Comment by Mz
9 years ago
Brits also are much more okay with embracing the idea that there are separate classes. Americans like to think we are better than that and (like to imagine that we) treat all people in some idealized egalitarian fashion. In practice, it is a lot, lot harder to treat everyone equally well and try to ignore class divides than to have protocols in place for bridging the gap between people explicitly of different classes.
It's entertaining how far we in the states go in denying we have classes. Some years back a blogger tried to cook up a taxonomy of our class system. Since we don't have words to describe them he adopted archaic Indian terms instead. Brahmins are the NY/CA elite, Vaisyas are the Trump voting worker caste, etc.
https://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/castes...
Other writers have recognized and described it too: http://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html
Even our very own Michael O. Church: https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/mess...
I'm with Mz on this - we should start explicitly recognizing our caste system.
It's been helpful to me; once I figured out our castes and where I live in it, suddenly a lot of things clicked into place. For example, why do so many people not recognize me as white? It's because I don't give off the cultural signals of being upper caste (Brahmin in Moldbug's taxonomy) but I'm solidly within Brahim professional and social circles. Given these mismatched signals, Kashmiri or Argentinian seems like the most plausible hypothesis.
Mz is not for a caste system. I am homeless and the top woman on hn.
Viva the difficult American social non system.
The fear of recognizing a caste system is that once you use words to describe something, the words themselves become a tool to reinforce and then codify that system.
I mean, India itself seems to be a prototypical example of that.
Is it? The caste system is mostly defunct. In my experience (admittedly, as an outsider who lives in mostly elite circles) there is actually a more significant caste-like system, but much like in the states there are no real words to describe it.
The best explanation I've seen of it is Chetan Bhaget's novel Half Girlfriend: http://amzn.to/2im0Cxq It's a masala romance novel, blah, but it's the only real discussion of the issue that I've seen.
He's also written a few newspaper columns on it: http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/The-underage-optimi... http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/The-underage-optimi...
Very few people can even discuss these subtle, un-named caste systems, let alone argue against them. I can't stand Chetan Bhaget, yet I link to him anyway simply because he's really one of the very few who actually discuss it. Consider how difficult it is to even discuss Trump's victory in these terms as well.
I think that the best protection the caste system has is that we refuse to even give it a word.
On the contrary, without the words to describe such structures, they remain hidden from discourse and direct criticism. This protects the implicit structures by rendering them unassailable by democratic processes.
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"It's entertaining how far we in the states go in denying we have classes."
America does have 'classes' but they are completely different from the type of class system you'll find in the 'old world'.
Many self-made Americans would consider themselves 'upper class', by virtue of wealth, status and behaviour. But classically, you really can't 'move' into class, you pretty much have to be born into it. Or possibly marry into it.
You can't easily move into it, but your children can be born into it (see the Rockefellers).
European class system is a hack around wealth in a society not always being distributed to the "right" people. Modern American class system simply assumes it has been distributed correctly and works around that.