Elitism

Elitism strikes again

 

            The Supreme Court decision about the legality of race-based college admissions has been almost universally—and in more than one instance probably hypocritically—deplored by American college and university administrators; but of course it has been accepted, for now, as the inconvenient law of the land.  But I doubt that much as been “settled.”  Quite apart from the widespread hope for a different court and a different decision at some point in the future, a large and well remunerated section of our legal fraternity have as their principal task finding ways of skirting such inconvenient laws as have not already been obviated by the friendly commerce of our large and well remunerated lobbying fraternity with the elected members of our Congress.  I don’t think we have any hard data on how the public rates lawyers on mass, only a frequently cited sanguinary suggestion in one of Shakespeare’s history plays.  But on Congress we do have a statistic: nineteen percent of Americans approve of the job it is doing.

 

            For the moment, the outrage of the aggrieved has shifted to another subject: legacy admissions.  That is the practice of giving some degree of preference to candidates for admission who have a plausible connection to the institution already.  This usually means that they are the children or grandchildren of alumni of the institution.  Oversimplifying somewhat: if you cannot have “affirmative action” for the underprivileged, how do you justify it for the overprivileged?  I am not entering the debate on the substance of the issues involved.  Neither one seems to me open-and-shut one way or the other.  The one dealt with by the Supreme Court was decided by a majority but not by a unanimous vote.  But I do want to talk about a topic front and center in the discussions: that is elitism.  Everybody seems to be against elitism, a very curious opinion to be held by citizens of the United States of America.  It seems to me that a lot of people don’t know what the word elite means.  For a long time I didn’t either.  I thought it referred only to the small type face on an old Remington portable typewriter.

 

            Elite is a French loan word, the past participle of the verb elire, which derives from the Latin eligo, the past participle of which is electus.  If electus sounds to you that it might have something to do with English elect, you are absolutely right.  What is elected or elite has been chosen from among plural options on some supposed belief in its comparative desirability.  The system of the American Constitutional political system is explicitly elitist.  We choose our legislators and our chief executives on the supposition of their superiority to alternative possibilities who are not elite or elected.  If you have ever voted for anything, if you have ever chosen one garment over another, if you have ever asked for chips rather than rice on the blue-plate special, you are an elitist.  If you put the Latin reflexive pronoun se at the front of eligo you get seligo, to select.  If you can in today’s English find a dime’s worth of difference between elect and select, please let me know. 

 

            Think of a few instances in which election or selection is involved.  Do you prefer any particular commercial good over another similar to it?  Is  the National Football League Draft “rigged” in favor of good football players?  If you prefer your soft-boiled egg pointy-side up in the eggcup, are you exercising malign discrimination against Big-Endians?  Is it unfair of your teacher to grade your course paper by a means other than the tossed-down-stairway method?  Now very manifestly the process of college admissions has to be an elite process that renders elite results.  Of course electing applicants for admission solely on the basis of their skin color would also be an exercise in elitism, as would specializing on the applicant’s eye color, whether their zipcodes begin with an even or an odd number, or possibly their shoe size.  This is not sophistry or philological arcana.  People who complain about “elitism” in American higher education, and in the practices of selective admission in general, are really complaining about something else, namely the social and sociological results they rightly or wrongly associate with a “good” college education.  But if it seems reasonable to you that the owners and managers of the New York Yankees hire their team members on the basis of their anticipated capacities to play baseball well, or that the Met choose its opera performers on its evaluation of their abilities to sing well, what possible objection can there be to a college admissions committee that tries in good faith to assess candidates on their probable abilities to thrive in, contribute to, and make the most of the educational opportunities in the specific institutional context on offer?  All of the “elite” colleges with which I am familiar are wealth-redistributing charities.  As one small contribution to this mission they have for many years run summer academies and the like, backed by energy and resources, in an effort to give some number of promising high school students from “underrepresented” groups the opportunity and the invitation to glimpse and participate in something like actual college life.  The motive is the sincere desire to inspire and encourage.  These are good faith institutional efforts, and one step ahead of mere symbolism.  But highly selective research institutions do not make the best use of their extraordinary resources by mounting remedial courses in basic literacy and numeracy, fundamental skills that since time immemorial have been regarded as the remit of elementary schools.  It is their elementary nature that makes secondary education secondary and higher education higher.  Though a topic for another essay, my opinion is that serious progress could be made in facing some of our problems of social inequality by yet further focusing national resources on the early years of public education.  But we need to do it with our eyes open.

 

            The schools and their teachers,--or, later,  the colleges and their professors-- should not be expected to do all the work, though they too often are.  “No Child Left Behind” is a great slogan for the right idea.  The limitations in its visible “outcomes” have not been the results of bad faith or the unwillingness to spend public money.  But at least half of our early education, surely, comes from the domestic setting, and from habits, practices, and expectations projected in a child’s home.  The triumph of the republican principle , which allows the individual citizen to express and act upon individual preference in search of  democratic decisions, has rightly been regarded as one of the lasting achievements of Enlightenment.  Yet true elitism, the maximization of  opportunity for wholesome independent choice, cannot thrive in a context of serious social pathology.

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.

In Search of Elitism

Norman Rockwell, "Election Day"

Recently I have been reading a good deal about elites and elitism in the papers, and it seems pretty clear that a lot of folks don’t like them or it.  Many of these elites live in coastal states, where they drink Sancerre and macchiatos—ingestive behaviors that have so provoked the non-elites, who live in landlocked states and drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and Doctor Pepper, as to lead to the election of President Donald Trump.  The denizens of Flyover Country are “populists” or at least suckers for “populism”—making it all the more confusing that Mr. Trump did not in fact win the “popular” vote.

For a long time I though elite meant “little writing”.  This is on account of an old Smith-Corona portable typewriter that was lying around my grandmother’s house.  It was an elite typewriter—meaning that it produced a line of type with twelve characters to the inch.  This seemed more elegant than the standard burly pica, with only ten characters per inch.  Many years later, when I began to learn something about printing, all this became clearer.  But since nobody can tell me what a “populist” is, I have came to think of Trump voters as the Picas.

American politicians were already wooing the Picas before Andrew Jackson.  If you are old enough you may remember Spiro Agnew, a disgraceful and indeed disgraced Vice-President in the Age of Nixon, notable back in the day for his pithy invective.  It was he, for example, who memorably characterized his critics as “nattering nabobs of negativism.”  Of course he only said that.  The actual author of the words was William Safire, a Republican speech-writer and long-time “word maven” for the New York Times.  But Agnew did actually say a few things on his own.  When criticized for being a mediocrity he uttered a plea of no contest but pondered aloud whether his critics didn’t think that the large number of mediocre Americans were deserving of representation.

            This was met with howls of derision, though it was in fact a classic American gesture of anti-elitism of the sort that has given so many of our politicians their annoying folksiness.  Once the Founding Fathers were gotten out of the way, claiming to have been born in a log cabin became one of the first requirements for major political office. The log cabin was the only maternity ward suitable for a serious presidential aspirant.  Having forebears who arrived on Plymouth Rock on the Mayflower was far less prestigious than having arrived in Dry Gulch in a covered wagon.  Oklahoma became a state in 1907.  It immediately became de rigueur for gubernatorial candidates there to boast of a strain of “Indian blood” not always clearly demonstrated by the handwritten genealogies in their family Bibles.  The current senior senator from Massachusetts, born an Okie, has carried the tradition into the twenty-first century.  No elitist can beat us.

            But the cold comfort of philology is that the American political system is and must remain inescapably elitist—at least so long as we remain committed to an electoral process.  As is true of many modern English word families, the vocabulary of election includes some words directly derived from Latin and some others indirectly derived by way of medieval French.  The Latin verb eligere means to choose, select, or elect.  The idea is that of identifying a preference among options.  The past participle of eligere is electus, and from that we get elect in its nominative and adjectival forms in both its theological (“Elect from every nation, yet one o’er all the earth…”) and social (the Mikado’s daughter-in-law-elect) senses.  The process of choosing is called election.  The word elite is an old French equivalent of the Latin electus, and it too has entered the English vocabulary.

            What goes without saying often goes unsaid.  The idea of election or choice implies a perceived superiority.  If you have a choice among several options, you want to choose the best, the biggest, the tastiest, the freshest, the cleanest, the most valuable, etc.  When we speak of “elite schools” it implies that we think that Harvard University is in some sense superior to Podunk County Community College.  And not to choose something is to neg+elect it.  We now hear that Donald Trump is the revenge of a neglected electorate.  This is all rather curious.  The associations of certain usages of the word elite—especially that of snobbish superiority—point to a paradox in the electoral process.  All politicians crave to be elected.  None dares claim to be elite.

You or I may find that elitism renders puzzling results.  In an age more innocent of political correctness a witty British journalist came up with a witty apothegm: How odd of God to choose the Jews.  To which the brilliant riposte soon came: Far from bizarre.  The goyim annoy Him.  We still await the bard of the election of 2016.