You can divide the whole population of the world into two categories: those who believe you can divide everyone in the world into two categories, and those who don't. An old joke maybe, but indisputably true. I fall into the second category myself, because I believe you can divide everyone in the world into eight categories, rather than just two. And it appears that I am right on the button there, because the government has just published a report, commissioned from Professor David Rose of Essex University sociology department, which declares that there are indeed now eight classes in our society. My eight aren't the same as Professor Rose's, but that's hardly surprising because I change my mind about them all the time.
I won't bore you with details of his new classes because you'll have seen more than your fill about them in the papers and on TV: suffice to say that a more cynical person than myself might suggest that moving teachers up into Class 1 is a good deal cheaper than giving them a pay rise. What seems to have gone missing from this new class system is that old Marxist bogey, the means of production. Of course we live in the Information Society now, so that sort of talk won't do, and besides it's terribly unfashionable. I still occasionally lapse though, and wonder why information is worth so much when you can't eat it or keep the rain off your head with it; why, in the end, do you have to transform it back onto the gross material plane, into boring old-fashioned stuff like food and roofs. It's very seldom the owners of information that perform such transformations of course, but they can always hire someone to do that...
But enough of this retrograde thinking, and back to my own latest version of an eight-fold division of the world. As a programmer I'm fond of binary divisions, and three such binary decisions will classify a population into eight subgroups. It's easy to visualise this graphically by placing the three binary divisions along 3 axes at right-angles, which gives you a cube divided into eight sub-cubes. My three binary divisions are these: Winner/Loser, Cool/Uncool and Masculine/Feminine, but I think they will all need a little explanation.
Winner and Loser refer to a person's place in the brave new Information Economy: they don't coincide entirely with Rich and Poor, but there's a lot of overlap. You are a Winner if you are Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch, or anything in the media, or indeed have any reasonably-paid job that is safe for longer than 12 months. Think BMW, Beluga and Blahnik, rather than bread, beans and bomber jackets. A Loser is anyone else.
Cool and Uncool are matters of attitude. My current working definition is "a denial of the legitimacy of mainstream mores; a permanent state of private rebellion". Some like to trace Cool back to the '60s, some back to the '50s, but in truth it's been around for centuries, wherever gamblers, musicians, writers and other hustlers have congregated: what's new is that it's becoming a mass phenomenon in most Western countries. Cool loves to look in the mirror, it prefers friends over family, drunk over sober, drugs over everything. Uncool is everyone else.
Masculine and Feminine need the most careful explanation of all. Understand, I'm not talking organs here, nor even secondary sexual characteristics (if you are confused about any of these, most book clubs nowadays carry a variety of delightfully illustrated manuals). I'm talking emotions. Women like to express them, and men, well, frankly, don't. This axis could be labelled Emotional Continence v Emotional Incontinence, but it wouldn't look so good.
OK so now we can start shovelling people into these little cubes. In CMW (Cool Masculine Winners) you would put the Bills Clinton and Gates, but Rupert Murdoch is solidly UMW, even if he has moved into the Village. Oprah Winfrey and Uma Thurman belong in CFW, while Anne Widdicombe and Margaret Thatcher are very, very UFW indeed. Many unmarried mothers are in CFL, along with Monica Lewinsky, while UML is a dangerous place to walk at night. Nearly all politicians are in UMW. Loaded Lads cavort loudly in CML, while UFL is the domain of the traditional downtrodden housefrau, maybe even your mum. Get the picture?
I contend that these categories will prove at least as useful as the official ones, and that they take more account of relationships to the mode of production. This being the Information Society though, it is the mode of production of egos, rather than of material goods.
After you've played Peter York games with this scheme for a while, seeing where you, and your spouse, and your boss, and your next-door neighbour fit in, you can move on to the really fun part: try a quantitative approach. How MANY of the population of the UK should fit into each cube? Of the USA? Of the world? In making this assessment, please bear in mind that Islam and fundamentalist Christianity make people automatically Uncool, as does any other religion or ideology that sets great store by the family (sorry Tony). So that means most of the population of China, and Indonesia, and India, and Latin America, and...
And now in the light of the figures you have collected for each box, you can play this little game. Which boxes do you think are most likely to band together, put some other box up against the wall and shoot it? I should warn you that my tongue is only halfway in my cheek here.
No comments:
Post a Comment