While I wait to board, the gatekeepers announce priorities for seating: “We welcome our privileged Platinum class to board now.” Later, “We now accept our Gold class passengers to board.” After running down a long list of precious metal classes, I, along with the remaining schmucks jostle for position and scramble to find an overhead space for our tattered luggage so the plane may take-off. In the process of finding our seats, we must walk passed the well-fed first class passengers already sipping cocktails and reading their Wall Street Journals.
Every time I board a plane, I think about class strata, all those socioeconomic factors that separate us. Too, a similar thought strikes me when I attend a baseball game and look to the luxury sky boxes where privileged people sip microbrews behind tinted glass. Then, on the way home, I poke along in traffic while luxury cars zip past in Lexus Lanes (toll lanes that relieve congestion for a metered price).
Certainly, money tops the list of who comes first and who gets the best treatment, but wealth is just one of several defining factors that separate people according to status. Military, clergy, academicians, and most organizations have a pecking order. Like ant colonies, society assigns stratification to its members. Even among ascetic religious orders, a hierarchy exists. Heck, I imagine even homeless people have a hierarchy, one that assigns who gets the most comfortable spot under the bridge.
Hereditary rank, according to our founding fathers, should not exist, but, of course, it does in recognizable degrees. Should we be able to look anyone in the eye and conclude, “We are all equal”? Our experiment in democracy starts with the premise that one person is as good as another vis-à-vis rights, free speech, and legal pursuits. But we know, yes, we all know, that education, money, power, gender, and race are factors in who gets to sit in the front row.
This brings to mind a British academic I met in London years ago. She lectured in one of the classes I taught there for rich college kids from America. After her brilliant lecture on the timeline of kings and queens (all done in a ninety-minute fast-talking recap), she and I retired for ale at the corner pub. She was in a quarrelsome mood because one of the students had asked her if a Roman Catholic could ever become the titular monarch of the realm. Her reply was fiery, her face flaming at the thought of a papist wearing the crown. She had said in an emphatic whisper that sounded like a shout, “NEVER!” So at the pub she chided me for not preparing my students with the necessary background of England and for not explaining the time-honored system of royal succession. Then she carped about what was really bugging her about Americans in general.
“The trouble with you Yanks is that you think you can be whatever you choose to be,” she began, “and of course you cannot.”
“Well,” I said.
“In this country we know our place in society, and we are happy to avoid the struggle to be something that we are not. We accept the station in which we find ourselves.”
“Well—”
“Moreover, you Yanks apparently think that you can elbow your way to the front of the line just by cheating and killing those in front of you.” She was getting hot. “To be boorish, gluttonous bullies, that is what your social system teaches. You talk too loudly and act as if you figured something out that we in this culture rejected centuries ago.”
In defense of the American way, I think I pointed out that England was a sexist, bigoted society beyond imagination, and that its colonial past and hegemonic behavior enslaved millions of people. I went on the say that America learned how to play the bully part from the nose-in-the-air British. While coursing across the village green, I think I said, the blue bloods took better care of their dogs than they did of the peasants cast into the poorhouses. I probably said much more, but I have forgotten how we came to a truce and ordered another round of drinks.
So how far have we come in levelling those disparities that divide the peoples of the world? Language, diet, customs, religion, money, race, and gender (not to mention dozens of other factors) all score demarcation lines among us. We may be able to ameliorate the inequalities for many of those divisive factors, say race and gender for instance. But wealth and power influences may be too much for civilization (is civilization is the proper term?) to bear. Consider this disturbing conclusion from the Huffington Post:
Using research from Credit Suisse and Forbes' annual billionaires list, the anti-poverty charity was able to determine that the richest 1 percent of the world's population currently controls 48 percent of the world's total wealth.
If trends continue, Oxfam predicts that the most affluent will possess more wealth than the remaining 99 percent by 2016, The New York Times reported. (Walker)
Because selfishness begets poverty, and because too many of us are downright selfish, economic classes appear to be those that will always divide people. No matter what.
How much unbalanced weight can this weary world tolerate? That is not a rhetorical question. Place 100 starving dogs in a fenced yard and give all the kibbles to one pampered pup. What do you think will happen? Now there is a rhetorical question.
Walker, Jade. Huffington POst. 19 January 2015. Online. 5 Novemeber 2015.