The Daily Telegraph recently ran a test to help readers answer this question.
The only time I took such a test before was almost 40 years ago, when my boss found one in a glossy magazine. That test was strictly about vocabulary: do you say ‘napkin’ or ‘serviette’, ‘lounge’ or ‘sitting room’, ‘vest’ or ‘waistcoat’, that sort of thing.
There were 10 questions altogether, and, according to my inquisitor, I gave no proletarian answers at all. “You must have been upper-middle class back in Russia,” he said, and he didn’t mean that as a compliment.
“We might or might not have been,” I replied. “But whatever we were, we spoke Russian, not English.”
Anyway, that test, an echo of Nancy Mitford’s U and non-U, put me squarely on the top rung of the social ladder. However, the Telegraph test left me barely clinging on to the bottom rung of the middle range. I don’t think my class identity, or rather the absence of one, has changed in the interim. So why such a difference?
The answer is, it’s not I who has changed. It’s the notion of what constitutes a class structure.
Most questions in The Telegraph had to do with money: income, investments, stock market activity, the use of financial consultants. Obviously, I fell far short of the top two categories, ‘The Elite’ and ‘The Ambitious High Earners’. Moreover, even my answers to the few questions related to culture also proved that I was at best a philistine, at worst a wretch belonging to the lowest category, ‘The Left Behind’.
As I recall, one of the culture-vulture questions was ‘How often do you go to the opera?’, to which my honest but clearly unsatisfactory reply was ‘Never’. I had to offer the same answer to the question about ballet, what with ‘Once every 20 years’ not appearing among the multiple choices.
Had they asked me about, say, Palestrina, Byrd or Bach, my social rating might have climbed up a notch, but these days such music is off the charts, as it were. Rossini-Puccini-Verdi seems to be the acme of cultural aspirations.
Reading books, however, doesn’t seem to be among such aspirations at all, at least not in the top two categories, the masters of our universe. Only about a third read them regularly, and it’s a good job the questionnaire didn’t probe deeper by asking what kind of books they favour.
Five gets you ten, most would specify the kind of potboilers that adorn the windows of even our better bookshops. By contrast, the window displays of bookshops in France show a wide selection of serious stuff: philosophy, history, even occasionally theology.
This is just an observation, not a serious comparison. I don’t know whether the French, those who belong to their elite, actually buy such books or the windows are just a merchandising trick, a way for a shop to establish its intellectual bona fides. Still, next time you visit a WHSmith shop, try asking for, say, The Critique of Pure Reason. See how far you’ll get.
Anyway, these are all moot points. The salient point is that even conservative British papers have adopted a Marxist view of class structure as a hierarchy based strictly on wealth. (The bearded monster called it ‘relationship to the means of production’, but that was at a time when things were actually produced, rather than imported from China.)
Just a few decades ago, class had less to do with money than with the names people applied to different rooms in their houses. But things have changed. Our upper classes are now young, bone-ignorant, ill-mannered high earners who read only trash, if anything.
The political elite in the two Western countries I know best is a case in point. Just compare American and British leaders today with their earlier counterparts.
John Adams, America’s second president, was an envoy to France when the battle between the Federalists, his and Hamilton’s party, and the Democrat-Republicans of Jefferson and Madison, reached a climax. Adams was asked to write a polemical essay, and in the next three weeks he knocked off a 900-page text, which is still standard fare in political science classes.
I doubt that even the most zealous of Trump fans would claim he’d be able to read a book that length in three weeks – or indeed that he has ever done so in his life. Lest you may think I’m on a Trump-bashing crusade, the situation with our leaders is just as dire.
According to the same Telegraph article, Rishi Sunak, our last Tory PM (and I do mean last, not latest) doesn’t venture any higher than Jilly Cooper, and our current Labour PM is no better. As for our likely next Labour PM, Angie Rayner, she probably moves her lips when reading The Daily Mirror.
However, Churchill not only was a highly educated man who knew all of Shakespeare practically by heart, but he actually won the Nobel Prize – for literature, not for ending eight wars before breakfast or for being the first black elected as US president.
Churchill’s younger contemporary, Enoch Powell, was a classical scholar who regrettably never got to be PM because he quoted Virgil and not The Communist Manifesto. And his even younger contemporary, Margaret Thatcher, quoted Aquinas at 10 Downing Street. Even if that piece of erudition came from her speechwriters (one of them, my late friend, was a top scholar), she clearly knew who Aquinas was. Does Angie? Rachel? For that matter, Keir?
And Thatcher definitely read thinkers like Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. I would have known this even if The Telegraph hadn’t said so: Maggie’s policies followed clearly identifiable patterns and antecedents.
It’s not just our political life that’s dominated by ignoramuses. So is our economic life, which is where most respondents in the Telegraph survey operate. Fair enough, I’m sure one doesn’t have to go beyond such masterpieces as The Art of the Deal to make a mint in property or other speculative investments.
But when it comes to running the economy of a country, especially one woven into a sprawling fabric of globalism, ignorance of economics, history, political philosophy is a sure recipe for national disaster.
Since Western countries increasingly resemble entrenched plutocrats fighting rearguard action against advancing Marxists, ignorance of serious subjects cedes the intellectual ground to villains mouthing bien pensant clichés. They are the ones who set the language and terms of the debate, which means they are guaranteed to win it.
Civilisation is about 5,000-years-old, meaning that everything that could be tried in politics or economics has been tried. History is bulging with correct answers, but do we know how to ask correct questions? How do we separate the wheat of successes from the chaff of failures? In fact, how do we define failure or success?
It takes intimate familiarity with a vast corpus of knowledge to answer those questions correctly, and answer them we must if our civilisation is to survive. Such familiarity can only come from a lifelong habit of reading serious texts – to begin with.
Also vital is training one’s mind and senses to chart a safe route through the moral and aesthetic minefields densely covering the political, economic and cultural landscape. Alas, such training and such learning can’t possibly be acquired by a dominant elite, two-thirds of which hardly ever open a book.
In that sense, the Telegraph survey is useful. It gauged the depth of the abyss into which our civilisation has sunk. And the worst thing is that what passes for today’s upper classes are so ignorant that they don’t even realise the abyss exists.
I came out as ‘ambitious high earner’ LOL
Congratulations. But how often do you go to the opera? Or sing in one for that matter?
Three or four times a year but only because I’m ‘friends and family’ so can get tix for £20.
If the Telegraph were a conservative newspaper, ancestry would play some part in its calculations of social class. For example, the Hon. Nancy Freeman-Mitford was upper-class not because of the words she used or even the accent in which she spoke them, but because her ancestors literally “came over with the Conqueror”.
Is there a connexion between high culture and high social class? Was there ever a greater Philistine than King George V? Some of his ancestors were already anointed Kings or England before the Conqueror came over, but he told Sir Thomas Beecham that Puccini’s La Bohème was his favourite opera. “Why is that, sir?” enquired the great man. “Because it’s the shortest one I know. Ha ha ha ha ha!”
I don’t know what class I belong to, because I haven’t done the quiz. But one of my scullery-maids tells me she enjoyed it.
I used to tell my class-obsessed co-workers that they couldn’t apply their customary categories to someone raised in a foreign country. I explained to them that I’m classless, but they wouldn’t accept that.
But surely a connection between high class and high culture exists? For example, not much great music would have been written without aristocratic patronage, all those kings, margraves, princes and electors. I’m sure that an aristocratic society is a sine qua non for high culture — this, even if aristocrats themselves don’t produce works of art. And I think there is more to the definition of upper classes than just lineage, certainly these days. I’ve met highly pedigreed chaps who spoke in broad London accents, and one of them had done a year in prison for knocking off a corner shop. Would you call him upper class? I wouldn’t.
But then of course there was that famous Duke of Gloucester, brother of George III. When Gibbon gave him the second volume of his Decline, HRH said: “Another damn’d thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?”
(A funny thing happened to me years ago. I was writing my first book in Italy, where we hired a house from a local farmer, Sergio. When he saw me hunched over my computer for hours, he said: “Sempre scrivi, scrivi, scrivi, signor Boot.” And he had never heard of Gibbon.)
If I had three weeks to spare, I’d write you nine hundred words about patronage, but i don’t think I’d reach a conclusion.
Clearly, aristocratic patronage produces better results than democratic or socialist patronage. But for every benign Prince of Cöthen there were two monstrous Prince-Archbishops of Salzburg.
Equally clearly, aristocrats are as good as, or better than, anybody else as producers of literature. But to find aristocratic composers of music one has to rummage in the basement inhabited by Prince Gesualdo and Lord Berners.
So all I have to offer is another anecdote. When Haydn returned from London to Vienna, his beloved patron and friend, Prince Nicholas von Esterhazy, was dead, and his successor was (not to mince words) a nasty little git. It’s recorded that Haydn approached the Dowager Princess with a polite request. “I’d be grateful, madam,” he suggested, “if you’d mention to your illustrious son that he addresses me as if I were a servant, when I am, as all the world knows, a Doctor of Music in the University of Oxford and a personal friend of King George III of England.” Haydn, the son of a village wheelwright, had become an aristocrat.
Nine hundred pages! Not words, pages! Pages! I had that joke prepared four hours ago, and I spoiled it!
That’s exactly my point. If it’s possible to become an aristocrat, aristocracy isn’t all about birth. But it’s a good point about aristocrats being better at writing than composing. Hildegarde? Was she aristocratic? Of course, the composers of the Russian Mighty Handful were all noblemen, but they weren’t great composers. Musorgsky could have become one, but he was held back by the traditional Russian vice (one shared with the Irish). But much of the great Russian literature was produced by noblemen or at least landed gentry. Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Tolstoy — and these are just the better-known names. (By the way, Lermontov had some Scottish blood — 13th century poet Thomas Lairmont was his ancestor.) France, ditto, although there the middle class was also strong, whereas in 19th century Russia it was practically non-existent.
Actually, the Russian Lermontov family was started by George Learmonth, a Scottish mercenary who came to Russia in the 17th century. But the family does go back to Thomas Learmonth (Lairmont), the poet.
I didn’t say that birth was necessary, only that its omission as a significant factor in social class by the Trotskygraph was disappointing.
It’s hardly surprising that gentlefolk don’t become great musicians, since a great musician has to be a specialist who studies and practises all the time from childhood onwards. A great writer merely has to talk and listen – but of course his talking and listening must take place in a culture where the standards of conversation and oratory are high.
I had to look Thomas Lairmont up. I know him as Thomas the Rhymer, who is known to me as a character in poems, not as a poet to whom any poems can be securely attributed. Previously the only Scottish Russian I knew was Barclay de Tolly.
It is interesting that the questions asked to determine class have changed so much over the years. My guess would be that is due to the person compiling the list. I would say that task is always performed by someone on the outside looking in (or the bottom, looking up). So, it is based on what someone outside of the highest class (at least) feels he is lacking – or maybe more importantly, what he thinks others feel he is lacking. Envy may play a role.
As for comparing the writing skills of Adams and Trump, the first factor is intellect. After that, I would say thought is the next biggest factor. By that I mean the amount of thought the author has put into the subject before writing. Adams had obviously thought for years about politics. It is easy to write (or talk) about a subject on which one has ruminated. I know I can be quite the bore when some polite person asks an innocent question on some subject that has been on my mind. After pontificating for some minutes, I will realize that I have droned on, apologize, and usually end with, “Well, you asked.”
PJR: Barclay was neither the first nor the only general of (in his case distant) Scottish descent in the Russian army. Barclay was really a Kurland German, the dominant nationality among Russian 1812 generals. Unlike him, Patrick Gordon was a Scotsman born and bred, and he was one of the most important generals and admirals during the reigns of Tsar Alexis and his son Peter I, whose close friend and adviser he was. Gordon, a lifelong Catholic, also founded the first Catholic school in Russia (or rather Muscovy). Actually, there were other Scottish soldiers in the Russian army too: Menzies and Livingston also served Alexis with distinction. However, it’s wrong to think that Gen. Maksimov was actually a McSimov.
Thank you for once again increasing my knowledge.
There may be no Clan MacSimov, but you surely can’t deny the obvious connexion between Glazunov and Glasgow!