More Humor, Or Something…

Since some of you (you know who you are!) rarely burrow into the Comments section (“Say What?”) where readers occasionally respond, I would like to lift from obscurity a recent comment on my post about hypocrisy in higher education and display it here.

I was a little confused by your recent anatomizing of the “hypocrisy” of the University of Pennsylvania.

You seem to deplore affirmative action as an imposition by an elite. Or at least that’s what I made of the reference to your “sense, based on survey and polling data and the few votes that have been taken (plus a large dollop of unsupported hope), is that a substantial majority of Americans still adhere to the ‘without regard’ principle, but that that principle has been largely rejected at the upper reaches of our society — in higher education, corporations, large media, and in the leadership rungs of the Democratic party.”

That’s a rather jaunty pseudo-populist note you struck, John. Yet you don’t deplore elites in principle. You just deplore the fact that the current elite–the “upper reaches of our society”–has, in your opinion, abandoned its “commitment to the principle of equality”.

In my experience, most people who fret as much as you do about the “principle of equality” become radical egalitarians, and are more concerned about the existence of elites at all than they are about the ethnic mixture of one in particular.

In fact, just to shove you into the four-poster with some strange bedfellows indeed, it’s worth mentioning that these radical leftists deplore affirmative action with as much vigor as you do—-only they attack it from the left.

These radicals believe that affirmative action is fundamentally a tactical response to conditions of inequality, which seeks merely to adjust how inequalities are distributed, but which never attacks the matter of inequality at its root. They’d tell you that equal opportunity still encourages individualistic competition and perpetuates divisions between the successful and unsuccessful—which is to say, affirmative action acts against the basic principles of egalitarianism, on the grounds that winning its own smaller battle is, tactically speaking, more important than any attempt to wage the larger war.

But I don’t suppose many people like that read your little echo-chamber-of-a-weblog, do they? And in any case, theirs is not your approach in the slightest. I’d wager that you, John, define yourself as some sort of libertarian meritocrat, and what worries you most about elites is that they are (in your view) hypocritically bending their stated principles, and admitting the wrong people to their elite universities—-a top graduate school that accepts a black B-student but passes over your daughter, despite better grades, just because she’s (technically) white.

In that case, you might want to recall what Michael Young, who coined the term “meritocracy”, had to say on the matter. I quote from Christopher Lasch’s _Revolt of the Elites_ (1994):

“…As [Michael] Young describes it, meritocracy has the effect of making elites more secure than ever in their privileges (which can now be seen as the appropriate reward of diligence and brainpower) while nullifying working-class opposition. ‘The best way to defeat opposition,’ [Young] observes, ‘is [by] appropriating and educating the best children of the lower classes while they are still young.’ ” (p43)

In other words, John, these elites that bother you so much (higher education, corporations, large media, the Democratic party) are simply *acting like elites*–they are co-opting any potential future opposition to their power, solely to secure their own continued existence.

Now in your view, these elites are exercising their power irresponsibly. To which one can only ask (rhetorically): isn’t that what elites always do? Let me quote from Christopher Lasch once again:

“Meritocracy is a parody of democracy…Social mobility does not undermine the influence of elites; if anything, it helps to solidify their influence by supporting the illusion that it rests solely on merit. It merely strengthens the likelihood that elites will exercise power irresponsibly, precisely because they recognize so few obligations to their predecessors or to the communities they profess to lead. Their lack of gratitude disqualifies meritocratic elites from the burden of leadership, and in any case, they are less interested in leadership than in escaping from the common lot—–the very definition of meritocratic success.” (p 41)

So yes. These elites have demonstrated “no gratitude” towards you, your daughter, or the hordes of middle-class whites who consider themselves to be radically disenfranchised by a few piddling quotas here and there.

And why have they turned their back on you? Because they are an elite. I quote from Lasch a final time:

“An aristocracy of talent—–superficially an attractive ideal, which appears to distinguish democracies from societies based on hereditary privilege–—turns out to be a contradiction in terms: The talented retain many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues. Their snobbery lacks any acknowledgement of reciprocal obligations between the favored few and the multitude.” (pp 44-5)

I can understand your resentment, John. It’s terribly unfair to comfortable well-upholstered white guys like you.

But to those of us who have read John Rawls, we know that any commitment to a princple of fairness—-or any larger definition of justice which pays proper attention to the idea of fairness—-needs to be based not on half-baked meritocratic principles like yours, but a recognition of the need for wholesale redistribution in American society at large.

And if you had read John Rawls, maybe you’d be a little less bitter about the “hypocrisy” of the University of Pennsylvania, and a little more attentive to the hypocrisy of a man who fulminates against judicial or legislative impositions from above as the action of an irresponsible elite, while at the same time evincing the most craven lickspittle desire to be part of some irresponsible elite himself.

Posted by: Edna Welthorpe on February 9, 2004 06:36 AM

I suppose it’s not unusual for strangers to discern one’s innermost values, but I was nevertheless surprised to learn here for the first time of my hostility to elites and, for that matter, of the mass of “radical leftists” who oppose affirmative action. I had somehow missed them. But those are trivial points, as is my alleged ignorance of Lasch and Rawls. There is one charge, however, that I find deeply offensive, and I want to deny it here as vigorously as I can: I am not now, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever be guilty of “anatomizing” anything.