Beyond Economics

The notion of social class makes a frequent appearance in social science. So much so, in fact, that its nature often goes unchecked, as when a figure of speech is used so often it becomes almost imperceptible. The idea has its origins in the seminal writings of European intellectuals in the 19^th century such as Emil Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber. They looked over their period and the ones that came before and saw a marked distinction between groups of people. Throughout history, they noticed, there were the privileged autocrats and the subordinate chains of retainers, servants, merchants, common folk, and slaves. Social roles were distributed unfairly, with certain institutions sprouting up that catered to the will of the powerful, and the poor downcast and spurned into crushing labor. For some reason this pattern was sharply pronounced, no matter what society they explored. Great but controversial theorists like Karl Marx went a step further than his contemporaries than just acknowledging this strange quirk in history. He asserted class was the nearly platonic absolute unit of historical development. To him, universal history was the history of universal class struggles; history was the molten stage on which these tectonic plates raged and crashed as they battled over the means of production.

The discontinuity in the idea of class, the thing that needs to be pointed out and rectified, is the same discontinuity that biological taxonomy suffers from.  It is what logicians call the fallacy of drawing a line or false concreteness. The bottommost unit of taxonomy is the species, a population of organisms that interbreeds to yield fertile offspring. However sound this definition seems, no matter how water tight it is, we have no basis for believing something like a species “exists” outside of our arbitrary classification. The more accurate description of the biosphere would more likely communicate the fact that all species are not firm categories but intermediary phases that are in the process of becoming but are never being; since evolution is thought to be constant with time but with a varying rate, species are constantly reshaping into some new form and never static. Our definition of species (and social class) is ailed by false concreteness; our language creates a solid category simply out of smoke and imagination. The best description of the biosphere would show that species are fluid and unfixed players in a larger undifferentiated scheme of genes and the bodily vehicles they use to embark copies of themselves forward in time.

This same trouble with false concreteness flares up in the definition of social class, if not more so. At what point exactly does a lower class family join the ranks of the middle class? At say, $X yearly income? What if their income is $X-1? Does the deficiency of one dollar instantly shift their class identity a whole degree? This is splitting hairs, but still, sociologists maintain and no sane person denies that there is a stark contrast between someone who earns $1 a week and someone who earns half a million in an equal space of time, so this leap in material condition must happen somewhere. The problem is that the mind wishes to isolate things, make them discrete, and label them as eternal categories. This is called essentialism and it curses most theoretical work.  We live in a world of continuum and liquid impermanence, so our categories are always going to be blurry and statistical at best.

In what way can a class be fairly treated as a homogenous unit, with a shared aggregate psychology? Marxist theorists and even more staid sociologists use terms like “class consciousness”, “class interest” and “class divisions” and with the whole unsaid metaphor being that human groups form blocky fusions that resonate the same intentions, motives, thoughts, and perspectives. I cannot however see how consciousness, if we are to use the word meaningfully, can be wedded to anything except an individual brain. Groups of people to not interlock to form a super-consciousness. Information is always funneled and stop-gapped at the individual brain which never melds into the minds of others to form an overmind. Nor are there literal “dividing lines” (talk about the fallacy of drawing a line!) that split groups of people as rigidly as the inside and outside of a circle in Euclidian geometry.

This kind of “social taxonomy” is not without its merits. Humans determine factuality by seeing how a proposition corresponds one-to-one with the world of the senses. That’s why I can confidently say, “there is no pink elephant in my room” and know it with the certitude of daylight that it is a fact. Sociologists refer to class by objective criteria like material conditions and financial status, and from a purely positivist frame of view, nothing better could be done with the idea without inventing false categories.

To dive into the heart of the human tendency to divvy things into categories, consider set theory, an area in mathematics.  Set theory is relatively straightforward. A class of objects is declared to be in a shared domain, due to the fact of them having a common property. For instance, a mathematician might call the set of all prime numbers G. This giant, infinite set is composed out of innumerable limbs, called “elements”, which stitch together a trove of sub-properties that divide them into further sets. {2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 19} are the first seven elements of set G.  {(3, 5) (11, 13)…} are members of a subset of all prime numbers, namely: the set of prime numbers that are exactly two units distant from each other, and so on.

Whether or not we are versed in set theory proper, human thought takes its logic to heart. Psychologically, each human being is an expert “lumper”, a master stereotyper, and a finessed “folk taxonomist”. The cardinal rule of mental life seems to be stuff things into categories. This is why we differentiate between a drinking cup and a person, even though they are both composed of essentially the same material. As it turns out, language is gorged with the tools for this job. Notice how we never category a dog as anything but a “dog” (or its synonyms). This seemingly trivial fact belies the central article of human category building, which is the fountainhead of our definitions of social class. The individual, if he is member of a certain set, be it “black, white, Puerto Rican, ruler, peasant”, is disinherited from his uniqueness and reduced to a common denominator. That denominator is annotated with a stereotypical definition and description (hence, a dog is something that barks, licks itself, likes bones, pees on the carpet, and is lovable), which holds sway over all that we consider to be in that category. This is how the mind organizes the vast world of living and non-living things into a simplified brochure of mental files.

There can be no doubt that his act of simplification enters in our definitions and even our cognition of class much to the detriment of our knowledge. But the whole concept of categorization destructs if you are too exacting about what detail tie two elements together into a pair. If we were to impregnate our definitions of social class too over-sensitively, with an eye for the endless minutia that differentiates people, we would find we would have 6.7 billion distinct and irreducible social classes.

Instead of bumping up with this overly literal take on classification, social scientists rightly base their class structures on objective criteria like income and employment status. Still, this highly positivist style of ordering things supplies data but no explanation, which is the jewel science tries to unearth. If one wishes to make claims about group psychology or group behavior, one is now set before this table of classes and it looks the most inviting point of entry to start basing claims. But here one treads into beclouded waters. I may crave the satisfying ring of an empirical assertion, but as soon as I speak of “class-interests” with certitude and precision I risk defocusing all the empirical accuracy I sought to engender by my claims. Before all else, in order for a claim to hold the dignified conditional of being empirically reinforced, it must by tautological necessity be inspired by direct sensory experience. It is not humanly possible to have the sufficient information needed to be able to declare a class-wide correspondence of psychological states; therefore any claim on class-interests or anything of the same ilk is unempirical. To lay claim to knowledge of class-interests is tantamount to laying claim to knowledge of the the individual psychological states of hundreds or thousands of people, a feat of unimaginable complexity if taken literally.

So where are we to go from this? If our notions of class are deficient but useful in helping us to organize the chaos of the world, we should retain our notions of class—but with revisions.  One step to take is what we may call the principle of self-segregation.  Human groups exhibit a constant tendency to sort themselves into mutually exclusive communities. Humans proudly distinguish themselves into special groups (think about the USA! USA! USA! chants at the Olympics), and they also damn others into shameful groups. The historical norm appears to be for human groups to distrust one another. Prejudice is common and perhaps even natural. These limits must reflect a neurological fact about how the brain is biologically and socially adapted.  The mind seems prepared to learn a variety of analogs at birth which initiate the child into a tribe. This emphasis on locality is stereotyped and culturally static, else we would find that children would learn to be citizens of the earth and not the local community, tribe, or nation.

It is astonishing how resilient these self-assembled boundaries are, and how intellectualized they can become. Religion is a hyphenated example of this case. In many societies, people accord higher respect to their coreligionists. And if they aren’t openly waging oppression against them, they typically derogate worshipers of other faiths. In some societies tolerance is practiced, but always with an air of tension and a hushed sense of dissonance and unease.  Like a tray of polarized Iron atoms, you can randomly distribute a group of coreligionists and it will only be a short while before they shuffle into some sort of assembly.

A social class might be another case where groups of people segregate automatically by the mutually observed conditions of the social system. A common game in history is for the ruling classes to splatter each other’s blood over some contested element, be it a crown or a title. The stratum of society naturally and without external provocation interacts within its own network in a stereotyped way, by dueling it out over claims to status. The characters involved recognize each other by the costumes, that is, the properties and assets of the rivals. This ability to recognize each other is invitation to begin to form a specialized social network, which we would end up calling “class-consciousness” and like terms.

Once a system of people has isolated itself through limiting and prioritizing its communications to fit that group, some process must withhold any disintegration or social drift within it. Those strata that have the means construct institutional structures which retain or grow their holdings (Adam Smith: “the military exists solely to protect the propertied classes from the poor”). The oppressed often find themselves victims of these instruments of containment, as when the Jews of medieval Spain were forced into isolation and stripped of land and entitlements, or when the residents of Gaza find they are penned like livestock by a violent foe. Internally, the mind is kindling with cognitive processes that instruct and help to author these acts. The brain seems able to assort the world into friend and stranger, and no matter how permeable the borderline between the dividers it still has some firm definition.

Race, ethnicity, sexual identity, religion, and even gender and sports fandom are all viable candidates for the principle of self-segregation.  We should note that there are passive and active forms of self-segregation. Since often the victims of segregation do not desire to be excluded and are forced to revert to a self-contained communal lifestyle. In this case the segregation is active, because there is intentional exclusion going on. In a passive state, the groups drift naturally into seclusion, as is the case with the Amish and many isolated tribes.

It does not overburden the imagination to see who self-segregation complicates human affairs. If the brain is engineered to assign people into classifications based on status, position, gender, race, etc– and to oppose the alien– conflicts are unavoidable. If the theory of self-segregation is true, strata that attempt to migrate beyond their artificial encirclement will receive the hostility of the greater society. Former slaves in post-civil war America led lives of extreme stress and harassment because they were striving to a life outside the institution of slavery, which was the normal condition in the minds of most southern whites. Many more examples could be cited for this case, but for the purposes of this sketch, I will leave the idea where it stands.