The Class Project 7: Playing by the Rules

What everything I’ve said up to this point comes down to is that different classes play by different rules, and a good deal of class conflict, and interpersonal conflict, results from this.  Members of one class will look at another and brand them either losers or cheats.

The middle class looks at the working class and considers them losers because they have less money.  The working class looks at the middle class and considers them losers because they’re so obsessed with money.  The lower class looks at the working class and considers them losers because they’re so risk-averse, tied down to jobs and family.

A lot of people misjudge class conflicts because they fail to recognize this difference in rules.  Marxists often assume that the working class must and should hate the upper classes because the upper classes have an unfair share of the world’s wealth, but this simply demonstrates that such Marxists are middle class in their attitudes — neither the working class nor the upper class considers money to be the most important thing going.  A lot of working class folks are perfectly happy letting someone else have all the money and power as long as they use it well and treat people with respect.  We are, as I said, hierarchical animals, and not everyone feels any great need to be at the top of the hierarchy.  There’s no need to squash the pyramid into a plane; people like feeling there’s a structure and that they fit into it.

Of course, you can go too far the other way, telling people they should know, and stay in, their place.  The problem there is that you don’t get to decide someone else’s proper place.  People find their own place, through a combination of choice and circumstance.  If someone rises above his station, well, good for him!

If someone plays by different rules than yours, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

So when that keeping-up-with-the-Joneses suburbanite with thirty grand in credit-card debt looks at the working class folks in their little old house with the hand-me-down furniture and considers them losers, he’s wrong.  They aren’t losing at his game; they aren’t playing his game.  They’re playing a game where he would be a loser.

Sometimes people can switch from one game to another; people do move from one class to another, and I don’t just mean making more or less money.  Ambitious lower-class or working-class folks may move into the middle class and start using money to keep score — and burned-out middle-class folks may drop out of the rat race and find a slower-paced job where they’re more concerned with self-respect and a sense of accomplishment than with money.  Class isn’t inborn, it isn’t destiny, and it isn’t just money.  It’s attitude, belief, and the rules by which you determine your status and decide whether you’re a success or a failure.  Most people learn those from their families while they’re growing up, and never fundamentally change.  Others rebel against their upbringing, with varying degrees of success.

And that, except for a footnote about race and ethnicity, is pretty much everything I have to say on the subject.

As for that footnote — certain groups are disproportionately represented in certain classes.  The lower classes in the U.S. come in all colors, but are disproportionately black and Hispanic.  This has often resulted in a confusion between class prejudice and racial prejudice.  If you ask me, this has muddied the picture horribly, and trying to sort it all out is far beyond anything I want to tackle in a blog.  If you, dear readers, want to discuss it among yourselves, feel free, but I don’t think I have much to say on the subject.

The Class Project 6: The Status Civilization

Status.

Human beings are apes.  We’re social animals, prone to creating hierarchies.  We do this a lot, and we have several ways of looking at it.  We have formal and informal structures and terminologies; we talk about rank, pecking order, social position, alpha males, dominant and submissive, corporate pyramids, and on and on.  There seems to be a desire to keep it all simple, to reduce everything to, “I’m at THIS LEVEL, and she’s above me, and he’s below me, and I want to move up.”

Except that it isn’t really simple at all.  We don’t each have a single level.  Even in formal hierarchic structures like the military, there may be complications.  My father was a TSgt in the U.S. Army during World War II — that’s “Technical Sergeant,” and I suspect that would be some sort of Specialist in modern terminology — which theoretically meant that he had to obey the orders of any commissioned officer in the chain of command, except where those orders conflicted with other orders.  In practice, it didn’t work that way, and more than once he found himself giving orders to a full colonel and expecting them to be obeyed, with the full weight of Army regulations saying they had to be obeyed.  Humans specialize, and that conflicts with simple hierarchies.  In a life-or-death situation, a doctor gives orders; in cosmetic surgery, the patient does.

But we still want to know where we rank in our hierarchies.  We want to define our status.

There are lots of ways to measure status:  money, education, birth, occupation, manners, formal rank, popularity, accomplishments, awards, accolades, appearance.  In relatively primitive societies these tend to bunch up — the right birth gives you rank and access to education, bestows wealth, keeps you well fed so that your appearance isn’t marred by malnutrition or disease, gives you the time and training to learn formal manners, etc.  In modern society this is less true — not gone, certainly, but less definite.

This is the change that led some folks to proclaim the U.S. a classless society — we no longer had all these status markers concentrated in one small group at the top of a social pyramid.  Instead they’re strewn about all over the place.  It’s very confusing.

Some people, when considering the issue of class, simply choose one scale of status markers and use that to define class — wealth and birth are the most common ones, I’d guess, though occupation and education are in there.

I don’t think that works.  Remember, I’ve said before that I think class is defined more by attitudes than anything else, and those attitudes are influenced by all these factors, but not determined entirely by any of them.

The attitudes themselves don’t work well as status markers because they’re not immediately obvious enough, by the way, but I think they do influence how people respond to you and perceive your status.

And how do the members of various classes look at the various status indicators?  Well, that’s where this series of essays bogged down when I first wrote it, six or seven years ago, but let’s take a look.

For the lower class, it seems to me that the major status markers are clothes, style, and success with the opposite sex.   If a man’s got it goin’ on, got the threads and the looks and the ladies, then he’s a success, even if he can’t hold a job or pay his rent.  Being seen as dangerous, as someone people don’t mess with, is also a plus.

For the working class, I’m not sure.  For some people it seems to be a matter of character, of playing by the rules — if you’re seen as a solid citizen, a good spouse, a good parent, a good worker, someone who does his duty, then you’re respected and recognized as having high status, but is that it?

For the middle class, it’s money.  Money is how you keep score, and you show how well you’re doing by buying expensive stuff.  You buy the biggest house you can, in the best neighborhood you can, to show how well you’re doing, how you’re climbing up the status ladder.

For the professional class, it’s education and peer recognition of professional success — which is often reflected in money, but not always.  For the professoriate, publications are as important as pay.  Degrees count — if you have a doctorate, you’re higher status than someone with a mere master’s.  For a lawyer, the prestige of your firm is a marker, and you can collect status points by handling high-profile cases.  Addressing the Supreme Court bestows more status upon you than a mere raise in pay.  Awards and honors, speaking engagements — these are all ways to count coup.

And for the upper class — well, you get to choose.  You’re already in the top bracket, just by being who you are, and you can decide how you want to compete — or if you want to compete.   Some people do it with family connections, some by going into politics or philanthropy, etc.

Me, I decided to write.

The Class Project 5: Mine!

Possessions.  Property.  Things.

This is actually the subject that first led me to believe that my attitudes are not middle class, but upper class.

It’s also a category where upper-class attitudes that have functioned well for centuries sometimes run into problems nowadays.

I believe that one’s class — mental class, not current economic situation — strongly affects what you buy, what you keep, how you treat it.  This is hardly news.  What I find interesting, though, is just how perverse some of the attitudes are.

Specifically, the lower class tends to buy what they want, rather than what they need, and to do so on availability, rather than quality or price.  Nutritionists and social workers often bemoan this, and attribute it to ignorance.

I’m not sure it is ignorance; I’m not sure just what’s going on, but it seems as if it’s not a lack of knowledge so much as a lack of belief.  If you want a Big Mac now, maybe you know that it’d be healthier and cheaper in the long run to buy some groceries and make something at home, but damn, you’ve got five bucks in your pocket and here’s Mickey D’s and it’s not like saving a buck is ever going to matter, or like being healthy is important, because you know that you’ll never save enough to matter, it’ll all get ripped off somehow, and your health isn’t important because you can’t afford a doctor and someday you’re going to catch a stray bullet or some stupid virus or some toxic chemical from the scrapheap you live in anyway, and it won’t matter if you’ve taken care of your heart or your colon.  So you buy the Big Mac and live for the present.

If you ever have money, you want to show it off, so you buy something trendy and expensive.    You buy what you want while you can.

The working class, on the other hand, understands savings, and will buy cheap.  Clipping coupons and hitting the weekly sales at K-Mart, stocking up on bargains, etc.  You buy when the price is right.

The middle class buys what it can afford.  “The one who dies with the most toys wins.”  Possessions confer status.  A car is a statement of who you are, your personal style and your current level of wealth.  You replace things when better ones become available — new-model cars, software upgrades, etc.

The upper class buys quality, and keeps it.  Price is irrelevant.

This was the point I tripped over sometimes as a kid.  Friends would notice something odd about our household and comment on it — for example, that we ate all our meals with antique sterling silver flatware.  We would shrug; it’s what we’d always done.

“But this stuff is worth money!  You could sell it to an antique dealer for hundreds of dollars!”

Yeah, but then we’d have to buy new flatware; what’s the point?  We don’t need the money right now, and we do need forks.

(Later, when I went to college, and eventually bought my own stainless steel flatware, I finally discovered the point — I like the taste of steel better than the taste of silver.  But that’s just me.)

In fact, here’s a clear-cut example of class attitudes.  Let us suppose you discover that the fancy china Grandma gave you is rare, collectible, and valuable.  What do you do with it?

If you’re lower class, you sell it.  If you’re bright, to a respectable antique dealer, after dickering; if you’re stupid, you pawn it.

If you’re working class, you get it appraised, then pack it up very carefully and set it aside somewhere, figuring it’ll appreciate and you can sell it for even more someday when you need the money.

If you’re middle class, you put it on display somewhere in your home, probably safely behind glass, and point it out to visitors.

If you’re upper class, you shrug, say, “That’s nice,” and use it to eat your meals, same as before.

This is where the distinction between nouveau riche and upper class becomes obvious; the nouveau riche think that money is for showing off, for establishing status, and will therefore buy the most expensive goods and display them prominently, while the upper class think that you buy things to use, and will therefore buy the best stuff, regardless of price, and use it.  Nouveau riche buy Rolexes; upper class buy whatever watch looks good and keeps good time.  Which might be a Rolex — or a Timex.

The nouveau riche build huge ostentatious mansions.  The upper class live in whatever’s comfortable for them.