Sir Patrick Stewart is a fine Shakespearean actor, but he can’t be immune to the typical foibles of his profession.
One such is a rather light burden of intellect (having grown up in an actor’s family always surrounded by his colleagues, I feel qualified to generalise).
This stands to reason: a man who slips into various personalities as easily as Sir Patrick does is unlikely to have much of a personality of his own, though I’m aware of a few exceptions here and there.
In the 80s Sir Patrick abandoned his career at The Royal Shakespeare Company and went to America to act in Star Trek. Not a silly move by itself, provided it was made for the right reasons: fame and money.
But, being an actor, Sir Patrick claims his real motive was to get away from Britain’s vile class system. He expected to find unadulterated classlessness in America, an expectation in which he was thoroughly and predictably frustrated.
Before his departure, the actor would have done well to read Paul Fussell’s excellent 1983 book Class, in which the author shows that America is more class-ridden than Britain.
Having lived in America for 15 years and now in the UK for almost 30, I can vouch for that.
The class system in any commonwealth of recent standing can’t possibly be based on centuries of selective breeding and careful nurturing. It can only be founded on money, the distinguishing feature being its overall amount and the length of time money has been in the family.
That being a contrived and therefore brittle structure, Old Money families in America guard it with greater vigilance than even the outer reaches of the royal family in Britain, never mind lesser aristocracy. This creates a class that Fussell calls ‘top out of sight’, which doesn’t exist in Britain this side of the inner core of the royals.
Hence the popular ditty: “Here’s good old Massachusetts, the land of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells talk only to Whitneys, and the Whitneys talk only to God.” Well, English aristocrats readily talk to mortals as well.
When I lived in the States, there was no path I could have taken into the mansions of American Old Money (not that I wanted to). Within a few months in London, however, I found myself rubbing shoulders with people whose titles go back to centuries before Americans stopped sporting war paint (not that I deliberately sought such company either).
Americans, especially those on the East Coast, can tell a person’s class from yards away, relying on such telltale signs as his clothes, posture, car and so forth. Fussell shows that even musical instruments are class giveaways (the higher the tone, the higher the class: the flute sits several rungs above the tuba).
And if any doubts still persist, they disappear the moment the stranger opens his mouth and says either ‘how do you do’ or ‘how are ya’. The class distinction between, say, ‘evening wear’, ‘dinner jacket’, ‘black tie’, ‘tuxedo’ and ‘tux’ is an unfordable watershed.
Contrary to socialist mythology, the British class system has always been permeable, of which Sir Patrick, born to a working class family, is living proof. In fact, only about two per cent of all English peerages go back further than 100 years, suggesting a high social mobility, both upwards and downwards.
An actor (or an intellectually challenged politician like John Major) can be forgiven for dreaming about a classless society. People who think more deeply know that classlessness is neither achievable nor desirable.
Whenever people have tried to achieve it, they’ve only ever succeeded in massacring or banishing the traditional upper classes and then replacing them with new ones, infinitely less suited for the role.
God clearly creates people unequal in every respect that matters: intelligence, character, talent, enterprise – you name it. And it’s to be expected that, when such qualities are put into effect, society will become stratified.
Even the church, while asserting the equality of all before God, never suggests that people ought to be equal in any other respect. According to one of Jesus’s parables the kingdom of God is a place where “many are called but few are chosen”.
It’s not only birds of a feather but also roughly similar people who flock together. Naturally, once a cohesive group is formed, it tries to protect its integrity. Class barriers fall in place, and they are only ever raised with reluctance.
But raised they are, for any group needs an influx of fresh blood to keep itself viable. Even European royalty occasionally admits commoners into the fold, with variable results.
Our class-tortured Sir Patrick found that starring in a hit TV series made him a Hollywood proletarian. The upper classes were formed of the big-screen stars, who tended to look down on TV upstarts. Even such a cloistered society arranged itself hierarchically.
Thus Sir Stewart’s fondest but rather silly dreams were frustrated. I hope he has learned his lesson: classlessness exists only in a mass grave. And mass graves always proliferate whenever those who aren’t only thick but also wicked try to make such dreams come true.