Class ceiling
Theodore Dalrymple says that America's social myths are healthier than Britain's 0 n a number of visits to the United States, I have been told by prosperous, intelligent and highly educated interlocutors that one of the great advantages of the United States compared with Britain is that it is a classless society. (I have been told exactly the same thing in Australia. by the same kind of people.) Everyone in the United States is middle class; and therefore class simply doesn't have the importance there that it has back in the old country.
This strikes me as distinctly odd. One has only to pass from Madison to Lexington Avenue in New York — not, after all, an immense distance — to see that class distinctions are alive and perfectly well in America. It isn't just that some people have more money than others, though clearly they do: it is that their whole manner of being, from their dress to their speech to their tastes in food and in practically everything else, is different. There is no such thing, at least in the modern world, as a classless society. Nor should there be what in fact there cannot be.
The first time I was told, apparently without irony, that America was a classless society was in a rather grand club. The man who was explaining the classlessness of America to me appeared not to notice that he was at the time being served, with considerable obsequiousness, by a small army of rather short men of copper-coloured complexion from south of the border. I was reminded of South Africa, where whites used to discuss the blacks (or rather, the blecks and the blicks) not always in sympathetic or flattering terms, while being served by them at table.
A friend of mine, of Russian origin, who has lived since his departure from the former Workers' Paradise for more than a decade in both America and Britain, tells me that he thinks it is easier for a stranger in Britain to gain entry into elevated social circles than it is in America. In part, no doubt, this is because of the much smaller scale of British society; but his rather surprising opinion is exactly the opposite of what conventional wisdom might lead one to expect.
In Britain, however, we have an equal and opposite myth about class: namely, that ours has traditionally been so class-conscious and class-bound a society that everyone was fated to die in the social position, high or low, into which he was born.
Now, just as in America it is clearly not true that one's fate in life has some connection, statistically speaking, with (among other things) who one's parents were and what they did for a living, and this despite the fact that social mobility in America has been a mass phenomenon, so in Britain it clearly is not true either that social mobility was practically non-existent. On the commonly accepted but nonetheless mistaken view, a man born to a hewer of wood or a drawer of water was destined by the inflexibility of the class system to remain himself a hewer of wood or drawer of water. Personal talent and effort were unavailing. Our history proves precisely the opposite.
Social mobility, both upwards and downwards, has been a feature of British life for centuries. No amount of evidence of such mobility is sufficient, however, to destroy the myth, any more than the myth of American classlessness is destroyed by the most patent differences to be observed within a few yards of where the speaker is speaking. It is as if we need myths to keep things simple.
The two myths serve different functions, however, and have different social and psychological effects. In my opinion, the American mythology of class — namely, that there is no such thing in America — is much the healthier of the two, though not any the more accurate in the absolute sense. Never mind that a classless society, if per impossibile it existed, would be grossly unjust and unnatural, in so far as it failed to provide any rewards or incentives, and prevented parents from passing on any advantages they might have accrued to their children,
which is a wholly natural and laudable desire. For while the American myth of classlessness promotes personal effort and a sense of control over one's destiny, the British myth of class-boundedness inhibits them.
This translates directly into the very evident difference in the willingness of American and British workers in the service industries, for example. 'Have a nice day' may be an irritating and insincere valediction, but it is better than a shrug of indifference. And the American attitude persists despite the fact that real wages for such workers in America have stagnated or declined in the recent past. If every soldier in the Napoleonic army carried a marshal's baton in his knapsack, every American believes that he carries the germ of his own business, and therefore of his fortune, in his head: as, indeed, many have, though still a small minority in the statistical sense. The economic, social and psychological effects of this attitude are mainly beneficial, though of course the difference between the American dream and its reality for many people, and its insufficiency even if realised, is a main theme of American literature, much of which is tragic. In a society as open as America's, personal failure, or the failure of one's children, may be seen as a bitter reproach. One has no one to blame but oneself. There could be no better spur to action.
The British mythology of class, by contrast, permits us to enjoy the sour joys of resentment. Like righteous indignation, resentment is an emotion that never lets you down and can be kept up continuously for years. It permits you to explain away all your failings and failures as being the fault of someone or something else — for example, 'the system'. You are poor, wretched and miserable because opportunity was wrongfully denied to you, merely by virtue of where you happened to have been born. This injustice keeps the home fires of resentment burning. You may be a failure, but at least you are a failure who occupies the moral high ground. Resentment gives you the kind of warm glow inside that a shot of whisky gives, but it lasts much longer.
Resentment, while it has its psychological rewards, is a wholly useless, indeed harmful, emotion in practice, and this is so even when it is justified. It prevents people from taking advantage of such opportunities as are offered them, and causes them to seek solutions from politicians who, as professional opportunists, are only too eager to oblige.
My sketch of the difference between Britain and America is of course only an outline. I do not mean that no one in America is resentful, or that no successful efforts have been made by political entrepreneurs to stir up the kind of resentment upon which their careers depend. Nevertheless, resistance to the siren song of this useless emotion, thanks to its mythology, is far stronger in America than in Britain, which (among other reasons) accounts for its superior vigour as a society.
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