I do O.K. with Aristotle. Modern philosophers, especially the more mathematical ones sometimes give me the heebie-jeebies. I noticed a few years ago that Aristotle has an affinity to Goldilocks. For him, the Virtuous Mean lay between extremes of deficiency and excess. Don’t be a skinflint, but don’t be a spendthrift, either. The same for Goldilocks. "This chair is too big!" "This chair is too little". "This chair is just right," etc., etc., etc. I get away with the etc. because we all know the story. (If you don’t, click the link above. The illustrations are luscious.)

Except I found out a few years ago, that a number of my International students didn’t know the story, and didn’t have an equivalent story in their cultural repertoire. This made me realize how dependent we are upon our classical heritage for our "middleness". One of the kind readers to my previous entry drew attention to this emphasis on the importance of the middle in Euripides’ Suppliants. But Aristotle makes the idea central to his Politics. The sections which I’m drawing upon today are parts three and four from the version available at the MIT Internet Classics Archive.

I think that if Aristotle was a Democrat, he was a reluctant one, perhaps, like Churchill, believing Democracy to be the worst form of government, except for all the rest. He did, however, see the middle class as the salvation of the system. (Why am I not surprised?).

The mean condition of states is clearly best, for no other is free from faction; and where the middle class is large, there are least likely to be factions and dissensions. For a similar reason large states are less liable to faction than small ones, because in them the middle class is large; whereas in small states it is easy to divide all the citizens into two classes who are either rich or poor, and to leave nothing in the middle. And democracies are safer and more permanent than oligarchies, because they have a middle class which is more numerous and has a greater share in the government; for when there is no middle class, and the poor greatly exceed in number, troubles arise, and the state soon comes to an end. A proof of the superiority of the middle class is that the best legislators have been of a middle condition; for example, Solon, as his own verses testify; and Lycurgus, for he was not a king; and Charondas, and almost all legislators.

One won’t find much argument about this around TPM Café. There is a tab devoted to the Middle Class, ably supervised by Elizabeth Warren, and it is a rare day indeed when no one uses the term–usually glorifying it or defending it, or fretting over whether or not it is threatened. I do, too, but I also spend a little time trying to understand what this "middle" means in the American Context. I do a little exercise with my students. The "middle" must have a "floor," below which rests the "lower" and a "ceiling" above which sits the upper. In economic terms, I suppose one could define those in terms of wealth or income, but income figures are easier to come by and understand. So I ask them, what is the household income ceiling for the middle class, and what is the income floor? The range is interesting, and varies a little from semester to semester. The lowest the floor usually goes is about $40,000.00. The highest the ceiling goes is usually in the $200,000.00 range, though one year it went to $375,000.00. When I post the numbers on the board and ask the kids "how many are middle class?", every hand rises.

So we all want to be middle. But if one does a reality check, one finds things a wee bit different. (Bless You, Wikipedia, for providing census data on household income by quintiles, 2000 census figures). If we take the middle three quintiles, we can place the floor of the Middle Class at a household income of $18,500 and the ceiling at $88,030. The New York Times subdivides the middle class in a way Aristotle would approve–lower middle, middle middle, and upper middle. For numbers nuts, here those are:

• Lower Middle,
• $18,500 to $34,738,
• Middle Middle,
• $34,738 to 55,331,
• Upper Middle,
• $55,551 to $88,030

Ooops. I’m upper class. Ugh. Yucky. My reaction mimics my students’ reactions. I ask them why it is important to them to consider themselves part of the middle, and the answer has to do with images associated with being "rich": being stuck-up, high-brow, a snob, etc. The Christian Science Monitor noticed what I noticed, great minds thinking alike:

Clearly the way one thinks about the bounds around the middle has implications for policy. I blame Aristotle and all those other old Greeks for giving us the idea of the virtuous middle. But then I forgive them for giving us Goldilocks.

Wikipedia (again, bless ye, Wikipedia) gives us a full discussion of various ways Americans "vaguely define" the Middle Class. It’s worth a read and it has lots of pretty charts, even. So, I’m wondering if anyone wants to give his/her definition of what constitutes the American Middle, or, if you want, whether the concept still has any use? What do you think? I’d like the to see this discussed sometime or other by the folks in Elizabeth Warren’s Bailiwick.

aMike

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