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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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....)
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
"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.
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.)
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.
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(?)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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"."
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
"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
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.
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?
"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).
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)
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."
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
Lots of words about if certain furnishings and knick-knacks are middle-class or not; almost no words about capitalism, production of surplus value, imperialism or resource extraction, commodity chains, etc....
"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 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".
"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!"
"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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
Was he actually joking all those times you said he was joking? It sounded like they could all be completely serious.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
How can that right picture not be Reagan in a book from the 80s? Or did I miss the joke again?
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....)
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.
> 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/
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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!"
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.
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).
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.
"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.
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.)
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.
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(?)
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.
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*
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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"?
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?
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.
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? 😀
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
>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.
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
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.
(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.
You know what Class X is, right? The class that's not a class? That's Fussell's Paradox.
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?
"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
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.
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?
"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).
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)
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
ochs plympton and ronald reagan
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.
"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?
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.
Lots of words about if certain furnishings and knick-knacks are middle-class or not; almost no words about capitalism, production of surplus value, imperialism or resource extraction, commodity chains, etc....
Interesting.
"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 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".
"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!"
"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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
Russell's analysis of class remains fundamentally accurate.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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
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”
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.]
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.