When you read history, you are often reading a history of the elite, of the aristocracy. People born to wealth and educated well.
All the Kings who waged war, the philosophers who pushed knowledge forward and some warriors who fought hard.
You don't really hear much about the rest of society. By in large, the rest of society were peasants. That was it. For all of history, humans have lived as peasants and aristocracy.
The first society to really carve out a middle class was that of Ancient Athens. They, in their development of democracy realised in order to vote, you had to be wealthy enough not to rely on the rich, but not so rich as to be able to rig the system.
They called them the Menoi - the middle. Most important to this part of society was the fact they would own a piece of land which they could grow enough to sustain their family. This signified their own self sufficiency and their tie to the society they lived - they cared what happened because they had a stake.
This idea collapsed until the modern United States and the industrial revolution. Very importantly, people were tied to the community with homes they owned.
Other than these two times in history, most people have been peasantry.
It's not the aristocracy who have become poorer and become the middle class, but the peasantry who have got richer.
This means that the majority of people we know, would have, in other social conditions been the peasants and poor.
I say this because I think it is important to be honest with ourselves about who we would be in the past. Most middle class people seriously take for granted the natural state of human affairs.
I have primarily been thinking about this in response to my absolute bewilderment at regular peoples' ignorance. I think that even though our social and political structure has allowed us to become rich (own homes, have weekends etc), most middle class still have the same brain as the peasantry do.
Characteristically:
- Resistant to change
- Intellectually incurious
- Materialistic
- Gossip (people oriented)
I think this is something we see among the middle class masses now. People are quite resistant to change. Generally comes from a suspicion of new ideas or outsiders.
The lack of intellectual curiosity always baffles me, but looking at it through this frame does starts to help it make sense. I'm reminded of the scene from the film Seven, where Morgan Freemans character goes to the library at night while all the security guards sit around playing poker. He says they have all the knowledge at their fingerprints, but they just sit around playing cards.
Thats how I feel about modern society. We have all the worlds knowledge at our fingertips - yet most people don't explore it.
The materialism in my opinion stems from the easy access we have to cheap goods and our good incomes. Most people I know are forever coming home with something knew which they don't need. It has the characteristics of short term thinking and social status chasing consumerism.
Gossip can largely been seen through the rise of shows like Love Island and the like. Instead of gossiping within the small agricultural community as we once did, we have found a replacement.
You may think at this point that I dislike our middle class - I don't. I think it is a wonderful thing that we have such prosperity as to live this way, to not worry about where food is coming from and raise our kids well.
But I do think it a shame that intelligent and capable people don't take the time to understand how we got where we are. They don't take the time to realise it was curiosity, education and hard work which gave us these lives.
We instead flitter away our time with cheap distractions, as Russian peasants might gamble and drink all day, we watch sport and scroll tik tok.
I think understanding the former peasantry has served as a good model to understand why so many people now are like this.
It has proven a beneficial thing for me. I understand how I would've lived a few hundred years ago: I also understand the attitudes and mindset which bought us out of poverty.
This way, I hope, I can secure a better future for myself. This way I hope I can actually believe that I would have been one of these heroes of history.