A Few Words about Elitism

I first heard the word “elite” in a somewhat unusual context.  My Aunt Heartz always seemed to me an exotic figure.  Before the War she had spent time in the Philippines with her military husband, and her house was filled with rattan furniture.  She also had a portable typewriter in which she took pride.  One of its most desirable features was that it was an elite, not a pica.  That was long before I had any technical knowledge of type and printing, but this elite typewriter produced text in approximately ten point, whereas the more standard office model pica was twelve point.  What elite meant to my aunt was something like stylish or elegant—definitely superior, a cut above.

Well, I have heard a great deal more about the words elite (adjective and noun) and elitism in the years since then.  Much of it has been censorious.  That is probably because I spent upwards of half a century teaching at one of the world’s most elite universities listening to my administrators and colleagues gas on about how terrible elitism is.  So let me say a few words in its defense.

People do not want to be “elitists” for good reason.  They do not want to be stuck-up snobs, reveling in their supposed superiority to supposed inferiors.  We want to be egalitarians—believers in the proposition put forward in our Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal.*  That all are “equal” is a very nice thought, but the moment one expresses it, one must realize the ways in which it is not true as well as those in which it is.  The equality of “all men” will not be found in their height, weight, physical dexterity, mental acuity or other accidental features, which in their composite entirety tend to define what we think of as individual identity or “personality”.  We mean that all men have ethical and political equality, that all have “equal protection under the law,” and (if we are religious) that all have certain rights endowed by God.  That is the essence of the matter.  When Robbie Burns writes “My love is like a red, red rose,” he is not trying to convince us that his girlfriend is bright vermillion of hue or that sharp spines protrude from her limbs.  No, he is claiming that she shares the essential aesthetic and moral attributes of “rosiness,” whatever they may be.

It may be impossible to impose effective economic coherence upon the egalitarian ideal.  The radical anarchist claim that that is the case cannot be refuted by reference to any known political system in today’s world, certainly.  Modern democracies have done a poor to fair-to-middling job at best, but they have been able to achieve even this only on the basis of elitism—that is, on some form or another of representative government.  The English word elite is very easily traced through its immediate French source to its Latin origins.  Elite means elected, chosen, picked   If you exercise any conscious sense of preference in the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the friends you make, the partner you marry, indeed if you make any choice among plural possible options, you are practicing elitism.

            All this is to say that you are being discriminating or practicing discrimination, another word likely to cause anxiety to many well-meaning people and therefore one perhaps deserving  a brief philological mini-lecture of its own.  Discrimination involves making a judgment or decision in relation to alternative possibilities.  One such distinction is between guilt and innocence.  Our word crime derives from the idea that a fact  has been ascertained by a certain kind of discrimination or judgement.  But discrimination can be practiced on the basis of both sound and unsound criteria, and those judged unsound have changed dramatically in the age of democracy.  It is the fear (and history) of using unsound criteria that spooks many people today.  For effective purposes the word discrimination as it is mainly used in your newspaper refers to racial discrimination.  Usually it is a fairly easy empirical matter to discriminate between a man and a woman, and between a black person and a white one.  But that discrimination is a matter of personal identity which, according to our Constitution, is politically irrelevant.  Though it has been very different in the not distant past, race-based discrimination is now legally authorized only in various “affirmative action” programs, where its operations are often highly opaque and contested.  In such programs, incidentally, the elitist program is often even more articulate than it is elsewhere.

            It is probably too late to save the word elitism or to use it in a benign sense.   Not too many words can survive the suffix ism.  There might yet be hope for discrimination, which is, from a certain point of view, the method as well as the goal of all education.  The cultivation of discriminating taste, the discriminating consumer, a discriminating mind—all these  are still positive concepts for most of us.  The value of discrimination is not limited to the purely aesthetic realm—concluding that King Lear is more worthy of your sustained attention than a Harlequin romance.  It is discrimination that advances our civilization in the material and practical realms as well.  The engineer who is expert in the strength of materials will discriminate between pre-stressed concrete and braided steel cables by applying expert knowledge to a specific situation.  Just as we would avoid shoddy construction materials in building our houses we should strive to avoid shoddy thinking.  And there’s another most interesting word, shoddy.  Its principal meaning as a noun was woolen stuff made from picking apart old rags.  The adjective soon followed.  It is akin to tawdry, the kind of stuff you could pick up cheap at Saint Audrey’s fair on October 17, the late medieval version of the Dollar General Store.  If we do not want our minds to be cluttered with the shoddy and the tawdry we are forced to become elitists through the operations of discrimination.

*And as an elitist, I am impatient of the philological ignorance than cannot recognize in this eighteenth-century usage the generic sense of all men as human kind.