Gentlemanly behavior

1. Treat your formal clothes like ordinary men treat their casual clothes
2. Treat your casual clothes like ordinary men treat their formal clothes
3. Treat plain women like ordinary men treat dishy women
4. Treat dishy women like ordinary men treat plain women
5. Treat tough gals like ordinary men treat princesses
6. Treat princesses like ordinary men treat tough gals
7. Always carry a clean pocket handkerchief

Guns

What with bloggers on the right inspired by the Virgina Tech shooting to pound the table about how brave they would have been in that situation, and how it shows that the victims should have been better-armed, I've been stumbling across a lot of gun stuff on the web lately.

One is a comment over at Making Light.

Since I DO know what it is like to face another human being with a gun in my hand, I wrote this.
....
Unless you have invested the time and money to be well trained in the defensive use of a handgun, don’t carry one.
....
Given my background I obviously am not an anti-gun crusader. I believe, however, that the decision to carry a weapon in the office or on the street places an enormous responsibility upon the bearer to obtain excellent training, to commit to frequent practice and refresher training, to choose a weapon ideally suited for you and the purpose, and to stare into the mirror and ask yourself if you could really use it—and if you would make its use a truly last resort.

If you shoot and kill someone in the office you are not going to be celebrated as “Annie Oakley” and carried around the Family Law convention on a sedan chair. You are going to go to a private place and vomit until you don’t think you will ever be able to stand up straight again.

Igloowhite at Everything2 has a dazzling little memoir on the subject, I glimpse the elephant, which says some wry and wise things about the unwholesome romance between men and guns.

Men who have been in combat will often say that there is no comparable experience to it in the whole of the world. They say it's like a car accident, that it is totalizing terror, that it is like watching yourself in a movie, that it is like many things. The usual metaphor is the old story of the three blind men and the elephant. One man touches the trunk and says, “It's like a hose.” One man touches the elephant's side and says, “It's like wall with a tapestry.” One man grabs the tail and says, “It's like a rope.” But until you see the whole thing, at once, you'll never know what it really is. This is the reason that men have often called their first combat experience “seeing the elephant.”
....
Seeing the elephant is some serious shit—as serious as it gets, so let me be right up front with this: I have not seen the elephant. I have glimpsed it, however—and that little peek was enough for me.

And I've got another memoir from a guy who was trampled by the elephant, and reports what a gunshot feels like:

My name is Jesse (online name Danny Bishop). I myself was shot--in the chest--on November 27th, 1994, at point-blank range with a .22" magnum revolver (single-action, convertable--to.22" LR with alternate cylinder). The bullet was likely 40-grain; the type: .224 caliber high velocity (WMR--Winchester Magnum Rimfire, MAxiMag), with a nominal muzzle velocity of 1,550 fps, from a likely 6.5" handgun barrel (applied pressure, point blank: 324 foot pounds per sq. inch). I can tell you--not from watching it happen--but from actually experiencing it, exactly what it was like. First of all, there was the most incredible, shocking impact you could ever imagine--equivalent with having an M-80 (quarter stick of dynmamite) go off in your shirt pocket--and I can tell you, I was sent reeling. It felt like I was thrown back good 2-to-5 feet or more, as my legs gave out on me. There was simultaneously, a feeling like a bomb went off INSIDE of my chest, and that of being jack-hammered through my chest wall--all of this, all at once. Then, everything semed to go into slow motion, as undoubtedly, a large amount of adrenaline was released from my adrenal medulla, causing my central nervous system synaopses to fire faster--like a high-speed camera, producing a slow motion effect. I was later told that the bullet (not surprisingly) ricocheted around in my chest like a pinball, first penetrating my entire chest mass, fracture and bounce off my left scapula, hurle back through my chest again, fracture a rib, and then bounce back through, trace a path around another rib (and puncture the pleural lining of my left lung), next flying straight into my spinal collumn, fracturing my T-9 and T-10 thoracic vertebrae, and transecting my spinal cord (I am now paraplegic). Feeling all of this, all at once, was equivalent roughly, I suppose, was like being shot three times or more, not to mention that waves of paresthesia (tingling) echoed and serged throughout my body. My feeling in my legs was gone, just like that, at the same time I was flying backward--into a chair and a desk. Oddly, at that moment, I was hell-bent on protecting my head. Finally, laying on the ground in that room, only a good 30 seconds or so post-impact, I felt my left lung begin to squeeze, and my breaths were agonizingly painful and teribly short. Every breath was a knife turning in my lung. Then, I began to loose my vision--like white-out erasing my visual field) as I began to go into hypo-volemic shock (low blood volume). I lost my ability to see temporarily, and could not tell what was going on around me. Then I passed out for what was probably thirty minutes. It was a darn miracle that I did not die, as a doctor later told me, the bullet almost 'curved' around my heart, within a centimeter or two of hitting it or a major blooc vessel (it could have easily hit me right in the inferior, or even the superior, veina cava, near the heart muscle, in which case death would have followed in 1-2 minutes or even fewer, and unconsciousness in thirty seconds or less. As to the question: 'Does a person writhe in agony?'--No, I personally did not WRITHE in agony, like I had been lit on fire, but I was instantly thrown into the most excruciating, truly agonizing experience of pain I have ever known--and I have had chronic spinal pain ever since, being on prescriptions such as morphine sulfate, Dilaudid (hydromorphone HCl) and levorphanol tartrate. The reason I was not WRITHING in agony is I was knocked into a state of indescribable shock, and was incapable of much, if any movement. However, after waking up thirty minutes or so after passing out, I managed to sit up, despite my paralysis, and I still remember--even though my pain had deminished somewhat at that point, due... undoubtedly, to endorphin release--the feeling of warm blood pouring down my shirt, and adding tot he pool of blood underneath me, the veinous flow coming directly from the now hot, burning wound on, and in, my chest. I laid there for about four more hours before someone found me--I could barely whisper, much less yell, due to my 16% or so lung capacity, and as it turns out, nearly two liters... the amount of fluid in a large soda pop bottle, on my left lung... like a refridgerator crushing the left side of my chest--and by the time the paramedics got there, I was in utter shock. I was also beginning to hurt so badly again that no words can describe it. It was horrible. Hospitalization was no picnic either, let me tell you. Even after draining off the fluid once with a chest tube--a rubber catheter inserted through your ribs, into the pleural lining of your lung, they gave me what is known as positive-pressure respiratory treatment, and the inflation of my lung popped a blood vessel and caused additional pleurasy, and another 'hemothorax'. Originally, I also had air trapped in my chest--a pneumothorax, which they had to releave with a cannula. That hurt too! After two additional chest tubes and having to bear down to force the reddish.-brown fluid out of my chest cavity and into a collector, I finally regained around 98% lung capacity, amazingly, and then--one month after arriving at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in the Bay Area, California, I began Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation. I had to learn to deal with having little control over my bowels, having to learn how to do a 'bowel program' with suppositories, and the fact that I had no feeling in my groin--meaning no future physical sexual feelings, and no ability to masturbate--and still having a huge sex drive... how do you like that?--I had almost no way to relieve tension, escept exciesize, for endorphin release, and taking my pain meds. What made it worse was, before I was shot, at age 16, I had never had sex, and never had a girlfriend, eventhough I can say honestly I am, and have long been, a very attractive man. And even though I have had half a dozen girlfriends now, ten years later, dating was no fun... having to explain my limitations. In October of 2003 however, I had one of the happiest days of my life, howver, when I married my wife, Jennifer. My dad was my best man. However, even being married, and having a willing sexual partner, I find myself doing almost all of the pleasing, and I suppose I will never know what it is like to be inside a woman--to actually FEEL it at all--or orgasm therein. Any of you out there who have had there experience, count yourselves as lucky. Unless there's sex in there Hereafter--and I hope there is... with my wife, I'm talking, right now--I suppose I will never know what sex is like. You have no idea how angry that makes me, and how much pent up sexual frustratipn a guy has after a decade of no orgasmic release. Hey, that may sound shallow, but TRY IT SOME TIME. It's funny, though. So many people, when finding out I was shot in the chest, ask the same question. "Did it... hurt?" Um, yeah, it was the most agonizing thing I ever experience, and could ever imagine experiencing, and so I can definately say, 'It wasn't like a massage.' But hey, I understand what fascination people have with pain and extreme injury. After all, before I was shot, watching action movies, I wondered what it was like. Some people have imediate endorphine releases and never have such pain symptomatology. I remember lying in bed, in the hospital, with this bloddy patch over theupper, left quadrant of my chest, thinking, "Wow. Was I really shot? Am I really shot??" it's hard to believe, when it happens to you. And assuming, if you will, that there's an Afterlife, I bet people, being delivered the news that they are dead, think/say to themselves, "Wow. Am I really dead? Dead?" Anyway, I won't bore you any further. I'll just leave you with, "Being shot--does it... hurt?" Yes, sir-ee, my friend. It most certainly... does. So now you know, like I have... for ten years. : )

That harrowing account is almost two-thirds of the way down the page.

Manly men

Ganked in its entirety from Overheard in New York.

I Don't Think You Quite Grasp This Manliness Business

Electric guy to himself: Where's my gloves?

Grip guy: Gloves? I don't use gloves. I use my bare hands like a man! Only pussies use gloves. Are you a pussy? Be a man, ya pussy.

Electric guy: But then my skin will get all dry and crack and stuff.

Grip guy: Duh, well, yeah. That's why you have to moisturize.

--Movie set of I Am Legend

Overheard by: Another electric guy

Clear

CLEAR is a service allowing faster airport security checkpoints for pre-screened travelers. Aside from being spooky, it's bad security. Bruce Scheiner, as usual, explains.

Sounds reasonable, but it would leave us all less safe.

Background checks are based on the dangerous myth that we can somehow pick terrorists out of a crowd if we could identify everyone. Unfortunately, there isn’t any terrorist profile that prescreening can uncover. Timothy McVeigh could probably have gotten one of these cards. So could have Eric Rudolph, the pipe bomber at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. There isn’t even a good list of known terrorists to check people against; the government list used by the airlines has been the butt of jokes for years.

And have we forgotten how prevalent identity theft is these days? If you think having a criminal impersonating you to your bank is bad, wait until they start impersonating you to the Transportation Security Administration.

The truth is that whenever you create two paths through security—a high-security path and a low-security path—you have to assume that the bad guys will find a way to exploit the low-security path. It may be counterintuitive, but we are all safer if the people chosen for more thorough screening are truly random and not based on an error-filled database or a cursory background check.

I think of Clear as a $100 service that tells terrorists if the F.B.I. is on to them or not. Why in the world would we provide terrorists with this ability?

Federal abortion ban

#@*!!

You may have heard that the Supreme Court just upheld the Federal abortion ban law passed in '03. The law prohibits abortions in the second trimester, even when necessary to protect the health of the mother.

The blogger behind Disgusted Beyond Belief has seen what the implications of this law would have been for his wife.

Nothing is stopping the bleeding. There seems to be nothing they can do. They talk about trying some drugs, but then they decide things are going too fast to give time to let them work. So that leaves only surgery as a possibility. Surgery means hosing her out. It means killing the baby. So obviously, we look into other options. Only now, my wife is so out of it, from blood loss, from the painkillers, that the doctor said she is no longer able to legally consent. Now I'm handed a clipboard. On it is consent to basically give my wife an abortion and kill our future child. And it is all on me, my decision, mine alone. Something I never thought I'd ever face, ever have to deal with. Made worse by being a decision of either kill the baby or potentially watch both my wife and the baby die. The doctors did not say at this point that it was absolutely necessary. Maybe more blood could be transfused in. Maybe she wasn't dilated—they hadn't figured it out yet. Still too much blood. So then there I was, facing the sort of choice that you usually see only in hypotheticals in ethics and philosophy classes. Only it was real. It was my wife. And I didn't have exactly a lot of time to think about it. It was just me and the clipboard. An empty line there, marked for my signature. My wife bleeding right next to me. The ultrasound of my baby, and its heartbeat, fresh in my mind from minutes before. I cannot begin to describe how I felt at that moment. One cannot know until you are in it. I won't even try. I hope I never feel that way again.

The next woman in this situation will die unless the doctors break the law, which could put them in jail. I know doctors who will take the risk, but they shouldn't have to.

DBB reports that the thought that he would have been spared the pain of this awful decision does not comfort him. Imagine that. Instead, he's angry that the US Federal government thinks it should be making these decisions for women ... and for him.

Me too.

The good people at Planned Parenthood are rallying people and information. They've put up a web wall of protest that I'm proud to be on. They also have an online petition that I've signed.

In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision, I am joining with hundreds of thousands of people all across America who are standing together to declare that America won't stand for abortion bans that threaten women's health.

I believe that a woman's personal medical decisions should be made by her, in ways consistent with her own values and in consultation with her doctor and family. And I am deeply offended by politicians acting to take these intensely private decisions out of women's hands.

My message to politicians seeking to capitalize on the Supreme Court's reckless decision is clear and simple: We won't let you get away with it.

Now's a good time to throw them a little money, too.

Little big science

What's that you say? You want a physics experiment you can do that will hurt your brain with a clear demonstration of the counterintuitive effects of observation in quantum mechanical behavior? You want an experiment you can perform on your dining room table, with equipment that you can easily buy for yourself at the mall for under ten bucks? With effects you can see plain as day with your own eyes?

No problem. Scientific American has your back.

You want extra credit? Spend a little time with Bell's Inequality, to warm up for the news that the sequel version, Legett's Inequality, has been tested experimentally and it turns out that the universe is not only non-local, it is definitely observer-dependent.

Bwahahaha

The Poor Man learns about the Vice President's travel arrangements.

Seriously, is Cheney trying to make himself into a cartoon supervillian?

Now the Poor Man's stock-in-trade is making the horrors of the Bush administration funny. And the Veep's travel arrangements are, in fact, kind of horrifying if you think about them. But they are also funny, all by themselves.

Paying the rent

There's Charlie Watts.

Commercial artist and award-winning jazz bandleader. His day job is drummer for the Rolling Stones.

There's Michael Moorcock. There's a legend told about him, not quite factual.

Moorcock is most famous for writing the Eternal Champion series of fantasy / science fiction novels and stories, most notably the hugely popular ones about Elric, the spooky albino warrior with his spooky magic sword Stormbringer.

In the 1960s Moorcock was publishing New Worlds magazine, which lost money every issue. But guys like Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, and J. G. Ballard were busily reïnventing science fiction in its pages. Mr Moorcock didn't want to change the magazine and he didn't want to let it to go under. So every so often, the magazine would go broke and Moorcock would retreat into a room with a typewriter, a ream of paper, and a lot of amphetamines. Three days later he would emerge with enough Elric to keep the magazine afloat for a while longer.

Then there's my man Steven Soderbergh.

His avocation is directing gutsy, experimental, flawed, ideosyncratic films like Kafka, Bubble, Full Frontal, and The Limey. (OK, The Limey isn't flawed, it's perfect.) Or my favourite example, spending a fifty million bucks of other people's money to do a remake of Russian master filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's long, slow, brilliant philosophical science fiction film Solaris.

And then, when he runs out of money for these things, he just rounds up a bushel basket of the biggest stars in Hollywood and cranks out another one of these.

Red transit

Via Ken MacLeod, I learn that the Scottish Socialist Party makes a surprisingly entertaining and sensible argument supporting universal free public transit.

It's enough to make me a Scottish socialist.

Vengence

Via Warren Ellis, I learn of a well-earned googlebombing attack on Moodia and BoggleIt, and I am happy to participate.

McCain

Like a lot of restless Americans, I was charmed by Senator John McCain during the 2000 primaries. A friend of mine described a journalist who was covering the campaign saying that McCain just fell under a spell there for a while, and started telling the truth ... and discovered that he liked it. So there he was, talking frankly about campaign finance—and for a while there, it seemed like he was genuinely reconsidering from first principles the policy questions that journalists were asking him. I remember a weird interview where a reporter asked him a hypothetical question about his daughter wanting an abortion, and he admitted that had just never occurred to him before, and he needed to think about it.

So I confess: I registered Republican for the one and only time in my life, so I could vote for him in the California primary. I wasn't sure that I wanted him to be President, but I wanted to find out what he would turn into because maybe, just maybe, the drug of truth would get him past his reflexive conservatism and turn him into something else. Something new. Maybe a Republican I could at least respect. Maybe a Republican I wouldn't mind seeing win. Maybe even a Republican I would vote for.

Well, maybe not.

The honeymoon didn't last. By the time the 2000 election had come around, he had reverted to form. And since then he's compromised everything there was to like about him, turned into a tool for the worst aspects of the Republican party, and gone past even that to become one of the most dangerous war hawks in American politics.

I've been meaning for quite a while to do a long post full of resources unpacking all of that, pointing to lefty bloggers who have been watching him closely, because I know that some folks are still imprinted on the McCain of Summer 2000. But I find that now I don't have to, because in less than a minute of video he demonstrates why he deserves neither power, nor a platform to speak from, nor even respect.

Today's quote

From How the World Works, hosted by Salon, via Infinite Perplexity:

I must have led a sheltered life, because prior to today I was unaware that monitor lizards were once used as siege weapons in 17th-century India.

Me too.

Political violence

I think that Hilzoy’s long essay Liberating Iraq has made me categorically more pacifist than I was before I read it.

This is another one of those posts where I’m giving you a long quote, but do so in hopes of whetting readers’ appetites to go read the whole thing. The essay is a marvel.

Back in 1983, I sat in on a conference on women and social change. There were fascinating people from all over the world, women who had been doing extraordinary things in their own countries, and who had gathered together to talk it through; and I got to be a fly on the wall.

During this conference, there was a recurring disagreement about the role of violence in fighting deeply unjust regimes. On one side were the women from India, who argued against the use of violence, generally on Gandhian grounds. On the other were many of the women who lived under deeply unjust regimes; I recall, in particular, the South Africans arguing that however laudable nonviolence might be, their situation was sufficiently desperate that they could not afford the luxury of waiting for nonviolence to work.

It seemed to me that at the heart of this disagreement was this one fact: that the women from India were from a country that had already achieved independence, and were living with the problems that came afterwards, whereas the women from South Africa were trying to achieve that self-government in the first place. The South Africans seemed to think that the women from India had forgotten what it was like to be subjugated. We need to win our freedom as quickly as possible, they seemed to say. We realize that it would be preferable to win that freedom in the best possible way. If we could win it just as quickly through non-violent means, we would surely do so. But you would not ask us to wait if you really understood what it is like to live in slavery.

By contrast, many of the arguments made by the Indians turned on the effects that achieving self-government through violence had on one’s own people.

[⋯]

So one thing I thought that the Indian women saw was this:

Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to.

And another was this: liberation is not just a matter of removing an oppressive government. It can seem that way when you live under tyranny. Nothing is more comprehensible than people living in apartheid South Africa, or under Saddam, thinking: if only that government were removed from power, things would be better. They would have to be. After all, how could they possibly be worse?

Hilzoy says this in support of criticizing the naïvité of disillusioned Iraq war hawk Peter Beinart.

I admire Peter Beinart’s willingness to think about what he got wrong, and why. But while I think that he’s right to say that we can't be the country the Iraqis and South Africans wanted us to be — a country wise enough to liberate other countries by force — there’s another mistake lurking in the train of thought he describes. Namely:

It’s not just that we aren’t the country Beinart wanted to think we were; it’s that war is not the instrument he thought it was.

Just so. There are cases where war really is the best option available. But those cases are precious few, and when they come, you are already in deep deep trouble.

Updates

Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex makes a similar point in In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization, on the way to countering a progressive who doubts that we need to speak in good faith in response to conservatives. I have a huge caveat about the author but I still believe in the heart of this piece.

A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel. And yet when liberals enter quarrels, they always win. Isn’t that interesting?

[⋯]

Arthur thinks that liberals who voluntarily relinquish any form of fighting back are just ignoring perfectly effective weapons. I’ll provide the quote:

In a war, a real war, a war for survival, you use all the weapons in your arsenal because you assume the enemy will use all the weapons in theirs. Because you understand that it IS a war … Any energy spent mentally debating how, in a perfect world run by a Lawful Neutral Cosmic Arbiter that will never exist, we could settle wars without bullets is energy you could better spend down at the range improving your marksmanship … I am amazed that the “rationalist community” finds it to still be so opaque.

Let me name some other people who mysteriously managed to miss this perfectly obvious point.

The early Christian Church had the slogan “resist not evil” (Matthew 5:39), and indeed, their idea of Burning The Fucking System To The Ground was to go unprotestingly to martyrdom while publicly forgiving their executioners. They were up against the Roman Empire, possibly the most effective military machine in history, ruled by some of the cruelest men who have ever lived. By Arthur’s reckoning, this should have been the biggest smackdown in the entire history of smackdowns.

And it kind of was. Just not the way most people expected.

Mahatma Gandhi said “Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.” Another guy who fought one of the largest empires ever to exist and won resoundingly. And he was pretty insistent on truth too: “Non-violence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another.”

Also skilled at missing the obvious: Martin Luther King. Desmond Tutu. Aung San Suu Kyi. Nelson Mandela was smart and effective at the beginning of his career, but fell into a pattern of missing the obvious when he was older. Maybe it was Alzheimers.

Of course, there are counterexamples. Jews who nonviolently resisted the Nazis didn’t have a very good track record. You need a certain pre-existing level of civilization for liberalism to be a good idea, and a certain pre-existing level of liberalism for supercharged liberalism where you don’t spread malicious lies and harass other people to be a good idea. You need to have pre-existing community norms in place before trying to summon mysterious beneficial equilibria.

So perhaps I am being too harsh on Arthur, to contrast him with Aung San Suu Kyi and her ilk. After all, all Aung San Suu Kyi had to do was fight the Burmese junta, a cabal of incredibly brutal military dictators who killed several thousand people, tortured anyone who protested against them, and sent eight hundred thousand people they just didn’t like to forced labor camps. Arthur has to deal with people who aren’t as feminist as he is. Clearly this requires much stronger measures!

Alexander quotes Gandhi, but omits the part of that quotation which echoes Hilzoy:

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

In his excellent “Bubbles” series of essays on cultural politics, politics politics, and moral philosophy, A. R. Moxon’s The Knife And The Train examines the temptation to believe in righteous violence.

The hero ends the violence that was already there, with redeeming violence of his own, which escalates until at last it has cleansed the narrative of all sources of bad violence. Violence can’t only be the solution; it also has to be the problem. Violence isn’t just very very good, it is also very very bad.

This is where two buckets comes in very handy. You need only look at who is doing the violence to know if it is good violence or bad violence. If you haven't earned life, how can your violence possibly be good? And, if you have earned life, how can your violence possibly be bad?

“They” do bad violence to us. “We” do good violence to end it.

If they keep doing bad violence after our good violence, it is because we didn’t do enough good violence previously. The solution becomes obvious: we must do more good violence at them. Harder violence, or more widely applied, or more brutal, or all three. The violence isn’t just good. It redeems. It is the perfected instrument for restoring bad things to goodness.

Emmett Rensin has Some Brief Thoughts On Political Violence which I find frightening and clarifying.

It has always seemed to me that collective theories of politics would therefore resist political violence. It is easy enough to justify the occasional murder of an actor if you believe his crimes begin and end with his own choices. But if entire classes are the engine of any political crime, then a politics that justifies the killing of those responsible does not end with an execution. It ends with a holocaust. I have always hoped that this inevitability would make collectivists wary of political violence, the ends of its logic too horrifying and too clear. But history contradicts my hope. When the left has seized power, it has always found kulaks to liquidate, great leaps to take forward. It has taken precisely the nightmare that arises from Robespierre’s excuse and applied it on a grand scale. Of course no individual is wholly responsible for its crimes, it says. That’s why we have to liquidate all the kulaks.

[⋯]

The question may seem silly right now. The Left has barely any power! We’re nowhere near a place where this matter must be resolved. But that is precisely why the Left must reckon with the question of violence now, while it still feels faintly ridiculous.

An additional comment from me, which I find myself saying more and more.

For all the reasons above, I am deeply committed to nonviolence, especially nonviolent politics. I believe that it is both morally right and strategically wise.

There are a few major criticisms of this stance.

But is not violence justified in response to violence? I grant that it is. I will go one further, in fact. Violence is justified in response to threats of violence. It is justified to punch a Nazi; by proclaiming their affiliation, the Nazi makes a threat. But even Frantz Fanon by way of Malcolm X opens the option of violence by calling for liberation “by any means necessary” — not any means possible, but any means necessary — which implies that we should use the least necessary violence.

The question is not simply whether violence is justified. Is it wise?

Many people who say that non-violent political movements are naïve because while mass nonviolent political action sufficient to be effective is a lovely dream, history teaches us that non-violence has only succeeded where it offers the powerful an alternative to violent movements they fear more. Indeed that is the history. But that does not mean that violent movements need my help, or yours. There will always be violent resistence to injustice. Non-violent movements need your help more. And if someday for the first time everyone does choose non-violent action, maybe that will also prove that non-violent action can create change alone.

So that is where I will place my voice and hand.

Musical comedy

My brother and his wife are both musicians. Like many musicians, and myself, they have a fondness for the great fictional composer P.D.Q. Bach.

I find P.D.Q. Bach delightfully baffling because I cannot put my finger on how, exactly, music can make you laugh. But it does, and in fact the more you know about music, especially “classical” music, the funnier he is.

Anyway, I'm thinking about P.D.Q. today because I've discovered Igudesman & Joo, who are also classical music comedians. Check out the videos on their website, they're funny as hell.

They also, apparently, cribbed a piece of their act from another classical music comedian (who knew this was a genre?), Rainer Hersch, who has an excellent commentary on Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

Today's quote

From a good little commentary at Click Opera about a report on the British Army's actual long term planning:

I must say I think the British Army is right. We're all sick of postmodernism, yet we know that there are really only two ways out of it: fundamentalist Islam and communism. I know which side I'm on.

The idea that the British Army is preparing to fight the British middle class does raise the worrying question of who the army is actually for, though. Doesn't the British middle class basically fund the British Army with their taxes? And isn't “the world's middle classes uniting, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest” pretty much a definition of the normal workings of any republic?

Mea culpa

European former Iraq hawk Bjørn Stærik asks What Went Wrong?

Bless him, he blames hawks—himself among them—for misjudging just about everything. If there were more like him, I'd be a lot less frightened now.

The stability of these authoritarian and extremist regimes was precisely the problem. A little chaos would only do the region good.

When I think of this chaos argument today I am struck with horror at the stupidity of it. There's no secret about what happens when a state collapses.

There are some now who say that even if the war supporters got a lot of things wrong, so did the opponents, so there you go, that's uncertainty for you. Everyone was wrong, but at least we were on the side of freedom, and they were on Saddam's. But that's just not true. The opponents were right. They said this was extremely risky, they said it might result in countless deaths and instability. They got a lot of details wrong, but that's just the point. For the Iraq invasion to go right, war supporters had to get many predictions right. Opponents knew that if any of those predictions were wrong, the whole thing could fail. So the smart choice was to be cautious.

That last is the thing I find most puzzling about our current mediasphere. Why aren't all of the people who advocated for the Iraq war discredited and off the stage?

Vengence

I have a friend who's a very serious amateur scholar of ancient civilizations' religions and philosophies. He takes a dim view of Christianity, and figures that if it hadn't come along Pagan thinkers would have come up with universal suffrage and the polio vaccine a thousand years earlier. I keep telling him that universal soteriology leads to a universal conception of the human condition leads to universal human rights, but he ain't buying it.

Ken MacLeod offers another advantage of Christianity while talking about reading old Icelandic sagas as research for an SF novel.

That's what the Icelanders did, by the way. Every so often they'd kill each other and then they'd sue each other. There's one scene where they're about to start killing each other in court, until somebody—obviously an experienced lawyer—points that it's going to be far too expensive, and everyone backs down. About two thirds of the way through the book the whole of Iceland converts to Christianity. It slowly dawns on them that it's OK to forgive people. You don't need to keep up all this vengeance business. Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord. You can just see them thinking, “Christ, what a relief.”

MacLeod also offers some nice stuff about computer games and the War on Adverbs.

1999

For the deeply geeky: I just found out about the fate of Moonbase Alpha.

Transit

This blog mourns the passing of the #15 Municipal Transit Bus, eliminated in favour of the new T line. You may recall that the #15 has moved me to poetry.

Animal pictures

Via the Wild Hunt, I learn that David Attenborough asks an interesting question.

Animals were the first things that human beings drew. Not plants. Not landscapes. Not even themselves. But animals. Why?

His answer turns out to be a non-answer, that animals are beautiful. But the question remains interesting to contemplate, and the history of drawings of animals that he offers is fascinating.

Z

Via the unbelievably clever zombie discussion thread over at Making Light, I learn of a little horror story that is clever, scary, and kind of poignaint.

Hang with it while it gets started; it will become clear, I promise.

Back on the air

Sorry to drop out for a while there, folks. I've been quite preöccupied.

Mr Vonnegut's passing has roused me, and I'll try to get back to daily posts. See y'all around.

Billy Pilgrim

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
1922-2007
American novelist

Like a lot of brainy, vaguely disaffected folks, I read a lot of Mr Vonnegut's writing when I was a teenager. As time went on, I got tired of the self-indulgent clowning that consumed much of novels like Breakfast of Champions, and was disappointed by the Cranky Old Guy rôle he took on late in life.

But Vonnegut did write Slaughterhouse 5 and Cat's Cradle, and either one of those would be more than enough to qualify him as a Great American.

My favourite of his novels was neither of these, but rather his lesser-known little book Mother Night. It's about the moral challenges one faces living in the face of political oppression—which being Vonnegut's work, is a good deal more entertaining than I make it sound. Its lesson is simple, and timely for our current age: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” I'm going to have to track down a copy to reread in honour of his passing.

You might want to check it out, too. It's short, lively, and will make you think, I promise. In the meantime, I just have my father's favourite passage from Slaughterhouse 5:

He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

(Image from a collection of other quotes from Slaughterhouse Five.)

Cracking good writing, and now we'll never hear any more from him.

Update: Warren Ellis says a few words, Gael Fashingbauer Cooper offers several more, the city of San Francisco remembers, Salon collects some famous folks' remembrances, and Content Love Knowles offers a quote from him appropriate for this moment.

I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, “Isaac is up in heaven now.” It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored.

And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, “Kurt is up in heaven now.” That's my favorite joke.

Kurt is up in Heaven now. So it goes.

Class categories

This post about understanding social class in the US has evolved and developed over time. It started with the overview of the Fussell system, and I kept adding to it.

• Payne — different cultures
• Sideriahas — economic vs social class
• Plumer — types of power
• Greer — types of income
• Fussell — expanding the categories
• Church — three ladders
• Me — work, culture, and social networks

Ruby K. Payne — different cultures

The book A Framework for Understanding Poverty is chaotic but vivid & insightful. It gets a lot from a simple split into only upper, middle, and lower classes, espeically on the cultural elements of class. It talks a lot about what each group understand s as “common knowledge.” One often sees a flyer circulated summarizing Payne’s system:

	Poverty	Middle	Wealthy
Money	to be spent	to be managed	to be invested
Personality	senses of humor	achievement	connections
Social emphasis	inclusion	self-sufficiency	exclusion
Food	quantity	quality	presentation
Time	in the moment	against future	tradition
Education	abstract	success & money	maintaining connections
Language	casual register	formal — negotiation	formal — networking
Family structure	matriarchal	patriarchal	who has money
Driving forces	relationships	achievement	financial & social
Destiny	fate	choice	expectations

Sideriahas — economic vs social class

Much as Payne does, this long post underlines the functioning of the cultural differences between classes.

It is a common misconception that the primary obstacle to being in a much higher class is money to afford the things by which one performs that class. The limiting factor is not money, it is this: it is impossible to join a culture the ways of which you know nothing. You may come by money, but the ignorance of how to use it to perform that higher class will keep you out as adamantly as if there were a wall built around it.

Brad Plumer — types of power

Capturing the entire thing here, since the archived blog post is hard to dig through:

What do we mean when we say “middle class”? Former Rep. Martin Frost had an editorial yesterday titled “Democrats Must Reconnect With Middle Class.” He cites a new survey showing that, among white voters making between ^$30,000 to ^$75,000 a year, some 45 percent of the vote, Bush beat Kerry by 22 points. Now there are a lot of ways to slice those numbers up, granted—one could start by noting that this is such a broad category that it more or less defeats analysis; of course the Democrats need to do better among a set of people making up 45 percent of the vote … really, now — but my question for now is this: are income levels useful for defining “middle class”?

One way to define class — and this is hardly an original thought — is to look not at income but at power. Power in the workplace. Power in the world. The working class, from this point of view, can be defined as those who do their jobs under strict supervision, have little control over what they do or how fast they do it, and have no power over anyone else. Notice I picked this definition somewhat deliberately; these are precisely the sorts of people who, under labor law, can join a union. Obviously the definition’s not hard and fast. I’m in a union, after all, because at work I technically get no input into the Mother Jones budget, and have precisely zero authority over any other employee. So that's the law. In practice, though, I do have the ability to hire, promote, and fire interns, I get to work at my own pace, and have wide discretion over what projects I want to pursue. So I’d put myself in the middle class, even if I make far less, income-wise, than many who would be considered working class. Intuitively, this classification makes far more sense than calling me “working class” and, say, a well-paid, unionized electrician “middle class.”

So that’s the working class. According to economist Michael Zweig, in his book The Working Class Majority, these workers make up some 62 percent of the labor force. This is your “typical” American right here. Way up at the other end of the spectrum are the owners and capitalists and rulers. They run boards of directors, control budgets, make economic decisions that affect thousands of workers, that sort of thing. Again, citing Zweig, this is about 2 percent of the labor force. (Meanwhile, the owners and capitalists with real power, serious national and political power, probably number no more than a couple thousand.)

In the middle is, well, the middle class. That includes everyone, I think, from small business owners to the foreman on the floor to doctors, corporate attorneys, senior managers, accountants. These are the folks with some significant amount of power and authority, are generally able to socialize with each other, but are still “in the middle” — they’re not the ones making the final decisions. (Even many small business owners lack the sort of authority and autonomy that large business owners and CEOs and COOs and what have you can wield.) Doing the math, this is about 36 percent of the labor force, and can stretch from workers making ^$25,000 or less to ^$300,000 or more.

So that’s another way to look at class, a very Marxist one, as I said, and one that isn’t necessarily based on income levels. Looking at “why class matters” is far beyond the scope of a single post, but here’s a question: From a political or policy standpoint, does this distinction even make a difference? Yes, I think so, but it often depends. Some issues, like the unaffordability of health care, or Medicaid cuts, are going to concern low-income voters more than middle- and high-income voters, regardless of class. (Although health care costs are, obviously, fast becoming a concern of middle-income voters too.) Same with welfare, or predatory lending, or public transportation.

On the other hand, labor issues are going to concern working class voters of all income levels. Unions, after all, aren’t just about getting better pay and benefits. They’re also about gaining some semblance of autonomy and respect for workers: that’s why unions devote so much energy fighting for various workplace rules and grievance procedures and standards for discipline and seniority; so that workers aren’t treated as arbitrary and expendable “labor inputs.” Of course, not everyone in the working class sees this as important; plenty of workers would prefer to just get along with management rather than act as a countervailing force. (Plenty of workers think they’ll launch out of the “working class” someday.) But unionization is a working class concern.

So, too, are things like job instability. My guess is that many “middle class” workers, regardless of income, are more sanguine about fluctuations in the job market, because they’re far more optimistic about their upward mobility. On a personal level, for instance, outsourcing worries me far, far less than it might someone from the “working class” making far more than me, if only because he has less control over his work; in important ways he’s, well, at the mercy of capitalists. That’s an important and likely a real divide between the middle and working classes, although I think it needs to be developed a bit more. But those infamous polls that show that 40 percent of Americans either believe they’re in the top 1 percent of the income bracket or will be soon? I think we've found them. And I haven’t even said anything about those much-vaunted “social issues,” which could very likely intersect with class divides in important ways. Education is a major factor too.

At any rate, damned if I know what the Democrats need to do to win elections. But I do know that dividing up voter blocs by income level isn’t the only way to look at the world, and it may be unduly constraining or misleading. Class, in the sense used here, still matters.

There is a bit of interesting discussion in comments on an earlier post of mine about it.

John Michael Greer — types of income

In the course of an old post Donald Trump and the Politics of Resentment on the Archdruid Report has a sharp little observation about social class categories which rhymes with Plumer’s point which gives him four classes.

It so happens that you can determine a huge amount about the economic and social prospects of people in America today by asking one remarkably simple question: how do they get most of their income? Broadly speaking — there are exceptions, which I’ll get to in a moment — it’s from one of four sources:

• returns on investment
• a monthly salary
• an hourly wage
• a government welfare check

People who get most of their income from one of those four things have a great many interests in common, so much so that it’s meaningful to speak of the American people as divided into an investment class, a salary class, a wage class, and a welfare class.

It’s probably necessary to point out explicitly here that these classes aren’t identical to the divisions that Americans like to talk about. That is, there are plenty of people with light-colored skin in the welfare class, and plenty of people with darker skin in the wage class. Things tend to become a good deal more lily-white in the two wealthier classes, though even there you do find people of color. In the same way, women, gay people, disabled people, and so on are found in all four classes, and how they’re treated depends a great deal on which of these classes they’re in. If you’re a disabled person, for example, your chances of getting meaningful accommodations to help you deal with your disability are by and large considerably higher if you bring home a salary than they are if you work for a wage.

It may not surprise you that one must caveat someone naming “government welfare” as a social class as having unwholesome politics.

Paul Fussell — expanding the categories

Paul Fussell’s book Class: A Guide Through the American Status Systems has a unique breakdown; here’s a summary of his categories:

Top Out of Sight

Billionaires and multi-millionaires. The people so wealthy they can afford exclusive levels of privacy. We never hear about them because they don’t want us to.

Upper Class

Millionaires, inherited wealth. Those who don’t have to work. They refer to tuxes as “dinner jackets”.

Upper Middle

Wealthy surgeons and lawyers, etc. Professionals who couldn’t be described as middle class. I suspect this is the class to which I, an engineer, am supposed to aspire.

Middle Class

The great American majority, sort of.

High Proletarian (or “prole”)

Skilled workers but manual labor. Electricians, plumbers, etc. Probably not familiar with the term “proletarian.”

Middle Prole

Unskilled manual labor. Waitresses, painters. (In other words, my mom and dad!)

Low Prole

Non-skilled of a lower level than mid prole. I suspect these people ask “Would you like fries with that, sir?” as a career.

Destitute

Working and non-working poor.

Bottom Out of Sight

Street people, the most destitute in society. “Out of sight” because they have no voice, influence or voter impact. (They don’t vote.)

That summary omits a non-class Fussell talks about:

Category X

Bohemian-ish people who try to withdraw from the class system.

This resembles my own taxonomy, below.

Michael O. Church — three ladders

The long blog post The 3-ladder system of social class in the U.S. offers a very elaborate and instructive system.

Typical depictions of social class in the United States posit a linear, ordered hierarchy. I’ve actually come to the conclusion that there are 3 distinct ladders, with approximately four social classes on each. Additionally, there is an underclass of people not connected to any of the ladders, creating an unlucky 13^th social class. I’ll attempt to explain how this three-ladder system works, what it means, and also why it is a source of conflict. The ladders I will assign the names Labor, Gentry, and Elite.

[⋯]

What I’ve called the Labor, Gentry, and Elite “ladders” can more easily be described as “infrastructures”. For Labor, this infrastructure is largely physical and the relevant connection is knowing how to use that physical device or space, and getting people to trust a person to competently use (without owning, because that’s out of the question for most) these resources. For the Gentry, it’s an “invisible graph” of knowledge and education and “interestingness”, comprised largely of ideas. For the Elite, it’s a tight, exclusive network centered on social connections, power, and dominance. People can be connected to more than one of these infrastructures, but people usually bind more tightly to the one of higher status, except when at the transitional ranks (G4 and E4) which tend to punt people who don’t ascend after some time. The overwhelmingly high likelihood is that a person is aligned most strongly to one and only one of these structures. The values are too conflicting for a person not to pick one horse or the other.

[⋯]

The relationship between the Gentry and Elite is one of open rivalry, and that between the Gentry and Labor is one of distrust. What about Labor and the Elite? That one is not symmetric. The Elite exploit and despise Labor as a class comprised mostly of “useful idiots”. How does Labor see the Elite? They don’t. The Elite has managed to convince Labor that the Gentry (who are open about their cultural elitism, while the Elite hides its social and economic elitism) is the actual “liberal elite” responsible for Labor’s misery over the past 30 years. In effect, the Elite has constructed an “infinity pool” where the Elite appears to be a hyper-successful extension of Labor, lumping these two disparate ladders into an “us” and placing the Gentry and Underclass into “them”.

I have constructed a summary diagram, to clarify an important point of his:

People can improve their incomes dramatically, but it’s rare for a person to move more than one or two rungs in a lifetime.
[⋯]
the ladders connect at a two-rung difference, with [⋯] ‘social equivalencies’ that don’t involve a change in social status, so they’re the easiest to transitions to make (in both directions)

That limitation on movement means a person can likely expect to shift one step vertically or horizontally, and rarely may manage two steps, but hardly ever more than that.

Labor	Gentry	Elite
		Global billionaires, drug kingpins, third-world despots
		National what most Americans think of as “upper class” or “old money”
	Cultural influencers widely recognized as smart, creative, and above all interesting	Servants the “working rich”: law-firm partners, senior investment bankers, corporate executives
	High from elite colleges, doing interesting, respected work	Strivers trying to “break in”: entrepreneurs & junior partners
Leaders hardworking small business owners & landlords	Primary “upper-middle class” with college degrees & professional jobs
High-skill “middle class” income & security like plumbers & electricians	Transitional young people entering the Gentry, usually from High-Skill Labor
Primary “blue-collar”
Secondary “working poor”

Underclass generationally poor

In a follow-up, Church has more cutting observations, saying that all of this three-ladder machinery obfuscates how there are really just two classes.

I do have strong thoughts on how that article has aged. At the time, I was unduly sympathetic to my native social class, the Gentry. This blinded me to something I had begun to suspect, and that Alex Danco articulated — that a sociological “middle class” is a comfortable illusion, a story capitalist society tells itself to mask its barbaric nature, performing a similar function to the notoriously clueless middle manager, Michael Scott.

[⋯]

To do Marx justice, we must note that Marx did acknowledge a middle class’s existence: he wrote on the petite bourgeoisie, the small business owners and independent professionals. He predicted, correctly, that they would be losers in the ongoing class war — that machinations of the politically-connected, mostly-hereditary haute (or “true”) bourgeoisie would push them to the margins and, eventually, throw them into the proletariat. Marx did not loathe the petite bourgeoisie and he did not overlook their existence — he simply recognized them as powerless relative to market forces and the movements of history. What they gain through innovation and comparative advantage, they lose over time to the superior political and economic power of the real elites, who never compete fairly.

If you have an interest in the tech industry, Church’s comments marry well with Putt’s Law Of Failure from his darkly satirical book Putt’s Law and the Successful Technocrat.

My personal taxonomy

I am not a real sociologist, but for what it’s worth, this is how I categorize class in the US, making quite a few fine distinctions among folks who may overlap in wealth and income but do different kind of work and have different culture and distinct social networks. Like Church, I think a simply linear heirarchy is misleading.

Note that practically all of the people ranging from the high professionals to the low working class in my system conceive of themselves as “middle class”.

High aristocracy

Permanent wealth sufficient to personally weild political power. As Fussel observes, these folks spend their wealth making themselves invisible.

Middle aristocracy

Permanent wealth sufficient to afford the trappings of wealth.

Low aristocracy

Permanent wealth sufficient to not need to work.

Minor celebrities
Major celebrities

This includes not only obvious movie and pop stars but also big-name politicians, a handful of entrepeneurs like Bill Gates, atheletes, and so forth. Fame is a different kind of currency than wealth, and it comes with its own social circle and culture. “Major” celebrities have a permanent place in this class; “minor” celebrities cannot count on it.

Nouveaux riche

Entrepeneurs, CEOs, and so forth who have made enough money that they don't have to work … but almost certainly continue to work, and work hard. These people may have wealth comparable to the middle aristocrats; at the point where they have as much money as high aristos they are better conceived as part of that artistocratic class, while at the low end they blur into the richest end of high professionals.

High professionals

People with a secure place making a prosperous living with some valuable mental skill — successful doctors, lawyers, and corporate executives — who do not make enough money that they can just quit working.

Low professionals

Just about everybody else who works in offices, from architects to customer service representatives, which means a broad range of actual income.

Intellectuals

People who make their living with some valuable knowledge: professors, scientists, and other experts of various kinds, including many successful artists. As with low professionals, this includes a broad range of actual incomes.

Intellectuals are often mistaken for professionals, but they differ in grounding their position in knowledge rather than skill. And they have a distinctly different culture, recognizable in intellectuals having more (and stranger) books in their houses.

Bohemians

People who devote themselves to art or entertainment (though that last may simply mean entertaining themselves). Musicians, actors, bartenders, sex workers, nightclub bouncers, twenty-four hour party people. Keeping late or odd hours is a key defining characteristic. Incomes vary dramatically in this class, though they tend to be low.

High working class

People who make their living through physical work and have a valuable skill, like plumbers or construction workers.

Low working class

People who make a steady living through physical work, but lack skills valued by the labor market.

Poor

People working, often working hard, but perpetually worried about money because they’re a paycheque away from economic disaster and homelessness without a route to improve that situation.

Underclass

People unable to connect to the above-board economy. This ranges from the hungry homeless to folks currently hustling up wealth on a par with the upper end of the low working class … but without any stability even at the day-to-day scale.

Michael O. Church in full

For convenience I have rescued the entire original 2012 blog post from the Internet Archive:

The 3-ladder system of social class in the U.S.

Typical depictions of social class in the United States posit a linear, ordered hierarchy. I’ve actually come to the conclusion that there are 3 distinct ladders, with approximately four social classes on each. Additionally, there is an underclass of people not connected to any of the ladders, creating an unlucky 13th social class. I’ll attempt to explain how this three-ladder system works, what it means, and also why it is a source of conflict. The ladders I will assign the names Labor, Gentry, and Elite. My specific percentage estimates of each category are not derived from anything other than estimation based on what I’ve seen, and my limited understanding of the macroeconomics of income in the United States, so don’t take them for more than an approximation. I’ll assess the social role of each of these classes in order, from bottom to top.

This is, one should note, an exposition of social class rather than income. Therefore, in many cases, precise income criteria cannot be defined, because there’s so much more involved. Class is more sociological in nature than wealth or income, and much harder to change. People can improve their incomes dramatically, but it’s rare for a person to move more than one or two rungs in a lifetime. Social class determines how a person is perceived, that person’s access to information, and what opportunities will be available to a person.

Underclass (10%). The underclass are not just poor, because there are poor people on the Labor ladder and a few (usually transiently or voluntarily) on the Gentry ladder who are poor. In fact, most poor Americans are not members of the Underclass. People in the Underclass are generationally poor. Some have never held jobs. Some are third-generation jobless, even. Each of these ladders (Labor, Gentry, Elite) can be seen as an infrastructure based, in part, on social connections. There are some people who are not connected to any of these infrastructures, and they are the underclass.

The Labor Ladder (65%).

This represents “blue-collar” work and is often associated with “working class”, but some people in this distinction earn solidly “middle-class” incomes over $100,000 per year. What defines the Labor ladder is that the work is seen as a commodity, and that there’s rarely a focus on long-term career management. People are assessed based on how hard they work because, in this world, the way to become richer is to work more (not necessarily more efficiently or “smarter”). The Labor ladder is organized almost completely based on income; the more you make (age-adjusted) the higher your position is, and the more likely it is that your work is respected.

Secondary Labor (L4, 30%) is what we call the “working poor”. These are people who earn 1 to 3 times the minimum wage and often have no health benefits. Many work two “part time” jobs at 35 hours per week (so their firms don’t have to provide benefits) with irregular hours. They have few skills and no leverage, so they tend to end up in the worst jobs, and those jobs enervate them so much that it becomes impossible for them to get the skills that would help them advance. The reason for the name Secondary in this class is that they are trapped in the “secondary” labor market: jobs originally intended for teenagers and well-off retirees that were never intended to pay a living wage. Wages for this category are usually quoted hourly and between $5 and $15 per hour.

Primary Labor (L3, 20%) is what we tend to associate with “blue-collar” America. If by “average” we mean median, this is the average social class of Americans, although most people would call it working class, not middle. It usually means having enough money to afford an occasional vacation and a couple restaurant meals per month. People in the L3 class aren’t worried about having food to eat, but they aren’t very comfortable either, and an ill-timed layoff can be catastrophic. If the market for their skills collapses, they can end up falling down a rung into L4. When you’re in the Labor category, market forces can propel you up or down, and the market value of “commodity” labor has been going down for a long time. Typical L3 compensation is $20,000 to $60,000 per year.

In the supposed “golden age” of the United States (the 1950s) a lot of people were earning L2 compensation for L3 work. In a time when well-paid but monotonous labor was not considered such a bad thing (to people coming off the Great Depression and World War II, stable but boring jobs were a godsend) this was seen as desirable, but we can’t go back to that, and most people wouldn’t want to. Most Millennials would be bored shitless by the jobs available in that era that our society occasionally mourns losing.

High-skill Labor (L2, 14%) entails having enough income and job security to be legitimately “middle class”. People in this range can attend college courses, travel internationally (but not very often) and send their children to good schools. Plumbers, airline pilots, and electricians are in this category, and some of these people make over $100,000 per year. For them, there must be some barrier to entry into their line of work, or some force keeping pay high (such as unionization). Within the culture of the Labor ladder, these people are regarded highly.

Labor Leadership (L1, 1%) is the top of the Labor ladder, and it’s what blue-collar America tends to associate with success. (The reason they fail to hate “the 1%” is that they think of L1 small business owners, rather than blue-blooded parasites, as “rich people”.) These are people who, often through years of very hard work and by displaying leadership capability, have ascended to an upper-middle-class income. They aren’t usually “managers” (store managers are L2) but small business owners and landlords, while they’re often seen doing the grunt work of their businesses (such as by running the register when all the cashiers call in sick). They can generate passive income from endeavors like restaurant franchises and earn a solidly upper-middle income standing, but culturally they are still part of Labor. This suits them well, because where they excel is at leading people who are in the Labor category.

The Gentry Ladder (23.5%).

England had a landed gentry for a while. We have an educated one. Labor defines status based on the market value of one’s commodity work. The Gentry rebels against commoditization with a focus on qualities that might be, from an extensional perspective, irrelevant. They dislike conflict diamonds, like fair-trade coffee, and drive cultural trends. In the 1950s, they were all about suburbia. In 2012, they had the same enthusiasm for returning to the cities. They value themselves not based on their incomes but, much more so, on access to respected institutions: elite universities, leading technology companies, museums and artistic endeavors. Labor aspires to occupational success and organizational leadership, while the Gentry aspires to education and cultural leadership.

Before going further, it’s worth noting that the typical socioeconomic ordering would have each Gentry level two levels above the corresponding Labor level in social standing. Thus, G1 > G2 > (G3 ~= L1) > (G4 ~= L2) > L3 > L4.

Transitional Gentry (G4, 5%) is the lowest rung of the Gentry ladder. Typically, I think of community colleges when trying to explain G4. It’s the class of people who are coming into the Gentry, usually from L2, and most people in it are looking to attain G3 (and many do). Since the Gentry is defined by education, culture, and cultural influence, earning a four-year degree (which about 20% of American adults have) will usually put a person solidly into G3.

Mobility between G4 and L2 is common, and G4 is a “young people” class, because people who don’t keep abreast of politics, current events, and at least the ”upper-middle-brow” culture of shows like Mad Men^[0] tend to return to L2 (which is not an inferior class, but an approximately-equal one with different values). Those who keep up tend to progress to G3.

[0] A couple of people have emailed me to ask why I “knocked” Mad Men. That wasn’t my intention. It’s an excellent show. “Upper-middle-brow” is not panning. I’m lower-middle-brow on a good day.

Primary Gentry (G3, 16%) is what Americans think of as the cultural “upper-middle class”. They have four-year college degrees and typically have professional jobs of middling autonomy and above-average income, but usually not leadership positions. Incomes in this class vary widely (in part, because the Gentry is not defined by income) but generally fall between $30,000 and $200,000 per year. People in this class tend to be viewed as taste-setters by Labor but are viewed as gauche by the higher-ranking G1 and G2 classes.

High Gentry (G2, 2.45%) tend to come from elite colleges and traditionally gravitated toward “junior executive” roles in medium-sized companies, innovative startups, management consultancies, and possibly investment banking (which facilitates the G2-E4 transition). But G2′s wouldn’t be caught dead in jobs that seem perfectly fine to G3′s, which they view (often rightly) to be dead ends. Having interesting, respected work is important to G2′s. To a G2, being a college professor, scientist, entrepreneur, or writer are desirable jobs. Creative control of work is important to G2′s, although not all are able to get it (because creative jobs are so rare). David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise captured well the culture of G2′s in that time. Members of this social class aggressively manage their careers to get the most out (in terms of intellectual and financial reward) of their careers, but what they really want is enough success and money to do what they really value, which is to influence culture.

G2 is my native social class, and probably that of most of my readers.

Cultural Influencers (G1, 0.05%) are the pinnacle of the Gentry. Jon Stewart is a classic example. He probably makes a “merely” upper-middle-class income working for the notoriously cheap Comedy Central, but he has the most well-regarded members of the intelligentsia on his show every night. For G1, I’m not talking about “celebrities”. Celebrities are a bizarre and tiny category that mixes all three ladders (I’d argue that they’re the upper tier of L1; most lack the power of Elites and the refinement of the Gentry). Rather, I’m talking about people who are widely recognized as smart, knowledgeable, creative, and above all, interesting. They tend also to have access to other interesting people. G1′s are not “famous” in the celebrity sense, and most of them aren’t that rich. I’d guess that their incomes vary mostly from $100,000 to $1 million per year, which is low for a social class that is so difficult to enter (much harder than E4, and possibly E3, to get into).

It’s quite likely that G1 is expanding, and it was probably much smaller in the past. The internet is allowing more people to become well-known and have some degree of cultural influence. Many bloggers have entered G1 without relying on established institutions such as publishers or universities (which used to be the only way). That said, G1 requires reliability in attention; people having their 15 minutes don’t count.

The Elite Ladder (1.5%).

This is an infrastructure “at the top of society”, but many of the people it includes are in many ways nowhere near the top. People complain about “the 1 percent”, but the reality is that most of that top 1.0% are nowhere near controlling positions within society.

Not all of the Elite are in the top 1% for income, but most will have the opportunity to be. The Elite includes everyone from billionaires to out-of-college investment banking analysts (who earn a middle-class income in one of the most expensive cities on the planet). What they have in common is that they are exerting themselves toward ownership. Labor provides the work and values effort and loyalty. The Gentry provides culture and it values education and creativity. The Elite owns things and values control and establishment.

As with the Gentry and Labor, when comparing these ladders, one should consider an Elite rung to be two levels above the corresponding Gentry rung, so in terms of social standing, E1 > E2 > (E3 ~= G1) > (E4 ~= G2) > G3 > G4.

The Strivers (E4, 0.5%) are another transitional class that is generally for young people only. They aren’t actually Elite, but they might, if lucky, move into E3. Junior investment bankers, law firm associates, and young startup entrepreneurs are in this category. They’re trying to “break in” to something rich and successful. If they get in, they’ll become solid E3. If they fail in doing so, they usually return to G2: upper-middle-class professionals not strongly bound to the Elite infrastructure. G2 is usually a happier place than E4, but E3′s and E4′s tend to deride this transition. In startups, a business move favoring this step (toward G1-2 upper-middle-class stability) is derided as a “lifestyle business”.

Elite Servants (E3, 0.8%) are the law-firm partners and senior investment bankers and corporate executives that might be called the “working rich” and they comprise what was once called the “white-shoe” culture. They’re quite well-off, as far as servants go, often earning incomes from $200,000 to $5 million per year, but their social standing is conditional. They serve the rich, and the rich have to keep finding them useful for them to maintain their place. It’s not an enviable place to be, because the social expectations associated with maintaining E3 status require high spending, and even the extremely well-compensated ($1 million per year and up) E3′s rarely have the savings to survive more than a year or two without a job, because of the need to maintain connections. E3′s tend to have as many money problems as people in the lower social classes. E3′s also suffer because they live in a “small world” society driven by reputation, long-standing grudges and often petty contempt. E3′s still get fired– a lot, because the pretense that justifies E3-level status (of a large-company “executive”) requires leadership and many don’t have it– and when it happens to them, they can face years during which they can’t find appropriate employment.

People tend to think of face leaders (politicians and CEOs) as belonging to a higher social class, but most are E3. If they were higher, they wouldn’t have to work so hard to be rich. Examining our most recent presidents, Barack Obama is G1, the George Bushes were E2, Bill Clinton was E3, and Reagan was in the celebrity category that is a hybrid of E3 and L1. John Kennedy was E2, while Lyndon Johnson was L1. Most CEOs, however, are strictly E3, because CEOs are “rubber gloves” that are used for dirty work and thrown aside if they get too filthy. There’s too much reputation risk involved in being a corporate CEO for an E2 to want the job under most circumstances.

National Elite (E2, 0.19%) are what most Americans think of as “upper class” or “old money”. They have Roman Numerals in their names, live in the Hamptons (although they’ve probably stopped using “summer” as a verb now that “the poors” know about it) and their families have attended Ivy League colleges for generations. They’re socially very well connected and have the choice not to work, or the choice to work in a wide array of well-compensated and highly-regarded jobs. Rarely do they work full time under traditional employment terms– never as subordinates, sometimes as executives in an apprentice role, often in board positions or “advisory” roles. It’s uncommon that an E2 will put a full-time effort into anything, because their objective with work is to associate their names with successful institutions, but not to get too involved.

To maintain E2 status, being wealthy is required. It takes about $500,000 per year, after tax, in income at a minimum. However, it’s not hard for a person with E2 status and connections to acquire this, even if the family money is lost. The jobs that E3′s regard as the pinnacle of professional achievement (the idea that such a notion as “professional achievement” exists is laughable to them; paid full-time work is dishonorable from an E2 perspective) are their safety careers.

Global Elite (E1, ~60,000 people worldwide, about 30% of those in the U.S.) are a global social class, and extremely powerful in a trans-national way. These are the very rich, powerful, and deeply uncultured barbarians from all over the world who start wars in the Middle East for sport, make asses of themselves in American casinos, rape ski bunnies at Davos, and run the world. Like the Persian army in 300, they come from all over the place; they’re the ugliest and most broken of each nation. They’re the corporate billionaires and drug kingpins and third-world despots and real estate magnates. They’re not into the genteel, reserved “WASP culture” of E2′s, the corporate earnestness and “white shoe” professionalism of E3′s, or the hypertrophic intellectualism and creativity of G1′s and G2′s. They are all about control, and on a global scale. To channel Heisenberg, they’re in the empire business. They aren’t mere management or even “executives”. They’re owners. They don’t care what they own, or what direction the world takes, as long as they’re on top. They almost never take official executive positions within large companies, but they make a lot of the decisions behind the scenes.

Unlike the National Elite, who tend toward a cultural conservatism and a desire to preserve certain traits that they consider necessary to national integrity, the Global Elite doesn’t give a shit about any particular country. They’re fully multinational and view all the world’s political nations as entities to be exploited (like everything else). They foster corruption and crime if it serves their interests, and those interests are often ugly. Like Kefka from Final Fantasy VI, their reason for living is to create monuments to nonexistence.

For the other social classes, there’s no uniform moral assumption that can apply. G1′s are likable and often deserving cultural leaders, but sometimes foolish, overrated, incompetent, infuriatingly petty, and too prone to groupthink to deserve their disproportionate clout. G2′s tend to have the best (or at least most robust) taste, because they don’t fall into G1 self-referentiality, but can be just as snooty and cliquish. As “pro-Gentry” as I may seem, it’s a massive simplification to treat that set as entirely virtuous. Likewise, the lower elite ranks (E2, E3, E4) also have their mix of good and bad people. There are E2′s who want to live well and decently, E3′s trying to provide for their families, and E4′s trying to get in because they were brought up to climb the ladder. On the other hand, E1 is pretty much objectively evil, without exceptions. There are decent people who are billionaires, so there’s no income or wealth level at which 100% objective evil becomes the norm. But if you climb the social ladder, you get to a level at which it’s all cancer, all the way up. That’s E1. Why is it this way? Because the top end of the world’s elite is a social elite, not an economic one, and you don’t get deep into an elevated social elite unless you are very simliar to the center of that cluster, and for the past 10,000 years the center of humanity’s top-of-the-top cluster has always been deep, featureless evil: people who burn peasants’ faces off because it amuses them. Whether you’re talking about a real person like Hitler, Stalin, Erik Prince, Osama bin Laden, or Kissinger, or a fictional example like The Joker, Kefka, Walter White, or Randall Flagg; when you get to the top of society, it’s always the same guy. Call it The Devil, but what’s scary is that it needs (and has) no supernatural powers; it’s human, and while one its representatives might get knocked off, another one will step up.

Ladder conflict

What does all this mean? How do these ladders interrelate? Do these three separate social class structures often find themselves at odds and fight? Can people be part of more than one?

What I’ve called the Labor, Gentry, and Elite “ladders” can more easily be described as “infrastructures”. For Labor, this infrastructure is largely physical and the relevant connection is knowing how to use that physical device or space, and getting people to trust a person to competently use (without owning, because that’s out of the question for most) these resources. For the Gentry, it’s an “invisible graph” of knowledge and education and “interestingness”, comprised largely of ideas. For the Elite, it’s a tight, exclusive network centered on social connections, power, and dominance. People can be connected to more than one of these infrastructures, but people usually bind more tightly to the one of higher status, except when at the transitional ranks (G4 and E4) which tend to punt people who don’t ascend after some time. The overwhelmingly high likelihood is that a person is aligned most strongly to one and only one of these structures. The values are too conflicting for a person not to pick one horse or the other.

I’ve argued that the ladders connect at a two-rung difference, with L2 ~ G4, L1 ~ G3, G2 ~ E4, and G1 ~ E3. These are “social equivalencies” that don’t involve a change in social status, so they’re the easiest to transitions to make (in both directions). They represent a transfer from one form of capital to another. A skilled laborer (L2) who begins taking night courses (G4) is using time to get an education rather than more money. Likewise, one who moves from the high gentry (G2) to a 90-hour-per-week job in private wealth management (E4) is applying her refined intellectual skills and knowledge to serving the rich, in the hope of making the connections to become one of them.

That said, these ladders often come into conflict. The most relevant one to most of my readers will be the conflict between the Gentry and the Elite. The Gentry tends to be left-libertarian and values creativity, individual autonomy, and free expression. The Elite tends toward center-right authoritarianism and corporate conformity, and it views creativity as dangerous (except when applied to hiding financial risks or justifying illegal wars). The Gentry believes that it is the deserving elite and the face of the future, and that it can use culture to engineer a future in which its values are elite; while the upper tier of the Elite finds the Gentry pretentious, repugnant, self-indulgent, and subversive. The relationship between the Gentry and Elite is incredibly contentious. It’s a cosmic, ubiquitous war between the past and the future.

Between the Gentry and Labor, there is an attitude of distrust. The Elite has been running a divide-and-conquer strategy between these two categories for decades. This works because the Elite understands (and can ape) the culture of the Gentry, but has something in common with Labor that sets the categories apart from the Gentry: a conception of work as a theater for masculine dominance. This is something that the Elite and Labor both believe in– the visceral strength and importance of the alpha-male in high-stakes gambling settings such as most modern work– but that the Gentry would rather deny. Gender is a major part of the Elite’s strategy in turning Labor against the Gentry: make the Gentry look effeminate. That’s why “feminist” is practically a racial slur, despite the world desperately needing attention to women’s political equality, health and well-being (that is, feminism).

The Elite also uses the Underclass in a different process: the Elite wants Labor think the Gentry intends to conspire with the Underclass to dismantle Labor values and elevate these “obviously undeserving” people to, at least, the status of Labor if not promoted above them. They exploit fear in Labor. One might invoke racism and the “Southern strategy” in politics as an example of this, but the racial part is incidental. The Elite don’t care whether it’s blacks or Latinos or “illigals” or red-haired people or homosexuals (most of whom are not part of the Underclass) that are being used to frighten Labor into opposing and disliking the Gentry; they just know that the device works and that it has pretty much always worked.

The relationship between the Gentry and Elite is one of open rivalry, and that between the Gentry and Labor is one of distrust. What about Labor and the Elite? That one is not symmetric. The Elite exploit and despise Labor as a class comprised mostly of “useful idiots”. How does Labor see the Elite? They don’t. The Elite has managed to convince Labor that the Gentry (who are open about their cultural elitism, while the Elite hides its social and economic elitism) is the actual “liberal elite” responsible for Labor’s misery over the past 30 years. In effect, the Elite has constructed an “infinity pool” where the Elite appears to be a hyper-successful extension of Labor, lumping these two disparate ladders into an “us” and placing the Gentry and Underclass into “them”.

Analysis of current conflict

Despite its upper ranks being filled by people who are effectively thugs, the Elite isn’t entirely evil. By population, most of them are merely E3 and E4 stewards with minimal decision-making power, and a lot of those come from (and return to) the Gentry and maintain those values. On the other hand, Elite values tend to be undesirable, because at that structure’s pinnacle are the E1 crime bosses. There are good people within the Elite, even though the Elite itself is not good.

For virtue, the Gentry does better. I don’t want to fall into the American fallacy of conflating “middle class” with virtue, and there are some awful and good people in all social classes, but I think that the Gentry is a more inclusive and reflective elite– one of ideas and values, not based on exclusivity.

One Gentry stronghold for a long time has been high technology, a meritocracy where skill, know-how, and drive enabled a person to rise to technical leadership of increasing scope and eventually business leadership and entrepreneurship. This created the engineering culture of Hewlett-Packard (before Fiorina) and the “Don’t Be Evil” mantra of Google. This is Gentry culture asserting itself. Be ethical, seek positive-sum outcomes, and win by being great rather than by harming, robbing, or intimidating others. It’s not how business is practiced in most of the world– zero-sum thuggery is a lot more common — but it’s how great businesses are made. This weird world in which self-made success was regarded higher than entrenchment, symbolized in Silicon Valley, enabled people from the Gentry to become very rich and Gentry ideas to establish lasting success in business.

What has made America great, especially from 1933 until now, has been the self-assertion of the Gentry following the defeat of the Elite. The first half of the American Era (1933 to 1973) utterly emasculated the Elite. Their rapacious greed and world-fucking parasitism was repaid with 90-percent tax rates, and they told to consider themselves lucky that it wasn’t full-on socialism (or a violent revolution in which they all died, Paris-1793-style). The so-called “WASP culture” of the E2 class derives many of its norms from the paranoia of that period (when the global elite was very small, and they were the “robber baron” elite). For example, the demand that a house not be visible from the road comes from a time in which that was physically dangerous. This four-decade curtailment of the American Elite, and the more resounding destruction of the European ones, was one of the best things that ever happened to the world. It made the golden age of Silicon Valley possible.

There are a lot of reasons why this “golden age” of a disempowered Elite was able to occur, but World War II was the biggest of all of them. Future historians will probably regard the two World Wars as one monstrous conflict, with a period of crippling, worldwide economic depression between them. Few disagree with the claim, for example, that the resolution of the First World War led inexorably to the evils of totalitarianism and the Second of these wars. This giant and largely senseless conflict’s causes seem complex — historians are still debating World War I’s inception– but the short version is that the world’s Elites did that. There was a 30-year period of war, famine, poverty, racial pogroms, and misery that existed largely because a network of high-level obligations and horrendous ideas (especially the racism used to justify colonialism, which benefitted the rich of these societies enormously, but sent the poor to die in unjust wars, contract awful diseases for which they had no immunity, and commit atrocities) set the conditions up. After about a hundred million deaths and thirty tears of war, societies finally decided, “No More”. They dismantled their Elites vigorously, North American and European nations included. This became the “golden age” of the educated Gentry. In the U.S. (for which the 1950s were a decade of prosperity; in Europe, it was a period of rebuilding and not very prosperous) it was also the “golden age of the middle class”.

However, the Elite has brought itself back to life. This Gilded Age isn’t as bad as the last one, but it’s heading that way. It started in the late 1970s when the U.S. fell in love again with elitism: Studio 54, cocaine — a drug that captures the personality of that cultural change well, because its effect is to flood the brain with dopamine, causing extreme arrogance — and “trickle-down economics”.

Assessing the present state of conflict requires attention to what each party wants. What does the Gentry want? The Gentry has a strange, love-hate relationship with capitalism. Corporations are detested (even more than they deserve) by this class and most people in the Gentry want the U.S. to look more like Europe: universal healthcare, decent vacation allotments, and cheap, ecologically sound high-speed trains. This might give the impression of a socialist bent, and that impression’s not wrong. Yet their favorite places are New York (the center of capitalism) and Silicon Valley (also fiercely capitalistic). Although left-leaning, the Gentry are strong champions for non-corporate capitalism. There is no contradiction here. European social democracies have also managed to create hybrid systems that combine the safety and infrastructure of socialism with the innovation and individual liberty of capitalism: the best of both worlds.

For a contrast, what the Elite has been pushing for is the worst of both worlds, at least for average people. The truth of corporate “capitalism” is that it provides the best of both systems (socialism and capitalism) for the Elite and the worst of both for everyone else. It’s a welfare state in which only very well-connected people are citizens, it favors command economies (which are what most corporations are, internally) and it stifles the positive-sum innovation that is capitalism’s saving grace. The upper tier of society wants social stability for themselves (to stay in and keep others out) but they favor extreme economic variability (also known as “inequality”) because it gives them more opportunities to exploit their social status for economic gain (read: private-sector corruption).

Air travel in the contemporary U.S. is an illustrative example of this “worst of both worlds” scenario: the pricing is erratic, unreasonable, and even a bit mean-spirited, which shows the volatility of capitalism, while the low quality of service and the abysmal morale of the industry feel like direct transplants from the Soviet Union.

The future

A major battle is coming, with all three of these categories (Labor, Gentry, and Elite) involved. The Gentry and the Elite are at fundamental opposites on the type of society they want to see and, for decades, the Elite has been winning, but their victories are becoming harder to win as technology opens up the world. Labor might seem like a nonparticipant in the ideological battles, but they comprise most of the casualties, and they’ve seen shells land in their backyard (especially if they live in Detroit). Not only are they losing their jobs and social status, but their communities have been demolished.

Something else is happening, which is relevant both in a macrohistorical sense and to the U.S. in 2012. One way to divide human history is into three eras: pre-Malthusian, trans-Malthusian, and post-Malthusian. I refer, of course, to the prediction of Thomas Malthus, early in the Industrial Revolution, that population growth in contemporary societies would lead to a catastrophe because population grew exponentially, while economic growth was linear. He was wrong. Economic growth has always been exponential, but for most of human history it has had a very slow (under 1% per year) exponential curve– slower than population growth, and slow enough to look linear. His mathematical model was wrong, but his conclusion– that population grows until it is checked (i.e. people die) by disease, famine, and war– was true in nature and of almost every human society from the dawn of time to about 1800. He was wrong that it would afflict England and the richer European countries in the mid-19th century– because the Industrial Revolution accelerated economic growth enough to prevent a global Malthusian crunch. On the other hand, there were local Malthusian catastrophes. Ireland endured severe poverty and oppression, colonialism was deeply horrible and did, in fact, represent many of the vices Malthus warned about.

The world was pre-Malthusian when societies were doomed to grow faster in population than in their ability to support it. This led, over the millennia, to certain assumptions about society that can be categorized as “zero-sum”. For one tribe to take care of its young, another tribe must lose wealth or be destroyed. For English to be rich, Irish must starve. For Southern whites to live well, blacks must be slaves. For capital to be profitable, labor must be exploited. If Catholic Spain has one colony, Protestant England must have more. For the German people to have “lebensraum”, Central European countries must be invaded and their inhabitants killed. “Medieval” horrors were an artifact of the Malthusian reality of that time, but such atrocities continued even as the long-standing Malthusian inequality (population growth being greater than economic growth) reversed itself.

We are now in a trans-Malthusian state, and have been for about two hundred years. Global economic growth is now over 4% per year, which is the fastest it has ever been, and there’s no sign of it slowing down. The world has a lot of problems, and there are pockets of severe decay, corruption, and poverty; but on the whole, it’s becoming a better place, and at an accelerating (hyper-exponential) rate. The world is no longer intrinsically Malthusian, but pre-Malthusian attitudes still dominate, especially at the pinnacles of our most successful societies. This shouldn’t be shocking, because the very traits (especially, low empathy and greed) that would be required to succeed in a zero-sum world are still strong in our upper classes. This legacy won’t go away overnight. The people haven’t changed very much. Pre-Malthusian fearmongering is also very effective on less intelligent people, who haven’t figured out that the world has changed in the past two hundred years. They still believe in the zero-sum world wherein, if “illigal” immigrants “take all the jobs”, middle-class white people will starve.

The trans-Malthusian state is, I believe, intrinsically more volatile than a pre-Malthusian one. Technology is causing the job market to change faster, but this paradoxically makes individual spells of unemployment longer. Another thing is that we’re seeing something that pre-Malthusian economies didn’t have to worry about: economic depressions. This is not to romanticize pre-Malthusian life or societies. They would experience famines, wars, and disease epidemics that would kill far more people than any economic depression, but those had natural or historical causes that were not intrinsic and desirable. We’ve been able to eliminate most of these evils from life without losing anything in the process. These depressions, in my view, come from economic progress itself (and moreover, our inability to manage growth in a way that distributes prosperity, rather than displacing people). The first quarter of the 20^th century saw unprecedented advancement in food production — a good thing, undeniably — which caused agricultural commodities to drop in price. This caused small farmers (who could not partake in these advances to the same extent) to fall into poverty. Without the small farmers, towns supported by them weren’t doing well either. Poverty isn’t a “moral medicine” that clears out the bad in society. It doesn’t make people better or harder working. It ruins people. It’s a cancer. It spreads. And it did. Rural poverty was severe in the United States by 1925, before the Depression officially began. Urban sophisticates and elites were OK in 1925, hence this era is remembered as being prosperous. In 1933? Not so much. The cancer had grown. Throughout the 1930s, the rich were terrified of an American communist revolution.

We don’t want another Great Depression, and what’s scary in 2012 is that it seems like what happened to agricultural products in the 1920s is now happening to almost all human labor. We’re outsourcing, automating, and “streamlining”, and all of these changes are fundamentally good, but if we don’t take steps to prevent the collapse of the middle class, we could lose our country. This will almost certainly require innovations that the right wing will decry as “socialism”, but it will also involve techniques (such as crowd-funding and microloans for small businesses) that are far more capitalistic than anything the corporates have come up with.

We are trans- (not post-) Malthusian because we live in a world where scarcity is still in force (although often artificial) and zero-sum mentalities dominate (even though they’re inappropriate to a technological world). If Mexican immigrants “take the jobs”, formerly middle-class white people will be without healthcare. What’s required is to step away from the zero-sum attitude (expressed often in racism) and recognize that no one of any ethnicity, jobless or employed, should be without healthcare. Ever. Technology is great at helping us generate more resources and make more with what we have, and we have to accept that it will “unemploy” people on a regular basis, but the bounty should be distributed fairly, and not hogged by the fortunate while those it renders transiently jobless are allowed to fall into poverty. “Collateral damage” is not acceptable and, if the 1920s and ’30s are illustrative, it can’t be contained. The damage will spread.

What does this have to do with the ladders and their conflict? Labor is a trans-Malthusian social category because it lives in a world that values fair play (a positive-sum, post-Malthusian value) but that is constrained by artificial scarcity. The Elite is pre-Malthusian; they are obsessed with the zero-sum game of social status and the need to keep themselves elevated and others out. The Gentry, although not without its faults, is properly post-Malthusian. Their values (political liberalism, individual freedom, enough socialism to ensure a just society, positive-sum outlook, and a positive view of technology) represent what it will take to evolve toward a post-Malthusian state.