The Mid-20th Century Classless Society and its Discontents

Chapter 18 of The Information Class

This is chapter 18 of a book that I’m publishing serially, entitled The Information Class. To get up to speed, read the intro, chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6, chapter 7, chapter 8, chapter 9, chapter 10, chapter 11, chapter 12, chapter 13, chapter 14, chapter 15, chapter 16, and chapter 17. Sign up to get future chapters in your inbox:

Also, please comment! I value your impressions greatly. I am not thin-skinned, so don’t hold back.

A classless society is possible. At least, class in the sense of the term I developed above may be absent from a society. Every moderately developed society must, to repeat, have substantial income inequality and extensive occupational specialization. But it need not have endogamous, meta-specialized classes morally adapted to a range of occupations within the larger specialization tree.

It's possible, instead, to have a society where anyone might marry anyone, and anyone might grow up to be anyone, and there is a presumption of equal status in the way strangers interact, and people's sense of identity is either individualistic or invested in nationality and citizenship, or religions, hobbies, clubs, ethnicities and the like, but not in class or anything known to be strongly class-correlated.

I take the mid-20th century United States to be an example of such a society, and it frequently shines as a kind of utopia in the retrospective vision of recent writers on both the left and the right. Left-leaning writers tend to admire it for its relative economic equality, while right-leaning writers tend to admire it for its relative social conservatism. And it was an admirable society in some ways, which it's reasonable to look back on with wistful nostalgia, up to a point. But it had major shortcomings and dark sides, and these were not accidental, but closely related to its classlessness.

I think there are, by the way, two other prominent recent examples of classless societies: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In those regimes, too, historic classes were suppressed, and a certain conformist egalitarianism was imposed from above. They were, of course, among the most ruthless, murderous, lying and soul-destroying tyrannies in human history. And their classlessness is connected with their tyranny via the “tall poppies” principle. An ancient writer, Livy, narrates how a visitor to an ancient tyrant, Tarquin the Proud, asked how he maintained control, and the tyrant answered by walking through a field and cutting down all the weeds that rose higher than the rest. Tyranny loves leveling, because it is the prominent, the celebrated, the well-known and admired who can check and challenge tyrants’ power. Nazi Germany and Soviet Union had cut down the tall poppies, and there was nothing to check the regimes’ tyranny.

The mid-20th century United States had done plenty of cutting down the tall poppies, too. Antitrust, confiscatory tax rates, regulations and whatnot had shattered the power of the capitalist dynasties of the Gilded Age, though it was important that unlike in the Soviet Union they had not been killed or exiled but merely tamed and caged. The gentlemen's wings were clipped, and government became more heavy-handed, pervasive and meddlesome. But the mid-20th century United States did not become a tyranny because of deep veneration for the Constitution and the tradition of liberal governance that it represented– even if the Constitution was severely abused by left-liberal judges to accommodate government’s appetite for invasive, omni-jurisdictional power– and because of the ongoing influence of Christianity. Also, a certain reactionary wisdom saw and recoiled from the horrors of Communism and fascism, and sought to renew and strengthen liberal traditions as a refuge.

Yet the fortress liberalism of the high Cold War was more fascist-flavored than we like to remember. There was a lot of censorship, some police brutality, a lot of government secrecy, a fair amount of propaganda, sordid alliances with dictators abroad, all sorts of intolerance, irresponsible anti-Communist fear-mongering, and of course, until the mid-1960s, a ruthless racial order of white supremacy. And there was lots and lots of regulation, which slowly killed off the innovation momentum of the Gilded Age and eased America into the Great Stagnation.

I don't think the racial segregation part was an accident. It was somewhat connected to the general classlessness of the times. A classless society tends to need other sources of identity and solidarity to make up for the lack of class. Race can fill the void. Certainly, the contemporary MAGA movement combines a militant nostalgia for the old classlessness with strong overtones of racism. But I don't want to exaggerate this connection, and suggest that classless societies are inevitably racist. I think there could be ways to thread the needle, and to be classless without being racist. Other problems with the classless society are more inherent and essential.

A mid 20th-century writer, David Riesman, striving to understand his times, coined the haunting phrase “the lonely crowd” (The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the American Character, 1950). It's a phenomenon typical of the classless mass societies of the mid-20th century, with lots and lots of people thrown together at random, without any structured relationships or mutual responsibilities, nor any common interests or values sufficient to motivate forming connections or making friends, a shallow prosperity masking a profound meaninglessness, a mere buzz of hurry and bustle with no fulfillment. The loneliness comes in one sense from insufficient commonality, but in another sense from insufficient diversity, for if someone is too much like you, you have little to learn by getting acquainted with them. It's like meeting oneself, but one has oneself on tap already. In a society of shallow conformism, casual acquaintance is cheap, but the opportunities and resources for loyal, giving, deep friendship are scarce or lacking.

“Consumerism” is another wise, haunting expression that captures a malady characteristic of the mid-20th century classless societies. To a certain kind of economist, it's strange for consumerism to be a bad thing. Shouldn't the consumer be king? Isn't consumption the end of production? One might object that people desire to be not only consumers but also producers. That's a naive objection in one way, because of course it was always implicit in consumerism that consumables need to be produced, so there would be plenty of jobs. But people's interest as consumers and producers may differ. It might be that securing maximum living standards means that most jobs will be boring and unfulfilling, and social arrangements that result in such outcomes should be avoided. But more to the point, consumables are almost by definition transient, and we sometimes want to make unique things that last. But it's characteristic of a classless society that people don't buy and build on behalf of their descendants. Their offspring will be re-absorbed into the classless mass, and follow the unforeseeable consumer fashions of the future. It they didn't, people's labors on behalf of descendants would set their descendants apart from others, and class would re-emerge.

Consumerism is also related to classlessness because classlessness gives people very thin identities, such that they're prone to being reduced to mere consumers. People are, moreover, always more differentiated as producers than as consumers, so the more their identities are invested in their productive roles, the more they tend to sort themselves into classes. As consumers, people are much more similar. Much of consumer behavior is driven by basic human needs for food, shelter, warmth, privacy, childrearing, and so forth. Consumers are especially similar when there is relatively little income inequality. And in a lonely crowd, consumers tend to seek community by following the fashion and buying what other people buy. Of course, such consumerist community is a shallow and unfulfilling affair.

It's characteristic of classless societies that the love between the sexes takes rather shallow forms. Any kind of long-term planning in which marriage becomes an investment in the continuation of an intergenerational family story would tend to lead back into class endogamy. If anything, even setting children aside for the moment, holistic, practical appreciation of a person romantically, for their virtues, life story, plans and potentialities also promotes class endogamy, since part of who they are is where they came from. The most classless basis for marriage is some sort of superficial attraction based on mere looks, greatly prized in the classless mid-20th century and captured in the cult of the cheerleader and the bikini, or some type of accidental commonality, like using the same bus stop. And so we get the shallow bubblegum love songs of the 1950s and the early 1960s. The spontaneity of that can be appealing, especially compared to decadent class habits of marrying for money. And certainly, plenty of lifelong happy marriages have come from falling in love for no good reason, especially in a Christian society. The instincts and the churches know their business, and can often turn the raw material of spontaneous romance into the rich fruit of lasting and fertile marriage. Even then, it has its costs.

For the great irony of a classless society is that the price of social integration is personal disintegration. The price of a cohesive society is splintered lives. It's characteristically a society where your friends, your wife, and later on your adult children understand nothing about how you earn your living, and your colleagues at work know nothing about what you do when you're off the clock. It's not the business of families to foster professional connections or shepherd children into specific careers, but only to spend and entertain. Business and government are simultaneously ubiquitous and impersonal. Life in general, and people's individual lives, are partitioned into several mutually non-interfering domains. From literature and film of the mid-20th century, I seem to recall themes of husbands whose wives cannot be confidants, because they have no understanding what happens in the office, while wives feel trapped in a shallow and surreal existence for the same reason. Children feel no duty to follow in their parents’ footsteps, and wouldn't know how, and wouldn't have the opportunity to do so even if they wanted to. Work is the key to a man's value, yet at the same time it's a kind of secret. Dad disappears for a few hours a day, and a paycheck appears every two weeks, and that's all anyone needs or cares to know.

Some writers, like David Brooks and Robert Putnam, have described the rich associational life of mid 20th-century America, which did much to mitigate the loneliness of the crowd. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had rich associational lives too, though poisoned with regime propaganda and bent to regime purposes. Putnam’s Bowling Alone describes the slow-motion eclipse of the mid-20th century profusion of clubbish organizations. To Putnam, this is a tragedy, and the most important culprit is TV. By this account, as TV spread, people turned into couch potatoes, staring at screens, and stopped joining clubs and participating in community. But the story raises the haunting question: how much could that associational life have been worth, if it was so easily forsaken in favor of the couch and the TV? What, after all, is there for community associations to do, in the face of mighty corporations flooding the market with goods to meet every need, and a huge omnicompetent government with endlessly proliferating agencies and programs trying to solve every problem? Not nothing, but was the residuum of tasks ever important enough to justify much effort to keep the clubs going? Maybe community just needs to be needed more than that, in order to stay healthy. And so social capital declined, and loneliness spread and deepened.

If, as I argued above, class stratification is efficient, then classlessness is odd. Why didn't class stratification spontaneously re-establish itself, laissez-faire style? Well, it did, in due course. But it took a while, because of all the coordination problems and human capital investment involved in growing a class. Also, technological conditions in the mid-20th century may have favored classlessness. The assembly line method of factory production temporarily heightened the relative marginal product of unskilled labor, provided people were willing to do very, very boring jobs. In due course, unskilled factory workers were overtaken by automation, and the relative marginal product of unskilled workers fell back to more normal levels. By the end of the 20th century, as in most of history, the earning power to support a middle class lifestyle generally required years to develop through acquisition of skills, connections, and good habits. By contrast, in the mid-20th century, factories needed hordes of unskilled workers, and rewarded them with new middle-class comforts that amounted to a revolutionary enrichment of the lifestyles of the common man. Part of the reason for the decline of classlessness was what is sometimes called “skill-biased technological change,” i.e., technological change that disproportionately raises the productivity of skilled relative to unskilled workers.

For the sake of balance, let me stress that there is a lot to like about the mid-20th century United States. In the 1950s and 1960s, living standards rose for the Western working class to unprecedented levels. Education levels rose. Life expectancies rose. The fruits of advanced capitalism finally filtered down to the vast majority of the people. Most people were middle class, with electricity, cars, indoor plumbing, television, telephones, and labor-saving home appliances. Food was plentiful. Jobs were plentiful. From time immemorial, it had seemed like virtually a law of nature that civilization had to be built on the excruciating poverty of masses of people. In the 1950s and 1960s, that was finally put to rest.

For people who had lived through the Great Depression, the mass prosperity of those years could not but produce satisfaction and gratitude. And for people who had also lived through World War II, the relative peacefulness of those years, despite the wars in Korea and Vietnam, was a welcome change from the past. A new kind of beneficent modernity seemed to have been born, which made people impatient with lingering injustices, and somewhat utopian. Facing off against monstrous fascist and communist regimes, America felt intensely the rightness of its cause as it led the Free World. And it was a family-friendly time, too, before the Sexual Revolution, and well after the mildly decadent 1920s, with its F. Scott Fitzgerald and its flappers. In the 1950s, chastity and the nuclear family were the norm. Entertainment had also attained new heights, with film and TV and rock-and-roll– though that was a disruptive force– coming to maturity, even as fairly socially conservative standards still prevailed in the arts. I like to watch old 1950s TV shows and movies, even though they're usually a bit shallow, because I like feeling safe from the offensive or sensual content that prevails in contemporary TV and film. In so many ways, it was a golden age.

But it couldn't last.

There were many reasons, good and bad, for why the egalitarian society exploded. The single largest and most catastrophic was the Sexual Revolution, which, to put it in the strongest language, massacred millions of honorable lineages through illegitimacy, childlessness, and abortion. We're mentally conditioned not to think of it that way. But the experience was agonizing for many, many people, and the damage it did beggars the imagination. Victims of the Sexual Revolution, raised in broken homes, lacking good upbringing and often emotionally damaged, tended not to be able to fulfill their prescribed roles in capitalist society, and many fell into a dysfunctional underclass of welfare, dependency and/or crime. And a major driver of class differentiation consisted simply in people's determined efforts to avoid falling into that underclass. Did classlessness cause the Sexual Revolution? Never mind. That's too hard to tackle just now. Let's assume it was just an unlucky accident.

But there was enough without that. The great lesson of the mid-20th century is the unsustainability of classlessness. People aspire to be more than conformist consumers in a lonely crowd. They looked for exits, and found many, of which the most productive was going to college. And society needs more creativity, freedom, and cultural memory than classlessness affords. So the consolidated, classless society of the 1950s broke up.

We shouldn't try to will and force our way back to the classlessness of yesteryear. It's not feasible, at any rate not by any means that lie remotely within the just powers of government, nor by any kind of reasonable moral suasion. And the price would be too high anyway. Class stratification is normal and functional. And the information class that has emerged to lead us is a fairly decent ruling class to have in charge, which would benefit from a good deal of reform and redirection, but shouldn't be rashly overthrown.