The omnivorous theory is the main thesis of Shamus Khan in this book “Privilege”. It’s not just about liking/enjoying a large spectrum of low/high culture, but being able to act comfortably and relaxed along the gamut. E.g. “eating taco bell after watching the met opera”
Had a mother from a nice mid-family (still do in a way) who was obsessed with being part of high society, so she married my father whose family was ye olde city builder, engineer-style. She went to the opera but dad hated it (she would sniff slightly at Puccini and suggest Wagner).
Point is, with all her efforts at raising cultured children, all of us ended up severely struggling with the meaninglessness of existence and have avoided the culture trap.
Rather than force culture upon our children we moved to a European country which still has their culture mostly intact. It's an extraordinary contrast to the english-speaking countries. I just have them reading a lot and following innate talents.
And... fwiw there are a few computer-music guys who are LEGENDS in the headphones.
This hypothesis of classism would appear to extend to the far-left "woke" and far-right "MAGA" classes of ideological identities.
Ideology has arguably always been a dimension of class, but what seems to be distinctive in our current political-classist sorting is that the presumably high-class "woke-sim" has effectively shut down debate over the power of their ideas, replacing debate with ideological certainty that "the system" is far more powerful than any specific evidence that might be brought to bare.
Whereas the MAGA right-wingers are more organized around a proletariat-class rebelling against this high-political-class argument that "system" is rigged, and therefore direct their ideological fervor exclusively on the anecdotes and exceptions that disprove the rule.
"Thus, in the dominant class, the proportion who declare that a sunset can make a beautiful photo is greatest at the lowest educational level, declines at intermediate levels […] and grows strongly again among those who have completed several years of higher education and who tend to consider that anything is suitable for beautiful photography."
thanks for writing this post. i picked up one of bourdeiu's books during the one semester i spent at harvard out of feeling very inept at keeping up with the kinds of things people were into and talking about. i could never actually get myself to read it and was really happy to see this post :)
it seems impossible to avoid getting drawn into at least one of these cultural signaling games because we're all embedded (consciously or not) into some social construct that's not entirely under our control (otherwise it just gets really, really lonely). i think i've been through several of these and have noticed a couple things:
1. there tends to be some haterade for the cuture/class just adjacent to you but "lower". its the group you tend to have more exposure to and try to distinguish yourself from. i noticed this working in int'l development where there were these fairly high class people trying to connect to lower class folks on high class culture stuff. the lower class folks were mostly just interested in middle class stuff (wwf, mma, rick ross) but often felt some weird pressure to speak to other things like charles dickens, philsophy and whatever else. i think upper class people end up having some fascination for lower class culture (they can't access) and some distaste for middle class culture which is more or less what the lower class people strive towards. middle class love the upper class and often have a fair bit of distaste for the lower. this is all captured in the stuff they are into.
2. the infinite level of nuance and/or taste diversity in the upper classes can suffer from some serious diminishing returns and start to feel pretty arbitrary. different for the sake of being different. after going through several of these phases and still feeling empty inside it was sort of a relief for me to re-embrace pragmatic/practical needs (food/water/shelter). obviously those were not constraints i faced but turned towards addressing those constraints for others.
Cool. Kind of want to read more about this myself.
Recently, while talking about some mundane chores with my wife, I had a rare moment of clarity and realized that a whole bundle of my moral intuitions around hard work, "eating everything you're served", "acts of service", etc. are all suspiciously well-tailored to functioning well with a low middle class income, which I grew up in. It even strikes me that a lot of this framework holds legacy features that likely come from the much poorer class of my grandparents.
Thanks for tying that insight into a much broader context.
Man whenever I see reviews of these older critiques on class vis a vis "taste" I always feel insane that nobody ever seems to think "people with more money can do more things and have more options and so will naturally have different preferences, guy with 40 choices is gonna have different preferences from guy with 5 choices" and was ready to despair again here until we got to the omnivore part which at least gets most of the way there.
I recently told my wife that we need to be able to enjoy middlebrow culture, food, and so on. I can't quite recall how I arrived at that conclusion. I may just be trying to signal more culture omnivore upper class status, or I may be instinctively recoiling from any suggestion that I have to act a certain way. I think it's the latter, but once you get into the funhouse of mirrors, it's hard to tell!
The whole thing is pretty confounded by the fact that once you get into something, it tends to become interesting. Even baseball (I hear).
I don't think you are right about 'Black English' being associated with the working class in the US--Black English is associated with some segments of the Black population, and with a certain fraction of upperclass whites who introduce snippets of it into their normal upperclass speech, because they think it is cool. I don't think it is used by the working class at all, except ironically-- and that the working class would consider actual use of it as an indication of socially undesirability.
The omnivorous theory is the main thesis of Shamus Khan in this book “Privilege”. It’s not just about liking/enjoying a large spectrum of low/high culture, but being able to act comfortably and relaxed along the gamut. E.g. “eating taco bell after watching the met opera”
Somewhat unrelated, but whenever I hear about signaling and counter-signaling I am reminded of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism
Had a mother from a nice mid-family (still do in a way) who was obsessed with being part of high society, so she married my father whose family was ye olde city builder, engineer-style. She went to the opera but dad hated it (she would sniff slightly at Puccini and suggest Wagner).
Point is, with all her efforts at raising cultured children, all of us ended up severely struggling with the meaninglessness of existence and have avoided the culture trap.
Rather than force culture upon our children we moved to a European country which still has their culture mostly intact. It's an extraordinary contrast to the english-speaking countries. I just have them reading a lot and following innate talents.
And... fwiw there are a few computer-music guys who are LEGENDS in the headphones.
>I’ll just admit—to me, the everyone-is-oppressed-by-everyone-else discourse sometimes seems a bit unhinged.
This is the point I'd most like to explore more. Especially straight white men.
https://www.mattball.org/2023/04/the-male-victimhood-complex.html
This hypothesis of classism would appear to extend to the far-left "woke" and far-right "MAGA" classes of ideological identities.
Ideology has arguably always been a dimension of class, but what seems to be distinctive in our current political-classist sorting is that the presumably high-class "woke-sim" has effectively shut down debate over the power of their ideas, replacing debate with ideological certainty that "the system" is far more powerful than any specific evidence that might be brought to bare.
Whereas the MAGA right-wingers are more organized around a proletariat-class rebelling against this high-political-class argument that "system" is rigged, and therefore direct their ideological fervor exclusively on the anecdotes and exceptions that disprove the rule.
This quite enjoyable documentary comes to mind
https://youtu.be/TCI7KvYi1m0?si=5dsGDWju0l9CmKiX
Your comics are beautiful by the way!
"Thus, in the dominant class, the proportion who declare that a sunset can make a beautiful photo is greatest at the lowest educational level, declines at intermediate levels […] and grows strongly again among those who have completed several years of higher education and who tend to consider that anything is suitable for beautiful photography."
In short: the midwit meme rules supreme.
I used to just think I had eclectic tastes. But now I learn that that I'm actually an upper class cultural omnivore. Cool!
Now that I realize I'm a member of the upper class, what do I get?
thanks for writing this post. i picked up one of bourdeiu's books during the one semester i spent at harvard out of feeling very inept at keeping up with the kinds of things people were into and talking about. i could never actually get myself to read it and was really happy to see this post :)
it seems impossible to avoid getting drawn into at least one of these cultural signaling games because we're all embedded (consciously or not) into some social construct that's not entirely under our control (otherwise it just gets really, really lonely). i think i've been through several of these and have noticed a couple things:
1. there tends to be some haterade for the cuture/class just adjacent to you but "lower". its the group you tend to have more exposure to and try to distinguish yourself from. i noticed this working in int'l development where there were these fairly high class people trying to connect to lower class folks on high class culture stuff. the lower class folks were mostly just interested in middle class stuff (wwf, mma, rick ross) but often felt some weird pressure to speak to other things like charles dickens, philsophy and whatever else. i think upper class people end up having some fascination for lower class culture (they can't access) and some distaste for middle class culture which is more or less what the lower class people strive towards. middle class love the upper class and often have a fair bit of distaste for the lower. this is all captured in the stuff they are into.
2. the infinite level of nuance and/or taste diversity in the upper classes can suffer from some serious diminishing returns and start to feel pretty arbitrary. different for the sake of being different. after going through several of these phases and still feeling empty inside it was sort of a relief for me to re-embrace pragmatic/practical needs (food/water/shelter). obviously those were not constraints i faced but turned towards addressing those constraints for others.
Cool. Kind of want to read more about this myself.
Recently, while talking about some mundane chores with my wife, I had a rare moment of clarity and realized that a whole bundle of my moral intuitions around hard work, "eating everything you're served", "acts of service", etc. are all suspiciously well-tailored to functioning well with a low middle class income, which I grew up in. It even strikes me that a lot of this framework holds legacy features that likely come from the much poorer class of my grandparents.
Thanks for tying that insight into a much broader context.
Man whenever I see reviews of these older critiques on class vis a vis "taste" I always feel insane that nobody ever seems to think "people with more money can do more things and have more options and so will naturally have different preferences, guy with 40 choices is gonna have different preferences from guy with 5 choices" and was ready to despair again here until we got to the omnivore part which at least gets most of the way there.
I recently told my wife that we need to be able to enjoy middlebrow culture, food, and so on. I can't quite recall how I arrived at that conclusion. I may just be trying to signal more culture omnivore upper class status, or I may be instinctively recoiling from any suggestion that I have to act a certain way. I think it's the latter, but once you get into the funhouse of mirrors, it's hard to tell!
The whole thing is pretty confounded by the fact that once you get into something, it tends to become interesting. Even baseball (I hear).
I thought there would be some mention of the empirical law of double jeopardy after reading “Unlike people who buy stuff based on marketing” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_jeopardy_(marketing)#:~:text=Double%20jeopardy%20is%20an%20empirical,and%20also%20lower%20brand%20loyalty.
I don't think you are right about 'Black English' being associated with the working class in the US--Black English is associated with some segments of the Black population, and with a certain fraction of upperclass whites who introduce snippets of it into their normal upperclass speech, because they think it is cool. I don't think it is used by the working class at all, except ironically-- and that the working class would consider actual use of it as an indication of socially undesirability.