Oxford vs Walmart

Very much like Godzilla vs Kong, except if that film were different in every way

In your mind, draw up a portrait of an Oxford student. Feel free to stereotype. The Oxfordians won’t mind; some might even like it. Our imagined student is terribly clever obviously, and their learning is decidedly bookish. They may have a posh smarm and/or the standard set of academic neuroses. They study in gorgeous libraries and walk down foggy ancient streets lined with spires, perhaps dressed in a rustling gown and carrying a stack of books. They romanticize their life which is fair because their environment is, in fact, romantic. They have money (potentially of aristocratic origin), they are from southern England, and they went to a fee-charging private school.¹ They may be an object of ridicule, but they are not an object of disdain. If your kid became their friend, you would be happy about it.

Now, come with me across the pond, and conjure up a portrait of a Walmart shopper, less politely called a Walmartian. The stereotypes are beyond unkind. We can find a real world example in, of all places, the top Goodreads review for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The review describes Huck as:

the kind of dirty-faced boy you see, in his younger years, in a shopping cart at Wal-Mart, being barked at by a monstrously obese mother in wedgied sweatpants and a stalagmite of a father who sweats tobacco juice and thinks the word 'coloreds' is too P.C. Orbiting the cart, filled with generic cigarette cartons, tabloids, and canned meats, are a half-dozen kids, glazed with spittle and howling like Helen Keller over the water pump…²

Less surprising, but even more aggressively unkind is the following Reddit comment:

I can handle Walmart. What turns me off about the place, is 350 lb whales, stuffed in yoga pants, walking around. Or even the fatter ones, in electric carts, hooked up to oxygen, shoving a double cheeseburger down their throats. Yes, that is rude. However, I just say what others don't have the balls to say, but are thinking it.

If you have my sensibilities, those descriptions filled you with a kind of white-hot rage. Still, I think they are similar to the picture that would be drawn in the minds of most honest middle-class Americans. The wording is ruder, but the basic features of poverty, obesity, and mess are consistent. Having generous views on class, at least in my case, does not exempt one from being molded by classism.

What divides Oxford and Walmart is the distinction between the elite and the democratic space.³ Oxford constrains membership. At Walmart the notion of membership is meaningless.

By design, elite spaces are remembered for their average member and sometimes for their most exemplary. By contrast, the inclusive democratic space is generally remembered for its least appealing members. The druggie in the public park. The loudmouth on the subway. The Walmartian. The person who can be most safely abhorred often comes to define the democratic space. When the abhorrence stops being socially sanctioned, but remains in the heart, it is often referred to via dog whistles.⁴ Both in the Oxfordian and the Walmartian case the stereotype is quite far from the real average, but in the latter, it is almost comically incorrect.

In elite spaces, the exercise of narrative control to elevate image is uniquely crucial because elites want, above all, to be admired.⁵ The image of the Oxford student is therefore reinforced by the culture, policy, and indeed the material structure of the university which is comprised of many circles of inclusion and exclusion. Physical space in an Oxford college is apportioned neatly and often hierarchically. Seniority and academic excellence determine proximity to important centers, access to “common” rooms, and the literal elevation one sits at while dining. Certain privileges are extended based on exam performance. Certain libraries are accessed only with letters of recommendation. These things are varying degrees of necessary, and removing them entirely would distort some of the legitimate functions of a university.⁶

Don’t mistake me. I loved Oxford. Both aesthetically and in a more mundane, utilitarian way. The careful cultivation of such space is not intrinsically wrong, and it is often the prerequisite of intentional community. The gay bar and the local parish are cultivated spaces and when done well, with healthy notions of who can enter and how they can exit, they foster care. As Wendell Berry says, “my love must be discriminate or fail to bear its weight.” Some exclusions are clearly necessary even in highly democratic spaces, such as the exclusion of the violent.⁷ Violence is a legitimate reason to fear democratic spaces given that places which are maximally inclusive may be more likely to be inhabited by violent people. This is one reason why democratic and egalitarian societies rely on (and should work to perpetuate) extremely rigid anti-violence norms. I am not, therefore, making a blanket argument about exclusion.

I am also not exactly making a moral defense of democratic spaces.⁸ I am not willing to claim that being democratic makes a space more moral. After all, by democratic I simply mean that there are extremely low barriers to entry. Plausibly, Walmart shouldn’t exist as it does now. In the optimal world all businesses should employ their laborers at a living wage and more commodities would be made to last.

My more fundamental point is that the appealing aesthetics of elite spaces are a direct consequence of exclusion, and often, the more exclusive a space is, the greater its aesthetic appeal grows. The question is whether we can learn to love the aesthetics of the democratic space. Such spaces will always be necessary, and they can even be transformative. Think of the public library!⁹ Under any economic system, something like Walmart needs to exist too. A space for fulfilling the more rudimentary material needs and wants of the least powerful and least aesthetic clientele. Can we learn to embrace the aesthetics of these inclusive spaces? Spaces which are not just unfashionable but almost anti-fashionable.¹⁰

After all, a basic feature of democratic space, maybe the central feature, is mess. The blending of many different types. Democracy smells. It can be fragrant, but it can also have the scent of bad weed and old cigarettes and even a bit of dookie. This triggers our deep impulse to excise and regulate the ugly. But doing so risks destroying the illegible, secret, and revolutionary beauty that can grow in the gaps of the disciplinary society. The beauty of queerness and punk and sunsets in the gas station parking lot. It can also kill more legible but less aesthetic goods. The joy of the child with Little Debbie’s snack cakes is real joy, even if we have decided that hydrogenated oils deserve censure.

When I shop at Walmart, my experience is often pleasant. In fact, sometimes shopping at Walmart gives me this kind of exuberant feeling. I love it when two people swerve to avoid hitting each other with their cart. I love it when I see a couple shopping together. I love it when a kid is riding in the top of their parent’s grocery cart. This often takes a conscious effort, but one I think is profoundly worthwhile. As Marilynne Robinson would say, everywhere you look the world can shine like transfiguration. I suspect that this reworking of my aesthetics, allowing beauty, is also an ethical act.

When my mood is right, everyone I pass seems remarkable. Noble primates in the least savannah-like location imaginable. The word Walmartian could not seem further from correct. My broken shopping cart tilts right, insistent, even animate, in a way that well-regulated things are not supposed to be. I almost run into an old Asian woman. We do an awkward shuffle to try and pass each other on the way to eggs or sriracha or whatever. Remarkably, she laughs, and I laugh too, and when we see each other again in the International Foods aisle we smile at each other. Though I avoid interacting directly with most of the other shoppers, we are keenly aware of each other, swerving lightly, stopping abruptly, or rerouting to accommodate conflicting trajectories. We are like celestial bodies interacting under obscure gravitational rules. This is called “civil inattention” which makes something beautiful sound sterile. As I approach the checkout, the cashier covertly vapes, and while he scans, he is approached by a young boy with down syndrome who needs help finding his parents. Quickly finishing his task, the cashier rushes off with the kid in tow. In the parking lot, an old man breaks civil inattention to ask for a ride home, he is nervous and insistent that he is a Christian, profoundly worried that he seems like a threat. He is from Indiana, and he has no family in Missouri because he moved here for a woman. Things between them fell apart in an obscure way which he is not interested in detailing. We ride back to his apartment in silence and shake hands at the door.¹¹

1. Confusingly, dear American readers, fee-charging private schools are called “public schools” in England. They are public in the sense that, hypothetically, members of any class or geographic background can pay to get into them. This historical quirk is at least a little bit revealing.

2. Some non-zero percentage of the time, imagining that a poor (and poorly educated) person must be a racist is simply a roundabout way of ridiculing their poverty and lack of education while maintaining the moral high ground. Incredibly gross.

3. The choice of Walmart as the representative democratic space in this essay is deliberate because it is probably the democratic space that it is most safe to dislike in anti-elite circles. Public parks would be easier subjects.

4. e.g. the replacement of “black” with “urban”

5. Worth saying that most elites, I think, want to be admired by a certain subset of people rather than people generically. The aesthetics of the “finance bro” are calculated to impress a different subset than the aesthetics of the academic. Often the signals are very subtle, and much is lost when different groups of elites train their gaze on one another. What seems anemic or gauche in one view becomes elevated or grand in the other. I’m actually fully fine with people having contests over taste though. I’m not saying you need to embrace every aesthetic.

6. Normative questions about what universities, especially elite universities, ought to be like are too complicated for me to talk about here

7. Though, there should be spaces for the violent because there will be people, for reasons of mental illness for example, who are unable to totally curb violent impulses. One of the deepest questions for a democratic society is how to craft ethical spaces for people who violate our most fundamental norms. Clearly, we are failing on this front. Exhibit A being the US prison system.

8. One thing worth noting here is that spaces which are inclusive to some are not inclusive to others, so an all-embracing democratic space is probably impossible. The interests of an autistic person with noise sensitivities can be in conflict with a group of rowdy young people. However, the contradictions of democracy and tolerance shouldn’t lead us to abandon them as ideals.

9. The library is democratic in having low barriers to entry, but it is also somewhat undemocratic in having a low ceiling of acceptable behavior. It is a democratic space, but not exactly the best example of one.

10. I am reminded of George Orwell when he visited Barcelona in the early days of the Spanish civil war, one of the few cities that at any time had come close to equalizing the social status of its population. “In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.” This is not how I would structure a society, but I agree with Orwell that there is something queer and moving in it.

11. Is all of this over romanticization? Probably to some degree because it skips over the fact that much of the mess of the democratic space is a product of poverty and other negative social forces. The balance between accepting and loving the marginalized and acting to end their marginalization is actually a fine balance. Many Christians and some leftists have gone so far in the direction of love that they forget poverty or low living standards is not virtuous as such. Accepting and embracing democratic space should not mean ceasing to care about producing better social outcomes.