From Aristocratic to Ordinary: Shifting Modes of Elite Distinction (2020)
journals.sagepub.com
journals.sagepub.com
This is my purely personal perspective, and I think it puts me into the camp of ascribing class behaviour to Pierre Bourdieu's 'misrecognition' theory as described in the paper. Perhaps part of the effect is that (some) mannerisms and behaviours of the upper classes in Britain are simply more useful to those in positions of power. This then cements the notion of these classes as befitting social institutions - the social error is ascribing the virtue of the institution back to its leaders, who may well not be any more virtuous than the average across classes.
It's a great reading. I read it in preparation for my first vacation in London ;)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_Lond...
I found the London part rather ho-hum in comparison, altho YMMV.
Like working and coping with (comparatively) low income?
Most people have to work and cope. If you don't have to work and cope, that makes you fundamentally unlike most people, because even if you do work and cope, it'll be on your terms. Even if some of the work and some of the cope is genuinely fun and engaging, I guarantee that nobody wants to have to do it and therefore that elites want to be elite even if it is gauche to say so out loud.
In America a it’s a completely different class of worms that mostly identify as middle class and we have what British would call middle class rich.
Say listening to shitty music while wearing big gold chains (real or not), Luis Vuitton cap and Luis Vuitton man purses thinking it's somehow "cool" or that it somehow "shows wealth" for example is a behavior that screams: "I'm from a low socio-economic class".
Or going to this or that country to support one's favorite soccer team, while wearing players' outfits, and singing gross songs while drunk. That also gives it away.
I also don't see many of my doctors full of tatoos (sister-in-law is a great tatoo artist btw) as if they were mexican hitmen, with piercing in the nose and ears. I saw zero doctors like that in my entire life. Same for judges, lawyers, ambassadors, etc. And nobody forces people to cover themselves in tatoos and piercing. Yet some people decide to give it away by being like that.
I mean: just as there may be shifting modes of elite distinction over the centuries, there may very well be shifting modes of low class distinction over the centuries too.
> there may very well be shifting modes of low class distinction over the centuries too.
I believe your perspective is biased and even discriminatory because it generalizes rap or hip hop (I assume) music as inferior, associates soccer enthusiasts with drunkness, and links tattoos with crime.
Soccer hooliganism isn’t just a bias, it’s a real thing that actually happens and has resulted in bystanders being harmed. That bias can protect you by helping you avoid negative situations.
I am very annoyed at our current zeitgeist where we all behave as if bias, discrimination, and stereotyping are inherently bad things. No, they’re the result of human biology optimizing for pattern matching and recognizing those patterns.
> we all behave as if bias, discrimination, and stereotyping are inherently bad things. No, they’re the result of human biology optimizing for pattern matching and recognizing those patterns.
From an evolutionary perspective, I agree. In ancient times, this trait must have been really important for survival. But in our modern society, we are past that point, and the way we communicate and perpetuate stereotypes can have detrimental effects on interactions between different groups within our society, so even if it's still useful in some contexts, we should take it with caution.
Citation needed.
> "An evolutionary approach thus (a) seriously considers the possibility that prejudices, stereotyping, stereotypes, and discrimination are in some aspects evolved adaptations, like the inclination to avoid dangerous animals."
> "For instance, individuals inclined to avoid predatory beasts were more likely than those without this inclination to survive such encounters, thereby increasing the likelihood they would successfully reproduce. To the extent that this avoidance inclination had a genetic component, and that the benefits of avoiding such animals existed for a long enough period of time, modern humans would come to be characterized by this avoidance adaptation and the cognitive and emotional inclinations causally linked to it."
The "we are past that point" remark refers to the fact that in our modern society we are no longer subject to "dangerous animals" or "predatory beasts" in our daily lives, in the literal sense.
[1] https://bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/faculty.sites.uci.edu/dist/1/8...
PS: I will refrain from continuing this conversation since I detect sarcarm and a passive agressive tone in your message. Thanks.
A darker interpretation: elites signal their status by doing what the rest of us can't. "Everyday cultural practice" is now out of the reach of most, due to the contemporary nature of housing, work, education, and healthcare.
It is having kids and affording healthcare, their own room in the house, friends to play with (i.e. daycare) so that they are not just watching a screen all day, giving them access to sports and other organized physical activities, education in at least an average school (full of kids who have at least average household incomes), hosting birthdays, going on vacations (especially flying places).
If I were to ask myself if I would have had kids if I were not able to afford the above, I would say no. And I grew up without any of that.
The paper's use of the word "highbrow," frames pursuits in terms of taste instead of their bar to entry, where someone playing golf can be considered as having an equivalently highbrow interest as someone who sails or rides horses, which is like comparing playing video games to programming or electrical engineering. Their interpretation of tastes in music conflates affect with effect, where pop music and "highbrow" music are placed on the same continuum of experience to create a grouping that seems more inclusive of lower-bar positional elites who have taste for pop music, and along side of the higher-bar company of actual musicians and patrons who support the pursuit of ideals and excellence in performance. The underlying misdirection is that the legitimacy of an elite does not require skill, responsibility, continuity, or succession - which of course a usurper would say, and so say these usurpers.
I'd argue the legitimacy and even the station of an aristocracy is a function of its actual nobility, which is the perfection of its ideals and the cost of their investment in aligning to and achieving them. The reason is that we have more in common with people who have pursued and achieved similar levels of excellence than with people who just like the same things. An olympic athlete has more in common with a CEO than someone who goes to the gym, and a concert pianist has more in common with an olympian than they do with someone who plays in a band. Interesting paper, but unless a writer is demonstrating noble ideals and the means to achieve them, I think they are misleading people.
Like this seems the classic leftist/materialist reframing trying to pretend there is not even a possibility of superior ideals and everything is just arbitrary and cultural. I always wonder of people pushing such ideas if they actually believe them or they just see it as a means to an end.
Why did the Bloomsbury set embark on this reform? To...claim eliteness and gain legitimacy themselves?
https://nypost.com/2019/08/17/luxury-beliefs-are-the-latest-...
There's a loooooot to unpack, but to me:
- the 3 men in the tale illustrate why these practices arise in the first place - to ease envy and direct competition
- the pardoner is disseminating "elite" practices for personal gain, being divorced from the meaning behind them in the process, and becoming a cargo cult of himself
> This article may document a neologism or protologism in such a manner as to promote it. (October 2023)
I suspect I may be part of Dr. Henderson's "elite", but since I follow[0] these idealistic viewpoints as well as promoting them, and in order to avoid the Lie Direct and stick with the Retort Courteous[1]: having read the fine article my opinion is otherwise.
[0] to the point of having voted with my feet to live in a better society than the States had, and (to judge from the news) has.
[1] see As You Like It V:iv
(households) I support a society where —as in the US of the last century in which I grew up— a single working parent suffices to support a household.
(religion) I support a society which has its own intrinsic solidarity, without needing the sort of middlemen who "love to pray standing ... in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men."
(success) I support a society where a good education —in trades as well as professions— is available even to those who have been so unwise as to pick the wrong parents.
(racism) I support a society where, sure, there's always some ethnicity on the bottom rungs, but at least it changes every generation as the old bottom rungs assimilate. (Over the last half century it's been, in turn, italians, turks, former yugoslavs, former warsaw pact, and now I guess north africans?)
Fortunately we don't have "high crime neighbourhoods" in the US sense — I think there are several obvious reasons why not, but implementing them in the US would require not only structural changes, but probably also constitutional amendment. (having seen what happened to the ERA in the Old Country, I'm not holding my breath)
Read the article if you don't like the wiki page.
Braverman got fired for being right. Sunak is weak.
Is it a side effect of internet? Easier to engage in highbrow activities from anywhere and combine it with a family life. Another contributing factor is the presumably larger percentage of women in the elite.
Interestingly enough, official replicas of this jacket were recently made and sold for $400. They sold out instantly. This is because people want to associate themselves with the "aristocracy" of Princess Di. She isn't quite "ordinary" yet. :) https://www.mitchellandness.com/team-varsity-jacket-philadel...
You can't decouple Princess Di from the kelly green or from retro 90s pop culture, whether you're a hipster who first saw the picture at Middle Child Clubhouse & just liked the vibes or if you were just paying attention to the news at the time. Any time you see the Philly media (social, traditional, even sports talk radio) talk about kelly green, they bring up Diana. It's as reflexive as the Philly Special, pickle juice, 4 & 26, etc. Scroll your socials back to the weekend of the Dolphins game or back to July when the jerseys were announced, and if the algorithms think you're a Philly sports fan, you'll see posts with the People photos & news articles about them (both new and contemporary).
Up until relatively recently, knowing, say, a couple of words in Latin or the definition of a polynomial was a sure sign of high-class education. Now that hoi polloi aren't as easily impressed, you would need a much greater depth to differentiate yourself that way.
But that's hard work. Much easier to shitpost on Instagram.
This is where the trends for sweater pants, "ugly dad sneakers", puffer jackets, etc come from.
Balanciaga perfected this art, take something cheap and common that everybody uses, add a small quirk, slap a $1000 price on it and call it a day.
Emulation might be a thing, and affordability to hobbies is at an all time high, but I think this misses a few things that separate classes because they're just not accessible to most.
If you plug in a more precise definition of "assets" and "living" you can turn this into a net worth threshold, but the number itself is far less interesting than what happens to incentives and strategies as you go from working to owning. They completely change. Night and day. Noble and peasant.
This isn't a "capitalism is feudalism in disguise" rant -- it's great that the nobility don't own the monopoly on violence anymore and that's enormous progress, but the "rich people get paid for being rich" bit stuck with us and isn't going away any time soon.
This surely was a source of influence and power, but must have also had the effect of putting pressure on elites to keep filling the role of novelty-producer, lest they lose attention and distinction.
I would like to see this type of analysis extended to other prestige people catalogs. In my country, I know there were catalogs for educators ("Norske skolefolk") and physicians ("Norske leger"), I've had some use of them in my genealogy work. My great-grandmother, who had a single year at the teacher's seminary, was included in one of those books and felt it was important that the country should know she was a knitter.
Am I missing your point?
The paper seems to be angling at the former while equating the two in class-terms and I think that is where it falls flat, the behaviours, shopping habits, and pastimes of the socially elite don't appear to have changed much (speaking anecdotally of course) but if assessed in terms of the meritocratic elite then yes obviously tastes have changed because the two groups are divergent when we look at trends in appointment to positions favoured by Who's Who when deciding who to include.
That last sentence is a bit of a run-on but I think it roughly conveys what I'm saying.
There was a time in Silicon Valley when the Los Altos Hunt ran Los Altos Hills. Once, some new landowner had the audacity to put a fence across a horse trail easement. The mayor, the police chief, and the master of the hunt showed up with wire cutters and took out the fence. The Hunt quietly disappeared in 2018.
This is the countersignaling phase:
Not to mention the Jarvis Cocker fascination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxhQiiNJG74
If you like the Pulp (original AFAICT) version, you have to listen to this cover by Cap'n Kirk:
These cultural practices then serve multiple functions: one is to provide a common culture that makes such marriages work, another is to use values-based definitions which makes them both more flexible and yet more clear.
One point overlooked by this excellent article is the structure of the shift to highbrow culture. Before ~1900 the activities were not only expensive (e.g. the Season, the hunt) but were rooted in lowbrow culture as much as today (an aristo could reasonably participate in farm festivals, help with a cow with a breach calf, etc without loss of status).
The Bloomsbury shift to “highbrow” reflected the post WWI (relative) impoverishment of the elites: it didn’t require the extravagant expense of balls and states, yet still required (less) expensive education and leisure time. It could also be paid for by the state (as discussed in the article by the BBC, but also museums and such), something the elites had the right access to effectuate, transferring the funds from a broader tax base to their own benefit.
Hunting on horseback has always been elite, because horses have always been an expensive preserve of the elite. But great numbers of country-folk that are far from elite follow the hunt on foot; it's especially a Boxing Day custom. Well, at least that was the case 30-40 years ago - things may have changed. As far as fishing goes, coarse fishing in canals and so on has deep working-class roots. It's fly-fishing for salmon and trout that was (and remains) the preserve of landed gentry and their guests/customers.
But if you think about it, they defined a game where they not only get to write the rules, they also get (collectively) to be the judges of the contestants. And, no surprise, they keep coming out the winners and everybody else keeps coming out the losers. For everyone else, the only winning move is not to play. Let the "elite" play their narcissistic status game by themselves. Instead of trying to imitate them (and failing), find something real do and to be.
Interesting theory.
Would you care to provide a couple of historical examples?
... Wait, Caligula? That was some four centuries before the Western empire bit the dust, only a few decades after the _creation_ of the empire.
I mean, I know people love blaming absolutely everything for the collapse of the Roman Empire, but delayed action of four centuries feels like pushing it.
My guesses - this is about (a) inequality reaching a breaking point, where non-elites are starting to reject the social contract, making elite signaling dangerous, and (b) that elites at that moment don't have enough justification for their elevated status (mystification, misrecognition, etc)
This route makes sense to me; I do think the deal has been getting worse and worse lately, and periodic renegotiation is required to keep things running properly.
And by that I mean a revolutionary people's party had replaced a corrupt elected government with a divine monarchy.
(I don't think I need to describe the wonders that did for equality in the Roman state. Archeological record indicates when barbarians conquered Roman lands, the nutrition of the lower classes often improved. But for some reason those same lower classes that had destroyed the republic never complained about inequality in imperial times.)
If that's it, then you could've been clearer.