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Business English: Stuck in the Muddle
People's social status is now determined by merit rather than place and the benchmark of merit is largely how much money you make.Britain's notorious class system is in serious need of an overhaul. With the decline of the aristocracy, almost the only people who could rightly be described as upper class any more are the Queen and her immediate family. With the decline of the country's industrial base, the working class, traditionally made up of manual labourers paid by the hour, has drastically shrunk. As deputy prime minister John Prescott remarked a few years back, we are all middle class now.
Except, of course, we are not. The middle class, too, is an endangered species. In its place, we have what the Future Foundation, a London-based forecasting group, recently dubbed the "muddle" class: a vast, heterogeneous mass comprising people of all backgrounds, incomes and occupations, many of them very confused about what class they belong to or whether they belong to any at all.
This is not to say that the class system has collapsed. It has simply been redefined. People's social status is now determined by merit rather than place and the benchmark of merit is largely how much money you make. So the new upper class is the plutocratic elite of executives, entrepreneurs, financiers and celebrities whose merits are most munificently rewarded by the prevailing political and economic conditions. The new lower class is the underclass made up of those who, whether by misfortune of nature or nurture, are without the necessary merits and are thus doomed to failure and alienation. The new middle class is everyone in between.
If it sounds odd to describe the middle class as endangered when it has grown so large, the reason is that I am talking about the old middle class, not the new one. Before it was absorbed into the "muddle", the middle class had an identity as clearly defined as that of the working class or the aristocracy. Middle-class people owned their own homes, had a small number of well brought up children and were possessed of a near-fanatical belief in education and the importance of passing exams. Middle-class men had secure, white-collar jobs as bank managers, businessmen or solicitors while their wives spent their days representing the family in the local community by attending tea parties, charitable events and fetes. Middle-class respectability and status were maintained through strict observance of the rules on decorum, specifically those pertaining to accent, appearance, manners, etiquette, morality and self-restraint.
Unfortunately, it was no coincidence that the phrase "middle class" was so often conjoined with the word "snob". There was little point in submitting yourself to the stifling conformity of the middle-class lifestyle unless it gave you a feeling of superiority over everyone else, whether the sprinkling of degenerate toffs above or the massed ranks of the working class below. But, in the new meritocracy, the old middle class has been forced down the social scale by the arrival of the plutocratric elite. Now just part of the inchoate "muddle", the middle class are no longer superior but just part of the masses themselves, with no one to look down on but the poverty-stricken and socially excluded.
It is this that explains the ear-splitting whine now emanating from the old middle class. Axiomatic to its belief system was the idea of advancement - the expectation that each succeeding generation would improve its social and economic status or, at least, maintain it. While the population as a whole grows better off, for the old middle class it seems that everything just gets worse - an accurate perception in many ways, this being a symptom of its own relative decline.
Think of it. A century ago, the middle classes were the wealthy elite, living in large houses in the best parts of town. The male head of household's income would be sufficient to provide financial security for the family, supporting not only a non-working wife and the children but also a small entourage of servants.
Even within living memory, the middle classes drove expensive cars on uncongested roads, lived in nice houses on leafy streets and sent their children to the best schools and universities. They had a career that promised promotion, a salary that rose with age and a pension that guaranteed a comfortable retirement.
Now, the plutocrats are the ones enjoying privileged access to the good life while the old middle classes have been thrust into competition for road space, housing and school places with the increasingly affluent masses. Spouses have to go out to work to help pay off the mortgage, job security has vanished, the pension is in jeopardy and many parents see their children slipping down the economic and social ladder rather than climbing it.
Ah well. The middle class had a good run - about two centuries, by most reckoning. For much of that time, it even came to be seen as the backbone of the nation. But classes come and classes go. There were few tears when the aristocracy and the working class met their doom and I doubt there will be many when the middle class goes the same way, unless it is by the middle classes themselves.
Boo hoo.
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FTD.de, 23.04.2007
© 2007 Financial Times Deutschland,
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