After work, we’ll have each other

From the article:

Let’s start with 18th-century aristocrats. Aristocrats are (typically) rich, which we certainly will be if we have robots capable of all normal nonrelational labor. More importantly, when they did need to acquire material resources, they did it through leveraging their connections to obtain more land or a lucrative position at court — no drudgery necessary.

They did not work for pay; they certainly did not see work as a source of meaning. It’s certainly true that some of them had real obligations, like governing or killing each other, but court life in the age of absolutism is as close to a purely relational world as anything I can think of.

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I’m no Lilti, but I’ve read a lot of aristocratic memoirs, and all of them are like this. Saint-Simon might be an unusually advanced case, but that’s all he is: The morbid symptoms are universal. Take the memoirs of Catherine the Great. Catherine is everything Saint-Simon is not: open-minded, intellectually voracious, an admirer of Voltaire, and ruthlessly pragmatic in the pursuit of power.

Catherine is a very different kind of observer, but the world she’s observing is essentially the same. St. Petersburg might not hold a candle to Versailles, culturally speaking, but the distinction hardly matters — as in the French court, the only path to advancement was through politics, and all politics was relentlessly personal. Daily life was, again, gossip: who was seen speaking to whom, who’s too religious or not religious enough, who’s having an affair, who’s offended or might offend or could be maneuvered into offending the empress. There was no freedom, no privacy, and almost no conversation that is not ultimately about jockeying for favor with someone closer to the center of power.

It’s difficult for modern readers — at least, for this modern reader — to understand why intelligent, perceptive adults with every material resource would behave like this. It all seems so undignified. But then, aristocrats are not like us. We’re bourgeois: Our idea of dignity involves being diligent, productive, responsible citizens. (That is, it involves working.) Aristocratic dignity comes from honor, which is to say it comes from maintaining distinctions of family and class.

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Susan Ostrander’s Women of the Upper Class is an ethnography of upper-class women in an unnamed Midwestern city in 1984.

Theirs isn’t a pure post-work society. All the women have husbands who have jobs, even if it’s just managing the family money, and one of them (but only one) works herself. Even so, I think this book is about the best modern case study of a relational society as we’re going to find. None of Ostrander’s subjects grew up with the expectation that they would work outside the home, and none of them feel any obligation to do so as adults. And Ostrander is interested in the same questions we are: Why do these women do what they do? What matters to them? What are the structuring assumptions of their lives?

The main structuring assumption, it turns out, is that class matters. Unlike 18th-century aristocrats, they are not especially ambitious (“These are men and women born to privilege, and social striving is not necessary”). Instead, “the women see to it that the social network of ‘congenial’ people is kept in good order.” Much of this work involves socializing and hosting, as well as supporting their husbands and — perhaps most important — ensuring that their children contract socially appropriate marriages. But this isn’t what occupies most of their time. One can only host so much, and by the time the kids are in boarding school they practically raise themselves. Instead of working, politicking, or developing rich and varied hobbies, they volunteer.

Volunteering, for the upper classes, is a very specific kind of activity. It does not involve picking up trash or ladling out soup. All of the women served on the boards of prominent nonprofit institutions — the opera, the symphony, hospitals, and various local philanthropies. Their work on these boards consisted almost entirely of fundraising. They raise funds, they say, because they’re best placed to do it: They’re all very rich, and they know all the other very rich people. They’re all socialized into the appropriate rituals of asking for money — the path to higher-level charity work runs through the Junior League, an exclusive upper-class service organization to which nearly all of them belong.

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Interestingly, while most of the women acknowledge a sense of noblesse oblige, none of them care much if their volunteer work achieves tangible results for the communities they serve. Instead, Ostrander writes,

The volunteer work of upper-class women has an elusive quality about it, and specific accomplishments, in terms of actually improving the life of the community, are difficult to come by. Mrs. Holt is a dedicated and influential community activist. In what appeared to be a slip of the tongue accompanied by a flush of apparent embarrassment, she said, “It’s that illusion of being useful that’s satisfying.” Mrs. Smythe referred to volunteer work as “a demonstration of sincerity.” And Mrs. Harper confessed, “I’m not sure that what I’ve done has really accomplished anything, a lot of it is busy work.”

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It’s not that West Enders liked their dead-end jobs. They just didn’t think much about them. Work was not a central organizing activity of West End life. West Enders worked just enough to support their lifestyle, which revolved around what Gans calls the peer group. The West End, in his words, was a “peer group society.” An adult peer group might include a married couple’s same-age relatives — siblings, cousins, in-laws — and perhaps a few childhood friends, who would probably be “adopted” in as godparents to the couple’s children. These people would spend almost all of their time together, meeting in the apartment of one family or another after work and staying late into the night. The men might gamble at a local corner store — gambling is absolutely omnipresent in this world — but mostly, they talked, and talking mostly meant gossip.

This is where the parallels to old money Midwestern ladies and European aristocrats start to show. While there are any number of things these groups don’t have in common, all of them share certain features.

First, none of them see work as a source of status. West Enders do like to show off, but never about their jobs: Their talent as conversationalists in the peer group setting is much more important. Second, they are exclusive. A West Ender knows all the same people from early childhood. They’re very skeptical of outsiders, including members of other ethnic groups who’ve lived in the same neighborhood their whole lives.

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West End culture was good for many of the people who lived it, but it was limited, and these limitations could have tragic consequences. One of them was the destruction of the West End. The West Enders don’t want their homes to be torn down and turned into luxury condominiums — but they repeatedly fail to organize against it. This is because the West Enders are not good at organizing. The peer group is, of necessity, egalitarian: They don’t trust anyone who tries to set himself up as a leader.

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Relational living comes to us naturally. It’s the most common form of social organization in human history, and millions of people around the world are perfectly happy with it. But when our personal dignity comes from our membership in a group, everything the group does reflects on us — and everything we do reflects, unavoidably, on the group. It’s not a coincidence that Russian princes and Bostonian Italian day laborers spent most of their time gossiping (or, if we want to be technical, constructing and enforcing norms of behavior). They were defending their collective reputations: the thing that mattered most to them in the world.