(2021-02-24) Alexander Book Review Fussell On Class

Scott Alexander: Book Review: Paul Fussell On Class (a 1983 book). He believes America has one of the most hypertrophied class systems in the world, that its formal equality has left a niche that an informal class system expanded to fill - and expanded, and expanded, until it surpassed the more-legible systems of Europe and became its own sort of homegrown monstrosity. He says he prefers the term "caste system".

He says...a lot of things, really. Sometimes it's hard to know whether to take him seriously. What is one to make of paragraphs like:

Anyone imagining that just any sort of flowers can be presented in the front of a house without status jeopardy would be wrong.

The meat of Class is ~200 pages of rankings like these, delivered authoritatively, and in almost Talmudic dialogue

All of these preferences and opinions seem totally reasonable on their own. But I notice that everyone I know has them, and that people spend a completely unnecessary amount of time talking about how they have them and how they could never ever understand someone who has the opposite opinion, and it starts to feel kind of suspicious.

Class separates people into three social classes with various subclasses.

The upper class is old money. The people you think of as rich and famous - tech billionaires, celebrities, whatever - aren't upper class.

The middle classes are salaried professionals, starting with the upper-middle class. Jeff Bezos, for all his billions, is only upper-middle-class at best.

The middle middle and lower middle classes are marked by status anxiety.

their yards and houses are maintained with a sort of "someone who could change my status might be watching, better make a good impression"

Proles do wage labor. High proles are skilled craftspeople like plumbers. Medium and low proles are more typical factory workers. They have a certain kind of freedom, in that they don't have status anxiety and do what they want. But they're also kind of sheep. They really like mass culture.

It’s impossible to tell when Fussell is serious vs. joking. The section on the physiognomy of different classes has to be a joke, right? But then how did he come up with the Virgin vs. Chad meme in 1983? Also, why does my brain keep telling me these are John McCain and Donald Trump?

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.

The last chapter of Class is one of the weirdest last chapters of anything I've read.

Fussell has spent the previous eight chapters pillorying everyone from every class.

But in Chapter 9, Fussell posits the existence of a "Class X". Class X are genuinely good people.

Am I being unfair? I'm trying my best to convey in a short paragraph the feeling of disorientation I got reading Chapter 9 of Class. Other chapters were written on the border of irony and sincerity, but at least as far as writing style is concerned Chapter 9 is 100% serious. Fussell has taken what I can't help assuming are his own personal tastes, and enshrined them as The Things That Indicate You Are A Perfect Pure Cinnamon Roll Who Has Transcended Class

Maybe my negative reaction comes from being a 2020er reading a 1983 book. Here's my theory: the class structure Fussell points to and lambasts is that of the hyperconformist monoculture typically associated with the 1950s

By the 1980s, that monoculture was starting to fray. Its enemy was the counterculture, the people Fussell describes as Class X.

Since all the genuinely intelligent and sensitive people were joining the counterculture, the best way to signal those qualities was adopting the symbols and habits of the counterculture. They succeeded at this and ate the counterculture alive.

So my second theory is that the counterculture won and the hyperconformist monoculture fractured into many different subcultures.

There is no longer anyone as heroically able to transcend their society as the counterculture of Fussell's time, just because there's no monoculture to serve as a foil - it's just different levels of hipsterdom all the way down.

But I also don't want to dismiss Fussell's class system as entirely irrelevant today

I would kill for somebody as keen-eyed and trustworthy as Fussell writing about the 2020 class system. I don't want to speculate about particulars here, because I feel like I'm at a lot of risk of bias. But I think it would involve a lot more politics and education, and a lot fewer rhododendra.