In the past 6 years, we have been watching the middle class continue in their excessive, destructive lifestyle. Addicted to oil, both for gas and for plastic, their careless accumulation and shedding has continued to damage the environment with little regard for, or awareness of, their contribution to climate change. We lament the fact that the middle class continues to fiddle while the Earth burns.
But we have to keep hoping and believing that someday, we can change this. We have to believe that someday, we can steer the middle class in a more progressive direction. This is a part two in a series on how I believe we can guide the middle class in a better direction.
Part 2 - Reasonable status symbols
This idea is a little less fleshed out than last week's. You're all welcome to pick it apart as much as you need to.... In fact, I'd be disappointed if you didn't.
It begins with an anthropological observation that anyone with a basic knowledge of history can make: the high cultural status and rarity of rich humans is always accompanied by materials of similar quality.
A good example that everyone will be familiar with is ancient Egyptian pharaohs. Blessed with the highest position in the social hierarchy of ancient Egypt, the pharaohs were afforded luxuries that few others in their society were even allowed. Mummifying was solely a royal practice for a long time; it required knowledge and materials that were not easily come by. It also required a great deal of disposable items to accompany the pharaoh into his journey in the afterlife.
What many of you may not know is that, while the pharaohs started the practice, the rise of a middle class in the later days of the civilization of ancient Egypt meant a rise in the number of people able to emulate the pharaohs' burials (for instance, scroll down (the link on the left won't take you there) to the end of the "Funerary Customs" section). While they weren't able to provide their burials with items as numerous or extravagant, the middle class did their best to keep up. The king's tomb was still the best, but lesser peoples began to have extra money beyond the normal expenses of daily life, forming one of the first middle classes in the world. With this extra cash, they could demand a better send-off than their impoverished ancestors and be mummified as well. The families they left behind could afford to outfit their tombs with more provisions than they had been able to before. In short, as much as they could, the Egyptian middle class acquired more prestigious symbols and the prestige of the symbols was directly related to the fact that those at the top of the social system used them.
Sound familiar?
This has happened in every culture in recorded history. The growth of a middle class has always coincided with a growth in accumulation (or at least a desire to accumulate) of whatever the rich in a particular society have. Humans have a lot of different methods of showing status, but status always confers exceptional rights upon the persons with the most, so we will climb the ladder of status in as many ways as we can.
It is only in our society that these perfectly normal attempts to snatch at ever higher places in the social hierarchy have actually reached the point of threatening the planet that we all live on. I can't emphasize enough that we all jostle for status; the only difference between many of us here on dKos and others in our society is that we see more non-material things as conferring greater status.
So while we here often condemn the reaching itself, we're condemning an innocent activity. Social climbing can actually be a very valuable tool, if we can manage to change the goals of it. And I think we have begun to change some of society this way, since fighting against global warming seems to be increasingly considered a worthy goal that conveys stature. If we can continue to push the middle class in this direction, and even convince them to leave a lot of their excessive and wasteful materialism behind, we will have steered the ship away from danger with the power of the grassroots. If, on the other hand, we continue to loftily complain that the act of seeking is the problem, rather than what is sought, we will still be doing so while the ship goes down.