To amuse myself with some light reading after the obscenely lengthy Golden Bough, I’m going through Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell, a really amusing book. Here’s a recent review by The Atlantic.

Reading a passage in the book confirms for me what I’ve had a feeling for all along: the upper classes (and would-be upper classes) have a distinct antipathy for thinking about the future. Here’s the passage:

We’ve already seen that organic materials like wool and wood outrank man-made, like nylon and Formica, and in that superiority lurks the principle of archaism as well, nylon and Formica being nothing if not up-to-date. There seems a general agreement, even if often unconscious, that archaism confers class. Thus the middle class’s choice of “colonial” or “Cape Cod” houses. Thus one reason Britain and Europe still, to Americans, have class. Thus one reason why inheritance and “old money” are such important class principles. Thus the practice among top-out-of-sight and upper classes of costuming their servants in some archaic livery, even such survivals as the white apron on the maid or, on the butler, a striped vest. It’s a way of implying that the money goes back a considerable time, and that one retains the preferences and habits one learned very long ago.

What Verblen specified as the leisure class’s “veneration of the archaic” shows itself everywhere: in the popularity among the upper-middle class of attending opera and classical ballet; of sending its issue to single-sex prep schools, because more unregenerate and old-style than coed ones; of traveling to view antiquities in Europe and the Middle East; of studying the “humanities” instead of, say, electrical engineering, since the humanities involve the past and studying them usually results in elegiac emotions. Even the study of law has about it this attractive aura of archaism: there’s all that dog Latin, and the “cases” must all be rooted in the past. Classy people never deal with the future. That’s for vulgarians like traffic engineers, planners, and inventors. Speaking of the sophisticated TV viewer’s love of old black-and-white films, British critic Peter Conrad comments, “Style for us is whatever’s perished, outmoded, lost.” Since the upper orders possess archaism as their very own class principle — even their devotion to old clothes signals their retrograde sentiment — what can the lower orders do but fly to the new, not just to sparkling new garments but to cameras and electronic apparatus and stereo sets and trick watches and electric kitchens and video games?

Uh-oh, looks like I’d better throw away all my video games!

In San Francisco, where the archaism of the wealthy set collides with the futurism of young startup mavens on a daily basis, these observations couldn’t be more useful or enlightening.

Usually, ignoring the future isn’t that huge of a deal, but humanity is at a special point in history where accelerating technological change is giving us tools with powers far beyond what we would have anticipated, thereby putting us in great danger until we can enhance our intelligence and compassion along with our technology.