Taste, class, and Mary Tyler Moore.

• Author: Lessard, Suzannah
• Position: Special Anniversary Section: Who We Are; What We Believe; Why We Believe It

This piece appeard in 1975.

The work of Edith Wharton may seem an unlikely place to look for illumination of current affairs, but there is one respect in which her novels and stories cast light on the workings of our own world. That is the role which cultivation, in the sense of a sophisticated appreciation of the arts and of ideas, plays in the American class structure. Social standing, in the old sense of who your parents are, is no longer a criterion, although a touch of that sort of glitter still can be made to go a long way; the result is a more accessible elite, and a more interesting one, in the sense that talent rather than genealogical credentials is the surer ticket to social success.

The fact that the high circles are accessible to a variety of people, however, does not mean that people judge each other more liberally than they once did. In fact, a case could be made that, in the absence of a standard measure of acceptability, a far more obsessive and byzantine method of cataloging has evolved. The rapid, sophisticated computations of multiple labels-dress, job, school, intelligence, political attitudes, accents, and acquaintances-with which one person judges whether another "is one of us" make the old society's manner of judging (what's your pedigree-usually meaning how much money do you have and how long have you had it) seem more innocent than snobbish. Being "in" nowadays is a condition that must be constantly and feverishly maintained and can depend upon...