GENERALLY speaking, climbing is something to be avoided. Stairs, walls, mountains: ascending these only leads to trouble.
But the worst kind of climbing is the social variety, whereby a citizen ascends from, say, socio-economic class C2 to, say, B1. Don’t get me wrong: it’s good that people get on.
No harm in earning more money or getting an interesting job that counts as a “profession”. No one wants to do badly at school because then, according to the law, one has to take a job where work starts at 8am rather than 9am. It seems sort of medieval now but the earlier start rule remains a relatively mild punishment for not paying attention in class or having phrenological indentures that prevented understanding.
But actually aspiring to go up a social class is reprehensible, reeking as it does of an elbows-out attitude to life and a desire for status that should make the practitioner unemployable but usually leads to promotion.
Social mobility should be by accident rather than design, a by-product of a talent or vocation, not a reward for being avaricious or greasily competitive.
But, however one moves onwards and upwards, the very idea of social climbing has revealed a faultline between the United States and parts of Britain. I say the latter because the first newspaper reports I read of this interesting study referred to “Britain” and “England” interchangeably. But it turns out they appear to have meant England.
And I say “appear to have meant” because — who knows? — maybe when the actual researchers at Manchester University said “England” they meant “Britain”. Who knows? It’s so confusing. If you have the misfortune to live in Scotia Minor, you’re never quite sure if you’re included or not.
At any rate, the story goes that English people, at the very least, who ascend the greasy pole are happier than those who don’t. But in the States, citizens are happier if they stay in the same social class as their parents.
The American side of things is perhaps surprising as we tend to associate the Land of the Free with “opportunity”, “making something of oneself”, and similar evils. Yet here they are sounding, if anything, like the notoriously Communist Scots, who pride themselves on being working-class, even when they own two Bentleys and an Apple computer.
I suppose, oddly enough, given its antipathy to Communism, America is more of a classless society than the likes of England and Edinburgh.
The real moral of the story is that, for many people, money can’t buy happiness. A big hoose is no guarantee of a big smile. By the same token, poverty is depressing. Perhaps we should aspire for everyone to meet somewhere in the middle.
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