In a bin outside a tiny corner shop in Tokyo’s old bookseller neighborhood Jinbocho, I found a yellowed paperback entitled Who Killed Society? basking in the sun. The date of publication is December 1960. Only a dog-eared receipt serving as a bookmark shows that it was in the hands of anyone before me. I wonder how this book got to Tokyo. Possibly the original owner was, like me, escaping from a dead society and searching for a living one.
It is a book about the loss of a word, and therefore the loss of meaning. It can tell the reader more about the meaninglessness of the modern era than any existentialist piddle. In this book you may learn that within America itself, there was once a sense of place, and of old families whose names were associated with different places. There was a time in America when local newspapers carried society pages replete with meetings of the Daughters and goings on about town, and indeed “ceremonies of Society were given more space than the proceedings of the Congress”, and when “inequality [was] as dear to the American heart as liberty itself”, and when “keeping up with the Joneses” was a frivolous joke directed by members of society towards outsiders, and not a real, uncomfortable description of everyday capitalist absurdity. Well-groomed and well-bred gentlemen met behind the closed doors of private men’s clubs in New York and Philadelphia to determine the fabric of the city. Quote:
In Pittsburgh … in deference to the “social” suburb of Sewickley and more particularly to the famous family of Nevin, the boy begins his prayer, “Our Father who art a Nevin.” And in this same city, where not even Sewickley outranks the awesome “Heights,” Mrs. James B. Davis adds the further intelligent that, while teaching Sunday school there, she distinctly heard one child singing, not “Glory to God in the Highest,” but simply “Glory to God in the Heights.” To a child in Pittsburgh the thought that the Almighty could live anywhere else was apparently unthinkable.
It is difficult to imagine an America so anti-democratic, but what is surprising is that it is also quite anti-capitalist. The reason this book has seen no new printing since 1962 is because it does not fit the narrative of modernity. The outlier these socialites worked the hardest to exclude was not the the Catholic or the Jew but the entertainer, the actor, on stage and film. Marrying an actor would purge you from the ranks of polite society, and rightfully so: actors were defined by their popularity, by how much money they could rake in when they appeared on the stage, while gentlemen were, ideally, defined by their families and their manners.
Born a Nicholson and descended from the Lloyds of Nye House, Mrs. Shippen was asked by a friend of hers if it had ever occurred to her that if Our Lord had come to Baltimore she would never have met Him–since His Father was, after all, a carpenter. “But, my dear,” replied Mrs. Shippen, “you forget. On His Mother’s side He was well connected.”
But to be defined by your family in a society of immigrants is a bit of a paradox, and indeed, American society was always a paradoxical thing. The 1910 book New York Society On Parade gets right to the point: ”New York has an ‘Aristocracy’ whose elevation is largely artificial, whose membership is largely arbitrary, and whose existence vitally depends upon those activities which are known as social function. In other words, while in Europe the mutual entertainments of an inherently stable upper class create Society, in New York the constant contortions of Society are indispensable to create and maintain a precarious upper class.” Note the inherent juxtaposition in this passage. If New York’s aristocracy is artificial and arbitrary, then European aristocracy is natural and constant. Today we know this is not really true; the natural, constant traditions embodied in European society are subject to the changes of modernity, albeit more slowly than Americans. But for Americans, modernity would change the entire social landscape within the century. The 1960 volume quotes a 1945 complaint by Frank Crowninshield:
The individual man is passing, and it is no longer even smart to belong to a club. As for the individual woman, she is no longer even a woman, let alone an individual. In another fifty years we’ll all dress alike, talk alike, smell alike, and love alike. It won’t be any fun.
Indeed, our remnant “high society” today, of country clubs and gated communities, is a very different beast from the one depicted in Who Killed Society? Like the Epicureans of late Rome, its old families are directionless, and enjoy their comforts most of all; they no longer have a commanding task with which they face the world, nor a voice which the world will listen to. The WASP world continues to rule in many regions, but its goings-on are no longer the talk of the town at large. It is cut off from the hearts of most American cities, which are now undesirable, and maintains a cohesive power only in New York and DC. Tradition is constantly being beaten back, out of the city, into ever more private corners. And the entire concept of family is vanishing; Warren Buffet’s progeny are not “the Buffets”, for they have scattered to the four winds.
Many of the families involved in Society were already gone in 1960. The author was forced to search the telephone book for them and discovered that in many cities, entire lines had gone extinct. The virtue pursued by society could not be bought with money, but in America, paradoxically, there was nothing to define that virtue except money, with the result that there was no point in marrying into a “good family”, and the entire concept of “good breeding” became confused. This perhaps presages the future for Europe if democracy does not peter out fast enough. If there is no prestige in marrying a Vanderbilt, why not just marry whoever you like? Even the question is somewhat silly to the modern ear.
The present meaning of the word society is only hinted at in this book. “I don’t think society is anything anymore,” says one Mrs. Perle Mesta, “except in its most liberal sense. I have the very oldest Bostonians to my party and even they like the liberal.” The old meaning of society, as social association based on principles of exclusion, has changed to one of radical inclusion. Thus “social issues” are no longer about who is marrying who, or indeed who anyone is, but what kinds of people will be included; ideally, everyone. The only kind of “social news” that is really news anymore is a placeless set of developments in inclusion. The New York Times carried its first gay couple on its weddings page a few years ago, and already this is old hat. One time the weddings editors found a lower class couple and did a front page story on them, and this was all very heartwarming, but also meaningless; nobody knows any of the family names involved in the weddings anyway, so the editors can do whatever they like, or even discontinue their weddings coverage altogether, without causing anyone alarm.
The author boasts boldly that he has written a book for the 1960s, meaning whatever was to come after 1959, but in the real 1960s, a cultural revolution would render his book not only irrelevant but almost unintelligible. We have only the faintest traces of memory to help us understand what he meant by Society, and what he means when he alludes to the old sayings and songs:
And here’s to old Boston, home of the beans and the cod,
Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God.
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Seems to me as if it isn’t a simple matter of society should legitimately = social association based on principles of exclusion. That’s all fine with me. It would be nice to see an “aristocracy”, though, that’s based on morality, modest living, concern for the poor, stupid & unwashed, and an understanding that no one’s shit smells like roses and that we all have to put our pants on one leg at a time.
It was inevitable that even the most privileged of the “true societies” of the past would eventually become liberals. Even they could see that their giant houses and battalions of servants, personal aircraft, etc. could not be justified. So, all their newfound radical inclusiveness made them feel all warm and fuzzy while still maintaining their repulsive, opulent daily lifestyle. How neat is that.
I rather like the way actors & entertainers (and their enablers) were viewed back then. Today, we pay them to insult us and they are the New Aristocracy.
Why do we need to justify this? Our leaders need better lifestyles to compensate them for the burden of serving as leaders. To lead, and achieve good results, is far harder than what most people can do. In the same way we pay a brain surgeon a lot more than a car mechanic, we should pay our aristocrats to serve a role that doesn’t quit at 5 pm like a regular job.
By the same token I’m not sure I think “concern for the poor” is really on any sensible agenda. The poor are always with us. They are always with us because they’re poor because they’re disorganized, addicted to drugs or drink, or stupid. They can’t be helped because they are the cause of their own misery.
I have to agree on actors and entertainers and the industry around them. Like pornographers, they’re parasites who lure us away with distraction and serve no necessary purpose.
A truly moral and useful leader doesn’t ask for, expect, or even want to live in the opulence that we see them enjoying. This is a sign of weakness, not strength.
Poor = disorganized, addicted, or stupid? O Mein Gott. There are countless poor who are none of those things and who, additionally, manage to live with dignity and carry out their duties.
Well, ‘poor’ is one of those emotive words that means something different to everyone.
You’re both right (and wrong). The word means nothing any more, since becoming so politicized.
I happen to be the ultimate expert on one kind of poor. It isn’t possible to exceed the poorness I have known. But I was never a self-styled victim, or even greatly inconvenienced by my poverty.
I dug my way out from it, by obscure and unlikely means.
Anyone can do that, if they can avoid feeling sorry for themselves. And nobody else can do it for them.
“Anyone can do that, if they can avoid feeling sorry for themselves.”
Exactly, so don’t pity the poor. Nature/God helps those who are ready to help themselves. The rest are being squeezed out by natural selection and we should support it. Those who lack the will to overcome themselves should die out, as they make us as a culture, a race and nations into weak people.
It is true: “poor” doesn’t mean much anymore except in the worst cases. You are like all “self-made, self-sufficient” persons, though: you fancy that you dug yourself out of your serious poorness. I know a hundred people who talk like that. You almost never see that you are indeed receiving help all the way along; you are blind to it and prefer to believe that it’s your good character and hard work that lifted you out of the mess. I am an oldish woman and I’ve been through the grinder, too, and can assure you that no one in comfortable circumstances has done it himself. Never.
I’m more interested, though, in the idea that the poor are that way for reasons of inferiority, stupidity and immorality. Well, that must mean, then, that all the extremely rich are that way because…they are paragons of virtue. This requires further investigation but off the top of my head I’d say are more likely to just know how to play the game required of people in a truly dissolute society. I think of the unrepentant Lord Black of Crossharbour, a.k.a. Conrad “Tubby” Black and his execrable wife for just one wee example.
You are being what you are. An oldish woman.
Meaning that you are delving, more and more, into the realms of opinion, and emotional responses, rather than fact, taking your own experiences to be the experiences of all.
It isn’t so.
We are not all ‘equal’. We are all very different. And our experiences are the most different things of all.
When I say I had no help, that is exactly what I mean.
I had no help.
Nothing helped me, even if something posing as help was offered to me. Because nothing could. In the same way that nothing can help anybody do, or be, what only those people, themselves can do, or be.
Maybe none of those hundred people you mention are anything like me. Or maybe they all are, but still you do not take what they say at face value.
And why is that?
Because what they say is at odds with what you prefer to believe?
One arrives at the truth, at new knowledge, not by rejecting what might seem wrong, but by considering it, and seeing if it might be true.
I see what you are getting at. For me, then, this is how it has been. On several occasions over the decades I thought I had done something “by myself”. I began to feel proud of my accomplishments, where I’d pushed through serious problems with great effort and got over them. I then could not understand why other people who had been in my kind of boat couldn’t similarly pull up their socks. Then, without warning, I fell into difficulty and found that I could not pull my own socks up as I had in the past, and then at last understood that I was still a decent, hardworking, honest person, and probably the people whose “lazyness” I sneered at were no different from me.
So, I do indeed have an old woman’s perspective and emotions. Where I may differ from many others is that I don’t want the government to steal my money in order to level us all. All the government needs to do is get the hell out of these kinds of matters. And if my lifelong judgment tells me that such & such “deserves” a bit of help from me, I will freely give it.
I see what you are getting at, too.
I’ve never had any kind of a problem with charity, as long as it is a personal, individual gesture. I can be supremely charitable, when the situation prompts it, while remaining utterly against it being any sort of an obligation.
It isn’t an obligation. That is what makes it charitable.
Additionally, the concept of ‘help’ is grossly bent out of shape. Experience proves, time and again, that nobody can help anybody, except in circumstances of dire threat to life and limb.
My life was saved, once, by two people who thought to consider my sudden disappearance as an anomaly. They found me on my anchored boat with a fever of 104, at death’s door, and provided medical help. Typhoid Fever.
Now that’s help. But for them, I would likely be dead.
Etc :)
There may be some poor that are as you describe, but the vast majority are addicted, disorganized, lazy, stupid, etc. There is a reason they are poor. It didn’t happen to them. Are you in denial that they tend to have more children? Tend to spend more money on alcohol, entertainment, cigarettes and lotteries than the middle class?
Wake up, your head is full of liberal pity propaganda.
Ha! Someone said it. Sad but true.
Even sadder is the sheer number of people who think of themselves as conservative, who have absorbed so much leftism, it has changed their body chemistry.
Mutants, so we are. Not all, but probably most.
It’s hard not to absorb it. People pass liberals memes on to me through conversation, even just standing in line at the grocery store.
They don’t know. I didn’t know when it was happening to me. It’s not a passive process to avoid it. You have to constantly push back.
I’m not generally pushy but the liberal myth is dangerous and must be destroyed. People are not all equal under the skin. We’re different and we need the best to win out and the rest to die out.
When we talk about dying out, I’m most concerned with the sociopathic criminal element and merchant classes, but the poor are also going to get shoved off the chain if they can’t find some way to be useful. A lot of people get out of poverty, maybe not the majority, but the good ones, so I think this is not only practical but fair, like all natural things are.
“The author boasts boldly that he has written a book for the 1960s, meaning whatever was to come after 1959, but in the real 1960s, a cultural revolution would render his book not only irrelevant but almost unintelligible.”
Oh the irony. I was raised in a super-strict county children’s hostel, in the late 50s, early 60s, presided over by an ex British Army tank commander. Forcibly taught how to behave, display impeccable manners, and to be always considerate. Just in time for the cultural revolution/dissolution that would render such qualities a liability, rather than a virtue. Raised to be a laughing-stock, really.
There used to be TV show in the UK, in the 60s, called ‘Adam Adamant’, that saw this Victorian gentleman crime fighter resuscitated in modern times. Complete with top-hat, cloak and sword-stick. But he retained his Victorian values, and waged a one-man war against anyone he saw as a ‘fiend’.
“You fiend!” he would cry, as he skewered them.
What a laughably biased, bigoted, hatemonger :)
I have always had a lot in common with that character.
Delightfully obsolete.
My cross to bear.
Obsolete, not at all. There was a time in history where silly people could tell lies, and get away with a lot of bad behavior before those lies revealed themselves, and that time is now. But even that is washing away as people are seeing that “great” liberal plans like sexual liberation, multiculturalism, class equality, and the like lead to more internal tension and a stronger neo-totalitarian state.
The insane jihad for equality is what crushed society.
People couldn’t bear the thought that some were higher born than others, so we created this great myth that it was “working hard” in school that made some into geniuses, and some into trogs.
Now of course we’re seeing that’s not true. I assume Barack Obama worked “hard,” but he’s not 1/10 the leader that George W. Bush was.
“Marrying an actor would purge you from the ranks of polite society, and rightfully so”
It was probably Grace Kelly’s marriage to the Prince of Monaco who changed all that; at least, unlike today’s entertainers, she learned to act the part of a Princess. Since then, the “beautiful people” and those connected to power began their increasingly more intricate alliance. The result is that, over time, the values of the prole and the outcast have become the “in” values: the need to shock, to overturn, to revolt; the quest for the novel and the bizarre; the pursuit of pleasure rather than depth; the elevation of appearance over reality; playing the part rather than being authentic.
Grace Kelly, oddly enough, is not listed as a suspect in “Who Killed Society?”. The following people are, on Page 16:
1. Murder in the First Degree
(a) With Premeditation
The Servant Problem
The Bureau of Internal Revenue
Hollywood
FDR
Hearst
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor
Walter Winchell
(b) Without Premeditation
Too Much Money, Too Little Money, “Quick” Money, Prohibition, Depression, Nightclubs, Cafe Society, Common Men, Working Girls, World Wars I and II, Cold War, Henry Luce, Harry Truman, Cholly Knickerbocker, Jack Paar, Antony Armstrong-Jones
II. Murder in the Second Degree
[Kennedys, Roosevelts, Russians etc.]
II. Manslaughter in the First Degree
Glamour Girl No. 1′s, Poor Little Rich Girls, Cinderella Girls, Chorus Girls, [etc.]
IV. Manslaughter in the Second Degree
Southampton, Bermuda Shorts, Zsa Zsa Gabor, [etc. Zsa Zsa is probably the only person named in this 1960 book who is still alive today]
edit: Antony Armstrong-Jones is still alive as well!
Zsa Zsa Gabor is still alive? Terrifying.
When I first saw Grace Kelly I was entranced by her beauty. Young men are stupid like that (well and also in that “watch this” way you see nothing wrong with strapping a rocket pack to a sports car for kicks) and fall for a beautiful woman every time.
Then I read about her life and what I thought was, “I would not want this broad to be the mother of my children,” or to have a buddy marry her. Sure she’s beautiful but that is the only thing that’s really skin deep. She was broken and hurting inside and because of that very destructive.
Among women, the best are pretty, intelligent and healthy with good moral character. That is more valuable than a movie star, which pours all that it’s got into the first category and fails the rest.