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such restrictions are the rule. (Yet the recent fascination of the British
public with the distinctions of U and Non-U speech and manners leads
one to surmise that in Britain, too, status lines have become blurred.)
Concern with status and background clearly reflects uncertainty about
social position, hence it is the
nouv,eaux Tiche
and the new middle
classes rather than the old upper classes who must, to allay their doubts,
display symbols of status and reject the strivings of the newest wave
of "upward mobiles." Bryce remarked long ago that "the existence of a
system of artificial rank enables a stamp to be given to base metal in
Europe which cannot be given" in America.
Nevertheless, concern for status is hardly a specifically American
characteristic, nor is it specific to the contemporary scene. Theodore
Dreiser and Edith Wharton knew more about it than Mr. Packard
will ever know; and when Edmund Burke wrote about the "nabobs,"
adventurers who had grown rich in India and suddenly found them–
selves sympathetic to the
J
acobin cause because, "they cannot bear to
find that their present importance does not bear a proportion to their
wealth," one is forcibly reminded of certain Texas oil millionaires who
supported McCarthy for quite similar reasons.
Though
Kitsch
sociology by its nature lacks genuine perceptiveness,
Packard has a fairly good journalistic eye for much that is happening
on the contemporary scene. He is shrewd enough, for example, to dis–
cern that though there is still considerable social mobility in America,
a great part of such mobility simply involves small movements back and
forth between the manual and lower white collar occupations, so that
analytic focus on such inconsequential movements in the status pyramid
obscures growing rigidities in more significant areas. Some of the de–
scriptions of the strategy of snobbishness, of the nightmare world of
subtopia and of the gambits of the status game as played in corporate
bureaucracies and on private golf clubs, are well done. There are some
interesting observations of class barriers in education. But all such post–
radical criticism is finally innocuous, for it is designed to afford its
audience the pleasure of deploring a state of affairs which it secretly
craves. It enables the reader to be simultaneously in and out.
Kitsch
sociology flatters its public; it allows the reader to compensate for his
guilt in condoning a meretricious reality by the fake catharsis of verbal
condemnation. And this very condemnation is, in turn, designed to re–
concile him to his role as a part of that reality.
Lewis Coser
