Class Gnosticism

Bethany and I have been reading through a couple of books on social class in our culture. I cannot recall precisely what sparked the readings--two books had been on my Amazon.com wishlist for some time and I decided to purchase both of them, but I do not remember what sparked the purchase in the first place. One book, "Class: a guide through the American status system" by Paul Fussell, I had read for a sociology class at Calvin and for some reason got rid of the book even though bits of it adhered strongly to my mind. I think I sold it back to the campus bookstore after the class was completed because the author's tone annoyed me so strongly. A year or two later I regretted having pitched the book because it was one of those books that is worth keeping around despite (or perhaps even because of) its provoking tenor. The second book was one I picked up in a book store several years back, skimmed through a couple of chapters and added to my "buy this book sometime" list. "Bobo's in Paradise: the new upperclass and how they got there" by David Brooks was a NYT best seller sometime approaching a decade ago and is almost thirty years older than the Fussell book. At the time I skimmed it sometime in the early aughts I had that experience of acquiring a category or vocabulary for a certain social phenomena that had niggled at me for a few years, that feeling of the word that was on the tip of your tongue being used precisely as you were struggling to use it.
I got the two together because it occurred to me that Brooks describes almost twenty years later what Fussell seems to long for at the end of his book, yet I doubt Fussell would be pleased with the advent of this new class. One of the things that most bothered me about Fussell's book was his condescending and arrogant tone towards all of the class typographies he describes (albeit with varying levels of vitriol), from low proll through upper-class. The proletarians (or prolls as he calls them) are too course, not educated enough, speak poorly, and their food and drink is vulgar. The middle class is pathetic in all ways; simpering, sexless, too conservative, and marked by a crass class anxiety and striving. Upper-middles are at least a bit more poised and cultivated than the lower classes, but they lack the vitality and sexuality of the prolls and because of their status they cannot subscribe to any ideas or ideologies that are truly dangerous. The truly upper class is a waste of oxygen, vapid, shallow, silly and not worth shedding a tear for when the proletarian rises up and dashes their infants on the stones (my hyperbole, but Fussell disdains this class probably more than the others, so much that he hardly speaks of it). At the end of his analysis, Fussell asks the question, if this is where we are at, and if it is that bad, what are we to do? His answer is "category x" which is more or less an amalgam of hippies, old-school bohemians, and academic free-spirits. What so irritated me the first time I read the book is that Fussell proceeds to describe this "category" precisely the way he has described the other classes, namely on the basis of consumption, and materialistic and lifestyle markers. At the time I simply wrote a mildly frustrated book report and concluded that Fussell had not managed to get off of the class cycle after all and sold the book back to the bookstore for a couple of bucks.
However, the book and its categories stuck with me; I found myself years later analyzing people or social memes along the lines Fussell points out, much as it irked me. Recently I thought of the Bobo's in Paradise book and it struck me that the Bobo (or Bourgeois Bohemian) nearly corresponds to Fussell's "Category x." The Bobo's know good taste, they eschew the mass market brands for those that have some "intrinsic" value, they read books, they are creative, they dress the way they want and not according to the dictates of class distinction, and so on. However, I highly doubt that Fussell would applaud this new upper-class as the subtitle puts it, precisely because they are still on the class merry-go-round. While they do not buy the mass market brand they are no less susceptible to marketing and are led to purchase things by marketers who know how to manipulate the bobo's love of intrinsic values, e.g. antioxidants, fair-trade, hand made by "artisans" etc.
Christian Lander, the guy who created the "Stuff white people like" blog, made this point quite eloquently in an interview with the Onion (of all places! I do not usually use the word "eloquent" in the same sentence as "The Onion"):

AVC: Obviously the site is meant as a joke, but how much anger is there behind that joke?
CL: It's comedy first and foremost. I value humor over all else in this book. I just want it to be funny. But yeah, there's anger about it, there's a lot of things I'm angry about. One of them is sort of saying, "Look at our generation. What do we have? What's left?" Stuff is all we have. We can have music, and we can have fixed-gear bikes, but at the same time, there are people exactly like us in every city and college town in the whole country, Canada, and parts of Europe. And we're being sold to in the same way as everyone in the mass media sells to everyone that we sort of despise.
But you're just as guilty of the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses' mentality as your parents or grandparents. It's not a display of wealth. It's about a display of authenticity and taste. And so it's just my anger about that competition. And what I'm angry about is, I just can't stop myself from doing it.
It's like what else do I do? Just move to a gated community? Just lock it up and call it a life, and say, "The rest of the world can just burn to the ground. I don't care. I'm safe here"? I don't know any other way. What's the alternative?

Bethany and I were discussing the books, which we have both been browsing the past couple of weeks, particularly this point of keeping up with the Joneses and the seeming impossibility of transcending this whole class game. Fussell wanted to, the bobo's and then the hipsters thought they did, but all have eventually realized (when at their most honest) that they are still stuck in the game. Part of the problem is that the more intently you stare at something the harder it is to get beyond it. The more class matters to you, and the more intent you are on escaping its clutches, the more you are in its thrall, or so it seems to me.
Yet is this desire to escape even healthy? Talking with Bethany it struck me that this desire is potentially just as guilty of gnosticism as some of the older errors, e.g. ones that denigrate "worldly" culture, or the physical body, sexuality and the like. The desire to be classless is at least in part a desire to be disentangled of all social bonds, and how healthy is that?
These critics make a very valid point, that much of our class system and our class striving is unhealthy and wrongheaded, but from the standpoint of Christian theology we also must maintain that as human creatures we are social and communal beings. Insofar as our social, cultural, and communal life marks us by certain class markers we are not less holy, we simply recognize our inculturedness just the same way we insist that our incarnateness is not in and of itself evil or unholy.
That being said, it does seem to me that some people are more comfortable in their social skins than others. There are some people who seem to be able to move among cultures and classes, comfortable in who they are and non-judging of those they brush shoulders with. (this latter point, about judging, is one of the things that irritated me to the point of throwing away Fussell's book the first time--he is so judging and arrogant of all classes, seldom availing himself of the virtue of charity, that I often couldn't stand it). These people tend to be older, have lived a long and thoughtful life, and do not allow class distinctions to shake them of their sense of self worth. This does not mean they are condoning of all class behaviors, but they are untroubled by them.
I suspect this is possible only when you have allowed other things to define you and your view of the world. If, for starters, you believe that humanity has been created in the image of God, your benchmark for valuing yourself and others is shifted from whether or not they fit your class ideals or whether you yourself measure up to the social status of others.
It would be interesting to write up a sort of anti-Fussell catalog, a list of attributes of the different classes viewed through a charitable lens. My own values would certainly come out in the attempt (I don't know how charitable I could be of the truly upper class, which still seems too frivolous and vapid to me), but it might be a healthy exercise in acknowledging our incarnate and creaturely nature.