Star-Spangled Manners by Judith Martin

Author:Judith Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2003-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

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Moving up in a classless society

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Debate about the American class system is endless, fierce, and unperturbed by the fact that we do not have one. We do not have a class system in theory, as everyone will grant, but we do not have a class system in fact, either. Challenged to define it, everyone who claims it exists describes another method of categorizing people—by their money, the age of their money, their choice of possessions, the age of their possessions, their date of family immigration, their education, their occupation, their statistical chances of success, or their knowledge of etiquette and how they put this knowledge to use (whether by obeying the rules or by using them to humiliate others).

All of this is very interesting to those who are proud or aggrieved about how they are rated, but it still does not define an operating class system, meaning a static stratification for assigning privileges and duties, which can only be entered through birth or marriage.

What it does approach is describing the basis for establishing a class system. Aristocracies are not founded by recruiting those who have the innate taste to realize that the model of a duck in the library is superior to the model of a flamingo on the lawn (unless it is a fluffy duck and an ironic flamingo, in which case the judgment is reversed). They are established by the powerful to perpetuate their power, to placate those they find threatening, and to secure those they find useful. Raw amounts of money, property, and military power, plus the luck to be on the scene at an early stage when the civilization has not quite jelled, are the traditional qualifications for ennoblement.

What we really mean when we use that term is an end product of inherited nobility, which is relief from the necessity of doing all that vulgar grabbing that secured the position in the first place. This is supposed to produce the leisure and security to reach a level of refinement unobtainable to those who must strive to achieve position.

Except that it does not work that way. The term “well-bred” is a misnomer. Even those who are born gloriously unequal are not born refined, and must learn from the same starting point of ignorance as everyone else. Presumably, the opportunity to learn, through observation, is greater, although this may be balanced by a lack of motivation when one starts at the social pinnacle. Being born with a silver spoon in your mouth does not suggest how interesting it would be to examine the hallmark, while being brought up in a barn could keep one alert to find a way out of there to the manor house.

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