Upper class Middle Class Lower Class
Too much care - Too little care
Gentle - Rough
Distant - Close
Hands off - Hands on
Many boundaries - No boundaries
Thick walls - Thin walls
Rigid - Loose
Clean - Dirty
Quiet - Loud
The emerging middle class of tradesmen and shopkeepers signal the decomposition of religious tradition.
“People here talk loudly, and frequently shout at one another. Kids can often be heard crying, and parents shouting. Their language and tone is aggressive. Tempers fray easily. They don’t look after anything very well, be it themselves, their kids, or their environment. The streets are strewn with litter and dog muck. Their gardens and yards are in a terrible state. There is no sense of ownership or responsibility. They’re totally selfish and have no consideration of other people. They are terrible neighbours.”
“People here are quiet and reserved. They rarely seem to talk to each other, and when they do it seems false and awkward, as if they’re holding something back, or they’d rather be elsewhere. They never show any passion, its as if they’re all afraid of each other. They seem to care more about their gardens than their families. They’re judgemental, of everyone. They always seem to be looking about with suspicious eyes. There’s no life here, everyone keeps to themselves. I bet they're all constipated.”
View #3 - Area A/B - (Synthesis)
"In Area A people live at a close distance to one another, both literally and figuratively. Their houses are smaller, and placed closer together, and many live in flats, with people above, below and to the side. Their boundaries are thin, and easy to cross or disregard. Sometimes those boundaries are so thin that they barely seem to exist at all. Things flow freely through them; smalltalk, arguments, insults, love, hate, affection, aggression - all of the things that pass between people.
What this area lacks are those positive things we associate with distance, and thicker walls. Privacy, for instance, is not as easy to come by, nor its corollaries - silence, seclusion, space. With distance comes the space and time to reflect, and so life can seem to pass at a slightly slower pace. The individual has more room to breathe, and to pause and reflect.
The people in Area A have different sensibilities to the people in Area B. They value closeness; they tend to prefer loud over quiet; fast over slow; expression over repression; active over passive. Those from Area B tend to favour the other side of the opposition.
- too quiet
- too clean
- too distant
- too repressive
- too little life
When people from Area B find themselves in Area A they tend to say that it is:
- too loud
- too messy
- too close
- too expressive
- too much life
As with any binary, one side always possesses what the other lacks. From where I stand here between them I can see that both have something to learn from each other."
One of the most shameful things I can admit as a working class person is I want to be middle class - cuz look at how cooshty their lives seem to be!
If a middle class individual expects a trigger warning, maybe it's because they're able to pick and choose and control most of the environments they go to in their lives on the regular and expect it elsewhere too, and I don't begrudge them that, it's all they've known, whereas having to see some brutal shit every other day is all that other people have known.
The latter implies a heavy desensitisation that I don't think humanity should aim for - I don't like the idea that we grab everyone by the neck and point at something shit and say "look, this is what real life is like!" I don't want my working class identity to be promoted by making a mockery of the middle classes. I'd rather we destroyed class.
[Scott Wilson]
Youtube comment on 'Trigger Warning: Final thoughts and summary before ceasing transmission'
The rational Christianity of the Unitarians, with its preference for "candour" and its distrust of "enthusiasm", appealed to some of the tradesmen and shopkeepers of London, and to similar groups in the large cities.
But it seemed too cold, too distant, too polite, and too much associated with the comfortable values of a prospering class to appeal to the city or village poor. Its very language and tone served as a barrier: "No other preaching will do for Yorkshire," John Nelson told Wesley, "but the old sort that comes like a thunderclap upon the conscience. Fine preaching does more harm than good here."
Dissent was caught in the tension between opposing tendencies, both of which led away from any popular appeal: on the one hand, the tendency towards rational humanitarianism and fine preaching - too intellectual and genteel for the poor; on the other hand, the rigid Elect, who might not marry outside the church, who expelled all back sliders and heretics, and who stood apart from the "corrupt mass" predestined to be damned.
"The Calvinism of the former," HaIevy noted, "was undergoing decomposition, the Calvinism of the latter petrifaction."
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.31, 37
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