The Wit’s Guide to Society

Or, Urban Haute Bourgeoisie

Max Beckmann’s Paris Society demonstrates that if you skimp on dimensionality when hosting, everyone ends up on top of each other.

There’s no such thing as society, Margaret Thatcher famously said, but since she died in 2013, society can retort that there’s no such thing as Margaret Thatcher. They’re both right. What That Bloody Woman was trying to say was that society, like Soylent Green, is just people. Which means that, if Sartre is correct that hell is other people, then society is hell.

“The real misanthropes are to be found not in solitude but in society.”
— Giacomo Leopardi

But maybe it’s a hell we choose? An old joke repeated by Mark Twain among others is that a dying man might well pause to choose his destination: heaven for the climate but hell for the society.

“Society is now one polish’d horde, Form’d of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.”
— Lord Byron

Society contained all of Oscar Wilde’s material, and he had its number right up until it had his. It’s full of arbitrary rules and codes, which makes it captivating as a spectacle but claustrophobic as a habitat. Everyone in society held the exact same opinions, he noted, which is why they found arguments so vulgar. It was full of women who had stayed 35 forever. You only spoke disrespectfully of society if you couldn’t get in. And though it was a bore to be in it, it was a tragedy to be out of it.

“Nature makes only dull animals; we owe the fool to society.”
— Honoré de Balzac

And then it died circa 1960, according to Cleveland Amory’s book Who Killed Society? The cause, he learns from an interview with the late editor of The Social Register, was that “insignificant people are getting in all over.” The snobbery is thickly applied in Amory’s telling, because though society used to include everybody who was anybody, “this was not literally everybody.” The glue that held it all together was that “people who were out wanted to get in and people who were in did not, as so many do today, want to get out.” It was Groucho Marx’s club he wouldn’t join if they’d have him and thus collapsed under the weight of its own illogic. The lesson: If you live in a paradox, hire a structural engineer.

“The ignorance of French society gives one a rough sense of the infinite.”
— Joseph Renan

The great society movie of the modern era is Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, revolving as it does around the debutante balls in which young women were formally introduced to the cloistered upper-class world. The 1990 movie is set in “Manhattan. Christmas vacation. Not so long ago.” and there the young, wealthy, and bored trade lines like “The cha cha is no more ridiculous than life itself” and “Our generation’s probably the worst since the Protestant Reformation.” You want to hate them, as when our hero Tom is rebutted after explaining that he doesn’t want to go to their parties on principle:

Nick Smith: Exactly what principle is that?

Tom Townsend: Well…

Nick Smith: The principle that one shouldn’t be out at night eating hors d’oeuvres when one could be home worrying about the less fortunate?

Tom Townsend: Pretty much, yes.

Nick Smith: Has it ever occurred to you that you are the less fortunate?

And the saving grace of this group of self-proclaimed Urban Haute Bourgeoisie (UHBs, though they wonder “is our language so impoverished that we have to use acronyms of French phrases to make ourselves understood?”) is that they know they’re a dying breed. Though there’ll soon be no such thing as society, there’s still time for one last party.

“It seems to me to be a duty which we owe to society, to feel pleased with ourselves.”
— Frank Swinnerton

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“A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.”
— Robert Frost

Each week, you choose a topic from five options. But paid subscribers can always suggest a subject in the comments! This is encouraged, even!

Get Wit Quick No. 331 didn’t even mention secret societies, but then we covered The Wit’s Guide to Secrets last year, so read both in rapid succession and then knock three times. This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. The Society of Wonderful People Who’ve Tapped the ❤️ Below is always accepting new members.

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