The widespread belief that the behaviour of the upper classes epitomizes good manners does not stand up against the research findings of Paul Piff, which we discussed in Chapter 3. He showed that, at least in more unequal societies, the higher people’s status the more antisocial their behaviour becomes: they are more likely to cut-off other drivers at road junctions or to help themselves to sweets intended for children. And if, as you would expect, there is an inbuilt tendency to be more attentive to our social superiors than to our inferiors (think baboons), then perhaps the behaviour of those nearer the top is simply a reflection of the fact that more of us are their social inferiors.
Just as we saw in Chapter 2 that levels of status anxiety are higher – across all income levels – in societies with bigger differences in income between rich and poor, so the power of all the markers of class and status tends to increase or decrease depending on the scale of inequalities in income and wealth in society. In Chapter 4 we saw how conspicuous consumption and consumerism increase with inequality as people spend on prestige items to express status. However, in the 1930s, when Norbert Elias was writing, he noticed that the endless ratcheting up of symbols of refinement and class superiority, which he had tracked historically over the centuries, seemed in decline. The tendency to ape the behaviour of the upper classes was becoming less pronounced. The most obvious examples can be seen in new styles of popular music and dance (which later led to the flowering of rock ’n’ roll from the 1950s). What Elias didn’t know was that income differences peaked in the 1920s, and that what he was witnessing was the result of the rapid beginning of the long decline of income inequality that lasted until the late 1970s (see Figure 9.1, here).
A glimpse of how the downward trend in inequality before, during and after the Second World War percolated through popular culture can be seen in a 1943 Sherlock Holmes film. Once justice has been served, the beautiful heroine chooses to pass up her inheritance for the benefit of her tenant farmers. Holmes, hardly a radical in Conan Doyle’s books, explains to Watson:
HOLMES: ‘There’s a new spirit abroad in the land. The old days of grab and greed are on their way out. We’re beginning to think what we owe the other fellow – not just what we are compelled to give him. The time is coming, Watson, when we shan’t be able to fill our bellies in comfort while other folk go hungry, or sleep in warm beds while others shiver in the cold. And we shan’t be able to kneel and thank God for blessings before shining altars while men anywhere are kneeling in either physical or spiritual subjection.’
WATSON: ‘You may be right Holmes – I hope you are.’
HOLMES: ‘And God willing, we will live to see that day, Watson.’
As the reduction of income – and so of status – differences continued through the 1950s and ’60s, the direction of cultural transmission also changed. New styles of music, dance and fashion started to permeate upwards from lower down the social ladder, reversing the top–down movement which had been dominant historically. Rock music and the dance styles which replaced traditional ballroom dancing invaded upper classes from below, as did many of the popular clothing fashions of the 1960s and ’70s. Noticing these changes, many academic sociologists began to think that social class divisions had transformed into something less to do with occupation and more to do with a sense of identity, constructed and expressed through consumer choices.365, 366
CLASS RENEWAL
As income differences in many countries began to rise from about 1980 onwards (see Figure 9.1), the importance of class and status has grown again. The decline in intergenerational mobility in Britain (the difference between people’s own social status and that of their parents) suggests that the class hierarchy has become more rigid – or the social ladder steeper – than it was a generation ago. The same pattern can also be seen in the proportion of marriages between people who come from different social classes. Among women reaching the age of twenty-five in the early 1980s who married, 61 per cent married men with different class backgrounds from their own. But twenty years later, among women who reached the age of twenty-five just into the new century, this proportion had shrunk to 44 per cent.367 The decline in the proportion marrying either up or down, and the decline in social mobility, suggest that class differences have strengthened their grip on us as income differences have widened again.
We saw in Chapter 6 how problems of class and status penetrate and damage family life. Although the proportion of interclass marriages declined as wider income differences strengthened social divisions, differences in class backgrounds have remained a difficulty in a large minority of marriages. How often do the parents on one side of a marriage harbour the view that their son or daughter has married ‘down’ and ‘could have done better’, that their offspring’s husband or wife is ‘not good enough’ for them? Even when nothing is said, the partner from the lower-status background will often fear that he or she is not really accepted by their in-laws and will interpret any potential criticisms in this light. Because women continue to be more involved in domesticity and child-rearing than men, conflicts over domestic standards and how grandchildren are brought up contribute to making mothers-in-law the traditional butt of jokes. For daughters-in-law who feel at a social disadvantage, it is hard not to be particularly sensitive to criticism.
In a Mumsnet poll of nearly 2,000 people, almost a third of them said they were made to feel they were not good enough for their partner. Some families even moved house to escape these tensions. Others said the conflict had been bad enough to have caused the breakdown of their marriage. A more detailed study of problems between in-laws found that class differences were one of the most common causes of difficulties and created more problems than either ethnic or religious differences.368 Rather than implying that these latter differences are easier to overcome, this may simply reflect that there are fewer marriages across these divides.
The power of class differences in family life is also seen in the way middle-class parents attempt to ‘correct’ their children’s speech or behaviour to avoid habits that might have inferior social connotations. As a result, many teenagers have to develop different class codes depending on whether they are at home or with school friends. Children become aware of social differences early on. Interviews show that children from poorer backgrounds feel ashamed when friends who live in posher houses come to their homes. An eight-year-old girl living in a poor area of Bradford said: ‘What I hate about the flats is you feel that you want to be sick when you have visitors. I don’t like having pals in my house, in case they bully me.’ A friend of hers chipped in: ‘Some people bully you because your house is not all fancy.’369
Research we looked at in Chapter 5 shows that bullying between children may be as much as ten times as common in countries with bigger income differences (and so steeper social gradients) between rich and poor.233 The divide between the bullies and the bullied is, as you might expect, often a matter of whether children see each other as coming from richer or poorer families. One study combined data from 28 separate pieces of research that looked at bullying among a total of almost 350,000 children in North America, Europe and Australia.370 It found that while bullies came from all classes, their victims were more likely to be poor. But whether it is rich attacking poor or the other way round, it seems clear that the struggle for status is again heightened in societies with larger income differences.
Another indication of the personal costs of inequality and the recent escalation in status consciousness associated with its increase comes from a study of 1,600 British children. It found that if boys (but not girls) from poor families lived in better-off areas, they were more likely to engage in antisocial behaviour, including lying, cheating and fighting.371 Behaviour was significantly worse if they lived in middle-income areas, and worse still if they lived in affluent areas where the inequalities were most apparent.
These examples all show how intimately we are affected by class differences and inequality: our personal lives and homes cann
ot be insulated from them. Family life, marital relationships, relationships between parents and children, as well as children’s relationships with each other are all damaged by them. The same divisions are also damaging to people’s sense of themselves. People who have moved into professional occupations from backgrounds in manual occupations often say that they feel as if they are not the genuine article and will at some point be exposed as fakes. We asked supporters of The Equality Trust to tell us about their experiences of class and status anxiety. One informant told us that the more academic qualifications he gained, the more he felt that he was an imposter and would one day be found out. In much the same way, a former teacher said that when he was made redundant, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that he had been discovered to be a fraud and was not a real teacher. Another who attributed his low self-esteem, sense of inferiority and feeling that he was a charlatan, all to his working-class upbringing, no doubt spoke for many others when he said that he had always felt ‘less than’ because of his social origins.
If these are the feelings of people whose upward social mobility would normally be regarded as evidence of success, what must it feel like to experience either downward mobility or a failure to rise from the bottom of the social ladder? Economic growth sometimes softens the experience. One of the effects of periods when inequality isn’t rising and the proceeds of growth are shared across all income groups making everyone richer, is a reduction in the sense of failure felt by those whose aspirations to climb the social ladder are thwarted. Even if you are not ‘moving up’ relative to others, you can still feel that you are making progress and live better than your parents did.
However, in the USA, increases in inequality have meant that poorer people have gained very little from economic growth for several decades. And among middle-aged (forty-five- to fifty-five-year-old) white Americans in lower income groups – the group we would expect to feel most acutely that they had failed to live up to their aspirations – death rates have been rising since the late 1990s.66 Increasing numbers of deaths (particularly among women) from alcohol and drug poisoning, cirrhosis and suicide – which are all reflections of stress – account for the bulk of the adverse trend. In contrast to these trends among whites, health among middle-aged Hispanics and African Americans has continued to improve, and these same causes of death have declined among them.67 Perhaps they never developed the same unrealistic aspirations as poorer white Americans. If there has recently been any lessening of the ethnic discrimination that blocked black and Hispanic aspirations in previous generations, it is possible that poor whites could have experienced it as a loss of superior status.
ART AND CULTURE
Appreciation and knowledge of the arts, classical music and literature have not escaped the divisive processes that have made trivial aspects of aesthetic taste, accents and word choice into markers of class and status. As we shall see, the use of ‘high’ culture as an indicator of social position narrows its following and alters the way it is made and appreciated. Artistic sensitivity is sometimes deployed as a sign that someone possesses refined sensibilities and the ability to enjoy more sophisticated cultural forms than those enjoyed by the masses. That is presumably part of the reason why the super-rich pay astronomical sums for original paintings, which, when hung on their walls, serve to testify – to themselves and others – that they are more refined than most people and possess aesthetic sensibilities profound enough to justify the price they pay.
This refinement is, of course, what the story of ‘The Princess and the Pea’ is about. The unknown young woman who claims to be a princess does eventually win her prince, but only after having been tested to see if she notices a pea placed secretly on her bed under a vast pile of mattresses. When asked how she slept she replies (in the 1835 Hans Christian Andersen version) by saying, ‘Oh, very badly! I have scarcely closed my eyes all night. Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It’s horrible!’ As Andersen says, ‘Nobody but a real princess could be as sensitive as that.’
Needless to say, in the real world claims to such elevated sensitivities are often more imagined than real. If the test had instead been whether someone could distinguish more expensive wines from cheaper ones, a trial involving 6,000 blind tastings found that most people would fail. No doubt because we are not princes or princesses, the bulk of the population were found (presumably to the consternation of wine sellers) to have a slight preference for wines that turned out to be the cheaper ones.372 The strong links between class culture and the arts act rather like the varnish often applied to old masters which has to be removed before a picture can be fully appreciated. As so many of the greatest artists have recognized, the best art, whether painting, music, theatre or literature, touches on aspects of our deepest humanity that are often obscured behind the social forms which divide people.
Aesthetic taste is an arena which gives almost unfettered expression to issues of class prejudice and distinction. Popular taste is often labelled ‘poor taste’, tacky, kitsch, obvious, crass, gaudy or sentimental. People will sometimes claim that the aesthetic tastes of elites really are better, and that they are guided by an appreciation of an objective aesthetic rather than a conditioned snobbery. Accents are sometimes dismissed as ‘ugly’, just as particular choices of words or a way of holding a table knife are thought to be ‘nicer’ than others. The deception is that these trivial distinctions are a matter of aesthetics rather than of social discrimination. Wherever there are class differences, we tend to regard the characteristics associated with people lower on the social ladder as inferior. That applies not only to behavioural characteristics but also to skin colour, religious affiliation and linguistic group, wherever they become associated with social status.
Several recent pieces of survey research have shown that liking or not liking classical music and opera continues to be highly correlated with social status.373 It was found, on further questioning, that even interviewees who initially said they liked most kinds of music tended to conform to class stereotypes. The desire to do what is associated with a higher status can, however, boost people’s interest in the arts. Mike Savage, professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, describes how, during one week in 2013, there was a sudden and surprising surge in demand for London theatre tickets.374 It turned out to coincide with the launch of a BBC online poll called ‘Class Calculator’, which had been completed by 161,000 people. Among the questions used to categorize people socially was one asking whether you go to the theatre, and how often. Savage suggests that the desire to tick ‘yes’ and thereby affirm cultural status led to an actual increase in ticket sales.
What is classified as ‘high’ culture in music is in danger of becoming confined to an ossified traditional repertoire. When first making this point, the historian Eric Hobsbawm pointed out that in a season in which the Vienna State Opera performed sixty different works, only one was by a composer born in the twentieth century.375 The classical music that is performed most frequently was composed between 100 and 250 years ago. No modern composers have achieved any really substantial popular following. Hobsbawm contrasts this with the continuing creativity in rock and pop music. For example, the Glastonbury Festival attracts 175,000 people over 5 days, has 100 or so music venues on site, and an official line-up of over 2,000 performances by live bands of every conceivable variety, usually playing their own music. We will never know how far the development of classical music may have been affected by its use as a marker of class differences.
Some classical musicians, such as the violinist Nigel Kennedy, choir master Gareth Malone and Gustavo Dudamel, former conductor of the Venezuelan Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, have made successful attempts to break classical music out of its class mould. The Simón Bolívar Orchestra is linked to El Sistema, an educational programme that is believed to have encouraged hundreds of thousands of young Venezuelans, many from poorer areas, to learn an instru
ment. Its adherents argue that playing together provides a model and experience of co-operation, while others – as if trying to protect the cultural position of classical music – claim to be disturbed by the impression that ‘art is being used to civilise the lower orders’.376 But when a woman, living in a deprived inner-city area of Britain, showed one of us photos of her granddaughter learning the violin as part of the spread of El Sistema, she was moved to tears. Explaining her emotion, and apparently fully aware of the class symbolism of classical music, she said it was just so wonderful that people ‘like us’ could have the chance to do something like that.
Research has shown that the popularity of, and participation in, the arts is substantially reduced in societies with bigger income differences.377 Using data for twenty-two European countries, researchers found that the frequency with which people visited museums and galleries, read books or went to the theatre was two or three times higher in the countries with smaller income differences (Figure 7.1). Similar results were found using different measures of cultural participation and different measures of income distribution. These findings, particularly the large differences in attendances, suggest that there are major contrasts in the position of the arts in different cultures and that these are related to inequality.
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