Sep 8, 2022·edited Sep 8, 2022Liked by Leighton Woodhouse
I find this facinating, but also wonder if the new cultural cache is backfiring. The old class markers had the advantage of bestowing those who held them with traits that may be somewhat neurotic, but ultimately advantageous. The dogged pursuit of higher education, fitness and food obsessions, the ability to track minor social etiquette queues all worked well in advancing one in career or helping one to marry well or both. So being a Cross-Fit, paleo, PhD who is obsessed with 4am wake ups, recycling and driving a Tesla may make you an annoying virtue signaler, it also probably makes you an effective Creative Director or owner of a yoga studio.
The new ettiquette seems to be backfiring. The obsession with equality of outcome over equality of opportunity destroys hard won social gains for some, while benefiting others, causing infighting and disharmony. The increasing loss of any sexual norms (they are oppressive!) is spiraling into increasing hookup culture, medicalization of children under the guise of "gender affirming care" and the further disintigration of marriage and family, an area that was holding strong for the upper classes while the working class has been losing ground for decades. (aka Douglass Murray's "Coming Apart") Concern for the environment has turned into Doomsday Nihlism and is shutting down investment in promising technological solutions like desalinaztion or nuclear power. The fetishization of mental illness has led us down a path of elevating serious disorders into badges of honor. Victimhood over achievement, weakness over strength.
None of this makes you a better member of the upper class. These new cultural signifiers are disintigrating the very markers of success they are supposed to be signaling.
As an anecdotal add-on to my theory, I admit to being a bit of a foodie and also have celiac so I occationally hop into high end specialty markets like Whole Foods or Fresh Market for items I can't find in regular grocery stores. The clientele there was the epitome of the MPC and while there were often some annoying people, they were generally the Beautiful People(tm). Thin, above average attractiveness, dressed in expensive clothes, hair perfectly done, manicured nails... they looked great in yoga pants! Just imagine the exact opposite of People of Walmart.
In the past few years I have noticed.. a change. More disheveled apperances. People whose gender I couldn't really guess. Skin marked with scabs, chipped nails, more obesity. They were still paying $4 for an heirloom tomato and piling into Lexus and Teslas in the parking lot, so I don't think this was a different class of people, just that the class of people had changed. I don't think it's just me. I mentioned this to my husband and he said I was imagining it, but then we stopped into a local high end neighborhood Whole Foods for some gluten free tortila wraps on our way home from his wealthy co-workers BBQ party one evening and he was looking around the store all wide eyed. Then in car said "My bad. WTF!"
Another interesting piece, and I hope you delve more into this. My son, who has just graduated from Stanford with a humanities degree, said that unless you're doing a STEM degree, the entire purpose of the four years was to teach the students proper etiquette you'll need as a member of the managerial class, and that individual subject matter was very much secondary.
Ironic it is that you release this perceptive essay on the day the death of Elizabeth II passes. I felt a real twinge as I watched the BBC report on the announcement from Windsor Castle. The Queen was a dignified and notable personage. She lived her life in support of an institution that has value, even as it fades in power. She was a living anachronism, the embodiment of a whole mess of cultural capital. So your essay, Leighton Woodhouse, made a good deal of sense on the day she was called beyond. It also gave me a couple of new social scientists to study. So thanks.
Solid: clear thinking as usual. I always sense forward motion with this author, practical and incisive rather than the silly equivocation of other substack authors.
Loved this piece. The over arching dynamic seems to be mimicry, with those at the top of the pile setting the behaviour norms that everyone who wants to be like them must follow
If only the party girls, wine moms and pajama boys ever even had an understanding of how absolutely brutal and violent history was up until a mere couple hundred years ago and how all of those possibilities really do still linger in the background of civilization. One unfortunatly timed sun spot away and we would soon get to see what everyone is really made of, regardless of wealth or status. Glimpses of human atrocities we have only read about in wars would quickly become the norm.
I realize Nietzsche hit it first, but there's nothing I find more endlessly fascinating than this thing humans call Morality.
I know the common conception is "it's just about being kind and not a gross garbage person" etc but morality is so much more: this sort of invisible electric fence that societies erect to delineate their borders, establish in group/out group, a way to preen and a way to destroy our enemies (often at the same time), a mask to wear in public, an invisible transmitter our tribes have installed in our brains to remind us of what's proper and what's not, and so much more.
Morality is just another thing humans have invented to constantly monitor, gossip about, police and compete with each other (most esp in our time of moral entrepreneurs). It is a form of social control, often necessary, yet like most beliefs, best to be worn as loosely and lightly as possible.
"As an adult in human society, you can’t go around screaming at people to give you what you want and throwing violent temper tantrums when they don’t comply. You’ll end up, at best, poor and lonely, and more likely, in prison."
One thing I find interesting about online culture is that one might have expected one's ability to write properly might have been an important status marker in a textual medium, but instead it's regarded as elitist, and therefore a demerit, to care about correct spelling or grammar. I think this may be explained by the tech-industry culture that created the internet and constituted its early population in the pre-Web days. The old clichés about the socially-awkward nerd with amazing coding skills did have some truth to them. These people, by and large (there were exceptions, of course), were not well-educated outside of computer science and math; many of them neither had, nor valued, writing skills, and resented any indication that anyone thought less of them for that. It also didn't help that some people would use their superior language skills to score points ("You can't even spell what you're talking about, so obviously your ideas aren't worthy of consideration" -- a logically-deficient but socially-powerful rebuttal to almost anything). The result is a triumph of know-nothings, online communities dominated by whoever can shout loudest, regardless of whether they're saying anything that makes any sense (which most of the audience can't tell anyway).
Well, as a journalist you know you shouldn't believe everything you read without corroborating evidence, and it's always been sport to slander one's opponents. So I'd like to know a little more about that knight and who was chronicling his crimes for posterity.
And surely in every hunter-gatherer society there was a hierarchy, based on the basics of family, that children learned to be mindful of.
Every single thing we do is within the framework of power, who has it, keeps it, uses it to dole out patronage. The more complex your society grows, the more people you've got to worry about offending. Manners are absolutely basic survival.
I find this facinating, but also wonder if the new cultural cache is backfiring. The old class markers had the advantage of bestowing those who held them with traits that may be somewhat neurotic, but ultimately advantageous. The dogged pursuit of higher education, fitness and food obsessions, the ability to track minor social etiquette queues all worked well in advancing one in career or helping one to marry well or both. So being a Cross-Fit, paleo, PhD who is obsessed with 4am wake ups, recycling and driving a Tesla may make you an annoying virtue signaler, it also probably makes you an effective Creative Director or owner of a yoga studio.
The new ettiquette seems to be backfiring. The obsession with equality of outcome over equality of opportunity destroys hard won social gains for some, while benefiting others, causing infighting and disharmony. The increasing loss of any sexual norms (they are oppressive!) is spiraling into increasing hookup culture, medicalization of children under the guise of "gender affirming care" and the further disintigration of marriage and family, an area that was holding strong for the upper classes while the working class has been losing ground for decades. (aka Douglass Murray's "Coming Apart") Concern for the environment has turned into Doomsday Nihlism and is shutting down investment in promising technological solutions like desalinaztion or nuclear power. The fetishization of mental illness has led us down a path of elevating serious disorders into badges of honor. Victimhood over achievement, weakness over strength.
None of this makes you a better member of the upper class. These new cultural signifiers are disintigrating the very markers of success they are supposed to be signaling.
As an anecdotal add-on to my theory, I admit to being a bit of a foodie and also have celiac so I occationally hop into high end specialty markets like Whole Foods or Fresh Market for items I can't find in regular grocery stores. The clientele there was the epitome of the MPC and while there were often some annoying people, they were generally the Beautiful People(tm). Thin, above average attractiveness, dressed in expensive clothes, hair perfectly done, manicured nails... they looked great in yoga pants! Just imagine the exact opposite of People of Walmart.
In the past few years I have noticed.. a change. More disheveled apperances. People whose gender I couldn't really guess. Skin marked with scabs, chipped nails, more obesity. They were still paying $4 for an heirloom tomato and piling into Lexus and Teslas in the parking lot, so I don't think this was a different class of people, just that the class of people had changed. I don't think it's just me. I mentioned this to my husband and he said I was imagining it, but then we stopped into a local high end neighborhood Whole Foods for some gluten free tortila wraps on our way home from his wealthy co-workers BBQ party one evening and he was looking around the store all wide eyed. Then in car said "My bad. WTF!"
Anyway, just a theory. Thanks for the article.
Another interesting piece, and I hope you delve more into this. My son, who has just graduated from Stanford with a humanities degree, said that unless you're doing a STEM degree, the entire purpose of the four years was to teach the students proper etiquette you'll need as a member of the managerial class, and that individual subject matter was very much secondary.
Ironic it is that you release this perceptive essay on the day the death of Elizabeth II passes. I felt a real twinge as I watched the BBC report on the announcement from Windsor Castle. The Queen was a dignified and notable personage. She lived her life in support of an institution that has value, even as it fades in power. She was a living anachronism, the embodiment of a whole mess of cultural capital. So your essay, Leighton Woodhouse, made a good deal of sense on the day she was called beyond. It also gave me a couple of new social scientists to study. So thanks.
Solid: clear thinking as usual. I always sense forward motion with this author, practical and incisive rather than the silly equivocation of other substack authors.
Loved this piece. The over arching dynamic seems to be mimicry, with those at the top of the pile setting the behaviour norms that everyone who wants to be like them must follow
Presumably you mean “courtiers of Elizabeth I”. One doesn’t usually think of the Virgin Queen maintaining a harem.
If only the party girls, wine moms and pajama boys ever even had an understanding of how absolutely brutal and violent history was up until a mere couple hundred years ago and how all of those possibilities really do still linger in the background of civilization. One unfortunatly timed sun spot away and we would soon get to see what everyone is really made of, regardless of wealth or status. Glimpses of human atrocities we have only read about in wars would quickly become the norm.
Excellent as always!
I realize Nietzsche hit it first, but there's nothing I find more endlessly fascinating than this thing humans call Morality.
I know the common conception is "it's just about being kind and not a gross garbage person" etc but morality is so much more: this sort of invisible electric fence that societies erect to delineate their borders, establish in group/out group, a way to preen and a way to destroy our enemies (often at the same time), a mask to wear in public, an invisible transmitter our tribes have installed in our brains to remind us of what's proper and what's not, and so much more.
Morality is just another thing humans have invented to constantly monitor, gossip about, police and compete with each other (most esp in our time of moral entrepreneurs). It is a form of social control, often necessary, yet like most beliefs, best to be worn as loosely and lightly as possible.
"As an adult in human society, you can’t go around screaming at people to give you what you want and throwing violent temper tantrums when they don’t comply. You’ll end up, at best, poor and lonely, and more likely, in prison."
Or, you could just end up as dedicated Democrat.
One thing I find interesting about online culture is that one might have expected one's ability to write properly might have been an important status marker in a textual medium, but instead it's regarded as elitist, and therefore a demerit, to care about correct spelling or grammar. I think this may be explained by the tech-industry culture that created the internet and constituted its early population in the pre-Web days. The old clichés about the socially-awkward nerd with amazing coding skills did have some truth to them. These people, by and large (there were exceptions, of course), were not well-educated outside of computer science and math; many of them neither had, nor valued, writing skills, and resented any indication that anyone thought less of them for that. It also didn't help that some people would use their superior language skills to score points ("You can't even spell what you're talking about, so obviously your ideas aren't worthy of consideration" -- a logically-deficient but socially-powerful rebuttal to almost anything). The result is a triumph of know-nothings, online communities dominated by whoever can shout loudest, regardless of whether they're saying anything that makes any sense (which most of the audience can't tell anyway).
Well, as a journalist you know you shouldn't believe everything you read without corroborating evidence, and it's always been sport to slander one's opponents. So I'd like to know a little more about that knight and who was chronicling his crimes for posterity.
And surely in every hunter-gatherer society there was a hierarchy, based on the basics of family, that children learned to be mindful of.
Every single thing we do is within the framework of power, who has it, keeps it, uses it to dole out patronage. The more complex your society grows, the more people you've got to worry about offending. Manners are absolutely basic survival.