Posts Tagged ‘class’
“Status is welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world”*…
We live in a time when a certain kind of status– expertise– is under attack. Dan Williams suggests that by celebrating “common sense” over expert authority, populism performs a dramatic status inversion. It gifts uneducated voters the power of knowledge and deflates those who look down on them…
… As Will Storr argues in The Status Game, humiliation is the “nuclear bomb of the emotions”. When ignited, it can fuel everything from genocide to suicide, mass atrocities to self-immolation. There are few parts of human nature more chaotic, dangerous, or self-destructive. And yet, there is often a rationale underlying these reactions rooted in the strange nature of human sociality.
If humans were solitary animals, we would have evolved to approximate the behaviour of Homo economicus, the idealised rational agent imagined in much of twentieth century economics. We would act in ways that are predictable, sensible, and consistent. The characters depicted in Dostoevsky’s novels would be unintelligible to such a creature, except as victims of mental illness.
But we are not. We are social creatures, and almost everything puzzling and paradoxical about our species is downstream of this fact.
For one thing, we rely on complex networks of cooperation to achieve almost all our goals. Given this, much of human behaviour is rooted not in ordinary material self-interest but in the need to gain access to such networks—to win approval, cultivate a good reputation, and attract partners, friends, and allies. Human decision-making occurs within the confines of this social scrutiny. We evaluate almost every action, habit, and preference not just by its immediate effects but by its reputational impact.
At the same time, much of human competition is driven by the desire for prestige. In well-functioning human societies, individuals advance their interests not by bullying and dominating others but by impressing them. These high-status individuals are admired, respected, and deferred to. They win esteem and all its benefits. Their lives feel meaningful and purposeful.
In contrast, those who fail at the status game—who stack up at the bottom of the prestige hierarchy—experience shame and humiliation. If their position feels unfair, they become resentful and angry. In extreme cases, they might take vengeance on those who look down on them. Or they might take their own life. In some cases, such as mass killings by young men who “lose face” and run “amok” (a Malay word, illustrating the behaviour’s cross-cultural nature), they do both…
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… The name of this newsletter, “Conspicuous Cognition”, is inspired by Veblen’s ideas about economics. Just as he sought to correct a misguided tendency to treat economics through a narrowly economic lens, my work and writings seek to correct a similarly misguided tendency to treat cognition—how we think, form beliefs, generate ideas, evaluate evidence, communicate, and so on—through a narrowly cognitive lens.
Much cognition is competitive and conspicuous. People strive to show off their intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom. They compete to win attention and recognition for making novel discoveries or producing rationalisations of what others want to believe. They often reason not to figure out the truth but to persuade and manage their reputation. They often form beliefs not to acquire knowledge but to signal their impressive qualities and loyalties.
Placed in this context of social competition and impression management, what might be called “epistemic charity”—the free offer of knowledge and expertise—takes on a different appearance. Although this charity can be driven by disinterested altruism (think of parents educating their children), it can also result from status competition and a desire to show off.
In some cases, people are happy to receive such epistemic charity and heap praise and admiration on those who provide it. The wonders of modern science emerge from a status game that celebrates those who make discoveries. However, we sometimes recoil at the thought of admitting someone has discovered something new, or—even worse—that they know better than we do. When that happens, we are not sceptical of the truth of their ideas, although we might choose to frame things that way. Rather, their offer of knowledge carries a symbolic significance we want to reject. It hurts our pride. It feels humiliating.
On a small scale, this feeling is an everyday occurrence. Few people like to be corrected, to admit they are wrong, or to acknowledge another’s superior knowledge, wisdom, or intelligence. On a larger scale, it might be implicated in some of the most significant and dangerous trends in modern politics.
Many of our most profound political problems appear to be entangled with epistemic issues. Think of our alleged crises of “disinformation”, “misinformation”, “post-truth”, and conspiracy theories. Think of the spread of viral lies and falsehoods on social media. Think of intense ideological polarisation, vicious political debates, and heated culture wars, disagreements and conflicts that ultimately concern what is true.
A critical aspect of these problems is the so-called “crisis of expertise”, the widespread populist rejection of claims advanced in institutions like science, universities, public health organisations, and mainstream media. Famously, many populists have “had enough of experts.” As Trump once put it, “The experts are terrible.”
This rejection of expertise goes beyond mere scepticism. It is actively hostile. The Trump administration’s recent attacks on Harvard and other elite universities provide one illustration of this hostility, but there are many others. Most obviously, there is the proud willingness among many populists to spread and accept falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and quack science in the face of an exasperated barrage of “fact-checks” from establishment institutions. Why are these corrections so politically impotent? Why do so many voters refuse to “follow the science” or “trust the experts”?
Experts have produced many theories. Some point to ignorance and stupidity. Some point to disinformation and mass manipulation. Some point to partisan media, echo chambers, and algorithms. And some suggest that the crisis might be related to objective failures by experts themselves.
There is likely some truth in all these explanations. Nevertheless, they share a common assumption: that the “crisis of expertise” is best understood in epistemic terms. They assume that populist hostility to the expert class reflects scepticism that their expertise is genuine—that they really know what they claim to know.
Perhaps this assumption is mistaken. Perhaps at least in some cases, the crisis of expertise is less about doubting expert knowledge than about rejecting the social hierarchy that “trust the experts” implies… some populists might sooner accept ignorance than epistemic charity from those they refuse to acknowledge as superior…
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… If this analysis is correct, the populist rejection of expertise is not merely an intellectual disagreement over truth or evidence, even if it is typically presented that way. It is, in part, a proud refusal to accept epistemic charity from those who present themselves as social superiors.
In the case of populist elites and conspiracy theorists, this refusal is often driven by objectionable feelings of grandiosity and narcissism. However, for many ordinary voters, it may serve as a more understandable dignity-defence mechanism, a refusal to accept the social meanings implied by one-way deference to elites with alien values. It is less “post-truth” than anti-humiliation.
This would help to explain several features of the populist rejection of expertise.
First, there is its emotional signature. In many cases, the populist refusal to defer to experts appears to be wrapped up in intense emotions of resentment, indignation, and defiant pride, rather than simple scepticism.
Second, the rejection of expert authority often has a performative character. Experts are not merely ignored. They are actively, angrily, and proudly rejected. Like Captain Snegiryov, the populist publicly tramples on the expert’s offer of knowledge.
Third, there is the destructive aspect of many populist sentiments. If the issue were merely scepticism of experts and establishment institutions, the solution would presumably involve targeted reforms designed to make them more reliable. As recent Republican attacks on elite universities make clear, many populists prefer to take a sledgehammer to these institutions. The explosive hostility towards public health experts during the pandemic provides another telling example.
Finally, there is the fact that populists often embrace anti-intellectualism as an identity marker, a badge of pride. The valorisation of gut instincts, the proposed “revolution of common sense”, and the embrace of slogans like “do your own research” affirm the status of those who prioritise intuition over experts. The demonisation of “ivory tower academics”, “blue-haired”, “woke” professors, and the “chattering classes” are crafted to have a similar effect. This all looks more like status-inverting propaganda than intellectual disagreements over truth and trustworthiness.
To understand is not to forgive. Just as we can empathise with Snegiryov’s refusal of much-needed money whilst condemning it as short-sighted and self-destructive, we can try to understand the populist rejection of expertise without endorsing or justifying it.
To be clear, there are profound problems with our expert class and elite institutions. They routinely make errors, sometimes catastrophic ones, and often wield their social authority in ways that advance their own interests over the public good. The Iraq war, the financial crisis, and the many failures of policy and communication throughout the pandemic provide powerful illustrations of these expert failures, but there are many others.
Moreover, the social and political uniformity of experts today creates legitimate concerns about their trustworthiness. When scientific journals, public health authorities, and fact-checking organisations are obviously shaped by the values, partisan allegiances, and sensibilities of highly educated, progressive professionals, it is reasonable for those with very different values and identities to become mistrustful of them.
Nevertheless, there is no alternative to credentialed experts in complex, modern societies. To address the political challenges we confront today, we need specialised training, rigorous standards of evidence, and coordinated activity within institutions carefully engineered to produce knowledge. Although these institutions must be reformed in countless ways, they are indispensable.
Given this, the populists’ rejection of expertise does not liberate them from bias and error. It guarantees bias and error. Gut instincts, intuition, and “common sense” are fundamentally unreliable ways of producing knowledge. As we see with the MAGA media ecosystem today, the valorisation of such methods means returning to a pre-scientific, medieval worldview dominated by baseless conspiracy theories, snake oil medicine, economic illiteracy, and know-nothing punditry.
And yet, the dangers associated with this style of politics underscore the importance of understanding its causes. If the crisis of expertise is partly rooted in feelings of status threat, resentment, and humiliation, this has significant implications for how we should think about—and address—this crisis.
Most obviously, it suggests that purely epistemic solutions will have limited efficacy. You cannot fact-check your way out of status competition. And as long as the acceptance of expert guidance is experienced as an admission of social inferiority, there will be a lucrative market for demagogues and bullshitters who produce more status-affirming narratives.
Moreover, it suggests that rebuilding trust in experts means more than improving their reliability, as crucial as that is. Institutions dominated by a single social class and political tribe will inevitably face resistance and backlash in broader society, regardless of their technical competence.
We do not just need better ways of producing knowledge. We need to rethink how knowledge is offered: in ways that respect people’s pride and minimise the humiliations of one-sided epistemic charity…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Status, class, and the crisis of expertise,” from @danwphilosophy.bsky.social.
(Image above: source)
* Buddha (Ittha Sutta, AN 5.43)
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As we dig dignity, we might send classy birthday greetings to George Bryan “Beau” Brummell; he was born on this date in 1778. An important figure in Regency England (a close pal of the Prince Regent, the future King George IV), he became the the arbiter of men’s fashion in London and in the territories under its cultural sway.
Brummell was remembered afterwards as the preeminent example of the dandy; a whole literature was founded on his manner and witty sayings, e.g. “Fashions come and go; bad taste is timeless.”
“No one knows toward what center human things are going to gravitate in the near future, and hence the life of the world has become scandalously provisional”*…
The estimable Ted Gioia has pulled a 2022 essay from his newsletter up from behind the paywall. It was very relevant then; if anything, more relevant now…
Back in 2014, I sketched out a widely-read outline of an alternative interpretation of cultural conflict. Curiously enough, the conceptual tools I used came from a 1929 book from philosopher José Ortega y Gasset entitled The Revolt of the Masses—a work that offers surprisingly timely insights into our current situation.
That article stirred up a lot of debate at the time, but the whole situation has intensified further since 2014. Everything I’ve seen in those eight years has made painfully clear how insightful Ortega had been. The time has come to revisit that framework, summarizing its key insights and offering predictions for what might happen in the future.
Here’s part of what I wrote back in 2014:
First, let me tell you what you won’t find in this book. Despite a title that promises political analysis, The Revolt of the Masses has almost nothing to say about conventional party ideologies and alignments. Ortega shows little interest in fascism or capitalism or Marxism, and this troubled me when I first read the book. (Although, in retrospect, the philosopher’s passing comments on these matters proved remarkably prescient—for example his smug dismissal of Russian communism as destined to failure in the West, and his prediction of the rise of a European union.) Above all, he hardly acknowledges the existence of ‘left’ and ‘right’ in political debates.
Ortega’s brilliant insight came in understanding that the battle between ‘up’ and ‘down’ could be as important in spurring social and cultural change as the conflict between ‘left’ and ‘right’. This is not an economic distinction in Ortega’s mind. The new conflict, he insists, is not between “hierarchically superior and inferior classes…. upper classes or lower classes.” A millionaire could be a member of the masses, according to Ortega’s surprising schema. And a pauper might represent the elite.
The key driver of change, as Ortega sees it, comes from a shocking attitude characteristic of the modern age—or, at least, Ortega was shocked. Put simply, the masses hate experts. If forced to choose between the advice of the learned and the vague impressions of other people just like themselves, the masses invariably turn to the latter. The upper elites still try to pronounce judgments and lead, but fewer and fewer of those down below pay attention.
This dynamic is now far more significant than it was eight years ago. So I want to share 15 observations on the emerging vertical dimension of cultural conflict—these both define the rupture and try to predict how it will play out…
Read on for: “15 Observations on the New Phase in Cultural Conflict” from @tedgioia.bsky.social.
(Image above: source)
* José Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses… where he also observed: “Liberalism – it is well to recall this today – is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy that is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so antinatural. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.”
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As we contend with contention, we might send rational birthday greetings to an avatar of the Enlightenment (which did so much to spawn liberalism), Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire; he was born on this date in 1694. The Father of the Age of Reason, he produced works in almost every literary form: plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works– more than 2,000 books and pamphlets (and more than 20,000 letters). He popularized Isaac Newton’s work in France by arranging a translation of Principia Mathematica to which he added his own commentary.
A social reformer, Voltaire used satire to criticize the intolerance, religious dogma, and oligopolistic privilege of his day, perhaps nowhere more sardonically than in Candide.
“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics”*…
Plutarch’s warning is one to take seriously–as then, now. So, how is the American Dream doing?…
In late 20th-century music, the elusiveness of the American Dream is a recurring theme. From Stevie Wonder’s ode to a boy “born in hard time Mississippi” in 1973 to Bruce Springsteen’s anthems to the working class in factory-shuttered towns in the 1980s, frustration with people’s inability to outgrow their circumstances is rife. The timing of the peak of that genre is no coincidence: whereas nearly all American children born in 1940 could still expect to do better than their parents, only two in five could by 1984…
… A new study by Raj Chetty, of Harvard University, and colleagues provides fresh data on how America’s landscape of opportunity has shifted sharply over the past decades. Although at the national level there have been only small declines in mobility, the places and groups that have become more (or less) likely to enable children to rise up have changed a lot. The most striking finding is that, compared with the past, a child’s race is now less relevant for predicting their future and their socioeconomic class more so.
The greatest drops in mobility have been not in the places evoked in song, but on the coasts and the Great Plains, which historically provided pathways up (see maps). “Fifteen years ago, the American Dream was alive and well for white children born to low-income parents in much of the North-east and West Coast,” says Benjamin Goldman of Cornell University, one of the co-authors. “Now those areas have outcomes on par with Appalachia, the rustbelt and parts of the South-east.”
The fact that white children have become more likely to remain in poverty than before, whereas for black children the reverse is true, raises many questions. The finding comes from tracing the trajectories of 57m children born in America between 1978 and 1992 and looking at their outcomes by the age of 27. “This is really the first look with modern big data into how opportunity can change within a place over time,” says Mr Goldman. For children born into high-income families, household income increased for all races between birth cohorts. Yet among those from low-income families, earnings rose for black children and fell for white children.
A black child born to poor parents in 1992 earned $1,400 a year more than one born in 1978. A similar white child earned $2,000 less than one born in 1978. But on average, a poor white child still earned $9,500 more than a poor black child.
This pattern has played out in virtually every county, though with big regional differences. As a result, the earnings gap between rich and poor white children (the “class gap”) grew by 27%, whereas the earnings gap between poor white and poor black children (the “race gap”) fell by 28%…
… None of this means that race is no longer relevant for Americans’ chances in life. Although the reversal of the direction of travel is striking, a young black American born in 1992 to poor parents was still four percentage points more likely to remain in poverty than a poor white peer, down from a 15 percentage-point gap for those born in 1978. And while the near doubling in rates of mortality among young, lower-income white Americans is deeply alarming, mortality rates for their black counterparts have increased too, and they are still (a bit) more likely to die young…
… Convergence has not yet brought equality. Despite improvements across America for poor black children, there is still no county where their outcomes match those of poor white ones. Yet the decline of the white working class is steep, and bound to cause grief. Telling a young white man with lower life outcomes than previous generations that he is still doing better than the average black peer is about as useful as telling a young black man that he’s doing well “for a black man”.
Another possible misconception is that social mobility is a zero-sum game: that poor white children are doing worse because poor black children are doing better. The authors tackle this by showing how in places where black children have done well, white children’s outcomes have remained stable; and in places where white children have done particularly poorly, their black peers have also not thrived.
In his previous work Mr Chetty demonstrated [see here for a summary of his 2018 study] just how much a child’s chances of outperforming their parents depended on their race and where they grew up. One of the questions the authors were left with was how “sticky” these effects would be over time: could opportunities for the next cohorts of children change within these same places, or were they fixed? The new study’s most hopeful finding is that, far from being fixed, opportunities within a place can change significantly and rapidly. Neither history nor place is destiny…
… Americans love a rags-to-riches story. In his acceptance speech [at the Republican Convention], Mr Vance pledged to “make this country a place where every dream…will be possible once again”. In his bestselling book “Hillbilly Elegy” he writes that the assumption “that only a truly extraordinary person could have made it to where I am today…I think that theory is a load of bullshit.”
But the story of Mr. Vance, who grew up in a poor part of the rustbelt, rose to be a venture capitalist and now, at 39, is a potential American president, remains extraordinarily rare. While there has been a reshuffling of opportunities for Americans trying to escape the lowest rung, there has been no progress at all for routes into the upper class. For the vast majority of poor black children, who continue to have a 3% chance of rising from the bottom to the top quintile, and poor white children, whose chances have fallen from 14% to 12%, that door remains firmly shut…
“Class, race and the chances of outgrowing poverty in America,” a big-data analysis– a gift article from @TheEconomist.
* Plutarch
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As we optimize opportunity, we might send mortgaged birthday greetings to Charles Darrow; he was born on this date in 1889. He designed (in 1933) and patented (in 1935) the board game Monopoly. He later sold his patent to Parker Brothers, which credits him as its creator.
In fact, the history of Monopoly is much longer. It can be traced back to 1903, when American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie created a game called The Landlord’s Game that she hoped would explain the single-tax theory of Henry George. It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative consequences of concentrating land in private monopolies.
After losing his job at a sales company following the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Darrow worked at various odd jobs. Seeing his neighbors and acquaintances play a board game in which the object was to buy and sell property, he decided to publish his own version of the game.
In fact, Darrow and his friends were just a few of many people in the American Midwest and East Coast who had been playing a game of buying and trading property– all based on Magie’s original… but most having morphed as warnings of that sort too often do) into the opposite of Magie’s intent– a celebration of accumulation. The game was used by college professors and their students, and another variant, called The Fascinating Game of Finance, was published in the Midwest in 1932. From there the game traveled back east, where it had remained popular in Pennsylvania, and became popular with a group of Quakers in Atlantic City. Darrow was taught to play the game by Charles Todd, who had played it in Atlantic City, where it had been customized with that city’s street and property names– to wit Monopoly‘s nomenclature.
“H as in How in the World Are We Going to Escape?”*…
A treatise on the the letter “H,” on the occasion of its becoming an arbiter of class in the later 19th century…
In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913), which inspired the musical My Fair Lady, a fictional linguist describes a phonetic endemic: missed employment opportunities due to the connotations of a person’s accent. Addressing the “many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue”, the professor insists that “the thing has to be done scientifically, or the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the first”. Shaw’s wit shows through in the near homonym: aspirations of social mobility, in this period, often included pronunciationary emulation — the breathy aitch sounds of aspirated consonants.
Alfred Leach, who Steven Connor, in Beyond Words, calls one of the “doughiest defenders of the h”, believed that English’s aspirated aitch (or rather, haitch) signaled a direct inheritance from Classical antiquity. In the pronounced h of words like “herb” — notably lacking from American English — he heard the “spiritus asper” of Hellenism. Leach was writing in a period when linguists began reflecting on the shifting history of aspirates and the role they played in indicating status, class, and education. These traits continue into our present day. The historian of language Henry Hitchings, whose own name is uncannily reminiscent of Shaw’s Henry Higgins, argues that the pronunciation of this letter is “still a significant shibboleth”, and quotes Leach’s contemporary, Oxford scholar Henry Sweet, who called it “an almost infallible test of education and refinement”.
Why so much huffing about the letter H? Throughout the nineteenth century, this aspirated sound was on the rise. At the end of the previous century, Received Pronunciation (RP) became known as the accent of aristocracy, leading to aspirational elocution guides like Poor Letter H (1854). While words like “hotel” had once been pronounced in the French style (oh-tell), English speakers had begun to exhale audibly, as if yawning at the continued Norman influence on British tongues. Leach led the charge against “English Grammarians” who “conspired to withhold from us the means of propitiating this demon Aspirate”. In The Letter H, he ridicules those he calls “H-droppers”, speakers whose phonetic errors seem to snowball: “lost H’s have a knack of turning up in wrong places, when they return at all”. Leach is prone to hyperbole — “the early aspirative labours of a converted H-dropper give birth to monstrosities” — and sneers at Cockney speech: “Horkney hoysters, ‘amshire ‘am, and ‘am and heggs”…
More, from Hunter Dukes (@hunterdukes) in @PublicDomainRev: “Aspirated Aspirations: Alfred Leach’s The Letter H (1880)“
(image above: source)
* Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler), The Hostile Hospital
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As we ponder pronunciation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1961 that Coronation Street premiered in ITV in the UK. It holds the Guinness World Record for longest running soap opera.
“A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implications lie in its power of debasing people and ideals.”*…
In 2018, Lewis Lapham wrote a foreword for the re-issue of his 1988 book, Money and Class in America…
… The dream of riches has been the hallmark of the American experience ever since the first settlements in the 17th-century wilderness were set up as joint ventures backed by Divine Providence and British gold. Among the gentlemen adventurers offloading Dutch cannon and Geneva bibles on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, there were those who had come in search of El Dorado, betting their lives and fortunes if not their sacred honor on rumors of precious metal and grade-A beaver pelt. Others arriving with blueprints for a new Jerusalem were content to lay up stores of virtue awaiting heavenly reward after the long, New England winter in the grave. No congregation was at a loss for a sermon, a real estate deal, or a discussion about the nature of their newfound wealth—wages of sin or sign of grace, proof of the good Lord’s infinite wisdom or the result of a sharp bargain with a drunken Pequot Indian.
The framers of the Constitution, prosperous and well-educated gentlemen assembled in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, shared with John Adams the suspicion that “democracy will infallibly destroy all civilization,” agreed with James Madison that the turbulent passions of the common man lead to “reckless agitation” for the abolition of debts and “other wicked projects.” With Plato the framers shared the assumption that the best government incorporates the means by which a privileged few arrange the distribution of property and law for the less fortunate many. They envisioned an enlightened oligarchy to which they gave the name of a republic. Adams thought “the great functions of state” should be reserved for “the rich, the well-born, and the able,” the new republic to be managed by men to whom Madison attributed “most wisdom to discern and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society.”
The words for their enterprise the framers borrowed from the British philosopher John Locke, who had declared his 17th-century willingness “to join in society with others who are already united or have a mind to unite, for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates, which I call by the general name property.” Locke could not conceive of freedom established on anything other than property. Neither could the 18th-century framers of America’s Constitution. By the word liberty, they meant liberty for property, not liberty for persons.
But unlike our present-day makers of money and law, the founders were not stupefied plutocrats. They knew how to read and write (in Latin or French if not also in Greek) and they weren’t preoccupied with the love and fear of money. From their reading of history they understood that oligarchy was well-advised to furnish democracy with some measure of political power because the failure to do so was apt to lead to their being roasted on pitchforks. Accepting of the fact that whereas democracy puts a premium on equality, a capitalist economy does not, the founders looked to balance the divergent ways and means, to accommodate both motions of the heart and the movement of a market. They conceived the Constitution as both organism and mechanism and offered as warranty for its worth the character of men presumably relieved of the necessity to cheat and steal and lie.
The presumption in 1787 could be taken at fair and face value. The framers were endowed with the intellectual energy of the 18th-century Enlightenment, armed with the moral force of the Christian religion. Their idea of law they held to be sacred, a marriage of faith and reason. But good intentions are a perishable commodity, and even the best of oligarchies bear comparison to cheese. Sooner or later they turn rancid in the sun. Wealth accumulates, men decay; a band of brothers that once aspired to form a wise and just government acquires the character of what Aristotle likened to that of “the prosperous fool,” a class of men insatiable in their appetite for more—more banquets, more laurel wreaths and naval victories, more temples, dancing girls and portrait busts—so intoxicated by the love of money “they therefore imagine there is nothing it cannot buy.”
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The divisions of race and class were present at the American creation. The planting of colonies in 17th-century America conformed to medieval Europe’s feudal arrangements of privilege and subordination. The aristocratic promoters of the project received land as a gift from the English king; the improvement of the property required immigrants (God-fearing or fortune-seeking) skilled as fishermen, farmers, saltmakers and mechanics. Their numbers were unequal to the tasks at hand, and in both the plantation south and merchant north the developers imported enslaved Africans as well as what were known as “waste people” dredged from the slums of Jacobean England—vagrants, convicts, thieves, bankrupts, strumpets, vagabonds, lunatics and bawds obliged to pay their passage across the Atlantic with terms of indentured labor on its western shore. The prosperous gentry already settled on that shore regarded the shipments of “human filth” as night soil drained from Old World sewers to fertilize New World fields and forests. By the time the colonies declared their independence from the British crown, the newborn American body politic had been sectioned, like the carcass of a butchered cow, into pounds and pence of prime and sub-prime flesh.
All men were maybe equal in the eye of God, but not in the pews in Boston’s Old North Church, in the streets of Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia, in the fields at Jefferson’s Monticello. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination divided the Massachusetts flock of Christian sheep into damned and saved; Cotton Mather in 1696 reminded the servants in his midst, “You are the animate, separate passive instruments of other men . . . your tongues, your hands, your feet, are your masters’s and they should move according to the will of your masters.” Franklin, enlightened businessman and founder of libraries, looked upon the Philadelphia rabble as coarse material that maybe could be brushed and combed into an acceptable grade of bourgeois broadcloth. His Poor Richard’s Almanac offered a program for turning sow’s ears if not into silk purses, then into useful tradesmen furnished with a “happy mediocrity.” For poor white children in Virginia, Jefferson proposed a scheme he described as “raking from the rubbish” the scraps of intellect and talent worth the trouble of further cultivation. A few young illiterates who showed promise as students were allowed to proceed beyond the elementary grades; the majority were released into a wilderness of ignorance and poverty, dispersed over time into the westward moving breeds of an American underclass variously denominated as “mudsill,” “hillbilly,” “cracker,” “Okie,” “redneck,” Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.”
Nor at any moment in its history has America declared a lasting peace between the haves and have-nots. Temporary cessations of hostilities, but no permanent closing of the moral and social frontier between debtor and creditor. The notion of a classless society derives its credibility from the relatively few periods in the life of the nation during which circumstances encouraged social readjustment and experiment—in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, again in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s—but for the most part the record will show the game securely rigged in favor of the rich, no matter how selfish or stupid, at the expense of the poor, no matter how innovative or entrepreneurial. During the last 30 years of the 19th century and the first 30 years of the 20th, class conflict furnished the newspaper mills with their best-selling headlines—railroad company thugs quelling labor unrest in the industrial East, the Ku Klux Klan lynching Negroes in the rural South, the U.S. army exterminating Sioux Indians on the Western plains.
Around the turn of the 20th century the forces of democracy pushed forward an era of progressive reform sponsored by both the Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson. During the middle years of the 20th century America at times showed some semblance of the republic envisioned by its 18th-century founders—Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, a citizen army fighting World War II, the Great Depression replaced with a fully employed economy in which all present shared in the profits.
The civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protests in the 1960s were expressions of democratic objection and dissent intended to reform the country’s political thought and practice, not to overthrow its government. Nobody was threatening to reset the game clock in the Rose Bowl, tear down Grand Central Terminal or remove the Lincoln Memorial. The men, women and children confronting racist tyranny in the South—sitting at a lunch counter in Alabama, riding a bus into Mississippi, going to school in Arkansas—risked their lives and sacred honor on behalf of a principle, not a lifestyle; for a government of laws, not men. The unarmed rebellion led to the enactment in the mid-1960s of the Economic Opportunity Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Medicare and Medicaid programs, eventually to the shutting down of the Vietnam War.
Faith in democracy survived the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963; it didn’t survive the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968. The 1960s and 1970s gave rise to a sequence of ferocious and destabilizing change—social, cultural, technological, sexual, economic and demographic—that tore up the roots of family, community and church from which a democratic society draws meaning and strength. The news media promoted the multiple wounds to the body politic (the murders of King and Kennedy, big-city race riots, the killing of college students at Kent State and Jackson State, crime in the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago and Newark) as revolution along the line of Robespierre’s reign of terror. The fantasy of armed revolt sold papers, boosted ratings, stimulated the demand for heavy surveillance and repressive law enforcement that over the last 50 years has blossomed into the richest and most innovative of the nation’s growth industries.
By the end of the 1970s democracy had come to be seen as a means of government gone soft in the head and weak in the knees, no match for unscrupulous Russians, incapable of securing domestic law and order, unable to disperse the barbarians (foreign and native born) at the gates of the gated real estate in Beverly Hills, Westchester County and Palm Beach. The various liberation movements still in progress no longer sought to right the wrongs of government. The political was personal, the personal political. Seized by the appetite for more—more entitlements, privileges and portrait busts—plaintiffs for both the haves and the have-nots agitated for a lifestyle, not a principle. The only constitutional value still on the table was the one constituting freedom as property, property as freedom. A fearful bourgeois society adrift in a sea of troubles was clinging to its love of money as if to the last lifeboat rowing away from the Titanic when Ronald Reagan in 1980 stepped onto the stage of the self-pitying national melodrama with the promise of an America to become great again in a future made of gold.
In 2018, the few optimistic voices at the higher elevations of informed American opinion regard the advent of Trump as a blessing in disguise, one that places the society in sufficiently dire straits to prompt the finding of a phoenix in the ashes, the best chance in two generations to resurrect America’s democratic life force. I like to think the same thought, but I rate the odds of rescue at 6-1 against…
On our nation’s birthday, bracing reading: “Of America and the Rise of the Stupefied Plutocrat.” Eminently worthy of reading in full.
And for an apposite (albeit curiously complacent) take from 1925, Sherwood Anderson‘s thought on the U.S. at the 150-year mark: “Hello, Big Boy.”
* Edith Wharton
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As we make birthday wishes, we might recall that on this date in 1862, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a young Oxford mathematics don, took the daughters of the Dean of Christ Church College– Alice Liddell and her sisters– on a boating picnic on the River Thames in Oxford. To amuse the children he told them the story of a little girl, bored by a riverbank, whose adventure begins when she tumbles down a rabbit hole into a topsy-turvy world called “Wonderland.” The story so captivated the 10-year-old Alice that she begged him to write it down. The result was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865 under the pen name “Lewis Carroll,” with illustrations by John Tenniel.
Readers in or around Oxford can join the celebration.
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