There’s a well-worn fictional scenario. Several enlightened people have a vexing conundrum – a murderer is on the loose, perhaps, or they’ve lost a golf ball. They’ll charge about like decapitated fowl before another person – usually male, often posh and with a vaguely endearing lack of gaum – blithely wanders past to solve the case or find the ball then amble off again, unaware of this achievement. That’s not too unlike the Telegraph neoconservative Charles Moore stumbling on a truth of our politics…
So the problem with “privilege” today is not that the dear dimwits of old are getting jobs because of who Daddy was. It is rather that the international elites of the entire modern world are genuinely very able – which is not, of course, the same as saying they are good or right. Given the nature of modern politics, which is much more to do with dealing with lawyers and bureaucrats, attending international conferences and clever media handling than it is with representing one’s electors in Parliament, these elites are probably producing the right sort of people. Whether we really want to be governed in such a way is another matter.
Thanks for offering me a choice, Mr Moore. These bastards won’t, of course.
January 29, 2011 at 10:26 am
revolution anyone?
February 3, 2011 at 8:52 pm
Moore’s point is the same one made by Charles Murray in the Bell Curve – the emergence and dominance of the ‘Cognitive Elite’, aided by assortative mating. He didn’t see it as a good thing either. Others like David (‘Bobos in Paradise’) Brooks make the same point more entertainingly in a US context :
“I’m not sure I’d like to be one of the people featured on the New York Times weddings page, but I know I’d like to be the father on one of them. Imagine how happy Stanley J. Kogan must have been, for example, when his daughter Jamie was admitted to Yale. Then imagine his pride when Jamie made Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude. Stanley himself is no slouch in the brains department: he’s a pediatric urologist in Croton-on-Hudson, with teaching positions at the Cornell Medical Center and the New York Medical College. Still, he must have enjoyed a gloat or two when his daughter put on that cap and gown.
And things only got better. Jamie breezed through Stanford Law School. And then she met a man—Thomas Arena—who appeared to be exactly the sort of son-in-law that pediatric urologists dream about. He did his undergraduate work at Princeton, where he, too, made Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude. And he, too, went to law school, at Yale. After school they both went to work as assistant U.S. attorneys for the mighty Southern District of New York.
These two awesome résumés collided at a wedding ceremony in Manhattan, and given all the school chums who must have attended, the combined tuition bills in that room must have been staggering. The rest of us got to read about it on the New York Times weddings page. The page is a weekly obsession for hundred of thousands of Times readers and aspiring Balzacs. Unabashedly elitist, secretive, and totally honest, the “mergers and acquisitions page” (as some of its devotees call it) has always provided an accurate look at at least a chunk of the American ruling class. And over the years it has reflected the changing ingredients of elite status.
When America had a pedigreed elite, the page emphasized noble birth and breeding. But in America today its genius and geniality that enable you to join the elect. And when you look at the Times weddings page, you can almost feel the force of the mingling SAT scores. It’s Dartmouth marries Berkeley, MBA weds Ph.D., Fulbright hitches with Rhodes, Lazard Frères joins with CBS, and summa cum laude embraces summa cum laude (you rarely see a summa settling for a magna—the tension in such a marriage would be too great). The Times emphasizes four things about a person—college degrees, graduate degrees, career path, and parents’ profession—for these are the markers of upscale Americans today.
Even though you want to hate them, it’s hard not to feel a small tug of approval at the sight of these Resume Gods. Their expressions are so open and confident; their teeth are a tribute to the magnificence of American orthodonture; and since the Times will only print photographs in which the eyebrows of the bride and groom are at the same level, the couples always book so evenly matched. These are the kids who spent the crucial years between ages 16 and 24 winning the approval of their elders. Others may have been rebelling at that age or feeling alienated or just basically exploring their baser natures. But the people who made it to this page controlled their hormonal urges and spent their adolescence impressing teachers, preparing for the next debate tournament, committing themselves to hours of extracurricular and volunteer work, and doing everything else that we as a society want teenagers to do. The admissions officer deep down in all of us wants to reward these mentor magnets with bright futures, and the real admissions officers did, accepting them into the right colleges and graduate schools and thus turbocharging them into adulthood.
The overwhelming majority of them were born into upper-middle-class households. In 84 percent of the weddings, both the bride and the groom have a parent who is a business executive, professor, lawyer, or who otherwise belongs to the professional class. You’ve heard of old money; now we see old brains. And they tend to marry late—the average age for brides is 29 and for grooms is 32. They also divide pretty neatly into two large subgroups: nurturers and predators. Predators are the lawyers, traders, marketers—the folk who deal with money or who spend their professional lives negotiating or competing or otherwise being tough and screwing others. Nurturers tend to be liberal arts majors. They become academics, foundation officials, journalists, activists, and artists—people who deal with ideas or who spend their time cooperating with others or facilitating something. About half the marriages consist of two predators marrying each other: a Duke MBA who works at NationsBank marrying a Michigan Law grad who works at Winston & Strawn. About a fifth of the marriages on the page consist of two nurturers marrying each other: a Fulbright scholar who teaches humanities at Stanford marrying a Rhodes scholar who teaches philosophy there. The remaining marriages on the page are mixed marriages in which a predator marries a nurturer. In this group the predator is usually the groom. A male financial consultant with an MBA from Chicago may marry an elementary school teacher at a progressive school who received her master’s in social work from Columbia.”
February 4, 2011 at 12:47 am
Can’t see much I disagree with there. (With two provisos: (a) that “genius” can depend on class and (b) that one can still prosper as an airhead if you’re somebody important’s airhead.) The weddings page sounds curious but I’d bet that a divorces page would be far more interesting…