This piece does not really touch on the many confounding variables that are found when examining the correlation between esoteric beliefs and social status. Level of education, for instance, is a biggie, even when accounting for the perceived prestige of where one goes to school.
The author dismisses some concepts, like cultural appropriation, by saying that the working-class people he grew up with not only didn't trouble themselves with it but didn't even realize that it was a concept.
But just because someone with low education and/or low status doesn't know about or understand a topic doesn't make that topic merely a status symbol, any more than it makes calculus a status symbol.
I agree, in part, with the author that certain pockets of higher education can veer into navel gazing and ivory-tower perspectives, and it can lead students to adopt distorted views of the world. But I don't think it can be said that just because a point of view is more prevalent among higher-educated people (who may indeed have higher status) that means the idea is bunk.
Did he say that a topic was bunk because it was held by the upper class? I took his point that the prevalence of these luxury beliefs is higher among the upper-class in gross disproportion to the impact those beliefs have on people. E.g. cultural appropriation is sometimes used by people in power to pretend they have a connection to cultures where none really exists. It's a form of manipulation. The impact that has on the average person's life is minuscule. The impact of someone from the middle-class taking cultural clues from other cultures in non-existent, yet it's easy to find discussions about the alleged harm this causes among some social groups.
The luxury is in the time spent on relatively unimportant matters, much like spending millions of dollars on a bejeweled egg. That doesn't mean the egg doesn't exist.
The author dismisses some concepts, like cultural appropriation, by saying that the working-class people he grew up with not only didn't trouble themselves with it but didn't even realize that it was a concept.
But just because someone with low education and/or low status doesn't know about or understand a topic doesn't make that topic merely a status symbol, any more than it makes calculus a status symbol.
I agree, in part, with the author that certain pockets of higher education can veer into navel gazing and ivory-tower perspectives, and it can lead students to adopt distorted views of the world. But I don't think it can be said that just because a point of view is more prevalent among higher-educated people (who may indeed have higher status) that means the idea is bunk.