Mercedes and I are looking for a new place to live, and it isn’t easy. Part of the reason it’s so hard for us is that we don’t fit very neatly into America’s class structure. What do I mean by this?
A Binary Model of Class
Basically America has two status ladders that we can climb: the priest class and the warrior class. The priest class values prestige, collaboration, connectedness, urban living, etc. The warrior class values money, competition, individual responsibility, rural living, etc. If you haven’t already, I recommend this amazing review of the 1983 book, Class, by Paul Fussell, by Scott Alexander. He considers Fussell’s somewhat dated (but surprisingly still relevant) distinctions between these two classes, which he calls by the more familiar names: the “middle class” and the “working class”.
So back to house hunting. Utah is, by and large, dominated by working class suburbia. But Mercedes and I are more drawn to some the forms of status signaling of the middle class. Luckily, there are some really nice middle class neighborhoods in Salt Lake (one of our favorites is called Yalecrest).
When we first moved to Utah, one of the ways that she expressed her preference was to say that she wanted a neighborhood that was “walkable”. Walkability is a pretty good sign of an urban middle-class neighborhood. Working class suburban neighborhoods tend to be more “driveable”.
But at the end of the day I am not super comfortable with middle-class neighborhoods, either. Part of the reason is that I think the priestly value system is characterized by a need for social conformity. For example, in the middle-class neighborhoods in SLC it seems pretty standard practice to put left-leaning political signs in your front lawn to signal to all your neighbors that you have adopted the prevailing orthodoxy.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There is definitely a form of conformity in working class suburbia. But it is more of a functional conformity. You tend to get more bang (i.e., sq. feet) for your buck if you buy in a neighborhood where the builder designed a handful of floor plans and built a hundred or more houses along the same lines. You know, economies of scale and all that.
The result is that the houses in many working class suburban neighborhoods look a lot more alike than those in middle class neighborhoods. Working class houses aren’t necessarily trying to conform, it is just cheaper that way. And working class buyers tend to prefer more obvious status signifiers like square feet. But I am not really into that either.
A Third Way
Okay, so where do you live if you don’t really want to display status either by orthodoxy confirming yard signs or a square footage pissing contest? Well, if we go back to Fussell, we learn of the existence of something he calls “Class X”. Apparently, there is a third way that Scott Alexander describes (somewhat, but I suspect not completely, ironically):
Class X are genuinely good people. They like art that is truly beautiful, food that really tastes good, neighborhoods that are liveable and attractive according to their own quirky aesthetics. They believe things because they are true.
In the Comments of the book review, someone mentioned that Fussell’s class X corresponds to academics. However, I would modify that to be “intellectuals” rather than “academics” because I think academia has become a pretty securely middle class institution. That is, it is too concerned with enforcing orthodoxy to be characterized as “they believe things because they are true.”
Anyway, the working class is pretty skeptical of intellectuals because they aren’t sufficiently practical. The middle class (even academia) is skeptical of intellectuals because they tend to think for themselves (sometimes) instead of accepting the orthodoxy. So intellectuals are left classless, and have a hard time finding neighborhoods where they fit in.
I consider myself an intellectual, and I do feel alienated by both working class and middle class ethics. However, for some reason I don’t really want to live in a neighborhood full of intellectuals. My dad has this favorite joke, which he used to tell about Boy Scouts, but I think applies just as well to intellectuals:
Scouts (intellectuals) are like manure, spread them out and they can do a lot of good. But gather too many in one place and they really stink!
In a modern world, it is fairly easy to find the kinds of people who think like you do and form a community around that. An in fact, there are some emerging communities based around a commitment to more intellectual-friendly value systems. For example, consider the rationalist community, which is the social home of the aforementioned Scott Alexander. From that link we find some of the driving reasons behind the formation of this community:
- Social structures that make it easy to make friends, colleagues, and perhaps romantic partners, who also care about one or more of the three focus areas (Truth seeking, Impact, and Personal Fulfillment).
- Social atmosphere that inspires and helps one to improve at one or more of the three focus areas.
- Institutions that actively pursue one of the three in a serious fashion, and that collaborate when appropriate.
- Sharing memes/culture/history. Feeling like “these are my people.”
This all makes sense to me, and in a way I consider myself a fringe member of the rationalist community (I have even gone to a rationalist meetup to see Scott Alexander in person!). But at the end of the day, I don’t think it’s healthy to arrange your social world based on an interest group, even if it’s a really cool interest like “rationality” or “Truth/Impact/Personal Fulfillment.”
A Fourth Way
So I feel like I don’t really fit neatly into the either the working class category or the middle class category, and I don’t really want immerse myself in the intellectual Class X. Then what do I do? Reject class altogether and try to live my own private life? Not exactly.
One of my first principles is that humans are social animals. Our brains are designed to construct and live within a social substrate. We can live alone, but in the presence of other humans we automatically construct social abstractions (like community, and class) and try to pinpoint our location within them. This is human nature. Why fight it?
Instead, what we need is to construct a social bubble (which I have called a micro-community or tribe) that includes a meta-class ideology. I have talked a lot elsewhere about trying to build a social bubble, so here I want to describe in a little more detail what I mean by meta-class ideology. Basically, it is a world-view that encompasses class and provides guidance for members of a community for how to engage in and navigate external social structures.
Class is a real thing. If you want to be a part of American society, you have to engage with different class-based value systems. But one thing to realize about classes is that they are essentially forms of organizing factions within nations. That is, classes exist as part of a national consciousness. And by nation I mean a super-tribe — a level of community organization that greatly exceeds the limits of our primitive community wiring.
Why is it important to recognize that class consciousness is a form of national consciousness? Because I am an advocate of trying to manually restructure our community awareness to focus on a hyper-local level. On a hyper-local level, people with priest tendencies (i.e., who strive for cooperation and egalitarianism) don’t band together with other a bunch of other priests. They engage with warriors (who strive to compete and win).
Completing the Journey
Imagine a family with two sons: one bookish son who loves education (i.e., the priest) and one extroverted son who dreams of starting his own business (the warrior). The first brother goes off to college and gets a job in a big blue city working within some big blue institution (i.e., government, university, law firm, etc.) The second brother bounces around failing at one business or another until they end up finding success in some random red state.
Because our economy thrives on division of labor, there are significant economic forces driving the two brothers apart. To build the kind of resume the first brother needs to get climb the prestige ladder (i.e., middle class ladder), he will need to go to a top notch university and surround himself with others like himself. Similarly, to make the kind of money he wants, the second brother will need to take big entrepreneurial risks along with other people willing to take such risks. He might meet some of these friends in university, but the first chance he gets he will leave the walled garden and go out looking for opportunities.
The two brothers will climb different class ladders, and rightfully so. But when they have proven themselves, the next big challenge is to come home. And when they come home, they build something together .In other words, they both need to complete the cycle of the Hero’s Journey.
So in my view, the modern Hero’s journey is a psychological descent from the safe space of a family/micro-community into the abyss of national consciousness. There we struggle and prove ourselves, but when we are reborn we don’t abandon our micro-roots and live out the rest of our lives immersed in some form of national status competition. We have to engage in some form of sacrifice, an “Atonement” that allows us to return and gives us the power to build a safe space for the next generation. The atonement represents giving up some degree of personal status in the form of money, power, or prestige (i.e., striving for status on a national scale) in order to secure a position within a non-class-based micro-community.
So the meta-class ideology, the theory of how class should fit into our consciousness, is that class ladders (both of them) are very relevant for a portion of our journey. But our true home should be built with family — i.e., with others who share some deep common bond, but have different class proclivities.
Now getting back to house hunting, what does all this mean in terms of what house we should buy? For us it means that we shouldn’t buy a house at all. We need to build something. Specifically, we need to build something that reflects our view of how we fit into society, and enables us to build the kind of safe space we want for raising our children.
