“But who, exactly, are these snobs that David Brooks is so upset about?” writes Michael Kinsley in today’s Washington Post, in response to a Brooks column about blue state snobbery and its relation to Sarah Palin. “In our hearts, of course, and in our secret covens on Sunday mornings when real Americans are in church so we hope they won’t notice, we liberals despise religion and loathe families. We knew that conservatives like Rush Limbaugh had seen through us, but we thought we had the David Brooks types fooled. Despite this, my impression is that liberals and Democrats have been careful to a fault about saying anything that would reveal our secret snobbery in public.”
Kinsley’s usually a witty writer, but his lame sallies here — secret covens? – suggest discomfort with his own assertions.
That discomfort is well-founded, as I’ll suggest in a moment. But first:
You need only scan the comment threads for her last two posts over at UD’s Inside Higher Ed branch campus to confirm the impression that our reemerging culture war offers: Many Americans detest professors and intellectuals (few professors are intellectuals, but let that go) — the ultimate embodiments, for them, of the cruel, out of touch, anti-democratic snobbery Kinsley’s denying. Let these haughty fools, with their utopian abstractions, their arrogant conviction of their correctness in all things, and their contempt for the actualities of ordinary peoples’ lives, get hold of the government, and watch it implode. These people live in a removed, hyper-controlled environment, with no real connections to their own families, let alone community and nation. Find them in David Lodge’s novel Changing Places, jetting about from conference to conference or consultancy to consultancy, estranged from ex-wives and ex-children… They don’t understand, and don’t like, real Americans, and if they get a chance to rule, they will destroy the nation.
Here’s Christopher Lasch on them, from his book The Revolt of the Elites:
The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life – hence their feeble attempt to compensate by embracing a strenuous regimen of gratuitous exercise. Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it has been called – as distinguished from the palpable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in the “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.
What purer distillation of this class than the American – or Canadian (see below) – university professor, curled in her tenured womb, sucking her thumb over Baudrillard and fantasizing revolution?
The professor’s version of snobbery is the most toxic of snobberies because it doesn’t say My car is better than yours. It says My consciousness is better than yours.
UD’s blogpal Timothy Burke tells a toxic tale about an exchange he once had with a fellow faculty member at Swarthmore:
I had a chance a few years ago to attend a dinner for a guest lecturer. Some of my favorite colleagues from Swarthmore were there. The conversation started with issues that were fairly specific to the speaker’s presentation and work, but very rapidly grew into a fast-paced bull session aimed at the primal question, “What is a good society”?
Afterwards, I talked with one of my colleagues who hadn’t been there about how this had been the best discussion I’d had since I was an undergraduate, and my feeling of melancholy about how rare and odd this conversation actually was. My colleague looked puzzled and said, ‘Sounds awfully simplistic.’
Maybe Palinites and Huckabites will derive some comfort from this — From the recognition that snobbish mental belittling goes all the way up, with one Swarthmore professor taking a swipe at another. But UD mainly wants to note, again, that thinking class snobbery is the cruelest of American snobberies, because it’s so intimate. It’s almost obscene. It goes to your most private depth, the texture of your soul, and says My interiority is finer than yours, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Europeans are simpler, more human snobs. They’re culture snobs, as a Canadian sports reporter notes of European sports reporters:
The Italian press corps is … the most cliquish. The rest of the press is simply ignored. Like the German press gang, the media passes worn by the Italians often make for interesting reading. About half of them appear to be called “Professor” while the Germans are big on being “Doctor.” I’ve always assumed this has to do with the official title a person with a BA or MA is entitled to receive in Italy or Germany. Me, I’ve got some university education, but I wouldn’t even mention that unless there was a point, and I’d be mortified if anybody called me “Professor.” I just writes for the paper.
Snobbery, says Joseph Epstein, is “arranging to make yourself feel superior at the expense of other people.” But there’s little expense to others in this version of snobbery. It’s quite egalitarian. Any moron can put Dottore in front of his name. We, like the Canadian, enjoy an unclouded laugh at him, just as we laugh at people who make up grand histories for their families because they’re family snobs (another popular Euro-snobbery).
Red Staters are right to recognize important differences between these ancient impulses and the snobbery that says I’m too smart to believe in God, and I’m too free to be bound by family constraints. Of course you can be a very virtuous and non-snobby atheist and divorcee (John McCain left his first wife and doesn’t seem, to UD, to be very God-fearing, but she has no doubt of his virtue.), but you can also hold these views in a way that demeans religious non-divorcees.
Here’s another way of saying this, from a recent essay in the San Francisco Chronicle:
‘You go to a place like Chicago,’ [says one San Francisco resident] ‘the only thing they’re snobbish about is pizza. Here our snobbery is an attitude that we’re living this ideal — this notion of I have a higher plane of understanding about the social good. I think we actually proselytize our point of view more strongly than other parts of country that are more overtly religious,” [a San Francisco resident] said.
… Largely devoid of bona fide religion, people in San Francisco tend to imbue lifestyle choices with a spiritual reverence. We are churchlessly holier-than-thou, hipper-than-thou and most definitely more-virtuous-than-thou. Among our temples is Chez Panisse, the church of Alice Waters, a pilgrimage for those spreading the gospel of “slow food” and nourishing their very souls on organically grown chard and heirloom Brandywine tomatoes while rescuing the endangered Blenheim apricot.
Red Staters are traditional money and size snobs, if they’re snobs at all. McMansions and Hummers don’t enrage them the way Blenheim apricots do; in fact, they’re building their own McMansions and leasing their own Hummers. What enrages them is the enigmatic mental superiority of latté liberals.
“They never tell you everything they’re thinking,” a McMansion owner in affluent, old-money Chevy Chase, a suburb near UD’s own ‘thesda, complains to a Washington Post reporter who’s there to report on mansionization. He’s furious at his quietly derisive neighbors, who find his new chateau alarming and embarrassing but won‘t come out and say it. Earlier, this man had seen one of these snobs, a Mr. Russell, talking to the Post reporter about all the big houses going up, and he had shouted at him:
‘“We like all the big houses!” the homeowner yelled at Russell, who ignored him.”Again, this is what they’re doing to the water,” Russell continued, pointing out [to the Post reporter] how runoff [from the new big houses] is being piped onto the street.
The man walked up to his front porch and yelled out in an effeminate voice: “The water’s coming! The water’s coming! The psychos are coming! Why don’t you do something with your life?”
“That’s very mature,” Russell finally called back.
…[The new homeowner, who's a builder,] has built 7,000-square-foot houses in town as well as smaller ones, such as his own 4,200-square-footer with a waterfall and goldfish pond in back. “I’m a high school dropout,” [he] said. “And I’m damn proud of what I did.”’
More coming up.
September 10th, 2008 at 10:06AM
Kinsley’s question is: who, exactly, are these snobs? And I’m still not seeing any answers. Someone overheard by a guy in another blog one time? Fictional characters from a 33-year-old novel? Not exactly forensic evidence.
But hey, Ressentiment is the new black this Fall.
September 10th, 2008 at 10:08AM
I am currently teaching Nowhere in my Renaissance and Reformation course. The following passages spring to mind:
"Consider how few of those who do work are doing really essential things. For where money is the standard of everything, many vain, superfluous trades are bound to be carried on simply to satisfy luxury and licentiousness."
"Some others are permanently exempted from work so that they may devote themselves to study. . .from this class of scholars are chosen ambassadors, priests, tranibors and the prince himself."
September 10th, 2008 at 10:30AM
Hold on, Alan. Autobiography, witnessing, coming up. As Whitman said: “I was the man. I suffered. I was there.”
September 10th, 2008 at 10:56AM
I’m too free to be bound by family constraints.
So despite the fact that divorce rates are higher in red state America than they are in blue state America, the blue states are the ones pshawing about family constraints?
September 10th, 2008 at 11:13AM
David:
I’d say this is as much about red staters’ perceptions of themselves and of others, and the particular values they put upon particular human fuck-ups, as it is about statistics.
It’s not that red staters avoid divorce; it’s that they have a different attitude toward it from blue staters. It seems to me (though I’m certainly no expert) that they tend to think many blue staters who divorce do it out of some self-aggrandizing liberation narrative (they’re not being fair in thinking this, but, again, this is about attitudes in a culture war), whereas when they do it it’s a darker story about weakness, the “unpredictable hazards that afflict human life,” as Lasch puts it.
September 10th, 2008 at 11:30AM
red staters’ perceptions of themselves
In your post, you intermingled those perceptions with your endorsements of those perceptions. Thus:
But UD mainly wants to note, again, that thinking class snobbery is the cruelest of American snobberies, because it’s so intimate.
and, from the part I quoted:
Red Staters are right to recognize important differences between these ancient impulses and the snobbery that says I’m too smart to believe in God, and I’m too free to be bound by family constraints. Of course you can be a very virtuous and non-snobby atheist and divorcee (John McCain left his first wife and doesn’t seem, to UD, to be very God-fearing, but she has no doubt of his virtue.), but you can also hold these views in a way that demeans religious non-divorcees.
By the way, the paragraph is written in a way that removes actual examples of people exhibiting such snobbery. Where’s SOS when you need her?
My point with these discussions is not to deny that one can come up with anecdotal evidence of such snobbery, but no one’s (to my knowledge) has demonstrated that such snobbery occurs more than all other kinds of prejudices that everyday people, whatever their intelligence, occupation, or geographic location, bring to the table.
September 10th, 2008 at 11:38AM
Where’s SOS when you need her?
I did wonder that myself. I think this posting could have done with a second draft. Any undergraduate who was so fuzzy about the difference between facts and perceptions would feel the wrath of my red pen.
September 10th, 2008 at 12:06PM
(few professors are intellectuals, but let that go)
I don’t think we should let that go in the current fascinating discussion. Erudition and skill do not make an intellectual: someone who has the capacity to understand in a dispassionate, balanced way and to act accordingly. My grandmother had more intellect than half my former colleagues/opinionators.
As usual, the bottom line is the failure of the educational system to provide the hard challenges that will develop intellect.
September 10th, 2008 at 12:16PM
David, I didn’t take UD to be claiming that the type of snobbery being discussed was more common than all the other kinds of prejudices that everyday people bring to the table. I took the point to be that we shouldn’t be surprised if people react with greater resentment to this kind of snobbery. My interiority is better than yours really does sting more than My hummer could eat your second-hand Ford.
Megan McArdle has been blogging on some related themes recently, most recently with this post:
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/coastal_privilege.php
Also, I think the red stater/blue stater trope is probably overdue for retirement, not because it traffics in stereotypes about people but because it encourages stereotypes about states:
http://www.newnewdemocrats.org/2004/11/nation-of-purple.html
September 10th, 2008 at 12:17PM
Ah, but she wasn’t an intellectual, francofou. Unless you’re Simone de Beauvoir’s grandson [GrandSON? I don't even know if you're a man. For some reason, I assume you are. Or have we had exchanges in which you said you were one? I think we have...] and forgot to tell me. To have been an intellectual, at least as I’ve always understood the term, your grandmother had to have produced intellectual work — published ideas, etc.
September 10th, 2008 at 12:20PM
Perhaps this is off-topic but I think that if intellectual credentials were truly indicative of leadership qualities then universities themselves would be shining examples of well-run organizations. We all know that’s hardly the case, just to use the example of my university (Palin’s alma mater), we regularly run ourselves into financial rocks then ask the state legislators, mostly potato farmers, for aid. This comes with the plea of ‘we’re educating your children’ (sometimes that’s doubtful). BTW we hit the rocks from stupid decisions made by seemingly smart people. Perhaps the smartest people in the state.
It doesn’t help our case when I have colleagues who routinely lecture the public in letters to the editor and op-ed pieces about their surly ways and propensity to shop at Walmart. UD hit the nail on the head with
"thinking class snobbery is the cruelest of American snobberies, because it’s so intimate. It’s almost obscene."
September 10th, 2008 at 1:21PM
I took the point to be that we shouldn’t be surprised if people react with greater resentment to this kind of snobbery. My interiority is better than yours really does sting more than My hummer could eat your second-hand Ford.
Which, I think, is also difficult to defend. There are all kinds of snobbery in the world, and a lot of them have actual physical consequences for people, like not being able to get jobs, or get into a particular organization because they’re not from the "right" kind of people (women not being able to get into golf clubs and do the old-boy network is a recent example). Those create actual problems for people, as opposed to some diffuse sense that somewhere a professor is sneering at them because their interiority is inferior.
Let me suggest a different explanation. Getting a college degree has become absolutely critical to economic success in the last generation. College at the same time has become more expensive and (at the high end) more exclusive. A lot of people are stressed by the challenge of getting their child into a good school and then paying for it (hell, I know I am). The people seen as the gatekeepers (the professoriate) or who have already gotten through it are perceived with some resentment. That explains the paradox mentioned above of cursing the professors while celebrating a local child getting into an Ivy.
And it also locates the failure of higher education in the much more real realm of spiraling tuition costs and increasing demand/limited supply, as opposed to a cartoon where ordinary people are driving to work, being heckled at stoplights by Lit Crit Ph.Ds about their lack of interiority.
September 10th, 2008 at 1:53PM
Thinking about all this myself today at Easily Distracted.
There is a kind of reversal one could perform on the point you raise, which is that the anti-snobs are doing pretty much the same thing you argue the snobs are doing. Anti-intellectualism in the US asserts also that it possesses a superior interiority, a finer way of knowing and being–and moreover, it sometimes (as now) asserts that not only does the anti-intellectual have a better kind of self, the anti-intellectual is more in tune with national destiny, with the true character of America. Think of all the scenes in Westerns where the East Coast dude shows up, nose upturned: he holds himself finer and more civilized, and is typically violently disabused of his pretentions, and often in so doing is even divested of his Americanness: he acts "European", he is not what a real American man ought to be.
So this can’t just be about the sin of holding oneself finer than another class or type of person: that’s too easy, too distributed.
A very different thought, coming from the entry I wrote today. Maybe the people commenting at Inside Higher Ed aren’t "Most Americans". Maybe the culture war as we see it now is really a much more intramural struggle between one group of middle-class Americans and another group of middle-class Americans. Maybe it’s not between McDonald’s and Chez Panisse but between the Olive Garden and Chez Panisse; not between someone with a GED and Harvard Law but between Penn State BAs and Harvard BAs. Maybe the people who write and talk at each other furiously on the Internet, *all* of them, are not really very descriptive of a much wider national conversation that is more diffuse, less intense, and more bygones-be-bygones. It only takes a cluster of about five or six very very intense people in a given message thread at a blog to make a reader feel like they are peering through a window at some larger national or social whole, and that is often a mistaken impression.
September 10th, 2008 at 5:28PM
"I don’t even know if you’re a man."
My mother often said the same thing.
What if we substitute "intelligence" for "intellect"?
September 10th, 2008 at 6:54PM
Intelligence for intellect is just the ticket.
(You make me laugh, francofou.)
September 10th, 2008 at 11:06PM
Ah… the culture wars. I exhibited my snobby liberal elite bias when I explained to my uncle Jim that the reason he didn’t go to Yale in 1969 was not that some black woman took his spot in a quota scheme but was more probably because he earned C’s in high school. I also said that I was sorry that he didn’t get into the National Guard and got stuck going to Vietnam even though there was a spot in the Guard for George W. Bush. Now he is now fretting about the under-clocked overtime he is being forced to work at the crappy job without a decent (well, O.K non-existent)pension that he’s been stuck in ever since John Deere laid him off in 1985. Apparently he can’t he can’t afford to go without the health insurance that he needs because his wife Iris has diabetes. I said to him, "now does that sound to you like the great promise of freedom and prosperity available only in America?" The GOP candidates rarely address health care and the economy in their campaign but uncle Jim and aunt Iris are still voting McCain – Palin because scary liberals like Barrack Obama just piss them off. What can you do?
September 11th, 2008 at 2:24AM
I agree with David that the gatekeeper role of elite colleges and universities has a lot to do with the disproportionate amount of attention the cultural and political views of professors receive. But I don’t think that’s the whole story, nor do I think it’s incompatible with the kind of analysis that UD was offering. Put another way: I think I can agree with what you say, even if you don’t agree with what I said.
There are all kinds of snobbery in the world, and a lot of them have actual physical consequences for people, like not being able to get jobs, or get into a particular organization because they’re not from the "right" kind of people (women not being able to get into golf clubs and do the old-boy network is a recent example).
Here, on the other hand, I think we’re just talking past each other. You seem to be arguing that the significance of the kind of snobbery we’re discussing is relatively trivial when compared to things like sexual discrimination. That may be – I’m certainly not inclined to argue the point – but I don’t think it undermines the claim that class snobbery is the cruelest form of snobbery because I don’t consider sexism to be a form of snobbery at all (male chauvinist pig is not a species of the genus snob).
Finally, if we think that this is just a matter of my being angry because somewhere on the East Coast a professor is thinking mean thoughts about my pick-up truck then of course it’s going to seem like an overreaction and more than a little silly. But a lot of this snobbery is given very public expression, as for instance in the case of the wave of "What the hell is wrong with you, you dumb hicks!?" analysis that followed the 2004 election. Moreover, since, as you say, many hiring and other business decisions are influenced by our sense of who is and who is not the "right" kind of person, it would be extremely surprising if cultural snobbery did not play a role in some of those decisions. So I don’t think it’s safe to assume that this is a prejudice without "physical" consequences.
September 11th, 2008 at 6:59AM
My interiority is better than yours…
The correct response…
"You would know, you having your head up your ass."
September 13th, 2008 at 7:27PM
I’m afraid that I must throw in with Alan, David and Francofou here: this is not UD at her best, which I am chagrined to say in my "debut" comment. It is one thing to have contempt for theory-heads in the university, but that group is simply the straw-man whom the [Republicans? the Conservatives? the Right? the Establishment? help me out here, I want a term for those who desire an anti-education electorate not derived by the group itself] use to turn the general public against any informed opinion. Most of those posting here, including, of course, UD, are "in the racket." We believe in teaching people to think in organized ways with various checks and balances on our emotional impulses. The rhetoric against intellectuals (a broad label for people who have degrees in something that leads them to think about concepts in terms other than "my leader says I should believe….", for my purposes here)goes farther and deeper than the folks parodied on the blog "Stuff White People Like." It leads to the selection of a president like W., who was woefully unqualified for the job, not because of his "values," but because he believed his opinion of himself and his initial impressions on anything were sufficient for making complicated decisions with far-reaching ramifications. It is true that most colleges encourage contempt for the working-classes, and that this should be changed. I’ve found that a large number of professors are from working-class families and try to remain closeted, when they aren’t wearing the fact like a medal. But I don’t think that we can lay the problems of the world at the feet of people who don’t yell at neighbors in front of reporters, or anecdotal yuppies who think that a preference for heirloom tomatoes marks them among the saved.
September 15th, 2008 at 8:10PM
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