gentry. In a practical sense, they are the ur-form of the upper-middles, and have always intermingled (think of Eliza Bennett in Pride and Prejudice: "[Mr Darcy] is a gentleman; I a gentleman's daughter. So far, we are equal."). Hence much of what is written above applies equally to the uppers.
Nevertheless, the distinction is clear as day to both sides: the upper-middles will never be upper, and the uppers, while they may be the best of friends with the upper-middles, maintain a distinct and discrete social bond with other uppers.
Unfortunately, new hereditary aristocratic titles are no longer created (a life peerage certainly does not count), and the great estates are progressively being bought up by the Russian oligarchs, Chinese bureaucrats and Middle-Eastern princelings. Things are not looking good for the uppers. Invariably, the staff have been let go, their homes thrown open to the paying public, and the families have retreated to an apartment in the East Wing.
So whereas the upper-middles are protected by their codes of behaviour, the uppers cannot afford to stand on ceremony. By necessity, they have embraced the opportunity to forge links with the global elite - however distasteful this may be. This is hardly new (listen to Noel Coward's 'Stately Homes of England'), but in a world where power and wealth have shifted decisively, the upper classes have no qualms about building bridges with all comers. This is particularly true for the young, who, after all, can have a lot more fun partying on a wealthy Russian's yacht off the Riviera than a mouldering old London club.
For all that, however, uppers are still uppers. Fussell is broadly right about food: whilst those in the upper-middle may well be inclined to explore novel cuisines, the uppers' diet is strictly British/French (albeit note that British cuisine is itself informed by 200 years of empire). Contrary to Fussell, however, one should not assume that this food is in any way boring - it is often excellently prepared. And the parties are often a lot better than he imagines, behind closed doors.
If upper-middles are defined by self-confidence, then uppers take this to the next level, with the sort of self-effacing performance that can only come from the utterly self-assured. Their titles are dismissed with a wave of the hand, their houses are "falling down". It is imperative for the upper to act, with regard to any priceless treasure in their house, as if they had hardly noticed it before, let alone thought about it. They are, by and large, utterly uninterested in the higher arts. Rather, like Lord Emsworth, their interests predominately lie in dogs, horses, hunting, shooting, fishing, and generally being ruddy-cheeked.
To their local communities, they are much like a municipal Royal Family - rarely seen, except when acting as a Patron of some charity or opening some event, and largely the subject of myth-making by the chattering classes.
A BRIEF NOTE ON THE 'RULING CLASSES'
Our political parties succeed where they are maximally flexible, and the Conservative Party is by far the most effective in this regard. I would place the current Cabinet accordingly:
Boris Johnson - Upper
Rishi Sunak - Middle-middle tending upper-middle (notwithstanding very profitable marriage)
Dominic Raab - Upper-middle tending middle-middle (he is just ghastly)
Priti Patel - Lower-middle (from a working class upbringing, I presume)
Michael Gove - Upper-middle
Gavin Williamson - The walking embodiment of lower-middle
Jacob Rees-Mogg - Desperately wishes to be upper but is really upper-middle (and tries far too hard)
The Labour Party, however, has seen the traditional working classes whittled away, and in any event hardly knows how to speak to them. They can make no connection with the Lumpenproletariat. The lower-middles despise them. The upper-middles didn't mind Tony Blair (one of them) but are fundamentally Tory, and the uppers will never vote for them. That just leaves the middle-middles - not enough to win an election.
*I am reminded of the Jeeves & Wooster episode (different from the book) where the men from Birdsburg, MI come to believe that the 8th Duke of Chiswick is a fraud: "Hey, he's only the EIGTH Duke! We want to see the FIRST Duke!"
For anyone who manages to hit this comment, perhaps the most valuable current day equivalent book is _Coming Apart_ by Charles Murray.
Yes, yes, I know, Charles Murray is worse than if Hitler and Stalin had a baby who was raised by Pol Pot. But if you are willing to actually consider changing your mind about important subjects, he lays out a huge amount of interesting information about both the top and bottom of America, how they differ, and how this difference is very much a post-Kennedy phenomenon.
"Category X" was a self-serving Mary Sue class, in my opinion. It's what everyone wants to think they are, it's the "I don't care what you think" class.
No one is truly free from the social reality of class. You can think your class is full of bozos (and be right, because all classes are full of bozos, because most people are bozos) but that doesn't break you free of the social obligations and subtle assumptions your born social class inflicts upon you, even if you think you've washed yourself clean of it. And you're right about the degradation of so-called "Category X" signals. "Authenticity" has been co-opted by corporates and made another into damn product, and this time there's nothing to replace it. People in the old world (1945-2001) could afford to be nonconformists and still get jobs. People in 2021, if they have to work to live, can't afford to be authentic-- they have to build reputations on terms someone else (with hostile intent) created-- so the fake-news commoditized authenticity is the only game in town.
A 2021 analysis would be much more apocalyptic in nature. Fussell's analysis pertained to cultural groups and didn't focus much on the vicious socio-economic competition (for resources in a dying empire on an overburdened planet) that dominates life today. He described class in a nicer society, one that existed before the national elite (his depiction's upper class) sold us out to the scumbag global one (who now own a bunch of real estate they don't even visit) and before people lost jobs because of stray insensitive comments from decades past. In 1983, people of different social classes sneered at each other, but that was usually the end of it; in 2021, any more inequality, hopelessness, and industrial alienation will put us in a civil war.
As for prole drift, I don't think there's a single direction it takes. Usages can also fall from upper to lower class: consider the word "ain't", which was once a high-class usage, then became a low-class word, then became something "everyone knew wasn't a word" even though it factually was and is a word (because, you know, descriptivism over prescriptivism). One point of Fussell's that I think still holds is that the upper and lower classes have more in common with each other than with the middle class-- both upper and lower class people live lives defined by money, and they know it. Both the top and bottom are crass and greedy, from a middle-class perspective. Middle class people also live lives defined by money (or, at least, the social perversions to which people subject themselves in order to have access to money) but they go to every extent to pretend otherwise-- to believe that they're professionals working for pro-social motives (because working for money is something they find disgusting), and that they have cultural armor (e.g., education) that will protect them in event of socioeconomic adversity. Of course, this middle class has been shrinking; in a real class war, that cultural armor is worth very little.
I read Fussell's book and found it illuminating and entertaining, but it's also a peacetime analysis of an era in which class at least seemed to be self-contained... in which being born prole might keep you out of Harvard but wouldn't block you from being rich enough to travel. We are now in class cold war at the minimum, and it's unpredictable how it will evolve considering the successful inundation, by the elite, of the proles with counterrevolution, division (racism, "red" versus "blue" states), and misinformation. The idea that class distinctions come down to floral arrangements is laughably quaint.
His description of classes doesn't cleave my experiences really well because most people I know exhibits some of the characteristics of several of the classes at once. Take for example my maternal grandparents. He was a top-tier computer science professor, and she was a housewife with a master's in math from Yale (middle). Listened to NPR and read the NYT (middle). Yet they also owned a lot of poinsettias (prole), aluminum-tube-plus-webbing lawn chairs (prole), went on cruises (prole), and lacked any noticeable status anxiety (prole or high) and came from solidly middle class backgrounds (her father was a pastor and his father was a real estate developer)
If someone wanted to do this class categorization for real, scientifically, they should just do a big survey and run a cluster-finding algorithm on it for N=3. Then, if the clusters map to class (a big if) you can precisely quantify P(classX|signalY) and P(signalY|classX).
I'm from east european post-soviet state and class divisions are different here. It's so fun to observe and compare. Great piece, really enjoyed reading it. Probably I would never had a chance to read the book but thanks to your review I've gained so many valuable insights.
I've read all the comments, and they frankly persuaded me that the upper class does not exist, at all.
All comments are of three varieties
- I have never met one, even in my six figure job or professional capacity that actually caters to the very high net worth individuals
- I have met some people whose family used to be like that, but it doesn't work like that anymore
- I have met these people: they are exactly like that. And then proceeds to describe someone who either became very rich, or whose parents were very rich, but no one that is actually "old money, no work, no signalling"
Also, people seemed very confused by people who should be in one class but behaves as from another, and that was only marginally helped by the three ladder concept.
Y'all need Marxism: it was frankly super weird to read 800+ comments about class without discussing class consciousness.
Some surprisingly explicit examples from the sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf, like when the proudly prole David Lister voices his secret shame: he went into a wine bar.
"It means I was a class traitor. I could have been on that slippery slope: hankering after pine kitchens, sleeping on futons, eating tapas! Who knows where it could have lead? I could have started having "relationships" with people instead of going out with them. Got married, got on the property ladder. God Almighty, who knows where it could have ended? Next thing you know, I'm playing squash every Tuesday night with a bloke called Gerald! A lucky escape, man, a lucky escape."
Or when his supervisor comments on his relationships:
"Didn't I tell you you'd never bridge that class division? Take her: navigation officer, cadet school, Space Corps, well-spoken, can stay awake during operas, knows her cheeses? She's class. And you? What are you? I don't mean to sound cruel but in comparison you're scum. And second-rate scum, at that ... Your type isn't Kochanski, Listy. It's someone called 'Tiffany'. It's someone who drinks Campari and soda and wears orange crotchless panties. Someone who thinks deely-boppers are funny, someone who says 'sumfink' instead of 'something', and laughs like a freshly wounded moose strapped to a cement mixer."
And have a servant to write the exec summary?
"I was astonished to realize that Scottish-ness and Irishish-ness, similar to the Anglophilia in many upper classes - thinking of William Buckley's accent now - had become posh in some contexts in the States. I was late coming to this realization and it's still weird."
I don't know much about the upper class, but a lot of middle-class Americans are very proud that some ancestor came from Ireland or Scotland.
"Lobster used to be low-class" is an overstated meme. In PG Wodehouse's "Code of the Woosters", Bertie Wooster agrees to do a favour (being thrown into gaol) for his Aunt Dahlia in exchange for a meal to be cooked by her (comedically amazing) personal chef Anatole, and immediately sets to setting out his dream menu. The fish course? Sylphides a la Creme d'ecrivesses: lobster with crayfish sauce (baked in pastry with brandy and cream). That was 1938.
Maybe not lobster so much, but things like oysters and shellfish in general were working/lower class cheap food. Oysters are now fancified, but nobody (so far as I know) has yet produced an upper-class version of a bag of whelks or jellied eels (though give them time).
And there's a certain irony in French food being considered high-class, since a lot of the recipes come from "we need to find ways to cook every part of the animal". Rural and farm cooking. The attitude behind Hogarth's The Roast Beef of Old England (the English are wealthy enough that even the common man may dine on beef rather than frogs' legs and snails): https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hogarth-o-the-roast-beef-of-old-england-the-gate-of-calais-n01464
"Numerous xenophobic references indicate Hogarth's low opinion of the French. The huge side of British beef at the exact centre of the picture, destined for the English inn at Calais, is neatly balanced by the scrawny French soldier at the other side of the drawbridge. A fat friar, the only well-nourished Frenchman in the picture, covetously pokes the beef."
And indeed a patriotic ballad prior to that:
"When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman's food,
It ennobled our veins and enriched our blood.
Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good
Oh! the Roast Beef of old England,
And old English Roast Beef!
But since we have learnt from all-vapouring France
To eat their ragouts as well as to dance,
We're fed up with nothing but vain complaisance
Oh! the Roast Beef of Old England,
And old English Roast Beef!"
How would we know if they disappeared? They were always invisible to normies.
Our boarding schools are still open, which is the surest way to know that we're still here. (This is exactly as tongue-in-cheek as Fussell.)
I read the X Class a little more broadly: it's academics, people who might have become academics if they'd played their cards right, and young people who still could.
I'd be very hesitant about drawing conclusions about past living standards from TV shows. Think about the oft-remarked difference between the apartments we saw on 'Friends', and the sort of New York apartments people in that income group would actually have been able to afford.
I actually disagree a bit here. I think academics have more potential than the average person to be X Class (especially younger academics), but also many academics are living out the upper-middle class dream of being a respectable professional.
Yes, I think it's basically hippy academics as opposed to more professional-signaling academics
I think it's basically hippy academics
The X Class is what every person believes he is: "The other people are poseurs and sheep. But I transcend all this and make choices independently on the merits. My choices reflect how unique and smart and independent I am. I am an X person."
Seriously, do you think anyone self-identifies as a "High-Prole?"
Mid-to-high prole, in the HOUSE! Like... if your grandpa wasn't a lumberjack, and your grandma didn't have plastic swans in the strawberry garden out in front of their mobile home, next to the potted geraniums, then what the hell are you even doing, calling yourself a Real Amurican? (I'm kidding here of course... sort of. No wait... Yes. Yes, I'm definitely totally kidding.)
One of the things I loved about Fussell's bullshit book was how it widened my hypothesis space for understanding why most people doing "white collar" work nearby to my aughties-era datascience gigs were so insecure. They like: *intrinsically cared* about how strangers who weren't even their family *saw them* for like... reasons OTHER than "not-unethically convincing a big boss type into granting one permission to play with super expensive toys". After reading Fussell, I started sometimes purposefully wearing purple because it was funny.
Sadly, I'm effortlessly svelte, even though my diet is mostly pizza and cheezburgs.
"Sadly, I'm effortlessly svelte, even though my diet is mostly pizza and cheezburgs."
Classic humblebrag, but I'll allow it.
I suspect "effortlessly svelte" for most of the actual upper class involves doctors who prescribe the diet pills which actually work.
I believe they are probably neurotic and anxious (the women) and thus fidgety and restless, and with good reason, because their husbands are keeping the weight off by banging the mistress. Also, the men golf and sail a lot.
Actually you don't need to be neurotic or anxious to be fidgety.
Source: am highly fidgety but emotionally on the chill side (and live a comparatively stress-free life), but do have ADHD. Wouldn't say I'm effortlessly svelte, but definitely don't watch my weight much and yet maintain normal BMI.
Is there such a thing as a diet pill which actually works?
Amphetamines don't count.
Why don't amphetamines count?
Amphetamines may not count, but they're what I meant.
Not yet, but there is one in development by Xeno Biosciences.
My grandparents would have both fit the bill. One would have objected to "prole", the other to "high".
My maternal grandfather was a very small scale farmer who wouldn't have known the term "prole" (in fairness it probably wasn't coined yet). In his view there were two kinds of people: "regular people" and "the rich." The former were good, the latter were thieves. He had zero desire to be rich, cared nothing about appearances, and was probably the happiest guy I ever met.
"Prole" is used extensively in 1984 (published 1949) - Google Books actually shows it peaking in 1611, though I wonder if most of that is confusion with the similarly-spelled Latin word for "offspring". https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=prole&year_start=1500&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3#
It's the same word - "prole" is short for "proletarius" or later "proletariat" who were originally just the people in the Roman census who didn't own anything so the censors just counted their kids.
Right, but it would be a mistake to count appearances of "prole" in Latin text (perhaps in quotations?) as if they were appearances of "prole" in the modern English sense.
The self-description isn't "High-Prole," it's "working-class-made-good." And yes, lots and lots of people identify like that.
A long time ago I read an article about the two middle classes, the Academic Middle Class and the Commercial Middle Class. All I can find of it now is this quote by Freeman Dyson:
> In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status. As a child of the academic middle class, I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher and have been gloomy ever since.
This sounds broadly correct to me, as one who awkwardly straddles both sides of the fence. The Commercial Middle Class can be seen in their BMW X5s, the Academic Middle Class in their Subarus or on their bicycles (with the occasional Tesla at the upper end). The commercial middle class are richer (per unit social status) than the academic middle class, so the academic middle class has to work harder on signalling in order to compensate.
Lawyers, bankers, and most types of engineers are Commercial Middle Class, while well-paid public-sector types tend to be Academic Middle Class (along with academics, of course). Silicon Valley seems to be largely Commerical Middle Class with a lot of Academic Middle Class pretensions, and much of the conflict you'll find inside big Silicon Valley companies is just AMC vs CMC posturing; it seems like the best way to get promoted is to have the ability to mouth AMC values while getting paid a CMC salary.
The AMC thinks the CMC is beneath them, because it goes around spending money on flashy crap like fancy cars and nice houses with swimming pools, and we all know that only lower-class people feel the need to signal like that. The CMC meanwhile thinks the AMC is beneath them because they don't even have flashy cars or nice houses with swimming pools, and that's just sad.
Fussell's Class X basically sounds like a description of the sorts of things that were becoming popular among the Academic Middle Class in 1983.
What you're describing sounds kind of like Moldbug's "Brahmin" (AMC) vs "Vaisya" (CMC), although it's hard to be sure of the identification. Seems a bit different from what Fussell is going for though; the AMC you describe definitely does not sound like Class X to me, instead sounding more just like his "upper-middle"...
There are several ways this distinction has been described, Piketty's Brahmin left & merchant right, I've also heard priestly class & merchant class. Either way, plus ça change... (indicating my frightful British middle class-ness by using French there, see Nancy Mitford's "U and non-U" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
Are doctors and lawyers CMC or AMC?
Lawyers tend to be CMC.
Doctors draw from both groups. Some specialties (plastic surgery?) are almost pure CMC, others (including psychiatrists maybe?) are more AMC.
Having spent time at a mid-size OLD Connecticut law firm, I'd say they are a definite mix. There were attorneys there that were old money, didn't need to work, but being an attorney was respectable and allowed them to help fellow upper-class people. Good firms need to have people like this because some old money people don't want to work with CMC people - ever. But this was disappearing when I entered the profession (mid 2000's). All the young associates were striver CMCs and there were no old money young lawyers. This is likely because the grind of being a young lawyer is not something someone with nothing to prove would ever do now.
Similar observation and strongly agree, with the exception being AMCs in a tax-exempt public-policy type of practice/consultancy.
My mostly-indirect exposure to 'real old money' (upper class) people was similarly enlightening – you've got the maybe upper-middle class people that do the work, the middle and lower class people that do the 'real' work (i.e. drudgery), and a few figurehead lower-upper class people being (AFAICT) 'punished' by being 'requested' to hold down an 'important' position at one of the family's concerns.
(The specific old money people I got some glimpses of were pretty scary in some ways too!)
How were they scary?
Along the lines of whatever it was that Jeffrey Epstein was doing is scary
In England, it's waaaay more complicated than this.
The Upper Class are proper hereditary peers, their families, the Royal Family, and the odd hanger-on who doesn't have a peerage but is clearly in the general milieu. Unlike other European countries, this was historically possible to enter through inter-marriage. This still happens a bit, but rarely in one step (e.g. Jeff Bezos sends his kids to Eton, and one of his granddaughters marries a marquess). All class movement (at least in England) is cross-generational, so you can't change class but your children can be a different class to yours.
The Working Class are people who work in factories, labourers, plumbers etc. There's a perennially unemployed underclass, who have now largely branched off but aren't quite a separate class as it's still possible to move between the two within one lifetime.
Historically, the middle class embraced industrial tycoons, lawyers, doctors, accountants and the better sort of "clerks" (white collar workers - Bob Cratchett and Scrooge were both middle class, but represent the farthest ends). A huge number of people moved up into this category after WWII, and particularly under Thatcher (when Blair was talking about "Mondeo man," this is who he was talking about.
The post-war movers represent the bulk of the middle class, and are people doing "office jobs" - salesmen, actuaries, solicitors (one type of lawyer), the sort of banker who might be a "trader" etc.* This is the Lower Middle Class and Middle Middle Class, although they seem to have more of a gradient between them than a line. This is the CMC. They're status-conscious, confrontation-averse and child-rearing-oriented, but in terms of accent and (physical) appearance aren't distinct from the working class.
The Upper Middle Class contains academics, the better sort of army officers, barristers (the other type of lawyer), doctors, senior civil servants (and the junior civil servants who are on track to become them), and the sort if banker who wouldn't be a "trader." They usually went to private schools or public schools (a confusing English term which means "expensive private school" and is what Hogwarts is a pastiche of), but some went to grammar schools (selective state schools). Within this class, there's a clear divide:
AMC (plus socially mobile people whose kids will be AMC): Most academics, a majority of senior civil servants, a majority of (white, gentile) doctors (including almost all male ones), roughly half of barristers, most people who work for NGOs, a few rich people living off their money, and some of the non-trader bankers. These people have their own public schools (e.g. Highgate, St Pauls) and private schools. They are more likely to be non-conformist or low-church (most are still Anglican by extraction), although they're mostly atheists. They were historically the old civilian middle class (merchants, clerks etc.), the sort of people who backed Cromwell in the civil war and became the American puritans. They're naturally Lib Dems politically but the Labour moderates (e.g. Starmer, Blair) come from this class. They probably instinctively think the roundheads were the good guys in the civil war (possibly with hand-wringing about Ireland). Historically, Barclays and Lloyds were run by them, banking seems to be mixed far more thoroughly now. If in doubt, ask yourself whether you'd believe they have a brother who teaches political science at KCL. Anyone who rises into the upper middle class through education (grammar schools or comprehensive>Oxbridge) ends up on this side of the aisle. Facially, think John Oliver.
[Martial?] Upper Middle Class: the better sort of army officers, some female doctors, a minority of the senior civil service (basically the rest of the Upper Middle Class). Eton is their Harvard, but somewhere like Rugby or Uppingham would be more typical. They tend to be high-church Anglican by extraction, and are far more likely to have a Norman surname or a weird Scottish connection than is typical in England. They're largely derived from the old rural gentry, or the eighth son of the fifth son of a ninth son of the Upper Class. These people *are* the Conservative Party, barring the occasional hanger-on like Hague or Gavin Williams. Historically, banks then ran were HSBC and funny like Arbuthnott's. If in doubt, ask yourself whether you believe they have a brother who's a captain in the Blues and Royals. To a man, they think the cavaliers were the good guys in the civil war. Anyone who rises into the Upper Middle Class from having parents who just randomly got rich enough to send their kids to public schools (businessmen, athletes etc.) tends to end up on this side of the aisle. Facially, think David Cameron.
I'm fairly sure both upper middle classes are roughly the same size, but I could be off by about an order of magnitude (especially as by educational footprint, the MUMC looks much larger).
The Moldbug parallel should be apparent - the MUMC are basically sub-optimates, the AMC are Brahmins, the bulk of the Middle and Working Class are Vaisyas. This all interacts with race in very complicated ways, and English jews have their own byzantine internal class structure I don't entirely understand, but seem to have at least one equivalent to every group.
*There are two types of bankers. Some of them are "traders" and these are always the lower-class type but are in a broader category. I'm fairly fuzzy on what any of these people do so can't draw the line occupationally, but socially the distinction is obvious. "M&A" is possibly on the upper side of the line...?
Actually, having googled him, John Oliver's face is too slightly too long but you get the basic idea.
"The Upper Class are proper hereditary peers, their families, the Royal Family, and the odd hanger-on who doesn't have a peerage but is clearly in the general milieu."
I was under the impression that the old aristocracy regarded the Royals as rather middle-class, although not to their faces.
Another complication in the English class system is where Catholics fit, especially those who would have a claim to be in the Upper Class.
"I was under the impression that the old aristocracy regarded the Royals as rather middle-class, although not to their faces."
Why? Because they have a job?
They're a bit "bourgeois" (in the condescending aristocratic sense): they like to seem like they uphold slightly old-fashioned middle-class "Victorian" values, aka, what middle-class people think "they're betters" should be like.
*their betters [come back edit button, all is forgiven!]
Because the contemporary branch of the reigning family stems from tiny Germany duchies, which at the time were ruled by small German grocers, and the family name until the WWI was Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. There are titled families in the UK with genealogical trees to William the Conqueror, and that is considered to be way more interesting than small German grocers. Diana once said to Charles, that her (original) title is older, which also was true.
Sorry - not the “title”, “original family name” was older.
I think your description of the Martial Middle Class is a bit off. The description implies a certain kind of old Englishness of public schools, long family history, and tradition "a brother in the Blues and Royals". But then you contradict yourself and inlcude "Anyone who rises into the Upper Middle Class from having parents who just randomly got rich enough to send their kids to public schools (businessmen, athletes etc.) tends to end up on this side of the aisle."
A quick look at the Tory cabinet suggests the latter is more fitting than the former as defining the Conservative party. Gove, Priti Patel, Hancock, are all children of business people, and Raab's parents were white collar employees. Except Gove, they're all second generation immigrants, none of them are descended from old rural gentry. In fact they all seem urban not rural.
In contrast Boris Johnson definitely strikes me as someone who oozes Englishness, though not the kind of Englishness you'll see in a Holywood film. I could very much see him as the village eccentric in a crowd of old rural gentry. Sunak's parents are probably AMC (doctor and pharmacist) but he went into banking (I think non-trading) but also seems to be turning into a bit of a country squire ever since he partially moved to the country.
I'd make two modifications to your taxonomy. First add an upper commercial middle class; this is where successful business people's children go and is is a backbone of the Tory party. The Martial/Country Squire upper middle class remains as a smaller (this might be my urban bias showing) group in the Tory party that has adapted to Thatcher-ism and now remains a firm ally of the commercial middle class (even if they might gripe about globalism now and then, or capitalism optimising away a nice institution or Victorian architecture).
Secondly your taxonomy doesn't have a place for everyone who defines themselves by education but didn't get the kind of degree that leads to a good graduate job. I'd say this is a new influx into the AMC that's got far less capital but is still changing it by weight of numbers plus some strong ideological weapons. Starmer vs Corbyn is an illustration of this fight.
The first "M" in MMC is probably an overstatement, but is just what distinguishes them from the AMC. My point is more "typical public school types" rather than "St Pauls/Highgate" types and that there's a clear distinction within them. It's more that Cameron and Osborne were clearly a different class to the self-made business types, but the self-made business types' kids would be almost indistinguishable by the time they left Eton; that's why I don't think the Upper CMC is a thing - it's not sustainable inter-generationally, and their socially merged with the country squire types in the surrounding countryside (for London, the home counties). The Tories, politically, are clearly aiming for the broad middle class (and now the working class), as voters. The people who are the MPs and most of the constituency associations are generally much more MMC.
I 100% agree that the long family tradition isn't close to universal (although within a couple of generations they all have it from inter-marriage). However, Britain being what it is, there really aren't enough self-made businessmen for them to have formed their own class.
Johnson is much more of an outlier but he's largely acting. His father and brother are much more conventionally MMC.
Corbyn and co are an odd bunch, who don't quite fit into a category. Corbyn in particular seems to be a hereditary left-wing campaigner, McDonnell's father came up from the unions and he went straight into politics, and Benn was upper class. I agree that the more general group you're referring to would be in the AMC.
> but the self-made business types' kids would be almost indistinguishable by the time they left Eton; that's why I don't think the Upper CMC is a thing - it's not sustainable inter-generationally, and their socially merged with the country squire types in the surrounding countryside (for London, the home counties).
You raise a good point. But I still think that if CMC (including upper) is looked at as a whole then it is inter-generationally sustainable. Your dad is a self made businessman and you've got an MBA and a management job. This roughly describes my and my bothers life paths. Our parents ran companies and sold them making good money but not stupid money. In practical terms, enough to contribute significantly to both of our first homes, but not enough to buy them for us outright (they could if they sold their second home, but they don't want to).
We were both supported and encouraged into education. But I went into computer science and got a white collar programming job, my brother now works at a hedge fund. We're both clearly distinguishable from the working class, but also clearly not Eton types, are would be repulsed by Corbyn even if we weren't Jewish (we weren't raised in the community).
I do agree about intermarriage with country squires. When we got the second home in the countryside my brother immediately developed a taste for fishing. The two classes are allied and the division is porous but I think the division is real. The average self made businessman who sends his kids to a good school probably sees his class and peer group as various other business people and his employees; not country squires unless he lives in the country and does squire things (but if he buys a country home he's high risk for getting typical hobbies). And while there's the potential for them to send kids to Eton or Rugby and produce little Camerons, most will send them to whatever local school is good with the intention of school->university-> white collar professional or the rich doctor / prestigious professor type of AMC.
> Corbyn and co are an odd bunch, who don't quite fit into a category. Corbyn in particular seems to be a hereditary left-wing campaigner, McDonnell's father came up from the unions and he went straight into politics, and Benn was upper class. I agree that the more general group you're referring to would be in the AMC.
I was thinking more about the general movement around Corbyn. Young, university educated, eager participants in imported American culture wars. But I think you got that from your last sentence?
I think you're in the group I'd be rounding off into the MMC (your brother particularly). I've never met a white-collar professional who didn't seem on one side of the line or another, but I'm slightly worried I might just be conflating a partisan divide with a broader social one. I've also no idea what the children of successful techies will be like!
I'm reluctant to type this, and am completely willing to defer if I'm very wrong, but I've also noticed that Jews seem to filter into the MMC less. This may be small sample size, but the handful of Jewish MMC I've met have all been at least third-generation. It must happen, but I suspect (possibly based on lazy stereotyping) that the slight contempt for academia that partly drives the division from the MMC side may generally be absent if your Jewish, so assimilation becomes more gradual absorption and hence more multi-generational...? I base that only on the fact that business-people whose kids I was at school with (massive selection bias there) would be horrified if their children went into academia.
The Corbyn clique themselves are very weird. I'd argue the Corbyn-supporting young are distinct from them (cf. Europe, coal-mining, Russia etc), and I'd assume are just young AMC and the political divide rounds off to age - young Liberal Democrats do exist, but they tend to make Young Conservatives seem normal by comparison.
Exactly. Almost every other culture has more complicated class system than America. There are really no classes in America, compared to UK, or Asia, or any other country except Canada and Australia. In America, the difference between top and the bottom class is like the difference between a white poodle and a black poodle. Everywhere else, it's like the difference between an ant and an elephant.
I think the CMC often looks down on the AMC also because of a view that they don't expose themselves to the risk and rewards of the market. That is certainly the case for my personal corner of the CMC filled with people who could have been academics but chose business. The view is that AMC develop theories without testing them in the real world like the CMC. The CMC has skin in the game.
Melvin, please share if you ever find that article
The Chattering Class has taken over from the X Class (forget who said it first), and the result is not good.
"Harry Potter" writ large. The books treat the Dursley's with undisguised class contempt; fat, materialistic, and having bad fashion sense to boot.
So unlike the sensitive, intelligent and cultured wizardfolk.
Pragmatically, you couldn't film a show in a typical NYC apartment. You wouldn't be able to get more than a couple of people in the frame without a room that's deeper (along the camera--subject axis" than the frame is wide.
True, but take a look at the apartment that Jackie Gleason's bus-driver salary afforded him in the 1950s "Honeymooners." I've lived in apartment buildings with nicer laundry rooms.
Americans got a lot richer between, say, 1945 and 1970.
Academia is now a 100% class signals game. The research activity does matter only via the number and place where the articles are published. Everything is optimized for the profit of publishers, in exchange for signals of value, as measured by academic bureaucracy.
On a tangent, even the (relatively) new phenomena, like Open Access, are already rotten by this class game. For those working in academia, how many time have you heard that huge article processing charges are OK, because why? if you can't pay the APC it means that your project is not funded, therefore not valuable. What if I don't want to pay the APC, when is clearly money for nothing? Class signals.
Fussell's Class X is more or less what we used to call bohemians. The closest modern equivalent are hipsters, but even that term is faded. What he's picking up on are traits of well-educated countercultures like ironic poverty.
David Brooks coined (or popularized?) the term "Bohemian Bourgeois" or Bobo. Although his take on them is far more positive than mine overall.
... which is what I think the X Class has become.
"Sure I'm the Assistant Director of Student Affairs for *InsertCollegeName*, but I'm cool and reuse my bags at the Organic Farmer's Market, and take 3 intercontinental/international trips by air per year (which totally cancelled out any benefit of not using plastic bags several times over at least in terms of CO2 Emissions). Last year we went to the Amazon and saw Pachamama statues..."
I think NPR subscriber. Although maybe the X Class has been subsumed into the UMC.
That Simpsons reference is deeply bubbled imo. There is a generation/subculture of people who grew up, went to a useless college, and don't have good jobs, but 65 percent of Americans are homeowners and the Simpsons are not astonishingly wealthy or anything by current standards, just by journalist/media studies person standards
It makes me very happy to see so many ACX commenters are casually familiar with Simpsons lore. I feel at home.
The story of small town America on Big Media is written by people who hated it, left, and nurse a grudge against the place they left. How many there genuinely like where they live? Those people aren't storytellers.
The only exception that comes to mind (which might reflect the fact I've not watched many shows set in small town America) is Stargirl. Blue Valley is portrayed as a very friendly place if slightly retro whose only major problem is supervillains; which are of course entirely necessary for the show to exist. I'd even say the show has some modest red-tribe coding (alongside plenty of blue). Pat Dugan strikes me as a small c-conservative. A mechanic who likes old cars and makes his son get a paper route to teach him responsibility; and sticks a Made In Detroit Stars&Stripes shield on his homemade giant robot.
Now granted (rot13 encoded spoilers) Gur fhcreivyynvaf ner jul gur gbja vf guevivat. Ubjrire gur fhcreivyynvaf ner irel oyhr pbqrq (fb ner zbfg bs gur urebrf; jura gurl urne jung gur ivyynvaf cyna gb qb gurve ernpgvba vf "ner lbh fher jr'er ba gur evtug fvqr"; hagvy gurl ernyvfr zvyyvbaf jvyy qvr).
All that said: for pro-small town America stories I strongly recommend Stargirl.
Wynonna Earp qualifies as smalltown too (although it does have a hugely disproportionate number of gay people).
The small town it's in is also more or less on the boundary of hell, so it's not an exception.
Agreed. Homer has a union job watching dials at a nuclear power plant, and does not live in a major metropolis. His kids go to public school, and his entire savings is often in a jar maintained by Marge.
I'm not surprised he can make the payments on a modest sized suburban home, even on one income. (It was less modest thirty years ago, but it hasn't gotten any bigger or, AFAIK, added any bathrooms since.)
technically it has gotten bigger over the years because simpsons continuity is not super well tracked so they've accidentally added rooms when people making episodes felt the need
The "does not live in a major metropolis" thing is big. People don't have to kvetch nearly as much about housing prices in Urbana as they do in Chicago.
Just for kicks, I went looking for a four-bedroom house in the America's various Springfields on Zillow.
You can get this one in Springfield OH for $140K. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, 2000 sqft, two-car garage, and it even looks a bit like the Simpson house. No trouble affording this for middle proles like the Simpsons: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2643-Lindair-Dr-Springfield-OH-45502/33295516_zpid/
Homer's basic lifestyle isn't unreasonable for someone who got in on a good union job in a boom (when they first built the nuclear plant), particularly when he was given the down payment. Sure, he's got two cars the whole time, but neither is new (and we don't know if he bought either new). One's a Plymouth (a "Junkerolla") the other a Chevrolet.
That he can somehow keep making payments and keep his job despite his extreme irresponsibility and incompetence is another matter, but if you take that away you have no show.
I think the last part is the most believable one, actually. Source: been at companies, seen things.
A replica Simpsons' house was built in Las Vegas and sold for $120k in 1997. But at 2200 square feet, it's clearly smaller than the one on TV, which I would guess is a little under 3000 sf.
The Simpsons house is at 742 Evergreen Terrace, presumably a reference to Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA where Matt Groening went to college. The most similar house in Olympia that I could find on Zillow in 2019 was a 2755 sf house on a 10,500 sf lot. It looks a little smaller than the TV house. It had recently sold for $500k.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/how-much-would-the-simpsons-house-cost-in-2019/
You need to pick a town that contains a nuclear plant maybe? I know here in Canada the housing around these places is crazy expensive because you’ve got all these high wage workers moving into a town far enough from a big population.
In the Lisa's First Word, it is indicated that Grandpa sold his house so that he could give Homer the money to buy his. So the no-inheritance is a bit of a stretch.
Also in Homer's Enemy, Grimy/the writers rub in our face just how fantastical it is for Homer to have the lifestyle he has. Even just the size of his house, his two cars, and the number of kids was realistically unfeasable. This was Season 8, so maybe the change happened between Seasons 1 and 8 or the better explanation is the TV shows have always shown the characters being able to afford a better dwelling than they'd reasonably be able to.
I think some of it depends on what you consider home ownership.
My dad was a Silent Generation Department of Transportation Engineer with only a HS Diploma and a few college courses the state put him through as part of job training, my Mom was a hairdresser with a cosmetology degree who had to retire in her 40s due to arthritis. In the Early 70s, they moved into a 3 bedroom, 2 bath Ranch with my older siblings, then about 5 and 1. They would host my maternal grand parents for the last few years of their lives, and by the tim I came along in the mid-80s and had grown old enough to be aware of my surroundings, the house had been expanded with a three-car garage with a second floor "mother-in-law's apartment over it and a large den on the back with a large back porch... From the time I turned 4 in 1990 to the time we lost the house to foreclosure in 2012, my dad was the primary bread winner, and for most of that time, the house was home to on average 7 people(My parents, me and my older sister, my brother-in-law,my sister's 2 daughters) and sometimes hosted as many as 12 during holidays. We didn't live high on the hog, but we lived comfortably for the most part, and while my mom drew disability, and I drew disability once my father started drawing social security and my sister was consistently employed, it was always my dad's income that provided the safety net for the rest of the family.
In a technical sense, my Dad never owned that house, having taken out a second mortage to build those additions and probably refinancing at least one other time, was about 31 when my family moved in, and while he was like the only government employee I can ever recall reporting a good wage, he made as much as he did thanks in large part to having worked for the NCDOT from his late teens until retirement... and then went back to work for them part time while drawing retirement pay until he was laid off. He was already in his mid-40s when I came along, and by the time he retired, he had just shy of 40 years after tacking on unspent sick leave.
Admittedly, my father was far more competent(and persumably, the only reason Homer keeps his job from an in-universe standpoint is that Burns doesn't want a competent safety inspector as having to keep the plant up to code would cut into profits), but aside from Homer and marge being maybe10-20 years younger than my parents, based on the stated dates of the earliest flashback episodes, as originally concieved, I don't think the Simpson's situation when they first moved on to Evergreene Terrace is too dissimilar from my own family's situation when they moved into my childhood home. Of course, this is ignoring the show's sliding timeline and that time stamps on flash backs and flash forwards always seem to assume the show's present is when the episode aired(E.g. Early episodes gave 1984 for when Bart was a preschooler and Lisa was a baby, while later episodes put Marge and Homer's college years in the 90s(and arguably retconning Homer from highschool drop out to college drop out)... and i'm pretty sure the show has increased the amount of debt the Simpsons struggle with over time. The show's always played a bit loose with reality, but the original premise doesn't seem all that outlandish fora older 30s couple with two school-aged children and a baby circa the early 90s.
For homeownership, millennials are "still 5 to 10 percentage points behind where Generation X and baby boomers were at the same age."[0] Homer and Marge don't have college degrees, which makes them even less likely to own a home, 48% in 2015 versus 58% in 1995 [1], with much of that remaining fraction being older people. Plus it's a single income household, which I'm sure drops the fraction again, although I don't have statistics.
[0]: https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/23/millennials-continue-to-lag-behind-in-home-ownership-rates/
[1]: https://www.redfin.com/news/homeownership-and-education/
Sure but you realize that 48 percent of people owning a home is still a far cry from "this is an impossible dream" right?
48% of people without a college degree own a home, but 80% of baby boomers own a home (and people even older are presumably even more likely)[0] while baby boomers and older are much less likely to have a college degree [1]. That 48% is going to be largely baby boomers and older who bought their house when it was much more plausible.
[0]: https://blog.firstam.com/economics/are-baby-boomers-the-key-to-the-housing-market-shortage
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/16/todays-young-workers-are-more-likely-than-ever-to-have-a-bachelors-degree/
So if you sample one group defined by age and another group defined by a social marker who average out younger, which group do you expect to display higher levels of homeownership, an attribute that is correlated to age since you can save more money if you are older?
OK, there's more to it, but your comparison lacks rigour if it doesn't correct for age. Or the fact that a young person today is more likely than a young boomer to have a degree, so that's not a like-for-like comparison either. There's a reason why good social science is difficult and agitpop opinions are easy.
So long as you can show that the price of housing has increased versus earning power, your underlying point is likely valid though.
According to Zillow, the median age for first home purchase was 34 in 2019 (the most recent I could find with a quick search). In the 70s and 80s it was about 30. http://zillow.mediaroom.com/2019-04-30-Coming-Wave-of-Young-Millennial-Home-Buyers-Expected-to-Further-Tighten-Market-for-Starter-Homes?mobile=No
The amount of time it takes to save up for a down payment has also gone up significantly due to various factors (rising home prices, increased rent, more money going to student loans), so we can expect this trend to continue. https://www.zillow.com/research/how-many-years-down-payment-21734/
So it's not just that older people own homes more often because they've had more time to accumulate wealth, it's also become more difficult for younger generations to accumulate the wealth needed.
Does that 48% actually own their homes, or does that include those paying on a mortgage? If it refers to true ownership, it makes some sense that older people would be ahead in ownership, they've had time to actually pay of their mortgages... if that includes people paying on a mortgage, I wonder how much of the discrepency is income going to student loan repayments eating up income previous generations would have put towards a mortgage.
By my understanding it includes mortgage holders, or else I'd expect the home ownership number to be essentially zero for millennials (given that most mortgages have a 30 year payoff period and millennials are all under 50)
Since a mortgage is a secured loan, not a staged purchase, mortgage lenders do not own property other than where a default has occurred. On that basis I think you are correct.
Also I have a mortgage but am legally a homeowner (e.g. it is me, not my bank, who is primarily responsible for the maintenance of the boundaries of the property).
I wonder how many of that percent *purchased* the home they own, versus whether they inherited it?
If there is a substantial proportion of the younger generation who have hand-me-down housing, then it's not unthinkable that purchasing housing now might be more difficult than 48% sounds.
If that's the issue, then when the boomers die off the discrepancy should be mostly resolved pretty fast right?
I would be very interested in reading about how much of the boomer/millennial wealth gap can be explained by longer life expectancy. (and possibly the potential for people today to spend that wealth living the retirement dream)
Mostly resolved in the least equitable fashion possible...
I think we are comparing apples and oranges here. Millennials have different priorities now. They marry significantly later than older generation, they want to "explore themselves" by traveling and buying nice things and by living in vibrant urban centers as opposed to smalltown suburbs with wife as the older generations did. The millennial lifestyle is better suited to living in rented place with roommates.
As another example: homeownership rate varies widely from country to country. In former eastern bloc countries the homeownership rate often exceeds 90%. In Switzerland it is 43.36. On the other hand for instance Swiss have vastly higher financial wealth than Eastern Europeans.
A lot of these statistics reflect changes in preferences which are vast over last few generations to put it mildly.
I don't have any statistics at hand here, but an informal survey of the millennials I know shows that it's not a change in preference but a feeling of inability to own a home. If you don't think you'll be able to own a home, then you'll prioritize goals that don't require owning a home, but that doesn't mean you don't want to own a home.
And I'm not sure the Eastern European example helps you here, since the reason for higher homeownership rates in Eastern Europe is that the USSR (and other Eastern European communist governments) provided essentially free housing to almost everyone. Everyone owns a home because it's easy to own a home, while in Switzerland owning a home is expensive and so Swiss people don't prioritize it
I can comment on Eastern bloc as I am from Slovakia. Now it is true that people owned their homes during socialism - but that was more than 40 years ago. The culture in my country is definitely aligned with the concept that the true independence also means owning your own house/condo. It also has a lot of good downstream effects: people care more about what is happening in the neighborhood and more active in local politics.
The Simpsons is also a fantasy cartoon. Despite what the author of that tweet says, it was never believable that someone with a high school degree could become a safety officer at a nuclear plant, let alone retain that job while being caught on camera sleeping all the time.
It's completely useless to use the world of the Simpsons as a measure of income inequality.
It is completely *true to life* even if not believable by you.
I worked at a Fortune 500 medical devices company with lots of fancy lab in Boulder, CO. 500+ employees working onsite, a big machine shop with 2 full-time union machinists, plus loads of fun chemicals and drill presses/emergency showers/cutting lasers sprinkled all around the campus, and literally dozens of PhD engineers at the top of their game making prototype battery-powered sonic cut-and-cauterize tools with exotic metals like tungsten.
The lead "materials safety" guy (in his own special lane, a dept that tracked all the active chemicals/dangerous equipment onsite, responsible for safe disposal I think) separate from a bigger team of folks who handled safety for *spaces* like this-or-that-lab space. He had been there for decades, no way he'd get hired there now (and in fact they didn't hire me directly, but as a temp, and would never since I don't have an engineering degree.) He got hired on the strength of having previously been a lead materials safety guy at... Rocky Flats, a nuclear weapon assembly facility in Colorado. He had his high school diploma only.
Interesting, and laudable (credentialism sucks). Was this recent?
In my defense, though, I'm guessing he didn't sleep on the job and narrowly avoid a meltdown using eeny, meeny, miny, moe :-)
(Also, *technically* Homer hadn't even graduated from high school when he was hired because he failed remedial science -- he just showed up the day the opened the panner plant and he got the job)
Of course Homer's mannerisms and level of incompetence is exaggerated. Wouldn't be much of a show if he didn't. But his material wealth relative to his occupation and social class is not exaggerated - that part is plausible.
He wasn't Homer, no... but IDK whether it's a small difference or a large one. He did have a huge gut and seemed to have no actual responsibilities and spend all his time doing nothing. Once in a while a PhD would deputize the lowest-ranking person available for the job of going to hassle him until he'd give the OK to change the assignments/passcodes so a different team of engineers would have access/authority over this or that lab space. One time I got that job, of going and asking him for something, which is the main reason I ever interacted with him enough to have an impression. My impression was... I have no idea what this guy's job is or why he's the person I'm asking about this. He seems... mean and sleepy?
I have no idea if the guy I'm talking about was generally competent or not--it was a big enough company that had for a very long time been "growing research team of kindly dorky nerds in HR environment that gives them toys and lets them play". I was only at the company a year, as a lowly tech.
Also, do you know very much about Rocky Flats? They pretty commonly noticed a room had become so dangerous there'd be no safe way to clean it, so they'd just brick up the doorway. Started causing cascading problems when things started dripping through walls & etc. At different points there was a big fire affecting floors w/ plutonium, a serious ground-water contamination concern, and more.
And you didn't even mention that Rocky Flats is a Superfund site that irradiated half of Denver!
Agreed. My father left college (football scholarship) after one year to get married and support a family. He worked in the stockroom for about a decade, and then was promoted to Facilities Manager without completing so much as an Assoc Degree.
As you say, it was indeed possible in that era. The responsibility of training and certifying him was borne by the institution, not by him personally, so any training in dealing with chemicals, security, etc. was paid by his employer.
For background, he was at the tail end of the Silent Generation.
Correct. That Homer is rankly unqualified is one of the show's central gags; he's the only person to be fired when the plant is bought by Germans, and his workplace successes own either to dumb luck or the intervention of others. It's made quite clear that he was not hired on merit.
Yeah, I grew up in a town called Springfield—capital of Illinois! plenty of stuff to do there, two huge hospitals, University of Illinois branch—and you can absolutely become Homer Simpson if you want. There's even a power plant (coal, alas). Here's a three-bedroom house near where I was born for under $100,000: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1121-N-5th-St-Springfield-IL-62702/75499034_zpid/ . If you're patient and can get up to $150k you've got a ton of options; you can buy a house near a park in a beautiful old neighborhood filled with tall trees, etc.
It's not Detroit, either—there was no huge boom and no huge bust, and there are no emptied-out neighborhoods where the houses are falling down—it's just a place that both housing bubbles mostly ignored. (All the expensive houses, because it's a fairly red city that hasn't had the millennial move-back-to-the-city, are big mcmansions on the historic edges of town, which got built out in the 80s.)
As someone who’s driven through Springfield countless times: yes, there is absolutely a power plant of some sort in the city. It’s really hard to miss.
Maybe, but you can get the true Springfield effect in one of the few areas of Pennsylvania there isn't a Springfield. US 422 West heading towards Reading, you go up a small rise and...
https://goo.gl/maps/oqKyHsVVGRAKCx1n6
I used to drive that route a lot, and every time I'd see that I'd hear the Simpson's theme in my head.
Mr. Burns could afford to pay Homer a living wage because his nuclear plant was not burdened with safety regulations. Maybe that is the lesson.
Assuming that Homer got the job and the house when the show started in 1989 makes the whole thing a lot more plausible. Standard union pay scale for a 40+ year career and staying in the same house for that long would be enough to let anyone live comfortably.
While not 'rap' specifically, there's a large literature on the migration of lower class language to the middle and upper class. Particularly African-American English. From 'high-fives' to 'cool' to the word 'rap' itself, not to mention 'straight up', 'lit', 'woke'. These have all migrated to standard English, through what linguists call 'covert prestige'. Put simply (and crudely and simplistically), it's cool to be gangsta, even for rich people.
Also on the level of accent. In the U.K., while Received Pronunciation is replacing a lot of regional languages among the middle classes, it’s also been very much affected by features of those accents, and that applies to the RP of even the high aristocracy. Prince William’s accent has numerous features like widespread glottal stops and l-vocalisation that traditional TO lacked, and others like linking /r/ that we’re present but disparaged. Interestingly (possibly?) Kate Middleton has a somewhat more traditional version of the accent, suggesting maybe that as an upper-middle-class person she is having to “try harder”, to echo the book under review here.
“that traditional *RP* lacked”
It's a pity Substack doesn't let you edit comments.
And of course "traditional" RP is just mid-late 20th Century BBC English, which in turn would differ from the upper and upper middle class accents of earlier periods. If you read The Forsyte Saga, you'll find Galsworthy (via one of his characters) musing on the differences between the accents of members of different generations of the same upper middle class family and their close associates in the 1920s.
Absolutely. I think the version you hear in period dramas is usually the mid-century version you describe - with /əʊ/ for the GOAT vowel rather than the earlier /oʊ/. But the version in some textbooks and online sources can still be pretty close to the early 20th-century version described by Daniel Jones. It can have weird results - I once met a Polish film director whose flawless English was in an accent that I don't think I had ever heard from a living English person, only from old Pathe news broadcasts!
As for modern RP, I think Geoff Lindsey describes it right -
https://www.englishspeechservices.com/blog/british-vowels/
- though he insists on calling it "Standard Southern British" which seems weird to me. I’s clearly an English accent.
What is southern Britain if not the Home Counties?
Pure RP accents are a thing of the past, but there are still recognisable public school accents (that is, what you get after attending a given public school followed by Oxbridge, or being socialised to speak as if you did).
My issue with it is that British doesn't make sense as a description of a group of accents. Obviously people talk about British accents in normal usage, but in linguistics it's not very coherent: RP has more features in common with Australian accents than with Highlands Scottish accents, and Northern Irish accents have more in common with North American ones than with southern English. Contrast this with North America, for example, where there is a wide variety of accents but the vast majority share more features with each other than they do with any other major accent group.
British English <I>grammar</I>, on the other hand, is a coherent category, so I dare say I'm fighting a losing battle on this one.
"What is southern Britain if not the Home Counties?"
I imagine there are some Cornish people who would take issue with this characterization.
Ah, but that’s the southwest. Totally different.
Elleston Trevor, who also wrote as Adam Hall for the Quiller books, once mentioned that after living in the US for decades and thinking the British Upper Class was still what he'd grown up with. he listened to the Queen on television in the 1990's and- she didn't quite sound upper class any more.
The Queen’s accent has indeed changed considerably. Compare her in 1957 to today:
https://youtu.be/mBRP-o6Q85s
https://youtu.be/OZbCRN3C_Hs
Nevertheless, she definitely still sounds upper class! She has about as high an RP as you will hear spoken today.
Interestingly (or not) I don't think this is conscious modulation on her part as a result of coaching from PR types. I grew up in the village where Diana Cavendish (Claire Foy's character from Breathe) lives, and she sounds pretty similar to the Queen now and I suspect sounded pretty similar to the queen 50 years ago.
Oh I'm certain that's right. Most people's accents change a fair bit over the course of their lives. Hardly anyone has the RP of the 1950s anymore, so it would be hard to maintain it.
I don't understand the technicalities of this stuff, but here's a story that backs up Geoff Nathan's take fairly well: My closest grad school friend is pretty posh: private (though not "public" i.e. super-elite) school in Cambridge, successful academics for father and uncle (at least one of whom was Oxbridge at one point I think), can trace her ancestry back to major 18th century Scottish aristocrats who were disposed after backing the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, her aunt once tried to donate the family sword that she will inherit to a museum. After schooling in Cambridge, she went to University College London (to do Classics, perhaps inevitably). A few years later, when she met up with high school friends again, they, who had all also been to university in London had all mysteriously managed to acquire *London* accents. Which is to say, relatively speaking, more working class accents. (In the UK, the more your accent is tied to a place and the more specific that place is, the more working class your accent, generally speaking.) She knew that this was obviously not just a natural process, since she sounded as posh as ever. (I can confirm that she does not remotely have anything like a London accent.)
This isn't the only incident of accent suspiciously failing to match class background I can remember from Oxford either. The poshest sounding guy I met there was a second-generation Greek immigrant from, by his own account, a pretty rough area of Birmingham. Meanwhile, there was at least one pretty damn rich guy from Brighton was a suspiciously strong London accent. Having said that, traditional snobbery DEFINITELY still exists as well. A philosopher of maths from Glasgow (so very strong working-class accent, even though her family weren't all *that* badly off) told me that she was teased mercilessly at Cambridge as an undergrad. (This would have been maybe 2003-11 depending on exactly when she went.) And also told by friends that since she could pull of a convincing imitation of RP, it was a mystery why she didn't choose to speak that way all the time.
I don’t really get what your friend means by not a natural process. It’s completely typical to pick up the accent of people around you. I started at a state school and had a somewhat North London accent, then moved to a posh-ish school and developed a modern RP. I may switch a bit depending on setting, but the basic process is largely subconscious for most people.
The fact that it affected your friend less could be less “natural”, not more! She may be deliberately resistant to change. But of course it also just affects different people differently. I knew a woman from
California who lived in London for 30 years and never, to my ear, lost her accent at all.
You're right of course that I can't *prove* my friend is right. But 3 years is really quite a short amount of time for a big shift. And I don't think she meant that they had absolutely consciously switched exactly, as that they were driven by a desire to sound cooler, even if that wasn't conscious. It's worth saying here that specifically London accents would not necessarily be all THAT dominant at a good London university, given how international they are.
I see your point. Three years is plenty, but I think it's probably impossible to disentangle "desire to sound cooler" from being subconsciously influenced by the accent of people who you think are cool. My hunch remains that it's largely subconscious, just because most language change is, but I don't know.
One thing I've noticed is that the younger brothers and sisters of my privately-educated peers tend to have accents much more touched by Multicultural London English (MLE), the working-class London accent that has largely displaced Cockney and other traditional ones within the city. MLE emerged in the late 70s / early 80s, and affected that cohort from around the mid-nineties, while leaving us (inevitably less cool) older siblings with unaffected modern RP accents. Modern RP includes things like lots of glottal stops and l-vocalisation (something like "animu" for "animal" before a consonant) but lacks many of the distinguishing MLE features. At the time I assumed that the younger siblings were "trying to sound cool," but I think that was oversimplifying the dynamic a lot.
My best friend - who I met at Oxford - is the son of a motor mechanic from the North-East. When I met him in his first year, his Northumbrian accent was fairly mild (certainly milder than his father's) but very much noticeable. Over the course of the following couple of years in Oxford, his masters year in Cambridge, and his professional career in the arts in London, it's receded to the point of being a barey noticeable twinge - except when he speaks on the phone to his parents, at which point (without any conscious choice on his part) it returns. People who meet him now assume he's just posh. I also knew a Canadian girl who went to an English boarding school from 13. She sounded RP as all get-out until she phoned home, when she started abooting like a South Park character.
Sometimes it's very much conscious. My friends from the American South tried hard to get rid of those accents.
Is there a hypothesized mechanism here? Countersignalling? ("I'm using this word to demonstrate that I can use the word and still be unambiguously considered high class")
I think it's just kids growing up. 30 years ago, I was all about Snoop smoking blunts and talking about how much he didn't love hoes. Now I'm the boss and kids think I'm a nerd. Whatever they're into now will be boring and bougie in 2050.
I wonder if this is perhaps an example of what's called Nostalgie de la Boue:
<i>"Nostalgie de la boue is a nineteenth-century French term that means, literally, ‘nostalgia for the mud.’" "Nostalgie de la boue tends to be a favorite motif whenever a great many new faces and a lot of new money enter Society. New arrivals have always had two ways of certifying their superiority over the hated ‘middle class.’ They can take on the trappings of aristocracy, such as grand architecture, servants, parterre boxes, and high protocol; and they can indulge in the gauche thrill of taking on certain styles of the lower orders. The two are by no means mutually exclusive; in fact they are always used in combination.”</i>
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/phrase-day-nostalgie-de-la-boue/
"Likewise, there are typical working-class vacations (cruises), gadgets (those watches with all the dials), and so on and so forth. None of these seem too weird on their own, but taken together they suggest a picture where lots of working-class people have lots of money and go on Caribbean vacations all the time."
Bias disclosure: I'm likely in Fussell's upper upper, so claiming that I'm more in touch with the working class than you is laughable. That said, I think Fussell is right here; working-class people *do* go on cruises. They just go into credit card debt to do it. A good treatment of class in the modern day would have to have an entire chapter on debt, and each class's treatment of it.
The upper class refuses to go take loans, since they have no need to. The middle class is extended credit and treats it carefully and responsibly. The working class is extended credit and abuses it. The lower class is not extended credit at all.
The lower and lower-working classes are preyed upon by payday lenders, Bridgecrest, and Capital One.
Although I personally have no prior knowledge of what a "bridgecrest" is, this checks out.
Or in the UK, BrightHouse, which sold overpriced household goods on hire-purchase at exorbitant interest rates.
The lower classes prey on payday lenders and credit card companies in a zesty spirit of 'good luck getting blood from this stone'.
"The lower class is not extended credit at all."
Huh? There is an entire class of bail bondsmen, appliance salesmen, used cars, and payday lenders that make a mint off loans to the "lower" class. I can see you've never had a neighbor who had to stop parking his car in his driveway to avoid it being repossessed.
I'm new to posting on this blog and...wow. It's true, you people really do have no idea whatsoever how the other half lives. You just make something up and believe that. :-(
Hi, new person. Phrases like “you people” are basically verboten here. Also, “I can see you’ve never...” is bad form. You can’t actually see that: you just get the sense that this person is out of touch. But they said that: the identified as upperest class. So being aggrieved at their ignorance doesn’t add a lot to the discussion. It’s sufficient and preferable just to point out they they’re substantially wrong, and explain why.
Welcome!
I'll take this as confirmation of my membership as The Other. Which was pretty much the point.
I think that would be a serious misread. There are communication norms in this space that can be adhered to by anyone of any class, and they’re certainly not native to any particular class. I’m pretty much doing the opposite of othering you: I’m taking the time to inform you of the social norms, and trusting in your fundamental reasonableness and good faith. You’re rather othering crotchety crank by taking one silly thing he said and creating a grand theory of “you people” out of it. Baseless assumptions are the heart of objectification
Uh, this is tricky. Harland isn't wrong. In "prole" culture you say it loud and brash and then fight about it. Metacogging about social and conversational norms while going out of your way to carefully signal welcomeness is a class marker from Harland's perspective.
I feel rather like a longhaired greasy freak who just drove into town with out-of-state license plates, and got pulled over right away by Cletus the county mounty. "Bwah, y'ain't from 'round here, are ya, bwah?" he says, shining his maglite into my eyes to check if they're bloodshot. Having had my license run through the computer and a momentary detention while a K-9 unit is called so it can sniff over my car, I'm being released with a friendly admonition that "this how we do things in this-sheah parts." Thanks kindly for your time, officer! I then immediately proceed to the nearest convenience store to purchase a "Blue Lives Matter" bumper sticker.
To be frank, almost everything you've described in this thread is a class norm. You think conflict, brashness, "rude" behavior, etc. are inimical to the development of healthy discourse. Taking a measured, faux-polite rhetorical position that is desperate to signal its rationality, calmness, and willingness to engage is at the absolute core of the educated elite's conception of the world. Those norms get elided on the internet, where a counter-norm of genuine acrimony and animosity on the part of the educated *young* elite is more predominant, but it doesn't mean what you describe is not a traditionally higher-class phenomenon.
The difference between the *young* elite's version (which is characterized by GENUINE disdain) and the "prole" perspective on discourse is that in the latter, being strong, brash, and having fights about everything is just... normal. People do it all the time. You and your best friend have furious arguments, maybe even physical fights on occasion. That's just life. Doesn't mean you don't like somebody -- in fact, you probably do it most with the people you love.
If I'd been writing more carefully, I would have added "...by banks." I was thinking of "loan" in the sense of mortgage rather than payday lending or used car loans, although you'll see in my response to Lexie that as soon as this other group of creditors was pointed out, I acknowledged it.
That's how absolutely everyone is. You only get a real sense of things in your environment.
The upper middle class is extended credit and treats it responsibly. The middle class varies a lot in that department, which is one reason they're precarious.
> The upper class refuses to go take loans, since they have no need to.
The upper class doesn't *take* loans, they are *given* loans, which are used (by financial planners and other "servants") to turn illiquid wealth into funding for day-to-day expenses. Most importantly, the upper class and upper-middle class have no need of *unsecured* credit (a true upper probably having no concept of it; upper-middle knowing about it but avoiding it), putting them almost entirely out of reach of the kind of debt spiral that can ruin other classes.
Actually, the truly wealthy use quite a lot of debt, because as you acquire assets, many of them are illiquid. It's a middle-class conceit that economic safety is being debt-free.
This is right! Similarly only the middle class are obsessed with owning everything. The proles can't afford to and the upper often can't be bothered with the upkeep!
A real upper-upper, that's like sighting Bigfoot. Do you think his treatment of you guys was fair? (modulo 1983)
Sadly, I'm too young to know! I'll ask my grandparents.
While I hardly grew up in the upper-upper world Fussell is describing (though my grandparents and to a lesser extend parents surely did), a lot of the particulars stood out to me as right on the money (the food, names, boring social scene almost by design, locations, house/furniture descriptions). However, in my life I've seen less of the "nothing to prove" attitude, as even the upper class scene I'm a part of is full of social jockeying (particularly around marriage) among people who don't have to ever think about money. I'd also anecdotally report sky-high high rates of alcoholism and depression that I vaguely theorize stem from most people being poorly equipped to handle a completely vacuum of purpose or financial drive to succeed.
This is a concern I've had about UBI in the future as well. People seem to assume freedom from work will lead people to commit their time to artistic passions or other virtuous ends, but the (admittedly not at all representative of the general populace) people we currently see experiencing freedom from work are hardly living this utopia, despite their piles of money.
Sigh...artistic passions. Only a tiny number of us humans have such desires, those of us high in the personality trait of Openness. The rest of us might make things, but according to our wants and needs, not because we have some burning passion inside. The real tragedy occurs when discussion is dominated by high Openness individuals who assume that anyone who doesn't feel the need to create art must be some kind of soulless insect. :/
In my career I’ve had periods of intense pressure when you’re super busy and periods of downtime, both at the same compensation level; as well as periods of genuinely worrying about money. Of the three, well compensated downtime is in my experience the most likely to result in depression and substance abuse.
I suspect in the UBI laden u/dys-topia, some clever entrepreneur would gamify daily life in a manner that would give people meaningful goals to shoot for in cases where people are not creative enough to fill their time in useful ways. Ideally something smarter than "how many likes can I get on instagram".
I'm hoping they'll spend a lot of time keeping each other entertained (throwing parties, gaming with each other, social media, etc.).
I fear that they'll spend most of their time trying to cancel each other.
It will still give them a sense of purpose.
Here's a video by The History Guy about John B. Calhoun and the real Rats of N.I.M.H. Fascinating research that predicted the rise of hypersexuality, sociopathic elites, soyboys, incels and ultimately the end, as young rats didn't learn courtship behaviors and could not breed. Afterwards the rats never recovered, even when introduced to a healthy society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kqti3tDz-M
That might explain why Brunner's _Stand on Zanzibar_ is nominally about overpopulation, but actually about crowding.
I've read some heavy criticism of thatt experiment; that Calhoun only got that result once in all his rat and mouse experiments, and that particular one started with four mice that were already closely related and all he ended up with was some unlucky effects of inbreeding and mutational load.
Sources?
You mean like the legions of starving artists, pre-tenure academics and other people who - in present day - sacrifice status and material comfort to work on things they're actually interested in?
I think we'll manage just fine, really, though there'll probably be a "lost generation" of people who were so used to getting orders they'll have no idea what to do with themselves.
This is a good reason why we need to legalize hallucinogenic drugs. At least you can alter your state in a manner that doesn't cause your liver permanent damage or send you into a bad addiction spiral.
>even the upper class scene I'm a part of is full of social jockeying (particularly around marriage)
I'd be interested to hear more about this
>I'd also anecdotally report sky-high high rates of alcoholism and depression that I vaguely theorize stem from most people being poorly equipped to handle a completely vacuum of purpose or financial drive to succeed.
Why don't they become philanthropists?
Because they have nothing to prove :)
I think there's actually a surprisingly large gap between the amount of wealth that precludes one or one's children and grandchildren from needing to work and the amount of wealth that can sustain philanthropy as a full-time, decades-long endeavor.
Specifically, a US stock market index fund can historically get you, say, 3.5% return on average after inflation, meaning that you you can invest $4M in one and live forever on the increases, but only if you're willing to live on $120k/year. Of course, the stock market is high variability, so you'll have smarter forms of wealth management (which means more money to start with). You also will probably want more than that total if you want to live the upper class life style. But it's still in the range of $10M to live a very comfortable life without ever working. However, that amount will not fund a charity for very long, especially not indefinitely.
Fair enough... maybe they could volunteer for philanthropic organizations full time? Making the world a better place is a great way to acquire a sense of purpose ;-)
They absolutely could! But that might put other class signals at risk, such as 'not looking like you're trying' and 'not getting too much education'. Plus, ignoring what a mess the world is in, and especially ignoring the people who are suffering the most from that mess is also a long-standing highest-class tradition. Stepping out of that bubble is a slippery slope ....
Interesting on the "nothing to prove" attitude.
I suspect Fussell has a lot of blind spots due to his own middle class position. It might look like the Upper Class has nothing to prove, but that's not true, it's just that they have nothing to prove to the likes of _you_. Their status games are invisible and incomprehensible to your middle-class mind.
I'm thinking that the Lower Class and Upper Class have just as many status games going on as the Middle Class, but Fussell is only sensitive enough to detect Middle Class signals.
You're right – but they're just different 'games', and they're such a tiny numerical minority, that it's all basically incomprehensible to outsiders.
theres writings on status games among the american lower classes, both white and black. some of them involve boasting and whatnot,
The way Scott describes Fussell describing the upper class gives the impression that they often have no conception of money whatsoever. It seems like this could lead to an embarrassing situation where, for example, someone with a net worth of $50 million accidentally buys a $100 million Pollock painting because they don't realize that they don't have $100 million. Have you ever heard of something like this happening? Or is there a mechanism to prevent it?
I think the mechanism is that the uppers don't really _do_ anything themselves, so whomever it is that handles their money (or the team of people that do, or even the several _companies_ that do) would prevent a faux pas like you describe (mostly).
And at that level – buying million dollar paintings – you definitely _can_ return it if, somehow, you couldn't pay for it. And there would be lawyers on retainer to protect against any consequences (tho possibly by paying the aggrieved 'merchant' off for their trouble).
Update: both generations above mine have already read it! One referred affectionately to "old fussy Fussell." They read it as somewhat satirical, and certainly inaccurate/unfair in places (for example, one person specifically objected to the "bland food" quip), but unfair in the same way that the Onion is unfair to the targets of its satire: even when it's exaggerated, it's exaggerated in a revealing direction. Could say much more, but maybe I'll save it for an open thread.
Do post a link to the OT comment here when you have it.
Some of my family were definitely in Fussell's working-class, especially back in the 80s, and it seems to be 100% accurate to me. They'd go to Vegas instead of on a cruise, but just about every description matches perfectly.
These days Vegas has been transformed until it resembles nothing as much as a stationary cruise ship. The buffets, the casinos, the shows, the comedians, the foreign underpaid labor...they're scarily alike.
I think Vegas also draws from plenty of middle class as well - at least compared to somewhere like Atlantic City or Reno. But lots of aspects of Vegas do seem to be the pinnacle of upper-prole.
Cruises and Disney vacations are certainly affordable (in the literal sense) for Fussell's "proles." It's just something you save up for over a longer time horizon or a special treat rather than something you just sorta do without putting much prior thought or planning into it.
I'd have to agree. Growing up in a very prolley household we went on vacation every year, but only to Disneyland twice. At the time (and still now, in my heart of hearts) I considered it the apex of all possible vacation destinations. You certainly can't afford to go there every year!
Working at Disneyland was my first real job and the employees (who are largely quite poor) go on Disney vacations themselves all the damn time because they can get into the parks for free and get gigantic discounts on hotels, flights, and yes, cruises (lest people forget that Disney also owns a cruise line).
I've never been to Disney Land... but my older brother worked at Disney World when I was a young child and my family went to Disney World several times during his tenure. I was too young to really remember much of those trips, but when me and my parents went in my teens, I remember it being a lot of quantity over quality... I personally find A day at Bush Gardens a superior vacation to a week at Disney World, or at least my teenaged self did... and being from North Carolina, Williamsburg is a much shorter car ride than Orlando.
I'm pretty sure at least some people do it – and I mean go several times a year – without quite 'saving up' for it in the normal way I think you intended. But I could be wrong – there are lots of ways to live more frugally, if one is willing to ignore at least some 'class expectations' (even as a prole).
I can confirm that they do go on cruises. I had a cruise line as a client once, and went on it for research, and was flabbergasted!
There are of course different cruise lines for different classes. Carnival or Disney is different to Cunard or Viking, say.
Non-prole cruises are generally filled with 80+ year olds who still want to travel to exotic destinations but find that air travel and dragging suitcases everywhere is getting a bit too exhausting at their age.
Anecdotally, the people I know who go on cruises can be divided into (a) proles, and (b) elderly middle-class.
It's official: Reading SSC is something upper upper class people do!
(Had to write this comment to restore classiness balance)
Now that you'd said that, they'll leave, because they have nothing to prove.
No, they'll lurk, that would be the highest class! Dabbling is very upper-upper.
I don't think a working class person, even if poor and a high school dropout, is necessarily "low" class. As I said in another comment, the restraint in what you do...speech, clothes, decor...all that defines class.
Trump, for example, was wealthy and had (on paper) a fancy education. His manners, speech, tweets...these were what made him "low class". He showed no restraint.
Recall that in this model you can have rich, successful or poor, low-achieving members of any class.
I hope links are ok here, because if so, the beginning of this John Mulaney bit is the most illuminating thing I can offer on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBNBAgtjYV8
Important line: "Donald Trump is not, like, a *rich man*. He's what a hobo imagines a rich man to be." So, "working class aesthetics" with "upper class" results.
Thanks. I watched it. Mulaney's disdain for lower class people is also, Fussell would say, lower class. But I don't think Mulaney realizes that!
The disdain, as such, is not even a nice thing (never mind what class it makes one). It is basically like laughing at the plight of a homeless guy.
Interesting - I interpreted amusement instead of disdain. Maybe that's just because it was communicated through comedy. I agree that he doesn't express any kind of understanding for a class perspective outside his own.
Trump talks and acts like a kid from Queens. That's part of why the elite hate him so much. He may have gone to Wharton and be a billionaire who lived on Central Park but he still acts like the guy in a working class bar who will slap the shit out of someone who gives him lip or disrespects him.
To many progressives and indeed elites of all persuasions, Trump is also the Prince of Anti-culture: mindlessly naïve American boosterism; conspicuous, 1980s-style unapologetic Democrat patriotism; repetitive and limited vocabulary; fast-food culinary tastes; Queens accent; herky-jerky mannerisms; ostentatious dress; bulging appearance; poorly disguised facial expressions; embracing rather than sneering at middle-class appetites; a lack of subtlety, nuance, and ambiguity.
In short Trump's very essence wars with everything that long ago was proven to be noble, just, and correct by Vanity Fair, NPR, The New Yorker, Google, the Upper West Side, and The Daily Show.
On the other hand, if Trump represents working-class culture (I don't think he really does) just why shouldn't that be a mark against working class culture? Like, Trump is someone who boasted about using the fact that he is famous to sexually assault people! That really is shameful, and if working class people really are more likely to ignore it in their judgment of him *as a person* (I'm not talking about deciding in whose interests he'd govern) then surely this reflects badly on working class culture. Ditto his attempts to constantly belittle and dominate everyone around him. These aren't neutral-in-themselves status signals that happen to be considered gauche because they have been adopted by particular social classes, but behaviors that genuinely and predictably hurt others.
I find a lot of people on the populist right *love* to entertain 'shocking' generalizations about the culture of various groups that liberals and social justice types consider oppressed, but then try to leverage exactly the same sort of 'don't punch down' norm that they otherwise mock when the criticism is aimed at the white working class. So you get a lot of 'but black people in cities really do have a culture that tolerates crime!' 'Muslim are more likely to be terrorists', but then moralistic shock about how snobby Jon Stewart is if he suggests people in West Virginia often believe dumb conspiracy theories. (This cuts both ways obviously, a lot of liberals want everyone to respect the 'don't punch down norm' except when liberals are talking about the white working class, which is equally hypocritical.)
Punching down is a concept in which you're assumed to have a measurable level of power and you're looking for a fight. Now, you can either go after the big guy who might hurt you, or go after the little guy who has absolutely no shot. Either way, you've picked a fight, but one fight is remarkably more noble and worthwhile than the other. Going after the big guy, punching up, is an act of nobility. Going after the little guy, punching down, is an act of bullying.
You comfort the afflicted, not the other way around!
Donald Trump is not afflicted, he's comfortable. He's not "the little guy," he just claims to represent them. Like every politician does. Dismissing criticism of a famous former president as "punching down" just because he shares an aesthetic with the working class makes no sense.
I wasn't slagging off the idea of punching down by being bad (often you shouldn't punch up either-i.e. judge-y tabloid gossip about the rich and famous is often just gross), just it's hypocritical deployment in a 'don't punch down against the groups I like, but it's fine if you do it against the ones I don't like'-way.
"Like, Trump is someone who boasted about using the fact that he is famous to sexually assault people!"
This is dishonest. In the famous statement related to this, Trump says "And when you’re a star, they let you do it," which is consent.
"They let you do it" is not (necessarily) consent. There is more than a touch of "They can't stop you doing it" going on there.
Retroactive consent doesn't count. He claimed he just went up to people and grabbed. (I know this an appeal to authority, but I'd note that Scott agrees- https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/gender-imbalances-are-mostly-not-due-to-offensive-attitudes/-with my reading and whilst he's not exactly a Trump fan, his written an entire post on how liberals are wrong when they call Trump openly racist.)
In any case, even if my reading is wrong, I'm not *lying*, I merely have a different interpretation than you do, of a remark which everyone knows the original of and can decide for themselves whether my reading is correct.
> Trump is someone who boasted about using the fact that he is famous to sexually assault people!
I really don't think that's an accurate (or charitable) interpretation of his statement, but I understand why 'everyone' jumped to it. (It certainly does _read_ and sound bad, especially weighed against present-day norms.)
But, yes, the literal interpretation of what he 'claimed' to do is in fact sexual assault.
Just to point out, other status-signals can also similarly genuinely and predictably hurt others. Like the Professional-Managerial Class trying to instead pull peoples' licenses or incite a SJW hatemob, or trying to snitch on you if you're doing something illegal but not necessarily unethical or in a 'grey zone' or morality ("so how old was she again?" or "that's a lot of cocaine to be doing before your surgery")
Class isn't about Upper is better than Middle is better than Pole. Class is about different ways of acquiring status. At a big university, who is better? The dean of the law school, the head of the archeology department or the head football coach?
If you answered law school, you're middle class. If you answered archeology, you're upper class. If you answered football, you're a prole. No answer is objectively right.
Trump had tons of Prole status (money, reality TV stardom, his name on buildings, hot women, conspicuous consumption), decent Middle class status, and almost no upper class status.
What if you said 'define better'?
Agreed, I too share your read on cruising working class people.
Very interesting re your background. Is there still a live separate old money upper class culture? Or has it culturally largely merged with high upper-middle-class? Like, is there a class of younger people (not just old remnants) who have very different status signals than the high upper-middle-class? And if so, how is it different - eg still a fondness for things that require servants and British things?
Credit card debt? I can tell you never go on any cruises. You can get them for as cheap as $400. If you shop around and do a couple a year $800 each is not at all out of the question.
But you're right though, the cheaper cruises *will* have working class people on them. And so many of our proper folks feel nothing but disgust upon gazing on the faces of those lower than them in society, and will never voluntarily associate with them.
You got me, I don't go on cruises. Thanks for the correction and perspective.
I'm pretty familiar with all the classes described here except for the 'upper upper'. I don't think I've ever met anyone like that. Maybe they're just very rare? Or wouldn't interact with me?
So to someone who is claiming to be in or close to that group I've never seen, is it real? And are Fussell's generalizations about it accurate? (I think his generalizations of the other classes I'm familiar with are reasonably accurate)
Was he actually joking all those times you said he was joking? It sounded like they could all be completely serious.
Your guess is as good as mine.
I imagine Fussell was inspired by a 1955 book by Nancy Mitford called "Noblesse Oblige" that drew attention to what was "U and non-U" in England: e.g., upper class people said "scent" while non-U people said "perfume." The book came with contributions from Mitford's snobby friends like Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and Peter Fleming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
Well, you say he's joking about the upper middle class vs prole profiles, but you knew which was which instantly, didn't you?
It's satire. He's being tongue-in-cheek, saying things that are true *in form* even if the content isn't specifically true/is completely made up.
He's being playful and deliberately caricaturing, but intends to gesture at something he thinks is at least somewhat true.
Last paragraph, 2021 class system?
Also I can't help but notice that ever since I moved to New England for my well paying professional job that was the result of high education, I've really been thinking of getting into sailing. And here I thought that was just Patrick O'Brian's influence.
Just don't get a Chris-Craft. It ain't genteel.
That is kind of a mistake, though a typo on Scott's part or an honest to goodness faux pas, and I mean faux pas, as in what does it say about him, on Fussel's part. A Chris Craft is the genteel boat, though a new one is a bit declasse. A wooden one, the only kind really, from 1951 is the epitome of genteel. Especially if inherited.
There are three references to Chris-Craft in the book:
p.66: "Go-to-hell in spirit also are the sports or playtime trousers which identify the upper-middle class, especially the suburban branch. One common type is white duck trousers with little green frogs embroidered all over them. A variation: light-green trousers, with dark-blue embroidered whales. Or signal Rags. Or bell buoys. Or lobsters. Or anything genteel-marine, suggesting that the wearer has just strolled a few steps away from his good- sized yacht. Thus also the class usefulness of Topsider shoes, the ones with the white soles "for gripping wet decks." The same with windbreakers displaying lots of drawstrings. The Chris- Craft mail-order catalog will show you the look to imitate, but classes much below the upper middle should take warning that they're unlikely to affect this yachtsman's look with much plau- sibility. A lot depends on a certain habitual carelessness in the carriage, a quasi-windblown calculated sloppiness. It's almost im- possible to imitate, and you should have a long thin neck, too."
p.112: "Because it's the most expensive, yachting beats all other recreations as a theater for upper-status exhibition. But certain inviolable principles apply. Sail is still far superior to power, partly because you can't do it simply by turning an ignition key and steering-you have to be sort of to the manner born. (Probably the most vulgar vessel you can own is a Chris-Craft, the yachting equivalent of the Mercedes.)"
p.191/192 ("Indicate the class of each of the following: ... 2. A 50-year-old man on the deck of a 35-foot Chris-Craft, drinking from a can of Bud and attended by three luscious girls wearing halters and inexpensive white yachting caps. ... He's a high prole, and he's saved all his life for that horrible boat. If he'll take the caps off the girls and pour his beer into a glass, he might pass for middle-class, or even upper-middle if he gets the girls into men's old shirts with the tails hanging out."
He's right about having to know how to sail, the best being an amateur racer. The sort of boat a real deal old money upper class wasp, who was still living off the fortune piled up by his 19th century ancestors, in 1983, or in the dwindling numbers they still are around in now, would need to have is one of these, the ones from the 40's and 50's.
https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS837US837&sxsrf=ALeKk03OJ7GdK17bYlo0UtvZWAv_VzO_sQ:1614231014365&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=chris+craft&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi67MiRp4TvAhUrc98KHfCmC24QjJkEegQIExAB
Furrel just gets that wrong, he evidently didn't know his boats.
See, that's the boat you use to get to the cottage on the little island in the middle of the lake. Said cottage should have no electricity, although running water is good, and be weather-beaten. But quite large, with some 'bunkies' to put all the extra kids or visiting young people in.
And of course, both boat and cottage will be maintained by local people, not 'the family'.
Hmm, sounds like you're talking about the Thousand Islands or some 'camps' that are up in the woods away from the coast in Maine. The ones in Maine, I hear, usually grouped together, as in one will have neighbors.
I know one guy who got invited to go to one of those camps in Maine, and though I've read about the Thousand Island scene, I've never actually met anyone who knew anything about the Thousand Islands firsthand. I've driven through there though, and one can almost smell the old money if you look around from the bridges.
Yeah, I was going by Fussell. I myself am blessedly ignorant of anything concerning boats.
My aunt and uncle moved to New England and ended up owning a boat, despite never previously having any of the risk factors for this kind of thing.
I thought that these days owning a boat is highly correlated with Trump voting (hence all the boat parades last year).
Sailboats don't fit under bridges. They're for people who live in houses next to the ocean and own their own marina slips. If you know how to sail though, you can get some good jobs if you hang around in Florida...rich people burn through deck hands fast and they always need someone new. You can travel for free and make some decent money if you can put up with being shouted at a lot. I knew a dude who got to spend a couple years up and down the Caribbean sailing other people's boats, and he said it was great being a fit single man in an ocean of old fat rich guys.
Owning a boat on Cape Cod or Long Island is very different from owning a boat on the gulf shore or a lake in the South-East. One significant difference is cost, plus the people who live in the location. Plus there's the type of boat, where a boat in New England is often going to be a sailboat, while the Trump-fan-owned boat is probably a motorboat.
I think that's one of the eye-popping ways I'm finding that readers of this blog are so monumentally out of touch with the rest of America that they mentally interchanged the word "boat" with "luxury yacht" or possibly "sailing vessel".
Boating isn't for the poor, but a 16 foot jonboat with a 30 horse ain't that expensive. You can save up a couple of paychecks and get one. People sell them on Craigslist all the time. Or some uncle is upgrading his boat and will sell you his old one cheap. Once you bought the boat, your only expenses are gas, bait and beer, and you can have a ton of fun fishing and generally being out in the sunshine. If you want a 25 foot center console, they cost about as much as a family car and aren't out of reach for plumbers or other deplorables. And if you actually are poor, or are just a tightwad, or the water is too rough that day, you go fish from the jetty. Lots of people do.
A lot of us *are* out of touch. If I read the dynamics correctly, the blog readers here mostly consist of people who either failed or refused to absorb current white-collar culture. We're less in touch with the white-collar class, and by nature of being rejects we tend to know even less about the working class than they do.
That said, I think most of us are pretty interested in learning more about the working class. We might be ignorant, but about this topic at least I don't think most of us are deliberately so.
If you're out of touch with current white-collar thinking, at least as expressed on the internet, you are odds on to be better connected to the working class than them to be honest. Other than honestly believing the working class to be the incarnation of Tolkien's orcs or so incapable of looking after themselves that they have to be institutionalized it's hard to see how you could find a more hostile viewpoint anyway. There seems to be a resentment that these people with their historical tendency to socialistic ideas and their rejection of modern liberal governance are a block to progress regardless of your political position within the middle class.
And yes, I'm strawmanning a lot there, but I think as a caricature it has some truth.
I don't think people here are out of touch in the sense that they're yachting class adjacent. The blog post set the context of boat = yacht.
I remember the first time I spoke to an upperclass person in grad school. She told me about a $5000 Piano her parents got her for Christmas, and I was shocked. She asked me what I would spend $5000 on and I replied a boat. She said you can't get a boat for $5000, and I just replied, "You can't, but I can find a decent one on Craigslist for that." We clearly were picturing different boats.
To be fair to her, even uprights are surprisingly expensive, and at a local music store start at about 4k€
Not sure I'll forget a $20k grand being described as "affordable", though.
Gotta be near water to have a boat - West Coast / North East have limited water and high population, so only the top e% can have them. In other parts of the country with more lakes and fewer people, boats can be more common.
Yeah...I mean here in Europe (Germany), boating certainly is a thing for the rich, but in the US or Canada it's more associated with the working-class...
My eyes lit up when I saw you were reviewing THAT book! I mention it all the time in my classes (particularly the sections on drinks, sweet being low class, and balls, smaller is better). I thought I was alone in remembering it.
I got "Class" many years ago and loved it then and still enjoy reading my dog-eared copy now. I like the strange combination of joking and semi-serious skewering of the American class system. He has a keen eye but also clearly isn't taking himself or his views too seriously.
And yes, Chapter 9 is weird and jarring. Either it's being ironic in a super subtle way or Fussell lost his bearings and fell into the trap of thinking you can escape class. His X Class are kinda like hipsters, thinking they're cool, which makes them even sillier than the other classes. I think he's being sincere, which makes Chapter 9 the weakest in the book. I find it almost painful to read in its oblivious sincerity. Still, overall the book is a fun read, I just ignore the last chapter.
The only way I can identify "good" wine is by asking two questions: "does it taste good?" and, if so, "would it still be good if it weren't sweet?" If yes to both, it's "good wine."
Good wine costs less than $10 and comes in two varieties, red and white. Some identifiable brand name is ideal but not required. Going for some specific type of wine signals nothing, because its presence alone signals a fancy occasion; otherwise you’d be drinking beer.
Guess which class I’m in, lol.
You should still shop around. My friends buy bottles for how they look when they could be buying good cheap bottles instead. It's not the money, it's the attention. Abandon your beerful ways, young padawan, and embrace the grape :>
What about orange wine?
Wine connoisseurship is woefully outdated in this time and era. We drink wines today that put the wines of yesteryear to shame. Instead of laying them down for years, we can drink them right away and they're fantastic. A $12 bottle of wine is better than what the kings of Europe drank a century ago. A $25 bottle is excellent and a $90 bottle is out of this world. Once you get above $100 a bottle, it doesn't really make much difference.
Just find out what you like and drink that. My family used to make fun of me for only drinking white wine - "it's like fruit punch!" Once I found out that what I didn't like wasn't red wine, but tannins, suddenly a whole new world opened up. Merlot! Pinot Noir! Malbec! And there's even a very good wine called Red Zinfandel that is nothing like that prole horror White Zinfandel. If you live in America we are now making the best wines in the world (just like we're making the best beer - fight me), and to heck with that French stuff. All the chateaux are being sold off to Chinese anyway.
This is the Class X perspective on wine (i.e. the correct one, and thus my own)!
I mostly associate zinfandel as "American coke" :P
The red z stuff, that is.
The fact that he even has an X class might imply that he does not think the upper class (as he defines it) is worth aspiring to belong to. The X class is what he thinks one should want to belong to.
I think that one cannot aspire to become upper class (but one can set things up for one's children or rather grandchildren to become upper class) and Fussil knew it very well.
But one can act as upper-classy as possible, in the hope that those below on the class ladder will be fooled! Those above never will be.
Yeah exactly. I kind of thing I myself might be a "X class", since I do not see myself fitting into any of these classes...ro for that matter, any subcultures or other "tribes"...
The preferences of intentional non-conformists becoming in-group signals for a new version of entrenched class structure seems to be as guaranteed and dependable a phenomenon as has ever existed.
Where does a critical mass of intentional nonconformists with uniform enough preferences come from? Is this just describing the genesis of new fashions within a class, since trendsetters are technically sort of nonconforming?
I’m from NYC and fairly young, basically everyone I know is aggressively nonconforming (which is an oxymoron, obviously). Half of my friends are rich kids pretending that they’re not rich. It was only when I went off to college that I met people from places like Miami and Los Angeles and learned that overt displays of wealth were common and non faux pas in other cities. No one I know would be comfortable flashing a new sports car.
No one actually intentionally nonconforms with the people they like - they just intentionally react counter to the people they think they don't like. All it takes is some young adults that live near each other to notice each other reacting against the same thing, start to like each other, and then start to subconsciously conform, and then you've got a nucleus for a new fashion to crystallize around.
I think this is describing one common method of the genesis of new fashions, though there's also another version where an existing fashion just develops and becomes a more baroque version of itself (with maybe the next generation slightly reinterpreting which aspects are the core that need to be elaborated as it continues to develop).
The book "Bobo's in Paradise" is awful close to this, but 20 years later. I found that one fascinating back then. Even with the same weird conclusion.
Weirdly, the word bobo that David Brooks invented has become a common word in french, you hear it all the time in casual conversation and it's in the dictionary despite the book never being translated in french.
[Totally pulling this out of the nether regions...] Maybe because at least one of the words it's made up from is actually French, so it was easier to preserve its meaning? In English, "Bobo" sounds like a clown or something. (As I just learned on Googling, in French, "Bohemian" actually seems to mean "Romani", or that other term for them that is now deprecated. And then again, "La Boheme", which is French even though the actual libretto is in Italian.)
Michael Church’s account takes the “three ladders” approach and runs with it: https://indiepf.com/michael-o-churchs-theory-of-3-class-ladders-in-america-archive/
Michael Lind’s article in The Bellows is pretty good on the contemporary politics of class https://www.thebellows.org/the-double-horseshoe-theory/ but that has less to do with the cultural signifiers you mention. (I’d phrase things slightly different than Lind but cashing out to the same thing: social positions can be mapped on a potestas axis and an auctoritas axis and those with both rule securely by variously allowing alternation between the Potestas Party and Auctoritas Party.)
Bourdieu did a bunch of shit with this (the cultural signifiers thing), all backed by statistics rather than individual observation, which probably means fewer things that are totally a figment of his imagination but probably less brilliant leaps like “Superb Owl”-type jokes being a thing forever. I assume it’s been endlessly updated but I haven’t followed the literature; I am *definitely* sure marketers have mapped this shit down to the inch and minute but that research likely isn’t public-facing.
Came to the comment section to see a Bourdieu mention, 10/10 not disappointed. If I recall correctly, he used multidimensional scaling or some other dimension reduction technique similar to factor analysis, which makes sense to me.
Also came here for the Pierre Bourdieu! It sounds like this Fussell guy read Distinction and decided he could apply the same conclusions to American culture while omitting any pesky citations to fussy French post-modernists. Which, fair.
IIRC, the thesis of Distinction is the (extremely French Marxist) argument that taste (in everything from paintings to food to flowers) is not just a function of class but a function of class *struggle* — i.e., the lower classes define themselves by liking the opposite of what the middle & upper like, the middle as the opposite of the lower, and the upper as the opposite of the middle. Also, Bourdieu describes an intellectual class not dissimilar to Fussell’s Class X, the entire aesthetic mantra of which seems to be fear of being seen as either middle or upper (but interesting, not lower) class — thinking of “Class X” as basically grad students and profs really clarifies this abstract category for me.
Indeed, their approaches are pretty similar. I haven't read Distinction (still need to finish Outline of a Theory of Practice lol), but my impression is that Bourdieu didn't lionize the intellectual class/"Class X" the way Russell did. He called them "the dominated of the dominant class" or something like that but better sounding and French.
Oh ha yes, that’s right! The whole dominant/dominated confusion matrix — I forgot all about that (it’s been over 10 years since I read it), but yeah, def you’re right that no class gets away with being “the best” in Bourdieu’s view. They’re all trapped in the same relational signaling game.
That book really blew my mind when I read it, for both the theory and the extremely determined empiricism. You should read it! Everyone should read it. I rant & rave about it to some unwitting victim at least once a month :)
@Scott book review of Distinction next pls
"It sounds like this Fussell guy read Distinction and decided he could apply the same conclusions to American culture while omitting any pesky citations to fussy French post-modernists. Which, fair."
Almost certainly Fussell read Vance Packard's "The Status Seekers."
>I am *definitely* sure marketers have mapped this shit down to the inch and minute
It's constantly astounding to me how much marketing accomplishes despite how little marketers actually *know*
Trial and error can lead very much in the right direction, as long as there is fairly immediate and clear (works/doesn't work) feedback. Marketing is just a very very long series of experiments, with often tiny changes being tested out.
I've actually seen some marketing research up close, and I have to say, most of it is crap. They're still asking small samples (via surveys) about their motivations and behaviour (insert psychologist eye-rolling).
I read another 'statistical' class book after reading "Class" – I don't think it was by Bourdieu.
It was terrible in comparison. For one, there were too many clusters and not enough 'dimensions' (with a handful of fairly distinct categories in each).
It just didn't seem informative or insightful at all to learn 'you might be on average 63% like one of several dozen statistical clusters'!
Steve Sailer has shared some good info about this kind of thing – he apparently _did_ do a bunch of market research work in a past career life.
How can that right picture not be Reagan in a book from the 80s? Or did I miss the joke again?
Yep. And that's got to be Buckley on the left.
I saw Reagan on the right and Bowie on the left, though a distinctly arrogant/stuck-up Bowie.
It's totally Reagan.
https://th.bing.com/th/id/Rd54ff23b9c703bd2d78e17b3447844fb?rik=t3sCJivO%2fe7Pqw&riu=http%3a%2f%2fi.huffpost.com%2fgen%2f1379473%2fthumbs%2fo-RONALD-REAGAN-facebook.jpg&ehk=aD6UCwT%2bDzSLf6%2bkbzcUinRqIi8ZGAXLt6cN3%2bYsiw4%3d&risl=&pid=ImgRaw
Not sure who is on the left; Buckley has the nose but not the weak chin.
Someone elsewhere commented it looks a lot like John D Rockefeller in his old age.
https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/105347394-1532378942989rock.jpg?v=1532563615&w=1400&h=950
Class X sounds like some combination of your very own gray tribe combined with a Max Stirner aversion to "Spooks".
Wow this post takes a book that I thought was an absolute joke and actually says a lot of interesting things about it! God I've missed SSC.
(I didn't actually read the book myself, a housemate did, and then she had us take the living room class quiz, which is where I got my impression that the book was an absolute joke. But like, also it was really fun to Goodhart on that quiz – an indoor citrus tree was worth hella class points, so now we have a lemon tree....)
Our group house did the same thing (took the quiz communally - not bought a tree). Our minimax strategy was to tile the house with pictures of the United Kingdom.
You realise for those of us here in the UK you've just made us incredibly classy so long as we don't draw the curtains. However, whilst my bedroom window looks over a tree-filled valley to the parish church on the hill opposite, the views of the windscreen glass factory from other windows might be less than classy?
The word "whilst" itself does a good job of signaling one class in the UK and a very different one in the US.
What’s the story with the UK usage? In the US I a associate it with a particularly absurd flavor of pretentious snootiness. Unsurprisingly I think I first encountered it in academia.
It's pretty pretentious in the UK as well. I use it because I prefer the flow at the start of a phrase to the monosyllabic while, so it's a marker of my education I guess. In some northern dialects I think it's normal usage though.
It's also usual usage for Indian formal documents, which indicates a certain status (Indian English being a great mirror in which to try and understand "proper" English).
I've been told that in British usage "whilst" is deprecated, but extremely common, while in American usage it is uncommon and looks like a Britishism. Looking it up a bit more now, I see that it is deprecated in British academic contexts because it looks pretentious (and is common in the same sort of student essays that begin "Since the dawn of time, ...")
If you want to get away with it, go with "Since Time Immemorial, ..." which happens to have a legal definition and thus is supportable.
It really depends on flow, as Watchman says below. If it fits the meter of the sentence and the register of the text then it’s not pretentious, just tasteful. If not, it’s really jarring.
I think whilst in the UK is just a synonym of while which people use idosyncratically. It's not particularly indicative of class or whatever. I've seen people describe semantic differences they use to determine whether to use while vs. whilst but these aren't consistent from person to person.
I am reminded of this image: https://imgur.com/pTR7f6D
I've recently been house shopping and couldn't help but have Fussell's voice in the back of my head as I looked around. One house was nice, but it had a cathedral ceiling in the living room. How many points does that lose me, again?
And I've never even read the whole book, just the quiz.
Perfect Pure Cinnamon Roll. That’s now part of my aspirational signaling. Thank you.
He seems to have anticipated elements of Brook’s “Bobo” class fusion with Class X.
Class X is just the bobos with a, uh, classier name. I don't see a bit of difference.
> the simpsons has been on so long that they went from a fairly standard single income middle class family with a house and three kids to an impossible fantasy world where a thirty four year old high school grad with no inheritance can have any of those things and still be ‘lazy’
The absurdity of the Simpsons' wealth was lampshaded in Homer's Enemy, season 8:
> Grimes: Good Heavens! Th-this is a palace! How c-- how can, how in the world can you afford to live in a house like this, Simpson?
>
> Homer: I dunno. Don't as me how the economy works.
Granted, Simpsons started as a parody of older sitcoms that played the trope unironically. But things haven't changed that fast.
Curious if you've gotten a chance to read RibbonFarm's 'premium mediocre' and thought about how it relates to Fussell in 2021 https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-life-of-maya-millennial/
The "premium mediocre" essay is a good window into exactly where the author sits in the class hierarchy, but I don't think it's much of an analysis in itself.
For the most part, the author uses "premium mediocre" to mean "things that seem fancy to proles, but which you and I know are actually naff", like "the finest bottle of wine at Olive Garden" or "Starbucks".
But the concept becomes fuzzy, because "extra legroom seats in economy" don't actually seem fancy to anyone but do offer tangible benefits. And the author sometimes claims to be premium-mediocre himself, but I'm sure still wouldn't be caught dead at Olive Garden.
There is a restaurant in Las Vegas, I think it is the steakhouse at the Four Queens, that is ripe for the New Yorker to do a rip-roaring roast ridiculing the working class. I went there and it was a parody of what poor people think rich people eat. They had the salad cart, the comically oversized pepper grinder, the white coated waiter, all of the things you never see in high end restaurants.
The menu was hilarious, with tired old dishes deplorables might have seen in a movie once, like Oysters Rockefeller and Bananas Foster. The salad was iceberg lettuce, thousand island, cherry tomato. My mother ordered her prime rib medium well. The wine list had a plethora of $75+ wines that were obviously there for show, along with the $14 chardonnay that you were supposed to get. They had a Beaujolais nouveau at $25 that I snapped up immediately because I love that stuff and have the tannin-avoiding wine palate of a teenager. The whole time I kept thinking what a secret this place would always be because anyone who could successfully ridicule it would always choose to dine somewhere better, missing a golden opportunity to punch down. Sort of the opposite of the Dunning-Krueger Effect.
I've read your posts in this topic and there's no way you're an "other" to members of this community. Hope you stick around.
"One of us!"
The first part definitely ventures into meme/just-for-fun territory, like an overwrought tweet-thread. However, I do think he gets into more interesting territory once reaching the different class levels around, and adjacent to, premium mediocre, along with the 'psychology' that led to the voluntarily creation of these classes
I agree, and I also thought that Rao got most of the signalling part of it a little off - I'm not sure that "convincing my parents I'm ok" would really be much of a factor outside of a narrow children-of-immigrants demographic and puts the cart before the horse - what he's trying to do is justify upper middle class signalling values to parents who think success=money.
Scott has, but doesn't really "get" Venkatesh Rao in general: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/31/links-817-exsitement/
Quote:
"I like Venkatesh Rao’s work, because it gives me a feeling of reading something from way outside my filter bubble. Like it’s by a bass lure expert who writes about bass lures, secure in the knowledge that everyone he’s ever met considers bass lures a central part of their life, and who expects his readers to share a wide stock of bass-lure-related concepts and metaphors. But Rao writes about modern culture from a Bay Area techie perspective, which really ought to be my demographic. I guess filter bubbles extend along more dimensions than I thought. Anyway, everybody’s talking about The Premium Mediocre Life Of Maya Millennial, and people who know more about bass lures than I do assure me it’s really good (it also says nice things about me!)"
> I would kill for somebody as keen-eyed and trustworthy as Fussell writing about the 2020 class system.
Talk to any halfway-competent marketer or read the NYT Style section or even Forbes—this stuff is all over the place and not especially hard.
Tressie McMillan Cottom writes moderately insightful things about the beauty industry in particular.
Read anyone who uses the term “petty bourgeoisie” or people who complain about gentrification or cultural appropriation.
Some right-wing critiques of the meritocracy also note some of the things you’re talking about. I’m thinking of a couple essays by Helen Andrews but there’s better stuff out there.
Unfortunately I can't downvote this. NIMBYs, scolds, and hall monitors are are our most trenchant cultural critics? I routinely see such people among the first rank of stultifying, status-obsessed groupthinkers who pollute discourse with yass qweens and claims
that they're committed to doing the work.
Granted, I've never heard of any of the people you cite, but I sincerely doubt they have anything like the craft that Scott attributes to Fussell.
lol @ getting so mad then saying you’ve never heard of any of those people.
Saying that people are status-obsessed and pointing out associated behaviors and constructing taxonomies based on cultural signifiers is hardly “most trenchant cultural [criticism]”—that’s the point. This is basic ethnography plus snark. I guess to a certain audience that’s the most satisfying sort of intellectual material to consume, but the level of understanding of culture and society being demonstrated here is hardly extraordinary. Again, marketers and trend-followers are fully competent in this kind of analysis.
I think you're right that the _info_ is there, somewhere, in all of the 'data' that you mention, but it's _not_ laid out in clear, and hilarious, prose like in this book.
I've read a few blog posts that got pretty close, and all riffing on the same theme as the book (or even reacting to others blogging about this particular book IIRC).
What Scott wants – and I'd also enjoy – is a good insightful synthesis of the raw data that you're pointing at.
Great review of a great book. I will offer an anecdote I have of a friend who's actually "upper class" in the sense that he (and his girlfriend) comes from real money. His parents are industry leaders from several decades ago, so you'd assume their kids acclimated a bit to that wealth. However he still does, of course, display some upper-middle class behaviors, like hanging out with me (heh).
He went to an old money school down south. He works in NYC mostly because his job seems fun and he feels the need to prove something to their parents, but it's clear given his family that he doesn't really need the money. He supported Trump in 2016 on uncertain-if-ironic-or-not grounds (I met him through a college friend, and he would insist to my college friend's face that the Trump banners were ironic, but admitted to me later that they were totally serious and he thought it was funny to tell people they were ironic). He would throw parties occasionally where nobody comments on anything ever, except maybe some tacky photos on the wall he put up as jokes. The people, mostly other investment bankers, would hang around and talk about god knows what. One time he came to a party I threw and used my point & shoot camera to take photos of his butthole (hilarious but crude, like how Fussell describes the upper class as "barbarians").
When he and I hang out, we never talk about money, he might tell me about a fun tax evasion scheme. When we talk about work, it's always about the content and never about how we feel we're being treated, etc. We went to see the Belmont (classic horse race in Long Island) once on an extremely hot day. He bought a bunch of property in coastal New Jersey after Katrina because it seemed like a fun thing to do, to become a slumlord. Stuff like that.
So hopefully this is a bit of a picture of what class ascendancy looks like in contemporary times -- acknowledging upper middle class taste, and then ignoring it, mostly because it's a fun thing to do, and doesn't matter at all to you personally. It may be worth comparing this to what I feel like the current "Class X" is: weird internet and twitter users who do their own thing and attempt to form their own alternate subcultures away from media consumption. The shallowest level might be Elon Musk and crypto fanboys who deviate just a little bit from consensus (although I assume that's more common in the Bay Area), leading to weirdo NRx types and eventually becoming hard to classify because that's exactly the goal, to avoid "class-ification".
I do think that it's on-the-money, though, to draw a relationship between "Class X" and "upper middle class", in that countercultural leanings do not necessarily cut across preexisting class lines. I see it as more of an affordance permitted by having the opportunity and capital to really cut away from one's familial position. The lower classes must, by nature of their material constraints, remain closer to their community, so the potential cost of deviating and ignoring the things their family and friends value is higher. This isn't to say that it doesn't happen--plenty of lower class people can and do cut away from their communities, plenty of middle and upper-middle class people stay onboard with what their families believe--but that it's harder to really "carve your own path" if you have a good reason not to.
I agree that "Class X" is part of the upper-middle class. Actually, all the classes have some kind of "countercultural" mode of expression:
upper class: eccentric
upper-middle class: "Bohemian", Class X
middle class: hippie
proles: biker
destitute: hobo
> He supported Trump in 2016 on uncertain-if-ironic-or-not grounds
> He bought a bunch of property in coastal New Jersey after Katrina because it seemed like a fun thing to do, to become a slumlord.
Another hypothesis for why the prediction markets remained at 15% after Trump lost is starting to form.
There’s likely no way to overcome the kind of snobbishness talked about here, but I should say that being aware of how closely a lot of my habits track my class has made me way less moralistic about taste, politics, etc. An older white business owner who talks up QAnon is just as much executing his script as overeducated-underemployed me is. I think Marvel movies are lame (he said, anxiously signaling) but my normie friends who like them have probably just experience less online brain damage than I have. And so on.
There’s something discomfortingly antihumanistic about internalizing this but it’s also a nice turn down the heat to the endless feeling of anxiety differentiation enmity &c.
Upvote for "online brain damage."
I think looks outside like Fussell's book and the resulting conversation here are immensely valuable, and if anything help in meeting other people as people and not shallow caricatures.
So when someone takes the time to build a taxonomy of class, isn’t the point to then do something with that model? In industry there’s a lot of effort that goes into customer segmentation because it helps sell the right things to the right people. What do people like Fussel seem to do with their class model?
I think Fussell would call that thought process hopelessly middle-middle class.
Some would say that a greater understanding of the world is its own reward. Moreover I think there's three great benefits to understanding class:
Firstly, you start to recognise that many of the strongly-held opinions that you hear around you about whether things like cathedral ceilings or Oxford commas or Marvel movies or Hamilton or Donald Trump are very good or very bad are not _really_ about the object-level issue at hand but simply about the speaker asserting their place in the class hierarchy. You can be a lot more chilled out about these sorts of arguments when you recognise this.
Secondly, you can start to recognise these patterns in your own thoughts and start to compensate for them. Do you _really_ want to write that thousand-word screed about how bad it is that Hugo Boss clothes increasingly insist on having "Hugo Boss" logos visible on the outside, or is that just a waste of time that your brain is telling you to do because it's dreadfully insecure that someone might mistake you for a member of a slightly lower class?
Thirdly, with enough understanding of class you just _might_ be able to occasionally and very poorly pass yourself off as a member of a class that you're not, with possible tangible benefits. With a lifetime of dedicated effort you can learn to pass for one class lower or higher (e.g. lower-middle to middle-middle, or vice versa if that's what floats your boat).
Upper class here, which is definitely middle class to say but I think it's ok since I'm anonymous. I would say that the one big change to the class system he outlined is that new money can definitely buy its way to the upper class. This was unthinkable for centuries but in the money obsessed current age is quite doable. Of course there is a world of difference between the my pillow guy and Henry Kravis so it's far from axiomatic that great wealth equals great class prestige. But where you used to see museum, presitigious university and music hall boards stuffed with Cabots and Astors those seats have been completely occupied by billionaires with maybe one or two exceptions for old times' sake. Get on a couple of those and you have risen to the top of the class hierarchy.
Old money types like me will always have an honorary place in the upper classes but the other reason that the upper classes have opened up for the billionaires is that the traditional old money is in the process of drying up. Old money used to be defined as 19th century or earlier in origin, and was eventually opened to make way for the descendants of the robber barons of the Gilded Age. But with relatively few exceptions, it stopped opening up after that, and fortunes made in the latter half of the twentieth century really don't get you much status (look no further than Trump). Meanwhile those proper old money fortunes continue to get divided generation after generation so I guess it was inevitable that the billionaires with some decent taste would have to refresh the ranks.
One last quibble I don’t think the observation that education doesn’t matter to the upper classes rings true. Perhaps it’s a New England thing, but almost all proper old money families have gone to the same boarding schools and ivy colleges for at least a century or two. It ‘s more out of respect for tradition than being considered brilliant, so maybe that’s the distinction with the upper middles.
Yeah, for the upper class it seems that higher education is more about an acculturation process (i.e. becoming a good, upstanding Harvard Man or something) rather than strictly a process of shoving as much information in your brain as possible in 4+ years.
It'd be interesting to test this by looking at what proportion of graduate students are upper class vs middle class (obviously proles will be rare, though I know one personally). My guess is that you'll mostly see middle class students (tending to upper middle class); the upper class kids are instead going to an elite school for the 4 years of networking and culture, and then peacing out of academia
From what I've read, ivy league colleges have two types of students, who do not socialize with each other. The rich kids who are there to meet other rich kids (and also get an education if they feel like it), and the smart kids who are there on scholarships. Only the very rich can afford the tuition without a scholarship.
I was one of the "smart" Ivy Leaguers, and it's true that I didn't have much contact with the real upper class. However, I did have an eye-opening moment when one of my team members pulled out some Gucci-branded thing that looked somewhere between a wallet and a handbag. (The fact that I don't know what it's properly called no doubt speaks volumes.) He made it clear that his father just buys him expensive things like that for no particular reason, since conspicuous consumption is the in thing among the Chinese upper class.
I think China has new money at the top, because Mao killed off the old.
A very large proportion of the "new" Chinese money is known to descend from the old Chinese money.
I've run into the occasional upper class type in academia; what's interesting is that they're all absolutely brilliant and at the top of their field.
Why? Because upper class types will only go into academia if they're just too goddamn brilliant for anything else.
> Meanwhile those proper old money fortunes continue to get divided generation after generation
What? Why? That's not how the British do it.
The British system is of course ideal for the eldest, less so for the rest. And we can do that here, it's just not generally the done thing. You can always cut out those who annoy you but it's fairly common to distribute the assets relatively equitably.
But the problem with division of property through equal inheritance is so obvious that you've already pointed it out -- it's much worse for the *family*, driving them into poverty when they could have lasted at the top indefinitely.
And the technology to avoid this wasn't exactly unknown; it was already an ironclad template from the source of all classiness, Britain. What happened?
I think (but don't know for certain) that the difference stems from the indivisibility of the British estate. There was only one primary title and one great estate, which generally held the bulk of the family fortune. It's just not practical to divide that up. The bulk of the American fortunes were made say from 1850-1920. They were of unprecedented size and divisibility. So a father sitting down to provide for his descendants probably envisioned giving each child a fortune with plenty to spare. And by tying up the assets in trusts looked after by conservative Boston money managers, it was expected that the system would last for a very long time. And for the most part it has, because most trustees have always worked off the cardinal rule of distributing only the income of the trust, not the principal. So most of the great New England fortunes are still in existence, they just pale in comparison to the neighbors who are managing a hedge fund. I would say the New York old money has dissipated more rapidly though. Greater extravagance, fewer restrictions on withdrawals, and more speculative ventures have tended to weaken many of the big New York families.
> I think (but don't know for certain) that the difference stems from the indivisibility of the British estate. There was only one primary title and one great estate, which generally held the bulk of the family fortune. It's just not practical to divide that up.
I think this gets the causality backwards. There's nothing difficult or impractical about dividing family wealth held mostly in land; this is how China operated. Equal inheritance there was compelled by law, and regularly drove the greatest familial landholdings into insignificance.
(Chinese titles of nobility are, to our eyes, weird. As far as I've seen (not that far), they don't attach to any particular lands. They also don't inherit in what you would think of as the normal way; all sons of a man who holds a particular title receive a different, lesser, title, until eventually the title is wiped out.)
So I would say that the "indivisible" estates and titles are technology the European nobility developed in service of the goal of not dividing their property through inheritance, not causes that created the effect of not dividing noble landholdings through inheritance. Look at all the effort expended in early modern Europe on preserving estate entailments, so as to prevent the estates from being divided through sale!
> by tying up the assets in trusts looked after by conservative Boston money managers, it was expected that the system would last for a very long time. And for the most part it has, because most trustees have always worked off the cardinal rule of distributing only the income of the trust, not the principal.
I've been wondering how this applies to modern stockholdings. If you own a lot of land or buildings, it's easy to say that the "real estate" is principal and rental income is income, and this makes a great rule of thumb for not impoverishing yourself. As long as you follow the rule, you'll always own a lot of land, even if some other harder-to-follow strategy might technically have been better. And if you own a lot of dividend-paying stocks, it's easy to say that the stocks are principal and the dividends are income.
But if you own stocks that return value solely through price appreciation, there is no distinction between income and principal.
(It's worth noting that there have been Chinese titles which were inherited without diminishment. But they were exceptions.)
I think your second point, or rather your reply to my second point, is quite interesting. Unfortunately it also gets far too close to money matters, which are strictly off limits. It's hard to believe, but really we mostly just get checks sent to us and the amount rarely varies. What goes on within the bank is pretty hard to tamper with. I'd assume it guides the manager to buy more utility stocks and less Tesla, which is understandable but regrettable.
Charlemagne's empire split up because Frankish law required partible inheritance, and no one had the authority to change the law. Later French kings figured out a workaround: The king appointed his oldest son co-king. When the father died, the son would become sole king, with inheritance laws never coming into play. After a while this practice took on the force of tradition and therefore law, and they dropped the pretense of having co-kings.
Rather than China, my mind immediately went to Timur Kuran's description of the Islamic world (more specifically, the Ottoman empire). In "The Long Divergence" he claims that egalitarian inheritance law (which pre-dated Islam but was set in stone afterward) prevented something like the Western European rediscovery of incorporation (originally a Roman institution, you can read about that in Harold Berman's "Law & Revolution"). The European tradition of primogeniture meant that there were entities with large, enduring amounts of wealth outside the state. In the Islamic world, wealthy men were more likely to marry polygamously, which meant even more division. The only way to keep a large amount of money was in a charitable "waqf", but those were much more restricted than corporations. I go more in depth on the book here:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/the-scylla-of-clannishness-and-the-charybdis-of-despotism/
This is where you run up against the deep water differences between America and Britain. Despite everything, there is still a democratic ethos in the bedrock over here.
One of Thomas Jefferson's prouder accomplishments and one of the first things he helped push through in Virginia after Independence was the abolition of Primogeniture (what you're talking about) and Entail (what prevented a dissolute heir from parceling up the family fortune in his lifetime).
There's probably more to it, but it's telling that partible inheritance is how the Republican French do it, too.
It doesn't drive them into poverty, just work. Which, admittedly, may be worse.
<i>there is a world of difference between the my pillow guy and Henry Kravis</i>
I laughed out loud.
"Meanwhile those proper old money fortunes continue to get divided generation after generation"
Is that still as much of an issue as it was 40 years ago? With various asset classes doing so well and people having fewer or no children it seems like the fortunes could be growing on a per capita basis.
I think that's a fair comment, but remember the money was generated a long time ago and for the most part locked up in trusts. The rules of the trusts vary widely but as you'd expect they're invested conservatively and have had to sit through the Depression, the seventies, the GFC etc. So it's really case by case, but no matter what the growth in the original family fortune divided by a generally increasing number of descendants will never keep up with the new Silicon Valley/Wall Street fortunes.
Long term stock returns controlled for inflation are what, 3% per year? If so, the assets only double every 25 years. That's about one generation. So you need to have at most 2 kids on average and ~0 spending to preserve a family's wealth...
The spouse is also old money.
Ah, right, of course. So having two kids, or less, leaves room for spending.
Can you describe some of your upbringing? What are some things that your parents tried to teach you about your place in the world and how to maintain it?
your question actually got me thinking/reminiscing a bit, which has been interesting. I can't get into too much detail, but I think what might make my "story" different from some others is that we are a very New England family. That's generally where the oldest of old money comes from, but it's quite a distinct upbringing. We were brought up quite strictly, managed by governesses during the day and shipped off to boarding school from the ninth grade. But we saw a lot of our extended family, and really by now almost all the old money families in New England are at least distantly related. So while our family was very social contacts were also fairly isolated to a pretty small group. There was never any talk of money, and anything like a sports car or designer labels would never fly. And I guess to Fussell's point, it wasn't like my family said we're rich so we should drive station wagons instead of Porsches. Understatement was just naturally more appealing and flashiness has always repulsive. Another New England "oddity", in addition to the understatement, is the general (though oft ignored) desire to be productive. You weren't supposed to go into business and be a success, but you were supposed to carve out your purpose in life. That traditionally was being involved in politics and charities, or developing an intellectual passion. So I'd say that's what my parents tried to instill in us. That, however, is increasingly difficult. The time when names like Saltonstall and Winthrop would be an electoral asset are over, and as per above, charitable endeavors are becoming constrained by the size of the trust funds, and in any event could never compete with the likes of the Gates Foundation.
That probably didn't answer your question and it was certainly meandering, apologies for that.
That "productive" instinct is called Conscientiousness, and is one of the Big 5 personality traits. High conscientiousness is tightly associated with being politically conservative.
My upbringing was fairly proletarian in character, though my parents were never financially unstable.
My parents emphasized the importance of stable family structure, retirement planning, and respecting authority figures. Though my parents are politically moderate, they hold activists and non-profits in contempt as "vain" and "indulgent" people. This distaste makes sense in light of my parents' disinterest in the public square – they feel that all unstructured time should be directed towards home and family life.
My parents' aspirations for their progeny include property ownership, spouse (NOT a "partner"), grandchildren, and a comfortable salary. Enormous material success or cultural capital do not exist in this vision. Obligations to kin and legacy are the values necessary for success.
I did not take social class seriously until my freshman year at a local high school, when I realized that my classmates's parents had (1) actual intergenerational wealth (2) advanced degrees from boutique institutions, cultural capital, and a global perspective. Feeling ashamed, I acquired as much cultural capital as I could. My performed mien was the only thing I could alter, and I managed to sport a carefully understated wardrobe of New England "preppy" attire by purchasing the right second-hand clothes. Of course, I never repudiated my humble roots (my classmates did not let me forget my origins.) I did blend with the WASP-y wallpaper, though, and often went unnoticed, which I preferred. I'm sure that few people have the experience attending a public high school this homogeneous, but the experience certainly altered me. I remember falling hopelessly in love with a girl – at this point I had improved my attire but not my attitude – and after some fun dates I irked her with a comment about how " 'X Chain Restaurant' is great" and immediately became single again. Her father holds several prestigious literary prizes; it is for the best that I did not meet him, as I doubt I could hold a conversation with a member of the literati when I was fifteen. (I could at this point in my life, though). I still experience simultaneous attraction and revulsion towards the upper-middle class.
Unless the fertility rate is higher among old money families than the general population or old money families are having children outside old money networks, that money will be concentrating, not dispersing. In developed countries, legacy populations are having so few children that they are shrinking, not growing.
In Russia certainly, but elsewhere the closest I've seen is replacement level birthrate. Have you got some stats for this?
One thing I have often wondered about the American class situation is how seriously to take the whole Daughters of the American Revolution thing. I'm not American and when I was a child, I remember a family gathering in which a big deal was made about a handshake between a distant relative of mine and another distant relative who fought on opposite sides of the Revolutionary war. They took a picture for the local paper. I often wonder what happened to all the Royalists who staid behind in America rather than repatriate and whether there are hints of those Royalist sympathies in the families today. Or, does everyone claim to have a "fought with" George Washington story?
Sorry for the late reply but just saw this. The DAR and Mayflower Society, and several other of these sorts of ancestral societies, is usually a marker of middle class. Having ancestors that came over on the Mayflower or fought in the Revolution is somewhat common among the upper classes (I have both) but joining societies to boast about it (or taking the somewhat cringeworthy photo you mention) is not. The Mayflower Society is particularly tricky, since naturally it's much smaller than the DAR since it was just one boat full of ancestors rather than a war full. But the religious zealots who arrived on the Mayflower came mostly from the merchant class, or their associated servants. I don't believe there was any nobility. So they were decidedly downmarket roots. Of course once they settled their descendants had a whole continent to exploit so many made great fortunes afterwards. The DAR folks are much more heterogenous, and certainly there were many wealthy families involved in the war. But those 18th century fortunes, while nice, were almost never enough to keep a family in the upper classes for long. The great fortunes were almost all made in the ca 1870-1920 period. So proper upper class members today invariably tie their ancestry back to the fortune makers of that period. If the founder of the family fortune had Revolutionary or Mayflower ancestry, then that was a small added bonus. The big bonus was finding noble or royal ancestry rather than American colonial ancestry. That rarely happened though, so industrious early generations following from the fortune makers almost always invented these connections and wrote detailed ancestries bragging about them. The New England Genealogical Society's library is positively groaning with these faux ancestries, which did grant the families lots of class points. Today there are mostly viewed as the butt of jokes, though.
Thanks for all those insights. It's fascinating to get it first hand. Every so often you hear about the DAR on US tv shows and it was hard to know what to make of them. It sounds a bit like our United Empire Loyalist who are granted a few honours such as a post-nominal UE to their name. I have only one friend who uses it and it does look a bit odd, but then I live in a very urban liberal milieu and maybe it's a real status symbol along the north shore of lake Ontario.
The Mayflower business and being able to trace your family back to it always seemed to be very confusing. I think as an Anglican, I have a bit of a bias against the idea of "nonconformists" in the upper class and certainly wealthy merchants from the 1800s. But I also remember spending time with a distant relative who's family had been rich since the 17th Century in Virginia. In grade 8, I remember being impressed that he had a guy who was hanging around with him who's job was to travel ahead to open up his house for his arrival, but looking back, he had the coat of arms of his aristocratic european for-bearers engraved on the hubcaps of his Cadillac. It's hard to imagine something more gauche than that. I remember that my grandfather wouldn't let me hang out with them.
Your grandfather was a very wise man! The hubcaps really do sound dreadful, although you'll find many old ancestral homes in the US festooned with the purported family crest. Unfortunate since it's almost always a false connection.
What's quite remarkable is that this fellow did, in fact, have the ancestral link to the coat of arms. I guess he had the right to use it after a fashion as someone in direct male descent from the arms holder. I don't know if you Americans really recognize those things. It's just remarkable how tacky it had become. Without getting too philosophical, our family experience has reminded me how ephemeral this concept of the upper class can be. Four generations from an English title or an Emerican fortune (being generous it's probably 2 generations) and you might be hanging on to the middle class by your finger nails. What you are left with is the grandchildren of the old upper class telling stories to college kids in bars about what it was like when they were kids and their grandparents were on top of the world.
It reminds me of someone who read Wodehouse and then translated that into observations about socioeconomic strata.
The curious part is the observations that seem to match some of the real world behaviour. I feel it's more akin to astrology though, there's always enough signs to point to an understanding just about accurate enough, but with enough holes that the standard deviations are crazy wide!
Loved this. Really wasn't sure where you were going to take this but the very end is quite an interesting perspective on how class shifts/is defined in our modern society.
Reading this I realised that U and Non-U related to Britain and not the US as it did not mention it, but it seemed the perfect context for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
Also the right hand picture in the profiles is Reagan, surely?
Lastly a quick diversion on rhododendrons - The comedian who observed that is does not sound like a flower. It sounds like a siege engine - "My Liege they have rhododendrons! All is lost!"
"In fifteen years the roots will get under the wall, fatally weakening them".
Although I always thought hydrangeas were much more threatening.
It's shockingly accurate when you think about it. Indeed much of our current political realignment is driven by the change in relative status between these groups.
Be careful of things that are shocking accurate. It's the Barnum effect.
a child of an scotts-irish engineer and a mother with a bryn mawr education, i had the pleasure and privilege of taking Fussell at UPENN for 18th century English lit. (lots of Boswell and Johnson).
I think its interesting his son Sam Fussell, went into bodybuilding.
As I recall, Sam Fussell went into bodybuilding out of a fear of needing to be able to defend himself-- in New York, I think.
It's the right physique for not needing to defend yourself, though, which is even better.
however, some people are aware of the whole "bodybuilders aren't necessarily good at fighting" thing. My grandfather (a former boxer) said basically that bodybuilding is a form of posturing or "showboating" and not really useful in a fight.
A boxer will beat a bodybuilder, but a bodybuilder will beat an ordinary person. I feel like most muggers aren't actually skilled fighters.
On the other hand, a rando with a knife can beat almost any unarmed person. So maybe bodybuilding doesn't help after all?
You just need the mugger to go for someone else instead of you.
Damn I shoulda ctrl+f'ed. Have you seen this about what he's doing lately: http://www.drmichaeljoyner.com/sam-fussell-an-interview-with-the-author-of-muscle/ ?
(well, circa 2014)
Sam Fussell’s book Muscle is really good and worth checking out. He would tell bodybuilding friends that his father had worked in a nail factory and was dead instead of admitting he was a Princeton professor. After graduating from Oxford, and starting bodybuilding because he was intimidated by city life, Sam started cosplaying the working class.
A 2021 version would be unlikely to repeat Fussell's complete neglect of the question of race (an omission I already found remarkable when I first read it in the mid-'80s).
I suspect it would make the model *vastly* too complicated - races tend to operate in part as sets of classes (e.g. the African American middle class), and as a (non-behavioural) class marker (Americans (unfairly) tend to assume black=underclass (poor scary criminals) until proven otherwise). I think (although I'm white so I'm not sure) they also have their own internal class-like structure while people also get categorised into the closest majority-race class. With some mutual exceptions you'd expect (you can't be in the African American working class and the white majority upper class), but not all (you can be a Bengali Dalit upper-middle class neurosurgeon), because the internal boundaries are defined differently. Attitudes to race are probably also a class marker (hence, as always, Trump).
Yeah, all the class categories he talks about need to have "White" before them to make any sense.
We see this in modern politics as well, where "working class" is used to mean white midwestern conservatives, not hispanic manual laborers in cities
What seems interesting to me about this is that class seems to be defined almost entirely by taste. Perhaps that's just the lens he chose to explore it, but class as I'd defined it always had a relationship with power and status.
Surely Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, as people with immensely vast fortunes and high profile businesses, must have more power and influence than many of the people he is defining as upper class. Could no amount of that break them into the high class category, even if they imitated high class taste and manners?
And if this upper class is largely invisible to us all, is their standing as cultural elites only supported by the opinions of their own insular groups? If the basis of class is social consensus then I think most people would perceive the social status of a highly successful and well known person who acted with some amount of decorum as upper class. Does the dissenting opinion of the secret upper class automatically exclude them from it?
I'm tempted to think of this invisible upper class as not the upper class at all, but some other subculture that while surely having money and power through personal connections, by excluding themselves from the public and influence in general societal messaging, loses out on the upper class definition.
Otherwise we cede them the power to define upper class, which is a lot to surrender to people with brass door knobs.
There’s a good article in Catalyst making precisely your complaint, that this meaning of class is orthogonal to the sense of class we really (have a reason to) care about: https://catalyst-journal.com/vol1/no2/bourdieu-class-theory-riley
That said, taste can be an interesting subject in itself, so as long as we know that any given meaning of “class” is or isn’t just referring to consumption signifiers, you can still have a decent conversation using it
I think this is just another way of saying that not all forms of privilege yield the same sorts of power. All the male privilege in the world won't give you white privilege. All the white privilege in the world won't give you male privilege (or female privilege, in the many contexts where that is significant). None of that is to say that it's impossible for a non-white person to pass as white and get white privilege, or for a trans person to successfully transition in a way that gets them that gender privilege (in at least many contexts). Money and class are two more dimensions of that. They're two separate ways of getting certain kinds of power and authority, and money is usually more significant than class. But that's not to say that class in the sense discussed here doesn't matter.
Avoiding this sort of confusion is why you need a monarch. Senior royals are paradigmatically upper class, and the question of the status of any particular billionaire can in principle be resolved with reference to the opinions of Her Maj (unlikely to be directly forthcoming, but sometimes discernible) or Phil (apt to not merely come forth but knock them about the head).
I think that there are exceptions in the case of Musk and Bezos with their $100+ billion fortunes giving them power as individuals in their own right, but there are probably less than 50 such people in the US. Once you get down even to single digit billionaires, their wealth and power is dwarfed by the aggregate of the old money upper class around them.
Part of it is also that that upper class set used to be in more positions of genuine power (look at the Kennedys and other political dynaties), and over time that has decreased, but they still have the patina of power by cultural inertia
"Destitutes and bottom-out-of-sights eat dinner at 5:30, for the prole staff which takes care of them wants to clean up and be out roller skating or bowling early in the evening."
My reaction: Huh! Growing up we always ate dinner at 5:00, and we weren't destitute. My mom was a schoolteacher, were were middle class!
"Fussell describes cruises as the working-class vacation par excellence and griping about them as a popular form of middle-class signaling."
Huh...growing up I saw a cruise as one of the coolest, most extravagant vacation I could think of. We never went on one because that was for "rich people." When my parents finally went on a cruise for their 25th anniversary I thought it was the kind of luxury that sort of event called for. When I went on a cruise for the first time I was kind of embarrassed about it, not because cruises are lame but because who did I think I was, spending all this money on a fancy cruise when I'm still in my twenties and have student loans left to pay? I was worried my family would be a bit scandalized.
"Closely related: the more technology something has, especially weird gimmicky "Space Age" technology, the lower-class it is."
Hmmm...*Remembers time we bought Dad a space age "Turbo Cooker 5000" that we saw in an infomercial for his birthday.*
"These are people who...visit Disneyland (and accept its mystique at face value)"
But it's the happiest place on Earth!
I went into the post thinking class in the US is all hooey, but it's become more and more obvious that I grew up in a very prole household, and am still pretty prole today even though I work in a white collar job.
"The West is the prole capital of the USA"
Another hit: I grew up in western Washington.
The shift of white collar work into proles is clear in my experience as well - many engineer jobs have shifted in this way
Cruises DID used to be high-ish class. In that "Love Boat" era, when the jumbo jet replaced the steamship, but luxury cruise ships still existed. By modern standards those ships are dull and tiny.
In the 90s marine construction techniques took off and they learned to build gigantic floating hotels holding thousands. Economies of scale became applicable and you could get a 4 day cruise for $400 if you sign up for their marketing lists.
Second the recommendation to look at David Brooks' Bobos in Paradise. He nails the value attached to natural / organic persisted until the noughties, the Veblenian signaling of sheer inconvenience to maintain is evergreen, the elevation of factory built environments, and more. Also, the nonce term "Bobo" has stuck
A very specific study of Washington DC's status-ranking is This Town (Mark Leibovich, 2013). Given that politics requires eagle-eyes for detecting even slight shifts in power, it's a pleasure to read all about the fine details of what's sometimes called Hollywood for Ugly People
> He nails the value attached to natural / organic persisted until the noughties
Food is still sold as "organic" so it persists to this day
I really like Scott's book reviews because I'm interested in the content but don't like reading books very much.
I think Scott does justice to the author, while also providing salient counter points. It feels like a discussion he is having with the author, and indeed, I feel like when Scott writes like this, the authors have replied in the past.
I have to be careful to decide what I believe between Scott and the author. If I only read Scott's review, it is so incredibly persuasive, that I just become his Follower and only consuming content without learning.
While I think this book is fun and interesting, I do not see preferences by class as a very telling concept. I think most people choose the entertainment, style of boat, or clothes based on learned preferences (stemming from upbringing) or availability within their budget.
Humans find patterns in anything and we love grouping things and people into imaginary groups. But I don't think upper class person Z does things for any reason other than "growing up I liked it" or "it's what makes practical sense given my budget". Ditto for lower class people. Enjoying bowling, while typically enjoyed by lower class people, is probably done because it's fun and they were exposed to it. I think upper class people would enjoy it just as much. Ditto for going on cruises.
Where Scott adds his own thoughts is on patterns of classism in the way we look down on people with bad grammar, or that aren't being environmentally conscious. While I agree that looking down on others is not good, I would not say that this is evidence of a class divide (I know lots of grammar snobs of the lower class) and rather that this is just based on each individual (not arbitrarily grouped into classes) person's own upbringing. Perhaps the perceived class differences are the Barnum effect at play here.
Don't get me started on my thoughts on generational differences and their uses (and misuses) in marketing.
I read this book right around the time it came out. One of the largest enduring effects was that when I speak of someone dying, I always use the word, "died." I never say "passed away" or use any other euphemism. Thank you for that, Paul Fussell.
The thing I remember about Class X was the mention of expats. The rest of that "bobo" stuff was just passing fancy, but being an expat was and is a bit more of a timeless designator of something than what you wear or how you play team sports or how you carry your baby.
I liked Fussell's observations and style at the time, but I wouldn't read it again, and I don't think of it as a terribly serious book. I'm surprised you put the effort you did into reviewing it, just as I was when you reviewed "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." I read both when they came out...I enjoyed both at that time in life...and each had a mild influence that makes me smile when I think about it. But neither -- in my opinion -- warrant this level of critique. I don't get it.
The real move is to expire, like a magazine subscription.
What exactly makes Fussell's "upper class" the upper class, as opposed to a specific clique of mostly-irrelevant rich snobs? Do they collectively control more wealth than the nouveau riche? Do they have a lot of pull with government and/or the media?
(I guess one possibility is, they were the upper class in 1983 but their influence has significantly diluted since then.)
I don't think its as much about how much money they have, but how they behave. It's not that the nouveau riche control less money than the "upper class" its that the "upper class" behaves in a certain way, has certain mores, and is recognizable as a distinct subculture.
I'm not contesting at all that they have a recognizable distinct subculture. My question is, what makes them "upper" and the middle class "middle", when most of the richest and most politically powerful people in the country are what Fussell would call middle class?
I guess the middle class come from the middle. Bezos parents had much less money than he does now. Old money upper class families have been that for a generations.
Pure force of will and inertia.
In Britain the Upper Class is very clear and defined. The Queen at the top, then Dukes, then Marquises, then Earls, then Viscounts, then Barons (then Baronets, then Knights, but that barely counts as U). If you don't have one of these titles yourself then you can at least point to a nearby family member with one; if you can't, then you're not the Upper Class.
The Upper Class in America is based on desperately trying to imitate this kind of structure without having the benefit of formal titles or a monarch to give it all legitimacy. I am assured that an American Upper Class does exist, but I've never seen it myself.
What puts 'upper class' above 'very rich but recent money' is that the merely rich very often aspire to look/act/sound like they are upper class.
They're the upper class by pure definition, not necessarily by actually having more influence or control. They're descended from people who definitely had more influence or control, and they definitely still have some (or else they wouldn't be able to maintain that lifestyle), but they're not definitionally the people with the most influence or control.
That makes some sense but using the term that way puts it a bit at odds with what I think most people would think of when they hear the "upper class". If it's purely a matter of subculture something like "old money" would convey it more clearly.
That's why I prefer the term "ruling class" for the top class, because it specifies more accurately what it is describing.
This includes:
- heads of state or government
- members of national or regional legislatures
- billionaires
- CEOs
- top/middle managers, particularly of big companies
- owners of small businesses
Basically, the ruling class values power, and someone is a member of it to the degree that they control others.
Yeah I feel like if this is a set of people nobody else knows about or interacts with then it almost makes more sense to describe them as an insular subculture mostly outside the main class system than as occupying an apex position within it.
One of the weird notions in contemporary cultural life, particularly among self-described geeks/nerds, is that upper crusters are going to the opera and listening to Mahler all the time. Which is just... not real. They watch capeshit and Star Wars the same as everyone else.
Of the people who are going to the opera, a large proportion are upper-crusters. But yeah, that’s ~zero people.
In the UK, Covent Garden is U, the Coliseum is non-U. Cadogen Hall is U, the Royal Festival Hall (with the whole of the South Bank) is non-U. The Proms are more U than one might expect, partly because of the geography.
Don't the Circle, District and Picadilly lines rather squash that geography? I don't see how that could overcome the fact that tickets start at £6.50 (for the mosh pit).
A significant part of the prom queue lives within walking distance. Indeed, when I lived in Kensington, I prommed a lot more than I do now. Apart from anything else, one can pop round to take a look at the state of the queue.
The Royal Albert Hall itself is rather vulgarian, and of course the point of the Proms is to make music available to the masses. Then again, the point of Eton is to educate poor people. There's something about promming which appeals to a certain sort of upper class person.
I suspect that it depends a bit on the programme. One should avoid anything too overtly populist but also anything which shows too serious an interest in music.
I dunno. My richest friends (NYC stockbroker, all Ivy, etc.) have a season subscription at the Met.
hmmm, possibly explained by either; they have the subscription but do they actually go that often? or, are they trying to look upper class?
Nice review! I loved this book when I read it (at UCSC in about 1984-5, that should say enough) and I found that—at the time—it really did open my eyes quite a bit. I think the one thing that I take from it that sticks with me still, regardless of the specifics of class signaling, is that *wealth does not really allow one to transcend class*. In both directions, though "poor nobility" probably don't get very far on their friends anymore! Watching US media in the past decades, there are always more examples of low class with money trying to "be classy" and proving their original status, just in greater scale.
I read "The Cult of Smart" and it makes a good case that intelligence is hereditary. One might expect that "grit" or whatever may also be hereditary. So I wonder if class stratification is just the expected end state for any meritocratic society(?)
Read some of Gregory Clark's work. It does, in fact, seem that class itself is hereditary (even absent direct wealth inheritance).
The book you're looking for is "Coming Apart" by Charles Murray (I haven't read it but I've absorbed bits by osmosis).
This fits awkwardly with Fussell's work. First, because he's claiming the upper upper class have very few redeeming features. Second, because he's claiming that wealth/success doesn't really cause class transition - to some degree, a prole who succeeds on merit will just end up a rich prole, marry another rich prole, and have prole kids.
On some level I'm afraid to read a book by Charles Murray. What happens if I end up agreeing with him on something? (And I'm only half joking.)
FWIW, I grew up in a blue collar home. I'm now a pretty high earner at a tech company. My wife is a second generation immigrant -- her parents were doctors. So I've definitely moved class from an income perspective. I guess, arguably, I'm still a prole though.
But this is probably why I find these topics so important.
Not all Murray books are the same, though there are linkages.
Educated people who are scared to learn things. My goodness gracious this blog is an eye-opener. Aren't authors supposed to challenge you? There's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything.
I think this isn't so much about being scared to learn things as being scared of the reputational consequences of being known to believe things: Charles Murray is best known for "The Bell Curve", which argued among other things that differences between the IQs of people of different races in America are partly genetic, so he is seen as racist and therefore Evil, at least among the conspicuously anti-racist progressives who are common in the middle class, so being seen to agree with him at all can be taken to imply that you are likewise racist (cf. some of the discussion of the New York Times article on SSC, e.g. https://twitter.com/mattficke/status/1360638327830032384 or https://twitter.com/_moonstorms/status/1360638974268637184 ). (Since TimG is commenting on this blog, I assume he doesn't think this way himself.) Also, while "challenging" the reader is seen as positive, in political terms (at least in middle-class progressive social contexts), it's expected that people will be challenged in that way by leftists in particular: being challenged by socialism or the latest form of anti-racism is seen as positive, since you're at least learning new things in a socially or politically unthreatening way and at best becoming more moral (again, in a middle-class progressive moral worldview that sees racism as evil), but being challenged by ideas on or past the conservative edge of the Overton Window indicates to such people that you're too stupid to understand Progress and possibly an ideological enemy. (Scott made this last point a while ago with the "fifty Stalins" analogy in https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/ , and I think this is correct and endorsed by him even if much of the rest of that post isn't.)
The Guilt By Association Fallacy? Really? Wow...
"Delores is a big supporter for equal pay for equal work. This is the same policy that all those extreme feminist groups support. Extremists like Delores should not be taken seriously -- at least politically."
Being afraid that people will employ fallacies in tearing you down seems... eminently reasonable?
> Also, while "challenging" the reader is seen as positive, in political terms (at least in middle-class progressive social contexts), it's expected that people will be challenged in that way by leftists in particular
Aka challenges on the "fifty Stalins" kind (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/)
of*
They’re not scared to learn things, they are being conditioned to avoid wrongthink by a handful of bullies who see them as excellent victims because of their openness to ideas and lack of social inhibitions.
It requires a bit of doublethink, when you know someone can convince you of something yet you choose not to believe it.
When such a person's personal interest is at stake, they get cured of doublethink real quick. Same thing with the ostentatiously religious (but I repeat myself).
Just to be clear: this was a joke. The NY Times "profile" of Scott made him out to be a white-supremacist by linking him to Charles Murray and "The Bell Curve."
That was something of a joke-- Scott was blamed for saying he agreed with something Murray said.
One of the most worthwhile ideas I've come across is "interestingly/entertainingly wrong". There are people who I've read, who haven't changed my mind, but I've still learned something seems-true-to-me from them, or gained a new interesting way to look at things, even if it's an ultimately wrong one.
Staying away seems like overt cleanliness. You don't develop perspective and turn into the intellectual equivalent of an allergic.
I used to teach philosophy, and I'd tell my students to let themselves be persuaded by the author's argument. That's how you come to understand things at a deeper level. So many of them were afraid that they'd never climb back out. The Queen in "Through the Looking Glass" may have believed six impossible things before breakfast; I've believed some really horrifying things for weeks or months at a time, til I could find a way to argue myself out of them (or let smarter people argue me out of them).
If that's what he's implying, I think he's very wrong about the kids in particular. Those rich proles are quite likely to send their children to elite educational institutions that acculturate them into an entirely different class. If you went to Eton (or Westminster, or Cheltenham Ladies College) and Oxford (or Durham, or St. Andrews) and your friends are aristocrats and you largely share their mores, you are probably not a prole, and I'm sure there are analogues for the US. Now, certainly this kind of transition into the true upper class is rare, but that's probably mostly because the upper class is very small. Other family transitions are far more common.
Oh come on. Rich proles are not sending their kids to Eton and St. Paul's, and if they did they'd likely have a bad time and wouldn't come out with upper-class mores. That's a tough enough journey for ordinary middle-class kids. That move takes two generations (or more).
It sort of depends how you measure. My paternal grandparents came from prole backgrounds, but were no longer proles by the time they started to have children and make a lot of money (I think it's almost impossible to remain a prole in Britain while being as academically gifted as they were). Their sons went to Westminster; I'm not sure about my aunt but it will have been somewhere analogous. Their descendants are mostly upper middle, but I think a pretty good case could be made for at least one uncle and his two children as upper, and a stronger one for my great uncle's descendants (my grandfather's brother; they made the bulk of their money in business together). So people who were born proles absolutely do, in some cases, send their kids to those schools.
People who are still proles even after being wildly financially successful, I honestly don't know. Frank Lampard Senior sent his son to a minor public school, and leading footballers in his day did not make close to the money their present day counterparts do. Would it really be so surprising to find Harry Kane's kids attending Westminster or St. Paul's in fifteen years' time, assuming they could pass CE, or some school for upper class thickos if they couldn't?
This would be an edit if such things were possible here: I think it's also worth noting that my grandfather retained significant prolish traits throughout his life: he was brash, boastful, reckless, ostentatious and extremely fat - almost Trumpy in presentation (though very different in his character, which was exceptionally warm and generous with a sincere interest in other people). He had to make three fortunes because he lost or spent the first two; his social connections with the elite were almost all rooted in the shared high/low love of horse racing. I hesitate to call him a lifelong high prole because he qualified and for a while worked as a chartered accountant, and because he loved classical history almost as much as the gee-gees. If my grandmother had never met him, she would have followed an absolutely classic high IQ high conscientiousness prole child-middle class adult path.
I actually played against Frank Lampard for my minor public (or rather “independent”) school.
He was... better than me.
Given that the wages are now higher than that of most bankers, let alone lawyers and doctors, I wonder if we’ll start to see the phenomenon of the upper-class footballer? I.e. with traditional upper-class attributes that someone like Lampard lacks (or hides). I’d guess not, because the culture of football will still militate against displaying those features.
Lampard comes across to me unlike most other English footballers, and like many English cricketers and rugby players. Certainly not upper class, but perhaps upper middle and certainly not prole. The actual poshest English high level footballer I know of is Patrick Bamford, but his poshness is unrelated to football (the B in JCB stands for Bamford). The poshest person in football anywhere is probably Luís André de Pina Cabral e Villas-Boas, and I'm pretty sure his upper classness is part of the reason he failed as a manager in England but succeeded everywhere else (where they don't care as much).
I can only imagine what playing against Lampard as a kid was like. When I was in my early 30s and in good shape (and quite good by the standards of random people) I played in a Sunday 6-a-side league. One week, our opponents showed up with only 3 players due to hangovers. However, those players were two kids from the Southampton youth team and a county U19 player. We got absolutely, embarassingly destroyed. I also played quite regularly in my gap year with a guy who'd been in the Galatassaray youth system. You could leather a ball in his general direction from a couple of yards away and he'd stop it dead in front of him like it was nothing, every time. And I assume the gap between guys like that and a future Ballon d'Or runner up is at least as big as between them and me.
Definitely not. Both my grandparents were what Fussell would call "high prole" (my grandfathers were a shopkeeper and a tradesman). Most of their children and the majority of their grandchildren ended up UMC professionals or MC.
Where do upper class people come from, then?
A prole who succeeds on merit can imitate middle class mannerisms (first awkwardly, but it's a skill like any other), pass them to their children, then after a generation or two nobody can tell the difference.
Getting to an upper class on merit seems difficult, but I actually think it advances one funeral at a time - the old upper class becomes increasingly irrelevant and gets replaced by the noveau riche, who get increasingly snobby.
There's also significant intermarriage between the upper and upper middle. I think it's fair to say that the Middleton girl's kids are, on balance, upper class.
Class stratification is the expected end state for class-stratified society. Attributes you inherit (both through genes or socialization) place you at a certain stratum. It's not some sort of justification for stratification, it's just tautological.
Note: this is completely different from "best qualified for the job" motte of meritocracy. Doing the specialist job you're uniquely qualified to do does not yet make you a different social class from your unskilled labor peers. Class stratification makes you a different social class. If you conflate the two, don't be surprised when opponents of class stratification also feel justified to conflate the two and rally against meritocracy. (Especially when in an ossified class-stratified society the merit required for positions is often really just class standing anyway.)
I guess people think of class as orthogonal (or unrelated) to capability. That's why there's another word for it.
But I think that your description is probably spot-on.
This only works if the main determiner of success is competence. But starting point wealth makes a bigger impact, and even more so in the past. If you randomly give money to people a few hundred years ago you'd see their descendents being wealthier, purely by having the ability that others don't to make investments and leverage that capital
Have you seen Scott’s discussion of the life outcomes of Georgians who were given Indian land?
This kinda sounds like it's the sort of thing that is based on six people the guy knew in high school, but one part made me chuckle, because these are the names of the cross streets in Back Bay (the neighborhood where Tom Brady used to live):
1) Arlington
2) Berkeley
3) Clarendon
4) Dartmouth
5) Exeter
6) Fairfield
7) Gloucester
8) Hereford
I read that book early on and thought it was hilarious. I still do. It's less a social commentary than a humorous description of how the "classes" he defined see each other, and of the various classes' sense of how the other classes view them.
I loved "prole collar gap" and the accompanying illustration, without even bothering to ask myself whether it's a real thing. And blue and and pink shirts (oxford button-down, of course) are better the paler they are, and if you really want to flaunt your upper-classness, especially to other upper-class people (i. e., if you you are looking to impress the elite at a cocktail party, even if you are not one of them), make sure that those shirts don't have pockets. Because upper class people hire people to carry pens around and write things down. And if you were really one of them, of course, you wouldn't have to be told.
Those are all 35-year old memories, and I think I'm remembering correctly, although the last few lines are my restatements of what I took from the book, though he did not state them all explicitly.
And I thought his description of upper-out-of-sight and lower-out-of-sight were poignant. His description of the diet of the uppers in general was hilarious and in its own way pitiful.
A few notions: The upper upper class *has* to be conformist and have stable preferences. It's a way of constraining behavior in the hope of keeping its members from burning their fortunes on personal whims. Relatively cheap eccentricity is alright (British but not American?), but building wild new mansions and getting tired of them isn't.
Delany claimed (probably in Babel-17) than new culture comes from criminals and artists. See above about upper upper class conformity plus what you said about middle class fear. Teenagers would also be sufficiently outsiders to have a chance of being inventive.
"Where then may a member of the top classes live in this country? New York first of all, of course. Chicago. San Francisco. Philadelphia."
What a window into the past, when the WASP upper class lived in *Philadelphia*
Right; that's one of the connotations of the play, later film, "The Philadelphia Story".
They’re still here, just out on the Main Line (NW Philly suburbs.)
Do people really care about what others think as much as Fussell says they do? This is an honest question -- it's not an attempt to signal that I'm part of the "don't care what people think" class.
I would expect that in practice a lot of the norms end up being internalized. For example, when I proofread my own writing and find misplaced apostrophes (or the wrong the[re/ir/y're]), I cringe not because "someone else might see if and judge me" but because It's Just Clearly Wrong And How Could I Do Something Like That.
This is called habitus in sociology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitus_(sociology)
> This is an honest question -- it's not an attempt to signal that I'm part of the "don't care what people think" class.
How do you know that?
It's possible that he is trying to signal this while fooling himself into thinking that he's not, if you accept Robin Hanson's theory of self-deception as having evolved to help with self-serving norm-bending (this is described at https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/homo-hipocritus.html ).
Yes.
The amount people care about what other people think is a primary impact of 3 of the big 5 personality traits: Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Which means that the amount someone cares about what others think varies tremendously based their personality. Someone extroverted, agreeable, and neurotic will spend an enormous chunk of their energy worrying about it. Someone introverted, disagreeable and emotionally stable will have to actively make themselves care enough to be marginally socially acceptable (or not, and simply be known as a curmudgeon with the associated consequences.)
There are very practical reasons to care. Your ability to successfully perform class behaviours determines job opportunities, potential friends and partners, how well you are treated in a number of contexts. A purely self interested rational actor would adopt those habits as a result, before you even get into psychology
"I would kill for somebody as keen-eyed and trustworthy as Fussell writing about the 2020 class system."
Fussell's writing style reminded me of 'Spent' by Geoffrey Miller (though that's a decade old now, and about signalling psychological traits rather than class).
The "less"/"fewer" shibboleth is an interesting one for me. My super-"classy", super-British education somehow completely failed to teach it - perhaps I just missed the relevant couple of days at school - meaning I was completely unaware of its existence until college.
As a result, it feels even more artificial to me than most of the prescriptive rules, but unlike those I also struggle to code-switch into applying it. If I'm in a formal setting I can Susie-and-I and whomever with the best of them if I have to, but "fewer" takes real effort, at least in speech. This to me supports the idea that the rule is still somewhat unnatural to English and has to be consciously learnt.
Also I've started noticing a tendency (though this could easily be the Recency or Frequency Illusion) for people to use "greater" in a parallel way with non-count nouns, rather than using "more" for both - perhaps in an attempt to make the system more symmetrical? Though it can't be fully implemented - "We should buy greater cheese" clearly isn't possible, or at least not with the right meaning.
There's a UK supermarket (I think it may have been Waitrose or Sainsbury's) that changed its "10 items of less" checkouts to "10 items or fewer" after customer complaints.
It was both Tesco and Marks and Spencer’s! There were a couple of posts at the time about the ridiculousness of the decision from syntacticians at Language Log:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=465
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=552
Since then, though, my feeling is that it has become more and more common to apply the distinction with numerals. My kids’ maths textbooks say things like “more or fewer than 10”.
This is my impression also. Similarly, 20 years ago, "whom" was almost never heard in speech, whereas now I seem to hear it reasonably frequently. The other day I heard someone say something like "The person to whom I'm giving it to", which suggested to me that they were adopting a speech pattern which didn't come naturally to them.
These would seem to be instances contrary to "prole drift", although my understanding is that historically linguistic changes have in fact often percolated down society as one might expect (e.g. Spanish "z"). Perhaps cultural changes can start with different social groups and this author merely notices "prole drift" because it's contrary to his expectations. Certainly it's easy to think of examples of Multicultural London English words entering the mainstream. I myself say "innit" sometimes.
I agree on "whom" - it certainly *feels* like it's having a resurgence, especially in the US but also the UK. Among educated US speakers I even hear "whomever" fairly often. I also agree that the usage is often erroneous (by traditional lights). Hypercorrections like "She's the one whom I think will succeed" and "The funds will go to whomever needs them" are common even in prestige publications/platforms like the NYT, VOX and the BBC.
Whether our intuition is correct is another question. If you squint you can maybe see a bit of an uptick in the US:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=whom%2C+whomever&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=28&smoothing=3
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=whom%2C+whomever&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=29&smoothing=3
With the Spanish "z", do you mean the story about it being copied from the King's speech impediment? Because that's apocryphal.
Funny, a friend just used “whomever” in a Facebook post today and I thought this was a little strange. I wasn’t aware that “whomever” was having a moment here in the US.
Hypothesis: the "whom" resurgence is essentially globalization. Modern English is analytic and its users naturally perceive he/him, she/her, etc. distinction as a meaningless relic, just a rule to be learnt, so when there appeared to be no such rule for "who", they don't even notice, much less care. However, the growing contingent of foreign speakers coming from inflected languages not only intuitively understands the difference in meaning between the two, it also finds it useful and expects it to be applied consistently across all pronouns. It discovers "whom", starts using it (with little trouble), internet brings us closer together and the natives start noticing the resurgence, so now they struggle to learn to use it at all.
But which languages would be driving the need for an accusative, aside from some on the Indian subcontinent? I don't think many major African languages like Igbo or Swahili mark case on relative pronouns.
It's not the case that English speakers perceive pronoun case to be meaningless. Errors like "Him went to the shop" are almost unheard of for native speakers of the standard English dialect. And the use of accusative forms in non-object position is systematic, not random - for many speakers the accusative is basically the default form all positions except for the whole, unmodified subject of a finite verb.
I am currently reading a witness statement (drafted by a solicitor) which contains the sentence, "He then introduced me to [redacted] whom was the previous proprietor."
I wonder if he's hurriedly read it back to himself as "to who", skipping over the parenthesised bit.
Maybe, now that our light informal interactions are much more in text form than before (twitter, whatsapp, predictive keyboards, etc), some features of written text have naturally moved to oral for some people, without them coming out unnaturally. (and the other way around, as this blog shows)
That’s a really interesting idea.
Text can also reveal language changes in progress that are hidden in speech. For instance, there are some reasons to think that the tendency to use “of” instead of “-‘ve” to form perfects with modal verbs - as in “would of”, “should of” - is more than a widespread typo... that it reflects the preposition genuinely being grammaticalised as a perfect marker in speakers’ minds. But in speech “of” and “-‘ve” usually sound identical so the change is only noticeable in text, and it’s only now that everyone, whatever their education level, writes text publicly the whole time that the change becomes visible.
Multicultural London English doesn't do a lot of H-dropping.
Right. Its vowels are also fairly different from Cockney.
One of its most interesting features is a version of /k/ pronounced pretty far back in the throat, before back vowels, especially among male speakers. There's some thought that it might derive from Arabic /q/.
"Fewer" is to do with number, isn't it? "We should buy less cheese" but "we should buy fewer blocks of cheddar".
Yes, exactly. Fewer is for count nouns, less for mass nouns.
Yes. What I’ve noticed is people substituting “greater” for “more” with non-count nouns. So for instance “greater fuss” or “greater controversy” where you might expect “more”.
This would bring (greater!) parallelism to the grammatical structure -
More : Fewer :: Greater : Less
It also helps allay most obvious objection to the prescriptivists’ central case for the rule: that we do perfectly well with one *positive* comparative - “more” - for all types of noun, so it’s not credible that it’s unclear or ambiguous to use “less” in the same way (as indeed it has been used, since Old English).
Not that I’m suggesting people are really doing it for conscious reasons - there’s often a tendency in language change for grammars to become more symmetrically organised. And they may not be doing it at all, I may be imagining it! And if they *are* it won’t work anyway in most cases, as in the cheese example.
Fwiw...
My education failed to teach it too, it's something that my parents taught me, and that's what makes it a good class signal. Though it's possible that some of my more persnickety English teachers might have mentioned as well.
This is one of those "midwit" things, isn't it?
Regular person: "ten items or less"
Midwit pedant: actually it's "ten items or fewer" because items are countable
True pedant: actually the use of "less" with countable objects is attested to the ninth century; the rule against it was no more than the personal taste of an 18th century grammarian that has since become etc., etc...
Yes that's surely right! And very relevant to Scott's article in terms of status signifiers.
I mean, I think I have some pretty good syntactic arguments as to why coordinated accusative pronouns in subject position are #actually natural English and "Ashley and I are blathering in the comments" is not... but my psychological motivation is probably identical to that of the pedant who corrects people's grammar in the more traditional direction.
I'm less Strunk & White prescriptivist than I once was, but singular "data" in particular still really rustles my jimmies. I like your exploding galaxy brain approach due to metacontrarian bias though.
Are your jimmies also rustled by singular "media"? Social media is or are?
And then can we discuss that the obviously correct plural of octopus is octopodes?
No, it's octopice.
Why did spell-check not flag this stupid word I just made up?
Paul Fussell missed out on what is clearly the best term for high-proles: tradie, short for tradesman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradesman
Scott's yearning for an observer as sharp as Fussell for modern times (which I think I share, but maybe not lest I feel too seen, as I have by Scott's summaries of the yearly SSC survey) made me think about the article I read earlier today (randomly) on Jesse Singal's substack:
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/win-a-copy-of-a-brilliant-new-satire
Based on Jesse's gloss (and without having read it), this Leigh Stein might be the successor we're looking for.
You know, I think he is right that America is NOT a classless society. I might be oblivious to these details, but I did cringe when I saw the decor in Trump's family photos (massive gold colored lions etc).
If you read 1850s British literature, it is primarily about understanding what class is.
A friend and I (who often discuss this) concluded that it has nothing to do with education, wealth or even if you have geraniums instead of rhododendrons. Class has everything to do with the restraint you show in different areas of life. An upper class person is very reluctant to ask personal questions, for example. Trump's decor could also be considered a lack of restraint.
Regarding decor, there was a snub recounted by Alan Clark in his diaries:
"Michael Heseltine: "An arriviste, certainly, who can't shoot straight and in Jopling's damning phrase 'bought all his own furniture', but who at any rate seeks the cachet. All the nouves in the party think he is the real thing."
The "Jopling" here was Michael Jopling, former Chief Whip, but the phrase was attributed to Clark and re-cast as "The trouble with Michael is that he has had to buy all his own furniture".
From The Economist, explaining why this is so damning: "Being the sort of person who 'buys his own furniture', a remark that Alan Clark, a former minister and diarist once reported as directed at Michael Heseltine, a self-made Tory colleague, is still worthy of note in circles where most inherit it."
In the US, the generational division is as much or more pronounced than the one between the classes. If there is someone to blame for the generational split, I'd point my finger at advertises (entertainment, clothes styles, etc.) in the past and unis and media presently.
PS I only add that in the US, in contrast with the European class system, the division is neither financial nor inherent but cultural and to some degree geographical.
> H. sapiens prolensis, typical female and male
At the risk of showing a classical education, -ensis is a marker of geographical origin, so this name explicitly identifies Prole as the place from which proles come.
The word comes from Latin in the first place; why not "H. sapiens proletarius"?
Now this is the sort of reply I read the comments section for. More of this please.
There’s a lot to say about Class X but it might be necessary for me to read the book in order to say it right.
I was 9 when that was published and there was something beginning to gather force, it pulled from PBS viewers, people who grow their own vegetables, early adopters of computers, Whole Earth Catalog readers, and academia; sometimes it bought Laura Ashley fabrics, did not own soft puffy furniture, played Trivial Pursuit and derided MTV. Liked Sting, identified center-left or center-right politically, veterans underrepresented. Middle class behaviors but it fed into Silicon Valley, which then boomed and which brought some of them enough wealth and cachet that their tastes became - well known? Targets of aspiration? Having the correct ideas, the correct tastes - it was influenced by counterculture but not at all identical. It also coincided with explosion of media and tech, and so their particularities were all over TV. They went to Disney so they would know more about it than the proles; or they went five times, depending on their caste roots. Wore birkenstocks, vacationed to Asia and Africa (not Europe); They owned Volvos, bought hardcover books, played ultimate frisbee and popularized mountain biking. This is just the side I saw; portions of multiple castes went to form it. A common feature of them is thinking they are correct; they may be blind to the range of choices available to them and not understand that not everyone has all those options. Choosing all the “best” stuff. So for those who look back and say, doesn’t everyone do those things, the answer to that is, there was a sort of hard fork in the 1990s, some got on the X train but some who maybe could have, did not, for a variety of reasons.
X also professed great love for basketball in order to signal racial inclusivity; read the Harlem Renaissance, listened to Putumayo (but not Santana), liked Janet Jackson but not JLo. Their descendants are the Colbert fan base, health food store snobs, early EV adopters and... sure in their correctness... the academia side of wokeology. Pro-internationalist, pro-US economic roots of world peace, anti-war but not into the details; older now, NIMBY.
More and less than a class, maybe a wave that drew from several and broke over society. It had other forks. The techie ones passed through it like a fog and came out the other end.
Common feature, lack of appreciation of ambiguity.
OK, hasn't Scott written about this before? Anyone getting deja vu? Or maybe I read something similar somewhere else - all this stuff about status signalling and how people of a certain class will adopt the mannerisms of the class above them but they're seen as try-hard and the real high-class people don't even bother with it. Why does this sound familiar? Can anyone help?
The first part of "Right Is The New Left" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/) and "Staying Classy" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/30/staying-classy/)
Yep, I think that "Staying Classy" was what I was thinking of. Thank you much!
David Chapman posted something like this in miniature: https://vividness.live/buddhist-ethics-is-advertising#class
The lack of reference to either of them did confuse me.
maybe here: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/castes-of-united-states/
I was going to comment on the same thing. I'm especially surprised that Scott is surprised in which direction fashion trends travel as he wrote about it in depth in "Right is the New Left".
Fussell was something of a provocateur during his life, was he not? Hence "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb."
"I'm probably what the book considers middle-to-upper-middle class, but by nature I'm not a very classy person"
You don't think of yourself in a class-rrelated manner because, as you say later, "The upper-middle class has made it; they're fine".
And so upper-middle people aren't really aware of their class because it's not something they grew up seeing anyone around them worrying about it, or publicly thinking about it.
Yours, another person from an upper-middle background.
By "I'm not a very classy person" I don't intend some kind of deep commentary. I mean "I go out in sweatpants that are colored to look like jeans, because I can't be bothered to wear actual jeans".
Kind of funny that jeans can be considered classy now. Another point in favor of the trickle-up cultural appropriation dynamic.
Fussell would probably say you are only able to do that because of your secure class position. And that if you were lower class you'd have to pay more attention to your appearance
This book sounds hilarious, because coming from the 80s the references and attitudes are dated , but also because the English have been doing dissections of this sort of thing for decades - be it Nancy Mitford's appropriation of U and Non-U https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English, Betjeman's poem poking fun at the earnest middle-middle class social striver (see below), or "Keeping Up Appearances" where Hyacinth is indeed exactly the sort of person who *would* plant rhododendrons rather than gladioli because one is considered more "common" than the other. (My late father, a prole by this definition and "rural working class" by mine, loved that show and found it absolutely hilarious). I admit, I'd like to hear his opinion on "room for a pony", I bet he would have had one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjkFKY2pddc
How To Get On In Society by John Betjeman
Phone for the fish knives, Norman
As cook is a little unnerved;
You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes
And I must have things daintily served.
Are the requisites all in the toilet?
The frills round the cutlets can wait
Till the girl has replenished the cruets
And switched on the logs in the grate.
It's ever so close in the lounge dear,
But the vestibule's comfy for tea
And Howard is riding on horseback
So do come and take some with me
Now here is a fork for your pastries
And do use the couch for your feet;
I know that I wanted to ask you-
Is trifle sufficient for sweet?
Milk and then just as it comes dear?
I'm afraid the preserve's full of stones;
Beg pardon, I'm soiling the doileys
With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.
The profiles cartoon is just poking fun at the perennial "chinless wonder" view of the upper classes ("The term is derived from the characteristic recessive chin of some aristocrats, popularly thought to be caused by inbreeding and associated with limited intelligence") and the rest of it is mix of honesty - yes, there is a class system in the USA - and the usual sort of thing I'd expect in a coffee-table book like this (apologies if the late gentleman did intend it to be an academic study, but the extracts sound like they fall squarely into that particular genre of British middle-brow book like Lynne Truss' "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" - in that liminal space occupied by pop science/pop history books which aren't fluffy enough to be simply throwaway but not a rigorous study either).
Class conventions get muddled when historical lag happens. "Lavatory" is upper-class? But I'm working to lower middle class and I was taught that word. I pronounce "envelope" and "garage" in the French pronunciation because that's how I learned it from my Victorian-born grandmother. Country people in Ireland eat their dinner in the middle of the day - like 17th century royalty:
"Reflecting the typical custom of the 17th century, Louis XIV dined at noon, and had supper at 10 pm. But in Europe, dinner began to move later in the day during the 1700s, due to developments in work practices, lighting, financial status, and cultural changes. The fashionable hour for dinner continued to be incrementally postponed during the 18th century, to two and three in the afternoon, and in 1765 King George III dined at 4pm, though his infant sons had theirs with their governess at 2pm, leaving time to visit the queen as she dressed for dinner with the king. But in France Marie Antoinette, when still Dauphine of France in 1770, wrote that when at the Château de Choisy the court still dined at 2pm, with a supper after the theatre at around 10pm, before bed at 1 or 1.30am.
At the time of the First French Empire an English traveller to Paris remarked upon the "abominable habit of dining as late as seven in the evening". By about 1850 English middle-class dinners were around 5 or 6pm, allowing men to arrive back from work, but there was a continuing pressure for the hour to drift later, led by the elite who did not have to work set hours, and as commutes got longer as cities expanded. In the mid-19th century the issue was something of a social minefield, with a generational element. John Ruskin, once he married in 1848, dined at 6pm, which his parents thought "unhealthy". Mrs Gaskell dined between 4 and 5pm. The fictional Mr Pooter, a lower middle-class Londoner in 1888-89 and a diner at 5pm, was invited by his son to dine at 8pm, but "I said we did not pretend to be fashionable people, and would like the dinner earlier".
The satirical novel Living for Appearances (1855) by Henry Mayhew and his brother Augustus begins with the views of the hero on the matter. He dines at 7pm, and often complains of "the disgusting and tradesman-like custom of early dining", say at 2pm. The "Royal hour" he regards as 8pm, but he does not aspire to that. He tells people "Tell me when you dine, and I will tell you what you are"."
I love roses, but I also love fuchsia - a shrub so commonly planted around houses out the country that it's become semi-wild http://www.wildflowersofireland.net/plant_detail.php?id_flower=330 and is even used as a branding logo for West Cork tourism/food companies. We have a similar problem with rhododendron escaping into the wild but this is a more serious problem as it is madly invasive on bogland, woodland and hillsides. It looks lovely but it chokes out native species https://www.superfolk.com/stories/2019/5/30/why-it-matters-rhododendron-a-terri
So which class am I, or is it nearer the truth to say I have no class at all? 😀
I probably am a natural prole by inclination and nature, not alone nurture, as I drink Coca-Cola *because I like it*. Though I just ordered a selection box of posh crisps off Amazon - how posh are they? They will take 2-4 weeks to deliver, that's how posh they are!
The British housing estates names makes me laugh because this was exactly the same thing that went on in Ireland during the boom construction times, though it wasn't just for hoity-toity estates. There was one name, something like "Belbury Downs", that annoyed me because *we don't have downland in Ireland*. But the rule of thumb seemed to be "if it sounds like you could be living in Surrey, it'll sell".
Regarding Class X, isn't that just boho reheated? Bohemianism is an old tradition now, and add in trustafarians for the more modern angle. In Chesterton's time, they clustered around Bedford Park (going under the name "Saffron Park" in "The Man Who Was Thursday"), and I can do no better than quote from the opening of that novel:
"The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not “artists,” the whole was nevertheless artistic.
...More especially this attractive unreality fell upon it about nightfall, when the extravagant roofs were dark against the afterglow and the whole insane village seemed as separate as a drifting cloud. This again was more strongly true of the many nights of local festivity, when the little gardens were often illuminated, and the big Chinese lanterns glowed in the dwarfish trees like some fierce and monstrous fruit."
I rather fear Class X would today be denounced as "gentrifiers".
Class is a strange beast, and the signifiers are subtle but potent. When BBC "Sherlock" was first broadcast, I amused myself by assigning probable schools to Inspector Lestrade, Dr. Watson and Holmes as follows - "Comprehensive, grammar school, public school" and I felt vindicated when a screenshot of Watson's CV for his job application revealed he had indeed attended a grammar school. The subtle social and economic scaling comes through even if you're not deliberately looking.
I think you’re right about “gentrifiers.” There is a neoliberal streak through this Class X phenomenon.
Hey, I've seen "Keeping up Appearances" too! Because here in America, watching the BBC is a class marker. What Hyacinth attempts, my mother has actually accomplished.
he spelled Featherstonhaugh wrong. I lost all respect... (no, I didn't but I was compelled to comment) the curious on this subject may enjoy "Watching the English" which is an interesting anthropogist does her own country sort of a book. I am certainly middle-middle, but in a nerdy/techy # way that makes my "look at my excellent stuff" game look odd to some, but that's not to say I'm not at it.
That was a fun read, thanks.
For a recent-ish (and more normative) perspective on taste and behavior from a class perspective, I found this (concerning Yale) thought provoking:
https://palladiummag.com/2019/08/05/the-real-problem-at-yale-is-not-free-speech/
tl;dr upper class signals have fallen out of fashion because nobody wants the responsibility of being an elite.
Huh, that's an interesting headline and summary.
I echo the sentiment that we need an updated version of this book - notable shifts:
* relationship to technology (Whoop seems to be taking a higher class position than the Apple Watch, likely because lack of screen, fitbit seems to be prole because android)
* platforms as signaling (Clubhouse seems middle-middle for the FOMO anxiety but could quickly shift classes as it grows. Substack is...?)
* travel (internet broke the Class X monopoly on exploration, with instagram providing middle-middle signal boosts, but now how you finance travel, how long you travel, and what you pack carries a lot of signal)
Still seems valid: dog breeds, dog names, choice of housing and landscaping
My cat is named after a Roman emperor, which probably says something about me.
Probably...did you name him Nero?
Trajan, right? Gotta be Trajan.
Depends exactly how obscure your emperor is.
Lower middle class emperor cat names: Nero, Augustus, Marcus Aurelius, Claudius
Middle middle class emperor cat names: Diocletian, Constantine, Trajan, Commodus
Upper middle class emperor cat names: Pertinax, Geta, Pupenius
Can this principle be applied to European Royalty as well?
So the "big names" and self-help emperors, the religious and mad, and the "smart ones"? (based on this pic, don't @ me https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2076740-wojak)
Knowing cats, Caligula?
Philip the Arab?
The class distinction in garden flowers is not as arbitrary as Scott makes it sound. The "prole" flowers are all annuals - exotic tropical flowers that have to be replanted every year in most of the US because they can't survive freezing temperatures. They are the Caribbean cruise of garden flowers. They are also cheaper than perennials in the short run but have to be replaced every year. Perennials, the upper-class flowers, are theoretically cheaper in the long run because they keep coming back year after year, but you only save money if you plant them in the right conditions, take good care of them, and stay in the same house long enough to reap the rewards. (Basically, perennials save money in the same way that a "timeless" wardrobe of quality pieces saves money.)
The fashion in upscale gardens has almost completely changed since the book was written. Low-maintenance is in, which the upper classes achieve through sleek minimalist landscaping and the lower classes achieve by not maintaining their yards.
In _Second Nature_, Michael Pollan does a class/regional analysis of seed catalogues.
From memory: Upper class New England-- blue and white flowers, photographed just before they're fully open.
Upper class southern-- very bright colored flowers, photographed a little after full bloom. The age of the variety is a big selling point. I wish I could remember what the selling point for New England was.
Lower middle class, possibly middle class-- Burpee. Novelty is a selling point. A cucumber which produces slices big enough to cover a hamburger is a big deal. This is the company which had a big contest to create a white marigold.
Weird: a company with a mission that I can't remember. Something idealistic but unusual.
Weird: something like Baker Creek, perhaps? Their stated goal is to preserve and supply all manner of heirloom varieties. Finding an almost-lost old variety to reintroduce is a big deal, especially if they had to travel overseas to find it.
The excerpt at amazon doesn't make it clear, but it might be Seeds Blum or J.L. Hudson, and they do seem to have something to do with biodiversity.
The part about the flowers made me laugh because my grandfather had intense opinions about which flowers were “common” and thus undesirable. He was a first-generation American, and on what he earned as a traveling salesman my grandparents could barely keep the lights on for a good chunk of their lives. They slept on a pull-out sofa for 25 years, but he’d be damned before he put carnations on HIS buffet table.
In more boreal climates, you also got the tradition of orangeries, where the upper class could signal wealth by building expensive greenhouses for mediterranean flora. (between improvments in glassmaking, looser regulation on conservatories and refrigerated ships full of exotic fruit, this doesn't seem to be a thing any more)
Yes! For example, this passage in Raymond Chandler's "The High Window," where annual flowers are used as part of his depiction of a nouveau riche household:
He went along the brick path under the tunnel of roses and through a white gate at the end. Beyond was a walled-in garden containing <b>flowerbeds crammed with showy annuals</b>, a badminton court, a nice stretch of greensward, and a small tiled pool glittering angrily in the sun. Beside the pool there was a flagged space set with blue and white garden furniture, low tables with composition tops, reclining chairs with footrests and enormous cushions, and over all a blue and white umbrella as big as a small tent.
A long-limbed languorous type of showgirl blond lay at her ease in one of the chairs, with her feet raised on a padded rest and a tall misted glass at her elbow, near a silver ice bucket and a Scotch bottle. She looked at us lazily as we came over the grass. From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away. Her mouth was too wide, her eyes were too blue, her makeup was too vivid, the thin arch of her eyebrows was almost fantastic in its curve and spread, and the mascara was so thick on her eyelashes that they looked like miniature iron railings.
>This puts the recent rise in wealth inequality in a new and starker light than I'd thought about much before.
The Economist ran some articles a couple years ago which were skeptical of the "rising inequality" thesis:
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/11/28/economists-are-rethinking-the-numbers-on-inequality
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/11/28/inequality-could-be-lower-than-you-think
(Could be they just wanted to flatter their wealthy readers)
>I would kill for somebody as keen-eyed and trustworthy as Fussell writing about the 2021 class system.
Maybe try this piece by Rob Henderson: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/10/opinion/sunday/television-culture.html
I think your theory corresponds to the omnivorousness hypothesis in cultural sociology. What sets the upper class people apart today is that they consume ALL cultural products. The most high brow thing you could say nowadays is something like "The harmonies in this new Kanye West album are eerly reminiscent of Scriabines's Étude in D-sharp minor, don't you think?".
It would be interesting if someone could sum up some relevant ideas from Bourdieu's Distinction here, which is kind of the scientific version of Fussell's book. Habitus, structural homologies, cultural and symbolic capital etc.
Highbrow is quite different from upper class, and that sort of statement is one I would expect from Fussell's Class X/the upper middle class counterculture, not the upper class.
You could say the theory is that the upper middle class counterculture has replaced upper class culture yes. There's a whole empirical debate about this, for example : https://hal-sciencespo.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01053502/document
On the subject of a class X that were fully counterculture, until the counterculture started to win, there's the great lyrics of "The Rebel" by Allan Sherman:
"Soon everyone was saying "heck"
They said it everywhere.
And the Rebel said to Rhonda,
"This is terribly unfair.
Being hip is getting middle class,
Let's you and I be square."
And they did, they squared it up.
Rhonda got a haircut,
The Rebel shaved his beard.
They were married and had children,
Which they subsequently reared.
They moved out to the suburbs
And they really disappeared.
Wow, did they conform!"
When I first started reading this my mind went straight to wealth, as I'm sure many others have, and I kind of scoffed at the idea. I know many very wealthy people who don't fit into the typical class structure, but the more I read the more I see his argument in a 1950s style way (some examples given are silly though). The only class signaling I see now seems to be trying to signal you aren't some out of touch upper class individual, but just another normal person. I can't help but wonder what affect the internet has had, where in many places class isn't obvious. Though you can argue Twitter has it's own class system of the upper verified class and the dirty unwashed unverified masses. Of course my views are probably that of some prole, seeing as how my hometown is Tampa, and therefore can't be trusted. But hey, my team won the Superbowl AND the Stanley Cup, in your face Paul Fussell.
I feel like the poor class teaches us how to enjoy the moment and cope with impossible circumstances. The working class teaches us to be rugged and capable and enjoy straightforward things. The middle class teaches us that you can carefully build up wealth over time.
What I really want to understand is what the upper class has figured out. Supposedly it's how to manage intergenerational wealth, knowing how to use the real levers of power, staying out of the limelight, etc. But I suspect it's much more nuanced than that, and nobody can ever tell me where to learn more. Like, I've heard stories about young princelings being expected to learn how to get their horses to jump over obstacles, as a way to teach leadership. Which makes me think there are deliberate traditions I could be learning from.
If I had to guess (and I'm extremely unqualified to) what the upper class has figured out is Epicureanism. How to preserve their wealth and enjoy life without ruining you life. I didn't grow up with money, so when I imagine having millions and millions of dollars I imagine building that giant, crazy mansion full of all the things I always wanted: which is a great way to lose millions and probably not be much happier in the end. Money is a great help, but it can be toxic as well. The successful upper class members are likely those who have learned how to live a life of monied leisure without falling into destructive hedonism or succumbing to nihilistic ennui.
I think it's about identity.
At each stage you describe, your identity is defined by certain things. Where you live. What school you attend. What you do for work. Where you do it at. What your hobbies are. I suspect but being somewhere in the middle-middle-to-upper-middle-ish space cannot prove that the upper class lesson is to be able to disassociate their sense of identity from the stuff the plebs rely on.
And you can't just decide that you're going to do it differently either. Seriously. Try going 10 minutes at a party where you don't know many people without the topic of your occupation or hobbies coming up. You'll find out what class you're enmeshed in real quick, and it is a total social faux-pas to duck the question if you decide that's not how you roll.
Fascinating. Is that just for signalling purposes or is there some other utility to not having hobbies?
It's not about having hobbies, it's about not being defined by them. Conspicuously showing your hobbies and interests is a prole/middle thing. I would also toss being defined by relationships in there too. Uppers *have* those things, middles and proles *are* those things, and lowers don't have/aren't.
Did not mean to imply lowers did not have relationships, but the have/are distinction is still the relevant thing.
That's an amusingly Keganesque way to put it.
Historically, the primary justification (in response to the Enlightenment and the rise of liberalism) for hereditary aristocracy and privilege and so on (other than being ordained by God, which we'll leave to one side) was that they alone had the breeding, wealth, and leisure to devote themselves to politics and other public services. Facially, this makes a kind of sense. In a complex society, it requires more than mere hobbyists and amateurs to instantiate an effective government with all its necessary accoutrements. Those who don't have to work for a living, and who aren't beholden to anyone for their next meal (or their next 30,000 meals), should have the ability take the time to learn the intricacies and become effective leaders who don't have a reason to suck up, flatter, or lie, and who aren't vulnerable to corruption due to their wealth.
And as to 'breeding' (beyond its eugenic connotations, which were often hilariously contradicted by European aristos' predisposition to things like hemophilia), I think they mean growing up in households where many of the (male) members had been in such vocations and being able to learn from their experience and example.
As to how well this has worked in practice, not great by any stretch of the imagination. But it's not crazy, and certain exemplars of the type really did try to live up to these kinds of expectations. But even the best had their vices. Take George Washington. He agreed to command the Continental Army for no salary as long as his expenses were covered. What a bro, right? Wrong. At the end of the war, he presented Congress with a bill of expenses of over a quarter million dollars (or something to that effect; I'm not positive on the number), a titanic sum at the time, considerably more than he'd have earned on even a generous salary, and which included all the luxuries he thought were surely 'his due.' As Stannis Baratheon says, a good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad the good.
Regardless, this is by far the best justification I can think of for the 'upper' class. And it's completely gone today. Most governments today are run by amateurs or by career civil servants whose salary is their daily bread. Or worse, by revolving-door apparatchiks. There are only something like 50 hereditary peers (the seats rotate among the surviving noble houses, or something) left in the British House of Lords, which has something like 800 members and is the most irrelevant legislative house in the western world. All remaining European monarchies are, at best, a kind of theme park (Elizabeth II), or at worse even less relevant and purely parasitic (looking at you Harald V of Norway). They don't even do philanthropy anymore. That's the noveau billions.
This class serves no useful function whatsoever. If they have anything to teach us, it may be how to make yourself irrelevant and despised. We can use those lessons and do the opposite, maybe?
Jokes aside, what does this mean? We need to exterminate this class by jacking up estate taxes to 100% on fortunes larger than, say, $5 million. I believe that, in the USA, the estate tax is minimal and is inapplicable to all but the largest fortunes.
"This class serves no useful function whatsoever."
Who ever said it had to? Just because something doesn't serve a function doesn't mean it needs to be destroyed. Society exists for people, not people for society.
I think serving some kind of useful function is implicit in the social contract. To be part of society, you must contribute to it. The 'upper' class does not. In fact, it doesn't even fulfill the function that it designed for itself.
Also, the 'functionless' things that we typically tolerate at least generate some kind of utility, no matter how marginal. Take Hummel figurines. Unquestionably functionless, they nevertheless persist because some people enjoy them. Someone makes them and someone buys them. That's enough for me, and it's more than I can say for the 'upper' class.
I might be being hyperbolic here, but I really do fail to see what the 'upper' class can do that the 'upper middle' can't. Your example, above, about epicureanism is unpersuasive.
My family are upper middle. I'm a lawyer, and I earn a lot of money. I managed to buy a single-family home with no student loan debt at age 29. I own nice things, but not ostentatious things, and typically only one of each (Just last night I chastised myself for wanting to buy another moderately high-end bluetooth speaker (JBL) so I wouldn't have to schlep it up and down three flights of stairs and/or inevitably forget it in my office or kitchen when I want to listen to audiobooks at bedtime and then run back down and up the stairs). I have no other debt (other than my mortgage and credit cards I keep below $1000 balance to pay every month to pad my credit score). I am far from being eaten alive by my wealth, which grows appreciably every day. A ton of that has to do with, yes, inherited privilege, but I had that because my parents (again, themselves upper-middle) so embodied the qualities you ascribe as being the area in which the 'upper' at least have a comparative advantage that it was almost trivial for me (with a side of hard work and two jobbing degrees from mid-tier schools) to achieve this.
"Society exists for people, not people for society." A platitude. Society and people are in a mutual relationship. What happens to one affects the other, and no one can have the relationship all their own way. The question of which precedes the other, like labor and capital, might be a fun way to dunk or score points, but is meaningless.
And you're overselling what I mean by 'exterminated.' Firstly (and using the oversold meaning of 'exterminated'), if all we have to do to destroy a class completely is pull on one pretty esoteric tax lever, that's a pathetically weak and despicable class. Second, and to emphasize, I'm talking about concentration camps or eating them. I just think society should tell them to use it or lose it. We definitely need the revenue.
"I think serving some kind of useful function is implicit in the social contract. To be part of society, you must contribute to it."
I think this is the source of our disagreement. What do you think about the homeless, or criminals? Are they not members of society?
I just don't think that not contributing to society is a problem that society has a right to "correct." What's more, if you are correct and in order to be a part of society you have to contribute to it, and the upper class contributes nothing, then obviously the upper class is not part of society. If they are not part of society, then what right does society have to do anything to them?
Bruh. Please stop being so pedantic. Regardless, I agree with your actual point. Society has no right to 'correct' a lack of participation. Society (or rather the people) does have the right to make policy that encourages participation. So for instance, let's say the Astor-Cabot-Molluscs are facing a $100 million estate tax bill when ol' George Henry VII dies. What can they do? They could knuckle under and let the next generation go on welfare. Or, they could liquidate assets to generate that sum and then put it to a productive use. They might donate a grand old house to the state government to be maintained as a museum and receive a nice tax break in exchange, or even a life estate and they could keep living in part of it. They might sell it to some grasper. Then they invest whatever cash they've raised by being confronted with said tax bill and become even richer than before, and all their money is in productive, diversified portfolios and safe from inheritance taxation. I'm not saying this is necessarily how it would go. I'm saying that this is a legitimate policy end (putting money to work and avoiding hereditary aristocracy) that the people and their representatives can pursue, including by (you might say) excessive estate taxes.
As criminals and the homeless, you're right (and also prove too much) that society isn't free to straightforwardly control the boundaries. So for rich people, we can't keep them out (because they still have money, and money is the ticket), even if they don't contribute. As to your jab about them 'not being part of society,' that's hogwash and you know it. There's another comment somewhere on here about members of that class (and perhaps specifically those with the storied surnames like Astor) having a handful of reserved seats on the boards of old-school cultural institutions for the sake of continuity, while billionaires fill out the rest of the seats. That's membership in society.
For the homeless and criminals, society can't chuck them out just because they don't contribute. For criminals, I'm sure you've heard the phrase 'paid their debt to society.' Criminal penalties are a means by which we incentivize criminals to become productive members of society, and the punishments are supposed to rehabilitate them. They largely don't, and we need a better way of doing this, but that is the goal. So criminals are unquestionably part of society, and will remain.
For the homeless, there are lots of reasons one might be homeless, but usually the reasons are more than just 'they're lazy.' Certainly, we as a society are not prepared to reach that conclusion. On humane grounds, then, they remain. There are no humane grounds on which to tolerate unproductive rich people.
"As to your jab about them 'not being part of society,' that's hogwash and you know it."
I do know it. You're the one who proposed that those who do not contribute to society are not part of it. That seemed wrong to me, which is why I pointed out the contradiction. I'm glad you agree. People are part of society regardless of whether they contribute to it: in other words, society does not have membership dues. Just as we do not choose the society we are born into, society does not choose the members that make it up. At least, big S society. Private societies can do as they like.
"Criminal penalties are a means by which we incentivize criminals to become productive members of society, and the punishments are supposed to rehabilitate them."
I disagree. Criminal penalties are the means by which we carry out justice (that is, giving people what they deserve). If you steal someone's property, or wound them, or rape them, then you deserve punishment: justice demands it. We try to structure the punishments so that they will deter further crime, and potentially rehabilitate, but deterrence and rehabilitation isn't the purpose of criminal penalties. If it was then we could accomplish those goals in much more effective ways: for example, summary execution without trial of all thieves would be an extremely effective deterrence: we don't do that because it would be unjust (ie, the punishment is far more harsh then what the crime deserves).
(This is all a bit of a tangent, but the deterrence and rehabilitation theory of punishment is a pet peeve of mine.)
"For the homeless, there are lots of reasons one might be homeless, but usually the reasons are more than just 'they're lazy.' Certainly, we as a society are not prepared to reach that conclusion. On humane grounds, then, they remain. There are no humane grounds on which to tolerate unproductive rich people."
So under your theory society has the right to find ways to force people to contribute, but we do not force the homeless to contribute because there are good reasons that they do not contribute. Yet are there not good reasons why the unproductive rich do not contribute? It's certainty not because they are lazy: it's because they are rich. And they certainly contribute far more to society than a homeless person simply through employment of others (I assume many are involved in charities and patronizing the arts, but even if they don't they certainly invest, which is a contribution in itself). I don't see any real difference between your attitude towards the homeless and the upper class except that you think the homeless have an excuse for idleness and the upper class doesn't. You remind me of a manager who would remind all the employees "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean! Everybody should always be working!" Even if there was nothing to do, we had to at least look busy or face a tongue lashing. That's reasonable enough in an employee-employer relationship where you are being paid to perform work, but I don't see how it applies to society as a whole. Who gave anyone the right to be a societal middle manager and yell at anyone who wasn't keeping busy? Why does someone need a permission slip from society to be idle?
"Jokes aside, what does this mean? We need to exterminate this class by jacking up estate taxes to 100% on fortunes larger than, say, $5 million. I believe that, in the USA, the estate tax is minimal and is inapplicable to all but the largest fortunes."
So successful family companies are just forbidden now? Or are you thinking solely of financier types here?
A local widget factory is pretty certainly over $5mil in value but a productive member of society.
Second, if that was put into place, you can bet your ass the rich people would come up with schemes to dodge it - money going abroad, of course, but also things like setting up trusts, selling them to a manager with strings attached but in a way the manager makes profit, etc.
You'd just make everything a stupidly opaque hell to manage and figure out who owns what, even moreso than today.
Please educate yourself on the estate tax. It in no way 'forbids' anything. It just applies an incentive to a particular kind of transfer (via inheritance). I am in favor of all those dodges. They achieve the same result: the money doesn't sit, it works.
We already live in a stupidly opaque hell of property ownership, and we all seem to get along just fine. The effect on that of tuning one policy lever is going to be minimal no matter what.
Building a local widget factory and passing it to the next generation to run would seem pretty forbidden unless you jumped through a whole bunch of hoops to achieve the same end state and essentially create more jobs for parasitic financial advisers who exist only due to government inconvenience. Set up a corner store, be amazing at your job, expand, oops, better be careful to be too successful lest you run into Eöl tax. And we're still just talking ordinary merchants running a shop. Does buying physical things, putting them on shelves for people to find and meet their needs with cease to be a contribution to society past a certain point? If it stays a corner store, it may be able to be passed on from father to son,
It'd basically eliminate non-crooked, productive people's ability to pass on what they have if they were too successful, and a wealth transfer from crooked uppers to the CMC, and specifically crooked-ish parts of it.
Basically, I can understand the impulse that there are people who inherit a pile of money and smoke weed all day, but there's also people whose wealth is bound up in real enterprises doing concrete things that they take part in. And your tax basically says "evade this or goodbye".
What's the qualitative difference between someone inheriting $4mil and smoking weed all day and someone inheriting a hardware store and selling people hammers?
> They don't even do philanthropy anymore. That's the noveau billions.
The British royal family still does, along side various government functions. Queen Elizabeth is known to be a very effective diplomat, but sparingly deployed. She helped get us the olympics for example.
They do philanthropy with money that belongs to the British people. And how did the Olympics really work out for London? My impression was that it wasn't quite as bad as it could have been, but there's still a bunch of stadia in the city that are totally disused, crumbling, and blighting the city. If I'm wrong about that second one, please do correct me. Regardless, excuse me if I don't bow and scrape.
The Olympics were a great showcase for the nation with a spectacular opening ceremony and a huge haul of medals. So it worked out great in my book. Also I'm not sure the success/failures of the stadiums has any relevance on the Queen's skills as a diplomat.
Also the Queen has her own money. There's an odd arrangement where the government gets the profits from her estates and gives her money that dates back to a king going bankrupt; but the government is profiting from that exchange. You'd have to go back generations to say it's the British people's money, I'm not sure how far back but I wouldn't be surprised if it's far enough that the king was directly spending that money to run the government.
It is absolutely relevant to her skills as a diplomat. If she's using those skills to bring things to the UK that are on net detrimental to the nation, that's pretty poor judgment and deployment of those skills. Fortunately, there's a growing consensus that the Olympics are extremely detrimental to the cities that it parasitizes every two years, and I'm heartened to see many cities slamming the door in the IOC's face. The Olympics requires huge facilities to be built and then never used again (despite the normal promises that they will be) and then almost all the new tourism dollars go right into the pockets of the IOC. As I said, I don't think it was as bad in London as it might have been, but I believe it was still pretty bad. Hopefully, we'll eventually get a permanent location (or a few), and stop this nonsense.
I'm happy to go back as far as you want. Let's crack open the Domesday Book, when William stole all the land in England from its native inhabitants and their indigenous nobility and handed it back out to his cronies, and then massacred the ones who resisted, noble or common.
I understand your opinion, but I'm not ever going to be convinced that any 'royal' has 'their own money.' I'm familiar with the arrangement you describe, and all I can say is that it exists at the sufferance of Parliament and the people. The best argument that can be made is that it (the arrangement) is ratification by Parliament of past abuses, thefts, and extractions. The government may be 'profiting,' but that is firstly beside the point and not entirely true. Some portion of those profits go back to the Queen and her family, which need not be the case.
> It is absolutely relevant to her skills as a diplomat. If she's using those skills to bring things to the UK that are on net detrimental to the nation, that's pretty poor judgment and deployment of those skills.
That's only true if she picks where to deploy her skills. On the other hand if the government decides to ask the Queen to speak to the Olympics committee it's on the politicians if the Olympics is a bad idea; and the Queen is simply judged on whether she succeeded in wowing the committee.
> I'm happy to go back as far as you want. Let's crack open the Domesday Book, when William stole all the land in England from its native inhabitants and their indigenous nobility and handed it back out to his cronies, and then massacred the ones who resisted, noble or common.
Why stop there? Many of the Anglo-Saxons that William stole his land from in turn stole it from the native Celtic Britons in the 5th century? And how many of *those* Britons got their wealth because of Roman imperialism?
And why start there. How many of the ordinary British citizens who'd get money back from redistributing the Queen's wealth owe money to people from the Empire? (And that includes non-white citizens, there's plenty of money to be made working for the British and richer people find it easier to immigrate). Surely we should look at recent history before medieval history.
Redistributing the Queen's money is not a consistent principle about writing past wrongs, but starting with a conclusion of disliking the monarchy then working backwards.
My favorite explanation for why "low class" signals become high class over time is twofold: it's the ultimate expression of having nothing to prove, but at the same time is a conscious effort to prove you're not the n-1 class; as middle class people try to copy high class things, high class people look for new signals. With three groups it's a stable cycle, because the high class can always choose to pick up low class signals and know the middle wouldn't dare for fear of someone being confused. Hence athleisure and Silicon Valley faux-casual wear.
For all that, though, I'm really not sure about the starting claim that this represents a more entrenched or odious class system than European nations have (or had when foundational American thinkers were thinking). If the book actually makes that argument, it did not make it into the review.
There also used to be a lot of non-class-based barriers bundled up with class, which you can see in the rise and slow fall of exclusively minority fraternities and country clubs. Not just visible minorities like skin color, but also minorities like Jews and Catholics. These minority-exclusive clubs only existed because minorities weren't allowed in the majority equivalents, but as those barriers came down now very few are left. So Fussel may say that those differences don't show, but someone people figured out how to send and receive those signals anyway.
The word you may be looking for here is "countersignaling".
As in https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
Hahahaha it’s a small intellectual world!
This seems like the sort of topic that we could talk about forever in a non-rigorous way and never get anywhere due to its nebulosity. What would it mean to make progress at understanding class, and what could we do with that knowledge?
There's an outstanding and very entertaining documentary about the same questions: How America is stratified into classes, the taste preferences and attitudes that signal one's class status, and what Americans of different classes think about the class system and their place in it. It's called "People Like Us: Social Class in America." Produced in 2001, it also feels dated, but it's mid-way between Fussell's observations and our own time. It's available in its entirety on Kanopy, and in pieces on YouTube.
Conjecture: the middle-middle and upper classes are mostly defined negatively (what you are not) and the prole and upper positively (what you are).
Prole: we're Packers fans. We're a union family. We're baptists.
Middle-middle: we don't do that in this household. We're not like those people. We can't let anybody see/know about X. Have to keep up appearances, unlike those losers.
Upper-middle: we're doctors/lawyers/high-status profession-havers. We're team Harvard/Yale/Stanford.
Upper: we're not anything, because that would imply we have something to prove, and we don't. But we definitely aren't those nouveau riche who have something to prove.
You forgot the lower middle AKA "upper proles" in Alex Danco's phrasing. Those ones has to be slightly different from prole-proles.
An anecdote illustrates the Upper-Upper mentality better than anything: when Rockefeller Center was built, Nelson Rockefeller (IIRC) was showing off the family office to his dad John Jr. At the end, he exclaimed "Pretty impressive, huh?", too which his father replied: "Son, who are we trying to impress?"
I am continuously amazed to learn how different America was just 40-50 years ago. I would read someone just recounting everything has changed, in terms of culture, norms, etc.
I remember reading a story somewhere about how at some tech-savvy place (MIT?) in a more traditional time (the 50s to 70s) there was one nerdy guy who just never dressed up the way everyone else did, and wore a beard, and that was a big deal. Now it's unthinkable for it not to be normal to dress how you want!
As a random anecdote:
> They are weirdly obsessed with cowboys
I can confirm that this was a thing. I've met them. Some of my friends' fathers are cowboy-people, with giant collections of cowboy boots and hats and the like. These are otherwise suburban family people (a doctor, in the case I'm thinking of) in a non-remotely-western part of the country. It was some expression of culture that is completely alien to us now but has held on in its adherents. It's so.. _weird_.
Makes you wonder what of our generation will seem so out of place in 30 years.
>I can confirm that this was a thing. I've met them. Some of my friends' fathers are cowboy-people, with giant collections of cowboy boots and hats and the like. These are otherwise suburban family people (a doctor, in the case I'm thinking of) in a non-remotely-western part of the country. It was some expression of culture that is completely alien to us now but has held on in its adherents. It's so.. _weird_.
>Makes you wonder what of our generation will seem so out of place in 30 years.
Might I suggest possibly that the middle-middle class version of this is an obsession with the culture of the urban black ghetto? And for much the same reasons (an ultra-romanticised admiration for a culture which seems much freer than their own?)
>A friend urges me to think of these not as "rich/successful people" vs. "poor/unsuccessful people", but as three different ladders on which one can rise or fall. The most successful proles are lumber barons or pro athletes or reality TV stars. These people are much richer and more powerful than, say, a schoolteacher, but they’re still proles, and the schoolteacher is still middle class. Likewise, a very successful middle class person might become a professor or a Senator or Jeff Bezos, but this doesn't make them even a bit upper class.
I agree this sounds like a helpful model (it's very similar to your "tribes" model), but doesn't it kind of ruin the book's whole thesis if there are multiple equally-valid ways to signal your classiness depending on which peer group you hang out with, and class isn't actually related to socioeconomic status in a useful way?
Like, I have one friend who is a very stereotypical jock. Unironically likes football, works out, invited me out to grill and have a few beers, talks casually about how hot he finds various women, etc. But he's also a computer science major, went to the same college as me, ended up in a similar upper-middle-class career. Would Fussel really categorize him as a "prole"?
I feel like "class" ought to mean more than "stuff a group likes" - we wouldn't consider white people to be a class even though "stuff white people like" has become a meme. We wouldn't consider rationalists to be a class even though you could probably come up with some eerily specific cultural markers to describe them, like "enjoys Harry Potter fanfiction."
However, it's interesting that in 1983 these classes were fairly universal, enough that Fussel could say "obviously the CEO is going to have a teakwood desk and his subordinates will have mahogany," rather than some companies being traditional mahogany-desk places and others being full of geeks whose desks have computer gadgets and anime figurines.
The titular White People of the blog (and books) are very much a culture (the author even points out that they can be of any race). And they seem to hew pretty closely to Class X. For example dressing at all times as though they might suddenly have to go hiking. The author also refers to “the wrong kind of white people” as roughly the High Proles described here. The blog was definitely tongue in cheek but honestly opened my eyes a bit that I do belong to a class/culture and also that it feels kind of bad to be stereotyped (before I had realized that it was written self-deprecatingly I was honestly a little offended by it).
I'm middle middle (and white), and my reaction to that blog was "who are these people?"
> doesn't it kind of ruin the book's whole thesis if there are multiple equally-valid ways to signal your classiness depending on which peer group you hang out with
Where do you get the notion that the ways are equally valid? The whole point is that, from the perspective of the other classes, success on one ladder isn't valid or admirable, it's tacky, pitiful, or empty.
Because that's equally true for all three ladders. There's no particular reason to prefer success on one ladder to another - being a Rockefeller doesn't seem better than being a Bezos or a Trump, they're just sitting on top of a different ladder.
Fussell actually denies the existence of a lower-middle class. His system is this (my glosses):
top out-of-sight: don't bother showing off
upper: inherited wealth, like to show off
upper-middle: educated professionals
middle: salarymen
high prole: independent craftsmen etc.
mid prole: factory workers, bus drivers, operators of stuff
low prole: seasonal farmworkers etc.
destitute: homeless
bottom out-of-sight: incarcerated, institutionalised
You're right; I'm not sure how I screwed that up. Fixed.
Factory workers! In what factories‽ There aren't any more factories.
How about nursing aide, childcare worker, or a grueling job at an Amazon warehouse shipping goods you can never afford to people who would never want to meet you.
The book was written in 1983.
There are 11.8 million manufacturing workers in the US, as of 2018.
Even a small city like the one I hail from still has 200+ manufacturing operations as of now. The death of manufacturing in the US has been greatly overstated. The death of union manufacturing and high employment manufacturing is the reality - it's given way to non-union shops for overseas companies (for instance, Toyota), and many manufacturing operations of varying sizes that employ relatively few people (from large factories run by a handful of technicians, to small workshops that employ a handful of very skilled craftsman making high-end boutique devices). We've shipped away anything that's low skill that can't be automated.
Is this Church's Three Ladders again?
Mildly O/T: Paul's son Sam Fussell wrote the criminally underappreciated _Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder_, which I suspect at least a few regular AST readers will enjoy.
yes indeed--a terrific book.
(I propose using the sum of squares here.)
"He says you can measure the unclassiness of a place in number of bowling alleys per capita, number of megachurches per capita, or (perhaps), some kind of joint bowling alleys plus megachurches index."
FWIW, I grew up as a prole in a prole family, entered college in 1980, and from then until 1990 or so -- right around the time of Fussell's analysis -- transitioned to upper middle. Fussell's analysis rings very true. My movement was semi-conscious. I made some changes intentionally but for most did not realize that my taste or behavior changed until after the fact. I do remember when I realized that artificial fabrics were not approved of by the right people and finding that annoying and stupid, because they were just useful, but I went along. Then there was a Cheers episode in 1988 in which lower-middle class character Norm had a secret and surprising talent for interior design, which itself plays on this idea in full, and he made a contemptuous remark about glass and chrome furniture, which embarrassed me because I owned some.
I don't know how this experience plays into Fussell's theory. I note that as I've gotten older, and more independent both socially and economically, I have fully re-embraced many of the value-type markers of my prole background: I'm very much an outlier among my current peers in being more conservative in faith, cultural norms, and politics. OTOH, I know several people, mostly from my high school, who made a similar journey and during the same period, and as best as I can judge they have not had a similar turn back on value type issues, or any markers that I am aware of. So nothing is predetermined.
Again, not sure what if anything this tends to prove or if it sheds any light, but thought it worth sharing on the chance it could help someone understand better.
Also, that most likely William Buckley on the left and definitely Ronald Reagan on the right.
Do you think that the values of your upbringing are morally superior to upper-middle class progressivism? I'm curious.
That's kind of inherent to one's choice of values, no? I suppose the upper middle thing to do is to deny that one set of values is better than another, but I don't think most of them believe it. I think they believe it is polite rather than true, which is, in effect, elevating that value above the others.
Also, to be clear, I'm understanding you to mean "value" related to the faith and cultural norms I mentioned, not more generally. Also I should mention that though I would consider myself an edge case in terms of someone who is upper middle on the cultural values scale, I wouldn't say I'm fully prole either. That's a detailed discussion we don't need, but I'm somewhere between the two camps, and yes, I'm picking particular value sets I believe are better because that's the only way that makes sense to me.
You know what Class X is, right? The class that's not a class? That's Fussell's Paradox.
It's the tribe whose outgroup is all tribes that aren't their own outgroups.
The X Class is also the name that Mercedes-Benz gives to its pickup trucks, which is about as class-confused as you can get.
I note that the X Class is not sold in the United States, where perhaps the class confusion around a Mercedes pickup would be too much to bear.
I must have one! Can I get it with a gun rack?
I've only just started reading, I'm up to the lists of things like flowers. And I wanted to quickly note that there's lots of similar content in Watching the English: the hidden rules of English behaviour Kate Fox; which isn't specifically about class but does cover it. (IIRC she explicitly says it's so all compassing that she'll address class in every section rather than it's own section).
It's been ages since I read it, but I remember she talks about how class has different gardens (so a dead match for flowers), cars, home layouts. One I distinctly remember was that (was it upper class, or upper middle) always put things like the kids sports medals in the downstairs toilet because:
1) It signals humility, we put the medals in the toilet of all places.
2) Where are guests going to sit down with no one to talk to and nothing to do but look at what's on the wall?
Displaying your kids' sports medals _anywhere_ seems fairly lower-middle-class to me. If my kids win any medals they're welcome to put them on display in their own bedrooms.
She's not talking about kids sports medals. She's talking about serious awards like a BAFTA (the British equivalent of an Oscar) or the like:
"The Brag-wall Rule
Another helpful class-indicator is the siting of what Americans would call your ‘brag wall’. In which room of your house do you display prestigious awards you have won, or photographs of yourself shaking hands with famous people? If you are middle-middle or below, these items will be proudly on show in your sitting room or entrance
hall or some other very prominent place. For the upper-middles and above, however, the only acceptable place to exhibit such things is the downstairs loo.
This trick is ‘smart’ in both senses of the word (posh and clever): visitors are highly likely to use the downstairs loo at some point, and to be impressed by your achievements, but by displaying them in the loo you are making a joke out of them (taking the piss, even) and thus cannot be accused of either boasting or taking
yourself too seriously."
"But it seems obvious to him that successful working-class people can have yachts if they want."
It seems obvious to me today that working-class people own boats if they want. Boat ownership in the U.S. for those earning less than $50K is 5%, for those earning more than $100K it is only 9.4%,
https://www.statista.com/statistics/240543/boat-ownership-by-household-income-in-the-us/
Given that boat ownership increased from about 8.5 million in 1980 to roughly 12 million today,
https://www.statista.com/statistics/240634/registered-recreational-boating-vessels-in-the-us/
I expect as many or more working class own boats now as in 1980.
Here you can buy a used Chris-Craft "yacht" for $3,000,
https://www.boattrader.com/boats/make-chris-craft/sort-price:asc/
Although media like to portray the working class as worse off than they were in 1980, by most standards they are better off. I expect they are just as likely to be able to afford a Chris-Craft today as they were then, even if tastes have changed and they may be more likely to spend their discretionary income on electronic gadgets (flat screen TVs, smartphones, etc.) than boating. Of course they also have many other cool options that didn't exist then, BMX, three-wheelers, tons of cool outdoor stuff for the weekends.
A few years ago Reason showed the surprise of French people watching American plumbers and carpenters spending the weekend driving to the lake and putting their boats in the water. In France it is a valid stereotype that only the well-to-do generally engage in recreational boating. But across the midwest, millions of working class Americans routinely go fishing or water skiing on their boats whenever they can.
Relatedly contra the stereotypes of American poverty,
"82% of poor American adults say they were never hungry during the last year because they couldn’t afford food; 96% of poor American parents say their children never went hungry because they couldn’t afford food. Half of poor Americans live in a single-family home, and 41% own their own home. Poor Americans have 60% more living space than the average European. 82% of poor Americans have air conditioning. 64% have cable or satellite t.v. 40% own a dishwasher. 34% have a t.v. that would have made billionaires drool in 1990. "
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2013/05/rector_poverty.html
Americans below the poverty line have more living space than the AVERAGE European, and are more likely to own most goodies.
It is not at all obvious to me that fewer low income people own boats today than did back in 1980. I didn't find a convenient data source to document that directly, but I see Scott's
Yeah. As a European, I definitely agree that the average American has a higher average living standard then the average (Western) European...(I won't even mention Eastern Europe here). SO why does the "liberal" left-wing in the US (generally wealthy people) admire Western Europe so much? Is it counter-signaling? I mean, it could be - e.g. material luxuries don't matter and immaterial benefits which EU countries provide (Healthcare, better urban planning, environmental consciousness) do matter - but then the liberal professional class in the US doesn't seem to want to live like the average European does, do they now?...
This makes me wonder about the upper-upper-class motifs in "Tenet", depicting both visually and narratively a world that is largely invisible to most of us in the middle/prole tiers, yet is completely normal to its inhabitants. Is Nolan subtly implying they've captured the rest of us in a "pincer movement"? That they play a quasi-pointless game amongst themselves, which makes no sense to anyone else? A game that bidirectionally bridges the corporate cyberpunk future with the aristocratic past, in a joyless unfolding of Calvinist determinism?
Or: perhaps I'm reading too much into it, and Nolan is just strip-mining upper-upper class aesthetics because it looks good on film to all us temporarily-embarrassed millionaires.
I came here to comment on Tenet as well. It is worth noting that Andrei Sator wears simple flip-flops and nylon. His watch is expensive and simple, but he never really dresses up, because he is always ready for business. His preferred locales are the Amalfi coast and the shores of Vietnam. His yacht is a military looking ice-breaker. His contacts are mostly military. https://robbreport.com/motors/marine/superyacht-star-christopher-nolans-action-flick-1234572078/ Sator, despite his leisurely malice, is still an evil member of the Bezos/Musk class of strivers. Musk wants Mars for humanity; Sator wants to undo the future past of humanity. Both have some mission.
By contrast Kat, however, is a member of a different class, the real rich, a more refined type, she has nothing to prove, but she does have a skill (because every Penelope needs a skill of some sort, whether its weaving or art assessment (come to think of it, Kat is very much like a Penelope in reverse. Held captive in a marriage, in which her 'betrayal' has been found out, she must help the Protagonist, our new Odysseus, free the household of humanity from her husband's grip). But her skill has nothing to do with purpose; her purpose in life is just her son. That's it. She has nothing else to prove or live for.
As social/tribal creatures we will always find the cultural nuances that separate and unite groups to be endlessly fascinating. But trying to shoehorn them into a useful hierarchical taxonomy of "class" or "caste" seems like a fool's errand, certainly at this point in the culture. There are just too many cultural signals, by too many people, which are changing too rapidly.
Maybe it would be more useful to look at this kaleidoscope of social signaling under a theory of "fashion," rather than social class. Has anyone even tried to develop a rigorous social science theory of fashion?
Some of the dynamics would obviously include: (a) What message people are trying to send about themselves (e.g., I am smart, rich, reliable, fun, sophisticated, unpretentious, morally virtuous, etc.); (b) What medium they are using to send their signals (dress, speech, consumer consumption, political positioning, aesthetics); (c) Whether they are trying to signal their membership in an in-group or their distance from an out-group; (d) Whether they are signaling conformity or non-conformity (which may of course include signaling conformity with the norms of the non-conformist group); and (e) Whether they are self-aware that they are signaling.
Also interesting would be: (e) The role of the majority's un-self-conscious behavior as the foil for signaling behaviors. (For example, people who watch football simply because they find it entertaining and buy Honda Accords simply because they are reliable transportation within their budgets); and (f) The role of "authentic eccentrics" (like the odd guys who chose to wear handlebar mustaches before, and after, it was a hipster thing to do).
Can we ponder the distinction between 'Class' and 'Caste' a bit more? I've generally intuited that one significant distinction between the two terms is the degree to which status is heritable (i.e. Caste 100%, Class < 100%). Fussell apparently treats them as more interchangeable. Curious what others believe.
Also, I have not read Isabel Wilkerson's book (Caste - The Origins of Our Discontents) but I gather from reading interviews that she views race as simply variable that best fits inside the taxonomy of caste, rather than as an alternate ranking system itself. She said: "Caste focuses in on the infrastructure of our divisions and the rankings, whereas race is the metric that's used to determine one's place in that."
My question is basically Linnaean in nature: what is the most apt terminology / framework to describe the socioeconomic hierarchies of contemporary America?
I want to read Wilkerson’s book but have not yet done so. NYT excerpted it though I think in the review of books. Caste seems to work. Class means too many things now.
Castes don't outbreed. If you look at a bunch of the jatis in India (basically, the tiny individual sub-castes), the majority of them have been endogamous for thousands of years. People didn't marry outside of the jati, much less into a different caste. Europe has had two major castes in historical memory, Jews and Gypsies (maybe the Cagots as well). Everyone else interbred with everyone else, to a lesser or greater extent.
I suspect Fussell wanted to use a word that sounds like "class" but isn't, because in American usage "class" tends to mean income bracket. The actual difference should probably be that "caste" is rigid and endogamous to an extent that "class" isn't.
"You have never heard of any of these people, although you might recognize the last name they share with a famous ancestor (Rockefeller, Ford, etc)."
Rockefeller? Ford? Aren't these people new money? If Wooster & Jeeves taught me anything it's that you're not upper class unless you can trace your ancestry to the Norman invasion (or regional equivalent).
Yeah, I just said below the west coast has no old money. We're all loser as far as the Rockefellers are concerned, but all North Americans are losers as far as the British are concerned. At best, the petty shit nobility, but more likely religious fanatics and idiotic adventurers that couldn't hack it in the home country. Hell, half of our old money here were slaveholders. That went out of style in England when? 800 years ago?
Given the general destruction of the plantation system and the supporting infrastructure during the Civil War I'd guess little to none of our current "old money" ever owned slaves, unless you mean old money prior to that time. But yeah, provincialism is always local, if it happened before 1620 AD it doesn't count.
Yeah, I mean during colonial and early post-revolution times, though I imagine at least some of the present-day cotillion class in Georgia and what not is descended from the original plantation class, though the New Englanders presumably look down on them as much as Englanders look down on New Englanders.
All New Englanders are judgemental regardless of their class position.
There was some relatively recent research showing that those families quickly recovered their positions:
https://www.al.com/news/2019/04/how-wealthy-southern-slave-owners-recovered-from-the-civil-war.html
Greg Clark would say family lines always tend to revert to their old class status. In the U.S there was an interesting natural experiment dating back even prior to the Civil War:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/the-lottery/
British colonies still had slavery for quite a long time.
In 1833, the British government used £20m, 40% of its national budget, to buy freedom for all slaves in the empire. The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015. Which means that living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade.
It's not obvious to me that anyone has mentioned this, but Douglas Coupland named "Generation X" after Fussel's X class. the important thing to keep in mind about his x class idea is that it represents the idea of "opting out" of a power structure: you stop trying to fit in with the cool kids and smoke with your buddies under the bleachers instead.
I think where fussel's idea falls flat is the idea that there is just one "american class system": IMO there are multiple sources of power that each have their own class system. The silicon valley class system looks different from the new york class system: both in terms of aesthetics and values.
take something like the movie "legally blonde": an upper class LA girl moves to the east coast to chase after her boyfriend at harvard law school, and suddenly finds herself at the bottom of the food chain. Her previous high status means nothing here. She befriends an actual prole who shares her aesthetics (a hairdresser), and learns enough about how the new rules work to climb back to the top (ending the movie as valedictorian). this shows two class systems (Beverly Hills vs Harvard) but I would argue there are as many as there are different american cultures (Like in that Collin Woodard book "American Nations" where he tries to boil it down to 11)
LA doesn't have an upper class. We're all crass proles to the east coast snobs. I was definitely a prole growing up (I mean, did some genealogical research on the Mexican immigrants I'm descended from last year and found from census records they were overwhelmingly farm hands and domestic help), but was good-looking and confident enough that every now and then a former child actress or daughter of a record exec would slum it with me for a few months. Enough to sometimes get into a party in Beverly Hills and the kind of people this guy is talking about wouldn't even step foot in one of these places, and there is no way in hell they would let someone like me into one of their parties. That's as good as it gets on the west coast. Wealthy maybe, but gaudy and classless. Hell, half these people probably made their money from the mob. There is no old money. There wasn't even really a city there until 1920 or so.
I agree that, in the context of this book's definition of "class" (which definitionally sets New York at the center of the universe), that you are correct. But if you think in terms of power, it's not clear to me that LA is less powerful than New York is, and there are people who are insiders and outsiders to that power in a way that's roughly analogous to how fussel's "class" works. The west coast's powerful people are certainly more willing to meet and mingle with less powerful people in a way that the east coasters are not, but IMO this is a reflection of a different set of values.
The classy friend I described in the post comes from LA. She seemed classy to me because she knows a lot of celebrities, some generic Rockefeller-type rich people, and has strong opinions about the relative desirability of various LA neighborhoods/restaurants/architecture. She also went to an Ivy and most of her LA friends are the sort of people who did/could go to Ivies. Her family works in show biz making shows whose names you'd probably recognize, and she's absorbed enough show biz knowledge by osmosis that "make a show and pitch it to studio executives, despite no previous experience" is one of the potential life plans she's considering, with high likelihood of success. All of this seems really classy to me, if class is a network of connections, social knowledge, social power, etc.
The reference to a Silicon Valley class system is also interesting. Surely there has to be one and it would be an obvious bias for me to say there isn't - but it's hard for me to think of what it would be (other than the obvious one where the programmers are a different class from the janitors, secretaries, and other support personnel). I think a lot of the billionaires know each other and are friends, but I don't know if that's enough to call it a class system. Despite my brand I don't actually know that much about Silicon Valley society - I live in the East Bay, don't program, and mostly hang out with rationalists who (if they're like any other community) are probably selected mostly from one specific class - so I'd be interested in hearing from people who know more.
I can't say much about how SV works because I don't live there, but the Paul Graham essay on cities seems relevant: http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html
I can talk more about how the game is played in Seattle though from the time i lived there (i imagine it's somewhat interconnected): in seattle everyone is conspicuously into hiking and rock climbing, spend a lot of time in the gym, and wear patagonia and functional athletic gear to signal. wearing "business casual" is definitely a signal of lower-to-middle class, you have to be wearing the right kind of shlubby clothes/tech company hoodie, unless you're even higher up and you're wearing tailored suits from nordstrom. There is also a big tech/not tech split: you're either working in tech or you are on the outside looking in and scowling. If you went to the right schools, it's incredibly easy to move from job to job, get meetings with investors and incubators, not hard to get a seat at the table. If you did not go to the right schools, it's hard to be employed in tech at all (even if you are talented).
I think that it hard for most people to appreciate that there can be huge gaps above (or below) them. They see someone far above them in wealth, class, athletic ability, etc, but don't realize that there is another gap just as large above that and perhaps another above that.
Gen X, though, "opts out" because it's not an option; as a small generation sandwiched between two large ones, power and cultural influence transitioned more or less smoothly from the Boomers to the Millennials.
Millennials weren't a thing yet when the book Generation X was written. Some of them weren't even born. Whatever characteristics Coupland attributed to Generation X were a function of itself and its predecessors, but not of its successors.
True, but we knew even then that Gen X was destined to be insignificant demographically.
So the real advantage of 'Class X' is not being a Boomer?
This was such an amazing thing to read. I'm afraid to read the book in case it is not as enjoyable as this review.
It's pretty short and a quick read. And Fussell is an entertaining writer. It's also an interesting snapshot of a time: I remember the 80's through the eyes of a child, it's a fascinating commentary on the things I lacked the depth to understand at the time.
I forget where I first read it, but someone somewhere once wrote that the best way to learn about class in America is to watch Gilmore Girls. Almost all of the conflict in that show comes from the tension between conflicting class norms.
It is a bit over-simplified. Read great British literature instead!
My mother had an upper middle to upper background (DAR type), my dad was lower middle (all grandoarents immigrants).
He did well but used to tease her by doing "lower class" things like putting turnips in soup when he started cooking (turnips are a big no) or wearing a baseball cap with a logo (double no).
"Limo" no. "Car"
"Chauffer" no. "Driver"
"Classy" no. "No one who has it says it"
A lotvof it is funny and useless but there have been / are serious divisions based on this stuff.
Who even knows what a "DAR type" is?
I know what it stands for, but I've never met any. I figure they have names like "Taliaferro" and "Somethingampton" but that's about it.
Migration: In the UK, posh people used to speak with (hi-class) "Received Pronunciation," but now even the likes of Prince Harry have dropped that for (low-class) "Estuary English."
Fussell's "Class X" maps directly onto David Brooks's "Bourgeois Bohemians," Robert Reich's "symbolic analysts," Ehrenreich's "professional managerial class," Young's "meritocracy," etc. College-educated Boomers having no attachment to their inherited traditions, they "invent" a new class for themselves."
Prince Harry does not have an Estuary accent: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2020/01/20/prince-harry-speech-full-says-meghan-had-no-option-step-back/.
Prince Harry is a weird example, he seems to be actively working to drop out of the Upper Class and awkwardly into the American Upper Middle to be with his wife. From my perspective it's sad and awkward to watch.
There's a floor to how low Harry can sink in my book, since he served in Afghanistan incognito and tried to serve in Iraq, but wasn't allowed. That's some high-conscientiousness shit right there, and it deserves to be remembered.
I think people underestimate how much all accents change over time. It's at the point where if you listen to FDR or Truman, they have a recognisably 1930s accent that no-one sounds like today. This may well have been happening throughout history, but we don't have old enough recordings.
Counter-argument: that's just the sound of crappy 1940s recording equipment
Now try Gervais Principle's "Clueless" or "Gentry" with Michael O' Church and Curtis Yarvin. For fun, the "Sacrificial Hero" and "Creatives" in An American Manifesto by Christopher Chantrill.
Some of these things are highly regional. Landscaping, for instance. In the Maryland suburbs I once lived in, middle and upper middle class, you definitely had the whole stereotypical US suburban lawn thing going on. Probably you could make some inferences based on flowers.
But where I live now in northern New Jersey, in a mostly upper middle class neighborhood, most people seem to not give a flying fuck about their lawns and landscaping. The few that do are pretty varied, and there's at least one person with poinsettia. Most, though, hire a landscaper (one of which lives in the neighborhood, so I guess we have some high proles as well, though probably wealthy high proles) to keep the yard from turning brown or being overgrown, and that's it. Shift over to the next town which is UMC and plain old upper-class, and you see the upper class have meticulously landscaped estates all right... but the UMC over there still don't seem to care.
Also regional: I spent much of the 80s in the DC suburbs. Except maybe the old money, EVERYONE went to or held Super Bowl parties.
A recent article sort of confirms some observations in a slightly less ironic way https://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html
Good post overall, but to quote one commenter there:
---
> "A thing that has been very frustrating to me is that most books and other discussions I have been able to find that really address that social classes are cultures have come out of the Right. Again this pattern: the Right, at least, admits the phenomenon exists, mostly so they can hate on people (also see "culture of poverty"); the Left engages in Orwellian doublethink, insisting the problem doesn't exist and shouldn't be spoken of."
>
> A thing that is very frustrating to me is that any discussion of class in America that I run into tends to make this sort of assertion about how the "Right" in America views social classes. The Left totally acknowledges some social classes, much of the complaining on the political right about this is accurate.
>
> The right in America is mostly very low class rank and very low status as a result, and they are painfully aware of this, so they tend towards flattened class as an ideal, but what you term "hate on people" is really about the kinds of fine-grained distinctions necessary to ego preservation that Orwell covered in his writing about the lower tiers of the upper class, those who knew in the abstract what to tip a servant but would never be able to afford one.
>
> One of the big class markers is how defining Right views of class as essentially evil or bad is considered utterly neutral. The left, far from ignoring class, has been quite expert at utilizing class markers that don't involve money to position class status as something you can gain levels of if you assert or support (some) of their political views. I see it frequently among working class people who don't have strong political views of any kind. They do know that saying you agree with left-leaning things is higher-class though, so they will agree if it comes up.
---
Funny when she admits to being classist, and more than a little irritating to be on the receiving end of. Books like Theodore Dalrymple's "Life at the Bottom" would undoubtedly get categorized as hating on people, but in places you can see in your mind's eye at how he's throwing his hat on the ground and stomping on it in sheer frustration at the bullshit some of his patients have had to deal with, and the whole book is essentially about how broken telephoning upper/upper-middle class fashions down to proleland breaks proleland and makes it a dysfunctional shithole. He doesn't like it being a dysfunctional shithole.
Reminds me of a book I read in the early 1980s by Jilly Cooper, called Class. Cooper wrote about the English, but made many of the same points that you attribute to Fussell. I believe that the book was considered satire at the time, but I personally recognized many traits that I had seen around me (in Canada).
At the price of great over-simplification, the best indicator of class forty years ago was education. The upper class often sent their children to university, but it was generally to study subjects that had no applications or usefulness in real life, such as anthropology or obscure languages or the history of remote corners of the globe. Some became academics or politicians. Upper middle class families intended their children for the professions, medicine, law and dentistry being popular, with the occasional accountant. Of course, the boundaries were permeable: if the family had enough financial security, many upper middle class children headed for the humanities. Others simply were not cut out for university and might enter family businesses or drift into quiet eddies of hobbies considered to be "work".
Neither Jilly Cooper nor Paul Fussell define middle middle class particularly well, or perhaps there were none around me, so I don't know what their educational preferences were. But lower middle classes wanted their children to finish high school at least, and maybe go on to "college", although few did. The working class people I knew despised higher education -- book learning -- and often thought that the sooner their children left school and got a job where they could get real-world experience, the better.
this resembles a lot The Gervais Principle (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/) from Rao Venkatesh as well, quite similar insights some decades ago.
Also, I just had one of the weirdest Baader–Meinhof phenomenons I ever had. Today, I started thinking about Douglas Coupland and his book Generation X which I last read many years ago. So I checked its wiki entry to see what were the inspirations, and this exact book was there. I saw that for the first time in my life and said "huh, that's an interesting book". Fast forward a couple of hours and I come across this article. Weird.
The Class X chapter did seem to be very disjoint with the rest of the book, which was basically about how it was very difficult to escape from the class you were born into. I've seen speculation that it was a chapter that the editors forced Fussell to write, so the book could end on an "optimistic note", which honestly seems pretty believable as far as conspiracy theories go
Loving the more frequent content but don't burn yourself out. And don't feel you have to because some of us have paid to subscribe. Lots of less interesting writers charge more for less posts.
He has articles stored up. This might have been written months ago.
Prediction time:
Scott used to write about 2-3 full-on articles a week
He's now on almost 1 a day, so conservatively is publishing at double the rate from archive material
He was offline for about six months (I just checked - it felt like *much* longer)
So we should finish archive material in April or May, or more likely June-July if he's interspersing new stuff or building up more of a backlog
Paul Fussell was definitely being tongue in cheek with the physiognomy, but I think it is or was a stereotype among WASPy types of WASP and like unwashed masses.
Also, prole guy on the right is Reagan.
Another person the American ruling class never forgave for his prole origins. The son of a salesman and a housewife, who lived above a store. What kind of political office does Eureka College qualify anyone for! Other than dogcatcher.
Whereas the British ruling classes seem to have embraced Thatcher, despite calling her "the grocer's daughter" at the time.
No, the ruling classes didn't embrace Thatcher at all. But, in part because of larger changes, and in part because of the policies she pursued, those ruling classes changed. The kind of patricians who dominated politics before the 80s just don't exist any more as a coherent force. Priti Patel gets the same class-based prejudice for the same reasons, but it's much weaker now because the upper ranks of our institutions have now got enough strivers to be a counteracting force.
As far as "prole drift" goes: I think this is a product of tastemakers in favor with the upper classes appropriating things they find personally appealing. Fussell mentions Picasso as something the upper class would buy, but 100 years before this book was published, no upper-class person in America would've dreamed of buying Cubist art. It wasn't until Kahnweiler started buying Picasso's art - and that of other impressionist/abstract artists - that it became popular among the upper classes. Kahnweiler wasn't exactly upper class at the time, being Jewish, but as far as I understand, he was quite influential and connected among the upper classes, and he was able to popularize Cubism effectively using those connections.
I think the classes are more about culture than about money. Scott hints this already when he thinks about the main classes could be just different ladders to climb and every class has its own (more or less) rich and poor people. At least for the low and middle class this is described clearly. Just the upper class is left out, but it is harder to observe, as they don't have to show off.
I think class X is just the upper class with less money. So upper class would be all people who just live for fun, sense or purpose and don't (have to) worry about resources or status. Or say, its the ones living by intrinsic motivation instead of external motivation and fear. So the best example of poorest upper class would be the hermit in the woods who owns almost nothing but is happily living his chosen way. Going all the way up along the artist living his dream with minimal money, to perhaps someone like current Scott, being able to earn a living by following his passion with helping people and writing. And the top being the old money who could cultivate this 'finding and living their passions' for generations. @arrow63 is kind of confirming this in his comment. (By the way, how do you link to a specific comment here? There has to be a way.)
It all just rings to me, as i was kind of thinking about this for a while. A good part of my family and friends somehow do not fit in the usual pattern of classes so they could be class X: judged by money and jobs they are lower middle class maximum, but by culture and interests they are definitely not. Many are freelancers, and have relatively little money because they just don't see the point in working more, and they don't care about status signaling. Many have had the chance to higher education but dismissed it in free choice because being happy and following the own interests was more important. Having not much money, because it's secondary as long as ends meet is perhaps similar to not caring about money because you inherited a lot. I know people having typical lower class jobs like craftsmen or bus driver, but they do not share most of the lower class culture of their colleges, just because its boring to them.
I suppose low to middle upper-class in this sense was growing fast the last 60 years or at least getting much more visible. This is strongly interconnected with the raising living standard in multiple ways:
1) giving many people the chance to live the dreams of generations like having a family and a save home without much worry.
2) freeing resources for hobbies and other interests so letting more people experience intrinsic motivation.
3) seeing that wealth alone does not make happy, makes them ask 'What does?'
Children growing up in this environment are more likely to question society, usual (class) culture or ask for the sense of live generally. This leads to counter culture, spiritual seeking and political activism at the same time. Some get the transition to upper class or at least plant the seed in their kids, that it's not the outside that counts and that are no longer guided by fear.
This also explains why it is much more likely to change from middle class to class X without being the same.
You can get a permanent link to a comment by clicking on the timestamp (the "2 min ago" next to the username).
ochs plympton and ronald reagan
I can't find anything about "Ochs Plympton", who is this?
my mistake - george plympton, ochs better known brother
and misspelled plimpton
and misspelled oakes
So, if Fussel's "upper class" actually existed, is there a reason any of the rest of us should even care? They hold title to some of society's productive capital, I'm guessing mostly real estate and older blue-chip industries, but they almost certainly delegate the active management to the same people who are managing capital owned by e.g. mutual funds and who would be managing that capital under just about any plausible socioeconomic system. They siphon off a bit of the income from that to fund their mansions and yachts, but that's a small parasitic load in the grand scheme of things. They explicitly *aren't* the Bill Gates/Jeff Bezos types who command even greater fortunes and use them in a way that actively transforms the economy. They might still count a few Senators among their ranks, but they haven't had a President in generations. They throw invisible parties, fund operas and charities, and basically seem to have isolated themselves from every part of the universe that I live in. Unless I'm missing something, even one chapter telling me how to identify them by the flowers in their garden is too much.
"Class X" seems to be self-congratulatory twaddle about how the author and people like him, from his immediate perspective, are above all of this. And it's almost certainly long obsolete; at least Scott's "Grey Tribe" is describing something that presently exist (and may sprout a future Bezos or two).
So Fussel writes a book on class as it was forty years ago, but all of the class distinctions that are actually relevant to me seem like they're being compressed into "some sort of middle class" or "some sort of prole". If someone wants to revisit the subject for 2021, I'd rather they look more at the class distinctions that matter. In particular the classes that actually and actively wield great power, like whatever class it is that Jeff Bezos does belong to. And, yeah, it would help if they weren't so flippant that we can't tell when they're joking.
We should care because the upper upper class is taxable, and I'd rather squeeze them than the entrepreneurs. Alas, inheritance tax is understandably quite unpopular.
I doubt you can get enough tax revenue out of them to matter, but even more importantly, you can't tax them without also taxing the entrepreneurs. The whole point of Scott and Fussell is that class is fundamentally not economic, but tax law fundamentally *is* economic. I can accept an argument that there's a real sense that Bezos, Musk, et al aren't "upper class". But to the IRS, they're going to look exactly like the upper class.
Including the part where, when they die, much of their money and assets will go into a trust or similar entity crafted by the finest lawyers money can buy to ensure that the taxman gets the smallest possible bite.
"The Simpsons were a prole family who absolutely seemed rich enough to take frequent cruises and maybe even save up for a yacht if they got lucky. This puts the recent rise in wealth inequality in a new and starker light than I'd thought about much before."
Really? I always thought the Simpsons were borderline poor and struggling to get by. I definitely didn't get the impression they would ever go on a cruise, let alone regularly. Certainly not that they would be in a position to buy a yacht.
Wealth inequality may have increased, but in general everyone is much better off now than in the late '80s, early '90s. How much has consumption inequality increased? At all? I feel like there has been incredible compression in the day-to-day life of different classes. Bill Gates may have thousands of times as much wealth as you, but is his daily life thousands of times better?
*Another* person who thinks cruises are expensive and that a boat must be a yacht. Sheesh, what is it with this blog's audience? This is what boats cost: https://corpuschristi.craigslist.org/d/boats/search/boo
This is what cruises cost: https://www.royalcaribbean.com/cruises/itinerary/4-night-western-caribbean-from-galveston-on-adventure/AD04GAL-597171024?sail-date=2023-04-27¤cy=USD
It is astonishing to find so much lack of cultural literacy among such obviously highly literate people. I don't think I've seen a single misplaced apostrophe in this entire discussion thread.
I’m glad I’m not the only one confused by all the talk of “yachts”. According to the internet, there’s no standard definition for yachts, but any boat with a cabin that you could sleep in might count. Which is a lot of boats.
And cruises might be one of the cheapest vacations you can get if you’re savvy and flexible. Friends of mine with very little spare cash managed to take a vacation every year by booking a cruise under specific conditions. There aren’t many other vacations where you can get transport somewhere sunny, a week’s worth of accommodations, almost unlimited food and entertainment for $600.
If poor people can regularly take vacations that cost $600/person, then maybe the whole discussion of class is passe?
Yachts (boats that have sleeping quarters) are astronomically expensive to maintain and store. Cruises might not be expensive FOR YOU, but for the Simpsons, who would have to drive to a port and pay for 5 people, it would be totally out of reach.
My friends did the cruise for $600 *for two adults*. It was not a small thing for them; they saved all year for it.
This family did a cruise for a family of 4 out of Nebraska including airfare for around $1500 in 2018. My blue-collar parents scraped together about that much for our vacations in 1990s dollars. I don’t know how many people can corner deals like this, but I know my relatives did it on multiple occasions in the past decade. He’s a construction worker and she’s a teacher’s aid. Maybe grandma threw them a few bucks? In any case, “ordinary” families can take cruises.
https://www.idreamoffire.com/we-just-took-a-5-day-carnival-cruise-heres-what-it-cost/
Maggie Simpson is an infant and could sail and fly free, too.
I'm sorry, I just don't see the Simpsons as a savvy couponing family that steals great travel deals and "goes on frequent cruises" as Scott says. My impression was that they struggled to get by. I don't see that the Simpsons cast modern inequality in a new light because we have it so much worse now than the Simpsons did. I would guess that cruises are less expensive now than when the Simpsons began and more accessible for the average family.
Minor quibble: The Simpsons live in a port town.
Depends where you are standing yourself, I suppose (and since it's a very long running show, any realism gets sacrificed for plot convenience. If Homer can afford to splash out hundreds on a dumb device for the sake of a joke, they'll do that, even if in a much earlier episode he couldn't afford to buy Christmas presents for his kids).
The Simpsons seemed solidly lower-middle/upper-working class to me. Marge doesn't have to work (unlike if they really were struggling to get by, where she'd be working in the local supermarket or wherever) and Homer has a decent union job which he will never lose, no matter how badly he performs it. Lisa can have an instrument and music lessons. They can afford two cars - Homer's sedan which is the family car, and Marge's station wagon which she uses while Homer is at work, and which the entire family uses to pack up in when going on vacation.
The kids have their own bedrooms, the house is in a decent neighbourhood and has a back garden. They're not rich or even "comfortably well-off" but they have a good standard of living and are not poor (though granted, if Homer ever does lose his job and/or something like a medical emergency eats through their savings, they'll fall down that step of the ladder).
There's a state of mind that I call unself-conscious self-consciousness (UCSC). An acute awareness of where you stand in relation to other people- their habits, their hierarchies, combined with an acute unawareness of where you stand in relation to the things that give meaning. A supremely aware life, filled with comparision and cataloguing, but totally unreflective in the sense Socrates meant when he said "the unexamined life is not worth living". The cause is a great deal of time thinking about what everything signals, and so little time thinking about what everything means.
I can't help but think that the best way to try and escape is to cultivate unawareness of class. I know, that on reflection, I have a lot of the traits associated with the upper-middle and middle class, even as that kind of game playing I associate with that class disgusts me. I'm never going to be able to think my way out of it. If I analyse my consumption choices to avoid looking like a good middle-class boy, I'll just end up looking like a bad middle-class boy who wants everyone to know how very rebellious he is. Rebellion becomes its own conformity as countless people have remarked, and the cycle starts again. So I must just stop using this lens altogether.
It's hard though because self-consciousness in relation to cultural categories like this is a trap that keeps luring you in. I don't want to correct people's grammar because it just seems snobby. But hang on! Does that just make me a special kind of meta-snob who looks down on those foolish grammar Nazis who haven't grasped the truth of descriptivism? How can I escape?
The best "trick" I've found for escaping this spiral to just try asking myself what a decent person would is. do, and think through that in a way that doesn't refer to snobbiness or counter snobbiness at all. A decent person would probably avoid correcting people unnecessarily because being corrected hurts. Ergo that's what I'll do. A decent person would also not over scold people who are having a little fun laughing at grammatical mannerisms, so that's what I'll do as well. Neither dogmatic prescriptivism nor descriptivism in practice, and whatever feels right in my own writing.
What I came to learn then was that there was some truth to the authors who said that cultivating virtue- even if, like me, you're not very good at it, is a path to freedom. Only by having values that aren't contingent on the game can you avoid being tossed around by its winds.
Now it may turn out that, on some analysis, this is just more game playing at a deeper level, that this kind of cultivated ignorance is actually a very common strategy for men of the academic subculture in their early thirties, and really I'm just a typical example. I don't know. The comfort I have here is not so much about not playing the game, it's about having a basis on which to think it doesn't matter so very much if I am or am not playing it.
Another way to put this is that in interpersonal life I've found the best strategy for being fully alive is to be oriented to other people and myself, rather than to the situations and contexts and conventions we find ourselves embedded in. It sounds like a distinction without a difference, and maybe in the final limit it is, but I've found it a helpful North Star.
Following your incentives leads to being eaten by Moloch in short order. You need to break free from status games for the same reason you need to break free from a game-theoretic dollar auction. Also, breaking rules grants you a certain kind of charisma by itself.
The older I am, the more social status seems to me like something claimed (it's just lying there! grab it!) rather than bestowed upon you by people. The people don't have a clue who you are anyway, they'll adjust to whatever you present as.
"Our era is the opposite: when you read someone's social media account, you can't tell what shirt they wearing, but you can scroll down and see every political position they've ever endorsed or condemned" you can infer the shirt from the politics. We're pretty sorted by class politically at this point.
I've never read Fussell's book, but most of what I know about class comes from a tiny book called "The Bluffer's Guide to British Class", part of a "Bluffer's Guide" series that was popular in the 90s. Of course this was about Britain, not America, but I'm Australian and nobody has ever written a decent book about class in Australia anyway (no obvious jokes please, I assure you it's just as complicated as class anywhere else).
Anyway, a few of my main recollections from that book:
1. It had twelve classes instead of nine: the main classes were Upper, Middle, Working, and Lower, and each of these was split into Upper, Middle, and Lower. This seems a key difference between US and UK class, there's no acknowledged "working class" in the US, and the people in this role (respectable steadily-employed blue collar or administrative types) are treated as either part of the lower or the middle class.
2. I had thought of myself as Upper Middle, but the book was very firm in putting me back in my place as Middle Middle. Now this is okay, because Middle Middle is well above average, only a few percent of society would be considered above Middle Middle.
3. Class has nothing to do with money. A penniless Duke will always be Upper Class, and a boorish used car salesman who makes millions of pounds a year will always be Lower or Working class, and there's nothing that can be done about that. Through concentrated effort over an entire lifetime you might be able to squeeze yourself up by one class (say from Lower Middle to Middle Middle).
4. Lower Upper is a very weird place, and if I recall correctly consists mostly of headmasters of sufficiently fancy schools, and certain types of bishop.
The US certainly does have a working class, and we call it that. I suspect that Fussell calls them "proles" because it sounds funnier.
Because his own class status depends on distinguishing himself from the working class.
He isn't as insulting to the other classes.
That's because he's middle class, and making sure he's not mistaken for a "prole" is his #1 class anxiety. (perhaps this is a bit tongue-in-cheek)
"Lower Upper is a very weird place, and if I recall correctly consists mostly of headmasters of sufficiently fancy schools, and certain types of bishop."
Belloc's Nordic Man! Though some confluence with Upper Middle as well:
"The Nordic Man is born either in the West End of London or in a pleasant country house, standing in its own park-like grounds. That is the general rule; he is, however, sometimes born in a parsonage and rather more frequently in a Deanery or a Bishop’s Palace, or a Canon’s house in a Close. Some of this type have been born in North Oxford; but none (that I can discover) in the provincial manufacturing towns, and certainly none east of Charing Cross or south of the river.
The Nordic Man has a nurse to look after him while he is a baby, and she has another domestic at her service. He has a night and a day nursery, and he is full of amusing little tricks which endear him to his parents as he grows through babyhood to childhood.
Towards the age of ten or eleven, the Nordic Man goes to a preparatory school, the headmaster of which is greatly trusted by the Nordic Man’s parents, especially by the Nordic Man’s mother. He early learns to Play the Game, and is also grounded in the elements of Good Form, possibly the Classics and even, exceptionally, some modern tongue. He plays football and cricket; usually, but not always, he is taught to swim.
Thence the Nordic Man proceeds to what is called a Public School, where he stays till he is about eighteen. He then goes either to Oxford or Cambridge, or into the Army. He does not stay long in the Army; while from the University he proceeds either to a profession (such as the Bar, or writing advertisements) or to residence upon his estate. This last he can only do if his father dies early.
The Nordic Man lives in comfort and even luxury through manhood: he shoots, he hunts, he visits the South of France, he plays bridge. He hates the use of scent; he changes for dinner into a special kind of clothes every day. He is extremely particular about shaving, and he wears his hair cut short and even bald. The Nordic does not bother much about Religion, so when he approaches death he has to distract himself with some hobby, often that of his health. He dies of all sorts of things, but more and more of the cancer; after his death his sons, nephews, or cousins take up the role of the Nordic Man and perpetuate the long and happy chain.
Such is the life-story of the Nordic Man. I have only given it in its broadest line, and have left out a great many sub-sections; but what I have said will be sufficient to indicate places in which he is to be surprised and the kind of things which you will there find him doing. As for his character, which lies at the root of all this great performance, that is less easily described, for one might as well attempt to describe a colour or a smell; but I can attempt some indications of it.
The Nordic Man dislikes all cruelty to animals, and is himself kind to them in the following scale: first the dog, then the horse, then the cat, then birds, and so on till you get to insects, after which he stops caring. Microbes, oddly enough, he detests. He will treat them in the most callous manner.
In the matter of wine the Nordic Man is divided; you cannot predicate of him that he will drink it, or that if he drinks it he will know what it is. But in the matter of whisky you may safely say that it is his stand-by, save for a certain sub-section of him who dare not touch it. These stand apart and are savage to their fellows.
The Nordic Man is very reserved, save in the matter of speech-making. He hates to betray an emotion, but he hates still more the complete concealment of it. He has therefore established a number of conventions whereby it may be known when he is angry, pleased or what not; but he has no convention for fear, for he is never afraid. This reminds me that the Nordic Man despises conflict with lethal weapons unless it be against the enemies of his country; but he delights in watching, and will sometimes himself practise, conflict conducted with stuffed gloves. As for fighting with his feet, he would not dream of it; nor does he ever bite.
The Nordic Man is generous and treats all men as his equals, especially those whom he feels to be somewhat inferior in rank and wealth. This is a very beautiful trait in the Nordic Man, and causes him to believe that he is everywhere beloved. On the other hand, the Nordic Man prefers to live with those richer than himself. The Nordic Man detests all ostentation in dress, and detests even more the wearing of cheap clothes. He loves it to be known that his clothes were costly. No Nordic Man wears a made-up tie.
The Nordic Man boasts that he is not addicted to the Arts, and here he is quite right; but he is an excellent collector of work done by the inferior Mediterranean race, and is justly proud of the rare successes of his own people in this field. In the same way the Nordic Man will tell you with emphasis that he cannot write. Here he tells the truth. Yet, oddly enough, he is convinced that no one has ever been able to write except Nordic Men; and this article of faith he applies particularly to True Poetry, which (he conceives) can only be inspired in his own tongue.
The Nordic Man does everything better than anybody else does it, and himself proclaims this truth unceasingly; but where he particularly shines is in the administration of justice. For he will condemn a man to imprisonment or death with greater rapidity than will the member of any other race. In giving judgment he is, unlike the rest of the human species, unmoved by any bias of class or blood, let alone of personal interest. On this account his services as a magistrate are sought far and wide throughout the world, and his life is never in danger save from disappointed suitors or those who have some imaginary grievance against him.
The Nordic Man is a great traveller. He climbs mountains; he faces with indifference tropical heat and arctic cold. He is a very fine fellow.
I must conclude by telling you all that I am not obtaining these details from any personal observations, as the part of the country in which I live has very few Nordic Men, and most of them are away during the greater part of the year staying either in the houses of other Nordic Men or in resorts of ritual pleasure upon the Continent. But I have had the whole thing described to me most carefully by a friend of mine who was for a long time himself a Nordic Man, until he had the misfortune to invest in British Dyes and crashed. He guarantees me the accuracy of his description."
The crazy thing is that by definition, my grandma (who inherited all her money and has basically never worked) ought to be upper class. However, she seems to hit all the prole descriptions: she loves going on cruises all the time, she owned a powerboat at her summer home for a while, she's very into state pride for Nebraska of all places, and she tends to like whatever is popular/mainstream. I don't know anyone else IRL who ticks any of those boxes, so it's distinctive how many she hits. I had assumed that cruises and powerboating were an upper class thing, mostly because of how expensive they are.
In some respects, Fussell's "Class" is a slightly updated and much more humorous re-spin of Vance Packard's "The Status Seekers" (1959). I highly recommend the Vance Packard book if you care enough to understand where Fussell gets a lot of his data/opinions.
"Someone named H.B. Brooks-Baker claims that saying "tux" is lower-class and "tuxedo" higher-class. But actually "tuxedo" is middle-class and real upper-class people say "dinner jacket"."
Since buying a Jaguar, I've discovered that mechanics always call them "Jags", the middle class calls them "Jag-wahrs", and Jaguar owners always call them "Jag-oo-ars".
But most people call fraternities "frats", while fraternity members call them "fraternities". This suggests these lexical "class" divisions signify ownership or membership in a club rather than a broad social class. "Tux" might be used by people who don't own tuxedos, and "dinner jacket" by people who wear them so often that they might actually wear them to dinner.
I always pronounced it (both the car and animal) "Jag-wire". This might be a regionalism, since I've heard others say it that way too.
Oh gosh, you are bringing me back to primary school elocution lessons, where one of the sample sentences we had to recite was "Father's car is a Jaguar, and Pa drives rather fast".
That was pronounced "Jag-u-ar" so far as I recall, so close to your "Jag-oo-ar". The purpose of the lessons was to get us pronouncing such a sentence with the long "a" sound etc. rather than our native style of "Fadder's karrrrr [we have very strong and prolonged 'r' sounds in my native wood notes wild] izza Jag'yar an' Paaah drives radder f'st [the "a" here is so short it practically disappears]"
That's because American English doesn't have many yods (the little y before the oo in jaguar). British English is losing them (its more-or-less lost them in evolution and revolution already).
"The counterculture were the only people with remotely modern norms. Compared to the hyperconformist society Fussell talks about, they really were as superior as he thinks they were."
This is an ideological position, not a fact.
The definitive book on what Fussell calls the upper class is Tad Friend's _Cheerful Money_ which is absolutely hilarious, beautifully written, and highly recommended. Gilmore Girls also gets an awful lot right. (Personal bias/perspective: I grew up in a mixture of what Fussell calls upper-middle and "X" but have family members and high school classmates who are legit upper class in Fussell's sense).
In particular, both Cheerful Money and Gilmore Girls explore how there are indeed gradations of success within the upper class despite the "nothing to prove" thing. Basically the most successful upper class people are the ones who are known *among their own kind* as pillars of the community, by doing lots of upper-class-pillar-of-the-community things like endowing scholarships and serving on boards without ever making a vulgar display of it. The least successful are the "black sheep" who can't keep their indulgences, vices, and/or mental health problems from interfering with their conformity to class standards of appearances.
Something I've wondered: is there a developed country that can accurately be described as "classless?" In the Anglosphere we tend to think of Northern European countries as having this property, but if you search for "<any country>" and "classless society" you just find peoples scoffing and saying "as if!"
New Zealand stands out to me as feeling much less class-bound than other developed countries I've been to, which was one of the pleasant things about it. Notably, the architecture, dress, and general material style of life seemed much more unpretentious and less obviously status-seeking than elsewhere. But that's a tourist's perspective, and those who live there might well feel differently.
In white South Africa (which to me feels like NZ) even apart from the racial stuff, there was very clearly class.
In NZ I expect that proles admit they enjoy Shortland Street, middle class claim they watch it ironically, and upper class claim they have no idea what it is.
Come off it, *nobody* enjoys Shortland Street. That would be like me claiming to enjoy Fair City! 😀
this australian academic argued that australia is compared to the US less classsist and more egalitarian. http://www.convictcreations.com/culture/egalitarianism.html
"None of these seem too weird on their own, but taken together they suggest a picture where lots of working-class people have lots of money and go on Caribbean vacations all the time."
I took a Caribbean vacation once, in the Dominican Republic. It cost me $250 in airfare and about $100/day for drinks, food, cab fare, windsurfer rentals, and a room on the beach at a resort with two pools (one with an open swim-up bar, and one without). Although this was during hurricane season.
Yeah, if you try you can get very good deals on this sort of thing. My parents went on cruises and they were nothing if not blue-collar; my dad was a postal worker and my mother worked retail in a sporting goods store. But she researched the hell out of vacations until she found one they could afford.
As to your discussion of "three ladders", this was pretty interestingly, though somewhat poorly, described in this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25892897 (Hacker News link for comments). I found the discussion of communication styles between the ladders somewhat more interesting than the existence of the ladders themselves, which seems relatively uncontroversial. I found this particularly compelling with regard to the way the high corporate leaders seem to be socially signalling on a variety of topics from electric vehicles, carbon neutrality, social justice, DEI, etc, but I'm not sure I entirely agree with some of the distinctions he makes on the individual members of the various groups. This melds nicely with the ranking of engineers as specifically lower-middle class, especially as I see no promotion beyond a certain very low level in my future without going into people managing, even at one of the big 3 automakers.
"Here are the three classes, all pathetic in their own way..."
"But just in case you aren't introspective enough to recognise that, yes, you belong to one of these classes and are carried along by the inherent biases, here is a special class just for *you* and all the people you like so you don't have to be bothered by it."
Or perhaps I'm wrong, and it's not just a safe escape-route! I'd have to read the book to make a proper opinion about it (not that that's ever stopped me before)
The pitch to the publisher must have gone something like:
Fussell: It will be about class in America. The tone will be like it's about 19th century France but it will be satirical. It will be true but funny. Funny because it's true.
Publisher: But why do people want to hear about class in America? Don't you realize that nobody wants class in America? Why would they want to hear about it?
Fussell: I was getting at that. You see, the whole point is... there's this new group... this new class... so to speak... I call the class... X.... They defy class. So the book is about how Americans defy class. They didn't defy it in the past. That's a myth. Old Americans are just as classist as any old European. But there's this new generation of Americans. They defy class. I want to write about them. It's an amazing story but I first have to explain what makes this new generation so amazing by putting it into the historical context by explaining how classist America was until this new generation came along.
Publisher: That sounds like total bullshit. The answer is "yes".
Am I being too unkind if I imagine the pitch went more like:
Fussell: I want to write a book about class in America
Publisher: But don't you realise that nobody wants class in America? Why would they want to read such a book?
Fussell: *throws several copies of British books written in such a mix of humour and pop-sociology on the desk* Like these but American
Publisher: Ah, an American version of a British book! Great, you've convinced me!
That last brought to you courtesy of the Wikipedia article on Lynne Truss' "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" and 'the usual practice':
"The book was a commercial success. In 2004, the US edition became a New York Times best-seller. Contrary to usual publishing practice, the US edition of the book left the original British conventions intact."
I find the diagram of the two faces as fascinating as they are creepy. Everyone is rightly disturbed by the idea of defining "classes" by head shape, facial feature etc. due to the baggage from things like phrenology and Nazism, but when it comes down to it...facial types do seem to strongly correlate with social position. I wonder if this could be due to the hyper-selective marriage mores that stretch back from the early 19th century to perhaps the middle ages and earlier, wherein the groups that would later rise to become the commercial and aristocratic classes in the modern-day kept their marriages to a tight genetic group. It's uncomfortable to think about, but western society basically did have a caste system in so far as marriages were concerned. Noblemen married noblewomen, shopkeepers married other shopkeepers and tradesman daughters, and so on for generation after generation. Hence why the range of faces you see in a silicon valley start-up varies from the range you'd see in a body shop. (Sidenote: this has no racial aspect. The faces you'd see in an Indian start up vs. an Indian bodyshop seem to be different in the same way) Anway this is totally non-rigorous spit balling.
True, but the head on the left is also relying on the chinless wonder stereotype of the "effete, over-bred aristocrat who has receding features due to his family all marrying their cousins for the past two hundred years" and the face on the right relies on the "strong jaws are more masculine" idea. So there's a joke in there as well as any pretensions to scientific physiognomy (and indeed mocking the whole idea of scientific physiognomy).
Like Belloc's Nordic Man parody: https://www.amren.com/archives/back-issues/december-2011/
"A third correspondent — who signs her letter ‘Onyx’ — is troubled about her children. There are five: three charming boys and two delightful girls. She has measured their heads with her husband’s calipers (he is an architect in full employment) and he finds that her eldest and her youngest are quite unmistakably Mediterranean; her second eldest painfully Alpine, only her second youngest clearly Nordic; while the one in the middle, a boy (by name, she tells me, Ethelred), seems to be a strange mixture of all three.
I cannot reply personally to this correspondent, as she does not give her address; but I trust that these lines will meet her eye. I would have her note that in the first place the skulls of children are no index to the shape they will have when they fossilize in mature years; and next, that even if three varied types appear in her family, it is not remarkable, for all three types are present in England. Moreover, she may have travelled."
I don’t think there is a need to update the book since basically everyone you meet in America is working class or middle class of some sort. I hate the Prol term for it condescension towards very good people who just happen to lack a certain type of financial or social capital. But, if you have a reasonably good job and a house or prospects of buying a house AND you are trying to keep up with the joneses then you are middle class (I.e. you care what people think of you and your choices). I think the only tension here is whether you are middle class or upper middle class. Upper middle class people care a lot about where theIt school ranks in USA News rankings (I.e. Weslyian), they subscribe to the NYTimes or the WSJ depending on their politics. The smartest go to Harvard and maybe clerk with a Supreme Court judge and the golden ring is to become President of the United States. The reason you don’t know any upper class people is because there are very few of them, but if you want to find them you should attend services in old Episcopal churches, go to horticulture fairs, or garages that specialize in old prestige cars ( not fixing them up but but keeping them running). You can learn more about them by watching the film Metropolitan. Upper class people almost never go to Harvard or Oxford because they can’t get the grades to get in. They go to old schools with lax entrance standards. I bet a bunch go to St John’s College Annapolis. They don’t want to be famous and they don’t want to know famous people. They just want quiet lives and for their kids not to get fleeced by social climbers marrying them to climb the social ladder.
Oh and the mention in the article about the classy friend who knows the guy with the cat named Spinoza, she is definitely upper middle class. If you meet an upper class person they will not be the classiest person you know. They wear their clothes too long and they mend them. Prince Charles still wears suits he had as a young man. They likely wear their parents clothes. Their babies wear christening gowns worn by their great grandparents, and the mothers of the bride wear the dress their mother wore to their wedding. They aren’t classy, they are your annoying friend who has threadbare couches that they inherited from their great aunt that was shipped over from England. They do things that, if viewed by the middle class or even upper class, would seem ridiculous and silly.
Further backing up your point, the Queen's dogs have names like Susan, Honey, Bushy, Foxy, Oxo, Spick, and Span.
And have you seen the zoom photos of the Royals at home? The property brothers would start over with those rooms.
I think you can slice the definitions a little more finely so that there's a lower upper-class and an upper upper-class. I think the Spinoza cat is definitely lower upper-class, maybe trembling on the margin between upper middle and lower upper.
It's a very fine shade of meaning, I agree, but it's more like the difference between the squire (who is technically a commoner), the baronet (who has a hereditary title, is part of the aristocracy, but the lowest rank) and the duke (royalty are their own case).
A duke and a baronet are on the same social scale, but there's a big difference between Peregrine Cavendish and George Osborne. You may well meet the duke going around in a pair of wellies (particularly since he is involved in horse racing) but if he has any cats I imagine they're named things like "Smudge", and I'm quite sure Osborne would think a cat named "Spinoza" would be the business and would only be enticed into a pair of wellingtons with great awkwardness. (Osborne is definitely regarded as upper-middle class rather than lower-upper, and for the Duke of Devonshire there's no question as to where he's situated).
What you mention about clothing etc. is behind the quip about Heseltine having to buy his own furniture, and the Sam Vimes Economic Theory of Boots:
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
Except that the rich person likes to buy designer boots. And the extra cost of the designer boots compared to the $50 pair outweighs the savings from the efficiency of the $50 pair compared to the $20 pair.
Also, this argument assumes zero ability to save.
Not everyone makes enough money to save; that's the point. Also not everyone who does have money is interested in designer goods. There really is a market for cheap stuff that wears out quickly, and for quality goods that aren't ostentatious.
I think we need to stay away from rich and poor when it comes to class, though. Also, you really save money if you wear your father's boots and watch your great aunt's tv will reclining on your 1st cousin twice removed's couch. All of which you were "gifted" when you bought your first house. And with all of those costs taken care of, you might be able to buy a nice watch that you will give to your granddaughter in 70 years.
George Osborne's cat is called Freya (I'm taking this as 100% proving your point), and has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freya_(cat) (which must prove some sort of point about something, but I dread to think what)
I didn't even know he had a cat! But I did know the Norse goddess Freya had a chariot pulled by cats, so this may be him being clever-clever in the naming
Lots of my middle-class friends have cats named after deities, including Freya.
These are all great points regarding the English situation. The one quibble is over baronets who are still commoners because they are eligible to sit in the HofC instead of the Lords. It's a quibble because so are the oldest sons of Barons, Earl's etc, but no one would deny that any of them are upper class.
But the trick is in applying this to an American situation, since there is no House of Lords or royal family to create an officially sanctioned pecking order. That's why I think it's tricky to identify an upper class in the US, but an upper middle class UMC seems so obvious. I certainly agree that there are gradations in the UMC with different people looking down on others who in turn are looking down on them. For example the tech billionaire visits a Vanderbelt and thinks, "They don't even own a private jet." and they look down on him and think, "Look at that ridiculous Tuxedo designed by Tom Ford he keeps going on about as though we are supposed to be impressed."
As for naming a cat Spinoza, you would really need to talk to the person to know what it all means. Did she name the cat Spinoza because it sounded impressive or because she did her PhD on Spinoza. It would be really impressive if her grandfather did his PhD on Spinoza and went on and on about him while she was a girl and so she named the cat after him as a way to tease her grandfather.
Probably the best way to define the American UC would be to borrow from the English idea of the gentry. People who have had property for a long long time. Many of them look down on the aristocracy because they were ennobled in 19th century for selling beer and donating generously to the Conservative party whereas, the old gentry families are descended from people in the doomsday book. Perhaps an American version would be having a mother who was in the Daughter of the American Revolution and a house that has been in the family since, ... well since the American Revolution.
Metropolitan is outstanding.
Here's a fuller explanation of the 3-ladder system:
http://sasamat.xen.prgmr.com/michaelochurch/wp/2012/09/10/the-3-ladder-system-of-social-class-in-the-u-s/
I'm not crazy about how it handles the "global elite" (in part because that's the group of which I have the least reliable knowledge of any form, and I feel that to some extent at least the author's biases are taking over) but overall I think it gets the US (the whole "modern world") in 2021 essentially correct, more so than Fussell and standard sociology/marxism.
I *suspect* that these three ladders are in a sense the result of the "excess of 'people with university degrees'" phenomenon that Fussell sees as already underway; the Gentry crowd are the people who learned in higher ed how to judge and be judged by standards convenient for those who went through higher ed.
To me Fussell's magical Class X is basically High Gentry/Bobo's in Paradise, nothing less and (absolutely!) nothing more. He even admits that it's defined by the High Gentry wrapper of "I'm better than you because I have the right tastes and display them in the right way; not because I'm richer or because of my family name or because of anything I've achieved".
If Fussell were still alive, he'd be High Woke.
I think there IS actually a Class X in America, and (hah, what a surprise, bet you didn't see that coming!) it's defined by the kinds of people who read Astral Codex Ten. It's the STEM folks who understand the *Theory* of Fashion, who have read On Human Finery or Oswald Veblen, but have zero interest in putting it into practice. It's the Silicon Valley folks whose homes simultaneously hold $100,000 artworks and furniture made of the most practical materials available. It's people who cared that the house looks nice (however they define nice) but who also care very much that it's functional along every dimension, from quiet AC to having a hot water recirculating system to having solar and a battery backup.
It's the people who have (mostly -- these things are always a spectrum) liberated themselves from concern with what *most* people think of their lifestyles and tastes (though they probably still care about their peers -- that Silicon Valley engineer can probably be pigeon-holed as to his TV/movie tastes, though maybe less so his music or reading tastes).
A second interesting version of this crowd are the true cosmopolitans, the people who have seriously lived in enough different places to realize just how ridiculous it is to limit one's tastes, and who likewise have no particular reason to care what other people think. Think for example of the wealthy Asians buying multi-million-dollar homes in Los Angeles. Yes you can peg these as nouveau-riche, but they're much more interesting than that. They don't care about the fakery (the Shakespeare on the coffee table, the name dropping of which college you went to) of the American nouveau-riche; they simultaneously wear absolutely gorgeous clothes (and wear them well), and are happy to admit that their favorite TV show is some declasse sitcom, or their favorite restaurant is some chain.
I think if one wants to understand America (and "the modern world") the Three Ladders theory is more useful in that in explains more and explains it better. If one wants start judging people (or judging/positioning oneself) I think the next step is to start asking the question of "why does it work this way", not in the Theory of Fashion sense, but in the "why does anyone care how other people are decorating their yards" sense.
For people who want to explore that, one option is Rene Girard and mimesis ("people don't know what they want, they don't even know what they like; so they latch onto role models and construct their tastes from those exemplars").
A second option is Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning stuff ("life is so complicated that the only way any of us can survive is by being able to ignore almost all of it almost all the time. This requires constant, policed, agreement as to almost every aspect of social life because the alternative is impossible; we can get nothing else done if *every* interaction has to be parsed in every aspect because we do not understand anything about why the other person dressed as they did, stood as they did, paced themselves as they did, mentioned these issues and not those, etc etc").
Finally I'll add my contribution to this genre, my theory of fundamentalisms. ("Every group's leaders make TACTICAL decisions at any time about some issue that comes along. The decisions are unprincipled, chosen for convenience. BUT
- almost by definition the issues are salient, get lots of press time, are talked about much more than the background group issues
- the next generation of group members hears about these tactical decisions constantly (and the background decisions much less) and so imbibes the idea that 'we are defined by these particular claims')
Hence there is always fundamentalism (a belief in the literal truth of claims that were made at a earlier time for convenience, as metaphor, or as aspiration), it just changes every two generations or so exactly what the contents of that fundamentalism are. Always same psychology, but differing earlier tactical decisions that have become sacralized. Once you realize this pattern you see it throughout history, from early Christianity to the Reformation to the reception of Darwin (or Marx) to abortion in the 80s, to Woke today.
One thing that pushes Fundamentalism forward is mediocre (but not terrible) minds going to college.
Brilliant minds at college develop new ways of looking at the world.
Good minds at college compare different versions of these systematizations and try to strengthen them.
Mediocre minds at college fixate on whatever is the current fashionable System of the World, and fetishize into a Fundamentalism.
The tell is, as usual, the response when a contradiction (apparent or real) is pointed out in the system; the Brilliant, the Good, and the Mediocre minds each have their characteristic responses.
> I think there IS actually a Class X in America, and (hah, what a surprise, bet you didn't see that coming!) it's defined by the kinds of people who read Astral Codex Ten.
What/how would they become in their calcified rigid phase (assuming nothing remains forever young, that is)? What could possibly follow them as the new condensing Class X+1?
It seems like Fussell's "upper class", if it exists, is an epiphenomon with no effect on the rest of society. Upper class people would presumably not run businesses or run for election, because then it might seem like they have something to prove, which they don't. So all the people will practical power will be in Fussell's upper-middle class.
That doesn't really follow: They would have people to buy laws for them.
No, Scott conflated Fussell's Top Out-Of-Sight with Fussell's Upper class. Fussell thinks there is both a group of people who are more or less in hiding since the Great Depression who don't work and inherited all their money (Top Out-Of-Sight), and another, larger group, who inherited most of their money but still work (Upper class). Neither want compliments, etc., but the Upper class works in politics and business.
p.31 "It's likely to make its money by controlling banks and the more historic corporations, think tanks, and foundations, and to busy itself with things like the older universities, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Association, the Committee for Economic Development, and the like, together with the executive branch of the federal government, and often the Senate. In the days when ambassadors were amateurs, they were selected largely from this class, very seldom from the top-out-of-sight. And secondly, unlike the top-out-of-sights, the upper class is visible, often ostentatiously so. Which is to say that the top-out-of-sights have spun off and away from Veblen's scheme of conspicuous exhibition, leaving the mere upper class to carry on its former role."
"Upper class people would presumably not run businesses or run for election, because then it might seem like they have something to prove, which they don't."
They don't run businesses, they have wealth managers to do that for them. They don't run for election, they are the wealthy donors to whom the candidate goes cap-in-hand begging for funding, and/or they are the behind-the-scenes advisers who have the ear of the selection committees choosing candidates.
Governor Jones of Wotta State knows that it'd be very bad for his career if he gets on the wrong side of Mrs Coffin van Rental, even though the only thing you might ever hear about the lady is a discreet article in 'Town and Owns Half The Country' magazine about the white garden at her little holiday getaway estate so charmingly modelled by her husband's great-grandfather on a French chateau in the Dordogne which he saw on his Grand Tour in 1867.
"The most prole piece of furniture is 'folding chairs made of aluminum tubing with bright-green plastic-mesh webbing'."
I haven't seen those in years. Are they out of fashion, or am I just the wrong class now?
You can still find them at Wal*Mart, as you'd expect, though the webbing comes in all sorts of colors now. The slightly higher-class version has a single piece of material instead of ribbons of mesh.
The memory of those chairs fills me with nostalgia, but weren't they mostly considered beach and picnic chairs? I have trouble believing it was prole to sit in those on the beach in 1983, but maybe it was. Maybe it is prole to sit on the beach?
It's pretty prole to take a chair to sit on at the beach. Or an umbrella, or (god forbid) one of those tents.
If you don't want to be a prole, take a towel, that's it.
What about for an 80-year-old? I mainly remember those chairs being for my grandparents to sit in at the beach.
Full disclosure: I grew up on the Gulf Coast, which is prole but also warm. I dunno if old people in New England sit on the beach, whether by towel or chair.
Russell's analysis of class remains fundamentally accurate.
Maybe if you want to sell things. Not if you want to understand and manipulate politics.
On the whole I think it holds, but you are correct that politically there is a *significantly* deeper split atm between the proles and the middle than 30-40 years ago. Which is relevant to both aims, actually.
I started this book once, and was immediately put off by stuff like that rhododendron paragraph.
The comedically excessive level of precise detail, the ever-present hedge that he might be joking (if you notice something just plan wrong), the schoolyard logic of "oh, you disagree? ha, typical American status anxiety" ... it just felt like bullshitting to me. Neither an honest attempt to relate facts not an honest observational comedy routine, but a cowardly mixture of the two, using each as a defense against its failing to accomplish the other.
You seem more confident than me about your ability to extract real insight from this book, but I'm confused why. You write
> I've previously found Fussell intelligent and trustworthy, at least when I can figure out how serious he's being.
But how do you figure that out? He's always at least half-jokey in tone. In content, he says a mixture of things that are recognizably true and things that aren't. If you figure he's joking when he says something that rings false, and figure he's being serious when he says something that rings true ... then all you get at the end is what you already knew going in.
Well, and stuff that rings true but which you had never noticed before. Are you gauging Fussell's trustworthiness by the frequency of that stuff?
I also sometimes write halfway between joking and serious, so it didn't feel so offensive to me. I agree there's a sense in which you only get what you had going in, but class is unusually suited for this - in a lot of ways you already know things about the class system, and just need a guide to point it out to you and say "yeah, that's class" (eg the anti-Superbowl party)
I am so glad that you reviewed this. I was confused by the Class X chapter, but it makes sense considering that nowhere in the book does the author talk about himself and what it says about him writing about class. He does not possess self-awareness, and it is very upper-middle-class of him to do the meta-thing of being a snob about snobbery.
I've socialized the book over a couple of years, and I've concluded that the class descriptions are just as rigid as he claims they are, but people have varying degrees of sensitivity and awareness. Some people wear their class uniform down to the T, but they have no sense that they are doing so.
People are so offended by the suggestion that these class groupings exist. Assuming the data was there, it would be trivial to prove it with factor analysis.
I am working on new class terms because the linear rankings of "upper," "middle," and "lower" offends the American Way. What if we reduce class to its essential kernel, which is how you make your living. My class distinctions would be:
Transcendent: no concern for money, i.e., hires the "rentier"
Capitalist: make money from money, i.e., the "rentier"
Expert: profits from expertise (doctors, lawyers, top scientists)
Working: people who worry about pay raises and such
Broke: no money or very inconsistent labor
Broken: those in prison or unable to work
I'm a signals-all-the-way down guy, so I believe very few people, maybe on the order of 1%, are immune to falling into class patterns
I also disagree with his notion that the movement of culture is exclusively from lower to upper. It is a two-way street. For example, it is now kind of low class to play golf. Also, having flashy cars was something only the wealthy could do until it became more affordable, and now it's gaudy.
Upper-borrowing-from-lower is the standard pattern of subculture co-option. (I recommend reading Subculture: The Meaning of Style by Dick Hebdige; also, we all speak vulgar English). However, yes, the lowers are trying to emulate the uppers constantly. As the economics of consumption change, the upper classes have to push back the goal-post of exclusive taste. The lower classes have strength in numbers, so in some ways, they are the easiest go-tos for defining mainstream culture.
"It is a two-way street. For example, it is now kind of low class to play golf. "
But it was always the way that culture (taste/fashion/etiquette) trickled down from the rich/upper-class to the classes beneath them. There's a wonderfully bitchy bit in Hilary Mantel's "Bring Up The Bodies":
"Anne the queen wears yellow, as she did when she first appeared at court, dancing in a masque: the year, 1522. Everyone remembers it, or they say they do: Boleyn’s second daughter with her bold dark eyes, her speed, her grace. The fashion for yellow had started among the wealthy in Basle; for a few months, if a draper could get hold of it, he could make a killing. And then suddenly it was everywhere, in sleeves and hose and even hairbands for those who couldn’t afford more than a sliver. By the time of Anne’s debut it had slid down the scale abroad; in the domains of the Emperor, you’d see a woman in a brothel hoisting her fat dugs and tight-lacing her yellow bodice."
I trust the comparison of Anne to a fat cheap whore is not lost on anyone? It's also a comment on how England, for all Henry's pretensions, is behind the times just slightly but significantly in comparison to Europe; part of Anne's initial attraction when she first appeared in court was the French polish (ha! unintended pun) and up-to-the-minute fashion and culture she brought with her.
That the fashions of the town penetrate to the provincial centres over time, so that last season's style or even two or more years ago is only now making a stir in the sticks, is a commonplace. Cultural influence trickling *upwards* is much more recent.
Even Marie Antoinette playing at shepherdess in the Trianon - is apparently a myth, Wikipedia tells me, but she did have her own "rustic retreat" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hameau_de_la_Reine#Life_at_the_Queen%E2%80%99s_Hamlet
And that again has more to do with the pastoral idyll poetry notion, from Virgil on down, than it has to do with being a genuine small landlord (or shepherdess). This wasn't something that came up from 'the people', the way rap music etc. became an appropriated cultural signal.
Refinement: Asset class difference might hint has different subtlety of class e.g. "landlords" are often themselves serfs to the real estate investment class. capacity, stake, and "passive income" are all from different classes. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1277262959828283392
Fantastic review. Enjoyed reading it, and it gave me a lot to think about. Seems pretty much right.
But I've become very confused at the prevalence of the idea that someone is *either* serious or joking. It is very common human behavior to make actual ("serious") points in a humorous or playful way. I noticed that a lot of historians could not understand this concept, and would cite jokes from old newspapers as literal facts. But they weren't "just jokes," either--the joke was intended to make a broader reality-based claim. I notice this overly-literal reading more frequently.
Maybe I'm being overly literal myself, but aren't lines like this exactly why your writing is popular? "The upper-middle-class likes New England, Old England, yachts, education, good grammar, yachts, chastity, androgyny, the classics, the humanities, and did I mention yachts?" I understand this to be a serious assertion, but one that is also joking/playful. You are using certain words and emphases to playfully convey a sensibility most readers will understand perfectly.
From the review, it also seems like this book, which I have not read, is sort of parodying a 19c treatise. The illustrations and the playful, florid style go with that. The idea is probably showing that such an off-putting, archaic formula, with all its fixation on categorization and labeling minute aspects of people, can be quite seamlessly applied to our own society. The casualness is part of the joke...the awkwardness of both attempting to dissect people like this, and the fact that we're not all that different from any society in terms of structure and behavior. He is both serious and playful at all the points you highlight.
I can't judge the final chapter without reading the book. Your explanation that he really saw the class as different, in ways that have since been obscured, may be correct. But the change in tone suggests to me that he knew what he was doing. After putting everyone under the microscope, he was going to write from the perspective of one inside a class, naturally oblivious to it, as most are. That reinforces his general point about how class works, and how it's off-putting to be dissected by experts like that, partly because we can't see our own class markers even when they are obvious to others. He may well have been mocking the culture of academics who write such treatises while not realizing their own habits, since they'd be most likely to read this. From the serious writing, I definitely suspect he was intentionally demonstrating what this kind of class signaling looks like. Calling it out would have killed the effect. But he may have been pretty serious about Class X being different due to its escape from the market, though the detailed specifics are odd. There *are* individuals who kind of do their own thing, and they do have commonalities, but not really the ones described. I think the bigger issue is that they are always a very small and dispersed group, and therefore do not really act as a class in the same way the others do. They do some signaling, but it is somewhat different because they lack a clear community and opposition. I'll have to read it before I can say more...I'm a little confused why he ends up focusing on the ethic of buying and selling, when it seems like the upper class is not fixated on that either, exactly, and that Class X is escaping a lot of indirectly related social logic as well.
Jeff Bezos only upper middle class, huh. Sure. I'll have whatever he's having.
What he's having is that class is not just about the money you have.
Same way thing like continent names have geographical meanings but also geopolitical meanings (and often point to different borders and include/exclude different populations when used in the latter way).
Jeff made his own money in trade, no less, rather than inheriting a trust fund set up by grandfather. That's the difference.
Yeah, most of us would take the billions and never mind if we eat with our elbows on the table, but when you're mingling with people who also have billions, then there has to be a new pecking order and class is it. Bezos and the tech billionaires may not care about class having sufficient 'fuck you' money to tell actual governments to go fuck themselves, so that may be a new development: formerly, the newly-rich aspired to be accepted into the upper class but now that fortunes can be spun like gold out of straw, the exceedingly wealthy may be happy enough to regard themselves as a class of their own and the old upper class are not so desirable a state as before.
Fussell was writing a generation ago about a world that was rapidly disappearing even then. The world that Edith Wharton had so meticulously dissected. It is really and truly gone now.
I cannot think of an institution that would not grovel to to get Bezos in the door. You name it: college, art museum, opera, country club. Or even a mere single digit billionaire.
The only real rule is the Golden Rule.
Not only that, but in the real world of political power, the man who owns the loudest megaphone in the capital city is at the top of the heap, no matter what his upbringing is.
I'm not sure the upper class have billions. A will with $100 million in assets divided among 8 grand children and after inheritance taxes have been paid is quite nice but none of those grandchildren is likely to run it back up even to the amount they inherited in their lifetime. This is my problem with Thomas Piketty.
The descriptions of Upper Upper sound a lot like (my understanding of) Scandinavian culture: humble conformity, distaste for those who stand out aesthetically or through economic ambition. It also reminds me of French culture in its profoundly confident yet insular perfection of taste. And, as mentioned, Old England is regarded as the pinnacle of taste.
Is it fair to generalize that American culture is Middle Class writ large whereas European culture is Upper Upper?
strike through the word "humble"
European culture is pretentious AF, so it's definitely an "aspiring upper" thing. Scandinavian, maybe less so.
"this was another one of the sections where I had trouble figuring out where Fussell was and wasn't joking."
This constant questioning of "is he joking or not" gives me a sense that you're like an alien trying to understand human customs, but not quite there yet.
Fussell is obviously writing freely, and with a frivolous spirit here and there. He is not downright ha-ha joking like a comedian, nor is is downright serious like an academic.
He merely has a light tone - and these "wild" passages, are just using the hyperbole or ultra-specificness to make his point. They are not written that way because it's some 100% provable and accurate description of the world, but because it shows a social truth through a stereotype.
I think Scott understand that, and what he means by "joking or not" is merely a question of where exactly the hyperbole starts and ends.
A few years ago I visited Boston and noticed the performing arts center there had changed names again. It had been the Wang Center, after the founder of a long-defunct computer company, and then the Citi Center, after a bank that bought naming rights. It is now the Boch Center, after the owner of a car dealership known for his frequent ads on local radio and television imploring us to "come on down."
Having your name on a cultural institution used to be reserved for the upper class, or at least people who are now seen as upper class in retrospect. (Was Andrew Carnegie upper class? Cornelius Vanderbilt? Both came from modest backgrounds, Vanderbilt was from Staten Island for cripe's sake.) Owning a car dealership is the zenith of the working class, setting aside the Trump family. So what am I to make of the Boch Center? Is live entertainment declasse now, or is Ernie Boch classier for his patronage of it?
How do the upper-uppers entertain themselves anyway? They used to go to the opera and the symphony, but that's more of a UMC thing now. Actually I have no idea what an upper class person is like these days. I've met some wealthy people - I'm talking private jet wealthy - and their tastes didn't seem to out of whack with mine and my UMC cohort... on the other hand they were all "new money" and (perhaps more importantly) largely Jewish.
When a name changed once every 50 years, you could know what a building was. "The Sears Tower" lasted a long time, but jow many people outside Chicago could tell you its current name?
When people assume the names will change every few years, they never bother to learn the new names, so there is no real point in getting a name on something now.
These days a young upper class person is probably a curate a Trinity Church Wall Street or some such place, or doing a PhD in Astronomy or Classics that they are paying full tuition on because it seems unfair to take a scholarship from someone who needs it. They probably play hockey or tennis or sail on the weekends. I'm sure that you can still find them at the opera or the symphony but definitely not in the box seats, and they are probably sitting with their grandmother and a cousin.
I worked for a wealthy prole for several years. He had a prominent potbelly, a handlebar mustache, and an assortment of flannel shirts. Though indistinguishable from the average yokel, he wielded enormous influence over state-level politics, endowed several artistic institutions, and often had upper-middle class professionals groveling before him in order to fund their nature conservatory, theater, gallery, or new academic building. Such professionals viewed him with a combination of resentment and fear.
Many are questioning the concept of “class” as distinct from the usual American notion of class as a socio-economic descriptor. Apparently Fussel would have preferred the word “caste”.
Allow me to get rude for a moment. Unstated here is *why* (I could have used all-caps but in this community hypertext for bold signals higher class) anyone cares about class. Perhaps--and this is the rude part--it is because women care about class, and yes, Jeff Bezos has more money and political power, but are women more attracted to an Upper Upper male than they are Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates? I think so.
Who keeps track of these class rules in the first place? In my experience, it is generally women. I don’t mean that as a bad thing, I mean it as a thing. Who is generally choosing what flowers grow in the garden and the furniture and paintings in the living room and the schools the kids go to?
A male Princeton professor half-understanding and somewhat-explicating the system seems brilliant only because he half-penetrated what so many more women already know but due to modesty and reasons of class won’t reveal.
Class would be a meaningless concept, perhaps, if the females among us didn’t care so much about it. I don’t mean that as a bad thing. But you can’t pretend there are a dozen different ways of thinking about class and that it’s all sort of arbitrary if women rank their marriage prospects based upon class, and they don’t see class as at all arbitrary.
Look at how Trump was regarded, spoken of, written of. Class was something that was used to bash him over the head, even if it wasn't crudely stated in that direct a way. But little scribblers for online magazines who were working gig economy piece-rate jobs wrote gleeful pieces about how low-toned and déclassé he was for eating well-done steak with ketchup. This wasn't simply "doesn't he know the best way to eat good steak is cooked like this to most appreciate the flavour?" food criticism, this was "for all his money, he's a prole and he'll NEVER be One Of Us". There was a line in one of these articles about the type of person you could be confident in bringing to a good restaurant, and it was heavily implied this was not Trump.
I found this very patronising and indeed insulting, because I'm sure these people would have fallen over themselves to signal the right attitudes towards "women'n'minorities" and gush about equality and diversity and uplifting the working class and "no-one is illegal". So the immediate question that sprang to my mind was "And would you be inviting as your dinner guest to one of these good restaurants, say, the undocumented immigrant lady who works as a contract cleaner in the office building you work at?" I don't imagine they would because Sonía (if they even know her name) may be a *wonderful* brown person but can you be sure she won't drink out of the finger bowl so, you know...
It certainly wasn't just women making class judgements on Trump and a lot of men were very eager to demonstrate that they were fully aware he was a jumped-up vulgarian even if he went to Fordham and Wharton. John Oliver's "Drumpf" skit is relevant here, as there's also class implications buried in with the 'reminder that he is of immigrant roots' (and coming from a Brit who immigrated to the US, that's rich). I think the reason that took off so much and was so popular was precisely because of the class implications; anyone with enough self-awareness to realise that mocking someone for being the descendant of immigrants sat badly with support for Dreamers could console themselves that it wasn't about that, it was about him being Not One Of Us.
I moved to the UK to study, and spent quite a bit of time around upper-class British people. One of the most noticeable traits they had in common was a certain performative attitude. Being authentic was passé; everything had to be tinged with self-aware irony.
Perhaps this helps explain why Fussell keeps blurring the line between serious and ironic.
Reminds me of Scruton's attitude to postmodern art:
https://www.city-journal.org/html/kitsch-and-modern-predicament-11726.html
"This is one reason for the emergence of a wholly new artistic enterprise, which some call "postmodernism" but which might better be described as "preemptive kitsch." Having recognized that modernist severity is no longer acceptable—for modernism begins to seem like the same old thing and therefore not modern at all—artists began not to shun kitsch but to embrace it, in the manner of Andy Warhol, Alan Jones, and Jeff Koons. The worst thing is to be unwittingly guilty of producing kitsch; far better to produce kitsch deliberately, for then it is not kitsch at all but a kind of sophisticated parody. (The intention to produce real kitsch is an impossible intention, like the intention to act unintentionally.) Preemptive kitsch sets quotation marks around actual kitsch and hopes thereby to save its artistic credentials. The dilemma is not: kitsch or avant-garde, but: kitsch or "kitsch." The quotation marks function like the forceps with which a pathologist lifts some odoriferous specimen from its jar.
And so modernist severity has given way to a kind of institutionalized flippancy. Public galleries and big collections fill up with the predigested clutter of modern life, obsolete the moment it goes on permanent display. Such is the "art" of Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili (winner of this year's Turner Prize), Gilbert and George, and all the other poseurs who dominate the British art scene. Art as we knew it required knowledge, competence, discipline, and study. Preemptive kitsch, by contrast, delights in the tacky, the ready-made, and the cut-out, using forms, colors, and images that both legitimize ignorance and also laugh at it, effectively silencing the adult voice—as in Claes Oldenburg and Jeff Koons. Such art eschews subtlety, allusion, and implication, and in place of imagined ideals in gilded frames it offers real junk in quotation marks. It is indistinguishable in the end from advertising—with the sole qualification that it has no product to sell except itself."
Fussell was a literary critic. Having been wounded in combat in WWII, his great subject was young men at war. His most famous serious book is "The Great War and Modern Memory" about WWI's influence on literature.
The one book by him that I have read was "Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars," with chapters on travel writers like Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming's brother Peter, and the like. 1930s novelists tended to search out material for novels by taking adventurous trips which they could write up as travel articles and then a travel book. Evelyn Waugh, for example, famously went to Ethiopia in 1930 to cover the Emperor's coronation for the papers, then turned it into his novel "Black Mischief."
British novelists like Waugh were obsessed with the class system and were brilliant at depicting it. Some American novelists have been similarly obsessed with class, such as John O'Hara. Tom Wolfe made his career by searching out and enthusiastically explaining obscure status systems, such as those of hot rod customizers, surfers, and test pilots.
I presume "Class" is a hybrid between criticism and a satirical novel. Maybe it started out as an attempt at fiction with amusing characters from different classes expressing all these over-the-top opinions?
I suspect it's also a bit of a provincial's exaggeration of the class structure of the East. Much like how "The Great Gatsby" is in part about an upscale Minnesotan's resentments of the Eastern rich, Fussell was from about as nice a background as you could be from in Southern California: his father was a lawyer for the top L.A. firm of O'Melveny & Myers, they lived in classy Pasadena, and he went to Pomona College, the top small liberal arts college in Southern California. But he made his academic career in the East and perhaps he was amused and a little hurt that nobody back east knew this background was highly respectable by L.A. standards.
But, that's just a guess.
Well this is making me feel pretty awkward about my Douglas Fir desk.
I don't know what it's like to read as a non-Brit, but 'Watching the English' by Kate Fox does a lot of the same work analysing the English class system and was published in 2004, so rather more up to date. The most glaring conceptual difference I spotted between the US and British systems from your review is that in the UK, it's totally possible for someone to be non-rich and upper-class, whereas in your description it seems like American upper-class people aren't showy, but are universally rich. Otherwise the principles seem very similar.
A while ago I read a webcomic which had American characters talking about class as something purely determined by savings and income, and it was staggering to me how alien I found that idea; it really underlined to me how much I'd internalised the British system. This, by contrast, feels much more natural.
I think the British system, being much older, has gone through a development where class was originally tied very much to property, status and wealth - a gentleman could be known as such by his landholdings. The notion then began to evolve where a gentleman was as much or more a possessor of certain qualities as of plain wealth, and so you could have poor gentlemen and rich commoners.
Take the example from Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby" where the decadent aristocrat Sir Mulberry Hawk is trying to seduce (and once repulsed, force himself upon) the virtuous Kate Nickleby. Her brother challenges him to a duel and Hawk refuses on the grounds that he's a gentleman and they don't duel commoners, but Nicholas retorts that he too is a gentleman by birth and breeding (so even if he and his sister now have to earn their living, being an impoverished ex-school master has nothing to do with that status).
"‘I am the brother of the young lady who has been the subject of conversation here,’ said Nicholas. ‘I denounce this person as a liar, and impeach him as a coward. If he has a friend here, he will save him the disgrace of the paltry attempt to conceal his name—and utterly useless one—for I will find it out, nor leave him until I have.’
Sir Mulberry looked at him contemptuously, and, addressing his companions, said —
‘Let the fellow talk, I have nothing serious to say to boys of his station; and his pretty sister shall save him a broken head, if he talks till midnight.’
...‘Will you make yourself known to me?’ asked Nicholas in a suppressed voice.
‘No,’ replied the other fiercely, and confirming the refusal with an oath. ‘No.’
‘If you trust to your horse’s speed, you will find yourself mistaken,’ said Nicholas. ‘I will accompany you. By Heaven I will, if I hang on to the foot-board.’
‘You shall be horsewhipped if you do,’ returned Sir Mulberry.
‘You are a villain,’ said Nicholas.
‘You are an errand-boy for aught I know,’ said Sir Mulberry Hawk.
‘I am the son of a country gentleman,’ returned Nicholas, ‘your equal in birth and education, and your superior I trust in everything besides. I tell you again, Miss Nickleby is my sister. Will you or will you not answer for your unmanly and brutal conduct?’
‘To a proper champion—yes. To you—no,’ returned Sir Mulberry, taking the reins in his hand. ‘Stand out of the way, dog. William, let go her head.’"
And in Britain, there was (and maybe still is) the soothing influence of time. You are a wealthy Yorkshire ironmaster who grubbed his way up from being a yokel living in a hut to "pots of money due to the Industrial Revolution". Nobody, including yourself, regards you as a gentleman for all your piles of dosh. But you can now afford to send your son to the good schools. Maybe he'll go on to run the business, but he's on the right ladder to ascend into the upper class. His son, your grandson, will certainly be regarded as a gentleman, having been raised as a rich man's son, gone to the right schools and university, mingled on equal terms with the sprigs of the gentry, and all traces of the horny-handed son of toil from Grand-dad have been successfully erased.
Your daughter will make a successful marriage to an impoverished nobleman, if he hasn't manage to snaffle an American heiress, in the good old bargain of "we've got the cash but no rank, you've got the rank but no cash, let's merge our forces" and will be accepted as a lady, and your grand-daughter will certainly be such.
The same forces may be at work in America. Jeff Bezos may be self-made man nouveau-riche and not 'really' of the upper class, but his grandchildren? A different story.
I like your description but it does all sound a bit Edwardian.
I mean, Arnold Scharznegger did marry into the extended family of the Kennedies (and divorce admittedly)
The notion that character and manners can be class-defining is much older, though. Boccaccio's Decameron is full of tales of men with beautiful gentlemanly manners who are impoverished by circumstance-- and often as not, eventually elevated in formal status and in property through being recognized by established grandees as gentlemanly. Fairy tales to be sure, but likely reflective of cultural assumptions of the time.
Interesting! So, for a Polish post-communist perspective instead, where all class boundaries have been rolled over by Soviet tanks...
Perhaps the most important thing that separates Eastern bloc culture from e.g. British culture is the concept of intelligentsia - a class materially poor but mentally rich, the artists and writers and academics. There is a strong implicit understanding that such a class is the heart of society, responsible for its "spirit" and the safekeeping of its values. Between WW2 and the subsequent Soviet occupation, this class has been essentially gutted, to a large extent physically (see e.g. Katyn massacre). In parallel, the communist effort to separate kulaks from both their holdings and the mortal coil has been successful, and there are no pre-war fortunes whatsoever. Communism falls, and now we have a tabula rasa society.
Yes and no. It turns out that when your entire country is privatized overnight, a clever person with connections - social capital, the best kind of capital - can acquire a ridiculous amount of money and power while nobody's looking. Moreover, aristocratic families keep their descendants educated (usually abroad, if possible), as well-connected as the previous generation, and ever eager to help each other out. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. So that's the old money, with some noveau riche mixed in who got lucky playing politics.
The lower class works basically as described in the book. The middle class is stuck in a curious position. Do we aim to be the new intelligentsia, perhaps inspired by our own grandfathers? Do we enthusiastically jump in the rat race and attempt to out-earn and out-Instagram everybody else (cf. the lower middle class of the book)? Do we ostentatiously drop both status ladders and do our own thing? The middle class is fractured and occupied by sneering at everybody climbing a different ladder than themselves.
The weirdest thing is that all societies converge to a similar stratification, regardless of the starting conditions. I'm sure ancient Romans were very busy displaying (or not) their rhododendrons.
Great post. And this gets me wondering in a dangerous way to what extent class is simply genetic.
Scott talks about the 3 ladders. Isn't that saying "you are in one of three classes, you can go up or down the ladder, but you can't switch ladders"?
I find the focus on taste interesting, because to what extent are these tastes genetic? I would think taste is more genetic than most things. Prefer sweet liquor or a complex wine? That's probably genetic.
Math skills, business skills are genetic but that's a banal observation.
What I find interesting is that these upper class traits require both male and female to make them robust. There's no upper class without men with supurb math and people skills, but whether to plant the rhododendrons or not, maybe some men are good at that, but I suspect women are better at this.
Taste is one of those genetic shortcuts. Taste is sexy because it means good breeding and healthy genes.
Taste seems to be this quality that is hyper IQ that women smell out. Sure women have better taste than men, perhaps, but a man with good taste is super sexy & probably really smart.
Perhaps smart women are even able to infer multiple qualities at once from a man's taste. How smart they are, how likely they are to cheat, how likely they are to succeed. For instance, one with Donald Trump's taste is both likely to both succeed and cheat. Some women will accept that and others won't.
My point is that for the nuanced observer maybe the flowers your parents plant outside your childhood home reveal much about you that is true in a multitude of ways. .
I think opting out of class and countersignalling ("class X") is extremely genetic - both low agreeability and high g factor predispose you for it.
Taste is proxy for both cognitive style (in particular high/low openness in the OCEAN model) and the social circles you frequent, so having people mate along taste lines makes sense.
"I'm sure ancient Romans were very busy displaying (or not) their rhododendrons."
Isn't that part of the Satyricon? In the Feast of Trimalchio, making fun of the vulgarly rich who are all freed-men and ex-slaves, enormously wealthy and showing off by extravagance to the point of parody https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyricon#Chapters_26%E2%80%9378,_Cena_Trimalchionis_(Trimalchio's_dinner)
This section of the Satyricon, regarded by classicists such as Conte and Rankin as emblematic of Menippean satire, takes place a day or two after the beginning of the extant story. Encolpius and companions are invited by one of Agamemnon's slaves, to a dinner at the estate of Trimalchio, a freedman of enormous wealth, who entertains his guests with ostentatious and grotesque extravagance. After preliminaries in the baths and halls (26–30), the guests (mostly freedmen) enter the dining room, where their host joins them.
"Extravagant courses are served while Trimalchio flaunts his wealth and his pretence of learning (31–41). Trimalchio's departure to the toilet (he is incontinent) allows space for conversation among the guests (41–46). Encolpius listens to their ordinary talk about their neighbors, about the weather, about the hard times, about the public games, and about the education of their children. In his insightful depiction of everyday Roman life, Petronius delights in exposing the vulgarity and pretentiousness of the illiterate and ostentatious wealthy of his age."
Well goodness me, and in the Notes to a translation of the Satyricon I find the following piece of edification (warning, if it be needed, for period-typical language of a racial character):
"“Drawing his hunting-knife, he plunged it fiercely into the boar’s side, and some thrushes flew out of the gash.”
In the winter of 1895 a dinner was given in a New York studio. This dinner, locally known as the “Girl in the Pie Dinner,” was based upon Petronius, Martial, and the thirteenth book of Athenaeus. In the summer of 1919, I had the questionable pleasure of interviewing the chef-caterer who got it up, and he was, at the time, engaged in trying to work out another masterpiece to be given in California. The studio, one of the most luxurious in the world, was transformed for the occasion into a veritable rose grotto, the statuary was Pompeian, and here and there artistic posters were seen which were nothing if not reminiscent of Boulevard Clichy and Montmartre in the palmiest days. Four negro banjo players and as many jubilee singers titillated the jaded senses of the guests in a manner achieved by the infamous saxophone syncopating jazz of the Barbary Coast of our times. The dinner was over. The four and one half bottles of champagne allotted to each Silenus had been consumed, and a well-defined atmosphere of bored satiety had begun to settle down when suddenly the old-fashioned lullaby “Four and Twenty Blackbirds” broke forth from the banjoists and singers. Four waiters came in bearing a surprisingly monstrous object, something that resembled an impossibly large pie. They, placed it carefully in the center of the table. The negro chorus swelled louder and louder--“Four and Twenty Blackbirds Baked in a Pie.”
The diners, startled into curiosity and then into interest, began to poke their noses against this gigantic creation of the baker. In it they detected a movement not unlike a chick’s feeble pecking against the shell of an egg. A quicker movement and the crust ruptured at the top.
A flash of black gauze and delicate flesh showed within. A cloud of frightened yellow canaries flew out and perched on the picture frames and even on the heads and shoulders of the guests.
But the lodestone which drew and held the eyes of all the revellers was an exquisitely slender, girlish figure amid the broken crust of the pie. The figure was draped with spangled black gauze, through which the girl’s marble white limbs gleamed like ivory seen through gauze of gossamer transparency. She rose from her crouching posture like a wood nymph startled by a satyr, glanced from one side to the other, and stepped timidly forth to the table."
Wait.
WW2 ends and we do have a new ruling class - originating from pre-war socialist/communist activists. We also have a lot of intelligentsia left, it's respected, deemed useful, allowed to run a lot of things, and most of all, culturally reproduce. They represent knowledge, science and progress, after all, and those are both good in principle and needed to rebuild the country.
The two converge into Đilas's New Class. You can divide them into bureaucratic apparatchik and free-thinking intelligentsia currents, but they're not a direct continuation of pre-war party cadres and intelligentsia, respectively, but of post-war factions within the current elite (the latter often coming out of the stalinist faction, increasingly pushed into opposition after nationalists win internal struggles for power). Also, eventually both conspire to dismantle the old regime, and share the spoils. The socially well-positioned can now acquire private fortunes they couldn't hold in the previous regime, just as keikaku.
But dismantling the regime does open things up. Turns out capitalism requires a different set of skills, and not every bureaucrat or academic can make the cut. Meanwhile educated youngsters in big cities can quickly make a professional-managerial career in newly opening branches and counterparts of western industries, while talented merchants can build trading empires out of a marketplace booth. Our new post-1990s elite is a combination of these three groups.
The career opportunities dry up after a decade or so, while the old industries and public services are dismantled, leaving both the working class and the new aspiring educated elites pretty much where they are in the west. And that's not weird. We've converged to the western system because (and only after) we've adopted the western system. The old regime had a different system, and different class divisions, too.
The communist-era "ruling class" was temporary and consisted mostly of lucky sociopaths and their spineless minions. Some of them were clever enough to build a power base that lasts them up to now, but they're an exception rather than the rule. The _opposition_ made a comfortable niche for themselves, indeed.
There is an "old money" class and they're pretty good at avoiding the limelight, though if you're inclined to go through the biographies of the elites you can find a lot of interesting coincidences - especially among the opposition figures! There are old families that still keep their traditions alive and provide favors for each other, across some hundreds or even thousands of members - I have met some, actually.
Totally disagree on educated youngers rising to elite status - being a middle manager in a corporation makes you, at best, lower middle class. Being a successful businessman sometimes makes you upper class, and sometimes everyone is laughing at you (see e.g. Filipiak, and his famous painting).
I'm still not convinced we have converged to the western system - not enough emphasis on money as a determinant of class. See discussion below about commercial vs academic middle class - a member of intelligentsia is, I think, best portrayed stereotypically as HBO's Chernobyl's physicist MC, when it comes to the standard of living he/she enjoys! Money is for the rubes, which is not really the case in the West.
(also, there's not enough money to go around, so most people who try to impress others with their riches are pretty pathetic, especially once you compare their "fortune" with old EU)
Well, "lucky sociopaths and their spineless minions" is how I'd describe ruling classes in general.
But I think you may mean that we've lost genuine "no need to work" upper classes, and I agree. A couple of successful business tycoons, and that's it. When I think of our modern elites, I picture UMC, and you could certainly get there from a management job at a 1990 startup / newly opening western corporation branch. We're talking about C*Os opportunities here. (Sure, this dried up quickly, by the late 1990s you're stuck at middle management, by now you're stuck in the cubicle.)
But the real class-unifying force is what happened with the children of those people. It's universal across the three groups I mentioned, and it's also inclusive of academics and media people, politicians and bureaucrats, possibly even of (some) middle management. I speak of western education (as in literally western universities), building western connections, adopting western globalist values. After all, in comparison with the US, UK and EU elites, they're all just aspiring upstarts. (This, I guess, is also why money may not be all that important at this point. Everyone's in the same boat, with the same catching up to do. But at the same time, this strengthens the case for convergence on the western system, even if the upper crust isn't there yet. But I mostly spoke of and care about the middle and the bottom in the first place.)
This is a great point, and I often wonder what happened to the upper class in communist countries. My guess is that many of their grandchildren now that communism has fallen will begin to revert to those older values having been quietly told what was the appropriate thing to do, quietly by their relatives. I think those values start to reassert themselves and many of them will assert values different from the upper middle class.
You forgot that good part of the new upper class, your "clever person with connections", were part of the former nomenclatura, who had their connections built during late communism. Hence the ostentatious pretending by the right-winger well-doers that they are not part of elite and not part of upper class.
Most of this isn't the least bit American. Half of it could come straight out of the Duke of Bedford's Book of Snobs or Nancy Mitford's U and non-U from 20 years before. It's not an accident that Albemarle, Berkeley, Cavendish, etc, would be classy street names in England too.
*Laughs in British* Pathetic. You're going to need at least 10 more class gradients and 1,000 more signifiers.
Speaking of cartographic interior-design-based countersignalling, what map should I ironically get to hang on a wall? I'm thinking a pre-mediatisation HRE with all the tiny little states and enclaves and exclaves. Or maybe a print of one of these Soviet military maps of the local area, with all the british place names lovingly transliterated into Cyrillic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ
I have a pressing need to order a beautifully illustrated map of Hanseatic League cities, given that I live in one and feel, at best, lukewarm about its allegiance to its nation-state. I'm not sure if it counts as signalling or countersignalling, though.
The difference between "middle class" and "working class" can to some extent be generated from a classification of jobs. Where the variability of productivity between people is low or easily observable (and thus pay is flat or largely comes in the form of a commission, respectively) there is little role for CVs to play. If there is some professional certification (possibly in-house) then check that, but otherwise there's no reason to ask more questions.
On the other hand, if individuals vary greatly in productivity but this is difficult to observe, employers care about past performance, hence CVs and the emphasis on formal education.
A weakness of the above is that it classifies schoolteachers as working-class, seeing how they are a typical union job (near-identical productivity, etc.).
Just a note: "they will quickly get covered with unsightly fingerprints unless polished everyday." 'Everyday' is an adjective that means daily. You probably wanted a space in there.
t. Working-class man.
Is there an extent to which Fussell just, like, didn't actually know any upper class people? It seems notable that he exhaustively dissects the habits and mores of the people he would be likely to come across, but the upper classes get reduced to "they don't play signalling games".
Humans being humans, it seems likely that the upper classes do indeed play their own class signalling games -- but maybe because they are such a rare species (and they are generally outside the public eye) it's harder to actually get a handle on what form those games take.
To completely invent an example, an upper class person might be secretly very proud of their early-Georgian dining table (as opposed to the gauche Regency era dining tables that their friends own), in just the same way that a middle class person might be proud of the literary books they own, or a working class person might be proud of their LED TV. But unless you actually *know* that world, it's all going to look like 'upper class people own antiques but don't make a big deal of it'.
I kind of recognize Class X from the 1980s, when I was in my 20s. But I find it odd to elevate them as the classless class who choose everything according to some objective measure unconcerned with class markers. I was moving from prole to upper middle around then and game recognizes game. These were upper middle people who aspired to the real upper class. The very idea that wearing LL Bean and Lands End flannel shirts and hiking boots is not a class based style choice is laughable. It's an upper middle variant on the shabby chic of the truly upper. They were working very hard to signal that they they were not trying to signal.
It's incredible how much explanatory power the description of middle class (not its particular cultural markers, the general psychological portrait from the beginning of section II) has when combined with Turchinian structural-demographic theories.
Widening inequality means less people at the bottom can be content with where they are, and less people "make it" to the top either. The former try to escape into, and the latter get squeezed into the middle (aspirant) class, growing its ranks to the point where it's now a dominant segment of society, able to shape its culture in its image. (This is, of course, not the same middle-class-as-defined-by-income that gets hollowed out. But defining classes by income was always an obfuscation.)
Conformism and norm-enforcing, snobbery, status anxiety and the need to impress others, optimism and glorification of individual achievement, etc. don't even intuitively fit together as one coherent package, and yet look around.
There's a problem with the interface-- replies I've already read are being listed as "new reply". My computer hasn't rebooted and I haven't reloaded the tab.
Lots of stuff is terrible, I asked Substack to fix it, they said they would, I'm still waiting.
I'm a relative oldster, here, reporting on a perception of the book from a time closer to its publication. I bought and read _Class_ somewhere around 1992 or 93. The person who recommended it to me considered it to be humor of the "ha ha, only serious" variety. He said, "You'll love the part about bumper stickers."
Regarding Class X: This seems to be an obvious bit of "reader service" to me. You and I, dear reader, are on the outside observing these other classes who lack self-awareness. Not us. We know the rules of the game and will now proceed to hack them to our advantage.
As for "prole drift" topic - I am surprised Scott did not remember his own article about mechanism how fashion changes based on something akin to cellular automata game between classes: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
I will also talk a little bit about one way I look at the Culture War topic. I think it is interesting to me that basically the modern liberal take on Cultrure War is the equivalent of the "table manners" of old. There was always this type of small "c" conservativism for upper middle class. You see it in the movie Titanic. Leonardo di Caprio was totally out of his elements. He did not know how to dress and how to move and what type of cutlery to use and when and what to talk about. Upper middle class people had to expend a lot of energy watching the fashion trends from time immemorial: "don't you know that Her Serene Highness Adelheid Louise Theresa Caroline Amelia did wear dress of vivid blue color? Silly you coming in this drab dress that is so 1815".
Only now it is more about reading the NYT and knowing perfectly what words to use and most importantly not use, having extensive knowledge of the latest superfood or that the theme of the black history month in 2021 is "The Black Family: Representation, Identity, and Diversity" so you better watch a debate on "From the Continent to Americas: Foodways, Culture and Traditions in the African American Family" so you can dazzle guest around the table with proper factoids. But of course you need to have vegan and gluten free options on the table. You cannot - I have to emphasize CANNOT - have plastic cutlery anywhere - even if some random guests decides to rummage through your kitchen shelves. You should avoid leather components in your dress and in general and you should make sure to have some some sprezzaturra skills and unobtrusively arrange some "fair trade" or "organic" packaging somewhere in the kitchen so everybody is at ease. You know the drill.
Missing word ('middle'?) near the end of '100% practical subjects (with engineering and business at the top, and hospitality and agricultural studies at the bottom) are or high-prole.'
In his autobiography Doing Battle, Fussell explicitly says we shouldn't be taking Class seriously:
"This was hardly a serious book, for often the presentation was conducted in the comical voice of an excessively earnest, pedantic professor of sociology, accustomed to rigid classifications and pseudo-scientific method. Among other things, the book was a satire on academic solemnity."
In 2009. Sandra Tsing Loh tried to update Fussell's classifications in the Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class-dismissed/307274/
Fussell would not have equated his class X with the counterculture. The counterculture of the 1960's and 70's was hippies, communes, acid, peyote, weed, new age mysticism, beads, very long hair, the Grateful Dead, etc. Not L. L. Bean at all.
The book 'The Authenticity Hoax", by Andrew Potter, 2nd ed from 2011 and therefore already outdating, gives and EXCELLENT summary of how the counterculture co-opted and was co-opted in class signaling, mixed into discussion of how the 'need to be unique' has been amplified by SM.
I dated the wealthiest person I knew in college. She had a doctor father and a two-story house in a neighborhood of two story houses, but watched the super bowl, went to Disneyland and Alaskan cruises, voted for Sarah Palin, and had "Go Jesus" opinions.
There are 'high prole' doctors for sure!
I'm a Brit, so we had class indicators fed to us with our mother's milk (breast = middle class, bottle = prole, nanny = upper), and much of Fussell's descriptions are accurate for modern 21st century Britain. The inheritance system has done a better job of reducing upper class wealth, perhaps, so old money often means falling down mansions and clothes with patched holes. Middle class and prole class are spot on, except for religion, which is more a middle class than a prole hobby over here. And mostly we don't desire yachts.
I feel like this explains an awful lot of things about US culture that I didn't understand before. The two political parties are explained much more by class than by wealth or race or anything. Feels like the upper-upper is solid Republican (because tradition and securing money), upper-middle is solid Democrat (because education, science, counterculture), and proles lean Republican (Go Jesus/Being rich is nice) but have some Democrat sympathies (getting money is nice). The middle-middle and middle lower confuse me (that's where I am, so probably some bias). I can see elements of prole appeal in both Obama and Trump, but not Hillary, McCain or Romney- so maybe that's a good prior for predicting election winners.
The Game of Thrones TV show bored me to tears, but I know it was super popular in NYC- and I could see how an audience of status-signaling, class-resenting Middles could have gotten really invested in it. This also could explain the controversial Daenerys ending- the audience was *against* the class system, so they wanted to see Daeny rise up through hard work and talent. But the showrunners were (I assume) higher-class and *for* the class system. For them class consciousness was just an interesting hobby, and the ending was decided by a snobbish, "proles gonna prole" determinism.
And I suddenly realize I don't know much about Middle religion.
A tangent from your mention of Obama. President Barrack Obama went to one of the most expensive private high schools in America, and his grandmother retired as the VP of her bank. Is this not very well known in America?
to black people at least, not very known. even among white people its not really well known. the right-wing thought he was less class-based than he actually was.
This isn't quite right, for one I don't think "the upper-upper is solid Republican". These are _really_ strange people, especially without any direct familiarity, and my own is mostly only second-hand anyways. They're mostly not political at all, or only in a very direct 'go ahead and protect my particular interests if you would' kind of way. They're _definitely_ not Republican (or Democratic).
I think you're a little uncharitable in jumping to thinking of GoT as a show where "an audience of status-signaling, class-resenting Middles could have gotten really invested in it". It really was good – when the writing was based on the existing books! The end sucked mostly because there wasn't sufficient setup for Daenerys's heel-faced turn. I would bet money, at long odds, that the show-runners are solidly middle or upper-middle class. (Upper class people don't work in any typical sense.)
Daeny isn't a prole. She inherited that throne, and is outraged that she also has to work for it.
I didn't see the later seasons, but from what I've heard the surviving heroes at the end decide to ditch hereditary monarchy and start electing kings. To an American, that message doesn't signal any particular class.
What category would we all be for reading a book about this and talking about it?! This is like a game of chutes and ladders. :)
Anyone want to compare “Class” to the much more contemporary “Bobos in Paradise” by David Brooks?
I found it largely forgettable, but dimly recall that his Bougousie Bohemians circa 2005 sound very similar to Class X.
"This applies even to yachts, where the average yachters uses a fiberglass boat but the very classiest use all-wood boats (which have no advantages, but are much harder to maintain)."
First of all, people who own boats don't generally refer to them as "yachts." Perhaps that changes when the boat under discussion is one that needs a paid crew; ie a very large boat.
Second, boats (both power boats and sailboats) are available in all price ranges, from free to 9 figures. Certainly someone with a union factory job can afford to own a boat if they choose. I share a sailboat with someone who's a handyman, and he has a powerboat on top of the one we share. So boat ownership is not an indicator of economic status at least. Also lots of boats are owned in the service of fishing rather than boating.
It's almost impossible to buy a new wooden boat of any kind (except perhaps a rowboat or a sculling boat), unless it's custom-built and designed, and thus out of the range of anyone with serious money. So owning a wooden boat, while it can be expensive to maintain, becomes more a signifier of regarding a boat as a collector's item rather than simply something to use. Perhaps old money prefers old boats, and anything pre-1960 is going to be a wooden boat.
It's not the yacht, it's the yacht club 😀 Mega-yachts are things that very rich but vulgar and not really upper class (unless you're a Saudi prince) but more "Russian oligarchs who made tons of money and want to show it off" thing. Yacht that you sail in the Fastnet Race - upper class or close enough. Being a member of a yacht club with "Royal" in the name. That sort of thing.
Is it me, or did Fussell basically just take Pierre Bourdieu's "Distinction", and update for North America in the 80s?
"My extremely classy friend who knows the Spinoza cat gets classified as upper-class by everyone I know, but is closer to the book's description of upper-middle."
Without in any way wanting to be a douche about it, this is just because of your own position on the ladder. You think of her as upper class because you can tell she's above you, and you can't actually see the real upper class from where you are, and have no experience of them, since they take care to keep well clear of you.
Well, yeah, they take care (actually they don't, it 'just happens') to keep well clear of everyone, except their peers and servants, not just Scott or people like him.
Some social media class indicators:
Prole: Earnest expressions of religion and politics without any defensiveness or aggression. Keeps up with all their friends from high-school. Sometimes leaves their spouse for their former high-school sweetheart after a chat.
Lower Middle: Constantly outraged over politics.
Middle Middle: Constantly complains about how sensitive people are these days, and constantly outraged over politics.
Upper Middle: Constantly says outraging things about politics.
Upper Class: Not on social media. Sometimes in politics.
Upper Class: still watches a black and white tv that they keep in the attic for important events.
Haha. Scott's fixation of the suffix to "rhodondendron" has ten times more to do with nerdiness than class signaling. He had to do it.
I read this when it came out and I still remember that shock of last chapter. It’s as if he was giving himself and his readers an out.
You said that Fussell appears to be half-joking and half-serious. You're reading him wrong. It is not an attempt at irony. Every single word is dead serious and meant to be taken literally, no matter how ridiculous it seems to you from our vantage point in 2020.
Donald Trump is High Prole. He doesn't act like a rich man, he acts the way a poor man imagines he would if he had a lot of money. He's tried to break into the upper and upper-middle class New York City society throughout his life, has failed miserably because he has "vulgar" lower-class taste, and has recently discovered that if you can't get respect, you can still try to get a dictator's power and demand people pretend to respect you at the point of a gun.
Trump being High Prole also explains his success at appealing to the working class as a populist politician - he acts like a poor man who happens to have a lot of money, not like a rich snob, so he codes as "one of us who made it" rather than "one of them rich bastards who think they're better than us."
Incidentally, "vulgar" comes from a Latin word meaning "of the common people"...
Incidentally, the reason it seems like the Simpsons can't afford their house is because, as a matter of fact, they actually couldn't. Homer's father Abraham "Grampa" Simpson sold his own house to give Homer the money to buy it.
Consider the following Straussian reading of Chapter 9/Class X:
This is what class membership feels like from the inside. When you're truly a member of a class in your heart, its norms are indistinguishable from true objective values.
I'm not sure if Fussell intended this reading but I think it's the correct one either way.
(I'm not above this effect either; I still think my cats' literary names are adorable)
Should we feel bad about participating in class signaling games? It's a little weird that an author who only knows your occupation automatically knows your opinion on cruises and apostrophe usage. But I don't think it follows that "I ought to do less class signaling."
Signaling can be good! I get pretty angry when cars make turns without doing it. And it's nice when people convey useful information. If somebody invited me to an anti-Super Bowl party, I'd probably attend: these are my people. But if my neighbor who wears hunting jackets and has religious iconography displayed on his house asks me to a barbecue, I know to decline graciously.
It's hipsterdom all the way down, and I'm happy about it. When my co-worker makes a sly reference to the Red Scare podcast, I'm not worried that they're going be causing problems on the work Slack channel. When I make a joke about "Dr. Who," I can signal that (a) I am the type of person who enjoys geeky stuff, but (b) I'm not a _that_ much of a geek.
The US has socio-economic strata. But it doesn't have a class system the way that Britain does (or used to).
George W. Bush's grandfathers were a New York magazine publisher and a Wall Street banker. Al Gore's grandfathers were both Tennessee dirt farmers. If the US had a class system, those family origins would outweigh the prole affectations of the one and the intellectual aspirations of the other in making their images. Instead, they're hardly thought of.
You know I've been kind of wondering why we don't see more rich people just funding megaprojects they're interested in (or came up with), e.g. Bezos's providing funding for the Clock of the Long Now. I don't imagine this is a big contributor to that, but I guess it's something...
I think one of the most interesting points in your summary of this book has been the idea that a prole can be as wealthy and powerful as a member of the upper- or middle class, without joining that class. I hadn't thought about it like that before. It implies several culture streams running in parallel more than anything else to me.
It makes me very curious how that would line up with the analysis you're asking for in your last paragraph. Or how a person or family migrates from one stream to the other and on what kind of time-scale that happens (since I assume that these classes didn't spring into being fully formed from the brow of Zeus).
And having read back the comment, I do realise that I am heavily signaling my own reading of the classics and, sod it, I'm just leaving it in because I don't feel like coming up with a different phrasing that would make me feel like less of a pretentious git.
It's a _very_ good book – and incredibly insightful, even with the very dated references!
What does it say about me that my first instinct about a cat named Spinoza is anger that someone would name a pet after someone who believed animals were either incapable of suffering or their suffering is morally meaningless (I don't remember which)?
Richard Grant has a great line in his book Dispatches From Pluto about leaving Manhattan and metropolitan liberal culture: "If one more person told me smugly what they weren't eating now, I was going to scream."
To avoid any connotations with high / low / middle my friends have taken to calling them "Pine class" "Oak class" and "Teak class" after my furniture hobbyist friend perfectly reproduced the desk-wood ranking
Um. It's actually many fewer rhododendra.
So even if all of these stereotypes are 100% true, is there anything inherently wrong in enjoying the same things as one's class? Is watching a baseball game better or worse than watching Broadway? It seems like people will gravitate toward whatever culture their friends already have, and there's nothing wrong with that.
https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social-class/
Perfectly describes the prole ladder you mention, as well as the other ladders, but I side with you on the true upper not having to work.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0uzc34803lawby6/AAC8oc3JR8AD_O5DbA73hCi7a?dl=0 The book Class sprung out of an essay Paul Fussel wrote “Notes in Class” in the book of short essays called the “Boy Scout handbook and other observations” The essay is available at the link above. Shorter and just as funny. Scott left out a funny line regarding the time people eat dinner. “uppers and top out of sights eat dinner at 8:30 or 9 after nightly protracted cocktail sessions.Sometimes they forget to eat at all”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2021/02/15/lee-smith-nails-it-the-elites-want-us-to-know-they-hold-all-power-and-control/ Recently posted and germane
There was a review of Class shortly after it came out, I forget where, suggested Fussell was talking up the aesthetic of academics as his "class X." A Washington Monthly review was less charitable, describing the book as "an extended sneer." (That's the review that induced me to buy the book.)
For some reason, David Brooks's bourgeois bohemians argument exists as if in a parallel universe, with no acknowledgement of Class.
This appears to be the kind of rigid pigeon-hole thinking Brits and Euro elites enjoy. Unsaid, of course, is the opinion that Euros posses infinitely more class than their American counterparts. They can't tolerate the notion of social mobility.
I read Fussell's book back when it came out.
It had some amusing, keen insights - although Wartime was much better - right up until the end, where it walked straight off a cliff.
Well how about that, I remember thinking, it turns out the only authentic people are those like Fussell himself, his higher-ed faculty pals and certain Arts & Crafts types he approves of.
Knock me down.
My grandfather was full on upper class. Like a parody of what you describe here. Lived in an inherited mansion on a money-losing farm in the nice suburbs of one of the UC cities you list. Hosted big not-too-exciting parties. Did some unremarkable work as a lawyer before he was appointed head of a non-profit for some reason. The family had cooks and maids growing up, but my mother considered spaghetti exotic until she went to college.
That lifestyle has gone extinct in the past 50 years. I think it was just prole-drifted away, to use your terminology. His children are indistinguishable from the UMC descriptors here. The family property has been sold -- partially because the money is running out, but even mostly just because no one wants to live there because the whole lifestyle is an anachronism.
The upper & upper-middle-class had, or may still (since I'm a lower-middle-class prole professional I don't know anymore) affected a slight Americanized WASPy British accent pushed through clenched jaws. I had the pleasure/displeasure of meeting this cohort when I lived and worked in the D.C. area and met the landed gentry-class who participated in steeplechasing, 3-day eventing, and thoroughbred racing. And by "participated" I mean they owned but had full-time staff to attend and ride their hobby horses.
At these horse events, the upper-class would arrive in fully-restored, classic cars - Jags and Benzs and the occasional 'working farm' restored Land Rover. The decidedly upper-middle-class striving for upper-class approval drove the more proletarian BMWs, Volvos, and new Range Rovers. They would all tailgate with well-appointed picnic baskets with oysters, caviar and chilled magnums of champagne. Meanwhile, the lower-middle and lower class proles would park far away and trudge to the fence-lines with plastic coolers filled with Coors light and ham sandwiches with the only common ground where these classes mixed was an appreciation of watching horses do their thing.
Class X is alive and well and can be identified by their simple, and universal, assertion that the problem with American society is that no one ever queues anymore.
I've had a thought that this article has brought to the forefront. I attended undergraduate (lower Ivy equivalent, think Duke, WashU, Georgetown) and graduate institutions (T10 law school) of basically equivalent prestige, selectivity, and student intelligence. Yet at my undergraduate institution, I (a textbook upper-middle) almost exclusively knew other upper-middles and various sorts of uppers, with literally one or two middles or lower-middles I can think of in my social circle. Now in graduate school, the class mix is skewed noticeably lower. Still lots and lots of upper-middles, sure, but not a single truly upper class person. And then there's (refreshingly!) quite a lot of middles and lower-middles. I think it's because no true upper class person would subject themselves to the rigors of a legal career (why?) and because its more socially normalized to strive for the absolute highest ranked law school you can get into and borrow money to go there, then it is for undergraduate, where people more often go where they can afford.
I'm not a regular reader of this blog, so I suppose I have come a little late to the party for this discussion, but here are a few comments from me (British, upper-middle class, from a family that has at various times occupied every step of the ladder).
First and foremost, Fussell did not invent the idea of 'Class X'. I say that with confidence, not because I have made any great study of the subject, but because the BBC (Radio 4 - very middle class) happens at the moment to be broadcasting an adaptation of the 1939 novel 'Rogue Male' by Geoffrey Household. I don't have the book to hand, but I have transcribed the below (presumably abridged) segment, in which the unnamed protagonist discusses 'Class X':
--
'The cook, who was peeling potatoes on a hatch cover, looked up from the bucket between his knees. "I'll see, sir."
'That "Sir" was curious and comforting. In spite of my shabby foreign clothing and filthy shoes, the cook had placed me at a glance in 'Class X'. He would, undoubtedly, describe me as a 'gent', and My Vaynor would feel he ought to see me.
'I say 'Class X', because there is no definition of it. To talk of an 'upper' or 'ruling' class is nonsense. The upper class, if the term has any meaning at all, means landed gentry, who probably do belong to Class X, but form only a small proportion of it. The ruling class are, I presume, politicians and servants of the state - terms which are self-contradictory.
'I wish there was some explanation of Class X. We are, politically, a democracy - or, should I say that we are an oligarchy, with its ranks ever open to talent, and the least class-conscious of nations in the Marxian sense. The only class-conscious people are those who would like to belong to Class X, and don't. The suburban old-school-tie brigade and their wives - especially their wives. Yet we have a profound division of classes, which defies analysis since it is in a continual state of flux.
'Who belongs to class X? I don't know till I talk to him, and then I know at once. It is not, I think, a question of accent, but rather of the gentle voice. It is certainly not a question of clothes. It may be a question of bearing.
'I'm not talking, of course, of provincial society, in which the division between gentry and non-gentry is purely and simply a question of education. I would like some socialist pundit to explain to me why it is that, in England, a man can be a member of the proletariat by every definition of the proletariat - that is, by the nature of his employment and his poverty - and yet obviously belong to Class X, and why another can be a bulging capitalist or cabinet minister - or both - and never get nearer to Class X than being directed to the saloon bar if he enters the public?'
--
Household's definition of 'Class X' is interesting, but I reality I think it largely constitutes a dotted line drawn around the upper and upper-middle classes, and the various groups which those two (in any event overlapping and interlinked) classes comprise: the aristocracy, the landed gentry, county society, and the wider pool of educated, well-off and/or urbane types who exude self-confidence and demonstratively lack self-consciousness.
Beyond that, speaking as an outsider who has spent time in the States, the caricatures which Fussell draws seem to be spot on (and very applicable to the UK, with minor tweaks). They are instantly recognizable, and demonstrate accurately the way in which our identities, interests and preferences are subconsciously (or consciously) a product of our social class.
That so many in the States cling to the idea that the USA is a 'classless' society has always struck me as odd. Firstly because class distinctions are so utterly transparent, but also because class provides a framework and a language to discuss the ways in which groups perpetuate power and influence (and exclude/manipulate other groups to that end). Class also establishes guardrails and boundaries for conduct - even if we rarely talk now about 'noblesse oblige'.
I see the same trends happening in the UK. It has been one of the greatest victories of the upper-middle classes (and their high-prole hangers-on) to largely convince the country that class is no longer relevant - or rather, that we are all middle class. I recently read an interview with a television presenter, Kirstie Allsop. The Hon. Kirstie is the daughter of Lord Hindlip, 6th Baron Hindlip*. Kirstie Allsop is, in the most literal, blue-blooded sense, a born-and-bred member of the upper class, and yet in the interview, without irony, she breezily refers to herself as 'middle class'.
Similarly, some years ago I watched a documentary set in a call centre. There can be no job, in this post-industrial age, more working class than being a call centre operative: it is low-skilled, low-paid, low-security drudgery. And yet, when asked what class they were, these operatives each defiantly asserted that they were middle class. Simply because they worked in an office, rather than down the pit or in a factory.
And, of course, if a call-centre operative on minimum wage, and a fabulously-wealthy aristocratic TV presenter, can both be called 'middle class', then there is absolutely no organising principle around which to build a political movement which serves the needs of those at the bottom of the food chain.
Perhaps the best way to think of class is as a heuristic. Whether or not we use the term, we know what class someone is the moment we see them, or the moment they speak. We know what names are upper or lower class, and if we were to guess that person's character, opinions, interests, then we know that we would be close to the mark most of the time. Let me therefore turn to the classes as I see them.
[Cont.]
THE LOWER CLASSES
Historically, we thought of the working class as 'horny-handed sons of toil' (as Salisbury had it). People of simple interests and simple tastes. People for whom poverty did not mean indignity - their houses may be small, but they were scrupulously clean; their outfits few, but always immaculately turned out. As Fussell notes, these are people whose little front gardens would be heaving with carnations and geraniums (Dahlias cut across classes, as they require the sort of tending that either a working-class man or upper-class chatelaine tend to enjoy), and whose mantlepieces (above a gas/electric fire) would be crammed with glazed porcelain figurines or commemorative royal mugs. They are socially conservative, but not nearly as much as people often assume. They were historically very effective at progressing their class interests (think e.g. Attlee '45). And they value education as the best way for their children to get on - meaning many did, in the mid 20th century, move into the middle classes.
Undoubtedly this group still exists, but anecdotally they seem to be overwhelmingly outnumbered by what may be thought of as an underclass (or, in the Marxist sense, the Lumpenproletariat). It is stereotypical to suggest that these people don't work. Yes, many do make a good living by pumping out children and playing the state for all it is worth. But most have jobs. What defines them, I think, is a sort of diffuse and inarticulate rage. Society has infantilised them - they dress like children (wearing pyjamas to the supermarket), they resolve disputes like children (fighting), they have a child's level of self-restraint (fast food), and, like a child, they are easily manipulated (by populists and charlatans). The Lumpenproletariat has been encouraged to think of themselves as victims - albeit almost never in the true manner in which they really are victims (lack of education etc.).
This sense of victimhood, which is emotionally very satisfying, strips them of the dignity of the Working Classes. Because it is decoupled from its true causes, the victimhood of resentment can be pointed in any direction, and they relish every opportunity of getting one over on their true enemies (the middle classes) - even to their own detriment. Brexit is the most obvious example in the UK - a revolt of the plebs, which hurts them most of all, in the service of people who wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire.
The middle classes are hated by the Lumpenproletariat, because they think themselves superior, whereas the upper classes, so long as they remain at a distance (the Royals) or pander to them (blue-blooded Brexiteers) are revered, because the proles know them to be superior.
Street names are mentioned in the article, and it is worth noting that the council estates, on which the lower classes tend to live, usually comprise streets which each have a vaguely patriotic theme ("King Edward Avenue" leading onto "Queen Victoria Parade", or "Australia Crescent" connecting to "Falkland Way").
Should a member of the working class attain a greater level of income or financial stability, then they will tend to become lower-middle class (or in exceptional circumstances middle-middle class - this depends much more on character than on income). Even when very wealthy, most will remain lower-middle class, though in the first generation will heartily assert their working class credentials. The Lumpenproletariat, even when stratospherically wealthy (e.g. Footballers) will tend to remain Lumpenproletariat. They don't think of themselves as belonging to any class.
THE MIDDLE CLASSES
*The Lower-Middle Class*
The archetypal lower-middle-class profession is that of the estate agent, recruiter, conveyancing solicitor, or perhaps a supermarket manager or the owner of a trade business (e.g. plumber). The bulk of lower-middle-class people occupy the lowest grade of clerical roles. The lower-middle classes cling to their middle-class identity - they may be many things, but they are not working class. They see no distinction between themselves and the other middle-class tiers, and they look up to the upper classes with a positive fervour - because, anyway, we're all middle class nowadays.
At lower income levels, the lower-middle class person will live in a new-build house in an estate called 'Carnation Drive' or 'Privet Lane' (think of the Dursleys in Harry Potter). At higher income levels, they will move to a large but cheaply-made new-build house with a name like "The Ascot" or "The Carnarvon", also in an estate with neat lawns and American-style picket fences, which they will unironically call 'posh' and consider the next best thing to Pemberley.
'Posh' is the ultimate lower-middle-class word, and is always meant positively. "That's a posh phone", "It's very posh here". They love Downton Abbey. For the lower-middle classes, aping the upper classes is an occasional entertainment to be enjoyed lightheartedly - taking mum to the Ritz for afternoon tea on her 60th, gaily snapping photos as she poses with the posh teacup (little finger extended, of course, because that's posh). They particularly enjoy musicals, which they consider very posh.
More broadly, lower-middle-class language is unquestioningly non-U. Couch, lounge, serviette, etc. They read the Daily Mail, which they consider to be a 'proper newspaper' compared to the working-class tabloids, and are thus fanatically right-wing.
*The Middle-Middle Class*
The middle-middle classes feel the precarity of their position. They wish to put as much distance between themselves and the ghastly lower-middle classes as possible, and are desperate to be accepted by the upper-middle and upper classes. Consequently, it is within this group that we find those who expend the most energy learning how to talk and how to act. Hyacinth Bucket ('Bouquet') from 'Keeping up Appearances' is the perfect exemplar, and it seems to cause them a great deal of stress.
There is another branch of the middle-middles which resents this. After all, are they not as good as anyone else? It is from these serried ranks that the frenzied supporters of Jeremy Corbyn hail. It is this group which is most performatively 'woke' (a term which I dislike, but the sense of which is understood). Most academics (outside the donnish Oxbridge types) fall into the middle-middle.
And then, of course, there is the great bulk of the middle-middles - perfectly ordinary people leading perfectly-ordinary lives, living in perfectly-ordinary nice little houses in towns and villages up and down the country. The provincial Tory types who read the Telegraph and sit on the Parish Council, the Green Party vegetarians who keep a few rescue chickens in the back garden, or the schoolteachers and nurses who go to All Bar One after work for a couple of cocktails with the girls. The archetypal middle-middle house is a 17th century thatched cottage. They will knock down all the walls, paint everything white, and install a kitchen with two ovens. It will have a very twee name. Everything middle-middle is twee. Cath Kidston everywhere.
The middle-middles love cinema. They enjoyed Bridgerton for its colourblind casting. Nowadays, they also like graphic novels. Don't call them comics.
[Cont.]
*The Upper-Middle Class*
Between the middle-middles and upper-middles there exists a gulf perhaps greater than between any other two class groups. This is not a gulf of income, so much as of perspective, taste, interest, etc. The upper-middles are dons, Deans and Archdeacons, barristers, those at the top of the professions, the public-schooled, certain officers, Whitehall mandarins, minor country squires, senior doctors, etc.
The overriding trait of the upper-middles is self-confidence. They know that the world is set up for them, and they know the people that matter within it. True, there are some at the lower end of this group who seek to act as gatekeepers (there is a certain accusatory tone to 'what school did you go to?' which one can spot a mile off) - but this act of gatekeeping only highlights the precarity of that individual's own position - they are on the cusp of sliding down to the middle-middle. The true upper-middle-class person does not need to justify their right to belong by reference to some bauble or other. Conversely, in fact, the only factor which truly matters to fellow members of this class is whether you are "the right sort"; in a word: clubbable.
I do not believe it is possible to be upper-middle class without belonging (or your husband belonging) to a Gentlemen's Club (the vast majority of which are open to women, I should stress). True Gentlemen's Clubs are the last bastion to have withheld the onslaught of the global nouveau-riche. Owned by their Members, they cannot be bought, as the top golf clubs have been (hello, Trump). It matters not how rich you are - if you're not clubbable, you're not getting in. Of course, the rich proles have created their own pseudo-clubs - a pale imitation of the real thing.
This is the great power of the upper-middle classes. Its rules are unwritten and unspoken - inculcated from youth, and frequently ignored (after all, knowing how and when to break the rules is part-and-parcel of being upper-middle). The middle-middles who try to ape it (language, table manners, snobbery) show themselves up immediately by their desperation. The distinctions pass the lower-middles by - after all, they too can dress up and go to Ascot, even if it's not the Royal Enclosure. The middle-middles do not go to Ascot, as that would be to acknowledge their separation from the upper-middles.
The upper-middles' cultural tastes are much as you would expect: theatre, opera, ballet, cricket, rugby.
The upper-middles, when young, will live in a smart flat in an expensive London postcode. You may later find them in a fine Victorian or Georgian townhouses, which will be elegantly decorated. More likely, they will be in the country, where they will own a characterful, rambling property with a few acres. They will ride with the local hunt and give generously to fund repairs to the church roof. They are staunchly Anglican (if not actually Christian).
THE UPPER CLASSES
By definition, the upper classes are the aristocracy and the wider reaches of the landed gentry. In a practical sense, they are the ur-form of the upper-middles, and have always intermingled (think of Eliza Bennett in Pride and Prejudice: "[Mr Darcy] is a gentleman; I a gentleman's daughter. So far, we are equal."). Hence much of what is written above applies equally to the uppers.
Nevertheless, the distinction is clear as day to both sides: the upper-middles will never be upper, and the uppers, while they may be the best of friends with the upper-middles, maintain a distinct and discrete social bond with other uppers.
Unfortunately, new hereditary aristocratic titles are no longer created (a life peerage certainly does not count), and the great estates are progressively being bought up by the Russian oligarchs, Chinese bureaucrats and Middle-Eastern princelings. Things are not looking good for the uppers. Invariably, the staff have been let go, their homes thrown open to the paying public, and the families have retreated to an apartment in the East Wing.
So whereas the upper-middles are protected by their codes of behaviour, the uppers cannot afford to stand on ceremony. By necessity, they have embraced the opportunity to forge links with the global elite - however distasteful this may be. This is hardly new (listen to Noel Coward's 'Stately Homes of England'), but in a world where power and wealth have shifted decisively, the upper classes have no qualms about building bridges with all comers. This is particularly true for the young, who, after all, can have a lot more fun partying on a wealthy Russian's yacht off the Riviera than a mouldering old London club.
For all that, however, uppers are still uppers. Fussell is broadly right about food: whilst those in the upper-middle may well be inclined to explore novel cuisines, the uppers' diet is strictly British/French (albeit note that British cuisine is itself informed by 200 years of empire). Contrary to Fussell, however, one should not assume that this food is in any way boring - it is often excellently prepared. And the parties are often a lot better than he imagines, behind closed doors.
If upper-middles are defined by self-confidence, then uppers take this to the next level, with the sort of self-effacing performance that can only come from the utterly self-assured. Their titles are dismissed with a wave of the hand, their houses are "falling down". It is imperative for the upper to act, with regard to any priceless treasure in their house, as if they had hardly noticed it before, let alone thought about it. They are, by and large, utterly uninterested in the higher arts. Rather, like Lord Emsworth, their interests predominately lie in dogs, horses, hunting, shooting, fishing, and generally being ruddy-cheeked.
To their local communities, they are much like a municipal Royal Family - rarely seen, except when acting as a Patron of some charity or opening some event, and largely the subject of myth-making by the chattering classes.
A BRIEF NOTE ON THE 'RULING CLASSES'
Our political parties succeed where they are maximally flexible, and the Conservative Party is by far the most effective in this regard. I would place the current Cabinet accordingly:
Boris Johnson - Upper
Rishi Sunak - Middle-middle tending upper-middle (notwithstanding very profitable marriage)
Dominic Raab - Upper-middle tending middle-middle (he is just ghastly)
Priti Patel - Lower-middle (from a working class upbringing, I presume)
Michael Gove - Upper-middle
Gavin Williamson - The walking embodiment of lower-middle
Jacob Rees-Mogg - Desperately wishes to be upper but is really upper-middle (and tries far too hard)
The Labour Party, however, has seen the traditional working classes whittled away, and in any event hardly knows how to speak to them. They can make no connection with the Lumpenproletariat. The lower-middles despise them. The upper-middles didn't mind Tony Blair (one of them) but are fundamentally Tory, and the uppers will never vote for them. That just leaves the middle-middles - not enough to win an election.
*I am reminded of the Jeeves & Wooster episode (different from the book) where the men from Birdsburg, MI come to believe that the 8th Duke of Chiswick is a fraud: "Hey, he's only the EIGTH Duke! We want to see the FIRST Duke!"
Check out “watching the English” by Kate fox
For anyone who manages to hit this comment, perhaps the most valuable current day equivalent book is _Coming Apart_ by Charles Murray.
Yes, yes, I know, Charles Murray is worse than if Hitler and Stalin had a baby who was raised by Pol Pot. But if you are willing to actually consider changing your mind about important subjects, he lays out a huge amount of interesting information about both the top and bottom of America, how they differ, and how this difference is very much a post-Kennedy phenomenon.
"Category X" was a self-serving Mary Sue class, in my opinion. It's what everyone wants to think they are, it's the "I don't care what you think" class.
No one is truly free from the social reality of class. You can think your class is full of bozos (and be right, because all classes are full of bozos, because most people are bozos) but that doesn't break you free of the social obligations and subtle assumptions your born social class inflicts upon you, even if you think you've washed yourself clean of it. And you're right about the degradation of so-called "Category X" signals. "Authenticity" has been co-opted by corporates and made another into damn product, and this time there's nothing to replace it. People in the old world (1945-2001) could afford to be nonconformists and still get jobs. People in 2021, if they have to work to live, can't afford to be authentic-- they have to build reputations on terms someone else (with hostile intent) created-- so the fake-news commoditized authenticity is the only game in town.
A 2021 analysis would be much more apocalyptic in nature. Fussell's analysis pertained to cultural groups and didn't focus much on the vicious socio-economic competition (for resources in a dying empire on an overburdened planet) that dominates life today. He described class in a nicer society, one that existed before the national elite (his depiction's upper class) sold us out to the scumbag global one (who now own a bunch of real estate they don't even visit) and before people lost jobs because of stray insensitive comments from decades past. In 1983, people of different social classes sneered at each other, but that was usually the end of it; in 2021, any more inequality, hopelessness, and industrial alienation will put us in a civil war.
As for prole drift, I don't think there's a single direction it takes. Usages can also fall from upper to lower class: consider the word "ain't", which was once a high-class usage, then became a low-class word, then became something "everyone knew wasn't a word" even though it factually was and is a word (because, you know, descriptivism over prescriptivism). One point of Fussell's that I think still holds is that the upper and lower classes have more in common with each other than with the middle class-- both upper and lower class people live lives defined by money, and they know it. Both the top and bottom are crass and greedy, from a middle-class perspective. Middle class people also live lives defined by money (or, at least, the social perversions to which people subject themselves in order to have access to money) but they go to every extent to pretend otherwise-- to believe that they're professionals working for pro-social motives (because working for money is something they find disgusting), and that they have cultural armor (e.g., education) that will protect them in event of socioeconomic adversity. Of course, this middle class has been shrinking; in a real class war, that cultural armor is worth very little.
I read Fussell's book and found it illuminating and entertaining, but it's also a peacetime analysis of an era in which class at least seemed to be self-contained... in which being born prole might keep you out of Harvard but wouldn't block you from being rich enough to travel. We are now in class cold war at the minimum, and it's unpredictable how it will evolve considering the successful inundation, by the elite, of the proles with counterrevolution, division (racism, "red" versus "blue" states), and misinformation. The idea that class distinctions come down to floral arrangements is laughably quaint.
His description of classes doesn't cleave my experiences really well because most people I know exhibits some of the characteristics of several of the classes at once. Take for example my maternal grandparents. He was a top-tier computer science professor, and she was a housewife with a master's in math from Yale (middle). Listened to NPR and read the NYT (middle). Yet they also owned a lot of poinsettias (prole), aluminum-tube-plus-webbing lawn chairs (prole), went on cruises (prole), and lacked any noticeable status anxiety (prole or high) and came from solidly middle class backgrounds (her father was a pastor and his father was a real estate developer)
If someone wanted to do this class categorization for real, scientifically, they should just do a big survey and run a cluster-finding algorithm on it for N=3. Then, if the clusters map to class (a big if) you can precisely quantify P(classX|signalY) and P(signalY|classX).
I'm from east european post-soviet state and class divisions are different here. It's so fun to observe and compare. Great piece, really enjoyed reading it. Probably I would never had a chance to read the book but thanks to your review I've gained so many valuable insights.
I've read all the comments, and they frankly persuaded me that the upper class does not exist, at all.
All comments are of three varieties
- I have never met one, even in my six figure job or professional capacity that actually caters to the very high net worth individuals
- I have met some people whose family used to be like that, but it doesn't work like that anymore
- I have met these people: they are exactly like that. And then proceeds to describe someone who either became very rich, or whose parents were very rich, but no one that is actually "old money, no work, no signalling"
Also, people seemed very confused by people who should be in one class but behaves as from another, and that was only marginally helped by the three ladder concept.
Y'all need Marxism: it was frankly super weird to read 800+ comments about class without discussing class consciousness.
This explains so much about my family and upbringing lol.
Some surprisingly explicit examples from the sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf, like when the proudly prole David Lister voices his secret shame: he went into a wine bar.
"It means I was a class traitor. I could have been on that slippery slope: hankering after pine kitchens, sleeping on futons, eating tapas! Who knows where it could have lead? I could have started having "relationships" with people instead of going out with them. Got married, got on the property ladder. God Almighty, who knows where it could have ended? Next thing you know, I'm playing squash every Tuesday night with a bloke called Gerald! A lucky escape, man, a lucky escape."
Or when his supervisor comments on his relationships:
"Didn't I tell you you'd never bridge that class division? Take her: navigation officer, cadet school, Space Corps, well-spoken, can stay awake during operas, knows her cheeses? She's class. And you? What are you? I don't mean to sound cruel but in comparison you're scum. And second-rate scum, at that ... Your type isn't Kochanski, Listy. It's someone called 'Tiffany'. It's someone who drinks Campari and soda and wears orange crotchless panties. Someone who thinks deely-boppers are funny, someone who says 'sumfink' instead of 'something', and laughs like a freshly wounded moose strapped to a cement mixer."