Reply to Upper-Middle Class vs Middle-Class Lifestyles

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As a public service announcement, I think Paul Fussell's book, "Class," still does the best job of defining class in America, which acknowledges that we lack a convenient system of inherited titles, ranks, and honors and each generation has to define the hierarchies all over again.  I'll summarize/plagiarize the best parts for you.  If you reveal your outrage at the very topic, you reveal it also by the way you define the thing that's outraging you.

At the bottom, Paul Fussell writes that people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have.  They also generally don't mind discussions of class because they know they can do little to alter their class identity.  In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do is equally important.  A tendency to get very anxious suggests that you are middle class and nervous about slipping down a rung or two.  Nearer to the top, people perceive taste, values, ideas, style and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or education.  Upper-class people generally love the topic of class to come up: the more attention paid, the better off they seem.

Fussell distinguishes UMC caste markers as having earned their living through law, medicine, oil, shipping, real estate and the like, living in house with more rooms than you need, role reversals among spouses (men think nothing of cooking, doing housework, etc.), and showing off costly educations by naming their cats Spinoza or Candide.  I might comment that technology may alter a modern definition of UMC and the rise of McMansions likely declasses the size of a house alone as status marker.  He describes an UMC office as wealthy, well kept, tasteful, impressive, comfortable, and private.  UMC people tend to have controlled precise movements - the way they use their arms and where their feet fall is dramatically different from lower middle class people, who tend to swing their arms out rather than hold them in closer to their bodies.   Also, class understatement is important - if your money and freedom and carelessness of censure allow you to buy any kind of car, you provide yourself with the meanest and most common to indicate that you're not taking yourself seriously with a so easily purchasable and thus vulgar class totem.  A high status sport, by definition, is one that requires a great deal of expensive equipment or an expensive setting or both, ideally, it will use up goods and services rapidly.  He notes that golf and skiing have sunk to middle class status or even below, although they began as high class sports because they were expensive, inconvenient, and practiced only in distant or exclusive places.  Riding and yachting are class sports of the UMC or upper class not only because they're expensive but because they're archaic.  He notes that it's the rare middle class American who doesn't secretly want to be UMC.

Fussell describes the middle class as distinguishable more by its earnestness and psychic insecurity than by its income.  That is, he knew folks that were very rich who remained stubbornly middle class, which is to say that they remain terrified at what others think of them and to avoid criticism, are obsessed with doing everything right.  The middle class is where table manners assume an awful importance.  Status panic is a middle class affliction with its need to take in the New Yorker, which it imagines registers UMC taste or to borrow status from the higher elements.  He notes middle class is the sort who buy their own heirlooms and issue annual family newsletters announcing their most recent triumphs as well as bumper stickers of your alma mater.  Wearing your clothes either excessively new or excessively neat and clean also suggests that your social circumstances are not entirely secure.  Worried a lot about their own taste and about whether it's working for or against them, members of the middle class try to arrest their natural tendency to sink downward by associating themselves, if ever so tenuously, with imagined possessors of money, power, and taste.  Oddity, introversion, and the love of privacy are the big enemies, a total reversal of values of the secure upper orders.  I imagine one's egregious use of social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is probably a modern caste signifier of someone that isn't UMC.  The middle is the class that makes cruise ships and group tours a profitable enterprise (i.e., to buy the feeling if only for a short time, of higher status).  On sports, two motives urge middle class and prole fans to obsession with such diversions.  One is their need to identify with winners.  Another is that these classes sanction a flux of pedantry, dogmatism, record-keeping, wise secret knowledge, and pseudo-scholarship of the sort usually associated with the decision-making or executive classes.  He also notes that catalog buying is the perfect way for insecure and the hypersensitive and the socially uncertain to sustain their selfhood by accumulating goods.  I wonder what he'd say about online shopping and Amazon or posting on DCUM?  Finally, he notes that one who makes birth or wealth the sole criterion of worth, the conventional definition for the snob, is in the middle class.

Because the American myth conveys the impression that you can readily earn or ape your way upward, disillusion and bitterness are particularly strong when you find yourself in a class system that you've been persuaded isn't important and of the difficulty of either upward or downward movement from the place you were nurtured.  Fussell wonders if it can ever really be taught, particularly the UMC sense of relaxation, play and to a degree, irony (it's all a game and hence its natural leaning toward frivolities).  And before those of you reading this decide to buy it and ape it, the very act of aggressively striving is a status marker in of itself.  So relax and stop worrying so much about what class you are.  In doing so, you'll most certainly be happier and (for those of you who really care) closer to UMC![/quote]

Perfect.[/quote]

Interesting. I have definitely gravitated heavily toward not caring as our income has increased dramatically, but I attributed that more to age and life experience (I’m approaching 40 and sadly just experienced the loss of my mother in her early 60’s. That definitely makes you realize how much DOES NOT MATTER.)[/quote]

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