Class and classes

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting bleg up today:

"Anyone know who said something to the effect of: Societies thrive when the lower classes try to emulate the upper classes and decay when the upper classes try to emulate the lower classes."

The answer is apparently Toynbee.

It got me thinking of something I noticed the other day. I went to a shopping mall for the first time in a while. It's a big mall downtown here and it has a very clear graduation of quality and price as you go up. Trash on the first floor, the Apple Store is on the second floor and higher end men's and women's clothing on the third. It's the sort of place where you can check your class assumptions by sitting near the escalators and seeing who gets off and who keeps moving higher.

It's not quite that simple, of course, there is a certain amount of voyeurism but it's easy to pick out who is simply wandering around the third floor and who is actual customer and similarly for the first and second.

In any case, it wasn't hard to split people into classes. Their dress, the way they talked and behaved, whether or not they have tattoos, you don't have to make any fine discerning judgments. And the people themselves are well aware of where they fit. Today we live in a society where class distinctions are sharper than at any other time in my life and these divisions are only becoming more pronounced.

Except at the very top. Intellectually and morally speaking, celebrities fit right in with the bottom classes. There are individual exceptions of course, there are good politicians and there are good people in the entertainment industry, but there aren't many. And, taken as a class, these people are morally worthless. This may have always been the case for all I know, a quick reading of the history of British royalty, for example, reveals almost all the kings and queens to have been scumbags.

But there is an upper class worth emulating. It is the upper middle class. The people in this class are not perfect, they are not angels, but they do well and good for the most part and anyone who wanted to succeed as a human being would do well to study them and learn from them.

The problem is that a lot of people have no access to the upper middle class. They don't meet them, they don't work with them and (because our school system is so segregated now) they don't see them in school. The only "upper" class that most members of the lower class see to emulate are morally worthless journalists, politicians and celebrities