What Is Your Social Class?

Upper class Burmese couple, 1890s.

I recently tried a quiz offered by the Christian Science Monitor, “What is your social class?” It put me in the middle class, which is just about spot on. Ain't nobody here but us bourgeois. But I found the analysis behind the questions shocking. It turns out that the current American upper class, based on real science, is the "small slice of society that tends to feel the least bound by the legal and moral rules observed by other Americans” In other words, the US has a corrupt and immoral upper class. 

If this is news, it is bad news. It seems to me that keeping the upper class honest is the sine qua non of civilizational success. This is the whole ball o'wax. It is what codes of chivalry, Confucianism, gentlemanliness, honour, professional ethics, are all about trying to do. That fight is always an uphill fight, because there are always fewer practical constraints on an upper class; self-indulgence is an eternal temptation. And the New Testament is no doubt right that the poor are always more ethical than the rich. But I do suspect things have gotten much worse since the Sixties, which were largely a rebellion by the upper classes against any constraints on their desires.

Police lead upper class New Yorkers through the slums of Five Points, 1880s.

A corrupt upper class is the sole difference between the Third World and the First. I suspect as well that the New Testament's persistent warnings about the corruptabiltiy of the upper class are the secret key to the Christian West's tendency to keep ahead of the rest of the world on most measures of social success. The upper classes are now in open rebellion against all that, in a way we have not seen for almost two thousand years.

On specifics, the studies behind the CSM quiz show that the American upper classes of this day are 1) more inclined to envy; 2) less inclined to courtesy (i.e., stopping for a pedestrian); 3) more inclined to steal; 4) more inclined to lie; 5) less inclined to trust or think highly of others; 6) less able to read others' emotions; 7) more inclined to spoil their children; 8) vastly less inclined to enjoy gospel music; 9) more likely to be atheist or agnostic; 10) less likely to give to charity; 11) more concerned about status in buying clothing. 

Hunting tigers out in India.

All bad traits, it seems to me.

Number six is particularly interesting: it suggests that the upper classes have less empathy for others. It also suggests that one does not get ahead in this culture by being sensitive to the feelings of others, but by being insensitive to them: that "emotional intelligence," to the extent that it really is a key ingredient in personal material success, is not a matter of learing empathy, but of learning psychopathy.