These pitiable days Class Structure is called Stratification. Why? Three reasons: (1) The Means of Production are less and less relevant to social scientists. (2) Chicken-shit professors petrified of being branded Marxist by American billionaires who wear their beaky hats backwards. (3) A Cell Phone in every ear. But rest assured, in the configuration of large modern, societies, class, as the divide between rich and poor, is alive and well because, since the advent of surplus as an often odious virtue our species has yet to learn how to live without class.
The peoples of more modern societies can be divided into Somewhere People and Anywhere People. Somewhere People are wedded to a sense of place, they remain where they came from, they stare at strangers and talk about great-great-great grandpappy. Anywhere People, on the other hand, might have less than idyllic memories of the farm, their sense of place travels with them, New York, Oldham, Paris, Karachi, then retirement in Bury Saint Edmunds.
This Somewhere/Anywhere divided is a class divide, whether positive or negative it's characterized by an almost instantly recognizable mentality. We can begin to call the distinction between Somewhere and Anywhere, Tory and Liberal.
Confused? In the American Colonies, during the Revolutionary War the Tories supported the English Monarchy, specially in the Carolina's, Georgia and so on. In the USA as it is today, the Tory Somewhere People are represented by the RBHM. (The red beaky hat movement) They have a somewhere to re-invent, it's English Speaking, it's white skinned, it's Protestant.
It's been argued by Evolutionary Psychologists that male jealousy is an evolved defense against what they call Paternity Uncertainty. I mention this because we have spent time with Friedrich von Schlegel, the author of a scandalous novel, Lucinde, which is about the emancipation of the flesh, the idea that sexual and intellectual freedom were inseparable, true freedom was a commingling of souls and bodies until some pain in the neck boy started getting jealous. Most of us might have come to terms with that, but Schlegel, to make himself feel better, decided to commingle with the conservative social values of white christian nationalism.
The point I'm trying to make might be clearer if we follow the meanings in the word sacred, and to do that we need to talk about boundaries. If there are no boundaries there is nothing sacred. Our friends, the Somewhere People, have a tighter understanding of the sacred and its boundaries. When it comes time for Somewhere People to defend their boys against Paternal Uncertainty, according to biblical scholarship, girls cannot be trusted which means that emancipation of the flesh is out of the question.
Schlegel could go on all he wanted about freedom, and it might be that Anywhere People think of Freedom as an absence of boundaries but Somewhere People will not blush when they declare that without boundaries, Freedom is impossible. Without boundaries emancipation of the flesh is not possible because a trait in our transcendental structures that puts a premium on bi-parental parenting. Schlegel got himself baptized as a Catholic.
Worth noting, in the USA there's a higher rate of births outside of marriage in rural areas (Mostly Somewheres) than there are in Urban Areas (Mostly Anywheres.)
