The Bourgeoisie

Charles Blow has an article in Saturday's The New York Times in which he offers his statistical findings to the question of how people define their class in terms of their income, the point being to demonstrate that more and more people feel that their failing incomes remove them from a definition of "middle class."  My response to class has always been atypical, I guess, since I do not consider income to be the defining factor, but rather culture.  Of course, for someone in his eighties my view of things is probably so out of date as to be entirely invalid, but Blow's article set me to thinking of the question.  Two anecdotes are revealing.  Years ago I met a woman whose family had escaped Budapest in the 1957 revolution; she had settled in Palo Alto with her husband who conducted some sort of business while she taught art history at night school since she had no means to get an academic position such as she had had in Hungary.  On a visit to fellow refugees who had settled in Montreal and enthusiastically taken up a new life, she was mocked by them when she mentioned her resumption of teaching art history.  "Aber, Susie, nicht hier." they laughed, "Kunst ist nur für arme Leute."  Speaking German, itself, was telling since both sets of friends were native speakers of Magyar who nonetheless spoke German together, the language of culture and civilization back before the Second World War in the Hungary of their youth.  But those newly settled in Montreal could proudly announce that "Art is only for poor people."  Which is to say, they had learned in the New World, that money not culture is the sole defining fact of one's place in society.  The second anecdote tells of a night out at a drinks party given by a neighbor in our cul de sac of high end development homes in Palo Alto when I was a lowly, minimally paid assistant professor who nonetheless tapped into a bit of inherited funds to buy the house in this neighborhood.  A fellow who lived two houses away, whom we were meeting for the first time, exclaimed with surprise and ill-concealed contempt, that he found it amazing that someone in my position could afford a house there.  He himself, as his wife explained to satisfy my curiosity, was the golf pro at a nearby club. My WASP good manners prevented my saying aloud what I thought, but indeed it was my turn to be shocked that someone so uncouth and clearly ill-educated would be a neighbor of mine and live in one of these very fine architect designed homes.  My job at Stanford University was to offer courses in ancient Greek literature and culture for a generation who in my expectation would be the finest specimens of the middle class, the people who inherited the culture, paid for the culture, created the culture which in grand terms we call Western Civilization.  That expectation dates to fifty years ago.  How it has all changed!  The goal of the majority of students at the so called best universities is to study finance, or law, or whatever else will make them money, as though that were the end of it all.  And the very institutions aid and abet that ambition, denying any conceivable guardianship of the civilization and culture that historically they were brought into being to investigate and strengthen.  A quirk of circumstance has brought me into contact with a group of rich persons who have banded together to support a major institution of culture in a place where I live in the winter.  I had initially assumed that their principal allegiance was to the grand culture of which this was a part, but upon closer association of three years I have yet to hear them speak about matters of art, music, literature, philosophy, theater, all those things that I in my naivete thought was the point of living.  I think it is more in the nature of a rich man's club.  I guess I just can't get it into my head "Karlchen, Karlchen, Ach du lieber, Kunst ist immer mehr nur für arme Leute."