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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35432 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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You didn't just have to mix with them, you had to lead them into battle. With the rise of gunpowder and the demise of the knight in shining armour as a practical battlefield weapon, the role of nobles (and gentlemen below them) on the battlefield became as officers, and officering the army became the de facto function of the nobility. And the other ranks tended towards the worst kind of oik. As Wellington said:

I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.

If I look at my own family history (I am from a multi-generational upper-middle class family), all my (male) ancestors had a job early in their career where they had to give in-person orders to their social inferiors. My father's first graduate job was as a shift manager in a factory, and the previous three generations were military officers. The only people I have ever had to give orders to (apart from servants - one of the advantages of the UMC mindset vs. the PMC one is that you can save money by hiring servants directly rather than going through a corporate intermediary) are juniors in the office who are basically younger versions of myself. And that is typical of my generation - the only person in my undergraduate social circle who expected ever to be giving orders to social inferiors was the lady who spent her whole gap year working at McDonalds and got promoted to floor manager half way through. (Quite a few people from UMC backgrounds had worked on the line in shitty jobs like McDonalds as student summer jobs etc. - but that is temporarily slumming it with the proles, not leading them, and thus a very different experience).

What's UMC? I assume it isn't United Methodist church.

Upper-middle class.

May be a British thing.

Upper-Middle Class?

Ah yeah that's probably it. I was stuck on 'Something Managerial Class'.

I spent a long time making the opposite mistake - thinking that the American usage of PMC was "Professional Middle Class". It didn't help that there used to be a website at classmatters.org (incidentally, a good website focussed on explaining to lefty activists why they were putting working class supporters off with inessential weirdness) which did use it that way.

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