Forget class, it’s ‘nobility of opinion’ that counts most now

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators marching through Sydney. Picture: Getty Images

Dividing people into social classes like breeds of dog is always good fun. Sociologists like to count them, while revolutionaries incite healthy intersectional violence.

The great thing about class is that it’s self-validating. Whether you are an aristocrat, New York Brahmin or colourful Sydney racing identity, once you are top class you are automatically superior and important.

Even Jim Chalmers probably knows Western societies such as Australia traditionally have three classes: upper, middle and lower. People are allocated to them according to an incestuous interaction of wealth, background, prestige and occupation.

But how all this stacks up for any particular individual is fraught.

The Brits have it easier. In their stratified society, it is a fair bet a duke socially outranks a dustman, and a countess beats a cleaner. Mind you, on a moral scale, things are often reversed.

Things are harder in Australia, where there is no Marquis of Mudgee. Will a professor always beat a plumber? What if the plumber has a fleet of contractors, and clears a couple of million a year? Does a prime minister really have more social prestige that Kylie Minogue?

But now we have a new class system emerging. It is based not on wealth, education or occupation, but on the group of thinkers to which you belong. You tell me your social and political views, and I will cast your hierarchical horoscope.

If you voted for Trump, you are garbage (not just horribly, horribly wrong). If you support Israel in Gaza, you are genocidal war criminal. If you are seriously religious you are a gullible bigot, and a would-be persecutor to boot.

Your class is Wrong Thought, right at the bottom. You are despised and dismissed on sight, like a Victorian chimney sweep.

Contrariwise, if you saw Kamala Harris as the new Joan of Arc, want Benjamin Netanyahu drowned in ethically sourced tar and see religion as the crystal meth of the masses, welcome to the top of the social tree. Your class is Right Thought.

You will be invited to Peter FitzSimons’ harbourside New Year party.

Generously, though, there is an intermediate position between thought classes, like one of the better suburbs of Purgatory. You may be confused, or misinformed, or just plain uninterested in the really important issues of the day, like climate change and pangolins.

If so, you are No Thought, which is not good, but redeemable. With education and dedication, you may yet be elevated to Right Thought. Or through sloth and disinformation, you might find yourself stuck firmly among the Wrong Thoughted.

We should be quite clear that this is not just an ordinary contest between competing strands of opinion. Categorisation under this schema is every bit as defining of human character and worth as any consignment to the old working class or elevation to the peerage.

But the critical problem for the Right Thoughted is that there are just so many people who are irredeemably wrong, or lazily without thought. Like 18th-century Whig aristocrats, our thought superiors despair of the endemically incorrect.

They try to educate us, but we are stubbornly ignorant. This breeds condescending frustration, which quickly turns to contempt, followed by righteous rage.

This partly explains why contemporary political and social debate is so vituperative. When one class is automatically right and the other by definition wrong, mere dissent is an Orwellian thought crime. This in turn underlies the current obsession with disinformation and misinformation.

The only way a Right-Thoughted person can confront contradiction is if their Wrong-Thoughted opponent is either spreading lies, is a contemptible dupe, or preferably both.

Either way, there is no need to actually address an argument. The mere fact that it is being put by an inferior intellectual class will explode it.

Sadly, the best example of this in contemporary Australia was the approach by some parts of the Yes campaign in the referendum for an Indigenous voice. Opponents were simply wrong in the way that only an intellectual sub-class can be wrong.

Insisting on supporting argument, bipartisanship, detail and explanation was not only unnecessary, but presumptuous. The right people are, by definition, right.

Of course, the central problem with this intellectual class approach is that there always are going to be a lot more people outside the magic circle than inside. That is the whole purpose of being upper class.

This conundrum is diabolical in a country such as Australia, which is not only a plural democracy, but has a Constitution that can be changed by referendum. No matter how clever you are, the dipstick down the road has the same vote.

The right also has to be careful of this correctness-by-classification regime. In the voice debate, for example, there were plenty on the No side who regarded their opponents as an intellectually debased class. Simply to describe them was to defeat them.

Australia has been mercifully free of an aristocracy of birth or wealth. The last thing we need is a nobility of opinion.

Greg Craven is the former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.