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Wednesday, April 05, 2006
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Two Posts For the Price Of One Let’s see if we can bundle Camille Paglia and Duke lacrosse into one post. During questions and answers after her talk at GW the other night, Paglia was asked about the situation at Duke. Here’s what she said, more or less: University athletes these days are a kind of master race. They get special favors, special dispensations. Does this sense of entitlement lead to crime? How does the ethos of the college sports team turn into Attila the Hun? It’s true that athletes at most campuses -- elite and non-elite -- get special treatment in all things. But the effort here is to understand how one team’s players at Duke -- among the most notable, high-profile, elite schools in the country -- managed to go so badly wrong. What’s distinctive about campuses like Duke is that almost everyone’s the beneficiary of special favors and dispensations. The Duke lacrosse team stands at the top of a ladder of entitlements on various rungs of which stand most of the students at these sorts of schools. Overwhelmingly, the students are from wealthy, indulgent families, and they have pretty much always experienced themselves as special. As perhaps better than other people. Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons offers a satirical take on these students; but if we want a deeper understanding, we need, I think, to turn to American historians and cultural critics -- among whom, for me, the late Christopher Lasch is among the most powerful on the question of why America is currently generating a rather scary elite subculture. I’ll also look at the work of Thomas Frank and Mickey Kaus. Lasch argues in his book The Revenge of the Elites (an almost too pertinent title in the present case) that the essential character of America’s elites has changed in the last few decades. From a civic sense of noblesse oblige, they have retreated into self-indulgent escapism, a removal from common American life which Robert Reich has called “the secession of the symbolic analysts.” (“Symbolic analysts” because these are people whose jobs typically involve the analysis of data rather than the generation of goods. Recall the difficulty Sherman McCoy in Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities had in explaining to his daughter what he -- an investment banker -- did for a living.) Moving in an abstract world in their workplace, symbolic analysts shift to a highly controlled world of private pleasures outside of work (movies like The Truman Show try to get at this). Here’s Lasch’s description: To an alarming extent the privileged classes - by an expansive definition, the top 20 percent - have made themselves independent not only of crumbling industrial cities but of public services in general. They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in company- supported plans, and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence against them. In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. May of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. And here, in very similar language, is Mickey Kaus, in his book, The End of Equality: We’ve always had rich and poor. But money is increasingly something that enables the rich, and even the merely prosperous, to live a life apart from the poor. And the rich and semi-rich increasingly seem to want to live a life apart, in part because they are increasingly terrified of the poor, in part because they increasingly seem to feel that they deserve such a life, that they are in some sense superior to those with less. An especially precious type of equality - equality not of money but in the way we treat each other and live our lives - seems to be disappearing. … [T]he wealthiest 20 or 30 percent of Americans are ‘seceding,’ as Robert Reich puts it, into separate, often self-sufficient suburbs, where they rarely even meet members of non-wealthy classes, except in the latter’s role as receptionists or repairmen… Imagine the smirks of these people, and their children, when their universities sanctimoniously speak of the value of economic and social diversity. Marooned in wealth monocultures, they mouth democratic cliches but cultivate an icy conviction of their personal exemption from common life. The heavy, high-riding vehicles they drive when speeding through the public realm convey to the rest of America superiority, aggression, and untouchability. Naturally the rest of America hates these people’s guts. Even if some of these people are slightly more evolved than what I’ve described -- even if they are David Brooks’s bourgeois bohemians -- they are, as Thomas Frank points out, still loathed: [P]eople know that in everyday life they are being screwed in a hundred ways, and that the people who benefit from this screwing are the ones they see driving Volvos and drinking lattes and enjoying life in Bethesda [UD’s hometown] or Georgetown or wherever. But there’s a twist: the children of Bethesda and Georgetown know that they themselves have been screwed over -- by their own parents. One of UD’s commenters got at this recently: I went to Landon's sister school and my sister was friends with some of the boys on Landon's lacrosse team. The cheating scandal discussed in this article, and the recent Duke scandal, don't really shock me. Yes, cheating was widespread at Landon and other local prep schools, as was heavy drinking to the point of alcoholism by age 18. But I don't think, as UD suggests in a later post, that either privilege or alcohol is the issue, per se. In many ways, I think it's the parents. In my experience, parents of prep school kids were more committed to their own work and social lives than parenting. I saw parents with very high expectations of their kids, but little commitment to teaching their children values. Money and socializing always seemed to come before family. Parents often turned a blind eye to drinking or even supplied the alcohol or the money for renting beach houses where kids spent unsupervised weeks drinking and having sex. There is only so much Landon, or Duke, can do when the parents exert enormous pressure on their children without teaching them values. I take issue only a little with this insightful remark. These parents have in fact taught their children values, values thoroughly internalized by some of the men on the Duke lacrosse team. These values are hyper-competitiveness, materialism as emotional compensation, neglect of non-instrumental human relationships, exclusivity and the fanatic small group bonding that accompanies it, and contempt for the less wealthy and less socially successful. What I’m suggesting is that the Duke lacrosse players represent a kind of Darwinian extreme, an evolutionary high point, in our immensely successful country’s trend toward affluent aggressivity. As often happens in Alexandrine cultures, a certain ironic reversal has begun to set in with cases like that of Duke, as learned inhumane behaviors go too far -- as the young begin, as the young will, to test the constraints on their imperial powers. |