NEW ORTHODOXIES: II

THE MARQUIS AND THE PLOUGHMAN

Shirley Robin Letwin asks

what class is, and finds it generally misunderstood

JUST when the demon class began to ravage the land is difficult to establish. Plenty of talk had gone on about classes, their merits and defects, throughout the history of Britain. But before the 20th century, class was treated as a matter of fact like the population of London. Some time after the turn of the century, it acquired a wholly different character.

Whatever else may have contributed to the transformation, the influence of Marx- ism removed class from the humdrum world of fact to a higher realm of meta- physical truth. In the Marxist world, hu- man beings are fixed in classes by cosmic forces over which they have no control. These forces pin workers to their machines, where they are exploited and impoverished by capitalists, who are pin- ned to the pursuit of profit at the expense of the proletariat. Workers produce pro- letarian babies and their bosses produce capitalist babies. Each class has its own interest which necessarily conflicts with the other's so that workers and capitalists are locked in a deadly struggle that will end Only with the advent of communism and the classless society. In short, class is a Condition imposed by nature, or, as Marx- ists say, 'the forces of production', and determines what people are and do. Few in Britain have been wholly per- suaded by this picture but almost everyone has to some degree absorbed the message that there is a thing called 'a class system' Which irresistibly imposes something awe- some upon us. But in all the rumination on the class system', asking just what is being ,111Posed on whom is scrupulously evaded. Pt_ nd so the discussion of class is a model of Sabel. Tempting as this makes it to dismiss

the subject altogether, we have to acknow- ledge that we do obviously associate ourselves and others, at least at times, with this or that class.

No so obvious is the ground on which we distinguish the classes. It is easiest and

most usual to rest class distinctions on occupation. But not everyone whom we call 'working class' is part of a production line nor are all those who work in offices immune to that label. And though we may say that a man has changed his class when he changes his occupation, something more is being noticed.

Yet the indices of class that have nothing to do with occupation are no better. John Braine says that it's all about the state of a person's teeth. Jilly Cooper finds that aristocrats are self-confident and adulter- ous, the middle classes beset by self-doubt and Puritanism, and that the working classes 'don't like people saving their money or getting on through hard work'. Other connoisseurs have discovered that the fewer the people who give you orders, the higher the class, which puts a Principal in the Civil Service well below an itinerant knife-grinder. Money is worst of all. Only the Redgraves all believe that the working class are all poor and the upper class all rich.

The one point established by the galli- maufry of class is that class distinctions are as disputable and changeable as everything else that men make. In other words, 'class' is a classification like the labels that we put on boxes to help us find what we want. But to say what the label 'middle-class' helps us to find is peculiarly difficult because class distinctions have been attributed to such a capricious lot of things.

The profusion, however, is revealing. It suggests that what distinguishes a class is a broad and indistinct resemblance, what might be called a cultural affinity. This implies that when we ask, what gives rise to class distinction? we are asking, what makes a set of individuals have similar habits and tastes? And the answer is nothing more abstruse than the propensity of men to want the company of others and to enter into the sentiments and prefer- ences of their associates. So the cause of class distinctions is the family dining table, pubs, high streets, factories, churches. clubs, indeed any place or activity where people regularly consort.

In a large, open, heterogeneous society, people will find that they have more cultural affinity with some than with others and separate themselves into different groups. The closer their relations, the long- er they remain together, the more they value their association, the greater their individuality, the better defined the group. The less anomalous individuals are, and the more readily they move about and 'make new friends', the more amorphous will be the distinctions among these groups. In Britain, class cultures are strongly marked because the British have long had a high regard for individuality, and friendship.

Occupation and wealth are important ingredients of class distinction because most people spend much of their time at work and are constrained by the size of their income. But as occupation and wealth play very different roles in different lives, there is no simple or necessary relation between class and occupation or wealth. And the same is true of all the other indices. Consequently the cultural affinity of a class is like a family resemblance. No one feature is present in all its members and yet each shares some features with others. That is why you could ruin a dinner party by trying to get agreement on the class of any ten people known to all and yet most of us can usually tell who belongs to our little world.

Class distinctions, then, describe a re- semblance among a set of people. But the information that they yield is severely limited because 'class' is an abridgment of a full personal description. Identifying someone's class tells us no more about him then recognising someone to be a member of a family. As we often find it useful or entertaining to make quick identifications, such abridgments are a natural part of social life. But no one's character, not even his manners, can be deduced from his class.

Nor can anyone's 'interests' be known from his class. Being a name, not an agent, a class as such cannot have interests. Only the individuals who are classified as mem- bers of a class can share certain wants and preferences and join together to satisfy them. But even if all the members of the working class were purely employees and never hired a baby-sitter, owned a house or bought an egg, still they might differ in their interests. Some might see their em- ployer as an enemy to be milked merciless- ly, while others regarded him as a partner in an enterprise whose success benefits the employees; they might prefer lower wages to working harder or vice versa; hate being pushed around by union officials or love being organised; look no further than the next pay packet or worry about pricing their children out of jobs. In reality, of course, members of the working class are also parents and child- ren, pigeon fanciers, football fans and taxpayers. They may act together to resist burglars, save the green, or get higher pay but nothing about their 'class' compels them to do any of these. Indeed their affinity might equally well inspire them to compete with one another or to retreat into Privacy. This is the nasty truth now being learnt by trade union leaders. Since we are all classes now, it is clear that any two people who possess a feature in common can be called 'a class'. But the notion of an inescapable 'class interest' or `class struggle' is a malign fantasy. If class distinctions are just a description, can they impose anything on us? The answer is Yes,, with qualifications. For one thing, a description arouses expectations and other people's expectations un- doubtedly affect us. The snob's use of class subjects us to false expectations. Because he is blind to how variously human beings combine and modify qualities, the snob deduces the characters of people from their class and so misjudges them. That can cause distress to the victims of his mis- takes. But however annoying the snob, he is neither the product nor the cause of class distinctions. He is a misuser of class dis- tinctions. The snob treats class as a free inference ticket. Nevertheless there is some truth in the his charge that a person is forever marked by s class. It means that the habits and tastes vri.rl acquire as children are more or less 1,a." to remain with us to the end. As our a bits and tastes are shaped by the influ- ence of parents, teachers and friends, their influence can be said to 'cause' our affinity with one class rather than another. And we can no more escape from such influences than cease being human because we are what we learn to be.

But it does not follow that everyone's class is determined by that of his parents. For influence can operate in more than one way. Parents can use their influence to make their children as different as possible from themselves. People can discover for themselves new models and influences which lead them to modify or reject what they learnt as children. Of course, what was learnt in the past will act as a con- straint on learning in the future and in that sense no one can escape 'the mark of class'. But this constraint is not imposed by class distinctions. It is intrinsic to our capacity to learn and to change ourselves. Certainly we could fix people in classes by compell- ing them to be just like their parents, by destroying all schools and institutions where they might learn new ways, and by ridiculing attempts to learn to pronounce aitches. But such madness is hardly inevit- able.

Some may more readily find models outside their class because they have grea- ter access to resources like education. And it might be thought desirable that such resources should be spread more widely. But none of this rests on class distinctions. They can make it easier to see where resources are wanted; they cannot prevent anyone from providing or using them. However lavish, such provisions will no more eliminate class distinctions than cheaper hair dye would make blondes indistinguishable from brunettes. And if hair dyes were adulterated to make them all alike, that would only make it difficult to change the colour of one's hair. In the same way, adulterating schools and univer- sities to produce uniformity can only pre- vent people from choosing their class, that is to say, living as they prefer. The British propensity for changing class is attested to by the public schools, Ox- bridge, titles and honours. Social mobility is such an old national pastime that no one dare boast of his ancestry — Queen Eli- zabeth I and the Dukes of Norfolk were descended from villeins. Even by the nar- row criterion of occupation, striking changes occur in one generation. Jane Austen's father, the grandson of a trades- man, married the great-niece of a duke, and his descendants included a grocer's assistant, an admiral, a bricklayer's apprentice and a royal spouse. In Bald- win's cabinet of 1935, the bastard of a Scottish servant girl and a ploughman sat alongside a marquis. Lloyd George was brought up by a shoemaker; the master of Caius College, Sir James Chadwick, was son of an unskilled worker; Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, Bt, dropped his aitches all the way from the bottom of the Lancers to the top of the Imperial General Staff. That these are not the appearances of a comet has been admitted by New Society, which reported in 1977 that only a quarter of those classified as managers and professionals had fathers in the same category.

None of this, however, can reconcile class distinctions with the dreams of ega- litarians. And that disparity is what now gives 'class' its bizarre importance.

One might suppose that class distinctions offend egalitarians because they are associ- ated with deference. Certainly everyone knows which way is up and the British are, as Bagehot said, a deferential nation. But their deference has nothing to do with servility or self-abasement. On the con- trary, they have always impressed fore- igners by their genius for combining defer- ence with independence, an 'easy mingling of orders' and 'a nice appreciation of the real merit' of persons, as Mme de Stael put it, along with a universal conviction that everyone is equal before the law.

Deference is simply a recognition that we go to those who know to learn the standards of a practice. The British expect members of a higher class to have qualities that they themselves lack and defer to them for it without necessarily wanting to emulate them. Of course not all aristocrats are good custodians of our artistic heritage or models of beautiful speech, nor does anyone suppose that they are. But the expectation is not wholly unreal and it serves an important purpose — to remind everyone that their own concerns and skills are not all there is to life. In other words, deference provides a protection against the provincialism of a class. And it is entirely compatible with feeling free to question the usual hierarchy. David Hume believed, as many have, that the middle classes are superior to the aristocracy because they are not too immersed in pleasure `to hearken to the calm voice of reason'.

All such considerations, however, are wholly irrelevant to the concerns of egalita- rians. They hate class distinctions not because, as they pretend, they pity the deprived but because they hate all distinc- tions. They consider it a sin to discriminate between those who know and those who don't or between the lazy and the indust- rious. They are offended by any division of labour and by all standards. They are outraged by the suggestion that men are different from mice. They would like everyone to be hermaphrodites speaking all tongues at once. And they will perse- vere until human beings are as alike as grains of sand. Nothing less will free them of their obsession with 'class'. In short, a classless society is the dream of those who cannot tolerate our humanity.