Sunday, May 16, 2004
"Top of the Heap" - May 16, 2004
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
..., and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!
...but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
POPULISTS used to hate the rich, but now they hate the elite. This shift
has made possible the migration of populism from the Democratic to the
Republican Party. The conservative notion of the elite has some internal
variations -- Dan Quayle's "cultural elite" isn't quite the same as Newt
Gingrich's "corrupt elite." But at its core the notion is descended from two
books published in the late 1950s by left-wing politicians on the other side
of the Atlantic Ocean: Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy and
Milovan Djilas's The New Class.
From Young came the idea that not long after a society institutes mass
educational sorting based on the results of IQ tests, a distinct high-IQ
ruling class will begin to emerge. Because of the tendency of people in this
class to marry fellow students at highly selective universities and pass on
their IQ-rich genes to their offspring, over time the meritocratic upper
class will more and more resemble a hereditary aristocracy. If this class
absorbs the left-wing views that prevail in the universities, then once it
is in power, it will resemble the arrogant Communist bureaucracy that was
the subject of Djilas's book. The emotional charge of conservative attacks
on organizations like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the
National Endowment for the Arts, and on more-amorphous institutions like the
news media, Hollywood, and the Washington establishment, comes from the idea
that they are made up of superior-feeling, isolated New Class members who
want to force their cultural mores on ordinary folks whom they despise.
Populism usually arises from a general discontent that precedes the
identification of a specific villain. People feel that things are out of
control, socially and economically. Men without higher education,
especially, have dramatically lost ground over the past two decades. The
idea that this is the fault of the meritocratic elite is an easy sell.
The pampered meritocrat has become the contemporary equivalent of the
Organization Man of the 1950s -- a symbol of the age for purposes of
middlebrow hand-wringing. A typical description of the type comes from an
article by Michael Lind in Harper's Magazine.
The closer you come to the centers of American politics and society, the
more everyone begins to look the same. . . . the people who run big business
bear a remarkable resemblance to the people who run big labor, who in turn
might be mistaken for the people in charge of the media and the
universities. They are the same people. . . . most of the members of the
American elites went to one of a dozen Ivy League colleges or top state
universities. . . . They talk the same. They walk the same.
Christopher Lasch called it "the new aristocracy of brains," or "the
knowledge class" as he championed a provincial lower-middle-class culture in
which the highest good is community, not the fulfillment of ambition, and
identified with a "petty bourgeoisie" of "small proprietors, artisans,
tradesmen, and farmers," which he admired for "its moral realism, its
understanding that everything has its price, its respect for limits, its
skepticism about progress." But he never patiently laid out a theory of who
the members of the elite are and where they came from.
It's easy, though, to extract a picture of them from the book. They have
a "growing insularity," they inhabit "an artificial world," they spend too
much time talking, exercising, and going to restaurants, they are
excessively mobile -- "at home only in transit, en route to a high-level
conference, to the grand opening of a new franchise, to an international
film festival, or to an undiscovered resort" -- and some partake of a
sob-sisterish brand of social-issue liberalism, a liberalism obsessed with
the rights of women and minorities, with gay rights and unlimited abortion
rights, with the allegedly epidemic spread of child abuse and sexual
harassment, with the need for regulations against offensive speech, and with
curricular reforms designed to end the cultural hegemony of "dead white
European males."
The implication is that American life can be understood as a grand
struggle between these people and the petit bourgeoisie: everything that
helps the former hurts the latter. For example, "feminism's appeal to the
professional and managerial class" is simply that it "provides the
indispensable basis of their prosperous, glamorous, gaudy, sometimes
indecently lavish way of life." Meanwhile, in the lower-middle class
feminism doesn't bring gaudiness, but it does mean that the children wind up
parked in front of the television set. The elite gets richer, and ordinary
people lose ground economically. The elite migrates, and ordinary people
remain in their deteriorating neighborhoods. The elite promotes
cosmopolitanism, and ordinary people feel their steady, traditional,
provincial civic life slipping away.
Hymn 295 Sing Out Praises for the Journey
On the Arabian Sea, along sundrenched shores, there are piles of wrecked
shipping vessels which have been carried in on tides, or blown in by fierce
winds, or dragged to rest. What were once the hulls of ships are cut into
salvage metal by workers shipped to the site -- often in the same worn out,
ill-maintained boats they end up processing -- from their native India. It
is a booming industry, recycling this steel. But Greenpeace has been trying
to shut it down. To hear some describe their efforts, a bunch of elitist
liberals are interfering in things they know nothing of, wrong-headedly
thinking they are helping these poor workers while actually depriving them
of their livelihood. What is not mentioned is the housing, which consists
of sand and sky and filth; the violence; or the toxicity of the materials
these people work with, and coincedentally release into the sea and the sky.
The shipping industry itself is a globalized form of free enterprise, and
the salvage operations are just a small arm of it, but profitability is what
drives it all. The steel is worth reclaiming if the Indians do it, and even
die doing it, but it such would not be the case if the heap of metal were in
a country with any health or safety regulations, let alone a set minimum
wage.
At the auction last time around, Susan Flint bought a sermon by me, and
told me right then and there she wanted it to be about elitism. About a
week later, I bought a new bedspread, and I was amused to read that it was
"Elite Brand", made in India. Textiles are a very big industry there, and I
have actually toured a shirt factory outside of Delhi and carpet workrooms
in Agra. These are not places for the elite to work, nor are the products
really meant for liberal elite, because the carpets are handmade, but by
children; and the shirts are mass produced in situations not all that
different from what the mill girls in Lowell might have seen in the
nineteenth century. So I was left wondering what the name Elite was meant
to convey, and found myself reciting the old self-mocking and yet prideful
rhyme: And so this is our old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod,
where Lowells speak only to Cabots, and Cabots speak only to God.
Greenpeace is elitist. A bedspread made in India is elite. Unitarian
Boston is elite. What does this mean? And why? Is it an illness to be
elite, or a does it reflect an achievement of some kind?
Well, it may in fact be both. In addition to being a catchphrase that
can mean almost whatever you need it to mean, the "culturally elite" may be
contemporary America¹s genuine expression of identity crisis. So, skipping
over the specifics of definition, as seems to be common practice among the
theorists, we can focus on the elite as a group which threatens us. Except,
it turns out, it is us.
Yes, we are the sob-sisterish, overly educated, immoral class of people
who are so busy championing the rights of minorities and gays and women that
we have made America weak, and God angry. This has been true since the days
of Henry Adams, who wrote of growing up Unitarian and seeking an education
in mid-19th century Boston: "the problem of life was as simple as it was
classic. Politics offered no difficulty, for there the moral law was a sure
guide. Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for
Good, and three instruments were all she asked -- Suffrage, Common Schools,
and Press. On these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and
man needed only correct knowledge of the facts to reach perfection....
Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the Unitarian
clergy... who controlled society and Harvard College. Uniformly excellent
of character, both moral and intellectual, they proclaimed as their merit
that they insisted on no doctrine, but tried to teach the means of living a
virtuous, useful, unselfish life.... Boston had solved the universe."
Adams lays out the theory of the culturally elite about a hundred years
before the term became a common way to denigrate liberals. He ties together
power, social control, public education and universal suffrage in exactly
the way current theorists do, but according to recent writers the elite are
a post-World War II phenomonen related to society¹s increasingly
technological basis; a phenomenon which threatens our country¹s traditions
and stability. But either way -- 19th century or 21st -- the term refers to
us. Is it fair?
Well, yes and no. Unitarian Universalists are a somewhat elite bunch,
if what we mean by that is we have had many priveleges which have granted us
choices in life. We are not exempt from human struggle or pain, but,
statistically, we are composed of people who have had the advantage of good
medical care, clean homes, enough food, and education, early and long. But
that doesn¹t necessarily make us elitist. The theory of a powerful new
"knowledge class" which is the product of leftist American higher education
comes from a book primarily remembered for its racism, The Bell Curve.
Once upon a time, the book argues, intelligence was randomized throughout
society. Now, because our high tech economy demands a very smart work
force, the cognitively elite are in school together, where they form social
groups and breed, and enter the market so that we now have "an
unprecedented coalition of the smart and the rich."
This theory may feel true to those of us who are from working class
backgrounds; who have educated ourselves into the professional class. But
it is not an idea which holds up well under scrutiny. Intelligence and
class are not related, and often neither are intelligence and achievement,
either financially or otherwise. When we refer to "the professional class",
it ignores the fact that there are plenty of professions which are not
valued monetarily. A job which requires a long education does not equal
wealth. But references to the elite always include financial power.
Without inserting a lot of statistics, I can tell you that as incomes rise,
so does the proportion which is derived from long-term capital gains. What
this means is that the rich are not overly-educated liberals with great
salaries. They have either inherited it or are entrepeneurs on a grand
scale. And in fact, research shows that the more money a person makes, the
more likely that person is to vote Republican. The actual elite, people
with money, power and status, is made up of conservative businessmen and
their families, who may or may not also have had educational advantages. So
why are liberals called elite?
Despite Henry Adams¹ critique, the idea that America is run by a
sophisticated, brainy, culturally liberal group for whom education is the
route to success is quite new, according to Nicholas Lemann. I would agree.
Adams¹ point, after all, was not that having advantages was bad; it was that
believing that education would exempt us from suffering profound human pain.
Genuine education should be transformative, and he saw it as static. So
where did the idea of a liberal elite running the country come from, and
why? Lemann tracks the idea to the Clinton White House, which differed
from previous administrations in that both Clinton and Rodham really did
achieve their success through education and merit, rather than through
social connections, class privelege or any other advantage of the elite. Our
current president is related to fifteen former presidents, the late Princess
Diana, and has multigenerational friendships with royalty and rulers
throughout the world. Bill Clinton is related to his brother Roger, and
Hillary to her brother Hugh.
Having Clinton -- a very bright person with no signs of an elite
background -- as the president caused some reassessment of the power
structure in our country, and made the idea of a liberal meritocracy seem
plausible. But it is bad social science being done for political purposes,
and it has been remarkably effective. It works for the powerful rich, and
for traditionalists who long to preserve that intangible sense of how life
feels. Those of us who believe in human rights and environmental
preservation are attacked from both sides. It maintains the status quo by
using education, rather than money, as a way of measuring how much power we
have in society.
It is particularly ironic that education is seen as the breeding ground
for elitism. After all, who is our education president and author of the No
Child Left Behind bill? It is important that we take note of what is
happening under George Bush. We are witnessing a huge shift in the role of
public education, from a service which was an essential part of our
definition of what it means to be a civilized, democratic culture, to a
business; to an industry with a bottom line. Under the guise of fairness
and objective standards, we have instituted policies which are based in very
negative assumptions about human nature and what is trustworthy, and which
reveal a high level of anxiety about how to locate our positions in the
universe. When I was a child, we had neighbors whose children always got
exactly the same thing we got for Christmas, but doubled -- so if my sisters
and I got a record player to share, the kids up the street would EACH get
the same one. My mother¹s explanation was that a lot of people were
insecure, and so they copied what the perceived upper-class people did
rather than figuring out what they really wanted for themselves. She said
you had to believe you had succeeded before you could ever really critique
the system. So a conflict of those who measure worth with external
standards and those with an internal compass is not about being fair and
objective so much as it is about establishing the pecking order. We see
this every time MCAS scores are reported. The back to basics, traditional
believers in tests want to have not just high scores, but scores which are
higher than a sibling¹s, a neighbor¹s, or a rival community¹s. There is no
intrinsic value in the score, yet the score determines one¹s worth. For
people who hate relativism and want objective standards, these scores are
central to an awful lot of relationships. The tests are part of
distrustful system of rewards and punishments which says, on the one hand,
that everybody can achieve; however, we don¹t believe they will. So we
develop testing corporations with huge government contracts to see if the
schools deserve any financing. There is absolutely no evidence of any
belief that students or teachers want to do well or would do anything if
they did not have to, or that there is any intrinsic meaning in life or
education.
On one hand, we believe in mass testing in order to ensure that the
schools are doing their jobs; on the other hand, higher education breeds an
insular and out of touch bunch of liberals. We can further add to this
irony by noting that there is evidence that the whole notion of a ruling
class of brainy people who don¹t understand regular folks is actually the
product of mass testing. As soon as tests to measure intelligence and
aptitude were developed and then put into place as screens into certain
schools and fields, we obviously developed a requirement that certain
professions would be dominated by people who did well on those tests. So,
although Herrnstein and Murray argue in The Bell Curve that our
technological culture demands that very smart people rule the social
structure, the only real reason that people from a narrow range of cognitive
ability can become lawyers, say, is because you have to pass the LSAT to get
in. Drawing up wills and deeds does not require giftedness. Educators have
known ever since the tests were developed that testing did not really
measure what individuals could do. But, anticipating the business model of
the 21st century, perhaps, James Conant, president of Harvard University in
the middle of the last century said of a colleague advocating educational
admissions tests: although "his conclusions could not be justified from his
data, yet he insisted that the conclusions were good propaganda for the
educational world and he has continued to preach them. . . . Certain
desirable social results may be obtained even though the methods of
obtaining them are wrong."
It is worth noting here that the only question is about the science and
methodology, not on what constitutes a desirable social result. Elitism
has appeal both nostaligically and instinctively, but it is by definition
conservative, in the sense of minimizing change; of keeping things the same,
with a social order that rewards economic achievement and suppresses
intellectual creativity by standardizing everything. Liberalism involves
change-- not as its purpose, but as the result of a consistent application
of abiding principles. Having had the benefits of health care, education,
and homes created by people who love each other and are supported in that
love, we try to keep extending these opportunities through all the world.
We want everyone to have what we have been given, or what we have been
allowed to work for, and we want people to know they are inherently worthy
of time, care, and attention. We believe in love. We believe in the golden
rule. We also believe in truth objectively arrived at, and in our human
capacity to grapple with such truths, and be changed by new information.
When the status quo is challenged; when we feel "our steady, provincial,
traditional, civic life slipping away," the resulting anxiety drives us to
look for someone to blame; some group more powerful than we are; some group
which is gaining while we are losing. It is very telling that if you do an
internet search on the term "cultural elite", you will be refered to
approximately 27,000 white supremacist websites. It was simultaneously
refreshing and terrifying to read homophobic, racist, antifeminist ideas
being expressed openly, rather than in the coded form running through our
public discourse. But Henry Adams comments were with me as I scrolled
through: In the fifty years since the Brown decision struck down
segregation by race, there have been additional court decisions to end
segregation by abilities. We have consistently -- if slowly -- worked
towards universalizing the opportunities offered by civic institutions and
social structures. What we would have expected to have accomplished with
those decisions was a deep enrichment of all that defines our culture:
freedom, reason, tolerance, progress. But the words on my computer screen
and the pictures in my newspaper reveal us to be just as divided and
hatefilled and disinterested in the humanity of those around us as was Bull
Connor and Louise Day Hicks; as Mitt Romney and those who murdered Matthew
Shepherd; as the prison guards in Abu Ghraib, and the Al Queda operatives
who beheaded an unemployed 26 year old walking out of Iraq. This is why we
who are called the liberal elite are confused, and a bit hurt: we know we
are comfortably alive, and want to be spurred into action which changes this
world. We want to help. But we also know we are pained beyond words by
these events, and in need of comfort ourselves. We are called names and
told we have power that we simply do not have, despite our schooling and
our standard of living.
The true elite are those who believe that money and power afford them
the abiliity to not care, as if humanity were somehow a luxury in this
world. There is an energy and excitement in success and achievement; a
survivor¹s affirmation of the self that can be infectious, like Frank
Sinatra singing "New York, New York." But there is a price to valuing
wealth and status above all else. It can be seen along the Arabian sea,
where the immigrant laborers scramble on heaps of metal, washed in toxic
waste. We believe those on the top of either heap are equally worthy, and
have connections between them that run much deeper than profits. We believe
that in the end, apologetics and judgement are both irrelevant. Rich or
poor, conservative or radical, intellectual or practical, we all owe this
world our love. We must engage; see; experience; grow; suffer; change.
That is the real work of all humanity; to bring more love to life.
There is one other author in my pack:
For some time I debated which to write to.
Which would least likely send my letter back?
But I decided that I would give a fright to Jane Austen if I wrote when I
had no right to,....
You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me uncomfortable to see an English spinster of the middle class
describe the amorous effects of brass, and reveal so frankly and with such
sobriety the economic basis of society.
"Top of the Heap" - May 16, 2004
Rev. Andrea Greenwood
Opening Words - W. B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
..., and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!
...but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Reading - A Cartoon Elite, by Nicholas Lemann
POPULISTS used to hate the rich, but now they hate the elite. This shift
has made possible the migration of populism from the Democratic to the
Republican Party. The conservative notion of the elite has some internal
variations -- Dan Quayle's "cultural elite" isn't quite the same as Newt
Gingrich's "corrupt elite." But at its core the notion is descended from two
books published in the late 1950s by left-wing politicians on the other side
of the Atlantic Ocean: Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy and
Milovan Djilas's The New Class.
From Young came the idea that not long after a society institutes mass
educational sorting based on the results of IQ tests, a distinct high-IQ
ruling class will begin to emerge. Because of the tendency of people in this
class to marry fellow students at highly selective universities and pass on
their IQ-rich genes to their offspring, over time the meritocratic upper
class will more and more resemble a hereditary aristocracy. If this class
absorbs the left-wing views that prevail in the universities, then once it
is in power, it will resemble the arrogant Communist bureaucracy that was
the subject of Djilas's book. The emotional charge of conservative attacks
on organizations like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the
National Endowment for the Arts, and on more-amorphous institutions like the
news media, Hollywood, and the Washington establishment, comes from the idea
that they are made up of superior-feeling, isolated New Class members who
want to force their cultural mores on ordinary folks whom they despise.
Populism usually arises from a general discontent that precedes the
identification of a specific villain. People feel that things are out of
control, socially and economically. Men without higher education,
especially, have dramatically lost ground over the past two decades. The
idea that this is the fault of the meritocratic elite is an easy sell.
The pampered meritocrat has become the contemporary equivalent of the
Organization Man of the 1950s -- a symbol of the age for purposes of
middlebrow hand-wringing. A typical description of the type comes from an
article by Michael Lind in Harper's Magazine.
The closer you come to the centers of American politics and society, the
more everyone begins to look the same. . . . the people who run big business
bear a remarkable resemblance to the people who run big labor, who in turn
might be mistaken for the people in charge of the media and the
universities. They are the same people. . . . most of the members of the
American elites went to one of a dozen Ivy League colleges or top state
universities. . . . They talk the same. They walk the same.
Christopher Lasch called it "the new aristocracy of brains," or "the
knowledge class" as he championed a provincial lower-middle-class culture in
which the highest good is community, not the fulfillment of ambition, and
identified with a "petty bourgeoisie" of "small proprietors, artisans,
tradesmen, and farmers," which he admired for "its moral realism, its
understanding that everything has its price, its respect for limits, its
skepticism about progress." But he never patiently laid out a theory of who
the members of the elite are and where they came from.
It's easy, though, to extract a picture of them from the book. They have
a "growing insularity," they inhabit "an artificial world," they spend too
much time talking, exercising, and going to restaurants, they are
excessively mobile -- "at home only in transit, en route to a high-level
conference, to the grand opening of a new franchise, to an international
film festival, or to an undiscovered resort" -- and some partake of a
sob-sisterish brand of social-issue liberalism, a liberalism obsessed with
the rights of women and minorities, with gay rights and unlimited abortion
rights, with the allegedly epidemic spread of child abuse and sexual
harassment, with the need for regulations against offensive speech, and with
curricular reforms designed to end the cultural hegemony of "dead white
European males."
The implication is that American life can be understood as a grand
struggle between these people and the petit bourgeoisie: everything that
helps the former hurts the latter. For example, "feminism's appeal to the
professional and managerial class" is simply that it "provides the
indispensable basis of their prosperous, glamorous, gaudy, sometimes
indecently lavish way of life." Meanwhile, in the lower-middle class
feminism doesn't bring gaudiness, but it does mean that the children wind up
parked in front of the television set. The elite gets richer, and ordinary
people lose ground economically. The elite migrates, and ordinary people
remain in their deteriorating neighborhoods. The elite promotes
cosmopolitanism, and ordinary people feel their steady, traditional,
provincial civic life slipping away.
Hymn 295 Sing Out Praises for the Journey
Sermon
On the Arabian Sea, along sundrenched shores, there are piles of wrecked
shipping vessels which have been carried in on tides, or blown in by fierce
winds, or dragged to rest. What were once the hulls of ships are cut into
salvage metal by workers shipped to the site -- often in the same worn out,
ill-maintained boats they end up processing -- from their native India. It
is a booming industry, recycling this steel. But Greenpeace has been trying
to shut it down. To hear some describe their efforts, a bunch of elitist
liberals are interfering in things they know nothing of, wrong-headedly
thinking they are helping these poor workers while actually depriving them
of their livelihood. What is not mentioned is the housing, which consists
of sand and sky and filth; the violence; or the toxicity of the materials
these people work with, and coincedentally release into the sea and the sky.
The shipping industry itself is a globalized form of free enterprise, and
the salvage operations are just a small arm of it, but profitability is what
drives it all. The steel is worth reclaiming if the Indians do it, and even
die doing it, but it such would not be the case if the heap of metal were in
a country with any health or safety regulations, let alone a set minimum
wage.
At the auction last time around, Susan Flint bought a sermon by me, and
told me right then and there she wanted it to be about elitism. About a
week later, I bought a new bedspread, and I was amused to read that it was
"Elite Brand", made in India. Textiles are a very big industry there, and I
have actually toured a shirt factory outside of Delhi and carpet workrooms
in Agra. These are not places for the elite to work, nor are the products
really meant for liberal elite, because the carpets are handmade, but by
children; and the shirts are mass produced in situations not all that
different from what the mill girls in Lowell might have seen in the
nineteenth century. So I was left wondering what the name Elite was meant
to convey, and found myself reciting the old self-mocking and yet prideful
rhyme: And so this is our old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod,
where Lowells speak only to Cabots, and Cabots speak only to God.
Greenpeace is elitist. A bedspread made in India is elite. Unitarian
Boston is elite. What does this mean? And why? Is it an illness to be
elite, or a does it reflect an achievement of some kind?
Well, it may in fact be both. In addition to being a catchphrase that
can mean almost whatever you need it to mean, the "culturally elite" may be
contemporary America¹s genuine expression of identity crisis. So, skipping
over the specifics of definition, as seems to be common practice among the
theorists, we can focus on the elite as a group which threatens us. Except,
it turns out, it is us.
Yes, we are the sob-sisterish, overly educated, immoral class of people
who are so busy championing the rights of minorities and gays and women that
we have made America weak, and God angry. This has been true since the days
of Henry Adams, who wrote of growing up Unitarian and seeking an education
in mid-19th century Boston: "the problem of life was as simple as it was
classic. Politics offered no difficulty, for there the moral law was a sure
guide. Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for
Good, and three instruments were all she asked -- Suffrage, Common Schools,
and Press. On these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and
man needed only correct knowledge of the facts to reach perfection....
Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the Unitarian
clergy... who controlled society and Harvard College. Uniformly excellent
of character, both moral and intellectual, they proclaimed as their merit
that they insisted on no doctrine, but tried to teach the means of living a
virtuous, useful, unselfish life.... Boston had solved the universe."
Adams lays out the theory of the culturally elite about a hundred years
before the term became a common way to denigrate liberals. He ties together
power, social control, public education and universal suffrage in exactly
the way current theorists do, but according to recent writers the elite are
a post-World War II phenomonen related to society¹s increasingly
technological basis; a phenomenon which threatens our country¹s traditions
and stability. But either way -- 19th century or 21st -- the term refers to
us. Is it fair?
Well, yes and no. Unitarian Universalists are a somewhat elite bunch,
if what we mean by that is we have had many priveleges which have granted us
choices in life. We are not exempt from human struggle or pain, but,
statistically, we are composed of people who have had the advantage of good
medical care, clean homes, enough food, and education, early and long. But
that doesn¹t necessarily make us elitist. The theory of a powerful new
"knowledge class" which is the product of leftist American higher education
comes from a book primarily remembered for its racism, The Bell Curve.
Once upon a time, the book argues, intelligence was randomized throughout
society. Now, because our high tech economy demands a very smart work
force, the cognitively elite are in school together, where they form social
groups and breed, and enter the market so that we now have "an
unprecedented coalition of the smart and the rich."
This theory may feel true to those of us who are from working class
backgrounds; who have educated ourselves into the professional class. But
it is not an idea which holds up well under scrutiny. Intelligence and
class are not related, and often neither are intelligence and achievement,
either financially or otherwise. When we refer to "the professional class",
it ignores the fact that there are plenty of professions which are not
valued monetarily. A job which requires a long education does not equal
wealth. But references to the elite always include financial power.
Without inserting a lot of statistics, I can tell you that as incomes rise,
so does the proportion which is derived from long-term capital gains. What
this means is that the rich are not overly-educated liberals with great
salaries. They have either inherited it or are entrepeneurs on a grand
scale. And in fact, research shows that the more money a person makes, the
more likely that person is to vote Republican. The actual elite, people
with money, power and status, is made up of conservative businessmen and
their families, who may or may not also have had educational advantages. So
why are liberals called elite?
Despite Henry Adams¹ critique, the idea that America is run by a
sophisticated, brainy, culturally liberal group for whom education is the
route to success is quite new, according to Nicholas Lemann. I would agree.
Adams¹ point, after all, was not that having advantages was bad; it was that
believing that education would exempt us from suffering profound human pain.
Genuine education should be transformative, and he saw it as static. So
where did the idea of a liberal elite running the country come from, and
why? Lemann tracks the idea to the Clinton White House, which differed
from previous administrations in that both Clinton and Rodham really did
achieve their success through education and merit, rather than through
social connections, class privelege or any other advantage of the elite. Our
current president is related to fifteen former presidents, the late Princess
Diana, and has multigenerational friendships with royalty and rulers
throughout the world. Bill Clinton is related to his brother Roger, and
Hillary to her brother Hugh.
Having Clinton -- a very bright person with no signs of an elite
background -- as the president caused some reassessment of the power
structure in our country, and made the idea of a liberal meritocracy seem
plausible. But it is bad social science being done for political purposes,
and it has been remarkably effective. It works for the powerful rich, and
for traditionalists who long to preserve that intangible sense of how life
feels. Those of us who believe in human rights and environmental
preservation are attacked from both sides. It maintains the status quo by
using education, rather than money, as a way of measuring how much power we
have in society.
It is particularly ironic that education is seen as the breeding ground
for elitism. After all, who is our education president and author of the No
Child Left Behind bill? It is important that we take note of what is
happening under George Bush. We are witnessing a huge shift in the role of
public education, from a service which was an essential part of our
definition of what it means to be a civilized, democratic culture, to a
business; to an industry with a bottom line. Under the guise of fairness
and objective standards, we have instituted policies which are based in very
negative assumptions about human nature and what is trustworthy, and which
reveal a high level of anxiety about how to locate our positions in the
universe. When I was a child, we had neighbors whose children always got
exactly the same thing we got for Christmas, but doubled -- so if my sisters
and I got a record player to share, the kids up the street would EACH get
the same one. My mother¹s explanation was that a lot of people were
insecure, and so they copied what the perceived upper-class people did
rather than figuring out what they really wanted for themselves. She said
you had to believe you had succeeded before you could ever really critique
the system. So a conflict of those who measure worth with external
standards and those with an internal compass is not about being fair and
objective so much as it is about establishing the pecking order. We see
this every time MCAS scores are reported. The back to basics, traditional
believers in tests want to have not just high scores, but scores which are
higher than a sibling¹s, a neighbor¹s, or a rival community¹s. There is no
intrinsic value in the score, yet the score determines one¹s worth. For
people who hate relativism and want objective standards, these scores are
central to an awful lot of relationships. The tests are part of
distrustful system of rewards and punishments which says, on the one hand,
that everybody can achieve; however, we don¹t believe they will. So we
develop testing corporations with huge government contracts to see if the
schools deserve any financing. There is absolutely no evidence of any
belief that students or teachers want to do well or would do anything if
they did not have to, or that there is any intrinsic meaning in life or
education.
On one hand, we believe in mass testing in order to ensure that the
schools are doing their jobs; on the other hand, higher education breeds an
insular and out of touch bunch of liberals. We can further add to this
irony by noting that there is evidence that the whole notion of a ruling
class of brainy people who don¹t understand regular folks is actually the
product of mass testing. As soon as tests to measure intelligence and
aptitude were developed and then put into place as screens into certain
schools and fields, we obviously developed a requirement that certain
professions would be dominated by people who did well on those tests. So,
although Herrnstein and Murray argue in The Bell Curve that our
technological culture demands that very smart people rule the social
structure, the only real reason that people from a narrow range of cognitive
ability can become lawyers, say, is because you have to pass the LSAT to get
in. Drawing up wills and deeds does not require giftedness. Educators have
known ever since the tests were developed that testing did not really
measure what individuals could do. But, anticipating the business model of
the 21st century, perhaps, James Conant, president of Harvard University in
the middle of the last century said of a colleague advocating educational
admissions tests: although "his conclusions could not be justified from his
data, yet he insisted that the conclusions were good propaganda for the
educational world and he has continued to preach them. . . . Certain
desirable social results may be obtained even though the methods of
obtaining them are wrong."
It is worth noting here that the only question is about the science and
methodology, not on what constitutes a desirable social result. Elitism
has appeal both nostaligically and instinctively, but it is by definition
conservative, in the sense of minimizing change; of keeping things the same,
with a social order that rewards economic achievement and suppresses
intellectual creativity by standardizing everything. Liberalism involves
change-- not as its purpose, but as the result of a consistent application
of abiding principles. Having had the benefits of health care, education,
and homes created by people who love each other and are supported in that
love, we try to keep extending these opportunities through all the world.
We want everyone to have what we have been given, or what we have been
allowed to work for, and we want people to know they are inherently worthy
of time, care, and attention. We believe in love. We believe in the golden
rule. We also believe in truth objectively arrived at, and in our human
capacity to grapple with such truths, and be changed by new information.
When the status quo is challenged; when we feel "our steady, provincial,
traditional, civic life slipping away," the resulting anxiety drives us to
look for someone to blame; some group more powerful than we are; some group
which is gaining while we are losing. It is very telling that if you do an
internet search on the term "cultural elite", you will be refered to
approximately 27,000 white supremacist websites. It was simultaneously
refreshing and terrifying to read homophobic, racist, antifeminist ideas
being expressed openly, rather than in the coded form running through our
public discourse. But Henry Adams comments were with me as I scrolled
through: In the fifty years since the Brown decision struck down
segregation by race, there have been additional court decisions to end
segregation by abilities. We have consistently -- if slowly -- worked
towards universalizing the opportunities offered by civic institutions and
social structures. What we would have expected to have accomplished with
those decisions was a deep enrichment of all that defines our culture:
freedom, reason, tolerance, progress. But the words on my computer screen
and the pictures in my newspaper reveal us to be just as divided and
hatefilled and disinterested in the humanity of those around us as was Bull
Connor and Louise Day Hicks; as Mitt Romney and those who murdered Matthew
Shepherd; as the prison guards in Abu Ghraib, and the Al Queda operatives
who beheaded an unemployed 26 year old walking out of Iraq. This is why we
who are called the liberal elite are confused, and a bit hurt: we know we
are comfortably alive, and want to be spurred into action which changes this
world. We want to help. But we also know we are pained beyond words by
these events, and in need of comfort ourselves. We are called names and
told we have power that we simply do not have, despite our schooling and
our standard of living.
The true elite are those who believe that money and power afford them
the abiliity to not care, as if humanity were somehow a luxury in this
world. There is an energy and excitement in success and achievement; a
survivor¹s affirmation of the self that can be infectious, like Frank
Sinatra singing "New York, New York." But there is a price to valuing
wealth and status above all else. It can be seen along the Arabian sea,
where the immigrant laborers scramble on heaps of metal, washed in toxic
waste. We believe those on the top of either heap are equally worthy, and
have connections between them that run much deeper than profits. We believe
that in the end, apologetics and judgement are both irrelevant. Rich or
poor, conservative or radical, intellectual or practical, we all owe this
world our love. We must engage; see; experience; grow; suffer; change.
That is the real work of all humanity; to bring more love to life.
Closing Words - WH Auden Letter to Lord Byron
There is one other author in my pack:
For some time I debated which to write to.
Which would least likely send my letter back?
But I decided that I would give a fright to Jane Austen if I wrote when I
had no right to,....
You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me uncomfortable to see an English spinster of the middle class
describe the amorous effects of brass, and reveal so frankly and with such
sobriety the economic basis of society.