Class Has Normative Power

Redditors on the r/slatestarcodex community were talking about sidrea’s summary of class, so I wanted to jot down some of my own thoughts, and one important dynamic that these discussions miss.

But I worry they’re talking about it all wrong. Their key limits after all are “class isn’t just money guys!”, and “let’s not get into race/gender/etc here.” Now I understand for the latter they are simply trying to avoid flame wars, but it’s really not that simple. Reading these essays, it’s like they’ve reduced class to some tribes with cultural signals. “One class wears these clothes, the other class talks about these issues, isn’t it all fascinating.” In Zizekian terms, it’s the “funny little dances” decaffeinated view of a culture, ignoring all the important structural and normative bits.

I understand why those rationalists don’t want to bite that apple, but well, I’m going to try. Here’s the most important point:

Class exerts an incredibly strong force on what we think is “better”.

This normative pull (in the sense of how we feel it) defines how class works. We value upper-class things because we think they are what we should do. Class is like whether your shirt has a ketchup stain on it or not when you go in for a job interview. In some detached sense, whether we have that red splotch on our clothes or not makes no difference and could just be viewed as a cultural choice. But the way we feel it is as “ugh this is horrible and people will think horrible things of me I need to change it as soon as possible.”

This is where the fact that class is an economic phenomenon becomes very important. Even if not every upper-class person has money, they are generally “where the money is”, and so by adopting their styles you are more likely to have access to that money. So the normative pull we feel does in fact lead to material rewards (ie, by having the same number of ketchup stains as the person interviewing us, we are more likely to get a job.)

Secondly, because the upper class has more money (and power in other forms), they are more likely to have the good things. So things that are objectively better (an education, expensive gems and fabrics, better medical care) will be associated with the upper class, and so our analogic mind fits that pattern about all the things they have. Internally we think that “talking with an upper class accent is like having enough time and money to always keep your shirts clean”, and the objectively good trait shares some of its affect-value with the more cultural arbitrary trait.

Now, for classes at a certain distance for us, it’s easier to “other” them and mock their class traits more than envy them. The Red tribe American can mock the snobby East Coast liberals (although the next time I see that that is not also tinged with resentment will be the first.) But this holds much less true when talking about our immediate superiors in the local class structure.

(And all the reverse holds for the immediate lower class. There is nothing most people fear more than “looking like one class below them”.)

All of which btw, leads to Scott’s pretty insightful essay on fashion, http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ , which I found to be a much better class analysis than “listing some traits of them like they are independent tribes”.

Consider a group of people separated by some ranked attribute. Let’s call it “class”. There are four classes: the upper class, the middle class, the lower class, and, uh, the underclass.

Everyone wants to look like they are a member of a higher class than they actually are. But everyone also wants to avoid getting mistaken for a member of a poorer class. So for example, the middle-class wants to look upper-class, but also wants to make sure no one accidentally mistakes them for lower-class.

But there is a limit both to people’s ambition and to their fear. No one has any hopes of getting mistaken for a class two levels higher than their own: a lower-class person may hope to appear middle-class, but their mannerisms, accent, appearance, peer group, and whatever make it permanently impossible for them to appear upper-class. Likewise, a member of the upper-class may worry about being mistaken for middle-class, but there is no way they will ever get mistaken for lower-class, let alone underclass.

So suppose we start off with a country in which everyone wears identical white togas. One day the upper-class is at one of their fancy upper-class parties, and one of them suggests that they all wear black togas instead, so everyone can recognize them and know that they’re better than everyone else. This idea goes over well, and the upper class starts wearing black.

After a year, the middle class notices what’s going on. They want to pass for upper-class, and they expect to be able to pull it off, so they start wearing black too. The lower- and underclasses have no hope of passing for upper-class, so they don’t bother.

After two years, the lower-class notices the middle-class is mostly wearing black now, and they start wearing black to pass as middle-class. But the upper-class is very upset, because their gambit of wearing black to differentiate themselves from the middle-class has failed – both uppers and middles now wear identical black togas. So they conceive an ingenious plan to switch back to white togas. They don’t worry about being confused with the white-togaed underclass – no one could ever confuse an upper with a lower or under – but they will successfully differentiate themselves from the middles. Now the upper-class and underclass wear white, and the middle and lower classes wear black.

Okay, pause. Selah. It’s worth thinking all of the above over.

***

Once you incorporate all the above points about the general way class works, a lot of the specifics that inform our lived cultural experience become more clear.

Some of the class differentiators we see are purely arbitrary, like what type of facial hair you have. Some of the class differentiators we see are as close to objectively superior as anything gets (like having better medical care). But the vast majority of class signifiers are in the middle vague territory “arguably better but also arguably arbitrary”.

For instance, all of the following pairs we could associate one with the upper class vs one with the working class:

Loudness vs subtlety

Punctuality vs tardiness

Neat vs slovenly

Outward displays of emotion vs containment

Artificiality vs authenticity

Clever vs witless

Worldly religion vs immaterial spirituality

Interest in diversity vs static tastes

Now, are one of these options in each pair better? Or are they objectively basically the same if we look at them dispassionately? Or maybe one option is a little better than the other but due to our fear of seeming lower-class, we give it a lot more weight than it objectively deserves. Or maybe the worse option is a result of *being* in the objectively lower class. It’s hard to disentangle all of these, but just considering each of these possibilities has made me a lot more empathetic about moral distinctions I used to make.

***

Secondly, it should be made absolutely clear that this entire system is *terrible*. The only words that can define how much I hate this system come off as comically manichean, like “it is the Devil”. But I really do believe that.

Class feeds off our natural insecurities, and amplifies them. It turns the capitalist mode of production into a psychological terror. Class makes it impossible to even discuss class properly because we are crippled by anxiety that we are actually doing everything wrong and we should never admit that we are failing to live up to the class we aspire to. Class existed before capitalism (yay feudalism), and even existed in the states that tried communism - it is able to adapt itself to any ideology we throw at it, and is generally what makes the downsides of those ideologies so much worse.

Economic injustice in this country is awful and causes starvation and deprivation, but I consider class even worse beyond that because it creates the constant dread that your starvation is *your fault*. Economic scarcity may mean that not everyone gets what they need because there isn’t enough to go around - but class-based status games are why we don’t share enough for everyone even when we *do* have enough to go around. I dissect it because it’s interesting, but it should be clear that the number one moral goal for me is to eliminate class.

And no one escapes this terror. The people at the bottom are oppressed by the people above them, but even the people at the top are filled with fear of even looking like class below them. No one deserves this system.

You are not your place on the class ladder. You are a human being. This can not be repeated enough.

(There’s a lot of socialist bloggers out there who seem to think the real struggle is about economic class and nothing else. I disagree with them pretty strongly. So far they are such a small voice that they don’t worry me, but if they became more successful I would find myself opposed to them.)

***

Micro-environments are real. We do not spend every minute of every day only thinking about ourselves in relation to the entire class structure of America, or the globe. We care specifically what our city thinks, or what our subculture thinks, or what our small group of friends think. Power dynamics - not just authority, but the dynamics of what is valuable - replicate within those local groups and make tiny class ladders. Sometimes they are parallel to the class structures of the broader culture, sometimes they are orthogonal to them. They’re still real and exert tremendous pressure on how people think they should act (though they generally have less actual material pressure). We imitate the local upper class, and fear being seen as like the local lower class.

***

Understanding racism is now easier. Racism works by treating race as a class signifier. Black people were (and are) treated as a lower class, which meant massive amounts of deprivation, and the shame of always wanting to live up to an ideal (white culture) they couldn’t reach (or at least it would be very hard to do so.)

Imagine everywhere you went, you had that ketchup stain on your shirt. No matter what you do, you can’t get it out. You consciously know it’s not your fault, but you know and fear that people judge you anyway. Maybe sometimes you can interview well enough that people overlook the stain, but you know you’re always at a disadvantage to begin with. This isn’t just bad for the economic consequences it has on your life (though they are very real), but for the internalized shame you constantly carry around because of it - even when you know it’s wrong.

(I am probably understating how bad it is for particular races in America, and that description still makes me shiver with empathy.)

Appeals to not be outright discriminatory to black people don’t work, because our mind isn’t going “Black, will not hire” but rather it is going “Went to a mid-tier school, wearing nice shoes, has a perm, is black, showed up late, no stains on shirt” and coming up with a calculation of their relative class status, and then hiring whoever has the higher class status in the final analysis.

Even attempts to give bias in favor of minorities won’t work. The black person who has other low-class signifiers will still suffer needlessly, and the best result is that you might hire a minority who can incorporate other upper class signifiers. And the one you did hire is all the more conscious of their precarious position, and their need to keep up the other class signifiers, creating a constant sense of alienation. Systemic oppression will continue.

In response, the social justice liberal project is to remove race as a class signifier. You can see this most blatantly in various pranks that show it’s easier for a (man dressed as a) hobo to get past building security than it is for a black man. The message is that it is offensive that the signifier “black” is more powerful than all the signifiers the homeless-looking man wears.

This project is laudable, but generally in inverse proportion to how many other class signifiers will remain.

(This analysis also extends to sexual orientation and gender identity, since both of those were initially associated with outcast lower-class identities. Look at how much initial criticism of “gay pride” is similar to criticism of garish lower-class activities, like NASCAR and Miss America.)

Gender has a more complex interplay with class. An essay on that will have to come later.

***

The success of ideological movements is usually down to how well they make class work for them. The social justice movement has done an extremely good job of making their morality an upper class trait. It is not only evil to be racist, but worse, it’s rude. People might stubbornly choose to go against moral conventions, but far fewer people want to be viewed as rude or lower class.

This is great since anti-racism is a moral cause, and class is an effective tool to use.

This is horrible because class status games are horrible, and are blunt hammers that tend to have a lot of unintended consequences.

For one, it risks turning morality into politeness status games. Morality should be about substantive outcomes (like the endemic poverty facing minority communities). Politeness is often about policing words and symbols. An ideology that is reliant on class-power, becomes one ever more focused on linguistics, appearances, and a complicated dance of ever changing behaviors (much like a fancy dinner party.) This is the sort of thing Freddie deBoer will not shut up about http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/12/22/yes-virginia-there-is-a-left-wing-reform-movement/

What do these people object to? They’re tired of the prioritization of the symbolic over the substantive; of the  ever-more-obscure left-wing vocabulary; of the near-total silence on class issues; of the abandonment of labor organizing as a principal method of political action; of the insistence that people who aren’t already convinced must educate themselves, when convincing others is and has always been the basic requirement of political action; of the confusion of pop culture ephemera with meaningful political victory

For another it turns politeness into morality. There are a lot of people who want to be good, but are lower class. Whenever they screw up using the correct word or behavior, they already feel embarrassed. This adds a moral dimension to their shame - not only are they unfashionable, but they are bad people for it. This both makes people miserable, and leads to resentment and revolt against upper class oppression (usually good) and the morality they are trying to enforce (in this case, bad.) Kevin Drum analyzes the current dynamic of this here http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/01/are-liberals-responsible-rise-donald-trump

Much of this I’ve learned from reading stuff by academics, who are the masters of acceptable language. As an example: If you were to call something “black behavior,” you’d probably get mauled. The solution? Call it “behavior stereotypically coded as black.” This accomplishes so many things at once. However, it’s also phraseology that no ordinary person would ever think of. This means they literally have no acceptable way of expressing the original thought, which makes them feel silenced.

(Neither of the above links should be construed as endorsements of everything they said there. In fact none of my links in this are to articles or authors I whole-heartedly agree with. They are just good illustrations of the sort of ideological cul-de-sacs that I am describing at the moment.)

***

I described class has exacerbating our insecurities. You may have noticed that all these factors I describe have a lot less effect on people who are more secure with themselves. So in a way, healthy self-esteem is one way to save ourselves from the monster of status games.

Healthy self-confidence is valuable.

And so of course, self-confidence becomes a major class signifier. The upper class are supposed to worry less about what class they appear as, and the lower class are known for worrying more. And so our desire for healthy self-esteem can become “am I being confident and cool enough” which can become “am I confident like a proper upper class person” again.

Argh argh argh.

I have similar feelings about the use of “authenticity”. Often a class struggle will be expressed by someone saying they don’t think everyone needs to act like them, but that they have extreme disdain for those who *try* to act like them, and fail. This is supposed to sound like a value neutral claim about authenticity, but instead has the effect of implying that their class is superior, so people want to imitate it, and people who can’t are inferior.

***

The big point about the Red tribe and the Blue tribe is that these two groups are not equal. The Blue tribe in America, and throughout most of history, has done a very good job of being the upper class tribe. They aren’t always more powerful or morally better, but they are more polite. Most people aspire to various Blue tribe virtues.

One of the biggest frustrations for the Red tribe, is that their political leadership has to go hang out with the Blue tribe and internally converts to their judgment system. Pundits describe it as corruption, as if a sufficiently moral figure could resist it, but actually it’s about a wholesale conversion to that values system, at least when it comes to politeness and status.

***

Class since the industrial revolution has really changed with the introduction of a strong middle class. It’s worth noting how much the middle class is based on the myth of stability and standardization, much more so than the tenuous lower class existence or the elite-networking based upper class. They believe much more in things like meritocracy and steadfast institutions to keep them safe and prosperous. This has had a huge impact in how much nations of the world were looking for predictable, stable systems during the twentieth century, and how often that resulted in totalitarianism.